Cuba's museum of Marxism
By George F. Will -
Published 12:00 am PST Thursday, March 6, 2008
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7
The letter from a 12-year-old to "my good friend Roosvelt" is dated
Nov. 6, 1940, one day after FDR won a third term. Saying he is "very
happy" FDR won, he adds: "If you like, give me a ten dollars bill
green american."
The letter, an enlarged copy of which is on display in the National
Archives, ends: "Good by. Your friend, Fidel Castro."
Young Castro with his hand out prefigured his role in political
history. Until its spell was broken, Marxism mesmerized millions by
promising to solve mankind's economic problem - abundance without the
alienation caused by work, the French word for which is travail.
Instead, Castro created mendicant Marxism, making Cuba dependent on
huge subventions from the Soviet Union. When Russia withdrew its aid,
Cuba's economy shrank 35 percent, more than the U.S. economy
contracted (26.5 percent) in the Depression. Cuba under communism had
to im****t sugar. Today, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela provides $4 billion of
oil to a Cuba with a GDP of $45 billion.
The departure, if such it really is, of Castro cures nothing. Cuba's
affliction remains: It is Castroism, which is communism colored by
Bonapartism. Communism of any stripe is afflicted by terminal
ignorance. Having no market, which is an information-generating
mechanism, communism cannot know what things should cost.
Hence communism's amazing contribution to humanity's economic history
is "value-subtraction" - products worth less than the materials that
go into them. That result is seriously inconvenient for Marxism's
labor theory of value - the theory that labor adds all value to the
world's materials.
Castro's career, although calamitous for Cubans, has provided
entertaining farce through its effect on Western political pilgrims
seeking leftist saviors. Joseph Goebbels called the Nazi regime
"ennobled democracy," the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo called
his "neo-democracy." In 1960, the second of Castro's 49 years as
warden of Cuba as prison, Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist and
Stalinist, published an enraptured book about Castro's democracy.
Sartre marveled at what he called Castro's "direct democracy" as
demonstrated when, at a roadside stand, Castro and Sartre were served
warm lemonade.
Castro got hot. The tepid drink, he said, "reveals a lack of
revolutionary consciousness." The waitress, Sartre re****ted, shrugged
and said the refrigerator was broken. Castro "growled" (Sartre's
approving description), "Tell your people in charge that if they don't
take care of their problems, they will have problems with me."
Sartre, deeply stirred, wrote:
"This was the first time I understood - still quite vaguely - what I
called 'direct democracy.' Between the waitress and Castro, an
immediate secret understanding was established. She let it be seen by
her tone, her smiles, by a shrug of her shoulders, that she was
without illusion."
In the wise man's prisons - according to Armando Valladares' memoir of
22 years in them ("Against All Hope") - some doors are welded shut and
prisoners are fed watery soup sometimes laced with glass, or dead
rats, or half a cow's intestine, rectum included, containing feces. In
2003, the wise man's pulverizing police state, always struggling to
reduce Cuba's civil society to a dust of individuals, sentenced 78
democracy advocates, after one-day secret trials, to sentences of up
to 28 years in those prisons. Pilgrims praising Cuban health care call
to mind Pat Moynihan's acerbic observation that when travel to China
was liberalized, many visitors seemed more impressed by the absence of
flies than by the absence of freedom.
Castro has ruled Cuba during 10 U.S. presidencies and longer than the
Soviet Union ruled Eastern Europe. The Economist has called him "a
Caribbean King Lear." Raging on his island heath, with nothing to
celebrate except his endurance, his creativity has come down to this:
He has added a category to the taxonomy of world regimes - government
by costume party. Useful at last, the Comandante presides over a
museum of Marxism.
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/763614.html
|
