Castro: A life of few regrets, no apologies
Posted on Wed, Feb. 20, 2008
By GLENN GARVIN
ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com
''I believe that one has to be consistent right up to the end,'' Fidel
Castro wrote in his resignation letter Tuesday, and he was.
The world may long argue whether he was a communist or a social
reformer, a murderous tyrant or a visionary savior, but no one will ever
doubt he was a shrewd survivor who left power just as he ruled: on his
own terms.
Defying the expectations -- and, in many cases, the hopes -- of an
eternally bemused world, Castro bowed out not a step or two ahead of an
enemy tank or a mob of angry voters, but on a timetable of his own
choice, handing Cuba over like a family heirloom to his little brother.
He outlived the Soviet Union, the nation that inspired him, succored him
and sometimes betrayed him. He outlasted nine U.S. administrations that
tried, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to topple him. He outstayed
dozens of other dictators, from Augusto Pinochet to Saddam Hussein, who
came and went while he ruled in Havana.
Aside from his aversion to elections -- the bullets fired on his behalf
were better than ballots, Castro always said, for ''it is not only with
a pencil marking a ballot, but also with blood, that a people can take
part in a patriotic life'' -- he was anything but rigid in his ideology.
If economic times were hard, he might crack the door to permit private
restaurants and small businesses, then slam it shut with a two-hour
speech denouncing the creeping revisionism of Havana hot-dog vendors.
If there was a current of political restlessness, he might allow
dissidents to speak up a little, then jail them. If he needed a favor
from Washington, he might reach out, then lash back with something like
the Mariel boatlift.
Castro was so flexible when it came to political tactics that scholars
and journalists argue to this day whether he's really a Marxist-Leninist
or simply a practitioner of ''wily political opportunism,'' as one
historian put it.
But of his survival skills, there was no dispute. Castro withstood Mafia
hit men, CIA-backed invasions, the collapse of world communism, a
four-decade U.S. economic embargo and the mortal hostility of millions
of his own countrymen.
If he had regrets, they were too few to mention. ''I distrust the
seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis of
self-flagellation,'' he wrote in his farewell letter.
That, too, is consistent. Castro has never apologized: not in 1953, when
he sent his first rag-tag band of followers on a suicidal attack against
a military barracks that ended with nearly all of them tortured, dead or
both.
Not in 1961, when he went on television to tell the Cuban people he'd
been deceiving them all along and that he drew his inspiration not from
Martí but Marx.
Not in 1962, when his attempt to install Soviet missiles on his island
came so breathtakingly close to ending in nuclear war that even rattled
allies in Moscow.
Hardship, he explained, was the lifeblood of the revolution. ''I feel my
belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger,'' Castro told his
countrymen.
``I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of
comfort and self-interest.''
At the beginning, at least, many believed. When Castro rode into Havana
on a tank on Jan. 8, 1959, after toppling the inept dictator Fulgencio
Batista, the streets were filled with cheering throngs.
So strong was Castro's charisma that millions of Cubans continued to
support him even as he jailed, exiled or executed political opponents
and even apostate followers.
BREAK FROM THE PAST
Barely 31, sporting a beard and a jaunty cigar, he seemed -- not just to
Cubans, but to followers all over the world -- to mark a clean break
with a corrupt, imperial past. His quick political collision with the
United States over nationalization of American-owned companies on the
island only enhanced his underdog romanticism.
But Cuban political and economic independence proved just as illusory as
the elections Castro promised in the early days of the revolution. Over
the next five decades, the island would be yoked more firmly first to
the Soviet Union and later Venezuela than it ever was to the United
States, its economy surviving on $4 billion to $6 billion a year subsidies.
Meanwhile, Castro's anti-yanqui fanaticism -- reciprocated in Washington
by the Bay of Pigs invasion, a series of hare-brained assassination
plots using everything from poisonous cold cream to exploding sea
shells, and the eternal economic embargo -- led him to ever-stranger
political alliances. By his final years in power, Castro embraced both
Iran, with its Islamic fundamentalist government, and North Korea, with
the megalomaniacal Marxism of Kim Jong Il without blinking.
His blood feud with the United States muffled criticism of Castro
overseas, where resentment of Washington's power festered. At home, it
was more difficult. As political freedoms wilted under the watchful eye
of Cuba's Ministry of the Interior and the economy crumbled under the
weight of Castro's eccentric micromanagement, millions of Cubans either
bolted (three million, more than a fifth of the population, now live
outside the country) or retreated into sullen despair.
By the 1990s, the island's suicide rate had tripled from
pre-revolutionary levels, and one of every three pregnancies ended in
abortion. The birth rate has dropped so low that Cubans are not even
replacing themselves: Women average less than two children apiece.
UNWILLING TO INVEST
''There are a number of factors feeding into the birth rate,'' said
Lisandro Perez, a Florida International University professor who studies
Cuba. ``But one of them is certainly that having children is an
investment in the future, and a lot of Cubans aren't willing to do that.''
The birthrate, falling since the mid-1960s, is the tip of the latest
iceberg approaching the Cuban ship of state. Cuba's rapidly aging
population is now the second-oldest in Latin America. A fifth of the
country has hit retirement age, and in another decade or so it will be a
fourth.
''You are going to have a serious manpower problem there,'' warned
Carmelo Mesa-Lago, an emeritus professor of economics at the University
of Pittsburgh. ``Somebody is going to have to work to pay the pensions
of all those old people.''
That labor will take place in one of the most decrepit infrastructures
in the world. Cuba's industrial underpinning consists almost entirely of
ancient Soviet factories and machinery that was nearly outmoded even
when it was installed.
Mesa-Largo for decades has been monitoring the production of 20 key
Cuban products, everything from eggs to textiles. Last year, production
of 14 of them was lower than in 1989. The Cuban sugar crop, once the
economic linchpin, was the smallest in a hundred years.
Many economists believe Cuba, caught in a pincer of economic and
demographic failures, is no more than a year or two from a major crisis,
much worse than the one it faced when the Soviet Union collapsed. If so,
Castro's political timing is once again perfect.
''He's leaving behind a mess,'' said Edward Gonzalez, an emeritus
political science professor at UCLA who consults for the Rand Corp.
``And now someone else will have to clean it up.''
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