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History and Castro

Aug 27, 2010 Editorial

Fidel Castro was pronounced to be in “magnificent” health by his admirer Hugo Chavez, who had just spent five hours with him. Earlier this month, Castro had addressed the Cuban Parliament, dressed in his familiar olive-green fatigues with his brother Raul, to whom he had relinquished the Presidency, at his side. With the world breathlessly following the state of his health, has history absolved him, as he predicted fifty-seven years ago?
In 1953, the then twenty-seven year-old Castro had launched the ‘Moncada Insurrection’ against the Batista dictatorship. After it crumbled against superior forces, Castro – a trained lawyer – defended his cohorts in court and made the prediction after a four-hour summation of his arguments. The charges against the majority were dropped and Castro and the remainder were freed after two years of public pressure. They left for Mexico to prepare for the “revolution”.
Returning on a decrepit boat, “Granma” in 1956, Castro and 82 others – including Raul and the Argentinian doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara – launched the most successful and famous guerrilla movement of the 20th century. From his base in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, they took on and by 1959 defeated the 50,000 strong army of Batista, who was backed by the US military and financial elites. It was a victory that inspired anti-colonial forces across the world – including, of course, those in the then British Guiana.
The US under the Einsenhower administration took Castro’s victory as a personal affront, even though many progressives looked favourably at the revolutionaries. Castro soon turned to the USSR for support and thereby cast its lot in the Cold War. The succeeding administration of John F. Kennedy, suffered a humiliating defeat when a CIA-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs collapsed and most of the invaders were captured. The US then launched an economic blockade of Cuba that exists to this day. The question that has to be answered is “how did Cuba survive against the might of the greatest power the world has ever seen when even its backer, the USSR, collapsed?”
The short answer is “Fidel Castro’s foresight, courage and diplomacy”. Castro chose the socialist path of development with the focus on “social” unlike those that sought to invent shortcuts to industrialization. He remained true to the humane focus of socialism. Whatever may be the criticism of “Castro’s Cuba” no one can question its egalitarian ethos in social welfare – and certainly not the majority of Cubans. Even today, Cuba is taking measured steps to deal with the needed growth in its economy rather than jumping on the neo-liberal bandwagon.
His courage, of course, was displayed not only in repelling the Bay of Pigs invasion, but in surviving several CIA-directed assassination attempts and in committing Cuban troops in Africa to assist in their struggle against colonialism. Unlike the USSR in its heyday, Castro never wavered in his commitment towards socialist ideals. Cuban doctors, in Guyana and in so many other third world countries, are a testament to that commitment, even as our locally trained doctors and nurses are encouraged to emigrate to the “developed” nations.
Castro’s diplomatic savvy was first unveiled during the famous “Missile Crisis” of 1962, when the world was brought to the brink of nuclear war between the US and the USSR. Even though the Russian missiles had to be removed, the supposedly inviolable Monroe Doctrine had to be loosened for Cuba. But not for Guyana, as we should know to our cost. Everyone predicted that with the disappearance of Russian subsidies after 1989, Cuba would collapse. But his fidelity to the socialist banner earned him new friends that have responded favourably to his outreach. Cuba stands firm and unbowed.
There is, of course, the matter of the lack of free and fair elections in Cuba. While this criticism comes most frequently from those in Guyana that do not give much shrift to elections leading to democracy here, it cannot be ignored. With the measured innovations presently in train, however, it would appear on balance, that history will absolve Fidel Castro.

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