(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
