Interview with Fidel Castro - Part 1:

Castro - man still standing

‘“I came out of hospital,

I went home, but I walked,

I exceeded myself. Then I had to do rehabilitation for my feet.

By then I was already managing to relearn writing”

He was fighting for his life for four years. Entering and leaving the operating room, intubated, being fed intravenously, catheters, frequent lapses into unconsciousness...

“My illness is no state secret,” he would have said just before it became a crisis and forced him to “do what I had to do:” to delegate his functions as President of the Council of State and consequently, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Cuba.

“I cannot continue any longer,” he admitted then - as he reveals in this his first interview with a foreign newspaper since that time. He made the transfer of command, and handed himself over to the doctors.

That event shook the entire nation, friends from other parts; prompted his detractors to cherish revanchist hopes and put the powerful neighbour to the North on a state of alert. It was July 31, 2006 when the resignation letter of the maximum leader of the Cuban Revolution was officially announced.

What his most ferocious enemies failed to obtain in 50 years (blockades, wars, assassination attempts) was attained by an illness about which nobody knew anything and everything was speculated. An illness which that regime, whether he accepted it or not, was going to convert into a “state secret.”

(I am thinking about Raul, about the Raul Castro of those moments. It was not only the package that he was suddenly entrusted with, although he was always in agreement; it was the delicate state of health of his partner Vilma Espin - who died of cancer shortly afterward - and the highly possible death of his older brother and the only leader in the military, political and family contexts.)

Forty days ago today, Fidel Castro reappeared in public in a definitive way, at least without any apparent danger of a relapse. In a relaxed atmosphere and when everything would make one think that the storm has passed, the most important man of the Cuban Revolution looks healthy and vital, while not fully dominating his leg movements.

For the approximately five hours that the conversation-interview with La Jornada lasted - including lunch - Fidel tackled the most diverse issues, although he is obsessed by some in particular. He allowed questions about anything - although he was the one who asked the most - and reviewed for the first time and with a painful frankness certain moments of health crises that he has suffered over the last four years.

“I arrived at the point of being dead,” he revealed with an amazing tranquillity. He did not mention by name the diverticulitis that he was suffering from, nor the haemorrhages that led the specialists of his medical team to operate on various or many occasions, with a risk to his life every time. What he did speak on at length was the suffering that he endured. And he showed no inhibition about describing that painful stage as a “Calvary.” “I no longer aspired to live, or far less... I asked myself on various occasions if those people (his doctors) were going to let me live in those conditions or if they were going to let me die. Then I survived, but in very poor physical shape. I reached the point of weighing just over 50 kilos.”

“Sixty-six kilos,” clarifies Dalia, his inseparable compaera who was there for the conversation. Only she, two of his doctors and another two of his closest collaborators were present.

“Imagine: a guy of my height weighing 66 kilos. Now I’ve gone up to 85-86 kilos, and this morning I managed to take 600 steps on my own, without my stick, unaided.”

“I am telling you that you are in the presence of a kind of re-sus-citat-ed man,” he stressed with a certain pride. He knows that, in addition to the magnificent medical team which attended him during all those years, thus putting to the test the quality of Cuban medicine, he has been able to count on his will and that steel discipline that is always imposed when he embarks on something.

“I never commit the slightest violation,” he affirmed. “Moreover, that means that I have become a doctor with the cooperation of doctors. I discuss things with them, ask questions (he asks many), learn (and he obeys).”

He is fully aware of the reasons for his accidents and falls, although he insists that one hasn’t necessarily led to another. “The first time it was because I didn’t do the necessary warm-up before playing basketball.” Then came that of Santa Clara: Fidel was coming down from the statue to Che, where he had presided over a tribute, and fell head first. “That was influenced by the fact that those who look after you are also getting old, losing their faculties and didn’t take care,” he clarified.

That was followed by the fall in Holguin, likewise a severe one. All of these accidents before the other illness turned into a crisis, leaving him hospitalized for a long time.

“Laid out in that bed, I only looked around me, ignorant of all those machines. I didn’t know how long that torment was going to last and my only hope was that the world would stop;,” surely in order not to miss anything. “But I rose from the dead,” he said proudly.

“And when you rose from the dead, Comandante, what did you find?” I asked him.

“A seemingly insane world. A world that appears everyday on television, in the newspapers, and which nobody understands, but one that I would not have wanted to miss for anything in the world,” he smiled in amusement.

With a surprising energy for a human being rising from the dead, as he put it, and with exactly the same intellectual curiosity as before, Fidel Castro has brought himself up to date.

Those who know him well, say that every project, colossal or millimetric, which he undertakes he does so with a fierce passion, and even more so if he has to confront adversity, as had been and was the case.

“That is when he seems to be in the best humour.” Someone who claims to know him well told him: “Things must be going very badly, because you’re looking in good health.”

This survivor’s task of accumulating daily news begins when he wakes up. He devours books with a reading speed obtained by nobody knows what method, he reads 200-300 news cables every day, he is aware of and up to date on new communication technologies, he is fascinated by Wikileaks, “the deep throat of Internet,” famous for the leaking of more than 90,000 military documents on Afghanistan, on which this new ‘surfer’ is working.

“You see what this means, companera?” he said to me. “Internet has placed in our hands the possibility of communicating with the world. We didn’t have any of that before,” he commented, while he delights in reviewing and selecting cables and texts downloaded from the net, which he has on his desk- a small item of furniture, two small for the size (even diminished by illness) of its occupant.

“The secrets are over, or at least would appear to be. We are in the face of a ‘high-technology research journalism,’ as The New York Times calls it, in the reach of everybody.

“We are in the face of the most powerful weapon that has ever existed, which is communication,” he interjects. “The power of communication has been and is in the hands of the empire and of ambitious private groups who used and abused it, that is why the media has fabricated the power that its boasts today.”

I listen to him and couldn’t help but think of Chomsky any of the deceptions that the empire attempts must previously have the support of the media, principally newspapers and television, and today, naturally, with all the instruments offered by Internet.

It is the media that creates consensus before any action. “It is making the bed,” we would say. It is setting up the theatre of operations.

However, Fidel added, although they have tried to preserve that power intact, they have been unable to. They are losing it day by day, while others, many, very many, are emerging every minute.

He went on to acknowledge the efforts of some websites and media in addition to Wikileaks - on the Latin America side, Telesur of Venezuela, Canal Encuentro, the Argentine TV cultural channel and all the public and private media that are standing up to the region’s powerful private consortiums and the news, culture and entertainment transnationals. Reports on the manipulation of information on the part of powerful national or regional business groups, their conspiracies to enthrone or eliminate Governments or political figures, or on the ‘dictatorship’ exercised by the empire via its transnationals, are now within the reach of all mortals.

But not of Cuba, which has just about one Internet port (ISP) for the entire country, comparable to that of any Hilton or Sheraton hotel. That is why connecting in Cuba is a desperate business. It is like surfing in slow motion.

“Why is it like that?” I asked. “Because of the categorical refusal of the United States to give the island Internet access via one of the underwater fibre optic cables that pass close to our coast. Cuba is obliged, instead, to download a satellite signal, which makes the service that the Cuban Government has to pay much more expensive, and prevents the use of a broader band that could allow access to many more users and at the speed normal throughout the world with broadband.”

And that is why the Cuban Government is giving connection priority not to those who can pay for the cost of the service, but to those who most need it, like doctors, academics, journalists, professionals, Government ‘cadres’ and social use Internet clubs. It cannot do any more.

I think about the extraordinary efforts of the Cuban website CubaDebate to internally nourish and take the country’s information abroad under the current conditions. But, according to Fidel, Cuba could find a solution to this situation.

He was referring to the conclusion of underwater cables extending from La Guaira port in Venezuela to the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba. With these works being undertaken by the Government of Hugo Chvez, the island could have broadband and possibilities for a huge amplification of the service.

“Cuba, and you in particular, have been pointed to many times as maintaining a strictly anti-US position and you have even been accused of bearing hatred toward that nation,” I said to him.

“Nothing of the kind,” he clarified. “Why hate the United States if it is only a product of history?”

But, in real terms barely 40 days ago, when he had not completely ‘risen,’ he concentrated - as a variation - on his powerful neighbour in his new reflections.

“The thing is that I began to see very clearly the problems of the growing world dictatorship,” and he presented, in the light of all the information that he was managing, the “imminence of a nuclear attack that would unleash a world conflagration.”

He was still unable to go out and talk, to do what he is doing now, he told me. He could just about write with some fluidity, because he not only had to learn how to walk again, but also, at the age of 84, he had learnt to write again.

“I came out of hospital, I went home, but I walked, I exceeded myself. Then I had to do rehabilitation for my feet. By then I was already managing to relearn writing.

“The qualitative jump came when I could dominate all the elements that made it possible for me to do everything that I am doing now. But I can and must improve. I can get to the point of walking well. Today, as I told you, I walked 600 steps alone, without a stick, without anything, and I have to balance that with climbing up and going down, with the hours that I sleep, with work.”