Collected Essays (42 page)

The Pope then, still bending down, placed his hand on my head, and speaking almost into my ear said: ‘Well done, well done, my boy . . . this is what I like to hear, and I will ask the good Lord to grant a special blessing on these good intentions of yours, so that you may really be a priest after his own heart. I bless all your other intentions too, and all the people who are rejoicing at this time for your sake.’ He blessed me and gave me his hand to kiss. He passed on and spoke to someone else, a Pole, I believe: but all at once, as if following his own train of thought, he turned back to me and asked when I should be back at my home. I told him: ‘For the feast of Assumption.’ ‘Ah, what a feast that will be,’ he said, ‘up there in your little hamlet (he had earlier asked me where I came from), and how those fine Bergamasque bells will peal out on that day!’ and he continued his round smiling.

The illustrations are many and satisfying, one in particular. Pope John is caught by the camera talking to a little girl sick with leukemia – he speaks with extreme gravity and she listens with the same deep seriousness. It is impossible to say which of them is the elder, which will be the first dead. He speaks to her as to an equal.

1965

THREE REVOLUTIONARIES

1. The Man as Pure as Lucifer

T
HROUGHOUT
the French war there was a school of thought which believed Ho Chi Minh to be dead, so unwilling were those who had encountered him in 1945 and 1946 to believe that he was a genuine Communist. One of Ho Chi Minh’s strongest opponents in the south had described him to me with unwilling admiration.
Un homme pur comme Lucifer.

When I met him
*13
(I had guaranteed that I would not publish the details of our conversation) it was in a small room in Bao Dai’s former palace, over a cup of tea, and I could not believe him to be a figurehead. Another Minister was present, but a Minister known to be
effacé.
He was there only because I had asked to see him, and he sat silent like a small boy so long as Ho Chi Minh was with us.

Dressed in khaki drill, with thick dark woollen socks falling over his ankles, Ho Chi Minh gave an impression of simplicity and candour, but overwhelmingly of leadership. There was nothing evasive about him: this was a man who gave orders and expected obedience and also love. The kind, remorseless face had no fanaticism about it. A man is a fanatic about a mystery – tablets of stone, a voice from a burning bush – but this was a man who had patiently solved an equation. So much love had to be given and received, so many sacrifices demanded and suffered. Everything had contributed to the solution: a merchant ship, the kitchens of the Carlton Grill, a photographer’s studio in Paris, a British prison in Hongkong, as well as Moscow in the hopeful spring days of the Revolution, the company of Borodin in China.

‘Let us speak as though we are at home,’ he said, and I wondered whether it was in the Carlton Grill that he had learnt his easy colloquial English (only once did he fumble for a word). I am on my guard against hero-worship, but he appealed directly to that buried relic of the schoolboy. When he put on his glasses to read a paper, bending a little down and sideways, shifting his English cigarette in long, bony, graceful fingers, the eyes twinkling at some memory 1 had stirred, I was reminded of a Mr Chips, wise, kind, just (if one could accept the school rules as just), prepared to inflict sharp punishment without undue remorse (and punishment in this adult school has lasting effect), capable of inspiring love. I regretted I was too old to accept the rules or believe what the school taught.

He was working fourteen hours a day, but there was no sign of fatigue. He got up to return to work (the National Assembly was meeting the next day), and his socks flapped as he waved back at me from the doorway, telling me not to hurry, to stay as long as I liked, to have another cup of tea. I could imagine them flapping all across the school quad, and I could understand the loyalty of his pupils.

There was sadness and decay, of course, in Hanoi, as there couldn’t help being in a city emptied of all the well-to-do. For such as I there was sadness in the mere lack of relaxation: nothing in the cinemas but propaganda films, the only restaurants prohibitive in price, no café in which to while away the hours watching people pass. But the peasant doesn’t miss the cafe, the restaurant, the French or the American film – he’s never had them. Perhaps even the endless compulsory lectures and political meetings, the hours of physical training, are better entertainment than he has ever known.

We talk so glibly of the threat to the individual, but the anonymous peasant has never been treated so like an individual before. Unless a priest, no one before the Commissar has approached him, has troubled to ask him questions, or spent time in teaching him. There is something in Communism besides the politics.

I thought with more sympathy now of the southern President Diem, for in Saigon where there is nothing else but politics he represents at least an idea of patriotism. He has some words in common with Ho Chi Minh, as Catholicism has some words in common with Communism, but he is separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers droning of global strategy, when he should be walking in the rice-fields unprotected, learning the hard way how to be loved and obeyed – the two cannot be separated.

One pictured him there in the Norodom Palace, sitting with his blank, brown gaze, incorruptible, obstinate, ill-advised, going to his weekly confession, bolstered up by his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle. The name I would write under his portrait is the Patriot Ruined by the West.

1955

2. The Marxist Heretic

No one since the Scarlet Pimpernel has been so ‘demned’ elusive as Fidel (whom no Cuban except an enemy calls by the name of Castro). He will see you, if that is his wish, in his own good time and in his chosen place, but there will never – that is certain – be a rendezvous appointed for eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning in an office on such and such a floor in Havana. For one thing he is seldom in Havana. Cuba is a country now and not merely a pleasure-capital as it was in Batista’s day. The new apartment prepared for Fidel in the palace of the revolution holds small attraction for him, with the exception of the big toy installed there, a map of Cuba as big as a billiard table with a great switch-board enabling him to illuminate the grazing areas, the areas of sugar, coffee, tobacco. This agricultural landscape is his home.
*14

Once we nearly stumbled on him on the Isla Turiguano, the state farm in Las Villas surrounded on three sides by marshes – an island of prize cattle, prize horses, and prize pigs. We had arrived at the cowboys’ motel in the evening, but we were a day late by our schedule (cars have a way of shedding parts after seven years’ hard use), and Fidel had left that morning. At Moron we arrived at mid-day to find that he had passed the night there and moved on somewhere else. In Camaguey they knew nothing of his movements at the Party headquarters, but the secretary significantly was absent ‘somewhere’, and Fidel appeared in Camaguey soon after we left. He was always ahead of us or behind us as we drove East to Santiago and Guantenamo.

On the second night of my arrival in Cuba, I watched him as he made one of his marathon speeches (four hours without a note) to the Congress of the Trade Unions. Knowing little Spanish I observed his physical performance rather than listened to his speech. I could have divided it like a play into acts: in the first act he was a grave formidable figure, almost motionless at the podium, the word
conciencia
chimed in his sentences. Then suddenly all changed to comedy and farce, as he imitated the ignorant member of a political
cadre, ‘No sé. No sé.
’ He began to play with his six microphones, touching, shifting, aligning them as though they were flowers; he knew exactly which one of them, if he bent above it, would emphasize best a purr, a laugh, an angry sneer, a humorous imitation. The arms moved all the time now, as he mimicked, play-acted, plucked laughter out of his audience. ‘There is no people more sensitive to ridicule than here.’ He savaged Señor Frei of Chile: you could almost see the poor man’s corpse slung over his shoulder.

After this speech he vanished into the countryside as effectively as he had vanished ten years ago from Batista’s troops and planes into the forests of the Sierra Maestre. But not till ten days later would reports and photographs of his travels appear in
Granma
– the daily paper with what seems to be an odd nursery title until you remember that
Granma
was the boat which brought him and his eighty-three revolutionaries from Mexico to Cuba – seventy-one were dead or captured in the first week – to overthrow Batista’s dictatorship.

This elusiveness is, of course, partly a matter of security. A gunman would find it difficult to choose the right spot at the right time, and in one of the last plots against his life, betrayed by a double agent in the C.I.A., the would-be assassins made a ruthless plan to ensure his presence at a given place at a given time. They began to shadow the car of Haydée Santamaria on her way home from work in the Casa America where she is in charge of relations with the Communist parties of Latin America. Her death, they believed, would lead them to Fidel.

There are three principal heroines of the revolution: Celia Sanchez, who in 1956 awaited Fidel in the Sierra Maestre, Vilma Espin, who fought with Raul Castro in Oriente and later married him, and Haydée Santamaria. Haydée (her surname is no more used than Fidel’s) fought in the unsuccessful attack on Moncada Barracks in Santiago in 1953. Her brother was killed there and his eyes torn out, her fiancé was killed and his testicles cut off, and the bodies were shown her in the prison. Four years later, married to Armando Hart, she fought in the Sierra. (I met her first in 1957 when she and her husband were hiding in a safe-house in Santiago on their way to the mountains.) If the assassins had succeeded in killing her, she would inevitably have been buried in the heroes’ pantheon, and her funeral would have been a rendezvous they could be certain Fidel would keep. But she noticed the lights of the following car and took evasive action.

So there is reason enough for Fidel to make few appointments for fixed hours and to be notoriously unpunctual at his public appearances (on August 29 the curtain rose on the C.T.C. Congress an hour late). But his enemies come only from outside. He has no cause to fear an unpremeditated attack. The nation is a nation in arms, and no tyrant could long survive his constant journeys through the countryside. But the paramount motive for his travels is not personal safety; he is discovering his own country for the first time, with a sense of excitement over the smallest details. In his speech to the Trade Union delegates he said: ‘I have never learnt as much as I have when talking with workers, students, and peasants. I have passed through two universities in my life: one where I learnt nothing, one where I have learnt all that I know.’ He is a Chestertonian man who travels towards home as though it were to a foreign land.

I was more fortunate than many my last night in Cuba, for a messenger came to fetch me from dinner and I was able to spend the early hours with him in a house on the outskirts of Havana. As soon as we sat down. Fidel began to describe to me, compulsively as though he needed a stranger in order to taste the pleasure of recounting his story again, how on his last journey he had entered a small pueblo after dark and noticed there were no lights in the streets – only in the house of the Party. In a bar two men sat playing dominoes and he sat down with them and joined the game. The rumour of his presence spread and the villagers gathered. They demanded a speech. (I was reminded how an intellectual had told me that in 1965, the bad year of drought and political uncertainty, Fidel had not spoken once between July 26, the National Day, and October, and how people had become nervous and unsettled by his silence.) In this pueblo he told them he would return another day to speak: now he wanted to ask questions . . . the shrewd humorous Socratic eyes looked me quickly over . . . he discovered why there were no lights in the street, how far a man had to walk to get his shoes repaired, how deeply dependent they were upon a town some fifteen kilometres away . . . they were small details, probably familiar to any country dweller, but most of his adult years have been spent in war, prison or exile. Now at forty he is really beginning to live. I had sometimes wondered how he would fare with the heroic days in the Sierra Maestre over, but perhaps the heroic days for him are only just beginning.

He spoke about that pueblo for more than half an hour: I would interrupt with a question and he would stop in mid-sentence, replying quickly and without hesitation, then pick up the unfinished phrase exactly where it had been left. He would change in a flash from the sly humorous observer to the enthusiast. If I had not missed him in the Isla Turiguano, if I had been with him in the country, I would have seen what he saw, I would have been present at the birth of his idea. It had come to him suddenly there, over the dominoes . . .

He intended to make an experiment in this remote pueblo. The inhabitants would be removed from their dependence on the town. Everything they needed would be provided free of charge. Their houses would be free (already in his speech of August 29 he had foreseen the universal abolition of rents in 1970), they already had a primary school – a secondary school would be built, they would have their own generator of electricity, there would be a nursery for the children and a communal restaurant free of charge which would relieve the women of most work in the home (‘In my opinion this will help many marriages to last’), there would be a free cinema twice a week, a cobbler cobbling free. Money would not be abolished, but the need of money would practically disappear. Socialism in one country had been tried elsewhere. This would be Communism in one pueblo. Sociologists and psychologists would watch the experiment. How would the people use their greater leisure? Would productivity rise or fall? And if the experiment didn’t work? If productivity didn’t rise? ‘We shall have to think again.’ How seldom have Communist leaders allowed that degree of doubt in any plan?