Usa Forum - Hart: Fidel is the Best Disciple of Marti

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8/17/2006 11:48:00 AM

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Hart: Fidel is the Best Disciple of Marti

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Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.ple...

Hart: Fidel is the Best Disciple of Marti

by Jorge Smith

Havana, Aug 16 (Prensa Latina) Armando Hart, an outstanding personality in
the Cuban Revolution and a renowned lawyer and intellectual, said on
Tuesday that Fidel Castro, who turned 80 recently, is the best disciple of
Cuban National Hero Jose Marti.

A friend of Fidel Castro´s at university and during the struggles against
corrupt governments, the Batista tyranny and the blockade the United States
has imposed on Cuba for nearly 50 years, Hart is currently the director of
the Office of the Marti Program, attached to the Council of State of Cuba.

The former minister of Education and of Culture, who has held high posts in
the Communist Party and is a prominent theoretician of the Cuban
Revolution, granted an interview to Prensa Latina.

- - How did you meet Fidel?

- - I have known him since I was 15 or 16 years old, when he traveled to
Matanzas to meet my sister Marina, who was a lawyer, during a vote-catching
tour. My father, a well-known magistrate, told me after he listened to him:
"That young man´s face and discourse seem noble". He was right.

- - What do you think is Fidel Castro´s main revolutionary contribution?

- - He is a man of thought and action who organizes the attack on the Moncada
Garrison, goes to prison, prepares an 82-strong expedition that lands in
Cuba and leads a successful war against an army that was supported and
financed by the United States. On the other hand, he leads a Revolution
that has confronted for 47 years the most powerful empire that has ever
existed on Earth. But, for me, Fidel has made other historic deeds, in the
first place, he set out, following Marti´s methods, to achieve the people´s
unity based on the interests of the vast majority of the people and he did
so inspired in universal and Latin American revolutionary tradition. Two
men in history made that unity feasible: Jose Marti and Fidel Castro. But
it is necessary that young people study the methods and political ways that
allow achieving such community of purposes and wills.

- - Which were those methods?

- - The study must be based on the Culture to make politics. I want to
emphasize this aspect because it seems to me that it is the most original
and useful fruit of the history of Cuban ideas with Marti and Fidel as
their highest expression. I am not referring to political culture only, but
to the practical ways of its materialization. I think that these two great
men´s contribution begins by rejecting the reactionary "divide and win"
concept and the use of another one that would be like "unite to win". In
the new situations, the old divide to dominate politics, which
characterized the Roman Empire and which Machiavelli retook at his time, is
no longer effective. In times of globalization, solidary forces need to be
integrated to meet the dramatic challenges of the century that has just
begun. There lies the wealth of Fidel´s politics. But there is an essence
of this practice

- - How would you define it?

- - The essence of Marti and Fidel´s political practice is that Fidel´s is in
the following: radical position regarding the defense of Man´s rights all
over the world and, at the same time, aspiration to find harmony. Some
proclaim themselves radical and are not harmonious, thus creating
innumerable problems, and some introduce themselves as harmonious and they
are not radical, and they do not solve anything either. Marti and Fidel´s
politics is: radical thought and, at the same time, seeking harmony, that
is, the maximum participation of everyone in their goals. The other thing
is Marti´s concept that Homeland is Humankind, which in Fidel it is
expressed by his vocation to "embrace the world", from the expedition to
Cayo Confites in 1947, to overthrow the Trujillo tyranny, to the latest
international assistance that Cuba granted Pakistan. It is necessary to say
that the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity had had a formal
expression in Europe; in Latin America and the Caribbean, however, a
highly-sensitive culture was created around the relationship between Man
and nature. The latter is based on three categories: ethics, education and
political practice. Fidel, however, assumes the entire legacy of the
democratic thought from 18th-century European revolutions from the
prospects of the interests of "the poor of Earth". On the other hand, he
assumes the ethics of Christianity in our culture, which did not put itself
before science and, thus, it is part of our national awareness. The issue
of God, for example, was taken as an affair of individual consciousness.

- - Then, how would you describe that entity named Fidel Castro?

- - Fidel is the son of a history, of a memory long-embraced by our people.
In him, we see a clear sense to distinguish and combine practice and ideal
aspirations, always having justice as the highest category.

hr/jg/js/vc

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Hart: Fidel is the Best Disciple of Marti

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