‘I came to be dead, but revived’
By Carmen Lira Saade
(Extracts from interview with Fidel Castro published by the Mexican daily La Jornada)
HAVANA – He spent four years struggling between life and death, in and out of the operating room, intubated, receiving food through intravenous catheters and with frequent loss of consciousness.
“My illness is no secret,” Fidel said shortly before the illness became a crisis and forced him to “do what had to be done”: to delegate his duties as President of the Council of State and, consequently, as commander-in-chief of the Cuban Armed Forces.
“I cannot go on,” he admitted then, as he revealed in this, his first interview with the foreign print media since then. He made the transfer of command, and turned himself over to the doctors.
The shock shook the whole nation and his friends elsewhere; it gave his detractors hope for revenge and placed the powerful northern neighbor on alert. It was July 31, 2006, when he officially released the resignation letter as the maximum leader of the Cuban Revolution.
What his most ferocious enemy had not achieved in 50 years (blockades, wars, assassination attempts) was accomplished by a disease no one knew anything about and everyone speculated much about. A disease that the regime, like it or not, would turn into a “state secret.”
[…]
Forty days ago today, Fidel Castro reappeared in public in a definitive manner, at least without any apparent danger of a relapse. In a relaxed atmosphere and when everything suggests that the storm has passed, the most important man in the Cuban Revolution looks pink-cheeked and full of life, although he has not completely mastered the motion of his legs.
For about five hours of a talk-interview with La Jornada (luncheon included), Fidel addressed the most diverse topics, but is obsessed with a few in particular. He allowed me to ask him about anything, although he was the one posing the most questions, and reviewed for the first time and with painful frankness some moments of the health crisis he suffered in the past four years.
“I came to be dead,” he reveals with astonishing tranquility. He does not mention by name the divertículitis he suffered or refers to the bleeding that led the specialists in his medical team to operate on him several or many times, putting his life at risk every time.
But he does expand on his account of the suffering he endured. And does not show any inhibition as he describes the painful stage as a “calvary.”
“I did not expect to live, not at all. I often wandered if these people [his physicians] would let me live in these conditions or if they would allow me to die […] Then I survived, but in very poor physical condition. I dropped to 50-some kilograms.”
“Sixty-six kilograms,” says Dalia, his inseparable companion, who is listening to the interview. Only she, two of his doctors and two of his closest aides are present.
“Imagine a fellow my height weighing 66 kilos. Today I’m up to between 85 and 86 kilos, and this morning I managed to take 600 steps alone, without a cane, without assistance.
“I want to tell you that you’re looking at a kind of re-sus-ci-ta-ted person,” he says with some pride. He knows that, in addition to the superb medical team that cared for him all these years, a treatment that tested the quality of Cuban medicine, he has his will and the discipline of steel that surfaces whenever he committs himself to something.
[…]
“And when you resuscitated, commander, what did you find?” I ask.
“A world of madmen […] A world that appears every day on television, in newspapers, that no one understands, but something I wouldn’t want to lose for anything,” he smiles, amused.
With an energy surprising in a human being who has risen from the grave, as he says, and with the very intellectual curiosity he had before, Fidel Castro brings himself up to date.
Those who know him well say that there isn’t a project, colossal or tiny, that he does not approach with fierce passion, especially if he has to face adversity, as was (and still is) the case.
In such cases, “he’s never in a better mood,” they say. Someone who thinks he knows him well said: “Things must be very wrong, because you are rosy.”
This survivor’s daily task of accumulating information begins from the moment he’s awake. Reading at an unmeasurable speed, he devours books. He reads between 200 and 300 news items per day; he is aware and up-to-date about all new technologies of communication; he is fascinated by Wikileaks, “the Internet’s Deep Throat,” famous for the leak of over 90 thousand military documents on Afghanistan, a subject on which this new “navigator” is working.
“Do you realize, comrade, what this means?” he asks me. “The Internet has put in our hands the possibility to communicate with the world. None of this we had before,” he says, while cheerfully reading and selecting news items and texts downloaded from the Web, sheets of paper covering his desk, a small piece of furniture too small for the size (even diminished by the disease) of its occupant.
No more secrets, or so it seems. This is “high-tech investigative journalism” as The New York Times calls it, available worldwide.
“We face the most powerful weapon that ever existed, which is communications,” he says. “The power of communications has been, and still is, in the hands of the empire and ambitious private groups that used them and abused them. That is why the media manufactured the power they hold today.”
However, Fidel notes, although they have tried to keep that power intact, they have been unable to. They are losing it every day. Meanwhile, others, many, many, emerge constantly.
[…]
Reports about the manipulation by the powerful local and regional business groups, their plots to enthrone or eliminate governments or political personalities, or about the “tyranny” exercised by the “empire” through multinational corporations, are now available to all mortals.
But not in Cuba, which has only one Internet point of entry for the entire country, comparable with the access available to any Hilton or Sheraton hotel.
That is the reason why connecting to the Internet in Cuba is so frustrating. Navigation is done in slow motion.
“Why is that?” I ask.
“Because of the United States’ outright refusal to give Internet access to the island via one of the undersea fiber-optic cables that pass near the coast. Cuba is forced, for that reason, to download the signal from a satellite, which makes it much more expensive for the Cuban government to buy the service, and prevents us from having a higher bandwidth that will allow access to many more users at the speed that is normal worldwide, with broadband.”
“For these reasons, the Cuban government gives connection priority not to those who can pay for the cost of the service, but to those that need it most, such as doctors, academicians, journalists, professionals, government cadres and Internet clubs for social use. We can do no more.”
[…]
Castro refers to the completion of the submarine cable that is laid from the port of La Guaira, Venezuela, to the waters off Santiago de Cuba. With these works, carried out by the government of Hugo Chávez, the island will have broadband and will enjoy the possibility of undertaking a major expansion of the service.
“Many times Cuba has been accused, and particularly you, of maintaining a thoroughly anti-American position, and you have even been accused of hating that nation,” I say.
“Not at all,” he says. “Why hate America, if it’s just a product of history?”
But, in effect, barely 40 days ago, before he was fully “resuscitated,” he wrote in his Reflections about Cuba’s powerful neighbor.
“It was because I started to see very clearly the problems of the growing global tyranny,” and he perceived, thanks to all the information he handled, the “imminence of a nuclear attack that would unleash a world conflagration.”
[…]
Fidel concentrates, closes his eyes as if to sleep, but no – he returns to the charge.
“I do not want to be absent these days. The world is in the most interesting and dangerous phase of its existence and I’m very committed to what will happen. I still have things to do.
Such as?
“Forming a whole anti-nuclear-war movement.” That’s what has engaged his time since his reappearance.
[…]
“To create an international force of persuasion to prevent this colossal threat from happening” represents a challenge, and Fidel has never been able to resist a challenge.
“At first I thought that the nuclear attack would be aimed at North Korea, but I quickly corrected myself because I told myself that China would stop it with its veto in the Security Council.
“But the attack on Iran is unstoppable because there is no Chinese or Russian veto. Then came the [United Nations] resolution and – although Brazil and Turkey vetoed it – Lebanon did not, and then the decision was made.”
[…]
Not everyone understands his concern. Many have seen catastrophism and even delirium in Fidel’s new campaign. To all this should be added the fear that many have that his health may suffer a relapse.
Fidel does not give up: nothing and nobody can stop him. He needs, at the earliest, TO CONVINCE in order TO STOP the nuclear conflagration that, he insists, is threatening to wipe out much of humanity.
“We need to mobilize the world to persuade Barack Obama, President of the United States, to avoid nuclear war. He is the only one who may, or may not, press the button.”
With the data he wields like an expert, and the documents supporting his statements, Fidel questions and makes a chilling statement:
“Do you know the nuclear power held by a few countries in the world today, compared with the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Four hundred seventy thousand times the explosive power of either of the bombs the United States dropped on those two Japanese cities. Four hundred seventy thousand times!” he stresses, shocked.
That is the power contained in each one of the more than 20,000 nuclear weapons believed to exist in today’s world.
With much less power – with only 100 bombs – a nuclear winter that obscures the whole world can be produced.
This atrocity can occur in a matter of days; to be precise, on Sept. 9, when the 90 days granted by the U.N. Security Council to begin to inspect the Iranian vessels will expire.
“Do you think the Iranians are going to retreat? Can you picture that? Brave men, religious men who see in death almost a prize? Well, the Iranians will not give up, that’s for sure. Will the Yankees give up? And what will happen if neither yields? And this can happen on Sept. 9.
“One minute after the explosion, more than half of human beings will have died, dust and smoke from the burning continents will defeat sunlight, and absolute darkness will reign again over the world,” wrote Gabriel García Márquez to mark the 41st anniversary of Hiroshima. “A winter of orange rain and freezing hurricanes will reverse the time of the oceans and the course of rivers, whose fish will have died of thirst in the burning waters … The era of rock and transplanted hearts will return to its glacial childhood.”
