By Isaac Saney*
On August 13, 2026, the world marks the centenary of the birth of Fidel Castro Ruz. One hundred years after his birth, Fidel remains a figure of extraordinary historical consequence—not simply because of the political and socio-economic transformation he led in Cuba, but because he dared to ask one of the most fundamental questions confronting humanity: What kind of world do we want to build?
His answer was uncompromising. Humanity, he believed, could not survive indefinitely in a world organized around exploitation, imperial domination, racism, war, poverty, ecological destruction and the limitless accumulation of wealth. Another world was not only possible; it was necessary.
We live in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. Fascist and authoritarian movements are gaining strength in many parts of the world. Racism and xenophobia are being normalized. Genocide and collective punishment of entire nations and peoples have become horrifyingly routine. The concentration of wealth continues while billions experience economic insecurity. Imperial rivalries are intensifying. Military expenditures soar while social needs remain unmet. And above all these crises hangs the impending ecological cataclysm.
The centenary, therefore, should not be reduced to an exercise in remembrance. It should be an occasion for reflection, struggle and renewal. Fidel himself rejected the idea that his legacy should be reduced to monuments or statues. The most meaningful tribute to him is not to place his image in stone, but to continue the struggles for which he dedicated his life: the struggle against exploitation and oppression; against imperialism and colonialism; and for socialism, peace, sovereignty, internationalism and the emancipation of humanity.
The Cuban Revolution vividly illustrates this praxis in action, demonstrating how revolutionary ideas can be translated into reality and sustained through collective struggle. On January 1, 1959, the Cuban people, led by Fidel Castro, firmly took control of their own destiny and opened a new chapter in the history of their nation. The decades since have provided a rich and profound illustration of what can be achieved when a people wins its independence, defends its sovereignty, and exercises its inalienable right to self-determination.
Under Fidel's leadership, Cuba undertook mass literacy campaigns, expanded access to education and healthcare, transformed land ownership, dramatically increased the participation of women in social and economic life, and developed institutions intended to make social welfare a collective responsibility rather than a commodity. The significance of these accomplishments cannot be separated from the extraordinary circumstances in which they occurred.
Socialism, for Fidel, was not merely a different system of economic management. It was a moral and political project: the attempt to construct a society in which human beings would no longer be treated principally as instruments for the accumulation of wealth. This was why Fidel repeatedly returned to the themes of dignity, solidarity and justice. And this was also why Cuba's internationalism became such a defining feature of the Revolution.
Fidel understood that Cuban sovereignty could never be separated from the sovereignty and liberation of other peoples. The Revolution therefore refused the logic that a small country should concern itself only with its own survival. Cuba's internationalism became one of the most remarkable expressions of this principle.
Nowhere was this more consequential than in Africa. Cuba's military intervention in Angola helped defend Angolan independence and played a decisive role in the struggle against South African apartheid forces. More than 2,000 Cubans lost their lives defending the sovereignty and the right of the peoples of southern Africa to self-determination and freedom. The conflict in southern Africa directly contributed to the independence of Namibia and accelerated the demise of apartheid in South Africa. The significance of this history is frequently misunderstood and distorted in the west when Cuba's actions are reduced to Cold War geopolitics. For Fidel, Cuba’s solidarity was an elemental expression of internationalist responsibility.
Cuban internationalism was similarly manifested in healthcare. Hundreds of thousands of Cuban doctors and medical personnel have worked across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and in other parts of the world. During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and COVID-19 pandemic, Cuba continued this tradition, sending medical personnel abroad even as the island itself confronted severe economic and material constraints. This was not charity. It was solidarity. And that distinction matters. Charity presupposes inequality between giver and recipient. Revolutionary internationalism begins from the proposition that human life has equal value everywhere.
Perhaps one of the most prescient dimensions of Fidel's thought was his understanding of the ecological crisis. During his 1979 speech on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement to the United Nations, he underscored the ongoing and escalating destruction of the environment. In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Fidel warned that humanity itself was threatened by ecological collapse. His words were remarkably prescient. He connected the looming environmental catastrophe to the structure of global inequality, arguing that the wealthy industrialized societies that had emerged from colonialism and imperialism consumed a vastly disproportionate share of the world's resources while much of the Global South remained impoverished.
This was a crucial intervention. Fidel refused to treat environmental destruction as simply an unfortunate consequence of individual consumption. He situated the ecological crisis within the political economy of capitalism, colonialism and unequal development. The question was not simply whether individuals recycled enough or consumed less. The question was who controls resources, who consumes them, who profits from their extraction, who bears the environmental costs—and whose lives are considered expendable? His conclusion remains haunting: “Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.”
Three decades later, the warning has acquired even greater urgency. Climate change, biodiversity loss, rising sea levels, extreme weather, ecological degradation and the destruction of ecosystems are no longer distant possibilities. They are defining realities of the 21st century. Fidel understood something that remains fundamental: there can be no genuine ecological solution without confronting global inequality. A world in which a minority consumes enormous quantities of resources while billions struggle for food, water, housing, healthcare and energy cannot simply be made “green” through technological adjustments.
Humanity requires a different relationship to nature—and a different relationship among human beings. As Fidel argued in Rio, the solution was not to deny development to the poor, but to construct a just international economic order in which resources and technology could be distributed according to human need rather than profit.
At the heart of Fidel's worldview was a profound conviction that history need not remain imprisoned within the structures of exploitation that have dominated human society. He envisioned a world free from imperial domination, racism, colonialism, poverty and exploitation.
Fidel understood the power of the forces arrayed against such a transformation. He understood that those who benefit from an unjust order rarely surrender their privileges voluntarily. But he also understood something equally important: human beings make history. The July 26 movement demonstrated it. The Cuban Revolution demonstrated it. The struggles of peoples throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean demonstrated it. And the continuing struggles of workers, peasants, Indigenous peoples, Black communities, women, young people and oppressed peoples demonstrate it today.
The alternative is not austerity for the poor while the wealthy continue to consume without limit. The alternative is a more rational organization of human society—one based on solidarity rather than competition, cooperation rather than domination, and human need rather than private accumulation. This is why Fidel's thought remains relevant. He does not provide a ready-made blueprint for every problem of the 21st century. Nor should revolutionary thought be transformed into dogma.
Nevertheless, he provides something perhaps more important: a framework for asking the right questions. Who benefits? Who pays? Who controls the resources? Whose lives are valued? Who has the power to determine the future? And what kind of society is necessary if humanity is to survive?
Nowhere is the contemporary relevance of Fidel's legacy more visible than in Cuba itself. Despite the relentless efforts of the empire to bend Cuba to its will—to isolate, impoverish, and bring the Revolution to its knees—the Cuban people have repeatedly demonstrated extraordinary resilience, determination, and courage. Their steadfast defence of the independence and dignity of their homeland is inseparable from the defence of their own freedom, dignity, and right to determine their future. Time and again, Cuba has demonstrated that sovereignty is not merely a juridical principle but a living practice, sustained through the collective will and sacrifices of its people.
Today, the Cuban people continue to renew and defend their Revolution, confronting new and profound challenges while striving to preserve and deepen its social achievements and emancipatory aspirations. Cuba remains a living example of the possibility of building a society grounded in solidarity, social justice, mutual care, and what Fidel described as the values of human fraternity and social love. Its significance extends far beyond its shores, offering humanity a powerful reminder that another path is possible—one in which human beings and their collective well-being are placed above exploitation, domination, and the relentless pursuit of profit.
Cuba is being tested not under ordinary circumstances, but under conditions of extraordinary external pressure. The question is whether a small nation should have the right to determine its own political and economic system without being subjected to collective economic punishment and a genocidal siege because it chose a path contrary to the interests of the world's most powerful state. For those who believe in national sovereignty, international law and the right of peoples to self-determination, the answer must be clear. The Cuban people have the right to determine their own future.
And solidarity with Cuba must mean more than admiration. It must mean opposition to policies that deliberately make ordinary people's lives harder in the hope that economic suffering will produce political capitulation. The struggle against the blockade - the genocidal siege - is therefore inseparable from the broader struggle for a world in which sovereignty is not reserved for the powerful.
Fidel's legacy is not that everything he believed or every decision made under his leadership should be treated as beyond criticism. Revolutionary history should never become hagiography. The significance of Fidel lies elsewhere.
It lies in the extraordinary audacity of his central proposition: that a small and economically dependent country could break with imperial domination; that socialism could be attempted in the Caribbean; that education and healthcare could be treated as rights; that international solidarity could be placed above geopolitical calculation; that the peoples of the Global South could exercise agency in world history; and that humanity could imagine a future beyond capitalism's logic of endless accumulation.
Fidel was – and is- therefore more than a political leader. He was – and is - a revolutionary in the fullest sense of the word: someone who did not merely imagine another world but devoted his life to organizing people to construct it. That vision continues to inspire millions. And it continues to provoke his opponents precisely because it refuses the proposition that there is no alternative. Fidel's most enduring contribution may therefore be his insistence that the impossible is often only what powerful interests have taught us to regard as impossible.
Bertolt Brecht wrote of those who struggle for a day, those who struggle for a year, those who struggle for many years—and finally of those who struggle all their lives. As Brecht noted, “These are the indispensable ones.”
Fidel was one of those people. His life stretched across the extraordinary transformations of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st. He witnessed the triumph of national liberation movements, the defeat of colonial empires, the rise and collapse of socialist states, the intensification of global capitalism and the emergence of ecological and technological crises that now threaten humanity's future.
Yet he never abandoned the belief that another world was possible. That belief is perhaps his most important legacy. Because today, when despair is often presented as realism and resignation as wisdom, Fidel's example reminds us that hope is not passive.
Hope must be organized. A better world will not emerge automatically from the ruins of the present. It must be fought for. It must be imagined. It must be built.
The centenary of Fidel Castro is therefore not an invitation to nostalgia. Fidel's legacy is not entombed in the past. It lives wherever people organize to challenge injustice and wherever human beings refuse to accept exploitation and domination as the inevitable order of things. To remember Fidel is to confront the question he posed throughout his life: What are we prepared to do to change the world? The answer cannot simply be found in speeches. It must be found in struggle.
The world Fidel envisioned—a world free from exploitation, oppression, imperialism, racism, poverty and war—has not yet been achieved. That future remains unwritten. And therefore, the struggle continues.
¡Fidel Presente! — ¡Hoy, mañana y siempre!
*Isaac Saney is a Professor and Cuba and Black Studies Specialist in Black African Diaspora Studies and History, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. He is also a member of the executive of the Canadian Network On Cuba.