On November 25, at the age of 90, Communist Cuba’s former President Fidel Castro passed away after a long battle with cancer.
Castro, who seized power in Cuba from its former leader Fulgencio Batista in 1959, ruled the Caribbean island with an iron fist until 2008 when he delegated control of the country to his brother Raul and retired from politics.
As one of the longest-reigning authoritarian leaders in modern history, Castro will be remembered for many things — for establishing a beachhead for Communism in the West only 90 miles from U.S. shores, for creating a nationalized health care and education system that was the envy of Latin American democracies and for a running propaganda battle with the United States that went on for decades and sparked one of the closest brushes with nuclear conflict the world has ever seen.
Castro became a larger-than-life figure whose fate and decisions impacted millions of people’s lives but also influenced numerous regimes in Latin America, Africa and Asia as despots and dictators around the world often modeled themselves after the fierce revolutionary who famously wore his trademark beard and military fatigues for decades.
Along with his second-in-command Che Guevara, Castro surprised Western powers by taking over Cuba in just 25 months and remaining in power for decades despite American-backed attempts to wrest back control of the island from his capable forces.
The infamous “Bay of Pigs” invasion operation funded and approved by U.S. President John F. Kennedy proved a total failure and embarrassment to the American administration and to U.S. intelligence agencies, which had attempted to invade Cuba using paramilitary groups of poorly trained Cuban exiles.
Over the course of half a century, escapees and refugees made their way to American shores (usually Florida), only to be held in internment facilities while their applications for asylum were processed. In 1980, 125,000 asylum seekers were allowed to leave Cuba on boats sent from U.S. shores in what was known as the Mariel Harbor Boatlift.
However, rather than model citizens, it soon became clear that many of these escapees were prisoners, mental patients or other undesirables, and the U.S. had to find improvised solutions for their housing.
A whole Cuban community sprang up in South Florida and particularly in Miami, which oozed a strong anti-Castro sentiment and later supported politicians such as Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who opposed any kind of placating of Castro’s regime or normalizing of relations with his government.
Castro was a symbol and a personification of someone who could and did stand up to the United States and remain in power, a maddening reminder that the United States could influence and control most, but not all, of its hemisphere politically and had to brook occasional dissent, as it did in the United Nations, which Cuba continues to take an active role in.
In his later years, Castro became a big influence for the socialist Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, and in 2011, Chávez went to Cuba for medical treatment before he himself died in 2013.
When Castro passed away, those on the left eulogized him by praising his many reforms and policies of his nation, which saw life expectancy and literacy rates for Cuban citizens exceed those of the United States. However, what many on the left don’t want to talk about are the tens of thousands of political prisoners and dissenters who rotted away in Cuban jails or were executed for treasonous acts.
President Obama formally restored some international relations with Cuba after 56 years in 2015. For most of the time prior to then, to travel to Cuba, Americans had to take a flight to Canada or another nation first. As of August 31, direct flights from the U.S. to the Cuban capital of Havana have been restored, but the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump may change this.
Unlike Obama, who released a consolatory statement offering sympathies to Castro’s family upon the leader’s death, Trump has taken a much more hard-line (and realistic) position, referring to Castro as “a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades” — phrasing that’s more fitting for a man who let his people starve while he lived a life of affluence, retaining some 20 homes and an 88-foot yacht, enjoying the company of a string of women and luxuries like cigars that were made of tobacco unavailable to his island’s commoners.
Like Chairman Mao in China, Castro established one set of rules for his people while he lived by a different code himself. Both men were fearsome enforcers of self-written ideologies and became demagogues to their captive citizens.
Today, life in Cuba is bleak, with most Cubans surviving on the equivalent of less than a U.S. dollar per day. Food is rationed by the government, and most citizens cannot afford meat.
The once-grand buildings on the island are crumbling away into ruins, and while the 60-year-old American automobiles that are used for taxis and other transport may be looked at as romantic relics, they speak volumes about the nation’s inability to provide even a modicum of industrial infrastructure for itself.
Even with Western tourists and investment in the island now trickling in, life hasn’t gotten much better for residents of the country, and opportunities remain limited.
The death of Fidel Castro no doubt has brought light to the eyes of many Cubans, but it will likely take the death of his brother to make the sun rise — figuratively speaking — over the horizon of this subjugated land once again.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
