Notable & Laudable: Condemning Tyranny in Cuba

"Fidel Castro has murdered many and imprisoned more to hang on to power. He has despoiled nature and desecrated the architectural heritage of what could have been an island paradise. His much-vaunted health service is decried by his enslaved people, many of whom prostitute themselves because of the degraded economy. The reality is it is time for Cuba to move on - to democracy and rule of law and prosperity which its depressed people so richly deserve after two generations of rule by the Castro brothers." —Edward McMillan-Scott, Vice-President of the European Parliament, February 25, 2006

Conservative parlimentarian and human rights activist Edward McMillan-Scott, MEP was expelled by the Castro regime in November 2006 because he had unauthorized contacts with Cuban dissidents while on an official visit to Cuba on behalf of the EU Democracy Task Force. His remarks were in response to Labour's Deputy Leader Harriet Harman's assertion that Fidel Castro was "a hero of the Left."

Confronted as we are every day by misrepresentations of the Castro regime which are the grist of 99% of the media's reportage on Communist Cuba, it is well to remember that not everybody is fooled. There are friends of Cuban freedom in the world. Although we tend to focus on the enemies because their words are the ones which media report and dwell upon, we should not ignore nor fail to praise the lonely voices that rise in condemnation of the despoilers of our country.

Sometimes it seems as if we are trapped in a Swiftian satire, where nothing is as it seems, and everybody walks on their heads and thinks that the sky is green and the earth is blue. Fifty years we have had to inhabit a world filled with such fools and been unable even to enjoy the spectable since, though fools they may be, they control the presses and disseminate their inanities as truth. In the absence of reforms, they invent them. Face to face with despotism, they ignore it. What they would not welcome for themselves they applaud as a heaven-sent dispensation for Cubans. It is thanks to them that even after 50 years of unrelenting tyranny the truth about the nature of Communism in Cuba is rarely acknowledged even by those in a position to know the truth. Can you imagine if in 1945 the same things were being said and written about Nazi Germany as in 1933? If Chamberlain still called for appeasement and Lindbergh still praised the "German Miracle" after the war as they had before it? Well, Castro has waged a 50-year war against the Cuban people which has devastated the island and decimated its people and still it's Jan. 1, 1959 as far as most of the media are concerned.