Has a “decent interval” expired since Jimmy Buffet’s passing? I refer to the interval during which no nasty things may be spoken or written about the dearly departed.
Probably not. So I will refrain from applying any disparaging nouns, adjectives or adverbs directly to his name. I will not call him a “hypocrite” or a “scoundrel,” or even a “slimy little weasel.” Instead I’ll simply document his propaganda services for the only dictator in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere to criminalize rock music and herd its Cuban practioners and fans into forced-labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point.
“If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane,” go the lyrics to one of my favorite of his songs. Indeed, Jimmy. So let’s laugh at the thundering irony of the scenario in the paragraph above.
Some claim that Cuban communism—with its initial long-haired, bearded hippie-type leaders—was different from the stodgy Soviet brand. And indeed it was. In 1967, for instance, when the Rolling Stones were holding a concert for Polish kids in Warsaw, Cuban kids were being rounded up and herded into forced-labor camps for the crime of listening to—or trying to listen to—Rolling Stones and Beatles music.
Oh, and in addition to the above, the Castro regime jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. It murdered more Cubans in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered Germans during his first six. Fidel Castro shattered — through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara beat ISIS to the game by over half a century. As early as January 1959 they were filming their murders for the media-shock value.
Fidel Castro also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war.
In the above process Fidel Castro converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.
Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Yet prior to Castroism, Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including the Ellis Island years, in fact.
Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.
Would anyone guess any of the above from reading or listening to the mainstream media or the History Channel?.....or Jimmy Buffett lyrics?
“AWWW, COME ON!, Humberto!” some amigos retort. “Jimmy Buffet was a GREAT musician, songwriter and entertainer! Why MUST you inject politics into his memorial!—GEEEZ!”
Because he often injected politics into his performances, going so far as to change the lyrics to his songs to more effectively (and comically, I suppose) bash Republicans. This was documented here.
Now I call your attention to how he smilingly bowed in front of mass-murderer Fidel Castro on one of his many, MANY Castro-regime-sanctioned visits to totalitarian Cuba. And never forget that the regime’s KGB-trained apparatchiks carefully vet all foreign celebrity visitors to ensure that they’ll serve as proper propaganda adjuncts.
Quite fittingly, CNN (the “Castro News Network,” as it’s been known in south Florida for decades) ran a recent special feature on Jimmy Buffett where CNN’s resident Cuba reporter Patrick Oppmann gushed that Buffet had a “special bond” with (Stalinist) Cuba and was “a constant presence” in (Stalinist) Cuba.
During his March 1999 visit/performance in Havana’s Karl Marx theater for Soviet-trained regime apparatchiks and their close family, Buffet went out of his way to stress to a reporter from Newsweek that politics WAS INDEED part of the rationale for his visit/performance: "It would be facetious to say that we're just here playing baseball or making music…Where it all leads, no one knows.”
This writer heard from several sources that Buffett was sniffing around to see about opening one of his Margaritaville/Cheeseburger in Paradise resorts in Cuba. He probably learned in short order how much of the ownership the Stalinist regime demanded on such a deal and backed off. But it wasn’t enough to sour him on frequently visiting Castro’s fiefdom and propagandizing for Obama’s opening to it.
In March of 1999, Jimmy Buffett was among the top acts of a celebrity-studded propaganda extravaganza for Stalinist Cuba titled “Music Bridges Over Troubled Waters." Buffet’s colleague in this venture Bonnie Raitt stopped hyperventilating just long enough to compose a song in Fidel Castro's honor titled, "Cuba Is Way Too Cool!" Among the lyrics: "It's just a happy little island!"
With Woody Harrelson gyrating drunkenly beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse, she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots, rasped out her ditty at Havana's Karl Marx theater. "Rock Against Freedom" sounds much better to me. A beaming, waving Jimmy Buffet came on right after Bonnie.
Then came Joan Osborne. R.E.M's Peter Buck, former Police’s Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland all made the groovy scene and took the stage in turn. In between crooning and strumming, these cheeky free-spirits all dutifully recited their propaganda scripts against the U.S. "embargo."
Against South Africa a decade earlier, of course, their script called FOR an embargo.
A crowd of 5000 Cubans huddled before them, swaying and clapping. All were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. Let's step back and contemplate the scene: here's these troubadours for human rights, here's the same smarmy gang who boycotted South Africa ("I Ain't Gonna Play Sun City!" thundered Bonnie Raitt herself alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Daryl Hall and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled, "Artists United Against Apartheid.")
But she'll GLADLY play in Havana's Karl Marx theater and bask in the applause of an audience pledging proud fealty to the most murderous ideology in human history. Indeed she'll happily compose a song in their honor—and all on the house!
Here's Bonnie and other shrill foes of capital punishment happily crooning lovesongs to card-carrying members (literally!) of an ideology whose minions shot, starved, strangled, drowned, hacked and worked to death 100 million human beings in the 20th century. According to the late researcher Dr. Armando Lago, many in Bonnie and Jimmy's very audience had a hand in 110,000 of these murders. Here's these do-gooders playing (free-of-charge) because of an invitation from Stalinists!
These musical hipsters composed gushy odes to coolness and happiness of a nation with the highest (youth) emigration, incarceration and suicide rates on the face of the globe.
In Castroland, Bonnie Raitt proudly authored paeans to the coolness and happiness of a place that also criminalized Beatles' and Rolling Stones' records—where long hair, blue jeans, and/or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off the streets by secret police and dumped in concentration camps with "Work Will Make Men Out of You," in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG. But the conditions were similar.
Much "wasting away" within their barbed wire, Mr Buffet. But not from Margaritas. Slave labor, disease, malnutrition, beatings, torture and hunger strikes caused this "wasting away."
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