"I disagreed with almost every tenet of U.S. foreign policy, from the Cold War freeze on any relations with Iron Curtain countries, to Vietnam and its aftermath, to the backing of right-wing tyrants through Africa and Latin America. But I felt a special frustration with America's stance toward an island close to home: not Grenada, but Cuba.
To me, Fidel Castro was still the brave revolutionary who'd overthrown a corrupt regime and was trying to create a socialist utopia. Our trade blockade pleased the right-wing Cuban-American community in Miami, but who were those angry partisans? A lot of them were cogs in the corrupt Batista machine who'd lost their plunder and were still mad about it! Long after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis, I still felt the United States should forge an alliance with Cuba that benefited both countries and gave Castro enough space to make his experiment work.
I guess I made that view pretty well known, because one day in early 1974, I got word that Castro would be honored to have Julie and me as his guests at the Havana Film Festival, which turned out to be one of the most impressive film festivals that I have ever seen. We flew to Montreal-the U.S. ban on all direct air travel to Cuba was in effect-and then to Havana. I assumed we'd have a short
meet and greet and pose for a picture or two. I had no inkling that this would be the start of a long friendship.
This was my first visit to Castro's Cuba, but not my first to the island. In the mid-fifties, when I'd played the Eden Roc in Miami, I'd taken to flying a prop plane over to Havana for a night of great food and gambling at a casino. Castro was already in the hills with his troops, planning his next moves, and most Americans I met there were cheering him on against the wildly crooked Fulgencio Batista. Soon after Castro marched into the capital in January 1959, I'd seen him in some big rooms in Harlem, raising funds to support the revolution, which needed all the help it could get; Batista had looted the treasury of $3oo million as he fled the country.
As part of the blockade, Americans were allowed to spend only a nominal amount of money in Cuba. For us that wasn't a problem; we were guests of the Cuban government. A car whisked us from the airport to the Hotel Habana Riviera, the famous high-rise casino resort on the Malecón waterfront built in the mid-fifties with the secret backing of Meyer Lansky and other Las Vegas mobsters. (Such were the U.S. citizens who'd lost their properties in the revolution, to the lasting indignation of their government.) When, we asked, would we meet our host? Our driver and translator smiled apologetically. As the target of literally hundreds of assassination attempts, they explained, Castro never announced his schedule in advance. We should expect that at some point we'd be interrupted in whatever we were doing and taken to an undisclosed location.
For a day or so we explored Havana and lolled by the pool. Then came word that we should be in the hotel lobby at a certain time. We were warned that we might wait awhile; Castro, as usual, was running late. We didn't care. We were going to meet Fidel! Unfortunately, the hotel lobby seemed to have no air-conditioning. For more than an hour, we sweated in stifling humidity, until I announced to Julie that I could stand no more; I was going up to our room to shower and change.
I was just drying off from a cooling shower when the phone rang. "Sefior Belafonte?"
"Yes."
"You are in your room."
"Yes."
"Not in the lobby."
"No."
"Where is your wife?"
"In the lobby."
"Is there anyone else in your room?"
"No."
I'm not sure how I understood this exchange, because I spoke no Spanish.
"Stay where you are, Sefior Belafonte."
About three seconds later came a knock on the door. I opened it to see an incredibly handsome young Cuban in military mufti—not rugged jungle but beautifully tailored: revolutionary haute couture. I, on the other hand, was wearing Jockey shorts—and nothing else. I saw, past his shoulder, that the room across the hallway was open and occupied by four or five other military men in mufti, all with sidearms and a couple of AK-47's. My eye went immediately to the one in the full black beard, who strode over to take my hand in his. "Welcome to Cuba, Senor Belafonte," exclaimed Fidel Castro, with a grin at my Jockey shorts. He was as tall as I was—six feet two—which I hadn't expected, with proud, flashing eyes and a broad grin. "You have made the Cuban people so happy!"
I put my pants on at that point, and one of the men went down to bring Julie up. With a beautiful female translator named Juanita at his side, Fidel thanked me for coming and said how much a fan he was of my music. As soon as Julie appeared, I could see he'd just become even more of a fan of hers. We talked in the hotel room for hours, then followed the entourage downstairs to the motorcade waiting outside. Off we sped to the Museum of the Revolution, with its amazing glassed-in atrium of full-grown indigenous trees and plants. The dining room to which we were shown was very grand, the hors d'oeuvres delicious, the dinner superb. As for the cigars—well, that went without saying. Later, when friends asked me if our day with Castro had worn us out, I told them the truth: absolutely not. Castro was so compelling, in both his physical presence and his intellectual passion, that Julie and I were genuinely sorry to say good-bye.
Castro was a film buff—that was clear from his many excited references to American classics. (His all-time favorite was Gone with the Wind.) At his urging, Julie and I came back just months later. This time we brought Sidney and his lady friend, Joanna Shimkus, a young Canadian actress whom he'd met when the two were cast together in a heist film called The Lost Man. (Like Julie, Joanna was both white and Jewish.) Over the next few days, we saw a lot of films, drank a lot of cocktails with leftist writers like Jorge Amado and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and listened to some of the world's best jazz musicians play late into the night: Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and more. Once again, Fidel's men in mufti materialized without advance notice. This time, we were taken first to the Museum of the Revolution, and up to Castro's private office, with a panoramic view of the city.
Castro came from behind his desk to greet us with outstretched hands. He dazzled Sidney with his thorough knowledge of his film career; he seemed to have seen every film Sidney ever made. (I couldn't help noticing that Island in the Sun was the one film of mine he knew; he did know most of my songs.) I'd come to realize that he understood English quite well—I could see that from his visceral reactions to what we said—but still he spoke in Spanish and relied on his gorgeous translator. Whether he felt uncomfortable speaking English, or liked his English-speaking guests to feel better informed by having to go through his translator, I can't say for sure.
Castro loved having two of America's top black stars on his turf, not because he was starstruck, but because we were black—Castro took pride in presenting Cuba to the world as a truly prejudice-free nation; it was part of his socialist outlook—and also because he knew we admired what he was trying to do. Sidney's doubts about Castro at the time were certainly greater than mine. But we both wanted to believe in the dream, and in the dreamer. Castro was a modern- day Bolivar; there was no other Spanish leader quite like him. Sekou Toure had thrown over his socialist ideals and become a dictator, as had others. I still hoped Fidel would avoid that trap.
We talked a lot in Castro's office that day about the U.S.-Cuba relationship. Despite all the assassination attempts made against him— a British documentary in 2006 would put the total to date at 638—Castro expressed no anger toward the United States. He did bring up President Kennedy's assassination, and sharply rebuffed the conspiracy theories that implicated Cuba. He explained how it made no sense for Cuba's interests to have taken Kennedy out. Why would Castro have wanted that heat, especially if, as the U.S. State Department feared, he was building atomic missiles and hiding them in the hills? We wanted to believe him, and his logic seemed persuasive. So then were Lee Harvey Oswald's efforts to fly to Cuba weeks before the assassination just the meanderings of a crazed lone gunman? The fact that the Cuban embassy in Mexico City held up his demand for a visa to Havana for five days would seem to suggest that. So does Oswald's decision not to go to Cuba when the visa finally came through. But to this day, no one knows for sure—except, perhaps, Fidel.
"Come back and visit us again," Castro said as he shook our hands good-bye. I don't think Sidney ever did, but I made a point of going to the Cuban film festival year after year. When I did, I was put not in the Hotel Habana Riviera but in a "protocol house," government-owned with household staff. I never knew on those visits if Castro would see me, but he almost always did. One day he took Julie and me on a drive to the prison in Oriente Province where he'd been confined before the revolution. Julie's parents were with us that time. When he showed us his cell, he grew very emotional; little by little, the man behind the figure was emerging. At other times we joined him for visits to schools, where the students' rapture at seeing him was unfeigned, as was his pleasure at seeing them. Inevitably on these visits we talked politics, and when we did, I made a point of gently relaying the views and frustrations of Cuban dissidents with whom I'd met—without naming names, of course. Castro would listen, and occasionally take heed, loosening some government edict or other. The most dramatic case came when I introduced him, in 1999, to Cuban rap.
Julie had come with me, as she almost always did, and we were staying in one of the protocol houses, but went for lunch one day at the National Hotel. At a nearby table, I noticed a group of blacks who seemed to be Cuban. I wound up talking to them, and they told me they were rappers. I said I hadn't known that Cuba had rappers. After all, rap is in your face, by definition. How could they be true to rap's spirit in Castro's Cuba? They couldn't perform in Havana's clubs, they acknowledged; to the country's elite, they didn't even exist. But they did perform underground, often for hundreds of people. That night, Julie and I went to hear the ones we'd met. We were amazed. Of course we didn't understand every word and idiom; rap is hard enough to follow in English, much less in a second language. But a translator helped us follow the gist, and I fully appreciated the passion behind what I was hearing.
The very next day, Julie and I had lunch with Fidel, along with his minister of culture, Abel Prieto, a tall, very handsome, very Spanish- looking hippie with long hair and blue eyes. We started talking about blacks in Cuban culture, which gave me an opportunity to bring up the black rappers we'd heard the night before, and what a pity it was that they could only perform underground. I could see that Castro had only the vaguest idea of what rap and hip-hop were, so I gave him a crash course in how they'd swept the planet, how they not only dominated the international music industry but had so much to say about the social and political issues of the day. For Castro to be unaware of how much Cuban rappers were adding to that conversation was truly a pity—not least because I could see how a U.S.-Cuban cultural exchange in rap and hip-hop might start a dialogue between the two countries.
Prieto had to admit he didn't know much about rap or Cuban rappers, let alone black ones. To Fidel, free speech wasn't so much the issue as racism; if black artists in Cuba were being repressed, that undermined Castro's no-prejudice policy. Lunch was over, so we stood up to take our leave. "Where are you going?" Fidel demanded. I suggested we might head back to our protocol house. "No, no, no. I want you to come with me and tell me more about these rappers."
Whether we liked it or not, we were now part of Fidel's entourage for the day. Out we went to his unmarked presidential car. Fidel slid into the passenger seat, while we got in back. "So," he said, turning back to us, "what is this hip-hop?"
First stop was a graduation ceremony for some four thousand medical students. Despite all the hardships, Cuba had kept up a highly regarded medical system for its citizens, and managed at the same time to send out thousands of newly certified doctors each year to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, reaping an enormous amount of goodwill throughout the developing world. Fidel pulled me onstage to say a few words to the sea of graduates, then launched into one of the marathon speeches for which he was so well known. Finally it was back into the car and off to the next event.
Fidel kept me close, peppering me with more questions on rap. Our final stop was a buffet dinner for Alicia Alonso, Cuba's top ballerina, who had studied with Balanchine, become a great star in the United States, then decided to go back to Cuba and devote her life to building a national ballet company. I was thrilled to meet her, though it wasn't long before I felt a familiar hand on my arm. "And what about white rappers? Are there many?"
"Yes," I said, "but I think what is most interesting about all this is that the largest audience in America for this music is white children. It is an amazing phenomenon."
Fidel considered that thought for a moment and simply said, "Hmm." When I got back to the protocol house, I looked at my watch: I'd just spent eleven hours with Fidel.
Almost a year later, on my next trip to Cuba, a young woman and two young men approached me and gave me some flowers. I said thank you, but what are these for? The young man said, "For everything you said to Fidel Castro about rap." All three were rappers. Since my last visit, their lives had changed dramatically. Fidel had not only declared his approval of Cuban rappers, he'd dedicated a brownstone in Havana to the nascent Cuban rap movement, and outfitted it with a recording studio, as well as all the equipment of a fully functioning office and communications center. Today those rappers are heard all over Latin America and have carved out a very respectable place in the U.S. rap scene. Some have even decided to live here.
My last visit to Cuba—in the fall of 2009—was, of them all, the most poignant. I was down with a film crew, gathering footage for a documentary about my life in the human rights movement. I asked Fidel for an interview, and for the first time, he invited me to his home. He may have other homes around the island for all I know; this one was a modest house with a swimming pool in the hills outside Havana.
Fidel had had a bad fall in 2004 while stepping down from a stage, breaking a kneecap and fracturing an arm. Two years later, intestinal surgery had left him so frail and despondent that he handed power over to his brother and, as he later put it in an interview, prepared to die. But Fidel is a tough old bird; somehow he'd regained the will to live, and embarked on a program of rehabilitation. The Fidel we saw that day was almost fully recovered—his cane discarded, his handshake firm, his eyes once again flashing with curiosity and passion, though also with some exasperation. "As a musician, you should know rhythm and timing," he grumbled as he greeted me. "Your timing is awful!"
I asked him what he meant by that.
"The playoffs!"
Castro is a rabid baseball fan. He did all he could to encourage promising Cuban players, only to have the best of them defect to the United States to play in the Major Leagues. "In order to see some of Cuba's best players play, I have to watch American baseball," he said. He indicated the TV behind him, and the game in progress.
The revolution hadn't fulfilled its promise, and now was facing its most critical challenge. While he never quite came out and said as much, Fidel clearly knew it. And yet his fascination with world politics was undiminished; he was up on every issue, and despite Cuba's problems, despite the global recession, he was filled with excitement for what might yet be."
