Plying the Word

...But the country he knows most about, after Cuba, is the United States...

...I have on my conscience having initiated and maintained him to date in the addiction to quick-consumption best-sellers as an antidote to official documents...

...He has never been heard to repeat any of the papier mAch6 slogans of communist scholasticism, nor make any use at all of the system's ritual dialect, a fossil language which long ago lost contact with reality and goes hand in glove with a laudatory and commemorative press made more for concealing than for divulging...

...Shortly afterwards, in August 1962, this prognosis seemed to have its first alarming confirmation when he was left mute after a speech announcing the nationalization of U.S...

...He loses no opportunity to learn...

...The improvisor's rostrum, then, seems to be his perfect habitat, although he always has to overcome an initial inhibition which few people know about and which he does not deny...

...He can put himself on the level of each and has vast and varied information that allows him to move easily in any medium...

...In immense Revolution Square, before half a million people, several times he felt himself VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 2 (AUGUST 1990) 41Cuba I suffocating in the strait-jacket of the written word, and every chance he got he departed from the text...

...But day to day he picks at a fish fillet with boiled vegetables, and then only when hunger overwhelms him, rather than at regular mealtimes...

...Only in very special cases does he use a card with some notes, which he unceremoniously takes out of his pocket before starting and holds within view...

...Finally, he convened a massive congress of experts in'Havana and gave a speech in which he left none of the questions of his preceding conversations unanswered...

...That is how it is: Weary from talking, he rests by talking...

...During the first few hours, the people of Havana, not yet familiar with the hypnotic power of that voice, sat down to listen in the traditional way...

...There was something to that at the beginning of the revolution, when he still clung to his habits from the Sierra Maestra...

...He says it with such sincerity that he does not even sit down...

...He reads English, but does not speak it...

...This faculty does not function by illumination, rather as the result of arduous and tenacious reasoning...

...They surround him freely, they use the familiar ttl, they argue with him, they contradict him, they make demands of him-a channel of immediate transmission through which the truth flows in torrents...

...Before, he would go entire days and nights snatching a few winks wherever exhaustion overcame him...

...Now it is quite different...

...TILL, HIS IMMEDIATE AND MOST FRUITFUL source of information continues to be conversation...

...He dreams that his scientists will find the final cure for cancer, and has created a foreign policy fit for a world power on an island without fresh water, 84 times smaller than its principal enemy...

...districts, on cafe terraces filled with flowers, in icy bars, and even in bursts from radios going full-blast that came through open windows as we walked the streets...

...In fact, especially outside Havana, it is not unusual for someone to call out to him from the crowd at a public demonstration and for them to begin a dialogue shouting at the top of their lungs...

...But what is most regrettable, for both Fidel Castro and his listeners, is that even the best journalists, especially the Europeans, do not have even the curiosity to square their questions with reality on the street...

...He has the habit of quick interrogations that resemble matriushkas, the Russian dolls from whose interior emerges a smaller version, from which emerges one smaller yet, and then another, until the smallest one possible is left...

...Perhaps he does not know it...

...He can remain like that for any length of time, standing up, without drinking or eating...

...His Homeric but momentary rages are now a thing of the past, and he has learned to dissipate his dark moods in an invincible patience...

...Spain, the land of his ancestors, is an obsession with him...

...Especially the foreign journalists, who do not consider their work finished unless they carry away the trophy of an interview with him...

...He breakfasts on not less than 200 pages of news from all over the world...

...But the infinite speeches of the early years belong to a past now confused with legend, because the many things the people had to understand from the beginning have now been more than explained, and Fidel Castro's style itself has become more compact after so many sessions of oratorical pedagogy...

...By then he had a comprehensive vision which the simple passage of time has borne out...

...Little by little, during three trips I made to Havana that year, I got to know his step-by-step discoveries: the repercussions of the debt on the countries' economies, its political and social impact, its decisive influence on international relations, its providential importance for a united Latin American policy...

...The subject of Latin America's foreign debt, for example, had surfaced in his conversations for the first time some two years before, and had been evolving, branching out, deepening, until it became something very much like a recurring nightmare...

...A man of austere ways and insatiable illusions, with an old-fashioned formal education, of cautious words and delicate manners, incapable of conceiving any idea which is not out of the ordinary...

...Especially if he has to face adversity...

...Even the most difficult speeches seem to be casual talks, in the style of those he held with students in the courtyards of the university at the beginning of the revolution...

...But his methods of resting seem too original, and some do not exclude conversation...

...he files it away forever...

...They are notebooks of ordinary paper, bound in blue plastic, which with the years have become countless in his private files...

...He conveys the impression that nothing amuses him more than showing his true face to those who arrive prepared by enemy propaganda to meet a barbaric caudillo...

...His supreme assistant is his memory, and he uses it to the point of abuse to sustain speeches and private conversations with overwhelming arguments and arithmetical operations of incredible speed...

...Or seventeen, as was the case with the interview Gianni Mina did for Italian television, one of the longest he has granted, and also one of the most complete...

...Everything is different, on the other hand, when he talks to people on the street...

...Indeed, the translator had once again confused the meaning of the word billion in the two languages...

...Despite his efforts to liven them up, and despite succeeding in many cases, those captive speeches left him with a feeling of frustration...

...I think that he would oblige them all if it were not for the physical impossibility: at this moment there are some 300 formal requests awaiting approval, and the wait could be infinite...

...Three hours for him are a good average for an ordinary conversation...

...When he needs some very recent book which has not yet been translated, he has it translated as an emergency...

...Then I asked him what in this world he would most like to do, and he answered immediately: "Hang around on some street comer...

...He told one official: "You hide truths from me so as not to trouble me, but when I discover them at last I will die from the impact of facing all the truths you have failed to tell me...

...During the war in Angola he described a battle in such detail at an official reception that a European diplomat was not easily convinced that Fidel Castro had not participated in it...

...At the end of the visit, with the new day already dawning, they were left awed by his explosive conclusion...

...This could explain his absolute confidence in direct contact...

...There is always a journalist waiting in some Havana hotel, having appealed to all kinds of sponsors to see him...

...The first thing he said, like a simple arithmetical conclusion, was that the debt was unpayable...

...But once the subject is exhausted, it is as though a vital cycle has been completed...

...But the essence of his own thought may lie in the certainty that to do mass work is fundamentally to be concerned about individuals...

...His devotion to the word is almost magical...

...These are veritable talk-fests...

...Private parties run counter to his character, as he is one of the rare Cubans who neither sings nor dances, and the very few he does attend change when he arrives...

...No one can explain how he finds the time or what methods he uses to read so much and so quickly, although he insists that there is nothing special about it...

...On one occasion, to a bipartisan group of congressmen and even a Pentagon official, he gave a very realistic account of how his Galician ancestors and his Jesuit teachers infused in him some moral principles which had proved very useful in the formation of his personality...

...They aspire to the trophy of the interview with questions formulated according to the political obsessions and cultural prejudices of their own countries, without taking the trouble to find out for themselves what today's Cuba is really like, what the dreams and real frustrations of its people are: the truth of their lives...

...As if he could see the projecting mass of an iceberg at the same time as the seven-eighths of it underwater...

...The seat of government was wherever he might be, and power itself was subordinated to the randomness of his wanderings...

...And he concluded: "I am a Christian...

...I do not think anyone in this world could be a worse loser...

...They said everything he wanted to say, and perhaps they said it better, but they left out the greatest stimulus of his life, which is the excitement of taking risks...

...I have always believed that the plural which he often uses when speaking of his own acts is not so majestic as it seems, but rather a poetic license to conceal his shyness...

...He devotes several hours to routine matters in his office at the presidency of the Council of State, where there is a well-ordered desk, comfortable furniture of untanned leather and a bookshelf which reflects very well the breadth of his tastes: from treatises on hydroponics to romantic novels...

...Any exaggeration in VIJLUMCrAAIV, NUWIfl3K L kUUUaI IYYU)>uba Io 4 Anw4rc A uba I The infinite speeches of the early years belong to a past now confused with legend this sense would be barely approximate, even in circum- stances as extreme as a trip in an airplane...

...On the other hand, a foreign visitor who met him for the first time told me a few years ago: "Fidel is getting old...

...In a note he sent me a few years ago asking me to participate in some public ceremony, he told me: "Try for once to get over your stage fright, as I myself must do so often...

...They get indignant about not knowing to whom to turn, because no one knows for sure what are the right steps for getting to him...

...last night he went back to the same subject about seven times...

...Someone who thinks he knows him told him: "Things must be going very badly, because you are radiant...

...Later we continued listening without a pause in the elevator, in the taxi that took us to the shopping Copyright (c) Gabriel Garcia Mirquez and Ocean Press, 1990...

...During the day, despite his tireless mobility, they pursue him everywhere with urgent information...

...Or with those who whisk the truth out of his sight so as not to cause him more worry than he already has...

...way they deprive the Cuban people on the street of an opportunity to talk to the world, and they deny themselves the professional achievement of questioning Fidel Castro, not about European suppositions, which are so distant, but about the anxieties of his own people, especially on this eve of great decisions...

...Sometimes the two hours planned turn into four, and nearly always into six...

...He is a good reader of literature, and follows it closely...

...companies...

...But above all in the most difficult and fruitless, with those who in his presence lose their naturalness and aplomb and speak to him in theoretical formulas that have nothing to do with reality...

...I have wondered this over the course of many dialogues, public and private...

...And from one three-hours to another, the days go by like puffs of air...

...Without losing the sources of his inspiration, which are very much his own, he has come around to imposing a certain order on his life...

...government, there is a flight almost daily between Havana and Miami, and not a day goes by without U.S...

...Once he left an intense work session at nearly midnight, with visible signs of exhaustion, and returned before dawn, fully recovered after swimming for two hours...

...He himself calculates that every day he has to read some fifty documents...

...He corrects a phrase several times, crosses it out, tries it again in the margin, and often searches for a word for several days, consulting dictionaries, asking around, until it comes out to his liking...

...As he is not an academic leader entrenched in his offices, but rather seeks out problems wherever they may be, his inconspicuous car, without the NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASroar of motorcycles, can be seen slipping along the deserted avenues of Havana or some out-of-the-way road even in the wee hours of the morning...

...There is no project, colossal or millimetric, which he does not undertake with a fierce passion...

...I pointed out to him that these nearly manic reiterations are one of his ways of working...

...Then there is a give and take between him and his audience which exalts them both and creates between them a kind of dialectical complicity, and in this unbearable tension lies the essence of his elation...

...His vision of Latin America's future is the same as that of Bolivar and Martf: an integral and autonomous community capable of influencing the destiny of the world...

...Once he said: "In my next reincarnation I want to be a writer...

...Perhaps the aspect of Fidel Castro's personality least in keeping with the image created by his adversaries is that of being a voracious reader...

...The fact is that everyone who goes to Cuba would like to see him in any way possible, and there are many who dream of seeing him in private...

...He has never refused to answer any question, provocative though it may be, nor has he ever lost his patience...

...In the 1970s he fell into the habit of writing out his speeches, so slowly and with such meticulousness that they resembled clockwork...

...The most serious are those they hide to conceal shortcomings, because alongside the enormous achievements which sustain the revolution in science, sports, culture, there is a colossal bureaucratic incompetence which affects nearly every order of daily life, especially domestic happiness, and which has obliged Fidel Castro himself, nearly 30 years after the victory, to take personal charge of such extraordinary matters as the making of bread and the distribution of beer...

...The countries he went to before the revolution are few, and in those he has visited since on official trips he has been condemned to the narrow horizon allowed by protocol...

...In fact, he writes well and likes doing it, even in a moving car, in the notebooks he always has at hand for writing down whatever comes to mind, even personal letters...

...This is the Fidel Castro I believe I know, after uncountable hours of conversation, through which the phantoms of politics do not often pass...

...I think he is one of the greatest idealists of our time and this, perhaps, may be his greatest virtue, although it has also been his greatest danger...

...You only have to know Fidel Castro a little to realize this was an exaggeration, and one of the biggest, because it is impossible to conceive of anyone more addicted to the habit of conversation...

...Twenty-six years have passed since then...

...It was as if he'd set off a grenade on the table...

...By evening we had done our day's work without missing a word...

...Of his various civilian and military names, only one is left then: Fidel...

...I have seen the most self-assured lose their poise in his presence, making a great show of modesty or overdoing an air of confidence, without ever imagining that he is as intimidated as they, and has to make an initial effort so that they do not notice...

...It is inspiration: that irresistible and dazzling state of grace, denied only by those who have not had the glory of experiencing it...

...This tends to happen when he is exploring an idea which besieges him, and no one can be more obsessive than he when he has set out to get to the bottom of something...

...It must be a world record...

...The fact is that the dancing is interrupted, the music suspended, the dinner put off, and the crowd gathers around him to join in the conversation which he begins immediately...

...Reprinted with the permission of Ocean Press, Melbourne, Australia, from their forthcoming title "An Encounter with Fidel," published in the United States in October and distributed by The Talman Company...

...Such is the discretion with which he protects his privacy that his intimate life has ended up being the most impenetrable enigma of his legend...

...It is then, rather than in intimacy, when you discover the rare human being that the brilliance of his own image hides from view...

...For the North Americans, brought up in a culture that understands life only in black and white, his prior explanation went right over their heads...

...He knows the twenty-eight volumes of Martf's work thoroughly, and has had the talent to incorporate his ideas into the bloodstream of a Marxist revolution...

...Never more than at such times does he look better, seem to be in a better frame of mind, or in higher spirits...

...But he flies poorly due to his anxiety to know everything: He neither sleeps nor reads, he hardly eats, he asks the crew for navigation maps every time he has some doubt, he makes them explain why this route is being taken and not this other one, why the noise of the turbines is changing, why the plane is bouncing in spite of the good weather...

...But as time passed they went back to their daily routine, with one ear to their affairs and the other to the speech...

...With time you learn that his master tactic is asking about things he already knows, in order to confirm his data...

...He always begins in a nearly inaudible voice, actually hesitant, pushing forward in the fog on an uncertain course, but seizing upon any glimmer to gain ground inch by inch, until he sort of lashes out and grabs hold of the listeners...

...One thing is certain: Wherever he may be, however and with whomever, Fidel Castro is there to win...

...When he read the memoirs of Lee Iacocca, he discovered several errors that were so incredible that he sent to New York for the English version, to compare it with the Spanish...

...In sum: an iron discipline...

...visitors of every kind arriving in Cuba, on special flights or in private planes...

...Not only because of the length of his speeches, but because he had no fixed address, nor an office for over fifteen years, nor did he have a schedule for anything...

...An assiduous interviewer could discover the first embryo of an idea and follow its development over many months through his persistent conversation, until he finally makes it public in its final form, as happened with the foreign debt...

...He has a language for every occasion and a different form of persuasion depending on with whom he is speaking, be they workers, farmers, students, scientists, politicians, writers or foreign visitors...

...It seems to me that his most unusual virtue as a politician is this faculty of discerning the evolution of a topic all the way to its remote conclusions...

...Many times I have seen him arrive at my house very late at night, still trailing the last scraps of an overly long day...

...He knows they do it...

...The conversation then recovers the expressiveness and crude frankness of real feelings...

...Fidel Castro's personality seemed to change when he read them: The tone was different, the style, even the quality of his voice...

...I have seen him telephone a friend in Mexico to ask her for the recipe for a dish he liked, and I have seen him copy it down leaning against the counter, among the dishes still unwashed from dinner, while someone on television sang an old song: Life is an express train that travels thousands of leagues...

...Now he tries to allow himself a minimum of six hours of undisturbed sleep, although not even he knows when he'll go to sleep each day...

...The other was the fragility of his voice-a hoarse voice which at times seemed breathless...

...Fidel Castro has just turned 63, and his voice sounds as uncertain as ever, although it continues to be his most useful and irresistible instrument in the delicate craft of the spoken word...

...In this VOLUME XXIV...

...He is thoroughly familiar with the nature of its people, its power structures, the ulterior motives of its governments, and this has helped him to steer his way through the incessant storm of the blockade...

...He is a habitual reader of economic and historical subjects...

...In his very few formal interviews he tends to grant the time requested, although he himself later prolongs it with an unpredictable elasticity, stimulated by the dynamics of the dialogue...

...But he also talks about them and about many others he has not been to as though he had...

...Many times I have asked him how things were going, and more than once he answered me: " Very well, we have all the reservoirs full...

...Colombian president Belisario Betancur, with whom he maintained frequent telephone contact despite the fact that they had never met and the two countries have no diplomatic relations, once called him about some casual matter...

...A doctor, on hearing him, concluded that even without Amazonian speeches like the one that day, Fidel Castro was doomed to lose his voice within five years...

...But this same virtue spoiled them...

...But in any case insufficient because the scarcity of time keeps imposing an unconventional schedule, and the force of his imagination carries him off to the unexpected...

...But his personality is so complex and unpredictable that any one of them can form a NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 42different impression of him in the same encounter...

...The inclement ease with which he gains weight has obliged him to adhere to a permanent diet...

...He gives them a few home truths and puts up very well with the ones they give him...

...Another vital source of information, of course, is books...

...He rarely quotes the phrases of others, either in conversation or on the rostrum, except those of Jos6 Marti, his author of choice...

...On the eve of elections there is an interminable influx of politicians from both parties...

...He prefers not to fly, and does so only when there is no alternative...

...Perhaps he is not aware of the power of his presence, which seems to fill immediately the entire space, even though he is not so tall nor so heavy-set as he appears at first glance...

...When a visitor from Latin America gave him a hasty statistic on the rice 44NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS j C !m (V 0, 0, ii' I k NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 44consumption of his compatriots, he did his mental calculations and said: "How strange, each one eats four pounds of rice a day...

...T HE SUBJECT CAN BE ANYTHING, ACCORDing to the interest of his listeners, but the opposite often occurs: It is he who takes a single subject to every audience...

...But whatever it may be, and wherever, everything happens within the ambit of inexhaustible conversation...

...Fidel Castro sees as many as he can, he makes sure they are well cared for while they wait and does everything possible to give them plenty of time for an exhaustive exchange of new information...

...The answers, of course, must be precise, as he is capable of discovering the slightest inconsistency in a casual phrase...

...One unrestrained Sunday, after a good-sized lunch, he ate eighteen scoops of ice cream...

...He was never satisfied...

...Sometimes, before going to bed, he knocks very late at the door of a close friend, where he can show up unannounced, and says he will stay only five minutes...

...In any case, he prefers to read in Spanish, and at any hour is ready to read any piece of paper with letters on it that may fall into his hands...

...He takes a long time over each one, he ventures out on the least expected, most difficult terrain without ever neglecting precision, knowing that a single word ill used can cause irreparable damage...

...A doctor friend sent him, as a courtesy, his treatise on orthopedics which had just been published, without of course any intention that he read it, but a week later he received a letter from him with a long list of observations...

...In the end, very few interviews please him, least of all the written transcripts, which in the interests of space tend to sacrifice the exactitude and the nuances particular to his personal style...

...Only in very special cases does he ask to see the questions beforehand...

...He stays in excellent physical condition with several hours of gymnastics daily and frequent swimming, limits himself to a shot of straight whisky in almost invisible sips, and has managed to control his weakness for the spaghetti he was taught to make by the first papal nuncio of the revolution, Monsignor Cesare Sacchi...

...The account he gave in a public speech of the capture and murder of Che Guevara, the one he gave on the storming of the Moneda Palace and the death of Salvador Allende, or the one he gave on the ravages of Hurricane Flora were great spoken r6portages...

...Depending on how things go, it could just as well be ten at night or seven in the morning...

...He has the nearly mystical conviction that the greatest achievement for a human being is the proper cllltvtinn nfrcnnripnrcp nd that mnral incrpntivp rather than material ones, are capable of changing the world and moving history forward...

...All this has given rise to the legend that he is a drifting loner, a disorganized and unconventional insomniac, who may turn up for a visit at any hour and keep his hosts awake until dawn...

...For some years now he has been arriving on the dot, and the duration of his speech depends on the disposition of the audience...

...His handwriting is tiny and intricate, although at first glance it looks as simple as a schoolboy's...

...Fidel Castro told me afterwards: "I took advantage of the fact that we both had time to ask him for some data that wasn't in the cables about the coffee situation in Colombia...

...But little by little, standing up, he gets animated again by the new conversation, and after a while he collapses into an easy chair and stretches out his legs, saying, "I feel like a new man...

...But it was a transitory setback that did not recur...

...His job of accumulating information begins when he wakes up...

...In his cars, from the prehistoric Oldsmobile to successive Soviet Zils, up to the current Mercedes, there has always been a light for reading at night...

...Despite the restrictions of the U.S...

...I have seen him open the refrigerator to eat a piece of cheese, which was perhaps the first thing he had eaten since breakfast...

...LONG TIME AGO HE SAID: "LEARNING TO rest is as important as learning to work...

...Such a verbal mill requires, of course, an incessant flow of information, well-chewed and digested...

...From the half a box of cigars he used to smoke each day he switched to absolute abstinence, just to have the moral authority to combat smoking in the country where Christopher Columbus discovered tobacco -still the source of a good part of its income...

...His attitude in the face of defeat, even in the slightest act of daily life, seems to obey a private logic: He does not even admit it, and he does not have a moment's peace until he has managed to invert the terms and turn failure into victory...

...It's an immense sacrifice, since his appetite is among the biggest, and he is an insatiable hunter of recipes, which he likes to try out with a kind of scientific fervor...

...One night, while he was eating vanilla ice cream in small slow spoonfuls, I saw him so overwhelmed by the weight of the destinies of so many others, so removed from himself, that for an instant he seemed different to me from the man he had always been...

...It is not unusual on any given night to find yourself flying in an airplane to some secret destination, being the best man at a wedding, fishing for lobsters on the open sea or tasting the first French cheeses made in Camagtiey...

...Many times he has taken a book before dawn, and commented on it the following morning...

...To this must be added the reports of his official services and of his visitors, and everything that could be of interest to his infinite curiosity...

...At the beginning of the revolution, hardly a week after his triumphal entry into Havana, he spoke on television for seven hours without respite...

...NUMBER 2 (AUGUST 1990) 45 45 VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 2 (AUGUST 1990)Cuba I I asKea nim wnat ne woula most liKe tO ao: "'-ang around on some street corner...

...I have heard him in his few moments of nostalgia evoking the pastoral dawns of his rural childhood, the sweetheart of his youth who left, the things he could have done differently to win more time from life...

...One was his terrible power of seduction...

...He asks successive questions in instantaneous bursts until he discovers the why of the why of the final why...

...His mannerof writing seems like that of a professional...

...I had arrived the day before with a group of journalists from Caracas, and we started listening in our hotel rooms...

...He thinks that the television interviews end up unnatural because of the inevitable fragmentation, and it seems to him unjust to have spent up to five hours of his life for a seven-minute program...

...On other occasions he found that his typists had made an error, and rather than correcting it as he went along he would stop reading and make the change with a ball-point pen, taking his time...

...He is the anti-dogmatist par excellence, whose creative imagination hovers on the edge of heresy's abyss...

...With him, you know where you begin, but you never know where you will end up...

...In conclusion, listening to Fidel Castro in so many and diverse circumstances, I have wondered many times if his zeal for conversation does not obey an organic need to hang on at all costs to the guiding thread of truth amid the hallucinatory mirages of power...

...Some wait for months...

...A T FIRST, PUBLIC EVENTS BEGAN WITH HIS arrival, and that was as unreliable as the rain...

...And in some cases to gauge the calibre of the person he is questioning, and treat him accordingly...

...His fellow conversationalist has to work to not feel like he is being subjected to an inquisitorial examination...

...Two things caught the attention of those of us hearing Fidel Castro for the first time...

...The most conservative of the legislators voiced the surprising view that to him no one seemed as effective as Fidel Castro for serving as a mediator between Latin America and the United States...

...The truth is that there are none...

...It is not unusual for some lucky journalist to ask him a casual question in the course of a public appearance and for the dialogue to end in an interview several hours long on every conceivable subject...