To Havana with love

Chanting Che, and armed with pencils and erasers, the children of the great land of Cuba swarm the classrooms. In red-bordered notebooks, w...

Chanting Che, and armed with pencils and erasers, the children of the great land of Cuba swarm the classrooms. In red-bordered notebooks, whose ancestry goes back to the Bolivian jungles, they write songs to the revolution. And a million erasers banish the last traces of imperial conspiracy from the margins. A momentous turn in history. Watching this spectacle from a luxury bunker in Havana is the maximo lider, a bearded Jehovah in olive green, his socialist grin rather incomplete without a cigar. In the history of nations, such moments rarely happen. But Cuba is different. It is revolution’s last residual joke, sustained by one man’s fantasy and a few outsiders’ benevolence. The pencils and erasers are succeeding where slogans have failed because there are benefactors even after the Soviet implosion. They are not necessarily dinosaur-crazy, wannabe Spielbergs. This time they happen to be young comrades from Bengal. The battling pencils and avenging erasers are provided by the romantics of DYFI and SFI. A great revolutionary gesture from Bengal’s apprentice apparatchiks whose only acquaintance with revolution is through the dialectics of crossword puzzles and the class struggle of comic strips. Nonetheless, they have saved a nation. It is Cuba of the day after.

Quite a romance it is. It is also reported that revolutionary cadres of the CPI(M) from other parts of India will follow the noble example of the Bengal units of DYFI and SFI, which want to teach the US imperialists a lesson through innovative school events like “Draw for Cuba: As You Feel”. Isn’t it indoctrination at school-level? Isn’t it really absurd that young communists of India are waging a comic proxy war with the Imperialists? Intellectually, the young in the CPI(M) are as ancient as their biological superiors. Cuba is bad news: agreed. No fuel; empty food stores; not to speak of pencils and erasers. The reason is spelt Fidel Castro, a beguiling despot who refuses to accept not only his own redundancy but the dynamics of history as well. Wall paintings of Che or slogans of nationally rejuvenating anti-imperialism cannot turn an archival land of socialism into a nation victimised. The Indian communists have lost India; they, Fidelists without a past, have even lost their solar system of ideology with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Still, they can distribute some pencils and erasers among the children of India. Perhaps, Indian children, who have no revolutionary pedigree, do not deserve such socialist gifts.

Probably romance is the wrong word to describe this communist gesture. It is nostalgia wrapped in superstition. Nostalgia because Cuba for them is still revolution’s last outpost, a solitary David against the Goliath across the Florida Straits. It is another story that rafts of defiance are braving the waves to reach the shores of freedom. Superstition because communism has long ago exposed its own scientific pretence — and how! One day the children of Cuba will require a new set of pencils and erasers — to draw liberation, to erase tyranny. That day the Leader will be a jaded portrait in the book of wildlife. For the moment, India needs a romantic, preferably from SFI or DYFI, to send a little statue of Liberty to the survivors of Tiananmen.