In his recently published book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, Gabriel Rockhill recounts the hunt for Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara: “They wanted his head… they literally wanted him decapitated so that his head could be placed in a jar and expedited to Washington as a war trophy.” As a celebrated anti-imperialist guerrilla, Guevara embodied the alternative to capitalism, which he fought until his last breath. His execution was intended to eliminate a revolutionary leader while symbolically decapitating the very idea of socialist and anti-imperialist nation building.After killing Guevara and years of assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, which ultimately failed, the attention has now turned to Raúl, the former president of Cuba, who was recently indicted by the United States Justice Department.What does Raúl Castro represent that makes the United State so vindictive? Before following his brother into guerrilla warfare, Raúl followed Fidel Castro to Havana University Law School, where he became active in communist student politics. He joined the attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953, which gave the guerrilla movement its name – the 26th of July Movement, of which the 73rd anniversary was on Sunday.During the guerrilla war, he earned his own command, rising through the ranks to captain. After the revolution, he led the ministry of defence, heading the newly created Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. Tasked with defending the revolution, under his supervision, the armed forces defeated the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the imperial plot to overturn the revolution and recolonise Cuba. That invasion included the participation of exiled Cuban American beneficiaries of Batista’s authoritarian-military regime until 1959, funded and maintained by Washington. Meanwhile, the majority in the countryside suffered from imperial plunder.Also unforgettable is the 1961 Cuban literacy campaign, when around 2,50,000 young volunteers, mostly women, packed their bags with textbooks and kerosene lanterns and travelled to the remotest areas of the country. Where water, electricity and roads had yet not reached, these volunteers moved in with the mission to education. Writer-translator Kian Seara Rey writes, “While their compatriots fought what remained of Batista’s loyalists in the mountains and in the invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the brigadistas did their part at home. They fought with the pen rather than the rifle, and their enemy was an enemy within, a deeply entrenched one: ignorance and widespread illiteracy.”Beginning January 1961 (as outlined in Fidel Castro’s September 1960 speech at the United Nations), the campaign virtually eradicated illiteracy in Cuba, decreasing it from 23.6% to 3.9% by December 1961. In his Introduction to the collection of Lenin’s writings from February 1917 to October 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow, Slavoj Žižek writes, “If ever a pen was a weapon, it was the pen which wrote Lenin’s 1917 texts.”Members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces carry portraits of former Cuban President Raul Castro during a rally in his support, in front of the US Embassy in Havana, Cuba on May 22, 2026, after US prosecutors filed an indictment accusing him of ordering the 1996 shoot down of civilian planes flown by Miami-based exiles. Photo: AP/PTI.Lenin’s pen drove the Russian Revolution, but it happened more than once. Cuba’s literacy campaign was the second time in history when the pens of hundreds of thousands of brigadistas became the harbinger of a revolution. The Cuban Revolution did not just seize power but decolonised the consciousness of its countrymen and women through mass education, until when it was incomplete.For all these reasons, Raúl symbolises the consolidation of revolutionary consciousness, whose history does not end with the Cuban revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis or the imperialist assassination of Guevara. His most enduring contribution begins with institutionalising the revolution after the 1960s.Author Antoni Kapcia writes on his legacy in the Jacobin:“There was also another dimension to Raúl’s admiration of the USSR, already glimpsed in the Sierra: his belief in effective organisation and economic stability. Like many others, Raúl perceived both to be present in the USSR, overriding any doubts that he may have harboured about a lack of accountability in Soviet structures. His belief in the need for an effective, accountable and internally democratic single party remained consistent throughout the decades, reflecting his preference for material incentives (rather than the moral ones stressed by Che), constant accountability, and effective debate.”The process that began in 1975, when the leadership declared that the revolution had “engaged in a transition to socialism”, where popular mobilisation was replaced by a Soviet-style state structure. Raúl favoured closer Cuba-Soviet ties and regular five-year party Congress meetings, pushing for internal democracy. He favoured “a more measured drive toward socialism, with structured accountability and appropriate – but limited – material rewards, but always with a clearly socialist and moral ethos behind everything.”Not limiting the revolution to home, Raúl supervised Cuba’s largest international deployment of forces in support of Angolan President Agostinho Neto against apartheid-era South African intervention. “The 15-year engagement ultimately forced Pretoria to the negotiating table and helped accelerate the end of apartheid in southern Africa – a contribution acknowledged by none other than Nelson Mandela.”The 1980s and 1990s tested Raúl’s military leader and organisational skills, with the weakening and collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s “main economic benefactor”. He transformed its armed forces (FAR) into an institution with economic functions and promoted the idea that practical needs mattered more than military strength. The military was directed towards agricultural production and other economic activities as well. These changes eventually led to the creation of Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA (GAESA), a military-run business conglomerate that controls a large part of Cuba’s economy.When Raúl was elected to succeed Fidel in 2006 as president, Western media buzzed with claims of hereditary leadership, ignoring that he had been vice president since 1976 and second secretary of the party since 1965. He reaffirmed to skeptics that he was not Gorbachev. He used his revolutionary legitimacy to launch a broad programme of reforms aimed at modernising Cuba while preserving the socialist system and encouraged a nationwide public debate of the revolution’s economic and administrative weaknesses.At the sixth party congress in 2011, he became the party’s leader and gained the authority to implement reforms under the principle of “without haste, but without pause”. His government expanded initiatives for self-employment, increased opportunities for limited private investment and eased travel restrictions, which later developed Cuban tourism. These reforms began during the economic crisis of the early 1990s after the Soviet collapse. Secondly, he promoted younger leaders within the Communist Party and government, gradually replacing the revolutionary generation.He retired as promised in 2018 after two terms as president, remaining the party leader until 2021 overseeing political, economic and legal reforms. This included the 2019 Cuban constitution, which focused on separation of powers, which commentators said reflected his doubts about the concentration of power. Government now shares responsibility between four potential centers: the national president, elected indirectly; a prime minister for day-to-day government; the president of the reformed Council of State and National Assembly; and the party leader.Raúl retired from active politics in 2021, largely withdrawing from the public life thereafter. Throughout his life he remained the defender of the revolution, of the idea that there can exist a political, social and economic system that does not perpetuate staggering inequality, illiteracy, illness, ignorance and hunger – which does not bow before the “invisible hand” of the market either.Raúl remains the last living symbol who personified this alternative with the passing of revolutionary symbols starting from Lenin and going down to Fidel, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Amílcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara and Hugo Chávez.For decades, the United States has called Cuba “a State Sponsor of Terrorism”. In reality, the US has for decades sponsored Miami-based anti-Cuban groups. By indicting Raúl, which is seen as a sure pretext for all-out war, it wants to punish Cuba for what Chomsky and Prasad have called the unpardonable sin of “defying” the US by not conforming, as the rest of Latin America did, by obeying US suzerainty pursued through economic, political and military means.The kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife by US armed forces in January 2026 showed the extent to which imperialist power could go on to penalise those who refuse to accept its servitude, along with the Wall Street economic model it perpetuates.We began with the image of Che’s severed head carried to Washington as a trophy. That image was never simply about a man. It was about an idea. The indictment of Raúl Castro seeks to accomplish something similar, not through execution but through criminalisation. It is an attempt to delegitimise the revolution that Che fought for and Raúl spent decades institutionalising: the proposition that nation building can proceed through anti-imperialist socialism rather than submission to global capital.In targeting the last living symbol of that revolutionary generation, Washington seeks once again to decapitate the idea itself. As Mark Fisher famously observed in his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Criminalising those who embodied an alternative helps ensure that this remains so.Tathagat Kumar has a master’s degree in Political Science from the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, in May 2026. His research interests include political theory, revolutionary movements, Marxist thought and anti-imperialist politics.