Op-Ed Columnist: Fidel in All His Facets

Napoleon is said to have remarked that if only a cannonball had hit him when he was riding into Moscow in 1812, he would have gone down in history as the greatest man who ever lived. In similar fashion, Fidel Castro outlived the moment of his greatness, if not the romance of his appeal.

Fidel. A single word suffices to evoke the man who descended from the Sierra Maestra with his ragtag army to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, purge Cuba of American domination, proclaim the empowerment of the poor, and embody Latin America’s thirst for an end to government by the pampered coteries of imperialism.

His message in its moment was electric. Fidel was the bearded hero of the voiceless “pueblo.” An unequal, corrupted continent was ripe for revolution; Ernesto “Che” Guevara set out from Havana in the mid-1960s to foment it.

Scarcely a nation in Latin America escaped the storm, from the Chile of Salvador Allende to the Nicaragua of the Sandinista revolution in 1979, from Argentina’s vicious military crackdown on leftists with its tens of thousands of “disappeared” to Brazil’s harsh government of the generals. The ideological potency of Fidel’s victory was singular.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen describes how, as Ho Chi Minh leads his Communist forces to victory in Vietnam in 1975, his protagonist “longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the Left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for.”

In the great postwar anticolonial, anti-imperialist struggle of the emerging world for independence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Fidel was a towering figure. But as with Ho in Vietnam, the noble ideals proved largely illusory. Fidel came to the United States in April, 1959, and, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” declared that democracy was his goal, along with “free ideas,” “freedom religious belief” and “free election” within four years. “I am not agreed with Communism,” he declared.

As with Ayatollah Khomeini’s promises of freedom two decades later in revolutionary anti-American Iran, it was a load of bunk. Fidel was done with America. He was disposed to embrace Moscow and vast Soviet subsidies (as well as the missiles that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962). His defiance of the vast country looming over his proximate island would define him, along with a growing megalomania.

Within three months of his takeover more than 400 opponents had been executed by firing squads; that number would grow over the years to some 5,600. Over the decades countless dissidents were thrown in jail. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled Fidel’s security apparatus for Florida. As I wrote in December 2008 after visiting Cuba to write a magazine piece on the 50th anniversary of Fidel’s revolution: “The press is muzzled” and “state television is a turgid propaganda machine.”

During that trip, I noted that the Cubans perched on the seafront wall in Havana rarely looked outward, despite the splendor of the sea view. I asked Yoani Sánchez, a dissident blogger, about this and she said: “We live turned away from the sea because it does not connect us, it encloses us. There is no movement on it. People are not allowed to buy boats because if they had boats, they would go to Florida.”

Fidel, the romantic liberator, had made of his island a prison, full of inert people mired in the poverty engendered by a nightmarish system. His considerable achievements in education, health care and basic welfare could not mask this fundamental failure.

I admire President Obama’s restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba that took him to Havana earlier this year to meet with Fidel’s brother, President Raul Castro, who took over in 2006. Frozen U.S.-Cuban relations had become an anachronism. I deplore, however, Obama’s feeble statement on Fidel’s death. It is not enough for an American president to say, “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure.” There has been plenty of history in Castro’s Cuba since 1959, much of it deplorable.

Obama’s reluctance to stand firmly for the idea of liberty and lead the free world against autocracy, as well as his tendency to assume a regretful or skeptical tone about the exercise of American power, has angered many Americans. It explains some of Donald Trump’s support; it has made the world more dangerous. Declining to allude to Fidel’s predations is of a piece with this Obama doctrine.

Fidel was a flawed giant. By the end the only idea of his still standing was the anti-American nationalism taken on by the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. However, this is certainly not the moment to say his stand for the disinherited of the earth was unimportant. Nor, at a time when the United States has elected a charlatan as president, is it the moment to overlook the fact that Fidel was a serious and uncorrupt politician. Nor to leave unsaid the suffering he inflicted.

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