Investors Business Daily on the not-soon-enough departure of Fidel Castro:
Is It Fidel’s Finale?
Communism: Cuba rearranged the deck chairs of its sinking Titanic by putting Fidel Castro out to pasture and naming another 80-year-old in his place. Whatever the dictator ship claims, word is out: The end is near.
The defining reality of 52 years of communism in Cuba is massive economic failure. The one-party state that rules with an iron fist in the name of “the people” is not only bankrupt, but completely incapable of feeding, housing, employing, medicating or providing any semblance of a decent life for Cuba’s 11 million citizens. On every last front, it’s a failure.
But that hasn’t stopped Cuba’s communist party, at its 6th Congress, from attempting to put a Potemkin face on “reform.” Tuesday it named 80-year-old Jose Ramón Machado Ventura as party chief and 79-year-old Ramiro Valdes, famous for cracking down on freedom of speech in both Cuba and Venezuela, as his lieutenant, supposedly to show it can correct course.
Fact is, it can’t. Communism is a monopoly of power whose only ambition is to extend its rule into eternity. It creates nothing of value and cannot raise standards of living, the way, say, Chile, a country the same size as Cuba, did, beginning in 1973.
In stepping down, Castro, 84, said as much when he declared he was confident his “revolution” would continue without him. No, not bettering Cubans’ lives, just his communist cronies continuing to rule.
But the Castroites’ “reform” is no more than a rotten state’s effort to save itself by firing workers. Last year, the regime announced layoffs of 500,000 state workers and issued 200,000 business licenses for menial jobs.
It didn’t go as expected. Half the workers have been laid off, but three quarters of the licenses have been grabbed by Cubans already running illegal businesses. Some workers at useless state jobs making $19 a month ask to be laid off to get licenses and be their own bosses.
It’s set off a chain reaction of market activities the authorities are powerless to control. Visitors to Cuba report that in the last four months, every house is now hawking something — string, paint, artwork, fruit — like a vast national garage sale.
At some point small businesses become big businesses, as happened in the USSR and Vietnam. Though the regime believes it’s in control, it’s not — not at a time when tyrants are being thrown out the world over.
As people taste their first freedom, communism is finished. As in Tunisia, those fruit sellers you see in Havana are the first bellwether of freedom.