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The American |
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(The Transfer of Authority) I understood how Rip Van Winkle felt when I resumed my collegiate education in January of 1970, following four (4) years of military service. Any who were then alive and beyond the age of puberty can understand how profoundly different was the American culture in 1970 as compared to 1966, especially the scene on the college campus, even though the span of time was so limited. When I entered the armed forces in February, 1966, the flames of protest and ‘radicalism’ were isolated and limited to ultra-liberal locations such as Berkeley, California, and Madison, Wisconsin, where the leftist fringe was enamored with communist zealots, such as Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, more commonly known as ‘Che’ Guevara, an Argentinean Marxist and disciple of Fidel Castro.
Che had ‘the look’ that made him a cultural icon, despite the blood on his hands from hundreds of Cubans executed under his direction following Castro’s conquest of the island in 1959. Guevara departed Cuba in 1965 to spread communist insurrection abroad. That episode was short-lived. He was captured and executed in Bolivia in 1967. When I returned from my service and entered a once quiet, urban, Southern, conservative campus, it was most amusing to find dozens of Che look-a-likes striking militant poses, each wearing tattered fashion attire (de rigueur) gathered from the Army-Navy surplus store. Of course, the anti-Vietnam War crusade was in full bloom as draft-age young men sought refuge from the national service that was the burden and duty of our generation. The classroom experience was also surprising, as waves of matriculated associates from graduate-schools, mostly draft-evading and deferment-seeking, entered classrooms with their ‘on the edge’ leftist ideology and covertly infected the faculty like a Stage 1 cancer. One of my favorites in this new wave was a doctoral professor of political philosophy who was an immigrant then married to an American woman he met in France while a student at the Sorbonne. He was a proud Palestinian whose disdain for all things Israeli, and most things American, was evident when he strayed from the text and entered the realm of personal opinion. The man was a brilliant academic and, though intellectually intimidating, actually enjoyed repartee with a student willing to test him. But he did not welcome a challenge unless an opinion was well-presented and defended. We agreed on little, politically. He came to learn my background (military, Vietnam service) and showed a quiet respect for that, knowing that I had earned my opinions the same way he earned his own, and that was from the brutal tutelage of real life experience. He held me to the same high academic standards he expected of all in his classes, and never allowed our differing world views to taint or prejudice his judgment of my work. One of our pet topics of contention concerned the Cuban experience under Fidel Castro. This was when tens of thousands of radical American students, known as the Venceremos Brigade (‘We Shall Overcome’) poured into Cuba to help in the harvest of the sugar crop, necessary to prop-up the faltering economy. (The most bombastic student in our class claimed he was going to join the brigade. The last time I saw him, he was wearing his chic Che shirt. He never came back and I’ve always wondered if he actually made the trip.) The Professor was a passive communist sympathizer and praised all the progress claimed to have been made under Castro’s regime, despite the known human rights’ abuses. We had a spirited, point-by-point debate, in which I became (by default) the defender of everything American, free enterprise, and capitalistic, while the Professor, enthusiastically cheered-on by most of the suck-up class, extolled the virtues of Cuban communism. Back and forth we went for almost the entire class period, as if in a fencing match, each seeking to thrust or parry the other. At the end of the exercise, having exhausted all arguments, I presented a final challenge to my more–skilled adversary, “The test of whether Castro’s experiment in Cuban-style communism is successful, depends, ultimately, on whether there is a peaceful transfer of power. Until that occurs, Castro’s government is nothing more than a dictatorship and no different, except in style, than Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Tse-Tung’s China.” To my astonishment and lasting respect for him, the Professor conceded, saying, “Touché. We will have to await the time when that occurs to know the answer.” Many years have passed and finally that time is at hand. Though Senor Castro has resigned, officially, the power has not been truly transferred and is being retained by his brother, Raoul. I’m wondering whether the Professor remembers our conversation on this subject. I think, given the experience of the decades, and being intellectually honest, he would agree that Castro’s experiment has been a total disaster for the Cuban people, regardless of what follows now. Adiós, Fidel.
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