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Ploughing dutifully through My Life I came to sense the power of inflicting boredom as a political weapon, a political tool in itself, and wondered why it has attracted comparatively little attention from theorists or analysts of ‘discourse’. Does Machiavelli have anything to say on the subject? Have I missed some systematic treatise? Repetition of the familiar is a recognisable trait of many a political speech, and is often a necessary one — the faithful find it reassuring, it has its place in the rituals — but with Castro we have mind-numbing of a different order, and not as an adjective, but as a distinctly transitive verb. ‘La France s’ennuie’, as someone said — Victor Hugo again? — before one of their 19th-century revolutions, but it usually takes even the French a considerable time to reach that stage — a quarter- century of boredom and inertia under Mitterrand and Chirac, for example, before the current ambiguous stirrings under Sarkozy. Cuba must be bored indeed.
Some little light relief is inadvertently provided by Ramonet in a chapter on Fidel and France. He has some remarkably banal early memories:
I still remember some of the words I learned back then: bonjour, bonsoir, fourchette, merci beaucoup . . . Later on in high school, I studied French, and I was crazy about the French Revolution, so I learned that political motto the revolutionaries of 1789 gave the world: Liberté, egalité, fraternité.
Gratifying for French readers, though they are duly warned that ‘later, and one must keep this firmly in mind, the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own children.’ Then there is Victor Hugo again, and an enthusiasm for Les Misérables shared with Castro’s new friend Hugo Chavez.
Ramonet fishes for compliments: what about de Gaulle, or the historians of the Annales school? The first gets an odd passing salute:
De Gaulle . . . saved France once again . . . Although I’m not sure what he saved, or what he saved it from, because you people have always had political crises, and there was a time when you had a different government every six months.
Castro has not read the Annales historians — he got stuck with Lamartine, Thiers and Jean-Jaurès — so we are mercifully spared his views on la longue durée and the inadequacies of l’histoire événémentielle.
There were happy hunting trips with good old Georges Marchais,
that enabled us to talk about all sorts of things. Every time he came, he’d bring me several bottles of excellent French wine, wonderful cheeses and sometimes foie gras, whose producers he knew personally. French wines, cheeses and foie gras are the best in the world. How delicious! . . . Well, I said, don’t even think about nationalising agriculture. Leave the small producers alone, don’t touch them. Otherwise you can kiss good wine, good cheese and excellent foie gras goodbye!
That brings to mind one of the myth-beliefs of the Left in the Sixties, that Castro had found the means in Cuba to produce a large range of fine cheeses — one was always given a precise number, several score, but I forget what it was — and that these cheeses were all going to find a ready market in Canada. Ramonet forgets to ask him what happened about that.
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