The Autobiography of Fidel Castro

Posted on Sunday, 01.17.10

FICTION
Review | 'The Autobiography of Fidel Castro': Quoting the despot, in
matters large and small
A former friend of Castro sends him up in this mix of history and satire.
BY ANN LOUISE BARDACH

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FIDEL CASTRO. Norberto Fuentes. Translated by Anna
Kushner. Norton. 572 pages. $27.95.

``No one owns the past, at least not until it is written,'' Fidel Castro
shrewdly observes at the start of his faux ``autobiography'' -- the
deliciously wicked construct devised by Norberto Fuentes. ``I've learned
something else,'' Castro adds: ``the Revolution is always creating the
past.''

In other words, as the cliche goes, history gets written by the winners.
And therein lies the conceit of this entertaining, edifying and
voluminous work that purports to channel the wily Cuban strongman. As
served up by Fuentes, a Cuban intellectual who fled his homeland in
1994, this brew of history and satire was originally published in
Spanish at even greater length -- perhaps fitting for the famously
verbose Castro. For the English-language version, the book has been
tweaked and pruned. Most Cubaphiles will find Fuentes' effort to be a
masterful act of ventriloquism, offering a Castro who is prideful,
intuitively Machiavellian and relentlessly cynical.

``Almost all civil wars begin as a demonstration that goes out of
control,'' Castro points out. ``Controlling the streets,'' he
emphasizes, was the crucial key to his maintaining power. To that end,
opponents -- or ``the enemy,'' as he puts it -- must not be allowed to
gather ``in groups of more than two or three individuals.''

Fuentes' Maximum Leader holds forth on all matters great and small just
as Castro, now Cuba's convalescent-in-chief, does in the hundreds of
columns he has written for the state-run media since his medically
mandated retirement after emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006.

Fuentes captures much of Castro, balancing the brilliant with the
despotic. After all, he knows his man, having formerly been a Fidel
literary favorite, along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Like the Colombian
Nobelist, Fuentes is fascinated by Latin American strongmen -- and their
enemies. (Rumor in Miami circles say that Fuentes also enjoys time with
Luis Posada Carriles, Castro's would-be assassin of many decades.)

Fuentes contends that his ``autobiography'' is based on confirmable
events and facts, but there is a smattering of minor errors of dates,
names, etc. At one point, Fuentes writes that Castro's father died in
1956 when his son was in the Sierra, when Fidel really was in Mexico.
However, Fuentes is the beneficiary of the superb editing and
translation of Anna Kushner, whose deftness reminds one of the deftness
of Natasha Wimmer.

The continuous play between fact and fiction in the book is nicely
augmented by the historic photographs that stud the text. Quite
fittingly, it concludes with a 1986 photograph of Castro, his arm draped
along the shoulder of a suited-up Fuentes, enjoying a whispered
confidence from the writer-cum-courtier. Perhaps one man the
comandante-en-jefe should not have trusted.

Ann Louise Bardach reviewed this book for The San Francisco Chronicle.

Review | 'The Autobiography of Fidel Castro': Quoting the despot, in
matters large and small - Living - MiamiHerald.com (17 January 2010)
http://www.miamiherald.com/living/story/1427180.html