The wilful blindness to President Castro's repression has been underlined by the shock at the recent crackdown. The Pope, who insisted on his controversial visit to Havana five years ago that he had won significant human rights concessions, spoke of his "deep sorrow" at the executions and urged Señor Castro to consider a "significant gesture of clemency" toward those convicted.
Perhaps the biggest shock was felt by the writers, poets and artists who have long defended Cuba and its autocratic ruler. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes called the country "a suffocating dictatorship", the Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago said Fidel Castro "cheated his enemies" and the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, who once praised him as a "symbol of national dignity", acknowledged that the crackdown had fuelled opposition claims that he was a dictator. There have been demonstrations in Caracas and Madrid.
The disillusion is as widespread, and almost as fatal, as the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising was to European communists. Señor Castro has been stung. Cuban artists have been "persuaded" to criticise the critics. But the damage has been done. In a rambling three-hour television address, the 76-year-old leader defended the executions as necessary to prevent a wave of hijackings that could have provoked a crisis with Washington and served as a pretext for military action against Cuba. The commandeering of the ferry was one of seven actual or attempted hijackings in seven months. No one was injured in the attempt, but Señor Castro insisted that "we had to pull the evil out by the roots".
His speech revealed the real explanation. Cuban Communists have long been unhappy with what they see as "creeping capitalism" on the island. In the desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy after the withdrawal of Moscow's aid and support, Cuba has tried to woo Western tourists and investment. But this has come at a price: greater access to the outside world, the dollarisation of the economy, a veneer of tolerance of the island's steamy lifestyle and the reluctant authorisation of hundreds of small-scale private businesses and transactions. The hardliners have longed to suppress the growing debate on democracy and silence speculation on post-Castro Cuba. What better time to do so than the build-up to the Iraq war, when world, especially American, attention was elsewhere?
The swift allied victory, however, has provoked considerable alarm. The paranoid Cuban leadership fears that an emboldened Washington may even be contemplating a military assault, avenging the Bay of Pigs. There is little evidence for this, but Señor Castro now sees only threats at home and abroad. His crackdown was intended to cow the opposition. But it has emboldened his many enemies abroad, who insist that this totalitarian regime cannot last. And nowadays there will be fewer in the salons of Europe and Latin America to regret its fall. [End]