By Alejandra Garcia on August 12, 2024 from Havana
Fidel is Fidel, photo: Roberto Chile
On August 13, Fidel Castro Ruz (1926-2016) would have turned 98 years old. Today, Resumen Latinoamericano honors the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution, as told by those who knew him.
The story of Fidel that is most known is that of Fidel the guerrilla leader; the Barbudo, the young man who stormed the Moncada Barracks with equally brave young men who sought radical political change.He is well known for his struggle in the Sierra Maestra to establish a fairer social model for the vulnerable people -the majority of the country- a model of the humble and for the humble.
The Fidel that Cuba remembers is the one who achieved victory on January 1st against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who was trampling on the then current Constitution, and led a bloody hunt against the young people of the July 26th Movement. He was most loved for defending a social project, which was the antithesis of U.S. interests, and was also hated for those same reasons.
But, there is a less known of his sensitive side, which was only discovered by those closest to him, testimonies that remained engraved in time thanks to articles, interviews and books. Colombian writer Gabriel García Marquez (1927-2014) never forgot Fidel’s devotion to words, nor his power of reason.
“Fidel goes and looks for problems wherever they are. He quit smoking to have the moral authority to fight smoking. He likes to prepare cooking recipes with a kind of scientific passion. He keeps himself in excellent physical condition with several hours of daily gymnastics and frequent swimming. Invincible patience. Iron discipline,” said the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude during an interview.
The Cuban journalist Katiuska Blanco, the most thorough biographer of Fidel’s life, work and thought, assured that he is a difficult man to catch in all his magnitude. She once said: “I can tell you that Fidel is the most generous man, the most simple and humble person one can imagine. If Fidel were here with us this afternoon, he would ask the simplest of workers anything, because he always considers that he has many things to learn from the humblest.”
Garcia Marquez agreed. “People on the streets call him: Fidel. They surround him without risk, they call him by his first name, they argue with him, they contradict him, they complain to him. It is then that one discovers the unusual human being he is and that the brightness of his own image does not let us see. This is the Fidel Castro I think I know: A man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, of cautious words and subdued manners and incapable of conceiving any idea that is not colossal.”
The Commander and friend of many years of struggle, Juan Almeida Bosque (1927 – 2009), also said that “Fidel is extremely pleasant, a self-taught man of science and military art, although he did not study a military career. He is a strategist. And in politics, for me, he is one of the greatest politicians of this century. He is a man of struggle with great sensitivity. He loves beauty and music.”
His enemies say he was a king without a crown and that he confused unity with unanimity. “And his enemies are right about that,” said Uruguayan political scientist Eduardo Galeano.
“But what his enemies do not say is that it was not because of posing for History that he put his chest to the bullets when the Bay of Pigs’ invasion came in 1961, or how he faced hurricanes as an equal, from hurricane to hurricane. They do not mention that he survived 637 attacks against his life or that his contagious energy was decisive in turning a colony into a homeland… and that it was not by a miracle of God that the new homeland could survive 10 presidents of the United States,” Galeano assured.
And they do not say that this revolution, grown in punishment, “is what it could have been and not what it wanted to be. Nor do they say that the wall between desire and reality got higher and wider thanks to the blockade, which stifled the development of a Cuban-style democracy”, Galeano concluded.
To think of Fidel is also to evoke the day when his brother, Army General Raúl Castro, laid his remains in the monolith of the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, Santiago de Cuba, in December 2016. Solemn silence prevailed during a ceremony of seconds that seemed like hours. The pain of a brother saying goodbye also hurt all of us who witnessed the moment. Shortly after, Raul said:
“Fidel was the one who taught us that, yes, we can resist, survive and develop without renouncing the principles or the conquests of socialism, that Cuba can be a medical power, that we can help the world, that we can be proud of our achievements. Words are not enough. Fidel is Fidel.”
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English