[Marxism] ALTERNET: Robert Scheer - What Does Castro's Resignation Mean for Cuba?

[Walter Lippmann]

(Way back in 1961, before his hair went gray, Robert Scheer wrote a
book with Maurice Zeitlin called CUBA: Tragedy in Our Hemisphere.
Later he ran for Congress as a Dumbocrat and lost, but the best to
come out of his campain was its characterization by Jerry Rubin:
"This campaign is scheer shit". And so he's still peddling the
same old snake oil of liberalism he's been pushing since then.
He did write that very helpful pamphlet we all used in the early
sixties called HOW THE UNITED STATES GOT INVOLVED IN VIETNAM, but
he's also written a great deal of garbage like this, from the
convenience and comfort of his home in Los Angeles. He's not all
that different then the other pompous critics of Cuba, however,
except, perhaps, in the exuberance of his verbosity. Vomitous.

(This is a sign of the pitiful degeneration of U.S. liberalism today.)
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What Does Castro's Resignation Mean for Cuba?
By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on February 20, 2008, Printed on February 25, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/77367/

The resignation of Fidel Castro is more promising for the burnishing of his legacy
than the mostly septuagenarian Cuban hard-liners in Miami and their fawning allies
in the Bush administration would like to believe. After all, Mao Tse-tung is still
honored in communist China, the fastest-growing capitalist power in the world, and
former KGB agent Vladimir Putin is, at least for now, a very popular elected Russian
leader.

Those hoping for a "freedom flotilla" of Cuban exiles returning to remake
Havana in the image of 1959, threatening the very future of Las Vegas with legalized
prostitution as well as gambling, are likely to be disappointed. Odds are that Castro's
successors, beginning with his rhetoric-weary brother, are likely to finally get
serious, after decades of fitful starts and reversals, about ending the grip of 
a moribund statist economy. Reform leading significantly down the path of the Chinese
model, or more appropriately that of Venezuela, which has thrown a lifeline to the
ailing Cuban economy, is more likely than sudden upheaval.

But those changes will come too late to justify the suffering of the Cuban people
for half a century at the hands of a revolutionary, as arrogant as he is idealistic,
who witnessed his vision flounder on the rocks of an incredibly cynical U.S. policy.
Prime responsibility for that suffering does go to the Colossus of the North, which
in the pursuit of economic exploitation and Cold War paranoia consistently preferred
Latin American dictatorships to serious experiments in popular rule and strangled
the Cuban economy with an embargo in place for the almost five decades since Castro
dared move against the U.S. corporations that claimed to own much of the island.

If Castro had attempted to listen to the better angels of his fervid imagination
and pursued the path of democratic socialism rather than communist dictatorship,
his effort most likely would have been subverted by the CIA, as was the case throughout
the world, but it would have been an effort worth making. That was the promise of
Castro's famous Moncada speech, offered when he was a jailed young revolutionary
dreaming of genuine populist power, and even he must have doubts as to whether, 
as he predicted back then, "history will absolve me" for the price paid
in individual freedom for the revolution's survival in power.

FULL (of...)
http://www.alternet.org/story/77367/

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     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
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