Cuba

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. 

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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.

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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.

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​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.

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​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”. 

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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).

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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.

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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. 

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Castro’s revolution was a remarkably peaceful process, apart from a number of Batista’s henchmen shot in the first weeks. [Hundreds of Batista's former supporters were executed after trials that many foreign observers deemed as less than fair.  . Hundreds of people were sent to jail and labour camps as political prisoners. Thousands of mainly middle class Cubans fled into exile. (BBC News)]. 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.

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But the Telegraph states: 'Opponents were executed and former allies imprisoned; Cuba was declared an atheist state; priests, churchgoers and homosexuals were singled out for persecution. No one complained, of course, because dissidents were incarcerated and the press censored. Castro had proclaimed himself the father of his people, and there was a heavy price to be paid for doubting his good intentions.'

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Also:  'For 30 years under Castro the Cuban people were merely reduced to penury, but after the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989 they found themselves in such straits that they struggled to avoid starvation. Thousands attempted to reach the United States on precarious home-made rafts, only to be sent back when caught by the Americans.  In this crisis Castro found himself compelled to allow Cubans to earn and spend more dollars, to open the country to tourism, to lift restrictions on religion. But he could not bring himself to do what was really required — admit that his anti-Americanism was now redundant, and make the concessions required to obtain the relaxation of the US trade embargo.'

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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.

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Text from Richard Gott, Guardian 26 November 2016 with additions.

 

“He was reasonable, not domineering, as one might expect,” Wayne Smith, a former US ambassador to Cuba who knew Fidel, told Al Jazeera.  “He would listen to you.”

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'While many Cubans undoubtedly detested Castro, others genuinely loved him. They saw him as a David who could stand up to the Goliath of America, who successfully spat in the "Yanqui" eye.  For them Castro was Cuba and Cuba was Castro.' (BBC New website)

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“Cuba is a poor country, but people did not live in the kind of misery as many other Latin American people in the surroundings of Lima or Mexico City,” said Volker Skierka, the author of Fidel Castro: A Biography. European diplomats estimate that 70 percent of Cubans would back the Castros, if free elections were held, Skierka said.