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Is Fidel Castro the 20th Century's Greatest Figure?

Americans will sometimes fall in love with a Vaclav Havel, or maybe briefly with a Mikhail Gorbachev, but what of a communist who gives organized crime the boot, provides universal health care to the people of his nation, and somehow manages to stay in power for a half-century and counting without being overthrown by reformers?

By RAR

Americans - particularly those living among Cuban exile families in Miami, or possibly New Orleans - have a point of view about Cuban President Fidel Castro that pretty much reads the same as this description of Humberto Fontova's book The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six. Alone among world leaders, Castro came to within inches of igniting a global nuclear holocaust.

But you would never guess any of that from reading the mainstream American media. Instead we hear fawning accounts of Castro liberating Cuba from the clutches of U.S. robber-barons and bestowing world-class healthcare and education on his downtrodden citizens. “Propaganda is vital—the heart of our struggle,” Castro wrote in 1955. Today, the concept is as valid to the Cuban regime as ever.

History records few propaganda campaigns as phenomenally successful or enduring as Castro and Che’s. The Longest Romance exposes the full scope of this deception; it documents the complicity of major U.S. media players in spreading Castro’s propaganda and in coloring the world’s view of his totalitarian regime. Castro’s cachet as a celebrity icon of anti-Americanism has always overshadowed his record as a warmonger, racist, sexist, Stalinist, and godfather of modern terrorism. The Longest Romance uncovers this shameful history and names its major accomplices.

Humberto Fontova, one will hardly be surprised to learn, "was born in Havana, Cuba in 1954 and fled to the U.S. with his family in 1961. He is the author of four books and a frequent commentator in national media. He lives in New Orleans, LA." - from his Amazon.com author's description.

After Castro came to power through coup d'etat in 1959, Cuba emptied of Batista supporters, including the organized crime operatives that had run the country in collaboration with the deposed president, as well as those well-to-do families that had prospered under the corrupt Batista regime. It is estimated than one million Cubans, or about 10 percent of its population in 1959, fled the island nation, with somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 dying in the 90 miles of water separating Cuba from U.S. shores.

The organization Human Rights Watch is no fan of the Castro regime: "Cuba remains the only country in Latin America that represses virtually all forms of political dissent. The government of Raúl Castro continues to enforce political conformity using short-term detentions, beatings, public acts of repudiation, travel restrictions, and forced exile. Although the Cuban government released dozens of political prisoners on the condition that they leave the country, the government continues to sentence dissidents in closed, summary trials. The government has also relied increasingly upon arbitrary arrests and short-term detentions to restrict the basic rights of its critics, including the right to assemble and move freely."

The CIA Fact Book says this about Cuba: Cuba's communist revolution, with Soviet support, was exported throughout Latin America and Africa during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The country faced a severe economic downturn in 1990 following the withdrawal of former Soviet subsidies worth $4 billion to $6 billion annually. Cuba at times portrays the US embargo, in place since 1961, as the source if its difficulties. Illicit migration to the US - using homemade rafts, alien smugglers, air flights, or via the US's southwest border - is a continuing problem. The US Coast Guard interdicted 1,275 Cuban nationals attempting to cross the Straits of Florida in 2012.

Getting a precise handle on the Castro regime's atrocities has been a hard thing for researchers to get their arms around.

• Amnesty International states that between the 1959 Cuban revolution and 1987, that there were 237 death sentences rendered, and 226 completed executions.
• Latin American historian Thomas E. Skidmore says that there were 550 executions in the first six months of 1959.
• British historian Hugh Thomas stated that "perhaps" 5,000 executions had taken place by 1970.
• The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators ascertained that there had been 2,113 political executions between the years of 1958-67.
• University of Hawaii Political Science Professor Rudolph J. Rummel estimates that there were between 4,000 and 33,000 political executions from 1958–87, with a mid range of 15,000.
• The Black Book of Communism estimates political executions throughout Cuba to have numbered from 15,000–17,000.

Obviously the way that one looks at Fidel Castro and the ongoing Castro regime has little to do with established facts and much more to do with political and personal biases.

In fact, political and personal biases have played central roles in Fidel Castro's legend. Following an unsuccessful overthrow of Batista in the early 1950s, he was imprisoned for two years by Batista and his military, who finally released him under the weight of public pressure to do so. Fidel Castro and his brother Raul repaired to Mexico, where with the help of Ché Guevara they organized a revolutionary army that stormed back into Cuba and forced Batista's surrender, eventually taking control of the Cuban army and then the entire government. That was in 1959 and they have held onto power ever since.

The Castro brothers had been born into wealth, but Fidel had grown up to become a Havana lawyer serving low-income clients. It is said that his experience with Cuba's poor galvanized his awareness of the inequalities in Cuban society, where a select privileged class controlled the majority of Cuba's financial resources. Keeping this system in place was a government that provided neither educational or healthcare benefits, which were among the first things that Castro provided once he took control of the Cuban government. Going even further, Castro confiscated land owned by Batista and his ministers and redistributed these properties among the nation's peasant farmers.

One looks around at the world leaders that have come and gone over the 50-plus years that the Castro brothers have been in power and the question has to be: Who has done anything equivalent to what the Castro regime has done for their people? While it is certainly true that the Castro regime violates human rights, and most particularly free speech, they have also provided high-quality universal health care and something near to full employment. Who else has done that and, moreover, sustained those initiatives over a half-century and counting?

Still, claims such as those by the Cuban exile Humberto Fontova continue to conflate Fidel Castro and the world's most tyrannical leaders, even comparing the island-nation leader to the Butcher of Stalingrad. In two much-maligned books by Robert Conquest jointly called The Great Terror (a 1990 issue was a reassessment of the first, from 1968), about Stalin's "Great Purge" of the 1930s, the Russian premiere was estimated to have sent 21.5 million people to the Gulags. Other claims in the book were that as many as 20 million Russians died through executions and man-made famines. This is the type of record of human rights that anti-Castro fanatics would like to project onto Fidel Castro, though such notions are utterly beyond the realm of possibility, let alone the realm of academic merit. Only commitment to communism connects the two historic leaders, not any analogous record of war and atrocity.

The Scorecard on the Castro Regime

RCJ came up with the following scorecard for making a subjective assessment of the leadership and overall effectiveness of Fidel Castro in terms of providing for his people (e.g., healthcare, public education, utility services, employment, etc.) and meeting the highest standards of a free society.  The 10 ratings categories selected are equally weighted, which is also a subjective decision, so this scoring device is not provided as a science-based tool, but rather a statistically-supported (the scorer referenced statistical data on Cuba available through the CIA Fact Book, the World Health Organization, and other sources) relative assessment of how the Castro regime has scored within those 10 categories. For comparison purposes, the same device is used to score the United States government, referencing the period from 1959-present.

*From Index Mundi on the Cuban economy: The government continues to balance the need for loosening its socialist economic system against a desire for firm political control. The government in April 2011 held the first Cuban Communist Party Congress in almost 13 years, during which leaders approved a plan for wide-ranging economic changes. President Raul CASTRO said such changes were needed to update the economic model to ensure the survival of socialism. The government has expanded opportunities for self employment and has introduced limited reforms, some initially implemented in the 1990s, to increase enterprise efficiency and alleviate serious shortages of food, consumer goods, services, and housing. The average Cuban's standard of living remains at a lower level than before the downturn of the 1990s, which was caused by the loss of Soviet aid and domestic inefficiencies. Since late 2000, Venezuela has been providing oil on preferential terms, and it currently supplies over 100,000 barrels per day of petroleum products. Cuba has been paying for the oil, in part, with the services of Cuban personnel in Venezuela including some 30,000 medical professionals.

The RCJ scorecard on Fidel Castro and the Castro Regime gives him only a score of 71 out of 100, which again is a subjective assessment but good enough for an "A" at Stanford.

Castro loses points in the key human rights and freedom of expression categories (scoring 8 of 30 possible points), but does far more than most government leaders in provision of key services and in social support mechanisms that keep unemployment low and societal integration high.

For purposes of contrast, the performance of the United States government from 1959 to the present has featured a series of disastrous policy decisions (e.g., waging war in Viet Nam, deregulation of key industries, lowering of tax rates for individuals and corporations, giving corporations rights equal to those given individuals, waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.) that have reduced the influence of the U.S. in the world. There has been an overall stagnation in each of these categories during this period that has created a deterioration that may be analogous to the slow collapse of an empire. The RCJ scores the performance of the U.S. in this period as a 61, or otherwise good enough for an "A" at Stanford.

What sets Castro apart from virtually any other world leader during his reign in Cuba is that there are virtually no others against whom he can be compared over a 50-year period. There have been eleven U.S. presidents serving during the time Castro has been office, and none of them brought universal health care to Americans, and each delivered higher rates of unemployment for U.S. citizens than Castro has for Cubans (currently 3.5% compared to 7.8% in the U.S.). There is no one in Castro's league among those leaders who have remained in office over decades. Here is a list from a couple years ago from the Business Insider, which did an international overview of long-standing leaders:

• Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi -- 20 years in power
• Chad's Idriss Déby -- 21 years in power
• Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev -- 21 years in power
• Sudan's Omar al-Bashir -- 22 years in power
• Uzbekistan's Islom Karimov -- 22 years in power
• Burkina Faso's Blaise Compaoré -- 24 years in power
• Uganda's Yoweri Museveni -- 26 years in power
• Cambodia's Hun Sen -- 26 years in power
• Cameroon's Paul Biya --29 years in power
• Iran's Ali Khamenei -- 30 years in power
• Zimbabwe's Robert Gabriel Mugabe -- 31 years in power
• Angola's José Eduardo dos Santos -- 32 years in power
• Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbaso -- 32 years in power
• Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh -- 33 years in power
• Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi -- 41 years in power

What you have there, primarily, is a list of despots from African and Middle Eastern countries, none of whom have done anything near for their people comparable to what Fidel Castro brought to Cuba in healthcare and anti-poverty programs.

When the people of Cuba were unhappy under Batista's rule, they got rid of him and put Fidel Castro into power. They have not repeated that type of forced government transition against Castro, which must mean something. Certainly it could be argued that his strict control over political expression plays a roll in that, but there is not a great deal indicating that the Cuban people are unhappy overall. What dictator has ever managed to remain in power for more than 50 years when the population they govern wanted him gone?

"None" is the answer that comes to mind.

However his score may vary from perfect, Fidel Castro has been in a league of his own when it comes to considering the greatest leader of the past 50 years. In an imperfect world, he stands as a colossus.

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