Fidel Castro - Life Is Truer Than Death

12/5/2016
FidelCastro:lifeistruerthandeath
Fidel Castro: life is truer

than death
by Azfar Hussain | Published: 21:45, Nov 27,2016
A file photo taken in the 1960s shows then Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro, right, talking with
Argentine guerrilla leader Ernesto Che Guevara. Fidel Castro died late on November 25 in
Havana. Agence France-Presse/Roberto Salas/Cubadebate
If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal,
an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire
world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really
universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism.
Fidel Castro
Revolution is not a bed of roses. Revolution is a struggle to the death between
the past and the future.
Fidel Castro
http://www.newagebd.net/article/3596/fidelcastrolifeistruerthandeath
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1
WASHINGTON and Wall Street want him to die.
And surely there are folks out there who have been wishing him a quick death
the sooner he dies, the better, as they would say while he has survived as many
as 638 assassination attempts on him, mostly credited to the US government and
its secret services. It was only relatively recently, only last year, that a US
presidential commission called for an $80 million program to support his
opponents, his death-seekers. And guess what? That funding was billed as a
democracy operation. Ah, democracy!
And it is he who has not only survived but has also braved demonisation and
deification both.
And it is he who has already appeared in both stories and films, eliciting responses
that again alternate between commendation and condemnation. And it is he who
continues to remain a threat and a challenge to capitalism and imperialism US
imperialism, to be specific a challenge, whether pronounced or not, that keeps
emanating from a small Caribbean island just a few miles away from the most
formidable imperial power ever known by humankind, to re-deploy his own
description.
It is true that he, at eighty now, is struggling in his death-bed; and even that kind
of struggle continues to serve as a threat to those oh yes! who wet their
trousers (to borrow from the poet Antler) just hearing of revolution and mass
movements and peoples struggles against oppression.
And his presence itself is not only an event in the history of human will-to-justice,
but is also an exemplary case of a dialectical interplay between resistance and
hope. His message always is: you can kill the rebel, not the rebellion. For him,
indeed, resistance, like hope, never dies.
And he cannot die, said the Kenyan writer-activist Ngugi wa Thiongo in one of
our freewheeling conversations in 2004. For the eighty-year-old man continues to
remain alive in the hearts of millions who believe in the possibilities of change, in
the possibilities of building a world better than the present one, a world fully
liberated. Indeed, way truer than his possible death is his own life, a life lived fully
and passionately and eventfully and even stubbornly.
And he asserts with nothing short of life-celebrating aphoristic force: North
Americans dont understand that our country is not just Cuba; our country is
also humanity. And his optative pronouncement remains an inspiration to
revolutionaries all over the world: If all roads lead to Rome, we can only wish for
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thousands of roads to lead to Revolutionary Rome!

Im speaking here of none other than Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary.
And celebrating Castros life which is struggle and humanity and even victory
made visible Che Guevara, another revolutionary, wrote a lyric called Song to
Fidel:
You said the sun would rise.
Lets go
along those unmapped paths
...our
brows swept with dark insurgent stars
We shall have victory or shoot past death
When your voice quarters the four winds
reforma agrarian, justice, bread, freedom
Well be there with identical accents
At your side.
2
Fidel Castro whose full name is Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on
August 13, 1926. It is significant that he was born on a sugar plantation in Birn, a
place located near Mayar, in Cuba. The Uruguyan historian Eduardo Galeano in his
major work called Open Veins of Latin America a work that traverses five
hundred years of colonial-capitalist or capitalist-colonial exploitation and atrocities
accompanied by indigenous anti-colonial revolts and struggles in Latin America
tells us of the significance of sugar to Cuba in particular: sugar is decisively
political and political-economic in that it invariably attracted colonial investments
and interventions, offering an entire scenario of a typical relationship between the
exploiter and exploited, a relationship that Castro himself observed firsthand
during his childhood days.
Also, Castros father Angel Castro y Argiz, a hardworking man, was directly
involved in the sugar industry, one who prospered relatively well in his area. But
Castros mother, Lina Ruz Gonzalez, was a household servant, according to some
accounts. Angel Castro married again, although he dissolved his second marriage
when Fidel was 15. Castro has two brothers and four sisters. His brothers are
Ramon and Raul, while his sisters are Angelita, Juanita, Emma, and Augustina. He
also has two half siblings: Lidia and Pedro Emilio. Castro grew up watching
troubled relationships, struggling family members, and the plight of plantation
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workers around him ones whose history he had to address and even change
only later.
And during his school days, Castro was intellectually curious, eager to learn, and
was also much interested in sports. He spent a number of years in private catholic
boarding schools. In 1945, he finished high school at Belen, a Jesuit school in
Havana; the same year, Castro joined the University of Havana to study law. That
university immediately turned out to be a crucial site for the rapid intellectualpolitical-ideological formation of Fidel Castro, one who only after a brief spell of
his withdrawal from the university decisively returned to the institution in
question, involving himself with full force in its political activities, increasingly
turbulent as they grew day by day.
Indeed, it was at this point that Castro began to see clearly the colonial
relationship between the regime of Cuba and US imperialism, whose significant rise
he himself later traced in terms of going back to three particularly crucial years in
the history of Latin America and the US: 1823, when the infamous colonialist-racist
Monroe Doctrine was fashioned and promulgated to make it clear that Latin
America in its entirety would continue to remain the backyard of the US;
1848, when the US grabbed more than half of Mexico, dramatically turning the
Mexicans in question into aliens in their own land; and 1898, when the US
through a series of remarkable manoeuvrings as well as direct military
interventions annexed to it as its colonies such areas as Hawaii, Guam, the
Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba itself. Indeed, in numerous speeches he had
delivered later as a revolutionary and as president of Cuba, Castros message came
out clearly like this: History like theory is a weapon provided you know how
to hold it right.
In 1948, armed with his growing historical consciousness of the US role in the
Western hemisphere, Fidel Castro visited Bogot in Colombia to attend a political
conference of Latin American students, a conference that significantly coincided
with the ninth meeting of the Pan-American Union conference. The students of
course intended to seize this particular opportunity to distribute pamphlets so as
to expose and oppose US dominance over Latin America. But within a few days
following the conference, massive riots broke out in the streets of Bogot, as the
populist Colombian Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliecier Gaitn was assassinated.
Eduardo Galeano, in his book Century of the Wind, narrates in the style of a
story-teller a segment of this history of riots vis--vis Fidel Castro thus: At 2 pm
of this ninth of April, Gaitn has a date with one of the Latin American students
who are gathering in Bogot on the fringes of General Marshalls Pan-American
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ceremony. At half past one, the student leaves his hotel, intending to stroll to
Gaitns office. But after a few steps a noise like an earthquake stops him, a human
avalanche engulfs him. The people, pouring out of the barrios, streaming down
from the hills, are rushing madly past him, a hurricane of pain and anger flooding
the city, smashing store windows, overturning streetcars, setting buildings afire.
They have killed him! They have killed him! It was done in the streets, with three
bullets. Gaitns watch stopped at 1:05pm. The student, a corpulent Cuban named
Fidel Castro, shoves his cap on his head and lets himself blown along by the wind
of people.
Indeed, riots spread like fire to other cities and places in Colombia, marking the
beginning of a turbulent period of bloody civil wars that came to be known as La
Violencia in the history of Colombia, a period whose superb novelistic and partly
magic-realist rendition we witness in the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia
Marquezs novel of epical amplitude called One Hundred Years of Solitude. And
those moments of fire, the moments of confrontation and rage, the moments of
insurrection, and their sheer power exercised quite an impact on Castro himself. In
several speeches he delivered later, for instance, Castro ardently accentuated the
power of peoples insurrection and the need for revolutionary violence with almost
Fanonian zeal.
Castro returned to Cuba with experiences of riots, and then married Mirta DazBalart (they divorced each other in 1955, and Castro later married Dalia Soto del
Valle). In 1950, he received his Doctor of Laws degree from the University of
Havana. He soon began practicing law, particularly lending legal support to those
who needed it most the poor and the marginalised. But his interest in direct,
hard politics grew stronger day by day, and he eventually ended up becoming a
candidate for a seat in the Cuban parliament at a time when, however, Fulgencio
Batista led a coup dtat in 1952, overthrowing the government of president Carlos
Prio Soccarras and cancelling the election.
Castro clearly saw the role of the US in instituting and backing this Batista regime,
while of course he witnessed a flagrant violation of the constitution of 1940. A
lawyer as he still was, he decided to wage legal warfare against Batista himself. But
Castros initial attempt in the form of a petition, known as Zarpazo, was denied a
hearing. This conjunctural crisis then prompted Fidel Castro to realise acutely that
the answer to the Batista regime and US colonialism was neither law nor
arguments, but Revolution itself.
3
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Indeed, to speak of Fidel Castro is certainly to speak of the Cuban Revolution itself.
Although my purpose here is not to reproduce a detailed and chronological
narrative of the revolution in question, I intend to chart out briefly and quickly
some of its crucial trajectories. Indeed, the meaning of the Cuban revolution for
Castro has characteristically been a loaded one in that the customary temporal
attribution of the revolution to the period between 1953 and 1959 does not always
wash with him, simply because the revolution did not stop after 1959, the year in
which of course the US-backed-and-even-ruled Batista regime colonial and
dictatorial and militaristic as it was in character and content was decisively
overthrown by the Castro-led movement. Castro himself has suggested time and
again that a revolution is not a product that comes neatly packaged at a given
moment in history, but is a ruptural process that continues in the face of all kinds
of odds and obstacles, while evolving its phases and stages in response to specific
material circumstances and conjunctural pressures.
One particularly significant phase began with the famous attack on the Moncada
barracks. On the July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro, along with his brother Raul Castro and
roughly 135 revolutionary militants, launched an armed attack on the Moncada
barracks, Batistas largest garrison outside Santiago de Cuba. But the attack failed,
and roughly 70 revolutionaries were killed, while Castro himself was captured. He
was tried in the autumn of 1953 and was sentenced to fifteen years of
imprisonment.
At his trial Castro delivered his famous speech History Will Absolve Me with his
characteristic ardentia verba and with the memorable energy of a stubborn
revolutionary. To quote from his speech: I warn you, Im just beginning! I know
that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled
with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not
fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades.
Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.
But Castro was released after roughly two years in May 1955 as a result of a
general amnesty from Batista who at the time was under tremendous political
pressure. Castro then went to Mexico where he began to organise what he came to
call the 26th of July Movement, named after the very date of the failed attack on
the Moncada barracks. It was in Mexico that the famous, historic encounter
between Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara took place an encounter that
eventually and consequentially shaped the direction of the Castro-led revolution
toward guerrilla warfare, something that was reckoned as a novel, creative
intervention in Latin America.
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On December 2, 1956, Castro accompanied by 82 comrades aboard the Granma

landed in Cuba. Their fight began in Cuba with full force. Initially, Batistas soldiers
succeeded in decimating the numbers of Castros comrades, but some of the
important revolutionary militants managed to move on to and hide in the Sierra
Maestra mountains that eventually turned out to be the prime site of guerrilla
warfare. But Castro and Che realized that guerilla warfare alone was profoundly
insufficient; that it needed a strong mass base, which they built in the Sierra
Maestra mountains, while subsequently the Castro-led movement gathered
momentum in cities as well. Students got involved.
In December 1958, the columns commanded by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raul
Castro, Camilo Cientfuegos, and others fiercely and almost uninterruptedly targeted
many of Batistas huge army units. Batistas soldiers found themselves unprepared
as the guerrilla style of warfare proved disastrously alien to them. It did not take
even a day of fighting for the revolutionary militants to capture the provincial
capital Santa Clara on December 31, 1958. After seizing power in a number of
places throughout the island, Castros army finally entered Havana victoriously on
January 8, 1959, bringing that part of the military phase of the Cuban Revolution
to a close.
It was in the same year 1959 that Fidel Castro became the prime minister of
Cuba. Later, in 1965, Castro became the first secretary of the Communist Party of
Cuba. In 1976, Castro became president of the Council of State and the Council of
Ministers, while he serves as Commandante en Jefe Commander-in-Chief of
the armed forces in Cuba. Now, after undergoing intestinal surgery, Castro
delegated his responsibilities as president to his brother Raul Castro on July 31,
2006, and this delegation of duties has been described as temporary.
Indeed, since 1959, Castro and Cuba have not only remained alive but have also
braved numerous and massive American hostilities almost in headlong
succession including the famous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 by the US
armed forces; the Missile Crisis itself; and certainly the embargo that has lasted for
more than forty years now. The US military historian William Blum, in his book
Killing Hope, offers us concrete and telling details of numerous assassination
attempts made on Castro by the US. And yet, Cuba and Castro are still alive, and
Cubas political, economic, cultural, educational, environmental progress
variously outstripping the records of such progress in numerous countries across
the world has by now been amply documented, the foul-mouthed detractors of
Castro and Cuba notwithstanding.
But Cuba is no paradise, nor is Castro a faultless revolutionary figure of our time.
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Yet the fact that both Cuba and Castro have remained alive under the very jaws of
US imperialism itself marks one of the most spectacular achievements in the
history of human will-to-struggle, solidarity, unity, dignity, conviction,
commitment, courage, and creativity.
4
To see the significance of Fidel Castro in our time, let me return to the lyrics of
Che Guevara I cited in the first section of this piece. Ches lines evidently
underline some of Castros own activist agendas. But the foremost agenda for
Castro was clearly reforma agraria or agrarian/land reform, reminding us of the
famous slogan land first, talk later that emerged from the heart of some
indigenous movements on the Caribbean, a slogan that the Native American writeractivist Leslie Marmon Silko captures well in her epic-novel Almanac of the Dead.
Indeed, as Castro has suggested on more occasions than one, no revolution in Cuba
and, for that matter, no mass movements in many parts of Latin America, Asia,
and Africa can bypass the land question and thus the peasant question itself.
After 1959, Cuba quickly turned out to be an internationally exemplary site of land
reform. The poor peasants in particular experienced and acknowledged a hithertounknown radical reconfiguration of political economy in the entire history of Cuba.
It is not for nothing, then, that the Nicaraguan Marxist poet-priest-liberationtheologian Ernesto Cardenal characterised Castro as a genuine leader and comrade
of peasants. So did the Latin American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an ardent
admirer of Fidel Castro.
Todays unprecedented capitalist urbanisation notwithstanding, peasants have not
at all disappeared from the stage of history. Under global capitalism itself, peasants
still continue to constitute the actual masses in many, if not all, parts of Latin
America, Africa, and Asia. And their primary, if not only, concern has historically
been land or landlessness. Thus, for immediate but crucial political-economic
reasons, the land question already directly preoccupied a whole host of
tricontinental revolutionaries from, say, the Chinese communist revolutionary
Mao Tse-tung and the Vietnamese anti-colonial freedom-fighter Ho Chi Minh to
such African socialists as Amilcar Cabral and Kwame Nkrumah to Castro and Che
themselves. And the land question also inflected and informed Marxism-Leninism
in ways in which it was possible, rather absolutely necessary, to posit a relatively
new revolutionary agent of change in history other than the urban proletariat in
the classical Marxist sense of the term. And that new agent was the peasant, of
course.
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Fidel Castro actively concerned as he is with the peasant question can

certainly be located within a tradition of those revolutionaries who have decisively
contributed to what I wish to call the third-worldisation of Marxism. And those reMarxianising Marxist revolutionaries from Mariategui to Mao, from Cabral to
Castro keep making the points that Marxism is not just a Eurocentric or
metropolitan phenomenon as such, and that, thus, to argue that Marxism is
Eurocentric as some post-al or postmodern-poststructuralist-postcolonial
theorists already did in the metropolis is to fall into the trap of an utterly
shoddy Eurocentrism itself. For the very argument that Marxism is Eurocentric
violently erases the actual life-and-death histories macro and micro of
Marxism being creatively applied to and even transformed by the deep specificities
of certain sites and subjects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, for instance.
And, indeed, to speak of Castro is to speak, all at once, of Cuba, the Cuban
revolution, and the Cubanisation of Marxism-Leninism interconnected as they all
are that together continue to take up the challenge of not only responding to
the crises of our contemporary conjuncture as such, but also braving US
imperialism at every turn.
In fact, the question of US imperialism is acutely relevant to our understanding of
the historically and politically significant role of Fidel Castro. He is an exemplarily
uncompromising and committed anti-imperial figure of our time a decisively
Cuban communist and an internationalist, one who has combined the latenineteenth-century Cuban revolutionary Jose Martis unflagging revolutionary
fervour with the Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariateguis Leninist penchant for
the concrete, the daily, and the detailed.
And Fidel Castro has been alive and alert in a number of instructive, even
inspirational ways. Given his long and inordinately eventful career, it is impossible
to relate and evaluate all aspects of his life, his work, and his contributions within
the relatively brief space of the present write-up. What, however, I intend to do is
first underline a particularly famous and still relevant characterisation of Fidel
Castro that has come from none other than Che Guevara himself, and then spell
out a few theoretical-political propositions, emanating as they do from Castros
own constellations of activities, underlining their relevance to our struggle against
capitalism and imperialism today.
To quote, then, Che at some length: He [Fidel Castro] has the qualities of a great
leader added to which are his personal gifts of audacity, strength, courage, and
these have brought him the position of honour and sacrifice that he occupies
today. But he has other important qualities his ability to assimilate knowledge
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and experience in order to understand a situation in its entirety without losing

sight of the details, his unbounded faith in the future, and the breadth of his
vision to foresee events and anticipate them in action, always seeing farther and
more accurately than his companeros. With these great cardinal qualities, his
capacity to unite, resisting the divisions that weaken; his ability to lead the whole
people in action, his infinite love for the people; his faith in the future and with
his capacity to foresee it Fidel Castro has done more than anyone else in Cuba to
create from nothing the present formidable apparatus of the Cuban Revolution.
What, then, can we keep learning from Castro at a time when capitalism,
imperialism (sometimes in the form of re-colonisation: witness Bangladesh), racism,
patriarchy, and other forms of oppression and domination have been more
profoundly and intricately interconnected than before?
One can go on and on citing numerous lessons from Castros own life-experiences,
his world of activities, and from thousands of speeches he has already delivered
with superb energy. But let me categorically and quickly focus on a few relatively
distinct yet interconnected areas relating to Castros work.
First, as Castro teaches us, revolution means a fundamental rupture with or
violence perpetrated on a given mode of production in order to inaugurate a
new one as well as inaugurate new epistemic-cultural modes of production and
exchange in the interest of the total liberation of humankind. And revolution is
not a product but a process that calls for continuously creative and critical
interventions. As Castro puts it in his On Imperialist Globalization: We, the
revolutionaries, have discovered an even more powerful weapon: men think and
feel.
Second, the unity and conviction and commitment of the masses can make a
relatively small geographical territory powerful and invincible even vis-a-vis an
antagonistic superpower. It is not for nothing that Castro could say with utmost
confidence, We have come here to stay. And we do not fear Yankee imperialism.
Third, as Castro teaches us, leadership is not a noun but a verb one that
continuously needs to derive its energy and inspiration from a thorough
knowledge of and undiminished commitment to specific subjects and sites,
dialectically capturing the specific within the general and the general within the
specific.
Fourth, US imperialism is simultaneously most aggressive, most naked, and most
crisis-ridden at this conjuncture when the people of the world are way more vocal
against US imperialism than ever before. And the fundamental sites of both
imperialist aggression and opposition to that aggression are Asia, Africa, and Latin
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America. Thus the national-colonial question returns with a vengeance. And

national liberation then comes to mean peoples liberation from both the
exploitative or plundering national ruling classes as well as from imperialism itself,
organically tied as they are. And, in this instance, of course, the primary and
secondary contradictions as well as their various shifting aspects would depend on
a given calculus of historical-material contradictions operating and obtaining
within a given society.
Fifth, there is then no alternative to building a national liberation movement as
well as a tricontinentalist movement against capitalism and imperialism (Che and
Castro learned from one another regarding what Che called tricontinentalism).
Sixth, Castro himself teaches us that a leader no matter how powerful and
knowledgeable s/he is is not a superhuman but an imperfect, vulnerable, mortal
being, as certainly Castro is. Our struggle, therefore, is to be directed against,
among other things, all imperfections and against romanticising or fetishising a
few individuals as the only protagonists of history as opposed to the masses who
themselves change and create history.
Seventh, Marxism-Leninism is not to be fixed and frozen in time and space, but to
be reinvented at every turn in response to the specific pressures and rhythms of
specific conjunctures, moments, histories, and spaces.
Let me now close with a few lines Che Guevara wrote in his last letter sent to his
children: If imperialism is finished, you, Camillo, and I will take a vacation on the
moon. While Che was killed, Fidel Castro has never been on a vacation! No, the
struggle doesnt end but only begins anew.
Azfar Hussain is vice-president of US-based Global Centre for Advanced Studies
and associate professor of liberal studies/interdisciplinary studies at Grand
Valley State University in Michigan. This article originally appeared in Slate,
the monthly magazine from New Age, in February 2007.
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12/5/2016

Fidel Castro: life is truer

thousands of roads to lead to Revolutionary Rome!

On December 2, 1956, Castro accompanied by 82 comrades aboard the Granma

Fidel Castro actively concerned as he is with the peasant question can

and experience in order to understand a situation in its entirety without losing

America. Thus the national-colonial question returns with a vengeance. And

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