FIDEL
A Critical Portrait
Tad Szulc
New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986
703 pp.
FIDEL
A Biography of Fidel Castro
Peter G. Bourne
New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986
322 pp.
Twenty-seven years in power make Fidel Castro's dictatorship the oldest in the hemisphere except for that of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, who has ruled Paraguay for thirty-two. Is there a connection between Castro's longevity, the peculiar nature of his rule, and the tragic outcome of the Cuban revolution? Tad Szulc's monumental biography fails to address this and other fundamental questions. Instead, it devotes only fifty-plus pages out of seven hundred to a state he dubs "The Maturity" (1964-1986), crucial years when several changes introduced by Castro during the previous five (1959-1963) began to bear their unforeseen results. Indeed, we are subjected to a cataract of detail (250 pages) about well-known episodes of the guerrilla campaign - somewhat grandiosely dubbed "The War," since Batista's army was never defeated in battle but simply fell apart, with light casualties on both sides. The book's major contribution is official confirmation on the part of Castro and others that: (1) yes, there was a shadow (communist) government from the inception of the revolution; (2) no, it was not brought about by hostile U.S. policies, and (3) yes, Castro was a Marxist-Leninist before the revolution.
But in order to understand the significance of these statements, as well as Szulc's interpretation of these events, one must locate them within a historical and especially a cultural context. The appeal of Marxism's anticapitalist message, the relation between Castro's need to control and his choice of an ideology of total power, and finally the connection between Little Cuba's Big-Power foreign policy and the island's history can be better understood if one examines Latin American culture in general and Cuban political culture in particular. Szulc's book does not provide this context.
Filthy Lucre, Honor, and the Public Man
The medieval concept of money as "filthy lucre" and its use in transactions as somewhat shameful and dishonorable is still a part of the Latin American ethos, as it was (and to an extent still is) in much of Spain and the Catholic Mediterranean. Unlike the rest of Latin America, Cuba was an integral part of Spain until the 1890s, a couple of decades before Castro's birth. Castro's father, moreover, was a Spaniard who bitterly resented Spain's humiliation during the Spanish-American War, and Castro's teachers during his childhood and youth were Jesuit priests who by training and disposition were hostile to the capitalist values of Protestant culture.
The favorite saying of Cuban politician Eduardo Chibas, one of the heroes of Castro's youth, was "Shame against money." He was, of course, referring to the rampant corruption of Cuban politicians in office. He did not say "shame against corruption," but against money. The idea of money as shameful is connected with the
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