My Life by Fidel Castro, with Ignacio Ramonet, translated by Andrew Hurley Published by Allen Lane
KEY POINTS:
In the early afternoon of December 5, 1956, Fidel Castro, then aged 30, and around 80 followers settled down to spend the night on a small hill surrounded by sugarcane fields and woods in Cuba's Alegria de Pio. Three days earlier, they had disembarked from a motor yacht, the Granma, ending an exile that started on their release from prison a year previously after a failed and bloody attempt to overturn the corrupt, inegalitarian regime of Fulgencio Batista. Now, they hoped to succeed where they had failed before.
The group had been resting only a short time when a government spotter plane flew overhead. Then fighter jets buzzed the woods where they were hiding. An hour later, the first shots came as government infantry closed in. Castro's men were scattered in the ensuing fighting. By nightfall, the young revolutionary's force was reduced to three men, with two rifles and 120 rounds.
After three more years of guerrilla activity, Castro seized power in Cuba and, having survived the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis and around 650 assassination attempts, he is still at the head of the small island nation.
Castro is now 81 and ailing. The young man who was caught in the woods by government soldiers in 1956 is still President, but his powers are delegated to his brother Raul. Cuba and the world are preparing for the post-Castro era. It is far from certain the transition will be smooth.
Castro has always fascinated observers. Cuba's continued opposition to the United States, its links with Moscow, his role in the non-aligned movement and the life and legend of Che Guevara, have all vested the country's recent history with a value that far exceeds its actual historical importance.
Yet, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Cuba has become a symbol of a world view and an ideology, a standard-bearer and a standard at the same time.
Ignacio Ramonet, editor of the dogmatically left-wing Le Monde Diplomatique, has secured astonishing access to the Cuban leader. Ramonet tells us, rightly proud, that Castro sat reading proofs of his book following critical surgery on his intestines last year. Sadly, the result of the hundreds of hours that Ramonet spent with Castro is disappointing.
An opportunity to write the definitive biography of one of the world's most important historical leaders has gone whistling. Instead, we have 700 pages of straight question and answer interviews which, not aided by a fairly leaden translation from the original Spanish, somehow succeed in being of limited interest, not an easy task given the nature of the raw material.
To say that Ramonet is uncritical would be an understatement. Occasionally, he poses a more difficult question to Castro, who has ruled a single-party state for nearly 50 years, mentioning that some dare to call the Cuban leader a "dictator", and raising the political repression that has been a persistent feature of his rule. Yet as the introduction makes abundantly clear, the author is a fan.
"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," Ramonet tells us on the third page. We also learn, fairly predictably, that "ideas bubble in a brilliant stream" from this "quick strategic thinker" who is "moved by humanitarian compassion and internationalist solidarity" and "likes precision, accuracy, exactitude, punctuality".
We learn that "under [Castro's] leadership, his little country 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".
We learn, that Castro is a man who in private is affable, courteous, considerate and frugal.
Thankfully, Castro is a good raconteur and not averse to speaking at length about episodes such as the battles in the mountains that led him to power. This breaks up the long, slow plod through fairly turgid Marxist interpretations of world history, sophomoric anti-Americanism and some fairly haphazard analysis of contemporary foreign affairs: "In England, the jails are full of Irish prisoners who had political, patriotic motives."
Castro's account of dragging an asthmatic Guevara through the Cuban hills in a downpour with hundreds of government troops in wet, cold pursuit is genuinely gripping and, in later parts of the book, his thumbnail sketches of other world leaders, are entertaining. Castro's thoughts are also stimulating when he talks about guerrilla warfare.
It was, he tells Ramonet, Hemingway's great Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, that allowed him and his fighters "to actually see the experience of an irregular struggle, from the political and military point of view".
"'That book became a familiar part of my life. And we always went back to it, consulted it, to find inspiration," Castro says. And it is this image - of the ragged, bearded revolutionary, carbine to hand, reading Hemingway in the Cuban hills - that has always clung to Castro and has aided him hugely.
For Ramonet, like millions of others, Castro is not a controversial dictator with a mixed record who has traced an interesting historical course, but the figurehead of opposition to the global hegemony of the US and the other great, related bogeyman of the European left. And wreathed in legend, he can do no wrong. There is, of course, no discussion of whether "neoliberal globalisation" - a nefarious attempt to impose unbridled capitalism on the world's suffering, impoverished masses - actually exists; it is taken as a given.
Towards the end of the lengthy introduction, Ramonet comments on the role of the journalist. "Apparently, some people believe that journalistic courage consists of lazily repeating the 'facts' and interpretations sung in chorus by the mass media over the past five decades," he says, clearly implying that he is of a different stamp. A few paragraphs later, the reader learns that "this ... book has ... been totally revised, amended and completed personally by Fidel Castro".
- Observer
