“Los judíos han vivido una existencia que es mucho más dura que la nuestra. No hay nada que se compare con el Holocausto”, dijo el Generalísimo Fidel Castro Rus, según señala el periódico yanqui The Atlantic. Interesante entrevista al líder cubano.
El líder cubano Fidel Castro le dijo al presidente iraní Mahmoud Ahmadinejad que deje de difamar a los judíos, según un artículo publicado en el website de la publicación yanqui The Atlantic.
El revolucionario habló en cinco horas de conversación sobre el antisemitismo, según escribió Jeffrey Goldberg, quien entrevistó a Castro en la capital cubana, La Habana.
Castro le dijo a The Atlantic que el gobierno iraní debía entender las consecuencias del antisemitismo.
“Esto sigue por quizás dos mil años. No creo que nadie haya sido difamado como los judíos. Debo decir que mucho más que los musulmanes. Ellos han sido golpeados mucho más que los musulmanes porque son culpados y atacados por todo. Nadie culpa a los musulmanes por nada”, expresó Castro.
Además agregó: “Los judíos han vivido una existencia que es mucho más dura que la nuestra. No hay nada que se compare con el Holocausto”.
Además, "el gobierno de Irán debe entender que los judíos fueron expulsados de su tierra, perseguidos y maltratados en todo el mundo, con el argumento de que mataron a Dios".
Según el ex presidente cubano, "durante 2.000 años (los judíos) fueron sujetos a una persecución terrible y a los terribles pogroms. Uno pensaría que hubieran desaparecido. Yo creo que fue su cultura y religión que los mantuvo unidos como una nación".
Para Castro, los judíos han llevado una existencia "mucho más dura que la nuestra (de los cubanos). No hay nada comparable con el holocausto".
Goldberg le pregunta entonces a Castro si podría decirle a Ahmadineyad lo que él le estaba diciendo.
"Le digo esto para que se lo haga saber", confirmó el ex presidente cubano, quien hace unos dos meses ha comenzado a desplegar una intensa actividad pública, tras cuatro años fueran del escrutinio público, a causa de una grave dolencia intestinal.
En la entrevista, Castro aprovechó la oportunidad para enviar un mensaje al primer ministro israelí, Benjamín Netanyahu.
"Israel sólo tendrá seguridad si abdica de su arsenal nuclear y el resto de las potencias nucleares sólo tendrán seguridad si ellas mismas también, desisten de sus arsenales nucleares".
Aunque, en su opinión, "el desarme nuclear simultaneo y global, pese a ser una meta que vale la pena, no es realista a corto plazo".
Según Goldberg, el autor, “Castro se da cuenta de que ha ido muy lejos en algunas críticas a Israel”.
“Creo que quiere ser un jugador en este tema y que está genuinamente ofendido por la negación del Holocausto”, agregó.
Ahmadinejad llamó públicamente al Holocausto “un mito” y dijo que los judíos exageraron el genocidio nazi para ganar la simpatía de los gobiernos europeos.
Reiteró su mensaje referido a que el enfrentamiento podría tener severas consecuencias mundiales, y que los iraníes no van a retroceder ante amenazas de Estados Unidos de América o Israel.
“Los hombres piensan que se pueden controlar pero (Barack) Obama podría sobre reaccionar y una escalada gradual podría convertirse en una guerra nuclear”, advirtió Castro.
Goldberg le preguntó si esta óptica se basa en las experiencias de Castro en la llamada “crisis de los misiles” en 1962, que llevó al borde de una confrontación nuclear entre la Unión Soviética y Estados Unidos de América por los misiles nucleares soviéticos en Cuba, y le recordó un mensaje que envío a Kruschev instándolo a considerar un ataque nuclear si Cuba era atacada por Washington, agregando a su pregunta si Castro pensaba si esa recomendación aún era lógica.
“Después de lo que he visto y sabiendo lo que sé ahora, no valió todo eso”, contestó Fidel Castro.
El mensaje de Castro a Israel en torno a la posible crisis bélica con Irán, reporta Goldberg, es que ese país sólo logrará la seguridad cuando abandone sus armas nucleares, al igual que todos los poderes nucleares del mundo.
Y Goldberg comenta que Castro lo sorprendió con su simpatía por la historia del pueblo judío y el derecho de Israel a existir.
Según, la académica Julia Sweig, que acompañó a Goldberg en su visita a Cuba la semana pasada, Castro se encuentra "en una etapa inicial de reinventarse a sí mismo como un estadista experimentado, no como un jefe de Estado, en un escenario domestico, sino antes que nada en un escenario internacional, lo cual siempre ha sido una prioridad para él".
En un aparte de la entrevista, Golberd dijo que anduvo tres días con Castro y que, aunque notó que su cuerpo aparenta cierta fragilidad, su mente está lúcida, tiene un alto nivel de energía y, de cierta forma, no ha perdido el sentido del humor.
Cuenta Goldberg que cuando le preguntó si la enfermedad no lo hizo cambiar de opinión sobre Dios, Castro le respondió: "Me perdona, pero sigo siendo un materialista dialéctico".
Fidel to Ahmadinejad: 'Stop Slandering the Jews'
Sep 7 2010, 12:06 PM
(This is Part I of a report on my recent visit to Havana. I hope to post Part II tomorrow. And I also hope to be publishing a more comprehensive article about this subject in a forthcoming print edition of The Atlantic.)
A couple of weeks ago, while I was on vacation, my cell phone rang; it was Jorge Bolanos, the head of the Cuban Interest Section (we of course don't have diplomatic relations with Cuba) in Washington. "I have a message for you from Fidel," he said. This made me sit up straight.
"He has read your Atlantic article about Iran and Israel. He invites you to Havana on Sunday to discuss the article." I am always eager, of course, to interact with readers of The Atlantic, so I called a friend at the Council on Foreign Relations, Julia Sweig, who is a preeminent expert on Cuba and Latin America: "Road trip," I said.
I quickly departed the People's Republic of Martha's Vineyard for Fidel's more tropical socialist island paradise. Despite the self-defeating American ban on travel to Cuba, both Julia and I, as journalists and researchers, qualified for a State Department exemption.
The charter flight from Miami was bursting with Cuban-Americans carrying flat-screen televisions and computers for their technologically-bereft families.
Fifty minutes after take-off, we arrived at the mostly-empty Jose Marti International Airport. Fidel's people met us on the tarmac (despite giving up his formal role as commandante en jefe after falling ill several years ago, Fidel still has many people).
We were soon deposited at a "protocol house" in a government compound whose architecture reminded me of the gated communities of Boca Raton. The only other guest in this vast enclosure was the president of Guinea-Bissau.
I was aware that Castro had become preoccupied with the threat of a military confrontation in the Middle East between Iran and the U.S. (and Israel, the country he calls its Middle East "gendarme").
Since emerging from his medically induced, four-year purdah early this summer (various gastrointestinal maladies had combined to nearly kill him), the 84-year-old Castro has spoken mainly about the catastrophic threat of what he sees as an inevitable war.
I was curious to know why he saw conflict as unavoidable, and I wondered, of course, if personal experience - the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 that nearly caused the annihilation of most of humanity - informed his belief that a conflict between America and Iran would escalate into nuclear war.
I was even more curious, however, to get a glimpse of the great man. Few people had seen him since he fell ill in 2006 and the state of his health has been a subject of much speculation. There were questions, too, about the role he plays now in governing Cuba; he formally handed off power to his younger brother, Raul, two years ago, but it was not clear how many strings Fidel still pulled.
The morning after our arrival in Havana, Julia and I were driven to a nearby convention center, and escorted upstairs, to a large and spare office. A frail and aged Fidel stood to greet us. He was wearing a red shirt, sweatpants, and black New Balance sneakers.
The room was crowded with officials and family: His wife, Dalia, and son Antonio, as well as an Interior Ministry general, a translator, a doctor and several bodyguards, all of whom appeared to have been recruited from the Cuban national wrestling team. Two of these bodyguards held Castro at the elbow.
We shook hands, and he greeted Julia warmly; they have known each other for more than twenty years. Fidel lowered himself gently into his seat, and we began a conversation that would continue, in fits and starts, for three days.
His body may be frail, but his mind is acute, his energy level is high, and not only that: the late-stage Fidel Castro turns out to possess something of a self-deprecating sense of humor. When I asked him, over lunch, to answer what I've come to think of as the Christopher Hitchens question - has your illness caused you to change your mind about the existence of God? - he answered, "Sorry, I'm still a dialectical materialist." (This is funnier if you are, like me, an ex-self-defined socialist.) At another point, he showed us a series of recent photographs taken of him, one of which portrayed him with a fierce expression. "This was how my face looked when I was angry with Khruschev," he said.
Castro opened our initial meeting by telling me that he read the recent Atlantic article carefully, and that it confirmed his view that Israel and America were moving precipitously and gratuitously toward confrontation with Iran. This interpretation was not surprising, of course: Castro is the grandfather of global anti-Americanism, and he has been a severe critic of Israel. His message to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, he said, was simple: Israel will only have security if it gives up its nuclear arsenal, and the rest of the world's nuclear powers will only have security if they, too, give up their weapons. Global and simultaneous nuclear disarmament is, of course, a worthy goal, but it is not, in the short term, realistic.
Castro's message to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, was not so abstract, however. Over the course of this first, five-hour discussion, Castro repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism. He criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the "unique" history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.
He began this discussion by describing his own, first encounters with anti-Semitism, as a small boy. "I remember when I was a boy - a long time ago - when I was five or six years old and I lived in the countryside," he said, "and I remember Good Friday. What was the atmosphere a child breathed? 'Be quiet, God is dead.' God died every year between Thursday and Saturday of Holy Week, and it made a profound impression on everyone. What happened? They would say, `The Jews killed God.' They blamed the Jews for killing God! Do you realize this?"
He went on, "Well, I didn't know what a Jew was. I knew of a bird that was a called a 'Jew,' and so for me the Jews were those birds. These birds had big noses. I don't even know why they were called that. That's what I remember. This is how ignorant the entire population was."
He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. "This went on for maybe two thousand years," he said. "I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything."
The Iranian government should understand that the Jews "were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here's what happened to them: Reverse selection. What's reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation."
He continued: "The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust." I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. "I am saying this so you can communicate it," he answered.
Castro went on to analyze the conflict between Israel and Iran. He said he understood Iranian fears of Israeli-American aggression and he added that, in his view, American sanctions and Israeli threats will not dissuade the Iranian leadership from pursuing nuclear weapons.
"This problem is not going to get resolved, because the Iranians are not going to back down in the face of threats. That's my opinion," he said. He then noted that, unlike Cuba, Iran is a "profoundly religious country," and he said that religious leaders are less apt to compromise. He noted that even secular Cuba has resisted various American demands over the past 50 years.
We returned repeatedly in this first conversation to Castro's fear that a confrontation between the West and Iran could escalate into a nuclear conflict. "The Iranian capacity to inflict damage is not appreciated," he said. "Men think they can control themselves but Obama could overreact and a gradual escalation could become a nuclear war."
I asked him if this fear was informed by his own experiences during the 1962 missile crisis, when the Soviet Union and the U.S. nearly went to war other over the presence of nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba (missiles installed at the invitation, of course, of Fidel Castro). I mentioned to Castro the letter he wrote to Khruschev, the Soviet premier, at the height of the crisis, in which he recommended that the Soviets consider launching a nuclear strike against the U.S. if the Americans attack Cuba. "That would be the time to think about liquidating such a danger forever through a legal right of self-defense," Castro wrote at the time.
I asked him, "At a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend that the Soviets bomb the U.S. Does what you recommended still seem logical now?" He answered: "After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it all."
I was surprised to hear Castro express such doubts about his own behavior in the missile crisis - and I was, I admit, also surprised to hear him express such sympathy for Jews, and for Israel's right to exist (which he endorsed unequivocally).
After this first meeting, I asked Julia to explain the meaning of Castro's invitation to me, and of his message to Ahmadinejad. "Fidel is at an early stage of reinventing himself as a senior statesman, not as head of state, on the domestic stage, but primarily on the international stage, which has always been a priority for him," she said.
"Matters of war, peace and international security are a central focus: Nuclear proliferation climate change, these are the major issues for him, and he's really just getting started, using any potential media platform to communicate his views. He has time on his hands now that he didn't expect to have. And he's revisiting history, and revisiting his own history."
There is a great deal more to report from this conversation, and from subsequent conversations, which I will do in posts to follow. But I will begin the next post on this subject by describing one of the stranger days I have experienced, a day which began with a simple question from Fidel: "Would you like to go to the aquarium with me to see the dolphin show?"
Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. Author of the book Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0375726705/theatlanticmonthA/ref=nosim/he has reported from the Middle East and Africa. He also writes the magazine's advice column.
www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fidel-to-ahmadinejad-stop-slandering-the-jews/62566/
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