Celia Hart: In memoriam

By
Jorge Gómez Barata                                                         Read Spanish Version

The
immensity of the tragedy caused by the hurricanes that flogged Cuba
overshadowed the news: on Sunday, Sept. 7, a tragic traffic accident
in Havana took the lives of Celia and Abel Hart Santamaría,
the children of Armando Hart Dávalos and Haydée
Santamaría.

I
knew Celia a little, and late in her life. Through a mutual friend,
she contacted me because, she said, she liked my way of writing and
she praised what she called my ability to broach "difficult
topics." At the same time, she cautioned me about what seemed to
her to be "ambiguities" that, in her opinion, might lead to
"theoretical inconsequences."

I
did not argue with her because I never do so with people who read me;
nor did I allow that she was right because such interpretations are
familiar to me. I never criticized her because it is not my place to
judge, because I believe in the right to think differently, and
because her political bravery and intellectual honesty seemed to me
respectable. In fact, we shared philosophical and political points of
view and, even though I sought the center and she moved in the far
end, we were comrades.

Most
remarkable about Celia Hart’s genuinely revolutionary thinking (and
paradoxically the axis of many of her contradictions) was her
admiration for Leon Trotsky, which went beyond a devotion for the
most romantic figure of the Bolshevik Revolution and the prototype of
the political fugitive and prompted her to make common cause with his
ideas.

Celia
was a Marxist of the type who took from Marx his most radical
anticapitalist conclusions, which she associated to the Bolshevik
experience, in particular to Trotsky, and viewed them in the context
of the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara and Fidel, thus producing a
focus not at all orthodox that contained reasons and arguments of
such radical theoretical quality that to some people (not to me)
seemed extremist. 

Naturally,
she was profoundly anti-Stalinist. I never asked her how her thinking
evolved. Perhaps she was at first critical of Stalin and down that
road she came to Trotsky — or the other way around. One day, I told
her that one can criticize Stalin without necessarily being a
Trotskyite. After all, the Russian revolutionary and intellectual (so
unfairly treated) was more a man of his time than a scientist, and
did most of his work while being excluded from the revolutionary
process. She did not dismiss that argument, although she inevitably
conditioned it.

Because
she admired Trotsky, Celia could not completely evade (though she
tried) the allusions to Lenin, an icon whom the Marxists avoid
confronting because he represents a kind of frontier, which is an
obstacle to a full understanding of the deformations that led to the
end of the Soviet experience. To fully exonerate Lenin is as wrong as
to fully blame Stalin. Once again, truth is a mixture.

In
fact, one can be both Marxist and Trotskyite, although it is more
difficult to be simultaneously a Trotskyite and a Leninist. Before
arguing with Stalin and succumbing to his power, Trotsky confronted
Lenin on the most sensitive of all topics related to the
"construction of socialism" — democracy, first in the
party and later in society. Trotsky took the first step in what from
the beginning was considered heresy and later a counterrevolutionary
act — he headed the "workers’ opposition."

Not
only because of those positions that Lenin criticized (although he
could coexist with them) but also for selfish ambitions of power,
Stalin relentlessly persecuted Trotsky, the true second-highest
figure of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin’s alter
ego.
Stalin deprived Trotsky of his posts and later of his nationality,
expelled him from the country and pursued him implacably.

Stalin’s
long hand did not respect the generosity of Mexican President Lázaro
Cárdenas, who granted exile to the fugitive. Stalin profaned
the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Khaló, infiltrating into
its inner circle a fanatic who did not hesitate to drive a pickaxe
into Leon Trotsky’s cranium.

I
am not surprised that Celia — whose family on both sides knew the
brutality of repression — repudiated those crimes, all the more when
they were allegedly committed in defense of socialism and Marxism,
something she loved. In any case, the inevitable has happened: she
left us in the fullness of her youth and amid a fevered revolutionary
activity, both creative and political. She left us as hastily as she
lived and left us when she was most needed.

Comparisons
are not an issue, and she was no "gold coin," but perhaps
she existed because she was needed. It is possible that revolutions
need men like Lenin and Trotsky, women like Rose Luxembourg and
voices like Celia’s, whose timbres and accents added to the Cuban
Revolution.

She
had many merits and other comrades who knew her better can describe
other facets. I — who had arranged with her a meeting that we now
will never hold — want to remember her in her most rebellious,
contradictory and perhaps most legitimate tessitura. I don’t ask that
she rest in peace, because she would have never wanted to rest — at
least not while there were any windmills to tilt at.

Jorge
Gómez Barata is a journalist and professor who lives and works
in Havana.