Fidel Comments on Congress from Sidelines
By Circles Robinson
HAVANA TIMES, April 18 — Fidel Castro is not among the thousand delegates of Cuba’s Communist Party meeting since Saturday in Havana to decide new directions for the country’s crisis-plagued economy, but that doesn’t mean he is not present.
Fidel said he is listening to the discussions, taking place behind closed doors, and issued some comments in a column distributed Sunday and Monday by the Cuban media. The Congress is poised to approve measures that will reverse part of Fidel’s 1968 almost total clampdown on the private sector, in an attempt to kick start a slumping economy.
“I listened on Sunday at 10 in the morning to the debates of the delegates at the 6th Congress of the Party. There were so many commissions that, logically, I couldn´t listen to everyone who spoke, wrote Fidel Castro.
“The new generation is being called on to rectify and change without hesitation all that must be rectified and changed, and to continue showing that socialism is also the art of doing the impossible: building and carrying out a revolution of the meek, for the meek and by the meek, and defending it during a half century from the most powerful power that’s every existed…”
Our beloved Fidel mischaracterizes the US as “the most powerful power that’s every existed.” Actually, it is very weak. It is on the verge of disappearing as a world imperialist power.
But those like Fidel who have misunderstood what workable socialism truly is are unable to understand. If Cuba or any other country should create a socialist Cooperative Republic, and prove that socialism is indeed workable, the people of the US would embrace the model and US imperialism would be discarded.
Fidel, just like all the sectarian Marxists–including the Trotskyists who also think of socialism as the state owning all productive property–is incorrect and will not correct himself. If he would, his doing so might transform the world in short order.
We love Fidel and appreciate his great role in modern history, but he has stumbled in the last lap when so much is at stake, and when his rectification could do so much.