The Left’s enthusiasm for communist dictatorships never ends. The younger set will not remember that in the 1960s the Left admitted that Castro was a dictator, but this should be overlooked because his regime supplied all of the people with education and health care. Here is the latest version of this nonsense from the BBC.
Moreover, we are told in typically Orwellian fashion, shortages are
really a blessing in disguise. After all, are the Cubans not lucky to
be spared the scourge of fast food and passenger cars? Walking and a
“balanced” diet, Harris [the BBC reporter] informs us, are the ingredients for a long and
healthy life. The Cubans even have an association that promotes healthy
living on the island. The vice-president of the 120 Club, Professor
Gerardo De La Vera, recommends that in order to live to 120, one has to
start by moving to Cuba. A government employee praising Cuba to high
heaven? What a surprise.
This type of reporting was made infamous by Pulitzer Prize winning NYT reporter Walter Duranty who ignored and covered up Stalin’s starvation of an estimated 14 million people in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. I recommend Robert Conquest’s excellent book on the famine, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine and Eugene Lyon’s first hand account of 1930s life in the Soviet Union, Assignment in Utopia.
