Fidel Castro Goes to the Aquarium
By Circles Robinson
HAVANA TIMES, July 16 — Former President Fidel Castro visited the Havana Aquarium on Thursday, spoke with workers and took in a dolphin show. Among the employees was Celia Guevara March, daughter of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who works there as a veterinarian, reported Granma daily.
After asking questions and listening to the staff about different aspects of their work, Castro told the workers that “there are two tremendous dangers” —facing humanity— “the danger of war and danger to the environment.”
Fidel called the dolphin show “something very peaceful, more beautiful than anything I’d seen.” He added: “If you want to give a gift to someone you feel special about, this is it.” During the summer months the popular aquarium is open until ten at night on Tuesdays through Sundays.
After four years out of the public eye following delicate intestinal surgery, an apparently recovered Fidel Castro has now made four public appearances in the last eight days. As when he was president, the Cuban newspapers give front page coverage to all of his activities.
grok: You continue to attribute all the shortcomings of the Cuban system to the “bureaucracy,” as though this powerful entity were the problem. It is a great aspect of the problem, but this choking “bureaucracy” is the necessary and inevitable product of something else.
Yes, bureaucracy is a cancer, but this cancer is produced by the core economic formula put forward by Engels & Marx in the 2nd chapter of the Communist Manifesto. By establishing that–in their view–the future socialist society would achieve “concentration of all the instruments of production in the hands of the state,” they imported into the socialist movement the formula of “state monopoly socialism.”
State monopoly socialism is the problem because full state ownership makes massive bureaucratic planning and control necessary to run the new economy. By scuttling private property and the mechanisms of the trading market, the only way left to run a complex economy is through bureaus.
Private property and the trading market should have been used all these years for the construction of workable socialism, through direct ownership of the instruments of production in the hands of the working, productive people via cooperative structures.
With such a dynamic socialist economy the socialist state, through partial, non-controlling ownership in lieu of taxes, would have more revenue at its disposal than under the state monopoly model.
I challenge you and others like you to say that the system of the old Soviet Union and now of Cuba is not best characterized as “state monopoly socialism.”
I believe the only thing that keeps you and others from seeing the truth of the Manifesto’s formula is your absolute faith in Karl Marx, i.e., cult personality worship. You and others twist and turn and try to blame everything on Stalin and all the nasty bureaucrats whosoever, but you all are only deluding yourselves.
Nice to see what socialist healthcare can do for octogenarians… In most countries Castro would simply have died, if he wasn’t well-off. I’m sure Cuba still has class differences in this regard too — and those will only grow, and not recede, if the bureaucracy is not brought to heel by the mass of the population — but still, it is an advance. May he live to 100. May all cubans live to at least 100.