Bye Bye Castro, Hello What?

On February 18, the 81 year old Fidel Castro announced his resignation from the Presidency of Cuba after 49 years of rule that spanned the reign of 10 U.S. Presidents. The man who rose from a lawyer, to a revolutionary guerilla, to absolute ruler, was the thermonuclear epicenter of the hottest days of the Cold War, has retired now due to health reasons.
His legacy will be, well, that’s a really good question.
In January of 1959 he overthrew the military dictatorship of the U.S. backed Generalissimo Batista with the aid of now famous T-Shirt icon “Che” Guevara. He would then nationalize nearly $800 million in U.S. corporations’ property on the island.
A timeline released by the National Security Archives shows the C.I.A. had began planning to overthrow the Castro government of Cuba as early as ten months after the revolution. In April 1961, with the aid of about 1,400 Cuban exiles, they struck at the Bay of Pigs and were quickly pushed back into the sea. The CIA, in a weird irony, honestly expected the Cuban people to welcome a U.S. sponsored invasion, causing them spontaneously rising up against the Castro regime. Roughly the exact opposite occurred.
Not long after the failed invasion Fidel Castro declared himself and his government as “Communist” and allied himself directly with the Soviet Union. The Soviets then station thermonuclear missiles in Cuba, a mere 90 miles from American shores causing the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Crisis would end in a mutual stalemate, but at it’s height Castro personally urged the Kremlin to launch a first strike against an American city. The Kremlin refused.
For the next 46 years, and well past the end of the Cold War, the United States has, and will continue to according to the State Department, maintain an effective trade embargo against the island of Cuba. Most analysts agree that this embargo, and the fear and resource scarcity it spread among the populace, effectively ensured Castro’s monopolization of political power. In him was seen as the protective authority figure in a continuous, undeclared war against the U.S. And so he remained.
The human rights record of the Castro regime ain’t stellar by a long shot. It’s a single party country with a badly distorted freedom of speech and information. Censorship is prevalent. Many anti-government “counter-revolutionaries” have been thrown in prison or killed. Though most of these political deaths only occurred in the first years after the revolution and have subsided since then. It was a dictatorship by all classical definitions.
Yet that’s not the complete story. Cuba has one of the best public health care system in the Western Hemisphere with disease and death rates at least on par with the United States, according to the World Health Organization. Literacy rates among adults is extraordinary high, practically perfect, with a fully funded free education up through and past the university level. It’s a dystopia, but a dystopia with a comfortable standard of living.
So what now.
The reins of his regime will be passed on to Fidel’s younger brother Raul, at least for the time being. But already across the international political spectrum, those pundits characterized by the CNN/Fox News/N.Y. Times types who make their living on telling us what to think have already lay down the approved framework on how these events should be view:
Fidel Castro was a ruthless dictator, a godless Red and the transfer of power to his younger brother is highly undemocratic. What needs to happen next is for Cuba to introduce some western style Representative Republic and allow foreign companies to set up shop on the island. With Free Speech and (a most importantly) Free Market for all.
Everyone seems to think they know what’s best for Cuba, what should happen next. Whether it’s the introduction of some Neoliberal or Neoconservative Democracy or whatever have you. What seems to matter is turning Cuba into a clean slate on which they can impose their Economic-Geopolitical ideals upon.
Nobody seems to be asking the actual Cubans what they want with their country. The 11.4 million Cubans are likely a thousand times more qualified to determine their destiny than all the Harvard educated social and political scientists combined. It’s time that we (and their own government for that matter) should give them a chance to decide.
Whatever the case this is no doubt a significant turning point in world history. And the sooner we pry our eyes away from the latest campaign coverage and notice the rest of the world, the better.