Castro is no more, but his spirit lives on
FIDEL Castro ignored my outstretched hand. He lunged and grabbed me in a bear hug.
El Comandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, internationalist and leader of the Cuban revolution, will be buried in Santiago de Cuba today. There will be no body to bury. A day after his passing, his wish to be cremated was honoured by his countrymen.
He may be gone, but I still feel the warmth of that enormous hug. How, you might ask, does a lad from the little Bangladesh market district get to commune with one of the world’s most iconic leaders? Well, we Chatsworth lighties can pull a job with anything.
It’s closer to the truth that I was an important woman’s date to a state dinner at which Castro was present. The occasion was the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Durban in September 1998. There were perhaps 50 heads of state, but it was Castro everyone lined up to greet.
As tears flowed in Cuba and around the world, I found solace in my bookcase. I extracted Fidel Castro – My Life, edited by Ignacio Ramonet and translated by Andrew Hurley. The 724-page tome was published in 2007 by Allen Lane of the Penguin Group. The publisher is significant in that Western nations historically have been hostile to the Cuban revolutionary.
Secret service agencies mounted several hundred attempts on his life, but he outlived all the enemy presidents who ordered them, eventually giving way at the ripe age of 90 on his own terms.
Fidel resisted the cult of personality common in biographies. He relented to 100 hours of interviews with Ramonet for an extraordinary book crafted as a series of conversations.
In the opening lines, we see the workaholic he was. “It was two o’clock in the morning and we’d been talking for hours.”
Ramonet describes Castro’s office in the Palacio de la Revolucion: “An immense bookshelf on one wall and, before it, a long, heavy desk covered with books and documents. Everything was neat.”
That is a far cry from my desk and library. Somewhere among my jumble is Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries and José Marti’s poems, all of which dwell on the great struggle to rid Cuba of capitalist dictatorship.
I also have Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which was inspired by his time in Cuba where he fished and smoked cigars with Fidel.
On the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, my son and I visited in the company of several South African comrades to express our solidarity with the Cuban people. On our last evening in Santiago de Cuba, we sipped mojitos from the roof garden of our hotel. It was near that city that the rebels scored their first victory. It’s fitting that Fidel’s revolutionary spirit will find its resting place there.
• Higgins is on Facebook as The Bookseller of Bangladesh, and at today’s Nelson Mandela Chatsworth Youth Centre Flea Market.