But it is nice to hear you have reservations about the value of “free” elections, Rat. They come with a price tag like everything else where “Democracy As We Know It” rules. And it is nice to hear you oppose the embargo.

Maybe you could just sing praises for Che and Camilo, long dead battlefield warriors, and for the people of Cuba, who have survived and are surviving the longest, most inhumane embargo in the history of the planet.

http://www.counterpunch.org/castro02232008.html

After that, I don’t know, free elections.

I think a strongman dictator is a strongman dictator. And to pick and choose which enemy of freedom we decide to condemn shows inconsitency.

I’ve never been to Cuba. And I don’t agree with current U.S. policy toward the country. But I’m not going sing praises for a dictator like Casto.

Do you think it’s a free nation?

Why can’t people leave Cuba legally, Mulga?

“Please Rat, stop insulting rodents.”

Why don’t you stop insulting me? Because I didn’t insult you.

I guess the Generalissimo was allowed to leave.

Travel is broadening, but it’s a privilege denied to most Cubans.

Make no mistake. Castro was brutal.

And he’s had 40 years to show the world he was pointing the way to…something. But what he has is a middling Caribbean country with crappy cars and no small measure of desperation.

That’s not good. It’s not even great.

Such a “mushmouth”; totally lacking any intellectual content whatsoever!

I was born of a privileged family, but my dad was not an elitist, and by the time I was in my early twenties and in law school (1963-66), I knew that Castro was the consummate underdog of the 20th century, and that if/when I inherited money from my father (and/or from his father – a Goldwater conservative wildcatter who started getting rich in about 1930, by striking oil in the Taylor Oil Field about 30 miles east of Austin, Texas), a goodly portion, or hopefully all of it, was going to go to la Gente Cubana, Fidel, Che, y Camilo. I got my chance in 1998, and took $50,000 cash thru Cancun in a money belt with a Reality Tour given by Medea Benjamin, having told no one about it but my psychiatrist and my then-wife before doing it. (I had already told her, and it was his very astute suggestion that I tell absolutely no one.) Landing in Havana and seeing, still on the airport’s walls and visible to land airplanes “Patria es humanidad!” was the thrill of my life. And I was almost speechless with emotion when the Head of the International Organization that was Reality’s Tour’s contact in Havana thanked me personally at a large party being given about a week after I’d placed the stacks of $100 bills on a table in front of his assistant.

To me, the most impressive thing about the first 150 pages of Fidel’s autobigraphy, was the gradually dawning realization that the revolution absolutely eschewed terror. Because the case of Cuba is still taught as a classic example of modern imperialism, at Harvard for example, and the soil for revolution vis-a-vis the Giant in the North was seeded far earlier and far more fertile-ly than later in Vietnam, for example. Eschewed terror, and used Che’s medical skills, and other revolutionaries’ medical skills as the movement gained momentum in 1958 and 1959, to medically attend captured Batista soldiers as well as their own.

In any case, I suppose that’s enough about me and my love for the Cuban people to enable five or ten internet assassins to say what a fool I was, and of course the money never got to the hospitalized children I was later informed that it was would be used for, etc, etc, blah, blah.

Oh no, one other true life story: about an ex-boxer/street person who accosted me about 4 AM the second morning the tour was in Santiago, and I asked him to meet me at the hotel we were staying at, late that afternoon. He did, and my spanish was still worse than his english. But he told me in english about being brought by “the promoters” to Florida in the 1940′s (I’d already told hm my father had taken me to see Willie Pep fight in San Antonio in the 1950′s); and after fighting eight or ten fights and getting squat for them, but big promises, he had landed back in Cuba broke and disilllusioned. I commiserated of course and bought him another mojito, and then the bulbe went off, and I asked him if he knew how Americanos sometimes referred to the fight business. He said, No? “La deportiva dulce,” I said. And almost before the third word was out of my mouth, he broke out into the loudest (and only) laughter I ever heard from him. And he was still smiling when our tour left the porch of the hotel overlooking Santiago’s central plaza, and I left with them.

Lloyd Rowsey

The problem was that it was all a “pot of message” whereas the working people wanted a mess of potage! Or a pot of anything as long as it was eatable! As long as the Soviet dictatorship poured treasure into the Cuban publicity stunt, including the military adventures that were part of it, Castro rode high on the hog. But that treasure was obtained by depriving working people in the Soviet Union of basic necessities and anything remotely ressembling a normal European lifestyle. Once the Soviet dictatorship was overthrown, the plug was pulled on Castro and he survived only because he was more use to the US as a propaganda bogeyman than if he had been overthrown.

I think Mr Rahkonen is right to think that when the Cuban dictatorship is overthrown, and that may happen quicker than anyone thinks, Cuban will follow the current Latin American trend towards the 21st century ideology which is being built on the success of 20th century socialism and 19th century liberalism. Castro will probably be remembered as a charming con man and a consummate showman. An amusing gadfly who conned po-faced Americans into taking him seriously!