translation not yet fully edited
August 25, 2007

The concept of human rights in the thought of Fidel Castro

By Miguel Limia David*

A CubaNews translation.

February 2009

Introduction

A theoretical analysis of the living legacy of Fidel Castro’s thoughts on human rights becomes an extremely important cognitive and ideological prerequisite now that demo-liberal pro-imperialist concepts loom large in our globalized academic and political circles.

Ranking among the top items on Fidel Castro’s organizational agenda are people’s problems, especially worthy of a careful deconstruction these days in light of the dramatic way things have changed in the international arena as a result of socialism’s collapse in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, as it provides keys to help us understand both the Cuban Revolution’s unyielding resistance to the catastrophe and the survival of our socialist project under such historic circumstances despite the intensification of Imperialism’s siege [1] and the impact of neoliberal globalization. Stating a scientifically objective opinion on such a thorny issue without giving rise to heated debates proves quite difficult, if not impossible, since its objective and subjective implications are tightly intertwined with the controversial realities of a Revolution where matters are resolved which are not only –or exclusively– of a domestic nature, but also increasingly consequential to the whole world for reasons by no means related to an alleged messianism or the wish to meet a special historic “fate” intrinsic to this human community.

I am fully aware of and accept these risks, convinced that any effort to help reveal the Revolution’s wealth of ideas without fetishizing its top exponents is an essential task whose importance goes beyond Cuba’s boundaries.

Contemporary socialist thinking is in urgent need of in-depth research into the history of the concrete results achieved after years of revolutionary practice –currently subject to unprecedented historic trials– and the very nature of its subjective premises.

Appraising Fidel Castro’s legacy from a social and humanistic viewpoint is highly complicated: since his historic mission is still on the go and constantly growing, its analysis will inevitably involve the student’s intellect as much as their passion, especially these days when liberalism prevails over individual-society relations and is systematically used by international political bodies as a platform to launch Imperialism’s hegemonic policies against the southern hemisphere and socialism.

Owing to the ontological approach to this view, it has virtually become a “fact” resulting from the speech used by transnational media to “construct” social reality. I must say that somehow this perception also affects Cuba’s social fabric due to the increasingly varied composition of its present-day society, which is more and more open with every passing day and therefore brimming with internal dialectical contradictions. The process is all the more fostered by Imperialism’s implicitly unipolar hegemony over the world’s media and means of production, free to act at its own discretion after the revolutionary forces fell back and the left got entangled in its usual crises.

Critical and constructive, the dialectical potential of Fidel’s thoughts is not at all depleted by the pressing need to construct socialism; rather, he’s found in it a firm handhold to boost a liberating crusade based on ideas totally devoid of any millennium-oriented purposes. Nor is it just a bunch of formulas to be learned by rote and applied uncritically, since they stem from and have a duty towards their practical effects. That’s why those who go about them from a different direction can be expected to meet the same fate of those Lenin berated for “merely repeating, parrot-fashion, words which have been learned by heart but not understood" [2]. Making this point quite clear is pivotal to Cuba’s progress and, in my opinion, it will be even more so as time goes by.

With this analysis I’m just trying to outline a few ideas about an issue which most scholars, excepting perhaps Dr. Fabio Raimundo Torrado [3] –whose works are referenced herein– have kept in the back burner for too long.

I) Social and theoretical assumptions in the fidelista notion of individual-society relations

Fidel Castro’s thoughts on human rights are in line with the conceptions of man, society and State, as well as with the former’s relations with the latter ever since they became part of nineteen century-Cuba’s revolutionary thinking, marked by a constant critical approach to social reality and strong quarrels with various kinds of political opponents with very special world views, as befits a social, nationwide, redeeming revolutionary project that confers dignity on human life. It’s what makes his ideology so different from Locke’s [4].

A major portion, not to say the core, of this concept is found in Fidel’s historic plea History Will Absolve Me, for what was actually at stake in the Moncada trial was "... something more than just a person’s freedom; (…) [it was] a fundamental question of principles... about man’s right to be free (…) and the very foundations of our existence as a civilized, democratic nation." [5]

It’s worth mentioning that the conceptions supporting the Cuban Revolution’s ideology came about and took shape, in principle, under circumstances unlike those which conditioned the work of liberalism’s earliest theoreticians in Great Britain and continental Europe, and had therefore to deal with a different sort of social and human problems and by different means. It’s a well-known fact that the ideological expression of the Cuban people’s concerns sprang from a world view with Catholic and Christian overtones, opposed to scholasticism, fueled by speculation, and founded on the kinship between knowledge and the needs of a newly-formed human community influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment.

It was the origin of a mostly cognitive assessment of –and an active exchange with– the surrounding world based on the aims of a brand-new national historic agent intent on playing such a role. What distinguished this worldy-minded product was the conceptual and historical-practical definition of Cuba’s national identity as opposed to, first, the imperialist metropolis then in the making and, second, the assertion of the new community’s right to conquer independence, social emancipation and individual dignity.

It’s a spiritual product that vindicates the rise of a new factor in international affairs, the bearer of a specific human character –Cubanhood [6]– whose legitimate rights were violated first by Spain and then by the Empire as they imposed, or tried to impose, a regime of servitude upon the island.

A revolutionary project with such traditions, who found its turning point and source of strength to move up to higher stages of development in the 19th century with José Martí’s ideas, stands for the new national community, the homeland and the Cuban character as absolute values, that is, as the ends, of itself valuable, to political revolutionary activity. Likewise, it provides a way to look at and put into practice the social world from an ethical, aesthetic and emotional viewpoint which differs from the picture drawn by capitalistic colonial and neocolonial institutions, as it does so from the outlook of a new community thirsty for sovereignty, realization, unity and independent progress on the objectively conditioned power base brought about by the attempts to find a solution to the social and national problem of the oppressed.

Explicitly and implicitly cognitive, this ideological speech inquires into real historical processes rather than speculate about them, always with a strong grip on empiric social reality and true universal history and inviting reflection on the effective course of social and personal life in order to gain authentic, not presumed, insight into the actions and accomplishments of those who led our last pro-independence war in the 19th century and use it as reference to tailor the world to the cause of the poor.

José Martí piloted the Cuban revolutionaries in their far-reaching efforts to link the concept of national community to that of popular masses or people until they managed to bring them together as one. Thus the said concept became conditional on a profound process of historical redefinition from a racial, ethnic, cultural, and socio-classist viewpoint, given the involved population’s growth and increasing transculturation [7], and people grew aware of –and embraced theories about– a culturally motley ethnographic nation eventually forced to set out to conquer the rights of the oppressed.

In practice, this national project was seen as a matter of popular and personal emancipation historically visible in the struggle against slave trade, slavery, colonialism, racial prejudice, neocolonialism, the exploitation of workers and peasants, sex discrimination, etc., eventually the hallmark of Cuba’s identity.

Irrespective of the epistemological features inherent to the way that Cuban revolutionary ideas developed since the 19th century –not fully covered here– we must point out to this regard that it’s mostly marked by a personal duty and a binding pledge to the community to preserve their independence, social freedom and human dignity.

Marx and Lenin fed Cuban revolutionary ideology with a new world view which let it rebuild itself on the new historic bases created by imperialist domination, gave fresh impetus to its ethical commitment to people’s true concerns, means and doctrines, and offered an improved ideal of rationality, until then unknown, dialectically bonded to social revolutionary projects from the 19th century [8]. By doing so they provided tools to learn more about social reality at home and elsewhere, make a better evaluation of the historical legacy from previous generations and set out on revolutionary changes of a broader practical scope.

Fidel carried on the individual-ennobling doctrine born in the liberation ideas of 19th century-Cuba heralded by José Martí, who concluded –after a thorough analysis of the steps to be taken by the national community to overcome their obstacles to exist and develop– that Cuba had necessarily and objectively to pass by a compatriot-citizen-“reconquered” man dialectics [9].

Fidel did so through Marxism and Martí’s legacy, which he made richer and turned them into the premise of the Revolution started in 1959. Therefore, in his thoughts –substantially and explicitly opposed to all things mechanistic and dogmatic [10]– this doctrine falls within the context of a philosophical concept based on dialectical materialism which deems history and society a human project freely erected on different kinds of objective determinations.

Ergo, his thoughts in this respect are subject to constantly evolving internal and external situations, which also means he’s biased not by the theoretical sources that carved his cultural formation but mostl of all by the nature of the urgent tasks undertaken by the Cuban Revolution from the outset, channeled through forms, ways and means of popular participation aligned with the very constitution of its social subjects. It’s so because his ideas are not academic reflections but theoretical positions with applied political and ideological goals, aimed at replacing the original neocolonial capitalistic society with a new social world despite the U.S. government’s unmoving hostility to such plans. Outside this context, a scientific understanding of the nature, place and scope of these ideas is simply impossible. In Fidel’s view, the fight for individual and collective human rights, with its practical political and economic problems, is not solely Marxism’s goal, but one to be shared by all revolutionary and progressive forces, as required by the need to face the high number of complex challenges posed by the development of a universal normative about this issue with the help of an international public opinion manipulated and controlled by mass media and international bodies operating under Imperialism’s thumb.

He doesn’t expect his thoughts to be the only expression of people’s rights, but the ideas of a member of the world revolutionary movement [11] who has an ecumenical vocation and flatly rejects pro-Western centrism and any pretension along those lines.

His ideas caught on and gained weight during the struggle against neocolonial capitalism of early 20th century-Cuba and Imperialism, and as such they side up with the interests of the masses exploited and oppressed by present-day capitalism and, under today’s circumstances, give Marxism’s portrayal of historic progress additional meaning and a higher dosage of optimism [12] –based not only on die-hard and by no means naïve trust in people’s generic ethical qualities but also on the knowledge gained from active international solidarity with developing countries worldwide [13]– noticeably absent from most turn-of-the-century leftist reflections.

Fidel Castro casts strong doubts on and undermines the premises of Modernism [14], mainly its assumptions on property, the consumption ideal [15] and the way to regulate social relations, both within a national community and the human race as a whole.

In the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in June, 1992, Fidel warned: "(...) a better distribution of wealth and of the technologies available in the world could spare humanity such devastation. Less luxury and waste in a few countries could bring about a reduction of poverty and hunger in a large part of the planet. Let’s put an end to the transfer of lifestyles and consumer habits to the Third World that ruin the environment. Let human life be more rational. Let a just international economic order be implemented. Let science work toward a sustainable development without contamination. Let the ecologic debt be paid and not the foreign debt. Let hunger disappear and not man". [16]

Another view on consumption and development from Fidel Castro’s thoughts revolves around the individual as a real, distinctive human being and his harmonic bond with nature and the environment. He stands to the notion of “development” stated by the very few who claim to be “civilizers” from the “First World" because the question of how we want to keep living in this planet and solve its growingly global problems cannot and must not be answered by preventing the development of "...those who need it most. The truth is that everything that today contributes to underdevelopment and poverty is tantamount to a flagrant attack on the econoly. As a result, tens of millions of men, women and children perish every year in the Third World, far more than in each of the two world wars. Unequal terms of trade, protectionism and the foreign debt are also an assault on the ecology and facilitate the destruction of the environment”. [17]

He insists on the need to define a non-instrumental, basically human notion of consumption that strays from the insane views imposed by developed capitalism. To Fidel, the aim of social development must be the well-being of the individual as the major actor and target of the efforts to that end. [18]

In his Message to the Rio Conference, Fidel talked about the widespread concept of “sustainable development”, so often discussed in reference to ecological problems, and mentioned some of its contradictions and limitations, particularly “…it’s ambiguous character insofar as it identifies today’s social inequalities but fails to recognize the system that caused them". He held that "... any consistent interpretation of sustainable development must start by recognizing that underdevelopment is a consequence of the plundering of the Third World, extended to our time through an international economic order which uses indebtedness, the unjust international division of labor, protectionism and the manipulation of financial flows to exploit the developing countries even more, which paves the way for ecological depredation". [19]

He also challenged the ongoing trend to see sustainable development as a cure-all capable of reconciling "environmental conservation, social equality, economic growth and the market forces", thus denouncing the danger that the “green market” formula poses to the developing countries inasmuch as it’s a neoliberal tool to "favor economic agents interested in giving legal force to the right to cause environmental damage and profiting from such right". [20]

Fidel’s conception of human rights comprises a number of key international and domestic premises about their effective applicability to a social body. The former are discussed further on, whereas the latter are, among others: 1) the existence of social conscientiousness about solidarity, fraternity, comradeship and respect for legitimate differences based on a collective way of production and life as a basic cultural condition to be met from the economic, social, legal, political and spiritual viewpoing; 2) fundamental equality in the distribution of wealth and ownership of the means of production; 3) the individual’s complete integration and participation in society based on national dignity and sovereignty understood as a tool for democratization and anti-hegemonic transformation rather than a means to dismantle international relations.

Fidel’s conception brims with ecumenicism and great ability to grasp a diversity of relevant humanizing and liberating cultural views on this issue. As a doctrine, it’s an integral part of a genuine socialist revolutionary paradigm designed to free the working class, establish a new form of appropriation of social relations and the environment different from and better than the one put forward by Modernism, including the mode of production and consumption put into practice in the former USSR and largely applied to Cuba’s economic and productive mechanisms in the 1970s and 80s [21].

This conception stems from a far-reaching social and personal emancipation project that can be improved on account of its internal logic and its dialectically contradictory link with the reality it tries to transform, and must not therefore be seen as a finished work or a closed-minded strategy. On a historical scale, its crystal-clear doctrines make it obvious that its evolution is hardly on a par with the first stages of the social revolution associated to it, so it remains open to future application and development. It’s based on the global liberating role that the working class –as the avant-garde of the masses exploited by capitalism– it’s called to play under certain historical condtions by virtue of its objective position in this society, which virtually allows it to draw together and capitalize on the forces of progress in a new, qualitatively superior sociality project [22].

II) The ideal of justice. Globalized sovereignty and solidarity

His views on human rights is couched on a concept of social justice that brings together the fate of today’s individual to that of mankind as a whole, for Fidel’s ideas make it clear that in the present circumstances –around the turn of the century– it’s practically impossible to defend and develop both the individual and the national communities [23] without solving mankind’s global problems after the radical change in the national/international correlation to puzzle out any social and personal development problem given the level and character of contemporary globalization [24]. Therefore, he draws a platform to fight for people’s rights in face of both national states and international political bodies.

Consequently, in Fidel Castro’s opinion, today’s ideal of social justice has to include on one hand the struggle to abolish all forms of hegemonic domination over the economic, political and cultural organization and management of the world’s international relations [25], and on the other, the opposition to any environmentally unfriendly activity [26]. Attaining this goal becomes an ethical and political imperative and a “must-do” standard for left-wing and progressive movements worldwide, which turns the defense and vindication of collective rights, and especially people’s sovereignty and right to development, into a fundamental mission for modern-day progressive thinkers if they want to tackle the growing poverty and stand up to the effective and real use of "hard" and "soft" lines imposed by hegemonic imperialist powers –with the U.S. at the head– as they try to centralize international law for their own benefit and bring it to bear in the political arena with a halo of legitimacy. This demands, among other things, a substantial democratization of international politics [27] and a drastic shift in the international economic order and its institutions. [28]

That’s why he recaptures and protects the idea of national sovereignty and the need to foster all-out integration in Latin America [29] and the Third World, at a time when so much is said about the alleged ageing of our nation as a form of human community and the removal of national borders as justified institutions, in order to face up to the global menace of hegemonic imperialisms on the economic, political and ideological-cultural front. Fidel’s remarks about this topic in the South Summit prove to be particularly eloquent. "Our reflections in this Summit were focused on the search for unity, strength, strategies, tactics and ways to coordinate and direct our efforts so that our vital economic rights are recognized. But this Summit also means that we are forced to fight for our dignity, our culture and our right to be treated as equals". [30]

A fundamental political asset in today’s world, sovereignty must be saved if we want to defend the interests of the vast majority of the world population. For this reason, it must come hand in hand with internationalism and not at its expense, as it’s not an index of villagers’ drive or fanatical nationalism, but a way to prevent the Global Village from gobbling up the Real World on behalf of a phony cosmopolitan universality and succeed in restructuring imperialist hegemony after the crash of socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. [31]

His thoughts are aimed at war as a mechanism to control international and domestic relations; it hails dignified, fair peace, and condemns imperialism’s arms race and plundering wars, oppression and occupation. In his speech at the closing of the International Meeting ‘Economics 1998’ held in Havana on July 3 that year, Fidel commented on this regard: "In fact, when one sees that, for example, just in perfecting and developing nuclear weapons, the U.S. spends 5 billion dollars every year; when one reads that it spends 27 billion dollars in espionage and intelligence work every year, and in manufacturing new, modern weapons—known as intelligent weapons—and planes invisible to radars, has millions of men ready for war, hundreds of the most modern warships, lots of aircraft carriers and submarines and bases all over the world, one wonders why and what for. There has to be elaborate forethought for that, a culture of domination and an instinct for appropriation". [32]

He stands by a people’s right to engage in war in order to defend its freedoms and right to peace and peaceful development. In like manner he lashes out at arguments in favor of “preserving peace and order” as a weighty reason to use violence against the people, calling them an excuse of tyrannical governments to maintain regimes of exploitation and crush revolutions which they present as acts of anarchy and chaos. Actually, legitimate peace and order at domestic level can only prosper when there’s social equality and solidarity.

Fidel counters an international political order based on hegemony with the notion of global solidarity [33] or the globalization of solidarity. While in Oporto in October 1998, he said that the above phrase –coined by the Pope– could only be brought to fruition in a globalized world protective toward nature and mankind where the colossal progress of productive forces, science and technology were put at the service of the latter. [34]

The ideal of justice adds to this conception the notion of people’s rights and duties and their accountability to their peers for the exercise of freedom, obligation to guarantee free individual development and full social equality, abolition of all forms of discrimination and social segregation and the required peaceful harmonization of their personal and social interests. Thus he extols equality, fraternity, solidarity and zero gender, sexual or racial discrimination.

Since this political doctrine with pragmatic fallout on human rights sprang from the “working class-bourgeoisie, Cuba-U.S. imperialism, poor countries-rich capitalist countries” conflict, it gives right of way to the gradual solution of these antagonistic contradictions even if, strictly speaking, it pervades other fields of power and “micropowers” existing beyond politics and the realms of the state, inspired as it is by a better understanding than the traditional liberal approach to individual-society relations and capable of providing new ideas to control it, much as they are contingent on the specific manner in which they have been objectively coordinated as the Cuban Revolution developed.

As an interested view of the above relations which has classist and cultural overtones, it fits into the contemporary historical realization of what’s truly universal about this issue, since it pays attention to the interests of the poor and the working class from the Third World and the extent and scope of their opposition to mankind’s global problems.

For this reason, we’re convinced that it’s pointless in this context to challenge the attainment of basic goals through the State and all of society’s political organization with what some call "the refinement of social and psychological life”, since such “refinement” is yet to come true –inasmuch as it has been ineffective– for a “first world” working class deprived of a real emancipating movement that it could use to become a collective subject, avoid spontaneous “dismemberment” and overcome the narrow enclosure of individualism and selfishness that hinders its ability to have its rights acknowledged by the powers that be. Accordingly, a "refinementa" thus achieved would lack its humanistic essence by relinquishing the spirit of solidarity that laid the groundwork for its contradictory, unequal existence.

III) Revolutionary liberating activity and people’s rights

Fidel conceives revolutionary action by the great masses [35] as a source of human rights with historic terms, contents, means, limitations and scopes at all times prone to redefinition as the internal and external circumstances change and the masses’ abilities, skills and sociopsychological constitution evolve on a par with revolutionary action itself, which –in line with its own nature– always makes progress and surpasses the most far-reaching and daring expectations.

The new sociality to be built in the planet must be able to leave behind contemporary capitalism’s overall structural contradictions, which calls for people’s individual liberation not only as citizens and members of a State, but also as persons who are part of a larger empirical group: the international community. It means in itself and of necessity that the ideological and political struggle to carry out this project must bear in mind the topmost aspiration of taking human life to absolute heights and putting all means produced by contemporary human culture at the service of what has been the crucial goal, no longer unfeasible, of mankind’s progressive forces throughout history. [36]

Reaching life’s absolute value is a purpose as yet unfulfilled in the field of sociopractical relations, not an axiom of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary thoughts or a starting point. The real starting point is exactly the opposite, both in and outside Cuba, a scientific truism shushed by the liberal political speech which reveals the epistemological inaccuracy and ethical hypocrisy of an ideological current presently used by imperialism to justify its hegemonic policies and aim its political-judicial human rights doctrine at the South and socialism. A society propped by capitalism’s market law makes a means, not an end, out of human life. That’s what makes it necessary to turn the tables and build a society at once just, economically efficient and sustainable. The process to attain the conditions to turn human life into the true end of social activity in a capitalistic world brimming with diametrical contradictions has to be relativistic at some point, and even erratic, as a result of the violence imposed by regressive forces, which accounts for the heroic nature of revolutionary ideology and man’s historical need to be altruistic, love his peers, sublimate his personal and social interests, and transcend his individuality for the benefit of the community on the basis of a noble, self-sacrificing ideal.

Never is the individual swallowed by this process, nor does he ever lose sight of his pivotal role in this historic process. In like manner, the idea of an alleged absolute ontological contradiction between the individual and society has no more success than the portrayal of the former in disagreement with his peers. On the contrary, they understand each other and come together to overpower any objective alienation.

IV) The issue of freedom

In his paradigmatic grasp of the individual’s relation with society, Fidel Castro assumes individuals as wholesome social subjects whose values must be fully established in the real social dynamics, not as a monad in possession of both the means of production and the goods resulting from their work. All social instruments must be at the service of people rather than placed before them as alien entity of oppression and control, as befits a humanizing vision of the person’s link with his social and natural milieu based on the consideration of real individuals and not on abstract principles that exist outside and in parallel to history and condition real life. Such is revolutionary practice’s guidance system, as well as its virtue and distinguishing feature.

Owing to the above, this conception rules out any abstract interpretation of individual freedom when individuals are seen as owners [37]. Instead, they are considered as a consummate treatable being able to communicate, built upon social and interpersonal relations –based on social ownership of the means of production and their output, solidarity, equality and a system of mutual support where contractual relations depend on such ends– rather than upon the image of society perceived as a network of market relations and their contractually interacting agents. In this context, market and property alike put themselves across as instruments to placed in society’s hands and not at the service of a few. Since the world of objective relations is held to be governed by ethical principles, then its conquest becomes an unequivocal imperative, no matter how difficult its construction may look, because it’s the only one worth being lived on and capable of assuring mankind’s survival and steady development within an increasingly shorter time.

Thus the issue of political and legal freedom can be seen from another angle by no means restricted to the Lockean viewpoint, known to be shared and used by Immanuel Kant to forward the idea of international public law and the often remembered grounds for "perpetual peace" among States expected to make up a “world republic" [38] where "...[men] lend obedience to no external laws except those to which they could have given consent” and “are governed by no will or legal restriction except the law he was entrusted to enact", or "...have a permanent standard to arrange their life, promulgated by the relevant legislative power and common to every member of such society" [39]. It extends instead to other fields and premises in order to make clear and accomplish the conditions that will make it valid to everyone and not just to a privileged few”.

This political stance is found in the ideology of the Cuban Revolution as the culmination of José Martí’s breakup with liberalism in the late 19th century, which sets in relief a major specific difference between a concept of human rights that promotes the political though prevailing in Cuba and the one maintained by imperialism, whose centers of power take advantage of their frequent control over the media, international public opinion and academic circles.

Capitalism’s notion of caprivate property sticks its nose in this conception of the individual’s relation with society as a bond of personal and collective self-respect to tamper with the sense of patriotic community and homeland by truly or potentially alienating the vast majority of the population from their essential means of existence people. As a result, the construction of a real national community entails its enhancement.

The right to ownership is seen through the opposition to the bourgeois concept of private property, which subordinates to its selfish thesis notions like liberty, morality, culture, family and humanity. In order to secure private interests, the homeland surrenders to imperialist domination, families prostitute themselves, freedom is suppressed and “a cruel society is imposed which is divided into exploiters and the exploited, and individuals are enslaved". [40]

The real existence of the national community is at odds with capitalist property as the weaver of society’s fabric and people’s relations with each other and their environment. Socialist revolution turns an imaginary community into an effective one, whereas capitalistic private property turns the community into a double-edged illusion: a group of people sharing a single patrimony and a national specific human physiognomy.

Fidel champions social property over the prime means of production, which belong to the working class and the population at large. This precept assumes, rather than exclude, personal ownership of certain means of living and backs private property among small farmers as a matter of strategic purpose and as long as it’s tied to socialist forms of ownership through multiple ways as a basis for the workers-peasants alliance.

He advocates the principle of collectivism, not against individuality but against the [liberal] bourgeois and pre-bourgeois individualism resulting from a culture –and so obvious in the psychology and viewpoints of some “razor-sharp” types and parasites– handed down to us by our colonial ancestors [41] ) and favorable to a liberating individualization. This collectivism is a weapon to use against capitalism and its attempts to settle down in the country and a brand-new basis to deploy an improved individuality through a process of personalization and multiplication of collective genius.

These ideas are aimed at masking the real distinction between individual status and purpose that occurs within the demo-liberal notion of political and civic rights, as it can undermine society’s division into antagonistic classes with particularly unequal shares of political, and namely state-based, power. For the record, this doesn’t mean it is restricted only to the classist and political plane of the matter, since Fidel also challenges other, nonpolitical forms of power that pave the way for segregation and oppression, particularly at the level of gender and race.

V) The State and the “positive rights”: freedom and equality

It’s on this premise that people’s individual and collective rights are defined, and I mean both the negative and –above all– the positive ones, that is, those of a personal and collective nature which at civic, political, economic, social and cultural level use the State and its social organizations as means to meet various kinds of material and spiritual needs. This is where a key aspect of this ideology lies: the difference between Fidel’s conception of human rights and other variations making the rounds of the world, and not only as an alternative to liberalism. In it we find the notion of the State-civil society unit, the genuinely popular character of the political regime, and the decisive role played in public life by the masses and some specific individuals.

The State has no other purpose than the concrete persons and communities it constitutes. There’s no “reason of State” above the subject of sovereignty or independent from it. Given the State’s duty to, strictly speaking, increasingly enlarge the social substratum of power and deprive it of its “public” trademark, that is, of its character as an organized force cut off from the community, it’s expected to serve the latter and its concrete, living members, not the desires of a minority who has drifted apart from the people. In politics, the link between the ruler and the ruled presupposes the latter’s subjection to the former, based on a complicated social regulation that changes with time and is, in the end, anything but a panacea, mainly if we take into account the historic experience gained throughout years of socialist construction processes in other parts of the world and yet to be sufficiently addressed by left-wing authors.

Highly revealing of the above is the State’s obligation regarding the individual. On November 13, 1964, in a meeting with students of the Technical Institute “Alvaro Reynoso” in Matanzas province, Fidel remarked with great precision: “The Revolution means precisely this guarantee of opportunity to each youth born in this country, the guarantee of education for each youth born in this country; the guarantee of the right to occupy a decent place in our society for all youth born and reared in our country; the right to live in dignity, honorably, decently; the right of each youth to occupy the place that belongs to him because of his qualifications, character, and virtues. This is the Revolution. The Revolution means the creation of these rights for everyone without that former hateful distinction between the rich and poor". [42]

This conception aims therefore at designing institutional social requirements that rid the community and its members of any existential anguish or concern about survival and protect people’s life as an ongoing, necessary and endless condition to constitute a society and establish, for good measure, the vital postulation of any truly free and democratic political system: pervade with creativeness all levels of social life.

This ideology intends precisely to make room in society for a personal life with new meanings by putting to good use the community’s achievements to meet its members’ basic needs. Accordingly, its practical realization eventually –and inevitably– unleashes collective genius and gives individuals a boost, together with multiple, growing and profound challenges to the current social structure and traditional styles of leadership, bearing in mind that such structure and leadership soon start to be outgrown by the new type of social interaction and personalities produced by the process of social and personal emancipation.

Within this frameworkIn, the successful revolutionary exercise of direct and indirect democracy by the people places the individual in the receiving end of rights and obligations laid down by a new State managed by the civil society and bound to return to the said society what previous antagonistic regimes stole from it. In principle, personal and general interests are assumed as coincidental, for the creatively free expression of the former goes through the successful realization of the latter.

Socialist ideology has remained counterproductively silent about the issue of peculiarities and individualization despite warnings dating as back as to the early 20th century following the experience of the October Revolution [43], in my view one of the lines along which these ideas will continue to evolve.

A review of the last 40 years shows that, in political practice, the agreement between personal and collective interests was an inescapable condition to develop free individuality in a country like Cuba post-1959. Personal dignity went of necessity through the emancipation of the masses, offensive though this may sound to the bourgeoisie’s narrow individualism and the “globalized sensibility” of certain intellectuals.

Thus the State gets committed to the substantive functions it must discharge by means of public policies conducive to the necessary conditions for society to be able to warrant each citizen as long, healthy and safe a life as possible, which doesn’t involve the imposition of a single canon of happiness, but the practical creation of living conditions for people less and less estranged from everyday life. In this connection, the State is compelled to see to it that society counts on mechanisms, public policies, jobs for everyone, access to cultural institutions and social protection for all citizens (pensions, social security), who are in turn duty-bound to fulfill their obligations to the community.

The end of any public policy must be the individual, and respect for them the chief social objective and virtually absolute value. In this regard, Fidel Castro’s political conception must be understood not as an instrumental but a human relationship, given that politics is what makes it possible to put instrumental relations at the service of the community and the individual. It’s the reason why politics, as a key field of action, is governed by external criteria.

Fidel’s notion of politics cannot speak the language of autonomous power, but that of a power held in place by moral authority, consensus, public recognition, and the desires, hopes, ways of thinking and will of the masses and concrete individuals. These criteria are first of all of an ethical nature. Politics acts as a sphere of popular participation, which implies the need to provide adequate and historically changeable institutional, normative, procedural and ideological mechanisms and skills required to develop it and improve it.

Fidel’s ideals attempt to overcome the individual-citizen dichotomy and put the State at the service of people who are well up on this condition, never on the basis of segregation on grounds of class, sex, gender, nationality or race. He holds that society must provide “really and absolutely equal opportunities" for a full physical and intellectual development free of any discrimination based on sex, gender, race or economic position. He presents it as an accomplishment of the Revolution and a daily challenge to be dealt with by stages and always on new bases, as the end result will be neither immovable nor final.

His notion supports the view that society must take real dynamic steps to eliminate poverty, prostitution and drug addiction so that man will not alienate himself from social wealth, his body, the community or his goals and norms. I believe this is where the criterion of progressive human rights development lies as a source of humanization at all levels of social life. The driving force of human rights in Fidel’s thoughts stems from the revolutionary masses, vested in their conscientious members and people of goodwill.

The State must provide a setting for society to take shape on bases of equality and nondiscrimination for reasons of race, gender or sexual orientation, which includes equal opportunities and treatment for all citizens, and wherefrom the State is perceived as both a governing and a humanizing, dignifying body in which everyone has their say. Therefore, it must eliminate any mechanism leading to economic, political, social or cultural discrimination as an essential trait visible in its daily performance.

Fidel stresses that antagonistic classist inequality clashes with the workers’ freedom, which makes it plain that equality –whether legal, material or spiritual– and solidarity are the pillars of his concept of political freedom and a guarantee of general access to social wealth and the governmental institutions in charge of meeting the need for personal growth and expression.

To Fidel, equality at economic, social, political, legal and cultural level is the sine qua non of real political freedom and democracy. His vision of society has no other place for the ruler-vs.-ruled relationship: anything else would make it illegitimate and phony. Ergo, this link calls for social configuration and control mechanisms capable of preserving its truly popular and democratic nature. During the “special period” of the early 1990s, however, his opinions met strong opposition regarding their implementation and ideological design.

People’s real political freedom per se –that is, barring any classist, ethnic, sexual, gender-related or racial bias– is deemed a function of social equality understood in its economic-productive, social, political, legal and cultural dimension as a vehicle to guarantee equal opportunities and treatment, only possible through the transformation efforts made by the great masses.

This notion of social equality is not equivalent to egalitarianism as it includes respect for both legitimate inequality and the unequal treatment of what’s legitimately unequal. Still, it seems to set a certain premise for its intervention as soon as the validity of its original design exceeds the Revolution’s initial destructive, critical and defensive mission. Therefore, the matter stands out as one major cornerstone of his ideology’s future progress. In the beginning of the Revolution, Fidel seemed to have kept these nuances away from the public eye, as befits the first stages of a social phenomenon plunged into the pressing tasks of those days. Yet, the subsequent dynamics of the process made it necessary to bring them entirely to light. The initial inequality called for unequal State policy and treatment in order to maintain social equity in the new historical circumstances.

Fidel privileges the purge of major inequalities, mainly those related to class, gender and race, and the provision of equal rights –more access to wealth and the means to produce it, its only caveat the extent of public wealth and the motivational requirements to ensure its steady growth and spread regardless of the current social conditions– which demands different treatments and policies to get over the initial absolute and relative inequalities and alienation of previous regimes of social exploitation and personal subordination.

I must underscore his emphasis on the essential values inherent to a country’s life if real political freedom is desired, namely –as stated before– equality and solidarity and the same economic, social and cultural rights for everyone. The civic character of human dignity demands socioeconomic premises based on equality. Real freedom demands that the fundamental material and spiritual needs be met ("no hunger and no illiteracy") as well as equal treatment, first of all by the State, but also by all forms of social association.

Fidel persists in the idea that democracy is impossible when there’s hunger and illiteracy, and ties true, sincere democracy to socioeconomic rights for and social justice applied to everybody equally: "neither bread without freedom nor freedom without bread." [44]

He believes a true Marxist-Leninist must get involved in real history as if they were the most consistent practical maker of human rights; hence the close link between his notion of this topic and the understanding of socialism, always considered as a great people-led social experiment [45] centered on the individual’s integral vindication and the humanization of public entities as means to create and shore up the required conditions to exercise personal freedom. His viewpoint entails practical results beyond theoretical discussions or simple ideas.

Fidel’s definition of democracy and socialism has to do with a hands-on style of participation in policy- and decision-making. So he argues: "...what is democracy? Democracy means a government by the majority, some said, and it’s true. Democracy, others said, is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. That’s also true. And here governs a majority of the people and by the people." Further on he adds: "...let the people take part in the problems, let the people give their opinions, let the people decide: that’s what democracy and socialism mean..." [46] This way to look at it brings to mind Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the October Revolution. [47]

According to this ideology, the usual individual-State relation must be rebuilt in order to put an end to its natural antagonism or conflict; therefore, any attempt to control it through “negative rights” is improper and unfair, since first of all you need “positive rights” to upgrade and express people’s dignity and their status as society’s and the State’s target outcome.

Fidel Castro’s notion of human rights makes political power available to the masses, and especially to the working class, in order to unleash a far-reaching process of social liberation and personal ennoblement like no other in mankind’s history.

Obviously, the ideological platform of this notion involves not only autonomous individualities but the provision in the social milieu of material, institutional, spiritual, cultural, and other conditions that bring to light its endless, community-oriented capacity to develop.

VI) Socialism and freedom of conscience

Regarding freedom of individual conscience and its historic corollary –older than freedom of worship, its generic formulation– Fidel’s ideology reveals concepts of particular significance to the world today and useful to understand socialism and communism. "...Nowhere is there a provision in socialism or communism or related to the profound social change they entail that intends to interfere with a person’s heart of hearts or deny any human being’s right to their own thoughts and beliefs. We think that is a most intimate matter of a human being (...). That’s intrinsic to socialism and communism and to any revolutionary idea about religious beliefs..." [48]. It’s worth mentioning that since 1959 Fidel tagged the respect to freedom of conscience and of worship as a key element in his democratic view of society. His grasp of democracy has increased as the Cuban Revolution has developed and bred particularly original and creative means, ways, methods and institutions wherefrom the masses can exercise public power. This is a focal point of controversy and confrontation with liberalism given that ideopolitical current’s deep-rooted, dogmatizing and absolutist trend to disregard history and culture in its approach to the model of political organization that prevails in the Western developed capitalist societies.

In 1977 Fidel remarked that the question of freedom of creed and worship "...is a quite critical element of all the rights we describe as human rights..." [49]. And he said so on the grounds that, since socialism’s strategic end is people’s utmost liberty, it can’t exclude the right to practice any kind of religion; on the contrary, it must embrace it as an inalienable right of any individual.

He also referred to the link between religious beliefs and people’s noble ideas and desires against which the Revolution cannot bear grudges, since both intend to do good and fight the scourges that make man suffer. In other words, the agreement between the revolutionary conception of the world and the right to freedom of worship becomes apparent in both currents’ aspiration to pursue good deeds and strive to make people happy.

In line with Cuba’s revolutionary thinking since the 19 thcentury, Fidel supports the institutional separation of the church and the State and opposes the use of religious ceremonies as public counterrevolutionary acts, that is, the intention of turning the church and its cult into an issue of a regressive political nature.

It must be said that Fidel has openly stated to be against thought control and even exposed how the big capitalist media practice such methods. By making a conceptual distinction between “freedom of the press” and “freedom of ownership of the mass media", he holds that the mass media must be owned by the people and go through a radical democratization process. This is at the core of his views on freedom of the press and of speech. He acts decisively against private property over the media, promoting their socialization for the benefit of the community and its members.

His ideas are directed toward the overcoming of spiritual alienation, the promotion of the autonomous character of individual conscience, and the existence of “subjected subjects", that is, controlled by power’s discourse. It’s in this spirit that he has more than once drawn attention to the importance of criticism within the Revolution: "We have said this before: never mind that they’re wrong once or a thousand times: the drawbacks of mistaken criticism are always preferable to the absence of any criticism!" [50].

His advocacy of human rights is highly subversive, as it’s zeroed in on the speech coming from a power that dominates and subdues peoples and individuals. Thus he fights for an alternative, humanizing power which takes on social norms and ideologies as an individual’s independent values in a setting where people’s social structures must be capable of sharing power’s speech and designing their own ideas and sources of knowledge. With this he wrecks any attempt to represent reality in an ideologically authoritarian way [51].

The practical application of this notion in political relations ends of necessity in the dissolution of an axiological and epistemological subject allegedly unique and centered and the question of whether it’s really necessary or legitimate. As a result, it becomes an ongoing systematic challenge to ideological work and social management within the revolutionary process because of its deeply democratic, revolutionary character, opposed to dogma and authoritarianism. Such is the ultimate goal of a social structured transformed and always renewed by revolutionary means.

VII) Unity and indivisibility of the individual/collective rights combination

Fidel’s work teems with in-depth arguments about the indivisibility and interconditioning of individual and collective rights and duties. Human rights are not just a catalogue of civic and political demands and their constitutional safeguards, but their socioeconomic and cultural foundations.

The potential that configures a human being’s dynamic plexus is indivisible, if only because he has to exist materially before he can go into politics, but most of all because his economic, social, political, legal and cultural dimensions can only be split abstractedly, for in real life they are linked to other people and institutions, even if they relate to a single agent.

His stance on rights indicates they’re all part of the process as virtualities to be progressively and systematically improved before they come into effect in social life. Therefore, he assumes the various types of rights as demands to be expressed in the changing social practice like an indissoluble unit and not as successive creations, despite what a prominent group of international law experts usually say.

Central to his ideology is the way he connects the rights of an individual to the collective rights of whole populations, which accounts for the impossibility to realize and venerate these rights in a country if they are not ensured “for all peoples around the world”. This is not simply a categorical imperative of an ethical persuasion, but a completely realistic political conclusion arising from the global character of contemporary capitalism. Such are the foundations of “mankind’s rights” he praises through his thoughts, a notion of people’s rights that brings together individual and social issues at national and international scale in these times of imperialism and neoliberal globalization.

VIII) Against all forms of discrimination

In light of the development of revolutionary activity, Fidel has systematically and comprehensively enriched the social liberation doctrine from the point of view of class, gender and race. He charges at all forms of discrimination against the poor and the black, against women and homosexuals, and blames the socioeconomic bases of classist exploitation as much as he does cultural machismo and its far-ranging alienating effect on individuals and communities and the roots and signs of racial prejudice and discrimination. His thoughts explicitly and provenly cover gender, race and homosexuality issues [52].

I must say that by machismo we mean a certain discriminatory attitude against sexual behavior that presupposes any interaction between men and women as based on the latter’s subordination to and domination by the former, who are free to humiliate and use their feminine counterpart as they please: males are in power and females comply.

From that perspective, sex is “read” as a sort of "action-passion” exercise that qualifies all social relations. Since a woman is the “passive” entity who gets “penetrated”, she doesn’t match up to the “man” –that is, the male– and can’t enjoy his "privileges" as a result. Thus she grows apart from him, seeing her human dignity as a female unrecognized or diminished. As a rule, her social appearances outstep the boundaries of interpersonal and family relations to become manifest in all spheres of society, from work and politics to spiritual life and language, even in certain institutions. This feature is typical of cultures with a patriarchal slant, where social thinking always interprets social and even political relations from the point of view of gender.

Fidel sides up openly with the political promotion of women in society and rails at both the State’s and the Party’s revolutionary policies on gender and Cuba’s traditional culture for being sexist and discriminatory against women and homosexuals. He calls the struggle for women’s rights one of the hardest ever fought by the Revolution, as it involves the alteration of deeply rooted political stereotypes and the establishment of social institutions and conditions needed to make it possible. Consequently, he carefully examines and explains specific ways to materialize women’s rights in practice, using the Federation of Cuban Women as an organizational tool to achieve such purpose with support from the Communist Party and the State. To him, fulfilling this goal is the mission of every political institution and the social system as a whole.

Once society gets rid of its main class differences, other no less important changes are required for the sake of women’s emancipation, to wit, new jobs, day-care centers, school lunch programs, legal standards like the Family and the Labor Codes, ideological modifications to the struggle against machismo in its different expressions, administrative policies to promote women to political and managerial positions, etc. It’s a complicated and lengthy process.

Furthermore, he holds the Revolution’s work cannot come to fruition without fully eliminating race-based inequality, so he lashes at the social mechanisms of the neocolonial society that caused and reproduced such evil, for instance, restrictive policies in workplaces and public resorts, a problem he solves from the outset with proper employment, educational and legislation programs.

At this stage Fidel makes a distinction between two major types of racial discrimination: in the workplace and in cultural or “recreational” environments. Everybody knows that racial discrimination is not an outgrowth of the Cuban Revolution, but a remnant of the past that it has countered by any means whatsoever to tear it out by its roots from its grip on society.

Mankind’s social and personal liberation cannot be solved for good with just classist and political emancipation; in fact, that would be merely a first step, if we go by what Marx said about reading socialism and communism as a new way for the real social subjects to get hold of ther social relations.

The sources of people’s subordination, segregation and stigmatization are not restricted to the areas addressed by the Socialist Revolution’s first actions, what with a culture it inherited from a past built on slave trade up until the mid-19th century and its resulting color-conscious social strata. There were other complementary, multisecular sources at social, economic, psychological, political, ideological, familial, institutional and cultural level also in dire need of education in order to eliminate racism’s anti-human effects on private and public life.

It’s worth pointing out that, at first, Cuban revolutionary ideology assumed its antidiscrimination and social justice measures would wipe this scourge off the objective reality, so it withdrew social psychology from use, calling it a remnant of the past, and for a long time failed to come up with adequate methods to pinpoint and constrain racism in the new historical circumstances or grasp the scale of its influence and likely impact on private and public life to prevent its subsequent evolution with systematic and conscientious action. With the moves to transform the internal and external conditions of development as its only obstacle, its evolution became largely dependent on spontaneity.

The question of racial equality has increasingly moved from the private to the public sphere as a result of the revolutionary transformations themselves, which changed the nature of people’s daily life and even the type of personality that prevailed in the population. Intolerance, as well as collective sensibility, has gradually grown in face of these unjustifiable inequalities, a fact patently obvious during the "special period" Cuba experienced in the 1990s, when various endogenous and exogenous factors rubbed off on material life and had negative repercussions on race relations and the black population’s ability to integrate into society.

New fields of social relations are pressed for change of inequalities yet to be eliminated or still emerging in the way people of different skin color treat one another, which has fallout on their everyday life and social spirituality. This is a very sensitive field given its past cultural charge and the forms of oppression it knew for centuries, not to mention its subtle nature. However, its delimitation is of great import to create conditions conducive to a regulatory strategy based on unity that can stay clear of any new form of segregation not in accord with the liberating project started in the late 19th century. To this end, Fidel’s thoughts are of the utmost importance.

For its very nature, this issue clearly exposes the link between the assurance that human rights are respected in a country or in the whole world. Fidel’s conception of this matter boasts a vital edge of international consequence, one which paved the way for the condemnation of apartheid and the active struggle to eradicate it.

Final considerations

What I have stated to this point makes it perfectly plain why conquering full human dignity as the ultimate goal of transformational revolutionary action is a topmost purpose in Fidel Castro’s thoughts. Note that it’s not just any “dignity”, but precisely the kind that makes it society’s uppermost end to change a real individual entirely, and not just partially as a citizen. His intention involves perforce making revolutionary changes to confer real dignity on the workers and the oppressed in traditional capitalism’s classist societies.

The notion of legitimate power in Fidel’s ideology is permanently connected with the vindication of the rights of the oppressed, their genuine popular character, and the decisive and ever increasing participation of the masses, particularly the “poor”, in power and policy-making in order to eliminate any form of alienation, whether social or individual.

Accordingly, its practical implementation leads to profound changes in capitalism’s conventional relation between the State and civil society, since it assumes that the former has to pluck up civility whereas the latter must have its say in politics, with all the consequences for private life and the reconstruction of public life that such move brings with it.

I am referring above all else to the elimination of any antagonistic position between the State and civil society and the gradual steps to be taken that lead to their reunion through a growing and dedicated popular participation capable of establishing and controlling the relations between the ruler and the ruled on truly democratic grounds. That’s why his thoughts are profoundly revolutionary and aimed at capitalism and all forms of social and personal oppression and subordination. That’s where his essence, subversive though it may be in today’s world, stems from. And hence its significance wherever socialism, out of historical necessity, is underway nowadays as a project in progress rather than a final stage to be reached.

His critical and constructive revolutionary potential remains in force despite what we hear some people say these days from the positions of an allegedly rediscovered liberalism, who claim that it’s still valid “as an attitude, not as an ideology" [53], the victory of Nihilism and the decease of the metanarratives –or “great emancipating speechess"– because the human problems it has tried to resolve and overcome through political practice are still alive and kicking in a globalized society set up under capitalism’s principles and conventions.

There is an urgent need to keep studying this living legacy so as to better understand all its features, as well as the nature of its development, its meaning to the contemporary design of Marxist theory and the internal and external challenges currently facing it, in order to optimize its impact on our social life.

Notes and references:

[1] In order to comprehend the full extent of this fact we need to keep in mind the text of the annual report on National Security Strategy for 1999 submitted by President Clinton to the U.S. Congress on January 4, 2000, as required by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, where it says: "The United States remains committed to promoting a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba and forestalling a mass exodus that would endanger the lives of migrants and the security of our borders. While maintaining pressure on the regime to make political and economic reforms, we continue to encourage the emergence of a civil society to assist the transition to democracy when the change comes". (Excerpt from the Report issued by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, dated January 21, 2000).

This intention dovetails nicely with what the President called the “three core objectives of the national security strategy", namely: "enhance America’s security, bolster America’s economic prosperity and promote democracy abroad". He also highlighted America’s active exercise of global leadership as pivotal to reach the above goals.

U.S. interference in Cuba’s internal affairs is part of the American state’s official policy that tries to modify the foundations of a society the island began to construct since 1959. The terminology attached to the Empire’s hegemonic and overbearing policy matches that of traditional demo-liberalism and is used to justify its true genocidal meaning and the flagrant violation of international law that both its letter and its spirit entail.

[2] V. I. Lenin, “Left-wing” childishness and the petty-bourgeois metality, Selected Works, Progress Editorial, 1981, T-2, p.730.

[3] Derechos humanos en Cuba, Editora Política, La Habana 1988; Derechos humanos civiles y políticos: Armonía y contradictoriedad, mimeographed five-page document, La Habana, 1993, and Fidel Castro, Los Derechos Humanos 1959-1988, Selección Temática, Editora Política, La Habana, Cuba, 1989.

[4] It’s a well-known fact that, according to Locke, political power, unlike other forms of power existing in society, is a right of making laws binding on all citizens, employing the force if need be, to enforce “penalties of death and other penalties for the regulating and preserving of property. That is, in a totally clear and honest manner, as befits a classic who is consistent with what he deems fair and necessary, Locke links politics with the regulation and defense of the economic order established by private property relations. Political power, then, entitles rulers to four major functions: a) making laws, b) imposing penalties to whoever fails to comply with them, c) employing the force of the community to enforce them, and d) employing the said force “in the defense of the common-wealth from foreign injury”. On this basis, the State supposedly acts for the public good. Man enters into political societies out of fear, to protect his life, liberty and property, within the framework of a given contractual State. Locke could not even imagine the paradoxes this concept brought about in social reality as soon as it took root in the existing relations. (See: Ensayo sobre el gobierno civil, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1941, pp. 2, 53, 79)

[5] Siete documentos de nuestra historia, Editora Política, La Habana, 1967, pp. 42-43.

[6] I use this term in the sense meant by Don Fernando Ortiz in Los factores humanos de la cubanidad: "(...) Full-fledged Cubanhood entails more than just being Cuban by any environmental chance which surrounds individual’s personality and forges its traits; you must throw in the awareness of being Cuban and the will to be so". That’s why he finds it necessary to distinguish what’s Cuban as follows: "... a full, heartfelt, conscious, desired, responsible Cubanhood where the three theological virtues –faith, hope and charity– fuse into one ". Therefore, it’s about a conscious, committed manner of carrying the emancipating, dignifying, pro-independence project inherent to this condition as an ideological trait of vital importance to the Cuban identity, exactly the way Fidel Castro interprets what being Cuban means when he says in History Will Absolve Me: "...We are Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty; not to fulfill that duty is a crime, is treason. We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights". (Don Fernando Ortiz’s quotation comes from Estudios etnosociológicos. Compilación, prólogo y notas de Isaac Barreal Fernández, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1991, p. 14, and Fidel is quoted from the cited edition).

[7] In his famous work Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, Don Fernando Ortiz describes the Cuban society’s ethnic composition using the term as follows: "We believe it’s better to use the word transculturation to express the various stages of transition from one culture to another, since it’s not only a matter of embracing a different culture, which is fair and square what the Anglo-American voice acculturation means; the process also entails of necessity the loss of or separation from a previous culture, what we could call a partial de-culturation, as well as the subsequent emergence of new cultural phenomena, what we could call neoculturation... All in all, the process is a transculturation, a term covering all phases of its parabola". (Editorial Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1983, p.90)

[8] See Olivia Miranda Francisco,.El método de conocimiento de la sociedad martiano y marxista y leninista in: La articulación del marxismo y el leninismo y las tradiciones nacionales en Cuba (1999, as yet unpublished).

[9] Note: For further details see my work Individuo y sociedad en José Martí: análisis del pensamiento político martiano, Editorial Academia, 1998, cap. IV.

[10] It’s worth mentioning that this antidogmatic and antimechanistic dimension of Fidel’s thoughts is remarkably similar to Antonio Gramsci’s words in his famous work Utopia: "[The reformists]”… (who can’t conceive divine freedom and moan endlessly over times past because things went wrong - M. L.) “fail to conceive history as free development –of free energies which rise and integrate into each other freely– unlike natural evolution, much as man and human associations are different from molecules and their aggregates. They are yet to learn that liberty is the immanent force of history that destroys all preestablished schemes. The Philistines of socialism have reduced socialist doctrine to the cloth of thinking, they soiled it, and now they get angry at those who, in their opinion, fail to respect it." (From, Para la Reforma Moral e Intelectual, selección de Francisco Fernández Buey, Los libros de la Catarata, Madrid, 1998, p. 51)

[11] Fidel said about this: "(...) everyone has his own options but no one has the right to convey to others his own philosophy on facing life or death. (...) This does not hold true for criteria, viewpoints and opinions about global issues that affect the planet, recommendable tactics and strategies of struggle. As citizens of the world and part of the human race, we have the right to clearly express our thoughts to those who want to hear, be they revolutionaries or not". (Fidel Castro, A revolution can only be born from culture and ideas, Master Lecture delivered at the main lecture hall of the Central University of Venezuela on February 3, 1999. Editora Política, La Habana, 1999, p.59).

[12] An outstanding example of this is Fidel’s reflection in Oporto on October 18, 1998 about the international economic order’s catastrophic consequences for the so-called Third World countries and the revolutionary movement: "Should this by any chance discourage progressive men or any men who wants revolutionary change? No, because the more difficult applying isolated solutions is in a given country, the more likely the chance to find global solutions to the world’s problems. Any progressive man would rather see the world change than see change only in his country". (Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual: características y contradicciones. Neoliberalismo y Globalización. Selección temática 1991-1998, Editora Política, La Habana, 1999, p.281)

[13] Fidel is very accurate when he says: "But in this ignored –highly ignored– effort (*) we have learned a lot from peoples. We have come to know those peoples and their extraordinary qualities. Among other things we have learned, not only through abstract notions but also in ordinary everyday life, that all men may not be equal in their features but all men are equal in their talents, feelings and other virtues. This proves that, in terms of moral, social, intellectual and human abilities, all men are genetically equal.” (Fidel Castro, A revolution can only be born from culture and ideas, Master Lecture delivered at the main lecture hall of the Central University of Venezuela on February 3, 1999. Editora Política, La Habana, 1999, p.12.

(*) In reference to internationalist missions fulfilled by the Cubans all over the world to fight natural disasters, poverty, ignorance, lack of medical care, apartheid, etc. (M. L.).

[14] With this term I refer to the appearance of capitalism as a universal socioeconomic formation and its ideological program, mostly designed as of the 17th century. For further detail, see From Modernism to Postmodernism: An anthology, published by Lawrence Cahoone, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., USA, UK, 1998.

[15] It’s important to stress in this regard Fidel’s choice of solid arguments to lash at globalized capitalism’s consumer patterns: "I usually say as an example that if the consumer pattern means that in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan o China there may be an automobile in every household... I apologize to those present who have one. Apparently there is no other choice, there are many avenues and the distances are long here. I mean no criticism but a warning against a model not applicable in a world that has yet to develop. (...)You will surely understand me because Caracas cannot make room for many more cars. You know they are going to have to build avenues three or four stories high. (...) I can imagine that if they were to do the same in China, then the 100 million hectares of arable land would have to be transformed into highways, gas stations and parking-lots leaving practically no space to grow a single grain of rice. The consumption pattern they are imposing on the world is sheer madness, chaotic and absurd. (...) It is not that I think the world should become a monastery. (...) However, I do believe that the planet has no other choice but to define which are going to be the consumption standards or patterns, both attainable and obtainable, in which mankind should be educated." Further on he added: Why must the person endure hunger, unemployment, early death from curable diseases, ignorance, the lack of culture and all sorts of human and social afflictions for exclusively commercial reasons and profits? Why, for the sole interest of an over-privileged and powerful elite operating under frenzied economic laws and institutions which are not, were not, and will not be eternal? Such is the case of the well-known market laws. The market has become today an object of idolatry, a sacred word pronounced at all hours. Why should this be so when it is possible to generate all the wealth required for meeting reasonable human needs compatible with the preservation of nature and life on our planet? We must ponder and reach our own conclusions. Obviously, it is reasonable for people to have food, health, a roof, clothing and education. Also adequate, rational, sustainable and secure transportation means; culture, recreation, a broad variety of options and many more things that could be at the reach of human beings and not, of course, a private jet or a yacht for each of the 9. 5 billion who will live on the planet within 50 years." (Fidel Castro, A revolution can only be born from culture and ideas, Master Lecture delivered at the main lecture hall of the Central University of Venezuela on February 3, 1999. Editora Política, La Habana, 1999, pp.17 y 18.

[16] Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual...p.535.

[17] Fidel Castro. Ibídem, pp. 34-35.

[18] See his speech to the XXXV Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on October 12, 1979 (Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos, 1959-1988: Selección temática de Fabio Raimundo Torrado. Editora Política, La Habana, 1989).

[19] Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual... pp. 36 and 37, respectively.

[20] Idem, p. 37

[21] See further details in Cuba verde: en busca de un modelo para la sustentabilidad en el siglo XXI, Editorial José Martí, La Habana, Cuba, 1999.

[22] It’s not my intention in this case to try and clarify such a complex topic related to contemporary developed capitalist societies, since everybody knows how their socioclassist structure is affected by the ongoing process of change in the correlation between the service, agricultural and industrial sectors in those countries, which are under the influence of the technological form of production that came into being in the wake of the scientific-technical revolution of the late 20th century. This brings with it a reorganization of social agents and subjects, their ability to change things and their organizational methods, levels of activity, etc., which demand a particular macrosociological study still to be found in left-wing literature.

[23] So he spoke on February 3, 1999 to the students and professors of the Central University of Venezuela: "Today, there is not one particular people to save. Today, a whole world, all of mankind needs to be liberated and saved. And it is not our task, it is your task" (Fidel Castro, A revolution can only be born from culture and ideas, Master Lecture delivered at the main lecture hall of the Central University of Venezuela on February 3, 1999. Editora Política, La Habana, 1999, p. 9)

[24] I believe the old problem posed by socialist thinking in the 19th century about the international character of society’s revolutionary transformation is back on the scene, only on particularly new bases. Even before World War II, Rosa Luxemburg had already reached the conclusion that the choice was socialism or barbarism. Nowadays, the international dynamics leads us straight to the same conclusion: the present structures of international domination are unsustainable and threaten to put the human race on the point of holocaust, not to mention the number of people who die throughout the Third World every day for that reason. All indications are that only by modifying the bases and methods of globalization today can we find a solution to the problems of development we find in specific countries or whole continents.

[25] In his closing speech of the IV Meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum on July 24, 1993, he said: "We cannot let the United Nations become an instrument of U.S. hegemony around the world; we cannot let the United Nations become and instrument of U.S. imperialism, since you all know it’s a very influential country that controls the World Bank, the Interamerican Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and many other credit institutions. We know that from our own experience”. Then he added: “That is why the struggle for the democratization of the United Nations should also be inscribed in the Latin American left-wing flag. These are matters of the utmost importance". (Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual..., p. 68)

[26] In the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, after pointing out that man as a biological species was endangered, he said: "The main responsibility for the brutal destruction of the environment lies with the consumer societies. They are the offspring of the old colonial metropolises and of imperialist policies that also begot the poverty and backwardness which are today the scourge of the overwhelming majority of humanity. With only 20% of the world population, these societies consume two thirds of the metals and three fourth of the energy produced in the world. They have poisoned oceans and rivers and contaminated the air; they have weakened and opened holes in the ozone layer and saturated the atmosphere with gases that impair climate conditions with catastrophic effects that we are starting to feel." (Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual... p.34)

[27] In this connection, he concluded in the IV Sao Paulo Forum: "(…) it’s quite clear that the democratization of the United Nations demands first of all the disappearance of the veto, an annoying privilege established 50 years ago in a post-war world very different from today’s; it means the regular election of all Security Council members without exception. (…) We understand that at this point there is no realistic chance of a full-fledged democratization of the United Nations, and that is why we raised in Salvador de Bahía the question of proportionally increasing the number of Security Council members to 40 or 45, since there are almost 200 countries, and there can be at least three times as many permanent members, in such a way that they could have two or more from Latin America, two or more from África, two or more from Asia, in which case the veto would not be the prerogative of a single country, as several others would also have that right. This would be a goal worth fighting for, but first we must increase public awareness". (Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual... pp. 67-68)

[28] At the opening session of the Group of 77 South Summit Conference held in Havana on April 12-14, 2000, Fidel presented a long list of arguments to explain that globalization “has been held tight by the patterns of neoliberalism; thus, it is not development that goes global but poverty; it is not respect for the national sovereignty of our states but the violation of that respect; it is not solidarity amongst our peoples but ''sauve-qui-peut'' in the unequal competition prevailing in the marketplace", so the Third World must be rescued from a blind alley. "Fifty years ago we were promised that one day there would no longer be a gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. We were promised bread and justice; but today we have less and less bread and more injustice". (…) "Another Nuremberg is required to put to trial the economic order imposed on us, the same that is killing of hunger and preventable or curable diseases more men, women and children every three years than all those killed by World War II in six years". (Granma newspaper, Year 36, No. 74, April 13, 2000; pp. 4-5)

[29] In this regard, what he said in the closing of the IV Meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum was very enlightening: "...another essential item we had on the agenda for the Summit Conference was Latin American integration, and when we say integration as a Latin American aspiration we speak about economic and political integration. It’s not a matter of sentimentalism. (...) It’s not a sentimental thing, I was saying, it’s a vital question, it’s a question of survival, for we are living in a world of great economic and industrial giants, of great economic and political communities. What prospects of independence, security, peace, development and well-being can our divided peoples have? Needless to say, it’s a very difficult task. Suffice it to review our isolated attempts at integration to understand how difficult economic integration is, but the truth is that we need economic and political integration and we need to overcome every obstacle to that end. Our integration and unity won’t come from the big transnational companies, but when we talk about economic and political integration iin Latin America we talk first of all about a matter of awareness, the awareness we must raise, the way of thinking we must create. Without that way of thinking and that awareness, nothing will ever be possible. (…) Now we are raising awareness of this issue. In my humble opinion, the left is duty-bound to raise awareness of the need for Latin American integration and unity. No region of the world has so many things in common: our language, including Portuguese, because we communicate very well with the Portuguese without an interpreter –well, now that we are taling about Latin America and the Caribbean, English is not so difficult after all– as well as a common culture, a common history, a mixture of races" (Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual… , pp. 65, 66-67.)

[30] From Granma newspaper, Year 36, No. 76, April 15, 2000, p. 5.

[31] At the end of the VIII Ibero-American Summit in Oporto, Portugal, Fidel told the journalists: "There is something to which we can sacrifice things; we would be willing to sacrifice even our own dearest flag in the name of a just internationalism" (Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual..., p. 297.)

[32] Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual..., p. 198.

[33] On March 12, 1995, at the World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen, Denmark, he said: "… there cannot be human rights where there is no compassion, or solidarity where selfishness prevails. The environment cannot be preserved, nor can the natural resources be protected from pollution and depletion and social development be made possible, while consumer societies and wastefulness are portrayed as models for a population that by now exceeds 5.7 billion human beings. Social development cannot be realized when the armsrace and the armstrade persist in spite of the end of the cold war and not a penny of what yesterday used to be, and still today is, wasted in weapons is devoted to human progress; when the military blocks are being recklessly expanded and sophisticated weapons continue to be produced and improved. Where hegemonism prevails, with all sorts of interventions carried out under any pretext –albeit in small Third World nations in contempt of every country's sacred right to its full independence and to stand on equal footing in international relations– neither peace nor social development can exist. That is a lie, a mere deception". (Ibídem, p.96)

[34] Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual…, p.282.

[35] I must remark that Fidel by no means reduces the concept of revolutionary activity by the masses exclusively to its implementation by force or arms or to the boundaries of a nation. When it comes to the very real threat posed to our peoples by contemporary imperialist hegemonism, he has made sufficient emphasis on the civic and ethical factors, among others, inherent to a truly popular revolutionary activity and the various ways it can use to express itself in practice. On July 24, 1993, in the closing session of the Sao Paulo Forum held in Havana, he commented: "I believe in the struggle, first and foremost in the struggle of the peoples; I believe in the struggle of the masses, and in recent times we have seen important examples in Latin America of what an unarmed people can accomplish, what the masses can accomplish, what conscientiousness can accomplish, what ethics can accomplish, because as these negative things happen people’s involvement inevitably increases". (Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual..., p.60)

[36] On September 4, 1998 he delivered a speech to the South African Parliament in Capetown: "Can the world be heedless of this disaster? Isn’t Man capable of addressing this situation with his astonishing scientific advances? What’s the point of talking about macro-economic indicators and other eternal fallacies; recipes and more recipes from the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, or the miraculous strengths of the blind market laws and the wonders of neo-liberal globalization? Why aren’t these realities recognized? Why aren’t alternative formulas being pursued, and is recognized that Man can organize his life and destiny in a more rational and humane fashion? (Fidel Castro, Capitalismo actual..., pp. 220-221)

[37] John Locke, Ensayo sobre el gobierno civil, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1941.

[38] Immanuel Kant, Sobre la Paz Perpetua, Editorial Tecnos, S.A., Madrid, 1994, p.16 and 26.

[39] Idem, p. 14

[40] Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos..., p. 82.

[41] See Entre brujas, pícaros y consejos, by María del Carmen Víctori Ramos, from the Cuban Culture Research and Development Center "Juan Marinello", published by José Martí Editorial in 1997.

[42] Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos..., p.204.

[43] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and where is it going?, Pathfinder. New York, London, Montreal, Sydney. 1992, pp. 147-148.

[44] Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos..., p. 126.

[45] In keeping with the genuine Marxist-Leninist concept of history and society, Fidel has repeatedly warned of socialism’s experimental nature and, therefore, the provisional character of all its institutions and legal regulations: "It’s a new society, a new world still at the experimental and trial stage; but if the right policy is in place and the right principles are respected, if the Party leadership remains close to the masses (…) and listens attentively to the people and the people feel they are taking an active part in the whole process and in every sense, then no contradictions should arise." (Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos..., p.149). This issue of the close Party-masses and rulers-ruled link and of the ways of popular participation was also central to V. I. Lenin’s work. In The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, Lenin wrote clearly about concrete action to organize the Soviets and Soviet Power: "Our aim is to draw the whole of the poor into the practical work of administration, and all steps that are taken in this direction –the more varied they are, the better– should be carefully recorded, studied, systematised, tested by wider experience and embodied in law. Our aim is to ensure that every toiler, having finished his eight hours’ ‘task’ in productive labour, shall perform state duties without pay." Then he added: "It is the closeness of the Soviets to the “people”, the working people, what creates the special forms of recall and other means of control from below which must be most zealously developed now." (V.I.Lenin, Selected Works, three volumes, Editorial Progress, Moscow, 1981, T-2, pp. 704 y 705)

[46] Idem, p.127.

[47] Rosa addresses the issue of the nature of proletarian dictatorship as opposed to that of bourgeois dictatorship from the standpoint of its sociological content, which she summarizes as follows: "Unlike bourgeois class rule, the proletarian dictatorship required the political training and education of the masses of the people as a whole”. (In: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks. Edited by Mary Alice Waters, Pathfinder, 1991, p. 389) In Rosa’s opinion, proletarian dictatorship is a political means to guarantee the participation of the working class and the people in public life, the revolutionary transformation of society and the increasing political training of the masses. To her, then, the new political society in the making must be a reflection of civil society and people’s daily life. Along the same lines are Antonio Gramsci’s statements on the October Revolution in its initial stages: "The Soviets and the Bolshevik Party are not closed organisms: they interact with each other all the time. Behold the dominance of liberty; behold the guarantees of liberty. They are not castes, but organisms in constant evolution. They represent the progression of conscientiousness and organizational ability within the Russian society. All workers can join the Soviets; all workers can play a role in their modification so they can better express their will and their wish. Russia’s political life is positioned in such a way that it tends to coincide with moral life, with the universal spirit of Russian humanity. A continuous exchange takes place between those hierarchical stages: an uneducated individual perfects himself in the debate to elect his representative to the Soviets, and he himself can be that representative; he controls those organisms because they are always within his reach, by his side, in a same territory. That’s how he gets a sense of social responsibility and becomes an active citizen in deciding the fate of his country. And power and conscientiousness spread through that hierarchy, from the individual to the crowd, and society turns into something it never was in previous history." (From Para la Reforma Moral e Intelectual, selección de Francisco Fernández Buey, Los libros de la Catarata, Madrid, 1998, pp. 52-53)

[48] Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos..., p.99.

[49] Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos…, p. 91.

[50] Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos…, p.116.

[51] As early as in 1961 Fidel said: "... We don’t tell the people, ‘Believe!’; we tell them, ‘Read!; we don’t tell them, ‘This is dogma..." (Fidel Castro, Los derechos humanos…, p.192)

[52] Interviewed by Tomás Borge, Fidel said the following: "I am not going to deny that, at one point, male chauvinism also influenced our attitudes towards homosexuality. I personally have no phobia against homosexuals. In reality, it has never been in my mind, and I have never supported, promoted, nor backed policies against homosexuals (…) I don't consider homosexuality to be a phenomenon of degeneration. I've always had a more rational approach, considering it to be one of the natural aspects and tendencies of human beings which should be respected. That's how I view it... I am absolutely opposed to any form of repression, contempt, scorn or discrimination with regard to homosexuals. That's what I think. (Fidel Castro, A grain of corn: conversation with Tomás Borge. Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, La Habana, 1992, pp. 237-238.)

[53] Fernando Gil Villa, El mundo como desilusión. La sociedad nihilista, Ediciones Libertarias-proudhufi, S.A., 1999, p.185.

* Miguel Limia David, Baracoa (1952), graduated in Political Sciences from the University of Havana in 1974 and received a Doctoral Degree in Philosophical Sciences from the State University "V. I. Lenin" of Belarus, USSR in 1983. A Full Researcher since 1995, he is a prestigious Professor and Researcher in the field of philosophy and politology with tens of articles published in Cuban and foreign countries to his credit. Since 2001 he has chaired the Council of Social Sciences of the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment.

Source: "Biblioteca Virtual de Filosofía y Pensamiento Cubanos" (Habana, Cuba): http://biblioteca.filosofia.cu/ 

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