Politics Index

Talkin? ?Bout A Revolution

January 2nd, 2009 admin Posted in conservative |

The Great Communist Experiment that Hugo Chavez wants to emulate and which sends thrills up Michael Moore’s leg turned fifty years old today.

Communist Cuba marked the 50th anniversary of its Revolution Thursday faced with an uncertain future, its iconic, ailing leader Fidel Castro withdrawn from power and the economy in dire straits.
President Raul Castro early Thursday paid his respects to national hero Jose Marti in Santiago de Cuba, the city from where his brother Fidel proclaimed victory over US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 after 25 months of fighting in the Sierra Maestra mountains.

Raul, 77,—who officially took over from 82-year-old Fidel last February—was scheduled to give a televised address there at around 6 pm (2300 GMT).

Fidel, who has not appeared in public since undergoing major surgery almost two and a half years ago, sent a brief, signed greeting to the Cuban people in Granma, the communist party newspaper.

But his image dominated giant banners and billboards amid somber celebrations, with the island hard hit by the economic crisis and the aftermath of three hurricanes this year which left some 10 billion dollars in damage.

“Let’s not kid ourselves by believing that from here on, it’s all going to be easy. Maybe from here on, it’s going to be more difficult,” Raul Castro cautioned late Wednesday.

Despite hardships he blamed on 46-year-old US sanctions, the president stressed: “this hasn’t been a failure, not even under these conditions. It has been a constant fight.”

Fidel Castro is one of the Last Communists Standing. He has run his country into the ground, kept his people poor and ignorant but patriotic, and outlasted ten U.S. Presidents despite being only 90 miles from our shores. It’s a thuggish regime that has supported Communist movements in Latin America and Africa. The American government tried overthrowing and then assassinating Fidel in the past, only to see him turn into an old man who’s even more decrepit than his government’s ideology. Castro’s ultimate legacy may not be that he outlived the rest of the Communist world, but that he is now desperately trying to hold on to the small piece of it that he has left. The Revolution survives only by sheer willpower on his part. When he is truly dead and gone, his Revolution may start to go with him through simple economic needs alone.

So happy anniversary to Cuba’s True Believers. At this point a dying old man is pretty much all you’ve got left.