Gerald Warner: Castro can write the book about building his own myth

Published on Wednesday 23 June 2010 19:15

BOOK launches are ubiquitous these days, but last week witnessed one that had a claim to be distinctive. Fidel Castro unveiled to the faithful in Cuba his autobiographical memoir The Strategic Victory. The Maximum Leader treated his captive audience to a reading of extracts from it for a little over an hour, which testifies to his weakened condition - he would never have spoken with such brevity in his heyday.

Castro must be the only man on earth more obsessed with his "legacy" than Tony Blair and is equally unlikely to enjoy the esteem of posterity. This memoir comes just three years after the English-language publication of Ignacio Ramonet's hagiography. If Castro has now decided that, if one wants a job done properly one had better do it oneself, it is certainly not for lack of sycophantic biographers. The Castro myth was created by Herbert L Matthews in three articles for the New York Times in 1957. Since then, inky-fingered useful idiots have never been in short supply.

Castro himself is probably best equipped to confect his own legend: as he disarmingly confessed to a teacher during his schooldays, "it's just that I'm in the habit of lying". When he gave Ramonet his account of the attack on the Uvero barracks on 28 May, 1957, he observed in the measured tones of a military veteran that, if government planes had arrived in support, "we'd (sic) have had to order a retreat, no doubt about it".

In fact, Castro was not there and he did order a retreat even without the intervention of enemy aircraft, but Che Guevara disobeyed him and took the barracks. Castro and his brother Raul arrived after it was all over.

The myth of Castro, second only to the legend of "Uncle Joe" Stalin, was the great socialist PR imposture of the 20th century. Castro executed 16,000 political opponents. His lieutenant Che Guevara enjoyed executions so much he made sure his office window overlooked the prison yard; whenever a distraught mother came to him to beg for the life of her son he would have the young man shot in front of her. The one execution Guevara did not appear to enjoy was his own ("I'm Che! I'm more use to you alive!").

The Maximum Leader's gulag has extended hospitality to more than 100,000 of his subjects in its labour camps. Western journalists who have worn down their fingers writing about Guantanamo do not even know the names of the island's other penal establishments: Kilo 5.5, Pinar del Rio, Kilo 7, the Capitiolo (for enemies of the revolution up to age ten) and others. Two million Cubans have voted with their feet to flee from Castro's socialist paradise, more than 30,000 dying in the attempt.

The UN Statistical Yearbook ranked pre-revolutionary Cuba third out of 11 Latin American nations for per capita daily calorific intake; today it comes last.The US economic embargo is a bogus alibi: Cuba can trade with anyone else in the world, while Cuban exiles in the United States remit more than $1 billion. The problem is that, due to Marxist dogma, an island that should be self-sufficient has to spend $1.4bn a year on food imports. This year the Index of Economic Freedom ranks Cuba 177th out of 179 nations.

The great healthcare revolution is the regime's iconic Big Lie. True, Castro has trained 70,000 doctors; but he has despatched them overseas to earn foreign exchange and spread propaganda. The last pre-Castro census, in 1953, recorded one doctor for every 1,000 Cubans. Today, outside the special clinics for the nomenklatura and rich foreigners, the revolutionary masses have to bring bedding, thread for sutures and lightbulbs to their vermin-infested hospitals. Castro boasts of the lowest infant mortality rate in the American hemisphere, apart from Canada; but pre-Castro Cuba not only had the best rate in Latin America but also ranked 13th in the world.

The ailing dictator has passed the sceptre to his brother Raul: the surviving Communist states are bastions of dynastic legitimism, with North Korea about to be ruled by the third generation of the Kim dynasty; Metternich would have approved. Fidel always had an eye to the main chance: in 1940 the young idealist wrote in "Spanglish" to president Franklin Roosevelt: "If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american... because never, I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them. My address is… Thank you very much. Good by. Your friend, Fidel Castro."

According to Forbes magazine, Castro now has 900 million green American dollar bills as his private fortune. It will be interesting to see if the Maximum Leader includes this interesting item of correspondence in The Strategic Victory.