The former youth leader and academic Hassan Pérez Casabona has returned to the public eye this week in a video shared on social media, in which he lavishes praise on the dictator Fidel Castro, within the context of the official Cuban campaign celebrating the centenary of his birth.
In the clip published on Facebook by Alejandro Ernesto Santamaría Tasende, Pérez Casabona describes Castro as "a man of extraordinary sensitivity, a giant of ideas, but at the same time a warm human being," and presents him as "probably the only person" who would have combined the qualities of a statesman, intellectual, and guerrilla leader.
Among the arguments he puts forward to illustrate that supposed exceptionalism, the academic claims that Castro was capable of simultaneously managing "the deployment of Cuban troops in Angola, where each piece of armament was," while also ensuring that "the fighters had chocolate and condensed milk."
The video is part of the official campaign under the hashtags #100YearsWithFidel and #TheCenturyOfFidel, with which the regime designated 2026 as the "Year of the Centenary of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz."
The main events took place in August, when Raúl Castro made a public appearance at the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana alongside President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and the official agenda will extend until December 4th.
Pérez Casabona, born in Jovellanos, Matanzas, in 1977, served as president of the University Students' Federation (FEU) from 1999 to 2003, and since 2004, he has been the second secretary of the National Committee of the Young Communist League (UJC), holding both positions during the so-called "Battle of Ideas," the political campaign promoted by Castro.
In September 2008, the UJC announced its replacement through a "logical renewal of cadres" and its transition to university teaching activities. Since then, he has been a full professor and researcher at the Center for Hemispheric Studies and United States Studies (CEHSEU) at the University of Havana.
His subsequent trajectory included a period in Bolivia, where he arrived in 2018 and, according to reports from 2019, advised members of the Bolivian presidential security during the government of Evo Morales. In May 2023, he reemerged at a virtual event for European groups supporting the Cuban regime, this time speaking partially in English.
The current video comes days after Pérez Casabona himself delivered a notably more nuanced speech to European audiences. In an interview published by the Spanish outlet Mundo Obrero on October 3, he stated that "Fidel cannot be invoked from repetition." The contrast between that stance and the direct praises in the video is striking.
In the clip, the academic also presents Castro's thought as a "method of analysis" superior to social media content: "The living Fidel, fighting and dialoguing, is not a discharge, it's not an algorithm, it's not a tutorial video," he states, concluding that "the best tribute to Fidel is to go directly to the source of his thought."
The author of the post refers to him as "Metralleta"—one of the nicknames he was given while being a speaker at the "Battle of Ideas," due to his combative and unrestrained rhetoric—and describes him as a "very fidelist fidelista" and a "social scientist out of his league."
Pérez Casabona published this year the book Clearing Paths… Fidel and the Conquest of Time, presented in Seville and at the Festival of the Communist Party of Spain in Rivas-Vaciamadrid at the end of September.
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