Holidays in Havana

All bad things come to an end

THE SUN came up on a new day, yet again. But the world feels different. Warmer. Heartening. For the first time in more than 60 years, a Castro doesn’t sit on his throne in Havana.

Raul Castro—the little hit man for his brother all those years as they struggled to get to power, then to hold onto it—is expected to step down as First Secretary of the Communist Party this weekend.

A few other Castros hold positions here and there in the Cuban government and military, but none of them is likely to be promoted to head of the government or the Party, which in Cuba are one and the same.

The reins of government aren’t passed down from father to son in Cuba, as they are in, say, North Korea. The next president and Grand Inquisitor of the Cuban people will probably be some apparatchik named Miguel Diaz-Canel, hand-picked by the Brothers Castro, which does not become him.

While Fidel! and Che Guevara might have had blood on their hands during their revolution, Raul had blood on his hands, upper arms, feet and pants. Call him the gun behind the throne.

Proving that only the good die young, Fidel! died in 2016 at 90 years old, and little brother is only now retiring at 89. There have been many changes in the United States in six decades— think Eisenhower’s administration compared to the Biden administration—but in Cuba things have stayed still.

Cuba is still a black-and-white 1957 regular-gas kind of place. The centrally planned economy hasn’t worked out the way The Castros & Co. promised when they ran Granma aground in a Cuban mangrove swamp.

They could always blame everything on El Norte. If the Castros produced only shortages, failed African coups and body bags all across Latin America, just blame the Kennedys. Or Johnson. Or Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden. And the state-controlled media of Cuba can be counted on never to place the blame on the Castros, communism or where it belongs.

The number of executions during the Castros’ late and unlamented rule ran into the thousands. But who’s counting? Certainly not the Cuban government, or any of its citizens/inmates who know what’s good for them. If not, a rigged trial might be waiting, then a re-education camp. If you were lucky.

Early in his career, before he took control of the island and our country’s front pages, a young Fidel Castro, on trial for opposing the regime he would eventually overthrow, told his judges that they couldn’t harm him. Go ahead, do your worst, he told them, because: “History will absolve me.”

Well, history will certainly judge him, his brother and the Castro government(s), too. And tally the number of disasters, injustices and graves they all left in their wake. And we suspicion the history books won’t be kind.

Now then. On to a new day! And good luck to the Cubans, who deserve better than the Castros.