Communism Has Failed Cuba

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

After nearly 50 years of suffering under Fidel Castro’s regime, Cubans can now realistically prepare for life after El Comandante. As of this writing, the 80-year-old Castro is very ill, if not completely incapacitated. When he dies, will the communist regime he created back in 1959 survive? Or will the country be transformed into a pluralist democracy, equipped with a market-based economic system and the existence of private property, as was the case with almost all of the communist Eastern Bloc dictatorships after the fall of the Soviet Union?

I predict the latter. In the Americas, at the turn of the 21st century, a dictatorship where human rights are not respected, which has more than 300 political prisoners—including 48 young people for collecting signatures for a referendum, 23 journalists for writing articles about the regime, and 18 librarians for loaning forbidden books—cannot be sustained. Fidel Castro’s death will be the starting point for a series of political and economic changes similar to those that occurred in Europe. Here’s why.

First, Castro’s leadership is nontransferable. He is a strongman who has personally exercised power for almost half a century. Although his ideology is communism, he is from the same anthropological stock as Spain’s Francisco Franco or the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo: the authoritarian military man. This type of authority, based as it is on a combination of fear and respect, cannot be handed down. It’s true that Castro’s brother, Raúl, has been hand-picked as the successor. But, at 75, his age is also a liability—as is his alcoholism and lack...