Life After Fidel

Sooner or later the Castro regime will come to an end and relations between Cuba and the United States will return to normal.

A returning vacationer in Cuba, a man without any pro-Castro sympathies whatsoever, predicted that immediately after the end of the régime and the normalization with the U.S. the island will begin to be colonized by American corporations. Burger Kings will sprout up everywhere and the beaches will be swamped by crowds of Americans. Havana in particular will lose its old-fashioned, pre-revolutionary charms, which, strangely enough, still remain impressive.

But one can safely assume that Cuban exiles have entirely different expectations. Some of them no doubt wonder how they will actually feel when at last the day of liberation comes. Very much aware that after the end of the Soviets Eastern Europeans had the same experience, a group of exiled Cuban journalists recently visited Bucharest to see how Romanian society is coping twenty years after the fall of communism.

Christian Ghinea from the weekly paper Dilema Veche gave them a philosophical discourse on the nature of happiness.

“I told them,” she wrote on December 23, “they will enjoy freedom for a few short days. That’s all – no more…. The thing is that free people no longer cherish the freedom they have. It’s like air, you only feel the lack of it when you’re suffocating. And it’s the same with freedom. It takes more than that to make you happy, but when it’s missing you’re automatically unhappy. Only rogues and scoundrels are the exception because they’re always happy regardless of how much freedom there is. The Cubans will have the same experience as the Romanians. They will obtain their freedom and then forget it again in a jiffy…. Then freedom will be just like the air: something that’s taken for granted, and no special cause for jubilation.”