What does one of this holiday season's best films, Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can," and those who claim to be concerned with human rights have in common? Not much, unfortunately.
Although UNC is known as a campus of activism, one will not find a table or demonstration promoting peace and freedom in Cuba. This mirrors a larger apathy and celebration by some of America's elites toward the despotic disaster of the blood-soaked 20th century closest to our own shores, Fidel Castro.
A few months ago Spielberg traveled to Havana to promote and discuss his films. Probably our most influential and important filmmaker, the creative force behind "Amistad" and "Schindler's List" should know a thing or two about tyranny. Yet he enjoyed lively dinner conversation and fine cigars while political prisoners languished in yet another Communist gulag.
Spielberg continues to make entertaining, sometimes quite significant films, even as the Cuban people have little say about the script of their own lives.
Cuban dissidents living in the freedom of the United States have horrendous stories to tell if only we would listen. The self-appointed human rights crowd extends little sympathy to them; the mainstream media routinely shuts them out. More than a few academics still celebrate Castro's idealism in one form or another, ideas aimed toward an unattainable socialist utopia.
Far from heaven on earth, what has emerged from his nearly half a century of rule is a state devoid of individual rights and human dignity from which the masses still flee. To enjoy the luxuries of this monster is to spit in the face of countless men and women whose lives have been threatened or extinguished for speaking out against him.
Historian of the Stalinist massacres Robert Conquest has observed, "Part of the reason the totalitarian ideologies achieved such a measure of success was that they were misunderstood by too many in the democratic countries."
Echoes of this persist even after the tragedies of the many tens of millions laid to waste by Communism are more fully revealed. No one should really care about Cuba's literacy rate or the "free" (complete with a substandard quality and long wait) health care in light of the torture, the killing, the fear for freely speaking, the absence of preference in the worship of God.
Yet one of Hollywood's most influential directors described his visit to Havana as "the most important eight hours of my life." The cover of people like Spielberg muddies the discredit Castro deserves.
