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]
Me:
One more thing. _Before Night Falls_ is an extraordinary movie about
Reinaldo Arenas's persecution by Castro's government, motivated solely
because he was gay. For some reason that's always a great crime under
Communism. The Soviets used to put their homosexuals in prison camps.
Anyways, Andrew Sullivan had some great comments on that movie, which I will
quote below:
BEFORE NIGHT FALLS: Saw a beautiful painting of a movie last night - a
sprawling, vivid, sensual, lung-filling account of the life of Reinaldo
Arenas, the Cuban writer. The movie, directed by Julian Schnabel, is a
delirious evocation of life before, during, and after the Cuban
"revolution." I have rarely seen a more searing anti-Communist statement.
One of the most glaring ironies of the Left's continuing soft spot for
Castro's dictatorship is Cuba's own merciless persecution of homosexuals.
Arenas was hounded, slandered, imprisoned, shoved in a cell so tiny he
couldn't stand up, raped, and sent to a concentration camp. What I admired
about Arenas was not just his devotion to his writing, epitomized by the
brilliant memoir, Before Night Falls, but his conviction that political
freedom included the freedom to seek pleasure. We are so used in this
culture to seeing the right as puritanical, we do not often see how adamant
the far left has often been against sex, love, irreverence, rebellion of all
kinds. Arenas was an unapologetic pursuer of sexual freedom. Even when he
was essentially crushed, he never capitulated to the soulless, lifeless
order that Communism imposed. It says something, doesn't it, that the
anti-communist right has barely mentioned this movie, and the cultural left
has barely celebrated it. In the New York Times review, Stephen Holden put
Arenas' dissident witness this way: "When the Communist revolution on which
he had pinned his inchoate boyhood hopes clamped down on Cuba's free-for-all
sexual climate and threw homosexuals in prison camps, Arenas began to throw
a lifelong tantrum." Tantrum? It's a tantrum to protect your writing from
censorship and your friends from concentration camps? Go see the movie. The
truth is out there.
Gautam
