Curtains For Castro?

Wouldn’t it be great if, while commemorating Fidel Castro’s 80th birthday this Sunday, he dropped dead right in the middle of the festivities?

Yes, I know, we’ve been hoping and praying for his demise for years in this country, and while doing so, he has managed to survive to the point where he is now the longest ruling leader of any country on earth.

His human rights abuses are legion, and you can read about them here. Beyond that, he has overseen truly horrendous deprivations that his people have had to live through on a daily basis, and all the while, he has maintained his support in large part by uniting his country against us (though we have helped by giving him plenty of reason in that unholy cause, especially recently under Bushco, and I’ll get to some of that later).

Reporter Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker wrote an extensive column on Cuba and Castro’s upcoming milestone in the magazine’s July 31st issue, and excerpts of that article follow. It should be noted that all of this preceded Castro’s recent medical setback, which may be for good this time.

So what was on Castro’s mind at the time? Anderson explains…

This spring, a friend of Castro’s, a veteran party loyalist, told me that the Cuban leader was angustiado – literally “anguished – over his advancing years, and obsessed by the idea that socialism might not survive him. As a result, Castro has launched his last great fight, which he calls The Battle of Ideas.

Castro’s goal is to re-engage Cubans with the ideas of the Revolution, especially young Cubans who came of age during what he calls the Special Period. In the early nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a precipitous end to Cuba’s subsidies, and the economy imploded. The crisis forced Castro to allow greater openness in the island’s economic and civil life, but he now seems determined to reverse that.

Of course; capitalism never solved a thing, right Fidel? And why is it some Marxist-Communist prerequisite to come up with some glorious sounding name and attach it to a failed, oppressive doctrine borne of bureaucratic stupidity?

Privately, many Cubans regard the Battle of Ideas, as a spectacle they must tolerate but which is irrelevant to their lives. Most of them do not earn enough money to eat well, much less live comfortably. As a result of the islands’ endemic shortages, almost everyone has some contact with Cuba’s black market. The tension of the public Cuba between (pro-Castro) rallies and tribunals and the hidden one is growing, and a number of Cubans and American officials I spoke to fear that the pent-up chaos could erupt into open unrest upon Castro’s death; looting, rioting, and revenge killings. Senator Mel Martinez, of Florida, who left Cuba as a fifteen-year-old in 1962, said, “My hope is that there will be one of those wonderful European revolutions, like the Velvet Revolution, without violence, but because of what’s going on – the repression and the iron grip of those in power for so long – there could be a vacuum, and that creates a potential for violence.”

Martinez is hardly an impartial player without blame in all of this as far as I’m concerned, as you’ll see when Anderson discusses the “Bush Plan” (yes, there is one for Cuba, though it’s possible that our beloved corporate media, obsessed with celebrity births, pregnancies, weddings, divorces, arrests and fleeting fits of spirituality, may have thought it wasn’t important and decided not to tell us about it).

In the past year, Castro – empowered by shipments of cheap oil from Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, and by Chinese investments – imposed a heavy tax on dollar transactions. This has made Cuba much more expensive for foreigners, although European package tourists continue to stay in all-inclusive beach resorts, where they have little contact with Cubans. This seems to be the way Castro wants it.

And by the way, when Fidel was recently hospitalized and handed power over to his brother Raul, did you see much reporting that gave you a clue as to what this guy was all about?

Well, as they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (as Anderson continues).

If Raul is in charge, moderation will not be a foregone conclusion. Despite his reputation for warmth, Raul can be impulsive, dogmatic and, at times, brutal. In 1959, he oversaw the surrender of Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, while Castro made his way towards Havana. There, in the most notorious act of retribution to follow the guerillas’ victory, Raul presided over the execution of more than seventy soldiers and officers, who were machine-gunned and then dumped into a pit. More recently, in 1996, Raul orchestrated a purge of Party intellectuals, whom he accused of being contaminated by “capitalist ideas.”

And as for daily life under Castro…

In Havana, I visited a Cuban couple whom I’ve known for many years, and was shocked to see how they were living. Some of their furniture had been sold, and they both looked thin. Now in their sixties, they were getting by on the equivalent of sixty dollars a month – more, in fact, than most Cubans earn.

And (as noted in the article accessible from this link by Jeffrey Laurenti of The Century Foundation)…

…for nearly half a century Cubans have been the laboratory rats for Fidel’s hare-brained economic experiments, and like Lysenko’s Stalinist mice, human nature has not been genetically reprogrammed by Castro’s ruthless egalitarianism. It is not simply cranky intellectuals, but the hard-pressed masses of Cubans who feel suffocated in their daily lives.

So what does the Bush cabal have in mind for Cuba on the day that Fidel finally leaves this earth? Enter Martinez (and Colin Powell, who, as far as I’m concerned, has had an infinitely better career as a soldier than a politician and a diplomat).

In December 2003, President Bush appointed Senator Martinez as co-chair of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, along with Colin Powell. Their mandate was to find ways to “hasten the end of Castro’s tyranny,” and to develop “a comprehensive strategy to prepare for a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.” The result of their work was a 500-page report, issued in May 2004, that included guidelines for everything from setting up a market economy to holding elections. It also recommends “undermining the regime’s succession strategy.”

In Havana, the so-called Bush Plan is regularly denounced on lurid billboards and by Castro’s deputies. Felipe Perez Roque said that the U.S. transition plan would “take away Cubans’ land and their houses and schools, in order to return them to their old Batistiano owners, who would come back from the United States.”

In a speech in March, Ricardo Alarcon, the president of Cuba’s national assembly, called the Bush Plan “annexationist and genocidal” (and Alarcon is actually somewhat friendly to this country, as stated in the article). In private, afterward, he was only slightly less adamant, telling me that it was “profoundly irresponsible, made up by people who prefer to ignore reality and who try to change it capriciously. Maybe it’s a Messianic thing.”

Indeed, and again, according to Laurenti…

With the administration’s track record in promoting democracy in places like Iraq, Cubans have good reason to tremble. Washington seems oblivious to lessons from its disastrous unilateral interventions. And the biggest worry on the island, and abroad, is that administration zealots may press a military intervention—a worry real enough that Iowa’s respected Republican congressman Jim Leach warns, “the key for America is not to attempt to coerce or bully but instead to extend a cooperative hand.”

Wow, a smart Repug; good for Leach (and Laurenti states it as clearly as possible here)

The United States needs to state plainly that it will keep its own troops at home.

Let us hope that Sen. Martinez, as well as crazed zealots like Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and others in Florida (as well as Bushco – yes, I can dream, I know) decide to let Cuba find its way to something approximating democracy on its own with the help of its regional neighbors and without our intervention after Castro’s wretched life finally and mercifully comes to an end (with his brother and other crazed Communist toadies following soon afterwards).

Wouldn’t it be nice to see this administration actually do something right for a change?