Anything We Love Can Be Saved

by Alice Walker

  The day before, I had gone to visit one of the “concentration camps for gays with AIDS.” I was a big hit there, much to my surprise. Everyone had read The Color Purple or seen the movie; everyone was a huge Steven Spielberg fan. Several had read The Temple of My Familiar in translation. The moment I got off the bus and was introduced, two men linked arms with me and walked me away from my group. When we arrived at their cottage they asked if I’d brought books with me. I had. They wanted to know if I would accept handmade items they wished to give me as gifts. I did. They wanted to know if, in the United States, there was any new drug, newer than AZT, that might save their lives. I had no idea. This information was of utmost importance to them; when I said I didn’t know, they looked stricken. We chatted about the scarcity of condoms on the island and how the U.S. embargo prevented their import. Cuba has a very low rate of HIV infection, I was told, largely because of its implementation of a plan to isolate those with AIDS from the rest of the population.

  Their simple cottages were scattered over many acres and resembled a Southern college campus. They explained that they were bored, but otherwise felt well cared for. While quarantined they were being taught how not to infect their partners and others sexually, and would soon be able to travel home for weekend visits. Many couples, both gay and heterosexual, shared small apartments. These spaces were neat, furnished simply, with lots of plants, and quiet. During the rest of the visit we saw where everyone worked: shops in which patients create printed cloth, leather goods, masks and figurines of papier-mâché.

  The bus stops near a huge statue of Lenin, I think, but on closer inspection it is José Martí, the beloved inspiration of Cuban resistance, who, in white marble, looks remarkably like his Russian counterpart. Excited, we climb the steps of the Palacio de la Revolución. In the green room we wait. I am with a delegation that includes workers, teachers, activists, and a couple of ophthalmologists. Also Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement and former United States attorney general Ramsey Clark. Within minutes Fidel appears, along with his interpreter. She is dressed in a brown skirt and a deep rose blouse. Fidel is wearing silken green fatigues, more elegant up close than on television, and she looks like a flower at his side. Two aides wearing guayaberas trail behind. Fidel is sixty-six years old. Though his beard is gray, he looks as handsome now as when he was young. I’ve read somewhere that he does a lot of underwater fishing, and it shows; he seems in very good shape. I feel I’ve been aware of him all my conscious life. For I did not really awaken until I heard the call to resist oppression that he and Martin Luther King, Jr., seemed to utter at the same moment. He is really tall. Slowly he moves around the room to greet each person. When he gets to me, he mentions having seen me on television the night before, when I had talked about my sadness at witnessing the worry and anxiety on the faces of Cubans agonizing over the shortage of food. He smiles as he takes my hand. They didn’t kill you; I’m so glad, I think, looking up at him and remembering other revolutionaries the C.I.A. did manage to assassinate.

  His daughter, who came to the United States a few months after my visit, has called him a “dinosaur,” a “relic” from another time. He did bring into the room with him that evening something of the past; the green uniform seemed part of a commitment to fight on that not everyone cared to remember. I have always felt that Fidel chose to be a revolutionary as a monk chooses to be a priest; it is a calling to which he is pledged. The uniform is his cassock. He is a religious person whose god is revolution. His way of “giving to the poor.” Looking at his tall, straight back and his almost courtly grace, I mused, Robin Hood also wore green his whole merry life.

  But Fidel is not merry, as we sit later around a large table listening to him. He is speaking urgently, angrily, with a dark look on his face. He looks distinctly demonic. At any moment I expect him to start tearing at his hair. I immediately think of his friend Gabriel García Márquez, and of his depiction of lugubrious Latin American generals in his novels, all mad with egotism and loneliness. Fidel is talking and talking and glaring at the two ophthalmologists, one of them a petite blond woman, the other a slender Japanese-American man. They are both from New York. For some reason the interpreter is late starting to translate. When she does, we learn what Fidel is raging about: an epidemic of blindness that is sweeping the island and affecting mainly young men.* The ophthalmologists are mentioning victims they have seen and suggesting possible reasons for the disease. Fidel has apparently stayed up nights researching the problem and is now running through the extensive information he knows. He also tells us what he fears: that the epidemic might be the result of chemical warfare introduced by the United States. It has been a long time since I’ve seen anyone so agitated, so troubled. Or so completely unconcerned about how upset he appears. It is not unlike being in the presence of a distraught parent, or of a betrayed child.

  By the time he begins talking with Dennis Banks, Fidel is more calm; his tone is sardonic. He knows a lot about the history of Indians in the United States, as well as those elsewhere in the Americas. He says Europe has not stopped raping the New World and is currently taking out even more gold than during colonial times. “We are all Indians now,” he says, after listening intently to Dennis. He is very present while each of us speaks, and he asks penetrating, thoughtful questions. He and Ramsey Clark seem to be on very friendly terms. I marvel at this: Clark, from Texas, once the attorney general of the United States, today makes it his business to lobby for the right of the Cuban people to exist as they choose. He tells Fidel how privileged we all feel to be bringing medicine to a country that has done so much to heal others. He is wonderful and speaks passionately from the heart. He looks like such a typical Yankee that the contradiction brings tears to my eyes.

  My statement about the prevalence of female genital mutilation in Africa and elsewhere startles Fidel; I have the impression he really feels he knows something about just about everything and is amazed that this information escaped him. He seems genuinely disturbed. When I mention how odd it seems to me that so many Cuban doctors have worked in Africa and never, apparently, mentioned this practice to anyone in Cuba, he seems irritated. “They may have known of this,” he says. “I just didn’t know.”

  But when I push a stack of my books across the table to him, he brightens. “The Color Purple in Spanish,” he exclaims. “Just what I’ve wanted!” He opens The Temple of My Familiar (in Spanish, El Templo de Mis Amigos) and begins to read it! He mutters how sick he is of reading government reports and how much he enjoys reading novels. As a writer of novels, I am thrilled.

  After an hour or so of conversation, and plenty of monologue, we are invited into the large reception hall of the Palacio de la Revolución. It is a delightful space, bare except for giant ferns, transferred from the Sierra Maestra, that seem to grow out of the walls. It is said that this hall was designed by Fidel’s former soulmate and compañera, Celia Sanchez, who died some years ago of cancer. Fidel offers us tidbits of chicken and tasty rum drinks called mojitos, apologizing for the limited supply and lack of variety. He continues to talk, answering questions energetically and thoroughly, the members of our delegation in a tight cluster around him. He enjoys talking. Or maybe it’s compulsive. There are many funny stories of his ability to go on and on, sometimes through the night. Looking at and listening to Fidel, I think how monologists must always seem dictatorial, simply because they are always speaking.

  I think about an interview I gave to a reporter from a radio station in Australia. He’d asked me why I participated in activity aimed at lifting the U.S. embargo against Cuba. I said I’d done it out of respect and admiration for the Cuban people, who had done me only good, never harm. And because I vote and pay taxes, I added, and the ability to express my disagreement with government policy is part of what it means to be an American citizen. He began to rant, literally, about how Fidel Castro was a dictator, and did my activity mean I condoned dictatorship? I was so taken aback by his vehemence I could only say
what I basically feel: That Fidel Castro has tried to improve the condition of poor people in his country and has, in fact, done so. That to blame him alone for Cuba’s troubles is simplistic and unfair. A more pertinent inquiry might be why the United States, while refusing to trade with Cuba and preventing other countries from doing so—because Cuba is not a “free society”—trades with, for instance, Nigeria, Indonesia, and China, countries with the most abominable human rights records. Does this mean the United States condones mass murder, kidnapping, assassination, imprisonment for political belief, forced marriage, slavery, and in the case of China’s occupation of Tibet, genocide?

  What I thought after the interview was something else. I was annoyed to think that a white Australian man actually believes he lives in something other than a dictatorship. Or that people anywhere believe they actually have democracy. What most people live under in the West is a white male dictatorship, although the particular white male leader is periodically changed; almost everywhere the dictatorship is male. Could anyone really think Native Americans, Australian aboriginal people, the Maori of New Zealand, or black people in the United States believe we live in anything other than a dictatorship? A regime put in place by white men, for white men, who dictate everything most people eat, think, and wear? Where even sexual fantasies and spiritual yearnings are controlled by media that are owned, almost entirely, by men who are rich and white? And what about women, the majority of humans on the planet? If there were democracy, we’d represent, politically speaking, half the power of the world. What about children, who have no say in their government at all? It is, of course, deepest cynicism to boast of democracy after having slain and enslaved the majority of the nonwhite people encountered or “found.”*

  I do think Fidel should retire. But I don’t think so for the same reasons advanced by Bush and Clinton and Dole, who seem to feel they are somehow better leaders than he is, and who exhibit a truly sickening ability to cast the first stone. I read in the paper one day that Fidel was finally visiting his father’s village in Spain, and that while there he’d mentioned being “the slave of the revolution.” In this statement I felt his weariness. For over three decades he has defied the mightiest country on earth. He has watched his best friends and allies shrivel and fall. He has survived numerous assassination attempts by the C.I.A. Only Nelson Mandela is perhaps his equal in terms of determination, self-sacrifice, and loss. There is a moving photograph of Mandela and Castro embracing when, after his almost thirty years in prison, Mandela went to Cuba to personally thank Fidel and the Cuban people for helping to turn back South Africa’s armies in the Front Line states, thereby playing a major role in the liberation of South Africa.

  Though his father was a wealthy landowner during Fidel’s childhood, he had left Spain poor, and in Cuba had sold homemade lemonade from a cart. His mother, about whom one hears little, except that she was originally his father’s cook and was very religious and that Fidel adored her, probably instilled in her son a love of and belief in the poor he has never forgotten. I believe Fidel was deeply inspired by these two. They named him “Faithful,” after his godfather. It is a lot to live up to.

  I do not believe in male-only leadership anywhere in the world, including Cuba. I think the woman at Fidel’s side should be his co-president, not his interpreter. Nor do I wish to imitate Frida Kahlo, one of whose last paintings was of “Uncle” Joe Stalin, whose attempts to improve the lives of Russians she respected and about whose gulags and genocidal policies she knew nothing. There is no way of knowing yet what skeletons, if any, are gleaming in Fidel’s closet. Or if they are worse than Clinton’s, Kennedy’s, Gingrich’s, or Dole’s. For years the United States media have been pulling out bones that almost never, once you actually go to Cuba and talk to Cubans, connect, except grotesquely, to the reality of life there and the dreams and aspirations of the people. As an outsider I have nothing to go on but the universal evidence of healthy bodies, sound teeth, and self-possessed spirits so lacking in many other third-world countries; the excellence Cubans exhibit in so many areas, including medicine, education, and sports. Even the Cuban boat people, escaping from the devastation and hunger of their island, were remarkable for their fitness, their ingenuity in constructing their boats, and often for their ability to speak more than one language.

  While Fidel is talking, talking, I think about those ten pounds we have been told every Cuban has lost because of a shortage of food. I had noticed the neatness and sheen of his uniform, and Fidel’s apparent good health; now I take a closer look. The worst thing in the world, I think, would be to see a fat leader in the land of the lean. But even without looking hard, or particularly noting the slackness of his belt, which even droops a bit on one side, I can see Fidel is considerably thinner than he was when he bought his uniform. I think of reports of him, as a younger man, cutting sugar cane side by side with other Cubans, women and men, bringing in the crucial sugar harvest. I’ve often asked myself how a strong, well-fed, militarily secure nation like the United States could demean itself by torturing a small country like Cuba, just because its leader refuses to knuckle under. Perhaps the answer is that no matter how crazy and out of touch Fidel is made to appear in the United States media, a huge threat to North America’s ego, he nonetheless never seems separate from the Cuban people.

  It amuses me that he can talk so long and that he expects his audience to stand just as long as he does. I’m tired by now and can’t. Besides, all I want to ask him about is his mother. I go over to the side of the room and sit down. I am soon joined by another member of our group. When speaking, I have read, Fidel must have every ear, and sure enough, he notices and is distracted by our absence; several times he glances over at us. We smile but stay where we are. He seems so human. I feel very tender toward him. I have the feeling he is a brother I miraculously have; it has been decades since I thought of him as white. It would break my heart if his skeletons are really bad. What are the chances, I wonder, that they’re not? And how many times has my heart already been broken? And is it by now only more flexible, or is it more cracked? Not to mention that I don’t believe, anymore, in leaders. Nor am I crazy about uniforms. The courage to stand with the poor I like. I drift back over. He is obviously glad that we have returned. He towers over us, like the last giant redwood in a clear-cut forest, so alive, so green, still, this man who inspired me to fight for my young life. I know I could never thank him enough for the shelter of his example, no matter what. Can I give you a hug? I ask, and it seems I hold many long, dark nights in my arms, nights of despair when I cried for Malcolm, for Martin, for Abel, for Che. For Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou. For my poor sharecropping parents, who never had anyone to fight for them, and for myself, who have fought long and hard, only to see today, in our drug-and-crime-and-poverty-infested “democracy,” the near ruin of my people. Fidel’s nights, I am sure, have been just as dark and long. His mornings just as bereft. Still, now, we are beaming. Impulsively kissing the top of my head, he returns my embrace warmly, like a man who understands what he is holding, like a man who has fought all his life for just such a time.

  As we leave the room, I tell him what I have come to tell him. Private words I have wanted to say to him for thirty years. He responds promptly with a gracefulness that touches my heart. I know we will never meet again. But, as the ancient Native Americans chanted, It is finished in beauty. Whatever my government does, I will always act as friend and neighbor to the Cuban people. I will never make war on this man.

  POSTSCRIPT: In less than two years I was to see Fidel again. In the spring of 1994 I received a fax from Leslie Cagan of the United States and Cuba Medical Project, asking if I would lead a delegation of women who would deliver five million dollars’ worth of antibiotics to Cuba. I said yes, with joy. I called Pratibha Parmar and Angela Davis and asked them to join me. Our all-woman delegation included Davis and Parmar, Cagan and Rachel Cohen of the United States and Cuba Medical Project, and Kathy Engle of Madre, an organization tha
t lends support to women and children in beleaguered countries around the world, of which I am also a member.

  After delivering the antibiotics, donated by North American pharmaceutical firms, to the Cuban Red Cross, we were invited to visit the Palacio de la Revolución to talk with Fidel. Like so many Cubans, Fidel was obviously delighted to see Angela Davis again, and they reminisced about their friendship of twenty-odd years earlier, when Angela, recently released from prison in the United States, was in Cuba, secluded in the mountains, writing her autobiography.

  He was fascinated by her long, copper-colored dreadlocks (when she was in Cuba before, she’d had an enormous Afro), and I was amused to see him surreptitiously examining a lock with his fingers when they embraced and he thought no one was looking. This inquisitiveness, curiosity about another’s reality, endeared him to me on this visit, as did his apparent pleasure in being called upon by so many wild women. The six of us had been swimming in a river earlier in the afternoon and had not expected to visit the president of the country directly after, or at all. So there we were. Angela in shorts and sneakers, me in damp and very baggy jeans, Rachel in a mini-dress that barely covered particulars. Everybody’s hair every which way. Beaming back at this revolutionary old man who doesn’t remind any of us of Stalin, and who thanked us for the medicine we brought to his country and said it made him so happy to see us.

  * Optic neuropathy. At the time of my visit it had affected some forty thousand people.

  * For anyone who still believes the United States is a democracy and not a white male corporate dictatorship, I recommend the book Partners in Power: The Clintons’ America, by Roger Morris.

  A Letter to President Clinton

  President Bill Clinton