The IRELA analysis concludes that this may lead in the long term to a “revolution with no heirs.”131
Castro, who is well read and by no means closed to the world, is certainly aware that for these reasons too he cannot halt the long-term trend toward greater openness. Nevertheless, he still seems to be trying to slow the process down – in line with his longstanding political principle of moving in pilgrim-like stages. In the case of the Pope, for instance, the first step was to go to Rome and bow to the Holy Father, and the second step was to get him to visit Cuba. In this way, he boosted his reputation on the international political stage, brought the Church over to his side as part of the nation, defined its future scope for action, and kept it so well under control that it would not really be able to move without him and the Party. The next step was therefore backwards. Suddenly the limits were no longer where people thought they had pushed them, but were being redrawn by a new round of repression. This is the method he has used for decades, especially against intellectuals, artists, or poets, until it is almost possible to say: “Every good Cuban writer is an exiled writer.”
Pope John Paul II, of course, did not gladly put up with Castro’s political maneuvers: he felt he was having the wool pulled over his eyes, and he said as much. Nearly two years after the papal visit, when a new Cuban ambassador, Isidoro Gómez Santos, presented his credentials at the Vatican, the Spanish daily El País reported that “during the normally humdrum ceremony he received a sound diplomatic ticking-off,” and that “John Paul II vigorously demanded greater efforts ‘to create an atmosphere of detente and trust’ in which the basic rights of each individual, whether a believer or not, would be guaranteed.” By adopting a more direct and critical tone than in his meetings with Fidel Castro, the head of the Church was seeking “to re-establish genuine credibility on the international arena,” which might then permit “a broad and effective opening of the world to Cuba, and of Cuba to the world.” Everything would be “much simpler if Cuba allowed its people new space for freedom and participation.”132
The lack of democracy and human rights has become an especially sore point as civilized countries (a category to which Castro would like Cuba to belong) have insisted on these principles of human coexistence in society. Castro’s shortcomings in this respect have become more clearly recognized since the dictatorships of the Eastern bloc and Latin America passed into history. The fate of a Honecker, Ceauşescu, Pinochet, Fujimori, or Milošević, but also of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, or even the opening of China’s economy by its Communist rulers, confirm how much the peoples of the world have emancipated themselves or are today shaking off ideological constraints. This process will develop in Cuba too.
But Castro has no time for criticisms of the human rights situation in Cuba. In his conversation in 1992 with the Nicaraguan writer and former interior minister, Tomás Borge, he expressed himself as follows:
I am firmly convinced that no country in the world has done more than Cuba to protect human rights. No children in Cuba have to beg or go homeless; no children have to scrounge for a living… . In our country, everyone knows how to read and write. Hundreds of millions of children in the world don’t have access to medical treatment, but in Cuba every child has a school to go to and has access to medical care.133
He further emphasized that Cuba had one of the lowest infant mortality rates and one of the highest life expectancies in the world.
In many countries, there are millions of beggars, women who have been forced into prostitution and adolescents and citizens in general who take drugs… . [In Cuba] those irritating differences between millionaires and beggars have disappeared; no one has to beg here now. People need more than bread: they need honor, dignity, respect and to be treated like human beings… . With the Revolution and with socialism, we have created a sense of solidarity and fraternity… . We don’t have any gross inequality… . Here, our citizens feel that they count; they are a part of society; they feel they have a national dignity and a homeland – something that is very rare and inaccessible to the vast majority of the people in today’s world… . Our Revolution has a characteristic … that very few revolutions have had in all of history: our people have been taught to hate crime, to hate torture, to hate the use of physical violence against individuals, to hate abuses of power.134
Castro traced these ethical standards of the revolution back to the years of struggle. “Since the triumph of the Revolution,” he claimed in a spirit of idealism, “nobody has been assassinated, no prisoners have been tortured and no physical violence has been used against prisoners; … since the triumph of the Revolution, Cuba hasn’t had any death squads or any victims of those illegal methods of imposing order. No people have disappeared in Cuba.”135
In his conversations with Borge, Castro also spelled out his understanding of democracy, as something with quite different origins and a different dialectic from the political system of the Western democracies that expected Cuba to follow their example.
People used to cite Greek democracy as an example, democracy from the classical age of Greek antiquity, which was the prototype of democracy, had 40,000 citizens – men, women and children – and 90,000 slaves.… I think of [José] Martí – Martí never conceived of that form of democracy. I think of Bolívar – Bolívar never conceived of that form of democracy for the Latin American countries. To the contrary, he criticized attempts to imitate the forms of political organization of France or the United States. Those great thinkers of Our America never identified themselves with the kind of democracy that the imperialists wanted to impose or had imposed or are trying to impose on us – and with which they have weakened our societies, breaking them up into a thousand pieces, so they can’t solve problems. There is no real participation by the people in that kind of democracy, because opinions are manipulated to a great extent by the mass media. People’s criteria and decisions are almost completely influenced by advertising, propaganda and what are called “scientific” methods for influencing how people think.136
Castro explained the world of difference between his basic philosophical understanding of democracy and that of his opponents. His position was cogent in that he applied it to himself:
I don’t believe it’s really necessary to have more than one party, either. For our countries, and especially for a country such as Cuba, one of the most important things is unity … which has made it possible for us to stand firm against all of the United States’ threats and acts of aggression. How could our country have stood firm if it had been split up into ten pieces? What is usually called democracy is a mechanism that serves as a tool; it’s a system that includes not only the political but also the economic and social ideas of imperialism… . I think that our system is incomparably more democratic than the system in the United States… . I think that the exploitation of one human by another must disappear before you can have real democracy.137
True democracy, then, could not exist amid social inequality. “Democracy can exist only in socialism. The highest form of democracy will be communism, but we haven’t reached that yet.138
Castro’s political view of the world is based not on parliamentary democracy, but on Lenin’s democratic centralism in which the Party represents the majority of the population, the working class, and makes all decisions in its interests. As Sheldon Liss put it: “As the leader of the party and elected government, Castro, in Rousseauean fashion, believes that he interprets the will of the people, … when society is guided by the dictatorship of the proletariat.”139 Castro therefore denies to the United States the right to sit in judgment, because it uses capitalist ideas and methods to analyze the political situation in Cuba. No one can look at democratic centralism from a liberal-democratic viewpoint and come to an objective evaluation.
If, especially since the end of the Cold War in 1989–90, Castro has acclaimed the observance of human rights as one of the pillars of his “democratic centralism,” the annual reports of A
mnesty International and other human rights organizations suggest otherwise. In 2000, for instance, Amnesty International reported that:
dissidents, who included journalists, political opponents and human rights defenders, suffered severe harassment during the [preceding] year. Freedom of expression, association and assembly continued to be severely limited in law and in practice. Those who attempted to organize meetings, express views or form organizations that conflicted with government policy were subjected to punitive measures and harassment. These included short-term detention, interrogation, threats, intimidation, eviction, loss of employment, restrictions on travel, house searches, house arrests, phone bugging and physical and verbal acts of aggression carried out by government supporters.140
The report estimated at “several hundred” the number of people imprisoned for “political offences;” “some trials of prisoners of conscience took place which did not conform to international standards;” there were “at least 13 executions” for criminal offences, and at least nine prisoners were still in death cells. Amnesty was especially critical of “the absence of any official data on the prison population,” and of “the difficulties imposed by the authorities on access to the country for independent human rights monitoring.” The Human Rights Information Bureau in Havana estimated that in the autumn of 1999 at least 110,000 persons – roughly 1 percent of the total population, with a disproportionate number of blacks – were serving sentences either in prison or in labor camps.141
The actions of the Cuban state against moderate dissidents caused a stir at the summit meeting of Ibero–American heads of state and government, held in November 1999 in Havana. Amnesty International estimated that, shortly before the arrival of delegations from abroad, between 200 and 300 dissidents were temporarily detained or placed under house arrest, and that others were beaten or physically intimidated by the security forces, or prevented from gathering together. When oppositionists tried to hold meetings in the run-up to the summit, or to gain a worldwide audience by contacting foreign embassies, Fidel Castro dealt with the subject for the first time in the presence of the international press, in a television broadcast lasting several hours. By himself mentioning dissidents such as Elizardo Sánchez by name, the Cuban head of state finally recognized before the Cuban public that an opposition existed inside the country. “They were planning a summit of their own,” he said angrily, as justification for the measures against the “counter-revolutionaries.” But his attempt to isolate them misfired. Several heads of government – some discreetly, others more openly – had meetings with an anti-Castro delegation led by Sánchez and Palacios. Spain’s prime minister, Aznar, met critics of the regime in the Spanish embassy in Havana, which was besieged for the occasion by a large number of journalists. And, at the banquet table for the summit guests, King Juan Carlos I also urged a new approach, despite his sympathies with the host sitting next to him: “It is our firm belief that our nations can meet the challenges of the twenty-first century … only with genuine democracy, comprehensively guaranteed freedoms and a deep respect for human rights.”142
But this made no impression on Castro. Whenever anyone accused him of violating human rights and jailing dissidents, he countered by pointing to the social achievements of the revolution. Presumably, therefore, so long as he lived and remained the Máximo Líder, there would be no freedom of opinion, no free elections, and no full economic freedom, such as existed in Western countries. For foreign observers who asked whether there was any chance that other political parties would be permitted, Castro had only one answer: “Parties, different ideologies and objectives? … No, I can’t do that. If it became absolutely necessary, my successor would have to do it.”143
10
Don Quixote and History
He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard. He had fought all his wars in the front lines, without suffering a scratch… He had emerged unharmed from every assassination attempt against him, and on several occasions his life had been saved because he was not sleeping in his own bed… . His disinterest was not lack of awareness or fatalism, but rather the melancholy certainty that he would die in his bed, poor and naked and without the consolation of public gratitude.1
These lines are from Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth, a novel dealing with the last days of South America’s great liberator from Spanish rule, Simon Bolívar (1783–1830). It is a melancholy reflection on the collapse of a great idea. More than once, especially when it draws out resemblances or parallels in the lives of the two figures, the reader cannot help but feel that its author also saw his friend Fidel Castro in the person of Bolívar.
García Márquez is one of only a few people who can really claim to know Castro well and to be familiar with details of his personal life. He tells us: “Many times I have seen him arrive at my house late at night, still trailing the last scraps of a limitless day.” The Colombian novelist is also one of the few remaining friends with whom Castro feels at ease and is able to behave as a private individual, although one can never quite think of Castro as anything other than a public, political person. It is true that, with García Márquez, he has occasionally wallowed in memories of his childhood on the family farm in Birán, but he always prefers to return to his political dreams. “Spain, the land of his ancestors, is an obsession with him,” García Márquez writes. “His vision of Latin America in the future is the same as that of Bolívar and Martí: an integral and autonomous community capable of influencing the destiny of the world.”2
Fidel Castro always wanted to go down in history – first only as an heir of the Cuban freedom-fighter José Martí, then as a legitimate successor of Bolívar and a renewer of Latin America. Cuba was meant to be just the beginning. Nor was he the only one to feel in himself the makings of a historical figure: his charisma impressed his enemies as much as it did his teachers and companions. We should remember that no less a person than John F. Kennedy, writing in 1960 before his election as US president, was convinced that “Fidel Castro [was] part of the legacy of Bolívar, who led his men over the Andes Mountains, vowing ‘war to the death’ against Spanish rule.”3 Kennedy also then thought that the latter-day Cuban Bolívar would help to make the US dominant in Latin America, if he was not prevented from doing so.
Kennedy was certainly the only one who might have been able to steer Castro and his revolution in a different direction, but in November 1963 the assassin’s bullets in Dallas removed that possibility. It is clear that, for all their antagonism, the two men were fascinated by each other. After the missile crisis, there were discreet feelers between Havana and Washington and behind the-scenes attempts to bring about a rapprochement – and we now know that, on the eve of Kennedy’s murder, they were already so far advanced that a public uproar was likely to break out sooner rather than later.4 There have always been suspicions and clues suggesting that this was the real motive for the assassination. An agreement between the ostensible arch-enemies Castro and Kennedy would not only have shattered the picture of the world underlying the unholy alliance of Cuban exiles, CIA, Mafia, and Pentagon reactionaries, who blamed and hated Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. It would also have removed any basis for their holy war against the revolutionaries in Havana.
Castro’s efforts to maintain secret contacts with Kennedy’s successor were unsuccessful. As recently declassified US documents show, Lyndon B. Johnson put an end to talks with Havana and robbed the continent of a political perspective that might have broken down Cold War patterns of thinking. García Márquez recalls how, at one of Castro’s meetings with the US politicians who still frequented Havana even in the darkest days of ideological confrontation, the most conservative among them suddenly said he was sure that no one could better play the role of mediator between Latin America and the United States than Fidel Castro.5
Kennedy, who competed with Castro for the favor of young people around the world, knew the power of attraction that the Cuban held for the Latin
American left and Third World liberation movements – and not only for them. The Cuban Revolution (whose legitimacy Kennedy recognized because of the exploitative Cuba policy of his predecessors) and the high moral purpose with which Castro and his comrades overturned the political conditions on their island also found an enthusiastic response among the rebellious post-war generation of the First World. Weary of the two-faced political morality of their parents and grandparents, young people saw in Che Guevara and Fidel Castro the harbingers of a purer, juster, less materialistic world, and the basis for a new socialist International that many thought should be oriented more toward Mao than Marx. In their eyes, Marx stood for Moscow and the old order of things, for the Cold War and – especially after the missile crisis – the status quo of non-intervention and so-called peaceful coexistence; whereas Mao stood for a new ideological departure and the export of revolution to the Third World, for a “second, third Vietnam.” That was the path down which Guevara strayed, and for a time Castro allowed his foreign and economic policy to be led in the same direction, believing as he did that Guevara was ideologically more developed than himself. But whereas his comrade left Cuba and eventually met his death in the Bolivian jungle, Castro returned to the marriage of convenience with the Soviet Union.
Any export of revolution now took place only with Moscow’s agreement. Logical and ideological support was given only where the major powers were fighting surrogate wars or conflicts – as in Africa or Central America. Thus, Cuban soldiers hastened the end of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa and Namibia, and threatened the US sphere of influence in the Horn of Africa by intervening in Ethiopia; and Castro hoped that aid to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the guerrilla forces in Guatemala would help to bring about another Cuba. But the decade or more of war in Angola, where at one point as many as 40,000 Cuban soldiers were engaged, overstretched Cuba’s economic capacities to such an extent that Castro had to be careful that it did not end up becoming his Vietnam. When the war game grew too risky and costly, and when the late eighties and early nineties brought peace agreements, democratization, and the collapse of the Soviet empire, the modern Bolívar had to withdraw into his Cuban preserve. He now sent only doctors instead of soldiers to the Third World, and carved out an image of himself as spokesman for the debt-ridden developing countries. Nevertheless, despite the economic catastrophe that hit Cuba when its East European allies pulled out, he achieved the miracle of protecting the revolution from widely expected collapse and carrying it into the new millennium without any outside support.
Fidel Castro Page 44
