by AIJAZ AHMED
The urn with the ashes of Fidel Castro is driven trhough Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, on December 1, during its four-day journey across the island for the burial in Santiago de Cuba. PHOTO/RDO/AFP
“Revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.”
–Fidel Castro
“You made this possible.”
— Nelson Mandela to Fidel at his own inauguration as President
“We lost Fidel. We gained a history of examples and wisdom.”
— Joao Pedro Stedile
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, son of a Galician immigrant, chief among the makers of the Cuban Revolution, as commanding a figure in the history of Latin America as Bolivar or Jose Marti, is no more. He survived 10 United States Presidents who all tried to kill him—in over 630 documented assassination plots—and finally succumbed to natural death, due to prolonged, fatal illness and advanced old age.
Fidel Castro was the last of the great revolutionary figures in the political tradition traceable to 1917: Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and a few others. He mentored his younger friend, Hugo Chavez, to inherit his mantle in Latin America and beyond, but Chavez was himself cut down by a mysterious cancer, at much too young an age and at the prime of his powers, even as he was just beginning to garner a global stature. Fidel was 90, ill for over a decade, a fighter in the realm of ideas until the very end, as he had promised when he stepped down from the presidency in 2008, but he was also almost unique in the history of the great charismatic leaders to have methodically prepared, since at least 1997, a transition from his own leadership to a set of institutions that were led by revolutionaries drawn from three successive generations, ranging from Fidel’s own comrades of 1959 to much younger ones born after the revolution. His dying feels very much like the closing of a heroic age. The revolutionary process, of course, goes on, in all its complexity and with great many twists and turns, producing magnificent new leaders in their own time and place, but it is difficult to think of one who occupies quite so central a position, beyond his own country or continent.
The loss seems to be all the greater in this precarious present of ours in which proto-fascist forces of the Far Right are ascendant in so many parts of the world. Progressive forces still seem to be more powerful in Latin America than elsewhere, but the region is beset by at least two worrisome processes. First, Cuban socialism is itself going through a process of profound restructuring, with elements of market economy and consequent market rationality getting assigned an increasingly larger role; a process that is likely to lead eventually to a system not unlike that of China or Vietnam though in a much smaller national economy that is proportionately very vulnerable to the possible aggression but also to the lure of its mighty, wealthy neighbour only 90 miles away. Second, the turn toward the Left that had characterised so much of Latin America in the recent past seems to be faltering as the constitutional coup in Brazil, the electoral results in Argentina and the ongoing crisis in Venezuela would testify. In this difficult situation, Fidel Castro’s special acumen, with its unique combination of revolutionary optimism and lucidly rational calculation of the balance of force, shall be greatly missed.
We shall return to some of this. The Comandante has in any case departed, and the torch shall soon be passed to a younger generation.
An audacious revolution
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