MY black-AND- white PHOTO WITH FIDEL CASTRO
A Cuban immigrant journalist recalls personal experiences with late leader
My phone has been burning up since Fidel Castro died.
Some friends from Miami sounded euphoric about the news from Nov. 25. Others, from Cuba, sad. And then there are those who seemed numb.
A childhood friend from Cuba, who also lives in Houston, insisted that I share my feelings.
“I really don’t know,” I told him. “I haven’t decided yet.”
His reply took me by surprise: “Perhaps you are afraid of feeling something?”
Am I? I thought. I went to search for an answer.
I’ve carried a trunk with me everywhere since I emigrated from Cuba in the 1990s, a couple of years after graduating from the University of Havana’s school of journalism. It’s in my garage now.
I opened it and found the blackand-white photo I was looking for: my first encounter with Fidel Castro.
The photo was taken during a relative’s wedding. The bride and groom were idealistic young participants in the revolution.
I was about 3 years old, and Fidel and I were sharing a plate.
According to family legend, at the moment the photo was taken, I was telling Fidel to close his eyes and open his mouth to taste the cake I was offering — just as my mother used to do with me when she wanted to delight me with some edible surprise. He had already begun to eat the chicken croquette I’d assigned him.
For me, he was just the man who was always on TV, the man who brought a lot of noise with his presence. There were green guys atop all the neighborhood roofs. A bunch of other men pretended to be guests, their eyes wide, their heads swiveling like oscillating fans.
I didn’t think anything of them. I told El Comandante what to do as if he were my teatime playmate.
Observing the photo now, I see the man in black and white, a figure drawn by its contrasts and polarities. White for those who admired him; black for those who hated him. A character who embodies everything that Cuba has been, and has not been, for half a century.
In Miami, at parties celebrating his death, Cuban exiles remember the dark side of Fidel. There, his death means the end of their pain; the end of a dictator; of a ruler who delayed the prosperity of Cuba by reversing the course of its history. One who, in the ’60s, expropriated people’s businesses and punished detractors with death sentences.
That’s the view of one person who, after Castro’s death, wrote this on my Facebook wall: “We celebrate the death of the dictator (Castro) as Jews did in Nazi Germany when Hitler died, as Italians after the death of Benito Mussolini, as they also celebrated it in Iraq after the death of (Saddam Hussein).”
On the other side, at the white pole, there are those who exalt a larger-than-life leader. The David of a small island who defied the Goliath of international imperialism. The man who dared to build a model of society not authorized by a bullying United States. The idealist who provided education, health and even free telephone service for Cubans. The leader of the nonaligned countries who challenged predatory international debts and fought for the independence of African countries against South African occupation.
A journalist from my graduation class writes from Cuba that his young daughter “also grew under (Fidel’s) wing, with his teachings, with his pride; that pride that has made this small Caribbean archipelago so great. Because Fidel touched us, he impacted us as the eldest father, the wise man of the tribe to which we always return in search of timely advice.”
Between those two poles, there are many other Cubans who neither celebrate nor mourn Castro’s death. Many of us do not belong to the diaspora that left the island in the revolution’s early years. We belong to a later generation of migrants who were born and grew up in Castro’s Cuba. We were formed there, and although we have long lists of criticisms of that Cuba, we also love it.
A friend warns me to be careful what I write. He says, “The moods are highly charged for Cubans who might not be open to gray areas when it comes to Fidel Castro.”
I understand what he means.
In my college years, I met Fidel Castro again.
This time, I was part of a small group of journalism students who proposed discussing our concerns about Cuba with Carlos Aldana, then the head of the Ideological Department of the Cuban Communist Party and the third-most-powerful person on the island.
The University of Havana’s school of journalism was a center of political and ideological discussions. We thought the country’s leadership would welcome a constructive dialogue with students and faculty members. We thought we represented a new generation of Cubans interested in improving our country.
The result, in late October 1987, was a closed-door meeting in a theater at the Party’s Central Committee headquarters — which is to say, the government’s headquarters.
Almost 300 people — journalism students and professors — were seated in the theater’s central rows, flanked by government leaders, party members, intelligence agents and a few journalists, there on the strict condition that they not report whatever they saw.
On the stage, Aldana and other government ministers responded to the questionnaire that we were required to send in advance. It included more than 90 questions on topics ranging from the personality cult of Fidel to the lack of freedoms of expression, organization and the press.
The meeting lasted more than 12 hours. Some called it a pitched battle.
After the last recess, Aldana resumed the session by introducing a surprise appearance: “El Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro.” Boom! The commander-inchief himself! The theater collapsed into applause.
Fidel always had an imposing presence. More than 6 feet tall, dressed in olive green, he emitted an irresistible charisma that burnished his myth. He was the man who’d survived hundreds of assassination attempts; the hero who stood up against the northern imperialistic bully; who attracted crowds nearly as fervent as the pope’s. A person so compelling that, as opposition activists used to say, they would rather not listen to Fidel because if they let him talk awhile, they would be convinced.
Now, the myth stood before us in the theater.
Emotions exploded. Everyone’s legs weakened. For some, there were tears. For others, the fear or guilt of a scolded child: We realized that, from the beginning, the meeting had been monitored through the dark glass that ornamented the theater.
Fidel had intended to finish the discussion with a lengthy monologue. But to his surprise, a few of us in the theater continued to raise our hands, asking for the floor. Normally, no one dared to interrupt him. But we writhed in our chairs, trying to get attention — or perhaps we were trembling, full of adrenaline, fearfully knowing that we were committing a transgression against the myth.
Some of us managed to be heard. I wanted to know why the heroes and leaders exalted by the press, in speeches and everywhere, were always those from the old guard, while our younger generation was feeling invisible and unrecognized, even though we were sacrificing thousands of lives of young people that they were sending to wars in other countries.
He didn’t answer our questions directly. His mythical image withered every time he pounded the table. With each violent swivel of his chair. With his condescending reprimands of our audacity.
That night, we lost our political virginity. We left the theater with a massive sense of loss. I suspect that Fidel’s government did as well.
Wilfredo Cancio Isla, one of my journalism professors who was at the meeting, has written that the event “shook the academic realm, shattered ideological commitments and forever transformed the way of thinking” for many Cubans. On that day, “a group of university students found, unintentionally, the vulnerability and senility of a man clinging to power.”
I believe the greatest loss was not that we’d discovered the myth’s imperfection. It was understanding that, in the mind of our omnipresent leader, there was no room even to discuss potential reforms — even reforms proposed by the generation that Castro’s own system had educated.
No report of the October meeting appeared in the Cuban media, but the powerful island medium “Radio Bemba” — aka word of mouth — distributed the news everywhere. Suddenly, Cuba felt different. In the island’s system, something had detonated.
Cancio wrote that the event is described as “the other October Revolution.” That seems exaggerated, but I do believe a crack opened in the old-guard leadership’s wall.
My generation began to fill that crack. A visual arts movement took to the streets and broke the rules of galleries and museums. Musicians pushed the envelope of censorship, students of philosophy and economics rethought the country and pressed to be heard. Cuba was changing long before the U.S. noticed.
Many of those people are now spread throughout the world, part of the Cuban diaspora of the ’80s and ’90s. Others remain on the island, a few changing the country from inside.
A phone call from Cuba pulled me away from the black-and-white photo.
It was Luis DunoGottberg, a Rice University professor and expert on Cuba and Latin America. He was in Cuba, accompanying the Rice baseball team on a tour of the island. “Here we feel the weight of history,” he said, “especially the history of the 20th century that has just ended.”
There it is, I think: Duno-Gottberg hit the nail on the head. For Cuba, and for much of Latin America, Nov. 25, 2016 — the day Castro died — marks the end of the 20th century.
Fidel was the last grand leader from the era of the great utopias. His death represents the end of the great Marxistinspired revolutions and projects. The end of the great humanist drive that sought equitable distribution of wealth as the basis for full equality — but which often distributed poverty instead. The end of an epoch of full-blown idealism that enamored a large part of the world — in Europe, Africa and Asia as well as in Latin America — but that turned out more beautiful in books than in reality.
Myths are simple stories we invent to explain things that are too complex to comprehend. We tend to love them. For better or worse, whole and shattered, they are how we frame the world.
I’ve decided that I am going to frame the photo of Fidel and me playing teatime. It’s time it came out of the trunk. It is a piece of 20th-century history.