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ConCLusion The Autumn of the Comandante For a substantial period, the world has now witnessed and wondered at the seclusion of Fidel Castro in what nearly everyone has assumed to be a final decline and slow progress toward the end of life. The Castro deathwatch , as it might be called, began more than a decade ago with rumors of infirmity ranging from Parkinson’s disease to pancreatic cancer. In 2006, intestinal surgery to relieve a blockage, perhaps cancerous, perhaps not, was alleged to have resulted in near-fatal peritonitis. In 2008 came Castro ’s resignation of the duties of the Cuban premiership and/or presidency he had held for five decades, with a transfer of official power to his brother Raúl. Subsequently, in the concluding years of the first decade of a new century, he has made the occasional curious return to the public eye. For a while he achieved modest celebrity in the new world of electronic communications through widely available Internet pronouncements, called “reflections,” comprising collected thoughts on various matters of history, leadership, memory, ideology. There have been none since April 2011. Still, he may be seen in the occasional interview, making various pronouncements on current events and appearing fit, energetic, quick witted. He has also made a special appearance to celebrate the first volume of his autobiography , with a second of another thousand pages allegedly to come. In the geopolitical view, such near-mythic evidence of survivability surely befits a figure who now remains as the last—albeit then as now, least likely—of the Cold War giants of the twentieth century: the handsome, charismatic, young barbudo in the green army fatigues and forage cap, known to phrasemakers as “el Caballo,” the survivor of the Moncada uprising and then the Granma expedition, along with the martyred heroes Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara, the leader of the valiant guerrilla band in the Sierra Maestra, surviving and eventually winning victory after victory against the hapless US-supplied and supported Batistiano military forces; eventually the conqueror, along with his ragtag army of mountain and jungle insurrectionists, making his joyous, triumphant entry into Havana; the new Latin American dictator in the pantheon of Conclusion 165 world Communism, with his Soviet patrons, plunging the world into the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of global nuclear catastrophe; finally, enduringly, “el Jefe,” riding out decades of US embargo, eventual Russian betrayal and abandonment, endless experiences of the Cuban people of hunger, shortage, social and economic deprivation. For all that, he has now outlived, along with a great deal of historical image intact, oncecontemporary counterparts including John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Tse Tung, and Ho Chi Minh, just to name the most prominent. The survival itself, in all these regards, may be itself reckoned an achievement deserving the term “greatness.” For Cubans, Fidel Castro lives on much more closely at hand—in what is thought to be a largely solitary existence, on the outskirts of the capital , in a compound somewhere on the far edge of Miramar. For them the present era is defined as the long, lingering, mysterious autumn of the Comandante . The literary reference in the foregoing sentence is purely intentional . It invokes the title and the political content of a famous novel by the Nobel Prize–winning Latin American writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez— himself a lifelong admirer and friend of the dictator, who has often served as an advisor and confidant. The novel, begun in 1968, largely finished (according to Márquez) in 1971, and first published in Spain in 1975, is entitled The Autumn of the Patriarch. It is about the long, strange, solitary , much-rumored and discussed death of a Latin American dictator—a caudillo—or, more properly, the death of a dictator amid myriad strange, conflicting, often grotesque rumors and stories concerning the alleged death of the dictator, the impending death of the dictator, the maladies likely to be drawing the dictator toward death, the strange forces of memory and imaginative will somehow keeping the dictator alive. An antitotalitarian allegory, written from the literary and political left, the novel is also of course about the fate of a country. We never know the country, save that it is in the Caribbean region of Latin America. Geographically it seems to be not an island, though it does have an extensive, valuable seacoast that figures prominently in the geopolitical drama. This last qualification is important but only in a limited way. Márquez as a...

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