Steve Wasserman on Fidel Castro

Posted on Apr 10, 2008

By Steve Wasserman

(Page 3)

The old debate over whether Castro was an opportunist with a hidden socialist agenda, or a social democrat and Cuban patriot forced by the enmity of the United States into accepting the Soviet Union’s help as the price of the revolution’s survival, hardly matters at this remove. It is clear from the abundant public and private record (only some of which has come to light) that Castro always regarded himself as a radical visionary and nationalist whose politics were shaped more by the writings of Marti and Bolivar than by Marx and Lenin. (Even though the revolution’s ideology is today officially proclaimed as Marxist-Leninist, in a speech delivered in East Berlin in 1977 Castro embarrassed his more orthodox Communist hosts by declaring: “I still don’t know to what extent I’m still a utopian and to what extent I’ve become a Marxist-Leninist—perhaps I may even be a bit of a dreamer.” (It is a speech, alas, not included in the “Fidel Castro Reader,” a recent compendium of 20 of Castro’s most important orations. The editors, David Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal, faced a daunting task: Castro, they estimate, has given “more than 5,000 speeches over a 48-year period.")

Castro, of course, was familiar with and admired Marx and Lenin. One did not have to wait for Ramonet’s questions to learn this. In letters Castro wrote while in prison in the Isle of Pines, serving a 15-year sentence for his failed attack on the Moncada—Batista would grant him amnesty after less than two years in jail—he wrote: “Marx and Lenin each had a weighty polemical spirit, and I have to laugh. It is fun, and I have a good time reading them. They would not give an inch and they were dreaded by their enemies.” Castro was enthralled by “the magnificent spectacle offered by the great revolutions of history: they have always meant the victory of the huge majority’s aspirations for a decent life and happiness over the interests of a small group.” He longed to revolutionize Cuba “from one end to the other.” He relished the prospect, vowing “I would not be stopped by the hatred and ill will of a few thousand people, including some of my relatives, half the people I know, two-thirds of my fellow professionals, and four-fifths of my schoolmates.”

(Twenty-one of these early and revealing letters are usefully collected in “The Prison Letters of Fidel Castro,” with an introduction by Ann Louise Bardach, the perspicacious and indefatigable author of “Cuba Confidential,” and an epilogue by Castro’s one-time friend and frequent correspondent Luis Conte Aguero, who fled to Miami in 1960. Others can be read in “Diary of the Cuban Revolution” by Carlos Franqui, the former head of Castro’s Radio Rebelde. An insightful account of the fates of his schoolmates at the elite Jesuit boarding school he attended as a teenager is to be found in “The Boys From Dolores: Fidel Castro’s Classmates from Revolution to Exile” by Patrick Symmes.)

Castro read voraciously in prison, often as much as 14 hours a day. Enamored with history’s radical reformers, Castro was particularly taken with the life of Napoleon ("How generous Napoleon was with his enemies! I have read many books about him and I never get bored."), Kant and Marx ("After breaking my head over Kant for a while, Marx seems easier to read than the Lord’s Prayer.") and Robespierre, whom he considered an honest idealist: “The [French] Revolution was in danger, the frontiers surrounded by enemies on all sides, traitors ready to plunge a dagger into one’s back, the fence sitters were blocking the way—one had to be harsh, inflexible, tough—it was better to go too far than not go far enough, because everything might have been lost. The few months of the Terror were necessary to do away with a terror that had lasted for centuries. In Cuba, we need more Robespierres.”

Yet later, in both private letters and public pronouncements, Castro disavowed terrorism as a tactic of revolutionary war. He was not a nihilist, and he deliberately eschewed, indeed, condemned, terrorism for its disregard of human life. In a letter during the fight against Batista rebuking his brother Raul for his reckless kidnapping of a group of U.S. citizens (subsequently released unharmed), Castro said: “It is essential to declare categorically that we do not utilize the system of hostages, however justified our indignation may be against the political attitudes of any government.” He went on to say that “such tactics would turn international opinion against us. ...” In a radio speech to Batista’s soldiers, Castro called on them to surrender, pledging that “[n]o prisoner will be interrogated, mistreated, or humiliated in word or deed, and all will receive the generous and humane treatment military prisoners have always received from us.” By most accounts, Castro’s practice—during the guerrilla war at least—was as good as his promise.

In his talks with Ramonet, Castro is at pains to emphasize the point (Cuba was, Castro says, the first country to condemn the 9/11 attackers and to express its sympathy and solidarity with the citizens of the United States), and in a remark which seems aimed at the insurgents in Iraq, Castro declares, “No war is ever won through terrorism. ... Neither the theorists of our wars of independence nor any Marxist-Leninist that I know of advocated assassination or terrorist-style acts, acts in which innocent people might be killed. That’s not contemplated in any revolutionary doctrine. ... Ethics is not simply a moral issue—if ethics is sincere, it produces results.”

Castro sought not merely to overthrow a single dictator, but to alter the habits of a nation’s entire cultural and political economy. He knew his nemesis lay 90 miles to the north. He knew he would have to vanquish a notion of Cuba that had lodged itself firmly in the American imagination. This would prove to be a herculean task. Cuba, for Americans, had long been a location of fantasy, of escape and reinvention. After the economic panic of 1893 plunged the United States into widespread depression, thousands of jobless men emigrated to Cuba to seek their fortune, seeing in Cuba, as the advertising campaigns of the time proclaimed, a “virgin land,” “a new California,” a “veritable Klondike of wealth.” The novelist James Gould Cozzens described Havana during these early days of the American occupation, following the defeat of Spain at the close of the 19th century, as being filled with “adventurers, misinformed idiots, knaves, murderers, thieving contractors, corrupt officials, lease hunters—every form of rogue and rascal. It was then the last and worst American frontier, with the ethics and atmosphere of all frontiers; life, depraved and violent; honor, non-existent; and fabulous money loose for the stealing.”

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