Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography

858 Pages·2008·6.86 MB·English

by  Ignacio Ramonet

To Alfredo Guevara
To my children, Tancréde and Axel
ALLEN LANE
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York rooi4,
USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, II Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New
Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New
Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WCZR ORL,
England
www.penguin.com

Fidel Castro: Biografia a dos voces first published in Spain by Random House
Mondadori 2006
Revised edition published 2007
This translation first published by Allen Lane 2007

Copyright © Ignacio Ramonet and Random House Mondadori, 2006, 2007
Translation copyright © Andrew Hurley, 2007

The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book

Set in PostScript Adobe Sabon
Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

ISBN: 978-0-713-99920-4

www.greenpenguin.co.uk
Contents
A Hundred Hours with Fidel
1 The Childhood of a Leader
2 The Forging of a Rebel
3 Entering Politics
4 The Assault on the Moncada Barracks
5 The Backdrop of the Revolution
6 ‘History Will Absolve Me’
7 Che Guevara
8 In the Sierra Maestra
9 Lessons from a Guerrilla War
10 Revolution: First Steps, First Problems
11 The Conspiracies Begin
12 The Bay of Pigs/Playa Giron
13 The ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ of October 1962
14 The Death of Che Guevara
15 Cuba and Africa
16 The Emigration Crises
17 The Collapse of the Soviet Union
18 The Ochoa Case and the Death Penalty
19 Cuba and Neoliberal Globalization
20 President Jimmy Carter’s Visit
21 The Arrests of Dissidents in March 2003
22 The Hijackings in April 2003
23 Cuba and Spain
24 Fidel and France
25 Latin America
26 Cuba Today
27 Summing up a Life and a Revolution
28 After Fidel, What?
Photographs
A Note on the Text and the Translation
Some Key Dates in the Life of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution
(1926-2007)
Notes
A Hundred Hours with Fidel
It was two o’clock in the morning, and we’d been talking for hours. We were in
his personal office in the Palacio de la Revolucion, a big, austere room with a
high ceiling and a large expanse of windows framed with light-coloured curtains
that opened out on to a broad balcony from which one could see one of Havana’s
main avenues. An immense bookshelf on one wall, and before it, a long, heavy
desk covered with books and documents. Everything very neat. In among the
books on the bookshelves and on small tables at each end of the couch were a
bronze figure and bust of the ‘Apostle of Liberty’ Jose Marti,1 a statue of Simon
Bolivar, one of Antonio Jose de Sucre,2 and a bust of Abraham Lincoln. In one
corner, a wire sculpture of Don Quixote astride his skinny steed Rocinante. And
on the walls, in addition to a large oil portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos, one of
Castro’s main lieutenants in the Sierra Maestra, three framed documents: a
handwritten letter by Simon Bolivar, a signed photograph of Ernest Hemingway
holding up a huge swordfish (‘To Dr. Fidel Castro - May you hook one like this
in the well at Cojimar. In friendship, Ernest Hemingway’), and a photograph of
his father, Angel Castro, on his arrival from distant Galicia in 1895.
Sitting before me - tall, robust, well built, his beard almost white, wearing his
ever-present impeccable olive-green uniform with no ribbons or decorations and
showing not the slightest trace of weariness despite the lateness of the hour -
Fidel answered calmly, sometimes in a voice so low that it was just a whisper,
almost inaudible. This was in late January 2003, and we were beginning the first
series of long conversations that would bring me back to Cuba several times
over the succeeding months, through to December 2005.
The idea for this conversation had come up a year earlier, in February 2002. I’d
gone to Havana to give a lecture at the Havana Book Fair. Joseph Stiglitz,
winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, was also there. Fidel
introduced me to him by saying, ‘He’s an economist and an American, but the
most radical one I’ve ever seen. Beside him, I’m a moderate.’ Fidel and I started
talking about neoliberal globalization and the World Social Forum in Porto
Alegre, which I was just returning from. Fidel wanted to know all about it - the
subjects that had been debated there, the seminars, the participants, the forecasts
... He expressed his admiration for the alternative globalization movement: ‘A
new generation of rebels has emerged,’ he said, ‘many of them Americans, who
are employing new methods of protest and making the lords of the world
tremble. Ideas are more important than weapons. Except for violence, all
arguments should be used to combat globalization.’
As always, ideas rushed like a bubbling stream from Fidel. Stiglitz and I listened
in fascination. He had an all-encompassing vision of globalization, its
consequences and ways of confronting them; his arguments, of a great modernity
and cleverness, made patent those qualities that many biographers have noted in
him: his sense of strategy, his ability to ‘read’ a concrete situation, and his
quickness at analysis. To all that was added experience accumulated over so
many years of governing, resistance and combat.
As I listened to him, it struck me as unfair that the newer generations knew so
little about his life and career and that, as unconscious victims of constant anti-
Castro propaganda, so many of those in Europe who were committed to the
alternative globalization movement, especially the young people, considered him
a relic of the Cold War, a leader left over from a stage of modern history that had
now passed, a man who had little to contribute to the struggles of the twenty-first
century.
Even today, and even in the inner circles of the Left, many people criticize,
distrust, even outright oppose the Castro regime in Havana. And though
throughout Latin America the Cuban Revolution continues to inspire enthusiasm
among leftist social movements and many intellectuals, in Europe it is the
subject of controversy. It is increasingly difficult, in fact, to find anyone - for or
against the Cuban Revolution - who, asked to sum up Castro and his years in
power, can give a serene, dispassionate opinion.
I had just published a short book of conversations with Subcomandante Marcos,
the romantic, galactic leader of the Zapatistas in Mexico.3 Fidel had read it and
found it interesting. I suggested that he and I do something similar, but on a
larger scale. He has never written his memoirs, and it’s almost certain that for
lack of time he never will. What I proposed would be, then, a kind of
‘autobiography a deux’, though in the form of a conversation; it would be Fidel
Castro’s political testament, an oral summing-up of Fidel Castro’s life by Fidel
himself at almost eighty and more than half a century after the attack on the
Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba in 1953 - the moment when, to some
degree, his public life began.
Few men have known the glory of entering the pages of both history and legend
while they are still alive. Fidel is one of them. He is the last ‘sacred giant’ of
international politics. He belongs to the generation of mythical insurgents -
Nelson Mandela, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Che
Guevara, Carlos Marighela,4 Camilo Torres,5 Mehdi Ben Barka6 - who,
pursuing an ideal of justice, threw themselves into political action in the years
following the Second World War. These were men who hoped to change a world
of inequalities and discrimination, a world polarized by the Cold War between
the Soviet Union and the United States. Like thousands of progressives and
intellectuals around the world, among them the most brilliant of men and
women, that generation honestly thought that Communism promised a bright
and shining future, and that injustice, racism and poverty could be wiped off the
face of the earth in a matter of just decades.
At that time - in Vietnam, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, over half the planet - the
oppressed peoples of the earth rose up. Most of humanity was still, back then,
subject to the infamy of colonization. Almost all of Africa and much of Asia
were still under the domination, under the thumb, of the old Western colonial
powers. Meanwhile, the nations of Latin America, theoretically independent for
150 years, were being exploited by privileged minorities and often subjugated by
cruel dictators (Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Duvalier in
Haiti, Somoza in Nicaragua, Ydigoras in Guatemala,7 Perez Jimenez in
Venezuela,8 Stroessner in Paraguay . . .) who were installed as leaders and
supported by Washington.
Fidel listened to my suggestion with a slight smile, as though the idea of it
amused him. He looked at me with mischievous eyes, and with a touch of irony
asked me, ‘Do you really want to waste your time talking to me? Don’t you have
anything more important to do?’ Of course I said I really did, and I didn’t,
respectively. Dozens of journalists from all over the world, among them the most
famous and respected, had spent years waiting for a chance to talk to Fidel. For a
professional journalist, could there be any interview more important than this
one - with a man who was unquestionably one of the most significant figures of
the last sixty years? Is Castro not the longest-serving head of state in the world
today?9 As a comparison, we should recall that the same day that Fidel, then
thirty-two years old, entered Havana in victory after defeating Batista’s army - 8
January 1959 - General Charles de Gaulle was being installed as the first
president of the Fifth Republic in France.
Fidel Castro has had to deal with no fewer than ten US presidents (Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II).
He has had personal and sometimes friendly relationships with some of the
world’s most important leaders since 1945 (Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Khrushchev,
Olof Palme,10 Willy Brandt, Ben Bella, Boumedienne,11 Arafat, Indira Gandhi,
Salvador Allende, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Mitterrand, Jiang Zemin, John Paul II,
King Juan Carlos of Spain, Nelson Mandela .. .), and he has known some of the
major intellectuals, artists and personalities of our time (Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Arthur Miller, Pablo
Neruda, Jorge Amado, Oswaldo Guayasamin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Oscar
Niemeyer, Julio Cortazar, Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Claudio
Abbado, Yves-Jacques Cousteau, Harry Belafonte, Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson,
Danielle Mitterrand, Costa-Gavras, Gerard Depardieu, Danny Glover, Robert
Redford, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Eduardo Galeano,12 Diego
Maradona, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky and many, many others).
Under his leadership, his little country (100,000 square kilometres, less than
40,000 square miles, with a population of about 11 million people) has
conducted a very powerful foreign policy, of far-reaching consequences - it has
even stared down the United States, whose leaders have not been able to
overthrow him or kill him, or even jostle the Revolution off its path.
In October 1962, a Third World War almost broke out because of the US
government’s opposition to the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba -
missiles whose function was, above all, to defend the nation and prevent a
second invasion like the one that had been carried out in 1961 at Playa Giron
(the Bay of Pigs) with the direct support of the US military, but an invasion this
time carried out directly by the US, and aimed at overthrowing the Cuban
government.
Since 1960, the United States has been waging economic warfare against Cuba,
and has kept the country, unilaterally and despite ever-increasing opposition by
the United Nations,13 under a devastating trade embargo, strengthened in the
nineties by the Helms-Burton Act and the Torricelli Amendment and
strengthened once again by the Bush administration in May 2004.14 This
embargo has obstructed the country’s normal development and helped aggravate
its precarious financial and economic situation,15 with tragic consequences for
its inhabitants.