1 December 2016

After the Revolution

Castro’s legacy.

by J.R.Thomas

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” advised Gil Scott-Heron, Chicago born anti-system soul and jazz singer.  But he had reckoned without the advertising skills of Fidel Castro, instigator, leader, publicist and proprietor of the Cuban Revolution.  Mr Castro, who died earlier this week, at the very respectable age of, perhaps, 90, displayed a remarkable ability to use every medium of communication, including television, to promote the particular Castro brand of Caribbean revolution.

After two years of guerrilla warfare following his landing on the Cuban shore from exile with his brother Raoul, Che Guevara and another eighty men (fifty eight died in the early fighting) Fidel had overthrown the Batista regime and was Leader of the Revolution and of Cuba.  Although few Cubans had television, he proceeded to televise and publicise the revolution, and his personal success in creating it, all he could.  But socialism – or at least, the Castro brand of it – did not seem to work very well in Cuba.  Under the Batista dictatorship with its close (although strategic rather than emotional) links to the USA, and with many natural resources and advantages, Cuba had been a wealthy island, albeit one where the wealth was concentrated among the elite.  Right from the instigation of the Castro government, the Cuban economy lost its key trading partner to the north and found that new markets were not easy to source.

Castro made a rejection of American values and USA influence in Cuba’s affairs a large part of his appeal for mass support.  The 1950’s and ’60’s were the great days of the end of western colonialism, and this line of anti-imperialism went down well, not just with Cubans rejoicing in their new “peoples republic” but also among Western left wingers looking for a more acceptable model of socialism than its grim manifestation in Russia and its satellite states, all controlled by aging grey men.  Castro was 32, a romantic figure in military fatigues smoking a giant cigar, a bearded man of the people delivering freedom to the toiling masses.  But, before long, the toiling masses found that things had changed little; poverty became ever more pronounced, and Castro was forced into a series of economic alliances with the Soviets.  Their motive was very clear; a friendly, indeed dependent, nation on the very doorstep of the USA.

That was a challenge that ended with the showdown of the Bay of Pigs, a stand-off as the Russians threatened to move nuclear missiles on to the socialist peace loving paradise.  The Russians blinked but the Cubans paid the price; in their economy as the American boycott became implacable, and in their political system as Fidel’s control became absolute.

Even the Soviets could have learned a thing or two from the Castro control of the revolutionary republic.  He openly criticised the very concept of democracy – why would you need such a thing when the Glorious Leader had access to all the answers?  He took complete control over the press and the media; the opposition was locked up or allowed to escape (often by small boat across the ninety miles of choppy water to Florida, the nearest point of the USA); escape saved the cost of keeping them in jail.  It is estimated that one and a half million Cubans left during the Fidel years, forming a major power bloc in Florida (one that brought Marco Rubio close to the Republican nomination earlier this year).

Cuba’s main export was raw sugar and its almost sole customer the Eastern Bloc; the other, and one which the Comrade President took great pains to personally publicise, was tobacco, in the form of cigars.  Cuban tobacco makes the finest cigars in the world and they are among the most expensive; somehow, USA boycott or no, the cigars did leak through the blockade and were widely available in all the wealthy places of the world, even in the USA, although not “legally”.

As the years passed and the rest of the world moved on, nothing changed on Cuba; Fidel remained in charge, assisted by his brother Raoul and a few long-term friends.  Most Cubans remained completely unaware of how the world had moved on, thanks to Castro’s control of all the media, and in many ways the people seemed not to be unhappy in their poverty-stricken ignorance.  What was spent on public welfare was invested in the health services and especially dentistry – Cuba was said to have one of the finest dental services in the world, a claim impossible to verify as no independent inspections were permitted, but visitors did comment on the good dentistry of many of those Cubans they met.

If the regime invested in healthcare and it showed, then what also showed was the extent to which they invested in nothing else.  For income Cuba was dependent on Soviet friendship, but after the Russians cut all favoured economic links in 1989 as their own revolution was abruptly terminated, the Cuban economy shrank by nearly half in just four years.  That was effectively the beginning of the end for the Cuban revolution although Fidel was determined to resist any vestige of capitalism.

As the need for foreign exchange grew desperate, the borders were cautiously opened to allow foreign tourists to visit Havana and some limited areas nearby, including newly-built resorts.   By the 1990’s one of the great attractions was that visiting Mr Castro’s socialist paradise was a trip back to the 1950’s.  It was as if the world had stopped in 1958; there were practically no cars or household goods manufactured after that date; most of the beautiful baroque buildings of pre First World War Havana had had no maintenance carried out and were in states of romantic if increasingly dangerous decay.  The locals were friendly and very eager to engage in currency dealing, especially for American dollars, which formed a black-market enabling currency.  (Don’t sneer – Eurodollars were performing a not dissimilar role in Europe not many years previously).  Before long the regime was also engaged in US dollar trading.

And most romantic of all, the Great Revolutionary still bestrode his revolutionary landscape, declaiming endless and interminable speeches and exultations as to how the rest of the world would become like Cuba and that what was happening there was the future. Nobody knew much about his personal circumstances – less it seemed as the years passed, including his correct age, which is almost certainly a year or two less than the official ninety he claimed as he approached his death.  He certainly had numerous lovers, many children, and, increasingly well proven, an immense fortune.  Investigative journalism is not practised in Cuba, but as some of those close to him escaped to the Cuba in exile on the mainland north, more and more leaked out about the doings of the Castro family – Fidel and his estimated ten children, plus his brother who succeeded him as President in 2008 after Fidel’s rumoured stroke.  Whatever the wealth of the family is, nobody of course knows, but some estimates are in excess of US$1bn.

Castro’s death will make little difference to his appallingly poor and mis-administered homeland.  Raoul Castro is quietly permitting modernisation and the entry of foreign private capital.  Soon, he too will pass from the scene and Cuba will probably move to a more western capitalist model, hopefully with participatory democracy.  The buildings will be repaired, the cars scrapped or sent to museums.  And the Cuban people may at last be able to earn more from their country than free dental work.

 

If you enjoyed this article please share it using the buttons above.

Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the ShawSheet