Fidel

December 5, 2016

Open-Wall---May-2016

Fidel

The death of Fidel Castro has prompted an unequivocal response from Russian state television; some people have different ideas.

The tomb of Fidel Castro
The tomb of Fidel Castro

The Kremlin’s chief propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov praised the former Cuban leader to the skies: Castro, in his words, was a “global-level politician and thinker” whose life represented a “supreme achievement.” Castro’s anti-Americanism, meanwhile, earned him particular kudos. “By way of response [to the revolution], the Americans imposed sanctions and a full trade blockade on Cuba” – but El Comandante not only didn’t surrender, he actually forced the US to reckon with him. “Fidel Castro was an invaluable ally for the Soviet Union. He was prepared to host Soviet missiles, aimed point-blank at America.” It was clear that Kiselyov himself would fly out to Cuba posthaste to do some aiming of his own, if only he could.

This is perhaps the first time since the Ukrainian Maidan that state television has expressed sympathy for revolutionaries and revolution in so explicit a fashion. But the propagandists aren’t exactly risking much; today, the majority of Russians perceive Fidel Castro not as a successful vanquisher of government troops but as a man they’ve known, one way or another, their whole lives – nostalgia in its purest form. Only the youngest Russians think and feel nothing at all when it comes to Castro, but, spurred on by those selfsame propagandists, they may be on the verge of thinking and feeling as follows: “Those ‘correct’ (sincere) revolutions are all a hundred years old and no longer exist beyond black-and-white newsreels; today’s ‘colour’ revolutions we see on CNN reports, in contrast, are no more than the machinations of the rapacious West.”

But these were the sentiments of TV propagandists and their mass audience. Russian intellectuals, meanwhile, have been praising Fidel Castro on entirely different grounds. “For me, Castro incarnated the right to revolt,” wrote Kirill Martynov, the political editor of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper. “He was part of a broader anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, and, ultimately, libertarian tradition – of a piece with the guerrillas who battled Nixon’s forces in Vietnam.” Oppositionist and historian Denis Bilunov, for his part, attempted to fathom out the mystery of El Comandante’s “remarkable appeal:” “Fidel and his comrades managed to convince the world that the Cuban revolution was a genuine breakthrough for freedom. These revolutionaries’ personal motivations and way of life did not, at least, appear to be in glaring contradiction with the propaganda myth.”

Some Moscow intellectuals have also been contemplating Castro’s contribution to the liberal world order. Carnegie.ru expert Maxim Samorukov, for example, believes that in the sphere of international relations, Castro did no less for the cause of inter-state equality than the entire European Union: “The rich and prosperous states of Europe have spent decades developing a system wherein tiny little Luxembourg enjoys the same rights as great big Germany – something they’ve achieved with great difficulty and not without suffering setbacks. Meanwhile, in the incomparably harsher conditions of Latin America, Fidel Castro was adamant that Cuba, small and poor though it may be, had the right to determine its own course in life, no matter what the big and powerful US might think. Two years before his death, he definitively proved that this was so.”

But far from everyone has been rushing to pay tribute to Fidel’s revolutionary romanticism. On the contrary, liberal segments of the Russian public have been vocal in denouncing him as a dictator, with opposition activist and blogger Rustem Adagamov, for one, reminding his Facebook followers that Castro dispatched a greater percentage of his country’s population to prisons and camps than did Hitler or even Stalin. Adagamov reels off a litany of El Comandante’s victims, which included, among others, “the innocent police officers he executed in Santiago de Cuba; the thousands of La Cabaña inmates tortured and killed by the thug Che Guevara; the peasant insurgents of Escambray, eliminated by Castro’s forces with the help of Soviet arms; [and] the tens of thousands of inmates in the UMAP labour camps, where people […] were forced to keep the lawns trim by eating the grass.”

Alexander Baunov, chief editor of Carnegie.ru, has also remarked on the extent to which Castro’s death has divided intellectuals in Russia and the West. Only yesterday, they were all seemingly united in their support for Clinton and antipathy for Trump; today, however, the Russian intelligentsia stands in broad agreement with The Donald, who has branded Castro a “brutal dictator,” and are far from sharing in Barack Obama’s sympathetic attitude to Cuba’s late leader. Once again, Baunov explains this with reference to the traumatic experience of post-Soviet people: “We in Russia are looking over at Cuba with the eyes of eastern Europeans who braved out the socialist experiment themselves.”

According to journalist Oleg Kashin, however, Russians regard Cuba and Fidel as mirrors not only for their own past, but for their present as well. “Putin is a Batista with the self-perception of a Castro,” Kashin writes, saying that Putin shares Batista’s commitment to degradational authoritarianism… and also bears an extraordinary resemblance to Castro the ruler (as opposed to Castro the revolutionary). Fidel, as he points out, was “a supremely anti-American ruler who managed […] to hold on to power despite an economic blockade and even go to war in Angola, who reigned into deepest old age, and who died a national hero – in his own bed.”

So if you want to know what Russia will look like when Putin breathes his last, have a look at Cuba.