Jay Parini, "The Guardian" , April 24, 2004 :

Castro's cult of destiny

Volker Skierka's revealing portrait of Fidel Castro sees beyond the self-propaganda, says Jay Parini

Buy Fidel Castro: A Biography at Amazon.co.uk

Fidel Castro: A Biography
by Volker Skierka, translated by Patrick Camiller
448pp, Polity Press, £25

A massively contradictory figure, Fidel Castro appears to revel in his own myth. He has been a master of self-propaganda, thrusting a vivid image of himself on the world's screen, and cultivating that image over five decades. Hardly a person on the planet would be unable to identify the man in the green fatigues with the coarse cigar, the curly beard, the extravagant hand gestures and oratorical flair. Perhaps only his friend and comrade, Che Guevara, managed (by virtue of his early death and elegant beret) to imprint his image more indelibly on the public imagination.
What makes for hell in one's own head of state is heaven for a biographer. Curiously enough, there have been few good lives of this charismatic leader, the best being Tad Szulc's lively and personal account, Castro (1986). Castro's current biographer is Volker Skierka, a German journalist who has dug deeply into source materials, including some recently accessible documents from East German archives. The result is a comprehensive and highly readable biography written in a remarkably even-handed tone.
One quickly learns from Skierka that nothing about Castro is black or white. Nothing, perhaps, except his force of character. At the age of 12, for instance, Fidel sent a letter to President Roosevelt, congratulating him on his re-election in 1940, signing off as "Your Friend". The young boarder at a Jesuit school in Santiago de Cuba had no difficulty in seeing himself as the equal of powerful figures such as FDR. In a sense, he was. A fiery personality, Fidel swaggered through the world from an early age, as if auditioning for the part of Zorba the Greek.
He proved himself an immensely talented baseball player while studying law at the university in Havana, and was offered a bonus of $5,000 to sign with the New York Giants in 1949. As the agent who approached him later recalled: "We couldn't believe he turned us down. Nobody from Latin America has said 'no' before." But Fidel Castro was not Nobody. He was Somebody - a young man whose will-to-power would have impressed even Nietzsche.
As a student, Castro mingled with rebellious types, modelling himself on the freedom-fighter and author José Martí. "In his writings," says Skierka, "Fidel found the roots for his own later development." Martí had, at the age of 15, founded a revolution, setting in motion a political wave that eventually overwhelmed the Spanish colonialists who ruled the island. From the beginning, Castro envisioned himself as extending, even completing, the revolution begun in the late 19th century by Martí and his Cuban Revolutionary Party.
Nevertheless, as Skierka makes clear, Castro was not necessarily a communist in the early years. He swept into power on a wave of reform, determined to end political corruption, improve the island's miserable schools and feeble medical system, and to institute land reforms. The corrupt Batista government had been systematically looting the country; in 1959, Batista himself, with family and friends, escaped to exile in the Dominican Republic with more than $400m in pilfered funds.
Castro insisted, in interviews on television and in newspapers, that his revolution represented neither left nor right; it was merely "one step forward". To American journalists, he declared: "I have said in a clear and definitive fashion that we are not communists." He insisted that the doors of Cuba remained open to private investments "that contribute to the industrial development of Cuba". He wished for peaceful relations with the US.
By contrast with Batista, Castro was relatively law-abiding and well-behaved. In the early days of his regime, reprisals were fairly moderate, and genuine reforms were undertaken. Slowly but inexorably, however, the human rights situation in Cuba worsened as Castro began to feel threatened from all sides. The American invasion of Cuba in 1961 - the Bay of Pigs fiasco - certainly made matters worse, forcing Castro to rely increasingly on the Soviet Union for assistance. As Skierka suggests, Castro was making some headway with John F Kennedy around the time of his assassination in 1963; there may well have been a rapprochement between the US and Cuba, and this could have done wonders for human rights on that island.
As it was, the assassination brought an end to negotiations; President Johnson wanted them stopped. The exiled Cuban population in the US (mostly in Miami) had become increasingly influential in American political circles, where for decades they have worked the system to their advantage, always with the goal of overthrowing Castro and recapturing the island. Repeated attempts on Castro's life, and the constant threat of invasion from the US, have made the dictator terribly edgy, reinforcing his narcissistic paranoia. The usual freedoms that democratic countries afford their residents have therefore been seriously absent in Cuba.
On the other hand, as Skierka notes, Cuba has many things going for it. Castro, in an interview from 1992, boasted of the achievements of his revolution: "I am firmly convinced that no country in the world has done more than Cuba to protect human rights. No children in Cuba have to beg or go homeless; no children have to scrounge for a living ... In our country, everyone knows how to read and write. Hundreds of millions of children in the world don't have access to medical treatment, but in Cuba every child has a school to go to and has access to medical care." While the first sentence quoted above is patently ridiculous, the rest contains a measure of truth. In many ways, Cuba puts the US to shame when it comes to access to health care for the poor in general.
It is Castro's inflated sense of his own destiny that has long made him appear ridiculous. In his public speeches, which can last for hours, he seems too much like Bill Clinton on speed. Like any number of dictators - the 20th century was rampant with them - Castro transformed Cuban politics into a cult of the leader, eliminating all notions of democracy and freedom of expression. On the other hand, as Skierka observes, Castro is almost unique among dictators in not robbing his own people blind. As far as anyone knows, he has not filled Swiss bank accounts with stolen cash. Nor has he established himself on lavish estates with dancing girls at his beck and call. In fact, he has no interest in the usual trappings of dictatorship.
But what happens in Cuba after Castro? Skierka argues that this revolutionary who has outlasted generations of American presidents and world leaders, who has dodged countless bullets (real and imagined) from the CIA, the Mafia and the Cuban exiles, who has ruled his own little postage stamp of an island with an iron hand for nearly half a century, has done little to prepare the way for his successor.
In The General in His Labyrinth, Castro's close friend and drinking buddy, Gabriel García Márquez, writes in the voice of Simon Bolívar, saying: "The man who serves a revolution ploughs the seas." But the great Liberator's last words in the novel are these: "This nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants of every colour and race." One suspects that, reading his friend's novel, Fidel must have shivered slightly - even in a very hot climate.
· Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, has just written a biography of William Faulkner. It will be published in November by HarperCollins (USA)