Comments by Michael D Higgins after the death of Fidel Castro triggered significant political controversy.
The president’s key argument in favour of the former leader was that under his guidance Cuba followed “a remarkable process of social and political change, advocating a development path that was unique and determinedly independent”.
Maybe so, but Cuba also had a miserable human rights record. In 1986 a “Tribunal on Cuba” was held in Paris to present testimonies by former Cuban prisoners to the international media. The gathering was sponsored by Resistance International and The Coalition of Committees for the Rights of Man in Cuba.
It heard allegations of arbitrary arrests; sentencing by court martial after a defence was denied; periods in hard labour camps without sufficient food, clothes or medical care; and the arrests of children.
Some 1.2 million Cubans — about 10 per cent of the population — left the island for the US between 1959 and 1993, according to the US government.
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Commenting on this lamentable human rights record, the president limply declared that the “economic and social reforms introduced were at the price of a restriction of civil society, which brought its critics”. The speech was also notable — although this attracted very little public attention — for its failure to mention the word “democracy” or Cuba’s lack of it under Castro.
In defence of the president, he has spent a long political life railing against US imperialist interventions in Latin American countries and promoting socialist causes at home.
For a generation of ageing political hippies such as Mr Higgins and Gerry Adams Castro’s Cuba was a plucky symbol of another route to national economic development other than slavishly following the US model.
The stance of the US in Castro’s early years certainly didn’t help matters. It is interesting to note the formal response when he visited the country, just four months after taking power in 1959, where he met with Richard Nixon, then vice president. Privately, Nixon hoped he could talk Castro into taking “the right direction”, but left the meeting having concluded that he was “either incredibly naive about communism or under communist discipline — my guess is the former”.
Shortly afterwards, American policy switched from attempted persuasion to attempted assassination. A murky figure here was Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of the CIA. It was he who later led President Kennedy up the garden path and into the morass of the failed Bay of Pigs landing by anti-Castro militants. Dulles hoped that failure would trigger a full-scale US invasion to depose Castro, but Kennedy refused to fall for the ploy and, shortly afterwards, dismissed Dulles.
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That particular development illustrates a cardinal virtue of democracy: it provides a method by which society can learn from its mistakes. Regime change can lead to policy change and Kennedy’s election certainly led to a different US stance on Cuba.
It also highlights an aspect of the European left’s reflex anti-Americanism that is disquieting. To be anti-American is not just to be anti-Nixon and anti-Bush, it also means being anti-Kennedy and anti-Obama.
When Kennedy had his finest hour, Castro had one of his worst. When the Soviet Union stationed nuclear weapons in Cuba to deter another invasion, Castro believed their purpose was to destroy the US. He told the Soviet ambassador, “If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of the earth”.
Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, responded by shouting, “This is insane — Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him”, according to his son and biographer. This is the same Castro that Mr Higgins referred to as “a giant among global leaders”?
“With economic growth rates similar to many other Latin American countries, inequality and poverty are much less pronounced in Cuba than in surrounding nations,” Mr Higgins said. So just how good is Cuba’s economic record?
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It’s hard to tell as official statistics may be unreliable, but according to The Guardian, which is hardly a nest of neo-conservative imperialism, Castro was responsible “for the central planning blunders and stifling government controls that — along with the US embargo — have strangled the economy, leaving most Cubans scrabbling for decent food and desperate for better living standards”.
Development efforts often focus exclusively on technical solutions to the problem of poverty such as the provision of education and healthcare on the basis that everything else will sort itself out, but here is a “technocratic illusion” that we can ignore the battle of values between freedom and dictatorship.
When there is an environment of respecting human rights for all, then technical solutions can happen. In the absence of those rights, there is no incentive to deliver any technical solutions on a permanent basis.
Freedom has been making gradual progress in Africa. The ratio of democrats to dictators among African leaders is rising. Consequently, since the mid-1990s, Africa has had strong economic growth. Rather than eulogising failure, influencers should be hoping for the same in Cuba.
@cormaclucey