Christmas in Cuba

Cuba found its way into Christmas in more ways than one this year. One is good, the other…remarkably bad. We need to be aware of both. This Wall Street Journal opinion piece does a good job of putting it all together.

It starts with the news that Target department stores carried kitschy little merchandise with the image of Che Guevara on them. When WSJ writer Mary Anastasia O’Grady confronted the chain about it, they promptly removed the merchandise. She elaborates:

That it took only a day for Target to make that admirable decision suggests that at least someone at the company knows who Guevara was and what Cuba is today thanks in part to him. The misstep, though, probably occurred because others at the company allowed Target to become a target itself of the Che myth.

Such myths are dangerous, and they’re proliferating. It’s a mindless assault on sensibilities, a glaring result of the dumbing down of history that we have wound up with a trend dubbed ‘tyrant chic.’

Guevara is not just a dead white guy from a well-to-do family who terrorized a racially mixed nation and executed hundreds of innocents in the late 1950s and 1960s. He is also a symbol of the totalitarian regime that persists in Cuba, which still practices his ideology of intolerance, hatred and repression. It is not the torture and killing alone that make the tragedy. That only describes the methodology. Guevara’s wider goal–to forcibly strip a population of its soul and spirit–is what is truly frightening and deplorable. Christians, who celebrate the birth of their Savior today, have particularly suffered under Guevara’s dream of revolution, which has lasted since 1959.

The fear under which Cubans have lived for 48 years was fathered by the merciless Che Guevara. The unhappy Argentine Marxist met Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1955 and later became a rebel commander. “The Black Book of Communism,” published in 1999 by Harvard University Press, notes that early in his career Guevara earned a “reputation for ruthlessness; a child in his guerrilla unit who had stolen a little food was immediately shot without trial.” In his will, the book says, “this graduate of the school of terror praised the ‘extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless and cold killing machines.’ “

That is breathtaking evidence from his own hand of willful, chilling intent.

All independent thought that refused to worship the communist state was an affront to Guevara. Christians were an especially difficult lot. From the earliest days after Castro took power, Che sent hundreds of men to face firing squads at the Havana prison known as La Cabaña. His victims could be heard at dawn loudly crying “Long live Christ the King, down with communism,” just before the rifle shots rang out.

That’s the bad story. But here’s the other side:

Amazingly, hope is still alive in Cuba. One reason is because although Guevara was able to kill a lot of Christians, neither he nor his successors succeeded in wiping out Christianity. The struggling Christian community, which takes seriously the religious teaching to reject fear in the face of evil, is playing a key role in the island’s dissident movement.

An icon of the Christian resistance is Oscar Elias Biscet, a black physician who is serving a 25-year sentence for his peaceful activism against the regime. He has been arrested more than 26 times since he began to express his dissent; he has been beaten, tortured and locked in tiny windowless cells for days on end. Hundreds of other prisoners of conscience are in jail, under atrocious conditions; many are also devout Christians.

The Christian faith has survived Che and Fidel and decades of brainwashing. It is battered but has not been defeated. Raul Castro fears it–which is why he takes Bibles away from his unbreakable prisoners. The moral of the story seems to be that even the all-powerful regime cannot stop Christmas from coming to Cuba.

But you can stop an American store chain from marketing the tyrant’s image.