Persona Non Grata: An Envoy in Castro’s Cuba By Jorge Edwards Translated from the Spanish by Colin Harding Pomerica Press, New York, 275 pp., $8.75 To understand Communist Cuba—how it grew and what it has become—it is absolutely essential to understand the personality of Fidel Castro. The dictators of the other established Communist states, from Leonid Brezhnev on down, are not personalities at all, for if they were they could not survive in states that have become institutionalized and require managers, efficiency experts, to keep them going. No one could be less efficient than Fidel Castro, yet so completely has his eccentric, free-wheeling personality come to signify the Cuban Revolution for the lowliest of Cubans and to generate the adoration without which the Revolution’s fearful economic sacrifices and political repressions would not be acceptable, that those who pay the bills in Moscow must tremble at the thought that something unforeseen might happen to this garrulous egocentric who sustains the illusion that freedom, progress, and abundance are just around the corner.
Who is capable of understanding such a man? Certainly not a Cuban, for there is no middle ground any longer between naive allegiance and fear. Certainly not an American, to whom this quintessentially Latin phenomenon is an enigma. A genuine Marxist would have to be as outraged by this betrayal of rule by and for the working class, as a genuine conservative by the destruction of the free market, or a genuine democrat by the flouting of civil liberties and the secret ballot. Only a Latin liberal, sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution but courageous and honest enough to report exactly what he sees and hears, could comprehend Fidel Castro.
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