My Friend Fidel

By Ignacio Ramonet on November 25, 2025

In the global pantheon dedicated to those who fought most hard for social justice and showed the greatest solidarity with the oppressed of the Earth, Fidel Castro—whether his detractors like it or not—has a place of honor reserved for him.

I met him in 1975 and spoke with him on multiple occasions, but for a long time, always in very professional and specific circumstances, when I was reporting on the island or participating in a conference, seminar, or event. Then our relationship grew closer. Sometimes he would invite me to dinner in the privacy of his office in the Palace of the Revolution, and we would chat for hours about the state of the world. Other times, he would entrust me with discreet “missions,” such as meeting with a Latin American leftist leader about whom he had his doubts, so that I could give him my personal opinion. He was the first person to speak highly of Hugo Chávez (who was then “suspicious” to much of the global left because he was accused of leading an attempted coup on February 4, 1992, against Carlos Andrés Pérez, the social-democratic president of Venezuela and leader of the Socialist International). Fidel advised me to go and see him, get to know him, and help him.

When, in 2003, we decided to write the book “One Hundred Hours with Fidel,” he invited me to accompany him for weeks on various trips. Both in Cuba (Santiago, Holguín, Havana) and abroad (Ecuador). By car, by plane, walking, having lunch or dinner, we talked at length. With and without a tape recorder. We talked about all kinds of topics, the news of the day, his past experiences, and his current concerns. I would then reconstruct these conversations from memory in my notebooks. Then, for three years, from 2003 to 2006, we saw each other very frequently, at least several days in a row, once a quarter, to make progress on the book.

I thus discovered an intimate Fidel. Almost shy. Very polite. Listening attentively to each interlocutor. Always attentive to others, and in particular to his collaborators. I never heard him raise his voice. Never an order. With manners and gestures of old-fashioned courtesy. A true gentleman. With a high sense of honor. Who lives, as far as I could tell, in a Spartan manner. Austere furniture, healthy and frugal food. The lifestyle of a monk-soldier.

His workday usually ended at five or six in the morning, when the day was just beginning.

More than once he interrupted our conversation at two or three in the morning because he still had to attend some “important meetings”… He slept only about four hours; plus, from time to time, an hour or two at any time of the day. But he was also an early riser. And tireless. Trips, travel, meetings followed one another without respite.

At an unusual pace. His assistants—all young and brilliant 30-somethings—were exhausted at the end of the day. They fell asleep standing up. Exhausted. Unable to keep up with this tireless giant. Fidel demanded notes, reports, cables, news, statistics, summaries of television or radio broadcasts, phone calls… He never stopped thinking, pondering. Always alert, always in action, always at the head of a small general staff—made up of his assistants and aides—fighting one battle after another. Always full of ideas. Thinking the unthinkable. Imagining the unimaginable. With unprecedented, spectacular mental daring.

Once a project was defined.

No material obstacle could stop him. Its execution was obvious, it went without saying. “The logistics will follow,” Napoleon said. Fidel was the same. His enthusiasm drew collective support. He lifted people’s spirits. Like an almost magical phenomenon, ideas were seen to materialize, to become tangible facts, realities, events. His rhetorical ability, so often described, was prodigious. Phenomenal.

I am not talking about his well-known public speeches, but rather a simple after-dinner conversation. Fidel was a torrent of words. An avalanche. A waterfall. He accompanied his words with the prodigious gestures of his fine hands.

He liked precision, accuracy, punctuality. With him, there were no approximations. He had a prodigious memory, of unusual precision. Overwhelming. So rich that it sometimes seemed to prevent him from thinking in a synthetic way. His thinking was arborescent. Everything was linked. Everything had to do with everything else. Constant digressions. Permanent parentheses. The development of a topic led him, by association, by the memory of a particular detail, situation, or person, to evoke a parallel topic, and then another, and another, and another. Thus straying from the central topic. To such an extent that his interlocutor feared, for a moment, that he had lost the thread. But then he retraced his steps and returned, with surprising ease, to the central theme, the main idea.

At no point, during more than a hundred hours of conversation, did Fidel set any limits on the issues to be addressed. As an intellectual of impressive caliber, he did not fear debate. On the contrary, he sought it out and was stimulated by it. He was always ready to argue with anyone, with great respect for the other person and with great care. He was a formidable debater and polemicist, with arguments in abundance. He was repulsed only by bad faith and hatred.

Few men have known the glory of entering legend and history while still alive. Fidel is one of them. He belonged to that generation of mythical insurgents who, pursuing an ideal of justice, threw themselves into political action in the 1950s with the ambition and hope of changing a world of inequality and discrimination, marked by the beginning of the “Cold War” between the Soviet Union and the United States.

At that time, in more than half of the planet, in Vietnam, Algeria, and Guinea-Bissau, oppressed peoples were rising up. Humanity was still, for the most part, subjected to the infamy of colonization. Almost all of Africa, part of the Caribbean, and a large portion of Asia were still dominated and subjugated by the old Western empires. Meanwhile, the nations of Latin America, theoretically independent for a century and a half, continued to be subjected to social and ethnic discrimination, exploited by privileged minorities, and often marked by bloody dictatorships supported by Washington.

Fidel endured the onslaught of no less than ten US presidents (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr.). He had political relations with the main leaders who shaped the world after World War II (Mao, Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-Sung, Khrushchev, Olaf Palme, Ben Bella, Boumedienne, Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Salvador Allende, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, François Mitterrand, John Paul II, etc.). And he personally knew some of the leading intellectuals and artists of his time (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Miller, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Rafael Alberti, Guayasamín, Cartier-Bresson, José Saramago, Gabriel García Marquez, Eduardo Galeano, Noam Chomsky, etc.).

Under his leadership, his small country (100,000 km², 11 million inhabitants) was able to conduct a powerful policy on a global scale, even going head-to-head with the United States, whose leaders failed to overthrow him, eliminate him, or even change the course of the Cuban Revolution. Finally, in December 2014, they had to admit the failure of their anti-Cuban policies and their diplomatic defeat, and begin a process of normalization that implied respect for the Cuban political system.

In October 1962, World War III was on the brink of breaking out because of the attitude of the US government, which protested against the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Their main function was to prevent another military landing like the one at Playa Girón in 1961 or another carried out directly by the US armed forces to overthrow the Cuban revolution.

For more than 60 years, Washington (despite the reestablishment of diplomatic relations) has imposed a devastating economic, commercial, and financial blockade on Cuba (reinforced by the 243 measures adopted during Donald Trump’s first term) with tragic consequences for the island’s inhabitants. Washington also continues to wage a permanent ideological and media war against Havana through social media, flooding Cuba with hostile propaganda as in the worst days of the Cold War.

Furthermore, for decades, several terrorist organizations hostile to Cuba—Alpha 66 and Omega 7—had their headquarters in Florida, where they had training camps and from where they regularly sent armed commandos to carry out attacks, with the complicity of the US authorities. Cuba is one of the countries that has suffered the most victims (some 3,500 dead) and terrorism in the last sixty years.

Faced with such constant attacks, the Cuban authorities have advocated, domestically, uncompromising unity. And they have applied in their own way the old Jesuit motto of Ignatius of Loyola: “In a besieged fortress, all dissent is treason.” But there was never – Fidel explicitly forbade it – any cult of personality. There was no official portrait, statue, stamp, coin, street, building, or monument bearing the name or image of Fidel or any of the living leaders of the Revolution.

A small country attached to its sovereignty, Cuba achieved exceptional results in human development under Fidel Castro’s leadership, despite constant external harassment: the abolition of racism, the emancipation of women, the eradication of illiteracy, universal vaccination, a drastic reduction in infant mortality, and a rise in the general cultural level. In terms of education, health, medical research, culture, and sports, Cuba has achieved levels that place it among the most efficient nations.

Its diplomacy remains one of the most active in the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, Havana supported guerrilla warfare in many countries in Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua) and South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina). The Cuban armed forces participated in large-scale military campaigns, particularly in the wars in Ethiopia and Angola. Its intervention in the latter country fifty years ago resulted in the defeat of the elite divisions of the Republic of South Africa, which undoubtedly accelerated the fall of the racist apartheid regime and favored the independence of Angola and Namibia.

The Cuban Revolution, of which Fidel Castro was the inspiration, theorist, and political and military leader, remains today, thanks to its successes and despite its shortcomings, an important reference point for millions of dispossessed people around the world. Here and there, in Latin America and other parts of the world, women and men protest, fight, and sometimes die in an attempt to establish systems inspired by the Cuban model.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the historic failure in Eastern Europe of state socialism and the model of centralized economic planning did not change Fidel Castro’s dream of building a new type of society in Cuba: one that was decolonized, fairer, healthier, more egalitarian, more feminist, more ecological, better educated, free of discrimination of any kind, and with a truly global culture.

Until the eve of his death on November 25, 2016, at the age of 90, he remained mobilized in defense of the environment, against climate change, and neoliberal globalization. He remained in the trenches, on the front lines, leading the battle for the ideas he believed in and which nothing and no one ever made him renounce.

Ignacio Ramonet  is a Spanish professor and journalist residing in France, where he edited the magazine Le Monde Diplomatique. He is the author of the definitive  book “One Hundred Hours with Fidel.”

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English