DEATH OF A DESPOT Don’t mourn THIS TYRANT
Lionised by the Left, the real Castro was a despot who condemned his people to poverty, slaughtered and tortured his critics... and brought the world to the brink of Armageddon
WHILE his modish Western admirers liked to call him ‘Fidel’, the despotic President Castro’s frightened subjects dared not speak his name. They feared they would be overheard by ever-present secret police spies who made East Germany’s Stasi look like amateurs.
Glancing around nervously, they would mime either a beard or a set of epaulettes, before speaking in whispers about the tyrant who dominated every aspect of their hungry, censored lives.
No wonder. The ‘Committees for the Defence of the Revolution’, present in every workplace, school and street, watched everyone, reported every word out of place and ruined the lives of those who spoke out of turn.
Though this apparatus endures to this day, it was originally the sword and shield of the Communist system which Castro first embraced when he became the USSR’s ally in 1959.
In this role, he nearly ended the world by welcoming Soviet nuclear missiles into Cuba, a few minutes flying time from Washington and New York. His part in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come to an actual nuclear war, was perhaps the worst of all his many cruel actions.
Luckily, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was too sensible to heed Castro – who wanted Moscow to threaten a Soviet nuclear strike on the USA if Washington ever again threatened Cuba. Khrushchev pulled the missiles out. Eventually Moscow could no longer afford to subsidise and defend Castro. And the collapse of the USSR left Cuba without its main protector and source of cash. But Soviet secret police methods stayed. They had become essential for maintaining the regime in power.
For despite his grandiose boasts and promises, Castro’s people lived mostly on black beans and rice. Their country, once one of the richest in Latin America, sank into decay and poverty around them. Everyone who could escape, left. It may well be that the Cuban state only survived because so many of its most dangerous opponents were allowed and encouraged to emigrate.
Castro, unlike the ordinary inhabitants of his alleged paradise, lived in considerable luxury, according to a former bodyguard, Juan Sanchez, who said the ‘Maximum Leader’ dwelt on a private island, Cayo Piedra, and liked to voyage aboard a large yacht with Soviet-built engines, the Aquarama II.
Many claims were made for Castro’s state by its western defenders. Propaganda about advanced health care was partly true, though there were the usual Communist shortages of vital drugs – and the elite had their own clinics.
But while literacy levels were certainly high (they always had been, Cuba was never Haiti), there was little to read apart from the leaden propaganda of one of the world’s last Marxist states. Gullible tourists admired the 1950s cars and the Capone-era hotels, and thought Havana’s decrepit, fly-infested streets were picturesque. They were not picturesque for those who had to live in them. Castro’s Cuba even had two currencies. There was a smart, crisp one featuring romantic portraits of the fun-revolutionary hero Che Guevara, for holidaymakers to buy luxuries. And then there was another grubbier one for ordinary Cubans to spend on necessities, if they were available that week. Perhaps now that what Castro’s millions of exiled opponents long called ‘the biological solution’ has finally arrived, the worship will end. The Castro myth, so powerful for so long, will begin to fade. But perhaps not. For Castro was repeatedly buoyed up and saved by his inept enemies. The CIA’s bungled and badly planned 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was the worst of these follies. It made Castro – in reality a nasty military dictator – look like the defender of his nation against the bullying USA.
And the spy agency’s attempts to kill him with explosive and poisoned cigars, and to make his beard fall out, predictably failed. Castro himself once said: ‘If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.’
Then years of futile blockade by the USA only served to strengthen his claim to be a patriotic champion. President Obama’s shrewdest move was the end of this isolation, and Castro’s state has been visibly crumbling as it has opened up to the outside world. He died as his supposed achievements were falling apart.
Who was he really? There is some mystery. Even his exact date of birth is not certain. But we know he was the illegitimate son of a rich sugar cane farmer and that he was a troublemaker at school. Despite being sent to an elite Jesuit college, he neglected his work for sport. At university, where he seems to have had no clear politics, he was mixed up with violent factions and eventually became an unsuccessful lawyer, so busy with political activism that his furniture was seized by bailiffs and his electricity cut off.
That episode helped to end his first marriage, to Mirta DiazBalart. Castro, who is thought to have fathered nine or 10 children, may or may not have married a second time and is reputed to have had two long-term mistresses and a number of brief dalliances. But as his private life and career fell apart amid various expeditions and political adventures in the early 1950s, Castro finally found a cause – the revolutionary overthrow of the then Cuban despot Fulgencio Batista.
His failed putsch, at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago in 1953, would have been farcical if so many people had not died in it. But Castro’s privileged background saved him from execution. Instead, he was held in a clean modern prison, and allowed to read what he wanted and stay in touch with his sympathisers. He served only two years of a 15-year sentence.
Castro never forgot this generosity, and resolved not to show it to anyone who challenged him. His own prisoners suffered terribly.
Finally, luck came his way. Gathering a new team of conspirators in Mexico, he voyaged back to Cuba aboard the motor yacht Granma, which a previous American owner had named after his grandmother. Perhaps Castro did not realise the homely origin of his ship’s name. For Granma would one day become the title of Cuba’s far-from-cosy or loveable Communist daily newspaper.
Once again, as at Moncada, there was farce. The yacht ran aground in a mangrove swamp. Its revolutionary human cargo, seasick and
‘Soviet police methods kept regime in power’ ‘Lawless show trials and mass executions’
lost, arrived too late for the rising they were supposed to join.
But the incompetence, sloth and over-reaction of President Batista’s army was such that Castro’s small band survived and prospered in its mountain hideouts. Batista’s government, given to torture and corruption, lost the support of Washington, which at that time viewed Castro as just another rebel, rather than as a Communist menace. Batista fell – and fled with his loot – above all because the USA cut off arms supplies, withdrew its support and told him he must go at the end of 1958.
A period of political confusion followed. During these months Castro held secret meetings with the Cuban Communist Party, which led to his eventual friendship with Moscow. It was then that Castro and Guevara staged the lawless show trials of opponents, held in sports stadiums.
On one occasion Castro personally reversed the ‘not guilty’ verdict of one such trial.
Next came mass executions in Havana’s La Cabana fortress (the bullet holes can still be seen) while Guevara looked on. Some of these executions were filmed and shown in cinemas. Over several months, it became clear to the outside world that Castro was the real successor to Batista and that he had embraced Soviet Communism.
Who can now say if he did this because he really believed in it, or because he saw Moscow as his protector and would pay almost any price for that? Castro’s government fiercely persecuted homosexuals, denouncing them and sending them to do forced labour in the cane fields, and later imprisoning them. His image in the West as a romantic rebel was false. Castro, for instance, loathed rock music (he later claimed to have changed his mind about this and homosexuality, but too late to help those who’d suffered at his hands).
He and his fellow rulers were embarrassingly loyal to their sponsor in Red Square. Castro backed the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And he was merciless to those who dared to dissent.
One of his most savage acts was the treatment of his former revolutionary comrade Huber Matos. Matos, a long-time democratic enemy of the dictator Batista, protested against Castro’s closeness to Moscow. After a hysterical show-trial, including a seven-hour speech of denunciation from his former friend, Matos was flung into prison for 20 years (16 of them in solitary confinement), during which he was horribly tortured. Another victim of Castro’s merciless intolerance was the poet Armando Valladares, originally a supporter of the revolution, who refused to put an ‘I’m with Fidel’ sign on his office desk. He was charged with ‘terrorism’ and sentenced to 30 years. He served 22 years during which he was forced to eat other prisoners’ excrement.
The regime’s hatred of dissent continues. More than 70 human rights activists were jailed on trumped-up charges in 2003. Their wives, who protest silently each week in Havana, were rounded up during President Obama’s visit to Cuba in March this year. Oswaldo Paya, an extraordinarily brave dissident who refused to accept any foreign support, died in a mysterious ‘road accident’ in 2012.
It is astonishing that such a man, and such a state, have attracted so much sympathy and admiration from so many in the West. These people quite rightly despise and shun the various ‘right-wing’ dictatorships of Latin America, and angrily pursued the Chilean military putschist Augusto Pinochet, who at least had the grace to retire, and hand the country back to democrats. Yet they admire the Cuban despot. Why is this? Fidel Castro, one of the cruellest tyrants of modern times, came to prominence in the strange years of cultural revolution which convulsed the Western world in the 1960s. Why was he not reviled and denounced by the sort of people who normally like to posture as the lovers of liberty? Why did they make excuses for him, why did authors and artists pay court to him and why did so many refer to him by his first name as if they knew him?
Perhaps it was because his tyranny took place on a beautiful tropical island rather than in a grim city on some snowy steppe.
Perhaps it was because his labour camps lay under the sun among fields of sugar cane and coffee, rather than on a windswept European plain. Perhaps it was because it was for so long fashionable to be anti-American, and who was more anti-American than Fidel Castro? Perhaps it was because he was bearded and dressed in fatigues instead of a Soviet-made suit. Perhaps because of his machismo and swagger, a generation of intellectuals treated him as a star rather than as the cruel failure he really was.
Well, now that we have the ‘biological solution’, the time may at last come for the truth.
But when it does, will those who were so wrong for so long admit their error, or will they prefer the romantic legend to that truth?
‘He was treated as a star – instead of a failure’ His image in the West as a romantic rebel was simply false. He was one of the cruellest tyrants of modern times