Semper (and suffer) Fidel: Artists conflicted about Castro
NEW YORK — As a prominent advocate for human rights, the poet Rose Styron knew well the abuses in Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the censorship of artists and publications with dissenting views. But when she and her husband, author William Styron, were invited to meet him in 2000 she didn’t hesitate to accept.
“He was an interesting, controversial, obviously very intelligent and charismatic figure,” she says of Castro, who died Nov. 25 at age 90. “And in the back of my head, I was also thinking there might be a way to persuade him not to put people in prison for free speech.”
For the Styrons and other artists, Castro was a contradiction they never quite resolved, a man equally hard to embrace or to ignore. He was the bold revolutionary who defied the U.S. government and inspired the left worldwide and the long-winded despot who drove out Eliseo Alberto, Daina Chaviano and other prominent writers and reminded artists of the right-wing leaders they had traditionally opposed.
But Castro was intriguing to the creative community in part because he was intrigued in return. Ernest Hemingway fished with him. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were early visitors after Castro took power in 1959 and Gabriel Garcia Marquez a longtime supporter. Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz and other jazz musicians performed in Cuba. Norman Mailer, who met Castro in the late 1980s, would list him along with Charlie Chaplin, Muhammad Ali and Ezra Pound as among the four great geniuses he knew personally.