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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