Castro, Charisma, Cuba: A Personal Memory

Today's New York Times reports "Fidel Castro Resigns as Cuba's President." So today I'm regretting the aging process, his loss, and Cuba's loss (more for what might have been than what is or was) and remembering my brief encounter with Castro and Cuba 30 years ago.

I wasn't alone with Fidel. But it was just me and about 100 other people with Fidel. He gave a three-hour meeting with 75 or so executives of international companies, as the highlight of what Business International called an Executive Roundtable. Sugar prices had skyrocketed that year, so suddenly Cuba had hard currency to spend. I was there as staff, listening. I was 29 years old. I'd been in Cuba about six weeks, preparing the advance economic study for the international execs. I'd arrived there from Mexico City, where I lived, expecting to find Mecca. Or maybe paradise. I was a product of the 1960s. I was also fluent in Spanish.

Fidel Castro was a showman, a performer, extremely charismatic. He held his audience of mostly high-powered executives of major international companies spellbound. He was side-splitting funny -- I mean stand-up comedian level funny -- at times, always warm, always sincere, but also quick to rise up in anger and become dramatic, but then he would spin back again to funny, and warm again, and back and forth and up and down while I and the rest of the group rose and fell with his every word.

Talk about charm: he had us all at hello and kept us until goodbye, literally three hours later, followed by a cocktail and handshaking and photo event. The photo here is one I took of that event .

This was in 1977. I was living in Mexico City, working on salary with Business International, and writing as well for McGraw-Hill World News, meaning Business Week and other magazines. Business International sent me to Cuba for a month to work on the documentation for the international business roundtable, which they eventually published as a book.

That visit refined my somewhat naive political views. I went to Cuba expecting to love it. I'd been a hippy and a leftist and got into journalism at least in part because of the idea that I'd (see, I said naive) change the world. Of course I learned that all I was really doing was filling space between the ads, but that's a different story.

For a long-haired liberal in his late twenties, there were a few things to love about Cuba in the 1970s. For example, if you were going to be poor and living in Latin America, you wanted to live in Cuba. You'd get decent housing, medical care, and schooling for kids like nowhere else in the region. And there was also the music, the beaches, and for me, then, the fact that I was a 29-year-old American journalist getting paid to study business in Cuba for about six weeks.

However, by the time I left, I couldn't wait to get out. That was a big surprise to me, and a big lesson in the difference between ideals and actual living in the place. I left Havana on a night flight. Waiting to get on that plane was like waiting to escape something as dark and quietly worrisome as the night.

Does that sound too dramatic? Maybe it comes out that way because I was shocked. I had expected to love Cuba. Instead, I ended up with a newfound appreciation for freedom and free enterprise and the possibility of entrepreneurship.

The allure left slowly but steadily, like air coming out of a tire with a small puncture, over a period of several weeks. It was great in the beginning. I was put up in a very nice hotel and set up to work with two other Americans and three Cubans. Of the Cubans, one was an economist, one a tour guide, and one a general assistant. We got to know them. We worked with them everyday. We had coffee with them in the morning, and lunch with them at midday, and the occasional beer with them after dinner.

But I developed a claustrophobia of the mind. I liked these people we worked with. And with time I realized that they were spouting slogans and phrases to each other -- for example the ubiquitous "companero," meaning "comrade" -- because that was important. Of course they were watching us, and that was off-putting but expected, but when I realized they were also watching each other, and spouting slogans as a protection, that gave me that special intellectual claustrophobia. It made me think how much it meant that I could be on salary with Business International and work on my own time with other publications, without a government interfering. That I could quit and open a travel agency if I wanted. My companeros, on the other hand, were assigned a career. One was the economist, and one was the tour guide, and neither could choose to change. And the worst part of it was that success was clearly related to spouting slogans, not necessarily to competence and performance, and major life changes were not easy options -- not that starting a business is easy in the U.S. or Mexico, but at least it's a possibility, while in Cuba, when I was there in 1977, it wasn't.

I remembered a detail I'd forgotten. In 1971 I covered Salvador Allende of Chile during a state visit to Mexico. Allende was another great man, a poet in statesman's garb. In one of those sideline in-the-hotel-bar off moments, sitting on bar stools, one of Allende's advisors told me, off the record, "Castro's people told him he had to kill about 500 guys to stay in power, but he won't, he's too good." That was six months before Allende was overthrown and killed by a right-wing CIA-sponsored coup, ending what had been Latin America's longest constitutional democracy.

Fidel, however, was like a human magnet. Everybody hung on his every word, not because we had to, not because it was good business, but because he was the kind of leader that attracted attention and admiration. His warmth, his sense of humor, his dedication to ideals, all of that made his personal power obvious. In his presence, it seemed only reasonable that an entire nation could depend on his one-man rule. Even though it was easy to see that Cuba wasn't working, it was also easy to believe it wasn't because it didn't have a great leader. To this day I'm convinced that Fidel would have risen to power almost anywhere. His ideals weren't working, and Cuba wasn't working, but Fidel Castro was.

I talked about this later with General (that was his given name, not his title or position) Fatjo, head of the Latin America group of Business International, Cuban, and at one point assistant director of economic studies under the Castro government.

General once told me of his time as a college student believing in the Cuban revolution because the previous government was so corrupt, and then his year inside the Castro government, and his eventual realization "that Casto had been a communist from the beginning." When General told the story, it was fun. But it wasn't fun for him getting to the United States, and he died a few years later, still wishing he could have his country back. He was a Miami Cuban.

I said above that Cuba was the best place in Latin America to be poor. It was also the worst place to be not poor, or educated, or entrepreneurial. That's why General, and most of the educated people in Cuba, left quickly for Miami. And Cuba missed them.

By the time I left on that night flight back to Mexico, I was pretty mixed up. Castro is clearly a great man, but perhaps he was not in the right place at the right time. During the 1960s we used to think U.S. policy had pushed him to the extreme left because it left him nowhere else to go. But my friend General was right in the middle of economic studies for his government, and he insisted until he died that Castro had fooled him and all of his college liberal friends, because Castro had always been hard-core communist, not just freedom fighter.

Thirty years later, I'm grateful to have seen him live and in person. And I'm not that surprised that he lasted so long. I'm still mixed up on this. So many different views are believable.

Comments

[maddogbitesback]

Castro fed, and educated and provided free health care for every child in Cuba. You can't say the same thing about America,s children.

[ElmoBo]

How ignorant you are. The people have very little food and live in levels way beyond normal poverty levels. You, like the other liberal fanatics who love Fidel and approve of his communist regime, should be ashamed of yourselves.

[rmajh5]

Fidel Castro may be gone, but the human tendency to keep following along the wrong road to nowhere remains intact. It has been nearly 50 years since America instituted its embargo against Cuba with nary a positive result, but does this alarm John McCain and so many other Americans? Not at all. Let's stay to the road. For after all, how in the world could we be served better by opening up a dialogue with Cuba sans pre-conditions? Hmmm. I tend to want to answer with "let me count the ways," but McCain and too many others would not be listening.

[cylindar]

Castro is indeed a great man. People either do not know how brutal Batista was or have forgotten (hard to forget such a thing however). Castro may have created a failed state but he DID get rid of Batista and for that every Cuban should get down on their knees and thank God for. Batistas government thrived on murder, extortion, rape and torture. People should never forgive this.

[Miamiman]

Thank Castro for separating my family for over 40 years? Forputting my ubcle in prison for 20 years because he wanted freedom?

Batista was a horrible, but you had the CHOICE to leave if you wanted. Catsro was WORSE and he kept you on the island and without hope for the future.

THIS YOU CALL GREAT?

[RogerHWerner]

Berry's article reminded me of my 1994 experiences in Sevastopol; a city closed to outsiders and one needed special invitations to get in. I spent six weeks over several summers working in the city. Ukraine hadn't forgotten its Communist past and there was little free market capitalism. By 1996, Germans and Swiss had built 5 star hotels in Yalta and European tourists were landing in Sevastopol. The city changed over three years; these were beneficial to some but by 1996, it was clear that most had no entrepreneurial aspirations and were happy working a routine job that paid a living wage and permitted basic dignity. I spoke to many about Communist ways and the opinion was that little had changed for most: Those in charge during the Communist era became capitalists and people got screwed. People liked freedom of speech but were frustrated by how little difference it made in their lives.

Communism was an imperfect system rife with cronyism and abuse; rather like US free market capitalism. Gorbachev may have been right arguing for a third way economy that balanced socialist ideals with the benefits of free markets and attempted to balance the excesses of both: A pipe dream perhaps but what we have today in America is a nightmare.

Cuba may be the best place to be poor but America is the best to be wealthy and one of the worst to be not quite poor: The belief that Horatio Ager wealth is available to all is presented to working classes like a carrot on a stick but the great majority will never pass lower middle class status and that level of largess is slipping away. I left Ukraine with regret: I loved the willingness of strangers at the bottom of the economic ladder to help their fellows..never a question of not helping; something lacking in America's "me society." The Ukrainian situation has changed as they've had 15+ years of western capitalism. I understand Berry's feelings and would have felt the same had Ukraine been Communist when I visited. Freedom of will is of underestimated importance.

[barkingdog]

How nice for us that we live in a country where we can freely opine and pass judgment on a society our government has been brutalizing and trying to destroy for almost fifty years.

Isn't that what freedom is all about?

[ElmoBo]

Sorry, but the only one brutalizing and destroying for almost 50 years was the communist dictatorship of Castro.

[panchovilla]

Thank you, Tim. Your honest personal, mixed feelings about Fidel Castro and Cuba. It is more descriptive of your own personal evolution and perspective than a decisive judgment of a complex social experiment conducted under pressure by the richest and most powerful country in history. Here's another view (wait for MP George Galloway's interview in the second part of the segment):

http://www.channel4.com/player/v2/asx/showpresentation_omni.jsp?showId=11176

[starboymikey]

Cuba has had it's revolution, as did China. Perhaps Cuba will now experience a shot at political "evolution," as has China.

I suppose that by our standards, China is not democratic, but there is no doubting it's great economic strides under the liberalization it has seen.

China now has a burgeoning middle class and its people enjoy a variety of freedoms they did not have under Mao and then the villified "Gang of Four."

A co-worker of mine who visits China regularly on business says that for the most part, the people seem happy, prosperous and free to do most of what they want. The main freedom they lack is the freedom to change their government.

But when people are feeling prosperous and relatively free, changing their government is not generally high on the list of wants.

And no, I'm not blind to the occupation of Tibet and various other infamies of the Chinese government. Change in China has come slowly, via evolution, and change may not be finished yet.

My hope for Cuba is that we do not try to force on them a type of government they are not yet ready for, much less want. Cuba is not a threat to us or any other government in the region. They are not committing genocide, as some of our so-called "friends" are doing. It is extremely doubtfull they are trying to develop WMDs or are harboring terrorists.

A "wait-and-see" attitude is called for now, and an attempt at reconcilliation by lifting the pointless embargo that has been in place for so many decades.

Richard Nixon's one lasting accomplishment of value may have been opening the door to China. Hopefully our next president will have the sense to do the same with Cuba.

[BARRISTER]

"..by our standards China is not democratic..."? Are you kidding? Do you think being able to go into a booth and pretend to vote for a candidate is "democratic" when in fact that vote does not count, is either deleted automatically or is outweighed by the computer program creating X number of contrary votes in response to yours??

What about "Signing Statements"? Democratic?

The "Patriot Act" ? Democratic?

Retroactive Immunity for telecoms ? Democratic?

100.00 a barrel oil? Democratic?

Unlawful invasion of Iraq? Democratic?

Guantanamo prisons? democratic?

Rendition of Innocnt persons who happen to be muslim? Democratic?

No Right to an Attorney? Democratic?

No right to know th "evidence" against you? Democratic?

Etc., etc., etc., Democratic?

America is THE WORST Human Righs abuser on earth! The LEAST Democratic country on earth.

[Miamiman]

Visit Cuba for a week and then tell me what you think..The U.S. for all it's shortcomings is still the BEST country in the world.

Move to Cuba or somehwere else if you hate it so much..

[honeybee49]

If you had been gay, you would not have been treated so well in Castro's Cuba.

[ADR]

Mr. Berry,

"...I'm still mixed up on this..."

You have mixed feelings about this?

Travel to the past: You personally go to Castro's Cuba expecting paradise (ideal) and find the opposite (reality). You cannot wait to get out of there only after a few weeks.

Flash forward to the present: After all you wrote about the reality of dictator Castro's Cuba you still say you have mixed feelings. I find that pretty amazing considering you had the *freedom* to leave Castro's Cuba. I find it amazing considering you have the *freedom* to vote for your elected officials. I find it amazing considering you can *choose* to be a left-wing journalist. However, what about those millions of people left behind in Communist-land? The benevolent Castro won't let them have the freedom to leave or vote or anything. What about them in your little world, Mr. Berry?

You and your fellow HuffPo writers should have absolutely no mixed feelings about this, sir.

[Tim Berry]

I guess I'm getting old then, ADR, because nothing seems that black or white to me anymore. Shades of gray.

I hope its clear from my post that I do see and feel what seems to be your side of this deeply. It's just that I see other sides too.

I'm not a left-wing journalist, by the way. I have an MBA degree and I own a software company with 40 employees. And I wasn't back then, either; I'm a free thinker, but when I was a journalist I did facts, not opinions. Hey, I was writing for Business Week, and Business International, how left-wing could I have been? (And hooray for Huffpo, I like opinions and I have a lot of them).

Still, I don't see it like you do, I do have mixed feelings. Maybe that's because Castro risked his life to throw out a noxious right-wing dictator supported by mobsters and the dark side of big international business. How about that lingering doubt that he might have been pushed into a corner? How about the fact that his government did pretty much serve the poor more than the rich? No, he's not an angel, but he isn't a devil either. Shades of gray.

Don't you ever wonder what might have happened if a man like him had grown up in the United States? I do. And if not, do you at least wonder what might have happened if our government had dealt with him differently?

[ADR]

Mr. Berry,

I appreciate your opinions and response. However, you seemed to have missed the points I was trying to make. Namely, you could freely leave Cuba at your will. The citizens of Cuba cannot. What don't you get about that? I don't mind people seeing shades of gray in things at all. But when it comes at the expense of human rights and freedom in Cuba I have a big problem.

Also, I got the aspect about you being a "left-wing journalist" from this quote from your essay. It wasn't my intent to offend.

"...I'd been a hippy and a leftist and got into journalism at least in part because of the idea that I'd (see, I said naive) change the world..."

Take care...

[bronceye]

Did you have to take your shoes off at the Havana airport? He was better than Batista or any other dictator that we would have chosen for Cuba. As we were taught to revile him personally, he obviously couldn't be bought by our corporate/government elites. Not about oil but about sugar and slave labor.

[S1m0n]

Its a fallacy to compare Cuba to the United States, or to any other western democracy. Cuba under Baptista was a peer of Haiti under the Duvalliers. If you want to judge the success of the Cuban revolution, that's the control.

And on that measure, the Cuban revolution has been the most successful government in the region.

[Congoboy]

Amen to that, my brother. I spent a lot of time in Haiti in the late 70's and early 80's. Haiti was our baby; we protected Haitians from the depradations of Castro. That's why millions of children died and adults suffered and experienced the shortest life spans in the Western hemisphere if not the world. Cuba: free medical care, universal education, housing for all. Haiti: a tiny minority of children in schools, almost not medical care, shantytown slums for housing, while an elite 10% fed their greed, living like high-class Parisians amidst the raw sewage and emaciated pigs in the street. When Castrol won the revolution in Cuba, Americans lost their whorehouses and casinos and the easy life an hour from Miami. The revolution never fulfilled its promise, but by God it did a damn sight better than anything we ever did for Haiti.