Sunday, August 24, 2002
Raging at a Lion in Twilight
By A.L. Bardach
On August 13, Fidel Castro turned 76. Across the Florida Straits on the same day, Castro's most zealous foe, U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart had a birthday as well.
The two are joined by more than a birthday - which neither has ever publicly acknowledged: and they are divided by more than ideology. Diaz-Balart is Castro's nephew by his first marriage, the son of his former best friend, Rafael Diaz-Balart and the cousin of Castro's eldest offspring, Fidelito Castro Diaz-Balart. In 1953, Fidel Castro declared war on his powerful in-laws when he attacked the Moncada garrison in Santiago de Cuba, became a national legend, and eventually sent them fleeing the country. "I may not live to see the end of him," Rafael Diaz-Balart told me recently, "but my sons certainly will." And we are reminded that this 43 year old high stakes showdown is, in some respects, a bitter family feud.
It's hard to say who has the upper hand in that feud at the moment. The last few weeks have been tough ones for Castro, Cuba's ruler-for-life. First, 23 young Catholic Cubans defected in Canada during a pilgrimage to see the Pope in early August. The next day, a former high level official, Alcibiades Hidalgo, washed up in Miami and told reporters that despair drove him to flee Cuba on a raft. Then word slipped out that Roberto Robaina, the former foreign minister and Castro favorite, had been tossed out of the Communist party in May, followed by a videotaped tongue lashing from Castro.
Moreover, Castro faces off against his tenth U.S. president, one who has placed more Cuban-Americans in key positions of power than any other in history. All of the Bush appointees--from Mel Martinez and Frank Jimenez at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to Otto Reich at the State Department to Emilio Gonzalez at the National Security Council--are exiles of the hardline persuasion, hellbent on maintaining and bolstering the embargo, along with the travel ban.
But Castro has always thrived -almost perversely -on adversity, and the kind of U.S. intransigence favored by Diaz- Balart and his allies has always been good news for Fidel Castro. Ironically, he will confront far more daunting challenges when the U.S. Congress abolishes the failed 40-year-old trade embargo and overrides a promised presidential veto--an event which could conceivably happen as early as September. At that point, forced to abandon his role as the beleaguered David staving off his nasty northern Goliath, the indomitable Castro will truly have to re-invent himself.
In the meantime, he has had plenty of good material to demonize his northern nemesis. Calling U.S. corporate scandals "bald faced robbery" and "criminal swindling," in a recent speech, Castro's implicit message is that capitalism has fallen on the heels of communism - and so, surprise, fidelismo is the answer.
Castro continues to assault the day with the energy of an adolescent. In fact, he has been telling friends that he hasn't felt so well in years. An eccentric hypochondriac, Castro maintains a rigorous exercise and diet regimen. Hoping to extending his 43 year old reign as Cuba's Maximum Leader, he has lately adopted macrobiotics -the austere Japanese diet -under the tutelage of one of the medical wizards in the Ministry of Health. This is not the first time Castro has made sacrifices in the pursuit of self preservation. In 1985, following a mild stroke, he gave up his beloved puros -Cuban cigars - and ever since he has been something of a health nut. Exceptions are made, of course, for food tastings in the name of U.S. trade with an endless queue of American VIP's who arrive weekly in Havana proffering delicacies.
Castro's most bedeviling challenges-ones that will exponentially augment if the embargo were lifted-are in his own backyard. In his efforts to upstage the Bush Administration, he indulged Jimmy Carter during his recent visit as he met with Cuban dissidents Osvaldo Paya and Elizardo Sanchez and endorsed their reform initiative, the Varela Project, on live Cuban television. Castro even sat through a thrashing of Cuba's human rights record from the former president. But the Varela Project, with its 11,020 signers urging democratic reforms, clearly hit a tender spot for the Cuban leader. The petition hoped to qualify its proposals-free elections, freedom of speech, the right to own a business and amnesty for political prisoners-in a national referendum to be scheduled by the National Assembly.
The petition has never been acted upon. Instead, Castro has sought to stamp it out with a vengeance normally reserved for infectious diseases and plagues. With Carter safely off his island, he hammered through an amendment to the country's Constitution, holding a massive signature-gathering campaign in which he claims 99% of the Cuban electorate called for making socialism in Cuba "eternal" and "untouchable." The Varela project, meanwhile, has become virtually unmentionable-so much so that when law students at the University of Havana recently requested a copy of it for academic study, they were refused.
But Castro's overkill may come back to haunt him sooner rather than later. Over drinks a few weeks ago in Havana on a trip for the American Journalism Foundation, I heard fury from a source I had long regarded as an unwavering fidelista. "I have always regarded myself as an authentic person, so this is the first time I have done something I do not believe in," he said, explaining how he came to sign on to Castro's petition. "I waited until the end of the third day--the last day of voting. Then my daughter visited me and said it could cost her husband his job and I knew the CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) was waiting for me to vote and I was afraid of the consequences."
He said he felt further dejected in that his belief that Castro should leave the Cuban stage is a minority view. "I think we are only about 35% of the country," he said plaintively. Many Cubans, he said, are worried about losing their health and education benefits - as happened to their former patrons, the Russians. " We also have a history with the mafia and no one wants to go back to that," he said. "You see, Castro is the devil we know." Still, he said, Castro's action had popularized the dissidents' cause. "Now everyone in the country knows about the Varela Project."
Some of Castro's dilemmas are of his own making. Having ushered in the highest literacy rate in the hemisphere, he must now cope with the inquisitiveness of his hyper-educated population. Many Cubans now have access to the internet and cibercafes have sprouted up around the capital. Fearless and natural entrepreneurs, Habaneros have somehow secured an estimated 20,000 satellite dishes this year delivering Direct TV into virtually every neighborhood in this city of two million. Dishes have even found their way into the provinces, and those who can't afford them, make their own antennas of mop handles and used kitchen and car parts. There are sporadic sweeps to seize the offending saucers, but the genie won't be easily returned to the bottle.
Lincoln Diaz-Balart has now appropriated the David role for himself in his fight to stop the erosion of the U.S. Embargo. He is mentored by his father, Rafael Diaz-Balart, who hosts his own show on Radio Marti, the U.S. tax funded propaganda station. The father, who is Castro's age, wants vengeance: Fidel Castro must be brought to his knees, punished and humiliated. For 40 years, they have argued that the Embargo is the moral and punitive means to achieve their goals. But like Lear, the fathers of exile Miami have been blinded and defeated by their rage. Clearly, the winds of discontent in Cuba could well turn into a gale once the island nation is opened to U.S. markets and culture. But the old men of Calle Ocho, like the old man in Havana, cannot bear to admit that they made a mistake.
Ann Louise Bardach is the author of Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana (Random House -October, 2002) and the editor of Cuba: A Travelers Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press)