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.