Controversial Castro

                                                                                                                                                   MARTIN VENGADESAN

Our history buff who named a son after Fidel Castro examines the legacy of Cuba’s iconic former president.

IT’S hard to think of any nation that has been as identified with its president as Cuba and its iconic “first citizen”, Fidel Castro. Rather ironic when one thinks that Castro came to power espousing an ideology of equality isn’t it?

But now the great man is frail and has finally stepped down. Once an irresistibly vital presence, Castro has spent the last few years in visible decline, suffering.

As he turns 82 this year, he’s turned over power (officially at least) to his spring chicken of a younger brother, 77-year-old Raul, who was officially elected President of Cuba by its National Council five days ago.

So what exactly is the legacy of the man once dubbed the “sexiest man alive” by American broadcast journalist Barbara Walters?

Well, if one is to believe the Cuban exiles who fled to the United States (to the city of Miami in particular) after Castro’s overthrow of the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Castro is the worst tyrant of the 20th century.

A man who crushed all who dared oppose him and subjugated his people to a rule so vicious that many of his people braved sharkinfested waters in flimsy fishing boats just to get away from Castro’s Cuba.

His admirers, on the other hand, believe that Castro was a liberator who set about restoring justice in the unequal society that Batista was running. They point to his achievements in fighting illiteracy and racism as well as helping ensure that Cuba’s people have access to basic health care and housing.

Certainly Cuba’s sporting heroes, like boxers Teofilo Stevenson and Felix Savon and athletes Javier Sotomayor and Ivan Pedroso (Olympic gold medallists all of them), famously turned their backs on lucrative professional careers in the United States and Europe to stay amateurs and be part of Castro’s revolutionary Cuba.

So where does the truth lie? Somewhere in between, of course.

Unlike other leftist icons like Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky, Castro actually lived long enough to face the task of ruling the regime.

Sometimes, men who have the charisma to lead and organise a revolution don’t have the personality to carry out the day-to-day business of running a country. Castro was forced to prove himself and eventually became more of a politician than Guevara and Trotsky ever were. In his half-century in power, Castro has seen the world change beyond recognition. In his early years, he and his comrade Guevara were at the forefront of global politics as the United States moved to stamp out socialism on its doorstep by attempting an invasion (1961’s spectacularly unsuccessful Bays of Pigs incident) and refusing to allow the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles on Cuban territory (the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962).

While Guevara left Cuba to export revolution (first in the Congo and then, fatally for him, in Bolivia), Cuba slowly became entrenched in one party rule under Castro’s Communist Party.

There is no doubt that the economic siege instituted by America forced Castro ever more firmly into the arms of the Soviet bloc. And when the Soviet bloc came crashing down in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cuba suffered economically, but that was another storm that Castro managed to weather.

As a new world order established itself, Castro assumed the role of an elder statesman – and he became the world’s third longestserving head of state, after Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and the King of Thailand! The wily politician in him could come to decidedly non-Communist countries like Malaysia (remember him chilling at KLCC in 2001?) and Canada and be on good terms with their leaders while still being a thorn in the side of American capitalist interests.

A new generation of “fans” led by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has seen governments friendly to Castro’s Cuba being elected all over South America.

However, questions remain about Castro’s own suppression of democracy (he has eased up on quashing religion), and the “dynastic succession” of his brother Raul leaves a sour taste in the mouth of many of his supporters.

Although it can be argued that his greatest tyranny in the last years of his rule was to inflict marathon speeches on the Cuban public!

I for one will miss Fidel and will always feel conflicted about the man and his role in history.

That my five-year-old second son is named Ekath Fidel (by the way, the lad refuses to believe that there are two Fidels in this world!) is testament to the respect Ekath’s mother and I feel for the stand that Castro took against the big boys of capitalism. But 50 years on, I fear that the Cuban revolution was an opportunity squandered, not realised.