Last hours of a monster

17 January 2007

Amid fresh reports that Fidel Castro is at death’s door, Daniel Hannan says that the Cuban dictator was the beneficiary of Western hypocrisy about left-wing tyrants, and of the strategic errors of the 44-year US blockade

By sheer force of personality, Castro kept the red flag flying over his muggy Caribbean island. His eyes grew rheumier, and his beard sparser, but his domination of the political machine remained total. The Americans were in no doubt that if they removed the dictator, the dictatorship would collapse. The CIA, acting on St Thomas’s dictum, is supposed to have tried to kill Castro 638 times, sometimes in ways that were pure Inspector Clouseau. On one occasion, agents are said to have persuaded Castro’s former lover to assassinate him with poisoned cold cream; on another, they tried to plant an infected wetsuit on him; on yet another, an exploding cigar. In the event, it has fallen to the Almighty to achieve what the boys from Langley could not.

It will fall to the Almighty, too, to hold Castro to account for his misdeeds — he has escaped any reckoning in this world. Not for him the international court orders that were served on Ariel Sharon and Donald Rumsfeld. Not for him the obloquy heaped on his old foe, Augusto Pinochet, whom he was delighted to survive. On the contrary, Castro’s most famous bit of swanking, the claim after his first failed coup attempt that ‘history will absolve me’, seems to be coming perversely true.

Fifty years almost to the day after the comandante landed on the Cuban coast, his dream of a Latin America united in revolutionary anti-yanquismo is finally being fulfilled. Six weeks ago, Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s caudillo, engineered a landslide re-election, and dedicated his triumph to the man he calls his father. Last week saw the installation of two more of Castro’s allies: Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista commander, in Nicaragua; and, Rafael Correa, who has pledged to close down parliament and rewrite the constitution, in Ecuador. Their victories complete an almost clean sweep of South America by the populist Left; only Colombia stands as an untoppled domino.

‘Why is it that dictators of the Left are not scorned in the same way as those of the Right?’ asks my fellow Peruvian, the Nobel prize-winning novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa. ‘Was General Pinochet, in his 17 years in power, crueller or bloodier than Fidel Castro has been in his four decades ruling Cuba?’

Good question. Both men crushed their opponents, closed down hostile media, suspended parliamentary democracy and filled the administration with their friends and family. The main difference is that, unlike Castro, Pinochet eventually submitted himself to the ballot box, offering Chileans a referendum in 1988 on whether they wanted to keep him. By 57 to 43 per cent, they voted ‘No’, and Pinochet grumpily stomped off the stage. Not that his resignation won him any credit with Lefties. As a Marxist friend told me accusingly at the time, ‘He’s just trying to make Fidel look bad.’