But Meantime, What of Castro?

Democrats all over the world have greeted with justifiable satisfaction the arrest in London of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who is to be turned over to Spanish authorities when he recovers from surgery.

What better warning for the aspiring dictators? To know that the international community does not guarantee them impunity for their crimes and to know they must always live on the run, like cornered rats, will be a powerful vaccine against the Third World plague of pronunciamientos, military uprisings and coups d’etat.

One of the few people to receive the news of Pinochet’s arrest without satisfaction has been--surprisingly--Fidel Castro. He was in Oporto, Portugal, attending the summit of Latin American chiefs of state when the press (which adores him) gave him the news. Castro, fingering his yellowed beard, said only that this arrest was certainly “an interference” and that it was strange that it should occur, given the services Chile rendered to Great Britain during the Falklands War.

Did the septuagenarian Maximum Chief fear, for a moment, that he might find himself in a case similar to that of the Chilean strongman?

But I am much afraid this handsome prospect will never come to pass. Because I have arrived at the bitter conclusion that only a minority of people feel an identical repugnance for all dictatorships. For many people, there are “good” and “bad” ones. Pinochet is the “bad” dictator. Castro is the “good” dictator whose crimes are excused even by adversaries.

Castro will have been in the saddle for 40 years this December, having outlasted the longest tyrannies in Latin American history. Does anyone reproach him for the thousands of Cubans imprisoned, tortured and murdered and the 1.5 million exiles? Does anyone dare mention that for four decades Cuba has not known free elections, freedom of expression, pluralism, exercise of criticism or freedom of travel or thought and that, owing to a disastrous economic policy, the Cuban people are literally dying of hunger and the island has become a paradise of prostitution for tourists?

Even John Paul II--who, as far as communist dictatorships are concerned, seemed to take a clear stand--went to Havana and blessed the revolution. Castro, in a sign of thanks, gave the pope a few prisoners (quickly replaced by others).

Since then, the few political voices have fallen silent that once ventured to speak of Castro as an anachronism in a hemisphere that, one way or another, seems now to have chosen the democratic path; there has been, rather, an increased profusion of offerings of aid and oxygen to the moribund dictatorship.

At the summits of the Latin American chiefs of state, where he is the unquestioned star--what sex appeal, compared to his, could the other poor devils have, who are elected for a mere four or five years and whose tenures are held in check by press and opposition?--he sets his name, very solemnly, to documents proclaiming solidarity with freedom and democracy. His colleagues, without blushing at the grotesque farce in which they are players, sign, too. And they slap him on the back and embrace him, so as to appear in the photographs.

The next summit is to be in Havana, no less. What greater democratic legitimacy could the good tyrant desire? Twenty-two chiefs of state paying court to a regime that, along with the North Korean, represents the last residue of Stalinist totalitarianism.