My swim with Fidel

So what do you do when you’re Reuters’ man in Havana in the 60s, intent on avoiding work by spending hours every morning at the beach, and you espy a rather familiar beard floating on the waters? Especially when Fidel Castro hasn’t been seen in public for weeks, rumours are mushrooming that he’s been deposed, lies at death’s door, or Lord alone knows what, and even Foggy Bottom in Washington is getting still foggier by announcing there’s something strange going on in the state of Cuba?

Well, jump into the waves, half-swim half-trip out to him and ask him what the hell’s going on - eventually! But more on that later.

This was just one more in a whole series of surreal moments. The Cuba of the 1960s was a wild, exuberant place. It was the golden age of the revolution. Millions throughout Latin America and the world idolised Fidel. He was the icon of the underdog fighting oppression, the olive-green garbed David flexing the sling of righteousness against the menacing Yankee Goliath - and, of course, the darling of the murk-minded berks of the knee-jerk left brigade throughout Europe and North America.

Even for the more straight-kneed liberals with their feet firmly on the ground there was hope that, despite the anarchic impulsiveness of Fidel's experimentation, the pitching and rolling zigzags, economic dislocations and chronic shortages of basic goods, the spasms of repression, then relaxation, then more repression, something positive would emerge from this petri dish of revolutionary ferment.

Fidel was forever professing his undying commitment to Marxism, but 1960s Cuba was nothing like the drab communist models of the Soviet bloc; here Marxism veered closer to Groucho than Karl.

This, after all, was the era when transport minister Faure Chomón’s clumsy bodyguard jumped into the car with the safety catch of his gun off and shot his boss in the bum - the second official communiqué of my nearly four-year tenure. The first was on the day I arrived when labour minister Augusto Martínez Sánchez tried to commit suicide on being dismissed - not in connection, I presume, with my arrival.

- When armed forces second vice-minister Major Efigenio Ameijeiras Delgado, one of Fidel’s earliest followers in the war against Batista and his faithful companion on the good ship Granma had a slight substance abuse problem and would bound down the steps from Havana's popular Carmelo café to direct traffic with gestures crisp enough to rival the most professional cop.

- When Ameijeiras' close colleague and fellow Granma shipmate, armed forces first vice-minister Juan Almeida, the country’s highest ranking Afro-Cuban, was selling songs in the country’s record shops, crooning and strumming while Cuba built communism.

- When Cuba’s revolutionary poets laureate were penning odes in the state-controlled newspapers like: Fidel, heart of Cuba/The whole world knows thee/To name thee is to say dawn,/Tomato, pineapple or coffee./To name thee, Fidel, Fidel,/Is to squeeze the fatherland/Into five tiny letters.

- When, not to be outdone, Rosita Fornés, the country’s foremost cabaret singer, was belting out her long-favourite staple, Cuba, Pearl of the Antilles, with a new add-on about “a Fidel who vibrates in the mountains”. Not just tomato now, vibrator, too!

- When two shiny snow ploughs broiled unused in the tropics after trade ministry officials became enthralled with the Arctic machines on a tour of East Germany. It was a Monty Python ministry before Monty Python had even been thought of.

- When Fidel gave an oration launching a new coffee revolution, calling for the little foreign exchange-earning bushes to be planted everywhere, and next morning workers were ripping up flowering shrubs from the median in Fifth Avenue in Havana’s upscale seaside Miramar neighbourhood, and replacing them with you know what. Of course coffee plants need proper soil and shade trees. The urban coffee plantations soon shrivelled, and nobody ever drank a Fifth Avenue Arabica or Miramar Robusta. 

Fidel presided over all this, his every action reported in minute detail in the state-controlled media. Travelling by plane, helicopter, car, jeep, launch, sleeping in mountain hospital, peasant cottage or simple hammock slung between two palm trees, he toured the island non-stop, giving orders, criticising, praising, dishing out plans at agricultural, hydraulic, educational or other projects.

He would appear unheralded at any time of day or night, anywhere in the country, unfettered by a permanent office in Havana or a fixed schedule. Wherever he went, striding forward in his olive-green fatigues, pistol strapped to his side, workers, peasants, everybody would rush forward and a quick-fire interchange of questions and comment ensued. 

No decision or subject was too small. Now etymologist, he decided the name of a new sugar mill, choosing one of native Indian origin. Now revolutionary sob sister, lying in a hammock, smoking a cigar, he gave a group of village girls advice on broken romance.  

In the countryside, he would drive his car or jeep himself. He would stand at the open door of a helicopter to get a better view and choose a landing site. He would turn up at a freight ship at 4 am to oversee better unloading techniques. He would appear at a hospital at 6 am to blast the local staff for the less than savoury state of the floor.  

He would wade up to his knees in rural mud to get to where he wanted to get, later squatting barefoot, waiting for his boots and socks to dry. 

One year Fidel decided that 400 medical students should hold their graduation ceremony atop 6,500-foot Pico Turquino in the Sierra Maestra, leading the march himself over the steep overgrown paths. To reward the climbers he had 100 gallons of ice cream helicoptered in half-way up on the plateau that had been his command post during his guerrilla war against Batista.

On the summit itself, six hairdressers descended from a helicopter, heavy hair setters, visors, generators and all. Cuba’s new women doctors, after all, must look their best on graduation day, he decreed.

In his interminable speeches, he was economist, dietitian, architect, military strategist, criminologist, party ideologist, agronomist, sportsman, female emancipator, cattle breeder. The subject might or might not be connected with the occasion being celebrated, since he progressed by association of ideas.  

One could go on forever with the theatre of the absurd. But there was also the sublime or verging on sublime: the massive literacy campaign; first aid posts in the last back-of-beyond, where no doctor, nurse, possibly not even an aspirin, had previously made an appearance; peasant children from the remotest villages ensconced in the appropriated Havana homes of the departed bourgeoisie, now converted into scholarship houses.  

Above all there was this hope of a better future in the not-too-distant future.

During all this time, until Fidel launched his ill-conceived “revolutionary offensive” in 1968, later relaxed, Cuba’s incredible tropical joie de vivre endured. Havana’s night life was still vibrating much as Rosita Fornés had Fidel vibrating in her song. I may have only had running water an hour a day, if that, in the Reuters flat-cum-office, but I had 71 wild, throbbing, pulsating nightspots within a mile or two’s radius, and tried them all - not in one night, though.

Above all, there was the inestimable bonus of being so cut off from Reuters’ head office that they left you alone, with barely a communication. One of the few I received came after I got pissed off about something and filed nothing for over three weeks. “Thank you for keeping cable costs down in August,” chief news editor Stuart Underhill wrote.

There was, of course, that time I resigned Fidel as prime minister during a communist politburo meeting. Well, I had it from “reliable sources”, and it was merely a technicality since he would keep the all-powerful post of first secretary in line with general communist practice.

New York or London rewrote it and sent out a snap, omitting the technicality and first secretary part. By the time those provisos limped in with a slow second take, radio stations up and down the Americas had already interrupted normal broadcasting with a “Breaking news, this just in from Reuters in Havana…”

Fortunately the other hacks in Havana followed my lead. Of course he never did resign. The party meeting was to purge an anti-party group.

And now back to that interview. I said eventually, because by the time I picked up the nerve to ask him something he was already out of the water and disappearing behind the pine trees with a small number of guards, after chatting with ordinary Cubans on the beach.

But as luck would have it, there he was the following day. Prepared this time, I shouted out to him if I could ask him some questions. He waved me over just as a guard was descending on me, making a weak joke about English weather. “My first swimming interview,” he said. We talked, swimming and standing, for over 90 minutes before we traipsed out and he bid me farewell: “Well, if you can remember all that, go and publish it.”

He was there the following day, too, though none of the other journalists thought of coming out to check up. We had another conversation for 20 minutes - after he blamed me for his getting his shoulders sun-burnt. 

There was no doubting the charisma of the man, and one cannot but help thinking what he might have achieved had he been less impulsive and repressive. Graham Greene slammed Fidel’s repression of Catholics, non-subservient intellectuals and homosexuals, but at the same time said: “There is an extraordinarily likeable quality in the man.”

And above all, a lightning-quick mind and wonderful way with words. When I asked him if he’d have had a better chance of coming to terms with Washington if Kennedy was still president, he replied: “Johnson is a mediocre bandit, whereas Kennedy was an intelligent bandit.” That got into the London Observer’s Sayings of the Year.

The gene must run in the family, though it seems to have given little brother Raúl a pass. In an interview with The New York Times, Fidel’s long-estranged younger sister Juanita, who despises Donald Trump as “repugnant” and “detestable”, saw parallels in Trump and her brother. “The only difference is that he may have millions but the other had a brain,” she said.

Swimming with Fidel: The Toils of an Accidental Journalist was published in March 2014 ■