Welcome Fidel

Abstract

In 1989, at the inauguration of the second presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela, the attendance of Fidel Castro triggered a controversy in the country. A group of intellectuals and artists published a release in the press, giving a laudatory and devotional welcome to the Cuban dictator. The author of this essay was one of those signatories and, two decades later, he tries to find reasons to understand why he did it. In this essay, the historical controversy of the "Padilla case" is taken up, a crucial event in the nexus of the Cuban Revolution with the intellectuals of the world, as well as some of the reflections that -on the subject of the relationship between intellectuality and totalitarianism- some thinkers had in the 20th century: Arendt, Kolakowski and Steiner, leaving open, in the end, the question of whether it is possible to overcome political polarization in urgent contexts such as Latin America, where inequality, poverty and impunity still reign.