ALL ON THE LEFT have a soft spot for Cuba. Through rose tinted spectacles they viewed the romance of the Castro regime; and of the Guevara legend. The legend that was encapsulated in that iconic image of the revolutionary that has decorated the bedrooms of students all over the world since the 1960s.
The Cuban revolution had, in true Robin Hood fashion, a hero who, through the simplicity of black and white, captured youth culture and hung on to it for over 50 years. Guevara and Castro plied their trade against the Cuban dictator Batista. There is no doubt that the Batista regime deserved what befell it. It was decadent and cruel, and what is more it was negotiating with the mafia to open a gambling empire on Cuban soil. Havana was set to become the Las Vegas of the Caribbean, and no doubt crime would have been the islands main industry with Batista accumulating vast amounts of wealth as his cut from the whole enterprise.
Batista needed to go and went. In his place was established yet another regime; this time it was driven by an ideology whose proponents turned out to be little better than the mafia puppet that preceded them.
All revolutions go through a period of idealistic intoxication where progress is made purely on the basis of the people’s enthusiasm for the revolution. There is no doubt that the majority of Cubans supported Batista’s dethronement. But not all Cubans supported what replaced the ancient regime and many fled to Florida while they still had the chance to do so.
Soon after the Castro takeover, Guevara had a falling out with Castro. Such splits are an almost daily occurrence on the Left, and Che took himself off to South America to expand the revolution, but was hunted down in Bolivia and killed - which served only to embellish further the romance that western youth had already discovered through the Cuban revolution.
Guevara’s early death served Castro better than had he lived. The Cuban revolutions almost religious significance to the youthful leftist idealists in the West, allowed the island of Cuba to be seen differently from other, more conservative Marxist states. All parties on the Marxist Left claimed Che as their own and they protected his name, and would not tolerate any kind of revisionary assessment of the great man’s life or criticism of the way the new Marxist regime was behaving on Cuba.
The fact that Castro was locking people up for their political views was axiomatic of all Marxist regimes. But Western leftist sympathisers who wore the progressive soubriquet like a badge of honour professed little knowledge of Castro’s treatment of homosexuals who were rounded up and sent to re-education centres for a ‘cure’.
When the fall of the Soviet Union occurred, Cuba had its main financial backer taken from it. Like the mafia under Batista, the Soviet Union had promised the Cuban regime prosperity.
Marxist Cuba had won a great victory over its main Western enemy, the USA. The victory of the Bay of the Pigs only enhanced the Left’s idolatry as far as the Cuban experiment went. But when Communism crumbled, the rug was taken from under Castro’s feet and showed to the world just how dependent this Caribbean Island was on the Soviet Union. Without its subsidies, Cuba began to stare reality in the face. She may have won a victory at the Bay of Pigs, but, as with Vietnam, the Americans won the peace.
NOW, WE COME TO one Denis Doody (not a name to compare with Castro or Che Guevara), but nevertheless a man steeped in an appreciation of the revolutionary iconoclasts of the Cuban revolution.
Mr Doody is an environmental manager of a housing association in West Yorkshire. He has on display on one of the walls in his office the aforementioned portrait of Che Guevara, partnered by a display of the great man’s sayings.
Now Mr Doody (56) and a national executive council member of the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians, had cause (as he saw it) to reprimand one of his staff and threaten him with dismissal if he did not remove an eight inch Christian (remember Easter was approaching) cross from the dashboard of the van he drove on behalf of the housing association he worked for. Now thanks to the attention of the Daily Mail, Mr Atkinson, the offender in question has been allowed to keep his cross on display and Mr Doody has voluntarily removed the portrait of Guevara from his office wall.
This should be the end of the story but the Daily Mail has looked into Mr Doody’s background and found that he has visited Cuba 40 times and has a dodgy past, with involvement in the so-called Battle of Fitzwilliam in July 1984, during the National Mineworkers strike: he was arrested and latter discharged, following his participation.
Mr Doody is a supporter of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign alongside Tony Benn, that corruptor of reason and promulgator of utopian socialism.
Mr Doody seems to have taken exception to Mr Atkinson, an electrician working for the housing association, for displaying the eight inch Christian cross on the front window of his company van. A devout Christian with little of Mr Doody’s political concerns, Mr Atkinson, a former soldier, merely chose to celebrate through his display of the cross at this important time in the Christian calendar the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
Denis Doody’s actions were indeed petty, but no doubt he saw himself as a warrior against religious superstition, backed-up by the regulations of the housing association. Although, what would have happened if the symbol on display had been from that of a minority religion, God (sic) only knows.
I suggest that under such circumstances Mr Doody would not only have had to remove the photo of his hero from the walls of his office, but also himself from the housing association to which he was a manager.
MR ATKINSON has been given his job back thanks to the Daily Mail. But there are still far too many Denis Doody’s left over from the 1980s, still plying their outmoded trade within the trade union movement and are being listened to once more. They will be given new life in these times of economic restraint, blaming the capitalist system for every misery from unemployment to infertility.
Denis Doody is comparable to a Jehovah Witness, in his relentlessness, while the Atkinson’s only wish is to celebrate the resurrection of their Lord as they see it. They do not proselytise as Mr Doody obviously does to the wider world through his membership of his trade union as well as his membership of the Labour Party (yes, I am only guessing).
Mr Doody’s infatuation with Cuba has turned him into a cheep groupie of all things to do with Castro and Guevara. Like the follower of a long departed pop icon, Doody continues to brood over the failure of Cuban Communism and its creators.
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