August 3, 2006
Fidel Castro Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Is Fidel Castro still alive? Only a very few know for sure. His sister, who lives in Miami, recently said that she had spoken with people in Havana and “He’s not dead. He’s very sick, but he’s not dead.” But his sister has been estranged from Castro for more than 40 years, so the quality of her sources is dubious. And it is hardly unprecedented for the death of tyrants to be kept secret while the underlings sort out the new pecking order and attempt to prevent a power vacuum.
But if he is not dead in fact, he is nearly so metaphorically.
The poet A. E. Housman extolled the advantages of an early death in “To an Athlete Dying Young”, where the hero would not be one of those “runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man.” Fidel Castro, 80 years old next week, is a great example of what Housman was talking about.
Fidel Castro has been a head of government longer than anyone else now in power. But the world that brought him to power, the world of the Cold War and the great geopolitical contest between democracy and communism, is long dead. There are now just five nations in the world with governments run by a Communist Party: China, Laos, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. Only the last two have communist systems that Lenin or Stalin or even Khrushchev would have recognized.
In his early days of power Castro was major player in world affairs and fairly obsessed the government of the United States. Cuba is a small country (a little smaller than New York State in area; its population is only 11 million, its economy primitive). But its location only 90 miles from American territory allowed Castro to play off the two superpowers and greatly enhance his own power thereby. His zest for doing so brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in 1962. As the Soviet Union backed away from the Cuban missile crisis, however, it never again allowed him as much freedom of maneuver. Cuba became little more than a client state of the Soviet empire, if a useful thorn in the side of America.
With the end of massive subsidies when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cuban economy fell even further behind and today has only half the GDP per capita of the Dominican Republic on the neighboring island of Hispaniola, and that only if we believe official Cuban government figures. It is still heavily dependant on the export of a single crop, sugar, that is grown and harvested the same way it was a century ago. Integrated into the world market, it could not hope to compete with the highly mechanized Brazilian and Australian sugar industries. It can do so now only by maintaining a miserably underpaid peasantry, condemned to one of the most backbreaking jobs on earth. So much for communism being the vanguard of the proletariat.
Cuba is intrinsically a rich country, with a great climate, rich soil, mineral resources, an educated population, and immense tourist potential. But it has been miserably misgoverned through most of its long history, first by the Spanish colonial government, then by a series of thugs and crooks, and then by Castro, who has been living proof of Lord Acton’s dictum about the corrupting nature of power. For the last few decades the maintenance of his own power has been his only concern. Today Cuba is technologically a museum of the 1950s. Agriculturally it is a museum of the 1850s.
But Cuba has one other major economic resource, one that once the country is freed of the incubus of communism could be decisive in bringing it rapidly to prosperity and modernity: its large, prosperous, and deeply patriotic exile community in south Florida and elsewhere in the United States. The “Little Havana” area of Miami erupted in joyous celebration on Monday on learning of Castro’s very serious medical problems. With their financial and intellectual capital, and their now decades-long experience of democracy, returning exiles could transform Cuba both economically and politically in an amazingly short period of time.
Castro, a pathetic relic of the past, could do his country no greater favor than dying if he has not already done so, allowing the future to come to Cuba at last.
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