An important person in my life was — is — Armando Valladares. A poet, he was a prisoner in the Cuban gulag for 22 years. Afterward, in America, he wrote a memoir about the experience: Against All Hope. It had an impact on me. Later, Valladares came to Harvard to speak. That had an impact on me too. It was moving to see him, and hear him, and shake his hand. Harvard would not let him have a platform alone. There was a professor along with him, whose job was basically to give the Castro point of view. To “balance” Valladares. In 1987, President Reagan appointed Valladares to be the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. human-rights commission in Geneva.
Today, right-wing populists and others call me a “zombie Reaganite.” I don’t know about the “zombie” part, but I am guilty of the “Reaganite” part.
Sometime in the 2000s, I think, I had a discussion with Valladares about Americans — in particular, about American supporters of the Castro dictatorship. Valladares said they were simply naïve — ignorant. One day, the dictatorship would fall, and the archives would be opened, and people who had supported the dictatorship would be ashamed. The scales would fall from their eyes.
I argued with him, gently. Some people were naïve, I said. But others were quite knowing. They knew exactly what the Castro dictatorship was and liked it.
Valladares was nicer, more generous, than I. I like to think I was more realistic. I don’t know.
In 2017, I had a similar discussion with Vladimir Kara-Murza. He is the Russian democracy leader who has been a political prisoner since 2022. Here is the relevant portion of my write-up of our discussion:
Of course, there are many, many people who support and like Putin in the West. Kara-Murza says that many are simply ignorant. They don’t know what Putin truly is. Others, meanwhile, are on the take. They profit from the Putin regime. Kara-Murza suspects we will learn a lot about this once the regime falls, even as we learned a lot from records after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Then there are people who support Putin out of affinity. “There have always been fellow travelers and enablers,” says Kara-Murza: “people who themselves live in the West and choose to justify and defend the actions of dictators who abuse the rights of their own people. I find such behavior despicable.”
Yes. So do I. Despicable, damnable — and widespread. Just as in Soviet days.