Was Cuba ever really a
threat to the United States?
By Pat M. Holt. The
Christian Science Monitor. January 4,
2007.
ARLINGTON, VA. - On New Year's Day 1959,
Fidel Castro's ragtag guerrilla army marched
triumphantly into Havana. Mr. Castro himself
followed a few days later and began his
half-century of work carrying out his revolution.
This turned out to be a real revolution
as distinguished from the coups d'etat that
had previously characterized Cuban politics.
By the time Castro turned over power to
his younger brother Raúl in July
2006, he had ruled longer than any other
current world leader.
We know that Castro is sick; we do not
know his diagnosis.
The US intelligence community thinks he
has terminal cancer. A Spanish doctor who
recently examined him says he does not have
cancer and can return to work after rehabilitation.
Either way, it is likely that his era has
ended.
Castro has outlasted nine US presidents:
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford,
Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton.
A tenth president, George W. Bush, is halfway
through his second term. All of these except
Mr. Carter did everything they and their
CIA directors could think of to bring Castro
down - without success. (Carter took a step
toward restoring diplomatic relations but
did not follow through after Cuba intervened
in the Angolan civil war.)
The United States would long since have
come to terms with any other revolutionary
Latin American government. That it has not
done so with Cuba is due mainly to ideological
bias in Washington and Havana as well as
the baleful influence of hordes of anti-Castro
refugees in Miami.
Castro has an efficient and ubiquitous
secret police and has not hesitated to use
it to quash opposition. But also, and somewhat
paradoxically, he has had remarkable public
support. In major part, this came from what
he did to change Cuban society.
He improved healthcare and made it more
widely available, despite a drain of skilled
health professionals who streamed out of
Cuba into Miami. He improved literacy -
which was already good by Latin American
standards - by forming "literacy brigades"
to teach illiterate men and women how to
read. Schoolchildren are clean and neatly
dressed. They even wear shoes. They look
well fed - no distended bellies, no spindly
arms and legs.
The Mafia was thrown out of Cuba when Castro
took power, and with it, the legality of
gambling and prostitution.
The Castro regime attacked the housing
shortage by obtaining land and building
materials and organizing teams of workers
who built apartment houses. Construction
workers then had priority for living in
the apartments.
The revolution got a big boost from the
Soviet Union, which sold oil for less than
the world price and bought sugar for more
than the world price. This provided a subsidy
of $3 billion to $4 billion a year, which
ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This precipitated a major economic crisis
for Cuba. Castro reacted by reluctantly
allowing hard currency investment in tourist
facilities. Europeans flocked to them, and
Cuba became in effect a two-currency economy.
On one side was the Cuban peso; on the other
was the US dollar which, despite opposition
from both the Cuban government and the US
Treasury, was what the melange of largely
European currencies settled into.
On one side are Cubans who are living reasonably
well; on the other are Cubans who are barely
surviving.
There the matter rests. It remains to be
seen who the long-term successor to Fidel
Castro will be, or what he or she will do,
but the US can learn some things from its
Cuban experience. Apart from the missile
crisis (which was precipitated by the Soviet
Union), Cuba has never been a threat to
the United States. Rather, as Sen. J. William
Fulbright (D) said in arguing with President
Kennedy against the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion,
Cuba has been "a thorn in the flesh,
not a dagger in the heart." Why, then,
have so many presidents, some of them otherwise
sensible, been so upset about it? In part,
Florida politics; in part, the possible
spread of communism; in part the fear that
Castro might seek to extend his revolutionelsewhere
in the Western Hemisphere.
Yet Castro said many times that revolutions
cannot be exported. He warned President
Salvador Allende, who died trying to bring
a similar revolution to Chile, not to pick
a fight with the US. His assertions don't
match with the US fear that Castro would
try to spread his revolution.
A regime change is under way in Cuba. Maybe
we would all be better off if there were
a policy change in the US as well.
* Pat M. Holt is former chief of staff
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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