Castro remains in power after 40 years

By Klaus Blume

HAVANA (DPA): It was as if carnival had come early. Long lines of cars decorated with Cuban flags drove through crowds of cheering people in the streets of Havana. Tropical music blended with a cacophony of car horns. Everyone around was shouting "Libertad!" -- Freedom -- as loud as they could.

On Jan. 1, 1959, communist revolution triumphed in Cuba. Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, a man as universally hated as he was corrupt, had fled the country at 2 a.m. in the morning, after news reached him that the city of Santa Clara had fallen to the rebels.

Batista's flight signaled victory for a 32-year-old revolutionary, Fidel Castro, and the end of a two-year guerrilla war. Three days later, Castro victorious marched into Havana.

From that day on, the beared revolutionary did more than just determine the fate of his country. He also played a role in global politics.

Castro led Cuba into the communist camp, backed revolutionary movements throughout the world, challenged his mighty neighbor the United States, and provoked the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

After 40 years, Castro, now one of the longest serving heads of state in the world, still has a firm grip on power, though the achievements of his revolution are not without controversy.

Castro began his battle against Batista in 1953 when he attacked the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. It was a suicide mission, and 56 of Castro's comrades were killed.

Sentenced to 15 years in jail, but granted an amnesty after just two years, Castro went into exile in Mexico. At the end of 1956, he returned with 81 fighters aboard the yacht "Granma" and set up his own rebel movement.

Though they were outgunned, the guerrillas defeated the regular army, whose troops were so demoralized that towards the end of the insurgency, they refused to leave their barracks.

Batista's regime became so unpopular after he took the presidency by force in 1952 that the communist revolutionaries could count on widespread support among ordinary Cubans.

In turn, the communists alienated the middle classes just as quickly as they nationalized their real estate, businesses and farms. The bourgeoisie fled across the Florida Straits into exile in the United States.

Because he did not shy away from nationalizing U.S.-owned property as well, Castro inevitably earned the animosity of his northern neighbor. The United States embargoed Cuba, but then the Soviet Union offered itself as a new ally and bought Cuba's sugar crop.

Thanks to generous Soviet subsidies revolutionary Cuba was able to set up a welfare state that is without parallel in Latin America. Health care is free, as is education. The revolution was able to create social equality at a low level, so that over the years the poorest people in Cuban society were able to move out of corrugated iron shacks and into rented apartments.

But as a result of the inefficient communist command economy the country's economic performance dipped sharply. Under Castro, Cuba became one of the richest and one of the poorest country's in Latin America.

Following the Soviet model, Cuban revolutionaries created their own surveillance apparatus and mechanism to repress dissent. The political opposition was persecuted. Castro's onetime fellow revolutionary Eloy Gutierrez spent 20 years in prison. In 1989, Castro had General Arnaldo Ochoa shot, because the popular army commander of Cuban troops in Angola might have emerged as a rival.

When the Iron Curtain fell in Europe, the Soviet Union collapsed and aid from Moscow came to an end, the Cuban revolution entered its deepest crisis. Food rations kept getting smaller and the shortage of gasoline forced Cubans to walk or cycle to work. There were no textbooks in the schools and the hospitals ran out of bandages and aspirin.

Castro reacted to the crisis with strictly limited economic reforms, allowing people to own U.S. dollars, go into business for themselves, sell home grown produce at farmers' markets and by opening the country up to tourism and foreign investment.

To this day, however, Cuba has failed to recover from the economic crisis caused by the lapse of Soviet aid. "Condemn me, history will find me not guilty," Castro said, when he on trial for the attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953. After 40 years of communism in Cuba, it seems unlikely that history will.