What’s it like to think like Fidel Castro?
Almost 22 years ago I was at a conference in Halifax, Novia Scotia.
One of the contributors to this was a high school classmate of Fidel Castro
who told the following story to me:
Fidel Castro invented a game
at the Catholic all boy’s high school where he went in Eastern Cuba.
So he invented a game which had the following characteristics:
find a bicycle, establish some distance
a quarter mile maybe
between where the bicycle begins with a rider
and a brick wall... Can’t be covered, no padding, it’s just brick.
The goal is to be the last person standing-
bloodied, you have to be bloodied or you can’t win this game.
But, if you crash into the wall going full speed,
are thrown over the handle bars of the bike into the brick wall,
and you get up,
you go to the next round.
A lot of people will stop.
A lot of people will kind of sort of ease their way and slide into it.
The person who is willing to sacrifice the most,
who is willing to take it to the limit,
maybe to die-- I mean in principle,
smash his skull against the brick wall
that guy wins the game.
This guy said Fidel Castro never lost this game.
He refused to lose this game.
If it was a tie they had to go into overtime.
They had to do it again, over and over again.
Fidel: undefeated world champion suicide bike driver…
That personality then became the leader of revolutionary Cuba on Jan 1, 1959.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis,
on what became the last weekend of the crisis,
Castro felt that Khrushchev did not have the courage to take it to the limit…
to take it all the way to nuclear war
and to destroy the United States.
He just felt this.
He had seen it happen just a couple days before
when Khrushchev had ordered his ships
to turn around when they got to the blockade line, the quarantine line,
and he wondered:
Does that man have the kind of courage to deal with the Americans?
Khrushchev sort of lacks that certain something
that were Khrushchev a Cuban in the old days
would have also led him to want to smack his face into a brick wall
to see if he could be the last bloodied person standing in this game.
He writes a letter to Khrushchev thinking that he needs to encourage him
not to worry about Fidel, not to worry about the Cubans.
That they are willing to go all the way.
They are willing to martyr themselves for world socialism;
they are willing to hit that wall, to bleed on that wall,
and to go down and to die at the foot of that wall if necessary.
If Khrushchev will pledge that in the event of an invasion,
in the event of a Cuban essentially suicidal attempt
to defend their island from American nuclear weapons,
If Khrushchev will say to him, “That’s fine. Thank you for that kind of pledge”
that “We really appreciate that.
Yes, we will attack the US in the event of an invasion of Cuba.
We will try to destroy it once and forever
if that’s what’s required, Comrade Fidel,
then, Yes, we’ll do it.
Well he never got that response.
Instead he got a response from Khrushchev that went something like this:
“Oh my God! Have you lost your mind?”
Well, that was deeply disappointing...
that Khrushchev if he would’ve of gone to Fidel’s high school
would have been one of the first chickens to drop out of the bicycle game…
and then Fidel had to admit that he was left basically with nothing.
He knew the Americans were coming,
and now he knew that the Soviets were going to back off-
that it was all kind of a game and they were going to take their weapons and go home.