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Fidel Castro obituary
Charismatic leader of the revolution and president of Cuba who
bestrode the world stage for half a century
Richard Gott
Saturday 26 November 2016 15.04 GMT
First published on Saturday 26 November 2016 12.12 GMT
Fidel Castro, who has died at the age of 90, was one of the more
extraordinary political figures of the 20th century. After leading a
successful revolution on a Caribbean island in 1959, he became a
player on the global stage, dealing on equal terms with successive
leaders of the two nuclear superpowers during the cold war. A
charismatic figure from the developing world, his influence was felt
far beyond the shores of Cuba. Known as Fidel to friends and enemies
alike, his life story is inevitably that of his people and their
revolution. Even in old age, he still exercised a magnetic attraction
wherever he went, his audience as fascinated by the dinosaur from
history as they had once been by the revolutionary firebrand of
earlier times.
The Russians were beguiled by him (Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas
Mikoyan in particular), European intellectuals took him to their
hearts (notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir), African revolutionaries welcomed his assistance and advice, and the leaders of
Latin American peasant movements were inspired by his revolution. In
the 21st century, he acquired fresh relevance as the mentor of Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, the leaders of two
unusual revolutions that threatened the hegemony of the US. Only the
US itself, which viewed Castro as public enemy No 1 (until they found
an “axis of evil” further afield), and the Chinese in the Mao era, who found his political behaviour essentially irresponsible, refused to
fall for his charm. It took until Barack Obama’s presidency for US restrictions to be eased – but by then intestinal illness had
compelled Castro’s resignation as president in favour of his brother
Raúl, who saw in the historic normalising of relations between the two countries. Nonetheless, Fidel maintained his antagonism until the end, declaring in a letter on his 90th birthday this year that “we don’t
need the empire to give us anything”.
Castro’s rule thus spanned nearly five decades, and during the cold
war hardly a year went by without his mark being made on international politics. On several occasions the world held its breath as events in
and around Cuba threatened to spill beyond the Caribbean. In 1961 an
invasion at the Bay of Pigs by Cuban exiles, encouraged and financed
by the US government, sought to bring down Castro’s revolution. It was swiftly defeated. In 1962 Khrushchev’s government installed nuclear
missiles in Cuba in an attempt to provide the infant revolution with “protection” of the only kind the US seemed prepared to respect. And
in November 1975 a massive and wholly unexpected airlift of Cuban
troops to Africa turned the tide of a South African invasion of newly independent Angola, inevitably heating up cold war quarrels.
The young anti-Batista guerrilla leader Fidel Castro.
Castro was a hero in the mould of Garibaldi, a national leader whose
ideals and rhetoric were to change the history of countries far from
his own. Latin America, ruled for the most part in the 1950s by
oligarchies inherited from the colonial era, of landowners, soldiers
and Catholic priests, was suddenly brought into the global limelight,
its governments challenged by the revolutionary gauntlet thrown down
by the island republic. Whether in favour or against, an entire Latin
American generation was influenced by Castro.
Cuba under Fidel was a country where indigenous nationalism was at
least as significant as imported socialism, and where the legend of
José Martí, the patriot poet and organiser of the 19th-century
struggle against Spain, was always more influential than the
philosophy of Karl Marx. Castro’s skill, and one key to his political longevity, lay in keeping the twin themes of socialism and nationalism endlessly in play. He gave the Cuban people back their history, the
name of their island stamped firmly on the story of the 20th century.
This was no mean achievement, though by the early 1990s, when the
collapse of the Soviet Union brought the Cuban economy down with a
bump, the old rhetoric had begun to wear thin.
Fidel was the son of Lina Ruz, a Cuban woman from Pinar del Río, and
Angel Castro, an immigrant from Spanish Galicia who became a
successful landowner in central Cuba. Educated by the Jesuits, and
subsequently as a lawyer at Havana University, he was clearly marked
for politics from early youth. A brilliant student orator and a
successful athlete, he was the outstanding figure of his generation of students.
The return to power by coup d’etat in 1952 of the old dictator,
Fulgencio Batista, seemed to rule out the traditional road to
political power for the young lawyer, and an impatient Castro embraced
the cause of insurrection, common in those years in the unstable
countries that bordered the Caribbean. On 26 July 1953, he led a group
of revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the dictator by seizing the
second largest military base in the country, the Moncada barracks in
Santiago de Cuba.
The attack was a dismal failure, and many of the erstwhile rebels were
captured and killed. Castro himself survived, to make a notable speech
from the dock – “history will absolve me” – outlining his political programme. It became the classic text of the 26th of July Movement
that he was later to organise, using the failed Moncada attack as a
rallying cry to unite the anti-Batista opposition into a single
political force.
Granted an amnesty two years later, Castro was exiled to Mexico. With
his brother Raúl, he prepared a group of armed fighters to assist the
civilian resistance movement. Soon he had met and enrolled in his band
an Argentinian doctor, Che Guevara, whose name was to be irrevocably
linked to the revolution. Castro’s tiny force sailed from Mexico to
Cuba in December 1956 in the Granma, a small and leaky motor vessel.
Landing in the east of the island after a rough crossing, the rebel
band was attacked and almost annihilated by Batista’s forces. A few
members of Castro’s troop survived to struggle up the impenetrable
mountains of the Sierra Maestra. There they tended their wounds,
regained their strength, made contact with the local peasants, and
established links with the opposition in the city of Santiago.
Throughout 1957 and 1958, Castro’s guerrilla band grew in strength and daring. They had no blueprint. Their first aim had been to survive.
Only later did revolutionary theorists develop the notion that the
very existence of an armed struggle in rural areas might help to
define the course of civilian politics, putting the dictatorship on to
the defensive, and forcing squabbling opposition groups to unite
behind the guerrilla banner. Yet that is what took place in Cuba.
Civilian parties and opposition movements were forced to accept orders
from the guerrillas in the hills, and even the conservative and
unadventurous Communist party of Cuba eventually came to bow the knee
to Castro in the summer of 1958. By December that year, Guevara had
captured the central city of Santa Clara, and on New Year’s Eve,
Batista fled the country. In January 1959, Castro, aged 30, arrived in
triumph in Havana. The Cuban revolution had begun.
His early programme was one of radical reform, comparable to that
espoused by populist governments in Latin America over the previous 30
years. The expropriation of large estates, the nationalisation of
foreign enterprises and the establishment of schools and clinics
throughout the island were the initial demands of his movement.
Like most Latin American leftwingers at that time, Castro was
influenced by Marxism – whatever that might mean in the Latin American context, about which Marx himself had little to say. In practice it
meant a warm feeling for the (far away) Russian revolution, and a
strong dislike of (nearby) Yankee “imperialism”. Radicals were
familiar with the historical tendency of the US to interfere in Latin
America in general and Cuba in particular – economically all the time
and militarily at all too frequent intervals. This leftist inclination
did not usually involve much enthusiasm for the local Communist party
which, in Cuba as elsewhere in Latin America (except in Chile), had
always been small and lacking influence. Castro himself was not a
communist, though his brother had strong sympathies, as did Guevara.
‘He led a humble life’: Fidel Castro’s biographer on the legacy of a revolutionary
Castro’s anti-American rhetoric and nationalisation of US companies
soon aroused American anger. The bungled Bay of Pigs invasion, in the
early months of John F Kennedy’s presidency, postponed any possible improvement in relations. US dislike of Castro was reinforced by the
presence of an immense diaspora of the Cuban middle class, based
chiefly in Miami, who had left in a hurry and expected at any moment
to return in triumph. It was not to be.
The missile crisis of October 1962 sealed the hostility. Khrushchev’s
move into Cuba – introducing nuclear weapons (other than US ones) into
an area of the world where the Monroe doctrine was held to prevail –
was widely regarded as destabilising, although the Soviet Union itself
had US nuclear missiles on its borders, notably in Turkey. Khrushchev
was forced to withdraw his missiles after days of global tension,
although not before he had received a tacit promise from the Americans
that there would be no further attempts to invade Cuba.
Castro’s performance during the crisis was less than heroic. The fate
of his revolution was decided elsewhere. The compromise on the
missiles reached between Washington and Moscow enabled his regime to
survive, but the ignominious manner of its happening was to fuel
Castro’s fierce sense of independence. His only success in the affair
was his absolute refusal to permit US inspection of the evacuated
missile sites.
Whether Castro was pushed into the Soviet camp by US mishandling in
the early years, or whether that was where he planned to be all along,
is a matter of historical debate. There is evidence on both sides, and
Castro allowed different interpretations to flourish. Guevara and Raúl
Castro were certainly persuaded of the need to make an alliance with
the Cuban communists, the only party that had troubled to enrol the
country’s black people, and they had great hopes of economic (and
later military) support from the Soviet Union. Yet for the first 10
years of Castro’s regime – until 1968 when he supported the invasion
of Czechoslovakia by Leonid Brezhnev – he fought hard to maintain
Cuba’s separate identity as a developing country struggling to take
its own particular road to socialism. Even when he had taken the
Soviet shilling, he tried ceaselessly to build bridges elsewhere – in
Latin America (to Peru, Panama and Chile); in Africa (to Algeria,
Angola and Ethiopia); and in Asia (to Vietnam – Vietnam Heróico as the Cubans liked to call it – and North Korea).
Although Kennedy had given a tacit promise to Khrushchev that invasion
would never be repeated, the Americans continued to permit
CIA-sponsored attacks on the island and refused to lift their economic blockade, pressurising the countries of Latin America to join in.
Castro was effectively deprived of all contact with the US mainland,
and later with most of Latin America. At first it was just fresh
vegetables that Cubans could no longer obtain from Miami. Soon they
were forced to abandon hope of receiving machinery and technology from
the capitalist world. The oil blockade was particularly damaging.
While the Soviet Union came to the rescue when oil could no longer be
obtained from Venezuela or the Gulf of Mexico, the long journey from
the Black Sea was hardly ideal. Their ships could carry no returning
trade.
For a Caribbean island, rooted historically and geographically in the
sea between the US and Venezuela, it was a cruel blow to lose the
taproot of its commerce. Cuba had had previous experience of a
monopolistic trade relationship, with Spain, its far-off madre patria,
but the Soviet Union was even further away, and had little in common
with Cuba except political rhetoric. The close Soviet link was to have
a serious disadvantage in that it gave Cuba little opportunity to
experiment economically. Guevara had hoped in the early days that the
island might escape from the tyranny of sugar production and diversify
its economy, but Castro perceived this to be an empty dream. Sugar was
the only significant product Cuba could exchange for Soviet oil.
Perhaps Castro should never have made the effort to go it alone. Some
thought the price was too high. The US was, and is, immensely powerful
– and very close. The Dominican Republic of Juan Bosch was unable to
escape US pressure in 1965, nor could Salvador Allende’s Chile in
1973. The baleful experience of Nicaragua, 30 years after the Cuban
revolution, showed that the passage of time had not made the task of
securing sovereignty any easier for a small Latin American state. Yet Castro’s largely successful attempt to escape from the geographic
fatalism that had affected Latin America for so long should not go uncelebrated.
Isolated from Latin America in the 1960s by the US blockade, Castro
made efforts to assist revolutionaries who sought to turn the Andes
into a new Sierra Maestra. The impact was considerable, yet brought
Cuba little political reward. No revolutionary group was able to
repeat the example of Cuba in the early years, and even when Guevara
himself joined the fray in Bolivia in 1966, his expedition was to end
in disaster a year later.
After 10 years in power, safely basking in Soviet approval, Castro’s
policy towards Latin America became more circumspect. When Allende, a
friendly socialist, won the presidential elections in Chile in 1970,
Castro counselled caution. The victorious Sandinistas of Nicaragua
received the same message in 1979. Castro knew from experience that
building socialism in one small, developing country was not an easy
option. Guevara had once called for the creation of “one, two, three,
many Vietnams”, but who was going to fund and sustain them? The large
Soviet economic support for Cuba was never going to be matched in
Chile or Nicaragua.
Castro’s Cuba was an early member of the Non-Aligned Movement, the
first attempt to mobilise the emerging developing countries for a
political purpose. Soon, leaders of African revolutionary movements
were honoured guests in Havana – notably Ben Bella and Houari
Boumédiènne from Algeria, and Agostinho Neto from Angola, in full
rebellion against the Portuguese. Guevara, by touring Africa in the
early 1960s and then going to fight with guerrillas organised in the
eastern Congo by Laurent Kabila, later president of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, also helped to bring Africa into focus in
Havana.
There was a further dimension. For Castro, Cuba was not just a
Caribbean country with Hispanic connections. He was the first white
Cuban leader to recognise the country’s large black, former slave
population and, after initial hesitation, to make efforts to bring
them into the mainstream of national life. Sergeant Batista, his
predecessor, banned from Havana’s top clubs because of his mixed race,
had secured considerable support from black people in the Cuban army,
and Castro took up their cause. His championing of them came at the
same time as the civil rights movement was growing in the US, and this
may have contributed to the nervousness of the US government over his
regime. On an early visit to the UN in New York, Castro stayed at the
Hotel Theresa in Harlem, a symbolic but significant gesture.
Recovering Cuba’s black roots, both in the African slave trade and in
the independence struggle of the 19th century, was a natural prelude
to taking an interest in an Africa still in the throes of
decolonisation. Cuban troops played a historic role in 1975 in
rescuing Neto’s embryonic MPLA government in Angola from the South
African army. Castro displayed a personal interest in the Angolan
expedition, as he did two years later in Ethiopia, when Cuban soldiers
were sent to assist the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The Cubans
helped the Ethiopians to push back the Somalis from the Ogaden.
Castro’s boldness in flinging men and resources into foreign wars when
Cuba itself was under permanent threat of attack was typical of his
style.
The policies of glasnost and perestroika espoused by Mikhail Gorbachev
in the 1980s brought a dramatic unravelling of the Cuban revolution.
Castro was always an opportunist communist rather than a true believer
such as Erich Honecker, the East German leader, yet the two men shared
a distrust of Gorbachev’s reforms. The stability and survival of their
states depended on Russian support, although Cuba, the fruit of a
popular revolution, had greater staying power than East Germany.
Unlike some in the Cuban political elite who appeared willing to
embrace changes in the Soviet system, Castro recognised that they
would lead to disaster. For Cuba, the writing was on the wall even
before the collapse of the Soviet Union after the failed coup against
Gorbachev in August 1991. Castro knew that the US had made clear to
the Russians, in 1990, that future economic assistance to the Soviet
Union would depend on an end to Soviet aid to Cuba.
Castro declared a state of emergency, of the kind that would have been
imposed had there been a military invasion. His political genius was
for improvisation and compromise, coupled with a verbal felicity that
proved capable of persuading people that he was doing one thing when
actually doing another. He now projected Cuba as the world’s first
truly “green” society, with industry powered by windmills, and the
people riding bicycles. It was guerrilla war all over again, with
Castro invoking the spirit of the Sierra Maestra.
Then, before any significant change could be made to the Cuban system,
the Soviet Union imploded, and with it went the extensive economic
network that it had maintained. A form of perestroika had now to be
forced on the Cubans whether they wanted it or not, for Castro’s ally
had simply melted away. Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian leader, was no
friend. He had even visited Jorge Mas Canosa, the principal organiser
of the Cuban exiles in Miami, and he soon removed Russian soldiers
from the island and abandoned most of the preferential economic
agreements that had kept the Cuban economy afloat for so long. Hopes
in the US that Cuba would go the way of the countries of eastern
Europe were encouraged by legislation in Congress that sought to
tighten the economic embargo.
Almost miraculously, Castro survived this period, throwing open the
country to foreign tourists and permitting a dual economy in which the
US dollar reigned supreme. In January 1998, his efforts to secure
fresh international recognition were crowned by a visit from Pope John
Paul II, seen by some as the author of the overthrow of communism in
eastern Europe. Castro’s communism had always been tempered by respect
for the Catholic church, and he had long taken an interest in
liberation theology and in the convergence on the ground in Latin
America – notably in the period of military dictatorships in the 1970s
– between Catholic priests and leftwing human rights activists. Yet
the pope was an outspoken opponent of that trend in his church, and
his visit thus seemed all the more unusual and surprising. If John
Paul had hoped that his visit would help to undermine Castro’s regime,
he was to be disappointed.
Early in this century, Castro’s star was once again in the ascendant,
with a marked improvement in the economic situation and the presence
in Latin America of a powerful and wealthy new acolyte. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, first elected in December 1998, was soon to identify
himself as Castro’s favourite son. Enjoying huge oil royalties, Chávez
was able to finance mutual aid that brought thousands of Cuban doctors
to work in the shanty towns of Venezuela, and hundreds of thousands of
gallons of oil to the thirsty refineries of Cuba. The impact on the
economy was immediate.
Castro was a legend long before his death. The early years of
revolutionary government, with dashing young men in guerrilla fatigues
sporting the then unfashionable beards grown in the revolutionary war,
were romantic, chaotic and exhausting. Castro worked at all hours of
day and night (mostly night), made long and didactic speeches, and was
rarely out of his 4x4, ceaselessly travelling from one end of the
country to another.
Over the years, he calmed down, became more measured, spoke as often
but not for so long. His government became less of a one-man band, and
power was sufficiently decentralised to allow him to travel abroad for
months at a time. The Americans could never forgive him, but he became
a welcome visitor all over the developing world, and notably, in the
1980s and 1990s, in Latin America. Although too long-winded for
European tastes, the best of his full-scale speeches were models of
wit and clarity, well-prepared and delivered with the panache of a
trained orator.
A handful of women found space in Castro’s life, but he always claimed
he was married to the revolution. He had married a fellow student,
Mirta Díaz-Balart, in 1948, and they had a son, Fidelito, but she
divorced him a few years later and went to live in the US. An early
lover was Naty Revuelta, with whom he had a daughter, Alina, and he
was always close to Célia Sánchez, the compañera he met in the
mountains in 1956. She died in 1980. In that year, he took a new wife,
Dalia Soto del Valle, a teacher from the town of Trinidad, who was
rarely seen in public. They had five boys – Angel, Antonio, Alejandro,
Alexis and Alex – named allegedly after his various noms de guerre in
the Sierra Maestra. Outside these relationships he had a son, Jorge
Angel, and a daughter, Francisca.
Castro’s revolution was a remarkably peaceful process, apart from a
number of Batista’s henchmen shot in the first weeks. Some
revolutionary enthusiasts of the first generation could not stomach
the government’s leftward drift, and swaths of the professional middle
class left for Miami, but the revolution did not “eat its children”.
Much of the inner group around Castro survived into old age.
Tensions arose occasionally with the old communists and the island’s intellectuals (who suffered as much from blockade-induced isolation as
from outright censorship), and in 1989 a couple of senior generals
were executed for drug-running. Critics liked to argue that “General” Castro was no different in essence from any other Latin America
dictator, yet such criticism was hard to sustain. He more closely
resembled the Spanish colonial governor-generals, many of whom were
benign autocrats, than the sanguinary military leaders of the 20th
century. Even when his regime was under attack, he retained immense
popular support. His huge personal charm and charisma, and his
political genius, kept him on top throughout: the only force that
could defeat him was the infirmity of old age.
The first premonition of his mortality came in October 2004, when he
stumbled badly after a speech made in Santa Clara. He fractured an arm
and broke a knee, and was for a while confined to a wheelchair. Yet he
kept up a heavy schedule of television appearances, announcing in
March 2005 an end to the “special period” of austerity that had begun
at the time of the Soviet collapse. In July 2006, he suffered a more
serious setback, and formally handed over power on a temporary basis
to his brother Raúl after emergency intestinal surgery. He never fully recovered and was rarely seen in public again. In February 2008, he
announced his resignation as president of the Council of State. The
tasks of government, he said, “required mobility and the total
commitment that I am no longer in a physical condition to offer”. Raúl Castro, five years younger and Fidel’s alter ego since the attack on
the Moncada barracks in 1953, became the new president of Cuba.
Castro is survived by his children, his brother, Raúl, and sister,
Juanita.
• Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, revolutionary leader, born 13 August
1926; died 25 November 2016
--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com
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