View transcript: The Last of the Mohicans

Running text

Che Guevara and Protest/ Fidel Castro and his republic / “Anti-bureaucratic revolutionaries” / Heiner Müller compares Fidel Castro with the German rebel Max Hölz - -

Intertitle

The Last of the Mohicans - -

Castro

I realize that if I hadn’t studied at the university, I wouldn’t have played an important role in the history of my own country.

Narrator

The attack on the military dictatorship of the Cuban general Batista began at the end of November 1956. Eighty-two armed students landed on the southwest part of the island. But they were discovered and almost all killed. Twelve survived. Among them Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The struggle continued.

Castro

We began without any experience but had plenty of experience by the end. We found a way to trick Batista’s army and to defeat them. You could even say that we toyed with Batista’s army. On the day the war was over, I felt that something strange had happened, very strange. Everything had crumbled, everything was over. We had to put aside everything we had learned and begin to build a new country on the basis of the revolution. And it was clear to me that this was much more difficult.

Narrator

Che Guevara, along with Fidel Castro a hero of the Cuban revolution, a martyr in the Bolivian guerrilla war and a model for the student movement in 68 - transfigured by time and distance.

Castro

He had the ancient privilege of dying young, and therefore left a great, eternal image. We who survived do not have the privilege of eternal youth. But we do have the privilege of eternal conviction and eternal steadfastness and eternal loyalty to our ideals. And we will keep going like this until the last minute. The relationships between Che and us, and Che Guevara and me, I think, were always exemplary. From the moment that he registered with our army, he offered to fight with us. His only condition was that on the day that the Cuban revolution was victorious he would be allowed to continue his fight, to go back to South America and fight for the revolution there. We granted him this promise.

Narrator

Maybe the doctor Che Guevara was more of an adventurer than a minister. But maybe his relationship to Fidel Castro was broken. On March 14, 1965 Che Guevara left Cuba for an unknown destination.

Kluge

Does the cigar that you are smoking still have the old quality?

Müller

Well, the cigar that I am smoking now is a Davidoff. And those were the most famous cigars in the world next to the Havanas, but they were only good as long as they were made from Cuban tobacco. Now because of the Cuba boycott Davidoff has decided to use only tobacco from the Dominican Republic, and since then they have been bad.

Kluge

Now you smoke them with regret, right?

Müller

With regret, because in all the major hotels only the bad Davidoffs are left. There aren’t any Cuban cigars anymore. I do think that it is an international conspiracy or a part of an international conspiracy against Cuba.

Kluge

So there is a cartel at work against Cuba?

Müller

I think so.

Kluge

To prove that they can’t survive.

Müller

Exactly. And also that their cigars aren’t needed.

Kluge

They are the last legionnaires… there were …

Müller

There was an order from Kennedy before or at the beginning of the Cuban crisis. He ordered - I don’t know how many, one hundred thousand - Havanas for the private use of the White House.

Kluge

Really\!

Müller

They were really bought.

Kluge

Did he do that as compensation, as an aggressive attack, or …?

Müller

No. It was because they were the best cigars.

Kluge

They were the best cigars.

Müller

And they knew that there would be a boycott after that, and no more Cuban cigars. So they had to have some.

Kluge

He secured some for himself.

Müller

Yes, he secured some for himself.

Kluge

It wasn’t ideological.

Müller

It was wasn’t ideological at all.

Kluge

Yes. And now there is a war of ideological eradication going on for the last ones, to destroy self-confidence.

Müller

Yes, exactly. I recently heard in KDW [Kaufhaus des Westens], that still has a good tobacco selection even of Cuban cigars, that there is now a major distribution problem because the Cubans don’t have any more wood for the cigar boxes. That is becoming a problem now. They can’t destroy their forests\- they already have to an extent - only to … because cigars are the primary export article, and they are trying to finally destroy them.

Kluge

How do you explain the stability, or the relative stability of Fidel Castro and the attitude of the Cubans? Who are in a sense hanging on to their self confidence in an outpost position that is absurd.

Müller

Yes. For one thing it is definitely the case that the Cubans have a foothold in Africa - the country is half African because of its black and half-black population. And someone in Havana once told me that when Castro delivered his first major speech - I don’t have any idea how they pulled it off - a white dove landed on his right shoulder, on the epaulettes on his right shoulder. And that was enough for a few decades. Because that was, first of all, an omen for all of those afro-religious people.

Kluge

For some it’s the Holy Spirit, for others the dove of peace, and so on, yes. The man radiated happiness.

Castro

Anyone who reads my speeches delivered during the entire history of the revolution, also in the phase of idealism, where we made idealistic mistakes, will see that my thoughts were closer to Che’s ideas than to the orthodox schools of Marxism-Leninism and the books and texts of socialist economic policy. I don’t shed a tear for these books that we read and discussed and tossed aside. I never mourned the death of these texts, because I never really agreed with these texts.

Narrator

For six years Che Guevara tried to stand by Fidel Castro as a member of the government. During that time they expropriated the US-American oil refineries and sugar plantations and introduced a planned economy. After the paths of the revolutionaries diverged in 1965, Fidel Castro continued to build his socialist Cuba. Che Guevara went to Bolivia and founded the guerrilla movement there. In the end the guerrilla was captured and severely injured and then murdered by soldiers of the Bolivian government on October 9, 1967.

Intertitle

Che Guevara

Narrator

As different as the temperaments of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were, one thing united them. Both exerted an enormous power of attraction on the people around them. That is still the strength of Castro, even today.

Castro

The tables and sinks go there. And now the refrigerator fits better there.

First Cuban

We’ll put the refrigerator back there. Have a look, commandante.

Second Cuban

Comandante, do you think it is normal that you are taking care of all of these details?

Castro

No, but I like to. It is not necessary, but I like to see for myself how things are going.

Narrator

The sensuous experience, the contact with the people, that is what keeps the commandante and Cuban Fidelism, as they say, alive.

Castro

Will we be driving to the kitchen?

Narrator

The food situation could become a catastrophe this year.

Intertitle

The only country in the world without illiterates\!

Müller

The other point is very basic. It is the only country without illiterates, and it is a paradise for children - still. And I think that there is no country in the third world where children are in such good hands and so well taken care of as in Cuba. As long as they can.

Kluge

Could you describe Castro and the quality of this regime? He has hardly any similarities with Lenin, and definitely not with Stalin. Whom does he remind you of? Spartacus is too much of a stretch. It is a Latin American variant of the Spartacus drama.

Müller

You know, he would remind me more of Max Hölz then.

Kluge

Max Hölz?

Müller

Yes. Max Hölz was a major figure around Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt -

Kluge

Eisleben.

Müller

\- that is how it was. Actually it is this: Max Hölz was … I can remember from my childhood that there were still traveling book salesmen, that were selling serial novels, around the towns in the Erzgebirge, bandit novels, like Rinaldo Rinaldine or Schlöbner-Karl, these famous Robin Hood characters, also in Germany, who ambushed the rich and stole and robbed, and gave it to the poor.

Kluge

He has something of that.

Müller

And they traveled from family to family, from house to house, always selling sequels to these novels, and then that would be picked up again, in the next month the next sequel came and was incredibly cheap. But that was actually the place of social romanticism and utopias, the desire for a just society, whatever. And Castro is of course something like that: a Robin Hood. And he is forgiven when occasionally someone gets killed. That can happen in Robin Hood.

Kluge

… but in larger quantities, then …

Müller

In the forest the situation is not clear, and sometimes the wrong person is killed there, and so on. People know that, but in end they will still forgive him. A critical point I think was the execution of this officer about a year or a year and a half ago, I think. He was of course falsely accused…

Kluge

Falsely accused?

Müller

A fake argument. And he was apparently a genuine rival - a potential rival - of Castro. That was a crisis point, I think. And he was executed for drug dealing. It was a gesture for the USA. But a very oblique gesture.

Kluge

And nothing about it was true?

Müller

And that was held against Castro. Maybe it is true. It is probably true, but if it is, then he did it for Cuba, not for himself.