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  • Fidel and The Tricontinental Imagination
  • Aditya Nigam (bio)

Recently a Left-wing music group from Delhi, Parcham, uploaded a Hindi version of the song "Guantanamera," the Cuban folk song revolutionized by the poetry of Jose Marti. In part, it was an exercise in nostalgia about what we had left behind, but in equal measure it was still a longing for a future that many of us had come to associate with the Cuban Revolution and the figures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. If Che was the perennial revolutionary, the figure of Fidel increasingly embodied for us, in our youthful revolutionary days, the "tricontinental" imagination—that is, the coming together of the oppressed peoples of three continents: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In this imagination the small Caribbean island offering dogged resistance to the big bully in the North appeared as a powerful voice of support and solidarity for us all.

We knew that "Guantanamera" was not just a plaintive love song, it was a song that embodied the fighting spirit of Cuba. And clearly its resonances were felt in similar ways elsewhere in the three continents as well. In October 2016, some of us were in Johannesburg for a workshop on Democratic Marxism. The Rhodes Must Fall movement, begun in Cape Town, had galvanized the very air of Johannesburg—and indeed all of South Africa. Acquiring massive dimensions, the struggle had transformed into the militant Fees Must Fall campaign for the democratization of higher education. One evening, after the workshop, our hosts took us to a restaurant with live music. Well into the night, as we were preparing to leave, the band suddenly started singing "Guantanamera," and the effect was electrifying. Almost everyone present joined in, we were singing an inspiring collective anthem. [End Page 320]

What does this have to do with Fidel? And why talk of him today, in 2017?

To my mind, the tricontinental spirit embodied the spirit of decolonization and was part of a process that has acquired newer dimensions today. It has been noted by analysts that it was the first Tricontinental Conference that not only brought together towering figures like Amilcar Cabral, Salvador Allende, and Fidel Castro, but also helped, along with unwavering Cuban support, the Palestinian cause enter into Latin American consciousness. At one level, we could say that even today, in 2018, the "colonial matrix of power" (Quijano; Escobar) continues to structure our world, and imperialist bullying across the three continents continues unabated. That legacy of decolonization, therefore, continues to be important for us today.

But that perhaps does not tell us the whole story.

For too long have we labored under the illusion that while we fight imperialist bullying and domination we can happily continue to build capitalism "in our own way" in our respective societies. Capitalism, after all, was also supposed to be about liberating ourselves from so-called backwardness and underdevelopment. For it was the agent of history just as colonialism—its overseas adventure—was an "unconscious tool of History." Even though there were theorists who proclaimed "underdevelopment" at one pole to be structurally linked to "development" at the other, the fascination for capitalism continued to hold its seduction through the desire for development.

It is only in recent times that the realization has started dawning among some sections of the Left that capitalism, in any form, is antithetical to the very existence of humankind. It is perhaps time to recognize that "capitalism" is not just an economic system (or a mode of production) ordained by history to unite the whole world into a modern cosmopolitanism. Rather, "capitalism" and "the economy" are Euro-America's poisonous gifts to humanity, for it is through the institution of bourgeois private property and the idea of "the economy" as an autonomous domain with its own self-fulfilling logic that the hegemony of the West is established over our minds. It is only now that we have seriously begun to appreciate how deeply and constitutively this hegemony is tied to the genocide of indigenous populations and racial slavery—tied to the idea that these are merely accidental by-products [End Page 321] of an otherwise emancipatory discourse through which the West colonized...

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