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The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times
By Anthony DePalma
Public Affairs, 308 pages, $36.95

Ernest Hemingway remarked of his fellow journalist: "When the fakers are all dead they will read Matthews in the schools to find out what really happened." It might have been so but for the highly polemical role played by Herbert Lionel Matthews in shaping world opinion about a young revolutionary hiding in the Cuban Sierra Maestra in the late 1950s.

Anthony DePalma's important and well-written book, The Man Who Invented Fidel, recounts the sad tale of the steady rise and meteoric fall of a shy New York City boy who had ambitions of being a scholar of Romance languages, but became a widely recognized New York Times foreign correspondent. Matthews reported from the front lines on many of the major events of the first half of the 20th century. His last assignment was covering the Cuban revolution.

DePalma, himself a Times correspondent, uncovers fresh details of Matthews's Cuban odyssey, and delivers a sympathetic but sober correction of the erroneous caricature that has survived for a half century.

Despite being a battle-weary 57 with a prior heart attack and bout of tuberculosis, Matthews jumped at the invitation to interview Fidel Castro at his mountain hideout in February, 1957. The world presumed that Castro was dead, killed by the soldiers of dictator Fulgencio Batista in December, 1956, as he landed in Cuba by boat from exile in Mexico.

Matthews and his young escorts underwent an arduous ordeal to get to Fidel, driving 500 miles by jeep, conning suspicious soldiers patrolling for guerrillas, hiding in a safe house and finally hiking through the night over swampy, dense, mosquito-infested mountains.

The interview produced three articles, the first accompanied by a large photo snapped by Matthews of an earnest Castro holding a rifle. Matthews's style, which he used in covering Castro, was to become emotionally involved with the characters in his story, faithful to the truth as best he could ascertain it, but devoid of the pretense of what journalist Martha Gellhorn referred to as "the objectivity shit."

The articles proved that Castro was alive, and provided, with some reservations, a generally glowing account of Castro and his mission. Matthews described Castro as a democrat committed to social justice, and an "anti-Communist." Because he was charismatic, well-spoken and dedicated to deposing a voraciously corrupt and ruthless dictator, Castro was the ideal subject for Matthews's emotional brand of reporting.

The articles caused a splash. Castro and Matthews each got what he wanted. As DePalma notes, Fidel benefited from an instant international image makeover from "a hot headed loser to a noble rogue with broad democratic ideals." Matthews reinforced this image in subsequent editorials and occasional news articles.

Matthews was lionized. But the crowning achievement of his distinguished career dissolved quickly and mercilessly. As the revolution took a sharp turn to the left and the dictatorial, Matthews was vilified. His initial judgment that Castro was a democrat and not a communist was blamed for creating an influential myth that Castro rode to power. J. Edgar Hoover placed Matthews under surveillance and The Times eventually muzzled him. Matthews spent the rest of his life trying to rehabilitate his reputation.

DePalma confronts squarely the contentious issues surrounding Matthews's methodology and judgments. The affaire Matthews raises many themes that are as relevant and critical now as they were in the 1950s, including: the wisdom of allowing a reporter to write editorials and news stories about the same subject; the dangers of a reporter becoming too close to his sources, appropriating a quasi-diplomatic role, and unabashedly taking sides; and the role of the media in myth-making.

DePalma analyzes correctly the two critical points for which Matthews has languished in the dock. Castro was not a communist in the very early months of the revolutionary government that came to power on Jan. 1, 1959, and was certainly not one in 1957. But Matthews was slower than others to conclude that Castro's ardent nationalism had definitively mutated into a peculiar brand of communism and totalitarianism within the first several years of the revolutionary government.

He is also correct that Matthews's portrayal of Castro was useful to the Cuban, but not a significant element in his triumph. Many other actors, and numerous and deep-seated factors, contributed to Castro's victory and the evolution of the revolution.

The book would have benefited from a discussion of how tempestuous U.S.-Latin American relations at the time and prior U.S. press coverage of Latin American reform movements affected Matthews's sentiments and sense of purpose. As the primary Times editorialist in the 1950s on Latin American affairs, Matthews would have known of the antipathy many Latin Americans felt toward the United States, exemplified by the barrage of stones and spittle endured by vice-president Richard Nixon during his infamous trip to Caracas in 1958.

Latin Americans were furious about the U.S. involvement only a few years earlier in the overthrow of the democratically elected reform government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and U.S. support for unsavoury dictators in the region. Matthews's empathy for the Cuban revolutionaries contrasted sharply with the unsympathetic U.S. press coverage given to Arbenz. Was Matthews using the Cuban revolution to even the score journalistically, and/or to express sentiments felt broadly across Latin America?

Herbert Matthews died in 1977 in Australia, where he spent his last years reading literature classics, building a relationship with his grown children, whom he rarely saw during their youth, and doting on his grandchildren. His simple tombstone provides his name, date of death and age. With this book, Anthony DePalma has added the letters "RIP."

Ken Frankel is a Toronto lawyer and member of the board of the Canadian Council of the Americas (FOCAL).