When I think of the first time I became aware of Fidel as something more than a reference to my parents or school, I guess it in that farewell speech to those killed in the crime of Barbados. That day in the Revolution square, when I was still a child, I perceived him in a different way because of the gigantic silence that surrounded me, the familiar faces with an expression I had never seen before and the voice that reached me without a face, because of my short stature. Those words whose content I could not grasp as much as the intuition that something tremendous was happening; the clamor at the end, of closed, hard, terrible and irrevocable unanimity has been with me ever since.
With Fidel, as with Martí, we risk reducing him to phrases rather than thoughts, isolated from the circumstances in which he reflected aloud and even more in which he acted. If we are talking about science, the relationship that Fidel established with it went beyond the commonplace of quoting him in that premonitory phrase of making the country one of science and scientists. There are few examples of a more complete dialectical praxis, in its complex richness, than the one Fidel practiced throughout his revolutionary life.
What kind of scientist was Fidel? Hard to say, assuming as true the implicit of the question. Certainly, it is easier to say what kind of scientist he was not. But I have no doubt that he carried in his blood the idea that practice is the criterion of truth, and with it he charges against all dogmatism of reducing thought to theses and theses to dogmas. That is scientific thought.
Some people today forget him. And in that oblivion, the danger of reproducing with him, that nefarious and superstitious rite that we practiced with Martí, of taking his expressions to our sardine. To "change what has to be changed" is becoming similar to "with all and for the good of all", turning the two maxims into a sack where we want the earthly and the divine to fit, as long as it is of our convenience. The first thing we must change is to want to make of Fidel a recipe book of commonplaces to use him, opportunistically, as a stoning of opinions contrary to our own. On one occasion, at the Convention Palace, I heard him say, with that frank smile with which he spoke profound truths: "Do not invoke my name in vain". Let us not do so.
Fidel built the post triumph unity from the minority within the majority. Those people of intuitions were not communist, and Fidel built the initial consensus for socialism in only two years. To do so, he did not lock himself up in preconceived theses as absolute truths, nor did he conceive the vanguard as an exclusive priesthood. I never heard Fidel despise the people in practice. If his understanding of the concrete reality differed from that of the majority, he would listen, and from the intelligent silence of listening, he would emerge, either with a consolidated criterion or with a changed one, a praxis that began by convincing others by looking them in the face. Faithful to his ideas, he could be stubborn, but of the type that always ends up converting his own mistakes into new paths to overcome them.
In that scenario, at the beginning of the Revolution, of tremendous heterogeneity of revolutionary forces, Fidel proposed to add all those who were not "incorrigibly counterrevolutionary", without distinction, without suspicion, with "great patience". A great people's front where there was room for all "honest" people willing to "work for the Revolution", as opposed to "mercenary" positions. We should, every time our compass gets stuck, calmly read that speech of Fidel to the intellectuals, among so many others, which he delivered on the last day of June 1961, only three months after the victory of the Bay of Pigs. It is always a good antidote against the pediatric fevers of leftism, which sees in the supposed clarity of the self-assumed vanguard, a privilege that justifies arrogant aggressiveness.
Consensus in Revolution is not a given, it is built daily against the objective and concrete reality, understanding the correlations of endogenous and exogenous, political, social and cultural hegemonies and in the same permanent exercise of balancing the revolutionary intransigence with the permanent purpose of adding up for the Revolution, already assuming it irrevocably socialist. I believe I am not far from Fidel, in the conviction that whoever believes that it is not a matter of adding all the social heterogeneity without distinction that we call people, and that continues to be the basis of this Revolution, does not have confidence in himself as a revolutionary. Our revolutionary center, that which has nothing to do with the sibylline restoring ideological centrism of capitalism, is the one that makes from the minority of the majority, the unity. Far from the extremes that consciously or de facto attempt against it and, therefore, against the socialism that we have given ourselves to build. The sky is taken by assault, little by little, building, "without haste, but without pause".
There are parallels that seem fortuitous but are not. Shortly before leaving us, Fidel said that our biggest mistake was to believe that we knew how to build socialism. The phrase reminds me of Marx's statement, also at the end, that he was not a Marxist, thus closing the doors to assume it as a religious dogma. Let us continue to seek how to build socialism, however terribly beautiful it may be, without losing that clamor of closed, hard and irrevocable unanimity that must always accompany us, with the immense and irreducible Fidel as our compass.
