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Castro’s legacy lives on in modern Cuba
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WHEN Raul Castro solemnly placed the cinerary urn containing his brother Fidel’s ashes in a columbarium niche in Santiago de Cuba, it seems dust has finally settled for Cuba’s charismatic revolutionary leader.
“Although Fidel Castro passed away physically, his spirit and ideals will live on in Cuba and in the world,” said Lisbet Quesada Luna, Consul General of Cuba in Shanghai.
His recent death, which plunged millions of Cubans into mourning, is an occasion for revisiting the legacies he left behind.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Cuba was a different country after the revolution led by Fidel Castro. Despite the commercial, economic, and financial blockade imposed by the United States on Cuba, it reached a very high level of development in education, health care, culture and technology and other areas, said Luna.
Cuba in 1959 was in limbo, economically, socially and intellectually.
The first task confronting Castro after he came to power was to promote literacy. At least 60 percent of Cubans were illiterate, while the remainder had varying degrees of literacy.
For example, Luna’s paternal grandfather, who died at the age of 84, was illiterate. Her grandmother could read and write, but with a fluency of only a 4th grader.
Thanks to the universal free education instituted after the revolution — all the way from primary school to university, including postgraduate studies — Cuba has eradicated illiteracy, said Luna.
The big strides made in medical services and innovations are also extraordinary. Of all the some 6,000 doctors in Cuba before the revolution, only half remained after 1959. The rest fled to the United States.
Right now the country boasts 91,000 doctors — not including nurses and other medical professionals — which averages out to one doctor for every 130 Cubans.
Moreover, the infant mortality rate had dropped to 4.3 percent.
Likewise, health care is free, something that one can only dream of even in some welfare states.
Although the US blockade spanning more than half a century has cut off Cuba from the technological advances happening in the outside world, it did miraculously little to thwart the continued progress of medicine in the small Caribbean country.
Remarkable achievement
For example, Cuban medicine treating diabetic foot problems is widely applauded as a technological marvel. Another important example is “CimaVax-EGF,” the first registered vaccine in the world used to treat cancer, specifically non-small-cell lung carcinoma in the early stage of this disease.
Similarly remarkable is that Cuba was the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
What Castro’s leadership brought to the Cuban people was more than a raised standard of living or longer life expectancy. More importantly, he engineered a reawakening of the civic spirit and restored social justice and equity in Cuba, Luna told Shanghai Daily.
Columbus’s discovery of the New World was followed by a steady influx of Spanish settlers and conquerors arriving in Latin America and the Caribbean, who subjugated the natives, robbed them of their riches, and imported slave labor from Africa to fuel the expansion of their empire.
Colonial repression and mixed ethnicity have long combined to frustrate attempts at nationhood, until the first independence war broke out in 1868.
The following century witnessed many more uprisings, most of which ended up being quashed.
At the turn of the 20th century, Cuba finally bade farewell to the Spaniards, only to be bossed around again by a new master in Washington.
Inspired by the ideals of José Martí, forerunner of the Cuban independence movement, a new generation of revolutionary youths led by Fidel Castro took up arms against dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1953. After six years of fighting, the revolutionaries ousted Batista.
It was only after 1959 that Cubans felt empowered over their own fate, and Castro restored dignity to a country whose people had long chafed under a dictatorship.
“His ideas are never outdated, they will inspire us for many years to come,” said Luna.
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