The last days of Castro

Her Majesty the Queen and Fidel Castro are, as far as I can ascertain, strangers. A shame – they share much in common. They are among the world's longest-reigning heads of states, and each has an impending golden jubilee. Next month, the Queen celebrates 50 years since she ascended, peacefully, to the throne; next year, it will be half a century since Dr Castro led a team of rebels into abject, bloody failure. And this week, as the former US President Jimmy Carter made a historic visit to the island, many watching the footage of the two elderly politicians started to think the unthinkable – that Castro cannot continue forever, and when these, his twilight years, finally come to an end, the island will change irrevocably. Will whoever takes over from Castro – and who that will be is itself unclear – make the democratic reforms that Cubans are starting to demand?

The assault on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on 26 July 1953 would have been comic – some revolutionaries turned up at the target by taxi – were it not so tragic. Many rebels died at the scene; some survivors were tortured and killed in captivity; but Castro was spared to make his celebrated assertion that "History will absolve me". He was imprisoned and later exiled, where he met a young Argentine, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The rest is history – a narrative that has been written by the victor since the triumph of the Revolution on New Year's Day, 1959. Unsurprisingly, the official chronicle makes heroes of the inept attack, deifies Che and provides Castro with absolution as advertised.

A more convoluted ascent to power, then, than simply waiting for nature and the British rules of succession to take their course and elevate one to the monarchy. Yet Elizabeth II and Fidel I would find plenty to chat about. Ruling a large, diverse island for much of your adulthood is tough. Take just one of the litany of titles that each must bear: he, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party; she, Defender of the Faith. Their job descriptions are identical: protect the state ideology by keeping one step ahead of its mutations over time, making it appear that you are leading, rather than reacting to, shifts in opinion.

Dr Castro has been a far more effective non-elected head of state than the Queen. But then, he has had the advantage of being despised by the world's leading superpower for the past four decades – a condition that confers enormous mastery on a potentate.

Five out of 10: that is Jimmy Carter's position in the roll call of US presidents who have squared up to Castro. The first was Dwight D Eisenhower, whose last significant political act was to sever diplomatic links with Cuba on 3 January 1961. The last is George W Bush, who has assigned the island to the axis of evil, that select list of nations that the US despises to the depths of its nuclear arsenals.

Of the presidents who have squared up to Castro – the others being Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Snr and Clinton – only Carter has shown any wit or wisdom in his dealings with Castro. The others have given the Cuban leader an ideological walkover for four decades.

Before 9 November 2000, I used to ridicule the way that candidates for the US presidency slavishly followed the hawkish agenda of the Cuban exiles in Miami. But on that morning I took a flight from Gatwick to Havana. Before take-off, the pilot announced George W Bush was the new President; by the time we touched down, he had been temporarily unanointed. Bush's vituperative anti-Castro rhetoric was to prevail in the ultimate swing state. Al Gore was perhaps wounded by the Democrats' insistence on doing the right thing in returning the schoolboy, Elian Gonzalez, to Cuba. So Castro indirectly handed power to Bush, returning the favour that has shored up his regime since the Revolution.

What more could a dictator need? Its neighbour had spent the first 60 years of the 20th century running Cuba as a semi-detached state – and a source of cheap sugar, sex and salsa. No more Mr Nice President: when Castro started to implement reforms, and laid the foundations for vast improvements in health and education, the White House turned nasty. Its incumbents filled the remainder of the century with a spite that played into the hands of the man the Americans sought to destroy. With every CIA assassination attempt – most as pathetic as the attack on Moncada – Castro's legitimacy grew. The attempts to destabilise the revolutionaries helped the leader to justify political repression, while the economic embargo enabled the leader to evade blame for the gross economic mismanagement over which he presided.

At the same time, US bellicosity has helped the last bastion of Communism in the West become an immensely strong brand. Rare is the city without a Café Cuba, or the glossy fashion magazine without a photo-shoot in Havana. An island with fewer people than the state of Ohio and a dodgy government is lauded around the world. The economic embargo has backfired even more explosively than a 1957 Chevrolet that deafens passers-by as it splutters around the capital, carrying twice as many people as the Detroit original envisaged.

Cuba's wheels have not come off – despite the best efforts of Washington, and the collapse of the benefactors in Moscow who shored up the island for 30 years after Castro decided he was a Marxist-Leninist. In his address to the people of Cuba this week, Jimmy Carter made one mistake. He said, "Our two nations have been trapped in a destructive state of belligerence for 42 years."

The harm, in fact self-inflicted, caused by Washington's sanctions takes a bizarre range of forms, from denying US cigar and rum connoisseurs the premiers crus of their chosen indulgences to intensifying the global notion that the US is not the world's policeman, but rather its big, bad bully. Significantly, it removes free choice about where Americans may vacation. And the winner is... the British holidaymaker.

When the Cuban economy went into freefall in 1993, Castro correctly predicted that only tourism could save the island. With Spanish, Canadian and British partners, he turned Communism's last-chance saloon into a new Caribbean beach destination – which this week will welcome more British visitors than it did in the whole of 1989. In a normal world, the Americans would have outbid us for the best places in the sun on their nearest island. But the risk of being jailed in the US and fined $55,000 (£38,000) is enough to deter most American citizens from breaching rules designed to outlaw tourism to the Caribbean's largest and most beautiful island. While we benefit from cheap holidays, the US Treasury operates a Cuba Sanctions Violation Hotline, so that Castro-fearing citizens can grass on American travellers who enter Cuba via Mexico or Canada. Even Jimmy Carter had to ask nicely for permission to visit Havana.

Since 42 years of sanctions have had precisely the opposite effect to that intended, I suggest an alternative prospectus: victory through tourism. Allow 270 million Americans access to the island most of them have only dreamed about, and they will help expose the brutality of Castro's regime. When a million camcorders are rolling on Disneyland Havana, suppressing dissidence gets much tougher. Enough of the money that the tourists bring in will reach the people to liberate them from Castro's economic oppression. Watchers of the decline of Communism know the event that sealed the fate of the USSR was the day in 1989 when McDonald's opened in Moscow, revealing to the citizens what many took to be a virtue of capitalism. The Big Mac could succeed where the CIA failed in toppling Castro.

El Jefe has already worked this one out. That is why Castro is seeking to secure normality on his terms, and working with Jimmy Carter. But no one is sure whether he has calculated the answer to the question that concerns most Cubans more than "when will I be able to order a burger and fries to go?"; "who follows Castro?"

If our respective heads of state meet, the Queen could perhaps explain the benefits of a clear line of succession. In Cuba, there is no obvious successor. Castro's seed is scattered far and wide, with a couple of illegitimate daughters popping up in Miami. His brother, Raul, is widely cited as the successor, but as a fellow revolutionary he is part of the (very) old guard. As with the house of Windsor, there is talk of skipping a generation. But Castro is in no rush.

Shortly after the Eastern Bloc collapsed, Andy Kershaw made a thoughtful and perceptive series of programmes for Radio 4. The title was Castro's Last Christmas?. Few imagined that, a decade later, he would still be the heavyweight champion of the Third World, on a par with Nelson Mandela. South Africa's liberator knew when to stand down and blossom into elder statesman for the oppressed. Castro, who tasted only a morsel of prison life compared with Mandela's jail term, shows no such inclination to abdicate – rather like the Queen. Perhaps they are unsure of their successors' abilities to defend their divergent faiths. Meanwhile, I urge you and Her Majesty to visit Cuba soon, while the humanity that has sustained the people through centuries of hardship prevails – and before tourism claims another victory.

The unlikely island: things you never knew about Cuba

* Cuba's national airline, Cubana Airlines, has a poor accident record and scores F on a rating of air safety from A to F.

* Old Havana, where the crumbling grandeur of the buildings is the subject of many coffee-table books and fashion shoots, is a Unesco World Heritage site.

* The American naval base in Guantanamo Bay, home to Camp X-Ray, was built by the US in 1903 and has now been leased until the year 2033.

* Cuba's health system has been acclaimed by many – medical, hospital and dental care is free for all Cubans. Life expectancy on the island is 73 years for men and 78 for women.

* Santeria, a religious cult with similarities to voodoo, is claimed by its members to have as many believers as the Roman Catholic church in Cuba.

* The face of Che Guevara, possibly the world's most photogenic revolutionary, gave us the iconic image on a T-shirt that spread round the world. Alberto Korda, who took the photograph on which the image is based, is said not to have received anything in royalties for it. Guevara, first name Ernesto, was not actually Cuban.

* Baseball, that most American of sports, is also considered the national sport of Cuba. It was first played on the island in the 1860s.

* Cuban cigars, banned in the US along with other Cuban products, are widely available across America. There are 32 brands, none of which are handrolled on the thighs of virgins, but the best are made by hand and banded with a government seal.

* With no car imports, Cubans resort to ingenious repairs and modifications to old models dating back to the 1940s, such as fitting Lada engines in Chevrolets.

Simon Calder is travel editor of 'The Independent', and co-author of 'Cuba in Focus' and 'Travellers' Survival Kit: Cuba'