New at Reason

In the cover story from Reason's March issue, Glenn Garvin reviews a biography of the man who made Fidel Castro. Read it before it's adapted into a quasi-sequel of The Last King of Scotland!

Comments

Thomas Paine's Goiter | February 28, 2007, 12:57pm | #

After reading this in the magazine, I started researching Matthews. I was flabbergasted at the respect that he still garners in some quarters.

joe | February 28, 2007, 1:04pm | #

This in tangential, but I don't think the hit on Anderson Cooper was warranted at all.

The implication of the author's phrasing makes it appear that he was reporting the false rumors about the Superdome et al, and he was not. Cooper tried to get too much play out of his spitting nails act, but his reporting was respectably factual and accurate.

ron | February 28, 2007, 1:13pm | #

The problem is that passion, as the mother of any teenaged girl will tell you, can lead to big trouble.

wait what

Marcvs | February 28, 2007, 3:56pm | #

The problem is that passion, as the mother of any teenaged girl will tell you, can lead to big trouble.

wait what

Pregnancy, my dear man, pregnancy.

ron | February 28, 2007, 4:01pm | #

well yeah i get it, i just think it was totally out of left field.

spur | February 28, 2007, 4:14pm | #

from the article:

he hypes Castro as Batista’s "most dangerous enemy" and declares that "hundreds of highly respected citizens are helping Señor Castro,” who is offering "a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist." We are assured that "thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro and the new deal for which they think he stands." Castro, while admittedly a "fanatic," is a "man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership," with an "overpowering" personality."

Outside of the anti-communist statement, what exactly is untrue here? He was Batista's most dangerous enemy, he has an overwhelming personality by all accounts and obviously has some leadership skills if he has been in power this long; and I don't like the guy but you obviously got to have some courage and conviction about your ideas to do what Fidel did in the early days, just ideas I disagree with.

swillfredo pareto | February 28, 2007, 4:49pm | #

He must have sat one cubicle over from Walter Duranty.

Les | February 28, 2007, 5:18pm | #

Outside of the anti-communist statement, what exactly is untrue here?

Well, he didn't have "thousands of men and women" with him, indeed, peasants were turning him in quicker than his brother could shoot them.

When you're a dictator, no one can really tell if you've got leadership skills, because you don't know who's following voluntarily and who's just trying to stay out of trouble.

Staying in power when you're a dictator doesn't require leadership skills, because you don't have to convince people that you're right. You just tell them that they can either agree with you or be sent to prison and/or executed.

Having courage and conviction about your ideas is easy when you force them on people at gunpoint.

I will admit, however, that Castro does haven and "overpowering personality." It has overpowered the good sense of liberals all over the world.

joe | February 28, 2007, 6:26pm | #

Les,

There weren't thousands of people fighting on Fidel's side? His followers were never more than a few hundred during the revolution? You sure about that?

And did you even notice that the article was written before Castro came to power?

"When you're a dictator, no one can really tell if you've got leadership skills," Yes, but Castro wasn't a dictator when that was written; he was a rebel living the countryside, and got people to risk their lives to follow him.

"Staying in power when you're a dictator doesn't require leadership skills, because you don't have to convince people that you're right." Yes, but coming to power when you're the leader of a guerilla group requires very effective leadership skills.

"Having courage and conviction about your ideas is easy when you force them on people at gunpoint." And it's very hard when the government and army will put you up against a wall for them.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, yes, Fidel Castro actually was brave and charismatic.

I think one of the reasons Castro comes off as credible to some people is the absolute inability of his most vocal opponents to be remotely objective about him.

Les | February 28, 2007, 6:43pm | #

joe,

At the time the article was written, Castro had a handful of soldiers, 18 I think it was.

I see your points about leadership abilities, though. And okay, "brave" counts, too!

I think one of the reasons Castro comes off as credible to some people is the absolute inability of his most vocal opponents to be remotely objective about him.

I see what you're saying, but I think it's not that hard to be objective about Castro, and by "objective," I'm assuming you mean pointing out the good and the bad.

Good: Healthcare. Literacy. (Brave and leadership skills, too! Happy!?)

Let me know what I missed.

Bad: Dictator, executed lots of political prisoners, imprisons reporters who are critical of his government, sent homosexuals to camps.

Once you get to "dictator," what else does one need to say? Once you're locking up dissidents and homosexuals, does it matter in the least that you showed leadership skills and bravery almost half a century ago?

joe | February 28, 2007, 7:26pm | #

Of course, Les. I'm certainly not trying to paint a pretty picture of him.

I just don't think it's wise to turn real life enemies into cardboard cutouts in our political discourse. It's a bad habit, and it makes us look stupid when we get called on it.

Les | February 28, 2007, 8:56pm | #

I just don't think it's wise to turn real life enemies into cardboard cutouts in our political discourse. It's a bad habit, and it makes us look stupid when we get called on it.

Point taken. But I honestly feel like the inclination for someone like me to reflexively dismiss the good qualities of a dictator like Castro is certainly more understandable than the tendency of too many intelligent liberals' to visit and be politely entertained by a tyrant. Maybe they think that because so many conservatives hate him, he can't be that bad. I honestly don't know.

Isaac Bartram | February 28, 2007, 9:38pm | #

Good: Healthcare. Literacy.

Hmmmm! Oh, except for the fact that Cuba already had the best healthcare and the highest level of literacy (close to 100% urban, while lower in the country) in Latin America under Battista. And the fact that many other countries in the region which were much more repressive in those days have moved into the democratic camp and seen much more dramatic improvements in both Public Health and literacy .

Yeah, that Fidel, such a genius!

joe | February 28, 2007, 10:06pm | #

Wow, you mean, better than Guatemala? The country went from third-world levels in those measurements to first world, with only a third-world economy to draw on. That ain't peanuts, and it happened decades earlier than other countries in the region.

Of course, it would have been better if the Cuban revolution had been a democratic one. I wonder how many Latin American democratic revolutions we quashed.

thoreau | March 1, 2007, 8:51am | #

I think joe makes some good points here. First, Castro must have some sort of skills, or else he wouldn't have been able to do what he did. It's not like you just get to say "I'm a dictator" and then somebody obligingly shoots whoever disagrees with you. You kind of have to build a movement, trick a bunch of people, out-maneuver whoever is currently in power, and then make sure that no charismatic dissident, guerrilla commander, or ambitious henchman offs you. And while you can keep a lot of people loyal with the spoils of your kleptocratic regime, it helps if you do at least one or two things sort of right (or at least "right" for enough people), so that you can avoid mass unrest. Or at least talk some other kleptocrat into funding you, so that everybody in your fiefdom gets a TV set with which to watch your 8 hour speeches.

Also, it does seem like some of the Castro critics make themselves easy to dismiss by pretending that he's, like, the worst dictator around. Sorry, but in a world that includes North Korea and Turkmenistan, and where many living people remember Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao's "Great Leap Forward", that's just not a credible claim.

The fact that Castro is a second-rate dictator should give us a clue about what a fucked up world we live in.