This Day in Latin American History (Narco-Dictator Noriega Surrenders to U.S. Forces)

Jan. 3, 1990—Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega surrendered to the U.S. troops who invaded his country in the most significant military action since the Vietnam War, ending 10 days when he was holed up in the Vatican embassy—and 22 years of corruption and violence by himself and his predecessor.

New York Times columnist James Reston once wrote, “The U.S. will do anything for Latin America, except read about it.” It has certainly been the case that, until—well, just the last week or so—this country had largely forgotten about Panama for the last 34 years, not paying much attention when Noriega died, still in captivity, in 2017.

The event that brought that nation back into our consciousness was a tweet by—well, You Know Who—about how Chinese soldiers were operating the Panama Canal, and that we were being overcharged for passage through it.

It’s hard to figure out what brought on this outburst, except that: 1) You Know Who likes to pick fights who allies with leaders who have been democratically elected, and 2) he might be, as former Congressman David Jolley suggests, jealous that Baby Jesus was receiving more attention on Christmas than he was.

Noriega seems like just the type of person he would have enjoyed. Actually, there is precedent for Republican Presidents keeping on good terms while he was in power—except that they did so while keeping as far away from him as possible, so as to avoid his ineradicable moral stench.

The path to power for Noriega ran through his hard-drinking, corrupt predecessor, Omar Torrijos, who seized power in a coup d’etat in 1968. From humble origins, Noriega became so indispensable to the dictator—first as an army colonel, then as his intelligence chief—that Torrijos called him “my gangster.”

Upon taking over Panama after Torrijos died in a 1981 plane crash, Noriega leveraged a comparatively small arms-and-drug trade into what journalists R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez Borbon called, in their account In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968-1990, called a "narcomilitary state."

Many of his countrymen would have privately agreed with the nickname bestowed on Noriega by his future American jailers to signify his pockmarked skin: “Pineapple Face.”

But they also would have been terrified that any one-liner—even a slight hint of a smirk—would have been noticed by the ruthless leader who, New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson commented in a 2017 podcast interview, possessed the frightening ability to observe the slightest thing out of the corner of his eyes even while seemingly focusing on someone else.

Though denying to Anderson that he was involved in drug trafficking with the Medellin drag cartel, Noriega did admit that he allowed money laundering for this crime in his country’s banks at the behest of the CIA, which wanted a means of monitoring this activity. Anderson judged this a half-truth.

Both Democratic and Republican Presidents chose to look the other way through two decades of the Torrijos-Noriega regime: Jimmy Carter needed Torrijos to take the Shah of Iran off his hands when the latter’s admission to a U.S. hospital sparked the hostage crisis, and Ronald Reagan and George Bush wanted to counter Communist influence in Cuba and Nicaragua.

As in the Philippines, a dictator’s heinous murder of a prominent dissident (in this case, Dr. Hugo Spadafora) caused such international revulsion that his American handlers felt compelled to act. When a call for him to step down went unheeded and Noriega voided the 1989 Presidential election, plans went into motion on how to remove him.

Noriega’s rash declaration of war on the U.S. and a subsequent killing of a U.S. Marine provided the Bush administration with the pretext needed to remove him in its “Operation Just Cause” December 1989 invasion.

The American casualties— 23 troops killed in action and over 300 wounded—may have seemed minimal compared to the Vietnam War, the largest previous U.S. military action. But, considering American complicity in the regime it ended up overthrowing, it was all so unnecessary.

This Day in Latin-American History (Castro Seizes Power)

January 1, 1959—Not long after midnight, guerrillas under the direction of lawyer-turned-revolutionary Fidel Castro sent the hated regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista running to the airport. With future legend Che Guevera and Camilo Cienfuegos leading the way, the victorious rebels marched into Havana.

Though hopes ran high for the new government, an omen appeared in Castro’s first statement upon taking the reins of power: “This time the revolution will not be frustrated! This time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will achieve its true objective. It will not be like 1898, when the Americans came and made themselves masters of the country."

As The Who sings: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution is an occasion for grief and condemnation:

* grief, because an island that could have been an oasis of democracy turned into just one more Latin American nation led by a caudillo;

* condemnation, because to this day so much of the intelligentsia—including, shamefully, members of the international media and Hollywood celebrities—wears blinders concerning a regime that continues to perpetrate human rights abuses—including, according to Amnesty International, “restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association and movement; arbitrary arrests, detention without charge or trial, and unfair trials; intimidation of dissidents; the death penalty; [and] restrictions on human rights monitoring.” (Let it be noted that this report was issued after Raul Castro took control from his ailing older brother.)

The day after Batista’s overthrow, a New York Times editorial hailed his conqueror as “an extraordinary young man” and bid him good luck. The editorial followed regular news coverage of the guerrilla leader by editorial writer-correspondent Herbert Matthews that might charitably be characterized as benign and that not-so-charitably might be viewed as being in Castro’s hip pocket.

A later Times correspondent, Anthony DePalma, examined Matthews’ case in his biography The Man Who Invented Fidel. Unlike Walter Duranty, the Times Moscow correspondent who won a Pulitzer for dispatches that softpedaled Stalin’s terror famine, Matthews appeared to believe honestly that Castro would bring “a new deal for Cuba.” That initial assessment was shared by many—not just Cubans, but even the Eisenhower administration, which recognized Castro’s government on the same day he entered Havana.

Moreover, the Castro claim that hung like an albatross around the correspondent’s neck—i.e., that the rebel leader, at a low point, had his 18 remaining men walk in circles to fool Matthews—really did not hold water, believed DePalma, who thinks this was mischievous boasting on the part of a leader who had become annoyed at a newspaperman’s claim to having made him.

What remains incontrovertible, however, is that Matthews never reconsidered his comparisons of Castro to Oliver Cromwell and John Brown, long after the “Maximum Leader” had not only ordered 600 summary executions in the immediate aftermath of his triumph but after he had backed away from ever holding democratic elections.

For years, Western intellectuals were gulled by Castro’s manipulations and artful anti-U.S. rhetoric into overlooking his abuses. The late Harold Pinter, for instance, supported the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, which not only calls for an end to the U.S. embargo but airily dismisses concerns that the Castro regime is a dictatorship.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another Nobel Prize laureate, has praised the dictator as “a man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, old-fashioned bearing, cautious words and fine manners whose ideas can't be less than extraordinary”—missing the irony that his longtime friend most resembles the protagonist of his second novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, a Caribbean tyrant loath to retire because he’s come to enjoy the perquisites of power.

Perhaps worse than writers, however, have been screenwriters, directors and stars who have treated the Castro regime with kid gloves:

* Havana, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, reached its apotheosis with the accession of Castro. Yet the Casablanca-influenced film never showed whether “Cuba Libre” ever turned out to be a reality—because it didn’t.

* Publicity materials for The Motorcycle Diaries describe this look at the young Che Guevara as “an inspiring and thrilling adventure that traces the youthful origins of a revolutionary spirit.” Left unmentioned was the fact that Guevara approved the summary executions of hundred of political prisoners at La Cabana prison in the first half of 1959, and that his ideal of revolution involved “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”

* Oliver Stone produced a documentary about Castro, El Comandante, that HBO gagged on. His second try, Looking for Fidel, was not much of an improvement. Asked by a reporter for Slate about whether one scene, in which eight prisoners are brought before Castro, might involve those men having “hell to pay” afterward if they were honest, the director answered: “I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.” (In a follow-up that does not inspire confidence, he admits that he has never visited a prison in any other Latin American country.)

In fact, the first Hollywood film to tackle in any way Castro’s brutalitarian regime was Before Night Falls, which took him to task for his mistreatment of gays. The film was right to bring these abuses to light, but gays and lesbians were only one small part of the groups herded into prisons: dissidents, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Afro-Cuban priests.

(Incidentally, even after presumably being sensitized to the plight of gays and lesbians by his starring turn in Milk, Sean Penn seems to have overlooked Castro's human rights abuses toward this group. In an interview with Raul Castro that formed part of a recent cover story in The Nation about his trip to Venezuela and Cuba, the Oscar-winning actor somehow neglected to ask Fidel's brother about the suffering of gays. Once again, Penn demonstrates that he should stick to acting instead of exposing his political naivete and awkwardly phrased writing submissions that would not be tolerated by most editors of any political stripe.)

One last group that has disappointed me profoundly is the American Library Association (ALA). Nat Hentoff, the recently fired Village Voice writer who has persistently flogged the Bush administration for its violations of human rights in the war on terror, wrote a powerful column several years ago in which he described how the ALA denied 10 independent Cuban librarians speaking spots on their program while allowing Cuban government-backed librarians nearly three hours to do so. As a librarian, I find the ALA stance one that will be impossible to justify to posterity—anymore than so many in the West will be able to explain how they let Castro’s smoke get into their eyes.