Castro's Silky Forked Tongue of Praise for Greece

 

IBDEditorials.com

“I warmly congratulate you for your brilliant political victory,” Fidel Castro wrote in a letter to Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras after Greek voters rejected tough fiscal reforms proposed by foreign creditors in last Sunday’s referendum. AP

Socialism: As Greece descends into financial madness, in wades Cuba's Fidel Castro, heaping high praise on the nation for choosing default in its referendum. What could be the aim? An old Castro story: to destroy capitalism.

Following plaudits from other socialist deadbeat states such as Argentina, Cuba's dictator emeritus wasted no time in oozing praise for Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras after Greek voters rejected tough fiscal reforms proposed by foreign creditors in last Sunday's referendum.

"I warmly congratulate you for your brilliant political victory," the 88-year-old communist autocrat wrote in a letter published in the state Cuban press Tuesday.

"Your country, especially your courage in the current situation, arouses admiration among the Latin American and Caribbean peoples of this hemisphere on witnessing how Greece, against external aggression, defends its identity and culture," Castro wrote.

If this isn't opportunism of the worst sort for the Mediterranean nation that has pretty well ruined its future with the European Union, then nothing is.

The Cuban tyrant's greeting ought to terrify the Greeks, given his game for the past 50 years — a long record of default, deadbeatery and corruption unmatched in the hemisphere on a per capita basis.

Castro, remember, is a totalitarian communist committed as "a revolutionary" to destroying the capitalist system. For all the attention there has been on his long record of human rights violations, his efforts to make economic warfare on the West and destroy the capitalist system is equally notable.

What could be the basis for Castro's gushing letter to the Greeks?

His own record of attempting to create a "debtor's cartel" to rise up against the Western powers, particularly the United States, and collectively default on all the billions owed to its banks. That way, capitalism could be destroyed — on the same twisted logic that if you owe the bank $500 and can't repay, you have a problem, but if you owe the bank $5 billion and can't repay, the bank has a problem.

Castro actually tried to arrange such a debtor's cartel in 1989, when various Latin American nations were in economic distress, egging on troubled nations to blame the United States for their inability to pay their debts.

The effort failed after word got out that Castro was secretly servicing his own debts at the same time he was publicly urging others to default.

This is not to say Castro paid his own debts.

He has serially defaulted on other occasions to Japan, Mexico, France, Netherlands, Russia, Venezuela, Argentina and others over the decades to the tune of $37 billion that we know about.

One can only conclude that Castro doesn't believe in paying his bills. Socialist nations are fine, as Margaret Thatcher once noted, until they run out of other people's money.

The only reason Castro services any debt at all is to maintain just enough credibility to access markets — and win over new suckers. Moody's rates Cuba a miserable Caa2 on sovereign debt, given this record. It's junk.

It was only last month that Castro finally agreed with his Paris Club creditors on what Cuba owes them — $15 billion — after a long period of wrangling.

The problem here is not debt. Lots of nations have debt and some have found themselves in very difficult situations. The problem is whether the system in place is sustainable for repaying debt or can only lead to a long string of serial defaults and amnesties such as Cuba has done — leaving the nation in ruins.

The plain fact is that Greece's real problem isn't debt at all, and its big bad debt bogeymen are all imaginary. No one wins, certainly not the European Union, if Greece goes belly up. No, Greece's real problem, as we noted earlier this week, is a lack of economic growth.

Policies based on less government spending, lower and fairer taxes, less corruption and the rule of law would help Greece grow — and let it pay its debts.

In the meantime, Castro's greeting is a warning to Greece: Being a socialist deadbeat can only make the beautiful Mediterranean country end up like Cuba, with its poverty, misery, underinvestment and tyranny.

That's a greeting Greece should run like hell from.