I was in Hollywood, Florida, on January 8, the 50th anniversary
of Fidel Castro’s triumphant arrival in Havana after shooting his
way to power and ousting the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio
Batista.
The morning newspaper at our hotel reported that Fidel Castro had
been arrested in the early morning hours, right about the time
the local bars were emptying out. It wasn’t the uppermost Fidel,
the seldom-seen 82-year-old who holds the record as the world’s
longest-running despot, who had been patted down and cuffed.
This particular Fidel, 32, “a habitual offender” according to
news report, was arrested at 1:31 a.m. in a white Ford pickup
truck for driving with a permanently revoked driver’s license.
“If this guy was wearing a beard and a jogging suit and was the
dictator of Cuba, people around here would be glad he’s going to
jail,” said Miami police commander Delrish Moss.
“At least 33 Fidel Castros with different dates of birth have
been arrested in Miami-Dade over the decades, court records
show,” reported the Miami Herald. “The charges range
from petty theft to cocaine possession to racketeering.”
My guess is that all these various crooks were named in honor of
the original Fidel before their parents realized that Castro’s
revolution for an egalitarian paradise wasn’t going to be all
that it was cracked up to be and they headed for capitalist
Florida on inner tubes or whatever else they could paddle off the
Cuban beaches in the dark of night, little Fidels in tow.
In 1959, the year of Castro’s collectivist conquest, Cuba was the
second richest country in Latin America. Now, even after being on
the receiving end of decades of massive amounts of Soviet
welfare, Cuba is the second poorest, just ahead of easy-to-beat
Haiti.
Wrapping up their analysis of Cuba’s 50 years of communist
economics, the generally not-overly-enthusiastic-about-capitalism
National Public Radio reported on January 8 that Cuba is still
short of basic foodstuffs after a half century of keeping a lid
on individualism and private enterprise.
“Government bodegas that sell heavily subsidized food rations
regularly run out of meat, eggs and cooking oil,” reported NPR.
Overall, even with perfectly fertile soil, “the agricultural
system on the island has declined so dramatically that Cuba now
imports roughly 60 percent of its food.”
There’s also a fish shortage, even though Cuba is surrounded by
fish on all sides. Anita Snow, Havana bureau chief for the
Associated Press, reported in 2007 that the allotment of fish per
capita in Cuba via government-issued ration books, after nearly a
half century of socialist development and Soviet-aided
infrastructure, was 10 ounces per person per month.
Other government-dictated monthly allotments per person in the
ration books included 4 ounces of coffee, 2 cups of vegetable
oil, 6 pounds of rice or dried beans, 8 ounces of chicken and 10
eggs. That’s based on the optimistic assumption that all goes
well in central planning and the projected eggs and fish actually
turn up.
What they need are some capitalist boat owners from Miami with
the latest fish-finding radar. But the success and money-making
of those entrepreneurs might well produce feelings of inadequacy
and resentment in those who are less successful, so it’s better,
according to the egalitarian ethos, to have no fish and equal
deprivation (except at the top, where there’s no shortage of
lobster for Fidel and family and his key enforcers of equal
scarcity).
The fish problem comes in two waves. First, there are no fish,
thanks to collectivism, and then you can get dropped in a dungeon
if you talk too much about it. The Committee for the Defense of
the Revolution has ears in every coffee-lacking coffee shop.
“No government in the Americas has been responsible for the
death, imprisonment, or exile of so many as has Castro’s,” writes
Cuban-born Otto J. Reich, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela and
former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere
Affairs, in “A Tyrant’s ‘Liberation’” in the January 16 issue of
National Review.
“Batista’s jails, odious though they were, never numbered more
than a dozen,” explains Reich. “To house his prisoners, Castro
would have to build 350 penitentiaries.”
The result? Some 14 percent of Cubans have fled their homeland,
providing Fidel Castro with the record of producing, reports
Reich, “the largest exodus of political refugees as a proportion
of a nation’s population in history.”
