The KGB has a museum in Moscow. The former East German Stasi has one in
Berlin. Not wanting to be left out, Cuba’s secret policemen, though still
very much active, created a museum in a lush suburb of Havana to catalogue
the triumphs — and disasters — of the Caribbean country’s experiment with
communism.
In a former oligarch’s mansion by the sea, the museum is dominated, like
everything else in Cuba, by Fidel Castro, the maximo lider, who
seized power from an American-backed dictator in 1959.
Last Thursday morning a woman was dusting the display cases inside. One large
room in the museum was dedicated exclusively to plots by America’s CIA, and
other assorted “counter-revolutionary criminals”, to kill Castro, of which
there have been no less than 637, including the famous “exploding cigar”
plan, according to my guide, an interior ministry official called Nora.
“They have plotted to ambush him,” she said, gesturing to a display case
featuring weapons and plans from an early, abortive attempt in 1961. “They
have tried to poison him, to blow him up and to shoot him at international
summits. There has hardly been a meeting he has attended abroad where there
has not been some plan to assassinate him. All of these efforts have failed.
Our commander-in-chief is made of steel.”
Or perhaps not.
Not even the incredibly tenacious Castro can escape what Cubans refer to,
euphemistically, as the “biological factor”, or human frailty. He was to
have marked his 80th birthday on August 13, but the celebrations have been
cancelled.
The announcement that he was handing over power to Raul, his younger brother,
while he recovered from surgery after intestinal bleeding came as a shock to
the nation. For almost half a century it has known no ruler other than the
bombastic, bearded figure in the green combat fatigues who, in all that
time, had never once seemed to drop his guard in the battle against
“imperialist aggression” from the north.
Inevitably, Cuba has been abuzz with speculation about the severity of his
illness and whether he will ever return to the helm of his nation. He was
said to be in a “stable” condition, but that much could hardly be said of
his country.
A tropical storm was bearing down on hurricane-prone Havana this weekend, but
the country of 11m was focused more on the political turbulence that might
shake one of the world’s last communist redoubts when Castro eventually
dies. Will the system that he embodied, a hybrid Marxist-Leninism with a
Caribbean lilt, drop like a rotten tropical fruit? If so, what will replace
it? The city was quieter than usual and people went about with long faces as
fears grew about the future. One anxiety was that the hunched and elfin
Raul, who is regarded by some as more of a hardliner than his brother, would
implement a draconian crackdown to prove to the world — and America in
particular — that Castroism could survive Castro. Others believed that Raul,
75, would be forced to loosen the controls or face a rebellion.
Cubans in Miami — some 2m are believed to be living in exile — were dreaming
of reclaiming houses and estates that were confiscated after the communist
takeover.
Castro has fascinated and infuriated the world in equal measure since he
overthrew Fulgencio Batista, the American-supported dictator, in 1959 with
comrades-in-arms including Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
A former law student, baseball fanatic and bibliophile, Castro was only 32
when he came to power. He has ended up as the world’s longest-serving
leader.
In 1961 the CIA and exiled Cubans organised the Bay of Pigs invasion to try to
remove Castro. It ended in a humiliating rout. An American trade embargo and
various assassination attempts have been just as ineffective. Castro has
outlasted nine American presidents and would no doubt like to take on one
more.
Recently, though, he has been showing signs of physical weakness. In 2001 he
fainted from heat exhaustion during a speech. In 2004, after another speech,
he stumbled and fell, shattering his left kneecap and breaking his right
arm. He began suffering from bouts of forgetfulness and incoherence. His
hand trembled, prompting the CIA to diagnose Parkinson’s disease.
In June, however, it began to look as though plans for the “transition” were
more developed than anyone had expected when Granma, the official party
newspaper, published an eight-page supplement entitled Raul Up Close, a
fawning eulogy of Raul, the defence minister, in which he was described as
“capable, responsible and brilliant”.
At the same time other members of the Castro clan have begun emerging from
behind the veil of secrecy that always used to surround them, perhaps in
preparation for assuming a more public role after the dictator has departed.
Among them is Dalia Soto del Valle, Castro’s second wife and the mother of
five of his sons.
Castro’s obsession with Alexander the Great — a fascination shared by Saddam
Hussein — explains the names of three of the boys: Alexis, a photographer,
Alexander, a cameraman, and Alejandro, a computer programmer. Antonio is an
orthopaedic surgeon. The career of Angel, the youngest son, is not known.
Castro has another son from his first marriage, to Mirta Diaz-Balart, who
lives these days in Madrid. Fidel, as he is called, is a Soviet-educated
physicist who ran Cuba’s atomic energy commission until the early 1990s,
when he was sacked for “incompetence” by his father. These days, however,
the two appear to have made it up and Fidel the younger has found a new role
as an adviser to Castro. ()
Castro also has a daughter called Alina from a relationship he had with Naty
Revuelta, a socialite, in the 1950s. She is unlikely to be playing any
future role in revolutionary politics, however.
When I met her in Havana in 1992, she told me that the only thing she
remembered about her father from childhood was a smell of cigars and
instructions to call him comandante. She fled Cuba in 1993 and runs
an anti-Castro radio programme in Miami called Simply Alina.
As for Raul, he is married to Vilma Espin Guillois, the head of the Cuban
Women’s Federation, and they have four children.
All are charged with protecting Castro’s legacy. But will it work? From his
thwarted dream in the 1980s of breeding a “super-cow” to his experiments in
the 1990s with rodents as a source of protein for the masses, Castro has
seldom been short of ideas, no matter how misguided, for building a better
society.
The problem for Castro, however, is that people have long since stopped
listening. Satellite television dishes are forbidden, but many people have
secretly installed them to tune into Miami television instead of seven-hour
speeches by Castro or mind-numbingly tedious documentaries about promoting
revolutionary values among the coffee-growers of the Sierra Maestra.
Trade agreements with China and Venezuela are supposed to have improved the
island’s economy in recent years, but basic goods such as rice and beans are
still rationed. Cuba, once one of the world’s most important “after-dinner”
economies and a leading producer of coffee and sugar, is importing sugar
from Belarus; and coffee is on the list of rationed goods.
Milena Martinez, a 36-year-old Havana teacher, said that Castro had once made
people dream, but “today he does not seem to have any answers”. She and
Alberto, her husband, who is also a teacher, and their two children scrape
by on about £20 a month. “It is all very well to hand out light bulbs, but
what about food? One of my elderly neighbours has had to sell off her
jewellery to buy food. People have had enough. There is a lot of anger.”
Until now, Castro and what some experts have referred to as the “personality
cult” surrounding him have managed to keep a lid on the pressure cooker.
In 1994, when hundreds of men and youths rioted along the Havana seafront,
only Castro’s personal intervention prevented the trouble from spiralling
out of control.
Followed by worried bodyguards, he marched into the crowd to try to reason
with the protesters. They dropped their rocks and stones and applauded. The
crowd began to disperse.
It is difficult to imagine any of Castro’s successors being able to pull off
such a stunt, particularly Raul, who comes nowhere near Castro as living
icon and legend.
Even some of Castro’s numerous victims grudgingly recognise his genius. “He
inspired us for many years,” said Oscar Espinosa, a dissident. “With him we
were going to build a paradise on earth. Now all that is over.”
Nothing illustrates more graphically the lunacy of the Cuban revolutionary
process than the story of this 65-year-old economist, one of 75 government
critics subjected to summary trials and lengthy prison terms in 2003 in one
of the most severe crackdowns on the Cuban opposition since the beginning of
the revolutionary reign.
“If Karl Marx lived in Cuba, he probably would have been jailed by now as
well,” said Espinosa. “There’s no logic to it whatsoever.”
Espinosa, who lives with Miriam, his wife, in a tiny flat dominated by two
carved wooden rocking chairs and a jumble of books and papers, participated
in the struggle against Batista in the 1950s. He had worked closely with
Castro in the 1960s when he was dispatched with a team of other economists
to serve briefly as an adviser to the government in communist North Korea.
He became a diplomat and was posted to Yugoslavia in the 1980s. His mistake
was to speak in favour of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika when Cuba was less
than happy about the idea. “I lost my job,” he said last week. “So did
Miriam.”
He began printing an economics newsletter which, unlike official publications,
did not try to hide the truth. In 2003 he was sentenced to 20 years in
prison for counter-revolutionary activities. “It was difficult, really
difficult,” he sighed. Apart from anything else he thought it was grossly
unfair: much of the evidence against him had been made up.
“They claimed I was getting help from America, which is not true,” he said.
“There probably are some pro-American dissidents, but not me. I’ve always
argued that the American policy of blockading Cuba is wrong. It has
encouraged totalitarianism. Castro thrives on conflict. It allows him to
cultivate nationalism.”
Miriam joined other wives, daughters and mothers of political prisoners in a
weekly gathering at the church of Santa Rita in Havana. They picked that
church because Santa Rita is the patron saint of difficult causes. The
church is also close to the embassy district of Havana, near the interior
ministry museum, and the women, who dress in white, hoped such a location
would draw attention to their campaign.
Espinosa was freed after 18 months on account of chronic liver disease, but
the order for his release stipulated that he should be returned to jail as
soon as he has fully recovered his health.
This has not dented his defiance. A schoolmasterly figure with grey hair and
glasses, he trots out one statistic after another to demonstrate just how
far behind other countries Cuba has fallen. The country’s agriculture has
been destroyed, he says. Sugar production has dropped to the level of 1904,
when Cuba had just 2m inhabitants. Teams of oxen are replacing clapped-out
Soviet tractors.
The birth rate is more than 60% below what it was in 1960, says Espinosa. More
than half of pensioners, meanwhile, live on the pitiful sum of £5 a month.
The suicide rate is among the highest in the world, as is the prison
population.
Yet, strange as it may seem, Espinosa is optimistic. Above all, he argues,
Raul is a pragmatist. “He’ll have to give something to the people,” said
Espinosa. “People are tired of speeches.”
Fidel’s little brother has always been something of an enigma. For years he
was regarded as one of the most hardline figures in the regime, but since
communism’s collapse he has avoided being closely identified with two more
recent crackdowns, including the one in 2003 in which Espinosa was jailed.
Raul and his military cohorts control the most profitable two-thirds of the
country’s economy, including tourism, and more economic reform would
increase profits.
It would also increase pressure for political openings, however, while the
vested interest of Raul and associates is in maintaining the status quo.
One possible sign of a softening in Raul’s attitudes are the activities of
Mariela, one of his four children. She is a sexologist who has been lobbying
the national assembly for changes in the law on behalf of transsexuals and
transvestites.
In the 1980s Raul organised the “rehabilitation” of gay men through forced
labour and those who were infected with the HIV virus were locked up in
asylums. He has done nothing, however, to prevent his daughter proposing a
law allowing transsexuals the right to marry and to enjoy the same
inheritance and pension rights as heterosexuals.
Raul’s big problem, however, is that while he can be given command on paper,
there is no way of passing to him the legitimacy that Fidel Castro enjoys as
the figurehead of the revolution.
“My bet,” says a European diplomat in Havana, “is that you can’t have
fidelismo without Fidel. It will be interesting, nonetheless, to see them
trying.”
