Mick Hartley

Well yes. Andrew Roberts in the Spectator:

Why are left-wing dictators always treated with more reverential respect when they die than right-wing ones, even on the Right? The deaths of dictators like Franco, Pinochet, Somoza are rightly noted with their history of human rights abuses front and centre, but the same treatment is not meted out to left-wing dictators who were just as monstrously cruel to people who opposed their regimes.

The death of Fidel Castro is a perfect case in point. BBC News described him as ‘one of the world’s longest-serving and most iconic leaders’ only mentioning in the fourth paragraph that ‘Critics saw him as a dictator’. Critics?! What other objective noun is there for a man who held no free nor fair elections for half a century, imprisoned his political opponents after trials presided over by crony judges, completely controlled all the national media and installed his brother as his successor?

The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation documented more than 8,600 politically motivated detentions of government opponents and activists during the year. Despite that, the Guardian announced that ‘The revolutionary icon, one of the world’s best-known and most controversial leaders, survived countless US assassination attempts and premature obituaries, but in the end proved mortal.’ In its 11^th paragraph it mentioned ‘concerns over human rights under the Castro regime,’ but only insofar as they were mentioned by Francois Hollande rather than the paper itself. Any reader would have been forgiven for thinking that Castro was ‘controversial’ not for his vicious dictatorship and use of torture but simply because the CIA didn’t like his Marxism-Leninism.

I imagine that is precisely what most Guardian readers actually believe.

The Guardian obituary – eulogy, rather – is written by Richard Gott. 

A charismatic figure from the developing world, his influence was felt far beyond the shores of Cuba. Known as Fidel to friends and enemies alike, his life story is inevitably that of his people and their revolution. Even in old age, he still exercised a magnetic attraction wherever he went, his audience as fascinated by the dinosaur from history as they had once been by the revolutionary firebrand of earlier times….

Castro was a hero in the mould of Garibaldi, a national leader whose ideals and rhetoric were to change the history of countries far from his own. Latin America, ruled for the most part in the 1950s by oligarchies inherited from the colonial era, of landowners, soldiers and Catholic priests, was suddenly brought into the global limelight, its governments challenged by the revolutionary gauntlet thrown down by the island republic. Whether in favour or against, an entire Latin American generation was influenced by Castro.

And so on.

Gott, it should be remembered, resigned from the Guardian in 1994 after it came out that he'd been recruited by the KGB. He then became a devout and tireless cheerleader for Chavez in Venezuela. Clearly, then, someone on the right side of history…and just the man to write the obituary of the Cuban caudillo.

Update: James Bloodworth – The romanticisation of Fidel Castro's Cuba must die with him.