Fidel Castro is dead at age 90. In power for more than a half century, his regime ruled the last planned socialist economy. (Unless we include quirky North Korea). In 1957, when Castro launched his Cuban revolution, Cuban GDP per capita equaled the Latin American average. On the day of Fidel’s death, it has fallen to less than half that average. Over the fifty years of Castro’s communist rule, Cuba went from being among the more prosperous countries of Latin America to being among its poorest. When Fidel marched victoriously into Havana, it had fifty-eight national newspapers. Now it has six, all published by the Cuban communist party and its affiliates.
When Communism fell in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, advocates of Communism throughout the world shrugged. They argued that the Communist system is sound. The problem is that Communist countries have had the wrong leaders. Communist true believers, the world over, had to put their faith in Fidel and to hope that his example would spread Communism beyond Cuba’s shores – to countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua. Communist true believers looked at Fidel’s Cuba and praised its health-care and education systems, its income equality, and the fact that Cuba survived the U.S. embargo. They ignored the fact the Fidel remained in power thanks to repression of political opponents, his willingness to lose his most ambitious citizens as boat people to the US, and cheap oil as a client state of the USSR and then Venezuela.
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