So Mexico is the perfect place to gauge how Latin Americans at large now feel about the recently retired strongman. A few hours after Fidel released his grip on Cuban politics last Tuesday, I ran a survey of Mexican public opinion via a nightly radio show that I do from a studio in Mexico City. The question was simple: has Castro been good or bad for Cuba? The show received dozens of calls almost immediately, with callers reflecting Latin America’s deeply ambiguous relationship with Castro and his legacy.
Younger callers, especially those who had been to Cuba, denounced Castro’s regime. Javier Castillo called to say he had visited Havana in 2007 and found “a miserable country, where people offer their daughters to tourists and everything is falling apart.” A 23-year-old student declared Castro to be “an anachronism.” But a majority of callers concluded that the dictator had been good for Cuba. “He was a hero,” said Teresa de Jesús García, from the northern state of Durango. A vehement Mario Vallarta called from Guadalajara: “Fidel Castro has given dignity to the Cuban people, and that you just don’t buy at the supermarket!” Guillermo López added that “Fidel has given education and free health services to all Cubans. We only wish we had something like that here.”
What explains this enduring affection? First, there is the original freedom and romanticism that the Cuban revolution, at its very beginning, represented for those who remember 1959 or lived through the transition. Eliseo Alberto, among the best of the many exiled Cuban writers, resents Castro almost instinctively. But when asked about the first stages of the revolution, he instantly describes them as “a beautiful thing.” The Cuban revolution has become, in Latin American mythology, a unique act of successful liberation from the powers that be. Castro’s accomplishments were not insubstantial: his initial defeat of Fulgencio Batista and his half-century battle against the U.S. embargo have made the man a hero regionwide. His appeal is the same as that of Che Guevara, to whom so many Latin Americans have paid adolescent homage by wearing that iconic T-shirt which illustrates, in one powerful image, a utopian ideal and the region’s soft spot for strongmen.
Castro’s role as David to America’s Goliath served him well. It is in this context that he should be understood: a purveyor of dignity in the Latin American model of a charismatic caudillo. After all, the region has long suffered from either U.S. disdain or intervention and Castro denounced both. Humberto Beck, a 20-something Mexican philosopher, sees Castro’s influence on younger leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, whose rhetoric and economic policies resemble Cuba’s. “There is a group of young people from the [Latin] left who see the possibility of a new project headed by Morales and Chávez, with Castro as the founding father,” says Beck.
These comments reveal the disturbing degree to which the Latin left remains enamored of authoritarian and revolutionary delusions. Washington should take note. While strangling Cuba’s economy with its embargo, the United States lost its grip on the ideals and imagination of much of Latin America’s youth. Yet as the younger callers to my radio show made clear, Castro’s legacy is not set in stone. During the hazy 1960s and ’70s, Castro could camouflage his disregard for human rights under revolutionary rhetoric. Now that ruse will no longer succeed. For the Internet generation, the suffering of the Cuban people has become more visible. Once the truth of Castro’s legacy becomes known—which may not happen until Raúl Castro, age 76, also departs the scene—Fidel’s image as a Homeric hero will begin to erode.
Many lessons will be there for the taking for Latin America’s young people: the sheer number of Cuba’s political prisoners, executions and men lost at sea will bring into perspective the real value of freedom as opposed to the romantic ideal of “la revolución.” There will be lessons for those in the United States as well: the embargo only managed to sink the Cuban people in a long and painful crisis while Fidel remained defiantly—even mockingly—in power. Pedro Alberto Barrios, a 22-year-old from Mexico City, said it best when he suggested that U.S. policy has played an enormous role in securing the romantic myth of Castro. “I couldn’t care less for [him],” says Barrios, “but I know what his last thoughts should be: thank you, America!”
