Strangely enough, it was I (an American) who informed my Cuban-born husband of Fidel’s death, not the other way around. Tears sprang to my eyes the moment I heard, and my husband was surprised at the depth of my reaction.
Eight years before, I had also been the messenger for a much more tragic event — the sudden death of my husband’s father, just eight months after he had emigrated to the United States. My father-in-law was a staunch Communist and “Fidelista” until the end of this life. While my husband holds more nuanced, often critical views of the government, I can see in him the emotional legacy of both Fidel and his father, particularly in his deep well of national pride and defensiveness upon hearing the Revolution critiqued, both by yuma (foreigners) and his Cuban compadres. Sometimes when we fight, he accuses me of being an “imperialist” American wanting to impose my desires onto a less powerful victim. Talk about the personal being political.
My tears surprised me, too. I’m not your run-of-the-mill lefty apologist for the Castro regime. Since 2003, I’ve traveled to the island 11 times, including a 10-month residence in 2006–2007. While I undoubtedly held romanticized views of the Revolution before going to Cuba, all of my preconceived notions were gradually shed while conducting fieldwork across the island, and while embarking on a relationship with a Cuban who would eventually become my husband.
I won’t pretend that I haven’t felt a sort of cultural cachet since I began to know the vibrant, intoxicating, endlessly frustrating, contradictory place that is post-Revolutionary Cuba. After all, I had in-depth cultural knowledge of a place that few Americans had experienced first-hand, but that many admired — if only for giving the middle finger to American hegemony for so many decades.
At the same time, I have constantly attempted to explain the contradictions of Cuba to friends, colleagues, and family members — that it’s not a socialist paradise, that since the Special Period (the period of economic crisis in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union) most Cubans face a precarious situation, wondering how they will feed their family on meager state salaries, when inflation on food products has skyrocketed and many things are sold in a currency worth 25 times that of their national currency.
As any Cuba scholar could tell you, the Revolution cannot be discussed as one big block of 60+ years; at the very least it must be divided into two periods, the first three decades and the post-Soviet era. My husband always talks about the Cuba of his youth, before the Special Period, when food and resources were plentiful and even people earning 100 pesos a month (currently the equivalent of about $4 USD) could afford to eat out and vacation at state-run resorts.
One of my most oft-repeated rebuttals to people who say that they want to travel to Cuba before Fidel dies or “before Cuba changes” has always been that it’s too late, because Cuba has been changing for a quarter century already.
By the time of my first trip in 2003, the fall of Soviet-style socialism had already resulted in drastic changes. Cuba had already restructured the economy to welcome foreign investment and tourism, as the government viewed these measures as the only way to continue to subsidize food, health care, and education for all citizens.
The post-Soviet era has been incredibly problematic, and difficult for Revolution supporters to defend. From tourist apartheid and the treatment of Cubans as second-class citizens in their own country, to the re-exacerbation of income inequality in the wake of the establishment of a dual currency, the socialist ideologies of solidarity, self-sacrifice, egalitarianism, and the negation of materialist consumption have all been eroded.
TThis is all to say that I have profoundly mixed feelings about Fidel and the Revolution he built. Unfortunately, the polarized rhetoric surrounding Cuba in the United States, which I believe was beginning to dissipate under Obama, has returned with a vengeance as people weigh in on Fidel’s legacy. The celebrations in Miami were to be expected, of course. However, there has also been a hyperbolic demonization of Fidel on social media, likening him to Hitler, and a complete myopia by anti-Castro fanatics who highlight all of the repressive elements of the Revolution while ignoring its gains.
One of my pet peeves is the ubiquitous trend in American journalism of painting Cuba as a country that has been in stasis for the past six decades. I’m referring to headlines stating, “now that Obama has reestablished diplomatic relations,” or “now that Fidel has passed,” Cuba can finally move on.
If there is anything Cuba scholars can agree on, it’s that the stereotype of Cuba as cultural artifact is patently false.
Notwithstanding the still-running 1950s Chevys and crumbling architecture, Cuba has been in a state of flux since the Revolution: from the huge societal changes in the 1960s (mass emigration by wealthy, white Cubans, the nationalization of all industries and sectors, public and residential desegregation), to the interventions in African liberation struggles in the 1970s, to the economic crisis and deprivation in the early 1990s, to the transfer of power from Fidel to Raúl in 2006 (which ushered in a more decentralized economy and greater reliance on private entrepreneurship), and finally to the post-normalization period of the last two years. This is to say nothing of the constant innovation within Cuban culture.
And yet, even despite the fact that Fidel has not been a major political figure for a decade, his death still feels momentous. This is not, I believe, because it will usher in wholesale change; the economic system — if not the political structure — has been shifting for decades, morphing into a hybrid form of socialism that coexists with elements of market-oriented capitalism.
Rather, it seems to me that Fidel’s passing symbolizes the death of a particular brand of anti-imperialism, of anti-colonial struggle. Countless American presidents underestimated the power and appeal of Fidel’s rhetoric of self-determination and independence by any means necessary.
This was not empty rhetoric — Fidel put boots on the ground in Angola, the Congo, Namibia, and elsewhere, often against the wishes of the Soviet Union. This is what Fidel’s legacy means to me.
NNo one will argue that the means Fidel’s regime employed were democratic, but I believe many were in the service of a greater good — to advance social and economic equality and national liberation struggles. He did not act, I believe, out of an insatiable appetite for power, as many Miami Cuban exiles tell it.
I do not endorse many of the tactics of the Revolution, but I understand the intentions behind them. For example, I don’t think the Revolution silenced Afro-Cuban activists because Fidel thought their cause unworthy or unnecessary; it did so because it feared the divisiveness of identity politics and felt that only a united front would allow Cuba to resist American hegemony. The Revolution mistakenly believed that race was reducible to class, and that white supremacy did not have to be addressed and dismantled independent of class struggle.
Some argue that the Revolution’s well-known commitment to internationalism was wholly self-serving (e.g., Fidel intervened into African liberation struggles in order to stick it to the U.S. and South Africa, and to spread communism). However, how does that view square with the humanitarian reach of Cuban doctors, who tend to be the first on the scene in disaster-stricken areas, from Haiti to Liberia — and, if the U.S. had accepted their offer of help, New Orleans? That the ELAM (Latin American School of Medicine) provides free medical schooling to aspiring international doctors not only from all over Africa and the Caribbean, but from the stinking rich United States? That Cuba flies in patients from all over Latin America and the Caribbean to undergo expensive surgery?
These humanitarian efforts take tremendous resources and sacrifices from the Cuban people. Is this all for the purposes of garnering international praise and showing up the United States? And even if it is, so what?
The end result has been independence for Angola and other African nations, free education for citizens of the Global South, and tangible medical assistance in the face of devastation. In the end, do the Revolution’s intentions matter when its actions advanced global equality and third-world sovereignty, and when it responds more quickly than rich countries to the needs of devastated communities?
FFidel’s most oft-quoted phrase was, “History will absolve me.” I truly believe this will come to pass. The evidence is in the reactions of world leaders across the globe — particularly in Africa and Latin America, where Cuba has had the greatest humanitarian impact. To these leaders, Fidel was a faithful friend and ally who believed in and fought for self-determination for all colonized peoples. And, despite the anti-Castro slant of American media coverage and the narrow-minded focus on the rejoicing of the Miami Cuban community, many Cubans remain loyal to Fidel and his ideals.
Notwithstanding the struggles of daily life on the island, and the diversity of political opinions, Cubans are almost unanimous in their support of the Revolution’s most fundamental goals of providing nutrition, health care, and education to all citizens. In this, Fidel succeeded.
It is impossible for people who have never spent considerable time on the island to understand how embedded into Cuban society is the Revolution’s community health care infrastructure, and what a relief it is to be able to access medical care so easily. My family has traveled to Cuba twice with my four-year-old son, and both times he has needed medical attention. The first stop for getting that care? Knocking on our neighbor’s door. There are two doctors (both women, I might add) who live on my mother-in-law’s block in Santiago, and who are available at all times for a quick consult. On our first trip my son came down with a nasty rash — we saw a primary care doctor, who then sent us to a specialist (via a free ambulance ride), all in one afternoon for a grand total of $35 (it would have been free if my son and I had been Cuban citizens).
This, too, is Fidel’s legacy. And this is what leads me to say not “burn in hell,” but que descanse en poder, rest in power.
