It was the story everyone wanted. For decades journalists have been queuing up to get Fidel Castro’s story — but his response had always been a polite, but resolutely firm, ‘no”. Until 2002, when the Cuban leader unexpectedly agreed to work on his biography with Ignacio Ramonet, the Spanish-born editor of French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique. The story of their collaboration turns out to be every bit as illuminating as My Life (Allen Lane) itself.
Castro could have taken his pick of any number of leading South American writers. So why a European? Partly it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. When Ramonet bumped into him at the Havana Book Fair in January 2002 and suggested they write a book together, Castro was nearing 80 and was not in the best of health, so the Cuban was in a more receptive mood than usual. But there was more to it than that. As Ramonet acknowledges, the relationship was as beneficial for Castro as it was for him.
‘We had met a number of times previously at conferences,” he says, ‘and he had taken a great interest in the World Social Forum [the anti-globalisation alternative to the G8 summit that Ramonet had been instrumental in setting up]. So he was familiar with me and knew that I wasn’t an enemy of Cuba. But he also knew that I had been critical of his country in the past.
‘I think this was very important, as he wanted to collaborate with someone with a reputation for integrity. If he had chosen a Cuban journalist — and there are some very good ones — everyone would have said the book lacked objectivity. It is the United States he wants to reach and by choosing to work with me — a foreign journalist from a prestigious newspaper and an author with several books behind him — he stood the best chance of achieving his ends.”
Even so, it still took more than a year to finalise the structure of the book. Ramonet had originally envisaged it as an extended piece of journalism, a snapshot of 21st-century Fidel and 21st-century Cuba. It was Castro who insisted it should be a historical overview, a book to encapsulate his life. ‘He repeatedly said that he didn’t want to die without setting the record straight,” Ramonet says.
But just how straight? The format for the book, a rather uneasy hybrid of question-and-answer, proved non-negotiable: ‘It was clear Fidel had things to say and he wanted to say them through conversation.”
Ramonet understands this makes him more vulnerable to criticism than if he had taken sole authorship and passed comment on Castro’s remarks. Yet he still believes it was a price worth paying. ‘Castro has never been allowed to express himself in the West as media organisations seldom report him accurately,” he says. ‘So it is clearly important his voice should be heard.
‘I had a list of 200 questions, but he never asked to see them in advance. We just sat together, often long into the night. He talked and I listened. There were some things he chose not to talk about, such as the Colombian humanitarian crisis, but there were many issues, such as the repression of homosexuals and racism in Cuba, about which he was forthcoming. He was also, for the first time, critical of Che Guevara, arguing he was too authoritarian.”
Ramonet knows that some will accuse him of being a willing stooge, but what politician or statesman — other than British MP Alan Clark — ever put their name to a memoir that was anything other than a well-spun, airbrushed version of history? In any case, with this particular quasi-autobiography the fact that it exists at all is a story in itself.
Castro has a reputation for being obsessively private and security-conscious — understandable, perhaps, in a man who has survived 638 assassination attempts. He remains a distant figure even to his family, never sleeps in the same place two nights running and rarely spends much time with his brother, Raul, in case someone tries to kill them both. So almost no one has a real sense of what makes Castro tick.
Having spent longer in Castro’s company — sometimes 10 days at a stretch — than anyone outside Cuba, Ramonet has a better idea than most. And yet he is curiously reluctant to pass judgement. But when pressed, he offers some revealing insights. ‘The world always sees the man in uniform, the self-assured leader,” he says. ‘But when you get to know him, he appears quite different. He is shy and unsure of himself but respectful of, and attentive to, other people’s feelings. He speaks incredibly quietly and doesn’t try to dominate a conversation; rather, he is always asking others for their opinions and ideas.
‘I saw him with his children, but we never talked about his emotional life. I’m not even sure that he has a private life. Even when he goes fishing it is with people with whom he can talk politics. For him, everything is politics; there has been no Latin-American intellectual to match him other than Bolivar.”
It becomes clearer still why Castro chose to work with Ramonet. Both men are steeped in the same left-wing political and intellectual traditions. You’d never catch an academic — let alone a journalist — talking about himself as a serious intellectual without a hint of self-deprecation; when Ramonet does so it is no more than a statement of fact; a job description.
Politics has been in Ramonet’s blood for almost all his life. He was born in Galicia, Spain, in 1943, but his parents moved to Morocco to escape the Franco regime two years later, and his childhood was shadowed by a lingering sense of displacement and injustice. He went to university in France, where his doctorate was supervised by Roland Barthes, before returning to Morocco to teach in the late 1960s.
It was not an easy time. The government was clamping down on political activists, so he returned to France where he started working as a journalist.
‘I got to know Claude Julien while writing for Le Monde,” he says, ‘and when he was appointed editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in 1983 he brought me with him.”
Ramonet covered many different beats and when Julien retired in 1991 he became the first — and so far only — non-French born editor of a French national newspaper, upping the political ante and becoming heavily involved in campaigns to introduce taxes on currency speculation and counter what he sees as the G8’s efforts to carve up the world.
‘We have built a movement that didn’t exist before — a new anti-globalisation forum that has helped create a new breed of leader in Latin America,” he says.
While he plans to step down as editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatique next year, he has no intention of leaving politics. ‘I want to think about creating an anti-globalisation thinktank,” he insists. ‘We have to learn from the past and create what the socialism of this century is going to be.
‘The left hasn’t produced theory for 30 years.”
It is not exactly the usual editor’s leaving speech. And you can’t help wondering what Castro might make of it. —