Alan Gross emerged Wednesday from five years of captivity in Cuba praising the Cuban people and offering a lesson he said he learned: Freedom is not free.
In his first public remarks after arriving in the U.S., Gross also spoke supportively of President Barack Obama’s move to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba after more than a half-century of discord. Calling the shift “game-changing,” Gross said that more than five decades of history had shown that the previous U.S. approach to its old foe wasn’t effective.
“Two wrongs never make a right,” Gross said. “I truly hope that we can now get beyond these mutually belligerent policies.” [Reported by Associated Press today.]
To say a policy is or isn’t effective implies a standard of what constitutes “effective.” Gross didn’t name his standard, and people usually don’t. Presumably he means that Cuba is still not a free country after all these decades of embargoes and lack of normal relations. Therefore, why not normalize everything, as if Cuba were, in fact, a free country? Maybe that will make the world safer for freedom.
This would be like saying the following about an abusive spouse or family member: “Holding the abusive person accountable for his actions, by withdrawing love, support and association with him, hasn’t worked. He’s still an abusive tyrant. So let’s just start treating him nicely, instead.”
Indeed, this is the very kind of reasoning that goes on every day in psychologically destructive and toxic family environments. It generally leads to even greater disaster than the policy of accountability ever could have. Relationships between countries and relationships within families may be different contexts, but the underlying principle here is the same.
The problem here lies in blaming the victim. When somebody says, “Being mean to Cuba hasn’t worked. So let’s be nice, instead,” they’re evading the basic and obvious fact that the problem is the fault of the victimizer, not the victim. The reason we have had poor relations with Cuba all these years is because the country has been run by an impervious dictator, and continues as a dictatorship to this day. Unlike the United States, which still has considerable economic and personal freedom, the nation of Cuba has little or none. There’s nothing morally virtuous about pretending otherwise, and there’s nothing practical to be gained by doing so.
Cuba is clearly not the same military threat it was to the United States way back in 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis. America faced the very real possibility of nuclear war with Soviet Russia at that time. That’s not the situation today, obviously.
But one thing has not changed: When a free country treats a dictatorship no differently from the government of a free (or even semi-free) country, it sends a powerful message. Among other things, it sends the message, “We don’t really care that much about our freedom. At least not enough to take a stand against those who deny it.”
I imagine we’re supposed to take Alan Gross’ statements without question, because he’s the one who has endured the pain of the dictatorship by being a political prisoner. But that pain and suffering doesn’t automatically make him right. In fact, it’s astonishing to hear a person who has gone through such pain and suffering evade the distinction between freedom and dictatorship, in one breath, and in the next breath declare, “Freedom isn’t free.”
What does it mean to claim that freedom isn’t free? It implies that freedom is not causeless. It arises from a prevailing set of ideas that people (and their leaders) accept. Freedom rests on the idea that human beings are volitional, thinking, self-responsible beings whose lives are ends in themselves, and who are morally (and therefore politically) entitled to live their lives as they see fit, so long as they don’t physically coerce others. Where this attitude and idea prevail, freedom will take hold. Where this attitude is not held, freedom won’t be practiced.
Cuba is a stubborn and living testimony to the existence of a government that will not give up on the idea that individual human beings are merely cogs in a wheel, wards of the state who exist to implement the needs of that state by living for what the government deems, “the common good.” Communism, in particular, rests on the idea that the primary purpose of individuals is to serve society, which in practice always leads to dictatorship because the state is the means by which this idea of morality is imposed. That’s true in America’s welfare-entitlement state, and it’s true on a grander and greater scale in Communist nations like Cuba.
“These changes will lead to legitimacy for a government that shamelessly continuously abuses human rights but it will not lead to assistance for those whose rights are being abused,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Wednesday.
This sums up the situation accurately. People like Obama and Alan Gross take it as a self-evident truth that by showing love and compassion to tyrants, you’ll somehow make the situation better for all. It never seems to occur to such people that it actually makes the situation worse, because you grant legitimacy and implicit sanction to people who would never otherwise obtain it rationally and peacefully. In the name of peace, love and brotherhood, we legitimize thugs, dictators and autocrats — congratulating ourselves on our enlightened and benevolent spirits.
Whom you choose as your friends says a lot about what you value, what you think and what you believe. Obama’s choice of the still-Communist Cuban government as a new friend reveals a lot about him that isn’t surprising. What is surprising, and a bit shocking, is to see a man who suffered at the hands of these dictators display the naiveté all dictators and abusers count on to make their harassment of innocent people possible.
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