Send Dick Cheney to Cuba

I was a child during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 but I remember it well because of the fear that it engendered; even little kids knew about nuclear war and its terrible consequences in those days. There are people today who ridicule Jack Kennedy for his somewhat over-active libido, but if Kennedy had not been President at this juncture it is dubious any of us would be here to discuss it.
Cuba generated a lot of hyper-ventilation back then: a communist state allied with the Soviets only 70 miles from Florida – freedom vs. tyranny -- Armageddon looms!
I didn’t learn until much later that we had a strategic military base at Guantanamo perched on Cuban soil all that time, a vestige of imperialism dating back to 1898. The bad feelings have not entirely dissipated, but the Cold War is past tense, the Soviet Union went out of business, and somewhat ironically we turned our last-defense-of-freedom bulwark against the global communist menace into a kind of stateless prison for “unclassifieds” where torture and indefinite detention without trial have been routine.
Dick Cheney and his right-wing allies fulminate against weakness and champion the waterboarding of terrorist suspects to keep America safe. Even though conservatives have reliably been on the wrong side of every major issue in American history over the latest 200 years (slavery, reconstruction, pure food and drug act, child labor laws, social security, confronting the Nazis, Marshall Plan, McCarthyism, Civil Rights, etc.) there are those on both sides of the aisle who are willing to listen to them.
Cheney and his cronies have used the politics of fear to justify despicable behavior every American should be ashamed of. If we need a Guantanamo, if we need to torture people in the light of day to defend freedom and human rights, then I believe we have lost the right to represent these ideals and perhaps deserve to lose them. Republicans claim they have kept us safe and strong. The safe and strong do not torture people, only the miserable and the weak and the cowardly. In 1962 we saw ourselves as a beacon of freedom. What in God’s name have we become to even lend credence to the words of fools and miscreants like the former vice-president?
I suggest we not only shutter the prison but also abandon the Guantanamo Naval Base entirely and score a symbolic victory by returning it to Cuban sovereignty. I have little use for Castro’s Cuba, but it is their territory, not ours, and the use we are currently putting it to only further casts a pall over our ideals.
Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s send Dick Cheney to Cuba, as well. Maybe Castro could use him: his convictions are more suitable to a dictatorship than a free society anyway.