Doug Casey On Castro and Cuba

Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

L: Doug, Fidel Castro is much in the news of late, with almost McNamara-like changes of heart, ranging from regretting the persecution of gay people under his rule, to admitting that socialism isn't working too well. The press reports him saying, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore." I just heard today that the Cuban government plans to fire a half a million government employees, and the number may climb to a million – those jobs were once sacred sinecures. I know you've been to Cuba and met Castro, so what do you make of all this?

Doug: I have to say, this gives me some hope. If only Obama could take a page from Fidel's new book. Perhaps Fidel is not a completely sociopathic criminal after all; perhaps he's just been deluded, and a very slow learner; perhaps he's actually capable of admitting guilt and reforming. He seems to be trying to rethink things in a more moral way, as the grim reaper approaches him. Perennial optimist that I am, I like to give folks the benefit of the doubt.

L: Do you think that's what it is, a desire to set right what he can before he exits this stage? Or could he actually be more honest than we gave him credit for, and now he's facing the evidence that says he was wrong?

Doug: You can never really know what's actually going on in his mind. But it puts him a cut above hopeless sociopaths like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao who never evidenced an iota of regret that we know of. Or even lesser lights, like FDR and Nixon. If Dante's Inferno exists, all of them would be in low and nasty circles. Let's hope Fidel at least makes it to the Purgatorio.

Doug Casey, upper left, sips a drink while Pierre Lassonde enjoys a lengthy lecture, finger jabs included, by Fidel Castro. (Photo courtesy of Paul Zyla.)

L: Of course. Silly question. So tell us about Cuba, why you went there, and what you thought of Castro when you met him.

Doug: I've visited Cuba four times over the years. The first time was not long after the Soviet Union collapsed. There was essentially nothing there. The country had been living for years on handouts from the USSR, getting paid way above market for its sugar, buying oil way under market, and getting all sorts of miscellaneous freebies from the Soviets. But that game fell apart, taking the Cuban pseudo-economy down with it. There are about three or four blocks in Havana that have been renovated for the benefit of tourists wandering around, but the vast majority of the city looks like Berlin in 1945 – and I kid you not. Hundreds of buildings with collapsed roofs, broken windows, no electricity or plumbing. Socialist economies have never understood the concepts of depreciation and maintenance.

L: The Soviets ran out of money before their government collapsed, so Cuba would have been on meager rations for some time when you were there…

Doug: And it couldn't be disguised. I went to a state dinner, and it was so bad, it was embarrassing. As I recall, the only thing they had to serve were some Spanish stuffed olives, which they'd bartered for some sugar, some bread, a few veggies, and a fish. Against all odds, somebody had gotten some gasoline and gone out in a boat and caught one. Things were really rough then.

L: Is that when you met Castro?

Doug: No, I think I met him on my third trip to Cuba. We were staying at a casa particular – a lot of times, when the government would host you, they'd put you up in a house that used to be owned by a rich Cuban who'd fled. It was a trip back in time. The furniture, the rugs, the curtains – all of it was stuff I'd last seen on 1950s TV reruns. It was all decades old.

L: Well, I guess the Cubans aren't going to make Architectural Digest any time soon. But what about health care? Admirers say real strides have been made there.

Doug: I happened to have visited one of the vaunted Cuban biotech centers while I was there; it basically resembled the chem lab of a rural high school in the U.S. But first we must be very careful to distinguish between "health care" and "medical care"  (see our conversation on this). The term health care is a fraudulent misnomer. Health is everywhere a strictly personal responsibility, and determined largely by diet and exercise. It was laughable when that fat slob Michael Moore made the argument that the average Cuban was healthier than the average American because of their nationalized doctors and hospitals. He's right that the average Cuban is much healthier – but it's solely because he's got a simple, fresh, low-calorie diet, he necessarily gets a lot of exercise every day, and he's not taking a half dozen pills every day to assuage every real or imagined pain.

The fact is that medical care in Cuba is about 50 years behind the times. Their technology, and the education of the doctors, is antiquated and primitive. They don't even have Band-Aids and penicillin, forget about MRI and CAT-scan machines. Cuba is not a good place to get a severe trauma or acute disease – which is where American medical care shines. But the average Cuban is vastly healthier than the average American, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with medical tech.

L: And the education system? It's said every Cuban can read and write, which didn't used to be the case…

Doug: I think there's some truth to that. But, once again, Boobus americanus completely misunderstands what it means. First, learning to read and write isn't rocket science. Second, it's something an individual is responsible for, not a school system. People who think it's a fantastic accomplishment apparently believe the government is a solution to illiteracy. Of course, Castro wanted everyone educated in the basics, but only so they could read propaganda, in my opinion. There's certainly not much else to read there – no books in the libraries, no magazines, no newspapers besides Granma, the state rag – and you can forget about computers. I think it's tough to get a decent education with few pens and pencils to be had, and very little paper, a few books, and the teachers putting political education first. Cuban students are in a time warp. Claims about Cuban education are just nonsense. It's a huge failure. But so is American education (see our conversation on education).

L: Okay… But what was an anarcho-capitalist doing in Cuba at all, let alone as a guest of the communist government?

Doug: Well, Americans are theoretically allowed to go to Cuba, but they are not allowed to spend any of their own money there. That's why, if you enter the U.S. from abroad and the officer who checks your passport has reason to believe you've been to Cuba, or if you reveal the fact that you've been to Cuba, you will definitely be interrogated. I understand that, at least during the Baby Bush years, the U.S. had agents in places like Cancun, Toronto, and Santo Domingo, from where a lot of flights for Havana depart, looking for people with U.S. passports at the check-in counter. We'll have to do one of these conversations on dealing with Customs, Immigration, and TSA types sometime soon… Anyway, since it's hard to visit a place and not spend any of your own money at all, they figure you've probably broken the law, and you will probably be prosecuted. So, American businessmen usually go there as guests of their business associates, enabling them to make the claim that they never spent anything in Cuba. The Cuban government treats them well, because it gets a 50% equity stake in any deal they make – you're always in business with the government in Cuba.

L: What kind of deals?

Doug: I went there with Leisure Canada (V.LCN), a small Canadian company that had acquired some spectacular beachfront property in Cuba and was planning to build resort hotels. Another time I was with a mining company that had a copper-gold deposit in the far west of the island. I went another time with a mining company that Pierre Lassonde had, with several projects around the country. And the other time was with another Canadian company that was trying to manufacture retail electronics in Cuba, taking advantage of the cheap labor. Those were my sponsors – and you needed to have a sponsor, of course.

It was always an adventure. One time we were flying to Santiago, in Santiago de Cuba province, where the revolution began, in an old Soviet An-1. I was talking to the pilot, and told him I flew. He let me take the controls for 10 minutes – try doing that on a commercial flight in the U.S. Another time we were taking an Mi-8, the workhorse Soviet helicopter, someplace and the pilot couldn't get the damn thing to fire up. So the copilot came back and started messing around in the fusebox with a screwdriver. The whole thing filled with acrid smoke, and we exited posthaste. Believe it or not, those guys flew the thing away – but I guarantee we weren't on it.

It was on the trip with Pierre that I met Fidel. There were only about ten of us there, and he presented himself, unannounced. I believe he speaks quite acceptable English, but he prefers to speak Spanish, for nationalistic reasons, and so as not to be misquoted or misunderstood in English. He rambled on for hours, through his interpreter. At that time, he'd already given up smoking cigars – he was well known for smoking Cohiba Lanceros, the long, thin panatellas. They are absolutely one of my favorite cigars as well. Cuban cigars are the only way to fly (see CWC on ATF).