Cuba

In the last year I have probably given driver's tests for over two dozen men and women who have emigrated to Grand Rapids, Michigan from the little Caribbean island of Cuba. Some are in their 20's and 30's, some have been in their 50's and 60's. I don't think any of them have come because one day they were having a nice dinner at home with their family after work and someone blurted out, "Hey, wouldn't it be nice if we moved way up North to, oh let's say Michigan, and see what it's like to live wearing sweaters and coats for most of the year?"

Cuba has been in the news for the last couple of days because our anti-imperialist president has chosen to once again make his point about past American sins and our present need to level our own unjust economic playing field by visiting that bastion of socialist empowerment. Perhaps we can even learn something from the system set up by the Castro brothers.

In Cuba everyone (except for the ruling elite) is equal. Although they are all equally poor and without any chance of economic advancement the government does provide for it's citizens education, health care and free rides home from party meetings. Freely attending a non official church is a little bit of a problem but it looks like someday soon that might become somewhat problematic here as well.

Our glorious leader has unilaterally decided that "the time is right" for our country to recognize the legitimacy of Castro's revolution and the reality of Cuban socialism/communism by ending embargos and normalizing relations. It reminds me a little of the rerun of a movie I watched this week where Bob Wiley is consoling his psychologist's family after the psychologist's blowup by saying something like, 'He is so far above us. We can't even begin to imagine where his brain is going'.

Normalizing relations isn't too popular with most of the elderly Cubans living in the U.S. who remember having their property confiscated and seeing friends and family killed, but to be honest many in the younger generations, not having lived through it, are OK with the idea.

Cuba declared their independence from Spain in the early 1900's. Eventually a guy named Batista came to power, large portions of the island were owned by big businesses and the Mafia had also invested heavily there. Our government tended to support dictators and there is no doubt that Batista was both a brutal and a corrupt dictator. The Castro brothers who brought along South American revolutionary Che Guevara wanted to replace the government of Batista. Eventually after a few years of armed conflict they were able to do so, taking power on January 1, 1959.

Castro did not come in as a Communist. In fact he promised his supporters that he was not a Communist. There were a certain number of the population who supported overthrowing the Batista regime but let us be brutally honest here. Like most revolutions, there is a small group of true believers and there are others who go along because of fear and intimidation.

Consider the use of Fidel's and Raul's firing squads. The official number of deaths attributed to their firing squads is 3,615, although I have read estimates that since 1959 there have actually been 30,000. Apart from the goal of eliminating political opponents firing squads have three other purposes: To enforce discipline, to punish disloyal followers, to intimidate opposition. A quote from the Left's folk hero Che Guevara is quite instructive:

"To send men to a firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an arcane bourgeois detail. There is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine of hate."

The Castro government seized billions of dollars of private property. It nationalized ALL foreign property. It is also estimated there have been over 2000 political assassinations, 5000 deaths in prison due to beatings and denial of health care and 60,000 Cubans who have died trying to flee their country. These totals pale in comparison to the 30 million who died in Russia and the 50 million who died in China in their communist revolutions, but again Cuba started with a much smaller population.

OK, we recognize and trade with those totalitarian regimes and we maintain embassies on their soil as well. Is there a logical reason not to do so with Cuba? Is "the time is right" truly now to end our embargo and have our president watch baseball at their stadium grinning his Cheshire cat grin while Europe is ready to explode?

One of the reasons the embargo started was our fear that the declaration of both Castro and Che Guevara to export their revolution to the rest of the Caribbean would be successful. We did not want to give them the financial wherewithal to do so. Indeed at various times Cuba did send troops to other countries, including 50,000 to help screw up everything in Angola. Plus it only took a short time for Castro to align with the Soviet Union, allowing their nuclear missiles and spying bases close access to the United States.

Now the missiles are gone, the Castro brothers are old as are the bulk of the people still alive whose property was stolen and families were murdered. The American Left is in love with socialism, they don't worry anymore about Russian missiles or Chinese domination and Cuban baseball players are in high demand. I don't know whether the world has changed or we've all gotten a little bit senile.