Inside Out | Hong Kong’s electorate feeling alienated by a political elite that has no sense of the hardships and hopelessness they feel
Leaders like Mao and Ho and Castro found resonance with local people not because they were communists or spouted communist mantras, but because they spoke to the pain of local people
For the past week, the death of Cuba’s Fidel Castro has captured the world’s imagination. Some have mourned. Some have popped bottles of champagne. A firebrand even in fragile old age, he was the product of a cold war era that we hope will never return. But as a ruthless champion against inequality in a country blighted by hopeless corruption, his story retains sobering relevance.
Many – in particular in the USA – will remember him as a communist icon. But far more accurately, he was a nationalist railing against the rape of his country by a corrupt elite that was unrepentantly aided by the US.
In this, the US today has cause for introspection – which of course we are unlikely to get from President-elect Donald Trump. But it is worth recalling John F Kennedy back in 1963 – just four years after Castro swept the corrupt Batista regime from power, and just a year after the Cuban missile crisis: “I believe that there is no country in the world, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonisation, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.
“I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins.”
Whether political and business leaders in the US today believe they have paid – or indeed should have paid – for those sins is open to doubt. Throughout those Cold War years, and even to this day, successive US administrations have forged awkwardly “pragmatic” alliances with large numbers of unsavoury, even barbarous regimes, in their ongoing battle against communism and radical Islam.
Wikipedia lists at least 22 military dictatorships supported around the world even today, and the list does not include the likes of Pinochet in Chile, Noriega in Panama, Duvalier in Haiti, Sadam Hussein in Iraq, or in Asia the likes of President Park in Korea, Marcos in the Philippines, or Suharto in Indonesia.
