If Serbia, why not Cuba?
By Joe Schembrie
web
posted January 10, 2000
If President Clinton is still searching for a legacy other than impeachment, then perhaps he should consider bombing Cuba.
Cuba has recently made the news because it is calling for the return of six-year old shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez, whose mother drowned while escaping from Cuba to the United States. Demanding that the boy be returned to Cuba and his father, Fidel Castro hop-marched three hundred thousand Cubans out into the streets of Havana for an Official Spontaneous Demonstration before the cameras of US reporters. And Janet Reno declared that the parental bond transcends public concerns.
Family values -- from the Clinton Administration?
Well, maybe so, but in the interests of international justice and human compassion, why isn't the Clinton Administration bombing Cuba?
Less than a year ago, we sent our warplanes to bomb the sovereign nation of Serbia back into the stone age. We razed whole cities and killed upwards of two thousand innocent people, not including soldiers (who were also innocent, it turned out). We risked World War III with Russia and China, who were brazen enough to tell us so.
And for what?
The pretext was that the Serbians were involved in a campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' against the Albanians in Kosovo. Over a hundred thousand ethnic Albanians had left Kosovo, with stories of Serbian brutality. We were assured by our government that a hundred thousand other Albanians had been systematically murdered by the Serbian armed forces.
But now, in the aftermath of the conflict, we are unable to find more than two hundred -- questionable -- mass graves.
Our bombing/strafing killed several times more Serbians and Albanians alike than did the so-called 'ethnic cleansing' -- if indeed such a campaign ever existed. Moreover, during the course of the air war, a half million additional Kosovars left their homeland out of fear of accidental bombing by NATO forces. Five times more refugees were created by our own bombing than by all of Slobodan Milosevic's alleged brutality.
To this day, the US government refuses to acknowledge that it was wrong to bomb Serbia.
So -- why don't we bomb Cuba?
If we're going to bomb a country which none of us can locate on a map, with a leader whose name we can't pronounce, why can't we drop a few on good old Cuba and Castro?
Slobodan Milosevic was democratically elected and his term of office was constitutionally limited. Castro is a dictator who seized power and refuses to stand in a fair election; he will give up power when someone pries it from his cold, dead fingers.
Milosevic's so-called 'ethnic cleansing' led to a hundred thousand refugees. Castro's oppression and tyranny have led to a million exiles. Moreover, the refugees from Castro's regime braved machine guns, sharks, and storms to make it to freedom's shore.
Milosevic's political opposition operated openly. Castro imprisoned, tortured, and executed his political opponents, by the thousands. By every standard, Castro is a far more evil man than Slobodan Milosevic.
And unlike the false charges leveled against Milosevic, Castro has publicly declared his intent to commit genocide.
Yes he has.
During recent anniversary celebrations commemorating the Cuban Revolution, Castro declared the slogan of his regime: "Socialism or Death!" Now, if we've learned anything from the past twenty years, it's that Socialism doesn't work.
So, in choosing between Socialism or Death, you'll always end up with Death.
Death -- by grinding poverty, by disease, by slow starvation, by sharks and shipwrecks as you risk escape from a Socialist disutopia whose despair is worse than a living death. Cuba's living standards, once among the highest in the Spanish-speaking Western Hemisphere, have sunk to the bottom.
Patrick Henry meant his own life when he said, "Give me liberty, or give me death!" When Castro says, "Socialism or Death!" he means to destroy a nation for his utopian fantasies. And he's getting close.
That's officially-acknowledged 'ethnic cleansing' -- which, just last year, our media's Clinton-simpaticos equated with genocide. So why aren't we saving Cuba from itself?
It would be so simple. There would be no threat of confrontation with Russian troops. Our planes had to travel thirty hours to drop a single bombload on Serbia, but wouldn't need to travel thirty minutes to strike Cuba.
And this time, when it's all over, we very likely will find mass graves to justify it all.
Well, there are some who say that we only gave up diplomacy and went to bombing Serbia because Clinton was facing down a rape accusation and looking for a wag-the-dog public distraction. If so, then Castro's best hope of survival may be that Clinton keeps himself clean of sex scandals for his remaining months in the White House.
Oh, by the way, Fidel . . . Hillary moved out. 
Joe Schembrie is a regular contributor to Enter Stage Right.