By way of Reason magazine’s Hit and Run blog is this excellent article by Paul Berman on the recent Che Guevara movie, The Cult of Che – Don’t applaud The Motorcycle Diaries. Dissident writers are dying and lingering Cuban prisons, with most of America is turning a blind eye to their plight. Berman wonders
[If the] people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It’s easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?
Given the long history of American intellectuals as fellow travelers to the Marxist creed, including the brutal and blood-stained reigns of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, I fear when Berman writes
“The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries[…]—those days appear to be over.”
that he is overly optimistic. Those days have never existed. The idea of liberty to American intellectuals, especially those of the arts, favors dissidents usually of a marxist-Leninist bent. That idea of liberty twists the meaning of the word beyond recognition.
