Fidel Castro, the ruthless dictator of Cuba, was recently ill with severe internal bleeding, bringing the media’s spotlight on the island. Castro’s physicians managed to bring the him back to good health but doubts have arisen as to how much longer the dictator will be in power. Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor to the “presidency,” has openly admitted that he desires to see a more open economy in Cuba. Raul has showed much sympathy towards the Chinese economy and their mixture of communist rule with quasi-free markets. That said, questions have surfaced as to the possibility of counter-communist revolution when Fidel “buys the farm.” Cuba has seen some civil unrest recently, mostly due to repressive labor laws and the government’s failure to pay workers. In this article, Liannis Merino Aguilera writes of graffiti that has appeared at a bus stop in Holguin which has caught the immediate attention of the communist regime. The article states that
someone wrote anti-government slogans on the walls of a bus stop across the street from a military post in Banes, Holguãn municipality last weekend. The graffiti read “Down with Fidel” and “We don’t want Raúl,” in chalk. A detachment from the political police, headed by Major Wilson Ramirez, of the Department of State Security, converged on the site in the early morning and cleaned up the wall after thoroughly photographing it. Later in the day, the local contingent of the “Rapid Response Brigades,” the government directed mobs who prosecute all those not in agreement with government policies, were gathered at the fire station and told to “be watchful of acts of disobedience like this one.”
There may not be a radical libertarian revolution when Fidel kicks the bucket but one thing is for sure, the coming years will be quite interesting. My family is Cuban and suffered tremendously under Castro. My mother was driven out of the country and my father was placed in a concentration camp for eighteen months cutting sugarcane for the regime. It would be a relief for my family as well as millions of exiled Cubans to see a significant change from a repressive communist regime to a much freer market.
