Three Night in Havana
Trudeau and his two friends didn’t make it to Cuba. They abandoned the journey fifty miles in, and a vomiting future prime minister was rescued by a CBC TV cameraman who was filming the attempt at derring-do. Sixteen years later, Trudeau would make the journey again, this time succeeding via an airplane, for a legendary visit to Cuba, chronicled by Robert Wright in Three Nights in Havana. It was an intimate state visit between two men who held each other in high esteem. At one point during a dinner of fish that Pierre and Fidel had caught on a diving expedition earlier in the day, we are told Castro turned to Trudeau and said, “You know, my eyes are not very strong, so every day to make them stronger I force myself to look at the sun. I find it very hard. But do you know what I find harder? That is to look into the blue of your eyes.” Okay, so Castro is talking to Margaret Trudeau, but reading Three Nights, you get the impression that he may as well have been addressing Pierre, and that Wright is merely a flower bearer at the great interstate love-in. The three nights (and days) actually take up very little of the book – just 31 of the 271 pages – and the rest is filled in with a remarkably uncritical account of Castro’s revolution and the death-squad cries of “Al Paredon!” (To the wall!) that accompanied the following bloodbath, and a glossy overview of Canada’s curiously friendly relations with Cuba. Wright has a disingenuous habit of referring to Castro when talking about good things, and about “the regime” when discussing the torture and oppression Castro ordered. This is a technique favoured by dictators themselves, and creates a false distance between the tyrant and his deeds. Wright tells us that the China- and Russia-visiting prime minister “loathed totalitarianism and the repression it meant for its subject people,” but he was clearly smitten by its trappings. When he arrived in Havana, Trudeau “was visibly awestruck by the reception he had received,” with giant posters of his own face draping the buildings and 250,000 cheering Cubans lining the streets to welcome him. Wright notes in passing that Castro had the crowds trucked in. The whole thing was fake, but Trudeau evidently enjoyed it. Three Nights in Havana fails utterly to deal with this massive hole in the relationship between Trudeau and Canada’s friendly tyrant. Wright notes that no book on Trudeau and Castro would be complete without careful consideration of the objection that the former, a proclaimed lover of liberalism and freedom, could be so enamoured of the latter, a man who holds his own people under a steel fist – and then waffles on, randomly pointing the finger at George W. Bush and Guantannomo Bay, Tiananmen Square, and the Maher Arar case, as though the fact that others have also done bad things exonerates Castro. Wright concludes with the unconvincing observation that Trudeau knew “human rights violations are never arbitrary.” Clearly, in the case of Castro, there are not – for almost fifty years now, he has systematically stifled opposition to his rule, imprisoned political dissidents, denied Cubans the right to leave their homeland, and violated whatever human rights he saw fit, all to one end: keeping a grip on power. At times, you wonder if Wright is joking. Talking about the “significant political reforms” Castro brought to Cuba in the 1970s, he says the dictator, who grabbed power in 1959 promising to quickly pave the way for free elections and saying he himself did not wish to rule the country, Wright glowingly records the process of the 1974 elections. Then he remarks in passing, “such elections were, of course, far from open in the Western sense of the term. Only the Communist Party could run candidates, campaign, or freely discuss issues.” The “Western” sense of openness? Trudeau’s 1976 visit was not his last – in 1991, the two friends were reunited during the retired prime minister’s personal visit to Cuba. We are told they embraced warmly, and continued what a former Canadian ambassador described as a “mentor-student” relationship, with “Trudeau in the senior role.” Trudeau asks his old friend to “call me Pierre or Pedro, as long as I can call you Fidel.” This gushing lack of critical analysis is the fatal flaw that guided Trudeau’s (and Canada’s) fundamentally failed relationship with Castro’s Cuba, and it sinks Wright’s book. First published in the Halifax Daily News on April 1, 2007.
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On May 1, 1960, Pierre Elliot Trudeau hopped in a canoe, pushed off the coast of Key West, and paddled for Cuba. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have made the reverse journey, fleeing the regime of Fidel Castro; 77,000 have died in the attempt.