Kathy Sheridan: Michael D got it wrong on Fidel Castro

On BBC Radio 4 last Sunday morning, the writer Peter Hitchens applied his fly-swatting skills to the Castro headlines. So Castro made revolutions "sexy", he quoted; ran a country where no one starved, where excellent healthcare was universal and illiteracy was eliminated?

Tell that, he said, to Hugo Matos, a writer who fought alongside Castro but was imprisoned for 20 years for questioning Castro's political direction and had his genitals punctured during torture. Tell that to the poet Armando Valladares, who was forced to eat the excrement of other prisoners.

Then the show faded out with a sublime version of Guantanamera, an old Cuban song about a peasant girl from Guantánamo, and a million babyboomers' hearts cracked for that blissful dawn in 1959 when they were young and idealistic and a dazzling 32-year-old called Fidel Castro offered a vision of morality and liberation.

While this heart beat along to Guantanamera, this head flashed back to a terrifying 13 days in October 1962. While the USSR, provoked by US nuclear weapons pointing at it from Turkey, threatened the world with Armageddon in the Cuban stand-off, our primary teacher assured us we'd be grand, because when the fireball came, we wouldn't know what hit us. Castro, meanwhile, was ready to "die beautifully" in a nuclear holocaust for the socialist cause.

On Sunday, messages pinged in to my phone from young people born many decades later. “Never heard a group usually so like-minded, so polarised . . . What you think?” asked one.

Despot

What do I think about adequate food, excellent literacy rates and healthcare, organised by a David who himself lives a modest life and stands up to several Goliaths, ones who have profited from little Cuba’s degradation to “the whorehouse of America”? Wonderful. But what if David is also a despot, who ridicules the notion of elections (“elections – for what?”), rigidly controls the arts and media, conducts show trials and public executions, exiles a sixth of the population, dispatches thousands of political dissidents to prison and torture, and as late as the 1970s is still holding gays and long-haired types in labour camps? Is it a zero-sum game?

Is torture ever permissible? What makes some despots more forgivable than others?

If there was ever a teachable moment by our elders, this was it. This story had everything and young people were all ears. If they listened to President Michael D Higgins’s tribute, they heard mainly unqualified praise for Cuba’s successes and for Castro himself – “a giant among global leaders whose view was not only one of freedom for his people but for all the oppressed and excluded peoples on the planet”. And nuance? A mild reference to reforms that came “at the price of a restriction of civil society, which brought its critics”. Even by the normal standards of diplomatic fudge, this was unusually emollient.

An Áras spokesman protested, reasonably, that the President had always discussed human rights concerns with representatives of the Cuban government. But the assumption that citizens – in whose name the President was speaking – would set his tribute in the context of previous expressions of concern, was wide of the mark. There is a reason why journalists, for example, are trained to assume they are being read by a just-arrived alien.

And perhaps, at a broader level, people are just weary of oily or obfuscatory language. We are a nation still trying to recover our dignity, living in the shadow of a debt mountain and leprechaun economics. We know more than most, sadly, about realpolitik and the value of diplomatic language.

Less effusive

Is it reasonable to ask that our elected leaders be just a little less effusive towards foreign office-holders, living or dead, with or without a history of disgusting or chequered behaviour? The image of Donald Trump, the red carpet and the harpist at Shannon Airport is ineradicable, but partly compensated for by the Taoiseach’s forthright condemnation of Trump’s campaign remarks as “racist and dangerous”. To hear him later excuse them as rhetoric blurted in the “heat of battle” was a heart-sink. Is this really what we Irish now deem to be normal?

The Taoiseach's "sincere" congratulations to the US president-elect "on behalf of . . . the people of Ireland", was irritating and probably lifted from a template. Now remember how Angela Merkel worded her message? "Please accept my congratulations on your election as president of the United States of America". Note the absence of "sincere" or any reference to the German people. Small but sensitive points for those of us citizens who fear the "normalising" of Trump.

Then Merkel spells out her unmistakable message, word by word, about a shared respect for common values, about “the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin colour, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views”. And then adds: “It is based on these values that I wish to offer close co-operation, both with me personally and between our countries’ governments”.

Now there’s a template right there.