By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Many Americans seem to assume that Cubans will at some point totally repudiate Fidel Castro.
I doubt if that will happen, especially while he is alive, and probably not when he dies, even if Cuba’s long and heavily repressed dissidents come to power.
Why?
An article I found in the Jamaica Gleaner provides the answer. The title of the article is “History Will Absolve Castro.” Lamenting the fact that Cuba, unlike Jamaica, ensures that all citizens are literate and also provides medical care for everyone,* the writer points out that Cuba “sent troops to get rid of South Africa’s apartheid army from Angola.” Doctors were also dispatched to Africa, the article notes with approbation.
The Gleaner is far from blind to the deficiencies of Castro’s Cuba:
Yes, there have been negatives. Human rights as defined by us have a different meaning in their culture. Dissidents are regarded as enemies of the State and are locked up. They have nationalized almost all private businesses and seized property.....
However, the Gleaner speculates, “the experiences of the Cuban people might have been different” and possibly better, if US policy toward the Cuban revolution had been different.
The past, of course, cannot be changed, but it is constantly rewritten by subsequent generations. As American historians look back on the Castro era, they might consider placing more emphasis on the fact that Comrade Fidel’s revolution overthrew the corrupt and brutal Batista regime. The Batista interlude was hardly democratic and certainly did not protect human rights, and yet it was tolerated by American governments of the day.
If only for removing Batista, I believe, Fidel Castro will always be respected. His biography will certainly include the excesses of a hyper-controlled polity and the pathetic economic performance. But, in the end, Castro will be, at worst, the hero who went astray, the well-born populist who began by bringing benefits to the disenfranchised and then, having not entirely unjustifiably identified the US with the vicious ancien regime, fell under the fatal spell of the enemy’s enemy and a once widely shared romantic view of Communism. As always with that bit of idealism, it degenerated into totalitarianism.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s call for democracy in Cuba deserves nothing but a cynical raspberry when the same foreign policy apparatus is patently undermining the resurgence of democracy in Pakistan. The Bush administration is pleading for the election-legitimized new leaders of Pakistan to cozy up to the democracy-usurping Pervez Mussharaf, the ex-general who is clinging to his rigged-election occupancy of the presidency and by extension to his control over the judicial system that might otherwise oust him.
Finally, however long the post-Castro transition takes, whatever the role Fidel Castro plays in history, it might be wise for Washington to resign itself to the fact that there will be no return to a status quo ante in which the US dominates Cuba to the disadvantage of most Cubans. The world has changed greatly in the interim. Hugo Chavez may have overplayed his hand, but Brazil really is rising, and Chile is not likely to forget the American role in bringing General Pinochet to power. All in all, thanks partly to China’s endless appetite for resources of all kinds, Latin America as a whole is not the U.S. dependency it used to be.
Yet the Guardian is not so sure that Cuba will have achieved lasting freedom from domination by the US. Many Cubans do believe that Castro gave Cuba dignity by standing up to the US, which was relatively easy so long as the USSR remained a power to be reckoned with. Yet the US is big, Cuba is small and they are only 90 miles apart. Still, the Cubans themselves have changed. Castro's education (not all of it propaganda) has something to do with it. Even if the US tries to interfere in Cuban affairs, domination in cahoots with a small rich corrupt elite will not be as easy as it was before.
Meanwhile, it’s looking as if the transition to a truly post-Castro government is going to proceed slowly and smoothly, which is probably a good idea, since counter-revolutions can be as bloody as the revolutions they seek to undo. Even the The Economist, no lover of socialism, sees evolution ahead. That being the case, an early end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba would be a good idea for at least three reasons. It would be of immediate economic benefit to ordinary Cubans, who might think better of us as Cuba evolves. It would probably create a good impression on the ultimate leaders of post-Castro, non-communist Cuba. It would also earn us lots of brownie points elsewhere in Latin America, where our image could use more than a little polishing..
*As the The Economist points out, since the demise of massive aid from the USSR, the quality of social services has declined along with the rest of the economy.
.