CUBA AND UNCLE FIDEL

What is extraordinary about Fidel Castro is that he is here at all. More than 40 years after coming to power, he survives. He survives in the face of the unremitting hostility of a superpower only 90 miles away. He survives in spite of these facts: his main patron, the Soviet Union, has disappeared, his ideology, Marxist-Leninism, is discredited, and his economy is in shambles. Despite the fact that an extraordinary number of ordinary citizens prefer to chance death at sea rather than remain in his nation, Fidel survives.

Not only does his survival require explanation but it begs a serious, strategic question: What does the survival of Cuba mean to the international system? As important, what does Castro want it to mean? He is a man of intentions, many of them admittedly failed. But unlike others who have clung to power because they did not know how to let go, Castro portrays himself as a man for whom power is a means to an end, not an end itself. After all, there have been easier paths for him to take. Therefore, understanding Fidel - and what he means in a larger sense - means understanding his intentions.

>From the beginning, Castro has shown an extraordinary understanding of how to shape public opinion. It is difficult to think of any world leader, let alone the leader of a minor Third World country, who has been more successful not only at drawing attention to himself, but in generating a positive global image. His 1953 attack on the army barracks at Moncada led only to his arrest and trial; but his "The World Will Absolve Me" speech at the trial sparked a movement. Even today, in the face of failure, human rights violations and isolation, he continues to generate support and admiration.

That skill is not incidental to his understanding of how the world works. Consider the latest affair. A small group of ordinary citizens, clearly driven by despair and desperate for an alternative, choose to escape. These people are so desperate to leave that they risk their lives in a rickety boat unsuited for the high seas. This is far from an isolated event. Men, women and children bear this risk regularly. In this particular case, a woman falls overboard and drowns, leaving behind a small son, who is taken to live with relatives.

In almost any other country, what would be considered shocking is the misery and hopelessness that led to the escape - and the moral character of a regime that holds its citizens as prisoners. Had this event involved Iraq or Serbia, the focus of the media would have been on the regime that generated the refugees. But Castro spun the situation brilliantly, turning the United States into the victimizer and Cuba into the victim. He did so by understanding the structure of international public opinion brilliantly, and with it, the dynamics of power.

Castro did not allow the world's attention to linger on the causes of the voyage. Instead, he fixated on the outcome of the voyage and the fact that the little boy had a father in Cuba to whom he should be returned. Now, there was certainly justice in that claim. A child's father surely has the right to a child when the mother is dead. The hesitancy of the United States in returning the child was based largely on political concerns in the Cuban-American community, as well as other, humanitarian concerns.

Castro seized on Washington's hesitation as an assault on paternal rights and he achieved two things. First, he turned Cuba, via the father, into the victim of an insensitive United States. Second, he forced discussion to focus on the aftermath of the escape rather than on the causes of the escape, namely conditions in Cuba. In short, he spun the issue.

This is far from the first time that Castro has humiliated the United States with the fact that Cubans want to flee. Recall the 1980 boatlift from the port of Mariel, in which 125,000 Cubans departed aboard boats from Miami. Castro only allowed the boatlift after crowds had stormed the Peruvian embassy demanding to leave. And he included criminals and the mentally ill among the refugees. Unprepared, the Carter administration placed many in camps. But by then Castro had spun the story to Washington's mishandling of the refugees; the United States was the heavy.

Castro deploys similar measures in a broader context. Cuba's economy is in disastrous shape - $11 billion in debt, years of poor sugar harvests and little industry other than tourism. But it has been this way since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the loss of $3 billion in Soviet-era subsidies. Castro's defense, however, is to blame the U.S. economic embargo. The fact is, of course, that the U.S. embargo is completely ineffective. Hardly any other nation in the world honors it. Cuba has access to capital in Canada, Europe and most of Asia. It can sell goods nearly anywhere and those goods can be reshipped to the United States with minimal difficulty.

As preposterous as it is, Castro's assertion is nevertheless widely believed and the United States is widely condemned for its boycott. Now, where many in the international community demand that the United States stop trade with countries that violate human rights, like Myanmar, many of the same people reverse themselves on Cuba, making the exact opposite argument. Castro turned the failure of his economic system into an indictment of the U.S. embargo. Rather than being lumped with other human rights violators, he casts himself as the victim of an oppressive U.S. foreign policy.

The key to Castro's ability to control these situations is that he understands the fundamental issue: it is not Cuba, but the United States. There is a deep ambivalence, a love-hate relationship between the United States and the world. On the one hand, no nation is more imitated than the United States. The United States serves as the standard against which the rest of the world measures progress. There is no nation that others would rather go to, if forced to leave their own home. The United States and its culture is overwhelming, powerful and penetrating.

On the other hand, it is this very power that makes the United States so deeply hated. Precisely because it overwhelms, overpowers and penetrates everywhere, precisely because the United States is so relentless and indifferent to the rest of the world, the United States is profoundly resented. The sense of helplessness in the face of U.S. power breeds a sense of rage against America. This ambivalence, it should be noted, exists not only abroad but in the United States, as well. It peaked in the 1960s, but remains a part of the political landscape.

Castro is a master of manipulating this ambivalence. His survival in Cuba is based on a state security apparatus that controls all opposition. His survival as an icon in global culture, however, is not rooted in anything that he has achieved in Cuba; it is rooted only in the fact that he defies the United States. Castro instinctively understands this. He understands that the world admires the United States infinitely more than it admires Cuba, that masses yearn to become American while hardly anyone would wish to be a Cuban. Yet, at the same time, he knows that those very same admirers resent the very success of the United States.

Castro has played this ambivalence to his advantage for 41 years. But at no time has he played it more brilliantly than since the fall of the Soviet Union. Having lost his strategic value and teetered on the brink of disaster, Castro has combined his internal security mechanism with his deep understanding of the global psyche to make himself the champion of the anti-American in everyone. He is given a pass on human rights not because anyone has any illusions about him, but because he is useful in countering American wishes.

Castro's use of global ambivalence points to an underlying source of energy that will fuel the geopolitical system for the rest of this century. We tend to look for non-psychological, material explanations for the behavior of nations. In general, that is a good methodology. But accompanying geopolitics is the psychological topography of the world. The existence of a single, overwhelming power must generate a psychological reaction. The very power generates fear and resentment. That fear and resentment can reinforce geopolitical processes.

This dualism about the United States is one of the most important features of the global political landscape today. Anti-Americanism is not ultimately ideological; it is an unavoidable reflex against overwhelming power. During the Cold War, that anti-Americanism coalesced in various Marxist and Marxist-inspired movements that ranged the world. Many of these movements, in turn, were inspired less by what they believed in than by what they despised - the United States.

At the moment, there is no ideological hook on which to hang anti- Americanism. But there are some signs of a stirring coherent movement centered on issues like global economics, environmentalism and so on. It surfaced during the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO). The movement has not yet congealed. It may not. But the root cause, anger at the United States and the world it has been instrumental in creating, remains. It is that anger that has sustained Castro on the world scene. It is an anger that should not be dismissed lightly.