(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)
"Querido pueblo de Cuba. Hoy, 25 de noviembre, a las 10:29 horas de la noche falleció el Comandante en Jefe de la Revolución Cubana Fidel Castro Ruz. En cumplimiento a la voluntad expresa del Compañero Fidel, sus restos serán cremados. En las primeras horas de mañana sábado 26, la comisión organizadora de los funerales, brindará a nuestro pueblo una información detallada sobre la organización del Homenaje póstumo que se le tributará al fundador de la Revolución Cubana. ¡Hasta la victoria siempre!" (video here).
It was with substantially these words that Raúl Castro, the current First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party
(PCC), President of the Council of State of Cuba and the President of
the Council of Ministers of Cuba since 2008, announced that the body of his brother, Fidel Castro Ruz, ceased to function (video
here). The announcement was a surprise, though only in that momentary sense of finally hearing what had long been expected. In a sense Fidel Castro had died many years before--only his body lingered. Yet even that body continue to serve as the physical manifestation of those points of conflict, rupture, solidarity and ideology around which so many people, states, enterprises and organizations, had ordered their lives and their relationships to each other. That body served as the physical manifestation of clusters of conceptions, of approaches to the world and to the management of its people, of the concrete manifestations of values around which the world organized its normative structures and applied them, in at time the most brutal ways possible. That, certainly, was the sense of some of us in the Cuban
community--both in Cuba and abroad. It was a sense of liberation long
after its most profound effects had long passed.
And now of course, one is treated to the usual unctuous blandness that provides the self serving reflections of those who speak for the global communities. These reflections tell us more about those who utter them, and their own relationship with the dead, than they do about the object of their speaking. The official U.S. response from our highest elected leaders provides a case in point. Both President and President Elect spoke to the passing, each each statement was more notable for the way it spoke about the men who made them and their relationship to their own agendas (e.g.,
here for the respective statements), than it said much about the confluence of events whose body was even then being prepared for incineration (e.g.,
here). Others exhibited the same self reference (e.g.,
here,
here,
here).
But even as his body is reduced to ash--to be venerated or despised in accordance with one's tastes-- the ideas, developed over half a century and more, appear more alive than ever. "
Las ideas no se matan" (ideas are not killed) (e.g.,
here, and
here). Fidel was fond of weaving this notion in his speeches--derived ultimately from the French Enlightenment through
Domingo Sarmiento, one of the great 19th century Argentine statesmen (e.g.,
here). And they are more alive precisely because they have finally been liberated from the body whose own self interests, histories and lusts served to anchor and diminish their possibilities--for good or ill--in the world.
It is to some of those ideas, now liberated and free to roam as they will, and to assume what form they will, and to be deployed as others might will, that is the object of this post. One cannot condense the dense interweaving of a maturing world view into a short post, but one can mark some of what for me are its most prominent features. These remains of Fidel Castro, are likely to retain their potency and influence in the years to come, especially in developing states (e.g.,
here). It is the fool that would dismiss them and not prepare for their deployment, or fashion them for her own use int he coming years. And yet, perhaps, it is the greater fool that develops insights he is incapable of applying to his own circumstances.
