‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung could lead Long March tours

Communist tourism may be a fringe business, but it can be a good one. Mao Zedong’s birthplace, in Shaoshan, Xiangtan, and Deng Xiaoping’s, in Guang’an, Sichuan, have become shrines.

Or, tired of the usual sightseeing in Vietnam? Try trekking and crawling through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the infamous military supply route through which North Vietnam armed the communist guerillas against the south and the mighty United States. It’s estimated that more American bombs were dropped along the 1,600km route during the Vietnam war than the entire second world war.

Down on his luck since his disqualification as a legislator more than a year ago, “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung was going to try his hand as a communist tour guide – to Cuba. It was not entirely frivolous. Rather the business plan was more serious than most of his antics and proposals in the Legislative Council in the past two decades. And it wasn’t going to cost taxpayers anything.

Who in Hong Kong could claim to know more than Leung, a self-styled Trotskyite, about Cuba, or at least its late communist leaders who launched the revolution? The guy still wears his signature Che Guevara T-shirts after all these years. Sadly, the plan didn’t quite pan out.

I could imagine sailing on a yacht along the route that took Che and Fidel Castro to launch the revolution that overthrew Fulgencio Batista, the corrupt dictator propped up by the Americans. That was the Latin American version of Lenin travelling by train to the Finland station.

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How about visiting the Bay of Pigs where the CIA and the Kennedy White House tried to launch an absurd and abortive coup against the Castro regime?

I would do it, and travelling with Long Hair as a guide could be fun. Alas, he was charging HK$62,800 for 15 days. That was way too much.

Cuba has become one of the hottest tourist attractions in the Caribbean. You can buy a cheap plane ticket to Canada or Mexico and travel by luxury cruise for less than half the price. And, presumably there just aren’t enough communist aficionados in Hong Kong for Leung’s Cuban trip.

Leung is now practically unemployable and unelectable, but a man has to eat. Maybe it’s time to make nice with Beijing. He could surely get a licence as an expert guide, say, to take tours for the legendary Long March.