As one wag on twitter said, everyone’s opinion will differ with everyone else’s opinion. We see video of Cuban exiles celebrating in Miami, while Havana is somber. Some thoughts:
As one wag on twitter said, everyone’s opinion will differ with everyone else’s opinion. We see video of Cuban exiles celebrating in Miami, while Havana is somber. Some thoughts:
1. While Cubans are very racially mixed, the people in the streets of Miami are generally descendants of the Spanish conquerors, while those who supported Castro were generally descendants of African slaves.
2. Before Castro’s revolution, the Spanish Cubans were on top of the economy and political system, and they created enormous wealth, but at the cost of racial division and economic inequality that exceeded what we have here. They were in power democratically and then by corrupt dictatorship, as Fulgencio Batista
took power in a military coup before the 1952 election.
3. After the revolution, the economic and political systems were overturned. A new group took control of the systems and created greater equality of access, but at the cost of a far more brutal autocracy. Literacy rose to the highest level in the Western hemisphere, so that people could read the government publications (propaganda). Healthcare was expanded to be universal.
4. Although ideological management of the economy and the impact of the US boycott both contributed to the impoverishment of the population, those who remained had little incentive to trade one for the other. And, before all those effects were felt, they had zero incentive to permit the return of the Batista regime so the population never rose up in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
5. In the fall of 1975 I was living in France, and a leftist friend came up to me all excited to announce that Franco (dictator of Spain)
had died. I looked at her. “What are you so excited about? While we don’t know if he was happy, he had wealth and power and died in his bed at 83? What is there to celebrate?” I feel about the same way regarding Castro.
6. Obama’s opening to Cuba was fortuitous, coming at the precise right moment, before Fidel Castro’s death and his brother Raul’s eventual death as well.
His opening is a counterpoint to hardliners on the island who will want to continue the relationship of the past half century. Whether Obama’s successor will move forward or revert to earlier failed US policies remains to be seen.
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