The Deng of Cuba?

Fidel Castro has undoubtedly led one of the more interesting lives of our times. The story of a gun-toting rebel coming to power and then staring down the most powerful men in the world for over half a century should have a personal dimension the world would love reading about. But anyone hoping to find that story in this tome attributed to Castro, with the help of Ignacio Ramonet, is bound to be acutely disappointed.

By presenting the story in the form of a 600-odd page fawning interview, the book reveals contempt for the reader that is extreme even by Communist standards. And just in case you don't get the hint, Ramonet tells you at the outset that "it never crossed my mind that we should speak about Castro's personal life, his wife or his children". My Life then is really My Official Life as the Cuban leader would have put it in a press note that was revised several times over. The few personal details that have been allowed to filter through are about his now distant childhood. And even here, though the facts suggest a rather turbulent period, what you get is a sanitised version of the individuals involved.

Once we cast aside expectations of a genuine autobiography, what we are left with is Castro's reconsidered version of the major events in Cuba's history since just before the revolution. And a researcher who is willing to dig her heels in could look for answers to some interesting questions. How, for instance, did the leader of a small state survive the hostility of a superpower neighbour, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

And the answer may well be: By not caring too much for Marxist theory. It is not just that he often gets the titles of Marx's works wrong and has to be corrected by Ramonet. He is quite explicit that his own view of globalisation is to the right of Stiglitz. And there are not many Marxists around the world who take a similar view of the Nobel prize-winning economist.

Nor is this an exception. Right through the book Castro reveals a willingness to pick up elements that are well beyond the line drawn by doctrinaire Marxism. He is particularly wary of what could go wrong with administered prices. Castro says he told Yeltsin, "You people keep some products so cheap that they are wasted. Bread is too cheap ... and a lot of people buy bread to raise chickens ... [That policy] led to all sorts of waste and diversion of resources" (p. 362). A free market economist could not have put it better.

His ability to first build an ideological barrier and then reach out successfully to elements from across that boundary is seen in the political sphere as well. He builds on his relationship with the former US president, Jimmy Carter, calling him "one of that country's most honest presidents" (p. 405). He also presents himself as a great friend of the Kennedy family, suggesting at one point that John Kennedy may have been assassinated because "he showed himself to be reasonable" (p. 289) during the Cuban Missile crisis.

Castro would like the world to see him as always being a pragmatist. In 1963 Che Guevara entered an economic debate with others that attracted, on opposite sides, the French economist Charles Bettelheim and the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel. Castro largely stayed out and now refers to the debate as "pretty Byzantine" (p. 249).

This pragmatism is mixed with contempt for what he calls hyperproduction (p. 355). He attacks the preoccupation with production in the Soviet Union and, more predictably, in globalisation. Hyperproduction comes with the destruction of the environment and the humanity of human resources. He believes it is this wariness about theorists' preoccupation with the productivity of globalisation that has ensured Cuba did not go the way of Nicaragua.

Fidel Castro would clearly like to be remembered as a Marxist who was as pragmatic as Deng Xiao Ping but much less preoccupied with production. But whether this worldview will survive beyond him is a question the book does not care to answer or even give us enough to hazard a guess.

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MY LIFE

Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet
Allen Lane
Rs 795; pp 724