NOTES ON FIDEL
By Said Musa
14 December 2016
Speaking with S.J.C. History Club)
When I went to meet Commandante en Jefe Fidel Castro in his office in the Palacio de La Revolución in early 1999 a few months after I was sworn in as Prime Minister of Belize the first thing that struck me was the large number of books and documents on shelves and his desk. On small tables on the side of the bookshelves were bronze figures of Jose Martí“the Apostle of Libertad”, a statue of Simon Bolívar, a bust of Abraham Lincoln and a wire sculpture of Don Quixote astride his skinny horse Rocinante.
Have you all read Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote? If you haven’t yet, you should. It is one of the greatest novels written in history. Don Quixote was a Spanish gentleman who read a lot about knights of the middle ages and became obsessed with the chivalrous ideals. So he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. He loses his sanity and decides to bring justice to the world. His trusted aide de camp was Sancho Panza. Don Quixote goes off attacking windmills mistaking them for enemies. Thus we have the expression “Tilting at windmills” meaning confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived.
Talking to Fidel you come across a man of ideas, bubbling with ideas whether the subject is how globalization is affecting our world making the weak and the poor weaker and poorer and the rich and powerful richer and more powerful.
Or whether it is the topic of climate change and global warming and the extreme weather patterns we are now experiencing with hurricanes and droughts as well as rising sea levels caused by the melting of the ice caps in the arctic region.
Fidel Castro has been described as the last “sacred giant” of international politics along with the other great revolutionaries like Nelson Mandela, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara who pursued an ideal of justice, hoping to change a world of inequality and discrimination.
Their world was polarized by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America.
Fidel like the others were branded communist and communism was enemy No. 1 of the capitalist West – USA and Europe.
Reading the biography of Fidel Castro makes for fascinating stories. Like when he had just graduated as a lawyer at the Jesuit University of Havana. He, together with a group of young men attacked the Moncada army barracks. Many were killed and others captured and imprisoned. At his trial Fidel made his now famous speech: “History will absolve me”.
Fidel was infused with Marxist/Leninist ideals even from then and he was out to bring down the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
Fidel has had to deal with no fewer than 11 US Presidents from Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, Bush 2 and Obama.
He has known some of the major intellectuals, artists and personalities of our time.
Jean Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemmingway, Graham Greene, Arthur Miller, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Oscar Niemeyer, Julio Cortazar, Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cousteau, Harry Bellafonte, Angela Davis, Danny Glover, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Eduardo Galeano, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky.
Cuba – 100,000 sq. k. about 40,000 sq. miles, population 12 million. He has stared down the US whose governments have tried to overthrow him and/or kill him.
October 1962 a Third World War almost broke out because of US Government opposition to the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba (to defend the nation from another US sponsored invasion) (1961 – Bay of Pigs).
Since 1960 the US has kept Cuba under a devastating trade embargo despite opposition by the overwhelming majority of countries voting at the United Nations (U.N.). (It is only this year the US has reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba).
Cuba was one of the first nations to support Belize’s struggle for independence.
Yearly since the 90s Cuba has provided 6 – 8 scholarships for Belize students to study medicine at the University of the Americas. And over the past 25 years has sent over 1,000 doctors and nurses to work in rural health clinics and hospitals in Belize.
In the geopolitical context the only left leaning progressive government to survive in our hemisphere was Cuba. Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Salvador Allende in Chile, Juan Bosch in Dominican Republic, Joao Goulart in Brazil were toppled in 1954 – 1973 in the days of the Cold War.
When Fidel fell ill in July 2006 and retired from active duty many in the US thought this is it the regime will collapse. But 10 years later the Cuban government continues to work for the health and welfare of its people providing free education, free pre-school to university and free healthcare for all its people.
The fact is that the majority of Cubans are loyal to the Revolution – a loyalty founded on patriotism and beliefs in the sovereignty of people and country and a historical resistance to annexationist intentions by the United States.
Note from 1901 The Platt Amendment that gave the US Government a lease in perpetuity over Guantanamo Bay.
Whether his distracters like it or not Fidel Castro has a place in the pantheon of world figures who have struggled most fiercely for social justice and who with the greatest solidarity came to the aid of the oppressed.
According to Ignacio Ramonet (who wrote the definitive biography by interview), Fidel is a man of infinite curiosity and he never stops thinking, pondering, always alert in action, ready to remake the revolution every day – a political creator.
“He believes passionately in what he is doing and his enthusiasm moves others not just to believe but to do. That must be the definition of charisma. It is ideas that transform the world, the way tools transforms matter.”
The Caribbean’s greatest impact on the 20th century was the creative imagination of our people.Bob Marley – Reggae Music, CLR James, Sir Arthur Lewis, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott – Writers and poets, The Might Sparrow – Calypso, Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective – Punta Rock and Paul Nabor’s Paranda music.
Cuba had its Fidel Castro who survived 11 US Presidents and a devastating economic blockade imposed by the most powerful nation on planet earth 90 miles away. Over 600 attempts on his life. And they did so led by a man whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes the way Fidel addresses crowds of hundreds of thousands in La Plaza de La Revolución. “He always begins almost inaudibly, his path uncertain, but he takes advantage of any glimmer, and spark, to gain ground, little by little, until suddenly he casts off – and takes control of his audience. It is inspiration, an irresistible blinding state of grace which is only denied by those who have not had the glorious experience of living through it”.