FACING MORTALITY

People whose loved ones have passed away often experience intense anger and disillusionment over their loss. They feel betrayed that a trusted individual whose guardianship, friendship or love they depended upon, in effect, abandoned them. They feel like orphans, lacking that guiding hand, encouraging, pointing to the possible, the achievable.

What happened in Cuba in 1959 is as important as similar events in Haiti in 1789. And both nations have had to pay the price socially, politically and economically for the independence they dared to seize from reluctant overlords. In some ways, we in parts of the English-speaking Caribbean are lucky that the British Empire was done with us, our economic and strategic value expired, so that we’ve had a fairer chance to muck things up more or less quietly as we struggle towards development.

Cuba didn’t actually belong to the USA but she might as well have been for all the freedom she had she couldn’t be anything other than the USA’s whorehouse and gambling den.

We living in what Washington regards as its backyard must appreciate what Cuba represents as a bulwark against US domination in the region. All should respect the incredible courage of Cuba’s attempt to put its house in order, the defiance of Castro who, famously, has outlived umpteen threats to his life and attempts to throttle Cuba’s self-determination.

Latin American history is a long saga of persistent and harmful economic and political intervention in the entire area. The Cuban story is almost magical in that context: the 1500 revolutionaries — pure heroes, the Davids of modern Caribbean history; the people heroic too — economically poor but for decades defiant against external hostility and subversion, their social development outstripping that of industrialised countries.

The USA remains embarrassed by tiny Cuba and is still seeking revenge through a near half-century trade embargo, getting increasingly petulant with each failed assassination attempt and economic setback Cuba overcomes. The recent US braying over the supposed imminent death of Castro is thoroughly distasteful. One cannot but defend the underdog when the two sides are so unevenly balanced, the self-interest so blatant.

We all know the triumphs of the revolution and also its failures but now we are daunted by what could be the approaching end. I am told the maximum leader himself is anguished by what will become of socialism after him.

When I was in Cuba in the early ‘90s the economy had imploded. The USSR had collapsed and Cuba had lost its main trading partner. Food and all supplies were scarce. Castro’s response was to allow limited private enterprise and legal use of the US dollar. He opened up Cuba to mass tourism, but once you left your hotel there was nothing to eat unless in special, expensive restaurants for tourists where you paid in $US.

Thousands of Cubans risked their lives fleeing the long food queues and the political rhetoric.

The “special period” saved the revolution but the social effect of acquiring foreign exchange was undesirable. It was incongruous to me that prostitution in Havana was open and tolerated. Cubans — known to be very friendly but desperate to get goods of any sort - befriended foreigners who became increasingly suspicious about the honesty of those relationships. Tourists’ complaints have grown about being hustled by Cubans anxious to sell anything or provide any service in exchange for food or money.

My fellow dinner guest now views Cubans through a filter, the human encounters as inauthentic.

Castro knows the corrupting effect of hungry bellies and to counter the danger the revolution faces reputedly launched, earlier this year, a new ideological battle — the Battle of Ideas, as he terms it, aimed at those who grew up in the “special period.” Prostitution has been reduced, the number of restaurants too, and his devaluation of the $US in relation to the peso is intended to make it unattractive to Cubans. He is reported to have said last November. “This country can self-destruct, this revolution can destroy itself.

“They (the US) cannot destroy it, but we can. We can destroy it, and it would be our fault.”Apart from Washington, the die-hard Cuban exiles in Miami, and the uninformed no one would want the Cubans to defeat themselves. They have been an inspiration. But Castro has his finger on the pulse of his society. He knows that the revolution hasn’t created the completely new Man and Woman, that corruption is widespread because the black market helps keep people alive, that Raul cannot replace him in people’s hearts. He knows too that a committee cannot run a country, that in the present climate the economy cannot expand, and that the battle for ideas is more of a war and the general is ill. Intimations of mortality are depressing.