Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Fidel at 90 From private businesses to internet, Cuba changes
FHAVANA idel Castro greeted his 80th birthday from his sickbed, gripping a newspaper to show he was alive two weeks after stepping down as president.
For the next 10 years the leader of the Cuban revolution watched from home as his brother Raul granted Cubans new economic freedoms and declared detente with the United States after a halfcentury of hostility.
Fidel Castro turned 90 on Saturday, thanking Cubans for their well-wishes and criticizing President Barack Obama in a letter published in state media.
“I want to express my deepest gratitude for the shows of respect, greetings and praise that I’ve received in recent days, which give me strength to reciprocate with ideas that I will send to party militants and relevant organizations,” wrote Castro, who stepped down as Cuba’s president 10 years ago after suffering a severe gastrointestinal illness.
Castro panned Obama, who appeared to anger the revolutionary leader with a March trip to Cuba in which he called for Cubans to look toward the future.
A week after the trip, Castro wrote a sternly worded letter admonishing Obama to read up on Cuban history, and declaring that “we don’t need the empire to give us anything.”
In Saturday’s letter, he criticizes Obama for not apologizing to the Japanese people during a May trip to Hiroshima, describing Obama’s speech there as “lacking stature.”
The man who nationalized the Cuban economy and controlled virtually every aspect of life on the island celebrated his birthday in a far different country than the one he ruled.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans are running private businesses, buying and selling their homes and cars, and checking the internet on imported cellphones. Castro’s greatest ally, Venezuela, is in economic free-fall, cutting the flow of subsidized oil that Cuba has depended on. Tens of thousands of Cubans are emigrating to the United States, hollowing out the ranks of highly educated professionals.
The island’s brightest economic hopes lie in a post-detente surge in tourism that is expected to boom when commercial flights to and from the United States, Cuba’s longtime enemy, start again Aug. 31.
“The future lies with the young people, and young Cubans aren’t waiting for things to come to them,” said Ernesto Gonzalez, a 25-year-old dance producer. “There’s much more information than there was 50 years ago, and this opening to the world, this new boom, Cuba as a top trending topic, makes us young people see things from a different perspective, in terms of developing this country and ourselves.”
It’s an uncertain time, with no settled consensus around Castro’s legacy. The government and its backers laud his nationalism and his construction of a social safety net that provided free housing, education and health care to every Cuban. Less is said about decades of economic stewardship that, with a U.S. trade embargo, has left Cuba’s infrastructure and its economy cash-strapped and still dependent on billions in aid from abroad.
The Cuban government took a low-key approach to Castro’s birthday: no big rallies or parades, no publicly announced visits by foreign dignitaries. Government ministries have held small musical performances and photo exhibitions that pay tribute to Fidel.
Castro last appeared in public in April, closing the twice-a-decade congress of the Cuban Communist Party with a call for Cuba to stick to its socialist ideals in the midst of normalization with the United States.
His voice quavered, but he appeared vigorous and healthy for a man of 89, whose long absences from the public eye have provoked speculation about his health ever since complications from gastrointestinal surgery forced him to hand power to his brother.
“Soon I’ll be 90, something that never would have occurred to me,” said Castro, the survivor of years of close-range fighting during the revolution and dozens of U.S.sponsored assassination attempts after his victory. “Soon I’ll be like all the others. Our time comes for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban communists will endure.”
That’s an idea that receives a qualified endorsement from many Cubans, who are disenchanted with the paltry salaries, shortages and paralyzing inefficiency that remain hallmarks of Cuba’s centrally planned economy.
Many Cubans today openly describe themselves as capitalists and say time has proved that Castro’s economic ideas do not work. But others praise Cuba’s low crime, its health and educational benefits, its investments in making cultural activities and sports available to all, and its support for putting family and friends before work obligations.
“The revolution has made a lot of mistakes, but the Cuban people are believers in Fidel because his ideas were noble,” said Marisel Avila, a 49-year-old singer. “We have to lift up our economy, without selling ourselves, without denying our history, but we can’t live in the past, either.”