Cuba Castro
Magazine ranks Raúl Castro as 4th worst dictator
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
An article in Foreign Policy magazine has ranked Cuba's Raúl Castro as
the world's 4th worst dictator, and argued that after 52 years of Castro
brothers rule "Cubans are stirring."
Castro is being forced by a listless economy to slash subsidies that
kept people in line for decades and will now rely "entirely on state
repression. It is a very fragile arrangement," it added.
"After 52 years under the rule of the Castro brothers, Cubans are
stirring," wrote George B.N. Ayittey, a native of Ghana and president of
the Washington-based Free Africa foundation.
He noted an Aug. 23 incident in which a crowd shouted insults at police
who arrested four dissident women who staged a protest on the steps of
the Capitol building in Havana.
Ayittey's article listed Castro at No. 4 on a list of six dictators. He
was behind Omar al Basher of Sudan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and ahead of Cameroon's Paul Biya and Teodoro
Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea.
His list of the world's worst dictators, which last year had Castro 21st
out of 23, was published Friday by Foreign Policy magazine, owned by
Washingtonpost- Newsweek Interactive, LLC. There was no explanation of
why the latest list was reduced to only six names.
The 2010 list described Castro as suffering from "intellectual
astigmatism" because he has failed to see that the Cuban revolution is
"obsolete, an abysmal failure. AndCQ totally irrelevant to the
aspirations of the Cuban people."
In this year's report, Ayittey noted that when he published last year's
list of dictators — he called them "coconut heads" — few people "thought
the tyrants would fall anytime soon."
Since then, the dictators of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have been toppled,
and the rulers of Syria, Bahrain and Yemen are facing bloody domestic
upheavals.
"The so-called experts in the Western media were caught napping. These
people are not ready for democracy, they once told us,'' Ayittey wrote.
"More pathetic and clueless than anyone else, however, were — and still
are — the hardened coconuts themselves."
Under increasing pressures for change, he added, dictators are resorting
to "the coconut boogie" — promises of reforms, brutal crackdowns on
opponents "and finally, a tumble for a hard landing on a frozen Swiss
bank account."
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