On August 13, 2016, Fidel Castro turned ninety years old. The scale of this personality is truly impressive. Fidel Castro - “the last of the Mohicans”, the only living great revolutionary of the twentieth century. Everything in him is amazing - both the biography itself, and the wonderful vitality and luck, which allowed him to survive as a result of many assassination attempts, and the oratorical gift, and the good health of the “cigar lover”. He is an iconic figure not only for Cuba, but also for the whole of Latin America.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926 in the small village of Biran, Oriente province. Fidel's father, the planter Angel Castro Argis (1875-1956), was a very wealthy person by the standards of the then Cuba. But the Castro family did not belong to a hereditary oligarchy or aristocracy. Angel Castro, a Galician by birth, came to Cuba from Spain. A poor peasant son, he managed to get rich quickly enough and turn into a large planter. Lina Rousse Gonzalez (1903-1963), Fidel's mother, worked most of her life as a cook on the estate of Angel Castro, and only when she gave birth to the owner of the plantation five children, he married her. By the way, both Angel Castro and Lina Gonzalez were illiterate people, like many people from peasant families, but they perfectly understood the importance of knowledge and tried to give their children a decent education. Moreover, it was not only the desire of rich people to provide children with a high social position - the Castro brothers really had great abilities, which, in principle, was confirmed by their whole future life.
In 1941, Fidel Castro entered the prestigious Jesuit College "Bethlehem", and after completing his studies there, in 1945 he became a student at the Faculty of Law at the University of Havana. It was during his student years that the formation of the revolutionary worldview of Fidel Castro began. We will talk about him in our article, since the milestones of the amazing biography of Fidel Castro are more or less known to a wide range of readers, while the majority has a much more vague idea about the ideology that guided the leader of the Cuban revolution.
In his younger years, Fidel Castro did not yet define himself as a communist, but rather a traditional Latin American nationalist. He was most influenced by the views of the Cuban thinker and revolutionary José Martí. Jose Marti's books were desktop for Castro, although during his student years he got acquainted with the works of Lenin, and Stalin, and Trotsky, and other socialist authors. The ideology of revolutionary Cuba is often referred to as Marxism-Leninism, but it is much more correct to speak of “castroism” as a special revolutionary worldview - a product of Latin American political tradition and culture.
Of course, castroism can be classified as one of the subdirections of communism, along with Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and so on, but the roots of castroism lie not so much in the world communist movement, ascending to the Marx International, but in Latin American history rich in revolutions and national liberation struggles. Castroism is actually a very distinctive adaptation of communism to the political and cultural realities of Latin America.
The first and very important component of castroism is Latin American revolutionary nationalism. Its tradition dates back to the era of the struggle of Latin American countries for independence from Spain and appeals to the heroic figure of General Simon Bolivar. The history of Latin America developed in such a way that most Latin American countries had to fight for independence from Spain with arms in hand, but then the independent countries turned into semi-colonies of the United States of America, with corrupt regimes and military dictatorships. For two centuries, the struggle did not stop in Latin America - first against the Spanish colonialists, then against the influence of the "gringos", against local juntas and latifundists. The political and economic sovereignty of Latin American countries is the main goal of Latin American revolutionary nationalism. If we talk about the figures of Latin American nationalism that influenced Castro, then this is Bolivar and, to an even greater extent, Jose Marti, already mentioned above.
Poet and publicist, Jose Marti went down in the history of Cuba and Latin America as a whole as a staunch fighter for the political and economic independence of all Ibero-American countries. An intellectual and creative person, he personally took part in the liberation struggle and died in battle. Jose Martí understood perfectly well where the main threat to the independence of Latin American states came from and called it directly - American imperialism. Jose Marti's ideas are officially enshrined, along with Marxism-Leninism, as the ideological basis of the state in the Cuban Constitution.
The second key component of castroism is voluntarism. In this regard, the political practice of Castroism inherits the "conspiratorial" traditions of the revolutionaries of the 19th and even the 18th centuries. According to Latin American revolutionaries, even a small group of people can change the course of the history of their own state. That is why in the countries of Latin America there have always been a large number of riots and coups, all sorts of rebel groups and groups have been operating. Actually, the activities of Fidel Castro, who initially had a very small detachment under his leadership, is a typical example of such Latin American revolutionary voluntarism.
In Soviet social science, the term "voluntarism" had rather negative content, but no one doubted the heroism of both Castro and his closest associate Ernesto Che Guevara, who then went to Bolivia - also with a very small detachment, at his own peril and risk. Revolutionary heroism is generally characteristic of Latin America, and more broadly, of the political culture of the Roman-speaking countries. What we just don't see here - French Jacobins and Blanquists, Italian Carbonari, Spanish and Latin American revolutionaries. All of them believed in the possibility of a political revolution by the forces of small groups of convinced revolutionaries. Fidel Castro was no exception.
Closely related to voluntarism is "caudillism", which no doubt is also present in the politics of communist Cuba. At the word "caudillo" many will associate with Generalissimo Francisco Franco, with numerous Latin American dictators such as Somoza, Trujillo or Pinochet. However, "caudillism" should be understood primarily as the cult of the leader. The leader is endowed with the qualities of the best and correct person, a role model. Such "leaderism" is generally characteristic of Latin American political culture. Renowned revolutionary leaders, guerrilla commanders in Latin America have always enjoyed great respect. These are Ernesto Che Guevara - the "saint" of the Latin American Revolution, and Simon Bolivar, and Augusto Sandino, and Farabundo Martí. Naturally, Fidel Castro has always been such a revolutionary caudillo.
If we talk about the Castroist theory of revolution, then it has common intersections with Maoism. First, the “world village” and “world city” are contrasted - that is, developing and developed countries. In Latin America, Asia and Africa, the revolutionary struggle is also viewed as a national liberation and anti-imperialist struggle, a struggle against modern colonialism in all its manifestations. It is the “third world” that appears in this case as the main revolutionary avant-garde of our time. Second, like the Maoists, the Castroists sought to rely on the peasantry, whom they saw as the driving force of the revolution. This was primarily due to the fact that the peasantry constituted the overwhelming majority of the population in the countries of Latin America. It was the poor part of the peasantry that was the most disadvantaged social stratum in Latin American countries. Consequently, it was the easiest thing to revolutionize the peasant masses. The national component was also mixed with the struggle of the peasantry - in Latin America, peasants are, as a rule, Indians or mestizos.
At the same time, unlike the Maoists, who nevertheless remained more faithful to Marxist-Leninist principles and argued the need to transfer the revolution from the countryside to the cities and unite the poorest peasantry with the urban proletariat, the Castroists see guerrilla warfare as the main form of resistance. At the same time, partisan detachments are interpreted as a kind of revolutionary elite, vanguard, ideologically influencing the peasantry "from the outside" and revolutionizing it. That is, it turns out that the energy of a small revolutionary avant-garde in the castroist concept turns out to be more important than the self-organization of the masses, including the peasantry.
As for the very figure of the Partisan, then in the castroist (and guevarist) political philosophy, he is endowed with special features. In fact, this is a person who has risen above many worldly passions, went into such a voluntary hermitage in the jungle or mountains, fraught with every second risk to life. Moreover, the followers of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are convinced that only in the conditions of a guerrilla war in the jungle can a truly revolutionary character be formed, which is facilitated by a life full of hardships in isolation from civilization. The ideas of guerrilla warfare in the jungle and the peasant revolution were embraced by many armed rebel organizations in Latin America, as well as Asia and Africa. It is noteworthy that Partizan's existential experience made him a figure standing above party and ideological differences. In the first place were such qualities as personal readiness to fight and sacrifice oneself, courage during the battle, loyalty to comrades in arms, and they were valued much more than the ideological component. Therefore, people of various views could fight in partisan detachments - both Latin American nationalists, and "traditional" communists of the Marxist-Leninist persuasion, and Maoists, and even anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists.
Considering guerrilla warfare as the main method of resistance, Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara relied primarily on their own experience. The revolution in Cuba began precisely in the form of a guerrilla war. The landing in the Sierra Maestra mountains ended unsuccessfully for the revolutionaries, but two groups managed to survive. They went on to separate operations, attacking police posts and patrols. When the revolutionaries proclaimed the distribution of land to the peasants, they enlisted the wide support of the local population and young and not very peasants were drawn into the partisan detachments. Several thousand soldiers of the expeditionary corps sent by Batista to the mountains went over to the side of the partisans. After that, the Batista regime could no longer offer serious resistance to the rebels. A powerful Rebel Army was formed, led by Fidel Castro as commander-in-chief. On January 1, 1959, the Rebel Army entered Havana. The Cuban Revolution has won.
However, the victory of the revolution presented Fidel Castro with tasks that were much more difficult than leading a partisan detachment and even an entire rebel army. It was necessary to establish a peaceful life of the state, to carry out economic reforms, and all these tasks required a completely different experience and even a certain revision of outlooks on life. In the end, Castro came up with the idea of a mass communist party of the "traditional" type. By the way, before coming to power, Fidel Castro did not declare himself precisely as a communist, Marxist-Leninist. Ernesto Che Guevara repeatedly called himself a communist, while Castro, until a certain time, preferred to refrain from identifying with communists. Even American intelligence did not have accurate data on the political convictions of the leader of the Cuban revolution. Fidel Castro announced that Cuba was going over to the socialist path of development after the counter-revolutionaries' attempt to overthrow the revolutionary government of the republic was repulsed in 1961. But only in 1965, the July 26 Movement was transformed into the United Party of the Socialist Revolution of Cuba, and on October 1, 1965, the latter, in turn, was renamed the Communist Party of Cuba.
The modern political situation in Latin America shows that even now those revolutionary anti-imperialist ideas, to which Fidel Castro has remained faithful throughout his life, do not lose their relevance. The United States remains the main enemy of the true economic independence of American countries - just look at Washington's policy towards Venezuela, a country following in the footsteps of Cuba. The US State Department breathes "poison" in relation to Bolivia, where the leftist Evo Morales is in power, in relation to Nicaragua, where the democratic expression of the will of the people again brought Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to power.
The majority of Latin American revolutionaries have never destroyed precisely the popular culture, so were the flesh and blood of the people's politicians. This explains the very interesting phenomenon of the union of communism and Christianity in Latin America. Relations with the church among Latin American revolutionaries remained rather friendly - and this despite the fact that many hierarchs in Latin American countries also played a not very positive role, collaborated with the pro-American oligarchy and dictatorial regimes. Nevertheless, Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader of Cuba, met with the Pope, and there were always many believers in the ranks of the revolutionary organizations that fought in various countries of the continent.
The uniqueness of the Latin American revolutionary tradition lies in the fact that it has formed such ideological concepts that combine the most important ideas for modern mankind - the desire for social justice, the desire for genuine political and economic sovereignty, the desire to preserve the national culture and identity. And Fidel Castro, the Man of the 20th century, did a lot for this.
