Castro's grip firm as Cuba's revolution turns 50

Here a tumultuous crowd greeted a 32-year-old Fidel Castro when he and his bearded fellow commanders reached Havana on Jan. 8, 1959, just a week after their victory in eastern Cuba spelled the end of the Batista government. Ernesto Plasencia, a bony 76-year-old ex-rebel, remembers that day on the Malecon.

"It was a fiesta, like carnival! We were so happy! The tyrant was gone!" he said.

He augments his disability pension of 140 pesos (about $6.70) a month by selling candy on the Malecon and has no major complaints. The government's broad social safety net ensures him and all other Cubans free medical care and heavily subsidized services, including a very cheap monthly food ration that provides about a third of the average dietary needs. Education through university level is free.

Like his government, Plasencia blames Cuba's hardships on the U.S. embargo, imposed after Castro embraced communism and nationalized Western-owned industries.

Plasencia is grateful for the communists' agrarian reform that gave his family a patch of farmland. "I had to leave school when I was 10 to shine shoes," he recalls. "My mother had to wash and iron rich people's clothes."

Old-timers in eastern Cuba, where Castro fought his guerrilla war, are similarly grateful.

"I have what I have to have: my house, my wife, my salary," said Ruben Lao, a 73-year-old former rebel who lives in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where Castro led his troops. "I don't lack food, or a refrigerator or television, which I couldn't have had back then."

Back in the capital, on the other side of Havana Bay, looms the Spanish fortress where Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a top Castro commander, directed executions of several hundred Batista police and army officials accused of torturing and killing opponents.

Executions and political prisoners
The last time Cuba carried out executions was in 2003, when three men went before a firing squad for trying to hijack a passenger ferry to the U.S. Their deaths followed a crackdown that condemned 75 government critics to long prison terms, dashing hopes of any relaxation following Jimmy Carter's visit, the first by a former U.S. president to Castro's Cuba.

In jails scattered across the island, Cuba holds 219 political prisoners, according to Elizardo Sanchez, of the independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. In 1964 Fidel Castro acknowledged holding as many as 15,000 political prisoners.

Sanchez, 60, is a former professor of Marxism who broke with the system nearly 30 years ago and spent eight years in Cuban prisons. For him, the bottom line of the revolution is sad and simple: "After 50 years, the government still cannot guarantee any civil or political rights."

If Cuba is sometimes frozen in the 1950s, small signs of the 21st century are popping up along the Malecon, which was built in 1901 when American forces occupied Cuba following the Spanish-American war.

The boom-BAH-boom-boom-boom of reggae music pours out from windows above once-elegant colonnades, and some long-neglected buildings are getting a foreign-funded facelift in funky yellow, green or apricot, reminiscent of the art deco style seen in Miami Beach, where many Cuban exiles live.

Wheeled transport on the coastal highway is a timeline of Cuba since the revolution: Oldest are the 1950s Chevrolets and Fords that chug along on Soviet tractor engines; next are Russian-made Ladas, then spanking new Chinese buses, and Cuba's first Fiat dealership, which happens to be next to a Malecon cafe where Havana's gays congregate.

The Malecon's seawall today is a long concrete couch, where the crashing waves occasionally spray canoodling couples, pole-casting fishermen, rum-swigging workers, and a lone saxophonist playing a mournful tune that floats toward the Florida Straits.

Since few people can afford a boat, or legally own one lest they use it to escape, the most common craft in view are a few bobbing inner tubes and fishermen's plastic foam rafts. Occasionally a freighter arrives, or a cruise ship carrying European tourists who will spend a few hours here, mingle with the kids in the museum, drink a few minty mojito cocktails while listening to salsa music, buy a few trinkets and then sail on.

The bay used to be jammed with Russian freighters bringing oil or canned beef, while Soviet arms shipments arrived discreetly at a military port to the west. In March 1993 a Russian ship carried away 1,500 former Soviet soldiers and their families, ending a three-decade Soviet presence on the island which included $5 billion a year in aid.

In late 2001 a freighter brought 500 tons of frozen chicken parts — the first U.S. commercial food shipment in 38 years.

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