May 2008

      As Fidel Castro fades into oblivion with little to do but post inconsequential musings in the Cuban media, it is fair to wonder if he might also be secretly dictating his memoirs.

     If so, he could by now have produced an enormous body of autobiography with the assistance of the doting aides and researchers presumably around him. Castro’s plan could be for the posthumous publication of multiple volumes of memoirs, and possibly for a dramatic announcement of such a plan coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution next January. There have been no hints of anything of the sort from Havana, but these are just the kind of surprises the infirm, immobilized Fidel, confined now for twenty-two months, would relish.

     Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev could be a role model. His memoirs, dictated secretly after he was deposed in 1964, and subsequently smuggled to the West, were published in three widely-read volumes. Initially at least, Khrushchev was motivated by the need to vindicate himself, and like all memoirists, to put his own spin and embellishments on the record. But despite all of their self-serving content, Khrushchev’s books were memorable because he was introspective, sharing candid observations about himself and his relationships with Stalin and many others, including Castro. And equally important, Khrushchev bared sensitive secrets from KGB and communist party archives.

     Castro may already have revealed all he intends to share following the publication this year of Fidel Castro: My Life, the product, it is said, of a hundred hours of interviews with Ignacio Ramonet, and marketed as a “spoken autobiography." And furthermore, Fidel has not been known since his youth to indulge in genuine introspection or self-examination, either publicly or privately. He is no more likely now, as he nears the end of his life, to admit serious errors or doubts about what he has done, including even the most heinous of his behavior. The impervious psychological barriers he has constructed against any probes of his real feelings and human qualities are not likely to be lowered now.

     Yet, with no remaining leadership responsibilities, and effectively muted by his successors, Castro probably has no higher priority now than to burnish his image by boasting of real and imagined accomplishments. With some of his harsh economic policies already abandoned by his brother Raul, Fidel has reason to fear that even more of his legacy will be repudiated.

     He knows that Khrushchev denounced Stalin and launched a de-stalinization campaign in the USSR within three years of his predecessor’s death. And in China, Deng Xiaoping also waited only about three years following Mao’s death before launching his economic liberalization program. All the more reason for Fidel to put a priority now on getting his interpretation of his career on the public record.

     And there may be another, perhaps even more compelling reason for him to emulate Khrushchev’s decision to speak into the recording machine. Anticipating and preempting threats to his hegemony has been one of the most consistent of Fidel’s leadership qualities, beginning during his university years. Today he knows all too well that there are many living witnesses, in Cuba and abroad, who may feel liberated to speak and write about him after his death. He must worry about the gruesome secrets that could be dredged up. He knows that many of the most tantalizing of the mysteries surrounding his sixty year career could become fair game once he is gone.

     For example, will his first wife, the long-suffering and always discreet Mirta Diaz Balart, feel free to abandon whatever oath of silence she has maintained all these years? Literary agents and publishers will beat a path to her door after Fidel’s death, hoping to get her into contract to draft what could be one of the most revealing books ever written about Castro, treating especially the years between their marriage in 1948 and the Moncada assault five years later.

     Would Rolando Cubela, the CIA’s famous AMLASH recruited to assassinate Fidel, feel he could finally reveal the truth of whatever his relationships actually were with the Castro brothers? Was he in fact working under the CIA’s control, or was he Fidel’s double agent as many have suspected? And what grotesque tales Patricio de la Guardia, the twin and co-conspirator of the executed Tony, could tell if he suddenly felt free to break his silence.

     There are many others with keys to the Cuban revolution’s most secret pathologies: Ramiro Valdes (twice minister of the Interior and recently restored to the communist party politburo); the Moncada and Granma veteran Juan Almeida; the merciless prosecutor Juan Escalona; most of the ranking generals; the purged Carlos Aldana (one of the few to have been as close to Fidel as he was to Raul); and so many others like him consigned through the years to internal exile and silence.

     Dalia Soto del Valle, Castro’s second wife and mother of five sons with him, could attract a huge international audience if she felt free some day to pen memoirs of her life with Fidel since the 1960s. So many other Cubans, in diverse walks of life, from the powerful to the servile, also have stories to tell that Fidel wants kept secret, or which now he may feel he must repudiate by preemption.

     And finally, we historians can only hope that Cuba’s official archives may contain valuable collections that have not been systematically purged. But if that is in fact too much to hope for --as most likely it is-- perhaps one or more Cuban equivalents of the Russian Vasili Mitrokhin may be lurking within Havana’s nomenclatura. That modest KGB archivist stole more than twenty-five thousand pages of sensitive intelligence documents, secreted them at his home, and eventually got them into the hands of British intelligence. Imagine how Fidel must worry that a Cuban like Mitrokhin might have purloined and safely preserved vast quantities of compromising intelligence records.

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