SCRIPT - Endorsements           

 

Almost Castro Showtime’s 'Fidel' lands in the reality of romanticism. By Myles Kantor, director of the Center for Free Emigration January 19-20, 2002

More recent cinema has cast an unromantic eye upon the Cuban Revolution. Leon Ichaso's Bitter Sugar (1996) depicts the disillusionment of a young Fidelista and the suffocated dreams of Cuban youth under Fidel Castro. Musician Arturo Sandoval and the repression that compelled his defection in 1990 is the subject of Joseph Sargent's For Love or Country (2000). Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls (2000) dramatizes the memoir of late dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas. On January 27, Showtime will premiere Fidel, a two-part miniseries on the life of Castro. Fidel appears to be a critical (i.e., factual) portrayal of the man who has held a country in captivity for 43 years. Its preview includes the narration "One man, one vote: his" and shows troops carrying away a woman who cries, "Can we not express a difference of opinion?" To depict a muzzled woman is particularly significant given Castro's claims that the Revolution has enhanced women's quality of life. (For a different perspective from a woman who spent 19 years as a political prisoner, see Ana Rodriguez's Diary of a Survivor.) Showtime's website for Fidel cites the 1959 show trial of Major Huber Matos, who fought with Castro against Fulgencio Batista and was military chief of the Camaguey province after Batista's departure. Matos criticized the new regime's increasing communism and sent Castro a letter of resignation. Soon after, he was tried for treason and sentenced to 20 years, remaining in prison until October 21, 1979. (A contemporary parallel to the Matos purge was the show trial and execution of General Arnaldo Ochoa in July 1989 by a firing squad using AK-47s — savagely emblematic of Stalinism's hegemony over Cuba.) Fidel nevertheless distorts Castro's character on a fundamental level. "He fought for freedom, he settled for power," the preview claims. The website refers to Castro's "transformation from man of the people to despotic Soviet puppet." This "Castro as freedom-fighter turned tyrant" matrix clashes with the historical record, which shows a terrible continuity between Castro before and after 1959. While attending the University of Havana from 1945 to 1950, Castro participated in the gangsterism that plagued the campus, joining the Insurrectional Revolutionary Union (Union Insurreccional Revolucionaria, or UIR) and carrying a gun. In December 1946, he attempted to murder UIR leader Leonel Gomez. Before joining an expedition in the summer of 1947 to overthrow Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, Castro bequeathed twelve volumes of Mussolini's writings to classmate Jose Pardo Llada (who he would denounce 14 years later as a traitor to the Revolution). Castro's preoccupation with Mussolini goes back to his adolescent years at Belen Academy where he emulated Il Duce and also carried a copy of Mein Kampf. (Upon coming to power through the present, Castro's fascist roots have manifested in his rhetoric and almost invariable military attire.) When he went to Bogotá, Colombia in 1948, Castro distributed anti-American propaganda and stoked insurgency after the assassination of Colombian Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. That same year, Cuban President Ramon Grau San Martin invited student leaders including Castro to the presidential palace after protests over bus fare increases. Castro proposed to his peers as they waited in the president's balcony: I have the formula to take power and once and for all get rid of this old son-of-a-bitch. Now, when the old guy returns, let's pick him up, the four of us, and throw him off the balcony. Once the president is dead, we'll proclaim the triumph of the student revolution and speak to the people from the radio. Castro maintained violent impulses after graduation. On July 26, 1953, he and approximately 160 anti-Batista rebels attacked the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba with the objective of acquiring arms they would distribute to foment Batista's overthrow. The attack was a failure, and Castro received a 15-year sentence after delivering his "History Will Absolve Me" courtroom speech (the conclusion of which mirrors Hitler's at his trial for the failed putsch of 1923). Castro's conditions at the model prison on the Isle of Pines were luxurious relative to the treatment of political prisoners after 1959. He corresponded with comrades, had his own stove, and received boxes of books, food, and cigars. He ate spaghetti with squid, drank filtered coffee, and read Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Lenin's State and Revolution, describing the authors of these "priceless books" as "Two genuine prototypes of the revolutionary!" "Both were implacable," Castro wrote, "and they put fear into the hearts of their enemies." Castro exclaimed in an April 15, 1954 letter, "I would sincerely love to revolutionize this country from one end to the other!" He also foreshadowed the terrorism that would undergird post-Batista Cuba in a March 23, 1954 letter praising the French Reign of Terror leader, Robespierre: With the revolution in danger, the frontiers surrounded by enemies, traitors poised with daggers to stab him in the back, vacillators gumming up the works, it was necessary to be hard, inflexible, and severe. He had to sin on the side of excess, never on the side of moderation, because he might be the cause of total loss. A few months of terror were necessary to end a terror that had lasted centuries. Cuba needs many Robespierres. (The Committees of Public Safety and General Security, the Law of Suspects, the Vendee, the noyades — each have been paralleled under Castro's Jacobinism: the Department of State Security, prohibitions against "enemy propaganda" and "ideological diversionism," the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and Rapid Response Brigades, the Escambray resistance, the execution of over 10,000 people by "revolutionary justice," the July 13, 1994 13 de Marzo tugboat massacre. But whereas Robespierre's Terror subjugated France from September 1793 to July 1794, Castro's has subjugated Cuba for nearly half a century.) Batista amnestied Castro in May 1955. Castro went to Mexico in July, planned an invasion of Cuba, and returned with his fellow pseudo-liberators in December 1956. The rest is misery. Castro stated in December 1961 regarding his ideological development: As a student I studied The Communist Manifesto and the Selected Works of Marx, Engels in Lenin…Do I believe in Marxism? Yes, I absolutely believe in Marxism. Did I believe in it on January 1 [1959]? Yes, I did. Did I believe in it on July 26 [1953]? Yes, I did. Do I harbor any doubts about Marxism or feel that some of its analyses are erroneous or in need of revision? No, I harbor no such doubts. Castro reiterated in a 1985 interview that at the time of the Moncada attack "I had a Marxist-Leninst ideology, quite a well-developed revolutionary ideology." He added: I didn't come in contact with revolutionary ideas, revolutionary theories, The Communist Manifesto, or the first works by Marx, Engels and Lenin until I was a junior in the university. To be frank, the simplicity, character and direct manner in which our world and society are explained in The Communist Manifesto had a particularly great impact on me. "When Raul [Castro] and I attacked the Moncada Garrison, we were Marxists. I had introduced him to Marxist-Leninist ideas," Castro told former Sandinista/Nicaraguan Soviet Minister of the Interior Tomas Borge in 1992, also noting his collegiate radicalization: [A]s I began to develop ideas and analyze the existing economic system on my own, my spirit became fertile ground for Marxist-Leninist ideas. That was the path, the open door, by which I entered, and I became a fanatic — to give it a name — an impassioned follower of the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Thus, Castro's truculent dogma after 1959 has amplified prior propensities; it does not counterpoint what had heretofore been patriotic virtue. The only alteration in Castro's conduct has been the sophistication with which he applies his fury. Notwithstanding its romantic distortion of Castro before 1959, Fidel (imagine a miniseries about Pinochet called Augusto!) at least isn't as bad on Castro's conduct after 1959. — Mr. Kantor is also a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com