Fidel Castro Centenary: The Last Homeric Hero

Fidel Castro speaks to a crowd of over 100,000 people at the Plaza de la Revolucion, Havana, January 2, 1969, for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution

By Dayan Jayatilleka

The month he turned 50, my father, Mervyn de Silva, and my mother, Lakshmi, were in Havana watching Fidel Castro take over the chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement at its 6th Summit. After my father died, I discovered in his briefcase the embossed invitation on stiff parchment. He had treasured it for two decades. I still do.

As I look to turn 70 this December, almost to the day that Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raul Castro and others landed on the shores of Cuba in the leaky yacht Granma in 1956, I am struck by the good fortune of having lived consciously in a period of History studded with giants: Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Ho Chi Minh, General Vo Nguyen Giap, Josip Broz Tito, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Agostinho Neto, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Nelson Mandela. From the Global South and East, these were great, heroic leaders of the Age of Liberation and Revolution.

Fidel lived longer than the others and impacted us more because he spoke and wrote—articulated his views, addressing his people and the world—much more than did the others. Though Ronald Reagan was called ‘The Great Communicator’, Fidel Castro was the far greater global communicator.

Humanity’s Tribune

Through speeches and interviews, international conferences and volunteer health workers, military training and action, Fidel also took more initiatives in support of causes and peoples all over the planet than any other world leader of our time. While patriotic, he was also the most internationalist. From a country with a smaller population than Sri Lanka, he gave voice to the peoples everywhere, and helped shape the world we lived in. He was a ceaseless ‘Tribune’ of the people against injustice, and this eventually made him the most prophetic global statesman.

At the 70th anniversary celebration of the October Revolution in Moscow in 1987, Fidel warned that ‘we may wake up one day and find that the Soviet Union has disappeared’.

In the aftermath of 9/11, he condemned terrorism, expressed solidarity with New York (a city he loved), offered the victims medical help in Cuba, and signaled a willingness to cooperate against Al Qaeda, mainly in the field of intelligence But, as a former guerrilla leader, he attached a warning: given the terrain, failure would confront the US if it launched its planned all-out war, including ground troops, against Afghanistan. He proved prophetic when the US withdrew in failure two decades later.

Israel’s Netanyahu worked incessantly to entangle successive US presidents in a war on Iran. In 2010, Fidel invited Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic to Havana – because Goldberg had written on Israel and Iran, and Obama read him closely. In the interview Fidel argued compellingly that a US-Israeli war against Iran would be disastrous regionally, globally, and for US interests. Netanyahu was unable to convince Obama, and the US shifted seriously to the negotiation track that culminated in the JCPOA.

Caught in a debt trap as Sri Lanka is, we should salute Fidel Castro as the world leader who campaigned earliest against foreign debt– even though his own country was not indebted. From the mid-1980s onwards he spoke exhaustively about the debt burden, its roots and consequences, hosting international conferences at which Professor Joseph Stiglitz was honoured guest and prominent speaker.

During the worst of the Vietnam War, Fidel took the enormous personal risk of visiting a liberated zone in Quang Tri in September 1973, and raising the Viet Cong banner. Having liberated his own country, he went on to help many others directly and personally, from Latin America through Africa to Asia. Years after his death a contingent of Cuban doctors flew to Covid-ravaged Italy to combat the disease at its frontlines.

Fidel and Che

The most luminous and universally embraced iconic hero of our time was and remains Che Guevara. Young Dr. Ernesto Guevara was an exceptionally brilliant, daringly adventurous, well-read Marxist, almost saintly in his work among the lepers. But Ernesto Guevara of The Motorcycle Diaries would never have become the immortal Che Guevara except for an encounter and conversation one night around a dining table in Mexico with one man who was out of jail after leading the attack on the Moncada barracks in Cuba in 1953, and planning to return by boat to begin a revolutionary war of liberation against the dictator Batista. That man was Fidel Castro. No Fidel, no Che.

When Che Guevara was captured and executed in Bolivia, it could have been seen as a defeat, a failure and an end. But Fidel was present to dialectically invert such an interpretation, just as in ‘History Will Absolve Me’ at his trial after Moncada he had transmuted a military defeat into a moral victory. In a long oration late at night in Havana to a gigantic crowd of sorrowing Cubans, he transformed Che into a towering saint and martyr of revolution; the archetypal hero of our time, projected in the consciousness of generations from then to now and tomorrow.

That night, Fidel Castro resurrected Che and immortalised him in History.

Soft Power, Hard Power

On Fidel’s watch, his country was so prestigious and influential in the world arena that it was nicknamed ‘the pocket superpower’. He demonstrated how a country of the Global South with a small population, located in close proximity to a hostile giant – the sole superpower – and with a military encampment of that superpower on its very territory (Guantanamo), could still maintain its dignity and earn respect and honour in the world without bartering its sovereignty.

Fidel’s politics had at its heart the duality that Machiavelli captured in the image of the Centaur to which Antonio Gramsci returned centuries later, denoting the combination of coercion and consent. In contemporary terms this is the combination of hard power and soft power.

The image of Fidel in uniform leaping off a battle tank, having rushed to the Bay of Pigs where he inflicted a defeat of the US and Cuban counterrevolutionaries in 1961, epitomises his mastery of ‘hard power’. So does the historic battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-1988 in Angola, the largest military battle in Africa since the end of WWII, where Fidel commanded from Havana the Cuban forces who defeated the invading military of industrial, NATO-equipped, nuclear-armed apartheid South Africa.

His friendship with Ernest Hemingway; his interviews to Playboy (1967, 1985); his long interviews with famous television journalist Barbara Walters (1977, 2002), and his four-hour speech to the congregation at the Riverside Church in Harlem, New York (2000) are evidence of his mastery of soft power.

Patriot and Internationalist

Fidel’s politics made a fundamental contribution to the field through the unity of patriotism with internationalism. He explicitly said he was not a ‘nationalist’ but a patriot, while insisting that internationalism was ‘an imperative’.

Fidel’s patriotism encompassed his country and all the people of all races within it. A factor that motivated his decision to send troops to Angola to resist apartheid South Africa’s invasion was that Cuba’s sugar industry had thrived on the backs of slave labour from Africa. In the struggle for Cuba’s independence from Spain, a powerful revolt had been led by a Black woman, a slave. Angola, explained Fidel, was Cuba’s chance to repay the people from and of Africa. The Cuban internationalist military expedition was named after the Black slave woman leader of that anti-colonial rebellion: Operation Carlota.

His patriotism was not a matter of crassly pragmatic ‘national interest’. There was a thaw in Cuba’s relations with the US under President Gerald Ford, and had Fidel believed in a narrow pragmatism, Cuba may have materially benefited. However, at that very moment the troops of apartheid South Africa had penetrated Angola (at Dr. Kissinger’s suggestion) and were within sight of its capital Luanda. Fidel decided that the principle of internationalism was more crucial than immediate material gain, and therefore answered the call by Agostinho Neto leader of the MPLA, the primary Angolan liberation movement legitimately wielding power in Luanda, for urgent support and assistance. Fidel’s was an existential choice, sourced in a higher way of being in the world.

It swiftly changed history. Upon release from jail after 27 years, Nelson Mandela’s first visit outside Africa was to Cuba, to thank Fidel for defeating the apartheid South African military, humbling the apartheid state and system, and opening the road that led to his freedom. South Africa’s President de Klerk met Mandela the year after Cuito Cuanavale, in 1989, and his release (1990) came a mere two years after Cuba’s victory there.

Castro and Christianity

Fidel Castro was a contributor to a confluence in the history of ideas which will outlast him by centuries. He designated it the ‘most explosive’ fusion—Christianity and Marxism. Liberation Theology within Catholicism in particular, and Christianity in general, was the crystallisation in Latin America of the consequences of the Second Vatican Council initiated by Pope John XXIII, intersecting with the impact of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro.

Baptised and raised a Catholic, a stellar product of elite Jesuit private schools, Fidel wore around his neck the image of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre during his years as guerrilla leader in the Sierra Maestra. The later Fidel was secular, not a believer in the divine, but he remained a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ. In ‘Fidel and Religion’ (1985) and ‘My Life’ (2006/7), he revealed himself shaped by his Spanish Jesuit teachers and reading the Bible, primarily the Gospels.

In his massive ‘spoken autobiography’ My Life (2007) comprising long conversations with Ignacio Ramonet, he put it plainly:

‘With the teachings of Christ, you end up with a radical socialist program, whether you are a believer or not.’ (My Life, 2007, p156).

Most striking is his revelatory self-definition at age 80:

‘Not long ago I was telling Chavez, the president of Venezuela – because Hugo Chavez is a Christian and talks about it a lot –‘if people call me Christian, not from the standpoint of religion but from the standpoint of social vision, I declare that I am a Christian.’ On the basis of my convictions and the objectives I pursue.’ (My Life, 2007, p156).

In the last decades of his life, Fidel met three Popes: John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. Pope John Paul II made a historic visit to Cuba in 1998. Fidel expressed warm admiration for him, despite the obvious paradox of the latter’s role in unravelling socialism in Poland – not least because the Pope was among the earliest and foremost critics of neoliberal globalisation.

Ethics and The Hero

My own book ‘Fidel’s Ethics of Violence: The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro’ (2007) focused on Fidel’s contribution to the political, strategic and philosophical problem of the ethics of violence. His was not the Gandhian renunciation of violence, nor the purely tactical use of violence such as that of Mandela and the ANC. Yet he rejected the practice of terrorism and the doctrine that any kind of violence, including the targeting of unarmed civilians, was legitimate in the course of a struggle for a cause deemed just.

Though paralleling and perhaps derivative of the Christian doctrine of Just War, Fidel’s ideas, strategy and practice differed from it in a major respect. Christian Just War theory was for states and Christian princes, mainly fighting each other – Just War ‘from above’, in which rulership was understood as ‘legitimate authority’. Fidel’s Just War theory pertained to struggles from below: wars for liberation and emancipation by the peoples against unjust, illegitimate authority. He insisted on and consistently practised the avoidance of violence against non-combatants and disarmed enemies. This extended from his own guerrilla war, through the counter-guerrilla war against CIA-backed Cuban émigrés, to large-scale war across the oceans – 12 years in Angola, fighting the armed forces of apartheid South Africa.

In his practice of what Marx called ‘the critique by weapon’, Fidel bridged the gulf between the archetypes of ‘The Rebel’ and ‘The Revolutionary’ posited by Albert Camus, which fed into his debate with Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus commended the Rebel with his or her limited aims and limited violence, as distinct from the Revolutionary whose drive for wider transformation inevitably led to untrammelled violence. Fidel transcended the antinomy by being the exception. He was Rebel and Revolutionary both, maintaining scrupulous selectivity in targeting while waging and supporting wars for deep-going revolutionary objectives; practising an ethic of violence which enabled him at all times to occupy the moral high ground by universalist-humanist standards – not self-proclaimed, or nationally and culturally self-referential, norms.

Television news is a constant if inadvertent reminder of what the world was when Fidel was alive and what it has become without him. Without him to play that planetary role of spokesperson, prophet and champion, humanity is lonelier and poorer.

Dayan Jayatilleka is a senior Sri Lankan diplomat and author of the books Fidel’s Ethics of Violence (2007) and The Fall of Global Socialism: A Counter-Narrative from the South (2014)

This article was produced by Globetrotter.