Fidel would’ve turned 100 last Thursday and Cuba marked the occasion with the kinda revolutionary spectacle Fidel had turned into a fine art – speeches, conferences, exhibitions, cultural performances and a gathering of international admirers!! More than 1,500 foreign delegates – including one Guyanese ex-president!! – trekked to Havana to celebrate the man who once made the small Caribbean island a world phenomenon!!
Your Eyewitness thinks there’s something uniquely Cuban about celebrating the centenary of a revolutionary leader – while the revolution’s economic model’s running out of electricity!! Blackouts can last for 20 hours daily; fuel, food and medicines are scarce; infrastructure has deteriorated; and emigration – now permitted! – has become the main safety valve for young people who’re more interested in leaving than studying the collected thoughts of Fidel Castro!!
The question for your Eyewitness ain’t whether Castro accomplished things – of course he did!! His Revolution destroyed the corrupt Batista order; achieved impressive gains in literacy, education and public health!! His internationalism – from Africa to Guyana – gave Cuba an outsized moral and geopolitical reach!! And the American role can’t be airbrushed from the story – their sanctions were hardly calculated to encourage Cuba’s experiment in political pluralism or economic reform!!
But that’s where the rose-coloured version of the Castro story begins to blur!! Castro defeated a corrupt and authoritarian order – only to construct a system in which state power coalesced around one leader – Fidel!! His personal control over government meant that “central planning” was just an extension of his idiosyncrasies!! So ironically, starting as a man who’d liberate Cuba from one-man dictatorship, he created a political system where political power and his own authority became indistinguishable!!
And tragically the revolution proved much better at surviving Fidel than at reforming Fidelism!! While his brother and successor Raúl eventually introduced economic reforms, the political system remained essentially intact!! The promised transition from revolutionary charisma to functioning institutions never quite arrived and Cuba exchanged one Castro for a committee – which aren’t even charismatic!!
A 2017 assessment of Cuba’s “coming” transition identified their central dilemma: the revolutionary model had to change if it was gonna survive. Nearly a decade later, that verdict looks less like an observation than an indictment – as Cubans have been voting with their feet!! Now while we can’t ignore the US continued pressures, we gotta accept that Cuba’s predicament’s a mixture of external punishment and INTERNAL failure!!
But finally, the revolution ironically is borrowing from the system it spent decades denouncing!! But historical inertia is unlikely to be accommodating to its overthrow, so as Pressie’s done – we gotta encourage democratic change!!
At 100, Castro remains larger than Cuba – and the question’s whether it can finally become larger than Castro!!
…Barima salvage bids
The Government’s receipt of Expressions of Interest for salvaging the MV Barima ain’t gonna end the Opposition’s exploitation of the disaster. In fact, your Eyewitness confidently predicts that WHATEVER the Government does next simply gonna become the next point of attack!! The Opposition had demanded the wreck be recovered urgently; but now Government’s kick-started the process, they complain the process is too slow, too secretive, too bureaucratic – and deviously deliberately designed to thwart the investigation!!
And when the wreck’s eventually raised, be assured the political goalposts gonna be moved again: who got the contract – and why; how much was paid and was the recovery conducted properly etc!! The already-established CoI’s already hasn’t escaped similar nitpicking!!.
Now, your Eyewitness accepts the tragedy demands answers, accountability and respect for the victims. But there’s a difference between demanding those things and converting every stage of the process into a permanent political sideshow!!
So, there’s simply never gonna be no government action capable of satisfying them – cause political dissatisfaction, rather than closure for the families, is the Opposition’s point!!
…power needs
Your Eyewitness has noted – with dismay!! – the call for husbanding AC’s usage since we’ve reached our peak electricity delivery capacity!! That all Europe’s already made that call is of little comfort!!
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