One way to think about the inferno that tore through a critically important fuel-storage terminal in the Cuban port of Matanzas last week is as a funeral pyre for the 1959 revolution.

Havana says the fire was caused by a lightning strike. That may be so. But without modern safety and maintenance protocols to mitigate the risks of an act of God, the aging tanks were an accident waiting to happen.

Images of billowing black soot drifting toward the heavens for nearly a week and of the charred remains of the facility are a metaphor for what six-plus decades of Castro tyranny and fraud has done to once-prosperous Cuba.

Cuban communism has gone up in smoke. That’s the good news. But the corruption and gangsterism championed by the megalomaniac Fidel lives on. A new generation of Castro kleptocrats—think of

Vladimir Putin’s

Russia—is trying to grab the baton. As if to prove the point, last week Fidel’s grandson took to social media to announce that he and a group of “entrepreneurs” had arrived in Matanzas to “help” the Cuban people.

A better outcome isn’t impossible. Cubans are clamoring for regime change. If they get it, a transitional government will need technical support to shape a free Cuba. One reasonable worry is that the Biden administration isn’t committed to Cuban freedom. The State Department recently reopened U.S. flights to two luxury resort destinations run by the military dictatorship desperate for dollars.

The Cuban economy has buckled. According to a paper by

Emilio Morales

of the Miami-based Havana Consulting Group, revenue generated by the nine most important economic sectors on the island was down 70% in 2021 from 2013. The Mariel Special Development Zone, financed by the Brazilian government, is a white elephant. Nine years after it was inaugurated, “only 32 of the 62 businesses approved by the government are still operating,” Mr. Morales writes, and it has received only “13.3% of the projected investment.”

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There are severe shortages in transportation, food and basic medications like aspirin. A dengue epidemic is sweeping the island, the peso is worthless, and tourism isn’t recovering from a steep pandemic contraction.

Three of eight fuel storage tanks at the Matanzas facility collapsed and a fourth caught fire, which means that the principal fuel supply for Cuba’s electricity generation is now crippled. Even before the fire, daily power outages were routine and more than simply inconvenient. Without electricity, food spoils and hospitals are without lights and reliable running water. “Living in the country has become a true hell for everyone: children, youth, adults and the elderly,” Mr. Morales explains.

The political scene is no more stable. It’s been 13 months since islandwide protests, sparked by extreme privation, filled the streets with calls for liberty. The uprising stunned dictator

Miguel Díaz-Canel.

He unleashed paramilitary brigades and uniformed state security agents to beat demonstrators in the streets. Many received harsh prison sentences.

But the regime’s go-to methods for controlling dissent—like nightsticks and cockroach-infested jail cells—hasn’t done the trick this time. As the online news outlet Diario de Cuba reported last week, “spontaneous protests have become a regular phenomenon in Cuba,” and “it is no longer extraordinary for there to be, every night, especially in towns suffering protracted blackouts, people banging pots and pans and shouting anti-regime slogans.” Those slogans feature vulgar personal insults directed at the ruling class.

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Farmers have engaged in a notable act of defiance by selling their tobacco crop in the black market, where they reportedly get three times the price the government pays them, or by simply refusing to plant tobacco.

Overt disrespect for the dictator and his decrees was once enforceable. But Fidel’s mystique is as dead as he is, and at 91 his brother Raúl is at most a symbolic figure.

The July death of Gen.

Luis Alberto Rodríquez López-Calleja,

Raúl’s former son-in-law, at 62 adds to the looming anarchy. As head of the large conglomerate Gaesa, he had become the most powerful man in the country. Under his leadership, Gaesa seized control of some 70% of the economy. His businesses included tourism, finance, retail, real estate, remittances, the port of Havana, the Mariel project, the telecom company and Cuba’s Banco Financiero Internacional.

López-Calleja was intelligent, worldly and ruthless. He also was Raul’s heir apparent. In the tradition of the Castro family, he used the country to make himself rich while Cuban misery deepened. As Mr. Morales notes, he leaves behind a bankrupt nation “bogged down between the stupidity of a bureaucracy that is incapable of reforming a proven obsolete model and the excessive ambition of a new mafia that has seized the country’s wealth.”

He also leaves behind a power vacuum, and we know how nature feels about that.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.

Journal Editorial Report: The week’s best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Peterson and Dan Henninger. Images: Reuters/Shutterstock/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly

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