A month after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro became Prime Minister on February 16, and, a few months later, he was appointed President of the State of Cuba. Fidel’s quick appointment as Head of State was intended as a way to safeguard the revolutionary momentum of the war against Batista’s army and to shelter it from the reformist attempts that soon wanted to push the revolutionary struggle towards a less radical drift.
Fidel’s first priorities
Fidel sought to ensure, among other things, the distribution of land among peasants through an authentic agrarian reform of popular origin, approved on May 17, 1959, which promoted the association of peasants in cooperatives. Before the Revolution, 80% of the best land was in the hands of a few foreign companies and 1.5% of landowners owned 46% of the arable land. After the Agrarian Reform, most of these plots of land were transformed into peasant production grouped in socialist enterprises, thus eliminating the large landholdings and benefiting more than 100,000 Cuban peasant families. It also initiated a process of modernization of agriculture. This process, in turn, was part of the first attempts to industrialize the country, which did not fully achieve its objectives due to the economic blockade (which will be discussed later).
Read more: Fidel Castro: a life of revolution
Another of Fidel’s early political concerns was the total condemnation of any act of racism against all Cubans (including racial segregation), considering such acts as anti-revolutionary and punishable by law. Hence, Fidel was also interested in anti-racist struggles outside Cuba, especially in the United States and Africa. On this aspect, Fidel said that “a Black man [necessarily] has suffered the injustice of society. And therefore I am tempted to think that he has more awareness of the problems of the world.”
His administration also quickly targeted the mafia groups operating in Cuba. In this regard, famed mafia boss Meyer Lansky said that the Cuban Revolution had ruined him.
It is also important to highlight the preeminence that Fidel gave to the National Literacy Campaign, which succeeded in making Cuba the first Latin American country to eradicate illiteracy. In the same vein, Fidel promoted the creation of hundreds of schools and hospitals throughout the Cuban territory, which were established from the beginning as free social development centers (in Fidel’s Cuba, private education and private health care were forbidden). To this day, Cuban medicine is recognized for its quality and its capacity for scientific research and innovation.
After the Revolution, the university enrollment rate skyrocketed as a consequence of the policies carried out by the State, which made Cuba, among other things, the country with the most doctors per capita in the world. Likewise, if we take as a measure the number of Olympic medals won by a country throughout its history, Cuba, whose population does not exceed 12 million inhabitants, became the second most successful country, in terms of sports, in the whole continent, only behind the United States. Not to mention the cultural and artistic development the country experienced, with the emergence of artists such as musician Silvio Rodríguez, dancer Alicia Alonso, writer Alejo Carpentier, poet Nicolás Guillén, filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez and the famous National Ballet of Cuba.
Fidel’s Influence in Latin America and the Third World
The impact of the Cuban Revolution on Latin America and the rest of the Third World was profound. Dozens of revolutionary movements emerged in the American continent imitating the strategy of guerrilla warfare, thus questioning the classical left-wing readings that suggested that before a socialist process, a bourgeois nationalist revolution must necessarily emerge.
Cuban troops participated in some of the most famous anti-colonial wars and national liberation struggles of the 20th century (Algeria, Syria, Congo, Angola, Ethiopia, Vietnam, among others), and many revolutionaries around the world received direct support from the Caribbean island.
Likewise, Fidel’s commitment to the revolutionary and anti-colonial processes in the United States, Asia, and Africa is proof of his internationalist position, despite all the adversities and threats that such support implied for Cuba.
In addition, Fidel personally supported political processes that were not marked by armed struggle and were not necessarily communist, such as those that took place in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende or in Venezuela during the presidency of Hugo Chávez.
In this way, Fidel became the most important character and symbol of the Latin American revolutionary left, not only for his ability as a military strategist but also as a statesman capable of understanding and managing complex geopolitical problems. Furthermore, he made Cuba one of the most important countries, geopolitically speaking, in the world, not necessarily because of its economic power, but fundamentally because of its political influence and its direct impact on international revolutionary processes.
On this matter, Fidel declared that “Internationalism is the most beautiful essence of Marxism-Leninism and its ideals of solidarity and fraternity among peoples. Without internationalism, the Cuban Revolution would not even exist. To be an internationalist is to settle our debt with humanity.”
Fidel: enemy of imperialism
The US State Department and the CIA recommended to President Dwight Eisenhower (and the rest of the US presidents to come) to undertake and finance actions against the nascent Revolution, such as air and piracy attacks, as well as support for various counter-revolutionary groups. For several years, US intelligence agencies developed hundreds of plans to assassinate Fidel Castro.
On March 4, 1960, the French ship “Le Coubre”, carrying arms to the island, was attacked with explosives. More than 100 people were killed. Faced with the attack, Fidel affirms that “Not only will we know how to resist any aggression, but we will know how to defeat any aggression, and that once again we will have no other choice than the one with which we began the revolutionary struggle: freedom or death. Only now freedom means something even more: freedom means homeland. And our dilemma would be ‘motherland or death.’”
Cuba directly accused the United States of the attack and re-established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In the face of the continuous US offensives, Fidel did not back down, but rather did the opposite, which, in the words of Che Guevara himself, made Castro a “truly revolutionary”. In June 1960, the Cuban State confiscated the refineries of Texas Oil Company, Shell and Esso, because they refused to process oil coming from the Soviet Union. The United States, meanwhile, reduced the purchase of sugar from Cuba. Faced with this, Fidel ordered the confiscation and nationalization of dozens of US companies.
On September 2, 1960, the First Declaration of Havana was issued, a document in response to the diplomatic isolation imposed by the Organization of American States as a consequence of the reestablishment of relations with the USSR and China. In the presentation of the document, Fidel demands “the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of peoples to turn their military fortresses into schools, and to arm their workers, their peasants, their students, their intellectuals, the Black, the Indian, the woman, the young, the old, all the oppressed and exploited, so that they can defend, by themselves, their rights and their destinies.”
In addition, the Cuban Revolution challenged US hegemony in the region when in 1961 it defeated, with Fidel on the battlefield, the Bay of Pigs invasion, made up of 1,500 soldiers armed by the CIA and the John F. Kennedy administration. After these attacks and international pressure, the “enigma” of Fidel’s political ideology is clarified: he publicly declares that he is a Marxist-Leninist.
This was followed by the Missile Crisis of 1962, before which the USSR obtained the commitment of the United States not to invade the Caribbean island, even though Fidel demanded the fulfillment of the five historical demands that the Cuban Revolution made to the United States: the end of the blockade, the end of the pirate attacks, the end of the dirty war, the end of the subversive plans, and the US withdrawal from the Guantanamo Naval Base.
However, the United States initiated an economic blockade that is still in force today, using which it sought and seeks to economically asphyxiate the Cuban Revolution. In 1959, 73% of Cuban exports were purchased by the United States, and 70% of imports came from the US. The impact on the Cuban economy has been severe and has impacted the island’s ability to advance in certain areas of economic and social development. The inclusion of Cuba on the US “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list in 2021 by Donald Trump, drastically tightened this blockade.
However, despite being one of the longest economic blockades in history (and probably the most drastic taking into account the economic difference between the US and Cuba), under Fidel’s leadership, Cuba undertook sports, cultural, educational, and scientific programs of the highest level, turning the island nation into one of the countries in the region with the greatest sports success, the best artistic programs, the highest university graduation rates, and one of the leading countries in scientific research worldwide (especially in the field of medicine).
Perhaps that is why Fidel said at the beginning of the Revolution, on April 16, 1961, that “That is what they [the imperialists] cannot forgive us, that we are there under their noses and that we have made a socialist revolution under the very noses of the United States!
In short, this mixture of stoic pragmatism and revolutionary insubordination is what characterizes Fidel Castro’s historical role in history, and this makes him, without a doubt, in the eyes of his admirers and enemies, the most important historical figure in Latin America in the 20th century.
