Castro Steps Down At Last

LEFTIES say the darnedest things. That’s because they regard the continuance in power of left-wing tyrannical regimes as a natural and harmless thing. But they hate every moment in power of right-wing regimes, elected or not.

So you’d expect the left-wing BBC to take a benign view of the tyrannical Fidel Castro’s decision to step down after nearly 50 years as the dictator of Cuba.

After taking the line that Castro was provoked into aligning with the Soviet Union by US intransigence, we get to the payoff line.

But Cuba under his rule has made impressive domestic strides.

Good medical care is freely available for all, there is 98% literacy, and Cuba’s infant mortality rates compare favourably with Western nations.

Is it? That’s not what I hear. What I hear is that medical care is strictly rationed and only the elite get good medical care. Even then, of course, Castro has a Spanish surgeon flown in to perform his abdominal surgery. I hear that Cuba’s infant mortality rates are skewed because questionable infants are aborted in Cuba. So as to keep the mortality rates favorable.

And as for the literacy rate? How do you define literacy? Does anyone know the methodology of Cuba’s literacy statistics? Or is it a state secret?

In other words, the BBC is talking rubbish.

But, at least, Castro has stepped down. In the last 50 years he has come as close as anyone can get to ruining his country. All because, as the BBC says, as an impressionable youth,

shocked by the contrast between his own comfortable lifestyle and the dire poverty of so many others, he became a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary.

It might be more accurate to say something like this.

“Like many another ambitious young man of good family down the ages, Castro’s ambition tempted him into the excitement of violent revolutionary activity rather than the boredom of democratic politics.”

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.