Requiem for El Jefe.

"History Will Absolve Me" ~Fidel Castro

Last night, Fidel Castro died. As I have said several times since I heard of it (Which was just before midnight as I was checking my phone walking into work...less than half an hour and a half after his death at 22:29 Hours) I feel like I just witnessed the end of a Geologic era. Logically, we all had to see it coming. Dude was 90 years old, after all. Still, I was pretty shocked. I figured that motherfucker might outlive ME.

The people of Cuba, I imagine, are mourning and preparing for his funeral and all that. I've heard that Cuban exiles in South Florida are celebrating and dancing in the streets. From my perspective as a complete and total outsider to the situation, I'd say both responses are equally valid. See, that's the thing with History...you don't just get to consider your view. Castro replaced Fulgencio Batista, your basic right-wing authoritarian shithead Banana Republic dictator, who was a very unjust ruler for pretty much any Cuban who wasn't a wealthy landowner. Fidel, of course, stood up for the little guy but, being a Leftist authoritarian shithead of a Communist dictator...well, he went on to commit his own injustices. I can damned well see both sides of the argument here, because unlike in American politics as they currently stand...both sides have a point. One thing that all agree on, though, is that Fidel made his mark on the world in a pretty big way.

Three words: Cuban Missile Crisis. That alone left a mark, for fuck's sake.

But the real story starts before that...a decade or so, in point of fact.

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and their little band of revolutionaries stood up to the United States of America and its capitalistic interests in Latin America when we damned well needed to be stood up to. I think the average American simply does not think about the crushing poverty, disease, government corruption, and rampant repression that was part of the deal for human beings in Latin America (and in Africa, in fact, in much of the world outside of First World nations) in the 1950's and 1960's when all this stuff was going on. Even today, many poor Americans have a lot compared to poor people (or even middle-class people) in other countries. If you want to understand how somebody like Fidel Castro can be a hero to so many people...you have to understand that. Hell, if you want to understand our own problems, up to and including income inequality which drives so many other political and social problems, you have to understand it. If you think human beings in Bolivia, or Chile, or Cuba, or Peru are any damned different from human beings in the United States...you have another thing coming.

I've always found Che Guevara to be a fascinating figure. For those who don't know, he was an Argentine revolutionary, a Doctor who found his real calling as an insurgent fighter and soldier, a hell of a diplomat and leader...who was an absolute beast as part of a team but who could really suck when left to his own devices, an anti-government revolutionary who became a government official, a crusader for justice who often perpetrated injustices. The contradictions with this dude are endless...

In 1950-1951, Che took time off from medical school to go on a couple of road trips, the second with a friend (Alberto Granado) on his motorcycle...as (naturally) chronicled in Che's book, the Motorcycle Diaries. In that book (which I read when I was in college) Che describes being shocked at the poor working conditions of Chilean copper miners, and his encounter with a persecuted Communist couple in the cold night of the Atacama Desert of Chile...and they were so destitute that they did not even have a blanket to keep warm. Che also wrote about the crushing poverty of rural Peruvian tenant farmers, and the camaraderie of the lepers in the San Pablo leper colony...who he spent several weeks providing medical care to as a volunteer, that being the nominal purpose of the trip in the first place. This is the rest of the world, as it once was. Not just what it was...but what some people want it to go back to.

At the same time, Fidel was a lawyer who was running for office, nominated to represent Havana's poorest districts. He lost, but then founded his own political movement, which eventually attacked the Cuban Army's Moncada Barracks outside of Santiago De Cuba. They lost the resulting battle and Fidel and his troops were rounded up, arrested and put on trial. The trial embarrassed the Army, and ultimately out of 122 defendants, all but 55 were acquitted and of those none would serve their full prison sentences. The quote at the beginning of this essay, is the title of the speech he gave at his trial.

They would go on to fight a war together, defeating the Cuban military and forcing Batista from power, and they would institute land reforms, nationwide literacy programs and various other projects. They would also consolidate power and kill a lot of people. Of course, there's the Cuban Missile Crisis, that was scary according to my Grandfathers. But, Among other things, well after Che's death in Bolivia in 1967, Fidel would send troops to Angola to fight against the efforts of the Apartheid government of South Africa to secure part of Angola as a buffer state to protect South Africa and Namibia from the hostile and mostly (with the exception of Botswana and always-on-the-ropes ally Rhodesia, which was busy losing its own war) Marxist-Aligned Front Line States. Yes, under Castro, Cuba fought against Apartheid. I can (and did, even as a young person in a moderately conservative family) agree with that course of action. It's not just that, though, that tells me the man and his nation are and were worthy of respect. Cuba today has one of the best National Health Service programs in the world. In point of fact the Cubans were instrumental in helping to deal with the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014.

I don't give a damn if you agree with all that, I don't, but I have to admit that Fidel Castro got a lot of shit done. There's a lot more than the list above. Please don't take my word for it, look this stuff up for yourself, that's how we grow as people.

Now, here's where the rubber meets the road. It's like I said when I saw Donald Trump's tweet of “Fidel Castro is dead!” (And yes, he really tweeted this. I went on Twitter and looked.) I had to stop and think and of course Trump represents every single thing about Capitalism that Fidel Castro opposed. As for me, I'm no socialist, hell I'm not even a straight-up liberal and I see this festival of envy, greed, hate, ridiculousness and vulgarity that our capitalistic system has become...and I don't like it, either. Like I said, Donald Trump wouldn't be worthy to hold Fidel's hat while he took a piss.

Income inequality, injustice, Lack of education, lack of employment opportunity, lack of health care, Opiate epidemics, poverty, racism, willful ignorance...and worst of all, indifference on the part of our fellow man...are just as much problems now as they were in the 1950's. Their program may have often sucked, but at least guys like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro stood up and tried to do something...and at least at first, they did so out of a sense of justice. Much has been made of Evangelicals and poor white folks supporting Trump for whatever reasons, racism has a lot to do with it but so does lack of decent jobs and decent health care. Bolivian Catholics prayed for Fidel when his health began to fail, too. They did it for the exact same reason that white Americans backed Trump. Whether he went about it the right way or the wrong way he gave them hope. People who have good lives don't vote for guys like Trump. People who have good lives don't pick up a rifle and line up on the side of guys like Fidel Castro, either. Am I saying that one is right and the other is wrong? No I'm not...not at all. I just think...honestly...that White Americans are going about it the wrong way. Classical/Traditional conservatism is dead, apparently Fascism is a real thing again...and if Trump isn't in on it, well it's safe to say that one hell of a lot of his followers are. Maybe in another ten or twelve or twenty years, we'll have Communists instead. Wouldn't that be ironic? I'm an old-school classical conservative and a Democrat...yet I look like a freaking Leftist nut compared to these alt-right Nazis. Fuck, if that's what we gotta deal with, I'll accept the label of "Comrade" I have weapons and I know how to shoot...

How far-fetched is it, really?

I mean, Fuck, Bernie Sanders damned near won the Democratic nomination. Bernie was around then, Bernie knew about this stuff from the evening news, rather than the history books. Bernie is an actual Socialist. Think about that for a second, will you? We should all, each and every last one of us, look around, pay attention, not just to the revolutionaries of the past but the ones of our present...the DAPL protesters, for one, bear watching. Learn the history, it doesn't always repeat itself, but it often speaks in rhyme. Learn the history and act upon the lessons it teaches us, and as always...FIGHT! 

Maybe history will absolve us, too.