Last hours of a monster

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

Sola mors tyrannicida est, wrote Thomas More: death is the only way to get rid of tyrants. And so it has proved for Fidel Castro. Sixteen years ago, he looked finished. The USSR had collapsed, and the Soviet subsidies that had propped up the Cuban economy for 30 years had been abruptly terminated. Around the world, statues of Lenin were being melted down or sold off to collectors of kitsch. But Castro never wavered in his revolutionary fervour. Unlike the apparatchiks of Eastern Europe, he had not inherited the communist system, nor seen it imposed by a foreign army. The Cuban revolution was his revolution, and he was damned if he was going to give it up.

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.