Second Draft Brave Comrade.docx

Brave Comrade: Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution
When Fidel Castro was put on trial for leading the uprising against at the Moncada Barracks against the Batista dictatorship (July 27, 1953) he said famously "history will absolve me." Sixty three years later history, except as it is written by the apologists for imperialism and "casino capitalism already has.
Serious students and scholars understand that Fidel remains the most revered figure throughout Latin America—not by landlords, various groups of local capitalists or the petty tyrants whom Franklin Roosevelt accurately referred to in the 1930s as "sons of bitches but our sons of bitches." And not by mass media in the United States or by those sections of the population who live in what the late Gore Vidal called "United States of Amnesia."
For the masses of poor people, workers, farmers, landless laborers, Fidel and the Cuban revolution was to continue to be a source of inspiration. If you survive the fury of U.S. imperialism in what it regarded as its "home territory," then working people everywhere can fight and win. That was the kernel of truth in the "domino theory" which reigned supreme in U.S, policy at the time of the Cuban Revolution. For cold warriors the "theory" was first and foremost about conspiracies that would expand from contiguous areas, since all revolutions that did were illegitimate save the "permanent revolution" of "free market" capitalism.
Peoples Revolutions
People's revolutions, to paraphrase Karl Marx move in zig zags with many detours and defeats. The strength of people's revolutions, Marx saw, is in the numbers that masses of people who are unified can mobilize along with their developing class consciousness.
The working classes don't have the wealth or institutional power of the ruling classes, who seek always to distract and divide them. For successful peoples revolutions both unity and effective leadership over time must be both developed and maintained
Fidel Castro understood that as a fighter against the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s before he committed himself to revolutionary socialism, which for Fidel to use a phrase from the People's Republic of China today came to mean the construction of socialism with Cuban characteristics. And his role in leadership from the first days of the overthrow of Batista (the political revolution) advanced the revolution, which had to take a socialist path to survive
How Fidel Beat U.S. Imperialism at Its own Game Over and Over Again
From the very beginning Fidel flew in the face of U.S. cold warriors who never believed that a successful social revolution in any Caribbean or Central American nation was possible.
The racism which always complements colonial relationships helps to explain this Cuba after all had been the model on which U.S. imperialism, which used "protectorates," as against formal colonies, had been based after the Spanish-American War. The Cubans for the U.S. army to withdraw had to accept the "Platt Amendment", a resolution advanced by a U.S. Senator, which gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba as it saw fit to protect Cuban "independence." Cuba also had to cede what became the naval base at Guantanamo to have U.S. occupation forces withdraw at the beginning of the twentieth century.
After many Marine interventions throughout the Caribbean and Central America based on the Platt Amendment, Franklin Roosevelt formally repealed it and announced a non-interventionist" Good Neighbor" policy 1933. This was a major step forward for the region even though U.S. diplomats colluded with local Cuban exploiters to install Fulencio Batista in the mid-1930s after a liberal government, initially supported by the Roosevelt administration, appeared to be veering to the left in response to workers and farmers.
Two decades later, at the height of the cold war, Castro's leadership of the guerrilla movement against Batista caught the attention of many Americans depressed by both the abandonment of New Deal domestic policies and U.S. cold war politics which celebrated suburban consumerism and a permanent holy war against international Communism.
The Eisenhower administration did everything it could to defeat the revolution, including a failed attempt to remove Batista near the end and replace him with a military junta. After Batista fled, U.S. policy sought to compel that the revolutionary government to go back to business as usual. The arrogant assumption was that Fidel, realizing he had no choice, would become "our son of bitch"
But Fidel had choices. First he appealed to Americans by appearing on the Ed Sullivan show, ending segregation in Cuban hotels (which the Batista regime had established for U, S. Southern tourists) and moving against U.S. gangster controlled Hotels and Casinos. Later, reactionaries would "accuse liberal media" of being "dupes" of Fidel, an all-purpose charge trotted out after every failure to defeat revolutionary movements throughout the cold war and post-cold war era.
Then the National Security Council moved forward with plans to overthrow Fidel's government the way Jacobo Arbenz had been overthrown in Guatemala. The responsibility for this fell to the CIA, which had directed the Guatemalan coup and involved itself in similar actions through the "third world."
But it would not be so easy. Fidel had already purged the military of the kinds of figures who had been the CIA surrogates in overthrowing Arbenz. And the revolution then did the unthinkable—it turned to the Soviet Union to prevent a U.S. economic blockade that the Eisenhower administration was sure would bring it down. When the U.S. General Assembly met in 1960, Fidel even stayed in Harlem's Hotel Theresa and met with Malcolm X while the U.S. press sought to portray him as a slovenly beatnik.
Fidel began to nationalize U.S. owned sugar plantations and other holdings and offer as compensation the value of the property that the companies and investors had declared on their Cuban tax returns, a tiny fraction of the real value. When Arbenz had done this with United Fruit Company land in 1954, it sealed his government's doom.
What followed was the CIA managed "liberation" of Cuba. CIA hired pilots pretending to be Cuban defectors bombed the tiny Cuban air force with planes that looked like Cuban Air Force planes. A U.S. advertising agency directed the propaganda campaign in Cuba. An "interim government" kept at a Florida Air Force base with no knowledge of what was happening was to be flown in to Havana following the triumph, in which the revolution would be drowned in blood while the press and television in the U.S. NAT0 bloc hailed the event as the triumph of democracy. It would be Guatemala all over again, a bloodier Guatemala perhaps, but the investors in sugar plantations, mills, hotels and casinos would all live happily ever after.
But what really happened was much more like an episode from the U.S. Television series of the 1960s satirizing the CIA Get Smart, than the series glorifying it, Mission Impossible.
The phony CIA pilots were exposed because the CIA used a more expensive model of the Cuban bomber plane than the Cuban Air Force had bought. The surviving Cuban Air Force planes sunk the ship in which the CIA had placed all of the invaders ammunition, and the beach-head as completely surrounded by Cuban forces led by Fidel, giving the U.S, the option of a massive invasion which would have been disaster for U.S. global policy or accepting the defeat.
Fidel rallied both the Cuban armed forces and people against the U.S. funded and managed invasion and in reality strengthened the revolution. The Kennedy administration and its successors responded with many documented assassination plots against Fidel, in Cuba and abroad, destructive commando attacks aimed at paralyzing the Cuban economy, and of course the Cuban Missile crisis, where Pentagon planners called for a strike against Cuba. Speculating that an ensuing nuclear war with the Soviets would lead to the destruction of the Soviet Union and much of Europe but that the U.S. would both survive and "win" with a mere 20 million casualties.
We could continue to tell the shameful story—the use of bacteriological warfare to destroy Cuba's swine herds, the Mariel Boat load, and the intensification of the blockade against Cuba after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union (the original "purpose" of the blockade and its continuation had been the Soviet "threat" to U.S. National Security).
We could continue to tell the heroic story—Cuba's involvement in African liberation struggles(particularly its aid to Angola) while U.S. governments and the CIA worked with South Africa and African reactionaries to subvert African peoples revolutions and its ability to soldier on.
. Donald Trump happily tweeted "Fidel Castro is dead!" Here a bully who has never showed either moral or physical courage in his life hurls in his inimitable way posthumous insults at a man whose life was an example of both moral and physical courage.
Perhaps Trump dreams now of a Trump Casino Hotel in Havana, the sort of abortion clinics for the American rich which existed under the Batista regime when abortion was illegal in the U.S., even the return to Cuba of some his mob connected former associates. Or maybe he dreams of leading a brigade of stock brokers, Black Jack dealers, and "alt-right" fantasy game fascists in a second invasion of the Bay of Pigs—one where Vladimir Putin will be his number one well wisher
But it won't happen because we who carry forward the battle against Trump on all fronts which refuse to let it happen. That is the debt we as Americans must pay to the Cuban people. It is also necessary for our own survival,
Fidel Castro outlived all of his major enemies. Cuba is a qualitatively better place for its people than it was in 1959 when the political revolution triumphed. One doesn't have to apologize for it, especially not to those in the U.S. who did everything to subvert and destroy the Cuban revolution
My "American Dream" is to imagine what a capital and professional labor rich U.S. as a real good neighbor could have done with Cuba in education, health care, social planning, and economic development through all of Latin America to raise living standards and the overall quality of life for the people of the Western Hemisphere. That future is the one we should fight to build today.
Fidel Castro for more than half a century was a model and a source of inspiration for people throughout Latin America, who fought local tyrants and foreign imperialists,
He remains a model not only for Latin America, but for people fighting against exploitation and oppression through the world, including today the people of the United States, whose task is to fight and defeat someone who is really "our son of bitch", Donald Trump