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Louis Perez: In death, Castro passes into status of historical subject impossible to discuss dispassionately for years to come
He says Castro defied America; even with his death Cuba not likely to bend to demands of US with incoming Trump administration
(CNN) —
Fidel Castro Ruz, the political personality, has died. Fidel Castro, the historical persona, has been born. He passes from the present into the past, to serve as an enduring historical subject of debate and dispute, about whom dispassion will be impossible for years to come. Fidel Castro was not a man about whom one is likely to be neutral.
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Louis A. Perez
Louis A. Perez
Fidel is a metaphor. He is a Rorschach blot upon which to project fears or hopes. A prism in which the spectrum of colors refracted out has to do with light that went in. He is a point of view, loaded with ideological purport and political meaning. A David who survived Goliath. A symbol of Third World intransigence against First World domination.
But it is also possible to discuss the historical “essences” of Fidel Castro. He emerged out of a history shaped by a century of Cuban national frustration, heir to a legacy of unfulfilled hopes for national sovereignty and self-determination, aspirations that put Cuba on a collision course with the United States. The collision of the early 1960s served to fix the trajectory of the 50 years of ruptured relations that followed.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Charles Tasnadi/AP
Fidel Castro exhales cigar smoke during a March 1985 interview at his presidential palace in Havana, Cuba. Castro died at age 90 on November 25, 2016, Cuban state media reported. Click through to see more photos from the life of the controversial Cuban leader who ruled for nearly half a century:
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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AFP/Getty Images
A portrait of Castro in New York in 1955. He was in exile after being released as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners in Cuba. Two years earlier, he and about 150 others staged an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the regime of Fulgencio Batista.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Getty Images
Castro with Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara during the early days of their guerrilla campaign in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains. Guevara, Castro and Castro's brother Raul organized a group of Cuban exiles that returned to Cuba in December 1956 and waged a guerrilla war against government troops.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Castro and his revolutionaries hold up their rifles in January 1959 after overthrowing Batista.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Grey Villet/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Crowds cheer Castro on his victorious march into Havana in 1959.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos
Surrounded by rebels who came with him from the mountains, Castro gives an all-night speech.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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AP
Castro, left, became Cuba's prime minister in February 1959. His brother Raul, right, was commander in chief of the armed forces.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Bob Henriques/Magnum Photos
During a visit to New York in 1959, Fidel Castro spends time with a group of children.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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CBS Photo Archives/Getty Images
American talk-show host Ed Sullivan interviews Castro on a taped segment in 1959.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Keystone/Getty Images
Castro shakes hands with US Vice President Richard Nixon during a reception in Washington in 1959.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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AP
Castro addresses the UN General Assembly in September 1960.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Bohemia Magazine/AP
Castro jumps from a tank in April 1961 as he arrives at Giron, Cuba, near the Bay of Pigs. That month, a group of about 1,300 Cuban exiles, armed with US weapons, made an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Castro.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images
Castro announces general mobilization after the announcement of the Cuban blockade by President John F Kennedy in October 1962.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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AFP/Getty Images
Castro raises arms with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during a four-week visit to Moscow in May 1963.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Grey Villet/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Castro in July 1964.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Ullstei Bild/Getty Images
Castro plays baseball in 1964.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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DPA/Landov
Castro addresses thousands of Cubans in Havana in 1968.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Tampa Bay Times/MCT/Landov
In 1977, Castro uses a map as he describes the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to ABC correspondent Barbara Walters.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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AFP/Getty Images
Iraq's Saddam Hussein, center, with the Castro brothers during a visit to Cuba in January 1979.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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AFP/Getty Images
Castro greets Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Havana in April 1989.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Charles Platiau/Reuters/Landov
Castro visits Paris in March 1995.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Michel Gangne/AFP/Getty Images
Castro meets with Pope John Paul II on an airport tarmac in Havana in January 1998. It was the first papal visit to Cuba.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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AFP/Getty Images
Castro puts his arm around South African President Nelson Mandela in May 1998 with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, left, and Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. They were in Geneva, Switzerland, for a conference of the World Trade Organization.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Getty Images
Castro welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin to Cuba in December 2000. Putin was the first Russian President to visit Cuba since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Cristobal Herrera/AP
Castro is helped by aides after he appeared to faint while giving a speech in Cotorro, Cuba, in June 2001. He returned to the podium less than 10 minutes later to assure the audience he was fine and that he just needed to get some sleep.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images
In July 2001, Castro talks with Elian Gonzalez, the young boy who was the focus of a bitter international custody dispute a couple of years earlier.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images
Castro and former US President Jimmy Carter listen to the US national anthem after Carter arrived in Havana for a visit in May 2002.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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RAFAEL PEREZ/Newscom/REUTERS
Castro at the May Day commemoration of Revolution Square in Havana in 2004. He held tightly to his belief in a socialist economic model and one-party Communist rule, even after the Soviet Union's end and most of the rest of the world concluded state socialism was an idea whose time had passed.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Cristobal Herrera/AP
Castro, left, and his brother Raul attend a session of the Cuban parliament in July 2004.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Sven Creutzmann/Getty Images
Castro speaks in Havana in February 2006.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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CRISTOBAL HERRERA/AP
Castro in Havana in September 2002. Several surgeries forced him to relinquish his duties temporarily to younger brother Raul in July 2006.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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AFP/Getty Images
In footage from state-owned Cuban television, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez visits an ailing Castro in September 2006. That July, it was announced that Castro was undergoing intestinal surgery. Castro resigned as President in February 2008, and his brother Raul took over permanently.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Javier Galeano/AP
Castro smiles before delivering a speech in Havana in September 2010. He had remained mostly out of sight after falling ill in 2006 but returned to the public light that year.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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L'Osservatore Romano Vatican-Pool/Getty Images
Pope Benedict XVI meets with Castro in Havana in March 2012.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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Reuters/Landov
In this picture provided by CubaDebate, Castro talks to Randy Perdomo, president of Cuba's University Students Federation, during a February meeting in Havana.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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From Estudio Revolución/Granma
Castro visits with 19 cheese masters on Friday, July 3, 2015, in a rare trip outside his Havana home.
Photos: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies
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TASS/Getty Images
Leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, left, visits with Fidel Castro during a meeting at Castro's home on February 14, 2016.
There was something deeply personal about the Cuba-U.S. estrangement. Fidel Castro offended American sensibilities. The sheer effrontery of Castro’s challenge to the United States was breathtaking: defiant, strident, often virulent denunciations of the United States, hours at a time, day after day, stretching into weeks and months, and years.
Castro’s invective was more than adequately reciprocated by American vilification. Fidel Castro was held personally responsible for almost all the challenges the United States faced in Central and South America, in the Caribbean, in Africa. Castro was transformed simultaneously into an anathema and phantasma, unscrupulous and perhaps unbalanced, possessed by demons and given to evil doings.
He defied years of US efforts at regime change and his very defiance transformed him into something of an enduring national obsession. Castro occupied a place of almost singular distinction in that netherworld to which the United States banished its demons.
He was the man Americans loved to hate; political conflict personalized; decades of frustration over the US’ unsuccessful attempts to force Cuba to bend its will – all this vented on one man. Certainly, scores of assassination plots against the life of Castro could not have made American wrath any more personal.
And, yes: the missiles of October 1962. Castro would never be forgiven. It is highly unlikely that any American administration could have embarked on a US-Cuba rapprochement with Fidel Castro in power.
His death leaves something of a void in Cuba. Not in the form of a power vacuum, of course, but as the absence of a voice and the loss of a presence.
Even old, feeble and in failing health, beset with infirmities, and perhaps with traces of senility, Fidel continued to discharge the role of symbol. He was suspicious of President Barack Obama’s rapprochement initiatives. He no doubt would have been alarmed by the campaign rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump.
The Republican Party platform inaugurated the 2016 electoral campaign prepared to welcome “Cuba back into our hemispheric family after their corrupt rulers are forced from power and brought to account for their crimes against humanity.” The President-elect vowed to roll back all “concessions” made to Cuba unless the “regime meets our demands,” demands that include “religious and political freedom for the Cuban people.”
At this stage of US-Cuba relations, the very proposition of American “demands” on Cuba bode ill for continued normalization. A people who have endured 60 years of privation over the course of 11 presidential administrations in defense of national sovereignty and self-determination will not likely acquiesce to demands of a 12th administration.
In passing from the present to the past, Fidel will henceforth speak from the grave.
