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The great autocrat

16th December 2016

By: Keith Campbell

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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One of the highest points of my career as a journalist happened, back in 1994, when I interviewed then Cuban President Fidel Castro, in Pretoria. He was attending the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela. Castro was unquestionably a very impressive man. And there can be no doubt that, love him or hate him, he was a major global figure during the second half of the twentieth century. (I was and am totally opposed to his policies and alignments, but had and will always have great respect for his politico-strategic brilliance – and that is not too strong a word.)

Castro can best be described by a good old-fashioned word – autocrat. Until severe ill health forced him to transfer power to his brother, Raul Castro, temporarily in 2006 and permanently in 2008. Fidel, as he was usually called, concentrated power upon himself (although he clearly had almost total trust in Raul), all too often resorting to micromanagement of the country and the economy, and crushed opponents.

British historian Hugh Thomas, in his magisterial history “Cuba”, suggests that in the first two years following Fidel’s seizure of power in 1959, some 2 000 people were shot, this figure “perhaps” reaching 5 000 by 1970. The Florida, US-based Cuban-exile programme the Cuba Archive reported it had so far individually identified 9 240 Cubans killed under Fidel’s rule, including 5 600 who were shot and another 1 200 who were extrajudicially assassinated.

In 1965, Fidel himself admitted that there were 20 000 political prisoners being held on the island; exiled opponents estimated the figure at 40 000. Torture was commonplace and is still practised today. Homosexuals were persecuted for decades. When HIV/Aids arrived in Cuba, sufferers were rounded up and put in special facilities. This was politely called “quarantining” in “sanatoriums”. It certainly kept the rate of HIV infection down, to 0.3% (according to UNAIDS) but the average for mainland Latin America is just 0.4% (according to Aids charity Avert), achieved without any violations of the rights of those suffering from the infection and the disease.

In addition, during the first decade or so of the Revolutionary government, half-a-million Cubans fled into exile. More fled later. Others died in the attempt. Fidel did not make it easy to flee, but he, unlike other communist leaders, did not make it impossible either. Escape of the discontented to the nearby US was a useful safety valve for his government.

Yet it has to be admitted that these figures are all low by the incredibly bloody record of communist revolutions. To cite just one example, in Albania, a country of only a little more than three million people (for comparison, Cuba has a population today of just over 11-million), it is estimated that that country’s communist revolutionary leader, Enver Hoxha, may, during his 41-year rule, have been responsible for the death of as many as 25 000 people and the imprisonment of up to 75 000 more.

What these grim numbers show is that Fidel had a different mindset to other communist leaders. His repression was more in line with that of right-wing military leaders in Latin America during the same period. He was less brutal than the Argentinian military regime, which “disappeared” between 9 000 and 30 000 people in just six years (1976-1982), but much more brutal than the Brazilian military government – just 500 killed or disappeared over 21 years (1964-1985). Perhaps his most direct counterpart was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, under whom 2 279 people were executed, 1 248 disappeared, 28 000 tortured and 200 000 driven into exile during his 17-year rule (1973-1990).

I must stress I am putting Fidel into context, not engaging in moral relativism.

Indeed, I am one of those who believe that Fidel was never truly a communist at all. He certainly was not a communist when he led his revolutionary army and the 26th of July Movement to victory, although Raul was. But Raul put loyalty to his brother ahead of loyalty to the party. In fact, the communist party (which had renamed itself the Popular Socialist Party or PSP in 1944) initially opposed Fidel’s revolutionary movement, only coming around to supporting it during 1958, by which time Fidel and his men had been fighting for more than a year.

After he came to power, Fidel did something that had never been done before (or since): he took over the Communist Party! At first, Fidel used the communists as allies, but, in 1963, the 26th of July Movement and the PSP were merged to form the Unified Socialist Party of the Revolution, renamed the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965. Of the 100 Central Committee members of the re-renamed party, only 21 had been communists before 1959. No member of the Politburo or of the Party Secretariat had been a communist before 1959; no fewer than 68 Central Committee members were from the military (and the Provincial Committees were also full of soldiers). In reality it was, and remains, the Castroist Party of Cuba. In many ways, Cuba was and is a disguised military regime.

There can be little doubt that Fidel took this route because Marxism-Leninism legitimised his autocracy and the party provided an ideal instrument to exercise it. Also, Fidel was very anti-American and highly nationalistic, and, by formally embracing communism, he caused the maximum possible alarm in the US while aligning himself with the one power capable of protecting him from Washington – the Soviet Union. (Fidel actually aligned with Moscow before he took over the Cuban communists.)

Why, then, did he adhere so rigidly to Marxist economics after the fall of the Soviet Union and the adoption of capitalist economics by China and Vietnam? I think it was because he feared that doing the same in Cuba would be seen, by the hated Yankees, as an admission of failure by the Revolution and as a triumph for the system that the Americans are especially associated with.

What is his legacy? He left the Cuban economy in ruins (the US embargo cannot be blamed as many other countries were happy to trade with the island State; American attempts to stop this, failed). He is often lauded for Cuba’s social achievements, but these enthusiasts are ignorant of the social progress made in the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America. In Cuba’s own region of the Caribbean and Central America, the country today ranks in human development behind the Bahamas, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Panama and Trinidad and Tobago – all of them impeccably democratic (and all but Panama democratic since independence). It is in foreign policy that Fidel leaves an indisputable legacy, for good and ill. Skillfully exploiting his alliance with Moscow, Fidel Castro elevated Cuba, for 30 incredible years, to almost great power status. Even his worst enemies cannot truthfully deny that.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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