Che Chic and the Ladies in White

It is fashionable to wear T-shirts with Che’s mug plastered across it. From teens in small villages in northern Italy to those Hollywood intellectuals on the Left coast, Che is chic.

But who champions the Ladies in White of Cuba – wives, mothers and sisters and daughters of prisoners rotting in Fidel Castro’s prisons for a variety of crimes from expressing “forbidden opinions” to attempting to flee the hell hole of Cuban dictatorship.

A piece by Mary Anatasia O’Grady (read) describes how in 2003 Castro “ordered the lockup of 75 journalists, librarians and democracy advocates” calculating that after an initial outcry by the outside world all would be forgotten. After all, isn’t that how Castro has maintained his grip on power for fifty years? Well these women had had enough of repression and so for two years there have been weekly gatherings and processions in white in a kind of defiant, silent protest.

This has caused Castro’s heavenly worker’s paradise to be catapulted into the news – again - because these brave and persistent women were awarded the European Parliament’s Sakhorov Prize which honors freedom of thought.

And what about the Left coast Idol? Castro excels in taking political prisoners (estimated at 500,000 since 1959) and executing thousands of these. What are crimes according to the gospel of Fidelito? Meeting to discuss the economy, writing letters to the government, “to report on political developments, to speak to international reporters, to advocate human rights or to visit friends or relatives outside your local area of residence without government permission” (read).

As for Che, well he was just an evil and incompetent fool. “Che excelled in one thing: mass murder of defenseless men. In anything like a fair fight Che was consistently routed, stomped and humiliated” (read).

Will the world turn a blind eye again to Castro’s virtual imprisonment of 11 million Cubans after mumbling a few words of indignation? But daaahling, it’s so much more chic to wear Che and fawn all over the strongman of Cuba - Fidel Castro.