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The Interviewer as Partisan: American Journalists in Conversation with Fidel Castro

Entrevistadores partidistas: los periodistas estadounidenses en conversación con Fidel Castro
Renzo Llorente

Résumés

Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, many US reporters, including some of the best-known names in American journalism (such as Barbara Walters and Dan Rather), had the opportunity to interview Fidel Castro. All of the resulting interviews, which range from relatively brief exchanges to book-length texts, served as contributions, to one degree or another, to Americans’ perception of Fidel Castro and, more generally, to Americans’ conception of the Cuban political system and US-Cuba relations. Given the high caliber of many of the journalists who interviewed Fidel, one would naturally assume that said contributions consist, by and large, of well-informed, unbiased, enlightening interviews with the leader of the Cuban Revolution. But is that what we really find in these interviews?
A careful analysis of interviews with Fidel Castro by major US journalists reveals that well-informed, unbiased, enlightening interviews are in fact the exception, rather than the rule. Indeed, most of these journalists’ interviews with Castro—such as those of Lisa Howard (1963); Barbara Walters (1977); Robert MacNeil (1985); Maria Shriver (1988); and Tom Brokaw (1995)—follow a surprisingly similar script: the interviewer focuses on alleged human rights abuses in Cuba; treats Cuba’s political institutions and practices with skepticism; insists on knowing what concessions Cuba is prepared to make to the United States; implicitly criticizes Cuba’s foreign policy and—prior to 1990—Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union; neglects to consider the validity of Cuba’s complaints about US policy; and, in general, suggests that the US government’s aggressive attitude toward Cuba is justified in light of the policies pursued by Castro. As a result, in interviewing Fidel many prominent and influential American journalists did little more than justify and perpetuate the attitudes and policies toward Cuba of successive US governments—something that becomes quite apparent when one contrasts these journalists’ endeavors with the major interviews conducted by well-known journalists from other nations who also had the chance to converse with Castro. In sum, far from enhancing the American public’s understanding of Revolutionary Cuba, many high-profile US journalists actually reinforced some of the very misconceptions, distortions and elements of misinformation that have long constituted an important barrier to a healthier relationship between the United States and its Caribbean neighbor.

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Texte intégral

Introduction

1It is fair to say that Fidel Castro was first introduced to the US public in February 1957, when the American journalist Herbert L. Matthews interviewed him in his hideout in the Sierra Maestra. That this interview, published in The New York Times (Matthews, 1957), helped to shape Americans’ initial perception of the Cuban rebel leader is beyond dispute, and the interview’s influence is reflected in the title of a biography of Matthews: The Man Who Invented Fidel (DePalma, 2006). Over the following decades many other US reporters, including some of the best-known names in American journalism (such as Barbara Walters, Dan Rather and Andrea Mitchell), would likewise have the opportunity to interview Fidel. While none of these later interviews, which range from relatively brief exchanges to book-length texts, had the immediate political impact of Matthews’s scoop, they all served as contributions, to one degree or another, to Americans’ perception of Fidel Castro and, more generally, to Americans’ conception of the Cuban political system and US-Cuba relations. Given the high caliber of many of the journalists who interviewed Fidel, one would naturally assume that said contributions consist, by and large, of well-informed, unbiased, enlightening interviews with the leader of the Cuban Revolution. But is that what we really find in these interviews?

2 A careful analysis of interviews with Fidel Castro by major US journalists reveals that well-informed, unbiased, enlightening interviews are in fact the exception, rather than the rule. As I shall argue below, most of these journalists’ interviews with Castro follow a surprisingly similar script: the interviewer focuses on alleged human rights abuses in Cuba; treats Cuba’s political institutions and practices with skepticism; insists on knowing what concessions Cuba is prepared to make to the United States; implicitly criticizes Cuba’s foreign policy and—prior to 1990—Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union; neglects to consider the validity of Cuba’s complaints about US policy; and, in general, suggests that the US government’s aggressive attitude toward Cuba is justified in light of the policies pursued by Castro. As a result, in interviewing Fidel many prominent and influential American journalists did little more than justify and perpetuate the attitudes and policies toward Cuba of successive US governments—something that becomes quite apparent when one contrasts these journalists’ endeavors with the major interviews conducted by well-known journalists from other nations who also had the chance to converse with Fidel, such as Regino Díaz, Gianni Minà, Beatriz Pagés Rebollar, and Ignacio Ramonet.

3 For the purposes of this article, I have examined more than twenty interviews that Castro granted to journalists from the United States, along with two interviews with Americans who were not journalists and several interviews with non-American interviewers. The American journalists’ interviews with Fidel were all conducted between 1963 and 2002, and thus all took place while Castro was both head of the Cuban government and had an overtly Marxist and socialist (and communist) political outlook; that is, I do not discuss any interviews from the pre-April 1961 period, such as the Matthews interview, the conversation with Robert Taber (1957) from the same year, or the interview conducted by the Hungarian-American Andrew St. George (Castro, 1972), published in early 1958. In addition, practically all of the reporters who produced the interviews that I do discuss were high-profile, influential figures within American journalism, and particularly within broadcast journalism, in the last four decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, for example, were for many years the anchormen for evening news programs on two of the three historic American television networks. Barbara Walters was, without question, the most famous female television journalist during the 1970s, 80s and 90s. C. L. Sulzberger II belonged to the family that owned The New York Times and was one of the newspaper’s most important foreign correspondents for many years. María Shriver and Andrea Mitchell, to mention two final examples, were, and continue to be, two of the most prominent and best-known journalists on the NBC television network. In short, the relatively uninformative, tendentious, and at times even propagandistic interviews discussed below were the work of reporters who enjoyed considerable prestige and authority within the world of American journalism.

Partisan Interviewing

4 If prominent American journalists’ interviews with Fidel were, on the whole, neither impartial, nor enlightening, nor particularly informative, it is because a certain political and ideological bias informed the interviewers’ questions, as well as their comments. This bias manifests itself both in the topics covered—which, in general, hardly vary from one interview to another—and in the manner in which the interviewers address these topics, that is, the political position and ideological premises that inform their questioning. But the bias also becomes evident when we consider the topics and issues for which the journalists display no interest, all those questions which they neglect to discuss.

  • 1 Significantly, one of the prisoners mentioned in the 1978 interview with reporters from the three m (...)
  • 2 I have only been able to access a Spanish-language transcript of Brokaw’s remarks (as published on (...)
  • 3 Note the date: more than three months before Fidel proclaimed the socialist character of the Cuban (...)
  • 1
  • 5 Here I refer to the Spanish-language version of Walters’s 1977 interview with Castro, for the text (...)

5 The first topic raised by nearly all the American journalists in their conversations with Fidel is that of alleged human rights abuses in Cuba. For example, most of the journalists ask Castro about the political prisoners who, they insist, are (were) imprisoned in Cuba (e.g., Lockwood, chapter 6; Castro, 1985b: 155; Castro, 1988; Castro, 1978b; and Castro, 1974). Yet when Fidel observes, as he usually does, that none of the alleged political prisoners would be regarded as such had they committed their offenses in other countries—for, as he remarks in his 1977 interview with Barbara Walters, “They are not political prisoners, they are counterrev­olutionaries, people who…committed sabotage. … These are people who have committed crimes, seri­ous crimes.” (Castro, 1977a: 49-50)—the American interviewers show no interest in considering the possibility that Castro might be right and that the prisoners in question should not be identified as “political prisoners” after all.1 Indeed, when Fidel presents this argument, and offers the analogy of, say, Basque prisoners (i.e., members of ETA) in Spain or “those who fight against the state…in Germany, France, Italy” (Castro, 1988), reporters typically change the topic, as does Tom Brokaw, who immediately tells Fidel that the countries that he cites (in this particular interview, Italy, Spain and France) respect the right to a free press, permit the expression of opposition to the government and recognize the right of the population to have many newspapers (Castro, 1995b).2 It is also worth mentioning, in this connection, reporter Maria Shriver’s response to Castro’s discussion of Armando Valladares, a putative political prisoner in Cuba whose case had received extensive coverage in the media. When Castro explains that Cuba had imprisoned Valladares for attempting to carry out a terrorist act and that the US government was deliberately and cynically misrepresenting his case (as well as his medical condition), Shriver changes the topic: “Mr. President, let's not argue about politics” (Castro, 1988). By contrast, the Italian journalist Gianni Minà allows Fidel to recount Valladares’s history at length and to show him the December 1960 newspaper article that both names Valladares and explains the plot in which he was involved3; Minà ultimately grants that Valladares is indeed both an “impostor” and a “terrorist” (Castro, 1987: 43-48). (The Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet likewise allows Fidel to tell the true story of Valladares, whom Ramonet rightly identifies as a police officer during the Batista dictatorship (2006: 413-414, 629, n. 17).4 In any event, the issues mentioned by Brokaw represent other examples of alleged human rights violations in Cuba cited by US journalists (see, for example, Castro, 1988; 1995c; and 1998). Yet, as with the case of the issue of alleged political prisoners, the American interviewers typically evince little interest in dispassionately hearing about and considering the historical factors adduced by Fidel to justify his rejection of a multi-party political system in Cuba (e.g., Castro, 1988) or the reasons that led him to dismiss the option of private ownership of mass media (see, e.g., Castro, 1985b: 156 and 1977c5)—questions that do interest interviewers from other countries (see Castro, 1991b: 29-32, Borge, 1992: 108-109, and Ramonet, 2006: 491-4).

  • 6 As with the previous reference to Brokaw (see note 2 above), I am using the Spanish-language versio (...)
  • 7 It may be worth noting here that only Vidal and Pagés Rebollar were professional journalists. But V (...)
  • 8 This passage is not included in the abridged, English-language version of the interview published i (...)

6 A second feature characteristic of the great majority of American journalists’ interviews with Fidel is a patent, unconcealed skepticism regarding the legitimacy of Cuban political institutions, along with a glaring lack of interest in learning about how these institutions function. One form that this skepticism assumes is a preconception that shapes the interviewers’ statements and questions, and which takes for granted that Cuba’s institutions are in no way democratic. For example, in her 1964 interview with Castro, Lisa Howard refers to “the people…who oppose you…because they thought that you were going to make a democratic revolution and instead you made a communist revolution” (Castro, 1964), while some 30 years later, Tom Brokaw disdainfully points out to Fidel that South Africa had changed as a result of the US embargo and had begun evolving toward democracy, but this had not happened in the case of Cuba (Castro, 1995b6). As for American journalists’ lack of interest in the nature and mechanics of Cuban political institutions, it suffices to compare the mindset of these journalists with that of, for example, Latin Americans who interviewed Fidel: while the journalists from the United States practically never ask Castro to explain, say, the electoral system in Cuba or Cuban political structures, interviewers Mario Vázquez Raña (Castro, 1991a), Tomás Borge (1992: 121-25), Diego M. Vidal (Castro, 2017: 124-26), Beatriz Pagés Rebollar (Castro, 1991b: 31-35) and Roberto D’Ávila (Castro, 1986a: 88) all devote portions of their interviews with Castro to his explanation of various aspects of Cuba’s political system.7 (In contrast to their counterparts from the United States, these interviewers do not “suffer from the mythomania that you [Americans] have a so-called democratic system and…that the only democracy in the world is yours [that of the US],” as Fidel remarked to Maria Shriver [Castro, 1988].) And it should not be assumed that American interviewers pose no questions about the specifics of Cuban political institutions because they are well-versed in the subject and understand its different dimensions. To the contrary, they seem ill-acquainted with the concrete elements of Cuba’s political system; and this ignorance is surely one of the factors, along with the fact that, as Fidel himself observes, “Americans tend to identify…processes with an individual” (Castro, 1988), which leads some interviewers, including Walters (Castro, 1977c: 528) and Shriver (Castro, 1988), to reduce the Cuban Revolution to the figure of Fidel Castro.

7 Another typical feature present in nearly all the interviews with Fidel published by journalists coming from the United States is an openly hostile attitude regarding Cuba’s foreign policy. In the early years of the Revolution, one common expression of this hostility consisted in the accusation that Castro sought to “export” the revolution. Lisa Howard’s question to Castro in the earliest interview under consideration here set the pattern: “Why,” she asks Fidel in 1963, “do you feel…that it’s necessary to export your revolution to other nations throughout Latin America?” (Castro; 1963a; cf. Howard, 1964; Eder, 1964:1, 12; and Mankiewicz and Jones, 1975: 123). As long as the Soviet Union was still in existence, this hostile attitude also, and even more frequently, took the form of a highly critical view of the relationship of friendship and solidarity that existed between Cuba and the USSR. For many, Cuba was a “satellite” of the Soviet Union, to use the term employed by Sulzberger in the mid-1960s (1964: 38), if not an outright “mercenary” of the Soviets, to use the term employed by Dan Rather, at the end of the 1970s, in describing the way that Americans’ supposedly perceived the presence of Cuban military personnel in Africa (Castro, 1981: 267). The Canadian-American journalist Robert MacNeil expressed a somewhat similar idea in his mid-1980s interview with Castro: “Is it not true,” he asked Fidel, “that your role in return for all the aid you get from the Soviet Union is to be a thorn in America's side?” (Castro, 1985b: 150).

  • 9 Fidel’s answer to Rabel astutely points up the problematic presuppositions in the journalist’s ques (...)

8 The last recurrent criticism of Cuba’s foreign policy under Fidel, found in many of the interviews conducted by American journalists from the mid-1970s forward, concerns Cuba’s support for liberation movements in Africa and, in particular, the post-independence government of Angola. With respect to this issue, American journalists typically assume that Cuba’s presence in Africa was problematic in a way that the United States’s presence in that part of the world was not, or else maintain that the US was somehow justified in insisting that Cuba ought not to be in Africa. For example, CBS reporter Ed Rabel asks Fidel in 1978, “Mr. President, you have often said that the greatest obstacle to the restoration of normal relations between the United States and Cuba is the U.S. blockade against Cuba. Does not Cuban intervention in Africa represent an impediment for the normalization of relations?”9 In the very same interview, reporter Richard Valeriani, representing another major network, tells Castro, “Obviously there's a lot, still a lot to do in Cuba. … Why do you have so many Cuban soldiers in Africa considering how very expensive it is and that the costs fall on the Cuban society?” (Castro, 1978b: 36; 41). Seven years later, Robert MacNeil would pose the question, apropos of the topic of normalizing relations, “What would happen—what would have to happen to start bringing the Cuban troops out of Angola?” (Castro, 1985b, 154). And three years after that, Maria Shriver would ask Fidel, “General Secretary Gorbachev has spoken recently about the need for communist bloc nations develop [sic] a fresher approach on the conflicts in the world—Afghanistan, Angola. Do you share that view, or are you out of step?” (Castro, 1988; cf. 1977a: 38ff.; 1978b: passim; and 1978a: 31). When one compares American interviewers’ inquiries about Cuba’s policies in Africa with, say, the chapter on “Cuba and Africa” in Castro’s book-length interview with Ignacio Ramonet (2006: 275-300) or Fidel’s exchange on Angola with Gianni Minà in Un encuentro con Fidel (Castro, 1987: 94-98), the highly tendentious quality of American interviewers’ questions and assertions can hardly escape our notice.

  • 10 Dan Rather may also be assuming that the blockade is irrelevant to Cuba’s fortunes when he asks Fid (...)
  • 11 Lee Lockwood is one of the very few American journalists to ask Fidel directly about the blockade’s (...)

9 A fourth characteristic that we find in nearly all of the interviews by American journalists is a tendency to minimize the social impact of the US economic blockade against Cuba. This tendency is reflected, first of all, in the paucity of references to the blockade’s devastating effects on the Cuban economy. For example, in the interview with Maria Schriver, one of Fidel’s longest interviews with an American journalist—84 pages of text in the Spanish-language edition—the reporter never inquires about the everyday impact of the blockade, despite the fact that Castro mentions the blockade as one of the topics that he would like to address if he were given the opportunity to speak with the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee (Castro, 1988). Shriver’s omission, replicated by most of the other American journalists who interviewed Fidel, appears that much more striking in light of the attention given to the blockade by interviewers who are not from the US, such as Gianni Minà (1991: xxvii, xxix, 191; Castro, 1987: 352) or the Latin American authors already mentioned (e.g., Castro, 1991a; 1991b: 53; and Borge, 1992: 130). In any event, we also find this tendency to minimize the social impact of the economic blockade in a certain banalization of this policy, with journalists referring to the blockade as if it were a relatively minor element of the United States’ relations with Cuba, and not what it really represents: an action that violates international law and whose aim is to thwart and stymie another nation’s economic and social development (in addition to being a policy condemned by most countries in the world). As an example of this banalization, consider the question Bernard Shaw poses in his 1995 interview with Castro: “In the U.S. Congress there is bill pending to tighten the economic embargo. Some of its provisions include that any country that [words indistinct] Cuban entry to world financial institutions. Your reactions?” (Castro, 1995c); or consider Barbara Walters’s question in her first, widely discussed interview with Fidel: “Well, suppose the embargo is lifted.... Would that mean normal relations?” Walters, 1977a: 26). This same banalization is evident, I submit, in some of the statements that Fidel’s interviewers used in formulating questions that do not explicitly refer to the blockade (or “embargo”), but which imply, in effect, that it has not been a fundamental cause of Cuba’s economic woes. In late 1995, for instance, Brokaw would tell Castro that the Cuban economy was managing to survive because of Western investments and the “farmers’ free markets,” without any acknowledgement that the US economic blockade represents the principal impediment to Cuba’s economic development (Castro, 1995b).10 In fact, none of the American reporters mentioned in this paragraph bother to ask the obvious question, as posed by a British financial journalist who interviewed Castro in the early 1990s: “How much does the US trade embargo affect Cuba?” (Castro, 1992: 44).11

  • 12 This is a re-translation of Brokaw’s question from the Spanish-language transcript (see note 2 abov (...)

10 In addition to the characteristics already mentioned, another noteworthy aspect of American reporters’ conversations with Fidel is the journalists’ inclination to imply, or suggest, that the United States’ aggressive attitude toward Cuba is justified in light of the principles and policies that define the Cuban Revolution. One of the most flagrant examples of this inclination appears in an interview that Dan Rather, who seems to have interviewed Castro on more occasions—a dozen altogether (“Foreign Affairs”)—than any other US journalist, conducted with the leader of the Cuban Revolution in 1979. In this interview, Rather tells Fidel that “many Americans…rank-and-file people, believe, many of them believe, that Cuba is a nuclear pistol pointed at their heads” (Castro, 1981: 268). In the same interview, Rather wonders whether Castro was “not contributing to world tension” by calling President Jimmy Carter “dishonest” after the latter had described Cuba and Fidel as “a puppet of the Soviet Union” (Castro, 1981: 262; 261). Cuba’s (and Castro’s) supposed desire to “export” the revolution, already noted earlier, likewise seemed to legitimize the US government’s hostility and aggressiveness toward Cuba in the opinion of American journalists. One might also mention in this regard the fact that many American interviewers insist on knowing what political concessions Cuba would be willing to make if the United States were to lift the blockade, as if a country deserved some kind of reward for abrogating a cruel, immoral and inhumane policy that it had applied for decades. A typical instance of this kind of question occurs in the 1995 Brokaw interview, when Brokaw asks Fidel what he would do as a gesture of “good faith” if the United States lifted the embargo tomorrow (Castro, 1995b).12

11 There is one final characteristic, or feature, of American journalists’ interviews with Castro which ought to be noted, and it is the following: interviewers from the United States often make scarcely any attempt to distinguish their perspective and political position from those of the United States government. Lisa Howard, for example, explains to Castro, that “we feel we want to live in peace” (Castro, 1964; emphasis added); Lee Lockwood informs him that “our position is that international communism is a conspiracy to enslave peoples” (2016: 257; emphasis added); and Barbara Walters tells Fidel, “we have made many gestures recently of friendship, or of trying to improve rela­tions,” while also posing the question, “If we lifted the embargo, would you release these prisoners? (Castro, 1977a: 26, 50; emphases added). Accordingly, when Castro asks Walters during a 2002 interview whether something that she has just said was her own view or a statement from President Bush, the leader of the Cuban Revolution was merely voicing a doubt that will occur time and again to any minimally impartial reader of American journalists’ interviews with Fidel: Is there really any difference between the interviewer’s point of view and that of the United States government?

Conclusion

  • 13 Incidentally, this interview and Fidel’s much earlier interview with a former US congressman (Castr (...)

12 As this brief survey of numerous interviews with Castro will, I hope, have demonstrated, a certain politico-ideological bias informed much of the work of the American journalists who had the opportunity to speak with Fidel. As a result, far from enhancing the American public’s understanding of Fidel Castro and Revolutionary Cuba, many eminent US journalists have instead reinforced some of the very misconceptions, distortions and elements of misinformation that have long constituted an important barrier to a healthier relationship between the United States and its Caribbean neighbor: indeed, the interviews lend credence to Castro’s claim, stated in a lengthy dialogue with an academic and congressman from the United States, that Americans are among “the worst-informed people in the world” (1986b: 58).13 To be sure, some journalists from the United States demonstrated a considerable measure of objectivity and impartiality in their interviews with Fidel; this is true, for example, of Lee Lockwood (2016), Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones (1975), Bill Moyers (Castro, 1977b), and the journalists who interviewed Fidel for The Washington Post in the mid-1980s (Castro, 1985d). It is also true that we find some of the characteristics discussed here in interviews with Fidel carried out by journalists and reporters who were not from the United States and who did not write for the American public. Still, it is fair to say, in my view, that the bias expressed though the characteristics examined in the preceding pages is especially typical of the American journalists’ interviews with Castro. In other words, it would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that the characteristics, tendencies and features analyzed here distinguish these interviews, as a group, from those conducted by journalists from other regions.

  • 14 To her credit, Howard did aim to make reporting on Castro and the Cuban Revolution less biased and (...)

13 A second conclusion has to do with the practical impact of these interviews, which was, I believe, the following: as a result of adhering to the “script” that I have delineated here, American journalists have ultimately both justified and reinforced the United States’ hostile, antagonistic attitude toward its Caribbean neighbor. Starting with the first of the pieces examined here, Lisa Howard’s mistitled 1963 television interview “Fidel Castro: Self Portrait” (Castro, 1963a)— “mistitled” owing to the interviewer’s preconceptions and the nature of her questions14—American interviewers failed to educate and enlighten the US public with respect to the thought of Fidel Castro and the nature of the Cuban Revolution, producing instead programs and articles that effectively helped to legitimize the US government’s policies toward Revolutionary Cuba. For this reason, the interviews represented an additional obstacle to the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba. Indeed, it is not so far-fetched to assume that such a normalization would have occurred long ago if certain journalistic norms had governed the work of all the American reporters who had the opportunity to interview Fidel Castro.

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Castro, F. (2017). Fidel como un colibrí: entrevista inédita al líder de la Revolución cubana. Interview by D. M. Vidal. Lanus Oeste, Argentina, Nuestra América.

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Notes

1 Significantly, one of the prisoners mentioned in the 1978 interview with reporters from the three major US television networks (including Barbara Walters) was the American Lawrence K. Lunt, who acknowledges in his memoir that he was a CIA operative in Cuba and had, among other things, aided counterrevolutionary rebels on the island. Although Lunt considered himself one of Cuba’s “political prisoners” (1990: 251), he is in fact a good example of the “counterrevolutionary prisoners” (to use Fidel’s term [e.g., 1974]) whom the Cuban Revolution’s detractors incorrectly refer to as “political prisoners.” In any event, an instructive contrast to the approach taken by most American interviewers can be found in Fernando Morais’s 1977 interview with Castro, conducted at roughly the same time as the interview cited above. Rather than using the term “political prisoner,” the Brazilian journalist asks Fidel about Americans imprisoned in Cuba for “crimes políticos,” i.e., “political crimes” (Morais, 2001: 180).

2 I have only been able to access a Spanish-language transcript of Brokaw’s remarks (as published on the website Fidel Soldado de la Ideas), which were, of course, originally spoken in English. The Spanish translation of Brokaw’s words is as follows: “Pero todos esos países que usted citó también tienen el derecho a la prensa libre, derecho a expresar su oposición al gobierno, derecho a tener muchos periódicos….”

3 Note the date: more than three months before Fidel proclaimed the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution. Minà includes a photo of the newspaper, whose editor at the time was Carlos Franqui—later a virulent critic of Castro—in his book Un encuentro con Fidel.

4

In his 1985 interview with Spanish journalists, Castro explains why Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, another prisoner whose case had become something of a cause célèbre, was anything but a “political prisoner” (1985c: 30-35). In fact, Gutiérrez Menoyo, whom Ramonet (2006: 630, n. 4) rightly identifies as a participant in the dirty war—“guerra sucia”—that sought to overthrow the Cuban Revolution, was a leading figure in the Cuban-American terrorist organization Alpha 66. For one of Fidel’s best brief discussions of the hypocrisy of calling individuals convicted for acts of political violence “political prisoners,” see Minà (1991: 140-141).

5 Here I refer to the Spanish-language version of Walters’s 1977 interview with Castro, for the text published in English is an abridged version of that interview and omits the passage cited.

6 As with the previous reference to Brokaw (see note 2 above), I am using the Spanish-language version of his interview with Castro, which includes the following passage: “Sudáfrica cambió después que Estados Unidos impuso un embargo y ahora se ha desarrollado hacia una democracia, algo que Cuba no ha hecho.”

7 It may be worth noting here that only Vidal and Pagés Rebollar were professional journalists. But Vázquez Raña, a very prominent Mexican businessman, conducted hundreds of interviews with important political figures from around the world.

8 This passage is not included in the abridged, English-language version of the interview published in Foreign Policy.

9 Fidel’s answer to Rabel astutely points up the problematic presuppositions in the journalist’s question:

“What kind of intervention is Cuba carrying out in Africa? There is no intervention; what there is is simply the cooperation which we have worked out with legitimately established governments that have asked for our help. That's not the same as intervention. Doesn't the United States cooperate militarily with dozens of countries all over the world? Aren't there U.S. troops in Japan, Okinawa, Korea and Taiwan? Aren't there U.S. bases in Turkey, Greece and all over Europe? Aren't there U.S. soldiers in Panama and even right here in Guantanamo, against the will of our people? I know that the U.S. soldiers are in Panama against the will of the Panamanian people, and they are in Cuba against the will of the Cuban people. We don't go anywhere against the will of the government and the people. This can't be called intervention. These are simply excuses put forward by the Government of the United States to maintain such an unjust and inhuman measure as the economic blockade” (Castro, 1978b: 36).

10 Dan Rather may also be assuming that the blockade is irrelevant to Cuba’s fortunes when he asks Fidel, likewise in 1995, whether or not he agrees with the claim that communism had failed as an economic system (Castro, 1995a). The passages from both Brokaw and Rather come from Spanish-language versions of their interviews with Castro (which are quite similar in several respects). Brokaw’s question in the Spanish-language transcript reads as follows: “En estos momentos la economía cubana está salvándose gracias a las inversiones de occidente y también merced a los mercados libres campesinos a los que ustedes se opusieron. ¿No le parece a usted que el marxismo y el socialismo son vestigios de un sistema fracasado?” The Spanish translation of Rather’s question is: “Señor Presidente, es evidente que el comunismo ha fracasado como sistema económico. ¿Estaría usted completamente de acuerdo con esta aseveración?”

11 Lee Lockwood is one of the very few American journalists to ask Fidel directly about the blockade’s effects on Cuba (2016: 269)—without, however, pursuing the topic with anywhere near the amount of interest that he devotes to, for instance, the question of alleged political prisoners—and likewise one of the few to unequivocally condemn the blockade, and US policy toward Cuba generally, in both moral and political terms (see, e.g., 2016: 339-340). Another American interviewer who asks Castro about the effects of the blockade is Jeffrey M. Elliot (Castro, 1986b: 76), but Elliot, who uses the phrase “economic boycott” in referring to US policy toward Cuba, was an academic, not a journalist. One American journalist who at least acknowledges the “ever crippling” impact of the embargo—without, however, actually asking Fidel about it—is Ann Louise Bardach (1994).

12 This is a re-translation of Brokaw’s question from the Spanish-language transcript (see note 2 above) of the interview: “Si levantaran el bloqueo contra Cuba mañana¿qué haría para demostrar su buena fe en respuesta a eso?”

13 Incidentally, this interview and Fidel’s much earlier interview with a former US congressman (Castro, 1963b) are far more informative and balanced than most of the American journalists’ interviews that I have examined.

14 To her credit, Howard did aim to make reporting on Castro and the Cuban Revolution less biased and more objective: see the interesting memorandum posted on the National Security Archive website (Howard, 1964). For interesting details regarding Howard’s interviews with Castro, as well as Howard’s efforts to improve US-Cuba relations, see Kornbluh (2018).

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Référence électronique

Renzo Llorente, « The Interviewer as Partisan: American Journalists in Conversation with Fidel Castro »Études caribéennes [En ligne], 54 | Avril 2023, mis en ligne le 15 avril 2023, consulté le 04 juin 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudescaribeennes/25841 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudescaribeennes.25841

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Auteur

Renzo Llorente

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Saint Louis University-Madrid, renzo.llorente@slu.edu

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