lamont on castro

[egb_hibs]

clearly some will ignore what the author says because of who he is, but lamont at least asks the question that also baffles me - why so many people who like castro don't like pinochet.


"So, Fidel Castro has hinted he may never again be President of Cuba. The hearts of hundreds of thousands of Cubans must have leapt.

It is difficult to know what will happen after Castro. Much will depend on the reaction both of America and the Miami Cubans, who can usually be relied on not to see sense. Castro might long ago have disappeared had it not been for the US economic embargo, which has allowed him to blame his economic failure on America and to promote an all-pervasive siege mentality.

It is said that Raoul Castro, Fidel's brother, would like to pursue the Chinese model; economic liberalism with political authoritarianism. My guess is that there will be attempts to preserve the system, with some changes, but eventually it will collapse like the Soviet Union.
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No doubt, when the "grand old man" of the Cuban revolution dies, there will be a mass turnout for his funeral. After years of brain-washing, perhaps some of the mourning will be genuine. But most Cubans know what life is like outside their own country and long for something better.

There is no need to mince words. Fidel Castro has been a brutal, old-fashioned, Stalinist dictator of the most ruthless kind, who has ruined his country economically and suppressed all democracy.

Curiously, there is still reluctance among much of the media to accept the real character of Castro or his equally ridiculously romanticised fellow murderer, Ché Guevara. On the 40th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, the BBC ran a whole week's programmes to celebrate the event. There were programmes about Cuban ballet, the health service and education. There was little about the poverty, absence of freedom, the "re-education" camps for gays, the firing squads and the political prisoners in solitary confinement.

When the Soviet Union existed, some people misunderstood the real nature of Communism. But since then, so much has been revealed; no one has any excuse for not understanding the real nature of such a system.

So, it is depressing that so many people, including the BBC, still cling to the view that Castro's regime is different. There are too many people who insist on seeing him as a genial, cigar-smoking, benign autocrat who has left Cuba a better place than he found it.

About three years ago, I asked a British diplomat if there were any underground newspapers in Cuba. "Where do you think they would get the paper from?" was his reply. I asked a taxi driver in Havana, who was bitterly critical of Castro, why there were no graffiti criticising the regime. "Where do you think they would get the paint from?" was his reply. Both remarks reminded me of the truth of Milton Friedman's observation that private property and free enterprise are "a necessary but not sufficient condition" for the existence of freedom.

In Cuba today, the control of the economy by the state is so widespread it makes dissent almost impossible. It is difficult to believe even the Soviet economy operated like this. Private restaurants are not allowed to have places for more than about 15 customers. If they exceed that, they are liable to be closed down.

A few years ago, Castro made a massively long speech to the so-called Cuban parliament about the type of energy-efficient light bulb that was going to replace all the existing light bulbs. About the same time, Castro had, with good reason, become so concerned about pilfering from state-owned petrol stations that he decided to replace all the petrol pump attendants with students. The result was an immediate surge in takings at the filling stations.

It is argued that Cuba has a wonderful health service with excellent doctors. It is certainly true that the Cuban figures for infant mortality are the best in Latin America, but not so far ahead of Chile, which probably has equally good health services across a broader front.

Cuban hospitals do turn out large numbers of under-paid doctors who are forcibly sent all over South America. But Cuban hospitals are pitifully short of drugs. A friend of mine, who required medical treatment in Cuba, was asked if he would pay in aspirin as the doctor had none.

It is interesting to compare the two South American dictators who dominated the 1970s and 1980s; Augusto Pinochet and Castro, one widely reviled and one, surprisingly, still admired. But it is the one who is admired, Castro, who was by far the more brutal."

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[Smurf]

Having visited Cuba back in 2003 i hope for the remarkable people of this country that things improve.

I would love to know what left wing visitors admire so much about the system of Government?