When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Over the years, the Americans devised a series of bizarre ways to take Castro’s life, which included exploding cigars, booby-trapped sea shells, cyanide-laced milkshakes and a fungus-infected scuba-diving suit. He survived them all. After a long period of poor health, he stood down as president at the age of eighty-one in February 2008, leaving power, in a mockery of his fine democratic words, to his 76-year-old brother Raúl. Castro and Guevara became poster boys for adolescent revolutionaries everywhere, some of whom never grew up. Their committed anti-Americanism and conviction that American imperialism was the world’s enemy informed everything they did. It is possible both to note the immorality of a great deal of American foreign policy in Latin America and to shudder at what became of the high ideals with which Castro and Guevara began. But the last laugh, if there were any laughs to be had, is on Castro and Guevara, who have both ended up as icons of the consumer culture that they both so ardently despised.

  I am going to make only one request of this court; I trust it will be granted as a compensation for the many abuses and outrages the accused has had to tolerate without protection of the law. I ask that my right to express myself be respected without restraint. Otherwise, even the merest semblance of justice cannot be maintained, and the final episode of this trial would be, more than all the others, one of ignominy and cowardice. I must admit that I am somewhat disappointed. I had expected that the Honorable Prosecutor would come forward with a grave accusation. I thought he would be ready to justify to the limit his contention, and his reasons why I should be condemned in the name of Law and Justice – what law and what justice? – to twenty-six years in prison. But no. He has limited himself to reading Article 148 of the Social Defense Code. On the basis of this, plus aggravating circumstances, he requests that I be imprisoned for the lengthy term of twenty-six years! Two minutes seems a very short time in which to demand and justify that a man be put behind bars for more than a quarter of a century … Honourable Judges: Why such interest in silencing me? Why is every type of argument forgone in order to avoid presenting any target whatsoever against which I might direct my own brief ? Is it that they lack any legal, moral or political basis on which to put forth a serious formulation of the question? Are they that afraid of the truth? Do they hope that I, too, will speak for only two minutes and that I will not touch upon the points which have caused certain people sleepless nights since July 26th? … Fundamental matters of principle are being debated here, the right of men to be free is on trial, the very foundations of our existence as a civilised and democratic nation are in the balance. When this trial is over, I do not want to have to reproach myself for any principle left undefended, for any truth left unsaid, for any crime not denounced … My purpose is not to bore the court with epic narratives. All that I have said is essential for a more precise understanding of what is yet to come.

  Castro was not a speaker who ever troubled himself too much with how long he spoke. This address, which he practised in his cell until dawn, lasted four hours and it was by no means the longest speech he ever gave. Once he took power there was virtually no stopping him. Castro asks if the court hoped he would speak for only two minutes. No, but two hours would probably have done. It is all but impossible to speak for four hours without longueurs and these edited extracts do not do justice to the feat of listening required to get through the whole thing. Castro is the Wagnerian among the speakers in this book, and Rossini’s remark about Wagner comes to mind: he had some brilliant moments but some truly awful quarter-hours.

  Before we even get to this point Castro has already treated the court to a lengthy wrangle about whether he had been well enough to testify (the authorities had pretended he was ill to stop him using the court as his theatre) and his reasonable complaints that he had been kept in solitary confinement, unable even to communicate with his son.

  Castro says he does not want, when all has been said and done, to reproach himself for having left anything he might have said unsaid. There isn’t much chance of that as he launches into an exposition on Cuban history to show that it is the generals who are the aberration rather than the revolutionaries. After this section, rather like Nelson Mandela in the same situation, he goes into great detail about the chronology of the struggle and its battles. The extenuating factor is that this is a court of law and he is conducting his own defence. Forensic rhetoric of this kind, which requires a thorough grounding in the facts, is bound to date.

  But the strategy is clear here. Castro is going to claim constitutional propriety. All the political virtues of a democracy, transparency, true liberty and justice, are his and all are threatened, indeed mocked, by the terrible government under which Cuba has been suffering. He turns the trial into a public relations disaster for the Batista regime. With all the skill of the lawyer that he once was, Castro sets out an impressive command of Cuban constitutional history and places himself as the scion of that tradition. It is an important and characteristic manoeuvre. Castro is not best understood as a Marxist pure and simple. He is also a Cuban nationalist and a patriot. He would not have commanded the loyalty in Cuba that he did if all his political thought came from the arid textbooks of Marxism–Leninism. It was warmer, more appealing, more homely than that. His objective is, as he goes on to say, not abstract justice but ‘Justice in Cuba’.

  Why were we sure of the people’s support? When we speak of the people we are not talking about those who live in comfort, the conservative elements of the nation, who welcome any repressive regime, any dictatorship, any despotism, prostrating themselves before the masters of the moment until they grind their foreheads into the ground. When we speak of struggle and we mention the people we mean the vast unredeemed masses, those to whom everyone makes promises and who are deceived by all; we mean the people who yearn for a better, more dignified and more just nation; who are moved by ancestral aspirations to justice, for they have suffered injustice and mockery generation after generation; those who long for great and wise changes in all aspects of their life … In terms of struggle, when we talk about people we’re talking about the six hundred thousand Cubans without work, who want to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a livelihood; the five hundred thousand farm labourers who live in miserable shacks, who work four months of the year and starve the rest, sharing their misery with their children, who don’t have an inch of land to till and whose existence would move any heart not made of stone; the four hundred thousand industrial workers and labourers whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose benefits are being taken away, whose homes are wretched quarters, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender, whose future is a pay reduction and dismissal, whose life is endless work and whose only rest is the tomb … These are the people, the ones who know misfortune and, therefore, are capable of fighting with limitless courage! To these people whose desperate roads through life have been paved with the bricks of betrayal and false promises, we were not going to say: ‘We will give you …’ but rather: ‘Here it is, now fight for it with everything you have, so that liberty and happiness may be yours!’

  This section leads in to Castro’s five revolutionary laws, the manifesto he would have proclaimed if the assault on the Moncada Barracks had been successful. The five laws are a return to the 1940 Constitution, protecting popular power, transfer of land ownership to tenant farmers, a 30 per cent profit share of all industrial enterprises given to employees, sugar planters given a right to a majority share of production, and the confiscation of all gains attributable to fraud during the previous regime. The proceeds recovered would have been spent on subsidising retirement funds for workers, hospitals, asylums and charitable organisations. In addition, quoting his nationalist hero José Martí, Castro pledged that Cuba would be a link of solidarity in Latin America.

  This section is Castro’s definition of the people, and it is interesting that ‘the people’ rather than ‘class’ is the category that he uses
throughout. There is, no doubt, a stress on those who have done less than well under the Batista dispensation. But that was, first, a lot of people and, second, it is a routine tactic for a political leader to appeal to those who feel neglected. There is, though, no attempt to draw on an explicit concept of class. Castro was never really a Marxist believer in the way that his comrade Guevara was. Like most utopians, Guevara wasn’t happy with people as they are. He wanted to create what he called el hombre nuevo, the new man, a selfless individual equipped for the beautiful world of cooperation that he alone had the vision to see. Castro was less easily persuaded by this sort of rubbish. He was instead a Cuban nationalist defined by a heavy belief that American capitalism was the bane of his country.

  The reality of Cold War politics did require Castro to make a choice, though, and Cuba become woundingly reliant on the Soviet Union. But whenever he came to talk about the nature of his revolution his words were particular rather than universal. This passage is also a glimpse down the path not taken. In Chile, Uruguay and Brazil brutal dictatorships were overthrown for liberal democracies. It was the alternate path in Latin America to the populist charlatan of the Chávez type in Venezuela. There was a fork in the road here and, although Castro used this speech to imply that he favoured the democratic route, he did, in the fullness of time, take the road populated with fellow travellers.

  A revolutionary government backed by the people and with the respect of the nation, after cleansing the different institutions of all venal and corrupt officials … would solve the housing problem by cutting all rents in half, by providing tax exemptions on homes inhabited by the owners; by tripling taxes on rented homes; by tearing down hovels and replacing them with modern apartment buildings; and by financing housing all over the island on a scale heretofore unheard of, with the criterion that, just as each rural family should possess its own tract of land, each city family should own its own house or apartment. There is plenty of building material and more than enough manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand years will have gone by and the problem will remain the same. On the other hand, today possibilities of taking electricity to the most isolated areas on the island are greater than ever. The use of nuclear energy in this field is now a reality and will greatly reduce the cost of producing electricity. With these three projects and reforms, the problem of unemployment would automatically disappear and the task of improving public health and fighting against disease would become much less difficult. Finally, a revolutionary government would undertake the integral reform of the educational system, bringing it into line with the projects just mentioned with the idea of educating those generations which will have the privilege of living in a happier land … The soul of education, however, is the teacher, and in Cuba the teaching profession is miserably underpaid. Despite this, no one is more dedicated than the Cuban teacher. Who among us has not learned his three Rs in the little public schoolhouse? It is time we stopped paying pittances to these young men and women who are entrusted with the sacred task of teaching our youth. No teacher should earn less than 200 pesos, no secondary teacher should make less than 350 pesos, if they are to devote themselves exclusively to their high calling without suffering want … Where will the money be found for all this? When there is an end to the embezzlement of government funds, when public officials stop taking graft from the large companies that owe taxes to the State, when the enormous resources of the country are brought into full use, when we no longer buy tanks, bombers and guns for this country (which has no frontiers to defend and where these instruments of war, now being purchased, are used against the people), when there is more interest in educating the people than in killing them, there will be more than enough money.

  This is an epic exercise in willing the ends. Structurally, Castro is all over the place. He has done a summary of the case for Cuban justice after a long procedural section about the assault on the Barracks, to which he returns after this. In between two sections that really ought to go together, Castro lurches into great detail about policies he intends to enact which is itself sandwiched in between two separate accounts of the despotism that Cuban has been experiencing. This section on solutions is preceded by an account of Cuba’s problems – the lack of suitable housing, the inflated price of rents, poor electricity coverage, education that extends to too few and a disgraceful health care system that allows children to be consumed by parasites as they walk to school. The morbid people of Cuba, says Castro, ‘will have heard ten million speeches and will finally die of misery and deception’ because the public hospitals only accept patients on the say-so of the powerful. Finally, he makes an implicit promise to bring jobs to Cuba when he laments that over a million people are without work.

  Castro’s policy manifesto is impressively detailed, though it is always a problem for a speechwriter to make policy commitments sound interesting. The details of schemes for improvement are not very easy to listen to. It is hard to be precise enough without numbers, and statistics usually slaughter interest in rhetoric. Yet in 1960, in a speech to the United Nations, Castro promised he would eliminate illiteracy in Cuba in a single year and he was almost as good as his word. A vast volunteer army reduced illiteracy from 23 per cent to 4 per cent. Unfortunately Castro had no real sense of how to pay the bills. The reforms to health and education were unaffordable in the context of a faltering economy. Despite having no credentials for the job, Guevara became finance minister and president of the National Bank. With his usual flair, he liked to sign ‘Che’ on the currency, but his ‘moral incentives’ for workers caused a steep fall in productivity and a rise in absenteeism. The economic stand-off with America meant Cuba’s export market was Russia and Eastern Europe, which, in time, proved to be a disaster. Castro asks himself a question on which the political Left has foundered too often: ‘Where will the money be found for all this?’ He doesn’t really have an answer.

  Let me tell you a story: Once upon a time there was a Republic. It had its Constitution, its laws, its freedoms, a President, a Congress and Courts of Law. Everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with complete freedom. The people were not satisfied with the government officials at that time, but they had the power to elect new officials and only a few days remained before they would do so. Public opinion was respected and heeded and all problems of common interest were freely discussed. There were political parties, radio and television debates and forums and public meetings. The whole nation pulsated with enthusiasm. This people had suffered greatly and although it was unhappy, it longed to be happy and had a right to be happy. It had been deceived many times and it looked upon the past with real horror. This country innocently believed that such a past could not return; the people were proud of their love of freedom and they carried their heads high in the conviction that liberty would be respected as a sacred right. They felt confident that no one would dare commit the crime of violating their democratic institutions. They wanted a change for the better, aspired to progress; and they saw all this at hand. All their hope was in the future. Poor country! One morning the citizens woke up dismayed; under the cover of night, while the people slept, the ghosts of the past had conspired and has seized the citizenry by its hands, its feet, and its neck. That grip, those claws were familiar: those jaws, those death-dealing scythes, those boots. No; it was no nightmare; it was a sad and terrible reality: a man named Fulgencio Batista had just perpetrated the appalling crime that no one had expected … Cuba is suffering from a cruel and base despotism.

  The contrivance of the fairy story comes as a welcome relief from the otherwise rather relentless rhetoric. It is a reminder that audiences cannot listen uninterrupted for long and they need the punctuation of a break or a story. Castro rarely breaks his flow, which makes this all the more notable. It is also a clever passage in the construction of the speech because it turns the main argument around. It is Batista who is the revolutionary, not him and his comrades. They are th
e patriots trying to restore legitimate constitutional government to Cuba.

  Throughout the speech Castro has taken care to compile a chronicle of Cuban history so as to place himself within it and the generals outside of it. Batista has usurped the rightful place in the constitution and Castro is therefore a restorationist rather than a revolutionary. This is at least as much a speech about legal right and wrong as it is about political Right and Left.

  Batista had come to power in a coup in 1952, and his government, which was dependent on dubious sponsorship from Washington and the favours of the local Mafia, was not popular. Under Batista, Cuba had become a haven for the rich, run by crime syndicates and awash with prostitution, gambling and drug trafficking. Batista claimed, absurdly, that his coup automatically cancelled the previous Cuban constitution and established a new legality which, retrospectively, made his coup legal. Castro had been one of the few who had attacked this from the start. He was in print denouncing the coup for its lack of legitimacy before anyone else. This speech would have been heard as a recapitulation of a reasonable view long held. Both in form and in content this is the most effective part of the address.

  It is well known that in England during the seventeenth century two kings, Charles I and James II, were dethroned for despotism. These actions coincided with the birth of liberal political philosophy and provided the ideological base for a new social class, which was then struggling to break the bonds of feudalism. Against divine right autocracies, this new philosophy upheld the principle of the social contract and of the consent of the governed, and constituted the foundation of the English Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1775 and the French Revolution of 1789. These great revolutionary events ushered in the liberation of the Spanish colonies in the New World – the final link in that chain being broken by Cuba. The new philosophy nurtured our own political ideas and helped us to evolve our Constitutions, from the Constitution of Guáimaro up to the Constitution of 1940 … The right of insurrection against tyranny then underwent its final consecration and became a fundamental tenet of political liberty. As far back as 1649, John Milton wrote that political power lies with the people, who can enthrone and dethrone kings and have the duty of overthrowing tyrants. John Locke, in his essay on government, maintained that when the natural rights of man are violated, the people have the right and the duty to alter or abolish the government. ‘The only remedy against unauthorized force is opposition to it by force.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau said with great eloquence in his Social Contract: ‘While a people sees itself forced to obey and obeys, it does well; but as soon as it can shake off the yoke and shakes it off, it does better, recovering its liberty through the use of the very right that has been taken away from it’ … Thomas Paine said that ‘one just man deserves more respect than a rogue with a crown’ … The Declaration of Independence of the Congress of Philadelphia, on July 4th, 1776, consecrated this right in a beautiful paragraph which reads: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’ … The famous French Declaration of the Rights of Man willed this principle to the coming generations: ‘When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for them the most sacred of rights and the most imperative of duties.’ ‘When a person seizes sovereignty, he should be condemned to death by free men.’