IN THE wake of President Ronald Reagan's recent death, the Cold War has re-emerged as a talking point on broadsheets and network newscasts around the country. It was appropriate, then, that one week to the day after Reagan's passing, I found myself sitting at a poker table, smoking a Cuban cigar next to a self-styled communist. Also sitting at the table was the source of our cigars, a friendlyinternational student who had just returned from a semester abroad in Havana. When the conversation turned from the trade embargo to Cuban politics in general, an interesting argument developed. As I sat riveted in the middle of the ensuing exchange between my two friends, I watched a powerful collision between the lofty ideology of socialism and the actual situation of a nation that socialism has utterly destroyed.
To my left was the bright-eyed idealist. Educated in the Ivy League, he sported a fashionable Che Guevara necklace and spoke passionately of Fidel Castro's socialist revolution. Scorning the inhumanity of American capitalism, he praised communism as an ideology of unrivaled compassion, brotherhood and social justice. He had never been to Cuba.
From our international friend, we heard the sad reality of Havana as it is today. In Cuba as in the rest of the world, the grim reality of communism stands in stark and appalling contrast to its glittering rhetoric. Devoid of private ownership and market-based commerce, the majority of Cubans live in unimaginable poverty. I have since checked the statistics, and the highest estimates I found put the average Cuban income at the equivalent of around 10 American dollars per month. Food is painfully scarce, leaving people to depend for their survival upon notoriously unreliable rations from the government. But there is no public outcry or even open criticism on the streets of Havana. Brutal censorship strangles political discussion, and any who dare to be dissidents waste away their lives in dark and dirty prison cells. "People just don't talk about it," our friend said. The worker's revolution is complete.
Similar types of political persecution, economic devastation and crippling poverty have plagued every nation where socialist dogma ever found a firm foothold. From Russia to China to Eastern Europe to Latin America, tens of millions of starved and murdered innocents cry out the solemn indictment of Marxism-Leninism. If there is any silver lining to be found among the corpses, it is that history has made communism's inevitable failure so painfully clear that it seems no one in his right mind could possibly support it any longer.
And yet, inexplicably, many educated people do. The one place in America that can be counted on to contain droves of fashionable socialists is on our nation's campuses. Che Guevara's face abounds on t-shirts, necklaces and dorm wall posters. "Progressive-minded" students routinely display portraits of Lenin and the hammer and sickle without a hint of irony, either blissfully ignorant or callously uncaring of the fact that Stalin and Mao together murdered several times as many millions of innocent people as the Nazis.
Legions of American professors and students alike today pay tribute to the very same dogmas of collectivism and totalitarianism that have reduced Cuba to shambles. At a Christmas party last year, I spoke with a young woman who had recently graduated with a degree in economics from Stanford. The problem with Cuba, she said, is that the government doesn't have enough control over the island's economy. If they truly want to make socialism work, she maintained, they really need to start cracking down.
Even among college students who would never describe themselves as socialists, it's common to hear the sentiment expressed that communism is a good idea in theory, but it just doesn't work in practice. This is a strange thing to say about a political and economic doctrine, especially one that not only doesn't work, but that has reliably produced fatal levels of poverty, brutal dictatorship and acute political repression wherever it has been implemented. The Western political and economic structure as defined by individual rights, free markets and peaceful voluntary exchange may not be perfect. Undoubtedly, it leaves room for a great deal of inequality and suffering in the world. But history teaches us that the collectivist and totalitarian alternative is so horrifically worse that a serious comparison is nothing but a fool's errand.
Anthony Dick is a Cavalier Daily columnist. He can be reached adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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