communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, left, with communist Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev
The Western hemisphere’s lone communist state, Cuba, announced this week that its ailing dictator, Fidel Castro, would step down. His brother, Raul, will reportedly take over the island nation.
Communist Castro ruled Cuba for 49 years—so much for Karl Marx’s withering away of the state—banning individual rights and torturing countless Cubans ever since. Today, even the Internet is banned in Cuba, a poor, struggling economy which depends on lurid European and Russian sex tourists that prey upon its starving young people, some natural resources, and money sent from relatives in the United States.
What happens now will be interesting. The Bush administration will probably squander this opportunity to advance U.S. interests, too. Castro, by himself, has never been what’s wrong with Cuba—a point lost on Cuban expatriates in Florida, who have demonized him for 50 years. Castro is merely another totalitarian thug and he can be replaced by another totalitarian thug. What’s wrong with Cuba is its philosophy: communism.
In his final years, Castro formed alliances with an axis of evil, to use President Bush’s phrase, (the President did no more to counteract this axis than he did to stop the other famously proclaimed axis): Venezuela, China, and Iran. Castro is known for cutting secret deals with states that are hostile to the United States—remember the Cuban nuclear missile threat posed by the Soviet Union—and, with communist China controlling the Panama Canal and Venezuela’s close proximity, the Caribbean could become a geopolitical hot zone. Look for these anti-U.S. states—which are allies in oil and arms—to assert power in this Western state before Cuba’s dictatorship withers away.
