Life after Fidel: What happens next?

BIRAN, CUBA— Loved and loathed and now lionized in death, as perhaps never before.

Even the most fervid of Fidel Castro detractors, by vilifying the revolutionary firebrand to the nth degree, invest him with a kind of inverse colossus stature in the depth and breadth of their hatred.

More easily expressed, of course, from the safe distance of the United States, where Cuban exiles and their progeny — including three U.S. senators, two of whom contended for the Republican nomination this past year — can rant to their hearts’ content, playing primarily to an audience of fellow travellers drawn from multiple generations of exodus.

“Fidel Castro seized power promising to bring freedom and prosperity to Cuba, but his communist regime turned it into an impoverished island prison,” fulminated Marco Rubio, following the announcement of El Comandante’s extinguishing last weekend. “Over six decades, millions of Cubans were forced to flee their own country, and those accused of opposing the regime were routinely jailed and even killed.

“The dictator has died but the dictatorship has not. And one thing is clear: history will not absolve Fidel Castro. It will remember him as an evil, murderous dictator who inflicted misery and suffering on his own people.”

A sentiment not reflected by the thousands upon thousands who’ve lined the funeral procession route across nearly 900 kilometres of Cuba these past several days, paying tribute to the “Caravan of Freedom” as Castro’s ashes, towed by a military jeep, are returned to the cradle of his revolution for interment on Sunday.

How sincere their grief is difficult to fathom. Most have been transported to their spot on the caravan trail in hundreds of buses commandeered for the purpose by the government. It might all be the Cuban version of a Potemkin village; a façade behind which 11 million citizens go on with their normal existence, if doubtless keenly curious about what happens next: Life after Fidel, life beyond the end of an era.

Castro may have subsided in relevance this past decade, since formally ceding the presidency to younger brother and chief aide de camp Raul while he tottered in feeble health into his 10th decade on Earth. But dying actually made him alive again, bringing the society he transformed so radically face to face with the mortality of Marxism-Leninism as a functioning political system. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc came to that reckoning, spectacularly, some time ago. Yet Cuba, except for modest free-market tweaks, has remained a citadel of communism in the Western Hemisphere through 11 U.S. administrations, Castro thrilling to defiance of American influence just 145 kilometres and a world away across the water.

Many have forgotten that, in 1959, following the collapse of the venal, corrupt Batista regime that had been propped up by Washington, Castro was actually feted during a tour of the U.S. In those long-ago days, The Bearded One had yet to fervently embrace Communism, didn’t definitively explain where he intended to take Cuba, and it was only after he nationalized American-owned companies worth a billion dollars — triggering the U.S. economic and diplomatic embargo — that Castro turned ardently, gratefully, to Moscow.

Biographers and social anthropologists have filled tomes trying to decipher the narrative arc of Castro’s shape-shifting. But the story starts here, in the rural village of Biran, where he was born. Oddly, perhaps, the cortege didn’t stop here yesterday on its way from Holguin to Santiago de Cuba. So, no crowds flanking the potholed road, no little shrines, no portraits held aloft. Just a handful of employees puttering around the estate that has been turned into a national museum, goats bleating in the background, and a couple of white horses grazing.

The house where Castro first drew breath — there’s the bed in which his mother gave birth, here’s the baby Fidel’s crib — has been restored to its original lavish design. Because the father of socialist revolution was the son of an affluent sugar cane plantation owner, Don Angel, a self-made immigrant from Spain who married the cook, Lina, but only after she’d borne him several of the eight children the couple eventually had.

“I made myself into a revolutionary,” Castro told the journalist, academic and activist Ignacio Ramonet, over the course of 100 hours of interviews that became the 2007 first-person autobiography My Life: A Spoken Autobiography. “I’ve reflected from time to time about the factors that had to do with that. Beginning with the fact of the place where I was born, way out in the country, on a large estate.”

It’s hardly unprecedented, for a rebel to come from money. Don Angelo had been so poor that, at least as his son tells it, he left Galicia in Spain as a soldier stand-in for a wealthy local man because the gentry could buy their way out of the Spanish army with a substitute.

Don Angelo later became a labourer for the railway — an employ of the American-owned United Fruit Company, which built it — and, over the years, parcelling together more than 10,500 hectares, Las Manacas, of sugar cane plantation, most of which he sold to United Fruit, retaining about 800 hectares, with a cockfighting arena in the back.

In campesino terms, Don Angelo was a rich man and Fidel was sent away to boarding school as an eight year old. His family wasn’t anywhere near as well-heeled as the boys he went to the Jesuit school with and, behind Fidel’s back, they called him guajiro — peasant.

“My character was moulded by the hard tests I had to pass, difficulties I had to overcome, conflicts I had to face, decisions I had to make, rebellions . . . ”

To hear Castro tell it, he felt himself a person of destiny.

“I had several reasons for being (an insurgent). Faced with a certain Spanish authoritarianism, and even more so the particular Spaniard giving the orders” — meaning his father — “I didn’t like authority, because at that time there was also a lot of corporal punishment, a slap on the head or a belt taken to you — we always ran the risk, although gradually we learned to defend ourselves against it.”

Precocious, scholastically gifted, a fine athlete — baseball was Castro’s favourite sport, though it’s a myth that he was ever scouted by the major leagues — he ultimately graduated from the University of Havana and hung his shingle out as a lawyer intending to represent the impoverished in their legal travails. And he did so for about a minute and a half before heeding the siren call of the Insurrectional Revolutionary Union. Had the despotic President Fulgencio Batista, who’d taken power in a military coup, not cancelled the 1952 elections in which Castro had been due to stand as a local candidate, the arc of history may have been drastically different.

But it was then that Castro decided the gun was more efficient than the ballot.

As the leader of a triumphant guerrilla campaign, he promised free elections. As the victor who chased Batista into exile, he imposed one-party rule and unbending repression: No elections, no free press, no workers’ utopia.

Goodbye to all that.

Nearly 58 years later: Goodbye to Fidel.