While initially I was jubilant at the news that Fidel Castro had resigned his presidency, a few minutes later I realized how very little it meant.
Sure, symbolically it means something very great; Fidel brings back memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Cold War standoffs. Practically? The Communist regime is still there, it will still jail dissenters at will, it will still zealously monitor internet usage, and overall will remain the backward, oppressive state we've come to know and hate.
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When one categorizes tyranny, it is important to determine whether it is entrenched or held together by a particular individual. Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia until the 1980s, was really the only thing holding the state together. With him fell the nation as we know it, and to this day it is still dividing and sub-dividing.
Cuba, on the other hand, has a firm and rigid government that is powerful and pervasive; it is proven that it can resist both outside interference and internal protest. Fidel has hand-picked his successor in his brother Raúl, part of the stagnant inner circle of the Cuban political elite, so there is no possibility of instability or power jockeying on a meaningful scale. The message from this all is: it's business as usual in Cuba. Indeed, the population of Cuba seems to solemly march on rather than resort to jubilation or revolution.
The statements from the candidates followed a similar form.
Hillary Clinton's campaign remarked that:
"I would say to the new leadership, the people of the United States are ready to meet you if you move forward towards the path of democracy, with real, substantial reforms.
While the Obama campaign said something similar:
If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change, the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalize relations and to ease the embargo of the last five decades.
Besides Barack Obama mentioning the key issue of the embargo, they basically said the same thing; when you change we'll help, until then we don't give a damn.
But this is clearly the wrong order of action. An impoverished population can never push the leadership for change, and the leadership in Cuba has no reason to change, as things have worked in their favor in the past five decades. Look at North Korea: it's heavily sanctioned and poor, yet in no other country is its tyranny so absolute. This shows the underlying fallacy in the current policy towards Cuba that will stagnate any progress that could be made with Fidel's resignation. The only way that democratic reforms will come from within Cuba is when there is wealth and power in places besides the government. Under its current state, it only "provokes today an unjustified suffering of the Cuban people.'
This kind of logic and wisdom is not lost on the world as a whole, as the UN's call to end the embargo shows. Some prominent Democrats have previously stated that the embargo is ineffective:
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), the incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has said the embargo is a "total failure." In the House, Charlie Rangel (D-NY), who is set to become chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, has in the past sponsored legislation to end the embargo.
Thus perhaps an incoming president, probably a Democrat hoping to make friends in the world, will see that coming out against the embargo is not a political death sentence. However currently US-Cuban foreign policy is and has for decades been stagnant, a Mexican standoff of sorts.
It seems ironic that the candidates paint Cuba as stubborn, when America is also to blame; it fully knows how dependent the Carribean is on American trade, and yet continues to mandate infeasible requirements to lift the embargo, and with it normalize foreign relations with one another.
Tyranny is a world problem, and it will require the work of more than just the Cuban government and its citizens. The United States is the power broker in this whole situation, and if they extend a hand to Cuba, then just maybe Fidel's resignation is the first step to a brighter tomorrow.