Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller has credited growing up listening to Fidel Castro’s musings on social justice for her political activism, and branded the Brexit vote an “emotional spasm”.
Speaking in a video for The Convention, a conference centred on Brexit which will be held betweeen 12-13 May, the millionaire said the Leave vote had “really wounded our country”.
“The Remain camp, I think we’re going to have to work harder, and we’re going to have to hear and engage and respond to all those people who voted Leave, and find out why they voted Leave and understand that cry,” she said.
“Because I do think a large populous voted Leave because they wanted someone to listen to them. They were crying out, it was an emotional spam,” she added.
Miller is currently heading up the Best for Britain campaign, backed by long-time EU enthusiast Sir Richard Branson, which hopes to galvanise Remainers into voting tactically for candidates with an “open mind” to blocking a Brexit deal in the upcoming snap election.
Miller’s father, a wealthy Guyanese politician, sent her to the expensive all-girls Roedean school in Sussex at the age of 11 – but before that, she recalls “[growing] up in a very privileged home where we talked about politics”.
She said she would “lie on the top of the stairs and smell the cigar smoke of Castro, or whoever it was, in the room, and listen to them debating about politics and social justice, and it always filled me with awe that you could change other people’s lives by your actions”.
Castro ruled Cuba from 1959 to 2008, handing the reigns of power over to his brother Raul at the age of 81. It is estimated thousands were murdered by the Cuban Communist Party regime, with tens of thousands more drowning as they attempted to escape the island.
Millions more would have been killed had the USSR acted on Castro’s recommendation to launch a nuclear strike against the U.S. in 1962, and he branded Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev a “traitor” for failing to do so.