The anti-Batista rebellion was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent, beginning with Fidel Castro himself. “Workers and peasants” were conspicuous by their scarcity. The Castro-Che regime’s initial showpiece cabinet consisted of seven lawyers, two university professors, three students, one doctor, one engineer, one architect, one former city mayor, and one captain who defected from the Batista army.
17
They were a notoriously “bourgeois” bunch, as Che himself might have put it. By 1961, it was the workers and
campesinos,
or country folk, who made up the overwhelming bulk of the
anti
-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray Mountains.
No discussion of Cuba is complete without mentioning Cuba’s vaunted “health care.” Colin Powell himself, at the same time he was making his case against Saddam Hussein at the United Nations, was quoted as saying that “Castro had done some good things for Cuba.”
18
Chances are he was anticipating some comment on Cuba’s “health care” from the reporter and answered on reflex.
So again, some facts. In 1958, Cuba had the lowest infant mortality in Latin America and the
thirteenth lowest in the world.
Cuba ranked ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, and Spain.
19
Today (and this if you believe the figures issued by Castro’s propaganda ministry), Cuba ranks
twenty-fifth from the top.
So relative to the rest of the world, Cuba’s health care has
worsened
after forty-seven years of Stalinism. Another thing: Castro’s Cuba’s staggering abortion rate of 0.71 abortions per live birth makes it—by far—the highest in the hemisphere and among the highest in the world. This reduces infant mortality by “terminating” high-risk pregnancies. Yet even with this harrowing statistic, Castro’s Cuba of today ranks relatively worse in infant mortality than Batista’s Cuba of half a century ago. Also, in 1957, Cuba had more doctors and dentists as a percentage of population than the United States and the United Kingdom.
20
A report snuck out of Cuba by a dissident reporter reveals that tuberculosis, leprosy, and dengue—diseases long gone from Cuba in 1958—are making a strong comeback in the Cuba of 2005.
21
Another left-wing truism is that Cuba was nothing but a corrupt and prostituted “playground” for American tourists. In 1957, Cuba hosted a grand total of 272,265 U.S. tourists. In 1950, there were more Cubans vacationing in the United States than Americans vacationing in Cuba. (In 2002, by the way, smack in the middle of the nefarious U.S. “embargo”—nay, the diabolical “imperialist blockade!”—approximately 203,000 Americans visited Cuba, by hook or by crook.
22
)
Biloxi, Mississippi, today has three times as many gambling casinos as all of Cuba had in 1958.
Of course, we can’t discuss Cuba without an account of her exploitation and humiliation by the rude and rapacious Yankee businessmen and gangsters who dominated her economy. Cuba’s Mayari province was a “virtual vassal state of United Fruit,” claims Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson. Cuba itself was “a virtual semicolony of the United States,” claims Jorge Castañeda. Che Guevara himself berated the United Fruit Company as “the Green Octopus.”
23
In fact, in 1958—after only fifty-five years of independence following an utterly devastating war against Spain—only 9 percent of Cuba’s invested capital was American, and less than
one-third
of Cuba’s sugar production was by U.S. companies. Of Cuba’s 161 sugar mills, only 40 were U.S.-owned. And only a
fraction
of these were owned by United Fruit.
24
Some “octopus.”
“I think there is not a country in the world, including all the regions of Africa and any other country under colonial domination, where the economic colonization, the humiliation, the exploitation have been worse than those which ravaged Cuba.” Those words were not spoken by Che Guevara on the stump at the United Nations. That was John F. Kennedy in an interview with French journalist Jean Daniel in 1963. “The result, in part, of the policy of my country,” added JFK for good measure.
25
In choosing the advisors who would inform his Cuba policy, President Kennedy once said, “You can’t beat brains.”
The U.S. Embargo—Che Begged for It
That the U.S. embargo of Cuba was a preemptive, unwarranted, and malicious “punishment” of Cuba by the arrogant Bully to the North has become enshrined in worldwide academic/leftist folklore. For fifteen years straight now, the U.N. General Assembly has voted every year almost unanimously to denounce it, even aping Cuba’s eunuch of a foreign minister, Perez Roque, by terming it a “blockade.” Only the United States, Israel, and the Marshall Islands buck the vote. Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Javad Aghazadeh, was particularly vocal in favor of his Cuban friends at the last vote, climbing the stump to blast the “U.S. blockade” as “intolerance toward other political, economic, and social systems, that runs counter to protecting human rights and dignity!”
26
This lecture on intolerance and human rights issues from the delegate of a nation that wants Israel “wiped off the map.”
History tells a different story, one in which U.S. policymakers had little choice. Che Guevara, as president of Cuba’s National Bank, repeatedly raged against Cuba’s business ties to the United States. Even though the United States bought Cuban sugar above the world price, Che denounced America for “economic slavery”!
Okay, fine, said Ike. So Americans stopped buying Cuban sugar. Well, according to Che, this response was now Yankee “economic aggression”! When Jean Paul Sartre called Fidel, Raul, and Che “the children in power,” he meant it as a compliment. It was, in fact, a painful truth, for Cuban economic policy was a tantrum. Che Guevara
asked for the embargo
. In a hysterical speech televised on March 23, 1960, Che Guevara declared, “In order to conquer something we have to take it away from somebody. That something we must conquer is the country’s sovereignty. It has to be taken away from that something called monopoly. It means that our road to liberation will be opened up with a victory over the U.S. monopolies!”
27
Che was ordering mass larceny directed at U.S. businesses. As economic minister, Che ordered the theft of almost $2 billion from U.S. businessmen and stockholders. Some 5,911 businesses were stolen—lock, stock, and barrel—from their hard-working, capital-risking, rightful owners at gunpoint. This remains the biggest heist in history. In two weeks, and using a few bands of machine-gun-toting goons, Castro and Che swiped more from American businessmen than all the other “nationalizations” (lootings) by all other nationalist (looter) regimes on earth, combined.
Castro crowed about it gleefully into a phalanx of microphones and shrieked that he’d never repay a penny. And he hasn’t. A few who resisted the plunder were executed. One was American citizen Howard Anderson, who had his Jeep dealership stolen. (Anderson, the reader will recall, was one of the victims of Che’s vampirism.) Another was Robert Fuller, whose family farm was stolen. Like Anderson, Fuller was bound, gagged, and shoved in front of a firing squad.
Europeans, especially the French, gloated while watching Che and Castro loot Uncle Sam. Then they scooted in themselves, rubbing their hands. The Europeans, however, were surprised to miss their windfall. Cuba was more than willing to borrow, but found repayment of foreign commercial and bilateral debt with all nonsocialist countries decidedly inconvenient. It stopped payment in 1986. The Paris Club of creditor nations found Cuba simply uninterested in talking to them.
What about the $5 billion a year Cuba received from its Soviet sugar daddy?
Fidel repudiated those debts, too. Once again, history absolved him when his creditor—the Soviet Union—no longer existed. How could he repay a legal entity that no longer existed?
“Che Lives”—the Squalid Legacy
“We arrived in Cuba without political prejudices, intent on seeing the country outside the much-lauded tourist areas,” says Spanish back-packer tourist Isane Aparicio Busto. “The blow was shocking. We left with our perceptions about the reality of the Cuban revolution—and even with our prior social and political principles—demolished.”
Isane had returned from a trip to Cuba in late 2005. Like so many “hip” European tourists, Isane might have been expected to sport Che Guevara’s face on her backpack or T-shirt. I suspect she won’t now.
“We saw police everywhere. And it soon became obvious that Cubans are the victims of the 21st century’s version of apartheid. Hotels for foreign tourists, stores for foreign tourists, buses for foreign tourists—a world set apart from the Cubans themselves as they are prevented by the police from entering. . . . The Cuban people’s personal aspirations seemed completely mutilated. I’ve never felt such anguish about a nation and a people in my life. If I were a Cuban, I’d certainly be on a raft.”
28
It sounds so easy. Why, just hop on a raft. Soon you’re drinking café con leche with your cousins in Miami. Nothing to it! Except that up until very recently only one in three rafters lived through the ordeal.
Varadero, where Isane stayed, is a gorgeous beach east of Havana where millions of Cubans cavorted every weekend, at least during Cuba’s stint as a racist-fascist U.S. satrapy terrorized by crooks and gangsters.
In 1959, Fidel and his vanguard of the downtrodden rose in righteous fury. Inflamed by a patriotic fervor, they ended foreign humiliation of Cubans. Of this we’re assured by everyone from Charles Rangel, to Noam Chomsky, to Robert Redford, to Jesse Jackson, to Norman Mailer, to virtually any Ivy League history professor.
Now, after almost fifty years of this fervently nationalist revolution, the best of Varadero beach is barricaded against Cubans by armed police and reserved for rich foreigners, their local footservants, and prostitutes.
Jimmy Carter, Barbara Boxer, and high-rolling trade delegations from Nebraska, Louisiana, California, or Maine are welcome, as well as many Isanes. But let a nongovernmental Cuban citizen try to enter and he’s bludgeoned with Czech machine-gun butts.
And I suspect Isane didn’t know the half of it. She probably didn’t know that before the glorious revolution, Cuba had a standard of living higher than the Venezuela and Mexico she’d visited, and higher than half of Europe, and boasted almost double her native Spain’s per capita income.
Revolutionary Cuba’s early minister of industries and bank president Che Guevara had quite a base to work with. It usually requires an earthquake, volcano, tsunami, or atom bomb to match Che’s industrial and economic achievements in Cuba. Indeed Tokyo, Pompeii, and Hiroshima have all recovered. Havana, richer in the 1950s than Rome or Dallas, now resembles Calcutta, Nairobi, or Phnom Penh. One place where Cuban exiles agree wholeheartedly with Castro is regarding his exalted post as a Third World leader. He and Che certainly made Cuba into a Third World country.
In January 2006, supermodel Helena Houdova, who had also been crowned “Miss Czech” in 1999, visited Cuba. She followed in the footsteps of Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss, who had visited in 1998—but not in their exact footsteps. Campbell confined herself to the sparkling tourist enclaves and to the regime-approved sites, dutifully following the regime’s helpful “guides” to La Plaza de la Revolución dominated by its huge portrait of Che Guevara. She came away smitten with everything around her.
“I’m very nervous!” Campbell twittered after arriving late at a press conference held at Havana’s Hotel Nacional. “I just spent an hour and a half talking with your president, Fidel Castro! But he told me there was nothing to be afraid of. Fidel knew who we were from reading about us in the press, but he said that it wasn’t the same as meeting us in person. We had also read so many things about Fidel. It is a great pleasure to be in Cuba,” she gushed. “I’ve enjoyed myself, and I plan to come back. . . . Fidel Castro is a source of great inspiration for me, an intelligent and impressive man who fought for a just cause.”
29
Campbell was right about one thing: Fidel Castro indeed knew a lot about her. But not from perusing stories in
Cosmo
or
Elle
(more on this in a minute).
Czech supermodel Helena Houdova tried to shake her government “guides” and venture into the interior of Havana. She heads a charity called the Sunflower Foundation that assists poor, handicapped, sick, and orphaned children worldwide. The Castro regime could have told her not to waste her time looking for such things in Cuba. Everyone from Naomi Campbell to Eleanor “to be a poor child in Cuba is better than being a poor child in America” Clift could have told Helena Houdova that nothing remotely of the sort afflicts Cuban children.
But Ms. Houdova was born and lived in Czechoslovakia, a nation overrun by Soviet tanks in 1945 and again in 1968. Unlike Ivy League and Berkeley professors, and all those hard-nosed investigative reporters from Dan Rather to CNN’s Lucia Newman, she knew better than to believe the proclamations from the propaganda ministry of a Stalinist regime—especially those of its multitude of agents and useful idiots. “It is almost impossible to provide any assistance through official means because the Communist authorities refuse to admit anything in their country does not work,” Houdova told the
Prague Daily Monitor
before visiting Cuba.
30
The intrepid model visited several Havana hospitals (not the ones for tourists and foreigners, the ones for Cubans) and came away disgusted. She then started snapping pictures of the dreadful slums around her in downtown Havana. And that’s when the cops walked up and ripped the camera from her hands. “They screamed at us,” said Houdova. “We were afraid, but we grew up under communism and know what it is like.”