The West’s Love Affair With Communist Dictator Fidel Castro

The message broadcast by major media outlets throughout the American presidential campaign was that Donald Trump showed utter contempt for the values that make America great. Donald Trump is divisive and dangerous. United States President Barack Obama said Trump is “uniquely unqualified” to serve as president of the United States. “He is temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief,” Mr. Obama later said.

All of this in contrast to the praise the Communist dictator of Cuba, Fidel Castro, received after his death last week.

When news of Castro’s death reached the White House, President Obama released a statement, which began:

At this time of Fidel Castro’s passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. 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. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.

No comment on the horrors of Castro’s tyrannical regime.

The statement from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was even more outrageous. “Fidel Castro was a larger-than-life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and health care of his island nation,” Trudeau said.

Here is the leader of a great Western nation saying that a Communist tyrant served his people and was legendary!

It gets worse. Trudeau continued:

While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for “el Comandante.”

I know my father was very proud to call him a friend, and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honor to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.

On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.

The leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, said Castro was “a huge figure in our lives” and “will be remembered both as an internationalist and a champion of social justice.”

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, said, “With the death of Fidel Castro, the world has lost a man who was a hero for many. He changed the course of his country and his influence reached far beyond. Fidel Castro remains one of the revolutionary figures of the 20th century.”

In the company of these Western leaders were some of the world’s dictators who also greatly admired Fidel Castro.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called Castro an “outstanding statesman.” He went on to say that Castro “embodied the highest ideals of politics.”

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei also admired Castro. “I extensively talked with Fidel Castro in person,” he said, “it is his personality to believe and rely on people.”

The democratic leaders of the West and the world’s dictators are in agreement that Fidel Castro was a wonderful leader. This is a frightening thing for the West to agree on and it exposes the deep infiltration of Communist ideals into Western society.

Condemning the rule of Fidel Castro should be an easy task for the leaders of the free world. Having to make this argument about whether his legacy was good or bad for Cuba in itself shows how much the Communist idea has been sold to the peoples of America, Canada, Britain and Western Europe.

The major media jumped on the Castro bandwagon, too.

bbc brought on a man named Richard Gott to help cover the news of Castro’s death. Gott spoke highly of the dictator and excused the murder of political objectors as “the sort of thing you would expect” from leaders in that area of the world. As it turns out, Gott was exposed back in 1994 for taking money from the kgb during the Cold War.

Shocked that bbc would bring Gott on television, the Telegraph wrote, “Suppose that, covering the death of General Franco, Benito Mussolini or any other right-wing dictator, the bbc had rustled up a comparable person to defend him and broadcast his views without explanation of this.”

bbc didn’t even mention Gott’s history with the Soviet Union. Is that honest, unbiased reporting?

The Guardian, bbc and even the Telegraph ran headlines that downplayed Castro’s horrific human rights record and relegated his tyrannical rule to something played up only by his critics.

Why is the West willing to overlook Castro’s blatant horrific acts and revise history to glorify his legacy?

Many cite health care and education as a symbol of Castro’s good works in Cuba. What they ignore is that Cuba’s government exaggerates and often lies about the nation’s statistics and that the average Cuban family makes $15-20 a month—all thanks to Communist rule.

In a scathing piece written for the Telegraph, historian Andrew Roberts wrote, “There is a great sickness at the heart of Western society when its leaders either cannot or will not denounce evil when it sees it. It is an unmistakable sign of decadent, disastrous cultural self-hatred when prominent leaders of democratic countries cannot state openly that evil dictators such as the late President Fidel Castro of Cuba were what they undoubtedly were: serial human rights abusers, torturers and tyrants.”

Roberts later referenced a report from Amnesty International stating that Cuba had arrested and detained 8,600 people for political reasons in the last year alone! The real legacy of this man is that he executed political opponents without trial, encouraged terrorism, was a proxy of the Soviet Union, and, as Roberts noted, “brought the planet to the brink of annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Fidel Castro’s leadership in Cuba was the antithesis of Western democratic values—yet democratic leaders around the globe adored this man!

Liberal leaders are talking about how great Castro was because they love the idea of communism and are looking for any excuse to make it sound great. And the more conservative-leaning leaders haven’t made a peep to condemn any of Castro’s actions.

America has lost its will and pride in its power. Fidel Castro opposed the West for decades and sided with what Ronald Reagan called the “evil empire.” Now Castro is regaled as a hero and no one is willing to contradict that revisionist legacy.

America has gone soft when faced by communism.

Back in 1956, Herbert W. Armstrong gave a strong warning about the dangers of Communist ideas (emphasis added):

What we fail to grasp, in the struggle with Russia, is this: We are not fighting a single nation in a military war, but a gigantic worldwide, plain-clothes army, masquerading as a political party, seeking to conquer the world with an entirely new kind of warfare! It’s a kind of warfare we don’t understand, or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence! All this, cleverly disguised as a harmless political party! Communism is worldwide psychological warfare!

Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959. He made it a one-party nation and he ruled as a tyrant—murdering dissidents, imprisoning objectors without trial, and supporting terrorism. The U.S. was threatened by a potential nuclear war that could have been launched from Cuba! The people of Cuba are in poverty and thousands have fled the island trying to reach America. This is the nation created by a dictator who forced communism on his people.

And what is the response by the West after his death? He instituted free health care in Cuba and revised the educational system.

The liberal leaders in the West are infatuated with communism and conservative leaders are too weak to condemn it. Mr. Armstrong used Bible prophecy to warn about a time when America and Britain would become “mixed up” ideologically “with foreigners” (Hosea 7:8-13; Moffatt).

We write about Mr. Armstrong’s warnings in our free booklet He Was Right. Request a copy or read it online if you haven’t already. In this book we write, “History and current events have since shown that America’s dalliance with Russian-style communism has perverted its morals, weakened its economic power, and eaten away its strength. This is a tragic story, but America was warned!” ▪