The death of Cuban communist dictator has been at the forefront of the news today. Fidel Castro was feted by the left as a hero and almost messianic figure for decades with trade unions being fooled by the hard left into affiliating to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign despite the continuing imprisonment of anyone who tried to set up a free trade union.
Cuba is not any kind of paradise with all political dissent suppressed and opponents imprisoned, tortured or killed with the bulk of the political left not raising a finger in protest, which speaks volumes about the kind of world these so-called socialists would create.
Free speech is absent from Cuba and this is the result.
Jeremy Corbyn with his usual foolishness declared:
“Fidel Castro was a massive figure in the history of the whole planet, ever since the revolution in 1959. There are stories of his heroism while living in Mexico in exile and then the boat to Cuba, the march to Havana… For all his flaws, Castro’s support for Angola played a crucial role in bringing an end to Apartheid in South Africa and he will be remembered both as an internationalist and a champion of social justice.”
Lets look at his flaws or victims to use plain English in this video by the Cuba Archive:
Further info: http://cubaarchive.org/wordpress/
That Newsnight spat over Cuba between Peter Hitchens and Tariq Ali made perfect sense if you knew that one was a veteran of the International Socialists while the other was a veteran of the International Marxist Group. Those factions' differing Trotskyist analyses of the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev years were being applied to Cuba before our very eyes, but in highly exaggerated form.
ReplyDeleteThus, to Hitchens, the state capitalist entity had no achievements whatever. While to Ali, the degenerated or deformed workers' state was degenerated or deformed no more, with no human rights abuses at all. It was an astonishing thing to have witnessed on the BBC in 2016.
I am told that, back in the day, there were Romeo y Julieta romances between the IS and the IMG at many a university. But you crossed the line if you took up with member of the Communist Party.