In 1997, two men sat down, with others, to dinner in Havana. One was John F Kennedy Jnr, eldest son of the assassinated United States President. The other was ”El Jefe Maximo” — the Maximum Chief — Fidel Castro. What a meeting: Castro and his guest’s father were the men who, in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, took the planet closer than ever before, or since, to blowing itself up.
The talk over this meal of shrimp and ice cream, recalls Inigo Thomas, a friend of Kennedy who was present, was ”all about the past”, and the discourse largely ”a series of Castro speeches interspersed with questions for John”. Kennedy gave Castro a copy of The Kennedy Tapes. Castro said he was reading books by Winston Churchill and Stefan Zweig, and asked Kennedy what he thought of Richard Nixon. Kennedy replied diplomatically that Nixon had been ”courteous” towards his family. Near the end of the evening, Castro explained his decision not to admit Lee Harvey Oswald to Cuba, prior to Kennedy’s assassination. At 2am the encounter ended, Castro saying how much he admired Pope John Paul II — about to make a visit — for rising at five, two hours after he was accustomed to retiring. Two years later the young Kennedy died. A decade on, the world’s longest-surviving ruler nears his own end.
”Fidel is in the Sierra Maestra again, battling for his life,” said his friend, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez . ”I wish he could live another 80 years. But Fidel Castro is one of those men that will never die.” Cuba has maintained intense secrecy around Castro’s health, which forced the revolutionary leader to relinquish power to his brother Raul on 31 July, but reports in last week’s El Pais newspaper claimed he had undergone three risky intestinal operations — none of which had been successful.
Although the Cold War is frozen in the past, the era recalled by the older man that night over dinner is not a closed chapter. More people across the Latin American sub-continent are looking to the Cuban leader for inspiration than ever before, as popular — and especially young — opinion swings against the United States. But the world’s most instantly recognisable leader, who has left his iconographic mark on history, is about to enter the Pantheon of memory.
Castro, ”El Comandante”, is most often known to his people as ”Fidel”, even to his face. They ”argue with him, they claim him”, writes Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If for some reason they don’t want to speak his name, Cubans run a finger across their chin to indicate the beard.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz: the man who outwitted 10 US presidents, and outlived most of them. The man born out of wedlock who took his mother’s surname as his own, who led an impossible revolution which has survived even more impossibly, and whose image Diego Maradona has tattooed on his leg. But there are few places where that figure is visible to most Cubans; the personality cult of Fidel is a singular one. It strikes one only after some time in crumbling but effervescent Havana that his image is nowhere to be seen, except maybe on the odd postcard or book cover in a shop window. No statues, no Castro Boulevard, no posters — the only face on a government building and on T-shirts for tourists is that of Che Guevara. With its peeling grandeur and dichotomies between hedonism and communism, sensuality and fear, Havana is on the edge of Fin-de-Something, but Fin-de-What, exactly?
Born on a sugar plantation owned by his father, to a household servant, Castro grew up aware of both his privileges and the things which kept him apart from Cuban society — educated by Jesuits, he was never baptised.
By the time he was a law student in the 1940s, Castro had already cast himself as a revolutionary (though not yet a communist), in the mould of his idol, freedom fighter and writer Jose Marti, who, at 15, set in motion the revolt which would expel Spanish colonialism. Castro saw himself as completing the revolution Marti had begun. He joined the Orthodox Party, but his willingness to participate in mainstream electoral politics evaporated after the coup of Fulgencio Batista in 1952. After the disastrous armed attack on Moncada Barracks in Santiago in July 1953, Castro was arrested; at his trial he gave a speech famed for the line: ”History will absolve me.”
Unexpectedly released, Castro journeyed to Mexico, where he met Ernesto ”Che” Guevara and plotted the overthrow of the Batista junta. A band of 82 guerillas returned but, after trekking through mango swamps, they were ambushed and half of them captured or killed.
The ensuing narrative is revolutionary legend. The peasantry was won over, Batista fled and Castro marched triumphantly into Havana in January 1959.
For all Guevara’s convictions, Castro’s revolution was not at first communist; indeed Castro’s ”adventurism” was criticised by the Communist Party and Castro travelled to New York to court US support. It was not until after the fiasco of the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion by the CIA, signed off by JFK, that Castro declared himself a ”Marxist-Leninist”, and embraced Moscow. The missile crisis was a consequence. Khrushchev decided that a deployment of missiles would deter a further invasion of Cuba and enhance Soviet influence, and the construction of missile installations was detected by US intelligence.
Khrushchev, foreseeing the calamitous consequences of a war, sidelined Castro, offering Kennedy a withdrawal of the missiles in exchange for a guarantee not to invade Cuba and a secret US withdrawal of missiles from Turkey. The US imposed a total trade embargo on Cuba, punishing the Cuban people for more than 40 years and inevitably driving Castro into becoming the USSR’s grateful client state in the Americas. Castro consolidated his power at home — thanks to both repression of dissent and popular resentment of Washington. Meanwhile, Cuba began exporting revolution abroad: the 1970s saw Cuba dispatch thousands of troops to fight in the anti-colonial war waged by Angola’s MPLA and during the years of US-backed dictatorships and coups in South and Central America, Cuba acted as haven and training ground for armed guerrilla resistance.
The ebb and flow of Havana’s relationship with Moscow ended with the collapse of communism, after which Cuba became beholden to China, both economically and politically. But China’s whimsical attentions were no substitute for Soviet aid. By 1994 waves of economic refugees were making the perilous trip across the Florida straits to the US. Castro, meanwhile, embarked on Cuba’s present chapter, of life as a revolutionary fortress in a capitalist world, compromising — needs must — with the winds of the market and the need to import hard currency.
Cuba is, as a result, a country with a higher life expectancy than the US. Cuba exports doctors all over the continent. The music, as everyone knows, is sublime. But Havana is a place where one can buy an ice cream with dollars in 30 seconds while Cubans wait for an hour to pay in pesos. A fat Dane breakfasts with the same 14-year-old girl for the third day running — a notorious branch of the tourist industry on which Havana thrives, but which Castro pretends does not exist.
In this world of dichotomies Castro inhabits a strange penumbra: a man so familiar, yet enigmatic and mercurial. Cubans are not even sure whether he is really married, whether reports of a secret wedding to Dalia Soto del Valle — mother of five of his six sons — are true.
There have been a few recent insights into the man who crossed into the 20th century and turned 80 last year. The Secret Life of Fidel Castro, aired on Florida TV in 2002, had home movie footage, showing Castro with his grandchildren playing around a swimming pool, and a man who lives without luxury.
The following year came Comandante by Oliver Stone, in which he brazenly defies Stone’s over-polite challenges on human rights, calls Nikita Khrushchev a ”wily peasant” and admits to crushes on Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot.
In 2004 came two biographies, one by a German, Volker Skierka, who captures Castro’s inflated, narcissistic sense of himself and his destiny. But he points out that he is almost alone among dictators in not having fleeced his people. No Swiss bank accounts, no personal wealth.
Castro travels in one of two identical jets — partly out of paranoia, partly out of necessity, for the CIA has been trying to assassinate him ever since he took power.
The inept attempts included spraying a television studio with LSD, an exploding cigar, slipping poison powder into a pair of his boots, poisoning a scuba-diving wetsuit proffered as a gift and dynamiting a conch shell in one of the President’s favourite waters. Even conventional attempts by snipers and grenade-throwers were thwarted.
No one who meets Castro — let alone struggled alongside him — is unaffected by the experience. Few were closer to him than Huber Matos, who joined Castro’s 26 July movement in the Sierra Maestra and swiftly became ”Comandante” of the Oriente front. Matos resigned from the revolutionary government, was accused of treason and imprisoned for 20 years in October 1959. He now lives in Miami. ”Once I achieved the rank of commander, we fought even harder. But since the day I met him, I had my reservations. Castro is a pretender of magisterial dimensions. He was always looking to convince me that everything he was doing he was doing humbly, for the people. But Castro turned out a man who used lies and dirty tricks.”
Another hero and ”Comandante” was Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, who went on to join the ”Alpha 66” revolt against Castro. ”I remember Castro talking to us about a revolution that was ‘as Cuban as the palm trees’,” he recalls. ”A democratic revolution, not the dictatorship of the proletariat or anyone else. And I feel more pain at the betrayal than from all those years in jail, trying to kill time before it killed me. The hardest thing in life is to break with something in which you put your faith. But Castro is like a fox — no, more a wolf. Both the hunter and the hunted. And the more the hunter went after him, the cleverer he became.”
Dissident Oswaldo Paya calls Castro ”a dangerous man”. ”Dangerous to the region, Cuba and the Cubans. But in the end the Cuban people, and democracy, are more dangerous to him than he is to them.”
The Cuba that Castro will leave behind is in part his creation, in part that of the calculated punishment of the US embargo. Ideological Marxism has not been the calamitous disaster it might have been. There have been terrible failures of collectivised sugar production, but coffee, tobacco and other Caribbean products are exported. A day in the resolve and order of a Havana school would leave most British parents with a sense of wilful longing. The hospitals are famously effective by many standards: Cuba caters for the health needs of its own people like no other Caribbean country.
But there is a terrible poverty trap in Cuba and those who live — crowded with their extended families — in the crumbling colonial houses eke out a living with their ration books and little else.
The perilous flotillas of desperation which cross the Florida straits are indicators in themselves. In Cuba, blacks tend to be poorer than Hispanics, but that is the same across Latin America.
The breezy sensuality of the Cuban island and its people masks grotesque human rights abuses. Castro says openly and repeatedly he will not tolerate what he calls ”enemies of the revolution”. Cuba executes by firing squad; homosexuality is forced underground, continually harassed. Religion — often an entwinement between Catholicism and Santeria voodoo — is tolerated in theory, but priests are persecuted in practice.
Carlos Salinas de Gortari, President of Mexico from 1988 to 1994, masterminded talks between Castro and President Bill Clinton. ”Castro’s life has to be framed inside the context of Cuban independence after 400 years of being a Spanish colony and then passing into US hands. Most of all, it has to be understood within the context of the most dramatic Cold War confrontation, the Cuban missile crisis.
”Subjected to an interminable blockade imposed by the US, and its constant harassment, [Castro achieved] something unique in today’s world. His legacy remains in the remarkable advance in healthcare and education of the Cuba people, and on his defence of Cuba’s sovereignty.”
Not every reaction to Castro is political, and not many photographers have been able to take close-up portraits. But Amelia Troubridge is one of them, and her recollections of a 1997 encounter illuminate an additional impact Castro can have, even on a 22-year-old.
”It was at a big dinner”, she recalls, ”I was three tables away, but the German ambassador, at Castro’s table, fancied me and asked if I wanted to meet the Cuban leader. There’s no doubt what was going on — I was a sexy, tanned, blonde chick and Castro is a flirt. And I tell you, when you have the attention of Fidel Castro, when he decides he wants to talk to you, there is nothing else in the world, the whole room goes silent. He started speaking, and I just felt buried in his beard. They were the best and longest five minutes of my life.”
Castro is a night owl. One former British diplomat says that he would arrive at an ambassador’s residence, unannounced with a bottle of whisky, and invite Her Majesty’s envoy to join him in drinking most of it. Among those who have been summoned for late dinner or drinks was Ernest Hemingway. But more recently paying homage to Castro has become fashionable. Steven Spielberg visited him. There was an audience with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, who likened Castro to Nelson Mandela. The then 71-year-old found meeting the brace of supermodels a ”spiritual” experience.
More penetrating was novelist Marquez, who wrote a characteristically elegant and penetrating profile of The Fidel I Think I Know as part of the 80th birthday celebrations. ”His devotion is to the word,” wrote Marquez. ”His power is of seduction … He has a language for each occasion and a distinct means of persuasion according to his interlocutors … He is capable of discovering the most minimal contradictions in a casual phrase.”
Castro the law student was such a talented baseball player that, the legend goes, in 1949 he was offered a $5 000 bonus to join the New York Giants team. His refusal is lore among fans of the national sport, stars of which are divided between those who follow Castro’s example, and those who go. The greatest, Lazaro Vargas, is among the former, having snubbed $6-million to join the Atlanta Braves. He explains how ”Castro is my leader and my model. He taught me it is a sweet feeling to walk down the street knowing that no one can buy you.”
That Castro has the hearts of many of his people is undeniable; his funeral will be a national wake. A reporter covering the trial at which Castro insisted that ”history will absolve me” was Marta Rojas, now 73, still close to El Jefe Maximo, of whom she says: ”The first time I saw him, a few steps ahead of me, I was still a journalism student. It was September 21 1953, the day the Moncada trials started. It is the same image I have of him today: converting himself from the accused into the accuser. That day, with his hands cuffed, he raised his arms and banged them yelling, ‘you cannot try a man, any man, cuffed like this’. It was then when he turned from being the defendant to the accuser. And I still have that image of him.”
In 2003 Castro unleashed his latest, maybe last, overt sweep against dissent, seizing and jailing 75 opposition activists, only 15 of whom have been released. In its typically, comically fumbling way, the CIA updated its psychological profiling of Castro, looking for signs of senility, noting that chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and Leonid Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan in their twilight years. But in the event, remarkably, it is not Castro who is creating his legacy any more — it is history itself.
Marquez wrote that Castro’s ”vision of Latin America in the future is… an integrated and autonomous community, capable of moving the destiny of the world”. For decades, such a vision seemed a pipedream, with Latin America either subjugated by pro-American dictatorships or economically and politically beholden to the US.
But over the past five years alone, a gyre has turned across Latin America, not necessarily behind Castro, but certainly in his slipstream. It is hard to think of another leader of whom one can say that, as they die, a momentum swells behind their vision, inspired by it and by him — a second wave propelled by another, younger generation.
The 21st century has seen governments elected to power harbouring varying degrees of antipathy towards US hegemony in Latin America — or at least some robust sense of ‘an integrated and autonomous community’ — in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and even, almost, Mexico. The spirit of Fidel Castro runs like a rip-tide beneath that wave, whether he intended it or not, and whether consciously or not. History may, after all and against all the odds, absolve him, and will certainly never forget him.
Many people think like Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Argentinian Nobel Peace Laureate, who deems him ”one of those who show commitment and coherence between what they say and do. He has left a gesture of solidarity to all the peoples of Latin America; a legacy of resistance, autonomy and sovereignty”.
William Jose Benitez is a student of social work in Venezuela, and a member of the National Institute of Youth: ”For me,” he says, ”Fidel is one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of the past 100 years. He has done what almost no one has ever done. For Latin American students like me, he is still the paradigm, the reference point. He has left his seed in today’s Latin America, and what we are living today is its manifestation — the awakening of the people of Latin America thanks to revolution led by Fidel.”
Then you have the crowd on the concrete steps of Havana’s stadium as Lazaro Vargas drives a curveball past second base. ”Fidel! Fidel!” shouted a man called Manuel, holding his palms aloft, as though to hail El Jefe Maximo, but then, with a puckish grin full of mischief, whipping the left palm behind him and making as though to wipe his backside with it. – Guardian Unlimited Â