CUBA

Andres Solares

• Publisher: Global Summit House
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781649454089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This book explains and analyses the current situation existing in Cuba under

the Castro's regime.

Chapter I

The reality of Cuba in 1959 and some misconceptions about Castro’s revolution

Since the first significant appearance of Fidel Castro in Cuban politics, when he attacked with a group of followers the Moncada Barracks, in Santiago de Cuba, and especially after he started his fight at the Sierra Maestra in 1956, until our days, he has received wide media coverage. At the beginning, it came mainly from the Cuban media; later, it came also from the American media and gradually the world media gave as well a very extensive coverage of him. For reasons that are not easy to understand, this media coverage, in general, with very few exceptions, has presented an image that is extremely shallow and decorated. The fact is that Fidel Castro, who did not have very good references when he started his movement, soon became a media star, and he has remained the same way during all these past sixty years.

There were many other leaders and personalities in Cuban politics at that time who had more qualifications and definitively much better moral backgrounds than Castro, and the reasons why he managed to displace them to become the leader of the majority of the Cuban people are not easy to explain.

Castro was cataloged by many people at the University of Havana, where he initiated his political career, as a sort of a gangster. He was not a good student or a respected university leader, and there were some turbulent accounts about his participation in an obscure chapter related with the killing of another university leader who was considered his rival.

In my view, the reasons why Castro managed to succeed in such an almost incredible way seem to come from three conditions:

First, the general conditions established by General Batista and his corrupt and violent regime. While most of the other existing Cuban leaders at that time were trying to oppose Batista on moral grounds and using political means, Castro decided to fight Batista by using his same terms and conditions but bringing them to another level. The corruption and violence he generated since the beginning was much stronger than the ones Batista ever generated. He killed people right and left, ignoring the Constitution and all the other existing laws; he made deals with whoever he could use for his purposes, and he enrolled, to become the core of his movement, some of the worst people available.

Second, he took a totally different avenue compared with other Cuban politicians, in which he was practically the single runner. When he decided to break with all the traditional bodies of Cuban politics and start his armed movement, he had his way open because there was no real competition. When some time later, other organizations woke up and started their own similar efforts, it was too late, Castro had already the advantage.

Third, the world was experiencing a series of political changes and the well-introduced image of Castro and his people fighting against all sorts of social, economic, and political “demons,” was very attractive for the most different spectrum of interests. The communist countries and specially the Soviet Union loved this image, but a good portion of the Western press and even some highlevel Western politicians and philosophers also did and it was very especially loved by the newly baptized underdeveloped or emerging world.

Practically nobody, other than the few people really very familiar with Cuban matters, really cared at that moment whether these “demons” I mentioned, were real in the case of Cuba or not.

It is a fact that very few people cared in many circles of the world at that time whether the conditions of Cuba were really as bad as they were being described by the propaganda and the press, or if the case of Cuba could be compared to other countries that were in a completely different stage of development. The fact was that Castro (and his movement) was quickly inserted into a worldwide perspective of underdeveloped countries in which he was able to avoid much competition as a leader once again, as had happened when he started his fight against Batista.

Most of the other leaders of the predominantly very poor countries of the world, including those countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which were obtaining their independence precisely in those years or were fighting for it, could not match Castro’s abilities and ambitions and especially his lack of scruples to deal with their political battles.

Castro’s image as a leader of underdeveloped countries was promoted not only by his own incipient propaganda machinery, but mainly by some Western press and later by the Soviet Union, which became his main ally, in a way that made him accepted as one undisputed leader, even when Cuba had very little in common with those countries, and due to this, he soon became the adored and admired leader of millions of people in the world, something that was used by the Soviet Union in their own advantage for all their efforts to penetrate different regions of the world and enhance its influence in world affairs.

Most political leaders of the underdeveloped nations during that historical stage of the decade of the sixties and seventies could not match Castro’s aggressiveness, and this allowed him to become not only respected but also feared.

Castro was allowed to do things that were unthinkable years before for a leader of any small nation: from international conspiracies to foreign invasions and wars, from blackmailing to killings of foreign political adversaries, from widespread sabotage of Western civilization standards to demonstrated drug and arm dealing in large scale, from imposition of political marionettes in some countries to support of guerrilla warfare, from well-established open espionage activities in developed and underdeveloped countries to recruiting and patronage of adepts within foreign governments and all sorts of international institutions.

Due to the above-described combination of factors, no matter what Castro and his regime did internally in Cuba, all this was practically minimized by many circles when Cuban matters were considered in the perspective of world politics, and the role allowed to Castro’s movement within it, well if it was the destruction of the Cuban democracy and all political alternatives, or the killing of tens of thousands of his opponents and the incarceration in savage conditions of hundreds of thousands of people, or the destruction of the Cuban economy and the appropriation of billions of dollars of property owned by the private sectors, or the disruption of moral, educational, and familial values and the indoctrination of children, or the repression of the smallest sign of free thinking and all opposing political views, or the condemnation of the whole Cuban people to live in miserable conditions.

One cannot ignore the fact that, if certainly the Soviet Union and other countries within its sphere of influence patronized in large degree Castro’s adventures for a long time in these past fifty years, there have been also many other accomplices of him all around the world, and the fact that the Soviet Union has not existed already for almost twenty years and Castro and his regime have continued existing and, even more important, keeping, with some logical adjustments, his same policy of sabotage of Western civilization and his oppression of Cuba, is a clear indication of this.

It is important to establish some very interesting facts: Cuba, in 1959, had the second highest standard of living in Latin America, comparable or better than the one that, at that time, nations like Italy, Norway, Spain, and many other European countries had. The world was less developed then and there were other standards, and even most of the countries, which currently belong to what is defined as the developed world, had much higher levels of poverty than what they currently have. Considering this, Cuba was not as such an underdeveloped country.

Many people do not presently understand that the figures frequently used by Castro for his propaganda and especially the images of Cuba in 1959, so frequently used by the defenders of his regime in many countries of the world, which present Cuba as a very poor country, with a predominantly illiterate population, an underdeveloped infrastructure, and a totally corrupted society, with very low economic, moral and social values, are very relative and may bring us to very inaccurate conclusions.

These mentioned images represent a partial vision and they can be compared with similar ones in many other countries, which later became developed nations, at that time, and they do not provide enough documented evidence to justify what has happened in Cuba during the past fifty years under Castro.

The justification of Castro can only be sustained by the ignorance on Cuban history or, in cases, by some dubious interest in supporting a wrong cause, ignoring the damage caused to Cuba by a dictatorship that has been there for the past fifty years. It is curious that most of the people who defend Castro in other countries are not ready to accept the same kind of regime established in their countries, which is an indication that their intentions are not always transparent.

There are all sorts of obvious and well-documented data of 1958 showing the following:

• • Cuba already had had, for almost thirty years, social laws and a constitution, which were among the most advanced in the world...