that. Carlos doesn’t even know if his parents are still alive. And Cuba isn’t exactly the future most of us have planned for our kids. Unless we’re really mad at the little buggers. “The revolution brought some benefits,” said Carlos, “at least at first. There was better housing, but it was gotten by giving away what had been stolen from others. The health care is free—and worth it. I can go to the doctor, but he can do nothing for me. This is why the Catholic Church must have its own hospitals. The education is free, too. But it’s indoctrination. This is not a real education. Then they make the students work on the sugar harvest. Of course, the students wreck the agriculture. They don’t care. They don’t know what they’re doing.” Carlos and Donna thought it was important that people know what a disastrous and terrifying place Cuba is. “Not for the sake of future revenge,” said Donna, “but because of the frailty of memory. People will forget how bad it was, the way they’re already forgetting in Russia. But more important, they’ll forget why it became that way.” It will take a lot of forgetting. Socialism has had a nasty reign in Cuba. Hundreds of low-level supporters of the ousted Batista regime were executed, and thousands were jailed. Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with AIDS antibodies have been sent to concentration camps. Critics of the government are forced into internal exile or confined in mental hospitals. The Americas Watch human-rights group has said that Cuba holds “more political prisoners as a percentage of population than any other country in the world.” Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization whose board of trustees is an ideological gamut running from Jeane Kirkpatrick to Andrew Young, says, “There is continued evidence of torture and killings in prison and in psychiatric institutions. . . . Local human-rights activists say that more than 100 prisons and prison camps hold between 60,000 and 100,000 prisoners of all categories.” (This is about twice America’s generous rate of per-capita incarceration.) How many of those categories are political? Well, from a socialist point of view, all of them. And any normal Cuban is probably going to wind up in jail sooner or later anyway, because, according to Amnesty International, serious offenses in Cuba include “illegal association,” “disrespect,” “dangerousness,” “illegal printing,” and “resistance.” Castro himself was in jail for a while under the previous administration and in a 1954 letter from his cell he wrote: “We need many Robespierres in Cuba.” I knew that the potential for disaster lurked in socialism, but what had caused
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