POLITICS: Tragic Cuba a dark lesson of the failure of Communism: ‘This is hell’

Cuba just endured a nationwide blackout of the electric grid, lasting for days — the third such disaster in six months. The population has succumbed to despair.

“There are no words to describe this,” a young Cuban YouTuber exclaimed. “This is hell.”

Yet the blackout scarcely made the news. Journalists and intellectuals have fallen out of love with Cuba, so nobody is asking the obvious question: How can any government allow such a humanitarian horror to continue?

Let me try to answer that question.

I was born on the island long ago, when it was a happier place. My childhood was spent in a subtropical garden ringed by the best beaches in the world.

Havana, my hometown, boasted magnificent colonial buildings from the time when the Spanish treasure fleet would rendezvous in the city’s protected harbor before sailing to Seville.

The island, though not wealthy, was prospering. Hard as it is to believe, at the time of my birth Cuba’s GDP per capita exceeded that of Japan.

The Cuban people, then as now, were pushy, loud, friendly and funny. I am reminded of the type whenever I visit Israel — only Cuba, back then, had better food and way better music than Israel ever did.

Politics swallowed isle

This picture of paradise was spoiled by a tragic flaw all too familiar to those who have lived in Latin America: Politics swallowed and destroyed everything else.

Cuban democracy was shaky and corrupt — but it turned out to be infinitely preferable to the succeeding alternatives.

In 1952, the military, led by Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the elected government. Since that fatal event, the Cuban people have remained unfree.

On New Year’s Day of 1958, Batista took his family, friends and bags of money on a plane and fled to the Dominican Republic. A motley crew of revolutionaries with big beards and olive-green fatigues, commanded by the 33-year-old Fidel Castro, was now in charge.

Castro fought Batista as a democrat but ruled Cuba for 50 years as a Marxist-Leninist “maximum leader.”

And here is a spoiler alert: It’s this strange and unnatural system, with its predictable consequences, that has driven Cuba and the Cubans into the abyss.

Marxism-Leninism combines a utopian idealism with the most brutal and rigid control over private life — even private thoughts — ever attempted by the state.

In theory, it aims to eliminate all oppression and exploitation, give to each person his or her due, and guide humanity from the “realm of necessity” to the “realm of freedom,” as Karl Marx put it.

The practice fell short of the ideal.

More than 60 million human beings were murdered by the state in the Soviet Union, many of them in Siberian labor camps — the infamous “Gulag Archipelago.” At least 45 million starved to death during China’s insane attempt to industrialize on Marxist principles, the “Great Leap Forward.”

Many, even today, fall passionately in love with the ideals and consider the killing fields to be a mere glitch in the matrix.

Those who have lived through the nightmare and survived know better.

Utopian nightmare

At the heart of the Marxist-Leninist system was the Communist Party, made up of people who considered themselves to be uniquely perceptive, capable of decoding the future course of history — the “vanguard” of the human race.

Party members grasped reality. Everyone else stumbled along in a fog of false consciousness, working against their own best interests.

To achieve utopia, therefore, the Party had to be treated like a kind of infallible pope and obeyed explicitly on every aspect of life from the cosmic to the mundane — or else.

This radical form of elitism demanded a complete monopoly over information, for the best of motives: The public would otherwise be bamboozled by fake news.

“What they call a free press in the United States is nothing more than the freedom of the rich to deceive the poor,” Castro once said.

Batista, the right-wing thug, censored the press. Castro, like all Marxists, believed the press could only be free when it was totally under his control. He demolished the lively Cuban media, including newspapers, radio and TV, and substituted a Party media that was deadly dull but ideologically pure.

I remember the death of freedom of the press in Cuba. In theory at least, it wasn’t done out of a mania for control. It was a kindness. We, the public — ordinary people — lacked the historical wisdom to parse the disinformation fed to us by “the rich.”

Castro and the Party knew best. The massive Marxist-Leninist state needed to crush every particle of independent thought in us to protect us from ourselves.

I also remember the feeling of the totality of the state like a pounding migraine that never went away.

If you picked up the phone, revolutionary slogans started pouring out before you could dial. If you turned on the TV, it was an interminable Castro speech. If you looked out the window, you saw a billboard with more slogans or a ramshackle militia post.

At Catholic school — I left Cuba shortly before they were closed forever — you were taken to Communist parades.

Perpetual dread

There was no escape. Those who have experienced totalitarianism know that it isn’t really a form of government: It’s an emotion, a perpetual sense of dread.

The reason for all this assertiveness was found in the utter failure of the human race to live up to the Marxist-Leninist program, which promised to fix whatever ailed us and achieve perfection at the end of history.

Alas, humanity has always been a disappointment to enlightened Marxists. It keeps deviating from the road to utopia due to primitive motives — love of family, say, or a yen for personal freedom, or simply a sense of fun.

The more frequently the public strayed from the true path, the more rules, regulations and punishments that were imposed as a corrective. In Cuba, as in every communist country, the prodigious energies of the state ultimately focused round the clock on two basic tasks.

The first was telling the masses how to think and act — hence the pervasive, migraine-inducing propaganda and speechifying.

The second was spying on everyone and everything, high and low, to ensure they thought and acted the correct way.

A hyper-regulated society can function only on a basis of total surveillance and betrayal. At the heyday of the system, anyone — a family member, a friend, a random stranger — could be a snitch.

Normal social bonds quickly dissolved in an acid bath of suspicion.

What if your spouse wishes to punish you for misbehaving?

What if your child blurts out something at school?

You learned to live in the silent prison of your own solitude, trusting no one.

That was proper and right. The single bond needed in a Marxist society was that of obedience to the Party.

The Cuban security apparatus was wonderfully effective. Dissidents who made too much noise were mobbed, beaten, jailed and on occasion killed. This was done, as Voltaire would say, to encourage the others.

Yet the most unique aspect of life under Marxism-Leninism wasn’t political but economic.

The state owned everything. For decades, Castro treated the island as his personal playground, which he enjoyed, no doubt, as a foretaste of the utopian future.

Cubans worked for the state, bought their necessities from the state, lived in state-owned dwellings. Individual possessions amounted to scarcely more than a toothbrush — and that was purchased from the state.

Given these conditions, no one had any incentive to produce anything — and logically enough, as a consequence, nothing was produced.

My prosperous paradise became The Land That Time Forgot. Famously, many cars in Havana are still from the capitalist 1950s. The wonderful old buildings are collapsing on the heads of passers-by — sometimes, whole families die in these disasters.

That seems almost too trite as a metaphor for the entire Cuban economy.

Economy in collapse

Sugar production, which Cuba once dominated globally, has crumpled like the old edifices: from 8 million tons in 1989 to a mere 160,000 tons last year — a 98% freefall. Today, Cubans must import their sweeteners.

From milk to antibiotics — items exempted from the US government’s embargo — important goods are unavailable for love or money. It’s not an economy of scarcity but of bare survival.

Cubans spend most of their time and all their ingenuity on two activities: standing in line for some rare product and scheming how to flee the country.

By far the most prolific export item from Cuba is Cubans.

In 2016, after all the drama of the Cold War, Fidel Castro died in the quiet comfort of his bed. His brother Raul, now 93, will soon join him in dialectical-materialist heaven.

The system, having somehow failed to reach perfection, is now in its dotage. The brave ideals are gone, and all that’s left is the true spirit of the thing: will to power.

Late-stage communism tends to fall back on archaic forms: Revolution ends with devolution.

The North Koreans are ruled by a dynasty of divine emperors. The Chinese Communist Party hardened into an aristocracy of princelings.

Cuba today resembles the plot of “Godfather II,” only with a trick ending: The rebels have become the mafia.

Party before country

The Party matters less than the family business — with the Castros of the lesser generations impersonating the Sopranos as bourgeois racketeers. The once-mighty Marxist-Leninist state has withered to a criminal organization. Party grandees are just thieves who send dirty money overseas for insurance, just in case.

Meanwhile, the economy has sunk to whatever misery must be endured below the level of “collapse.”

It’s the dark ages, literally: The blackouts go on for days, so that food spoils in the fridge and old people must sleep outdoors, among the mosquitos, because the elevators to their apartments aren’t working.

Those who can are leaving the island in record numbers — 10% of the population fled in the last two years alone. But with the Trump administration’s hard line on immigration, the outward-bound stampede will be barred at the gates.

That’s how this system, so admired by intellectuals, so often praised as a superior alternative to our way of life, comes to an end: with rank corruption at the top and wild desperation at the bottom.

When I recall the lovely garden of my childhood, I feel unutterably sad.

But every day, really every instant, I feel an immense gratitude for my American existence, because I consider the fate of the poor Cubans and I think: there, but for the grace of God and the wisdom of my parents, go I.