Even Fidel Castro and the old King of Thailand could not survive this Year of Death. Westminster Abbey is gearing up for a coronation, I reckon.
I do not deny the problems with human rights in Cuba, any more than I deny the ghastliness of the "exiles" in Miami who aspire to turn the place back into the giant drug den and brothel depicted in The Godfather Part II.
A government that is allied to Saudi Arabia is not entitled to criticise the human rights record of any other country apart from North Korea. The reverse would also hold.
A government that is allied to Saudi Arabia is not entitled to criticise the human rights record of any other country apart from North Korea. The reverse would also hold.
We shall see how much more democratic Cuba becomes as it is turned into a miniature version of China, but with and by American rather than indigenous corporations.
There are doubts about the claims relating to healthcare, although it is not unknown for the Durham Miners' Association to fly the children of its communities to Cuba for the treatment that they have been denied by the ruination of our own National Health Service.
Certainly, Cuba's medical internationalism is no myth. American attempts to encourage defection from within it have been embarrassingly fruitless.
The lifting of the embargo might indeed devastate Cuba's healthcare system by corporate interests if great care is not taken, but those expecting a mass exodus of highly trained staff to the United States are engaged in sheer wishful thinking.
Certainly, Cuba's medical internationalism is no myth. American attempts to encourage defection from within it have been embarrassingly fruitless.
The lifting of the embargo might indeed devastate Cuba's healthcare system by corporate interests if great care is not taken, but those expecting a mass exodus of highly trained staff to the United States are engaged in sheer wishful thinking.
On education, Cuba is the last great tribute to the thorough effectiveness of the highly traditional pedagogical methods on which the Old Left has always insisted.
If your essay is to write a Marxian analysis of Cecilia Valdés, then you have to have read Cecilia Valdés. If your essay is to write a Marxian analysis of the Spanish-American War, then you have to know the facts of the Spanish-American War.
I have survived only one attempt on my life, and that was by no one in particular. By no one and nothing at all, really. I know that they are regular readers, so I shall say it again: you are no one and nothing at all. The proof is that I am still alive.
Castro, on the other hand, lived to be 90 despite at least 638 attempts by the CIA to kill him. And despite being a heavy smoker.
A Cuban cigar has been cluttering up the inside breast pocket of my dinner jacket since before the smoking ban.
I always said that I would smoke it when Fidel died. But I am not going out in this just for a smoke. Could he not have died in the summer?
Oh, well, it will keep until May, when we overthrow the Fulgencio Batistas, Santo Trafficantes and Meyer Lanskys of Durham County Council.
¡Hasta la victoria, siempre!
¡Hasta la victoria, siempre!
They would elect the present regime anyway. Cuba I mean, not County Durham. So any elections would be rigged. In Cuba and County Durham alike I fear.
ReplyDeleteAnd by not unconnected elements, in that case. This unitary authority for half a million people, the longest-standing Labour council in the country, is a flagship of the Blairite Right of the Labour Party, which since the fall of Cameron and then of the Clintons has a reasonable claim to be the principal remaining force for neoliberal economic and neoconservative foreign policy.
DeleteDonald Trump threatened to imprison his political opponent. He would not have recognised the result of a free and fair election if he had lost. To put it mildly, he does not support LGBT rights. He has a dodgy right-hand man. He doles out top jobs to his close family members. And he has massive support from Russia. As Theresa May would put it, "Remind you of anyone?"
ReplyDeleteHomosexual activity has been legal in Cuba since 1989, which is longer than in Scotland, or in Northern Ireland, or in many American states.
DeleteThe people who will accept no nuance about Castro today, just as you would accept none in the other direction about Pinochet when he died, since when did you like the gays, anyway? At least officially?
A true patriot and leader of the only independent country in the Americas.
ReplyDeleteRIP
My family left Cuba for the US during the revolution. Not for ideological reasons, they would have left anyway. I was born in the US, I'm a first generation Cuban-American, and I'm 51 years old. The grandchildren of the first generation Cuban-Americans have no real personal connection with Cuba, or Castro, and seriously, could not care less, like most other Americans. I don't know who is dancing in the streets of Miami, or why, but whoever they are, it's about the past, not the future.
ReplyDeleteThe present regime probably will die with Raúl. But what comes after it really does want watching. They are all still there, waiting in the wings. And they are frighteningly well-connected.
DeleteYour cigar must be pretty dry by now. I wouldn't advise smoking it. Otherwise I agree with you.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I'm on two attempts on my life. As you say, nothing at all.
Love your claim on Twitter that the Cuban doctors will soon be arriving in Britain because of the running down of the NHS.
ReplyDeleteWatch this space.
DeleteCuba led the global response to the Ebola outbreak. There'd be none of that from the Batista restorationists.
It is outrageous that the Cuban doctors have never had the Nobel Peace Prize, considering many of the people who have, and considering that even the White Helmets are now up for it.
Some stupid leftist just hilariously tweeted at Peter Hitchens that Castro helped "end apartheid"!
ReplyDeleteHitchens response: ""It was the end of the Cold war that ended Apartheid.Till then,most people were reluctant to put the slavishly pro-Soviet ANC in charge of SA.""
Indeed.
It was Reagan/Thatcher's defeat of the Soviet Union that removed the threat of ANC-ruled South Africa becoming a Soviet satellite state, and forced the ANC to abandon terrorist violence and adopt the path of peace.
Thatcher and Reagan (asleep for much of his second term) did not defeat the Soviet Union. It collapsed, anyway.
DeleteOh, well, if this is how the Right reconciles itself to its own appalling record on South Africa, then good luck to it. That is not how anyone in South Africa remembers these things.
The fall of apartheid was a strictly unintended consequence of anything Thatcher ever did.
DeleteQuite.
DeleteShe worshipped it. Literally worshipped it. Apartheid South Africa was what Margaret Thatcher had instead of religion.
The USSR was quite the fair weather friend of the liberation struggle in South Africa and the wider region. Cuba was the real deal, the most important ally.
DeleteA very important point. Cuba was an apartheid society before the Revolution. Now, I am not saying that racial integration there is perfect today. But it is unrecognisable from the way it was.
Delete