No Rest for the Commie Hunters : The 35-year battle to eliminate Castro dithers on; why not try a China-size dose of capitalism?

Thank God for Fidel Castro. And for Jesse Helms, who, if he had his way, would make smoking a Cuban cigar a capital offense. Helms’ bill to tighten the embargo on trade with Cuba has been condemned by Canada and the European Union, but what do they know of Castro’s unique place in the American political psyche? We would be lost without him.

Who would have thought it would come to this: The Caribbean mouse that roared is all that’s left of our global crusade against communism. At a time when the Vietnam War is recognized as a “terrible mistake,” and the Chinese Communists represent the world’s fastest-growing capitalist economy and the former Soviet Reds are on our welfare rolls, it’s reassuring to have Castro to contain.

The danger is real. I don’t need to remind you of the threat that refurbished casinos in Cuba would pose to Atlantic City. Only 90 miles from our shores are beaches, cigars, music and women so alluring that hundreds of thousands of Germans, Spaniards and Canadians are, even as we speak, risking their democratic souls and the opprobrium of the U.S. government to vacation there.

If Republicans think Hollywood is a threat to family values, they must shudder at the return of the Havana of old. In 1960, on the eve of the embargo, I caught one of the last flights out evacuating conventioneers from Cuba to Key West, and let me tell you, getting them on the plane was a close call. One more round of rum and Cokes and they would have been lost to communism for the next 35 years.

Then there’s the democracy question. Castro is a dictator, and if he hadn’t been isolated, we’d have other non-democratic governments in the hemisphere. Just look at Guatemala, which inspired our Cuba policy. Back in 1950, nine years before Castro’s revolution, Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala. Some election--the wrong guy won. Arbenz had barely settled in when he started making moves on the United Fruit Co., talking about giving land to the peasants and other red stuff. Well, the CIA ousted him, and Guatemala was saved for the free world.

I know, the U.S.-trained Guatemalan military was recently blamed for killing a U.S. citizen who owned a hotel in the rain forest there, but that’s a small price to pay for our national security. Nor does it matter that the accused killer, a colonel named Julio Alpirez, was a CIA operative. Who else can provide reliable inside information on the Guatemalan government?

True, Castro also killed, and he definitely had useful inside information, but that wasn’t enough to qualify him as a U.S. ally. Castro had his chance; we tried working with him during his student revolutionary days, but when he got in power, he turned around and nationalized one of our nickel companies. We saw then that he had “commie” written all over him, and the final proof came when he turned to the Soviets for economic aid after the U.S. government cut his access to trade with the West.

We tried to get rid of Castro with the Bay of Pigs invasion, but that failed when the people in Cuba didn’t rise up as expected. Then we tried democracy through assassination. Just how hard we tried was documented in a CIA report, declassified two years ago, which detailed how the agency supplied the Mafia with money, explosives, infected saccharine pills and poisoned cigars. Strong believers in the free market, the Mafia shared the U.S. government’s antipathy to Castro, who had nationalized their casinos, but the mob’s hit men kept losing their nerve at the last minute.

Another U.S.-sponsored invasion was in the works when Castro got the Soviets to put some missiles in, and the world almost came to an end. But cooler heads prevailed and a deal was struck in which the United States agreed to stop trying to invade Cuba and instead continue a policy of economic strangulation and subversion. And the Soviets took their missiles home.

A somewhat muddled policy, you might say, but be fair: Bob McNamara was in charge. As he said in a 1987 interview reflecting back on the Cuban missile crisis: “What in the hell does the president of the Ford Motor Co., which I was, know about the issue? I’ll tell you what this automobile executive knew: Zero! Nothing! I knew it too. I felt in my heart that my appointment as secretary of defense was wrong.”

No argument here. But in this season of mea culpas, maybe we should shift tactics and follow the example of our China policy: Try invading Cuba with salesmen instead. Once inundated with credit cards, VCRs and Coca-Cola, communism doesn’t stand a chance. And will the last sailor out of Guantanamo please turn out the lights.