As Fidel Stands Down, Others Stand Up

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.