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'Prince' or Pawn?
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18531 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
2,931 Words |
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Daniel James
Daniel James has written extensively on Cuba. He is the author
of Cuba: First Soviet Satellite in the Americas and Che
Guevara: a Bibliography, and editor-translator of The Complete
Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents. |
GUERRILLA PRINCE
The Untold Story of Fidel Castro
Georgie Anne Geyer
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991
445 pp., $22.95
Georgie Anne Geyer deserves an A for original research. She has uncovered information about Fidel Castro's early years, and his private life after becoming a world figure, which has not appeared in other biographies known to this reviewer. It comes as a surprise, for example, that Castro depended upon Cuba's voodoo-like Santeria sect for guerrilla recruits as well as psychic sustenance in the first stages of his struggle against the Batista dictatorship.
One of Geyer's most valuable contributions to an understanding of Castro is her evocation of the roles of the two most important women in his life (after his mother), his wife Mirta Diaz Balart and his secretary-lover Celia Sanchez. It is interesting to learn that his one true love was always--and, the author suggests, still is--Mirta, who bore him his only legitimate offspring, a son and namesake.
Castro loved Celia, too, but more like a master does a loyal and devoted servant. The two met in the Sierra Maestra at a highly significant time, exactly one day before he would be interviewed by Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, who there and then would create virtually out of whole cloth the guerrilla hero we later knew. Celia quickly became "a kind of moving office, a floating bureaucracy," for she was organized where he was chaotic in his daily affairs. In sum, she was "his secretary, his guide, his mother, his protective shadow, that one woman in a man's life who will and must always be there because she is the one woman who has made herself indispensable." Celia also was "the one woman who would and could tell him when he was wrong, pigheaded, or just damned foolish."
Castro's meeting with Mathews was pure "guerrilla theater," as his erstwhile admirer Tad Schulz termed it in his recent biography and Geyer confirms in a chapter so entitled. Castro's entire guerrilla force consisted of only eighteen poorly armed men, but he paraded them back and forth repeatedly before the gullible Yankee journalist, to make it appear that they were more numerous than they actually were. Matthews, in turn, gulled his editors into playing up three articles by him which transformed fiction into "news" and deceived the world into believing that Castro led a formidable band of heroic young
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