Fidel Castro: "My Life"

Now in his December days, Fidel Castro offers his last account, his last statements, on one of the most interestingly consequential lives lived on the 20th-century geopolitical landscape. In The Nation, Greg Grandin reviews at length this new memoir, My Life, presented in the form of a long interview distilled from over a hundred hours of conversations with Le Monde diplomatique editor Ignacio Ramonet. And according to Grandin, Ramonet's ambiguously sympathetic presentation of Castro and Cuba does not disappoint.

Castro shares with Ramonet interesting details about his life from boyhood onward. And while he does not clarify or augment what little is known about his controversial role in the contentious and violent student politics of his university days, he is quite candid and revealing about much else. But he is unrepentant and unswerving in his continuing defense of his Marxist-Leninist line and his oppressive half-century of totalitarian rule in Cuba. He is clear that he believes his country's accomplishments in education and health care, advances in science and medicine, justify the oppression Cuba has endured under him. But, to all the intrigue and violence, to all the contradictions in his ambiguous social idealism and repression of Cuban dissent and markets, to all the disappointments of the Cuban social experiment, Grandin must respond with questions about the legacy of Castro's revolution and his rule:

The circularity of My Life's narrative is not just that Castro reconnects with postwar social democracy but that many of the problems that plagued Cuba prior to the revolution have returned, including sex tourism, race-based economic inequality and corruption, which partly explains Castro's rehabilitation of the good-government crusader Chibás. The most damning criticism that can be leveled at a revolution is not that it is repressive but that its repression was for naught. It's an indictment Castro himself raises, at the end of his interview, the only moment where his certainty gives way to something sounding like exhaustion: "How many ways are there," he asks, "of stealing in this country?"

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080721/grandin