Castro’s resignation means nothing
All day yesterday I was bombarded with multi-lingual reports of Castro’s resignation. Telemundo mentioned it every 30 seconds during their news hours and Fox mentioned almost as much. But, hinestly, I don’t think it means anything. Did anyone see Uhaul vans pulling up to Castro’s residence to make room for a new leader? Fidel castro isn’t moving physically or politically from Cuba’s repressive government. In his near-fifty years of running Cuba into the ground, he’s needed the support of hundreds, if not thousands, of fellow Cubans to the island’s population under his thumb. At the moment the current system collapses, those people, who really wield the power Castro exercised, are the folks who’ll be jailed and punished – they can’t allow the current system to fail in a crash. They certainly remember Honnecker of East Germany, Ceausescu of Romania and Saddam Hussein.
The whole point of the boycott against Cuba was to protest Castro’s seizure of private US industry – that hasn’t changed. Why would our policy toward Cuba change when US industry still hasn’t been reimbursed for their losses? Of course, the Washington Post had no trouble finding people to write irrelevant opinions about the issue, like Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist, who makes the typical, ignorant argument;
A lot of what will happen after the inauguration in 2009 will depend on the attitudes of the small group of radical American-Cuban Republicans who have been holding Washington hostage to their extremely radical anti-Castro policies.
Um, how can a “small group” hold the rest of the country’s policy hostage? Except maybe in Palestine. The policy against Castro’s Cuba has remained steadfastly in place over the last forty-five years because it’s what all Americans support – well, all thinking Americans, anyway. It’s only a small minority who want to to pander to the Communist dictator. A small minority who never admits to their anemic numbers.
Another worthless opinion that the Washington Post offers is Bill Emmot, a British journalist who calls the embargo “the absurd and counter-productive economic embargo that America has imposed on Cuba for all these decades”. Funny, but one goal of the embargo was to contain Cuba’s military expansion in the reason and except for a few forays during Democrat administrations (Johnson – Bolivia, Vietnam and Carter – Africa, Central America), Cuba was constrained because they lacked economic strength.
But, no, there’ll be no real change in Cuba as long as there are hundreds of communists who still value their necks and they still have all of the guns. Investors Business Daily concurs (h/t Babalu Blog);
Raul may permit some economic freedom, but he remains a doctrinaire Marxist and will do so only if it serves the state. Real reform, however, is not about tactics. It’s about giving rights to people. Castro’s exit and Cuba’s transition to a family dynasty with a large fortune should not be mistaken for real democracy.
Raul’s vision for Cuba is an economy like China’s because it’s the only way he can protect himself and the rest of the communists from the Cuban people both inside and outside of Cuba. Anyone celebrating Castro’s resignation has no memory of events over the last twenty years.
Category: Politics
