Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington by Ann Louise Bardach
Scribner, £18.99
I am engaged in writing a short and, hopefully, clear and simple biography of Fidel Castro and I therefore feel under some obligation to get up to date about what else is being written about him. Nevertheless, I do trenchantly claim the Tribune medal of honour, first class, or at the very least a Michael Foot special certificate of merit, for my intellectual heroism in having got to the end of this book.
Cavil not, gentle reader. Have you ever submitted to reading 328 pages of self-absorbed solipsistic US guff from a journalist based in California who is at war permanently not just with clear and elegant writing, not just with the English and, at times, the Spanish languages, but with the very patois of the Pacific coast where she lives. The best that can be said for her as she reclines in a photograph on the back of the dust cover on a chaise longue, blonde, bare-shouldered and showing an elegant ankle, is that she makes a clean breast of her chequered past.
She admits, nay confesses, to having covered Cuban-Miami politics since 1992 for publications from Vanity Fair to the Washington Post and New York Times via Newsweek, Slate and the Daily Beast. No one would have survived that long on a mainstream US newspaper if she or he had not drunk deep at the wells of the Washington sense of exceptionalism and swallowed the idea that her country was, despite its often major faults, made up of the good guys while the Cubans – including many who obtained generously granted rights to settle in the land of the free and the home of the brave – were the baddies.
Without Fidel contains some little known information about the Castro family and acres and acres and acres of speculation, rumour and innuendo about Fidel, his successor Raúl and senior figures in the Cuban government all wrapped up in gossip column prose that would shame Rupert Murdoch’s Sun on a bad day.
This book, in short, provides a primer about how the United States gets its policies wrong in the Western hemisphere in the same way as the Chilcot inquiry showed how a former Prime Minister went adrift about Britain and the Middle East. Bardach, like Blair, is under an empty delusion, based on culpable ignorance and dodgy intelligence: all foreign opponents are terrorists. Living in their fantasy worlds and let down by their intelligence agencies, neither the journo from Vanity Fair nor the chequered leader from Chequers realises that Kennedy’s invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq were two versions of the same Western terrorism – and each with a horrendous death toll. Both acts had similar effects in besmirching the reputations of their governments and their standing in the world.
Any reader feeling that attaching the term terrorist to the United States is a vapid exaggeration should read chapter eight of this book where the author demonstrates how successive governments in Washington protected the right-wing Cuban Luis Posada Carriles, a contemporary of Fidel Castro at the University of Havana. Posada made his first contact with the CIA in 1960, the year President Eisenhower started planning the invasion of Cuba. Five years later he was convicted in Venezuela of blowing up a Cuban airliner off Barbados on October 6 1966 killing 73 passengers and crew including 24 members of Cuba’s national fencing team. Last year, he was still being publicly feted in Miami. War on terror? What war on terror?
As one who has been visiting Cuba since the early 1960s, this reviewer can certify that even a book as unappealing as this has some value – if only in illustrating how the White House, the US Congress and the State Department look after their own.
Hugh O’Shaughnessy
