Cuba: The End of Castro?

Cuba: The End of Castro?
by
Norman Barry

The ailing communist leader of Cuba, now 80, has handed power
temporarily to his brother, the 75yearold Raul. And we wonder, is this
the end of the one of the last remaining communist dictatorships? Long
an icon the left intelligentsia in the West we must hope that the end of
the Castro regime brings freedom and prosperity this benighted island.

And is North Korea far behind? Successful in a 1959 coup to oust the
right wing dictator, Fulgencio Batista, Castro has impoverished the
island and systematically violated human rights, imprisoned and exiled
opposition leaders, of which there are none in the country so successful
has the security forces been in intimidating all dissent. There are
still 300 political prisoners on the island and as a grim reminder of
its totalitarianism recently the death was announced of Eduardo Ordaz
head of a psychiatric hospital in Havana in which dissenters were
routinely tortured.

Castro apologists in the West point to the rising standards of literacy,
but what is the use of that if you are allowed so little to read? And
rising health standards? Access to these is reserved for the party
elite. Well-endowed with natural resources communism ruined the economy
which was kept from starvation by subsidies from the Soviet Union but
that ended with the collapse of communism in Russia in 1990. Since then
the fellow left wing firebrand Hugo Charvez, from oil rich Venezuela,
has stepped in with aid of $2 billion a year. But Charvez and Evo
Morales, president of Bolivia, are Castro's only two friends despite an
increasingly leftward Latin America.

Craven acolytes of Castro will say that Cuba's economic problems have
been ruinously exacerbated by the blockade imposed by the US throughout
Castro's 47 year reign as dictator. Trade is banned, and even visits to
the island are forbidden for US citizens but there is no way Castroites
can hide the fact that Cuba's economic catastrophe has been caused by
communism.

Is there any prospect for freedom in Cuba? Not from Raul Castro whose
background in the security services suggest that he will be as ruthless
as his elder brother in preserving communist rule. And the communist
party members themselves have done too well out of the Castro tyranny to
want any change. And Castro himself, despite the suffering he has
caused, still has some charisma and holds much of the population in his
thrall. But here one suspects that they are driven as much by fear of
the chaos that might follow his death as by any affection for communism
or Castro.

Any hopes for reform within the Cuban communist party look grim. The
only slight move was to permit the circulation of the dollar (no one
takes the peso seriously), now rescinded, and the freeing of the tourist
industry, which attracts 7 million people, all non Americans, a year. We
don't know how many internal dissidents there are, or whom they are,
since Castro has silenced or terrorised them. But two are known about
and are bound to figure in a liberated Cuba. There is Oswald Paya,
leader of the Christian Liberation Movement. Paya managed to present a
250000 signatures petition to parliament but 75 members of the
organisation were arrested and jailed. From a more directly
pro-capitalist perspective there is Ramon Sanchez, who leads the
Movimiento Democracia movement. He was born in Cuba but sent by his
parents to the US at ten. In his early days as a dissident he was an
active guerrilla fighter and was jailed for four and a half years by a
US court for refusing to testify in a case involving an assassination
attempt on Castro. He now proclaims that he is planning a peaceful
takeover and hopes to lead thousands of Cubans into Havana shouting
'liberty'. He hopes that the end of Castroism will mean that exiles can
return to Cuba and reclaim their properties and business seized by the
communists after 1959. The exiles are in Florida a mere 90miles from
Cuba. There are 650,000 and others perished in the risky trip.

But why has Castro lasted so long? Forty seven years is a long time for
any political leader, let alone one who has impoverished his country and
ruthlessly persecuted its citizens. One answer must be the tacit support
given to him by the intelligentsia of the West who in their naïve way
thought that Cuban communism was the wave of the future. He was helped
in the 159 coup by Che Guavera who became a kind of rock star of the
revolution. How many students of the 1960s had that famous photo stuck
to their bedroom walls? Probably not quite as many as Castro jailed but
enough to glamourise terrorists throughout the West.

Whether Castro will survive for much longer or his regime at all it is
difficult to say but the lessons of are obvious: that despite its
grandiose promise communism is a hideous system producing economic
misery and almost a complete loss of liberty for those condemned to live
under it. It might well survive in China where a communist political
regime profits from a more or less capitalist economy but that has
nothing to do with Marxism. But the most important message for
Westerners is that we must not glamorise dictators merely because they
seem to have right ideas, are inspired by noble ambitions for society
and profess the right intentions. Dictators are dictators and repress
that crucial feature of capitalism – freedom. Most of all we must not be
afraid to criticise them even when that is unfashionable. Monsters like
Castro survive for so long partly because naïve idealists in the West
just do not want to see the truth about communism. I suspect that we
will not know the full truth about Castro's Cuba for many years just as
we did not discover the reality of Mao' Test Tong's communist China
until a long time after his death. He was, of course, another icon of
the left, who survived for as long as he did partly because of the
contemptible fawning and flattery of graduates for Oxford, Cambridge and
Harvard; and many stupid movie stars from the days when leftist ideology
was a fashion item.

08.18.2006

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