Fidel’s end will not bring happiness

Peter Hitchens

02 August 2006

One or two outlets exultantly proclaim ‘We have rum’, the national solace. Rum of this quality might be better used to fuel the museum-piece 1950s American cars, which — kept going out of necessity, not nostalgia — clatter and burp down the pitted tarmac, emitting clouds of filth. Yet halfway along the street you can also find a superb restaurant, reached by climbing a half-ruined, majestic staircase. Here tourists and rich Cubans may dine in unlikely splendour, and one person’s meal costs rather more than a normal monthly salary. Bills must be paid in ‘Convertible Pesos’, the special currency which is increasingly essential for anything beyond the basics of rice, black beans and lard, a type of wealth which — for most Cubans — is as unobtainable as moonrock.

The shadowy shape of a more normal, unequal and perhaps prosperous Cuba is already beginning to form, even as the system’s creator lies in hospital suffering an ‘intestinal crisis’ and the world begins to wonder if Cuba is possible without Fidel Castro. The spread of private wealth hints at a future modelled on Deng Xiaoping’s China. It is in queer contrast with the impoverished, egalitarian abnormality resulting from Comrade Castro’s preposterous attempt to recreate the Soviet Union in the Caribbean. Actually, this unhinged project has been surprisingly successful on its own terms. Some of Havana’s brutalist 1970s suburbs are physically identical to Brezhnev-era sections of Moscow.

The economy too has attained Soviet success levels. Only the statistics are good. It is currently kept alive solely by oil transfusions from the Venezuelan loudmouth, Islington hero and general menace Hugo Chavez.