You can’t cheer some victories — they just don’t seem real.
I mean, what can you make of the “victory” for term limits represented by Raul Castro’s endorsement of the reform during an endless speech at his country’s Sixth Communist Party Congress?
Castro told fellow commies that political officials, including El Presidente, should be limited to two consecutive five-year terms. Seems that with the Castro brothers about to shuffle off this mortal coil, decades of dictatorship have shrunk the pool of well-tested vicious ranters experienced maligning capitalist running dogs and running the country into the ground.
The dear leader’s speech touted a laundry list of proposed changes to Cuba’s socialist system, including legalizing the sale of cars and homes, a possibility the party has been “studying.” Some of these reforms might take effect and make life a little easier for Cubans.
Perhaps Raul Castro, 79, reflecting on his ailing fratello’s disastrous half-century dictatorship (1959 to 2008, more or less), has decided Cuba’s socialism and autocracy don’t really work after all.
It’s happened in other moribund societies.
But even if presidential term limits should (against all odds) be enacted before Raul kicks the bucket, they won’t mean much if his successor decides they don’t mean much. And like other critics of the regime, I doubt that Cuba will be the country to buck the trend of governments “restricted” by term limits that are not worth the tissue-paper constitutions they’re written on.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “Term Limits for Cuba?”
Liberals love the Castro Brothers, more evidence of their delusion. People in this country don’t think the Cuban’s form of “government” can happen here. Yet, we are marching ever closer to it with the current “regime” we have in power right now. Obama ignores whichever laws he does not like and will not comply with them. When will people in this country wake up? And, when can the impeachment proceedings start?
Wonder if they will still love them if Raul starts leaning towards capitalism and away from the progressive/socialism of El Jefe?
Wouldn’t take very much reform to turn Cuba into a capitalist, manufacturing beacon and the Hong Kong of the West. And they would be able to price the land on the whole island there by the square foot, instead of by the acre.
In my opinion Castro’s statements about the five-year terms limitation of the government’s top positions is only one part of his tactics to appear more democratic. In fact the majority of these positions will still be held by members of the Communist party who have to listen to their leader’s orders.
I am sure that Jimmy Carter (and Hillary Clinton & Obama-all of whom also extol Assad in Syria as a good leader) will approve.