The Tyranny of Fidel Castro

So what do the Vatican and the Cuban church want from this visit? First, the church would like the assistance of Latin American priests as it expands its activities. The Cuban government has, until quite recently, regularly denied (or terminally stalled) requests for visas from Latin American clergy. In pre-visit negotiations with the government, the Vatican raised the issue of visas, arguing that the church needed priests to help prepare for the pope’s visit. Soon, the government changed its policy and issued a significant number of visas. The church would like to see the visa process routinized, so that it has clergy sufficient to maintain a vigorous public ministry. Then there is the question of the church as a charitable institution. Recent Cuban policy has allowed the church to receive humanitarian assistance from abroad (primarily foodstuffs and medicines), but not to distribute it–a role the government has reserved for itself. A change in this policy, allowing the church to distribute independently the aid it receives, would be a major improvement. Another issue is media access. Ever since the Communists seized power, the church has been denied access to the mass media, a major factor in widespread public ignorance of the church and its leading personalities. (Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Havana, walks through the streets of his city unrecognized by many.) Moreover, the church has not been allowed to publish independently; religious materials–Bibles, catechisms, missals, hymnals–must be imported (under government control, of course). But there has been some easing of these restrictions in advance of the pope’s visit, and the church hopes that the trend will continue, and even expand, after the pope leaves. And last, there is the persistent matter of political prisoners. Church sources indicate that some 900 remain in jail. The church wants them released, and it wants the government to permit them and their families to emigrate, if they so choose.

In 1971 Cuban state security jailed the poet Heberto Padilla for a book that appeared to criticize the revolution and its father, Fidel Castro. Padilla was forced to confess his sins and denounce other transgressors, a handful of Cuban writers including his wife Belkis Cuza Malé, also a poet. Padilla apologized to Castro, to whom, as Padilla said, he had “been unfair and ungrateful [and] for which I will never tire of repenting.” Castro’s subsequent speech underscored the purpose of the arrest and confession​—​a “rigorous alignment with the revolution and subordination to its political dictates,” as one scholar put it, “was a precondition for intellectual activity.” In other words, this socialist utopia would cut off the tongues of its subjects unless they sang its praises. Many literary figures, including a number of major Latin American novelists and poets like future Nobelists Mario Vargas Llosa and Octavio Paz, turned on Castro and withdrew their support for a revolution that they came to recognize as simply another color in the totalitarian spectrum. In response, Castro fumed in the clichéd rhetoric of revolution that these were “brazen Latin Americans” who “live in bourgeois salons 10,000 miles from the problems.”

The most original and engaging piece of reportage on Cuba in recent years, Pitching Around Fidel documents the human costs of Cuba’s state-run system of “amateur” sports. The billboards in Havana may say that “Sport is the right of the people,” but in fact athletes have no more rights than anyone else in Cuba. The Communist party hack who currently runs Cuba’s National Sports Institute tells Price that if an athlete “doesn’t have an attitude where we — the people who created him — can have confidence in him, then he will never have the right to represent Cuba in an international event.” Yes, top-flight athletes enjoy perks like private cars and decent housing. But they are constantly monitored for the slightest sign of deviation from the party line. Anyone who doesn’t pass ideological muster risks being sidelined permanently. The most famous such case, of course, is Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, the pitching ace who was kicked off the national team and sent to work in a psychiatric hospital because his half-brother, Livan Hernandez, left to pitch for the Florida Marlins in 1995. El Duque subsequently escaped the island and led the New York Yankees to victory in the 1999 World Series. There are others, though, less famous than El Duque but no less talented, still stuck in limbo down on the island. Take Lazaro Valle. Price paints a marvelous portrait of this right-handed flamethrower, a pitcher arguably more dominant than El Duque. At the age of thirty-five, he is semi-washed up in Cuba, spending his days smoking, drinking, and bumming a few bucks from foreigners. He never left Cuba because he didn’t want to break up his family. At the same time, he refused to join the Communist party, as many other top athletes did. When his best friend, pitcher Rene Arocha, defected in 1991, Valle was subjected to police interrogation and banned from traveling with the national team overseas for two years. (Arocha had been banned from the national team in 1982 because his local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, Castro’s ubiquitous snoops, fingered him as disloyal.) Valle “suffered and cried over the situation, the whole time,” his wife explains. He was finally allowed to play with the national team in America, where he wandered around like a free man — even partying with old friends in Hialeah, the working-class Cuban section of South Florida — before going back to Cuba. That really made Castro’s state security suspicious. Upon arrival in Havana, he was hauled in for more questioning. Nowadays, he’s at odds with the Cuban baseball authorities, unwanted even as a coach. “I feel like an alien,” he tells Price. “Nobody calls me. Nobody talks to me. My opinion doesn’t count. I feel like an alien in my own country.” Another ruined career is that of Pedro Jova, a former manager of the national team who was banned for life from Cuban baseball in 1997 for supposedly talking to a defector on the phone. His son, a prospect, then jumped on a raft to the United States. Jova’s ban has now been lifted — but he’s left coaching twelve-year-olds and doing some scouting. Hector Vinent, twenty-five, one of the best light-welterweight boxers in the world, has been banned from Cuba’s national team since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics where two of his friends defected. In Atlanta, the state security agents who accompany all Cuban athletic delegations abroad hounded Vinent. (By the way, why does the United States issue visas to these enforcers?) The surveillance has never let up back home. “They don’t know I’m going to run, but they think it. That’s my ‘conduct’ problem,” he tells Price.

Over the years, the NCC has produced a mountain of paper relating to Cuba—books, statements, Official Declarations. Much of it has consisted of predictable (though in some cases, not entirely baseless) attacks on the U.S. embargo. But the NCC has also published a number of first-person accounts of life in revolutionary Cuba. Most of them could pass for press releases from the Cuban ministry of tourism. One such travelogue, characteristic of the genre, is an account of a church delegation’s trip, entitled Summary Report of a 1976 Visit to Cuba. The report dwells lovingly on “the spotless state of the streets,” “the purposefulness of the people as they commuted to and from work,” the “vibrant and positive theological awareness” of state-sanctioned churches. Then it goes over the top. Even allies of the Cuban regime rarely defend Castro’s methods of social control. The NCC has often seemed more than happy to. The country’s Stalinist Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the 1976 report notes approvingly, are now “being administered with maturity and confidence.” The political indoctrination of elementary school students? A positive good, the report declares: “Bright children between the ages of five to fourteen years volunteer [sic], after parental consent is given, to dedicate themselves to complete knowledge of and for the Revolution at the provincial Palace of Pioneers. Our group was absolutely impressed by the level of learning, zeal and intelligence of the young boys and girls. Their educational training is truly remarkable.”

Pete Waldmeir of the Detroit News, for instance, laments Al Gore’s decision to break with the Clinton administration’s policy on Elian Gonzalez: “If he’d cave in to a bunch of wackos just because they hint at civil disobedience if they don’t get their way, what would Gore do as president if some Third World nut case got in his face in a real crisis?” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch views the efforts of Cuban-Americans to keep Elian in the United States as “mob rule,” saying the demonstrators have a “blindingly obsessive hatred of Fidel Castro.” The Seattle Times thinks Elian should not be “a trophy to be paraded around by zealots.” Syndicated columnist Mark Russell refers to “the crazy Cubans in Miami” (though maybe that’s part of his comedy routine). The San Francisco Chronicle, for its part, calls the peaceful demonstrators near Elian’s Miami relatives a “racket of rabble rousers” and “shouting street mobs.” (Such rhetoric for the Chronicle is highly unusual, to say the least: When its own city erupted in violent riots along with Los Angeles in May 1992, the Chronicle sympathetically noted that the “riots spring from years of injustice.”) Other journalists not ordinarily identified with the cause of law and order have lost patience for the first time in their professional lives with the venerable idea of civil disobedience. “Are we going to be governed in this country by law or by mob?” asks Anthony Lewis in the New York Times.David Rieff, author of The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami, also felt free to vent in the New York Times: The “most extreme and fanatical elements in the Cuban exile community” want “to defy both the United States and common-sense morality.” Miami, claims Rieff, is “an out-of-control banana republic within the American body politic.” Perhaps most remarkable in the Times was columnist Bob Herbert, a man who calls his own city a “police state” even as he urges Miami police to unsheathe their batons and go after “the crazies”: “These kinds of disputes,” says Herbert, “are usually resolved peacefully. The authorities are called in, the crazies are routed and the rule of law prevails. But in this case the authorities have largely linked up with the crazies.” Al Gore, he complains, is “giving aid and comfort not to the rule of law but to the mob.”