‘Men come and go, but the people remains’: the legacy of Fidel Castro

Brasil de Fato

“Fidel Castro Ruz is Cuba. We can’t talk about Cuba without talking about Fidel, since the last 65 years of Cuban history were marked by his trajectory,” states Cuban historian Sissi Abay Díaz to Brasil de Fato.

As risky as this phrase may seem, it’s hard not to see the importance of Fidel Castro in Cuba’s recent history. Born on August 13, 1926, in a small town in the province of Holguín, Fidel Castro Ruz has shown extraordinary relevance to Cuba’s social and political scene since his youth.

Being one of its main leaders, Fidel was 33 years old when the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, a historical process that would quickly become one of the most important events in Latin America and the Caribbean. The entire history of the second half of the 20th century on the continent was marked by the social and political influence ignited by this revolution in this small country that made “socialism speak Spanish for the first time.”

For years, Cuban researcher and essayist Sissi Abay Díaz has studied the life and work of Fidel Castro. She wrote dozens of articles about different aspects of the life and legacy of the Cuban revolutionary. Currently, Abay Díaz is the vice director of the Fidel Castro Ruz Center, an institution dedicated to studying and popularizing his work.

In a long interview with Brasil de Fato, in the Fidel Castro Center, the researcher revisits some essential aspects of Castro’s revolutionary thoughts and trajectory in the recent celebration of his birth. Read below the main excerpts from the interview.

The first years

“When I was really young, Fidel understood that the only way to change the country was through an armed fight – and he did it. He waged a war that lasted a little more than two years and led him to power, the kind of power I wouldn’t like to have.

When he was only 21, Fidel was the president of the “Pro-Democracy Dominican Committee” of the National Undergraduate Federation, aimed at promoting different actions in solidarity with the Dominican people and against the dictatorship led by Rafael Trujillo. It was the initial international militancy that made him be elected as a delegate in an international student congress in 1948 under the patronage of the then Argentinian President Juan Domingo Perón.

That year, Fidel traveled abroad for the first time. He visited Venezuela and Panama, establishing contact with young people linked to the nationalist and anti-imperialist processes that were taking place in different parts of the continent.

Before returning to Cuba, Fidel visited Bogotá to meet with popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who was then running for president of Colombia. However, the meeting never took place: on the same afternoon as the meeting, Gaitán was assassinated, sparking years of violence in Colombia. Decades later, it was revealed that the CIA was involved in the assassination.

The rapid contact Fidel made with social and anti-imperialist fights on the continent would mark his life forever.

But it would be a few years later that Fidel’s name would become famous in every corner of Cuba. Still a young lawyer, Fidel ran for the House of Representatives of the Cuban Congress. At the time, the country was going through a serious economic and political crisis.

However, the electoral process never took place. Just a few months before the elections, on March 10, 1953, General Fulgencio Batista carried out a coup d’état. His government’s legitimacy was immediately recognized by Washington. Batista installed a repressive regime that sought to stifle any struggle that aimed to change the country. 

When he was only 27, Fidel was one of the main organizers of the attempted assault on the Moncada Barracks. In the early hours of July 26, 1953, 131 young people – with an average age of 26 – tried to storm two military barracks to start a popular rebellion to overthrow Batista’s dictatorship.

The attack failed and dozens of these participants were killed by the dictatorship. Along with other leaders, Fidel Castro was arrested and subjected to a trial in which he chose to assume his own defense. The allegation of this trial is known as “History Will Absolve Me”, considered the first political document of the revolution in Cuba that would end up triumphing in 1959.  

Fidel Castro (center) / Fidel Soldado de Ideas

The dream of independence

After three years of dictatorship, Batista was finally forced to resign on December 31, 1958, surrounded by revolutionary forces. January 1, 1959, marked the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

On that day, in front of thousands of people gathered in the central square of Santiago de Cuba, Fidel gave a long speech. “This time, fortunately for Cuba, the Revolution really will come to power,” he said amid applause and shouts of joy.

He then went on to list all the times the Cuban revolutionary and independence processes have been interrupted or betrayed. “No thieves, no traitors, no interventionists. That is the time of revolution.”

“The men who fell in our three wars of independence unite their efforts today with those who fell during the recent war; and to all our dead in the struggle for freedom, we can say that the time has finally come to realize their dreams.”

The fall of the dictatorship was only the beginning of a long and inexhaustible process of struggle to build popular power, in which the dreams of liberty are not closed within the institutions of power. A struggle that continues to this day.

“Fidel knew the costs of power in revolutionary processes, which transforms or disfigures the founding purposes,” says Professor Sissi Abay Díaz, recalling that the leader did not occupy the presidency despite the enormous relevance he already had.

“The first institutional responsibility he took on in the government was because many people in important government posts didn’t understand why a revolution was being made. In the same way, Fidel spotted the danger of it being just another political process in which only the owners would change and some people would get richer, but the country would not be transformed, which was the goal,” she adds.

For six months, Manuel Urrutia Lleó was Cuban president after the fall of Batista. He soon left office to join the counter-revolutionary efforts organized in the United States. Thus, for the first 17 years of the revolution, Cuba’s president was Osvaldo Dorticos.

Revolution means never lying

Despite coming from a privileged family, Fidel chose to dedicate his life to the poor and oppressed. He could have been a good lawyer defending just causes, denouncing the sad reality of the poorest. However, he chose to interwind his fate with that of the people.

“Only four months had passed since the adoption of the most important measure of the first stage of the Cuban Revolution: agrarian reform, the distribution of land to those who worked for it,” explains Abay Díaz. For the researcher, this meant the importance of “the role given to the people, such as farmers, in the structure of the revolutionary power.” 

At the beginning of February 1959, in front of a crowd of 150,000 farmers, Fidel Castro declared: “Without agrarian reform, there can be no revolutionary government.” Just five months later, surrounded by members of the Council of Ministers, he signed the Agrarian Reform decree on top of a hill in Sierra Maestra.

Fidel’s own family’s property was among the first to be distributed among poor farmers, which led to serious disputes. After the revolution was consolidated, Fidel never accepted gifts, donating everything he received to the Cuban people.

Fidel Castro signing the decree on agrarian reform / Fidel Soldado de Ideas

A grain of corn

“Fidel comes from a Jesuit background,” explains Abay Díaz, for whom “the severe spirit of the Jesuits and their discipline” had a profound impact on the revolutionary leader. 

“Oliver Stone, the American filmmaker, interviewed Fidel and asked him what would happen to Cuba when he was no longer there.” At that moment, Fidel gave him an extraordinary answer: he told him that he had always doubted the relativity of glory and, quoting José Martí, he replied that “men come and go, but the people remains. All the glory in the world fits in a grain of corn’.”

“Fidel dedicated himself to suffering the fate of others. To show solidarity with the causes that he felt most affected the essence of human beings. That is the greatest ethical lesson he could give.”

One of the things that most impresses foreign visitors in Cuba is the fact that there isn’t a single statue of Fidel Castro or a single street named after him anywhere on the island. Against the cult of personality, Fidel forbade any kind of homage to him after his death, aware that the only tribute worth paying is the affection of his people and that the only true triumph is the permanence of ideas.

“Fidel was concerned about the cult of personality. Above all, he said power debases men. And the man who believed he was in power would always be at a disadvantage compared to history,” says Ebay Díaz.

“His main legacy was the Cuban people, the work to make the revolution happen. That there are things we could do better, things that we have to propose to do better in the difficult situation in which we had to build a process that was different from those before, but worthwhile. And he always led us to what was worth saving in the revolutionary project. Men come and go, but the people remains, that is his legacy. In his last speech to Cubans at the party congress, he said that ‘the ideas of the Cuban communists will remain’. In life, he declared that his main heir was his thought.”