Fidel Castro, the enigmatic revolutionary hero and despot of Cuba, passed away on Friday. Castro was believed to be 90, although some accounts of his life have dated his birth year as 1927. His tenure on the international stage was unprecedented, both culturally and historically, and rivaled in duration only by the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Castro, after all, survived eleven presidents, nearly sent the world to the brink of annihilation, and watched many new world orders pass by him. His ascension was documented memorably in The Godfather II. At the end of his life, after President Barack Obama used his executive powers to begin normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba, The Kardashian Sisters would be filmed riding through Havana's handsome boulevards in the backseats of pristine jalopies.
In some ways, it would have been more appropriate had Castro left the world in the 70s, mysteriously—when there were still Maoists and Sandinistas and the Soviet Union appeared to be possibly on the right side of history. When there was still a Soviet Union. Alas, he lived to see himself marginalized, not by the party or the Russians or a C.I.A.-backed junta, but by history, itself. A cruel joke stretched out over several decades in front of the whole world, crueler still to a revolutionary who seemed (for a while, at least) the personification of indomitable, scientifically determined historical forces.
Had that happened, had Castro's personal Ilyushin jet gone down over the Andes en route to a tête à tête with Salvador Allende, had he gone missing during one of his spearfishing expeditions, that would have been a little magical. That would have inspired fellow travelers everywhere, and he would have become a symbol that would have endured long after Beijing had gone capitalist and glasnost and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. His friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have written an elegantly worded essay in The New York Review of Books (which would have been turned into a novel, which would have been turned into a movie by Steven Soderbergh, which would have starred Benicio del Toro and won big at Sundance) about the dream that might have been. And that is how the world would have remembered Fidel Castro.
Instead, El Jefe became a caricature of himself: rich, imperious, out of step, cordoned off from the proletariat, a kind of tin-pot farce. And then he withered. He became frail and sad and irrelevant, and eventually he had to hand over the reins to his less intelligent younger brother, Raúl. After Obama opened up relations with Havana and became the first American president to visit Cuba in half a century, the elder Castro composed a whiny get-off-my-lawn epistle declaring, “we do not need the empire to give us anything.” For some brief time, that may have been true, and his own countrymen would have enthusiastically believed him. But as millions of Cubans surely knew, it wasn’t any longer. The world, it seemed, had truly passed Castro by.
There was a time, in the early sixties, when Castro seemed to hold Washington’s cojones in the palm of his hand. That surreal moment began with the Bay of Pigs, in April 1961, and ended with the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962. That was when the young, untested John F. Kennedy went head to head with Nikita Khrushchev, and for a year-and-a-half it seemed as if the fate of humankind would be decided in Havana, in a room filled with smoke emanating from the cigar of the ex-baseball player, ex-lawyer who appeared to have threaded the communist needle.
For a little while, among leftists in the West who had abandoned Stalin and Mao and not yet discovered Allende or civil rights or the environment or identity politics, Castro was believed to have liberated Cubans without oppressing them, to have achieved the Bolshevik dream without morphing into a Bolshevik. This was not, in fact, true. His regime murdered, tortured and spied on countless enemies of the state, including those who had the temerity to try to flee Cuba by raft for Florida. But, for a little while, no one knew or cared.
Castro was widely viewed as a romantic—even if he wasn’t—and even though Khrushchev ultimately blinked and the Americans emerged from the missile crisis victorious (sort of), there was a mythology about Castro. When Kennedy was assassinated, a little more than a year later, that mythology deepened, and turned a shade of evil. There were theories tying Castro to Lee Harvey Oswald, and even though those remained theories, fevered imaginations of anti-communists, they infused Castro with more power, something nebulous and dark.
He was helped by events beyond his control: the Vietnam War and its discontents, which seemed to confirm growing suspicions that America was in decline; the proliferation of leftist uprisings across Latin America; and the emergence of an influential Cuban-exile community in Miami that insisted on viewing Castro as more nefarious than he probably was and the election of a president—Ronald Reagan—who was happy to oblige those resentments in exchange for political fealty.
Now he is gone. Soon, the ancient jalopies will disappear, and venture capital will start to pour in, and Americans will stop traveling to Havana via Mexico City and instead catch the forty-minute puddle-jumper from Miami to José Marti International Airport in search of late-night fiestas and girls and ropa vieja (shredded skirt steak marinated in red sauce), and Cubans will venture north to America to visit the outlets and Las Vegas and New York. And then, one imagines, he will be forgotten.
Castro’s death closely follows the democratic election of another unlikely populist folk hero whose mastery of social media and reality TV, the mediums of our time, closely resembles El Jefe's preternatural understanding of the emerging power of image and photography. Castro, it is worth recalling, became a socialist icon despite a law degree, private school rearing, and a comfortable upbringing. “How could Fidel, who had been given the best of everything, be a Communist?,” his sister, Juanita Castro, wrote in an article for Life magazine in 1964. “This was the riddle which paralyzed me and so many other Cubans who refused to believe that he was leading our country into the Communist camp.”
In the end, however, Castro was unable to reconcile his evolving political ideology with his regime. He came to power with the hope that freedom and civil liberties would replace a military dictatorship. Doves flew on his shoulder as a crowd sang out his name. But soon enough, as The New York Times noted in its obituary, “despite worldwide condemnation of his actions, Mr. Castro clamped down on a fledgling democracy movement, jailing anyone who dared to call for free elections. He also cracked down on the nucleus of an independent press, imprisoning or harassing Cuban reporters and editors.” It sounds like the relics of an forgotten brand of rule. Let us hope that is true.
Peter Savodnik is the author of The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union.
