In a volume of memoirs recently translated as Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography, prominent French intellectual Regis Debray evoked the experience of being summoned to an audience with Fidel Castro.
This was in the mid-1960s, at the height of the Cuban revolution's influence on young radicals around the world.
He recorded his thoughts well before Ignacio Ramonet, a Spanish journalist who edits the French newsweekly Le Monde diplomatique, spent 100 hours interviewing Castro for the spoken autobiography published as Fidel Castro: My Life.
But I found myself thinking of Debray's memoir frequently while reading the interviews — for it helped explain the overawed and even cowed manner Ramonet often seemed to manifest as an interviewer.
A philosopher by training, Debray, while in his twenties, had helped translate the improvised strategies and doctrines of Fidel and of Che Guevara into more intellectually rigorous terms.
He even followed Che into the jungles of Bolivia — an expedition that ended badly, with Debray lucky to get out alive after three years in prison.
Knowing of that drama gives added flavour to Debray's wry description of the “game without rules'' unfolding when a prominent Left-wing figure would arrive in Havana from abroad.
There were three stages: “The first began at the airport,'' Debray writes, “where a minder dressed in olive drab would murmur in a low voice: ‘Fidel wants to see you.''' The visitor would spend the entire trip waiting for the meeting.
Then, a day before heading home, the revolutionary tourist might hear an urgent message: “Fidel's going to see you.'' Thus began another round of waiting — now less patient. Days or even weeks later, Debray writes, there would be “the whirlwind arrival of someone of high rank ... in person, announcing: ‘Fidel's coming.'''
It did not mean he was just around the corner, though. “This acme of expectation could still last anything from 30 minutes to three days,'' as Debray recalled.
Without adding much to the historical record, My Life is certainly readable. Many things about it are questionable but Castro's keen awareness of his own place in Cuban and world history never seems like mere vanity.
About half of the book can be considered an autobiography, with the rest consisting of a protracted official news conference — that term comes less and less to refer to a historical event (or a political process) than to Castro's self writ large.
At one point, Castro mentions a deep love of Hemingway's novels, in particular, he says, “the monologues, when his characters talk to themselves''.
Ramonet is much too deferential an interviewer to interrupt Castro's own monologues or challenge him very often. In any case, Castro is a capable raconteur, telling the stories of guerrilla combat in the Sierra Maestra that must have been the highlight of many an official dinner party over the past five decades.
Castro was the son of a prosperous landowner, which raises questions about his willingness to betray his ruling-class background and become a populist rebel.
He suggests it was a matter of his father having been a self-made millionaire so it would have taken at least another generation for bourgeois ideology to sink deeply into the family. Perhaps.
But the fact that his parents were unmarried until Castro was 17 was hardly a thing that would go unnoticed in a rural community. He never mentions it.
We are told just a little about Castro's involvement as a student in the Orthodox Party — a nationalist group, though by no means one infused with Bolshevik aspirations.
Yet we are assured on several occasions that by the early 1950s, when he first led a revolt against President Fulgencio Batista, he was already influenced by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
This certainly makes his revolutionary career seem more consistent but it probably qualifies as a case of creative backdating. One senses an effort to downplay the fact that his turn to Marxism-Leninism came later, under the influence of his comrade Che Guevara and his brother (and likely successor) Raul.
The pages about Che are especially disappointing. Here, affection yields little more than hagiography: “Che is an example,'' Castro says. “An indestructible moral force. His cause, his ideas, in this age of the fight against neoliberal globalisation, are triumphing.''
Put that on the T-shirt, too. But some richer insight into the man's ideas and personality would be good to have, as well.
Responsibility for the book's limitations falls only in part on Castro himself.
As a prominent spokesman for alterglobalisation'' (alternative globalisation) movement and the editor of one of the most influential journals of opinion, Ramonet doubtless enjoyed more streamlined access to the Jefe (the chief) than Debray had. But having won an audience, Ramonet seems to have been unwilling to risk losing it.
“Here, no one has ever been imprisoned for being a dissident or because they see things from the way the Revolution does,'' Castro says. “Our courts sentence people to prison on the basis of laws, and they judge counter-revolutionary acts.''
Did Ramonet consider asking Fidel why — after almost 50 years of the Revolution — citizens cannot be trusted to organise independent labour unions or libraries?
The closest we get to a tough question is when Ramonet asks: “Some prosecutors accuse the Cuban Revolution of all sorts of things. What arguments in defence can you offer them?'' Seldom has the complaint that journalists serve as stenographers to power ever seemed more justified.
