Today, the world's attention turned to Cuba, where Fidel Castro retired and was succeeded by his younger -at seventy-six years of age- brother, Raúl. Castro's enemies have a good reason to rejoice. Or maybe not. After all, Fidel outlasted ten American presidents and the collapse of the regime's main ally, the Soviet Union; survived the longest economic embargo in history, several assassination plots, one invasion attempt, and thirteen days of a nuclear missile crisis; and he is willingly stepping down while making sure that power stays in the family and the ideological contours of his revolution are not blurred.
With time, it is likely that his heirs will toy with the free market in a gradual and centrally-planned manner, à la China or Vietnam. But I suspect that it will continue to be safer to criticize Cuba's appalling lack of political freedom than its economic under-performance. After noting that Cuba is outranked in the UN's Human Development Index by Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, the editors of The Economist wrote, characteristically: "Forget the cigars and the posters: Cubans have had a rotten deal from a miserable regime -and they know it." The statement is incomplete. In the Americas, Cuba is also outranked by the United States, Canada, Barbados, and the Bahamas. And yes, according to the same index, Cuba is better off than the remaining 26 countries in the Americas, including NAFTA's Mexico and Brazil; better off than two EU countries, Romania and Bulgaria; better off than all the other communist, single-party regimes, such as China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea, and than every non-EU offshoot of the Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine; better off, in sum, than 126 countries listed in this ranking.
On the same day but a different island, another Communist was elected president of his country. In Cyprus, Demetris Christophias made history by becoming the first Communist in the history of the European Union to reach the presidency in one of its states. Christophias is the Secretary-General of AKEL, a Marxist-Leninist party, and was labeled by his opponents as the Castro of the Mediterranean. He is, after all, Soviet-educated (Ph.D. in History at Moscow's Academy of Social Sciences), and maintains ties with the Kremlin. The party, AKEL (formerly KKK, or Communist Party of Cyprus), had never before fielded a candidate for presidential elections. No one in Europe seems, however, too worried. Demetris Christophias may do to the 'communist' label what Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done to the 'Islamist' label. If anything, some hope that Christophias will be successful in addressing one of the world's most intractable problems: the division of the island among Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots. Christophias' rejection of the UN's 2004 reunification plan was merely tactical, and his party is more inclined to a federal solution to the island's partition. It will be a hard sell and an improbable journey, but so is everything else.
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The realities of life in Cuba bear little resemblance to the projection of it in the US media. The problem is that we—that is American citizens—cannot go there and see for ourselves what things are like. This combined with a powerful ethnic lobby intent on reclaiming lost property, status, and power in their homeland distorts our perception of Cuba. My students expressed surprise that few in Cuba were excited about the change in leadership. There reason why no one is dancing in the streets is because many people in Cuba fear the unfiltered return of the "exiles" more than a continuation of the status quo.
Politics in Cuba has become highly racialized over the decades since Castro’s rise to power. The upper class whites fled to Florida while the poor blacks and mixed race Cubans stayed on. (The irony is that the Castros come from an upper class background and are Galician/Gallego in their ancestry making them "whiter" than most other criollos in Cuba). Today, those of African and mixed descent are well-represented in the halls of power: the army, the bureaucracy, etc. What will happen when Fidel and Raul are gone? No one knows. What is guaranteed is that a triumphal return to Havana of the blancos will present a strange anachronism as the crystallized racial politics of 1960 Cuba (insulated in the never-neverland of Little Havana) shatter on the beaches of that island nation.
Orthodox church has much apology to make in Western World: protocommunist massacres by Palamite Zealotes under Hesychast hyperventilatory halucinations, Cantacuzene taxation driving farmers to embrace Turks, Komyakoviac Obshchina giving birth to soviet communism as reactionary casuistry opposing Napoleon's defeudalization, Cosmus Aitalius being patron originator of of modern genocide as seen by the massacre of Turks in Crete by Venizelos. And their hypnotic brainwashing incantations are designed to make theirf locks into terrorists. Is all masochistic because reject Original Sin.
Yes, Cuba is on the 51-st place according to HD Index. But people forget that it could have had a much better economic situation if a quasi-communist system did not rule the country. Not to mention the lack of individual freedom and freedom of expression... Before anyone tries to say something positive about communism, that person should at least ask others who went through living in a horrific experiment of the communist system (like me). I am fearful of those under 30 who show positive sentiment about the system of one party and one man today...
I wasn't doing such thing. I was only pointing out the incoherence in using the HDI to back up your argument, when it turns out that Cuba, despite Castro and despite the embargo, is better off -again, according to the ranking they used in the article- than most other countries in Latin America.
Most of us are in no way delusional about communism, regardless of age, but many of us are also anti-anti-communists. You have to be a very hysterical kind of anti-communist, for example, to maintain a policy (that is, the embargo), that surely ranks very close to the top among failed and counterproductive policies. Unlike many leftists in Spain, I never liked Castro. However, I also have to call foul when they list him in every top five of "worst person in the world." He never invaded another country, or committed genocide against his own people. I bet that both you and I can think of a list of 30 or 40 leaders in the last half of a century that have, indeed, done precisely such things.
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