Castro Retires

He's been out of power for more than a year, his brother took office. So it comes as no surprise. He's old as fuck. About time.

How long until there's a MacDonald's on every piece of land in Cuba?

But seriously, it's a beautiful country down there and while I would love to see the country and their people get aid and be brought into the new world I don't want to see their culture get destroyed by American business interests. Though I have a feeling the American stubbornness will keep the embargo in line for quite awhile. 'Cause you know, Cuba is an enemy combatant and all.

Ha. I never actually thought about it from that angle, such beauty in the simplicity of the whole thing.

But you're not the only one. I think alot of dictators get a bad rep (or at least a worse rep) simply because our leaders determine for us whether or not a dictator is evil. Very often it simply means that they are opposed to the US, and it's important to understand the distinction. In the case of Fidel Castro, can't say I blame him. He certainly was not worse than dictators that our government has installed and supported.

And everyone in Cuba has bitchin' classic cars.

In the 21st century you should get de facto bad rep for just being a dictator, I can't believe this still needs to be pointed out.

Castro is a complete failure, I'm amazed that he officially let go, but his greediness and distrust for his own people has compromised everything he once stood for when he was a younger and more idealistic person.

Here's hoping his brother will do the right thing and push for reform and real elections, but I'm sure he won't.

A couple of films came to mind when I heard the announcement this morning:

[about the unrest in Cuba]
Michael Corleone: I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't.
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael Corleone: It means they could win.

Also:

[first lines]
Don Dunphy: Good afternoon. Wide World of Sports is in the little republic of San Marcos where we're going to bring you a live, on the spot assassination. They're going to kill the president of this lovely Latin American country and replace him with a military dictatorship. And everybody is about as excited and tense as can be. The weather on this Sunday afternoon is perfect; and if you've just joined us, we've seen a series of colorful riots that started with the traditional bombing of the American embassy - a ritual as old as the city itself.
Howard Cosell: This is tremendous, Don, just tremendous. The atmosphere heavy, uncertain, overtones of ugliness. A reminder, in a way, of how it was in March of 1964 at Miami Beach when Clay met Liston for the first time and nobody was certain how it would turn out. The crowd is tense; they've been here since ten this morning. And... and I think I see... the door beginning to open. El Presidente may be coming out. The door opens. It's he... it's El Presidente waving at the crowd. A shot rings out! He turns... he runs back toward the building, trying to get in. This crowd is going wild. He's caught in a crossfire of bullets. And down! It's over! It's all over for El Presidente!

I was hoping he would retire from life. Soon I guess.

Castro survived an invasion, several assassination attempts, a decades long trade embargo, the fall of Communism, the loss of foreign aid and Anthony LaPaglia.

The man deserves some rep.

For being a giant douche?

REP REP REP

I thought being a giant douche is usually seen as an advantage on the internet.

Suppressing Human Rights, eliminating freedom of association and assembly, incarcerating opposition members, staging fake elections, motivating thousands of poor people to die or risk their lives to come to the US, promoting the almost Taliban like concept of "acts of repudiation".

Hey but if you are a tourist, you can enjoy some great resorts and be treated like a king, of course normal Cuban citizens can't enjoy these things unless they get a job serving richer westerners who have no problem with this whole setup.

Let's give the man some rep, whoo-hoo!

I can't believe the love some of ya'll are giving this guy. Sure, he has told the US to kiss his ass. If that's what makes you happy, fine. But he has decimated that country and its people. Cuba has the potential to be so, so much more and its people deserve it. But Castro, fuck him in his goat ass.

Yeah, it's amazing how quickly people forget history.

As ElCapitan alludes, some of my friends have vacationed in Cuba and enjoyed it immensely.

However, some of my co-workers have traveled to Havana to work at the Embassy (Canadian) on temporary duty and have experienced living conditions more akin to the locals. Terrible, terrible conditions. Poverty and repression, fear and hopelessness are what the Cuban people live with daily. And yet they were generous to a fault when my aforementioned co-workers arrived and found amenities to be 'lacking'.

Castro may have had best intentions for the Cuban people when he diposed Batista, but I doubt that "history will absolve (him)".

I have a grudging respect for his charisma and scorpion-like aptitiude for survival, but the man is a villain. Too bad he never became a ballplayer, Cuba probably would have been better off.

None of the things you say are false. And forgive me if I mistakenly attribute to you things you don't mean, but until you feel like this for everyone of the many dictators the world over, either on the US's side or not, they are also kind of hypocritical.

Castro is a direct product of the US's direct support of Batista's corrupt and brutal regime. Also don't forget that during the early period of Castro's "career" the US had the chance to bring him to their side, only the government caved in to outside pressure and put him firmly behind the iron curtain.

While the guy is rightly hated for what he's become and the nasty things he's done, I can't get past the 98% literacy rating among ALL island citizens. Cuban doctors are also pretty world-renown; something I just could never understand. I do wish this all went down after the November elections because I hate the idea of this administration trying to get their version of "democracy" going in Cuba. I think that Fidel's brother, who's been described as pretty smart, won't make any moves towards the US until after Bush is out of office.

In my view, dictatorships run contrary to what we should expect as minimum standards for human freedoms in the last and current centuries. Having said that, I don't think it is necessary for me to accompany my criticisms of Castro with public denunciations of all dictatorships like we need some type of disclaimer to have an opinion on this.

At the end of the day the responsibility lies at Castro's feet. He had a chance to shape the country in any way he pleased. He had high goals and ideals when he started, and he proved that at the end of the day this wasn't so much about ideology but about personality. And you can't build nations solely based on personality.

What is left? A crumbled nation, and his legacy is what ... his brother? All these years and he never took the time to provide an environment where the successor for his "revolution" spring from the people he claims to care so much about.

He fails deeply in the end, and he proves that he was basically a one hit wonder living in the past and never looking at today or tomorrow. This is all his fault, totally.

I'm pretty confused as to why there's people praising him and people saying nothing but bad about him.

Oh wow, he pointed nukes at the US!! Holy shit! That's soooo Johnny Cash! Wait...no. Russia did it too, so what? I mean hell, the taliban hit us with fucking planes.

*Golf Clap*

I'm really not a fan of Castro. Personally I never went for the whole "revolutionary chic" that many liberals in the west like. But I also cannot outright reject everything he did or stood for. Finally, while I'm not an expert on Cuba I don't see how it's so much worse than many Central and South American countries, Bolivia for example. And they had this whole embargo to deal with.

Bolivia is a mess, but ironically they have more political freedoms than Cubans. That may not matter to you, but it depends on your priorities.

Are you saying Cuba is better of than most of the countries in Latin America? I hope not, but if you want to point out nations that are worse off (mainly economically) we can have a long list but miss the point completely.

Having countries that are doing horribly financially (like Haiti) doesn't excuse the failure of the Cuban state.

I don't necessarily disagree Capitan, my only real point was that Castro wasn't as bad as some of the asshole dictator's our leaders have installed and supported. That is all.

Oh, and for all of Castro's failures and whatever fucked up things he did, people tend to forget how much the trade embargo and lack of foreign aid seriously fucked Cuba.

While the trade embargo has hit Cuba hard over the last few decades, don't forget that almost everyone one else in the world is doing business with Cuba.

Castro is cool becuase he pointed nuclear weapons at the US?! At YOU, YOUR PARENTS AND FRIENDS?! Christ people are stupid (unless you are outside the US, in which case you are a douche).

El Capitain said it best. Castro was a dictator pure and simple, and the daily life of normal Cubans sucks.

People are praising Castro as some kind of Existential Hero because he "faced down the US" for decades. Fewer people seem to care about the decades long oppression of the Cuban people, or the fact that Castro once advise Khrushchev to launch those nukes at the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis (see Fog of War for details).

And the way he has been glorified by Hollywood types likes Oliver Stone and even Speilberg is truely sickening.

[Edited to add more Vitriol]

If I correctly recall one of his last acts before stepping down to let his brother run the country day-to-day was to throw a bunch of journalists and assorted writers in jail. Class act all the way.

"Many observers believe Fidel Castro will either be replaced by his brother Raul, or by his idiot son, Fidel W. Castro."
- David Letterman

Well as of this upcoming Friday, I'm 23. So I wasn't alive, and especially not living under the fear that big bad Cuba was bad enough to take on the US and not be completely wiped off the map, or that they were suicidal retards who would actually launch the missiles and usher in the apocalypse. They were many things, but they weren't suicidal religious zealots.

but history has shown that Castro is a suicidal religious zealot.

You should watch "The Fog of War" by Errol Morris. My favorite quote:

Hmmm....once Castro-ism crumbles, I hope I'll get a chance to visit the Museum of the Entire Island of Cuba before it becomes completely commercialized/westernized.

In fact there was ONE suicidal religious zealot. His name was Castro, and his religion was Communism. Afterwards he converted to Castroism. Go rent Fog of War..it will open your eyes to a lot of things.

By the way, ONE nuke can destroy a city. Cuba had at least 20 on the ground capable of being launched, and we had (and have) no way to stop them once they were in the air.

Also it wasn’t just Big Bad Cuba...it was the USSR which was Cuba’s ally. The USSR had a hell more Nukes than Cuba and would have launched them if things had gone out of control.

You know, one thing I felt sure would change after 911 is that the American people would collectively pull their heads out of their asses. The US is not invincible; a very few evil people can cause damage and mayhem way out of proportion to their numbers or “strength” This does not mean we need to treat everyone in the world as an enemy. It does mean we should treat them with respect. Thanks for showing yet again that Americans do not learn.

Don't agree. I think on some level Castro understood that the US would back off when threatened with a touch of their own medicine.

I'll check out The Fog of War, though. It's been recommended before.

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet but I just gotta give props to Hitler. I know he was painted as crazy and shit during WW2, but damn if he didn't unify a country faster than 9/11. In fact, props to Osama for doing the same. Guy's got charisma!

Gotta love the sense of perspective here. Especially in the face of the fact that the US has supported far worse monsters than Castro ever was.

Your perspective is someone who doesn't live under Castro so therefore you don't care or feel anything for the regime, just a media and self-created image.

If Castro is not quite a Hitler it's not for lack of trying. He spent the 1960's trying to export his brand of Communism throughout South America. The right wing regimes in Argentina et al came to power in large part as a reaction to his activities and the USA's support.

No dude, just no. That's just hyperbole, plain and simply. His activities simply cannot be compared to a man who was driven by such hatred and a lust for power, not to mention delusional occult beliefs. Jesus.

There's really no point in trying to have a discussion here at all if anyone here is going to try to play the bullshit Hitler comparison card that our leaders and media play all the time, when speaking of people who just do not compare.

Castro did some fucked up things, no one denies that, but it's very hard to argue that his actions were never dictated by a genuine love for the people, and the conviction that he could give them a better world, misguided as those beliefs may have been.

The U.S. was meddling in South America while Castro was still in Mexico trying to drum up support for his revolution.

Sure, and for a time the US courted Castro. But the Cold War caused the US to strenghten it's support of right wing regimes (not to mention bring some to power) more than would otherwise have been the case (Note: my opinion).
Castro taking over Cuba as a Communist, and his subsequent actions, accelerated that.

Isildur; My comparison to Hitler was in one respect: both tried to expand their sphere of influence and idealogy. Sorry if that was not clear.

And Hitler loved the German people, in fact he thought they were superior to all other human civilizations. Can't get much more love than that!

Yes, and that's a very broad statement to make, it's not in and of itself a bad thing. But saying it, as though Castro really compares to Hitler on this point is suggesting more than just this. This is not something that only pertains to evil men like Adolf Hitler. So there's no real comparison here.

And that (along with all else it implies) is precisely why there is no real comparison between Hitler and Fidel Castro.

They're also on completely opposite sides of the political and economic spectrums. Dubya is more comparable to Hitler in those respects.

What?

The Cold War was secondary to keeping American economic interests happy and the domination of South American economies and natural resources by American Companies. Those were the primary motivations. "The Red Menace" was just a buzz word to justify our actions. Kind of like "Terrorism."

Castro could have spouted all the left wing, Commie loving junk he wanted as long as money wasn't taken out of the hands of America or American friends and given back to whom it belonged; the people of Cuba. Let's not act like America is some altruistic grandfather looking over "poor Latinos" who can't govern themselves properly. It's that kind of patronizing attitude that people hate about our country.

I may have a chance to go to Cuba at the end of April.

Well, "Commie loving junk" and taking "money out of the hands of America" kind of go together, don't they?

And I do not suggest that in the absence of Castro things would have been hunky dory in South America. (actually I didn't even address that question) Nor do I know how you think I have a patronizing attitude or think America is some kind of Shepard to Latin America.

As long as we're throwing innuendos, don't be so eager to Hate America First! Communism was a very real threat to the free world. Because things broke our way, don't retroactively assume there never was a threat.

My point of the mockery was that people seem to paint him as a totally cool rebel who should America who's boss lol! Wit dah missles! in cuba r sumtin.?

Our government blows and funds tons of dictators. We suck, they suck, and Castro sucks. Fuck that dude, bro.

Where's the Rep button when I need it?!!

REP! REP! REP! REP! REP!