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Our Man In Havana

Come a few more months, it will be two score years since the Cuban revolution. None of the vicissitudes visiting it has been able to bring down the revolution. Fidel Castro's Cuba has survived not because of any dereliction on the part of the United States administration of what it has consistently regarded as its holy duty. The early fiasco of the Bay of Pigs did not deter the Central Intelligence Agency. The tacit understanding John Kennedy reached with Nikita Khurshchev, following the October 1962 crisis, to let Cuba be, has been flouted in a thousand different ways.

Sporadic attempts to bump off Castro have never been altogether suspended. US intelligence agencies have, in turn or simultaneously, actively encouraged acts of terrorism against Cuba while sabotage and espionage by remnants of pro-Batista exiles ensconced in Florida have received plaudits and protection from the American establishment. Infiltration from the Guatammano naval base and the constant barrage of abuses and canard beamed by the Voice of America have proceeded without interruption. And a heartless trade embargo has been enforced through the decades to starve Cubans to death: their unpardonable crime, as judged by Foggy Bottom, is their loyalty to socialism.

Nothing has mattered though. Cuba and Castro have continued to be around. One of history's most authentic heroes, Che Guevara, a restless soul if ever there was one, left the shores of Cuba on a more magnificent quest, to ignite the fire of revolution among the oppressed millions in the deepest interior of South America. He failed in his adventure and died a martyr's death.

Both his seeming failure and Cuba's success constitutes a noble parable of truth. Notwithstanding the ethos currently dominating large parts of the globe, the laws of eternity are bound to ensure a special place of honour for those who consider the welfare of their neighbours ahead of their own narrow self-interest. Is that not also the quintessence of socialism? It is a simple enough, almost homespun, proposition: what one achieves in this planet can in large measure be attributed to the generosity of those around, it is the neighbours' labour and exertions which safeguard the life, liberty and prosperity of each citizen.

If nothing else, to return to the neighbours a part of their bequest is an aesthetic necessity. Perhaps there is no equivalence in the exchange, the endeavour toward reaching equivalence is nonetheless an authentic acknowledgement of one's social obligation. This modest tenet has relevance as much for a village or a cluster of villages as for a township or a cluster of towns. It has the same relevance for a province, for a country consisting of various provinces, and, finally, for a continent made up of a continent of countries.

Attempts are mounted every now and then to persuade nations to disown the tenet and cross over to an ambience where nihilistic philosophies hold sway. Such contrivance has not been successful most of the time. Unless the base of the system is overhauled, mere tinkering at the level of the superstructure does not help. It has not helped in capitalist countries nor in those that have struggled to emerge from the shadow of the double inheritance of feudalism and colonialism.

Socialism has been prevented from spreading, sometimes socialism has brought about its own destruction due to a slippage from its norms and ethos, but the problems afflicting the wretched of the earth have not disappeared. In many quarters, the human condition has in fact worsened. Conventional modalities of reconstruction have failed to reverse the process.

This is precisely where Castro's bareback heroism has scored such rich points. If you de-class yourself from your hoity-toity roots, allow yourself to descend to the level of the masses, remain a partisan to the core in all seasons, the revolution will come through. There is, however, little scope for nurturing illusions. The enemy will constantly bombard the ramparts of resistance, conspirators will be sabotaging the cause, but as long as the vanguards of revolution maintain their communion with the people, nothing will stop the inexorable march of history.

This is, some will say, high romanticism, period. But Cuba is proof that romanticism works as long as comrades are around to make it work. The US is not known either for its patience or its forbearance. It has always treated Haiti as a pocket borough; it had not compunction 15 years ago about landing troops in little Grenada, inhabited by barely 100,000 people, on the slightest of pretexts. Cuba, barely 90 miles away from the Florida coast with a US naval base strongly entrenched within its belly, could have been easily overrun by American armed forces if a decision to that effect had been taken in Washington, DC.

The US establishment nonetheless has thought twice, thrice, several times. Cuba is qualitatively different from not just the rest of the Caribbean islands but also from the chaotic quasi-anarchy of the East European countries. The Americans had been itching to teach Cuba a lesson, and yet they have held back. And for solid objective reasons.

Cuba happens to be a fully integrated society, where all colour bars and ethnic distinctions have been demolished even as the revolution has marched forward. That apart, the leaders of the revolution continue to be, even at the end of 40 long years, very much a part of the people. Were parliamentary elections organised in conditions that are either similar or identical to prevailing notions in western democracies, an overwhelming proportion of the Cubans -- one can lay a wager --would vote for the revolution.

The revolution has not given them affluence, but factors which contribute to what the United Nations jargon describes as human development -- including provisions for education, health, nutrition, habitat, old age care, women's and children's welfare -- have blanketed the island country. The masses, it is therefore hardly surprising, will ferociously defend their revolution. After their experience in Vietnam, the American top brass has learnt to dread this ferocity.

A millennium is drawing to a close. The future historian has an open set of hypotheses to choose from to give his verdict. He or she can wax eloquent on the majesty of the revolution despite the humiliating collapse, at the end of 70 long years, of the first great experiment with people's uprising to effect revolutionary changes in the base of society. Should he or she decide to do so, Cuba's contrary example would be available to the historian. It may appear trite to contrast the glaring failure of V I Lenin's revolution with the speck of success that Cuba is. As the physics of the atom has however taught us, the concept is what matters, the power packed in a minuscule particle has infinite possibilities.

Besides, the relevant contrast to draw in the current phase is between the integrity of the Cuban revolution and the amorality infesting the liberalisation-globalisation paradigm. The Margaret Thatcher-Ronald Reagan theology has one exclusive central message: we exist only for the furtherance of our own interests, the community or the neighbourhood is not our concern. It is the profit an individual garners for himself on the narrowest of considerations which propels society. One must therefore worship at the temple of the rate of return alone: voluptuousness and self-seeking are, it follows, the summum bonum of human experience.

The ethnical code underlying this rationale is typified by the American cliché of running over one's grandmother if that would yield an extra couple of thousand grand. Is not this degradation of the human condition equally aptly illuminated by the impending finale of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky episode too? The decline of Pompei, we have been told, is accounted for by the pits of self-indulgence its rulers had descended to, evidence of which is now doled out to curious tourists who pour out of the boats transiently anchoring at the Bay of Naples.

Young children in the middle decades of the 21st century and thereafter will perhaps have an opportunity to compare the quality of the vibrant invocation of the revolution by Fidel Castro and his comrades with the text of the clinical analysis to prove or disprove the presence of an American president's semen on the dress of a Washington courtesan. Even as they express their preference or alternately, sense of disgust, they will also reveal the remorselessness of history's choices and decisions.

Ashok Mitra