The Italian journalist and television host Gianni Minà, who conducted a long interview with Fidel Castro in 1987, died Monday in Rome at the age of 84 after a “brief heart disease.” Famous for his friendship with soccer player Diego Armando Maradona and other left-wing media figures, Minà visited Cuba more than fifty times and helped spread an idyllic opinion about the Cuban regime internationally.
Minà’s conversation with Castro is part of a series of interviews in which the ruler outlined the international image he wanted to give of the Island. This series of books, luxuriously edited by the Publications Office of the Council of State, also includes Fidel and religionby the Brazilian Frei Betto; Nothing can stop the march of historyby Americans Jeffrey Elliot and Mervin Dymally, and One hundred hours with Fidelby the Spanish-French Ignacio Ramonet. A meeting with Fidelthe volume where Minà questioned Castro on multiple issues, was reprinted time and time again by the regime, even during the paper shortage in the Special Period.
His interview included the filming of the documentary A day with Fidelwhere Castro reviewed the “achievements” of the Revolution and had the luxury of showing his interlocutor from his private office to the maximum security prisons in Havana, freshly painted to receive the visitor.
During the filming and writing of the book, Minà reproduces the conception of the history of Cuba that Castro proposes to her, where the island had been a “colony of the United States” where “the singing voice” was led by the “Italo-American mafia”. . Silent, Minà lets the president elaborate and then describes the Cuban reality with romanticism, theorizing about the “city of the socialist future” which, the president promises, Havana will become.
Despite the importance of Italian in the validation of the Cuban regime in Europe, a few years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the official press dedicated rather modest obituaries to Minà on Tuesday
Despite the importance of Italian in the validation of the Cuban regime in Europe, a few years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the official press dedicated rather modest obituaries to Minà on Tuesday. They attribute the celebrity that the journalist achieved precisely to the fact of having interviewed Castro, and mention that his book, which the Cuban government approved, was “one of the most sought-after titles in those years.”
However, they emphasize the fact that Minà addressed a letter to the workers of the Finlay Vaccine Institute in 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic. In the letter, reproduced in its entirety together with the news of his death, the official press encrypts the Italian’s “testament” on the Island: a call for the resistance of the “system”, the “utopia that has come true”.
Born in Turin on May 17, 1938, Minà stood out as a sports journalist in the 1960s and 1970s, closely following the careers of boxers like Mohamed Ali or soccer players like Maradona, whom he interviewed. In addition, he produced numerous reports on Latin America and became interested in the historical personalities of the last decades of the 20th century, among which were Ernesto Guevara –one of the subjects of his conversation with Castro–, the Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, Subcomandante Marcos and the former Cuban president himself.
From 1996 to 1998 he produced the television program Storie, where he interviewed celebrities such as Naomi Campbell, the Dalai Lama and Martin Scorsese. He received, for his work, the 1981 Saint Vicent award, given to the best journalist of the year; the Flaiano prize in 2004 and the Special Vittorio Mezzogiorno prize in 2010.
His books include The Pope and Fidel (1998), a vanished continent (1998) and Marcos and the Zapatista insurrection (1997). Until his death, Minà defended the vision of the regime that Castro entrusted to him in 1987 and never qualified his statements about the Government of the Island.
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