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The Conversion of Fidel
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13420 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
4,254 Words |
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Georgie Anne Geyer
Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist whose columns on
international affairs appear in more than a hundred newspapers
in the United States and Latin America. Her most recent book
is Guerrilla Prince, a biography of Fidel Castro. |
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
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