Fidel Castro stepped down Tuesday morning as the president of Cuba after a long illness, ending one of the longest tenures as an all-powerful, communist head of state in the world, according to Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party.
In late July 2006, Mr. Castro, who is 81, handed over power temporarily to his brother, Raúl Castro, 76, and a few younger cabinet ministers, after an acute infection in his colon forced him to undergo emergency surgery. Despite numerous surgeries, he has never fully recovered but has remained active in running government affairs from behind the scenes.
Now, just days before the national assembly is to meet to select a new head of state, Mr. Castro resigned permanently in a letter to the nation and signaled his willingness to let a younger generation assume power. He said his failing health made it impossible to return as president.
“I will not aspire to neither will I accept — I repeat I will not aspire to neither will I accept — the position of President of the Council of State and Commander in chief,” he wrote.
There's something kind of quaint about Castro paraphrasing Lyndon Johnson, of all people, isn't there?
And so the last of the old guard of high profile leaders largely leaves the stage -- only largely because he has pledged
... to continue to be a force in Cuban politics through his writings, just as he has over the last year and a half. “I am not saying goodbye to you,” he wrote. “I only wish to fight as a soldier of ideas.”
...which means that little is likely to change in Cuba over the short term.
Cuba under Castro has been useful to the right-wing for well over 40 years now, with the poverty in which so many of its citizens live being the example used for the failure of Castro's quasi-socialist government. But the picture is more complex than that. Cuba also boasts a literacy rate of 99.8% (ranking behind only Finland, the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Luxembourg and Norway) vs. the U.S., which ranks in a tie for 21st at 99%, an infant mortality rate of 6.04 deaths/1,000 live births (vs. 6.37/1000 live births in the U.S.), an average life expectancy of 77.08 years (not significantly less than the 78 years of the U.S.), and an unemployment rate of 1.6% (vs. the U.S., which currently stands at a 4.9% rate that does not include those who have given up looking for work).
I'm not going to argue Cuba's health care system here because I haven't studied it carefully and there are enough reports of filthy hospitals that didn't appear in Sicko that the picture therein is more complex than either side is about to discuss. I'm also not going to paint Cuba as some kind of Socialist Worker's Paradise. But hasn't this notion of Castro as some kind of imminent threat to the U.S., which he may have been as long as there was a Soviet Union, has gone on far too long? In 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq War, World Nut Daily was insisting that Islamic terrorists were establishing a beachhead in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America. Funny how not even the Bush Administration, with all its lies about how if we don't give the telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution for its mass wiretaps of the communications of all Americans we're all going to die tried to push that one very hard. Not none but the most lunatic of Republicans claims that the "hordes of brown-skinned people invading our shores from the south (sic)" are about terrorist infiltration.
Fidel Castro may not yet be completely gone, but his usefulness as all-purpose boogeyman in the Western Hemisphere is vastly diminished today. But all is not lost for the fearmongers. After all, they now have Hugo Chavez to fill that role.
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