Old Friends

On the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s birth, I recall his friendship with Che Guevara.

By Urariano Mota

On the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s birth, I recall his friendship with Che Guevara. The following remarks are based on statements Jon Lee Anderson made to the press and on the biography he wrote about Che.

Here, in an interview published in Colombia’s *Semana*, Jon Lee Anderson talks about the deaths of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara - *Semana*

“Che died young, at the height of the utopian ideals of the 1960s, which, to a certain extent, died with him. Although there were other guerrilla struggles after that, very few succeeded in seizing power. Fidel, on the other hand, ultimately proved to be the Quixote—the one who grows old before everyone’s eyes but who, stubbornly, remains at the helm of a country that manages to establish itself as revolutionary and socialist, despite everything.

Although many underestimated Fidel because he was elderly and had been out of the public eye in recent years, it is only now that we can reassess and recognize his true importance. And his historical importance is enormous, for it was he himself who inspired Che, convincing him to become a revolutionary.

Fidel’s remarkable life story is almost unprecedented; it is a detailed portrait of a man whose knowledge is encyclopedic when it comes to his career and role on the world political stage over the past six or seven decades.

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro met in 1955 through Raúl’s brother in Mexico City, at a time when Fidel had been granted amnesty by the dictator Batista after spending two years in prison for the attempted coup at the Moncada Barracks. During that period, Raúl and other members of his July 26 Movement had established a solidarity network in exile. The young Ernesto Guevara, a medical student and a recent but avid reader of Marx, had arrived in Mexico frustrated by his experience in Guatemala. There, like other young leftists from across the hemisphere, he had hoped to be swept up in Latin America’s first socialist revolution—that of Jacobo Arbenz—but it all fell apart. A far-right regime seized power, and Ernesto fled to Mexico.

They met one night, and Fidel convinced the young Guevara of the justice of his mission and invited him to join him as the expedition’s doctor. Fidel’s personality made a deep impression on him. Guevara was already convinced that there was a great evil in Latin America: capitalism—unjust, unequal, and feudal. And that the capitalist policies of the time—which were far from admirable—were the poison, the cause of the endemic ills that turned the poor Latin Americans of that era into a sort of subspecies: malnourished, short, with low life expectancy… He was convinced that the only solution was a radical revolution. And he was looking for a strongman. He was thinking of going to Paris. If Fidel hadn’t shown up, who knows—maybe he would have ended up as just another Argentine wandering around Europe and writing poetry.

Fidel saw in him a young man with a special charisma. He wasn’t outgoing. He wasn’t political, tactical, or diplomatic. He was radical, but level-headed. He was a visionary, daring, and reckless. Very early on, Fidel realized that Che felt no fear. He sensed that this cultured, well-read young man would be willing to join them. He wanted to devote himself to a kind of internationalist mission. So did Fidel. Before Moncada, in his own country, he had joined a failed expedition against Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. There was a mystique and a tradition of Latin Americanism in the region. And they—highly educated, voracious readers of the biographies and exploits of the great figures, from San Martín and Bolívar to Martí—wanted to see themselves reenacting these great Latin American feats. It is one of those brilliant—or, to others, diabolical—encounters that occur once in history.

If Che ultimately became, in mythological terms, the Icarus of 20th-century radical socialism—a symbol of sacrifice, of austerity, of flying toward the sun and burning his wings in an epic and heroic feat—then Fidel ends up being the patriarch. The patriarch of all these utopian feats.

The patriarch of a revolution that, although now in decline, managed to take root and endure over the decades, under Raúl’s leadership. And although it has suffered an economic setback, it must be acknowledged that Cuba is the safest country in the Western Hemisphere, with commendable indicators in public health and education. These are precisely the things that remain out of reach for most Latin American societies.”

In Jon Lee Anderson’s statements, summarized above, we sense the perspective of a non-socialist reporter who works and makes a living in the media owned by big capital, and who is therefore limited to gathering data, data, and more data—but whose conclusion is far from generous. This is a limitation we will also see later in the excerpt I transcribe from his biography of Che Guevara. Jon Lee Anderson conducted his research and was honest in his approach, but his selection of material undermines his immense body of work. To draw a rough comparison, it would be like a biographer of Kepler who failed to grasp the scientist’s monumental achievements. Thus, while he delves into the genius’s daily life and the places he frequented, and explores the laws he discovered, he fails to grasp the scope of what the genius saw.

In the book “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life”, we can read:

“In the summer of 1955, Ernesto noted an event in his diary: ‘A political occurrence is having met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary, a young man, intelligent, very sure of himself and of extraordinary audacity; I think there is a mutual sympathy between us’....

The island went through many shifts in political position under Fidel’s long tenure as jefe máximo. In the immediate aftermath of Che’s death, relations with the Soviet Union went into a deep freeze. Angered over Moscow’s implicit backing of the Bolivian Communist Party line, and because of harshly critical articles on Che and the “export” of revolution published in Pravda, Fidel shunned the Kremlin. As an expression of his displeasure, he sent his lowly health minister to attend the annual festivities in Red Square in November 1967. Ambassador Alexandr Alexiev, who was seen as too close to Fidel, was withdrawn from his post in 1968 and dispatched to, of all places, Madagascar. Fidel launched a new purge of the pro-Soviet “old Communists” after allegedly uncovering a dissident faction engaged in a talking conspiracy against him with members of the Soviet embassy staff. Like the purge of “sectarianism” in 1962, this plot featured the redoubtable Aníbal Escalante; this time, he was not sent to Moscow but was given a fifteen-year prison sentence. Among Escalante’s and his fellow conspirators’ tape-recorded crimes was criticism of Che.

Che’s officially induced “hibernation” lasted for a decade and a half. He reemerged as a revolutionary touchstone in Cuba only after the Soviet Union itself began to change in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev. Fidel opposed the liberal reforms of glasnost and perestroika with what he called a “rectification” process, which reinstituted Che’s ideas as the correct ones for Cuba’s Communists to follow. This coincided with the precipitous collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the long flow of Moscow’s subsidies to Cuba. Forced to allow limited foreign capital investment and other “market reforms” to rescue Cuba’s battered economy, while instituting austerity measures, Fidel managed to pull Cuba back from the brink of disaster. Throughout the difficult “Special Period,” as Fidel defined the post-Soviet era, he encouraged Che’s resurrection as a popular hero who best represented the ideals of revolutionary Cuba.

The remains were exhumed and placed in coffins and flown to Cuba, where they were received in an emotional private ceremony that included Fidel and Raúl Castro. Three months later, on October 10, 1997, at the beginning of a week of official mourning in Cuba, Fidel and Raúl paid their respects formally. The coffins of Che and his six comrades lay in state at the José Martí monument, an obelisk in the center of the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. For the next few days, an estimated 250,000 people waited in line for hours to file past. Children left letters to Che. Weeping men and women recited poems and sang revolutionary songs. Then the flag-draped coffins were driven slowly in a motorcade to the city of Santa Clara, which Che had conquered in the final and most decisive battle of Cuba’s revolutionary war, almost forty years earlier. He and his comrades were interred there in a mausoleum that had been built to honor the Heroic Guerrilla."

I repeat: we are presented with the perspective of a non-communist reporter who works and makes a living in the media owned by big capital, and who is therefore limited to gathering data, data, and more data—but whose conclusion is far from generous. Note that the political errors of the Soviet bloc are mentioned to highlight the friendship between Fidel and Guevara. It does not occur to Anderson—or if it does, he refuses to acknowledge—that the “theory of the focal point” was doomed to failure, and that this was not a mistake on the part of the Soviet Union.

So, I’ll return to the end—to the figure of Fidel Castro on his 100th birthday.

One of the universal geniuses of the Americas, Gabriel García Márquez, wrote the following about him:

“Fidel rarely quotes others’ words, neither in conversation nor from the podium, except for the words of José Martí, who is his favorite author. He has a thorough knowledge of the twenty-eight volumes of Martí’s works.

His greatest asset is his memory, and he uses it to the point of overuse to support speeches or private talks with subtle reasoning and arithmetic calculations of incredible speed. His task of gathering information begins as soon as he wakes up. He has breakfast with no fewer than two hundred pages of news from around the world.

A man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, with an old-fashioned formal education, careful with his words and subtle in his manners, incapable of conceiving any idea that isn’t colossal. He dreams that his scientists will find the definitive cure for cancer, and he has crafted a world-power foreign policy on an island with no fresh water, eighty-four times smaller than his main enemy. Such is the modesty with which he guards his privacy that his personal life has ended up being the most impenetrable enigma of his legend….

I've been listening to Fidel during his rare moments of nostalgia, when he recalls the mornings in the countryside of his rural childhood, the girlfriend from his youth who is no longer with him, and the things he could have done differently to gain more time in life.”

The world knows that Fidel Castro is immortal—before, during, and after his 100th birthday. But what exactly is this so-called immortality? I tried to shed light on the phenomenon in a passage I wrote in the novel “Never-Ending Youth”, translated by Peter Lownds:

“What lasts is life. I see this as a bizarre contradiction and repeat it—life, so brief, is all that lasts. But what a paradox! If, in time, one scurries toward the end, if, in time, one ceases to be, how can one resist the irresistible? Because there is resistance in the duration of the moment through the intensity of its light or the scintillation of its brevity. It is like the light of a distant star that we receive now, still “now.” But this simultaneous now is not plausible. What we see no longer exists, so great was the distance the light had to travel in space to catch our attention. But this is the terrain of physics, of quantum mechanics, the realm of light speed: 186,000 miles per second. I am writing about something of a different nature.

The resistance implied by the act of living is made by the actions and work of all those who have parted or are in the process of parting. But we who are still here do not have to practice immobility as we wait for our train. We are the agents of the time that is left to us. The train will not be preceded by an announcement on the public address system, “Attention, Mr. or Ms. Passenger, your hour has come.” Perhaps because it may come unannounced and is not really the train you are expecting. The train is always at the service of those who remain. And as agents of duration, our lives are spent resisting everything transitory. We only live while we resist.”.

I believe it is in this way—through the endurance of being, through a life that is resistance—that we can see Fidel Castro’s immortality. He did not become immortal only now. He became immortal long ago, ever since the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista and the revolution on the island that became a continent. Fidel lives on in the present and will endure through his life over time.

Fidel resists.

Urariano Mota is a writer and journalist, author of the novels "Soledad in Recife" and "Never-Ending Youth" which narrate the Brazilian dictatorship.