Loyalty everywhere
No monuments are needed for Fidel. He is on every corner, and in every street, and in the people, in their pains and joys, in the best of us, in criticizing mistakes, and in what makes us proud and sustains us. He who should live, he lives
Author: Yeilen Delgado Calvo | nacional@granma.cu
August 12, 2022 23:08:38
Fidel Castro Ruz Center
Photo: Ismael Batista Ramírez
In The office of the spoken word , a shocking chronicle written in 1987, Gabriel García Márquez masterfully describes a Fidel seen from the admiration and the intimacy of friendship.
That text ends with a short story: «One night, while slowly spooning a vanilla ice cream, I saw him so overwhelmed by the weight of so many foreign destinies, so far from himself, that for an instant he seemed different from the one I had always been. So I asked him what he wanted to do most in this world, and he immediately replied: “Stand on a corner” ».
In those few lines is the testimony of the sensitivity of a man who to his contemporaries always seemed titanic; and so it will also happen to those who shelter under his legacy in the future.
However, the uniqueness of Fidel’s leadership was precisely in that humanity, that desire to be one more among the people and, nevertheless, accept the moral imperative of making a Revolution and sustaining it against a powerful and implacable enemy.
He captivated, and still does, because he was exceptional in his pedagogical way of explaining the challenges to the people; for his ability to understand national and international complexities (and even those of men and women), in such an illustrious way that it seemed like divinatory art; for the ability to learn at insane rates, and process that data sometimes better than those understood.
But if the people ignored the appointments and only baptized him Fidel, if he offered himself over and over again “for whatever,” it was due not only to the marvelous reality of his moral and intellectual stature, but to the unprecedented and mythical nature of his figure, but also that he recognized himself in it.
Like Martí, deep roots of the national are synthesized in Fidel, in his life and work: love for others to the point of detachment; stubbornness against adversity; the fierceness against those who covet the Homeland; in short, the Cubanness, a concept so deep and difficult to summarize, although so easily identifiable.
Fidel could never, after throwing himself into the arms of the Island and its destiny, be that normal man who stops at a corner to observe from anonymity. Others were the demands of his missions. Whenever he was in public, his presence soothed and inflamed.
He did not want to be glorified, perhaps because he knew that the best way for ideas to endure and triumph is for them to be planted, reborn and renewed in the souls of generations.
No monuments are needed for Fidel. He is on every corner, and in every street, and in the people, in their pains and joys, in the best of us, in criticizing mistakes, and in what makes us proud and sustains us. He who should live, he lives. Fidel is everywhere.