| When Oedipus, the tragic hero of Greek mythology, realized in agony and shame the calamity he had brought his city, he could not bear to see the results of his hubris. Overwhelmed with the knowledge of his wrongdoings, Oedipus stabbed his own eyes out, and went into exile. |
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| Havana, Cuba |
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In Cuba, Raul Castro, unwilling to change course, simply rewrites the history of the Revolution’s failure and seeks to dress his regime in designer clothing.
By any objective socio-economic measure, pre-Castro Cuba was a relatively advanced country. In the 1950’s Cuba’s infant mortality rate was the best in Latin America and the 13th lowest in the world. In the region Cuba ranked third in per capita food consumption, fourth in literacy, and first in television sets per capita.
Pre-Castro’s Cuba had 58 daily newspapers of different political hues and ranked eighth in the world in number of radio stations. In 1957, Cuba’s 128 physicians per 100,000 inhabitants ranked third in Latin America and ahead of the United Kingdom and Finland.
In 1958, Japan, with four cars per 1,000 inhabitants, was far behind Cuba’s 24 cars. Japan’s current rate is 453 passenger cars per 1,000 people and Cuba’s rate has dropped to 21. In 1957 Cuba’s average wage was higher than that of Belgium, Denmark, France, or Germany.
After 58 years of the reverse alchemy of central planning, Cuba has been transformed from one of the most prosperous countries in the Hemisphere to one of the most miserably poor. Raul Castro’s Cuba is a country anesthetized by fear and plunged into a culture of poverty with average yearly earnings below $250.
Moreover, according to the “Freedom in the World” report by Freedom House, Cuba remains the only country in the Americas deemed “Not Free” with scores in the worst-of-the-worst categories for political rights and civil liberties. Of the 47 countries in the world designated as “Not Free”, only 9 have scores slightly worst than Cuba (North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Somalia).
Yet, the architects of this tragedy are not disgraced, but honored in Latin America.
Given the abject failure of Cuba’s socioeconomic model, the sycophancy of Latin American leaders towards the Cuban leadership is perhaps best explained as a petulant form of anti-Americanism. It is not that the Cuban revolution has accomplished much for the Cuban people; it has not. It is that the Castros have successfully confronted the goliath of the North. That seems to be what Latin American leaders’ value from the disastrous Cuban experiment.
In “Oedipus at Colonus”, the second play of Sophocles’ trilogy, the exiled king dies cursing his sons to kill each other in battle, and his grave is said to have become sacred to the gods. The Castros have condemned Cuban brothers on each side of the Florida Straits to battle each other, but when the true history of the Cuban tragedy is known, the Castros graves will not be sacred to anyone. History will not absolve them.
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This article was originally published in English in the Miami Herald and in Spanish in El Nuevo Herald.
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