Fox rejected that call as a diplomatic error or a calculated maneuver.
CDMX, Mexico. – In an interview With the Mexican communicator Melo Montoya, former president Vicente Fox returned to the episode of “You come and you go” addressed to Fidel Castro in 2002 and maintained that the famous phrase was decontextualized by the then Cuban ruler, who would have recorded and disclosed without warning a telephone conversation between the two.
Fox, who was president of Mexico between 2000 and 2006, rejected that that call was a diplomatic error or a calculated maneuver: “Neither one nor the other. Fidel caught me with his fingers in the door,” he stated at the beginning of the story, when the interviewer asked him if the phrase “You eat and you leave” was a mistake or a necessary move.
According to the former president, the episode occurred in the middle of a series of efforts to convince Castro to attend the International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Nuevo León, between March 18 and 22, 2002.
Fox described a previous meeting in which, he claims, he, the then Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda and Fidel Castro himself participated. According to his story, there he tried to persuade the Cuban leader to attend the multilateral meeting: “Hey, Fidel, boy, you have to come to this Ibero-American meeting. All the presidents of Latin America are coming to meet in Monterrey. You can’t miss it.”
Fox maintains that Castro was reluctant to confirm his trip because he feared being detained outside Cuba. “And foolish in that he did not come (…). Fear, pure couscous that they would catch him outside the base and arrest him there, outside his country,” he stated.
The former president also assured that, given the uncertainty, in the last call he complained: “I said: ‘Chingao, Fidel, now. Why do you have me here with the uncertainty? Tell me yes or no. Either you come or you don’t come.'”
Fox presented the conversation as a generous offer to Castro to express himself on a large public stage in Monterrey. “Look what I’m offering you: Did you want to speak in public? I offer you the macro plaza in Monterrey, Nuevo León, at the foot of Cerro de la Silla. What more do you want? Fill the macro plaza and talk and say everything you want,” said the Mexican.
Along the same lines, he assures that he even organized the political staging of the official meal of heads of state. This is how he would have explained to Castro: “You, being from the left, are going to sit on my right. The other one, whom you call ‘Diablo’, Bush 43, being from the right, we are going to sit on the left. (…) Who do you think is going to be the only speaker? I just introduce you and you are the one who is going to speak. And to say what you want, there is no censorship here, there is nothing.”
The key moment comes when Fox narrates the phrase that would give rise to “You eat and you leave.” After listing the concessions that, according to him, he offered to Castro, he concludes: “It doesn’t matter what time you arrive, it doesn’t matter what time you leave. You come, you show up, you come to that meal, you eat and you leave.” In his version, that line was part of an attempt to guarantee that the then Cuban ruler attended at least part of the conference.
Fox assures that he never imagined that the conversation was being recorded in Havana. “What I didn’t count on was that he was recording,” he says in the interview. And he added that the leak came from Castro himself: “So, it was recorded the next day, by Fidel, he put it on the radio and in the media, that President Fox had expelled him from Mexico. (…) Let him eat and leave. That’s where that phrase came from.”
“Yes I said it,” Fox stressed, “but in another context.”
What the 2002 recordings show
Beyond this, Fox’s latest account of the events, the content of the call with Fidel Castro is documented. In fact, the Cuban dictator himself He made the recording public on April 22, 2002during an event in Havana, to denounce what he presented as pressure from Mexico to shorten his stay in Monterrey and moderate his criticism of the United States.
In the transcript of that dialogue, reproduced in academic research and university theses Based on the book by former Mexican ambassador to Havana Ricardo Pascoe, Fox is heard explicitly asking Castro to leave the summit after the official meal: “You accompany me to the meal and from there you return.” The Cuban leader responds: “And from there I carry out your orders: I am returning.”
The exact phrase that appears in the record is, therefore: “You accompany me to the meal and from there you return,” and not “You eat and you leave.” Several studies on Mexican foreign policy They agree that the expression that went down in history as such was a synthesis created by the press—particularly by the newspaper Millennium—from that line of the conversation, which condensed the idea that Fox was asking Castro to withdraw from Mexico once the minimum agenda was completed.
The release of the audio caused a strong diplomatic crisis. The Mexican Government reacted with a statement read by presidential spokesperson Rodolfo Elizondo in Los Pinos, in which he questioned the dissemination of a private conversation by the Cuban head of state, although he recognized the authenticity of the exchange.
From colloquial phrase to political symbol
The episode quickly became a turning point in relations between Mexico and Cuba. Academic analysis and journalistic reconstructions they point out that the call and its public dissemination marked the practical abandonment of the historical Mexican policy of “non-intervention” towards the Island and Fox’s closer approach to Washington.
Two years later, in 2004, the conflict escalated to the temporary withdrawal of the Mexican ambassador in Havana and the expulsion of the Cuban diplomatic representative in Mexico City, which left the bilateral relationship on the verge of breaking down.
Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) He took up the episode in his morning press conference. In April 2023, he cited it as one of the examples of the “submission” of previous governments to the interests of Washington, recalling that Fox agreed with Castro to remain in Monterrey only until lunch because George W. Bush would arrive later.
In the Cuban case, the call also became a piece of internal propaganda. Texts published in the official press and compilations on the figure of Fidel Castro They collect the final dialogue of the conversation – “You accompany me to the meal and from there you return” / “And from there I carry out your orders: I return” – as proof of the subordination of Mexico to the United States and of the Cuban leader’s ability to unmask his interlocutors.
Fox had already alleged audio manipulation
The interview with Melo Montoya is not the first time that Fox maintains that “You come and you leave” was taken out of context by Fidel Castro. In 2016, in his program Fox Populi in Millennium Televisionthe former president stated that the Cuban leader “edited” the recording to position the phrase in a negative way. According to the reconstruction published by MillenniumFox then said: “He asked me in the afternoon what was next, so I told him ‘You eat and you leave’, that’s how I was candid, he took it out and positioned it in a negative way, edited it and cut it to remove that part.”
In 2022, in a conversation with the youtuber Luisito Comunica, took up the same argument and assured that the audio broadcast in 2002 had been “taken out of context” by Castro. On that occasion, he also insisted that the intention of the call was to avoid a direct confrontation between the Cuban leader and US President George W. Bush during the Monterrey conference.
