Fidel.

Against All Hope, by Armando Valladares (Knopf, 380 pp., $18.95) Fidel: A Critical Portrait, by Tad Szulc (Morrow, 703 pp., $19.95) Fidel, by Peter G. Bourne (Dodd, Mead, 332 pp., $18.95)

I'LL NEVER forget attending, in an elegantWashington drawing room (Embassy Row, not Georgetown, for once), a private showing of a documentary film about Fidel Castro. This was in 1976. The film--shameless propaganda from beginning to end--had been made by Saul Landau of the Institute for Policy Studies. A dozen or so IPS types constituted the audience. The lights came on, and there was a sincere round of applause--as much for Castro as for Landau. I was anxious to preserve docorum, not to mention my by-then shaky liberal credentials, but I couldn't stand it any longer. "Pure propaganda!' I shouted out, rattling the wine glasses and cheese knives.

"Could you have done that?' someoneshouted back. "Could you take power in that way?' He paused, evidently to reflect on the magnitude of Castro's glory, and exclaimed: "He actually did it!'

He actually did it. I have neverforgotten that ugly paean of power-worship. Oh, the craving for power that gnaws at so many intellectuals! Never underestimate it, in trying to fathom their enduring love affair with Communism. In the ensuing argument, there was no real debate about the totalitarian nature of Castro's rule or the reality of his dungeons. If pressed, the IPS types would have conceded all that. There was merely a worship of power. The man seized a whole country and made it his private domain. Top that, Bethell! What's your excuse for living?

Now come three books about theFuhrer of the Caribbean and his private domain. The first, by Armando Valladares, has already received well-deserved attention. After an appeal to Castro from Francois Mitterrand, Valladares was released from the Cuban Gulag in 1982, having been held for 22 years in various hellish prisons. His account has been compared to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. If anything, Valladares's account is even more impressive, just as the savagery he encountered may have been even greater. No one reading Valladares can any longer believe that Communism is a Slavic aberration.

Every night there were firing squads.When I heard the discharges of the rifles I would be seized with horror, and I embraced Christ in desperation. . . . There came a moment when, seeing those young men full of courage depart to die before the firing squad and shout, "!Viva Cristo Rey!' at the fateful instant, I not only understood instantly, as though by a sudden revelation, that Christ was indeed there for me at the moments when I prayed not to be killed, but realized as well that He served to give my life, and my death if it came to that, ethical meaning. . . . Those cries of the executed patriots--"Long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!' . . . became such a potent and stirring symbol that by 1963 the men condemned to death were gagged before being carried down to be shot . . .

Captain Herman F. Marks, an Americanwhom Fidel Castro had appointed head of the garrison of La Cabana and official executioner, was the man who fired those coups de grace and carried out the inspections. When he was drunk, which he was very frequently, Marks would order the garrison to form up in full military gear and attack the prisoners. He called the prison his "private hunting reserve.' Another of his amusements was to stroll through the galeras and call out to those who were to be tried for offenses which carried the death penalty; he would ask them behind which ear they wanted the coup de grace. He had a dog he took with him to the executions so the dog could lap the dead men's blood. Years later he returned to the United States.

That is the last we hear of CaptainMarks. There are 380 pages in this vein. At times it is almost unbearable reading. Apart from preserving his sanity, Valladares did a heroic job of remembering names, dates, and places, jotting things down, including poems, on tiny scraps of paper whenever he could. It was his status as a poet that gained him his release. In the weird hierarchy of deference observed in the twentieth century, "Communism' trumps "civil liberties' but in turn is imperiled by poets. (Incidentally, we are often told that Nicaragua is full of poets, and I wonder if this ultimately spells the downfall of the Sandinistas. It is something for the Ortegas to worry about, certainly.)

IT'S TEMPTING to think that the publicationof Valladares's book was ill-timed from the point of view of Tad Szulc, a onetime reporter for the New York Times, longtime acquaintance of Fidel Castro, and now the author of an admiring biography of the dictator. But I doubt if Szulc has lost much sleep over Valladares. Just as we knew about the Soviet Gulag before Solzhenitsyn, so we had ample evidence of the Cuban version before Valladares. Several books, among them I Was Castro's Prisoner by John Martino (1963), described it almost as graphically as Valladares. But Szulc is just not interested and ignores all such testaments to Castro's brutality. In June 1984, Jesse Jackson visited Cuba and obtained the well-publicized release of 48 political prisoners. Their stories have since been told in many articles in the U.S. press. But Szulc mentions none of these accounts, nor does he touch on Jackson's visit.

In a seven-hundred-page book Szulcdevotes one sanitized paragraph to the Cuban Gulag--just enough to let him deny that he overlooked the subject entirely. He alludes to ". . . hundreds of Cubans who were tried by these courts and, twenty or 25 years later, remain imprisoned on obscure charges.' Note the misleading "obscure.'

Despite his subtitle, A Critical Portrait,Szulc worships Castro too much to bother with his defects. He concentrates almost entirely on Castro's seizure of power and his swift imposition of totalitarian rule in the early Sixties. Szulc is really not at all interested in the plight of Cuba. The years 1964-86 are glossed over in little more than fifty pages--mostly an account of Cuban-Soviet relations. Szulc has virtually nothing to tell us about Castro's relations with the Sandinistas or with his deposed (and murdered) protege in Grenada, Maurice Bishop.

The following quotations about theCuban Fuhrer are distributed throughout the book. For the sake of convenience I have brought them together in one paragraph. Castro, Szulc tells us, is a "senior statesman,' a "man of astonishing daring and imagination and romanticism,' responsible for "immeasurably improving the human condition of millions of Cubans.' He is moreover a "great teacher' with a "superb mind,' a "vision of history,' and a "superb sense of timing.' "Cervantes lives in Castro's magnificent and constant use of the Spanish language.' His revolution "bestowed on Cuba extraordinary gifts of social justice and equality, advances in public health and education, and an equitable distribution of the national wealth, and Fidel Castro deserves total credit for it.'

In making "the necessary materialavailable' to Szulc, Fidel told him, "shortly after midnight' on February 11, 1985, "We would be taking a great risk with you . . . Will your political and ideological viewpoint allow you to tell objectively my story and the revolution's story?'

Castro need not have worried, asindeed one suspects he only pretended to. Szulc's ideological viewpoint turned out to be simpatico with Castro's. One is forced to this conclusion by Szulc's assertion that Castro immeasurably improved the human condition of millions of Cubans. According to a recent State Department report, there is in Cuba today an "aggressive, systematic, and institutionalized denial of human rights in virtually every form . . . Freedom of expression does not exist, telephones are tapped and mail opened,' and "private expression of differences from government policies is repressed by an informer network operated by Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (block committees).' Notice that this total breakdown of the rule of law exposes everyone in the country (except a few of Castro's trusted henchmen) to arbitrary arrest. No one is or is intended to be secure in such an environment. Religion is ruthlessly repressed.

Far from havig "immeasurably improved'the human condition of millions of Cubans, all this has gravely undermined it. A few sadists and born criminals might find the lawless climate to their liking, and of course some Party officials have prospered. In material terms, however, the standard of living in the country has sunk-- from fourth in Latin America (in GNP per capita) to about twentieth. The alleged medical advances are bogus: syphilis, malaria, and polio are on the rise. In its infant-mortality rate Cuba has lost ground since the revolution. Education is synonymous with indoctrination. As a striking measure of the Cuban decline, the country now actually has to import and ration sugar. Meat consumption per capita is one-fifth its 1959 level. Without his $4-billion annual subsidy from the Soviet Union, Castro would have to mitigate his tyranny.

Szulc has pleased some conservativesby reporting that, "from the outset, Castro went about turning Cuba into a Marxist-Leninist state,' only feigning interest in democracy to retain the support of bourgeois journalists; that Castro embraced the Soviets without a Yankee push; and so on. As a result few have noted Szulc's enthusiasm for Fidel and his works. It can scarcely bother Castro now to be depicted by his biographer as an early Communist, any more than it would bother Cardinal Obando to be denounced by the Sandinistas as a consistent Roman Catholic.

Since 1961 Castro has publicly proclaimedhis fealty to Communism. The validity of his profession of faith (and thus Szulc's reliability) is now lengthily disputed by K. S. Karol in The New Republic. One who has "no ties to the specific theory and the specific history' of Communism "cannot be a Communist,' Karol grandly asserts. But Communism today is merely a rationale for the seizure and retention of power. The question whether Castro's ideological proclamations were opportunistic is of no interest, since in the pursuit of power there can be no distinction between opportunism and principle.

We might more appropriately dismissas inconsequential anyone who sought total power in the latter half of the twentieth century without using Communist slogans and methods. A French leftist, Karol evidently wants to rebut the presumption that Communism can be cynically adopted. In this, I side with Szulc.

Meanwhile, Frank Calzon of the CubanAmerican National Foundation points out that some of Szulc's "revelations' were published years ago by Theodore Draper. Compare Szulc, page 472: The need for ideological caution "was expressed in a private wartime remark by Castro, that "I could proclaim socialism from the Turquino Peak, the highest mountain in Cuba, but there is no quarantee that I could come down from the mountain afterward.''

Draper, Castro's Revolution: Mythsand Realities (1962), page 150: "Of course, if we stopped at the Pico Turquino when we were very weak and said, "We are Marxist-Leninists,' possibly we would not have been able to descend from the Pico Turquino to the plain.' Draper attributes this to a public speech given by Castro on December 20, 1961.

DR. PETER BOURNE, a psychiatristand erstwhile advisor to President Carter, comes close to the truth when he writes, at the end of his otherwise adulatory work, Fidel: "Some say that the primary attraction of Communism was that it was an ideology that would allow [Castro] to justify assuming total power and keeping it for the rest of his life without being accused of being just another Latin American dictator driven solely by a desire for power and personal aggrandizement.'

Bourne might have paused to reflecton the very interesting question why Communism so successfully immunizes its practitioners and apologists against such accusations. But, like Szulc, he is blinded by admiration for his hero-- "one of the greatest figures of all time,' Bourne said in a TV interview with CBS reporter Terence Smith. Bourne has some cheap psychiatry for us: Castro managed his heroic achievements even though he was illegitimate --a "harsh burden' in the "deeply moralistic Catholic environment' of Castro's youth. (Actually, Castro's "environment' was far from moralistic. His father was an unscrupulous marauder from Spain who stole his absent neighbors' property by surreptitiously moving their fences in the dead of night, and who whipped the Negro laborers, but let that pass.) In Bourne's diagnosis, the indignity surrounding Fidel's birth drove him to "need' many things: "dictatorial power over his fellow countrymen,' for example. There were other needs. "The need to thrust himself on the world stage,' "the need for total control,' the "need for recognition and acceptance,' and an "inescapable need to break the bond with the United States.' And so on. Fidel Castro is among the world's needy, apparently.

When Bourne visited Cuba in 1960what struck him was the "vibrant sense of excitement.' The "entire country had been stood on its head by a man who was only 33 years old.' It does not occur to the British-born doctor that this might be an uncomfortable position. Bourne unwisely boasts that "during the last several years I have remained intimately involved with Cuban affairs, making regular visits to the island.' Why, then, does he omit the Cuban Gulag from his account?

"History would view him as one ofthe major figures of the century,' Bourne writes of Castro--a man of "extreme daring,' "insatiable intellectual curiosity,' "hypnotic charm,' "encyclopedic knowledge,' "astonishing charisma,' and "seductive charm.' He gave his subjects "great equality of opportunity,' "high-quality health care,' "excellent education,' and "basic necessities in the way of food staples, clothing, and simple electric appliances' on a "rationed but highly subsidized basis.' Heil Fidel!

As I say, Communism immunizes itsapologists against effective criticism. Our "mass elites' (as Joe Sobran calls them), like Castro, have a "need' for power. Communism gives it to them free of civil-libertarian carping. But can someone tell me why this should be so, and for how much longer we must submit to this self-imposed insanity?