The Return of Fidel Castro and Post-Fidel Cuba By William Ratliff Price of Liberty

July 02, 2007

We finally have tolerably good evidence that Fidel Castro is really alive and at least to some degree recuperating after ten months and several surgeries. The key event was a fifty-minute pre-recorded interview broadcast on Cuban National Television in early June, in which Castro, still clearly weak, aimlessly reminisced and at times appeared a bit incoherent.

The only people who had seen Fidel since he disappeared from public view (besides medical personnel) were, reportedly, his international revolutionary heir apparent, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, high level Asian communist officials and assorted crony bureaucrats and political lap dogs. Reportedly he recently met with the top leaders of Vietnam, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

Yet the photos of these meetings were carefully staged photo-ops, filtered and screened by his handlers. Foremost among them is his brother, Raul, Fidel’s domestic heir apparent, who took over when Fidel went in for surgery. The big questions now are what his true condition is, whether he will get better and what role he will try (or be allowed) to take in running the country.

For decades Fidelistas of all stripes worldwide took as an article of faith that Fidel loved the Cuban people. If that is still the case and Fidel is well enough to meet with foreign leaders, why doesn’t he step forward for a moment to greet his beloved fellow-countrymen face-to-face? Several weeks ago in an article carrying his name, he whined that he too busy “to constantly trim my hair, beard and moustache, and to get dressed up every day” to meet people. Except, apparently, foreign leaders.

Why are his handlers so afraid of his appearing before Cubans and unbiased, non-apparatchik outsiders? Perhaps because they don’t know what he would say if he were on his own in public?

Fidel’s only other public appearances, besides the photo-ops with foreigners, had been just over a dozen short reflections published in his name in the Cuban Communist Party paper, Granma. For all we know these often turgid homilies and harangues are heavily edited or simply written by some party flunky. Fidel didn’t show up for his birthday parties last year (plural because when he couldn’t make the first one a second was scheduled, which he also missed), or for the May Day parade last month, although Chavez insisted that he would appear.

Taking what little we know for sure, what might Cubans and the world expect now? Fidel could still be a terrible spoiler, in Cuba as well as abroad. His adamant, decades-long commitment to failed socialist formulas got Cuba into its current mess. Were he to actively press these formulas again, the transition already tentatively underway could be de-railed. If his survival raises the stock of “Chavistas” around the hemisphere, he could further delay modernization and prolong the misery and inequality that characterize the entire region.

But, while he still slams the United States, there is reason to think he will now cooperate with the economic reforms being proposed—reforms that would create greater domestic opportunities for individual Cubans as well as expanded trade in global markets. Those reforms could actually improve the lives of the nation’s people. The entire Cuban leadership has a stake in his cooperating, or seeming to cooperate, because productive reforms are what might guarantee their political survival, at least in the short- to medium-term. Fidel’s interview comments, his newspaper columns and several other things suggest that he may now act as elder statesman and help implement a smooth transition into the post-Fidel period.

In the reported meetings with Chinese and Vietnamese leaders Fidel praised their rapid economic growth for benefiting so many of their people. And, several weeks ago Chavez spoke of a letter Fidel had presumably sent him praising the Chinese model for significant market-oriented reform.

What model? A long-time aide to Raul who is now in exile, former Cuban U.N. ambassador Alcibiades Hidalgo, and I, have written that for years Raul has sympathized with change in the Chinese or Vietnamese style, that is, significant market-oriented reform in the economy, which is still called socialist, under the continuing direction of a single party and repression of politics.

If Fidel supports such reform, or at least does nothing to impede it, the prospects for serious civil conflict will be substantially reduced, the lives of the Cuban people will improve and the prospects for the survival of the Cuban Communist Party well into the post-Fidel period will be much improved.

William Ratliff is Adjunct Fellow at the Independent Institute, Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and a frequent writer on Chinese and Cuban foreign policies.

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office, and Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Full Biography and Recent Publications

Jonathan J. Bean is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, and editor of the forthcoming book, Race and Liberty: The Classical Liberal Tradition of Civil Rights.

Anthony Gregory is a Research Analyst at The Independent Institute. He earned his bachelor's degree in American history from the University of California at Berkeley and gave the undergraduate history commencement speech in 2003. In addition to his work with the Independent Institute, he regularly writes for numerous news and commentary web sites, including LewRockwell.com, Future of Freedom Foundation, and the Rational Review.
Full Biography and Recent Publications

Dominick T. Armentano is professor emeritus in economics at the University of Hartford (Connecticut) and a research fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. He is author of Antitrust & Monopoly (Independent Institute, 1998).

Alvaro Vargas Llosa is director of The Center on Global Prosperity at The Independent Institute. He is a native of Peru and received his B.S.C. in international history from the London School of Economics. He is widely published and has lectured on world economic and political issues including at the Mont Pelerin Society, Naumann Foundation (Germany), FAES Foundation (Spain), Brazilian Institute of Business Studies, Fundación Libertad (Argentina), CEDICE Foundation (Venezuela), Florida International University, and the Ecuadorian Chamber of Commerce. He is the author of the Independent Institute books The Che Guevara Myth and Liberty for Latin America. Full biography and recent publications.

Pierre Lemieux is an economist and co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research Group at the Université du Québec en Outaouais and a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

Alexander Tabarrok is research director at The Independent Institute, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, editor of the Independent Institute books, Entrepreneurial Economics, The Voluntary City (with D. Beito and P. Gordon), and Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime.

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute, author of Against Leviathan and Crisis and Leviathan, and editor of the scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. Click here for a bio on Dr. Higgs, the noted economist and historian.

William Marina is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and Professor Emeritus of History at Florida Atlantic University.

David T. Beito is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama, and co-editor of the book, The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society.

William Marina and David T. Beito belong to "Liberty and Power," a group blog at the History News Network.

For further articles and studies, see the Center on Peace & Liberty and OnPower.org.

Nicolas Heidorn is a public policy intern at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

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