On the homepage today, I have an article about Lincoln Díaz-Balart — a personal appreciation. He was a congressman, and a friend of mine. He passed away on Monday. My article is here.
The article brings up some broader issues, which I’d like to touch on now. One is “dual loyalty,” a loaded concept in our politics. Another is related: “hyphenated Americanism.” People have been talking about these things lately because of remarks by JD Vance about Ukrainian Americans.
Well, we have always talked about these things — but they arise at particular moments.
Lincoln Díaz-Balart was an American, for sure. And a Cuban American, for sure. He was born in Cuba, into a prominent political family. As a congressman, he placed special emphasis on Cuban affairs — particularly the political prisoners in his native land. He made no apologies for this. “How can you do otherwise,” he said, “if you know what’s going on?”
He had three brothers (sometimes known as “the Cuban Kennedys”). One of them is Mario, who has been a member of Congress since 2003. Their father said of his sons, “They’re 100 percent American and 100 percent Cuban.” But that’s impossible, right? You have to choose one or the other, right? The issue is more complicated than that.
In my article, I say, “Lincoln was 100 percent devoted to the people he loved and 100 percent devoted to his ideals.”
When I was growing up in Michigan, the Polish Americans were keenly interested in the Solidarity drama: martial law, John Paul II, and all of that. Were they wrong or disloyal? No, they just knew more than the rest of us, I think, and their feelings were naturally more intense.
Irish Americans cared about Northern Ireland. Jewish Americans were especially interested in Israel (and took a lot of grief for it). And on and on.
Another issue: communism and fascism, Left and Right. The Díaz-Balarts’ father, Rafael, was once a close friend of Fidel Castro’s. They were roommates and, eventually, brothers-in-law. Then there was a big split between them. Rafael Díaz-Balart became the majority leader of the Cuban House of Representatives.
In 1955, he described Castro as “a psychopathic fascist, who could choose to align himself with communism only because fascism was defeated in the Second World War.”
Lincoln and I spoke of this issue at some length. Raúl Castro was a communist, he said. Fidel? When he was educated by Spanish priests at the Belén Academy, his heroes were Primo de Rivera, Hitler, and Mussolini. But after 1945, that was problematic.
Fidel was always a fascist, Lincoln maintained — or someone who simply sought power, and the cult of personality that can go with it.
I often think of a wise professor of mine, who said, “Whether the boot is black or red is of no particular importance. What matters is that it is stamping on the human face.”
Consider Putin. What is he? He is a dictator, of course, but of Left or Right? Putin is “a product of the system,” Vladimir Bukovsky once told me. (Bukovsky was a leading dissident in the Soviet Union.) Putin is a classic Soviet man. “Everything that comes from him has a birthmark on it,” Bukovsky said. Putin was an officer in the KGB. Over the past many years, he has succeeded in re-Sovietizing Russia: abolishing civil society, abolishing independent media, etc. There are more political prisoners in Putin’s Russia than there were in the last stage of the Soviet Union.
Yet Putin is admired by right-wing parties and movements across Europe and elsewhere. Is he Left or Right? Does it matter? Not to the victims, not to the corpses.
Nayib Bukele is no Vladimir Putin. But he makes an interesting case nonetheless. Bukele is the president of El Salvador, and I wrote about him in a series on Latin America last week (here). Mary Anastasia O’Grady, the Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote about him too: here. Under Bukele, she said, El Salvador has “become one of the least free countries in the region.” Indeed, she likened it to Cuba.
Bukele is right-wing, correct? Trump Jr., Matt Gaetz, Mike Lee, and other Republicans attended Bukele’s second inauguration. But consider this: Bukele began his political career in the FMLN, the party that grew from the Marxist guerrillas. He was elected mayor of San Salvador as an FMLN-er. He lost some power struggles within the party, however, and founded his own: Nuevas Ideas. Were the ideas so new?
(There is a lot more to say about Bukele — positive and negative — but this post of mine is just for the raising of a few issues.)
One more thing: In my article today, I say that Lincoln Díaz-Balart cared about freedom, democracy, and human rights across the board — not merely for a select few. He did not think that some people were born to suffer under dictatorship and others born to be free. If you were a political prisoner, he cared about you, no matter the political coloration of your tormentor.
This is not especially common.
I can tell you something from my own experience. If you write about human-rights abuses in, say, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, some people like it, some people don’t. If you write about human-rights abuses in, say, Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, the people may switch sides: some liking it, some not.
Very human, and very unfortunate.