Makers of history

Published December 2, 2016
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

FROM a very young age, we Pakistanis are fed an official diet according to which individuals are made out to be almost exclusive makers of history. In the standardised version of Pakistan Studies, Mohammad bin Qasim, Mahmud Ghaznavi, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Allama Iqbal and Mohammad Ali Jinnah bring Pakistan, its culture, identity and everything else into being and ostensibly will it to survive after their deaths.

To the extent that we acknowledge serious flaws in the now 70-year-old nation-building project, they are easily attributed to the fact that no individual of their stature has graced us after they departed the scene. Seven decades and hundreds of millions of people later, we just can’t seem to produce another larger-than-life figure that can transform the land of the pure into the paradise on earth it was supposed to be.

I wonder if Cubans will become similarly defeatist following the death of their truly larger-than-life leader, Fidel Castro. One would not blame them if they did — it can reasonably be argued that Castro has had a bigger influence on his country than any other single political personality of the past half century. Regardless of the many criticisms of him, there are very few Cubans who are not in mourning at the demise of their greatest son.

It is worth bearing in mind that Castro had not directly been at the helm of affairs in Cuba for a decade, and that he had not necessarily seen eye to eye with state policy since his stepping down. More importantly, neither Castro during his lifetime nor Cubans in general believe their revolution to be the doing of one man. Which is to say that the death of one man cannot be its undoing either.


The Cuban nation is arguably the most self-aware on the planet.


A great deal has been said and written about contemporary Cuban society and Castro’s role in shaping it over the past few days, much of it emphasising the apparently dictatorial nature of the regime that he had spearheaded since the overthrow of the Washington-backed Batista regime in 1959. I need not respond to such polemics here, in part because many facts about revolutionary Cuba and Castro have already been presented on these pages by fellow columnists over the past few days.

What merits saying is that the Cuban nation is arguably the most conscious and self-aware on the planet. Cubans of all ages, races and genders have a keen sense of their history— history before 1959 and how it has been reshaped since the revolution. They have demonstrated that a united people living on a small island without significant natural endowments can create an egalitarian society in which human dignity is valued above all else. And that too while resisting the most powerful empire in the history of the world.

Certainly, individuals like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara have played enormous roles in the building of this society, but the collective will of the Cuban people has been the biggest agent of change over the past few decades. Each individual Cuban understands that the gains of the revolution have been achieved because everyone has fulfilled their own responsibility, including that of understanding history and thereby knowing how to change its course.

In contrast to the Cuban state, Pakistani officialdom has stunted rather than developed the critical faculties of ordinary people. This is why we think of history as little more than the actions of ‘big men’ and continue to look for individual messiahs to solve all of our problems, or, more accurately, reinvigorate the lost ideals of the five men mentioned earlier.

Most often the messiah has been a general, but sometimes a judge and at others a maulvi. Cricketer-philan­thropists are currently also in vogue. It is more than a little ironic that a right-wing populist party like the PTI has attempted to identify itself with the ‘revolutionary icon’ that was Fidel Castro. Individuals like Castro stand out because of their role in the conscious collective struggles of the Cuban people. The way we glorify individuals in this country is another matter altogether. Rest assured the way words like ‘revolution’ and ‘change’ are being thrown about in Pakistan these days bears no similarity to the Cuban case.

Fidel Castro became a hero to his people long before 1959, during the trial following his first attempt to overthrow Batista in 1953. Representing himself, Castro humiliated the regime and mesmerised Cuba’s long-suffering people through soliloquies that lasted for hours, and in which he demonstrated his mastery of history, philosophy and his inimitable ability to inspire. The most famous phrase he uttered during the trial was a taunt to the regime about how history would absolve him even if the court convicted him. History has absolved Fidel indeed — Cuba’s revolution lives on, defended by the people who brought it about and who continue to live it every day.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2016

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