Reflections on the Death of Fidel Castro

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Published: Thursday, December 15th, 2016 @ 8:14 am
By: Bobby Tony ( More Entries )

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This article is offered for discussion and thought on the future of Cuba since Fidel Castro has passed.

Fidel Castro took over the Cuban island in 1959. I was a Junior in high school when the Bay of Pigs invasion disaster occurred (April 1961). It made little difference to me at that time and I have very few if any actual memories of that event. My first presidential election would not be until 1964, and as a result I, like most teenagers I guess, just did not care about politics. Just one and a half years later the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) took place during my senior year. That got my attention as it no doubt did for many other teenagers as well as adults. I have a cousin in Greenville S.C. who became interested in Major Rudolph Anderson (pictured right) who was the shot down while taking high altitude pictures of the Missiles. He has been instrumental on trying to establish a monument there. Major Anderson was a native of Greenville and a graduate of Clemson University. Subsequent study and research on Cuba and Fidel Castro has given me a perspective that is more backward thinking than any realization at the time these events occurred. We were engaged in the Cold War up to our necks and the battle between Russia and the USA was paramount in the news. I have a very vague recollection about the Berlin Airlift in 1948. Since I was only three at the time my memories are retrospective based on contemporary knowledge.

Castro was a result of our support of Batista in Cuba. Batista was a brutal and corrupt dictator and as they say "The chickens will eventually come home to roost." I am not one that blames everything on America but the seeds are almost always planted when one country tries to run another country or sets up a puppet regime. I am not an isolationist but I serious question any politician who uses the "Clear and Present Danger" or "National Security" argument for meddling in other countries politics.

Fulgencio Batista
Fidel Castro's revolution was fueled by the support of the population with most likely some help from foreign governments, but it was home grown based on the abuses of Batista.

Fidel Castro

According to Castro, the revolutionaries started reorganizing with only two rifles. But by early 1957 they were already attracting recruits and winning small battles against Rural Guard patrols. "We'd take out the men in front, attack the center, and then ambush the rear when it started retreating, in the terrain we'd chosen," Castro said in his spoken autobiography. In 1958, Batista tried to snuff out the uprising with a massive offensive, complete with air force bombers and naval offshore units. The guerrillas held their ground, launched a counterattack and wrested control from Batista on January 1, 1959. Castro arrived in Havana a week later and soon took over as prime minister. At the same time, revolutionary tribunals began trying and executing members of the old regime for alleged war crimes. History.com-Fidel Castro.

The result of the revolution is the Cuban people traded one tyrant owned by the USA for one owned by the USSR. Pure and simple, it was a puppet government, but Fidel did not see himself as a puppet. He was a committed nationalist (Somewhat akin to Gaddafi) who took help from where ever it was offered. He was also fiercely Anti-American based on our support of Batista. But none the less he was "Just a Pawn in their Game" as Bob Dylan wrote about the civil rights movement in the USA at the time. Meanwhile the Cuban people suffered through it all.

Castro and Khrushchev
    Our economic embargo is not about the Cuban people. I suspect that the real reason for the embargo was to help drain the Soviet coffers of funds to support a regime that would not be self-sustaining without that support. Once the USSR fell the next puppet master was Venezuela. It too has failed. Venezuelas money no longer fits in a wallet

    Finally, I come to my conclusion which is based on nothing more than my only experience in Foreign Policy. After I decompressed from my tour of Vietnam, I formed the opinion that there was nothing to fear from the Vietnamese by the USA. The Vietnamese people have fought against foreign imperialism (I do not agree that was our purpose) since before we or the French were ever involved. Our battle had larger a global basis.

    My experience with the Vietnamese lasted just under one year. The war however and USA involvement with them lasted from 1954 through 1975 with the fall of Saigon. My lack of fear came to me in a reflective moment in 1975 when I was wondering why we had apparently squandered 58,178 and counting lives without a victory. The fears of the politicians that the domino theory would foretell the end of that part of the world for freedom were real and not imagined, but times change and results are not always predictable. I have no illusions that our involvement was designed to help the Vietnamese people, it was to stop the flow of communism in Southeast Asia as was stated by JFK and LBJ.

    I did feel however that no amount of government control short of a Mao-type purge could stop the lesson the Vietnamese people had learned during our occupation. And the new regime did its best to purge the former allies from its population. We left a legacy of "PURE CAPITALISM" there that I doubted any government could dislodge. It is the Black Market and it is super efficient based on pure supply and demand. I got it and you want it. How much are you willing to pay for it?

    My opinion is based on a few personal observations. Every time we would pitch camp anywhere near a village or population center, the Lambretta scooters would arrive as if we sounded a siren. Don't think that our coming and going was a secret. It damn hard to transport several hundred grunts in noisy Hueys without someone noticing it. They would bring American beer to sell us as well as other items that Infantrymen found important ( wink wink). As I remember, the beer sold for about $1 per beer. The native Beer called "33" sold for 50 cents a can. Although I did not smoke, cigarettes were not really a part of the black market trade in the field but they were big business in the cities. Cigarettes were in every resupply helicopter to the grunts along with an occasional one beer and soda per guy. The black market was alive and well. I often wondered how many tons of the supplies unloaded from the ships in Saigon Harbor actually made it to the Black Market.

I've got it you want it, how much are you willing to pay?
    The other factor that helped me form my opinion was the apparent lack of any concern from the residents of the small villages about whom the hell was running things in Saigon or Hanoi. The raised their crops and bartered trade with each other for essentials. In the rural areas money was not a big factor. Rural areas seldom have a problem with central government unless it intrudes on their space. It is the urban centers where the rabble-rousers ferment then and now.

    Since we were not paid in real USA dollars, any money that they got was in the form of MPC (Military Payment Certificates) which was supposed to only be good at USA facilities. Good luck with that policy. The MPC became the defacto fiat money for the locals, which they would use to buy things from each other. The only danger they faced is when MACV (look it up) decided to change the money supply from one color to another color. That happened twice when I was there. When they did that the old money was worthless at USA facilities as well as between the Vietnamese.

   Today the Vietnamese country is a thriving semi capitalistic / communist country.

Vietnam struggled to find its feet after unification and tried at first to organise the agricultural economy along strict state-run lines. But elements of market forces and private enterprise were introduced from the late 1980s and a stock exchange opened in 2000

Vietnam Today.

    What the hell does all this have to do with Cuba and the Cuban people? Have you ever been to Miami? There is a whole population of "CAPITALIST" living there in exile. I have a few Cuban friends and former business acquaintances left from my time living in South Florida. Many of the Cuban community that are third or fourth generation Americans feel that they are part of the exile community. Many of them would prefer that Cuba be treated like any other country where they could visit their relatives or return to start businesses. Some would like to see Cuba be the 57th state that Obama referred to. I have no doubt that there are many inside Cuba who have hope for a free society as well.

    Based on that and my Vietnamese experience, I think we will not have to worry about the future of the Cuban people when and if we finally open up trade and travel between Cuba and the USA. My only concern is if we or another country will try to meddle in their politics again. I am sure that Putin will test the resolve of Obama as well as Trump to see if he can re-establish Russia's influence in this hemisphere with post Castro-Cuba. We may in fact return to the Russian and USA battle for influence there. The Raul Castro regime will collapse of its own weight as have most communist countries without an economic basis or conquest. Sooner or later we must learn that we cannot be the umpire or policeman for human abuses or the ever catch all phrase "Human Rights." To do so would mean we would be a war with half the world and offering aid and or protection to the other half.

    As strange as it seems, the celebration in Miami on the announcement of Castro's death is really, what many have been waiting for since 1961. I would hope that Donald Trump will devise a policy to move the Cuban government towards a mutual beneficial policy. Communism has morphed into a pseudo-capitalist entity just as we have morphed away from capitalism.

    Once again I reiterate that I am not an isolationist and we should be very aware of potential Hitler's on the horizon, but trying to pick winners and losers in world geography has hardly worked for us or anyone in the past and most likely will not in the future. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan among others are good examples of the unintended consequences of meddling in other countries. I am by no means a fan of or excuse maker for Fidel Castro, I am just trying to put him in a context of the larger issues. He was a tyrant who betrayed the hope of his people after taking power. That seems to be a common theme among the freedom fighters.

   Years ago, I heard a speaker offer some of the best advice for changing the world I have ever heard. His basic premise was that if you truly wanted to change the world in any country send them plane loads of Bibles and Sears Roebuck catalogs. The Bibles would help them endure the hard times and the Sears catalog would give them a yearning for a better life that they would rise up and make the changes themselves without one American soldier shedding blood. It seems simplistic but it has a basic understanding of the human condition. The Baptist have made missionary work a cottage industry and though the Sears catalog is no longer around it exist on the internet. That is why Cuban has a ban on the internet. I doubt that they will ever be able to ban the faith of the Cuban people.