Eric S. Margolis
19 January 2009
The 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's revolution has been modest and
low key. Fidel remains gravely ill and out of sight for the past two
years. Economically stricken Cuba is hanging on by its fingernails. Life
is grim on this beautiful but impoverished island.
My parents used to bring me to Havana each winter, and we often joined
Ernest Hemingway at its fabled 'Floridita Bar.' He was big, vivacious
man with a white beard and a rumbling laugh. I still have one of his
books, inscribed, 'to Eric, from his friend Ernest Hemingway, Havana, 1951.'
Eight years later, a Communist lawyer named Fidel Castro Ruiz stormed
ashore with 81 men to begin a guerilla war against the US-backed Batista
dictatorship. Cuba was then a virtual American colony: Americans owned
60 per cent of Cuba's farmland and industry.
On January 1, 1959, Castro's guerilla fighters arrived in Havana and
proclaimed a revolutionary republic. For the first time in its long
history (Havana is 50-70 years older than New York City), Cuba was
genuinely independent of Spanish rule and American domination.
Once Castro was in power, his comrade-in-arms, Ernesto 'Che' Guevera,
today an icon of romantic revolution to the uninformed and juvenile,
ordered the execution of over 600 'bourgeois,' then got killed leading a
farcically inept Marxist revolution in Bolivia.
In an era when America bullied and exploited Latin America, Castro's
revolution was a triumph. His resistance to 50 years of US efforts to
overthrow or assassinate him, and a near-lethal embargo, was epic.
US attempts to topple Castro nearly led to nuclear war with the USSR in
1962. The Soviets rushed missiles into Cuba to thwart a planned US
invasion. The US imposed a naval blockade of Cuba. Nuclear war was very
close.
In the end, Moscow won the confrontation, though Americans believe
President John Kennedy was the victor. Moscow withdrew its missiles in
exchange for the US agreeing never to invade Cuba and pulling its
missiles out of Italy and Turkey.
The cost of Cuba's independence and dignity was poverty, dictatorship,
and becoming a Soviet satellite. Today, only oil-rich Venezuela and
Canadian tourists are keeping battered Cuba afloat.
Havana, once called 'the naughtiest city on earth,' is a museum of the
1950's: decaying, melancholy, dark.
Cuba has Latin America's best medical and education system, and highest
literacy. But life in Cuba is punishing: food and power shortages,
endless queuing, grinding poverty and constant supervision by secret
policemen and Communist party informers.
Castro blames this misery on the US embargo. The US blames Castro's
failed Stalinist economics. Both are
responsible. Cuba has suffered
fifty years of the kind of pitiless collective punishment that Gaza is
now experiencing. The US has maintained its crushing boycott under the
pretext that Havana holds 200 political prisoners and is Communist.
Yet the US cheerfully deals with Communist China and Vietnam, and itself
holds 36,000 Iraqi political prisoners, not to mention Guantanamo.
America's ally Israel holds 10,000 political prisoners.
One of President Barack Obama's first acts should be to close the
Guantanamo prison camp and demand Congress end the hypocritical, idiotic
embargo of Cuba. Even half of Miami's once fanatically anti-Castro
Cubans now support ending the blockade.
It's high time the West Indies' largest island was welcomed back to this
hemisphere and given civilised treatment. Equally important, Chinese
influence is moving into Cuba, and Russia is reasserting its strategic
presence. Moscow plans to rearm Cuba's military. So the US has little
time to lose.
First Fidel, and now Raul Castro, have been happy to keep the US at
arm's length by provoking occasional crises. An end to US-Cuban
hostility could bring up to two million US tourists. The creaky
Communist control system could not withstand this invasion. Young Cubans
are yearning for the kind of anti-Communist revolution that swept
Eastern Europe.
So the Party, which refuses to implement Chinese-style reforms, may keep
Cuba frozen in time. Or, at minimum, until Fidel Castro, whom everyone
regards as the nation's beloved 'papa,' finally dies.
The age of Yankee imperialism in Latin America is over. Cuba raised the
banner of revolt, and paid the price. Now is the time for Cuba to rejoin
the polity of Latin American democratic nations.
Eric S Margolis is a veteran US journalist who has reported from the
Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan for several years
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