In 2001 Tom Freston, the founder of MTV, along with other American media executives, snuck into Cuba under the guise of a cultural research exercise – one of the aims being to watch the brilliant Buena Vista Social Club live. While they drank at a pavement bar one night, a telephone in a booth across the road rang. It was then-president Fidel Castro’s people and they wanted to have lunch with the Americans the following day.

Freston, no fool, was seated on the right of El Comandante. What followed was extravagance: lobster tails, exclusive white rum, Cohibas from Castro’s personal stash, beef fillet, and vintage Spanish Rioja – things that your average Cuban would never have laid their eyes on.

At that point Castro had already amassed a fortune exceeding a billion dollars, technically legislated that his younger brother Raúl succeed him, and persecuted homosexuals – most of whom he jailed, then tortured.

But Freston quickly got bored of the windbag dictator and frequently left his place to visit the lavatory, gobbling up time. The lunch finished at 5pm. Freston could barely keep his eyes open.

Nine years later, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, arrived in Havana to interview Castro, still – bizarrely – considered the most left-wing man in the world. In the discussion, Castro reaffirmed that Israel had a right to exist, and that then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a chronic Holocaust-denier, was off his head. Goldberg then asked: “Do you think your Cuban politics can still work for the world?” After some silence Castro, visibly aging, sighed: “They don’t even work in Cuba.”

What went through Goldberg’s mind as his chartered flight departed Havana isn’t known, but a reasonable assumption might be: “Bugger me spastic – the most left-wing man in the world is actually the most right-wing.”

Castro took the world’s dictating liberators for fools. Having acquired power, he spent his days walking on a treadmill, swimming, eating, talking the ears off his aides, and occasionally – allegedly – making love to Justin Trudeau’s mother. Anything resembling a bush war, or jungle hideouts lashed by weeks of torrential rain, sat in the distant rear: on the day Prince Yormie Johnson sipped a Budweiser as his thugs cut Liberian President Samuel Doe’s penis off with garden shears, Castro sipped a mojito by the pool in the grounds of Punto Cero, the sprawling presidential mansion.

Most Similar

Today the leader that most closely resembles Castro’s insincerity is Cyril Ramaphosa. Three weeks ago he was invited to Spain to address The Global Progressive Mobilisation Plenary – which sounds like a type of massage, something Spain’s Prime Minister might know, having previously managed a sauna. But the day was actually about inequality, which is something Ramaphosa definitely knows about – his party is a world champion in growing, spreading it.

David Ansara’s excellent review of the speech in Barcelona warrants no further comment, save a plea: no more, Mr Ramaphosa – and we’ll try to unsee and unhear. Unfortunately Ramaphosa, emboldened by the sauna manager and mousey academics and frumpy middle-class señoritas linked to the corrupted and censorious European project, has on 4 May elevated himself into the most Castro of contemporary discussions: reparations for slavery.

RW Johnson has already documented the more epic features of this hallucination: what was $777 trillion calculated by some folk in Ghana back in 1999 has been discounted  – presumably on the basis it’s paid in cash – to $107 trillion by a Caribbean judge at the International Courts of Justice. Lawyers are notoriously bad with the books, so it was left to some other Caribbean folk to – reluctantly – determine that the figure was more or less $33 trillion. Now, word is that whoever is making these demands will accept $17 trillion – ideally in $20 and $50 notes.

Lots of people enjoy talking about slavery reparations. The Green Party in the United Kingdom has a “slavery reparations officer” called Antoinette Fernandez. Antoinette isn’t Portuguese but she wants money. Now. Unfortunately, the Green Party’s vetting process is about as thorough as its economic policies: had it spent a bit of time researching, it would have discovered that Antoinette descends from Nigerian royalty – the slave-owning kind, approximately 1 400 of the poor bastards.

Embarrassing

Failing legacy media also love talking about slavery reparations – until they invite someone who actually knows about slavery. Then it becomes embarrassing: occasionally a guest historian will point to the Ottomans, or the Crown’s Royal Navy losing two thousand souls in its campaign to abolish slavery. What, do you suppose, might have happened had the Malian Empire’s Mansa Musa, one the richest men in history and the owner of approximately 12 000 slaves, received Max du Preez one day, and Du Preez had raised a fist, gone down on a knee before the ruler, then pointed to the columns of the shackled and declared, “Black lives matter”? Food for the pet leopard, possibly.

Perhaps Ramaphosa, learned with scams, possesses an instinctive urge to counsel reparation’s agitators. But absorbing his advice will only lead to misery: in the event country A in the Caribbean gets – I don’t know – $40 quadrillion, country B in West Africa will likely get annoyed that it only received $99 trillion. “You’re fronting,” country B will write to country A, “We want some of that money now.” Country A tells country B to get stuffed, whereupon the latter’s advisers decide: “There’s a time for talking, and there’s a time for cartels.” Then the guys from Papua New Guinea rock up and they aren’t pretending – “both you f*****, hand it over now” – and while bloodletting follows, the Palestinians and the Kurds chisel away at places for themselves within the reparations architecture – at which point applications are lodged from the two warlords who’ve torn Sudan apart.

Elite Obsession

After decades of interventions to stop the violence hosted by the Swiss, United Nations (UN) declarations, and revelations that white Democrats have somehow pocketed billions from the frenzy, stony-faced academics from the historically black Morehouse College in Georgia face the media: “We regard the slavery reparations, initiated by liberal Europeans, as being the worst thing that has ever happened – so today we are demanding reparations for the slavery reparations debacle.”

Slavery reparations is an elite obsession, poised to be the most current current thing ever – BBBEE writ large. Were Fidel Castro alive to watch the UN surrender its faculties some weeks ago, he would have laughed before opening another bottle of French champagne, certain that the madness he helped normalise would endure, before retreating to the bedroom where Mrs Trudeau, also still alive, would be smoking a cigarette.