Raimondo said that we should not talk about him personally but only remind everyone of the great cause for which he dedicated his life, unfortunately cut short too soon.

In fact, Raimondo has been a militant, since he was very young, and ever since then, in the party of international communism, in our party.

Obeying his desire, therefore, we do not recall here his uncommon qualities, of sensitivity, the lively intelligence in his eyes and the patient smile, of someone who knows how to understand men and situations, before intervening with affectionate firmness, respectful towards all.

This is another lesson he leaves us. You can’t talk about a communist without talking about communism. And Raimondo in particular can be remembered truly, fully, faithfully, only within his, and our, need for communism.

It is individualism that mortifies and deforms the individual. Raimondo told us do not speak of me, because by speaking only of him we would have betrayed him.

We overcome personalization not to deny the individual but to exalt him, to free him in a strengthened and dense network of relationships. A man is made by his relationships with others. He cannot be defined otherwise.

Raimondo lived, realized and satisfied that need for relationships with all men and things in the world. And a communist is a communist always, in all the concrete, daily events of life. Not only in dreams or in an aspiration or, worse, in nostalgia, a regret, or just a ritual.

And this is possible because a communist sees what others cannot see, blinded by the smoke bombs of this society and deafened by the inappropriate screams of the monkeys with which they represent all the bloodthirsty states of the world.

Every man, more or less consciously, feels the need for what he knows can and should be an indistinct better world, and suffers from the abuses on the majority of humanity, which he calls injustices, imposed for the selfish interests of a tiny minority, and from the absurdities, wastes, sufferings, mourning and massacres that are imposed on them. Religions suffocate this need by sending it back to an otherworldly world.

But in this increasingly tormented earthly world the communist sees and feels that communism is already there. It is not the will of the communists but capitalism itself that progressively demolishes all its material and ideal presuppositions and foundations. All our real life is materially ready for communism, even if men cannot know it and only dream. But man dreams as much as he can dream, what is already within reach.

We will not say that Raimondo did not have time to see communism. Instead, he saw it. And he saw it completely because he fought for communism together with his companions.

Because of his great tranquility, Raimondo has never shown impatience, which is a weakness of individualism. What we have not been able to understand and do, those who come after us will do. And if not here, they will start in other countries and continents. Communists are never in a hurry.

This patient preparation, carried out according to a plan and continuity of practical attitudes, day after day, year after year, generation of militants one after the other, is it not already communism? The negation of envy, disorder, the contingent and the expedients of capital?

Of course this is not enough to console us. Life has these wounds. That network that closely connected Raimondo to all of us has been torn, and we all suffer and feel great pain. We must now re-tie that network, made of affections and memories, to pass on his life lessons to the young and to those who will come.