The always-lovable John Bolton was on the BBC news last night, giving his reaction to the news that Fidel Castro is stepping down as President of Cuba. Would the US now ease its economic blockade of the island? "No", said Bolton winningly: before that can happen, "Castro has to die". He explained that he expected the communist state in Cuba to fold like a pack of cards once Csatro was out of the way, but in the meantime the US would have no truck with a regime that had spent the last couple of years trying to rig the succession. Quite right, I say: how can you possibly deal with leaders who try to get their close relatives into positions of power?
Bolton went on to say with an undisguised sneer that the future of Cuba would not be decided "by the people who are proud of their healthcare system" (i.e. those who actually live there), but by "people who value freedom" -- i.e. the emigres in Florida, who will presumably be expecting to return "home" soon and take up where they left off. It sort of reminds me of a comment by a State Department hack at the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003: "the first action of an independent Iraqi government will be to recognise the state of Israel". Clearly this is a different definition of "independent" from the one that most of us use.
There should certainly be plenty of work for the lawyers as the emigres try to regain the property that they abandoned when they fled. The people who stayed behind won't stand a chance. It's probably unlikely that Cuba will revert to the kind of gangster paradise that provoked Castro's revolution in the first place, but if Bolton and his amigos get their way, it's a pretty safe bet that Cuba's literacy rate and longevity statistics will be significantly lower in ten years time than they are today.
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