Has the ‘revolution’ finally died with Commandante Fidel Castro?

Fidel Castro’s death brought three apparently disconnected thoughts to my mind. One was Guantanamera, the second was a little piece of verse I wrote many years ago, called ‘Revolution’.

The third and most relevant flash through my mind was “L’historia me absolvera” (history will absolve me), which I think I mentioned in these pages some months ago. It is the title of the famous speech that Fidel Castro delivered to the Cuban court that condemned him to 10 years in prison for subversive activities, in 1952.

I clearly remember reading this historic document a few months before I went up to university in 1965, although I cannot quite recall how I came by a copy of it. The gist of Castro’s oration was that it was necessary to agitate and act for fundamental change in the Cuba of his times.

If the people in power thought that that was wrong, Castro said, he was prepared to face the consequences, but history would eventually prove him right. Nelson Mandela, “Madiba”, Castro’s bosom friend, echoed the same sentiments in his own Rivonia trial in South Africa in 1962.

GENEROUSLY AND IMPRESSIVELY

Generously and impressively, history justified the two political giants, even in the literal sense of their longevity. I, however, never had any strong feelings of attachment or aversion to Castro. But admiration and respect, those no sensitive observer could deny him.

As for Guantanamera, that is as Cuban as Fidel himself. The little ditty with the captivating lyrics, “I am a sincere man from the land where the palms grow…/I cultivate bright white roses in July and in January too”, was one of the few products that burst out of Cuba onto the world, even in the face of mighty America’s strenuous efforts to blockade the island.

Incidentally, my “Revolution” poem also has something to do with growing things. As I always do when I want to cheat my editor, I will present it here as a prose paragraph.

I wrote: “A simple-minded man, all I want is a watering can. Revolution is a blade of grass amidst the desert sands, a shrub where once stood a stone. Revolution is green: lettuce green. Revolution is red: tomato red.”

I wrote the “revolution” piece out of a “fed-upness”, a surfeit of the revolutionary rant that was being almost literally slammed down our throats by our Marxist and Maoist-inclined teachers in our student days in the late 1960s and most of the 70s.

Those of us who demurred were, of course, called names: bourgeois, reactionary, decadent, comprador, colonial lackey and the like. But the point is that we did not necessarily object to ideology as such.

What we were questioning was the wholesale and rigid imposition on us of single-tracked viewpoints straight out of Marx, Lenin or Mao Zedong. These comrades, and Fidel Castro, were, indeed, great thinkers and indisputable activists.

But was there absolutely no other approach to the problems that they were addressing? More specifically, could their theories and practices be lifted lock, stock and barrel out of their historical contexts and societies and be successfully applied to the African societies of our times?

LOOK AT AFRICAN COUNTRIES

I suppose one can only answer these questions by critically looking at the state of African countries today, some of which were or still are led by agemates of mine, among them self-confessed ardent disciples of revolutionary scientific socialism. I, however, am on record as saying somewhere that neither paper socialism nor paper degrees were going to solve the problems of our continent.

Be that as it may, the name of Fidel Castro cannot be separated from the theory and practice of revolution in this and the last century. In Latin America, Castro and his Argentinian comrade, Ernesto che Guevara, were the most hallowed icons of revolution.

I know that to most of us who are perennial victims of Western information and propaganda systems, these hombres have been simply labelled Communists, anarchists or Russian agents and left at that. But we should not passively buy these simplistic vilifications. We need to try and understand what these unique men dedicated their lives to, how they operated and how they influenced their societies and the rest of the world, especially our own Africa.

When we say “revolution”, in the sense that Castro and “Che” seem to have understood it, we mean radical, accelerated, systematic and sustained transformation of society. In other words, revolution is fundamental change, not just a few cosmetic patches of reform here and there. It is accelerated in the sense that it is made to come about and not left to slow evolutionary processes that may take decades or even centuries.

PROPER REVOLUTION

A proper revolution is planned and directed to achieve specific improvements in the society. It is in this sense that we expect it to be systematic. The planning ensures that the change process is carried out patiently and diligently through specific interconnected steps.

Finally, revolution is a sustained and ever-continuous process. It is not an event or a one-off happening. As Chinua Achebe hints in A Man of the People, those politicians who entered the state houses and other seats of power after driving out the colonists or the dictators are wrong to tell us to stop knocking or even banging on the gates.

They seem to imply that the independence “revolution” is over and done, and we should stop agitating for change. That is selfish opportunism, not revolution.

True revolutionaries summarize their approach in the dictum: “We make revolution in order to make an ever-better revolution.”

I am not a revolutionary. I know deep within that, in the face of people like Fidel Castro, I just do not have what it takes to live, breathe, drink and eat “revolution” all the days of my life. Oh, revolutionaries sleep it, too, although they do very little of that. Maybe we should say they “wake” revolution through most nights.

Growing green lettuce and tending red tomatoes is probably the only revolutionary tribute I can pay to Commandante Fidel.

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and Literature in East Africa. [email protected]