Epical Castro Has Nothing to do with Today’s Resistance!

Today, the most important question is to take Castro out of this superficial worshiping propaganda machinery and dig into the people’s history to understand what really went wrong in this nation.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa-Nov 28, 2016

(November 28, 2016, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Mere propaganda of personalities is neither going to achieve the true success of the nation nor improve the living condition of the people who sacrificed much more than what our popular leaders on the headlines did. People in Cuba and the world is mourning and celebrating the death of Dr Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz who ruled the island nation located just 90 miles away from its top enemy United States of America. For some, he is a true legendary hero, but others he is a brutal dictator who assassinated the very meaning of a nation.

What is the lesson need to be learned here? Give a damn to Batista who is the corrupted puppet whose woebegone govern policies has created the path to control Cuba by one person, Castro, for decades. No election, but celebrations on revolution. No essentials to general life, but mere statistics on the success of the socialist way. The list is much bigger than the bearded face portraits placed on most of the walls in Cuba. Castro has taken the last breath. It is somewhat an end of an era of this tiny Caribbean Island.

I’m not in a hurry to brand Castro as a bad man which I would never agree, but, the system he has developed was, unfortunately, unable to solve the very problems of the society. When Pol Pot failed in achieving prosperous change even by killing one-fourth of his countrymen and women, defeated Pol Pot finally declared the experiment had failed, therefore he had failed. But Cuba is different from Cambodia. In fact, Cuba is different from most of the others who attempted liberation through “socialism”.  Cuba remains in world politics and played a significant role in the international affairs from sending well-trained doctors to heal the sick around the globe to preventing the most deadly political crisis in our history – the missiles crisis. But, it is unfair to engage in blindfolded praise of Castro while ignoring the public in the country.

Let our old distorted and deteriorated so-called leftists who were enjoying all in the capitalist societies while wearing leftist clothes on the stage commemorate and write epics on Fidel and his death. Those hypocrites are always grabbing the opportunities and deteriorate the space of true resistance. Let them sell the old songs as usual. But, the real challenge before us is to deconstruct Fidel’s ideology and understand the commitments by the common people in Cuba. Such will facilitate an opportunity to re-design the resistance to be compatible with and capable of addressing the core notions of the social contrasts.

Castro read himself much earlier than anyone else. He was groomed as a dynamic and charismatic youth activist since the day he delivered a speech against US Marine Corps who urinated the statue on the José Martí, a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. It is something that makes one be proud of him as a fellow human being. Unlike most of other politicians, he has written constantly not the jargon but some meaningful lines of understanding. He would have no worries before his death as he went far than his imagination. He is bigger than his life. But, what about the rest who were falling in love with his bearded face with a Havana cigar which is little more than a commodity and useful tool in highly motivated propaganda?

Life in Havana

Let’s take Castro into our mind as per his respect for self-dignity. Let’s leave our older generation to blindfolded worship and honour before the memories they have on Castro continuing in their habitual commemorations of Ho Chi Min, Che and Mao even Stalin and Pol Pot. But, how relevant is his ideology in the present context is our question. Neither his strategies nor his economic policies are going to solve what the present youth are demanding. In this situation, Castro will remain like the wallpaper as the subject of the past. It is hardly believable that Castro’s ideology can represent in the resistance against suppression where pleasure is used as the tool to oppress society.

Nonetheless, no doubt Castro has become an icon in the pages of history. But he is now mere symbolic figure among the youth population in which almost all are spending most of their time with smartphones and other fancy utilities in the world today. Since the announcement of his death by his brother, the President of Cuba, Rahul Castro, like other sharing through social media the Facebook which is owned by billions of unique users who are selling their personal life for nothing, has come under the Castroism rain. Most of them were based on what they have heard from someone else and it’s highly unlikely that one would find anyone who would have a relative and comprehensive viewpoint of the people in Cuba today. Why should people in this nation don’t matter while a handful of leaders who controlled the island dominated all attention of wider world?

Today, the most important question is to take Castro out of this superficial worshiping propaganda machinery and dig into the people’s history to understand what really went wrong in this nation. Castro has accomplished his mission much earlier under severer difficulties just because of the thoughts and needs of majority were sacrificed for Castro.  This blind love kept the Castro’s administration going indefinitely and it handed over the power to the leader to decide the ultimate. At the same time, undemocratic despicable attempts and brutal embargo to overthrow Castro by the United States strengthened Castro while giving him legitimacy to suppress the dissidents and the general public. As a result, many more prisons were constructed, and the local spy agencies systematically suppressed the civil liberties of society in that part of the world. The abuse so much that Castro himself admitted that the system (model) he had developed was no longer working even in Cuba. This is the nucleus of the system that would deconstruct Castroism.

But, we made the same mistakes over and over again in attempting to deconstruct those who were larger than life personalities. Right after the death of most leftist icons their credits were turned into a blind credence by their followers than making use of their contribution to re-design the political formula to understand what needed to be done to save the positive and prevent the negative. Modern day resistance against systemic crimes in ruling structures will not succeed without the total destruction and elimination of the old pattern of credence.

A new era has begun much earlier than anyone thought. Our yesteryear heroes have left after taking and rendering some meaning to life. But, we seem to be already late to constellate and consolidate to determine who can resist future oppression except for nothing more than pleasure. Castro fought guerrilla warfare, but present oppressor has to calculate systematic ways of eliminating privacy, climate change, nuclear arsenal and much more.

To successfully face the real challenges in the post-Castro era one needs to look into Huxley’s significant understanding of social control than the Orwellian theory of a boot stamping on a human face.