In the words of US president-elect, Donald Trump, Fidel Castro is dead! I don’t think anyone missed the news last week. Some received it with jubilation, others celebrated his life and what he stood for, and yet others took the middle road, leaving it to history to judge his legacy. Whether you are a Fidelista or not, you cannot ignore the legacy of a man who survived a reported 634 assassination attempts and survived all efforts by the United States government to discredit him and bring him down.
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Fidel Castro was born on August 13, 1926 in Birán, Holguín Province, Cuba. Before he became known as a revolutionary (or brutal dictator, to some) he was a lawyer. He graduated in 1950 with a Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Havana where he was very active in student politics. He practised law in a small partnership in Havana until his discontent with Fulgencio Batista’s government convinced him that a revolution was the only way to depose Batista. After several battles and guerrilla attacks, Fidel Castro and his rebel forces (including his brother Raul and his friend Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara) ousted Batista who fled to the Dominican Republic on January 1, 1959.
In the early 1960s, one of my grand-aunts went to Lagos, troubled about her son and the fact that he was a 12-year-old boy who had the physical stature of a five-year-old. He had stopped growing! With my aunt in Lagos, they consulted with many doctors until referrals got them to a Cuban doctor on a health mission in Lagos. It was this Cuban doctor who diagnosed my uncle with a thyroid condition and made available the drugs that my uncle took for over a year to rectify the condition. Today my uncle is a man of average height and that experienced inspired him to also become a doctor. This was a family tale told over and over again by my aunt. In 2004, I lost a dear friend in Ghana under very mysterious circumstances. There is no need to go into the details except to say that the one year he had some relief was when he was under the care of a Cuban doctor on a health mission in Accra. It is fair to say that I have always had a special interest in Cuba and the Revolution, trying to understand it from the different lenses through which it can be understood.
My obsession with Cuba, the Pearl of the Antilles, intensified around the year 2000 after my Swiss photographer neighbour visited Havana and returned with an album with the most attractive pictures I had ever seen. I was intrigued by the images that could have been straight from a 1950s movie. The big, old American cars with fancy hood ornaments; the colonial and art deco buildings painted in bright colours typical of Latin America; and the people. For all the stories about Fidel Castro’s iron rule and the austere lives of Cubans, I expected to see more sad eyes in the pictures but it was quite the opposite—beautiful ladies, distinguished men, all looking like they were holding a full cup of life. I had to experience it all first hand and as soon as Fidel Castro’s health began to fail around 2008 there was more urgency to make the trip because I imagined that there would be big changes in Cuba when Fidel Castro died. I wanted to see Cuba stuck in time, before the big changes blew in like a hurricane and swept out every trace of what has defined Cuba in the last five decades. So when I was nominated for the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2008, I said that if I won the prize I would visit Cuba. And I did visit Cuba. Those eight days in January 2009 remain one of the most memorable holidays of my life.
Cuba is by no means a perfect story. Amidst tales of its beauty, history, appreciation for the arts, etc., questions arise as to how successful any attempt at such strict social engineering can be. As a result of the Revolution, Cuba made strides in health care and racial equality, and has tried to be self-reliant in their agriculture and industrial sectors, but today, the economy is heavily reliant on tourist services and repatriation of funds from Cubans abroad. The result is a form of inequality that is propelled by the parallel economies of the Cuban Convertible Currency (CUC) and the Cuban Pesos. The CUC is what tourists spend and for those employed in the service industry who have access to CUC, life is more comfortable. Employees of the State, including doctors and teachers, earn Cuban Pesos, and therefore cannot afford any luxuries. In my opinion, this has led to illegal activities such as prostitution, drug trafficking, racketeering, and socioeconomic inequalities, the same issues that were the basis for the Revolution.
In Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth, Dick the butcher’s contribution to Jack Cade’s grand plans for a social revolution was the now famous quote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. There are arguments on either side of the point of whether that quote is a compliment to lawyers or not. Whatever the case, in Cuba, a lawyer was the central figure in their social revolution. Were Fidel Castro’s measures extreme? Yes, but no revolution was ever successful by half measures. Cuba will no doubt evolve, only time will tell exactly what that evolution will look like.
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