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

One thing, and one thing alone, allowed the old monster to get away with it: Washington’s 44-year-old economic blockade. All countries rally round their leaders when they are at war, and Castro’s Cuba has been semi-officially at war since he seized power. The US sanctions allowed him to escape blame for his mismanagement. It’s not communism that has reduced Cuba to this squalor, he could assure his people — it’s the yanqui embargo. The same excuse served to justify his totalitarianism. As he put it in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs debacle, ‘The revolution has no time for elections.’

In his memoirs, José María Aznar, the former prime minister of Spain, recalls meeting Castro in 1998. He told the comandante that if it were up to him, the blockade would be lifted the next day and the regime would fall within three months. Castro ruefully agreed.

The siege didn’t just give Castro a domestic alibi; it gave him international sympathy. A surprising number of people are prepared to ally themselves with any regime, however vile, provided it is sufficiently anti-American. This tendency is especially apparent in the EU. The development commissioner, a pompous Belgian called Louis Michel, horrified dissidents in Havana when, on a recent visit, he proclaimed that Brussels would engage positively with Castro. I don’t imagine for a moment that Mr Michel truly approves of Cuban communism; it’s just that he likes to thumb his nose at Washington. The same unlovely instinct makes Eurocrats want to do business with Tehran’s ayatollahs and with Beijing’s autocrats — but that’s another story.

What will happen after Fidel? In the immediate term, power will pass to his brother Raúl. For a long time, the Vice-President was seen as the more hardline of the two Castros: a doctrinaire Marxist from his youth who maintained an iron grip on the army. More recently, though, Raúl has shown a certain pragmatism, supporting the legalisation of the dollar and encouraging the development of tourism. When the US began to intern terror suspects at Guantanamo, he astonished the American authorities by assuring them that Cuba’s security forces would round up and return any escapees.