Indonesian president Sukarno with Fidel Castro, 1960
There is something peculiar about the fervency and near unanimity with which the British left has eulogised Fidel Castro. The regime which Castro led was a one-party state, which persecuted its political opponents, including leftists, and whose trade unions were run by the ruling party. Nonetheless, it gets a better write-up than many eastern European communist states which, by and large, also provided their inhabitants with a greater degree of material security and state welfare than they enjoyed in the years following the fall of the Berlin wall.
Part of what fuels the left’s romantic view of Castro’s Cuba is the very particular role of the Cuban revolution. Castro’s heroic overthrow of the US-backed Batista regime in 1959 opened a new alternative across the Latin American continent. For many, it marked the beginning of the political upheaval of the 1960s. The story of Che Guevara, the rugged Argentinian doctor who trekked across South America on a motorbike is, in the minds of many in the west, part of an aesthetic that includes the cigars and the music as well. The truth is that, across the political spectrum, people seem willing to tolerate lower standards of human rights in places that seem exotic, and far from home.
