Questions After Burying Fidel Castro / 14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner

Funeral acts to say goodbye to Fidel Castro's ashes in Havana (EFE)
Funeral acts to say goodbye to Fidel Castro’s ashes in Havana (EFE)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 3 December 2016 — Almost no one knows how his final hours passed. Did he die suddenly of a cardiac arrest, did he agonize for several days, or did he suffocate because a throat obstruction, as rumors circulate sotto voce in Havana ?

Why the hurry to cremate him? Was it that they didn’t want his final image to be that of a fragile and shrunken old man with a deranged expression? Is that why they made the people file past a photograph of the heroic Comandante on the Sierra Maestra? There is an old tradition of revolutionary primness. One of Stalin’s last requests was that his mustache be well combed.

Why did they place the urn with the ashes in the Granma Hall of the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, far from the presence of the multitudes? Did they fear the improbable scenario that passions might overflow?

Or did they only want for his old comrades-in-arms, like Ramiro Valdés, to bid farewell privately to the caudillo and chief who guided them to victory and turned them into important — though hated and feared — personages?

Is it true that the Comandante’s mortal remains did not travel in the precarious jeep that allegedly carried them to their final destination so as not to endanger them on a pothole-riddled road made hard to navigate by government neglect? Did the idea of giving Cubans a symbolic farewell prevail? What did it matter if the vehicle carried sand or the ashes of another dead man if the act was purely ritual? If Raúl swapped Hugo Chávez’s cadaver, why wouldn’t he do the same with his own brother’s?

Is it true that they planned to switch the ashes at dawn Sunday, shortly before the burial? Using a body double was a trick that Fidel Castro used frequently in life. Was the custom followed after his death? Is that an example of the revolutionary cunning Fidel boasted of so often when he inhabited this vale of tears?

Why did no one interview his official widow and the five sons he had with her? Why didn’t the journalists record the reactions of the other 10 (more or less) unofficial heirs known or presumed to be his? Or the reactions of the 10 other grieving and presumably desperate women who at one time loved the Maximum Leader and dared to give birth to his child?

Is it true that between Raúl’s and Fidel’s families there are barely any channels of communication? Is it true that Raúl’s heirs consider themselves devoted revolutionaries and see their cousins as contemptible bon vivants who mindlessly waste the resources given to them in the sins of the dolce vita, while they themselves aggrandize the legacy of their elders in patriotic endeavors?

Or is it perhaps the domestic and familial variant of the face-off between Fidelistas and Raulistas who, according to the well-informed, has existed deep in the ruling cupola ever since, precipitously in 2006, Raúl came to power hanging from Fidel’s bowels, severely damaged by diverticulitis?

How does Raúl Castro really feels after the disappearance of the older brother who gave him the ideas, the vital drive, the structure of values, who made him Comandante, then Minister, then President and handed him a country he could make or break at will, all the time reminding him that he was an intellectually inferior pygmy without imagination, learning or charisma?

Is Raúl a victim of the love-hate and admiration-rejection provoked by relationships where one party feels he is someone else’s caboose? Does he resent the humiliations received or does he thank Fidel for giving him a remarkable life? Gratitude is the most difficult emotion to handle by most human beings.

Is Raúl aware that the solid juvenile adherence aroused in him by his brother-hero turned to a critical evaluation of the brother-loony with more darkness than glow who lived in a universe of unhinged words or initiatives — dwarf cows, moringa plantations and a thousand other inanities — that gradually destroyed the material foundation of Cubans’ coexistence?

There remains, of course, the most important of all questions. What will happen in the future, now that Fidel Castro lies in Santa Ifigenia Cemetery under a heavy stone, near José Martí’s tomb? That will be the subject of a future article.

Ed. note: English translation comes from Mr. Montaner’s own blog.