Cuba: The Morning After: Confronting Castro's Legacy

How refreshing to read a book that deals with reality, rather than the romantic rantings of liberals enamoured with Fidel Castro, cheap rum and desparate prostitutes. This book is a seriuous analysis of the problems Cuba will face in the future, and the legacy of hardship its people will have to endure thanks to the failed socialist experiment. Anyone interested in a serious look at the costs of the "Socialist Paradise" where "everyone is equal" and there are "no poor people," should read this book. The disaster of this social experiement will impact us here in the USA whether we like it or not.

Yes, Cuba is a charming and seductive place to visit. But as any one of the thousands of desperate migrants from that troubled land can tell you, it is a brutally hard place to live. Those women the tourist meets stolling along the seawall aren't out there for the view or the exercise. They are locked in a heart-wrenching struggle to eck out another day's subsistence using the only thing the state hasn't stolen from them (yet). So it is a dirty job, but someone has to look past the charm and facade of today's Cuba and examine the cruel reality of Castro's legacy objectively. Numbers don't lie--they are what they are. That Cuba's numbers are horrible is not the fault of the author; those numbers (and the human suffering they entail) are the fault of Castro and the legions of boot-licks who have kept him in power, lo these many years. Left-wing American journalists, academics, democrat politicians, and celebrity activists figure prominently in that group, to their shame. Mark Falcoff did this dirty job about as well as anyone could have expected. It's always a challenge to study a closed society such as Cuba's, where important facts are hidden away, crucial incidents are covered up or denied, and the official story is always a deliberate lie. I've studied Cuba closely for years, and I have always hoped that the long-sufering Cuban people would one day have a brighter future, free of Castro's suffocating bite. I was as disheartened as the previous reviewers were to be confronted with the ugly facts, but there they are. Complaining about them won't help. Those who really care about Cuba should thank Mr. Falcoff for the 'heads up' this book provides. I hope our policy makers are aware of the information and analysis this book provides, and have some kind of plan to deal with the societal implosion the book predicts.