Probably the most-persuasive evidence that socialism has failed in that country is the chart showing how Cuba has fallen behind other (very similar) countries ever since Fidel Castro took over more than six decades ago.
Though I’ve always thought the most-damning visual came from the Economist, which compared labor productivity in various Latin American nations. As you can see, workers are very poor because it’s almost impossible to be productive in a socialist system.
For purposes of today’s column, however, I don’t want to focus on Cuba’s economic performance.
Instead, I want to condemn the dictator who has caused that nation’s economic misery.
Fidel Castro not only impoverished his people. He oppressed them and stole from him. A kleptocrat, par excellence.
All things considered, a terrible human being.
Here are some excerpts from John Suarez’s article for the Brussels Signal.
Fidel Castro died in 2016 after handing power over to his brother Raúl in 2006. Communists the world over claim him as one of their own, and international visitors are being hosted by the dictatorship to celebrate this anniversary. In 2006, Forbes magazine reported that Fidel Castro’s net worth was $900 million (€780 million). One of his bodyguards, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, who defected, wrote a tell-all book, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo, detailing Fidel’s 29 luxury homes, four yachts and private island (Cayo Piedra), not to mention other luxuries. This in a country where 89 per cent of the population lives in extreme poverty.
Writing for the American Thinker, Monica Showalter was similarly scathing.
The left has been making a big deal about its hatred for billionaires, hoping the public will buy into its philosophy of envy and rubbish about an economic pie that somehow never expands. …But there’s one billionaire they make an exception for: Dead Cuban dictator Fidel Castro… Which was ironic: Castro died a billionaire. He got his wealth by taking it from other people, a textbook case of rigging and not paying his fair share, as Fake-Indian Liz ranted about, usually just stealing it outright until there was nothing left to steal. …Now the left is celebrating it. Seems they have double standards on billionaires, and a man like Elon Musk, who earned his fortune by making electric cars and payment systems and converting it into rocket launches to Mars, is the bad guy here, while Castro, who stole and hid his wealth, nothing but a two-bit thief who took a lot of stuff, is the hero.
And it is not an exaggeration to point out that Castro is a hero to some folks on the left.
Here’s a tweet from the economic Luddites at Democratic Socialists of America.
If that happens, the Washington Post has a good suggestion in a recent editorial.
The Victims of Communism Museum, in a handsome 1912 Renaissance Revival building across from McPherson Square, is “dedicated to commemorating the more than 100 million people killed by Communism around the world,” its website says… Given the contemporary fashion for museums establishing branches in other countries — the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Louvre Abu Dhabi — we suggest a new entry: the Victims of Communism Museum Havana. Many people in Cuba long for freedom from the totalitarian regime that has immiserated the island for 67 years. Cuba will be free one day, the arrival of which the Trump administration is, in its ham-fisted way, trying to hasten. But the human and economic wreckage inflicted on the Cuban people should not be allowed to fade from memory. …An estimated 1 million Cubans, or about 10 percent of the population, have fled in recent years…trash piles up in the streets because garbage trucks have no fuel. But on the bright side, the squalor is at no risk of driving away tourists, who basically quit coming during the pandemic and never returned. Perhaps the charms of sipping a mojito in moldering Old Havana, gazing upon a cowed and fearful citizenry, have waned even for vacationing social-justice warriors.
