Castro finally succumbed to time, having dodged dozens of assassination attempts, an abortive invasion, a blockade, a missile crisis, and decades of animosity on the part of a colossus next door that remained overtly hostile for the whole of his tenure in the president’s chair and for all of his brother’s tenure, thus far, mild rearranging of relations of the past year notwithstanding. Dictator, yes, and a man who manufactured a bouquet of political prisoners along with other controversies, but also a man responsible for a régime that lifted his country out of the morass of inequality, ignorance and poverty that was bequeathed him by the Batista junta that preceded him and which has been the lot of, for instance, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Haiti, all of which have evolved under the tender tutelage of he Washington consensus. The jubilation in the streets of Miami’s Little Havana shows the depths of bitterness felt by those dispossessed by the revolution, and that from a coterie that profited handsomely from the privilege that kept so many Cubans in poverty. It infuriates many that Castro delivered Cuba into the Soviet Bloc, but was it not the refusal of the US to back any meaningful change that forced the Cuban revolutionaries to seek economic aid elsewhere?
One has to wonder what might have become of Cuba had there been some accommodation on the part of the US administration,, but Eisenhower and Dulles would seem unlikely candidates for cozying up to anything that looked like social progress, especially given the tense nature of relations between the US and the USSR, along with the rabid Red Scare tactics of official Washington and the general my-country-right-or-wrong attitude of the general populace.
One of the real ironies emerging from the aftermath of Castro’s death is the heat JT is taking for not condemning the man outright, when, in fact, Trudeau The Lesser is striving furiously to establish his credibility as a Free Trader and Privatizer, meaning that any dealings with a post-revolutionary Cuba would likely mirror our tarnished and tawdry dealings with Haiti, but you won’t get to read about that unless you search out the work of Yves Engler and others who’ve made it a point to document how nasty we’ve been to our Caribbean neighbours.
Oh, and here’s a little ditty that comes to mind whenever I find myself contemplating the dawn of the Trump era:
