there goes Florida

Sometimes in the unscripted moments of a campaign, when the handlers are away, a candidate shows his true nature. Earlier this month, Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald asked John Kerry what he thought of something called the Varela Project. Kerry said it was “counterproductive.” It's necessary to try other approaches, he added.

The Varela Project happens to be one of the most inspiring democracy movements in the world today. It is being led by a Cuban dissident named Oswaldo Payá, who has spent his life trying to topple Castro's regime. Payá realized early on that the dictatorship would never be overthrown by a direct Bay of Pigs-style military assault, but it could be undermined by a peaceful grass-roots movement of Christian democrats, modeling themselves on Martin Luther King Jr. […]

Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole in the Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose legislation if they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They began a petition drive to call for a national plebiscite on five basic human rights: free speech, free elections, freedom to worship, freedom to start businesses, and the freeing of political prisoners.

This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures, and more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The European Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights.

Then came Castro's crackdown. Though it didn't dare touch Payá, the regime arrested 75 other dissidents and sentenced each of them to up to 28 years in jail. This week Payá issued a desperate call for international attention and solidarity because the hunt for dissidents continues.

John Kerry's view? As he told Oppenheimer, the Varela Project “has gotten a lot of people in trouble … and it brought down the hammer in a way that I think wound up being counterproductive.”

Imagine if you are a Cuban political prisoner rotting in a jail, and you learn that the leader of the oldest democratic party in the world thinks you're being counterproductive. Kerry's comment is a harpoon directed at the morale of Cuba's dissidents.

The title of this post may be flippant, but the subject is utterly serious. I decided to quote David Brooks at some length as his op-ed is behind the NYT subscription wall.

Kerry's statement regarding Varela is not an aberration. On the contrary: the liberal blueblood has had a soft spot for third-world communist dictatorships for decades. First was a meeting with representatives of the North Vietnamese government, which Kerry himself described as “on the borderline of private individuals negotiating, et cetera”—borderline negotiations, that is, while the war was ongoing. During the mid-1980s the freshman senator was the leading congressional champion of the Sandinista junta in Nicaragua. And now, he is dismissing as “counterproductive” the indigenous movement that, for a brief moment, was the best hope of democratic reform in Castro's island prison.

Marxism, in its every application, has been an unmitigated evil—a simple truth that limousine liberals somehow will not grasp. Their message to the little people still under the yoke remains freedom for me, but not for thee.