Look at Fidel Castro’s legacy from a fair perspective | Letters

Zoe Williams (Forget Fidel Castro's policies. Above all, he was a dictator, 28November) bases her judgment of Castro on a frighteningly simplistic division of states into democracies, by implication multiparty ones, and dictatorships, by implication any state that is not multiparty. She then makes a blanket assertion that the latter are so inherently bad that their actual record of government is irrelevant. This is to ignore all the complex details of political structures by which a population can be oppressed or empowered. For us, from a practical point of view, the worst danger of such thinking is to exaggerate the benefits of our political system.

While Castro may be rightly criticised for executing Batista supporters, even those guilty of torture and multiple murder, it may be salutary to remember that back then, in 1959, Britain executed people accused of a single murder. It was also a time when British forces were imprisoning and torturing Kenyans, and those of the French multiparty democracy were torturing and killing Algerians. Even those crimes pale before the horrors the US multiparty democracy was shortly to unleash on Vietnam.