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Interview
with Fidel Castro (Part 1)
“Obama has to be persuaded to avoid nuclear war”
• Fidel answers questions from
Carmen Lira Saade, editor of Mexico’s La Jornada
newspaper
(Taken from
CubaDebate)
HAVANA. He was
fighting for his life for four years.
Entering and leaving the operating room, intubated,
being fed intravenously, catheters, frequent lapses
into unconsciousness…
 “My
illness is no state secret,” he would have said just
before it became a crisis and forced him to “do what
I had to do:” to delegate his functions as president
of the Council of State and consequently, as
Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Cuba.
“I
cannot continue any longer,” he admitted then – as
he reveals in this his first interview with a
foreign newspaper since that time. He made the
transfer of command, and handed himself over to the
doctors.
That
event shook the entire nation, friends from other
parts; prompted his detractors to cherish revanchist
hopes and put the powerful neighbor to the North on
a state of alert. It was July 31, 2006 when the
resignation letter of the maximum leader of the
Cuban Revolution was officially announced.
What
his most ferocious enemies failed to obtain in 50
years (blockades, wars, assassination attempts) was
attained by an illness about which nobody knew
anything and everything was speculated. An illness
which that regime, whether he accepted it or not,
was going to convert into a “state secret.”
(I
am thinking about Raúl, about the Raúl Castro of
those moments. It was not only the package that he
was suddenly entrusted with, although he was always
in agreement; it was the delicate state of health of
his partner Vilma Espín – who died of cancer shortly
afterward – and the highly possible death of his
older brother and the only jefe in the
military, political and family contexts.)
Forty days ago today, Fidel Castro reappeared in
public in a definitive way, at least without any
apparent danger of a relapse. In a relaxed
atmosphere and when everything would make on think
that the storm has passed, the most important man of
the Cuban Revolution looks healthy and vital, while
not fully dominating his leg movements.
For
the approximately five hours that the
conversation-interview with La Jornada lasted
– including lunch – Fidel tackled the most diverse
issues, although he is obsessed by some in
particular. He allowed questions about anything –
although he was the one who asked the most – and
reviewed for the first time and with a painful
frankness certain moments of health crises that he
has suffered over the last four years.
“I
came to the point of being dead,” he revealed with
an amazing tranquility. He did not mention by name
the diverticulitis that he was suffering from, nor
the hemorrhages that led the specialists of his
medical team to operate on various or many
occasions, with a risk to his life every time.
What
he did speak on at length was the suffering that he
endured. And he showed no inhibition about
describing that painful stage as a “Calvary.”
“I
no longer aspired to live, or far less… I asked
myself on various occasions if those people (his
doctors) were going to let me live in those
conditions or if they were going to let me die… Then
I survived, but in very poor physical shape. I
reached the point of weighing just over 50 kilos.”
“Sixty-six kilos,” clarifies Dalia, his inseparable
compañera who was there for the conversation.
Only she, two of his doctors and another two of his
closest collaborators were present.
“Imagine: a guy of my height weighing 66 kilos. Now
I’ve gone up to 85-86 kilos, and this morning I
managed to take 600 steps on my own, without my
stick, unaided.
“I
am telling you that you are in the presence of a
kind of re-sus-citat-ed man,” he stressed with a
certain pride. He knows that, in addition to the
magnificent medical team which attended him during
all those years, thus putting to the test the
quality of Cuban medicine, he has been able to count
on his will and that steel discipline that is always
imposed when he embarks on something.
“I
never commit the slightest violation,” he affirmed.
“Moreover, that means that I have become a doctor
with the cooperation of doctors. I discuss things
with them, ask questions (he asks many), learn (and
he obeys)…”
He
is fully aware of the reasons for his accidents and
falls, although he insists that one hasn’t
necessarily led to another. “The first time it was
because I didn’t do the necessary warm-up before
playing basketball.” Then came that of Santa Clara:
Fidel was coming down from the statue to Che, where
he had presided over a tribute, and fell head first.
“That was influenced by the fact that those who look
after you are also getting old, losing their
faculties and didn’t take care,” he clarified.
That
was followed by the fall in Holguín, likewise a
severe one. All of these accidents before the other
illness turned into a crisis, leaving him
hospitalized for a long time.
“Laid out in that bed, I only looked around me,
ignorant of all those machines. I didn’t know how
long that torment was going to last and my only hope
was that the world would stop;” surely in order not
to miss anything. “But I rose from the dead,” he
said proudly.
“And
when you rose from the dead, Comandante, what did
you find?”
I asked him.
“A
seemingly insane world… A world that appears every
day on television, in the newspapers, and which
nobody understands, but one that I would not have
wanted to miss for anything in the world,” he smiled
in amusement.
With
a surprising energy for a human being rising from
the dead, as he put it, and with exactly the same
intellectual curiosity as before, Fidel Castro has
brought himself up to date.
Those who know him well, say that every project,
colossal or millimetric, which he undertakes he does
so with a fierce passion, and even more so if he has
to confront adversity, as had been and was the case.
“That is when he seems to be in the best humor.”
Someone who claims to know him well told him:
“Things must be going very badly, because you’re
looking in fine health.”
This
survivor’s task of accumulating daily news begins
when he wakes up. He devours books with a reading
speed obtained by nobody know what method; he reads
200-300 news cables every day; he is aware of and up
to date on new communication technologies; he is
fascinated by Wikileaks, “the deep throat of
Internet,” famous for the leaking of more than
90,000 military documents on Afghanistan, on which
this new ‘surfer’ is working.
“You
see what this means, compañera?” he said to me.
“Internet has placed in our hands the possibility of
communicating with the world. We didn’t have any of
that before,” he commented, while he delights in
reviewing and selecting cables and texts downloaded
from the net, which he has on his desk: a small item
of furniture, two small for the size (even
diminished by illness) of its occupant.
“The
secrets are over, or at least would appear to be. We
are in the face of a ‘high-technology research
journalism,’ as The New York Times calls it,
in the reach of everybody.
“We
are in the face of the most powerful weapon that has
ever existed, which is communication,” he
interjects. “The power of communication has been and
is in the hands of the empire and of ambitious
private groups who used and abused it, that is why
the media has fabricated the power that its boasts
today.”
I
listen to him and couldn’t help but think of
Chomsky; any of the deceptions that the empire
attempts must previously have the support of the
media, principally newspapers and television, and
today, naturally, with all the instruments offered
by Internet.
It
is the media that creates consensus before any
action. “It is making the bed,” we would say… It is
setting up the theater of operations.
However, Fidel added, although they have tried to
preserve that power intact, they have been unable
to. They are losing it day by day, while others,
many, very many, are emerging every minute…
He
went on to acknowledge the efforts of some websites
and media in addition to Wikileaks: on the Latin
America side, Telesur of Venezuela; Canal Encuentro,
the Argentine TV cultural channel; and all the
public and private media that are standing up to the
region’s powerful private consortiums and the news,
culture and entertainment transnationals.
Reports on the manipulation of information on the
part of powerful national or regional business
groups, their conspiracies to enthrone or eliminate
governments or political figures, or on the
“dictatorship” exercised by the empire via its
transnationals, are now within the reach of all
mortals.
But
not of Cuba, which has just about one Internet port
(ISP) for the entire country, comparable to that of
any Hilton or Sheraton hotel.
That
is why connecting in Cuba is a desperate business.
It is like surfing in slow motion.
“Why
is it like that?” I asked.
“Because of the categorical refusal of the United
States to give the island Internet access via one of
the underwater fiber optic cables that pass close to
our coast. Cuba is obliged, instead, to download a
satellite signal, which makes the service that the
Cuban government has to pay much more expensive, and
prevents the use of a wider band that could allow
access to many more users and at the speed normal
throughout the world with broadband.”
And
that is why the Cuban government is giving
connection priority not to those who can pay for the
cost of the service, but to those who most need it,
like doctors, academics, journalists, professionals,
government ‘cadres’ and social use Internet clubs.
It cannot do any more.
I think about the extraordinary efforts of the Cuban
website CubaDebate to internally nourish and take
the country’s information abroad under the current
conditions. But, according to Fidel, Cuba could find
a solution to this situation.
He
was referring to the conclusion of underwater cables
extending from La Guaira port in
Venezuela
to the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba. With these
works being undertaken by the government of Hugo
Chávez, the island could have broadband and
possibilities for a huge amplification of the
service.
“Cuba, and you in particular, have been pointed to
many times as maintaining a strictly anti-U.S.
position and you have even been accused of bearing
hatred toward that nation,” I said to him.
“Nothing of the kind,” he clarified. “Why hate the
United States if it is only a product of history?”
But,
in real terms: barely 40 days ago, when he had not
completely “risen,” he concentrated – as a variation
– on his powerful neighbor in his new Reflections.
“The
thing is that I began to see very clearly the
problems of the growing world dictatorship…” and he
presented, in the light of all the information that
he was managing, the “imminence of a nuclear attack
that would unleash a world conflagration.”
He
was still unable to go out and talk, to do what he
is doing now, he told me. He could just about write
with some fluidity, because he not only had to learn
how to walk again, but also, at the age of 84, he
had learn to write again.
“I
came out of hospital, I went home, but I walked, I
exceeded myself. Then I had to do rehabilitation for
my feet. By then I was already managing to relearn
writing.
“The
qualitative jump came when I could dominate all the
elements that made it possible for me to do
everything that I am doing now. But I can and must
improve… I can get to the point of walking well.
Today, as I told you, I walked 600 steps alone,
without a stick, without anything, and I have to
balance that with climbing up and going down, with
the hours that I sleep, with work.”
“What is there behind this frenzy of work which,
instead of rehabilitation could lead him to a
relapse?”
Fidel concentrated, closed his eyes as if to sleep,
but no… he returns to the charge:
”I do not wish to be absent in these days. The world
is in the most interesting and dangerous phase of
its existence and I am very committed to what is
going to happen. I still have things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Like constituting a whole anti-nuclear war
movement;” that is what he has been devoting himself
to since his reappearance.
“Creating an international force of persuasion to
avoid that colossal threat happening,” represents a
tremendous challenge, and Fidel has never been able
to resist a challenge.
“In
the beginning I thought that the nuclear attack
would be on North Korea, but I soon rectified that
because I said to myself that China would stop that
with its Security Council veto…
“But
nobody is stopping that of Iran, because there is no
Chinese or Russian veto. Then came the (UN)
Resolution and although Brazil and Turkey vetoed it,
Lebanon didn’t and so the decision was taken.”
Fidel is calling on scientists, economists,
communicators, etc to give their opinions on what
the mechanism might be via which the horror is going
to be unleashed and the way that it might be
avoided. He has even taken them to exercises of
science fiction.
“Think, think!” he urges in discussions. “Reason,
imagine,” exclaims the enthusiastic teacher that he
has become in recent days.
Not
everyone has understood his concern. More than a few
people have seen his new campaign as preaching
disaster or even delirious. To that must be added
the fear of many that his health will suffer a
relapse.
Fidel is not giving up: nothing or nobody is capable
of even holding him back. He needs to convince as
rapidly as possible in order to detain the nuclear
conflagration that, he insists, is threatening to
obliterate a large part of humanity. “We have to
mobilize the world to persuade Barack Obama,
president of the United States, to avoid a nuclear
war. That is the only thing that he can do or not
do, press the button.”
With
the data that he handles like an expert and the
documents backing up his words, Fidel is questioning
and making a spine-chilling exposition:
“Do
you know the nuclear power that is held by a good
few countries in the world at present, compared to
that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki era?
“It
is 470,000 times the explosive power of either of
the two bombs that the United States dropped on
those two Japanese cities; 470,000 times more,” he
emphasizes, scandalized.
That
is the power of each one of the 20,000-plus nuclear
weapons calculated as being in the world today.
With
much less than that power – with just 100 – a
nuclear winter which would darken the world in its
totality could be produced.
This
barbarity could come about in a matter of days, to
be more precise, on September 9, which is when the
90-day period given by the UN Security Council
before inspecting Iran shipping expires.
“Do
you think that the Iranians are going to give in?
Can you imagine that? Courageous and religious men
who see death as almost a prize… Well, the Iranians
are not going to give in, that is a fact. Are the
Yankis going to give in? And, what is going to
happen if neither one gives in? And that could
happen on September 9.”
Gabriel García Márquez wrote on the 41st anniversary
of Hiroshima: “One minute after the explosion, more
than half of human beings will have died, the dust
and smoke of continents in flames will defeat
sunlight and total shadows will return to reign in
the world. A winter of orange-colored rain and icy
hurricanes will invert the season of the oceans and
turn around the course of the rivers, whose fish
will have died of thirst in the boiling waters… the
era of rock and heart transplants will revert to its
ice infancy…”
“I
DO NOT HARBOR THE LEAST DOUBT THAT THERE WILL BE
GREAT CHANGES IN MEXICO”
“Tell me, tell me, what is all this that the “mafia”
is saying about everything that I wrote?”
“It
isn’t only the mafia, all right? There are more
people disconcerted by those Reflections,
Comandante. Not to mention the displeasure that you
gave to the Mexican government.”
“I
had no interest in criticizing the government… Why
would I get involved with the Mexican government?
For fun? If I devoted myself to getting involved
with governments, to stating the bad or erroneous
things that I consider they have done,
Cuba
wouldn’t have any relations.
“It
is being said that with your praise and open
acknowledgements, what you said to Andrés Manuel
López Obrador was the “kiss of the devil”… and
people are asking why it is that you are now making
public both the statements of Carlos Ahumada to
Cuban justice and details of your singular
relationship with Carlos Salinas de Gortari. They
suspect a hidden intention.”
“No,
no, no. I had the good fortune to find Andrés
Manuel’s book. Somebody gave it to me at the end of
the (National) Assembly session. I read it rapidly
and its reading inspired me to write what I wrote.”
“What inspired you?”
“Discovering what he had done with the land, with
the mines; what he had done with the oil… Finding
out about the theft, the plunder that that great
country has suffered; about that barbarity that they
have committed, and that (now has Mexico how it
has…)”
“There are mistrustful people on one side or the
other who are insisting that there are other
intentions behind your chance words.”
“No.
I hadn’t planned to write what I wrote; it wasn’t
within my plans. I have a free agenda.”
“Well, it’s caused an uproar, I can tell you. They
are accusing you of having unleashed a whole
political scandal and the criticisms are raining
down because they are saying that whether for good
or bad, Comandante, you have gotten involved with
the Mexican electoral process…”
“Ah!
Yes?” he asks very animatedly. “So there is
criticism of me? How good, how good! Send me them!
And who are these criticisms coming from?”
“From many people, apart from one. The only one – of
those involved – who has not said a single word is
Carlos Salinas…
“Because he’s the most intelligent one, he always
was, as well as being more skillful,” said Fidel
with a mischievous smile. Judging by his expression,
it would seem that he is already waiting for
Salinas’ response. At best, even a book.
He
went on to repeat some of the paragraphs of his
Reflections: that Salinas had been in solidarity
with Cuba, that he had acted as a mediator
(appointed by
Clinton
in 1994) between the United States and the island
“and conducted himself well and really acted as a
mediator and not as an ally of the United States…”
He
related that when Salinas obtained permission from
the Cuban government to take refuge in that country
and even “legally” acquire a house, that they saw
“quite a lot of each other” and exchanged points of
view, et cetera.
“I
came to think that he never tried to deceive me,”
Fidel said sarcastically.
“Really?” I asked. Did Salinas comment on or consult
with him concerning his government’s decision to
open up relations with self-declared terrorist
organizations, such as the Cuban-American National
Foundation, created with the exclusive purpose of
overthrowing the regime and assassinating its
president, Fidel Castro?
For
the first time in the history of relations between
the two countries, a Mexican government opened the
doors of the presidential palace to Jorge Mas
Canosa, at that time president of that paramilitary
organization, and an old enemy of the Cuban
Revolution.
“The
man that you brought to this house was a killer,” I
told Carlos Salinas on that occasion, during an
interview with La Jornada.
Salinas
nodded, giving me the right. But he immediately
justified himself by saying that his government was
seeking participation with Cuban “plurality” in the
“dialogue” that was taking place for a rapprochement
between the two sides.
“I
wish to state that Mexico is extremely respectful of
the internal processes decided by the Cubans,”
Salinas affirmed then.
“But
what is happening to Cuba is not going to be at a
remove from Mexicans; Mexicans cannot be absent from
the transformations that might happen in that
country because they will have repercussions in
Mexico, in all of Latin America. We have to maintain
this communication with the whole range of opinions…
(La Jornada, August 1992).
“Opinions? Mexico needed the “opinion” of a criminal
to enrich its dialogue with neighboring countries,”
I enquired now.
Fidel had lowered his head and asked, as if to
himself:
“Why
did he do that to us? He had conducted himself as a
friend of Cuba. Pending political and economic
matters were being arranged with him, finally… He
gave the impression that he didn’t have any problems
with us.
“Why
the hell did he have to receive that bandit?” he
asked, somewhat disconcerted.
But
he didn’t want to say anything more. He had turned
the page a while back or had reserved it for the
moment at which – after the obligatory balancing –
he would decide to make public knowledge the
termination of his relationship with the former
Mexican president, as occurred with his Reflection
“The giant with the seven-league boots.”
“Cuba never wanted to hand over the filmed
documentation that confirmed the conspiracy against
López Obrador, as the PRD was demanding at the time.
“In
that we could not please them,” he explained. “We
sent all the documentation to the authority asking
for his extradition (the Mexican Foreign Ministry).
Any other attitude would not have been serious,” he
emphasized.
Then, Fidel became seriously ill and that matter,
like many others, had had to wait.
“Why
the mention of López Obrador at this pre-electoral
moment?
“Because I had a debt with him. I wanted to tell him
(although he did not agree to hand over the
documentation asked for) that we were not in any
conspiracy against him, nor (were we) or are we
aligned with anybody in order to damage him. That,
as I said in what I wrote, I am honored to share his
points of view.
“That is precisely where they are saying that you
gave him ‘the kiss of the devil,’ Comandante.”
“So
we won’t even mention inviting him to Cuba, right?”
he said with a roguish smile. “That would be risking
too much, wouldn’t it? That whole gang would fall on
top of him, to discredit him and take votes away
from him.
“Like 50 years ago, in the early days of the
Revolution, when traveling to Cuba was a totally
daring undertaking. One photo arriving or leaving
the Mexican airport for Havana could result in
persecution, blows, prison…”
Fidel maintained his that little laugh of his, and
advised:
“You
Mexicans shouldn’t be so concerned about these
things. All of that is going to change. I do not
harbor the slightest doubt that there are going to
be great changes in Mexico.”
To
be continued...
Translated by Granma International
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