Steve Wasserman on Fidel Castro

Posted on Apr 10, 2008

By Steve Wasserman

(Page 5)

    Having the United States provide a haven for his opposition meant that Castro could favor expulsion over extermination. This was particularly true after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, which ended in a secret understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union: In exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet nuclear missiles, Washington agreed to end its violent efforts to overthrow or otherwise end the Castro regime. Of course, this was a shift in policy honored more in the breach than in practice and it did nothing to weaken the economic embargo that Washington had imposed on Cuba—an embargo that remains in force down to the present day. But Castro’s revolution had secured a degree of security.

    Geography is fate. It was both Castro’s curse as well as his blessing that the United States was so near. It was easy to banish his opposition and send it packing across the Florida Straits. Or, to put it another way, it is unlikely that, after Castro’s demise, unmarked mass graves will be found filled with the remains of opponents who had been made to disappear. Cuba is not Chile under Pinochet or Argentina under the generals. Or Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Or Russia under Stalin. Those of his critics who have inflated their rhetoric to the Heights of Hyperbole do a disservice to actually understanding the more complicated reality and character of the revolt Castro mounted and the revolution he made.

    It is nonetheless true, however, that Castro, with the indispensable subvention of the Soviet Union, set about creating a police state to enforce an ethic of self-denial and unremitting labor. But nothing worked, neither incessant moral hectoring nor harsh laws. His people, despite the many years of being enjoined “to be like Che,” remained firmly attached to the pleasure principle, with an undiminished affection for American movies, jazz, music and sport. It didn’t seem to matter whether they were workers or peasants, lived in the city or toiled in the countryside. The Russian Lada never had a chance against the American Ford. After years of wearing Arrow shirts, riding in Otis elevators and repairing their clothes with Singer sewing machines, Cubans found it all but impossible to accept the inferior goods produced in the Soviet bloc. Ideology succumbed to aesthetics.

    Nor could the Cuban revolution be exported, as Castro hoped, despite the exemplary work of tens of thousands of doctors and teachers in a score of countries. Only music could; and the music that sold was the pre-revolutionary music of an older, nearly forgotten Cuba whose best representatives had become the invisible men of a decaying, melancholic Havana. Today, in Castro’s closing years, a new generation of Western movie stars, rock musicians and supermodels—from Robert Redford to Ry Cooder to Naomi Campbell—parachutes into the island, seeking renewal and rejuvenation at the fount of its irrepressible libido. Cuba once again is an exotic location for fantasies of indulgence and abandon. Politically indifferent, the new tourists enroll themselves in the service of an old story.

    Some years ago, I attended a sold-out concert of the Buena Vista Social Club, making its debut in Los Angeles’ art deco Wiltern Theatre. With the legendary Cachaito Lopez on bass, the elegant, silver-haired Ruben Gonzalez at the piano, the silky vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer and the sexy Omara Portuondo at the microphone and a dozen other virtuoso musicians, including Eliades Ochoa, the ensemble seemed a miracle, indeed, a resurrection. Effortlessly gliding from ballad to ballad, the trombonist suddenly broke into a languorous, Cuban-inflected melody whose familiar strains were greeted with an audible gasp of recognition from the delighted audience: He was playing, lyrically and lovingly, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The audience began to sing, wistfully at first and then with gathering conviction, the lyrics of one of America’s best-known songs. Whatever else might be said about Cuba and the United States, one thing is certain: It is not yet the end of the affair.

    As for Castro, all things must pass. His early ideals of libertarian socialism are nowhere in evidence. Today it is abundantly clear that Castro was essentially a practical caudillo for whom power mattered above all else. His tragedy: Confronting unremitting hostility from the Colossus of the North, Castro felt himself forced to destroy the revolution in order to save it. His survival was made possible by the Cold War. As he admits to Ramonet, the Soviet Union provided the crucial support without which the United States might well have crushed him. He goes further, speculating: “If we’d won on that 26 July 1953 [in attacking Batista’s Moncada army barracks], we wouldn’t be here today. The alignment of forces in the world in 1953 was such that we wouldn’t have been able to withstand them. Stalin had just died—he died in March of 1953—and the troika that succeeded him would never have given Cuba the support that Khrushchev did, let’s say, seven years later, when the Soviet Union didn’t, perhaps, equal the United States but did at least have great economic and military power.” The price Castro paid was steep, especially after the failure of his bid to achieve economic independence in 1970 by harvesting a record 10 million tons of sugar, a debacle that nearly wrecked the economy and left him in ever greater thrall to Moscow. It was then, as Régis Debray puts it in the second volume of his recently published memoirs, “Praised Be Our Lords,” that a “Soviet starch had been ironed into the criollo insouciance.”

    When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba was bereft: “We lost all our markets for sugar, we stopped receiving foodstuffs, fuel, even the wood to bury our dead in. From one day to the next, we found ourselves without fuel, without raw materials, without food, without soap, without everything.” Castro’s repeated and increasingly feverish attempts to diversify the country’s economy had largely failed. Today the tyranny of cash-crop monoculture remains unbroken: the Cuban economy is, again, dependent on sugar, tobacco and tourism (particularly sex tourism). Chavez’s Venezuela has replaced the Soviet Union as a supplier of cut-rate oil. Meanwhile, the gerontocracy now headed by Castro’s 76-year-old brother, Raul, lurches from one nostrum to another as a hurricane of high-tech mongrel capitalism swirls about his socialist Erewhon.

    His triumph: standing up for the right of small states to resist the bullying and domination of large powers. He was not willing to submit to the dictates of Washington, nor was he always a reliable cat’s paw for Moscow. One has only to examine the roots of Castro’s Africa policies, which antedated his coziness with the Soviets and were carried out independently of Soviet desires throughout much of the 1960s, to know that he very often refused to kowtow to Kremlin orthodoxy. Whatever else might be said of this most complicated and audacious figure, he strode the world’s stage as if his island were a continental power, raising a prophetic voice, decrying the unequal relations between North and South, upholding the right of rebellion and human solidarity, denouncing the despoilment of the environment and excoriating “the profligate, egotistical and insatiable consumerism of the developed countries.” His dream of leading a continental revolution, like a latter-day Simon Bolivar, now reposes in the figure of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. But Hugo, Castro must know, is no Fidel.

        The irony: Had Castro died shortly after overthrowing Batista, his unsullied place in Cuba’s history would have been assured. His work as a revolutionary might have been regarded as fruitful up to the moment when he failed to recognize that it was time to step aside. He was unable to do so. His lust for power and a sense of messianic mission prevented him. What Simon Leys once wrote of Mao’s China can as well be said of Castro’s Cuba: “Nations which do not have the opportunity of getting rid of their geniuses are sometimes liable to pay very dearly for the privilege of being led by them.”

    Or as Bertolt Brecht put it: “Unhappy the nation that needs heroes.”

    As for the United States, Washington’s continuing refusal to award Cuba the relations it is willing to accord other Communist countries—like China and Vietnam—is petulance raised to the level of policy. Cuba’s heresy does not rest on Castro’s Communist conceits. Rather, it rests on its unwillingness to accept America’s hemispheric hegemony. Cuba is neither the revolutionary specter of Castro’s hyperbole nor the subversive hobgoblin of White House propagandists. Castro’s threat does not lie in his fealty to Marxist dogma, but rather in the delusions suffered by planners in the Pentagon, and his enduring example of stiff-necked resistance to American hubris. For in the eyes of Washington’s imperial overlords, Castro’s greatest sin is his pride, and that they can never forgive.

Steve Wasserman, literary editor of Truthdig, is managing director of the New York office of literary agency Kneerim & Williams at Fish and Richardson P.C. Since first visiting Cuba in 1970, he has returned on numerous occasions. Some portions of his essay have appeared, in slightly different form, in past pieces he wrote for the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic and the (London) Times Literary Supplement.

Elsewhere: .

Comments

Are you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig.