performance
David Beresford
`Castro is a lion,” sang the South African Communist Party choir enthusiastically. At 71, Fidel Castro cut a somewhat aged king of the jungle.
Nevertheless, the comparison seemed a fair one as the Cuban leader, with grizzled mane and beard, clambered out of his Mercedes Benz in Soweto on Saturday and made his way to the closest thing this country has to the tomb of the unknown warrior.
Although last week South Africa saw a concatenation of heads of state, hosting the summit of non-aligned nations, there was no doubt as to who was the most popular foreign leader.
President Nelson Mandela was said to have been refused 10 extra seats for guests in the stampede to hear the Cuban president address the Cape Town Parliament on Friday.
Those lucky enough to attend heard Castro paint a chilling picture of capitalism on the brink of collapse – the global economy transformed into an “enormous casino”.
Necessity has made Sowetans a more phlegmatic lot, less sensitive to the gyrations of the world stock markets, or predictions of financial Armageddon. But about 2 000 of them gathered to chant “Castro, Castro, Castro” as the famous revolutionary emerged from the last of three steel shipping containers, in which he had been reminding himself of the township’s days of grief and glory with the help of a makeshift photo exhibition on the 1976 uprising.
After laying a wreath and solemnly saluting at the roadside shrine to Hector Petersen, Castro made his way to the speakers’ platform.
Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga was there to greet him, along with Walter Sisulu. Introducing the Cuban, the temptation for a little local politicking overcame the premier.
“It is indeed amazing the Democratic Party opposes the visit by the greatest opponent of the mother of all crimes, the inhuman system of apartheid,” he said.
“This betrays the insincerity of the DP’s stance on crime prevention. They claim the African National Congress is not doing much to prevent crime. Together with the Cuban forces under the capable leadership of Commandant Castro, the ANC defeated the mother of all crimes,” he added triumphantly.
Desultory applause greeted this gambit, suggesting that even the crowd, predisposed as they were to their premier’s general case, were less certain of the specifics.
But doubts were banished as the main speaker was ushered in by a final bout of sycophancy – a ringing announcement by Motshekga that in Castro, Mandela and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki the world had “the greatest political prophets of our time”.
Unperturbed by this disclosure, Castro opened diffidently. “I’ve not come to make a speech, I’ve just come to talk to you for a while,” he confided. “A speech would have to take a long time.”
There followed two hours of one-sided conversation, a bravura performance in which the lilting Spanish of the president and the majestic English of his female interpreter interwove with the practised ease of an operatic duo. At least, it was a performance which could have been described as operatic in its range, if not its musicality.
Castro opened by brooding on the destruction of the great library at Alexandria and the discovery that the world was flat. This was followed by a reflection on what would have happened to the Spanish conquistadors and their 12 horses if Christopher Columbus in his confused search for India had landed up in well-horsed China instead of Latin-America: “The 12 Spanish horses would have been nothing; they would have disappeared in a matter of seconds!”
A tour of the cosmos ensued with a meditation on what would have happened if there had been men on the moon before the Americans got there. “They would have taken possession of the moon in the name of the king of Washington,” he hazarded.
Ruminating on the irony that Venus was named after the goddess of love – “400 degrees of heat and actually at that temperature there is no way you can make love” – he touched briefly on the barrenness of Mars before landing back on earth with a thump, concluding it was clear this was the only populated planet, so even those who suffered extremes of poverty needed to be persuaded to the environmentalist cause if mankind was to survive.
Going on to marvel at the mastery of mathematics by those who constructed the pyramids, he demanded rhetorically: “If Einstein had been born Hector Petersen, would the theory of relativity have ever been discovered?”
Confiding to the crowd that his sizeable retinue of bodyguards reflected the long history of attempts to kill him, Castro delivered a succession of swipes at President Bill Clinton, including ridicule at his use of four American helicopters to take him from Cape Town to Robben Island.
Marvelling at the scope of American “imperialism” – “even in India and China they are drinking Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola (and eating McDonald’s) hamburgers”, he said in wonderment.
Castro climaxed with the ringing declaration: “You have apartheid when you have a world of the rich and a world of the poor.
“Soweto 1976 was a victory in the struggle against apartheid. It was a struggle which we all have a duty to fight and which we will continue to fight.”
Clearly energised by his vision of the universe and all its problems, Castro strode off the platform, rushed around the security barriers waving at his fans, embraced the premier, clambered into his Mercedes and disappeared. No encore was offered, although it would no doubt have been welcomed.