SAN JOSE COSTA RICA Ñ
Outside of sex and salsa, nothing inflames Latin American passions more than a hard-fought soccer match or a good revolution. And unlike sex and salsa, the winners in soccer and revolutions can be tracked statistically. On July 17, tiny Costa Rica whipped Cuba 3 to 0 on the soccer field, so how well each is doing in that field is clear. But that same week Cuba took a second whipping from Costa Rica, one of even greater importance, when the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) issued its annual Human Development Report, its annual ÒrankingÓ of the countries in the world in terms of basic human development, infant mortality, education, literacy, life expectancy and general well-being. And there too Costa Rica also trounced Cuba, rising sharply upward towards the top of the Latin American list even as Cuba continued to slide towards the bottom. Fifty years ago, the two were very different, and therein lies the tale.
Costa Rica held its revolution first, in 1948, when Jose "Pepe" Figueres led an armed movement that kept the then sitting President Otilio Ulate from extending his mandate unconstitutionally. At the time Costa Rica was a relatively poor developing country with literacy rates below those of many of its neighbors including Panama, Colombia and Cuba. Life expectancy was low, infant mortality high and public health services problematic. But once in power, Figueres, a man of the radical but not Communist left chose to govern democratically, embrace the free market and hold honest elections. Under his leadership civil liberties were greatly expanded, education improved dramatically, public health, sanitation and rural electrification programs pushed into the furthest reaches of the country, and economic growth continuous. In addition to abolishing the Costa Rican army, a bold action in Latin America, Figueres set several other precedents: He engaged all the country's political forces, from far left to far right, in the political processes, assured that elections were democratic in nature not just theory, with hard fought but open and fair one-man one-vote political contests followed by peaceful transfers of power. The results have been remarkable, constant economic, social and political improvements that have raised Costa Rica out of pack and given its people an outstanding quality of life unexcelled in the region.
In Cuba Fidel Castro chose a very different path for the Cuban revolution. Although Castro rode out of the Sierra Maestra and into power at the head of another armed movement while invoking the same slogans Figueres had embraced a decade earlier, democracy and civil liberties, he chose Marxism as his model. At that time Cuba was ruled by a dictator, Fulgencio Batista, but nonetheless ranked third in the Americas behind only the US and Canada in basic human development. But once firmly in power Castro abandoned his democratic pretensions in favor of staging a revolution of his own personal design.
Ever since Castro triumphed, the world has been inundated with incessant and unchallenged hosannahs to his Triumphant Revolution: sugar production has increased dramatically this year, literacy rates now surpass those of Sweden or Switzerland, ours health system is among the world's best, life expectancy has soared, all claims the world's admirers of ÒrevolutionÓ fully embraced, no doubts allowed. But these immutable ÒtruthsÓ just crashed into a logical dilemma in the form of the UN's official statement as to just how Cuba has actually been doing. If Cuba, the most developed country in Latin America in 1959, has since dropped to fifth place in terms of the basic human development these ÒtruthsÓ cannot be true. For me the only real surprise is that the UN has finally doffed its deep pink-tinted glasses and admitted that for nearly a half-century Costa Rica, a free market democracy, has regularly been outperforming communist Cuba in terms of human development, and doing so without charging its citizens the terrible human taxes Cubans have been forced to pay for Castro's neo-Marxist adventurism.
Castro's apologists can be expected either to ignore the UN or to trot out their favorite lame excuse for Cuba's revolutionary shortcomings Ñ they are all the fault of the United States embargo, not Communism or Castro. That this requires studiously ignoring the reality that neither Europe, Asia, Africa nor the rest of the Americas has ever embargoed trade with Cuba making it a logically absurdity, will bother them not one whit. They may even trot out their second favorite lame excuse. Castro's Cuba has received no U.S. economic aid: Therefore it has not been able to prosper. This argument, that studiously ignores the tens of billions in Soviet bloc aid Cuba received before the Berlin Wall fell, is even more logically absurd than the first, because it both ignores Castro's pathological hatred of all things Americas that would have precluded his accepting our help even if we had offered it and their own arguments against America.
Even a few Old Europeans now appear realize that Fidel Castro, a dictator who took the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, who denies his people even minimal freedoms, and who just refilled his political prisoners with human rights advocates is hardly a prime candidate for American taxpayer largesse, nor even for their own. Perhaps they have been shocked by Castro's recently having told them and the entire European Union to go to hell and take their Euros with them for having the sheer audacity to remonstrate against his refilling of his prisons with their friends. May I suggest a perfectly logical alternative explanation as to why Costa Rica has outperformed Cuba, one that even fits the evidence? Democracy and free markets not Marxism works best. That is the real reason why, in terms of quality of life, Costa Rica just gave authoritarian Cuba its second trouncing. And in both instances the cure is clear. Cuba's soccer team needs a new coach, and its political team needs a new model. Until these two changes have been made, and especially in the ratings race that really counts, that of human development, Cuba will just keep on failing, and failing, and failing.
Timothy C. Brown (tcbrown@hoover.stanford.edu) chairs the International Relations Department at the Sierra College and is a Research Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He writes monthly for World Tribune.com
