Michael Totten visits the Spanish colonial town of Trinidad, Cuba:
Trinidad is not a nice place because of its communist government. Trinidad is a nice place despite its communist government. It’s five hundred years old. None of it was built by the communists. The city looked as it does now centuries before Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. Fidel Castro is responsible for precisely nothing I love about it. All he did was fail to destroy it. That’s not progress or a point scored for the revolution. It’s just damage control.
But I will give Cuban communists this much—they feel a connection with the pre-communist past and aren’t trying to obliterate it from the earth or from memory. They are not at war with every single last thing that predates them. There was no Year Zero in Fidel Castro’s Cuba like there was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The colonial buildings of Trinidad were not razed and replaced with horrifying tower blocks as was so much of the Soviet bloc. Cuban communists did build some ghastly new structures, but not at the expense of what came before, and not in the old center of Trinidad.
That’s a low bar for praise, to be sure, but so many communist regimes failed to live up even to that. Look at what the Soviet Union did to Chisinau in Moldova, which is even older than Trinidad.
(Photo by Flickr user F Mira)
The Dish 