“You are still an incorrigible dreamer,” Ignacio Ramonet commented to him inquisitively, almost at the end of that exceptional book that is One Hundred Hours with Fidel, and the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution responded with a serenity and wisdom that make one think he was forewarned.

“Dreamers do not exist. This from a dreamer who has had the privilege of seeing realities that he was not even capable of dreaming,” he told him in proof that he did not see himself as a some type of Quixote, although in reality his life shows that dreams lived inside him and he was a permanent defender of the revolutionary utopia.

In another moment of the long conversations held between the Spanish professor and journalist and the Commander in Chief, in early 2003 and mid-2005, Ramonet invites him to confront his possible dissatisfaction, as a revolutionary after all.  

-Do you see your dreams fulfilled when you left for the assault on Moncada?

-I can say now, 46 years after the triumph and more than 50 years after the Moncada, that what we achieved is far beyond the dreams we could have conceived then, and we were dreamers at the beginning… Although dreams were not his main source of creation, his life was a perennial struggle to achieve the impossible and nothing made him as happy as seeing projects of social benefit materialize.

Even the very act of having decided to take by force the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks, on July 26, 1953, was a great sign of optimism and then a demonstration of how to turn adversity into victory, something that would later define the future path of the revolutionary process.

As he did so many times afterwards, Fidel fulfilled his commitment to the people contained in La Historia me absolverá (History will absolve me), “that deep-rooted document… a programmatic manifesto, an act of accusation and denunciation, a plea of legal, moral, philosophical and political justification of the revolutionary struggle against tyranny.”

His chimerical dream was to sow health and education, in a small sovereign country, with very few resources, that moved by humanitarian force and solidarity has always bet on noble aspirations, and ideals of social justice and equity.

This is the spirit that has characterized the Cuban Revolution for more than six decades, of which Fidel was the inspiration and charismatic leader, according to his closest compatriots and friends from other latitudes.

This is evidenced by the fact that from its very origins, the Revolution set goals even greater than its capabilities, knowing that when fighting for a more humane and just Homeland, all obstacles are overcome and difficulties are removed.

To cite just a few examples, and as part of the great cultural work initiated with the triumph of January 1st, the victory against illiteracy, in which some 100,000 volunteers taught more than 700,000 Cubans to read and write, as well as the training of thousands of doctors after the emigration of half of Cuba’s health professionals in 1959.

Or the unusual impulse to sports as a right of the people, which in a short time produced the first Olympic and world champions that put Cuba at the forefront of the area in that aspect; or the construction of schools in the countryside and the creation of the Manuel Ascunce Domenech Pedagogical Brigade, to promote the training of teachers in order to ensure the continuity of studies.

The nation, despite the incessant harassment from the United States and its hostile blockade, soon achieved unquestionable progress in human development: it outlawed racism, fought early for the emancipation of women, eradicated illiteracy, drastically reduced infant mortality, raised the general cultural level, as recognized by politicians and international organizations.

And one day, when the socialist bloc collapsed and the Soviet Union fell, when the situation could not have been more difficult, aggravated by the omnipresent blockade, the country gave greater impetus to medical research and promoted greater development for the scientific community.

More recently, in the midst of an economic panorama fraught with difficulties, the country continues to defend a national project in which social justice and the inclusion of citizens in its development are paramount.

And in this, undoubtedly, we are inspired by the anti-imperialist legacy of the National Hero José Martí and the extraordinary example of Fidel.

Placing science at the forefront was also what the current leadership of the country did in the face of the scourge of COVID-19 and in spite of the intensification of the criminal blockade.

The decision was to produce vaccines against the disease, not for money, but to make the difference between life and death. Cuba developed and produced the first anti-COVID vaccine in Latin America, and was the first country to immunize its pediatric population between two and 18 years of age.

The anti COVDI-19 vaccines Abdala, Soberana 01, Soberana 02, Soberana Plus and Mambisa are the fruit of the intelligence, dedication and spirit of solidarity of Cubans, and illustrate the inexhaustible capacity of a people to dream, sometimes in the harshest conditions, amid great economic difficulties, food shortages, harshness of daily life, galloping inflation and even under the effects of bureaucracy and our own shortcomings and mistakes.

It also explains to some extent why Cuba, despite all that, continues to be an important reference for millions of excluded people on the planet, and helps to better understand Fidel’s answer when Ignacio Ramonet asked him, “Do you see the future of Cuban society with optimism?”

“We are optimistic, we know what destiny we can have, a very hard destiny, but very heroic and very glorious. This people will never be defeated… Every time I talk about what we have done, I express shame for not having done more.”

When asked by Nicaraguan Comandante Tomás Borges if it was worth continuing to dream of a better world, he replied, “We have no alternative but to dream, to continue dreaming, and to dream, moreover, with the hope that that better world has to be a reality, and it will be a reality if we fight for it.”

Translated by ESTI

Continue reading Cuba continues to be an important guidance for millions of the planet’s excluded →

Loyalty everywhere
No monuments are needed for Fidel. He is on every corner, and in every street, and in the people, in their pains and joys, in the best of us, in criticizing mistakes, and in what makes us proud and sustains us. He who should live, he lives

Author: Yeilen Delgado Calvo | nacional@granma.cu

August 12, 2022 23:08:38

Fidel Castro Ruz Center
Photo: Ismael Batista Ramírez
In The office of the spoken word , a shocking chronicle written in 1987, Gabriel García Márquez masterfully describes a Fidel seen from the admiration and the intimacy of friendship.

That text ends with a short story: «One night, while slowly spooning a vanilla ice cream, I saw him so overwhelmed by the weight of so many foreign destinies, so far from himself, that for an instant he seemed different from the one I had always been. So I asked him what he wanted to do most in this world, and he immediately replied: “Stand on a corner” ».

In those few lines is the testimony of the sensitivity of a man who to his contemporaries always seemed titanic; and so it will also happen to those who shelter under his legacy in the future.

However, the uniqueness of Fidel’s leadership was precisely in that humanity, that desire to be one more among the people and, nevertheless, accept the moral imperative of making a Revolution and sustaining it against a powerful and implacable enemy.

He captivated, and still does, because he was exceptional in his pedagogical way of explaining the challenges to the people; for his ability to understand national and international complexities (and even those of men and women), in such an illustrious way that it seemed like divinatory art; for the ability to learn at insane rates, and process that data sometimes better than those understood.

But if the people ignored the appointments and only baptized him Fidel, if he offered himself over and over again “for whatever,” it was due not only to the marvelous reality of his moral and intellectual stature, but to the unprecedented and mythical nature of his figure, but also that he recognized himself in it.

Like Martí, deep roots of the national are synthesized in Fidel, in his life and work: love for others to the point of detachment; stubbornness against adversity; the fierceness against those who covet the Homeland; in short, the Cubanness, a concept so deep and difficult to summarize, although so easily identifiable.

Fidel could never, after throwing himself into the arms of the Island and its destiny, be that normal man who stops at a corner to observe from anonymity. Others were the demands of his missions. Whenever he was in public, his presence soothed and inflamed.

He did not want to be glorified, perhaps because he knew that the best way for ideas to endure and triumph is for them to be planted, reborn and renewed in the souls of generations.

No monuments are needed for Fidel. He is on every corner, and in every street, and in the people, in their pains and joys, in the best of us, in criticizing mistakes, and in what makes us proud and sustains us. He who should live, he lives. Fidel is everywhere.

In the country’s every heartbeat
On Fidel’s 95th birthday, in a 2021 full of challenges, a pandemic and a criminal blockade, the Comandante en jefe returns “on battle footing,” in this great struggle for life

Author: Elson Concepción Pérez | internet@granma.cu
august 13, 2021 10:08:20

Photo: Granma Archives
Fidel is always present, with his example, with his ideas and actions, in the country’s every heartbeat. In times of adversity and of times of victory.

Now, on his 95th birthday, in a 2021 full of challenges, a pandemic and a criminal blockade, the Comandante en jefe returns “on battle footing,” in this great struggle for life, guiding the generation of continuity, correcting the course of the work we are constructing.

From the sacred boulder, where his physical remains rest, he accompanies his brothers and sisters in combat, in the Sierra and on the plains, and his younger followers, who apply his teachings, offering, first and foremost, his example of always being close to the people, listening to them, convoking them, sharing the truth, building confidence in victory.

The Comandante of ideas and action is the Fidel Cubans know, recognized and respected around the world.

As fate would have it, his 95th birthday coincides with the most terrible pandemic seen in centuries. During this difficult journey for Cuba, Fidel, as always, has been present, every day, every hour – a light.

Fidel foresaw these times. He was the architect of a scientific infrastructure that today provides an urgently needed response. Cuba, without the slightest self-congratulatory rhetoric, is the only country in the Third World that has been able to conceive and develop five candidate vaccines – one already a recognized vaccine – to immunize the entire country this year and share with other peoples.

His presence is a living force in every testimony of a grateful Cuban, from the campesino in the Sierra Maestra, vaccinated with Abdala very close to his land, who exclaimed on television, “Thank you Fidel,” to the parents of a small girl in Camagüey, who expressed similar words when their daughter became one of the first children to receive a dose of the immunogen, as part of clinical trials in the pediatric age group, a study still pending in almost all countries producing vaccines.

Fidel understood, like few others, the intricacies of how a poor, blockaded country, with little industrial development and a legacy of colonial backwardness, would be able to undertake one of its most colossal battles: to become a country of science.

He not only internalized and helped others understand the need to prioritize the training of men and women who, perhaps illiterate in 1959, could be the seeds watered during the Literacy Campaign, whose children and grandchildren, with new schools and fabulous teachers, would learn that only with education could the Cuban nation become the country imagined in the Moncada Program.

When Fidel said, “The first thing we must save is culture,” he synthesized in this expression how much culture lies within education, science, humanism, solidarity.

Once the first scientists were trained, the Comandante en jefe went for more: constructing scientific research and development poles, with modern facilities and state-of-the-art technology, with laboratories and industrial plants to produce drugs, vaccines and even equipment manufactured only in the so-called First World, denied to Cuba on orders from imperialism.

Well before the pandemic had spread to our archipelago, the continuators of his work, the hundreds and thousands of graduates from our universities, were charged with developing plans and protocols to confront the virus, without abandoning the other battles of a nation that is determined – by Fidel’s own mandate – to “change everything that must be changed,” to be better.

A number of expressions of this gratitude were also heard recently from the other side of the world, when in faraway Tokyo, our Olympic champions dedicated their medals to the memory of the Comandante en jefe, recognizing him as the driving force behind our current sports development. He was remembered, euphoric and proud, when, after each victory, Party First Secretary and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, personally called the medal winners, often during the dawn hours in Cuba, and congratulated them on behalf of our people, just as the leader of the Revolution did.

There will be no other commitment to this Fidel than that of defending and perfecting the great work he bequeathed to us.

As difficult as it may be, this 2021 will continue to be another year with Fidel, a year of resistance and victory. His example, today and always, remains and summons us.

Photo: Juvenal Balán

Fidel: A necessary presence
On the fourth anniversary of the Comandante en jefe’s physical disappearance, November 25, his work, example, and words as alive as ever, “We have shown that human beings can and must be better. We demonstrate the value of conscience and ethics. We offer lives.”
This last year we have seen you riding, as an invincible warrior, into combat against an epidemic, the consequences of which you anticipated, with your vision of future, when you filled the island with doctors and research centers to confront – with science – the many diseases that would appear over time.

You knew that it would be poor countries that would be the most affected and made much-needed solidarity a fundamental banner of the Revolution, unfortunately little practiced where selfishness and greed prevail under the name of neo-liberalism.

Although you left for another dimension, you are leading the current battles, from the depths of a rock extracted from the mountains of your Sierra Maestra. We confirm how necessary you are – perhaps indispensable.

But the current year of 2020, four years after we accompanied you to immortality, has been singular, given the challenges, the battles fought, the action of a people who know you are present, who saw and felt you in every effort undertaken, on every front, in every victory achieved and every adversity faced

I can imagine how you would feel knowing that a doctor or nurse, of those tens of thousands you saw trained, today face, there in the red zone or in the rear of a hospital, doctor’s office or polyclinic, a terrible pandemic that has endangered all of humanity.

What would you say when those who by the thousands departed to confront Covid-19 in other lands around the world, making a reality of that phrase you repeated so many times, “We do not give away what we have left over; we share what we have.”

How present you have been at the Finlay Vaccine Institute, among those who have set out to make your teaching a reality and to produce the candidate vaccines Sovereign 01 and 02, to combat the pandemic not only in Cuba, but making them available to the entire world, to the poorest countries.

How many times have you visited the exemplary Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center, and how many times have you discussed the role of science in the development of our homeland, with workers, doctors, scientists?

You are recalled here and now, within every institution located in the Scientific Pole. Working there are many of those who shook your hand, those who answered your questions, those who accepted the challenge you posed to undertake the necessary work of those who cannot wait, over time and with quality.

When I see the thousands of members of the Henry Reeve Contingent brigades depart and return victorious, I am reminded of the first health professionals organized to offer solidarity abroad.

Today, more than ever, your thoughts are present, as expressed in the constitution of this medical contingent: “We have shown that human beings can and must be better. We demonstrate the value of conscience and ethics. We offer lives.”

I remember the time in May of 2001, when I participated as a journalist in your visit to Algeria, the meetings with leaders and professionals of that nation, who were always grateful for the honor of being the first to receive a Cuban medical brigade, just a few months after that nation achieved its independence.

On May 24, 1963, a group of 58 health professionals departed to Algeria, including 32 doctors, four dentists, 14 nurses and eight technicians who worked in different parts of the country for some 18 months.

Nor can I forget Barbados, when in December 2005, you spoke to Caribbean leaders at the Cuba-CARICOM Summit, and referred to Operation Miracle that had saved the vision of so many in these small countries. You were moved by what leaders like Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, said, who, with tears in his eyes, thanked you for Cuba’s great solidarity with the world’s most needy.

Today, when you are not physically present among us, you continue to be a daily reference that marks a human work of extraordinary magnitude.

This is why, across the Caribbean, you are remembered and venerated, in the countries of Africa, in a grateful Vietnam, in Latin America where Cuban solidarity, our medical and educational missions, and others, have contributed to millions, saving lives, curing disease, and more millions learning to read and write.

Another battle waged this year, one of those in which you always took the lead, was the battle against tropical storms like Eta, with their devastating impact on agricultural, housing, schools and other institutions. We remember the great flood control works you conceived when a hurricane named Flora, October 3, 1963, struck our country, mainly areas in the present provinces of Las Tunas, Holguín, Granma and Camagüey.

What would have become of our island without the dams, the canals, the reservoirs of various sizes throughout the country, which as you would so often explain, store the water needed for human and agricultural use, and most importantly prevent floods, overflowing rivers and other phenomenon that cost human lives and destroy food crops?

During this year’s great battles, like others in previous years, we have had in you, Fidel, an obligatory reference, the example to follow, the lesson that makes every Cuban part of a better present and future for our people.

We can assure you that you are present, Comandante, as is the Revolution you made, which this people continues to carry forward.

Fidel: A necessary presence
On the fourth anniversary of the Comandante en jefe’s physical disappearance, November 25, his work, example, and words as alive as ever, “We have shown that human beings can and must be better. We demonstrate the value of conscience and ethics. We offer lives.”

Elson Concepción Péreznovember 24, 2020 09:11:53