President Higgins’ Castro comments were questionable
PRESIDENT Michael D Higgins’ tribute to Fidel Castro – described as fawning by many critics – is questionable at the very least. President Higgins is right in his assertion that Castro was a ‘giant’ figure but he was a giant for many wrong reasons. In his youth Castro was a revolutionary firebrand, vociferously opposed to American imperialism, who took up arms to end the criminal regime of Fulgencio Batista. By the time he died, Castro had become the embodiment of the tyranny he railed against.
Civil rights groups conservatively estimate that Castro’s regime murdered some 15,000 people and ran a network of forced labour camps that, at their height, imprisoned 30,000 Cuban citizens. These included homosexuals, dissidents, intellectuals and, indeed, anyone who opposed Castro’s dictatorship.
In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro urged the USSR to carry out a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USA. Mercifully, his calls to start nuclear Armageddon were ignored by Nikita Kruschev.
Currently Cuba – now led by Castro’s brother Raúl – ranks 169th of 180 countries in terms of press freedom; has the most restrictive laws on freedom of expression in the Americas and access to the Internet is among the most tightly controlled in the world.
On hearing the news of Castro’s death, President Higgins issued a statement of approximately 450 words, expressing his “great sadness” at the passing of “a giant among global leaders” who “brought significant political and social change to his country”.
Many critics have rounded on President Higgins’ statement for allegedly ignoring the Castro regime’s predilection for murdering or torturing its opponents.
It’s true that President Higgins discussed human rights concerns with representatives of the government of Cuba on every occasion they met. A spokesman from the Áras also pointed out that the president’s statement clearly referred to human rights abuses in Cuba.
Indeed it did. In a single 20 word sentence, President Higgins referred to the murder, torture and jailing of dissidents and almost 60 years of totalitarian repression in Cuba as “a restriction of civil society, which brought its critics”. A mild rebuke perhaps but hardly a swingeing denunciation of totalitarianism.
It has also been pointed out that President Higgins’ tribute to Castro came just hours after he delivered a speech in Dublin’s Mansion House, calling for the defence and support of human rights defenders around the world.
Castro’s popularity among western liberals may, in some way, be explained by the fact that he and right-hand-man ‘Che’ Guevara have been glamourized poster boys for revolution since the 1960s.
Despite such repression, Cuba has a genuine multi-racial society that has better levels of education, health and nutrition than most other Latin American and third world coutries.
The United State’s crippling economic embargo on the island – which is only now loosening – also helped garner enormous sympathy for Castro’s regime.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have an interesting take on Castro and the embargo. Since his death both have said Castro used the ‘misguided US policy’ as a pretext to repress opposition; to play the victim and to discourage other democratic governments from condemning his oppressive policies.
President Higgins is perfectly entitled to express an opinion on Castro’s death. Our president is a renowned orator but on this occasion a more measured approach – like that adopted by President Obama – may have been the right option.