If Fidel Castro hadn’t existed, his friend and novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have had to invent him.
Castro sprang from the great tradition of improbable, romantic revolutionary heroes that Latin American culture excels at producing. He was a Promethean figure, bestriding his nation like an over testosteroned hombre, sweeping into power with great promise (and promises), and backed by vast popular support, who ended his days like King Lear, raging at the storm from a lonely hospital bed as his work vanished from history almost as easily as cigar smoke dissipates into air.
The man himself seemed to step from Central Casting: he had considerable physical presence: tall, with excellent posture, a high, forehead and natural tilt to his head which gave him a vaguely imperious air. He was athletic in youth, not in the modern bulging-with-muscles sense (he won a prize as the best all-round sportsman in Cuba) but in a disciplined way, allowing him to maintain a trim figure throughout his life. He was personally headstrong, almost to the point of recklessness; as a boy, he once charged his bicycle headlong into a wall to prove that he was no shrinking violet. And, most importantly for both the future of the cause he came to represent and that of his nation, he was steadfast, so absolutely convinced was he of his destiny, that he would brook no contradiction to his views and was utterly uncompromising when his mind was made up. It was the personality of man destined to cause waves, the type for whom the odds against the success of a venture counted more as incentive than deterrent.
How else to describe the sheer audacity of his Cuban revolutionary adventure except breath taking? Here was the (illegitimate) scion of a wealthy farmer, schooled in Law at the University of Havana, rejecting family, class, wealth, status, for an idealistic socialist dream which led him before to dabble in revolutionary uprisings in the Dominican Republic and Colombia – embarking on the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista. With a bare handful of men (82) packed into an overcrowded pleasure boat, he sailed from Mexico in 1956, aiming to foment a popular uprising. He had no real military experience, and took to the wild, rambling hills of the Sierra Maestra when his first few weeks on Cuban soil became a desperate battle for survival.
What he lacked in military prowess, he made up in wiliness, a flair for reading the mood of the people, a knack for publicity and a shrewd sense of timing. By effective propaganda and sheer force of will, he slowly transformed himself into the undisputed leader of a broad and politically rainbow-hued movement for the ostensible restoration of democracy and the 1940 constitution, both cut short after an experiment of only a dozen years, by Batista.
When at last, the guerrillas in the mountains, together with sabotage and strikes across the island, the weight of endemic poverty, corruption and incompetence proved too much for the dictator’s regime, Batista himself fled -- on New Year’s Eve 1958 -- taking most of the Central Bank’s reserves of dollars and gold. Castro took power with relatively little bloodshed and set about a wholesale remaking of the nation.
He installed a provisional government with an initially populist agenda: big wage increases, rent reductions and a radical land reform. But this was merely a smokescreen, while he built up his true power base -- the military and security services -- and cultivated an alliance, begun in secret in the sierra, with the Communist Party. Before the revolution was even a year old, “bourgeois elements” in the government were purged; over the next few months, critical media outlets were shut down. Within six years, all private property was expropriated by the state. By then, most of the middle class had fled to Miami, where his death on November 26th was met with cheers and street parties.
Fidel became a Marxist, a Cuban nationalist and a Latin American strongman. His lifelong hero was José Martí, the Cuban patriot who battled Spain but was acutely conscious of American attentions on Cuba. In the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States co-opted the independence rebellion Martí had started and turned Cuba essentially into a colony, reserving the right to intervene in the island at any time. American domination of the economy and the vital sugar industry continued until the revolution. It brought development—the middle class lived well—but also gross class inequality.
The United States and Castro were not fated to part ways. Yet neither side had many illusions about the other. In the post-war hothouse atmosphere of uncertainty and fear caused by the rise of Soviet military power, the Americans had sought to forestall any communist incursion in the Caribbean by supporting tin-pot dictatorships like Batista’s deeply corrupt and brutal regime. Castro knew who provided the aerial bombs Batista’s air force had dropped on his insurrectionists, and had sworn revenge. His gravitation to the Soviet bloc was a manifestation of this resentment.
Fidel embraced Martí’s nationalism, preference for the underdog and anti-imperialism, but not his belief in social democracy. He turned to communism because it was a means by which his absolute power could be consolidated, coming, as it did, with the shield of Soviet financial and military protection. The consequent American trade embargo was even more useful: it allowed him to blame the imperialist enemy for the woeful economic failures of his own central planning.
In the early days, at least 550 (and perhaps 2,000 or more) revolutionary opponents were executed. Many of them were Batista henchmen whose elimination met with approval from the masses. Once the revolution was secure, Castro’s rule was repressive though not especially bloody by such standards. Nothing and nobody was allowed to diminish his power, not even his friend and revolutionary comrade in arms, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Rumours persisted to this day that he allowed Guevara to wither on the vine in Bolivia, or could have done more to try to save him, gaining a martyr in the process as well as basking in the sunshine of his reflected fame.
Castro would prove to be a problematic ally for the Soviets, pursuing an erratic course which made clear he would never accept that Cuba was a satellite power in the same manner as the downtrodden eastern Europeans. He took their money but not always their advice. He first embraced crash industrialization, then dropped it in favour of the drive for a 10 million-tonne sugar harvest. Both involved serious economic reverses with long-term consequences. Though sometimes persuaded to decentralize economic decision-making (which usually boosted output) he was a chronic micro manager, always ending up concentrating all power in his own hands.
He gave Cubans first-world education and health services, and did not care about the economic cost. He offered neither opportunity nor prosperity, least of all freedom. Dissenters faced a grimly simple choice: risk fleeing to Florida, or the grim jails of Cuba’s gulag. Unsurprisingly, most chose silence. Eventually Castro would let those who might stir up trouble at home, flood the United States in a series of well-publicized forced "migrations."
Fidel was the inspirational leader, the man of action, the master strategist, the obsessive control-freak who intervened in everything from hurricane preparedness to the potato crop. He was, above all, seemingly tireless. In marathon sessions, often beginning after midnight and lasting until far after dawn, he would interrogate visitors about every facet of the political situation in their own countries. He loved details—the statistics of food production in every Cuban province or the properties of Chinese electric rice-cookers. He kept them in his head, and would recite them in those epic speeches.
In foreign affairs Castro operated on the world stage as no other Latin American leader ever had. With the same penchant for publicity and seizing the limelight that had brought him to power, he turned himself into a far more important player in the global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, than a country of Cuba’s heft might have otherwise been. In seeking the protection of Soviet missiles he came closer than anyone else to turning that ideological confrontation into nuclear war.
Under his leadership, Cuba, an island of just 10 million people, became a staging point and training ground for military adventurism: In the 1960s Castro aided a generation of idealistic young Latin Americans who died in droves who succeeded in causing enough instability to result in takeovers by ostensibly anti-communist military dictatorships; In the 70’s he sent troops to Africa, to help combat apartheid but also to prop up corrupt or repressive regimes in places like Ethiopia and Angola; In the 1980s he armed and aided leftist revolutionaries in Central America. That many of these adventures ended badly or petered out was not relevant – they were means by which Cuba – and Castro – kept themselves in the global power game.
The Soviet Union's demise cut off the tap of economic aid, wiping out a third of Cuba’s gross national product. Castro launched a “Special Period in Peacetime” initiative, cover for some limited and pragmatic reforms. He reluctantly allowed Cubans to set up small businesses, such as restaurants, home repairs and produce markets. He also legalized the use of the dollar and reached out for foreign investment, especially in developing a mass tourism industry. Once again, as it had under Batista, Havana’s hotels became a venue for sex tourism, as women sold their bodies to escape the revolution’s privations. Remittances from Cuban-Americans, tourism and nickel mines, run by a Canadian firm, replaced sugar as the mainstay of the economy. The health-care and education systems were tapped for hard-currency earnings, too, with the development of biotechnology and of medical tourism. State companies were given more autonomy to manage their budgets and to trade. All these steps helped Cubans to get by day to day, but they brought with them new inequalities and resentments, and slowly regime’s control over daily life began to slacken. Castro's project was unraveling.
In the end time is almost communistic in its egalitarianism and spares no one from its ravages. In 2006, Castro took ill and transferred power – temporarily, it was said – to brother Raoul and a tight council of associates. In 2008, this became a formal arrangement as the state of Fidel’s infirmity began to become public.
Raoul is cut from a different cloth entirely and the course he has charted is very likely not one Fidel would have chosen. Modest economic reforms have been launched, small steps like allowing Cubans to buy and sell houses and cars, stay in tourist hotels and have access to mobile phones and the internet. Fidel’s centralized economy is also being dismantled as the first steps along China-paved road of mixing Marx with economic growth are being taken: 500,000 Cubans are now self-employed, working in small businesses or as private farmers. Cuba has begun to move inexorably towards a mixed economy. The project's unraveling is gaining pace.
Like Garcia’s ‘General in His Labyrinth,’ Castro spent his final years isolated from the world, alone with his memories, reveling in past glories, maybe seeing shapes in the shadows. He wrote a regular newspaper column, which became a vehicle for his increasingly rambling, occasionally incoherent musings on the dire state of world affairs. As he slowly degenerated he became a wispy presence in his secure Havana compound, occasionally shown with visiting dignitaries looking progressively more frail with each airing. Yet he had managed to outlast ten US presidents. He lived just long enough to watch his revolution, like him, slip into its last gasps. He even saw Cuba restore diplomatic relations with the United States in 2015 and an American president, Barack Obama, visit Havana and appealed to the Cuban people “to choose their government in free elections.”
Fidel Castro’s was the force of nature, brooding like an inclement storm over Cuba’s run-down streets with their uncertain lighting and 60's era cars. His was the Voice, thundering in televised speeches for hour after hour, rising and falling like waves echoing on the shore.
That voice will speak no more, except in the echo box of recordings.