Katie Pavlich: A tyrant, not a hero, is dead

During a speaking event at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara a few years ago, I had the honor of meeting a man named Félix Rodriguez. During lunch, I learned about who he was and his story.

He knew the Castro regime and the Cuban revolution well. After all, he was one of the CIA agents who helped capture Castro ally Che Guevara and stood next to him just minutes before he was taken away to be executed. Before I left the event, Rodriguez gave me a photo of the historic moment and laughed when I told him in college I wore an anti-Che T-shirt, confusing and enraging my Latin-American popular culture professor who regularly praised him.

{mosads}On Friday when Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was declared dead, I’m sure Félix was smiling.

I’m not Cuban and therefore don’t have any family members who were oppressed by Castro’s regime. But I do have a number of friends whose families were. I’ve listened as they’ve described in horror the way Castro and his thugs pillaged the country, promising social services like healthcare and education were worth their freedom. They describe the details of escaping an island where firing squads, torture and concentration camps were a regular part of Castro’s rule.

In the wake of his death, remembering their stories while hearing many on the left praise Castro as positive force in the world has been especially sickening.

“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lamented in a statement. “Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.”

“Fidel Castro was a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire. Presente!” Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein tweeted.

These sentiments are void of fact and are a false reflection of Castro’s historical record. Of course Castro was Cuba’s longest serving president. After all, he was a dictator.

When President Obama “normalized” relations with Cuba in 2014, he said it was time to move away from the past and into the future.

“Change is hard — in our own lives and in the lives of nations. And change is even harder when we carry the heavy weight of history on our shoulders. But today we are making these changes because it is the right thing to do,” Obama said at the time. “Today, America chooses to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a better future — for the Cuban people, for the American people, for our entire hemisphere, and for the world.”

Since then, nothing in Cuba has changed. Dissidents who greet cruise ships are still beaten and thrown in prison. Internet and access to the outside world are still severely limited. The supposedly wonderful healthcare system leaves the most vulnerable to die in dirty hospital rooms. Fidel Castro might be dead, but his brother, Raul, is still in charge and working for the regime, not the people.

This week, Obama further normalized the behavior of one the world’s worst tyrants by sending deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Jeffrey DeLaurentis to pay their respects at Castro’s funeral, as if he deserves any. It wasn’t an official presidential delegation, but it might as well have been.

Not only was Castro a monster, but he was a self-proclaimed enemy of the United States until the day he died. The White House sending even a single person to his funeral is not simply a disgrace, but lends credibility to Castro’s decades-long anti-American cause and creed.

Thankfully, those who escaped Castro’s brutality have passed on the stories of pain, sacrifice and despair to younger generations. Fidel Castro must be remembered in history as the mass murderer he was, not the fantastical freedom fighter too many on the left have falsely made him out to be. 

As Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) said, “Fidel Castro created hell on Earth for the Cuban people; he will now become intimately familiar with what he wrought.”

Pavlich is editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.