The Untold Story of Fidel Castro’s Lavish Lifestyle

A former bodyguard spills the beans on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s luxurious way of living.

From Miami Herald (hat Tip EPJ)

With luxury homes, diamonds, women and more, Fidel Castro ‘lives in a luxury that most Cubans can’t even imagine,’ says a former bodyguard who wrote a book of memoirs on the dictator.

Fidel Castro once claimed that he lived a life of exemplary revolutionary frugality on a salary of merely $36 per month.

“Lies,” said Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, 65, who served as a bodyguard for the former Cuban leader for 17 years and has published a book of memoirs portraying Castro as a sort of feudal lord who ran the island like it was a personal fiefdom.

Castro controlled about 20 luxury homes, a Caribbean island getaway with a pool and dolphins, the 88-foot yacht Aquarama II, and several fishing vessels whose catch was sold for dollars deposited in his accounts, according to Sanchez.

“He always claims he lives frugally. Lies. He lives in a luxury that most Cubans can’t even imagine,” Sanchez told el Nuevo Herald in his first interview after writing his book, The Secret Life of Fidel Castro, published Wednesday in France.

More…

His 325-page book says Castro, now 87, controlled several numbered bank accounts abroad as well as the finances of several state enterprises — including a small gold mine in the Isle of Youth — that reported to him as president of the ruling Council of State. When Castro received a Cohiba cigar box full of Angolan diamonds, he told an aide to sell the gems on the international market “and you know what to do,” Sanchez said.

Two large elephant tusks that once stood in his home also came from Angola. None of the bank accounts or enterprises were in Castro’s name, but they didn’t have to be, the bodyguard said. “He didn’t have to report to anyone. He had sole control” over economic activity he estimated at “hundreds of millions of dollars” over 10 years. 

But after Forbes magazine included the Cuban ruler in its 2006 list of 10 richest “Kings, Queens and Dictators,” he declared that his salary was about 900 pesos per month, or $36. The former bodyguard said part of the book focuses on Castro’s luxurious life because so little is known about it even within the communist-ruled nation. The leader has said his personal life is a “state secret” because of the multiple attempts to assassinate him.

If true, then the communist purist used the state’s coercive machinery to siphon the nation’s resources to his account for him to indulge in a stealth hedonist lifestyle. Poor Cubans.

But this is how the world of politics has mostly worked; smoke and mirrors.

Even Fidel Castro Seems To Have Given Up On Socialism

Still dreaming of the magic of socialism?

Even practitioner Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro seems to have given up on the failed model.

This from Yahoo news.

Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country’s president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

To put things in perspective, Cato’s Dan Mitchell observes that economic growth in Cuba has stagnated throughout the years of socialism. This is sharply in contrast to Chile whose economic growth has exploded following the latter’s embrace of economic freedom.

From Mr. Mitchell, (bold emphasis mine)

This chart, comparing inflation-adjusted per-capita GDP in Chile and Cuba, is a good illustration of the human cost of excessive government. Living standards in Cuba have languished. In Chile, by contrast, the embrace of market-friendly policies has resulted in a huge increase in prosperity. Chileans were twice as rich as Cubans when Castro seized control of the island. After 50 years of communism in Cuba and 30 years of liberalization in Chile, the gap is now much larger.

Thus, I am reminded by the prescience of Mr. Ludwig von Mises who again has been validated when he wrote... (bold emphasis mine)

All efforts to realize Socialism lead only to the destruction of society. Factories, mines, and railways will come to a standstill, towns will be deserted. The population of the industrial territories will die out or migrate elsewhere. The farmer will return to the self-sufficiency of the closed, domestic economy. Without private ownership in the means of production there is, in the long run, no production other than a hand-to-mouth production for one's own needs...

It might so happen that some nations would remain socialistic while others returned to Capitalism. Then the socialist countries alone would proceed towards social decline. The capitalist countries would progress to a higher development of the division of labour until at last, driven by the fundamental social law to draw the greatest number of human beings into the personal division of labour, and the whole earth's surface into the geographical division of labour, they would impose culture upon the backward nations or destroy them if they resisted. This has always been the historical fate of nations who have eschewed the road of capitalist development or who have halted prematurely upon it.

Socialism is ever the elusive utopia which appears to thrive successfully only in the mindset of those who refuse the functionalities of the real world.