Half Century of Castro Oppression

By Christopher Lingle

UBUD, Bali ― When Cuba marked 50 years of communist rule on New Year's Day 2009, media coverage was charitable, to say the least.

Nothing much critical was said about the dynastic oligarchy of the Castro brothers and the military dictatorship that Fidel installed. Neither were questions raised over why 100,000 Cubans left for the United States during the so-called Mariel boatlift, nor were there musings about thousands more that died attempting to flee.

Absent too were queries about hundreds of ``roqueros'' (rock-n-roll fans) put into prison camps in the 1960s with forced labor as punishment for ``counter-revolutionary crimes.''

Instead, his regime was praised for progressive social policies, like universal health care and education. But the actual gains are exaggerated and whatever gains there were came at a very steep price.

As it is, pre-revolution Cuba had the highest per capita spending on public education of any Latin American country with 80 percent of Cubans being literate in 1958. And at that time, there were more doctors and dentists per capita than in Britain and infant mortality was lower than in France and Germany.

Castro may deserve bouquets for achieving near-total literacy, but he certainly deserves brickbats for imposing near-total censorship. The simple fact is Fidel imposed a totalitarian regime marked by intolerance and repression that led to economic conditions that have worsened over five decades.

As it is, the improvements in social indicators are overwhelmed by the abject failure of economic policies to improve the lives of most ordinary citizens.

Norton Ginsburg's ``Atlas of World Economies'' published at the end of 1950s shows Cuba as 22nd among 122 nations, with per capita income about the same as Italy's in 1953. And Cuba's per capita income was higher than Austria and Japan while its industrial workers earned the 8th highest wages in the world.

According to the International Labor Organization, average daily wages of Cuban agricultural workers in the 1950s exceeded those in France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany.

While Castro supposedly ``liberated'' Cuba from foreign imperialism, locals were in control of most sugar factories by 1958 with only 14 percent of capital owned by Americans. It is true there were sharp income inequalities, but Cuba had a large middle class before the revolution.

Now, Cuba's food production does not meet domestic requirements, so it must import 84 percent of its food, with much of it coming from the United States, despite the embargo. And sugar production fell from 7 million tons in 1952 to 1.5 million tons in 2008 due to collectivization and policies that destroyed individual incentives and brought massive inefficiencies.

While destroying the Cuban economy was not good for most Cubans, the Castro family seems to have done quite well. Forbes magazine named Fidel Castro among the richest heads of government in 2005 by estimating his personal fortune to be $550 million.

In 2006, Forbes estimated his net worth to be worth $900 million, about 10 percent of Cuba's gross domestic product (GDP), increasing his ranking to the seventh richest head of state.

Fidel's accumulation of great personal wealth comes from control over Cuban enterprises and the output of an entire country. Until handing over nominal power to his brother, his official status was chief of state, head of government, prime minister, first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Under his role of ``Maximum Leader,'' he had partial ownership of state enterprises, including the Havana Convention Center, the Cimex retail conglomerate and Medicuba.

Despite this private wealth, Castro harangues Cubans with the motto, ``socialism or death.'' Data documented in ``The Black Book of Communism'' indicates that the latter half of this choice was made for those that opposed him. During the 1960s, between 7,000 and 10,000 people were killed by the regime while 30,000 were imprisoned for political reasons over the same period.

Survival of this repressive regime for so long depended on massive outside financial support. Soviet subsidies until the early 1990s worth over $100 billion for Cuba's 6.5 million people was four times greater than the Marshall Plan given to all of Europe and three times larger than U.S. aid given to all Latin American countries under the Alliance for Progress.

Despite Castro's flaws, there has been a willful silence from those that should have been critics, often insisting that he enjoys widespread domestic popularity. But much of this political support has been bought with generous handouts to impoverished groups and is exaggerated by an effective suppression of dissent.

Claims for support of the regime overlook a bloody rebellion from late 1959 to 1966 that involved almost 180 different groups and ignores dissidents jailed for demanding freedom of speech in 2003.

Meanwhile, Castro gained supporters outside of Cuba by engaging in spirited diatribes against the death-merchants of the imperialist Yanqui regime of the United States. A more careful reading of world affairs is that he had an outsized impact on global death and destruction.

At the Tri-continental Conference held in Havana in 1966, Castro implicitly denounced democracy by urging that bullets be used instead of ballots in order to gain power. In voicing support for armed revolutionary struggle, he ridiculed those that opposed such conflicts. Fidel enthusiastically supported the Soviets for crushing the Prague Spring, denouncing Czech dissidents as ``fascists.''

While the United States is regularly assailed for interfering in internal affairs of other countries, few complaints are recorded about Castro's meddling. This included support for anti-American regimes and guerrillas in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Bolivia during the 1960s.

Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua received military personnel, weapons and intelligence to support military takeover. Cuba also helped foment El Salvador's bloody civil war.

In Africa, the USSR and Cuba backed the Movement for the Liberation of Angola, with up to 3,000 Cuban troops being active on the continent in 1974. Castro provided aid and training to the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army while offering a safe haven for dissident black leaders.

Cuban military instructors and advisors were in Palestinian Liberation Organization bases and were involved with Libya in founding World Mathaba, a terrorist movement.

Obama's inaugural address plea for dictators to unclench their fists surely applies to Senores Castro. Unfortunately, it appears that only death will inspire Fidel to do so.

Christopher Lingle is a research scholar at the Center for Civil Society in New Delhi and visiting professor of Economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala. He can be reached at CLingle@ufm.edu.