The Last Communist

TITLE: CASTRO’S FINAL HOUR: THE SECRET STORY BEHIND THE COMING DOWNFALL OF COMMUNIST CUBA

AUTHOR: ANDRES OPPENHEIMER

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 461 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: This well-reported, entertaining read shows, despite the title, why Fidel remains in power.

Reporting from a paranoia-mad communist country has never been easy, and these days Cuba is a more difficult assignment than ever. Most journalists do the prescribed, unenlightening rounds of officialdom in Havana, sneak off to see a few dissidents, then interview cab drivers or disgruntled locals in food lines. Honesty is like bread — a commodity on rations. Oppenheimer, a Pulitzer-prizewinning correspondent for the Miami Herald, found a way around this difficulty: he carried letters from Cubans in Miami to relatives on the island, thus gaining their trust. As a result, he captures a truer, if sadder, portrait of Cuba today.

His tale of a nation of “zombies” waiting for change makes it hard to gloat over the fall of communism. What he found was a Cuba that still respects Fidel as a well-intentioned grandfather who tried to bring equal rights, education and health to the island but is now behind the times. Oppenheimer was exhaustive in his research, which spanned two years, including five months on the hermetic island. He interviewed 500 people, from Castro’s own disaffected daughter Alina to Cuba’s “yummies” (young upwardly mobile Marxists). Especially telling is the contrast between Che Guevara’s eldest grandchild, Canek, a vocally unhappy heavy-metal rock fan, and Armando Hart, the Minister of Culture, who protests “I am a hard-liner!” when complimented for being an open-minded member of Fidel’s circle.

Oppenheimer, who somehow obtained secret Communist Party documents, reveals how close reformers came to approving a plan to ease Fidel into a Prime Minister’s job and ease out socialism at the October 1991 Party Congress. His reporting is solid and engrossing, especially on the Ochoa-De La Guardia drug scandal and Cuba’s involvement with Panama’s now deposed Manuel Noriega. Oppenheimer claims that Cuba was set to begin running Panama’s intelligence apparatus just before the 1989 U.S. invasion. He also deals with Cuba’s silent issue, the black majority who are not eager to see the white exiles of Miami return. Though he adds few fresh observations, he offers a detailed description of the business ties of President Bush’s son Jeb to the Cuban exiles in Miami and of Jeb’s influence on U.S. policy toward the island.

There are funny passages (about the made-at-home shampoo that attracts flies) as well as depressing ones (Ping-Pong paddles used for oars by desperate rafters fleeing to Miami). The author’s encounter with the grouchy Cuban TV chef Nitza Villapol, who teaches a country without food how to cook, is deliciously absurd. Oppenheimer adroitly picks up nuances: for example, how , in a country with no food, everybody’s main concern seems to be getting deodorant and toothpaste. From Jose, a welder in Cienfuegos, he learns the sign language used when discussing the forbidden subject of Fidel: an imaginary beard drawn with the hands from the chin.

What is missing from the book is Fidel. As in real life, he pulls the strings offstage, but he is rarely glimpsed up close. He appears for gloomy late-night ruminations with author Gabriel Garcia Marquez at a protocol house outside Havana and in a visit with children ages 6 to 14 where he drones on for three hours about the dialectics of Che. In the end, Oppenheimer doesn’t make a convincing argument that Fidel is in his “final hour.” His reporting, in fact, illustrates precisely how Castro remains in power: through a combination of personality, national pride and paralyzing fear.