Roguish Lawyer
02-10-2004, 10:22
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110004675
Twilight in Havana
Cuban tyranny may not die with Castro.
BY MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
Tuesday, February 10, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Now and then rumors surface that Fidel Castro is not in the best health--that he is even at death's door. Only last month the Miami Herald reported that such a rumor was buzzing through South Florida, "with anxious callers inundating police departments, media outlets and exile groups."
"Anxious" here probably means "eager." There is little doubt that when Fidel waves his revolutionary finger in the air and denounces the imperialist Yankees for the last time, the tectonic plates of Cuba's political system will heave mightily. Exiles call it the "biological solution." Conventional wisdom holds that the regime will crumble, freedom will blossom and the path to Cuban prosperity will open up at last.
Mark Falcoff isn't so sure. In "Cuba: The Morning After," Mr. Falcoff concludes that post-Castro Cuba may well struggle hard to recover from more than four decades of dictatorship. "Failed states typically become--like Haiti--platforms for the export of illicit substances, centers of international criminality, and vessels leaking illegal immigrants," he writes. "Perhaps, indeed, the island will somehow avoid this fate, but present indicators do not offer much encouragement."
This is no casual speculation. Mr. Falcoff, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, offers a painstaking historical analysis and a detailed investigation of Cuba's current realities. Castroism in its present form, he notes, is widely expected to collapse once the bearded one passes away. He cites Elizardo Sánchez, a prominent island dissident, saying: "When the days of charismatic caudillos are over, their ideologies are also over." And Cuban-born writer Roberto Luque Escalona: Castro's regime "is an edifice constructed on one pillar. It cannot stand once the pillar has fallen."
But that doesn't mean that dictatorship will not go on. Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, who heads the Cuban military, has warned that "things are all arranged--but good." Indeed, Raul has "summoned to life a new structure of power within the existing regime," writes Mr. Falcoff, "by putting professionals and military men loyal to him in key positions, particularly in the few dynamic sectors of the economy such as biomedical products and tourism." What is more, the Castro family runs an economic empire that represents, according to accounts in the Spanish press, "$1 billion worth of transactions a year." Prying greedy hands off that war chest may take more than the death of an old man.
Other obstacles abound, Mr. Falcoff argues, even if the dictatorship topples like the Berlin Wall. Cuba, once prosperous, is now desperately poor, and one of Castro's legacies is the destruction of the whole framework of civil society. Gone are the entrepreneurs of Spanish-immigrant culture. Gone are the vibrant business groups, labor federations and professional societies. Gone are the engines of wealth, like a profitable sugar industry. The regime has trashed the island's environment and badly damaged its human capital. Cuba now ranks among the world's top five nations in suicides per capita. Even psychologically healthy Cubans are burdened by years of indoctrination, with its bias against individual responsibility and risk-taking.
By the end of Mr. Falcoff's thorough work, it is easy to feel less than sanguine about Cuba's future, at least in the near term. Yet that is what sober, scholarly assessments are for: to throw doubt on easy triumphalism. One thing is certain: Nothing will change until Fidel dies, so powerful is the cult of personality surrounding him and the romance of his revolutionary past.
An early glimpse of the Castro myth is on display in Alma Guillermoprieto's "Dancing With Cuba," a vivid memoir of her six months as a dance instructor there in 1970. When she arrives in Havana from New York, at age 20, she meets privation, inequality and repression. But she is mesmerized by El Maximo Lider and resists the temptation to hold him accountable for Cuban suffering. The first time she hears him speak, she decides that "there had never existed a more lucid, heroic man." She recalls another time: "For more than three hours I lost myself in a rapture that was produced not so much by the speech as by the sonorous undulation of his words and his expression of pain."
Ms. Guillermoprieto's visit to Cuba coincides with "The Ten Million Ton Harvest," a national push to overcome Soviet dependency. The country's revolutionary pride depends on its success. Everywhere are plastered slogans to inspire Cuban citizens to cut sugar cane day and night. Naturally, the effort fails. But Fidel remains above it all, spellbinding, "transporting us with him on the wings of his rhetoric, jabbing a prophet's blazing finger."
Fidel's magnetism seduces the dance instructor, but the effects on the Cuban people of his decade in power horrify her daily. Dire food shortages are an unceasing source of distress. "I was about to weep from hunger," she recalls. "If putting up with a few hunger pangs was every revolutionary's duty, why did I feel so famished?" Indeed, she is hungry for all that the revolution prohibits. She wants to eat chocolate bars and listen to Mozart and watch the ballet. She doesn't want to cut sugar cane. This provokes self-hatred. "You are unredeemable," she tells herself.
It is, though, intellectual and artistic repression that takes the biggest toll on her psyche. "Is it possible to be an intellectual outside the Revolution? To say yes was immediately to become a counterrevolutionary. To say no, for me, meant an attempt at self-annihilation."
Ms. Guillermoprieto's problem was that she longed to be free and yet couldn't relinquish the dreamy ideals of Marxism. As she explained to her guerrilla lover: "I don't like living here and at the same time it's clear to me that the Revolution is absolutely necessary to the better future of humanity."
In some quarters this is known as cognitive dissonance. When it comes to Cuba, plenty of people still suffer from it.
Ms. O'Grady edits The Wall Street Journal's Americas column.
Twilight in Havana
Cuban tyranny may not die with Castro.
BY MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
Tuesday, February 10, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Now and then rumors surface that Fidel Castro is not in the best health--that he is even at death's door. Only last month the Miami Herald reported that such a rumor was buzzing through South Florida, "with anxious callers inundating police departments, media outlets and exile groups."
"Anxious" here probably means "eager." There is little doubt that when Fidel waves his revolutionary finger in the air and denounces the imperialist Yankees for the last time, the tectonic plates of Cuba's political system will heave mightily. Exiles call it the "biological solution." Conventional wisdom holds that the regime will crumble, freedom will blossom and the path to Cuban prosperity will open up at last.
Mark Falcoff isn't so sure. In "Cuba: The Morning After," Mr. Falcoff concludes that post-Castro Cuba may well struggle hard to recover from more than four decades of dictatorship. "Failed states typically become--like Haiti--platforms for the export of illicit substances, centers of international criminality, and vessels leaking illegal immigrants," he writes. "Perhaps, indeed, the island will somehow avoid this fate, but present indicators do not offer much encouragement."
This is no casual speculation. Mr. Falcoff, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, offers a painstaking historical analysis and a detailed investigation of Cuba's current realities. Castroism in its present form, he notes, is widely expected to collapse once the bearded one passes away. He cites Elizardo Sánchez, a prominent island dissident, saying: "When the days of charismatic caudillos are over, their ideologies are also over." And Cuban-born writer Roberto Luque Escalona: Castro's regime "is an edifice constructed on one pillar. It cannot stand once the pillar has fallen."
But that doesn't mean that dictatorship will not go on. Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, who heads the Cuban military, has warned that "things are all arranged--but good." Indeed, Raul has "summoned to life a new structure of power within the existing regime," writes Mr. Falcoff, "by putting professionals and military men loyal to him in key positions, particularly in the few dynamic sectors of the economy such as biomedical products and tourism." What is more, the Castro family runs an economic empire that represents, according to accounts in the Spanish press, "$1 billion worth of transactions a year." Prying greedy hands off that war chest may take more than the death of an old man.
Other obstacles abound, Mr. Falcoff argues, even if the dictatorship topples like the Berlin Wall. Cuba, once prosperous, is now desperately poor, and one of Castro's legacies is the destruction of the whole framework of civil society. Gone are the entrepreneurs of Spanish-immigrant culture. Gone are the vibrant business groups, labor federations and professional societies. Gone are the engines of wealth, like a profitable sugar industry. The regime has trashed the island's environment and badly damaged its human capital. Cuba now ranks among the world's top five nations in suicides per capita. Even psychologically healthy Cubans are burdened by years of indoctrination, with its bias against individual responsibility and risk-taking.
By the end of Mr. Falcoff's thorough work, it is easy to feel less than sanguine about Cuba's future, at least in the near term. Yet that is what sober, scholarly assessments are for: to throw doubt on easy triumphalism. One thing is certain: Nothing will change until Fidel dies, so powerful is the cult of personality surrounding him and the romance of his revolutionary past.
An early glimpse of the Castro myth is on display in Alma Guillermoprieto's "Dancing With Cuba," a vivid memoir of her six months as a dance instructor there in 1970. When she arrives in Havana from New York, at age 20, she meets privation, inequality and repression. But she is mesmerized by El Maximo Lider and resists the temptation to hold him accountable for Cuban suffering. The first time she hears him speak, she decides that "there had never existed a more lucid, heroic man." She recalls another time: "For more than three hours I lost myself in a rapture that was produced not so much by the speech as by the sonorous undulation of his words and his expression of pain."
Ms. Guillermoprieto's visit to Cuba coincides with "The Ten Million Ton Harvest," a national push to overcome Soviet dependency. The country's revolutionary pride depends on its success. Everywhere are plastered slogans to inspire Cuban citizens to cut sugar cane day and night. Naturally, the effort fails. But Fidel remains above it all, spellbinding, "transporting us with him on the wings of his rhetoric, jabbing a prophet's blazing finger."
Fidel's magnetism seduces the dance instructor, but the effects on the Cuban people of his decade in power horrify her daily. Dire food shortages are an unceasing source of distress. "I was about to weep from hunger," she recalls. "If putting up with a few hunger pangs was every revolutionary's duty, why did I feel so famished?" Indeed, she is hungry for all that the revolution prohibits. She wants to eat chocolate bars and listen to Mozart and watch the ballet. She doesn't want to cut sugar cane. This provokes self-hatred. "You are unredeemable," she tells herself.
It is, though, intellectual and artistic repression that takes the biggest toll on her psyche. "Is it possible to be an intellectual outside the Revolution? To say yes was immediately to become a counterrevolutionary. To say no, for me, meant an attempt at self-annihilation."
Ms. Guillermoprieto's problem was that she longed to be free and yet couldn't relinquish the dreamy ideals of Marxism. As she explained to her guerrilla lover: "I don't like living here and at the same time it's clear to me that the Revolution is absolutely necessary to the better future of humanity."
In some quarters this is known as cognitive dissonance. When it comes to Cuba, plenty of people still suffer from it.
Ms. O'Grady edits The Wall Street Journal's Americas column.