Fidel Castro
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A report in the US-based Cuban Studies estimated:
There is probably another $8–10 billion of profitable investment available to foreign capital in Cuba in the coming years. According to some sources, twenty-five of the sixty largest US claimants have indicated an interest in doing business with Cuba without first settling their claims. Once the US embargo is lifted, within five years US exports to Cuba could reach around $6–7 billion and generate some 70,000–100,000 jobs in the United States. On the Cuban side, some estimates have suggested that even a partial lifting of the US embargo on Cuba would result in a doubling of import capacity and a 25 percent increase in Cuban national income.59
In 1998 the Clinton administration began to see which way the wind was blowing and cancelled a number of restrictions. A Pentagon study, produced together with the CIA and the army secret service, helped the government out by arguing: “At present Cuba does not represent a major danger either for the USA or for other countries in the region.”60 US defense experts assessed the strength of Castro’s army at no more than 65,000 men, with training and equipment considerably weakened by lack of resources. An army with a high level of activity in the Third World had turned into a stationary force with a minimal conventional fighting power. The navy was no longer capable of operating outside Cuban waters, and the air force had only a couple of dozen airworthy MIGs from Soviet times. On the other hand, Cuba had one of the most broadly developed biotechnological industries in the Third World, and was in a position to develop biological warfare agents. The report suited Castro’s opponents because it tended to present their arch-enemy as a paper tiger, but they did not at all like its political direction and tried to ensure, through their lobby in Congress, that it was sent back for reworking.
Clearly, however, Washington was by this time no longer interested in a violent overthrow of the aging Castro. On October 27, 1997, when US coastguards west of Puerto Rico seized a Miami-registered yacht with damaged engines, they found in a secret compartment two .50 calibre telescopic-sight rifles with a range of nearly 1 mile. All four men on board the Esperanza (Spanish for “hope”) were Cuban exiles, on their way to Venezuela. One of them confessed that they had been planning to shoot Castro on the island of Margarita, during the seventh summit meeting of Ibero–American leaders. The FBI immediately took over the investigation, and its agents discovered that the guns had been acquired by a Bay of Pigs veteran and none other than the managing director of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), Francisco Hernández. The person who sold them was also a Bay of Pigs veteran, while the owner of the boat proved to be a member of the CANF’s 28-member executive committee. Further enquiries revealed that a total of seven people had been involved in the plot. The four in the yacht were taken to Miami and later charged with attempted murder.
In late November 1997, not long after the failure of this assassination attempt, the CANF had to report the surprise death of its chairman and Hernández’s superior, Jorge Mas Canosa. The autocratic leader of the militant Cuban exile association, described by the Miami Herald as a “dictator in waiting,” died at the age of 58 of bone cancer. And so, the fact that Castro had outlived yet another of his powerful opponents increased the level of bitterness among the 55,000 CANF members. The organization now began to lose power and influence, as Mas Canosa – rather like Castro – had not groomed a strong successor during his lifetime.
In the autumn of 1999, Cuba saw the highest-ranking visit from the United States since the revolution, when the Republican governor of Illinois, George Ryan, arrived on a five-day trip with an entourage of 500 politicians, businessmen, religious leaders, and journalists. The guest from Chicago, whose state was one of the main exporters of grain and other farming produce, was a declared opponent of the Helms-Burton Act; his meeting with Fidel Castro went on for seven hours. One of the members of the delegation was the president of the US Chamber of Commerce, and in a demonstrative gesture the guests brought with them an aid package of goods worth a million dollars.
The Cuban exile community in Florida was stunned. But there too the front gradually started to break up, after surveys showed that more than two-thirds of the US population were opposed to the embargo. Finally, in October 2000, Congress took a historic vote that might spell the beginning of the end of the embargo. After the House of Representatives, the Senate voted 86 to 8 for a lifting of the ban on the export of food and medicine to Cuba. On the other hand, although in July both Houses had originally voted on a first reading to restore the right of US citizens to travel to Cuba, the constitutionally dubious restrictions on this freedom were in the end not only maintained but further tightened. Whereas it had previously been possible at any time for the President to issue an order setting these restrictions aside, they were now enshrined in a law which, like the Helms-Burton Act, could be amended by Congress alone. Only politicians, journalists, and others holding special permits could travel with impunity to Cuba, as well as individuals invited by Cuban organizations that agreed to bear the costs (a category which foreign-currency shortages kept virtually empty).
The changing attitude of Congress was due to pressure from American business and farming associations, which had been having to sit and watch as this largest, and increasingly lucrative, Caribbean market was gradually lost to the European and Canadian competition. Even now, though, US farmers and other businessmen did not obtain a major relaxation of trade, for there were built-in conditions that greatly limited the positive effect. Thus, exports of food and medicine to Cuba could not be financed by public loans from the USA, nor could they be delivered to government institutions. Yet Cuba depended on credit financing for 80 percent of its food imports, and the state was the commercial partner at nearly every level of transactions (apart from Church organizations such as Caritas, which were not given an easy time by the state). To be sure, money might be available from the big European banks, which would be glad to do business with Cuba at high rates of interest.
The group which most often boasted of watering down the draft legislation in the run-up to the US presidential elections of 2001 was the “Cuban-American Lobby” in Congress, and, in particular, the politicians Helms, Burton, and Lincoln Díaz-Balart. Scarcely had the law been passed when the latter’s uncle, Fidel Castro, mobilized a vast crowd of 800,000 in Havana and marched off with them waving little flags to the US representation of interests on the Malecón, where they protested against the constant “humiliation” of their country. Immediately afterwards, he ordered a 10 percent increase in the taxes chargeable to US telephone companies for communications between the USA and Cuba.61 The Republican-dominated farmers’ lobby in the United States was certainly not happy with the new legislation, but it felt reassured that it again had a foot in the door for doing business with Cuba – and that was rather more important to it. A lobby spokesman promptly announced that the door now needed to be opened wider, so that not only wheat, rice, beans, and dairy produce but also fruit, vegetables, and meat could pass through.
On September 6, 2000, when Cuban state and Party leader Fidel Castro was on his way in a dark suit to join 160 colleagues for a photo opportunity at the UN millennium summit in New York, he suddenly found himself facing Bill Clinton. Out of “simple good manners,” as he later put it, he stretched out his hand to the American president, who did “exactly the same.” The two men then exchanged a few words. Over four decades, eight successive US presidents had given Castro a very wide berth, but now all that was supposed to be over. Now, 60 years after Castro’s childhood letter to Roosevelt, and 40 years after the victory of the Cuban Revolution, a US president was for the first time talking to the Máximo Líder – and the whole world soon heard the news. In Miami militant Cuban exiles shouted “treason,” because Clinton had not simply given their arch-enemy the brushoff; Clinton’s spokesman followed up the “handshake” with a lame denial that no one believed; and Fidel Castro felt “content with his respectful and civilized behavior towards the president of the count
ry hosting the summit.”62 The political earthquake lasted less than 20 seconds: for many it was the collapse of a whole world, for others the beginning of a new historical phase.
The wary normalization of US–Cuban relations was due in part to a little Cuban boy called Elián González, who in late November 1999 lost his mother in a sunken ship full of refugees before being washed ashore on the coast of Florida. A great-uncle living in Miami and the militant Cuban exile movement immediately took him under their wing and, in the guise of loving care, used the traumatized child as a political weapon against Castro’s Communist regime. Havana, for its part, mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate over a period of months outside the US representation, demanding the child’s return to his Cuban father and grandparents. On December 6, when Elián celebrated his sixth birthday in his great-uncle’s house, relatives took a picture of him in a fighting pose, with a helmet on his head, surrounded with weapons and wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. “In other words,” wrote Gabriel García Márquez in the New York Times, “the real shipwreck of Elián did not take place on the high seas, but when he set foot in America.”63 In the end, after six months had gone by, the child had to be forcibly released by a special unit of the immigration authorities acting on the instructions of the US Supreme Court; only then could he be returned to his real father.
The person who excelled himself in the unworthy game over the little Cuban boy was once again Castro’s nephew, Republican Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart. In doing so, he was evidently working off a family trauma of the Díaz-Balart clan, associated with Fidel’s and Mirta’s son Fidelito. For, in its ideological faultlines, the drama over young Elián did indeed recall the fate of Fidel Castro Jr after his parents’ divorce early in 1955, when Castro was in prison for the Moncada Barracks attack and Mirta moved with their six-year-old son to New York, where the family of her future second husband lived. She apparently had the blessing of the family court, especially as Castro, up until the Moncada incident, had not particularly distinguished himself as a caring father. Fidel Castro saw what happened as a “kidnapping” and was beside himself with rage. “I don’t like to think that my son will sleep even one night under the same roof with my worst enemies and be kissed on his innocent cheek by those evil Judases… . Only over my dead body will they take that child away from me,” he wrote in late November 1954, in a letter from prison to his half-sister Lidia.64 The next year, when the budding revolutionary was allowed to receive a visit from Fidelito in his Mexican exile, Castro simply kept the child and entrusted him to the care of a Mexican couple he had befriended and two of his sisters who were also living there. Then the Díaz-Balart family hired three agents, who kidnapped the boy while he was out walking with Castro’s sisters in Chapultepec Park, in the center of Mexico City, and handed him over to his mother who had meanwhile hurried down from New York. With the victory of the revolution, the ten-year-old Fidelito went back to Cuba and remained with his father, apparently with his mother’s agreement.
The reason for this arrangement was probably that, during the revolution, Mirta had married the son of the former Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, Emilio Núñez Portuondo, whom Batista had made his prime minister in 1958. Later she moved to Madrid, while Fidelito attended school in Cuba and eventually went on to study nuclear physics and to graduate from, among others, Moscow’s Lomonosov University; he then became head of the Cuban program for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. After 1992, when he was removed from that post because the nuclear power station at Juragua was still incomplete after years of construction work, the younger Fidel dropped out of public view. This also put an end to the (perhaps not unjustified) suspicions that his father had wanted to be eventually succeeded as head of state by the son who, though strikingly reserved in manner, outwardly resembled him so much. In 1997, at the age of 48, Fidelito published a book on the prospects for nuclear energy in the twenty-first century.65
At the time of the Elián drama, Fidelito’s cousin, Lincoln Díaz-Balart, did not spell out all the facts when he claimed on CNN News that it was very strange “to hear Castro saying he had a small child’s interests at heart, when he even kidnapped his own son;” nor did he notice the conflict between this condemnation of Castro and his own battle for the US courts to place little Elián in the care of his elderly great-uncle, instead of returning him to his legal father in Cuba.66 In the end, Díaz-Balart argued, Elián would be going back to “a dictator who has reiterated he would ‘reprogram,’ in other words destroy emotionally and psychologically, this defenseless boy.”67 When Díaz-Balart visited the completely shaken Elián in the great-uncle’s house, penetrated day and night by media floodlights, he praised the numerous demonstrators who had been keeping watch to ensure that the boy did not escape the political captivity of his “welfare worker.” He brought the boy a black Labrador puppy as a plaything. This elicited a commentary in the International Herald Tribune to the effect that nothing the boy had experienced since being washed ashore had been “as bad as Congressman Díaz-Balart" and his cuddly toy. “Elián has lost his mother. He needs his father and his grandparents, not a Labrador puppy.”68
In cynically playing with the fate of little Elián, the Cuban exiles lost sympathy and influence not only in the world at large, but among the especially important American public and political class. The Clinton government used this to expand its room for maneuver in relation to Cuba, although the Helms-Burton Act was not going to disappear overnight and there was hardly any imminent danger for the exile organizations. Even if the two sides did not say as much, the anachronistic system of regulations had over the years been a politically stabilizing factor that suited their respective plans. Alejandro Álvaro Bremer from the University of Miami wrote in the Journal of Latin American Affairs:
Paradoxical though it may appear, Fidel Castro represents for the United States political and social stability in this phase of upheaval. The embargo, even if sharper still, offers greater security for a progressive transformation on the island. A lifting of the embargo would most likely trigger a genuine revolution as well as the hoped-for change in internal policy… . Radical change in Cuba [,however,] will move outside the simulations of the administration… . Let us consider why this is so. On the Cuban stage, there is no political force capable of replacing Fidel Castro, and the political groups in exile are all completely rootless.69
Castro, God, and the Pope
Does Fidel Castro, the Jesuit boarder and professed Marxist-Leninist, believe in God? One could not help asking this question when it became certain that Pope John Paul II would visit Cuba between January 21 and 25, 1998. But the answer is known only to the Comandante himself – perhaps also to the Pope, since the audience he granted Castro at the Vatican in November 1996, and possibly to the Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto. After Castro’s godfather and lifesaver, Bishop Enrique Pérez Serantes, turned away in disappointment from the revolution in the early sixties, Betto seems to have become in the seventies (when the two first met) the priest in whom the Cuban leader had the greatest confidence. He is the only person to whom Castro has spoken in detail about questions concerning belief and religion, state and Church under socialism, and to whom he has afforded deep insight into his private and political world of belief and lived experience.
Even in his talks with Frei Betto, however, Castro avoided a direct answer to the direct question of whether he believed in God. He has told journalists that he does not wish to make any public statement on the issue.
These are personal matters about which I do not speak in public. Besides, if I say now that I don’t believe, I will upset those Cubans who do believe in God; if I answer that I do believe, I will become a preacher for religion that I am not. I respect believers and nonbelievers; I have respect for any religious conviction. That is the duty of a politician.70
He has also said that not even the Pope put the question to him.71
Everyone will have to work out the answer for themselve
s – with the help of a “set of clues” that Castro provided in his 1985 conversations with Frei Betto. It must certainly mean something that, when he went beyond day-to-day matters to discuss his philosophical (and sometimes very private) thoughts about politics and religion, faith and conviction, he confided not in a Communist author but in a member of a Catholic order who was identified with the socially militant Liberation Theology. What emerged was an autobiographical statement of a kind of spiritual affinity between Communist ideology and Christian faith, a belief in the need for partnership between Communism and the Church in the struggle to overcome social inequalities. The conversations with Betto were indeed a unique document for the Communist world at that time, which must have fueled, and must continue to fuel, doubts about the reliability in Marxist-Leninist terms of a man who was able to cut across ideological boundaries in that way.
Even many of Castro’s opponents admit that, in his political activity, he has also been driven by high moral demands on himself. He told Betto:
My ethical values were created at school, by the teachers, and even at home, by the members of my family. I was told very early in life that I shouldn’t lie. I was undoubtedly taught ethical values… . They weren’t Marxist, and they didn’t stem from an ethical philosophy. They were based on a religious ethic. I was taught what is right and wrong, things that should and should not be done. In our society, the first notion children got of an ethical principle may have been based on religion. In the prevailing religious environment, people absorbed a number of ethical values as a matter of tradition, even though there were some irrational beliefs, such as thinking that the flight and screeching of an owl or the crowing of a rooster could foretell disaster… . Undoubtedly, my teachers, my Jesuit teachers – especially the Spanish Jesuits, who inculcated a strong sense of personal dignity, regardless of their political ideas – influenced me. Most Spaniards are endowed with a sense of personal honor, and it’s very strong in the Jesuits. They valued character, rectitude, honesty, courage and the ability to make sacrifices… . The Jesuits clearly influenced me with their strict organization, their discipline and their values. They contributed to my development and influenced my sense of justice.72