Stone Cold Stupid

Nick Gillespie | February 16, 2003

In an AP article incongruously titled, "Oliver Stone Not Swayed By Castro Charm," the auteur who dared take on the NFL in Any Given Sunday proclaims of Cuba's own Alvin "Pete" Rozelle: "We should look to him as one of the earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult."

Human Rights Watch takes a different, rather dim view, of Castro's wisdom, titling its 1999 report on the tropical paradise Cuba's Repressive Machinery: Human Rights Forty Years After the Revolution. (If you want the executive summary version, here it is: There aren't any human rights in Cuba 40 years after the Revolution.)

Stone says he's against the U.S. embargo against Cuba. He's right to want to end it, but he seems fails to understand the real problem with the embargo is not that it immiserated Cuba--Castro's own economic and political policies did that--but that it gives Castro a freer hand in repressing his own people.