Havana’s Revolution Is Dying

The Cuban regime survived the Bay of Pigs. Fidel Castro’s cigars never exploded. Operation Mongoose was a failure. Embargo, pressure, the Helms-Burton Act — Havana ignored all of them. The islanders are underfed, sick, and demoralized as a so-called strongman, Raul Castro, clings to power. Yet this time Cold War tactics might be unnecessary: Once admired by Communists world wide, Havana’s revolution is now dying of old age. An indictment against the nonagenarian Raul Castro is expected to be unsealed tomorrow, raising the ante in President Trump’s pressure on Havana. The case against the Castro brother, who has always been more ruthless than Fidel, harks back to 1996. That is when a Cuban fighter jet struck two small American planes, killing four of the crafts’ pilots. The attack was meant to disrupt an operation run by a Florida-based group, Brothers to the Rescue. Young New Yorkers might be unaware of the origin of a Manhattan intersection, right where the Cuban UN mission is located. Named after the Brothers to the Rescue, it commemorates the Cuban-American pilots, including some veterans of the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. They flew over the water between Miami and Cuba to escort small boats fleeing to freedom. Fidel gave the order, but Raul oversaw, in February 1996, the fatal attack.The Cuban atrocity revived a drive to pass the Helms-Burton Act. Signed into law by President Clinton, it widened America’s embargo of Cuba to include non-Cubans profiting from assets that the Communist regime confiscated after nationalizing all private property. One of the act’s champions was the founder of the Cuban American National Foundation, Jorge Mas Canosa, whose son is now emerging as a champion of the island’s revival. The demise of the Communist regime is expected “before the end of summer, perhaps even sooner. We will see changes within weeks,” the Miami-based Jorge Mas Santos, told el Pais last week. After decades of attempts to unseat the Havana Communists, this time the prediction seems at least plausible. Raul Castro, who will celebrate his 95th birthday in a couple of weeks, may soon be confined to a small prison cell.Taking the reins after Fidel Castro’s death in 2016, his brother slowly but surely concentrated nearly all of Cuba’s wealth, such as it is, in the hands of cronies and family members. The Raulitos, as Castro’s sons and grandsons are known, took away businesses even from their kin, the Fidelitos. A third generation of Cuban Communists is no longer motivated by revolutionary zeal, but they will fight to preserve power based on greed. What the Raulitos learned from their patriarch is to cling to the throne. “Raul is 95 for a reason: He’s a tough SOB,” a lawyer representing Cuban Americans with property claims against the regime, Jason Poblete, tells our Benny Avni. While the regime might be on its last legs, its hard core Castroites will scratch and claw to hold on. After all, what future do they have outside the island of Communist Cuba?Cuba’s patrons, Russia and Venezuela, are no longer there for a regime that has bedeviled American presidents since John F. Kennedy. Communist China is uninterested. The community of Cuban-American exiles is wealthy, influential, and eager to retrieve assets the regime stole from its ancestors. They, rather than Communists, are the future of the island. We’d like to think that Cuba Libre will soon be more than rum and Coca-Cola.

Havana’s Revolution Is Dying

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