“Condemn me. It doesn’t matter. History will absolve me,” said the young Fidel Castro proudly at the start of his revolutionary career, defying the judges of Fulgencio Batista’s regime.

Among the last remaining to uphold, if not glorify, its political legacy – the Cuban communist regime that survived the end of Soviet communism – are the young members of a party, the PD, founded almost twenty years after the end of the PCI, who, on the hundredth anniversary of Castro’s birth, published a celebratory post on social media https://www.instagram.com/p/Db_QalgiYKB/, which would not have looked out of place at the 1978 International Festival of Communist Youth in Havana.

Nostalgia for Castro and Guevara

It may seem surprising that nostalgia for Castro and Guevara continues to take root amongst young people on the left who, before they were even born, had to renounce communism in order to legitimise their credibility – a credibility that had been severely undermined for much of the First Republic precisely by Togliatti’s dual allegiance: to the democratic method and to the Soviet system (of which Castro’s Cuba was a part).

The post-communist left

In fact, there is little cause for surprise, given that the PD has, when all is said and done, proved itself – precisely on an ideological level – to be yet another political embodiment of the post-communist left, of its aspirations, its frustrations, its idiosyncrasies and, of course, its duplicity.

Pro-Europeanism, Atlanticism and the political imagination

Behind all the professed commitments to Europeanism and Atlanticism – which are a precondition for political viability within a battered and radicalised Western democratic left – but not post-communist, there is an increasingly frequent emergence of an irrefutable adherence to a political and ideological framework that is an alternative to the liberal-capitalist one, both domestically and internationally.

A different view of the world

The PD is still, in the spirit of Berlinguer, in pursuit of ‘another vision of the world’; for this reason, it is increasingly reluctant to defendthe post-Cold War Western-centred international order, increasingly enamoured with the anti-globalisation promises of the ‘no global’ ideology, increasingly entangled in pacifist pretences and variable-geometry resistance rhetoric, which prevent it from taking a fully pro-Kyiv stance, but compel it to show the utmost complicity with Albanese-style Palestinianism and condescension towards the anti-Zionist rhetoric of the 25 April commemorations and the ‘judenfrei’ Gay Pride events.

Fidel’s return

It is no surprise, then, that the old, familiar figure of Fidel – the man responsible for a historic catastrophe of violence, misery and lies, the scale of which was all the greater because of the immense illusions he had raised – should once again become a reassuring fetish and a wreck to cling to, in order to stay afloat in the ocean of misunderstandings that is this new and failed ‘third way’ betweenthe liberal West and all its enemies.

The post-communist backlash

However, in this PD, in the midst of a post-communist backlash, whilst ambiguity is certainly present, what is lacking is the seriousness that the leaders of a party – one that had come a long way and wanted to go far – loved not only to flaunt but also to cultivate. So this return to its roots is being pursued with the daft, carefree attitude of a school trip, the enthusiasm for change of which the class representative certainly appreciates, but she is not the best person to understand the disastrous consequences.