He had grown so old that for a moment you thought he had also triumphed against the grim reaper. It was no longer possible to speak about him in ordinary human terms. Even in death, something simply does not add up. A man who defied death so many times and dared the powerful living was not supposed to die peacefully at home. He ought to expire in the field of battle. Last week, Fidel kept faith with death just as he kept fidelity with history and heroic action. His life had become a brilliant film. He was a box office attraction, the major star in his own epic.
With the death of the modern day Spartacus in Havana last week end, the world has lost one of its most iconic figures. In a sense, the passing of the great Cuban leader signals the end of an era of revolutionary titans, men of exceptional courage and unrivalled heroism who seized history by the scruff of the neck and by so doing altered the course of history and the story of their society.
Fidel Castro was without any doubt one of these giants of history and they include world-historic personages such as Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, his fabled lieutenant, Joseph Stalin their nemesis, Mao Tse Tung, the architect of the Chinese Revolution, Chou En Lai, the warrior-diplomat, Marshal JosefTito of the defunct Yugoslavia, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam and ErnestoChe Guevara of Argentina. It is impossible to write the story of what has been called the short twentieth century without mentioning their superhuman stirring at the behest of their respective societies.
Like all true revolutionaries, Fidel Castro operated at the summit of human consciousness, the rarefied zone where ideological clarity combines with intellectual rigour to dispel the fog of illusion, superstition, supernatural idiocies and human complicity in their own wretched existence. Revolutions have no historical timeframe. There will always be revolutions whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe for revolutions. To the extent that revolting injustice remains part of the human condition, people will always revolt against injustice.
This open defiance of an unjust order, the collective rebellion against official brutality, has always been part of the human condition. But since no two revolutions are ever alike, every revolution is a unique leap of radical faith. Revolutions are not a drab repeat of the past or its mere encore. They can only borrow tropes from past events. They must find own unique strengths and internal energies in the powerful furies that drive their resentments as well as in the vitality and charisma of their leadership.
It is this superlative heroism and boundless vitality that link Fidel Castro to all the great figures of popular revolt against inhuman authority, beginning with Spartacus, the Thracian born leader of the slave revolt in Rome, El Cid, a fabled hero of the Iberian revolt against the Berbers and of course Jesus Christ the spiritual father of them all who is arguably the greatest revolutionary of all times. In all these men, moral imagination leads to a penetrating insight into the plight of the poor while emotional intelligence at its most proactive leads to an identification with the needy in alltheir emotional distress and psychic disorientation.
Although born into considerable wealth and privilege as the son of a nouveau riche sugar plantation owner, Fidel Castro never wavered once he had identified the underprivileged as his soul mates and kindred spirits. Like a passionate lover he spent his time serenading them from the prison and from the presidential bunker. And while marching towards Havana from the hills and the forests, he kept faith and fidelity to their cause. For Fidel Castro, nothing else mattered but the Cuban people. This is leadership at its most sublime and inspiring. It does not matter that it came with a lust for power and freak control.
Before Castro, Cuba was a backyard luxury slum for American playboys and superrich to indulge in their fantasies. There was cheap rum, cheaper hand-rolled cigars and sex at its most volatile and cheapest. The Americans were determined to keep their toy and so was the local tyranny. The military campaign against the FulgencioBatista dictatorship was a ferocious slog with neither side taking hostage. Summary execution was the norm. The brutality and cruelty on both sides was to affect the colour and complexion of Cuba’s history.
Those who were cheering and weeping profusely in Cuba last week were the relics of the revolution and their descendants who feel eternally grateful to Castro for delivering them and their country from modern slavery. But on the other side, particularly among the hordes of Cuban refugees and immigrants, were those who felt undone by the revolution and who had nothing but harsh words for the leader. Donald Trump, the US president-elect, dismissed him as a brutal dictator.
Revolutions are a sharply polarizing and bitterly divisive affair. They are not, and cannot, be driven by normal consensus. While those who lost their old privileges are bound to rue and regret for eternity, those who have discovered new privileges are bound to be grateful forever. But the gold standard test of every step taken by government must remainwhether it is in the greatest interest of the greatest majority of the populace.
In one generation, Fidel Castro has wiped out illiteracy from Cuba. He has also extended free medical facilities to about ninety eight per cent of the Cuban populace. Nothing in the dismal and desultory history of Cuba and its unending parade of crackpot tyrants could have prepared the much-abused island for this revolutionary leap into modernity and within so short a timeline. The transformation was so sudden and irruptive that it led to immense dislocation on the social and class ladder. From a rural and backward Third World country, Cuba has leapfrogged into First World reckoning at least in service delivery to the citizens.
In another stupendous feat of social engineering, Fidel Castro virtually eliminated corruption from Cuba’s social life by force of example and a zero personal tolerance for the cankerworm. In 1989, many thought that Fidel Castro would wilt under the strain and stress when his childhood friend, revolutionary crony and hero of Angolan wars in Africa, General ArnaldoOchoa Sanchez, was docked for racketeering, drug-cartelling and corrupt self-enrichment. But once the much decorated warlord was found guilty, Castro swiftly assented to his summary execution.
Perhaps Cuba’s greatest achievement under Castro was its unswerving and unwavering commitment to the international brotherhood of humanity in the finest socialist tradition. At a point when the greatest beneficiaries of globalization are shrinking from its ultimate logic, this is a point worth mulling over. Wherever there was injustice or an infringement of socialist ideals anywhere in the world, you could be sure to find Cuban troops in the thick of the fighting and in the hottest sector of the engagement. In Congo, in Angola, in Grenada, in the forests and mountainous ranges of Latin America, Cuba troops fought with uncommon bravery and valour and a desperate heroism stemming from the noblest of human ideals.
It all seems like yesterday but it is almost sixty years when Castro and his ragtag band of starry-eyed idealists descended on Havana in a classic military decapitation of the rump of a corrupt and dissolute order, Batista having fled with 300milion dollars pilfered from the country’s coffers. Castro’s greatest legacy to social engineering is that the revolution has held despite the gravest odds which include countless assassination attempts, actual invasion, threats of nuclear annihilation and economic blockade by the US. The more they threw at the cigar-chomping maverick, the more he seemed capable of absorbing.
On the obverse side of this tale of stirring heroism are reports of vicious suppression of individual rights, state terrorism at its most cynical and a stringent curtailment of free association and freedom of expression. Socialism has not brought great prosperity to Cuba. The brutal suppression of greed and the human lust for material prosperity leads to a drastic curtailment of the urge for innovation and the capacity for invention. With its smoke-belching ancient vehicles and colonial promenades, Havana is a city frozen in time.
Yet when these drawbacks are weighed against the socialist reengineering of the Cuban society in the last sixty years, the odds seem to favour the drastic intervention despite the loss in modernizing edge and political freedom. If the post-Castro phase were to witness a liberalization of politics and a gradual loosening of state grip on economic matters, the irony of it all may well be that the socialist phase might have made it easier for Cuba to force its way into the capitalist orbit of human development at a higher level and on its own terms.
In the final analysis, the point is not whether a society should have a revolution or not; or whether revolutions are desirable. History is not a schoolboy’s debate. In any human society where the possibility of redemption appears remote and where injustice has become a permanent way of life, revolution will always remain on the card as the last gesture of heroic desperation. In that respect, Fidel Castro was not a villain but a hero responding to the historic yearning of a society in need of salvation. He will be sorely missed as the founding father of modern Cuba. Adieu Fidel.