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Castro: El Supremo
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11746 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1987 |
5,920 Words |
| Author
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Dolores Moyano Martin
Dolores Moyano Martin is a Washington-based writer who
specializes in Latin American affairs. |
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.
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