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

Published on Saturday 3 January 2009 19:20

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.