REFLECTIONS
BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
LULA
(Part
One)
He spontaneously decided to
visit
In the past, as he himself
said, he visited the
There I also met with Frei Betto who today is a critic,
but not an enemy, of Lula, as well as with Father Ernesto Cardenal,
a militant leftist Sandinista and, today, an adversary of Daniel. The two
writers were part of the Theology of Liberation, a progressive trend which we
always saw as a great step towards unity between revolutionaries and the poor,
beyond their philosophy and their beliefs, in accordance with the specific
conditions of struggle in
Nonetheless, I must confess
that I perceived in Father Ernesto Cardenal, unlike
others in the Nicaraguan leadership, an image of sacrifice and privations resembling
that of a medieval monk. He was a true
prototype of purity. I leave aside
others less consistent, who were at one time revolutionaries, including
militants of the far left in
What does all this have to do
with Lula? A lot. He was never a left-wing extremist, nor did
he become a revolutionary through philosophical studies but rather he came from
very humble working class roots and Christian beliefs, and he worked hard
creating surplus value for others. Karl
Marx saw the workers as the ones who would bury the capitalist system: “Workers of the world unite,” he
proclaimed. He presents us with reasons
and demonstrates this with irrefutable logic; he takes pleasure and makes fun
of the cynical lies used to accuse Communists.
If the ideas of Marx were just at that time, when everything seemed to
depend on the class struggle and the growth of the productive forces, science
and technology, that supported the creation of essential goods to satisfy human
necessities, there are absolutely new factors which say that he was right and
which at the same time clash with his noble aims.
New necessities have arisen
which could destroy the aims of a society with neither
exploiters nor exploited. Among these
new necessities we have that of human survival.
No one had even heard about climate change in Marx’s day and age. He and Engels
surely knew that one day the sun would be extinguished as it consumed all of
its energy. A few years after the Manifesto
was written, other men were born who made inroads in science and knowledge
about the laws of chemistry, physics and biology ruling the Universe and
unknown then. Into whose hands would
this knowledge fall? Although it
continues in its development and even improves, and again partially denies and
contradicts its own theories, new knowledge is not in the hands of the poor
nations who today make up three-quarters of the world’s population. It is in the hands of a privileged group of
wealthy and developed capitalist powers, associated with the most powerful
empire ever to exist, built on the bases of a globalized economy, governed by
the very laws of capitalism described by Marx and thoroughly studied by
him.
Nowadays, as humankind still
suffers from these realities due to the very dialectics of events, we must
confront these dangers.
How did the revolutionary
process in
For me, unity means sharing
in the struggle, the risks, the sacrifices, the aims, ideas, concepts and
strategies, assumed after discussion and analysis. Unity means a common struggle against
annexationists, quislings and corrupt individuals who have nothing in common
with a militant revolutionary. It is to
this unity revolving around the idea of independence and against the empire as
it advances over the peoples of the
The old pre-revolutionary
slogan of unity has nothing to do with the concept, because in our country
today we do not have political organizations seeking power. We have to avoid that, in the enormous sea of
tactical criteria, strategic lines become diluted and we imagine nonexistent
situations.
In a country invaded by the
The real producers of sugar
who were the recently freed slaves and the peasants, many of whom fought in the
Liberation Army, transformed into squatters or completely lacking any land of
their own, who were pitched into the sugarcane harvests in the great estates
created by United States companies or Cuban land-owners who inherited, bought
or stole land, were adequate material for revolutionary ideas.
Julio Antonio Mella, founder of the Communist Party together with Baliño –who knew Martí and who,
with him, created the party that would lead Cuba to independence-- took up the banner,
brought to it all the enthusiasm derived from the October Revolution, and gave this
cause his own blood, that of a young intellectual conquered by revolutionary
ideas. The Communist blood of Jesús Menéndez would join that of
Mella 18 years later.
We, teenagers and youths,
studying in private schools had not even heard of Mella. Our class or social group, having incomes
greater that those of the rest of the population,
condemned us as human beings to be the selfish and the exploiters of society.
I had the privilege of coming
to the revolution through ideas, escaping the boring fate that life was leading
me to. I explained why at another moment;
now, I remember this only in the context of what I am writing.
Hatred for Batista's repression and his crimes
was so great that nobody paid heed to the ideas I expressed in my defense at the Court in Santiago de Cuba, where there was
even a book by Lenin printed in the USSR –coming from the credit I had at the
People’s Socialist Party bookstore at Carlos III in Havana– found among the
combatants’ belongings. “Whoever hasn’t
read Lenin, is an ignorant”, I blurted out during the interrogation at the
first sessions of the oral hearing when they brought it up as a damning bit of
evidence. They were still trying me
together with all of the surviving prisoners.
It would be hard to
understand what I am saying if one doesn’t keep in mind that at the time we
attacked the Moncada, on July 26, 1953, --an action
made possible by the organizational efforts of more than a year, with nobody on
our side other than ourselves-- the policies of Stalin, who had died suddenly a
few months earlier, prevailed in the USSR.
He was an honest and devoted Communist, who would later make serious
mistakes leading him to extremely conservative and cautious positions. If a Revolution like ours had succeeded at
that time, the
The
As the leaders of the USSR
themselves told me when I visited that great country in April 1963, the
revolutionary Russian combatants --well seasoned against foreign interventions aimed
at destroying the Bolshevik Revolution, which was left blockaded and isolated--
had established relations and exchanged experiences with German officers, those
with a Prussian militarist tradition, humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles
which put an end to World War I.
The SS intelligence services devised
schemes against many who were, in their vast majority, loyal to the Revolution.
Motivated by suspicions that turned pathological, Stalin purged 3 of his 5 Marshals,
13 of the 15 Army Commanders, 8 of the 9 Admirals, 50 of the 57 Army Corps Commanders,
154 of 186 Division Commanders, one hundred percent of Army Commissars, and 25
of 28 Army Corps Commissars of the Soviet Red Army in the years preceding the
Great Patriotic War.
The
In 1943, with some delay, the
last Nazi spring offensive was launched at the famous and tempting Kursk Bulge, with 900 thousand soldiers, 2700 tanks and
2000 planes. The Soviets, experts in
enemy psychology, laid in wait in that trap for the sure attack, with one
million and 200 thousand men, 3300 tanks, 2400 planes and 20,000 artillery
pieces. Led by Zhukov and Stalin himself, they destroyed Hitler's last
offensive.
In 1945, Soviet soldiers
advanced unstoppable to capture the German Reich Chancellery in Berlin where
they hoisted the red flag stained with the blood of the many fallen.
I observe Lula’s red tie for
a minute and I ask him, Did Chávez
give you that? He smiles and answers:
Now I am going to send him some shirts because he is complaining that the
collars on his shirts are too hard, and I am going to look for them in Bahía so that I can make him a present of them.
He asked that I give him some
of the photos I took.
When he said that he was very
impressed with my health, I told him that I spent my time thinking and
writing. Never in my life had I thought
so much. I told him that, at the end of
my visit to Córdoba, Argentina, where I had attended
a meeting with many leaders, and he had been there as well, I came back, and
then I took part in two ceremonies for the July 26th Anniversary. I
was checking over Ramonet’s book. I had answered all his questions. I had not taken the thing too seriously. I had thought that it would be a quick thing,
like the interviews with Frei Betto
and Tomás Borge. And then I became a slave to the French writer's
book, when it was at the point of being published without my going over it,
with some of the answers being a bit off the cuff. I barely slept during those days.
When I fell gravely ill on
the night of the 26th and in the early morning of the 27th
of July, I thought that would be the end, and while the doctors were fighting
for my life, the head of the Council of State Office was reading me the text,
at my insistence, and I was dictating the pertinent changes.
Fidel Castro Ruz