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(Part One)
He spontaneously decided to visit Cuba for the
second time since he became President of Brazil,
even though the state of my health did not
guarantee that he would be able to meet with me.
In the past, as he himself said, he visited the
Island almost every year. I met him on the
occasion of the first anniversary of the
Sandinista Revolution at the home of Sergio
Ramírez who at that time was the Vice President
of that country. By the way, I would say that
Ramírez fooled me, in some way. When I read his
book, Divine Punishment –an excellent
narrative– I came to believe that it was a real
case that had happened in Nicaragua, with that
legal nuisance so common in the former Spanish
colonies; he himself told me one day that it was
pure fiction.
There I also met with Frei Betto who today is a
critic, but not an enemy, of Lula, as well as
with Father Ernesto Cardenal, a militant leftist
Sandinista and, today, an adversary of Daniel.
The two writers were part of the Theology of
Liberation, a progressive trend which we always
saw as a great step towards unity between
revolutionaries and the poor, beyond their
philosophy and their beliefs, in accordance with
the specific conditions of struggle in Latin
America and the Caribbean.
Nonetheless, I must confess that I perceived in
Father Ernesto Cardenal, unlike others in the
Nicaraguan leadership, an image of sacrifice and
privations resembling that of a medieval monk.
He was a true prototype of purity. I leave
aside others less consistent, who were at one
time revolutionaries, including militants of the
far left in Central America and other areas, who
later, anxious about their well-being and money,
crossed over, part and parcel, to the ranks of
the empire.
What does all this have to do with Lula? A
lot. He was never a left-wing extremist, nor
did he become a revolutionary through
philosophical studies but rather he came from
very humble working class roots and Christian
beliefs, and he worked hard creating surplus
value for others. Karl Marx saw the workers as
the ones who would bury the capitalist system:
“Workers of the world unite,” he proclaimed. He
presents us with reasons and demonstrates this
with irrefutable logic; he takes pleasure and
makes fun of the cynical lies used to accuse
Communists. If the ideas of Marx were just at
that time, when everything seemed to depend on
the class struggle and the growth of the
productive forces, science and technology, that
supported the creation of essential goods to
satisfy human necessities, there are absolutely
new factors which say that he was right and
which at the same time clash with his noble
aims.
New necessities have arisen which could destroy
the aims of a society with neither exploiters
nor exploited. Among these new necessities we
have that of human survival. No one had even
heard about climate change in Marx’s day and
age. He and Engels surely knew that one day the
sun would be extinguished as it consumed all of
its energy. A few years after the Manifesto was
written, other men were born who made inroads in
science and knowledge about the laws of
chemistry, physics and biology ruling the
Universe and unknown then. Into whose hands
would this knowledge fall? Although it
continues in its development and even improves,
and again partially denies and contradicts its
own theories, new knowledge is not in the hands
of the poor nations who today make up
three-quarters of the world’s population. It is
in the hands of a privileged group of wealthy
and developed capitalist powers, associated with
the most powerful empire ever to exist, built on
the bases of a globalized economy, governed by
the very laws of capitalism described by Marx
and thoroughly studied by him.
Nowadays, as humankind still suffers from these
realities due to the very dialectics of events,
we must confront these dangers.
How did the revolutionary process in Cuba
develop? Quite a bit has been written in our
press in recent weeks about different episodes
of that period. Great respect has been shown
for various historical dates on the days
corresponding to anniversaries that commemorate
years ending in a five or a zero. That is fair,
but we must be careful, in the sum-total of so
many occurrences described in each newspaper or
article, according to their criteria, lest we
lose sight of them in the context of the
historical development of our Revolution,
despite the efforts of all those excellent
analysts that we have.
For me, unity means sharing in the struggle, the
risks, the sacrifices, the aims, ideas, concepts
and strategies, assumed after discussion and
analysis. Unity means a common struggle against
annexationists, quislings and corrupt
individuals who have nothing in common with a
militant revolutionary. It is to this unity
revolving around the idea of independence and
against the empire as it advances over the
peoples of the Americas that I always referred
to. A few days ago, I once again read it when
Granma published it on the eve of our
election day, and Juventud Rebelde
reproduced a facsimile of my thoughts on the
idea, in my own handwriting.
The old pre-revolutionary slogan of unity has
nothing to do with the concept, because in our
country today we do not have political
organizations seeking power. We have to avoid
that, in the enormous sea of tactical criteria,
strategic lines become diluted and we imagine
nonexistent situations.
In a country invaded by the United States while
involved in a solitary struggle for independence
as the last Spanish colony, together with our
sister Puerto Rico, – “birds of a feather” –
nationalist feelings ran very deep.
The real producers of sugar who were the
recently freed slaves and the peasants, many of
whom fought in the Liberation Army, transformed
into squatters or completely lacking any land of
their own, who were pitched into the sugarcane
harvests in the great estates created by United
States companies or Cuban land-owners who
inherited, bought or stole land, were adequate
material for revolutionary ideas.
Julio Antonio Mella, founder of the Communist
Party together with Baliño –who knew Martí and
who, with him, created the party that would lead
Cuba to independence-- took up the banner,
brought to it all the enthusiasm derived from
the October Revolution, and gave this cause his
own blood, that of a young intellectual
conquered by revolutionary ideas. The Communist
blood of Jesús Menéndez would join that of Mella
18 years later.
We, teenagers and youths, studying in private
schools had not even heard of Mella. Our class
or social group, having incomes greater that
those of the rest of the population, condemned
us as human beings to be the selfish and the
exploiters of society.
I had the privilege of coming to the revolution
through ideas, escaping the boring fate that
life was leading me to. I explained why at
another moment; now, I remember this only in the
context of what I am writing.
Hatred for Batista's repression and his crimes
was so great that nobody paid heed to the ideas
I expressed in my defense at the Court in
Santiago de Cuba, where there was even a book by
Lenin printed in the USSR –coming from the
credit I had at the People’s Socialist Party
bookstore at Carlos III in Havana– found among
the combatants’ belongings. “Whoever hasn’t
read Lenin, is an ignorant”, I blurted out
during the interrogation at the first sessions
of the oral hearing when they brought it up as a
damning bit of evidence. They were still trying
me together with all of the surviving prisoners.
It would be hard to understand what I am saying
if one doesn’t keep in mind that at the time we
attacked the Moncada, on July 26, 1953, --an
action made possible by the organizational
efforts of more than a year, with nobody on our
side other than ourselves-- the policies of
Stalin, who had died suddenly a few months
earlier, prevailed in the USSR. He was an
honest and devoted Communist, who would later
make serious mistakes leading him to extremely
conservative and cautious positions. If a
Revolution like ours had succeeded at that time,
the USSR would not have done for Cuba what the
Soviet leadership did years later, liberated by
then from those murky and tortuous methods, and
enthused by the Socialist Revolution that burst
on the scene in our country. I understood that
very well in spite of the fair criticisms I made
of Khrushchev as a result of events that were
well known at the time.
The USSR had the most powerful army among all
those contending in World War II, but
unfortunately it was purged and demobilized. Its
leader underestimated Hitler’s threats and
bellicose theories. From the very capital of
Japan, an important and prestigious Soviet
intelligence agent had communicated the
imminence of the attack on June 22, 1941. This
surprised the country which was not in combat
readiness. Many officers were on leaves. Even
without their most experienced unit leaders
--who were replaced-- if they had been alerted
and deployed, the Nazis would have clashed with
powerful forces from the very first second and
they wouldn’t have destroyed most of the fighter
planes as they sat on the ground. Even worse
than the purge, was the surprise. The Soviet
soldiers did not surrender when they were told
about enemy tanks in the rearguard, the way the
other armies from capitalist Europe did. In the
most critical moments, with sub-zero
temperatures, the Siberian patriots started the
lathes in the weapons factories that Stalin had
far-sightedly moved to the inner reaches of
Soviet territory.
As the leaders of the USSR themselves told me
when I visited that great country in April 1963,
the revolutionary Russian combatants --well
seasoned against foreign interventions aimed at
destroying the Bolshevik Revolution, which was
left blockaded and isolated-- had established
relations and exchanged experiences with German
officers, those with a Prussian militarist
tradition, humiliated by the Treaty of
Versailles which put an end to World War I.
The SS intelligence services devised schemes
against many who were, in their vast majority,
loyal to the Revolution. Motivated by suspicions
that turned pathological, Stalin purged 3 of his
5 Marshals, 13 of the 15 Army Commanders, 8 of
the 9 Admirals, 50 of the 57 Army Corps
Commanders, 154 of 186 Division Commanders, one
hundred percent of Army Commissars, and 25 of 28
Army Corps Commissars of the Soviet Red Army in
the years preceding the Great Patriotic War.
The USSR paid for those serious mistakes with
enormous destruction and more than 20 million
lives lost; some claim it was 27 million.
In 1943, with some delay, the last Nazi spring
offensive was launched at the famous and
tempting Kursk Bulge, with 900 thousand
soldiers, 2700 tanks and 2000 planes. The
Soviets, experts in enemy psychology, laid in
wait in that trap for the sure attack, with one
million and 200 thousand men, 3300 tanks, 2400
planes and 20,000 artillery pieces. Led by
Zhukov and Stalin himself, they destroyed
Hitler's last offensive.
In 1945, Soviet soldiers advanced unstoppable to
capture the German Reich Chancellery in Berlin
where they hoisted the red flag stained with the
blood of the many fallen.
I observe Lula’s red tie for a minute and I ask
him, Did Chávez give you that? He smiles and
answers: Now I am going to send him some shirts
because he is complaining that the collars on
his shirts are too hard, and I am going to look
for them in Bahía so that I can make him a
present of them.
He asked that I give him some of the photos I
took.
When he said that he was very impressed with my
health, I told him that I spent my time thinking
and writing. Never in my life had I thought so
much. I told him that, at the end of my visit
to Córdoba, Argentina, where I had attended a
meeting with many leaders, and he had been there
as well, I came back, and then I took part in
two ceremonies for the July 26th
Anniversary. I was checking over Ramonet’s
book. I had answered all his questions. I had
not taken the thing too seriously. I had
thought that it would be a quick thing, like the
interviews with Frei Betto and Tomás Borge. And
then I became a slave to the French writer's
book, when it was at the point of being
published without my going over it, with some of
the answers being a bit off the cuff. I barely
slept during those days.
When I fell gravely ill on the night of the 26th
and in the early morning of the 27th
of July, I thought that would be the end, and
while the doctors were fighting for my life, the
head of the Council of State Office was reading
me the text, at my insistence, and I was
dictating the pertinent changes.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 22, 2008
Part
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