Somewhere in Havana, Fidel Castro is probably laughing out loud to see Hosni Mubarak lose his grip on power after 30 years of undisputed leadership. In Castro’s eyes, no doubt, the octogenarian Mr. Mubarak brought a world of trouble on himself by trying to mollify Western critics through the creation of a phony democracy that would give his regime a veneer of respectability...
Cuba is a different place.
In Cuba, none of the trappings of democracy have existed for half a century. It is not part of the Castro playbook to permit any activity that would nurture the popular aspiration for liberty.
Access to the Internet for everyone – are you kidding? There is no opposition press, real or make-believe, no opposition parties, foreign reporters are closely monitored and the average citizen has practically no access to independent sources of information. Egypt’s business class is reported to be in anguish over the turmoil because it’s hurting the economy. In Cuba, there is no business class – the military runs the economy. Nor is there any civil society to speak of...
Fidel Castro has no use for the trappings of democracy because he has no interest in democracy. His is a zipped-up, no-nonsense totalitarian regime, designed to perpetuate one-man rule, brooking no opposition and making no concessions to foreign or domestic critics...
Fidel and Raul Castro have had 50 years to hone the apparatus of Cuba’s paranoid tyranny. Crushing dissent has been their principal preoccupation.
If the streets of Havana do not burst forth with protest, it is not because Cuba’s people are any less thirsty for liberty than the people in Cairo. But, unlike Hosni Mubarak – and Sadat and Nasser before that – the Castro brothers have foreclosed every avenue of rebellion and taken every conceivable step to stifle the longing for freedom. Like the Sun King, Louis XIV, Fidel Castro has been able to proudly proclaim that he is the state.
