Fidel’s end will not bring happiness
5 August 2006
The one who is left is, of course, the sinister Raúl, said to have had contacts with the KGB as long ago as 1955, a practitioner of the show trial, the firing squad and the mass grave. Nowadays he is on excellent terms with China’s elite, who have managed to abandon the old ideology while continuing to employ the labour camp and the bullet in the back of the head to stay in power. Raúl, 75, may also have learnt from the Chinese the art of using a communist military apparatus to milk tourism for dollars. It would be optimistic to conclude from any of this that he will offer any significant change. The ridiculous Cuban constitution, which pretends to be Marxist yet provides for a succession by horizontal bloodline, was presumably intended to prevent such change, not to prepare for it. The illness of the older Castro brother, long expected, will now test this plan. It may work, but not for very long. Quite soon, the strange, cruel, idealist fantasy of Castro’s Cuba must end. But, after the disappointments and paradoxes which followed the collapse of European Bolshevism, it is hard to imagine any joyous outcome.
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday.
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