Liberation abroad, tyranny in Cuba

One of life’s tragedies is to become the thing you hate. This is precisely what happened to Fidel Castro.

He promised the Cuban people liberty from colonialism and dictatorship, yet he allied his country to the imperialist Soviet Union abroad and established a tyranny at home.

The country he leaves behind is archaic and fossilised – far removed from the image of youthful revolution that he once presented to the world.

Cuba under Castro wasn’t a socialist paradise. It was North Korea with cheap rum.

To understand Castro, one has to understand the history of Cuba and its struggle for dignity.

Once a Spanish colony, it won independence thanks to support from America. But this came at a price: the US retained a right to intervene in the island’s affairs.

The men who held power were gangsters tolerated by Washington. Fulgencio Batista, whom Castro overthrew in 1959, was a dictator ruling a land plagued by grotesque inequality, gambling, corruption and prostitution.

Castro’s status anxieties reflected those of his compatriots. He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy farmer. His father was a Spanish migrant, but also a Cuban nationalist, and Castro inherited from him a profound hatred of America.

And Castro might have been an atheistic rebel but he learnt discipline from clerical schoolmasters, just as Joseph Stalin did.

But he proved a genius at trouble-making. His first attempt to bring down Batista, leading a rabble against a barracks in 1953, was a farce.

However, the guerrilla war he fought in the late 1950s from the Sierra Maestra mountains generated a legend – a victory accomplished with genius and willpower.

When his soldiers rolled into Havana on January 2 1959, it was a moment of potential national liberation. America suddenly had a revolutionary regime on its doorstep. A revolution led by an articulate, good-looking star.

Norman Mailer, the American writer, called him “the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War”. Castro embodied defiance of Uncle Sam.

There are rumoured to have been more than 600 attempts to kill him, using bizarre methods such as poisoned cigars, a bomb disguised as a shell planted in his favourite swimming location and a wetsuit covered in toxins.

CIA agents theorised about slipping him a cigar laced with LSD so that he would gyrate madly during a television interview, or covering his boots in a chemical that would cause his famous beard to fall out. Perhaps they imagined that, like Samson, Castro shorn of his hair, would lose his powers.

The failure of John F Kennedy’s 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, however, suggested he was here to stay – possibly even immortal. An atheist god.

Unfortunately, the reality of the Cold War meant the only way to defy the West was to ally with the East. So Castro joined the Warsaw Pact. How sincere his faith in Marxism was is open to question, but it served a patriotic purpose. Not only would Soviet arms protect him from invasion, but nationalisation would also end foreign interference in the economy.

Overnight, Cuba moved from being on the edge of one monolithic Cold War bloc to the centre of another.

As a capitalist nation, Cuba was just a tourist trap. As a communist power, it held the attention of the world.

The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 offered a fascinating insight into Castro’s personality. He was happy to accept Soviet nukes on his country’s soil, although he thought their deployment should be brazen rather than, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev insisted, secret.

The Americans discovered the subterfuge, and for a few days, the world came perilously close to war.

On October 26, in the middle of the crisis, Castro wrote to Khrushchev. He said he was convinced the Americans meant to attack Cuba and pressed the Soviets to “eliminate this danger for ever”.

This meant a nuclear strike – the consequences of which would have been horrific for Cubans. Castro described them as “serene and ready”. It was the language, not of a statesman, but a fanatic prepared to sacrifice millions to secure his place in history. Khrushchev was appalled. He eventually removed the missiles. Castro never forgave him.

Castro’s cult, however, still flourished abroad – and with good reason. Castro helped nations gain their freedom.

Portugal, for instance, did not surrender its African empire peacefully – the people of Angola and Mozambique had to fight for independence, and Cuba assisted them despite the cost in gold and blood.

Even after those countries won their liberation, in 1975, the South African apartheid government sponsored partisan movements that, again, Cuba helped to fight.

As the USSR became arthritic and Red China chaotic, Cuba kept the lamp of revolution burning in the seventies. Castro and Che Guevara became pin-ups on western campuses. They were also an inspiration to the black civil rights movement.

However, the reality of Cuban life was far removed from its propaganda. Racism was common. On an island where about two-thirds of the population is black, the government is today estimated to be about 70% white. The gulf between rich and poor remains, in some quarters, as wide as under Batista. A former bodyguard claimed Castro lived on a private island south of the Bay of Pigs, a tropical paradise complete with a turtle farm and dolphins, reached by a luxury yacht fitted with rare Angolan wood and four motors provided by the Soviet Union.

There were plenty of women, too. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 1993, the notorious philanderer was asked how many children he had and he replied, with a grin: “Almost a tribe.”

Machismo mattered under Castro. Homosexuality or long hair on a boy could get you thrown in jail. Thousands of political dissidents sweltered in gulags; the church was constantly harassed.

Cubans benefited from one of the finest health and education systems in the world. But they also starved. Rationing was common, basic foodstuffs and goods were absent.

When communism crumbled in the 1980s, Castro did not liberalise, he got tougher. But at the same time as he launched his “economic war of all the people” against resurgent Cuban capitalism, he also opened the country up to foreign investment.

After 40 years of trying to create a pure, socialist paradise, the dreaded tourists were back. So was the criminality. So were the prostitutes. It is only a matter of time before McDonald’s opens in Old Havana.

I visited Cuba in 2000. It was a beautiful place, in part because poverty had denied it modernisation. The streets were cluttered with 1950s cars; the buildings were crumbling colonial mansions. It was far safer than Haiti – or even Jamaica at the height of its gang wars – and its achievements have to be judged in the context of the Caribbean, rather than western Europe.

But even if the population was literate and healthy, there was the unmistakable sense of despair of a people with nothing to do. They couldn’t get rich. They couldn’t run for office. Art serves the state. On every street corner stood a young man in uniform – a conscript who had probably bought his way out of army service – pretending to police people who were pretending to order their lives around socialism. All that held this masquerade together was the personality of Fidel. He was the only show on television. His personality kept things going, as did America’s boycott of the country, which sustained the narrative of Cuba defying the Anglos.

The re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 2014 moved towards the end of the embargo. Castro’s demise may spell the death of the regime.

But until that happens, we won’t know what ordinary Cubans really think of Castro. It doesn’t help that only about 5% of them are granted access to the internet.

Citizens in Latin America, Africa and Asia may feel they have lost a man who represented their cause on the world stage. The adulation of westerners such as Ken Livingstone or Justin Trudeau, Canadia’s prime minister, is less easy to understand. It’s likely that they saw Castro as a humane alternative to Sovietism, as a third way between the East and West.

But while he certainly claimed to be that, the reality is he served the communist bloc right to the end with a ruthless dedication that the Russians often found unnerving. Castro’s struggle for Cuban dignity was so destructive that he was prepared to blow up the world to make his point.

Perhaps he proved that whenever the state defines itself as the arbiter of morality, and whenever it is prepared to use violence to serve its ends, it becomes as unjust as the forces it claims to oppose.

Castro did help many poor and oppressed people to find liberty. But he denied that freedom to his own people.

Tim Stanley wrote this piece for the Sunday Telegraph