Former Cuban leader and president, Fidel Castro. Photo: Roberto Chile/AFT/Getty Images.
By Alejandra Garcia – Aug 12, 2024
On August 13, Fidel Castro Ruz (1926-2016) would have turned 98 years old. Today, Resumen Latinoamericano honors the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution with commentaries by those who knew him.
Fidel is best known as a guerrilla leader: the Barbudo, the young man who stormed the Moncada Barracks alongside others who sought radical political change. He is well known for his struggle in the Sierra Maestra to establish a fairer social model for vulnerable Cubans—the majority of the country—establishing a model of the humble and for the humble.
The Fidel that Cuba remembers is the one who achieved victory on January 1st against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who was trampling on the Constitution and leading a bloody hunt against the young people of the July 26th Movement. Fidel was most loved for defending a social project, which was the antithesis of US interests, and was hated for those same reasons.
However, there is a less known of his sensitive side, which was only discovered through testimonies from those closest to him, testimonies that remain engraved in time thanks to articles, interviews, and books. Colombian writer Gabriel García Marquez (1927-2014) never forgot Fidel’s devotion to words, nor his power of seduction:
“Fidel goes and looks for problems wherever they are. He quit smoking to have the moral authority to fight smoking. He likes to prepare cooking recipes with a kind of scientific passion. He keeps himself in excellent physical condition, with several hours of daily gymnastics and frequent swimming. Invincible patience. Iron discipline,” said the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude during an interview.
The Cuban journalist Katiuska Blanco, the most thorough biographer of Fidel’s life, work, and thought, said that it is difficult to capture Fidel’s magnitude. She once said, “I can tell you that Fidel is the most generous man, the most simple and humble person one can imagine. If Fidel were here with us this afternoon, he would ask the simplest of workers anything, because he always considers that he has many things to learn from the humblest.”
Garcia Marquez agreed. “People on the streets call him, ‘Fidel!’ They surround him without risk, they call him by his first name, they argue with him, they contradict him, they complain to him. It is then that one discovers the unusual human being he is that the brightness of his own image does not let us see. This is the Fidel Castro I think I know: a man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, of cautious words and subdued manners, and incapable of conceiving any idea that is not colossal.”
The Commander and friend of many years of struggle, Juan Almeida Bosque (1927 – 2009), also said that “Fidel is extremely pleasant, a self-taught man of science and military art, although he did not study a military career. He is a strategist. And in politics, for me, he is one of the greatest politicians of this century. He is a man of struggle with great sensitivity. He loves beauty and music.”
His enemies say he was a king without a crown and that he confused unity with unanimity. “And his enemies are right about that,” said Uruguayan political scientist Eduardo Galeano.
“But what his enemies do not say is that it was not because of posing for history that he faced the bullets when the Bay of Pigs’ invasion came in 1961, or how he faced hurricanes as an equal, from hurricane to hurricane. They do not mention that he survived 637 attacks against his life or that his contagious energy was decisive in turning a colony into a homeland… and that it was not by a miracle of God that the new homeland could survive 10 presidents of the United States,” Galeano said.
“And they do not say that this revolution, which flourished under duress, is what it could have been and not what it wanted to be,” Galeano concluded. “Nor do they say that the wall between desire and reality became higher and wider thanks to the blockade, which stifled the development of a Cuban-style democracy.”
To think of Fidel is also to evoke the day when his brother, Army General Raúl Castro, laid his remains in the monolith of the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba in December 2016. Solemn silence prevailed during a ceremony of seconds that seemed like hours. The pain of a brother saying goodbye pained all of us who witnessed the moment. Shortly after, Raul said:
“Fidel was the one who taught us that, yes, we can resist, survive, and develop without renouncing the principles or the victories of socialism, that Cuba can be a medical power, that we can help the world, that we can be proud of our achievements. Words are not enough. Fidel is Fidel.”
