Castro’s death was his greatest contribution to Cuba.
On Nov. 25, 2016, Fidel Castro, the last authoritarian figure created by the socialist revolution of the 20th century, died at the age of 90.
He controlled Cuba for 47 years, from 1959 to 2006. Starting out as a lawyer with a social justice agenda and a violent revolution, Castro easily seized power in Cuba on New Year’s Day 1959. His posters took the world by storm – beard, cigar, military uniform, sharp eyes, contemptuous smile – and Castro was the new totem of the anti-establishment, anti-traditional left-wing movement in an era of value vacuums, the promotion of individual liberation, and the prevalence of utopia.
After establishing power, Castro embarked on a socialist path, imposing authoritarian rule and advancing the cult of the individual. He always appeared in an anti-American posture, establishing his personal authority. Several U.S. presidents, from Kennedy and Ford, to Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush and Obama, were subjected to Castro’s invective. By constantly provoking the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world, he has established himself as a symbol with his sharp eloquence: the star who defies all authority.
Many of the world’s cultural giants: Sartre, Beauvoir, Marquez have fallen at his feet, and these left-wing figures have brought him more honor; and the legend of the so-called more than 600 unsuccessful assassinations, mainly by the CIA, has brought him more mystery, and toughness, fighting, passion, indomitable, and mystery have become a dazzling aura over his head, shining brighter than a movie star.
But let’s not forget that Castro was a national leader who held sole power for 47 years, which was his main identity and his main job, not as a street politician, or a rock star.
So, how did he govern his country? And what is the effect of governance? Did it bring happiness to the Cuban people?
Let’s sort it out: according to official data, Cuba’s annual national income per capita in 2015 (not easy to find in recent years) was $5,539, but most Cubans earn only about $20 a month, and under Castro’s rule, Cuba became one of the countries with the lowest per capita income in the world, with less than 5% of Cubans connected to the Internet in 2015. It is a backward and closed country, and arguably a failed state.
On the other hand, Cubans have given Castro nearly 50 years to demonstrate his ability to govern. His “socialist transformation” into a utopia has led Cuba into a dark alley of history, where the majority of Cubans cannot be happy with the effects of a planned economy, where most of the means of production are controlled by the state, and where most of the labor force is employed by the public. At the same time, Castro insisted on both the lifelong and hereditary system in politics (giving the ruling power to his own brother), and finally made himself a laughing stock of the world (very eloquent, but autocratic and backward himself, making speeches everywhere, constantly amplifying his own stubbornness, ugliness, hypocrisy, arbitrariness and vanity), and was finally nailed to the pillar of shame of the development process of world civilization. History is always fair, and time is always just.
Let’s take a look at how Castro governed his country again.
- Castro’s Utopia: Cuba’s version of “socialist transformation”
Within two years of taking power, Cuba became a highly planned economy under the sole control of the July 26th Movement. At the same time, Cuba exported its revolution to Latin American countries, sending guerrilla units to train radicals and wage guerrilla warfare. Since 1962, food and other living materials have been rationed in Cuba, and socio-economic development has been in decline since then, and the prosperity of ordinary people has become an illusion.
2、Déjà vu of the smashing of the “anti-party group”
On the evening of January 28, 1968, the Cuban people gathered in front of TV sets and radios to listen to Castro’s important speech, in which he announced that a group of senior cadres, led by Central Committee member Escalante, had been uncovered within the party. This was the peak and the beginning of the purge.
- The absurd “war on peddlers”
On March 13, 1968, Castro declared that the next goal of the revolution was to declare war on peddlers in a speech broadcast live to the nation from the University of Havana, which lasted late into the night. Overnight, hawkers and private owners became street rats for everyone, and in addition to raids and confiscations of property, many stores were smashed and owners beaten. Castro was trying to set a precedent of using a mass movement to manage social circulation, which is similar to the socialist reform movement in China.
- The children’s version of “national mobilization and militarization of labor”
The “Committee for the Defense of the Revolution” is an original Cuban creation, but its functions are almost all-encompassing, and it has become half a local government. Every aspect of Cuban social life was managed and supervised by these organizations, and it was through them that Castro was able to mobilize the entire country into a “revolutionary offensive.
The militarization of labor was another major front of the “revolutionary offensive,” and in 1968 members of the Communist Party’s Central Bureau and Secretariat went to the provinces as special agents, with provincial secretaries and deputies as local commanders and chiefs of staff, and local party organizations and governments, as well as factories and farms, following the same pattern. Castro’s brother and successor, Raúl, personally sat on the ground and awarded symbolic military ranks to cadres at all levels.
The “battle” was a hypothetical invasion, and when the alarm went off, all the men, women and children took their places, with the young and strong men going to the “battlefield” (i.e., the sugar cane fields) and the women taking over the positions left by the men in the rear. In the cities, in order to create a realistic war effect, many factories even pulled the power supply and drove workers to bomb shelters before disarming them and allowing them to return to the workshop, some deliberately producing with insufficient lighting, in order to stimulate the workers’ motivation in this tense wartime atmosphere. Cuba was turned into a huge military camp by this militarization of labor, which was much more radical than the people’s communes and production units, but of course the results were even worse.
The main battle of the “revolutionary offensive” was Castro’s goal of producing 10 million tons of sugar a year, and 1969, the tenth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, which he named “the year of decisive progress” (each year since the Revolution has been given a special name, such as The year of agricultural reform, the year of organization, the year of solidarity, the year of the heroic Vietnamese people, the year of the heroic guerrillas, etc.), he mobilized the human and material resources of the entire country to the limit and put them all into the sugar cane fields. In addition, he announced that the first seven months of 1969 and 1970 would be counted together as one year, a year of fighting for 10 million tons of sugar, and that all holidays in 1969 would be cancelled and the Christmas and New Year holidays at the end of the year would be extended to July of the following year to celebrate with the victory of 10 million tons of sugar. In this way, Castro changed the calendar, and the “revolutionary offensive” failed unsuspectingly, just like our “Great Leap Forward”, which was absurd and cruel.
- The creation of the “new man” in the sky
One of the characteristics of the Cuban revolution was that it always put the creation of “new people” in the most important position, and many collective examples of “new people” were set up in Cuba at that time, the most prominent one being the Pine Island Youth Commune. Castro’s goal was to turn the island into a base for Cuba’s citrus exports, with production exceeding that of the entire United States and Israel, another country that exported a lot of citrus at the time. Such a cow, in the first day is destined to be blown to the end.
6、Cuban style “re-education of the poor peasants”
In the “revolutionary offensive” and the shaping of the “new man” in the social engineering, education is an important front. From the early 1960s, Cuba spent a lot of money on building new schools in the countryside, sending urban children and youth to the countryside to receive a militarized education in isolation from their families, parents and urban environment, combining learning with productive work.
In the second half of the 1960s, Castro proposed a program of “schools in the countryside,” in which all students and teachers in secondary schools throughout Cuba would be sent to the countryside for one or two months each year to study while working there. Castro’s basic attitude toward higher education was one of contempt for classroom teaching and advanced studies, and especially for advanced intellectuals, and he always advocated student rebellion against teachers. Is the Cuban style of “re-education of the poor peasants” not familiar to the Chinese? Such a powerful means of educating the people was finally successful in brainwashing.
Cuba’s “revolutionary offensive” can be said to be a combination of the Cuban model of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, with both political and economic objectives.
Castro became a nightmare for many Cubans. In the 1960s, Cuba was the scene of several large-scale smuggling waves, with millions of Cubans risking their lives to cross the rough waves of the Caribbean Sea to the U.S. In 1980, Castro took revenge on the U.S. by releasing control of the ports and allowing 150,000 prisoners, prostitutes and mentally ill people to flee to Miami.
To Castro’s surprise, Miami, which was a small fishing village, became a mega-city with the gathering of Cuban refugees, and became a rich American colony; those who were considered prisoners, prostitutes and mentally ill in Cuba created their own civilization in a foreign country, opened up a new life, and became the heroes of the city.
Evidently, this is an irony of Castro’s great utopian social practice – a regime that forces people to risk death to escape is bound to be a shameful one.
What was Castro’s greatest contribution to Cuba and the world? His death is the greatest contribution to Cuba and the world.
Recent Comments