Guerrilla Prince/Fidel/Cuba

...Through it all, as Fidel lived on the edge of danger, women paraded through his life (as they still do), providing him with a sense of importance and validating his masculinity...

...He sees Fidel's successes during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years as due to both American naivete and Castro's keen perception that the United States's power at the time was subtly limited by its preoccupation with domestic problems...

...T he book benefits from typically 1 sharp woman's instinct...

...Equally, Heath felt he could snub Nixon because he saw Britain's destiny elsewhere, and possibly even perceived advantages in downplaying British Atlanticism to his European audience...

...no price given) CUBA: A JOURNEY Jacobo Timerman/Alfred A. Knopf/125 pp...

...Luque's history of the Machado and Batista dictatorships and the pre-rule years of Fidel and Che covers familiar territory, but in a lively way...

...Sometimes it was one-sided: Harold Wilson perceived Lyndon Johnson's wary disdain as genuine esteem...

...Similarly, the Reagan cabinet was left in no doubt as to the extent to which Margaret Thatcher's blind-eye-turning and linguistic sophistry helped them weather the Iran-contra storm...

...His anthology on Cuban Communism is now in its seventh edition, while his memoir, Daydreams and Nightmares, was recently awarded the 1991 National Jewish Book Award in autobiography...

...22.95 FIDEL: EL JUICIO DE LA HISTORIA Roberto Luque Escalona/Editorial Dante (Yucatan, Mexico)/185 pp...

...What Timerman likes to call the "Jewish element" in journalism—irony and skepticism—is here merely ambiguity and confusion...

...Great dictators desire to control not only present but also future interpretations of their roles...

...It was Macmillan who made the supremely patronizing remark about Britain becoming Greece to America's Rome...

...Similarly, Fidel in his endless interviews provides a self-portrait that has effectively made him his only biographer...

...For, although Reagan exudes an old-world gallantry towards women, which Mrs...

...The problem with Castro is better revealed in Robert Dahl's phrase "After the Revolution, What...

...The relationship developed so felicitously precisely because distance lent enchantment to the already slightly idealized view each had of the other...

...Still, we learn the extent to which totalitarianism presupposes a personality cult...

...She was undoubtedly relieved when a believer in self-reliance, economic discipline, cultural traditions, and pugnacious nationalism was elected in 1980...

...Ever since the Grand Alliance of FDR and Churchill, image-builders on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to portray each President and Prime Minister as personal friends...

...I am not sure that a male author could so successfully have tied in Fidel's sexual adventures and misadventures with his disregard for marital vows and parental responsibilities...

...Thatcher had fairly detailed knowledge of what Poindexter, North, and the others were up to some twelve months in advance...

...Only the reflexively anti-American EdAndrew Roberts is the author of The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax, published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson...

...It is Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ernest Hemingway who seem to attract most of his energies...

...Far more than any personal chemistry (let alone the sexual frisson some commentators have tried to spot), it was this political soundness that attracted her to him...

...Unlike other dissenters, however, he still lives in Cuba...

...Most tellingly, Geyer notes the mutual admiration between Castro and Franco...

...give absolute power to a sinner and you have the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution...

...Thatcher's ideology explains the respect she expressed for Reagan's gubernatorial achievements in California when they met in 1975 and again in 1978...

...Why look to literature rather than to politics to explain him...

...Barbara Walters's interviews, for example, succeeded more in giving Fidel a forum than in giving the viewer knowledge...

...W e are reminded how easy it has been for terrorists to influence the foreign policy of the world's number-one superpower simply by kidnapping her citizens...

...This sort of "even-handedness," in which dictators and democrats are seen as equivalent while left-socialists like Timerman parade their virtues, ends in Advice such as "Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly" not only gives an insight into how intimate Margaret Thatcher and George Bush became during the Gulf Phony War, but also confirms our perception of the former premier as congenitally unwobbly...

...The colossal ego of this minor political actor (Timerman) is so overwhelming that the analysis of the colossal ego of a major political figure (Castro) is lost...

...By 1979, Margaret Thatcher had realized that if her country was to matter a jot on the world stage, she would have to get on well with whoever was President of the United States...

...Where Reagan is anecdotal, easygoing, and genuinely humorous, Mrs...

...Timerman downplays Cuba's economic failures, reserving his polemics for "CIA marionettes...

...Thatcher is analytical, polemical, and would not recognize a joke if it were to walk up to her and hand her a red box...

...But, just before the entire account begins to sound like the ramblings of some gossipy old spook, the reader is brought up sharply by a fact...

...He gives a superb overview of the role personal friendships have played since 1941 in Anglo-American relations...

...This impressive new book gives us several clues...

...Tacobo Timerman's extended essay J on Cuba is best viewed as a sightseeing footnote to Geyer's work...

...After the magnificence of the Thiur(fo, they immediately began calling him "Castro," in sobriety, in respect, in fear...

...Give absolute power to a saint and you have the Inquisition...

...Authorized biographies of Stalin reached the point at which no one could be trusted to write them...

...Stripped of his moralistic fervor, Timerman is revealed as simply a man at loose ends...

...This proved difficult at first: Jimmy Carter was far closer to Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan (whose vacillation in the face of England's "winter of discontent" in 1978 mirrored Carter's own vacillation at America's economic "malaise") than he was to Mrs...

...immeasurably to the authority of her work...

...For Castro is a dictator with the staying power of a Franco and the vision of a Torquemada...

...How often did she have to give the same advice to Bush's predecessor...

...BOOK REVIEWS W ith the 1989 overthrow of totali- tartan states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, even those Stalinist regimes that survived have undergone substantial changes: Albania has just held its first elections ever, North Korea is dropping hints at reintegration with the South, and Cambodia and Vietnam are showing signs of political—or at least diplomatic—liberalization...

...By subjecting Castro to a scrutiny of his bad marriage, illegitimate children, and failed romances, Geyer cuts through the myth to the man...

...What an appalling tactical error Saddam Hussein made when he released his "guests" last Christmas...

...T he harsh logic of national interest 1 has always underlain these public-relations games...

...The first section will undoubtedly carry the freight for the sophisticated reader, for it explores aspects of the pre-1959 period that the ruler has largely kept hidden...

...oberto Luque Escalona, who describes himself as "a man, and only a man," and bolsters his macho credentials by dedicating his book to Jersey Joe Walcott, takes a more personal angle on Fidel...

...One must wade through piles of Timerman's rhetoric: his lifelong identification with revolution, his clashes with American anti-Castro forces, his debates with the Cuban organizers of the trip...

...It has not been stage-managed by Fidel and does not rest on late-night "interviews" patently intended to disinformlike those which led to Tad Szulc's uncritical FideL A Critical Portrait...

...than in Max Weber's oft-repeated but little-understood notion of charisma...

...Geyer explains the taxonomy on the very last page of the book: In the beginning, the Cuban people had called him "Fidel" in adoration, in salvation, in love, like a Spanish woman with her husband before marriage...

...Franco greatly admired Castro's anti-American-ism, and Castro in turn declared a national week of mourning after the generalissimo's death...

...The book is a Hollywood-style chronique scandaleuse: behind the sociological rhetoric of the "charismatic figure" is a psychological portrait of a man who plainly does not want to be examined in his role of father, lover, or lout...

...a quagmire...

...For Luque went to Mexico in 1958, where he was part of the crucial support base for the 26th of July Movement...

...The author is surely right in saying that had Reagan, with his poor grasp of details, been a British politician, Mrs...

...But instead of following this sensitive appreciation with some tough analysis, Timerman veers off into a study of cultural and literary clashes...

...Despite Timerman's polemical animus towards "United States aggression," the book does offer glimpses into Castro's Cuba...

...Timerman even envisions Castro being wounded by his not having set up an interview...

...18.95 Irving Louis Horowitz THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 35 man baron...

...Thatcher, like a virgin at a toga party, actually stuck to her principles while all about her were divesting themselves of theirs as quickly as possible...

...Because the shrinking of Cuba's power base to Fidel's immediate family gives him a dynastic role that is near-archaic, and would be more easily understood by students of Elizabethan tragedy than by State Department policy-makers...

...Thatcher's instinctive pro-Americanism as lying deep in her youth...

...His "evidence" comes from a 1988 report by the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies—hardly a haven for moderates...

...But I think she made the wise decision, one that adds Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University...

...In the end, they called him only "El," or "He...

...The tone in such passages is engagingly disapproving, but if Fidel had in fact been some sort of strait-laced Puritan, would the outcome have been any different...

...It is now known that MI5, Britain's equivalent of the CIA, bugged the hotel room in which Robert McFarlane and Oliver North met the Iranian arms dealer Ghorbanifar in December 1985...

...He admits that "no one believes it is possible for Cuba, via the armed forces and its security organs, to be a distributor of Colombian drugs without the Castro brothers' participation in the operation...

...For he had become finally not one of them but a differentiated creature away from them—that sun so hot that it burned to come close...

...Their breaks with the regime had to do with public issues, like economics and foreign policy, not private ones, like philandering and fornicating...

...Geyer forgets that many of the people she interviewed were part of the 1959 revolution...

...Yet, thirty-two years after Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement triumphed over the thoroughly corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Castro remains in absolute power, more adamant than ever that he will not modify his direction...

...22.95 Andrew Roberts 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991...

...biography became autobiography...

...ward Heath bucked the trend, finding himself unable to get along on any sort of personal terms with Richard Nixon...

...But this counts for little compared to "the scant credibility of the United States government in its accusations against Cuba—often verging, no doubt, on paranoia or on state terrorism tactics...

...After returning to Havana in 1961, he worked for the regime until breaking with Castro over the leader's unquestioning support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...

...Thatcher's decision to allow American bombers to attack Tripoli from British soil was a clear quid pro quo for the help certain Anglophiles in the Pentagon—such as Caspar Weinberger and John Lehman—had afforded the British during the Falklands War...

...Into Mr...

...The author is probably correct when he perceives Mrs...

...In fact, the most interesting chapters of Smith's book are those dealing with Iran-contra...

...Thatcher...

...The Second World War molded her generation, and in the Cold War Anglo-American cooperation proved of paramount importance...

...On February 29, 1986, two top British foreign policy officials, Sir Antony Acland and Sir Percy Cradock, met Admiral Poindexter in Washington and discussed the arms-forhostages deal...

...Castro does that to critics: he makes the world of socialism uninhabitable for Westerners, but also manages to convince them that there is no way out of it...

...The vignettes—Fidel on his honeymoon in New York buying a Lincoln Continental, witnessing the Bogotazo that followed the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitin in Bogota in 1948, walking about Havana with his copy of Mein Kampf—give a rich portrait of the young man as a budding old dictator...

...Timerman's elevation of himself to the role of counterweight to the "rightist views" of Armando Valladares (an unpardonable slander against the man who exposed Cuba's prison system) is sheer conceit...

...Thatcher would have had very little time for him...

...Geyer's decision to write an unauthorized biography was clearly a difficult one...

...The problem continues to be the limitations imposed by the impenetrable glass dome on Cubans' lives, their energies, their innermost human nature...

...For those who—whatever the reason—can only hear or trust such a voice, this can be a useful book...

...as a journalist she doubtless would have preferred interviewing to surrounding Fidel with associates' anecdotes...

...Geyer has made it crystal-clear that it is the legacy of Spain, not the "ideology" of Russia, that best explains his soul and substance...

...We also see how Mrs...

...At other times the propagandists relied on a spurious avuncularity, as in Macmillan's dealings with Kennedy...

...It is unauthorized biography...

...Geoffrey Smith, a veteran Times of London journalist and longtime Washington habitue, has written a fascinating and highly readable account of the most genuinely close partnership in the history of the Special Relationship: his two protagonists meet, win the respect of one another, and finally effect the geopolitical equivalent of falling in love...

...She actually believed in REAGAN AND THATCHER Geoffrey Smith/W...

...W. Norton/285 pp...

...In his remarkable essay FideL El juicio de la historia ("The Judgment of History"), Luque, like Geyer, emphasizes Castro's roots in the Spanish province of Galicia—whose people are violent, ruthless, uncompromising...

...And if at times she is one-sided, she at least succeeds in redressing the deadly-dull exercise of taking Fidel at face value as the Bolivar of our time...

...Thatcher likes and which sends feminists berserk, their personalities are very different...

...The sheer length of time they had in power together—she was Prime Minister throughout his years in the White House—allowed favors to be granted and called back again over time...

...Finally (on page 45) we get to the core of his concerns: Cuba's problem goes deeper than the deterioration of world economic conditions or the fact that Cuba is in the Caribbean and not on the Black Sea...

...We get a portrait of Castro as part of a network of twentieth-century cult figures who have far more in commonpersonally than ideologically...

...Sometimes the attempt reflected genuine chumminess, as in that between Macmillan and Eisenhower, forged in the shared experiences of the War in the Mediterranean...

...Fanatics make good biography, and Georgie Anne Geyer's Guerrilla Prince is one of the most important contributions to an understanding of Cuban Communism that has appeared in recent years...

...Churchill professed to worship Roosevelt, "this thrice-chosen leader of the greatest democracy on earth," because the survival of his country depended on it...

...In politics, longevity is nearly as fascinating a topic as legitimacy, and, as tyrants will, Castro repeatedly lays claim to the latter by means of the former...

...Guerrilla Prince is cleverly divided into three parts: "Fidel," "Castro," and "El...

...Smith's normally forthright narrative creep the weasel-words "probably," "perhaps," and "apparently...

...The great chain of dictatorial beings—from Lenin and Stalin through Hitler and Mussolini—provides an unambiguous governing force in Castro's life...

...But Luque also sees Fidel as a Robin Hood, a Captain Ahab (to the United States' Moby Dick), even as a "perverse NorGUERRILLA PRINCE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF FIDEL CASTRO Georgie Anne Geyer/Little, Brown/407 pp...

...One wonders what members of the Abraham Lincoln brigade who fought against Franco, and the younger generations who formed the backbone of Castro's Venceremos Brigade, will think upon learning that their personal hero was cut from such neofascist cloth...

...Smith is historian enough not to attempt to depict the Reagan=Thatcher affair as unique...