I was born in Bolivia, the South American country named after the first larger-than-life South American indépendantiste Simón Bolívar.
Bolivar was a 19th century Venezuelan blueblood, who was the central figure in the establishment of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Panama as sovereign states free of Spanish colonial rule.
Like many South Americans, in 1959 when Fidel Castro ousted the corrupt and authoritarian President Fulgencio Batista as head of government in Cuba, I wondered if Fidel was the next Bolivar.
I clipped and saved newspaper photos of Fidel and articles in the adolescent hope that he would be a hero.
Bolívar's political life ended in disappointment when his grand ambition to unite the free countries of South America was not realized.
Before he died in 1830, at the age of 47, Bolívar said that, "all who served the revolution have plowed the sea.”
My family had a connection of sorts with Fidel Castro.
A church my Baptist missionary father built and pastored in Oruro had in its Sunday School several young boys who, as young men, went into the mountains to join Castro's proxy, Che Guevara, in a failed attempt to export Marxist revolution to Bolivia.
My father was an evangelical Christian whose first priority was converting souls. However, a part of his work, and that of the Baptists in Bolivia for more than a century, was parallel to the liberation theology of Latin and South American priests who sought economic, social and political justice on earth as a preface to spiritual justice in heaven.
The Canadian Baptists, for example, were a prime influence for land reform that emancipated the land-imprisoned Aymara and Quenchua, and Mestizos farmers.
In the long run “El Jefe,” the boss of Cuba, did not measure up to the freedom and justice that Bolívar and the Christians of Bolivia worked for.
Castro made Cubans “plough the sea of revolution” for six decades.
El Jefe's free medical care for the people of Cuba is paid for in the blood and sorrow of execution, torture and imprisonment without trial.
He enjoyed a long political life by shortening the lives of others.
When his people asked for bread, he gave them fear instead.
All prime ministers from Diefenbaker to Trudeau Jr. gave him diplomatic recognition and Canadian banks, mining companies and other business have operated in Cuba.
Canadian businesses have also operated in China, the USSR and other cesspools, but no one confuses that with approval for their history, political and humanitarian records.
Fidel was photogenic and articulate, and that covered a multitude of sins.
The present generation of Cubans, if they have not fled the country, have forgotten and perhaps forgiven El Jefe's terrible deeds.
At his trial for sedition in 1953 he said that, “history will absolve me.”
But no, history will condemn him.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
