Cuban Wretch "Escapes" Castro's Paradise

On Thursday, July 14, 2011, a young Cuban who tried to stow away inside the landing gear of a Spanish airliner died during the nine-hour flight from Havana to Madrid. It was, ironically, Lenin who invented the term “voting with their feet” during the Russian Civil War to describe people moving into areas controlled by the Communists. Collectivists have never found occasion to use that term again.


The flight of Cubans out of their horrific prison camp nation to anywhere else is a 60-year-old story. Fidel Castro inherited a nation that was among the most prosperous in the Western Hemisphere. Although there was much to dislike about Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban leader whom Castro ousted, there was also much to admire about Cuba before Castro.

Indeed, there was a great deal for collectivists to admire about Batista. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt, actually described Batista as a communist. Batista, the first Cuban leader to bring members of the Cuban Communist Party into his Cabinet, described himself as a “progressive socialist.” When Castro attacked Batista in 1953, the Cuban Communist Party actually accused Castro of “Putchism,” another one of the surreal words invented by Marxists which onlinedictionary.com defines as "a method of revolution or overthrow involving secret planning."

Batista had won during a competitive election in 1940, although he later effectively usurped power. Nevertheless, after his first term as President, Batista left office peacefully. Unlike Castro, who came from an affluent upper-class family, Batista grew up in poverty. He worked in the sugar cane fields, on railroads, and in the hard labor that the poor must do to survive.

Fulgencio Batista was part black, part Chinese, part American Indian, and part European. Unlike Castro, Batista genuinely was a “man of the people,” and his rise to power — from a sergeant in the Cuban army to leader of his nation — reflected that connection with ordinary people. When he was elected in 1940 with about 60 percent of the vote, he was the first non-white Cuban to win that office (the Barack Obama of his nation).

Cuba before Castro is uniformly depicted by the establishment media as horrific. The reality is dramatically different. While Batista and others ruled Cuba, the nation flourished. (This is in spite of the socialist policies of Batista, not because of those policies.) How well off was pre-Castro Cuba?

The Cuban peso had the same value as the U.S. dollar. There were 101 privately owned newspapers. Cuba had one radio per five Cubans and one television set per 28 Cubans. One out of every 40 Cubans owned a car, and one out of every 38 owned a telephone. These were among the best rates of ownership in the world. The infrastructure of Cuba — highways, ports, etc. — was considered by the U.S. Commerce Department to be the best in Latin America.

How well was labor compensated? The average Cuban industrial worker earned $6 a day in 1958. Although that figure sounds low to us in our hyper-inflated world, that wage level can be understood only in comparison with nations’ average daily industrial compensation at the time: Sweden ($8.10), Switzerland ($8.00), New Zealand ($6.72), Denmark ($6.46), and Norway ($6.10.) Cuba also had the seventh-highest level of compensation for agricultural workers in the world, behind only Canada, America, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, and Norway. Unemployment in Cuba was the lowest in Latin America.  Even the leader of the Cuban Communist Party until 1962, Anibal Escalante, said, “Cuba is one of the countries [in Latin America] in which the standard of living of the masses was particularly high.”

The per capita income was the third-highest in Latin America, after Argentina and Venezuela. Ginsburg’s 1959 Atlas of the World Economy placed Cuba at 22nd out of the 122 nations surveyed. Income surpassed that of Spain and Portugal and was comparable to that of Italy.

The Cuban public educational system received a higher percentage of the government’s budget than any other Latin American nation, with Costa Rica, a famously peaceful and orderly nation, second. Cuba also had 900 private schools and three private universities. Rural education received special attention and was supplemented by a mobile library system. According to the UN report of 1953, the literacy rate in Cuba was 82 percent, higher than in any other Latin American nation except Argentina and Costa Rica.

How healthy were Cubans before Castro? They ate quite well. Per capita consumption of meat was 65 pounds per year, exceeded only by England, Australia, and Denmark. Caloric intake was the third-highest in Latin America, after Argentina and Uruguay. The nation had the third-lowest mortality rate in the world — lower, in fact, than America or Canada. The infant mortality rate was 3.76 per thousand, while next in line in Latin America was Argentina at 6.11 and Venezuela at 6.56. In fact, the infant mortality rate in Cuba was lower than in France, Italy, Belgium, or Austria. Only Argentina had more doctors per citizen than Cuba. Life expectancy was significantly higher than in Latin America in general.

Cuba was doing well, but it was doing well in spite of the “progressive” policies of Batista, not because of Batista. What this nation needed was a return to free markets, the end of incessant government intervention on the side of labor, and public expenditures (which were often inefficient) to improve education and health. What Cuba did not need was a collectivist totalitarian such as Castro.

In the Never-Never land invented by Marxists which divides mankind into “progressives” and “reactionaries,” where was Castro? In his youth, Castro owned the complete works of Benito Mussolini. When he was tried in Cuban courts, his oral argument was virtually modeled on Hitler’s “History will absolve me” speech. When Francisco Franco died, after Castro had been in power over 15 years, Castro ordered a day of respect for the Spanish dictator.

Fidel Castro believes in power. The Cuban people have suffered grievously during the last 50 years. From 1959 to 1994, more than one million Cubans have left their island home for anywhere else. The horrors of Castro’s Gulag are as awful as anything in the ghastly history of modern totalitarianism. This nation that was once among the most affluent in the Western Hemisphere or, indeed, the world, now languishes in poverty and experiences persistent shortages of even the most basic items such as milk, soap, and clothing. Rationing is the norm.

The incidental byproducts of Castro’s Cuba are found in baseball players and other athletes who abandon their communist prison as soon as they can, in the grinding poverty of those who cannot leave, and in those desperate enough to hide in the landing gear of an airliner traveling across the Atlantic Ocean from Havana to Madrid.

by Bruce Walker

Source: New American

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Castro vs Batista

Castro to Batista: "Are we there yet?"

Fifty-two years into the Revolution, Fidel Castro will have achieved all the failings, real and perceived, that Cuba had under Batista, and it will have retained few of the virtues.

Over at the Museo de la Revolucion, Fidel Castro's case against the dictator he overthrew 52 years ago is vividly on display.

Fulgencio Batista was evil incarnate, the museum earnestly instructs visitors in room after room of the once-magnificent building, formerly a presidential palace built in 1920 and decorated by Tiffany's of New York. Under Batista and his predecessors, we learn through photos and text, Cuba became a playground for crass tourists who came for sex, drink and gambling, and who crowded the country's pristine beaches to the detriment of ordinary folk. To drive home the immorality of pre-socialist times, the museum displays an original National Lottery of Cuba ticket from early in the century, a symbol of the country's fall from grace.

We learn that Batista was an illegitimate leader, the election he won stolen by manipulating the press. Worse, Batista intimidated, even jailed or killed, political opponents.

But Batista also failed Cuba by failing to invest government funds wisely. One damning display berates Batista's priorities with a list of budget line items that show government expenditures on frills such as roads, promenades and buildings. Batista's sky-high spending on telecommunications - which the display dubs as military - comes in for criticism. Another display lambastes Batista for failing to diversify the economy. Another still, which provides a year-by-year report of sugar output, accuses Batista of neglecting this all-important industry. The numbers show a downward trend, interrupted with some up-ticks, in the 1950s, and then a giant leap forward, as Castro mobilized the country to produce more sugar in one of his regime's grand economic plans.

The moral and economic rot under Batista led to humiliation and human tragedy, the museum tells us. "Many women who were denied jobs saw themselves forced to become prostitutes in order to survive," said one display. Said another: "According to a census in 1953, there were 200,000 shacks and misery huts." Said a third, also referring to the 1953 census: "40,939 people died due to lack of medical attendance and unsanitary living conditions."

The history the museum imparts is part truth, part fiction and all hypocrisy. Batista was indeed an unsavory character. He did oversee a corrupt administration in Cuba. He did undermine the halting democracy that the United States helped create after liberating Cuba from oppressive Spanish occupation at the turn of the century.

But Cuba and its U.S.-style constitution was also an economic powerhouse with potent social institutions and impressive accomplishments. A 1958 United Nations report ranked Cuba's vibrant free press eighth in the world, and first in Latin America. Despite its much smaller population, Cuba had 160 radio stations compared to the U. K.'s 62 and France's 50. It had 23 television stations compared to Mexico's 12 and Venezuela's 10. The tiny country supported 58 newspapers, fourth in Latin America behind populous Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Raul Castro (r), now the President of Cuba, in the hands of Fulgencio Batista (around 1938).

Cuba once installed telephones at a rapid rate. No more. It once ranked first in Latin America, fifth in the world, in television sets per capita, and also ranked high in radios, automobiles, and many other consumer goods. No more. With the population increased and the housing stock degraded, more people suffer inadequate housing today than ever before, and sanitary conditions have become a scandal through much of the country.
 
The information-hungry populace in the Batista era was well-educated, as it remains. Student registration at primary schools in 1955 was 1,032 students per 10,000 inhabitants, higher than the figures for 1990 of 842. The registration rate for higher education was an impressive 38 per 10,000, about the same as it was 10 years later (34 per 10,000) and 15 years later (41 per 10,000). The country, in fact, had a long history of high literacy levels: At the turn of the 20th century, only 28% of those 10 and over couldn't read or write, not that different from the current figure, 100 years later, of 16%.

But unlike today, Cuba's economy under Batista was powerful, both domestically and in exports, and it was becoming increasingly diversified. Under Castro, its economy is in tatters, nowhere more so than in the sugar industry that Castro once promoted so heavily. A few years ago, Castro announced a shut down of half of the country's sugar mills. "We had to act or face ruin," he explained. As he told NBC News at the time. "It cost us more to produce sugar than what we could sell it for."

But if Batista bested Castro in virtually every broad socio-economic indicator, he paled in comparison when it came to controlling either the electoral process or the populace. Castro executed thousands of political opponents after he came to power, imprisoned tens of thousands and caused hundreds of thousands to flee to exile. Where Batista won a disputed election, a Castro election leaves no room for dispute: Castro allows no opponents, no opposing viewpoints to appear in the press, and, because that might not be enough, his political machine ensures a good turnout by keeping tabs on who votes and who doesn't: In the 2003 national election, Castro managed a 90%-plus "yes" vote, not quite as impressive as Saddam Hussein's 100% but, among dictators, respectable enough.

Those who revile Batista often point to a decadent economy that relied on mafia-run casinos, prostitution and other demeaning jobs servicing tourists. Tourism was important under Batista - Havana was an east-coast alternative to Las Vegas, complete with the sex and gaming, and the same mafia owners - but never as important as tourism has become today. Cuba's once diversified economy is gone and Castro is now putting all of his hopes in attracting tourists.

To do this, Castro's Cuba now permits prostitution, it winks at sex tourism - tourist guide books even include sections on the country's once-taboo gay and bisexual scenes - and, as under Batista, the country unabashedly invests heavily in tourism. In 2003, Castro inaugurated a US$100-million resort on the island's northeastern coast, broadcast nationwide, to underscore the importance the government places on the new five-hotel complex of 944 rooms able to house 1,500 tourists.

Tourism is now Cuba's No. 1 source of foreign income, with 1.6 million visitors generating about US$2-billion in 2002. More tourists come from Canada than from other important sources of foreign exchange, chiefly Germany, Britain, Italy, France, and Switzerland. Castro, like Batista, is eyeing one other important tourist market.

"Our friends from the north are not in this list," Castro said once with a grin, referring to Americans that can't travel to Cuba due to U.S. government regulations.

Some day soon, perhaps, Castro's dream may be realized, and Cuba's economy may once again benefit from U.S. tourism. If it does, Cuba under Castro will have recovered one of the benefits that the country once enjoyed. Fifty-two years into the Revolution, Castro will have achieved all the failings, real and perceived, that Cuba had under Batista, and it will have retained few of the virtues.

Updated from an article by Larry Solomon in the Capitalism Magazine

Some images from Cuba before 1959  

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Gambling and the Law: Cuba will have casinos, again

Casino Plaza in Cuba, destroyed in 1959.

President Obama has just announced that he is easing restrictions on visits to Cuba; the second time he will be relaxing travel rules imposed on Americans by Pres. George W. Bush.

Casual tourism is still difficult, but it will be much easier for students and teacher, religious groups and journalists to request permission to visit Cuba. He had already made it easier for Cuban-Americans to travel to see relatives on the island.

Although the State Department takes the position that tourists cannot legally travel to Cuba, my reading of the statutes is a little different. To obey federal laws, all U.S. citizens have to do is not spend any money whatsoever once they set foot on the island.

But that law will have to be changed. Because Cuba will have casinos within the next 10 years.

Or, more accurately, Cuba will again have casinos. Because during the 1950s the island nation, less than 100 miles from Florida, was one of the leading gaming and tourist destinations of the world.

It started in the 1920s, when Havana assumed a role later taken by Las Vegas: a vacation spot where Americans could party in ways not allowed at home. But it was not the gambling as much as it was the booze. America was in the midst of the disastrous experiment known as Prohibition, which also created modern organized crime. Cuba flourished with nightclubs, bordellos and casinos.

World War II was a minor interruption. Then the partying was reborn. Havana became so notorious, that in 1950 a Broadway musical, "Guys and Dolls," could be built around its reputation. The audience knew why Nathan Detroit (the Frank Sinatra character in the 1955 film) bet Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) that Sky could not convince the Salvation Army "doll" (Jean Simmons) to go with him for "dinner in Havana."

But it looked for a while like the good times might be coming to an end. Cuban casinos had become so crooked that Americans were beginning to stay away. They were saved when Fulgencio Batista became dictator in 1952.

In an ironic twist, Batista called upon the mob, particularly Meyer Lansky, to clean things up. And they did. It is hard to believe organized crime syndicates would run completely honest games. But Lansky realized they could make more money with magnificent hotel-casinos then if they cheated everyone.

Throughout the 1950s, the American and Cuban mob families opened luxurious casino resorts, each one bigger and more successful than the last. The money poured in. Batista got a cut of everything.

Three recent books, Offshore Vegas: How the Mob Brought Revolution to Cuba; Havana Before Castro: When Cuba was a Tropical Playground (great photos); and Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution (being made into a movie), may overstate the importance of organized crime in the Communists coming to power.

The economy under Batista was not that bad. Cuba had a large middle class. Lansky was, in fact, originally reluctant to open casinos, because labor unions were so strong.

Still, most Cubans never shared the wealth they saw all around them, and corruption was rampant. The result was revolution.

When news hit the streets on New Year's Day, 1959, that Batista had fled the country, angry crowds poured into the casinos, destroying everything inside.

As one of his first decrees, Fidel Castro outlawed gambling. He then tried to reopen some, with untrained dealers, after he discovered how important the casinos were to the local economy. But it was too late the American patrons were gone.

The Soviet bloc never could supply enough tourists to make up for being isolated from the U.S. I remember seeing faded posters for Havana vacations in a tourist bureau in Prague, shortly after the Velvet Revolution. But the other store windows were practically empty, since there was little to buy and few people had any money, or the right to fly over the barbed wire and minefields that had surrounded Communist Czechoslovakia.

The fall of the Iron Curtain shows what we can expect for Cuba: A combination of two of the greatest expansions of legal gaming in the last 40 years.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the replacement of communism with capitalism lead to an explosion of casinos throughout Eastern Europe and Russia.

And the death of the dictator Francisco Franco led to an explosion of slot machines and other legal gaming throughout Spain.

Although Franco was strongly anti-communist, the comparison with Castro is apt. The Iberian peninsula and Latin America have a long tradition of strongmen, "caudilhos" in Portuguese, in Spanish "caudillos." Franco ruled from 1936 to 1975, and even called himself "Caudillo de España, por la gracia de Dios;" which Wikipedia translates as "Leader of Spain, by the grace of God."

Castro has been the caudillo since 1959, first as Prime Minister, then President and now as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba. Due to illness, he turned over much of his power to his younger brother Ra?l, on July 31, 2006.

Raúl has shown some independence. He doesn't really have what it takes to be a caudillo. So he might start true liberalization as soon as the sickly Fidel, 84 years old, dies. Raúl is 79, so both Castro brothers will probably be gone within the next 10 years.

The caudillo tradition seems to be coming to an end. The U.S. will drop its economic embargo when democracy and capitalism come to Cuba, in whatever form they take. In fact, as we know from Macau, democracy is not the essential part of the equation. China is still Marxist, but it is hard to call it communist.

The initial breakthrough will probably take place on cruise ships, with casinos, returning to the Port of Havana. Initially, gaming will only be permitted on the high seas. But it is a short step from there to allowing the casinos to be open while the ships are docked.

Bingo machines are sweeping Latin America. These are often called Class II. Of course, there is no Class I or Class III, since the categories were created by, and apply only to, the U.S. Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. But, it is an easy way to distinguish these gaming devices from true slot machines, at least for political cover.

True casinos, with true slots and table games, are also common in much of Central and South America. But even more so in the Caribbean. A free Cuba will quickly allow casinos to reopen, in high-quality hotels designed for, and possibly even limited to, tourists.

So, I'm inviting you to G2E-IGE Havana, 2011. Given the consolidation of every part of the gaming industry, I have taken the liberty of predicting the merger of the two largest trade shows, the Global Gaming Expo, now held in Las Vegas, and the International Gaming Expo, in London.

And the conference venue should be magnificent. Castro's Communist regime may have accidentally contributed something else to the speedy rebirth of casinos. There has been so little economic progress on the island, that apparently the ornate buildings constructed in the 1950s to house the mob's casinos are still standing, waiting to be refurbished and reopened, under new management.

By I. Nelson Rose

From: Casino City Times

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