In August 13, 2009, the Granma newspaper published this consideration by the writer Gabriel García Márquez, on the occasion of the 82nd birthday of his friend Fidel Castro.
His devotion to the word, his power of seduction… he seeks the problems where they are. The inspiration’s motions are characteristic of his style. The books reflect very well the wideness of his tastes.
He gave up on smoking having the moral authority to fight smoking. He likes preparing recipes with a kind of scientific fervor. He is still in excellent physical condition with several hours of daily gymnastics and frequent swimming. Invincible patience, strong discipline… the power of imagination drags him to the unexpected. Learning to work is as important as learning to rest.
Tired of talking, he rests talking. He writes very well and he likes doing it. The greatest stimulus of his life is the emotion of taking risks. The improviser stand seems to be his perfect ecological environment. He always starts with an almost inaudible voice, with an uncertain path, but he takes advantage of any flash to gain ground, inch by inch, until he gives a kind of great blow and seizes the audience. It is the inspiration: the irresistible and dazzling state of grace, which only those who have not had the glory of living it deny it. He is the antidogmatic par excellence.
José Martí is his bedside author and has had the talent of incorporating his ideology into the bloodstream of a Marxist revolution. The essence of his thinking could be in the certainty that doing mass work is fundamentally dealing with individuals.
This could explain his absolute confidence in direct contact. He has a language for each occasion and a different mode of persuasion according to the different interlocutors. He knows how to place himself at the level of each person and has vast and varied information that allows him to move easily in any circumstance.
One thing is known for sure: wherever he is, in any mood and with anyone, Fidel Castro is there to win. His attitude towards defeat, even in the minimum acts of daily life, seems to obey a private logic: he does not even admit it, and he does not have a moment of calm while he fails to reverse the terms and turn it into victory. No one can be more obsessive than him when he has set out to get anything. There is no colossal or millimeter project, in which he does not engage in a violent passion, and especially if he has to face adversity. Never like then, he seems in better disposition, in better mood. Someone who thinks to know him well said once: things must go very wrong, because you are stunning.
Repetitions are one of his ways of working. Ex.: The issue of Latin American foreign debt had appeared for the first time in his conversations for about two years, and had evolved, branching out, deepening. The first thing he said, as a simple arithmetic conclusion, was that the debt was un-payable. Then, the staggered findings appeared: the repercussions of the debt on the economy of the countries, its political and social impact, its decisive influence on international relations, its providential importance for a unitary policy of Latin America…until achieving a totalizing vision, which he presented at an international meeting convened for this purpose and that time has been responsible for demonstrating.
His most rare virtue of politician is that power to glimpse the evolution of a fact until its remote consequences… but that power he does not exercise it by illumination, but as a result of an arduous and stubborn reasoning. His supreme assistant is memory and he uses it in abuse to support speeches or private talks with overwhelming reasoning and arithmetic operations of incredible speed.
It requires the help of incessant, well chewed and digested information. His informative accumulation task starts from when he wakes up. He has breakfast with no less than 200 pages of news from around the world. During the day people send him urgent information wherever he is, he calculates that every day he must read about 50 documents, adding the reports of the official services and his visitors and everything that may interest his infinite curiosity.
The answers have to be exact, as he is able to discover the slightest contradiction of a casual phrase. Another source of vital information is books. He is an insatiable reader. Nobody explains how time reaches him or what method he uses to read so much and so quickly, although he insists he has none in particular. Many times he has taken a book in the early morning and comments it the next morning. He reads English but does not speak it. He prefers reading in Spanish and at any time he is willing to read a letter paper that falls into his hands. He is a regular reader of economic and historical issues. He is a good reader of literature and he follows it carefully.
He has a habit of quick interrogations. Successive questions he asks in instant bursts until he discovers the why of the why of the final why. When a visitor from Latin America gave him a hurried data on the rice consumption of his countrymen, he made his mental calculations and said: How strange, each one eats four pounds of rice a day. His master tactic is to ask about things you know, to confirm your data and in some cases to measure the caliber of the interlocutors, and then, treat them accordingly.
He does not miss the opportunity to inform himself. During the Angolan war he described a battle with such thoroughness at an official reception that it was hard to convince a European diplomat that Fidel Castro had not participated in it. The story he made of the capture and murder of Che, the one that made the assault of la moneda and the death of Salvador Allende or the one that made the devastation of Cyclone Flora, were great spoken reports.
His vision of Latin America in the future is that of Bolívar and Martí, an integral and autonomous community, capable of moving the destiny of the world. The country he knows more about after Cuba is the United States. He thoroughly knows the nature of his people, his power structures, the second intentions of his governments, and this has helped him overcome the ceaseless storm of the blockade.
In a multi-hour interview, he stops at each topic, ventures through his least-thought vertices without ever neglecting precision, aware that a single misused word can cause irreparable damage. He has never refused to answer any question, however provocative it may be, nor has he ever lost his patience. Those who hide the truth for not causing him more worries than he has: he knows it. To an official who did it, he told: They hide truths for not worrying me, but when I finally discover them I will die for the impression of facing so many truths that they have stopped telling me. The most serious, however, are the truths that are hidden to cover up deficiencies, because next to the enormous achievements that underpin the Revolution the political, scientific, sports, cultural achievements, there is a colossal bureaucratic incompetence that affects almost all orders of daily life, and especially to domestic happiness.
When he talks to the people of the street, the conversation recovers the expressiveness and raw frankness of real affections. They call it: Fidel. They surround him without risks, they guard him, they discuss, they contradict, they claim, with an immediate transmission channel through which the truth flows in gush. It is then that the unusual human being is discovered, that the brightness of his own image does not reveal. This is the Fidel Castro that I think I know: A man of austere customs and insatiable illusions, with an old-fashioned formal education, with cautious words and tenuous manners, and unable to conceive any idea that is not colossal.
He dreams of his scientists finding the final medicine against cancer and has created a foreign policy of world power, in an island 84 times smaller than its main enemy. He has the conviction that the greatest achievement of the human being is the good formation of his conscience and that moral stimulation, rather than material, are capable of changing the world and pushing history.
I have heard him in his few hours of longing for life, to evoke the things that he could have done otherwise to gain more time from life. Seeing him very overwhelmed by the weight of so many foreign destinations, I asked him what he wanted to do most in this world, and he answered me immediately: stand in a corner.
Written by Gabriel García Márquez, published in Granma in 2009
Edited by Francisco Martínez Chao
Translated by Susel Esquivel Castro
