My Own Thoughts on Castro's Birthday

It is quite common to hear in the same sentence, from liberals and fidel supporters, these facts regarding fidel: that he has outlasted X amount of U.S. Presidents, that he has outlasted X amount of world leaders, that he has outlasted many Cuban Exiles like Celia Cruz, and just recently I heard the achievement of outliving the previous Pope.

And this is suppose to be a good thing?

Shall we look at anyone else who has similar "success stories" against the other leaders of the world?

Stalin reigned 34 years
Saddam reigned 35 years
Ivan the Terrible reigned 51 years (why aren't they excited about this guy too?)
and castro is reigning in 46 years.

Now shall we compare?

Ghandi served India for 28 years.
Martin Luther King was active in civil rights for 14 years.
Ronald Regan fought the cold war against Russia for 8 years.
and Oscar Romero worked against the oppression in El Salvador for 3 years.

As you can see, a longer reign isn't always a better reign.

There is a problem when one continous reigning individual is the apex of the life and death of a people. If we look at evolution we will see that it is through the plurality of events in a given environment that adaptation is thus stimulated allowing life to grow and evolve.

However, when a dicator, like castro, asfixiates a nation, the nation's plurality of thought and of being become the forced monocrome existence of the dictating ideology. The nation, much like life, is now unable to easily adapt thus hampering it's own growth and evolution as a society; a dictator's surest achievement is the gradual extinction of his own people.