Life In Cuba, Circa 2013

I ran across this while following a link in comments to Jonn’s article about the death of Fidel Castro.  To give some perspective to Castro’s “accomplishments”, thought I’d post links to what I found here.

The article is by Michael J. Totten, a US journalist.  It first appeared in the Spring 2014 City Journal magazine.

According to Totten, Cuban officials don’t allow foreign journalists routine entry to Cuba.  After reading the article, the reason why should be fairly obvious.

Totten nonetheless managed to lie his way past customs and spend some time in that “Communist Utopia”.  But unlike Michael Moore and others, he made it a point to get outside the “tourist zones” and see how the Cuban populace actually lives.

The documents his firsthand observations regarding the conditions when he visited Cuba in 2013 – the conditions outside Havana’s “tourist enclaves”.  Totten went out of his way to spend time outside Havana’s “tourist enclaves”, and observe – and later record – what he’d seen.  In short, he went to those places where Cubans actually live.

The article can be found here.  It’s longish, but it’s definitely worth reading.

Here’s a little excerpt for one TAH reader we all “know and love”.  I’ve added emphasis in a few places.

Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it—and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. “This was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.” Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not—cannot—build such grand or elegant cities.

But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living standards over the period.”

Yep.  Just your garden-variety Socialist “worker’s paradise”.  Sounds quite a lot like accounts I’ve read of the former Soviet Union, actually.

But the threat from Communism is now “passe”.  Remember:  Don’t Fear the Commie!

Rot in hell, Fidel.  If even a small part of that article is true, you richly deserve it for what you did to your own nation and countrymen.   Even the thoroughly corrupt and morally bankrupt bastard Batista was a piker by comparison.

 

Hat tip to TAH commenter HMCS(FMF) ret for linking to an article in his comments. A link embedded in the article he linked ultimately led me to the gem above.

Category: Reality Check, Shitbags, Who knows