Foreign Policy Blog (which also has a very amusing photograph) notes this priceless quotation, attributed to Fidel Castro in a 1959 interview with CBS’s Edward Murrow:
I’m not thinking to cut my beard, because I’m accustomed to my beard and my beard means many things to my country. When we have fulfilled our promise of good government I will cut my beard.
You said it, oh, bearded one. You said it.
Fidel Castro, the dictator and oppressor-in-chief of communist Cuba, has resigned as president. At last!
For some years now, pundits have been speculating whether Fidel Castro really is still alive. A case in point is the Wall Street Journal’s resident funny man, James Taranto. Despite clear indications to the contrary, Taranto speculated in August 2006 that his condition might improve to such an extent that doctors may soon be able to pronounce him dead. The following January, he noted a headline that began, “Castro Reportedly in Grave…”, and bemoaned the fact that the next word was “Condition”. He wished the adjective were a noun.
I share Taranto’s disdain for Castro. Having overthrown the corrupt Fulgencio Batista almost 50 years ago with promises of liberation, he instead murdered hundreds of opponents, jailed thousands more, and established an oppressive, communist tyranny. The pretence of a glorious revolution for freedom and democracy didn’t last long. However, the cult of El Lider Maximo, as he became known, took on heroic proportions. First, the Bay of Pigs betrayal was spun into a glorious victory by Cuba over the evil Americans. Not long afterwards, the legendary stand-off between him, as proxy for Nikita Kruschev, and John F Kennedy cemented Castro’s reputation, and the secret deal that ended the Cuban missile crisis cemented his political survival and longevity.
Surprisingly, Cuban communism survived — but only just — the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, the real Cuba, described by people other than leftist propagandists led by the nose by state minders, remained rather less romantic than the fantasies of useful idiots would have it. Still, Cuba remains an icon of hope for people who love 1950s automobilia, or pine for the glory days of Soviet anti-capitalism. People like Thabo Mbeki, for example. Apparently, we have a lot to learn from Cuba. I’d agree. We can learn how not to run a country, or an economy, for example.
Here’s hoping Cuba rouses itself from its torpor and shakes off the bonds of Castro’s mind-numbing personality cult. Here’s hoping they reject the regency he has installed, in the person of his brother, Raúl Castro. Here’s hoping that when they do, they also renounce the destructive communist idealism of which El Lider Maximo was one of the last hold-outs. Here’s to the fall of Fidel Castro.
Update: Corrected an error, introduced by careless editing, which made the last sentence of the second paragraph refer to the wrong antecedent.
Prompted by Wessel van Rensburg’s comment on another post, I dug through my archives to find a story I wrote for CIO Africa in September 2004, on Somalia’s telecommunications industry. It is not available online, but I have permission to quote it here in full:
Absent rules, luxuriant growth
Somalia’s telecom sector: a case study in anarchocapitalism
By Ivo Vegter“A wild rose roofs the ruined shed / And that and summer well agree.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Day Dream
The most unlikely places throw up the most unlikely tales. Though Somalia has had no government for over a decade – or rather, because of this – international call rates are the lowest in Africa, most of the country has telephone coverage, and you can get an Internet account in a day.
When Somalia’s former ruler, General Muhammad Siyad Barre, was ousted in January 1991, the country rapidly degenerated into turmoil. The country has been fought over by secessionist factions and warlords ever since. A shortlived attempt at US intervention led to a famous withdrawal, and more recent peace negotiations in neighbouring Djibouti have spluttered fitfully without achieving much by way of either peace or effective government.
Before the collapse of the Barre regime, there had been 8 500 fixed lines, most of which were in the capital, Mogadishu. Even that meagre public switched telephone network was destroyed, leaving the country entirely bereft of telecommunications of any description.
Yet, when Walter Brown, an African telecommunications expert with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), was asked by the Ugandan delegation to a 1999 conference on rural telecoms about the best way to introduce a mobile phone operator, he suggested talking to the Somali delegation. At the time, the Somalis had a deal on the table for a tenth of what the Ugandans could extract from likely equipment vendors.
Speaking to CIO Africa at Johannesburg’s Kind of Blue, the jazz restaurant to which he has since retired, Brown says, “My presentation to the ITU conference said that technology lends itself to a private sector approach, by moving away from circuit-switched telecoms to packet-switching even in rural areas. It can be done cheaply, using any bearer you wish – radio, powerline, satelite, copper, fibre – and you can deal with any vendor you like.”
He recalls: “I made many friends, but made enemies of large industry players who needed to dump circuit-switching technology somewhere. Many delegates said the environment didn’t allow them to speak out.”
Not so the Somali delegation, which had no government to answer to, no vendors to mollify, and no legacy systems to consider.
According to the CIA World Factbook, the small industrial sector has been looted for scrap metal – among the country’s chief exports – and there is no formal banking sector. Yet despite this seeming anarchy, Somalia’s service sector has managed to survive and grow.
“Telecommunication firms provide wireless services in most major cities and offer the lowest international call rates on the continent,” it states.
Accurate statistics are hard to come by in a situation as fluid and chaotic as Somalia.
While the ITU estimated there to be about 10 000 main lines in operation at the end of 2000, the latest World Factbook figures, which date to 2002, estimate that there are 100 000 main telephone lines, 35 000 mobile phones, and 89 000 Internet users.
Writing in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) magazine, Choices, reporter Finbarr O’Reilly quotes Abdi Karim Mohamed Eid, manager of private telecommunications company Telesom, as saying, “If you add up the other companies, there may be around 20 000 Internet subscribers in [the northern region of] Somaliland. That’s much more than we anticipated initially and it’s a remarkable achievement given that there is no backing from the international community. This is solely done by the Somali business community. We are really proud of that.”
According to O’Reilly, 87% of the country now has telephone service, and some operators claim to be able to install fixed lines withing two days of applying, and establish Internet accounts within 24 hours. His figures of 105 000 fixed and 39 000 mobile lines back up the CIA’s numbers. An older report from the Somali Telecom Association (STA) state that 47 out of 74 towns have telephone service. And international call rates are as low as $1 per minute.
“It was clear supply and demand,” says Brown. “There was a need, and it got supplied. The service is reliable, because operators know if there is no service, there is no money. And you can get service within days of applying.”
The STA was formed at the behest of the UNDP and the ITU, in order to address the problem that to reach all people will telephones in Somalia, people had to subscribe to at least three different networks.
“With no government, no regulator, and no policy, they formed interconnect agreements,” says Brown. “Vendors didn’t take them seriously, until they started making money. Now companies like MCI help broker deals for Somali operators. Tariffs are set according to supply and demand, and are the cheapest in Africa.”
He adds: “They did well, and were able to advise Uganda to get rid of their oversight yokes.”
Not that complete anarchy is necessarily a good thing, of course. Though nobody imposes taxes on telephone calls, protects incumbent monopolies, demands exorbitant licence fees or imposes counter-intuitive technology restrictions, nobody collects refuse, supplies reliable electricity or provides adequate security either.
But Somalia’s experience with free-market telecommunications shows that the continent’s penchant for regulation, red tape and big government is not the solution to local development challenges.
It adds a new dimension to the existing weight of evidence that argues the benefits of telecommunication for the developing world.
“Consider the ITU study on the transport sector in Yemen,” explains Brown, “where simply providing communication long highways cut the costs of trucking companies by as much as 80%. Or the study in Sri Lanka, where farmers improved their income by 70% simply using a public telephone box.”
Somalia is a case study for the truth Brown learnt in a career spent at telecoms operations ranging from Zimbabwe’s PTC to the Iridium satellite venture to the ITU: “Oversight should not manage. It should lead, encourage and incentivise.”
Left free to innovate, an entrepreneurial people will find ways to succeed despite the most adverse of circumstances. Development goals foisted upon them by supranational organisations merely sound lofty. Liberalisation plans managed by government merely sound responsible. What makes the difference, in the end, is mere supply and demand.
2004 (c) CIO Africa, BDFM Publishers
