Books in Brief

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God by George Weigel (Basic, 202 pp., $23) George Weigel, the biographer of Pope John Paul II, has written a finely honed reflection on post-Christian Europe--how it got that way, why it matters, and what it might portend. The backdrop is Europe's startling demographic decline, which Muslim immigrants are more than willing to reverse. The event around which Weigel's argument crystallizes is the deliberate exclusion from the new European constitution of any acknowledgment of the continent's Christian heritage.

Why this flight from historical truth? How is it that the present generation of European statesmen came to see their project in aggressively secular terms? In this, they are unlike the founding fathers of the E.U. itself--Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, Robert Schumann, Jean Monnet, serious Catholics all.

Weigel contemplates the sheer oddness of it: Modern Europeans have made a religion of anti-fascism; revulsion at the Holocaust drives their commitment to tolerance, human rights, and peaceful negotiation. Yet they see Christianity as threatening--though the Holocaust and the Gulag, like the Terror of the French Revolution, were the product of godless ideologies, while the biblical religions teach the dignity of persons made in the image of God.

Weigel digs back to the 19th century antecedents of contemporary "Christophobia" (a provocative usage he adopts from the Jewish scholar Joseph Weiler) and finds--who else?--Nietzsche, glorifying violence and the will to power. And he digs much further, to reconstruct in broad strokes the Christian contribution to the emergence of polities respectful of citizens' rights. He starts at the beginning, when Christians denied that Caesar was God, and "an antitotalitarian vaccine was injected into Europe's civilizational bloodstream."

Christians have often failed to live up to their creed, and Weigel concedes that Rome was slow to articulate, from within its own premises, "a persuasive, compelling case for democracy." But with Vatican II and the papacy of John Paul II, it has now done so. Whether the generation inspired by John Paul will spur a Christian revival or witness the progressive Islamicization of Western Europe may be the question on which hangs the future of liberty in Europe.

--Claudia Winkler

Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto E. Fontova (Regnery, 229 pp., $27.95) Fidel Castro turns 79 this August. His revolution, meanwhile, clocks in at over 46 years in the making. Which means Castro has ruled the roost in Cuba for most of his adult life. And what a life it's been. How the lider maximo of a small Caribbean island grew to wreak such havoc on America, the world, and--above all--the Cuban people is a brutally tragic tale.

But it's a tale worth telling. In Fidel, Humberto E. Fontova proves up to the task. A gifted polemicist, he pulls no punches in rehashing Castro's legacy of plunder, torture, murder, and terrorism. Along the way, Fontova dispels countless popular myths about the history of Cuba and U.S. foreign policy. He knows Cuba well. Fontova fled the island with his parents--to escape Castroite persecution--when he was 7.

Now an acclaimed author, he offers a treasure chest of underreported Cuba nuggets. For instance, Fontova recounts the saga of ex-Black Panther Garland Grant, who hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1971 and wound up in Castro's prison system, where the guards beat him so badly he lost an eye. Grant later told an APreporter there was more racism in Communist Cuba "than in the worst parts of Mississippi." He was "living like a dog in Cuba," and wanted only "to get back to the United States."

And did you know FBI agents foiled a Castro-backed terror plot to bomb subways and other New York City landmarks in November 1962? Probably not. So much about Castro's Cuba is shrouded by misinformation. Luckily, for those who are interested, we now have Fontova's highly readable new volume. He's done a great service for liberty, justice, and truth--all of which remain painfully absent from his native land.

--Duncan Currie