I met nobody who was pleased with the current state of affairs. He achieved it through sheer intolerance and cruelty. People will debate for a long time how many millions of lives he disrupted, how many thousands of political dissidents he imprisoned, and for how many tens or hundreds of thousands of lives lost he is responsible. Castro justified the worst crimes through the supposed achievement of the greater good—national sovereignty, universal health care and education, social equality, the fight against imperialism, etc.
Never mind that the reality was quite different. With all its problems, Cuba, the most developed country in Latin America before the revolution, became relatively less developed and even more dependent on outside powers after the revolution, first on the Soviet Union, then on Venezuela.
The extent of control that the communist nomenclatura has over others in society represents an inequality of power that Cuba had never before seen. Castro knew that much of the outside world would overlook that reality and buy into official myths. The use of moral equivalence in argumentation, or the old trick of suggesting that criticism of the new regime was the same as support for the old status quo went a long way. Castro knew that the world was imperfect and turned Cuba into the focal point of what Latin America had long been: a place where outsiders could project their vision of utopia or express dissatisfaction with the many things wrong in their own societies.
In this way, the revolution became useful to intellectuals, journalists, activists, and countless others around the world. As my colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo notes , just three years ago the regime hosted a summit of Latin American leaders, which called on the region to strengthen human rights and democracy.
How the future will unfold in Cuba is unpredictable, but we can expect its military dictatorship to remain in control in the short term and probably longer. Following the revolution, Castro set out to bring social welfare and land reform to the Cuban people and to confiscate the ill-gotten gains of the Cuban elite.
But when the defeated Fulgencio Batista and his associates fled Cuba, they stole millions of pesos from the National Bank and the Treasury. The country was decapitalised, severely limiting the capacity for public spending and private investments. Wealthy Cubans were leaving the island, taking their deposits and taxes with them. How was the new government going to carry out the ambitious socio-economic reforms without financial resources?
We have to consider these real circumstances at every juncture. Is it GDP per capita? Is it money-income per day? Cuba has eliminated child malnutrition. No children sleep on the streets. In fact, there is no homelessness. Even during the hungry years of economic crisis of the s, Cubans did not starve.
Cuba stuck with the planned economy and it enabled them to ration their scarce resources. The state provides a very basic food basket while utility bills, transport and medicine costs are kept low. The opera, cinema, ballet and so on are cheap for all.
High-quality education and healthcare are free. They are part of the material wealth of Cuba and should not be dismissed — as if individual consumption of consumer goods were the only measure of economic success. Fidel and his most trusted adviser, the infamous Ernesto "Che" Guevara, saw how the United States had used the Army and other state institutions to overthrow leftist governments, and were determined to avoid the same fate, especially after the U.
But reasons melt into lame excuses. Castro may have been the perfect picture of a revolutionary, but he lacked either the vision or the guts, or both, to uplift Cuba's downtrodden people and to also bestow fundamental freedoms. The Castro conundrum, however, is that unlike many of the other authoritarian rulers of the 20th Century, Fidel actually did invest some of his revolutionary capital in programs that were intended and -- despite a lack of material resources -- often succeeded at offering basic services to all of Cuba's citizens.
As Canada's Trudeau pointed out, the Castro regime had actual achievements in the areas of health care and education. On the education front , all schooling in Cuba, including college is free. The government spends more of its national budget -- 13 percent -- on education than any other, and the World Bank not a hotbed of socialism, last time I checked rates Cuba's learning system the best in Latin America and the Caribbean. The adult literacy rate in Cuba is reported to be at or near percent compared to 86 percent in the U.
Cuba also reports a lower infant mortality rate than the United States according to the CIA, for what it's worth and its citizens enjoy an average life expectancy that is comparable to Americans and other developed nations. One reason for that is because Cuba produces as many or more doctors per capita as economically advanced nations. But Cuba clearly is not economically advanced, even as we continue to debate how much of that poverty is the U.
Doctors are not well paid, and crucial drugs are not always available. But a much bigger question looms over Fidel Castro's legacy:. Is it possible to have the basic human rights of good health and a good education I think often of the political evolution of Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom I studied extensively for an e-book last year. His youthful enthusiasm for Castro's vigor, at the dawn of the s, is what caused Sanders as a college sophomore to reject both major U.
But Sanders evolved into what he called a "democratic socialist," and why wouldn't he?
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