It is not only liberal democracies whose population seems to be split down the middle as manifested in the victory of Donald Trump in the United States presidential election and the Brexit vote in June, which heralded the process for British exit from the European Union.
The death on Friday of the most iconic revolutionary of the 20th Century, Fidel Castro, at the age of 90, the erstwhile president of Cuba, has similarly seen emotions split between his stunned supporters, both at home and abroad, to whom he was a liberator from a corrupt mafia state led by a brutal military leader, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959, and those rejoicing his death in Little Havana in Miami with its one million-strong exiled Cuban diaspora because to them, Castro, to echo president-elect Trump, was a “brutal dictator”.
It is no secret that this socio-political divide between a Marxist Socialist vision as opposed to a democratic “Americanised” free market one in a post-Castro Cuba will continue, especially with a chauvinistic cynic poised to enter the White House in January.
“While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and towards a future in which the Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve,” said Trump.
Maybe the US president-elect is feigning a selective memory, but whatever Castro’s totalitarian shortcomings, especially in human rights, history would record and judge his enormous impact not only on Cuba, but also on other countries still under or freed from the yoke of colonialism, dictatorial military or absolute monarchical rule. Even his staunchest critics have acknowledged the tremendous strides Cuba made in healthcare and education provision which, in fact, have become a model for other nations.
South Africa’s first black president Nelson Mandela paid tribute to Castro and Cuba for their “unwavering support” to the African National Congress (ANC) in its “darkest hour”. Mandela did not hesitate to invite Cuban doctors to work in the rural heartland of the ANC to meet a shortage of medics when South African urban professionals were reluctant to do so. Cuban military personnel also trained, advised and fought alongside African nationalists in liberation wars in Mozambique, Angola and Namibia.
After almost five decades of Cuban-American antagonism, President Barack Obama finally ended Cuba’s isolation by extending a hand of friendship to the Cuban people last year, which resulted in diplomatic ties being restored between Havana and Washington DC for the first time since Castro and his band of revolutionaries, accompanied by the pin-up boy Che Guevara, entered the Cuban capital in 1959 to oust Batista. Obama even paid an official visit to Cuba and met Raul Castro, the sibling of the incapacitated Fidel who had taken over as president.
As in life, sometimes with death comes a new beginning. And politics should be no exception. Trump, who in hindsight perhaps not surprisingly garnered a largish support from ethnic Cuban voters in the key state of Florida despite his seemingly racist views on Mexicans and Latinos, stressed on Friday that his administration would do all it could to ensure Cubans could “begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty”.
It would indeed be a major threat to regional stability if the president-elect’s more extremist coterie of friends, advisers and officials were tempted to attempt a “Bay of Pigs” Mach Two.
Whatever course President Raul Castro sets for a post-Fidel Cuba, he will find that the world of 2017 is very different to that of 1959. Gone are the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union, effectively Cuba’s “Protector of Last Resort”. Globalisation and the shift in economic power from the US to Asia and the Western-engineered global financial crisis that almost brought the global financial system to collapse is ushering in an “Asian Century” to the chagrin and potential marginalisation of the industrialised countries.
So how to reconcile the left-right schisms in Cuban society, both at home and in the diaspora? Surely, only through a shared vision of a future built on basic rights and opportunities for all can a society flourish.
Raul can take a leaf from another South American country, Chile, which was also ravaged by ideological division, that pioneered the concept of “Truth and Reconciliation”, following the brutal excesses of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who overthrew a democratically-elected government led by then president Salvador Allende Gossens in the notorious Sept 11, 1973 military coup.
Chile, alas, failed to implement that noble idea of Truth and Reconciliation. It was left to South Africa under Mandela, which set a global standard and legacy in Truth and Reconciliation, which has yet to be replicated in other countries of former conflict and repression, inter alia Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Cuba.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was based in part on the Chilean Rettig Commission, created under former Chilean president Patricio Aylwin Azocar, to investigate abuses under the Pinochet regime.
Jose Miguel Insulza, the foreign minister under the subsequent Chilean president Eduardo Frei, in an interview with this writer was to the point: “Chile as a country has not done all it could. I wish we had more justice and that we knew more about the fate of those who disappeared.
“The type of transition we chose and the legal limitations prevented us from doing all that was possible.”
The key is for both sides to show repentance and acknowledgement by all Cubans admitting that they committed mistakes. Only then can a united Cuba arise from the legacy of Fidel Castro!
Mushtak Parker is an independent London-based economist and writer