He was a repressive tyrant and terrible gerontocrat who fought against the previous repressive tyrant and the malign influence of US capitalism. That he’s dead just means one less dictator in the world, and unfortunately there’s a long line of them waiting to take over everywhere.
I might care more if his absence made a difference for the people of Cuba, but his brother is already holding the reins of power.
I share Jeff Shallit’s opinion. He murdered thousands of dissidents. He gathered up gay people and put them in labor camps. He was dictator for life, and passed power to his brother, who is the new dictator. You can point to a few good things he did for Cubans, I’m not denying that, but in general, he was a tyrannical monster who seized power for himself and never let it go.
It’s customary to only speak good of the dead.
So as per custom—
He’s dead. Good.
Well this should keep you off that right wing professor’s watch list for awhile. I have rarely seen you post anything so completely one sided and wrong as this. You might want to check out what he accomplished for the people of Cuba and what Cuban doctors and medical personal are still accomplishing for the rest of the world right now.
As far as the repression is concerned, it is on a much lower level than almost all of the rest of Latin America and a great deal is, I suspect, in response to our ongoing attempts to over throw him over a 50 year period: an invasion, over 600 assassination attempts, an ongoing embargo.
Fidel was hanging on still hoping to see the downfall of the United States, but he did live long enough to see Trump win the election. So he got as far as the mountaintop at least.
Hereditary leadership has to be one of the worst ideas humans have come up with.
“You might want to check out what he accomplished for the people of Cuba ”
http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm
Kept them in poverty while the rest of the Caribbean advanced in leaps and bounds?
And on the subject of healthcare:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/06/201265115527622647.html
Criticism from the US must come with a caveat. Think ‘Guantanamo Bay’ and ‘Bay of Pigs’. You seriously think that’s any better than Castro’s treatment of Cubans? It isn’t. The appalling treatment of Cuba by the US kept him in office far past his sell-by date. If you’d just opened up trade and travel, he’d have been undermined decades ago.
My thought for a long time.
1. Fascism or in this case, autocracy, needs an external enemy.
For Putin it is the USA.
For the USA it is Muslims and Hispanics. It was for a long time, commies.
2. If we had just treated Cuba as another country, they would have fallen or reformed long ago. A rich nation of 324 million people 90 miles away is a huge influence.
“If you’d just opened up trade and travel, he’d have been undermined decades ago.”
Couldn’t agree more.
He had a mixed but mostly negative legacy. Cuba has some real health care and literacy accomplishments, but the Castro regime was already building on a country that had good education and health care stats before the Revolution – the biggest triumph was in extending them to the countryside. Aside from that, you’ve got the dictatorship, the repression, the mismanagement, the devastation once the massive Soviet aid evaporated in the early 1990s, and now under his brother a (probably) corrupt partial or total privatization. Maybe I’ll give him some extra points for giving a gigantic symbolic middle finger to the US in an era where we were toppling governments around the world, but even that makes me feel a bit queasy when I remember that he was egging on the Soviets to start a nuclear war with the US in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Of course, the blockade was a spectacular own goal. I doubt it was responsible for much of Cuba’s misery (most other countries ignored it and traded with Cuba), but it stalled relations for decades and helped Castro, and literally only exists because the Cuban refugees landed in a swing state.
Sorry, make that relatively good. Cuba’s pre-revolution stats were relatively good compared to Latin America, not necessarily good in general.
but even that makes me feel a bit queasy when I remember that he was egging on the Soviets to start a nuclear war with the US in the Cuban Missile Crisis. – brett@10
Yes, I’ve never quite forgiven him for trying to kill me (and a few hundred million others) on that occasion!
OPtimal Cynic@6,
From your own link:
The recod of Castro’s Cuba, at home and abroad, is mixed. Blanket condemnation is no more valid than idolatry.
People here seem to be forgetting that Castro was a big improvement on the dictator he overthrew, Batista, even if later Castro committed some of the same atrocities. And I suspect that most of those who fled did so because they were involved in the enormous corruption of Batista.
I think Fidel dying now could be important given who is about to become US President. Could Trump, either on his own or via the manipulation of his cabinet, decide he’s going to do something to “free” Cuba?
I am a stone-cold lefty from away back, and I loathe Fidel, Raul, and all of the other fuckheads that have been running Cuba since the disgusting Batista fucked off to an undeserved, wealthy, and comfortable retirement. Since my political wakening in 1968 (the assassination of MLK) I have been watching revolutionaries and “people’s champions” throughout the world take over, sometimes by bullet, sometimes by ballot box, and sometimes by a combination of things, and turn around and start to oppress, imprison, torture, and murder their citizens.
Fidel was an egomaniac (four-hour speeches, anyone?), a sadist (easy to find documentation of thousands of extrajudicial murders and torture), a petty dictator propped up, ironically, by the irrational and unproductive hatred of the US political establishment. Their continuous threats kept him in power long, long past his due-date, much like the US continues to ensure the power of the mullahs of Iran.
The only thing I loathe more than these kind of dictators are western lefties who excuse their atrocities. (I once read a book about the unification of Vietnam under the North Vietnamese; the book’s writer had pointed out that the North Vietnamese weren’t so bad, because they arbitrarily executed “only” about 30,000 South Vietnamese in Hanoi when they took over.)
There is no civilized excuse for torture and mass-murder of one’s own citizens.
First time I’ve heard you agree with Trump. Could this be the start of a trend?
A REALLY important person died yesterday. AICH-TEE-TEE-PEE://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florence-henderson-dead_us_5837d277e4b01ba68ac456d9
“I am a stone-cold lefty from away back” says Komrad Hairhead@16.
I’m a fairly warm leftie from a little earlier. My “epiphany” was, more or less, John Pilger’s journalism of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, so we share the same sort of heritage, but it seems we view it a little differently. @16 wants to assess the Cuban state as one would, say, Norway or Canada- states that had the luxury of calm space in which to develop social policies. Cuba on the other hand has been under siege- by slef- proclaimed proponents of Democracy- for over fifty years. That they have a stable state at all is remarkable under such circumstances. And they should really be compared with states that have had the benefit of full guidance by the P’s of D, and their trajectories over the last 50 years. Nicaragua, perhaps, Colombia, maybe. Haiti.
I really think the Castros did quite well under the circumstances. and I wish Tito had had someone to take over his dictatorship program in Yugoslavia, rather than the racist nationalists. After all, are you REALLY going to proclaim, this year, that Democracy is the sole and infallible guarantee of human values?
jacksprocket #19:
Er, yes?
Or are you going to argue that what happened in the USA during their recent election is an example of a well functioning democracy?
Fidel Castro was like other Marxist-Leninist Dictators and ideologues of the twentieth century in that Marxist-Leninism provided a good ideological excuse for a section of the intelligentsia to justify the seizing and holding supreme power. Basically Marxist-Leninism, also called Communism, provided provided the ideological cover, or false consciousness, to justify the power of what Milovan Djilas called the New Class and in Russia the Nomenklatura. It is fascinating how in so many formally Communist states that the former Communist elite has transformed itself into the new Capitalist class.
And like so many Communist regimes the elite in Cuba didn’t hesitate to use their positions of power to featherbed themselves. (Castro’s hunting lodges and yachts .) And of course like so many of these regimes external and internal threats, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, where used to justify internal repression, torture and murder and the existence of an ubiquitous secret police. Threats real and imagined were useful cloaks for the real reason for mas internal repression which was to squash opposition to the new ruling elite.
So frankly I do not accept that if the US had not done various things like the embargo, the various assassination attempts, that the regime would have fallen sooner or been modified in a positive direction. I suspect the New elite would have found new “enemies” and new excuses to snuff out opposition, real or imagined. So I am doubtful that a less antagonist approach would have made much of a difference. Certainly the history of Marxist-Leninist regimes world wide doesn’t give much hope.
There was and continues to be a section of “left” who in the past and even now make excuses for the various atrocities and idiocies of the regime. I particularly remember a certain media critic who justified Cuban government control of the media and censorship on the grounds that the government had to protect people from lies and the distortions of the evil capitalist media. This of course made the agenda of this person painfully apparent in that he clearly desired that people like him decide what the “little people” could read and hear.
Marxist-Leninism, aka Communism, was the ideology of a section of the intelligentsia designed to advance and at the same time cloak and justify it’s desire for and wielding of power. One of it’s foremost ideological proponents is dead is all I get from the death of Fidel Castro.
For all of you wondering about “fair and free elections”. Can you point to any country in Latin America that the good ole USofA has permitted to have fair and free elections? For the most part we either interfere in ways that would be manifestly illegal if done in this country or if a moderate leftist wins we make sure that he is overthrown shortly. And by the way this is not ancient history, see Honduras for our current liberal government’s take on real democracy in the region.
It also appears that although Cuba still has the death penalty on the books, no one has been executed there since 2003. So how do the horrors of the Cuban prison system compare with, oh I don’t know those in our country?
As a Cuban American living in Miami, even the most leftist Cuban living in this country would still regard Castro as a horrible asshole dictator responsible for the suffering of millions. And those who got the idea that a lot of the Cuban refugees were a part of Batistas corruption probably haven’t actually meet any Cuban exiles in their life. I’m sure there’s some who were a part of it, but many poor Cubans come over here to escape his regime, not just the remnants of Batistas establishment. The fact that he did some good (better medicare, public education) does not change the fact that he made things worse for a large section of the population through his communistic reforms.
I recall in my college youth the public glee over Reagan’s anti-communist rhetoric. No serious left wing intellectual supported any of the totalitarianism of the USSR or Castro’s Cuba. But neither did they support the US support of Latin American fascist dictators like Batista, Samoza or Duarte. It always annoyed me that Reagan loved those right wing nut jobs. Communism is over in USSR and will likely disappear in Cuba. Yay! But now we have Putin who influenced the outcome of our election and installed a pumpkinhead Manchurian candidate. I’m sure Stalin, Mao, Khrushchev Brezhnev and now Castro are all smiling in their graves.
jacksprocket
Yeah, I’m kind of glad we passed on that, even with nationalists in charge now.
Sure, we might have got a benevolent dictator who would have kept Croats and Serbs from slaughtering each other or joining in slaughtering Muslim Bosnians, but then on the other hand we might have not. I’ll take democracy, such as it is, over a faith that a “good guy (for a dictator)” will take control of my future.
But thanks for the well wishes! Bless your heart
A) If you are introducing a source to back up a point you are making, consider pointing to the information relevant to the point being made, be it a particular map / database / abstract / etc.
B) Hey I wonder if Cuba’s economic slump has something to do with the decades-long international economic sanctions championed by the US?
Did you even read that article? I did, and it makes two things quite clear: not enough funding (probably due to sanctions) and not enough contact with medical professionals at e.g. conferences (definitely due to sanctions).
# 12 KG
he was egging on the Soviets to start a nuclear war
It’s amazing how well Americans are conditioned to believe their own propaganda.
Every heard of self-defence? The USA, the most powerful country in the world, and as noted, 90 miles away, had just sponsored a botched invasion. Russia was a Cuban ally. Perhaps Cuba felt some help from their allies might their self-defence.
Oh the US misses in Europe and Turkey, of course, were just defence too but I am not sure the USSR felt that reassured.
The USA had an enviable record of invading and occupying Latin American countries. How long did it take to get the USA out Haiti after the 1915 invasion in brave defence of the bankers? Twenty years? Oh only 19. I am sure Castro knew his history.
https://www.yachana.org/teaching/resources/interventions.html
BTW as other commentators have pointed out, with the restoration of normal relations with the USA in a reasonable length of time, I expect that Castro would have either morphed into a left-wing social democratic leader or just faded away into a respected former military commander.
On the other hand with the USA trying to assassinate him, presidents and senators calling for his destruction—and concomitantly the destruction of the Revolution Castro may have felt that he needed to remain at the helm and even take some alarmingly repressive security measures to protect the Revolution. Castro probably did not want a new Franklin Delano Roosevelt writing the new Cuban Constitution as F.D.R reportedly did for Haiti.
As a non-USAian, I have long tended to think of the US attitude towards Cuba as
almostcompletely irrational.Hey Logicalcat where to you get the millions? Unless you are claiming that everyone in Cuba is suffering, which I guess you have aright to do, that figure is grossly exaggerated. I also like how you kind of slid by the better education and medical care as though it is nothing. That is real True Believers art there. I also see that you ignore the little issues of having enough food and housing, but hey those mean nothing, I guess.
Beatrice @25: I wasn’t making that up, I was paraphrasing a friend – a Croat married to a Serb. And as for Olav @20’s reply, well, no true Scotsman…
@28 Ronald Couch
The “hey he improved medicare and education” if the left equivalent of “Hitler made the trains ran on time”.
You are right that I exaggerated, I tend to do that, my bad. Not all Cubans are suffering, just most of them. The ones who arent work for Castro and are part of his establishment. He might have improved the lives of poor people slightly, but then again by robbing people of their land, money, and freedom he expanded the poverty rate of Cuba. Not to mention the murders, assassinations, the imprisonment of political prisoners and activist, the total lack of freedom of the press and speech. The lack of freedom of choice, since your profession was chosen for you. All of that shit. The embargo did not create these issues. I’ve known Cuban refugees who were rich doctors* in Cuba and gave it all up to be poor truck drivers in America so that their children can have the freedom they deserve. Like I said earlier, anyone who thinks Cuba was better with Castro, I question to whether they ever met any actual Cubans. Have you Ronald? Other than myself I mean.
*And by rich doctor, I mean that they were still poor as doctors, but have a lot of stuff. Because for all that praise Cuba gets for its medicare, no one can afford it because everyone has shit salaries unless they work for Castro. So they pay for services through a barter system. Everyone talks about the embargo, but people who have actually lived in Cuba sees this as naive. Cuba as an island nation has always had wealth, embargo or not. But it all belongs to the government. All that extra money through trade just means more money for the Castro regime to keep. Ppl would still go hungry. Another case of American left Castro apologist talking shit without considering the opinions of the people who had to live it. There’s a word for that, isn’t there?
Logicalcat: Healthcare and education are goods in themselves. No matter why you think Castro felt the need to improve them, or what else he did, providing good healthcare and education was a very significant, positive act that directly improved people’s lives. He didn’t have to do it — most Latin American rulers didn’t. You can balance that against other things he did in judging him, but you don’t get to just dismiss it.
In fact there’s very little point in having abstract political freedoms when you are sick and ignorant. It’s not the same as “making the trains run on time”.
Yeah, let’s applaud a dead dictator for health care is so good.
If only The Netherlands were a dictatorship, our health care would be as good as Cuba’s.
I have traveled around most of the Caribbean. The poorest place I visited was also where the people seemed the happiest – Cuba. St Thomas seemed to be the most unhappy despite its wealth.
I must confess that the reason is probably not due to any communist rule – more the absence of US TV which seems to be designed to make you unhappy with your lot so you buy something you dont need.
rietpluim: The Netherlands haven’t been in a perpetual state of cold war with the most powerful country in the world right on their doorstep.
If Castro had allowed full political freedoms he’d have fallen to US subversion within a couple of years and the place would be run by a second Batista under US protection. I personally value my freedom not to die of preventable diseases or be murdered by death squads higher than my freedom to publish any newspaper article I want, but maybe that makes me craven or something.
Castro was the nicest, least dictatorial dictator in the region by a big margin, which is why it’s so pathetic that the US spent decades trying to ruin the nation while overthrowing democratically elected rulers and propping up mass murdering psychos in other Latin countries purely on the virtue of said psychopaths’ staunch anticommunism.
If there’s anyone they should have co-operated with in order to foster friendly relations and a gradual opening of the society (you know, like they pretend they’re doing when they make deals with other despots) it was him.
Establishing an excellent healthcare and education system on an isolated island nation while in a permanent cold-ish war with the US, who are incessantly trying to fuck you over and destroy your economy (when they’re not trying to murder you outright) is a genuine achievement. Hell, not starving was an achievement under those circumstances.
If you want to see what happened to similarly placed nations who didn’t resist US interference, look at Nicaragua, or Colombia, or Haiti (thanks jacksprocket).
#10 Brett
Of course, the blockade was a spectacular own goal. I doubt it was responsible for much of Cuba’s misery
Oh it was. If you wanted to sell in the US market you could not sell anything to Cuba.
Cuba, reportedly has a highly developed and sophisticated pharmaceutical industry. Why? Because none of the major pharmaceutical companies would deal with them (at least openly) for fear of losing their access to the US market
Want a few hundred tons of cement—good luck finding a supplier within economical shipping distance. Most of them deal with the USA or may be a US subsidiary and they won’t touch you. I wonder if some of the reasons for the delapitated look of Havana and other cities is that Cuba literally had nothing to with which to do repairs?
Volunteers in my country dismantled and shipped an entire used hospital to Cuba mainly because Cuba could not buy modern equipment on the world markets.
About 10 years ago, I remember, a CEO of a major hotel/resort company in the UK investing in Cuba; he was immediately banned from entering the USA. Obviously his company had no US interests. I remember the story for the line (very crude paraphrase) “Yes we usually visit the USA three or four times a year, oh well.”
Think about it, if most of your heavy construction equipment is Caterpillar, you cannot buy so much as a single replacement part from Caterpillar. If you have a national airline, you certainly are not going to be flying Boeing.
The only reason the embargo was slightly less awful than the Iraqi one was that any number of people and companies with no American ties thought it was stupid and paid no attention to it. Or, in some cases, did their damnedest to help overcome it.
This got posted to the wrong thread:
This morning,Yesterday, as I’m getting ready for work…Me (to father): “Castro’s dead.”
Dad: “Yeah, I know. I’m sure all you liberals will be in mourning. [Sarcastically]A champion for the poor and the little guy who made those rich bastards pay, right? Sure he killed millions of people, but he agreed with you so it’s OK, right?”
Me: “…”
I mean, what CAN you say to someone who thinks like that?
# 21 pacal
Fantastic learned discussion.
However it hinges on the issue of whether or not Castro would have turned Cuba into a true Marxist–Leninist state until driven to desperation by irrational US hostility.
I really doubt it. Castro may have been a M-L but he was also a pragmatic politician who might very well have settled for a left-wing social democratic government structure if only to try to pacify the mad Americans.
I am not sure I agree with all of your analysis by any meants but by the 1980s you probably are correct in general. The real issue from 1959 to the end of the 1970s was just keeping the Revolution alive (and for Castro staying alive himself as the CIA kept trying to assassinate him).
Much of the repression probably can be seen as a reaction against US subversion. I had not heard about the gay round-ups; that sounds like pure prejudice but if it was in the 1960s or 1970s it was worse but perfectly in accord with policies in the USA and the UK, Canada, and probably most of Western Europe.
@ Zepplin
I’m not dismissing his contributions towards healthcare and education. What I am doing is dismissing the fact that a lot of people like to use these as a way to sugarcoat his terrible regime, ignoring the struggles actual Cubans went through, and continue to go through today. I’m talking about Castro apologists. The kind who think Cuban exiles are the remnants of those who exploited the poor and had their power taken away from them. The kind who thinks he was better than Bautista, even though he wasn’t. The kind who think Castro was a good leader. The kind who think all the problems with the country comes from the embargo (it doesn’t). And many more bullshit I wont even go through. My statements were addressed to Ronald Couch, who appears to be an apologist, even though he might not share all of their beliefs. But he did say PZ was wrong and one sided in his words about Castro’s death, and I’m here to say “absolutely no he wasn’t”. If anything he was too kind to Castro. And calling his (or mines) one sided just because he didn’t take care to mention all the good he’s done amidst all the even more encompassing evil, feels wrong. Its concern trolling at best. I also find him calling me a “True Believer” incredibly fucking insulting, the kind only an apologist would make. There is no belief here, my family had lived it, my friends had lived it, my coworkers had lived it. It is akin to calling someone who’s family survived the holocaust a “True Believer”. Fuck that.
I know from being Cuban American, and by being surrounded by Cubans my whole life that while they see it as shameful that the united states has a worse healthcare and education by comparison, they risked their lives to come here nonetheless. So those abstract political freedoms you so casually dismissed, well Cubans thought they were more important enough to risk their lives, leave everything behind (including the better healthcare and education) to start anew. Many of these Cuban exiles even choose to live in those other countries you mentioned (like Colombia) because they were explicitly better. But thanks for dismissing the concerns and lives of refugees though. *roll eyes*
It absolutely is a “Hitler ran the trains on time”. Obviously not a one to one comparison, but I used it to point to the fact that it doesn’t matter if a ruthless dictator got something right, when he was still way fucking evil. I cant think about a better analogy involving sugarcoating terrible regimes to fit. This is not about dismissing his accomplishments, its about having perspective.
Shit, block quote fail.
jrkrideau@27,
1) @12 I was quoting brett @10.
2) I’m not an American, and have been rather consistently campaigning and demonstrating against central aspects of American foreign policy for some 35 years.
3) I was not talking simply about Castro getting help from the USSR, but specifically about the letter he sent to Khruschev, which Khruschev at least apparently interpreted (it had of course been translated from Spanish into Russian) as a proposal for a Soviet nuclear first strike. Castro claimed later that his letter had been misinterpreted, but I have not seen anyone cast doubt on the existence of either letter, and certainly he was at least proposing that the USSR launch an attack on the USA if the latter invaded Cuba – which would have led to global nuclear war.
@Zeppelin – I am aware of how the US’ foreign policy badly influences the situation in other countries including Cuba.
That doesn’t make Castro less a dictator.
41 KG
I realized I’d messed up the attribution a couple of hours later as I was going to bed and was too tired to go back then. My apologies. The first sentence of my post should be taken as applying to brett @10.
Castro claimed later that his letter had been misinterpreted
Traduire, c’est trahir!
Having sweated bullets a couple of times worrying about the accuracy of a translation into a language I have absolutely no knowledge of, I think I’d give Castro the benefit of the doubt. And I have seen the results of a couple of spectacular screw ups but nothing even remotely as serious. And some of the translations on the cafeteria menu board were interesting.
Come to think of it, if there was an error it might well have been a function of where the Russian translators were educated. If they were European trained, Cuban usage might just have been enough to mess things up. I dread to think what our English to French translators here in Canada might do when translating an Australian letter. :)
The recent furor over Putin calling Trump “brilliant” is a great example of translation problems. Apparently Putin called Trump яркий which seems mean more “flamboyant” or “showy” than brainy. I have always thought that Putin has a very wiry sense of humour for an ruthless autocrat.
certainly he was at least proposing that the USSR launch an attack on the USA if the latter invaded Cuba
And?
The USA/NATO was not planing on doing the same thing if the USSR/Warsaw Pact stepped one inch over the Warsaw Pact boundaries? There is little use having an ally who stands by and does nothing while you are being overrun.
That is what MAD was in those great old days.
Plus, you know, the small matter of US naval forces dropping depth charges on nuclear-armed Soviet submarines in international waters… What’s the term? Oh yeah – “act of war”.