Like his model Bolívar, Castro appears in a way to have arrived in his twilight years at the point from which he started; his life has come full circle. Yet it has certainly been one of the most fascinating and controversial political biographies of the last century. If he has become a myth in his own time, this is largely thanks to the United States and – as he once said in an interview – “to the failure of its countless attempts to put an end to my life.” Naturally he will remain a myth after his life is over. Or, as he added with a mixture of self-assurance and delicate mockery: “Should the merit of having fought for so many years against such a mighty empire be treated lightly?”6 Perhaps more than Bolívar, however, Castro has had to assume that he will end his life “without the consolation of public gratitude,” or, if he is lucky enough to receive some, that it will be kept within very narrow limits – the limits of Cuba. There, at least, he has made more progress than his model José Martí. But any such gratitude will not mainly stem from his achievement in leaving behind education and health systems without equal in the Third World, for a population that has doubled since the time he launched his political struggle in the middle of the twentieth century. Nor will it count for much that the mass of Cubans, despite economic hardship and shortages, are better off than 50 years ago – better, or anyway hardly worse off, than most people in large parts of Central and Southern America, not to speak of elsewhere in the Third World. For the fact is that nearly two-thirds of today’s Cubans were born after the revolution, and many of them consider that the achievements have been bought at too high a price. Discontent continues to result from lack of political and material freedoms, uncertain prospects at work and in private life, uncertain political conditions, and consumer temptations that cannot be satisfied within the system.
What does count, and what Cubans are grateful to Castro for, is their liberation from colonial dependence and their ability to lead a civilized life in dignity. That was not there before the revolution. Cubans are a proud people, not at all broken by the hardship that both the US government and, to a large extent, Castro expect them to put up with. Anyone who travels there can see that for themselves. Identification with the revolution is still high among ordinary people, including many young people, and it will outlive the Máximo Líder. One thing Cubans certainly do not want is to return to the old dependence on the great neighbor to the north. The early introduction of the euro as a convertible currency alongside the dollar was, in this respect, also an appeal for help that many European politicians did not understand.
“History will absolve me!” Castro declared in his final address to the court, before he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for his failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. It was during the two years which he eventually served in prison that he planned the overthrow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Former New York Times journalist Tad Szulc wrote in his mid-eighties biography of Castro: “Batista’s rule was so widely hated that it brought more unity to Cubans than any event since the Machado dictatorship twenty years earlier, unity which Batista himself failed to understand and which would serve as the main trigger for the revolution.” “As directed and inspired by Fidel Castro,” the Cuban struggle had two objectives: the “tactical objective of ousting Batista,” and the “strategic objective of all-embracing social revolution.”7
The belief and the hope that history would absolve him became a kind of obsession. But history does not actually acquit anyone: each revolutionary, liberator, or statesman is guilty. And since the court’s verdict is handed down by others who also want to make history, and who therefore are themselves “guilty” of bias, it falls at best to the appeal courts of later generations to pass a more lenient judgment. Are the history books not filled with admiration or sober respect for “undemocratic” rulers, for despots from antiquity down to modern times, in comparison with whom the revolutionary Fidel Castro from the Caribbean appears as rather a small fish? No more than other politicians could he count on receiving a suspended sentence. If it was to be granted him, it would have to be as a bonus of political office. And mercy is something else that history does not know.
There are, however, extenuating circumstances: perhaps, in Castro’s case, the US embargo dating back to the early sixties, the longest, most uncompromising, and politically most senseless economic blockade that a large country has ever inflicted on a smaller one, and which has had the opposite of the intended effect. It did not weaken but strengthened Castro in his politics and his basic principles: “They [the Americans] will see,” he said as long ago as 1980, “that they will never bring us to our knees, that we can resist for one, ten or as many years as necessary, even if we have to live like the Indians that Christopher Columbus found here when he landed 500 years ago.”8 He would be proved right. In the 1990s, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the United States tightened the embargo still further, Cubans were indeed forced to live almost as the Indians had done before them. And they pulled through.
One of the main replies that Castro’s opponents make to his plea for historical absolution is also one of their main accusations against his regime: namely, that he has imposed his will on the people like a patriarch. He has withheld virtually all the individual freedoms characteristic of a progressive society, because he has always believed that he alone knows what is best for his people. “We are working out our own Cuban system, to meet our problems and satisfy our people,” he said in 1967. People had to be guaranteed a decent existence, in which money no longer played a role and the state looked after them, while in return their work would be their “contribution to the good of all people and the State.” That was “true Marxism-Leninism, as we see it, … not Communism as it is practised in Russia, Eastern Europe or China.”9 Again and again, he infuriated orthodox comrades with this kind of revolutionary individualism.
Yet, just as scarcely anyone can refrain from openly or secretly admiring the fact that, despite numerous plots to murder him, he has been able to maintain himself for half a century at the head of a revolution-turned-state, so does everyone also realize that such a degree of autocracy cannot be good for a country. What will happen when the power accumulated over decades in the hands of a single person suddenly disappears, through either abdication or death? It may lead to a rude awakening. For, when the debits and credits are weighed up, it will certainly be apparent that Cuba – despite its much-praised social system – has lagged behind technologically and economically to a depressing degree. And these aspects, so crucial for the country’s future, are capable of developing only in an open society.
When Castro has been asked about what will come after him, his replies have always been vague. Once, in 1998, he told North American journalists: “Nothing will happen, and maybe things will get better.”10 In the early nineties, when Tomás Borge suggested that politicians ought to resign when they reached 60, Castro countered by citing Plato’s view that no one should assume public office before the age of 55 – and, given the advance in life expectancy, he noted with a touch of self-irony that the equivalent age today would be 80.
Such questions are relative, he said by way of justification; they ultimately depend upon the individual’s state of health and whether he or she is still able to perform public functions. For himself, he carried them out with pleasure and a sense of duty. But, he added, “I don’t have the energy I had when we were in the mountains or in the early years after the triumph of the Revolution.” He felt strong enough to go on struggling for a long time to come, “as long as my comrades believe that I’m needed in that battle.” There had been many statesmen in the modern world who had remained active well past the age he had already reached. “My problem isn’t age so much as my forgetting that I’m not 30 any more; that’s my problem. My mind is adapted to being 30, and I’m not 30.”11
To Federico Mayor Zaragoza, former director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), he said in the year 2000, when he was 74:
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I know well enough that man is mortal; and the key to my life has always been never to think about that. When my rebellious character became caught up in the risky career of a revolutionary fighter, without anyone forcing me into it, I also knew that I was unlikely to have a long life. I was not a head of state but a quite ordinary person. I have not inherited any office and I am not a king; therefore I have no need to prepare any successor, certainly not to spare the country the trauma of a chaotic transition.
He repeated the assurance:
There will be no trauma, and no transition will be necessary. The transition from one social system to another has been taking place [in Cuba] for more than forty years. The important thing is not the replacement of one man by another. Once a genuine revolution has consolidated itself and the seeds of ideas and consciousness are bearing fruit, no individual is indispensable, however important his personal contribution may have been.12
To emphasize that others were equally suited to lead the revolution, that he was but one among many, Castro pointed out that there was “no personality cult” around him: “No streets, parks or schools bear the name of living leaders. You won’t even come across official photos.” But then there is no need for them: everyone knows that he is Cuba. The revolution was and is Fidel Castro, and he will continue to be everywhere even after his death. In his lifetime, any public floating of the name of a future successor is purest speculation, and for the person concerned it carries the risk that he will sink into oblivion. That has actually happened to many potential candidates whose names have been mentioned at various times.
For decades the outside world seems to have been waiting impatiently for news of his passing away. The gauge of when this might come has always been his external appearance: whether his latest speech was long or short, whether the pauses seemed to last forever, whether he read from a text or just used notes, whether he was wearing glasses or not, whether he spoke slowly or hesitantly, whether he managed to pick up the thread after a particularly long sentence or intricate idea, whether his voice was firm or brittle, whether his hands trembled, whether his face was gaunt and waxen, whether his complexion was healthy or pallid, whether his eyes still gleamed or looked dull and weary, whether his hair was thin and tousled, his beard strawy and translucent, whether he walked upright or shuffled along, whether his handshake was firm or limp. Stomach cancer, lung cancer, a brain tumor, Parkinson’s, a heart attack: his condition has been diagnosed by a succession of screen doctors, as well as by Castrologists in the diplomatic corps and the press offices. It has been going on for 10 or 15 years, and in the meantime Castro really has been growing old. Whatever the immediate cause of death may one day be, he will certainly have succumbed to exhaustion. “I nearly always live and work at every hour, day and night. Can you lose any time when you are past seventy?” he asked in his conversation with Federico Mayor Zaragoza. “As for my speeches, I have come to the conclusion, perhaps too late, that they should be kept short.” But that does not mean that, when some new infirmity is rumored, he will not again stand up and torture his audience for four, five, or six hours at a time. Things are not going to change, until he draws his final breath.
And when he is no longer there, everyone will miss him – even his opponents. No one really knows what should happen then. Future names are one problem, future policies another. Officially, his brother Raúl, five years younger than himself, has always been considered the candidate for the succession. But even in Cuba no one wants or is able to imagine him in the role of single ruler; he is not much loved and he knows it. He has always been in the shadow of his bigger, and indeed physically larger, brother. Since Fidel had the luck to be the elder of the two, though not the firstborn in the family, the order of precedence did not pose any problems for a Latin American farmer’s son. (The eldest son, Ramón, like Fidel’s son Fidelito, never succeeded in politics and is said to live a secluded farmer’s life somewhere in Cuba, though both he and his sister Juana are also said to have toyed with the idea of leaving the country because of their powerful brother’s oppressive presence.)
A collective leadership is the most likely in the period after Castro, as he himself indicated a couple of times to Federico Mayor Zaragoza: “The succession … has not only been planned in advance, but has already been functioning for some time.… The country’s life will be in the hands of a large group of experienced young people, plus a smaller group of revolutionary veterans with whom they deeply identify.”13 First among the “experienced young people” are Carlos Lage, the deputy head of government and architect of the economic turn following the collapse of the Soviet Union; Ricardo Alarcón, the parliamentary speaker, former foreign minister and Castro’s chief emissary in matters concerning Cuban–US relations; and Felipe Pérez Roque, the youngest of the three, foreign minister and formerly Castro’s right-hand man. Of the few remaining old hands, the most prominent apart from Raúl Castro are Juan Almeida, Fidel’s comrade-in-arms from Moncada days, and General Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, an Angola veteran and, since the execution of General Ochoa, interior minister and a close associate of the Castro brothers. But Castro also has ready a number of other leaders in the Party’s periodically rejuvenated ideological reserve department, in the Politbureau.
If Raúl Castro outlives his brother, he will certainly be part of the new leadership. For the security apparatus comes under his responsibility, and in a period of transition it will be especially important if the country is not to risk sliding into anarchy. Its future cohesion seems to have been assured both by privileged treatment from the Castro brothers and by the activities of militant Cuban exiles in Miami, whose dire threats, constantly issued over Radio Martí, have welded the police and military more firmly together inside Cuba. There are also many in the population at large who have something to lose, however little, in the sphere of social security. Castro may have failed to shape a “new man” in Cuba, but he has built a new Cuban who, though wishing to live better than or as well as family relatives in Florida, has no desire to give up his personal or national identity.
We shall be able to tell from personnel trends which way things are moving politically in a post-Castro Cuba. The options are: either everything continues as before, or there is a further cautious opening under the sole rule of the Communist Party, perhaps similar to the one in China. “We must and shall continue bringing our economic structures into line with changes and prevailing trends in the world economy. We live in a globalized world, and globalization is not only irreversible but will grow deeper still,” Castro’s political foster-son Carlos Lage told the author in 1999, though he left no doubt that the adjustment would occur within the framework of the existing system. “We are not planning any third way, because we are Communists.”14 Castro himself has defined the framework for the changes that he and his colleagues wish to pursue:
We have not committed the follies and stupidities there have been in other countries, which have accepted the advice of European and US experts as if they were biblical prophets… . The madness of privatization did not have us in its grip, much less the folly of confiscating goods from the state and handing them over to relatives or friends.15
Every effort will be made to prevent a neoliberal opening in the manner of Eastern Europe and a return of the all too well-known phenomenon of gangsterismo. Even if the political right in the USA and sections of Cuban exiles in Miami dream of a collapse in Cuba, it should not be wished on anyone. Whether post-Castro Cuba heads into chaos, or toward a transitional model, will ultimately depend upon the degree of rationality and willingness to negotiate in Havana, Washington, Miami, and various European capitals.
In any event, it should be expected that the security apparatus will exert stronger pressure for an indeterminate period. Already in the late nineties, the regime was visibly pursuing an “increasingly belligerent course against all internal and external enemies of the Revolution.” Susanne Gratius, from the Hamburg Institute for Iberoamerican Studies, evaluat
ed this in spring 1999 as “a dependable barometer of rising tensions in the internal political situation”16 – as if the country was already in a process of transition. The government evidently thought it was “exposed to a growing threat from within” and feared that it might “lose control of the situation.” The “half-hearted” opening to the market that began in the early nineties had already “shaken Cuban socialism to its foundations” and undermined the legitimacy of the political elite.
The political spectrum in Cuba has widened, as new space for the Catholic Church and many smaller non-governmental organizations has developed alongside the Communist Party. At the same time, the distance between government and intellectuals is growing larger… . Greater freedom of opinion and a degree of pluralism are emerging even within the country’s political elite. Although there are undoubtedly reform forces inside the Communist Party, they have not up to now managed to assert themselves against the hardliners.
The last Party congress makes it clear, however, that “the united party is by no means a monolithic bloc, and that there is certainly disagreement between renovators and traditionalists concerning the content and implementation of the reform process.”17
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