EL-HE (continued)

In Cali, Colombia, the big, handsome José Pardo Llada still started out his popular radio show every day with the poignant song of the Cuba he had left behind, "Guantanamera."

Carlos Franqui, Castro's great editor, went back and forth from Cuba to Europe as his disillusion grew in the early and mid-1960s, and he finally left for good in 1968. Always lean, intelligent, and somewhat haunted-looking, he wrote book after book and appeared often at conferences. Always, he wrote and spoke of one person: his former friend, Fidel Castro.

When the Directorate intellectual chief Jorge Valls was finally released from prison by Castro in 1984, after unusually brutal treatment, Cuban state security officers took him around Havana on a remarkably Orwellian tour because they wanted him to leave with "a good impression of Cuba." In the zoo, they explained to the wondering Valls, "We're building a zoo where the animals will run free, and the people will be able to view them from these buses."

As for Raúl, he was named Fidel's successor, but his was an ambivalent gift of inheritance, because Fidel fully meant that in truth no one should (or could) succeed him. To try to name a successor meant that the great leader's power could be transferred or acquired, whereas the charismatic leader knew it could not be and must not be -- it was truly "after me, the deluge." That was the only way to bind the people to him forever. He would illustrate with the finality of the grave how little they could live without him. Meanwhile, Raúl's life, which had hitherto been an open one, now was nearly as closed as his brother's. Passing by in cars, Cubans would point to "Raúl and Vilma's apartment," thinking they knew them too. What they did not know was that, even though Vilma always properly appeared in public with Raúl, they had for some time been divorced and Raúl had a new wife, a mate who now remained as unseen and unknown as Fidel's women.

Meanwhile, the world continued to define the mysterious Fidel Castro in myriad and phantasmagoric ways. He was a Third World Napoleon, the head of the first Fascist Left regime in history, a psychopathic caudillo, a socialist caudillo, Jesus Christ on earth, an aging pimp, the Lone Ranger, a socialist huckster, everydictator, everyprince, everyrevolutionary, a thwarted democrat, a Communist, a Gallego cacique, Machiavelli's Prince, Francisco Franco's classic guerrilla, an inquisitional bishop, a Caribbean Proteus, a new kind of actor on the world stage, a dynastic Communist, the vicar of the complexes of the Third World, the prototype of the new Third World, a classical opportunistic son-of-a- bitch. . .

But as much as he lied and as much as he embellished the truth, there were times of stark honesty that finally revealed the man. When TV anchorman Dan Rather suggested in 1985 that he had made Cuba "one of the most dependent nations on earth," Castro smiled knowingly and said, "I agree with you, but on the inverse, because we are the most independent country of the world." Why? "Because we do not depend, not even the slightest, on the United States." When NBC reporter Maria Shriver spoke with him in 1988, he repeated this theme. "We are left," he told her, "with the honor of being one of the few adversaries of the United States." She asked if that were such an honor. "Of course it is an honor," he replied, "because for such a small country as Cuba to have such a gigantic country as the United States live so obsessed with this little island -- a country that no longer considers itself an adversary of the U.S.S.R. or an adversary of China yet still considers itself an adversary of Cuba -- it is an honor for us." And when Barbara Walters asked him about the idea that "we drove you to Communism," he said simply and pointedly, "No one drove me anywhere." In all of these moments, he was zeroing in relentlessly upon the single and only and necessary enemy of his life: the United States of America and its concomitant "Americanization" of the Cuban spirit.

For Fidel Castro had lived his entire life totally obsessed by the United States. Could he have destroyed it, he would have. As much as he could neutralize its power, in Cuba and without, he did. The obsession in part sprung from the ancient Spanish Catholic abhorrence of the northern Protestant spirit; it was in the blood of Angel Castro, who fought against the Americans for Mother Spain, and it passed into the blood of his most prominent son. But it also sprung from beautiful Cuba's being a half- finished, an incomplete, an atimia society. A desperate people, an unfinished people, a people needing terribly to be consolidated in a society, a people who came to be consolidated in one person. Fidel Castro. He gave them a feeling of completion, the feeling of the totality of a very great love. He gave them his own culture. That is why he sent the Christian, Westernized, socialized Cuban middle class away; that is why he sent vulnerable young virgins out to work in the fields and thus implement his destruction of the traditional Cuban family; and that is why he smashed the old statues and destroyed Rolando Amador's library. It was the only way he could settle his old scores with the United States. For just at the moment in history when Cuba had been weak, America had crept into her very soul. That was why he had had to close down Cuba. Not because the Americans turned their backs on him, but in order to avoid the wrenching feelings of inferiority, so as not to have to compete with a culture that was so unbearable exactly because the Cuban people wanted it. Castro had also created a new -- a substitute -- Cuba. He had made a massive "identification with the aggressor" (mainly his father, but also Batista and the Jesuits), as psychiatrist Facundo Lima explained it. His father had owned great amounts of land: Fidel became for all intents and purposes the owner of Cuba. Angel Castro had had a number of illegitimate children: Fidel had more of them. His father had had a "divided family," one legitimate and the other a bastard one: Fidel divided utterly the Cuban family so that on the one hand there were the revolutionaries (the legitimate family) and on the other the counterrevolutionaries, the bastards. Marxism, he turned into the new Jesuitical faith, and that faith's "new man" would undo all the history of his illegitimate background.

But basically, he was always a destroyer. The numbers of people who owed their deaths to Fidel Castro are difficult to establish, his influence and power were so often so amorphous, but at the same time so decisive; but when one simply tallies up the force of his influence in countries like Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and even remote and forgotten places and situations like Zanzibar (not to mention the Cubans themselves killed and the more than one million Cubans exiled because of him), one has to come to the conclusion that he is personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of persons.

But he killed still more. He is supremely responsible for drawing out poisoned situations into endless conflicts -- without his involvement, these conflicts would have ended far more quickly and far more decisively, with immeasurably far less suffering. In the end, he also killed culture; he killed every human value; he killed a Cuba that, left alone and with a real reform, would have evolved into a developed and reasonably just nation in the time that he ruled over the days of its destruction. In the end, he left only silence, fear and hatred, obsession and exhaustion.

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