To the Editor:
Gasping, I read this long, grim account of Fidel Castro’s life and of the anticolonial, socialist revolution he inspired and led. The article seemed to me to ridicule the Cuban revolution.
Mr. Castro is described as a “rabble-rouser” who “swaggered,” “a self-obsessive zealot,” “a tyrant”—not as a brilliant leader of a guerrilla struggle and then president of a tiny socialist republic with the highest literacy rate and best health care in the hemisphere, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida and under constant siege.
I am one who has for many years wished that Mr. Castro could have trusted the progress of the revolution enough to allow for open elections. Under constant attack from the United States—economically, militarily and through propaganda—it is clear why he thought the revolution had to be protected by the revolutionary party that led it.
One can condemn Cuba’s prosecutions of gays, and I do. And one would have hoped that Cuba hadn’t imported from the Soviets a system of surveillance that is still active today. Fidel Castro’s revolution has failed to provide liberty for each and every Cuban, but consider our contemporary surveillance situation and our political prisoners.
When sentenced to up to 15 years in prison by the Batista regime in 1953, Mr. Castro said, “History will absolve me.” All in all, it has.
JILL GODMILOW
New York
The writer, professor emerita in the Film, Television and Theater Department at the University of Notre Dame, is a documentary filmmaker.
Note from KBJ: Shorter Godmilow: "Fidel Castro was a tyrant and a homophobe, but at least his subjects were healthy and literate!" Query: What did Cubans have to read, and what's the point of being in good health if you lack liberty, opportunity, prosperity, and hope? Jill Godmilow should thank her lucky stars that she lived in the United States rather than in Castro's Cuba.
