By Martin Hacthoun, IANS
Three days after Fidel Castro’s decision to neither aspire to nor accept re-election as president of the Council of State and Commander in Chief hit the news, life in Cuba and for Cubans goes about as usual.
And contrary to what the US government and the big media groups are disseminating, the only transition on the island in the foreseeable future rests on the changes the Cubans themselves are proposing to improve their socialist system of common and equal benefits for all.
“He who believes that Fidel’s decision means the end of Socialism in Cuba is wrong. There’s neither a sign nor a symptom that significant sectors of the Cuban society wants to roll back to Capitalism. Not even a majority of bishops of the Catholic Church”, Brazilian theologian Frei Beto remarks.
After the Cuban leader’s message made the big headline in Cuba Tuesday morning, the world media, particularly the big Western news transnationals unleashed an avalanche of stories, some even apocalyptic, and placed the island of 11.2 million people under their analytic microscope.
However, they have found – whether they print or broadcast it, a nation that goes on peacefully and normally with the course of life, knowing that it is living historic moments, but at the same time, aware that it is itself the true leading protagonist of its own history.
“It is an exercise, moreover, that it has been practicing for over 50 years by now beyond Western imposed silences”, an editorial in the Spanish publication Rebelión points out.
Cubans are not reluctant to changes. Vice President Raul Castro, also Minister of the Armed Forces, promoted a massive public debate in which four million people expressed freely their opinions and suggestions about the future course the country should take and how to improve their social system.
The government collected some two million proposals from these town hall and neighborhood meetings. Washington and the big American media chose to silencing or twisting this unique exercise of open and pluralistic democracy.
Those debates took place after Raul Castro announced in a speech on July 26, 2007, that the government was profoundly studying comprehensive structural changes to encourage production and the economy.
During the debates, the people conveyed their concerns on issues ranging from the shortage and poor conditions of housing, the insufficient public transport system, the two-tier monetary structure that implies a low purchasing power for many, the price hike, the huge amount of existing economic regulations to the scarce recreation and entertaining sites.
The Cubans know better than anyone what their problems and difficulties are, which have increased due to the more than 40-year-old US economic blockade costing the island over $82 billion in damage and losses.
Nevertheless, Cuba has struggled to achieve a literacy rate of 99.8 percent. It has 70,594 doctors for a population of 11.2 million inhabitants (one physician for every 160 people). It has an infant mortality rate of 5.3 every 1,000 live births, even better than that of the US, and 800,000 graduates and post-graduates from 67 universities and institutes, in which 606,000 students enroll every year.
In addition, Cuba has today doctors and teachers in nearly 100 countries, and promote the Latin American “Miracle Operation” project to cure free of charges eye ailments, and also the literacy campaign “Yes I Can”, which has even been extended to non-Spanish speaking countries like Timor Leste.
Following the general elections last January, which confirmed the broad support to the revolutionary process Fidel started in 1959, the new National Assembly will convene next Sunday.
Besides electing the island’s new authorities, it should debate and pass any proposal on economic, social or political change of importance.
Here rests, Rebelión’s editorial underlines, “the true news on the near future of the Revolution: the huge responsibility that this institution has ahead at times of exceptional significance for the Cuban nation”.
As with Fidel, besides showing political maturity and an admirable courage in the hardest moments for any human being, he will continue to be the indisputable historic leader for the Cubans and all progressive forces in the world.
His merits go beyond having faced 10 US presidents and survived hundreds of assassination attempts their administrations plotted against him for making and boosting a socialist revolution at roughly 140 kms from the great superpower.
Argentinean academic Néstor Cohan, author of the book “Fidel for Beginners”, writes that Fidel is not fleeing in a helicopter, nor he’s toppled by a people’s revolt, neither does he have to leave under corruption charges, enriched and a millionaire but scorned by the people, like many others”.
“He does not finish his political tenure”, he adds, “hiding in the dark shadows of the night like many Latin American dictators, who were protected by the Pentagon and the CIA with their uniforms tainted by the blood of the people and their pockets full of dollars”.
Instead, he chooses to pass on his duties to a new generation of leaders, trusting just like his people expect, too, that they will not only continue but better the work he began.
And he’s not shying away from the public scene either. From his trench, as he calls it, of a shrewd and reflexive political observer, he will push ahead his battle of ideas for what he believes a better world should be.
(Martin Hacthoun is the South Asia bureau chief of Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency. He can be contacted at [email protected])