CUBA: Fidel Castro, 70 Years Old and Still Going Strong

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Aug 12 1996 (IPS) - Love him or hate him, Fidel Castro is still in control of Cuba’s communist regime as he celebrates his 70th birthday Tuesday.

“You said that I, I would have to give in, but I’m still here, see….I’m still here,” runs a famous salsa song on Cuban television, singing defiance to the US Helms-Burton bill.

And he’s still here. Against the will of his opponents, the oracles, fortune seers and the United States, though the socialist bloc no longer exists and the nation is in the worst Economic crisis since Castro took over in 1959.

Fidel will laugh at the predicters of doom once again with the children’s parties and shows of production like in the good old days on Tuesday 13th.

After half a lifetime in power, Castro has had to relax some of his principles and make concessions, especially in the last five years, where survival at all cost has replaced the socialist Utopia.

“If one day they tell me that 98 percent of the people do not believe in socialism, I will keep fighting; if one day they say I am the only one defending these ideas, I will keep fighting,” said Castro in 1990, after the fall of the communist regimes in Europe.

The nation now seems to have pulled out of the crisis and the economy grew by 9.6 percent in the last six months, though the achievements have been made by reforms which many of the leaders find distasteful.

Opening up to foreign capital, increasing private enterprise, self-employment as an answer to unemployment, taxes and the open circulation of US dollars and the peso, have all been established by decree.

In real terms, the Cuban people have seen their living conditions deteriorate, the confirmation of the economic errors of the past and, at the same time, the efforts to preserve the best of the Revolution led by Fidel Castro.

“I never imagined I would live 70 years and I am now receiving the punishment of the self sufficiency of the young people who believe life is eternal,” he said to the Pioneers (the party youth club) meeting in July.

Castro was born in 1926 in Biran, in eastern Cuba, the third child in the family. He went to a Jesuit school, trained as a lawyer, sued Fulgencio Batista for his military coup in 1952 and came down triumphant from the Sierra Maestra in 1959.

Thirty seven years later he still controls the nation, and according to Nobel Literature prizewinner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fidel is “one of the great idealists of our time…Perhaps this is his greatest virtue, though it has also been his greatest danger.”

The leader has gone greyer, speaks slower and quieter, and has even been known to give up his olive green fatigues for a suit and tie on foreign visits, but the light still shines in his eyes as he talks.

He sometimes disappears for months, or makes an appearance every day, and his enemies take the opportunity to whip up stories of illness, though these have never been confirmed.

Castro is still cagey about his private life, obsessive if something awakens his interest, analytically quick, and brilliant in times of crisis.

Garcia Marquez, his declared friend, wrote in 1988 that “wherever he is, however, and with whomever, Fidel is there to win.”

“He attitude to defeat, even in the tiny details of daily life, appear to obey a private logic: which he doesnt even admit, and he hasn’t a moment’s rest until he manages to turn the situation around and convert it into a victory,” he added.

Thus, he appeared in the streets of Havana on Aug. 5, 1994 to quieten the first anti-governmental demonstration since he came to power, converting it into a celebration of people shouting his name and following his voice.

The “raft people” crisis, which could have destabilised the regime, was calmed by the signing of migration agreements between Havana and Washington, and the shooting down of two civilian aircraft which entered Cuban airspace on Feb. 27 never attracted international condemnation.

Only Washington took measures against the nation, with the Helms-Burton bill to toughen the embargo on the island, though, ironically, this has merely increased worldwide backing for Cuba.

“What I really want at this time is to have the experience I have now couples with the youth of when the revolution began,” he said in 1994 in an interview with founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua, Tomas Borge.

In a story in Mexican publication ‘Excelsior,’ Castro said he would like other people to do his job, but his companions feel his experience is needed, and he will continue as president of the Council of State and Ministers, as secretary-general of the Communist Party and commander in chief of the armed forces for the time being.

Though no data is available on his popularity amongst the Cuban people, they seem divided between those who see him as “the best,” those who justify him because they think “he is unaware” of the big mistakes or those who see him as “guilty for everything” that has happened on the island.

The illegal dissidents want nothing to do with him, with the sole exception of president of the Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission, Elizardo Sanchez, who is calling for a transition to democracy with Castro still in charge.

Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, of the Habana archbishopric also said while Castro “lives and is capable of goverment and national leadership,” it would be “absurd to think of promotion projects which do not include him as an essential piece.”

However, contrary to the official view of the immortality of Cuban socialism beyond Fidel, Cespedes said he was irreplaceable as the main “axis” of the project and that, once he has gone, there will be transition towards a model which will bear the marks of the achievements and frustrations of the last decades.

The intellectuals vary widely in their opinions, from the exiled writer, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who hates him so vehemently that he refuses to accept anything to do with Cuba since Castro came to power to others prefer to remain on the island despite the problems, errors, defects and virtues.

Still others, like the singer Silvio Rodriguez, they declare themselves committed “Fidelists.”

Castro is still a voracious reader of everything that comes into his hands, an insatiable conversationalist, admirer of the literary figure of Don Quixote and with the secret desire of being a writer in his next life, but he seems set to wrest a good few years more from this one first.

For him “life is an express train which rushes through thousands of lands” and he lives it with the constant obsession that “any small country of today, if not ingenious, will be wiped from the face of the earth.”