My Friend Fidel

By Ignacio Ramonet on August 13, 2021

In the world pantheon consecrated to those who fought the hardest for social justice and who showed the most solidarity in favor of the oppressed of the Earth, Fidel Castro -whether his detractors like it or not- has a reserved place.

I met him in 1975 and talked to him on many occasions, but, for a long time, always in very professional and very precise circumstances, on the occasion of reports on the island or participation in some congress or event. When we decided to write the book One Hundred Hours with Fidel, he invited me to accompany him for days on various tours. Both in Cuba (Santiago, Holguin, Havana) and abroad (Ecuador). By car, by plane, walking, having lunch or dinner, we talked at length. Without a tape recorder. About all possible subjects, the news of the day, their past experiences and their present worries. Which I would then reconstruct, from memory, in my notebooks. Then, for three years, we saw each other very frequently, at least several days, once a quarter.

It was during this time when I 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 say a word louder than the other. Never an order. With manners and gestures of a courtesy of yesteryear. A true gentleman. who lives, as far as I could appreciate, in a spartan manner. Austere furnishings, healthy and frugal food. A monk-soldier’s way of life.

His workday was usually finished at six or seven o’clock in the morning, when the day dawned. More than once he interrupted our conversation at two or three o’clock in the morning because he still had to participate in some “important meetings”… He slept only about four hours, plus, from time to time, one or two hours at any time of the day.

But he was also a great early riser. And tireless. Trips, travels, meetings were chained without respite. At an unusual pace. His assistants – all young and bright in their 30s – were, by the end of the day, exhausted. They fell asleep standing up. Exhausted. Unable to keep up with this indefatigable giant.

Fidel demanded notes, reports, cables, news, statistics, summaries of television or radio broadcasts, telephone calls… He never stopped thinking, pondering. Always alert, always in action, always at the head of a small general staff -that made up of his assistants and aides- fighting a new battle. Always with ideas. Thinking the unthinkable. Imagining the unimaginable. With spectacular mental daring.

Once a project was defined, no obstacle could stop it. Its realization was his own. “Intendancy will follow”, Napoleon used to say. Fidel was the same. His enthusiasm dragged adhesion. He raised wills. As an almost magical phenomenon, ideas were seen to materialize, to become tangible facts, things, events.

His rhetorical capacity, so often described, was prodigious. Phenomenal. I am not talking about his public speeches which are well known. I am talking about a simple after-dinner conversation. Fidel was a torrent of words. An avalanche. That accompanied the prodigious gestures of his fine hands.

He liked precision, accuracy, punctuality. With him, no approximations. A portentous memory, of an unusual precision. Apprehensible. So rich that sometimes it even seemed to prevent her from thinking in a synthetic way. His thinking was arborescent. Everything was linked together. Everything had to do with everything. Constant digressions. Permanent parentheses. The development of a theme led him, by association, by memory of such a detail, such a situation or such a character, to evoke a parallel theme, and another, and another, and another, and another. Thus moving away from the central theme. To such an extent that the interlocutor feared, for a moment, that he had lost the thread. But then he would retrace his steps and return, with surprising ease, to the main idea.

At no time, during more than a hundred hours of conversations, did Fidel set any limits to the questions to be addressed. As an intellectual of considerable caliber, he was not afraid of debate. On the contrary, he required it, stimulated it. He was always ready to litigate with anyone. With great respect for the other. With great care. And he was a fearsome debater and polemicist. With arguments galore. He was repulsed only by bad faith and hatred.

Few men have known the glory of entering alive in the legend and in history. Fidel is one of them. He belonged to that generation of mythical insurgents who, pursuing an ideal of justice, launched themselves, in the 1950s, into political action 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, in Algeria, in Guinea-Bissau, the oppressed peoples were revolting. Humanity was still largely subjected to the infamy of colonization. Almost all of Africa and a good part of Asia were still dominated and subjugated by the old Western empires. While the nations of Latin America, theoretically independent for a century and a half, continued to be exploited by privileged minorities, subjected to social and ethnic discrimination, and often marked by bloody dictatorships, protected by Washington.

Fidel endured the onslaught of no less than ten U.S. presidents (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush senior, Clinton and Bush junior). He had political relations with the major leaders who shaped the world after World War II (Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Khrushchev, Olaf Palme, Ben Bella, Boumedienne, Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Salvador Allende, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, François Mitterrand, John Paul II, etc.). And he met 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 Márquez, Eduardo Galeano, Noam Chomsky, etc.).

Under his leadership, his small country (100,000 km², 11 million inhabitants) was able to conduct a great power policy on a global scale, and even had an arm wrestle with the United States, whose leaders did not manage to overthrow or eliminate him, or even change the course of the Cuban Revolution. And finally, in December 2014, they had to admit the failure of their anti-Cuban policies, their diplomatic defeat and initiate a normalization process that implied respect for the Cuban political system.

In October 1962, World War III was about to break out because of the attitude of the U.S. Government protesting against the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, whose function was, above all, to prevent another military landing like the one at Playa Giron or another directly carried out by the U.S. armed forces to overthrow the Cuban Revolution.

For more than 50 years, Washington (despite the reestablishment of diplomatic relations) has imposed a devastating trade embargo on Cuba (recently reinforced with the 243 measures adopted by the Donald Trump administration) with tragic consequences for the inhabitants of the island. Washington also continues to conduct a permanent ideological and media war against Havana through social networks to flood Cuba with propaganda as in the worst times of the Cold War.

On the other hand, several terrorist organizations -Alpha 66 and Omega 7- hostile to Cuba have their headquarters in Florida where they have training camps, and from where they regularly send, with the passive complicity of U.S. authorities, armed commandos to commit attacks. Cuba is one of the countries that has had the most victims (some 3,500 dead) and has suffered the most from terrorism in the last 60 years.

In the face of such a permanent attack, the Cuban authorities have advocated, at the domestic level, the union at all costs. And they have applied in their own way the old motto of St. Ignatius of Loyola: “In a besieged fortress, all dissidence is treason”. But there never was – Fidel explicitly forbade it – any cult of personality. No official portrait or statue or statue or seal or coin or street or building or monument with the name or figure of Fidel, or any of the living leaders of the Revolution.

Cuba, a small country attached to its sovereignty, obtained under the leadership of Fidel Castro, despite permanent external harassment, exceptional results in human development: abolition of racism, emancipation of women, eradication of illiteracy, drastic reduction of infant mortality, raising the general cultural level… In education, health, medical research and sports, Cuba has obtained levels that place it in the group of the most efficient nations.

Its diplomacy continues to be 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 have participated in major military campaigns, particularly in the wars in Ethiopia and Angola. Its intervention in the latter country resulted in the defeat of the elite divisions of the Republic of South Africa, which undoubtedly accelerated the fall of the racist apartheid regime.

The Cuban Revolution, of which Fidel Castro was the inspirer, the theoretician and the leader, remains today, thanks to its successes and despite its shortcomings, an important reference for millions of disinherited of the planet. Here or there, in Latin America and elsewhere in the world, women and men protest, fight and sometimes die to try 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 historical failure of State socialism did not change Fidel Castro’s dream of establishing in Cuba a new type of society, fairer, healthier, more egalitarian, better educated, without privatization or discrimination of any kind, and with a total global culture.

Until the eve of his death at the age of 90, he was still mobilized in defense of ecology and the environment, and against neoliberal globalization, he was still in the trenches, in the front line, leading the battle for the ideas in which he believed and which nothing and nobody made him renounce.

Source: Network in Defense of Humanity, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English