Month: December 2016

The first phase was romantic. Fidel and his bearded soldiers were like the Three Wise Men bearing a simple political message: democracy, free elections and social justice.

Most people applauded the deception. Fidel deceived the public by appearing to distance himself from communism and seducing a large swath of the world’s intellectuals.

Then there was his own version of the Storming of the Bastille. Red tides, confrontations, executions of opponents, a phony civil war in the Bay of Pigs and seven years of uprisings in the Escambray Mountains.

Large industries were nationalized as an astute Fidel Castro entered into a strategic geopolitical alliance with the Soviet Union. It was the most violent phase of his rule, with 50,000 political prisoners. He governed the country as though it were his private estate and transformed Havana into the Mecca of anti-colonial guerrilla movements.

One day, when the secret archives of the state sanctum are opened and their contents are dispassionately examined, we will see how irresponsible Castro was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Urging Nikita Khrushchev to launch the first atomic missile strike, thus condemning his own people to extermination, was no small detail.

The years 1968 to 1976 marked Fidel Castro’s most radical phase. He confiscated small businesses, anesthetized art and culture, and accumulated total power.

From that date until 1991 he began building Soviet Cuba. The army grew to a million men, four thousand tanks and two-hundred-fifty MIG fighter jets.

Espionage became professionalized and social control began to be applied with scientific precision. Cuban intelligence services ultimately had agents operating in half the world’s countries and about five thousand in Florida alone.

The arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, along with his policies of perestroika and glasnost, heralded the decline of Castro’s personal empire. Already in the fifth phase, Cuba suddenly found itself face to face with reality. It was a nation that had been impoverished by economic delusions and Fidel’s wars in Africa and Latin America.

Thus began a painful period of deprivation. People fainted from hunger in the streets, oxen replaced tractors in the fields and daily blackouts lasted for twelve hours or more.

In spite of thousands of Cubans fleeing by air, land and sea, as well as an attempted popular uprising in 1994, Fidel Castro was able to govern without major disruption due to the efficiency of his propaganda and security apparatus.

The sixth phase was a gift from Santa Claus. Hugo Chavez — a former parachutist from the Venezuelan city of Barina, a man of disjointed speeches with the obsessions of a visionary hero — attempted to revive socialism by combining a handful of theoretical inanities by Heinz Dietrich with a bogus religiosity and odes to Simon Bolivar.

In his twilight years Fidel Castro achieved his crowning achievement: Venezuela. It was perhaps as significant as the victory at Cuito Cuanavale, a key battle against the South African army, which he had commanded from ten thousand kilometers away.

The Venezuelan case is worthy of study by political scientists and instructors in espionage. Castro conquered Caracas without firing a shot. His recipe? Ideology and backroom consultations.

Fidel remade himself into a kind of Caribbean Rasputin. Never in human history has a nation with an army of has-beens managed to colonize another nation with three times the population and four times the GDP.

The symbolism and message it offered were enough. Chavez opened the doors of his presidential palace to Cuban military advisers and the South American country got thirty thousand doctors and medical personnel.

Half of this aid was paid for with petroleum, the other half with dollars. The current Venezuelan crisis, a perfect storm, arose from the fall in petroleum prices but was aggravated by interference from Cuba.

The seventh and current stage began with the political death of Fidel Castro on July 31, 2006. His brother and hand-picked successor, Raul, is trying to dismantle the operation and get the machinery of production back in order.

In the international arena, Cuba put away the pistols and began the diplomatic dialogue. Raul Castro, always operating from behind the scenes, negotiated the release of a handful of political prisoners with the Catholic church and the Spanish government. Cuba held secret talks with the United States, which made possible the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with its old enemy. It helped mediate an end to the civil war in Colombia. It alleviated burdensome international financial debts and it allowed Cubans to be tourists in their own country. Believe me, all this was no small feat.

It did all this while still repressing dissenting voices. The repressive model of the Raul era is different and probably more efficient. Opponents can travel overseas and, if they are detained, it is often only for a few hours in police holding cells except in unusual circumstances.

By the time Fidel Castro had died — from causes still unknown — on the night of November 25, a quarter of a million Cubans had emigrated over the previous four years, the economy had run aground, corruption had become endemic, the country faced an eminent demographic time bomb, apathy and discontent were widespread and an amateurish dissident movement was as disorganized as it was distracted.

With the death of Fidel Castro, things are bound to change in Cuba. One cannot continue to expect good results from the same old economic, political and social recipes.

Fidel Castro was the past. When he came to power, there were no such things as cell phones, the internet or gay marriage. Some nations were still colonies and electronic commerce was something out of science fiction.

The European Union was but a dream in the head of the French president, General Charles de Gaulle, and no one foresaw the end of Russian communism. Raul Castro announced that he will retire in February 2018, a year and two months from now.

According to Cuba watchers, the possible subsequent scenarios range from neo-Castroism to state capitalism to a family dynasty. And any of the three, they predict, could lead to democracy in the not too distant future.

The reason is simple: we have already hit bottom.

Marti Noticias, December 7, 2016

A resident of Santos Suárez, now deceased, told me that on November 8, 1958, Batista’s hitmen were involved in a shootout for more than five hours with four young people from the July 26th Movement, who were holed up in a building at Goicuría and O’Farrill streets in what is today the Tenth of October district.

No one from the neighborhood came to the defense of Pedro Gutiérrez, Rogelio Perea, Angel “Machaco” Ameijeiras and Norma Porras, who was nineteen-years-old and pregnant by Machaco, the group’s leader. Residents remained indoors, watching the shooting from behind their blinds. They later recounted seeing the three men taken alive. After being tortured, they were executed. Porras was captured on a neighboring roof and taken to a military hospital.

Neither their torture nor their corpses, which were thrown into a ditch by Batista’s repressive security agencies, were enough to convince Cubans to hold public demonstrations. Similarly, dissident protests denouncing human rights violations are not enough to summon the large mass of Cubans who harshly criticize the Castros in private.

According to experts, closed societies govern by resorting to human fear. In a democracy, any incident or injustice can be an incentive for strikes or public protests.

But in an autocracy — whether it be communist, fascist or a banana republic — acquiescence and fear stifle rebellion. It’s not as though Cubans have a genetic predisposition for this condition. Certainly not.

In Italy, Mussolini reined in the Mafia. In Germany, Hitler used the public squares for his xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and militaristic harangues.

Cuba has spent sixty-four years under dictatorships. Seven under a capitalist dictatorship which respected free press and granted amnesty to political prisoners. Although it did impose press censorship at times, it also later lifted it. For fifty-six years the socialist dictatorship has invoked a false sense of nationalism and co-opted the heroes of Cuban independence for its own advantage.

Fidel Castro was clearly an important leader, for good and for evil, but only in the political realm. In 1956 he raised a guerilla army and launched a war that broke all the rules of conventional warfare, destroying a professional army that relied on artillery, planes and war ships.

He was a key figure in Africa’s anti-colonial movement. He provided men and materiel to seventeen African nations. He tried to subvert almost all of Latin American except for Mexico (although Subcomandante Marcos’ men did train in Cuba) with strategies that combined armed struggle with terror.

A majority of the continent’s seditionists — from Venezuela’s Carlos the Jackal to Colombia’s Manuel Marulanda (alias Sure Shot) — passed through the military camp set up in Guanabo, a seaside area on the outskirts of Havana. They also included commandos from the Basque terrorist group ETA as well as the PLO and the IRA.

In terms of economics, Fidel Castro did very little that is worthy of applause. And a lot at which to jeer. Let’s consider what has come of some of his hair-brained schemes, the lies he told, the promises he never fulfilled.

In Picadura Valley there are no air-conditioned dairies or robust livestock setting new records for dairy production. Nor any exotic fruits in Baconao. And Havana was never able to attain the standard of living of New York, as he once promised in one of his hundreds of speeches.

Rather the opposite has occurred. The neighborhoods he built are a master class in architectural folly. His schemes destroyed or depreciated sugar, citrus and coffee production operations.

His brother Raúl had to resort to urgent economic reforms, timid and still incomplete, if for no other reason than to paper over the disasters created by Fidel.

Castro I was a dictator, an enlightened leader. He did not have a 900 million dollar fortune, as Forbes magazine reported. He had much more. He had something that cannot be appraised in monetary terms. He had a whole country. A country that he ran like his own personal estate.

Now that he has died, the question that arises is: What will happen to the more than twenty houses that he owned throughout the country? Or to his private navy? Or his island in Cayo Piedra south of the Bay of Pigs?

The man whom God has just called home has, to my mind, caused damage on an anthropological scale to Cuba and to Cubans. He polarized society and opinions. He sold us on the idea that the Fatherland was synonymous with revolution and socialism.

Castroism did not end with Fidel Castro’s death. The regime still has some life left in it. But with his death an era ends and the revolution loses a symbol. International economic forces will require new reforms if it is to survive. A relapse into ideology and a retreat from economic reform will spell the beginning of the end for Castroism.

After Fidel Castro’s ashes have been set inside an enormous rock, supposedly brought down from the Sierra Maestra, and the funeral services have concluded, honest Cubans — those from here and those from there — must sit down and discuss whether or not we want live in a democratic nation.

All of us are vital to the future of Cuba. The best way to repair the terrible sociological and spiritual damage Fidel Castro has caused is to set aside resentment and engage in dialogue.

To paraphrase the poet Angel Cuadra, the two sides have the same hero, José Martí. Both always defend their ideas singing the same anthem and raising the same flag.

The war is over. Let’s build a new Cuba together.

 Diario Las Americas, December 4, 2016