Unabashed

Reflections by Comrade Fidel. Oh yeah, he should get a blog, or at least set up RSS for these articles.

El Jefe is jefe no more, handing the reigns to brother Raul, ending the tenure of the Last Great Revolutionary. What does this bode for Cuba, pearl of the Caribbean Sea? Not much in the immediate future, as Raul is fundamentally and ideologically as hard-line as Fidel. But Raul will likely want to leave his own mark in the history books of Cuba, rather than being a simple note at the end of Fidel’s paragraph: “At this point Raul assumed power and everything was the same as before.” I believe Raul will do something, but what that something will be I have no idea.

For Fidel, it looks like blogging will occupy a bit of his time for a while. And what a great blog that would be, too. No, he won’t call it a blog, but essentially that’s what it’ll be, and for the time being he’s calling it “Reflections by Comrade Fidel.” His first entry is interesting enough to make me want to read more. The enigmatic Marxist is imminently quotable, as well:

The end of a historical period is not the same as the beginning of the end of an unsustainable system.

Cryptic, yes, but he’s talking about America there, in a way that says “this is what I have known for many years.” He believes, as he always has, that America’s system won’t support itself, that it is bound to eventually fail, and he may have been right all along, even though he may not live long enough to see the resulting cataclysm.

And he says:

At this point I am dedicating myself to the adversaries. I enjoyed watching the embarrassing position of all the candidates for the United States presidency. One by one they were obliged to announce their immediate demands of Cuba in order not to risk losing a single voter. Not that I am a Pulitzer Prize winner interrogating them on CNN on the most delicate political and even personal matters from Las Vegas, where the logic of chance of the roulette rules and where one has to make ones humble presence if aspiring to be president.

Fifty years of blockade seemed too little to the favorites. Change! Change! Change! They all cried in unison.

I agree. Change! But, inside the United States. Cuba changed long ago and will now follow a dialectical path.

Yes, dialectical and mired in poverty. Dear Jefe, your life’s work is nearing its end, and left so much unaccomplished. You fought long and hard, but in the end your island gem of the Caribbean is in little better shape than it was when you firmly announced your presence.

Fidel Castro is one of those great men, the kind who walk into a room and own it without saying a word. He always had that way about him, too, it didn’t come by way of his presidency. One thing is for certain: Fidel became the revolutionary he is because he loved Cuba and he (correctly) believed the system in place at the time was corrupt. He removed the corruption, but then he replaced it with dictatorial communism, firmly believing in its core theory, failing to realize that human nature would never allow it to function as designed. 

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: America, Caribbean, Castro, Embargo, Fidel, Marxism, Raul, Revolution, Revolutionary, Trade, United States