- by Stephen Wilkinson – Editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies
- The Guardian
- Issue #2203
Fidel Castro. Photo: Ismael Francisco/Cubadebate – flickr.com (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Fidel’s centenary arrives as Cuba weathers perhaps the most severe external assault in its history.
Trump and Rubio’s fuel blockade has cut Venezuelan oil supplies, produced blackouts of 20 hours a day, and driven food and medicine to levels the United Nations has described as a humanitarian catastrophe.
Yet the Cuban people still resist. The government has just passed 176 economic reforms through its National Assembly, and is attracting investment from China, Vietnam, Russia, and the Gulf states. A Vietnamese delegation arrived in Havana the day after the reforms were announced.
None of this is the behaviour of a failed state. All of it is recognisably Fidelista: the refusal to capitulate, the sovereign determination to find a way through, and the sophisticated understanding that the struggle is longer than any single moment of crisis.
That spirit has deep roots. Fidel was born in Biran, in what was then Oriente province, the son of a Spanish immigrant landowner.
He grew up in a Cuba that was formally independent but substantively colonised by the United States. US capital dominated the economy, US strategic interests dominated the politics, and its racial attitudes permeated the social hierarchy.
Fidel’s contribution to Marxist thought is the way in which he fused Marti with Marx. It is something philosophically remarkable and an underappreciated reason why the Cuban Revolution is so durable.
Fidel did not merely apply European socialism to a Caribbean island. He produced a synthesis of two strands of political thought that rooted the revolutionary process in Cuba’s own civilisational experience. Moreover, it imbued Cuba’s socialism with a deep moral imperative that elevated the task of building socialism to a calling.
The revolution itself needs little summary.
The Moncada attack of 1953, the trial at which Fidel turned the dock into a platform for his masterpiece “History will absolve me” speech that spawned a movement. Two years of guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra, the triumphant entry into Havana on 1 January 1959, all well-known.
Within two years, Cuba had reduced illiteracy from roughly 25 per cent to zero. Within a decade, Cuba had built a healthcare system that would go on to produce life expectancy and infant mortality figures consistently better than those of the US.
Like the great chess player and military general he was, Fidel once said that the Revolution had survived because all its errors were tactical rather than strategic. This was because he was able to see problems coming and to prepare his people for them.
The Rectification Campaign, launched in 1986 as Gorbachev was unveiling perestroika, was one of the greatest examples. It was a deliberate strategic inoculation against the corrosive reform process that was being introduced in Moscow.
While Gorbachev was introducing market mechanisms and dismantling party discipline, Fidel moved Cuba in the opposite direction, returning to Che’s moral economy, rejecting material incentives, and shoring up the ideological foundations on which Cuba’s survival would depend.
Cuba’s internationalism is where the calumnies of Fidel’s enemies are most comprehensively demolished by the facts.
Between 1975 and 1988, 375,000 Cuban soldiers, doctors and teachers served in Angola. At the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-88, Cuban and Angolan forces defeated the apartheid South African army in the largest conventional military confrontation on the African continent since the second world war.
The names of 2,070 Cubans who died in Angola are inscribed alongside South African liberation fighters at Freedom Park outside Pretoria. Nelson Mandela was precise about what this meant: “Without the defeat of Cuito Cuanavale our organisations would not have been legalised.” The first country outside South Africa that Mandela visited after his release from prison was Cuba.
A hundred years after his birth in the village of Biran, Fidel Castro is most honestly understood as the embodiment of Cuba’s centuries-long, irreducible, deeply civilised refusal to accept the terms that imperial power would impose upon it. History, as he said, will absolve him.
On the available evidence, it already has.
