Revolutionary shook planet to its roots
HAVANA— There are no statues of him. No streets or parks named for him. His face doesn’t appear on a peso or a postage stamp.
Fidel Castro — just Fidel, never Castro here — rejected the cult of personality à la Mao or à la Stalin or à la Kim; forbade monuments in his honour as one of the first edicts issued upon his triumphal entry into the capital on Jan. 8, 1959, the revolutionary hero who, with a ragtag army of rebels, wrested a country from a tyrant.
But really, why put your moniker on a building or a plinth when you’ve got an entire island nation fashioned in your image? For half a century, Cuba might as well have been renamed Fidel-Land, such was the dictator’s all-encompassing control of the Caribbean country, reinvented in his image and according to his rigid fiats.
The proscription against idolatry — and banning came easy to Castro — will likely fade quickly now as Cuba looks for ways to memorialize Il Comandante in the annals of history.
He is history: not just because the iconic leader has been reduced to ashes in an urn — dying peacefully in his bed at 90, after surviving (by his count) 634 assassination attempts, most of them zany plots devised by the CIA and rabid antiCastro expat factions — but also because, even in death, he remains the repository of memory for modern Cuba. He envisioned it. He made it so.
Castro shook the planet to its roots, wielding an international influence at staggering odds with his tiny domain and bringing the world, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as close as it’s ever been to nuclear war.
Only the very old can recall the pre-Fidel era of Havana as a Mafia Bohemia or the island as a President Fulgencio Batista fiefdom of corruption.
Dimming memories of a lifestyle of abandon, at least for the rich and the connected. Today, in the greatest failing of Castro’s revolution, just about everybody is poor, still scrambling for food that doesn’t remotely fill store shelves, still driving Chevrolets from the ’50s — like stepping into American Graffiti — and stripped of its relevance as a Communist outpost, just 145 kilometres from the United States, by its most crucial benefactor: the Kremlin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be attending Castro’s funeral. So maybe you find out who your true friends are only after you kick the bucket — except, of course, Castro is beyond the slings of snubbing now.
Other dignitaries — including notorious world leaders such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe; Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa; and Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan president — began arriving here Tuesday, landing amid a nine-day period of official morning, featuring a mass rally at Revolution Square Tuesday night, to be followed by a grieve-a-thon procession that will stretch for 1,450 kilometres — retracing, in reverse, the “Caravan of Freedom” march Castro and his revolutionaries took to Havana as the Batista regime disintegrated, ending in Santiago de Cuba, where the ashes will be interred.
Castro’s body, according to his younger brother Raul, the current president, was cremated in the early hours last Saturday, shortly after the nation learned the Marxist-Leninist colossi who’d stood astride the country for so many decades had finally breathed his last. It is unclear whether Castro had left instructions for so extensive a display of veneration. Doesn’t quite sound like him. But who can say what Castro was thinking as introspection, frailty and solitude — rarely seen in public since 2006 — marked his protracted years of decline after turning the reins of power over to Raul. No longer the virile romantic figure in olive-drab fatigues and shin-high combat boots, chomping on a cigar — he gave those up in 1995 — but a stooped, feeble greybeard in a track suit that hung off his gaunt frame.
Castro did say at one point, to the filmmaker Oliver Stone, that he “never spent one second” thinking about how he would be remembered.
Stone was among the besotted and they were legion, for a good long time: Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Mandela, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the many left-wing ideologues of Latin America and post-colonial Africa, where Castro deployed thousands of troops — Angola and Ethiopia most impactful — and even more doctors and teachers and military advisers.
He inspired left-wing movements around the world, exporting his liberation ideology even after much of the planet came to view him as a Cold War relic, his ideology discredited.
“It is difficult to even imagine a Cuba without Fidel,” said Rodrigo Cabral, a retired printer who, at 76, can actually remember a Cuba without Fidel. “Even though we never saw him anymore, he would write things in the newspaper and sometimes they released photographs of him. But we are all hoping that Raul will continue with these reforms, allowing people to own their own little businesses. But will Fidel’s loyalists in the government allow that? It’s like everything is suspended for a while and then we will see.”
Cabral was among hundreds who filed by at Revolution Square to pay their respects, although the actual urn with Castro’s remains was nowhere visible.
This mourning period coincided, on Monday, with the first commercial flight from the U.S. — American Airlines, Miami to Havana — in half a century, a tangible outcome of Raul and U.S. President Barack Obama re-establishing diplomatic relations in late 2014. Other carriers will soon initiate flights to Cuba from various U.S. airports — although the historical détente may be dialed back by Donald Trump.
“It took us 50 years to come this far,” said Jorge da Silva, who sells bats inscribed with baseball lover Castro’s name to tourists at a kiosk off the Plaza de la Catedral. “I know many Americans are afraid of what President Trump will do because he’s a crazy guy. We are afraid too, that he will turn the clock back.”
By high noon Tuesday, Revolution Square had been denuded of mourners in preparation for the evening rally, returned to its vast Soviet-style barrenness. All of the capital has felt eerily quiet, subdued, since the weekend, as if a pallor hangs over the usually chaotic city, with flags at half-staff, most government departments shut, alcohol sales suspended for the mourning period, shows and concerts cancelled.
As dusk fell, though, the square had filled up again with tens of thousands gathering for the first public farewell ceremony — some out of a genuine sense of loss, others for the sense of occasion. A group of nurses, in their white stockings and oldfashioned starched caps, weeping. Multiple contingents from the Young Communist League, chanting Fidel slogans, harking back to the rousing speeches Castro routinely delivered at this very spot.
“I don’t think anything will change with Fidel gone,” said Rolando Mantele, a 20-year-old who ekes out a living pedalling a bicycle-cab. “It’s like he’s still here, watching us.’’
In one of his most famous flights of rhetoric, after being sentenced to 15 years in prison — following a botched 1953 revolution bid — the trained lawyer Castro declared:
“Condemn me if you will. History will absolve me.”
Absolution might never be granted. Wrong about that too.