Some thoughts about Fidel Castro

I have been listening to the audiobook autobiography of Fidel Castro.  It was in the form of an interview in 2005 between foreign journalist Ignacio Ramonet, and Fidel himself.  The transcript had to be approved by Castro first before publication, and was translated into English, and performed by 2 actors for my enjoyment.  I borrowed it from the Public Library. 

One major theme throughout the tale was ethics.  Fidel explained that there is subjective and objective ethics.  Subjective ethics are about honor, protecting the innocent, being able to sleep at night.  Subjective ethics are about seeing international corporations coming into a nation and exploiting the human and natural resources to depletion for their own profit, and seeing the indigenous people being robbed of their capital legacy. 

Another shocking realization that has lifted the wool from my eyes is that the USA, the land I was raised to think had the moral high ground, has been sponsoring terrorism on the sovereign nation of Cuba for 55 years starting with our beloved JFK.  The fact that the microscopic nation of Cuba has persisted this long in spite of the acts of aggression from its giant nearby neighbor only attests to the validity of Castro’s assertions. 

And why should giant USA be threatened by the tiny little Caribbean nation of Cuba?  Why not be friends and trading partners like we are with Communist China?  The obvious reason is that the validity of Castro’s philosophy of ethics is so infectious, that it threatens the corporate oligarchy, which has been in control of our government for longer than we think. 

Castro actually admired JFK for withdrawing from the 1961 Bay of Pigs and admitting defeat.  He understood that Kennedy had inherited the plot from Eisenhower.  Castro’s forces had taken 1200 prisoners of war, which they ethically exchanged in 1962 with lawyer James Donovan for $53 of private medical supplies.  On the other hand, the non-violent Cuban 5 in the USA unethically all got life sentences, and Luis Posada Carriles, a convicted terrorist, lives free in luxury in Miami. 

Once again, our media portray Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as dangerous maniac armed revolutionaries.  But when you read their writing, they were totally rational and ethical.  They both saw the corporate machine robbing every resource possible if not stopped by persons with ethics.  They heroically stood up to the plate, but corporate censorship and spin have rewritten history to make the corporate oligarchy the good and moral side, and Castro and Guevara were on the bad and destructive militant revolutionary side. 

What Fidel & Che began to fight is upon us all with spades now, worldwide.  We are drowning in the toxic wastes of the for profit corporate depletion of our natural and human resources.  We are fed up with governments that serve corporate interests over the interests of the electorate, and enable our nation to descend into a banana republic.  Let We the People unite to non-violently create a “wall of separation between corporation and state” by amending the Constitution to define a person under the law as a human being, and money is not speech.   And with another amendment to mandate public funding of political campaigns with an eight-week campaign limit.