Excerpts from speeches by Comandante en jefe Fidel Castro Ruz in 1970, 1981, 1992 and 2001
Rarely in any process, perhaps never in a political process, has a thought, a mind, an intellect been able to make such a significant contribution. Lenin was a tireless investigator and worker. It can be said that after acquiring political consciousness, he did not rest a single moment during his lifetime.
He did not cease to investigate, to study, and to work on charting the revolution's course.
There has been no gladiator who fought more ideological battles than Lenin. It is surprising how many he fought in the ideological arena. His history cannot be compared to that of other men who accomplished extraordinary feats, in terms of personal merit.
Lenin is one of those truly exceptional cases. A simple reading of his life and his work, the most objective analysis of the way his thought and activity developed throughout his life, shows him to be a truly, I repeat, exceptional man in the eyes of all human beings.
Lenin had the possibility to not only develop theory but to find a concrete field of action and the opportunity to implement his theory.
We honor Lenin with emotion, but when his work and life are studied, when his thought and doctrines are studied, peoples can acquire a true treasure from the political point of view.
When a better, superior evaluation is made history's personalities, Lenin, along with Marx, will stand out among the most transcendental thoughts, intellects, efforts in the history of humankind.
We recall how, in the months preceding July 26, 1953, most of the small group of compañeros working on those tasks were always carrying the works of Marx and Lenin, and we remember how some of Lenin's books, because they were Lenin's books, fell into the hands of the police during searches made after the Moncada attack.
We remember how, during the Moncada trial, a politically motivated prosecutor included among his most serious accusations against us, among his most capricious questions, whether it was true that we had books by Lenin and whether they were ours.
Lenin from the very outset was not only a political theoretician, a political philosopher, but a man of action, a permanent, tireless revolutionary.
He had the opportunity to develop a doctrine and apply it under difficult conditions, really impossible to imagine any worse.
We drew decisive conclusions from Lenin's works. Of course, when I talk about Leninism, I am talking about Marxism, about the essential ideas of Marx developed by Lenin, and one very specific idea of Lenin’s, State and Revolution, which clarified so many concepts for us, which enlightened us so much when the time came to develop our revolutionary strategy, the struggle for the conquest of revolutionary power. It was very decisive to the preparation of our strategy.
At a time when luminaries of revolutionary thought in Europe did not take into account Russian revolutionaries at all, when they looked with a certain disdain at these revolutionaries, when many of them would not have even deigned to consider Lenin's thought at all, or even the possibility of a Marxist revolution in that Russia of the czars, Lenin was undertaking his long pilgrimage, his long, protracted struggle to carry out a Marxist revolution in the conditions of that country.
But a truly objective study of history does not admit any possible comparison, no possible comparison is admissible, putting any other thought on the par with Lenin’s is not admissible, because Lenin's thought stands out from the beginning to the end, and was the backbone, the soul of the process.
And it is precisely in the bosom of that country, in the bosom of the empire of the czars, that this brilliant, truly brilliant man emerged, and developed Marxist doctrine there and applied it there, with extraordinarily creativity.
He defended Marx's ideas against all mystifications, distortions and deformations. He defended it and showed how right he was. Historical facts showed how all those currents in different European countries, against which Lenin fought, contributed to the crisis of the revolutionary movement, to the failure of the revolutionary movement, to the betrayal of the revolutionary movement.
Lenin said that a revolution was real when it was capable of defending itself. To tell the truth, our Revolution has shown that it is capable of defending itself. And it defends itself with powerful instruments.
We will not stop admiring Lenin, and every day we will admire him more. How we miss him!
Not even they could ever imagine that such a small country, so close to the monster, on its own - without the slightest help, not a penny, not a weapon, not anything, on the basis of our own conclusions - could have made such a radical, profound social revolution, as we did in our country, inspired by the traditional patriotic ideas of our people and our great heroes, by Martí, but also by Marx, Lenin, Engels and others who gave us - at least me - an idea of what society and the world were!
It must be said that Lenin was not only one of the most creative, most combative and most brilliant men, but one of the most courageous, morally courageous men. Courage that he demonstrated in very difficult trials, in very difficult decisions, throughout his life and throughout the revolutionary process.
Source:www.granma.cu
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