By Iroel Sánchez on March 6, 2021
The Fidel Castro Study Center
In Havana, a Study Center named after Fidel Castro will soon be opened; it is the only institution on the island that, according to the law, can be named after the man who, in the words of the Argentine poet Juan Gelman, rode upon himself one day and enlarged the gates of history. At the express wish of the Comandante himself, it is forbidden in Cuba to erect statues of Fidel or to name places, streets or institutions after him. This was the case during his lifetime and will be the case after his death.
The organizers of the Center have been able to count on a lot of historical documentation but very little of what a head of state would be considered to have treasured: the valuable objects received as gifts from foreign governments and admirers by Fidel during his lifetime were immediately destined by him, almost always in silence, to museums of decorative arts in the country or places like the Casa de África managed by the Office of the Historian of Havana, to be placed for the enjoyment and education of all the people.
His threadbare uniform, his old, small Soviet-produced jeep in which he went to the riskiest places during the countless hurricanes that hit the island and in which he arrived unarmed at the vortex of the riot on August 5, 1994, where his mere presence turned into applause and shouts of “Fidel, Fidel!” will be there, attesting to the austerity of a man who belonged to a pre-revolutionary party with the motto “Shame against money” and whose relationship with material things evokes the Don Quijote to which Gabriel García Márquez once compared him.
The heart of the Fidel Castro Center will be a library where scholars from all over the world, and most probably many Americans, will surely come, I imagine, to try to understand, among other things, from the documentation available there, how this man managed to ensure that a small, poor and underdeveloped country remained undefeated against its powerful neighbor from which more than 600 plans were drawn up to assassinate him.
When Cuba barely had a breath of fresh air after the severe impact on its economy of the collapse of the USSR, Fidel promoted the opening of new schools of visual arts and art instructors in all the country’s provinces, the renovation and growth of the National Museum of Fine Arts, new halls for theatre and music, and spaces on television and in the municipalities to multiply the availability of university-level knowledge within the reach of all the people. That is why the new institution located in a neuralgic place in the Cuban capital will not only be for scholars or researchers; its library, amphitheater, and a multi-purpose hall for cinema, conferences, book presentations, and concerts are intended to host a rich cultural life.
Fidel is very dangerous, as Richard Nixon understood and wrote when he met him in Washington in April 1959. Since he crossed the Rubicon of history a month later, with an Agrarian Reform Law that neither the American monopolies nor the CIA would forgive, Fidel did not cease to use revolutionary power to give to the most what only the least enjoyed in Cuba and in much of the world; from the possibility of reading and writing to the tastiest ice cream, from graduating from a university to the most sophisticated eye or heart surgeries.
He had to be demonized. But like the lightning that never ceases, far from what his enemies announced, as time goes by, Fidel becomes more dangerous. If this were not so, there would be no need to try to erase the slogans he launched, nor to associate him with the errors of others, which he criticized and fought against, nor to look for any pretext to sully his name, except for the lucrative business that it is for the Miami-based hate industry. Fidel does not need monuments or institutions to defend him, as Martí sowed in the people and that is and will be his best defender, but in a war of thought like the current one, it is worth having a weapon to stimulate and organize its study and dissemination. Some haters are already barking in the networks against the Fidel Castro Center, there is no better omen for it.
Source: Al Mayadeen, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English