Collegiate Times

This was a big news week, and I admit I had a tough time deciding on what to write.

First there is the recent declaration of independence by Kosovo - in short, "Foreign Affairs" got it right: Kosovo's independence should not be held hostage to Serbia's inability to trust itself to behave responsibly.

Then there is the resurrection of the Danish cartoon idiocy - which Christopher Hitchens summed up well when he skeptically remarked, "the incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability!"

Also there was the massive California meat recall, but what can I say? It's "The Jungle" out there, folks.

But what's really jumped out at me this week is the muted media reaction to the retirement of Fidel Castro. Honestly, I'd expected much more overheated rhetoric from the pro- and anti-Castro factions in the media.

The only thing I can say that I regret about "el comandante's salida" is that this swine will never sit in the dock at the ICC for fifty years of repression, tyranny and murder.

The transition of power did not go on the way I'd have liked - that being a popular uprising that made the Castro brothers flee into the arms of their thuggish comrade-in-tyranny Hugo Chavez.

So Castro's Cuba will - for the foreseeable future at least - remain the impoverished autocracy that it's been since my father was a boy.

Having tested the waters in 2006 by temporarily handing power off to his brother Raul, Fidel has ensured that the tin-pot despotism he'd set up would persist - at least for a while.

"Even if Castro no longer calls the shots, the repressive machinery he constructed over almost half a century remains fully intact," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, America's director at Human Rights Watch. "Until that changes, it's unlikely there will be any real progress on human rights in Cuba."... And that machinery grinds exceedingly fine.

Sixty-nine so-called "prisoners of conscience" sit in Cuban prisons, among them Orlando Zapata Tamayo who, according to Amnesty International, was sentenced to three years in 2003 on charges of showing "contempt to the figure of Fidel Castro," "public disorder" and "resistance."

In 2005 he was reportedly sentenced to an additional 15 years for "contempt" and "resistance" in prison. In 2006, he was tried again on the same charges and sentenced to an additional seven-year term. He's serving a prison sentence of 25 years and six months.

Journalist Oscar Mariano Gonzalez-Perez has been in prison since July 2005 without trial or charges for "suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities," a government euphemism for investigative reporting. He is one of 24 independent journalists incarcerated by the Castro regime.

Due process is hindered by a lack of judicial independence, freedoms of expression, association and assembly, all contingent on their compatibility with "the existence and objectives of the socialist state," or contrariness to the "decision of the Cuban people to build socialism and communism."

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says, "It is evident that the exercise of the right to freedom of expression ... is governed by two fundamental determinants: on the one hand, the preservation and strengthening of the communist State; on the other, the need to muzzle any criticism of the group in power."

This is the house that Fidel built - a repressive, impoverished nation, a one-party authoritarian feudal fief that would make Thomas Hobbes blush ... aided and abetted by the idiotic American embargo policy that allows the Cuban leadership to carry on with or without Castro and punishes Cubans for living in a despotic state.

The machinery of state tyranny built on the backs of the Cuban people by this bloody thug will continue to grind shakily on ... for a little while anyway, but I hope that the whole rotten enterprise will collapse sooner rather than later.

I sincerely look forward to a time when things improve, when the United States and Cuba can have a rapprochement that allows for democracy, liberty, the rule of law and republican government ... but I fear that el comandante may have been right in his farewell address: "Our Revolution can still count on cadres from the old guard and others who were very young in the early stages of the process."