Castro at 100: Prophet of the Multipolar World
by Bob Hickok
Bob Hickok marks Fidel Castro’s centenary by examining how his lifelong struggle against hegemony helped prepare the ground for the multipolar world now emerging.
Today Fidel Castro would have turned one hundred. How should we mark the centenary of a man who became one of the defining revolutionaries of the twentieth century? The answer cannot lie in ceremony alone. Castro mattered because he refused to accept that small nations must live according to rules written by great powers. Cuba was poor, isolated, and only ninety miles from the United States, yet under his leadership it insisted on acting as a sovereign political force. That refusal carried a meaning far beyond the Caribbean. Long before the word multipolarity entered common political speech, Castro defended the principle on which a multipolar world rests: that history cannot belong to one empire, one ideology, or one center of command. His Cuba became proof that even a small country could resist absorption into a larger system and claim the right to choose its own course.
Was Castro one of the first revolutionaries to foresee the end of the unipolar world?
