This question was put to Labour MP Harriet Harman and her answer was 'Hero of the Left but time for Cuba to move on'. Now my most generous interpretation of her answer is that it is simply a statement of fact that much of the 'Left' (Ken Livingston, Galloway) regard Castro as a hero, but that he is not necessarily Harman's own personal hero. However, I fear that she meant he is a hero to all of the Left including herself.
This has wound up a number of Conservative and Liberal writers who see Castro as an authoritarian dictator who has been given a free pass by the Left.
For instance, Daniel Finkelstein writes an article in The Times about Harriet Harman's comment:
'I had a strange idea yesterday. I had the idea of inviting Harriet Harman home for dinner. This isn't a thought that occurs to me often, but I suddenly felt it might be fun.
I'd invite my Dad too. And then, when we'd given Harriet a nice meal (what do you think she likes to eat?), my father could tell her his story.
He could tell her how the Soviets and the Nazis closed in on his home town of Lvov in September 1939 and how the town council chose the Soviets to surrender to. Then he might tell her how the fathers of his friends were taken to the woods at Katyn and shot by the communists.
Background
He might recount the story of his father's arrest as an antisocial element, of Adolf Finkelstein's repeated interrogations leading to a trial in his absence and a jail sentence of 15 years' hard labour. Then Dad could tell the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party about his own experience as a child, exiled to a remote Siberian village. And how he and his mother and his father never saw their home again.
And, when he'd finished, he could let Harriet speak. And she could explain to Dad why she thinks that Fidel Castro is a hero.'
And on his blog Comment Central Daniel Finkelstein lists the reasons why Castro isn't a Hero to the Left:
'In an extraordinary statement Harriet Harman, Deputy leader of the Labour Party, says that she believes Fidel Castro to be a "hero of the left".
Here are the top ten reasons why she is wrong.
1. Hero of the left? In the 1960s, Cuba sent homosexuals to forced labour camps. Raul Castro was particularly active in this policy, reputedly because he looked effeminate at the time and wanted to seem more macho
2. Hero of the left? In 2003, Castro oversaw the execution of three men who had hijacked a ferry in a bid to escape from the island. Sounds pretty left wing to me.
3. Hero of the left? During the Cuban missile crisis, Castro urged Khrushchev to launch a nuclear first strike on the American mainland. This is never mentioned by the anti-war campaigners who admire Castro.
4. Hero of the left? According to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, in 2006 there were 316 political prisoners in Cuba.
5. Hero of the left? Independent labour unions are illegal in Cuba. Has Harriet told Jack Dromey?
6. Hero of the left? On January 19, 2003, an election was held for the Cuban National Assembly. There were 609 candidates —all supported by the regime— vying for 609 seats.
7. Hero of the left? The purchase of computers and access to the internet is severely restricted with many citizens using black market sources.
8. Hero of the left? In 2003, state security forces raided 22 independent libraries and sent 14 librarians to jail with terms of up to 26 years.
9. Hero of the left? Castro personally has been one of the most conservative forces in the Cuban government. Castro was fiercely opposed to economic reforms of Gorbachev. At the 4th Cuban Communist Party Congress in 1991, there was a movement for modest liberalisation of the economy - allowing limited market in agricultural products. Fidel immediately scotched any suggestion of it.
10. Hero of the left? Castro’s admirers talk about how the deployment of troops to Angola in 1975 helped defeat apartheid in South Africa. But they don’t discuss the other aspects of his Africa adventures. Notably, how he supported the despicable Mengistu in Ethiopia, which cost enormous number of lives during the war with Somalia.
Harriet Harman has made a dreadful error. She should apologise.'
3 comments:
Peter Hitchens writes a very long post on Fidel Castro, the Left and the Death penalty:
If it's all right for Cuba to have the death penalty, why can't we have it too?
'I was struck last week by the treacly response given to the retirement of the grisly old monster, Fidel Castro. In so many leftist media, from the BBC to the Guardian, we were offered the usual muck about Cuba's supposedly excellent schools and health care, by people who referred to the pensioner tyrant by his Christian name, 'Fidel', as if he were a personal friend rather than one of the remotest and most inaccessible dictators in the world.
They also pretended that Cuba's 'National Assembly' was a real Parliament rather than what it is, an appointed chamber of toadies and puppets, and - though they claim to be outraged by the powerless British monarchy being handed on from father to son - they were un-outraged by the handing over of real supreme authority from brother to brother. Vertical inheritance is all wrong. Horizontal's cool. Republicans, they're so ridiculous, can you beat them?
What would these people think of someone who referred to General Pinochet as 'Augusto', or if he had handed over power to his sibling? And why - I'll come to this at length later - is Castro allowed to maintain the death penalty, and to keep his popularity with the Left , whereas if I say I'm in favour of it, I'm a pariah from one end of Islington to the other?
By the way, I think all these pro-Castro ( sorry 'Fidel') people should be compelled, if they fall ill, to go to Cuba and - without access to hard currency - be left to endure the Cuban health service they so idiotically praise, under the same conditions suffered by the Cuban people. I think we would then hear a lot less about Castro's marvellous health service. The main 'evidence' for this claim comes of course from the Cuban state, famous for its severe prevention of independent journalism or any other critical examination of its activities.
As for the schools, they may well be better than ours at teaching children to read (not difficult) but some, notably the Lenin High School in Havana, are a good deal less equal than others. Like its British equivalents, the London Oratory, William Ellis and the Camden High School for Girls, the Lenin High School provides the children of a leftist elite with a far better education than they might get elsewhere. Everyone in Havana knows this. Why doesn't the Guardian know it? Or the BBC?
Anyway, the problem with being educated in Cuba is that, once you've been educated, there's nothing to read except the works of K. Marx and V.Lenin, or of course the collected speeches of F.Castro and E.Guevara. - and the world's worst and most absurdly-titled newspaper 'Granma'. (I'll explain later how this journal gets its ludicrous name).
But back to the death penalty. The countries which wield this most keenly these days are all left-wing states. The People's Republic of China, of course, tops the world execution league. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is also quite a keen execution state - supposedly 'corrupt' businessmen have been shot in public, with lemons stuffed in their mouths to stop them screaming.
And then there's Cuba. The jolly, liberal fun revolution of 1959, with all those glamorously-bearded young men in fatigues in charge, began with howling show trials (the few not-guilty verdicts reversed on a whim by the leader himself) and much spraying of bullets, screaming and splattering of blood, a lot of it ordered by the picturesque Ernesto Guevara. The bullet-pocks from the firing squads can still be inspected (I have done so) in the moat of the La Cabana fortress, now a tourist site but until recently a squalid prison. Total figures for those judicially murdered by the Castro terror are not available, but the distinguished Historian Hugh Thomas has put the figure (perhaps modestly) at 5,000.
More recent executions have been colder, more secret and even more sinister. The 1989 shooting of General Arnaldo Ochoa, after a largely secret trial, ostensibly for alleged drug trafficking, is generally thought in Cuba to have been the despotic snuffing out of a dangerous rival who might have defected. Ochoa, a former ' hero of the revolution, technically faced a maximum of 20 years in prison for his crime. But in lawless Cuba, where 'Fidel' was all-powerful, Ochoa went to the firing squad anyway. It was typical of Cuba that a political case should have been dressed up as a criminal one, so that Castro could continue to pretend that he has no political prisoners. Opponents of the regime are almost invariably persecuted for imagined or fanciful violations of the criminal code.
So why do the Left swallow this camel, praising and sucking up to and romanticising this sordid despotism, and ignoring its habit of killing opponents, but strain at the gnat of hanging a few heinous murderers here in Britain?
It's all from the same root - the Left's worship of the supposedly all-benevolent state which they control, or hope to control. Get in the way of that, and you can be liquidated. It is the supreme law, and you will be an expendable casualty in a wider war. In fact, most socialists once they have supreme power, happily reintroduce the death penalties they campaigned against when they were powerless.
When I pointed out in my 'Brief History of Crime' that the 1930s English barrister D.N.Pritt, a prominent campaigner against the death penalty was a leading apologist for Stalin's show trials ( which always ended in death for the accused), I drew upon myself the livid rage of leftist critics. How dare I suggest an inconsistency in the Left on the basis of this horrible man? Yet when it comes to the Stalins of today, the Pritts of today still suffer from the same doublethink. You can work out who I'm getting at.
And now, for those of you faced with arguments at work or in the pub about the death penalty, I shall now provide a Question and Answer guide to the case for hanging.
Q. Well, I would be in favour of the death penalty, but I am worried about innocent people being hanged. Doesn't that fear make it impossible to have a death penalty?
A. No. It is a perfectly good argument for taking a huge amount of trouble to ensure that innocents are not executed. It is also a good argument for bringing back some sort of property or education qualification for juries, and abolishing majority verdicts. Nobody should be hanged except on a unanimous verdict of mature and educated people. But the world isn't perfect, and we don't let this concern for the innocent stand in the way of lots of other policies, many of them supported by the very people who raise this objection to execution.
For instance, every three years, two people are killed by convicted murderers released early from prison. These victims are innocent. In that case, the liberals who advance this argument would have to accept that every convicted murderer should be locked up for life without the chance of parole so as to avoid the risk to the innocent. But they don't believe this. So where's their concern for innocent death now? Then again, most people supported the Kosovo war and still do (especially liberals). But when we bombed Serbia, we knew that innocents were bound to die, and they duly did die - including the make-up lady at the Belgrade TV station. That didn't stop these liberal leftists, who oppose hanging guilty murderers, from supporting it, and continuing to support it after those deaths had taken place.
Not a liberal leftist? Then there's our mad transport policy which just happens to suit quite a lot of us down to the ground, of relying so heavily on motor cars that we require an incredibly feeble driving test and allow tens of thousands of unskilled people to drive cars at a far too young age. We know from experience that this will result, every year , in at least 3,000 deaths. Yet we do nothing.
Our failure to act, in the knowledge that this failure will lead to those deaths, is deliberate, conscious self-interested negligence, morally equivalent to deliberate proxy killing for personal advantage (as offered by Harry Lime to Holly Martins in the Big Wheel in 'The Third Man'). It is also the reason why the courts don't adequately punish those who kill while driving. We're all conscious that driving isn't really safe, that we impose far too much responsibility on drivers in a fundamentally dangerous system, and that it could so easily have been us who did the killing. Personally I think this intolerable carnage is a much more urgent problem in our society than the faint hypothetical risk of hanging someone for a murder he didn't commit. So is the growing level both of homicide itself, and of violence that would be homicidal were it not for our superb emergency surgeons, who nightly drag back dozens from the lip of the grave.
People dislike being told this because it is absolutely true and very harrowing. These deaths are all of innocent people. If the fear of killing an innocent person really was an overwhelming veto on a public policy, then the driving test would have to made so difficult that most of us could never pass it, speed limits would have to be lower than they are now, and private car ownership restricted to a tiny few highly-skilled persons.
The truth is that the fear of killing innocents is not a reason to abolish or ban capital punishment. If it were, we'd have to abolish the armed services and be forced to ride bicycles. It's an excuse for people not to face up to their responsibilities.
Q. How can you express moral disapproval of killing, by killing someone else?
A. It is not killing we are trying to express loathing for. It is murder. All of us, except absolute pacifists, accept that killing is sometimes justified. In simple self-defence, the case is easy. In defensive war, in which aggressive actions are permitted, less straightforward but still acceptable to most of us. And I think quite a few of us would be ready to forgive and condone in advance an assassination of an aggressive tyrant before he could embark on war. So we license armed forces to shoot back at our attackers, or to attack our attackers in retaliation or deterrence.
What we are disapproving of is murder ( the Commandment is not, as so often said 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' but 'Thou Shalt do no Murder'). This remember, is the deliberate, premeditated, merciless (and often prolonged and physically cruel in the extreme)killing of an innocent person, generally for the personal gain of the murderer. There is no comparison between such an action and the lawful, swift execution of a guilty person, after a fair trial with presumption of innocence, the possibility of appeal and of reprieve.
Absolute pacifists are at least consistent, but if they had their way we'd be in a German empire where innocent people were being executed all the time with gas-chambers, guillotines and piano-wire, and worse. So their consistency doesn't offer much of a way out.
Q. But deterrence doesn't work. Most states in the USA have the death penalty and the murder rate is often higher there than in states that don't have it.
A. First of all, this is not the USA, a country with far higher levels of violence(until recently anyway) than we have had for centuries. Comparisons between the two countries need to be made with great care. Secondly, no US state really has the death penalty. Even Texas, which comes closest, still fails to execute the majority of its convicted murderers, who fester for decades on death row while conscience-stricken liberals drag out their appeals to the crack of doom.Most states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never apply it.
The 1949 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (which was inconclusive on deterrence and most other things) pointed out that deterrence was very hard to establish. Countries which abolish the death penalty usually do so after a long period of suspension, or when it is hardly used, or when the law is unclear. So the murder rates before and after the formal date of abolition often tell us very little. In Britain, this is also the case. The death penalty had its teeth drawn in 1957 and the annual number of executions in the final years of capital punishment was small. So the penalty's official date of abolition, 1965, is misleading. There's another feature of this I'll turn to later.
Then there is the difficulty of classifying murder. The 1957 Act introduced a category of 'manslaughter due to diminished responsibility' which got you off the death penalty. And so, for the eight years after 1957, this category of homicide grew quite sharply. Some suspect that these are cases which would have been murders before 1957. If that is so, as we shall see, then it makes quite a lot of difference. Since then, it has not been so important, since the difference between a manslaughter sentence and the so-called 'life' sentences given for murder is no longer as stark as the old distinction between a prison sentence or an appointment with Mr Albert Pierrepoint on the scaffold.
Nowadays, it is suspected (especially by the relatives of victims who write to me about this complaining) that quite a lot of cases which would once have been prosecuted as murder are now prosecuted as manslaughter so as to get a quicker, easier conviction.
So the homicide statistics offer a rather wobbly idea of what is going on. Skip this if you want, but it is important. The blurred categories might suggest one thing, while actually saying another. Even so, here are some samples.In 1956, when the death penalty was still pretty serious, there were 94 convictions for homicide in England and Wales (all future figures refer to England and Wales unless otherwise stated). Of these, 11 were for infanticide, 51 for manslaughter and 32 for murder. In 1958, after the softening of the law, there were 113 homicide convictions - 10 infanticides, 48 manslaughters, 25 for manslaughter with 'diminished responsibility' and 30 for murder. By 1964 there were 170 homicide convictions - 12 infanticides, 73 manslaughters, 41 manslaughters due to 'diminished responsibility' , 44 murders. So, in eight years, a rise in homicide from 94 to 170, quite substantial. But those convicted for murder had risen only from 32 to 44, which hardly seems significant at all. What was really going on here could only be established by getting out the trial records. But it is at least possible that, by reclassifying and downgrading certain homicides, the authorities had made things look a good deal better than they were. Remember, these are convictions, not totals of offences committed.
Sorry, more statistics here. In 1966, immediately after formal abolition, there were 254 homicide convictions, 72 of them for murder. In 1975, 377 homicide convictions, 107 for murder. In 1985, 441 manslaughter convictions, 173 for murder. In 2004, there were 648 homicide convictions - including 361 murders, 265 ordinary manslaughters and 22 'diminished responsibilities'. Interestingly, more people were convicted of manslaughter (265) than were charged with it (137) and none of those convicted of 'diminished responsibility' (22) were charged with it . Many murder prosecutions failed (759 were proceeded against).
The increasingly important charge of 'attempted murder' has also run into trouble. In 2004 417 were proceeded against, and 96 convicted. Prosecutions for wounding or other acts endangering life was even more troublesome, with 7,054 proceeded against and 1,897 convicted. These figures, again,. are for charges and convictions rather than instances of the offence, which in both cases is considerably higher. Offences of wounding etc are now close to the 19,000 mark each year, around triple the total for 30 years ago.
And many of these cases would have been murders, if we still had the medical techniques of 1965. Again, this makes direct 'before ' and 'after' comparisons, required for a conclusive case for or against deterrence. hard. And we must also remember the general moral decline that has accompanied the weakening of the law, and may have been encouraged by it. If you remove the keystone of an arch, many other stones, often quite far away in the structure, will loosen or fall.
Finally, a little historical curiosity which I personally find fascinating. Some American researchers suggest that the sort of murder which has increased since the death penalty in the USA was effectively abolished is so-called 'stranger' murder, for example, the killing of a woman by her rapist , or of a petrol station attendant by the man who has robbed him. The calculation ( and criminals do calculate) is simple. "If I leave this person alive, she or he can testify against me, and I could go to jail for a very long time. If I kill him or her, then there will be no witness and I will probably get away with it entirely. And even if I am convicted of murder, all that will happen is jail time." Bang.
So, the death penalty may actually prevent or deter violent crimes which might otherwise end in an opportunist killing. It is said that British bank-robbers, before 1957, would search each other for weapons in case one of them killed, and they all swung - which was then the rule.And Colin Greenwood, a former police officer and expert on Gun Crime, produces the following interesting , in fact gripping fact. In both 1948 and 1956, the death penalty was suspended in this country while Parliament debated its future. During both periods of suspension, armed and violent offences rose sharply. After the 1948 attempt to abolish hanging failed ( Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin being among the Labour MPs who voted to keep it), they fell sharply. After 1956, when the law was weakened, they fell back again, but not so sharply. In 1964, they rose again, and have been doing so ever since.
I think this, taken together, is strong evidence for a deterrent effect. I am not talking about total deterrence - some crimes could never be deterred - but partial and significant, potentially lifesaving. How many innocents have died, or been horribly maimed, because those who accept the salaries and perks of office are not prepared to assume its hard duties, and wield the civil sword?And yet opponents of the death penalty whimper on about the minuscule danger of hanging the wrong person.
Q. Surely revenge has no part in a civilised society?
A.How true, and how right. One of the purposes of stern penalties is to prevent revenge by making it clear that the law has real teeth. But a toothless law will lead to the return of revenge among us. The bargain we strike with our rulers is that we give up the right to personal vengeance, and the endless blood-feuds that follow it. And in return, we ask our rulers to wield a stern law, dealing with wrongdoing in such a way as to drive home the moral lesson that no evil deed goes unpunished. It's a simple contract. Civilised, law-governed societies rest on it, but our political class prefer not to fulfil it because they haven't the moral guts to take responsibility for sending a murderer to his death. It is this gutlessness among politicians, more than anything else, that has led to the abolition of the death penalty. They won't take the responsibility. This cannot be said often enough. The result is that responsibility is increasingly handed over to an unofficially armed police force, which shoots people without trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, and often gets it wrong. Watch the numbers grow.
But that's only the beginning. If ( as I fear) respect for the criminal justice system continues to dwindle especially among the abandoned honest poor, we can expect to see an increase of vigilante private 'justice', even lynch-mobs. What the left-liberals don't seem to grasp is that if they strangle justice, revenge is what they will get. And then, rather too late, they will be able to tell the difference between the two. I wish there was some other way to explain it to them.
*Oh, yes, and the reason why the Cuban Communist paper is called 'Granma' is that this was the name of the boat in which Castro and his friends arrived in Cuba for their second attempt to overthrow Batista. It is a smallish motorcruiser, whose original owner had named it in hour of his grandmother. I don't think Castro or his comrades ever realised that was what the name meant.
Blogger Johan Norberg on Cuba before Castro:
'the celebrations of Fidel Castro´s social achievements usually ignore that Cuba was higly developed before communism. Before 1959 Cuba had more doctors per capita than Britain, lower infant mortality than France and West Germany, more cars per capita than the Japanese and more television sets than West Europeans.
The US Department of State has more UN data about this.'
And here is the State report he links to:
A Comparative Look at Socio-Economic Conditions in Pre-Castro and Present Day Cuba
'An enduring myth is that 1950's Cuba was a socially and economically backward country whose development was jump-started by the Castro government. In fact, according to readily available historical data, Cuba was a relatively advanced country in 1958, certainly by Latin American standards and, in some areas, by world standards. The data show that Cuba has at best maintained what were already high levels of development in health and education, but at an extraordinary cost to the overall welfare of the Cuban people. These include access to "basics" such as adequate levels of food and electricity, but also access to consumer goods, the availability of which have increased significantly in other Latin American countries in recent decades.
In this study, the most recent data available has been used. Castro does not allow regular surveys on certain Cuban topics that would ultimately reflect the continuing steady decline of the Cuban economy. Therefore, the data provided is not as current as that which would be used in ideal circumstances.
It is true that Cuba's infant mortality rate is the second best in Latin America today, but it was the best in Latin America -- and the 13th lowest in the world -- in pre-Castro Cuba. Cuba also has improved the literacy of its people, but Cuba had an excellent educational system and impressive literacy rates in the 1950's.
On the other hand, many economic and social indicators have declined since the 1959 revolution. Pre-Castro Cuba ranked third in Latin America in per capita food consumption but ranked last out of the 11 countries analyzed in terms of percent of increase since 1957. Overall, Cuban per capita food consumption from 1954-1997 has decreased by 11.47 percent [1]. Per capita consumption of cereals, tubers, and meat are today all below 1950's levels[2]. The number of automobiles in Cuba has fallen since the 1950's[3] -- the only country in Latin America for which this is the case. The number of telephone lines in Cuba also has been virtually frozen at 1950's levels[4]. Cuba once ranked first in Latin America and fifth in the world in television sets per capita. In 1996 it barely ranked ninth[5] in Latin America and is well back in the ranks globally.'
Two found by Andy.
Wikileaks/Cablegate: Guardian reports Cuba banned Michael Moore's "Sicko" for fear of public backlash
BoingBoing
Dec 17, 2010
US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks state that the government of Cuba banned Michael Moore's 2007 documentary, Sicko, "because it painted such a 'mythically' favourable picture of Cuba's healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a 'popular backlash', according to US diplomats in Havana."
What, those gleaming hospitals aren't available to everyone in Cuba? And you can't believe everything you see in a Michael Moore movie? Say it ain't so! Snip:
The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.
But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so "disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room". Castro's government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it "knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them."
Cable Shows Nations Going Easy on Cuba
NY Times
December 17, 2010
WASHINGTON — Cuba is getting a free pass on its human rights abuses from many of the world’s leading democracies, with visitors from Canada, Australia and Switzerland failing to criticize the Castro regime or meet with dissidents while on the island, according to a confidential diplomatic cable sent to the State Department from Havana.
In the cable about how other countries deal with Cuba on official visits, American officials classified those approaches on a scale from kowtowing to confrontational: “best-friends-forever,” “keep-it-private,” “we-respectfully-disagree” and, in rare cases, “take-your-visit-and-shove-it.”
A large majority of countries with diplomatic posts in Havana, it said, do not raise human rights issues with the Cuban government in public or private. A handful of countries — including Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic — have refused to send senior officials to Cuba, rather than accept the government’s restrictions on who they can meet while there.
Other countries fall somewhere in between, agreeing to restrictions but broaching the topic of human rights, mostly behind closed doors. A senior Canadian minister, Peter Kent, broached the issue of political prisoners with officials, but left Havana without voicing public criticism.
Another offender, the cable said, was the European Union, which takes a softer line toward Cuba than many of its member states. Officials at the European mission, it said, told American diplomats they looked forward to Spain’s assuming the rotating presidency of the union because it was more moderate than the “radical” Swedes and Czechs.
The cable singles out the Vatican for praise, noting that one of its representatives, Archbishop Claudio Celli, called for “greater information and Internet access for all Cubans.” He even praised Cuban bloggers, angering his hosts, though he later softened his comments back in Rome.
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