Chilling examples of moral stupidity

The first comprises ``virtuous'' people who do good for themselves and others.

The ``careless'' constitute Cipolla's second class of moral actors. These nebbishes are strictly out for themselves, yet their bumbling and shortsightedness usually end up benefiting others.

Next come the most disquieting categories: The ordinary ``bad'' guy who harms the rest of us in pursuit of his interests, and the ``morally stupid.'' It doesn't matter whether they think of themselves as good or bad, they always inflict material or psychological damage on themselves and others. Cipolla says that these moral idiots are our planet's most dangerous characters.

Consider two local examples of moral idiocy: Roberto Martin, the young man allegedly sent by Cuba's secret police to Miami to kill Jorge Mas Canosa and other Cuban American National Foundation leaders; and Col. Daniel Alarcon Ramirez, alias ``Benigno.'' A veteran of Che Guevara's merry band, Fidel Castro's security detail, and other Cuban practitioners of stupidity and evil, Benigno defected some weeks ago in Paris.

Martin and Benigno are moral idiots -- former Castro zombies with a bad hangover.

What is a Castro zombie? Someone who has drunk from Fidel's totalitarian potion. He has administered it to millions of subjects, using them to further his political objectives.

Both Benigno's and Martin's incongruent statements betray lingering signs of their earlier existence as blind servants of the revolution. It's hard to quit Castrozombiehood. Just look around Miami, where thousands who survived Castro's bewitchment reside. Having devoted themselves blindly, with pure zombie hearts, to the revolution, many now blindly follow the imbecilic agitators on Spanish-language radio who subject other Cubans to tests of anti-Castro purity.

But I'll leave the local zombies and the presumed assassin to devotees of witchcraft, espionage yarns, and convoluted conspiracy theories. I am really interested in Benigno, the willing executioner for Castro's mob. His testimony is a chilling example of Cipolla's notion of moral stupidity in practice.

Unlike some Uruguayan and Argentine officers who expressed remorse for their crimes during their countries' dirty wars, Benigno shows neither regret nor a readiness to accept his share of the responsibility for the grim destiny that has befallen Cuba. Nowhere does he establish a causal relation between his glory days alongside a cruel Che Guevara and his participation in criminal activities designed to expand and to protect Che and Fidel's totalitarian revolution.

Why doesn't Benigno put in a word of remorse for his regime's many victims? Because the ``worms'' -- as Castro branded his opponents -- probably don't elicit Benigno's sympathies. Before exterminating his counterrevolutionary ``class enemies'' and other allies of U.S. imperialism, Benigno and his accomplices dehumanized them.

That doesn't prevent a group of Miami ``worms'' from organizing a welcoming reception whenever he visits here. He will fit in. Like Benigno, few exiles have shown a willingness to assume their share of responsibility for Cuba's tragic fate. What is more, a small group even transmutes its guilt into an aggressive boosterism.

These former Batista officials waste no opportunity in singing the public praises of a corrupt, illegitimate regime that they supported and that paved the way for the victory of Benigno and his buddies. I know that Benigno will get along just fine with the Batistianos. He can join them in blaming ``Castro and the Americans'' for all of Cuba's ills. He will feel right at home here, surrounded by such a rich array of zombies and moral idiots.

Benigno's defenders observe that he is a man of dirt-poor peasant origins who is not good with words, thus doesn't know what he is saying. That may be true, but he surely knew what he was doing before his opportune disillusionment with the revolution that transformed him into a cruel zombie.