There are limited grounds to celebrate President Obama’s Cuba visit. This is arguably one of the most choreographed US presidential trips ever.
Nevertheless, protesting this historical reopening of US-Cuban relations, a group of Castro-regime opponents has mounted a demonstration. They have been arrested. But there is no way that the Obama White House is going to make a big public issue out of this. It would a muddying of one of the final acts of a lackluster Obama presidency.
Nevertheless, most young Cubans are greeting the US presidential visit as a life-changing experience. Their assessment is based almost entirely upon the luxurious American lifestyle that is beamed to them from nearby Florida. If Obama arrives, can the McDonalds and French fries be far behind?
Beside the pernicious effects of US-generated junk food, the Cubans have much about which to be concerned. There can be no denying that the Castro regime has stayed in power thanks to a very efficient and brutal intelligence machine. But there is clear evidence over the last decade that this surveillance state has been collapsing. It is interesting to ask why this should be happening.
Essentially Cuba and the Cubans are laidback. Castro’s revolution happened in rural areas because the farmers were ambivalent about politics. If you read any of the approved histories of the revolution and its aftermath, you will find Cuban agriculturalists, and particularly sugarcane farmers, in the vanguard of productivity. It is of course nonsense. The Cuban economy could not have survived without support from Moscow. That support has gone, therefore it is entirely inevitable that Cuba should turn toward the United States.
The big question for Cubans, as they prepare to embrace the full force of American consumer culture, is what they are going to lose as opposed to what they are going to gain. For many of them nothing that they currently have in their lives is adequate.
The Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro has been massively romanticized. For some left-wing rebel to have overthrown a US-backed regime a mere 65 miles from Florida was astonishing and for the Americans deeply disturbing. As long as Moscow was prepared to back Cuba and pay silly money for its principal export — sugar — the country had an economy that could just about survive.
However, Moscow has long since given up on the alluring option of having a military presence so close to the underbelly of America, and it has no further taste for high-priced Cuban sugar. Therefore it was inevitable that Cuba would need to rediscover its relations with the USA. A failed dalliance with the economically inchoate Venezuela, whose late dictator Victor Chavez was lauded as a revolutionary hero, did nothing for Cuba’s long-term prospects.
But it is important to remember why Castro’s revolt against the US-backed Batista regime succeeded. Cuba and Havana in particular had become a Mafia colony, with drugs, prostitution and gambling the mainstays of a deeply corrupt economy. Castro’s revolution destroyed these evils. Now that Obama is intent upon restoring US relations with Cuba, it would be comforting if he made a point of targeting any attempt by the Mafia to regain it brutal foothold in the island and if he made a point of preventing the mobsters from re-establishing their lawless offshore regime of drugs and depravity.
