Fifo. To me, you are the oldest of the old. And in a dictatorship, the leader’s expiration date is the closest thing there is to hope.
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 1 December 2024 — Between sips of coffee, with the faith of a true believer, of a fanatic who has earned his place in paradise, a teacher of mine once told me, “You are incapable of having any feelings for the revolution because you’ve only ever known an old Fidel.” Not old, I thought, without interrupting my interlocutor’s mystical outburst. More like decrepit. A mummy, a zombie, the bogeyman, Nosferatu. The Prince of Darkness reduced to a hunchbacked spine. The translucent beard, the ratty hair, the dark circles of the faithful departed
“What does Fidel have, what does Fidel have?” asks the almost pornographic little ditty. A firm chest, an invincible strength, a frightful steeliness, an enormous sword thrust inside and affixed there forever (oh, for God’s sake, Manuel Navarro Luna!), immense tenderness, a fountainhead of tuberoses, a river of triggers running down his belt. He could teach Homer’s heroes a thing or two. And Don Quixote too! But he hates those rotten dollars (though nothing could be further from the truth). You already know what Fidel has.
But not for me, Fifo. To me, you are the oldest of the old. And in a dictatorship, the leader’s expiration date is the closest thing there is to hope. His sacred presence became ever more sacred until death separated him from the masses, which happened on my way to Varadero — a wonderfully surprising gift of a day — on November 25, 2016. “But there was one thing I couldn’t quite shake,” I told my gentle teacher: “the voice of Fidel.”
“Can a human voice cast a long, depressing shadow,” asked George Steiner in reference to Hitler
“Can a human voice cast a long, depressing shadow?” George Steiner asked himself in reference to Hitler. The philosopher’s childhood in Paris took place amid the soundtrack of the Führer’s speeches on the radio. The commanding diction and accompanying gestures — there are voices that are a whole body — defined the soundscape of his generation. Hitler wanted to sweep away an entire vocal culture — Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein — and no one can imagine a silent Hitler.
The voice of the dictator stays with the child forever, dear parents and pedagogues. While a young Steiner was listening in terror to Hitler, a young Umberto Ecco heard Mussolini declare war against France and Britain. For him, the Fascist diatribes were as much a part of his childhood as Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy comic strips, the adventures of Sandokan and Professor Lidenbrock, music theory and drawing classes.
Our historic moment was a desperate attempt to abandon history, encapsulated in the voice of the dictator
In school, when hordes of students were forced to swear loyalty to “il duce,” those who came from anti-Fascist families always found ways to make fun of the oath. One of Ecco’s classmates would jokingly shout “Arturo!” instead of “Lo giuro!” (“I swear!”). How many times did we ourselves purposely mangle slogans during military preparation marches? One, two, three, four, eating shit and ruining shoes. First of May, horses’ day. April 1st, it’s the worst. No, the fun never ends, Carlos Puebla.
Revolution is a sense of the historical moment. Our historical moment was a desperate attempt to abandon history, encapsulated in the voice of the dictator. Díaz-Canel not only has no balls, he has no voice. His stutter, his inability to speak other languages, his fear of crowds, all disqualify him as a true leader. Neither did Raúl, who speaks with the nasal voice of a Cuban drunkard, a boozer, the family e’er-do-well. Raúl Modesto reminds us of Francisco Franco in some ways: the mustache, the low volume, the annoying, almost telephone-like ring. They all compensated for this by being relentlessly aggressive. Blood will calm any neurosis.
A sonorous museum of cruelty might include the the staccato voice of Hugo Chavez (“Ah, Mr. Danger, you messed with me, little bird.”); the cretinous voice of Nicolás Maduro (“Sometimes I realize that it is me when I look in the mirror.”); the fawning voice of Evo Morales (“Fidel has not fallen ill, he is just being repaired.”); the guttural voice of Adolf Hitler (“People have never been liberated with humanity and democracy”); the ranting voice of Kim (“Nuclear power is a symbol of sovereignty.”); the monotonous voice of Stalin (“I became a socialist in the seminary”); the tense voice of Putin (“Ukraine is an artificial state that Stalin willed into being.”); the pathetic voice of Ceausescu (“This morning we decided to increase the minimum wage.”).
And, of course, the voice of Fifo. (“I have never been nor am I now a communist… I am not a communist… I am a Marxist-Lenist and I will be a Marxist-Leninist till the day I die… I always admired Christ because he was the first communist… I apologize for having fallen.”)
Anyone who thinks that there are no believers left, that no one cries when a dictator dies, that no one sighs at his absence, is very wrong. Fidel has his mourners, perhaps thousands of them. On November 25, while I was celebrating these eight wonderful years of silence, a couple of “Granma” journalists reached the climax with a disturbing article about the leader.
“Fidel, whose umbilical chord was cut from two wombs — that of Lina, his biological mother — and Cuba, forged with his nation an alliance founded on love. He loved it like a father loves his children… Fidel literally opened his heart to danger and, in the midst of the rain, the mud and the roads destroyed by the combined power of the wind and the water, he was with his people in those distressing moments… The Commander’s love for his people is reborn in our president, [Miguel] Díaz-Canel.”
Honestly, who writes this stuff? And what psychiatrist are they seeing?
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