Saturday, September 12, 2015

CUBA

For a six year period in my life, from 1955 to 1961, business took me, frequently, to Cuba.  Indeed, Cuba was my introduction to Latin America, where I, later, spent much of my adult years.  I saw Cuba before the arrival of Castro; I was there when Fidel came down from the Sierra Maestra;  I was frequently there when he was forming his first Government.

I have always been sympathetic to Fidel even as I severely criticized his intellectual laziness in not finding an indigenous solution to Cuba's many problems.  Despite any claims to the contrary, Cuba was not a tropical paradise, at least not for 90% of its population.  In 1957, the per capita income of Cuba was $361.00 (at the time the per capita income in the U.S. was more than 10 times as great), yet 10% of the population had a life style equal to that, or better, than the middle class in the U.S.  Their standard of living was subsidized by a population that was forced to live on pennies a day.  Cuba was  in need of reform.

When Fidel arrived, triumphant, in Havana, he had a united populace behind him.  He could have brought about  reforms any way he chose.  By choosing another dogma, Marxism Leninism, instead of  developing a Cuban solution, he failed to reach most of his stated goals.  He would have been better off taking Singapore, another island nation, under an authoritarian regime, as his model than that of the Soviet Union.




   

5 comments:

  1. Hindsight is always 20/20 ... I bet Castro wishes he knew what he knows now.

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  2. In my case it was foresight. I took a lot of abuse from pro Castro people who later turned against him, and, of course, later didn't think kindly of me because I was the, as I am now, sympathetic toward, Fidel.

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  4. Accordin to "After Tocqueville"he didn't have much choice.A benevolent monarchy might have worked if the intellectuals in the movement went along.

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  5. Fidel had more power, in Cuba, than any monarch, when he arrived in Havana. He bought into Marxism Leninism, and alignment with the Soviet Union, by his own volition. He had Eisenhower, no right wing ideologue, as President. He could have had a benevolent left wing government with the active cooperation of the U.S. if only he had not decided to become a player on the international stage. At the time, even non-aligned Communists like Tito of Yugoslavia were doing quite well in their dealings with the U.S.

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