Life ends at 50 for deluded acolytes of Castro's revolution

Gerald Warner:
Life ends at 50 for deluded acolytes of Castro's revolution
Published Date: 04 January 2009

SORRY to intrude a melancholy note into the festive climate of New Year,
but there is mounting concern over the state of health of the Maximum
Leader. As the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Cuban
revolution, Fidel Castro remains as conspicuous by his absence from the
public forum as he has consistently been since July 2006. The question
now exercising bien-pensant commentators is whether the Leader of All
Progressive Humanity is actually dead.

Fidel missed his 80th birthday party when even a specially imported
medical vehicle for his transportation and a custom-built abdominal
brace to enable him to stand proved inadequate to render him fit for
public display. Fortunately, Cuba being a Marxist state, the dynastic
succession of Fidel's brother Raul obviates any unseemly jockeying for
power in an election or any such destabilising phenomenon.

The 50th anniversary of the revolution without Fidel is Hamlet without
the prince. Yet there is so much to celebrate. The average salary of
Cubans is now £17 a month; food imports, on an island that should be
self-sufficient, cost £1.4bn a year; on the index of economic freedom
Cuba ranks 150th out of 157 nations; clearly, capitalist materialism is
not a threat to the Caribbean's Potemkin village. Marxism enriches: we
know this because Fidel's personal fortune is $900m – sufficient to gain
him entry to Forbes magazine.

Castro is as much a hero to the Left as Pinochet was a bogeyman. At
first blush, this is puzzling. Castro has executed 16,000 people and
imprisoned more than 100,000 in labour camps. While liberals around the
globe agonise over Guantanamo, they do not even know the names of the
camps in Castro's gulag: Kilo 5.5, Pinar del Rio, Kilo 7, the Capitiolo,
for children up to age 10 (political incorrectness can manifest itself
at a very early age). Two million of Fidel's ungrateful subjects have
fled his socialist paradise, more than 30,000 have died in the attempt.

Yet any socialist will tell you Pinochet was the real villain. In fact,
his coup was launched to pre-empt a self-coup by Salvador Allende and
his Cuban, East German and North Korean-trained militia, quaintly known
as the Groups of Personal Friends. It followed a resolution of the
Chilean Chamber of Deputies that Allende had failed to respect the
constitution and it was subsequently validated by a referendum in 1980
when Pinochet won 67% support.

The referendum was rigged, claim leftists. In that case, why did
Pinochet not also rig the 1988 referendum, which went against him, after
which he restored full democracy and surrendered power? When leftists
were trying to draw up a dossier of alleged murders against Pinochet,
they were dismayed to find not only that the number of deaths fell far
below the 500,000 reported by Moscow Radio, but it was difficult to push
the figure up to the 3,000 mark, regarded as iconic.

They eventually succeeded – by the simple procedure of including in the
statistics those who were killed fighting for Pinochet, as well as those
against him. You have to accord the Left credit for its chutzpah, if not
its veracity.

Castro, who killed many times the number that Pinochet did – and in cold
blood – remains a hero to the useful idiots of the western commentariat
because murdering members of the bourgeoisie is just breaking eggs to
make the Marxist omelette, whereas killing Reds is an intolerable abuse
of human rights. Nobody epitomised this ambivalence better than 'Che'
Guevara, who enjoyed executions so much he had a window in his office
overlooking the prison yard.

Whenever a mother visited him to plead for the life of her totally
innocent son, Che would demonstrate his revolutionary sense of humour by
having the young man shot in front of her. The one execution he did not
seem to enjoy was his own ("I'm Che! I'm more use to you alive!").

Fidel es un pais ("Fidel is a country") proclaim the propaganda
billboards in Havana. Unhappily, the twinkling-eyed mass murderer they
celebrate is in no condition to embark on a Five Year Plan. His last
remaining usefulness is to highlight the moral illiteracy of the Left.

To be a socialist is to fail a very low-grade intelligence test. Just as
"bastard feudalism" heralded the death throes of that system, bastard
socialism spawned by panic reaction to a recession is currently
imparting a spurious appearance of life to the collectivist corpse. This
is the last guttering of the candle flame before eternal night closes in
on a failed ideology. Fidel, however, will be too otherwise disposed to
notice the demise of the Marxist nightmare in tandem with his own.

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