FIDEL AND RELIGION
Castro Talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto
Introduction by Harvey Cox
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987
314 pp., $19.95
Two years ago, as I was deep into my definitive biography of Fidel Castro, I managed to get one of the two copies in America of the original Portuguese language edition of an amazing book, Fidel and Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto. I read it with fascination, getting new materials and insights for my own book, but also with a kind of patient amusement; no serious person could really believe, I thought then, that Fidel Castro, who declared himself a "Marxist-Leninist and always...one" in 1961, was really all that enthralled with Christianity.
The book sold heaps in Brazil, where it was first published. Then, a year later, it came out in the Dominican Republic in Spanish, and we began to hear that it had sold two million copies in Cuba itself (which is not surprising since the society is so bored and since the Cuban people know so little about the leader who rules every corner of their lives). And now, Simon and Schuster has gullibly published the book in English, and people who should really know better are discussing whether "Fidel" is really becoming a closet Christian.
Praise for the book
Indeed, some of the praise for the book is clearly wish fulfillment, filled with the idea, or at least the hope, that, yes, communist leaders can be converted to another faith. As professor of theology Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School says in his generally fair-minded and balanced, if irresistibly enthusiastic, introduction,
What [Castro] has to say in this book about religion will...seem shocking and unorthodox and maybe even "heretical." Castro does not believe that religion is always an "opiate of the people."...For the Comandante, religion can be either an opiate or a stimulant. He says, "I think one can be a Marxist without ceasing to be a Christian and can work together with a Marxist Communist to transform the world."
Kirkus Reviews found that Castro's "extraordinary charisma" managed to seep even onto these printed pages and that most of what he says "intrigues or even dazzles." Publishers Weekly also found it a "dazzling performance." This is puzzling because there is really nothing new here on the all-important question of how power is distributed, and it is disturbing that so few reviewers chose to look not-even-very-far underneath the surface, or to question Castro's words and concepts in terms of praxis (will it work in practice, what does it in mean in reality?) instead of having strictly emotional and ideological responses.
Indeed, much of this response to Fidel and Religion makes me recall a wonderful interview I had in 1985 with Fidel's old Jesuit mentor at the Belen high school, which he attended in the 1940s. First, Father Armando Llorente, a Spanish Jesuit, recalled how, when Fidel did something, he did it all the way. "He learned basketball, and then practiced so much that I had to put a light in the basketball court so he could play at night," Father Llorente told
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