Fidel was apparently more conservative than his brother Raul, who appears to recognize that some things in Cuba need to change (but only a little so far).
http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-cuba-raul-castro-20161129-story.html
While Raul has implemented more market oriented reforms, he was forced to by the increasing effect of economic sanctions after the Soviet subsidies ended in the late '80s and the effects really started to bite not too long afterwards.
As for his declaration he will step down in 2018…I’ll only believe it when I see it.
Especially considering back in the revolution and right after victory, Fidel Castro initially promised his revolution was meant to restore the constitutional democratic government which existed before the Batista coups before going back on his words and installing himself as another dictator with different branding.
Words many Cubans including those from the upper/upper-middle classes believed enough to not only withdraw support from Batista, but also to initially throw their support behind Castro’s uprising in the mid-late '50s.
Incidentally, some of the most bitter Cuban exiles in the US including a few in my old NYC neighborhood included those who initially supported Castro in his uprising…some even actively fighting in his guerilla forces before becoming disillusioned and feeling deeply betrayed once he revealed his true dictatorial intentions and that his prior promises were lies just months after Batista’s regime collapsed.
Castro was a true believer communist and as such he couldn’t see beyond that IMO, like any rigid idealogue he worked in absolutes, which in the real world don’t work, Cuba was able to stay afloat before the 1989 collapse of the USSR based on subsidies (given Cuba was a perfect thorn in the side of the US, invaluable), and couldn’t see IMO the forest for the trees (and this isn’t limited to socialists or communists, true believers of any kind are like that).
I have heard those who tell me what a paradise Cuba was before Castro took over, and I shake my head at that, those who say that were likely those who benefitted from Batista’s cronyism and the like, or were tourists who didn’t see the more seemy side of things (Havana had a sex trade that was much like Bankok and other places, where young girls, I mean really young, were selling themselves or being sold to match the tastes of the well off who flocked there for that reason). Cuba was basically owned equally by the mob and by American big business interests, and to call it a constitutional Democracy would be like Castro claiming his Cuba was a workman’s paradise.
Batista didn’t exactly have his hands clear of violence or suppressing political rivals and reformers, either, so it really to me is like comparing cow poop versus sheep poop as to which one smelled worse. Peasants who under Batista had no hope their kids would get an education or do better might argue that Castro gave them more hope, and there would be a point to that in a country where so many were so poor and ill educated and doomed to be a peasant (seen from their view). Does that justify the dictatorship of Castro or the way he ran things and whatnot? No, it just says I can understand why someone who was some dirt poor peasant cutting sugarcane and seeing only the same for their kids might think differently if under Castro their kids got an education and were able to be a doctor or something,impossible under the prior regimes.
The funnest thing about Castro dying was just how long everyone predicting it was coming, and soon, when I was in high school in the late 70’s they were predicting he was going to die, they predicted it in the 80’s and the 90’s, and we almost made 2020 …
In the end to me it comes down to comparing two evils and trying to decide which stank more and why and like many things it is complicated, The Batista regime was a repressive dictatorship in the banana republic school of things, Castro was more like Stalin and in the end both of them to me stank to high heavens and were a disgrace, Castro wasn’t stupid, far from it, but he let ideology blind himself to reality and in the end created a cult around himself rather than create what you would have hoped he would do, create a better Cuba.
The ironic part was if one read that scholarly article I posted and about his earlier life, he wasn’t always as fervent in his communist beliefs.
Especially considering before he started his guerilla movement, he was active in the Patido Orthodoxo political party in the '40s and early '50s which while nominally left-leaning and populist was in practice an exceedingly broad-based ideological party which included many conservative landowners, upper/upper-middle class business owners/professionals, and religious conservatives. Some of my poli-sci scholar friends would quip that such parties don’t really have a coherent political ideology at all in practice beyond gaining enough support to gain and sustain their hold on political power.
However, once he started his guerilla movement, especially after he returned in the mid-late '50s to continue his guerilla campaign, he and many in his movement was swept up like many “revolutionaries” of that generation not only into becoming a committed true believer, but one with an extra zeal often associated with relatively recent converts. He was also charismatic, clever, and well-educated* in rhetoric and PR appeals to effectively conceal his zealous beliefs to the point he even fooled some of his closest followers for months after Batista’s regime collapsed.
- Fidel Castro was a University of Havana law school alum and by some accounts, worked as a lawyer before entering politics, becoming a guerilla, and later...being the successor repressive dictator to the preceding one.
When Stalin died the entire country cried and few thousands of mourners were stampede to death at his funeral. Today most Russians recognize that Stalin was an Evil man.
I hope that someday the history books in Cuba tell the truth about the atrocities committed under the brutal Castro regime.
This apparently resulted in an unintended natural experiment in public health.
Basically, Soviet food subsidies ended when the USSR ended, and fuel was in short enough supply that public transit bus service was cut back. Food consumption fell from 3,000-3,200 calories per day to 2,400 calories per day. People also got more exercise walking or riding bicycles compared to riding the buses. This resulted in a 10 pound typical adult weight loss, obesity rate falling from 12% to 7%, and 80% meeting exercise guidelines. Diabetes and heart disease fell.
But these public health improvements were reversed by increased food production and imports in the 2000s, with obesity rate back up to 15.7% by 2010 and diabetes and heart disease coming back up.
Just think of how healthy North Koreans must be…
Good riddance. He was a murderous tyrant with, like most of his group, many admirers. Congratulations to Cuba.
Castro also asked the Soviet Union to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States.
Khrushchev told him no:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/jfk-defendcuba/