When chic hero-worship turns a blind eye to evil

Livingstone is about to kowtow to Castro, a man in the super-league of human rights abusers

Like the dysfunctional family in Paul Abbott's brilliant TV series Shameless, Mayor Ken Livingstone knows how to throw a party. Writing in this week's Time Out, he has invited Londoners to come up with new ideas for parties. His authority has been doing its best, planning such events for 2005 as a Respect Anti-Racism concert, a Russian festival, not to mention commemorations of St Patrick's Day, St George's Day, the Chinese New Year and, slightly more surprisingly, the 20th anniversary of the day that Chris Smith, the Labour politician, came out of the closet. According to Ken, this was an "absolutely significant event ... very seminal in giving other politicians the courage to start coming out."

Like the dysfunctional family in Paul Abbott's brilliant TV series Shameless, Mayor Ken Livingstone knows how to throw a party. Writing in this week's Time Out, he has invited Londoners to come up with new ideas for parties. His authority has been doing its best, planning such events for 2005 as a Respect Anti-Racism concert, a Russian festival, not to mention commemorations of St Patrick's Day, St George's Day, the Chinese New Year and, slightly more surprisingly, the 20th anniversary of the day that Chris Smith, the Labour politician, came out of the closet. According to Ken, this was an "absolutely significant event ... very seminal in giving other politicians the courage to start coming out."

There will be those who deplore the idea that £10,000 or so of civic funds being spent celebrating the gayness of Chris Smith, but I am not one of them. As Ken says, lesbians and gays pay their taxes like everyone else. Besides, a bit of skittish tokenism can often stir up a useful debate.

So when I first read that Mayor Ken was planning another anniversary celebration, this time to honour his favourite world leader, Fidel Castro, I assumed at first that the old stirrer was teasing us again. But the reports seem alarmingly well-founded. Talking to a group of union officials, the Mayor is said to have announced that he planned to invite Castro to London to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the landing of El Comandante and his revolutionaries in Cuba.

Here is one of those moments when harmless radical chic tips into something altogether more sinister. Livingstone has been a supporter of human rights and free expression during his terms of office - Index on Censorship has the run of City Hall, free of charge, for their annual awards - but now he is about to congratulate and kowtow to a man whose recent way with dissidents has put him in the super-league of human rights abusers.

In spite of the appalling events of the past two years, Castro remains a seductive figure for liberals. With his raffish beard, his cigars (now abandoned), his jolly way with Western interviewers, his love of baseball, he has come to represent the acceptable face of one-party politics, less a dictator than a sort of lefty Father Christmas. He believes in health and education. He has stood up to the United States. He is demonised by the American right. Even before Oliver Stone made his hagiographic and intellectually dishonest documentary Comandante, Fidel was a great favourite among thinking celebrities.

What is genuinely shocking, and a reminder of how thin and frayed the line between reasonableness and extremism can be, is that there are still people - perhaps Mayor Ken is one of them - who will excuse brutality and suppression, or at least turn a blind eye to it, when it is perpetrated by their political heroes. Another anniversary is approaching, and it is considerably more relevant than anything that happened 50 years ago, because the event it marks lives on in the form of political prisoners languishing in Cuban prisons.

On 18 March 2003, while the world's media was distracted by the invasion of Iraq, Fidel Castro acted decisively to remove a number of dissidents who had dared to write and campaign in favour of democratic elections. Police rounded up 75 people, many of them independent journalists and librarians (the unauthorised lending of books is against the law in Cuba). A series of hurried secret trials resulted in heavy jail sentences for all but one of the accused. The writers and librarians were imprisoned for between 14 and 27 years.

Before Ken Livingstone extends a fraternal invitation to Comrade Fidel, it might be worth his casting an eye over reports, gathered by PEN, the writers' organisation which campaigns for free expression and those who suffer for it around the world. Here he will get a sense of what has happened, and what is happening today, to those who dare to disagree with their president.

There is Pedro Argüelles, a journalist in his fifties who is now serving a sentence of 20 years. He is ill, has lost a lot of weight, has been moved from prison to prison and has not been allowed visitors or medicine since November 2003. Or Victor Arroyo, jailed for 26 years, who is suffering from liver problems and pulmonary emphysema and who has spent months in a punishment cell so small that he in unable to lie down. Or Juan Carlos Herrera, sentenced to 20 years, who has been on hunger strike as a protest against prison conditions and has been knocked unconscious by prison guards in a punishment cell.

The list goes on, a litany of cruel and degrading treatment to dissidents and their families. Over the past few weeks, nine prisoners have been released because their health had declined so seriously, but even they can be re-arrested at any time.

These people are not revolutionaries, like those bearded guerrillas that can still cause fraternal hearts in City Hall to flutter with admiration. They are ordinary, thinking people who have had the courage to speak and write on behalf of democracy, and are now paying the price. Some time, perhaps as he raises a glass of champagne at Chris Smith's coming-out party, the Mayor might spare a thought for them, too.

terblacker@aol.com