Like many around the world we mourn the death of Fidel Castro. We  express our condolences to Raul Castro and the rest of Fidel’s family, the Cuban people and the Communist Party of Cuba.

However, with that mourning comes a celebration of a life well lived in the service of humanity.

Bertoldt Brecht wrote:

There are those that struggle for a day, and they are good.
There are those that struggle for a year, and they are better.
There are those that struggle for many years, and they are better still.
But there are those that struggle all their lives.
These are the indispensable ones.

Fidel Castro was one of the indispensables ones. While there are those, as in Miami, celebrating his death, those celebrations amount to just sound and fury, signifying nothing. The leader of the Cuban Revolution accomplished his work and passed away naturally after retiring.

Castro led the first socialist revolution in the Americas, which evolved from a struggle to defeat the U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. The armed revolt against the dictatorship was itself a fight for national liberation struggle against U.S. domination.Fidel Castro led the Cuban people in creating a socialist society with the means of production in the hands of the working class and farmers. Cuba became the first country in the Western Hemisphere to have a 100 percent literacy rate, free education and healthcare for all.

The Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro himself irked U.S imperialism for having lost control of that island nation and they attempted to thwart the socialist project through subversion, and actual invasion and an economic embargo that is still in place.. They attempted to destroy the revolution by getting rid of its leader. The US through the the CIA orchestrated over 600 plots and attempts to murder him.

Perhaps the time that Fidel Castro’s revolutionary leadership was most tested was with the counter-revolutionary defeat of the socialist camp in Europe.With the implementation of glasnost and perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev, introduced bourgeois ideas and bourgeois relations of production, thus opening the door to pro-capitalist elements and the counter-revolutionary overthrow of socialism. This counter-revolution spread through the other European socialist states.

Many communist leaders, both in the socialist and capitalist countries, left their Marxism-Leninism behind,  becoming social-democrats. Others became outright proponents of capitalism.

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, an economic organization of member-states that worked for the economic integration of socialist countries, of which Cuba was a member was disbanded.  With that, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its most important trading partners.

However, Castro maintained a staunch defence of Marxism-Leninism and the socialist system. Being a committed Marxist-Leninist, Castro was a committed anti-imperialist and led Cuba in that direction. This was an anti-imperialism that was not just words, but action. Cuba has a long list of political, military and material support for countries fighting against imperialism.  The military defence of Angola against the US-backed intervention, the support for Puerto Rican independence, and the support for the countries of Latin America to free themselves from US control comprise just a short list of the examples of Cuba’s anti-imperialism under the leadership of Fidel Castro.

While he will be missed, especially by the peoples of the world fighting for social justice and the new socialist world, his life’s work will endure as a lasting memory of  one of humanity’s indispensable persons.