Castro's Lesson

Check out Brad DeLong on how, yes indeed Communism produced economic disaster in Cuba just as it did everywhere else. But leaven Brad's righteous anti-Communism with a dose of Tony Karon's take on why Castro remained a compelling figure to many third world political leaders who knew perfectly well that emulating his policies would produce disaster.

I think there's probably a lesson to be learned with regard to current issues with Islamist political movements around the world. For good reasons and for bad ones, the romance of thumbing one's nose at the USA has powerful and important resonance for a lot of people around the world. Under the circumstances, it rarely serves our interests to get into dramatic confrontations with leaders who are far too puny to objectively threaten our interests. After all, what significance would Castro have without his superpower adversary? US persecution of the Communist regime in Havana is really the only thing it has going for it.

Meanwhile, Grame Woode imagines post-Communist Cuba.

Comments

I think Mr. DeLong's commentators are a lot closer to the truth than he is.

Posted by Hector | February 21, 2008 2:04 PM

Even as we speak, they are burning our embassy in Serbia.

Are any of the American channels covering this?

Posted by KathyF | February 21, 2008 2:12 PM

No, no, no. Please link to Chris Bertram's tribute to Mussolini making in the trains run on time, er, I mean, Castro defeating South African apartheid. Much better.

Posted by Al | February 21, 2008 2:22 PM

We went after Castro for the same reason we invaded Grenada: Oil tankers coming into our refinery nexus in Houston /Louisiana have to follow a narrow sea corridor for hundreds of miles through the reefs and are sitting ducks. Especially given the short range of jet fighters deploying from Texas. Just ask George W.
After all, Austin's current Airport used to be an Air Force Base until recently.

Plus,there was those nuclear ICBMs. And John Kennedy's buttkissers --in dicussing how he "stared down the Russian bear" --somehow forgot to mention all those Soviet Nuclear Missile subs deploying out of Cuban ports for much of the 1970s/1980s. And those Russian nuclear bombers flying up the East Coast from airfields in Cuba.

Posted by Don Williams | February 21, 2008 2:23 PM

I think there's probably a lesson to be learned with regard to current issues with Islamist political movements around the world.

Communism is founded in logic and reason. It fails because it assumes certain falsehoods about human nature and the ability of men to micromanage the entirety of a large society. It also never questions its own desirability. Fallacious and destructive as it is, it remains an intellectual philosophy.

Islamism (though not necessarily all belief in Islam), by contrast, is based on superstition and irrational adherence to violent trivialities. It is an anti-intellectual, primitive and barbaric discipline that considers reason and logic to be threats.

The notion that we could learn something about how to deal with Islamists from the history of our reaction to communism was wrong when Norman Podhoretz suggested it and is wrong now that Yglesias suggests it.

Posted by Shinyk | February 21, 2008 2:24 PM

Al,

Cuba _did_ play a large and critical role in defeating South African apartheid, thorugh their interventions in Angola and Namibia, are going to deny that?

Posted by Hector | February 21, 2008 2:24 PM

NPR covered today's earlier vandalization in Belgrade, but the crowd hadn't gotten inside of the empty building, yet.

I don't think the Cuban government is going to come apart at the seems just because Castro is (almost) out of the way. The Cuban economy has been managing for quite a while w/o outside subsidies, and Fidel's gradual fading from the scene gives everyone plenty of time to adjust.

Posted by cmholm | February 21, 2008 2:25 PM

Maybe Cuba is an economic disaster. But I think DeLong is asking the wrong question. It is more useful to ask whether Cuba would be better off had Castro never been there.

I tend to think the answer is no. Compare Cuba to other Latin American nations. Thanks to the US support of Trujillo, the Dominican Republic never became communist. Are they better off than Cuba because of it? Uh, no. Cuba ranks #5 among Latin American nations in the UN Human Development Index--higher than Mexico even. So I'm not sure that capitalism, and particularly the style of capitalism practiced by US companies in Latin America, would have left Cuba one iota better off economically than Castro did. And that doesn't even begin to take into account the significant social programs Castro implemented.

Posted by Erik | February 21, 2008 2:48 PM

"I think Mr. DeLong's commentators are a lot closer to the truth than he is."

I agree. The commenters were generally trying to make the case that either in certain individual areas Castro had a decent track record, that Castro wasn’t as bad other leaders, or didn’t have as much policy flexibility as Delong asserts. Delong by contrast seemed interested in broadly declaring Castro sucked. Delong wasn’t compelling on anything unrelated to economics. That Cuba could be better off economically if different economic policies were followed isn’t exactly cutting edge stuff.

Posted by Christopher Colaninno | February 21, 2008 2:57 PM

Erik said,

Compare Cuba to other Latin American nations. Thanks to the US support of Trujillo, the Dominican Republic never became communist. Are they better off than Cuba because of it? Uh, no. Cuba ranks #5 among Latin American nations in the UN Human Development Index,

Before that conclusion can be made, you would need to look at the difference in Development Index between Cuba and the Dominican Republic just before the Cuban Revolution. I would suspect that, because of pre-revolutionary foreign investment, Castro had a lot more to work with in confiscated assets than the Dominican Republic has ever had. But that's only a suspicion of mine.

Posted by Shinyk | February 21, 2008 3:02 PM

The consensus, in both parties and across the spectrum of the US political system is that the embargo is working. The embargo is effectively advancing what the US political system has identified as US interests.

What is the embargo doing effectively? Is it forcing Castro out of power? No. It is impoverishing Cubans. That is the job of the embargo.

Cuba has taken steps, in this case they happen to be the nationalization of assets owned by US entities, that have caused the US to attempt to crush the Cuban economy and the US is attempting to crush the Cuban economy.

If Cuba had a market economy but the US political apparatus for any other reason decided to attempt to crush the Cuban economy, they would be just as successful crushing Cuba's market economy.

Cuba could easily have an economy no more communist than China's with comparable economic results, but by a wide consensus the US political system has dedicated itself to ensuring that Cuba's economic results are poor.

If the argument is that ferocious opposition from the US is inherent in communism (which it is not, see China) then "communism" has been a disaster for Cuba. Not because of systemic inefficiencies but because of ferocious US opposition to Cuban economic growth.

But that argument requires decision-making agents in Cuba and in countries in Cuba's position, but machines in the US that automatically apply these ferocious policies. That's a weird position to take from inside the US, as an adjunct member of the US policy-making class.

Posted by Arnold Evans | February 21, 2008 3:07 PM

Considering that the US has always supported dictators and tried to overthrow elected leaders of Central and South America, this all boils down to a very simple question- is it better to ensure that everybody has equal access to the medical care and education a country can provide, or are you happier when a few billionaires and millions of dirt-poor slum dwellers average out to an arithmatical mean average of per capita income that is slightly higher?

Or you could do the short form- for almost 50 years Cuba has been defended against US invasion by a well-armed militia and the balanced outlook of world opinion. Maybe if more Americans had been allowed to travel to Cuba we'd have more understanding of how this could be so.

Posted by serial catowner | February 21, 2008 3:29 PM

When the subject turns to Castro, we quickly see that not much has changed since the days of Walter Duranty and The Nation defending the Moscow trials

The HDI is based on state-provided data.

Posted by Pithlord | February 21, 2008 3:45 PM

Brad DeLong has a kneejerk reaction to anything to the left of neoliberalism? Say it ain't so.

History works in funny ways. 1959 Cuba is like yesterday in the American cultural mindset -- and admittedly, The Godfather Part II and various MLB stars may have as much to do with that as the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis.

1954 Guatamala might as well be another planet.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | February 21, 2008 4:02 PM

Dear God, but Delong is odious. He begins by calling all who make reasoned points against his positions "Castro fans", and goes down from there:

he made the choice of political strategy, he did not let the people of Cuba make that choice.

Has this dumbass even heard of Guatemala? Look at all the nations who "let the people" make the choice, then got shredded by the US when the people made the wrong one.

I was in Cuba in 2004, and I would take it development-wise over any but 2 Latin American countries, in a Rawlsian veil of ignorance experiment.

Posted by nolaboyd | February 21, 2008 4:33 PM

nolaboyd,

I would infinitely rather be a peasant in Cuba than a peasant in India....and you're probably right about being a peasant in most other LA countries as well.

Everything I've heard from people who have been to Cuba- doctors, anthropologists, travelers- helps convince me that the HDI data is more or less accurate. I don't have any reason to disbelieve it.

History will absolve him, indeed.

Posted by Hector | February 21, 2008 4:38 PM

I'm reminded of a Dave Barry line that suggested that the motto of the CIA was "Proudly Overthrowing Fidel Castro Since 1962."

For what it's worth, I'd say Castro was worse than, say, Alberto Fujimori, about the same as, say, Augusto Pinochet, and better than, say, Papa Doc Duvalier.

In short, it's a level of badness that isn't worth getting massively worked up over from a historical perspective* -- he's not Pol Pot or Hitler -- but it's not worth defending either.

There are plenty of regimes that do some good things, and aren't truly monstrous in the Pol Pot or Hitler sense, but are on the whole somewhat cruel and oppressive. This has probably been the default mode of human organization throughout history -- truly monstrous totalitarianism and popular, democratic sovereignty are more recent modes of governance. It's worth making a distinction between the likes of Stalin or Mao and the likes of Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro, and Ferdinand Marcos, but for the life of me, I don't see why we should be defending the latter.

*Of course, it is worth getting massively worked up over from a personal perspective; if Castro or Pinochet has had you family members killed, then that's terrible.

Posted by Julian Elson | February 21, 2008 7:29 PM