Political Memes

Castro cuts such a tragic figure to my eyes. I, of course, abhor the authoritarian regime Castro established, but at the same time, I recognize that the disproportionate hostility of the US/offered aid of the Sovs, and the conditions of Cuba, made it such a tempting thing for a genuine idealist to put down. And from everything I've read, Castro was a genuine idealist (if a crafty son of a bitch), and open to changing his mind with the times.

But once you're a strongman, you're stuck there. You can't step down without losing control of the country's development - and hell, why would you give control of the country's development to people who are going to do things that (in your view) will wreck the country? "I'm going to hand over power to Republicans, or neoliberals in the Dem Party", like, fuck, you'd have to be stupid.

But counterintuitively, it's also the only way to preserve anything that you do. Even if you're 100% correct, a true philosopher-king, as long as you are the strongman, what comes after you will not be a continuation of your policies. If you don't give up the power to autocratically (or oligarchically) enforce your policies, then that power will simply be preserved for whoever comes next - and positions self-select for people who are good at the system which gets them there, not necessarily the position itself.

And God help you if you admit fault, because strongman regimes are, by their nature, brittle. Every time you admit something went wrong, that's a knife by the opposition (which has no real other options than total overthrow considering your power) ready to jab between your ribs and overthrow quite literally everything you've accomplished. So what do you do? You clamp down. They'll use anything, no matter how small or even untrue, so you have to.

It's a shit position, and Castro quite clearly loved his country and worked for its betterment, unlike most dictators and many democratic politicians. It doesn't make dictatorship excusable, but it does make the choices he made understandable. If I was in his place, would I have made different decisions? Fuck, man. That's above my pay grade.