Celia and Fidel: why the timing is perfect for a new play about Castro

Fidel Castro is back in the news. Bernie Sanders, favourite for the Democratic nomination for US president, recently noted that when the Cuban revolutionary gained power in 1959, he launched a massive literacy programme. “Is that a bad thing, even if Fidel Castro did it?” he asked.

The political backlash was swift and uncompromising. Rival candidate Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, wrote on Twitter: “Fidel Castro left a dark legacy of forced labor camps, religious repression, widespread poverty, firing squads, and the murder of thousands of his own people. But sure, Bernie, let’s talk about his literacy program.”

Related: If Bernie Sanders thinks Cuba is worth defending, he should talk to gay dissidents | Aaron Hicklin

Social media seems ill-equipped for nuance and the notion that a political leader can be both heroic and despotic. Theatre, however, invites and revels in the possibility that opposing viewpoints can coexist truthfully at the same time. Castro, who died four years ago, offers the dramatist a Shakespearean bundle of contradictions.

Eduardo Machado, 66, a Cuban playwright based in the US, says: “He’s a genius, he’s a totalitarian, he’s an egomaniac. There’s a part of the Cuban revolution that’s more humanitarian than, say, the eastern bloc. He was sexy. So he’s a mess because every time you think you’ve come to a decision about him, you get evidence that goes, no.

“It’s been the story of my life from worshipping him to hating him to thinking, ‘Oh, he had to do it and I’m proud that he did it,’ because we are not the whores of the United States, to then seeing how the people live, part of which is wonderful and part of which is really oppressive. And seeing all that at once, constantly when I’m in Cuba, it’s like I’m changing my mind every five minutes.”

Machado is speaking at the Arena Stage theater in Washington, which in recent years has brought to life political figures such as John Quincy Adams, Lyndon Johnson and Vladimir Putin. It is now producing the world premiere of Machado’s latest work, Celia and Fidel, which shines a light on Cuba’s most influential female revolutionary, Celia Sánchez, who was Castro’s political partner and most trusted confidant.

Yet Sánchez remains relatively little known internationally. Today, foreign tourists who flock to Havana’s Revolution Square, where Castro made many speeches, find vintage car tours on offer and see giant steel profiles of heroes Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos.

Machado, the author of 53 plays, says: “Celia was more important than Che. She’s not written out of history in Cuba but in the rest of the world they never considered how much power she actually had, which I find interesting. She had a lot more power than Che. Che left early on in the revolution and she helped shape how the revolution treated its citizens much more than anybody else.”

Castro said little about the nature of their personal relationship. Machado comments: “They were most likely lovers but he married other people and they were very close. Someone in Cuba told me there was no Fidel without Celia and no Celia without Fidel.

“She never got married. He was her life and they had offices next to each other and they saw each other every day and very much ran the government together. And then there’s Raul, his brother, who also had big influence, and a doctor that Fidel had that was also very influential, but mostly it was Celia even before his brother.”

Sánchez was a positive influence on Castro, the writer believes, until her death from lung cancer removed a crucial guardrail that would prove a major loss for the people. “They disagreed on a lot of things. Unfortunately, she died in 1980 and the revolution took a twist after that.”

The revolution had overthrown Fulgencio Batista, a dictator backed by the US – part of a long, hypocritical history of Washington meddling in its own backyard. Staged just a couple of miles from the White House, Celia and Fidel promises a revealing, disquieting insight into how Cubans view America.

“All of Latin America sees America as imperialists that have tried to control their governments and their fate, and certainly Cubans see that more than anybody else,” Machado says. “So it’s about the oppression we lived under because we live 99 miles away from the biggest power in the world.

“Before Teddy Roosevelt went into Cuba and ‘liberated’ it, Cuba was shown in drawings as a white woman that was about to get raped by the natives and the only people that could save her were the Americans. I think that’s still the attitude that’s ingrained.”

Machado’s family at first embraced the revolution. One day he went with them to a local bar and came face to face with Castro, Guevara and Cienfuegos. What does he remember of that experience? “Aww,” he chuckles. “I thought they were our saviours and I was seven and impressionable.

“My family was for Castro and fought to to get him there and we hated Batista, something they don’t remember any more, and we thought he was gonna save us. He saved some people, but not us because we owned a bus company and that’s the first thing they nationalised. So we got out of there quickly after that.”

Another, “horrifying” childhood memory was watching televised executions. He recalls: “I think assassinating people against the wall, which I watched on TV when I was a little kid, was the final straw that turned a lot of people against him, because that’s what Batista did and he didn’t do it on television.

“Interestingly enough, like Trump, Fidel always thought if you show everything, nobody’s going to say anything. He had trials on television, too, and then you would see them go off to the firing squad and you would see them die.”

Machado, who was eight, and his five-year-old brother left Cuba in Operation Peter Pan, a US government programme designed to protect children from communist indoctrination. “It was chaotic. We went to the airport five times before I ever got on a plane. There were masses of kids but the Cuban government approved it.”

The boys started their new life in Miami. Their parents arrived eight months later and the family settled in Los Angeles.

Machado adds: “I didn’t learn to speak English until I was 11. When I was young, I thought if I want to understand America, I have to understand English people. So I started reading all the biographies of English kings and queens and then I read Shakespeare at 13 and actually understood it. That’s sort of what got me into plays and playwriting. So it was Shakespeare’s fault.”

Asked if Castro reminds him of any Shakespearean characters, the writer, who has returned to Cuba often over the past 20 years, names Richard III. “The same can be said about Trump,” he muses, “and that’s what’s interesting about doing the play right now”.

• Celia and Fidel is at Arena Stage in Washington, DC until 12 April