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Castro’s legacy: how the revolutionary inspired and appalled the world
The man who led a revolution and strode the world stage for half a
century left Cuba with free healthcare, food shortages – and not a
single street in his name
Rory Carroll and Jonathan Watts in Havana
Saturday 26 November 2016 05.50 GMT
Last modified on Saturday 26 November 2016 19.03 GMT
No street bears his name and there is not a single statue in his
honour but Fidel Castro did not want or need that type of recognition.
From tip to tip, he made Cuba his living, breathing creation.
Children in red neckerchiefs scampering to free schools, families
rationing toilet paper in dilapidated houses, pensioners enjoying free
medical treatment, newspapers filled with monotonous state propaganda:
all in some way bear the stamp of one man.
Historians will debate Castro’s legacy for decades to come but his revolution’s accomplishments and failures are on open display in
today’s Cuba, which – even with the reforms of recent years – still
bears the stamp of half a century of “Fidelismo”.
The “maximum leader” was a workaholic micro-manager who turned the Caribbean island into an economic, political and social laboratory
that has simultaneously intrigued, appalled and inspired the world.
“When Fidel took power in 1959 few would have predicted that he would
be able to so completely transform Cuban society, upend US priorities
in Latin America and create a following of global proportions,” said
Dan Erikson, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank and
author of The Cuba Wars.
The most apparent downside of his legacy is material scarcity. For
ordinary Cubans things tend to be either in short supply, such as
transport, housing and food, or prohibitively expensive, such as soap,
books and clothes.
These problems have persisted since Fidel handed the presidency to his
brother Raúl in 2008. Despite overtures to the United States and
encouragement of micro businesses since then, the state still controls
the lion’s share of the economy and pays an average monthly wage of
less than £15. This has forced many to hustle extra income however
they can, including prostitution and low-level corruption. The lucky
ones earn hard currency through tourism jobs or receive dollars from
relatives in Florida.
Cubans are canny improvisers and can live with dignity on a
shoestring, but they yearn for conditions to ease. “We want to buy
good stuff, nice stuff, like you do in your countries,” said Miguel,
20, gazing wistfully at Adidas runners on a store on Neptuno street.
Castro blamed the hardship on the US embargo, a longstanding,
vindictive stranglehold which cost the economy billions. However, most
analysts and many Cubans say botched central planning and stifling
controls were even more ruinous. “They pretend to pay us and we
pretend to work,” goes the old joke.
Thanks to universal and free education and healthcare, however, Cuba
boasts first-world levels of literacy and life expectancy. The
comandante made sure the state reached the poorest, a commitment
denied to many slum-dwellers across Latin America.
Idealism sparkles in places such as Havana’s institute for the blind
where Lisbet, a young doctor, works marathon shifts. “We see every
single one of the patients. It’s our job and how we contribute to the revolution and humankind.”
Castro continued to hold a place in people’s hearts and minds despite
largely withdrawing from public life in the last decade of his life. Increasingly infirm, he mostly tended his garden in Zone Zero (the
high security district of Havana), rebutted frequent premature rumours
of his death with photographs showing him holding the latest edition
of the state-run newspaper Granma, and wrote the occasional column,
including grumpy criticism of Cuba’s drift towards market economics
and reconciliation with the United States.
But his influence was clearly on the wane. Although he met Pope
Francis in 2015, he spent a lot more time with his plants than with
national and global power brokers. Even before his death, he had
become more of a historical than a political figure.
“Fidel was the dominant figure for decades, but Raúl has been calling
the shots,” observed a European diplomat based in Havana, who
predicted the death would have more symbolic than political
significance. “Has his presence been a block to reforms? Possibly.
There could be an impact on young Cubans, but we won’t see a huge
shift of Cuban politics after Fidel’s death. More significant would be
if Raúl dies because he put his leadership on the line for reform.”
Cuba had already begun the move away from Fidel’s era in a similar
series of gradual steps to that taken in China after the the death of
Mao Zedong or Vietnam after the demise of Ho Chi Minh.
Under the Economic Modernisation Plan of 2010, the state shed 1m jobs,
and opened opportunities for small private business, such as paladares
– family-run restaurants – and casas particulares, or home hotels.
Farmers have been given more autonomy and price incentives to produce
more food. The government has eased overseas travel restrictions,
loosened pay ceilings, ended controls on car sales and tied up with
overseas partners to build a new free-trade zone at the former
submarine base in Mariel. The biggest changes have been in the
diplomatic sphere, where Cuba strengthened ties with the Vatican and
signed a historic accord with the United States to ease half a century
of cold war tension.
But this is still an island shaped more by Fidel Castro than any other
man. Wander up the marble steps at the centre of Revolution Square and
stand where Castro used to give his marathon orations to an audience
of more than a million and you can still see just how much the
revolution he led reshaped the country. On one side are the giant
profiles – illuminated at night – of his two lieutenants: Che Guevara
on the ministry of the interior and Camilo Cienfuegos across the
facade of the communications ministry.
In the distance, you can see the tower blocks that were formerly the headquarters of major US corporations such as ITT and General Electric
but were nationalised under Castro, and hotels such as the Havana
Libre, which were once owned by US mobsters but later turned over to
the state.
Part of Cuba’s charm for tourists – and the curse for many locals – is that it is all too easy to remember what life here was like in the
early days of the revolution because the city has barely move on in
the subsequent half century. Thanks to the economic embargo imposed by
the United States, Castro’s Cuba became a time capsule. Despite a
partial facelift ahead of Pope Francis’s visit in 2015, many streets
are still lined by crumbling colonial facades and potted by holes that
look like they have been there for decades.
The former mafia hotels have had little more than a lick of paint
since they were frequented by mobsters like Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. And, of course, classic cars from the 1950s – Buicks, Chryslers, Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets – still cruise the Malecón.
Close to Revolution Square is the run-down La Timba neighbourhood,
where a young Fidel Castro cut his teeth as a lawyer defending the
local community of shanty-home dwellers against eviction by
developers. Juvelio Chinea, an elderly resident, said the changes
brought by the revolution in his own life had been modest, but his
sons and grandsons had been able to attend university – the first
generations in their family to be able to do so.
Chinea recalls hearing the comandante’s speeches from inside his home.
The 21-gun salute used to crack the walls and shake the cutlery. There
would be singing and shouting from the crowd, then a hush as Castro
started speaking. “Some speeches were better than others,” he
remembers. “I wish he could have stayed in power longer.”
Not everyone is so sure about that. At the law department in Havana
University, where Castro studied from 1945, there is admiration for
the country’s former leader, but many believe he held back
development.
“The best thing Fidel did for Cuba was to give us free healthcare at
the level of a first world nation,” said one student. “The worst thing
is that economic change has been delayed. If Fidel and Raúl had acted
earlier, many of today’s problems would already have been solved.”
The student dreams of starting his own private law firm but that is
not yet possible, he says, “because the government prefers to keep
lawyers and courts under control” so he is thinking of joining his
brother, who moved recently to the United States. Nonetheless, he is
proud of his country’s and his university’s history. “It’s great that this school was where an icon like Fidel studied.”
That many still feel affection for “El Jefe Máximo” despite his
ruinous economic policies is because he is judged more for his
nationalist triumphs than his communist failures. Castro’s main
inspiration was not Karl Marx, but José Martí, the 19th-century Cuban independence hero. While the latter fought to eject Spanish
colonisers, Castro ended US neo-imperialist rule by kicking out US
corporations and gangsters. The former banana republic is now proudly sovereign.
Camilo Guevara, the son of Castro’s comrade-in-arms Ernesto “Che” Guevara, said these achievements were secure despite the recent
overtures from Washington.
“The revolutionaries changed the status quo and established a base for
this nation that is independent, sovereign, progressive and
economically sustainable. That’s how we got where we are,” he said at
the Che Guevara Institute, which is dedicated to maintaining the
ideological legacy of his father’s generation.
The message is driven home at the Museum of the Revolution, where the
trophies of the early Castro era are prominently displayed outside the
building that was once the presidential palace. Here you find the
Granma yacht, on which Castro and 81 fellow revolutionaries sailed
from Mexico in 1956 to begin the war against the US-backed
dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Here too is the engine of the US
U-2 spy plane that was shot down in 1962 during the Cuban missile
crisis. Inside, the exhibits and photographs ram home how this small
island, under Castro’s leadership, defied the Yankee superpower
despite the threat of nuclear annihilation.
For many elderly Cubans, that was a terrifying, thrilling time to be
alive and they remain grateful to Castro for guiding them through it.
Frank López, a retired teacher, speaks fondly of that early era under
the comandante. “It was frightening. The US jets would fly low and
fast above the city, shattering the windows with their noise. We were
all trained to use rifles and machine guns and would have to do drills
every night. But in the end, nothing happened and we all went back to
school. People should stand up to the US more often.”
But he is not dewy-eyed about Castro. Although he admires the early
healthcare and education reforms, he also recalls the economic
hardships and the intrusive, suspicious state security apparatus. At
one point, he was placed under surveillance for six years because a
friend had plotted against Castro. These days, a bigger problem is
making ends meet in the face of shortages of basic foodstuffs. “We
must all do other work to get by. It’s been like that for more than 20 years,” he says. “So while we say thank you to the revolution for the education and healthcare, we also ask how much longer we have to keep
saying thank you.”
While Castro became a figurehead for revolutionary armed struggle
throughout and beyond Latin America, the former guerrilla was far from universally popular in his home country once he turned his hand to
government. Property appropriations, restrictions on religion and
crackdowns on suspected enemies left many, particularly in the old
middle class, hating him – a sentiment that has spanned the
generations.
As a child, Antonio Rodiles said he rebelled after learning his
mother’s property had been confiscated and a cousin executed as a
suspected CIA agent. “They used to tell me ‘Fidel is your daddy’. I replied ‘No, he’s not’. I hated them for forcing me to do things. As I grew up I realised this kind of system is not natural,” he recalls.
Today, he heads the opposition group Citizen Demand for Another Cuba
and is often arrested and beaten. “Fidel has left a shadow over Cuba.
His legacy is terrible. He destroyed families, individuals and the
structure of society.”
Similarly, Rosa María Payá grew up watching her father fight against
and suffer from a system that tolerated little dissent. Oswaldo Payá
was a leading campaigner for free elections who was imprisoned first
for his religious beliefs and then for his political campaigns. He
died in a car accident in 2014. Rosa María believes he was forced off
the road by the government agents who were following him. She said the
Castros have left a legacy of tyranny that is unchanged despite the
cosmetic reforms and diplomatic deals of recent years.
“The Cuban people haven’t had a choice since the 1950s,” she says. “My father spent three years in a forced labour camp because he was
Catholic. Others were imprisoned with him because they were
homosexuals or dressed the ‘wrong’ way. The reality is that you can’t
be alternative to the line of Fidel and Raúl.”
From the 1960s onwards, the Intelligence Directorate intrusively
monitored opponents, many of whom were beaten by police or spent years
in jail. Despite the release of dozens of political prisoners in the
wake of the 2014 Cuba-US agreement, many activists were detained or
harassed ahead of visits by Barack Obama in 2016 and Pope Francis the
previous year.
Yet, compared with the past, there is a little more scope for
criticism, a lot more opportunity to travel, and slightly less of a
sense of crisis. Cuba may still be more closely aligned to Venezuela
than the United States, but it is clearly hedging its bets more than
it used to do under Fidel. Today the country is different from the one
that confidently erected a now-fading plaque on Avenida Salvador
Allende with a quotation from Chile’s socialist leader: “To be young
and not to be revolutionary is a contradiction, almost a biological
one.”
Instead, on Avenida G, a bohemian hub of cafes and street corners for Havana’s teens, the talk is not of politics but iPods, fashion, films
and Major League Baseball.
In a valedictory speech at the close of the 2016 Cuban Communist party congress, Castro urged his compatriots to stick to their socialist
ideals despite the warming of ties with the US, but he recognised that
his generation was passing.
“Soon I’ll be like all the others,” he said of his dead comrades. “The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban communists
will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with
fervour and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods
that human beings need, and we need to fight without truce to obtain
them.”
Despite the trembling voice and mournful tone, it was a typically
combative call to arms. The last of many. It may have been several
years since Castro’s thunderous, marathon orations, but Cuba will
still feel strangely quiet without him.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/26/fidel-castro-legacy
for some other responses to the death of Castro and his legacy, see
here:
https://khanya.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/the-death-of-fidel-castro/
--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com
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