Farewell, Fidel

Fidel Castro once said, “I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.” Castro may have physically deteriorated over the years but that flame never weakened and even now, with his death at the age of 90, it will never be extinguished. It can be easy to reduce the man to his caricatures – the cigar smoking, the lengthy speeches, the iconic beard – and far more difficult to appreciate the breadth of his achievements, especially when he was, and is still being, so demonised by the Western media. The zeal for equality was always present in Castro. As a teenager studying at the University of Havana, he became a vocal opponent of US imperialism in the Caribbean and in 1947 he was part of an expedition to overthrow the US-allied junta of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. That unsuccessful attempt was followed by another doomed effort in Argentina. But by this time Castro’s fervour was being given intellectual heft by his deep readings of thinkers like Marx and Engels. By 1952, the dictator Batista had installed himself as the ruler of Cuba with US backing and, after failed non-violent attempts to oppose him, Castro started thinking big. It was opposition to Batista that would guide Castro’s revolution. As a lawyer, he had served only the poor and tried to bring changes to the system, even bankrupting himself in the process. It is the realisation that he was making little difference that would turn the lawyer into a revolutionary. The failed attack on the Moncada Barracks and his subsequent trial, where he would deliver his famed History Will Absolve Me speech, became the model for the 26th of July Movement. Starting with a force of just 80 men, Castro would end up ousting a brutal dictator backed by the world’s biggest superpower. His ragtag guerrilla army included figures like Che Guevera, whose early and heroic martyrdom at the hands of US agents and the Bolivian state made him possibly the only revolutionary more romanticised than Castro. There has never been a better example of how sheer brute force cannot overcome the solidarity of a people who have justice and passion on their side. The image of Castro as a revolutionary was born in this time but his six decades as leader of Cuba serve as a shining example of how to prevent that vigour from waning.

Castro’s Cuba came to be seen as a model for how to build a more equal society. He showed how economic planning can be used for the benefit of all. Universal healthcare and education were not just an ideal in Cuba; they became a reality. Homelessness was eradicated. It would be an injustice to Castro to reduce his legacy to mere figures but the improvements in life expectancy, infant mortality and adult literacy were stunning. In just one year, in 1961, with the Cuban Literacy Campaign, more than 700,000 people were taught to read and write.          If one were to look at this domestic achievements alone, Castro would rank as one of the 20th          century’s greatest leaders. But Castro’s influence was felt in every corner of the globe. He never stopped standing in solidarity with the oppressed and suffering, no matter where they may be. His support for anti-imperialism was unstinting and went well beyond mere words. He supported establishment of Marxist governments in places recovering from US exploitation such as Chile and Nicaragua. He was willing to send his troops to defend anti-colonial movements in Palestine and Angola. His maintained lifelong friendships with leaders like Nelson Mandela because he was one of the few people to be by the side of revolutionaries before the Western world deemed them respectable. And he did all of this knowing any day could be his last. It is estimated that Castro survived more than 600 attempts on his life, most of them directed by the US. There were the serious tries, like the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, repelling which propelled Castro to a new level of adoration in the Third World. That love only increased during the famous Cuban missile crisis. Then were the ridiculous assassination attempts, like trying to make him ingest acid so that his beard would fall off or using exploding cigars, which only showed how even the hegemonic US could be shown as toothless in front of a figure like Castro. The decades-long US embargo was an act of economic terrorism, meant solely to immiserate the Cuban people so that they would rise up against Castro. That they never did was a testament to Castro’s leadership. The US would point to continuing poverty in Cuba as proof of Castro’s failure without ever admitting that the superpower was the chief contributors to any economic malaise on the island.         

Castro’s aid was genuine and came with no strings attached.               Cuba became particularly renowned for its programme of medical internationalism. To this day, Cuba has more than 40,000 medical workers operating around the globe, all of them sent by the government – a greater number than most of the largest economies in the world combined. In Pakistan, we have particularly fond memories of how Cuba rushed its doctors to Azad Kashmir after the devastating earthquake in 2005. Pakistan, and the rest of the Muslim world, will also not quickly forget how he was one of the very few leaders to publicly condemn drone attacks even as the rest of the world averted its gaze. His leadership didn’t end there. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when Cuba lost its largest trading partner and was still under the crippling US embargo, Castro became a leader of the environmental movement, long before the rest of the world woke up to the reality of climate change. He was one of the first to give a critique of the devastation globalisation would cause, both on the environment and the life of the working class. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas was his last great contribution to solidarity among the oppressed. From Lula in Brazil to Chavez in Venezuela, and every liberation movement that springs up even now can be traced to the bearded rebel who never gave up trying to forge a better world.