EL-HE (continued)

But something distinctly odd happened. Despite the fact that the United States failed in almost every diplomatic, political, and military confrontation with Fidel, in the end the United States "won" the long fight. It won in the very area that Castro had tried so desperately to dominate, but could not: culture. American culture could not be defeated, because it was the culture of modernity and of the future. Indeed, in the end the final irony and the final indignity was that, in destroying every traditional moral basis for Cuban society, he became himself the oppressor. In wanting not to be free from (thus liberating oneself from) the outside "oppressor" but actually to be the "oppressor" (thus melding oneself to it), he in the end became his vision of Americans. He thus never became really a founder of his own country, as did his old nemesis Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela, but only a competing metropole to "America" and to "Americanization" in the world.

As the first year of the new decade slipped by, Castro became increasingly frantic, his paranoia growing exponentially and in morbid intensity as he became more and more isolated and closed in, his friends falling all around him. Havana was going to "sink" into the sea. The Cuban people would return to the mountains, factories would be stoked with wood, not oil. His speeches grew more and more nihilistic and apocalyptic, as though Armageddon hovered nervously just over the horizon. He had closed in upon himself, like a wolf tracking itself under moons it could no longer gauge. He even had already created "experimental zones," where Cubans expecting the final American attack could return to the countryside to live off the land. In San Cristóbal, he formed an El Mango farm where oxen replaced broken-down tractors, where homemade thread was made to replace sutures, and where the jutía, a Cuban rat, was the subject of a food-generating breeding program so that it could be used in place of meat. No more dreaming of cows, now the Revolution's dreams had come down to rats! One thing that Castro had never lost was his ironic sense of symbolism: San Cristóbal was also the same area where the missiles of 1962 had been installed!

He was ending his days in a defeat too different from the mountain tops he had scaled, and he was not going to disappear quietly into the night. Unless he suddenly died naturally, his would be a Götterdämmerung end. Some kind of terrible striking out lay ahead -- an attack on the United States, a mass suicide within, a bitter war within the military between the generations, something rightfully commensurate~ with- the greatness and drama of Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, in Miami, the Cubans in exile had also returned to their past -- they were organizing, mobilizing, planning, training, dreaming of returning to Cuba, of getting their land back, of restoring the questionable Cuban "grandeur" of the past . . .

In the beginning, the Cuban people had called him "Fidel" -- in adoration, in salvation, in love, like a Spanish woman with her husband before marriage. After the magnificence of the triunfo, as after the marriage, they immediately began calling him "Castro" -- in sobriety, in respect, in fear. In the end, they called him only "El" or "He," for he had become finally a differentiated creature existing away from them -- that sun so hot that it burned to come close.

They understood, and he finally understood, in St. Mark's words, that he was "knowing himself that virtue had gone out of him." That is why they could now sing "That Man Is Crazy," and why they could begin -- only begin -- to dream of a time when they could individuate themselves from him.

So it was that, as Mikhail Gorbachev turbulently de-Communized his own world, Fidel Castro came to stand alone in history as the "last Communist." He held stubbornly to autocracy even while all the world was transforming itself in the name of individual liberties. In truth, with his megalomania and proud indiscipline and teeming personal demons, he had always been the last man on earth to be a Communist. But truths are treacherous wraiths, and often they change color as the lights of history fall at geometrical or seasonal angles, and so only in the end did he finally turn out truly to be a "Communist" -- what he always was, truly the last Communist.

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