It was around 1:30 in the
afternoon, Cuban time. We were having lunch in the living room of the
modest summer residence which Fidel Castro owns on magnificent Varadero
Beach, 120 kilometers from Havana. For at least the tenth time, I was
questioning the Cuban leader on details of the negotiations with Russia
before the missile installations last year. The telephone rang, a
secretary in guerrilla garb announced that Mr. Dorticós, President of
the Cuban Republic, had an urgent communication for the Prime Minister.
Fidel picked up the phone and I heard him say: “Como? Un atentado?”
(“What’s that? An attempted assassination?”) He then turned to us to
say that Kennedy had just been struck down in Dallas. Then he went back
to the telephone and exclaimed in a loud voice “Herido? Muy gravemente?” (“Wounded? Very seriously?”)
He came back, sat down, and repeated three times the words: “Es una mala noticia.”
(“This is bad news.”) He remained silent for a moment, awaiting another
call with further news. He remarked while we waited that there was an
alarmingly sizable lunatic fringe in American society and that this deed
could equally well have been the work of a madman or of a terrorist.
Perhaps a Vietnamese? Or a member of the Ku Klux Klan? The second call
came through: it was hoped they would be able to announce that the
United States President was still alive, that there was hope of saving
him. Fidel Castro’s immediate reaction was: “If they can, he is already
re-elected.” He pronounced these words with satisfaction.
This
sentence was a sequel to a conversation we had held on a previous
evening and which had turned into an all-night session. To be precise,
it lasted from 10 in the evening until 4 in the morning. A good part of
the talk revolved about the impressions I recounted to him of an
interview which President Kennedy granted me this last October 24, and
about Fidel Castro’s reactions to these impressions. During this
nocturnal discussion, Castro had delivered himself of a relentless
indictment of U.S. policy, adding that in the recent past Washington had
had ample opportunity to normalize its relations with Cuba, but that
instead it had tolerated a CIA program of training, equipping and
organizing a counter-revolution. He had told me that he wasn’t in the
least fearful of his life, since danger was his natural milieu, and if
he were to become a victim of the United States this would simply
enhance his radius of influence in Latin America as well as throughout
the socialist world. He was speaking, he said, from the viewpoint of the
interests of peace in both the American continents. To achieve this
goal, a leader would have to arise in the United States capable of
understanding the explosive realities of Latin America and of meeting
them halfway. Then, suddenly, he had taken a less hostile tack: “Kennedy
could still be this man. He still has the possibility of becoming, in
the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the
leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between
capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an
even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for
Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this
impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev. Other leaders have
assured me that to attain this goal, we must first await his
re-election. Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I
will say this: he has come to understand many things over the past few
months; and then too, in the last analysis, I’m convinced that anyone
else would be worse.” Then Fidel had added with a broad and boyish grin:
“If you see him again, you can tell him that I’m willing to declare
Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy’s re-election!”
This conversation was held on November 19.
Now
it was nearly 2 o’clock and we got up from the table and settled
ourselves in front of a radio. Commandant Vallero, his physician,
aide-de-camp, and intimate friend, was easily able to get the broadcasts
from the NBC network in Miami. As the news came in, Vallero would
translate it for Fidel: Kennedy wounded in the head; pursuit of the
assassin; murder of a policeman; finally the fatal announcement:
President Kennedy is dead. Then Fidel stood up and said to me:
“Everything is changed. Everything is going to change. The United States
occupies such a position in world affairs that the death of a President
of that country affects millions of people in every corner of the
globe. The cold war, relations with Russia, Latin America, Cuba, the
Negro question… all will have to be rethought. I’ll tell you one thing:
at least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed. This is a
serious matter, an extremely serious matter.”
After the
quarter-hour of silence observed by all the American radio stations, we
once more tuned in on Miami; the silence had only been broken by a
re-broadcasting of the American national anthem. Strange indeed was the
impression made, on hearing this hymn ring out in the house of Fidel
Castro, in the midst of a circle of worried faces. “Now,” Fidel said,
“they will have to find the assassin quickly, but very quickly,
otherwise, you watch and see, I know them, they will try to put the
blame on us for this thing. But tell me, how many Presidents have been
assassinated? Four? This is most disturbing! In Cuba, only one has been
assassinated. You know, when we were hiding out in the Sierra there were
some (not in my group, in another) who wanted to kill Batista. They
thought they could do away with a regime by decapitating it. I have
always been violently opposed to such methods. First of all from the
viewpoint of political self-interest, because so far as Cuba is
concerned, if Batista had been killed he would have been replaced by
some military figure who would have tried to make the revolutionists pay
for the martyrdom of the dictator. But I was also opposed to it on
personal grounds; assassination is repellent to me.”
The
broadcasts were now resumed. One reporter felt he should mention the
difficulty Mrs. Kennedy was having in getting rid of her bloodstained
stockings. Fidel exploded: “What sort of a mind is this!” He repeated
the remark several times: “What sort of a mind is this? There is a
difference in our civilizations after all. Are you like this in Europe?
For us Latin Americans, death is a sacred matter; not only does it mark
the close of hostilities, but it also imposes decency, dignity, respect.
There are even street urchins who behave like kings in the face of
death. Incidentally, this reminds me of something else: if you write all
those things I told you yesterday against Kennedy’s policy, don’t use
his name now; speak instead of the policy of the United States
government.”
Toward 5 o’clock, Fidel Castro declared that since
there was nothing we could do to alter the tragedy, we must try to put
our time to good use in spite of it. He wanted to accompany me in person
on a visit to a granja de pueblo (state farm), where he had
been engaging in some experiments. His present obsession is agriculture.
He reads nothing but agronomical studies and reports. He dwells
lyrically on the soil, fertilizers, and the possibilities which will
give Cuba enough sugar cane by 1970 to achieve economic independence.
“Didn’t I Tell You”
We
went by car, with the radio on. The Dallas police were now hot on the
trail of the assassin. He is a Russian spy, says the news commentator.
Five minutes later, correction: he is a spy married to a Russian. Fidel
said, “There, didn’t I tell you; it’ll be my turn next.” But not yet.
The next word was: the assassin is a Marxist deserter. Then the word
came through, in effect, that the assassin was a young man who was a
member of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” that he was an admirer of
Fidel Castro. Fidel declared: “If they had had proof, they would have
said he was an agent, an accomplice, a hired killer. In saying simply
that he is an admirer, this is just to try and make an association in
people’s minds between the name of Castro and the emotion awakened by
the assassination. This is a publicity method, a propaganda device. It’s
terrible. But you know, I’m sure this will all soon blow over. There
are too many competing policies in the United States for any single one
to be able to impose itself universally for very long.”
We arrived at the granja de pueblo, where
the farmers welcomed Fidel. At that very moment, a speaker announced
over the radio that it was now known that the assassin is a “pro-Castro
Marxist.” One commentator followed another; the remarks became
increasingly emotional, increasingly aggressive. Fidel then excused
himself: “We shall have to give up the visit to the farm.” We went on
towards Matanzas from where he could telephone President Dorticós. On
the way he had questions: “Who is Lyndon Johnson? What is his
reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What
was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?” Finally
and most important of all” What authority does he exercise over the
CIA?” Then abruptly he looked at his watch, saw that it would be half an
hour before we reached Matanzas and, practically on the spot, he
dropped off to sleep.
After Matanzas, where he must have decreed a
state of alert, we returned to Varadero for dinner. Quoting the words
spoken to him by a woman shortly before, he said to me that it was an
irony of history for the Cubans, in the situation to which they had been
reduced by the blockade, to have to mourn the death of a President of
the United States. “After all,” he added, “there are perhaps some people
in the world to whom this news is cause for rejoicing. The South
Vietnamese guerrillas, for example, and also, I would imagine, Madame
Nhu!”
I thought of the people of Cuba, accustomed to the sight of
posters like the one depicting the Red Army with maquis superimposed in
front, and the screaming captions “HALT MR. KENNEDY! CUBA IS NOT
ALONE….” I thought of all those who had been led to associate their
deprivations with the policies of President John F. Kennedy.
At
dinner I was able to take up all my questions. What had motivated Castro
to endanger the peace of the world with the missiles in Cuba? How
dependent was Cuba on the Soviet Union? Is it not possible to envisage
relations between Cuba and the United States along the same lines as
those between Finland and the Russians? How was the transition made from
the humanism of Sierra Maestra to the Marxism-Leninism of 1961? Fidel
Castro, once more in top form, had an explanation for everything. Then
he questioned me once more on Kennedy, and each time I eulogized the
intellectual qualities of the assassinated President, I awakened the
keenest interest in him.
The Cubans have lived with the United
States in that cruel intimacy so familiar to me of the colonized with
their colonizers. Nevertheless, it was an intimacy. In that very
seductive city of Havana to which we returned in the evening, where the
luminous signboards with Marxist slogans have replaced the Coca Cola and
toothpaste billboards, in the midst of Soviet exhibits and
Czechoslovakian trucks, a certain American emotion vibrated in the
atmosphere, compounded of resentment, of concern, of anxiety, yet also,
in spite of everything, of a mysterious almost imperceptible
rapprochement. After all, this American President was able to reach
accord with our Russian friends during his lifetime, said a young Cuban
intellectual to me as I was taking my leave. It was almost as though he
were apologizing for not rejoicing at the assassination.
![NEOCASTRISMO [Hacer click en la imagen]](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_5jy0SZhMlaU/SsuPVOlq2NI/AAAAAAAAH1E/4xt2Bwd2reE/S150/ppo+saturno+jugando+con+sus+hijos.jpg)
