The following despatch from Havana was published in the Mail on Sunday on 30th July 2006. I think it holds up pretty well.

In Cuba the last Communist God is Dying after decades of Tyranny. But if you thought Fidel Castro was bad, wait till you meet his brother Raul.



By: PETER HITCHENS



Sinister black flags fly this week on the windy seafront of Havana, their mourning colour seeming to foretell an approaching death. In fact the dark banners are part of an obscure propaganda war between Cuba's communist state and the reviled American diplomatic mission which sits sulkily in the heart of the capital.



But the unintended effect is to make passers-by wonder if they are being prepared for the end of the longestlived dictatorship in the world. Old age has at last stolen up on FidelCastro, who will officially be 80 on August 13.



Well, probably – such is the night and fog of his censored police state, nobody really knows when he was born.



The man who was once the rock-star revolutionary who made communism seem cool now looks in official posters like a slightly gaga grandfather.



'Vamos Bien,' they say ('We're doing well'). But the vague eyes, grey hair and beard and the shrunken, lined features send another message: 'I'm getting old.' As if to try to cheer everyone up, these unsettling portraits are being replaced by chirpy flags squawking: '80 more years. Long live Fidel.' Eighty more years of this? The world's most efficient secret police, verminous prison cells full of peaceful dissidents, rationing, a diet of rice and black beans, a servile Press, the slow collapse of civilised life, power cuts? Heaven preserve us.



For all those Sixties rebels who fantasised-about fighting in the jungle with Fidel and Che Guevara, their hero's decline is a reminder of their own mortality. For Cuba, it is far more serious. And, given the astonishing impact this island has had upon the world in Castro'stime, we ought to worry too.

Coming within inches of nuclear war



Castro's 1959 revolution convulsed the world, creating a communist base 90 miles from US territory. In 1962, Russia and America came within inches of nuclear war over the missiles the USSR had placed in Cuba.



The migration of two million anti-Castro Cubans to Florida has turned Miami into a Latin American city and shifted the balance in several US presidential elections. It is almost certainly responsible for the narrow election of George W. Bush six years ago.



Since January 1, 1959, all power has rested in the hands of Fidel Castro, the 'Maximum Leader' and the one free man in Cuba. All others, even his family, have had the choice between being his loyal serfs or facing exile, prison or death. Yet somehow he has managed to escape the loathing that normally comes the way of Latin American tyrants.



Castro's rebel chic gave revolution a smart new image which to this day infects the educated elites of almost every advanced country.



Until Castro, communism was about tanks crushing romantic revolts in the streets, and dreary, potato-shaped, middle-aged men in hats and overcoats saluting rockets on Red Square.



After Castro it was about romantic revolts and guerrilla bands, featuring young bearded heroes and smouldering, beautiful revolutionary women, overthrowing corrupt dictatorships in a festival of the oppressed. And it began in Havana, Ernest Hemingway's 'great white city on the bay',perhaps the most perfect backdrop on the world with its happy music,its picturesque,easygoing people, its enjoyably grotesque mobster hotels, its cigars and rum.



Marx and Lenin, dressed up in fatigues, were suddenly fun and sexy, freed from the Kremlin puritans.



Castro was to revolution what Mick Jagger was to rock, and his image (and Guevara's) had a lot to do with the strange student revolt that destroyed Charles de Gaulle's conservative France in 1968, and with the wave of cultural revolution that changed the morals and attitudes of the Western world and has now subsided into the weary swamps of political correctness.

Castro didn't actually like rock music



Interestingly, the student revolutionaries who loved Castro and Guevara got Fidel wholly wrong. He loathed rock music as degenerate and only in recent years has he recognised it as an ally, permitting a John Lennon memorial park in Havana. They got a lot of other things about him wrong, too.



Castro matters so much to the fashionable liberal Left that they have tried to deny – to themselves – the true nature of his very nasty regime. A recent example of this was a March 2005 letter to The Guardian signed by, among others, Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, Nadine Gordimer,Harry Belafonte and Danielle Mitterrand, which claimed that in Cuba 'there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised'.



This is almost total garbage and just shows what the Left will put up with when it likes someone. Castro personally reversed the verdict of an important trial when he disagreed with it. He used to round up homosexuals and put them in labour camps to 'make men of them'.



One of his old comrades, Huber Matos, confided after 20 years of brutality and starvation inCastro's jails that he was 'subjected to all kinds of horrors, including the puncturing of my genitals'.



Just three years ago, after a brief period of liberalisation, Castro threw 75 peaceful dissidents into dungeons.



Most are still there. Their wives demonstrate bravely every Sunday for their release and are attacked and abused by 'spontaneous' mobs of loyalist women.



Others who defy the leader face similar misery short of jail. They lose their jobs. Their houses are trashed by government supporters. One incredibly brave dissenter, Oswaldo Paya, remains at liberty but he is constantly watched and the state has placed an insulting poster near his house which says: 'In a country under siege, all dissent is treason.' Imagine the response of Pinter and his friends if a Rightwing Latin American dictator had done half these things. No wonder one of the alsatian guard dogs that patrol Castro's villa near Havana is called Guardian.



Or so I am told. Like all tyrants, Castro conducts his real life behind thick screens. After a long absence he has twice appeared in public recently.



During a rambling speech in Cordoba, Argentina, he continually plucked at his collar as if in some sort of discomfort.



The cameras swung away. Back in Cuba a few days later, he jokingly promised not to stay in power until he was 100.



A recent rumour that he had died was spread, as always, by Cuban exiles who yearn for him to go so that they can come back. The story was denied not by Castro but by his new friend and admirer, the Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chavez.



The Miami Cubans long ago despaired of overthrowing Castro and now mutter about what they call 'the biological solution', when he is removed at last by the Grim Reaper and the tongue that gave so many endless harangues is finally silenced.



There have been hints of mortality. In June 2001 Castro seemed to faint during a seven-hour speech in the merciless Cuban sun, but came back later to finish it. In October 2004 he fell off the stage at a rally, breaking his arm and his kneecap – but five days later he was on TV making jokes about staircases.



The CIA spreads stories that he has Parkinson's disease – but then the CIA would, having failed to finish him off in various ludicrous assassination attempts in the Sixties. Castrodenies it and says he doesn't care if he does get Parkinson's, since it did not seem to hamper Pope John Paul II all that much.



The little we know about his current life is this: Castro lives a little way out of Havana in a villa that most Cubans would regard as luxurious, but which a rich Westerner would view as modest.



He is a grandfather several times over. He now seems to have a settled personal life,after some years of roaming when he claimed to be 'married to the revolution'. His second wife, Dalia Soto de Valle, could pass unnoticed anywhere in Cuba since pictures of her and her five sons (Angel, Alex, Antonio, Alejandro and Alexis) are never published there. Another son, Jorge, the supposed result of one of Castro's affairs, is believed to be living in Cuba, but nobody knows where.

A Disloyal Daughter



Castro's illegitimate daughter Alina Fernandez, offspring of a romance with the beautiful Natalia Revuelta,broadcasts uncomplimentary programmes about her papa from an exile radio station in Miami.



The leader's first wife, Mirta, lives in obscurity somewhere in America and never speaks about her onetime spouse. This may have something to do with staying in contact with the couple's only son, Fidelito, who looks astonishingly like his father and sometimes appears at Havana receptions for visiting businessmen, who are suitably impressed at this close brush with superstardom.



But Castro's most important relative by far is his younger brother and designated heir, Raul, who is 75. Left-wingers who sneer at the hereditary principle seem only too willing to keep things in the family themselves. No doubt, Raul Castro has his talents, but he isCastro's appointed successor because he is his brother.



And Comrade Raul is, well, not very nice. He is thought to have been recruited by the KGB back in 1955 and so to have been one of the main early links between Castro and the Kremlin. In the early days of the revolution, during which 550 men were shot, according to official figures, he was a great signer of death warrants.



He is said to have presided personally over the mass execution of 70 government soldiers, machinegunned in front of an open trench.



Around about this time, the Cuban journalist Carlos Franqui called Raul 'an operetta-class Hitler'.



But he is way out of the operetta class now. As well as commanding the powerful and competent armed forces, Raul is in charge of much of Cuba's new tourist industry, which brings in so much badly needed hard currency.



Together with the horrible and bloodthirsty Guevara, he is also said to have been keen on the obscene show trials, where jeering audiences in stadiums demanded the death sentence while gorging on ice cream and peanuts, and firing-squad executions which were filmed and shown in cinemas to enthusiastic audiences.



If you look carefully at the walls of the former prison (now a tourist destination) of La Cabana in Havana, you can still see the pockmarks from the bullets of these executions and find traces in the grass of the posts to which the victims were tied.



Fidel Castro has sometimes rather enjoyed threatening his enemies with Raul. He once warned opponents that it would be no good assassinating him. They would only get Raul instead.



He said: 'The destiny of peoples cannot depend on one man. Behind me come others more radical than I. Assassinating me would only fortify the revolution.' In other words, don't kill me or you'll get someone even worse – a charming fraternal recommendation.



Castro is plainly both flattered and unsettled by the growing debate about his coming death.



'Raul's not getting any younger,' he remarked in grumpy tones a few months ago.



Yet something is plainly going on.



The official media, where nothing happens by accident, has begun to show more and bigger pictures of Raul, who, strangely, looks nothing like his big brother, being small and having a faintly Japanese look to him. His tedious speeches are reported at enormous length. Some now argue that Raul, without his brother's passion or his fire, will be able to compromise with the United States and begin to open up the country.



The outlines of coming change are already there. Money from rich exiles and semi-legal business is already creating a shadow market economy. There are luxury shops in the Havana suburb of Miramar and new air-conditioned banks in the heart of the capital. There is also a Citroen showroom.



If Raul gave the word, a great gush of money – and perhaps democracy – would pour across the Florida Strait and create a capitalist revolution. Some think the new Cuba could be a huge offshore banking centre. Others suspect that its neglected port facilities would be enormously profitable.



Nobody really knows.



But perhaps it won't happen.



Having struggled in pinched poverty and misery for years after their Russian subsidies were withdrawn, Cubans now benefit from new patrons equally interested in annoying Uncle Sam.



These new helpers see that Washington, with its endless, futile blockade of Cuba, has turned Castro from a failed revolutionary into a patriotic hero. They notice that George W. Bush's despicable prison camp in Guantanamo Bay makes it far harder for Washington to criticise Cuba's human rights abuses.



Look up Cuba and human rights on the internet and it is Guantanamo, not Castro's Gulag, that shows up.



They see that Cuban patriotism is hopelessly mixed up with hatred of the gringos to the north. And they, like Moscow before them, can see the strategic use of this well-placed island. True, the only missiles I found in Cuba were decommissioned relics of the Cold War, still pointed towards America, but there are plenty of other ways in which Cuba could be used by foes of Washington.



Hugo Chavez of Venezuela provides oceans of cheap, evil-smelling oil and petrol, and in return gets Cuban help building his increasingly nasty people's republic. And China, perhaps interested in Cuba's nickel reserves as well as its political potential, has become very friendly.



Smart new Chinese buses now join the clattering Chevrolets and sputtering Ladas on Havana's potholed streets, monuments to layer on layer of superpower interference.



If you ask Cubans what will happen when their Maximum Leader is gone, the smarter ones almost invariably speak of Raul. For an informal opinion survey I visited a crude, bare bar in a concrete Havana suburb – a place so bleak it was actually called a 'Beer Dispensary', and that is what it did, providing our table with glasses of the cloudy brew that poor Cubans can buy with the special, near-worthless money now reserved for them.



One of the customers had to be shushed by other guests as he raged about how Raul was not worthy to step into his brother's shoes. This man, politically simple, was like many poor Cubans who have soaked up decades of propaganda and cannot really imagine thatCastro is mortal. He summed up the state of affairs in Cuba thus, and quite accurately: 'The health and education are good. Everything else is s***.' He had not heard of Oswaldo Paya.



But another of the customers had and obviously admired Paya's guts and persistence, qualities that make some think he might be Cuba's Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel.



Certainly the place could do with a non-violent figure of reconciliation. Since fighting its way out of the Spanish empire, Cuba has had a tradition of savage and violent overthrows. The hotel in which I am writing this, the Nacional, was shelled by rebels in a 1933 putsch. Nearly 100 people were killed and supporters of the defeated regime were then dragged to their deaths by troops of the coup leader Batista – who was himself to be overthrown byCastro with much bloodshed in 1959.



There are other traditions but they are not so strong.



The city possesses a majestic American-style Capitol building, with debating chambers for a congress and senate, but it has not been used since 1958. Some hope that it may be about to come back into its own.

How did he survive so long? He let his enemies leave



It is very hard to tell. By allowing his enemies to leave in huge numbers and by buying off most of the rest, Castro has created a state that depends on him completely.



The people live amid desolation. There is a lot of talk about Havana as a modish tourist destination, and so it appears to be if you do not look too hard and do not mind about the political prisoners. There are plenty of picturesque museum-piece American cars from the Eisenhower era, most of them held together by paint, and imitations of the Buena Vista Social Club play with grim determination at smart new cafes in the expensively restored Old City.



But step a few yards away from the pretty parts and you find a city in ruins, literally falling to bits from poverty and neglect, people crammed into collapsing, stinking buildings with fizzing, ancient wiring and sewage leaking into the water supply. Sometimes the houses actually do collapse. The place looks as if it has been under bombardment because there is so much rubble about.



It is all very well saying Cuba has no shanty towns, unlike the countries to the south. But much of Havana, 50 years ago one of the most advanced cities in the Americas, is crumbling into the mother of all shanty towns.



Two parallel currencies operate. The 'convertible peso' is now needed to buy almost everything from petrol to clothes, and the 'national money' is the second-class cash which the poor can use in the ghostly, and mainly empty stores selling rationed rice, eggs (eight per month) beans and fatty pork.



Yet people are not as angry about this as they are entitled to be (imagine how you would feel if such a system operated in Britain). Cubans as a whole are some of the most pleasant people in the world. Perhaps because they live on an island, perhaps because they have learned the hard way not to care too much, they seem to prefer to be content. And, cut off from real information about the outside world, they are in a Garden of Eden of communist innocence.



I visited Yaney, a young schoolteacher in her pretty but crumbling house overlooking Havana's harbour. 'We are entirely in agreement with the system,' she declared, sitting on an ancient sofa in her cheap clothes beneath a rotting roof. Rightly praising her fellow citizens' kindness and generosity, she denounced 'horrible capitalism', saying: 'I fear capitalism. I fear its return.' This enthusiastic Fidelista lives with her husband and her mother on an income of 1,000 pesos a month – the equivalent of about £22. Her grandmother's pension of about £4 a month is eaten up by utility bills, including electricity charges that were raised sharply this year to try to prevent power cuts.



She could not really cope with the idea that Castro might soon be gone. And she doesn't seem to want him to be. 'I am a simple citizen. But I think it's not going to happen . . . It's going to be against Cuban society,' she said, obviously disturbed by the thought of what may be coming.



Some very different Cubans, a group of blacks sitting on their doorsteps in a typically grimy Havana street, deal with the subject more simply. 'He's not going to die,' they affirm. 'There's no reason why he can't just go on and on.' But there is. One day soon, the blackflags will fly in earnest. So Cuba waits, and the world waits, and many other ageing radicals wait, to see what will happen when this, the last communist god, finally dies. Let us hope that the truth will at last be told about this wicked tyranny and that Cuba will not have to hear the sound of the firing squads again.