Neither Castro Nor Chavez Are Communists
Let me clarify right away. I am not saying that Marxist ideology doesn’t play a role in both leaders’ views of the world. Nor that the Cuban people aren’t suffering because of totalitarianism, or repression, or a communist economy’s chronic incapacity to make bread. I am talking about Latin American culture.
It is clear that I need a lot of help at this time, so let me bring Gabriel García Márquez to my side, somebody who knows more about Latin American culture than most. García Márquez began his career as a journalist in Venezuela in the fifties, during the dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jimenez, and has been a close friend of Fidel Castro for many years. In one of his many creative escapes from Marxist ideology, he once said (I am reciting) that “Fidel is not a communist, he is a typical Latin American dictator who has conveniently chosen to wear a communist mantle.” Whether true or not, the phrase has been attributed to him.
In that phrase, the Colombian writer who is justly famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that some critics have compared to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, was exposing the kernel of Latin American culture and the source of our best-known contributions to the world: magical-realist novels and the populist dictator typified by General Juan Domingo Perón.
It is not a coincidence that some of the best Latin American novels have dictators as protagonists. Fidel Castro, García Márquez was pointing out, is just a dictator who through the grace of mimicry (and political circumstances) had improved his chances of subjugating a population. On this he is followed closely by his protégé Hugo Chávez, who can also mimic Perón at will, as country after country churns imitators out of the original Argentine mold as well as similar political and economic failures, in a tragic, hopeless and peculiar cloning process. As Venezuelan writer María Sol Pérez Schael says in an excellent article (in Spanish) today, “despite the variety of countries that conform it, Latin America does nothing more than repeat itself. This domino effect is like a sickness that devours us, an uncontrollable mimic that pushes us to identical catastrophes.”
And the sickness has a permanent mantra, because the dictators don’t end their mischief after death. They leave political organizations such as the pathetic Peronist (Justicialist) party of Argentina, of which Pérez Schael cites Jorge Luis Borges’ final judgment: “peronists aren’t good nor bad, they are incorrigible.”
All this, of course, because culture matters, a true assertion that is nonetheless anathema to our fantasyland multicultural liberals.
Posted by Val at March 7, 2003 11:51 AM