joanna blythman on castro�s retirement

NO sooner had news of Fidel Castro's retirement broken this week than it was instantly juxtaposed with a statement from George Bush - he who gave the world Guantanamo Bay - mouthing off about a return to democracy and an end to dictatorship. That set the tone for British media coverage, with a plethora of reports majoring in criticisms of the Castro regime.

It reminded me of that famous Monty Python sequence, What Did The Romans Do For Us?, as reporters shoehorned their reports into the pre-ordained format with contorted scripts along the lines of: "Apart from establishing universal, free high quality healthcare, schools and universities etcetera what did Castro ever do for Cubans?" The coverage was made all the more crass by its patronising implication that any country not fully signed up to the US model of globalised capitalism necessarily inhabits a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder towards democratic progress.

You can be sure that news coverage of Castro's departure will be more nuanced in Latin America and the Caribbean. I have travelled throughout the West Indies talking to ordinary people, and it was impossible not to pick up the warmth felt towards Cuba. On Dominica, workers' association representatives explained how any Dominican with the requisite academic qualifications could go to Cuba to train for free as a doctor. All they needed was the money for their ticket and a small amount to cover accommodation. On St Vincent, banana growers told me how their teenagers had gone to Cuba - at nominal cost - to study agronomy. Such Cuban scholarship agreements operate throughout the Caribbean and Africa.

It is impossible to touch down on Grenada without sensing how Cuba, despite all its own economic difficulties, has contributed to its infrastructure. After US marines so democratically invaded the island in 1983 to oust its Marxist leader, Maurice Bishop, under US pressure it severed ties with Cuba, only to renew them less than a decade later. Now the fact that Grenada has an international airport at all is down to the Cubans, whose aid and technical assistance made it possible. If you have a heart attack on Grenada, you would doubtless be grateful for the new seaside hospital, build again with Cuban aid, which is geared up to high-tech heart surgery, all run by Cuban-trained doctors and technicians.

This sort of achievement makes you think about what democracy really means. If you define that as citizens being given the opportunity to vote once every four or five years in a multi-party election, then the US is a democracy and Cuba is clearly not, although nobody seems to dispute the fact that if there had been multi-party elections in Cuba, Fidel would have been returned time and time again. But access to free medical care is surely another fundamental civil right, and on this measure, the US is profoundly undemocratic because poor people there can't afford to get sick. This irony was exposed in Michael Moore's film, Sicko. He took to Cuba a number of 9/11 survivors, unable to afford the medical treatment they needed in the US.

Not surprisingly, Cubans are tired of being unable to afford things that more affluent countries take for granted. However, Cuba's standard of living is largely a consequence of the savage embargo the US has imposed on it for almost half a century. It is a tribute to the resilience of Castro and the Cuban people that, notwithstanding the hardship inflicted by the region's controlling superpower, they have managed to care so well for the most essential health, welfare and education needs of the populace.

All countries struggle to be democratic when they are grindingly poor, and there are legitimate criticisms to be levelled at Castro when it comes to censorship, but some infringements of individual liberty are what you might expect from a small island constantly being subverted by the world's most powerful country. Cuba nevertheless compares favourably to the banana republics of Latin America where US-approved puppets have poor children cleaned off the streets like vermin, and where a tiny percentage of the population live the American dream while the rest endure the harsh reality of being a have-not. In Cuba, the diet may be limited, but nobody starves. There is no illiteracy and the streets are not rife with guns. By way of basic civil rights, that's not a bad package.

If Bush, or any of the eight US presidents before him who maintained the embargo, wanted democracy in Cuba, then they would have dropped the blockade. But they made the mistake of thinking that they could starve Fidel out of office and impose US geopolitical power. Even as Fidel stands down, John Negroponte, the US deputy secretary of state, says that he anticipates no end to sanctions. Let's not be coy here. The US has a track record of loving dictators, torturers and greedy autocrats who do what it tells them. It loathes independent-minded leaders like Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Eva Morales in Bolivia, because they dare to channel resources away from corrupt elites and into projects that benefit their poorest, most disadvantaged citizens.