On throwing the bums out

DallasBlog.com | William Murchison:

“It would have been hard to get rid of Castro and to clean up after him. Yet is it really doubtful, all these years later, what a gain to peace and freedom his political demise would have been. There would have been no missile showdown with the Soviet Union; no Kennedy assassination; no Cuban-inspired attempt to communize Chile; no bloody guerrilla wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador; no political prisons for freedom-minded Cubans; no flight of Cubans to the United States; no Mariel refugee crisis; no overturned boats and drowned refugees between Cuba and Florida; no Elian Gonzalez mess; no...
"Action has its undoubted costs and dangers; just like non-action, when you get right down to it.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

Fidel Castro may have been involved in many of the bad things that happened in Latin America over the last 40 years, but he was hardly solely responsible. It is naive to assume that if he had been neatly taken out in 1959 then Latin America would have seen no other dictatorships, coups or guerrilla movements.

It's also naive to believe that an invasion of Cuba was a straightforward task for the US military or that the assassination of Castro would have ended the Cuban revolution or that ... what, Cubans would have lived happily ever after under a Batista restoration?

The history of that era has a not-so-shining example of how difficult it is for the US military to impose American style democracy on an indigenous revolution -- the Vietnam War. And, now, in the 2000s, we have another not-so-shining example -- the Iraq War -- which teaches us that deposing a dictator, rather than resulting in a flowering of democracy, sometimes results in sectarian violence or civil war, regional instability, and increased anti-American sentiment around the world. Only through a willful ignorance of history can one wistfully regret that President Kennedy didn't go to war against Cuba in 1961.