The Cuban historian Mario Juan Valdés Navia, Associate Researcher at the National Humanities Center and Duke University, published an essay this Friday in which he dismantles the ideological framework of Castroism and argues that Fidel Castro's leadership rested on an axiom never publicly stated, but "known to all": “The Revolution is me”.
The text argues that Castro constructed a demagogic discourse based on the fusion of three concepts—"Fatherland," "Revolution," and "Socialism"—which the author describes as a "new Holy Trinity" in which the people were to place their faith and hope. In that context, according to Valdés Navia, Castro would "reign as a sort of mediator, a high priest who would explain to the people what to do to sustain it."
The essay chronicles almost six decades of power, from 1956 until the dictator's death on November 25, 2016, documenting how his will "was imposed on the nation to fracture and reshape it, like a collective Frankenstein, through campaigns, battles, offensives, tasks, strategies, plans, missions, programs, and any voluntarist social engineering project he could conceive."
As early evidence of this logic of absolute control, Valdés Navia cites a letter that Castro addressed to the National Directorate of the Movement 26th of July in September 1955: "there will be no need to speak of coordinating efforts but rather to plainly and simply accept that the revolutionary leadership has changed hands, and all other factors will have to subordinate themselves to its new strategy, discipline, and program."
Once in power, the concentration was immediate. The Fundamental Law of February 7, 1959 granted the Prime Minister both executive and legislative powers simultaneously, relegating the president to a secondary role. That same year, the Council of Ministers approved a provision stating that, in the absence of the Commander in Chief, Raúl Castro would replace him at the helm of the Armed Forces. "Free elections were never discussed again," notes the historian.
In ideological terms, the "Words to the Intellectuals" from June 30, 1961, established cultural censorship with a formula that the regime continues to repeat today: "Within the Revolution: everything; against the Revolution: no rights." That same year, Castro acknowledged his Marxism-Leninism and admitted that he had concealed it for convenience: "If we had stood at the peak of Turquino when we were 'a few people' and said: we are Marxist-Leninists, we probably would not have been able to descend to the plain. So we referred to ourselves differently."
The essay also documents how Castro used emigration as a negotiating tactic. The Freedom Flights, between 1965 and 1973, transported 260,561 Cubans to the United States. Three decades later, following the popular uprising known as the "maleconazo" in August 1994, Castro deliberately promoted the Balseros Crisis: 47,844 people reached U.S. shores, 32,362 were intercepted at sea and confined in Guantánamo, and it is estimated that around 8,000 died during the journey.
In his final active years, Castro came to acknowledge to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and researcher Julia Sweig that "the Cuban model no longer works even for us," although he later tried to retract that statement. He also confessed to Carmen Lira, the director of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, about his responsibility in the Military Units to Support Production (UMAP): "They were moments of great injustice, a great injustice! [...] If anyone is responsible, it is me."
Valdés Navia, born in Sancti Spíritus in 1961 and separated from Cuban universities in 2011 for writing critically about the regime's policies, has been welcomed since 2023 as a Scholar at Risk at Duke University. His analysis connects Castro's legacy with the current crisis: the single party he founded remains the only legal one, the Castroist power group controls the economy through the GAESA holding, and the Rapid Response Brigades that he institutionalized continue to operate against any dissent.
The triad "Fatherland-Revolution-Socialism" that the essay analyzes as an instrument of symbolic domination is still invoked by the regime amid the energy collapse, food shortages, and mass exodus. The country is falling apart; yet the government is deploying all its resources to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the dictator's birth.
In 1987, Castro stated that "the ultimate test of a citizen's identification with the State […] is their total commitment to that process, their willingness to defend it with their life." For Valdés Navia, that phrase does not describe any identification but rather the abduction of individual will by those who control the apparatus of the State.
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