Fidel Castro: The Playboy Interview (Singles Classic) (50 Years of the Playboy Interview)

by Playboy Magazine

Our system is cleaner, because we’re not pretending to be the best of liberty.

The fact is that for the past 100 years in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the world, this anti-Communist feeling has been drilled into the masses by all possible means; the anti-Communist indoctrination begins practically when a child is born.

Castro: As regards the charge of cruelty, I think the crudest people on earth are the ones who are indifferent to social injustice, discrimination, inequality, the exploitation of others—people who don’t react when they see a child with no shoes, a beggar in the streets or millions of hungry people.

I’d say that what is really cruel is a society—a capitalist one, for instance—that not only is cruel in itself but forces man to be cruel. Socialism is just the opposite. By definition, it expresses confidence and faith in man, in solidarity among men and in the brotherhood of man—not selfishness, ambition, competition or struggle. I believe that cruelty is born of selfishness, ambition, inequality, injustice, competition and struggle among men.

I think that someday, that policy—the policy of intervening in all countries of Latin America, setting guidelines, saying what type of government should be elected, the social changes that can or cannot be performed—will give out and result in a crisis, and I really believe that that moment is drawing nearer.

People can be manipulated; they can even applaud crimes. When the Nazis annexed Austria, the German people applauded; when they occupied Warsaw, the vast majority of Germans applauded. Some Americans applauded at the start of the invasion of Vietnam; later we saw the consequences. I believe future generations of U.S. citizens will be ashamed of the way their people were manipulated.

You know, I’ve had the rare privilege of meeting some figures whom you would find courteous, well educated, who have studied in Europe or the United States, and later on you find out that they’ve done horrible things. It’s as if at some moment, people go mad. It seems that there are people whose brain neurons aren’t adapted to the complexities of revolutionary political problems, so they do crazy things that are really amazing.

I wonder: Is there any fascist regime in the past 40 years that has not been an ally of the United States? In Spain, the Franco regime; in Portugal, the Salazar regime; in South Korea, the fascist military; in Central America, Somoza, the military dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador; and Stroessner, the military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, as well as the Duvalier regime. I don’t know of any reactionary, fascist state that has not been a close ally of the United States.

We certainly won’t adopt any such measures as cutting aid to the elderly, reducing old-age pensions, cutting medicines for the sick, reducing hospital and school appropriations. We don’t sacrifice social programs, as they do in the United States, for the sake of building aircraft carriers, MX missiles and other engines of war that the world abhors.

And criticizing us for our dependency on the Soviets is like telling us, “Look, we sank the ship—and you used a lifesaver!”