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By Dayan Jayatilleka
(February 07, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The call from Cuba came this morning, Tamara excusing herself for the early hour to say she had very bad news and I thought Fidel was gone, but no, it was Miguel – my long link, as it were, to him, our father who art in Havana. Dr. Miguel Alfonso Martinez, Professor Emeritus, jurist, pedagogue and ex-diplomat, my pony-tailed companero in his seventies, had died some hours ago and had already been cremated.
The email from Juan Antonio, former Cuban perm rep in Geneva and brother-in- arms, now head of that country’s UNESCO Commission, came minutes later. Sanja was shedding silent tears. A few feet away, in our bedroom at that moment was one of Miguel’s gifts, a CD he had his son record, “El Guayabero” by pianist/composer Faustino Oramas. There were always thoughtfully chosen gifts from Miguel on his visits to Geneva, reproductions of paintings by Cuban artists, music CDs, books. Miguel, a friend of Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan mission to the UN in Geneva for years had been introduced to me over lunch by my predecessor Sarala Fernando, but he was (always) impeccably informed and standing next to ambassador Juan Antonio, murmured that “in Havana we have already heard of the Sri Lankan ambassador-designate who has declared ‘don’t ever expect me to abstain on the issue of Cuba’ ”.
Miguel was one of my connections to the source, to those last Titans and that Promethean Age of History, the ideas and values of which had so influenced my choices and trajectory. He was living proof that it wasn’t all a grand delusion: another ethos, another way of being, another Person, was possible; existed. Preparing for his role in Soderbergh’s Che movie, Benecio Del Toro sat with Miguel who was breakfasting on the top floor of the Hotel Nacional, fished out some old photographs and asked him, “This is you, isn’t it?” They were snapshots of the young diplomats in the Cuban delegation during Che Guevara’s stay in New York and address to the UN General Assembly in late 1964. Che roomed in the apartment building owned by the Cuban mission in which Miguel (at the time, or a bit later, the Charge D’ Affairs, I think) and his family were housed and “fell in love” with Miguel’s two year old daughter. Miguel had missed Guevara in Geneva. He had been sent there to work with Che on his visit for the founding conference of UNCTAD in 1964, but Miguel’s spat with a superior and a bureaucratic delay prevented him from arriving in time. (Prof Jean Ziegler, then a young communist militant who was Che’s designated companion and chauffeur for his 12 day stay in Geneva, completed that chapter, while musing “Che could be cold”). Miguel made it to New York in time for Che. The Commandante’s refusal to take the underground garage and back exit as insisted upon by his well intentioned New York City Police Captain escort after a bazooka shell had been fired at the UN building during his speech, saying “I shall leave the way I came”, adding to Miguel “I must be like Caesar’s wife”; his sardonic wit even towards his security detail and the Cuban diplomatic staff, were the stuff of Miguel’s midnight memories in Geneva restaurants.
|Simultaneously a Cuban patriot, a revolutionary and a broad internationalist, Miguel Alfonso’s was a patriotism and anti-imperialism that few in today’s Sri Lanka could understand, though with the father I had, and my own upbringing and consciousness, it made us bond easily, naturally.|.........................................
“Man, I’m no Guevara groupie”, Miguel Alfonso forewarned Benecio Del Toro. True: he was first, foremost and finally, Fidel’s man. He told us how Fidel’s and Che’s different personalities complemented each other perfectly; yin and yang, while Raul translated Fidel’s vision into practice, giving it material form, organizing the impossible. He had also known Manuel Pineiro (‘Barbaroja’, ‘Redbeard’), the iconic US educated head of ‘the Americas Department’ which coordinated internationalist support, including Che’s missions, and Cuban counterintelligence, and met him a week before his death. In the crucial defining days of the Fidel-Che project, the mid-late ’60s covering the Tricontinental and the OLAS (Organization of Latin American Solidarity) conclaves, Miguel Alfonso was Fidel’s English language voice in the earphones, translating live as Castro set the continent aflame with his oratory. “That was when we were fighting the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Latin American governments, and the Trotskyists all at once…it was terrible!” Miguel would throw up his hands and grin. These days of the 21st century, with almost all of Latin America having shifted to the left under a generation deeply respectful of Fidel, were a massive breakthrough, triumph and validation.
“Wherever in the world I go, including to the United States, I can see the instant impact, the respect I derive from the four letters I carry behind my name…C…U…B…A… and that is because of Fidel and the Revolution!”, he would tell us often. Miguel had lived the difference between pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba, had known the difference in attitude towards Cubans while travelling in the USA as a boy of fourteen and as an adult after the advent of Fidel. Utterly judgmental and never known for flattery, Miguel paid me some of the most precious compliments of my life. He exclaimed that in my Granma essay I “had seen deeply into the mind of Che” and kept an annotated copy of my Fidel book with him, marveling how someone who had never visited Cuba had “grasped the very crux of Fidel’s thought; its moral and ethical dimension”. The translation of my book into Spanish has been delayed also because Miguel wanted to work on it himself, unwilling to trust anyone else with the political philosophy segments, and his tireless travels on behalf of Cuba never gave him the three months he said he needed for the task.
He would quote Fidel often, proud of his leader’s prescience and wisdom, and we would sometimes trade quotes, me finishing what he started. Miguel said that ‘for Marxist theory the most important contemporary problem is to re-conceptualize the Leninist notion of self determination in this period of history, where in Fidel’s words of 1986-7, socialist revolution is no longer on the agenda and the foremost task is the defense of national independence and state sovereignty’. When the episode involving Felipe Perez Roque and Carlos Lage took place, saddening and confusing, Miguel took it upon himself to come to our residence, and pulling out some folded pages, explain what had happened, appreciative of my faith in Fidel.
Miguel was a trainer of gladiators, the finest diplomatic fighters in the world arena. He had taught generations of Cuban diplomats who represent their country superbly throughout the world, combining idealism, tireless energy and professionalism. An Emeritus Professor of International Law, expert in the UN and human rights, he was a legend at the Higher Institute for International Relations, Cuba’s premier diplomatic training academy. Miguel was one of those instrumental in crafting in the 1990s, one of Cuba’s biggest diplomatic operations; a strategic gamble which has reaped rich political dividends each year. This is the UN General Assembly vote, where ever-growing triple digit majorities take a stand against the US economic blockade (or ‘embargo’). Though he couldn’t be in Geneva during the UN Human Rights Council’s 11th Special Session, on Sri Lanka, Miguel followed it keenly and anxiously from Havana, keeping in touch with me, Cuba’s ambassador Juan Antonio and Sri Lanka’s ambassador Kunanayakam. Later, when it was all over, Juan, our partner and ally in the struggle came up to me in the splendid assembly hall with a message he’d received from Miguel who thought the successful Sri Lankan fight-back, mobilizing the Non aligned and its friends against formidable opponents, was something he would like to convert into a teaching module. He regarded it as a model of tactics.
Simultaneously a Cuban patriot, a revolutionary and a broad internationalist, Miguel Alfonso’s was a patriotism and anti-imperialism that few in today’s Sri Lanka could understand, though with the father I had, and my own upbringing and consciousness, it made us bond easily, naturally. Steeped in Western culture and modernity, Miguel’s anti-imperialism was never anti-American or anti-Western. The first book he had read in the English language as a boy was Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and later in the 1960s, as a Cuban diplomat in New York, he moved among the non-conformist intellectuals and artists of that city. He was a friend of the mother of the beautiful Mary Travers of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Married to Portia, a New York Jewish intellectual and former activist who is Cuba correspondent for one of America’s top TV networks, Miguel has three children, a daughter (and fellow academic) from an earlier marriage and two sons, one of whom was discovering kibbutz life in Israel – a fact that stunned a hardcore Zionist lobbyist at the UN HRC who had nicknamed Miguel ‘Mephistopheles’ for his pro-Palestinian (but in no way anti-Semitic) stance and tactics. He was pleased and cautiously optimistic about the Obama victory.
Critically and cynically appreciative of the culture, social surroundings and lifestyle of the “solid, old bourgeoisie”, more comfortable in the bohemian cafes of Europe and the US, Miguel waged guerrilla war against Western hegemony on its own terrain, challenging it from within a culture, civilization and norms of universality. Knowledgeable, self-confident and irrepressibly mischievous, he enjoyed the contest with the world’s only superpower (but obtained the greatest pleasure teasing its trans-Atlantic ex-colonial cousin). Constantly humming Sinatra’s classic ‘Dancing Cheek to Cheek’, (also sung by Fred Astaire, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong) he would give voice to his own modification of the opening line whenever the US Ambassador was within earshot. So, instead of “Heaven, I’m in heaven”, there was pony-tailed, broad, bulky Emeritus Professor Miguel Alfonso, his eyes gleaming behind heavy glasses, singing softly yet audibly, “trouble, I’m in trouble…” while limping in the buffet queue behind the US permanent representative, a ramrod stiff Texan, George Bush nominee and multi-billionaire.
| “Man, I’m no Guevara groupie”, Miguel Alfonso forewarned Benecio Del Toro. True: he was first, foremost and finally, Fidel’s man.|........................................................................................
“I am a product of Western thought”, Miguel declared unapologetically and unambiguously at Prof Jean Ziegler’s home at an intimate farewell dinner for us. Sanja said she hadn’t seen me quite so relaxed, at ease and at home in a long while. It was not only the location, the surroundings (Jean’s book and painting lined cottage in a Swiss-French village overlooking a vineyard) but also the shared politico-cultural community of friends, Miguel, Jean and wife, and the Venezuelan ambassador. Edward Said, writing of CLR James, perfectly situates the space that Miguel occupied: “There is no sense in their work of men standing outside the Western cultural tradition, however much they think of themselves as articulating the adversarial experience of colonial and/or non-Western peoples…Indeed it is worth noting that… James stood stubbornly for the Western heritage, at the same time that he belonged also to the insurrectionary anti-imperialist movement that he shared with Fanon, Cabral and Rodney”. (Said: ‘The Voyage In’)
Pain was Miguel’s constant companion, an old injury causing him to hobble, his knee hurting terribly. Yet he kept pushing himself, maintaining a punishing international schedule, part sensei, part Merlin the magician, whenever and wherever he could be of service to the Cuban Revolution in the global battleground of ideas. Write your autobiography, I kept telling him. Sure, he replied, he already had the title: “Memoirs of An Amnesiac”. I got it: he wouldn’t be going beyond that. A fall in the bathroom, temporary and partial incapacitation and then prostate cancer, but with death he deftly avoided his unexpressed yet discernible fear of a worse fate: life in a world without Fidel.
[Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka, author of Fidel’s Ethics of Violence: The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro (Pluto Press) and Sri Lanka’s former Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, will shortly take up an appointment as Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies/National University of Singapore.]
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