Thread: A very hot place awaits Fidel

A very hot place awaits Fidel

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

In the end, he died like most people do – i.e., old age. No CIA assassination. No overthrow. Just an old man probably connected to a bunch of machines staying alive.

For most of us Cubans, and the ones who grew up here like me, this is a moment when images fly in your head.

First, I recall the morning Batista fled and the expectations. My mother serving us breakfast and my father on the phone talking about the future of Cuba. The phone did not stop ringing. My mother kept bringing my father coffee and offering her opinions as well. The TV was on with constant reports of Cuba. The Voice of America in Spanish on my father's short wave radio.

Most importantly, no one that morning had a clue of what would happen to Cuba in a few years.

Second, the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis. As my mother would joke later: "¡Nosotros los primeros!" Or loosely translated, we would have been the first ones to go if the missiles were fired. Thankfully, the missiles were not fired, and my mother's words did not come to pass.

Third, I will always remember the day we left and the look on my mother's face when the plane took off.

Most of all, we remember how he destroyed Cuba. He came to power when Cuba was a very prosperous island with a growing middle class. It is not that country anymore, as Tim Worstall wrote:

Fidel Castro, the Communist Dictator of Cuba, has died at the age of 90. There have been those, over the decades, who have held him up as some paragon of a new world order, one in which people will not be subservient to either America nor capitalism. The truth is that he visited an economic disaster upon the island nation of Cuba. No, it was not the US, it was not any blockade or embargo, not anything external to Cuba that caused this, it was quite simply the idiocy of the economic policy followed, that socialism, which led to there being near no economic growth at all over the 55 years or so of his rule. What little that did occur happening when the strictest of his rules were relaxed.

It is polite, human and common to withhold criticism of the dead in the immediate aftermath of their demise. But leaving 11 million people grossly poorer than they ought to be in the name of a bankrupt ideology is not the stuff of which hagiographic obituaries are made.

He promised elections but kept delaying them. They never happened.

He denied that he was communist and locked up people like my dad's cousin for publicly saying so. A bit later, he declared himself a communist but did not release those who called him one.

In the end, he leaves a poor island with very little hope. He leaves political prisons, families crushed, and empty store shelves.

What happens now? This is a great opportunity for President-Elect Trump to demand some real concessions from the island's leadership.

Fidel's death is really the end of communism in Cuba. Raúl is also an old man and probably won't be around in a few years, either.

Cuba is screaming for change. Let's hear it and demand real concessions from Raúl Castro.

And please don't insult the memory of so many by sending a big delegation to his funeral. Stay away and show your respect for the thousands executed by this regime.



http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/...its_fidel.html

We need a new policy in Cuba and that requires a new attitude towards them. We assume that the voices of those who fled Cuba are the only ones that matter, they aren't. The people who still live in Cuba are the ones who matter now and we should show our respects to them the same as we show respect to any nation who lost a leader. Not everyone in Cuba agrees with those who fled. That is a fact. They have relatives who remember the way things were under Batista, they remember everything because they were still in Cuba and have actually witnessed the differences. There are two sides to the situation in Cuba, one as seen through the eyes of those who left and another as seen through the eyes of those who didn't. The don't want to go back to the days of Batista, even if everything is not hunky dory under Castro. Across the board, things are still better for most Cubans now than they were under Batista and that's why Castro has sustained all these years. He actually delivered a better result than the way things were under Batista and most Cubans are afraid of a return to that if things change too much too fast under an American Umbrella. Those who fled Cuba were not really a "growing middle class", they were an upper class, not that different than the French Bourgeois during the French Revolution. They weren't responsible for the disparities in Cuba, they were just too often indifferent to the problems.

Go slow, but go forward. To me that is the best new policy for Cuba-US Relations. The still see US as "imperialists" so we'll have to earn a different label. I think Trump can do that, especially since Obama has opened the door a little. There's not much that I agree with Obama about, but there are a few things, and improving relations with Cuba is one of them.

I think we should oppose the communist dictatorship police state in Cuba. We are not opposing the people of Cuba. It's their totalitarian government we oppose. As long as their government continues to abuse the people of Cuba, we should oppose it. It doesn't matter what Batista did. That's history. What matters is what the Cuban government is doing now to the people of Cuba. If they stop the human rights abuses and stop limiting the freedom of their people, we can have better relations. If not, we can't. Simple.

It's not an either or deal. We can normalize diplomatic relations with a country without supporting their government or policies. We do it all over the world so why not do it with a country 90 miles from Florida? We don't even know if these stories are even true or what the real circumstances are behind them. There was a female Republican member of Congress from Florida, a Cuban-American, who spoke the other day with Fox News and she doesn't even know that 90% of Cubans own their own homes and many own their own businesses and have since 2011 when the policy changed. She wants freedom for Cubans so the Cuban-Americans here in the states can get their money and property back, she even said when we get our house back we're going to give it our relatives who live in it. She's so in the dark about what's really going on in Cuba, she doesn't know that her relatives already own the house they live in. It's about the money for the Cuban-Americans, they want reparations for their lost property.

The Castros never lined their pockets off the people like so many dictators do. Fidel Castro never even owned a house. There is no monument to Fidel Castro or any street named after him, totally unlike what you see in most "totalitarian" regimes. The Castros survived because we were wrong about them, and the Cuban people know that.

Now that we know the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro 600 times starting as early as 1960, it's pretty easy to understand why Castro changed his plan to establish a democracy for Cuba when the greatest democracy in the world was trying to kill him and take out his new government. So he went another route. It's also understandable that he went with a police state to try to avoid being killed and his new government overthrown by the United States.

Castro won. We lost. It's time we admit that and fix the problem that created this tension to begin with. Some truth in the mix would be good as well. Are the Cuban people better off than they were during the time when America was so deeply involved in their country? Without question they are. If we're going to be part of a country's economy we have to make sure it works for the people of that nation or we become a problem instead of a benefit. For the US to act like we care more about the people of Cuba than the Cuban people feel about themselves or their government is the very arrogance they've rejected all these years.

We need to be humble and smart and sit down with them and discuss without any arrogance, how do we do this that meets the needs of your country while still rendering a return for our investors? I could cook that deal in 4 hours. Trump can probably do it in 2 hours. Remember, the Cubans watched Katrina on television. The Cubans see the pictures of our homeless people sleeping on the streets in San Francisco. They know the stories of 23 million Americans without health insurance and no money to pay medical bills. They know the stories of food stamps .... IN THE UNITED STATES!!! They know our dark side and unfortunately for the past 50 years, they've not experienced any good side from the United States, we tried to invade them, we tried to assassinate their leader and we've tried to overthrow their government. Hell, we even tried to kidnap one of their children, Elian. This does not win trust or confidence of their government or their people.

To Obama's credit, this is one partial success out of many of his foreign policy failures. We need to go slow, but go forward with a new policy between the United States and Cuba. There are 12 million Cubans and 330 million Americans. There are 1.8 million Cuban Americans, including both foreign born and native born. They don't own Cuba any more, so they shouldn't own US policy towards Cuba.

Just food for thought. It's a new day, a new time, and a crack in the door is open. If we don't maximize this and move the policy forward, then we'll China on our doorstep 90 miles from Florida. A grave and tragic error for the national security of the United States in my opinion.