Shaman or Charlatan?

My Life

Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet
Allen Lane, £25.00

PLENTY of books have been written about Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution - some of them hagiographic and others mindlessly derogatory. These are the extremes of attitude which the man and the country generate and, in reflecting them, the literature becomes hugely unreliable.

So the history and biography markets have long been in need of a Castro classic. Fidel's illness of the past year has heightened the sense of urgency and Ignacio Ramonet might have got there just in time. The 100 hours of interviews on which the book is based were conducted in the two years prior to Castro's hospitalisation and his revisions of the text took place during the course of his recuperation.

That process points to a significant health warning that must attach to the book. It is rightly filed under "autobiography" and is an account by Castro of his own life and outlook; albeit in an unusual question and answer format. Those who cannot bear to see any good written about the man, his political values or the society he has moulded will doubtless denounce Ramonet for being the mere accomplice in a work of self-justification.

But all autobiographies suffer, or benefit, from that same characteristic. The refreshing point about this one is that the approach taken by Ramonet has ensured that Castro was obliged to answer the difficult questions as well as the easy ones. There have been no areas of exclusion for Ramonet in his quest for Castro's inner thoughts and descriptions of his experiences. The revisions and the translation certainly mean that the text is sometimes stilted, but the basic point of the exercise remains intact - Castro's testimony is now in print, to be accepted or contested.

I have a particular affection for the style of this book because I spent many hours in similar conversations and through them I acquired some understanding of the man's complexity, intelligence, extraordinary retention of detail and vision for a better world. Castro is a great raconteur but all of his stories have a meaning and a point. I do not believe that any other form of autobiography would have reflected these attributes so accurately.

Because Ramonet's roots are in Spain and France, his questions - and Castro's answers - reflect the anecdotes, experiences and opinions which relate to these countries and cultures. Equally, I have heard Castro hold forth on a vast range of particularly British interests; not least his great admiration of Churchill as a military strategist. So there could be any number of books in the same genre. Press the right buttons, and Fidel will respond with great stories and insights. This book captures a fair cross-section.

Ramonet is by no means an uncritical admirer. But criticism has to be tempered by regard to the circumstances that prevailed and an understanding of alternatives at any point in history. This is Castro's opportunity to state his case and answer his critics, in his own words. It is the least that he deserves. The courage of the original invasion and uprising, half a century ago, remains awe-inspiring. So too are the achievements of Castro's Cuba despite the cruel, illegal persecution to which it has been subjected.

I have great personal memories of conversations across the dinner table with Fidel Castro. To my astonishment, I found that the great iconic figure sitting opposite me wanted to argue rather than lecture. His thirst for knowledge extended to subjects as eclectic as salmon farming and Scotch whisky production. He had a view of world affairs which was brilliantly informed by copious reading and political insight, but was still limited, sometimes comically, by lack of contact with those parts of the world which had chosen to treat him like a leper.

Sadly, Britain's record of engagement with Cuba is pathetic. François Mitterrand, when he was in the Élysée Palace, invited Castro to make an official visit to France. In this book, Castro describes beautifully the background to what was obviously a memorable event in his life, which derived from Mitterrand's intelligent, socialist understanding of the Cuban revolution's significance. Over the course of 50 years, there has been no parallel gesture from Britain.

Anyone who is interested in Cuba and the values that it represents should read this book. It will not be difficult to imagine yourself round the dinner table with Fidel Castro - listening, challenging, arguing, enjoying long convoluted stories which always end up somewhere worthwhile. Above all, give a fair hearing to the man who has outlasted every American president since Eisenhower and has been a constant symbol of an alternative approach, however difficult, to meeting human needs and aspirations.

...but Gerald Warner condemns the mendacity and brutality of the Cuban tyrant

THIS is an English-language edition of the book whose publication in Spanish 18 months ago provoked a controversy over its claim to represent 100 hours of conversation between Fidel Castro and the interviewer/editor, Ignacio Ramonet. Critics claimed significant portions of it (42 pages were identified) were recycled texts of Castro's speeches.

Ramonet, editor of the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique, has retained the title 'A Hundred Hours With Fidel' for his introduction to this edition, in which he makes no attempt to disguise his Castroite, leftist sympathies. His interrogation of the Maximum Leader is as challenging and critical as Unity Mitford interviewing Hitler. Ramonet even indulges in the narcissistic speculation that Castro's painstaking rereading of the text may have contributed to the illness that felled him in July 2006.

The Castro legend was created by Herbert L Matthews in three articles for the New York Times in 1957. This book forms its closing parenthesis. Even by the standards of dictators, Castro has always been an extravagant fantasist and fabricator of his own myth. At school he disarmingly confessed to a teacher, "it's just that I'm in the habit of lying". His career has owed as much to Munchhausen as to Marx. Clearly he sees these dictated memoirs as the testament that will perpetuate the mythology.

The dictator is keen to pose as a Renaissance Man - he discourses plausibly, even perceptively, on Balzac and other cultural icons. Otherwise the mendacity is pervasive, relentless and transparent. Of the attack on the Uvero barracks, on May 28, 1957, Castro observes that if enemy aircraft had arrived in support "we'd have had to order a retreat, no doubt about it". In fact, Castro, who did not participate in the assault, ordered a retreat in any case, but was ignored by Che Guevara, who took the barracks. Major Victor Mora, who was with Castro, testified to this. Fidel and his brother Raúl arrived when it was all over.

Castro is especially anxious to milk the great Cuban health care revolution - the regime's most audacious propaganda success - for all it is worth. "Our infant mortality rate has dropped from 60 per 1,000 live births to a figure that ranges between 6 and 6.5, the lowest in the hemisphere, with the exception of Canada, from the United States to Patagonia." So? Pre-Castro Cuba had the best rate in Latin America and ranked 13th in the world.

He boasts of 70,000 doctors, though he admits "tens of thousands" have been sent abroad. This is to earn foreign exchange and spread Cuban propaganda; Castro has equipped 20 hospitals in Bolivia alone. The last pre-Castro census (1953) recorded one doctor for every 1,000 Cubans. Today, outside the showcase clinics the regime maintains to treat the nomenklatura and rich foreigners, patients have to bring their own bedding, thread for sutures and even light-bulbs to more typical hospitals. When the dictator fell ill last year, a Spanish surgeon and his equipment were flown in on a chartered jet to a country with a supposedly state-of-the-art healthcare system.

In all Castro's claims of social improvement we are in the familiar territory of tractor production figures for the Ukraine, circa 1950. The United Nations Statistical Yearbook recorded pre-revolutionary Cuba ranking third out of 11 Latin American countries for per capita daily calorific intake; today it is last. The US economic embargo, so often made the alibi for Marxism's economic failure, has little relevance. Cuba can trade with almost anywhere else in the world, while US-based exiles remit more than $1bn. Not everyone on the island is destitute: the Maximum Leader's personal fortune is $900m, sufficient to gain him entry to Forbes magazine.

Understandably, of 626 pages of text, only 10 negotiate the sensitive topic of human rights. Castro denounces "the lies and calumnies that are spread about us" and proudly declares that 80% of the measures passed by the Human Rights Commission in Geneva are proposed by Cuba. That statistic may be right. It would be typical audacity by a tyrant who has executed 16,000 people in his one-party state and imprisoned more than 100,000 in labour camps.

Every liberal agitator knows about Guantanamo; few have heard of Kilo 5.5, Pinar del Rio, Kilo 7, the Capitiolo (for children up to age 10) and the other hells that compose Castro's gulag. Cuba's boat people, the balseros, have voted with their feet: 100,000 have tried to escape by sea, about a third dying in the attempt. Sandbags are dropped on their fragile craft by Castro's helicopters; in the summer of 1994 alone, 7,000 drowned. Two million of Castro's subjects have spurned his socialist paradise and now live abroad.

When Castro dies and his police state implodes, this book will be a jokey souvenir for collectors, like Chairman Mao's little red book. Only the surviving useful idiots who watched too many grainy Eisenstein films in polytechnics in the 1970s will mourn the passing of this egomaniac mass murderer. He is good on Balzac, though.