Is He a Liar?
Many people seem to ignore that Fidel Castro is a liar. As a matter of fact, he is a very convincing one. Writer K. S. Karol tells an anecdote about the way he met Castro. On the occasion of Castro’s visit to New York in 1960 to address the U. N. General Assembly, a group of Castro admirers, among them Henri Cartier-Bresson, I. F. Stone and Karol himself, met Castro, who told them about his speech next day. Castro complained that the United States government was waging a perfidious war against Cuba, just because Cubans wanted their independence from the United States. According to Karol, “He was speaking in a low voice, as if his words were meant for us alone, with obvious sincerity and great conviction.”
What Karol and his friends ignored was that Fidel Castro has learned to lie with facial expressions and body language as well as with words.
Being a compulsive liar, Castro lies not only for political reasons about things of cardinal importance, but also gratuitously, over matters of little apparent importance. But, as it happens with most compulsive liars, he has a strong concern about keeping his image of a sincere person. One of his first speeches after his rise to power had as a main theme the phrase: “Nos casaron con la mentira y nos obligaron a vivir con ella,” “They married us to a lie and forced us to live with it.”
Like many policemen, Castro is very adept at lying. Since he was very young, he discovered that he had been endowed with the liar’s best gift: he could absolutely convince himself that he is saying the truth, convince his own respiratory system, and come eventually to believe it wholly. He didn’t swallow or tremble, he didn’t breath raspily, or touch his mouth. He has no difficulty meeting anyone’s eyes, his pupils did not get small and faraway, his face color did not change. His face is perfectly passive when is lying. His voice is calm, earnest, under control. His throat is unfilled with phlegm, his heart beats dully.
Look carefully at him when he is lying–as he does it most of the time–and you will find the none of the telltale signs of the liar: a strained neck, a furrowed brow or a false smile. His face is totally bleached from anxiety, fear, mistrust or nervousness. But, even for a professional liar like Fidel, lying is not an easy task. Some intelligence analysts have observed that when he lowers his voice and speaks slowly with sincerity and conviction, is an unmistakable sign that he is lying. Another sign is that, perhaps unconsciously, when Castro is lying he reverts to the drooling accent characteristic of his native Oriente province.
One of Castro’s political assets is his ability to convince many different people that each of them alone enjoys his special confidence. Sooner or later they find they have been deceived, for Fidel gives his confidence and trust to nobody. Like most compulsive liars, Fidel has the utter conviction that everybody around him is a liar.
From his infancy at Angel Castro’s Birán estate, he was characterized by his basic distrust of others. As he became a political leader he so distrusted others that he made sure his thoughts were concealed even from his closest advisers. And when he suspects that someone might be penetrating his defenses, he reinforces them through deliberate disinformation. This quality of distrust, aloofness and impenetrability has been of considerable political advantage for him. In his rise to power it helped him play to perfection the role of the inaccessible and infallible Maximum Leader operating in a realm far removed from petty political or personal squabbles.
As good as he is to avoid having his outer shell penetrated, he
is an artist in penetrating other people’s defenses. The ones who become the focus of his attention like Fidel at first sight. In these moments Castro becomes an actor, a salesman, a therapist, and, above all, a friend. He is quick with a handshake and a smile, sometimes patting his unaware victim in the arm or the knee, tossing off a friendly confidence and effortlessly lending an understanding ear. Immediately he becomes the kind of individual you like, and you would like to earn his admiration in return. He’s the kind of person you just want to talk to. While he’s playing his charmer’s role to the hilt he’s carefully watching their interlocutor’s face looking for signs that he is a liar–signs that he always believe to find, thus reinforcing his need to protect himself from liars by his own lying.
Fidel Castro has that weird psycho’s gift of utter conviction. He is an extraordinarily good salesman. He could sell Stalinism in the Gulags. Moreover, he possess the odd chameleon-like ability of absorbing your personality, of becoming you, and so in effect entering your subconscious as he grinds you down with furious and one-pointed eye contact, smothering, ass-kissing charm, and a bandit’s utter ruthlessness.
Furthermore, Castro is not only a liar, he is a shameless one. Probably his teachers and schoolmates at the Colegio de Belén had this in mind when they wrote about him in the 1945 Yearbook: “He has good timber and the actor in him will not be lacking.”
When Castro visited New York in 1966 to give a speech at the U.N. General Assembly, he paid an impromptu visit to the CBS studios, where he talked to Dan Rather and others. Just before he left, Mike Wallace asked him a difficult question. “More than thirty years ago you came to New York to speak at the U.N. and, before leaving, you said you were going back to Cuba to restore democracy and to call for free elections. What happened?” Castro’s unabashed answer: “¡Eso fue hace mucho tiempo!” (“That was a long time ago!”).
In the Sierra Maestra manifesto published in July, 1957, Castro specifically promised that within a year after his provisional government took over there would be general elections, and he gave “absolute guarantee” that his government would grant individual and political rights specified in the 1940 Constitution. No wonder Mario Lazo, a Cuban exile, called him “the great dissembler.”