Fidel Castro
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Relations with the European Union, culminating after long negotiations in the opening of an EU mission in Havana, could not have worked out better at the start of Castro’s historic year 2003. But perhaps everything went too well, perhaps everything was too friendly and free of conflict. In a pattern familiar from Moscow, any political spring in Cuba has been followed in the past by a sudden return of the ice – in order to maintain an ideological distance and to prevent a flagging of principles. And, this time too, there was a startling change of direction, at once disturbing and difficult to understand. In March, no sooner had the world’s attention been diverted by the first American air raids on Baghdad than it was reported in the press that 75 oppositional journalists, writers, librarians, and other intellectuals had been arrested in Cuba. Within little more than two weeks, they were convicted as “mercenaries in the service of the Empire” (that is, the United States) and sentenced to terms of 10 to 26 years in prison, which were immediately confirmed by the relevant courts of appeal. A total of 1,454 years imprisonment, as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung pointed out. A few days later, death sentences were carried out on three men who, in another brief trial, had been convicted of attempting to divert a ferry with 50 passengers from Havana to Miami. (A unit of Cuban special forces had intervened to end the hijacking.)
The execution of these draconian sentences was a source of consternation, especially for those in the international community and human rights organizations, who for some time had thought that the Cuban state was willing to deal more leniently with critics and to forego applying the death penalty. Recent condemnations of Cuba by these institutions have turned out to be correspondingly moderate. The European Union, in particular, was largely agreed that Havana did not actually need to resort to such measures, because the people in question did not pose any real danger to the system and the government. There was also the unsavory detail that the groups in which the dissidents circulated had without exception been infiltrated by state security agents working in the respective professions, who had pretended to be dissidents, or even published material as “journalists “ on the Internet, and were now fêted as heroes by the government. Criticism poured in from all sides, including from people friendly or generally well-disposed to the regime. Many deplored what had been done, seeing it as an expression not of strength but of weakness and lack of confidence. Those who, against strong resistance, had managed to break down aversions abroad and to promote a rapprochement with Cuba now saw themselves as having been duped and robbed of the fruits of their patient, well-meaning labor.
Castro could not have given the United States a better present. The Bush administration immediately announced a further intensification of sanctions, and the EU scarcely had any choice but to react accordingly. In a statement categorically demanding the release of the prisoners, Brussels announced that no more ministers or high government officials from the EU should travel to Cuba until the human rights situation had improved. Cultural exchanges were also to be frozen, and in future dissidents would be included on the guest list for embassy functions. Economic sanctions, on the other hand, were explicitly ruled out. These altogether moderate sanctions, necessary for the EU to save face, sparked a furious reaction in Havana. A crowd of hundreds of thousands, headed by Castro himself, marched to protest against the measures in front of the embassies of EU countries (most notably, Spain and Italy). The EU’s decision to include dissidents on embassy guest lists so infuriated the Cuban leadership that it announced for its part that it would not send government representatives to any official event to which critics of the regime had also been invited.
The disproportionate Cuban response during this period, against internal opponents as well as criticism from outside, started a guessing-game as to whether something more might lie behind it. There was even hushed speculation that dramatic events might be in the offing, and that the Cuban leadership was trying to intimidate or lock away critics of the regime as a precautionary measure. Again and again there have been rumors of this kind. But in 2003 crystal-ball gazers were even whispering that Castro might soon hand over his official duties to a successor and retire into old age as the superintendent father of the revolution.
It is possible that more was involved than one was initially prepared to believe. After all, Cuba could not afford the conflict with the European Union, either politically or economically; and closure of the EU mission in Havana, which was also within the realm of possibility, would have caused almost irreparable longterm damage. Or was the Cuban behavior simply provoked by covert action on the part of the “arch-enemy,” going beyond the bounds of the acceptable? Already in January 2003 there was much evidence of such activity: diplomatic and journalistic circles were increasingly speaking of provocations by the US mission in Havana, which had gone far beyond what was customary in international diplomacy, with the intention of sooner or later forcing the Cubans to respond. Journalists did not even exclude the possibility that James Cason, head of the United States Interests Section, would be expelled from Havana, since he had the appearance of being not so much a diplomat as a representative of the hardline anti-Castro Mafia in Miami.
Wayne Smith, a Cuba expert who had himself been head of the Interests Section in Havana during the Carter era, seemed to share this view. Although he too deplored the Cuban reaction and evidently considered it overdone, he wrote in an article that appeared in The Nation on May 12, 2003:
Why the crackdown? In part, it was a reaction to growing provocations on the part of the Bush Administration, which had ordered the new chief of the US Interests Section, James Cason, to hold a series of high-profile meetings with dissidents, even including seminars in his own residence in Havana. Given that Cason’s announced purpose was to promote “transition to a participatory form of government,” the Cubans came to see the meetings as subversive in nature and as highly provocative. And, in fairness, let us imagine the reaction of the Attorney General and the Director of Homeland Security if the chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington was holding meetings with disgruntled Americans and announcing that the purpose was to bring about a form of government – a socialist government – in the United States. He would have been asked to leave the country.
Smith also referred to the character of US propaganda over the previous months, in which Cuba, without any supporting evidence, had been labeled part of the “axis of evil.” Equally unproven was the claim that Cuba had been producing biological weapons and was therefore a potential threat to the United States. All this, Smith argued, following the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, naturally raised the question: “Who knows? We may be next.”
Nevertheless, Cuba’s harsh response landed it in the same deadend as in previous decades. Familiar low-level provocations were met with knee-jerk reactions that betrayed a lack of self-confidence and command of the situation, as well as threatening to forfeit the sympathy of well-wishers. It is striking, however, that the UN Commission on Human Rights has avoided outright condemnation of recent Cuban policies and remained content, as in 2002, to demand that Cuba allow a human rights representative to visit the country. In any event, it would harm the cause of dissidents to allow oneself unthinkingly to be used for the aims of a US government which, not for the first time, has played a cynical game with innocently trusting critics of the regime and, together with the Cuban state apparatus, turned them into martyrs. In this connection Osvaldo Payá, who has been left untouched by the Cuban authorities, stressed in his criticism of the arrests and jail sentences that he rejected any US financial support for Cuban dissidents.
It was thought that Castro had for some time been above such games, that he was prepared to give up his pathological fixation on the United States and to turn his gaze towards Europe, the homeland of his ancestors. Thus, when the Americans decided to intern more than 600 Taliban fighters from Afghanistan at Guantánamo in eastern Cuba (where the US has run a Marine base for the past 100 years under an agreement with Cuba that is extremely qu
estionable in international law and has never been recognized by the Castro regime), everyone expected loud protests from Havana. But, instead, the Cubans reacted in an unusually calm and quick-witted manner, asking Washington to allow their famously well-trained doctors to provide the prisoners with medical care under the law.
And so, the wheel turned full circle in the anniversary year of 2003, insofar as things were the same as before. David against Goliath. While the Europeans to a large extent (including on the issue of dissidents) hoped for “change through rapprochement,” and while the Americans fine-tuned an embargo that could hardly be tuned any further, Castro soldiered on largely unimpressed by all the hostility shown towards him, in the hope that posterity would reward him for an ascetic life devoted to the revolution. “History will absolve me,” he confidently asserted in October 1953, when he was sentenced for the attack on the Moncada Barracks. It remains to be seen whether it will absolve him. But, with or without absolution, one thing is certain: he will go down in history as one of the few revolutionaries who remained true to his principles.
Volker Skierka
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The Heroic Myth
“One thing is certain: wherever he may be, however and with whomever, Fidel Castro is there to win. I do not think anyone in this world could be a worse loser. His attitude in the face of defeat, even in the slightest events of daily life, seems to obey a private logic: he will not even admit it, and he does not have a moment’s peace until he manages to invert the terms and turn it into a victory.”1 The man who wrote these words is the writer Gabriel García Márquez, a longstanding friend of the Máximo Líder. They give us some idea of what may have driven Fidel Castro for more than half a century to outlast his various enemies, opponents and critical friends: namely, a wish to be proved right, to be morally as well as politically victorious. No self-doubt: “his” Cuba for the Cubans! The final verdict on his “mission” would rest with history alone – although Castro also tried from the beginning to keep the last word for himself and to anticipate the verdict of history. In 1953, at his trial for the abortive attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba which launched his career as a professional revolutionary, he concluded his famous defense plea with the certainty: “History will absolve me!” For García Márquez, “he is one of the great idealists of our time, and perhaps this may be his greatest virtue, although it has also been his greatest danger.”2 Yet an even greater danger has always been lurking in the background: the danger of isolation. For only in isolation is there no possibility of contradiction.
With an iron will Castro has survived generations of American presidents, Soviet general secretaries, international leaders of states and governments, democrats and potentates, until he has become by far the longest-ruling “number one” of the twentieth century and one of the most interesting figures of contemporary history. Bearded, always dressed in his green uniform, a hero and object of hate in one: this is how the world knows him. Against no one else are so many murder plots supposed to have been hatched. Leaders who are so unyielding, so “unpolitical” in their refusal to compromise, do not usually survive for long in that part of the world; they tend to be overthrown or killed. The fact that Castro is still alive is little short of a miracle. It is due to the alliance of his own well-trained instinct with a ubiquitous security apparatus that is considered among the most efficient in the world. From soon after his twentieth birthday Castro had assassins and conspirators on his trail: political gangsters at Havana University in the late 1940s, henchmen of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, traitors in his own ranks, big landowners evicted during the Castroite revolution in 1959, Cuban exiles in Florida working hand in hand with the CIA and the Mafia. Their bosses, most notably the legendary Meyer Lansky, lost a fortune estimated at more than US100 million in hotels, clubs, casinos, brothels and other such establishments – a good tenth of the value of US assets taken over by the Cuban state. That a stubborn farmer’s son from the underdeveloped east of the island simply came and took away this lucrative paradise and sink of iniquity from the fine, upstanding United States; that he went on to humiliate the “Yankees” and President Kennedy in the eyes of the world when they attempted an invasion with exiled Cuban mercenaries in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs; that Soviet nuclear missiles installed for his sake in Cuba nearly led in 1962 to a third world war – these deep narcissistic wounds will never be forgiven, even after his death, by the great power to the north.
There are scarcely any photos that show Castro laughing. Yet the Cubans are a spirited people full of joie de vivre. Gabriel García Márquez described Castro as “one of the rare Cubans who neither sing nor dance.”3 He is said to have a good sense of humor – but it is as if he has forbidden himself any public display of laughter or pleasure. Such things are secret, and it is a state secret whether there is a private Castro behind the political Castro. Information about himself and his family is filtered for public consumption, becoming partly contradictory or inaccurate. On the whole, then, not much can be gleaned about his personal life. We know that his marriage came to an early end, that he had a few passionate affairs such as those with Natalia Revuelta (once the most captivating woman in Havana) and Marita Lorenz (a German captain’s beautiful daughter who was later contracted by the CIA to assassinate him). He has one son from his marriage, Fidelito, a nuclear scientist with a doctorate, as well as several children born out of wedlock and a host of grandchildren. In each case, so it is said, he is a kind yet strict father or grandfather – yet Alina, his daughter by Natalia Revuelta, keeps tormenting him with her hatred. It is well known that Castro likes to go swimming and diving; that he enjoys baseball, sleeps little and has a mania for working at night; that he had to give up smoking cigars for health reasons; that he lives an ascetic existence with few material demands, but is fond of ice cream and likes to cook spaghetti for himself. When García Márquez once found him in a melancholic mood and asked what he would most like to do at that moment, Castro astonished his friend with the answer: “Just hang around on some street corner.”4 Did he ever think that perhaps he ought to have become a baseball player? He certainly had the opportunity. For in his student days, he was such a good pitcher that the New York Giants offered him a professional contract. Had he accepted, part of world history would have taken a different course.
Instead, this son of a big landowner from eastern Cuba felt called to lead a handful of comrades – including the Argentinean Che Guevara, later deified as a pop icon of the sixties generation – in a movement to bring down the dictator Batista. Since 1959 Castro has ruled his people like a large family, with the stern hand of a patriarch. The whole island is his “latifundium.” He wants to be seen not as its owner, however, but as its trustee. Under his rule, sweeping reforms have made Cuba’s health and education systems unparalleled in Latin America and beyond; and for the first time Cubans have been able to develop a national identity, even maintaining it through a period of political and economic dependence upon the Soviet Union. These achievements, and not just the ever-present straitjacket of state security, may be one of the reasons why Castro’s system has been able to last so long despite its lack of democratic and material freedoms. For decades now the majority of Cubans have lived with a split mentality: on the one hand, a love–hate relationship with the United States and a longing for the life conjured up by the glitter of Western globalization; on the other hand, admiration and respect for Fidel as their patron even in times of greatest hardship.
Although Fidel Castro seems to have taken more after his father, we should not underestimate the influence that his mother’s strict Catholicism and his long years at a Jesuit boarding school had upon his essential character. It is no accident that he has repeatedly drawn parallels between early Christianity and his understanding of socialism, even if he has long been in conflict with the official Church. In this way, he has over the years developed an “ideology” of his own that involves more than just the adoption of Soviet-style Communism. His Cari
bbean model of socialism is “Castroism,” or, as Cubans say, “Fidelism” – a pragmatic mixture of a little Marx, Engels and Lenin, slightly more Che Guevara, a lot of José Martí, and a great deal indeed of Fidel Castro. Martí was the Cuban fighter who, in the late nineteenth century, launched the decisive struggle for the country’s independence from Spain; Castro identified with him from early youth and always saw himself in the role of his heir and descendant. “He knows the 28 volumes of Martí’s work thoroughly,” writes García Márquez, “and has had the talent to incorporate his ideas into the bloodstream of a Marxist revolution.”5 Martí, who was killed in the early months of war in 1895, was spared from seeing how the United States eventually intervened and, after the Spanish defeat in 1898, established its own dominance over the island. But on the day he died, he wrote with great concern to a friend: “Belittlement by a mighty neighbor who does not really know us is the worst danger for our American continent.”6 Precisely this is the deeper cause of the Cuban–American and indeed the Latin American dilemma, and it will remain such after Castro himself has departed from the scene.