The museum of communism

Fifty years ago last weekend, Fidel Castro led a small group of followers on a near-suicidal raid against an army barracks, the precursor of Cuba’s 1959 revolution. Fifty years on, Mr Castro is still there, bearing an increasing resemblance to a Caribbean King Lear. Having outlived many of his enemies, he is busy finding more: his anniversary speech was mainly an angry rant against the European Union. Maybe that was because he has little left to celebrate, except survival.

In April, in its harshest crackdown on dissent in decades, his regime imposed long jail terms on 75 opponents, most of them independent journalists, librarians or democracy activists. Mr Castro justified this as a necessary defence against “regime change” promoted by an American administration he sees as the most aggressive towards Cuba since the 1960s. Outsiders (such as the EU, which withdrew its aid and curbed political ties) believe the crackdown’s real purpose was to silence a small but growing opposition before economic problems amplify the grumbles of discontent. The problems do, indeed, go deep. Many poorer Cubans got some benefit from the radical egalitarianism of Mr Castro’s revolution, especially from its achievements in health and education. The infant mortality rate is the lowest in Latin America, and similar to that in the United States. Yet such gains came at a heavy cost, in lost human freedom and in Soviet subsidies. When the latter disappeared, Mr Castro opted to preserve his regime at the price of its principles. Ten years ago last weekend — a date which will be seen as the beginning of the end of the revolution — he legalised the use of his arch-enemy’s currency, the American dollar. He had earlier invited foreign investors to Cuba to develop a mass tourist industry.

Ironically, the only things that now stand between Mr Castro’s revolution and mass poverty are remittances from the 1.2 million Cubans who live in the United States and investors and tourists from the EU, whose governments he now abhors. They cannot mask the strains on the vaunted health and education services. But they have weakened the regime’s control, exposed the bankruptcy of the communist economy and introduced new inequalities. In Cuba now, a waitress in a tourist hotel or a prostitute earns more in a day than a surgeon or teacher gets in a month. The dollar shops overflow with goods, while in the peso economy of subsidies and rationing, shelves are often bare. To have a family in Miami is more useful than to have a Communist Party card. Given this demonstration of the superiority of market economics, what keeps Mr Castro in power, 14 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Repression, and the fact that Cuba is an island from which escape is hard, are part of it. But so too are Cubans’ residual respect for their leader, their fear of the future, and the United States’s futile trade embargo. His successful defiance of the trade embargo and the revolution’s past social achievements still give Mr Castro a certain aura among people such as members of the European Parliament, Hollywood film directors and Latin American students. But like the 1950s American cars and decaying Spanish-colonial tenements, Mr Castro has become part of the island’s time warp. Repression apart, his revolution has come to resemble a Potemkin village of stage scenery. Behind the picturesquely crumbling fa?ades, the dollar is already in charge.(Guest editorial from The Economist).