Mi Vida: The Manichean Face of Dictatorship

Fidel Castro is one of the few surviving Cold War enemies of the United States. He has witnessed as adversaries ten US Presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Younger. Castro is certainly the longest running dictator in the Western hemisphere, and arguably in modern times. He certainly has an acute sense of history, or at least Cuban–American relations, as the ultimate measuring rod of the success of his regime. To be sure, this relationship remains his testing rod from start to finish. Exactly 1 year prior to the anniversary of his movement’s 1959 seizure of power, he announced to a television audience that “In the morning, 49 years of the revolution will be behind us and the 50th year will symbolize half a century of heroic resistance. We proclaim our pride in this record to the world.” His autobiographical potpourri, Fidel Castro: My Life is intended to both share the pride and give his version of events for the historical record. Longevity is indeed the acid test of legitimacy—as it is for all political structures. There is a sense in which Castro’s premature celebration of a half century of rule is quite accurate. For the year 1958 was one in which his guerrilla movement held increased ground in the sparsely populated regions of Cuba, and even more significant, a time in which the decay of the Fulgencio Batista regime became apparent. The entrenched political apparatus had been paralyzed and the Cuban military forces had become incapable of hard fighting. So the claim of the text of this work that it represents a half century review is justified, and should not excite historical purists who date the regime from the entrance of the guerrilla forces on the streets of Havana on January 8th, 1959. Indeed the failed attack at the Moncada Barracks in 1953 is frequently used as the benchmark for the new era. But whatever the dates used by both friend and foe of the regime, this guerrilla group’s seizure of political power must be surely recognized as a major event of the twentieth century—a movement with a rise that, as of this writing, is still awaiting its fall, a fall that Fidel Castro has sworn to prevent from happening. It is assuredly an accident that the autobiographies of both Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro are entitled My Life. Even so and in both instances, the government changes they initiated have had a profound impact on the course of events. One must also note that Castro, like Clinton, has been clever enough to realize that makers of history operate in a climate of public acquiescence if not complete active support. That allows for the first and perhaps most significant observation about Castro’s autobiography: his increasing awareness of the need to reshape the record of his half century into a response to populist aims and nationalist ambitions. Castro’s thundering earlier rubbish that “history will absolve me” has been replaced by endless repetition in which Fidel assures his readers that in past and present, his only concern has been to satisfy the needs and desires of the Cuban people. Behind the absolute dictatorship of Castro family hierarchy lurks a mythic “public opinion” democracy of the people. This perhaps explains Castro’s extraordinary claims that Cuba has never been a nation that harbored political prisoners or ever resorted to illegal measures to extract confessions, even as thousands languish in its places of incarceration. Then again, it was none other than Joseph Stalin in his own autobiography who announced as his primary achievements as absolute Soc (2008) 45:300–304 DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9092-6