Don’t Conflate Castro and Hitler

To the editors:

The column “Albert Speer at Harvard” was insulting and morally obscene. To compare the Cuban regime with that of the Nazis—or even with that of Stalin’s Soviet Union—is to show the worst kind of specious moral equivalence.

Fidel Castro’s regime has since 1959 brought dignity and equality to the lives of millions of Cubans, has assured them of a decent standard of living and has given meaning to the lives of millions of others by engaging them in the effort to build a new society based on love and self-sacrifice rather than the self-indulgence that characterized Cuban society before 1959 and American society today. He has carried out this social revolution with little tolerance for dissent, but at the same time with a regard for human life and mercy that is not only unparalleled in the old Soviet bloc but is also rare by the standards of most Latin American countries.

To compare this regime to the Nazis is a slap in the face both to all patriotic Cubans as well as to the 50 million dead victims of Nazism. To not see that the real crime of Hitler’s Germany was not that (like Castro) it cracked down on dissent but that it cold-bloodedly decided to exterminate whole ethnic groups, is to be willfully ignorant—or perhaps just monstrously callous. Thank God for all those brave Cubans who fought and died to liberate their country from half a century of being America’s vassal state. And thank God for Mario Coyula-Cowley.

Nikhil S. Jaikumar ’02

Mar. 4, 2002