A history of courage

Before Huber Matos was a comrade of Fidel Castro in the famed Cuban Revolution.

Before Huber Matos died in Miami on February 27, just five years shy of a century of existence, before he moved to Florida in the US in the 1980s to live in exile, before he spent 20 years in a Cuban prison, before all that, he was a comrade of Fidel Castro in the famed Cuban Revolution.

At that time, the revolution in Cuba was simply about freedom — perhaps an unintelligent parallel could be drawn with the initial days of the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt in 2011. Castro was associated with the anti-communist People’s Party of Cuba and so was Matos. But where Castro became pro-communism later and through him Cuba moved towards a socialist nation, Matos was unable to reconcile with what most of the obituaries published about him in papers worldwide have called a ‘communist infiltration’ in the government.

Matos was imprisoned on charges of treason. When he was released in 1979, he could not return to Cuba, where Castro still ruled, so he moved to Miami by way of Costa Rica, where he died, as most of his obituaries put it, a ‘counter-revolutionary’ and a ‘democracy supporter’. I know about Matos after reading through these obituaries. I might have heard about him in passing before, but the information must have been so fleeting I could not recall it at the time of the news of his death.

By now, you might have guessed that there is no point in me writing about Huber Matos. There is no message in this article. There is opinion, but even that is not well-informed. I have nothing against communism, just as I do not have anything against most such systems. I do not have anything against Matos or Castro. I think it should not matter if I have an opinion about these personalities or not.

From Matos’s life, there is probably nothing better to take away than perhaps a sense of principled courage with which he told Castro, as one obituary mentioned, to “not bury the revolution” before he was arrested and tried for treason. There will perhaps always be disagreement on the nature and efficacy of revolutions, of democracies, and unfortunately, of dictatorships. History is a cruel thing. Some people say it has lessons. I don’t really get those people.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 22^nd, 2014.