The Cuba protests shame the British left
Edward Howard
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week or so, you’ll have noticed that in Cuba, one of the last truly communist countries on Earth, there have been several anti-government protests, in response to the shortages in food and medicine in the country, the way the government has handled the COVID-19 pandemic in the area, and the one-party state that they are forced to live under.
These protests are clearly a force for good – they’re largely peaceful, serve a genuinely good purpose and are a grassroots fightback (based on all available evidence) against one of the most totalitarian states out there. The concessions given (mainly on those on food and medicine) shows that they are actually working to this good end. Hopefully such protests will continue, and will lead to serious change for that country and its people later on.
What is more significant about them however is much of the Western left’s, including much of Britain’s for that matter, response to it. Given that many of the radicals and some of the soft left in that movement have vested interests in protecting the Cuban regime, their response has been as predictably pathetic and as tone deaf as ever.
This is especially true for much of the American left, who have been shills for Cuba for some time now. Black Lives Matter for example blamed the ‘U.S. government’ for what was happening on Cuba, and how it has tried to ‘crush this Revolution for decades’. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also blamed the US again for its ‘embargo’ of which has caused ‘contribution to Cuban suffering’. And the Biden administration, not wanting to annoy the radical base of which is slowly taking over the Democratic Party, initially only gave mild concessions, blaming ‘government mismanagement’ at first. It only condemned the communist system of government there after much pressure from both Democrats and Republicans on the issue.
For the British left, there has only been at best silence on the issue (there have been no statements by left-wing MPs in Parliament for example), and at worst the expected gaslighting of the regime there. For Novara Media, they also blamed the embargo, citing the UN’s condemnation of it – very tellingly nothing about criticising Cuba specifically. Owen Jones echoed a similar sentiment, also complaining about the blockade, but not criticising the Cuban regime at all. Labour MP Diane Abbott sang a similar chorus, going as far to blame it for the current crisis with no evidence. The obvious oversimplification and dodging of the other issues that have started this new series of protests is sad, but expected.
But of course, this has been the usual pattern of such behaviour for the British left when it comes to Cuba – upon the despot Fidel Castro’s death at the ripe old age of 90, many celebrated and defended him, despite the horrors he afflicted on his country. Northern Ireland’s then Deputy First Minister Martin McGuiness called it an ‘end of an era’ and ‘sad’ on his Twitter account. Famed socialist academic Tariq Ali also praised Castro’s supposed progress with education and healthcare on BBC Newsnight, and flew off the handle when a fair comparison to the military dictator Augusto Pinochet reared its ugly head. And Jeremy Corbyn, the then leader of the Labour Party, claimed that Castro was ‘a champion of social justice’, while similarly praising the education and healthcare reforms the government had supposedly made under Castro’s rule.
So it can be seen that for much of the British and Western left that they are willing to bend over backwards to protect a horrid despotism like Cuba, in the same way no-one on the right would dare defend similar far right or military dictatorships like Pinochet’s Chile or Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko for instance.
This is especially true given how cruel and inhumane Castro’s despotism was. One can take a look into the many political prisoners it housed – estimates of which vary; Castro himself admitted to housing 15,000 of them in 1963, and more modern data on this indicates that many are still held captive for such disobedience - including those the regime found ‘counter-revolutionary’ (as in the LGBT community and the clergy), as well as horrific means of torture while there. Freedom of the press meanwhile is heavily curtailed and cracked down upon, all the while the Cuban regime imprisons any foreign journalists who refuse to tow the party line. Racism is also heavily prevalent in Cuba too, against its minority black population there, with police brutality against the Afro-Cuban population there being common, and some have admitted that any civil rights movement on the island would lead to many ‘black people dead’ as a result.
The country is also literally a kleptocracy, with heavy poverty on the island itself – 15% of the population live in extreme poverty, the monthly wage is $17-30 and the collapse of the Soviet regime in Russia of which gave it much economic aid has seen it monetary prospects plummet – all the while the Castro family are multimillionaires, with the late Fidel taking much of the profit pie there. And let’s not forget that it was Fidel Castro’s reckless behaviour that did more than anything to nearly start a nuclear World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis. From all of this, it wasn’t surprising when many of Cuban descent celebrated in Little Havana in Miami when Fidel Castro died in 2016.
But why do so much of the left in general back Cuba, even going as far as to dismiss genuine grassroots protests against its communist rulers?
There are several reasons for this, and none of them are good signs.
Firstly, it’s because propaganda works. Much of the pro-Cuba messaging from the left over the last few decades usually isn’t to defend itself against the barbarous behaviour of its government – mainly for PR reasons and to avoid sounding conspiratorial as opposed to anything sincere – but to praise how supposedly better the country is now under communist rule than it was formerly. It is a cynical case of a post hoc argument – the idea that because some of the institutions in Cuba aren’t rotten to the core, that not only is the country itself good, but that its brand of socialism should be replicated.
The only problem is that much of the propaganda rests much on shaky foundations at best.
There’s the assumption that the current regime while flawed, was much better than the Batista dictatorship which ruled over it previously. Now while it was certainly true that the Batista years saw Cuba under a heavily corrupt, unequal and often Mafia run system, there are clearly things that Cuba did better under that time than under the Castros and onwards. The economy was growing along with a thriving middle class, with a literacy rate of 76% (the fourth highest in Latin America) and whose healthcare was often widely praised, with many private clinics and hospitals offering services to the poor. Meanwhile, it had been progressing since the early 20th century to being a country with a working democracy and had several attempts at being a constitutional republic during that time as a result. Batista’s regime was highly troubled no doubt, but none of those points could be stated for Castro’s Cuba, either now or then.
Meanwhile, there is the healthcare argument, often used as a wedge issue by much of the American left to slam the failings of the current American health system there. While the American healthcare system has many faults and is still sadly a major contention of political strife, it is much better than the current system Cuba has. Photo evidence has shown that the services offered there in regards to healthcare are often dirty and in poor condition at the best of times – not to mention this government’s failure to handle the coronavirus outbreak, of which in part triggered these protests in the first place. One can only gather that this propaganda line comes from how it has been a product of celebrities who use Cuban healthcare (of which they pay good money for too) and then brag about it once they come back – akin to how the Soviets would bring intellectuals over to impress them with their system by showing them selected parts of it, so that they could praise that system too.
Meanwhile the education point is a mute one – education may be free and literacy may have increased, but it means nothing if all the populace are permitted to read and think is that of government propaganda and talking points that they can’t deviate from. Besides, other despots have improved literacy rates in their respective countries – Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe are good examples of this. But no-one would dare defend those dictators on a similar charge, due to how the blatant horrors and tyranny of the regimes in question cancels out the supposed good that it did, especially when many Western nations make similar improvements without needing to use such methods to control the populace.
Secondly, it’s because of much of their anti-Americanism, of which in general they use the communist Cuba to pivot as a poor victim of the United States’ supposed imperialism. It’s akin to how many leftists will stick up for Palestine over Israel to pivot for their anti-Israeli feelings too – hence why a band like Radiohead will get endlessly criticised for playing in Israel, but no criticism shall befall the Rolling Stones for playing in Cuba for example.
This is especially true in the reason that they give for why Cuba doesn’t succeed economically – that being of the United States’ economic embargo on Cuba, of which has been in place since 1960. Now beyond that being a very weak reason to defend Cuba – it doesn’t explain away the human rights abuses or why such a poor country would have multimillionaire rulers in the Castro family – it removes all agency and context as to why that was the case. The embargo was put in place as a response to Castro nationalising American-owned oil refineries without compensation, not completely because of its communist ideology. Meanwhile, the embargo didn’t stop Cuba from trading from other countries beyond the States (of which it has continued to do since the 1990s), and the embargo has been softened since the end of the Cold War, both under the Clinton and Obama Presidencies.
Finally it’s because, for much of the genuine communists and socialists on the left, it’s the last state that they sympathise with of which the soft and some of the centre left can back them on, for the aforementioned two other reasons.
North Korea for example is so infamously cartoonish in its authoritarian ways that it is impossible to defend without looking extremely foolish for doing so. China meanwhile causes too much division in left wing circles as to whether it is actually of them or not to be worth defending anyway – and given that regime’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims and possible intentional releasing of the coronavirus, and the further scrutiny that will be placed on it in next few years because it, it shall make even the staunchest defenders of China less noisy.
Presumably the likes of Laos and Vietnam lack the propaganda campaigns that Cuba has had, while the rest of the former communist states that used to enslave half of the world are now just as much of a series of dead relics of the 20th century as the fascist states of Central Europe are – and very tellingly, few in those nations would want to return to that style of government.
So by logical deduction, Cuba is the last nation standing for all of those reasons, and despite all of the horrors and despotism that goes on there, it becomes immediately worth defending for much of the radical left.
Hence why they ignore the protests at best, and at worst slam the causes as either the fault of the West or as cranks in that country who don’t appreciate what they have.
What such a line of thinking in the end does do is show how much of the left’s support for these states is simply pure fanaticism and nothing more.
‘Fanaticism, the false fire of an overheated mind’ stated the English poet William Cowper. That is a statement that couldn’t be truer for the left’s defence of Cuba as these protests continue.
But hopefully it shouldn’t deter those brave men and women in Cuba who are taking on this regime, and should win in the long term, and whose supporters far outnumber the detractors in their fringe circles. Good luck to them.