Last hours of a monster

20 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

To this day, the slightest connection with right-wing authoritarianism disqualifies a politician from office. Fair enough, you might say. But, at the same time, Europe’s palaces and chancelleries teem with former ‘sandalistas’: youngsters who volunteered to work on collectives in Cuba and Nicaragua. No fewer than seven European commissioners are ex-communists, including Peter Mandelson, who visited Cuba as a student.

Why do we not apply the same standard to them? The idea that Castro’s Cuba was any cuddlier than Pinochet’s Chile simply doesn’t stand up. This is the man who enthusiastically supported the crushing of the Prague Spring, calling the Czech dissidents ‘fascists’. This is the regime that backed the IRA and the FARC. Over 40 years, Castro reduced his country to a pauperism unknown in the rest of the Western hemisphere. Not only did he forbid his people to travel abroad, he also barred them from the segregated tourist resorts on the island.

Even reliable party members are rarely trusted to visit capitalist countries. I once tried to chat up a pretty Cuban student on a long bus journey in Syria. She was a loyal Fidelista, and became quite testy when I asked her whether it was easy for Cubans to travel abroad. ‘Of course we can,’ she snapped. ‘We can go virtually anywhere in the world: Iran, Angola, North Korea....’

There are few sights so degrading as Western lefties arguing that all this is somehow compensated by the fact that Cuba is good at producing ballerinas and doctors. Even in socialist terms, Castro ought to be a disappointment. One of the first things to strike a visitor to the island is the visible ethnic disparity: whites and mestizos run the place, while blacks are in as wretched a condition as anywhere in the Caribbean. Indeed, for a long time, Castro deliberately tried to displace the racial problem by encouraging black Cubans to volunteer for the war in Angola. As a good Leninist, he knew all about countries exporting their internal contradictions.