1959: The Year of the Cuban Disaster
Fidel Castro did everything he could to erase the memories of pre-1959 Cuba; this book by Manuel Gayol MecÃas, aims to thwart the Castroists and their plans.
CaribbeanCuba
By Guest Contributor Last updated Dec 27, 2018
By Luis Leonel León
The year 1959 marks not the beginning, as it is said, of the deepest and longest misfortune of the Cubans, but the victory of the revolutionary yearning, that other real wars and repeated revolts, had begun much earlier. 1959 was the end of our short-lived republic. Since then, we Cubans have no country. Only a fight against the demons of an incomplete, wounded, fragmented, illusory, non-existent nationality. And an imagined nationality, as Manuel Gayol MecÃas warns in his recent book, titled 1959 (Neo Club Ediciones-Palabra Abierta Ediciones).
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It took him 10 years took him to write this essay, whose title could be no other. 1959 is a year that marks the Cubans. It is not a matter of history: even 6 decades later, it’s a reality. A frightening reality, intensely flawed, that assaults our senses with its absolute brazenness and sociological perversity. And although our spirit refuses to believe it, or even to accept it, there are not a few times when, both inside and outside the island, we feel that this ghostly epilogue that seems to us to live – to live despite dying all the time – could again portend hope, despair, and imagination. The yin and yang of our lost attempts. Our agenda for change has not born fruit. That’s what we’ve been doing since 1959.
Gayol MecÃas knows it. Therefore, between the sword and the wall, between certainty and uncertainty, he has written this long list of the trials and tribulations of the modern Cuban. He discusses our existence as a nation, how we have been seen and imagined, with successes and mistakes. It exposes what has happened to that imagery, which socialist realism has transformed into a representation the size of the island, where even without the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, for the majority, between myths and realities, it is almost impossible to escape . An island that seems to float, but does not go anywhere. An illusion, disguised as a country.
Read more at: https://panampost.com/editor/2018/12/27/1959-the-year-of-the-cuban-disaster/
It's New Year's Eve, New Year's Day they came to power, they meaning the Castro regime.... so that is now, 60 years ago.
From Forbes Magazine:
Viva La Revolucion? Not So Much
Art Carden
Sixty years ago tomorrow, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others emerged victorious in the Cuban Revolution when Cuban President Fulgencio Batista fled the country. In this article for the American Institute for Economic Research, the economic historian Vincent Geloso--with whom I have collaborated on an unrelated research project that I summarize here--tries and measures Cuba's economic record and finds it...wanting, or at least inconsistent with romantic visions of revolutionaries liberating the people and working toward a workers' paradise in the Caribbean.
Here I would like to consider the broader framework—socialism—in which Castro, Guevara, and their fellow revolutionaries operated. A few years ago, the philosophers James Otteson and Jason Brennan completed the critique of the socialist program by dismantling its status as a moral ideal. They were responding directly to the philosopher G.A. Cohen, who wrote a very short book titled Why Not Socialism? in which he used a camping trip as a thought experiment that defended the supposed moral superiority of socialism (I reviewed the book for the Foundation for Economic Education shortly after it was published). We wouldn’t like it if all our interactions on a camping trip were price-mediated and narrowly self-interested; therefore, we should prefer socialism to capitalism even if socialism is impractical. Cohen argues that the free market is “a casino from which it is difficult to escape.†It's a strange claim given that the places people are trying to escape--and that are difficult to escape--are those that have largely rejected free markets.
Castro’s defenders will note his successes in delivering health care and education and in raising Cuban literacy rates. Assume for the sake of argument that this is true: even then, many people were desperate to escape his workers’ paradise. The rickety boat traffic went from Cuba to Miami, not the other way around. Western intellectuals could praise Castro’s system to the heavens, but through their actions, the people who actually had to live under his regime revealed a preference for free markets. If we’re interested in autonomy for everyday people, we should take their actions seriously--and they are voting with their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor against socialism.
Read more at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2018/12/31/viva-la-revolucion-not-so-much/#2f2c666c5ecf
