Cuba was in a strange state of limbo. From appearances, a casual observer could not be blamed for thinking that the country looked as though it had just emerged from a ruinous period of war and privation.
The enigmatic revolutionary, El Lider Maximo, had brought his country to economic collapse and disaster. He was no hero, just another idealist who had backed the wrong horse. He was not the only one to have believed in revolution, equality, communism and the Soviets and he was not the only one to suffer its consequences.
He was born a wealthy sugar plantation owner’s son. At first he became a lawyer and then a revolutionary, overthrowing the corrupt, but typical Latin American dictatorship of the fifties.
Fidel Castro had not been a communist when he arrived in Havana in January 1959 as a young barbudo hot on the heels of the ousted Batista regime, and perhaps he had never been a communist; that would remain a question for future political analysts and historians. As events developed in those early years, Castro had certainly imagined that he could manipulate the Soviets against the Yankees. However, Moscow saw Cuba at best as a symbol of revolutionary communist fervour and in the worse case merely a Cold War pawn in their struggle with the West.
In any case Castro was drawn into the East-West confrontation where he had little or no control of the events that were to result in the Missile Crisis. He became the target of the Kennedy administration’s wrath and that of successive presidents of the USA. Castro was seen as the prime menace to the regimes dominated by the United States in the war against communism in Central and Latin America, where Castro’s lieutenant, the charismatic Che Guevara, fomented trouble and idealistic revolutionary struggle.
With the development of ties to Moscow and the American embargo, Cuba became totally reliant on the Soviet block for the export of its primary product, sugar, as well as its imports of oil, industrial plant, manufactured goods, services, technology and just about everything else.
With the collapse of communism the consequences for Cuba were in many ways no different to that of the other Soviet satellites, but in certain ways were worst as a result of the continued survival of El Lider Maximo. There was no way Castro could be forgiven for the lese majesty and the perceived treachery to the USA. Cuba had a choice, either get rid of Castro or rot in its cane fields, before any change of policy could come about.
The USA, it seems, did not hold a permanent grudge against the Cuban people for whom it offered asylum to those who braved the waves of the Atlantic to reach Florida, across the 150 kilometres of sea that separated Key West from the north coast of Cuba. The result was a thriving community of six hundred thousand Cubans in the USA mainly living in Southern Florida.
By 2000 Cuba had become dependant on the yearly one billion dollars of transmittals from its expatriates in Florida, twenty times as much as it earned from the export of its celebrated cigars, the import of which was forbidden in the USA.
Their other industry was tourism, which counted on two million visitors for the year 2000. The tourists were in preference parked in golden ghettos with sun, sand and mojitos. Contacts between Cubans and tourists were kept to a strict minimum.
It was a long way from the revolutionary rhetoric of Che Guevara, who at the end of the twentieth century had become a legend, on a par with John Lennon - twenty dollar Tee shirt heroes. Whilst Fidel Castro, sporting his beer belly, had become an ageing tyrant with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s lurking in the background, ready to take over at an opportune moment.
His succession would be left to a struggle between second class socialist minded politicians, doubtful Miami capitalists or the Mafiya, ready to divide the carcass of the people’s revolution with the other vultures that would be present at the meagre feast.
Che had the good fortune to die a hero, he was still adored by Cubans and many others, sacrificed at the symbolic age of 33 by Imperiums Americana, worshipped as a people’s hero, a modern Christ.
Castro’s greatest risk would be going the way of Ceausescu, if by chance a wild spark carried by the wind inflamed the Cuban people, weary of his oppressive regime and their continued privation.
Chapter 4
Santiago de Cuba
Offshore Islands Page 3