Fidel is Fading
January 22, 2009
Fidel
Fidel, commenting on Obama (Reflexiones), says: “I am going over sayings and matters I’ve collected for over half a century. I had the rare privilege of observing these occurrences for all that time. I receive information and I think calmly about these occurrences. I do not hope to enjoy such a privilege in four years, when the first presidential term of Obama ends.”
Fidel is fading. I know there’s some out there that will seize on the opportunity to offer a postprogressive critique of his crimes, his iron glove, his olive garb—and they’re not wrong—…but I’m sad. There’s something in his inflexibility, in—let’s face it—his absurd arrow-line inflexibility, that’s valuable. Well it’s flexing, and we’re losing something. The arrow bends, and we spend our time designing bows that look like a Dr. Suess machine.
Fidel comes from the woods. Fidel believes in the woods. Possibly, even: Fidel believes he is still in the woods. The next one wears no uniform, he wears a suit. Surely, this is superficial, and may have nothing to do with how he looks to a Cuban—but what are we talking about but precisely superficiality, the cycles of a sign? One sign is replaced by another, the bombastic signature of Fidel falls off the foreheads it has signed and it’s replaced by spidery signatures, made by crawling pens.
Let’s not be so stupid as to say this is the death/defeat of communism. Communism—at least as an actually existing system out there—is constantly and continually changing, and will probably not go away any sooner than capitalism (now there’s a dialectic to leave behind…). But as Fidel fades, so also fades a certain relationship to communism and the whole kingdom-come project. The kingdom is not come anymore, is not coming, but is now, now, now: patchworked together out of provisionality, a cessura indefinitely and arythmically falling through to the next note.
With this new president our horizons are opening up: a welcome change from the last eight years of battening down the hatches. Hope springs eternal, as they say. So it does, but neither horizons nor hope are blanks without content. Ours has yet to be filled in; everything could change in a minute; but the outlines are there: this is to be a strange kind of neoprogressivism, where helping hands prop up the old systems and care for the sick and poor, where mixed races pull both halves together, where justice is apportioned justly to the just and unjust, where freedoms are scrawled over legal pads. So with all that, why should I be upset about Fidel? Isn’t he laying in his bed, a different product of the same kind of thinking, cheering our hopes and critiquing our means? Yes, but Fidel (at least as symbol) is nothing if he isn’t serious. To the extent that Obama is completely every-fiber-of-my-body-serious he is ridiculous. Because we’re not.
Fidel fades. We can’t reach him anymore. We don’t have that sort of access to our futurity. Everything is so sophisticated now, so exact; the farmer’s almanac that listed two weeks of warmth in the spring, an early frost, gives way to the weather report of 85% chance of rain the day after tomorrow. But let’s not make this a eulogy for the astrologers. History buries forever. But we can mourn, we can move on, we can learn, we can rethink, we can rebuild, we can repeat.
¡Viva Fidel! ¡Viva La Revolución!
