Nick G.
The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) joins with progressive and revolutionary peoples the world over to mourn the passing of Comrade Fidel Castro.
Castro led the guerilla movement that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. He served as Prime Minister of Cuba for the next 47 years and as President of Cuba from 1976 to 2006. He was First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party from 1961 to 2011.
Castro led the Cuban Party and government through periods of great difficulty including the period of ideological confusion engendered by Soviet leader Khrushchev’s revisionist attacks on Marxism-Leninism, and the entire period of US imperialist hostility towards the Cuban revolution.
The US imperialists brazenly invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and made one attempt after another to assassinate Cuba’s leader. The blockade of Cuba imposed by US imperialism created economic hardship. With the support of the Cuban people, Fidel Castro frustrated every evil scheme to subvert and destroy Cuba’s independence, sovereignty and socialist economy.
Under Castro’s leadership, Cuba won great prestige among the poor and oppressed nations and peoples by guaranteeing its own people’s health care, education and literacy, and housing. In an extraordinary gesture of proletarian internationalism and solidarity with the global poor, Cuba trained health professionals from Third World countries at no cost and made literacy programs and teachers available to those in need.
In the decade after his resignation as leader of the Cuban state, Castro provided exemplary political leadership through a series of letters, notes and interviews. He was unrelenting in his exposure of the crimes of the imperialists and in his encouragement of socialist sentiment and the science of Marxism.
His final major speech was delivered at the Cuban Communist Party’s 7th Congress on April 16, 2016 which was both the anniversary of the Party’s founding and the 55th anniversary of the Declaration of the Socialist Nature of the Revolution.
In the speech, Castro solemnly addressed his own mortality, not with fear of the inevitable, but with confidence in the ideas of Communism, saying, “Soon I will be 90 years old. I would never have thought of such an idea and it was never the result of an effort, it was a whim of chance. Soon I will be like all the others. We all will have our turn, but the ideas of the Cuban communists will remain as proof that on this planet, if we work with fervour and dignity, we can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we must fight without ceasing to obtain them. To our brothers in Latin America and in the world we must convey to them that the Cuban people will win. Maybe this is one of the last times that I speak in this room….”
The time will come when every one of us speaks last words. Few will have the privilege of their words outliving them and of their life resonating through the ages in those words.
Fidel Castro will join the great revolutionary leaders of the modern era who will continue to live long after death.
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