Reading Books

Books

According to Fidel Castro, Tony Blair, whom he once met at a WTO meeting in Geneva, “had a swagger” and was “haughty”, and Britain is merely in America’s thrall. He has little affection for George W Bush or Nixon but Jimmy Carter “was as honest as one could be while being president of the US”. Che Guevara, on the other hand, comes across as “an indestructible moral force. His cause, his ideas in this age of the fight against neoliberal globalisation are triumphing.”

Though dipping into five decades of name-checks are quite thrilling, Fidel Castro’s “spoken autobiography” – as told in one hundred hours to Ignacio Ramonet, a Spanish journalist who edits Le Monde – does not add much to the historical record. Around a half of this 800-pager is autobiography – his childhood, his meeting Che, the 1959 Cuban revolution, the failed US attack Bay of Pigs attack. The rest is Castro’s pronouncements on the world in relation to “the Revolution.”

Because the book has a sort of chat-show formula it is easier to read than one might imagine the memoirs of a long-serving communist dictator to be, but Ramonet assumes the role of chat show host too eagerly and dumps any guise of political interrogator early on. Castro’s monologues, although colourful enough for any dinner table, are rarely challenged and there is no probing when his subject whizzes through areas such as his childhood, his introduction to Marxism, and the influence of Guevara. There are no revelations about Castro’s comrades, just misty-eyed eulogies, and even more frustratingly, there is also little insight about his brother (and now successor) Raúl.

In a way, we have been prepared for all this. In the book’s introduction, Ramonet pooh-poohs “those who think of the interview as a police interrogation... or as an inquisitorial relationship with a perpetrator of crimes standing before a harsh judge whose job it is to extract a confession.” It is still disappointing though.

It is not to dismiss Castro’s achievements, which are lengthily trotted out – Cuba is the largest educator of doctors in the world, its Operation Miracle has restored sight to a million patients from 32 countries, and so on – to expect some sort of acknowledgement of less palatable facts of Cuban life. When Castro claims “Here, no one has ever been imprisoned for being a dissident...” Ramonet resists asking why writing poetry can qualify as a “counterrevolutionary act” worthy of punishment? He also resists asking Fidel why, after almost 50 years of the Revolution, Cubans cannot be allowed independent trade unions.

Ultimately Castro will ultimately be judged by others and a lot sooner than he seems willing to believe. BF

Russia watchers have been pontificating furiously over the significance of the emergence of Dmitry Medvedev as the country’s new president, along with Vladimir Putin’s sidestep into the prime ministership. Is Putin still pulling the strings, they ask; will Medvedev be able to clean up some of the rumoured corruption which continually blights Russia’s business environment?

The Age of Assassins casts new light into the murky life of Putin, including his early association with Medvedev in their home city of St Petersburg, claiming a highly complex series of links between Putin and members of Russia’s underworld, with organised crime bosses and with many members of the security services – the KGB – who are alleged to have carried out numerous assassinations. Among them is the notorious former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London in November 2006 by the rare radioactive isotope Polonium 210. The author claims to have helped Litvinenko escape Russia in 2000 and has amassed a wealth of material on Putin’s alleged crimes.

The book opens with a description of how Putin, having been head of the KGB, began to recruit KGB people to fill top positions once he became president. They then used the surveillance and assassination techniques they had practised in their former jobs on a much wider scale, killing dozens of political opponents and jailing others on trumped up or exaggerated charges.

We then backtrack to Putin’s early days – disputed accounts of his parentage (which Putin has taken steps to censor, the author claims), the dodgy commercial deals of his time in St Petersburg, the way he managed to outmanoeuvre rivals for power, besides colourful episodes such as when he escaped from his burning house by tying some sheets together and climbing down to the ground, naked, as the neighbours watched.