Ask a Cuban if it’s fun living in a time warp

Ask a Cuban if it's fun living in a time warp
Don't mourn the passing of old Cuba, for all its vintage charm. Under
Castro, people voted with their feet
By David Blair5:00AM BST 20 Jul 2015

Fidel Castro was surely guilty of the single most irresponsible act in
human history. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, he dispatched
a letter to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev urging an immediate
nuclear strike on the United States. "However harsh and terrible such a
decision would be, there is no other way out, in my opinion," read the
missive on October 27 1962. "With fraternal greetings, Fidel Castro."
At that perilous moment, when President Kennedy placed the odds on
nuclear war at "20 chances out of 100", Castro's "fraternal" advice
might actually have triggered, well, the end of the world. Fortunately,
Khrushchev was wise enough to ignore his comrade – and consequently a
Cuban embassy will be re-established in Washington today, opening its
doors in the very capital which Castro had wanted his ally to incinerate.

Later this summer, the US mission in Havana will become a full embassy
and the story will turn full circle: America and Cuba, the implacable
duo whose rivalry launched a thousand crises large and small, will
become normal neighbours again. No great powers of foresight are
required to predict the next chapter. Once the octogenarian Castro
brothers, Fidel and Raul, are removed from the scene and their homeland
is flooded with American tourists and investment, then Cuba will come to
resemble much of the rest of the world.
Instead of being a socialist theme park, complete with vintage cars,
charmingly run-down colonnades and strict controls on the internet, the
island will be a new market for Starbucks and every other emblem of
consumerism. That prospect will cause many hearts to sink. When the
pointless US embargo is swept away, Cuba will revert to being just
another Caribbean island. Without the two Castros their former domain
will be a country rather than a cause, deprived of its veneer of
revolutionary chic.

But no one should dread this outcome; on the contrary, it should be a
cause of rejoicing. After all, there is nothing more patronising than
the Western visitor who wants the Saharan nomads, or Amazonian Indians,
or the people of some moth-eaten authoritarian state to live in
conformity with a popular image, no matter how poverty-stricken or
soul-destroying that reality happens to be.
The people of Cuba are not obliged to inhabit a socialist time warp just
because some Westerners, who enjoy freedom and plenty themselves, savour
the supposed romance of their plight. Everything that certain visitors
find most enticing about Cuba, after all, involves a terrible price.
There is one simple test of a country's happiness: are people trying to
get in, or get out? With no opportunity to remove Castro in free
elections, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have voted with their feet –
or rather their paddles – by travelling across the 90 miles of ocean to
Florida. Their supposedly benign leader responded with infantile fits of
rage. Take the "Mariel Boatlift" in 1980 when at least 125,000 people
left from the port of Mariel in the space of a few months. Castro's
official media denounced them as "criminals, lumpen and anti-social
elements, loafers and parasites". Later, about 10,000 Cubans sought
asylum in the grounds of the Peruvian Embassy. Castro duly called them
"scum" and the party organised protests outside their homes.

In fairness, the Castro era was not devoid of advances. Universal
education and full employment were both achieved in the teeth of
America's blockade. Meanwhile, infant mortality fell to seven per 1,000
live births, compared with 30 in the Caribbean as a whole. Long before
the thaw with America, Cuba had begun cautious economic reforms, induced
by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The sudden disappearance of
preferential trading rights and Moscow's annual payment of at least £2
billion wiped out a third of Cuba's economy between 1989 and 1993. None
the less, the Castros managed to preserve their state welfare system.

But the boat people still fled to Florida and, far away, Castro's
revolutionary foreign policy inflicted death and suffering upon some of
the poorest people in the world. In the Horn of Africa, Castro backed
Eritrea's struggle for independence against Ethiopia – and then
Ethiopia's bid to subdue Eritrea, depending on where the Marxists
happened to hold power.
So forget the supposed romance of Castro's island. When the old dictator
was not risking a nuclear war or inflaming distant conflicts in Africa,
he was vilifying his own people for daring to flee his rule. Such was
his determination that power should run only through him that he happily
imprisoned those who wanted to set up independent trade unions. Hardly a
workers' paradise, then. Cuba's impending normality should be celebrated.

Source: Ask a Cuban if it's fun living in a time warp - Telegraph -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/cuba/11749890/Ask-a-Cuban-if-its-fun-living-in-a-time-warp.html