Gautam Mukunda wrote:
...
> As Pinochet (for
> example) was clearly a hell of a lot better than Castro.
...
Gautam--
This statement gave me pause. I tried to do some quick
research, but had trouble finding figures from obviously unbiased
sources. In terms of raw numbers, Pinochet seems to have killed
5000 while taking power and 3000 more during his reign. It's
not clear how the "missing" are counted, but the source seemed
solid. Castro was harder to find reliable numbers on, although
a rabidly anti-Castro site gives an upper bound of 100,000 dead.
What do you base your statement on?
---David
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S. Did you know that Pinochet overthrew Allende on
September 11th (1973)? Coincidence?
Me:
No, I didn't know that, and I rather expect that it was coincidence, since
Osama Bin Laden has probably never heard of Allende, and certainly wouldn't
have cared had he heard. I don't have a copy of the Black Book of Communism
currently at hand - it's the standard reference on questions like that. The
numbers I recall were in the range of 20-50,000, which is, by Communist
standards, not _that_ bad. The problem with Cuba, of course, is that
precisely because Castro is so much more repressive than Pinochet ever was,
we don't have very good information on what happened. We didn't discover
the details of Stalin's death camps for _decades_. There's no chance
anything that bad is happening in Cuba, but things of a smaller scale are
also, of course, easier to keep quiet. Thus, in the odd calculus of some
international human rights activist groups, an incredibly repressive
dictator who eliminates all freedom of the press comes under far less
pressure than one who is just really bad but doesn't keep such a tight grip
that no one knows what happens in his country. When you combine Castro's
murders with the total destruction of the Cuban economy, Pinochet's eventual
willingness to step aside in favor of a democratic government (something
that, however evil he was, he also deserves some credit for) compared to
Castro's complete and obvious unwillingness to do the same, and the far more
totalitarian nature of Castro's regime, it doesn't seem to me that it's even
close between them. The casualty rates for people fleeing from Cuba to
Florida approach 50%, by most estimates. Yet, when Castro allows people to
flee, thousands do. You never saw anything even vaguely equivalent under
Pinochet. The praise of him that swept some parts of the right when the
Spanish went after him was astonishingly idiotic - he was, clearly, an evil
man, even if the question of whether he should have been prosecuted is open
to debate. But in the end he peacefully gave up power in a Chile far
wealthier and more stable than he found it, and was replaced by a democratic
government. Anyone want to bet on the odds of the same thing happening in
Cuba?
Gautam
