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Fidel and Physics: Keeping the Commander Alive

HAVANA TIMES – Faced with an increasingly tangled and contradictory Cuban reality, it is surprising to see how intelligent people resort to convoluted arguments to (in my humble opinion) justify the unjustifiable.

The ultimate expression of this tactic is the attempt to establish the legitimacy of Cuba’s current internal situation through the exact sciences.

I recently read two examples of such efforts, invoking Physics, Cybernetics, and Semiotics (I hope I’m not mistaken about the latter two) to discuss Fidel Castro Ruz’s continued relevance in today’s Cuba.

Energy and the Machine

Fidel Castro Smirnov, grandson of the Commander-in-Chief, published a text last August, on the occasion of his grandfather’s centennial, arguing that his grandfather remains present in Cuba because his energetic imprint is still active, by virtue of some obscure derivations of natural laws supposedly discovered by modern Physics.

Castro Smirnov is the son of Fidelito (Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart), the eldest son of the Maximum Leader, born before 1959, who studied Nuclear Physics in the USSR and later headed Cuba’s nuclear energy program. Fidelito married a Soviet colleague (hence his son’s Russian second surname) and committed suicide several years ago, joining the long list of famous Cubans who have taken their own lives. It is said that his death was the result of severe depression. Many people were fond of him…

Castro Smirnov’s controversial “physics-based” argument triggered an avalanche of reactions from internet users who expressed their astonishment on social media at the use of a “scientific” argument by someone presumably “materialist” in his philosophical outlook.

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© Havana Times