In Mexico City, two icons of Cuban repression are banished

The shrine to Castro and Guevara — the two foremost figures of the Cuban Revolution — depicted them sitting side by side on a bench, not far from the apartment in Mexico City where they first met in 1955. That encounter has taken on "near-mythical dimensions among many on the left," the Los Angeles Times observed the other day. Tourists often posed with the statues; some admirers, caught up in the legend of Castro and Guevara as romantic liberators, left flowers.

But for all the radical chic they inspired, and despite the swooning of countless useful idiots, Castro and Guevara were not liberators. They were killers. And that first meeting in Mexico City set in motion one of the cruelest and longest-lived dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere. Together they brought Cuba not freedom and justice but tyranny: mass executions, political prisons, economic ruin, and relentless repression.

Yet even after all these years, they are still celebrated as icons of the left, their faces plastered on clothing, posters, and coffee mugs. Dismantling their monument in Mexico City is a welcome step toward setting the record straight. With Rojo de la Vega's directive coming just ahead of Cuba's Rebellion Day, this is an apt moment to recall just what that record comprised.

When Castro and Guevara came to power in Cuba in 1959, they quickly consolidated their control through terror. Political opponents were hauled before kangaroo courts and executed at what became known as "el paredón," the wall where executions took place. Those they killed, recounted "The Black Book of Communism," an authoritative survey of communist regimes in the 20th century, included "former comrades-in-arms who refused to abandon their democratic beliefs." Within a few years, thousands had been shot.

At the Havana fortress of La Cabaña, Guevara personally oversaw mass executions. "A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate," he declared. "We don't need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him."

Even after the revolution's early days, repression never ceased. Cubans who tried to leave the island were treated as traitors. Dissidents were jailed, tortured, or driven into exile. Entire families were punished for one member's alleged crimes.

This month — July — evokes a particularly bloody memory of that repression.

On July 13, 1994, more than 70 Cubans crowded onto an old tugboat, the "13 de Marzo," and set out from Havana under cover of night, desperate to reach Florida.

Seven miles off the Cuban coast, they were intercepted by government vessels. The security boats rammed the tug repeatedly, smashed its hull, and trained high-pressure hoses on the passengers — men, women, and children — as it sank. Thirty-seven people died. The Cuban government never acknowledged wrongdoing and never punished those responsible.

The tugboat massacre is only one entry on the long list of human rights atrocities committed by the regime Castro and Guevara established. Yet despite its litany of horrors, countless journalists, celebrities, and politicians have long rhapsodized about what a paradise communist Cuba has been.

A row erupted after the sculpture was removed from the park in Cuauhtémoc last week. Among those complaining was Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who insisted that the "historic moment" represented by the statues merited a public tribute of memory. As the Mexican journalist Carlos Bravo Regidor noted, Sheinbaum, like others on the left, seemed more upset about "some miserable statues of Fidel and Che" being banished than about "the misery suffered by those who live beneath the yoke of the Cuban dictatorship."

Symbols matter. Statues and monuments help shape a society's collective memory, and to enshrine Castro and Guevara in bronze was to enshrine the lies they told and the suffering they caused. Their sculptures on a bench in the heart of Mexico's capital was a declaration that their partnership was something admirable and worthy of commemoration, perhaps even something to emulate. In reality, it was a partnership in despotism, and it brought misery to millions.

Rojo de la Vega's order to cart away the monument was an act of moral hygiene. May the removal of the statues in Mexico City be only a prelude to the removal of their dictatorship in Havana — and to the day when the Cuban people can finally breathe free.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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