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The first obituaries for Fidel Castro were published in December 1956. It was then that the government of President Fulgencio Batista duped a gullible UPI correspondent named Francis McCarthy into reporting that Fidel Castro, and his brother Raúl, had been killed in an ambush. In fact, the 29-year-old leftist rebel leader was hiding out in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Desperate to jumpstart his revolution -- and his life -- Castro dispatched an emissary to find an A-list messenger. After a grueling trek, slogging through the near-impenetrable Sierras, Herbert Matthews, a star correspondent for The New York Times, was told to wait in the wet, chilly and dark woods. It was dawn before Castro, ever mindful of stagecraft, finally descended from the hills – thus establishing his standard operating procedure with the media: Always keep reporters waiting, and preferably in the dark, for as long as possible. The result was a heroic portrait that landed on page one of the Times. From the beginning, newspapers and networks have maintained a standing obituary of Castro. It seemed only wise. After all, several American presidents had decreed that his elimination was a desirable outcome. Then there were the legions of freelance assassins – embittered, hard-wired exile militants – determined to wreak vengeance on the man whom, in their view, had hijacked their country. In the mid 1990s, high-decibel gossip that Castro had barely slipped away from a rendezvous with his Maker, prompted news organizations to freshen up their obituaries. Pundits prepared their sound bytes, ready to yammer on for their allotted 75 seconds of live television. And again, on June 23, 2001, following Castro’s famous “desmayo” or fainting spell - and the improvised oratory of his panic-stricken Foreign Minister, Castro’s obits were rushed back to the re-write desk. The Castro obit industry cranked up one more time in 2004 when Fidel fell face-down splat to the ground. By then, Castro had made some unusual concessions about his mortality. Subtle but crucial changes signaled concerns for his health and the future of his Revolution. On July 1, 2006, Cuba’s Communist Party decreed that the twelve member Secretariat would be restored, thus enhancing the role of the Party when the transfer of power occurred. The Secretariat had been disbanded in 1992 after the Soviets dropped out of the picture. Hence forward, it would serve as the Party’s steering committee and ensure that the Party, and its majority hardliners, would play a central role in the post-Fidel era. A month later, when Castro underwent emergency surgery, the obit business roared to a frenzy and has remained on standby ever since. Over the next three years, Castro’s obit would be revised monthly, sometimes weekly, at news bureaus around the globe. One reporter at National Public Radio lamented she had taped three Castro obituaries in the first year of his illness. In the second and third year of his infirmity, there would be many more revisions. “We had to redo our obit several times,” Anders Gyllenhaal, the editor of The Miami Herald said a year after Castro fell ill. Tom Fiedler, the paper’s editor from 2001 to 2007, told Editor & Publisher that "we had plans for Castro's death going back to the 90s. It was truly exhaustive, maybe more detailed than the Pentagon's plan to invade Iraq.” “We’ve had internal workshops here about it and had to make big changes twice,” said Gyllenhaal in 2007. “Fortunately, we had a dress rehearsal.” A year later, the Herald was not feeling so sanguine. A senior editor, Manny Garcia, discarded traditional newsroom etiquette, and penned a dishy, ornery brief in which he compared Castro to a “kidney stone -- a constant pain who never seems to go away.” Garcia sought to explain his pique. “You gotta understand that the Cadaver-in-Chief is our story and biggest challenge,” he complained. “We sit in meetings, long meetings, going over possible stories. Phrasing. Tone. Length. We got at least five different versions of Fidel's obit, pegged to the time of day or night he dies. We built a Web page for the big day…” For journalists covering Cuba, whom Castro had long held in insect-low regard, the long dying of the Caribbean strongman had become one more indignity to be endured. ** The first attempt at a Castro biography appeared in April 1959, with a collection of his letters entitled Cartas del Presidio [Letters from Prison] with the curious subtitle of A Preview from a Biography of Fidel Castro. Its cover featured the 26 year old Castro's mug shot taken after his arrest for the Moncada assault in 1953. The book’s twenty one letters included missives sent to his wife, Myrta, his half-sister, Lidia, the esteemed intellectual Jorge Mañach who had elegantly glossed Castro’s Moncada speech for him, his personal lawyer, a future mistress, and the father of a compatriot who perished in the Moncada attack. The collection also includes several to his trusted friend and political stalwart, Luis Conte Aguero, who published the letters and wrote its preface, a passionate tribute to the man he believed would be Cuba's savior. Two years later, Conte Aguero had fled the country and copies of the book disappeared from the shelves. In 2005, I wrote a new introduction to the book, which was republished in a English/Spanish edition. A celebrity inmate, Castro used his time in prison – about 22 months - resourcefully. He read and wrote ceaselessly and relentlessly plotted his political future. The letters amply demonstrate Castro’s strategic thinking, and natural leadership. They are an early indicator of his Machiavellian cunning and his genius for public relations. “We cannot for a minute abandon propaganda, for it is the soul of our struggle,” he famously wrote his confederate Melba Hernández in 1954. Letter after letter illustrates Castro's ability to inspire others to do his bidding. Many of his correspondents appeared to have centered their lives around him, seeking to know his needs and anxious to fulfill them. Some focused on his political agenda while others awaited instructions in public relations and talking points: “Maintain a deceptively soft touch and smile with everyone,” he advised Hernández. “Follow the same strategy that we followed during the trial; defend our points of view without raising resentments. There will be enough time later to squash all the cockroaches together. Do not lose heart over anything or anyone.” The letters are an early map of Castro's political ambitions, along with lesser matters including his desired visits with Fidelito, his devolving marriage and subsequent divorce. Although Castro has never been regarded as a man of easy sentiment, the letters are filled with warmth and affection towards those he trusted. To those who opposed him, there were rages and rants. There are disquisitions on all manner of topics from his food preferences, pubic relations, and philosophical musings including his esteem for the Stoic philosopher Cato, who chose to end his life rather than live under Caesar. For his enemies, a casual homophobia leaked from his pen: “Only an effeminate like [Ramon] Hermida, at the lowest degree of sexual degeneration, would resort to these methods, of such inconceivable indecency and unmanliness,” Castro huffed in one letter, referring to the Minister of Interior. The most poignant aspect of the letters is the number of correspondents lauded by Castro as devoted friends or heroes, who would later break from him when he assumed power. Support for the Cuban Revolution had cut across all class and economic distinctions. Most believed that the removal of the corrupt and repressive Batista regime could only auger better things for Cuba. But in time, many came to believe they were betrayed. Many like Jorge Mañach and Castro's own sister fled into exile. Others were sent to prison or the firing squad. A few like Miguel Ángel Quevedo, the gifted editor of Bohemia, who proved so helpful to Castro, took their own lives. Such was Quevedo’s singular importance that Castro had beseeched Conte Aguero to bring the publisher-editor on board. “I beg you to visit Quevedo,” he wrote, “and exhort him in this sense… The simple publication of the charges will have tremendous consequences for the [Batista] government.” In another letter to his wife Myrta, he reminds her, “Do not fail to give the article to Miguel Quevedo, now with more reason than ever.” On July 26, 1958, the third anniversary of the Moncada assault, Bohemia published Fidel’s Sierra Maestra Manifesto laying out his fervently held belief on the necessity to unite the various factions seeking to topple Batista. On January 11, 1959, the magazine printed a special edition that sold more than one million copies. Quevedo’s subsequent suicide note, sent to the renowned journalist Ernesto Montaner, is a searing indictment against his former friend. “Fidel is nothing more than the result of the clash between demagoguery and stupidity,” he wrote before taking his life in Caracas in August 1969. “All of us contributed to his creation….I die disgusted and alone. Condemned, without a country, and abandoned by friends to whom I generously gave financial and moral support during the most difficult days….And now we are all victims.” *** It was inevitable that Fidel Castro would seek to have the last word. Make that roughly 200,000 final words – as is the case with My Life, Castro’s voluminous and irresistible “autobiography.” Published in the United States in early 2008, it is based on some 100 hours of conversation with the Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramónet, spanning more than two years. The book was first published in 2005 in Spanish under the title Fidel Castro: Biografia a dos voces- [A Biography in Two Voices]. Castro, however, regarded the English language edition as being of greater significance. To that end, Ramónet informed his readers that Castro “totally revised and amended” the Spanish original. According to Ramónet, Castro was still glossing the text in November 2006. That would mean that while the Cuban leader was dangling between life and death, being fed intravenously, fifty pounds thinner and barely able to sit up, he summoned his uber-human will to rewrite his memoirs. “I wanted to finish it because I didn’t know how much time I’d have,” Castro explained to a friend. With his pliant interlocutor, Castro does have the last word. After all, Fidel Castro was not spilling the beans with just anyone. Ramónet is an unabashed fidelista who addressed his subject as “Comandante.” “Few men have known the glory of entering the pages of history and legend while they are still alive,” he wrote in his Introduction. “Fidel is one of them.” High praise but true enough. Then the Kool-Aid kicks in. “He is the last sacred giant of international politics.” Notwithstanding his considerable experience and talents as a journalist, Ramónet functions somewhat as a literary Oliver Stone – whose cinematic hagiography of Castro produced two rosy portraits, “Comandante” and “Looking for Fide.l” Undoubtedly, scholars and historians will forever be in the debt of both Stone and Ramónet for their extraordinary access and the sheer scope of their materials: 50 hours of videotape and hundreds of hours of audiotape. The tape transcripts, when edited by less partisan chroniclers, will be well worth the wait. To their credit, Castro and Ramónet turned to the excellent translator Andrew Hurley in presenting their opus to English language readers. He was an unusual choice, having previously translated several vociferous Castro critics, including Heberto Padilla, Jorge Edwards and Reinaldo Arenas. Hurley seemed surprised to get the assignment and his notes are among the most interesting parts of My Life. Comparing his work as a translator to that of a defense lawyer, Hurley noted that “I saw, and see, Fidel Castro as one of the most ‘censored’ world figures in English… represented almost invariably by his enemies.” Hurley had to cope with the Maximum Leader’s 11th hour revisions which he described as Castro’s desire “to present a less ‘outspoken’ or ‘unbuttoned’ image.” He wrote that some of Castro’s changes stemmed from wanting to revise a “’politically incorrect’ statement” ….[and thus] some of his more direct and uninhibited statements ended up on the cutting room floor.” Hurley found the requested changes to be “historically interesting” because ‘they revealed Castro’s mind at work before the super ego of hindsight and counsel kicked in.” So extensive were Castro’s edits -“tens of thousand of changes” - that the marked up, inky pages “looked like ants at a picnic,” according to Hurley. Fortunately for historians and Cubaphiles alike, he took relocated some of Castro’s cuts to the book’s endnotes. Castro shared his own memories of the acute anxiety he felt during the revision process. "Never in my life had I thought so much,” he told an interlocutor from Granma. “I had thought that it would be a quick thing, like the interviews with [writers] Frei Betto and Tomás Borge. And then I became a slave to the French writer's [Ramónet] book. When it was at the point of being published without my going over it,…I barely slept during those days.” Castro goes on to paint an astonishing, and not especially flattering self portrait - a man more preoccupied with his legacy than his own physical survival who had summoned and dispatched what may have been his final breath to micro-manage his After Life. “When I fell gravely ill on the night of the 26th and in the early morning of the 27th of July [2006], I thought that would be the end,” Castro recalled. “And while the doctors were fighting for my life, the head of the Council of State’s office was reading me the text, at my insistence, and I was dictating the pertinent changes." Not surprisingly, Castro’s prodigious gifts are well displayed in his autobiography: his formidable erudition, steely discipline, epic curiosity and an astute grasp of history. A careful reader can even glimpse his flaws: the obsessive micro-management, colossal pride and fierce willfulness. “I made myself into a revolutionary,” he points out proudly, suggesting a view of himself as a changeling. And there are also telling, even chilling insights. Discussing an early betrayal when he was a young activist in Havana in 1952, Castro said he learned some hard lessons, matters that would harden his heart. “He was a companero,” he said of a cohort turned informer. “I trusted him. That’s the mistake. You shouldn’t trust someone just because he’s a friend.” At times, it seems as if all of Castro’s reflections are in his memoir - from the history of Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet empire, Stalin, his mentorship of Hugo Chavez, U.S. politics, even Lee Harvey Oswald. Castro is never boring and presents himself as a man who never knew boredom. He sees the broader, global picture – especially in regards to history’s strongmen. “Despite his terrible abuses and errors,” Castro opines on Stalin, “one has to give [him] credit for an accelerated industrialization of the country.” For the English edition, Castro added a chapter devoted to all things French, perhaps to honor France’s historically good relations with Cuba and himself. Castro lavishes admiration on former French president Francois Mitterand and his wife Dominique, Jean Paul Sartre, and the works of Balzac and Victor Hugo. In Castro’s reading of history, Charles De Gaulle was “a genius” – as well as a soul mate of sorts. He saluted De Gaulle for what he called “his intransigence [and] defiance of the United States and the English.” He even offers a shaky comparison between the Cuban and the French Revolutions. And there are many interesting musings on his childhood idol and lifelong north star, Napoleon Bonaparte. For the English edition, Castro added a new chapter on his family and background in which he is uncharacteristically forthcoming and emotional. He speaks of his mother, who died in 1963 at the age of 57 from heart failure, with immense affection, sprinkled with hyperbole: “Without her, I assure you that I – who always loved to study – would be a functional illiterate. My mother was practically illiterate, and like my father, she learned to read and write practically on her own. With a great deal of effort and determination, too. I never heard her say that she’d gone to school. She was self-taught.” In the eye of Castro’s mind, Lina Ruz was a guajira Renaissance woman - notwithstanding the misfortunes and austerity of her own life. “My mother, although she wasn’t saying so every minute, adored her children,” “She was a cook, a doctor, a caretaker of all of us- she provided every single thing we might need and she was a shoulder to cry on for any problem we might have….I never saw her rest one second the whole day. “ But much is left unsaid or sanitized - from the excesses and failures of the Revolution to family secrets. Castro’s account has his mother Lina giving birth to her first born, daughter, Ángela, (named for the child’s father), in 1923 when she is 19. Some Castrophiles contend that Lina was actually 14, having been seduced by Ángel Castro, soon after she began working in his home. (Records document Lina’s birth year as both 1903 and 1908, which could be the result of a typo, a careless registrar, or some historical fudging.) Castro recalls his parents as almost hard-scrabble pioneers, who through dint of their ceaseless labors, became immensely successful. Both Angel and Lina roamed the family hacienda on horseback, their rifles tucked into their saddles. “My father was a very isolated landowner, actually. My parents didn’t go out and only rarely had visitors. There was no rich-family culture. They worked all the time. And our only contact was with the people who lived there in Birán,” said Castro about his earliest years. He well describes the schizophrenia of being the offspring of wealth but not culture – of not hailing from what Cubans call “una buena cuna” – literally a good cradle but meaning a a ‘proper’ family. “If I’d been the grandson of a rich family… I’d have had an aristocratic birth, and all my friends and all my culture would have been marked by a sense of superiority and all that. But in fact, where I was born everybody was poor — children of farm workers and extremely poor campesinos. . . And my own family, on my mother’s side, was poor, and some of my father’s cousins, who came over from Galicia, were poor…I lived with people of the most humble origins... On the other hand, in Santiago and later in Havana, I was in schools for the privileged.” Ángel Castro, who donned a pistol, whip and machete over his coveralls, was known to be both severe and generous with his 300 plus workers and his own children. “There was also the fact of corporal punishment, a slap on the head or a belt taken to you,” Castro said about his father. “We always ran that risk.” At the age of 6, Castro and his older brother Ramón and sister Ángelita were sent to Santiago to live and study with the family of their Haitian school teacher. It is probable that Ángel Castro’s unusual domestic relationships necessitated moving some of Lina’s children out of sight for a period. No doubt, Lina believed, as well, that she was improving her children’s opportunities. But it proved to be a harrowing, almost Dickensian experience for Castro and his siblings. The Haitian family, desperate for money, hoarded the stipend paid to them by Ángel Castro (“120 pesos a month, which at the time was a fortune”), and provided the Castro children with minimal food and study. “Because I was the son of a rich man, I was the victim of exploitation,” Castro explained. “I gave myself my own lessons. Since then, I’ve always taught myself things.” Asked if that experience damaged his esteem of his parents, Castro answered with an adult’s hindsight. “No, I loved them, at least respected them.” While Castro was a precocious, gifted student, he was rebellious and pig-headed from the gate. At one point, he and his brothers Raúl and Ramón attended grade school at the Colegio de La Salle, a Marist Christian school in Santiago. When their parents came to pick them up for Christmas holiday, they were mortified to learn that their sons- Fidel in particular – were the terror of the school. The principal told them that their progeny “were los tres bandidos más grandes que habían pasado por la escuela - the three biggest rascals that had ever gone through the school.” For punishment the three were taken out of their expensive school and returned to the family farm and grounded. There would be no more fancy out-of-town prep schools. In response, Fidel famously threatened war on his family. “I must have been eleven, because I was in the fifth grade, and that’s when I said all those terrible things,” he recalled. Castro confirmed the childhood anecdote that some journalists suspected was apocryphal: “I said I was going to burn the house down,” he tells his Boswell, pointing out that the building “was made of wood.” But you didn’t really intend to do that, did you?, queried Ramonet. “I’m not sure what I would have done,” Castro mused, with a nod to the origins of his scorched-earth warrior character. “Most likely I wouldn’t have. I mean, I was very, very angry, but I wouldn’t have done it, I’m convinced. But I said I would, and I must have said it very seriously.” Castro conceded what his friends at the posh Havana prep school, Belen, would invariably point out: that there was a decided cultural deficit in his upbringing. “We were privileged, going to schools for the wealthy, the upper class, yet we had big gaps in art, painting…Nothing at all about art.” It would remain so throughout his life. Castro had tremendous talent and an insatiable interest in sports, science, politics, history and military strategy but he never developed a passion for art, dance, film or the belles lettres. He told me in 1994 that he spent his free time watching documentaries about science and astronomy. It would be left to his comrades Celia Sánchez and Alfredo Guevara, to foster and preserve Cuban culture in whatever ways they could. While Castro’s memoir seems to touch on just about everything, there are significant blanks in the narrative. George Orwell’s admonition that “autobiography is the most outrageous form of fiction,” comes to mind in some patches of his self portrait. There is no mention of his sister Juanita’s flight into exile. More tellingly, he is mum on the near-dozen children he has sired, and has nothing to say about his first great love, Myrta Díaz-Balart, and his second spouse, Dalia Soto del Valle. Nor is Ramonet much help. “It never crossed my mind that we should speak about Castro’s private life, his wife or children,” Ramónet tells readers to their palpable disappointment. Put another way, Castro is the master of the verbal smoke screen, in the parlance of Zen Buddhism. He knows all too well, whether speaking or writing, that a blizzard of words can both tell a story and obscure simple facts and humble truths. After all, he Castro is an accomplished story teller and mythographer. As it turned out, Castro was not alone in seeking to have the final word on his life. Published almost at the same time was The Autobiography of Fidel Castro – a 1300 page tome written in Castro’s fictional voice by Norberto Fuentes. Formerly, Fuentes had been cozily comfortable with the Revolution and quite the Castro pal with unusual access. His disillusionment had begun in the late 1980s and he defected in 1994. In an interview, Fuentes said he opted to omit “the usual things about the Revolution and Castro: a dictator, a murderer with blood on his hands. The idea is to understand a phenomenon, a force of nature, somebody who exists, who is with us, and who will be a part of history forever." Asked to list some of Castro’s vices, Fuentes gave a generous appraisal: “He has a lot, but as he himself would say: why look at the Sun's spots? There's no point in assessing Castro in terms of his vices; it is his virtues that count, his achievements as a leader.” The Miami Herald – Best Books of 2009 “Without Fidel is news between hard covers by a relentless reporter who writes like a dream." Tom Wolfe "Wthout Fidel is superb -- a phenomenally enlightening, engaging read." Eason Jordan, former CNN Chief News Executive Without Fidel: Ann Louise Bardach: Reporter and Cuba expert examines the fallout of Fidel Castro's semi-retirement in Havana, Washington, D.C. and Miami, which she calls ``the Cuban triangle of capitals.'' “In her clear-eyed and well-researched new book, Bardach charts the political ripples radiating from the shock wave of the maximum leader's semi-retirement, not only in Havana but also in Miami and Washington…An intrepid reporter.” Miami Herald 11/15/09 "Back in the 1990s, Ann Louise Bardach made herself infamous in Miami by scoring a huge interview with Fidel Castro for Vanity Fair. Later, she nailed American hypocrisy toward terrorists when talking with Magic City mad bomber, Luis Posada Carriles, who masterminded the shoot down of a Cubana airliner. That work was published in the New York Times. In her new book, Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington, Bardach tells more about the Castro's present maladies (she calls him the "convalescent-in-chief" ) and his complicated family tree than has ever been divulged before." Miami New Times 11/12/09 |
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