The world has changed, but Fidel Castro has no regrets_______________________________________
by A.J. Philip
(February 01, February, Havana, Sri Lanka Guardian) Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s is the kind of life legends are made of. Son of a poor Galician emigrant who went to war as a replacement for a rich man, he is arguably one of the most charismatic leaders of the world. Given his oratorical skill that has dazzled his countrymen for over half a century, he could have taken to writing like fish to water. Instead, he found a new stratagem – “a revolutionary has to be one up always” – to produce My Life*. He granted 100 hours of his precious time to Ignacio Ramonet, a long-time editor of the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique.
In a question-answer format, Castro encapsulates his life that began on a farm where he remembers that when he was three or four years old, “the cows slept underneath the house”. He grew up watching cockfights and listening to the battery-run radio that gave news of the Spanish civil war and to his father’s bookkeeper who loved talking about Greek orator Demosthenes.
It was a time when “boys are brought up watching violence from the moment they are born”. Small wonder that what strikes Castro most about the Bible are the punishment of Babylon, the enslavement of the Jews, the crossing of the Red Sea, Joshua and his trumpets bringing down the walls of Jericho, Samson and his Herculean strength, able to pull down a temple with his own hands and the Tablets of the Law he learnt from the First Grade as Sacred History.
Circumstances made Castro a rebel. He rues his father’s decision to send him to a teacher at Santiago, who did not give him enough food, let alone any education. There, he was often hungry which he thought was not hunger but appetite. Years later when he read Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, they reminded him of his own days of penury.
Such experiences steeled his resolve to fight injustice. Fulgencio Batista was in power at that time. For Castro and his followers, he was the most hateful, diabolical ruler who needed to be removed at any cost. He is at his best when he waxes eloquent about the days of revolution when he and his comrades disembarked from the motor yacht, the Granma, ending their self-exile, to begin their violent struggle.
Revolution had its setbacks as when Castro’s force was reduced to three men, with two rifles and 120 rounds. But that did not deter him. Three more years of guerrilla activity saw him seizing power in Havana in 1959. Whatever might have been the designation or title he had chosen for himself, Castro has remained in complete control of Cuba since then. When, last year, reasons of health compelled him to abdicate in favour of his brother Raul, many mistakenly saw the end of an era.
Neither Castro nor Cuba can be written off. The revolution has not crumbled when he was put on a ventilator as his enemies had imagined. The transition was smooth, though Raul is only four years younger to him. My Life is a litany of his achievements and struggles. Though it was Batista against whom he revolted, he considers the US as his greatest enemy.
What transformed him is the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion soon after Castro captured power. He can be merciful to Batista but not to the US which, he believes, made 600 assassination attempts on him. The book is more or less a diatribe against the Americans who ‘even tried to undermine the agricultural wealth of Cuba by exporting worms and pests’.
In between, Castro makes some comments on world events and statesmen, some hilarious, some enlightening, which enable the reader to plough through the 724-page tome. He blames the imbecility of Khrushchev for the USSR’S surrender during the missile crisis. It was President Kennedy’s warning of a full-fledged war that forced the Soviets to take the missiles back.
Castro quotes extensively from the letters he exchanged with Khrushchev on the subject to suggest that it was the “hot love” of the superpowers during the “cold war” that did Cuba in. Itching as he was to fight the imperialists, he was not impressed by Khrushchev’s logic that “it is difficult to say how a thermonuclear war would have turned out. In the first place, the fires of war would have burned Cuba”.
How truthful Castro is when he says “the eyes of many men, Soviet and Cuban, who were willing to die with supreme dignity, wept when they learnt of the surprising, unexpected and practically unconditional decision to withdraw troops” is difficult to say. At no point of time did the world heave such a sigh of relief as when the Soviets withdrew the missiles and a war, possibly nuclear, was averted. But Castro is not impressed.
Nothing seems to have impacted Castro, a beneficiary of Cold War, more than the collapse of the Soviet Union. He blames Gorbachev for putting the nation on a self-destruct mode little realising that the USSR was an artificial construct. Of course, allowance has to be made for his ability to survive even after Soviet tankers stopped arriving in Cuba with cheap oil.
If survival is an achievement, Castro is an achiever. He has figures to parrot about the significant strides Cuba has made. Few countries, including the US, can compete with the island nation in life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, housing, educational opportunities, provided we depend on his words. He calls Cuba a medical superpower.
Under Batista, Cuba was a major producer of sugar and cigar. Fifty years under Castro, it produces nothing but these two items, though in smaller quantities. But that does not prevent him from boasting about how he sent his men to fight other’s wars in as far away as Timbuktu.
Often, fact and fiction merge in Castro’s life. It was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls on the Spanish civil war that allowed him and his fighters “to actually see” the experience of an irregular struggle, from the political and military point of view. “That book became a familiar part of my life. And we always went back to it, consulted it, to find inspiration”. One can only imagine the ragged, bearded, carbine to hand, reading the Spanish translation of Hemingway in the rugged wilds of Cuba while fighting the Batistas.
If anyone gets unqualified praise, it is Che Guevara. His account of dragging the asthmatic Argentinian through the Cuban hills in a downpour with hundreds of government troops in wet, cold pursuit is gripping, though his account of his death in the jungles of Bolivia – incapacitated because a bullet had hit his gun and made it in-operational – is unbelievable. Amazingly, he has only words of praise for Kennedy, who inflicted the worst shock of his life during the missile crisis.
Castro is a relic of a past when Tito, Nasser and Nehru thought they were non-aligned, despite their ideological proximity to the USSR. While the world has changed, Castro still has no regrets that he cheered the Soviets as they descended on Prague in the spring and later on Kabul. While he enjoys providing salacious bits about Clinton’s Monica connection and Francois Mitterand’s lovechild, he does not mention a word about his wives, past and present, and a large brood of children.
The interviewer is only happy to play along, for he is not a detached observer who can ask him tough, uncomfortable questions but a sympathiser, who believes every word of what the Cuban leader says. In the process, My Life turns hagiographical with little light on Castro, the lover, the husband, the father and the grandfather. Instead, we have an abundance of Castro, the revolutionary who can never make mistakes.
*Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet, Penguin, 2007, 724 pages, Rs 795.
(February 01, February, Havana, Sri Lanka Guardian) Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s is the kind of life legends are made of. Son of a poor Galician emigrant who went to war as a replacement for a rich man, he is arguably one of the most charismatic leaders of the world. Given his oratorical skill that has dazzled his countrymen for over half a century, he could have taken to writing like fish to water. Instead, he found a new stratagem – “a revolutionary has to be one up always” – to produce My Life*. He granted 100 hours of his precious time to Ignacio Ramonet, a long-time editor of the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique.
In a question-answer format, Castro encapsulates his life that began on a farm where he remembers that when he was three or four years old, “the cows slept underneath the house”. He grew up watching cockfights and listening to the battery-run radio that gave news of the Spanish civil war and to his father’s bookkeeper who loved talking about Greek orator Demosthenes.
It was a time when “boys are brought up watching violence from the moment they are born”. Small wonder that what strikes Castro most about the Bible are the punishment of Babylon, the enslavement of the Jews, the crossing of the Red Sea, Joshua and his trumpets bringing down the walls of Jericho, Samson and his Herculean strength, able to pull down a temple with his own hands and the Tablets of the Law he learnt from the First Grade as Sacred History.
Circumstances made Castro a rebel. He rues his father’s decision to send him to a teacher at Santiago, who did not give him enough food, let alone any education. There, he was often hungry which he thought was not hunger but appetite. Years later when he read Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, they reminded him of his own days of penury.
Such experiences steeled his resolve to fight injustice. Fulgencio Batista was in power at that time. For Castro and his followers, he was the most hateful, diabolical ruler who needed to be removed at any cost. He is at his best when he waxes eloquent about the days of revolution when he and his comrades disembarked from the motor yacht, the Granma, ending their self-exile, to begin their violent struggle.
Revolution had its setbacks as when Castro’s force was reduced to three men, with two rifles and 120 rounds. But that did not deter him. Three more years of guerrilla activity saw him seizing power in Havana in 1959. Whatever might have been the designation or title he had chosen for himself, Castro has remained in complete control of Cuba since then. When, last year, reasons of health compelled him to abdicate in favour of his brother Raul, many mistakenly saw the end of an era.
Neither Castro nor Cuba can be written off. The revolution has not crumbled when he was put on a ventilator as his enemies had imagined. The transition was smooth, though Raul is only four years younger to him. My Life is a litany of his achievements and struggles. Though it was Batista against whom he revolted, he considers the US as his greatest enemy.
What transformed him is the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion soon after Castro captured power. He can be merciful to Batista but not to the US which, he believes, made 600 assassination attempts on him. The book is more or less a diatribe against the Americans who ‘even tried to undermine the agricultural wealth of Cuba by exporting worms and pests’.
In between, Castro makes some comments on world events and statesmen, some hilarious, some enlightening, which enable the reader to plough through the 724-page tome. He blames the imbecility of Khrushchev for the USSR’S surrender during the missile crisis. It was President Kennedy’s warning of a full-fledged war that forced the Soviets to take the missiles back.
Castro quotes extensively from the letters he exchanged with Khrushchev on the subject to suggest that it was the “hot love” of the superpowers during the “cold war” that did Cuba in. Itching as he was to fight the imperialists, he was not impressed by Khrushchev’s logic that “it is difficult to say how a thermonuclear war would have turned out. In the first place, the fires of war would have burned Cuba”.
How truthful Castro is when he says “the eyes of many men, Soviet and Cuban, who were willing to die with supreme dignity, wept when they learnt of the surprising, unexpected and practically unconditional decision to withdraw troops” is difficult to say. At no point of time did the world heave such a sigh of relief as when the Soviets withdrew the missiles and a war, possibly nuclear, was averted. But Castro is not impressed.
Nothing seems to have impacted Castro, a beneficiary of Cold War, more than the collapse of the Soviet Union. He blames Gorbachev for putting the nation on a self-destruct mode little realising that the USSR was an artificial construct. Of course, allowance has to be made for his ability to survive even after Soviet tankers stopped arriving in Cuba with cheap oil.
If survival is an achievement, Castro is an achiever. He has figures to parrot about the significant strides Cuba has made. Few countries, including the US, can compete with the island nation in life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, housing, educational opportunities, provided we depend on his words. He calls Cuba a medical superpower.
Under Batista, Cuba was a major producer of sugar and cigar. Fifty years under Castro, it produces nothing but these two items, though in smaller quantities. But that does not prevent him from boasting about how he sent his men to fight other’s wars in as far away as Timbuktu.
Often, fact and fiction merge in Castro’s life. It was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls on the Spanish civil war that allowed him and his fighters “to actually see” the experience of an irregular struggle, from the political and military point of view. “That book became a familiar part of my life. And we always went back to it, consulted it, to find inspiration”. One can only imagine the ragged, bearded, carbine to hand, reading the Spanish translation of Hemingway in the rugged wilds of Cuba while fighting the Batistas.
If anyone gets unqualified praise, it is Che Guevara. His account of dragging the asthmatic Argentinian through the Cuban hills in a downpour with hundreds of government troops in wet, cold pursuit is gripping, though his account of his death in the jungles of Bolivia – incapacitated because a bullet had hit his gun and made it in-operational – is unbelievable. Amazingly, he has only words of praise for Kennedy, who inflicted the worst shock of his life during the missile crisis.
Castro is a relic of a past when Tito, Nasser and Nehru thought they were non-aligned, despite their ideological proximity to the USSR. While the world has changed, Castro still has no regrets that he cheered the Soviets as they descended on Prague in the spring and later on Kabul. While he enjoys providing salacious bits about Clinton’s Monica connection and Francois Mitterand’s lovechild, he does not mention a word about his wives, past and present, and a large brood of children.
The interviewer is only happy to play along, for he is not a detached observer who can ask him tough, uncomfortable questions but a sympathiser, who believes every word of what the Cuban leader says. In the process, My Life turns hagiographical with little light on Castro, the lover, the husband, the father and the grandfather. Instead, we have an abundance of Castro, the revolutionary who can never make mistakes.
*Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet, Penguin, 2007, 724 pages, Rs 795.
Post a Comment