Cuba

Thursday

Tim Butcher

Both Belgium and the United States should be called to account for the death of Patrice Lumumba

For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with. Like so much connected with the Congo, details were lost in the murk of Africa’s magnificent but broken giant. He had been fed to Katangan pigs, drowned in the river — or was perhaps even still alive and being held hostage in the Ituri rain-forest. So radiotrottoir assured me variously in January 2001 when I made my first visit to Kinshasa around the 40th anniversary of Lumumba’s disappearance. The reason for my trip felt darkly familiar: one of Lumumba’s successors as national leader, Laurent Kabila, had himself just been assassinated

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba? What’s with all this eruption of sanity in Washington?

The conventional wisdom, at least in Britain, seems to be that Barack Obama’s presidency has been a desperate disappointment. That is partly a reflection of the extravagant – impossibly so – expectation that accompanied him to the White House and partly, of course, a simple reminder of political reality. And yet it seems to me that you can make a persuasive case that he’s been a better President than his predecessor (a dismally low bar, granted) but also a better President than Bill Clinton. This, true, reflects the gravity of the times. Clinton complained in his autobiography that he’d been deprived the chance of tackling the kind of challenges that

Thursday

Rian Malan

What a lost prison manuscript reveals about the real Nelson Mandela

This is a story about Nelson Mandela, and it begins on Robben Island in 1974. Prisoner number 466/64 is writing up his life story, working all night and sleeping all day.  Finished pages go to trusted comrades who write comments and queries in the margins. The text is then passed to one Laloo Chiba, who transcribes it in ‘microscopic’ letters on to sheets of paper which are later inserted into the binding of notebooks and carried off the island by Mac Maharaj when he is released in 1976. Outside, the intrepid Mac turns the microscopic text into a typescript and sends it to London, where it becomes the Higgs boson

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: The Chinese must save the cigar from extinction

In Dorchester during the Christmas holiday I bought a two-slice electric toaster at Currys. It was a nice little toaster that worked very well when I got it home. And it cost only £4.50, which turned out to be little more than half the price of a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. It’s some years since I gave up smoking; but at my peak I smoked three packets of Marlboros a day, which now would cost the same as more than five two-slice electric toasters. Or, put another way, with the money I have saved from giving up smoking I could buy nearly 2,000 electric toasters a year. I could by

Saturday

James Bloodworth

Venezuela: a shining example of how not to help the poor

No serious person today views the Cuban Revolution as anything other than an impoverished tyranny – up to and including the leaders of that Revolution, who have been hastily turning toward capitalism since learning in 2009 that the island was on the brink of insolvency. It remains much easier to find useful idiots willing to defend Venezuela’s so-called ‘Bolivarian revolution’, however, which until recently was supposed to promise something better than its ossified Caribbean neighbour. Not for much longer, perhaps; for Venezuela is on the brink of a social explosion after 15 years of economic incompetence by Islington’s favourite petrocrat. It was reported this week that, absurdly, the most oil

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Carlos Acosta, the great dancer, should be a full-time novelist

Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money was tight, but Carlos won a place at ballet school, and before long he was enthralling audiences at Covent Garden as a half Jagger, half Nureyev figure with a twist of the moon-walking Jackson in the mix. Now Acosta is about to leap into the world of literature with a debut novel, Pig’s Foot, written over a period of four years during rehearsal breaks. For all its manifest debt to Latin American so-called ‘magic realists’ (Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa), the novel stands triumphantly on its own. In pages of salty-sweetprose,

Wednesday

Clarissa Tan

May Day, May Day

There was a sense of urgency, even emergency, in many countries on May 1 this year. The goings-on in the UK were muted in comparison: France Presidential incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy staged a rally in front of the Eiffel Tower called ‘The Feast of Real Work’, to counter the traditional show of heft by the left. ‘Put down the red flag and serve France!’ he shouted to the unions. His campaign claims a turnout of 200,000. The left was irritated by Sarkozy’s hijack of their celebration, and his insinuation that they don’t understand what work is. The far right, led by a scornful Marine Le Pen fresh from rejecting an overture

Sunday

Alex Massie

Working-Class People Can Like Opera Too, You Know

Brother Korski is right to draw attention to Rachel Sylvester’s interview (£) with Unite’s Len McCluskey and right too to note that his defence of Castro’s island gulag* is indefensible. But there’s more that’s wrong with it than that and not all of that is McCluskey’s fault. Consider these lines: He would choose tea and scones at Fortnum and Mason over beer and sandwiches in a smoke-filled room. He is a fan of the romantic poets — “I love Byron, Keats and Shelley, I’m a romantic at heart” — and takes a feminist interpretation of Christina Rossetti. He is a theatre aficionado — “I do like Shakespeare, I’ve probably seen

Saturday

Daniel Korski

Unite chief blames MI5 for protest violence

Sometimes, just when you think that the craziest left-wing ideologues have gone off to tend to their gardens, up one pops. Meet Len McCluskey, the head of Unite, who tells The Times’s Rachel Sylvester (£) that Fidel Castro has been a “heroic” leader of his people. That would be the same Cuban dictator who jails journalists and trade unionists. Odd choice of hero. But it gets better. McCluskey seems to think that MI5 encouraged violence at the last anti-cuts protest. I kid you not: “Mr McCluskey believes that the secret services, in particular MI5, may have been working under cover to encourage the violence as part of a conspiracy to

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Citizen Castro rains on Comrade Hattie’s last parade

There was praise for Fidel Castro – of all people – at PMQs today. That the tribute came from a Tory MP must make this a unique event in the annals of parliament. Castro’s recent admission that Cuba’s state monopolies might profit from a little nibbling around the edges gave Priti Patel, (Con, Witham), a bright idea. She asked the prime minister if the Marxist cigar-enthusiast might visit the TUC Conference to share his economic vision with the brothers. The PM, who seemed calm, fresh and genially bullish today, caught the joke and ran with it. He offered his own tribute to the semi-retired dictator. ‘Even Comrade Castro is on

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Will the TUC Condemn Castro?

Obviously this is one of John Rentoul’s Questions to which the Answer is No. Nevertheless, given that the TUC is fond of congratulating* the Castro regime for its great achievements and humanity and all the rest of it one does wonder if the Congress will want to regret the Castros apparent, if unusual, embrace of economic reality. To wit, massive public sector cuts: Cuba has announced radical plans to lay off huge numbers of state employees, to help revive the communist country’s struggling economy. The Cuban labour federation said more than a million workers would lose their jobs – half of them by March next year. Those laid off will

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Exotic Cuban underworld

Before the revolución of 1959, Havana was, effectively, a mafia fleshpot and colony of Las Vegas. Before the revolución of 1959, Havana was, effectively, a mafia fleshpot and colony of Las Vegas. Graham Greene first visited in 1954, when the dancing girls wore spangled headdresses. The Batista regime was then at its height, and tourists flocked to the Cuban capital for its promise of tropical oblivion. George Greene, the ‘GG’ of the title of this novella, is an English holidaymaker on the prowl in pre-communist Havana. Castro’s revolution is less than four years away — it is the summer of 1955 — and George hurls himself promiscuously into Batista’s grimy

Wednesday

Malcolm Deas

The ghost of an egoist

Very long books appear at intervals about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Rarely do they contain anything both significant and new, and they get longer and longer. This one too is a long book, though it is mercifully an abridgement of the original Spanish edition, which ran to over 1,400 pages. Anything in it both significant and new has escaped me. Most of it is about Castro’s childhood, youth, the overthrow of Batista and the early years of the revolution: Castro gave up smoking many years ago, but here he is still puffing away. All the same, it provokes thoughts. The first is that it confirms the view that history

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Semper Fidelis For Shame

I’d actually thought Castro’s retirement would prompt more of this sort of nonsense. I guess we’re still waiting for Seumas Milne to pipe up in The Guardian. Still, the palm for the most idiotic thing I’ve seen goes to Chris Bertram: …And, of course, Castro ran a dictatorship that has, since 1959, committed its fair share of crimes, repressions, denials of democratic rights etc. Still, I’m reminded of A.J.P. Taylor writing somewhere or other (reference please, dear readers?) that what the capitalists and their lackeys really really hated about Soviet Russia was not its tyrannical nature but the fact that there was a whole chunk of the earth’s surface where

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Mills of History Keep Grinding

The morning after the night before: a friend emails, noting Obama’s humping great triumph in Joe McCarthy’s old state, Wisconsin and quips: Can you imagine if you were a rabid 1950s era McCarthy-ite and somehow you saw today’s Washington Post front page – a black man is the front runner to be the next President and Castro made it all the way to 2008?

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Cuba: The Last Refuge of Excuse-Making Scoundrels

I suppose one ought not to be surprised that there remain some folk for whom the Cuban revolutionaries remain unblemished heroes. Equally, there is, alas, no great reason to be too astonished that the Guardian still publishes panegyrics saluting the brilliance and ineffable wisdom of Castro and Guevara. Nevertheless, Simon Reid-Henry’s* article today may take the biscuit in terms of recent contributions to the genre: After the war, what had begun as little more than an association of convenience developed into one of the most intriguing of all political partnerships. Their different working styles and approaches to revolution helped the Cuban leadership negotiate the hazardous switch from American to Soviet

Friday

Alex Massie

The Che Chronicles

How many people really think of Che Guevara as a romantic, if occasionally headstrong, revolutionary? Outside Latin America, I mean. Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but does anyone under the age of 35 really give even half a damn about Che Guevara? Certainly, the anti-Che forces continue to write as though he remained a clear, present, danger to all things good and holy. Here’s John J Miller at The Corner, for instance: I have no objection to a movie about the life of Che Guevara. At least in theory. Yet it’s probably impossible for Hollywood to make an honest film about this awful man — case in point being the

Thursday

Alex Massie

Parliament of Fools

Further to this and this, I see, thanks to Mr Worstall, that no fewer than 72 Members of Parliament have put their name to this Early Day Motion: EDM 982 FIDEL CASTRO 20.02.2008 Burgon, Colin That this House commends the achievements of Fidel Castro in securing first-class free healthcare and education provision for the people of Cuba despite the 44 year illegal US embargo of the Cuban economy; notes the great strides Cuba has taken during this period in many fields such as biotechnology and sport in both of which Cuba is a world leader; acknowledges the esteem in which Castro is held by the people and leaders of Africa,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Fidel: Forever In Our Hearts…

Commenting on this post about Fidel Castro’s welcome retirement, a reader wrote, quoting part of my argument: “If conservatives – on both sides of the North Atlantic – were too ready to turn a blind eye to Pinochet’s crimes, left-wingers have been equally credulous with regard to Castro’s Cuban dictatorship.” When Pinochet died, Jonah Goldberg and I had an email back-and-forth about this very claim. I dispute that the level of admiration for Castro on the left is anything approaching the right’s support for Pinochet. Only among the most extreme, throwback lefties would you find a good word for man. Compare with Pinochet, who received so many kind words from

Thursday

Alex Massie

This will definitely hasten regime change in Havana

And while we’re on the subject of cricket, here’s the latest madness from the United States: Cuba have been blocked from playing in their first ever international cricket tournament because of a US embargo. Cuba had been invited to take part in the Stanford 20/20 tournament, which features 20 Caribbean teams. But the competition is backed by US businessman Allen Stanford, who by law must ask permission to engage in commercial activity with Cuba. Texan billionaire Stanford said on Tuesday that his application had been denied by the US government. “We have been anxious to include the entire Caribbean in the Stanford 20/20 Cricket Tournament and I am extremely disappointed