Jose Manuel Prieto structures his article in The Nation (via) on the conceit that he's setting the world's cab drivers straight - "The Cuban Revolution explained to taxi drivers". When they hear he's Cuban, these assorted drivers, they invariably shout out the name of Fidel Castro with approbation. As an Indian/Pakistani driver in New York put it to him with some enthusiasm, "He gave to the Americans up the ass."
Prieto of course, having some experience of Cuba under Castro, knows better than this:
[F]or those who are confused by the unswerving loyalty of so many Latin American intellectuals, so many writers of genius, to Fidel Castro, let me explain. They see him for what he is: the greatest fabulist of his time, an outstanding performance artist whose famous speeches are the most considerable part of the performance. The writers know he is as great as they are for this one achievement: his discovery of how to cease being a provincial in the arena of world politics, his strategy of effectively embedding himself in world literature (or in the world's fictions).
Maybe I'm wrong. I can hear more than one voice pounding in my ears (in a friend's living room in Paris, in a Stockholm kitchen), shutting me up--in keeping with our lovely island tradition--by shouting me down.
They can shout all they want.
I'll wait them out, then immediately continue to expand on what I've just been saying: it's easy to see Fidel Castro (the hateful and terrible Fidel Castro) as a great artist who was able to stage a massive production (with the participation of the United States in the role of big bully) of the myth of a confrontation between a tiny country and the Empire, the insubordination that has awoken so much sympathy.
And perhaps therein lies the cause of his popularity within the United States itself, which I vaguely intuit to be in the fine, supremely American, very citizenly tradition of facing down the government: pre-1959 Cuba viewed as a place in America where the US government had gone too far.
His admirers forgive him--and with them, the whole world forgives him--for having taken an entire country prisoner, for the terrible impoverishment of its life, all in the service of a confrontation they saw as far too costly for their own countries, a confrontation that a public not silenced by the pretext of an eternal state of emergency, not automatically accused of giving in to the Enemy, wouldn't hesitate to condemn.
The Cuban Revolution awoke a tremendous enthusiasm in Latin America, fed by the hatred and visceral anti-Americanism that the United States' stunning and incomprehensible success arouses in the somewhat magical mind of Latin Americans, who understand only plunder and looting and can explain the American miracle of prosperity to themselves only in those terms.
And isn't there also, across Europe, a certain discomfort with America--and might that be why they were delighted to see America "having trouble" with a very clever young fellow whose manners were appalling, true, but who was superb in his role of denouncer, thorn in the side? (But a terrible, tendentious and obviously limited politician, a fast talker, a demagogue, an arrogant street hawker.)
Well yes; very well put. But of course, as Prieto well knows, and as the passage above demonstrates, it's not so much the cab drivers that need to be educated out of their reflex support for Castro, and their reflex hatred of America, it's the left-leaning intellectuals: precisely, in fact, the kind of people who read The Nation.
There's an interview with Prieto here.
Do you remember the Mariel boatlift? It's a shame we didn't have blogging back then. It was almost excruciating to watch American academcs twist themselves into pretzels to make it all seem less than it was. I remember one in particular tell his audience that his "research" (whatever than meant) showed that only prisoners and drug dealers were leaving Cuba.
Posted by: Dom | November 29, 2009 at 04:27 AM