Add The New York Post on Google “Condemn me, I don’t care. History will absolve me.” Google this melodramatic dare, and you’ll read that this is how Fidel Castro ended his self-defense at the 1953 trial for an attack on a police barracks in eastern Cuba, the event that catapulted him to stardom.
It is very doubtful, however, that Castro was absolved by his Maker after his death in 2016. In 1959 he imposed a rigid one-party Marxist state that executed thousands, sent more to infernal gulags, plunged the once-rich island into its present indigence and led to the exodus of one quarter of Cuba’s population.
And it is doubtful that his brother Raul, all of 94 and the real power in Cuba, will fare well either after the US Justice Department indicted him on Wednesday on charges of the murder of Americans for his involvement in shooting down two planes in 1996.
The two Cessnas were being flown by pilots for the Miami-based charity Brothers to the Rescue, which conducted search-and-rescue missions for Cuban escapees who found themselves in distress in the Florida Straits.
The first rule of the Socialist Paradise is that you’re not supposed to escape it, so Raul grew weary of the charity’s activities. Then defense minister, he sicced his Soviet-made MiG fighters on the Cessnas. The civilian aircraft exploded into fireballs over international waters after being shot upon by Raul’s MiGs.
According to a recording, one of the MiG pilots celebrated with, “We blew his cojones off.”
More damning for Raul, because it establishes that the murder of these Americans took place over international waters, is another recording in which he says: “I told them [the Cuban pilots] to try to knock them down over [Cuban] territory, but they [the Brothers to the Rescue pilots] would enter Havana and go away . . . Well, knock them down into the sea when they reappear.”
What happens to Raul now? The arrest on Jan. 3 of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro, also on federal US charges, sets an obvious precedent. Let’s just say that Raul won’t be sleeping well.
Even if an arrest warrant is never served, the indictment considerably adds to the brinkmanship already underway with Cuba.
But the indictment serves an even greater purpose. These crimes were only four of many that the Castros have perpetrated against Americans, never mind Cuba’s long-suffering population. The federal indictment should thus lead, after the regime’s collapse, to a Nuremberg-style tribunal that metes out justice to Raul Castro, his entire family, and those “following orders” for 67 years.
This tribunal should not be held to seek vengeance, nor should it be a kangaroo court, such as the ones that the Castros and their henchmen held after 1959, which lasted minutes and sent souls to the firing squad for the mere “crime” of refusing to turn over their land. And it shouldn’t be a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where criminals escape retribution.
What the Havana Tribunals need to do is establish what Cuba’s butchers did and why they did it. Cubans, as well as the outside world, need to hear what took place in those gulags, and how the lives of citizens were made hell by constant harassment. And, of course, the tribunal must hand out sentences.
But determining individual guilt is not sufficient in itself.
The tribunal is needed to establish, for all time, what communism does to nations, to their cultures, but especially to people and their families; how the constant elevation of the state over the individual eventually starts to eat away at their soul. How the promise of earthly utopia turns people messianic and accepting of any atrocity.
We need them so there will be no more Zohran Mamdanis, or AOCs, or Bernie Sanders, running around promising equality when what the Marxist experiment always produces is something like Cuba.
This is what the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunals did for Nazism. The fact that they were held is part of the reason there are no serious Nazis or fascists today.
The mask must come off. The revolution has not been just a disaster, but one built on lies. Like the one about the “history will absolve me” speech.
There were no cameras in that courtroom that day. Fidel Castro made a recording later and disseminated it. History must take note.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and co-author of “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.”
