Now that the era of Fidel Castro has — even in name — come to a close, it is even more interesting to inquire how and when it actually started. Cuba is now in the hands of an unsmiling and elderly “younger” brother who runs the armed forces: a uniformed coup without the fuss of an operatic military proclamation.
Grim. But, depending on the year of your birth, that elusively romantic decade “the Sixties” can be said to have begun either on New Year’s Day 1959, when the guerrillas swept in from the Sierra Maestra and took over Havana, or in the early autumn of 1967, when a triumphant CIA and its Bolivian military allies were able to exhibit the corpse of Che Guevara. How did we get from there to here? Whether in victory or defeat, revolutionary Cuba once had the capacity — in common with other rebellious islands such as Ireland or Cyprus — to “punch above its weight”. The victory of Castro in 1959 coincided with the end of the elderly and conservative regime of Eisenhower and Nixon. It also seemed to offer an alternative to the dreary eastern European statified socialism that had, in Budapest in 1956, exposed itself as another form of alienation and exploitation.
But within a few years the emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba had brought the world as close as it should ever wish to get to a thermonuclear immolation, while John F Kennedy’s supposedly more liberal and forward-looking ethos was over almost before it had begun on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs.
(To this day, those who still brood on Kennedy’s murder are forced to wonder if it was not a “blowback” from the sinister forces originally recruited to bring about the assassination of Castro.) Nixon’s return to power was abruptly aborted when a group of anti-Castro fanatics was caught burgling the office of the Democratic National Committee in a new building next to the Kennedy Center called Watergate.
The stuff of history, in other words, is involved in this tale. If John Kerry had been elected in 2004, he would have become the 11th president of the United States to confront the persistent problem of a communist island only “90 miles”, as the old saying had it, “from Key West”.
In the minds of millions of people of radical sympathy, this continued intransigence in the face of a superpower was a never-ending source of pleasure. It showed, as Norman Mailer wrote when the revolution first triumphed and then survived, that the big battalions did not always have to win. The fact that Cuba stayed true to the old course, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, still cheers some leftist veterans who have little else with which to console themselves.
In fact, as one always knew, the Cuban revolution was an almost exact inversion of the Marxist theory of history. It involved a concentration on the figure of a “great man” — a single leader or caudillo — which was as antithetical to Marxism as anything could be. It relied for its impetus much more on nationalism than on socialism.
()After almost half a century, it still depends on the colonial staples of tourism and the export of sugar and tobacco. It also relies on the regular export of its more ambitious or restless citizens to the convenient port of nearby Miami, a community which has been meditating revenge since 1959 and now believes that the hour has struck. (Not all of these émigrés are by any means former mafiosi or land barons: I know several Cuban radicals who have been patiently writing their manifestos in Florida for years now.) “Charisma” is a form of authority that undergoes sharply diminishing returns. I have seen Castro twice in person. The first occasion was a rally in Santa Clara on July 26, 1968, anniversary of the first battle of the revolution. Che was hardly cold in his grave, the guerrillas of Portuguese Africa were scoring triumph after triumph, the shock of the Vietnamese Tet offensive was still echoing around the globe and in mid-town Havana a huge “clock” ticked up a numeral every time an American plane was shot down over Hanoi and Haiphong.
That most intoxicating of all Third World rebel movies, The Battle of Algiers, was playing non-stop in the city. American Black Panthers were practically darkening the sky itself with the number of planes hijacked to the defiant island where, it was confidently claimed, racism had been abolished.
Some of this was exciting and inspiring, but even then one could easily pick up news of the suppression of writers and artists and of the persecution of homosexuals. There was a barracks-like atmosphere with too much emphasis on sports and parades. Above all, there was the impending crisis over Czechoslovakia. When it came, all the brave talk of a distinct “Cuban” socialism was dissipated.
I watched Castro’s television broadcast coming out in favour of Leonid Brezhnev’s panzers on August 21, 1968 and felt that it was all over. From then on Cuba acted and spoke like a member of the bleak Warsaw pact, yet the next time I saw Castro in the flesh (at a reception for movie makers in Havana in 1988, where Oliver Stone almost managed to introduce me in person), the official Cuban press was at last anti-Moscow — in that it was denouncing Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika.
You used to hear that the revolution had brought universal literacy, but it was more noticeable that it did not trust its people to read. The island’s best authors, from Heberto Padilla onwards, were either in prison or in exile.
As to the abolition of racism, I have been barred by Castro’s police from bringing a black Cuban guest into a Havana hotel, and such spots are reserved anyway only for those who have dollars. The reign of tourist values and prostitution is now as lurid as it was in the old Godfather days.
The thin layer of revolutionary sloganising is not enough to disguise a stagnant and impoverished society, condemned until recently to listen to endless speeches by the only Latin American ruler who refuses to submit himself for election. The crowning insult is probably the dynastic one — the assumption that Castro can appoint his own brother just like that.
Yet none of this has been enough to shake the allegiance of a large section of the left. What can explain this? I think in part it is nostalgia for the brave days when impetuous young men humbled a mighty empire. There is a residual yearning, too, for the days of a socialist fatherland (this yearning now being transferred, by some, onto the grotesque figure of Hugo Chavez). Finally, the true left really does believe that the main enemy is not totalitarianism but the American-led global order, and if you believe that then you must believe that anything is preferable.
Castro believed it, too, which is why he is bequeathing the world an intelligent and resourceful people who live in a political and economic slum run by a banana republic family which will take time to get used to the 20th century, let alone the 21st one.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, has just been published by Atlantic
