My google-fu is weak today. Do we know how much Raul & Fidel Castro’s net worth is? Were they despotic dictators that amassed a huge personal fortune, or not so much?
Net worth is more complicated when you are Prime Minister/President/Gand Pooba for life without governmental controls. There’s property that is defacto yours and support spending that we’d normally think of as governmental spending/property. What gets skimmed off the top in the event you are deposed isn’t usually trumpeted publicly. When you have the power to get what you want out of the system without spending personal funds it blurs the personal net worth discussion too.
Forbes estimates 900 million, though. Castro says it’s zero.
Let’s say they only have a net worth of $10 million. How do they justify having any accrued wealth in a socialistic society where most people make between $25 and $50 a month? Do the Cuban people care that their leaders are wealthy beyond their wildest dreams?
Why do you need money when you have a country?
I imagine it would be, though I think it’s unusual for any such leader to be free of governmental controls. These nominally socialist countries tend to have some measure of collective leadership where the people at the very top ensure that the others don’t overexert their own nominal authority. You can read a fascinating case study of this in Henry Kissinger’s top-secret memo to Gerald Ford about negotiating with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Some relevant snippets:
This is getting closer to the reality of things. The perks of being a ruler in most Soviet-patterned countries come not from amassing a large amount of personal wealth to spend as you please, but rather exploiting your privileged positions to enjoy a much higher standard of living – that is, access to and control (but not necessarily ownership) of a better quality of goods and services. When you leave office, you don’t take much in the way of a personal fortune with you, and when you die the assets you once enjoyed don’t pass to your heirs. This appears to be the case both for those who died or retired relatively peaceably in their own countries, as well as those who fled abroad after being ousted from power. For example, when Khrushchev was pushed into retirement, he languished in obscurity, with only the use of a dacha and a modest but comfortable pension of 500 (later reduced to 400) rubles. When Honecker fled East Germany for Chile, he didn’t have much to take with him; in fact, the German government had seized from him assets worth about 60,000 euros, which was evidently an important enough sum that his wife was still trying to recover it years after his death.
You don’t. The whole idea is to keep your assets modest and your consumption inconspicuous. I don’t know whether this is the case with the Castros, though if their political compatriots are any indication, it probably is.
According to this report, the Forbes estimate was produced by using a discounted cash flow method to value certain state-owned enterprises, and then “assuming a proportion of that profit stream goes to Castro”. The assumption is said to be justified by the claim that the magazine had “heard rumours Castro has salted away a percentage of these companies’ profits over the years”.
Call me a crusty old cynic, but at least I’m a equal opportunity cynic. I don’t see the Castros - yet - as being in a position where are shown to have any accrued wealth that needs to be excused or justified.
It’s all relative too. Compared to his predecessor Batista, he is a model of frugal conservatism. Much of the poverty in that country must be due to the hard line their rich and powerful neighbour has taken over the last 50 years.
What would be their incentive to accrue personal wealth? What would they do with it? They don’t appear to have constructed grand temples or monuments to themselves, they didn’t drive a different Maserati every day, they can only drink so much champagne, if they were jet-setters, ,they kept it pretty wall hidden from the paparazzi. Why would they want to or need to accumulate personal convertible foreign reserves? All they would need would be enough to resettle in Switzerland with decent comfort if things got out of hand.
Wait – Maybe they just took Batista’s vast personal fortune, that he stole from the Cuban people…
Of all the things I’ve heard and read about Castro, living high off the hog isn’t one of them. If he had Maseratis or private jets and frequent trips to the casinos on the Riviera, or loud boisterous drunkfest parties, we’d certainly have heard about it. I don’t recall even hearing about that sort of thing about the children of the current elite, something we tended to hear about of east bloc elite.
A presidential palace belongs to the country, however opulent it may or may not be. Unless you’re Hugo Chavez’s family, you move out when your term is up.
My impression is that Castro and his immediate cronies are more fanatic egalitarians with a fond nostalgia for the difficult times of the revolution; and probably enforce that view to limit the excesses of the elite. Once the two Castros are gone, who knows what will happen.
I suspect the current loosening will make things difficult for them. For now, rich relatives didn’t come to visit and hand out cash because of the Americans. When that excuse is gone, when people find out how much better off things are 90 miles away, when some people live high off the hog on small stipends from moderately well off American relatives, I sense a serious social disorder.
Besides - if the Castros had a lot of money, where would they stash it?
So you can tip the dancers?
Reported for making an ass out of you and me.
What is their incentive? Well, anything can happen. They can be deposed either by internal or external forces, and assuming they get wind of it they can flee to some other country. If you’ve been a ‘dictator for life’ starting over isn’t going to be that easy. If it were me I would have stashed away some currency in a Swiss bank account to ensure a soft landing wherever I might end up for myself and my family. Nothing lasts forever.
That’s true, but Cuba (and Venezuela) are much more one-man shows than the post-Stalinist Soviet Union was. (They’re also nicer places to live- the kind of government in a place has no necessary relationship to the standard of living). Fidel Castro didn’t have his roots in any sort of Marxist theory or Communist Party (the Cuban Communist Party weakly supported Batista and was pretty dismissive of the 26th of July Movement until pretty late in the game). He started as a Charismatic Leader with some left wing ideas, and only later adopted communism, so his rule has always been about personal charisma at least as much as communist ideology.
Yes, this. The Forbes estimate are a joke (as we probably could have guessed).
I’m sure Castro lives a more comfortable lifestyle than the average Cuban, but I’m also pretty sure he doesn’t have a massive personal fortune.
Yasser Arafat was the same way. Money for its own sake never really interested him.
Interestingly, while he rarely spent it on himself, Arafat actually did have a huge amount of money squirreled away to pay loyalists and bribe various officials, along with other payments that no-one in his organization other than him could control or supervise. The money was solely used as a means of control and as a way to make him indispensable, which it did (there was a huge mess when he died and left it all to his wife). I wouldn’t be surprised if the Castros didn’t also have a similar personal slush fund.
Along these lines, the Sultan of Brunei dropped off the list of the world’s richest people after they re-jiggered the formula to better separate his personal wealth fom the nation of Brunei’s assets.
Like any other despot they save it out of country so that they can live like kings when thrown out. Mobutu, Duvalier, Marcos, Hosni Mubarak, etc
According to one of his former bodyguards he lives very lavish lifestyle. He said Castro has a huge yacht that he uses to travel to his private island. He claimed Castro has a huge mansion in Havana with a private marina, bowling alley, basketball court, and medical center.
There were also videotapesthat were smuggled out of Cuba by a former girlfriend of one his sons. They depict a large compound with well groomed grounds and many creature conforts.
I already said that. Reading my post all the way to the end would reveal that it would not be surprising if he stashed away enough to live comfortably on a rainy day, and that would be much, much less than the Bush or Cheney family fortunes.