The Cuban historian Mario Juan Valdés Navia, an 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 a publicly unspoken axiom, 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 the "new Holy Trinity" in which the people were to place their faith and hope. In this environment, according to Valdés Navia, Castro "would reign as a kind of mediator, a high priest who would explain to the people what to do at every moment to maintain it."
The essay chronologically covers 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 remake it, like a collective Frankenstein, through campaigns, battles, offensives, tasks, strategies, plans, missions, programs, and whatever voluntarist social engineering project he could think of."
As early evidence of this logic of absolute control, Valdés Navia cites a letter that Castro addressed to the National Directorate of the 26th of July Movement in September 1955: "There will be no need to speak of coordinating efforts but rather of a straightforward and simple acceptance 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 of authority was immediate. The Fundamental Law of February 7, 1959 granted the prime minister 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 take over the leadership of the Armed Forces. "There was never any more talk of free elections," notes the historian.
In the ideological realm, the "Words to Intellectuals" delivered on June 30, 1961, established cultural censorship with a formula that the regime continues to repeat to this day: "Within the Revolution: everything; against the Revolution: no rights." That same year, Castro acknowledged his Marxism-Leninism and admitted to having concealed it for convenience: "If we had declared ourselves Marxist-Leninists when we were 'just a handful,' we probably wouldn't have been able to come down from the mountains. So we identified ourselves differently."
The essay also documents how Castro used emigration as a bargaining tool. 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 Raft 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 deny it. He also confessed to Carmen Lira, the director of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, about his responsibility in the Military Units for Production Support (UMAP): "there were moments of great injustice, a great injustice! [...] If anyone is responsible, it is me."
Valdés Navia, born in Sancti Spíritus in 1961 and expelled from Cuban universities in 2011 for writing critically about the regime's policies, was welcomed as a Scholar at Risk at Duke University in 2023. His analysis links Castro's legacy to 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 he institutionalized continue to operate against any dissent.
The triad "Homeland-Revolution-Socialism," which the essay analyzes as a tool of symbolic domination, continues to be 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 proof 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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