WHAT WAS THE CUBAN REVOLUTION?

For nearly seven decades, a tiny, mismanaged island remade hemispheres. Now it is dying. The myth, unfortunately, will outlast the wreckage

- BY JORGE G. CASTAÑEDA

JUST HOW AND WHEN THE CUBAN DICTATORSHIP WILL DISAPPEAR is impossible to predict: a deal with Donald Trump to build hotels in Varader; the Marines welcomed by crowds on the Havana Malecón; popular protests overwhelming an army unwilling to fire on its people; a real, necessary and desirable peaceful transition to democratic rule and economic reform. Dozens of experts and pundits have lost their shirts betting on the regime’s demise since 1959. The convergence of new factors, however, suggests that Cuba has entered a new and probably terminal phase. Its economic collapse, the end of the Venezuelan subsidy, the Trump administration’s willingness and ability to squeeze it further, the growing discontent and protests of the island’s inhabitants, are all factors that were absent in prior decades.

But those unknowns only mask a certainty: The idea of the Cuban Revolution and the historical forces it unleashed have already been extinguished. For nearly half a century, a persistent external attraction and fascination allowed Cuba and its outsized leader to punch way above their weight in international affairs. Partly out of a cunning strategy for dealing with the United States, partly out of sheer megalomania, Fidel Castro was able to project his revolution’s impact well beyond the island’s shores: in Latin America, in Africa and in a different, more defensive fashion, in the United States and Europe. Not to mention the Soviet Union, which made Cuba a centerpiece of its foreign policy for 30 years. Perhaps the only other nation of a similar population (on par with Paris) and with similar clout on the world stage has been Israel, with a similarly powerful military and intelligence service.