...and so the dog and pony show begins again.
I've had an entry saved in my drafts for over a year now about Fidel Castro. This isn't it. That one concerns his death and I'm sure that it will be coming soon. This isn't quite as good but is a move in the right direction.
In 2006 there were huge parties and boisterous gatherings in Little Havana in Miami with the news of his sickness. This time it's a bit more muted.
In a letter dated yesterday evening Fidel Castro fully resigned as the President of Cuba, turning the reigns of power over to his brother Raul. News outlets around the world are calling on Cuba for democratic reforms. The shit just ain't happening, at least not today. Socialism is so entrenched in the daily lives of the Cuban government that they don't want to give it up (the government, not necessarily Cubans in general).
As the letter of resignation can attest, although Castro resigns as President, he will still be a member of parliament and will most likely be 'elected' to the Council of State on Sunday and he also retains the post of first secretary of Cuba's Communist Party. Here is the english translation of Fidel Castro's letter of resignation:
Message from the Commander in Chief
Dear compatriots:
Last Friday, February 15, I promised you that in my next reflection I would deal with an issue of interest to many compatriots. Thus, this now is rather a message.
The moment has come to nominate and elect the State Council, its President, its Vice-Presidents and Secretary.
For many years I have occupied the honorable position of President. On February 15, 1976 the Socialist Constitution was approved with the free, direct and secret vote of over 95% of the people with the right to cast a vote. The first National Assembly was established on December 2nd that same year; this elected the State Council and its presidency. Before that, I had been a Prime Minister for almost 18 years. I always had the necessary prerogatives to carry forward the revolutionary work with the support of the overwhelming majority of the people.
There were those overseas who, aware of my critical health condition, thought that my provisional resignation, on July 31, 2006, to the position of President of the State Council, which I left to First Vice-President Raul Castro Ruz, was final. But Raul, who is also minister of the Armed Forces on account of his own personal merits, and the other comrades of the Party and State leadership were unwilling to consider me out of public life despite my unstable health condition.
It was an uncomfortable situation for me vis-à-vis an adversary which had done everything possible to get rid of me, and I felt reluctant to comply.
Later, in my necessary retreat, I was able to recover the full command of my mind as well as the possibility for much reading and meditation. I had enough physical strength to write for many hours, which I shared with the corresponding rehabilitation and recovery programs. Basic common sense indicated that such activity was within my reach. On the other hand, when referring to my health I was extremely careful to avoid raising expectations since I felt that an adverse ending would bring traumatic news to our people in the midst of the battle. Thus, my first duty was to prepare our people both politically and psychologically for my absence after so many years of struggle. I kept saying that my recovery "was not without risks."
My wishes have always been to discharge my duties to my last breath. That's all I can offer.
To my dearest compatriots, who have recently honored me so much by electing me a member of the Parliament where so many agreements should be adopted of utmost importance to the destiny of our Revolution, I am saying that I will neither aspire to nor accept, I repeat, I will neither aspire to nor accept the positions of President of the State Council and Commander in Chief.
In short letters addressed to Randy Alonso, Director of the Round Table National TV Program, --letters which at my request were made public-- I discreetly introduced elements of this message I am writing today, when not even the addressee of such letters was aware of my intention. I trusted Randy, whom I knew very well from his days as a student of Journalism. In those days I met almost on a weekly basis with the main representatives of the University students from the provinces at the library of the large house in Kohly where they lived. Today, the entire country is an immense University.
Following are some paragraphs chosen from the letter addressed to Randy on December 17, 2007:
"I strongly believe that the answers to the current problems facing Cuban society, which has, as an average, a twelfth grade of education, almost a million university graduates, and a real possibility for all its citizens to become educated without their being in any way discriminated against, require more variables for each concrete problem than those contained in a chess game. We cannot ignore one single detail; this is not an easy path to take, if the intelligence of a human being in a revolutionary society is to prevail over instinct."
"My elemental duty is not to cling to positions, much less to stand in the way of younger persons, but rather to contribute my own experience and ideas whose modest value comes from the exceptional era that I had the privilege of living in."
"Like Niemeyer, I believe that one has to be consistent right up to the end."
Letter from January 8, 2008:
"...I am a firm supporter of the united vote (a principle that preserves the unknown merits), which allowed us to avoid the tendency to copy what came to us from countries of the former socialist bloc, including the portrait of the one candidate, as singular as his solidarity towards Cuba. I deeply respect that first attempt at building socialism, thanks to which we were able to continue along the path we had chosen."
And I reiterated in that letter that "...I never forget that 'all of the world's glory fits in a kernel of corn."
Therefore, it would be a betrayal to my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer. This I say devoid of all drama.
Fortunately, our Revolution can still count on cadres from the old guard and others who were very young in the early stages of the process. Some were very young, almost children, when they joined the fight on the mountains and later they have given glory to the country with their heroic performance and their internationalist missions. They have the authority and the experience to guarantee the replacement. There is also the intermediate generation which learned together with us the basics of the complex and almost unattainable art of organizing and leading a revolution.
The path will always be difficult and require from everyone's intelligent effort. I distrust the seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis the self-flagellation. We should always be prepared for the worst variable. The principle of being as prudent in success as steady in adversity cannot be forgotten. The adversary to be defeated is extremely strong; however, we have been able to keep it at bay for half a century.
This is not my farewell to you. My only wish is to fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas. I shall continue to write under the heading of 'Reflections by comrade Fidel.' It will be just another weapon you can count on. Perhaps my voice will be heard. I shall be careful.
Thanks.
Fidel Castro Ruz
February 18, 2008
5:30 p.m.
Basically this opens the door for Raul Castro to succeed to the presidency with somewhat full autonomy. Last year he raised expectations that he will bring about modest (minor) economic reforms and unspecified structural changes in the government and also acknowledged that the government wages of around $19 a month don't meet basic needs. So what's going to change? Not a damned thing right now. If our government and people are willing to press Cuba like we did in the early sixties the government might acquiesce but I don't think we have the balls anymore.
Brian Latell is considered the top CIA expert on Fidel Castro and his brother Raul and is the author of the book "After Fidel
Fidel Castro, along with his brother Raul and Ernesto 'Che' Guevera were revolutionaries and I can see why what they did initially endeared them to the Cuban peoples along with revolutionaries in the four decades since. Fidel grew up wealthy in a poor area of Cuba, was educated by Jesuits and got his law degree from the University of Havana which he used to offer free legal services to the poor. In 1952 he ran for Cuban Parliament but just before the election the government was overthrown by Batista, who established a dictatorship.
In 1953 Castro participated in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Batista and was thrown into prison for two years. In 1955 he lived in exile in the U.S. and Mexico where he organized a guerrilla campaign with his brother and Guevara. In 1956 they, along with 79 other fighters, landed in Cuba. Most of them were killed and the survivors fled to the Sierra Maestra Mountains where they waged a guerrilla war that finally brought down Batista in 1959.
Romantic, no? The stuff that movies are made of. All except for the part where after taking power he started nationalizing factories and plantations owned by others, including American companies. In January of 1961 we broke of diplomatic relations with Cuba. A few months later a group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles armed with U.S. weapons landed at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Castro. Obviously they failed and this is what is known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco because two weeks later Castro formally declared Cuba a socialist state. In October of the same year the Soviet Union installed nuclear weapons in the country. President Kennedy demanded that the soviets remove them and blockaded the island, bringing us to the brink of a nuclear war. The Soviet Union backed down and that began almost five decades of iron rule from the man who had turned into another Batista.
I have wondered before what would have happened had the Soviet Union NOT backed down and taken the nukes out of Cuba. Who would have fired the first shot. As bloodthirsty as it sounds I think it would have been us. While we have always felt that we are the protectors of democracy and demonized communism (as it should be), I think we are a bit more bloodthirsty than the rest of the nations and had push come to shove we might have turned the little island into a piece of glass in the Gulf of Mexico. That's one of the reasons the Soviets chose Cuba to install the weapons. VERY far from home for them and they could gauge our reaction. After that they knew we were in a stalemate for the long haul.
What is it that Castro's supporters remember about him and what do they think about? To them it's not 2008 living under a cruel and merciless dictator, it's still 1959 and Castro is like George Washington, fighting to free them from tyranny. It will also be 1959 for the folks that love Fidel Castro and everything else is just an unfortunate side-effect.
How about some other questions. If Cuba was so ass-backwards and undeveloped prior to communist rule how is it that Fidel Castro obtained a law degree from the University of Havana? How about the fact that education was free in Cuba before the revolution. Or the fact that the Cuban Peso was worth MORE than the U.S. dollar and there were all kinds of Cuban owned industries that flourished there.
The United States, The U.K. and the rest of the European Union are calling for a transfer to democracy in Cuba. "What does this mean for the people in Cuba?" Mr Bush said, at a press conference in Rwanda.
"They're the ones who suffered under Fidel Castro. They're the ones who were put in prison because of their beliefs. They're the ones who have been denied their right to live in a free society. So I view this as a period of transition, and it should be the beginning of the democratic transition in Cuba."
The EU has offered to enter into a "political dialogue" with Cuba in an effort to encourage a transition to democracy. It would be nice if this were to come about. If I recall, there are only five countries remaining that are ruled by the failed experiment of Communism. Cuba, China, North Korea, Laos and North Vietnam. China is very slowly transitioning to a market economy which will in turn hopefully transform the social aspects, Laos took out all references to communism and socialism in it's constitution in 1991 but I don't know much more about it. They had some economic reforms in the '90s that has helped private enterprise to increase. Several other countries such as Moldova have multi-party systems with the communists currently in control but that doesn't make them a communist run country.
Anyway, so what's to become of Cuba? In an article published last year in the Los Angeles Times Paolo Spadoni wrote:
...if the White House is serious in its attempt to reach out to other countries on Cuba, it needs to devise a foreign policy that is more in line with the position of the rest of the world and less driven by domestic political considerations.
When a billboard war between Cuba and the U.S. broke out in early 2006 in Havana, one of the messages displayed on a huge electronic sign at the U.S. Interest Section was a famous quote by former Polish President Lech Walesa: "Only in totalitarian societies do governments talk and talk at their people and never listen."
As the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, Bush should stop pandering to a shrinking group of Cuban American hard-liners and start listening to that world he claims to represent.
Mr. Spadoni is dead wrong on this account. I honestly believe that although our hard line against Cuba has been unsuccesful so far, it is exactly what is needed until the Cuban government starts to make concessions and loosen the noose on the freedoms of the people it supposedly represents.
Over at the Times Online one reader posted this comment:
The passing of an era on the world stage more like - how many Presidents has Fidel survived ?
Love him or loath him - he's stayed the course and when he was the victorious new leader of Cuba he could walk on water forever !!!! Lets never forget that fact people !!!
Ian Payne, Walsall,
Mr Payne, you just don't have a fucking clue is all I have to say. Judging by the name you obviously aren't any more Cuban than I am. Perhaps you need to speak to or read the work of someone who IS Cuban and find out the facts you fucking douche-bag.
I always expect something intelligent and thought-provoking when I visit Babalu Blog and I wasn't disappointed today when I read "The Broken Record" which disses on the BBC as well as all the others who revere Fidel Castro. I won't reproduce it here, just go read it for yourself.
In one interesting article, Frances Robles wants to know if Fidel Castro's writings are jabs aimed at his brother Raul...
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