Stubbornly moribund

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

On Saturday, Oct. 28, Fidel Castro summoned CNN's correspondents in Havana, to demonstrate before the TV cameras that he was alive. Actually, he almost demonstrated the opposite. The spectacle was painful: we saw a senile old man with a haggard face who read the newspaper with difficulty, uttered nonsense in grave tones (“we live in a very complicated world”) and walked like a mummy that escaped from its tomb in the Boris Karloff movie. In addition, to prove he was still at the helm, he announced that he studied the planet's serious conflicts via his television set, then picked up the phone and pretended he was calling a subaltern. This -- let's be fair -- he did well. He put the earpiece to his ear and the mouthpiece to his mouth. He didn't miss.

Shortly before the release of the filmed testimony of the Comandante's ghastly state of physical and mental health, colonel Hugo Chávez, who nowadays doesn't miss a single opportunity to make harebrained statements (perchance he is a sinister CIA agent?), probably with the intention of cheering up his moribund friend said that Fidel Castro is a randy old goat who cannot control himself when he sees the beautiful stewardesses in the presidential plane -- and attacks them. According to Chávez, Fidel is an “atacón,” a barracks word in Venezuela used to describe a sexual predator. Of course, Chávez described that behavior not with the intent to censure Castro but with the greatest admiration.

But that's not the end of the story. After disclosing Castro's testosterone-induced frenzy, Chávez added another alleged feat, one that's patently false. Fidel Castro, now recovered, goes out by night to walk through the towns of Cuba, he said. Now, that cannot possibly be true. If some Cuban pedestrian ran into Fidel Castro coming out of the shadows, walking and waving his arms like he did on television, he'd die instantly of a heart attack

For Raúl Castro and the rest of the dictatorship's heirs, Fidel's stubborn insistence in remaining more or less alive, without totally leaving power, is becoming a serious problem. During the first three months of the transfer of authority (now over), the fact that the Comandante continued to breathe suited them fine. That gave Raúl space, time and peace to take over the institutions, install his people and begin to govern. He also learned that the citizenry hasn't the slightest intention of engaging in street protests and that nothing resembling the sound of rattling sabers rose from the army barracks. The main fears, therefore, were allayed.

But after that point, Fidel Castro ceased to be a guiding angel and became an inconvenience. Not just because functionaries have to consult with him about the most important decisions and even some insignificant ones (although his powers of reasoning, which were never great, have diminished substantially), but also because the entire upper crust of power has to decipher what the Comandante would do, or would have done, when dealing with any specific problem.

I remember only three similar instances in contemporary history. The first was Portuguese dictator Antonio Oliveira Salazar. He began to govern with an iron hand and fascist ideas in 1932, but in 1968 he fell off a chair and hit his head so hard he practically unplugged his brain. He didn't die until 1970, but even though he was unconscious and in a vegetative state, the inertia of his authority weighed heavily on his successor, poor Marcello Caetano, making it impossible for Caetano to carry out the reforms the country so urgently needed.

In Spain shortly thereafter, Francisco Franco, though sick and devoid of reflexes, refused to abandon power until he died (in 1975), a fact that perhaps in some way helped to accelerate the ensuing decomposition of Francoism.

But perhaps the most significant episode of the end of stubborn dictators was that of Habib Bourguiba. The creator of the Republic of Tunisia (1957), who was declared President for Life in 1975, became senile in power, until in 1987 his aides wrapped him in a straitjacket and removed him, screaming, from Government House. It was the first psychiatric coup d'état in history. It is just possible that Fidel Castro will go the same route. He's like the farmer's dog. He doesn't govern, but he lets no one else govern.

November 6, 2006

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