From Cuba to Palestine, when revolutionaries end up as dictators, people pay the price | Simon Tisdall

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W.Did he betray the revolution? It’s a question that Cubans have been asking after the regime’s crackdown on street demonstrators marching for freedom over the past week. It is also a mystery to other former liberation movements that now wield power in places as far away as South Africa, Nicaragua and Palestine. Too often, it seems, the new bosses behave little better than the old bosses who overthrew them.

The progressive left faces an obvious dilemma when revolutionaries backfire. According to a simplified American tradition, US President Joe Biden zealously divides the world into good and bad, democrats and autocrats. Attention has mainly focused on authoritarian right-wing leaders, as in Brazil, Belarus, Russia and Myanmar.

But what about the dictatorships of the left? China does not fit this definition so easily because it long ago exchanged communist theory for capitalist practice – although the CCP does not admit it. In contrast, Cuba’s top cadres, self-proclaimed heirs to Fidel Castro, cling to the old-school Marxist ideology and rhetoric. Cuba’s president has textbookly dismissed the protests as a Yanqui conspiracy.

Miguel Díaz-Canel stuck to the traditional tale of a Bay of Pigs coup hatched by mercenaries and subversives in Miami. “They will have to search our bodies if they want to face the revolution,” said the 61-year-old party bureaucrat, glossing over his lack of Che Guevara expertise. The demonstrators are “confused revolutionaries,” he said – a term that applies more to him.

Far more honest would have been an admission that any “confusion” among Cubans is due to the hardship caused by a shrinking economy, mismanagement, Covid-19, US sanctions, and a lack of subsidized Venezuelan oil – and that Failure of a democratically illegitimate, corrupt regime to tackle them, imprisoning demonstrators and journalists is not a solution.

So is it fair to say that Cuba’s communists betrayed their own revolution? Incomplete. Castro’s Cuba after 1959 suffered for decades from US-led manipulation and interference. Efforts to create a more just society have been sabotaged from the outside.

Biden is less openly hostile. A fundamental change in US policy seems unlikely, however, given the importance of Florida’s Republican-dominated Latino vote in next year’s midterm elections. Knowing this, Cuba’s leaders will not voluntarily change either. So the siege – and the fight – goes on.

Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, veteran of the 1981-90 war with US-funded right-wing Contra rebels, similarly argues that the country’s 1979 revolution is relentlessly betrayed and infiltrated from abroad – although its Sandinista Front enjoyed foreign support in its heyday, not least at least Great Britain.

So how disappointing that Ortega has become a modern version of Anastasio Somoza, the dictator he overthrew. Like another socialist hero, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and his sinister successor Nicolas Maduro, he has gutted opposition parties, abolished term restrictions, tied up the judiciary and the media, and arrested opponents. It was like the old days when Washington imposed sanctions last week.

In the truest sense of the word, Nicaragua’s revolution never stood a chance. The global geopolitical, financial and trading systems have been stacked against it. More than 40 years later, the country is still one of the poorest in the western hemisphere.

But that’s not how Ortega tells it. He and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, cling to the cloak of successful, groundbreaking revolutionaries with strange incongruence. Who is kidding in the mutual betrayal debate?

Rooted poverty, a history of colonial exploitation and the aftermath of the war were challenges that African freedom fighters of the 20th century also faced. But once they were in charge, they all too often fell short of their principle of power.

In high-energy Angola and Mozambique, where money trumps the collective, supposedly left-wing liberators are the new elites, while the people remain poor. Robert Mugabe’s post-independence Zimbabwe was a disaster in a league of its own.

But how do you explain the unrest that is now shaking up South Africa, which, when the African National Congress took the lead in 1994, was the richest economy on the continent? These recent riots and looting are ultimately not about the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma, but about the imprisoned dream of a post-apartheid era of shared prosperity and equal opportunities.

Circumstances have no doubt conspired against South Africa. The economic devastation of Covid, now in a third wave, has been particularly severe. Unemployment was over 32% in the first three months of 2021. The unemployment rate among young people is the highest in the world. But none of that fully explains the meltdown.

The bottom line is that the ANC, weakened by endless power struggles and corruption scandals, has clearly failed to fulfill the hopes placed in Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation – and the people are paying the price. A once inspiring movement has visibly lost its way. The use of troops against desperate civilians carries ominous echoes of the past.

For those concerned about rising authoritarianism on the left, the dictatorial behavior of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is uniquely troubling. The unpopular 85-year-old Fatah leader has had no parliamentary elections since 2006. His government is considered selfish, divisive and ineffective. The recent death of critic Nizar Banat in custody sparked howls of protest across the West Bank, which were harshly suppressed.

Palestinian statehood is a very symbolic cause of the left. But under the dead hand of the ruler of Ramallah, the vision fades as foreign interest wanes and Israel shamelessly usurps their land. The Palestinians urgently need new, unifying, democratically elected leaders who can contain the violence of the Hamas hardliners, avoid Israeli, Saudi and Iranian political pitfalls, and revive active international support for a viable two-state solution.

To win, the conditions in which this and other battles are fought must change. Old lessons about freedom have to be relearned, resisted slipping into authoritarianism. It’s time for a revolution on the left.

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