Cuba at the Crossroads: Books on the Brothers Castro and an Epidemic of Suicides
Reviewed by A.L. Bardach
Sunday, February 12, 2006
AFTER FIDEL
The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader
By Brian Latell
Palgrave Macmillan. 273 pp. $24.95
TO DIE IN CUBA
Suicide and Society
By Louis A. Perez Jr
Univ. of North Carolina. 463 pp. $39.95
As political brother acts go, the most famous and dazzling of our time was the Kennedys, Jack and Bobby. But the most enduring and successful has been the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, who outwitted the Kennedy boys -- then chewed their way through 10 American presidents. And they are not done yet: A post-Fidel succession plan would give Raul Castro the top slot.
While much has been written about Cuba's Maximum Leader, who turns 80 this August, far less is known about Raul, five years his junior, who dodges the limelight with the same zeal that his brother shows in pursuing it. In the early 1990s, I had an unusual encounter with Raul Castro. Minutes into an interview with his brother in Havana's Council of State, Raul came bounding over to greet me. A small, trim man, he was ebullient and garrulous. Fidel Castro neither budged nor uttered a word but fixed his eyes on his brother like a cobra. Fearlessly, Raul offered another jest, then bolted from the room. I had learned a crucial lesson about Cuban politics: Raul Castro shares the throne with his brother. The younger Castro wields immense power as defense minister along with other lofty sinecures. Moreover, he is the only member of the ruling cadre who is allowed to opt out of state receptions, meetings and even his brother's interminable speeches. Such absences -- and a vigilantly guarded personal life -- have made Raul the mystery man of Cuba.
Brian Latell, a former CIA Cuba analyst, draws a lively psychological portrait of the Castro brothers in After Fidel , albeit one primarily derived from journalists and biographers who have mined the territory. While Fidel is an unsentimental man obsessed by politics, Latell writes, Raul enjoys a life filled with extended family, friends, outside interests and deep loyalties. And his army runs most everything in Cuba that works. Latell's Raul pivots between two personas: Raul the Terrible, responsible for summary executions, and Raul the Compassionate, the family man who remembers everyone's birthday. Still, Latell makes a compelling case for Raul being a more pragmatic and amenable leader than his brother.
But readers expecting a text studded with glittering gems of intelligence from a 30-year CIA career will be disappointed. Indeed, it is alarming just how little the CIA knew about Cuba and how ineptly they have forecast events, including Latell's prediction of Fidel's demise in the early 1990s.
My main quibble concerns the omission of the pivotal role played by Rafael Diaz-Balart in Fidel Castro's ascent and survival. Rafael introduced his close friend Fidel to his sister Mirta, resulting in a marriage that engendered five decades of bad family blood. Rafael also introduced Castro to Fulgencio Batista, friend, neighbor and political patron to the Diaz-Balarts. Simply put, Fidel Castro would not be alive without the repeated intercessions of his former brother-in-law, who was deputy interior minister under Batista.
For deeper insights into the suicidal nature of Cuban politics, there is no greater resource than Louis A. Perez's To Die In Cuba . Writing what he calls "a study of the Cuban way of death," Perez answers the riddle as to why Cubans have the highest rate of suicide in Latin America and among the highest in the world. But Perez's work goes further, illuminating Cuban culture and its unforgiving, scorched-earth politics.
An estimated one-third of the Indians living in Cuba committed suicide when the Spanish brutally seized control of the island in the early 1500s, many by leaping off the steep "promontory overlooking the Yumurí Valley." Likewise, African slaves and Chinese indentured workers seeking escape from their barbarous masters took their lives in staggering numbers, described by one bishop as "a plague of suicides." Subjugation to the Spanish was equally intolerable for criollos (the native-born) and Cuban nationalism from time immemorial is studded with the rhetoric of self-sacrifice, from the 1854 chant of Cuba Libre o Muerte ("A Free Cuba or Death") to the post-Castro slogan Patria o Muerte("Country or Death"). Indeed, " La Bayamesa ," the Cuban national anthem, declares " Que morir por la Patria es vivir " -- "To die for the homeland is to live."
Cubans continue to take their lives in record numbers: men often by hanging, women sometimes by setting themselves on fire. Interestingly, the grim statistics are roughly the same for Cubans in exile. Former Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarrás shot himself through the heart in Miami in 1977. The writers Reinaldo Arenas and Calvert Casey also chose suicide in exile, as did Miguel Angel Quevedo, the brilliant editor of Bohemia, once Latin America's most popular magazine. According to Perez, an astute and prolific writer on all things Cuban, suicide has been so ingrained in the "national sensibility" that it long ago "passed from the unthinkable to the unremarkable. "
"Suicide is the sole and, of course, definitive Cuban ideology," the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante glumly noted. José Martí, the frail, romantic poet of the revolution, rode his horse straight into a Spanish ambush. In the 20th century, the stunning suicide of the presidential aspirant Eddy Chibás, who shot himself during his live radio show, galvanized Castro's political ascent. Indeed, the sad history of Cuba, and its 45-year showdown with its northern neighbor, cannot be entirely unrelated to a culture that abhors surrender, rejects compromise and finds a measure of redemption in suicide. ·
