Castro lambasts US Republican primary as idiotic

From the AP via the San Francisco Chronicle, courtesy of the Daily Kos:

Fidel Castro lambasted the Republican presidential race as the greatest competition of "idiocy and ignorance" the world has ever seen in a column published Wednesday, and also took shots at the news media and foreign governments for seizing on the death of a Cuban prisoner to demand greater respect for human rights.

Castro's comments came in a long opinion piece carried by official media two days after Republican presidential hopefuls at a debate in Florida presented mostly hard-line stances on what to do about the Communist-run island, and even speculated as to what would happen to the 85-year-old revolutionary leader's soul when he dies.

And

"The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been," said the retired Cuban leader, who has dueled with 11 U.S. administrations since his 1959 revolution.

More here.

There is a lot of legitimate criticism one can direct at Fidel Castro. He's never been really good with freedom of speech, for instance. Indeed, Cuba's prisons have long held a number of political dissidents, and the island nation is routinely on Amnesty International's list of countries that hold political prisoners. On the other hand, of course, so is the United States, and even though we have some relatively profound Constitutional protections for free speech, generally, dissenting views are kept out of the public discourse by non-governmental means.

So for my money, it's difficult to say whether Castro's Cuba is better or worse in terms of freedom than the US. I mean, sure, Cuba's no democracy, but then neither are we--I don't remember the last time I voted for a candidate who stood a chance to win but hadn't been bought out by corporate interests. I do know this, however. Nobody is hungry in Cuba. Nobody goes without decent medical care. And their prisons are not full of black people.

At any rate, Castro is necessarily a student of US politics. After all, as the article observes, he's lived through eleven American Presidents who were all out to get him--indeed, some even attempted multiple times to assassinate him. So when he calls the current GOP primary "the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been," it's not propaganda; it's truth coming from experience. I mean, you know, you can say what you want about Ike, or Tricky Dick, or George HW Bush, but they weren't ignorant idiots--they were worthy adversaries to the Cuban dictator.

Why the fuck won't serious public observers here in the US say the same thing, that the Republican primary field is full of morons? It's the fucking truth. What keeps our establishment from admitting what everybody outside the American echo chamber fully understands? I know, I know. Media, yadda yadda, "Washington Consensus," yadda yadda, "American Exceptionalism," yadda yadda. It all adds up to a ruling class that is just about as stupid as the GOP presidential contenders are. I mean, more suave and sophisticated, to be sure, but just as fucking stupid.

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