The heart of the revolution

The cover of the latest edition of the Economist magazine shows a newly stubbed-out Cuban cigar amid piles of ash and smoking debris. Fidel's life still smoulders, the image suggests, but he has departed the political stage and his revolution is nearing its end.

It is a familiar message that has been repeated in many different guises and on many different occasions since the triumph of January 1959, when the bearded, olive-clad columns of guerillas came down from the mountains and the peasants and industrial workers rallied to their support.

Since then, at every key juncture - the nationalisation of key industries, the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union - the end of the revolution and of Fidel himself have been confidently predicted and, in each and every case, they have been proved to be wrong.

Cuba endures and the man and the revolution have become synonymous.

Indeed, few Cubans today can remember a time before Fidel, when his words were not heard and his actions did not bring change, whether to the cane fields in Cuba or to the battlefields of southern Africa. Without him, the future might appear uncertain, unthinkable and perhaps even frightening.

Last week, Castro's decision to step down as president of Cuba throws the publication of his official biography into a whole new light. The volume now appears, for better or for worse, as a personal and political coda to a life of extraordinary significance, endeavour and achievement.

Few men have been so loved and so bitterly calumniated. He has been both a friend to the dispossessed and the hopeless and a terror to his corporate US foes.

Moreover, there is scarcely a major world event - from the brinkmanship of October 1962, when the cold war suddenly threatened to go hot, to the anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s and '70s, the implosion of the socialist countries of eastern Europe and the end of the apartheid regime - with which Fidel has not been inextricably involved.

In consequence, a work which allows him to record his own views, thoughts and opinions commands our attention from the outset.

Official biographies can often be dull affairs, works that serve as the terminus of political careers, attempts at self-justification and crude score settling with former adversaries.

More often than not, they are entirely ghostwritten with little input from the subject or constructed through the judicious cutting and pasting together of previous articles and memoirs. Fortunately, this book certainly does not fall into any of these categories.

At a mammoth 700 pages, it takes the form of a series of extended conversations between Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, recorded in Cuba between January 2003 and the end of 2005.

Over more than 100 hours of taped interviews, there are few areas that are unexplored or deemed to be off-limits. Castro seems relaxed with his interviewer and as open as any head of state can ever hope to be.

This is not, however, a conventional biography of the type neatly arranged into chronological order and focusing on the narrative. Rather, it takes the form of a series of themed dialogues, which reveal both Castro's thought processes and the ideals that shaped him.

The unsuccessful attack on the Moncada barracks and the terrible reprisals that followed it at the hands of members of the Batista regime are explored together with the guerilla struggle in the Sierra Maestra and his evolving relationship with Che Guevara. By turns, his comments are astute, revealing and poignant.

As Ranomet points out in his introduction, Castro "is incapable of having an idea that is not a big idea."

Here, certainly, we are faced with a torrent of thoughts, forcefully and frankly expressed. Theories of politics, governance, economics and morality, both of persons and nation states, predominate and are clearly what Castro is happiest discussing.

He describes his own development from being "a utopian Marxist" at the time of the attack on the Moncada, to his increasing identification with the works of Marx and Engels as the revolution was fought for and progressed.

Yet, as he is keen to point out, "Socialism didn't arrive here through cloning, or through artificial insemination." It was, instead, the product of an organic political tradition that had its roots in the works of Jose Marti and in the struggles of generations of political activists from Carlos Cespedes to Julio Mella and Blas Roca.

Thus, the Cuban revolution was, from the outset, critical, questioning and, most of all, highly creative.

In the face of constant attacks, acts of terrorism and economic blockades, the revolution has held firm in defending rights to education and health care for all and in producing a society which, in Castro's words, is "less unequal, healthier, better educated without privations and discriminations."

This represents a formidable achievement by a small island confronted, across only a 90-mile stretch of water, by a hostile superpower. Fittingly, the scope and heroism of the revolution's achievement is reflected in every one of the book's pages.

Castro emerges as thoughtful, wry and highly principled and as a man who intends, even after stepping down from the helm of power, to continue thinking, reading and debating.

"My only wish," he states, "is to fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas ... Perhaps my voice will be heard."

That voice is all the clearer and more forceful for the publication of this book.

It cannot be drowned out in the shanty towns of the developing world or ignored in the capitals of European finance.

The lion may be entering his winter, but the revolution and the ideals he has inspired will always remain part of humanity's new spring.