When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  This is Castro’s second long passage of intellectual history. He has already invoked Montesquieu’s distinction in The Spirit of Laws, between the republican form of government in which the people are sovereign and the despotic form where one man rules at will, the Chinese tradition by which a king who governed ‘rudely’ should be deposed in favour of a virtuous prince, the philosophers of ancient India who upheld the principle of active resistance to arbitrary authority on the grounds that ‘a rope woven of many strands is strong enough to hold a lion’, the city-states of Greece and republican Rome, which meted out violent death to tyrants, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s endorsement of the people overthrowing a tyrant, Martin Luther’s argument that a people is released from the obligation to obey, and the same point emphasised by John Knox, George Buchanan and obscure German jurists of the seventeenth century.

  It is an astonishing catalogue of allies to summon, and Castro is, as he said before, only just getting started. There follows here the main course. Castro’s objective is to establish the deep constitutional roots of his case. He is explicitly not claiming himself as a revolutionary. He is claiming a kinship with an established tradition of thought that even extends to a fraternity with the founding fathers of the American constitution. For a man whose abiding hatred of America was, as Richard Nixon once said, ‘incurable’, this was quite a departure. Underpinning the long quotation of theorists from the Western tradition is the philosopher who Castro refers to throughout as ‘the Apostle’ and the ‘Master’: José Martí, the hero of Cuba’s liberation from Spanish colonial power. Castro was familiar with the twenty-eight volumes of Martí’s work and he thought of himself as more like Garibaldi than like Marx – the prophet with honour in his own country.

  Still there is one argument more powerful than all the others. We are Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty; not to fulfil that duty is a crime, is treason. We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights … We were taught to cherish and defend the beloved flag of the lone star, and to sing every afternoon the verses of our National Anthem: ‘To live in chains is to live in disgrace and in opprobrium,’ and ‘to die for one’s homeland is to live forever!’ All this we learned and will never forget, even though today in our land there is murder and prison for the men who practise the ideas taught to them since the cradle. We were born in a free country that our parents bequeathed to us, and the Island will first sink into the sea before we consent to be the slaves of anyone … I come to the close of my defence plea but I will not end it as lawyers usually do, asking that the accused be freed. I cannot ask freedom for myself while my comrades are already suffering in the ignominious prison of the Isle of Pines … The guilty continue at liberty and with weapons in their hands – weapons which continually threaten the lives of all citizens. If all the weight of the law does not fall upon the guilty because of cowardice or because of domination of the courts, and if then all the judges do not resign, I pity your honour. And I regret the unprecedented shame that will fall upon the Judicial Power. I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of seventy of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

  This is defiant and rather magnificent. It is easy to see why Castro commanded the Cuban people as he did. The reference to the absolution of history at the end is not Marxist historicism. Castro does not mean History with a capital H, he means the verdict of historians and the judgement of time. The instant verdict of the judges was less forgiving. Castro was sentenced to fifteen years in jail, although under the terms of an amnesty he was to serve less than two years, which were spent on the Isla de Pinos, south of the mainland.

  Castro’s testimony became a venerated script of the revolution, but, for all the hopes vested in it, the historical verdict has to be that the Cuban revolution went wrong. Castro had spoken of free elections, but in May 1961 he abolished multi-party elections. Hundreds of Batista supporters were executed by firing squad after trials that did not exceed in fairness the procedures Castro himself had criticised. Free media were suppressed. Priests and homosexuals were jailed. The crumbling elegance of Havana in Castro’s final years is a metaphor for his regime, the decay of which can be measured economically. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cuban economy shrank 40 per cent in two years. The power was off for most of the day and night and basic provisions, such as bread, were scarce. Cuban GDP today is the same as it was thirty years ago.

  In the end, the allure of a nation can always be judged by the net exporting of people. If nobody is clamouring to get in but the ports are full of people trying to get out, then something is going wrong. One of the only people taken into Castro’s confidence during the planning of the assault on the Moncada Barracks, the cause of this speech, was a supporter called Naty Revuelta. In the event that the attack succeeded it would have been Revuelta’s job to broadcast the news over the radio. She did it anyway, seizing a radio station in Havana, playing Eroica, the symphony that Beethoven wrote for Napoleon, and then fleeing to avoid detection. Castro and Revuelta went on to have a daughter together, Alina, who was born in 1956. Alina Fernández Revuelta lived in Cuba until 1993, at which point, using false papers and disguised in a wig, she left for Spain and then Miami, where she too, like her mother, took a job in radio. Her show Simplemente Alina was a Wednesday afternoon discussion of Cuban politics. Her memoir, Castro’s Daughter, was a distressing, critical account of the way that liberty in Cuba was inhibited, even for those inside Castro’s court.

  Castro’s friend Gabriel García Márquez caught both sides of the revolutionary bargain: ‘He is one of the great idealists of our times and perhaps this may be his greatest virtue, although it has also been his greatest danger.’ It was, and the danger was not exclusive to Castro. By the end he had turned Cuba, in the words of his sister Juanita who defected to America, into ‘an enormous prison surrounded by water’.

  VÁCLAV HAVEL

  A Contaminated Moral Environment

  New Year’s Address, Prague

  1 January 1990

  Václav Havel (1936–2011) was the tenth president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. He was the man who gave voice to a people emancipated from the moral slavery of communism. Havel was that rare creature, a man of letters whose eloquence turned towards politics without disappearing into the ether. He could craft words of hope that were rooted in the soil. A dissident since the Prague Spring, Havel lived most of his adult life either in prison or under surveillance from the police. When, in the speech that follows, he rose to his full intellectual height, Havel knew of what he spoke. He was a philosopher and he was a king.

  Havel was born in 1936 to a wealthy entrepreneurial and intellectual family and started his career in the theatre as a stagehand at Prague’s Theatre ABC. His absurdist works The Garden Party and The Memorandum brought international acclaim. Havel’s participation in the Prague Spring led to him being blacklisted after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and his plays were banned in his own country. This treatment radicalised him further and he helped found dissident initiatives such as Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted. He had several spells in prison, the longest between 1979 and 1983.

  Communist rule in Czechoslovakia seemed impregnable right up until the moment it collapsed. The end when it came was astonishingly swift. The Communist Party, which had lost the will to go on, simply fell apart. Its leaders, Husák and party chief Miloš Jakeš, resigned in December 1989. Havel reluctantly agreed to stand for president as posters saying Havel na Hrad (Havel to the Castle) appeared in Prague. On 29 December he was installed as president by a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly. In 1990 Czechoslovakia held its first free elections in forty-four years, which produced an o
verwhelming victory for Havel’s Civic Forum and its Slovak counterpart Public Against Violence.

  Havel did not especially enjoy politics. He kept his appointments on a scrap of folded paper and hated the pomposity of political life. But, as a citizen of the world, he proved to be a statesman of wisdom and subtlety. Havel dismantled the Warsaw Pact and expanded membership of NATO to the East, which in his memoir To the Castle and Back he counts as his most important accomplishment. He was feted and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the United States. But his reception abroad was not always repeated at home. His granting of a general amnesty to all those imprisoned under communism and his condemnation of the Czechoslovak treatment of Sudeten Germans after the Second World War were not popular. Havel resigned as president when the Slovaks issued a divorce decree in 1992. However, he did stand again in the new Czech Republic, and was re-elected president in January 1993 and then again in 1998 until his term ended in 2003.

  Václav Havel died on 18 December 2011 at the age of seventy-five. The Czech prime minister declared three days of mourning and Havel was granted a state funeral at Saint Vitus Cathedral.

  In 1982 Samuel Beckett dedicated a play to Havel, who was a political prisoner at the time, with the title of Catastrophe. Beckett’s title is a reminder of the truth about Czechoslovakia, which is exactly what Havel dispenses in the speech that follows. It is his New Year’s address, his first as the president of the newly free nation. He is live on television and radio. The context is the accumulated weight of dishonesty under which the people of Czechoslovakia had lived for four decades. Havel declines to bother with any of the usual parish notices or courtesies. He comes straight to the point – in his time, having lived his life, to vacillate would have been trivial. Havel had waited a long time to say what he says here and he had suffered a lot. Most of his life his country had been the victim of a catastrophe. Here he speaks at last, certain and unafraid.

  My dear fellow citizens. For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you. Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. A country that once could be proud of the educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world. We have polluted the soil, rivers and forests bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adults in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.

  After decades of double-speak and power politics and fictitious statistics, Václav Havel, at long last, stands up and tells the truth. There is no self-deprecation and no conventional flattery. It is unadorned, direct, and feels like a cleansing of the contaminated realm. It is so stark and so pellucid that no explanation feels necessary.

  The history gives the words their resonance. The reference to forty years takes us back to February 1948, when the communists took power. Under Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia became a satellite state of the Soviet Union. Dissidents were purged, its economy centrally planned and private capital abolished. The communist hegemony was solidified under Antonín Novotný, who became president in 1957. In the 1950s the Stalinists arranged a series of show trials for any former communist leaders they accused of having an ‘international’ background, by which they meant Jews, Spanish Civil War veterans and anyone connected to the West. The 1960 rewriting of the constitution had declared the victory of socialism and inaugurated the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR). But the economy began to stagnate in the early 1960s, which led the Communist Party to approve rudimentary free market disciplines in their ‘New Economic Model’. The reform continued when Alexander Dubček became first secretary of the party in January 1968. Censorship was lifted and anti-Soviet polemics started to appear in the press in the spring of 1968. The Social Democrats began to form as a separate party. The seeds of plural politics were sprouting.

  This was meant to be, in Dubček’s famous phrase, ‘socialism with a human face’, but the idea of religious and political pluralism was too much for the Warsaw Pact countries. On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. The peace that Dubček negotiated produced the Brezhnev Doctrine, which ensured strict control of the media and the suppression of the Social Democratic Party. Dubček was removed from his post, political liberty repressed, the economy controlled and ideological uniformity enforced. With that gift for sinister language that was the preserve of the totalitarian regimes (one of the many ways in which we can describe them as Orwellian or perhaps Kafkaesque), this was labelled as a period of ‘normalisation’.

  There was no one more sensitive than Havel to the corruption of language that we see in all totalitarian regimes. His first full-length play, The Garden Party, was a parody of the meaningless clichés of communism. His next play, Memorandum, introduced a language invented, like Newspeak, to eliminate all ambiguity. In his collection of essays The Power of the Powerless, Havel described a society in which citizens were forced to ‘live within a lie’. It is possible for the whole history of a country to be a tissue of lies, and this was the offence against truth that Havel was rebelling against when he stood up to speak: the clownish incompetence, the ubiquitous corruption. In a single, direct paragraph of searing honesty, in his first act as president, Havel told the truth about power.

  Allow me a small personal observation. When I flew recently to Bratislava, I found some time during discussions to look out of the plane window. I saw the industrial complex of Slovnaft chemical factory and the giant Petr’alka housing estate right behind it. The view was enough for me to understand that for decades our statesmen and political leaders did not look or did not want to look out of the windows of their planes. No study of statistics available to me would enable me to understand faster and better the situation in which we find ourselves. But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful and that the special farms, which produced ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children’s homes and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.

  The first casualty of the war on truth is morality. The statistics that Havel declares unnecessary would never have been accurate anyway. A factotum from the bureaucracy would always have been on hand to supply the desired number, which was always preferable to the real one. That is why looking out of the window of the plane would have told the leaders of Czechoslovakia something that was not in their dossiers. In that split second before their brain re-engaged and reinstated the ideological lie, their eyes could not deceive them. The visual imagery is effective here. We can see the unduly privileged nomenklatura enjoying the hospitality in their specially commissioned aircraft and we can see the brutal reality of the prison-like chemical factory and the brutalist housing estate from which they turn their gaze. What Havel is saying here, with great subtlety, in a single material image, is
that if they had looked they would have known. He had only to look out of the window and the truth stared back at him.