Fidel’s revolution will soon follow him to the GRAVE E

El Commandante, at 90, has wandered off back to the Sierra Maestro mountains of Eastern Cuba, from which, on one of his acclaimed visits here, he said he could see the mountains of Jamaica. Approaching 90, and reappearing from retirement before a Congress of the Cuban Communist Party one last time, he told them: “Soon I will be like everybody else. Our turn comes to us all, but the ideas of Cuban communism will endure.” Mr Castro was right about the soon-for-himself and about everyone’s turn coming. He’s not right about the endurance of communism, even when qualified as ‘Cuban’. At his famous trial in 1953 after the failed rebel attack upon the army barracks at Moncada, he closed his four-hour-long defence speech as a prisoner of the Batista regime saying, “History will absolve me.”

He may be right about that, too, in terms of any longterm assessment that his intentions were good, and that, overall, he did more good than harm in seeking to implement noble intentions for, and upon, the captive Cuban people. Already, history has correctly judged Fidel Castro as one of the great leaders of the 20th century.

But history will shortly be consigning the Cuban Revolution to its dustbin.

Mr Castro should have remained a believer in Divine Providence as his Catholic upbringing would have taught him. He miraculously survived the wiping out of the forces that mounted the Moncada attack. He was pardoned, not executed, by the Batista regime. He escaped the slaughter by Batista’s army of most of the handful of revolutionaries who accompanied him on the Granma from Mexico back to Cuba. He survived the dangers and death of the campaign to oust Batista, and, ensconced in power, he outlived possibly hundreds of assassination attempts failed to contract lung cancer from his trademark cigar smoking and lived, to his surprise, to die peacefully at age 90.

Not only is the trajectory of history changing, but socialism, particularly in its extreme communist manifestation, is inherently unstable as an economic and political system and is doomed to completely collapse.

INEVITABLE DEMISE

The collapse as a serious world system is already well advanced. Only Cuba and North Korea now remain as committed communist regimes, staggering to their inevitable demise. China and Vietnam are roaring freemarket, capitalist economies clinging to the veneer of a communist political system. The market will shortly strip away that political façade. These clever states are seeking to ride two horses going in opposite directions. And the market, in which are embedded some of the strongest and most ineradicable human instincts, will win. Nobody now even can recall readily which are the other few communist states surviving the collapse of the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, and Yugoslavia.

Four years before Fidel was born, the son of a welloff Spanish migrant landowner, and the parent Russian Revolution was only five years old, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises published Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, a monumental exposé of the weaknesses of the socialist system in both principles and practice.

It is not likely that young Fidel and his friends