Somalilandsun-Fidel Castro of Cuba is finally dead! He has died at the age of ninety, his death comes at a time when the world is wary of the American politics of exclusion pushed forward by Donald Trump, social exclusion is vice which Castro has been fighting through–out his life, along with other socialist comrades like Che Que vara, Gramsci, Freire, Thomas Sankara, Amilca Cabral, MaoTse Tung and very many others. I mean Castro and those that thought like him stood bolt up-right against forces of imperialized capitalism.
Mourning Castro in Africa and especially in Kenya is not complete without literary, ideological and historical reflections. The literary reflections about live in the last century which was intellectually not at home and dry without reading Castro’s 1959 trial speech published in form of a book under the Title; History will Absolve Me which first appeared in the Spanish version as Me Historia Absolvera. This is the literature which described colonial system of government as democracy in chains. Castro’s literary adventures were wide and sporadic; he is the one who wrote the preface to the two books of Gabriel Garcia Marguez; You Can’t Write to the Coloneland then Love in times of Cholera. History of liberation literature in Africa cannotpermit us to forget the asylum he gave to anti-colonial and anti-apartheid African writers like Alex La Guma,Denis Brutus and very many others. Technically, it has to be deciphered that, Castro played a very critical role in the growth of Africa’s liberation and post-colonial literature, ideology and political socialization.
What remains enigmatic around Castro’s life is how he remained a superb intellectual, physically secure and culturally exuberant against strong forces and currents of heavy capital and anti-Castro movements as perpetrated by America and championed by most of the Western Politics. The answers to these which are also lessons to most of us who have a course to pursue are that Castro was nothing else but persistence and positive thinking, extensive reading, honesty in intellect and passion towards duty. These can possibly be deemed as vices by those opposed to him but truly they are barely positive lessons to those like Kwame Nkrumah who always lookedat every problem as a fountain of positive lessons and negative lessons. Such objective out-look does not render Castro a problem as the western world intended, but a paragon of social democracy which is a usual answer to political tyranny any-where and everywhere. Social democracy relies on the strong middle-class to protect good governance, and this is actually the governance model that America has been using under Barrack Obama for good of all in terms of health-care, economic opportunities and judicial democracy, and hence this is how actuallyhistory has absolved Castro as hehad initially predicted.
Personally I share with the people of Cuba the grieve and pangs of painful loss of such a resourceful person, I also condole the children of Castro Alina, Angel and Alex that the loss of their father is the loss of us all living in the world where those who have oppress those that have-not.
Alexander Opicho
(From Lodwar, Kenya)
