Online Feature

Cuba Under Fidel

With the recent retirement of Fidel Castro, the following selection of pieces published in The New York Review between 1963 and 1998 may be of interest.

—March 5, 2008

Castro Convertible
By Daniel M. Friedenberg
November 28, 1963
A type of tic-tac-toe game has gone on in American intellectual circles for the last two years. It consists of trying to show whether Fidel Castro was pushed toward Russia by United States policy or marched there himself through natural desire. The stakes are greater than seem apparent at first glance.

"This Shame Will Be Welcome..." A Speech by Fidel Castro
By Lee Lockwood
September 24, 1970
Cuba clearly needs many things: more democratic forms, more mass participation in decision-making, less hostility from this country, more and better newspapers. We could use some better newspapers ourselves. Against that day, here, free of static and distortion, is "Cuba's only newspaper," speaking directly in his clear and unique voice.

• The Speech by Fidel Castro

20 Years of Castro's Revolution
By Juan Goytisolo
March 22, 1979
In The Crack-up, F. Scott Fitzgerald observes, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." In judging what one reads on Cuba, this sort of intelligence at work appears to be rare. Most writers emphatically deny some part of Cuban reality. Paradise or concentration camp: such crude judgments falsify the complex and contradictory experience of twenty years of revolutionary government.

Inside the Revolution
By Robert S. Leiken
October 11,1984
Journalists, scholars, and exiles have given us general impressions of Castro's administration but Carlos Franqui is the first to write with the authority of a former member of the inner circle.

Four Days with Fidel: A Havana Diary
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
March 26, 1992
Tuesday, January 7. We are flying to Miami en route to Havana for a conference, with Fidel Castro, on the Cuban missile crisis.

A Raisin in the Sun
By Murray Kempton
March 24, 1994
Havana—Thirty-five years and six weeks are gone since the day Fidel Castro came in glory to the great stage of history, and no one is left among the actors he met there except Jordan's King Hussein and North Korea's Kim II Sung, minor-league players then and now.

Fidel in the Evening
By Alma Guillermoprieto
October 22, 1998
If you are in the neighborhood of forty years old and Cuban, Fidel Castro has been at the center of your heart and thoughts, for however small a second, each day of your life. Perhaps you saw him first in the Plaza of the Revolution, when doves landed on his shoulders as he made his first speech in power. Even if you weren't there you remember this event as if it had happened to you, because the photographic image of that moment has become part of the national memory. Fidel visited the shiny new infant nurseries and kindergartens and dandled you on his knee and patted your teacher on the back and told you in his papery voice that you were the future of the Revolution. Later he would spread his solemn soaring gaze over Cuba like a protective mantle and you saw him on every poster and wall mural in your barrio. "With Fidel, our whole life!" "In every barrio, Revolución!"