It happens to few people in history to be known simply
by their first name: but when the word went around the world that Fidel was
dead, everyone must have known of whom the news spoke. And this Fidel was a man
who led a revolution on a small Caribbean island 57 years ago. He was not
everybody’s cup of tea: his revolution did not mess around. Within 80 days of
taking office, they had summarily executed some hundreds of people who were
judged by their revolutionary tribunals to be irreconcilable enemies. It was
the signal for tens of thousands of other residents to decamp, with all their
belongings and wealth, to the United States.
No one could
have imagined that this tiny island led by its bearded guerrilla fighters could
withstand the assembled power of their great neighbour for decade after decade.
And yet, such was this man’s charisma, such his determination, his stubbornness,
his idealism, often his wrong-headedness, and his caution in face of hundreds
of assassination plots directed against him, that such has been the case. The
Cuban revolutionaries are still in command, and the island is as far as it
could be from the evil days when the dictator, supported and armed by the
United States, made it into a safe playground for corrupt American gambling.
Not four
months after marching into Havana, Fidel Castro visited Montreal to collect
some 20,000 toys that had been collected for destitute Cuban children by the
Junior Chamber of Commerce. I was a reporter in Montreal when Fidel visited in
April 1959, and was assigned to follow him around all day. He was like no other
politician the local security authorities ever had to deal with. Immediately on emerging from the plane at the
airport he broke away from his security and insisted on pressing the flesh with
the people who had turned up to see him. He did the same thing throughout the
day, giving headaches to his security men, and more especially to the local
police who were assigned to protect him. He was taken to the hospital where he
insisted on stopping off to meet sick children, and spent so long with them
that he immediately fell behind schedule, and when he arrived at the downtown
hotel for a scheduled press conference, at which he arrived 40 minutes late, he
gave of his time so generously that he
was still at it 90 minutes later, giving one-on-one interviews to television
reporters (one of whom was Rene Levesque, who later became, just as Fidel has
become in Cuba, one of the most memorable figures in the political history of
Quebec.)
That press
conference in Montreal was held in the months when Fidel was denying he had any
interest in taking office in the new Cuban government. He also said he was
anti-communist. But within months he took over the running of the government, and
he never relinquished his hold on it for the next 47 years. I have a picture of
that press conference, and I was surprised to see a little reproduction of it
on the below mentioned web site, showing me scribbling away in the front row of
journalists.
The day after
the visit, when my story had been published in the newspaper, my boss came up
to me and said, “I see you didn’t think too much of our visitor.” And yet, other people who read my stuff and
were used to my style, said to me, “How the hell did you ever get such a favorable
impression of Castro into the newspaper?”
It was all done by smoke and mirrors. In those days I always considered
myself part of the opposition within the newspaper, and had developed the useful
skill of suggesting things that I would never have been allowed to say straight
out.
The whole
story of this visit is well told in a web site with the following link:
http://www.claude.dupras.com/new_page_121.htm
Of course, as
the government began in the succeeding months to redistribute the agricultural
land it had seized from the owners of the big estates, and finally to nationalize
all American companies, the United States, smarting from this defiance, so much
at odds with the previous history of Latin America, imposed an embargo on all
trade, expecting to bring them to their knees overnight. That this embargo
should have continued until the present day is a tribute to the irrationality
of big power politics as well as to the stubborn resistance of the island’s
people.
One of the
outstanding characteristics of the new leader that is exhibited by the story of
the locals who organized Fidel’s 1959 visit to Montreal, was the extreme
difficulty they had in getting in touch with him, and the near-impossibility of
pinning down anything like a meaningful schedule on which plans could be based.
This was a caution that he carried through the rest of his life, and which accounted
for the failure of so many well-organized efforts to assassinate him. One of my
friends in later years was Robert Resha, a South African member of the African
National Congress, who was assigned to London and whose job it was in the tough
years of the 1960s (for the South African revolutionaries), to tour the world
trying to raise money that would enable the AFN to carry out its proposed armed
rebellion against the apartheid regime in their country. Robert visited Cuba in
pursuit of this objective, and he told a remarkable story of waiting for days
in a hotel room in the hope that his messages for Fidel had been delivered and
he might be summoned to the presence. That never happened. But what did happen
was that one night, when he was fast asleep, at something like 3 am, there was
a knock on his hotel door, and the great man himself stood there, available at
last. He came in, sat down, and talked
for several hours to his comrade-in-arms. It could have been that this meeting,
and the rapport that Robert succeeded in creating with him, set the stage for the
extremely significant interventions Cuba later made in the anti-colonial
struggle in Africa.
According to
Robert, Fidel never slept in the same bed for two nights in a row. And his
experience is reflected in the later stages of the account of the Montreal
visit given on the above-mentioned web site.
A Montreal businessman who had offered a gift of tractors to Cuba, managed to get his gift delivered, but he wanted,
if possible, to have it formally accepted by Fidel. He travelled to Cuba with that expectation,
and contacted the people who knew about his gift, and the circumstances of the
Montreal visit. But he waited for one night, only to be told Fidel was at the
other end of the island, then a second night, a third, a fourth, and finally he
announced he would have to return to Montreal. He never did get the picture he
so wanted for his company’s publicity.
On the same subject, the National Film Board
made a very amusing film called Waiting
for Fidel, which recorded the experience of the Newfoundland premier, Joey
Smallwood, who once travelled to Cuba, in company with a newspaper proprietor
of his acquaintance, with the expectation of meeting el jefe. They travelled
around, visiting hospitals and the like, waited and waited some more, and even
had time for the newspaper proprietor to stand on his head on the beach at the
Bay of Pigs, but they never did get to meet the boss.
Fidel was definitely cheeky. He not only
provided a signpost to better possibilities in Latin America (although Che
Guevara’s ill-advised attempt to foment revolution in Bolivia was a miserable
failure), but as his nation outstripped all others in Latin America in
education and medical services, he also began to make an impact by exchanging
thousands of doctors in exchange for oil and the like, much to the chagrin of
he Americans. His intervention in Africa was probably the most significant of
his foreign adventures. It began in the 1970s, when he sent 5,000 troops to
help the leftist FNLA government of Angola to resist the American supported and
armed right-wing group UNITA. This Cuban involvement in Africa had so enraged
Henry Kissinger, that, according to the US National Security Archive, which
released documents to this effect, he had urged President Gerald Ford to order
a massive bombing of Cuba to be followed by an assault of ground troops based
on the US base at Guantanamo Bay. But its most important effect came a decade
later when South Africa sent its army into Angola in an effort to stem a
government advance. Cuba in 1987 sent a
force of 15,000 troops (later, according to the Archive, increased to 55,000) who
fought huge battles against the invading South Africans, and beat them. The
UNITA rebellion was beaten off, and, although this is not widely known --- but it is recognized by the AFN --- this
defeat was one of the major influences in the later downfall of the apartheid
regime.
So, Fidel is
dead. And whatever may have been his weaknesses, he certainly was a figure of
world-wide influence, who apparently knew when his time had come to quit
(unlike so many others in the developing world), and who, to judge by the
articles he contributed until almost his last year, certainly understood very
well the affairs of the wider world, and kept his marbles intact right until
the end. The world will miss him; I miss him already.
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