Fidel Castro led Cuba for five decades, and in that time inspired both admiration for his transformation of Cuba and revolutionary ideals, and animosity for his dismal human rights record and antagonistic relationship with the United States. Now, after his death, the legacy he leaves behind in Cuba and the rest of the world will no doubt be just as complicated.
Peter Kornbluh is the director of the Cuba Documentation Project and the Chile Documentation Project and author of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.” Kornbluh joined Boston Public Radio with Jim Braude and Margery Eagan to discuss Castro and his many contradictions.
MARGERY EAGAN: Was Castro a terrible tyrant, a visionary revolutionary, or a bit of both?
KORNBLUH: He certainly was both of those things. He ruled Cuba longer than any other foreign leader who wasn’t a monarch. He could be very repressive over the years. But he brought tremendous transformation to his country, both domestically and internationally, bringing great benefits to the majority of Cubans who were on the island in terms of health care and education and bringing Cuba great stature with his international policies and operations supporting revolution, supporting social movements, solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, training doctors, sending them around the world to impoverished societies for free medical treatment. That’s why you’ve seen fairly substantive outpouring of international support for his passing.
JIM BRAUDE: Isn’t part of that support not just because he supported liberation movements around the world, but because a little tiny island nation stood up to the great huge United States?
KORNBLUH: Absolutely. Fidel Castro’s main legacy will be David versus Goliath: standing up to the United States, taking an island that was essentially a province of the United States that the U.S. had turned into a playground for the rich and famous and corrupt, kind of a weekend vacation site for the elites of America, and transformed it into an independent and sovereign and self-determination-oriented island nation. He’s always going to be remembered for defeating the colossus of the north at the Bay of Pigs, withstanding all the assassination plots—the exploding seashells, the poison pens, the sniper rifles that the CIA gave to his enemies—surviving the embargo that’s still in place, maintaining Cuba’s sovereignty in the face of great pressure, almost constant pressure until recently, to the United States of America.
BRAUDE: But the flip side, as Margery noted, is that human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch say under him and his brother, there continue to be drastic violations of human rights, not to mention an absence of democracy. Describe the darker side of Castro's half-century.
KORNBLUH: Cuba became a national security state particularly in the wake of the U.S. attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow the Castro revolutionary government in 1961. We know from our own experience in the United States of America after 9/11 that abuses of power and abuses of civil liberties take place when national security becomes preeminent. That’s been an ongoing debate, and Trump is raising the debate again as he comes in and wants to use torture again, etc.
In Cuba, because people who opposed the revolution were seen as agents of a country (the United States) that was hell-bent on rolling back the revolution and assassinating its leader, there was no space for dissidence. Even most of these years later, there isn’t any space. Although anyone traveling to Cuba in this day and age does see more open opinion, more open acts of disobedience, there is no substantive organized opposition to the Castro government. The Communist Party is very deeply entrenched. The human rights side of Cuba has been dark at times. There’s no debating that.
But Castro came to stand for something else in his own society and around the world, that’s why you see a four-page obituary in the New York Times and all the discussion going on about him now that he’s gone.
To hear more from Peter Kornbluh—including how relations between Cuba and the United States changed under the Obama Administration and how they may change again under President Trump—tune in to Boston Public Radio above. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
