Where now are the earthly paradises from which an idealist can take hope?

It is only natural, when that hopey-changey thing is in short supply at home, that idealists start looking overseas for inspiration. And for some, it doesn’t stop there. Not content with attending demos and maybe tweeting and Facebooking in support of whatever country they happen to be making common cause with, they actually go there to express their solidarity.

That is not, of course, why Barack Obama is visiting Cuba this week, but it is why British leftwingers have made the self-styled socialist paradise their holiday destination of choice for decades. Sure, the weather’s great and so is the music. But what really attracts them, as long, that is, as they can forget about all the political prisoners and all the rationing, is its defiant refusal to compromise its principles.

Lefties aren’t entirely alone in this. The British right, after all, began its ongoing love affair with the US long before the left fell head over heels for Havana. Rightwingers’ affection for the Anglosphere also means that Canada, Australia and New Zealand regularly get prayed in aid of a policy being pushed at home, be it a supposedly no-strings-attached free-trade deal, a tough-as-it-gets asylum regime, or a system of contestable advice and recruitment from the private sector in the civil service.

But the left has always – and perhaps has always had to – cast its net rather wider when looking for shining examples and sources of optimism, revolutionary or otherwise. Sadly, however, the sheer variety of countries in which it has invested its hopes, as well as the sometimes wilful naivety that helped nurture them in the first place, has seen those very same hopes dashed time and time again. As long ago as 1956, Jimmy Porter, the antihero of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, was lamenting: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left.” And in some ways the first cut was the deepest. Many progressives had put their faith in the Soviet Union – and continued to do so long after it made any moral or practical sense – only to see it smashed to pieces by the invasion of Hungary that same year.

Fortunately, for the British left anyway, the often dark and disturbing legacy of this country’s colonial past provided plenty of other causes to latch on to. Perhaps the most significant, because it was so self-evidently ethical, was the long-running campaign against apartheid South Africa, a cause that could be easily converted, once Nelson Mandela became its first black president, into sympathy and solidarity with the “Rainbow Nation” he hoped to build.

To claim that Mandela’s project has run into the sand would be going too far. But anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to how things have gone since his departure would be hard pressed to regard today’s South Africa with starry-eyed admiration.