Intellectual Soulmates

On January 28, 1976, speaking in Spanish to a Cuban audience, Pierre Elliott Trudeau uttered one of the most extraordinary declarations ever made by a Canadian prime minister. It was the third and final day of an official visit to Cuba by Trudeau and his wife, Margaret. The Cold War was in its 30th year. Sharing the stage in the port city of Cienfuegos with Fidel Castro, his communist host, Trudeau said he and Castro had had extensive talks and differed on many things, but had agreed to “disagree honourably and without disrespect.” He summed up with the electrifying words: “Long live Cuba and the Cuban people! Long live Prime Minister Fidel Castro! Long live Cuban-Canadian friendship!”

This is the pivotal event in Three Nights in Havana: Pierre Trudeau, Fidel Castro and the Cold War World, Robert Wright’s engaging account of the two men and the relationship that evolved between Canada and Cuba after Castro led his guerrillas to power in 1959. The book is built on the Trudeaus’ trip to Cuba (they also travelled to Mexico and Venezuela) and the friendship with the Cuban leader that blossomed while they were there. Trudeau and Castro were ideological adversaries, but they had in common a Jesuit education, an appreciation of physical endurance and the fact that, to a certain extent, each occupied a subordinate position to a Cold War superpower. In 1991, long after leaving office, Trudeau began going back to Cuba on private visits, at times lobbying on behalf of businesses and other causes, and all the while steadily renewing his acquaintanceship with Castro. Most Canadians failed to appreciate the strength of the bond between the two men until 2000, when Castro attended Trudeau’s funeral in Montreal and declared: “I share in the grief and sorrow of Pierre Trudeau’s family and of all Canadians.”

The 1976 trip was certainly remarkable, but in the long run it changed little between Canada and Cuba. Despite Trudeau’s forthright profession of friendship, political and diplomatic relations between Ottawa and Havana soon reverted to formality and correctness. On his return from Latin America, Trudeau was heavily criticized inside and outside Canada for cozying up to a dictator—not just any dictator, but one whose meddling in Africa threatened to upset the equilibrium of the Cold War. The prime minister himself was increasingly dismayed by Castro’s decision to send troops to Angola to bolster the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola against its South African– and U.S.-backed rivals. He had hoped his journey to Havana would spark a deepening of détente between the superpowers and their satellites, but it did not. A little more than two years after the historic visit, with tens of thousands of Cuban troops in Angola, Trudeau’s government cut off foreign aid to Cuba in protest.

What the Havana trip did do, on Wright’s reading, was light the fuse that eventually blew up the Trudeaus’ marriage. Some of the best passages in Three Nights in Havana are those in which he comments on the dissonance between Margaret’s personality, marriage and motherhood and the expectations surrounding a political spouse. She fought successfully to be included in every segment of the Cuba trip, including the idyllic late-night barbecue laid on by Castro at Cayo Largo, his personal relaxation spot off Cuba’s southern coast. (Wright’s title is somewhat misleading; it was Canadian reporters who actually spent three nights in Havana, seething at having been tricked by Castro’s security detail and separated from the prime minister.) She later described the Cuban leader as “ridiculously romantic” and wrote that at Cayo Largo “it was as well that Castro and I were not alone.” She claimed to have found herself in Cuba—but the discovery had alarming consequences. On the next leg of the journey, in Venezuela, she refused to participate in most of the events laid on for her. At a formal dinner she sang a cringe-making self-penned song to her hostess. A year later the Trudeaus separated; Margaret’s well-publicized meltdown had begun.

These are disparate strands, and Wright set himself no small challenge in trying to weave them into an attractive tapestry. Moreover, the total quantity of known information about the relationship between Trudeau and Castro is somewhat underwhelming. The story achieves book length by means of long detours through the history of the Cold War, the Cuban revolution, the antics of Cuban exiles and the Trudeaus’ marital difficulties—all well-worn paths. Still, Wright is an effective guide along them, and his book is an easy, often enjoyable read, spiced with reflections on Pierre and Margaret, Castro’s character and charm, and the limitations of global statesmanship.

Wright relies heavily on published and broadcast sources. Some of his best bits will be familiar to readers of Margaret Trudeau’s books. He owes a substantial debt to John Kirk and Peter McKenna’s Canada-Cuba Relations: The Other Good Neighbour Policy, a comprehensive history of the relationship between the two countries—but one that, curiously, kissed off the 1976 visit in less than two pages. Wright has also delved into diplomatic archives and conducted extensive interviews with James Hyndman, who was Canada’s ambassador to Cuba at the time of the visit. It is Hyndman who provides the most amusing moment in the book, recalling that Castro showed up at the ambassador’s home a full two weeks after Trudeau’s departure bearing a red snapper the two leaders had caught while spearfishing at Cayo Largo, with instructions to deliver it to Ottawa. Unfortunately, even after all these years, “Canadian officials” (presumably including Hyndman) declined to reveal to Wright the full details of the talks that took place on Cayo Largo. Perhaps one day, when Cuban archives are fully accessible, we will have them.

What was the basis of the attraction between Trudeau and Castro? Certainly not an ideological affinity, despite what the Canadian leader’s more strident critics claimed. In Wright’s view, it was more akin to honour among thieves—an appreciation by each man of the extent of the other’s travails. “It was in the realm of politics that each man came to value the courage of the other,” he writes at one point. And later: “Political courage … the quality that Trudeau and Castro came to respect so profoundly in each other, meant walking the tightrope. It meant having the fortitude to challenge continually the limits imposed on their nations by history and circumstance, without destroying the delicate strategic balance that was absolutely essential to their self-preservation.”

There may have been something even more basic—a kind of intellectual isolation that only the most senior political leaders come to know and feel. Surely no one looks at the world quite like someone who has headed a government. No one has been confronted with choices of the same magnitude, and no one understands the constraints of decision making in quite the same way. Indeed, the boredom threshold of such individuals must be rather low, for the concerns the rest of us occupy ourselves with are entirely petty by comparison. In this light, it is easier to understand how personal friendship could endure between two men who regularly acted against each other’s interest, or in defiance of each other’s counsel.

But could such a relationship develop today? One imagines Jean Chrétien struggling to establish this kind of rapport with Castro (the two met in 1998, with woeful results), or Jacques Chirac. One doubts that Tony Blair and George Bush, for all their political compatibility, became “intellectual soulmates”—the term one former diplomat used to describe Trudeau and Castro. One wonders what type of relationship would blossom, say, between Stephen Harper and Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian president whom Harper met during his Latin American swing in July.

Indeed, one marvels at Wright’s story for the manner in which the political personalities dominate it. They clear out their own space and spontaneously carve their own narrative arc in a way that is hard to imagine in the current century, with its carefully wrapped message politics and fast-moving media juggernauts. Harper’s handlers seem to spend much of their time trying to mask his personality, and his wife would never be allowed the space for personal expression that public life granted Margaret Trudeau. Perhaps there was a moment during Harper’s recent trip when he felt like crying “Viva el Presidente Alvaro Uribe,” but even if he did so, who would remark on it? Canadians, Colombians, whoever—for better or worse, we seem resigned to the managed and the predictable in high office, instead of true newsmakers who keep us off balance with unscripted humanity and fresh ideas.

For all that, Wright is too kind to both his central subjects, eager as he is to cast them as twin principled opponents of U.S. domination. His passage on human rights under Castro is far too apologetic in tone, suggesting that Washington’s grave and systematic abuses in its “war on terror” somehow justify, or help to explain, half a century of repression in Cuba. As for Trudeau, many who lived through the 1970s and ’80s in Canada will surely pinch themselves awake before Wright’s reverie has run its course. Wright claims that Trudeau, as a “true liberal,” always privileged individual rights over collective concerns, but in reality he had his own authoritarian streak. He never hesitated to act decisively to deal with perceived crises, prolong the length of his governments or accomplish political goals, in ways that were often difficult to reconcile with any system of political or philosophical principle.

His internationalism and curiosity also had their limits. The Trudeau who captivated Castro was real, but sometimes a different person showed up inside the same skin. Canadian journalist Augusta Dwyer met this other Trudeau in action in 1988 and recounted the story in Into the Amazon: The Struggle for the Rain Forest, her memoir of Brazil’s rainforest, its inhabitants and its politics. By coincidence, Dwyer happened to be visiting the Yanomami Indians in the northern Amazon when Trudeau alighted on a whirlwind visit. Brazil at the time was at the centre of an international furor over the devastation of its rainforest by ranchers, colonists and gold miners. The Yanomami, seriously weakened by hunger and disease, were trying desperately to stop local authorities from allowing miners onto their supposedly protected territory. Yet the same man who in Cuba was a passionate and engaged analyst, eager to learn about local affairs, was for Dwyer “uncaring,” “cold” and “distant.” She reports that he asked few questions, but nevertheless gave an interview to a newspaper reporter in which he described the Yanomami as happy and well treated, and said he had seen no threat to the beleaguered forest.

Wright’s tale is also a sober reminder that in the majority of cases, the ability of individuals to decisively affect world events has strict limits. While the personal ties between Trudeau and Castro endured and deepened over more than two decades, the official relationship between Canada and Cuba waxed and waned—mostly the latter. In fact, Three Nights in Havana spotlights the fickleness of official Canadian engagement with Latin America as a whole. More than a decade ago, political scientist James Rochlin opened Discovering the Americas: The Evolution of Canadian Foreign Policy Towards Latin America with the words: “Canada is on the threshold of a new partnership with Latin America.” There had been several false starts during the 20th century, Rochlin noted. Nevertheless, with the Cold War over, military dictatorship in eclipse and Canada finally a member of the Organization of American States, he stated confidently that “the new global reality has dictated a larger Canadian role in hemispheric affairs.” Yet just a few years later, Canada’s developing-world preoccupations had swung back to Africa and Asia—a trend intensified by the 9/11 attacks.

Now Ottawa is looking southward once again. At the annual G8 summit meeting in June, Harper declared (to the dismay of advocates for Africa) that “a focus of our new government is the Americas.” That was followed by his July swing through Colombia, Chile, Barbados and Haiti, during which he promised a “new model of partnership” (that word again) in the service of “peace, security and development.” Speaking in Santiago, Harper sought to reassure his audience in Santiago that Canada not only speaks softly but also carries a small stick. “It is not in our past, nor within our power, to conquer or to dominate,” he said. It was a surprising sentence, with its implicit questioning of U.S. practice in the Americas—and one that could easily have been spoken by Pierre Trudeau. All well and good, perhaps, but if this new thrust is to succeed, sensitivity, humility and a long-term perspective must take precedence over the short-term concerns of a minority government. For Latin Americans (and perhaps for Canadians, more than we care to admit), relationships are more important than the deal, or the policy, of the day. The point is rammed home by Andrea Mandel-Campbell in Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson, her savage critique of the international performance of Canadian businesses. And it is underscored by the story of the Castro-Trudeau friendship.

At the end of Three Days in Havana, Wright alludes to another story—that of the real (as opposed to the official) relationship between Canada and Cuba. Business, culture, tourism, environmentalism, human rights activism—all these and more are theatres in which a myriad of personal dramas have developed. Together they are producing slow but steady growth in understanding between Canadians and Cubans, in contrast to the swoops and dips recorded in the official archives. This is a rich and complex popular history, one that has yet to be compiled.