¤ Fidel defied the monster and got away with it all these years, something cherished by billions in a hundred countries. He even brought a warmongering US president to his land, sporting his fine talk. For the first time, the perennial enemy pretends to be a friend hoping to stab Cuba in the back.
Fidel, Cuba and Me
In 1980, I fell in love with a Danish woman, Grethe Porsgaard, and moved to her country. On my way to assist the rebellion in El Salvador, in 1987, we traveled to Cuba. This was my first visit to Cuba and my first book had just come out when I met Fidel.
“Fidel Castro, October 12, 1987”—that is what Fidel wrote on my book, Yankee Sandinistas: Interviews with North Americans living and working in the new Nicaragua.
I had given him a copy after he spoke about the legacy of Che Guevara 20 years after his murder in Bolivia. We were hundreds of Cubans, a few solidarity foreigners and journalists gathered before a newly built hospital in the Cuban province of Matanza.
Cuba’s Ministry of Culture had invited me to work for a book publishing house, Editorial José Martí, which had published my book, Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn. concerning double agents in the CIA loyal to Cuba. This was the first of six books I wrote on Cuba. Between 1988 and 1996, I worked for this publisher and for Prensa Latina, the foreign news agency, which Che had founded.
I briefly met Fidel on four occasions. In my sleep, I was often entangled in a murderous nightmare with him. I stand in a crowd close to where Fidel is speaking. My wary eyes catch an assassination attempt on our leader’s life. I cast myself over him and take the bullet.
Yet despite the myriad plots and attempts on his life over the years, Fidel died peacefully, once again defying the monster. This epitaph was written at the encouragement of my friend and colleague Dave Lindorff. Before me is the Danish TV-Radio news story about his death. In the nation’s main broadcast medium the story of Fidel’s legacy is a four-word clause within one sentence: he “survived 600 murder attempts”.
There is no reference to who tried to murder him, nor to the illegality or immorality of that campaign. Readers and listeners must simply know that it was the world’s loudest “human rights advocate”, the United States of America. There was no condemnation; no call for bringing the nation’s leaders before any international tribunal of war crimes. And I’m sure that the mass media don’t know or don’t want to remember that the International Court of Justice in the Hague found the US guilty of war crimes against Nicaragua, in 1986 — just as a point of reference.
What we did get to read, however, was what President Barak Obama had to say about Fidel: “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him….We offer condolences to Fidel Castro’s family, and our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people. In the days ahead, they will recall the past and also look to the future. As they do, the Cuban people must know that they have a friend and partner in the United States of America.”
Oh Yeah, “friend and partner” of the country whose president the US had tried to murder 600 times. US terrorist attacks did murder and maim several thousands of Cuban on their own soil over the years since the revolution that liberated Cuba from its US puppet dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. And it nearly caused an atomic world war, which was only prevented on October 27, 1962 when the brave Russian submarine ship captain and “dirty commie” Vasil Arkhipov courageously refused orders from Moscow to fire his nuclear torpedo while under depth-charge attack in international waters by a US war ship armed with atomic weapons.
The Revolution and Fidel’s Downsides
Ten years after returning to Denmark I was in Cuba again. Fidel had recently spoken to college students about internal conflicts.
“This country can self-destruct; this Revolution can destroy itself, but they [the US] can never destroy us; we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault.”
In his November 17, 2005 speech, Fidel referred publicly for the first time to Cuba’s own blame in failing to develop a revolutionary consciousness among the population as a whole.
A disillusioned populace, Fidel explained, pursues individual greed-consumerism, and can destroy the Cuban revolutionary project, something the enemy cannot. That would mean that the key goal, which was Che’s motto—“The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see man liberated from his alienation”—had not progressed sufficiently.
That the “maximum leader” made this reflection publicly was an enormous admission of the greatest actual challenge for this humanistic revolution. The moral root to this dilemma—selfishness vs. holism—is, in fact, at the core of existence for the human race and the planet.
As a correspondent for the English daily Morning Star, I was invited to receive the newly elected president of Bolivia, the indigenous fighter Evo Morales. A corps of foreign and national reporters stood by the runway alongside hundreds of Bolivian students studying medicine in Cuba. Evo’s plane was soon to land.
I had prepared a question for this new hope of Bolivia: How do you intend to confront and win the inevitable conflict between your humanitarian program and that of greedy corporations? What then occurred caught me by surprise. Fidel arrived and promptly shook hands with the Bolivian youth. I was standing next to them. Suddenly, Fidel stopped in front of me. His large right hand was slightly extended. My hand rose exuberantly to reach his. Then four Rons inside me spoke at once.
Revolutionary Ron: I want to shake his hand, hug him; tell him how much he means to me, to us.
Journalist Ron: Now you have to come up with a good question. He is there waiting for you.
Ego Ron: Tell him you want to get a book published here so that Cubans can read you in this land of your heart.
Cuban Ron: You must not touch The Commandant’s hand! Remember how supposed journalists tried to murder him in Chile, in 1971, with a gun hidden inside a TV camera? Fidel’s guards will think of me as a potential killer.
In the end, Cuban Ron stopped my hand. Confused Journalist Ron could not think fast enough to dominate the other Rons, and instead asked Fidel the question meant for Evo.
Ever the realist, Fidel replied: “That is a question for Evo Morales”.
What a dummy I am! and the President walked onward.
Later, I recounted this story to two Cuban journalists. They said that I should have caught his attention by telling him that it was I who had burned my Yankee passport and renounced my citizenship in front of the US Interests Section in Havana, in January 1991, to protest of its first US war against Iraq.
The following day, I told the story to Antonio García Urquiolla. He was the merchant marine captain I had sailed with and had been a successful double agent who had infiltrated inside the CIA (see Backfire). The CIA had wanted him to assist in murdering Fidel.
Antonio’s reply to me: “Ron won the battle of Rons”!
In 2009, I was again in Cuba to witness the revolution’s 50-year celebration. I wrote:
“The historic and indelible advantages Cubans earned from forging an incipient socialism following the nation’s real independence, with its ensuing products and services for all, was supported by the vast majority of the population, especially in the early years… “However, today, fifty years later, there is still a long ways to go to advance the interests, energies and the wisdom of Cuba’s working people…The nation is clearly fraught with passivity and poor production in quantity and quality. I believe this is so in large part because people lack the real power to make decisions at their work centers, schools, and even in their local governments and provincial and national legislatures.”
Soon after this piece appeared, I received an email from Armarantha Visalakshi. She wrote representing the Latin America Friendship Association in Tamil Nadu, India. Her group had actively supported Cuba and Fidel for many years, and had translated many of their writings.
And now she told me: “It is a great shock for the people of Tamil Nadu to find that Cuba…supported the Sri Lanka Government in annihilating the Tamil population in the Island nation [Sri Lanka].”
“We here in Tamil Nadu celebrated the 80th birthday of Comrade Fidel by releasing eight books on Cuba’s achievements…We are struck dumb and rendered disheartened and disillusioned by this act of those countries of Latin America on which we have pinned our hopes for the future.”
On my wall before my writing machine is my photo of the Cuban billboard: “Ser Internacionalista es saldar nuestra propia deuda con la humanidad.” “To be an internationalist is to settle our debt with humanity.”
This motto is at the heart of what Fidel said: “Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.”
It was this more than anything else that made me a great admirer of Fidel and his country’s sacrifice for international brotherhood. But this letter from India forced me, most reluctantly, to investigate her charges and it ended with me remorsefully writing scores of articles and a book, Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka (New Century Book House.Chennai, India, November 2011).
Here are excerpts from my first article, “Cuba-ALBA Let Down Sri Lanka Tamils”, Nov.16, 2009:
“I think that the governments of Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua let down the entire Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, as well as ‘proletarian internationalism’ and the ‘exploited’, by extending unconditional support to Sri Lanka’s racist government…[They did so by] signing a UN Human Rights Council resolution praising the government of Sri Lanka for ‘the promotion and protection of human rights’, while only condemning for terrorism the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought the government in a civil war since 1983 until their defeat on May 19, 2009.
“During the last year of war, the Sri Lankan government illegally and brutally interned nearly half-a-million Tamil civilians; 280,000 of these civilians were entrapped in several ‘welfare centers’ upon the LTTE’s surrender…Their conditions are the opposite of ‘promotion and protection of human rights’. Hundreds have died and are dying for lack of food, water, basic health care.”
Having spoken the truth that the Cuban government, the greatest internationalist nation on earth, had reversed the key principle of solidarity, I became a betrayer in the eyes of some Cuban solidarity organizers, a sore I must bear because I can not abandon this essential critique. The younger Fidel, and Che, would never have forgiven me if I did.
In 2011, I was invited to conduct a speaking tour of my Tamil book being released in India. I spoke of how great the Cuban revolution was for us all but lamented this critical flaw in failing to support the oppressed Tamil people. In one rally, I appeared with Che’s face on a red T-shirt to the standing ovation of 15,000 Tamils. Che and the Cuban revolution were still the great love and hope for this people, despite the fact that the Fidel and Raul Castro government had betrayed their trust.
I am now moved to cite my conclusion on this matter:
“I am sickened by the Cuban government’s hypocritical support of [the Sinhalese President] Rajapaksa and his family regime…the immoral acceptance of the genocide against a minority people…I recommend that leftist-progressive organizations and websites, and especially solidarity groups with Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua (ALBA countries) make these governments aware that they need to return to their original principle as internationalists who support the oppressed everywhere on earth, and cease supporting unquestionably the genocidal government of Sri Lanka.”
No revolutionary or communist government has dared to hand over the reigns of real power to the working class, to the collective way of socialism. There is a perennial lack of trust in the people, and in trusting our ideological morality.
If morality does not become integral to our struggles, I’m afraid we are headed for a global moral collapse already underway due to the intrinsic immorality of capitalism and its imperialism; the foundering of contemporary socialism; and the rise of fascism throughout much of the world. November 28, 2016
Journalist and socialist activist RON RIDENOUR is an expat living in Denmark. After publicly renouncing, in Havana, his US citizenship in 1991 following the first US invasion of Iraq, he lived and worked in Cuba for eight years, before moving to Europe. A co-founder and co-owner with Dave Lindorff and several other journalists of the short-lived Los Angeles Vanguard alternative news weekly back in 1976, he writes occasionally form Europe for ThisCantBeHappening! and contributed this personal recollection of Cuba’s revolutionary leader.