Castros Pull It Off, Again? Some Preliminary Thoughts

I broke my vow never to listen to an Obama speech; I listened to the one he gave on Cuba. I also listened to the matching speech given by Raul Castro. I am going to write about Cuba here, but I ask readers to pardon a bit more than usual incoherence on my part. I am still conflicted and uncertain about the effects of what was announced today, so I will be thinking aloud. I reserve the right to change my mind, or better said, to make up my mind.

Part of my problem is that I have been very close to the Cuba issue for years. I dealt with Cuban issues directly at the UN, at the OAS, at Southern Command, and had dealings with many Cubans, both Castroites and the victims of Castro. I have lots of Cuban friends. I have seen the DGI--Cuba's very good intel service--up close and I abhor it and the thugs it employs. I have written a great deal about my experiences and views on Cuba and don't want to repeat all that. I certainly don't want to be Obamesque and make this about me; I am just laying out for you that I have issues when dealing with Cuba, ones that make it hard for me to be dispassionate.

My biggest issue is that I see the Castro brothers as evil monsters who have subjugated and brought ruin to a wonderful country, and done it with the tacit approval of the bien pensants around the world. Prior to 1959, Cuba was not some dirt-poor plantation as it has been portrayed by the Castros, Hollywood, and their many other apologists. It was a country with a remarkable cultural and economic level. Remember that before 1959, Cuba had an IMMIGRATION problem, that is to say, it was having a hard time coping with all the people from Europe and elsewhere who wanted to come to Cuba. My own in-laws in Spain made considerable money exporting high-end baby clothes to the Cuban middle class. Cuba had world-class doctors, engineers, poets, businessmen, and thinkers. It had a standard of living that was by some measures second only to that of the USA in the Western Hemisphere--it had a standard of living considerably higher than that in most of Europe and all of Asia.

Cuba, however, failed in the political sphere, suffering through a succession of corrupt and inefficient governments since independence in 1898--that is why so many members of the quite ample Cuban middle class initially supported the Castros, getting taken in by their anti-corruption and Jeffersonian rhetoric. The Castro brothers, of course, had another agenda. They wanted total power, to bring violent revolution to the Americas, and to develop a model socialist state of "New Men" in Cuba. They certainly achieved the first, failed at the second, and brought only poverty, imprisonment, and misery to Cuba's men and women, "new" and old. From being one of the richest countries in America, that island is now one of the poorest countries in America; it has gone from an importer of people to an exporter of people. ¡Con la Revolución todo es posible!

The brothers proved lucky and brilliant at staying in power and pulling victory, or at least survival, from the jaws of impending destruction. They were masters of the Hail Mary. They dodged the first big bullet in 1961, when the feckless JFK abandoned La Brigada on the beach. They survived the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when after Castro threatened the destruction of the United States with Russian Missiles, in exchange for Nikita Khrushchev's agreeing to remove those missiles, the JFK administration agreed not to topple the Castro regime. In the 1990's, they even survived the collapse of the Soviet bloc and found in Chavez's Venezuela a fawning benefactor who helped make up the loss of Soviet aid. The brothers were masters at eliminating those in their inner circle who seemed to step outside their assigned roles as cheerleaders for the brothers: Che, Ochoa, dozens of others met fates including exile, firing squads, and long prison terms. All the while the United States could not make up its mind what to do about the Castros and their revolutionary pretensions. The rest of the West, and eventually all of the Latin America, decided to do nothing and went along with the regime in Havana out of fear, cowardice, indifference or as a cheap way to defy the gringos. The much ballyhooed American "embargo" was always a half-baked affair, never fully enforced, and riddled with loopholes, and often defied.  The rest of the world had no intention of imposing an embargo, so while it was true, for example, the regime could not buy Fords and Chevrolets, it had no difficulty buying Toyotas and VWs, using dollars often sent by the Cuban exile community. The "boycott" served primarily to give the Castro brothers an excuse for the grotesque failings of socialism in Cuba. When Senator Helms tried to give the boycott some teeth, his efforts were sabotaged by the White House and the State Department. Within little time, the US was actually Cuba's third or fourth largest (depending on the year) trading partner. Some boycott.

Now to the speech by Obama. It was a clever speech designed for people who don't know the full history of Cuba since 1959 or the nature of US-Cuban relations. The speech gave away the leftist bias of its drafters with the nonsense equating "colonialism" and "Communism." What colonialism was Castro Communism fighting? Cuba had been independent for sixty years when the brothers took over; one of their first acts was to turn the country into a colony of the Soviets. Communism and colonialism went hand-in-hand, no opposition, no clash. Obama's speech sought "balance" by blaming both Cuba and the US for the state of relations. Nonsense. The Castros were and are murdering thugs who have never hesitated to kill anybody in their way whether at home or abroad. Castroite firing squads were operating at full speed even during the honeymoon period with the USA, when the NY Times was writing fawning pieces about Fidel Castro.

My first thought on hearing Obama talk about the need to get past colonialism and Communism was that he was channeling his father's anti-British obsessions. Cuba as Kenya. Much like Obama's immigration speech, it is not at all clear what we are getting. Alan Gross, who should never have been detained, has been released as has a long-imprisioned intel asset. In exchange, we freed the Cuban agents who helped set up the murder of American citizens. There is a further loosening of currency and travel restrictions. The speech, of course, will upend years of established American positions and lead, for example, to the entry of Cuba into the OAS without meeting any of the requirements laboriously worked out, e.g., a functioning democracy with full respect for human rights.

Raul Castro's speech was very short and to the point. None of the flowery phrases that his older brother would have used. Very business-like. No discussions of colonialism and Communism, and, above all, no promises to do anything in particular except to keep talking to the US. The impression I got was that he felt he had just pulled off another Hail Mary. Just as Chavez/Maduro Venezuela collapses along comes Obama . . .

This is getting a bit long and I will end it here with the observation that it is now up to Congress to decide what to do with this jumble dropped on its doorstep by Obama. The "embargo," what's left of it, is now in the hands of Congress, and Obama can go back to leading from behind.

I will have more to say in the coming days as my thinking clarifies.