Fidel Castro is dead. The dictator of Cuba died on Friday night, November 25th, after years of debilitating illnesses that had taken him out of the public light and handed the day-to-day leadership of the state to his brother Raúl. The internet wags promptly joked that the anti-capitalist Commandante had picked Black Friday to depart the Earth; but a May Day death would have been too much to swallow. The man who had survived Bautista, war, revolution, the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, the US embargo and innumerable CIA plots to kill him, but a Donald Trump presidency simply proved to be too much for him.
Impeccable timing.
Castro had his faults; cruelty, assassination and widespread repression being among them. Corruption was another: the Castro family was a poor as dirt before they took power, but el Comandante and his brother have managed to accumulate millions of dollars in a country that must ration food and medicine. Some animals are more equal than others, as George Orwell so eloquently noted[1]. No one should mourn the passing of such a dictator. But a dictatorship that needs to be taken in context. Castro’s regime was brutal and repressive, but Fulgencio Batista’s was even worse, adding a layer of sheer incompetence with which no one could accuse the communists. Cuba is poor, at least by standard measures of GDP and per capita income, but it is a poor country with the highest standards of literacy in Latin America, the greatest number of doctors and nurses per inhabitant, the lowest rates of infant mortality and a quality of life index that is equal to Portugal and exceeds that of Eastern European members of the European Union. This is a considerable accomplishment for a nation that has been cut off from its principal markets for over 50 years.
None of the above excuses Castro’s excesses or his authoritarianism; though if you had been threatened by invasion and assassination by your colossal northern neighbor, you might also think twice before loosening the reins of control. But even without the menace of the United States, it is safe to say that Castro would have acted in exactly the same way. He wasn’t a frustrated Democrat, forced to take extraordinary powers against his will; he was a true believer in proletarian revolution and the one-party state. He wouldn’t have instituted democratic reforms in Cuba even if Havana and Washington had been best buddies. And that is a grievous failing; the Cuban people deserved democracy much sooner.
If Castro doesn’t deserve the praise that some hardline relics of a bankrupt ideology have tried to heap upon, neither does he deserve the degree of scorn that the victorious Right has indulged in. As a dictator, he was not among the worst – not even close to an Idi Amin or a Pol Pot. Not as bad as a Nicolas Ceaucescu, any of the North Korean Kims, a Franco or Videla. When the old King Salman al Saud died a couple of years ago, world leaders lined up to pay their condolences and be in the photo op, despite his ruling a bigoted theocratic autocracy that had beheaded or stoned tens of thousands of people during his reign and who was, at the time of his death, the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. But it always helps to be a right-wing dictator; when you die, you’re more likely to be eulogized, whatever your crimes. If Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland, he’d have died an old man in his bed, fêted by all as the man who had saved Germany from the Great Depression and restored it to its place in the sun. It wouldn’t have mattered how many car loads of Jews and gypsies had disappeared into Mathausan or Teresienstadt, so long as he had been discrete about it.
If there is a reason to mourn Castro, it is because he was the last of the Left; of an ideology that was once the hope of change and betterment for millions of people around the world. This will undoubtedly sound strange and ridiculous to the modern reader, conditioned as they have been for most of their lives to equate “left” with a failed experiment, freakish and wrong. Though I remember a time in the 1980’s when not only the end of the Cold War, but its eventual winner, remained very much in doubt. Ronald Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of Soviet weakness in 1980 or 1984; quite the opposite, he exploited a perception of Soviet strength to defeat Carter and Mondale. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not foreordained; Gorbachev’s reforms could have been successful under different circumstances, as any China-watcher will tell you.
For those of us born before 1984, the world we grew up in was a world of the Left. The victory of the Second World War was a victory of the Left over the Right, most obviously in the victorious march of the Red Army from Stalingrad and Moscow all the way to Berlin. But even in the democratic nations, it was Franklin Roosevelt and the left-wing politics of the New Deal that won the economic and military victory for America, leading to the dominance of the Democrats in government until 1980. In Britain, Churchill was High Tory, but he led a National Unity government during the war, and the war was not even concluded before he lost a Parliamentary election to a Labour challenger. And post-war Europe was universally left-leaning, with the exception of Iberia’s two fascist holdovers and Greece, where civil war immediately broke out. There was no political party in Western Europe that was remotely comparable to the GOP; they all embraced some version of social democracy as necessary and inevitable to prevent revolution in the post-war ruins.
That world, so excoriated by the reactionaries on the right, nevertheless delivered the largest and longest period of peaceful growth in world history. It created the largest middle class and the lowest levels of inequality that Europe and North America have ever known. It unleashed the scientific and technological energies that eliminated polio and took us to the Moon. That world died 30 years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Vladimir Putin has said that this was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century; he might be proven right, though not for the reasons he was thinking of. Like Castro, no one should mourn the brutal contradictions of the Soviet system. But when the Soviets fell, they took Communism with them, and when Communism fell, it took the whole ideology of the Left with it. That is something we should mourn.
In its essence, the real Left was an ideology of hope: hope that not every human relationship could be reduced to a transaction; that the cash nexus and market were not the only and final arbiters of all human existence; that savage individualism and cutthroat competition in all aspects of human affairs, even within the nuclear family, was not the only bleak reality for mankind. For all of its excesses and failed experiments, it offered to the downtrodden a hope for the future that they could only find otherwise in religion…and of course you needed to die to get at that blessed state. Roosevelt’s New Deal, of Truman and the Fair Deal, of John and Bobby Kennedy, of Martin Luther King, of Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act, of a decent standard of living and a dignified retirement for all Americans: they were the real Left, the promise of progress and betterment for humanity.
Without the Left, all that remains are the ideologies of the Right. Of neo-conservatism and “democracy from the barrel of a gun”; of the existential emptiness of the market state ruled by a global corporatocracy; of massive and permanent inequality imposed by the inescapable logic of the “winner-takes-all” economics that now dominate uncontested in every corner of the globe. This nihilistic bleakness finds its natural ally in religion, for a system that condemns the vast bulk of humanity to a state little better than serfdom provides no hope whatsoever – that must come from the promise of something better in the next world. God forbid that the masters should give up their power and riches to provide it in this one.
The Right is not an ideology of progress and betterment: the past was always better for them and though they promise to “make us great again”, it is a lie that neither they nor their followers believe. They can do no better than evoke nostalgia with the Wagnerian romanticism of a lost purity; their mythos of a heroic Volk, whether it be Aryanism or the White Man’s Burden; and its raucous cry against all “Otherness.” The ideology of the Right is inescapably, consciously racist: there must always be an “other”, else who would be to blame when things inevitably go wrong? It doesn’t matter if the “others” are the Jews, or the Masons, or the Romani, or the Elders of Zion, or the Mexican immigrants, or #BlackLivesMatter – there must always be a racial enemy and it will always end in cattle cars and gas chambers.
A geopolitical catastrophe – yes, it was. The threat of the Soviet Union imposed constraints on the United States, both politically and ideologically. Without that counterpoise, American hyper-power became a poison, breeding ideological aberrations that went from harmless (e.g. Fukuyama’s “The End of History”) to the deranged (e.g. the neo-cons, regime change and democracy by perpetual war). And the traditional Left connived in their own destruction; the Democrats, Labour, European social democratic parties all sold out to a new alignment with corporate elites. They sold the working classes down the river in order to be invited to Davos. America has been the victim of our own success; but this is not a phenomenon confined to our country. It is – frighteningly – sweeping the world. Europe has just had a blatantly Nazi party come in second place in the Austrian presidential elections[2] and has a number of other stridently nationalistic voices threatening to win major elections in France, the Netherlands and Italy this year. In Turkey, President Erdogan has overseen a Great Purge of over 50,000 military, police personnel as well as public officials – mostly teachers; in the Philippines, the new President has instituted a new war on drugs that includes the summary execution of addicts and pushers by the police, with anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 extrajudicial killings in less than 6 months.
For the every shrinking plurality of Americans who still long for the center, for compromise and bipartisanship, I regret to inform you that those died as well. You can mourn them along with the death of the Left. A scale can have no equilibrium if one of its arms is broken, and there can be no ideological center so long as the only option is the Right. Unless and until the Left finds itself again and can enunciate a new and compelling message of hope, there can be no balance.
Welcome to our brave new world
[1] Animal Farm.
[2] It is important to recognize that the President of Austria is a largely ceremonial role as Head of State, the real power resides with the Head of Government, which is the Prime Minister, where the Freedom Party is less popular.
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