Tue 22 Aug 2006
The Castro that Sacha Trudeau Does Not See
Posted by kaqchikel under africa , foreign policy & diplomacy , general , human rights , latin america , leadership & leaders , media analysis , religion & spirituality , tyranny , war & peaceFor those who celebrate ‘Fidel Castro’s greatness’ and ‘brotherly internationalism,’ no amount of evidence can make them believe that he is anything other than a great hero. The selective intellectual minds in Europe and North America can probably recite examples of Vietnam atrocities, but are blind to Cuba’s exploits in Africa in the nineteen seventies. A letter to the editor (subscribers only) in the National Post today should be kept away from Sacha Trudeau, whose sheltered moral turpitude recently found public display.
As a former United Church of Canada missionary to Angola, I can attest to Cuban atrocities even more horrific than those mentioned by letter-writer Andrew Galloway.
In 1975, the Cuban army arrived in Angola to support the Russian-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). They first went north and turned their guns on Holden Roberto’s National Front for the Liberation of Angola, then wheeled around south to attack Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Eventually, after destroying our central mission station in Dondi, they arrived at the Kavango Leprosarium. After ordering all of the lepers, their families and their helpers into their huts, they set them on fire, burning everyone to death. Any who emerged were machine-gunned. This was attested by one of our pastors, who saw it all from the bush where he was hiding.
Ten years later, I travelled to Jamba, UNITA’s capital in the southeastern part of the country. I was taken to a camp occupied by hundreds of survivors of Cuban poison-gas attacks. Nerve gas, when it does not kill outright, leaves the victims with a mind that has been completely addled and, at times, limbs that no longer function. It was the most horrific sight that I have ever witnessed.
Now that Fidel Castro is reaching the end, it is my fervent wish that he burn in Hell.
–John Hart, Mississauga, Ontario.
The Motorcycle Diaries shows a young Ernesto Guevara developing a love for the poor in a leper colony established by the Catholic Church in the Peruvian Amazon. Much is made out of those scenes in the film. His time in the leper colony is portrayed as transformative. The same Cuban regime that the Argentinian helped to install and soldiers he helped to train later turned against helpless Christian missions, and against crippled African lepers to burn them alive.
But please, nobody tell Sacha Trudeau a word about the reality of Cuban international solidarity.
I have actually had the pleasure of meeting Alexandre Trudeau, the one who wrote the letter to the Star, and he had quite an interesting view on Canada in general.
I recall him saying, and he told me I could quote him on this, “fu***** Canadians, they’re so hysterical”; knowing he said those words, and the context he said them in, and I don’t doubt he truly meant what he said.
A brush with greatness, eh.
What was the context in which he said it? Do tell!
It was a brush with greatness. We were talking about eating food in other countries and about how foreigners are always told, don’t eat raw vegetables, don’t eat fruit, don’t eat…and then we ate cockroaches at a festival right near the Thailand/Burmese border. At the time, he was filming one of his documentaries and he was dealing with a very adverse situation; he visted the largest Burmese refugee camp in Thailand, which had been constantly bombarded by the Burmese military. He had no fear and taught myself and other Canadians the same kind of attitude.
Being Canadians, and Westerners in general, we live a very sheltered life. Not many of us put in dawn-to-dusk type hours on a farm that many less developed countries people need to do in order to survive. I think we have taken this fortune for granted, and we have become too comfortable with thinking food comes from a grocery store and not a farm.
Alexandre would be the type of Canadian who could survive in the back-country, living on insects (I myself have seen, and have the pictures to prove, that he has eaten cockroaches, grasshoppers, and worms). If it’s something new, he would want to be the first one to try it; he is a risk-taker.
Look at how easily you criticize the Liberals, especially the likes of Volpe, Martin, and Chretien. In their ten plus years of power, I think even you could find one positive thing to say about the Liberals, other than it’s good that they’re gone or about Chretien’s accent; something more concrete and policy oriented.
Some people, like Alex Trudeau, focus on the positive aspects of a leader, like Cuba’s high literacy rate, whereas others focus on the more negative aspects, such as Castro’s policy in Angola.
Toby: Thanks for the personal account. He sounds so fatherly. You were actually serious about a “brush with greatness.” My apologies.
Forgive me. I really don’t see the heroism in eating roaches, except for the guys in Papillon, maybe. He’s right that we take lots for granted in Canada –and I do say the same often, but I don’t eat bugs to make the point. A simple Guiness does the trick for me.
What struck me in the quote was not the colourful language –but the detached “they” to tell you the truth. Is he a little Ignatieff who speaks about Canadians as “an other”?
He eats worms and is a positive guy; I eat beef so I am a negative guy, I guess. I bet he sees wonderful things in Stalin’s leadership as well (BTW: you have heard me say positive things about a Liberal policy or two).
I know about the literacy rate in Cuba, but not the greatness that some ascribe to it. They can read Marx, Guevara and Castro in Cuba, maybe some Marti and now Chavez’s speeches. Really educational stuff. That don’t impress me much.
It’s actually cruel to teach people to read, but limit their horizon to the point of not allow them to be educated. Cuban’s train people well in some technical aspects –except for doctors, but there is no education in the real sense of the term there. To indoctrinate is not to educate, as you well know. I don’t recall any Nobel laureates come out of Cuba.
About Cuban doctors. Go to the Nicaraguan (or Angolan or Mozambican) country side and ask the peasants about Cuban doctors. Nicaraguans had the priviledge of hosting a few thousand of them in the 1980s. People went to see them at the beginning, but many didn’t go back and would rather suffer or go to the witch doctors than be subjected to the butchery and the misdisgnoses.
People would be lining for hours to see a Nicaraguan doctor, while there were less and less repeat patients chez les cubains. And if less people came to see them, the Cubans were happier. They got paid anyway.
Trudeau writes about Castro from behind the sheltered veil of his priviledged life and his dream-like childhood. In fact, he writes like a child wanting to please and not like a grown man. It’s a bit pathetic, in my view. There I go being negative, again. That seems to run counter to the fatherly picture you saw –but my impression is based on words on a paper and yours on an actual encouter to I’ll defer to you on that.
Perhaps the difference is that we were never forced to eat roaches; it was a new experience that probably neither of us would have tried without the other. In the end, neither of us minded eating the bugs.
I have told that same story to other people and they could care less about the encounter with Alex Trudeau; it was more of a surprise for them that I ate the bugs rather than who I ate the bugs with. Nobody I’ve met said that if given the opportunity they would eat bugs. I always hear, that’s disgusting! Canadians, in general, would never think about eating a bug.
And I’m sure you can also find something positive, or at least semi-positive, about Stalin’s leadership.
BTW: I’ve eaten bugs, in Colombia. I just never thought about preaching about it, like your friend has done, to give an impression that I am above or more enlightended than my countrymen.
Most Canadians have never eaten feces, I’d guess. I wonder if Sacha would just to make his point. Given his soaring degree of enlightement, he probably already has.
Oh.., and you’d be correct about Stalin. I am glad he ate the poison he was fed.
[...] It almost ounds like a dining experience for Sacha. [...]