Going on and on
Malcolm Deas
MY LIFE by Fidel Castro, edited by Ignacio Ramonet, translated by Andrew Hurley Allen Lane, £25, pp. 724, ISBN 9780713999204 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Fidel Castro, hélas, et encore, hélas, hélas. Castro is the most famous Latin American since Bolívar, one of the few to have achieved world fame. He deserves it, as a third-world revolutionary and as a survivor. There are many studies of him, and here is another, the product of some hundred hours of interviews conducted by Ignacio Ramonet, whose inexhaustible stamina in serving him up sycophantic lobs seems to have surprised even Castro himself. Though monumentally uncritical and containing few if any new revelations, it is not entirely useless. It summarises the Castro line on a wide range of subjects. As the Spanish saying goes, the Devil does not know so many things because he is the Devil, but because he is so old, and Castro has the longest experience of all heads of state with the exception of Queen Elizabeth II and the King of Thailand, whose trials have been less demanding. Like all tyrants he is guarded in what he says, and like all revolutionaries he is always right — they only admit mistakes when those who might benefit from the admission have departed the scene. So here for specialists who have to know about these things, and for fans — two different sets of readers and the only two likely to get anything out of this book — is a sort of manual of the Fidel line to be referred to as the occasion demands.
Why hélas? Like the original subject of that lament, Victor Hugo, Castro is not only important, at times eloquent and interesting, but frequently, commonly quite extraordinarily boring — much more so than Victor Hugo. Andres Oppenheimer wrote 16 years ago in the preface to his prematurely titled Castro’s Final Hour, ‘Few presidents speak more, and more often than Fidel Castro — and few repeat their public speeches so often in private conversation.’ He is not a great orator — I remember Raymond Carr pointing out in the dawn of the regime that people listen to such figures for the simple reason that they want to know what is going to happen next. He has no sense of humour, and has never been troubled by self-doubt. He has never lost certain youthful enthusiasms, and when triggered will always start off once more on the glories of the Cuban wars of independence and José Martí. An acquaintance of mine says he was nearly driven to throwing himself out of the window when trapped as the audience to an all-night conversation between Castro and García Márquez — another impossibly famous person with whom Fidel likes sharing the burdens of fame — on the significance of the French Revolution.
Ploughing dutifully through My Life I came to sense the power of inflicting boredom as a political weapon, a political tool in itself, and wondered why it has attracted comparatively little attention from theorists or analysts of ‘discourse’. Does Machiavelli have anything to say on the subject? Have I missed some systematic treatise? Repetition of the familiar is a recognisable trait of many a political speech, and is often a necessary one — the faithful find it reassuring, it has its place in the rituals — but with Castro we have mind-numbing of a different order, and not as an adjective, but as a distinctly transitive verb. ‘La France s’ennuie’, as someone said — Victor Hugo again? — before one of their 19th-century revolutions, but it usually takes even the French a considerable time to reach that stage — a quartercentury of boredom and inertia under Mitterrand and Chirac, for example, before the current ambiguous stirrings under Sarkozy. Cuba must be bored indeed.
Some little light relief is inadvertently provided by Ramonet in a chapter on Fidel and France. He has some remarkably banal early memories: I still remember some of the words I learned back then: bonjour, bonsoir, fourchette, merci beaucoup . . . Later on in high school, I studied French, and I was crazy about the French Revolution, so I learned that political motto the revolutionaries of 1789 gave the world: Liberté, egalité, fraternité.
Gratifying for French readers, though they are duly warned that ‘later, and one must keep this firmly in mind, the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own children.’ Then there is Victor Hugo again, and an enthusiasm for Les Misérables shared with Castro’s new friend Hugo Chavez.
Ramonet fishes for compliments: what about de Gaulle, or the historians of the Annales school? The first gets an odd passing salute:
De Gaulle . . . saved France once again . . . Although I’m not sure what he saved, or what he saved it from, because you people have always had political crises, and there was a time when you had a different government every six months.
Castro has not read the Annales historians — he got stuck with Lamartine, Thiers and Jean-Jaurès — so we are mercifully spared his views on la longue durée and the inadequacies of l’histoire événémentielle.
There were happy hunting trips with good old Georges Marchais,
that enabled us to talk about all sorts of things. Every time he came, he’d bring me several bottles of excellent French wine, wonderful cheeses and sometimes foie gras, whose producers he knew personally. French wines, cheeses and foie gras are the best in the world. How delicious! . . . Well, I said, don’t even think about nationalising agriculture. Leave the small producers alone, don’t touch them. Otherwise you can kiss good wine, good cheese and excellent foie gras goodbye!
That brings to mind one of the myth-beliefs of the Left in the Sixties, that Castro had found the means in Cuba to produce a large range of fine cheeses — one was always given a precise number, several score, but I forget what it was — and that these cheeses were all going to find a ready market in Canada. Ramonet forgets to ask him what happened about that.
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