There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro’s level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats (I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats) but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis (you can read about what he said toward the end of my previous post - but he said, in so many words, that he regrets asking Khruschev to nuke the U.S.).

Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. We were seated around a smallish table; Castro, his wife, Dalia, his son; Antonio; Randy Alonso, a major figure in the government-run media; and Julia Sweig, the friend I brought with me to make sure, among other things, that I didn’t say anything too stupid (Julia is a leading Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations). I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat – it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.

“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said.

This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, “Never mind”?

I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

There is much to digest but this is especially interesting:

He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. “This went on for maybe two thousand years,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.” The Iranian government should understand that the Jews “were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation.” He continued: “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. “I am saying this so you can communicate it,” he answered.

US foreign policy is better described as the policy of total impunity.

I’m beginning to feel like Amos Kenan…[who in 1969 wrote] a Letter to all good people, in which he said I have been rejected by the left that I belonged to all my life. I love Cuba, I believe in Fidel Castro, but I am not allowed to love Cuba because I’m an Israeli and a Zionist. I’m frozen out of the left because I believe in supporting my own people.

And I will begin to feel like that. No I won’t support dismantling the Israeli state. Again, your goal is to have Israel stop being a Jewish state. Israel aspired, originally aspired, to be as Jewish as France is French. That is, it should have a culture that reflects its majority–aspirationally the majority will remain Jewish–[and] that all citizens should be full citizens. And again it has not lived up to that. It’s gone better and it’s gone worse. But the goal is not to deprivilege the people who aren’t Jewish but to make a state that adheres by what we regard as traditional Jewish values in which all citizens are equal.

If it doesn’t go there, then I will be very very sad, and I will feel my life’s work essentially to have been a failure. But I don’t think it will get that far. Because if Israel launches another operation and kills 5,000 or 10,000 people, the pressure in the world community will be so great that it will be forced, it will be forced to sit down and negotiate to withdraw to the 67 borders. That’s what the world wants, the European union wants, the Arab League wants.

Parque Trillo used to be a lively pocket of Havana. A small open space bounded by four streets, it was where Cubans came to gossip, shop, play baseball and dance.

On the surface little has changed. Pensioners chat on benches, housewives trawl the food market, teenage boys take turns swinging a bat, and the Palacio de la Rumba nightclub throbs after dusk.

Things are gritty – buildings are dilapidated, grass is strewn with rubbish and the park’s blue pillars are discoloured and peeling – but that is hardly new. Jaime Valdés, however, has noticed one big change. “It’s a lot quieter these days. Young people are disappearing. The ones in their 20s and 30s, they’ve left.”

From his bench the retired chemist pointed to San Rafael street. “Fifteen from there, gone.” He pointed to San Miguel street. “There, another nine or 10, gone.” From Aramburu street, another eight, and from Hospital street, about a dozen, said Valdés. “It’s an exodus.”

Neighbourhoods across Havana report the same phenomenon. Young people, especially well-educated professionals, are fleeing the island. Tens of thousands have emigrated in the past two years. The exodus has alarmed the communist government but remains largely unreported, a taboo topic for state media.

“It’s a sign that the revolution has failed, so they don’t want to talk about it. We are losing our future,” said Ricardo Martinelli, a university professor who has seen many of his students and his only child, a 23-year-old technician, emigrate in recent months.

The U.S. government-sponsored television and radio stations aimed at bringing objective news into communist Cuba aren’t doing the job and need new leadership and direction, according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In a new report by the committee’s majority staff, led by John Kerry, D-MA, lawmakers are calling out Radio Marti and TV Marti, both of which are funded by Congress, for a lack of quality programming and for failing to uphold the standards of a free and fair journalistic enterprise.

The aim is to bring “objective news” into Cuba? Please. It’s to replace one form of propaganda (pro-Castro rants) with pro-Washington diatribes.

So, a Cuban walks into his neighborhood barbershop for a trim and a shave on a Havana afternoon. In all likelihood, haircutter and customer argue about baseball. Maybe they discuss CompaneroCompanero Fidel’s latest column in Granma. When they finish, the newly coiffed client pays for the services in Cuban pesos; about 15% goes to the state for taxes, and the owner legally pockets the rest.

Private profits in communist Cuba? This is no joke. It’s Havana’s latest, limited experiment with the free market. The government is divesting itself of hundreds of state-run barbershops and beauty shops with three workstations or less, turning people who have been wage-earners for decades into small-time entrepreneurs who will pay the state 15% of average revenues in the area for the right to operate. Like some Cuban growers who are allowed to rent stalls from the government in farmers markets, and some cooks who run modest restaurants out of their homes, these hairstylists and manicurists will be entering the world of free-market competition. They will be allowed to set their own prices and presumably will succeed or fail on the quality of their cuts and mani-pedi services. Now, imagine that.

Since the 1959 revolution, Cuba has privatized most of its economy, with about 90% of legal activity now concentrated in government hands. President Raul Castro appears committed to the basic model, at least as long as his big brother is alive. But the latest shift is driven by necessity. In addition to the U.S. trade embargo, Cuba is suffering the same hardships as most other countries in the global recession. Tourism, nickel exports and remittances from the U.S., all of which are key sources of foreign currency, have fallen off. Cuba’s elderly are living longer and the young need jobs. Castro recently declared that the government has a million employees too many on its payroll.

The cautious measures appear designed to relieve some of the pressure on the state without risking political challenge or creating significant private wealth. Furthermore, they are meant to limit opportunities for corruption, to encourage people to work harder and to draw some cash from the illegal, underground economy into government coffers; officials also have approved new licenses for private taxis while cracking down on unauthorized so-called gypsy cabs.

The changes are less ambitious than we’d wish and aren’t irreversible. The government legalized self-employment in several retail services in 1993, then strictly limited the number of licenses available. But for Cubans, who deserve a better standard of living, these are positive steps — profit-making jobs and free-market pedicures.

The news that the Government of Sri Lanka is to close the internment camps where thousands of Tamils were illegally detained, following the end of the country’s civil war against the Tamil Tiger rebels six months ago, is testimony to the effect of international pressure. The European Union backed the call by Judge Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, for an independent, international investigation of war crimes allegations. And it threatened to withdraw Sri Lanka’s coveted membership of ‘GSP-plus’: the Generalised System of Preferences scheme that gives developing countries privileged trading access to EU member states.

The US State Department produced a lengthy report, detailing attacks on civilians during the war including some 158 incidents of shelling or bombing that could only have come from the government side: a record that is, the authors noted, likely to represent only a cross-section of the full picture since many will have gone unreported to the outside world. When the International Monetary Fund voted on a package of soft loans to Sri Lanka, worth US$2 billion, earlier this year, the US took the unusual step of declaring publicly that it had abstained (voting is held in secret). The agreement is subject to quarterly review, so there are further opportunities for leverage.

In Australia, by contrast, official hand-wringing has been accompanied by a notable pusillanimity in following through with any form of action. Canberra has one of the two directorships for an Asia-Pacific group of countries on the IMF board, representing 3.4% of the vote; it kept shtum about how it was used, so we must assume it voted in favour. And Foreign Minister Stephen Smith went cap in hand to Colombo to ask for help in deterring Tamils from seeking refuge in Australia, after the arrival of a few boats had triggered the usual barrage of hysteria from right-wing politicians and media. Instead of governmental action, pressure has been applied through campaigning and lobbying from civil society, keeping a focus on so-called “push factors” that have seen asylum claims, from Tamils who have managed to reach Australia, being approved, at a rate of 95%, in recent months.

More obvious guilty parties include Cuba, which sponsored the motion at the UN Human Rights Council, congratulating the Government of Sri Lanka for its ‘victory’; a move that probably emboldened the Colombo authorities to believe they could get away with keeping the detainees for far longer than they otherwise would. The move dismayed many supporters of Cuba’s socialist government, including some in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Amarantha Visalakshi, an author and translator of books about Latin America, issued this response:

“We here in Tamil Nadu celebrated the 80th birthday of Comrade Fidel by releasing eight books on Cuba’s achievements in various fields…and are in the midst of our preparation for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution…

“We are struck dumb and rendered disheartened and disillusioned by this act [the HRC resolution] by those countries of Latin America on which we have pinned our hopes for the future – Socialism of the 21st century.

“Why do these countries wish for wiping out the Tamils from the Sri Lankan soil where they rightfully belong? What are the sources of information for these Latin American countries to decide against the Tamils and in favour of the racist Sri Lankan government in the UN Human Rights Council?”

…

The Tamil community in Sri Lanka must be allowed to elect credible leaders who can negotiate meaningfully on political arrangements for a shared future of justice and equality. So they must be allowed to speak and organise freely, with full access to International NGOs and – in the case of alleged Tamil Tigers now being arrested – to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Here’s the latest example of Castro’s goons attacking Sanchez and her friends.