Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 22, 1993 TAG: 9307210158
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A. It would be reckless to compare Fidel Castro to Stalin, but we can't help but note that three-decade dictator Joe Stalin didn't last this long. Castro has been around even longer than Bob Dylan (speaking of bad beards).
So why has this revolutionary government, which is more out of date and faded than a Che Guevara poster, survived? How could it still be around even after its Soviet patron is long gone?
We talked to a bunch of Cuba experts, and they had, naturally, differing ideas on this delicate matter. Here's a sample:
1. Repression. The secret to longevity for any communist regime is to control information, jail critics, and keep history under lock and key. It's an almost foolproof strategy; the Soviet Union, built on lies and sustained by brutality against its own people, survived for more than seven decades. It collapsed soon after it eased access to history. Cuba remains a closed society, street by street and block by block.
"Castro has brought as his contribution to Marxist-Leninist theory the idea of the neighborhood watch committee. A watchdog if you will on every neighborhood corner," says Jose Cardenas, spokesman for the Cuban American National Foundation in Washington.
2. Legitimacy. Cuba isn't Romania or Bulgaria or East Germany or Poland. Castro came to power in a genuine people's revolution. "It was not imposed on the points of Soviet bayonets, as Marxism-Leninism was in Eastern Europe," says Wayne Smith, former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. The apparatchiks of Eastern Europe didn't create their communist regimes and thus didn't fight passionately to save them when the "velvet revolution" occurred in 1989-90.
Initially Castro had almost unanimous support. Only after he turned to the left, embraced the Soviets and seized private property did he drive a million middle-class Cubans into exile. But he remained popular among most other Cubans, notably the Afro-Cuban majority, because their day-to-day lives improved, with better education and health care. The standard of living is now getting worse, but even so, many Cubans feel connected with the revolution and responsible for its consequences, several Cuba experts told us.
3. Geography. Cuba's proximity to the United States provided an escape valve for his opponents. It's easier to stay in power when you live on an island in the Caribbean and your enemies are in Miami. By contrast, the leading dissidents and reformers in the Soviet Union never left. "There is no Yeltsin in Cuba," says Jorge Dominguez, a professor of government at Harvard whose family fled in 1960. "The origin of the political stability of the Castro government is that it successfully exported the opposition."
4. U.S. policy. No trade with Cuba is permitted. Last year the U.S. extended the trade embargo to cover subsidiaries of American firms operating in other countries. The goal is to cause immediate hardship to Castro's regime - says Cardenas, "It's been 34 years. We're looking for short-term solutions" - but the long-term effects may be to strengthen Castro's hand. Other countries have been sympathetic to Cuba's underdog status. And Castro can use patriotic fervor to rally Cubans against the great bully to the north.
By contrast, when Eastern Europeans were feeling nationalistic and resentful of superpower interference, that turned them against the Soviets, not the West.
"Inadvertently, no doubt, the U.S. government has helped to stabilize the Castro regime politically over the years," says Dominguez.
At the least, says Dominguez, we should increase the paths by which information can flow to the island. At the moment U.S. policy prevents the sale of such things as fax machines, or the creation of a direct mail service. Even calling Cuba is nearly impossible - only a fraction of the calls go through, because the only underwater cable is a relic of the 1950s.
The history of the 20th century is stained by totalitarianism. Precisely where Castro's Cuba fits into that history is something we'll leave to smarter folks. But maybe someday this column will be able to figure out the real mystery of the century: Why have so many people collaborated in their own repression?
We love to demonize dictators; we merely get confused when we see how the dictators are loved by their subjects. Maybe those of us in places like the United States are the freaks - we believe in the supremacy of the individual, an idea that in many places on the planet would be intolerably revolutionary. \ The Mailbag:
Robert H. of Washington has his own description of why -2 times -2 equals positive 4. He says imagine that you ride the subway and buy a fare card at the beginning of the week for 10 dollars. The ride to work costs a buck, the ride back a buck. That subtracts 2 dollars from the card every day. At the end of the week, after five round trips, the machine keeps your card. You could say that's -2 times 5, which equals -10.
But what about Thanksgiving week? On Wednesday afternoon, the machine gives you your card back, and you don't have to go to work the next two days. So that's -2 times -2, which equals positive 4 - and so your card still has 4 bucks on it.
Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.
by CNB