Iron law is left as tide of idealism fizzles out
The rise of nationalism provides a sobering illustration of the difficulty of even talking about progressive change, writes Mark Beeson
Twentieth-century political icons don’t get much bigger than Fidel Castro. His death will reignite many important and still unresolved debates about his place in history and about the revolutionary ideas he seemed to epitomise. For many of my generation, the Cuban leader retained a special place in our collective imagination, however undeserved it may have been in reality. The hopelessly corrupt regime that he and his even more glamorous co-conspirator Che Guevara overthrew was the quintessential banana republic. Causes didn’t get much more worthy, it seemed. The parasitic regime of Fulgencio Batista provided a convenient playground for dissolute Americans escaping the cloying morality of the US in the 1950s. From the little we knew about Cuba then, Castro looked to be unambiguously on the right side of history. But this is not the way he will be remembered. Unlike Guevara, Castro lived long enough to see his legacy tarnished, his model overturned and relations with his archenemy no...
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