Fading Fidel

R. Emmett Tyrrell gives the Communist thug a richly deserved sendoff. I really do hope he suffers before assuming room temperature.

In these last months of Fidel Castro's moribundity, there is delicious irony in the film clip of him repeatedly shown on cable television. Wearing a clownishly incongruous jogging suit, the fabled maestro of revolution and progress is filmed shuffling metronomically, gray and feeble, blank-faced, and apparently going no place.

Maybe he is on a treadmill that we cannot see. Maybe he is merely picking up his tired feet and putting them back down with no forward motion. Possibly this whole idiotic scene is a fabrication created by our CIA. Well, if so, it is a job well done. There is poetry here.

The cadaverish dictator shuffling in place is a perfect metaphoric rendering of Mr. Castro's Cuba over these many decades. He took his country from prosperity and a place at the head of Latin America in material terms to the bottom. In practically every material measure his country is a slum. In terms of freedom, it is one vast jail.

Had he, when he came to power after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's seven-year dictatorship, made good on his promise to return Cuba to its democratic condition of the 1940s, his country today would most likely be the richest and freest country south of our borders, and possibly Fidel would be in the pink and deserving of the accolades now paid him by the American left's rich and fatuous.