by Jerome du Bois
Fidel Castro, besides being one of the most evil human beings ever to disgrace this planet, is also probably the most loquacious. According to Brian Latell in After Fidel:
It is no exaggeration to say that he has spoken more words on the public record than any political leader in history. Probably no other human in any line of work has ever been recorded uttering such avalanches of words.
And most of this logorrhea is stultifyingly pedestrian:
It is also notable that in those billions of spoken words, Fidel will not be remembered for any single galvanizing performance or sparkling passage that is uniquely his own. Unlike many great orators he has hoped to emulate, nothing he has uttered in public has reverberated over time as a defining rhetorical moment. His oratory is bereft of adornment, memorable phrases, aphorisms, or allusions. A majority of the speeches have been apallingly boring recitations of facts and figures, often going on self-indulgently for hours.
All of Fidel's public broadcasts have been intercepted, translated, and transcribed by the Federal Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), "America's oldest civilian foreign intelligence organization." And Latell, the CIA's top Cuban analyst for more than twenty-five years, has read and studied every one, poor fellow.
Cuban intelligence knows about FBIS's work, and vice versa, resulting in a curious relationship.
A shadow-boxing game of sorts developed between Fidel and the American intelligence analysts perusing his words for clues and indicators. Often his most attentive audience was not the gathered Cuban bureaucrats or the crowd arrayed right before him wherever he was speaking, but us, the anonymous American intelligence analysts working in distant cubicles, parsing his every sentence . . . He liked the challenge of communicating regularly with the Cuban masses while not giving away any secrets or making mistakes that could be used against him. This may help to explain his extraordinary success -- with only a few really damaging exceptions through the years -- at avoiding slips of the tongue and unconsidered outbursts in his public appearances.
One of these exceptions offers a tantalizing glimpse into Fidel's twisted psyche, and involves Latell himself. And mangoes.
In late 1989,
Fidel visited the Salvador Allende hospital in Havana, and spoke to a small audience in an outdoor courtyard. Mango trees were growing there, and as he droned on about the revolution's accomplishments in health care, he digressed. The trees somehow distracted and irritated him. The FBIS transcript had it all word for word: "Why is this mango tree here? This mango tree does not belong in this patio. It must be cut down"
It was not a typical performance. Fidel is not given to public soliloquies, and does not often digress so abruptly. The aside was a rare nugget in the billions of words he had spoken on the record that was revealing of character and personality flaws. A part of his arbitrary leadership style was in full view.
Then, in February 1990, Brian Latell gave a speech about Fidel at the University of Miami, wherein he referred to the mango tree incident. By then he was well-known to Cuban intelligence, and he was certain that his words would find their way to Fidel. "There could be no doubt" [Latell said] "that the mango tree was promptly cut down, despite whatever pleasures it may have provided the patients."
It was an all-too-typical example, I said, of Fidel's micromanagerial style when even the most obscure and irrelevant matters suddenly, and for no apparent reason, become important to him. It was Fidel at his autocratic worst. It reflected pettiness, obduracy, total self-absorption, disregard for everyone. Incredibly, a mango tree had become an issue of state.
A year went by. Fidel kept up his chinwagging, and Latell kept doggedly reading. And in February 1991, droning on about accomplishments in health care and medicine at a provincial assembly in Havana, Fidel cited the Allende hospital as "a very good institution . . . the pride of the capital."
Then, the FBIS transcribers noted, he paused. His mention of the Allende hospital had triggered the memory of my criticisms of him in Miami. In an angry outburst, he reacted, defending what he had done. I had been right. The mango tree was cut down. Except it was actually a small grove of trees that he had destroyed. As if speaking only to himself and to me, he complained: "What came out in that meeting about the Salvador Allende hospital was incredible. The fences were broken because of the construction work which, who knows how many years had been going on. There was a mango grove. That was the only time in my life that I ordered to clean, to bulldoze a mango grove.
The mango grove was inside the hospital. The kids jumped everywhere. In fact they did not have to jump because there was no fence and they got in there to eat the mangoes. Everyone ate mangoes there. Even the patients ate the mangoes. The place was full of flies and there was a terrible lack of hygiene."
He concluded by emphasizing, "There is a beautiful park there now."
But the mangoes are gone.
There is plenty of vicious irony to go around here. I'll pick out just two points. First, mangoes are pretty much the national fruit of Cuba, and it is characteristic of Castro to be completely indifferent to the people's emotional attachment to them. Second, this incident occured during the Special Period of Peace, after the collapsing Soviet Union withdrew its billions of dollars of yearly subsidies to the Island. If there was ever a time when the people needed every bite of food they could find, this was it. But once again, Castro didn't care.
Compared to Castro's other depredations, the mango tree incident is petty, isn't it? But it does reflect his shrivelled soul: petty, barbarous, and cruel. Every little bit hurts.
Posted by Jerome at June 24, 2006 09:24 AM | TrackBack