Tyranny Pays Well

While Cubans struggle to subsist under totalitarian central planning, Forbes estimates Fidel Castro's net worth at $550 million. Georgie Anne Geyer writes of this autocracy-acquired wealth in her biography of Castro:

"There was a mansion in historic Siboney near Santiago, another on 49th Street in Havana. There was an estate in Candelaria, 'La Deseada,' and about ten kilometers away from there lay his lordly hunting estate, 'La Vibora,' which remarkably resembled the huge estates that Eastern European leaders had seized from the old aristocrats in the early years of Communism. When Fidel hunted there, he would instruct the Cuban Air Force to send a small plane or helicopter to skim the mangroves and scare up the ducks so they could be more easily shot, and if his pilots died in such adventures, as they did, it was their privilege. Some of his homes even had bowling alleys made in Japan.

He had a complete island, Cayo Piedra, near Cayo Largo, which was reserved for the lider maximo's most intimate and personal affairs. A sophisticated facility that included every type of game and a heated pool, this 'home' served other purposes besides recreation or the ever-constant wooing of foreign visitors, pilgrims, and supplicants. Fidel's Panama operations--financial dealings that were a kind of 'caudillo capitalism'--were conducted in the most total secrecy in places like Cayo Piedra and the strange, isolated Orwellian settlement of Barlovento, which opened to the sea but was wholly closed to Cuba. In these somehow ominous and eerily depersonalized villas by the sea, shadowy international buccaneers like Robert Vesco could come and go in a world without immigration laws or visas, live in surrealistic and clandestine comfort in a stateless world, suspended in time and place, and provide Fidel Castro with virtually everything he needed, from Apple computers to American machine guns."