THE past 250 years have seen a tsunami of revolutions — the American, the French, the Chinese, and imitating them, the Cuban. Their waves swept across the world, impacting us today and, as Chairman Mao Zedong predicted, they will affect tomorrow’s history. This year, friends of America celebrate its first 250 years; its detractors see them as its last 250 years. America enjoys the pre-eminence that capitalism promised — at a Faustian price, redeemable in US dollars. America is discomfited by Russia, a perpetual migraine; China, a recurring malaise; and Cuba, an irritating thorn in its side.
A recent book by Simon Hall — Three Revolutions: Russia, China and Cuba (2025) — examines the genesis of their social upheavals. Interestingly, he links them to three writers (all American) who happened to be in the right place at the right time: John Reed, who in 1917 witnessed the ignition of the Russian Revolution; Edgar Snow, who met Mao and those who had survived the gruelling Long March of 1934-35; and Herbert Matthews, a New York Times correspondent, who in 1957 wriggled into Cuba and watched Fidel Castro’s underfunded but determined bid to depose Gen Batista. The three wrote accounts of their experiences and interaction with leaders, especially Lenin, Mao and Fidel Castro. They provided authentic, corrective insights into the social cataclysms that continue to be misunderstood by the West.
In 1917, Reed sees the storming of the czar’s Winter Palace in Petrograd (now St Petersburg). Looters are prevented from despoiling the palace’s treasures and opulent furnishings by “self-appointed sentinels”, who shout: “Comrades! Don’t take anything! This is the property of the people!” Another diligent sailor guarding the Winter Palace refuses entry to a new provisional government minister and the city’s mayor. “What will you do?” the two unarmed civilians ask him. The burly sailor replies: “We will spank you, and if necessary, shoot you!”
On meeting Lenin, Reed notices that he “looks through you with those terrible eyes … of being intensely interested”. Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) quotes Trotsky’s recollection of how Lenin, on Oct 10, 1917, scribbled a call for armed insurrection “hastily … with the gnawed end of a pencil on a sheet of paper from a child’s notebook ruled in squares”.
Internecine conflicts have replaced revolutions.
Lenin’s “sealed train” journey, from Switzerland across Germany and Finland to Russia, was more comfortable than the privations of the Long March. Of the 100,000 troops and party stalwarts who started from Jiangxi, only 6,000 or so reached Yan’an, 9,000 kilometres away. Edgar Snow first met Mao in 1936. He described him as a “gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure … with a face of intellectual shrewdness”. He attributes Mao’s genius to “his uncanny ability to embody the demands of millions of his fellow citizens — above all, the peasantry”.
Snow converted memories of a three-month stay in China into a book — Red Star over China (1937). It had an immeasurable impact, even in Washington’s highest circles. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, H. Ickes, remarked presciently that “any people that can do what the Red Army did during the Long March and after” were “positively invincible”.
Simon Hall’s inclusion of the Cuban revolution of 1956-59 may appear surprising until one reads how Castro achieved it. Arrested by Gen Batista’s soldiers, Castro’s life is spared by a compassionate lieutenant who tells his troops: “Don’t shoot. You can’t kill ideas”. Castro is tried and sentenced to 15 years in jail. In court, he makes a defiant speech: “I do not fear prison[.] Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”
Batista made the mistake of granting Castro an early amnesty. Castro repaid the favour by returning to Cuba from exile in Mexico. In 1956, he landed in Granma — “a creaking, leaking leisure yacht”. It was less “a landing than a shipwreck”. Harassed by Batista’s soldiers, Castro hid in the Sierra Maestra mountains — the commander of “two men, a couple of rifles and 120 rounds of ammunition”. There, he is joined by his brother Raúl, who brought five guns. Castro says, with bravado: “That makes seven. We have won the war!”
Herbert Matthews interviewed Castro in his Sierra hideout, writing afterwards: “He has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba [because] he is an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage, and of remarkable qualities of leadership.” Within three years, Castro toppled the US-supported Gen Batista.
In the 21st century, internecine conflicts have replaced revolutions. Autocracies may blindfold eyes that dare to see. Revolutions, though, like tsunamis, are unpredictable. They do not wait for submissive activists who, in Lenin’s words, sit in “armchair ideas” plotting “armchair action”.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, October 1st, 2026
