DURING recent months various events in Colombia have been commented on by Fidel in his habitual "Reflections," published in the Cuban press. The humanitarian operation sponsored by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, which culminated in the release on January 10 of Clara Rojas and Consuelo González, held by the guerrilla forces. Then came the military incursion of March 1, with U.S. assistance, and the massacre on Ecuadorian territory of combatants in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and young people of other nationalities, in flagrant violation of the sovereignty of a foreign country, condemned a few days later in the Río Group meeting in the Dominican capital. And then the release of former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and another 14 people in an action that relied on U.S. logistic support and intelligence, all of which motivated successive appreciations by the leader of the Cuban Revolution on the connotations of the events and their political and ethical implications in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Starting from a question that he asks himself – Was I objective and fair in my analysis of Marulanda and the Communist Party of Colombia in the "Reflections" published on July 5, 2008? – Fidel wrote La paz en Colombia (Peace in Colombia), the revealing title of a book published by Editora Política, on which he spent 400 long and arduous hours of documentation, analysis and drafting.

In the book, Fidel develops three central ideas: one, the characterization and development of the deceased FARC chief, the evolution of the guerrilla movement and his role in the complex Colombian political framework; secondly, the incidence of the oligarchic power, its instruments of exploitation and repression and its alliance with U.S. imperialism in the genesis of and constant exercise of violence; and thirdly, the real nature of Cuba’s links with the Latin American revolutionary movements and its long and sustained contribution to the search for a just, realistic and humanitarian solution to the armed conflict that is bleeding Colombia.

This country, Andean and Caribbean at the same time, is a long and ancient wound festering in the body of the continent. Even before Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated in a Bogotá street on April 9, 1948, the day on which the spiral of violence that continues up until today took on impulse, the nation experienced many pages of terror. In another of his "Reflections" (July 17, 2008), Fidel, who was in Colombia during known tragic events such as El Bogotazo, recalls having read "news on the massacres that were taking place in rural areas under the conservative government of Ospina Pérez. Normally, there was news of dozens of campesinos killed in those days."

La paz en Colombia is not a speculative essay, but a testimony that adheres to the objectivity of events. From its opening chapters – in which he summarizes the First and Second Declaration of Havana (1960 and 1962), essential for an understanding of the response of the Cuban government and people to the harassment of the empire and its subjected Latin Americans – until the final one – where he contrasts the memoirs of former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana with his own recollections of the issues covered in his talks with the former, and publishes Pastrana’s words on the "transparency, sincerity, loyalty and friendship toward Colombia" of the Cuban leader, Fidel gives precedence to documentary exposition.

In that context, the historical leader of the FARC (his real name was Pedro Antonio Marín) is perceived via the excellent testimonies of writer Arturo Alape and he sees himself in the so-called Cuadernos de Marulanda (Marulanda Notebooks). One key witness in terms of understanding the intrigues in the peace negotiations in Pastrana’s time is widely quoted in the book: José Arbesú, an official in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, who was present at the negotiations in Caiguán in January 2001, and then had meetings with Marulanda.

Likewise extremely interesting are the references written by Jacobo Arenas (the nom de guerre of Luis Morantes), author of Diario de la resistencia de Marquetalia (Diary of the Marquetalia Resistance, 1972), and a member of the Colombian Communist Party who joined the FARC and contributed to the ideological training of the guerrilla cadres. Arenas died in 1990, after having been one of the principal architects of the Unión Patriótica Movement, in which the FARC and other forces were grouped to participate in the public political scenario. During the government of Belisario Betancur, two presidential candidates, eight Congress members, 13 deputies, 70 councilors and 11 mayors and thousands of their members were assassinated by paramilitary groups, the security forces and drug trafficking hired killers.

The book also reveals the decisive Cuban mediation in the release in 1996 of Juan Carlos Gaviria, taken hostage by the Dignidad por Colombia Movement – an episode so bizarre that Fidel approaches it in a chapter titled "Fictional Events;" and even before in the peaceful solution to the crisis brought about on February 27, 1980 by the occupation and taking of hostages in the embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogotá.

The transcript of long excerpts of Fidel’s talks with the guerrilla commanders of the Simón Bolívar Coordinating Committee in Havana in 1991, evidences the respect with which the leader of the Revolution handled the delicate issue of the insurgency in that South American country.

With the aim of living a more precise idea of the context in which popular struggles developed in former decades on the continent, in the face of imperial interference and crimes, Fidel includes in his exposition details of the internationalist coordination that contributed to the Sandinista’s triumph over the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, and the brutal Yankee aggression against Grenada in 1983, which cost the lives of Cuban internationalists on that Caribbean island working on a noble civil mission.

With total frankness and absolute transparency, and starting from the mass of information handled, Fidel defines Marulanda as a leader who,

"understands the realities of the country and the period in which it befell him to live. He was far from being the bandit and drug trafficker that he was painted by his enemies."

At another point he states:

"He did extraordinary things with guerrilla units that, under his personal leadership, penetrated deep into enemy territory. Whenever anybody failed to fulfill a similar mission, he was always ready to demonstrate that it was possible."

But at the same time, with honesty and a knowledge of the cause, Fidel states from the beginning:

"My disagreement with Marulanda’s conception is based on living experience, not as a theoretician but as a politician who confronted and had to solve very similar problems as a citizen and as a guerrilla fighter, only that his were more complex and difficult."

And toward the end he argues:

"I disagreed with the FARC chief over the rhythm he assigned to the Colombian revolutionary process, his idea of an excessively prolonged war… My opposition is known to holding prisoners of war, implementing policies that humiliate them or subjecting them to the extremely hard conditions of the selva. In that way they will never hand over their weapons, even though the combat is lost. Neither was I in agreement with the taking and holding of civilians at a remove from the war."

In relation to the Communist Party of Colombia, Fidel describes how, as in other similar formations in Latin America,

"they were disciplined members of the International while it formally existed," under the line of the Communist Party of the USSR. In the case of Cuba, not without contradictions and tensions, unity prevailed among the revolutionary forces. The programmatic disagreements between the Colombian Party and the insurrectionary movements in diverse stages of that country’s history, do not in any way imply any devaluation of their selfless members."

Among the conclusions to be derived from reading this book, there are two that should be underlined: the interested and pernicious conduct of U.S. imperialism in the Colombian conflict on the one hand, and on the other, the value of revolutionary principles.

Only from a profound commitment to the truth, justice, the destiny of the peoples and the Martí faith in human betterment can a book like this be conceived.

A contribution of this magnitude to an understanding of the dramatic vicissitudes of Colombian history throughout the last 60 years is possible given the political education, analytic lucidity and the elevated ethics of a man whom an eminent Colombian, Gabriel García Márquez deemed: "His vision of Latin America in the future is the same as that of Bolívar and Martí, a integrated and autonomous community, capable of moving the destiny of the world."

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2008/noviembre/mier12/
46Pazencolombia-ing.html

READ MORE OF FIDEL'S "REFLECTIONS" ON AXIS OF LOGIC