Old friends are passing quickly. One of them, Saul Landau, who died of cancer in late 2013, was a regular link between Ricardo and myself. Saul was inspired by the Cuban Revolution in 1960 and spent his lifetime traveling there, writing books and articles, documentary films, serving as a hopeful go-between in the long process of normalization. Saul was there as a founding member of Fair Play for Cuba. Saul was there as a translator for C. Wright Mills. Decades later, Saul was passing messages between Kissinger and Fidel. Saul sometimes lamented that the Cuban dream was fading. His daughter Carmen attended medical school in Cuba, married a Cuban, gave Saul a grandson. Saul mentored and opened doors for Julia Sweig, who became the Cuba expert at the prestigious Council of Foreign Relations. In recent years, Saul undertook the grueling journey to interview Gerardo in a California desert prison. In one of his final projects, Saul filmed a documentary interview with Mariela Castro, Raúl’s daughter, Cuba’s leading advocate of LGBT rights—Saul had met her in San Francisco and thought her to be a “great lady.” Saul also sent me a flurry of emails proposing that Cuba should agree to take the US detainees from Guantanamo in exchange for the United States giving back the prison site. His brain never ceased.
In the final days when Saul’s health problems became terminal, Ricardo issued a lengthy tribute on behalf of the Cuban people and government.
Days before he died, I visited Saul at his home near the sea, in Alameda, California. He was suffering, barely able to move, busy holding last conversations with old friends like California senator and former congressman John Burton, who came along with me to say goodbye.
Looking at Saul’s tired frame, I thought of Cuban history. We were all so young when the revolution was born, vibrant, new, experimental, radical. Whatever troubles, even nightmares, lay ahead, we would overcome them. In a surprisingly short time, great things were achieved. At midlife, power consolidates, with all its contradictions. We experienced unexpected setbacks and divisions. Power becomes middle-aged, then simply old. The process is not a choice, neither for a movement nor for a single human being, not for Cuba’s revolution and not for Fidel and Raúl Castro. Revolutions have similar phases to the human: the bloody eruption of birth, innocence and idealism, the forceful assertion of autonomous identity, the struggle with inner and outer foes, the responsibilities of power, then decline and atrophy, with renewal and revision coming on the terms of the next generations for whom the past is ancient history.
Having already shaken the world and altered politics in favor of the dispossessed, the Cuban people are entering a new chapter in what Martí called the vast and beautiful space of “our America.”