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THE FIDEL
CASTRO WHOM I KNOW
BY GABRIEL
GARCIA MARQUEZ
HIS devotion
to the word. His power of seduction. He goes to seek
out problems where they are. The impetus of
inspiration is very much part of his style. Books
reflect the breadth of his tastes very well. He
stopped smoking to have the moral authority to
combat tobacco addiction. He likes to prepare food
recipes with a kind of scientific fervor. He keeps
himself in excellent physical condition with various
hours of gymnastics daily and frequent swimming.
Invincible patience. Ironclad discipline. The force
of his imagination stretches him to the unforeseen.
As important as learning to work is to learn how to
rest.
Tired of
talking, he rests by talking. He writes well and
likes to do so. The greatest stimulus of his life is
the emotion of risk. The tribunal of the improviser
would seem to be his perfect ecological medium. He
always begins in an almost inaudible voice, in an
uncertain direction, but takes advantage of any
spark to move on gaining ground, palm to palm, until
there is a kind of bang! and he takes control of his
audience. It is inspiration: the irresistible and
dazzling state of grace, only denied by those who
have not had the glory of experiencing it. He is the
anti-dogmatist par excellence.
José Martí
is his foremost author and he has had the talent to
incorporate Martí’s thinking into the sanguine
torrent of a Marxist revolution. The essence of his
own thinking could lie in the certainty that in
undertaking mass work it is fundamental to be
concerned about individuals.
That could
explain his absolute confidence in direct contact.
He has a language for each occasion and a distinct
means of persuasion according to his interlocutors.
He knows how to put himself at the level of each one
and possesses a vast and varied knowledge that
allows him to move with facility in any media. One
thing is definite: he is where he is, how he is and
with whom he is. Fidel Castro is there to win. His
attitude in the face of defeat, even in the most
minimal actions of everyday life, would seem to obey
a private logic: he does not even admit it, and does
not have a minute’s peace until he succeeds in
inverting the terms and converting it into victory.
Nobody is more obsessive than him when he has
decided to get to the bottom of something. There is
no project, however colossal or tiny, that he does
not undertake with an incarnate passion. And
especially if he has to stand up to adversity. Then,
like at no other time, he appears in a better mood
and a better humor. Someone who thinks that he knows
him well told him: “Things must be going very badly,
because you’re looking the picture of health.
Reiteration
is one of his ways of working. E.g.: the issue of
the external debt of Latin America appeared in his
conversations around two years ago, and has been
gradually developed, ramified, made more profound.
The first thing that he said, like a simple
arithmetical conclusion, was that the debt is
non-payable. Afterwards came the staggered
discoveries: the repercussions of the debt in
countries’ economies, its political and social
impact, its decisive influence in international
relations, its providential importance for a unified
Latin America politics… until assuming a total view,
which he expounded in an international meeting
convened to that effect and which time has taken
charge of demonstrating.
His rarest
virtue as a politico is that faculty of discerning
the evolution of an action to its remotest
consequences… but he does not exercise that faculty
out of illumination, but as the result of arduous
and tenacious reasoning. His supreme aide is his
memory and he uses it to the point of abuse to
sustain speeches or private conversations with
overwhelming reasoning and arithmetical operations
of an incredible rapidity.
He requires
the aid of incessant information, well masticated
and digested. His task of informative accumulation
is a priority from the moment that he wakes up. He
breakfasts with no less than 200 pages of news of
the entire world. During the day he is sent urgent
news wherever he is; he calculates that he has to
read some 500 documents, to which one has to add
reports from the official services and from his
visitors and anything that might interest his
infinite curiosity.
Responses
have to be exact, given that he is capable of
discovering the most minimal contradiction in a
casual phrase. Another source of vital information
is books. He is a voracious reader. Nobody can
explain how he finds the time or what method he uses
to read so much and with such rapidity, although he
insists that he doesn’t have any special ones. On
many occasion he has taken away a book in the early
hours and by the morning is commenting on it. He
reads in English but does not speak it. He prefers
to read in Spanish and is prepared to read a paper
that comes into his hands at any hour. He is a good
reader of literature and follows it with attention.
He has the
habit of firing rapid questions. Successive
questions that he makes in instantaneous bursts
until discovering the whys and wherefores of the
whys and wherefores of the final whys and
wherefores. When a visitor from Latin America gave
him a hasty figure on the rice consumption of his
compatriots, he made his mental calculations and
said: “How odd, each person eats four pounds of rice
per day.” His masterly tactic is to ask about things
that he knows, to confirm his information. And in
certain cases to measure the caliber of his
interlocutor, and deal with him/her accordingly.
He does not
lose any occasion to inform himself. During the
Angola war he described a battle in such detail at
an official reception that it was hard work to
convince a European diplomat that Fidel Castro had
not participated in it. The account he gave of the
capture and assassination of Che, that he gave of
the assault on the Moneda Palace and the death of
Salvador Allende, or that he gave of the ravages of
Hurricane Flora were all great oral reports.
His vision
of Latin America in the future is the same as that
of Bolívar and Martí, an integrated and autonomous
community, capable of moving the destiny of the
world. The country about which he knows the most
after Cuba is the United States. He has a profound
knowledge of the nature of its people, their power
structures, the secondary intentions of its
governments, and this has helped him to handle the
incessant torment of the blockade.
In an
interview lasting a number of hours, he dwells on
each issue, adventures into its least thought-of
complications without ever neglecting precision, in
the awareness that one single ill-used word could
cause irreparable damage. He has never refused to
answer any question, however provocative it might
be, nor has he ever lost his patience. In terms of
those who are economical with the truth in order not
to give him any more concerns than those that he
already has: he knows it. He said to one official
who did so: “You are hiding truths from me in order
not to worry me, but when I finally discover them I
will die from the impact of having to confront so
many truths that I have not been told.” The gravest,
however, are the truths that are concealed to cover
up deficiencies, because alongside the enormous
achievements that sustain the Revolution – the
political, scientific, sporting, cultural
achievements – there is a colossal bureaucratic
incompetence that is affecting almost all the orders
of daily life, and particularly domestic happiness.
When he
talks with people in the street, his conversation
regains the expressiveness and crude frankness of
genuine affection. They call him: Fidel. They
surround him without risks, they address him
informally, they argue with him, they contradict
him, they claim him, with a channel of immediate
transmission from which the truth gushes forth. It
is then that one discovers the unusual human being
that the reflection of his own image does not let us
see. This is the Fidel Castro that I believe I know.
A man of austere habits and insatiable illusions,
with an old-fashioned formal education of cautious
words and subdued tones and incapable of conceiving
any idea that is not colossal.
He dreams
that his scientists will find the final cure for
cancer and has created a foreign policy of world
reach in an island that is 84 times smaller than
that of his principal enemy. He has the conviction
that the greatest achievement of human beings is the
solid training of their conscience and that moral
incentives, more than material ones, are capable of
changing the world and driving history.
I have heard him in his scant hours of yearning for
life evoking things that he could have done in
another way to gain time in life. On seeing him very
overburdened with the weight of so many distant
destinies, I asked him what was it that he most
wished to do in this world, and he immediately
answered me: “stand on a corner.”
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