Castro, Fidel

From Philosopedia

Castro, Fidel (1926— ) Castro is the Cuban revolutionary and premier of Cuba who toppled Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar in 1959, installing his own Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. An atheist who has called his philosophic outlook “humanism,” he has been a symbol of revolution and social change in Latin America and elsewhere. “Liberty with bread, without terror–that is, Humanism,” he stated when first displacing the Batista government. His government, however, did not carry out that slogan. He campaigned for the socialistic nationalizing of industry, the confiscating of foreign-owned property, the collectivizing of agriculture, and improving of the average person’s quality of life. However, this “humanism,” according to most other professed humanists, led more than one million Cubans to flee the island because of his authoritarian and undemocratic rule. Those who fled, called la escoria (scum) or gusanos (worms), decry the chivatos (informers) who did not flee. Meanwhile, with the incredibly fast fall of other Marxist-Leninist governments in the 1990s, Castro remained a solitary symbol of his brand of humanism. His 1996 meeting with the Pope at the Vatican led him to say, “As a child, I never would have imagined that one day I would have lunch with cardinals and meet with a Pope.” Little wonder, for he long ago went on record:

When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn’t for me. As pointed out by Sidney Hook and other humanists, communistic humanism was destined to fail because it is not founded upon freedom, the significance of the individual, and political democracy. In mid-1994, Castro in a pragmatic decision invited some of the gusanos to return to their former country. In 1998 he invited Pope John Paul to visit Cuba. Asked by reporters if this implied he was no longer an atheist, Castro said,

I can say one thing. I respect those who believe and those who do not believe. If you say you do not believe, you offend those who believe. If you say you believe, you offend those who do not believe. In a way you become a preacher. I am not a preacher. I do believe in mankind and in the goodness and nobility of man. I believe the world should live in a way that is just and rational. {CE; E; The Economist, 16 August 1997}