The Good

The Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago focused among other things on the exclusion of Cuba.  President Obama appears ready to engage Cuba but on what terms.  A return to pre-Castro Cuba is not an option, at least for the people of the island.  Fidel Castro was an icon of the 20th century.  His legacy will live on in Cuba for generations to come.  Some people hate him, some people love him.  Castro has done marvelous things for Cuba.  Did he make mistakes?  Yes, of course he did.  But the benefits to the island far outweigh any negative. 

It is true that elections as we know them have not been held in Cuba since Castro marched into Havana to seize power January 1, 1959.  Oh wait, elections hadn’t happened in Cuba for a long time prior to Castro occupying the presidential palace.  So maybe U. S. hatred of Cuba wasn’t about democratic ideals.  I know, it was about land reform.  How dare Castro distribute land legally owned by faceless American corporations to those greedy campesinos.  Or maybe it was the public education or health care that offended the moral sense of America.  Whatever it was, for the sake of the Cuban people, I sure hope the Americans don’t get their way and dismantle it. 

The Bad

I have always wondered what the Castro revolution might have looked like had it not faced the enmity of the world’s most powerful state since its infancy.  All states while under siege from a foreign power centralize authority and keep a fairly tight reign on political factions.  For example Canadians should read the War Measure Act.  To think that U. S. behaviour did not affect Cuba would be naive to the extreme.  With the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its patron and source of much of its foreign capital.  The island has been facing economic hardships since the 1990s, not because Castro’s economic policies were flawed, but because the United States won the Cold War. 

People will follow anyone who offers them bread.  Castro gave them bread but much more in the bargain.  While he was forced to keep tight political control he did not sink to using death squads as most American supported Latin American regimes have done.  Cuban jails hold political prisoners as does America’s today.  Just ask Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement.  Barak Obama has a chance here to show that he is truly a different kind of American politician.  Can he reach out America’s hand in friendship without clenching the fist and forcing a wad of America political culture back down the throat of Cubans.  A minor incident gives me some inkling of what is to come.  When questioned about a book he received as a gift from Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, Obama made a joke.  The book was a chronicle of the abuses of the South American continent by American and European powers.  I know that would leave me laughing in my

The Ugly

armchair.  (The book is The Open Veins of Latin America:  Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano) 

Our intrepid leader, Stephen Harper, in his usual right off the hay wagon style said that he supported warming up relations between Washington and Havana but reassured his supporters back home that he was still an anti-communist conservative.  I must have missed that class back at university.  The one where we studied pro-communist conservatives because I have never heard of them before.  It just shows that none of us are as smart as we think we are.

For the Cuban people, Fidel Castro passing from the political scene, should be and I suspect is for most, a moment of reflection.  Fidel’s health has been failing in recent years.  He has had to hand over political control to his brother Raul although I suspect he is no farther away from the levers of power than his health forces him.  Raul reminds me of those reasonable facsimiles one could send in instead of actual boxtops to receive a baking soda submarine.  He is just not the real thing.  Regardless it is not Raul that the Americans have to deal with, it is the legacy of a giant, Fidel Castro.