Fidel is dead. And most persons would understand what that statement – carried by every national newspaper – meant, even though it referred to the passing of a leader of a rather inconsequential small island. “Fidel”, of course, is Fidel Castro and he was the revolutionary leader of Cuba who defied the US, the mightiest country on the globe, for over half a century by representing an alternative vision of human development in the twentieth Century.
Like most countries in Latin America, Cuba had been ruled in the 1950s by a dictator, Batista, who had close ties with business and political interests in the US and which controlled much of the Cuban economy. An idealistic, newly-minted lawyer, who was the son of a wealthy plantation owner, the young Castro launched an attack against a military barrack on July 26, 1953 to trigger an open rebellion against the dictatorship. Even though it failed ignominiously and he was captured, at his trial, Castro made a powerful speech in which the phrase, “history will absolve me” became a rallying cry for many youthful colonial politicians who were struggling to free their countries from the yoke of imperialism.
Castro was released and fled to Mexico where he raised a rag-tag group of revolutionaries, including the Argentinian medical doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara, returned to Cuba and waged a guerrilla war against the Batista regime from the Sierra Maestra mountains. By January 1959 he and his troops entered Havana and took over the Government after Batista fled to the US. Castro was just 32 years old.
Initially he was viewed positively in the US but after he nationalised businesses, land and property owned by Americans to distribute to landless peasants, sentiments shifted. And as he adopted an increasingly radical posture and opened up communications with the USSR, then locked in a “Cold War” with the US, by 1960, the Eisenhower Government began preparations for a CIA-organised invasion to overthrow Castro’s “revolutionary Government”.
This “Bay of Pigs” invasion was eventually conducted by the new administration of John F Kennedy and its miserable failure was to weigh heavily on his foreign policy initiatives.
Castro’s story became intertwined with ours, after Cheddi Jagan won the 1961 elections, visited Washington in search of aid but in the opinion of JFK, equivocated on the question as to whether he was a “communist”. His fate was sealed and he was duly deposed by 1964 in a CIA-directed operation that worked through local labour and political leaders. The PNC, which was ushered into office under Forbes Burnham, was allowed to rig elections to remain there for 28 years because Cheddi Jagan was still unacceptable to the Americans.
Castro encouraged revolutionary activity against dictatorships in Latin America and in 1962 there was one leftist guerrilla group in western Venezuela, which encouraged that Government to collaborate with the US efforts to remove Jagan from office. JFK actually visited Venezuela at this time.
Ironically, of course, Burnham veered “leftwards” after 1970 and vied with Jagan for the approbation of Fidel Castro as a “revolutionary”. Burnham was one of the Big Four leaders in the British Caribbean who opened up diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1972. Eric Williams, one of the other Big Four leaders, wrote a book, “From Columbus to Castro” to signal the seminal role Castro played in West Indian History.
Domestically, Castro held the faith on the low esteem leftists held for what the west defined as “democracy” but they called “bourgeois democracy” since it focused on the “political” right to elect governments but not on ensuring that “economic and social rights” were concretely given meaning.
Castro’s regime introduced universal free education from nursery to university, levelled income distribution, gave his country a free medical system and concretely integrated Cuba’s mixed population.
The US economic embargo against Cuba, however, helped to retard economic progress and maybe with the passing of Castro, this might finally be lifted.
