Castro's death divides the world

To some - a revolutionary guerilla leader who fought for social justice, who ensured Cubans had access to good healthcare and educations.

To others - a tyrant, who wielded absolute power, abusing human rights, denying free elections, freedom of speech and freedom of movement.

I err towards the latter assessment of the man.

I see human progress as being a continual struggle of the Network against the Hierarchy. The Hierarchy, embodied in the Great Leader at its pinnacle, is an ultimately flawed system. In it, the One Leader turns out to want no more than to gain power, consolidate power, and hold absolute power. Power flows vertically downwards from the Great Leader; there's no tolerance of bottom-up initiatives that see the world in different terms.

The Network, on the other hand, is self-regulating and proceeds in a measured way towards people's greater good while casting aside flawed models. Networks evolve to survive. Bad ideas, bad people, are discarded from the network, which is slowly but constantly improving. People work with each other, not for the person above them in the hierarchy.

History is full of leaders who dragged their followers to their doom - or else simply stifled their ambitions and their human potential.

Castro was such a man. For him, Marxism-Leninism, of socialism, of anti-imperialism, Cuban nationalism, were ideological tools, put into the service of his greater aim - absolute power.

Cuba today remains a backwater of an outmoded and utterly discredited ideology. To Western visitors seeing the sixty year-old American cars and crumbling Spanish Empire architecture under a hot sun seems appealing, but many Cubans must feel the same way as Poles and other Central and Eastern Europeans did under communism - poor, humiliated - unfree.

This weekend, the internet is full of comments regarding Castro's death. But in Cuba itself, with the lowest internet penetration rate in the Western hemisphere, all online content remains subject to review by the state censor - the Department of Revolutionary Orientation. The sale of computer hardware and software is strictly regulated. Internet access is controlled, and e-mail is closely monitored.

A price to pay for the much-vaunted healthcare system? Singapore had a similar GDP per capita to that of Cuba at the start of the 1960s; today, the average Singaporean's wealth is six times higher than the average Cuban's. So there was no need to repress the Cuban people with a one-party system, human rights abuses, to deny them freedom of speech, to shut them off from the West - with the right governance, free-market democracy would have delivered them a far higher standard of living.

I'd rather be governed by a committee of faceless, though democratically-elected decision-makers than by one Leader, be it a Stalin, a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Pol Pot, Louis XVI, Franco, Mao Tse Tung or Putin. Once such a person gains power, they then focus on extending and maintaining it. The ideology becomes nothing more than a convenient narrative that claims to have the People's best interest at heart - but is actually all about gaining, consolidating and maintaining power.

To submit to the will of the One Leader is to be intellectually lazy; hoping that the One Leader will deliver security and prosperity in exchange for limiting one's freedom is fatuous. It does not work. The lesson of Castro's Cuba, to all romantics of the left, is that one-man rule invariably leads to ruthless repression, censorship and economic hardship. No matter what cock-and-bull story is dreamt up to mask the One Leader's personal ambition.

And name me one country, one place in time, where One Leader has ultimately delivered on human progress?

Good government is about checks and balances, independent courts upholding the rule of law, free media, freedom of speech, freedom of movement.

Fidel Castro was not an exemplar to the free world. May his like never hold such power again.

The way to prevent such egregious abuse of power is to network - to engage in the political process, beginning at the local level, ensuring that decisions that affect your life are taken with your knowledge if not with your consent. Understanding the process of government - and it is a complex process - requires effort on the part of the citizen, but keeping an eye on the hands of those who govern is crucial.

Of everything I have read of the man, the three words that best epitomised this One Leader came from his own sister Juanita, who buggered off to Miami rather than share an island with her brother. "He never listened." A fitting epitaph for any One Leader.

I for one do not mourn Castro's passing.

This time last year:
London to Edinburgh by night bus
[yesterday I did the same trip in reverse]

This time three year ago:
The Regent's Canal, London

This time five years ago:
An end to the entitlement way of thinking

This time six year:
West Ealing - drab and sad suburb

This time seven years ago:
To Poznań by train

This time nine years ago:
Late autumn drive-time