Go, Raul, Go

Fidel Castro wasn't just a lousy human being. He was a lousy ruler. Cuba went to hell under his "leadership." Michael Moore went down there to slobber all over him because his government provided a modicum of "free health care," but I'll bet Old Fat Stuff never got too close a look inside a Cuban hospital. Lousy service was a hallmark of communism, and I know what I'm talking about because I got a glimpse of its legacy, and not while being squired around by government stooges carefully managing what I saw, as I'm sure was the case with old "Krispy Kreme" Moore. Once, when serving at the American embassy in Moscow a short time after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I went to the hospital to visit a Russian friend. My pal Sasha had gone in for surgery to have a hemorrhoid fixed. I imagined him lying around with nothing to do but look at the ceiling, so I went to see him and by the way took along a little radio I had to lend him, so he'd at least have something to listen to while lying around.

Here I was seeing a snapshot of what was left of the famous Soviet "free health care." The wallpaper was dirty. I saw a cockroach near the elevator. Sasha's roommate was a man clearly moribund. ("He's a goner," Sasha remarked) The man was lying in his not-too-clean bed, wheezing out his last breaths. There was no oxygen, no IV, no ICU for him. Just a guy alone in a bed in a corner, dying.

This is the kind of "free health care" I would wish on Michael Moore.

But back to Cuba. Free shitty health care aside, check out the rest of the pretty picture. No automobiles from later than 1959 on the roads. Jails full of souls locked up for daring to say anything critical of "Fidel." Crumbling infrastructure. Crumbling buildings. Havana was once one of the most beautiful cities in the western hemisphere. Castro turned it into a mass testing ground for blight.

But now his younger brother is in charge. Don't get me wrong, I'm not cheerleading for this guy. Cuba is still a dictatorship. But, as National Review magazine recently put it, if Cuba can move from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian one, well, at least that's a step in the right direction. Better to imitate China than North Korea if you must wrongheadedly cling to mouthing Marxism.

So I've been reading little things in the paper. Cubans can have cell phones now. They can shop in stores formerly open only to foreigners. Farmers can acquire partial ownership of the land they till, and former government employees can bequeath land to their heirs. Raul Castro is gradually instituting a laundry list of these "little reforms," no doubt aimed at increasing foreign trade and investment. Fair enough.

I have a personal stake in all of this. Some of us cigar aficionados are whispering among ourselves words to the effect that if Raul loosens things up in Cuba sufficiently, perhaps the nearly-50-year-old U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba might be lifted. And we'd be able to get Cuban cigars. Legally, not by having a friend go down and buy them in Tijuana, then smuggle them past Customs by stuffing them into the bottom of a bag of dirty laundry in the trunk of his car.

But there's a problem here, too. Among the many things Fidel Castro managed to wreck with his big, fat collectivist fingers was that very legendary Cuban cigar industry that for so many years defined the island nation in the eyes of the world as surely as there are Swiss watches, French cheese and Colombian coffee. During Fidel's enlightened rule, a lot of Cuban farmland that had been dedicated to the cultivation of cigar tobacco was converted to sugar cane cultivation. (We sixties kids remember our muddle-headed older brothers and sisters, the love-beads-and-thrush crowd, idealistically traveling to Cuba to "help with the sugar cane harvest," thinking they were doing their bit for The Revolution. Today they live in Fairfax or Montgomery County, drive Volvos and bore their friends to death with talk about their carbon footprints.)

The sugar cane industry set Cuban cigars back a good many years, because even when some of that land was re-planted with tobacco, it nevertheless takes years for the residual chemicals from sugar-cane farming to leach out of the soil, and those chemicals adversely affect cigar tobacco just as surely as putting a fine Pinot Noir in the refrigerator will render it worthy of the kitchen drain and not much else.

A cigar-industry pundit put it quite bluntly about 25 years ago: "Let's get this in perspective. The Cubans made some great cigars and they also made a lot of crap."

I can speak to that. In Moscow, for instance, I once got the bargain of a lifetime, or so it appeared at first glance. I was there during the chaotic early Yeltsin period, when the Russian economy was imploding and the market on the streets was a free-for-all. Kiosks were everywhere, and you could buy almost anything in the kiosks. One day I managed to buy a box of Cuban cigars at one of the kiosks for the equivalent of 40 U.S. dollars. Joyfully I spirited my treasure back to the embassy, where, with trembling hands, I opened the box, took out one of these legendary beauties, inhaled its aroma, savored its texture, made some fresh coffee, cut off the tip and lit up.

Ho-hum. It was okay, but no better than some of the Honduran and Nicaraguan smokes I'd enjoyed in the past. Nothing to write home about. And there you have it: socialism, after all, is about the triumph of mediocrity, and here it was, in spades.

So I say, you go ahead and keep reforming away, Raul. We cigar buffs will wait and hope. But I, for one, don't expect a whole lot for a while. Maybe for as many years as it takes the chemicals from sugar cane farming to leach out of what was once damn fine tobacco land.