ABSTRACT
Carmelo Mesa-Lago is the veritable decano of Cuban studies. He sees it as part of the corpus of social scientific, especially economic, examinations of the Fidel Castro regime from its inception to the present. One might well argue that Castro's incredible megalomania was fueled by early economic successes, that he saw the prospects for further economic development through political consolidation. The underestimation of the totalitarian nature of the Castro regime was partially a consequence of the overestimation of the socialist character of the economy. The unraveling of the regime was not primarily a function of the collapse of Soviet and East European communism, but of a series of policy decisions by Castro driven by ideological commitment and cultural closure. Overtures toward rapprochement with the rest of Latin America or the United States were always based on ridiculous premises that the rest of the hemisphere must make concessions to him.
