The Great October Socialist Revolution was undoubtedly one of the great events in the history of Humanity, the assault on heaven by the oppressed peoples. Young people today did not even know the multinational state that that experience –with its lights and shadows– engendered, and in which thousands of their parents and grandparents studied. The passion that moves history falls asleep in the intricacies of time, the word that one day came accompanied by actions, shared by millions of fiery throats, later rests, helpless, in the history books. We revolutionaries have the duty to shake the books every so often so that the words incarnate again in deeds; awaken the sleeping heroes, prisoners of interests opposed to their own. It was what Fidel did on the centenary of the birth of José Martí. What Chávez did when he resumed the unfinished work of Bolívar. The imperialists fear history; that is why they trivialize or distort it when they cannot hide it.
But there are no heroes or popular events that are the heritage of a single person. Fidel and Chávez are as necessary for Russians today, as Lenin is for Latin Americans. And if necessary, it is also ours. How to awaken curiosity, interest, around the figures of the past? It is important to listen to or read to those who experienced the events. It was the American John Reed who was the best chronicler of the October Revolution - which occurred in November, according to the old Russian calendar - and his book The Ten Days that Shook the World, an exciting document, whose reading I always recommend. This is how he describes the founder of the first socialist State of Humanity:
It was exactly eight forty when a storm of cheers announced the entry of the Bureau, with Lenin, the great Lenin. He was a short man, stocky, with a large round bald head sunk at the shoulders, small eyes, a blunt nose, a large and generous mouth, a heavy chin. He was completely shaved, but already his beard, so familiar in the past, and now eternal, was beginning to bristle his features. His jacket was threadbare, his pants were too long for him. Although he did not lend himself much, physically, to be the idol of the multitudes, he was loved and revered like few chiefs in the course of history. A strange popular chief, who was so only by the power of the spirit. Dull, humorless, uncompromising and cold, without any picturesque peculiarity,
They were days of glory for Humanity. The scene described takes place one day after the revolutionary victory and is the preamble to the adoption of the proclamation of peace (that will lead the Russian people out of the inter-imperialist war) and of the decree on land (agrarian reform). In 1973, Fidel would affirm: «Without the luminous preaching of José Martí, without the vigorous example and immortal work of Céspedes, Agramonte, Gómez, Maceo and so many legendary men of past struggles; without the extraordinary scientific discoveries of Marx and Engels; Without Lenin's brilliant performance and his marvelous historical feat, a July 26 would not have been conceived.
By; Enrique Ubieta Gomez, internet@granma.cu, 11/07/2020.
