It wasn’t enough that Fidel Castro’s socialism impoverished and imprisoned Cuba for more than a half century.
It wasn’t enough that Hugo Chavez, Castro’s ally in Venezuela, tried but failed to prop up the Cuban socialist hell and then created a Venezuelan socialist hell.
It wasn’t enough that Castro dismissed his own socialist health-care system when he took ill in 2006 and called in a doctor from Spain to save him.
'Caravan of liberty.' But this weekend, the official socialist Cuban jeep-like vehicle pulling Castro’s ashes broke down in the socialist’s memorial procession.
After a final farewell early in the week at Havana’s Revolutionary Square, the former president’s remains, placed in a small, glass-encased casket, began moving east in a cross-country cortege through towns, cities and listless countryside. The state called it “The Caravan of Liberty,” the same name the guerrillas called the journey they made from Santiago to Havana to topple the Batista regime in 1959.
It didn’t all go well despite the state’s attention to details: at one point, soldiers were forced to push the jeep towing the remains when it broke down, fitting for a country where vehicles creak along.
There’s a pattern to all of this, but socialists never seem to catch on.
No real caravan of liberty is led by a socialist vehicle.
Frank Warner
* * *
Recent Comments