Fidel Castro: Biografía a Dos Voces
Ignacio Ramonet
Random House Mondadori • 2006 • 655 pages

REVIEW by SAM FARBER

THIS IS a book-long interview, the outcome of conversations that Ignacio Ramonet, the Spanish-born editor of the Parisian Le Monde Diplomatique, had with Fidel Castro from January 2003 to December 2005. A short time after the book came out, Castro stepped aside as head of state on July 31, 2006, due to a serious illness, the nature of which was declared a state secret. His younger brother Raúl, officially designated as his successor since the early days of the 1959 Revolution, replaced him “for the time being.”¹ The timing of Castro’s illness and the release of Ramonet’s book led the Cuban government’s media to make a lot more out of this publishing event than might have otherwise been the case. Significantly, the ample coverage and serialization of Ramonet’s interview was accompanied by the Cuban media’s serialization of the Secretos de Generales,² containing the biographies of forty-one top Cuban generals, which had already appeared and been serialized ten years earlier. The official media, while glorifying Fidel, were simultaneously building up the image of the top army brass.

Fidel Castro’s interview with Ramonet seems to have become, for all intents and purposes, his political testament. It is a very long and wide-ranging presentation of the worldview and values of an obviously knowledgeable political leader and an account of Cuban and world history and politics as he sees it. Castro also provides his views and impressions of the many foreign dignitaries he has met throughout his political career. Finally, this book is also an exercise in self-justification and a clear attempt to influence and shape how history will evaluate his very long (more than forty-seven years) record in power.³

The roots and nature of Fidel Castro’s view of emancipation

Among the many topics and issues addressed in this book, there are some that have special relevance to those who for decades have found ourselves as a small minority within the Left for insisting on Eugene V. Debs’ principle that if a Moses can lead the workers out of bondage, they can be led back in. Thus, the issue of whether the exploited and oppressed need to emancipate themselves or can be emancipated by others is central to our concerns.

As on many other occasions, Fidel Castro mentions his early upbringing when talking to Ramonet. He tells him that as a young boy, he identified with great generals such as Alexander the Great, Aníbal, and Napoleon. (57–58) He also expresses great respect and admiration, in spite of their political views, for the pro-Franco Spanish Jesuits who educated him. According to him, they “combined the tradition of the Jesuits—a military spirit, their military organization—with the Spanish character. The Spanish Jesuit knows how to inculcate a great sense of personal dignity, the sense of personal honor, he knows how to appreciate character, frankness, rectitude, the person’s courage, the capacity to endure sacrifice. They are values that he knows how to extol.”⁴

Perhaps most revealing are the terms in which he spoke of his father Ángel, a self-made man who originated from the Spanish province of Galicia, who made a lot of money in Cuba and who was neither cultured nor educated. Most important of all, Fidel points out that although politically conservative (he opposed the republic in the Spanish Civil War), his father kept close contact with and was accessible to the poor people who worked for and lived near the Castro family. As Fidel relates it, his father “was there, went out and saw people every day, he had no bodyguards or people who looked after his safety. He went alone along many kilometers, and people would approach him and had access to him. They had no access to the president of an enterprise, like United Fruit or others in New York, and that is why conditions were more humane under my father. I saw all that, and it helped a lot to mold my character.” (116) Fidel Castro shrewdly observed that had he been the grandson, instead of the son of a landowner, he would have grown up in a rich people’s neighborhood with no contact with agricultural workers and peasants; would have felt superior to them, and I may add, indifferent if not hostile to their fate and welfare. (59, 115) But revealing that these personal links existed within the context of certain power relationships, Fidel Castro relates in another interview that his father controlled most of the votes of the people working for him and living on his land because providing jobs and a place to live were considered big favors.⁵ Thus, while Fidel Castro’s comments to Ramonet show much insight into one type of impersonal, capitalist relationship, he ignores another and perhaps more subtle paternalist type of class relationship between his father and his subordinates. In light of this, it is easy to see how the elder Castro’s paternalism, a paternalism rooted in a precapitalist and Hispanic authoritarian tradition, “helped a lot to mold [Fidel’s] character.”

Castro’s authoritarian paternalism can’t conceive the possibility that Cuban revolutionaries could effectively defend the country and socialism if they had political differences and were organized in more than one party. He makes it abundantly clear that his view of socialism requires a “unity” that is incompatible with the organized expression of differences of opinion. He asserts that as the Cuban people have become more cultured and gotten to know the world better, the more they value and the happier they are with their “unity.” He contrasts this with what he calls the “spectacle” of what occurs in some countries with a hundred or a hundred and twenty parties, which he sees as a crazy situation and a manifestation of alienation. (547) Thus, Castro asserts that had he followed Gorbachev and established perestroika on the island, “we would have divided ourselves into ten fractions and would have begun a great struggle for power…we would have self-destructed.” (325) He also condemned, in 1968, the emergence of various political tendencies in Czechoslovakia and supported the USSR’s invasion of that country on the grounds that, as he tells Ramonet, Czechoslovakia “was marching toward a counterrevolutionary situation, toward capitalism and into the arms of imperialism…[starting] from the [initially] just demands, they arrived at a frankly reactionary politics. And we had to approve, bitterly and painfully, that military intervention.” (522)

In other interviews, Castro has spoken about the lessons he derived from his participation in the aborted 1947 Cayo Confites expedition that was to invade the Dominican Republic in order to topple the Trujillo dictatorship, and the 1948 riots in Bogotá, Colombia, that followed the assassination of the popular Liberal Party leader Gaitán.⁶ He saw the failures of those efforts as being primarily the result of the lack of political leadership, organization, and education. Castro may well have been correct in his diagnosis of what went wrong with the Cayo Confites and Colombian events, but the political lessons he drew from those events were one-sided and heavily weighted toward the need for political order and control from the top. This is a key factor in explaining why in the Cuban Revolution, as compared to all other major social revolutions such as the Russian, Mexican, and Chinese Revolutions, there were so few spontaneous seizures of land, let alone commercial or industrial installations. When the old, pro-Moscow communists encouraged land seizures in the first months of the Cuban Revolution, Castro responded quickly and energetically with a decree depriving people who took part in land occupations from any future benefits under the Agrarian Reform Law that was eventually approved in May 1959. (222)

It should be noted that Castro does not come through in this interview as a run-of-the-mill Stalinist in the style of the old pro-Moscow communist parties. Thus, Castro tells Ramonet that Lenin believed, following Marx, that “there could not be revolution in only one country and that there had to be simultaneous revolution everywhere, on the basis of the great development of the productive forces.” (351–52) According to Castro, Lenin faced a great dilemma of whether or not to continue the revolution at home when the revolutionary movement failed in the rest of Europe. This, Castro argues, left Lenin with only one option: to build socialism in only one country—Russia—notwithstanding the difficulties of building socialism with 80 percent illiteracy, having to fight against all those who attacked them, and with all the principal intellectuals having left the country or having been shot. (351–52) In addition, he criticizes Stalin’s many abuses of power such as the policy of purges and the beheading of the armed forces, and for making many strategic errors, political as well as military. Castro insists, however, that in spite of his abuses and errors, Stalin deserves credit for the accelerated development of industry, an almost vital necessity, especially in the light of future defense needs against Hitler’s Germany, which would have won the war if the USSR had not been industrialized. Among the great political and military errors committed by Stalin, Castro included the invasion of Poland of September 1, 1939, and the “little war” against Finland. In addition, he made criticisms of the international policy of the Popular Front that resulted in the Cuban Communist Party being forced to ally itself with the bloody, repressive and corrupt Batista government. (67–68, 321)

Fidel Castro on civil rights and civil liberties in Cuba

Throughout the interview, Castro discusses the issues of civil liberties and civil rights at great length.⁷ This is interesting given the Cuban government’s position in the past that these issues are subordinate to the tasks of national liberation and “building socialism,” a position echoed by much of the international radical Left. It is possible that Castro’s detailed discussion of these issues is related to his concern about the legacy he is leaving behind. Be that as it may, there is no other topic that is more imbued with sophistry, self-contradictions, and outright lies. Independent and credible organizations such as Amnesty, PEN International Writers Union, and Human Rights Watch (and its predecessor, Americas Watch) have throughout the last decades collectively written hundreds of reports about Cuba. These reports have criticized and denounced stonings, beatings, and other physically abusive “repudiation acts” conducted by government-organized mobs, unjust arrests, sentences, and prison conditions that either because of reasons of omission or commission constituted physical abuse (i.e., torture.)

In recent years, the number of political prisoners has been in the hundreds (generally from 300 to 400), but there were a far larger number of political prisoners at least until the late seventies. During this time, the most egregious abuses were carried out against the plantados (the planted ones) who for many years demanded to be treated as political rather than common prisoners. The plantados, who are ignored by Castro and Ramonet in this interview, resisted their treatment as common criminals and refused to attend the “political education” classes offered by the authorities as a condition of better treatment and eventual release. It is important to underline in this context that the distinction between political and common prisoners is strongly rooted in Cuban and Latin American political culture and penal traditions. Historically, there has been a Latin American practice to allow political prisoners to dress in civilian clothes, create their own prison organizations, and to carry on their own, rather than the jailers’, political education. This held true, for example, for most of the time that Fidel Castro and his fellow Moncada attackers were in Batista’s prisons from 1953 to 1955.⁸ A couple of decades ago, much of the U.S. press lionized the account of prison conditions in Cuba written by Armando Valladares, a right-wing former political prisoner of questionable credentials and credibility.⁹ The Cuban official press, and its sympathizers abroad, had a field day discrediting Valladares in Cuba and throughout the world, with the implication, if not the outright claim, that there was nothing problematic about prison conditions on the island. However, about the same time, Americas Watch published a scrupulously objective, yet devastating account by the former Cuban political prisoner and Christian socialist Jorge Valls that was paid little attention by the U.S. press, and was of course totally ignored by the Cuban press and government and like-minded sympathizers abroad.¹⁰

In the 1960s, the Cuban government built the infamous UMAP (Military Units in Support of Production) camps that segregated religious believers, homosexuals, and other “deviants.” Castro’s response borders on sheer impudence when Ramonet broaches this subject: he tries to make the UMAPs appear as if they had merely been alternative service institutions. According to Castro, they were neither “internment units nor punishment units; on the contrary, we tried to raise morale, to offer possibilities of employment, and to help the country in those difficult circumstances.” (205)

In his conversation with Ramonet, Castro claims that in Cuba people are punished for actions, not ideas. (516) But he contradicts himself when discussing the oppositionist Varela Project earlier in the book, when he says that “our laws punish the slanderous campaigns that are made against the state, the campaigns that strengthen the arguments of our aggressors, that justify the blockade, even if they say that they are against the blockade; that justify the whole philosophy of aggression against Cuba, the economic blockade, the economic war against our country…. That is to say, these are crimes that are well defined and qualified in our laws.” (387) The “campaigns” that Castro is referring to are primarily Cuban dissidents writing and speaking their minds.

At the same time, the discussion of the death penalty, which Castro acknowledges is currently used more for common than political crimes, is full of diplomatic formulations aimed at friends of the regime abroad who oppose capital punishment. The discussion of this topic is also full of circumlocutions and vague promises about the future elimination of the death penalty in Cuba. (341–48, 443–46) In this context, Castro also claims that there has not been a single case of extra-judicial execution or torture in Cuba under his rule. (191) Notwithstanding Ramonet’s willingness to accept this claim at face value, (15) it is disingenuous since there is no need for extrajudicial executions when the legal system itself openly and officially allows for execution under a wide variety of circumstances.

There is only one civil rights and civil liberties issue where Fidel Castro usually responds in a brutally frank and straightforward way. When Ramonet broached the issue of freedom of the press, Castro responded that the press organs were not in the hands of the enemies of the revolution, nor in the hands of the agents of the United States, but in the hands of revolutionaries. He added that if freedom of the press meant the right of the counterrevolution and of the enemies of Cuba to speak and write freely against socialism and against the revolution, then “I would say that we are not in favor of such ‘freedom.’” (491) Castro justifies his stance claiming that as long as there was a U.S. blockade against the island and the country was threatened by the president of the United States, “we cannot give that ‘freedom’ to the allies of our enemies whose objective is to struggle against socialism’s reason for existence.” (491) This is an argument that might have a place under conditions of outright military warfare where it could reasonably be claimed that action is imminent and that there is no room left at that particular time and place to use persuasion and the open struggle of ideas to win people to one’s side. Castro, however, surreptitiously transfers this argument to a situation that does involve struggle but differs dramatically from actual military combat. In this manner, Castro replaces the open political struggle with police and bureaucratic administrative repression as the favorite means to deal with what are in fact peaceful political opponents.

It is Fidel Castro and his close associates who have had the monopoly of defining what is and what is not revolutionary, and therefore of who is allowed and on what terms to have access to the Cuban media. The Cuban leaders have historically used censorship over their own people to impose their own particular view of the world, and to present the news according to their own interests. This has included, for example, delaying for several days the news of such major events as the 1979 USSR invasion of Afghanistan, the Cuban radio stations’ decades-long ban of Celia Cruz, imposing strict controls on Internet access, the attempt to almost ignore and distort the coverage of the Cuban intellectuals’ protest at the beginning of 2007, and the deliberate failure to translate into Spanish Noam Chomsky’s critique of the human rights situation in Cuba in an appearance on Cuban television during a recent visit to the island. Censorship reflects the state’s lack of trust in people being able to obtain unfiltered information and arrive at their own best judgment. That leads to the very thing that Rosa Luxemburg warned of in her critique of the Russian Revolution: “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all.” She pointed out that serious consequences would follow from such repressive policies, namely that “with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also become more crippled…life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep,”¹¹ and that is the case in Cuba.

Race, marginality, and the culture of poverty

Ramonet also asked Fidel Castro about the issue of racism in Cuba. Castro’s answers go beyond the traditional Cuban government claim (supported by Ramonet himself in the introduction to the book¹²) that racism had been abolished. According to this official view, only attitudinal leftovers have remained and they will disappear as the educational and cultural level of the population continues to develop and the racist heritage fades into memory. Instead, Castro acknowledges that Cubans of African origin live in worse housing, work at harder and lower paid jobs, and receive from five to six times fewer dollar remittances than their white compatriots. (210)

The issues of race and class have been more intermingled in Cuba than in the United States; consequently, much of white Cuban worries and hostility toward Black Cubans have been so mixed in with the issue of social marginality that it has been very hard to separate one from the other. This historical entanglement was exacerbated by the serious economic effects of the special period after the collapse of the USSR that led to the growth of a mass of disproportionately Black unemployed or underemployed people living in highly precarious conditions. This context helps to explain why Fidel Castro brought up the “culture of poverty” theory and its link to race in his interview with Ramonet: “at the beginning [of the revolution] we eliminated some marginal neighborhoods. But already a culture of marginality had been created, that even if you make new houses for them, the phenomena that took place in those areas, persevere. That is a culture that repeats itself and then with their children….” And elsewhere in the interview:

I remember that we discovered that there was a culture of rich people and a culture of poor people. That of the rich, very decent: I buy and I pay. That of poor people: how can I get this? How do I steal from rich people or from whomever? Many good, humble, and patriotic families, told their son who works, for example, in the hotel industry: “Hey take away a bedsheet, a pillow, bring me this, bring me that.” Those attitudes are born from the culture of poverty, and when social changes are made to change all that, habits last a much longer time. (211, 323–24)