Well, they went ahead and did it -- yesterday morning, despite the fact that the new membership of Cuba's National Assembly is one of the youngest and most diverse ever, it dutifully rubber-stamped 76-year-old Raúl Castro Ruz as El Presidente, thereby further cementing that paradise lost's Soviet-style gerontocracy. Not only that, but they installed an even older and harder-line communist, ideologue José Ramón Machado Ventura, as his número dos, to be first and foremost among five simultaneously serving vice presidents. Not only that, but in his acceptance speech Raúl made darn sure nobody forgot that Comrade Fidel is still very much in the picture if behind the scenes, quoted him up the wazoo, and with unintentional hilarity "appealed" to the handpicked Party kids in the hall to "allow" him to "continue consulting with the maximum leader of the Revolution" forever and ever, amen (though at least his speech lasted just a half hour or so instead of nine). Not only that, but he wound up with another sunny Fidel gem pointing to "the arduous path of duty, not to a more comfortable life." And that very same day, yet another boatload of escapees from the island washed up in Key West.
Not exactly a swell start to a transition most of the world hopes will bring reforms, eh? The picture on the front page of this morning's Miami Herald was of a wrinkled old man squinting out at the crowd flashing a "V" for victory. Does this really mean the long-hoped-for changes that might finally make life a little more bearable for Cubans are being put off for years - maybe even another decade or so - and the ones to come are likely to be no more than Band-Aids and window dressing? Did they decide to count on the Cuban public's continued passivity to let them perpetuate their creaky old failure of a system without significant protest?
All the experts are certainly now busy arranging the various tea leaves under various microscopes, classic Kremlinologist-style, to try to discern what might come next. I had mixed feelings about yesterday; while it admittedly wasn't promising, we shouldn't necessarily throw up our hands in despair. Maybe Raúl won't be a tropical Mikhail Gorbachev after all. But on the other hand, just as the Bush-Cheney crowd's web of ideologically-blindered fantasy in the United States has become unstuck by the cold, hard facts those of us in the "reality-based community" have seen all along, in Cuba economic, political, and social pressures have reached their highest ebb since the Fulgencio Batista régime. Reality bites, and it's unlikely they'll be able to get by for much longer with mere window dressing.
And remember, despite all the Communist platitudes spouted in China then and now, it was Deng Xiaoping, also in his mid-70's, who saw the handwriting on the wall and finally lifted the dead hand of that country's Fidel, Chairman Mao, opening the door to turning a still nominally Communist country into a crypto-capitalist powerhouse that has in many ways changed the world. And even if none of that comes to pass in Cuba for now, if in fact the chance has been missed for reform, Raúl could well help do what old guys Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko once did for the Soviet Union, post-Brezhnev: prime things so that change is all the more certain next time around, making way for that Cuban Gorbachev. The Miami exiles are just going to have to accept one of those two scenarios, and it would be nice to think they'd at long last realize that the U.S. can better help by engaging rather than bulling ahead with its boneheaded and counterproductive stabs at isolation and strangulation.
I'm not holding my breath on that front, of course. But I do hope that American voters might at least take note this November and not allow the installation our very own 70-something gerontocracist with a heroic past, John McCain. The elderly gent who sounds generally reassuring and admits that mistakes were made, but still praises his failed predecessor and clings to disastrous, discredited policies - ring a bell? What a tragedy it would be if we, too, ended up prolonging these dark days by ignoring the lessons of Cuba and letting the fears from the past overcome hope for the future.
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That is just a silly post.
I don't get this article at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate_(2005)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate
I think that's an analogy too far.
And even if he were a Bush apologist, even for those of us who find the Presidency of GW Bush an unmitigated disaster, Pres Bush is not Fidel Castro.
We may not yet be Canada, but the USA is not Cuba, either.
They never understood what they'd actually had, until it was gone.
As soon as the Berlin Wall fell, America promptly put forth not one but two proposals to build new ones on both its northern and its southern borders, and (of course) issued no-bid contracts to crony friends to begin construction. Meanwhile, as a matter of what is supposed to pass for "foreign policy," America has worked hard to stuff its hand into every hornet's-nest imaginable, while selling billions of dollars' worth of weapons to all sides.
But is this the future of the next generation? I think not.
When the current reins of political power fall from the grasp of the self-important people who now wield them, it will truly be a sea-change as spectacular as what transpired in Germany, when the people of that country realized that their future was not to be divided.
Beyond that, the main problem in Cuba is that the U.S. has repeatedly attacked them, set up embargoes, forbade its citizens from going to travel even to visit relatives, bombarded them with right-wing delusional propaganda by Cuban exiles, paid $4.0 million/year to corrupt Cubans to sit on their butts in Miami and march around once/year saying "We hate Castro."
If the U.S. would stop being such a bully towards Cuba, things would much improve in that country.
The first step would be to admit that most of the problems in Cuba have been caused by the militaristic interventions, attempted assasinations, historical lies and deceit, of the U.S. The second step would be to admit that our own government in the U.S. is so corrupt that we have no business pointing fingers at anyone else.
And the third step would be for the government to get out of the way, let the people of this country have free and open relations with Cuba. Jesus, what do they think is so scary about Havana?
It's not like Castro has been kidnapping people, taking them to other countries, torturing them, holding them in secret prisons then murdering them, right? That's what we do, not what Castro does.
Nobody in the U.S. has any business criticizing Cuba or Fidel Castro, or his brother. Everyone needs to get down off their high horses and start facing the horrid truth about ourselves, stop pointing fingers at others.
Why are americans so fixated with such a small, resource-poor country? Is it because it is a country where continuous american foreign policy and dirty tricks have failed so abysmally for 50 years, embarrassing america like no other country has?
U.S., get your own house in order before trying to alter others.
I criticize our regime aplenty, and respect the rights of others in the international community to do so as well. But to say that "nobody in the U.S. has any business criticizing Cuba or Fidel Castro, or his brother" is just wrong, as long as we're evenhanded. I suppose nobody should have the right to criticize what's going on in Darfur either, or that little internal matter in Germany a few years ago called the Shoah? Gimme a break...