Literature in Castro’s Cuba
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
(In a way he is the ultimate "startup hero" -- from zero to world-class disruptor!)
That said, his government has clearly failed all the ideals he touts in this '60s interview. For example, he speaks in favour of freedom of expression -- if only the means were there for everybody to get published:
"The day will come when all the resources will be available, that is, when such a book would not be published to the detriment of a textbook or of a book having universal value in world literature. Then there will be resources to publish books on the basis of a broader criterion, and one will be able to argue whatever one wishes about any theme. I, especially, am a partisan of the widest possible discussion in the intellectual realm. Why? Because I believe in the free man, I believe in the well-educated man, I believe in the man able to think, in the man who acts always out of conviction, without fear of any kind. And I believe that ideas must be able to defend themselves. I am opposed to the blacklists of books, prohibited films, and all such things."
Well, the Internet became just that medium, but Castro never deemed fit to give access to the citizens of his country. He and his comrades are just too old to get it. They should have made room for new generations long ago instead of clinging to power and the illusion of their own indispensability. Their extended single-party reign has crippled the Cuban economy more than any sanctions could.
Beyond the political executions and purges, one of the first orders of business for Castro was the establishment of Committees for the Defense of the Revolution in every neighborhood. Their task? To monitor the population for disloyalty and errant political thoughts.
My family escaped this horror and had to rebuild their lives from scratch well into adulthood and with children in a new land, so it really bothers me to see people praise anything about this monster.
Would you post a comment saying that you admire Hitler for his takeover of a massive industrial power? So why would you for Castro?
Also, quoting from the Chomsky clan doesn't help your credibility. These are the same people who sang the praises of Hugo Chavez as he ruled Venezuela by decree and ran it into the ground.
And yes, the CIA did help organize an invasion force made up of Cuban exiles who wanted to save their country from communism. It's a shame Jack Kennedy didn't have the intestinal fortitude to either see it through or cancel it, instead deciding to cancel air support after landing people on the beaches.
It's possible to admire the latter aspects in isolation, without condoning most of what they did. I feel the same way about Castro's revolutionary campaign.
(Let's leave Hitler out of online forum conversations for everyone's sake...)
I think this quote from your original post better shows the profound misconceptions that you have about the Castro regime.
The internet is not tightly restricted because the "he and his comrades are just too old to get it". It's restricted because the free exchange of ideas and facts is a threat to their brutal dictatorship. Because all of their heads would probably roll if it ever collapses.
Napoleon and Caesar are now academic history. They are not combatants in any ongoing conflicts, nor causing any ongoing suffering. The Castros, meanwhile, are still exporting their "revolution" to other places (Venezuela is a very visible victim) and those who suffer greatly at their hands are still with us.
For several years until 1959, the Batista government received financial, military, and logistical support from the United States.
The Kennedy speech they link to is amazing:
The real question is: What should we have done? What did we do wrong? How did we permit the Communists to establish this foothold 90 miles away?
The answer is fourfold.
First, we refused to help Cuba meet its desperate need for economic progress. In 1953 the average Cuban family had an income of $6 a week. Fifteen to twenty percent of the labor force was chronically unemployed.
Only a third of the homes in the island even had running water, and in the years which preceded the Castro revolution this abysmal standard of living was driven still lower as population expansion out-distanced economic growth.
Only 90 miles away stood the United States - their good neighbor - the richest Nation on earth - its radios and newspapers and movies spreading the story of America's material wealth and surplus crops.
But instead of holding out a helping hand of friendship to the desperate people of Cuba, nearly all our aid was in the form of weapons assistance - assistance which merely strengthened the Batista dictatorship - assistance which completely failed to advance the economic welfare of the Cuban people - assistance which enabled Castro and the Communists to encourage the growing belief that America was indifferent to Cuban aspirations for a decent life.
This year Mr. Nixon admitted that if we had formulated a program of Latin American economic development 5 years ago: "It might have produced economic progress in Cuba which might have averted the Castro takeover." But what Mr. Nixon neglects to mention is the fact that he was in Cuba 5 years ago himself - gaining experience. He saw the conditions. He talked with the leaders. He knew what our aid program consisted of. But his only conclusion as stated in a Havana press conference, was his statement that he was "very much impressed with the competence and stability" of the Batista dictatorship.
Mr. Nixon could not see then what should have been obvious - and which should have been even more obvious when he made his ill-fated Latin American trip in 1958 - that unless the Cuban people, with our help, made substantial economic progress, trouble was on its way. If this is the kind of experience Mr. Nixon claims entitles him to be President, then I would say that the American people cannot afford many more such experiences.
Secondly, in a manner certain to antagonize the Cuban people, we used the influence of our Government to advance the interests of and increase the profits of the private American companies, which dominated the island's economy. At the beginning of 1959 U.S. companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands - almost all the cattle ranches - 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions - 80 percent of the utilities - and practically all the oil industry - and supplied two-thirds of Cuba's imports.
Of course, our private investment did much to help Cuba. But our action too often gave the impression that this country was more interested in taking money from the Cuban people than in helping them build a strong and diversified economy of their own.
The symbol of this shortsighted attitude is now on display in a Havana museum. It is a solid gold telephone presented to Batista by the American-owned Cuban telephone company. It is an expression of gratitude for the excessive telephone rate increase which the Cuban dictator had granted at the urging of our Government. But visitors to the museum are reminded that America made no expression at all over the other events which occurred on the same day this burdensome rate increase was granted, when 40 Cubans lost their lives in an assault on Batista's palace.
The third, and perhaps most disastrous of our failures, was the decision to give stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in 7 years - a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and he turned democratic Cuba into a complete police state - destroying every individual liberty.
Yet, our aid to his regime, and the ineptness of our policies, enabled Batista to invoke the name of the United States in support of his reign of terror.
You also need to be mindful of the situation in Cuba before the revolution, where the people felt that their country was becoming a satellite of the US, and losing control over its own destiny.
The embargo has created a dearth of medical supplies & knowledge, has negatively impacted nutrition, lack of resources, lack of tourism dollars, and provides a bogeyman for the regime to blame for all its ails. It has helped repress and impoverish the people more than anything else. The United Nations General Assembly has passed a resolution every year since 1992 opposing it.
It's possible that, like China, the oppressive effects of Communism could have been lessened (even if just a little) under the benefits of trade with a Capitalist democracy. Medical crises would have been dealt with quicker, and they would have had more cash on hand from tourism to invest in agriculture (or at the very least, import more food).
And you may feel differently about this, but I think the ban on travel really sucked ass for Cuban families who couldn't visit their relatives, and the bans on transfer of money to family members in Cuba. But that's not really a regime thing, that was just the US being dicks.
The oppressive effects of communism were lessened because China lessened communism by introducing free market reforms. It wasn't just trade with capitalist nations that improved the welfare of China and its people, it was becoming more capitalist a nation itself.
In a single year (1978-1979) new party leader Deng Xiaoping led economic reforms to the PRC, signed an accord with Jimmy Carter for the US to officially recognize the PRC, and attracted new business from Boeing and Coca-Cola. More reforms followed soon after. But it is absolutely clear that they thought the Capitalist model was what worked and they wanted a form of it, and used trade with the US as its beginning.
I make this distinction about the US influencing them because without the successful model (and attractive potential partner) of the US, the push for a market economy may not have worked.
Cuba could have done the same, except we were still giving them the finger.
Cuba is towards the top of that list, by life expectancy, caloric intake, GDP per capita, literacy, child mortality.
Cuba has a lot of problems... But still it turned out far better then, say, Haiti, or Honduras ever will be, despite all the benefits of open markets. This is consistently missing from the narrative.
If you're one of the educated white folks whose family lost a plantation or Havana mansion, I can understand you hate the Castros. It's like getting kicked out of Paris and 60 years later the city is literally crumbling. For a while it was like a civilization trapped in amber but infrastructure has gone over the line into complete decay.
On the plus side is good education, good health care, not a lot of crime, until recently a guarantee of a job that would keep body and soul together.
The Castros still have > 50% popular support, they have managed to maintain control of the country and the armed forces despite all their failures, foreign military adventures, withdrawal of Russian support, constant pressure from the USA.
It's a very mixed bag but not the one-sided disaster we constantly hear about from people who make a cottage industry of selling that story (someone has got the US to spend $500m on broadcasts to Cuba no one can receive, and that's just one example).
Moving to a more liberalized economy and attracting foreign investment without causing social unrest, giving up control will be a challenge, and the fact that all the educated people want to leave will not make it easier.
these were interesting http://fusion.net/story/116226/historic-poll-top-25-findings...
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/03/21/2157021/the-us-and-cub...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/cuba-after-obama...
https://medium.com/@dtemkin/spending-the-last-week-in-cuba-w...
It would be also very interesting to know from where you get that figure that more than 50% of the population support the Castros as that data is famously unavailable.
for the record, it's an effed system and economy and a poor country, just not quite as effed as people would like you to believe. people flock to the US from Mexico too, and that's without the wet foot/dry foot policy giving Cubans automatic asylum.
if they do get decent Internet it will be a pretty good tech hub due to the education. Americans might even flock there for a cheap, beautiful and fascinating place to live. Cubans actually have the full US cable/media package via el paquete and eat it up.
while you're at it, read up on the Fanjuls, some of America's greatest recipients of corporate welfare, and why US sugar prices are a multiple of world prices. if you love free markets, best thing we could do for poor countries is not blockade them while subsidizing politically connected moguls. (who profit from boycott and generated the constant anti-Castro drumbeat and policy...until they decided they'd rather do business with Cuba)
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/02/floridas-fanjuls-2001...
https://www.aei.org/publication/protectionist-sugar-policy-c...
If the United States had a wet foot/dry foot policy with the rest of Central America, it would be absolutely flooded with asylum seekers. It's already flooded with illegal aliens risking their lives, paying coyotes to smuggle them across the Mexican border - imagine what would happen if they were automatically legalized.
Other countries had brief experiences with more pro market governments (even if by necessity as opposed to ideology, such as in Brazil), or now in Argentina.
The results have always been positive, but we seem destined to be governed by populist left wing governments.
Cuba was at the top of the list by the end of the 1950's, when its US-backed dictator had turned it into one of the leading developed nations in the world. Then the Castro regime comes in, and things don't go very well, but the Soviet Union floats it along for a few decades. Then things go down hill real fast.
Almost any regime that didn't have such an antagonistic relationship with the US would probably have done better. But it's clear the US was intentionally hurting them in order to pressure some sort of additional revolution so they could install a new dictator. That never happened, so the US forced them to suffer the continued loss of US trade. We could have lifted it during the 90's famine (the OAS lifted its embargo 30 years prior), but still no. I don't see why anyone would downvote my parent comment; the UN has been agreeing with me for 25 years.
There is no justification for what they did.