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A life dedicated to revolution, proletarian internationalism and Marxism-Leninism
By Freedom Road Socialist Organization
On Nov. 25, 2016 workers and oppressed peoples of the entire world lost a giant with the passing of Fidel Castro Ruz. Fidel lived a life worth honoring, studying and emulating. He was a key leader in the 1959 Cuban revolution, in building socialism in Cuba for more than five decades to the present day, and in exemplary acts of international solidarity.
Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) extends our condolences to the family, friends and comrades of Fidel Castro, and to the Cuban people as a whole for this tremendous loss.
Fidel Castro was a revolutionary who fought against seemingly impossible odds and won. He led a guerrilla movement against the vicious U.S.-backed Batista regime which governed Cuba in the interests of U.S. imperialism while Cuban workers and peasants suffered harshly. Despite experiencing defeats in its early days, the revolutionary movement learned lessons, rebounded and won national liberation. Fidel played a key role in leading the revolutionary movement to victory.
The 1959 revolutionary victory in Cuba inspired people throughout the Americas and the world to fight for liberation in their own countries. The Cuban revolution created the conditions for incredible gains for the Cuban people, despite it being a poor country. The revolution swiftly solved problems that capitalism can’t solve. Illiteracy and starvation were wiped out in Cuba and the best education and health care systems in the Americas were created. This continues to this day in socialist Cuba and stands in stark contrast to Cuba’s neighboring countries which are dominated by imperialism.
The Cuban revolution, under the guidance of Fidel Castro and his comrades, also unleashed a boundless internationalism and sacrifice in support of revolutionary movements and attending to human needs throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The exemplary internationalism displayed by Cuba over decades – providing whatever they could and asking nothing in return – leads to the enthusiastic embrace of socialist Cuba and its leaders such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara throughout the world.
U.S. imperialism had no intention to stand by idly and let a revolution survive on the small island nation which the U.S. had held as a colony just 90 miles off its coast. Barely in its infancy, the Cuban revolution faced invasion from U.S. imperialism at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Under Fidel’s leadership, the U.S.-led military invasion was repelled. The U.S. government lashed out, imposing a barbaric economic embargo which continues to this day. U.S. imperialism has engaged in countless acts of sabotage against the Cuban revolution and hundreds of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro personally. But they failed to stop the revolution.
They failed because of the collective leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba, of which Fidel was a key leader. Fidel Castro became a communist and adopted the ideology of Marxism-Leninism through learning from experience in making revolution. As the Cuban revolution confronted concrete problems about how to move forward, Fidel saw that only socialism could solve the problems of the Cuban people, and that Marxism-Leninism provided the theory and practice that could guide the revolutionary process forward. Once he adopted Marxism-Leninism, Fidel never wavered.
The Cuban revolution faced its most trying period in the 1990s when it was left politically and economically isolated. Fidel Castro led the way in Cuba’s difficult decision to hold firm to Marxism-Leninism, anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalism despite the incredible difficulties they knew they would face. They confronted those difficulties and overcame them when very few thought it would be possible. At that time Cuba was isolated on the world stage and in the Americas. The U.S. government tightened the noose by making its blockade more severe, hoping to end the Cuban revolution once and for all. But through staying true to principle and continuing to struggle ahead with dignity, Cuba was able to turn isolation into its opposite.
By 2014 it was U.S. imperialism that was isolated in the Americas while Cuba had many friends, and in the U.N. General Assembly nearly the entire world had voted repeatedly for the U.S. to end the unjust blockade of Cuba. In the face of this isolation, the U.S. finally admitted its decades-long efforts to defeat the Cuban revolution had failed, and took initial steps to normalize relations with socialist Cuba. But the unjust U.S. blockade remains in place and the struggle continues to end it.
As the leader of the Chinese revolution Mao Zedong said, “All people must die, but death can vary in its significance…it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather. To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.”
It is clear that comrade Fidel Castro’s death is weightier than Mount Tai. He lived and died for the Cuban people and for the working class and oppressed peoples around the world. He was a revolutionary, a communist, a Marxist-Leninist.
Because of the example of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, we know another world – a socialist world – is possible. Fidel’s example inspires us to continue to support the socialist revolution in Cuba, and carry forward the struggle against imperialism and for socialism in our country.
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A potential positive result from the election of Donald Trump as our next president could be that it will provoke a long overdue public debate over US nuclear weapons policy. Such a debate could educate Congress and force much needed steps toward reducing the dangers from the Doomsday Machine that the United States and Russia built and then walked away from after some downsizing at the end of the Cold War.
There is widespread concern that President-elect Trump may not be a thoughtful, cautious custodian of the US nuclear “button.” This concern highlights the absurdity of giving one person the authority to order the launch US nuclear weapons, an action that could well result in the end of our civilization. The rationale is that, given that the warning time for an incoming nuclear attack could be only a matter of minutes, there would be no time for democratic consultation. If a country has a survivable second strike force, as the United States does, however, that argument should not be the last word.
We have been extraordinarily lucky to get this far without a nuclear Armageddon. We cannot depend on such luck continuing. The only complete solution is to get rid of nuclear weapons. President Obama embraced that goal in his Prague speech of 2009, but there was little follow-up because of a lack of public engagement. As far as the general public is concerned, the threat of nuclear annihilation receded with the end of the Cold War. There is much more concern about the possibility of nuclear terrorism and President Obama initiated a series of Nuclear Security Summits focused on that issue.
Lacking public pressure for nuclear reductions and adamant Republican support for strategic ballistic missile defense, which poisoned Russian interest in further nuclear reductions, President Obama ended up achieving only minor reductions in New START and had to pay a very high price to get it ratified. In exchange for the votes of some Republican senators, President Obama agreed to a plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decades to replace every nuclear weapon delivery system in the US strategic nuclear arsenal and modernize the nuclear warheads carried by these delivery systems. Earlier this year, Obama failed even to carry his own officials when he proposed adopting a no nuclear first use policy. His Secretaries of Defense, State and Energy reportedly all objected, and he dropped the idea.
It would have been much easier to make progress toward nuclear disarmament during Obama’s presidency had there been a mass movement pressing for it. In 1980-83, the “Nuclear Weapons Freeze” movement sprang up to oppose the Reagan administration’s program to deploy thousands of warheads accurate enough to destroy Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles in their silos. The pressure became so intense that President Reagan switched to advocating nuclear abolition and ballistic missile defense and agreed to include in his joint summit statements with General Secretary Gorbachev the sentence, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
The Nuclear Weapons Freeze movement arose because of frightening statements from Reagan administration officials about the possibility of fighting a nuclear war. President-elect Trump has insisted on not ruling out using nuclear weapons first against ISIS because “I frankly don’t want the enemy to know how I’m thinking.” This indicates that he does not understand the taboo that has built up around nuclear weapons use in the seven decades since Nagasaki.
Could the general citizen uprising that has already begun because of fears of Trump administration actions against minorities and environmental regulations result in a new flow of youthful energy into the nuclear disarmament movement? That is what happened in the late 1960s when anti-Vietnam War activism bled over into other areas, such as environmentalism and opposition to the deployment of nuclear-armed ballistic-missile interceptors around U.S. cities.
Along with supporting a global treaty to ban nuclear weapons that the United Nations will begin negotiating in 2017, interim goals for a new movement could include a no-first-use policy, taking intercontinental ballistic missiles off launch-on-warning alert, eliminating the long-range, nuclear-armed cruise missiles that provoke fears of first strikes in China and scrapping the ineffectual national ballistic missile defense that has made it impossible to negotiate further reductions with Russia.
If a new generation of nuclear disarmament activists emerge, I am sure that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will provide them a forum to promote and refine their ideas, as it has done for generations of us going back 70 years to the original atomic scientists.