https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/802556967361323008
Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald has written a great long-read on Castro.
Roundups of dissidents continued regularly through the final years of Castro’s rule. He might ease the pressure occasionally for public-relations purposes — several hundred prisoners were released in advance of Pope John Paul II’s visit to the island in January 1998 — but inevitably resume when the spotlight moved elsewhere.
“Cuba remains a Latin American anomaly: an undemocratic government that represses nearly all forms of political dissent,” the independent group Human Rights Watch observed in 2008. “Cubans are systematically denied basic rights to free expression, association, assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law.”
The beleaguered Cuban population’s response was a retreat into sullen despair. By the 1990s, the island’s suicide rate had trippled from pre-revolutionary levels, and one of every three pregnancies ended in abortion. The birth rate dropped so low that Cubans weren’t even replacing themselves: Women average fewer than two children apiece.
By the time Castro left the Cuban presidency in early 2008, the country’s rapidly aging population was the second-oldest in Latin America. A fifth of the country had hit retirement age, and the percentage was steadily rising. The workers weren’t the only thing geriatric about the Cuban economy: Its industrial underpinning of ancient Soviet factories and machinery was crumbling. In 2007, production of 14 of Cuba’s 20 key products was lower than in 1989. One, the sugar crop, was the smallest in a hundred years.
You can find the entire article here.