High-ranking Cuban government officials, including President Miguel Diaz-Canel, recently conducted a five-day festival of concerts, art exhibits, and educational colloquiums to celebrate what would have been Fidel Castro’s 100th birthday on Aug. 13. He died in 2016.
On August 1, 1953, in the mountains of Cuba, a Rural Guard squad led by Lt. Pedro Sarria found Castro sleeping in a hut. The soldiers wanted to kill the guerrilla leader, but Sarria thought law should prevail. After a couple of years in prison, Castro was released, and a few years later, in 1959, he led the revolution that installed him in power. Among the many words Castro spewed forth in seven-hour speeches before the masses, a single line delivered in 1961 captures his essence: “The revolution is all; everything else is nothing.”
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He got the last half of that zinger right. Nothing has pretty much defined the living conditions and material well-being of the Cuban people since that speech almost seven decades ago. The Soviet-style economic model Castro so adored is as worse now as it has ever been. Prolonged power outages run up to 20 hours a day in most of the provinces. Even access to drinking water is precarious. Garbage is piled high on city streets. Food shortages are rampant in Havana and other cities, while crates of food rot in port facilities that lack transportation. The trucks hauling produce got no gas due to President Donald Trump’s fuel embargo set in motion last January, combined with the near end of subsidized oil imported from the former socialist brotherhood in Venezuela. The tourism industry, which provided many jobs and lots of dinero pumping into the economy, has all but collapsed. This has been especially hard on the putas — no need for translation — since these women are dependent on the kindness of generous tourists visiting the island seeking to sample its tropical flavors.
The exhausting yearslong socialist experiment showing its true colors at the moment authorities put on a spectacular gala to commemorate Fidel’s centenary is all too revealing. “This event is an extraordinary example of political necrophilia — a celebration of dead ideas, zombie ideas that don’t work,” Moisés Naim, an analyst for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, told the Wall Street Journal.
In the United States, admirers of communism puffed up with Cuban characteristics include the New Left in the 1960s, on down to the Democratic Socialists of America today, who recently released this statement: “DSA stands unwaveringly against Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and the billionaire class’ attempts to repress and silence our movement to end the United States’ genocidal blockade against Cuba.”
The DSA absolves the Cuban government’s role in creating the economic and humanitarian disaster and blames the country’s poverty, deprivation and lack of freedom on Yankee imperialism. They refuse to recognize the madness of central planning, price controls, ration books, land nationalized and businesses seized and expropriated. And it is not just the big capitalists who fell under Castro’s decayed Stalinist obsessions. The “Kulaks” (Russian peasant farmers) in Cuba were 57,000 small businesses Castro nationalized in 1968. He said these snack vendors, beauty salons, bicycle repair shops, and fruit and veggie dealers were “bloodsuckers conducting their commerce in the shadows.”
Living conditions today are back to the economic stagnation period in the 1990’s with the loss of subsidies from the Soviet Union after its grand and well-deserved collapse. The International Monetary Fund forecasts a 7.2 % GDP contraction by the end of this year. The real legacy of Castro is not that history will absolve him, as he liked to say, but that people “voted with their feet,” as his devotees like to say. But instead of voting for the revolution, they voted to flee. Out of a population of about ten million, since 1959 over two million Cubans have “voted with their oars.” It is only 90 miles over the waves to Key West.
Before closing, I must confess an embarrassing truth here. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, when I was in high school and college, I dug Castro. For those of us with liberal parents who joked about “Reds under the bed,” it was thrilling to watch the communist conspiracy finally knock on America’s back door. On black-and-white TV, premier Nikita Krushchev looked like a slob, but Castro looked utterly cool, decked out in snappy fatigues, a beard, a big smile, and best of all, that cigar. And wow, he knew where to jam that Cohiba.
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When he visited New York City in 1960 with a United Nations delegation, Dwight Eisenhower did not invite him to a luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue. Castro played the snub beautifully. He checked into the Hotel Theresa on 125th Street, saying he would be “honored to lunch with the poor and the humble people of Harlem.”
Groovy, back in the day, the Hotel Theresa gambit. No longer. Luckily, I am not forever young, but love the Dylan song.
Bob Armstrong is a contributing writer to the online magazine, Thursday Review. His memoir, No Exit from Vietnam, is just out from Pen & Sword Books.
