As you can see, above, Vladimir Putin has unveiled a statue of Fidel Castro in Moscow. He did so in a ceremony with Miguel Díaz-Canel, the current boss in Cuba. From the Associated Press, the headline reads, “Russia, Cuba leaders meet in Moscow, honor rebel icon Castro.” (Article here.) “Rebel icon”? Yes, that’s true, to a degree. It’s also true to say that Fidel Castro was a dictator, a tyrant, persecuting Cubans for 50 years.
The friendship between the Kremlin and the Cuban regime is natural. It was natural in Soviet days, and it is natural in Putin days. In 2014, I wrote a three-part series called “Fraternal Relations.” It examined Havana’s relations with North Korea, Russia, and China. To read the Russian part, go here.
Díaz-Canel “is set to travel on to Turkey and China,” according to the AP. That makes sense.
Authoritarian regimes are very good at allying with one another. Democracies tend to be less good, I think. As there was a Communist International, there is an Authoritarian International. In Moscow, Putin and Díaz-Canel exchanged tender expressions of solidarity.
In a piece last month about Nicaragua and its political prisoners, I wrote,
This regime has many allies, birds of a feather — chiefly Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia. In June, Ortega invited Russian troops to train in Nicaragua. There are eight countries that, in 2014, recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea. One is Nicaragua. The others are Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, and North Korea.
In 2018, Erdogan, the Turkish boss, staged an inauguration, after staging an election. The list of attendees, I wrote,
was instructive, and predictable: Medvedev of Russia (standing in for Putin). Orbán of Hungary. Maduro of Venezuela.
Maduro pronounced Erdogan a “leader of the new multi-polar world” — which is accurate.
The year before, Orbán had said, “We all sense — it’s in the air — that the world is in the process of a substantial realignment.” He was meeting with Putin — who hailed Hungary as an “important and reliable partner for Russia in Europe.”
Hungary and Turkey present ticklish cases. The second is a member of NATO. (I wrote at length about this issue in 2019, here.) The first is a member of both NATO and the European Union. An AP report last Friday was headed, “Hungary will not support EU aid plan to Ukraine, Orban says.” Earlier this week, the Hungarian foreign minister traveled to Russia, to participate in an expo. A year ago, the Kremlin bestowed on him its Order of Friendship.
You know who needs friendship? Russia’s political prisoners. And Cuba’s. And Ukrainians, as a people. And people all over. Freedom, democracy, and human rights need friendship. The new statue in Moscow says a lot. There are Putin fans and Castro fans. The former tend to be rightists and the latter tend to be leftists. They are cut from the same general cloth, regardless.
Solidarity should not be left to the authoritarians. The democrats should meet them, step by step, and ultimately prevail against them.