The text is the transcript of a Questions & Answers session between Fidel Castro and students at the University of Concepción, Chile, on November 18 1971.
I was the
son of a landowner—that was one reason for me to be a reactionary. I was
educated in religious schools that were attended by the sons of the
rich—another reason for being a reactionary. I lived in Cuba, where all
the films, publications, and mass media were “Made in USA”—a third
reason for being a reactionary. I studied in a university where out of
fifteen thousand students, only thirty were anti-imperialists, and I was
one of those thirty at the end. When I entered the university, it was
as the son of a landowner—and to make matters worse, as a political
illiterate!
…And mind
you, no party member, no Communist, no socialist or extremist got hold
of me and indoctrinated me. No. I was given a big, heavy, infernal,
unreadable, unbearable textbook that tried to explain political economy
from a bourgeois viewpoint—they called that political economy!
And that
unbearable book presented the crises of overproduction and other such
problems as the most natural things in the world. It explained how in
Britain, when there was an abundance of coal, there were workers who
didn’t have any, because by the inexorable natural and unchangeable laws
of history, of society and nature, crises of overproduction inevitably
occur, and when they do, they bring unemployment and starvation. When
there’s too much coal, workers will freeze and starve!
So that
landowner’s son, who had been educated by bourgeois schools and Yankee
propaganda, began to think that something was wrong with that system,
that it didn’t make sense…
As the son
of a poor man who later became a big landowner, I had the advantage of
at least living in the countryside, with the peasants, with the poor,
who were all my friends. Had I been the grandson of a landowner, it’s
quite possible that my father would have taken me to live in the
capital, in a superaristocratic neighborhood and those positive factors
at work on me wouldn’t have been able to survive the influence of the
milieu. Egoism and other negative traits we humans beings have would
have prevailed.
Luckily,
the schools I studied in developed some of the positive factors. A
certain idealistic rationality; a certain concept of good and evil, just
and unjust; and a certain spirit of rebelliousness against impositions
and oppression led me to an analysis of human society, and turned me
into what I later realized was a utopian Communist. At the time, I still
hadn’t been fortunate enough to meet a Communist or read a Communist
document.
Then one
day a copy of the Communist Manifesto—the famous Communist
Manifesto!—fell into my hands and I read some things I’ll never forget…
What phrases what truths! And we saw those truths every day!
I felt like
some little animal that had been born in a forest which he didn’t
understand. Then, all of a sudden, he finds a map of that forest—a
description, a geography of that forest and everything in it. It was
then that I got my bearings. Take a look now and see if Marx’s ideas
weren’t just, correct, and inspiring. If we hadn’t based our struggle on
them, we wouldn’t be here now! We wouldn’t be here!
Now then,
was I a Communist? No. I was a man who was lucky enough to have
discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool
of Cuba’s political crisis long before becoming a full-fledged
Communist…
I went on
developing. Afterwards, I had the opportunity to know imperialism more
concretely than I had through Lenin’s book. I got to know
imperialism—the worst and most aggressive of all… And I believe life has
given me a better understanding of reality. It has made me more
revolutionary, more socialist, more Communist…
