BAD KARMA FOR CASTRO

Death came quick to two of the world's most evil men recently – Sapamurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov, dictator of Turmenistan, dead of a heart attack on December 21, and Saddam Hussein.  It's coming slowly to a third – Fidel Castro.

Castro's medical care has been overseen by a team of physicians from Spain, some of whom are providing details of his condition to the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), Spain's CIA.  The picture is truly horrific.

Last summer, the CNI confirms, he suffered from massive gastrointestinal bleeding.  The cause could have been the "superwarfarin" broadifacoum poison speculated by Dagny D'Anconia in The Partial Assassination of Fidel Castro.  No warfarin metabolites were found in his blood by lab analysis, but if an analog of the poison (which are rumored to exist) was used, the labs couldn't test for it.

Or it could have been rapid-onset diverticulitis caused by infectious bacteria, which is the most the CNI will say now.

The bleeding was so massive that immediate surgery was required, in which much of his large intestine was removed and his colon re-connected or "anasmotosed" to his rectum.  This normally is successful, but Castro is a hypochondriac who has taken many anti-biotics over the years, which built up bacterial resistance in his body. 

Thus he contracted a nasty infection after the surgery, which inflamed the peritoneum or membrane that surrounds the digestive organs.  This condition is called peritonitis, causing nightmare abdominal pain and requires more surgery.

Castro's second surgery removed the rest of his large intestine and created an "artificial anus," an opening in his abdomen connected to an excreta bag. 

It didn't take long for word of this to be whispered in the streets of Havana, accompanied by a joke:  "Castro now has three a**holes – the one he was born with, the one the doctors gave him, and the third is Castro himself."

After the second surgery, he got an infection in his bile duct, the drainage system that carries bile away from the gallbladder.  With the duct blocked, he contracted cholecystitis, immensely painful inflammation of the gallbladder.

This required a third surgery to insert a stent in the bile duct so it would drain.  It didn't work.  A fourth surgery implanted a different stent and the docs are crossing their fingers.

Castro can now only be fed intravenously.  He is constantly doped-up on pain-killers like morphine.  The prolonged agony and suffering he has endured for seven months may even have exceeded that of the thousands of political prisoners he ordered tortured during the decades of his tyranny.

Castro is dying ugly.  If there is anyone who deserves such bad karma, it is him.

There is almost no way he can live for much longer – a few weeks or months at the most.  Once he goes, his brother Raul will try desperately to hold the dictatorship together, and he will fail – fast.

Raul is 75 (Fidel is 80) and a drunk.  His liver is shot.  The generals who run the huge drug-smuggling operations will be the first to break away and set up a private mafia.  But the society will really start its descent into anarchy when the CDR and BRR leaders begin getting killed.

The Committees of the Defense of the Revolution were set up for Castro by the East German Stassi or secret police during the 1960s.  Every residential block in every city and town in Cuba has a CDR "block committee" to spy on neighbors.  Everyone knows who runs the committee in their block.  As soon as Castro dies, he might as well have a big red bullseye painted on him.

The same goes for the legion of plainclothes government thugs composing the Rapid Response Brigades or BRR, whose purpose is to beat up anyone suspected of being anti-Fidel.  When Castro goes, they are screwed.

The bloodletting won't be a sudden tsunami.  It will start slow, a CDR block guy knifed here, a BRR guy beaten to death there.  It will take a while for folks to let their rage overcome their fear.  As they see or hear about government goons getting knocked off, the fear-rage ratio changes, and will reach a threshold.  Then comes chaotic social violence.

The goons' only defense will be to form private criminal gangs preying upon citizens.  It'll be like some dystopia sci-fi action flick.  Think Mad Max in the Tropics.

In the meantime, the Miami Exiles will begin their return to discover how much they are hated by those who couldn't escape.  Cuba will be a very dangerous place for them as well.

The bottom line is that there is not going to be any sort of smooth transition after Fidel expires to any sort of social normality.  Folks who have done nothing but taken orders for two generations have no concept whatever of individual responsibility and self-reliance.  They are far more likely to swing from total passivity to explosive bloody chaos.

The best we can hope for is Cuba's post-Castro swing from one political extreme to the other will be fairly short-lived.  It may be over in as little as a year or two.  It will take at least that long to get the rage out of the system.  I don't think it will take longer than five.

With that, the price of Castro's Bad Karma may finally be paid by the Cuban people, and the island will flourish and boom.  Just don't plan on investing in Cuba once you hear the evil old man has finally croaked.  Be patient, and savor that he went out the way he deserved.