Early Castro: “it’s never going to taste the same”
I’ve just finished my latest book group assignment, Waiting For Snow in Havana, a memoir by Carlos Eire about his childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, the Castro takeover, and the circumstances under which he was able to leave Cuba for the US at the age of eleven.
It’s a pretty good read, although a bit long. A great deal of it is free-form and poetic, and deals with Eire’s extremely odd family and the pranks he and his friends got into (some of them might be considered more serious than pranks, actually; that Eire and his buddies didn’t kill either themselves or each other seems a small miracle).
So the book’s political emphasis is hardly unrelenting. But the shadow of Castro hangs over the entire story, and lends a somber seriousness. Eire’s childhood in Cuba doesn’t really represent an idyllic Paradise Lost; it was too complex and too troubled for that. But there is no question that Castro is the snake in whatever Eden did previously exist there.
I don’t know Eire’s present political persuasion, but like many refugees from Communist countries he is adamant about the soul- and mind- and economy-stifling effects of the rule of a leftist dictator (and his henchmen; Che figures in the book as well) bent on reorganizing a society with an iron hand for its citizens’ “own good.” Eire has many chilling passages about Castro’s Reign of Terror that leave a reader with no doubt as to how bad it was. Castro may not have been Stalin, but only because he had a smaller canvas to work on.
Here’s a passage that gives you an idea of the book’s flavor. It’s not about the torture or the killings, but about something seemingly more trivial. As seen from a child’s eyes, the revolution took away everything good and replaced it with ugliness and dullness [in the following passage, “Cawy” refers to a Cuban soft drink, made by the family of a schoolmate of Eire’s, and Eire’s “Cuban people” remark is sarcastic]:
…Cawy and all the other soft drinks went down the tubes soon enough. The Cawy boy and his family lost everything. Confiscated. Nationalized. Everything from Coca-Cola to Cawy and Materva and Ironbeer, everything taken over by the state. Excuse me. Taken over by the Cuban people.
And the soft drinks went to hell.
…Once, when [Che Guevara was] asked on television about soft drink production in the newly nationalized bottling plants, he admitted that they had no clue as to what they were doing, that they didn’t know how to get them to taste good. The owners had been forced to turn over their bottling plants but not their recipes.
“Forget about coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cole,” said Che. “Forget about them. We’ll keep bottling something that looks like them, but we don’t have the formulae. The Yankee Capitalists took them. You can keep drinking the stuff, if you want, but it’s never going to taste the same.”
The decline in the taste of soft drinks may seem a relatively trivial change, but it’s part of a generalized quality of life issue that is one of the many, many failures of Communism. Life loses much of its savor, its taste—and that’s not trivial, although it pales in comparison to the brainwashing and the mind-control about which Eire also writes.
Eire also makes it crystal clear that it wasn’t just the money and savings of the rich that were confiscated. It happened to everyone. For him it has had lifelong repercussions:
One fine morning…Che came up with the great idea of doing away with money altogether…So all banks have been closed, and all accounts have been seized. This is the first step. Everyone who had a bank account can keep some arbitrary low sum—a few hundred pesos, I think. All else is gone, obliterated…
The second step is to change all the currency so that the bills and coins that people have will be worthless and all Cubans can start with a completely level playing field…
The lines are very long, but they move fast because you are allowed to change so very little. I’m standing in line, and so is my brother Tony, and everyone else I know. No one is sure about the rules, but the money changers don’t ask very many questions. When you finally make it to the changing table with bills and coins in your hand, they take them from you and give you new colorful bills with pictures of Fidel and Che and Raul and Camilo and all the other heroes of the Revolution. The new coins are so flimsy that we take turns trying to blow them off one anothers’ hands…
Four decades later, I am staring at my troubled bank account, meditating on the numbers I see before me. Suddenly I see them all turn to zero. I am back in line that Sunday morning and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I still expect all the money in America to disappear some day, the same way. It’s all an illusion, mere figures on paper. Retirement account? Stocks? Bonds? Savings accounts? Forget it. I don’t put away one cent. I don’t have any money in the bank, save for the little I have in my checking account, which is always fully depleted at the end of every month. I spend every cent I earn and then some. I’m always in debt, always ready for the day when everyone else will lose their money. On that day, thanks to my advance planning, I won’t have any to lose. I’ll only have debts to wipe out, like my uncle’s customers, come the Revolution.
Ha.
Not everyone would react in that particular fashion. But every refugee bears the scars. It’s no accident that emigrants from Communist countries are among the most virulent anti-Communists imaginable. Their cynicism about its false promises and its brutal leaders is profound, because they’ve lived it.
It’s funny, too (and not “funny ha-ha”), how similar all these stories are, even though the countries might be different. The pattern could not be more clear, and yet so many people think that somehow the pitfalls can be avoided and true “fairness” can be achieved—next time. There is something in human nature that falls prey to this dream, and it is a something can be taken advantage of over and over by cynical and power-hungry dictators.
And then it’s too late—and it’s never going to taste the same.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The above hints at something which is missing from communism, and which – possibly above all else – is responsible for the impossibility of communism ever succeeding. I speak of what Father Robert Sirico calls: “touching the material world with our transcendence.” We are NOT strictly physical beings. We are also transcendent beings. Any political system which fails to account for our transcendence must itself fail.
Father Sirico is the author of “Defending the Free Markets: a Moral Case for a Free Economy”:
Frédérick Bastiat pointed out that socialism is theft and the government can’t create prosperity.
In russia the term was when will it be like it was… as everyone was waiting for the hard times to end and the bitter sacrifices then bearing some kind of improvement or such. but it never really came…
It’s no accident that emigrants from Communist countries are among the most virulent anti-Communists imaginable. Their cynicism about its false promises and its brutal leaders is profound, because they’ve lived it.
and as red diaper babies tend to lean left, the children of such “immigrants” are also versed… some a lot, some not at all, as the “immigrants” wanted to spare them and hope they would never know…
However, the reason i am putting quotes on it, is that these are not immigrants… an immigrant WANTS to leave their own country. but people didn’t immigrate from such places, they escaped, or were forced out…
you wont call a person on a pile of foam battling sharks to get to the beach so that his feet touch sand so that they wont deport him… an immigrant…
thats a refugee…
same with defectors…
they are refugees of a different sort.
want to know the difference between a immigrant and a refugee? a refugee on some level wants to go back… feels that one day, they will return. till they are shattered and dont ever want to go back… but they also instill this same thing in their kids.
how similar all these stories are, even though the countries might be different. The pattern could not be more clear,
that’s because what is done is a refined process. That is, each time its tried, and such, its the same process, but improved (Darwinian). the evil gets better but the people stay the same ignorance, eventually they perfect it till your already living in it, and past the border, when they suddenly act upon the power that you think they don’t have because they didn’t act.
that is, before exercising the power that is no longer able to be hidden, they go way past the line of tha power… they hold back what they can do, and instead keep building base till they cant be opposed.
the states may be 100% failures, but i know of only one or two such things that were not successful, and none of them because of the people.
There is something in human nature that falls prey to this dream, and it is a something can be taken advantage of over and over by cynical and power-hungry dictators.
same process
same ideas
same experiences
same inspirations…
“the dream that would not die” and variations of that idea are old on the subject.
“The Dream We Lost” was the title of a book similar to the one you just read… as is Stalin’s children…
The full title is:
The Dream We Lost Soviet Russia Then and Now
http://ia600500.us.archive.org/14/items/dreamwelostsovie010072mbp/dreamwelostsovie010072mbp.pdf
i recommended reading it several times on your quest of reading refugees from totalitarianism…
this is what foreign affairs magazine said about it (in part)
i thought you would find it more interesting to read about a westerner whose ideals and such would cause them to immigrate, like the man who shot kennedy, to the soviet union…
not a resident who watched the conversions…
these stories are even more interesting… as they are much like malcom mudderige, and the award winning times author that hid the starvations… and so on and so on.
westeners who are in love with what they believe so much, that they do what most here dont do (but many here wish they would) and that is rather than change the place they live in, leave and go tothe place that is like they dream of.
then find the truth personally…
“One’s character is one’s fate,” and one’s character is no doubt mainly the product of environment. But it is only as one approaches middle age that one can look back and see how the influences of one’s early youth determined the course of one’s life. Those influences in my case were both socialist and liberal. It was a passion for the emancipa- tion of mankind rather than the blueprint of a planned society or any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellowship which led me to enter the Soviet Union and to leave it six years later with my political beliefs and my personal happiness alike shattered.
I came to communism via Greek history, the French revolutionary literature I had read in childhood, and the English nineteenth-century poets of freedom; not as a revolt; against a strict bourgeois upbringing, nor on account of failure to make a place for myself in capitalist society, but profoundly influenced by a happy childhood, a socialist father, and a Continental education. For me the communist ideal seemed the fulfillment of the age-long struggle of mankind for freedom and justice. I was, perhaps, mainly attracted to communism by its internationalism and its anti-imperialism. The Labour party in England had alienated me by its participation in the exploitation and oppression of the conquered races of Africa and Asia. My studies both of ancient history and modern economics made me abhor slavery in any form, and the Communists were the only socialists whose ideal was a world-wide equality and liberty.
The same influences of my upbring- ing which by 1925 had turned my hopes toward the U.S.S.R., were to make it impossible for me to accept the Soviet regime once I came to know it intimately.
I was, in Stalinist phraseology, a “rotten liberal,” a “petty bourgeois intellectual”-one who foolishly desired social justice, freedom, and equality, and had imagined that socialism meant an end to oppression and injustice.
the same ideals that got her into it
where the same ideals that got her to run from it
as i said… you never changed..
you only realized that they were not what you thought they were, and so, they no longer seemed to reflect you…
she was VERY well connected into the deep of it.. which makes it even more interesting (Thoug not enough to actually read it when recommended)
All the evidence about the failure of communism/socialism/fascism is available. Many, many books such as neo reports on. Many others reporting on the economic affects of those centrally planned, elite run economies. Even to someone as poorly read as me, it is quite clear – it does not work! Yet there are so many who just don’t want to see it. Even when they read about it, they seem unable to believe it could happen here.
Yes, we have a much deeper tradition of freedom, a more freedom loving society, and more complex economy than Cuba, Chile, Argentina, or even the old Soviet Union. Yet a Nancy Pelosi can float the idea of confiscating IRAs and 401Ks without fear of being denounced far and wide or, better yet, of being tarred and feathered. And confiscating retirement accounts would be a first step toward “leveling” the playing field.
There are 49 retired couples in my neighborhood. Most of them are well educated retired Boeing employees, bankers, farmers, etc., but only about ten of those couples are aware that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their progressive cohorts are a threat to their now happy lives. It’s difficult to live among such people because I know all but the ten will probably vote for Obama. Most of them resent the fact that I have Romney/Ryan signs in my yard. Many treat me like I’m a bit of a barbarian. Fortunately, our covenants allow such signs or they would gladly tell me to take them down. They would love to tell me how to behave. It is to weep.
75 days to go!
The four most dangerous words in the english language “this time is different”. There is even a very good econ book with the same title, which I recommend.
The year 1776 saw the birth of two major statements on freedom: one, obviously, was “The Declaration of Independence”; the other was the publication of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”*. True political freedom is inseparable from economic freedom.
*The shorter, better known, title.
P.J. O’Rourke said it best in the early ’90s before China dumped any pretense of having a socialist economy: “Cuban cigars are rationed in Havana, you can’t get good Chinese take-out in Beijing, and that tells you all you need to know about socialism”.
Socialism fails, always, because it is contrary to human nature. But just as surely, there will be those who think like Bullwinkle with his rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick, “this time for sure!” Human nature also includes varying degrees of gullibility.
.
What was that saying about an ascendant Nazi Germany?
.
“Picture a boot stomping on the
face of humanity — forever…“
.
Communism is just the same shit in a different colored uniform.
}}} like the man who shot kennedy, to the soviet union…
There was generally no evidence Oswald ever lost his faith in the ideal of Communism. As with most libtard idiots, all he lost faith in was a specific single implementation of it.
Libtards simply CANNOT learn from experience.
It’s their defining quality, I believe…
The notion that “it just wasn’t done right”, never, ever leads to the inevitable, self-evident conclusion:
“the only way to do it right, is to never do it at all”.
Create a thousand, a million Hells, and they’ll still be absolutely sure that the Next Time a Heaven will result.
IGotBupkis: that saying was not about Nazi Germany. It occurs in Orwell’s 1984, and it described the goals of the dystopic totalitarian mind control of “Ingsoc”–an English Socialism of the future.
– Alexis A. Gilliland, ‘Long Shot for Rosinante’ –
A nice little SF book set on an O’Neill colony Space Station, published in the early 1980s, about a “Second American Revolution” that takes place when the colony breaks off from its American roots.
The argument above takes place between the station’s AI computer (Skashkash) and one of the residents, a firm believer in Marxist Theory.
LOL, I stand corrected, Neo. I thought it was Orwell, but was pretty sure it was about Nazi Germany. But it’s certainly an apt description of the end result of any socialist revolution.
Funny how liberals always assume the dictatorships will come from the Right, which I think is usually pretty rare in developed nations, isn’t it? Don’t most of them, historically so far, come from the Left? Isn’t Nazi Germany one of the few (debatable, I think) exceptions to that?
IGotBupkis: very debatable. In fact, I think the argument that Nazis were of the left is stronger than that they were from the right. See this.
Good set-up question for Fidel worshipers/PSF[Pendejos Sin Fronteras]:
Life expectancy in Cuba is 5 years greater than life expectancy in Latin America [79 versus 74 years.] Does this difference of five years in life expectancy show that Fidel and his brother have been good stewards of the Cuban nation?
When the PSF/Fidel worshipers reply with a resounding YES, then ask them the following question.
Life expectancy in Cuba in the 1950s was 8 years greater than life expectancy in Latin America [62 versus 54 years.] Does this difference of eight years in life expectancy show that Batista was a good steward of the Cuban nation?
The point is two-fold. First: contrary to the claims of PSFs, Castro took over a country that, for all its problems, was relatively well-off. Second: while there has been progress in public health in Cuba under the Castro regime, there has also been progress in public health in the rest of Latin America.
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