The comander calls it a day

Well, there we have it. The comandante has stepped down. And what a timely resignation it is for Castro. Never have the whims of world power gone wonkier since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, we face a capital recession that is giving investors worldwide a bone-shaking run for their money. We perceive a smouldering Afghanistan and a broken Iraqi population that leave us wondering who the bloodiest dictators really are. There has never been a riper moment for summing up the lifetime and adventures of Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, ex-President of Cuba and leader of the Cuban Revolution since 1958.

Sooner or later, somebody had to do this mammoth task. Castro himself made it clear his time was too precious to lavish on writing self-narratives. But Ignacio Ramonet found a way of tapping his subject's notable gift of the gab. The result is an assisted autobiography, with a researcher asking questions, and Castro answering, recollecting, and fine-tuning the facts of a 49-year-long stint as Cuban leader. The format suits Castro's penchant for oratory, and readers of this 626-page, 28-chapter exchange with Prof. Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, will find in Castro's meticulous answers that same eloquence that triggered Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez's wonder at the Revolutionary's rhetorical panache.

Castro "begins almost inaudibly, his path uncertain, but he takes advantage of any glimmer, any spark, to gain ground, little by little, until suddenly he casts off - and takes control of his audience", writes Mr Marquez. My Life - Fidel Castro, is the result of some 100 hours of face-to-face conversation that an ailing Castro chose to grant Prof. Ramonet.

In terms of research, comprehensiveness and eliciting the finer details of Castro's history, the biographer has produced a laudable volume. His conversation with Castro covers his birth and upbringing, his political debut as a young lawyer, and the 1953 assault of the Moncada Barracks - the event that signalled the eventual overthrow of President Batista and the triumph of the Revolution in 1958. Prof. Ramonet devotes an entire chapter to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis while another chapter is allotted to the death of Che Guevara, whom Castro portrays as a quasi-flawless, wholesome revolutionary mind. We are offered Castro's first-hand accounts of his adventures as a guerrilla, his initial years in power, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the biological warfare against Cuba under Nixon's US, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time of hardship for Cuba that Castro euphemistically portrayed to his people as a "special period". In his first-person account as in his speeches, and perhaps out of habit, Castro often employs the "We", a very perplexing mannerism, coming from the guerilla par excellence; the comrade who swore blood allegiance to the socialist ideals and reputedly shunned the cult of personality.

Castro speaks of surviving hostilities from numerous countries, especially the crippling US embargo still in effect, and his own personal ordeal as prime CIA target. His account of the several attacks on his life - an incredible 600 of them - carried out by the CIA, Omega 7 and Alpha 66 affords a presumably more veritable version of the intrigue unfolding behind Castro's formidable public image. Castro mentions, among others, an attempt to mix cyanide into his drink and a TV camera equipped with a gun trained on him during a press conference.

Throughout the conversation, the Commander-in-Chief emphasises his commitment to the revolutionary ideal of an egalitarian society, and insists that his Cuban Revolution has by now "fathered" four generations of loyal, industrious companeros. Indeed, Castro's stature, even on the international stage, subscribes to the cult of immortality. He has survived nine US Presidents, and has garnered enough support from his own people and the army to keep him in power for half a century. Prof. Ramonet's elaborate introduction to the work is as revealing as the conversation itself. He notes Castro's shy personality and his understated approach during his direct encounters with people. Moreover, Prof. Ramonet, a very respected specialist in the history of culture and geopolitics, makes a space-clearing gesture for Castro's international standing. "Few men have known the glory of entering the pages of both history and legend while they are still alive. Castro is one of them [...] He belongs to the generation of mythical insurgents - Nelson Mandela, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral [...] - who, pursuing an ideal of justice, threw themselves into political action in the years following the Second World War."

The biographer's problem here is that his divisive subject is hardly comparable to Cabral and Mandela, except that Castro was inspired by the former and provided aid to the latter. And here lies Prof. Ramonet's Achilles' heel, one that may prejudice the credibility of this volume. His writing comes across as "making a case" for Castro, and very often, the work reads like a painstaking effort at absolving him. It is not a matter of the biographer's confronting Castro with bold questions - which he does - but a totalising conception of Castro leading Ramonet to state that "the fact is that the majority of Cubans (though admittedly not all) are loyal to the Revolution". It certainly is not a view shared by many Cuban artists and writers in exile, including Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and the Cuban-born Andy Garcia, whose movie The Lost City offers a scathing depiction of the brutal facts of Castro's regime.

In his final chapter, After Fidel - What?, Ramonet broaches the question of Cuba's destiny after Castro, which prompts the Cuban leader to spell out what will not take place. He insists that "the Yankees can't destroy this revolutionary process, because we have [...] an entire nation that despite our errors, has such a high degree of culture, knowledge and awareness that it will never, ever, again allow this country to become a colony of theirs".

Time will tell. But a reflection on Marxist socialism volunteered by Henri Lefebvre may not, perhaps, be completely misplaced at this intriguing stage of Cuba's development: "Just how wide by now is the rift between the 'real' society rightly or wrongly referred to as socialist and Marx and Engels' project for a new society?" Castro will not dare answer it. Neither will Prof. Ramonet.

• Mr Bugeja is a Doctoral Researcher and Commonwealth Scholar in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

• A review copy of this book was supplied by Agenda Bookshop.