Behind Me Are Others More Radical Than I – Fidel Castro
On Sunday, 24 February, 2008 the newly elected 614 members of the Cuban National Assembly convened to fulfil their responsibility to elect a 31 member Council of State, which in turn elected Raúl Castro to the position of President of the Republic of Cuba.
Whilst Cuba has always had a collective approach to leadership, and the revolutionary calibre and commitment of Raúl and other government ministers speaks for itself, it is a fact nonetheless that, in the short-term at least, the future leadership of Cuba will operate in the political and moral shadow of Fidel Castro, undoubtedly one of the most significant figures ever in World history.
Fidel Castro has been in touch with history in a way that very few people ever have. He and fellow combatants of the 26th of July Movement swept away the US supported regime of Fulgencio Batista and instituted a system that has, its shortcomings notwithstanding, undeniably always been directed at maximising the well-being of the people of Cuba.
For this, Cuba has suffered abominably under an embargo and act of collective punishment that has cost the country in the region of 70+billion dollars, attacks from within and without at the behest of consecutive US administrations costing thousands of lives, and upwards of 400 assassination attempts on Fidel himself.
Yet they have endured and never wavered from their commitment to secure and defend the civil and human rights of the Cuban people and countless others throughout the world.
In a moving tribute to his Comandante in Jefé, Rene Gonzalez, one of the Miami 5 currently imprisoned in the US for building intelligence on Miami based terrorist organisations openly organising attacks on The Cuban nation, wrote how,
“Those who count with their fingers the successive emperors humiliated by our peoples' resistance under your leadership, will not have enough to tally the imperial servants to be buried by your ideas.”
That this small nation of 11 million people situated 90 miles from the most powerful empire ever known to humanity has endured is testament to the strength of belief that exists there with regard to the possibility of a better world – one based upon the principles of human solidarity and co-operation.
The success of the Cuban Revolution up to this point in history is in great measure due to the contribution of Fidel Castro. He would however be the first to point out that he is not the Cuban Revolution, that the Cuban Revolution is much greater than him.
The Cuban Revolution will survive the fact that Fidel will no longer be at its helm. This is a fact that most enemies of Cuba fail to acknowledge. As one Cuban journalist recently commented, a fundamental error of attribution on the part of many has been the propensity to confuse Fidel with a whole nation. The Revolution in Cuba will endure because it has brought freedom and human dignity to Cubans in a way that Capitalism never can. This is not the end of an era. It is a new day in the struggle for a world polity based upon principles that respect and defend all of the people who inhabit this earth.
According to the Cuban university professor Frank Josué Solar Cabrales,
“The spirit of a whole epoch palpitates in the Cuban Revolution. Much of the destiny of humanity will depend in forthcoming years on the outcome of its fate. Today capitalist prehistory not only signifies backwardness, servitude, and abysmal inequalities. Its levels of consumption, wastefulness, of irrational exploitation of natural resources, of aggression against the environment, have arrived at a point, which have put the very survival of the human species in danger.
Therefore, what is at stake with the advance or backward movement of this revolutionary process is something as serious as our very own existence. The very permanence of the Revolution signifies an enormous impulse to those who rebel, to those who confront domination, to revolutionary struggles across the globe, to the dream of making this world of ours better.”
Fidel Castro has been and will continue to be in his new role, an enormous inspiration to all those who believe in and struggle for a better world.
There is no doubt that history will remember well this 'humble soldier of honour'. If humanity is to survive the crises that face it today and into the future, it is to people with the commitment, political vision and passion of Fidel Castro that it will need to turn.
Long may his contribution to humanity continue.
Viva Fidel!
Hasta La Victoria Siempre!