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| Sunday, 21 November 2004 |
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Features |  |
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45th anniversary year of DPL relations between Cuba and Sri Lanka : Castro's code, Cuba's ethos by Dayan Jayatilleka In conversation with Sir Leycester Coltman, the British ambassador to
Cuba (their man in Havana) and Westerner who was closest to No glory lasts over two thousand years, except that of Christ, Julius Caesar and Charlemagne, or a few persons from antiquity I don't worry about history. I ask myself: What is my duty? What should I do? I am not bothered what people will say about me. What has been said already is enough, some good things and some bad things. In the end people have to acknowledge that we have been steadfast, defended our beliefs, our independence, wanted to do justice, and were rebellious. (Leycester Coltman, 2003: Yale, New Haven and London, pp. 321-2). Fidel Castro's moral-ethical code (especially its dimension of discrimination and restraint in the use of violence) is notable due to a cluster of factors. The history of Cuba was filled with violence, its conquest and the several wars for independence. The Cuba in which Castro grew up and practised politics was a violent one. There had been a revolution in 1933, and upheavals in the 1940s. The university milieu was fraught with violence, with groups of former political militants degenerating into armed gangs enjoying state patronage. While fighting the revolution and at the moment of assuming power, he had as competitors several armed organisations. Then there was Castro's own temperament, which was a militant, combative, even violent one. Castro was never a believer in non-violence. Both by instinct and by conviction he favoured hitting back. (Coltman, 2003:24). Almost everything about the man seemed to make him ideally suited to lead such a movement; his penchant for politics, his affinity for the outdoor life and, most importantly, his passion for action, violent action. (John Dorschner & Roberto Fabricio, The Winds of December, New York 1979, p 31). Revolution Finally and most remarkably, the fact that he was a man of war, a man who without any formal military training participated in violent expeditions, assaulted a large army barracks, was imprisoned, released and then returned to the country to launch a guerrilla war, supported armed revolution in Latin America, sent Cuban volunteers to fight on other continents, commended the defence of Cuba against the US supported Bay of Pigs invasion, involved Cuba in two major wars in Africa (Angola and Ethiopia/Somalia), personally immersed himself in the strategy and tactics of major, decisive campaigns in Angola, and repeatedly entertained the possibility of and planned for a military confrontation with the United States, the world's mightiest military power. Perhaps Angola provided the most dramatic example of the extent of Castro's achievement. In the most detailed study of Cuba in Africa, "Conflicting Missions" Piero Gleijeses of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, writes that while all the Cuban soldiers in Angola were volunteers, there was a ban on members of the Central Committee volunteering because their was such a rush to do so. Instead the leadership made the decision. The senior-most party official in Angola, Jorge Risquet had official complaints made against him by his colleagues because he turned up for a meeting with a photograph of himself with African liberation leaders taken in 1965 when he was liaising between Havana, Africa and Che Guevara's mission in the Zaire/Congo. Risquet brought the photograph as evidence of his familiarity with Africa's liberation movements but his comrades protested that he was lobbying. He got the job. Gleijeses writes that Cuban officers troops were paid only their regular salary, and that by the Cuban Government, not the Angolan. He quotes an official South African army history to the effect that the Cubans fought cheerfully until death, and documents in painstaking detail the military defeat of the powerful South Africans at the hands of the Cuban volunteers. Resistance This exemplifies the thermopylae mentality of the Cuban Revolution, and both Fidel Castro and Defence Minister Raul Castro have made repeated reference to the example of the Spartan resistance against Darius massive force, immortalised in Herodotus Histories. But scholars and journalist also report that Cuba's various revolutionary anniversaries, including its national day are celebrated by huge open air all-night parties hosted by Fidel and the leadership, with bands on every street corner. Castro's leadership avoided the Scylla and Charybdis of politics: total lack of scruple as regards means on the one hand, and lack of purposiveness on the other, in gaining, wielding and retaining state power. Examples of the first abound, from the aftermath of the French revolution through that of the Russian, and the Cultural Revolution in China. The Nicaraguan Revolution and the Zapatistas in Mexico provide examples of the latter: the FSLN, humane revolutionaries who hoped to pioneer a model that combined direct and indirect democracy (as envisaged by Rosa Luxemburg), lost state power. The Soviet Communists under Gorbachev provide the classic example of this outcome. The Zapatistas deliberately eschewed the classic focus of politics: the assumption of state power, and limited themselves to opening up an autonomous space at the periphery. Fidel Castro remained relentless focussed on the dispossession of the enemy from state power, and unlike the Sandinistas and Gorbachev, in their different ways, will not gamble with the Revolution's hold on state power. However, he has not practised a doctrine and has maintained a sense of proportionality between (often coercive, violent) means and (revolutionary) ends. Violence A characteristic of revolutionary struggles is the loss of innocence. With the loss of innocence comes the loss of self-control and selectivity in the use of violence. However idealistic they are at the outset, the shock of repression induces a metamorphosis in revolutionary movements. The lesson that is learned from initial failure followed by repression, torture, and extrajudicial execution is that the movement was not harsh enough. The behaviour of the oppressor causes a mirroring in that of the rebellion. It is compounded by the impulse of vengeance. The Cuban revolution under Fidel Castro avoided this process of brutalisation. The horrific torture and arbitrary executions of the July 26 movement after Moncada did not result in a geographic progression in the ruthlessness of the Castro forces. The indiscriminate repression conducted by the Batista forces after the Granma landing and throughout the war, did not result in corresponding conduct on the part of the Rebel army. At no point in the struggle was there a moral equivalence between the regime and that of the revolutionary army. Many revolutionary vanguards, which remain restrained and selective in the struggle for power, lose that restraint in the struggle to retain power, when faced with internal and external foes. In the Cuban case, there were executions in the post revolutionary period with estimates ranging from 5,000 to a high of 15,000 (Dorschner & Fabricio: 1980). However, there was no unleashing of plebeian passions on the defeated enemy, there was no mass terror and no collective punishment of whole social categories in the name of patriotic or class struggle. Castro effected or is the great synthesis. While he was no Savonarola, he did not adhere precisely to Machiavelli either; he was not a Girondin, and was an avowed admirer of Robespierre, but sparing and surgical in his use of the guillotine. In an essay on Machiavelli in his volume Against the Current (1979), Sir Isaiah Berlin argued (to paraphrase) that his great merit was in laying it bare to the bone, making explicit that there were two distinct paradigms, that of Christianity and that of Rome; that of morality and theology on the one hand, and that of politics on the other. One was not intrinsically superior to the other and each was valid within its own force field. However the two were separate, incompatible, and if one wished to succeed in the political domain one had to abandon the theological-ethical outlook. The political practice and relative success of Fidel Castro shows that the distinction is not necessarily a Great Wall, and that a synthesis is possible. Cuba itself represents a synthesis thought impossible: a Sparta, with a Dionysian popular culture. |
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Fidel after
the New York Times Herbert Matthews, Castro musingly disclosed his credo:
Very few people will remember me. Who remembers the dust, unless he was a
saint like the apostle James?
