
Fidel Castro seems to have been a very old man for a very long time. I am sorry, due to my age, to have missed the early days: the heroism, the black and white television interviews with the guerilla fighter in the Sierra Maestra, the magnificant entrance into Havana on 1st January 1959, that famous victory speech during which a white dove landed on his shoulder seeming to signal that a new saviour was at hand. Back then the beard was full and black, there was a grizzly radicalism, sweeping changes were at hand. This was a world in which revolutions happened, in which anything seemed possible given the will to force the pace.
And now? Fidel is dying in a world more constrained. Capitalism reigns triumphant, international communism a thing of the past: even where (excepting Cuba and one or two other places) Communist parties still rule, they do so as the masters of capitalist economies. Marxism of the orthodox kind is intellectually discredited, no longer providing as it once seemed to a persuasive route map showing how to get from A to B, from capitalism to socialism.
When I first visited Cuba in 1996 I went expecting to find one of two things - that it would either be a socialist paradise that could be unequivocally supported by all good lefties or that it would be ghastly grey communist dictatorship that had to be condemned. Of course it was neither of these things - life and politics are rarely so straight forward.
There are truly appalling things about Cuba's system. I remember the students I used to teach were amazed that I was allowed to get books out of the university library without submitting them to the 'philosophy' lecturers whose job was to decide whether or not they were fit for consumption (Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed raised eye brows when it was spotted in my bedroom). I remember the same students telling me how at the end of the year there would be a mass student union meeting at which people would condemn their colleagues (and even their friends) for expressing counter-revolutionary sentiments. Those deemed guilty would have a black mark by their name which would matter when it came to the allocation of work at the end of their university careers.
On the other hand there are the revolution's incredible achievements. The health service is the envy not just of other developing countries but wealthy nations too - free to all and with an extensive system of primary care. I benefited myself when at one point I had lost so much weight (the food - in most large institutions - is terrible) that I got infected kidneys. Cubans are some of the most educated people in the world - zero illiteracy, universities, schools and colleges free to all. A genuinely egalitarian social structure (being eroded it has to be said by tourism and the dollar economy), no real unemployment, none of the teeming squalor of the slums of Sau Paulo, Caracas or Santiago de Chile. There are beggars of course, as there are everywhere - I concluded during my time there that socialism (in the Marxist Leninist sense) would not eliminate alcoholism, family break down and old men sitting on park benches drinking themselves into oblivion. They will forever be with us.
And Fidel was always there in the background - I remember sometimes walking through the streets late at night and all the television channels would be broadcasting one of his marathon two to three hour speeches. His passionate (and surprisingly high pitched) tones would ricochet around the streets wherever you went.
What the Cuban revolution taught me was the real possibility of radical social change if the will is there to make it happen. Illiteracy gone in a generation, real grinding poverty of the kind that plagues the lives of so much of humanity eliminated in a poor Caribbean country. Take religion - here was a once Catholic country that in the space of four decades had forgotten the meaning of Christmas. I'm not arguing for state imposed atheism - but it just shows that politics can make a hell of a difference.
Of course the collapse of the Berlin wall had a dramatic effect - Cubans used to always refer to 'antes' - a time in the mid 1970s when the streets were apparently paved with Russian gold - or at least when you could eat well on very little money. The opening to tourism and the dollar was necessary - but it brought back inequalities, crime and prostitution.
And now? Fidel is dying in a world more constrained. Capitalism reigns triumphant, international communism a thing of the past: even where (excepting Cuba and one or two other places) Communist parties still rule, they do so as the masters of capitalist economies. Marxism of the orthodox kind is intellectually discredited, no longer providing as it once seemed to a persuasive route map showing how to get from A to B, from capitalism to socialism.
When I first visited Cuba in 1996 I went expecting to find one of two things - that it would either be a socialist paradise that could be unequivocally supported by all good lefties or that it would be ghastly grey communist dictatorship that had to be condemned. Of course it was neither of these things - life and politics are rarely so straight forward.
There are truly appalling things about Cuba's system. I remember the students I used to teach were amazed that I was allowed to get books out of the university library without submitting them to the 'philosophy' lecturers whose job was to decide whether or not they were fit for consumption (Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed raised eye brows when it was spotted in my bedroom). I remember the same students telling me how at the end of the year there would be a mass student union meeting at which people would condemn their colleagues (and even their friends) for expressing counter-revolutionary sentiments. Those deemed guilty would have a black mark by their name which would matter when it came to the allocation of work at the end of their university careers.
On the other hand there are the revolution's incredible achievements. The health service is the envy not just of other developing countries but wealthy nations too - free to all and with an extensive system of primary care. I benefited myself when at one point I had lost so much weight (the food - in most large institutions - is terrible) that I got infected kidneys. Cubans are some of the most educated people in the world - zero illiteracy, universities, schools and colleges free to all. A genuinely egalitarian social structure (being eroded it has to be said by tourism and the dollar economy), no real unemployment, none of the teeming squalor of the slums of Sau Paulo, Caracas or Santiago de Chile. There are beggars of course, as there are everywhere - I concluded during my time there that socialism (in the Marxist Leninist sense) would not eliminate alcoholism, family break down and old men sitting on park benches drinking themselves into oblivion. They will forever be with us.
And Fidel was always there in the background - I remember sometimes walking through the streets late at night and all the television channels would be broadcasting one of his marathon two to three hour speeches. His passionate (and surprisingly high pitched) tones would ricochet around the streets wherever you went.
What the Cuban revolution taught me was the real possibility of radical social change if the will is there to make it happen. Illiteracy gone in a generation, real grinding poverty of the kind that plagues the lives of so much of humanity eliminated in a poor Caribbean country. Take religion - here was a once Catholic country that in the space of four decades had forgotten the meaning of Christmas. I'm not arguing for state imposed atheism - but it just shows that politics can make a hell of a difference.
Of course the collapse of the Berlin wall had a dramatic effect - Cubans used to always refer to 'antes' - a time in the mid 1970s when the streets were apparently paved with Russian gold - or at least when you could eat well on very little money. The opening to tourism and the dollar was necessary - but it brought back inequalities, crime and prostitution.
I remember in my first week innocently taking a shine to some girls who seemed to have taken a shine to me before being warned by students that they were 'jinateras' (people who would hang around with you in the hope you'd buy them a drink or even eventually get them a passport out of the country). I spent a year never knowing whether girls were really interested in me for my youthful good looks or for my imagined wealth - which at the age of 18 in a country half populated by beautiful women can be intensely frustrating.
With all of the caveats and qualifications I have always respected Fidel and supported the Cuban revolution, but of course want to see a democratic opening - a glastnost without a brutal perestroika. Fidel's death could at some point in the 1990s have triggered a crisis - but I think with a stronger economy and with the support of most of Latin America's left wing governments, things will be a lot smoother. We can now realistically hope that a reforming Communist leadership can safeguard the revolution's progressive achievements, while democratising the political system and defending the island from the gangster capitalists of Miami.
Despite his faults and the complexity of his legacy, I confess I will be sad when the old man passes - authoritarian, ego-centric and flawed - but at the same time principled and visionary. La historia lo absolvera.
With all of the caveats and qualifications I have always respected Fidel and supported the Cuban revolution, but of course want to see a democratic opening - a glastnost without a brutal perestroika. Fidel's death could at some point in the 1990s have triggered a crisis - but I think with a stronger economy and with the support of most of Latin America's left wing governments, things will be a lot smoother. We can now realistically hope that a reforming Communist leadership can safeguard the revolution's progressive achievements, while democratising the political system and defending the island from the gangster capitalists of Miami.
Despite his faults and the complexity of his legacy, I confess I will be sad when the old man passes - authoritarian, ego-centric and flawed - but at the same time principled and visionary. La historia lo absolvera.