Peddling fidel’s “Succession”

About a year ago, Cuba “experts” were proclaiming that the succession from Fidel to Raul had gone off without a hitch.
One “expert” Julia Sweig – was giddy that fidel had pulled off his “final victory” over the Miami Mafia and Washington by “orchestrating the transition” himself.
castro was praised for his brilliant scheme of handing power over before his death and thus thwart the evil Empire from bringing democracy to Cuba through a real transition.
And so, here we are almost a year later, and we’re still stuck on inertia.
Nothing has changed and Cuba expert Sweig is still cynically peddling the brilliance of the fidel engineered Cuban succession:

“Fidel’s illness but not death and now this further yielding allows Raúl and the others around him who are running the country to manage expectations and keep them under control, but allow this process of debate and slow but incremental reform to go forward,”

Maybe I can’t fully grasp the situation because I’m no Cuba expert, because I know fidel is evil and English is my second language and all, but if last year, fidel in all his Machiavellian maniacal brilliance, had pulled off his “final victory”, why is it that a year later the Cuban regime is still “managing expectations and keep them under control”- in other words, lying-just to hold on to power in an ever more fragmented and divided regime?
fidel, other than killing and oppressing the Cuban people and bringing misery to Cuba, has never been successful at anything. All he has ever “managed” to do is hang on to power by holding a people hostage-at gunpoint- and by receiving handouts from the enemies of America willing to finance his thorn in the side of the US role. All other schemes have been failures. He has even been a failure at dying.

11 thoughts on “Peddling fidel’s “Succession””

  1. Nobody is an ” expert” when it comes to Cuba
    ” for 49 years El unico experto en todo esto ha sido fidel castro ruz
    he has all the questions and all the answers”
    fantomas Dic 18, 2007

  2. Gusano,
    I agree with all except for the dieing part. Much to our dismay, I think he’s taken this long to die because he’s needed to suffer with a crap bag on his side, floating in excrement and all the other indignities that he has suffered as payment for all his arrogance and cruelty. I just wish someone in the heavens would realize that they could keep him in that condition for 50 more years and he still wouldn’t pay for what he’s done, then scratch the whole payment process and send him straight to hell already.

  3. I’m getting ready for the Cuba experts to start proclaiming that fc is holding on through sheer will and revolutionary determination to outlast Dubya-that should start next year.

  4. I think that on the contrary to Sweig’s opinion, fidel’s long and drawn out illness has created an environment of ever increasing expectations. Soon Raul is going to have to put up or shut up. People are losing their fear and starting to openly defy the regime. As Juan Amador says, the spark that will ignite a movement in Cuba will be unpredictable. The best we can do is provide conditions for that spark to take hold.

  5. Personally, I don’t think fidel ever had any detailed plans to turn over power to raul. He probably thought he would keep on ruling until his last dying breath and after that it would become raul’s problem. Maybe he had some concern about his legacy, but considering the fact that he is quite aware that history will not absolve but condemn his existence after he’s gone, it is quite likely he has no concern about legacies. He saw what happened to the “triumphs” of the USSR when the iron curtain collapsed and the truth was exposed.
    The curveball came when he got too sick to appear in public 18 months ago. His ego would not allow him to appear to the world as a frail old man more dead than alive. It doesn’t seem he ever anticipated that scenario and now, if he’s still alive, he’s just shooting from the hip. If a plan existed to transfer power to someone else while fidel was still (or said to be) alive, they would not look like the Keystone cops they look like now in Havana.
    I have to agree with Gusano’s brilliant last sentence: “He has even been a failure at dying.”

  6. Here is my 2004 academic review of Julia Sweig’s propagandistic book “Inside the Cuban Revolution,” which is an apology for Fidel Castro:
    http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/academic/fhq-12-04.pdf
    Cuban studies, like former Soviet studies, is a bipolar field. This is partly because the Castro regime is a zealous guardian of its revolutionary image as it plays into current politics. As a result, the Cuban government carefully screens the writings and political ideology of all scholars allowed access to official documents. Julia
    Sweig arrived in Havana in 1995 with the right credentials. Her book preface expresses gratitude to various Cuban government officials and friends comprising a who’s who of activists against the
    U.S. embargo on Cuba during the last three decades.
    This work, a revision of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation, analyzes the struggle of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship from November 1956 to July 1958. Sweig recounts how the M-26-7 urban underground, which provided the recruits, weapons, and funds for the guerrillas in the mountains, initially had a leading role in decision making, until Castro imposed absolute control over the movement. The “heart and soul” of this book is based on nearly one thousand historic
    documents from the Cuban Council of State Archives, previously unavailable to scholars. Yet, the author admits that there is “still-classified” material that she was unable to examine, despite
    her repeated requests, especially the correspondence between Fidel Castro and former president Carlos Prio, and the Celia
    Sánchez collection.
    Sweig is politically selective regarding her oral sources. She conducted nineteen interviews in Havana, including former socialite Naty Revuelta, the mother of Castro’s out-of-wedlock daughter Alina. The author omitted interviewing leading revolutionary participants who are dissidents in Cuba or in exile. These include Gustavo Arcos, Huber Matos, Pedro Diaz Lanz, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, Carlos Franqui, Manuel Ray, Raúl Chibás, and Millo Ochoa, who are mentioned in the book, and Castro’s sister Juanita, who lives in Miami. These persons have been minimized or excised from the official historiography produced in Cuba, and
    Sweig has abided by that pattern.
    The author had difficulty describing the terrorist campaign waged by M-26-7 with kidnappings, airline hijackings, assassinations,
    and indiscriminate bombings in schools, nightclubs, theaters, and other public places. According to the New York Times, these attacks intensified during the last three months of the revolution, when three hundred bombs exploded in Havana. Sweig downplays these incidents and refers to them with euphemisms such as “sabotage” (used-twenty-four times), “the underground’s
    harassment campaign,” and “massive display of firepower by the militia.” Sweig naively asks, “Had Fidel approved of this strategy?”
    She portrays Castro as an infallible leader detached from the terrorist acts committed by his underlings. The most heinous of these crimes, overlooked by Sweig, was the first international airline hijacking in history. Five men wearing M-26-7 armbands seized a commercial Cubana Viscount plane, Flight 495 from Miami to Varadero on 1 November 1958. It crashed into Nipe Bay, killing seventeen passengers and crew, including women, children, and six U.S. citizens.
    In describing the revolutionary triumph, Sweig omitted analyzing the major impact of the U.S. arms embargo on the Batista regime in March 1958 and the ultimatum for Batista to step down
    delivered by the U.S. Ambassador on 17 December 1958. There is also no mention of the participation of twenty-five Americans who fought with the guerrillas, including Comandante William Morgan, or the role of Afro-Cubans in the revolution, none of whom appear in any of the twenty-two photos in the book.
    Sweig acknowledged that her work “does not represent an indepth examination” of the Cuban revolution, whose full history “has yet to be written.” She lamented that during her last meeting with Fidel Castro in 2001, he agreed to speak with her about the early revolutionary period, but had not done so when her work went to press. The author hopes that her book “will raise enough questions to prompt him to schedule an interview.” The recent wave of repression in Cuba indicates that her wait for the interview may be a long one.

  7. I don’t think history will not call fc a genius. He was just lucky. Somebody, maybe fc, had the idea to take away all the guns early in the revolution. Next they took away the food. It takes no genius to figure out that an army, or a people, cannot fight without guns and food. That , in my humble opinion, is one of the reasons, one of the reasons fc has stayed in control for so long. That, and the support of lackeys around the US and the world.

  8. Not to be a total cynic, but each time I see or hear an eager self-avowed “expert” on Cuba, I cringe (first), then sprinkle a healthy dosage of mistrust on what they are telling me. Thank God for this blog, that educates and sets the record/s straight.
    And while I regret that the beast appears to still be alive, consuming time and energy and resources and making other miserable, whether he dies tomorrow or suffers for another 50 years, one thing is certain: justice awaits him on the other side. Even when it looks weird and screwy to us on this end, no one (NObody, certainly not him) escapes their time of accounting with their Maker. So, for him, indeed ya viene llegando.

  9. Just a few of the reasons fifo has been able to stay in power:
    He began in 1959 by disarming the population and executing everyone (that didn’t escape in time) in the military. He executed the chiefs of police and/or anyone in a leadership position.
    He imprisoned/executed former “revolutionaries” that opposed him. (Cubans began to leave Cuba in troves for fear of their –and their family- lives).
    He set up the CDR (in each neighborhood block) with people loyal to the revolution. The CDR spied/spies on all the people living in their block. They know everything (and I mean everything) that goes on in their block.
    He closed ALL the churches and did away with all religious holidays (including Christmas).
    He confiscated/expropriated all private property/assets making the Cuban government the only employer.
    He instituted the food rationing card. Those that opposed the regime were/are denied the rationing card and as a result they can’t buy food to feed their family.
    He took away the “Patria Potestad” from parents, making the government the one responsible for “raising” the children after age 7. All decisions made pertaining to their education/indoctrination was/is made by the Cuban government.
    He instituted summer “working farms” for high school students ages 15 and up. While at these working farms parents were “discouraged” to visit their children. These children were/are not only indoctrinated, they were/are told it was/is “their solemn duty to the revolution” to tell on their parents.
    Any student that rebelled against the government was placed in a concentration camp called the UMAP.
    He did away with ALL social institutions.
    He instituted a widespread network of informants (secret police) so effective that the STASI was impressed (still in place). When members of STASI visited Cuba, they remarked that the Cuban government’s operation had surpassed that of theirs.

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