What do Castro and Chavez have in common?

Apr 04, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Fidel Castro would have lived an embarrassing life as a leader if he was still in charge after Barack Obama became the President of the US. Obama is a living testimony of the ignominious collapse of Castro as a leader and the Cuban system.
For almost fifty years, Cuba has ridiculed American society as the failure of capitalism and a country where the capitalist class has total control.

Yet this very tightly regulated capitalist country (in Castro’s eyes) was able to elect a lower middle class lawyer without any serious connection to the bourgeois world. Most fascinatingly, large sections of the middle classes, the bourgeois strata and even aristocratic sector rooted for Obama.
What could Castro have said to Obama if Castro was still in power? What derogation could he have heaped on Obama? The entire world would have been curious to see what kind of denunciation Castro would have assigned to President Obama.

After all, the US was free enough to elect as President, a member of the minority race while Cuba is still to produce an African President despite the fact that the African race constitutes the majority ethnic constituency in both the society (76 %) and army (85 %).
Long time critic of Castro, Professor Carlos Moore was in Trinidad last week to launch his latest book, “Race and Revolution in Cuba.” Moore shot to world fame in the seventies with an iconoclastic article in the Marxist American journal, Monthly Review.
He claimed in that analysis that Afro-Cubans were discriminated against and the Communist Party was a subtle practitioner of racism.

The article attracted heated debate on university campuses throughout the world and here in Guyana. During my student days at UG I remember the Ratoon Group engaging PPP theoreticians on Moore’s thesis. Now Moore is back with a bang. In an interview with the Trinidad Express, he predicts a violent coup in the armed forces if racism against Africans continues.
He opines that the Castro brothers are afraid of this because 85 percent of the armed forces are Africans. Moore estimated that of the 138 generals only 35 are Blacks. In the general population, unemployment is running out of control among Blacks.

Here is an interesting angle that Moore offered to his interviewer. He described a violent demonstration in 1994 by Afro-Cubans in which cars and buildings were set on fire but Castro was smart enough not to fire on the protestors because of the traditional fear of that coup.
For more on Moore’s breath-taking evaluation of Castro and Cuba, see the March 29 edition of the Trinidad Express. Much of his description on the nature of the police state, the executions and the general repression that characterize Cuban society is not new and the objective reader would already be familiar with this kind of material. It is Moore’s description of racism in Cuba that the reader would find intriguing.
There was a nasty development in Cuba two weeks ago that symbolizes the degree to which the messianic cult is inherent in Fidel Castro.

There was a large Cabinet reshuffle in which some long serving communists were removed, one of which was Castro’s protégé, Felipe Perez Roque. Roque spent ten years as Foreign Minister after being the confidential secretary of Castro.
Last week, Castro used disparaging remarks against the dismissed Ministers saying they were failures. How sickening! Castro has been in power just months short of half of a century but he is not a failure, his past and present Ministers are.

This is the messianic cult that so many critics the world over has castigated Castro for.
At the psychological level, Castro operates with the same “divine” inspiration as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and other genocidal practitioners.
It is grand delusion of course but still it lives inside of him. That inspiration is that he is the super god that Nietzsche wrote about. Next door, he has managed to cultivate this illusion of grandeur in Hugo Chavez.
The Opposition leader in Venezuela has now gone in hiding because Chavez wants him arrested (on bogus charges of course). This was predictable.

What was also predictable was that he would change the constitution to rule for life. Both Castro and Chavez believe they are special leaders called upon earth to save their respective countries. Only death could have stopped Castro.
The rumour is that he is terminally ill. Chavez will go on indefinitely once the Venezuelan people do not stop him. Both Castro and Chavez were jailed for trying to overthrow their respective governments. History made a mistake in not locking them up forever.

---

---