The Autobiography of Fidel Castro
Norberto Fuentes
Norton
REVIEW: Gerald Shaw
This book is neither autobiography nor biography but something in between.
It reads like a novel, telling of the extraordinary life of one of the most bombastic, ego-driven and ruthless revolutionaries to strut the world stage in our times.
And it does so in entertaining fashion.
Norberto Fuentes, a noted Cuban writer, was a comrade-in-arms and confidant of Castro’s who knew him as well as anyone.
He is now exiled from Cuba. Although he is not the author, it is Castro’s own voice which dominates this bawdy, sordid and rambling narrative.
We are given a picture of the Cuban dictator, purportedly in his own words, as a compulsive womaniser who has illegitimate children because “I hate condoms” and has no scruples in killing his followers who are seen to be informers and traitors to the cause.
He boasts that he lost his virginity at the age of seven with an older woman.
“When I was 19 I had already killed. And I knew something that all men who have killed know from the moment they have killed for the first time. That I had lost God… you’ve put an end to any dialogue with God. From then on you are charting your own way in the universe without any assistance.”
And after that first killing, we gather, the others were easy. Castro insists that HE made the Cuban revolution. “It was all personal… No Stalinism or imperialist mistakes or any of that Marxist nonsense… I am the revolution.”
He partially contradicts himself elsewhere when he acknowledges his debt to Lenin.
In spite of the bombast, and the ruthless means employed, Castro’s domestic achievement has been considerable, standing up to a super-power and surviving the economic and CIA-style military consequences at the Bay of Pigs.
And he has been successful in starting 10 000 new schools and increasing literacy to 98 percent. Cubans enjoy a universal health care system.
Yet trade unions have lost the right to strike, independent newspapers have been shut down, and religious institutions harassed.
Castro removed opposition to his rule through executions and imprisonments, as well as through forced emigration.
Castro’s earlier essays in urban revolution – attacks on police barracks and such like – were failures, and even when he returned to invade Cuba from the sea after going into exile, it was a fiasco.
He fled into the mountains with a small band of followers and it was from here that a guerilla campaign was launched which was ultimately successful.
He speaks patronisingly of Che Guevara as a “poor devil” who he claims “only exists as propaganda” rather than being a key figure in the Cuban revolution. This contention will no doubt be widely contested. But his account of the Cuban missile crisis will fascinate historians.
In a chronology of his life Castro is described as the victor of the war in Angola, winning the last military victory in his life.
It is said that at Cuito Cuanavale the Cubans and Angolans stopped more than 100 armoured South Africans in their tracks.
It remains to be seen what will happen when Castro goes.