FIDEL Castro would have been amused by an unexpected encomium from the belly of the beast on the eve of his birth centenary, which will be commemorated tomorrow. Even the title of last month’s US State Department 100-page diatribe, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, could be interpreted as a tribute. Like much else in a report intended to make the case for state capitulation or capture, this is an egregious exaggeration. The idea, obviously, is to illustrate how a small Caribbean island has posed an unacceptable threat to US ‘national security’ for nearly 70 years, and why that nuisance must be eliminated. Yet the supporting text is not mere fiction. Chunks of it could be read as an explanation for why Cuba proved so influential internationally in the decades after the 1959 revolution spearheaded by Castro.

A few examples from the report follow: “While Soviet communism was frequently driven by more practical great-power concerns … its Cuban successor was built around a near-singular obsession with the ‘liberation’ of the Global South from its Western colonial oppressors. In the minds of the Cubans, there was only one path to this goal: the destruction of the Yankee imperialist regime.” This ‘obsession’ deserves a red........

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