Castro should not be glorified

The final days of Fidel Castro, when they arrive, will provide an interesting glimpse of the state of western political consciousness. Already, in the commentaries that greeted news of his recent illness and standing-aside from the Cuban presidency could be observed the ambivalence that derives in part from his status as an icon of 1960s pop culture in the West. But it runs deeper than this. Castro, because of his role of opposition to the United States, is the archetypal hero of the western neurotic imagination. He is, in a sense, a rock star, but more than that – a rock star whom our fathers, in their "conservatism", despise. It is therefore almost impossible for the West to get honest about Fidel. The generations of pampered western pop children who now reign supreme over the West live under a make-believe cloud of illusory oppression, imagining themselves subdued by conservatism, patriarchy and so forth, when in truth they are spoilt beyond redemption. The only tyranny they recognise is the phantasmagorical oppression of themselves by their elders, and they are blind to all that does not feed this fantasy. Fidel, because he has been defined by his opposition to the US, feeds the fantasy better than anyone or anything else.

For the rebel imagination of the '60s generation to go against him, therefore, would be to go against its own central and most passionate beliefs about itself. By any objective standard, Fidel Castro is, and long has been, a nasty piece of work. If an organisation like Amnesty International, which seeks to excuse all manner of abuses and injustices as long as they are left-wing inspired, is capable of sounding warning notes about Cuba, you can be sure the situation there is very serious indeed. Censorship in Cuba is on a par with what used to prevail behind the Iron Curtain and foreign travel is tightly controlled. Dozens of prisoners of conscience, including more than two dozen journalists, continue to be detained at the pleasure of His Excellency. But there is an even more interesting issue from the viewpoint of western left-liberal values. Usually, left-liberals place the treatment of women before virtually any other consideration as a measure of a society's standing. And yet the present generation of western left-liberals has nothing at all to say about the fact that Fidel Castro has condemned successive generations of his countrywomen to lives of low-grade prostitution.

For many years now, western men of a certain age – mainly men of the '60s generation, as it happens – have been visiting Cuba and taking with them commonplace items from western store shelves which, on arrival in Cuba, they exchange for sex. A South American friend of mine who has worked in the diplomatic sector describes the phenomenon as "prostitution lite". Western men form relationships with Cuban women which are maintained sometimes over many years. Each time he visits, the man brings with him basic items unavailable in Cuba and in return he is entertained in the home of his young Cuban "girlfriend", often with the collusion of her parents and siblings. Mother brings breakfast in bed, while father drives the happy couple around during the day. The men, of course, are wont to describe this as being symptomatic of a different "culture", but in truth the relationships between them and their Cuban women are entirely based on a power relationship defined by the disjunction between western prosperity and the Cuba created by Fidel Castro.

You would think by now that the western liberal imagination – so fixated on signalling at all times its concern for the welfare of women above all other values – would have started to holler about this. The fact that it has not tells us how much the Castro myth means to those who hold cultural power in the West, and how much they have to lose by the truth coming out.