El Jefe -- "the chief," a.k.a. Fidel Castro -- has banned average Cuban citizens from using the Internet/World-Wide Web. He imposed a new "law" which took effect yesterday. Most Cubans have been using dial-up Internet access, in which they connect to the world-wide network via a phone line. At the technical level, it is not difficult to differentiate between voice calls and Internet connection calls. As such, Cuba's state-owned telephone company Etecsa will monitor phone lines to detect and block Internet connections. The law will only permit mid- and high-level communist party officials (apparachniks) and doctors to browse the web.

So Castro has made the political repression in Cuba even more repressive. I can't even imagine what it is like for the Cuban people to have lived for 50 years under Castro's iron fist. Castro's "socialist" economy has brought nothing but deprivation to his people. He executed three Cubans last year for trying to escape their "worker's paradise." He jailed 75 poets, journalists, economists and other dissidents because they dared to express political opposition. These moves sparked worldwide condemnation of Castro, even from left-leaning groups like Amensty International. Now his people can't even take a break to surf the web.

Doesn't this seem like overkill? Castro has maintained power for FIFTY YEARS! His position is secure. One might think that with age, maybe just one molecule of sympathy for his people would touch his heart. But it hasn't. He's just another Stalin, Saddam, Mao, etc. He just keeps piling more hardships on his citizenry.

I was recently very surprised to find an article about Cuba in The Nation, written by Arthur Miller. At first glance, I assumed Miller would bore me with another dogmatic left-wing rationalization of Castro's Cuba. He obviously still has delusional attachments to the utopian Marxist-Leninist dream of world-wide socialism but, nonetheless, Miller's article was very critical of Fidel. He visited Cuba recently and was invited to lunch with Fidel. The two conversed and Miller observed Castro. Miller concluded:

...I wondered whether Castro might have been as remote from his own country as from ours [America]. One is forever attributing informed wisdom to power, but in the face of the privation around him, should not a wise ruler who even in a free election would doubtless be re-elected, nevertheless recognize that after almost fifty years in supreme control the time had come to make way for a regime with new people and possibly more effective ideas?

Watching him at lunch--he ate two leaves of lettuce--one saw a lonely old man hungry for some fresh human contact, which could only get more and more rare as he ages. He might very well live actively for ten years, perhaps even longer as his parents reportedly had done, and I found myself wondering what could possibly be keeping him from a graceful exit that might even earn him his countrymen's gratitude?

The quasi-sexual enchantment of power? Perhaps. More likely, given his history, was his commitment to the poetic image of world revolution, the uprising of the wretched of the earth with himself at its head. And in plain fact, as the chief of a mere island, he had managed to elevate himself to that transcendent state in millions of minds. The more so now, after all other contestants had fallen away and conditions in Latin America and Africa gone from bad to worse, the possibility needed only its right time to erupt again. After all, he had thrown Cuban forces into action in many countries around the world despite his country's poverty and the obstinate resistance of his main sponsor, the now-abominated Soviet leadership.

It would have been too much to expect that after half a century in power he would not become to some important degree an anachronism, a handsome old clock that no longer tells the time correctly and bongs haphazardly in the middle of the night, disturbing the house. Notwithstanding all his efforts, the only semblance of a revolt of the poor is the antimodern Islamic tide, which from the Marxist point of view floats in a medieval dream. With us he seemed pathetically hungry for some kind of human contact. Brilliant as he is, spirited and resourceful as his people are, his endless rule seemed like some powerful vine wrapping its roots around the country and while defending it from the elements choking its natural growth. And his own as well. Ideology aside, he apparently maintains the illusions that structured his political successes even if they never had very much truth in them; to this day, as one example, he speaks of Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union as unnecessary, "a mistake."

What more can be said about Cuba? When will her people be free? It seems -- barring some huge upheaval -- we'll have to wait until Castro drops dead.