Castro Needs Spies?

It isn't news to me that Fidel Castro has legions of sympathizers among the American left, but even so, Humberto Fontova's recent piece (HT: Dismuke) on the Walter Myers spy scandal is upsetting.

To highlight that difficulty in catching Castro's spies that bedevils U.S. spy-catchers, let's play a game I've titled, "Castro Spy or Democratic Official? Who Said It?"

"Fidel has lifted the Cuban people out of the degrading and oppressive conditions which characterized pre-revolutionary Cuba. He has helped the Cubans to save their own souls. Cubans don't need to try very hard to make the point that we have been the exploiters."

If you answered, "Castro spy Kendall Myers, from his diaries," you're right.

"I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime…"

If you answered, "Democratic President of the United States John F. Kennedy speaking to French Journalist Jean Daniel in Nov. 1963," you're right again.

No less of a challenge to the spy catchers -- or to my stomach -- has been the high demand in "high" society for Fidel Castro that Fontova describes on top of that.

Castro has huge numbers of aspiring spies and little need for them for precisely the same reason: The dominant code of morality in our society is altruism, of which communism -- as preached and practiced by Castro and his Soviet mentors -- is a consistent political expression.

Now that we've seen a very ugly rip here, what to do?

Keep after the spies and fight against "improving" American relations with Cuba to the extent possible, of course. But there is also a more effective long-term solution available: Repair our social fabric by arguing for a superior moral code or supporting those who do. With an improved culture in America, sympathy for communism here will, like Castro's decrepit body, inevitably wither away.

-- CAV