Secretary of State John Kerry's official statement on the death of the Cuban "leader" Fidel Castro reads like somebody sneaked into state's press office and wrote a parody that was released to the world when somebody accidentally pressed the send button. The secretary's statement began:
We extend our condolences to the Cuban people today as they mourn the passing of Fidel Castro. Over more than half a century, he played an outsized role in their lives, and he influenced the direction of regional, even global affairs.
That would be the Cuban people who were reduced to poverty by the repressive Castro regime. They were dancing in the streets in Miami, but we don't know what the Cuban people at home think. They can't say. Cuba is not a free society. Outsized figure–yeah, but not in a good way.
Secretary Clueless continued:
As our two countries continue to move forward on the process of normalization — restoring the economic, diplomatic and cultural ties severed by a troubled past — we do so in a spirit of friendship and with an earnest desire not to ignore history but to write a new and better future for our two peoples.
The United States reaffirms its support for deepening our engagement with the Cuban people now and in coming years.
Engagement with the Cuban people would be a good thing, but it is unlikely to happen unless they are able to shake off the Castro regime, now led by Fidel's brother Raul. No, Mr. Secretary, we'll be engaging not with the Cuban people but with a corrupt government that will take away from the people any earnings in cash made at Starbucks or another U.S. company in Cuba and return it to them in the worthless currency of the regime.
Here from the Wall Street Journal is a better appreciation of what the outsized leader did for the Cuban people:
Fidel Castro’s legacy of 57 years in power is best understood by the fates of two groups of his countrymen—those who remained in Cuba and suffered impoverishment and dictatorship, and those who were lucky or brave enough to flee to America to make their way in freedom. No progressive nostalgia after his death Friday at age 90 should disguise this murderous and tragic record.
Castro took power on New Year’s Day in 1959 serenaded by the Western media for toppling dictator Fulgencio Batista and promising democracy. He soon revealed that his goal was to impose Communist rule. He exiled clergy, took over Catholic schools and expropriated businesses. Firing squads and dungeons eliminated rivals and dissenters.
The terror produced a mass exodus. An April 1961 attempt by the CIA and a small force of expatriate Cubans to overthrow Castro was crushed at the Bay of Pigs in a fiasco for the Kennedy Administration. Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union, and their 1962 attempt to establish a Soviet missile base on Cuba nearly led to nuclear war. The crisis was averted after President Kennedy sent warships to intercept the missiles, but the Soviets extracted a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba again.
The Cuba that Castro inherited was developing but relatively prosperous. It ranked third in Latin America in doctors and dentists and daily calorie consumption per capita. Its infant-mortality rate was the lowest in the region and the 13th lowest in the world. Cubans were among the most literate Latins and had a vibrant civic life with private professional, commercial, religious and charitable organizations.
Castro destroyed all that. He ruined agriculture by imposing collective farms, making Cuba dependent first on the Soviets and later on oil from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. In the past half century Cuba’s export growth has been less than Haiti’s, and now even doctors are scarce because so many are sent abroad to earn foreign currency. Hospitals lack sheets and aspirin. The average monthly income is $20 and government food rations are inadequate.
Sure, it may be hard to strike the right note when a dictator dies, but Kerry's statement was so divorced from reality that we are once again reminded of what a mistake it was to send the coiffed one into the lion's den to negotiate with the Iranian regime. He probably thinks that the Iranians in the street love the mullahs–or he just doesn't care.
Justin Trudeau's statement was even dumber, but I'm not Canadian so I don't care. President Obama's statement, like John Kerry's, was full of unintended humor:
“The Cuban people must know that they have a friend and partner in the United States of America,” Mr. Obama said. “We know that this moment fills Cubans – in Cuba and in the United States — with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation.”
Powerful emotions? That's rich. Obama tiptoed around the matter of Castro's tyranny saying "history" will judge Castro, while Jesse Jackson's statement was–well, what you'd expect. Chris Deaton at the Weekly Standard comments:
The widespread responses largely overlooked Cuba's well-documented human rights abuses and political oppression, which have been tracked by such organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the New Jersey-based Cuba Archive project, which has worked to tally and verify the deaths of Cubans attributable to the Castro regime.
Fidel was a hero to the left, and many lefties have not grown up. One of them apparently serves as secretary of state. Castro was, as his daughter put it, not just a dictator but a tyrant.
President-elect Donald Trump put out a different kind of statement and GOP leaders are trying to persuade the Obama administration to ignore Fidel's funeral.