MB Civic

Havana. August 7, 2006

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.

Jos Mart is his foremost author and he has
had the talent to incorporate Marts 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 minutes
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 youre
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 doesnt 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 Bolvar and Mart, 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.