Source: Jacobin

Fidel Castro was a towering champion of the oppressed, but we shouldn’t ignore the limits of the socialism he helped build.

Before the revolution, Cuba symbolized colonialism at its most pernicious. Its war of liberation from Spain was appropriated by the United States, whose government claimed that victory as its own and rewrote the newly independent country’s constitution to ensure its dominance.

Cuba’s sugar was taken by the imperialist interests that maintained its subservient status. Its culture — the voice of slaves who refused to be silent — was emptied of its content and offered to tourists for their consumption.

All that ended on January 1, 1959. A United States confident of its global dominance was challenged by a small Caribbean island. And every occupied country, every suppressed national liberation movement, stood up and celebrated. The giant, it seemed, had clay feet after all.

Again and again, Fidel Castro refused to surrender to threat or blackmail — it is that refusal that explains the blind fury and wrath of his enemies. Republican and Democrat administrations sustained the siege of Cuba for six decades, ranting in disbelief at their own ineffectiveness.

It was, of course, collective resistance that foiled the 1961 US-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The 1962 Missile Crisis, however, showed the leadership in Havana that Soviet support was conditional, and that Cuba was a small actor in a global power game. Distancing itself briefly from Moscow, that was the moment when the country moved into its most radical phase, joining with the liberation struggles of the Third World in a common front that stretched from Latin America to Vietnam. That was the moment when Cuba inspired and symbolized the rising of the oppressed — expressed in the image of Che Guevara.

Guevara’s death in Bolivia in October 1967, however, was a crossroads for the revolution. In Peru, Guatemala, and Venezuela, too, the attempt to repeat the Cuban experience had failed with disastrous consequences. Fidel, always concerned first and foremost with the survival of a Cuba under vicious siege and trapped by its economic limitations, drew back from the guerrilla strategy.

A year later, the failure of the 1969 sugar harvest to produce 10 million tons (as was inevitable) marked an ending. Within a year, Cuba fell fully and definitively into the Soviet embrace, and publicly identified with its Third World strategy of alliances and compromise. When Fidel went to Chile, the future supporters of Pinochet took to the streets to bang their pots in protest; yet he was there to congratulate Allende on his election victory and the progress of his parliamentary road to socialism.

After the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro declared that the revolution was socialist. Though Fidel himself came from a radical nationalist background, his announcement was a recognition of both Cuba’s economic dependence on the Soviet Union and of the central role the soon-to-be-refounded Communist Party would play in its future.

In this context, socialism was understood to mean a strong centralized state along Soviet lines. This coincided with both Castro’s and Guevara’s views of how revolutions are won — by the actions of small and dedicated groups of cadre acting on behalf of the mass movement.

When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Castro supported the action, confirming once again Cuba’s dependence on the Soviet Union and the nature of the new state in the wake of Che’s death. But in Southern Africa, the country asserted its own, bolder, foreign policy.

During the seventies, the role of Cuban forces were key to defeating right-wing insurgencies and sustained Castro’s anti-imperialist reputation. There is little doubt their actions hastened the end of apartheid. Yet in the Horn of Africa, Cuban troops defended governments allied with Soviet regional interests that brutally repressed internal liberation movements.

Fidel was never a pliant subordinate. He used his extraordinary charisma and clout to fire occasional warning shots towards Moscow, on the one hand, and to reinforce his personal control of the state on the other. The survivors of the guerrilla force that landed from the “Granma” in 1956 and brought down the Batista dictatorship remained, for the most part, at the center of power for the five decades that followed.

The socialism that Castro espoused had little resemblance to Marx’s “self-emancipation of the working class.” It was a socialism with a command structure much like that of the guerrilla army in which Fidel was commander-in-chief. What held it together was both Fidel’s incontestable authority and the unrelenting hostility of the United States, which not only tried to murder him hundreds of times but was willing to starve the Cuban people into submission.

Under these tough conditions, the system that the revolutionaries built left real gains. Most celebrated of these were efficient and universal systems of health and education. Beyond that, daily life was hard, even before the withdrawal of Soviet aid and the “special period” that followed, which brought the island to the brink of disaster.

It was collective solidarity and sacrifice alone that held back collapse then. Yet there was already serious discontent expressed in absenteeism, in workplace resistance, in the disillusionment of African veterans, for example, as many hopes of the revolution proved illusory. While there was basic social provision, there was little in the way of consumer goods and dissent was treated harshly, whatever its form.

The extreme concentration of power (the leading organs of the state were run by a couple of dozen “historic” leaders under Fidel’s control) at the top of the pyramid stifled any possibility for socialist democracy. Political institutions were centrally controlled at every level; local organs, like the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, maintained vigilance against dissent. On occasions when discontent grew too noisy, thousands of Cubans were dispatched to Miami amid clamorous marches denouncing the departed as “scum.”

It was relatively simple to dismiss the calls for democracy from internal critics as imperialist propaganda, rather than a legitimate claim by working people that a socialism worthy of its name should transform them into the subjects of their own history. Public information was available only in the impenetrable form of the state newspaper Granma, and state institutions at every level were little more than channels for the communication of the leadership’s decisions.

An opaque bureaucracy, accountable to itself alone, with privileged access to goods and services, became increasingly corrupt in the context of an economy reduced to its minimal provisions. Castro’s occasional calls for “rectification” removed some problem individuals but left the system intact.

Yet Cuba survived, due in good part to Fidel’s sharp political instincts and his willingness to find allies wherever he could in the wake of the fall of Eastern Europe. But though “pink tide” leaders celebrated Fidel’s legacy, as the twenty-first century dawned, new anticapitalist movements, with their emphasis on democracy and participation, had little to learn from Cuba.

The reality was, after all, that the island had featured a highly authoritarian interpretation of socialism that could allow (at one time) the repression of gay people, the denial of criticism, and the emergence of the regime that now prevails in Cuba, where a small group of bureaucrats and military commanders manage and control the economy. They will be the beneficiaries of Cuba’s reentry into the world market, not the majority of Cubans.

Fidel, who fell ill in 2006, said relatively little from then on. His death will be mourned across the Third World, because Cuba for so long represented a possibility of liberation from imperial oppression. Its very survival inspired hope. And yet the state that Castro built is a reminder any socialism worth its name needs a deep and radical democracy.

Source: The Nation

Perhaps he just couldn’t bear the thought of President Donald Trump. Having been sanctimoniously lectured by all 11 US presidents on what constitutes proper democratic procedure, he might have thought Trump, about to take office with a minority of the vote and with significant voter suppression, a vindication.

I doubt it. In recent years, since he gave up power to his brother Raúl, Castro has dedicated himself to writing lengthy thought pieces, many of them on global warming, war, the fascism of neoliberalism, poverty, and other threats to humanity.

Castro was a famous optimist and an irrepressible strategist, finding ways out of the grimmest situations (such as helping to nurture the coming to power of an electoral left in Latin America, which ended Cuba’s post–Cold War geopolitical isolation).

His good friend the late Gabriel García Márquez once said Castro was a “sore loser” who would not rest until he was able to “invert the terms of the situation and convert defeat into a victory.” But, after having dodged by some counts 639 assassination attempts by Washington, Castro is finally at rest. The nightmare of Trump might have been a US president too far.

There’s going to be a lot said about him in the coming days, and hopefully the recent thaw between Obama and Raúl Castro will permit a more generous assessment than what otherwise would have been on offer. A good starting place, for those wanting to go beyond the obits, would be the closest thing we have from Castro to an autobiography.

About a decade ago, Castro did over a hundred hours of interviews with Ignacio Ramonet, published in English in 2008 as My Life. In it, Castro relates a story that captures his incongruities nicely: One of his earliest political memories, he tells Ramonet, is of the Spanish Civil War. His Galician father was a franquista, as were his Jesuit teachers, who prayed for Spain’s martyred priests.

But he also learned of the Civil War, and what was being fought over, from loyalists. When asked by his family’s illiterate cook, a “fire-breathing Republican,” for news of the war, the 9-year-old Castro read him stories that played up loyalist success because he wanted to make him “feel better.” Thus Castro’s very first act of censorship was done in kindness.

Another story has Castro, in 1939, writing President Franklin D Roosevelt to practice his English, requesting “a ten dollars green bill.” Roosevelt replied, but didn’t include the ten bucks, giving Castro a joke he’d use throughout his life: If FDR had paid up, then perhaps he wouldn’t have led a nationalist, anti-interventionist revolution.

Nationalist resentment is sometimes built from fabricated grievances. Not in Cuba. In the late 19th century, rebels against Spanish rule forged an antiracist and democratic nationalism, only to be preempted by the United States’ 1898 invasion. Over the subsequent years, the United States regularly intervened on the island—the Marines occupied it in 1906–09, 1912, and 1917–22—and just at the moment when FDR proclaimed his Good Neighbor Policy, his ambassador in Havana was openly working to oust a reformist president. Castro incarnated his generation’s finely tuned sense of anticipated betrayal and disappointment, animated by the spirit of New Left volunteerism, in a belief that the course of history could be bent to his will.

For decades now, celebrants and critics of the Cuban Revolution have played a mug’s game of trying to pinpoint the moment when Castro turned to Marxism. Castro himself has long hedged on this question, downplaying his populist roots in order to claim a purer socialist pedigree, though in My Life he acknowledges equally the influence of José Martí’s “ethics,” which for Castro meant national dignity, and Marxism-Leninism’s historical “compass.” He admitted favoring the moralizing Marx, whom Castro, a Jesuit-educated lawyer, admired for his “austerity” and “self-sacrifice.” “If Ulysses was captivated by the songs of the sirens,” Castro said, then he “was captivated by the irrefutable truths of the Marxist denunciations.”

It’s a tempting analogy; after all, it is only by closing his eyes and willfully blinding himself to the ugliness of the singers that Ulysses could be seduced by their song. But explaining the Cuban Revolution’s tilt toward the Soviet Union by pinpointing when its captain broke free from the course of moderation misses the obvious: If Castro had been a Cuban Communist, he probably would have been more willing to accommodate himself to the realities of Washington’s power in the hemisphere; the Partido Socialista Popular—as the Cuban Communist Party was called—had carved out a space in national politics by entering into successive backroom deals with corrupt regimes. It was Cuban populist-nationalism that was unyielding.

“We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights,” Castro said in a lengthy defense at his 1953 trial for his first failed attempt to overthrow Batista, “and the island will first sink into the sea before we consent to be the slaves of anyone.”

There are many other arguments to be had about Castro and the Cuban Revolution, about the relationship of political to social rights, about whether, considering the fate of other social democratic experiments in Latin America—in Guatemala, for example, or Chile—the Cuban Revolution would have survived had Castro not shut down civil society, and if that survival was worth it.

In My Life, Castro lists his country’s accomplishments in education and health care, advances in science and medicine, contributions to decolonization and defeating back white supremacy in Africa, ongoing humanitarian internationalism, and the audacity of having survived “thousands of acts of sabotage and terrorists attacks organized by the government of the United States.” “What,” he asks, “is Cuba blamed for?”

The list is long, and over the decades the defense of the Cuban state has been, for many, deeply dehumanizing. And since Castro himself has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the individual in history—a “man’s personality can become an objective factor,” he once said—he will be held to account for the high cost involved in the revolution’s survival.

And the most damning criticism leveled at the Cuban Revolution is not that it is repressive but that its repression was for naught, with all the old problems that plagued Cuba prior to the revolution having returned, including sex tourism, race-based economic inequality, and corruption—problems that will worsen if rapprochement is allowed to proceed.

In all his goodness and badness, Castro was a full man of the Enlightenment. It’s fitting, though depressing, that’s he’s left us on the cusp of a new darkness. But as he once said, the ideals of “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,” though routinely trampled, “will always sprout anew, everywhere.”

Source: Verso

Castro was tried and defended himself with a masterly speech replete with classical references and quotations from Balzac and Rousseau, that ended with the words: ‘Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.’ It won him both notoriety and popularity.

Released in an amnesty in 1954, Castro left the island and began to organize a rebellion in Mexico. For a time he stayed in the hacienda that had once belonged to the legendary Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

In late November 1956 eighty-two people including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara set sail from Mexico in a tiny vessel, the Granma, and headed for the impenetrable, forested hills of the Sierra Maestra in Oriente province. Ambushed by Batista’s men after they landed, twelve survivors reached the Sierra Maestra and began the guerrilla war. They were backed by a strong urban network of students, workers and public employees who became the backbone of the 26 July Movement.

In 1958 the guerrilla armies began to move from the mountains to the plains: a column led by Fidel began to take towns in Oriente, while Che Guevara’s irregulars stormed and took the central Cuban city of Santa Clara. The day after, Batista and his Mafia chums fled the island as the Rebel Army, now greeted as liberators, marched across the island into Havana.

The popularity of the Revolution was there for all to see. Castro’s victory stunned the Americas. It soon became obvious that this was no ordinary event. Any doubts as to the Revolution’s intentions were dispelled by the First Declaration of Havana, Castro’s declaration of total Independence from the US made in public before a million people in Revolution Square.

Washington reacted angrily and hastily, trying to cordon off the new regime from the rest of the continent. This led to a radical response by the Cuban leadership. It decided to nationalize US-owned industries without compensation.

Three months later, on 13 October 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations; subsequently, it armed Cuban exiles in Florida and launched an invasion of the island near the Bay of Pigs. It was defeated.

President Kennedy then imposed a total economic blockade, pushing the Cubans in Moscow’s direction. On 4 February 1962, the Second Declaration of Havana denounced the US presence in South America and called for the liberation of the entire continent. Forty years later Castro explained the necessity for the Declarations:

At the beginning of the Revolution … we made two statements, which we called the First Declaration of Havana and the Second Declaration of Havana. That was during a rally of over a million people in Revolution Square. Through these declarations, we were responding to the plans hatched in the United States against Cuba and against Latin America – because the United States forced every Latin American country to break off relations with Cuba … [These declarations] said that an armed struggle should not be embarked on if there existed legal and constitutional conditions for a peaceful civic struggle. That was our thesis in relation to Latin America …

While they were in the Sierra Maestra, the direction that the revolution would take was still not clear – even to Castro. Until that point, he had never been a socialist, and relations with the official Cuban Communist Party were often tense. It was the reaction of that noisy and powerful neighbour from the north that helped determine the orientation of the Revolution.

The results were mixed. Politically, the dependence on the Soviet Union led to the mimicking of Soviet institutions and all that that entailed.

Socially the Cuban Revolution created an education system and health service that remain the envy of much of the neo-liberal world. History will be the final judge, but Fidel Castro has already been elevated by a vast number of Latin Americans to the plinth occupied by those great liberators Bolívar, San Martín, Sucre and José Martí.

BBC doesn’t get the response it expected on the death of Fidel Castro

Cuba expert Dr Denise Baden educates a BBC interviewer intent on echoing establishment belittling of Castro’s achievements.