Castro’s memoirs: No regrets

No one familiar with Fidel Castro’s oratory and ego is surprised that his autobiography runs more than 600 pages and concedes neither error nor excess during his nearly 50 years ruling Cuba.

What has surprised analysts has been his conciliatory approach to some of his erstwhile adversaries, including Presidents Kennedy, Clinton and Carter, the latter of whom he termed “a man of honor, an ethical man.”

As Castro steps down from the presidency, “Fidel Castro: My Life,” provides a panoramic view of the 81-year-old leader’s years in power. The book, first published in Spain in 2006, was edited by Castro in his sickbed for release in the U.S. last month.

Throughout the book, Castro touts what he considers prime accomplishments of his revolution: universal literacy, free higher education, one of the world’s lowest infant-mortality rates and a healthcare network that treats all Cubans for free and provides relief in the Third World and to victims of natural disasters from Pakistan to Haiti.

What does Castro regret in five turbulent decades that included the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, the Mariel boatlift and the fall of communism across much of the world? Nothing, he says -- not the dissidents jailed for demanding elections, the rivals executed nor the thousands of lives lost in the Cuban military’s “internationalist” deployments.

“I have not one iota of regret about what we’ve done in our country and the way we’ve organized our society,” Castro told coauthor Ignacio Ramonet during more than 100 hours of interviews over three years, ending in December 2005.

Castro insists throughout the discourse that the communist nature of Cuba’s revolution is “irrevocable.” But he also warns that Cubans can kill off his life’s work if they continue to follow the siren cries of capitalism and self-enrichment.

“This revolution can destroy itself. We, we can destroy it, and we would be to blame,” he says.

Bellicose and swashbuckling, with his trademark fatigues and scruffy beard, Castro frequently outmaneuvered his powerful neighbor and archenemy over the second half of the 20th century.

Though a succession of U.S. presidents and hard-line Cuban exiles in Miami regarded him as a dictator who trampled on the rights of his people, Castro stood as a symbol for many Latin American leaders who envied his defiance of the powerful norteamericanos.

His reach, and appeal, spanned the globe. He aided revolutionaries from Nicaragua to Angola, supported leftists such as Chile’s Salvador Allende and Grenada’s Maurice Bishop, fomented unrest against conservatives in Venezuela and Argentina, and kept allies in power in Mozambique.

Born in a village in eastern Cuba on Aug. 13, 1926, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was the son of a prosperous Spanish immigrant and the servant he had taken as a mistress. He was sent to a Jesuit-run boys academy in the capital, and then studied law at the University of Havana.

Castro excelled at both basketball and baseball, but he also began plotting revolution as a student. Resentful of U.S. backing of corrupt leaders and ownership of exploitative factories and plantations, he joined the Orthodox Party, which embraced the legacy of Jose Marti.

He ran as an Orthodox Party candidate for parliament in 1952, but the vote was canceled when Gen. Fulgencio Batista overthrew the government and imposed a right-wing dictatorship.

Castro organized a revolutionary movement. An attack in 1953 on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba failed miserably, and several dozen of his followers were killed. Castro and many others were captured. Freed two years later in an amnesty for political prisoners, he fled to Mexico.

Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and 80 followers headed back to Cuba in late 1956 to launch the revolution that led to their seizure of power on New Year’s Day 1959.

Initially acclaimed on the international stage, Castro charmed journalists and socialites in New York and Washington that April.

Countless biographers, interviewers and political scientists say his lifelong confrontation with his northern neighbor didn’t have to happen. In their view, Batista supporters whose homes and businesses had been seized by Castro encouraged Washington to reject him, pushing him into the arms of the Soviet Union.

President Eisenhower slapped a trade embargo on Cuba in October 1960 and severed diplomatic relations three months later. The $1.8 billion worth of U.S.-owned property nationalized after the revolution remains uncompensated and a barrier to trade and diplomatic relations.

On the eve of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist. Beholden to Moscow and fearful of another U.S. attack, Castro permitted the Soviet Union to install medium-range missiles in his country in 1962, and found himself caught in the middle of a high-stakes Cold War showdown that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Through the next decades, Castro aided leftist movements around the world. But despite improvements in living standards at home, Cuba could not keep up with the economic development of the West. He resorted to repression when the early successes of his revolution and popular enthusiasm for it faded.

Exiles who were able to visit Cuba beginning in the late 1970s provided evidence of their prosperity. Cubans began hijacking small aircraft, commandeering boats and besieging embassies for asylum.

In 1980, Castro allowed anyone who wanted to leave to travel from the port city of Mariel. About 125,000 took him up on the offer -- including some prisoners and mental patients whom Castro freed.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended Moscow’s subsidies to Havana and forced Castro to grudgingly permit some economic liberalization. Castro later tried to roll back those reforms, but remittances from relatives abroad quickly became a mainstay of the Cuban economy.

And a brief opening to the United States early this decade closed as well. In 2003, Castro jailed 75 dissidents. Some were previously released, and Spain said last week that it had negotiated freedom for seven more.

Forced by a serious intestinal illness to cede power to his brother, Raul, in the summer of 2006, Castro has been out of the limelight for most of the last 18 months. It was in that time that he pored over the text of his autobiography.

In the book, he denounces the corruption that has become widespread in his country, as workers moved by greed, envy or hunger steal from their offices or factories.

Castro laments the encroachment of the U.S. dollar into his island’s economy. The opening of hard-currency stores to bring those dollars into the state coffers created a class divide between people with dollars and those earning only unconvertible pesos.

“I’ll have the glory of dying without a penny of convertible currency,” Castro boasts, denying claims that he has squirreled away billions abroad. He said his salary has been $30 a month for decades.

Castro also denounces what he sees as selfish consumerism rampant in the United States, asking readers to imagine the pollution and depletion of fossil fuels that would result if all the world had the per capita car ownership of his nemesis to the north.

With so many Cubans eager to earn more, Castro may be out of touch with his people. Few Cubans appear to disparage the availability of imported goods, only their inability to buy them.

But Peter Kornbluh, head of the Cuba documentation project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, also was struck by Castro’s “charitable descriptions of more than one president.”

Kennedy, under whose presidency the Bay of Pigs invasion was launched and the Cuban missile crisis resolved, was “one of the United States’ most brilliant personalities,” Castro said.

Carter was “one of the country’s most honest presidents,” he said. Carter, president during the 1980 Mariel immigration crisis, was allowed to visit Cuba in 2002.

Asked by Ramonet in the book if he found Clinton more constructive than the Republican leaders who came before and after him, Castro said that he did, and that Clinton “wasn’t particularly demanding.”

Castro’s ideological heroes, he asserts, were his fallen revolutionary comrade Guevara, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and China’s Jiang Zemin. A prolific reader, Castro also pays homage to authors Ernest Hemingway and Miguel de Cervantes, creator of his favorite character, Don Quixote.

He describes those who oppose him as “lumpen” instruments of Washington, and the hundreds of thousands who have fled as selfish.

Despite his vitriolic sentiments toward President Bush and South Florida’s staunchly anti-Communist Cuban exiles, Castro expresses often his affection for the U.S. populace.

“Never has the revolution blamed the American people” for the caustic state of Cuban-U.S. relations, he said.

But he concludes his self-assessment with a characteristic prediction that he will prevail, even if from the grave.

“Our enemies should not delude themselves; I die tomorrow and my influence may actually increase,” he says. “I may be carried around like El Cid -- even after he was dead his men carried him around on his horse, winning battles.”

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carol.williams@latimes.com