By Ana Hurtado on April 19, 2023 from Havana
I go as often as I can, but now, I have returned to make the thorough tour that I made the first time I went a little over a year ago.
This colonial house, which more than a century ago belonged to a wealthy family, is now a heritage of the Cuban people and of any visitor who wants to visit it. In its walls there is history, there is pain, but above all there is triumph. The triumph of a life full of example and heroism.
In March 2022, when I saw it in front of me, holding his personal items, his photographs, his belongings, his people, the story of the child Fidel to Fidel the adult, I knew that I was here to give my heart. He did not want streets, any statues or monuments, but this place is a memorial to his memory, because friends, fathers, heroes are not said goodbye to. They live in memory. And this center is the memory of an era. It is the memory of a life, of a generation and of a country.
I must have attended almost a dozen events there, but yesterday, Tuesday, April 18, coinciding with the anniversary of Playa Giron, I revisited all its rooms. To get to know it again. To laugh and cry with his exploits, with his anecdotes, with the setbacks of his people but above all with each triumph and victory that he built on each of those falls.
Because no one like him knew how to show that aesthetics is politics. With his decorum, with his respect, with his nobility, with his manners Fidel taught the world how to do politics. He created the school. He taught several generations to think critically in order to believe; he encouraged us to know how to analyze the world in order to understand it. Thanks to him we understand that now the battles also lie in the emotions, apart from ideas and the false and true information.
His ideas are more valid than ever. His socialism, the Cuban socialism, the socialism of his people, still continues to cause irritation in Western countries. His ideas are frightening, because they imply the freedom of the peoples. He himself said:
“This is the socialist and democratic Revolution of the humble, with the humble and for the humble.”
Why so much fear of equality?
The youth was another of his great responsibilities, and continues to be so for all those revolutionaries who believe in socialist continuity. Youth and its development in a community space for struggle, physical and virtual. A space of organization based on the ideas of the heroes that reinvent the language of the left adapted to the times, without ever losing the ideological basis.
The challenge today of any world revolution, and mainly of the lighthouse and guide, the Cuban one, is to maintain peace and unity among its members. Hatred is the most fragmentary feeling that exists. And it is through hatred that the enemies of humanism try to perpetrate in this system, a friend of just causes and the dignity of the people.
photo: Ana Hurtado
Fidel endowed his people so that anyone would know how to defend themselves in any war, but especially in the arena of ideological warfare. He taught his people to read so that they could believe and question any situation. If he was capable of endowing an entire country with ideology, could we not endow virtual spaces, new generations and new scenarios with ideology?
It is important enough to always return to him, to follow his legacy, to remember him, to visit his Center and return to the core of his thought.
Fidel is Fidel. He is universal. And that is the strongest weapon that the Cuban people, and the revolutionaries who love him as if he were a father, have.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English