The motto on the Cuban matchbox:
I conquistando el futuro! I conquer the future!
Can express in the best way the luck that the work of Mikis Theodorakis will have. Mikis’ relationship with Fidel Castro and his acquaintance with Che Guevara, which began in 1962, as well as his historic concert in Havana in 1981, are well known.
In fact, when his personal friend, Comandante Fidel, died in November 2016, Mikis said goodbye to him with a succinct phrase:
“My dear Fidel, you left us and this is the first time I disagree with you”.
However, with an even more succinct phrase, the Hellenic-Cuban Friendship Association closes its farewell to the great Greek composer:
“Until victory, Miki, forever!”
The music of Mikis, inspired by the fighting heritage of our people, will live forever as a great cultural legacy that will be passed on to future generations. His music expresses the experiential relationship he had with the struggles of the people, with the sufferings that the country went through, the right of the wronged and the persecuted, that is why it has a global dimension.
It has been said and it is true that with his songs he gives voice and melody, strength and confidence, to the cry of whole generations fighting for freedom, equality, social justice and independence.
He himself felt complete, which is why he had said:
“I was happy to meet in life the intoxication of methexis between my work and others. I saw my works take root in foreign souls, spreading branches and blooming… What else, really, is a square, a stadium, a street full of people, who sing a song of yours as a group, than a flowery plain? I achieved this, I lived it and even now I still live it and consider it as the greatest blessing of the heavens… “.
However, although he had realized the greatness of his music, he asked as epitaph a phrase referring to the corresponding epigram of Aeschylus, who had fought against the Persians in the battle of Marathon, specifically he said to write: He fought in December.
Mikis’s struggles are not only intertwined with his huge work of art, they are the story of a century. Several of his political choices could be seen by some as contradictory. The answer, however, is given by Mikis himself, when he realized that the time crew had arrived and he “made a fund”. In the letter he left to the Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (ΚΚΕ), which is essentially his political will, he writes:
Now, at the end of my life, at the time of the accounts, the details disappear from my mind and the “Large Sizes” remain.
Thus, I see that I spent my most critical, strong and mature years under the banner of the KKE.
That’s why I want to leave this world as a communist…