By Vincent Carroll
Posted: 06/09/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT
Anyone who hung around leftists in the 1960s or '70s knew someone like
Walter Kendall Myers, the former State Department official charged last
week along with his wife, Gwendolyn, with spying for Cuba. Privileged,
intelligent and self-righteous, the Myers of that era were so
exquisitely sensitive to the flaws of their own country (both real and
imagined) that they were suckers for regimes whose records were far
worse by every objective standard.
"I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening
news is a radicalizing experience," Myers wrote in his diary in 1978,
according to The Washington Post. He was bitter, The Post explained,
about "what he described as greedy U.S. oil companies, inadequate health
care and 'the utter complacency of the oppressed' in America."
That same year Myers, the son of a Washington heart surgeon who'd
attended one elite school after another, traveled to Cuba, where the
allure of a tyrant got the better of him. "Everything I hear about Fidel
suggests that he is a brilliant and charismatic leader," Myers noted in
his diary.
Fidel Castro had that effect on lots of disaffected intellectuals, as
did Mao Tse-tung and a number of lesser revolutionary lights such as Ho
Chi Minh. The difference is that somehow the mystique of the Cuban
revolution lingers to this day in some quarters.
Nearly everyone now realizes that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was a
barbaric bloodbath, for example, but few seem to appreciate the scope of
bloodletting engineered on an island 90 miles off the Florida coast.
Perhaps this ignorance explains why a psychopathic, mass-murdering
henchman of Castro's, Che Guevara, is still the object of romantic film
treatments such as the one released last year by director Steven Soderbergh.
Last week, the Organization of American States deemed Cuba fit to rejoin
that group after decades of banishment, so it's a good time to review
the record of the dictatorship for which Myers allegedly spied.
At the time of Myers' 1978 trip, the Castro regime was holding 15,000 to
20,000 prisoners of conscience, according to the authoritative 1999
classic, "The Black Book of Communism." That's a staggering number for a
nation with a population at the time of 10 million, the equivalent of
the U.S. holding 450,000 to 600,000 political prisoners today. Between
1959 and the late 1990s, the same source says, more than 100,000 Cubans
were confined for political reasons to prisons, camps or "open-regime
sites," where many thousands were left traumatized or otherwise broken
for life and 15,000 to 17,000 were shot. (Che himself founded the first
labor camp, according to fellow revolutionary Regis Debray; he also
supervised hundreds of executions while in charge of Havana's La Cabana
prison.)
As recently as February, the U.S. State Department reported that Cuba
still held "at least 205 political prisoners and detainees" while "as
many as 5,000 citizens served sentences for 'dangerousness,' without
being charged with any specific crime."
It's not as if there haven't been other murderous police states in Latin
America — the junta in Buenos Aires in the late 1970s, for one — but
none has evoked the same degree of starry-eyed affection abroad as Cuba.
It is almost inconceivable that an American disgusted by this society
would express admiration for the architects of Argentina's "dirty war,"
but that same person could unashamedly salute the architects of
concentration camps that imprisoned, in the words of Peruvian-born
writer Alvaro Vargas Llosa, "dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims,
Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests" and many others.
Myers and his wife owned a yacht, and they reportedly told an undercover
FBI agent that they wanted to take it to Cuba someday. "Our idea is to
sail home," Myers said.
They may never sail to Cuba now, but their dream of going "home" may not
be entirely dashed. For a Cuban-like experience, after all, you can
hardly beat a lengthy stint behind bars.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com
Carroll: No glory in spying for Castro - The Denver Post (9 June 2009)
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