How the US and the EU sustained the Castro dictatorship

Daniel Hannan
Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the EU is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free. He is the winner of the Bastiat Award for online journalism. How the US and the EU sustained the Castro dictatorship
By Daniel Hannan World Last updated: March 19th, 2010




Sola mors tyrannicida est, wrote Thomas More: death is the only way to get rid of tyrants. And so it has proved for Fidel Castro. Twenty years ago, he looked finished. The USSR had collapsed, and the Soviet subsidies that had propped up the Cuban economy for 30 years had been abruptly terminated. Around the world, statues of Lenin were being melted down or sold off to collectors of kitsch. But Castro never wavered in his revolutionary fervour. Unlike the apparatchiks of Eastern Europe, he had not inherited the Communist system, nor seen it imposed by a foreign army. The Cuban revolution was his revolution, and he was damned if he was going to give it up.

By sheer force of personality, Castro kept the red flag flying over his muggy Caribbean island. His eyes grew rheumier, and his beard sparser, but his domination of the political machine remained total. The Americans were in no doubt that if they removed the dictator, the dictatorship would collapse. The CIA, acting on St Thomas’s dictum, is supposed to have tried to kill Castro 638 times, sometimes in ways that were pure Inspector Clouseau. On one occasion, agents are said to have persuaded Castro’s former lover to assassinate him with poisoned cold cream; on another, they tried to plant an infected wetsuit on him; on yet another, an exploding cigar. In the event, it will fall to the Almighty to achieve what the boys from Langley could not.

It will fall to the Almighty, too, to hold Castro to account for his misdeeds — he has escaped any reckoning in this world. Not for him the international court orders that were served on Ariel Sharon and Donald Rumsfeld. Not for him the obloquy heaped on his old foe, Augusto Pinochet, whom he was delighted to survive. On the contrary, Castro’s most famous bit of swanking, the claim after his first failed coup attempt that ‘history will absolve me’, seems to be coming perversely true. (I know readers of this blog are bored rigid by South American dictators, but look at what has happened in Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia, for Heaven’s sake.)

If the US has been unwise in giving the Cuban Communists the alibi of their blockade, the EU has behaved wretchedly, refusing to deal with the pro-democracy dissidents. Between them, they have condemned Cuba to 50 years of poverty and dictatorship. History will not absolve them.