Fidel Castro strode triumphantly into Havana in January 1959. That’s 67 years ago—two generations and change. The Cold War, in which Castro played such an outsize part, ended 35 years ago with the fall of his Soviet patrons. Enfeebled by age, the old totalitarian turned the regime over to his brother Raúl in 2008 and died in 2016. Raúl, the last link to the old generation, himself retired in 2021. He is now an unsteady 94.
The Cuban revolution has become detached from its own history yet continues to grind on, mechanically, as a sort of theme park of 20th-century Marxism-Leninism. It’s the land of animatronic revolutionaries, where tourists, to their amazement, can experience the political repression, economic misery, and infrastructure collapse invariably produced by this system. The parades and slogans are still there, but the feeling has died.
