EDITORIAL: Fidel Castro’s mirage
Africa’s gratitude obscures Castro’s human rights abuses and brutal repression in Cuba
Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who died last week, divides even more intensely SA’s existing cleavages. Everything depends on where you stand. To many, perhaps most, black South Africans he constitutes an unadulterated hero. He certainly was that to SA’s own hero, Nelson Mandela. To leftists in the southern hemisphere, the Cuban revolution in 1959 was an inspiration. Mandela was so inspired he began the task of building a guerrilla army in SA only two years later. The commonalities seemed obvious. Cuba constituted a glorious example of victory against imperialism of the "West" in an era of Cold War rivalry that overflowed in ungainly examples of atrocities into proxy wars in the countries of the "Third World". Castro, for his part, repaid the compliment, opposing apartheid with venom — so much so that Cuba was one of the first countries that Mandela visited after his release. He called Castro’s revolution "a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people". The other crucial reason f...
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