Tag: Communism

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term limits

Term Limits for Cuba?

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.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Fidel Fesses Up

Cuba’s 1959 revolution happened before I was born. Fidel Castro won, and ruled the country with an iron fist and steel jaw until a few years ago, when he handed power over to his brother, Raul.

The country’s been Communist, governed on allegedly Marxist principles, with the Castros sticking by their faith in total government even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Their dogged dedication to state socialism is impressive, in its way.

It’s like, say, watching Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter character on the silver screen. You cannot approve of motive or act, but the sheer fortitude! The evil genius!

A journalist for The Atlantic recently asked the retired Fidel Castro whether he still thought Cuba’s communism was exportable. And the old man replied, “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

The journalist’s companion, a Latin American scholar, interpreted this huge admission as recognition that Cuba has too much government.

Should we take a camera, a megaphone and a boat to Michael Moore’s moat and ask him how he feels about this?

The Cuban government provides its citizens with free education, medical care, and transportation. And not much else. Except state harassment and arrest for speaking out. And the rationing of food is pretty stingy. Nearly everybody works for the government nexus.

But hey, many well-educated folks in America have admired the government. Why? For all those big state projects. Health! Education! Buses!

Big whoop, when you’re hungry and a slave to the state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.