FIDEL CASTRO 1926-2016
Scourge of the West dies at 90
The death of Fidel Castro, the 90-year-old Cuban revolutionary who once brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, plunged his country into mourning yesterday and reignited global divisions over the communist ideology he espoused.
As Cuba embarked on a nine-day period of national homage to a shaggy ex-guerrilla who turned into a cultural icon, battalions of his critics and admirers fought over his legacy.
For an older generation of radicals raised on inspirational images of cigar-chomping Cubans in combat fatigues, Castro was, as the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn hailed him, “a massive figure in the history of the whole planet”.
For Donald Trump, a different kind of politician suddenly facing his first serious foreign policy challenge, Castro was “a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades”.
The US president-elect first noted Castro’s death with a four-word message on his Twitter account — “Fidel Castro is dead!” — but later issued a longer statement denouncing his legacy of “firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights”.
Leaders of Cuba’s former Cold War allies soon chimed in on Castro’s side, with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, declaring that “this distinguished statesman . . . was a sincere and reliable friend of Russia”. Xi Jinping, the Chinese communist leader, praised a “good and true comrade” and added: “Castro will live for ever.”
Similar divisions emerged on social media, as admirers of Cuba’s health service and egalitarian education system posted tributes. But one opponent wrote: “Delighted to hear that Castro is dead.”
Leaders of Cuba’s former Cold War allies soon chimed in on Castro’s side, with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, declaring that “this distinguished statesman . . . was a sincere and reliable friend of Russia”. Xi Jinping, the Chinese communist leader, praised a “good and true comrade” and added: “Castro will live for ever.”
Similar divisions emerged on social media, as admirers of Cuba’s health service and egalitarian education system posted tributes. But one opponent wrote: “Delighted to hear that Castro is dead.”
In Washington, a row broke out over who should represent America at Castro’s funeral; several Republican senators called for President Barack Obama and the secretary of state, John Kerry, to stay away.
In London, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, offered a low-key statement: “Fidel Castro’s death marks the end of an era for Cuba and the start of a new one for Cuba’s people.”
There was a lot more passion in Europe, where Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, described Castro as “a hero for many”.
The great survivor of plots on his life
and his beard
Fidel Castro makes his triumphant entry to Havana in 1959
The plot — and others involving a poison pen and an exploding cigar — are documented in a museum in Havana, the Cuban capital, a testimony to America’s chief obsession during the Cold War: removing Castro from power.
It was not to be. After overthrowing Fulgencio Batista, the dictator, in 1959, Castro spent longer on the world stage than any other figurehead except the Queen, a rumbustious titan of the 20th century who defied a succession of American presidents and ended up turning his tiny nation into one of the world’s last communist bastions.
Even when illness forced him to cede power to his brother Raul, now 85, in 2006, Castro still hovered in the background. With his once powerful voice reduced to a whisper and the beard turned wispy and grey, he would appear from time to time in his blue tracksuit to insist that communism would endure.
However, for the European left, including figures such as Danielle Mitterrand, France’s former first lady, he was an iconic figure, a hero who had liberated his people from a corrupt, American-backed regime that had turned Havana into a playground for rich American tourists and mobsters.
In the early days, as he fought in the mountains, the world gave Castro the benefit of the doubt. His revolution had seemed doomed at the outset. In 1956, when Castro, aged 30 and with only a small band of followers, landed in a coastal mangrove swamp from Mexico aboard a yacht called the Granma — later to become the name of the Cuban communist daily newspaper — government troops were lying in wait. Newspapers around the world reported that the guerrilla leader had been killed in the battle that ensued. But somehow he survived to fight another day.
Later that year Castro loyalists contacted an American journalist, Herbert L Matthews, who was escorted into the mountains disguised as a wealthy American planter to interview Castro. He described the revolutionary parting the jungle leaves and striding into a clearing. “This was quite a man,” he wrote. “A powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a scraggly beard.”
His sympathetic portrait, combined with the news that Castro had survived the landing, gave impetus to the guerrilla campaign. In 1959 Norman Lewis was dispatched by Ian Fleming, the novelist, spy and Sunday Times foreign manager, to assess Castro’s chances of ousting the Batista regime.
Lewis recalls two colourful encounters in Havana: one with Ed Scott, the model for James Bond, who was said to have entertained naked women in his office and worn spent cartridges as cufflinks; the other with the novelist Ernest Hemingway, who was in those days in the habit of drinking neat half-pints of Dubonnet. “He told me nothing,” wrote Lewis, “but taught me more than I wanted to know.”
By the time Batista fled from Havana airport in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1959, Castro had become a living legend.
One of his first acts was to put 500 Batista officials before a kangaroo court, where they were sentenced, led out and shot. Black-and-white images of the killings were broadcast on American television to a horrified nation. Castro defended the executions as a necessary evil for solidifying the revolution. But to the outside world it was a first signal that this was no champion of freedom.
One of the most colourful figures of Castro’s early entourage was Ernesto Guevara, the cigar-chomping, beret-wearing Argentine doctor who went on to become as much of a leftist icon as Castro and whose part in the revolution was made famous years later in the film The Motorcycle Diaries. He knew nothing about economics, but Castro put him in charge of the central bank, where he signed Cuba’s new banknotes under his nickname, “Che”.
But opposition to Castro was growing. In 1961 an army of exiles tried to take back Cuba by force with the help of the CIA. Their idea was to land at the Bay of Pigs on the south of the island and set up a beachhead — but this time Castro was waiting. The would-be liberation army of 1,500 was destroyed, most of them either captured or killed.
Great dramas were to follow. In 1962 American spy planes above Cuba detected Soviet construction sites for intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of hitting America. President John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, were locked for 13 days in a high-stakes confrontation that could have plunged the world into nuclear war.
The Cuban leader with the French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
It has emerged that Castro, in a secret cable to Khrushchev, was urging the Soviets to strike at America. Khrushchev replied that this was tantamount to asking “that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy”, which would be “the start of a thermonuclear war”.
After receiving assurances that America would remove missiles from Turkey and not invade Cuba, the Soviets withdrew their arsenal from Cuba and dismantled the bases. But the Soviet presence in Cuba carried on growing, producing a generation of blonde Cubans with names such as Vladimiro. Hundreds of Cuban students studied in Moscow and other parts of the Soviet bloc.
Castro began to persecute the Catholic church and set up revolutionary “defence committees” for rooting out dissidents who, along with homosexuals, were sentenced to prison or forced labour.
Striving to become a global player in the struggle to promote communism, he began exporting revolution all over the world, sending thousands of Cuban soldiers to fight in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia in support of Marxist insurgents.
At home, however, things had begun to go wrong. Guevara, who had grown hostile to Moscow, had fallen out with Castro. He set off for Bolivia to help rebels there, but was captured and killed in 1967.
Meanwhile, the CIA’s many attempts to kill Castro only backfired as the dictator used evidence of assassination plots to stoke fears of invasion and galvanise support for the revolution.
Relations with America improved, briefly, when Castro allowed Cuban Americans home for the first time to visit their loved ones. But in 1980 there followed a bizarre episode in which he tried to defuse growing domestic discontent by allowing 125,000 Cubans to flee in boats, rafts and inner tubes in the Mariel boatlift. Many had been freed from prisons or mental asylums. Castro hoped they would cause havoc on enemy soil.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, which had for so long propped up the Cuban economy, should have put paid to the regime. But still Castro soldiered on, experimenting with a limited form of capitalism. He turned a blind eye to people setting up restaurants in their own homes and allowed farmers to sell their produce at market rates and foreign companies to open hotels.
It was not enough to silence the critics, however, prompting him to lock up hundreds of activists clamouring for elections.
During his visit in 1998, Pope John Paul II expressed concerns about human rights but also criticised the American embargo as “unjust and ethically unacceptable”, allowing Castro — who, unusually, had put on a suit for the occasion — to claim a political victory.
Castro’s last public appearance was in April this year, at the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party. His hands quivered as he expressed his surprise at reaching his 90th birthday. He bade his party farewell. “Soon I will be like everybody else,” he said. “Our turn comes to us all, but the ideas of Cuban communism will endure.”
The making of a political giant
1926
Born the son of a wealthy farmer
1955
First attempt at revolution fails. Sent into exile
1956
Returns to Cuba and begins to fight guerrilla war in mountains
1959
Leads 9,000-strong force into Havana. Dictator Fulgencio Batista flees. Castro becomes prime minister
1961
Washington breaks off all diplomatic relations. The US sponsors an abortive invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. Castro proclaims Cuba a communist state
1962
Cuban missile crisis ignites when, fearing a US invasion, Castro agrees to allow the USSR to deploy nuclear missiles on the island
OCTOBER
1962
US President JF Kennedy announces a naval blockade of Cuba. After 13 days, when Moscow and Washington fear war, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announces that he is withdrawing the nuclear weapons
1976
Castro sends troops to oil-rich Angola as the Portuguese flag came down after 500 years of colonial rule to support the new Marxist government against US backed military interference
1980
About 125,000 Cubans crammed on small boats and rafts flee island
1991
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president, pulls military advisers out of Cuba as the USSR collapses
1998
Pope John Paul II visits Cuba
2006
Castro has major intestinal surgery
2008
Brother Raul Castro takes over as president, days after Fidel announces his retirement
2016
His last official appearance was at a communist party meeting
Castro is an icon — for dictators
While western leftwingers praised his revolutionary fervour, Cubans knew Fidel’s rule meant torture, oppression and poverty, writes Douglas MurrayWhy are some dictators remembered so fondly? Long before his death it was obvious that Fidel Castro would benefit from the “revolutionary hero” type of obituary more than the “murderous bastard” variety. The BBC and the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, among others, have not disappointed.
Even now, Castro’s eulogists claim a man who urged the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev to issue a pre-emptive nuclear strike against America to have been a man of peace. They claim the torturer of dissidents and sexual minorities to have been the representative of the oppressed. And they claim an unimaginative and logorrheic egomaniac to have been the voice of the voiceless. For decades before his death, Castro enjoyed a disgusting leniency, not to mention sycophancy, outside the nation he immiserated.
At the start there was some justification. The revolution began as a genuinely popular movement against a corrupt and anti-democratic government. Fulgencio Batista had overthrown Cuba’s first attempt at democracy and subsequently mired the country in kleptocracy and brutality. So it was understandable that Castro had at the outset some of the world’s admiration. Then he once again proved the maxim that things can always grow worse.
Because his revolution with the people, for the people turned out to have very little interest inthe people. If the justification for overthrowing Batista had been that Batista overthrew democracy, there was no evidence in the decades that followed that Castro had any devotion to the ballot box. And if Batista was brutal and oppressive — and he was — it was a habit Castro showed no desire to kick. Throughout his rule, Castro tortured, murdered and imprisoned his opponents to keep himself in power. Those who still deny these facts — and they are many — should consult the online Cuba Archive as a corrective to their frivolous and sinister revisionism. Like dictators throughout history, Castro was on the side of the people for only as long as all the people were slavishly on his side. And as in North Korea, one of Castro’s staunchest allies, communism was not only the blueprint for the revolution but also an excuse of sorts. It applied an internationalist, intellectual coating to conceal a squalid and deeply parochial crime scene. As the decades wore on and the revolution itself receded into the distance, Castro and his circle continued to pretend the revolution was alive, well and glorious. In fact, they spent decades keeping themselves in grandiose comfort while the Cuban people lived in squalor.
It is only because there are so many apologists for the regime that it remains necessary to say this, but Castro and the barbudos (bearded men) with whom he triumphantly entered Havana in January 1959 had no idea how to run an economy. Having propelled himself forward as the father of the nation, Castro — like North Korea’s former leader Kim Il-sung — found himself in the position of having to know about everything. The people and his immediate circle became increasingly disinclined to venture opinions to the contrary, and in time the suspicion became ingrained in Castro — like many a dictator before him — that these people who expressed such everlasting love and admiration might be onto something.
The results speak for themselves. Even today, delegations of left-wing politicians and journalists visit Cuba and return with the same stories of the glories of the revolution: “For a tiny sum the Cuban people will cook for you in their homes”; “The Cuban people are so welcoming”. Rarely do these eager dupes stop to wonder why the populace of this earthly paradise needs the extra cash.
In the year that Cuba became one of the last remaining communist “paradises”, the English writer Anthony Daniels gave a more honest tourist’s-eye view. In 1989, he wrote: “Havana is like Pompeii and Castro is its Vesuvius. The lava of his words has poured over the city continuously for 30 years, preserving it from any form of change except decay. This magnificent city, the pearl of centuries of exploitation, is an inhabited ruin; the inhabitants are like a wandering tribe that has found the deserted metropolis of a superior but dead civilisation and decided to make it home.”
The flow of people leaving Cuba was another eloquent demonstration of the truth. Until the day Castro died, Cubans continued to flee the socialist paradise he claimed to have created. When President Barack Obama reopened diplomatic ties in 2014, the number of Cubans fleeing to America shot up. Were they all “counterrevolutionaries”? No, they were people who recognised that the revolution was a sham and who wanted the living standards and hopes they saw across the water.
To the extent that history will remember Castro as anything other than a minor 20th-century dictator, it will remember him as someone distinctly lucky in the choice, timing and missteps of his enemy. Had the Americans not launched the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro could probably not have ensured his decades-long grip on power. Had he not been able to present himself as the intrepid opponent of American power, the international left and the flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War would not have adopted him as a symbol of their various manias and needs. Even now, with his death, we hear the implication that Castro at least “meant well”. This obscene claim can be heard in the assertion by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that Castro was “a champion of social justice”. It can be heard in the BBC describing Castro as “iconic”. And it can be heard in the corporation’s invitations to former KGB agents of influence, such as Richard Gott, to laud their hero on the airwaves.
Yet while they mourn, Cuba should smile. For Castro’s death provides the country he misruled with the greatest opportunity of all. Raul Castro has shown slightly less belligerence than his brother. And now a new American president has been elected, a rethinking and thawing of relations between the US and Cuba could be a real possibility.
It was the Cuban people who truly needed Castro to die. Only now that he is gone does their nation have a chance of living.
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