By placing moral pressure on the United States to end the embargo against Cuba, the pope did not help the needy and the starving. Instead, he deflected blame from the real culprits: Fidel Castro and the communist ideology that made his reign of misery possible.
The U.S., through its embargo, is simply refusing to participate in Cuba’s self-destruction. Our embargo tells Cuba, in effect: “We oppose communism and its crushing of capitalism and individual rights. We will have nothing to do with it. If you want to commit suicide, you will have to do so without our cooperation.” By lifting the embargo, the U.S. would help Cuba’s government retain its totalitarian grasp–extending its path of starvation and destruction still farther.
If the pope really wanted to build the morale of the Cuban people, he should have told them to assert, without compromise, the supremacy of individual rights and freedom. He should have explained how evil and dictatorship are morally impotent and can only survive so long as people hold their heads down in fear and humility. He should have pointed to the heroic dissidents who helped overcome or weaken dictatorship in Soviet Russia and Communist China.
Instead, the pope granted Castro’s Communist government respectability it most certainly does not deserve. In exchange for a few crumbs of religious “liberty,” which will likely disappear now that the television cameras have left, the pope provided Castro with a cynical public relations opportunity to blame the United States for the failures of communism. In so doing, Pope John Paul II helped ensure that Castro–and his hand-picked communist successors–will rule the country for many more generations to come.
