Castro and human dignity

Leaving aside the celebrations on the streets of Miami, the most widespread reaction among Cubans to the death of Fidel Castro, inside and outside the island, seems to be the relief. One of the greatest narcissists in history, the father of almost 60 years of national torment, has returned to the dust from which he came. That is a comfort.

Castro left behind a prosperous and promising land in abject poverty. But his legacy is far worse than the material ruin of a country. His insatiable appetite for absolute power was demonstrated in an obsession with hunting to the last unconformity, taking away from the population his human dignity.

It is worth remembering this reality in moments when the world offers retrospectives on the life of Castro, almost always adding that the tyrant gave Cuba a great health system. If that were true, it would not justify their brutality. And it is not true, as we discovered in 2007, when Cuban doctors made mistakes in their treatment for diverticulitis and a Spanish specialist had to travel to save it. The truth is that human life does not matter to the regime.

Castro was driven by a maniacal ambition to possess and dominate the Cuban soul. There is no place where the consequences can be seen more than in the extremely high rates of abortion in the country. In a Nov. 22 article for the Cubanet site, independent journalist Eliseo Matos cited an abortion study conducted by Cuban doctors Luisa Álvarez Vásquez and Nelli Salomón Avich. They found that since 1980, a third of Cuban pregnancies have been disrupted.

Equally disturbing is that abortion rates are high among adolescent girls and are often required by the state. One does not have to be religious to see this as a national existential crisis, a reflection of a society that fights against nihilism.

This did not happen overnight. It is the result of decades of living under a dictatorship that demands total submission to the will of a person.

In a 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Armando Valladares, who was a prisoner of Castro for 22 years, described the regime's use of "drawer cells" in its dungeons. Five or six prisoners were confined for days in these narrow spaces of 1.8 meters in length. "They had to sit with their knees against their bodies. There was no room to move; The prisoners had to urinate and defecate there, "Valladares explained.

All kinds of torture were used in order to "break the prisoner's resistance," Valladares said. If a prisoner said that "he was wrong, he denied his religious beliefs, asserting that they came from the dark ages and if he admitted that he now understood that communism was the solution to the problems of humanity and he wanted the opportunity to re-enter the new communist society , Then he could leave the cell and move to a re-education farm. "

There could be no greater power, no one more adored than Fidel. God was a problem, so priests and nuns were arrested and exiled, religion was banned and the regime did everything possible to destroy the Cuban family.

In 1997, Christmas was legalized and the Catholic and Protestant churches slowly gained some space. But this was allowed as long as the teachings on the sacredness of human life did not interfere with the control of the regime. Therefore, Cardinal Ortega of Havana distances himself from the dissident group of Catholic women known as the Ladies in White, although they are frequently beaten in the streets.

In a system in which all must submit to the state, it is not surprising that abortion rates are particularly high among adolescent girls. Children learn about human sexuality from their communist teachers, in purely mechanical terms, of course. Generations of adolescents have been removed from their families and sent to labor camps as part of their indoctrination.

As Valladares wrote in The Wall Street Journal in May 2000, "away from paternal supervision for nine months, children suffer from venereal diseases as well as teenage pregnancies, which inevitably end in forced abortions." Another reason for the high rates of teenage abortions is that teenage prostitutes now occupy the streets of Havana, working to earn foreign exchange from tourists.

Abortion is also a key tool of the regime for its "health". Any pregnancy considered as risky is terminated immediately, a decision that the State takes. This reduces the rate of infant mortality, which is used by Cuba to impress the world with its "progress."

However, Cuba has not achieved anything special regarding infant mortality. In a December 1 blog entry on the Cato Institute's HumanProgress website, Marian Tupy noted that between 1963 and 2015, child mortality in Cuba fell by 90%, while in Chile it fell by 94%. In Latin America and the Caribbean in general has fallen 86%.

The only singular achievement of Fidel Castro was 57 years of repression that sought to exterminate any meaning of the lives of those who lived under his yoke. 
O'Grady@wsj.com; Mary Anastasia O'Grady 
Taken from: The Wall Street Journal