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./articles/Leon-Abram/https:..www.marxists.org.subject.jewish.leon.biblio | <body>
<h2>Abram Leon</h2>
<h1>The Jewish Question</h1>
<p>
</p>
<hr>
<h3>Bibliography</h3>
<p>
Albertini, Eugene. <strong>L’empire Romain</strong>. Paris, 1929.</p>
<p>
Ansiaux, Maurice. <strong>Traité d’Économie Politique</strong>. Paris, 1920-26.</p>
<p>
Aristotle. <strong>Politics</strong>. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford, 1885.</p>
<p>
Autran, Charles. <strong>Les Phénici ens</strong>. Paris, 1920.</p>
<p>
Avenel, Georges d’. <strong>Histoire Économique de la Propriété, etc.</strong> Paris, 1894.</p>
<p>
Ballester y Castell, Rafael. <strong>Histoire de l’Espagne</strong>. Paris, 1928.</p>
<p>
Bauer, Otto. <strong>Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie</strong>. Vienna, 1907.</p>
<p>
Bédarride, I. <strong>Les Juifs en France, en Italie et en Espagne</strong>. Paris, 1867.</p>
<p>
Beloch, K.J. <strong>Griechische Geschichte</strong>. Berlin, 1914-27.</p>
<p>
Ben-Adir. <em>Anti-Semitism</em>. In <strong>General Encyclopedia</strong> (Yiddish). Paris, 1936.</p>
<p>
Böhm, Adolf. <strong>Die Zionistische Bewegung</strong>. Berlin, [1935-37].</p>
<p>
Brentano, Lujo. <strong>Die Anfänge des Modernen Kapitalismus</strong>. Munich, 1916.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Eine Geschichte der Wirtschafthichen Entwicklung Englands</strong>. Jena, 1927-29.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Das Wirtschaftsleben der Antiken Welt</strong>. Jena, 1929.</p>
<p>
Brutzkus, Dr. Julius. <em>History of the Jewish Mountaineers in Daghestan (Caucasia)</em>. In <strong>Yivo Studies in History</strong>, vol.2.(Yiddish). Wilno, 1937.</p>
<p>
——— <em>Trade Relations of the West European Jews with Medieval Kiev</em>. In <strong>Writings on Economics and Statistics</strong> (Yiddish). Edited by J. Lestschinsky Berlin, 1928.</p>
<p>
Bühl, F. <strong>Die Sozialen Verhältnisse der Israeliten</strong>. Berlin, 1899.</p>
<p>
Caro, Georg. <strong>Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden im Mittelalter und der Neuzeit</strong>. Frankfort, 1924.</p>
<p>
Causse, Antonin. <strong>Les Dispersés d’Israël</strong>. Paris, 1929.</p>
<p>
Clerc, Michel. <strong>Les Métèques Atheniens</strong>. Paris, 1893.</p>
<p>
Cunow, Heinrich. <strong>Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte</strong>. Berlin, 1926-31.</p>
<p>
Depping, G.B. <strong>Histoire du Commerce entre le Levant et l’Europe</strong>. Paris, 1830.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age</strong>. Paris, 1845.</p>
<p>
Dubnow, S.M. <strong>History of the Jews in Russia and Poland</strong>. Philadelphia, 1916.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Die Neueste Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes</strong>. Berlin, 1920-24.</p>
<p>
Dubnow, W. <em>On the Economic History of the Jews in Russia</em>, In <strong>Writings on Economics and Statistics</strong> (Yiddish). Edited by J. Lestschinsky Berlin, 1928.</p>
<p>
Francotte, Henri. <strong>L’Industrie dans la Grèce Ancienne</strong>. Brussels, 1900-1901.</p>
<p>
Frank, Tenney. <strong>An Economic History of Rome to the End of the Republic</strong>. Baltimore, 1920.</p>
<p>
Friedländer, Ludwig. <strong>Roman Life and Manners under the Early empire</strong>. London, 1910.</p>
<p>
Furtenbach, Friedrich von. <strong>Krieg gegen Russland und Russische Gefangenschaft</strong>. Nuremberg, 1912.</p>
<p>
Fustel de Coulanges, N.D. <strong>The Ancient City</strong>. Boston, 1874.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Histoire des Institutions Politiques de l’Ancienne France</strong>. Paris, 1888-92.</p>
<p>
<strong>General Encyclopedia</strong> (Yiddish). Paris, 1936.</p>
<p>
Gibbon, Edward. <strong>The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman empire</strong>. New York: Heritage Press, 1946.</p>
<p>
Gide, Charles. <strong>Principles of Political Economy</strong>. Boston, 1905.</p>
<p>
Graetz, Heinrich Hirsch. <strong>Popular History of the Jews</strong>. New York, 1919.</p>
<p>
Gumplowicz, Ludwig. <strong>The Outlines of Sociology</strong>. Philadelphia, 1899.</p>
<p>
Günther, Hans. <strong>Rassenkunde des Jüdischen Volkes</strong>. Munich, 1930.</p>
<p>
Hasebroek, Johannes. <strong>Staat und Handel im Alten Griechenland</strong>. Tübingen, 1928.</p>
<p>
Hatzfeld, Jean. <strong>Les Trafiquants Italiens dans l’Orient Hellénistique</strong>. Paris, 1919.</p>
<p>
Heller, Otto. <strong>Der Untergang des Judentums</strong>. Vienna, [1931].</p>
<p>
Herzfeld, Dr. L. <strong>Handelsgeschichte der Juden des Alterthums</strong>. Braunschweig, 1879.</p>
<p>
Holleaux, Maurice. <strong>Rome, la Grèce et les Monarchies Hellénistiques au IIIe Siècle avant J.C.</strong> Paris, 1921.</p>
<p>
Hölscher, Gustav. <strong>Urgemeinde und Spätjudentum</strong>. Oslo, 1928.</p>
<p>
<strong>The Holy Bible</strong>. Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, [1901].</p>
<p>
Jannet, Claudio. <strong>Les Grandes Époques de l’Histoire Économique</strong>. Paris, 1896.</p>
<p>
Josephus, Flavius. <strong>Works</strong>. London, 1844.</p>
<p>
<strong>Jüdisches Lexikon</strong>. Berlin, 1927-30.</p>
<p>
Juster, Jean. <strong>Les juifs dans l’empire romain</strong>. Paris, 1914.</p>
<p>
Kautsky Karl. <strong>Are the Jews a Race?</strong> New York, 1926.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Foundations of Christianity</strong>. New York, [1925].</p>
<p>
Klatzkin, Jacob. <strong>Probleme des Modernen Judentum</strong>. Berlin, 1918.</p>
<p>
Köhler, Dr. Max. <strong>Beiträge zur Neueren Jüdischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte; die Juden in Halberstadt und Umgebung his zur emanzipation</strong>. Berlin, 1927.</p>
<p>
Krauss, Dr. Samuel. <strong>Studien zur Byzantisch-Jüdischen Geschichte</strong>. Leipzig, 1914.</p>
<p>
Kriegk, Georg Ludwig, <strong>Frankfurter Bürgerzwiste und Zustände im Mittelalter</strong>. Frankfort, 1862.</p>
<p>
Laurent, Henri. <em>Religion et Affaires</em>. In <strong>Cahiers du Libre Examen</strong>.</p>
<p>
Lavisse, Ernest. <strong>Histoire Générale du IVe Siècle à Nos Jours</strong>. Paris, 1893-1904.</p>
<p>
Legaret, Gustave. <strong>Histoire du Développement du Commerce</strong>. Paris, 1927.</p>
<p>
Lenin, V.I. <strong>The Development of Capitalism in Russia</strong>. <strong>Selected Works</strong>.</p>
<p>
Lestschinsky, Jacob. <strong>The Development of the Jewish People in the Last 100 Years</strong>. (Yiddish). Berlin, 1928.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Der Wirtschaflliche Zusammenbruch der Juden in Deutschland u. Polen</strong>. Paris, 1936.</p>
<p>
Lestschinsky, J., editor. <strong>Writings on Economics and Statistics </strong>(Yiddish). Berlin, 1928.</p>
<p>
Lods, Adolphe. <strong>Israel from Its Beginnings to the Middle of the Eighth Century</strong>. London, 1932.</p>
<p>
Lucas, Dr. Leopold. <strong>Zur Geschichte der Juden im Vierten Jahrhundert</strong>. Berlin, 1910.</p>
<p>
Marx, Karl. <strong>Capital</strong>. Kerr Edition.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Selected Essays</strong>. New York, 1926.</p>
<p>
Marx and Engels . <strong>Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels</strong>. New York, 1942.</p>
<p>
Menes, A. <em>Craft Industry among the Jews in Biblical and Talmudic Times</em>. In <strong>Writings on Economics and Statistics</strong> (Yiddish). Edited by J. Lestschinsky. Berlin, 1928.</p>
<p>
Meyer, Eduard. <strong>Blüte und Niedergang des Hellenismus in Asien</strong>. Berlin, 1925.</p>
<p>
Mommsen,Theodor. <strong>The History of Rome</strong>. London, 1911.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>The Provinces of the Roman empire</strong>. New York, 1887.</p>
<p>
Montesquieu. <strong>Spirit of the Law</strong>. Cincinnati, 1873.</p>
<p>
Movers, F.C. <strong>Die Phönizier</strong>. Berlin, 1856.</p>
<p>
Philippson, Martin. <strong>Neueste Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes</strong>. Leipzig, 1907.</p>
<p>
Piganiol, André. <strong>La Conquéte Romaine</strong>. Paris, 1927.</p>
<p>
Pirenne, Henri. <strong>Belgian Democracy: Its Early History</strong>. London, 1915.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Histoire de Belgique</strong>. Brussels, 1902-32.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>A History of Europe from the Invasions to the 16th Century</strong>. London, 1939.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Mohammed and Charlemagne</strong>. New York, 1939.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Les Villes au Moyen Age</strong>. Brussels, 1927.</p>
<p>
Roscher, W. <em>The Status of the Jews in the Middle Ages</em>. In <strong>Historia Judaica</strong>, vol.6.</p>
<p>
Rostovtzev, M. <strong>The Social and Economic History of the Roman empire</strong>. Oxford, 1926.</p>
<p>
Roussel, Pierre. <strong>La Grèce et l’Orient</strong>. Paris, 1928.</p>
<p>
Ruppin, Arthur. <strong>The Jews in the Modern World</strong>. London, 1934.</p>
<p>
Salvian. <strong>On the Government of God</strong>. New York, 1930.</p>
<p>
Salvioli, Giuseppe. <strong>Der Kapitalismus im Altertum</strong>. Stuttgart, 1922.</p>
<p>
Sayous, André. <em>Les Juifs</em>. In <strong>Revue Économique Internationale</strong>, March 1932.</p>
<p>
Schipper, Ignaz. <strong>Anfänge des Kapitalismus bei den Abendländischen Juden in Früheren Mittelalter</strong>. Vienna, 1907.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Jewish History</strong> (Yiddish). Warsaw, 1930.</p>
<p>
Schubart,Wilhelm. <strong>Aegypten von Alexander dem Grossen bis auf Mohammed</strong>. Berlin, 1922.</p>
<p>
Schulte Aloys. <strong>Geschichte des Mittelalterlichen Handels und Verkehrs zwischen Westdeutschland und Italien</strong>. Leipzig, 1900.</p>
<p>
Sée, Henri. <strong>Economic and Social Conditions in France during the 18th Century</strong>. New York, 1927.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>Esquisse d’une Histoire Économique et Sociale de la France</strong>. Paris, 1929.</p>
<p>
Smith, Adam. <strong>The Wealth of Nations</strong>. New York: Modern Library, 1937.</p>
<p>
Sombart,Werner. <strong>L’Apogée du Capitalisme</strong>. Paris, 1932.</p>
<p>
——— <strong>The Jews and Modern Capitalism</strong>. London, 1913.</p>
<p>
Strabo. <strong>The Geography of Strabo</strong>. London, 1854-57.</p>
<p>
Thierry, Augustin. <strong>History of the Conquest of England by the Normans</strong>. London, 1856.</p>
<p>
Toutain, J.F. <strong>The Economic Life of the Ancient World</strong>. New York, 1930.</p>
<p>
Ullmann, Dr. Salomon. <strong>Histoire des Juifs en Belgique jusqu’au 18e Siècle</strong>. Antwerp, 192?.</p>
<p>
Vandervelde, emile. <strong>L’Exode Rural et le Retour aux Champs</strong>. Paris, 1903.</p>
<p>
Voitinski, Vladimir. <strong>Tatsachen und Zahlen Europas</strong>. Vienna, 1930.</p>
<p>
Weber, Max. <strong>General Economic History</strong>. New York, 1927.</p>
<p>
Weinryb, S.B. <strong>Neueste Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Russland und Polen</strong>. Breslau, 1934.</p>
<p>
Wodd Jewish Congress (Economic Bureau). <strong>La Situation Économique des Juifs dans le Monde</strong>. Paris, 1938.</p>
<p>
<strong>Yiddishe Economic</strong> (Yiddish). Wilno.</p>
<p>
<strong>Yivo Studies in History</strong>. Wilno, 1937.</p>
<p>
Zeiller, Jacques. <strong>L’empire Romain et l’Église</strong>. Paris, 1928.</p>
<p>
</p>
<hr>
<p class="footer"><a href="index.htm">Contents</a> | <a href="../index.htm">Jews and Marxism Subject Page</a></p>
</body> |
Abram Leon
The Jewish Question
Bibliography
Albertini, Eugene. L’empire Romain. Paris, 1929.
Ansiaux, Maurice. Traité d’Économie Politique. Paris, 1920-26.
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford, 1885.
Autran, Charles. Les Phénici ens. Paris, 1920.
Avenel, Georges d’. Histoire Économique de la Propriété, etc. Paris, 1894.
Ballester y Castell, Rafael. Histoire de l’Espagne. Paris, 1928.
Bauer, Otto. Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie. Vienna, 1907.
Bédarride, I. Les Juifs en France, en Italie et en Espagne. Paris, 1867.
Beloch, K.J. Griechische Geschichte. Berlin, 1914-27.
Ben-Adir. Anti-Semitism. In General Encyclopedia (Yiddish). Paris, 1936.
Böhm, Adolf. Die Zionistische Bewegung. Berlin, [1935-37].
Brentano, Lujo. Die Anfänge des Modernen Kapitalismus. Munich, 1916.
——— Eine Geschichte der Wirtschafthichen Entwicklung Englands. Jena, 1927-29.
——— Das Wirtschaftsleben der Antiken Welt. Jena, 1929.
Brutzkus, Dr. Julius. History of the Jewish Mountaineers in Daghestan (Caucasia). In Yivo Studies in History, vol.2.(Yiddish). Wilno, 1937.
——— Trade Relations of the West European Jews with Medieval Kiev. In Writings on Economics and Statistics (Yiddish). Edited by J. Lestschinsky Berlin, 1928.
Bühl, F. Die Sozialen Verhältnisse der Israeliten. Berlin, 1899.
Caro, Georg. Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden im Mittelalter und der Neuzeit. Frankfort, 1924.
Causse, Antonin. Les Dispersés d’Israël. Paris, 1929.
Clerc, Michel. Les Métèques Atheniens. Paris, 1893.
Cunow, Heinrich. Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Berlin, 1926-31.
Depping, G.B. Histoire du Commerce entre le Levant et l’Europe. Paris, 1830.
——— Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age. Paris, 1845.
Dubnow, S.M. History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Philadelphia, 1916.
——— Die Neueste Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes. Berlin, 1920-24.
Dubnow, W. On the Economic History of the Jews in Russia, In Writings on Economics and Statistics (Yiddish). Edited by J. Lestschinsky Berlin, 1928.
Francotte, Henri. L’Industrie dans la Grèce Ancienne. Brussels, 1900-1901.
Frank, Tenney. An Economic History of Rome to the End of the Republic. Baltimore, 1920.
Friedländer, Ludwig. Roman Life and Manners under the Early empire. London, 1910.
Furtenbach, Friedrich von. Krieg gegen Russland und Russische Gefangenschaft. Nuremberg, 1912.
Fustel de Coulanges, N.D. The Ancient City. Boston, 1874.
——— Histoire des Institutions Politiques de l’Ancienne France. Paris, 1888-92.
General Encyclopedia (Yiddish). Paris, 1936.
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman empire. New York: Heritage Press, 1946.
Gide, Charles. Principles of Political Economy. Boston, 1905.
Graetz, Heinrich Hirsch. Popular History of the Jews. New York, 1919.
Gumplowicz, Ludwig. The Outlines of Sociology. Philadelphia, 1899.
Günther, Hans. Rassenkunde des Jüdischen Volkes. Munich, 1930.
Hasebroek, Johannes. Staat und Handel im Alten Griechenland. Tübingen, 1928.
Hatzfeld, Jean. Les Trafiquants Italiens dans l’Orient Hellénistique. Paris, 1919.
Heller, Otto. Der Untergang des Judentums. Vienna, [1931].
Herzfeld, Dr. L. Handelsgeschichte der Juden des Alterthums. Braunschweig, 1879.
Holleaux, Maurice. Rome, la Grèce et les Monarchies Hellénistiques au IIIe Siècle avant J.C. Paris, 1921.
Hölscher, Gustav. Urgemeinde und Spätjudentum. Oslo, 1928.
The Holy Bible. Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, [1901].
Jannet, Claudio. Les Grandes Époques de l’Histoire Économique. Paris, 1896.
Josephus, Flavius. Works. London, 1844.
Jüdisches Lexikon. Berlin, 1927-30.
Juster, Jean. Les juifs dans l’empire romain. Paris, 1914.
Kautsky Karl. Are the Jews a Race? New York, 1926.
——— Foundations of Christianity. New York, [1925].
Klatzkin, Jacob. Probleme des Modernen Judentum. Berlin, 1918.
Köhler, Dr. Max. Beiträge zur Neueren Jüdischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte; die Juden in Halberstadt und Umgebung his zur emanzipation. Berlin, 1927.
Krauss, Dr. Samuel. Studien zur Byzantisch-Jüdischen Geschichte. Leipzig, 1914.
Kriegk, Georg Ludwig, Frankfurter Bürgerzwiste und Zustände im Mittelalter. Frankfort, 1862.
Laurent, Henri. Religion et Affaires. In Cahiers du Libre Examen.
Lavisse, Ernest. Histoire Générale du IVe Siècle à Nos Jours. Paris, 1893-1904.
Legaret, Gustave. Histoire du Développement du Commerce. Paris, 1927.
Lenin, V.I. The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Selected Works.
Lestschinsky, Jacob. The Development of the Jewish People in the Last 100 Years. (Yiddish). Berlin, 1928.
——— Der Wirtschaflliche Zusammenbruch der Juden in Deutschland u. Polen. Paris, 1936.
Lestschinsky, J., editor. Writings on Economics and Statistics (Yiddish). Berlin, 1928.
Lods, Adolphe. Israel from Its Beginnings to the Middle of the Eighth Century. London, 1932.
Lucas, Dr. Leopold. Zur Geschichte der Juden im Vierten Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1910.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Kerr Edition.
——— Selected Essays. New York, 1926.
Marx and Engels . Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels. New York, 1942.
Menes, A. Craft Industry among the Jews in Biblical and Talmudic Times. In Writings on Economics and Statistics (Yiddish). Edited by J. Lestschinsky. Berlin, 1928.
Meyer, Eduard. Blüte und Niedergang des Hellenismus in Asien. Berlin, 1925.
Mommsen,Theodor. The History of Rome. London, 1911.
——— The Provinces of the Roman empire. New York, 1887.
Montesquieu. Spirit of the Law. Cincinnati, 1873.
Movers, F.C. Die Phönizier. Berlin, 1856.
Philippson, Martin. Neueste Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes. Leipzig, 1907.
Piganiol, André. La Conquéte Romaine. Paris, 1927.
Pirenne, Henri. Belgian Democracy: Its Early History. London, 1915.
——— Histoire de Belgique. Brussels, 1902-32.
——— A History of Europe from the Invasions to the 16th Century. London, 1939.
——— Mohammed and Charlemagne. New York, 1939.
——— Les Villes au Moyen Age. Brussels, 1927.
Roscher, W. The Status of the Jews in the Middle Ages. In Historia Judaica, vol.6.
Rostovtzev, M. The Social and Economic History of the Roman empire. Oxford, 1926.
Roussel, Pierre. La Grèce et l’Orient. Paris, 1928.
Ruppin, Arthur. The Jews in the Modern World. London, 1934.
Salvian. On the Government of God. New York, 1930.
Salvioli, Giuseppe. Der Kapitalismus im Altertum. Stuttgart, 1922.
Sayous, André. Les Juifs. In Revue Économique Internationale, March 1932.
Schipper, Ignaz. Anfänge des Kapitalismus bei den Abendländischen Juden in Früheren Mittelalter. Vienna, 1907.
——— Jewish History (Yiddish). Warsaw, 1930.
Schubart,Wilhelm. Aegypten von Alexander dem Grossen bis auf Mohammed. Berlin, 1922.
Schulte Aloys. Geschichte des Mittelalterlichen Handels und Verkehrs zwischen Westdeutschland und Italien. Leipzig, 1900.
Sée, Henri. Economic and Social Conditions in France during the 18th Century. New York, 1927.
——— Esquisse d’une Histoire Économique et Sociale de la France. Paris, 1929.
Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern Library, 1937.
Sombart,Werner. L’Apogée du Capitalisme. Paris, 1932.
——— The Jews and Modern Capitalism. London, 1913.
Strabo. The Geography of Strabo. London, 1854-57.
Thierry, Augustin. History of the Conquest of England by the Normans. London, 1856.
Toutain, J.F. The Economic Life of the Ancient World. New York, 1930.
Ullmann, Dr. Salomon. Histoire des Juifs en Belgique jusqu’au 18e Siècle. Antwerp, 192?.
Vandervelde, emile. L’Exode Rural et le Retour aux Champs. Paris, 1903.
Voitinski, Vladimir. Tatsachen und Zahlen Europas. Vienna, 1930.
Weber, Max. General Economic History. New York, 1927.
Weinryb, S.B. Neueste Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Russland und Polen. Breslau, 1934.
Wodd Jewish Congress (Economic Bureau). La Situation Économique des Juifs dans le Monde. Paris, 1938.
Yiddishe Economic (Yiddish). Wilno.
Yivo Studies in History. Wilno, 1937.
Zeiller, Jacques. L’empire Romain et l’Église. Paris, 1928.
Contents | Jews and Marxism Subject Page
|
./articles/Leon-Abram/https:..www.marxists.org.subject.jewish.leon.ch4 | <body>
<h2>Abram Leon</h2>
<h1>The Jewish Question</h1>
<p> </p>
<hr>
<h3>FOUR<br>
The Jews in Europe after the Renaissance</h3>
<p><a name="a"> </a></p>
<h4>A. The Jews in Western Europe after the Renaissance<br>
The Thesis of Sombart.</h4>
<p class="fst">The discovery of the new world and the tremendous current of exchange that followed upon it sounded the death knell of the old corporative feudal world. Mercantile economy reached a higher stage, smashing the remnants of previous periods and preparing, by the development of manufacture and rural industry the bases of industrial capitalism. The place of the old centers of corporative industry and medieval trade, fallen into decay, was taken over by Antwerp, which became the commercial center of the world for a certain period.</p>
<p>Everywhere, although at different times and in different forms, the decline of the economy producing use values was accompanied by the decay of the economic and social function of the Jews. An important number of the Jews was compelled to leave the countries of Western Europe in order to seek refuge in the countries where capitalism had not yet penetrated, principally in Eastern Europe and in Turkey. Others became assimilated, fused with the Christian population. This assimilation was not always easy. Religious traditions long survived the social situation which had been their foundation. For centuries the Inquisition struggled mercilessly and barbarously against Jewish traditions which persisted among the mass of converts.</p>
<p>The Jews who penetrated into the merchant class acquired a certain notoriety under the name of “new Christians,” principally in America and also at Bordeaux and Antwerp. In the first half of the seventeenth century, all the great sugar plantations in Brazil were in the hands of Jews. By the decree of March 2, 1768, all registers concerning new Christians were destroyed; by the law of March 24, 1773, “new Christians” were made equal before the law with “old Christians.”</p>
<p>In 1730, Jews possessed 115 plantations out of 344 at Surinam. But contrary to previous epochs, the activity of the Jews in America no longer had a special economic character; it was in no ways distinguished from the activity of Christians. The “new Christian” merchant was little different from the “old Christian” merchant. The same was true of the Jewish plantation owner. And this is also the reason why juridical, religious, and political distinctions rapidly disappeared.</p>
<p>In the nineteenth century, the Jews in South America no longer constituted more than a handful. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> Assimilation of the Jews proceeded just as rapidly in France and in England. The rich merchant Jews of Bordeaux, of whom it was said that they “possessed entire streets and had large trade,” felt themselves completely integrated into the Christian population. “Those who are acquainted with the Portuguese Jews of France, Holland, England, know that they are far from having an unconquerable hatred for all the peoples who surround them, as Mr. Voltaire says, but on the contrary they believe themselves so identified with these peoples that they consider themselves a part of them. Their Portuguese or Spanish origin has become a pure ecclesiastical discipline.” <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> The assimilated Jews of the West acknowledged no relationship with the Jews still living under the conditions of feudal life. “A Jew of London as little resembles a Jew of Constantinople as the latter does a Chinese Mandarin. A Portuguese Jew of Bordeaux and a German Jew of Metz have nothing in common.” “Mr. Voltaire cannot ignore the delicate scruples of the Portuguese and Spanish Jews in not mixing with the Jews of other nations, either by marriage or otherwise.” <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p>Alongside the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English Jews, whose complete assimilation is proceeding slowly and surely, we still find Jews in Western Europe, primarily in Italy and in Germany, who inhabit ghettos and are mostly petty usurers and peddlers. This is a sorry remnant of the former Jewish merchant class. They are reviled, persecuted, subject to innumerable restrictions.</p>
<p>It was on the special basis of the rather important economic role played by the first category of Jews that Sombart presented his famous thesis on “The Jews and Economic Life.” <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a> He has himself summarized it in these terms: “The Jews promote the economic flowering of countries and cities in which they settle; they lead the countries and cities which they abandon to economic decay.” “They are the founders of modern capitalism.” “There would be no modern capitalism, no modern culture without the dispersion of the Jews in the countries of the North.” “Israel passes over Europe like the sun: at its coming new life bursts forth; at its going all falls into decay.”</p>
<p>This is the way, in rather poetic fashion as we can see, that Sombart presents his thesis. And here are the proofs adduced in its support:</p>
<ol class="numbered"><br>
<li>“The first event to be recalled, an event of world-wide import, is the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) and from Portugal (1495 and 1497). It should never be forgotten that on the day before Columbus set sail from Palos to discover America (August 3, 1492) 300,000 Jews are said to have emigrated from Spain ....”<br>
</li>
<li>In the fifteenth century; the Jews were expelled from the most important commercial cities of Germany: Cologne (1424–25), Augsburg (1439–40), Strasbourg (1438), Erfurt (1458), Nuremberg (1498–99), Ulm (1499), Regensburg (1519). In the sixteenth century; the same fate befell them in a number of Italian cities; they were driven out of Sicily in 1492, from Naples in 1540–41, from Genoa and Venice in 1550. Here as well the decline of these cities coincides with the departure of the Jews.<br>
</li>
<li>The economic development of Holland at the end of the sixteenth century is marked by a great rise of capitalism. The first Portuguese Marranos settled at Amsterdam in 1593.<br>
</li>
<li>The brief flowering of Antwerp as the center of world trade and as a world exchange coincides exactly with the arrival and departure of Marranos.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">These arguments, essential to the Sombart thesis, are very easily refuted:</p>
<p class="fst">1. It is absurd to see in the simultaneity of the departure of Christopher Columbus “to discover America” and the expulsion of the Spanish Jews a proof of the decline of the countries which they left. “Not only did Spain and Portugal not fall into decline in the sixteenth century; under Charles V and Emanuel, but on the contrary they reached their historical apogee at that time. Even at the beginning of the reign of Philip II, Spain is still the foremost power in Europe and the wealth of Mexico and Peru which flowed to it was immeasurable.” <a href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a></p>
<p>This first Sombartist proof is based on a crying falsehood.</p>
<p class="fst">2. The very figures which he supplies on the redistribution of the Jewish refugees coming from Spain aids in demolishing his thesis. According to him, out of 165,000 exiles, 122,000 or 72 percent emigrated to Turkey and into Moslem countries. Consequently it is there that the “capitalist spirit” of the Jews should have produced the most important effects. Is it necessary to add then, that while we can speak of a certain economic rise in the Turkish empire under Suleiman the Magnificent, that country remained the least accessible to capitalism up to a very recent period, so that the rays of the sun there proved to be ... very cold? It is true that a rather important number of Jews (25,000) settled in Holland, at Hamburg, and in England, but can we concede that the same cause produced diametrically opposite effects?</p>
<p class="fst">3. The coincidence which Sombart perceives in the decline of the German cities is easily explained by reversing the causal relation. The ruin of these cities was not provoked by the measures taken against the Jews; these measures were on the contrary the effect of the decline of these cities. On the other hand, the prosperity of other cities was not the result of Jewish immigration but it was the latter which naturally directed itself toward prosperous cities. “It is obvious that the relation of cause and effect is contrary to that presented by Sombart.” <a href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a></p>
<p>A study of the economic role of the Jews in Italy and Germany at the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fully confirms this viewpoint. It is clear that the pawnshops, the business of Jewish usurers, were endurable so long as the economic situation of these cities was relatively good. Every worsening of the situation rendered the burden of usury more intolerable and the anger of the population vented itself first of all against the Jews.</p>
<p class="fst">4. The example of Holland does not, it is true, weaken the thesis of Sombart but neither does it reinforce it. Even if we admit that its prosperity was favored by the arrival of the Marranos, we are not thereby authorized to make it its cause. And how can we explain, if we base ourselves on this criterion, the decline of Holland in the eighteenth century? It appears, moreover, that the economic role of the Jews in Holland is exaggerated. Sayous says, in connection with the Dutch East India Company, whose importance to the prosperity of Holland was decisive: “The Jews have in any case no role whatsoever in the formation of the first genuinely modern stock corporation, the Dutch East India Company; they subscribed barely 0.1 percent of its capital and played no important role in its activity during the ensuing years.” <a href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a></p>
<p>Is it necessary to continue? Must it be shown that the important economic development of England took place precisely after the expulsion of the Jews? “If the causal relation established by Sombart were true, how explain that in Russia and in Poland, where the southern people from the ‘desert’ have been most numerous for centuries, their influence on the northern peoples produced no economic flowering whatever?” <a href="#n8" name="f8">[8]</a></p>
<p>The theory of Sombart is consequently completely false. <a href="#n9" name="f9">[9]</a> Sombart claims that he is portraying the economic role of the Jews, but he does so in a completely impressionistic way, rearranging history to suit his theory. Sombart presents a thesis on the Jews and economic life in <em>general</em>, but deals solely with a very limited part of their history. Sombart builds a theory on the Jews in <em>general</em> and on economic life, but he limits himself to a minority of Western Jews, of Jews on the road to complete assimilation.</p>
<p>In reality, even if the role of the Western Jews had been such as Sombart presents, he would still have had to make an abstraction from it in order to understand the Jewish question in the present period. Without the influx of Eastern Jews into Western Europe in the nineteenth century, the Western Jews would long ago have been absorbed in the surrounding milieu. <a href="#n10" name="f10">[10]</a> One more observation regarding the theory of Sombart: If the Jews constituted such an economic boon; if their departure provoked the economic decay of cities and countries, how explain their continuous persecution in the late Middle Ages? Can this be explained by religion? But then, why was the position of the Jews so solid in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages and in Eastern Europe up to the nineteenth century? How explain the prosperity of the Jews for long centuries in the most backward countries of Europe, in Poland, in Lithuania; the powerful protection accorded them by the kings? Can the difference in the situation of the Jews be explained by the difference in the intensity of religious fanaticism? But then how can we concede that religious fanaticism should be most intense precisely in the most developed countries? How can we explain that it was precisely in the nineteenth century that anti-Semitism developed most strongly in Poland?</p>
<p>The question then is to seek the causes for the existence of differences in the intensity of religious fanaticism. And thus we are brought back to the duty of studying economic phenomena. Religion explains anti-Jewish persecutions like a soporific explains sleep. If the Jews had really played the role that Sombart attributes to them, it would be very difficult to understand why the development of capitalism was such a mortal blow to them. <a href="#n11" name="f11">[11]</a></p>
<p>It is consequently inaccurate to regard the Jews as founders of modern capitalism. The Jews certainly contributed to the development of exchange economy in Europe but their <em>specific</em> economic role ends precisely where modern capitalism starts.<br>
</p>
<h4><a name="b">B. The Jews in Eastern Europe up to the nineteenth century</a></h4>
<p class="fst">At the dawn of the development of industrial capitalism, Western Judaism was on the road to disappearance. The French Revolution, by destroying the last juridical obstacles which stood in the way of assimilation of the Jews, only gave sanction to an already existing situation.</p>
<p>But it is certainly not by chance that at the same time that the Jewish question was being extinguished in the West, it rebounded with redoubled violence in Eastern Europe. In the period when the Jews in Western Europe were being massacred and burned, a large number of Jews had sought refuge in the countries where capitalism had still not penetrated. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the immense majority of Jews inhabited the east of Europe, principally the former territory of the monarchist republic of Poland. In this paradise of a carefree <em>Shlachta</em> (petty nobility), the Jewish commercial class had found a large field of activity. For long centuries, the Jew was a merchant, usurer, publican, steward to the noble, an agent for everything. The small Jewish cities, submerged in a sea of peasant villages, often themselves adjoining the chateaux of the Polish feudal lords, represented exchange economy within a purely feudal society. The Jews were situated, as Marx states, in the pores of Polish society. This situation lasted as long as the social and political organization of Poland remained static. In the eighteenth century, following upon political confusion and economic decay, Polish feudalism found itself fatally stricken. Along with it the secular position of the Jews in Eastern Europe was shaken to its foundations. The Jewish problem, close to vanishing in the West, flared up violently in Eastern Europe. The flame, close to extinction in the West, received renewed vitality from the conflagration which arose in the East. The destruction of the economic position of the Jews in Eastern Europe will have as a consequence a massive emigration of Jews into the world. And everywhere, although in different forms and under different guises, the flood of Jewish immigrants coming from Eastern Europe will revitalize the Jewish problem. It is in this respect that the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe has certainly been the decisive factor in the Jewish question in our epoch.</p>
<p>The commercial relations of the Jews of Eastern Europe, of Bohemia, Poland, and Little Russia, date from the Carolingian era. The trading circuit that the Jews had established during the early Middle Ages between Asia and Europe became extended in this way across the fields of Poland and the plains of the Ukraine. Like their coreligionists, the Radamites, the Eastern Jews exchanged the precious products of Asia, spices and silks, for the raw materials of Europe. They constituted the sole commercial element in a purely agricultural society. In the Carolingian era, the economic regime of all Europe being practically the same, the role of Eastern Judaism was similar to that of Western Judaism. It is only later that their history will enter upon completely different paths.</p>
<p>Accounts of the travels of Ibrahim Ibn Jakob (965) testify to the considerable development of Jewish trade at Prague in the tenth century. The Jews came there from the Far East and from Byzantium, bringing different kinds of precious merchandise and Byzantine money, and there bought wheat, tin, and furs. In a document of 1090, the Jews of Prague are depicted as traders and money changers, possessing large sums of silver and gold; they are depicted as the richest merchants among all peoples. Jewish slave merchants, as well as other Jewish traders coming from the Far East and traversing the frontier in caravans, are also mentioned in documents of 1124 and 1226. The interest rate among the Jewish bankers of Prague, whose operations were very extensive, fluctuated between 108 and 180 percent. <a href="#n12" name="f12">[12]</a> The chronicler Gallus states that in 1085, Judith, the wife of Prince Ladislag Herman of Poland, strove to buy back some Christian slaves from Jewish merchants. Excavations undertaken in the past century have helped bring to light the great economic importance of the Jews in Poland in this period. Polish money has been discovered bearing Hebraic characters and dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This fact in itself proves that Polish trade was in the hands of the Jews. The Tartar invasions of the thirteenth century must certainly have had some influence on the Russian and Polish Jews, but as early as 1327, there is a privilege conferred by the Polish king, Vladislav Lokietek, involving Hungarian Jewish merchants coming to Kraków. Far from diminishing, Jewish trade in Poland only takes on greater extension in the course of succeeding centuries.</p>
<p>Just as in Western Europe, development of trade went together with an expansion of usury. Here also, the nobility, principal client of the Jewish usurers, strove to obtain restrictions on Jewish usury as against the kings who favored it “for the Jews, in their capacity as slaves of the treasury must always have money ready for our service.” In the <em>sejm</em> of 1347, the nobility, desiring to limit the interest rate which had reached 108 percent, collided with the firm resistance of royalty.</p>
<p>In 1456, King Casimir Jagiello proclaims that in protecting the Jews he is inspired by the principle of tolerance which is imposed upon him by divine law. In 1504, the Polish king, Alexander, declares that he acts towards the Jews as befits “kings and the powerful who distinguish themselves not only by tolerance towards worshippers of the Christian religion but also towards the adherents of other religions.”</p>
<p>Under such auspices, the affairs of Jews could not help but prosper. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, Jewish usurers succeeded in taking possession of a portion of the lands belonging to the nobles. In 1389, the Jew Sabetai becomes proprietor of a section of the Cawilowo domain. In 1390, the Kraków Jew Iosman receives the property of Prince Diewiez of Pszeslawic as security. In 1393, the Posen Jew Moschko takes possession of the Ponicz manor. In 1397, the lands of the Abiejesz manor are pledged with the Posen Jew Abraham. These lands of the nobles are allotted to the Jews with complete property rights. Thus, in the last cited example, the noble having attacked the possessions transmitted to Abraham, the tribunal confirms the right of possession of the Jew and punishes the aggressor with a heavy fine. In 1404, the verdict of a tribunal declares that three villages pledged with the Jew Schmerlin of Kraków, are transmitted to him with complete property rights and forever (<em>cum omnibus juribus utilitatibus dominio, etc. in perpetuum</em>).</p>
<p>The most important “bankers” lived in Kraków, residence of the kings. Their principal debtors were in effect the kings, the princes, the voyevode (governors), and the archbishops. Thus Casimir the Great borrowed the enormous sum of 15,000 marks from Jewish bankers. King Louis of Hungary owed the usurer Levko of Kraków 30,000 gulden at one time, 3,000 gulden at another. King Vladislav Jagiello and the queen, Jadwiga, also owed him substantial sums.</p>
<p>Levko was not only a great banker; he was also a wholesale farmer for the kingdom. He leased the mint and coined its money; and the salt mines of Wieliczka and of Bochnia were also farmed out to him. He owned houses at Kraków, as well as a brewery. Just like the great patricians, he was honored with the title of “<em>vir discretus</em>.”</p>
<p>The usury of the great Jewish bankers such as Miesko, Jordan of Posen, and Aron, who succeeded in amassing immense properties and took possession of villages and lands, raised a storm of protest among the nobility. The <em>Statute of Warta</em> (1423) greatly restricted Jewish usury. Thus, in 1432, the Jew Alexander, with whom the villages Dombrowka and Sokolow and a part of their living inventory had been pledged, was forced to return these properties to his debtor by decision of the tribunal, the Statute of Warta having proscribed loans on real property.</p>
<p>The Jews and the kings did not readily resign themselves to this situation. A fierce struggle enabled them to abolish the <em>Statute of Warta</em>. The bankers were able to expand their sphere of operation. Thus, in 1444, the King pledged his palace at Lemberg to the banker Schina.This usurer also had among his clients Prince Szwidrigiella, the voyevoda Chriczka, who had pledged the village of Winiki with him, etc.</p>
<p>But neither did the nobility accept defeat. It returned continuously to the charge and succeeded in forcing the king to promulgate the <em>Statute of Nieszawa</em> in 1454, with harsher provisions than the <em>Statute of Warta</em>. Nevertheless, and this fact is sufficient to show the fundamental difference which existed in this sphere between Poland and Western Europe, the most Draconian laws were not able to end Jewish usury. Starting with 1455, we even witness a rebirth of the banking trade mainly as a result of the immigration of Jews from Moravia and Silesia, as well as from other countries. From 1460 on, the records of Kraków testify to such an extensive revival of usurious transactions that this period is reminiscent of the epoch of Levko and of Schmerlin. The richest banker is a certain Fischel who had married the female banker Raschka of Prague and who furnished funds to the Polish king, Casimir Jagiello, as well as to his sons, the future kings Albrecht and Alexander. Whereas the nobility of Western Europe, thanks to the penetration of exchange economy and to an abundance of money, succeeded in ridding itself everywhere of Jewish usury the persistence of feudal economy in Eastern Europe made the nobility powerless on this terrain. Jewish banking survived all proscriptions.</p>
<p>The backward state of the country also fettered the evolution which we have observed in the countries of Western Europe: the eviction of Jews from commerce and their confinement within usury. The bourgeois class and the cities were only beginning to develop. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the Jews remained in an embryonic state and did not achieve any decisive results. The artisans, oppressed by Jewish usury, joined ranks with the traders. Here also, the sooner a province developed, the sooner arose conflicts with the Jews. In 1403, at Kraków, and in 1445 at Bochnia, artisans incite massacres of Jews. But the struggles were only episodic and nowhere ended with the elimination of the Jewish element. On the contrary, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their situation is only strengthened and Jewish commerce continues to flourish.</p>
<p>In the second half of the fourteenth century, we hear of a “syndicate” of three Lemberg Jews, Schlomo, Czewja, and Jacob, formed with a view to furnishing Italian merchandise to the city council of Lemberg. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Jews are provisioners of the royal court. In 1456, the <em>starosta</em> of Kamieniec Podolsky confiscates Oriental merchandise worth six hundred marks from Jewish merchants coming to Poland from the commercial centers of the Black Sea. The Byzantine and Italian Jews of Capha made numerous trips to Poland. The Jew Caleph Judaeus of Capha passed great quantities of Oriental goods through the customhouse of Lemberg. Even after the destruction of the Italian colonies in the Black Sea (1475) the Jews continued to maintain relations with the Orient. From 1467 on, the Jew David of Constantinople regularly supplied Lemberg with Oriental goods. There is even mention of a renewal of the slave trade in Little Russia from 1440 to 1450. Russian law books recount an interesting fact in 1449: A slave belonging to a Jew Mordecai of Galicia having fled, his owner sues in the courts for his return.</p>
<p>The Jewish merchants of Capha and Constantinople came only to the great fairs of Lemberg and Lublin. To these also came the Jews dispersed throughout the Russian and Polish cities and market towns in order to purchase Oriental goods and spread them throughout the districts which they inhabited. These Jewish merchants traveled the roads running from Lemberg and Lublin through Little and Greater Poland up to the Silesian frontier.</p>
<p>The Jews also crossed this frontier and conducted a very lively trade with Bohemia and Germany. Letters from 1588 inform us that hides and furs were brought from Kraków to Prague and that money was loaned at interest and against pledges.</p>
<p>The fair of Lublin served as the commercial meeting place between the Jewish merchants of Poland and of Lithuania. The Jewish merchants exported hides, furs, timber, honey from Lithuania, and at the Lublin fair they bought spices coming from Turkey and manufactured goods originating in Western Europe. Records of the city of Danzig mention Jewish merchants from Lithuania who exported timber, wax, fins, hides, etc., during the period 1423 to 1436.</p>
<p>The position of Lithuanian Judaism was still more favorable than that of the Polish Jews. Until the Union of Lublin (Union of Poland and Lithuania), the Lithuanian Jews enjoyed the same rights as the entire free population. In their hands lay big business, banking, the customhouses, etc. The farming of taxes and customs brought them great wealth. Their clothes glittered with gold and they wore swords just like the gentry.</p>
<p>Records of the Lithuanian chancellery show that in the period from 1463 to 1494 the Jews had leased almost all the customs offices of the Duchy of Lithuania: Bielek, Bryansk, Brchiczin, Grodno, Kiev, Minsk, Novgorod, Zhitomin. Some documents from the years 1488 and 1489 mention certain Jews of Trock and of Kiev as exploiting the Grand Duke’s salt mines. In the same period, we begin to meet Jews in the role of publicans, a profession which in the Polish and Little Russian village goes hand in hand with the trade of usury.</p>
<p>The strengthening of the anarchy of the nobles in Poland necessarily affected the situation of the Jews. In the sixteenth century, their position remains very solid but they pass more and more from royal control to that of the large and small feudal lords. The decline of the royal power makes its protection less effective and the Jews themselves seek less brilliant but surer protectors. King Sigismund complains to the sejm of 1539: “The aristocracy of our kingdom wants to monopolize all the profits of the Jews inhabiting the market towns, villages, and manors. It demands the right to judge them. To that we reply: If the Jews themselves resign the privileges of an autonomous jurisdiction which the kings our forefathers granted them and which have also been confirmed by us, they do in fact abandon our protection, and no longer drawing profit from them, we have no reason whatever to impose our kindnesses on them by force.”</p>
<p>It is obvious that if the Jews now declined these “kindnesses,” it was because royalty no longer had any degree of real power in this country dominated by the nobles.</p>
<p>In the sixteenth century the situation of the Jews became stronger. They received anew all the rights against which attempts had been made in the preceding century. Their economic position improved. The growing power of the nobility (Poland became an electoral kingdom in 1569) deprived them of the protection of the kings, but the feudal lords did everything to stimulate their economic activity. The traders, lenders at interest, stewards of the noble manors, with their inns and breweries, were extremely useful to the feudal lords who passed their time abroad in luxury and idleness. “The small towns located on the estates of the nobility were full of shops, of inns, of eating and drinking places, as well as of artisans. The Jew enjoyed absolute freedom if he only succeeded in ingratiating himself into the favor of his lord or ‘<em>Poritz</em>’.” <a href="#n13" name="f13">[13]</a></p>
<p>The economic situation of the Jews was in general very good but their subordinate position to the nobility sapped the basis of the highly developed Jewish autonomy which had existed in Poland. “Circumstances were such at that time that the Jews of Poland could form a state within a state.” <a href="#n14" name="f14">[14]</a></p>
<p>With their special religious, administrative, and juridical institutions, the Jews constituted a <em>special</em> class there enjoying a special internal autonomy.</p>
<p>A decree of Sigismund August (1551) established the following bases for the autonomy of the Jews of Great Poland: The Jews had the right to choose, upon general agreement among themselves, rabbis and judges who were to administer them. The coercive power of the State could be put at their disposal.</p>
<p>Each Jewish city or market town had a community council. In large centers, the community council consisted of forty members; in small ones, of ten members. The members of this council were elected by a system of double voting.</p>
<p>The activity of the council was very extensive. It had to raise taxes, administer the schools, institutions, decide economic questions, engage in administering justice. The power of each council, called a Kahal, extended to the Jews of the surrounding villages. The councils of the large cities had authority over the small communities. In this way community unions were created, the Galil.</p>
<p>We have already spoken of the Vaad Arba Aratzoth which was the General Assembly of the Jewish councils of Poland (of four countries, Great Poland, Little Poland [Kraków], Podolia [Galicia-Lemberg], and Volhynia), which met at regular intervals and constituted a veritable parliament.</p>
<p>In the seventeenth century the foundations of Jewish autonomy began to rock. This coincided with the worsening of the situation of Polish Judaism as it began to feel the disagreeable effects of the anarchy that Polish feudal society was passing through. The partial change in the situation of the Jews, arising from the lessening of royal authority, had as result the placing of the Jews in greater contact than previously with the great mass of the bonded population. The Jew, becoming the steward of the noble or a publican, was hated by the peasants equally with or even more than the lords, because he was the one who became the principal instrument for their exploitation. This situation soon led to terrible social explosions, above all in the Ukraine, where the authority of the Polish nobility was weaker than in Poland. The existence of vast steppes permitted the formation of Cossack military colonies where fleeing peasants could prepare their hour of vengeance.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Jewish steward strove to draw as much as possible from the manors and to exploit the peasant as much as possible. The Little Russian peasant bore a deep hatred for the Polish landed proprietor, in his double role as foreigner and noble. But he hated even more, perhaps, the Jewish steward with whom he was in continuous contact and in whom he saw at one and the same time the detestable representative of the lord and a ‘non-Christian’ who was foreign to him both by his religion and his way of life.” <a href="#n15" name="f15">[15]</a></p>
<p class="fst">The tremendous Cossack revolt of Chmielnicki in 1648 results in completely erasing seven hundred Jewish communities from the face of the earth. At the same time the revolt demonstrates the extreme feebleness of the anarchic Polish kingdom and prepares its dismemberment. From 1648 on, Poland never ceases to be the prey to invasions and domestic troubles.</p>
<p>With the end of the old feudal state of things in Poland the privileged position of Judaism is likewise finished. Massacres decimate it; the anarchy which rules the country makes any normal economic activity impossible.</p>
<p>The worsening of the situation of the Jews weakens the old ideological bases of Judaism. Poverty and persecution create a propitious terrain for the development of mysticism. Study of the Kabbala begins to replace that of the Talmud. Messianic movements like that of Sabbatai Zebi take on a certain dimension.</p>
<p>It is also interesting to recall the conversion of Frank and his adherents to Christianity. “The Frankists demanded that they be given a special territory because they did not want to exploit the peasants and live from usury and the exploitation of taverns. They preferred to work the land.” <a href="#n16" name="f16">[16]</a></p>
<p>These movements did not take on very great dimensions because the position of Judaism was not as yet definitely compromised. It is only toward the close of the eighteenth century that Polish feudal society really begins to cave in under the combined blows of internal anarchy, economic decay, and foreign intervention. It is then that the problems of emigration and of passing over to other professions (“productivization”) begin to be posed for Judaism.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="information"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> In the nineteenth century “there were hundreds of Jewish merchants, landed proprietors, and even soldiers scattered throughout the vast republics of what once was Spanish South America, but they now knew hardly anything of the religion of their fathers.” Martin Philippson, <strong>Neueste Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes</strong> (Leipzig 1907), p. 226.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> In England “certain Spanish Jews converted to Christianity ... Some families which later became famous throughout the world thus abandoned Judaism: the Disraelis, Ricardos, Aguilars. Other Sephardic families were slowly assimilated by English society.” Heinrich Hirsch Graetz, <strong>Histoire Juive</strong>, vol. 6, p. 344.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> <strong>Lettres de Quelques Juifs</strong>, 5th edition, 1781. Quoted by Sombart, <strong>Jews and Modern Capitalism</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 348.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> See Sombart, <strong>Jews and Modern Capitalism</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, chapter 2.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> Brentano, <strong>Die Anfänge des Modernen Kapitalismus</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 163.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> Brentano, <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 165.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> André Sayous, <em>Les Juifs</em>, <strong>Revue Économique Internationale</strong>, March 1932, p. 526.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f8" name="n8">8.</a> Brentano, <strong>Die Anfänge des Modernen Kapitalismus</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, pp. 165–66.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f9" name="n9">9.</a> “Mr. Sombart’s book on the Jews suffers from an endless sequence of serious errors; one might call it the rigorous development of a paradox by a man having the genius for portraying things with a great sweep. Like every paradox, it does not consist solely of false ideas; its part relating to the present period deserves to be read, although it very often deforms the characteristics of the Semitic people. Its historical portion in every case is almost ridiculous ... Modern capitalism was born and first developed at the moment when the Jews, rejected almost everywhere, were in no condition to become its precursors.” Sayous, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 533.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f10" name="n10">10.</a> See <a href="ch6.htm" class="mia" target="new">Chapter 6</a>.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f11" name="n11">11.</a> In history, “the position of the Jews during the Middle Ages may be compared sociologically with that of an Indian caste in a world otherwise free from castes ... Hardly a Jew is found among the creators of the modern economic situation .... This type was Christian and only conceivable in the field of Christianity. The Jewish manufacturer, on the contrary is a modern phenomenon.” Weber, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, pp. 358–60.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f12" name="n12">12.</a> Schipper, <strong>Jewish History</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 2, pp. 77–81.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f13" name="n13">13.</a> Graetz, <strong>Popular History of the Jews</strong> (New York 1919), vol. 5, p. 10.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f14" name="n14">14.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, vol. 5, p. 28.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f15" name="n15">15.</a> Graetz.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f16" name="n16">16.</a> Graetz.</p>
<p> </p>
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<p class="updat">Last updated: 2 August 2020</p>
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Abram Leon
The Jewish Question
FOUR
The Jews in Europe after the Renaissance
A. The Jews in Western Europe after the Renaissance
The Thesis of Sombart.
The discovery of the new world and the tremendous current of exchange that followed upon it sounded the death knell of the old corporative feudal world. Mercantile economy reached a higher stage, smashing the remnants of previous periods and preparing, by the development of manufacture and rural industry the bases of industrial capitalism. The place of the old centers of corporative industry and medieval trade, fallen into decay, was taken over by Antwerp, which became the commercial center of the world for a certain period.
Everywhere, although at different times and in different forms, the decline of the economy producing use values was accompanied by the decay of the economic and social function of the Jews. An important number of the Jews was compelled to leave the countries of Western Europe in order to seek refuge in the countries where capitalism had not yet penetrated, principally in Eastern Europe and in Turkey. Others became assimilated, fused with the Christian population. This assimilation was not always easy. Religious traditions long survived the social situation which had been their foundation. For centuries the Inquisition struggled mercilessly and barbarously against Jewish traditions which persisted among the mass of converts.
The Jews who penetrated into the merchant class acquired a certain notoriety under the name of “new Christians,” principally in America and also at Bordeaux and Antwerp. In the first half of the seventeenth century, all the great sugar plantations in Brazil were in the hands of Jews. By the decree of March 2, 1768, all registers concerning new Christians were destroyed; by the law of March 24, 1773, “new Christians” were made equal before the law with “old Christians.”
In 1730, Jews possessed 115 plantations out of 344 at Surinam. But contrary to previous epochs, the activity of the Jews in America no longer had a special economic character; it was in no ways distinguished from the activity of Christians. The “new Christian” merchant was little different from the “old Christian” merchant. The same was true of the Jewish plantation owner. And this is also the reason why juridical, religious, and political distinctions rapidly disappeared.
In the nineteenth century, the Jews in South America no longer constituted more than a handful. [1] Assimilation of the Jews proceeded just as rapidly in France and in England. The rich merchant Jews of Bordeaux, of whom it was said that they “possessed entire streets and had large trade,” felt themselves completely integrated into the Christian population. “Those who are acquainted with the Portuguese Jews of France, Holland, England, know that they are far from having an unconquerable hatred for all the peoples who surround them, as Mr. Voltaire says, but on the contrary they believe themselves so identified with these peoples that they consider themselves a part of them. Their Portuguese or Spanish origin has become a pure ecclesiastical discipline.” [2] The assimilated Jews of the West acknowledged no relationship with the Jews still living under the conditions of feudal life. “A Jew of London as little resembles a Jew of Constantinople as the latter does a Chinese Mandarin. A Portuguese Jew of Bordeaux and a German Jew of Metz have nothing in common.” “Mr. Voltaire cannot ignore the delicate scruples of the Portuguese and Spanish Jews in not mixing with the Jews of other nations, either by marriage or otherwise.” [3]
Alongside the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English Jews, whose complete assimilation is proceeding slowly and surely, we still find Jews in Western Europe, primarily in Italy and in Germany, who inhabit ghettos and are mostly petty usurers and peddlers. This is a sorry remnant of the former Jewish merchant class. They are reviled, persecuted, subject to innumerable restrictions.
It was on the special basis of the rather important economic role played by the first category of Jews that Sombart presented his famous thesis on “The Jews and Economic Life.” [4] He has himself summarized it in these terms: “The Jews promote the economic flowering of countries and cities in which they settle; they lead the countries and cities which they abandon to economic decay.” “They are the founders of modern capitalism.” “There would be no modern capitalism, no modern culture without the dispersion of the Jews in the countries of the North.” “Israel passes over Europe like the sun: at its coming new life bursts forth; at its going all falls into decay.”
This is the way, in rather poetic fashion as we can see, that Sombart presents his thesis. And here are the proofs adduced in its support:
“The first event to be recalled, an event of world-wide import, is the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) and from Portugal (1495 and 1497). It should never be forgotten that on the day before Columbus set sail from Palos to discover America (August 3, 1492) 300,000 Jews are said to have emigrated from Spain ....”
In the fifteenth century; the Jews were expelled from the most important commercial cities of Germany: Cologne (1424–25), Augsburg (1439–40), Strasbourg (1438), Erfurt (1458), Nuremberg (1498–99), Ulm (1499), Regensburg (1519). In the sixteenth century; the same fate befell them in a number of Italian cities; they were driven out of Sicily in 1492, from Naples in 1540–41, from Genoa and Venice in 1550. Here as well the decline of these cities coincides with the departure of the Jews.
The economic development of Holland at the end of the sixteenth century is marked by a great rise of capitalism. The first Portuguese Marranos settled at Amsterdam in 1593.
The brief flowering of Antwerp as the center of world trade and as a world exchange coincides exactly with the arrival and departure of Marranos.
These arguments, essential to the Sombart thesis, are very easily refuted:
1. It is absurd to see in the simultaneity of the departure of Christopher Columbus “to discover America” and the expulsion of the Spanish Jews a proof of the decline of the countries which they left. “Not only did Spain and Portugal not fall into decline in the sixteenth century; under Charles V and Emanuel, but on the contrary they reached their historical apogee at that time. Even at the beginning of the reign of Philip II, Spain is still the foremost power in Europe and the wealth of Mexico and Peru which flowed to it was immeasurable.” [5]
This first Sombartist proof is based on a crying falsehood.
2. The very figures which he supplies on the redistribution of the Jewish refugees coming from Spain aids in demolishing his thesis. According to him, out of 165,000 exiles, 122,000 or 72 percent emigrated to Turkey and into Moslem countries. Consequently it is there that the “capitalist spirit” of the Jews should have produced the most important effects. Is it necessary to add then, that while we can speak of a certain economic rise in the Turkish empire under Suleiman the Magnificent, that country remained the least accessible to capitalism up to a very recent period, so that the rays of the sun there proved to be ... very cold? It is true that a rather important number of Jews (25,000) settled in Holland, at Hamburg, and in England, but can we concede that the same cause produced diametrically opposite effects?
3. The coincidence which Sombart perceives in the decline of the German cities is easily explained by reversing the causal relation. The ruin of these cities was not provoked by the measures taken against the Jews; these measures were on the contrary the effect of the decline of these cities. On the other hand, the prosperity of other cities was not the result of Jewish immigration but it was the latter which naturally directed itself toward prosperous cities. “It is obvious that the relation of cause and effect is contrary to that presented by Sombart.” [6]
A study of the economic role of the Jews in Italy and Germany at the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fully confirms this viewpoint. It is clear that the pawnshops, the business of Jewish usurers, were endurable so long as the economic situation of these cities was relatively good. Every worsening of the situation rendered the burden of usury more intolerable and the anger of the population vented itself first of all against the Jews.
4. The example of Holland does not, it is true, weaken the thesis of Sombart but neither does it reinforce it. Even if we admit that its prosperity was favored by the arrival of the Marranos, we are not thereby authorized to make it its cause. And how can we explain, if we base ourselves on this criterion, the decline of Holland in the eighteenth century? It appears, moreover, that the economic role of the Jews in Holland is exaggerated. Sayous says, in connection with the Dutch East India Company, whose importance to the prosperity of Holland was decisive: “The Jews have in any case no role whatsoever in the formation of the first genuinely modern stock corporation, the Dutch East India Company; they subscribed barely 0.1 percent of its capital and played no important role in its activity during the ensuing years.” [7]
Is it necessary to continue? Must it be shown that the important economic development of England took place precisely after the expulsion of the Jews? “If the causal relation established by Sombart were true, how explain that in Russia and in Poland, where the southern people from the ‘desert’ have been most numerous for centuries, their influence on the northern peoples produced no economic flowering whatever?” [8]
The theory of Sombart is consequently completely false. [9] Sombart claims that he is portraying the economic role of the Jews, but he does so in a completely impressionistic way, rearranging history to suit his theory. Sombart presents a thesis on the Jews and economic life in general, but deals solely with a very limited part of their history. Sombart builds a theory on the Jews in general and on economic life, but he limits himself to a minority of Western Jews, of Jews on the road to complete assimilation.
In reality, even if the role of the Western Jews had been such as Sombart presents, he would still have had to make an abstraction from it in order to understand the Jewish question in the present period. Without the influx of Eastern Jews into Western Europe in the nineteenth century, the Western Jews would long ago have been absorbed in the surrounding milieu. [10] One more observation regarding the theory of Sombart: If the Jews constituted such an economic boon; if their departure provoked the economic decay of cities and countries, how explain their continuous persecution in the late Middle Ages? Can this be explained by religion? But then, why was the position of the Jews so solid in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages and in Eastern Europe up to the nineteenth century? How explain the prosperity of the Jews for long centuries in the most backward countries of Europe, in Poland, in Lithuania; the powerful protection accorded them by the kings? Can the difference in the situation of the Jews be explained by the difference in the intensity of religious fanaticism? But then how can we concede that religious fanaticism should be most intense precisely in the most developed countries? How can we explain that it was precisely in the nineteenth century that anti-Semitism developed most strongly in Poland?
The question then is to seek the causes for the existence of differences in the intensity of religious fanaticism. And thus we are brought back to the duty of studying economic phenomena. Religion explains anti-Jewish persecutions like a soporific explains sleep. If the Jews had really played the role that Sombart attributes to them, it would be very difficult to understand why the development of capitalism was such a mortal blow to them. [11]
It is consequently inaccurate to regard the Jews as founders of modern capitalism. The Jews certainly contributed to the development of exchange economy in Europe but their specific economic role ends precisely where modern capitalism starts.
B. The Jews in Eastern Europe up to the nineteenth century
At the dawn of the development of industrial capitalism, Western Judaism was on the road to disappearance. The French Revolution, by destroying the last juridical obstacles which stood in the way of assimilation of the Jews, only gave sanction to an already existing situation.
But it is certainly not by chance that at the same time that the Jewish question was being extinguished in the West, it rebounded with redoubled violence in Eastern Europe. In the period when the Jews in Western Europe were being massacred and burned, a large number of Jews had sought refuge in the countries where capitalism had still not penetrated. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the immense majority of Jews inhabited the east of Europe, principally the former territory of the monarchist republic of Poland. In this paradise of a carefree Shlachta (petty nobility), the Jewish commercial class had found a large field of activity. For long centuries, the Jew was a merchant, usurer, publican, steward to the noble, an agent for everything. The small Jewish cities, submerged in a sea of peasant villages, often themselves adjoining the chateaux of the Polish feudal lords, represented exchange economy within a purely feudal society. The Jews were situated, as Marx states, in the pores of Polish society. This situation lasted as long as the social and political organization of Poland remained static. In the eighteenth century, following upon political confusion and economic decay, Polish feudalism found itself fatally stricken. Along with it the secular position of the Jews in Eastern Europe was shaken to its foundations. The Jewish problem, close to vanishing in the West, flared up violently in Eastern Europe. The flame, close to extinction in the West, received renewed vitality from the conflagration which arose in the East. The destruction of the economic position of the Jews in Eastern Europe will have as a consequence a massive emigration of Jews into the world. And everywhere, although in different forms and under different guises, the flood of Jewish immigrants coming from Eastern Europe will revitalize the Jewish problem. It is in this respect that the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe has certainly been the decisive factor in the Jewish question in our epoch.
The commercial relations of the Jews of Eastern Europe, of Bohemia, Poland, and Little Russia, date from the Carolingian era. The trading circuit that the Jews had established during the early Middle Ages between Asia and Europe became extended in this way across the fields of Poland and the plains of the Ukraine. Like their coreligionists, the Radamites, the Eastern Jews exchanged the precious products of Asia, spices and silks, for the raw materials of Europe. They constituted the sole commercial element in a purely agricultural society. In the Carolingian era, the economic regime of all Europe being practically the same, the role of Eastern Judaism was similar to that of Western Judaism. It is only later that their history will enter upon completely different paths.
Accounts of the travels of Ibrahim Ibn Jakob (965) testify to the considerable development of Jewish trade at Prague in the tenth century. The Jews came there from the Far East and from Byzantium, bringing different kinds of precious merchandise and Byzantine money, and there bought wheat, tin, and furs. In a document of 1090, the Jews of Prague are depicted as traders and money changers, possessing large sums of silver and gold; they are depicted as the richest merchants among all peoples. Jewish slave merchants, as well as other Jewish traders coming from the Far East and traversing the frontier in caravans, are also mentioned in documents of 1124 and 1226. The interest rate among the Jewish bankers of Prague, whose operations were very extensive, fluctuated between 108 and 180 percent. [12] The chronicler Gallus states that in 1085, Judith, the wife of Prince Ladislag Herman of Poland, strove to buy back some Christian slaves from Jewish merchants. Excavations undertaken in the past century have helped bring to light the great economic importance of the Jews in Poland in this period. Polish money has been discovered bearing Hebraic characters and dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This fact in itself proves that Polish trade was in the hands of the Jews. The Tartar invasions of the thirteenth century must certainly have had some influence on the Russian and Polish Jews, but as early as 1327, there is a privilege conferred by the Polish king, Vladislav Lokietek, involving Hungarian Jewish merchants coming to Kraków. Far from diminishing, Jewish trade in Poland only takes on greater extension in the course of succeeding centuries.
Just as in Western Europe, development of trade went together with an expansion of usury. Here also, the nobility, principal client of the Jewish usurers, strove to obtain restrictions on Jewish usury as against the kings who favored it “for the Jews, in their capacity as slaves of the treasury must always have money ready for our service.” In the sejm of 1347, the nobility, desiring to limit the interest rate which had reached 108 percent, collided with the firm resistance of royalty.
In 1456, King Casimir Jagiello proclaims that in protecting the Jews he is inspired by the principle of tolerance which is imposed upon him by divine law. In 1504, the Polish king, Alexander, declares that he acts towards the Jews as befits “kings and the powerful who distinguish themselves not only by tolerance towards worshippers of the Christian religion but also towards the adherents of other religions.”
Under such auspices, the affairs of Jews could not help but prosper. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, Jewish usurers succeeded in taking possession of a portion of the lands belonging to the nobles. In 1389, the Jew Sabetai becomes proprietor of a section of the Cawilowo domain. In 1390, the Kraków Jew Iosman receives the property of Prince Diewiez of Pszeslawic as security. In 1393, the Posen Jew Moschko takes possession of the Ponicz manor. In 1397, the lands of the Abiejesz manor are pledged with the Posen Jew Abraham. These lands of the nobles are allotted to the Jews with complete property rights. Thus, in the last cited example, the noble having attacked the possessions transmitted to Abraham, the tribunal confirms the right of possession of the Jew and punishes the aggressor with a heavy fine. In 1404, the verdict of a tribunal declares that three villages pledged with the Jew Schmerlin of Kraków, are transmitted to him with complete property rights and forever (cum omnibus juribus utilitatibus dominio, etc. in perpetuum).
The most important “bankers” lived in Kraków, residence of the kings. Their principal debtors were in effect the kings, the princes, the voyevode (governors), and the archbishops. Thus Casimir the Great borrowed the enormous sum of 15,000 marks from Jewish bankers. King Louis of Hungary owed the usurer Levko of Kraków 30,000 gulden at one time, 3,000 gulden at another. King Vladislav Jagiello and the queen, Jadwiga, also owed him substantial sums.
Levko was not only a great banker; he was also a wholesale farmer for the kingdom. He leased the mint and coined its money; and the salt mines of Wieliczka and of Bochnia were also farmed out to him. He owned houses at Kraków, as well as a brewery. Just like the great patricians, he was honored with the title of “vir discretus.”
The usury of the great Jewish bankers such as Miesko, Jordan of Posen, and Aron, who succeeded in amassing immense properties and took possession of villages and lands, raised a storm of protest among the nobility. The Statute of Warta (1423) greatly restricted Jewish usury. Thus, in 1432, the Jew Alexander, with whom the villages Dombrowka and Sokolow and a part of their living inventory had been pledged, was forced to return these properties to his debtor by decision of the tribunal, the Statute of Warta having proscribed loans on real property.
The Jews and the kings did not readily resign themselves to this situation. A fierce struggle enabled them to abolish the Statute of Warta. The bankers were able to expand their sphere of operation. Thus, in 1444, the King pledged his palace at Lemberg to the banker Schina.This usurer also had among his clients Prince Szwidrigiella, the voyevoda Chriczka, who had pledged the village of Winiki with him, etc.
But neither did the nobility accept defeat. It returned continuously to the charge and succeeded in forcing the king to promulgate the Statute of Nieszawa in 1454, with harsher provisions than the Statute of Warta. Nevertheless, and this fact is sufficient to show the fundamental difference which existed in this sphere between Poland and Western Europe, the most Draconian laws were not able to end Jewish usury. Starting with 1455, we even witness a rebirth of the banking trade mainly as a result of the immigration of Jews from Moravia and Silesia, as well as from other countries. From 1460 on, the records of Kraków testify to such an extensive revival of usurious transactions that this period is reminiscent of the epoch of Levko and of Schmerlin. The richest banker is a certain Fischel who had married the female banker Raschka of Prague and who furnished funds to the Polish king, Casimir Jagiello, as well as to his sons, the future kings Albrecht and Alexander. Whereas the nobility of Western Europe, thanks to the penetration of exchange economy and to an abundance of money, succeeded in ridding itself everywhere of Jewish usury the persistence of feudal economy in Eastern Europe made the nobility powerless on this terrain. Jewish banking survived all proscriptions.
The backward state of the country also fettered the evolution which we have observed in the countries of Western Europe: the eviction of Jews from commerce and their confinement within usury. The bourgeois class and the cities were only beginning to develop. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the Jews remained in an embryonic state and did not achieve any decisive results. The artisans, oppressed by Jewish usury, joined ranks with the traders. Here also, the sooner a province developed, the sooner arose conflicts with the Jews. In 1403, at Kraków, and in 1445 at Bochnia, artisans incite massacres of Jews. But the struggles were only episodic and nowhere ended with the elimination of the Jewish element. On the contrary, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their situation is only strengthened and Jewish commerce continues to flourish.
In the second half of the fourteenth century, we hear of a “syndicate” of three Lemberg Jews, Schlomo, Czewja, and Jacob, formed with a view to furnishing Italian merchandise to the city council of Lemberg. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Jews are provisioners of the royal court. In 1456, the starosta of Kamieniec Podolsky confiscates Oriental merchandise worth six hundred marks from Jewish merchants coming to Poland from the commercial centers of the Black Sea. The Byzantine and Italian Jews of Capha made numerous trips to Poland. The Jew Caleph Judaeus of Capha passed great quantities of Oriental goods through the customhouse of Lemberg. Even after the destruction of the Italian colonies in the Black Sea (1475) the Jews continued to maintain relations with the Orient. From 1467 on, the Jew David of Constantinople regularly supplied Lemberg with Oriental goods. There is even mention of a renewal of the slave trade in Little Russia from 1440 to 1450. Russian law books recount an interesting fact in 1449: A slave belonging to a Jew Mordecai of Galicia having fled, his owner sues in the courts for his return.
The Jewish merchants of Capha and Constantinople came only to the great fairs of Lemberg and Lublin. To these also came the Jews dispersed throughout the Russian and Polish cities and market towns in order to purchase Oriental goods and spread them throughout the districts which they inhabited. These Jewish merchants traveled the roads running from Lemberg and Lublin through Little and Greater Poland up to the Silesian frontier.
The Jews also crossed this frontier and conducted a very lively trade with Bohemia and Germany. Letters from 1588 inform us that hides and furs were brought from Kraków to Prague and that money was loaned at interest and against pledges.
The fair of Lublin served as the commercial meeting place between the Jewish merchants of Poland and of Lithuania. The Jewish merchants exported hides, furs, timber, honey from Lithuania, and at the Lublin fair they bought spices coming from Turkey and manufactured goods originating in Western Europe. Records of the city of Danzig mention Jewish merchants from Lithuania who exported timber, wax, fins, hides, etc., during the period 1423 to 1436.
The position of Lithuanian Judaism was still more favorable than that of the Polish Jews. Until the Union of Lublin (Union of Poland and Lithuania), the Lithuanian Jews enjoyed the same rights as the entire free population. In their hands lay big business, banking, the customhouses, etc. The farming of taxes and customs brought them great wealth. Their clothes glittered with gold and they wore swords just like the gentry.
Records of the Lithuanian chancellery show that in the period from 1463 to 1494 the Jews had leased almost all the customs offices of the Duchy of Lithuania: Bielek, Bryansk, Brchiczin, Grodno, Kiev, Minsk, Novgorod, Zhitomin. Some documents from the years 1488 and 1489 mention certain Jews of Trock and of Kiev as exploiting the Grand Duke’s salt mines. In the same period, we begin to meet Jews in the role of publicans, a profession which in the Polish and Little Russian village goes hand in hand with the trade of usury.
The strengthening of the anarchy of the nobles in Poland necessarily affected the situation of the Jews. In the sixteenth century, their position remains very solid but they pass more and more from royal control to that of the large and small feudal lords. The decline of the royal power makes its protection less effective and the Jews themselves seek less brilliant but surer protectors. King Sigismund complains to the sejm of 1539: “The aristocracy of our kingdom wants to monopolize all the profits of the Jews inhabiting the market towns, villages, and manors. It demands the right to judge them. To that we reply: If the Jews themselves resign the privileges of an autonomous jurisdiction which the kings our forefathers granted them and which have also been confirmed by us, they do in fact abandon our protection, and no longer drawing profit from them, we have no reason whatever to impose our kindnesses on them by force.”
It is obvious that if the Jews now declined these “kindnesses,” it was because royalty no longer had any degree of real power in this country dominated by the nobles.
In the sixteenth century the situation of the Jews became stronger. They received anew all the rights against which attempts had been made in the preceding century. Their economic position improved. The growing power of the nobility (Poland became an electoral kingdom in 1569) deprived them of the protection of the kings, but the feudal lords did everything to stimulate their economic activity. The traders, lenders at interest, stewards of the noble manors, with their inns and breweries, were extremely useful to the feudal lords who passed their time abroad in luxury and idleness. “The small towns located on the estates of the nobility were full of shops, of inns, of eating and drinking places, as well as of artisans. The Jew enjoyed absolute freedom if he only succeeded in ingratiating himself into the favor of his lord or ‘Poritz’.” [13]
The economic situation of the Jews was in general very good but their subordinate position to the nobility sapped the basis of the highly developed Jewish autonomy which had existed in Poland. “Circumstances were such at that time that the Jews of Poland could form a state within a state.” [14]
With their special religious, administrative, and juridical institutions, the Jews constituted a special class there enjoying a special internal autonomy.
A decree of Sigismund August (1551) established the following bases for the autonomy of the Jews of Great Poland: The Jews had the right to choose, upon general agreement among themselves, rabbis and judges who were to administer them. The coercive power of the State could be put at their disposal.
Each Jewish city or market town had a community council. In large centers, the community council consisted of forty members; in small ones, of ten members. The members of this council were elected by a system of double voting.
The activity of the council was very extensive. It had to raise taxes, administer the schools, institutions, decide economic questions, engage in administering justice. The power of each council, called a Kahal, extended to the Jews of the surrounding villages. The councils of the large cities had authority over the small communities. In this way community unions were created, the Galil.
We have already spoken of the Vaad Arba Aratzoth which was the General Assembly of the Jewish councils of Poland (of four countries, Great Poland, Little Poland [Kraków], Podolia [Galicia-Lemberg], and Volhynia), which met at regular intervals and constituted a veritable parliament.
In the seventeenth century the foundations of Jewish autonomy began to rock. This coincided with the worsening of the situation of Polish Judaism as it began to feel the disagreeable effects of the anarchy that Polish feudal society was passing through. The partial change in the situation of the Jews, arising from the lessening of royal authority, had as result the placing of the Jews in greater contact than previously with the great mass of the bonded population. The Jew, becoming the steward of the noble or a publican, was hated by the peasants equally with or even more than the lords, because he was the one who became the principal instrument for their exploitation. This situation soon led to terrible social explosions, above all in the Ukraine, where the authority of the Polish nobility was weaker than in Poland. The existence of vast steppes permitted the formation of Cossack military colonies where fleeing peasants could prepare their hour of vengeance.
“The Jewish steward strove to draw as much as possible from the manors and to exploit the peasant as much as possible. The Little Russian peasant bore a deep hatred for the Polish landed proprietor, in his double role as foreigner and noble. But he hated even more, perhaps, the Jewish steward with whom he was in continuous contact and in whom he saw at one and the same time the detestable representative of the lord and a ‘non-Christian’ who was foreign to him both by his religion and his way of life.” [15]
The tremendous Cossack revolt of Chmielnicki in 1648 results in completely erasing seven hundred Jewish communities from the face of the earth. At the same time the revolt demonstrates the extreme feebleness of the anarchic Polish kingdom and prepares its dismemberment. From 1648 on, Poland never ceases to be the prey to invasions and domestic troubles.
With the end of the old feudal state of things in Poland the privileged position of Judaism is likewise finished. Massacres decimate it; the anarchy which rules the country makes any normal economic activity impossible.
The worsening of the situation of the Jews weakens the old ideological bases of Judaism. Poverty and persecution create a propitious terrain for the development of mysticism. Study of the Kabbala begins to replace that of the Talmud. Messianic movements like that of Sabbatai Zebi take on a certain dimension.
It is also interesting to recall the conversion of Frank and his adherents to Christianity. “The Frankists demanded that they be given a special territory because they did not want to exploit the peasants and live from usury and the exploitation of taverns. They preferred to work the land.” [16]
These movements did not take on very great dimensions because the position of Judaism was not as yet definitely compromised. It is only toward the close of the eighteenth century that Polish feudal society really begins to cave in under the combined blows of internal anarchy, economic decay, and foreign intervention. It is then that the problems of emigration and of passing over to other professions (“productivization”) begin to be posed for Judaism.
Notes
1. In the nineteenth century “there were hundreds of Jewish merchants, landed proprietors, and even soldiers scattered throughout the vast republics of what once was Spanish South America, but they now knew hardly anything of the religion of their fathers.” Martin Philippson, Neueste Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (Leipzig 1907), p. 226.
2. In England “certain Spanish Jews converted to Christianity ... Some families which later became famous throughout the world thus abandoned Judaism: the Disraelis, Ricardos, Aguilars. Other Sephardic families were slowly assimilated by English society.” Heinrich Hirsch Graetz, Histoire Juive, vol. 6, p. 344.
3. Lettres de Quelques Juifs, 5th edition, 1781. Quoted by Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism, op. cit., p. 348.
4. See Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism, op. cit., chapter 2.
5. Brentano, Die Anfänge des Modernen Kapitalismus, op. cit., p. 163.
6. Brentano, Ibid., p. 165.
7. André Sayous, Les Juifs, Revue Économique Internationale, March 1932, p. 526.
8. Brentano, Die Anfänge des Modernen Kapitalismus, op. cit., pp. 165–66.
9. “Mr. Sombart’s book on the Jews suffers from an endless sequence of serious errors; one might call it the rigorous development of a paradox by a man having the genius for portraying things with a great sweep. Like every paradox, it does not consist solely of false ideas; its part relating to the present period deserves to be read, although it very often deforms the characteristics of the Semitic people. Its historical portion in every case is almost ridiculous ... Modern capitalism was born and first developed at the moment when the Jews, rejected almost everywhere, were in no condition to become its precursors.” Sayous, op. cit., p. 533.
10. See Chapter 6.
11. In history, “the position of the Jews during the Middle Ages may be compared sociologically with that of an Indian caste in a world otherwise free from castes ... Hardly a Jew is found among the creators of the modern economic situation .... This type was Christian and only conceivable in the field of Christianity. The Jewish manufacturer, on the contrary is a modern phenomenon.” Weber, op. cit., pp. 358–60.
12. Schipper, Jewish History, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 77–81.
13. Graetz, Popular History of the Jews (New York 1919), vol. 5, p. 10.
14. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 28.
15. Graetz.
16. Graetz.
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<h2>Abram Leon</h2>
<h1>The Jewish Question</h1>
<p> </p>
<h3>Translator’s foreword</h3>
<hr>
<p class="fst">Writing in the shadow of Nazi occupation, the possibility of conforming his work on the Jewish question to certain formal standards of scholarship simply did not exist for the author. In making the English translation of his work, considerable time and effort were devoted to locating and identifying Leon’s source material and quotations, so as to eliminate, insofar as possible, this purely technical shortcoming. We were not always successful in this research project, and it has considerably delayed the appearance of the work in English, but it is hoped that even this limited success will prove helpful to serious students of Jewish history and the Jewish question.</p>
<p>One further word as regards quoted material: English sources have in all cases been used as they appear in English editions – they are not retranslations from the French text. In all other cases, we have utilized standard English translations of foreign works, where they exist; and where the sources remain untranslated we have checked Leon’s text against the original French, German, or Yiddish editions.</p>
<p class="date"><em>Mexico City, 1950</em></p>
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<p class="updat">Last updated: 27 August 2020</p>
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Abram Leon
The Jewish Question
Translator’s foreword
Writing in the shadow of Nazi occupation, the possibility of conforming his work on the Jewish question to certain formal standards of scholarship simply did not exist for the author. In making the English translation of his work, considerable time and effort were devoted to locating and identifying Leon’s source material and quotations, so as to eliminate, insofar as possible, this purely technical shortcoming. We were not always successful in this research project, and it has considerably delayed the appearance of the work in English, but it is hoped that even this limited success will prove helpful to serious students of Jewish history and the Jewish question.
One further word as regards quoted material: English sources have in all cases been used as they appear in English editions – they are not retranslations from the French text. In all other cases, we have utilized standard English translations of foreign works, where they exist; and where the sources remain untranslated we have checked Leon’s text against the original French, German, or Yiddish editions.
Mexico City, 1950
Contents | Jews and Marxism Subject Page
Last updated: 27 August 2020
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<h2>Abram Leon</h2>
<h1>The Jewish Question</h1>
<p> </p>
<hr>
<table align="center" width="80%">
<tbody><tr><td>
<h3>FIVE<br>
Evolution of the Jewish problem in the nineteenth century</h3>
</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p class="fst">At the beginning of the nineteenth century the immense majority of Jews was concentrated in the backward countries of Eastern Europe. In Poland at the time of the partition of the country there were over a million Jews. According to the Russian census of 1818, the social composition of Eastern Judaism was the following:</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">BUSINESSMEN</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">ARTISANS</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">FARMERS</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="sm1">Ukrainia</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">86.5%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.1%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1.4%</p>
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Lithuania<br>
and White Russia</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">86.6%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.8%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">2.6%</p>
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Together</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">86.5%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">11.6%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1.9%</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The percentage of artisans and farmers indicates the beginning of the social differentiation of Judaism. But in a general way, the structure of Eastern Judaism had not yet undergone any important changes; it remained what it had been for many centuries. Certain travelers’ stories by soldiers who participated in the Russian campaign of Napoleon constitute invaluable testimony relative to the life of the Jews at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “Many of them,” says von Furtenbach, “farm out and manage seignorial manors and exploit taverns. Everything is in their hands. They lend money to lords and peasants and they go to purchase merchandise at Leipzig.” <a href="#n1" name="1">[1]</a> Another soldier, the Frenchman Puybusque, in his <strong>Lettres sur la guerre en Russie</strong> (Paris 1818), supplies interesting information on the role of the Jews in the economic life of the country: “They were the intermediaries between the peasants and the lords. The lords farmed out the taverns to them and compelled them to sell only drinks made in their manors. On the occasion of festivals, baptisms, burials, marriages, the peasants were compelled to buy at least a bucket of whiskey. The Jews sold them on credit but exacted heavy interest. They intervened in all the commercial operations of the country. They were also bankers.” The author relates that constant business relations linked the Polish Jews to their brothers in Germany. They had their own postal service and were informed about stock exchange quotations everywhere in Europe. <a href="#n2" name="2">[2]</a></p>
<p>The author of <strong>Journey of the Moscovite Officer V. Bronevsky from Trieste to Constantinople in 1810</strong> states: “Poland should in all justice be called a Jewish kingdom ... The cities and towns are primarily inhabited by them. Rarely will you find a village without Jews. Jewish taverns mark out all the main roads ... Apart from some rare manors which are administered by the lords themselves, all the others are farmed out or pledged to the Jews. They possess enormous capitals and no one can get along without their help. Only some few very rich lords are not plunged up to the neck in debt with the Jews.” <a href="#n3" name="3">[3]</a> “The Jews in the villages,” writes Kamanine in <strong>L’archive de la russie méridionale et occidentale</strong>, “restrict themselves to farming [leasing] mills, liquor shops and taverns. There is hardly a village without its Jewish ‘farmer:’ Such is the extent of this that the census often confines the idea of farmer with that of Jew and links the profession to the nationality or to the religion. Instead of writing ‘there is no Jew in the village,’ they write: ‘there is no “farmer” in the village.’ ” <a href="#n4" name="4">[4]</a></p>
<p>Nevertheless, while believing that they were describing the present, these various authors were no longer painting anything but the past. The secular situation of Judaism in Eastern Europe was, very slowly it is true, being swept away in the current of capitalist economy. Even before substituting itself for the old, the new regime was breaking it. The decay of feudalism preceded its replacement by new capitalist forms. “The numerical growth of the Jews demanded new and greater means of subsistence while the old economic positions were vanishing ... The Jews, adapted for centuries to a natural economy, felt the ground slipping beneath their feet ... In that earlier undeveloped economy they had been the middlemen and had held a virtual monopoly of trade ... The process of capitalization in Russia and in Poland now led the landed proprietors to attend personally to various branches of production and to drive the Jews out of them. Only a small section of rich Jews could find a favorable field of action in this new situation.” <a href="#n5" name="5">[5]</a></p>
<p>On the other hand, the immense majority of Jews, consisting of petty merchants, publicans, and peddlers, suffered greatly from this new state of things. The old trade centers of the feudal epoch declined. New industrial and commercial cities supplanted the small towns and fairs. A native bourgeoisie began to develop.</p>
<p>“The economic situation of the Jewish masses had become so critical, even before the partition of Poland, that questions of the transformation of the social structure of the Jews and of their emigration became posed automatically.” <a href="#n6" name="6">[6]</a> Emigration was possible in this period only within the boundaries of the states into which Poland had been divided. The Jewish masses strove to leave the decadent and backward regions of the former aristocratic kingdom with the continually declining possibilities for subsistence, in order to seek new occupations in the more developed sections of the empires which had inherited Poland. As early as 1776 and 1778 several Polish Jewish communities ask the Russian government for permission to emigrate to Russia. “At the beginning of the nineteenth century a large stream of emigration is going from former Poland towards Russia.” <a href="#n7" name="7">[7]</a> The same was true of the regions annexed by Prussia and Austria. The Jews headed for Berlin, for Vienna, for all the centers in which the pulse of a new economic life was beating, where commerce and industry offered them vast openings. “Jewish emigration from Podolia, Volhynia, White Russia and Lithuania, towards Russia, that of Posnan and Polish Jews to England and even to America, all prove that the Jews of Eastern Europe were looking for countries of immigration as early as the first half of the nineteenth century.” <a href="#n8" name="8">[8]</a></p>
<p>This desire for expatriation went hand in hand with attempts to make the Jews into “useful citizens,” to adapt them to the new situation by making them artisans and farmers. The Polish “Great Sejm” of 1784-88, already had the problem of the “productivization” of the Jews on its agenda. <a href="#n9" name="9">[9]</a> All the governments which had inherited a section of Polish Judaism considered its social structure as an anomaly. Attempts were made to transform the Jews into factory workers. Premiums were granted both to artisans who hired Jewish apprentices and to the Jews who became apprentices. <a href="#n10" name="10">[10]</a></p>
<p>Thousands of Jews were also colonized in certain regions of Russia. Tsar Alexander I encouraged this colonization. Despite great difficulties at the start, these villages succeeded in becoming acclimated in the long run.</p>
<p>“Two processes characterize the development of the Jewish people in the course of the last century: the process of emigration and the process of social differentiation ... The decay of the feudal system and of feudal property and the rapid growth of capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe created new sources for subsistence, but in a far greater measure they destroyed their positions as intermediaries, by which the greatest part of the Jewish people lived. These processes forced the Jewish masses to change their living places as well as their social appearance; forced them to seek a new place in the world and a new occupation in society.” <a href="#n11" name="11">[11]</a></p>
<p>At the beginning of the nineteenth century the process of “productivization” is still only in its opening phase. On the one hand, the decline of feudal economy is proceeding rather slowly and the Jews are still able to hang on to their old positions for a long time; on the other hand, the development of capitalism is still clothed in quite primitive forms and a great number of Jews find a vast field for occupations in trade and in artisanry. <a href="#n12" name="12">[12]</a> They played a role as very active commercial agents for young capitalist industry and contributed to the capitalization of agriculture.</p>
<p>In general we may consider that Jewish penetration into capitalist society took place up to the end of the nineteenth century. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, substantial masses of Jews were compelled to leave Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>The annual average of Jewish emigration was:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1830 to 1870</p>
</td>
<td rowspan="4"><p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">4,000 to 5,000</p>
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1871 to 1880</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">8,000 to 10,000</p>
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1881 to 1900</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">50,000 to 60,000</p>
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1901 to 1914</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">150,000 to 160,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">During the first period, which extends up to 1870, we witness primarily an internal migration directed towards the great cities. From 1830 to 1870, when annual emigration did not exceed 7,000, the Jewish people increased from 3,281,000 to 7,763,000. Consequently, this substantial natural increase was in the main absorbed within the countries inhabited by the Jews. But what an extraordinary change takes place, beginning with 1881 and even more so after 1901, when Jewish emigration reaches the truly impressive figure of 150,000 to 160,000 per annum! What were the causes for this change?</p>
<p>The process of capitalization of Russian economy was accelerated by the reform of 1863. Agriculture began to produce increasingly for the market. The bonds of serfdom and of feudal restrictions became looser; social differentiation progressed rapidly in the village. A section of peasants became transformed into well-to-do farmers; another section became proletarianized. Capitalization of agriculture had as effect the opening of an important domestic market for means of production (machines, etc.) and for articles of consumption.</p>
<p>Capitalist production in agriculture means in effect the following: (1) division of labor within agriculture due to the specialization of its branches; (2) a growing demand for manufactured products by the enriched peasants and by the proletarianized mass, which has only its labor power to sell and must purchase its subsistence; (3) agricultural production for the market necessitates a more and more extensive use of machines, and this develops industry in the means of production; (4) growth in production of the means of production brings with it a continuous increase of the proletarian mass in the cities, and this contributes also to enlarging the market for means of consumption.</p>
<p>These vast possibilities within the domestic market gave the Jewish masses, crowded out of their former economic positions, the opportunity to integrate themselves into capitalist economy. Workshops and small industries experienced a great expansion.</p>
<p>Whereas the non-Jewish blacksmith or peasant found his way into the factory or the mine, the Jewish proletarianized masses flowed into small industries producing consumers goods. <a href="#n13" name="13">[13]</a></p>
<p>But there is a fundamental difference between the transformation of the peasant or blacksmith into a steelworker and the transformation of a Jewish merchant into an artisan or garment worker. Capitalist development of the branches of heavy industry is accompanied by a <em>change in the material conditions of production</em>. Not only do the means of production change their destination but they also change their <em>form</em>. The primitive tool becomes the perfected modern machine. The same is not true of the means of consumption. Clothing, whether it be produced for the maker’s own use or for the local or world market, does not change its appearance. The same is not true of the tool which is transformed into the ever increasingly perfected machine and which <em>requires the investment of increasingly greater capital</em>.</p>
<p>In order to undertake the manufacture of machines, it is necessary, from the very beginning, to have a large capital. This is explained, especially in the beginning, by the length of the working period, the “number of consecutive working days required in a branch of production for the completion of the finished product.” <a href="#n14" name="14">[14]</a> “According to the working period required by the specific nature of the product, or by the useful effect aimed at, is short or long, a continuous investment of additional circulating capital (wages, raw and auxiliary materials) is required ...” <a href="#n15" name="15">[15]</a></p>
<p>It is for this reason that from its very beginning production of the means of production has taken place in the capitalist form of large factories, whereas the production of means of consumption can continue to be carried out in the same artisan workshops as before.</p>
<p>It is only much later that the great factory crowds out the workshop and its outmoded methods of work in this latter sphere as well. This follows upon the invention of perfected machines which then invade the sector of the means of consumption. It is, consequently, the growth of fixed capital which here plays a dominant role. <a href="#n16" name="16">[16]</a> In this way conditions of production in these two main sectors of economy are brought to the same level. “Whether a steam engine transfers its value daily to some yarn, which is the product of a continuous labor-process, or for three months to a locomotive, which is the product of a continuous process, is immaterial for the investment of the capital required for the purchase of the steam engine ... In either case, the reproduction of the steam-engine may not take place until after twenty years.” <a href="#n17" name="17">[17]</a></p>
<p>The liberation of the peasants in Russia had created a big market for manufactured products. Instead of an economy still largely feudal, the production of exchange values becomes established. Russia begins to become the granary of Europe. Cities, centers of trade and industry, rapidly develop. The Jews leave the small towns <em>en masse</em> in order to settle in the great urban centers, where they contribute heavily to the development of trade and artisan industry (means of consumption). In 1900, out of twenty-one important cities in Poland, Jews are an absolute majority in eleven of them. Migration of the Jews into the large cities is accompanied by a social differentiation which shakes the traditional bases of Judaism.</p>
<p>But the development of the means of production sector brings about a mechanization of agriculture and light industry. Machines begin to compete fiercely with the small Jewish artisan workshops. Towards the end of the last century a great mass of non-Jewish workers migrates to the great cities where the rhythm of increase in the Jewish population is falling off and even coming to a complete halt. <a href="#n18" name="18">[18]</a> Jewish artisan industries, which developed because of the expansion of the domestic market, succumb for the most part because of the mechanization and modernization of industry.</p>
<p>It was difficult for the Jewish artisan to compete with the peasant masses flowing in from the country who had a very low standard of living and were accustomed to hard physical labor from earliest times. Of course, in some places Jewish workers, surmounting all difficulties, also found a place in mechanized industries, but for the most part they had to take the path of exile at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The process of transformation of the Jewish precapitalist merchant into a craft worker is crossed by another process, that of the elimination of the Jewish worker by the machine. <a href="#n19" name="19">[19]</a></p>
<p>This last process influences the first. The Jewish masses, crowded out of the small towns are no longer able to become proletarianized and are forced to emigrate. Herein, in large part lies the explanation of the enormous growth in Jewish emigration at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Whereas dissolution of the old feudal economy and creation of the domestic market had <em>similar</em> effects on the Jewish and non-Jewish masses, industrial mechanization and concentration produced opposite results. From that also arise certain different tendencies in Jewish emigration from those of general emigration. Jewish emigration is relatively late and continues to increase, whereas the reverse is often the case for general emigration. For example, in Germany annual emigration, which fluctuated between 100,000 and 200,000 persons from 1880 to 1892, never exceeded 20,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century. This heavy drop in German emigration is explained by the tremendous economic development of Germany in this period.</p>
<p>The phenomenon of the elimination of the Jews from industry leads us quite naturally to the subject of the Jewish proletariat.</p>
<p>The confinement of the Jewish working class in consumer goods industries undoubtedly constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of the economic and social structure of the Jewish people. The fact that a tiny number of Jewish workers is involved in the initial phases of industrial production, whereas their percentage in the final phases is extremely high, strikingly characterizes what has become known as the Jewish anomaly. This economic base of the Jewish proletariat is not alone weak in itself, it is also continually contracted by technological development. The Jewish workers not only suffer the inconveniences inherent in craft industry notably social weakness, seasonal employment, sharpening exploitation and bad working conditions, but they are increasingly driven out of their economic positions.</p>
<p>Capitalist economy is characterized by the uninterrupted growth of constant capital at the expense of variable capital, or to put this another way, by the increase in the importance of capital constituted by means of production and the decrease in the importance of capital which buys the form of labor. This economic process produces the familiar phenomena of elimination of the worker by the machine, of annihilation of the artisan workshop by the factory and of a decrease in the specific weight of the section of the class producing consumers’ goods relative to the other section which is engaged in the manufacture of means of production.</p>
<p>Official economics thus characterizes this process:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The one certain fact—and it is a very important one—is that the economic evolution of the past hundred or hundred and fifty years has operated in the direction of the increase in relative importance of fixed capital and the decrease in relative importance of circulating capital.” <a href="#n20" name="20">[20]</a></p>
<p class="fst">The more primitive man is the more important is the work which allows him to satisfy his immediate needs. But the more humanity progresses, the more it turns first towards the tool, and later towards the machine which enormously increases its productive power. First the tool is an appendage to man, then man becomes an appendage to the tool.</p>
<p>This recollection of a rather well-known economic process serves but to underline its decisive importance in the specific situation of the Jewish working class and allows us to proceed immediately to our subject. The question which becomes posed immediately and which has not up to now received any attention is to find the historic cause or causes for this state of things.</p>
<p>In the substantial study dedicated to Jewish economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century which was undertaken by Lestschinsky in his book <strong>The Development of the Jewish People in the Last 100 Years</strong>, he writes as follows on the professional composition of Jewish and non-Jewish artisans in this period:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The most superficial glance over this comparative statistical material is sufficient to note that those trades were in the hands of Jewish artisans which had the smallest chance of going over to factory production, whereas, precisely to the contrary, the professions most adapted to this transformation were widespread among non-Jewish artisans. In Galicia, non-Jews constituted 99.6 percent of the metalworkers, 99.2 percent of the weavers, 98.2 percent of the blacksmiths, 98.1 percent of the spinners (whereas, in sharp contrast, 94.3 percent of the tailors and 70.0 percent of the furriers were Jews). These first four trades were the labor foundation on which the textile and metallurgical industries were later constructed. Without these trained workers which large-scale industry inherited from artisanry the birth of these industries would have been impossible ... It is in this historic fact that the fundamental cause may lie for the weak penetration of large-scale industry by the Jews. It was no more than natural that the first workers’ cadres in the metallurgical and textile plants should consist exclusively of non-Jews. And these compact masses of non-Jewish workers certainly had a natural attractive force for the non-Jewish populations which were closer to them from the religious, national, and psychological point of view, whereas, on the other hand, they repelled the Jewish mass which has remained foreign to them in every way up to this day.” <a href="#n21" name="21">[21]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Lestschinsky’s explanation contributes to clarifying the problem with which we are engaged and shows us the first immediate cause for the specific professional structure of the Jewish working class. But in its turn, it places before us a new problem, or rather raises the old one to a new level. If we now clearly see the present Jewish worker as a descendant of the eighteenth century artisan, we must still find an explanation of the different professional composition of Jewish and non-Jewish artisans in that period. Why were the former primarily tailors and the non-Jewish artisans blacksmiths? Why were the latter to be found in trades linked with <em>production</em>, and the former confined to clothing, producing consequently for <em>consumption</em>? To pose the question in this way is practically to resolve it.</p>
<p>Natural economy which ruled Eastern Europe in this period was characterized by the almost exclusive production of use values and implied an almost complete absence of the division of labor (into trades).</p>
<p>Each family was self-sufficient or practically so, producing everything necessary for the satisfaction of its needs. Here is how Vandervelde describes this state of affairs:</p>
<p>“Each family is sufficient to itself or practically so: it is lodged in a house made of timber coming from the nearest forest, and obtains straw and mortar right on the spot. It warms itself exclusively and primarily with turf, heather, furze, dead wood gathered in the vicinity. It spins, weaves, transforms flax and hemp of its own harvesting into clothes; it feeds itself with its own wheat, potatoes, vegetables ... it bakes its bread, makes its wine ... or beer, dries its own tobacco, exchanges its eggs and butter against rare goods which it secures from without: candles, oil, ironware, etc. In short, it produces almost everything which it consumes and consumes all that it produces, selling only what is strictly necessary to meet very limited money expenses.” <a href="#n22" name="22">[22]</a></p>
<p>The same could be said, with very little correction, regarding the feudal manor.</p>
<p>It is readily understandable that while such an economic system does not <em>absolutely</em> exclude professional specialization, the few trades that find a place within it are the products of quite exceptional conditions.</p>
<p>“We should consider the labors of the blacksmith and the potter as the first which rose to special professions because they demanded from the very beginning more skill and more specialized working equipment. Even among nomad peoples, special artisans devoted themselves to the iron trade.” <a href="#n23" name="23">[23]</a></p>
<p>It is therefore easy to understand that even in the era of natural economy, the trades of blacksmith and of weaver <a href="#n24" name="24">[24]</a> were spread throughout the villages and abounded in the cities, which, in Eastern Europe, were almost exclusively military and administrative centers.</p>
<p>“In Galicia, in Bucovina, in many parts of Hungary, Romania, and Transylvania, as among the Yugoslav peoples, there were up to recent times no artisans other than blacksmiths.” <a href="#n25" name="25">[25]</a></p>
<p><em>Non-Jewish artisanry in Eastern Europe was therefore the product of special causes which, in a society based on natural and not exchange economy, nevertheless requires an exchange of services.</em></p>
<p>Completely different was the point of departure of Jewish artisanry. <em>It was born in the specific conditions of the small Jewish town and produced for that town.</em></p>
<p>But whoever speaks of the small Jewish town of the eighteenth century speaks of an agglomeration of small traders, publicans, bankers, and intermediaries of all sorts. <a href="#n26" name="26">[26]</a></p>
<p>The Jewish artisan therefore did not work for the peasant <em>producers</em>, but for the merchants, the banker <em>intermediaries</em>. It is here that we must seek the fundamental cause for the specific professional structure of the Jewish proletariat and of its ancestor, Jewish artisanry. The non-Jewish artisan did not produce articles of consumption for the peasant because, as we have seen, the latter was sufficient to himself in this regard. But that was precisely the principal occupation of the Jewish artisan, his clientele being composed of men devoted to trade in money and in goods, thus non-producers by definition. Alongside of the peasant, we find the non-Jewish blacksmith artisan; close to the money man, we find the Jewish tailor. <a href="#n27" name="27">[27]</a></p>
<p><em>The professional difference existing between the Jewish and non-Jewish artisans therefore derives in the last analysis from the difference in their spheres of activity.</em></p>
<p>It goes without saying that this explanation is necessarily schematic and like all schemas allows us to understand phenomena in their general aspect but cannot present the diversity of real life with complete exactness. But to try to reflect the latter with exactness and in detail would mean in turn to make it difficult to understand the general processes which derive from it. Sociology is therefore compelled to make a complete and continuous circuit: from reality to theoretical schema and the reverse. Those who reproach this method for not reflecting the entire diversity of life have not completely understood this dialectical interdependence.</p>
<p>It should also be noted that the struggles which broke out in certain periods between Jewish and non-Jewish artisans appear to have been provoked by the <em>encroachment</em> of one section of artisans upon the sphere of activity of another and should not be attributed to some alleged national competition which was simply inconceivable in the feudal epoch because it is prior to the formation of nations. “Nationality” is “a sentiment unknown to the heterogeneous society of the Middle Ages.” <a href="#n28" name="28">[28]</a></p>
<p>By way of illustration, we quote this passage from an ancient chronicle of Prague, the <strong>Ramschackie Chronik</strong> of 1491: “Jews were forbidden to do work for Christians but they were all free to work for Jewish clients.”</p>
<p>The city council of Prague also complains in the same period: “that the Jews pay no attention to the old privileges and ordinances whereby they are forbidden to work for Christians.” “At Posen,” states Graetz, “Jews were allowed to engage in certain trades, like that of tailoring, but only to satisfy their own needs and not for Christians.”</p>
<p>It seems to me that we have thus traversed the causal chain leading from the present-day economic structure of the Jewish proletariat back to its origins. It is complete in this sense that it brings us back to the social problem of a more general order, which has already been explored: that of the social and economic function of the Jews in the precapitalist era.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="information"><a href="#1" name="n1">1.</a> Friedrich von Furtenbach, <strong>Krieg gegen Russland und Russische Gefangenschaft</strong> (Leipzig 1912), pp. 101, 204.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#2" name="n2">2.</a> <strong>Yivo Studies in History</strong> (Wilno, 1937), vol. 2, p. 521.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#3" name="n3">3.</a> Quoted by W. Dubnow in <em>On the Economic History of the Jews in Russia</em>, <strong>Writings on Economics and Statistics</strong> (Yiddish). J. Lestschinsky ed. (Berlin 1928), vol. 1, p. 92</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#4" name="n4">4.</a> Quoted by Jacob Lestschinsky, <strong>The Development of the Jewish People in the Last One Hundred Years</strong> (Yiddish) (Berlin 1928), p. 55.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#5" name="n5">5.</a> S.B. Weinryb, <strong>Neueste Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Russland und Polen</strong> (Breslau 1934), pp. 5-8.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#6" name="n6">6.</a> Lestschinsky, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 25.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#7" name="n7">7.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 28.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#8" name="n8">8.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 29.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#9" name="n9">9.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 30.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#10" name="n10">10.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, pp. 32-34.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#11" name="n11">11.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 1.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#12" name="n12">12.</a> The struggle between “Haskalah” (the movement for emancipation) and orthodoxy between those who wanted to transform the economic life of Judaism as well as its cultural life as against the supporters of old traditions, is a reflection of the antagonism between the new Jewish bourgeoisie profiting from capitalist development and tending towards complete assimilation and the old feudal layers attached to their ancient mode of existence. This struggle continues throughout the entire course of the Nineteenth Century and ends in the defeat of the assimilationists. This defeat is due not so much to the solidity of the old economic forms as to the fragility of the new ones.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#13" name="n13">13.</a> This process is analyzed later in the chapter.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#14" name="n14">14.</a> Marx, <strong>Capital</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 2, p. 308.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#15" name="n15">15.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, vol. 2, p. 309.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#16" name="n16">16.</a> The long persistence of the system of home industry has its basis in the slightness of the fixed capital which it requires. See Weber, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 160.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#17" name="n17">17.</a> Marx, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 2, p. 308.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#18" name="n18">18.</a> “In the nineteenth century the increase in the Jewish population in the cities of Poland was greater than that of the non-Jewish population. Towards the end of the last century in the period when large-scale industry was created and when great masses of non-Jewish workers migrated to the cities, the rhythm of Jewish population increase slowed down and in places the movement came to a complete halt.” Congrès Juif Mondial, Départment Économique, <strong>La Situation Économique des Juifs dans le Monde</strong> (Paris 1938), pp. 215–16.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#19" name="n19">19.</a> A similar phenomenon can also be seen in the rural sphere. “In those districts where agricultural capitalism is developed most, this process of introducing wage labour, simultaneously with the introduction of machinery, cuts across another process, namely the wage workers are squeezed out by the machine.” Lenin, <strong>The Development of Capitalism in Russia</strong>, in <strong>Selected Works</strong> vol. 1, p. 275.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#20" name="n20">20.</a> Ansiaux, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 1, p. 137.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#21" name="n21">21.</a> Lestschinsky, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 60.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#22" name="n22">22.</a> Émile Vandervelde, <strong>L’Exode Rural et le Retour aux Champs</strong> (Paris 1903), p. 70.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#23" name="n23">23.</a> A. Menes, <em>Craft Industry among the Jews in Biblical and Talmudic Times</em>, <strong>Writings on Economics and Statistics</strong> (Yiddish), J. Lestschinsky, editor (Berlin 1928), vol. 1, p. 65.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#24" name="n24">24.</a> The trade of weaver, like that of blacksmith, demanded a special professional formation and early became separated from rhe household economy. The weaver in the feudal era is a traveler who moves from one place to another, from one village to another, in pursuing his trade.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#25" name="n25">25.</a> Ansiaux, <strong>op. cit.</strong></p>
<p class="information"><a href="#26" name="n26">26.</a> All the Jews did not live in small towns, far from it, but their social role in the large cities or in the village was the same as in the small town. The latter, however, by its specific aspect, best characterized this social role. According to a governmental census in 1818, in the Ukraine and Byelorussia:</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="information">86.5 percent of the Jews were traders;<br>
11.6 percent of the Jews were artisans;<br>
1.9 percent of the Jews were farmers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="information">In Galicia, in 1820, 81 percent of the traders were Jews.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#27" name="n27">27.</a> Certain crafts, close to trade, were also often exercised by Jews. Such was the goldsmith’s craft.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#28" name="n28">28.</a> Pirenne, <strong>Belgian Democracy</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 143.</p>
<p> </p>
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Abram Leon
The Jewish Question
FIVE
Evolution of the Jewish problem in the nineteenth century
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the immense majority of Jews was concentrated in the backward countries of Eastern Europe. In Poland at the time of the partition of the country there were over a million Jews. According to the Russian census of 1818, the social composition of Eastern Judaism was the following:
BUSINESSMEN
ARTISANS
FARMERS
Ukrainia
86.5%
12.1%
1.4%
Lithuania
and White Russia
86.6%
10.8%
2.6%
Together
86.5%
11.6%
1.9%
The percentage of artisans and farmers indicates the beginning of the social differentiation of Judaism. But in a general way, the structure of Eastern Judaism had not yet undergone any important changes; it remained what it had been for many centuries. Certain travelers’ stories by soldiers who participated in the Russian campaign of Napoleon constitute invaluable testimony relative to the life of the Jews at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “Many of them,” says von Furtenbach, “farm out and manage seignorial manors and exploit taverns. Everything is in their hands. They lend money to lords and peasants and they go to purchase merchandise at Leipzig.” [1] Another soldier, the Frenchman Puybusque, in his Lettres sur la guerre en Russie (Paris 1818), supplies interesting information on the role of the Jews in the economic life of the country: “They were the intermediaries between the peasants and the lords. The lords farmed out the taverns to them and compelled them to sell only drinks made in their manors. On the occasion of festivals, baptisms, burials, marriages, the peasants were compelled to buy at least a bucket of whiskey. The Jews sold them on credit but exacted heavy interest. They intervened in all the commercial operations of the country. They were also bankers.” The author relates that constant business relations linked the Polish Jews to their brothers in Germany. They had their own postal service and were informed about stock exchange quotations everywhere in Europe. [2]
The author of Journey of the Moscovite Officer V. Bronevsky from Trieste to Constantinople in 1810 states: “Poland should in all justice be called a Jewish kingdom ... The cities and towns are primarily inhabited by them. Rarely will you find a village without Jews. Jewish taverns mark out all the main roads ... Apart from some rare manors which are administered by the lords themselves, all the others are farmed out or pledged to the Jews. They possess enormous capitals and no one can get along without their help. Only some few very rich lords are not plunged up to the neck in debt with the Jews.” [3] “The Jews in the villages,” writes Kamanine in L’archive de la russie méridionale et occidentale, “restrict themselves to farming [leasing] mills, liquor shops and taverns. There is hardly a village without its Jewish ‘farmer:’ Such is the extent of this that the census often confines the idea of farmer with that of Jew and links the profession to the nationality or to the religion. Instead of writing ‘there is no Jew in the village,’ they write: ‘there is no “farmer” in the village.’ ” [4]
Nevertheless, while believing that they were describing the present, these various authors were no longer painting anything but the past. The secular situation of Judaism in Eastern Europe was, very slowly it is true, being swept away in the current of capitalist economy. Even before substituting itself for the old, the new regime was breaking it. The decay of feudalism preceded its replacement by new capitalist forms. “The numerical growth of the Jews demanded new and greater means of subsistence while the old economic positions were vanishing ... The Jews, adapted for centuries to a natural economy, felt the ground slipping beneath their feet ... In that earlier undeveloped economy they had been the middlemen and had held a virtual monopoly of trade ... The process of capitalization in Russia and in Poland now led the landed proprietors to attend personally to various branches of production and to drive the Jews out of them. Only a small section of rich Jews could find a favorable field of action in this new situation.” [5]
On the other hand, the immense majority of Jews, consisting of petty merchants, publicans, and peddlers, suffered greatly from this new state of things. The old trade centers of the feudal epoch declined. New industrial and commercial cities supplanted the small towns and fairs. A native bourgeoisie began to develop.
“The economic situation of the Jewish masses had become so critical, even before the partition of Poland, that questions of the transformation of the social structure of the Jews and of their emigration became posed automatically.” [6] Emigration was possible in this period only within the boundaries of the states into which Poland had been divided. The Jewish masses strove to leave the decadent and backward regions of the former aristocratic kingdom with the continually declining possibilities for subsistence, in order to seek new occupations in the more developed sections of the empires which had inherited Poland. As early as 1776 and 1778 several Polish Jewish communities ask the Russian government for permission to emigrate to Russia. “At the beginning of the nineteenth century a large stream of emigration is going from former Poland towards Russia.” [7] The same was true of the regions annexed by Prussia and Austria. The Jews headed for Berlin, for Vienna, for all the centers in which the pulse of a new economic life was beating, where commerce and industry offered them vast openings. “Jewish emigration from Podolia, Volhynia, White Russia and Lithuania, towards Russia, that of Posnan and Polish Jews to England and even to America, all prove that the Jews of Eastern Europe were looking for countries of immigration as early as the first half of the nineteenth century.” [8]
This desire for expatriation went hand in hand with attempts to make the Jews into “useful citizens,” to adapt them to the new situation by making them artisans and farmers. The Polish “Great Sejm” of 1784-88, already had the problem of the “productivization” of the Jews on its agenda. [9] All the governments which had inherited a section of Polish Judaism considered its social structure as an anomaly. Attempts were made to transform the Jews into factory workers. Premiums were granted both to artisans who hired Jewish apprentices and to the Jews who became apprentices. [10]
Thousands of Jews were also colonized in certain regions of Russia. Tsar Alexander I encouraged this colonization. Despite great difficulties at the start, these villages succeeded in becoming acclimated in the long run.
“Two processes characterize the development of the Jewish people in the course of the last century: the process of emigration and the process of social differentiation ... The decay of the feudal system and of feudal property and the rapid growth of capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe created new sources for subsistence, but in a far greater measure they destroyed their positions as intermediaries, by which the greatest part of the Jewish people lived. These processes forced the Jewish masses to change their living places as well as their social appearance; forced them to seek a new place in the world and a new occupation in society.” [11]
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the process of “productivization” is still only in its opening phase. On the one hand, the decline of feudal economy is proceeding rather slowly and the Jews are still able to hang on to their old positions for a long time; on the other hand, the development of capitalism is still clothed in quite primitive forms and a great number of Jews find a vast field for occupations in trade and in artisanry. [12] They played a role as very active commercial agents for young capitalist industry and contributed to the capitalization of agriculture.
In general we may consider that Jewish penetration into capitalist society took place up to the end of the nineteenth century. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, substantial masses of Jews were compelled to leave Eastern Europe.
The annual average of Jewish emigration was:
1830 to 1870
4,000 to 5,000
1871 to 1880
8,000 to 10,000
1881 to 1900
50,000 to 60,000
1901 to 1914
150,000 to 160,000
During the first period, which extends up to 1870, we witness primarily an internal migration directed towards the great cities. From 1830 to 1870, when annual emigration did not exceed 7,000, the Jewish people increased from 3,281,000 to 7,763,000. Consequently, this substantial natural increase was in the main absorbed within the countries inhabited by the Jews. But what an extraordinary change takes place, beginning with 1881 and even more so after 1901, when Jewish emigration reaches the truly impressive figure of 150,000 to 160,000 per annum! What were the causes for this change?
The process of capitalization of Russian economy was accelerated by the reform of 1863. Agriculture began to produce increasingly for the market. The bonds of serfdom and of feudal restrictions became looser; social differentiation progressed rapidly in the village. A section of peasants became transformed into well-to-do farmers; another section became proletarianized. Capitalization of agriculture had as effect the opening of an important domestic market for means of production (machines, etc.) and for articles of consumption.
Capitalist production in agriculture means in effect the following: (1) division of labor within agriculture due to the specialization of its branches; (2) a growing demand for manufactured products by the enriched peasants and by the proletarianized mass, which has only its labor power to sell and must purchase its subsistence; (3) agricultural production for the market necessitates a more and more extensive use of machines, and this develops industry in the means of production; (4) growth in production of the means of production brings with it a continuous increase of the proletarian mass in the cities, and this contributes also to enlarging the market for means of consumption.
These vast possibilities within the domestic market gave the Jewish masses, crowded out of their former economic positions, the opportunity to integrate themselves into capitalist economy. Workshops and small industries experienced a great expansion.
Whereas the non-Jewish blacksmith or peasant found his way into the factory or the mine, the Jewish proletarianized masses flowed into small industries producing consumers goods. [13]
But there is a fundamental difference between the transformation of the peasant or blacksmith into a steelworker and the transformation of a Jewish merchant into an artisan or garment worker. Capitalist development of the branches of heavy industry is accompanied by a change in the material conditions of production. Not only do the means of production change their destination but they also change their form. The primitive tool becomes the perfected modern machine. The same is not true of the means of consumption. Clothing, whether it be produced for the maker’s own use or for the local or world market, does not change its appearance. The same is not true of the tool which is transformed into the ever increasingly perfected machine and which requires the investment of increasingly greater capital.
In order to undertake the manufacture of machines, it is necessary, from the very beginning, to have a large capital. This is explained, especially in the beginning, by the length of the working period, the “number of consecutive working days required in a branch of production for the completion of the finished product.” [14] “According to the working period required by the specific nature of the product, or by the useful effect aimed at, is short or long, a continuous investment of additional circulating capital (wages, raw and auxiliary materials) is required ...” [15]
It is for this reason that from its very beginning production of the means of production has taken place in the capitalist form of large factories, whereas the production of means of consumption can continue to be carried out in the same artisan workshops as before.
It is only much later that the great factory crowds out the workshop and its outmoded methods of work in this latter sphere as well. This follows upon the invention of perfected machines which then invade the sector of the means of consumption. It is, consequently, the growth of fixed capital which here plays a dominant role. [16] In this way conditions of production in these two main sectors of economy are brought to the same level. “Whether a steam engine transfers its value daily to some yarn, which is the product of a continuous labor-process, or for three months to a locomotive, which is the product of a continuous process, is immaterial for the investment of the capital required for the purchase of the steam engine ... In either case, the reproduction of the steam-engine may not take place until after twenty years.” [17]
The liberation of the peasants in Russia had created a big market for manufactured products. Instead of an economy still largely feudal, the production of exchange values becomes established. Russia begins to become the granary of Europe. Cities, centers of trade and industry, rapidly develop. The Jews leave the small towns en masse in order to settle in the great urban centers, where they contribute heavily to the development of trade and artisan industry (means of consumption). In 1900, out of twenty-one important cities in Poland, Jews are an absolute majority in eleven of them. Migration of the Jews into the large cities is accompanied by a social differentiation which shakes the traditional bases of Judaism.
But the development of the means of production sector brings about a mechanization of agriculture and light industry. Machines begin to compete fiercely with the small Jewish artisan workshops. Towards the end of the last century a great mass of non-Jewish workers migrates to the great cities where the rhythm of increase in the Jewish population is falling off and even coming to a complete halt. [18] Jewish artisan industries, which developed because of the expansion of the domestic market, succumb for the most part because of the mechanization and modernization of industry.
It was difficult for the Jewish artisan to compete with the peasant masses flowing in from the country who had a very low standard of living and were accustomed to hard physical labor from earliest times. Of course, in some places Jewish workers, surmounting all difficulties, also found a place in mechanized industries, but for the most part they had to take the path of exile at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The process of transformation of the Jewish precapitalist merchant into a craft worker is crossed by another process, that of the elimination of the Jewish worker by the machine. [19]
This last process influences the first. The Jewish masses, crowded out of the small towns are no longer able to become proletarianized and are forced to emigrate. Herein, in large part lies the explanation of the enormous growth in Jewish emigration at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Whereas dissolution of the old feudal economy and creation of the domestic market had similar effects on the Jewish and non-Jewish masses, industrial mechanization and concentration produced opposite results. From that also arise certain different tendencies in Jewish emigration from those of general emigration. Jewish emigration is relatively late and continues to increase, whereas the reverse is often the case for general emigration. For example, in Germany annual emigration, which fluctuated between 100,000 and 200,000 persons from 1880 to 1892, never exceeded 20,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century. This heavy drop in German emigration is explained by the tremendous economic development of Germany in this period.
The phenomenon of the elimination of the Jews from industry leads us quite naturally to the subject of the Jewish proletariat.
The confinement of the Jewish working class in consumer goods industries undoubtedly constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of the economic and social structure of the Jewish people. The fact that a tiny number of Jewish workers is involved in the initial phases of industrial production, whereas their percentage in the final phases is extremely high, strikingly characterizes what has become known as the Jewish anomaly. This economic base of the Jewish proletariat is not alone weak in itself, it is also continually contracted by technological development. The Jewish workers not only suffer the inconveniences inherent in craft industry notably social weakness, seasonal employment, sharpening exploitation and bad working conditions, but they are increasingly driven out of their economic positions.
Capitalist economy is characterized by the uninterrupted growth of constant capital at the expense of variable capital, or to put this another way, by the increase in the importance of capital constituted by means of production and the decrease in the importance of capital which buys the form of labor. This economic process produces the familiar phenomena of elimination of the worker by the machine, of annihilation of the artisan workshop by the factory and of a decrease in the specific weight of the section of the class producing consumers’ goods relative to the other section which is engaged in the manufacture of means of production.
Official economics thus characterizes this process:
“The one certain fact—and it is a very important one—is that the economic evolution of the past hundred or hundred and fifty years has operated in the direction of the increase in relative importance of fixed capital and the decrease in relative importance of circulating capital.” [20]
The more primitive man is the more important is the work which allows him to satisfy his immediate needs. But the more humanity progresses, the more it turns first towards the tool, and later towards the machine which enormously increases its productive power. First the tool is an appendage to man, then man becomes an appendage to the tool.
This recollection of a rather well-known economic process serves but to underline its decisive importance in the specific situation of the Jewish working class and allows us to proceed immediately to our subject. The question which becomes posed immediately and which has not up to now received any attention is to find the historic cause or causes for this state of things.
In the substantial study dedicated to Jewish economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century which was undertaken by Lestschinsky in his book The Development of the Jewish People in the Last 100 Years, he writes as follows on the professional composition of Jewish and non-Jewish artisans in this period:
“The most superficial glance over this comparative statistical material is sufficient to note that those trades were in the hands of Jewish artisans which had the smallest chance of going over to factory production, whereas, precisely to the contrary, the professions most adapted to this transformation were widespread among non-Jewish artisans. In Galicia, non-Jews constituted 99.6 percent of the metalworkers, 99.2 percent of the weavers, 98.2 percent of the blacksmiths, 98.1 percent of the spinners (whereas, in sharp contrast, 94.3 percent of the tailors and 70.0 percent of the furriers were Jews). These first four trades were the labor foundation on which the textile and metallurgical industries were later constructed. Without these trained workers which large-scale industry inherited from artisanry the birth of these industries would have been impossible ... It is in this historic fact that the fundamental cause may lie for the weak penetration of large-scale industry by the Jews. It was no more than natural that the first workers’ cadres in the metallurgical and textile plants should consist exclusively of non-Jews. And these compact masses of non-Jewish workers certainly had a natural attractive force for the non-Jewish populations which were closer to them from the religious, national, and psychological point of view, whereas, on the other hand, they repelled the Jewish mass which has remained foreign to them in every way up to this day.” [21]
Lestschinsky’s explanation contributes to clarifying the problem with which we are engaged and shows us the first immediate cause for the specific professional structure of the Jewish working class. But in its turn, it places before us a new problem, or rather raises the old one to a new level. If we now clearly see the present Jewish worker as a descendant of the eighteenth century artisan, we must still find an explanation of the different professional composition of Jewish and non-Jewish artisans in that period. Why were the former primarily tailors and the non-Jewish artisans blacksmiths? Why were the latter to be found in trades linked with production, and the former confined to clothing, producing consequently for consumption? To pose the question in this way is practically to resolve it.
Natural economy which ruled Eastern Europe in this period was characterized by the almost exclusive production of use values and implied an almost complete absence of the division of labor (into trades).
Each family was self-sufficient or practically so, producing everything necessary for the satisfaction of its needs. Here is how Vandervelde describes this state of affairs:
“Each family is sufficient to itself or practically so: it is lodged in a house made of timber coming from the nearest forest, and obtains straw and mortar right on the spot. It warms itself exclusively and primarily with turf, heather, furze, dead wood gathered in the vicinity. It spins, weaves, transforms flax and hemp of its own harvesting into clothes; it feeds itself with its own wheat, potatoes, vegetables ... it bakes its bread, makes its wine ... or beer, dries its own tobacco, exchanges its eggs and butter against rare goods which it secures from without: candles, oil, ironware, etc. In short, it produces almost everything which it consumes and consumes all that it produces, selling only what is strictly necessary to meet very limited money expenses.” [22]
The same could be said, with very little correction, regarding the feudal manor.
It is readily understandable that while such an economic system does not absolutely exclude professional specialization, the few trades that find a place within it are the products of quite exceptional conditions.
“We should consider the labors of the blacksmith and the potter as the first which rose to special professions because they demanded from the very beginning more skill and more specialized working equipment. Even among nomad peoples, special artisans devoted themselves to the iron trade.” [23]
It is therefore easy to understand that even in the era of natural economy, the trades of blacksmith and of weaver [24] were spread throughout the villages and abounded in the cities, which, in Eastern Europe, were almost exclusively military and administrative centers.
“In Galicia, in Bucovina, in many parts of Hungary, Romania, and Transylvania, as among the Yugoslav peoples, there were up to recent times no artisans other than blacksmiths.” [25]
Non-Jewish artisanry in Eastern Europe was therefore the product of special causes which, in a society based on natural and not exchange economy, nevertheless requires an exchange of services.
Completely different was the point of departure of Jewish artisanry. It was born in the specific conditions of the small Jewish town and produced for that town.
But whoever speaks of the small Jewish town of the eighteenth century speaks of an agglomeration of small traders, publicans, bankers, and intermediaries of all sorts. [26]
The Jewish artisan therefore did not work for the peasant producers, but for the merchants, the banker intermediaries. It is here that we must seek the fundamental cause for the specific professional structure of the Jewish proletariat and of its ancestor, Jewish artisanry. The non-Jewish artisan did not produce articles of consumption for the peasant because, as we have seen, the latter was sufficient to himself in this regard. But that was precisely the principal occupation of the Jewish artisan, his clientele being composed of men devoted to trade in money and in goods, thus non-producers by definition. Alongside of the peasant, we find the non-Jewish blacksmith artisan; close to the money man, we find the Jewish tailor. [27]
The professional difference existing between the Jewish and non-Jewish artisans therefore derives in the last analysis from the difference in their spheres of activity.
It goes without saying that this explanation is necessarily schematic and like all schemas allows us to understand phenomena in their general aspect but cannot present the diversity of real life with complete exactness. But to try to reflect the latter with exactness and in detail would mean in turn to make it difficult to understand the general processes which derive from it. Sociology is therefore compelled to make a complete and continuous circuit: from reality to theoretical schema and the reverse. Those who reproach this method for not reflecting the entire diversity of life have not completely understood this dialectical interdependence.
It should also be noted that the struggles which broke out in certain periods between Jewish and non-Jewish artisans appear to have been provoked by the encroachment of one section of artisans upon the sphere of activity of another and should not be attributed to some alleged national competition which was simply inconceivable in the feudal epoch because it is prior to the formation of nations. “Nationality” is “a sentiment unknown to the heterogeneous society of the Middle Ages.” [28]
By way of illustration, we quote this passage from an ancient chronicle of Prague, the Ramschackie Chronik of 1491: “Jews were forbidden to do work for Christians but they were all free to work for Jewish clients.”
The city council of Prague also complains in the same period: “that the Jews pay no attention to the old privileges and ordinances whereby they are forbidden to work for Christians.” “At Posen,” states Graetz, “Jews were allowed to engage in certain trades, like that of tailoring, but only to satisfy their own needs and not for Christians.”
It seems to me that we have thus traversed the causal chain leading from the present-day economic structure of the Jewish proletariat back to its origins. It is complete in this sense that it brings us back to the social problem of a more general order, which has already been explored: that of the social and economic function of the Jews in the precapitalist era.
Notes
1. Friedrich von Furtenbach, Krieg gegen Russland und Russische Gefangenschaft (Leipzig 1912), pp. 101, 204.
2. Yivo Studies in History (Wilno, 1937), vol. 2, p. 521.
3. Quoted by W. Dubnow in On the Economic History of the Jews in Russia, Writings on Economics and Statistics (Yiddish). J. Lestschinsky ed. (Berlin 1928), vol. 1, p. 92
4. Quoted by Jacob Lestschinsky, The Development of the Jewish People in the Last One Hundred Years (Yiddish) (Berlin 1928), p. 55.
5. S.B. Weinryb, Neueste Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Russland und Polen (Breslau 1934), pp. 5-8.
6. Lestschinsky, op. cit., p. 25.
7. Ibid., p. 28.
8. Ibid., p. 29.
9. Ibid., p. 30.
10. Ibid., pp. 32-34.
11. Ibid., p. 1.
12. The struggle between “Haskalah” (the movement for emancipation) and orthodoxy between those who wanted to transform the economic life of Judaism as well as its cultural life as against the supporters of old traditions, is a reflection of the antagonism between the new Jewish bourgeoisie profiting from capitalist development and tending towards complete assimilation and the old feudal layers attached to their ancient mode of existence. This struggle continues throughout the entire course of the Nineteenth Century and ends in the defeat of the assimilationists. This defeat is due not so much to the solidity of the old economic forms as to the fragility of the new ones.
13. This process is analyzed later in the chapter.
14. Marx, Capital, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 308.
15. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 309.
16. The long persistence of the system of home industry has its basis in the slightness of the fixed capital which it requires. See Weber, op. cit., p. 160.
17. Marx, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 308.
18. “In the nineteenth century the increase in the Jewish population in the cities of Poland was greater than that of the non-Jewish population. Towards the end of the last century in the period when large-scale industry was created and when great masses of non-Jewish workers migrated to the cities, the rhythm of Jewish population increase slowed down and in places the movement came to a complete halt.” Congrès Juif Mondial, Départment Économique, La Situation Économique des Juifs dans le Monde (Paris 1938), pp. 215–16.
19. A similar phenomenon can also be seen in the rural sphere. “In those districts where agricultural capitalism is developed most, this process of introducing wage labour, simultaneously with the introduction of machinery, cuts across another process, namely the wage workers are squeezed out by the machine.” Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in Selected Works vol. 1, p. 275.
20. Ansiaux, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 137.
21. Lestschinsky, op. cit., p. 60.
22. Émile Vandervelde, L’Exode Rural et le Retour aux Champs (Paris 1903), p. 70.
23. A. Menes, Craft Industry among the Jews in Biblical and Talmudic Times, Writings on Economics and Statistics (Yiddish), J. Lestschinsky, editor (Berlin 1928), vol. 1, p. 65.
24. The trade of weaver, like that of blacksmith, demanded a special professional formation and early became separated from rhe household economy. The weaver in the feudal era is a traveler who moves from one place to another, from one village to another, in pursuing his trade.
25. Ansiaux, op. cit.
26. All the Jews did not live in small towns, far from it, but their social role in the large cities or in the village was the same as in the small town. The latter, however, by its specific aspect, best characterized this social role. According to a governmental census in 1818, in the Ukraine and Byelorussia:
86.5 percent of the Jews were traders;
11.6 percent of the Jews were artisans;
1.9 percent of the Jews were farmers.
In Galicia, in 1820, 81 percent of the traders were Jews.
27. Certain crafts, close to trade, were also often exercised by Jews. Such was the goldsmith’s craft.
28. Pirenne, Belgian Democracy, op. cit., p. 143.
Contents | Jews and Marxism Subject Page
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<h2>Abram Leon</h2>
<h1>The Jewish Question</h1>
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<h3>SIX<br>
Contradictory trends in the Jewish problem during the period of the rise of capitalism</h3>
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</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The French Revolution put the finishing touches to the course of the economic and social evolution of Judaism in Western Europe. The development of industrial capitalism will speed up the penetration of the Jews into the ranks of the bourgeoisie and their cultural assimilation. The triumphant march of the Napoleonic armies was the signal for Jewish emancipation everywhere. Napoleonic policy reflected the will of bourgeois society to assimilate the Jews completely. But in the regions still ruled by the feudal system, important difficulties surged across the road to emancipation. Thus, contrary to the Jews of Bordeaux, completely absorbed into the bourgeois class, the Alsatian Jews were little differentiated from their ancestors of the Middle Ages. The peasant riots against Jewish usury compelled Napoleon to promulgate exceptional laws against Alsatian Judaism. Bourgeois juridical norms proved inapplicable to a feudal state of society. The same was true of Poland where formal legality for all citizens before the law introduced by Napoleon was not applicable to Jews “for a period of ten years”—as the face-saving formula put it. It is necessary to add that the great mass of Polish Jews, led by fanatical rabbis, was resolutely opposed to emancipation. Except for a small layer of wealthy bourgeois, the Polish Jews in no way felt the need for civil equality.</p>
<p>But in general, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Western Judaism enters on the road of complete assimilation. By the end of the eighteenth century, one half of the Jews of Berlin had become converted to Christianity in a period of thirty years. Those who remained faithful to the Jewish religion vigorously denied that they formed a distinct nation. “Without a land, without a state, without a language, there can be no nation, and that is why Judaism long ago ceased to constitute a nation,” said Riesser, one of the representatives of the German Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> “We are Germans, and Germans only, in whatever concerns nationality,” a Jewish professor of Berlin wrote somewhat later, in 1879.</p>
<p>Contrary to Western Europe, where their assimilation was favored by capitalism, in Eastern Europe capitalism uprooted the Jews from their secular economic positions. Thus, by provoking a flow of Jews towards the West with its left hand, it was destroying the accomplishments of its right hand. Waves of Eastern Jews continuously flowed towards the Western countries and instilled new life into the moribund body of Judaism. <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a></p>
<p class="quoteb">“Our great popular masses of the East, who are still rooted in Jewish tradition, or at least live in its atmosphere, form a barrier to the disappearance of Western Judaism .... <em>Western Judaism no longer exists save as a reflection of Eastern Judaism.</em>” <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p class="fst">In order to understand the importance of the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, it is sufficient to recall that in Vienna, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were only several hundred Jews, and that in the twentieth century, their number reached 176,000.</p>
<p>The massive emigration of Jews to Western Europe and mainly to America went hand in hand with a complete transformation of the territorial structure of Judaism. We know that the advance of capitalism was accompanied by an enormous extension of urban developments. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, the great centers of commercial and industrial life became a powerful attractive pole for the Jews.</p>
<p>The concentration of the Jewish masses in great cities was as obvious in the countries of immigration as in the regions from which the Jews originated. The Jews en masse forsook the little towns which had for centuries been the centers of their economic life and flowed either into the commercial and industrial cities of Poland and Russia, or towards the great cities of the Western world—Vienna, London, Berlin, Paris, and New York.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Far into the nineteenth century the greater part of world Jewry inhabited Eastern Europe, where in the absence of good means of communication small towns continued to offer opportunities to traders [and] during that period the Jews lived predominantly in small towns ... According to a statistical survey of the Polish provinces of Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia, made in the second half of the eighteenth century, there were in every village, on the average, seven Jewish inhabitants, <em>i.e.</em>, one Jewish family. But there were innumerable villages and very few towns; in East Galicia, therefore, 27.0 percent of the Jewish population lived in villages, and in West Galicia, even 43.1 percent ... Similar conditions prevailed in a few German states, for instance, in Hesse and Baden.” <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a></p>
<p class="fst">This condition underwent a decisive change in the twentieth century. Substantial Jewish masses became concentrated in the urban centers of the world.</p>
<p>In Russia, between 1847 and 1926, the Jewish population in communities numbering more than ten thousand multiplied eightfold. In 1847, there were only three Jewish communities comprising more than ten thousand people in the entire Russian empire. There were twenty-eight of these in 1897 and thirty-eight in 1926 (in the old territory of Holy Russia).</p>
<p>The percentage of Russian Jews living in large communities was:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="c">1847</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c"> 5.0%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="c">1897</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">28.2%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="c">1926</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">50.2%</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Here are the corresponding figures for Germany:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="c">1850</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c"> 6.0%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="c">1880</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">32.0%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="c">1900</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">61.3%</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">More than three-quarters of American Jews are presently living in communities of more than 10,000 persons. The tremendous Jewish agglomerations of New York (2,000,000), Warsaw (300,000 to 500,000), Paris, London, etc., bear witness to the fact that the Jews have become the “greatest urban people in the world.” The concentration of the Jewish masses in the great cities undoubtedly constitutes one of the most important phenomena of Jewish life in the modern capitalist epoch.</p>
<p>We have already examined the difference between Jewish emigration up to 1880 and the exodus after that date. Up to 1880, the states inhabited by the Jews still offered vast possibilities for penetration into capitalist economy; migration was primarily internal. After this date, events are precipitous: feudal economy is smashed to bits and with it goes the ruin of the artisan branches of capitalism in which the Jews are very widely represented. The Jews begin to forsake their countries of origin in great masses.</p>
<p>“Between 1800 and 1880 the number of Jews in the United States, the main destination of Jewish emigrants, rose from a few thousands to 230,000—which points to an average yearly immigration of about 2,000; between 1881 and 1899, the yearly average reached 30,000 and between 1900 and 1914, 100,000. Adding the emigration to other overseas countries (Canada, the Argentine, South Africa, Palestine, etc.) and to Central and Western Europe, the total Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe during the years 1800 to 1880 must be put at about 250,000, <em>i.e.</em> a yearly average of about 3,000; for 1881–99, at 1,000,000 and a yearly average of about 50,000; and for 1900–1914 at 2,000,000, and an average of 135,000. Percentually these figures place the East European Jews first among emigrant nations; about the middle of the period 1881–1914, their number in Russia, Galicia, and Romania amounted to about 6.5 million, and measured by that figure, the emigrants formed about 46 percent. The corresponding Italian rate, which is otherwise the highest in Europe, was only 15 percent after the re-emigrants have been deducted—these were numerous among the Italians, but very few among the Jews.” <a href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a></p>
<p>This great emigration was favored by the high birthrate of the Jews. Their number in the world rose as follows:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="c">1825</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">3,281,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">1900</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">10,602,500</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="c">1850</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">4,764,500</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">1925</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">14,800,500</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="c">1880</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="c">7,663,000</p>
</td>
<td colspan="4">
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Between 1825 and 1925, the number of Jews multiplied five times, a rate of increase one and a half times larger than that of the population of Europe.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The number of Jews must certainly exceed 18 million at the present time. It is important to note that despite the high emigration figures, not only has the number of Jews in Eastern Europe not decreased but it has even greatly increased.” “Judaism in Eastern Europe sent abroad almost four million persons in the course of the last thirty-five years and yet not only has the number of Jews in Eastern Europe not diminished during this period but it has greatly increased; it has gone from less than six to eight millions.” <a href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Emigration contributed to the social differentiation of Judaism, a process which had made rapid progress in the course of the nineteenth century.</p>
<p>At least 90 percent of the Jews were agents and merchants at the beginning of the capitalist era. In the twentieth century we can consider that in America we have almost two million Jewish proletarians, who are almost 40 percent of all the economically active Jews. <a href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a></p>
<p>Here is the professional division for all Jews in 1932:</p>
<table align="center" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">TRADE (INCLUDING TRANSPORTATION,<br>AMUSEMENT, BANKING)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 6,100,000</p>
</td>
<td rowspan="7">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">(38.6%)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="sm1">INDUSTRY (INCLUDING<br>MINING AND ARTISANRY)</p>
</td>
<td><p class="smc"> 5,750,000</p>
</td>
<td><p class="smc">(36.4%)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="sm1">LIBERAL PROFESSIONS AND ADMINISTRATION</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 1,000,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> (6.3%)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">AGRICULTURE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 625,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> (4.0%)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">PART-TIME WORKERS AND DOMESTICS</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 325,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> (2.0%)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="sm1">NO TRADE (LIVING FROM INCOMES,<br>PENSIONS, OR CHARITY)</p>
</td>
<td><p class="smc"> 2,000,000</p>
</td>
<td><p class="smc">(12.7%)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">TOTAL</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">15,800,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The number of Jewish workers, relatively low in the backward countries like Poland where it reaches about 25 percent of all persons economically active, reaches 46 percent in America. The professional structure of the Jewish working class still differs greatly from that of the proletariat of other peoples. Thus white collar workers form 30 to 36 percent of all Jewish wage earners, which is a proportion three to four times as great as among other nations. Agricultural workers, practically completely missing among the Jews, constitute from 15 to 25 percent of non-Jewish workers. Sixty to 70 percent of the Jews employed in industry are in reality worker-artisans (in Eastern Europe 80 percent of the proletarians work in shops and not in factories) whereas among the workers of other nationalities, 75 to 80 percent are factory workers. Finally, the Jewish workers are employed primarily in branches of consumer goods; non-Jewish workers in the same branches form only a small percentage of the proletariat as a whole.</p>
<p>Comparative statistics of the professional division of Jewish and “Aryan” workers will permit of an easier grasp of this phenomenon.</p>
<table align="center" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">IN SEVERAL EUROPEAN COUNTRIES</p>
</td>
<td rowspan="10">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">JEWS</p>
</td>
<td rowspan="10">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">NON-JEWS</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Clothing</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">43.7</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Food</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">11.0</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Leather</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.5</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 1.7</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Metallurgy</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.6</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">19.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Lumber</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 7.9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 6.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Textiles</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 6.8</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.0</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Building</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 4.2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">15.2</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Printing and paper</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.2</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Others</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.8</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">22.1</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<table align="center" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">IN POLAND (1931) <a href="#n8" name="f8">[8]</a></p>
</td>
<td rowspan="9">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">JEWISH<br>WORKERS</p>
</td>
<td rowspan="9">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">NON-JEWISH<br>WORKERS</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="sm1">Artisanry</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">58.7</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">33.2</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Business and transportation</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">18.7</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Homework</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9.2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 1.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Small industry</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9.6</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">Medium and large industry</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.8</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">23.0</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Mines</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 0.4</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.4</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Electricity, water, railroads</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 0.3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Foundries</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 2.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">These statistics clearly show that the Jews are employed primarily in artisanry whereas non-Jewish workers, on the contrary are concentrated mainly in heavy industry. Jews are relatively five times more numerous than non-Jewish workers in the clothing industry but in metallurgy, the textile industry, and building, non-Jewish workers are two or three times more numerous than Jewish workers.</p>
<p>However, while the professional structure of the Jewish working class still differs greatly from that of the non-Jewish, poverty is driving them more and more to the penetration, despite all barriers, into professions which have been inaccessible to them up to now.</p>
<p>Some twenty years ago, when a great industrialist of Lodz was asked about the ban against Jewish workers in his factories, he replied: “I do not want to have two thousand partners in my business.” But prior to this war [World War II], 15 percent of Jewish workers were operating machines.</p>
<p>Judaism has therefore undergone a very important transformation in the capitalist epoch. The people-class has become differentiated socially. But this process, while of considerable scope, is accompanied by a multitude of contradictory tendencies, which have not as yet allowed the crystallization of a stable form for Judaism in our period. It is far easier to say what Judaism has been than to define what it is.</p>
<p>In effect, the evolution of the Jewish question resulting from capitalist development has been thrust onto diametrically opposite paths. On the one hand, capitalism favored the economic assimilation of Judaism and consequently its cultural assimilation; on the other hand, by uprooting the Jewish masses, concentrating them in cities, provoking the rise of anti-Semitism, it stimulated the development of Jewish nationalism. The “renaissance of the Jewish nation,” the formation of a modern Jewish culture, elaboration of the Yiddish language, Zionism, all these accompany the processes of emigration and of the concentration of Jewish masses in the cities and go hand in hand with the development of modern anti-Semitism. In all parts of the world, along all the roads of exile, the Jewish masses, concentrated in special quarters, created their own special cultural centers, their newspapers, their Yiddish schools. Naturally it was in the countries of greatest Jewish concentration, in Russia, Poland, and the United States, that the national movement took on its greatest scope.</p>
<p>But the development of history is dialectical. At the same time that the bases for a new Jewish nationality were being elaborated, all the conditions were likewise being created for its disappearance. Whereas the first Jewish generations in the countries of immigration still remained firmly attached to Judaism, the new generations rapidly lost their special customs and language.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Among the East European immigrants to Western Europe, America, and other non-European countries, Yiddish is still retained, at any rate in the first generation, though a large number of English words are introduced, so that it is growing into a dialect different from the Polish or Lithuanian Yiddish. The second generation speak both Yiddish and the language of the country, while the third no longer know Yiddish ...” <a href="#n9" name="f9">[9]</a> “The Yiddish press in the United States developed strongly during the last fifty years because of the coming in of more than two million East European Jews who knew no English. ... But of recent years, a marked decline has set in of the Yiddish press, immigration having stopped, while the younger generation is becoming Americanized.” <a href="#n10" name="f10">[10]</a></p>
<p class="fst">In 1920, according to official statistics, Yiddish was the mother tongue of 32.1 percent of American Jews; in 1930, of 27.8 percent. In Hungary, Yiddish disappeared almost completely. In the census of 1920, 95.2 percent declared Hungarian as their mother tongue, 4.0 percent German, and 0.8 percent other languages.</p>
<p>Throughout the world: in 1900, 60.6 percent of the Jews spoke Yiddish; in 1930, 42.7 percent of the Jews spoke Yiddish.</p>
<p>During this same period that the use of Yiddish is declining, we witness a considerable growth in mixed marriages. The more highly developed the country, the more frequent are its mixed marriages.</p>
<p>In Bohemia, 44.7 percent of all marriages in which at least one party was Jewish were mixed marriages. As against this, the number of mixed marriages in sub-Carpathian Russia and Slovakia was insignificant. <a href="#n11" name="f11">[11]</a></p>
<table align="center" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
<tbody><tr><th colspan="3"><p class="smc">Ratio of mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews<br>to purely Jewish marriages <a href="#n12" name="f12">[12]</a></p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" rowspan="2">
<p class="sm1">BERLIN</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1901–4</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">35.4%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1905</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">44.4%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">HAMBURG</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1903–5</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">49.5%</p></td></tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">TRIESTE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1900–1903</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">61.5%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td rowspan="3" valign="top">
<p class="sm1">COPENHAGEN</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1880–89</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">55.8%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1890–99</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">68.7%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1900–1905</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">82.9%</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">An increase in conversions is also noted. Thus in Vienna, the average of Jewish conversions went from 0.4 percent in 1870 to 4.4 percent in 1916–20. However, the general weakening of religion removes most of the importance from this index.</p>
<p>We thus see how precarious are the bases for the “national renaissance” of Judaism. emigration, at first a powerful obstacle to assimilation and a “nationalization” factor of the Jews, rapidly changes into an instrument of fusion of the Jews with other peoples. The concentration of Jewish masses in the great cities, which thus became a sort of “territorial base” for the Jewish nationality, cannot long impede the process of assimilation. The atmosphere of the great urban centers constitutes a melting pot in which all national differences are rapidly wiped out.</p>
<p>While capitalism first created conditions for a certain Jewish “national renaissance,” by uprooting millions of Jews, by tearing them from their traditional living conditions and concentrating them in large cities, it soon contributes to accelerating the process of assimilation. The development of Yiddish, for example, is followed by its rapid decline. Capitalist development, although at times in rather unexpected ways, ends with the fusion of the Jews among other peoples. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the signs of capitalist degeneration become manifest. The Jewish question, which seems to be developing normally in the nineteenth century rebounds with unprecedented sharpness as a result of the decline of capitalism. The solution of the Jewish question appears to be farther off than ever.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="information"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> S.M. Dubnow, <strong>Die Neueste Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes</strong> (Berlin, 1920–24), vol. 2, p. 42.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> “The flow of Eastern Jews into Western Europe stopped and probably saved the Western Jews from the complete disappearance which was inevitable.” Lestschinsky, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 9.</p>
<p class="information">“Without immigration from Eastern Europe, the small Jewish communites of England, France and Belgium would probably have lost entirely their Jewish character. Also German Jewry ...” Ruppin, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 63</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> Jacob Klatzkin, <strong>Probleme des Modernen Judentum</strong> (Berlin 1918), p. 46.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> Ruppin, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, pp. 31–33.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 45.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> <strong>Yiddishe Economic</strong> (Wilno, January–February 1938), p. 11.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> The percentage of employees and workers was:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">ENGLAND</p>
</td>
<td rowspan="4">
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">77.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">(1923)</p>
</td>
<td rowspan="4">
<p> </p>
</td>
<td rowspan="4">
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">FRANCE</p>
</td>
<td rowspan="4">
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">48.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">(1906)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">U.S.A.</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">75.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">(1920)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">POLAND</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">24.8%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">(1921)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="sm1">BELGIUM</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">73.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">(1910)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">RUSSIA</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">15.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">(1925)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p class="sm1">GERMANY</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">62.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">(1907)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Jews</p>
</td>
<td><p class="smc">35.8%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="information"><a href="#f8" name="n8">8.</a> <strong>Yiddishe Economic</strong> (July–August 1938), p. 317.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f9" name="n9">9.</a> Ruppin, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, pp. 289–90.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f10" name="n10">10.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 351.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f11" name="n11">11.</a> <strong>Yiddishe Economic</strong> (April–June, 1939), p. 176.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f12" name="n12">12.</a> Based on Ruppin, <strong>op. cit.</strong>. Leon’s operation on Ruppin’s statistics here appears to be incorrect. We therefore append an abstract of Ruppin’s table (pp. 319–20). Despite the differences, these confirm Leon’s contention. – <em>Tr.</em></p>
<table align="center" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
<tbody><tr>
<th>
<p class="sm1">City</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">Year or Period</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="9">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">To every 100 Jews entering<br>marriage, mixed marriages<br>were contracted by</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2" valign="top">
<p class="sm1">BERLIN</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1901–4</p>
</td>
<td><p class="smc">15.06</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1929</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">29.21</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2" valign="top">
<p class="sm1">HAMBURG</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1906–10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">24.30</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1928</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.83</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2" valign="top">
<p class="sm1">TRIESTE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1900–1903</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">17.90</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1927</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">56.10</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2" valign="top">
<p class="sm1">COPENHAGEN</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1880–89</p>
</td>
<td><p class="smc">21.84</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1900–1905</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">31.76</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p> </p>
<hr>
<p class="footer"><a href="index.htm">Contents</a> | <a href="../index.htm">Jews and Marxism Subject Page</a></p>
<p class="updat">Last updated: 19 August 2020</p>
</body> |
Abram Leon
The Jewish Question
SIX
Contradictory trends in the Jewish problem during the period of the rise of capitalism
The French Revolution put the finishing touches to the course of the economic and social evolution of Judaism in Western Europe. The development of industrial capitalism will speed up the penetration of the Jews into the ranks of the bourgeoisie and their cultural assimilation. The triumphant march of the Napoleonic armies was the signal for Jewish emancipation everywhere. Napoleonic policy reflected the will of bourgeois society to assimilate the Jews completely. But in the regions still ruled by the feudal system, important difficulties surged across the road to emancipation. Thus, contrary to the Jews of Bordeaux, completely absorbed into the bourgeois class, the Alsatian Jews were little differentiated from their ancestors of the Middle Ages. The peasant riots against Jewish usury compelled Napoleon to promulgate exceptional laws against Alsatian Judaism. Bourgeois juridical norms proved inapplicable to a feudal state of society. The same was true of Poland where formal legality for all citizens before the law introduced by Napoleon was not applicable to Jews “for a period of ten years”—as the face-saving formula put it. It is necessary to add that the great mass of Polish Jews, led by fanatical rabbis, was resolutely opposed to emancipation. Except for a small layer of wealthy bourgeois, the Polish Jews in no way felt the need for civil equality.
But in general, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Western Judaism enters on the road of complete assimilation. By the end of the eighteenth century, one half of the Jews of Berlin had become converted to Christianity in a period of thirty years. Those who remained faithful to the Jewish religion vigorously denied that they formed a distinct nation. “Without a land, without a state, without a language, there can be no nation, and that is why Judaism long ago ceased to constitute a nation,” said Riesser, one of the representatives of the German Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century. [1] “We are Germans, and Germans only, in whatever concerns nationality,” a Jewish professor of Berlin wrote somewhat later, in 1879.
Contrary to Western Europe, where their assimilation was favored by capitalism, in Eastern Europe capitalism uprooted the Jews from their secular economic positions. Thus, by provoking a flow of Jews towards the West with its left hand, it was destroying the accomplishments of its right hand. Waves of Eastern Jews continuously flowed towards the Western countries and instilled new life into the moribund body of Judaism. [2]
“Our great popular masses of the East, who are still rooted in Jewish tradition, or at least live in its atmosphere, form a barrier to the disappearance of Western Judaism .... Western Judaism no longer exists save as a reflection of Eastern Judaism.” [3]
In order to understand the importance of the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, it is sufficient to recall that in Vienna, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were only several hundred Jews, and that in the twentieth century, their number reached 176,000.
The massive emigration of Jews to Western Europe and mainly to America went hand in hand with a complete transformation of the territorial structure of Judaism. We know that the advance of capitalism was accompanied by an enormous extension of urban developments. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, the great centers of commercial and industrial life became a powerful attractive pole for the Jews.
The concentration of the Jewish masses in great cities was as obvious in the countries of immigration as in the regions from which the Jews originated. The Jews en masse forsook the little towns which had for centuries been the centers of their economic life and flowed either into the commercial and industrial cities of Poland and Russia, or towards the great cities of the Western world—Vienna, London, Berlin, Paris, and New York.
“Far into the nineteenth century the greater part of world Jewry inhabited Eastern Europe, where in the absence of good means of communication small towns continued to offer opportunities to traders [and] during that period the Jews lived predominantly in small towns ... According to a statistical survey of the Polish provinces of Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia, made in the second half of the eighteenth century, there were in every village, on the average, seven Jewish inhabitants, i.e., one Jewish family. But there were innumerable villages and very few towns; in East Galicia, therefore, 27.0 percent of the Jewish population lived in villages, and in West Galicia, even 43.1 percent ... Similar conditions prevailed in a few German states, for instance, in Hesse and Baden.” [4]
This condition underwent a decisive change in the twentieth century. Substantial Jewish masses became concentrated in the urban centers of the world.
In Russia, between 1847 and 1926, the Jewish population in communities numbering more than ten thousand multiplied eightfold. In 1847, there were only three Jewish communities comprising more than ten thousand people in the entire Russian empire. There were twenty-eight of these in 1897 and thirty-eight in 1926 (in the old territory of Holy Russia).
The percentage of Russian Jews living in large communities was:
1847
5.0%
1897
28.2%
1926
50.2%
Here are the corresponding figures for Germany:
1850
6.0%
1880
32.0%
1900
61.3%
More than three-quarters of American Jews are presently living in communities of more than 10,000 persons. The tremendous Jewish agglomerations of New York (2,000,000), Warsaw (300,000 to 500,000), Paris, London, etc., bear witness to the fact that the Jews have become the “greatest urban people in the world.” The concentration of the Jewish masses in the great cities undoubtedly constitutes one of the most important phenomena of Jewish life in the modern capitalist epoch.
We have already examined the difference between Jewish emigration up to 1880 and the exodus after that date. Up to 1880, the states inhabited by the Jews still offered vast possibilities for penetration into capitalist economy; migration was primarily internal. After this date, events are precipitous: feudal economy is smashed to bits and with it goes the ruin of the artisan branches of capitalism in which the Jews are very widely represented. The Jews begin to forsake their countries of origin in great masses.
“Between 1800 and 1880 the number of Jews in the United States, the main destination of Jewish emigrants, rose from a few thousands to 230,000—which points to an average yearly immigration of about 2,000; between 1881 and 1899, the yearly average reached 30,000 and between 1900 and 1914, 100,000. Adding the emigration to other overseas countries (Canada, the Argentine, South Africa, Palestine, etc.) and to Central and Western Europe, the total Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe during the years 1800 to 1880 must be put at about 250,000, i.e. a yearly average of about 3,000; for 1881–99, at 1,000,000 and a yearly average of about 50,000; and for 1900–1914 at 2,000,000, and an average of 135,000. Percentually these figures place the East European Jews first among emigrant nations; about the middle of the period 1881–1914, their number in Russia, Galicia, and Romania amounted to about 6.5 million, and measured by that figure, the emigrants formed about 46 percent. The corresponding Italian rate, which is otherwise the highest in Europe, was only 15 percent after the re-emigrants have been deducted—these were numerous among the Italians, but very few among the Jews.” [5]
This great emigration was favored by the high birthrate of the Jews. Their number in the world rose as follows:
1825
3,281,000
1900
10,602,500
1850
4,764,500
1925
14,800,500
1880
7,663,000
Between 1825 and 1925, the number of Jews multiplied five times, a rate of increase one and a half times larger than that of the population of Europe.
“The number of Jews must certainly exceed 18 million at the present time. It is important to note that despite the high emigration figures, not only has the number of Jews in Eastern Europe not decreased but it has even greatly increased.” “Judaism in Eastern Europe sent abroad almost four million persons in the course of the last thirty-five years and yet not only has the number of Jews in Eastern Europe not diminished during this period but it has greatly increased; it has gone from less than six to eight millions.” [6]
Emigration contributed to the social differentiation of Judaism, a process which had made rapid progress in the course of the nineteenth century.
At least 90 percent of the Jews were agents and merchants at the beginning of the capitalist era. In the twentieth century we can consider that in America we have almost two million Jewish proletarians, who are almost 40 percent of all the economically active Jews. [7]
Here is the professional division for all Jews in 1932:
TRADE (INCLUDING TRANSPORTATION,AMUSEMENT, BANKING)
6,100,000
(38.6%)
INDUSTRY (INCLUDINGMINING AND ARTISANRY)
5,750,000
(36.4%)
LIBERAL PROFESSIONS AND ADMINISTRATION
1,000,000
(6.3%)
AGRICULTURE
625,000
(4.0%)
PART-TIME WORKERS AND DOMESTICS
325,000
(2.0%)
NO TRADE (LIVING FROM INCOMES,PENSIONS, OR CHARITY)
2,000,000
(12.7%)
TOTAL
15,800,000
The number of Jewish workers, relatively low in the backward countries like Poland where it reaches about 25 percent of all persons economically active, reaches 46 percent in America. The professional structure of the Jewish working class still differs greatly from that of the proletariat of other peoples. Thus white collar workers form 30 to 36 percent of all Jewish wage earners, which is a proportion three to four times as great as among other nations. Agricultural workers, practically completely missing among the Jews, constitute from 15 to 25 percent of non-Jewish workers. Sixty to 70 percent of the Jews employed in industry are in reality worker-artisans (in Eastern Europe 80 percent of the proletarians work in shops and not in factories) whereas among the workers of other nationalities, 75 to 80 percent are factory workers. Finally, the Jewish workers are employed primarily in branches of consumer goods; non-Jewish workers in the same branches form only a small percentage of the proletariat as a whole.
Comparative statistics of the professional division of Jewish and “Aryan” workers will permit of an easier grasp of this phenomenon.
IN SEVERAL EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
JEWS
NON-JEWS
Clothing
43.7
8.5
Food
11.0
9.5
Leather
10.5
1.7
Metallurgy
8.6
19.9
Lumber
7.9
6.9
Textiles
6.8
12.0
Building
4.2
15.2
Printing and paper
3.2
3.2
Others
3.8
22.1
IN POLAND (1931) [8]
JEWISHWORKERS
NON-JEWISHWORKERS
Artisanry
58.7
33.2
Business and transportation
18.7
12.5
Homework
9.2
1.9
Small industry
8.9
9.6
Medium and large industry
3.8
23.0
Mines
0.4
8.4
Electricity, water, railroads
0.3
8.9
Foundries
2.5
These statistics clearly show that the Jews are employed primarily in artisanry whereas non-Jewish workers, on the contrary are concentrated mainly in heavy industry. Jews are relatively five times more numerous than non-Jewish workers in the clothing industry but in metallurgy, the textile industry, and building, non-Jewish workers are two or three times more numerous than Jewish workers.
However, while the professional structure of the Jewish working class still differs greatly from that of the non-Jewish, poverty is driving them more and more to the penetration, despite all barriers, into professions which have been inaccessible to them up to now.
Some twenty years ago, when a great industrialist of Lodz was asked about the ban against Jewish workers in his factories, he replied: “I do not want to have two thousand partners in my business.” But prior to this war [World War II], 15 percent of Jewish workers were operating machines.
Judaism has therefore undergone a very important transformation in the capitalist epoch. The people-class has become differentiated socially. But this process, while of considerable scope, is accompanied by a multitude of contradictory tendencies, which have not as yet allowed the crystallization of a stable form for Judaism in our period. It is far easier to say what Judaism has been than to define what it is.
In effect, the evolution of the Jewish question resulting from capitalist development has been thrust onto diametrically opposite paths. On the one hand, capitalism favored the economic assimilation of Judaism and consequently its cultural assimilation; on the other hand, by uprooting the Jewish masses, concentrating them in cities, provoking the rise of anti-Semitism, it stimulated the development of Jewish nationalism. The “renaissance of the Jewish nation,” the formation of a modern Jewish culture, elaboration of the Yiddish language, Zionism, all these accompany the processes of emigration and of the concentration of Jewish masses in the cities and go hand in hand with the development of modern anti-Semitism. In all parts of the world, along all the roads of exile, the Jewish masses, concentrated in special quarters, created their own special cultural centers, their newspapers, their Yiddish schools. Naturally it was in the countries of greatest Jewish concentration, in Russia, Poland, and the United States, that the national movement took on its greatest scope.
But the development of history is dialectical. At the same time that the bases for a new Jewish nationality were being elaborated, all the conditions were likewise being created for its disappearance. Whereas the first Jewish generations in the countries of immigration still remained firmly attached to Judaism, the new generations rapidly lost their special customs and language.
“Among the East European immigrants to Western Europe, America, and other non-European countries, Yiddish is still retained, at any rate in the first generation, though a large number of English words are introduced, so that it is growing into a dialect different from the Polish or Lithuanian Yiddish. The second generation speak both Yiddish and the language of the country, while the third no longer know Yiddish ...” [9] “The Yiddish press in the United States developed strongly during the last fifty years because of the coming in of more than two million East European Jews who knew no English. ... But of recent years, a marked decline has set in of the Yiddish press, immigration having stopped, while the younger generation is becoming Americanized.” [10]
In 1920, according to official statistics, Yiddish was the mother tongue of 32.1 percent of American Jews; in 1930, of 27.8 percent. In Hungary, Yiddish disappeared almost completely. In the census of 1920, 95.2 percent declared Hungarian as their mother tongue, 4.0 percent German, and 0.8 percent other languages.
Throughout the world: in 1900, 60.6 percent of the Jews spoke Yiddish; in 1930, 42.7 percent of the Jews spoke Yiddish.
During this same period that the use of Yiddish is declining, we witness a considerable growth in mixed marriages. The more highly developed the country, the more frequent are its mixed marriages.
In Bohemia, 44.7 percent of all marriages in which at least one party was Jewish were mixed marriages. As against this, the number of mixed marriages in sub-Carpathian Russia and Slovakia was insignificant. [11]
Ratio of mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jewsto purely Jewish marriages [12]
BERLIN
1901–4
35.4%
1905
44.4%
HAMBURG
1903–5
49.5%
TRIESTE
1900–1903
61.5%
COPENHAGEN
1880–89
55.8%
1890–99
68.7%
1900–1905
82.9%
An increase in conversions is also noted. Thus in Vienna, the average of Jewish conversions went from 0.4 percent in 1870 to 4.4 percent in 1916–20. However, the general weakening of religion removes most of the importance from this index.
We thus see how precarious are the bases for the “national renaissance” of Judaism. emigration, at first a powerful obstacle to assimilation and a “nationalization” factor of the Jews, rapidly changes into an instrument of fusion of the Jews with other peoples. The concentration of Jewish masses in the great cities, which thus became a sort of “territorial base” for the Jewish nationality, cannot long impede the process of assimilation. The atmosphere of the great urban centers constitutes a melting pot in which all national differences are rapidly wiped out.
While capitalism first created conditions for a certain Jewish “national renaissance,” by uprooting millions of Jews, by tearing them from their traditional living conditions and concentrating them in large cities, it soon contributes to accelerating the process of assimilation. The development of Yiddish, for example, is followed by its rapid decline. Capitalist development, although at times in rather unexpected ways, ends with the fusion of the Jews among other peoples. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the signs of capitalist degeneration become manifest. The Jewish question, which seems to be developing normally in the nineteenth century rebounds with unprecedented sharpness as a result of the decline of capitalism. The solution of the Jewish question appears to be farther off than ever.
Notes
1. S.M. Dubnow, Die Neueste Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (Berlin, 1920–24), vol. 2, p. 42.
2. “The flow of Eastern Jews into Western Europe stopped and probably saved the Western Jews from the complete disappearance which was inevitable.” Lestschinsky, op. cit., p. 9.
“Without immigration from Eastern Europe, the small Jewish communites of England, France and Belgium would probably have lost entirely their Jewish character. Also German Jewry ...” Ruppin, op. cit., p. 63
3. Jacob Klatzkin, Probleme des Modernen Judentum (Berlin 1918), p. 46.
4. Ruppin, op. cit., pp. 31–33.
5. Ibid., p. 45.
6. Yiddishe Economic (Wilno, January–February 1938), p. 11.
7. The percentage of employees and workers was:
ENGLAND
77.0%
(1923)
FRANCE
48.0%
(1906)
U.S.A.
75.0%
(1920)
POLAND
24.8%
(1921)
BELGIUM
73.0%
(1910)
RUSSIA
15.0%
(1925)
GERMANY
62.0%
(1907)
Jews
35.8%
8. Yiddishe Economic (July–August 1938), p. 317.
9. Ruppin, op. cit., pp. 289–90.
10. Ibid., p. 351.
11. Yiddishe Economic (April–June, 1939), p. 176.
12. Based on Ruppin, op. cit.. Leon’s operation on Ruppin’s statistics here appears to be incorrect. We therefore append an abstract of Ruppin’s table (pp. 319–20). Despite the differences, these confirm Leon’s contention. – Tr.
City
Year or Period
To every 100 Jews enteringmarriage, mixed marriageswere contracted by
BERLIN
1901–4
15.06
1929
29.21
HAMBURG
1906–10
24.30
1928
3.83
TRIESTE
1900–1903
17.90
1927
56.10
COPENHAGEN
1880–89
21.84
1900–1905
31.76
Contents | Jews and Marxism Subject Page
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<h2>Abram Leon</h2>
<h1>The Jewish Question</h1>
<p> </p>
<hr>
<h3>THREE<br>
The period of the Jewish usurer</h3>
<p class="fst">Up to the eleventh century, the economic regime reigning in Western Europe is characterized by the absence of commodity production. The few cities which survived from the Roman era primarily fulfill administrative and military functions. All production is destined solely for local consumption and the seignorial domains, being sufficient to themselves, enter into contact with the wide world solely through Jewish merchants who brave its strange places. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> The commercial role played by Europeans could only be passive in character. But with time and with the continuous growth in the importation of Oriental goods, there is an incentive to produce directly for exchange. The development of trade thus stimulates native production. The production of use values progressively gives way to the production of exchange values.</p>
<p>Not all native products are desired by the Orient. The production of exchange values first develops in those places where a set of conditions exists for the manufacture or extraction of certain goods especially prized abroad: <em>monopoly products</em>. Such were the woolens of England, the cloths of Flanders, the salt of Venice, copper from Dinant, etc. In these favored places, rapidly develop those “specialized industries, the products of which were at once beyond their place of origin.” <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a></p>
<p>Trade advances from the passive to the active stage and Florentine fabrics leave to conquer the wide world. As they are much sought after, these products are at the same time the source of enormous profits. This rapid accumulation of wealth is the basis for an accelerated development of a native merchant class. Thus, “salt became a potent weapon in the hands of the Venetians for attaining wealth and for holding peoples in subjection. From the very beginning, these islanders had made a salt in their lagoons which was much sought after by all the peoples situated on the Adriatic and which brought Venice trading privileges, concessions, and advantageous treaties.” <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p>So long as Europe lived under a regime of natural economy, the initiative in commercial traffic belonged to merchants from the Orient, principally the Jews. Only some peddlers, some lowly suppliers to the chateaux of the nobles and the clergy, succeed in freeing themselves from the humble mass of serfs bound to the soil. But the development of native production makes possible the rapid formation of a powerful class of native merchants. Emerging from the artisans, they gain control over them by taking over the distribution of raw materials. <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a> Contrary to trade as conducted by the Jews, which is clearly separate from production, native trade is essentially based on industry.</p>
<p>Everywhere industrial development marches hand in hand with expansion of trade. “Venice had the advantage of being simultaneously one of the greatest commercial cities of the world and one of the most industrial. Its fabrics were of immense service to its traders in their relations with the Orient .... Venice and its neighboring cities were full of all kinds of fabrics.” <a href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a> “In Italy, as in Flanders, the maritime commerce, and the inland commerce which was its continuation, resulted in the activity of the seaports: Venice, Pisa, and Genoa in the South; Bruges in the North. Then, behind the seaports, the industrial cities developed: on the one hand, the Lombard communes and Florence; on the other, Ghent, Ypres and Lille, Douai, and further inland, Valenciennes, and Brussels.” <a href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a></p>
<p>The woolen industry became the basis of the greatness and prosperity of the medieval cities. Cloths and fabrics constituted the most important goods in the fairs of the Middle Ages. <a href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a> In that is to be seen the profound difference between medieval capitalism and modern capitalism: the latter is based on a tremendous revolution in the means of production; the former reposed solely on the development of the production of exchange values.</p>
<p>The evolution in exchange of medieval economy proved fatal to the position of the Jews in trade. The Jewish merchant importing spices into Europe and exporting slaves, is displaced by respectable Christian traders to whom urban industry supplies the principal products for their trading. This native commercial class collides violently with the Jews, occupants of an outmoded economic position, inherited from a previous period in historical evolution.</p>
<p>The growing contradiction between “Christian” and Jewish trade therefore leads to the opposition of two regimes: that of exchange economy as against natural economy. It was consequently the economic development of the West which destroyed the commercial function of the Jews, based on a backward state of production. <a href="#n8" name="f8">[8]</a></p>
<p>The commercial monopoly of the Jews declined in the degree that the peoples, whose exploitation had fed it, developed. “For a number of centuries the Jews remained the commercial guardians of the young nations, to the advantage of the latter and not without open recognition of this advantage. But every tutelage becomes burdensome when it continues longer than the dependence of the ward. Entire nations emancipate themselves from the tutelage of other nations, even as individuals used to, only by means of struggle.” <a href="#n9" name="f9">[9]</a></p>
<p>With the development of exchange economy in Europe, the growth of cities and of corporative industry; the Jews are progressively eliminated from the economic positions which they had occupied. <a href="#n10" name="f10">[10]</a> This eviction is accompanied by a ferocious struggle of the native commercial class against the Jews. The Crusades, which were also an expression of the will of the city merchants to carve a road to the Orient, furnished them with the occasion for violent persecutions and bloody massacres of the Jews. From this period on, the situation of the Jews in the cities of Western Europe is definitely compromised.</p>
<p>In the beginning, the economic transformation reaches only certain important urban centers. The seignorial domains are very little affected by this change and the feudal system continues to flourish there. Consequently, the career of Jewish wealth is still not ended. The seignorial domains still offer an important field of action to the Jews. But now Jewish capital, primarily commercial in the preceding period, becomes almost exclusively usurious. It is no longer the Jew who supplies the lord with Oriental goods but for a certain time it is still he who lends him money for his expenses. If during the preceding period “Jew” was synonymous with “merchant,” it now begins increasingly to be identified with “usurer.” <a href="#n11" name="f11">[11]</a></p>
<p>It is self-evident that to claim, as do most historians, that the Jews began to engage in lending only after their elimination from trade, is a vulgar error. Usurious capital is the brother of commercial capital. In the countries of Eastern Europe, where the Jews were not evicted from commerce, we encounter, as we shall see later, a considerable number of Jewish usurers. <a href="#n12" name="f12">[12]</a> In reality, the eviction of the Jews from commerce had as a consequence their entrenchment in one of the professions which they had already practiced previously.</p>
<p>The fact that Jews at different periods may have held landed property cannot serve as a serious argument in favor of the traditional thesis of Jewish historians. Far from constituting a proof of the multiplicity of the occupations of the Jews, Jewish property must be considered as the fruit of their usurious and commercial operations. <a href="#n13" name="f13">[13]</a></p>
<p>In the business books of the French Jew Heliot of Franche-Comté, who lived at the beginning of the fourteenth century, we find vineyards mentioned among his properties. But what clearly emerges from these books is that these vineyards did not constitute the basis of an agricultural profession for Heliot but were the product of his mercantile operations. When in 1360, the king of France had again invited the Jews into his territory, the representative of the Jews, a certain Manasé, raised the problem of royal protection for the vineyards and cattle which would pass into the hands of the Jews as unredeemed securities. In Spain, in the time of great theological disputes between Jews and Christians, the latter blamed the Jews for having become wealthy as a result of their “usurious” operations. “They have taken possession of fields and of cattle .... They own three-fourths of the fields and lands of Spain.” <a href="#n14" name="f14">[14]</a></p>
<p>The passage of property of the nobility into the hands of the Jews was a common phenomenon in this epoch. Such was the village of Strizov, in Bohemia, which had belonged to two nobles and was assigned in payment of debts to the Jews Fater and Merklin (1382). The village Zlamany Ujezd, in Moravia, was allotted to the Jew Axon de Hradic; the village Neverovo, in Lithuania, was assigned to the Jew Levon Salomic, etc.</p>
<p>So long as the landed property of the Jews constituted solely an object of speculation for them, it could only have an extremely precarious character because the feudal class very early succeeded in imposing a ban upon mortgaging real properties with the Jews.</p>
<p>It was altogether different wherever a genuine economic and social mutation took place: in those places where the Jews abandoned business in order to become real landowners. Sooner or later, they necessarily also changed their religion.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a Jew named Woltschko, having become the proprietor of several villages, the king of Poland exerted every effort to lead him to “acknowledge his blindness and to enter the holy Christian religion.” This fact is significant, for the kings of Poland carefully protected the Jewish religion. They would never have thought of converting Jewish merchants or bankers to Christianity. But a Jewish landowner in the Middle Ages could only be an anomaly.</p>
<p>This is equally true as regards the Christian usurer. This problem naturally has nothing in common with the banalities on racial peculiarities. Clearly it is foolish to claim, with Sombart, that usury constitutes a specific trait of the “Jewish race.” Usury, which as we have seen plays an important role in precapitalist societies, is almost as old as humanity and has been practiced by all races and nations. It is enough to recall the leading role played by usury in Greek and Roman societies. <a href="#n15" name="f15">[15]</a></p>
<p>But to pose the question in this way means to invert the conditions of the problem. It is not by the “innate” capacities or the ideology of a social group that we must explain its economic position. On the contrary, it is its economic position which explains its capacities and its ideology. Medieval society is not divided into lords and serf because each of these groups originally possessed specific qualifications for the economic role which it was to play. The ideology and capacities of each class formed gradually as a function of its economic position.</p>
<p>The same is true of the Jews. It is not their “innate” predisposition for commerce which explains their economic position but it is their economic position which explains their predisposition to commerce. The Jews moreover constitute a very heterogeneous racial conglomeration. In the course of their history, they have absorbed a multitude of non-Semitic ethnic elements. In England, the “monopoly of usury brought them such wealth that some Christians undoubtedly went over to Judaism in order to participate in the Jewish monopoly in lending.” <a href="#n16" name="f16">[16]</a></p>
<p>Judaism therefore consists rather of the result of a social selection and not of a “race having innate predispositions for commerce.” But the primacy of the economic and social factor does not exclude—far from it—the influence of the psychological factor.</p>
<p>As it is infantile to see the economic position of Judaism as the result of the “predispositions of the Jews,” just so it is puerile to consider it as the fruit of persecutions and of legal bans against exercising other professions than commerce or usury. “In numerous writings on the economic life of the Jews in the Middle Ages, it is stated that they were excluded, from the very beginning, from artisanry; from traffic in goods, and that they were prohibited from possessing land property. That is only a fable. In fact, in the twelfth century and in the thirteenth century, living in practically all of the great cities of Western Germany, they dwelt among the Christians and enjoyed the same civil rights as the latter ... At Cologne, during an entire period, the Jews even possessed the right to compel a Christian, who had a claim to make against a Jew, to appear before Jewish judges in order to have the matter adjudged according to Hebraic law .... It is just as false to assert that the Jews could not be admitted into the artisan guilds. True, several guilds did not admit what were termed ‘Jewish children’ as apprentices but this was not the case for all the guilds. The existence of Jewish goldsmiths and silversmiths, even in the period when the guild rules become far more severe, is sufficient proof of this. There were certainly few Jewish blacksmiths, masons, and carpenters among the artisans of the Middle Ages, but Jewish parents who gave their children into apprenticeship in these trades were very rare. Even the guilds which excluded the Jews did not do so out of religious animosity or racial hatred but because the trades of usury and peddling were reputedly ‘dishonest’ ... The guilds excluded the children of Jewish businesspeople engaged in usury or peddling, in the same way that they did not accept the sons of simple laborers, carters and boatsmen, barbers, and weavers of linen into their ranks.” <a href="#n17" name="f17">[17]</a></p>
<p>Feudal society was essentially a caste society. It desired that everyone “should remain in his place.” <a href="#n18" name="f18">[18]</a> It fought usury by Christians just as it made it impossible for the bourgeois to attain nobility; and just as it disdained the noble who lowered himself to the practice of a trade or to engaging in business.</p>
<p>In 1462 the doctor Han Winter was driven from the city of Nordlingen because he practiced usury through the intermediary of a Jew. Thirty years later, in the same city, a bourgeois named Kinkel was placed in the pillory and driven from the city for having practiced the “Jewish profession.” The synod of Bamberg, in 1491, threatened to drive every Christian practicing usury, either by himself or through the intermediary of Jews, out of the Christian community. In 1487, in Silesia, it was decreed that every Christian practicing usury would be placed in the hands of the royal tribunal and punished in exemplary fashion.</p>
<p>So long as the feudal structure remains solid, the attitude of Christian society toward loans at interest does not change. But the deep-seated economic mutations which we have examined previously transform the conditions of the problem. Industrial and commercial development elevate banking to an indispensable role in economy. The banker advancing funds to the merchant or the artisan becomes an essential element in economic development.</p>
<p>The treasury of the usurer, in the feudal era, fulfills the role of a necessary but absolutely <em>unproductive</em> reserve. “The most characteristic forms, in which usurers’ capital exists in time antedating capitalist production, are two ... The same forms repeat themselves on the basis of capitalist production, but as mere subordinate forms. They are then no longer the forms which determine the character of interest-bearing capital. These two forms are: First, usury by lending money to extravagant persons of the higher classes, particularly to landowners; <em>secondly</em>, usury by lending money to the small producer who is in possession of his own means of employment, which includes the artisan, but more particularly the peasant, since under precapitalist conditions, so far as they permit of independent individual producers, the peasant class must form the overwhelming majority.” <a href="#n19" name="f19">[19]</a></p>
<p>The usurer makes loans to the feudal lords and to the kings for their luxuries and their war expenditures. He lends to the peasants and the artisans in order to allow them to pay their taxes, rents, etc. ... The money loaned by the usurer does not create surplus value; it merely allows him to take possession of a portion of the surplus product which already exists.</p>
<p>The function of the banker is altogether different. He contributes directly to the production of surplus value. He is productive. The banker finances great commercial and industrial ventures. Whereas credit is essentially <em>consumer</em> credit in the feudal era, it becomes credit of <em>production</em> and of <em>circulation</em> in the era of commercial and industrial development.</p>
<p>There is consequently a fundamental difference between the usurer and the banker. The first is the credit organ in the feudal era, whereas the second is the credit organ in the era of exchange economy. Ignoring this fundamental distinction leads almost all historians into error. They see no difference between the banker of antiquity; the Jewish banker of England of the eleventh century and Rothschild or even Fugger. “Newman ... says that the banker is respected while the usurer is hated and despised, because the banker lends to the rich, whereas the usurer lends to the poor (J.W. Newman, <strong>Lectures on Political Economy</strong>, London, 1851, p. 44). He overlooks the fact that <em>the difference of two modes of production and the corresponding social orders intervenes here</em>, and the latter is not exhausted by the distinction between rich and poor.” <a href="#n20" name="f20">[20]</a></p>
<p>Of course this distinction becomes really obvious in the capitalist epoch properly so-called. But “the money-lender stands in the same relation to him [the merchant] in the former stages of society as he does the modern capitalist. This specific relation was felt also by the Catholic universities. ‘The universities of Alcala, of Salamanca, of Ingolstadt, of Freiburg in the Breisgau, Mayence, Cologne, Treves one after another recognized the legality of interest on money for <em>commercial loans</em>.’ ” <a href="#n21" name="f21">[21]</a></p>
<p>In the measure that economic development continues, the bank conquers ever more solid positions while the Jewish usurer increasingly loses ground. He is no longer to be found in the prosperous commercial cities of Flanders because the Jews, “unlike the Lombards, <em>only practiced placement at interest and did not play the role of intermediaries in commercial operations</em>.” <a href="#n22" name="f22">[22]</a></p>
<p>After their elimination from commerce, a process which is accomplished in Western Europe in the thirteenth century the Jews continue to develop the business of usury in regions not yet reached by exchange economy.</p>
<p>In England, in the period of King Henry II (second half of the twelfth century) they are already involved up to the hilt in usury. They are generally very rich and their clientele is composed of the great landed proprietors. The most famous of these Jewish bankers was a certain Aaron of Lincoln, very active at the end of the twelfth century. King Henry II alone owed him one hundred thousand pounds, a sum equal to the annual budget of the Kingdom of England at this time.</p>
<p>Thanks to the extremely high rate of interest – it fluctuated between 43 and 86 percent – a large number of estates of the nobility had passed into the hands of the Jewish usurers. But they had powerful associates and – exacting ones. If the kings of England supported the business of the Jews, it was because it constituted a very important source of revenue for them. All loans made with the Jews were registered in the <em>Scaccarium Judaeorum</em> [Exchequer of the Jews] and were assessed a tax of 10 percent in behalf of the royal treasury. But this legal contribution was far from sufficient for the kings. Any pretext was good enough for despoiling the Jews and the income from their usury continually contributed to enlarging the royal treasury. It was particularly bad for the Jews to have the kings as important debtors. The rich banker Aaron of Lincoln found this out in 1187 when the King of England confiscated his property.</p>
<p>The dispossessed nobility would avenge itself by organizing massacres of the Jews. In 1189, the Jews were massacred in London, Lincoln, and Stafford. A year later, the nobility, led by a certain Malebys, destroyed the <em>Scaccarium Judaeorum</em> of York. The notes were solemnly burned. The Jews, besieged in the chateau, committed suicide. But the king continued to protect the Jews even after their death .... He demanded payment to himself of the sums due the Jews, by virtue of the fact that the Jews were the “slaves of his treasury.” Special employees were ordered by him to make an exact list of all the debts.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the thirteenth century the king granted a “Magna Carta” to the nobility which brought certain improvements in the sphere of loans. Nevertheless, in 1262 and in 1264, new disturbances broke out against the Jews. In 1290, the entire Jewish population of England, that is to say almost three thousand people, was expelled and its property confiscated.</p>
<p>The economic situation of the Jews of France, far more numerous than the English (one hundred thousand), was not perceptibly different from that of the English Jews. “With the accession of Philip Augustus (1180) and in the first years of his reign, the Hebrews were rich and numerous in France. Learned rabbis had been attracted to the synagogue of Paris, which, on the solemn entry of Pope Innocent at St. Denis in 1135 had already figured among the corporations of the capital at the time of the passage of the Pontiff. According to the historian Rigord, they had acquired almost half of Paris. “... Their credits were spread throughout villages, cities, and suburbs, everywhere. A great number of Christians had even been expropriated by the Jews because of debts.” <a href="#n23" name="f23">[23]</a></p>
<p>It is mainly in Northern France that the Jews were engaged in usury. In Provence during the thirteenth century, Jewish participation in trade was still very important. The Jews of Marseilles were in regular business relations with Spain, North Africa, Sicily, and Palestine. They even owned ships, and like their ancestors of the Carolingian epoch, they imported spices, slaves, etc.</p>
<p>But these are only vestiges from a previous period. Usury appears to constitute the principal economic function of the Jews of France in the thirteenth century. A notary was appointed in each city for dealings in loans. The interest rate rose to 43 percent. Up to the statute of Melun (1230), which prohibited the Jews from making loans on real property, the principal clients of the Jewish bankers were the princes and lords. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the Jew Salomon of Dijon was the creditor of the greatest cloisters of France. The Count of Montpellier owed a Jew by the name of Bendet the sum of fifty thousand sous. Pope Innocent III, in a letter to the king of France, expresses indignation at the fact that the Jews are taking possession of church property, that they are seizing lands, vineyards, etc.</p>
<p>While the economic position of the Jews of France is similar to that of the English Jews, their political situation is different. Power, which was far more divided, placed them in the hands of a multitude of princes and lords. The Jews were subjected to a host of levies and taxes which enriched the powerful. Various means were utilized in order to extract the maximum of money from the Jews. Mass arrests, ritual trials, expulsions, all of these were used as pretexts for enormous financial extortions. The kings of France expelled and admitted the Jews a number of times in order to seize their property.</p>
<p>The social and economic position of the Jews in Moslem Spain is not known with accuracy. There is, however, not the shadow of a doubt that they belonged to the privileged classes of the population. “Arriving in Granada,” writes a certain Isak de Alvira, “I saw that the Jews here occupy leading positions. They have divided up the capital and the province. These accursed ones are everywhere at the head of the administration. They are engaged in the collection of taxes and live in luxury while you, Moslems, are clad in rags.” In Christian Spain, in Castile, the Jews are bankers, tax farmers, quartermasters to the king. Royalty protects them as its economic and political supporters. The interest rate, lower than in other countries, is 33.3 percent at the beginning of the twelfth century. In a great many <em>cortes</em> the nobility has struggled for a reduction in the rate of interest but has always met with the resistance of the kings. It was solely in the reign of Alphonse IX that the nobility achieved some concrete results in this sphere.</p>
<p>A similar situation arose in Aragon. Jehuda de Cavallera is a characteristic example of a great Jewish “capitalist” of the thirteenth century. He leased salt mines, coined money, supplied the army and possessed great estates and great herds of cattle. It was his fortune that made possible the construction of a battle fleet for the war against the Arabs.</p>
<p>The economic backwardness of Spain made it possible for the Jews to preserve their commercial positions longer than in England or in France. Documents of the twelfth century mention Jews of Barcelona who made voyages as far as the Bosphorus. In 1105, Count Bernard III granted a monopoly in the importation of Sicilian slaves to three Jews, merchants and proprietors of ships at Barcelona. We must await the fourteenth century, when Barcelona, according to Pirenne, will be “transformed into an enormous store and workshop,” before the Jews are completely expelled from trade. Their situation then declined to such an extent that they were compelled to pay taxes in order to be able to pass through this city. “The unfortunate Israelites, far from being merchants at Barcelona, entered it like merchandise.” <a href="#n24" name="f24">[24]</a></p>
<p>Jewish usury took on such dimensions in Aragon that serious movements against the Jews arose among the nobility and the bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>In Germany, the primarily commercial period extends up to the middle of the thirteenth century. The Jews bring Germany into relations with Hungary, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria. The slave trade flourishes up to the twelfth century. Thus, we are reminded in the customhouse tariffs of Walenstadt and of Coblenz that Jewish slave merchants had to pay four denars for each slave. A document of 1213 says of the Jews of Laubach “that they were extraordinarily wealthy and that they conducted a great trade with the Venetians, the Hungarians, and the Croats.”</p>
<p>From the thirteenth century on, the importance of the German cities grows. As elsewhere, and for the same reasons, the Jews are eliminated from commerce and turn towards the banking business. The center of gravity of Jewish usury is concentrated in the nobility. The Acts of Nuremberg show the average debt contracted with the Jews rose to 282 gulden among the city people and 1,672 among the nobles. The same is true of the 87 notes of Ulm which belonged to Jewish banking houses. Of the 17,302 gulden which they covered, 90 percent belonged to noble debtors. In 1344, the Jewish banker Fivelin loaned the Count of Zweibrücken 1,090 pounds. The same Fivelin, in collaboration with a certain Jacob Daniels, loaned 61,000 florins to the King of England, Edward III, in 1339. <a href="#n25" name="f25">[25]</a></p>
<p>In 1451, emperor Frederick III asked Pope Nicolas V for a privilege in behalf of the Jews, “so that they could live in Austria and there make loans at interest to the great convenience of the nobility.” In the thirteenth century, in Vienna, the Jews Lublin and Nzklo are engaged in the important functions of “finance administrators of the Austrian Duke (<em>Comites camarae ducis austriae</em>).</p>
<p>But this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely. Usury slowly destroyed the feudal regime, ruined all classes of the population, without introducing a new economy in place of the old. In contrast to capital, usury is essentially conservative. “Both usury and commerce exploit the various modes of production. They do not create it but attack it from the outside. Usury tries to maintain it directly in order to exploit it ever anew ....” <a href="#n26" name="f26">[26]</a> “Usury centralizes monetary wealth, where the means of production are disjointed. <em>It does not alter the mode of production</em> but attaches itself to it like a parasite and makes it miserable. It sucks its blood, kills its nerve and compels production to proceed under ever more disheartening conditions ... Usurer’s capital uses capital’s method of exploitation without its mode of production.” <a href="#n27" name="f27">[27]</a> Despite this destructive effect, usury remains indispensable in backward economic systems. But there it becomes an important cause of economic stagnation, as can be seen in many Asiatic countries.</p>
<p>If the burden of the usurer becomes more and more unbearable in Western Europe, it is because it is incompatible with the new economic forms. Exchange economy penetrates rural life. Industrial and commercial development of the cities deals a blow to the old feudal system in the country. A vast market opens up to agricultural products, which leads to a decided recession in the old forms of servitude, and of rents based on the natural economy. “Hardly anywhere, save in regions which were difficult of access, or very remote from the great commercial movements, did serfdom retain its primitive form. Everywhere else, if it did not actually disappear, it was at least mitigated. One may say that from the beginning of the thirteenth century the rural population, in Western and Central Europe, had become or was in process of becoming a population of free peasants.” <a href="#n28" name="f28">[28]</a></p>
<p>Everywhere in Western Europe, and in part in Central Europe, the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries are the epoch of the development of Jewish usury. But economic evolution brings about its rapid decline. The definitive expulsion of the Jews took place at the end of the thirteenth century in England, at the end of the fourteenth century in France, at the end of the fifteenth century in Spain. These dates reflect the difference in the speed of economic development within these countries. The thirteenth century is an epoch of economic flowering in England. For Spain it is the fifteenth century which is the high point of the process wherein the Spanish kingdoms “developed their commerce and added to their wealth. Sheep began to cover the countryside, and in the trade with the North of Europe Spanish began to compete with English wool. The exports of wool to the Low Countries were considerably increased, and sheep-farming began to give Castile its characteristic aspect and to enrich the nobility. There was also an increasing trade with the North in iron from Bilboa, olive oil, oranges and pomegranates.” <a href="#n29" name="f29">[29]</a></p>
<p>Feudalism progressively gives way to a regime of exchange. As a consequence, the field of activity of Jewish usury is constantly contracting. <em>It becomes more and more unbearable because it is less and less necessary.</em> The more money becomes abundant as a result of the more intensive circulation of goods, the more pitiless becomes the struggle against an economic function which could hardly find economic justification except in a time of economic immobility, when the treasury of the usurer constituted an indispensable reserve for society.</p>
<p>Now the peasant begins to sell his products and to pay his lord in money. The nobility in order to satisfy its growing luxury requirements is interested in freeing the peasantry and in everywhere replacing fixed rent in kind by rent in money. “The transformation of rent in kind into money rent that takes place at first sporadically, then on a more or less national scale, presupposes an already more significant development of trade, urban industry, commodity production in general and therefore monetary circulation.” <a href="#n30" name="f30">[30]</a></p>
<p>The transformation of all classes of society into producers of exchange values, into owners of money, raises them unanimously against Jewish usury whose archaic character emphasizes its rapacity. The struggle against the Jews takes on increasingly violent forms. Royalty, traditional protector of the Jews, has to yield to the repeated demands of congresses of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Besides, the monarchs themselves are increasingly compelled to dig into the treasuries of the bourgeoisie, a class which soon monopolizes the most important portion of mobile wealth. In the eyes of the kings the Jews, as a source of revenue, become less interesting (leaving out of consideration the fact that expulsion of the Jews was always an extremely profitable operation).</p>
<p>It is in this fashion that the Jews were progressively expelled from all the Western countries. It was an exodus from the more developed countries to the more backward ones of Eastern Europe. Poland, deeply mired in feudal chaos, became the principal refuge of Jews driven out of every other place. In other countries, in Germany, in Italy, the Jews still survived in the less developed regions. At the time of the travels of Benjamin of Tudela, there were practically no Jews in commercial centers such as Pisa, Amalfi, Genoa. On the other hand, they were very numerous in the most backward parts of Italy. Even in the Papal States, conditions were far superior for Jewish trade and banking than in the rich mercantile republics of Venice, Genoa, and Florence.</p>
<p>Mercantile economy therefore expelled the Jews from their last strongholds. The Jew, “banker to the nobility,” was already completely unknown in Western Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages. Here and there, small Jewish communities succeeded in maintaining themselves in certain secondary economic functions. The “Jewish banks” were no longer anything but pawnshops where it is poverty which is the borrower.</p>
<p>The collapse was a total one. The Jew became a petty usurer who lends to the poor of town and country against pledges of petty value. And what can he do with the securities which are not redeemed? He must sell them. The Jew became a petty peddler, a dealer in secondhand goods. Gone forever was his former splendor.</p>
<p>Now begins the era of the ghettos <a href="#n31" name="f31">[31]</a> and of the worst persecutions and humiliations. The picture of these unfortunates bearing the badge of the wheel and ridiculous costumes, paying taxes like beasts for passing through cities and across bridges, disgraced and rejected, has been implanted for a long time in the memory of the populations of Western and central Europe.</p>
<p> </p>
<h4><a href="ch3b.htm" class="mia">Continuation</a></h4>
<p> </p>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="information"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> “The manorial domain must contain in itself all that is necessary for life. It must so far as possible buy nothing from without and must not call for external aid. It is a small world in itself and must be sufficient to itself.” N.D. Fustel de Coulanges, <strong>Histoire des Institutions Politiques de l’Ancienne France</strong> (Paris 1888–92), vol. 4, p. 45.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> Pirenne, <strong>Belgian Democracy, Its Early History</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 91. “Copper from Dinant and Flemish cloths, owing to a merited reputation, appear to have expanded beyond the narrow confines of the city market.” Maurice Ansiaux, <strong>Traité d’Économie Politique</strong> (Paris 1920–26), vol. 1, p. 267.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> Depping, <strong>Histoire du commerce entre le Levant et l’Europe</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 1, p. 182.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> “Among the weavers, who sometimes work for distant markets, we see merchants becoming differentiated from the mass of artisans: these are the cloth merchants ....” Sée, <strong>Esquisse d’une Histoire Économique et Sociale de la France</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 102.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> Depping, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 1, pp. 184–85.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> Pirenne, <strong>A History of Europe</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 227.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> Weber, <strong>General Economic History</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 155.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f8" name="n8">8.</a> Roscher states: “It might well be said that medieval policy toward the Jews is almost the reverse of the general economic trend.” Roscher, <em>Status of the Jews in the Middle Ages</em>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 14.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f9" name="n9">9.</a> <em>Ibid.</em>, p. 20. “The rule that the independent development of merchants’ capital is inversely proportioned to the degree of development of capitalist production becomes particularly manifest in the history of the carrying trade ...” K. Marx, <strong>Capital</strong>, vol. 3, p. 387.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f10" name="n10">10.</a> Aloys Schulte, in his <strong>Geschichte des Mittelalterlichen Handels und Verkehrs zwischen Westdeutschland und Italien</strong> (Leipzig 1900, p. 152), claims that the Jews did not try to establish connections with the artisans as the Christian entrepreneurs did, and losing their commercial position as a result of this, they had to engage exclusively in credit. This observation is highly interesting. It shows the essence of the problem: the link of Christian trade with industry and the lack of this tie on the part of Jewish trade.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f11" name="n11">11.</a> In a study devoted to the Jews of a German city, Halberstadt, Max Köhler states that from the thirteenth century on, “the most important profession of the Jews of Halberstadt appears to have been usury.” Dr. Max Kohler, <strong>Beiträge zur Neueren Judischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Die Juden in Halberstadt und Umgebung bis zur emanzipation</strong> (Berlin 1927), p. 2. Heinrich Cunow tells us in <strong>Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte</strong> (<strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 3, p. 45): “Although the economic conditions of the nobility were becoming worse all the time, its military games, its orgies, its festivals, its magnificent tourneys ... did not fail to expand in the fourteenth century. Poor nobles also considered it their duty to take part in them. As the necessary monetary prerequisites for this show were lacking to them, they went into debt with the Jews whose principal occupation was lending at interest ....”</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f12" name="n12">12.</a> The example of Poland again proves how infantile are the customary schema of Jewish historians who attempt to explain the commercial or usurious function of the Jews on the basis of persecutions. Who then had forbidden the Jews of Poland from becoming agriculturists or artisans? Long before the first attempts of the Polish cities to struggle against the Jews, all commerce and all banking in that country already lay in their hands.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f13" name="n13">13.</a> This false conception of Jewish historians finds its counterpart in the proposition according to which the Jews had to abandon their “agricultural profession” because of legal bans. It is incorrect “to assert that the Jews were forbidden to own land. Wherever we find Jews doing business in the medieval cities, they are likewise the owners of their own houses. Moreover they often possessed larger pieces of land in the territory of the city. Truthfully speaking, it does not appear that they cultivated these lands anywhere. As soon as land came into their hands as security, they tried to sell it. It was not because they were forbidden to keep it but simply because they had no desire to do so. We do often find in the records, however, that vineyards, orchards, flax fields, etc. belonged to Jews. The products of these lands could easily be sold.” Cunow, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 3, p. 112.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f14" name="n14">14.</a> Schipper, <strong>Jewish History</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 1, p. 127.</p>
<p class="information">“The Jews formed a social class very powerful because of the riches gained in industry, commerce and particularly banking operations.” Rafael Ballester y Castell, <strong>Histoire de l’Espagne</strong> (Paris 1928), p. 154.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f15" name="n15">15.</a> “The virtuous Brutus lent money in Cyprus at eight-and-forty percent as we learn from the letters of Cicero.” Adam Smith, <strong>The Wealth of Nations</strong>, Modern Library Edition, p. 94.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f16" name="n16">16.</a> Brentano, <strong>Eine Geschichte der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung Englands</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 1, p. 366.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f17" name="n17">17.</a> Cunow</p><p class="information">vol. 3, p. 110.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f18" name="n18">18.</a> If it is puerile to think that feudal society whose principle was that “everyone should remain in his place,” transformed “Jewish agriculturists” into merchants, it is obvious, however, that legal prohibitions, themselves the fruit of economic conditions, played a certain role in confining the Jews within trade. This is above all true in periods when as a result of economic changes the traditional situation of the Jews became compromised. Thus, for example, Frederick the Great was not in favor of the Jews exercising manual professions. He wanted “everyone to remain in his profession; that the Jews be aided in the exercise of commerce but that the other professions should be left to Christians.”</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f19" name="n19">19.</a> Marx, <strong>Capital</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 3, p. 697–698.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f20" name="n20">20.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, pp. 698. My emphasis.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f21" name="n21">21.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 697. My emphasis.</p>
<p class="information">“In the same period, the famous theologian Medina, developing a premise which is also found in St. Thomas, acknowledges the play of supply and demand as a natural mode of determining the proper price. The <strong>Trinus Contractus</strong>, that marvel of juridical analysis which justifies the charging of interest in <em>business loans</em> when the money is really used as capital, is then admitted by the Italian and Spanish canonists, more enlightened than those of France, or rather <em>situated in a more advanced social milieu</em>.” Jannet, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 284. My emphasis.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f22" name="n22">22.</a> Pirenne, <strong>Histoire de Belgique</strong> (Brussels 1902–32), vol. 1, p. 251. My emphasis.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f23" name="n23">23.</a> Depping, <strong>Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, pp. 132–33.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f24" name="n24">24.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 387.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f25" name="n25">25.</a> Bücher tells us in his book <strong>Bevölkerung von Frankfurt am Main im XIV und XV Jahrhundert</strong> (quoted by Cunow, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 3, p. 46) “Among the debtors to the Frankfort Jews, we find a large part of the nobility of Wetterau, Pfalz, Odenwald, etc., represented .... The Archbishop of Mainz also owed the Jews money .... It is primarily the nobility that is heavily indebted. There were few lords in the area around Frankfort whose notes and pledges were not to be found in the Jewish quarter .... Certain Christian bourgeois of Frankfort and the neighboring cities had also contracted ‘Jewish debts’ (as the report of the city council expresses itself on this subject) but the greatest part of the 279 notes with which the city council was concerned were obligations of nobles.”</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f26" name="n26">26.</a> Marx, <strong>Capital</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 3, p. 716.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f27" name="n27">27.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 700. My emphasis.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f28" name="n28">28.</a> Pirenne, <strong>History of Europe</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 237.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f29" name="n29">29.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, pp. 491–92.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f30" name="n30">30.</a> Marx, <strong>Capital</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 3. p. 926.</p>
<p class="information">“This transformation of customs into money rent corresponds to the growth of mobile property .... Money becomes the readiest hallmark of wealth and begins to be preferred to natural products in evaluating the revenues of landed property. A similar evolution is noted in other countries and particularly in England where it is even more pronounced ....” Sée, <strong>Esquissse d’une Histoire Économique et Sociale de la France</strong>, pp. 61–62.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f31" name="n31">31.</a> Contrary to a rather widespread conception, the ghetto is a rather recent institution. It was not until 1462 that the Jews of Frankfort were enclosed in a ghetto. “There never was a question of such a measure in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the Jews could select their living quarters freely and could go anywhere in the whole city at any time.” Georg Ludwig Kriegk, <strong>Frankfurter Bürgerzwiste und Zustände im Mittelalter</strong> (Frankfort 1862), p. 441.</p>
<p class="information">We must not confuse Jewish quarters with ghettos. While the former are known in various epochs of Jewish history, the latter constitute an institution born of the period when the Jew becomes “a petty usurer.” Thus, in Poland, the ghetto constitutes the exception and not a rule. This did not prevent Hitlerite barbarism from “returning” the Polish Jews to the ghettos.</p>
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Abram Leon
The Jewish Question
THREE
The period of the Jewish usurer
Up to the eleventh century, the economic regime reigning in Western Europe is characterized by the absence of commodity production. The few cities which survived from the Roman era primarily fulfill administrative and military functions. All production is destined solely for local consumption and the seignorial domains, being sufficient to themselves, enter into contact with the wide world solely through Jewish merchants who brave its strange places. [1] The commercial role played by Europeans could only be passive in character. But with time and with the continuous growth in the importation of Oriental goods, there is an incentive to produce directly for exchange. The development of trade thus stimulates native production. The production of use values progressively gives way to the production of exchange values.
Not all native products are desired by the Orient. The production of exchange values first develops in those places where a set of conditions exists for the manufacture or extraction of certain goods especially prized abroad: monopoly products. Such were the woolens of England, the cloths of Flanders, the salt of Venice, copper from Dinant, etc. In these favored places, rapidly develop those “specialized industries, the products of which were at once beyond their place of origin.” [2]
Trade advances from the passive to the active stage and Florentine fabrics leave to conquer the wide world. As they are much sought after, these products are at the same time the source of enormous profits. This rapid accumulation of wealth is the basis for an accelerated development of a native merchant class. Thus, “salt became a potent weapon in the hands of the Venetians for attaining wealth and for holding peoples in subjection. From the very beginning, these islanders had made a salt in their lagoons which was much sought after by all the peoples situated on the Adriatic and which brought Venice trading privileges, concessions, and advantageous treaties.” [3]
So long as Europe lived under a regime of natural economy, the initiative in commercial traffic belonged to merchants from the Orient, principally the Jews. Only some peddlers, some lowly suppliers to the chateaux of the nobles and the clergy, succeed in freeing themselves from the humble mass of serfs bound to the soil. But the development of native production makes possible the rapid formation of a powerful class of native merchants. Emerging from the artisans, they gain control over them by taking over the distribution of raw materials. [4] Contrary to trade as conducted by the Jews, which is clearly separate from production, native trade is essentially based on industry.
Everywhere industrial development marches hand in hand with expansion of trade. “Venice had the advantage of being simultaneously one of the greatest commercial cities of the world and one of the most industrial. Its fabrics were of immense service to its traders in their relations with the Orient .... Venice and its neighboring cities were full of all kinds of fabrics.” [5] “In Italy, as in Flanders, the maritime commerce, and the inland commerce which was its continuation, resulted in the activity of the seaports: Venice, Pisa, and Genoa in the South; Bruges in the North. Then, behind the seaports, the industrial cities developed: on the one hand, the Lombard communes and Florence; on the other, Ghent, Ypres and Lille, Douai, and further inland, Valenciennes, and Brussels.” [6]
The woolen industry became the basis of the greatness and prosperity of the medieval cities. Cloths and fabrics constituted the most important goods in the fairs of the Middle Ages. [7] In that is to be seen the profound difference between medieval capitalism and modern capitalism: the latter is based on a tremendous revolution in the means of production; the former reposed solely on the development of the production of exchange values.
The evolution in exchange of medieval economy proved fatal to the position of the Jews in trade. The Jewish merchant importing spices into Europe and exporting slaves, is displaced by respectable Christian traders to whom urban industry supplies the principal products for their trading. This native commercial class collides violently with the Jews, occupants of an outmoded economic position, inherited from a previous period in historical evolution.
The growing contradiction between “Christian” and Jewish trade therefore leads to the opposition of two regimes: that of exchange economy as against natural economy. It was consequently the economic development of the West which destroyed the commercial function of the Jews, based on a backward state of production. [8]
The commercial monopoly of the Jews declined in the degree that the peoples, whose exploitation had fed it, developed. “For a number of centuries the Jews remained the commercial guardians of the young nations, to the advantage of the latter and not without open recognition of this advantage. But every tutelage becomes burdensome when it continues longer than the dependence of the ward. Entire nations emancipate themselves from the tutelage of other nations, even as individuals used to, only by means of struggle.” [9]
With the development of exchange economy in Europe, the growth of cities and of corporative industry; the Jews are progressively eliminated from the economic positions which they had occupied. [10] This eviction is accompanied by a ferocious struggle of the native commercial class against the Jews. The Crusades, which were also an expression of the will of the city merchants to carve a road to the Orient, furnished them with the occasion for violent persecutions and bloody massacres of the Jews. From this period on, the situation of the Jews in the cities of Western Europe is definitely compromised.
In the beginning, the economic transformation reaches only certain important urban centers. The seignorial domains are very little affected by this change and the feudal system continues to flourish there. Consequently, the career of Jewish wealth is still not ended. The seignorial domains still offer an important field of action to the Jews. But now Jewish capital, primarily commercial in the preceding period, becomes almost exclusively usurious. It is no longer the Jew who supplies the lord with Oriental goods but for a certain time it is still he who lends him money for his expenses. If during the preceding period “Jew” was synonymous with “merchant,” it now begins increasingly to be identified with “usurer.” [11]
It is self-evident that to claim, as do most historians, that the Jews began to engage in lending only after their elimination from trade, is a vulgar error. Usurious capital is the brother of commercial capital. In the countries of Eastern Europe, where the Jews were not evicted from commerce, we encounter, as we shall see later, a considerable number of Jewish usurers. [12] In reality, the eviction of the Jews from commerce had as a consequence their entrenchment in one of the professions which they had already practiced previously.
The fact that Jews at different periods may have held landed property cannot serve as a serious argument in favor of the traditional thesis of Jewish historians. Far from constituting a proof of the multiplicity of the occupations of the Jews, Jewish property must be considered as the fruit of their usurious and commercial operations. [13]
In the business books of the French Jew Heliot of Franche-Comté, who lived at the beginning of the fourteenth century, we find vineyards mentioned among his properties. But what clearly emerges from these books is that these vineyards did not constitute the basis of an agricultural profession for Heliot but were the product of his mercantile operations. When in 1360, the king of France had again invited the Jews into his territory, the representative of the Jews, a certain Manasé, raised the problem of royal protection for the vineyards and cattle which would pass into the hands of the Jews as unredeemed securities. In Spain, in the time of great theological disputes between Jews and Christians, the latter blamed the Jews for having become wealthy as a result of their “usurious” operations. “They have taken possession of fields and of cattle .... They own three-fourths of the fields and lands of Spain.” [14]
The passage of property of the nobility into the hands of the Jews was a common phenomenon in this epoch. Such was the village of Strizov, in Bohemia, which had belonged to two nobles and was assigned in payment of debts to the Jews Fater and Merklin (1382). The village Zlamany Ujezd, in Moravia, was allotted to the Jew Axon de Hradic; the village Neverovo, in Lithuania, was assigned to the Jew Levon Salomic, etc.
So long as the landed property of the Jews constituted solely an object of speculation for them, it could only have an extremely precarious character because the feudal class very early succeeded in imposing a ban upon mortgaging real properties with the Jews.
It was altogether different wherever a genuine economic and social mutation took place: in those places where the Jews abandoned business in order to become real landowners. Sooner or later, they necessarily also changed their religion.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a Jew named Woltschko, having become the proprietor of several villages, the king of Poland exerted every effort to lead him to “acknowledge his blindness and to enter the holy Christian religion.” This fact is significant, for the kings of Poland carefully protected the Jewish religion. They would never have thought of converting Jewish merchants or bankers to Christianity. But a Jewish landowner in the Middle Ages could only be an anomaly.
This is equally true as regards the Christian usurer. This problem naturally has nothing in common with the banalities on racial peculiarities. Clearly it is foolish to claim, with Sombart, that usury constitutes a specific trait of the “Jewish race.” Usury, which as we have seen plays an important role in precapitalist societies, is almost as old as humanity and has been practiced by all races and nations. It is enough to recall the leading role played by usury in Greek and Roman societies. [15]
But to pose the question in this way means to invert the conditions of the problem. It is not by the “innate” capacities or the ideology of a social group that we must explain its economic position. On the contrary, it is its economic position which explains its capacities and its ideology. Medieval society is not divided into lords and serf because each of these groups originally possessed specific qualifications for the economic role which it was to play. The ideology and capacities of each class formed gradually as a function of its economic position.
The same is true of the Jews. It is not their “innate” predisposition for commerce which explains their economic position but it is their economic position which explains their predisposition to commerce. The Jews moreover constitute a very heterogeneous racial conglomeration. In the course of their history, they have absorbed a multitude of non-Semitic ethnic elements. In England, the “monopoly of usury brought them such wealth that some Christians undoubtedly went over to Judaism in order to participate in the Jewish monopoly in lending.” [16]
Judaism therefore consists rather of the result of a social selection and not of a “race having innate predispositions for commerce.” But the primacy of the economic and social factor does not exclude—far from it—the influence of the psychological factor.
As it is infantile to see the economic position of Judaism as the result of the “predispositions of the Jews,” just so it is puerile to consider it as the fruit of persecutions and of legal bans against exercising other professions than commerce or usury. “In numerous writings on the economic life of the Jews in the Middle Ages, it is stated that they were excluded, from the very beginning, from artisanry; from traffic in goods, and that they were prohibited from possessing land property. That is only a fable. In fact, in the twelfth century and in the thirteenth century, living in practically all of the great cities of Western Germany, they dwelt among the Christians and enjoyed the same civil rights as the latter ... At Cologne, during an entire period, the Jews even possessed the right to compel a Christian, who had a claim to make against a Jew, to appear before Jewish judges in order to have the matter adjudged according to Hebraic law .... It is just as false to assert that the Jews could not be admitted into the artisan guilds. True, several guilds did not admit what were termed ‘Jewish children’ as apprentices but this was not the case for all the guilds. The existence of Jewish goldsmiths and silversmiths, even in the period when the guild rules become far more severe, is sufficient proof of this. There were certainly few Jewish blacksmiths, masons, and carpenters among the artisans of the Middle Ages, but Jewish parents who gave their children into apprenticeship in these trades were very rare. Even the guilds which excluded the Jews did not do so out of religious animosity or racial hatred but because the trades of usury and peddling were reputedly ‘dishonest’ ... The guilds excluded the children of Jewish businesspeople engaged in usury or peddling, in the same way that they did not accept the sons of simple laborers, carters and boatsmen, barbers, and weavers of linen into their ranks.” [17]
Feudal society was essentially a caste society. It desired that everyone “should remain in his place.” [18] It fought usury by Christians just as it made it impossible for the bourgeois to attain nobility; and just as it disdained the noble who lowered himself to the practice of a trade or to engaging in business.
In 1462 the doctor Han Winter was driven from the city of Nordlingen because he practiced usury through the intermediary of a Jew. Thirty years later, in the same city, a bourgeois named Kinkel was placed in the pillory and driven from the city for having practiced the “Jewish profession.” The synod of Bamberg, in 1491, threatened to drive every Christian practicing usury, either by himself or through the intermediary of Jews, out of the Christian community. In 1487, in Silesia, it was decreed that every Christian practicing usury would be placed in the hands of the royal tribunal and punished in exemplary fashion.
So long as the feudal structure remains solid, the attitude of Christian society toward loans at interest does not change. But the deep-seated economic mutations which we have examined previously transform the conditions of the problem. Industrial and commercial development elevate banking to an indispensable role in economy. The banker advancing funds to the merchant or the artisan becomes an essential element in economic development.
The treasury of the usurer, in the feudal era, fulfills the role of a necessary but absolutely unproductive reserve. “The most characteristic forms, in which usurers’ capital exists in time antedating capitalist production, are two ... The same forms repeat themselves on the basis of capitalist production, but as mere subordinate forms. They are then no longer the forms which determine the character of interest-bearing capital. These two forms are: First, usury by lending money to extravagant persons of the higher classes, particularly to landowners; secondly, usury by lending money to the small producer who is in possession of his own means of employment, which includes the artisan, but more particularly the peasant, since under precapitalist conditions, so far as they permit of independent individual producers, the peasant class must form the overwhelming majority.” [19]
The usurer makes loans to the feudal lords and to the kings for their luxuries and their war expenditures. He lends to the peasants and the artisans in order to allow them to pay their taxes, rents, etc. ... The money loaned by the usurer does not create surplus value; it merely allows him to take possession of a portion of the surplus product which already exists.
The function of the banker is altogether different. He contributes directly to the production of surplus value. He is productive. The banker finances great commercial and industrial ventures. Whereas credit is essentially consumer credit in the feudal era, it becomes credit of production and of circulation in the era of commercial and industrial development.
There is consequently a fundamental difference between the usurer and the banker. The first is the credit organ in the feudal era, whereas the second is the credit organ in the era of exchange economy. Ignoring this fundamental distinction leads almost all historians into error. They see no difference between the banker of antiquity; the Jewish banker of England of the eleventh century and Rothschild or even Fugger. “Newman ... says that the banker is respected while the usurer is hated and despised, because the banker lends to the rich, whereas the usurer lends to the poor (J.W. Newman, Lectures on Political Economy, London, 1851, p. 44). He overlooks the fact that the difference of two modes of production and the corresponding social orders intervenes here, and the latter is not exhausted by the distinction between rich and poor.” [20]
Of course this distinction becomes really obvious in the capitalist epoch properly so-called. But “the money-lender stands in the same relation to him [the merchant] in the former stages of society as he does the modern capitalist. This specific relation was felt also by the Catholic universities. ‘The universities of Alcala, of Salamanca, of Ingolstadt, of Freiburg in the Breisgau, Mayence, Cologne, Treves one after another recognized the legality of interest on money for commercial loans.’ ” [21]
In the measure that economic development continues, the bank conquers ever more solid positions while the Jewish usurer increasingly loses ground. He is no longer to be found in the prosperous commercial cities of Flanders because the Jews, “unlike the Lombards, only practiced placement at interest and did not play the role of intermediaries in commercial operations.” [22]
After their elimination from commerce, a process which is accomplished in Western Europe in the thirteenth century the Jews continue to develop the business of usury in regions not yet reached by exchange economy.
In England, in the period of King Henry II (second half of the twelfth century) they are already involved up to the hilt in usury. They are generally very rich and their clientele is composed of the great landed proprietors. The most famous of these Jewish bankers was a certain Aaron of Lincoln, very active at the end of the twelfth century. King Henry II alone owed him one hundred thousand pounds, a sum equal to the annual budget of the Kingdom of England at this time.
Thanks to the extremely high rate of interest – it fluctuated between 43 and 86 percent – a large number of estates of the nobility had passed into the hands of the Jewish usurers. But they had powerful associates and – exacting ones. If the kings of England supported the business of the Jews, it was because it constituted a very important source of revenue for them. All loans made with the Jews were registered in the Scaccarium Judaeorum [Exchequer of the Jews] and were assessed a tax of 10 percent in behalf of the royal treasury. But this legal contribution was far from sufficient for the kings. Any pretext was good enough for despoiling the Jews and the income from their usury continually contributed to enlarging the royal treasury. It was particularly bad for the Jews to have the kings as important debtors. The rich banker Aaron of Lincoln found this out in 1187 when the King of England confiscated his property.
The dispossessed nobility would avenge itself by organizing massacres of the Jews. In 1189, the Jews were massacred in London, Lincoln, and Stafford. A year later, the nobility, led by a certain Malebys, destroyed the Scaccarium Judaeorum of York. The notes were solemnly burned. The Jews, besieged in the chateau, committed suicide. But the king continued to protect the Jews even after their death .... He demanded payment to himself of the sums due the Jews, by virtue of the fact that the Jews were the “slaves of his treasury.” Special employees were ordered by him to make an exact list of all the debts.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century the king granted a “Magna Carta” to the nobility which brought certain improvements in the sphere of loans. Nevertheless, in 1262 and in 1264, new disturbances broke out against the Jews. In 1290, the entire Jewish population of England, that is to say almost three thousand people, was expelled and its property confiscated.
The economic situation of the Jews of France, far more numerous than the English (one hundred thousand), was not perceptibly different from that of the English Jews. “With the accession of Philip Augustus (1180) and in the first years of his reign, the Hebrews were rich and numerous in France. Learned rabbis had been attracted to the synagogue of Paris, which, on the solemn entry of Pope Innocent at St. Denis in 1135 had already figured among the corporations of the capital at the time of the passage of the Pontiff. According to the historian Rigord, they had acquired almost half of Paris. “... Their credits were spread throughout villages, cities, and suburbs, everywhere. A great number of Christians had even been expropriated by the Jews because of debts.” [23]
It is mainly in Northern France that the Jews were engaged in usury. In Provence during the thirteenth century, Jewish participation in trade was still very important. The Jews of Marseilles were in regular business relations with Spain, North Africa, Sicily, and Palestine. They even owned ships, and like their ancestors of the Carolingian epoch, they imported spices, slaves, etc.
But these are only vestiges from a previous period. Usury appears to constitute the principal economic function of the Jews of France in the thirteenth century. A notary was appointed in each city for dealings in loans. The interest rate rose to 43 percent. Up to the statute of Melun (1230), which prohibited the Jews from making loans on real property, the principal clients of the Jewish bankers were the princes and lords. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the Jew Salomon of Dijon was the creditor of the greatest cloisters of France. The Count of Montpellier owed a Jew by the name of Bendet the sum of fifty thousand sous. Pope Innocent III, in a letter to the king of France, expresses indignation at the fact that the Jews are taking possession of church property, that they are seizing lands, vineyards, etc.
While the economic position of the Jews of France is similar to that of the English Jews, their political situation is different. Power, which was far more divided, placed them in the hands of a multitude of princes and lords. The Jews were subjected to a host of levies and taxes which enriched the powerful. Various means were utilized in order to extract the maximum of money from the Jews. Mass arrests, ritual trials, expulsions, all of these were used as pretexts for enormous financial extortions. The kings of France expelled and admitted the Jews a number of times in order to seize their property.
The social and economic position of the Jews in Moslem Spain is not known with accuracy. There is, however, not the shadow of a doubt that they belonged to the privileged classes of the population. “Arriving in Granada,” writes a certain Isak de Alvira, “I saw that the Jews here occupy leading positions. They have divided up the capital and the province. These accursed ones are everywhere at the head of the administration. They are engaged in the collection of taxes and live in luxury while you, Moslems, are clad in rags.” In Christian Spain, in Castile, the Jews are bankers, tax farmers, quartermasters to the king. Royalty protects them as its economic and political supporters. The interest rate, lower than in other countries, is 33.3 percent at the beginning of the twelfth century. In a great many cortes the nobility has struggled for a reduction in the rate of interest but has always met with the resistance of the kings. It was solely in the reign of Alphonse IX that the nobility achieved some concrete results in this sphere.
A similar situation arose in Aragon. Jehuda de Cavallera is a characteristic example of a great Jewish “capitalist” of the thirteenth century. He leased salt mines, coined money, supplied the army and possessed great estates and great herds of cattle. It was his fortune that made possible the construction of a battle fleet for the war against the Arabs.
The economic backwardness of Spain made it possible for the Jews to preserve their commercial positions longer than in England or in France. Documents of the twelfth century mention Jews of Barcelona who made voyages as far as the Bosphorus. In 1105, Count Bernard III granted a monopoly in the importation of Sicilian slaves to three Jews, merchants and proprietors of ships at Barcelona. We must await the fourteenth century, when Barcelona, according to Pirenne, will be “transformed into an enormous store and workshop,” before the Jews are completely expelled from trade. Their situation then declined to such an extent that they were compelled to pay taxes in order to be able to pass through this city. “The unfortunate Israelites, far from being merchants at Barcelona, entered it like merchandise.” [24]
Jewish usury took on such dimensions in Aragon that serious movements against the Jews arose among the nobility and the bourgeoisie.
In Germany, the primarily commercial period extends up to the middle of the thirteenth century. The Jews bring Germany into relations with Hungary, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria. The slave trade flourishes up to the twelfth century. Thus, we are reminded in the customhouse tariffs of Walenstadt and of Coblenz that Jewish slave merchants had to pay four denars for each slave. A document of 1213 says of the Jews of Laubach “that they were extraordinarily wealthy and that they conducted a great trade with the Venetians, the Hungarians, and the Croats.”
From the thirteenth century on, the importance of the German cities grows. As elsewhere, and for the same reasons, the Jews are eliminated from commerce and turn towards the banking business. The center of gravity of Jewish usury is concentrated in the nobility. The Acts of Nuremberg show the average debt contracted with the Jews rose to 282 gulden among the city people and 1,672 among the nobles. The same is true of the 87 notes of Ulm which belonged to Jewish banking houses. Of the 17,302 gulden which they covered, 90 percent belonged to noble debtors. In 1344, the Jewish banker Fivelin loaned the Count of Zweibrücken 1,090 pounds. The same Fivelin, in collaboration with a certain Jacob Daniels, loaned 61,000 florins to the King of England, Edward III, in 1339. [25]
In 1451, emperor Frederick III asked Pope Nicolas V for a privilege in behalf of the Jews, “so that they could live in Austria and there make loans at interest to the great convenience of the nobility.” In the thirteenth century, in Vienna, the Jews Lublin and Nzklo are engaged in the important functions of “finance administrators of the Austrian Duke (Comites camarae ducis austriae).
But this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely. Usury slowly destroyed the feudal regime, ruined all classes of the population, without introducing a new economy in place of the old. In contrast to capital, usury is essentially conservative. “Both usury and commerce exploit the various modes of production. They do not create it but attack it from the outside. Usury tries to maintain it directly in order to exploit it ever anew ....” [26] “Usury centralizes monetary wealth, where the means of production are disjointed. It does not alter the mode of production but attaches itself to it like a parasite and makes it miserable. It sucks its blood, kills its nerve and compels production to proceed under ever more disheartening conditions ... Usurer’s capital uses capital’s method of exploitation without its mode of production.” [27] Despite this destructive effect, usury remains indispensable in backward economic systems. But there it becomes an important cause of economic stagnation, as can be seen in many Asiatic countries.
If the burden of the usurer becomes more and more unbearable in Western Europe, it is because it is incompatible with the new economic forms. Exchange economy penetrates rural life. Industrial and commercial development of the cities deals a blow to the old feudal system in the country. A vast market opens up to agricultural products, which leads to a decided recession in the old forms of servitude, and of rents based on the natural economy. “Hardly anywhere, save in regions which were difficult of access, or very remote from the great commercial movements, did serfdom retain its primitive form. Everywhere else, if it did not actually disappear, it was at least mitigated. One may say that from the beginning of the thirteenth century the rural population, in Western and Central Europe, had become or was in process of becoming a population of free peasants.” [28]
Everywhere in Western Europe, and in part in Central Europe, the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries are the epoch of the development of Jewish usury. But economic evolution brings about its rapid decline. The definitive expulsion of the Jews took place at the end of the thirteenth century in England, at the end of the fourteenth century in France, at the end of the fifteenth century in Spain. These dates reflect the difference in the speed of economic development within these countries. The thirteenth century is an epoch of economic flowering in England. For Spain it is the fifteenth century which is the high point of the process wherein the Spanish kingdoms “developed their commerce and added to their wealth. Sheep began to cover the countryside, and in the trade with the North of Europe Spanish began to compete with English wool. The exports of wool to the Low Countries were considerably increased, and sheep-farming began to give Castile its characteristic aspect and to enrich the nobility. There was also an increasing trade with the North in iron from Bilboa, olive oil, oranges and pomegranates.” [29]
Feudalism progressively gives way to a regime of exchange. As a consequence, the field of activity of Jewish usury is constantly contracting. It becomes more and more unbearable because it is less and less necessary. The more money becomes abundant as a result of the more intensive circulation of goods, the more pitiless becomes the struggle against an economic function which could hardly find economic justification except in a time of economic immobility, when the treasury of the usurer constituted an indispensable reserve for society.
Now the peasant begins to sell his products and to pay his lord in money. The nobility in order to satisfy its growing luxury requirements is interested in freeing the peasantry and in everywhere replacing fixed rent in kind by rent in money. “The transformation of rent in kind into money rent that takes place at first sporadically, then on a more or less national scale, presupposes an already more significant development of trade, urban industry, commodity production in general and therefore monetary circulation.” [30]
The transformation of all classes of society into producers of exchange values, into owners of money, raises them unanimously against Jewish usury whose archaic character emphasizes its rapacity. The struggle against the Jews takes on increasingly violent forms. Royalty, traditional protector of the Jews, has to yield to the repeated demands of congresses of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Besides, the monarchs themselves are increasingly compelled to dig into the treasuries of the bourgeoisie, a class which soon monopolizes the most important portion of mobile wealth. In the eyes of the kings the Jews, as a source of revenue, become less interesting (leaving out of consideration the fact that expulsion of the Jews was always an extremely profitable operation).
It is in this fashion that the Jews were progressively expelled from all the Western countries. It was an exodus from the more developed countries to the more backward ones of Eastern Europe. Poland, deeply mired in feudal chaos, became the principal refuge of Jews driven out of every other place. In other countries, in Germany, in Italy, the Jews still survived in the less developed regions. At the time of the travels of Benjamin of Tudela, there were practically no Jews in commercial centers such as Pisa, Amalfi, Genoa. On the other hand, they were very numerous in the most backward parts of Italy. Even in the Papal States, conditions were far superior for Jewish trade and banking than in the rich mercantile republics of Venice, Genoa, and Florence.
Mercantile economy therefore expelled the Jews from their last strongholds. The Jew, “banker to the nobility,” was already completely unknown in Western Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages. Here and there, small Jewish communities succeeded in maintaining themselves in certain secondary economic functions. The “Jewish banks” were no longer anything but pawnshops where it is poverty which is the borrower.
The collapse was a total one. The Jew became a petty usurer who lends to the poor of town and country against pledges of petty value. And what can he do with the securities which are not redeemed? He must sell them. The Jew became a petty peddler, a dealer in secondhand goods. Gone forever was his former splendor.
Now begins the era of the ghettos [31] and of the worst persecutions and humiliations. The picture of these unfortunates bearing the badge of the wheel and ridiculous costumes, paying taxes like beasts for passing through cities and across bridges, disgraced and rejected, has been implanted for a long time in the memory of the populations of Western and central Europe.
Continuation
Notes
1. “The manorial domain must contain in itself all that is necessary for life. It must so far as possible buy nothing from without and must not call for external aid. It is a small world in itself and must be sufficient to itself.” N.D. Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des Institutions Politiques de l’Ancienne France (Paris 1888–92), vol. 4, p. 45.
2. Pirenne, Belgian Democracy, Its Early History, op. cit., p. 91. “Copper from Dinant and Flemish cloths, owing to a merited reputation, appear to have expanded beyond the narrow confines of the city market.” Maurice Ansiaux, Traité d’Économie Politique (Paris 1920–26), vol. 1, p. 267.
3. Depping, Histoire du commerce entre le Levant et l’Europe, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 182.
4. “Among the weavers, who sometimes work for distant markets, we see merchants becoming differentiated from the mass of artisans: these are the cloth merchants ....” Sée, Esquisse d’une Histoire Économique et Sociale de la France, op. cit., p. 102.
5. Depping, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 184–85.
6. Pirenne, A History of Europe, op. cit., p. 227.
7. Weber, General Economic History, op. cit., p. 155.
8. Roscher states: “It might well be said that medieval policy toward the Jews is almost the reverse of the general economic trend.” Roscher, Status of the Jews in the Middle Ages, op. cit., p. 14.
9. Ibid., p. 20. “The rule that the independent development of merchants’ capital is inversely proportioned to the degree of development of capitalist production becomes particularly manifest in the history of the carrying trade ...” K. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 387.
10. Aloys Schulte, in his Geschichte des Mittelalterlichen Handels und Verkehrs zwischen Westdeutschland und Italien (Leipzig 1900, p. 152), claims that the Jews did not try to establish connections with the artisans as the Christian entrepreneurs did, and losing their commercial position as a result of this, they had to engage exclusively in credit. This observation is highly interesting. It shows the essence of the problem: the link of Christian trade with industry and the lack of this tie on the part of Jewish trade.
11. In a study devoted to the Jews of a German city, Halberstadt, Max Köhler states that from the thirteenth century on, “the most important profession of the Jews of Halberstadt appears to have been usury.” Dr. Max Kohler, Beiträge zur Neueren Judischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Die Juden in Halberstadt und Umgebung bis zur emanzipation (Berlin 1927), p. 2. Heinrich Cunow tells us in Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte (op. cit., vol. 3, p. 45): “Although the economic conditions of the nobility were becoming worse all the time, its military games, its orgies, its festivals, its magnificent tourneys ... did not fail to expand in the fourteenth century. Poor nobles also considered it their duty to take part in them. As the necessary monetary prerequisites for this show were lacking to them, they went into debt with the Jews whose principal occupation was lending at interest ....”
12. The example of Poland again proves how infantile are the customary schema of Jewish historians who attempt to explain the commercial or usurious function of the Jews on the basis of persecutions. Who then had forbidden the Jews of Poland from becoming agriculturists or artisans? Long before the first attempts of the Polish cities to struggle against the Jews, all commerce and all banking in that country already lay in their hands.
13. This false conception of Jewish historians finds its counterpart in the proposition according to which the Jews had to abandon their “agricultural profession” because of legal bans. It is incorrect “to assert that the Jews were forbidden to own land. Wherever we find Jews doing business in the medieval cities, they are likewise the owners of their own houses. Moreover they often possessed larger pieces of land in the territory of the city. Truthfully speaking, it does not appear that they cultivated these lands anywhere. As soon as land came into their hands as security, they tried to sell it. It was not because they were forbidden to keep it but simply because they had no desire to do so. We do often find in the records, however, that vineyards, orchards, flax fields, etc. belonged to Jews. The products of these lands could easily be sold.” Cunow, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 112.
14. Schipper, Jewish History, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 127.
“The Jews formed a social class very powerful because of the riches gained in industry, commerce and particularly banking operations.” Rafael Ballester y Castell, Histoire de l’Espagne (Paris 1928), p. 154.
15. “The virtuous Brutus lent money in Cyprus at eight-and-forty percent as we learn from the letters of Cicero.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Modern Library Edition, p. 94.
16. Brentano, Eine Geschichte der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung Englands, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 366.
17. Cunowvol. 3, p. 110.
18. If it is puerile to think that feudal society whose principle was that “everyone should remain in his place,” transformed “Jewish agriculturists” into merchants, it is obvious, however, that legal prohibitions, themselves the fruit of economic conditions, played a certain role in confining the Jews within trade. This is above all true in periods when as a result of economic changes the traditional situation of the Jews became compromised. Thus, for example, Frederick the Great was not in favor of the Jews exercising manual professions. He wanted “everyone to remain in his profession; that the Jews be aided in the exercise of commerce but that the other professions should be left to Christians.”
19. Marx, Capital, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 697–698.
20. Ibid., pp. 698. My emphasis.
21. Ibid., p. 697. My emphasis.
“In the same period, the famous theologian Medina, developing a premise which is also found in St. Thomas, acknowledges the play of supply and demand as a natural mode of determining the proper price. The Trinus Contractus, that marvel of juridical analysis which justifies the charging of interest in business loans when the money is really used as capital, is then admitted by the Italian and Spanish canonists, more enlightened than those of France, or rather situated in a more advanced social milieu.” Jannet, op. cit., p. 284. My emphasis.
22. Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique (Brussels 1902–32), vol. 1, p. 251. My emphasis.
23. Depping, Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age, op. cit., pp. 132–33.
24. Ibid., p. 387.
25. Bücher tells us in his book Bevölkerung von Frankfurt am Main im XIV und XV Jahrhundert (quoted by Cunow, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 46) “Among the debtors to the Frankfort Jews, we find a large part of the nobility of Wetterau, Pfalz, Odenwald, etc., represented .... The Archbishop of Mainz also owed the Jews money .... It is primarily the nobility that is heavily indebted. There were few lords in the area around Frankfort whose notes and pledges were not to be found in the Jewish quarter .... Certain Christian bourgeois of Frankfort and the neighboring cities had also contracted ‘Jewish debts’ (as the report of the city council expresses itself on this subject) but the greatest part of the 279 notes with which the city council was concerned were obligations of nobles.”
26. Marx, Capital, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 716.
27. Ibid., p. 700. My emphasis.
28. Pirenne, History of Europe, op. cit., p. 237.
29. Ibid., pp. 491–92.
30. Marx, Capital, op. cit., vol. 3. p. 926.
“This transformation of customs into money rent corresponds to the growth of mobile property .... Money becomes the readiest hallmark of wealth and begins to be preferred to natural products in evaluating the revenues of landed property. A similar evolution is noted in other countries and particularly in England where it is even more pronounced ....” Sée, Esquissse d’une Histoire Économique et Sociale de la France, pp. 61–62.
31. Contrary to a rather widespread conception, the ghetto is a rather recent institution. It was not until 1462 that the Jews of Frankfort were enclosed in a ghetto. “There never was a question of such a measure in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the Jews could select their living quarters freely and could go anywhere in the whole city at any time.” Georg Ludwig Kriegk, Frankfurter Bürgerzwiste und Zustände im Mittelalter (Frankfort 1862), p. 441.
We must not confuse Jewish quarters with ghettos. While the former are known in various epochs of Jewish history, the latter constitute an institution born of the period when the Jew becomes “a petty usurer.” Thus, in Poland, the ghetto constitutes the exception and not a rule. This did not prevent Hitlerite barbarism from “returning” the Polish Jews to the ghettos.
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<h2>Abram Leon</h2>
<h1>The Jewish Question</h1>
<p> </p>
<h3>TWO<br><br>
From antiquity to the Carolingian epoch:<br>
The period of commercial prosperity of the Jews
<p><a name="a"> </a></p>
</h3><h4>A. Before the Roman conquest</h4>
<p class="fst">From a very remote time Syria and Palestine were the highways for the exchange of goods between the two oldest centers of culture of the ancient Mediterranean world: Egypt and Assyria. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> The essentially commercial character of the Phoenicians and Canaanites <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> was a product of the geographical and historical situation of the countries which they inhabited. The Phoenicians became the first great commercial people of antiquity because they [were] located [between] the first two great centers of civilization. It was Assyrian and Egyptian goods which at first constituted the main object of Phoenician trade. The same was certainly true for the Palestinian merchants. <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a> According to Herodotus, Assyrian goods were the most ancient and most important articles of Phoenician commerce. No less ancient, however, was the connection of the Phoenicians with Egypt. The legends of biblical Canaan, as well as Phoenician myths, reveal continuous relations by land and by sea, between the inhabitants of these countries and the Egyptians. Herodotus also speaks of Egyptian goods which the Phoenicians had been bringing to Greece from very remote times. <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a></p>
<p>But if the geographical situation of Palestine was as favorable as that of Phoenicia for mercantile trade between Egypt and Assyria <a href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a>, the facilities for navigation at the disposal of Syria were completely lacking in Palestine. Phoenicia was abundantly provided with everything necessary for sea travel; the cedar and cypress of Lebanon furnished it with timber; copper and iron were also plentiful in the mountains of Lebanon and in the outskirts. On the Phoenician coast, many natural ports were available for navigation. <a href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a> It is therefore not surprising that at a very early date Phoenician ships, heavily laden with Egyptian and Assyrian products, should have begun to ply the navigable routes of the ancient world. “The political and mercantile relations of Phoenicia with the great states of the Nile and the Euphrates, relations established more than two thousand years before Christ, permitted the expansion of Phoenician trade to the coastal countries of the Indian Ocean.” <a href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a> The Phoenicians brought the most diversified peoples and civilizations of antiquity closer together. <a href="#n8" name="f8">[8]</a></p>
<p>For many centuries the Phoenicians maintained a monopoly of trade between the relatively developed countries of the East and the less civilized countries of the West. In the era of the commercial hegemony of the Phoenicians, the islands in the western Mediterranean and the countries bordering it were economically still very backward. “This does not mean that trade was unknown to the society of the day [Homeric Society], but for the Greeks it consisted essentially of importations .... In payment for these purchases [for the raw or precious materials, the manufactured goods, which the foreign navigators came to offer them], the Greeks seem to have given chiefly cattle.” <a href="#n9" name="f9">[9]</a> This situation, so highly disadvantageous for the natives, was not long maintained. Phoenician commerce itself became one of the principal stimulants for the economic development of Greece. The rise of Greece was also favored by Hellenic colonization, which expanded greatly between the ninth and seventh century before Christ. The Greek colonists spread in all directions over the Mediterranean. Greek cities multiplied. Thucydides and Plato attribute the Greek emigration to the shortage of land.</p>
<p>The development of Greek colonization was accompanied by a tremendous rise, at least for that era, in Hellenic industry and commerce. This economic development of Greece inevitably brought about the commercial decline of Phoenicia. “In the past, the Phoenicians had landed their goods at the Greek anchorages and had exchanged them against native products—usually, it seems, cattle. Henceforward, the Greek mariners <a href="#n10" name="f10">[10]</a> would themselves go to Egypt, to Syria, to Asia Minor, and among the peoples of Europe, the civilized Etruscans, and the barbaric Scythians, Gauls, Ligurians, and Iberians, taking with them manufactured goods and works of art, tissues, weapons, jewelry and painted vases, which had a great reputation and were eagerly bought by all the barbarians.” <a href="#n11" name="f11">[11]</a> The period extending from the sixth to the fourth century appears to have been the era of the economic apogee of Greece. “The characteristic of this new period was that the professions had become more numerous, organized and specialized. The division of labor had been greatly developed.” <a href="#n12" name="f12">[12]</a> At the time of the Peloponnesian War, Hipponikos employed six hundred slaves and Nikias one thousand in the mines.</p>
<p>This important economic development of Greece has stimulated most bourgeois scholars to speak about a “Greek capitalism.” They go so far as to compare Hellenic industry and trade with the vast economic movement of the modern industrial era.</p>
<p>In reality, agriculture continued to be the economic foundation of Greece and its colonies. “The Greek colony was not a trading colony: it was practically invariably military and agricultural.” <a href="#n13" name="f13">[13]</a> Thus, Strabo relates apropos of Cumes, a Greek colony in Italy, that it was not until three hundred years after settling there that the inhabitants noticed that their city was located near the sea. The essentially agricultural character of the economic life of the Hellenic world is incontestable. Nor can there be any question of an industry comparable to modern industry. “The methods of production and of organization remained on the artisan level.” <a href="#n14" name="f14">[14]</a> Only the mines seem to have presented, at least insofar as labor power is concerned, a picture similar to that which we see at the present time.</p>
<p>The fact that despite their great expansion, industry and commerce remained for the most part in the hands of metics, of foreigners, proves best their relatively subordinate role in Greek economy. “In the immense trade of which Athens is the center, as well as in its industry the metics play a preponderant role.” <a href="#n15" name="f15">[15]</a> At Delos, the great commercial center, the inscriptions show that almost all the traders were foreigners. <a href="#n16" name="f16">[16]</a></p>
<p>The Greek citizen despised trade and industry; he was primarily the landed proprietor. Aristotle, like Plato, was opposed to granting citizenship to merchants. <a href="#n17" name="f17">[17]</a></p>
<p>It is therefore necessary to guard against exaggerating the importance of the industrial and commercial development of Greece. In fact, Greek expansion was primarily agricultural and military. It did, however, go hand in hand with an industrial and commercial development of considerable importance for its time. <a href="#n18" name="f18">[18]</a></p>
<p>The Greeks never became a commercial people like the Phoenicians and the Jews; but we do find a very important commercial and industrial development in the Greek colonies and later in the Hellenic kingdoms. And, of course, the Greek states, while not really mercantile, supported commerce and industry with all their might as financial sources of the utmost importance.</p>
<p>It is not solely to the economic development of Greece and its colonies that we must attribute the decline of Phoenician commerce; there was still another important cause: the growing antagonism between Persia and Greece. Paralleling the extension of Hellenic civilization was the victorious march of the Persians across Asia. The Persian empire reached its apogee in the fifth century B.C. It extended over a part of Asia and over Egypt.</p>
<p>The parallel development of Greek and Persian civilization necessarily dealt a mortal blow to Phoenician commerce. Trade between Asia and Europe was certainly rendered very difficult by the division of the Mediterranean world between two mutually hostile societies. The Persian and Greek worlds each created its own commercial trade.</p>
<p>With the decline of Phoenicia and the development of Asiatic trade after the period of the Persian conquests, we can assume that Palestine, previously completely supplanted by Phoenicia again began to play an important commercial role. The passageway between Egypt and Babylonia recovered all its value. Whereas Phoenician trade lost more and more of its ancient importance up to the point where, in the time of Lucian, salted products were the main cargo, the Jews played a leading role in the Persian empire. <a href="#n19" name="f19">[19]</a></p>
<p>Certain historians attribute an important role to the Babylonian exile in the transformation of the Jews into a commercial people. In Babylonia, “the Jews became transformed into a commercial people, such as we know them in the economic history of the world. They found highly developed economic relations among the Babylonians. Recently uncovered cuneiform texts show that the exiled Jews participated actively in commercial life. They were involved in credit business, highly developed among the Babylonians; they were also big traders.” <a href="#n20" name="f20">[20]</a></p>
<p>But the dispersion of the Jews is certainly prior to the Babylonian exile. “There are serious reasons for conceding the existence of a pre-exile Diaspora.” <a href="#n21" name="f21">[21]</a> The scope of the Jewish exile under Nebuchadnezzar is very greatly exaggerated. Only a part of the ruling classes was hit by the measures of the Babylonian king. The majority of the Jews established in Palestine continued to live there. Consequently, if during the Persian epoch the Jews were to be found spread over all parts of that enormous empire (and the Book of Esther is very eloquent on this subject), it would be childish to view this fact as a consequence of the Babylonian exile, an exile which lasted altogether some fifty years. It is equally puerile to believe that the Jewish people returned to Palestine in the period of Ezra and Nehemiah. Their work was primarily of a religious character. It was a matter of rebuilding the temple and of reconstructing a religious metropolis for dispersed Judaism. “Most historians have considerably exaggerated the role of Palestinian Judaism in the Persian epoch. They reason as if Jerusalem, once restored, all the history of Israel became concentrated around the holy mountain; as if all the people had really returned from exile and had lived on a land measuring some few hundred square kilometers in Tekoa, Mitspa, and Jericho. In reality, in this epoch, the Jews of Judea represented only a part, and the smallest, of Judaism. And undoubtedly it was the least vital part.” <a href="#n22" name="f22">[22]</a></p>
<p>The Edict of Cyrus is addressed to the Jews of the Diaspora in the following words: “And whosoever is left, in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help [those who are going to Palestine] with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, besides the freewill offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem” (<strong>Book of Ezra</strong> 1: 4). “And all they that were round about them,” continues the <strong>Book of Ezra</strong> (1: 6), “strengthened their hands [the 42,000 Jews who were returning to Palestine] with vessels of silver, with gold, with goods, and with beasts.” It is obvious that we are not dealing here with a mass return of the Jews to Palestine but primarily with the reconstruction of the temple.</p>
<p>During the Persian epoch the principal colonies of the Diaspora were situated in Mesopotamia, in Chaldea, and in Egypt. The documents which have been found at Elephantine in Egypt, dating from the fifth century before Christ, throw an interesting light on the condition of the Jewish colonies of the Diaspora in this epoch.</p>
<p>According to the archives belonging to a Jewish family, it appears that the “Jews engaged in trade, bought and sold houses and land, loaned money, acted as depositories, and were well versed in matters of law.” It is very interesting to note that even the songs and chronicles are in Aramaic, which shows that as early as the fifth century B.C. Hebrew was no longer a customary language for the Jews. <a href="#n23" name="f23">[23]</a> Aramaic was the great Asiatic language of the period, the commercial language.</p>
<p>The religion of the Jews of Elephantine was not as developed as the official religion codified during the Ezra-Nehemiah era. In a petition to the Persian governor, they asked for authorization to rebuild their temple. But the reform of Ezra-Nehemiah was aimed precisely at concentrating all the Jews of the Diaspora around the single temple of Jerusalem. And it was in fact to Jerusalem that the gifts of the Jews dispersed throughout the world continued to flow up to the year 70.</p>
<p>It was this wealth of the temple of Jerusalem that was probably the principal reason for the offensive of Antiochus against the Jews. “Simon advised him that the public treasury at Jerusalem was full of large sums and that there were enormous public riches.” (<strong>Second Book of the Maccabees</strong>, 111: 6). Later, on the little island of Cos, Mithridates confiscated eight hundred talents that were destined for the temple of Jerusalem. In the Roman era, Cicero complained in his speeches of the immense sums which were flowing into Jerusalem.</p>
<p>The Hellenistic period constitutes the epoch of the economic apogee of antiquity. The conquests of Alexander destroyed the barriers between the Hellenic world and Asia and Egypt. Cities sprang up like mushrooms in all parts of the Hellenic empire. The “greatest founders of cities, not alone of this epoch but even in all history, were Seleucos I and his son Antiochus I.” <a href="#n24" name="f24">[24]</a> The Hellenistic kings created new urban centers destined to supplant the old Phoenician and Persian cities. “On the coast of Syria, the port of Antioch causes the old cities of Tyre and Sidon to be forgotten.” <a href="#n25" name="f25">[25]</a> Seleucos creates Seleucia on the banks of the Tigris in order to rob Babylonia of its central role in world commerce. <a href="#n26" name="f26">[26]</a> This goal was completely attained.</p>
<p>Whereas Babylonia fell into decline, Hellenic Seleucia probably became the greatest city of this epoch. According to Pliny, it had six hundred thousand inhabitants. Alongside of Seleucia, Alexandria and Antioch became the centers of the Hellenistic world. All of these cities experienced an unchallenged prosperity during the Hellenistic period.</p>
<p>The situation of the Jews appears to have been further strengthened after the conquests of Alexander. “It appears that they were able to secure special privileges equally well, both from the Seleucidae and from the Lagidae. At Alexandria, to which they had been attracted by Ptolemy I and where they abounded, they formed a separate community which governed itself and was not subject to the jurisdiction of the Greek courts.” <a href="#n27" name="f27">[27]</a> “The Jews enjoyed a certain autonomy and a privileged position in Antioch, the capital of Syria. This was also true at Cyrene.” <a href="#n28" name="f28">[28]</a> The privileged position and the specific economic roles of the Jews had already become the source of serious conflicts with the population of the cities which they inhabited. Struggles broke out continuously in Alexandria, Seleucia, Cyrene, and Cyprus, as well as in the Palestinian cities. <a href="#n29" name="f29">[29]</a> These conflicts had nothing in common with present-day national antagonisms. On the contrary the Hellenistic empires witnessed a tremendous assimilation of their component peoples. The name Greek ceased after a while to be applied to the members of a particular nation but was assigned to the ruling and cultured sections of the population. Alexander ordered everybody, an ancient writer tells us, to consider the world as his fatherland, the well-to-do as his kin, and evildoers as foreigners.</p>
<p>The increased importance of Judaism in the commercial life of the Hellenistic world must also be attributed to the displacement of economic life toward the East. The prosperity of Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia offers a striking contrast to the poverty and decay into which Greece has fallen in the same period. Polybius repeatedly stresses the decline of Greek cities. Somewhat later, in the second century, “visitors could hardly believe that this city, where water was scarce, the streets badly laid out, the houses uncomfortable, was the famous Athens.” <a href="#n30" name="f30">[30]</a> Athens was shorn of its role as center of the civilized world. What contributed to the ruin of Greece, together with her economic decline, was the ceaseless class struggles <a href="#n31" name="f31">[31]</a>, which by virtue of the backward mode of production, could bring about no important changes. The victory of the plebeian was ephemeral, the redistribution of wealth could only wind up in new social inequalities, breeding centers of new social conflicts. Thus the triumph of Greece, after the conquests of Alexander, proved illusory. The displacement of the economic center of the world toward the East, which followed the conquests, brought about the rapid decline of Greece. <a href="#n32" name="f32">[32]</a> The propertied and aristocratic classes, powerless before the plebeian revolts, had to seek support from Rome <a href="#n33" name="f33">[33]</a>, but the latter could only answer by dealing the final blow to Greece as well as to Hellenism. The Romans threw themselves on the Hellenistic world as on a convenient prey to be pillaged and conquered. “Between 211 and 208, according to the assuredly very incomplete information which has come down to us, five ‘old cities of the Hellenes’ ... were sacked.” <a href="#n34" name="f34">[34]</a> Corinth, the rich commercial city was destroyed. “I was there,” recounts Polybius. “I saw pictures trampled under foot, and soldiers sitting on them while throwing dice.” Rome also dealt very harsh blows to Hellenism in Asia. <a href="#n35" name="f35">[35]</a> Under the combined blows of the Romans and the Parthians, the magnificent structure of Greece was destroyed.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h4><a name="b">B. Roman imperialism and its decline</a></h4>
<p class="fst">In contrast to modern imperialism which is based essentially on the development of the productive forces, ancient imperialism was founded on the looting of conquered countries. For ancient imperialism it was not a question of opening new roads for its products and its capital; its objective was exclusively the despoiling of conquered countries. The backward state of production in antiquity could sustain the possessing classes of the conquering countries in luxury only by means of the more or less rapid ruination of the conquered peoples. Exhaustion of the conquered countries, growing difficulties in making new conquests, the gradual softening of the conquerors, all these sooner or later brought about the decline of ancient imperialisms.</p>
<p>Rome provides the classic example of ancient imperialism. There have been great exaggerations concerning the commercial and industrial development of Rome. Its trade always showed a deficit. <a href="#n36" name="f36">[36]</a> Rome drew exports from the provinces without giving anything back in return. <a href="#n37" name="f37">[37]</a> The Roman ruling classes heartily despised every kind of trade. The Claudian law forbade Senators, their sons, and the entire aristocracy of Rome to own ships drawing more than 300 amphoras, which corresponds to less than 225 bushels of grain or vegetables. This was equivalent to forbidding them to engage in trade. Caesar renewed this ban. Roman policy was never determined by its so-called commercial interests. The best proof of this is that Rome, after the defeat of Hannibal, still allowed the Carthaginians to bar entry into their sea. <a href="#n38" name="f38">[38]</a> “In general, it must be said that the Roman economic problems were unusually simple. The gradual conquest of Italy and the provinces more than occupied the surplusage of capital and population so that there was no crying need for industry and commerce,” states Tenney Frank. <a href="#n39" name="f39">[39]</a> The traders at Rome were as a rule foreigners and it is that moreover which explains the continuous growth in the Jewish colony at Rome from Caesar’s epoch on. Roman businessmen were not traders but usurers who looted the provinces. <a href="#n40" name="f40">[40]</a> The development of trade in the Roman empire must above all be ascribed to the growing luxury requirements of the ruling classes of Rome. Strabo explains the development of the great market of Delos in this fashion: “Hence arose a proverbial saying ‘Merchant come into port, discharge your freight—everything is sold.’ The Romans, having acquired wealth after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth, employed great numbers of domestic slaves.” <a href="#n41" name="f41">[41]</a></p>
<p>The same was true of industry. Roman industry depended primarily on the luxury requirements of the aristocracy. “Tenney Frank, after observing that no appreciable progress was made in the domain of industry in the fourth century B.C., adds: ‘In the two succeeding centuries we do not find evidence of any marked change in the nature of production at Rome. Doubtless the amount of ordinary ware produced at home increased with the growth of the city ... but of goods worthy of export we do not hear. The only difference now is that work previously performed by free labor began in the second century to fall into the hands of slaves.’ ” <a href="#n42" name="f42">[42]</a></p>
<p>Even those authors who consider that Italy had been a producer country in the republican epoch admit that it ceased to be one in the imperial period. “Italy becomes less and less a producer country .... Several industries which were prosperous at the end of the republican period are now in decline .... Thus trade between Italy and the Orient now takes place only in one direction, and it also becomes lodged more and more in the hands of Asiatics, of Alexandrians and Syrians.” <a href="#n43" name="f43">[43]</a></p>
<p>Thus Italy now lived only on the exploitation of the provinces. Small property, the foundation of Roman strength, was progressively supplanted by vast domains serving the luxury needs of the Roman aristocrats and on which slave labor predominated. <a href="#n44" name="f44">[44]</a> Pliny’s conclusion is known to all: <em>“Latfundia perdidere Italiam.”</em></p>
<p>The slave became more and more an item of luxury rather than a factor in production. <a href="#n45" name="f45">[45]</a> Horace, in one of his <strong>Satires</strong>, states that a minimum of ten slaves was the indispensable prerequisite of a gentleman. Thousands of slaves did in fact work in the vast latifundia. “In the domains of Tusculum and Tibur, on the shores of Terracina and Baiae—where the old Latin and Italian farmers had sown and reaped—there now rose in barren splendor the villas of the Roman nobles, some of which covered the space of a moderate-sized town with their appurtenances of garden grounds and aqueducts, fresh and salt water ponds for the preservation and breeding of river and marine fishes, nurseries of snails and slugs, game preserves for keeping hares, rabbits, stags, roes and wild boars, and aviaries in which even cranes and peacocks were kept.” <a href="#n46" name="f46">[46]</a></p>
<p>At the same time that free labor was being eliminated by slave labor, Italy became an immense center of squandering the wealth drained from the entire empire. Crushing taxes ruined the provinces; “the frequent and costly naval armaments and coast defenses in order to check piracy; the task of supplying works of art, wild beasts, or other demands of the insane Roman luxury in circus, theater and the chase ... were just as frequent as they were oppressive and incalculable. A single instance may show how far things were carried. During the three years’ administration of Sicily by Gaius Verres, the number of farmers in Leontini fell from 84 to 32, in Motya from 187 to 86, in Herbita from 252 to 120, in Agyrium from 250 to 80, so that in four of the most fertile districts of Sicily, 59 percent of the landholders preferred to let their fields lie fallow rather than to cultivate them under this <em>regime</em> .... In the client states the forms of taxation were somewhat different, but the burdens themselves were if possible still worse, since in addition to the exactions of the Romans there came those of the native courts.” <a href="#n47" name="f47">[47]</a></p>
<p>Roman capitalism, to the extent that the term capitalism is applicable here, was essentially speculative and bore no relationship whatever to the development of the productive forces. <a href="#n48" name="f48">[48]</a></p>
<p>Roman trade and banking resembled organized brigandage. “But still worse if possible and still less subject to any control, was the havoc committed by the Italian men of business among the unhappy provincials. The most lucrative portions of the landed property and the whole commercial and monetary business in the provinces were concentrated in their hands .... Usury flourished as it had never flourished before .... ‘All the communities’ it is said in a treatise published in 684/70, ‘are ruined’; the same truth is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul, the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still in the most tolerable economic position. In Asia Minor, even towns like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which the free provincials succumbed and even the patient Asiatic had become, according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves, weary of life .... Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece and Asia.” <a href="#n49" name="f49">[49]</a></p>
<p>Clearly this system of parasitism and brigandage could not last indefinitely. The source of wealth from which Rome drew dried up. Long before the fall of Rome we witness a steady slowing up of trade. The arena for pillage contracted in the measure that Rome emptied the conquered countries of their substance.</p>
<p>The fact that the production of grain, especially wheat, diminished, while the vine and olive tree conquered vast domains in the east and west, constituted an ominous token of the state of things. Luxury products displaced products which are indispensable for production and for reproduction of the labor force. “The spread of the culture of vines and olive trees ... not only meant economic ruin for Italy but might also result in a corn famine throughout the empire.” <a href="#n50" name="f50">[50]</a> Trajan vainly tried to ward off this danger by compelling Senators to buy land in Italy. His successors achieved as little. Luxury killed off production. “Soon superb buildings will leave no more land for the plough of the toiler,” Horace cried out.</p>
<p>By the third century, the decline in trade was complete. Relations with distant countries were cut off. “Practically no Roman coins of the third century have been found in India,” which proves a breakdown of exchange between Rome and India. <a href="#n51" name="f51">[51]</a> The decline of Egyptian agriculture became so pronounced in the third century that it was necessary to forego a part of the deliveries of grain from this formerly wealthy province. These Egyptian deliveries had to be replaced by grain supplies from the province of Africa (the Algeria and Tunisia of today). <a href="#n52" name="f52">[52]</a></p>
<p>Commodius found it necessary to establish a flotilla for transporting the grain grown in the province of Africa. We have seen that trade in the Roman empire was primarily based on supplying the wealthy classes of Rome. Is there any wonder then that exhaustion of the provinces was followed by a decline in trade? More and more, Roman emperors were compelled to resort to requisitions in kind, which only resulted, however, in aggravating the lot of the suffering provinces. “The system of requisitions was rampant: corn, hides, wood for spears, and draught animals had to be delivered, and payment for them was irregular and indeed problematic” <a href="#n53" name="f53">[53]</a></p>
<p>A purely natural economy, producing exclusively use values, slowly displaced the exchange of products. “Whereas the Roman peace had formerly brought about a regular exchange of goods and the equalizing of living conditions between the different regions of the empire, in the anarchy of the third century each country was often condemned to live upon itself, painfully and poorly.” <a href="#n54" name="f54">[54]</a></p>
<p>An attempt has been made to explain the gradual displacement of slavery by the <em>coloni</em> system either as a result of the lack of energy on the part of landed proprietors or by a shortage of slaves caused by the termination of foreign wars. The gradual ruin of the colonies, the halt in the flow of their products, was probably the main reason. The great proprietors, more and more reduced to living on the products of their own lands, were interested in replacing slave labor, relatively low in productivity, by the <em>coloni</em> system, which resembles the system of serfdom that flourished in the Middle Ages. “The <em>colonus</em> owes his master everything that the serf will have to give his lord.” <a href="#n55" name="f55">[55]</a></p>
<p>The power of the landed proprietors, who often possess enormous areas of land, kept growing continuously. In Egypt, in the fifth century the peasants will be completely subject to them. State administration passed entirely into their hands. <a href="#n56" name="f56">[56]</a></p>
<p>It is therefore quite inaccurate to view the natural economy which flourished in the Carolingian epoch as an outgrowth of the fall of the Roman empire and the destruction of Mediterranean economic unity. <a href="#n57" name="f57">[57]</a></p>
<p>Undoubtedly the barbarian invasions played a very important role in the decline of ancient trade and in the rise of feudal economy. But the economic decline of the Roman empire began long before the fall of Rome and several centuries before the Moslem invasion.</p>
<p>Another very important indication of the evolution toward a natural economy was the monetary change which had already begun under the reign of Nero. <a href="#n58" name="f58">[58]</a> Copper increasingly replaced gold and silver. In the second century, there was an almost complete dearth of gold. <a href="#n59" name="f59">[59]</a></p>
<p>The development of a natural economy, of an economy primarily producing use values, was consequently far from being an “abnormal phenomenon” as Pirenne claims. The Roman empire was ruined economically before it was ruined politically. The political blow to the Roman empire was rendered possible only by its economic decline. The political anarchy of the third century, like the barbarian invasion, can be explained accurately and exclusively by the economic decline of the Roman empire.</p>
<p>To the extent that the provinces were ruined, an intensive exchange of goods ceased, and a return took place to a natural economy, to that same extent the very existence of the empire became a matter of indifference to the possessing classes. Each country, each province withdrew into its shell. The empire, with its immense administrative apparatus and its extremely costly army, became a cancer, a parasitic organism whose unbearable weight pressed down on all classes. Taxes devoured the substance of the peoples. Under Marcus Aurelius, when the soldiers after their great victories against the Marcomanni, demanded an increase in pay, the emperor made this significant reply: “Everything you would receive above your usual pay would first have to be drained from the blood of your relations.”</p>
<p>The Treasury was exhausted. In order to maintain the administrative apparatus and the army, it was necessary to confiscate individual fortunes. While the lower classes were in ceaseless revolt, the possessing classes were turning away from the empire, which was ruining them. After the economic ruin of the empire by the aristocracy, the aristocracy was in its turn mined by the empire. “Daily people could be seen who only yesterday were still among the wealthiest and today have to take up the beggar’s staff,” said Herodian. The soldiers grew more and more bestial. It was not greed alone which forced them to despoil the inhabitants; impoverishment of the provinces and the wretched state of transportation, which created difficulties in provisioning the armies, forced the soldiers to use violence in order to find their means of subsistence. Caracalla, in granting Roman citizenship to all Roman inhabitants, sought only to increase the taxable population. Irony of history: The whole world became Roman when Rome was no longer anything!</p>
<p>The exactions of the Roman administration and the excesses of the soldiery incited all the inhabitants of the empire to hope for its destruction. “The quartering of soldiers was a real disaster: the population of Syria regarded an occupation by the Parthians as a relief in comparison with a prolonged stay of Roman troops.” <a href="#n60" name="f60">[60]</a></p>
<p>“The Roman government appeared every day ... more odious and oppressive to its subjects .... The severe inquisition, which confiscated their goods and tortured their persons, compelled the subjects of Valentinian to prefer the more simple tyranny of the Barbarians ... They abjured and abhorred the name of Roman citizen, which had formerly excited the ambitions of mankind.” <a href="#n61" name="f61">[61]</a> The Christian writer Salvian stated in <strong>De Gubernatione Dei</strong>: “Hence all the Romans in that region [Gaul and Spain] have but one desire, that they may never have to return to the Roman jurisdiction. Yet we are surprised that the Goths are not conquered by our resistance, when the Romans would rather live among them than at home ... I could find occasion to wonder why all the poor and needy taxpayers do not follow their example, except for one factor that hinders them, namely, that they cannot transfer their poor possessions and homes and their households.” <a href="#n62" name="f62">[62]</a></p>
<p>Far from being an “abnormal” phenomenon, the barbarian invasion was the normal consequence of the economic and political decline of the empire. Even without the invasions, the empire would probably have been dismembered. “In Asia Minor, as well as in Syria, one of the leading features of life was the gradual reversion to the feudal system .... The so-called revolt of the Isaurians in Asia Minor is another symptom of the same tendency towards the formation of almost independent states within the empire.” <a href="#n63" name="f63">[63]</a> Similarly, the attempt to create an independent Gallo-Roman empire, the attempts at secession, prove how weak had become the bond of empire. The barbarians only gave the coup de grâce to the shaking edifice of the Roman state.</p>
<p>The fundamental cause for the decline of the Roman empire must be sought in the contradiction between the growing luxuriousness of the possessing classes, between the incessant growth of surplus value, and the static character of the mode of production. During the entire Roman epoch, very little progress was registered in the sphere of production. The tools of the cultivator retained their primitive form. “Plough, spade, hoe, mattock, pick, fork, scythe, sickle and pruning knife, were, as the surviving specimens show, just as they had been handed down from generation to generation.” <a href="#n64" name="f64">[64]</a> The growing luxury of the Roman aristocracy and the expenses of imperial administration were covered by a furious exploitation of the provinces, which had as its consequence economic ruin, depopulation, exhaustion of the soil. <a href="#n65" name="f65">[65]</a> Unlike the capitalist world, which must perish from the (relative) superabundance of means of production, the Roman world perished from their scarcity.</p>
<p>The reforms of Diocletian and of Constantine constituted an attempt to set the Roman empire on the foundations of a natural economy. “The State had now to be based on the country and the peasants.” <a href="#n66" name="f66">[66]</a> The peasant was now chained to his bit of land. Each landed proprietor became responsible for his domain and for the number of <em>coloni</em> who were established on it; the new tax was assessed on this basis. “The reform of taxation by Diocletian and the edicts of later emperors made the <em>colonus</em> a serf, bound to his domicile and to his master ....” <a href="#n67" name="f67">[67]</a> The same was true of the other layers of the population; small proprietors, artisans, merchants, all were chained to their living place and to their profession. The epoch of Constantine is the epoch of the unlimited rule of the great landed proprietors, undisputed masters of vast princely domains. The aristocracy more and more abandons the cities which fall into decay and flees to sumptuous country villas where it lives surrounded by its clients and its serfs.</p>
<p>The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine constituted attempts to adapt the empire to a natural economy. But we have seen that the empire had, on this basis, no reason for existence. Its various parts could be held together longer only by tyranny. Thus, if from the economic and social point of view, Constantine ushers in a new historical era, symbolized by the adoption of Christianity, from the political point of view, he opens the last act in the history of the Roman empire.</p>
<p> </p>
<h4><a href="ch2b.htm" class="mia">Continuation</a></h4>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="information"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> “In the ordinary language of European science, ancient life is that which developed chiefly round the Mediterranean basin.” J.E Toutain, <strong>The Economic Life of the Ancient World</strong> (New York 1930), p. 1.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> It was probably the commercial prosperity of Palestine which made it appear to the Israelites as a land of “milk and honey.” It is also probable that the Israelite invasion dealt a serious blow to Palestinian commerce. But with time the Israelites in their turn renewed the profitable relations with the countries of the Nile and the Euphrates.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> Thus, from the very beginning, it was a specific geographic and historic situation which determined the commercial character of the Phoenicians and the Jews. It is obvious that only the proximity to centers of civilization equipped with a relatively important industry, only the closeness to countries already producing in part for exchange, could permit the development of such specifically commercial peoples as the Phoenicians and the Jews. It was alongside the first great centers of civilization that the first great commercial peoples developed.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> F.K. Movers, <strong>Die Phönizier</strong> (Berlin 1856), vol. 2, p. 18.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> “Even before the advent of the Israelites in Canaan, commerce was highly developed there. In the Tell-el-Amarna letters (fifteenth century B.C.) reference is made to caravans crossing the country under protective escort.” F. Bühl, <strong>Die Sozialen Verhältnisse der Israeliten</strong> (Berlin 1899), p. 76.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> Movers, <strong>up. cit.</strong>, vol. :2, pp. 19–20.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, vol. 2, p. 18.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f8" name="n8">8.</a> “By their indefatigable commercial enthusiasm and their entrepreneur spirit, the Phoenicians acquired a name as a commercial people far exceeding that of any other people of antiquity. It was only later, during the Middle Ages, that this name, with all the invidious connotations attached to it, passed to their neighbors and commercial heirs, the Jews of the Diaspora.” <strong>Ibid.</strong>, vol. 2, p. 26.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f9" name="n9">9.</a> Toutain, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, pp. 19–20.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f10" name="n10">10.</a> These “Greek mariners” appear to have been mainly “metics,” foreigners who had established themselves in Greece. The commercial role of the Phoenicians had been tied up with the development of Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations; the rise of Hellenic civilization brought as a consequence the commercial prosperity of the metics.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f11" name="n11">11.</a> Toutain, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 31.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f12" name="n12">12.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 53.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f13" name="n13">13.</a> Johannes Hasebroek, <strong>Staat und Handel im Alten Griechenland</strong> (Tübingen l928), p. 112</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f14" name="n14">14.</a> Hasebroek, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 78. The production of use values remains the foundation of the economy. All that can be conceded is that production for exchange took on in Greece the maximum dimensions possible for the ancient mode of production.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f15" name="n15">15.</a> Pierre Roussel, <strong>La Grèce et l’Orient</strong> (Paris 1928), p. 301. See also Michel Clerc, <strong>La Métèques Athéniens</strong> (Paris 1893), p. 397: “Maritime commerce was in effect largely in the hands of metics”; and Henri Francotte, <strong>L’industrie dans la Grèce Ancienne</strong> (Brussels 1900–1901), vol. l, p. 192: “This commerce [at Athens] appears to have been mainly in the hands of foreigners.”</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f16" name="n16">16.</a> Hasebroek, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 27. In the period of its prosperity; Athens contained 400,000 slaves; 20,000 citizens; and 30,000 metics.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f17" name="n17">17.</a> “It is no more permissible to speak of the commercialization of the world than of its industrialization. The agrarian character of economy is predominant even in the fourth century B.C.” Hasebroek, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 101.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f18" name="n18">18.</a> “Any analogy between the ports of ancient Greece and modern Genoa or Marseilles will provoke only skepticism or a smile. Nevertheless, the spectacle afforded by all this exchange, shipping, and coming and going of goods was then a new thing in the Mediterranean. It was quite different in intensity and in nature from that previously afforded by Phoenician trade, which had been mere sea-peddling rather than real business.” Toutain, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 65.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f19" name="n19">19.</a> Charles Autran, <strong>Les Phéniciens</strong> (Paris 1920), p. 51.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f20" name="n20">20.</a> Lujo Brentano, <strong>Das Wirtschaftsleben der Antiken Welt</strong> (Jena 1929), p. 80.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f21" name="n21">21.</a> Antonin Causse, <strong>Les Dispersés d’Isräel</strong> (Paris 1929), p. 7.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f22" name="n22">22.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, pp. 54–55.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f23" name="n23">23.</a> <strong>Jüdisches Lexicon</strong> (Berlin 1927–30), vol. 2. Article on Elephantine, pp. 345–46.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f24" name="n24">24.</a> Eduard Meyer, <strong>Blüte und Niedergang des Hellenismus in Asien</strong> (Berlin 1925), p. 20.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f25" name="n25">25.</a> Roussel, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 486.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f26" name="n26">26.</a> Meyer, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 22.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f27" name="n27">27.</a> Roussel, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, pp. 480–81.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f28" name="n28">28.</a> Brentano, <strong>Das Wirtschaftsleben der Antiken Welt</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 78.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f29" name="n29">29.</a> Meyer, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 61.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f30" name="n30">30.</a> André Piganiol, <strong>La Conquête Romaine</strong> (Paris 1927), p. 205.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f31" name="n31">31.</a> These class struggles were limited strictly to the free population of the Greek cities. “Some degree of equality in the possession of property appeared necessary to the maintenance of this political democracy. Therein lies the source of the bloody wars between the rich and the poor, the end-product of Hellenic demagogy. But the slaves, serfs, and metics took no part in these struggles ....” Claude Jannet, <strong>Les Grandes Époques de l’Histoire Économique</strong> (Paris 1896), p. 8.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f32" name="n32">32.</a> “The Greek peninsula [in the Hellenistic period] thus increasingly lost its leading position and the economic center of the world was displaced toward the East.” K.J. Beloch, <strong>Griechische Geschichte</strong> (Berlin 1914–27), vol. 1, pp. 279–80.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f33" name="n33">33.</a> See N.D. Fustel de Coulanges, <strong>The Ancient City</strong> (Boston 1874), p. 498.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f34" name="n34">34.</a> Maurice Holleaux, <strong>Rome, la Grèce et les Monarchies Hellénistiques</strong> (Paris l921), p. 231.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f35" name="n35">35.</a> Piganiol, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 232.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f36" name="n36">36.</a> See Heinrich Cunow, <strong>Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte</strong> (Berlin 1926–31), vol. 2, p. 61.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f37" name="n37">37.</a> Pirenne, <strong>A History of Europe</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 40. “Products flowed to the center without there being any compensating current backward.” Gustave Legaret, <strong>Histoire du Développement du Commerce</strong> (Paris 1927), p. 13.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f38" name="n38">38.</a> Tenney Frank, <strong>An Economic History of Rome to the End of the Republic</strong> (Baltimore 1920), p. 116.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f39" name="n39">39.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 126.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f40" name="n40">40.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 283.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f41" name="n41">41.</a> Strabo, <strong>Geography</strong> (London 1854 57), vol. 3, p. 51.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f42" name="n42">42.</a> Toutain, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, pp. 234–35. Toutain does not subscribe to this opinion.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f43" name="n43">43.</a> Jean Hatzfeld, <strong>Les Trafiquants Italiens dans l’Orient Hellénistique</strong> (Paris 1919), pp. 190–91.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f44" name="n44">44.</a> “The subject of the disappearance of the peasants was a common topic of discussion among the leading men of the Augustan period.” M. Rostovtzev, <strong>The Social and Economic History of the Roman empire</strong> (Oxford 1926), p. 65.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f45" name="n45">45.</a> Karl Kautsky, <strong>Foundations of Christianity</strong> (New York 1925), p. 66.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f46" name="n46">46.</a> Mommsen, <strong>The History of Rome</strong>, vol. 4, p. 478.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f47" name="n47">47.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, vol. 4, p. 501.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f48" name="n48">48.</a> Giuseppe Salvioli, <strong>Der Kapitalismus im Altertum</strong> (Stuttgart 1922), p. 206.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f49" name="n49">49.</a> Mommsen, <strong>History of Rome</strong>, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, vol. 4, pp. 502–4.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f50" name="n50">50.</a> Rostovtzev, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 188.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f51" name="n51">51.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 421.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f52" name="n52">52.</a> Wilhelm Schubart, <strong>Aegypten von Alexander dem Grossen bis auf Mohammed</strong> (Berlin 1922), p. 67.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f53" name="n53">53.</a> Rostovtzev, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 374.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f54" name="n54">54.</a> Eugene Albertini, <strong>L’empire Romain</strong> (Paris 1929), p. 306.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f55" name="n55">55.</a> Ernest Lavisse, <strong>Histoire Générale du IVe Siècle à Nos Jours</strong> (Paris 1893), vol. 1, p. 16.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f56" name="n56">56.</a> Schubart, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 29. Very significant also is the gradual disappearance of the class of knights, the class of Roman “capitalists.”</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f57" name="n57">57.</a> “The demesnial organization, as it appeared from the ninth century on, is therefore the result of alien circumstances; nothing can be observed there in the nature of an organic transformation. This is equivalent to saying that it was an abnormal phenomenon.” Henri Pirenne, <strong>Les Villes au Moyen Age</strong> (Brussels 1927), p. 46. “The French empire was destined to lay the foundations of the Europe of the Middle Ages. But the mission which it fiilfilled had as an essential precondition the overthrow of the traditional world order; there would have been no summons to this task if historical evolution had not been turned aside from its normal course, if it had not been, so to speak, thrown off its axis by the Moslem invasion. Without Islam, the Frankish empire undoubtedly could never have existed and Charlemagne would be inconceivable without Mohammed.” <strong>Ibid.</strong>, pp. 27–28. For Pirenne, feudal economy is therefore a result of the destruction of Mediterranean unity; produced primarily by the Mohammedan invasion.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f58" name="n58">58.</a> Rostovtzev, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 171.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f59" name="n59">59.</a> Salvioli, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 245.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f60" name="n60">60.</a> Rostovtzev, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 375.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f61" name="n61">61.</a> Edward Gibbon, <strong>The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman empire</strong> (New York: Heritage Press 1946), vol. 2, p. 1103.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f62" name="n62">62.</a> Salvian, <strong>On the Government of God</strong> (New York 1930), p. 146.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f63" name="n63">63.</a> Rostovtzev, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 425.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f64" name="n64">64.</a> Toutain, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 282.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f65" name="n65">65.</a> Certain authors see depopulation and exhaustion of the soil as the essential causes for the decline of the empire.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f66" name="n66">66.</a> Rostovtzev, <strong>op. cit.</strong>, p. 453.</p>
<p class="information"><a href="#f67" name="n67">67.</a> <strong>Ibid.</strong>, p. 472.</p>
<p> </p>
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Abram Leon
The Jewish Question
TWO
From antiquity to the Carolingian epoch:
The period of commercial prosperity of the Jews
A. Before the Roman conquest
From a very remote time Syria and Palestine were the highways for the exchange of goods between the two oldest centers of culture of the ancient Mediterranean world: Egypt and Assyria. [1] The essentially commercial character of the Phoenicians and Canaanites [2] was a product of the geographical and historical situation of the countries which they inhabited. The Phoenicians became the first great commercial people of antiquity because they [were] located [between] the first two great centers of civilization. It was Assyrian and Egyptian goods which at first constituted the main object of Phoenician trade. The same was certainly true for the Palestinian merchants. [3] According to Herodotus, Assyrian goods were the most ancient and most important articles of Phoenician commerce. No less ancient, however, was the connection of the Phoenicians with Egypt. The legends of biblical Canaan, as well as Phoenician myths, reveal continuous relations by land and by sea, between the inhabitants of these countries and the Egyptians. Herodotus also speaks of Egyptian goods which the Phoenicians had been bringing to Greece from very remote times. [4]
But if the geographical situation of Palestine was as favorable as that of Phoenicia for mercantile trade between Egypt and Assyria [5], the facilities for navigation at the disposal of Syria were completely lacking in Palestine. Phoenicia was abundantly provided with everything necessary for sea travel; the cedar and cypress of Lebanon furnished it with timber; copper and iron were also plentiful in the mountains of Lebanon and in the outskirts. On the Phoenician coast, many natural ports were available for navigation. [6] It is therefore not surprising that at a very early date Phoenician ships, heavily laden with Egyptian and Assyrian products, should have begun to ply the navigable routes of the ancient world. “The political and mercantile relations of Phoenicia with the great states of the Nile and the Euphrates, relations established more than two thousand years before Christ, permitted the expansion of Phoenician trade to the coastal countries of the Indian Ocean.” [7] The Phoenicians brought the most diversified peoples and civilizations of antiquity closer together. [8]
For many centuries the Phoenicians maintained a monopoly of trade between the relatively developed countries of the East and the less civilized countries of the West. In the era of the commercial hegemony of the Phoenicians, the islands in the western Mediterranean and the countries bordering it were economically still very backward. “This does not mean that trade was unknown to the society of the day [Homeric Society], but for the Greeks it consisted essentially of importations .... In payment for these purchases [for the raw or precious materials, the manufactured goods, which the foreign navigators came to offer them], the Greeks seem to have given chiefly cattle.” [9] This situation, so highly disadvantageous for the natives, was not long maintained. Phoenician commerce itself became one of the principal stimulants for the economic development of Greece. The rise of Greece was also favored by Hellenic colonization, which expanded greatly between the ninth and seventh century before Christ. The Greek colonists spread in all directions over the Mediterranean. Greek cities multiplied. Thucydides and Plato attribute the Greek emigration to the shortage of land.
The development of Greek colonization was accompanied by a tremendous rise, at least for that era, in Hellenic industry and commerce. This economic development of Greece inevitably brought about the commercial decline of Phoenicia. “In the past, the Phoenicians had landed their goods at the Greek anchorages and had exchanged them against native products—usually, it seems, cattle. Henceforward, the Greek mariners [10] would themselves go to Egypt, to Syria, to Asia Minor, and among the peoples of Europe, the civilized Etruscans, and the barbaric Scythians, Gauls, Ligurians, and Iberians, taking with them manufactured goods and works of art, tissues, weapons, jewelry and painted vases, which had a great reputation and were eagerly bought by all the barbarians.” [11] The period extending from the sixth to the fourth century appears to have been the era of the economic apogee of Greece. “The characteristic of this new period was that the professions had become more numerous, organized and specialized. The division of labor had been greatly developed.” [12] At the time of the Peloponnesian War, Hipponikos employed six hundred slaves and Nikias one thousand in the mines.
This important economic development of Greece has stimulated most bourgeois scholars to speak about a “Greek capitalism.” They go so far as to compare Hellenic industry and trade with the vast economic movement of the modern industrial era.
In reality, agriculture continued to be the economic foundation of Greece and its colonies. “The Greek colony was not a trading colony: it was practically invariably military and agricultural.” [13] Thus, Strabo relates apropos of Cumes, a Greek colony in Italy, that it was not until three hundred years after settling there that the inhabitants noticed that their city was located near the sea. The essentially agricultural character of the economic life of the Hellenic world is incontestable. Nor can there be any question of an industry comparable to modern industry. “The methods of production and of organization remained on the artisan level.” [14] Only the mines seem to have presented, at least insofar as labor power is concerned, a picture similar to that which we see at the present time.
The fact that despite their great expansion, industry and commerce remained for the most part in the hands of metics, of foreigners, proves best their relatively subordinate role in Greek economy. “In the immense trade of which Athens is the center, as well as in its industry the metics play a preponderant role.” [15] At Delos, the great commercial center, the inscriptions show that almost all the traders were foreigners. [16]
The Greek citizen despised trade and industry; he was primarily the landed proprietor. Aristotle, like Plato, was opposed to granting citizenship to merchants. [17]
It is therefore necessary to guard against exaggerating the importance of the industrial and commercial development of Greece. In fact, Greek expansion was primarily agricultural and military. It did, however, go hand in hand with an industrial and commercial development of considerable importance for its time. [18]
The Greeks never became a commercial people like the Phoenicians and the Jews; but we do find a very important commercial and industrial development in the Greek colonies and later in the Hellenic kingdoms. And, of course, the Greek states, while not really mercantile, supported commerce and industry with all their might as financial sources of the utmost importance.
It is not solely to the economic development of Greece and its colonies that we must attribute the decline of Phoenician commerce; there was still another important cause: the growing antagonism between Persia and Greece. Paralleling the extension of Hellenic civilization was the victorious march of the Persians across Asia. The Persian empire reached its apogee in the fifth century B.C. It extended over a part of Asia and over Egypt.
The parallel development of Greek and Persian civilization necessarily dealt a mortal blow to Phoenician commerce. Trade between Asia and Europe was certainly rendered very difficult by the division of the Mediterranean world between two mutually hostile societies. The Persian and Greek worlds each created its own commercial trade.
With the decline of Phoenicia and the development of Asiatic trade after the period of the Persian conquests, we can assume that Palestine, previously completely supplanted by Phoenicia again began to play an important commercial role. The passageway between Egypt and Babylonia recovered all its value. Whereas Phoenician trade lost more and more of its ancient importance up to the point where, in the time of Lucian, salted products were the main cargo, the Jews played a leading role in the Persian empire. [19]
Certain historians attribute an important role to the Babylonian exile in the transformation of the Jews into a commercial people. In Babylonia, “the Jews became transformed into a commercial people, such as we know them in the economic history of the world. They found highly developed economic relations among the Babylonians. Recently uncovered cuneiform texts show that the exiled Jews participated actively in commercial life. They were involved in credit business, highly developed among the Babylonians; they were also big traders.” [20]
But the dispersion of the Jews is certainly prior to the Babylonian exile. “There are serious reasons for conceding the existence of a pre-exile Diaspora.” [21] The scope of the Jewish exile under Nebuchadnezzar is very greatly exaggerated. Only a part of the ruling classes was hit by the measures of the Babylonian king. The majority of the Jews established in Palestine continued to live there. Consequently, if during the Persian epoch the Jews were to be found spread over all parts of that enormous empire (and the Book of Esther is very eloquent on this subject), it would be childish to view this fact as a consequence of the Babylonian exile, an exile which lasted altogether some fifty years. It is equally puerile to believe that the Jewish people returned to Palestine in the period of Ezra and Nehemiah. Their work was primarily of a religious character. It was a matter of rebuilding the temple and of reconstructing a religious metropolis for dispersed Judaism. “Most historians have considerably exaggerated the role of Palestinian Judaism in the Persian epoch. They reason as if Jerusalem, once restored, all the history of Israel became concentrated around the holy mountain; as if all the people had really returned from exile and had lived on a land measuring some few hundred square kilometers in Tekoa, Mitspa, and Jericho. In reality, in this epoch, the Jews of Judea represented only a part, and the smallest, of Judaism. And undoubtedly it was the least vital part.” [22]
The Edict of Cyrus is addressed to the Jews of the Diaspora in the following words: “And whosoever is left, in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help [those who are going to Palestine] with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, besides the freewill offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem” (Book of Ezra 1: 4). “And all they that were round about them,” continues the Book of Ezra (1: 6), “strengthened their hands [the 42,000 Jews who were returning to Palestine] with vessels of silver, with gold, with goods, and with beasts.” It is obvious that we are not dealing here with a mass return of the Jews to Palestine but primarily with the reconstruction of the temple.
During the Persian epoch the principal colonies of the Diaspora were situated in Mesopotamia, in Chaldea, and in Egypt. The documents which have been found at Elephantine in Egypt, dating from the fifth century before Christ, throw an interesting light on the condition of the Jewish colonies of the Diaspora in this epoch.
According to the archives belonging to a Jewish family, it appears that the “Jews engaged in trade, bought and sold houses and land, loaned money, acted as depositories, and were well versed in matters of law.” It is very interesting to note that even the songs and chronicles are in Aramaic, which shows that as early as the fifth century B.C. Hebrew was no longer a customary language for the Jews. [23] Aramaic was the great Asiatic language of the period, the commercial language.
The religion of the Jews of Elephantine was not as developed as the official religion codified during the Ezra-Nehemiah era. In a petition to the Persian governor, they asked for authorization to rebuild their temple. But the reform of Ezra-Nehemiah was aimed precisely at concentrating all the Jews of the Diaspora around the single temple of Jerusalem. And it was in fact to Jerusalem that the gifts of the Jews dispersed throughout the world continued to flow up to the year 70.
It was this wealth of the temple of Jerusalem that was probably the principal reason for the offensive of Antiochus against the Jews. “Simon advised him that the public treasury at Jerusalem was full of large sums and that there were enormous public riches.” (Second Book of the Maccabees, 111: 6). Later, on the little island of Cos, Mithridates confiscated eight hundred talents that were destined for the temple of Jerusalem. In the Roman era, Cicero complained in his speeches of the immense sums which were flowing into Jerusalem.
The Hellenistic period constitutes the epoch of the economic apogee of antiquity. The conquests of Alexander destroyed the barriers between the Hellenic world and Asia and Egypt. Cities sprang up like mushrooms in all parts of the Hellenic empire. The “greatest founders of cities, not alone of this epoch but even in all history, were Seleucos I and his son Antiochus I.” [24] The Hellenistic kings created new urban centers destined to supplant the old Phoenician and Persian cities. “On the coast of Syria, the port of Antioch causes the old cities of Tyre and Sidon to be forgotten.” [25] Seleucos creates Seleucia on the banks of the Tigris in order to rob Babylonia of its central role in world commerce. [26] This goal was completely attained.
Whereas Babylonia fell into decline, Hellenic Seleucia probably became the greatest city of this epoch. According to Pliny, it had six hundred thousand inhabitants. Alongside of Seleucia, Alexandria and Antioch became the centers of the Hellenistic world. All of these cities experienced an unchallenged prosperity during the Hellenistic period.
The situation of the Jews appears to have been further strengthened after the conquests of Alexander. “It appears that they were able to secure special privileges equally well, both from the Seleucidae and from the Lagidae. At Alexandria, to which they had been attracted by Ptolemy I and where they abounded, they formed a separate community which governed itself and was not subject to the jurisdiction of the Greek courts.” [27] “The Jews enjoyed a certain autonomy and a privileged position in Antioch, the capital of Syria. This was also true at Cyrene.” [28] The privileged position and the specific economic roles of the Jews had already become the source of serious conflicts with the population of the cities which they inhabited. Struggles broke out continuously in Alexandria, Seleucia, Cyrene, and Cyprus, as well as in the Palestinian cities. [29] These conflicts had nothing in common with present-day national antagonisms. On the contrary the Hellenistic empires witnessed a tremendous assimilation of their component peoples. The name Greek ceased after a while to be applied to the members of a particular nation but was assigned to the ruling and cultured sections of the population. Alexander ordered everybody, an ancient writer tells us, to consider the world as his fatherland, the well-to-do as his kin, and evildoers as foreigners.
The increased importance of Judaism in the commercial life of the Hellenistic world must also be attributed to the displacement of economic life toward the East. The prosperity of Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia offers a striking contrast to the poverty and decay into which Greece has fallen in the same period. Polybius repeatedly stresses the decline of Greek cities. Somewhat later, in the second century, “visitors could hardly believe that this city, where water was scarce, the streets badly laid out, the houses uncomfortable, was the famous Athens.” [30] Athens was shorn of its role as center of the civilized world. What contributed to the ruin of Greece, together with her economic decline, was the ceaseless class struggles [31], which by virtue of the backward mode of production, could bring about no important changes. The victory of the plebeian was ephemeral, the redistribution of wealth could only wind up in new social inequalities, breeding centers of new social conflicts. Thus the triumph of Greece, after the conquests of Alexander, proved illusory. The displacement of the economic center of the world toward the East, which followed the conquests, brought about the rapid decline of Greece. [32] The propertied and aristocratic classes, powerless before the plebeian revolts, had to seek support from Rome [33], but the latter could only answer by dealing the final blow to Greece as well as to Hellenism. The Romans threw themselves on the Hellenistic world as on a convenient prey to be pillaged and conquered. “Between 211 and 208, according to the assuredly very incomplete information which has come down to us, five ‘old cities of the Hellenes’ ... were sacked.” [34] Corinth, the rich commercial city was destroyed. “I was there,” recounts Polybius. “I saw pictures trampled under foot, and soldiers sitting on them while throwing dice.” Rome also dealt very harsh blows to Hellenism in Asia. [35] Under the combined blows of the Romans and the Parthians, the magnificent structure of Greece was destroyed.
* * *
B. Roman imperialism and its decline
In contrast to modern imperialism which is based essentially on the development of the productive forces, ancient imperialism was founded on the looting of conquered countries. For ancient imperialism it was not a question of opening new roads for its products and its capital; its objective was exclusively the despoiling of conquered countries. The backward state of production in antiquity could sustain the possessing classes of the conquering countries in luxury only by means of the more or less rapid ruination of the conquered peoples. Exhaustion of the conquered countries, growing difficulties in making new conquests, the gradual softening of the conquerors, all these sooner or later brought about the decline of ancient imperialisms.
Rome provides the classic example of ancient imperialism. There have been great exaggerations concerning the commercial and industrial development of Rome. Its trade always showed a deficit. [36] Rome drew exports from the provinces without giving anything back in return. [37] The Roman ruling classes heartily despised every kind of trade. The Claudian law forbade Senators, their sons, and the entire aristocracy of Rome to own ships drawing more than 300 amphoras, which corresponds to less than 225 bushels of grain or vegetables. This was equivalent to forbidding them to engage in trade. Caesar renewed this ban. Roman policy was never determined by its so-called commercial interests. The best proof of this is that Rome, after the defeat of Hannibal, still allowed the Carthaginians to bar entry into their sea. [38] “In general, it must be said that the Roman economic problems were unusually simple. The gradual conquest of Italy and the provinces more than occupied the surplusage of capital and population so that there was no crying need for industry and commerce,” states Tenney Frank. [39] The traders at Rome were as a rule foreigners and it is that moreover which explains the continuous growth in the Jewish colony at Rome from Caesar’s epoch on. Roman businessmen were not traders but usurers who looted the provinces. [40] The development of trade in the Roman empire must above all be ascribed to the growing luxury requirements of the ruling classes of Rome. Strabo explains the development of the great market of Delos in this fashion: “Hence arose a proverbial saying ‘Merchant come into port, discharge your freight—everything is sold.’ The Romans, having acquired wealth after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth, employed great numbers of domestic slaves.” [41]
The same was true of industry. Roman industry depended primarily on the luxury requirements of the aristocracy. “Tenney Frank, after observing that no appreciable progress was made in the domain of industry in the fourth century B.C., adds: ‘In the two succeeding centuries we do not find evidence of any marked change in the nature of production at Rome. Doubtless the amount of ordinary ware produced at home increased with the growth of the city ... but of goods worthy of export we do not hear. The only difference now is that work previously performed by free labor began in the second century to fall into the hands of slaves.’ ” [42]
Even those authors who consider that Italy had been a producer country in the republican epoch admit that it ceased to be one in the imperial period. “Italy becomes less and less a producer country .... Several industries which were prosperous at the end of the republican period are now in decline .... Thus trade between Italy and the Orient now takes place only in one direction, and it also becomes lodged more and more in the hands of Asiatics, of Alexandrians and Syrians.” [43]
Thus Italy now lived only on the exploitation of the provinces. Small property, the foundation of Roman strength, was progressively supplanted by vast domains serving the luxury needs of the Roman aristocrats and on which slave labor predominated. [44] Pliny’s conclusion is known to all: “Latfundia perdidere Italiam.”
The slave became more and more an item of luxury rather than a factor in production. [45] Horace, in one of his Satires, states that a minimum of ten slaves was the indispensable prerequisite of a gentleman. Thousands of slaves did in fact work in the vast latifundia. “In the domains of Tusculum and Tibur, on the shores of Terracina and Baiae—where the old Latin and Italian farmers had sown and reaped—there now rose in barren splendor the villas of the Roman nobles, some of which covered the space of a moderate-sized town with their appurtenances of garden grounds and aqueducts, fresh and salt water ponds for the preservation and breeding of river and marine fishes, nurseries of snails and slugs, game preserves for keeping hares, rabbits, stags, roes and wild boars, and aviaries in which even cranes and peacocks were kept.” [46]
At the same time that free labor was being eliminated by slave labor, Italy became an immense center of squandering the wealth drained from the entire empire. Crushing taxes ruined the provinces; “the frequent and costly naval armaments and coast defenses in order to check piracy; the task of supplying works of art, wild beasts, or other demands of the insane Roman luxury in circus, theater and the chase ... were just as frequent as they were oppressive and incalculable. A single instance may show how far things were carried. During the three years’ administration of Sicily by Gaius Verres, the number of farmers in Leontini fell from 84 to 32, in Motya from 187 to 86, in Herbita from 252 to 120, in Agyrium from 250 to 80, so that in four of the most fertile districts of Sicily, 59 percent of the landholders preferred to let their fields lie fallow rather than to cultivate them under this regime .... In the client states the forms of taxation were somewhat different, but the burdens themselves were if possible still worse, since in addition to the exactions of the Romans there came those of the native courts.” [47]
Roman capitalism, to the extent that the term capitalism is applicable here, was essentially speculative and bore no relationship whatever to the development of the productive forces. [48]
Roman trade and banking resembled organized brigandage. “But still worse if possible and still less subject to any control, was the havoc committed by the Italian men of business among the unhappy provincials. The most lucrative portions of the landed property and the whole commercial and monetary business in the provinces were concentrated in their hands .... Usury flourished as it had never flourished before .... ‘All the communities’ it is said in a treatise published in 684/70, ‘are ruined’; the same truth is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul, the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still in the most tolerable economic position. In Asia Minor, even towns like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which the free provincials succumbed and even the patient Asiatic had become, according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves, weary of life .... Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece and Asia.” [49]
Clearly this system of parasitism and brigandage could not last indefinitely. The source of wealth from which Rome drew dried up. Long before the fall of Rome we witness a steady slowing up of trade. The arena for pillage contracted in the measure that Rome emptied the conquered countries of their substance.
The fact that the production of grain, especially wheat, diminished, while the vine and olive tree conquered vast domains in the east and west, constituted an ominous token of the state of things. Luxury products displaced products which are indispensable for production and for reproduction of the labor force. “The spread of the culture of vines and olive trees ... not only meant economic ruin for Italy but might also result in a corn famine throughout the empire.” [50] Trajan vainly tried to ward off this danger by compelling Senators to buy land in Italy. His successors achieved as little. Luxury killed off production. “Soon superb buildings will leave no more land for the plough of the toiler,” Horace cried out.
By the third century, the decline in trade was complete. Relations with distant countries were cut off. “Practically no Roman coins of the third century have been found in India,” which proves a breakdown of exchange between Rome and India. [51] The decline of Egyptian agriculture became so pronounced in the third century that it was necessary to forego a part of the deliveries of grain from this formerly wealthy province. These Egyptian deliveries had to be replaced by grain supplies from the province of Africa (the Algeria and Tunisia of today). [52]
Commodius found it necessary to establish a flotilla for transporting the grain grown in the province of Africa. We have seen that trade in the Roman empire was primarily based on supplying the wealthy classes of Rome. Is there any wonder then that exhaustion of the provinces was followed by a decline in trade? More and more, Roman emperors were compelled to resort to requisitions in kind, which only resulted, however, in aggravating the lot of the suffering provinces. “The system of requisitions was rampant: corn, hides, wood for spears, and draught animals had to be delivered, and payment for them was irregular and indeed problematic” [53]
A purely natural economy, producing exclusively use values, slowly displaced the exchange of products. “Whereas the Roman peace had formerly brought about a regular exchange of goods and the equalizing of living conditions between the different regions of the empire, in the anarchy of the third century each country was often condemned to live upon itself, painfully and poorly.” [54]
An attempt has been made to explain the gradual displacement of slavery by the coloni system either as a result of the lack of energy on the part of landed proprietors or by a shortage of slaves caused by the termination of foreign wars. The gradual ruin of the colonies, the halt in the flow of their products, was probably the main reason. The great proprietors, more and more reduced to living on the products of their own lands, were interested in replacing slave labor, relatively low in productivity, by the coloni system, which resembles the system of serfdom that flourished in the Middle Ages. “The colonus owes his master everything that the serf will have to give his lord.” [55]
The power of the landed proprietors, who often possess enormous areas of land, kept growing continuously. In Egypt, in the fifth century the peasants will be completely subject to them. State administration passed entirely into their hands. [56]
It is therefore quite inaccurate to view the natural economy which flourished in the Carolingian epoch as an outgrowth of the fall of the Roman empire and the destruction of Mediterranean economic unity. [57]
Undoubtedly the barbarian invasions played a very important role in the decline of ancient trade and in the rise of feudal economy. But the economic decline of the Roman empire began long before the fall of Rome and several centuries before the Moslem invasion.
Another very important indication of the evolution toward a natural economy was the monetary change which had already begun under the reign of Nero. [58] Copper increasingly replaced gold and silver. In the second century, there was an almost complete dearth of gold. [59]
The development of a natural economy, of an economy primarily producing use values, was consequently far from being an “abnormal phenomenon” as Pirenne claims. The Roman empire was ruined economically before it was ruined politically. The political blow to the Roman empire was rendered possible only by its economic decline. The political anarchy of the third century, like the barbarian invasion, can be explained accurately and exclusively by the economic decline of the Roman empire.
To the extent that the provinces were ruined, an intensive exchange of goods ceased, and a return took place to a natural economy, to that same extent the very existence of the empire became a matter of indifference to the possessing classes. Each country, each province withdrew into its shell. The empire, with its immense administrative apparatus and its extremely costly army, became a cancer, a parasitic organism whose unbearable weight pressed down on all classes. Taxes devoured the substance of the peoples. Under Marcus Aurelius, when the soldiers after their great victories against the Marcomanni, demanded an increase in pay, the emperor made this significant reply: “Everything you would receive above your usual pay would first have to be drained from the blood of your relations.”
The Treasury was exhausted. In order to maintain the administrative apparatus and the army, it was necessary to confiscate individual fortunes. While the lower classes were in ceaseless revolt, the possessing classes were turning away from the empire, which was ruining them. After the economic ruin of the empire by the aristocracy, the aristocracy was in its turn mined by the empire. “Daily people could be seen who only yesterday were still among the wealthiest and today have to take up the beggar’s staff,” said Herodian. The soldiers grew more and more bestial. It was not greed alone which forced them to despoil the inhabitants; impoverishment of the provinces and the wretched state of transportation, which created difficulties in provisioning the armies, forced the soldiers to use violence in order to find their means of subsistence. Caracalla, in granting Roman citizenship to all Roman inhabitants, sought only to increase the taxable population. Irony of history: The whole world became Roman when Rome was no longer anything!
The exactions of the Roman administration and the excesses of the soldiery incited all the inhabitants of the empire to hope for its destruction. “The quartering of soldiers was a real disaster: the population of Syria regarded an occupation by the Parthians as a relief in comparison with a prolonged stay of Roman troops.” [60]
“The Roman government appeared every day ... more odious and oppressive to its subjects .... The severe inquisition, which confiscated their goods and tortured their persons, compelled the subjects of Valentinian to prefer the more simple tyranny of the Barbarians ... They abjured and abhorred the name of Roman citizen, which had formerly excited the ambitions of mankind.” [61] The Christian writer Salvian stated in De Gubernatione Dei: “Hence all the Romans in that region [Gaul and Spain] have but one desire, that they may never have to return to the Roman jurisdiction. Yet we are surprised that the Goths are not conquered by our resistance, when the Romans would rather live among them than at home ... I could find occasion to wonder why all the poor and needy taxpayers do not follow their example, except for one factor that hinders them, namely, that they cannot transfer their poor possessions and homes and their households.” [62]
Far from being an “abnormal” phenomenon, the barbarian invasion was the normal consequence of the economic and political decline of the empire. Even without the invasions, the empire would probably have been dismembered. “In Asia Minor, as well as in Syria, one of the leading features of life was the gradual reversion to the feudal system .... The so-called revolt of the Isaurians in Asia Minor is another symptom of the same tendency towards the formation of almost independent states within the empire.” [63] Similarly, the attempt to create an independent Gallo-Roman empire, the attempts at secession, prove how weak had become the bond of empire. The barbarians only gave the coup de grâce to the shaking edifice of the Roman state.
The fundamental cause for the decline of the Roman empire must be sought in the contradiction between the growing luxuriousness of the possessing classes, between the incessant growth of surplus value, and the static character of the mode of production. During the entire Roman epoch, very little progress was registered in the sphere of production. The tools of the cultivator retained their primitive form. “Plough, spade, hoe, mattock, pick, fork, scythe, sickle and pruning knife, were, as the surviving specimens show, just as they had been handed down from generation to generation.” [64] The growing luxury of the Roman aristocracy and the expenses of imperial administration were covered by a furious exploitation of the provinces, which had as its consequence economic ruin, depopulation, exhaustion of the soil. [65] Unlike the capitalist world, which must perish from the (relative) superabundance of means of production, the Roman world perished from their scarcity.
The reforms of Diocletian and of Constantine constituted an attempt to set the Roman empire on the foundations of a natural economy. “The State had now to be based on the country and the peasants.” [66] The peasant was now chained to his bit of land. Each landed proprietor became responsible for his domain and for the number of coloni who were established on it; the new tax was assessed on this basis. “The reform of taxation by Diocletian and the edicts of later emperors made the colonus a serf, bound to his domicile and to his master ....” [67] The same was true of the other layers of the population; small proprietors, artisans, merchants, all were chained to their living place and to their profession. The epoch of Constantine is the epoch of the unlimited rule of the great landed proprietors, undisputed masters of vast princely domains. The aristocracy more and more abandons the cities which fall into decay and flees to sumptuous country villas where it lives surrounded by its clients and its serfs.
The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine constituted attempts to adapt the empire to a natural economy. But we have seen that the empire had, on this basis, no reason for existence. Its various parts could be held together longer only by tyranny. Thus, if from the economic and social point of view, Constantine ushers in a new historical era, symbolized by the adoption of Christianity, from the political point of view, he opens the last act in the history of the Roman empire.
Continuation
* * *
Notes
1. “In the ordinary language of European science, ancient life is that which developed chiefly round the Mediterranean basin.” J.E Toutain, The Economic Life of the Ancient World (New York 1930), p. 1.
2. It was probably the commercial prosperity of Palestine which made it appear to the Israelites as a land of “milk and honey.” It is also probable that the Israelite invasion dealt a serious blow to Palestinian commerce. But with time the Israelites in their turn renewed the profitable relations with the countries of the Nile and the Euphrates.
3. Thus, from the very beginning, it was a specific geographic and historic situation which determined the commercial character of the Phoenicians and the Jews. It is obvious that only the proximity to centers of civilization equipped with a relatively important industry, only the closeness to countries already producing in part for exchange, could permit the development of such specifically commercial peoples as the Phoenicians and the Jews. It was alongside the first great centers of civilization that the first great commercial peoples developed.
4. F.K. Movers, Die Phönizier (Berlin 1856), vol. 2, p. 18.
5. “Even before the advent of the Israelites in Canaan, commerce was highly developed there. In the Tell-el-Amarna letters (fifteenth century B.C.) reference is made to caravans crossing the country under protective escort.” F. Bühl, Die Sozialen Verhältnisse der Israeliten (Berlin 1899), p. 76.
6. Movers, up. cit., vol. :2, pp. 19–20.
7. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 18.
8. “By their indefatigable commercial enthusiasm and their entrepreneur spirit, the Phoenicians acquired a name as a commercial people far exceeding that of any other people of antiquity. It was only later, during the Middle Ages, that this name, with all the invidious connotations attached to it, passed to their neighbors and commercial heirs, the Jews of the Diaspora.” Ibid., vol. 2, p. 26.
9. Toutain, op. cit., pp. 19–20.
10. These “Greek mariners” appear to have been mainly “metics,” foreigners who had established themselves in Greece. The commercial role of the Phoenicians had been tied up with the development of Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations; the rise of Hellenic civilization brought as a consequence the commercial prosperity of the metics.
11. Toutain, op. cit., p. 31.
12. Ibid., p. 53.
13. Johannes Hasebroek, Staat und Handel im Alten Griechenland (Tübingen l928), p. 112
14. Hasebroek, op. cit., p. 78. The production of use values remains the foundation of the economy. All that can be conceded is that production for exchange took on in Greece the maximum dimensions possible for the ancient mode of production.
15. Pierre Roussel, La Grèce et l’Orient (Paris 1928), p. 301. See also Michel Clerc, La Métèques Athéniens (Paris 1893), p. 397: “Maritime commerce was in effect largely in the hands of metics”; and Henri Francotte, L’industrie dans la Grèce Ancienne (Brussels 1900–1901), vol. l, p. 192: “This commerce [at Athens] appears to have been mainly in the hands of foreigners.”
16. Hasebroek, op. cit., p. 27. In the period of its prosperity; Athens contained 400,000 slaves; 20,000 citizens; and 30,000 metics.
17. “It is no more permissible to speak of the commercialization of the world than of its industrialization. The agrarian character of economy is predominant even in the fourth century B.C.” Hasebroek, op. cit., p. 101.
18. “Any analogy between the ports of ancient Greece and modern Genoa or Marseilles will provoke only skepticism or a smile. Nevertheless, the spectacle afforded by all this exchange, shipping, and coming and going of goods was then a new thing in the Mediterranean. It was quite different in intensity and in nature from that previously afforded by Phoenician trade, which had been mere sea-peddling rather than real business.” Toutain, op. cit., p. 65.
19. Charles Autran, Les Phéniciens (Paris 1920), p. 51.
20. Lujo Brentano, Das Wirtschaftsleben der Antiken Welt (Jena 1929), p. 80.
21. Antonin Causse, Les Dispersés d’Isräel (Paris 1929), p. 7.
22. Ibid., pp. 54–55.
23. Jüdisches Lexicon (Berlin 1927–30), vol. 2. Article on Elephantine, pp. 345–46.
24. Eduard Meyer, Blüte und Niedergang des Hellenismus in Asien (Berlin 1925), p. 20.
25. Roussel, op. cit., p. 486.
26. Meyer, op. cit., p. 22.
27. Roussel, op. cit., pp. 480–81.
28. Brentano, Das Wirtschaftsleben der Antiken Welt, op. cit., p. 78.
29. Meyer, op. cit., p. 61.
30. André Piganiol, La Conquête Romaine (Paris 1927), p. 205.
31. These class struggles were limited strictly to the free population of the Greek cities. “Some degree of equality in the possession of property appeared necessary to the maintenance of this political democracy. Therein lies the source of the bloody wars between the rich and the poor, the end-product of Hellenic demagogy. But the slaves, serfs, and metics took no part in these struggles ....” Claude Jannet, Les Grandes Époques de l’Histoire Économique (Paris 1896), p. 8.
32. “The Greek peninsula [in the Hellenistic period] thus increasingly lost its leading position and the economic center of the world was displaced toward the East.” K.J. Beloch, Griechische Geschichte (Berlin 1914–27), vol. 1, pp. 279–80.
33. See N.D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Boston 1874), p. 498.
34. Maurice Holleaux, Rome, la Grèce et les Monarchies Hellénistiques (Paris l921), p. 231.
35. Piganiol, op. cit., p. 232.
36. See Heinrich Cunow, Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Berlin 1926–31), vol. 2, p. 61.
37. Pirenne, A History of Europe, op. cit., p. 40. “Products flowed to the center without there being any compensating current backward.” Gustave Legaret, Histoire du Développement du Commerce (Paris 1927), p. 13.
38. Tenney Frank, An Economic History of Rome to the End of the Republic (Baltimore 1920), p. 116.
39. Ibid., p. 126.
40. Ibid., p. 283.
41. Strabo, Geography (London 1854 57), vol. 3, p. 51.
42. Toutain, op. cit., pp. 234–35. Toutain does not subscribe to this opinion.
43. Jean Hatzfeld, Les Trafiquants Italiens dans l’Orient Hellénistique (Paris 1919), pp. 190–91.
44. “The subject of the disappearance of the peasants was a common topic of discussion among the leading men of the Augustan period.” M. Rostovtzev, The Social and Economic History of the Roman empire (Oxford 1926), p. 65.
45. Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (New York 1925), p. 66.
46. Mommsen, The History of Rome, vol. 4, p. 478.
47. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 501.
48. Giuseppe Salvioli, Der Kapitalismus im Altertum (Stuttgart 1922), p. 206.
49. Mommsen, History of Rome, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 502–4.
50. Rostovtzev, op. cit., p. 188.
51. Ibid., p. 421.
52. Wilhelm Schubart, Aegypten von Alexander dem Grossen bis auf Mohammed (Berlin 1922), p. 67.
53. Rostovtzev, op. cit., p. 374.
54. Eugene Albertini, L’empire Romain (Paris 1929), p. 306.
55. Ernest Lavisse, Histoire Générale du IVe Siècle à Nos Jours (Paris 1893), vol. 1, p. 16.
56. Schubart, op. cit., p. 29. Very significant also is the gradual disappearance of the class of knights, the class of Roman “capitalists.”
57. “The demesnial organization, as it appeared from the ninth century on, is therefore the result of alien circumstances; nothing can be observed there in the nature of an organic transformation. This is equivalent to saying that it was an abnormal phenomenon.” Henri Pirenne, Les Villes au Moyen Age (Brussels 1927), p. 46. “The French empire was destined to lay the foundations of the Europe of the Middle Ages. But the mission which it fiilfilled had as an essential precondition the overthrow of the traditional world order; there would have been no summons to this task if historical evolution had not been turned aside from its normal course, if it had not been, so to speak, thrown off its axis by the Moslem invasion. Without Islam, the Frankish empire undoubtedly could never have existed and Charlemagne would be inconceivable without Mohammed.” Ibid., pp. 27–28. For Pirenne, feudal economy is therefore a result of the destruction of Mediterranean unity; produced primarily by the Mohammedan invasion.
58. Rostovtzev, op. cit., p. 171.
59. Salvioli, op. cit., p. 245.
60. Rostovtzev, op. cit., p. 375.
61. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman empire (New York: Heritage Press 1946), vol. 2, p. 1103.
62. Salvian, On the Government of God (New York 1930), p. 146.
63. Rostovtzev, op. cit., p. 425.
64. Toutain, op. cit., p. 282.
65. Certain authors see depopulation and exhaustion of the soil as the essential causes for the decline of the empire.
66. Rostovtzev, op. cit., p. 453.
67. Ibid., p. 472.
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<p class="title"> Castro Internet Archive </p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h3>Cuba's achievments and America's Wars<br>
</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"> <span class="info">Spoken: </span> Delivered at
the May Day rally held in Revolution Square. Havana, May 1, 2003<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/index.html"> Discursos e
Intervenciones del Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz</a> (cuba.cu) <br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Christian Liebl<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive
(marxists.org) 2003 </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p><font face="Arial">Distinguished guests;</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Dear fellow Cubans:</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Our heroic people have struggled for 44 years
from this small Caribbean island just a few miles away from the most
formidable imperial power ever known by mankind. In so doing, they have
written an unprecedented chapter in history. Never has the world
witnessed such an unequal fight.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Some may have believed that the rise of the
empire to the status of the sole superpower, with a military and
technological might with no balancing pole anywhere in the world, would
frighten or dishearten the Cuban people. Yet, today they have no choice
but to watch in amazement the enhanced courage of this valiant people.
On a day like today, this glorious international workers’ day, which
commemorates the death of the five martyrs of Chicago, I declare, on
behalf of the one million Cubans gathered here, that we will face up to
any threats, we will not yield to any pressures, and that we are
prepared to defend our homeland and our Revolution with ideas and with
weapons to our last drop of blood.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">What is Cuba’s sin? What honest person has any
reason to attack her?</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">With their own blood and the weapons seized from
the enemy, the Cuban people overthrew a cruel tyranny with 80,000 men
under arms, imposed by the U.S. government.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cuba was the first territory free from
imperialist domination in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the only
country in the hemisphere, throughout post-colonial history, where the
torturers, murderers and war criminals that took the lives of tens of
thousands of people were exemplarily punished. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">All of the country’s land was recovered and
turned over to the peasants and agricultural workers. The natural
resources, industries and basic services were placed in the hands of
their only true owner: the Cuban nation.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In less than 72 hours, fighting ceaselessly, day
and night, Cuba crushed the Bay of Pigs mercenary invasion organized by
a U.S. administration, thereby preventing a direct military intervention
by this country and a war of incalculable consequences. The Revolution
already had the Rebel Army, over 400,000 weapons and hundreds of
thousands of militia members.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In 1962, Cuba confronted with honor, and without
a single concession, the risk of being attacked with dozens of nuclear
weapons. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">It defeated the dirty war that spread throughout
the entire country, at a cost in human lives even greater than that of
the war of liberation.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">It stoically endured thousands of acts of
sabotage and terrorist attacks organized by the U.S. government. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">It thwarted hundreds of assassination plots
against the leaders of the Revolution. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">While under a rigorous blockade and economic
warfare that have lasted for almost half a century, Cuba was able to
eradicate in just one year the illiteracy that has still not been
overcome in the course of more than four decades by the rest of the
countries of Latin America, or the United States itself. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">It has brought free education to 100% of the
country’s children.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">It has the highest school retention rate –over
99% between kindergarten and ninth grade– of all of the nations in the
hemisphere.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Its elementary school students rank first
worldwide in the knowledge of their mother language and mathematics.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The country also ranks first worldwide with the
highest number of teachers per capita and the lowest number of students
per classroom.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">All children with physical or mental challenges
are enrolled in special schools. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Computer education and the use of audiovisual
methods now extend to all of the country’s children, adolescents and
youth, in both the cities and the countryside.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">For the first time in the world, all young people
between the ages of 17 and 30, who were previously neither in school nor
employed, have been given the opportunity to resume their studies while
receiving an allowance.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">All citizens have the possibility of undertaking
studies that will take them from kindergarten to a doctoral degree
without spending a penny.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Today, the country has 30 university graduates,
intellectuals and professional artists for every one there was before
the Revolution.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The average Cuban citizen today has at the very
least a ninth-grade level of education. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Not even functional illiteracy exists in Cuba.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">There are schools for the training of artists and
art instructors throughout all of the country’s provinces, where over
20,000 young people are currently studying and developing their talent
and vocation. Tens of thousands more are doing the same at vocational
schools, and many of these then go on to undertake professional studies.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">University campuses are progressively spreading
to all of the country’s municipalities. Never in any other part of the
world has such a colossal educational and cultural revolution taken
place as this that will turn Cuba, by far, into the country with the
highest degree of knowledge and culture in the world, faithful to
Martí’s profound conviction that "no freedom is possible without
culture."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Infant mortality has been reduced from 60 per
1000 live births to a rate that fluctuates between 6 and 6.5, which is
the lowest in the hemisphere, from the United States to Patagonia.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Life expectancy has increased by 15 years.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Infectious and contagious diseases like polio,
malaria, neonatal tetanus, diphtheria, measles, rubella, mumps, whooping
cough and dengue have been eradicated; others like tetanus,
meningococcal meningitis, hepatitis B, leprosy, hemophilus meningitis
and tuberculosis are fully controlled. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Today, in our country, people die of the same
causes as in the most highly developed countries: cardiovascular
diseases, cancer, accidents, and others, but with a much lower incidence.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">A profound revolution is underway to bring
medical services closer to the population, in order to facilitate access
to health care centers, save lives and alleviate suffering.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In-depth research is being carried out to break
the chain, mitigate or reduce to a minimum the problems that result from
genetic, prenatal or childbirth-related causes.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cuba is today the country with the highest number
of doctors per capita in the world, with almost twice as many as those
that follow closer.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Our scientific centers are working relentlessly
to find preventive or therapeutic solutions for the most serious
diseases.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cubans will have the best healthcare system in
the world, and will continue to receive all services absolutely free of
charge.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Social security covers 100% of the country’s
citizens.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In Cuba, 85% of the people own their homes and
they pay no property taxes on them whatsoever. The remaining 15% pay a
wholly symbolic rent, which is only 10% of their salary.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Illegal drug use involves a negligible percentage
of the population, and is being resolutely combated. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Lottery and other forms of gambling have been
banned since the first years of the Revolution to ensure that no one
pins their hopes of progress on luck.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">There is no commercial advertising on Cuban
television and radio or in our printed publications. Instead, these
feature public service announcements concerning health, education,
culture, physical education, sports, recreation, environmental
protection, and the fight against drugs, accidents and other social
problems. Our media educate, they do not poison or alienate. They do not
worship or exalt the values of decadent consumer societies.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Discrimination against women was eradicated, and
today women make up 64% of the country’s technical and scientific
workforce.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">From the earliest months of the Revolution, not a
single one of the forms of racial discrimination copied from the south
of the United States was left intact. In recent years, the Revolution
has been particularly striving to eliminate any lingering traces of the
poverty and lack of access to education that afflicted the descendants
of those who were enslaved for centuries, creating objective differences
that tended to be perpetuated. Soon, not even a shadow of the
consequences of that terrible injustice will remain.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">There is no cult of personality around any living
revolutionary, in the form of statues, official photographs, or the
names of streets or institutions. The leaders of this country are human
beings, not gods.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In our country there are no paramilitary forces
or death squads, nor has violence ever been used against the people.
There are no executions without due process and no torture. The people
have always massively supported the activities of the Revolution. This
rally today is proof of that.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Light years separate our society from what has
prevailed until today in the rest of the world. We cultivate brotherhood
and solidarity among individuals and peoples both in the country and
abroad.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The new generations and the entire people are
being educated about the need to protect the environment. The media are
used to build environmental awareness.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Our country steadfastly defends its cultural
identity, assimilating the best of other cultures while resolutely
combating everything that distorts, alienates and degrades. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The development of wholesome, non-professional
sports has raised our people to the highest ranks worldwide in medals
and honors.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Scientific research, at the service of our people
and all humanity, has increased several-hundredfold. As a result of
these efforts, important medications are saving lives in Cuba and other
countries.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cuba has never undertaken research or development
of a single biological weapon, because this would be in total
contradiction with the principles and philosophy underlying the
education of our scientific personnel, past and present. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In no other people has the spirit of
international solidarity become so deeply rooted.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Our country supported the Algerian patriots in
their struggle against French colonialism, at the cost of damaging
political and economic relations with such an important European country
as France.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">We sent weapons and troops to defend Algeria from
Moroccan expansionism, when the king of this country sought to take
control of the iron mines of Gara Djebilet, near the city of Tindouf, in
southwest Algeria.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">At the request of the Arab nation of Syria, a
full tank brigade stood guard between 1973 and 1975 alongside the Golan
Heights, when this territory was unjustly seized from that country.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The leader of the Republic of Congo when it first
achieved independence, Patrice Lumumba, who was harassed from abroad,
received our political support. When he was assassinated by the colonial
powers in January of 1961, we lent assistance to his followers.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Four years later, in 1965, Cuban blood was shed
in the western region of Lake Tanganyika, where Che Guevara and more
than 100 Cuban instructors supported the Congolese rebels who were
fighting against white mercenaries in the service of the man supported
by the West, that is, Mobutu whose 40 billion dollars, the same that he
stole, nobody knows what European banks they are kept in, or in whose
power.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The blood of Cuban instructors was shed while
training and supporting the combatants of the African Party for the
Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, who fought under the command of
Amilcar Cabral for the liberation of these former Portuguese colonies.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The same was true during the ten years that Cuba
supported Agostinho Neto’s MPLA in the struggle for the independence of
Angola. After independence was achieved, and over the course of 15
years, hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteers participated in
defending Angola from the attacks of racist South African troops that in
complicity with the United States, and using dirty war tactics, planted
millions of mines, wiped out entire villages, and murdered more than
half a million Angolan men, women and children.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In Cuito Cuanavale and on the Namibian border, to
the southwest of Angola, Angolan and Namibian forces together with
40,000 Cuban troops dealt the final blow to the South African troops.
This resulted in the immediate liberation of Namibia and speeded up the
end of apartheid by perhaps 20 to 25 years. At the time, the South
Africans had seven nuclear warheads that Israel had supplied to them or
helped them to produce, with the full knowledge and complicity of the
U.S. government. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Throughout the course of almost 15 years, Cuba
had a place of honor in its solidarity with the heroic people of Viet
Nam, caught up in a barbaric and brutal war with the United States. That
war killed four million Vietnamese, in addition to all those left
wounded and mutilated, not to mention the fact that the country was
inundated with chemical compounds that continue to cause incalculable
damage. The pretext: Viet Nam, a poor and underdeveloped country located
20,000 kilometers away, constituted a threat to the national security of
the United States.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cuban blood was shed together with that of
citizens of numerous Latin American countries, and together with the
Cuban and Latin American blood of Che Guevara, murdered on instructions
from U.S. agents in Bolivia, when he was wounded and being held prisoner
after his weapon had been rendered useless by a shot received in battle.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The blood of Cuban construction workers, that
were nearing completion of an international airport vital for the
economy of a tiny island fully dependent on tourism, was shed fighting
in defense of Grenada, invaded by the United States under cynical
pretexts. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cuban blood was shed in Nicaragua, when
instructors from our Armed Forces were training the brave Nicaraguan
soldiers confronting the dirty war organized and armed by the United
States against the Sandinista revolution.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">And there are even more examples.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Over 2000 heroic Cuban internationalist
combatants gave their lives fulfilling the sacred duty of supporting the
liberation struggles for the independence of other sister nations.
However, there is not one single Cuban property in any of those
countries. No other country in our era has exhibited such sincere and
selfless solidarity.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cuba has always preached by example. It has never
given in. It has never sold out the cause of another people. It has
never made concessions. It has never betrayed its principles. There must
be some reason why, just 48 hours ago, it was reelected by acclamation
in the United Nations Economic and Social Council to another three years
in the Commission on Human Rights, of which it has now been a member for
15 straight years.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">More than half a million Cubans have carried out
internationalist missions as combatants, as teachers, as technicians or
as doctors and health care workers. Tens of thousands of the latter have
provided their services and saved millions of lives over the course of
more than 40 years. There are currently 3000 specialists in
Comprehensive General Medicine and other healthcare personnel working in
the most isolated regions of 18 Third World countries. Through
preventive and therapeutic methods they save hundreds of thousands of
lives every year, and maintain or restore the health of millions of
people, without charging a penny for their services.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Without the Cuban doctors offered to the United
Nations in the event that the necessary funds are obtained –without
which entire nations and even whole regions of sub-Saharan Africa face
the risk of perishing– the crucial programs urgently needed to fight
AIDS would be impossible to carry out.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The developed capitalist world has created
abundant financial capital, but it has not in any way created the human
capital that the Third World desperately needs.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cuba has developed techniques to teach reading
and writing by radio, with accompanying texts now available in five
languages –Haitian Creole, Portuguese, French, English and Spanish– that
are already being used in numerous countries. It is nearing completion
of a similar program in Spanish, of exceptionally high quality, to teach
literacy by television. These are programs that were developed in Cuba
and are genuinely Cuban. We are not interested in patents and exclusive
copyrights. We are willing to offer them to all of the countries of the
Third World, where most of the world’s illiterates are concentrated,
without charging a penny. In five years, the 800 million illiterate
people in the world could be reduced by 80%, at a minimal cost. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">After the demise of the USSR and the socialist
bloc, nobody would have bet a dime on the survival of the Cuban
Revolution. The United States tightened the blockade. The Torricelli and
Helms-Burton Acts were adopted, both extraterritorial in nature. We
abruptly lost our main markets and supplies sources. The population’s
average calorie and protein consumption was reduced by almost half. But
our country withstood the pressures and even advanced considerably in
the social field. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Today, it has largely recovered with regard to
nutritional requirements and is rapidly progressing in other fields.
Even in these conditions, the work undertaken and the consciousness
built throughout the years succeeded in working miracles. Why have we
endured? Because the Revolution has always had, as it still does and
always will to an ever-greater degree, the support of the people, an
intelligent people, increasingly united, educated and combative.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Cuba was the first country to extend its
solidarity to the people of the United States on September 11, 2001. It
was also the first to warn of the neo-fascist nature of the policy that
the extreme right in the United States, which fraudulently came to power
in November of 2000, was planning to impose on the rest of the world.
This policy did not emerge as a response to the atrocious terrorist
attack perpetrated against the people of the United States by members of
a fanatical organization that had served other U.S. administrations in
the past. It was coldly and carefully conceived and developed, which
explains the country’s military build-up and enormous spending on
weapons at a time when the Cold War was already over, and long before
September 11, 2001. The fateful events of that day served as an ideal
pretext for the implementation of such policy.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">On September 20 of that year, President Bush
openly expressed this before a Congress shaken by the tragic events of
nine days earlier. Using bizarre terminology, he spoke of "infinite
justice" as the goal of a war that would apparently be infinite as well. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"Americans should not expect one battle, but a
lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"We will use every necessary weapon of war."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"Every nation, in every region, now has a
decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the
terrorists."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"I've called the Armed Forces to alert, and there
is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"This is civilization's fight."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"…the great achievement of our time, and the
great hope of every time --now depends on us."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"The course of this conflict is not known, yet
its outcome is certain … and we know that God is not neutral."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Did a statesman or an unbridled fanatic speak
these words?</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Two days later, on September 22, Cuba denounced
this speech as the blueprint for the idea of a global military
dictatorship imposed through brute force, without international laws or
institutions of any kind.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"The United Nations Organization, simply ignored
in the present crisis, would fail to have any authority or prerogative
whatsoever. There would be only one boss, only one judge, and only one
law."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Several months later, on the 200<sup>th</sup>
anniversary of West Point Military Academy, at the graduation exercise
for 958 cadets on June 3, 2002, President Bush further elaborated on
this line of thinking in a fiery harangue to the young soldiers
graduating that day, in which he put forward his fundamental fixed ideas:</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"Our security will require transforming the
military you will lead -- a military that must be ready to strike at a
moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will
require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready
for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend
our lives."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"We must uncover terror cells in 60 or more
countries…"</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"…we will send you, our soldiers, where you're
needed."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"We will not leave the safety of America and the
peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants. We
will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or
impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. … We are
in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its
name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a
problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In the speech I delivered at a rally held in
General Antonio Maceo Square in Santiago de Cuba, on June 8, 2002,
before half a million people of Santiago, I said:</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"As you can see, he doesn’t mention once in his
speech (at West Point) the United Nations Organization. Nor is there a
phrase about every people’s right to safety and peace, or about the need
for a world ruled by principles and norms."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"Hardly two thirds of a century has passed since
humanity went through the bitter experience of Nazism. Fear was Hitler’s
inseparable ally against his adversaries… Later, his fearful military
force [led to] the outbreak of a war that would inflame the whole world.
The lack of vision and the cowardice of the statesmen in the strongest
European powers of the time opened the way to a great tragedy.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"I don’t think that a fascist regime can be
established in the United States. Serious mistakes have been made and
injustices committed in the framework of its political system --many of
them still persist-- but the American people still have a number of
institutions and traditions, as well as educational, cultural and
ethical values that would hardly allow that to happen. The risk exists
in the international arena. The power and prerogatives of that country’s
president are so extensive, and the economic, technological and military
power network in that nation is so pervasive that due to circumstances
that fully escape the will of the American people, the world is coming
under the rule of Nazi concepts and methods."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">"The miserable insects that live in 60 or more
countries of the world chosen by him and his closest assistants --and in
the case of Cuba by his Miami friends-- are completely irrelevant. They
are the ‘dark corners of the world’ that may become the targets of their
unannounced and ‘preemptive’ attacks. Not only is Cuba one of those
countries, but it has also been included among those that sponsor
terror." </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">I mentioned the idea of a world tyranny for the
first time exactly one year, three months and 19 days before the attack
on Iraq.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In the days prior to the beginning of the war,
President Bush repeated once again that the United States would use, if
necessary, any means within its arsenal, in other words, nuclear
weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The attack on and occupation of Afghanistan had
already taken place.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Today the so-called "dissidents", actually
mercenaries on the payroll of the Bush’s Hitler-like government, are
betraying not only their homeland, but all of humanity as well.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In the face of the sinister plans against our
country on the part of the neo-fascist extreme right and its allies in
the Miami terrorist mob that ensured its victory through electoral
fraud, I wonder how many of those individuals with supposedly leftist
and humanistic stances who have attacked our people over the legal
measures we were forced to adopt as a legitimate defense against the
aggressive plans of the superpower, located just a few miles off our
coasts and with a military base on our own territory, have been able to
read these words. We wonder how many have recognized, denounced and
condemned the policy announced in the speeches by Mr. Bush that I have
quoted, which reveal a sinister Nazi-fascist international policy on the
part of the leader of the country with the most powerful military force
ever imagined, whose weapons could destroy the defenseless humanity ten
times over. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The entire world has been mobilized by the
terrifying images of cities destroyed and burned by brutal bombing,
images of maimed children and the shattered corpses of innocent people.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Leaving aside the blatantly opportunistic,
demagogic and petty political groups we know all too well, I am now
going to refer fundamentally to those who were friends of Cuba and
respected fighters in the struggle. We would not want those who have, in
our opinion, attacked Cuba unjustly, due to disinformation or a lack of
careful and profound analysis, to have to suffer the infinite sorrow
they will feel if one day our cities are destroyed and our children and
mothers, women and men, young and old, are torn apart by the bombs of
Nazi-fascism, and they realize that their declarations were shamelessly
manipulated by the aggressors to justify a military attack on Cuba.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Solely the numbers of children murdered and
mutilated cannot be the measure of the human damage but also the
millions of children and mothers, women and men, young and old, who
remain traumatized for the rest of their lives.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">We fully respect the opinions of those who oppose
capital punishment for religious, philosophical and humanitarian
reasons. We Cuban revolutionaries also abhor capital punishment, for
much more profound reasons than those addressed by the social sciences
with regard to crime, currently under study in our country. The day will
come when we can accede to the wishes, so nobly expressed here in his
brilliant speech by our beloved brother Reverend Lucius Walker, to
abolish such penalty. The special concern over this issue is easily
understood when you know that the majority of the people executed in the
United States are African American and Hispanic, and not infrequently
they are innocent, especially in Texas, the champion of death penalties,
where President Bush was formerly the governor, and not a single life
has ever been pardoned.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The Cuban Revolution was placed in the dilemma of
either protecting the lives of millions of Cubans by using the legally
established death penalty to punish the three main hijackers of a
passenger ferry or sitting back and doing nothing. The U.S. government,
which incites common criminals to assault boats or airplanes with
passengers on board, encourages these people gravely endangering the
lives of innocents and creating the ideal conditions for an attack on
Cuba. A wave of hijackings had been unleashed and was already in full
development; it had to be stopped.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">We cannot ever hesitate when it is a question of
protecting the lives of the sons and daughters of a people determined to
fight until the end, arresting the mercenaries who serve the aggressors
and applying the most severe sanctions, no matter how unpleasant it is
for us, against terrorists who hijack passenger boats or planes or
commit similarly serious acts, who will be punished by the courts in
accordance with the laws in force.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Not even Jesus Christ, who drove the traders out
of the temple with a whip, would fail to opt for the defense of the
people.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">I feel sincere and profound respect for His
Holiness Pope John Paul II. I understand and admire his noble struggle
for life and peace. Nobody opposed the war in Iraq as much and as
tenaciously as he did. I am absolutely certain that he would have never
counseled the Shiites and Sunni Muslims to let them be killed without
defending themselves. He would not counsel the Cubans to do such a
thing, either. He knows perfectly well that this is not a problem
between Cubans. This is a problem between the people of Cuba and the
government of the United States.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The policy of the U.S. government is so brazenly
provocative that on April 25, Mr. Kevin Whitaker, chief of the Cuban
Bureau at the State Department, informed the head of our Interests
Section in Washington that the National Security Council’s Department of
Homeland Security considered the continued hijackings from Cuba a
serious threat to the national security of the United States, and
requested that the Cuban government adopt all of the necessary measures
to prevent such acts. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">He said this as if they were not the ones who
provoke and encourage these hijackings, and as if we were not the ones
who adopt drastic measures to prevent them, in order to protect the
lives and safety of passengers, and being fully aware for some time now
of the criminal plans of the fascist extreme right against Cuba. When
news of this contact on the 25 was leaked, it stirred up the Miami
terrorist mob. They still do not understand that their direct or
indirect threats against Cuba do not frighten anyone in this country.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The hypocrisy of Western politicians and a large
group of mediocre leaders is so huge that it would not fit in the
Atlantic Ocean. Any measure that Cuba adopts for the purposes of its
legitimate defense is reported among the top stories in almost all of
the media. On the other hand, when we pointed out that during the term
in office of a Spanish head of government, dozens of ETA members were
executed without trial, without anyone protesting or denouncing it
before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, or that another
Spanish head of government, at a difficult moment in the war in Kosovo,
advised the U.S. president to step up the war, increase the bombing and
attack civilian targets, thus causing the deaths of hundreds of innocent
people and tremendous suffering for millions of people, the headlines
merely stated, "Castro attacks Felipe and Aznar". Not a word was said
about the real content.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">In Miami and Washington they are now discussing
where, how and when Cuba will be attacked or the problem of the
Revolution will be solved.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">For the moment, there is talk of economic
measures that will further intensify the brutal blockade, but they still
do not know which to choose, who they will resign themselves to
alienating, and how effective these measures may be. There are very few
left for them to choose from. They have already used up almost all of
them. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">A shameless scoundrel with the poorly chosen
first name Lincoln, and the last name Díaz-Balart, an intimate
friend and advisor of President Bush, has made this enigmatic statement
to a Miami TV station: "I can’t go into details, but we’re trying to
break this vicious cycle."</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">What methods are they considering to deal with
this vicious cycle? Physically eliminating me with the sophisticated
modern means they have developed, as Mr. Bush promised them in Texas
before the elections? Or attacking Cuba the way they attacked Iraq?</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">If it were the former, it does not worry me in
the least. The ideas for which I have fought all my life will not die,
and they will live on for a long time.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">If the solution were to attack Cuba like Iraq, I
would suffer greatly because of the cost in lives and the enormous
destruction it would bring on Cuba. But, it might turn out to be the
last of this Administration’s fascist attacks, because the struggle
would last a very long time. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The aggressors would not merely be facing an
army, but rather thousands of armies that would constantly reproduce
themselves and make the enemy pay such a high cost in casualties that it
would far exceed the cost in lives of its sons and daughters that the
American people would be willing to pay for the adventures and ideas of
President Bush. Today, he enjoys majority support, but it is dropping,
and tomorrow it could be reduced to zero.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The American people, the millions of highly
cultivated individuals who reason and think, their basic ethical
principles, the tens of millions of computers with which to communicate,
hundreds of times more than at the end of the Viet Nam war, will show
that you cannot fool all of the people, and perhaps not even part of the
people, all of the time. One day they will put a straightjacket on those
who need it before they manage to annihilate life on the planet.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">On behalf of the one million people gathered here
this May Day, I want to convey a message to the world and the American
people:</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">We do not want the blood of Cubans and Americans
to be shed in a war. We do not want a countless number of lives of
people who could be friends to be lost in an armed conflict. But never
has a people had such sacred things to defend, or such profound
convictions to fight for, to such a degree that they would rather be
obliterated from the face of the Earth than abandon the noble and
generous work for which so many generations of Cubans have paid the high
cost of the lives of many of their finest sons and daughters.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">We are sustained by the deepest conviction that
ideas are worth more than weapons, no matter how sophisticated and
powerful those weapons may be.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Let us say like Che Guevara when he bid us
farewell:</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Ever onward to victory!</font></p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer"> <a href="../../index.htm">Castro Internet Archive</a> </p>
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Castro Internet Archive
Cuba's achievments and America's Wars
Spoken: Delivered at
the May Day rally held in Revolution Square. Havana, May 1, 2003
Source: Discursos e
Intervenciones del Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz (cuba.cu)
Markup: Christian Liebl
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive
(marxists.org) 2003
Distinguished guests;
Dear fellow Cubans:
Our heroic people have struggled for 44 years
from this small Caribbean island just a few miles away from the most
formidable imperial power ever known by mankind. In so doing, they have
written an unprecedented chapter in history. Never has the world
witnessed such an unequal fight.
Some may have believed that the rise of the
empire to the status of the sole superpower, with a military and
technological might with no balancing pole anywhere in the world, would
frighten or dishearten the Cuban people. Yet, today they have no choice
but to watch in amazement the enhanced courage of this valiant people.
On a day like today, this glorious international workers’ day, which
commemorates the death of the five martyrs of Chicago, I declare, on
behalf of the one million Cubans gathered here, that we will face up to
any threats, we will not yield to any pressures, and that we are
prepared to defend our homeland and our Revolution with ideas and with
weapons to our last drop of blood.
What is Cuba’s sin? What honest person has any
reason to attack her?
With their own blood and the weapons seized from
the enemy, the Cuban people overthrew a cruel tyranny with 80,000 men
under arms, imposed by the U.S. government.
Cuba was the first territory free from
imperialist domination in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the only
country in the hemisphere, throughout post-colonial history, where the
torturers, murderers and war criminals that took the lives of tens of
thousands of people were exemplarily punished.
All of the country’s land was recovered and
turned over to the peasants and agricultural workers. The natural
resources, industries and basic services were placed in the hands of
their only true owner: the Cuban nation.
In less than 72 hours, fighting ceaselessly, day
and night, Cuba crushed the Bay of Pigs mercenary invasion organized by
a U.S. administration, thereby preventing a direct military intervention
by this country and a war of incalculable consequences. The Revolution
already had the Rebel Army, over 400,000 weapons and hundreds of
thousands of militia members.
In 1962, Cuba confronted with honor, and without
a single concession, the risk of being attacked with dozens of nuclear
weapons.
It defeated the dirty war that spread throughout
the entire country, at a cost in human lives even greater than that of
the war of liberation.
It stoically endured thousands of acts of
sabotage and terrorist attacks organized by the U.S. government.
It thwarted hundreds of assassination plots
against the leaders of the Revolution.
While under a rigorous blockade and economic
warfare that have lasted for almost half a century, Cuba was able to
eradicate in just one year the illiteracy that has still not been
overcome in the course of more than four decades by the rest of the
countries of Latin America, or the United States itself.
It has brought free education to 100% of the
country’s children.
It has the highest school retention rate –over
99% between kindergarten and ninth grade– of all of the nations in the
hemisphere.
Its elementary school students rank first
worldwide in the knowledge of their mother language and mathematics.
The country also ranks first worldwide with the
highest number of teachers per capita and the lowest number of students
per classroom.
All children with physical or mental challenges
are enrolled in special schools.
Computer education and the use of audiovisual
methods now extend to all of the country’s children, adolescents and
youth, in both the cities and the countryside.
For the first time in the world, all young people
between the ages of 17 and 30, who were previously neither in school nor
employed, have been given the opportunity to resume their studies while
receiving an allowance.
All citizens have the possibility of undertaking
studies that will take them from kindergarten to a doctoral degree
without spending a penny.
Today, the country has 30 university graduates,
intellectuals and professional artists for every one there was before
the Revolution.
The average Cuban citizen today has at the very
least a ninth-grade level of education.
Not even functional illiteracy exists in Cuba.
There are schools for the training of artists and
art instructors throughout all of the country’s provinces, where over
20,000 young people are currently studying and developing their talent
and vocation. Tens of thousands more are doing the same at vocational
schools, and many of these then go on to undertake professional studies.
University campuses are progressively spreading
to all of the country’s municipalities. Never in any other part of the
world has such a colossal educational and cultural revolution taken
place as this that will turn Cuba, by far, into the country with the
highest degree of knowledge and culture in the world, faithful to
Martí’s profound conviction that "no freedom is possible without
culture."
Infant mortality has been reduced from 60 per
1000 live births to a rate that fluctuates between 6 and 6.5, which is
the lowest in the hemisphere, from the United States to Patagonia.
Life expectancy has increased by 15 years.
Infectious and contagious diseases like polio,
malaria, neonatal tetanus, diphtheria, measles, rubella, mumps, whooping
cough and dengue have been eradicated; others like tetanus,
meningococcal meningitis, hepatitis B, leprosy, hemophilus meningitis
and tuberculosis are fully controlled.
Today, in our country, people die of the same
causes as in the most highly developed countries: cardiovascular
diseases, cancer, accidents, and others, but with a much lower incidence.
A profound revolution is underway to bring
medical services closer to the population, in order to facilitate access
to health care centers, save lives and alleviate suffering.
In-depth research is being carried out to break
the chain, mitigate or reduce to a minimum the problems that result from
genetic, prenatal or childbirth-related causes.
Cuba is today the country with the highest number
of doctors per capita in the world, with almost twice as many as those
that follow closer.
Our scientific centers are working relentlessly
to find preventive or therapeutic solutions for the most serious
diseases.
Cubans will have the best healthcare system in
the world, and will continue to receive all services absolutely free of
charge.
Social security covers 100% of the country’s
citizens.
In Cuba, 85% of the people own their homes and
they pay no property taxes on them whatsoever. The remaining 15% pay a
wholly symbolic rent, which is only 10% of their salary.
Illegal drug use involves a negligible percentage
of the population, and is being resolutely combated.
Lottery and other forms of gambling have been
banned since the first years of the Revolution to ensure that no one
pins their hopes of progress on luck.
There is no commercial advertising on Cuban
television and radio or in our printed publications. Instead, these
feature public service announcements concerning health, education,
culture, physical education, sports, recreation, environmental
protection, and the fight against drugs, accidents and other social
problems. Our media educate, they do not poison or alienate. They do not
worship or exalt the values of decadent consumer societies.
Discrimination against women was eradicated, and
today women make up 64% of the country’s technical and scientific
workforce.
From the earliest months of the Revolution, not a
single one of the forms of racial discrimination copied from the south
of the United States was left intact. In recent years, the Revolution
has been particularly striving to eliminate any lingering traces of the
poverty and lack of access to education that afflicted the descendants
of those who were enslaved for centuries, creating objective differences
that tended to be perpetuated. Soon, not even a shadow of the
consequences of that terrible injustice will remain.
There is no cult of personality around any living
revolutionary, in the form of statues, official photographs, or the
names of streets or institutions. The leaders of this country are human
beings, not gods.
In our country there are no paramilitary forces
or death squads, nor has violence ever been used against the people.
There are no executions without due process and no torture. The people
have always massively supported the activities of the Revolution. This
rally today is proof of that.
Light years separate our society from what has
prevailed until today in the rest of the world. We cultivate brotherhood
and solidarity among individuals and peoples both in the country and
abroad.
The new generations and the entire people are
being educated about the need to protect the environment. The media are
used to build environmental awareness.
Our country steadfastly defends its cultural
identity, assimilating the best of other cultures while resolutely
combating everything that distorts, alienates and degrades.
The development of wholesome, non-professional
sports has raised our people to the highest ranks worldwide in medals
and honors.
Scientific research, at the service of our people
and all humanity, has increased several-hundredfold. As a result of
these efforts, important medications are saving lives in Cuba and other
countries.
Cuba has never undertaken research or development
of a single biological weapon, because this would be in total
contradiction with the principles and philosophy underlying the
education of our scientific personnel, past and present.
In no other people has the spirit of
international solidarity become so deeply rooted.
Our country supported the Algerian patriots in
their struggle against French colonialism, at the cost of damaging
political and economic relations with such an important European country
as France.
We sent weapons and troops to defend Algeria from
Moroccan expansionism, when the king of this country sought to take
control of the iron mines of Gara Djebilet, near the city of Tindouf, in
southwest Algeria.
At the request of the Arab nation of Syria, a
full tank brigade stood guard between 1973 and 1975 alongside the Golan
Heights, when this territory was unjustly seized from that country.
The leader of the Republic of Congo when it first
achieved independence, Patrice Lumumba, who was harassed from abroad,
received our political support. When he was assassinated by the colonial
powers in January of 1961, we lent assistance to his followers.
Four years later, in 1965, Cuban blood was shed
in the western region of Lake Tanganyika, where Che Guevara and more
than 100 Cuban instructors supported the Congolese rebels who were
fighting against white mercenaries in the service of the man supported
by the West, that is, Mobutu whose 40 billion dollars, the same that he
stole, nobody knows what European banks they are kept in, or in whose
power.
The blood of Cuban instructors was shed while
training and supporting the combatants of the African Party for the
Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, who fought under the command of
Amilcar Cabral for the liberation of these former Portuguese colonies.
The same was true during the ten years that Cuba
supported Agostinho Neto’s MPLA in the struggle for the independence of
Angola. After independence was achieved, and over the course of 15
years, hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteers participated in
defending Angola from the attacks of racist South African troops that in
complicity with the United States, and using dirty war tactics, planted
millions of mines, wiped out entire villages, and murdered more than
half a million Angolan men, women and children.
In Cuito Cuanavale and on the Namibian border, to
the southwest of Angola, Angolan and Namibian forces together with
40,000 Cuban troops dealt the final blow to the South African troops.
This resulted in the immediate liberation of Namibia and speeded up the
end of apartheid by perhaps 20 to 25 years. At the time, the South
Africans had seven nuclear warheads that Israel had supplied to them or
helped them to produce, with the full knowledge and complicity of the
U.S. government.
Throughout the course of almost 15 years, Cuba
had a place of honor in its solidarity with the heroic people of Viet
Nam, caught up in a barbaric and brutal war with the United States. That
war killed four million Vietnamese, in addition to all those left
wounded and mutilated, not to mention the fact that the country was
inundated with chemical compounds that continue to cause incalculable
damage. The pretext: Viet Nam, a poor and underdeveloped country located
20,000 kilometers away, constituted a threat to the national security of
the United States.
Cuban blood was shed together with that of
citizens of numerous Latin American countries, and together with the
Cuban and Latin American blood of Che Guevara, murdered on instructions
from U.S. agents in Bolivia, when he was wounded and being held prisoner
after his weapon had been rendered useless by a shot received in battle.
The blood of Cuban construction workers, that
were nearing completion of an international airport vital for the
economy of a tiny island fully dependent on tourism, was shed fighting
in defense of Grenada, invaded by the United States under cynical
pretexts.
Cuban blood was shed in Nicaragua, when
instructors from our Armed Forces were training the brave Nicaraguan
soldiers confronting the dirty war organized and armed by the United
States against the Sandinista revolution.
And there are even more examples.
Over 2000 heroic Cuban internationalist
combatants gave their lives fulfilling the sacred duty of supporting the
liberation struggles for the independence of other sister nations.
However, there is not one single Cuban property in any of those
countries. No other country in our era has exhibited such sincere and
selfless solidarity.
Cuba has always preached by example. It has never
given in. It has never sold out the cause of another people. It has
never made concessions. It has never betrayed its principles. There must
be some reason why, just 48 hours ago, it was reelected by acclamation
in the United Nations Economic and Social Council to another three years
in the Commission on Human Rights, of which it has now been a member for
15 straight years.
More than half a million Cubans have carried out
internationalist missions as combatants, as teachers, as technicians or
as doctors and health care workers. Tens of thousands of the latter have
provided their services and saved millions of lives over the course of
more than 40 years. There are currently 3000 specialists in
Comprehensive General Medicine and other healthcare personnel working in
the most isolated regions of 18 Third World countries. Through
preventive and therapeutic methods they save hundreds of thousands of
lives every year, and maintain or restore the health of millions of
people, without charging a penny for their services.
Without the Cuban doctors offered to the United
Nations in the event that the necessary funds are obtained –without
which entire nations and even whole regions of sub-Saharan Africa face
the risk of perishing– the crucial programs urgently needed to fight
AIDS would be impossible to carry out.
The developed capitalist world has created
abundant financial capital, but it has not in any way created the human
capital that the Third World desperately needs.
Cuba has developed techniques to teach reading
and writing by radio, with accompanying texts now available in five
languages –Haitian Creole, Portuguese, French, English and Spanish– that
are already being used in numerous countries. It is nearing completion
of a similar program in Spanish, of exceptionally high quality, to teach
literacy by television. These are programs that were developed in Cuba
and are genuinely Cuban. We are not interested in patents and exclusive
copyrights. We are willing to offer them to all of the countries of the
Third World, where most of the world’s illiterates are concentrated,
without charging a penny. In five years, the 800 million illiterate
people in the world could be reduced by 80%, at a minimal cost.
After the demise of the USSR and the socialist
bloc, nobody would have bet a dime on the survival of the Cuban
Revolution. The United States tightened the blockade. The Torricelli and
Helms-Burton Acts were adopted, both extraterritorial in nature. We
abruptly lost our main markets and supplies sources. The population’s
average calorie and protein consumption was reduced by almost half. But
our country withstood the pressures and even advanced considerably in
the social field.
Today, it has largely recovered with regard to
nutritional requirements and is rapidly progressing in other fields.
Even in these conditions, the work undertaken and the consciousness
built throughout the years succeeded in working miracles. Why have we
endured? Because the Revolution has always had, as it still does and
always will to an ever-greater degree, the support of the people, an
intelligent people, increasingly united, educated and combative.
Cuba was the first country to extend its
solidarity to the people of the United States on September 11, 2001. It
was also the first to warn of the neo-fascist nature of the policy that
the extreme right in the United States, which fraudulently came to power
in November of 2000, was planning to impose on the rest of the world.
This policy did not emerge as a response to the atrocious terrorist
attack perpetrated against the people of the United States by members of
a fanatical organization that had served other U.S. administrations in
the past. It was coldly and carefully conceived and developed, which
explains the country’s military build-up and enormous spending on
weapons at a time when the Cold War was already over, and long before
September 11, 2001. The fateful events of that day served as an ideal
pretext for the implementation of such policy.
On September 20 of that year, President Bush
openly expressed this before a Congress shaken by the tragic events of
nine days earlier. Using bizarre terminology, he spoke of "infinite
justice" as the goal of a war that would apparently be infinite as well.
"Americans should not expect one battle, but a
lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen."
"We will use every necessary weapon of war."
"Every nation, in every region, now has a
decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the
terrorists."
"I've called the Armed Forces to alert, and there
is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act."
"This is civilization's fight."
"…the great achievement of our time, and the
great hope of every time --now depends on us."
"The course of this conflict is not known, yet
its outcome is certain … and we know that God is not neutral."
Did a statesman or an unbridled fanatic speak
these words?
Two days later, on September 22, Cuba denounced
this speech as the blueprint for the idea of a global military
dictatorship imposed through brute force, without international laws or
institutions of any kind.
"The United Nations Organization, simply ignored
in the present crisis, would fail to have any authority or prerogative
whatsoever. There would be only one boss, only one judge, and only one
law."
Several months later, on the 200th
anniversary of West Point Military Academy, at the graduation exercise
for 958 cadets on June 3, 2002, President Bush further elaborated on
this line of thinking in a fiery harangue to the young soldiers
graduating that day, in which he put forward his fundamental fixed ideas:
"Our security will require transforming the
military you will lead -- a military that must be ready to strike at a
moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will
require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready
for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend
our lives."
"We must uncover terror cells in 60 or more
countries…"
"…we will send you, our soldiers, where you're
needed."
"We will not leave the safety of America and the
peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants. We
will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world."
"Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or
impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. … We are
in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its
name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a
problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it."
In the speech I delivered at a rally held in
General Antonio Maceo Square in Santiago de Cuba, on June 8, 2002,
before half a million people of Santiago, I said:
"As you can see, he doesn’t mention once in his
speech (at West Point) the United Nations Organization. Nor is there a
phrase about every people’s right to safety and peace, or about the need
for a world ruled by principles and norms."
"Hardly two thirds of a century has passed since
humanity went through the bitter experience of Nazism. Fear was Hitler’s
inseparable ally against his adversaries… Later, his fearful military
force [led to] the outbreak of a war that would inflame the whole world.
The lack of vision and the cowardice of the statesmen in the strongest
European powers of the time opened the way to a great tragedy.
"I don’t think that a fascist regime can be
established in the United States. Serious mistakes have been made and
injustices committed in the framework of its political system --many of
them still persist-- but the American people still have a number of
institutions and traditions, as well as educational, cultural and
ethical values that would hardly allow that to happen. The risk exists
in the international arena. The power and prerogatives of that country’s
president are so extensive, and the economic, technological and military
power network in that nation is so pervasive that due to circumstances
that fully escape the will of the American people, the world is coming
under the rule of Nazi concepts and methods."
"The miserable insects that live in 60 or more
countries of the world chosen by him and his closest assistants --and in
the case of Cuba by his Miami friends-- are completely irrelevant. They
are the ‘dark corners of the world’ that may become the targets of their
unannounced and ‘preemptive’ attacks. Not only is Cuba one of those
countries, but it has also been included among those that sponsor
terror."
I mentioned the idea of a world tyranny for the
first time exactly one year, three months and 19 days before the attack
on Iraq.
In the days prior to the beginning of the war,
President Bush repeated once again that the United States would use, if
necessary, any means within its arsenal, in other words, nuclear
weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons.
The attack on and occupation of Afghanistan had
already taken place.
Today the so-called "dissidents", actually
mercenaries on the payroll of the Bush’s Hitler-like government, are
betraying not only their homeland, but all of humanity as well.
In the face of the sinister plans against our
country on the part of the neo-fascist extreme right and its allies in
the Miami terrorist mob that ensured its victory through electoral
fraud, I wonder how many of those individuals with supposedly leftist
and humanistic stances who have attacked our people over the legal
measures we were forced to adopt as a legitimate defense against the
aggressive plans of the superpower, located just a few miles off our
coasts and with a military base on our own territory, have been able to
read these words. We wonder how many have recognized, denounced and
condemned the policy announced in the speeches by Mr. Bush that I have
quoted, which reveal a sinister Nazi-fascist international policy on the
part of the leader of the country with the most powerful military force
ever imagined, whose weapons could destroy the defenseless humanity ten
times over.
The entire world has been mobilized by the
terrifying images of cities destroyed and burned by brutal bombing,
images of maimed children and the shattered corpses of innocent people.
Leaving aside the blatantly opportunistic,
demagogic and petty political groups we know all too well, I am now
going to refer fundamentally to those who were friends of Cuba and
respected fighters in the struggle. We would not want those who have, in
our opinion, attacked Cuba unjustly, due to disinformation or a lack of
careful and profound analysis, to have to suffer the infinite sorrow
they will feel if one day our cities are destroyed and our children and
mothers, women and men, young and old, are torn apart by the bombs of
Nazi-fascism, and they realize that their declarations were shamelessly
manipulated by the aggressors to justify a military attack on Cuba.
Solely the numbers of children murdered and
mutilated cannot be the measure of the human damage but also the
millions of children and mothers, women and men, young and old, who
remain traumatized for the rest of their lives.
We fully respect the opinions of those who oppose
capital punishment for religious, philosophical and humanitarian
reasons. We Cuban revolutionaries also abhor capital punishment, for
much more profound reasons than those addressed by the social sciences
with regard to crime, currently under study in our country. The day will
come when we can accede to the wishes, so nobly expressed here in his
brilliant speech by our beloved brother Reverend Lucius Walker, to
abolish such penalty. The special concern over this issue is easily
understood when you know that the majority of the people executed in the
United States are African American and Hispanic, and not infrequently
they are innocent, especially in Texas, the champion of death penalties,
where President Bush was formerly the governor, and not a single life
has ever been pardoned.
The Cuban Revolution was placed in the dilemma of
either protecting the lives of millions of Cubans by using the legally
established death penalty to punish the three main hijackers of a
passenger ferry or sitting back and doing nothing. The U.S. government,
which incites common criminals to assault boats or airplanes with
passengers on board, encourages these people gravely endangering the
lives of innocents and creating the ideal conditions for an attack on
Cuba. A wave of hijackings had been unleashed and was already in full
development; it had to be stopped.
We cannot ever hesitate when it is a question of
protecting the lives of the sons and daughters of a people determined to
fight until the end, arresting the mercenaries who serve the aggressors
and applying the most severe sanctions, no matter how unpleasant it is
for us, against terrorists who hijack passenger boats or planes or
commit similarly serious acts, who will be punished by the courts in
accordance with the laws in force.
Not even Jesus Christ, who drove the traders out
of the temple with a whip, would fail to opt for the defense of the
people.
I feel sincere and profound respect for His
Holiness Pope John Paul II. I understand and admire his noble struggle
for life and peace. Nobody opposed the war in Iraq as much and as
tenaciously as he did. I am absolutely certain that he would have never
counseled the Shiites and Sunni Muslims to let them be killed without
defending themselves. He would not counsel the Cubans to do such a
thing, either. He knows perfectly well that this is not a problem
between Cubans. This is a problem between the people of Cuba and the
government of the United States.
The policy of the U.S. government is so brazenly
provocative that on April 25, Mr. Kevin Whitaker, chief of the Cuban
Bureau at the State Department, informed the head of our Interests
Section in Washington that the National Security Council’s Department of
Homeland Security considered the continued hijackings from Cuba a
serious threat to the national security of the United States, and
requested that the Cuban government adopt all of the necessary measures
to prevent such acts.
He said this as if they were not the ones who
provoke and encourage these hijackings, and as if we were not the ones
who adopt drastic measures to prevent them, in order to protect the
lives and safety of passengers, and being fully aware for some time now
of the criminal plans of the fascist extreme right against Cuba. When
news of this contact on the 25 was leaked, it stirred up the Miami
terrorist mob. They still do not understand that their direct or
indirect threats against Cuba do not frighten anyone in this country.
The hypocrisy of Western politicians and a large
group of mediocre leaders is so huge that it would not fit in the
Atlantic Ocean. Any measure that Cuba adopts for the purposes of its
legitimate defense is reported among the top stories in almost all of
the media. On the other hand, when we pointed out that during the term
in office of a Spanish head of government, dozens of ETA members were
executed without trial, without anyone protesting or denouncing it
before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, or that another
Spanish head of government, at a difficult moment in the war in Kosovo,
advised the U.S. president to step up the war, increase the bombing and
attack civilian targets, thus causing the deaths of hundreds of innocent
people and tremendous suffering for millions of people, the headlines
merely stated, "Castro attacks Felipe and Aznar". Not a word was said
about the real content.
In Miami and Washington they are now discussing
where, how and when Cuba will be attacked or the problem of the
Revolution will be solved.
For the moment, there is talk of economic
measures that will further intensify the brutal blockade, but they still
do not know which to choose, who they will resign themselves to
alienating, and how effective these measures may be. There are very few
left for them to choose from. They have already used up almost all of
them.
A shameless scoundrel with the poorly chosen
first name Lincoln, and the last name Díaz-Balart, an intimate
friend and advisor of President Bush, has made this enigmatic statement
to a Miami TV station: "I can’t go into details, but we’re trying to
break this vicious cycle."
What methods are they considering to deal with
this vicious cycle? Physically eliminating me with the sophisticated
modern means they have developed, as Mr. Bush promised them in Texas
before the elections? Or attacking Cuba the way they attacked Iraq?
If it were the former, it does not worry me in
the least. The ideas for which I have fought all my life will not die,
and they will live on for a long time.
If the solution were to attack Cuba like Iraq, I
would suffer greatly because of the cost in lives and the enormous
destruction it would bring on Cuba. But, it might turn out to be the
last of this Administration’s fascist attacks, because the struggle
would last a very long time.
The aggressors would not merely be facing an
army, but rather thousands of armies that would constantly reproduce
themselves and make the enemy pay such a high cost in casualties that it
would far exceed the cost in lives of its sons and daughters that the
American people would be willing to pay for the adventures and ideas of
President Bush. Today, he enjoys majority support, but it is dropping,
and tomorrow it could be reduced to zero.
The American people, the millions of highly
cultivated individuals who reason and think, their basic ethical
principles, the tens of millions of computers with which to communicate,
hundreds of times more than at the end of the Viet Nam war, will show
that you cannot fool all of the people, and perhaps not even part of the
people, all of the time. One day they will put a straightjacket on those
who need it before they manage to annihilate life on the planet.
On behalf of the one million people gathered here
this May Day, I want to convey a message to the world and the American
people:
We do not want the blood of Cubans and Americans
to be shed in a war. We do not want a countless number of lives of
people who could be friends to be lost in an armed conflict. But never
has a people had such sacred things to defend, or such profound
convictions to fight for, to such a degree that they would rather be
obliterated from the face of the Earth than abandon the noble and
generous work for which so many generations of Cubans have paid the high
cost of the lives of many of their finest sons and daughters.
We are sustained by the deepest conviction that
ideas are worth more than weapons, no matter how sophisticated and
powerful those weapons may be.
Let us say like Che Guevara when he bid us
farewell:
Ever onward to victory!
Castro Internet Archive
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="sum_03.html">July/August 2003 • Vol 3, No. 7 •</a></b></font></p>
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<p align="CENTER"><font size="4"><font color="black" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5"><b>A Message to the Venezuelan President On Literacy</b></font></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font color="black" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">By Fidel Castro</font></p>
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<p>Dear President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Hugo Chávez Frías:</p>
<p>I have viewed with contempt and repugnance, the dirty campaign against your noble proposition to eradicate illiteracy in Venezuela.</p>
<p>The most employed pretext is the modest cooperation in this effort on the part of Cuba, which is being unmercifully attacked and slandered. Such cooperation is based fundamentally on details of a technical nature linked to the use of audiovisual methods in education, whose results are amazing.</p>
<p>Cuba was the first country in the hemispheres to eradicate illiteracy. It did so through the mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of students, teachers and other citizens with a certain education level. It took one year. The cost in terms of economics and human energy was high. Although its efficiency was satisfactory, it cannot compare with what you (the Venezuelan people) will achieve in just three months.</p>
<p>It is worthwhile recalling that Cuba’s literacy campaign was carried out when our countryside and mountains, where 30% of totally illiterate citizens lived, were being subjected to a dirty war unleashed on Cuba from abroad. Bandit groups killed teachers and literacy workers. In April of that same year, 1961, Playa Girón was invaded by a mercenary contingent brought to our country from Central America, and supported by U.S. aircraft, ready to intervene.</p>
<p>After repelling that attack, the first decision taken was not to halt the literacy campaign.</p>
<p>Despite actions against the Bolivarian Revolution that the whole world is aware of, I envy the peace and order that Venezuela is now enjoying after the events of April 11, 2002, and the serious and dangerous attempt to stop the process of change in December and January, and that will enable it to speedily promote the fast-track literacy program. Nothing could be more strategic.</p>
<p>Throughout history, ignorance has been the inseparable and essential ally of exploiters and oppressors.</p>
<p>Martí’s phrase; “To be educated is the only way to be free,” is more relevant than ever in our era, when deception and lies are the chosen weapons of those who pillage and enslave the peoples.</p>
<p>Cuba would never have been able to resist more than 40 years of blockade, aggression and death threats without education. This constitutes our invincible weapon. After the literacy campaign came the follow-up courses, similar to those that you are proposing.</p>
<p>Today we can proudly affirm that there is not one single illiterate person in Cuba, one single child without a school, anybody who cannot continue schooling up to ninth grade, and nobody in need of special education is unable to enroll in the pertinent institutions. Perhaps the most outstanding aspect is that today, university education is occurring all over the country in 169 municipalities, something that we could not even dream of when we began to make changes in our homeland.</p>
<p>How can we speak of freedom and democracy when millions of people are total or functional illiterates? What criteria and elements of judgment can we employ to analyze political programs and adopt decisions on vital questions whose essence and content are completely unknown?</p>
<p>The privileged persons and masters of the world vehemently wish for masses of illiterate and semi-illiterate people.</p>
<p>Those affirming that teaching reading and writing is to Cubanize Venezuelans are not offending Cuba; on the contrary, they are honoring it; as is the case with those who label as indoctrinators our selfless doctors battling to bring health care and life to many parts of the world, or our sports trainers. This is the equivalent of saying that to save a life or contribute to a young person obtaining a gold medal for his or her homeland is to Cubanize the Venezuelan people.</p>
<p>We should thank those stupid people for such a great honor.</p>
<p>I tell you, Hugo, with my hand on my heart, that Cubans are willing to give their lives for Venezuela, the Venezuela of Bolívar, Sucre and Simón Rodríguez.</p>
<p>I especially congratulate you, on a day like today, for the immense wisdom and courage to initiate the fight to bring million of men and women out of the darkness. In 10 or 15 years, Venezuela can reach what has taken Cuba 44 years to achieve. Your effort and its results will have an impact on the hemisphere and the world. Many other countries will imitate Venezuela’s example. It will be the best favor that you and Bolívar’s homeland can do to help the world.</p>
<p>As you like to do, recalling a giant of our America, I bid you farewell with a ¡Hasta la Victoria Siempre!</p>
<p>Fidel Castro</p>
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<p><i>—Granma</i>, June 23, 2003</p>
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July/August 2003 • Vol 3, No. 7 •
A Message to the Venezuelan President On Literacy
By Fidel Castro
Dear President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Hugo Chávez Frías:
I have viewed with contempt and repugnance, the dirty campaign against your noble proposition to eradicate illiteracy in Venezuela.
The most employed pretext is the modest cooperation in this effort on the part of Cuba, which is being unmercifully attacked and slandered. Such cooperation is based fundamentally on details of a technical nature linked to the use of audiovisual methods in education, whose results are amazing.
Cuba was the first country in the hemispheres to eradicate illiteracy. It did so through the mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of students, teachers and other citizens with a certain education level. It took one year. The cost in terms of economics and human energy was high. Although its efficiency was satisfactory, it cannot compare with what you (the Venezuelan people) will achieve in just three months.
It is worthwhile recalling that Cuba’s literacy campaign was carried out when our countryside and mountains, where 30% of totally illiterate citizens lived, were being subjected to a dirty war unleashed on Cuba from abroad. Bandit groups killed teachers and literacy workers. In April of that same year, 1961, Playa Girón was invaded by a mercenary contingent brought to our country from Central America, and supported by U.S. aircraft, ready to intervene.
After repelling that attack, the first decision taken was not to halt the literacy campaign.
Despite actions against the Bolivarian Revolution that the whole world is aware of, I envy the peace and order that Venezuela is now enjoying after the events of April 11, 2002, and the serious and dangerous attempt to stop the process of change in December and January, and that will enable it to speedily promote the fast-track literacy program. Nothing could be more strategic.
Throughout history, ignorance has been the inseparable and essential ally of exploiters and oppressors.
Martí’s phrase; “To be educated is the only way to be free,” is more relevant than ever in our era, when deception and lies are the chosen weapons of those who pillage and enslave the peoples.
Cuba would never have been able to resist more than 40 years of blockade, aggression and death threats without education. This constitutes our invincible weapon. After the literacy campaign came the follow-up courses, similar to those that you are proposing.
Today we can proudly affirm that there is not one single illiterate person in Cuba, one single child without a school, anybody who cannot continue schooling up to ninth grade, and nobody in need of special education is unable to enroll in the pertinent institutions. Perhaps the most outstanding aspect is that today, university education is occurring all over the country in 169 municipalities, something that we could not even dream of when we began to make changes in our homeland.
How can we speak of freedom and democracy when millions of people are total or functional illiterates? What criteria and elements of judgment can we employ to analyze political programs and adopt decisions on vital questions whose essence and content are completely unknown?
The privileged persons and masters of the world vehemently wish for masses of illiterate and semi-illiterate people.
Those affirming that teaching reading and writing is to Cubanize Venezuelans are not offending Cuba; on the contrary, they are honoring it; as is the case with those who label as indoctrinators our selfless doctors battling to bring health care and life to many parts of the world, or our sports trainers. This is the equivalent of saying that to save a life or contribute to a young person obtaining a gold medal for his or her homeland is to Cubanize the Venezuelan people.
We should thank those stupid people for such a great honor.
I tell you, Hugo, with my hand on my heart, that Cubans are willing to give their lives for Venezuela, the Venezuela of Bolívar, Sucre and Simón Rodríguez.
I especially congratulate you, on a day like today, for the immense wisdom and courage to initiate the fight to bring million of men and women out of the darkness. In 10 or 15 years, Venezuela can reach what has taken Cuba 44 years to achieve. Your effort and its results will have an impact on the hemisphere and the world. Many other countries will imitate Venezuela’s example. It will be the best favor that you and Bolívar’s homeland can do to help the world.
As you like to do, recalling a giant of our America, I bid you farewell with a ¡Hasta la Victoria Siempre!
Fidel Castro
—Granma, June 23, 2003
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<p class="title">Fidel Castro Internet Archive</p>
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<h1>Address by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz<br> at Céspedes Park in Santiago de Cuba, on the 1st of January of 1959</h1>
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<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> January 1, 1959
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<span class="info">Source:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version. Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado
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<span class="info">Markup:</span> David Walters, 2019
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<span class="info">Online Version:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
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<p class="fst">Compatriots of Cuba, all:</p>
<p>We have finally reached Santiago. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) The road has been long and tough, but we have arrived. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>It was being said that today at 2 o’clock in the afternoon we were being expected in the capital of the Republic and I was the first person to be amazed (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) because I was one of the first people to have been surprised by that traitorous and confabulated coup this morning in the capital of the Republic.</p>
<p>Furthermore, I was going to be in the capital of the Republic, I mean in the new capital of the Republic (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE), because Santiago de Cuba will be the capital, according to the wishes of the provisional president, according to the wishes of the Rebel Army and according to the wishes of the people of Santiago de Cuba who so highly deserve it. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) Santiago de Cuba will be the provisional capital of the Republic! (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Perhaps the measure is a surprise for some; it is a new measure, but for that reason the Revolution must be precisely characterized for doing things that have never been done before. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) When we make Santiago de Cuba the provisional capital of the Republic, we know why we are doing it. It isn’t a matter of flattering a certain town in demagogic fashion; it’s simply a matter of the fact that Santiago has been the most steadfast bastion of the Revolution. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The Revolution begins here and now. The Revolution won’t be an easy task. The Revolution will be a tough undertaking and full of dangers, especially during this initial period. What better place to establish the government of the Republic than in this fortress of the Revolution, (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) so that it may be known that this is going to be a government which is firmly backed by the people in the Heroic City and in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, because Santiago is in the Sierra Maestra. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) In Santiago de Cuba and in the Sierra Maestra, the Revolution will have its two greatest strengths. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>But there are others as well… (INTERRUPTION)…Naturally we have never… (INTERRUPTION) …refused any collaboration… (INTERRUPTION)… “Are you promising me that you won’t?” And he says: “I promise I won’t.” I say: “Do you swear you won’t?” And he told me: I swear I won’t” (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>I believe that the first thing a soldier should have is honor; the first thing a soldier must do is keep his word, and that man has not only demonstrated a lack of honor and a lack of keeping his word, he also lacks brains, because a movement could have been done right from the start, with the complete support of the people and with triumph assured right from the start, but what it did instead was to somersault into a vacuum. He thought it would be much too easy to fool the people and to fool the Revolution.</p>
<p>He knew something. He knew that when it was said that Batista had grabbed the plane, the people would throng into the streets, crazy with happiness, and they thought that the people were not mature enough to see the difference between Batista’s flight and the Revolution. Because if Batista leaves and Cantillos’ friends take possession of the tanks, it might very well happen that Dr. Urrutia would also have to leave within three months; because whatever betrays us now, will betray us later on, and the great truth is that Mr. Cantillo betrayed us before the Revolution. He demonstrated it very well and I am going to show it.</p>
<p>An agreement was struck with General Cantillo that the uprising would take place on the 31st at 3 in the afternoon. It was made clear that the armed forces would give their unconditional backing to the Revolutionary movement, the President who appointed the revolutionary leaders and the positions that were assigned to the military by the revolutionary leaders; what was offered, meant unconditional backing. The plan was agreed to in all its details: on the 31st, at 3 pm, the Santiago de Cuba Garrison would revolt. Immediately, several rebel columns would penetrate the city and the people would immediately fraternize with the soldiers and the rebels and a revolutionary proclamation would be launched in the country to invite all honorable soldiers to join the movement.</p>
<p>It was agreed that the tanks in the city would be placed at our disposition and I personally offered to move towards the capital with an armored column preceded by the tanks. The tanks would be handed over to me at 3 pm, not because it was believed that we would have to fight, but to be forewarned in case the movement would fail in Havana and we would have to position our vanguard as close as possible to the capital. Besides, it was also to foresee that no excessive events would be taking place in Havana.</p>
<p>It was logical that with all the hatred aroused there with the public force, because of the indescribable horrors committed by Ventura and Pilar Garcia, Batista’s fall was going to produce disorganization among the citizenry and that, moreover, those police were going to feel like they had no moral force to contain the people; and effectively that’s just how it took place. A series of excessive occurrences took place in the capital such as looting, shooting and fires. All the responsibility for that falls on the shoulders of Gen. Cantillo since he had betrayed his word and because he hadn’t followed the plan that had been agreed. He thought that he could solve the problem by appointing police captains and chiefs, many of whom had already left by the time he appointed them, proof of the fact that their consciences were not so clear.</p>
<p>Of course how different it all was in Santiago de Cuba. What great order and civic mindedness! What great discipline the people demonstrated! Not one single case of looting, not one single case of personal vengeance, not one single man dragged through the streets, not one single fire was set. Santiago de Cuba’s behavior has been admirable and exemplary, in spite of two things. In spite of the fact that this has been a city that had suffered the most and had seen the most terror, thereby having more right to feeling outraged, (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) and also in spite of our declarations this morning saying that we were not agreeing to the coup.</p>
<p>Santiago de Cuba’s behavior was very exemplary and I think that this is a reason for which the people of Santiago de Cuba, the revolutionaries and the military in the Plaza de Santiago de Cuba can feel very proud. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) And it cannot be said that the Revolution is anarchical and disorganized; that happened in Havana, due to a treacherous act, but it didn’t happen in Santiago de Cuba and we can set it up as a model whenever they try to accuse the Revolution of being anarchy and disorder. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>It’s a good idea for the people to know about the communications between Gen. Cantillo and myself, if the people are not too tired, (SHOUTING AND CRIES OF “No!”) I can read the letter.</p>
<p>After the agreements made, when we had already suspended our operations on Santiago de Cuba, because on the 28th our troops were by then very close to the city and we had carried out all the preparations for the attack on the Plaza in accordance with the interview we had had, we had to undergo a series of changes, to abandon the operations on Santiago de Cuba and to direct our troops towards other locations where we presumed that the movement had not been assured right from the very start. When all our movements had been made and the columns were prepared to march on the capital, I got this note from General Cantillo, a few hours before; it stated verbatim:</p>
<p>“Circumstances have changed considerably in a sense that is favorable for a national solution”… in the sense that he wanted for Cuba. It was odd because after analyzing the factors we had on hand, the circumstances couldn’t have been more favorable. Triumph was assured and so it was odd that he would say: Circumstances have produced very favorable changes.” They were the circumstances agreed to by Batista and Tabernilla, circumstances ensuring the coup.</p>
<p>“I recommend that you do nothing right now and wait for events during the next few weeks, prior to the 6th.” Of course, it was the indefinitely prolonged truce, while they were getting all the conditions ready in Havana.</p>
<p>My immediate answer was: “The contents of the note are completely different from the agreements made; it is ambiguous and we cannot understand it and it has made me lose my confidence in the seriousness of the agreements. Hostilities cease as of 3 pm tomorrow, that being the day and the time agreed by the Movement.”</p>
<p>And then a very strange thing occurred. Besides that very brief note, I also sent a message to the chief at Plaza de Santiago de Cuba via the same messenger, saying that if hostilities were ceasing because the agreement terms were not being fulfilled and we were being forced to attack Plaza de Santiago de Cuba, then there would be no other solution other than for the Plaza to surrender, that we would demand that the Plaza surrenders if hostilities ceased and the attack was initiated by us. But as it happened, the messenger did not correctly interpret my words and he told Col. Rego Rubido that I had said that I was demanding the surrender of the Plaza as a condition for any agreement. He didn’t say what I had declared to him about the attack being initiated, but not that I had presented Gen. Cantillo with the condition that the Plaza should surrender.</p>
<p>As a result of the message, the Colonel in Chief of the Plaza de Santiago de Cuba sent me a very conceptual and honorable letter which I will also read. Naturally he was offended by that proposal that had been presented to him erroneously and he said: “The solution found is not a coup d’état or military junta and, nevertheless, we think that is the best thing for Dr. Fidel Castro in accordance with his ideas and it would put the fate of the nation into his hands in 48 hours. It is not a local solution but a national one and any advance indiscretion could compromise it or destroy it and create chaos. We would like you to trust our dealings and you will have the solution before the 6th.”</p>
<p>“As for Santiago, because of the note and the messenger’s words, we have to change the plan and not enter; those words have caused ill will amongst the staff…and we shall never hand over the weapons without a fight. Weapons are not surrendered to an ally and they are not handed over without honor”… lovely phrasing from the chief of the Plaza de Santiago de Cuba.</p>
<p>“If you do not trust us or if you attack Santiago, the agreements will be considered as broken and the dealings for the offered solution will be paralyzed; we shall formally relinquish all commitments. Due to the time needed to act in one way or another, we hope the answer arrives in time so that it can be sent to Havana in the afternoon.”</p>
<p>I responded to that note written by Colonel José Rego Rubido as follows:</p>
<p>"Free Territory of Cuba, 31 December 1958</p>
<p>"Sir:</p>
<p>"An unfortunate error has occurred in the transmission of my words to you, perhaps due to the haste with which I answered your note and the hurried nature of the conversation I had with the messenger. I did not tell him that the condition we proposed in the agreements made was the surrender of Plaza de Santiago de Cuba to our forces; that would have been a discourtesy to our visitor and an unworthy and offensive proposal for the soldiers who have approached us in such a fraternal manner.</p>
<p>“The matter is quite something else. An agreement had been reached and a plan was adopted between the leader of the military movement and ourselves; it was to start being effective on the 31st at 3 pm. Even the details were agreed after carefully analyzing the problems that had to be dealt with; we would start with the removal of the Santiago de Cuba Garrison, I persuaded the general…of the advantages of starting in Oriente and not at Columbia, in order to largely spare the people from any coup at the barracks in the capital of the Republic and how difficult it was going to be in that case to associate the citizenry with the Movement. He fully went along with my points of view, he was only concerned about order in the capital and we agreed to measures that would avert danger. The measure was precisely the advance of our column on Santiago de Cuba. It was a matter of a united action between the military, the people and us, a type of revolutionary movement that from the very beginning would have the trust of the entire nation.</p>
<p>“Immediately, and in accordance with what we had put together, we suspended the operations that were being undertaken and we took on the task of carrying out new movements of forces towards other points such as Holguín where the presence of well-known henchmen was making resistance to the revolutionary military movement an almost sure thing.</p>
<p>“When all our preparations were ready, I received the note yesterday, where I was informed that the agreed action would not be carried out. It seemed there were different plans but I was not informed what they were or why. Indeed the matter was now not our business, we simply had to wait. Everything changed unilaterally and our forces were placed at risk; according to what had been assured, they would have been sent to undertake difficult operations; we were subjected to threats, to all kinds of imponderable elements… (INTERRUPTION) …any risk of the general…in his frequent trips to Havana would militarily become a disaster for us. You can recognize that right now everything is very confusing and that Batista is a skillful and crafty individual who knows how to manoeuver. Any risk… (INTERRUPTION) …How could they ask us to forego all the advantages obtained in the last few weeks of operations, to have us wait patiently for events to happen?</p>
<p>“I clearly stated that it couldn’t be an action with just the military, for that reason we really didn’t have to await the horrors of two years of warfare. To have our hands tied at a decisive moment is not something we can be asked to do, we who have not rested in our fight against oppression for the last seven years.</p>
<p>“Even though you intend to hand over power to the revolutionaries, it is not power per se that interests us; what interests us is that the Revolution fulfills its destiny. I am even concerned that the military, because of an unjustified excess of scruples, would facilitate the flight of the important guilty parties who would go abroad with their great fortunes to make all kinds of trouble for our homeland from over there.</p>
<p>“I can personally add that power holds no interest for me, nor do I intend to occupy it; I shall only be vigilant that the sacrifices of so many compatriots are not wasted, whatever my subsequent fate may be. I hope that these honorable reasons which I explain to you, with all respect for your dignity as a soldier, are understood. You may rest assured that you are dealing with neither an ambitious nor an insolent man…”</p>
<p>Stop the tanks for me over there, please. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>ANNOUNCER- Please keep those tanks quiet. Please; it is an order of the Commander in Chief that you silence the tanks and stop them right there so that the people can go on listening to the words of the supreme leader of the Cuban Revolution, Dr. Fidel Castro. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>DR. FIDEL CASTRO- When we finish our declarations and the proclamation of the provisional president, the tanks will render honors to the Civil Power of the Republic, parading in front of our balconies. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>He continued to read the letter of the 31st, written by the Colonel in Chief of the Plaza de Santiago de Cuba.</p>
<p>"I can personally add that power holds no interest for me, nor do I intend to occupy it. I shall only be vigilant that the sacrifices of so many compatriots are not wasted, whatever my subsequent fate may be. I hope that these honorable reasons which I explain to you, with all respect for your dignity as a soldier, are understood. You may rest assured that you are dealing with neither an ambitious nor an insolent man…</p>
<p>"I have always acted with loyalty and frankness in everything I do; one can never call something that has been achieved with deceitfulness and deception a triumph; the language of honor, which you understand, is the only language I know how to speak.</p>
<p>"The word “surrender” was never mentioned at the meeting with the general; what I said yesterday and what I reiterate today is that as of 3:00 pm of the 31st, the date and time we agreed upon, we could not prolong the truce in regards to Santiago de Cuba because it would be extraordinarily detrimental to our union… (INTERRUPTION)…Never a conspiracy…Last night the rumor reached us here that the general…had been arrested in Havana, that several youths had turned up murdered in the Santiago de Cuba Cemetery. I had the feeling that we had miserably wasted our time, even though fortunately today it appears to be proven that the general…can be found at his post; what need do we have to run such risks?</p>
<p>“What I told the messenger in terms of surrender, which was not transmitted literally and seemed to motivate the words of his note today, was as follows: ‘if hostilities were broken because of noncompliance with the agreed terms, we would see ourselves forced to attack Plaza de Santiago de Cuba, something that is inevitable given the manner in which we have directed our efforts in the last few months, in which case, once the operation was initiated, we would demand the surrender of the forces defending it’. This does not mean that we think they will surrender without a fight because I know, even without a reason to fight, Cuban soldiers defend their positions with stubbornness and it has cost us many lives. I only wanted to say that after the blood of our men has been spilt to conquer an objective, any other solution could not be acceptable, since even though it is a steep price for us to pay, given the current conditions of the forces defending the regime which were unable to provide backing for that city, the city would inexorably fall into our hands. That has been the basic objective of all of our operations during the past few months and a plan of this magnitude cannot be suspended for some weeks without serious consequences, in the case that the military movement is thwarted, losing, moreover, the opportune moment, which is this one, when the dictatorship is suffering huge setbacks in the Oriente and La Villas provinces.</p>
<p>“We are placed in the dilemma of giving up the advantages of our victory or attacking, a sure triumph in exchange for a probable triumph. Do you think that with yesterday’s note, so ambiguous and laconic a note, containing a unilateral decision, I could incur in the responsibility of keeping the plans suspended? As a military man, you can surely recognize that we are being asked the impossible. You have not for one moment stopped digging trenches; those trenches can be used against us by Pedraza, Pilar García, or Cañizares, if the general…is relieved of his command and along with him his trusted men. We cannot be asked to stand idly by; see how… (INTERRUPTION)…even though they bravely defend their weapons, we are left with no other option than to attack, because we also have very sacred obligations to fulfill.</p>
<p>“More than allies, I wish that we and your honorable soldiers could be comrades in one single cause, the cause of Cuba. Above all else I wish that you and your comrades don’t get the erroneous idea that my attitude and my feelings, that (INTERRUPTION)… they are mistaken for…(INTERRUPTION)… I respect the tacit ceasefire in the zone of Santiago de Cuba, to avoid any doubts, I ratify that even though at any minute before combat starts we can take up operations again; as of today, it should be taken under consideration that the attack is going to happen at any time and for no reason whatsoever shall we suspend our plans again, since our … (INTERRUPTION) …may sow the seeds of confusion among the people and harm the morale of our combatants.</p>
<p>“Sincerely,</p>
<p>"Fidel Castro Ruz" (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Col. Rego answered me with an honorable letter which is also worthy of honor and it sreads as follows:</p>
<p>"Sir:</p>
<p>"I received your kind letter dated today and please believe me when I say that I deeply thank you for the clarification on the previous note, even though I should tell you that I always thought that it was a matter of poor interpretation since over time I have observed your style of behavior and I am convinced that you are a man of principle.</p>
<p>“I didn’t know about the details of the original plan since I was only informed about the part that affected me, nor do I know anything about some of the small details of the current plan. I would guess that in part you are right when you analyze the original plan; but I think that we still need a few days to see its consummation and we would never be able to avoid that many of the guilty individuals, the big, medium and small guilty individuals, would escape.</p>
<p>“I am one of those who think that it is absolutely necessary to provide an example in Cuba for those who, taking advantage of their positions of power, commit all kinds of punishable acts. But unfortunately history is infested with similar cases and very rarely the guilty parties have been placed at the disposition of the competent authorities, because very rarely do revolutions do what has to be done… (INTERRUPTION)…</p>
<p>I perfectly comprehend your concerns in this case, although I, bearing less of the historical responsibility, rather accept it.</p>
<p>“As for the unilateral actions of which you speak, I repeat to you that…in both cases I was only informed of the part affecting me, considering that what happened was that the general…rendered the idea of what you wanted according to his norms and principles, thereby acting accordingly.</p>
<p>"I have no reason to suppose that anybody is trying to abet the flight of the guilty person and, personally, I am opposed to such a thing,” said Col.Rego Rubido (APPLAUSE) — "but in case this should happen, the historic responsibility for such occurrences would fall on the shoulders of those making it possible and never on the others.</p>
<p>"I sincerely believe that everything should take place in harmony with your ideas and that, in general, it is…inspired by the best wishes for Cuba’s welfare and that of the Revolution you are starting.</p>
<p>"I learned about a young dead student found in the cemetery and just today I made sure that exhaustive investigations would be carried out in order to determine who was the killer and under what circumstances it occurred, just as in days past I placed the suspected persons responsible for the event at the disposition of the corresponding judicial authorities.</p>
<p>"Finally I must inform you that I sent a dispatch to the general about a plane to send him your letter full of ideas, and don’t get impatient; maybe before the date set as the maximum limit, you will be in Havana.</p>
<p>"When the general left, I asked him to leave me the helicopter with the pilot if it should occur to you to take a trip on Sunday afternoon over Santiago. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>"Well, Doctor, please receive assurances of my highest consideration and my fervent wish for a happy New Year.</p>
<p>"Signed: Colonel Rego Rubido" (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Talks were at this stage when the chief of Plaza Santiago de Cuba, Colonel Rego, and I were surprised by the coup at Columbia which was completely out of the range of the agreements. And the first thing that was done, the most criminal thing that was done, was to let Batista get away, along with Tabernilla and the major guilty parties. (APPLAUSE) They were allowed to escape with their millions of pesos; they were allowed to escape with the 300 or 400 million pesos that they had stolen. It’s going to cost us a lot, because now from Santo Domingo and other countries they are going to be creating propaganda against the Revolution, cooking up everything they can to hurt our cause; and we are going to have them there, threatening our people, putting us into a constant state of alertness because they are going to be paying for and cooking up conspiracies against us. (SHOUTING)</p>
<p>As soon as we heard about the coup, what did we do? As soon as we learned about it on Radio Progresso. And even at that time, guessing what they were cooking up, I was making some declarations when I found out that Batista had fled to Santo Domingo. And I thought: could this be a mistake? And I sent someone to find out about it when I hear that, effectively, Mr. Batista and his posse have escaped, and the loveliest thing about it was that Gen. Cantillo was saying that the movement had happened thanks to Batista’s patriotic proposals. Batista’s patriotic proposals! That he resigned in order to avoid a bloodbath. What do you think about that? (SHOUTING)</p>
<p>And there is still more. For you to have some idea about the kind of coup that was prepared; it’s enough to say that they had appointed Pedraza as a member of the Junta and he left. (SHOUTING) I don’t think we need to add anything else to see what intentions the perpetrators of the coup had. And they didn’t appoint President Urrutia, the man proclaimed as the president by the Movement and by all the revolutionary organizations. (APPLAUSE) They called up a man who is nothing but the oldest man among all the Supreme Court judges, and they are all quite old, especially a man who has been Presiding Judge, until today, of the Supreme Court, where there was no justice whatsoever.</p>
<p>What was the result of all that going to be? A half-baked revolution, a shady deal, the caricature of a revolution. That Mr. Perico de los Palotes, it’s the same whatever you call him, whatever you call this Mr. Piedra who, by now, if he hasn’t resigned should be preparing himself for us to make him resign when we get to Havana. (APPLAUSE) I don’t think he’s going to last 24 hours. He’ll break a record. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Appointing this man, really nice: Cantillo, a national hero, the champion of Cuban liberties, the lord and master of Cuba, and that Mr. Piedra over there. Quite simply we would have overthrown one dictator and installed another one. By all accounts, the Columbia Movement was a counter-revolutionary movement; by all accounts it was far from the peoples’ proposal; by all accounts it was suspicious and immediately Mr. Piedra said he was going to convoke the rebels and a peace commission. And we would calmly dispose of our weapons, leaving everything and we would go there to show respect to Mr. Piedra and Mr. Cantillo.</p>
<p>It was clear that both Cantillo and Piedra were living on another planet. They were somewhere on the moon because I think that the Cuban people have learned a lot and we, the rebels have learned something.</p>
<p>That was the state of affairs this morning; it isn’t the same situation as it was during the night because a lot has changed. (APPLAUSE) Faced with this event, faced with this treachery, we ordered all rebel commanders to continue with their military operations and to continue marching to their objectives; consequently we immediately ordered all the columns destined for the Santiago de Cuba operation to advance to the city.</p>
<p>I want you all to know that our forces had very seriously decided to take Santiago de Cuba by storm. That would have been very unfortunate because it would have cost a lot of blood and tonight would not have been such a night of joy as it is, nor would there have been peace like we have now, nor would there have been such a spirit of fraternity as we have now. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>I must confess that if no bloody battle was waged in Santiago de Cuba this is due to a great degree to the patriotic attitude of Army Colonel José Rego Rubido (APPLAUSE); to the commanders of the frigates "Máximo Gómez" and "Maceo", to the chief of the Santiago de Cuba Naval District (APPLAUSE) and to the officer who was in charge of police headquarters (APPLAUSE). All of them, and that’s exactly what we are acknowledging and grateful for here, contributed in avoiding a bloody battle and they turned the counterrevolutionary movement that morning into a revolutionary movement this afternoon.</p>
<p>We were left with no other alternative than to attack because we couldn’t allow the Columbia coup to consolidate and so we had to attack without delay. And when the troops were already moving out towards their objectives, Col. Rego went out in the helicopter to find me; the frigate commanders got in touch with us and unconditionally followed the orders of the Revolution. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>By that time, counting on the support of the two frigates which have great fire power, with the support of the naval district and with the support of the police, I called for a meeting of all army officers at Plaza Santiago de Cuba, over 100 of them. When I invited them to meet with me, I told those soldiers that I didn’t have the slightest concern about talking with them because I knew I was right; because I knew they would understand my arguments and that an agreement would come out of this meeting. In fact, by nightfall, early that night, we met at El Escandel, almost all the army officers in Santiago de Cuba, many of them young men who look like they are eager to fight for the good of their country.</p>
<p>I assembled those soldiers and I told them about our revolutionary feeling; I talked to them about the aim for our country; I talked to them about what we wanted for the country, what our conduct with the military had always been, about all the harm the tyranny had done to the army and about how it wasn’t fair they should think of themselves as being the same as all soldiers, that the criminals were only an insignificant minority and that there were many honorable soldiers in the army, and that I know how they hate crime, abuses and injustice.</p>
<p>It wasn’t easy for the soldiers to develop a determinate type of action; it was logical since the higher ranks in the army were in Tabernilla’s hands, in the hands of Pilar García, in the hands of Batista’s family and his unconditional followers, and that the army was overrun with a great sense of terror. Once couldn’t expect any isolated officer to shoulder the responsibility.</p>
<p>There were two types of soldiers, and we know about them very well: soldiers like Sosa Blanco, Cañizares, Sánchez Mosquera, Chaviano (SHOUTING), who are characterized by crime and the point blank murders of unfortunate peasants. But there were soldiers who were very honorable in their campaign; there were soldiers who never killed anyone or burned down any houses, such as Major Quevedo who was our prisoner after putting up heroic resistance at the battle of El Jigüe, and who today is still a major in the army (APPLAUSE). There was Major Sierra, and many other soldiers who never burned down any houses. Those soldiers were never promoted. It was the criminals who were promoted because Batista always made sure he rewarded crime. For example we have the case of Col. Rego Rubido who doesn’t owe any of his stripes to the dictatorship; he was already a colonel when the events of the 10th of March occurred. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>It is quite true that I asked for the support of the army officers at Santiago de Cuba and that the army officers of Santiago de Cuba gave their unconditional support to the Cuban Revolution. (APPLAUSE) Bringing together the officers of the navy, the police and the army, we were able to bring down the coup rigged up in Columbia and to support the legal government of the republic, because it had the majority of our people, which is Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó. Thanks to such an attitude we were able to avoid a lot of bloodshed; thanks to that attitude we have given birth to the truth, on this afternoon today, to a true revolutionary military movement.</p>
<p>I understand that among the people there are many justified passions; I understand our people’s yearning for justice and we must have justice. (APPLAUSE) But I would like to ask our people here…we are at a time when we must consolidate power, first and foremost. And nobody would be against that! Because the army and the armed forces are among those who most want to see that the guilt of a few is not paid by the entire corps, and that it shouldn’t be shameful to wear a uniform; that the guilty should be punished so that the innocent do not have to bear the load of disrepute. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Trust us! That’s what we are asking of the people because we know how to do our duty. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>In those circumstances, this afternoon a true revolutionary movement of the people took place, a revolutionary movement of the military and of the rebels, in the city of Santiago de Cuba. The enthusiasm of the military is indescribable! And here are all the army officers! There are the tanks at the beck and call of the Revolution! There is all the artillery at the beck and call of the Revolution! There are the frigates at the beck and call of the Revolution! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>I am not going to say that the Revolution has people; that cannot be said because everyone knows it. I was saying that people, who had shotguns before, now have artillery, tanks and frigates and there are many trained technicians in the army who are going to help us handle them. (APPLAUSE) Now it is really the people who are armed! I can assure you that when we only numbered 12 men, all on our own, we didn’t lose hope; now that we have 12 tanks over there, how are we going to lose hope?</p>
<p>I would like to clear up that today, tonight, during the dawn hours, because it is almost morning, that illustrious magistrate Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó shall take possession of the Presidency of the Republic. (APPLAUSE) Does Dr.Urrutia have the support of the people or not? (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTING) Because I mean that the President of the Republic, the legal president, that is what counts for the people and that man is Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó.</p>
<p>Who wants Mr. Piedra to be the president? (BOOING) If nobody wants Mr. Piedra as president, why are we going to be saddled with Mr. Piedra? (BOOING)</p>
<p>If that is the command of the people of Santiago de Cuba, which is the sentiment of all the people of Cuba, as soon as this function ends I will be marching with the veteran troops from the Sierra Maestra, the tanks and the artillery, towards the capital, so that the will of the people is fulfilled. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Here we stand, very simply, at the command of the people. What is legal at this moment is the mandate of the people; the president is elected by the people and not by a coterie at Columbia at 4 o’clock in the morning (APPLAUSE). None of the positions, none of the ranks that have been awarded by the Military Junta during the small hours of this morning have any validity whatsoever; all the appointments for army positions are null and void; I refer to all those appointments made this morning. Whoever accepts a position designated by the Junta will be a traitor this morning, they will be assuming a counterrevolutionary stand, call it what you will, and consequently they will be outlaws.</p>
<p>I am completely sure that all the military positions in the Republic will have accepted the provisions of the President of the Republic. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The President will immediately proceed to appoint the chiefs of the army, navy and police. For his excellent service afforded at this time to the Revolution and for having places thousands of his men at the disposition of the Revolution, we recommend Col. Rego Rubido as the Chief of the aArmy; he is a man…(APPLAUSE) Likewise, as Chief of the Navy we will appoint one of the two commanders of the frigate that was the first one to join the Revolution (APPLAUSE) and I have recommended to the President of the Republic that he designate Major Efigenio Ameijeiras as the head of the National Police Force; he has lost two brothers, he was one of the members of the Granma expeditionary force and he is one of the most capable men in the revolutionary army. (APPLAUSE) Ameijeiras is conducting operations in Guantánamo but he will soon be with us here. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>I only ask for time for us and for the Civil Power of the Republic in order to carry out things as the people ask, but little by little. (SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE SAYS SOMETHING) I am just asking one thing of the people, and that is to be calm (FROM THE AUDIENCE SOMEONE SAYS: “Oriente federal, Oriente capital!”) No, no! The republic must be united above all else. What you have to ask for is justice for Oriente. (APPLAUSE) In short, time is an important factor. The Revolution cannot…rest assured that the revolution will do it; rest assured that for the very first time the Republic will be entirely free, and the people will have…(APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Power has not been the result of politics; it has been the result of the sacrifice of hundreds and thousands of our comrades. There is no other commitment with the people and with the Cuban nation. A man has come to power who has no commitments with anybody, only with the people, exclusively. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Che Guevara received orders to advance on the non-provisional capital of the Republic and Major Camilo Cienfuegos, Chief of the Antonio Maceo Column 2 has received orders to march on greater Havana and to assume the command of the military headquarters of Columbia. Simply, the orders of the President of the Republic and the mandate of the Revolution will be followed. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Don’t blame us for the excesses that were committed in Havana; we were not in Havana. Blame Gen. Cantillos for the disturbances occurring in Havana and the individuals who put together the dawn coup; they thought they were going to dominate the situation over there. (APPLAUSE) In Santiago de Cuba, where a true revolution occurred, there has been complete law and order; in Santiago de Cuba the people have united, the military and the revolutionaries are together, and that is indestructible. The head of the government, the head of the army and the head of the navy will be in Santiago de Cuba; their orders must be fulfilled by all the command posts in the Republic. We would hope that all honorable soldiers bide by these provisions because soldiers, above all else, are at the service of the law and of authority, not constituted authority, because often this is a poorly constituted authority, but authority which has been legally constituted.</p>
<p>No honorable soldier has anything to fear from the Revolution. Here in this struggle there are no vanquished persons, because only the people have been the victors. (APPLAUSE) Some have fallen on one side and some on the other side, but we have all come together to give the nation its victory. We have given the fraternal embrace, the good soldiers and the revolutionaries. (APPLAUSE) Now there will be no more blood spilt; I hope that no nucleus will put up any resistance because besides being useless resistance, it would be resistance that would be crushed in a few moments, it would be resistance against the law and against the Republic, and against all the sentiment of the Cuban nation. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>It has been necessary to organize today’s Movement so that no other war will take place in the next six months. What happened during the machadato? Well, one of Machado’s generals staged a coup and removed Machado and a president was installed that lasted for 15 days; the sergeants arrived and said that those officers were responsible for the Machado dictatorship and that they didn’t respect them, revolutionary effervescence grew and they kicked out the officers. Now that couldn’t happen in this way; now these officers are backed by the people, and they have the backing of the troops and they have the prestige which is given them after they have joined the true revolutionary movement. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>These soldiers will be respected and well-regarded by the people and we won’t have to use force and we won’t have to go on the streets armed with guns, inspiring fear in everyone; because true law and order is that which is based on freedom, on respect for justice, and not on force. From now on the people shall be completely free and the people will know how to behave correctly, just as they have demonstrated today. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The peace our country needs has been achieved; Santiago de Cuba has moved on to freedom, without having to spill any blood. That’s why there is so much joy and that’s why the soldiers who disregarded and disapproved of the coup at Columbia so that they could unconditionally join the Revolution deserve our recognition, our gratitude and our respect. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The armed institutions of the Republic will be model institutions in the future, due to their capacity, their education and the way they identify with the cause of the people because from now on, rifles will only be at the service of the people. There will be no more coups d’état, no more wars because we have looked after that so that the same thing that happened with Machado happens here and now. Those gentlemen who would like to have the occurrence at dawn resemble the Machado case… that time they installed Carlos Manuel and now they have installed another Carlos Manuel. (BOOS)</p>
<p>What we won’t have this time is a Batista, because we don’t need another 4th of September that destroyed the discipline of the armed forces, because what happened with Batista was that he installed indiscipline here in the army, because his policy consisted of praising the parties in order to diminish the authority of the officers. Officers will have authority; there will be discipline in the army, there will be a military criminal code where the crimes against human rights and against honor will be duly punished and there will be an obligatory sense of morals for every soldier. (APPLAUSE) There will be no privileges for anyone; soldiers with capacity and merit will be promoted, not the relatives or friends, something that went on until today when the ladder of ascension had not been respected.</p>
<p>All of those mandatory obligations will cease for soldiers and for all workers; for workers union dues will cease (APPLAUSE) and for soldiers it’s the “peso for the First Lady” that will disappear; two pesos here and two pesos there, and so the entire salary disappears.</p>
<p>Naturally the people have everything to expect from us, and they shall receive it. But I have talked to the military so that they also know they will receive everything from the Revolution, all the improvements they never had because when the state budget is not being pilfered the military will be much better off than they are today. Soldiers won’t have to serve as police; soldiers will be at their training sessions, in their barracks and they won’t have to act as a police force. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>(SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE SAYS SOMETHING) Nothing about microwaves, although I’d like to clarify that at this moment the rebels have microwaves, because we need them, but the microwaves now do not come with the henchmen, none of that, no murderers, no more screeching brakes in front of your homes and no more midnight knocks at the door. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>I am sure that just as soon as the President of the Republic takes office he will decree the reestablishing of guarantees, and the absolute freedom of the press and all individual rights in the country (APPLAUSE), all labor union rights and all the rights and demands of our peasants and our people. We shall not forget our peasants in the Sierra Maestra and in Santiago de Cuba. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) We won’t go to live in Havana and forget about all of you; where I want to live is in the Sierra Maestra. At least, in the part that belongs to me, because of my very deep feelings of gratitude; I shall not forget those peasants and as soon as I have some free time I will go to see where we will put up the first school-city that can hold 20,000 children. (APPLAUSE) and we will set it up with the help of the people; the rebels are going to work there and we are going to ask every citizen for a bag of cement and one steel rod and I know we will get the help of our citizens.</p>
<p>We shall never forget any sector of our country (SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE SAYS: Viva Crescencio Pérez!) Long live Crescencio Pérez who lost a child in the days after the war!</p>
<p>The country’s economy will be immediately reestablished. This year we will be the ones to look after the sugar cane so that it doesn’t burn, so that this year the sugar tax won’t serve to buy murdering weapons and bombs, and the planes to bomb our people. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We will look after communications and now, from Jiguaní to Palma Soriano, telephone lines have been reestablished and the rail lines have been reestablished. There will be a sugar cane harvest throughout the country and there will be good salaries because I know that that is the goal of the President of the Republic. And there will be good prices because, precisely, the fears of there not being a sugar harvest raised the prices in the world market; and the peasants can get their coffee out and the ranchers can sell their fat cows in Havana because fortunately the triumph has arrived in good time so that there won’t be any sort of disaster.</p>
<p>It is not my place to speak of these things. You all know we are men who keep our word and that we fulfill our promises and we like to promise less than we can deliver, not more, but less than what we are going to deliver and to do more of what we offer to the people of Cuba. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We don’t think that all the problems are going to get solved easily; we know that the road is strewn with obstacles, but we are men of faith and that we always face great difficulties. (APPALUSE); the people maybe sure of one thing and that is that we may make mistakes over and over, but the only thing they can never say about us is that we steal, that we betray, that we are involved in dirty business. And I know the people will forgive the mistakes but won’t forgive the scoundrels. And those individuals we have had up to now have been scoundrels.</p>
<p>Upon taking office as president, as of that moment, when he takes the presidential oath before the people, Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó will be the supreme authority in our country. (APPLAUSE) Nobody thinks that I would like to take on powers here that go above the authority of the President of the Republic; I would be the first man to abide by the orders of the Civil Power of the Republic and the first man to provide an example (APPLAUSE); we shall simply follow his orders and, within the powers he grants us, we shall try to do as much as we can for our people, without any personal ambitions, because fortunately we are immune to ambition and vanity! What greater glory can there be than the love of our people! What greater prize is there that those millions of arms waving, full of hope, faith and love for us! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Never will we allow ourselves to be dragged down by vanity and ambition because as our Apostle once said: “All the glory of the world fits into a single kernel of corn”, and there is no satisfaction or prize greater than fulfilling one’s duty, as we have been doing until today and as we shall always do. And I do not speak of this on my behalf; I speak on behalf of the thousands and thousands of combatants who have made victory for the people possible. (APPLAUSE) I speak of the profound feeling of respect and devotion for our dead who shall not be forgotten. The fallen shall have in us their most faithful comrades. This time it won’t be possible to say as at other times that the memory of the dead has been betrayed, because the dead will continue to command. Physically Frank País and Josué País are no longer with us, nor are the others; but morally they are here with us, they are here spiritually, and only the satisfaction of knowing that the sacrifice has not been in vain compensates for the immense emptiness they left along the way. (APPLAUSE) Their graves will go on having fresh flowers! Their sons will not be forgotten because the relatives of the fallen will be helped! (APPLAUSE) We, the rebels, will not get paid a salary for the years we fought and we are proud that we aren’t getting a salary for the services we have provided for the Revolution. But it is possible that we will continue fulfilling our obligations without being paid any salaries because if there is no money, it doesn’t matter, what we have is the will, and we will do whatever is necessary. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>But I also want to repeat here what I said in “History Will Absolve Me”: we will be making sure that the means of support, the assistance, the education of the children of the soldiers fallen fighting against us will not be lacking, because they are not to blame for the horrors of the war. (APPLAUSE) We will be generous with everyone because, I repeat, there are no vanquished here, only victors. Only the war criminals will be punished because that is the inevitable duty we have with justice, and the people can be sure that we are going to perform that duty. (APPLAUSE) And when justice is meted out, there will be no vengeance. We must have justice today so that in future days there will be no attacks on anyone. Since there will be justice, there will be no vengeance. There will be no hatred. We have eliminated hatred from the Republic, like a damned shadow left to us by ambition and ….</p>
<p>It is sad that the most guilty parties have escaped; there were thousands of men ready to look for them, but we have to respect the laws of other countries. It would have been easy for us, because we have more than enough volunteers ready to risk their lives to go looking for those criminals; but we don’t want to seem to be a people which violate the laws of others. We shall respect them while they respect ours, but it is certain that in Santo Domingo they are getting ready to conspire against us…(INTERRUPTION)</p>
<p>I had thought, at one time, that Trujillo would have harmed us by selling arms to Batista, and the damage he occasioned was not because he sold the arms but because he sold such bad arms so that when they fell into our hands they were good for nothing. (LAUGHTER) Nevertheless he sold bombs and with these bombs many peasants were killed. We don’t even have any wish to return the carbines because they are no good, but we should return something better…</p>
<p>Yes; it’s logical in the first instance that the politically persecuted of Santo Domingo will have here their better home and their better asylum and the politically persecuted of every dictatorship will have here their best home and the best understanding because we ourselves have been politically persecuted.</p>
<p>If Santo Domingo becomes an arsenal for counterrevolution, if Santo Domingo becomes a base for conspiracies against the Cuban Revolution, if those gentlemen dedicate themselves to engage in conspiracies from there, they’d be better off leaving Santo Domingo soon because they won’t be safe there either. (APPLAUSE) And it won’t be us, because we have no business getting mixed up in Santo Domingo’s problems; it’s just that the Dominicans have learned from Cuba’s example and things are going to get very serious over there. The Dominicans have learned that it is possible to fight against tyranny and defeat it, and this example is what the dictators fear most; a heartening example for the Americas has just taken place in our country. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The Americas must look after the course and the future of this Revolution; the Americas are looking at us, the Americas accompany us with their best wishes for triumph, the Americas will support us in our difficult moments, and just as we have rejoiced when some dictator falls in Latin America, the Americas too will be glad for the Cubans.</p>
<p>I must conclude, even though the load of feelings and ideas that with the disorder, hubbub and emotions of today bring to mind is great. I was saying, and I still haven’t finished that idea, that there will be justice and that it was unfortunate that the guiltiest parties have escaped, the fault of people we know because the people realize who is to blame for their escape. And that they left behind, I won’t say the most unfortunate but yes, the most dim-witted persons, those who didn’t have the money, the men in the rank and file who obeyed the orders of the guiltiest parties; they let the guiltiest parties escape so that the people could satisfy their anger and indignation with those who held less responsibility. It is right for them to be punished this time, so that they learn (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>The same thing always happens; the people warn them that the big fish are getting away and they stay. But the same thing always happens; the big fish leave and the little ones stay behind; well, they should also be punished. (APPALAUSE) The big ones leave, and they too will be punished; it’s tough, very tough having to live far away from your homeland for the rest of your life, at the least they will be condemned to ostracism for their entire lives, all those criminals and thieves who have suddenly fled.</p>
<p>If only we could spy on Mr. Batista right now! That punk, that arrogant man who made speeches only to call upon cowards, scoundrels, bandits and the like! Here nobody has called anybody a bandit; here hatred does not reign; we do not breathe in the hatred, arrogance or disdain which filled the dictatorship’s speeches. They say that man had a bullet in his pistol when he entered Columbia and he left early in the dawn in a plane with one bullet in his pistol. It was demonstrated how dictators are neither so feared nor so suicidal, and that when all is lost, they flee like cowards. What is really unfortunate is that he escaped when he could have been taken prisoner, and if we had imprisoned Batista we would have taken away the 200 million pesos he stole. We would reclaim the money, no matter where he had stashed it, because those kinds of men are not political criminals. They are common criminals! And we shall see who shows up in the embassies, and we shall see if Mr. Cantillo has given them their safe-conducts. We will differentiate between political criminals and common criminals; asylum for political criminals and nothing for common criminals. They will have to show up at court and show that they are political criminals and if it is proven that they are common criminals they will be handed over to the authorities.</p>
<p>And Mujal, in spite of the fact that he is big and fat…we don’t know where he is right now. (SHOUTING) See how they run away! (SOMEONE SAYS SOMETHING FROM THE AUDIENCE)</p>
<p>I don’t understand how you all still remember these wretches! The people have finally gotten rid of all those bastards.</p>
<p>Now anyone who wants to can speak, for good or for bad, but anyone can speak. It’s not like it used to be here when only those people talked and they spoke badly; there will be freedom…because of that…freedom so that they can criticize and attack us; it will always be a pleasure to speak when they fight us with the freedom we have helped everyone to attain. (APPLAUSE) We will never offend them; we will always defend ourselves and we will follow only one rule, the rule of respect for the law and respect for how other people think.</p>
<p>This names that have been mentioned here, those people who are in who knows which embassy, on which beach, on which ship, wherever they have ended up…(UNINTELLIGIBLE)…we have gotten rid of them, and if they have some little home, some little estate or some little cows somewhere, we will simply have to confiscate them.</p>
<p>But I have to point out that the tyranny’s officials, the representatives, the senators, those who haven’t especially been stealing, but those who have been paid their salaries, they will have to return every last cent they have been paid in these last four years because they have been paid illegally and they will have to reimburse the Republic for the money those senators and representatives earned. And if they don’t return it, we will confiscate the assets they have. (SHOUTING) That, besides what they stole, because those men who stole have nothing left that is a product of the theft, because that is the first law of the Revolution. It isn’t fair to send a man to prison for stealing a chicken or a turkey and then those men who stole millions of pesos are set for life somewhere over there. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And they should be careful! The thieves of today and yesterday should be careful; they should be careful because revolutionary laws can come down over all the guilty persons of all times, because the Revolution arrives at its triumph without any commitments to anyone at all. There only commitment is with the people because the people are the only ones to whom they owe their victory. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>I shall finish now, (SHOUTING OF: “No!”) I shall finish for today. Don’t forget that I have to immediately march out, this is my obligation, and you have been on your feet for many hours. (SHOUTING)</p>
<p>I see so many red and black flags pinned to the dresses of our female comrades and so it is really tough to leave this podium where we have experienced, all of us here today, the greatest emotions of our lives. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We cannot help but remember Santiago de Cuba with overwhelming love. The times we have met here, a meeting over there in the Alameda, a meeting over here in an avenue, Trocha, where one day I said that if they took away our rights by force, we would make a change…and take up guns. (APPLAUSE) And they blamed Luis Orlando for those statements, I kept my mouth closed, in the newspaper they wrote that it was Luis Orlando who had said that. I was the one who had said that but I wasn’t sure if the statements were well made because in those days there weren’t… (LAUGHTER) and it turned out we had to exchange everything, the students, their books and pencils, for guns; the peasants would exchange their work implements for guns and we would all have to exchange everything for guns. For the time being the gun matter has ceased. Guns will be kept where they can be accessed by men who have the duty to defend our sovereignty and our rights.</p>
<p>But when our people are threatened, it won’t be just the 30,000 or 40,000 members of the Armed Forces who will fight; instead it will be 300,000 or 400,000 or 500,000 Cubans who will be fighting, men and women here who are able to fight. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) We will have the necessary weapons to arm everyone who wants to fight when the time comes to defend our sovereignty. (APPLAUSE) Because it has been demonstrated that it isn’t just the men who fight, but the women also fight in Cuba, (APPLAUSE) and the best proof of this is the Mariana Grajales Battalion which distinguished itself so highly in a number of battles. (APPLAUSE) And the women soldiers are as excellent as our best male soldiers.</p>
<p>I wanted to show how women could be such good soldiers. At first I had to get over my problems with the idea because there were many prejudices and there were men who would wonder how a gun could be given to some woman when there was a man with a rifle around. But why not?</p>
<p>I wanted to show how women could be such good soldiers, and that there were many prejudices…about women, and that the female sector of our country also needs to be remedied, because women are victims of discrimination in jobs and in many other aspects of life.</p>
<p>We organized female units, and they demonstrated that women can fight. And when men and women fight in a country, that country becomes invincible.</p>
<p>We shall keep the militias or the female reserve troops organized and we shall keep all the women volunteers trained. (APPLAUSE) And all these young women I see here today wearing the red and black dresses, the colors of the July 26th Movement, I hope they too will learn how to handle weapons. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And this Revolution, my compatriots, that has been accomplished with so much sacrifice, our Revolution, the Revolution of the people, is now a beautiful and indestructible reality! What a reason for well-founded pride, what a reason for sincere joy and for the hopes of all our people! I know it’s not just here in Santiago de Cuba; it goes from Point Maisi to the Cape of San Antonio.</p>
<p>I fervently hope to see the people all along the route to the capital because I know that it is the same hope, the same faith of all the people who have risen up, that have patiently withstood all the sacrifice, who haven’t complained about the hunger; that when we gave permission, three days for setting up communications again, so that they wouldn’t be hungry, everyone protested (APPLAUSE) because what they wanted was to achieve victory, whatever the cost. And our people really deserve a better future, they really deserve to have the happiness that they haven’t achieved in their 50 years of Republic; they really deserve to become one of the top-ranking countries in the world, because of their intelligence, their courage and their spirit (APPALAUSE).</p>
<p>Nobody can think that I speak like a demagogue. Nobody can think that I want to bamboozle the people. I have demonstrated my faith in the people enough because when I arrived with 82 men on the beaches of Cuba and people were saying that we were crazy and they were asking us why we thought we were going to win the war, I told them” “Because we have the people.” (APPLAUSE) And when we suffered our first defeat, and only a handful of men remained and we kept on fighting, we knew that this would become reality, because we believed in the people. When they broke us up five times in 45 days and we got together again and took up the battle again, it was because we had faith in the people. And today we have the most tangible demonstration that the faith had a firm basis (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>I have the satisfaction of having profoundly believed in the people of Cuba and that I have instilled that faith in my comrades; that faith which, more than faith, is the complete security in our men. And that same faith we have in all of you is the faith we want you to have in us, always (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>The Republic wasn’t free in 1995 and the hopes and dreams of the Mambises were thwarted at the last moment. The Revolution didn’t take place in 1933 and it was thwarted by its enemies. This time the Revolution has all the people; it has all the revolutionaries, it has the honorable militants. Its strength is so great and so irrepressible that this time triumph is assured!</p>
<p>We can jubilantly say that in the four centuries since our nation was founded, for the first time we will be completely free and the work of the Mambises will be fulfilled (APPALUSE).</p>
<p>Just a few short days ago, on the 24th of February, I couldn’t resist the temptation to visit my mother. I hadn’t seen her for several years. When I was returning along the road crossing the Mangos of Baraguá, during the dark hours of night, a feeling of deep devotion made us stop there. Those of us travelling by car stopped there at that spot where they have erected a monument commemorating the Protest of Baraguá and the start of the invasion. At that time, in the presence of those sites, thinking about the exploits of our wars of independence, the idea that those men had fought for 30 years and never saw their dreams made reality because the Republic had been thwarted, and the foreboding that very soon the Revolution they dreamed of, the homeland they dreamed of, would become real. It made us feel the most exciting sensations that could ever be imagined.</p>
<p>I saw those men with their sacrifices come to life again, those same sacrifices we have also come to know at first hand; I was thinking of their hopes and dreams, the same as our hopes and dreams, and I thought about how this generation of Cubans has to pay and how they have now paid the most fervent tribute of acknowledgement and loyalty to the heroes of our independence.</p>
<p>The men who have fallen in our three wars of independence today join forces with the men who have fallen in this war. And we can say to all those who have fallen in our struggles for freedom that at last the time has come for their dreams to be fulfilled. The time has come for all of you, finally, our people, our good and noble people which are total enthusiasm and faith, our people which freely love and freely trust, that fears men with affection above and beyond what they offer, they will have everything they need (APPLAUSE). I only have to say to them here, modestly, sincerely, with profound emotion, that they will always have us, their revolutionary combatants as their loyal servants; they will only have to serve them in return (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Today, upon assuming the presidency of the Republic, Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó, the judge who said that the Revolution was just… (INTERRUPTION) ... liberated territory now takes up the entire country; I shall simply take on the functions he assigns me, all the authority of the Republic is in his hands. (APPLAUSE) Our arms bow down respectfully to the Civilian Power in the civilian Republic of Cuba. (APPLAUSE) I don’t have to tell you that we are hoping he will fulfill his duty, because we are simply sure that he knows how to fulfill it. The provisional president of the Republic of Cuba…and the authority, and I give him the podium so that he may address the people.</p>
<p>(OVATION)</p>
<p class="fst">SHORTHAND VERSIONS – COUNCIL OF STATE<br>
VERSIONES TAQUIGRAFICAS - CONSEJO DE ESTADO</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
Address by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz at Céspedes Park in Santiago de Cuba, on the 1st of January of 1959
Delivered: January 1, 1959
Source: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version. Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado
Markup: David Walters, 2019
Online Version: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
Compatriots of Cuba, all:
We have finally reached Santiago. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) The road has been long and tough, but we have arrived. (APPLAUSE)
It was being said that today at 2 o’clock in the afternoon we were being expected in the capital of the Republic and I was the first person to be amazed (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) because I was one of the first people to have been surprised by that traitorous and confabulated coup this morning in the capital of the Republic.
Furthermore, I was going to be in the capital of the Republic, I mean in the new capital of the Republic (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE), because Santiago de Cuba will be the capital, according to the wishes of the provisional president, according to the wishes of the Rebel Army and according to the wishes of the people of Santiago de Cuba who so highly deserve it. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) Santiago de Cuba will be the provisional capital of the Republic! (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
Perhaps the measure is a surprise for some; it is a new measure, but for that reason the Revolution must be precisely characterized for doing things that have never been done before. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) When we make Santiago de Cuba the provisional capital of the Republic, we know why we are doing it. It isn’t a matter of flattering a certain town in demagogic fashion; it’s simply a matter of the fact that Santiago has been the most steadfast bastion of the Revolution. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
The Revolution begins here and now. The Revolution won’t be an easy task. The Revolution will be a tough undertaking and full of dangers, especially during this initial period. What better place to establish the government of the Republic than in this fortress of the Revolution, (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) so that it may be known that this is going to be a government which is firmly backed by the people in the Heroic City and in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, because Santiago is in the Sierra Maestra. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) In Santiago de Cuba and in the Sierra Maestra, the Revolution will have its two greatest strengths. (APPLAUSE)
But there are others as well… (INTERRUPTION)…Naturally we have never… (INTERRUPTION) …refused any collaboration… (INTERRUPTION)… “Are you promising me that you won’t?” And he says: “I promise I won’t.” I say: “Do you swear you won’t?” And he told me: I swear I won’t” (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
I believe that the first thing a soldier should have is honor; the first thing a soldier must do is keep his word, and that man has not only demonstrated a lack of honor and a lack of keeping his word, he also lacks brains, because a movement could have been done right from the start, with the complete support of the people and with triumph assured right from the start, but what it did instead was to somersault into a vacuum. He thought it would be much too easy to fool the people and to fool the Revolution.
He knew something. He knew that when it was said that Batista had grabbed the plane, the people would throng into the streets, crazy with happiness, and they thought that the people were not mature enough to see the difference between Batista’s flight and the Revolution. Because if Batista leaves and Cantillos’ friends take possession of the tanks, it might very well happen that Dr. Urrutia would also have to leave within three months; because whatever betrays us now, will betray us later on, and the great truth is that Mr. Cantillo betrayed us before the Revolution. He demonstrated it very well and I am going to show it.
An agreement was struck with General Cantillo that the uprising would take place on the 31st at 3 in the afternoon. It was made clear that the armed forces would give their unconditional backing to the Revolutionary movement, the President who appointed the revolutionary leaders and the positions that were assigned to the military by the revolutionary leaders; what was offered, meant unconditional backing. The plan was agreed to in all its details: on the 31st, at 3 pm, the Santiago de Cuba Garrison would revolt. Immediately, several rebel columns would penetrate the city and the people would immediately fraternize with the soldiers and the rebels and a revolutionary proclamation would be launched in the country to invite all honorable soldiers to join the movement.
It was agreed that the tanks in the city would be placed at our disposition and I personally offered to move towards the capital with an armored column preceded by the tanks. The tanks would be handed over to me at 3 pm, not because it was believed that we would have to fight, but to be forewarned in case the movement would fail in Havana and we would have to position our vanguard as close as possible to the capital. Besides, it was also to foresee that no excessive events would be taking place in Havana.
It was logical that with all the hatred aroused there with the public force, because of the indescribable horrors committed by Ventura and Pilar Garcia, Batista’s fall was going to produce disorganization among the citizenry and that, moreover, those police were going to feel like they had no moral force to contain the people; and effectively that’s just how it took place. A series of excessive occurrences took place in the capital such as looting, shooting and fires. All the responsibility for that falls on the shoulders of Gen. Cantillo since he had betrayed his word and because he hadn’t followed the plan that had been agreed. He thought that he could solve the problem by appointing police captains and chiefs, many of whom had already left by the time he appointed them, proof of the fact that their consciences were not so clear.
Of course how different it all was in Santiago de Cuba. What great order and civic mindedness! What great discipline the people demonstrated! Not one single case of looting, not one single case of personal vengeance, not one single man dragged through the streets, not one single fire was set. Santiago de Cuba’s behavior has been admirable and exemplary, in spite of two things. In spite of the fact that this has been a city that had suffered the most and had seen the most terror, thereby having more right to feeling outraged, (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) and also in spite of our declarations this morning saying that we were not agreeing to the coup.
Santiago de Cuba’s behavior was very exemplary and I think that this is a reason for which the people of Santiago de Cuba, the revolutionaries and the military in the Plaza de Santiago de Cuba can feel very proud. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) And it cannot be said that the Revolution is anarchical and disorganized; that happened in Havana, due to a treacherous act, but it didn’t happen in Santiago de Cuba and we can set it up as a model whenever they try to accuse the Revolution of being anarchy and disorder. (APPLAUSE)
It’s a good idea for the people to know about the communications between Gen. Cantillo and myself, if the people are not too tired, (SHOUTING AND CRIES OF “No!”) I can read the letter.
After the agreements made, when we had already suspended our operations on Santiago de Cuba, because on the 28th our troops were by then very close to the city and we had carried out all the preparations for the attack on the Plaza in accordance with the interview we had had, we had to undergo a series of changes, to abandon the operations on Santiago de Cuba and to direct our troops towards other locations where we presumed that the movement had not been assured right from the very start. When all our movements had been made and the columns were prepared to march on the capital, I got this note from General Cantillo, a few hours before; it stated verbatim:
“Circumstances have changed considerably in a sense that is favorable for a national solution”… in the sense that he wanted for Cuba. It was odd because after analyzing the factors we had on hand, the circumstances couldn’t have been more favorable. Triumph was assured and so it was odd that he would say: Circumstances have produced very favorable changes.” They were the circumstances agreed to by Batista and Tabernilla, circumstances ensuring the coup.
“I recommend that you do nothing right now and wait for events during the next few weeks, prior to the 6th.” Of course, it was the indefinitely prolonged truce, while they were getting all the conditions ready in Havana.
My immediate answer was: “The contents of the note are completely different from the agreements made; it is ambiguous and we cannot understand it and it has made me lose my confidence in the seriousness of the agreements. Hostilities cease as of 3 pm tomorrow, that being the day and the time agreed by the Movement.”
And then a very strange thing occurred. Besides that very brief note, I also sent a message to the chief at Plaza de Santiago de Cuba via the same messenger, saying that if hostilities were ceasing because the agreement terms were not being fulfilled and we were being forced to attack Plaza de Santiago de Cuba, then there would be no other solution other than for the Plaza to surrender, that we would demand that the Plaza surrenders if hostilities ceased and the attack was initiated by us. But as it happened, the messenger did not correctly interpret my words and he told Col. Rego Rubido that I had said that I was demanding the surrender of the Plaza as a condition for any agreement. He didn’t say what I had declared to him about the attack being initiated, but not that I had presented Gen. Cantillo with the condition that the Plaza should surrender.
As a result of the message, the Colonel in Chief of the Plaza de Santiago de Cuba sent me a very conceptual and honorable letter which I will also read. Naturally he was offended by that proposal that had been presented to him erroneously and he said: “The solution found is not a coup d’état or military junta and, nevertheless, we think that is the best thing for Dr. Fidel Castro in accordance with his ideas and it would put the fate of the nation into his hands in 48 hours. It is not a local solution but a national one and any advance indiscretion could compromise it or destroy it and create chaos. We would like you to trust our dealings and you will have the solution before the 6th.”
“As for Santiago, because of the note and the messenger’s words, we have to change the plan and not enter; those words have caused ill will amongst the staff…and we shall never hand over the weapons without a fight. Weapons are not surrendered to an ally and they are not handed over without honor”… lovely phrasing from the chief of the Plaza de Santiago de Cuba.
“If you do not trust us or if you attack Santiago, the agreements will be considered as broken and the dealings for the offered solution will be paralyzed; we shall formally relinquish all commitments. Due to the time needed to act in one way or another, we hope the answer arrives in time so that it can be sent to Havana in the afternoon.”
I responded to that note written by Colonel José Rego Rubido as follows:
"Free Territory of Cuba, 31 December 1958
"Sir:
"An unfortunate error has occurred in the transmission of my words to you, perhaps due to the haste with which I answered your note and the hurried nature of the conversation I had with the messenger. I did not tell him that the condition we proposed in the agreements made was the surrender of Plaza de Santiago de Cuba to our forces; that would have been a discourtesy to our visitor and an unworthy and offensive proposal for the soldiers who have approached us in such a fraternal manner.
“The matter is quite something else. An agreement had been reached and a plan was adopted between the leader of the military movement and ourselves; it was to start being effective on the 31st at 3 pm. Even the details were agreed after carefully analyzing the problems that had to be dealt with; we would start with the removal of the Santiago de Cuba Garrison, I persuaded the general…of the advantages of starting in Oriente and not at Columbia, in order to largely spare the people from any coup at the barracks in the capital of the Republic and how difficult it was going to be in that case to associate the citizenry with the Movement. He fully went along with my points of view, he was only concerned about order in the capital and we agreed to measures that would avert danger. The measure was precisely the advance of our column on Santiago de Cuba. It was a matter of a united action between the military, the people and us, a type of revolutionary movement that from the very beginning would have the trust of the entire nation.
“Immediately, and in accordance with what we had put together, we suspended the operations that were being undertaken and we took on the task of carrying out new movements of forces towards other points such as Holguín where the presence of well-known henchmen was making resistance to the revolutionary military movement an almost sure thing.
“When all our preparations were ready, I received the note yesterday, where I was informed that the agreed action would not be carried out. It seemed there were different plans but I was not informed what they were or why. Indeed the matter was now not our business, we simply had to wait. Everything changed unilaterally and our forces were placed at risk; according to what had been assured, they would have been sent to undertake difficult operations; we were subjected to threats, to all kinds of imponderable elements… (INTERRUPTION) …any risk of the general…in his frequent trips to Havana would militarily become a disaster for us. You can recognize that right now everything is very confusing and that Batista is a skillful and crafty individual who knows how to manoeuver. Any risk… (INTERRUPTION) …How could they ask us to forego all the advantages obtained in the last few weeks of operations, to have us wait patiently for events to happen?
“I clearly stated that it couldn’t be an action with just the military, for that reason we really didn’t have to await the horrors of two years of warfare. To have our hands tied at a decisive moment is not something we can be asked to do, we who have not rested in our fight against oppression for the last seven years.
“Even though you intend to hand over power to the revolutionaries, it is not power per se that interests us; what interests us is that the Revolution fulfills its destiny. I am even concerned that the military, because of an unjustified excess of scruples, would facilitate the flight of the important guilty parties who would go abroad with their great fortunes to make all kinds of trouble for our homeland from over there.
“I can personally add that power holds no interest for me, nor do I intend to occupy it; I shall only be vigilant that the sacrifices of so many compatriots are not wasted, whatever my subsequent fate may be. I hope that these honorable reasons which I explain to you, with all respect for your dignity as a soldier, are understood. You may rest assured that you are dealing with neither an ambitious nor an insolent man…”
Stop the tanks for me over there, please. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
ANNOUNCER- Please keep those tanks quiet. Please; it is an order of the Commander in Chief that you silence the tanks and stop them right there so that the people can go on listening to the words of the supreme leader of the Cuban Revolution, Dr. Fidel Castro. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
DR. FIDEL CASTRO- When we finish our declarations and the proclamation of the provisional president, the tanks will render honors to the Civil Power of the Republic, parading in front of our balconies. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
He continued to read the letter of the 31st, written by the Colonel in Chief of the Plaza de Santiago de Cuba.
"I can personally add that power holds no interest for me, nor do I intend to occupy it. I shall only be vigilant that the sacrifices of so many compatriots are not wasted, whatever my subsequent fate may be. I hope that these honorable reasons which I explain to you, with all respect for your dignity as a soldier, are understood. You may rest assured that you are dealing with neither an ambitious nor an insolent man…
"I have always acted with loyalty and frankness in everything I do; one can never call something that has been achieved with deceitfulness and deception a triumph; the language of honor, which you understand, is the only language I know how to speak.
"The word “surrender” was never mentioned at the meeting with the general; what I said yesterday and what I reiterate today is that as of 3:00 pm of the 31st, the date and time we agreed upon, we could not prolong the truce in regards to Santiago de Cuba because it would be extraordinarily detrimental to our union… (INTERRUPTION)…Never a conspiracy…Last night the rumor reached us here that the general…had been arrested in Havana, that several youths had turned up murdered in the Santiago de Cuba Cemetery. I had the feeling that we had miserably wasted our time, even though fortunately today it appears to be proven that the general…can be found at his post; what need do we have to run such risks?
“What I told the messenger in terms of surrender, which was not transmitted literally and seemed to motivate the words of his note today, was as follows: ‘if hostilities were broken because of noncompliance with the agreed terms, we would see ourselves forced to attack Plaza de Santiago de Cuba, something that is inevitable given the manner in which we have directed our efforts in the last few months, in which case, once the operation was initiated, we would demand the surrender of the forces defending it’. This does not mean that we think they will surrender without a fight because I know, even without a reason to fight, Cuban soldiers defend their positions with stubbornness and it has cost us many lives. I only wanted to say that after the blood of our men has been spilt to conquer an objective, any other solution could not be acceptable, since even though it is a steep price for us to pay, given the current conditions of the forces defending the regime which were unable to provide backing for that city, the city would inexorably fall into our hands. That has been the basic objective of all of our operations during the past few months and a plan of this magnitude cannot be suspended for some weeks without serious consequences, in the case that the military movement is thwarted, losing, moreover, the opportune moment, which is this one, when the dictatorship is suffering huge setbacks in the Oriente and La Villas provinces.
“We are placed in the dilemma of giving up the advantages of our victory or attacking, a sure triumph in exchange for a probable triumph. Do you think that with yesterday’s note, so ambiguous and laconic a note, containing a unilateral decision, I could incur in the responsibility of keeping the plans suspended? As a military man, you can surely recognize that we are being asked the impossible. You have not for one moment stopped digging trenches; those trenches can be used against us by Pedraza, Pilar García, or Cañizares, if the general…is relieved of his command and along with him his trusted men. We cannot be asked to stand idly by; see how… (INTERRUPTION)…even though they bravely defend their weapons, we are left with no other option than to attack, because we also have very sacred obligations to fulfill.
“More than allies, I wish that we and your honorable soldiers could be comrades in one single cause, the cause of Cuba. Above all else I wish that you and your comrades don’t get the erroneous idea that my attitude and my feelings, that (INTERRUPTION)… they are mistaken for…(INTERRUPTION)… I respect the tacit ceasefire in the zone of Santiago de Cuba, to avoid any doubts, I ratify that even though at any minute before combat starts we can take up operations again; as of today, it should be taken under consideration that the attack is going to happen at any time and for no reason whatsoever shall we suspend our plans again, since our … (INTERRUPTION) …may sow the seeds of confusion among the people and harm the morale of our combatants.
“Sincerely,
"Fidel Castro Ruz" (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
Col. Rego answered me with an honorable letter which is also worthy of honor and it sreads as follows:
"Sir:
"I received your kind letter dated today and please believe me when I say that I deeply thank you for the clarification on the previous note, even though I should tell you that I always thought that it was a matter of poor interpretation since over time I have observed your style of behavior and I am convinced that you are a man of principle.
“I didn’t know about the details of the original plan since I was only informed about the part that affected me, nor do I know anything about some of the small details of the current plan. I would guess that in part you are right when you analyze the original plan; but I think that we still need a few days to see its consummation and we would never be able to avoid that many of the guilty individuals, the big, medium and small guilty individuals, would escape.
“I am one of those who think that it is absolutely necessary to provide an example in Cuba for those who, taking advantage of their positions of power, commit all kinds of punishable acts. But unfortunately history is infested with similar cases and very rarely the guilty parties have been placed at the disposition of the competent authorities, because very rarely do revolutions do what has to be done… (INTERRUPTION)…
I perfectly comprehend your concerns in this case, although I, bearing less of the historical responsibility, rather accept it.
“As for the unilateral actions of which you speak, I repeat to you that…in both cases I was only informed of the part affecting me, considering that what happened was that the general…rendered the idea of what you wanted according to his norms and principles, thereby acting accordingly.
"I have no reason to suppose that anybody is trying to abet the flight of the guilty person and, personally, I am opposed to such a thing,” said Col.Rego Rubido (APPLAUSE) — "but in case this should happen, the historic responsibility for such occurrences would fall on the shoulders of those making it possible and never on the others.
"I sincerely believe that everything should take place in harmony with your ideas and that, in general, it is…inspired by the best wishes for Cuba’s welfare and that of the Revolution you are starting.
"I learned about a young dead student found in the cemetery and just today I made sure that exhaustive investigations would be carried out in order to determine who was the killer and under what circumstances it occurred, just as in days past I placed the suspected persons responsible for the event at the disposition of the corresponding judicial authorities.
"Finally I must inform you that I sent a dispatch to the general about a plane to send him your letter full of ideas, and don’t get impatient; maybe before the date set as the maximum limit, you will be in Havana.
"When the general left, I asked him to leave me the helicopter with the pilot if it should occur to you to take a trip on Sunday afternoon over Santiago. (APPLAUSE)
"Well, Doctor, please receive assurances of my highest consideration and my fervent wish for a happy New Year.
"Signed: Colonel Rego Rubido" (APPLAUSE)
Talks were at this stage when the chief of Plaza Santiago de Cuba, Colonel Rego, and I were surprised by the coup at Columbia which was completely out of the range of the agreements. And the first thing that was done, the most criminal thing that was done, was to let Batista get away, along with Tabernilla and the major guilty parties. (APPLAUSE) They were allowed to escape with their millions of pesos; they were allowed to escape with the 300 or 400 million pesos that they had stolen. It’s going to cost us a lot, because now from Santo Domingo and other countries they are going to be creating propaganda against the Revolution, cooking up everything they can to hurt our cause; and we are going to have them there, threatening our people, putting us into a constant state of alertness because they are going to be paying for and cooking up conspiracies against us. (SHOUTING)
As soon as we heard about the coup, what did we do? As soon as we learned about it on Radio Progresso. And even at that time, guessing what they were cooking up, I was making some declarations when I found out that Batista had fled to Santo Domingo. And I thought: could this be a mistake? And I sent someone to find out about it when I hear that, effectively, Mr. Batista and his posse have escaped, and the loveliest thing about it was that Gen. Cantillo was saying that the movement had happened thanks to Batista’s patriotic proposals. Batista’s patriotic proposals! That he resigned in order to avoid a bloodbath. What do you think about that? (SHOUTING)
And there is still more. For you to have some idea about the kind of coup that was prepared; it’s enough to say that they had appointed Pedraza as a member of the Junta and he left. (SHOUTING) I don’t think we need to add anything else to see what intentions the perpetrators of the coup had. And they didn’t appoint President Urrutia, the man proclaimed as the president by the Movement and by all the revolutionary organizations. (APPLAUSE) They called up a man who is nothing but the oldest man among all the Supreme Court judges, and they are all quite old, especially a man who has been Presiding Judge, until today, of the Supreme Court, where there was no justice whatsoever.
What was the result of all that going to be? A half-baked revolution, a shady deal, the caricature of a revolution. That Mr. Perico de los Palotes, it’s the same whatever you call him, whatever you call this Mr. Piedra who, by now, if he hasn’t resigned should be preparing himself for us to make him resign when we get to Havana. (APPLAUSE) I don’t think he’s going to last 24 hours. He’ll break a record. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
Appointing this man, really nice: Cantillo, a national hero, the champion of Cuban liberties, the lord and master of Cuba, and that Mr. Piedra over there. Quite simply we would have overthrown one dictator and installed another one. By all accounts, the Columbia Movement was a counter-revolutionary movement; by all accounts it was far from the peoples’ proposal; by all accounts it was suspicious and immediately Mr. Piedra said he was going to convoke the rebels and a peace commission. And we would calmly dispose of our weapons, leaving everything and we would go there to show respect to Mr. Piedra and Mr. Cantillo.
It was clear that both Cantillo and Piedra were living on another planet. They were somewhere on the moon because I think that the Cuban people have learned a lot and we, the rebels have learned something.
That was the state of affairs this morning; it isn’t the same situation as it was during the night because a lot has changed. (APPLAUSE) Faced with this event, faced with this treachery, we ordered all rebel commanders to continue with their military operations and to continue marching to their objectives; consequently we immediately ordered all the columns destined for the Santiago de Cuba operation to advance to the city.
I want you all to know that our forces had very seriously decided to take Santiago de Cuba by storm. That would have been very unfortunate because it would have cost a lot of blood and tonight would not have been such a night of joy as it is, nor would there have been peace like we have now, nor would there have been such a spirit of fraternity as we have now. (APPLAUSE)
I must confess that if no bloody battle was waged in Santiago de Cuba this is due to a great degree to the patriotic attitude of Army Colonel José Rego Rubido (APPLAUSE); to the commanders of the frigates "Máximo Gómez" and "Maceo", to the chief of the Santiago de Cuba Naval District (APPLAUSE) and to the officer who was in charge of police headquarters (APPLAUSE). All of them, and that’s exactly what we are acknowledging and grateful for here, contributed in avoiding a bloody battle and they turned the counterrevolutionary movement that morning into a revolutionary movement this afternoon.
We were left with no other alternative than to attack because we couldn’t allow the Columbia coup to consolidate and so we had to attack without delay. And when the troops were already moving out towards their objectives, Col. Rego went out in the helicopter to find me; the frigate commanders got in touch with us and unconditionally followed the orders of the Revolution. (APPLAUSE)
By that time, counting on the support of the two frigates which have great fire power, with the support of the naval district and with the support of the police, I called for a meeting of all army officers at Plaza Santiago de Cuba, over 100 of them. When I invited them to meet with me, I told those soldiers that I didn’t have the slightest concern about talking with them because I knew I was right; because I knew they would understand my arguments and that an agreement would come out of this meeting. In fact, by nightfall, early that night, we met at El Escandel, almost all the army officers in Santiago de Cuba, many of them young men who look like they are eager to fight for the good of their country.
I assembled those soldiers and I told them about our revolutionary feeling; I talked to them about the aim for our country; I talked to them about what we wanted for the country, what our conduct with the military had always been, about all the harm the tyranny had done to the army and about how it wasn’t fair they should think of themselves as being the same as all soldiers, that the criminals were only an insignificant minority and that there were many honorable soldiers in the army, and that I know how they hate crime, abuses and injustice.
It wasn’t easy for the soldiers to develop a determinate type of action; it was logical since the higher ranks in the army were in Tabernilla’s hands, in the hands of Pilar García, in the hands of Batista’s family and his unconditional followers, and that the army was overrun with a great sense of terror. Once couldn’t expect any isolated officer to shoulder the responsibility.
There were two types of soldiers, and we know about them very well: soldiers like Sosa Blanco, Cañizares, Sánchez Mosquera, Chaviano (SHOUTING), who are characterized by crime and the point blank murders of unfortunate peasants. But there were soldiers who were very honorable in their campaign; there were soldiers who never killed anyone or burned down any houses, such as Major Quevedo who was our prisoner after putting up heroic resistance at the battle of El Jigüe, and who today is still a major in the army (APPLAUSE). There was Major Sierra, and many other soldiers who never burned down any houses. Those soldiers were never promoted. It was the criminals who were promoted because Batista always made sure he rewarded crime. For example we have the case of Col. Rego Rubido who doesn’t owe any of his stripes to the dictatorship; he was already a colonel when the events of the 10th of March occurred. (APPLAUSE)
It is quite true that I asked for the support of the army officers at Santiago de Cuba and that the army officers of Santiago de Cuba gave their unconditional support to the Cuban Revolution. (APPLAUSE) Bringing together the officers of the navy, the police and the army, we were able to bring down the coup rigged up in Columbia and to support the legal government of the republic, because it had the majority of our people, which is Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó. Thanks to such an attitude we were able to avoid a lot of bloodshed; thanks to that attitude we have given birth to the truth, on this afternoon today, to a true revolutionary military movement.
I understand that among the people there are many justified passions; I understand our people’s yearning for justice and we must have justice. (APPLAUSE) But I would like to ask our people here…we are at a time when we must consolidate power, first and foremost. And nobody would be against that! Because the army and the armed forces are among those who most want to see that the guilt of a few is not paid by the entire corps, and that it shouldn’t be shameful to wear a uniform; that the guilty should be punished so that the innocent do not have to bear the load of disrepute. (APPLAUSE)
Trust us! That’s what we are asking of the people because we know how to do our duty. (APPLAUSE)
In those circumstances, this afternoon a true revolutionary movement of the people took place, a revolutionary movement of the military and of the rebels, in the city of Santiago de Cuba. The enthusiasm of the military is indescribable! And here are all the army officers! There are the tanks at the beck and call of the Revolution! There is all the artillery at the beck and call of the Revolution! There are the frigates at the beck and call of the Revolution! (APPLAUSE)
I am not going to say that the Revolution has people; that cannot be said because everyone knows it. I was saying that people, who had shotguns before, now have artillery, tanks and frigates and there are many trained technicians in the army who are going to help us handle them. (APPLAUSE) Now it is really the people who are armed! I can assure you that when we only numbered 12 men, all on our own, we didn’t lose hope; now that we have 12 tanks over there, how are we going to lose hope?
I would like to clear up that today, tonight, during the dawn hours, because it is almost morning, that illustrious magistrate Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó shall take possession of the Presidency of the Republic. (APPLAUSE) Does Dr.Urrutia have the support of the people or not? (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTING) Because I mean that the President of the Republic, the legal president, that is what counts for the people and that man is Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó.
Who wants Mr. Piedra to be the president? (BOOING) If nobody wants Mr. Piedra as president, why are we going to be saddled with Mr. Piedra? (BOOING)
If that is the command of the people of Santiago de Cuba, which is the sentiment of all the people of Cuba, as soon as this function ends I will be marching with the veteran troops from the Sierra Maestra, the tanks and the artillery, towards the capital, so that the will of the people is fulfilled. (APPLAUSE)
Here we stand, very simply, at the command of the people. What is legal at this moment is the mandate of the people; the president is elected by the people and not by a coterie at Columbia at 4 o’clock in the morning (APPLAUSE). None of the positions, none of the ranks that have been awarded by the Military Junta during the small hours of this morning have any validity whatsoever; all the appointments for army positions are null and void; I refer to all those appointments made this morning. Whoever accepts a position designated by the Junta will be a traitor this morning, they will be assuming a counterrevolutionary stand, call it what you will, and consequently they will be outlaws.
I am completely sure that all the military positions in the Republic will have accepted the provisions of the President of the Republic. (APPLAUSE)
The President will immediately proceed to appoint the chiefs of the army, navy and police. For his excellent service afforded at this time to the Revolution and for having places thousands of his men at the disposition of the Revolution, we recommend Col. Rego Rubido as the Chief of the aArmy; he is a man…(APPLAUSE) Likewise, as Chief of the Navy we will appoint one of the two commanders of the frigate that was the first one to join the Revolution (APPLAUSE) and I have recommended to the President of the Republic that he designate Major Efigenio Ameijeiras as the head of the National Police Force; he has lost two brothers, he was one of the members of the Granma expeditionary force and he is one of the most capable men in the revolutionary army. (APPLAUSE) Ameijeiras is conducting operations in Guantánamo but he will soon be with us here. (APPLAUSE)
I only ask for time for us and for the Civil Power of the Republic in order to carry out things as the people ask, but little by little. (SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE SAYS SOMETHING) I am just asking one thing of the people, and that is to be calm (FROM THE AUDIENCE SOMEONE SAYS: “Oriente federal, Oriente capital!”) No, no! The republic must be united above all else. What you have to ask for is justice for Oriente. (APPLAUSE) In short, time is an important factor. The Revolution cannot…rest assured that the revolution will do it; rest assured that for the very first time the Republic will be entirely free, and the people will have…(APPLAUSE)
Power has not been the result of politics; it has been the result of the sacrifice of hundreds and thousands of our comrades. There is no other commitment with the people and with the Cuban nation. A man has come to power who has no commitments with anybody, only with the people, exclusively. (APPLAUSE)
Che Guevara received orders to advance on the non-provisional capital of the Republic and Major Camilo Cienfuegos, Chief of the Antonio Maceo Column 2 has received orders to march on greater Havana and to assume the command of the military headquarters of Columbia. Simply, the orders of the President of the Republic and the mandate of the Revolution will be followed. (APPLAUSE)
Don’t blame us for the excesses that were committed in Havana; we were not in Havana. Blame Gen. Cantillos for the disturbances occurring in Havana and the individuals who put together the dawn coup; they thought they were going to dominate the situation over there. (APPLAUSE) In Santiago de Cuba, where a true revolution occurred, there has been complete law and order; in Santiago de Cuba the people have united, the military and the revolutionaries are together, and that is indestructible. The head of the government, the head of the army and the head of the navy will be in Santiago de Cuba; their orders must be fulfilled by all the command posts in the Republic. We would hope that all honorable soldiers bide by these provisions because soldiers, above all else, are at the service of the law and of authority, not constituted authority, because often this is a poorly constituted authority, but authority which has been legally constituted.
No honorable soldier has anything to fear from the Revolution. Here in this struggle there are no vanquished persons, because only the people have been the victors. (APPLAUSE) Some have fallen on one side and some on the other side, but we have all come together to give the nation its victory. We have given the fraternal embrace, the good soldiers and the revolutionaries. (APPLAUSE) Now there will be no more blood spilt; I hope that no nucleus will put up any resistance because besides being useless resistance, it would be resistance that would be crushed in a few moments, it would be resistance against the law and against the Republic, and against all the sentiment of the Cuban nation. (APPLAUSE)
It has been necessary to organize today’s Movement so that no other war will take place in the next six months. What happened during the machadato? Well, one of Machado’s generals staged a coup and removed Machado and a president was installed that lasted for 15 days; the sergeants arrived and said that those officers were responsible for the Machado dictatorship and that they didn’t respect them, revolutionary effervescence grew and they kicked out the officers. Now that couldn’t happen in this way; now these officers are backed by the people, and they have the backing of the troops and they have the prestige which is given them after they have joined the true revolutionary movement. (APPLAUSE)
These soldiers will be respected and well-regarded by the people and we won’t have to use force and we won’t have to go on the streets armed with guns, inspiring fear in everyone; because true law and order is that which is based on freedom, on respect for justice, and not on force. From now on the people shall be completely free and the people will know how to behave correctly, just as they have demonstrated today. (APPLAUSE)
The peace our country needs has been achieved; Santiago de Cuba has moved on to freedom, without having to spill any blood. That’s why there is so much joy and that’s why the soldiers who disregarded and disapproved of the coup at Columbia so that they could unconditionally join the Revolution deserve our recognition, our gratitude and our respect. (APPLAUSE)
The armed institutions of the Republic will be model institutions in the future, due to their capacity, their education and the way they identify with the cause of the people because from now on, rifles will only be at the service of the people. There will be no more coups d’état, no more wars because we have looked after that so that the same thing that happened with Machado happens here and now. Those gentlemen who would like to have the occurrence at dawn resemble the Machado case… that time they installed Carlos Manuel and now they have installed another Carlos Manuel. (BOOS)
What we won’t have this time is a Batista, because we don’t need another 4th of September that destroyed the discipline of the armed forces, because what happened with Batista was that he installed indiscipline here in the army, because his policy consisted of praising the parties in order to diminish the authority of the officers. Officers will have authority; there will be discipline in the army, there will be a military criminal code where the crimes against human rights and against honor will be duly punished and there will be an obligatory sense of morals for every soldier. (APPLAUSE) There will be no privileges for anyone; soldiers with capacity and merit will be promoted, not the relatives or friends, something that went on until today when the ladder of ascension had not been respected.
All of those mandatory obligations will cease for soldiers and for all workers; for workers union dues will cease (APPLAUSE) and for soldiers it’s the “peso for the First Lady” that will disappear; two pesos here and two pesos there, and so the entire salary disappears.
Naturally the people have everything to expect from us, and they shall receive it. But I have talked to the military so that they also know they will receive everything from the Revolution, all the improvements they never had because when the state budget is not being pilfered the military will be much better off than they are today. Soldiers won’t have to serve as police; soldiers will be at their training sessions, in their barracks and they won’t have to act as a police force. (APPLAUSE)
(SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE SAYS SOMETHING) Nothing about microwaves, although I’d like to clarify that at this moment the rebels have microwaves, because we need them, but the microwaves now do not come with the henchmen, none of that, no murderers, no more screeching brakes in front of your homes and no more midnight knocks at the door. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
I am sure that just as soon as the President of the Republic takes office he will decree the reestablishing of guarantees, and the absolute freedom of the press and all individual rights in the country (APPLAUSE), all labor union rights and all the rights and demands of our peasants and our people. We shall not forget our peasants in the Sierra Maestra and in Santiago de Cuba. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) We won’t go to live in Havana and forget about all of you; where I want to live is in the Sierra Maestra. At least, in the part that belongs to me, because of my very deep feelings of gratitude; I shall not forget those peasants and as soon as I have some free time I will go to see where we will put up the first school-city that can hold 20,000 children. (APPLAUSE) and we will set it up with the help of the people; the rebels are going to work there and we are going to ask every citizen for a bag of cement and one steel rod and I know we will get the help of our citizens.
We shall never forget any sector of our country (SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE SAYS: Viva Crescencio Pérez!) Long live Crescencio Pérez who lost a child in the days after the war!
The country’s economy will be immediately reestablished. This year we will be the ones to look after the sugar cane so that it doesn’t burn, so that this year the sugar tax won’t serve to buy murdering weapons and bombs, and the planes to bomb our people. (APPLAUSE)
We will look after communications and now, from Jiguaní to Palma Soriano, telephone lines have been reestablished and the rail lines have been reestablished. There will be a sugar cane harvest throughout the country and there will be good salaries because I know that that is the goal of the President of the Republic. And there will be good prices because, precisely, the fears of there not being a sugar harvest raised the prices in the world market; and the peasants can get their coffee out and the ranchers can sell their fat cows in Havana because fortunately the triumph has arrived in good time so that there won’t be any sort of disaster.
It is not my place to speak of these things. You all know we are men who keep our word and that we fulfill our promises and we like to promise less than we can deliver, not more, but less than what we are going to deliver and to do more of what we offer to the people of Cuba. (APPLAUSE)
We don’t think that all the problems are going to get solved easily; we know that the road is strewn with obstacles, but we are men of faith and that we always face great difficulties. (APPALUSE); the people maybe sure of one thing and that is that we may make mistakes over and over, but the only thing they can never say about us is that we steal, that we betray, that we are involved in dirty business. And I know the people will forgive the mistakes but won’t forgive the scoundrels. And those individuals we have had up to now have been scoundrels.
Upon taking office as president, as of that moment, when he takes the presidential oath before the people, Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó will be the supreme authority in our country. (APPLAUSE) Nobody thinks that I would like to take on powers here that go above the authority of the President of the Republic; I would be the first man to abide by the orders of the Civil Power of the Republic and the first man to provide an example (APPLAUSE); we shall simply follow his orders and, within the powers he grants us, we shall try to do as much as we can for our people, without any personal ambitions, because fortunately we are immune to ambition and vanity! What greater glory can there be than the love of our people! What greater prize is there that those millions of arms waving, full of hope, faith and love for us! (APPLAUSE)
Never will we allow ourselves to be dragged down by vanity and ambition because as our Apostle once said: “All the glory of the world fits into a single kernel of corn”, and there is no satisfaction or prize greater than fulfilling one’s duty, as we have been doing until today and as we shall always do. And I do not speak of this on my behalf; I speak on behalf of the thousands and thousands of combatants who have made victory for the people possible. (APPLAUSE) I speak of the profound feeling of respect and devotion for our dead who shall not be forgotten. The fallen shall have in us their most faithful comrades. This time it won’t be possible to say as at other times that the memory of the dead has been betrayed, because the dead will continue to command. Physically Frank País and Josué País are no longer with us, nor are the others; but morally they are here with us, they are here spiritually, and only the satisfaction of knowing that the sacrifice has not been in vain compensates for the immense emptiness they left along the way. (APPLAUSE) Their graves will go on having fresh flowers! Their sons will not be forgotten because the relatives of the fallen will be helped! (APPLAUSE) We, the rebels, will not get paid a salary for the years we fought and we are proud that we aren’t getting a salary for the services we have provided for the Revolution. But it is possible that we will continue fulfilling our obligations without being paid any salaries because if there is no money, it doesn’t matter, what we have is the will, and we will do whatever is necessary. (APPLAUSE)
But I also want to repeat here what I said in “History Will Absolve Me”: we will be making sure that the means of support, the assistance, the education of the children of the soldiers fallen fighting against us will not be lacking, because they are not to blame for the horrors of the war. (APPLAUSE) We will be generous with everyone because, I repeat, there are no vanquished here, only victors. Only the war criminals will be punished because that is the inevitable duty we have with justice, and the people can be sure that we are going to perform that duty. (APPLAUSE) And when justice is meted out, there will be no vengeance. We must have justice today so that in future days there will be no attacks on anyone. Since there will be justice, there will be no vengeance. There will be no hatred. We have eliminated hatred from the Republic, like a damned shadow left to us by ambition and ….
It is sad that the most guilty parties have escaped; there were thousands of men ready to look for them, but we have to respect the laws of other countries. It would have been easy for us, because we have more than enough volunteers ready to risk their lives to go looking for those criminals; but we don’t want to seem to be a people which violate the laws of others. We shall respect them while they respect ours, but it is certain that in Santo Domingo they are getting ready to conspire against us…(INTERRUPTION)
I had thought, at one time, that Trujillo would have harmed us by selling arms to Batista, and the damage he occasioned was not because he sold the arms but because he sold such bad arms so that when they fell into our hands they were good for nothing. (LAUGHTER) Nevertheless he sold bombs and with these bombs many peasants were killed. We don’t even have any wish to return the carbines because they are no good, but we should return something better…
Yes; it’s logical in the first instance that the politically persecuted of Santo Domingo will have here their better home and their better asylum and the politically persecuted of every dictatorship will have here their best home and the best understanding because we ourselves have been politically persecuted.
If Santo Domingo becomes an arsenal for counterrevolution, if Santo Domingo becomes a base for conspiracies against the Cuban Revolution, if those gentlemen dedicate themselves to engage in conspiracies from there, they’d be better off leaving Santo Domingo soon because they won’t be safe there either. (APPLAUSE) And it won’t be us, because we have no business getting mixed up in Santo Domingo’s problems; it’s just that the Dominicans have learned from Cuba’s example and things are going to get very serious over there. The Dominicans have learned that it is possible to fight against tyranny and defeat it, and this example is what the dictators fear most; a heartening example for the Americas has just taken place in our country. (APPLAUSE)
The Americas must look after the course and the future of this Revolution; the Americas are looking at us, the Americas accompany us with their best wishes for triumph, the Americas will support us in our difficult moments, and just as we have rejoiced when some dictator falls in Latin America, the Americas too will be glad for the Cubans.
I must conclude, even though the load of feelings and ideas that with the disorder, hubbub and emotions of today bring to mind is great. I was saying, and I still haven’t finished that idea, that there will be justice and that it was unfortunate that the guiltiest parties have escaped, the fault of people we know because the people realize who is to blame for their escape. And that they left behind, I won’t say the most unfortunate but yes, the most dim-witted persons, those who didn’t have the money, the men in the rank and file who obeyed the orders of the guiltiest parties; they let the guiltiest parties escape so that the people could satisfy their anger and indignation with those who held less responsibility. It is right for them to be punished this time, so that they learn (APPLAUSE).
The same thing always happens; the people warn them that the big fish are getting away and they stay. But the same thing always happens; the big fish leave and the little ones stay behind; well, they should also be punished. (APPALAUSE) The big ones leave, and they too will be punished; it’s tough, very tough having to live far away from your homeland for the rest of your life, at the least they will be condemned to ostracism for their entire lives, all those criminals and thieves who have suddenly fled.
If only we could spy on Mr. Batista right now! That punk, that arrogant man who made speeches only to call upon cowards, scoundrels, bandits and the like! Here nobody has called anybody a bandit; here hatred does not reign; we do not breathe in the hatred, arrogance or disdain which filled the dictatorship’s speeches. They say that man had a bullet in his pistol when he entered Columbia and he left early in the dawn in a plane with one bullet in his pistol. It was demonstrated how dictators are neither so feared nor so suicidal, and that when all is lost, they flee like cowards. What is really unfortunate is that he escaped when he could have been taken prisoner, and if we had imprisoned Batista we would have taken away the 200 million pesos he stole. We would reclaim the money, no matter where he had stashed it, because those kinds of men are not political criminals. They are common criminals! And we shall see who shows up in the embassies, and we shall see if Mr. Cantillo has given them their safe-conducts. We will differentiate between political criminals and common criminals; asylum for political criminals and nothing for common criminals. They will have to show up at court and show that they are political criminals and if it is proven that they are common criminals they will be handed over to the authorities.
And Mujal, in spite of the fact that he is big and fat…we don’t know where he is right now. (SHOUTING) See how they run away! (SOMEONE SAYS SOMETHING FROM THE AUDIENCE)
I don’t understand how you all still remember these wretches! The people have finally gotten rid of all those bastards.
Now anyone who wants to can speak, for good or for bad, but anyone can speak. It’s not like it used to be here when only those people talked and they spoke badly; there will be freedom…because of that…freedom so that they can criticize and attack us; it will always be a pleasure to speak when they fight us with the freedom we have helped everyone to attain. (APPLAUSE) We will never offend them; we will always defend ourselves and we will follow only one rule, the rule of respect for the law and respect for how other people think.
This names that have been mentioned here, those people who are in who knows which embassy, on which beach, on which ship, wherever they have ended up…(UNINTELLIGIBLE)…we have gotten rid of them, and if they have some little home, some little estate or some little cows somewhere, we will simply have to confiscate them.
But I have to point out that the tyranny’s officials, the representatives, the senators, those who haven’t especially been stealing, but those who have been paid their salaries, they will have to return every last cent they have been paid in these last four years because they have been paid illegally and they will have to reimburse the Republic for the money those senators and representatives earned. And if they don’t return it, we will confiscate the assets they have. (SHOUTING) That, besides what they stole, because those men who stole have nothing left that is a product of the theft, because that is the first law of the Revolution. It isn’t fair to send a man to prison for stealing a chicken or a turkey and then those men who stole millions of pesos are set for life somewhere over there. (APPLAUSE)
And they should be careful! The thieves of today and yesterday should be careful; they should be careful because revolutionary laws can come down over all the guilty persons of all times, because the Revolution arrives at its triumph without any commitments to anyone at all. There only commitment is with the people because the people are the only ones to whom they owe their victory. (APPLAUSE)
I shall finish now, (SHOUTING OF: “No!”) I shall finish for today. Don’t forget that I have to immediately march out, this is my obligation, and you have been on your feet for many hours. (SHOUTING)
I see so many red and black flags pinned to the dresses of our female comrades and so it is really tough to leave this podium where we have experienced, all of us here today, the greatest emotions of our lives. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
We cannot help but remember Santiago de Cuba with overwhelming love. The times we have met here, a meeting over there in the Alameda, a meeting over here in an avenue, Trocha, where one day I said that if they took away our rights by force, we would make a change…and take up guns. (APPLAUSE) And they blamed Luis Orlando for those statements, I kept my mouth closed, in the newspaper they wrote that it was Luis Orlando who had said that. I was the one who had said that but I wasn’t sure if the statements were well made because in those days there weren’t… (LAUGHTER) and it turned out we had to exchange everything, the students, their books and pencils, for guns; the peasants would exchange their work implements for guns and we would all have to exchange everything for guns. For the time being the gun matter has ceased. Guns will be kept where they can be accessed by men who have the duty to defend our sovereignty and our rights.
But when our people are threatened, it won’t be just the 30,000 or 40,000 members of the Armed Forces who will fight; instead it will be 300,000 or 400,000 or 500,000 Cubans who will be fighting, men and women here who are able to fight. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) We will have the necessary weapons to arm everyone who wants to fight when the time comes to defend our sovereignty. (APPLAUSE) Because it has been demonstrated that it isn’t just the men who fight, but the women also fight in Cuba, (APPLAUSE) and the best proof of this is the Mariana Grajales Battalion which distinguished itself so highly in a number of battles. (APPLAUSE) And the women soldiers are as excellent as our best male soldiers.
I wanted to show how women could be such good soldiers. At first I had to get over my problems with the idea because there were many prejudices and there were men who would wonder how a gun could be given to some woman when there was a man with a rifle around. But why not?
I wanted to show how women could be such good soldiers, and that there were many prejudices…about women, and that the female sector of our country also needs to be remedied, because women are victims of discrimination in jobs and in many other aspects of life.
We organized female units, and they demonstrated that women can fight. And when men and women fight in a country, that country becomes invincible.
We shall keep the militias or the female reserve troops organized and we shall keep all the women volunteers trained. (APPLAUSE) And all these young women I see here today wearing the red and black dresses, the colors of the July 26th Movement, I hope they too will learn how to handle weapons. (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE)
And this Revolution, my compatriots, that has been accomplished with so much sacrifice, our Revolution, the Revolution of the people, is now a beautiful and indestructible reality! What a reason for well-founded pride, what a reason for sincere joy and for the hopes of all our people! I know it’s not just here in Santiago de Cuba; it goes from Point Maisi to the Cape of San Antonio.
I fervently hope to see the people all along the route to the capital because I know that it is the same hope, the same faith of all the people who have risen up, that have patiently withstood all the sacrifice, who haven’t complained about the hunger; that when we gave permission, three days for setting up communications again, so that they wouldn’t be hungry, everyone protested (APPLAUSE) because what they wanted was to achieve victory, whatever the cost. And our people really deserve a better future, they really deserve to have the happiness that they haven’t achieved in their 50 years of Republic; they really deserve to become one of the top-ranking countries in the world, because of their intelligence, their courage and their spirit (APPALAUSE).
Nobody can think that I speak like a demagogue. Nobody can think that I want to bamboozle the people. I have demonstrated my faith in the people enough because when I arrived with 82 men on the beaches of Cuba and people were saying that we were crazy and they were asking us why we thought we were going to win the war, I told them” “Because we have the people.” (APPLAUSE) And when we suffered our first defeat, and only a handful of men remained and we kept on fighting, we knew that this would become reality, because we believed in the people. When they broke us up five times in 45 days and we got together again and took up the battle again, it was because we had faith in the people. And today we have the most tangible demonstration that the faith had a firm basis (APPLAUSE).
I have the satisfaction of having profoundly believed in the people of Cuba and that I have instilled that faith in my comrades; that faith which, more than faith, is the complete security in our men. And that same faith we have in all of you is the faith we want you to have in us, always (APPLAUSE).
The Republic wasn’t free in 1995 and the hopes and dreams of the Mambises were thwarted at the last moment. The Revolution didn’t take place in 1933 and it was thwarted by its enemies. This time the Revolution has all the people; it has all the revolutionaries, it has the honorable militants. Its strength is so great and so irrepressible that this time triumph is assured!
We can jubilantly say that in the four centuries since our nation was founded, for the first time we will be completely free and the work of the Mambises will be fulfilled (APPALUSE).
Just a few short days ago, on the 24th of February, I couldn’t resist the temptation to visit my mother. I hadn’t seen her for several years. When I was returning along the road crossing the Mangos of Baraguá, during the dark hours of night, a feeling of deep devotion made us stop there. Those of us travelling by car stopped there at that spot where they have erected a monument commemorating the Protest of Baraguá and the start of the invasion. At that time, in the presence of those sites, thinking about the exploits of our wars of independence, the idea that those men had fought for 30 years and never saw their dreams made reality because the Republic had been thwarted, and the foreboding that very soon the Revolution they dreamed of, the homeland they dreamed of, would become real. It made us feel the most exciting sensations that could ever be imagined.
I saw those men with their sacrifices come to life again, those same sacrifices we have also come to know at first hand; I was thinking of their hopes and dreams, the same as our hopes and dreams, and I thought about how this generation of Cubans has to pay and how they have now paid the most fervent tribute of acknowledgement and loyalty to the heroes of our independence.
The men who have fallen in our three wars of independence today join forces with the men who have fallen in this war. And we can say to all those who have fallen in our struggles for freedom that at last the time has come for their dreams to be fulfilled. The time has come for all of you, finally, our people, our good and noble people which are total enthusiasm and faith, our people which freely love and freely trust, that fears men with affection above and beyond what they offer, they will have everything they need (APPLAUSE). I only have to say to them here, modestly, sincerely, with profound emotion, that they will always have us, their revolutionary combatants as their loyal servants; they will only have to serve them in return (APPLAUSE).
Today, upon assuming the presidency of the Republic, Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleó, the judge who said that the Revolution was just… (INTERRUPTION) ... liberated territory now takes up the entire country; I shall simply take on the functions he assigns me, all the authority of the Republic is in his hands. (APPLAUSE) Our arms bow down respectfully to the Civilian Power in the civilian Republic of Cuba. (APPLAUSE) I don’t have to tell you that we are hoping he will fulfill his duty, because we are simply sure that he knows how to fulfill it. The provisional president of the Republic of Cuba…and the authority, and I give him the podium so that he may address the people.
(OVATION)
SHORTHAND VERSIONS – COUNCIL OF STATE
VERSIONES TAQUIGRAFICAS - CONSEJO DE ESTADO
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="june_02.html">June 2002 • Vol 2, No. 6 •</a></b></font></p>
<p></p>
<div align="left">
<div align="left">
<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5">Once Again: <br>
Before and After Jan. 1, 1959<br>
</font></b></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div align="right">
<p>By Fidel Castro</p>
</div>
<div align="left">
<hr noshade="" size="3" width="75%" align="left">
<p><font color="black">Dear compatriots from Holguin, Granma, Las Tunas and from all of Cuba:</font></p>
<p>On May 20, the day of the shameful show in Miami, it was ironic to listen to Mr. W. Bush claim strongly for independence and freedom, not for Puerto Rico but for Cuba, and to talk much about democracy, not for Florida but for Cuba. Mr. W. made a special point of defending private property, as if it did not exist in Cuba.</p>
<p>I then realized that years pass. The days are really far now when a man spoke from his wheelchair with a soft voice and a persuasive accent. He spoke as a president of the United States of America and he inspired respect. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He did not speak like a showoff or a thug, nor was the United States the hegemonic hyperpower it is today.</p>
<p>At that time, Ethiopia had been occupied. The bloody Spanish Civil War had begun. China was being invaded and Nazi-fascism was a threat to the world. Roosevelt, who I think was a real statesman, was striving to steer his country away from a dangerous isolationism.</p>
<p></p>
<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" width="64">
<tbody><tr>
<td><img src="Castro_WCAR.jpg" width="350" height="268" border="0"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b><font size="-1">Fidel Castro participating in discussion in a workshop at the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa, August 31 through September 7, 2001.</font></b></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>I was then a sixth or seventh grader. I was 12 or 13 years old. I had been born deep in the countryside, where there was no electricity. Sometimes the only way to get there was riding a horse through very muddy dirt roads. Back then, I spent most of the year in a rigid and segregationist boarding school in Santiago—that is, in sexual apartheid, where the boys were kept at great distance from the girls, in schools that were light-years away from each other—with several interspersed holidays and a longer vacation in summer time when I came to Biran.</p>
<p>Those of us who were privileged could have shoes, clothes and be well fed; however, a sea of poverty surrounded us. I don’t know how large is Mr. W.’s Texas ranch. I do remember that my father had over 24,700 acres of farmland. Of course, that meant hardly anything as extensive areas, between 272,710 and 284,245 acres, surrounded the family land owned by the West Indies Sugar Company and the United Fruit Company.</p>
<p>I remember that when it was announced that the president of the United States would speak it was tantamount to saying that God would speak. And it was only natural, since everything came from there: the beautiful, the good and the useful things, from a razor blade to a locomotive; from a postcard of the Statue of Liberty to one of those Western films, which fascinated both children and adults.</p>
<p></p>
<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" width="64">
<tbody><tr>
<td><img src="castro.jpg" width="250" height="275" border="0"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b><font size="-1">Fidel Castro about 1959</font></b></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>Moreover, “it was from there that our freedom and independence had come.” That was what the dozens of thousands of farm laborers and farmers with no land of their own were told in those areas where they could only work part of the year cleaning or cutting sugar cane. They went hungry and barefoot, dressed in rags and lived in terror of the “rural guard”—a special force created by the administrators of the country and armed with Springfield rifles and long and thin machetes that became famous. They also used to wear big hats and ride seven-foot-Texas horses that, with their imposing sizes, scared our undernourished workers ruthlessly suppressed by those guards if they as much as threatened to revolt or go on strike.</p>
<p>In those immensely extensive fields, where there were huts, thatched-roof shacks, impoverished villages and sugar mills, it was hard to find a single very poor classroom for the 200 or 300 children who lived in the area; there were no books, very few school materials and sometimes not even a teacher. It was only in the hamlets that sprang up around the big sugar mills that there were one or two physicians who basically cared for the families of the foreign sugar companies’ local managers and senior operatives.</p>
<p>On the other hand, a rather strange character could be easily found everywhere. He had no more than a third or a fourth grade of grammar school, but that meant being practically a wise man as compared to the masses of illiterates. He was often a godfather of somebody’s child and an occasional visitor to the families living in the countryside. He was in charge of things related to elections. He obtained the peoples’ ID cards and the promise of their votes he was the politician’s crony.</p>
<p>The people in the countryside did not intend to sell their votes, but rather help “their friend.” With few exceptions, the candidates with most money in their chests, who could hire more political cronies, won the races either for national legislative office or for other county or provincial elective positions. If any of those elections was intended to change the President—never the political or social system, which was unthinkable—and if there was any conflict of interests, it was the rural guard that decided who the new leaders would be.</p>
<p>Most of our people were either illiterate or semi-illiterate and they depended on a miserable job arbitrarily handed them by an employer or an elected official. The people had no choice, as they even lacked the minimum indispensable knowledge to decide on the increasingly complex issues of this world.</p>
<p>As for the history of our homeland, they only knew the legend passed down by the grandparents and the parents about past heroic struggles fought in the colonial days; eventually, it was fortunate that it was that way. As for the traditional political parties, where the oligarchies that served the empire prevailed, how could our people understand them? Who could teach them? Where could they read about it? With what alphabet? How could that information be passed on?</p>
<p>The brilliant and heroic effort of the leftist intellectuals of the time, who made remarkable progress under those circumstances, clashed with the insurmountable walls of a new imperial system and the centuries-old experience of the ruling classes to keep the peoples oppressed, exploited, confused and divided. The only property right known by most Cubans before 1959 was the right of the big foreign companies and their allies of the national oligarchy to own enormous amounts of farmland in our country, as well as the country’s natural resources and biggest factories, the crucial public services, the banks, the storage facilities, the ports, the hospitals and the private schools that served with excellence a negligible minority of the privileged population.</p>
<p>As fate would have it, I was honored to be born precisely in the territory of this province, in a place that is 33.5 miles in a straight line from this Plaza, but which is very close to my memory, hardly ten millimeters or ten seconds from my mind.</p>
<p>In those enormous sugar cane fields, I could only see dozens of thousands of farmers with no land to till or sharecroppers paying huge rents but without any contracts to back the arrangement, and constantly threatened and evicted by those riders of Texan horses. In the cities, very few owned their dwellings for which they had to pay very high rents. I never saw hospitals or schools for ordinary people and their children; I did not see brigades of doctors and teachers. I only saw extreme poverty, injustice and hopelessness everywhere. The Cuban people had been confiscated and stripped of any property.</p>
<p>It was imperative to resume the struggle. The chains had to be broken. A deep revolution was indispensable. We had to be willing to either win or die for it. And we decided to fight.</p>
<p>The socialist revolution has created in Cuba more property owners than all those created by capitalism throughout centuries. Today, hundreds of thousands of peasant families own their land, for which they do not even pay taxes. Others have it in usufruct, free of charge, and they exploit it either individually or in cooperatives; they are the owners of the machinery, the workshops, the livestock and other goods. But, most important of all is that the Revolution gave the people the property of their own country. What the Revolution eradicated was the property of the basic means of production, of the financial institutions and of other crucial services which were in the hands of those who plundered and exploited the people and made fortunes on the workers’ sweat—or that only served the rich and the privileged, leaving the poor and the Black people out.</p>
<p>The nostalgia over their property that the leader of an imperial government might feel could be overcome by seeing that, in addition to the farmers, millions of families in the cities presently own their dwellings, for which they do not even pay taxes.</p>
<p>Out of a historical necessity to leave behind a legacy of underdevelopment, Cuba shares with foreign companies those productions that it would not have access to with its own technologies and funds, but no international financial institution or foreign private capital can determine our destiny.</p>
<p>Nor does a single penny end up in Castro’s pockets or those of his followers. No senior Cuban revolutionary leader has a dollar in a bank, or a personal bank account in hard currency in Cuba or anywhere else. None of them can be bribed. The hundreds of foreign companies doing business in Cuba today know that very well. None of our leaders is a millionaire like the president of the United States, whose monthly wage is almost twice that of all the members of the State Council and the Council of Ministers in a year. None can be included in the long list of Mr. W.’s neoliberal friends in Latin America who are Olympic champions of misappropriation and theft since the few who do not steal from the public coffers and state taxes steal from the poor and the hungry the surplus value of their work, while killing hundreds of thousands of Latin American children every year whose lives could be saved. That is the system that Mr. W. longs to impose on Cuba as a model. His insults are unwarranted, thus, he should not complain from our tough responses.</p>
<p>The end of the exploitation of human beings and true equality and justice is, and will be, the objective of a Revolution that will never cease to be what it is.</p>
<p>The work of the Revolution has been remarkable all over the country, and hugest in the dear and heroic eastern region, which was the poorest and most backward. Of the five eastern provinces, the three—Holguin, Granma and Las Tunas—that have sent more than 400,000 combative and enthusiastic people to this rally, have attained in a few years social and human achievements unparalleled in the world.</p>
<p>Some data of what they had before and what they have after the triumph of the Revolution:</p>
<ul>
<li type="disc">Infant mortality rate: before, over 100 per one thousand live births; today, 5.9, well below the United States.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">Life expectancy at birth: before, 57 years; today, 76.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">Number of doctors: before, 344; today, 10, 334.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">Health units: before, 46; today, 4,006.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">Hospital beds: before, 1,470; today, over 12,000.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">Schoolteachers: before, 1,682; today, 77,479.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">Universities: before, 0; today, 12.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">Illiteracy rate: before, 40.3 percent; today, 0.2 percent.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">Grammar school graduates: before, 10 percent of only 34 percent of children in school age who attended public school; today, one hundred percent of children attend grammar school and 99.9 percent graduate.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">TV sets for audiovisual education: before, 0; today, 13,394.<br>
<br>
</li><li type="disc">PCs for computer science education from kindergarten to sixth grade: 5,563 that benefit 237,510 children.
</li></ul>
<p>Over 27,000 youths between the ages of 17 and 29, who had no jobs, are studying middle and higher education in recently established Schools for the Comprehensive Education of the Youth, for which they receive remuneration. These three provinces have 62 museums, 62 cultural centers, 21 art galleries and 72 libraries.</p>
<p>Every child in Cuba, regardless of his parents’ income and the color of his skin, has high quality health care services ensured from his birth until the end of his life. The same applies to education, from kindergarten up until graduation as a PhD, and that absolutely free of charge. No other country in Latin America gets even remotely close to Cuba in any of these indicators. In Cuba, there is not one single child begging in the streets or working to make a living instead of attending school. Nor are there narcotics that poison and destroy teenagers and young people.</p>
<p>This is not a tyranny, as Mr. W. has claimed. It is justice, it is true equality among human beings, it is general learning and culture without which there is not, there cannot be, nor will there ever be true independence, freedom and democracy anywhere on Earth. Mr. W. should be ashamed to call those societies where corruption, inequality and injustice prevail, and which are being destroyed by the neoliberal model, examples of independence, freedom and democracy!</p>
<p>For Mr. W. democracy only exists where money solves everything and where those who can afford a $25,000 a plate dinner—an insult to the billions of people living in the poor, hungry and underdeveloped world—are the ones called to solve the problems of society and the world, the same [people] that will determine the fate of a great nation like the United States, and the rest of the planet.</p>
<p>Don’t you be a fool, Mr. W.; show some respect for the minds of people who are capable of thinking. Read some of the 100 thousand letters sent to you by our children. Do not insult Jose Marti. Do not invoke his sacred name in vain. Stop using his phrases out of context in your speeches. Show some respect for others and for yourself.</p>
<p>The criminal blockade he has promised to tighten will only multiply the honor and glory of our people against which their wicked plans will smash, I assure you. Compatriots: In the face of dangers and threats, long live today, more than ever, the Socialist Revolution!</p>
<p>Homeland or Death! We shall overcome!</p>
<p> </p>
<p>—Information Office Cuban Interests Section, June 1, 2002</p>
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June 2002 • Vol 2, No. 6 •
Once Again:
Before and After Jan. 1, 1959
By Fidel Castro
Dear compatriots from Holguin, Granma, Las Tunas and from all of Cuba:
On May 20, the day of the shameful show in Miami, it was ironic to listen to Mr. W. Bush claim strongly for independence and freedom, not for Puerto Rico but for Cuba, and to talk much about democracy, not for Florida but for Cuba. Mr. W. made a special point of defending private property, as if it did not exist in Cuba.
I then realized that years pass. The days are really far now when a man spoke from his wheelchair with a soft voice and a persuasive accent. He spoke as a president of the United States of America and he inspired respect. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He did not speak like a showoff or a thug, nor was the United States the hegemonic hyperpower it is today.
At that time, Ethiopia had been occupied. The bloody Spanish Civil War had begun. China was being invaded and Nazi-fascism was a threat to the world. Roosevelt, who I think was a real statesman, was striving to steer his country away from a dangerous isolationism.
Fidel Castro participating in discussion in a workshop at the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa, August 31 through September 7, 2001.
I was then a sixth or seventh grader. I was 12 or 13 years old. I had been born deep in the countryside, where there was no electricity. Sometimes the only way to get there was riding a horse through very muddy dirt roads. Back then, I spent most of the year in a rigid and segregationist boarding school in Santiago—that is, in sexual apartheid, where the boys were kept at great distance from the girls, in schools that were light-years away from each other—with several interspersed holidays and a longer vacation in summer time when I came to Biran.
Those of us who were privileged could have shoes, clothes and be well fed; however, a sea of poverty surrounded us. I don’t know how large is Mr. W.’s Texas ranch. I do remember that my father had over 24,700 acres of farmland. Of course, that meant hardly anything as extensive areas, between 272,710 and 284,245 acres, surrounded the family land owned by the West Indies Sugar Company and the United Fruit Company.
I remember that when it was announced that the president of the United States would speak it was tantamount to saying that God would speak. And it was only natural, since everything came from there: the beautiful, the good and the useful things, from a razor blade to a locomotive; from a postcard of the Statue of Liberty to one of those Western films, which fascinated both children and adults.
Fidel Castro about 1959
Moreover, “it was from there that our freedom and independence had come.” That was what the dozens of thousands of farm laborers and farmers with no land of their own were told in those areas where they could only work part of the year cleaning or cutting sugar cane. They went hungry and barefoot, dressed in rags and lived in terror of the “rural guard”—a special force created by the administrators of the country and armed with Springfield rifles and long and thin machetes that became famous. They also used to wear big hats and ride seven-foot-Texas horses that, with their imposing sizes, scared our undernourished workers ruthlessly suppressed by those guards if they as much as threatened to revolt or go on strike.
In those immensely extensive fields, where there were huts, thatched-roof shacks, impoverished villages and sugar mills, it was hard to find a single very poor classroom for the 200 or 300 children who lived in the area; there were no books, very few school materials and sometimes not even a teacher. It was only in the hamlets that sprang up around the big sugar mills that there were one or two physicians who basically cared for the families of the foreign sugar companies’ local managers and senior operatives.
On the other hand, a rather strange character could be easily found everywhere. He had no more than a third or a fourth grade of grammar school, but that meant being practically a wise man as compared to the masses of illiterates. He was often a godfather of somebody’s child and an occasional visitor to the families living in the countryside. He was in charge of things related to elections. He obtained the peoples’ ID cards and the promise of their votes he was the politician’s crony.
The people in the countryside did not intend to sell their votes, but rather help “their friend.” With few exceptions, the candidates with most money in their chests, who could hire more political cronies, won the races either for national legislative office or for other county or provincial elective positions. If any of those elections was intended to change the President—never the political or social system, which was unthinkable—and if there was any conflict of interests, it was the rural guard that decided who the new leaders would be.
Most of our people were either illiterate or semi-illiterate and they depended on a miserable job arbitrarily handed them by an employer or an elected official. The people had no choice, as they even lacked the minimum indispensable knowledge to decide on the increasingly complex issues of this world.
As for the history of our homeland, they only knew the legend passed down by the grandparents and the parents about past heroic struggles fought in the colonial days; eventually, it was fortunate that it was that way. As for the traditional political parties, where the oligarchies that served the empire prevailed, how could our people understand them? Who could teach them? Where could they read about it? With what alphabet? How could that information be passed on?
The brilliant and heroic effort of the leftist intellectuals of the time, who made remarkable progress under those circumstances, clashed with the insurmountable walls of a new imperial system and the centuries-old experience of the ruling classes to keep the peoples oppressed, exploited, confused and divided. The only property right known by most Cubans before 1959 was the right of the big foreign companies and their allies of the national oligarchy to own enormous amounts of farmland in our country, as well as the country’s natural resources and biggest factories, the crucial public services, the banks, the storage facilities, the ports, the hospitals and the private schools that served with excellence a negligible minority of the privileged population.
As fate would have it, I was honored to be born precisely in the territory of this province, in a place that is 33.5 miles in a straight line from this Plaza, but which is very close to my memory, hardly ten millimeters or ten seconds from my mind.
In those enormous sugar cane fields, I could only see dozens of thousands of farmers with no land to till or sharecroppers paying huge rents but without any contracts to back the arrangement, and constantly threatened and evicted by those riders of Texan horses. In the cities, very few owned their dwellings for which they had to pay very high rents. I never saw hospitals or schools for ordinary people and their children; I did not see brigades of doctors and teachers. I only saw extreme poverty, injustice and hopelessness everywhere. The Cuban people had been confiscated and stripped of any property.
It was imperative to resume the struggle. The chains had to be broken. A deep revolution was indispensable. We had to be willing to either win or die for it. And we decided to fight.
The socialist revolution has created in Cuba more property owners than all those created by capitalism throughout centuries. Today, hundreds of thousands of peasant families own their land, for which they do not even pay taxes. Others have it in usufruct, free of charge, and they exploit it either individually or in cooperatives; they are the owners of the machinery, the workshops, the livestock and other goods. But, most important of all is that the Revolution gave the people the property of their own country. What the Revolution eradicated was the property of the basic means of production, of the financial institutions and of other crucial services which were in the hands of those who plundered and exploited the people and made fortunes on the workers’ sweat—or that only served the rich and the privileged, leaving the poor and the Black people out.
The nostalgia over their property that the leader of an imperial government might feel could be overcome by seeing that, in addition to the farmers, millions of families in the cities presently own their dwellings, for which they do not even pay taxes.
Out of a historical necessity to leave behind a legacy of underdevelopment, Cuba shares with foreign companies those productions that it would not have access to with its own technologies and funds, but no international financial institution or foreign private capital can determine our destiny.
Nor does a single penny end up in Castro’s pockets or those of his followers. No senior Cuban revolutionary leader has a dollar in a bank, or a personal bank account in hard currency in Cuba or anywhere else. None of them can be bribed. The hundreds of foreign companies doing business in Cuba today know that very well. None of our leaders is a millionaire like the president of the United States, whose monthly wage is almost twice that of all the members of the State Council and the Council of Ministers in a year. None can be included in the long list of Mr. W.’s neoliberal friends in Latin America who are Olympic champions of misappropriation and theft since the few who do not steal from the public coffers and state taxes steal from the poor and the hungry the surplus value of their work, while killing hundreds of thousands of Latin American children every year whose lives could be saved. That is the system that Mr. W. longs to impose on Cuba as a model. His insults are unwarranted, thus, he should not complain from our tough responses.
The end of the exploitation of human beings and true equality and justice is, and will be, the objective of a Revolution that will never cease to be what it is.
The work of the Revolution has been remarkable all over the country, and hugest in the dear and heroic eastern region, which was the poorest and most backward. Of the five eastern provinces, the three—Holguin, Granma and Las Tunas—that have sent more than 400,000 combative and enthusiastic people to this rally, have attained in a few years social and human achievements unparalleled in the world.
Some data of what they had before and what they have after the triumph of the Revolution:
Infant mortality rate: before, over 100 per one thousand live births; today, 5.9, well below the United States.
Life expectancy at birth: before, 57 years; today, 76.
Number of doctors: before, 344; today, 10, 334.
Health units: before, 46; today, 4,006.
Hospital beds: before, 1,470; today, over 12,000.
Schoolteachers: before, 1,682; today, 77,479.
Universities: before, 0; today, 12.
Illiteracy rate: before, 40.3 percent; today, 0.2 percent.
Grammar school graduates: before, 10 percent of only 34 percent of children in school age who attended public school; today, one hundred percent of children attend grammar school and 99.9 percent graduate.
TV sets for audiovisual education: before, 0; today, 13,394.
PCs for computer science education from kindergarten to sixth grade: 5,563 that benefit 237,510 children.
Over 27,000 youths between the ages of 17 and 29, who had no jobs, are studying middle and higher education in recently established Schools for the Comprehensive Education of the Youth, for which they receive remuneration. These three provinces have 62 museums, 62 cultural centers, 21 art galleries and 72 libraries.
Every child in Cuba, regardless of his parents’ income and the color of his skin, has high quality health care services ensured from his birth until the end of his life. The same applies to education, from kindergarten up until graduation as a PhD, and that absolutely free of charge. No other country in Latin America gets even remotely close to Cuba in any of these indicators. In Cuba, there is not one single child begging in the streets or working to make a living instead of attending school. Nor are there narcotics that poison and destroy teenagers and young people.
This is not a tyranny, as Mr. W. has claimed. It is justice, it is true equality among human beings, it is general learning and culture without which there is not, there cannot be, nor will there ever be true independence, freedom and democracy anywhere on Earth. Mr. W. should be ashamed to call those societies where corruption, inequality and injustice prevail, and which are being destroyed by the neoliberal model, examples of independence, freedom and democracy!
For Mr. W. democracy only exists where money solves everything and where those who can afford a $25,000 a plate dinner—an insult to the billions of people living in the poor, hungry and underdeveloped world—are the ones called to solve the problems of society and the world, the same [people] that will determine the fate of a great nation like the United States, and the rest of the planet.
Don’t you be a fool, Mr. W.; show some respect for the minds of people who are capable of thinking. Read some of the 100 thousand letters sent to you by our children. Do not insult Jose Marti. Do not invoke his sacred name in vain. Stop using his phrases out of context in your speeches. Show some respect for others and for yourself.
The criminal blockade he has promised to tighten will only multiply the honor and glory of our people against which their wicked plans will smash, I assure you. Compatriots: In the face of dangers and threats, long live today, more than ever, the Socialist Revolution!
Homeland or Death! We shall overcome!
—Information Office Cuban Interests Section, June 1, 2002
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1959.01.21 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h1>
When the people rule
</h1>
<h4>
Cuba is a nation which rules itself and does not take orders from anyone
</h4>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> January 21, 1959 in Havana in front of a million Cuban workers and peasants
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> FBIS <!--Havana, COBC, in Spanish, to Cuba, Jan. 21, 1959, 2203 GMT-->
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>
Mr. President, gentlemen of the diplomatic corps, reporters of the
entire continent, fellow citizens:
</p>
<p>
I am going to ask the people to do something for me, and that is to
help me. There are a million persons here and the loudspeakers cannot be
heard. Absolute silence is necessary. It is very difficult to speak when
[one cannot be heard] perfectly well, and today I should like to tell the
people what I feel; I would like to tell the reporters what the people of
Cuba feel, I want to tell the diplomatic representatives of the entire
world the way our people think. To hear us, it is not enough to have been
here; to have attended is not enough alone. It is necessary to be silent.
It is necessary to show the people's discipline by being quiet. Let us see
if a million people can be silent. (He waits to let the crowd calm
down--Ed.)
</p>
<p>
Fellow citizens, it is possible that our fighters trembled more today
before this crowd then they ever did before enemy bullets. For us, who
have extraordinary faith in our people, this assembly has exceeded all
estimates. It is said that with those who have just arrived the crowd
extends from the Malecon to the Park of Fraternity. We can say one thing
here today, and that is that there is no place in Havana to bring together
all the people who support the revolution. (Applause) Before a small park
was enough and there was room left. This time all the parks together
around the presidential palace are insufficient. I am going to tell you an
anecdote so that you can understand the full moral value of this meeting
for us.
</p>
<p>
One of our comrades attached to the Havana municipality told me that this
morning the employees gathered and asked him where they were meeting to go
to the assembly, and our friend replied: "No, those who want to can go and
those who do not can go home." This is not the kind of meeting organized
before! (Applause) How different it is when the people feel free! How
different it is when the people rule! People have come from Matanzas and
Pinar del Rio on foot. Thousands of our fellow citizens have come on foot
because there were not enough vehicles.
</p>
<p>
We spoke of a half million, of getting together half a million Cubans, but
the people said no, not half a million, but one million; and it turned out
to be one and a half million. I went through some of the city's streets
before arriving, and Havana was deserted. Not a soul was to be seen for
blocks on end in the districts of Havana. All Havana had come, the whole
city, all the surroundings, and thousands and tens of thousands of Cubans
from the provinces nearest to Havana. I am sure that if it had been
physically possible 6 million Cubans <span class="inote">[the total population of the country]</span> would have gathered here today.
</p>
<p>
I realize that the best speech for this afternoon is your presence. I
realize that nothing can speak so eloquently to the diplomatic crops and
the 380 newsmen who have come from all the hemisphere as your presence.
Many Cubans here present cannot even here me. I asked the men who
organized the affair and they told me all the loudspeakers in Havana were
set up here; and yet many tell me they cannot hear me. It hurts me to
think that you are making the sacrifice of standing since hours ago and not
even being able to hear what we are saying, but at least you can have the
satisfaction of knowing that your presence has not been in vain and that
this gathering today, <em>this gathering here today</em>, is the finest battle the
people of Cuba have fought in this revolution. It is a victory by force of
arms; not a shot has been fired. It is a much finer victory. It is a
victory of right; it is a victory of justice; it is a victory for morality.
Those who thought we were just ordinary guerrillas, those who thought we
knew nothing but the use of firearms, those who thought that after our
military victories they would crush us in the field of information, and
crush us in the field of public opinion, have found that the Cuban
revolution also knows how to fight and win (battles) in that field.
</p>
<p>
Those who thought that monopoly over international cables, those who
thought that spreading lies and slander right and left, would let them
weaken our revolution and discredit our people, so that they could then
leap upon it when it was weak, were mistaken, for the revolution today is
more solid and stronger. Instead of weakening it they have strengthened
it. The revolution is not intimidated by attacks. The revolution is not
weakened by attacks. On the contrary, it waxes and gains strength, for
this is the revolution of a valiant, fighting people.
</p>
<p>
With another people, another people lacking the virtues of the Cuban
people, it would not even be worthwhile having started this struggle, but
when one has a people like this to count on, one not only begins but
achieves and goes on to total victory.
</p>
<p>
To the people of Cuba everything is clear. The Cuban revolution was an
exemplary revolution. There was no coup here.
</p>
<p>
If we had been a group of army officers who, without the help of the
people, had ousted the President and installed another in his place and had
at once bowed to all the vested interests; if this had not been a
revolution, we would not have enemies; they would not have attacked us;
they would not slandered us.
</p>
<p>
While this palace housed a dictatorship that sold out the nation's
interests; while this palace housed a dictatorship that made the most
onerous concessions to foreigners; while this palace housed a dictatorship
that betrayed the people, nobody attacked it; these press campaigns were
not waged against it abroad; [U.S.] Congressmen did not speak out to censure it.
While it housed a miserable traitor, a criminal who murdered 20,000 of our
fellow citizens, these campaigns were not waged against Cuba, or against
him. While it housed someone who stole 300 million pesos; while the
republic was governed by a band of thieves who stole more than a billion
pesos, these campaigns were not waged against them abroad. While dozens of
Cubans were being killed here every night; while young men were being found
murdered with a bullet in the temple; while barracks yards were heaped with
corpses; when our women were violated; when children were murdered; when
police entered embassies to murder 10 refugees in a few minutes, these
campaigns were not waged against Cuba, nor did the [U.S.] Congressmen over there,
with rare exceptions, speak out to condemn the dictatorship.
</p>
<p>
But there is no need to go further. There you have Trujillo with his
dictatorship 27 years old; there you have the 10,000 Haitians murdered by
the Dominican dictator; there you have the tens of thousands of men
murdered inside and outside of Santo Domingo by the henchmen of the
criminal dictator. And there you have Somoza. Somoza is of the dynasty
that for more than 25 years has been oppressing his country, with his
full jails, his press censorship, his thousands of crimes. And no
campaigns are organized against them.
</p>
<p>
A campaign against the Cuban people, <em>yes</em>, because they want to be free. A
campaign against the Cuban people, yes-- <em>a campaign against the Cuban
people, yes</em>, because they want to be free not just politically, but
economically as well. A campaign against the people of Cuba, because they
have become a dangerous example for all America. A campaign against the
people of Cuba because they know we are going to call for cancellation of
the onerous concessions that have been made to foreign monopolies, because
they know electric rates are going to be lowered here, because they know
that all the onerous concessions made by the dictatorship are going to be
reviewed and canceled.
</p>
<p>
There, fellow citizens, you have the chief cause of this campaign. The
explanation of this must be sought, the explanation of this campaign must
be sought--if you let me talk I am going to explain; I would like to
explain this thoroughly, so the people and the foreign press can understand
it. We have not obtained the crowd's full cooperation in maintaining
absolute silence. (Sentence indistinct)
</p>
<p>
The explanation for this campaign must be sought somewhere. Why has this
campaign been launched against Cuba? The vilest, most criminal, and most
unjust that has been launched against any people. Why, when barely four or
five days had passed since the victory, did international cable services
and certain U.S. Congressmen loose a barrage of defamation against the
Cuban people? The purpose is clear. Our revolution was able to present
itself to the world as a model of revolutions. The rebel army's generosity
toward the enemy was without precedent in the history of revolutions and
wars. Thousand of prisoners fell in our hands. Hundreds of wounded were
cared for by our doctors. (Words indistinct) Not one prisoner was struck.
(Much crowd noise--Ed.)
</p>
<p>
Fellow citizens,next time I am going to ask 2,000 Cubans to come instead of
a million. That is a lot, and there is not room. The crowd is being
pressed together.
</p>
<p>
(Possibly one or two sentences indistinct, as if volume had been turned
down --Unreadable text-- loudspeaker--Ed.) I am going to sum up ideas. We
invited the people of Cuba. We had nothing to say to them, because the
people of Cuba know the truth very well. We do not have to convince the
people of Cuba of anything, because the people of Cuba are more than
convinced. It is necessary to convince the world public, and we are going
to convince it through the newsmen who have come here.
</p>
<p>
Tomorrow we are going to meet with the newsmen who have come from all over
the hemisphere. At the meeting I will submit to interrogation, as one can
who has done his duty. I am going to submit to interrogation by America,
as can be done by a man with a clear conscience. I do not have to give an
account to any U.S. Congressman. I do not have to give an account to any
foreign government. I will give an account to the peoples. In the first
place I give an account to my people, to the Cubans. In the second place,
to all the peoples of America. I give an account to the people of Mexico,
to the people of the United States, of Costa Rica, of Venezuela, and of the
whole world. <span class="inote">[Castro would do just this two days later begining January 23, 1959, to spread his ideas throughout Latin America.]</span>
</p>
<p>
For that reason I called in the newsmen, to come and see the truth with
their own eyes. Where there is justice there is no crime, and where there
is crime there is no freedom of the press. Where there is crime, people
hide their actions.
</p>
<p>
Here things have been done in the open. We came here so they could see
that there is justice. And so we invited all newsmen of the world, for
here in Cuba there is a freedom of the press (word or two indistinct) that
is not found anywhere else in the world. In Cuba there is a respect for
human rights not found anywhere else in the world.
</p>
<p>
The Cuban people are not a savage people, or a criminal people. This is
the noblest and most feeling people in the world. If an injustice were
committed here, all the people would be against it. Our intellectuals are
not unfeeling; our newsmen are not unfeeling; our workers are not
unfeeling; our peasants are not unfeeling; our priests are not unfeeling,
and when everybody [agrees to] the punishment, it is because the
punishment is a just one, it is because the punishment is deserved.
</p>
<p>
The allied powers punished the war criminals after the second world war,
and they have less right to do so than we have, because they meted out
punishment under the ex post facto legislation, while we are punishing the
war criminals under legislation passed before the crime, in public trials,
in courts made up of honest men. To avoid mistakes we are trying only the
most notorious criminals, those who have 5, 10, 15, or 20 murders against
them, those known to all the people. But is it not possible to
expatriate, and I am going to meet with newsmen from the whole hemisphere.
We have also invited the President of Cuba to attend the interview, and we
are going to invite the cabinet. And we are going to explain fully to the
newsmen everything they want us to explain. We must not expatriate; there
is just one thing more.
</p>
<p>
Reporters of the entire continent, diplomatic representatives accredited to
Cuba, imagine an immense jury, imagine a jury consisting of a million men
and women belonging to all social classes, of all religious beliefs, of all
political ideas. I am going to ask this jury something. I am going to ask
the people something: Those who agree with the justice that is being
carried out, those who agree that the henchmen should be shot, raise your
hands. (Applause of about 2 minutes)
</p>
<p>
Gentlemen of the diplomatic corps, reporters of the entire continent: The
jury of a million Cubans representing all views and social classes has
voted. To those who are democrats, or those who call themselves democrats
I say: This is democracy, this is respecting the will of the people.
Those who are democrats, or those who call themselves democrats, must
respect the will of the people.
</p>
<p>
Before concluding I should like to say something I consider important: It
is that the people of Cuba are worried about our security.
</p>
<p>
Thousands upon thousands of our fellow citizens have asked us to take care
of ourselves. They fear that we will be attacked by enemies of the
revolution. The people fear that the death of one of their leaders would
be failure for the revolution. What I am about to tell the people of Cuba
today is that this is not true. What I am going to tell the people of Cuba
is that the revolution cannot depend upon one man. The fate of a nation
cannot depend upon one man, that the fate of (justice?) cannot depend upon
one man. Moreover, the leaders cannot be placed in a glass case.
</p>
<p>
I am firmly determined to continue doing things as I have been doing. I am
firmly determined to challenge calmly all dangers, come what may. I am
doing this for one reason. It is because I am very aware that nothing and
no one can stop the revolution. And I also have something to say to my
enemies: Behind me are others more radical than I. In the same way, by
attacking our revolutionary justice, they have done nothing but reinforce
the revolution. By killing me they will only strengthen the revolution.
</p>
<p>
In order to take the proper precautionary measures so as to be protected
against all eventualities, I am going to propose to the board of the July
26 Movement that it appoint comrade Raul Castro second in command of the
July 26 Movement. (Vigorous applause) I am doing it not because he is my
brother, (words indistinct) but because I truly consider him sufficiently
capable to substitute for me should I have to die. Moreover, he is a
comrade with very firm revolutionary convictions and he has shown his
ability in this struggle. He was one of the leaders of the attack on the
Moncada garrison; he spent two years in prison; he has carried out so many
(word indistinct) for the country; he has shown his ability as an organizer
and a leader. I wish that this did not concern a brother. I wish that he
had been another in order to remove the slightest suspicion that I am
favoring a relative. I must say right here that no one is being favored
because for us the country means suffering and duty, not pleasure or
vanity, or pleasures of a personal nature. For us this work is the work of
a slave (who knows his people are lost?)
</p>
<p>
For us leadership means sacrifice. For us leadership is not aspiring to
power. Everyone knows that I gave up power a long time ago. Everyone
knows with what disinterestedness I fought, and that I am of the opinion that
no man is indispensable, and that any honorable Cuban can be a good
President of the Republic. (Applause) Everyone knows that not only did I
refuse to be President of the Republic, but I gave my full support to the
President. Everyone knows my respect for the civil institutions of the
republic. Everyone knows that I have neither interfered nor will interfere
in matters pertaining to the presidency.
</p>
<p>
Everyone knows that I have been able to maintain unlimited (word
indistinct) and if I have replied to thousands of questions it is because
they were asked and because I was authorized (several words indistinct) if
the President will not allow me to hold a single press conference, and the
President will not allow me to make another statement while I am commander
in chief of all the forces of the republic I will obey this order
unconditionally.
</p>
<p>
What I have done is to defend the revolution from slander. What I have
done is to defend the good name of my country when others were seeking to
represent us as a country of criminals and savages. What I have done is to
defend the prestige of this revolution which has cost so much find and
freely shed blood. I say this because to be a leader is really not a
pleasure trip or a bed of roses, but a sacrifice, the extent of which
perhaps very few can understand. This is all the more so when one feels
the responsibility of so great a faith as the faith our people have placed
in us.
</p>
<p>
By stating here the necessity that the people be alert and be prepared for
any attack on its leaders or on one of its leaders, by presenting here this
necessity, I do so with the honest conviction of a man who is not only
concerned with the present but also the future of the country, of a man who
is thinking about the country, not only while he is alive, but after his
death. By stating here that I consider Comrade Raul Castro could replace
me if necessary, I am not making the decision alone. Rather I want to
consult with the people to see whether they agree.
</p>
<p>
My enemies know how that they can attack because everything has been taken
care of. Moreover, should they attack Raul, behind him another would rise
and behind that one another, and so forth. In the struggle the people of
Cuba will not be lacking in leaders, because everything will have been
taken care of. We who were able to win the war in the face of all odds
will also be able to win the revolution against all the enemies who plan
to attack it. Thus, the people of Cuba (words indistinct) each day we
will be stronger in our defense of the interests of the country and the
interests of the people. Finally, the people have attained their goal; the
complete freedom and sovereignty which it never had. It is a nation which
rules itself and does not take orders from anyone.
</p>
<p>
We have a just question to ask here. We will take advantage of this
opportunity to ask the U.S. Government to return the war criminals who have
taken refuge there. (Applause) The people of Cuba demand of the people of
the United States not give asylum to the Masferras, the Venturas, and the
other criminals. The people of the United States must demand of the U.S.
Government the return of the war criminals because they are war criminals.
</p>
<p>
After the world war the people of the United States would not have agreed
for Goering, Himmler, and Hitler to take refuge here <span class="inote">[although unknown at the time, many Nazi scientists and officers <em>were in fact</em> brought into the U.S. government, though entirely without the knowledge of the U.S. workers, to scale up production and technology against the Soviets.]</span>. Well, our Himmler is
Ventura. Our Goerings are the Tabernillas, the Pinar Garcias, the
Tavianos, the (Laurens?). Our Hitler is Batista.
</p>
<p>
If the United States wants to be just, if the United States wants to
respect the feelings of the people of Cuba, it must consent to extradite
the war criminals because they are not political criminals. Those who
violated women cannot be considered political criminals because the
violation of woman has nothing to do with politics. Those who tore out
eyes cannot be considered political criminals, because pulling out human
eyes has nothing to do with politics, those who assassinated children and
old women, those who tortured thousands and thousands of our fellow
citizens without pity cannot be considered political criminals because
torture has nothing to do with politics. They cannot be sheltered as
political criminals because they are common law criminals. The millions of
pesos which they stole to place in American banks must be returned to us.
Filling one's pockets with the people's money in order to take it abroad
has nothing to do with politics, because the theft of the republic's money
to spend it on luxuries has nothing to do with politics, and they are
thieves here and anywhere in the world. Therefore, the people of Cuba have
the right to demand the return of the assassins, torturers, and also the
return of the money taken from all the peoples.
</p>
<p>
We are not going to waste our time asking Trujillo to return the thieves to
(word indistinct) and we are not going to ask for the return of the air
force planes which the refugees took with them. We are not asking Trujillo
to return them because the people of the Dominican Republic will return
them and because we do not want any kind of relations with Trujillo.
</p>
<p>
Of course, Trujillo is not a dictator; just talk with those Congressmen who
are attacking us and you will see that Trujillo is a saint. If was
disgusting; there were some papers, some Mexican papers, for example, with
a cartoon showing Cuba dressed in white in a bath of blood, in a puddle,
and us there with beards and rifles like common executioners, of course.
</p>
<p>
Why? Ah! Because the international cable agencies are there, the same
agencies that (few words indistinct). They could not kill me and now they
are trying to kill the revolution's prestige, and of course very subtly.
Anybody with a minimum of understanding need only read the international
dispatches to see how this campaign was organized. The sad part is that
they have confused some American peoples. (Few words indistinct)
</p>
<p>
The Mexican people, a country that had a great territory wrested from it, a
country that has been so humiliated and mistreated; to this country came
the agencies that represent monopolistic, exploiting interests, to deceive
the Mexicans and make them believe that we are something worse Trujillo,
worse than Somoza, worse than (few words indistinct) the world has seen.
Our name has been presented as that of a murderer among the peoples of
America.
</p>
<p>
Here, or in any country in America, I can stand with my head high, with the
satisfaction of having a clear conscience and my hands free of blood <span class="inote">[Of all the prisoners of war captured by Castro during their revolutionary struggle, not one was executed, not one was harmed. In fact, the Cuban revolutionaries gained world renown and even U.S. funding because of their exeplaray treatment of prisoners in time of a guerrilla war -- using their own medical supplies to heal prisoners]</span>. I
can stand before any nation to tell it the truth. I am only sorry that the
peoples of America should let themselves be deceived so abominably. I am
only sorry to think what the fate of America would be if this revolution is
crushed, because this revolution, which is not a coup, which is not the
uprising of a group of military caudillos, but a revolution of the people,
authentically of the people, should represent a hope for the peoples of
America. And why? Ah! Because we have hit America's sore spot. The
history of America for more than a century is plain; America is the victim
of ambitious men, military caudillos, military castes. How much America and
the peoples of our hemisphere need a revolution like the one that has taken
place in Cuba. How much America needs an example like this in all its
nations. How much it needs for the millionaires who have become rich by
stealing the people's money to lose everything they have stolen. How much
America needs for the war criminals in the countries of our hemisphere all
to be shot.
</p>
<p>
Had these things been, maybe our continent would not be what it is today:
Groups of nations divided, set apart despite their identical feelings,
needs, interests, race, and culture; it would not be the group of divided,
weak nations, victims of the customary tyranny and military castes. How
much America needed Cuba's example. We Cubans can feel proud of a
revolution that came with no ambition for dominion, with no goal of
exploitation or domination over other countries; it came as an example, as
aspiration for justice, broad justice, (word indistinct), within the most
extraordinary system of respect for human freedoms the world has ever
known.
</p>
<p>
The Cuban revolution can be summed up as an aspiration for social justice,
within the fullest freedom and absolute respect for the people's rights.
Our revolution must be defended as a patrimony of Cuba, if not of America.
The honest men of America, the honest newsmen of the continent, the peoples
who are our friends--we must ask them to defend our revolution, not allow
it to be slandered in an attempt to destroy it to the detriment of not just
Cuba, but America. There are some who want to keep the Cuban revolution
from raising its head, so that no country in America can raise its head.
</p>
<p>
We had seven years of tyranny. Seven years, and nobody came to give us
freedom; we had to win it with our sacrifices. Governments did not help
us--we were helped by the peoples. The peoples of all America sympathized
with us; the peoples of all America were our friends. And now they are
trying to take away the only friends we had; they are trying to take away
the peoples, trying to alienate peoples from us by telling them that we are
carrying out mass executions, without trials, of Batista supporters. The
dispatches do not say that they are the tyrant's henchmen; the dispatches
do not say that they are murderers; the dispatches do not say that each of
the men executed has 10, 12, or even 100 killings against his name. No,
the dispatches say that they are mass executions, without trial, of
"Batista supporters."
</p>
<p>
And since the peoples of America have seen the horrors of dictatorship,
since the peoples of America are accustomed to hearing about mass
executions of political opponents without a trial, an effort is made to
make them believe this is such a case. The dispatches do not talk about
the conduct of the rebel army; they have not stressed that this has been
the only revolution where not a single man was mobbed to death; they do not
stress that no other people in the world have conducted themselves in such
a civilized way as the Cubans have done; that not a single henchman of the
dictator has been tortured; that not a single enemy has been beaten; that
this is the only revolution in the world where the people, instead of
taking vengeance into their own hands, placed the criminals at the disposal
of the revolutionary courts.
</p>
<p>
Ah! They do not say these things. The men we are sentencing now are the
ones that the people usually kill the first three days after a revolution.
We are executing the ones the people would have mobbed to death had we not
asked them to have faith in justice. We have been more than generous.
Informers have not been shot. The thing to do with informers is not shoot
them, but send them to work, sentence them to forced labor, since they
wanted to make their living by betrayal and informing, let them work for
the people, <em>let them work</em>. But the hired killers must be shot, for even
the Bible says "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword." They
must be shot, because those who today ask that they not be shot will in
three years be asking us to turn them loose. It is clear; there cannot be
peace without justice; there cannot be democracy without justice. In the
name of peace real crimes have been committed. And I can ask the
Congressmen who attacked me, I can ask them: What did the United States
do--I can ask the Congressmen who have attacked us: What was done at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ah! In the name of peace, two cities and
(500,000?) human beings were bombed. We have not executed any child. We
have not executed any woman. We have not executed any old man.
</p>
<p>
Yet at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 300,000 human beings died (words indistinct)
And in the name of what? Well, they said it was to obtain peace. They also
said it was to prevent the death of many North Americans in battle. All
right; I tell those Congressmen that, aside from the fact that they have
nothing to do with Cuban affairs, we are executing the tyrant's henchmen to
obtain peace, and we are executing the (butcher?) so that they cannot
murder our children again tomorrow.
</p>
<p>
Besides, the number of henchmen we are going to execute will not be more
than 400. That is about one for every 1,000 men, women, and children
murdered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it is a question of telling the
truth, why did they not come here to talk? When we told them to come and
see what the people want, why did they not come? Two Representatives who
have defended the Cuban cause came. Representative Porter and
Representative Powell came to testify to our being right. But the ones who
attacked us, whom we invited to come and talk, face to face, to learn what
the people (words indistinct).
</p>
<p>
Since they call themselves democrats let them see what democracy is. Since
they talk about the will of the people, let them see what the will of the
people is. We did not invite (words indistinct) but so they could see the
truth.
</p>
<p>
There is one thing I want to explain so the people will be clear on that
point. The U.S. Government has not directly attacked us. The entire U.S.
press has not attacked us. Part of the press, including Herbert Matthews,
has defended us. And it is clear: At present the U.S. Government (has not
assumed a hostile attitude?) toward us, but we know what the mechanics are
in the United States. A certain campaign is begun; the interests that fear
the revolution organize a campaign against the revolution; they shape
public opinion, and then ask the U.S. Government to take action. Not yet,
not yet, because they have not waged the campaign yet (words indistinct).
</p>
<p>
If it is necessary, we extend a permanent invitation to the newsmen; here
we have nothing to hide. And since we have so much faith in the people, so
much faith in their political maturity, we know that nobody will be able to
bamboozle the people or swerve them (words indistinct). A beginning was
made with the slander campaign, but we countered it in time.
</p>
<p>
Of course I want to make it clear that the people of Cuba are not animated
by any feeling of hostility toward the people of the United States. On the
contrary; we are also talking to public opinion in the United States, so
that it may support us against those interests, which are the enemies of
both Cuba and the United States.
</p>
<p>
We have not carried out an aggression against anybody. The Cuban
revolution has not attacked any nation. On the contrary it is the Cuban
people, for the mere fact of having freed themselves from tyranny at the
cost of many sacrifices, who have been made the target of the most
criminal, base, and cowardly campaign.
</p>
<p>
But, fellow citizens, I assure you that this battle is won; it has been won
with the help of everybody, with the help of men of all different ideas,
(religions?), and (few words indistinct). This is a battle that belongs to
everybody. The people have united admirably in defense of their justice,
sovereignty, and prestige.
</p>
<p>
Our gratitude and admiration are well deserved by a people that have been
able to unite as one man in this struggle. Nobody can defeat such a
people. We must prevent any split; we must remain united to defend the
interests of the fatherland. (Few words indistinct) not just against the
criminals, but also social justice.
</p>
<p>
A nation like this, which despite its hundreds of thousands of unemployed
has given an incomparable example of order; a capital like this, where
despite hundreds of thousands of unemployed there are no policemen, where
there is not a single (word indistinct), certainly deserves (few words
indistinct). A people that will not steal even though hungry deserve
anything.
</p>
<p>
One example we can point to with pride is that despite the hunger and
unemployment that exist, police are not needed in Havana, and the Boy
Scouts are practically insuring order. In what country is there such
extraordinary order and absolute peace that children are put in charge of
keeping order in the capital after a revolution? That is what we want the
newsmen of the American hemisphere to tell their own people.
</p>
<p>
Fellow citizens, my (warmest?) congratulations, my gratitude (passage
indistinct). Today, after this extraordinary demonstration; today, after
the satisfaction we feel at seeing this support from the people; today, as
we feel such pride at being Cuban and belonging to this people, one of the
world's finest peoples; today, on behalf of all and in the name of the
revolutionary government and the fighters of the rebel army, I want to say thank you
to my people. Thank you very much.
</p>
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Castro Internet Archive
When the people rule
Cuba is a nation which rules itself and does not take orders from anyone
Spoken: January 21, 1959 in Havana in front of a million Cuban workers and peasants
Source: FBIS
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
Mr. President, gentlemen of the diplomatic corps, reporters of the
entire continent, fellow citizens:
I am going to ask the people to do something for me, and that is to
help me. There are a million persons here and the loudspeakers cannot be
heard. Absolute silence is necessary. It is very difficult to speak when
[one cannot be heard] perfectly well, and today I should like to tell the
people what I feel; I would like to tell the reporters what the people of
Cuba feel, I want to tell the diplomatic representatives of the entire
world the way our people think. To hear us, it is not enough to have been
here; to have attended is not enough alone. It is necessary to be silent.
It is necessary to show the people's discipline by being quiet. Let us see
if a million people can be silent. (He waits to let the crowd calm
down--Ed.)
Fellow citizens, it is possible that our fighters trembled more today
before this crowd then they ever did before enemy bullets. For us, who
have extraordinary faith in our people, this assembly has exceeded all
estimates. It is said that with those who have just arrived the crowd
extends from the Malecon to the Park of Fraternity. We can say one thing
here today, and that is that there is no place in Havana to bring together
all the people who support the revolution. (Applause) Before a small park
was enough and there was room left. This time all the parks together
around the presidential palace are insufficient. I am going to tell you an
anecdote so that you can understand the full moral value of this meeting
for us.
One of our comrades attached to the Havana municipality told me that this
morning the employees gathered and asked him where they were meeting to go
to the assembly, and our friend replied: "No, those who want to can go and
those who do not can go home." This is not the kind of meeting organized
before! (Applause) How different it is when the people feel free! How
different it is when the people rule! People have come from Matanzas and
Pinar del Rio on foot. Thousands of our fellow citizens have come on foot
because there were not enough vehicles.
We spoke of a half million, of getting together half a million Cubans, but
the people said no, not half a million, but one million; and it turned out
to be one and a half million. I went through some of the city's streets
before arriving, and Havana was deserted. Not a soul was to be seen for
blocks on end in the districts of Havana. All Havana had come, the whole
city, all the surroundings, and thousands and tens of thousands of Cubans
from the provinces nearest to Havana. I am sure that if it had been
physically possible 6 million Cubans [the total population of the country] would have gathered here today.
I realize that the best speech for this afternoon is your presence. I
realize that nothing can speak so eloquently to the diplomatic crops and
the 380 newsmen who have come from all the hemisphere as your presence.
Many Cubans here present cannot even here me. I asked the men who
organized the affair and they told me all the loudspeakers in Havana were
set up here; and yet many tell me they cannot hear me. It hurts me to
think that you are making the sacrifice of standing since hours ago and not
even being able to hear what we are saying, but at least you can have the
satisfaction of knowing that your presence has not been in vain and that
this gathering today, this gathering here today, is the finest battle the
people of Cuba have fought in this revolution. It is a victory by force of
arms; not a shot has been fired. It is a much finer victory. It is a
victory of right; it is a victory of justice; it is a victory for morality.
Those who thought we were just ordinary guerrillas, those who thought we
knew nothing but the use of firearms, those who thought that after our
military victories they would crush us in the field of information, and
crush us in the field of public opinion, have found that the Cuban
revolution also knows how to fight and win (battles) in that field.
Those who thought that monopoly over international cables, those who
thought that spreading lies and slander right and left, would let them
weaken our revolution and discredit our people, so that they could then
leap upon it when it was weak, were mistaken, for the revolution today is
more solid and stronger. Instead of weakening it they have strengthened
it. The revolution is not intimidated by attacks. The revolution is not
weakened by attacks. On the contrary, it waxes and gains strength, for
this is the revolution of a valiant, fighting people.
With another people, another people lacking the virtues of the Cuban
people, it would not even be worthwhile having started this struggle, but
when one has a people like this to count on, one not only begins but
achieves and goes on to total victory.
To the people of Cuba everything is clear. The Cuban revolution was an
exemplary revolution. There was no coup here.
If we had been a group of army officers who, without the help of the
people, had ousted the President and installed another in his place and had
at once bowed to all the vested interests; if this had not been a
revolution, we would not have enemies; they would not have attacked us;
they would not slandered us.
While this palace housed a dictatorship that sold out the nation's
interests; while this palace housed a dictatorship that made the most
onerous concessions to foreigners; while this palace housed a dictatorship
that betrayed the people, nobody attacked it; these press campaigns were
not waged against it abroad; [U.S.] Congressmen did not speak out to censure it.
While it housed a miserable traitor, a criminal who murdered 20,000 of our
fellow citizens, these campaigns were not waged against Cuba, or against
him. While it housed someone who stole 300 million pesos; while the
republic was governed by a band of thieves who stole more than a billion
pesos, these campaigns were not waged against them abroad. While dozens of
Cubans were being killed here every night; while young men were being found
murdered with a bullet in the temple; while barracks yards were heaped with
corpses; when our women were violated; when children were murdered; when
police entered embassies to murder 10 refugees in a few minutes, these
campaigns were not waged against Cuba, nor did the [U.S.] Congressmen over there,
with rare exceptions, speak out to condemn the dictatorship.
But there is no need to go further. There you have Trujillo with his
dictatorship 27 years old; there you have the 10,000 Haitians murdered by
the Dominican dictator; there you have the tens of thousands of men
murdered inside and outside of Santo Domingo by the henchmen of the
criminal dictator. And there you have Somoza. Somoza is of the dynasty
that for more than 25 years has been oppressing his country, with his
full jails, his press censorship, his thousands of crimes. And no
campaigns are organized against them.
A campaign against the Cuban people, yes, because they want to be free. A
campaign against the Cuban people, yes-- a campaign against the Cuban
people, yes, because they want to be free not just politically, but
economically as well. A campaign against the people of Cuba, because they
have become a dangerous example for all America. A campaign against the
people of Cuba because they know we are going to call for cancellation of
the onerous concessions that have been made to foreign monopolies, because
they know electric rates are going to be lowered here, because they know
that all the onerous concessions made by the dictatorship are going to be
reviewed and canceled.
There, fellow citizens, you have the chief cause of this campaign. The
explanation of this must be sought, the explanation of this campaign must
be sought--if you let me talk I am going to explain; I would like to
explain this thoroughly, so the people and the foreign press can understand
it. We have not obtained the crowd's full cooperation in maintaining
absolute silence. (Sentence indistinct)
The explanation for this campaign must be sought somewhere. Why has this
campaign been launched against Cuba? The vilest, most criminal, and most
unjust that has been launched against any people. Why, when barely four or
five days had passed since the victory, did international cable services
and certain U.S. Congressmen loose a barrage of defamation against the
Cuban people? The purpose is clear. Our revolution was able to present
itself to the world as a model of revolutions. The rebel army's generosity
toward the enemy was without precedent in the history of revolutions and
wars. Thousand of prisoners fell in our hands. Hundreds of wounded were
cared for by our doctors. (Words indistinct) Not one prisoner was struck.
(Much crowd noise--Ed.)
Fellow citizens,next time I am going to ask 2,000 Cubans to come instead of
a million. That is a lot, and there is not room. The crowd is being
pressed together.
(Possibly one or two sentences indistinct, as if volume had been turned
down --Unreadable text-- loudspeaker--Ed.) I am going to sum up ideas. We
invited the people of Cuba. We had nothing to say to them, because the
people of Cuba know the truth very well. We do not have to convince the
people of Cuba of anything, because the people of Cuba are more than
convinced. It is necessary to convince the world public, and we are going
to convince it through the newsmen who have come here.
Tomorrow we are going to meet with the newsmen who have come from all over
the hemisphere. At the meeting I will submit to interrogation, as one can
who has done his duty. I am going to submit to interrogation by America,
as can be done by a man with a clear conscience. I do not have to give an
account to any U.S. Congressman. I do not have to give an account to any
foreign government. I will give an account to the peoples. In the first
place I give an account to my people, to the Cubans. In the second place,
to all the peoples of America. I give an account to the people of Mexico,
to the people of the United States, of Costa Rica, of Venezuela, and of the
whole world. [Castro would do just this two days later begining January 23, 1959, to spread his ideas throughout Latin America.]
For that reason I called in the newsmen, to come and see the truth with
their own eyes. Where there is justice there is no crime, and where there
is crime there is no freedom of the press. Where there is crime, people
hide their actions.
Here things have been done in the open. We came here so they could see
that there is justice. And so we invited all newsmen of the world, for
here in Cuba there is a freedom of the press (word or two indistinct) that
is not found anywhere else in the world. In Cuba there is a respect for
human rights not found anywhere else in the world.
The Cuban people are not a savage people, or a criminal people. This is
the noblest and most feeling people in the world. If an injustice were
committed here, all the people would be against it. Our intellectuals are
not unfeeling; our newsmen are not unfeeling; our workers are not
unfeeling; our peasants are not unfeeling; our priests are not unfeeling,
and when everybody [agrees to] the punishment, it is because the
punishment is a just one, it is because the punishment is deserved.
The allied powers punished the war criminals after the second world war,
and they have less right to do so than we have, because they meted out
punishment under the ex post facto legislation, while we are punishing the
war criminals under legislation passed before the crime, in public trials,
in courts made up of honest men. To avoid mistakes we are trying only the
most notorious criminals, those who have 5, 10, 15, or 20 murders against
them, those known to all the people. But is it not possible to
expatriate, and I am going to meet with newsmen from the whole hemisphere.
We have also invited the President of Cuba to attend the interview, and we
are going to invite the cabinet. And we are going to explain fully to the
newsmen everything they want us to explain. We must not expatriate; there
is just one thing more.
Reporters of the entire continent, diplomatic representatives accredited to
Cuba, imagine an immense jury, imagine a jury consisting of a million men
and women belonging to all social classes, of all religious beliefs, of all
political ideas. I am going to ask this jury something. I am going to ask
the people something: Those who agree with the justice that is being
carried out, those who agree that the henchmen should be shot, raise your
hands. (Applause of about 2 minutes)
Gentlemen of the diplomatic corps, reporters of the entire continent: The
jury of a million Cubans representing all views and social classes has
voted. To those who are democrats, or those who call themselves democrats
I say: This is democracy, this is respecting the will of the people.
Those who are democrats, or those who call themselves democrats, must
respect the will of the people.
Before concluding I should like to say something I consider important: It
is that the people of Cuba are worried about our security.
Thousands upon thousands of our fellow citizens have asked us to take care
of ourselves. They fear that we will be attacked by enemies of the
revolution. The people fear that the death of one of their leaders would
be failure for the revolution. What I am about to tell the people of Cuba
today is that this is not true. What I am going to tell the people of Cuba
is that the revolution cannot depend upon one man. The fate of a nation
cannot depend upon one man, that the fate of (justice?) cannot depend upon
one man. Moreover, the leaders cannot be placed in a glass case.
I am firmly determined to continue doing things as I have been doing. I am
firmly determined to challenge calmly all dangers, come what may. I am
doing this for one reason. It is because I am very aware that nothing and
no one can stop the revolution. And I also have something to say to my
enemies: Behind me are others more radical than I. In the same way, by
attacking our revolutionary justice, they have done nothing but reinforce
the revolution. By killing me they will only strengthen the revolution.
In order to take the proper precautionary measures so as to be protected
against all eventualities, I am going to propose to the board of the July
26 Movement that it appoint comrade Raul Castro second in command of the
July 26 Movement. (Vigorous applause) I am doing it not because he is my
brother, (words indistinct) but because I truly consider him sufficiently
capable to substitute for me should I have to die. Moreover, he is a
comrade with very firm revolutionary convictions and he has shown his
ability in this struggle. He was one of the leaders of the attack on the
Moncada garrison; he spent two years in prison; he has carried out so many
(word indistinct) for the country; he has shown his ability as an organizer
and a leader. I wish that this did not concern a brother. I wish that he
had been another in order to remove the slightest suspicion that I am
favoring a relative. I must say right here that no one is being favored
because for us the country means suffering and duty, not pleasure or
vanity, or pleasures of a personal nature. For us this work is the work of
a slave (who knows his people are lost?)
For us leadership means sacrifice. For us leadership is not aspiring to
power. Everyone knows that I gave up power a long time ago. Everyone
knows with what disinterestedness I fought, and that I am of the opinion that
no man is indispensable, and that any honorable Cuban can be a good
President of the Republic. (Applause) Everyone knows that not only did I
refuse to be President of the Republic, but I gave my full support to the
President. Everyone knows my respect for the civil institutions of the
republic. Everyone knows that I have neither interfered nor will interfere
in matters pertaining to the presidency.
Everyone knows that I have been able to maintain unlimited (word
indistinct) and if I have replied to thousands of questions it is because
they were asked and because I was authorized (several words indistinct) if
the President will not allow me to hold a single press conference, and the
President will not allow me to make another statement while I am commander
in chief of all the forces of the republic I will obey this order
unconditionally.
What I have done is to defend the revolution from slander. What I have
done is to defend the good name of my country when others were seeking to
represent us as a country of criminals and savages. What I have done is to
defend the prestige of this revolution which has cost so much find and
freely shed blood. I say this because to be a leader is really not a
pleasure trip or a bed of roses, but a sacrifice, the extent of which
perhaps very few can understand. This is all the more so when one feels
the responsibility of so great a faith as the faith our people have placed
in us.
By stating here the necessity that the people be alert and be prepared for
any attack on its leaders or on one of its leaders, by presenting here this
necessity, I do so with the honest conviction of a man who is not only
concerned with the present but also the future of the country, of a man who
is thinking about the country, not only while he is alive, but after his
death. By stating here that I consider Comrade Raul Castro could replace
me if necessary, I am not making the decision alone. Rather I want to
consult with the people to see whether they agree.
My enemies know how that they can attack because everything has been taken
care of. Moreover, should they attack Raul, behind him another would rise
and behind that one another, and so forth. In the struggle the people of
Cuba will not be lacking in leaders, because everything will have been
taken care of. We who were able to win the war in the face of all odds
will also be able to win the revolution against all the enemies who plan
to attack it. Thus, the people of Cuba (words indistinct) each day we
will be stronger in our defense of the interests of the country and the
interests of the people. Finally, the people have attained their goal; the
complete freedom and sovereignty which it never had. It is a nation which
rules itself and does not take orders from anyone.
We have a just question to ask here. We will take advantage of this
opportunity to ask the U.S. Government to return the war criminals who have
taken refuge there. (Applause) The people of Cuba demand of the people of
the United States not give asylum to the Masferras, the Venturas, and the
other criminals. The people of the United States must demand of the U.S.
Government the return of the war criminals because they are war criminals.
After the world war the people of the United States would not have agreed
for Goering, Himmler, and Hitler to take refuge here [although unknown at the time, many Nazi scientists and officers were in fact brought into the U.S. government, though entirely without the knowledge of the U.S. workers, to scale up production and technology against the Soviets.]. Well, our Himmler is
Ventura. Our Goerings are the Tabernillas, the Pinar Garcias, the
Tavianos, the (Laurens?). Our Hitler is Batista.
If the United States wants to be just, if the United States wants to
respect the feelings of the people of Cuba, it must consent to extradite
the war criminals because they are not political criminals. Those who
violated women cannot be considered political criminals because the
violation of woman has nothing to do with politics. Those who tore out
eyes cannot be considered political criminals, because pulling out human
eyes has nothing to do with politics, those who assassinated children and
old women, those who tortured thousands and thousands of our fellow
citizens without pity cannot be considered political criminals because
torture has nothing to do with politics. They cannot be sheltered as
political criminals because they are common law criminals. The millions of
pesos which they stole to place in American banks must be returned to us.
Filling one's pockets with the people's money in order to take it abroad
has nothing to do with politics, because the theft of the republic's money
to spend it on luxuries has nothing to do with politics, and they are
thieves here and anywhere in the world. Therefore, the people of Cuba have
the right to demand the return of the assassins, torturers, and also the
return of the money taken from all the peoples.
We are not going to waste our time asking Trujillo to return the thieves to
(word indistinct) and we are not going to ask for the return of the air
force planes which the refugees took with them. We are not asking Trujillo
to return them because the people of the Dominican Republic will return
them and because we do not want any kind of relations with Trujillo.
Of course, Trujillo is not a dictator; just talk with those Congressmen who
are attacking us and you will see that Trujillo is a saint. If was
disgusting; there were some papers, some Mexican papers, for example, with
a cartoon showing Cuba dressed in white in a bath of blood, in a puddle,
and us there with beards and rifles like common executioners, of course.
Why? Ah! Because the international cable agencies are there, the same
agencies that (few words indistinct). They could not kill me and now they
are trying to kill the revolution's prestige, and of course very subtly.
Anybody with a minimum of understanding need only read the international
dispatches to see how this campaign was organized. The sad part is that
they have confused some American peoples. (Few words indistinct)
The Mexican people, a country that had a great territory wrested from it, a
country that has been so humiliated and mistreated; to this country came
the agencies that represent monopolistic, exploiting interests, to deceive
the Mexicans and make them believe that we are something worse Trujillo,
worse than Somoza, worse than (few words indistinct) the world has seen.
Our name has been presented as that of a murderer among the peoples of
America.
Here, or in any country in America, I can stand with my head high, with the
satisfaction of having a clear conscience and my hands free of blood [Of all the prisoners of war captured by Castro during their revolutionary struggle, not one was executed, not one was harmed. In fact, the Cuban revolutionaries gained world renown and even U.S. funding because of their exeplaray treatment of prisoners in time of a guerrilla war -- using their own medical supplies to heal prisoners]. I
can stand before any nation to tell it the truth. I am only sorry that the
peoples of America should let themselves be deceived so abominably. I am
only sorry to think what the fate of America would be if this revolution is
crushed, because this revolution, which is not a coup, which is not the
uprising of a group of military caudillos, but a revolution of the people,
authentically of the people, should represent a hope for the peoples of
America. And why? Ah! Because we have hit America's sore spot. The
history of America for more than a century is plain; America is the victim
of ambitious men, military caudillos, military castes. How much America and
the peoples of our hemisphere need a revolution like the one that has taken
place in Cuba. How much America needs an example like this in all its
nations. How much it needs for the millionaires who have become rich by
stealing the people's money to lose everything they have stolen. How much
America needs for the war criminals in the countries of our hemisphere all
to be shot.
Had these things been, maybe our continent would not be what it is today:
Groups of nations divided, set apart despite their identical feelings,
needs, interests, race, and culture; it would not be the group of divided,
weak nations, victims of the customary tyranny and military castes. How
much America needed Cuba's example. We Cubans can feel proud of a
revolution that came with no ambition for dominion, with no goal of
exploitation or domination over other countries; it came as an example, as
aspiration for justice, broad justice, (word indistinct), within the most
extraordinary system of respect for human freedoms the world has ever
known.
The Cuban revolution can be summed up as an aspiration for social justice,
within the fullest freedom and absolute respect for the people's rights.
Our revolution must be defended as a patrimony of Cuba, if not of America.
The honest men of America, the honest newsmen of the continent, the peoples
who are our friends--we must ask them to defend our revolution, not allow
it to be slandered in an attempt to destroy it to the detriment of not just
Cuba, but America. There are some who want to keep the Cuban revolution
from raising its head, so that no country in America can raise its head.
We had seven years of tyranny. Seven years, and nobody came to give us
freedom; we had to win it with our sacrifices. Governments did not help
us--we were helped by the peoples. The peoples of all America sympathized
with us; the peoples of all America were our friends. And now they are
trying to take away the only friends we had; they are trying to take away
the peoples, trying to alienate peoples from us by telling them that we are
carrying out mass executions, without trials, of Batista supporters. The
dispatches do not say that they are the tyrant's henchmen; the dispatches
do not say that they are murderers; the dispatches do not say that each of
the men executed has 10, 12, or even 100 killings against his name. No,
the dispatches say that they are mass executions, without trial, of
"Batista supporters."
And since the peoples of America have seen the horrors of dictatorship,
since the peoples of America are accustomed to hearing about mass
executions of political opponents without a trial, an effort is made to
make them believe this is such a case. The dispatches do not talk about
the conduct of the rebel army; they have not stressed that this has been
the only revolution where not a single man was mobbed to death; they do not
stress that no other people in the world have conducted themselves in such
a civilized way as the Cubans have done; that not a single henchman of the
dictator has been tortured; that not a single enemy has been beaten; that
this is the only revolution in the world where the people, instead of
taking vengeance into their own hands, placed the criminals at the disposal
of the revolutionary courts.
Ah! They do not say these things. The men we are sentencing now are the
ones that the people usually kill the first three days after a revolution.
We are executing the ones the people would have mobbed to death had we not
asked them to have faith in justice. We have been more than generous.
Informers have not been shot. The thing to do with informers is not shoot
them, but send them to work, sentence them to forced labor, since they
wanted to make their living by betrayal and informing, let them work for
the people, let them work. But the hired killers must be shot, for even
the Bible says "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword." They
must be shot, because those who today ask that they not be shot will in
three years be asking us to turn them loose. It is clear; there cannot be
peace without justice; there cannot be democracy without justice. In the
name of peace real crimes have been committed. And I can ask the
Congressmen who attacked me, I can ask them: What did the United States
do--I can ask the Congressmen who have attacked us: What was done at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ah! In the name of peace, two cities and
(500,000?) human beings were bombed. We have not executed any child. We
have not executed any woman. We have not executed any old man.
Yet at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 300,000 human beings died (words indistinct)
And in the name of what? Well, they said it was to obtain peace. They also
said it was to prevent the death of many North Americans in battle. All
right; I tell those Congressmen that, aside from the fact that they have
nothing to do with Cuban affairs, we are executing the tyrant's henchmen to
obtain peace, and we are executing the (butcher?) so that they cannot
murder our children again tomorrow.
Besides, the number of henchmen we are going to execute will not be more
than 400. That is about one for every 1,000 men, women, and children
murdered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it is a question of telling the
truth, why did they not come here to talk? When we told them to come and
see what the people want, why did they not come? Two Representatives who
have defended the Cuban cause came. Representative Porter and
Representative Powell came to testify to our being right. But the ones who
attacked us, whom we invited to come and talk, face to face, to learn what
the people (words indistinct).
Since they call themselves democrats let them see what democracy is. Since
they talk about the will of the people, let them see what the will of the
people is. We did not invite (words indistinct) but so they could see the
truth.
There is one thing I want to explain so the people will be clear on that
point. The U.S. Government has not directly attacked us. The entire U.S.
press has not attacked us. Part of the press, including Herbert Matthews,
has defended us. And it is clear: At present the U.S. Government (has not
assumed a hostile attitude?) toward us, but we know what the mechanics are
in the United States. A certain campaign is begun; the interests that fear
the revolution organize a campaign against the revolution; they shape
public opinion, and then ask the U.S. Government to take action. Not yet,
not yet, because they have not waged the campaign yet (words indistinct).
If it is necessary, we extend a permanent invitation to the newsmen; here
we have nothing to hide. And since we have so much faith in the people, so
much faith in their political maturity, we know that nobody will be able to
bamboozle the people or swerve them (words indistinct). A beginning was
made with the slander campaign, but we countered it in time.
Of course I want to make it clear that the people of Cuba are not animated
by any feeling of hostility toward the people of the United States. On the
contrary; we are also talking to public opinion in the United States, so
that it may support us against those interests, which are the enemies of
both Cuba and the United States.
We have not carried out an aggression against anybody. The Cuban
revolution has not attacked any nation. On the contrary it is the Cuban
people, for the mere fact of having freed themselves from tyranny at the
cost of many sacrifices, who have been made the target of the most
criminal, base, and cowardly campaign.
But, fellow citizens, I assure you that this battle is won; it has been won
with the help of everybody, with the help of men of all different ideas,
(religions?), and (few words indistinct). This is a battle that belongs to
everybody. The people have united admirably in defense of their justice,
sovereignty, and prestige.
Our gratitude and admiration are well deserved by a people that have been
able to unite as one man in this struggle. Nobody can defeat such a
people. We must prevent any split; we must remain united to defend the
interests of the fatherland. (Few words indistinct) not just against the
criminals, but also social justice.
A nation like this, which despite its hundreds of thousands of unemployed
has given an incomparable example of order; a capital like this, where
despite hundreds of thousands of unemployed there are no policemen, where
there is not a single (word indistinct), certainly deserves (few words
indistinct). A people that will not steal even though hungry deserve
anything.
One example we can point to with pride is that despite the hunger and
unemployment that exist, police are not needed in Havana, and the Boy
Scouts are practically insuring order. In what country is there such
extraordinary order and absolute peace that children are put in charge of
keeping order in the capital after a revolution? That is what we want the
newsmen of the American hemisphere to tell their own people.
Fellow citizens, my (warmest?) congratulations, my gratitude (passage
indistinct). Today, after this extraordinary demonstration; today, after
the satisfaction we feel at seeing this support from the people; today, as
we feel such pride at being Cuban and belonging to this people, one of the
world's finest peoples; today, on behalf of all and in the name of the
revolutionary government and the fighters of the rebel army, I want to say thank you
to my people. Thank you very much.
Castro Internet Archive
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Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h1>
Facing U.S. Aggressions
</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> July 9, 1960
<br>
<span class="info">First Published:</span> July 11, 1960
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html">Castro Speech Database</a>
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>
(Editor's note--E) The Cuban FIEL radio network on July 9 at 0200 GMT
began an interview with Prime Minister Fidel Castro by reporters Mario
Cuchilan and Luis Baez. Replying to the first question of Mario Cuchilan
on what measures are to be adopted by the revolutionary government in the
present economic situation Castro said in brief: The first measure is not
to lose patience. I think we must not lose our patience, calm, or good
humor. We must take this struggle to victory, forcing our reason to
prevail and knowing how to do this.
</p>
<p>
We are acting with reason and right on our side. They are acting against
reason, right, and history. We are certain we will emerge victorious in
this struggle. We are absolutely certain we will win the economic battle.
We should act in a manner that would be of no benefit to them. They always
expect certain reactions from the revolutionary government. They are always
mistaken. These mistakes are characteristic of U.S. foreign policy.
</p>
<p>
They have done all they can to remove the revolutionary government. From
the first there have been campaigns, aggressions, lies, aerial incursions.
Note how they have used all these weapons at different times. Before the
harvests they permitted the planes to fly over. Now that the harvest is
done the planes have stopped--as if by order. Now they have reached the
stage of direct economic aggression. They have been using the policy of
provocation, defamation, and aggression but they will not budget Cuba from
its path.
</p>
<p>
They tell the tourists to stay away yet we, on the other hand, treat the
tourists well. We always try to act in the correct manner, with sincerity
and clarity. We have never lied. All we have done is defend ourselves
from aggression. Until they began their campaign of aggressions what did
we do? We did not eject the UNITED PRESS or ASSOCIATED PRESS. They are
still here. We brought newsmen from all over to see the truth about Cuba.
When they began the air attacks we mobilized the people. We expressed the
people's protest. It was proved that the planes were coming from Florida
even after the U.S. Government declared they did not come from U.S.
territory.
</p>
<p>
We have never been guilty of any act of aggression. We have only been
doing the revolutionary thing in defending ourselves. The result was that
President Dorticos was received everywhere with sympathy and Latin American
solidarity was seen all over. Eisenhower went to Latin America first and
his tour took place amid turmoil and tear gas. Our President went and the
result was a triumphant tour. We have been winning all the battles. We won
the battle against slander. We also now have plenty of arms; just how much
I would not like to reveal here.
</p>
<p>
I would like to tell the militiamen not to be discouraged about weapons.
Every militiamen will have an automatic weapon. That much I can say. (The
audience cheers enthusiastically.) We have taken the necessary measures.
Each militiaman will have a weapon and the country can count on the
security it offers.
</p>
<p>
The maneuver in Latin America is another tactic against us. The result of
this was that we won again and the Cuban President won the Latin American
people over.
</p>
<p>
Then came the oil battle. They conceived the plot of leaving us without
fuel. They had great hopes in this maneuver. They were convinced that the
oil matter would defeat the revolution. The result of this is that we have
taken over the refineries and we have not been left without oil. There are
19 Soviet ships on the way to Cuba with oil.
</p>
<p>
By the middle of the month the supply will be completely normal. This does
not include the effort the government will make to obtain Venezuelan oil.
We will ask them to sell us oil which will strengthen our security in fuel
supply.
</p>
<p>
The Soviet ships to arrive are: On July 7, a ship with 70,000 barrels;
July 12, another ship with (79,300?) barrels; July 12, another with 76,500
barrels; July 14, another, the Peking, with 170,000 barrels; July 15, a
ship with 78,000 barrels; July 16, one with 79,700 barrels; July 19,
another ship with 78,000 barrels; July 20, another ship with 78,000
barrels; July 21, another with 78,000; July 22, another ship with 130,000
barrels; July 25, another with 78,000; July 28, another ship with 140,000
barrels; July 31, another ship with 42,000 barrels and 40,000 barrels of
another type of fuel; and July 31, another ship with 70,000 barrels; plus
three ships, another three ships loaded with fuel, which are on the way.
</p>
<p>
They thought to reduce the nation seriously. They must, by now, have lost
this hope. They calculated incorrectly once again. The result is that we
have kept our promise to the people that gasoline would not be lacking.
</p>
<p>
We have been facing all these aggressions, adopting always the correct
policy needed to win battles now and in the future. We have taken measures
to grant the power to nationalize U.S. firms when the interests of the
country demanded it. In reply to aggression we have adopted a law that
will protect the interests of the nation.
</p>
<p>
All U.S. firms have been here without suffering infringement. The laws we
have passed have been aimed at those interests that exploited our country.
The fact that American interests still are here proves that the aggression
is not on our part. We have been the object of subversive plots and
aggressions. These aggressions have been the policy of the U.S.
Government. I want to clear this up for they still say they are acting
against the government and not the people.
</p>
<p>
No people is cruel. Those who are cruel are the oligarchs who support
powerful interests. Using military interests and political strength, they
rule the peoples. The Japanese people could not be held responsible for
the oligarchial attack on Pearl Harbor. The people can understand that the
people are not responsible for actions of oligarchies during various
periods of history. We cannot accuse Romans of the barbarities of Roman
senators. The plebians were below the patricians. Below the plebians were
the slaves who worked for patricians. One cannot accuse the North American
worker, among whom there are intelligent, generous persons, of the deeds
committed by his nation. One cannot accuse the southern Negroes, for they
are victims of injustice. We want our people to understand these matters
of history. We are not going to contribute to errors.
</p>
<p>
We have been the victims of a series of attacks. A Cuban plane is being
held. The Cuban Sugar kings (baseball team) have lost their (franchise?).
Our relations with the United States have previously been excellent in
matters of support. Today, this spirit has been violated.
</p>
<p>
We have continued to be victims of a series of aggressions. We shall
continue to be victims of this series of aggressions but our weapon is
reason. We shall show the world that this unjustified attack is being
carried out against a small country by a powerful country. The Latin
American nations will see that the U.S. Government does not want people to
develop. It does not want hunger to end; does not want the peasants to
have land; does not want illiterates to have schools; does not want nations
to have culture or high living standards; does not want them to enjoy their
work and their land.
</p>
<p>
The U.S. policy toward Trujillo is to make him a soldier at their orders.
They helped him for 30 years as they helped Somoza, Perez, and Batista, and
for 30 years they were indifferent to the poverty-stricken state of the
Dominicans, indifferent to the assassinations at night and during the day,
and to the sufferings of the students. The Latin Americans can compare
their attitude toward the Dominican Republic and toward a nation in which
the people want to improve themselves.
</p>
<p>
The attitude of the government and the people of Mexico (audience applauds
and there are shouts of "viva Mexico") can be seen. They have written a
heroic page. The people had to suffer from attacks, the reduction of
territory, the loss of their best sons. Courageously the people of Mexico,
through their congress and the bicameral commission, and Lazaro Cardenas,
have expressed their solidarity with the Cuban people in the face of
aggression. This is the reason for our eternal gratitude to the people and
government of Mexico. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
The President of Uruguay and labor unions of Argentina, Chile, Venezuela,
and Brazil have expressed their solidarity with Cuba.
</p>
<p>
Marti said that one must do whatever must be done at all times. We must
mobilize the entire nation so the world may see how Cuba mobilizes against
aggression and protests aggression. This is to be an appeal to the public
opinion of the world. The world is to see how this aggression will fail in
the face of the worthiness of our people. This is a chance for all Cubans
to act at an important time in the struggle of nations to be free and to
progress.
</p>
<p>
We must remember that we are a small nation, that we are right, that we
have many virtues, that we have a long tradition and that we are
intelligent. We shall be victorious in our struggle. We are certain we
shall face all difficulties and the people too shall face them. We will
not withdraw a single step. We shall not be conquered should they commit
the ultimate mistake of attacking us.
</p>
<p>
(A second question is posed asking Castro to explain the basis for the new
budget.)
</p>
<p>
Castro: The budget is the result of great efforts by the government in the
realm of economy. Technicians and accountants are working out the final
details. Previously there had been a complete lack of control. There was
theft and there were improper investments. We shall see the ideal of
complete compatibility of state expenditures. All unnecessary expenditures
will be cut. It took time to solve these problems. With the aid of the
people we were able to eliminate the negative forces.
</p>
<p>
Cutting down expenses goes hand in hand with another thing--overstaffing.
There were a great number of persons in excess. Offices had been invented
to place relatives. Nepotism caused expenditures to skyrocket. We tried
not to put anyone out into the street. That could not be our solution.
Our plan is to continue paying the personnel and to train them to aid the
country where their services will be most useful.
</p>
<p>
Interviewer: A cable from London has said China would buy a considerable
quantity of our sugar. Would you comment on this.
</p>
<p>
Castro: I heard this report also. Cepero Bonilla knows more than I do
about this matter. I can say that with regard to the general sugar
situation we should understand better the lack of good faith with which our
enemies have acted toward Cuba.
</p>
<p>
You will recall that when we spoke of agricultural reform the first thing
said was that production would diminish. The truth of the matter is that
just the opposite has happened. This agrarian reform in our country was
organized. All was done as planned and in an orderly manner. In Cuba we
have been able to peform the miracle of increasing production from the
outset. Events proved that all dire predictions were uncalled for.
</p>
<p>
We have also been finding markets for our production. This year we are on
the road to setting a record for sales. Our reserves have reached 205
million dollars. Not only have we reduced imports, produced more and
increased employment but this increase is being absorbed by our new plans.
We are planning to produce sheep which will sell cheaper than beef. In the
winter months we have excellent areas for raising beans. As for sugar, we
are on the way to selling six and one-half million tons.
</p>
<p>
The revolution showed it could march ahead and has taken a correct line.
They took some of our sugar quota. That was done so the savings of the
people would be lost and all the people's sacrifices wiped out. But the
production of sugar did not diminish. Cubans are producing more than ever.
We are selling more sugar than ever before in history. Our country was
losing its market year by year and the production of sugar was falling.
Cuba has attained the dream of the people, that is to sell its sugar.
</p>
<p>
Why is all this being done against us? Because the revolution has won.
Because the revolution has been pointing out the truth. Had the reform
failed and if we had failed to sell our sugar this would not have happened.
Had the revolution failed these attacks would not have been necessary.
Our successes have been their disappointment.
</p>
<p>
The Cuban revolution has shown that it can go ahead; that an economy can be
developed despite the fact that not a cent comes from abroad. We are
destroying the lie upon which the policy of oligarchy in Latin America was
based. It is necessary to improve industry, education, living standards.
Everything must be done to produce more. Everything must be done to
improve consumption without investments from the United States.
</p>
<p>
Everyone can contribute and produce. How much can be saved is difficult to
estimate. It is expected that a billion dollars can be saved for the
country.
</p>
<p>
The production of fats is a problem. Therefore we should not use such
fats. The problem of producing fats to avoid imports must be solved. We
shall produce vegetable fats. We will product meats and the people can
help in the battle against economic blockade. We must all make sacrifices,
down to the last citizen. We must make every effort to carry this out.
All agricultural cooperatives may be asked to sow grain for a common fund.
(Applause) Actually this is not necessary yet but it may become necessary.
This is an example of the ability of a nation to resist. In the event of
an emergency the food fund could be used to resist aggression.
</p>
<p>
One thousand teachers in the Sierra Maestra have gone as volunteers. Many
were there enduring the rains of last month. They have gone where there
never were schools before. Now they are there teaching.
</p>
<p>
The people try harder when the path becomes more difficult. The more
obstacles in their way, the more sacrifices they make. They have great
reserves of creative ability. One should see what the militiamen have
done. They are being trained. They will be the pride of the nation. They
have exhibited considerable discipline. Their uniforms will be a matter of
pride to the wearer.
</p>
<p>
The recent economic victories, the victory in education, the labor victory
despite attacks by powerful interests show what reserves are in the people
of Cuba. We have be satisfied with what we have done. We live in a period
of moral and patriotic satisfaction. We are developing our creative and
positive faculties. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Now the people have another chance to fight for the revolution. We are in
the second stage of the revolution. Those who regretted not helping us in
the first stage will have an opportunity to participate in the second
stage. Those who fought in the first stage will now be joined by the
others and together they will win the second stage.
</p>
<p>
(A question is asked, apparently about the recent ammunition dump
explosion.)
</p>
<p>
Castro: Up to this moment we have found no evidence that the explosion was
sabotage. You know we always tell what we find out. Of course, the
circumstances were different than in the case of the Le Coubre but nothing
has been found. All the old ammunition, grenades, and old weapons were
being collected to be destroyed. It was not impossible that one of the
many types of arms in there exploded. The army was very careful and the
place was well guarded. We can inform the people, however, that it was
probably an accidental explosion.
</p>
<p>
(Another unintelligible question is asked.)
</p>
<p>
Castro: The basis should always be equal treatment, respect for our
sovereignty. That is where they must begin. They must respect our
economic interests, our sovereignty. They must prove that they respect our
sacred rights. They have increased the Dominican quota but Trujillo is the
owner there. While they are working against Cuba they are giving Trujillo
10,000 tons of sugar.
</p>
<p>
Now the United States does not know where it will buy sugar. We shall
continue to sell sugar. We shall pursue a wise policy. We will supply
groups other than the usual ones.
</p>
<p>
Question: Would you like to tell us about July 26 preparations?
</p>
<p>
Castro: The young congress is most active. The success of the congress is
assured. Transportation is to be provided. It will depend largely upon
the spontaneous effort of the people. There is no need for concern about
gasoline. (Applause) A promise has been made to visit the farmers this
year. It is a human and good decision.
</p>
<p>
Fidel is not with us because his illness demands that he rest. Now let us
all shout: "Cuba yes, Yankees no." (Crowd shouts.)
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
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</body> |
Castro Internet Archive
Facing U.S. Aggressions
Spoken: July 9, 1960
First Published: July 11, 1960
Source: Castro Speech Database
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
(Editor's note--E) The Cuban FIEL radio network on July 9 at 0200 GMT
began an interview with Prime Minister Fidel Castro by reporters Mario
Cuchilan and Luis Baez. Replying to the first question of Mario Cuchilan
on what measures are to be adopted by the revolutionary government in the
present economic situation Castro said in brief: The first measure is not
to lose patience. I think we must not lose our patience, calm, or good
humor. We must take this struggle to victory, forcing our reason to
prevail and knowing how to do this.
We are acting with reason and right on our side. They are acting against
reason, right, and history. We are certain we will emerge victorious in
this struggle. We are absolutely certain we will win the economic battle.
We should act in a manner that would be of no benefit to them. They always
expect certain reactions from the revolutionary government. They are always
mistaken. These mistakes are characteristic of U.S. foreign policy.
They have done all they can to remove the revolutionary government. From
the first there have been campaigns, aggressions, lies, aerial incursions.
Note how they have used all these weapons at different times. Before the
harvests they permitted the planes to fly over. Now that the harvest is
done the planes have stopped--as if by order. Now they have reached the
stage of direct economic aggression. They have been using the policy of
provocation, defamation, and aggression but they will not budget Cuba from
its path.
They tell the tourists to stay away yet we, on the other hand, treat the
tourists well. We always try to act in the correct manner, with sincerity
and clarity. We have never lied. All we have done is defend ourselves
from aggression. Until they began their campaign of aggressions what did
we do? We did not eject the UNITED PRESS or ASSOCIATED PRESS. They are
still here. We brought newsmen from all over to see the truth about Cuba.
When they began the air attacks we mobilized the people. We expressed the
people's protest. It was proved that the planes were coming from Florida
even after the U.S. Government declared they did not come from U.S.
territory.
We have never been guilty of any act of aggression. We have only been
doing the revolutionary thing in defending ourselves. The result was that
President Dorticos was received everywhere with sympathy and Latin American
solidarity was seen all over. Eisenhower went to Latin America first and
his tour took place amid turmoil and tear gas. Our President went and the
result was a triumphant tour. We have been winning all the battles. We won
the battle against slander. We also now have plenty of arms; just how much
I would not like to reveal here.
I would like to tell the militiamen not to be discouraged about weapons.
Every militiamen will have an automatic weapon. That much I can say. (The
audience cheers enthusiastically.) We have taken the necessary measures.
Each militiaman will have a weapon and the country can count on the
security it offers.
The maneuver in Latin America is another tactic against us. The result of
this was that we won again and the Cuban President won the Latin American
people over.
Then came the oil battle. They conceived the plot of leaving us without
fuel. They had great hopes in this maneuver. They were convinced that the
oil matter would defeat the revolution. The result of this is that we have
taken over the refineries and we have not been left without oil. There are
19 Soviet ships on the way to Cuba with oil.
By the middle of the month the supply will be completely normal. This does
not include the effort the government will make to obtain Venezuelan oil.
We will ask them to sell us oil which will strengthen our security in fuel
supply.
The Soviet ships to arrive are: On July 7, a ship with 70,000 barrels;
July 12, another ship with (79,300?) barrels; July 12, another with 76,500
barrels; July 14, another, the Peking, with 170,000 barrels; July 15, a
ship with 78,000 barrels; July 16, one with 79,700 barrels; July 19,
another ship with 78,000 barrels; July 20, another ship with 78,000
barrels; July 21, another with 78,000; July 22, another ship with 130,000
barrels; July 25, another with 78,000; July 28, another ship with 140,000
barrels; July 31, another ship with 42,000 barrels and 40,000 barrels of
another type of fuel; and July 31, another ship with 70,000 barrels; plus
three ships, another three ships loaded with fuel, which are on the way.
They thought to reduce the nation seriously. They must, by now, have lost
this hope. They calculated incorrectly once again. The result is that we
have kept our promise to the people that gasoline would not be lacking.
We have been facing all these aggressions, adopting always the correct
policy needed to win battles now and in the future. We have taken measures
to grant the power to nationalize U.S. firms when the interests of the
country demanded it. In reply to aggression we have adopted a law that
will protect the interests of the nation.
All U.S. firms have been here without suffering infringement. The laws we
have passed have been aimed at those interests that exploited our country.
The fact that American interests still are here proves that the aggression
is not on our part. We have been the object of subversive plots and
aggressions. These aggressions have been the policy of the U.S.
Government. I want to clear this up for they still say they are acting
against the government and not the people.
No people is cruel. Those who are cruel are the oligarchs who support
powerful interests. Using military interests and political strength, they
rule the peoples. The Japanese people could not be held responsible for
the oligarchial attack on Pearl Harbor. The people can understand that the
people are not responsible for actions of oligarchies during various
periods of history. We cannot accuse Romans of the barbarities of Roman
senators. The plebians were below the patricians. Below the plebians were
the slaves who worked for patricians. One cannot accuse the North American
worker, among whom there are intelligent, generous persons, of the deeds
committed by his nation. One cannot accuse the southern Negroes, for they
are victims of injustice. We want our people to understand these matters
of history. We are not going to contribute to errors.
We have been the victims of a series of attacks. A Cuban plane is being
held. The Cuban Sugar kings (baseball team) have lost their (franchise?).
Our relations with the United States have previously been excellent in
matters of support. Today, this spirit has been violated.
We have continued to be victims of a series of aggressions. We shall
continue to be victims of this series of aggressions but our weapon is
reason. We shall show the world that this unjustified attack is being
carried out against a small country by a powerful country. The Latin
American nations will see that the U.S. Government does not want people to
develop. It does not want hunger to end; does not want the peasants to
have land; does not want illiterates to have schools; does not want nations
to have culture or high living standards; does not want them to enjoy their
work and their land.
The U.S. policy toward Trujillo is to make him a soldier at their orders.
They helped him for 30 years as they helped Somoza, Perez, and Batista, and
for 30 years they were indifferent to the poverty-stricken state of the
Dominicans, indifferent to the assassinations at night and during the day,
and to the sufferings of the students. The Latin Americans can compare
their attitude toward the Dominican Republic and toward a nation in which
the people want to improve themselves.
The attitude of the government and the people of Mexico (audience applauds
and there are shouts of "viva Mexico") can be seen. They have written a
heroic page. The people had to suffer from attacks, the reduction of
territory, the loss of their best sons. Courageously the people of Mexico,
through their congress and the bicameral commission, and Lazaro Cardenas,
have expressed their solidarity with the Cuban people in the face of
aggression. This is the reason for our eternal gratitude to the people and
government of Mexico. (Applause)
The President of Uruguay and labor unions of Argentina, Chile, Venezuela,
and Brazil have expressed their solidarity with Cuba.
Marti said that one must do whatever must be done at all times. We must
mobilize the entire nation so the world may see how Cuba mobilizes against
aggression and protests aggression. This is to be an appeal to the public
opinion of the world. The world is to see how this aggression will fail in
the face of the worthiness of our people. This is a chance for all Cubans
to act at an important time in the struggle of nations to be free and to
progress.
We must remember that we are a small nation, that we are right, that we
have many virtues, that we have a long tradition and that we are
intelligent. We shall be victorious in our struggle. We are certain we
shall face all difficulties and the people too shall face them. We will
not withdraw a single step. We shall not be conquered should they commit
the ultimate mistake of attacking us.
(A second question is posed asking Castro to explain the basis for the new
budget.)
Castro: The budget is the result of great efforts by the government in the
realm of economy. Technicians and accountants are working out the final
details. Previously there had been a complete lack of control. There was
theft and there were improper investments. We shall see the ideal of
complete compatibility of state expenditures. All unnecessary expenditures
will be cut. It took time to solve these problems. With the aid of the
people we were able to eliminate the negative forces.
Cutting down expenses goes hand in hand with another thing--overstaffing.
There were a great number of persons in excess. Offices had been invented
to place relatives. Nepotism caused expenditures to skyrocket. We tried
not to put anyone out into the street. That could not be our solution.
Our plan is to continue paying the personnel and to train them to aid the
country where their services will be most useful.
Interviewer: A cable from London has said China would buy a considerable
quantity of our sugar. Would you comment on this.
Castro: I heard this report also. Cepero Bonilla knows more than I do
about this matter. I can say that with regard to the general sugar
situation we should understand better the lack of good faith with which our
enemies have acted toward Cuba.
You will recall that when we spoke of agricultural reform the first thing
said was that production would diminish. The truth of the matter is that
just the opposite has happened. This agrarian reform in our country was
organized. All was done as planned and in an orderly manner. In Cuba we
have been able to peform the miracle of increasing production from the
outset. Events proved that all dire predictions were uncalled for.
We have also been finding markets for our production. This year we are on
the road to setting a record for sales. Our reserves have reached 205
million dollars. Not only have we reduced imports, produced more and
increased employment but this increase is being absorbed by our new plans.
We are planning to produce sheep which will sell cheaper than beef. In the
winter months we have excellent areas for raising beans. As for sugar, we
are on the way to selling six and one-half million tons.
The revolution showed it could march ahead and has taken a correct line.
They took some of our sugar quota. That was done so the savings of the
people would be lost and all the people's sacrifices wiped out. But the
production of sugar did not diminish. Cubans are producing more than ever.
We are selling more sugar than ever before in history. Our country was
losing its market year by year and the production of sugar was falling.
Cuba has attained the dream of the people, that is to sell its sugar.
Why is all this being done against us? Because the revolution has won.
Because the revolution has been pointing out the truth. Had the reform
failed and if we had failed to sell our sugar this would not have happened.
Had the revolution failed these attacks would not have been necessary.
Our successes have been their disappointment.
The Cuban revolution has shown that it can go ahead; that an economy can be
developed despite the fact that not a cent comes from abroad. We are
destroying the lie upon which the policy of oligarchy in Latin America was
based. It is necessary to improve industry, education, living standards.
Everything must be done to produce more. Everything must be done to
improve consumption without investments from the United States.
Everyone can contribute and produce. How much can be saved is difficult to
estimate. It is expected that a billion dollars can be saved for the
country.
The production of fats is a problem. Therefore we should not use such
fats. The problem of producing fats to avoid imports must be solved. We
shall produce vegetable fats. We will product meats and the people can
help in the battle against economic blockade. We must all make sacrifices,
down to the last citizen. We must make every effort to carry this out.
All agricultural cooperatives may be asked to sow grain for a common fund.
(Applause) Actually this is not necessary yet but it may become necessary.
This is an example of the ability of a nation to resist. In the event of
an emergency the food fund could be used to resist aggression.
One thousand teachers in the Sierra Maestra have gone as volunteers. Many
were there enduring the rains of last month. They have gone where there
never were schools before. Now they are there teaching.
The people try harder when the path becomes more difficult. The more
obstacles in their way, the more sacrifices they make. They have great
reserves of creative ability. One should see what the militiamen have
done. They are being trained. They will be the pride of the nation. They
have exhibited considerable discipline. Their uniforms will be a matter of
pride to the wearer.
The recent economic victories, the victory in education, the labor victory
despite attacks by powerful interests show what reserves are in the people
of Cuba. We have be satisfied with what we have done. We live in a period
of moral and patriotic satisfaction. We are developing our creative and
positive faculties. (Applause)
Now the people have another chance to fight for the revolution. We are in
the second stage of the revolution. Those who regretted not helping us in
the first stage will have an opportunity to participate in the second
stage. Those who fought in the first stage will now be joined by the
others and together they will win the second stage.
(A question is asked, apparently about the recent ammunition dump
explosion.)
Castro: Up to this moment we have found no evidence that the explosion was
sabotage. You know we always tell what we find out. Of course, the
circumstances were different than in the case of the Le Coubre but nothing
has been found. All the old ammunition, grenades, and old weapons were
being collected to be destroyed. It was not impossible that one of the
many types of arms in there exploded. The army was very careful and the
place was well guarded. We can inform the people, however, that it was
probably an accidental explosion.
(Another unintelligible question is asked.)
Castro: The basis should always be equal treatment, respect for our
sovereignty. That is where they must begin. They must respect our
economic interests, our sovereignty. They must prove that they respect our
sacred rights. They have increased the Dominican quota but Trujillo is the
owner there. While they are working against Cuba they are giving Trujillo
10,000 tons of sugar.
Now the United States does not know where it will buy sugar. We shall
continue to sell sugar. We shall pursue a wise policy. We will supply
groups other than the usual ones.
Question: Would you like to tell us about July 26 preparations?
Castro: The young congress is most active. The success of the congress is
assured. Transportation is to be provided. It will depend largely upon
the spontaneous effort of the people. There is no need for concern about
gasoline. (Applause) A promise has been made to visit the farmers this
year. It is a human and good decision.
Fidel is not with us because his illness demands that he rest. Now let us
all shout: "Cuba yes, Yankees no." (Crowd shouts.)
Castro Internet Archive
|
./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1983.10.grenada | <body>
<p class="title">
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr>
<h1>Fidel Castro’s Press Conference on Grenada</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> October 26, 1983
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> Havana Television Service, obtained from Latin American Network Information Center
<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: David Adams
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Zdravko Saveski, 2021
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>We want to clear up all events and circumstances with respect to the topic to which I will be referring. I do not know how the coordination of the translation into in English has been organized. Maybe I can speak in Spanish while the translator speaks in English. We do not want to make it lengthy.</p>
<p>Declaration of the Cuban Party and Government on the Imperialist Intervention in Grenada:</p>
<p>The painful internal events in Grenada that resulted in the death of Comrade Bishop and other Grenadian leaders are known by all the people.</p>
<p>In the 20 October declaration, the Government of Cuba explained in detail the evolution of events and expressed the fear and worthy principled position of our country with respect to the events, and warned that imperialism would try to obtain the maximum benefit possible from the tragedy that had occurred.</p>
<p>But above all, Cuba's strict policy to fully abstain in every way from interfering in the internal affairs of the party, government, and people of Grenada was specifically stressed. The merits of that principled policy can be appreciated now more than ever as it becomes obvious that the Cuban personnel in Grenada had the fighting capability with which they could have attempted to influence the course of the domestic events.</p>
<p>The weapons in the hands of the Cuban construction workers and collaborations in Grenada had been assigned to them by Bishop and the leadership of the party and Government of Grenada so that they could defend themselves in case of external aggression against Grenada, as has unfortunately been the case. They were mainly light infantry weapons. Those weapons were under the custody of our own personnel in the area of residence. They were not supposed to be used in any internal conflict, and they were neither used nor would they ever be used for it.</p>
<p>No fortifications were built because it was not logical to do so in times of peace in an area of an airport, one exclusively of a civilian nature. Something else, when the invasion of Grenada took place, the weapons in the hands of the Cubans only had less than one magazine of ammunition per rifle.</p>
<p>After Bishop's death and Cuba's declaration, relations between our party and the new Grenadian leadership were extremely cold and in a certain way tense. But, we were not willing, under any circumstances, to play the game of imperialism and abandon the people of Grenada by suspending the cooperation and work of our construction workers, physicians, teachers, and other specialists. Actually, we did not even suspend the services of the military security advisers.</p>
<p>Future relations with the new leadership would be determined by the behavior of the new leaders, and their domestic and foreign policies, in the hope that the revolutionary process could be saved, even though it seemed possible only through a miracle of wisdom and serenity on the part of the Grenadian people themselves and the international progressive movement.</p>
<p>Relations with the new government had to be decided. But aside from the aforementioned reasons concerning our cooperation with the Grenadian people, at the very moment when it was announced that powerful U.S. naval forces were advancing toward Grenada, it was morally impossible to consider the evacuation of the Cuban personnel from Grenada. On the other hand, the new Grenadian leadership, because of the imminent danger it was facing, in the name of the security of the fatherland was requesting our cooperation, to which it was not easy to accede after the events that had taken place in the country. Many messages were exchanged on these matters between Cuba and our representative in Grenada, who was in turn expressing the Grenadian request.</p>
<p>Now a very important matter. In the face of an imminent aggression, on 22 October, Saturday, in the afternoon, Comrade Fidel sent the following message to the Cuban representative in Grenada: I feel that organizing our personnel's immediate evacuation at a time when U.S. forces were approaching would be highly demoralizing and dishonorable for our country in the eyes of world public opinion.</p>
<p>A large-scale Yankee aggression against us could take place at any time in Grenada against our collaborators, in Nicaragua against our physicians, teachers, technicians, builders, and others, in Angola against our troops and civilian personnel, or right here in Cuba. We must always be ready and keep our morale high in the face of that painful possibility. I can well understand how difficult it is for you, as well as for us here, to risk compatriots in Grenada after the gross mistakes made on the Grenadian side and the tragic developments that followed.</p>
<p>But our position has been unequivocally and honorably clarified, so much so that it has been received with great respect everywhere. It is not of the new Government of Grenada we must think now, but of Cuba, its honor, its people, its fighting morale.</p>
<p>I believe that in the face of this new situation we must strengthen our defenses, keeping in mind the possibility of a surprise attack by the Yankees. This danger that has been created fully justifies our doing so. If the United States intervenes, we must vigorously defend ourselves as if we were in Cuba, in our campsites, in our closest workplaces, [but] only if we are directly attacked. I repeat, only if we are directly attacked. Thus we would just be defending ourselves, not the government or its leaders.</p>
<p>If the Yankees land on the runway areas, near the university, or in the surrounding areas to evacuate their citizens, fully refrain from interfering. Advisors from the Army and the Ministry of the Interior are to. stay at their posts awaiting new orders, so as to receive information and try to exert as much positive influence as possible on the behavior of the Army and the security forces toward the people.</p>
<p>The <em>Vietnam Heroico</em> vessel is to be kept there by all means. An effort should be made to put children and people who are not essential to indispensable services and work there on the first plane that lands on the island.</p>
<p>To inform Grenadian leaders Austin and Layne verbally of the following answers to their statements:</p>
<p>That our force which is mainly made up of civilian collaborators is too small to be taken as a factor of military importance in the face of a large-scale invasion. That sending of reinforcements is impossible and unthinkable. That the political situation created inside the country due to conflicts with the people, due to events, the death of Bishop and that of other leaders, external isolation, and so forth, considerably weaken the defensive capacity of the country, a logical consequence of the grave errors committed by the Grenadian revolutionaries.</p>
<p>That because of this situation, the present military and political conditions are the worst to organize a solid and efficient resistance against the invaders which, without the participation of the people, is practically impossible. That they must think of some way of achieving a reconciliation with the people, maybe one of these could be clarifying Bishop's death and that of other leaders, clearly identifying those responsible.</p>
<p>That the Grenadian Government may try to avoid pretexts for intervention, offering and reiterating publicly basic guarantees and total facilities for evacuation of personnel from the United States, from England, and so forth. That nevertheless, should the invasion take place anyway, their duty is to die fighting, no matter how difficult and disadvantageous the conditions may be. That Cuban personnel have instructions to remain in their camps and continue the work on the airport. That they shall adopt defensive measures and shall fortify the place as much as possible in order to defend themselves effectively from a surprise attack from abroad.</p>
<p>That you are in constant communication with the leaders of our party and that if an imperialist attack takes place you will receive immediate instructions concerning what you should do [as heard]. That they must maintain maximum calmness and nerve under these circumstances if they wish to preserve the possibility of survival for the Grenadian revolutionary process. That Cuba shall try to launch, together with other progressive countries, a strong campaign against the threats of the United States against Grenada.</p>
<p>Something that is also very important: At 9 pm, on that very same Saturday, October 22, through the Interests Section, we sent the following message to the Government of the United States: That the U.S. side is aware of the developments in Grenada, that it is also aware of our position on these developments and of our determination of not interfering in the internal affairs of that country. That we are aware of their concern for the many U.S. residents there.</p>
<p>We are also concerned about the hundreds of Cuban collaborators who are working on various projects and about the reports that U.S. naval forces are approaching Grenada. According to our reports, no U.S. or foreign citizen has run into any problem, nor has our personnel met with problems.</p>
<p>It is convenient that we maintain contacts regarding this matter in order to cooperate if any type of difficulty arises and so that any measure regarding the security of these persons can be resolved favorably, without violence and without any type of interference in the country. This was the message that was sent to the U.S. Government at 2100 on Saturday 22 October.</p>
<p>As soon as the agreement of a group of Yankee satellite [countries] in the Caribbean region to send troops to Grenada was learned of, the new leadership of that country reiterated its request that Cuba send reinforcements.</p>
<p>Comrade Fidel on Sunday night, 23 October, sent the following message to Cuba's embassy in Grenada: Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Barbados do not have sufficient forces to invade Grenada. If this occurs, it is just a simple pretext of the Yankees so that they can interfere immediately afterward. In this case, you must strictly obey the instructions that you received yesterday.</p>
<p>You must verbally transmit the following answer to the Grenadian leadership: That Jamaica, St Lucia, and Barbados do not have sufficient forces to invade Grenada. If this occurs, they can defeat them with their own forces, without major difficulty. That, if this takes place, then it could be a pretext for the Yankees to act directly. If this is the case, then the Grenadian revolutionaries must try to win over the people in order to defend the country, they must be ready to fight to the last man, and they must create the conditions for a lengthy resistance against foreign invasion and occupation.</p>
<p>That, Cuba cannot send reinforcements, not only because it is materially impossible in face of the overwhelming superiority of U.S. air and naval forces in the region, but also because, politically, if it is a question of a struggle among Caribbeans, then it must not send reinforcements so as not to justify a U.S. intervention. That, on the other hand, the unfortunate events that have occurred in Grenada make it morally impossible before our people and the world the useless sacrifice of sending such reinforcements to fight against the United States.</p>
<p>That, in view of our country's honor, morality, and dignity, we are keeping Cuban personnel there at a time when powerful Yankee naval forces are approaching Grenada. That, if Grenada is invaded by the United States, Cuban personnel will defend its positions within its camps and work areas with all the energy and courage of which it is capable. That, due to the fact that it is a limited force, no other type of mission can be assigned to it.</p>
<p>That, the Grenadian revolutionaries have the exclusive responsibility for having created this difficult and unfavorable political and military situation for the revolutionary process in the political and military fields.</p>
<p>That, the Cuban personnel in Grenada, within the difficult conditions that have arisen, will know how to honorably obey the task that our revolution has assigned them under these circumstance. That, regarding the question of military advice, due to this situation, all possible cooperation will begiven the personnel in view of this situation.</p>
<p>That, it is necessary to continue with the adequate political and diplomatic efforts on their part to prevent intervention without the concession of principles on our part. That, we ourselves will make every possible effort in this respect.</p>
<p>After this message, the Grenadians continued to insist on plans that in our judgment were, in some aspects, unreal and not politically feasible. They also wanted to sign a formal agreement regarding what each involved party had to carry out in the military field and they also wanted to subordinate the Cuban construction workers and collaborators to the Grenadian Army.</p>
<p>During the course of the afternoon of 24 October the following essential points were transmitted to the Grenadian leadership: That, Cuban personnel will defend the positions in which they currently find themselves. In other words, the runway up to the fill-in of (Harvey) Bay and the area between Salines Point and Mount Rose if there is a largescale U.S. invasion.</p>
<p>That our personnel have neither the means nor the strength to fulfill any other mission; nor the moral and international justification under present circumstances to do so in any other location which is not their area of work.</p>
<p>That, it is clear to us that if it is a case of just the evacuation of foreign personnel, we would not be facing an invasion and, under those circumstances, we suppose they would find the solution with those involved.</p>
<p>That because of that, the American University and the surrounding area should be under the custody of Grenadians themselves, if they feel it is necessary and convenient. The American University is located near one of the ends of the runway the Cubans are building. Perhaps it would be better if that area were free of military personnel so it would not be regarded as a war zone, thereby justifying armed actions by imperialism under the pretext of evacuating its citizens.</p>
<p>That, there is no need for informal agreement between us.</p>
<p>That, the orders regarding what the Cuban personnel can do in case of war can only be given by the Government of Cuba. This message, which should have been delivered by 0800, 25 October, Tuesday, did not even reach the addresses. U.S. intervention in Grenada took place in early dawn.</p>
<p>The Cuban representative and personnel strictly abided by the orders of the party and Government of Cuba, which was to fight if they were attacked at their camp and working area. In the early hours of the day, while the U.S. troops were landing with helicopters in the area of the university, there was no combat with the Cubans who had taken a defensive position in the area referred to previously.</p>
<p>Around 0800, Grenadian time, 0700 Cuban time, U.S. troops started to advance from different directions toward the Cuban positions, and the combat started. At 0830, Cuban time, 25 October, the U.S. Government responded to the Cuban message sent on the evening of Saturday, 22 October -- that is, nearly 3 days later. The note read: "The United States of America Interest Section of the Embassy of Switzerland presents its compliments to the minister of foreign relations of the Republic of Cuba and has the honor to inform the minister that the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, acting out of great concern of its members for the anarchy, bloodshed, and callous disregard for human life of the island of Grenada, has asked the United States Government to assist the armed forces of its member states to restore security in Grenada. In response to this request, and taking into consideration the need to safeguard the lives of hundreds of U.S. citizens now in Grenada, the U.S. Government has agreed to the request.</p>
<p>"Consequently, armed forces from the member states of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, supported by those of the United States, Barbados, and Jamaica, have entered Grenada for the purpose of restoring order and public safety. The U.S. Government is aware that military and civilian personnel of the Republic of Cuba are present in Grenada. It has taken into full account the message on this subject which was delivered on the night of 22 October from the Ministry of Foreign Relations to the acting chief of U.S. Interest Section in Havana.</p>
<p>"It wishes to assure the Government of the Republic of Cuba that all efforts are being and will continue to be made to ensure the safety of each person while order is being restored. This personnel will be granted safe passage from Grenada as soon as conditions permit. The Government of the United States accepts the Cuban proposal of 22 October to maintain due respect concerning the safety of the personnel of each side.</p>
<p>"The appropriate civilian representative with the United States Armed Forces present in Grenada has been instructed to be in contact with the Cuban ambassador in Grenada to ensure that every consideration is given to the safety of Cuban personnel on the island and to facilitate the necessary steps with Grenadian authorities for their prompt evacuation.</p>
<p>"The U.S. Armed Forces will be prepared to assure this evacuation at the earliest possible moment on ships of third countries.</p>
<p>"On the other hand, should there be a vessel of the Cuban Merchant Marine, not a warship, in Grenadian waters at this time, that vessel may be authorized to conduct the evacuation of Cuban personnel. In addition, any Cuban views communicated to the U.S. Department of State through the Cuban Interests Section in Washington or through the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, will be given immediate attention.</p>
<p>"The Government of the United States calls upon the Government of the Republic of Cuba, in the interests of the personal safety of all concerned, to advise its citizens and forces in Grenada to remain calm and to cooperate fully with forces of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and with those of the United States, Jamaica, and Barbados. It asks that they be instructed to avoid any steps which might exacerbate the delicate situation in Grenada.</p>
<p>"Above all, the Government of the United States cautions the Government of the Republic of Cuba to refrain from sending any new military units or personnel to Grenada. The United States of America Interests Section of the Embassy of Switzerland avails itself of this opportunity to renew to the Ministry of Foreign Relations of the Republic of Cuba the assurances of its highest and most distinguished considerations."</p>
<p>When this note from the Government of the United States reached us, 1 and 1/2 hours had passed since U.S. troops had attacked Cuban personnel and 3 hours had passed since the landings had begun. Throughout today, Tuesday, 25 October, the people of Cuba have been kept informed as thoroughly as possible on the details of the fighting and of the resolute and heroic resistance put up by the Cuban construction workers and collaborators who had had practically no time to even dig trenches or fortify their positions on rocky terrain in the face of a naval, air, and ground attack from U.S. elite troops.</p>
<p>The people know of the message exchanged between the commander in chief and Colonel Tortolo, the man in charge of Cuban personnel. This man, who had barely been in the country 24 hours on a working visit, with deeds and words has written in our modern history page worthy of Antonio Maceo.</p>
<p>At 5 PM, while intense fighting prevailed, the Government of the United States, through Mr. Ferch, head of the U.S. Interests Section, sent the following message to Cuba:</p>
<p>"Cuban personnel stationed in Grenada are not the target of U.S. troop action there. The United States is ready to cooperate with Cuban authorities in evacuation of its personnel to Cuba. The United States is aware that the armed Cuban personnel have neither the armament nor the ammunition reserves required for a protracted action. Therefore, to maintain a belligerent position would only provoke a senseless loss of human life. The United States does not want to portray the withdrawal Cuban armed personnel as a surrender. Finally, it regrets the armed clashes between armed men from both countries and considers that they have occurred due confusion and accidents brought about by the fact that the Cubans were near the operational sites of the multinational troops."</p>
<p>At 8:30 pm, the following response to the Government of the United States was turned over to Mr. Ferch:</p>
<p>1. That we did everything possible to prevent the intervention. That in our note on Saturday we explained that no U.S. citizen or foreign national, according to our reports, was in any danger while at the same time expressed our willingness to cooperate in order to resolve problems without recourse to violence or intervention.</p>
<p>2. That the intervention is absolutely unjustifiable. That we had absolutely refrained from meddling in the country's internal affairs despite our friendship with and sympathy for Bishop.</p>
<p>3. That the response to our constructive note, delivered Saturday, 22 October at 9 pm, arrived on Tuesday, 25 October at 8:30 am, at the time when our personnel and installations at the airport had already been under attack by U.S. troops for 1 and 1/2 hours.</p>
<p>4. That we had no soldiers in Grenada but construction workers and civilian advisers, with the exception of a few tens of military advisers who were working with the Army security forces prior to Bishop's death. Our men had been instructed to fight back only if attacked, and they were not the first to fire. Furthermore, they had been given instructions not to obstruct any action aimed at the evacuation of U.S. citizens in the area of the runway near the U.S. University. It was clear that if any attempt to occupy Cuban installations was made clashes would occur.</p>
<p>5. That our personnel have suffered an as yet undetermined number of dead and wounded in today's fighting.</p>
<p>6. That the attack by U.S. troops cane as a surprise and there was no type of prior warning.</p>
<p>7. That although the Cuban personnel that are still in a position to resist are at a numerical, technical, and military disadvantage, their moral remains high and they are firmly prepared to continue to defend themselves if the attacks continue.</p>
<p>8. That, if there is a real intention to forestall further bloodshed, attacks against Grenadian and Cuban personnel who are still fighting should stop and an honorable way should be sought to put an end to a battle which far from honors the United States, a battle against small forces which, although unable to resist the overwhelming military superiority of U.S. forces -- even when losing the battle and sacrificing themselves – could still inflict a costly moral defeat on the United States, the most powerful country in the world engaged in a war against one of the smallest nations on earth.</p>
<p>9. That the Cuban commander in Grenada has instructions to receive anyone who approaches to parley, listen to his views and transmit those views to Cuba.</p>
<p>10. It must be taken into account that some Grenadian units are fighting and they must receive the same treatment that the Cubans receive.</p>
<p>This was the answer that we addressed to the United States today.</p>
<p>The Cuban constructors and collaborators were still entrenched in several of their positions this evening in an unequal and difficult fight, but their morale and strength is at a very high level.</p>
<p>Very few reports were being received this evening from Grenada and communication was very difficult. The courageous and heroic Cuban constructors and collaborators have written an indelible page in the history of international solidarity. They have also undertaken the battle in Grenada in the name of the world's small nations and in the name of all the nations of the Third World in the face of the brutal aggression of imperialism. They have also fought for America and for their own fatherland as though they were defending the first trench for the sovereignty and integrity of Cuba there in Grenada. For the Yankee imperialists, Grenada can become in Latin America and the Caribbean what the Moncada was for the Batista tyranny in Cuba.</p>
<p>Eternal glory for the fallen Cubans and for those who have fought and continue to fight, defending their honor, principles, their tasks for internationalism, the fatherland, and their own personal integrity threatened by the unjustified, treacherous, and criminal imperialist attack.</p>
<p>Fatherland or death, we shall win.</p>
<p><em>[At this point the announcer indicates that the question and answer session begins]</em></p>
<p><b>Question -- in English: What is the estimate of Cuban dead and wounded, and do you know whether prisoners have been taken?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> We still do not have sufficient information to be able to determine the number of dead, because the Cubans were defending themselves from several positions. We did not have direct communication with the individual positions. We were in communication with the embassy, and the diplomats at times were in communication with the command post, but it was not possible to obtain information about each isolated position due to the intensive fighting that went on during the day.</p>
<p>Regarding prisoners, we know, as I have already explained, that Cuban personnel had light infantry weapons. Regrettably, no one believed that this would happen. Apparently there was a situation of peace.</p>
<p>No one had expected these events, first the domestic events, and then the external events. The rifles had ammunition quantities of 0.9 canisters [modulos]. Supposedly, three canisters are necessary for combat, in addition to several reserves. The Cubans had less than one canister; in other words, they had less than 300 rounds per rifle. After many hours of combat, they began to run out of ammunition. There might be a number of prisoners, but we are not certain; we don't know if there were 100 to 150. There were also women, non-military personnel, and almost the entire staff of the Cuban Embassy in Grenada. We don't have the exact figures at this time.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] It is a follow-up question about a report. I believe it was AP, that there were Soviet advisers, and that some of them had been (captured?)?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> I have no knowledge, not even the slightest knowledge, about the presence of Soviet military advisers or Soviet technical advisers. I really have no knowledge about this. I believe that there were no Soviet advisers; I know that there were no military advisers. As for civilians, I think that there was a Soviet diplomatic representation, a small group of Soviet diplomats, but it is not true that there were Soviet advisers there; at least I don't have such information.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] Has the U.S. Government replied to the response given by Cuba yesterday, or does the Cuban Government expect it for January?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> Well, a period of time always elapses between the arrival of a note, its translation into Spanish, and the preparation of a reply and its delivery. We received the note at approximately 1800. It was quickly translated, and we promptly sent our reply, which was delivered to the U.S. Government at 2030. I imagine that there was enough time to deliver it to the U.S. Government. It was very clear, concrete, and precise, and they have had enough time to analyze it. Now, what will they decide? Will they try to find a solution; will they stop fighting and attacking; will they try to arrive at an honorable solution there; will they try to eliminate all those who are resisting? This we don't know, but we have received news that they are mobilizing the 82nd Airborne Division, to launch it against Grenada tomorrow. What will their final decision be? We don't know, but the U.S. Government has had time to receive our reply. It will decide whether the fighting will continue tomorrow, or whether it will try to obtain a military victory, which would be a Pyrrhic victory and a disastrous defeat in terms of morale.</p>
<p><b>Gus Monroe of TIME magazine: You said that you had indirect communication with the Cuban workers in Grenada. When did you lost direct communication with the Cuban workers today?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> A very strange thing happened. We had telephone communication with our representatives almost all the time at the embassy. At certain times, we also had communication with the command of the military personnel. However, when the fighting increased, they destroyed the means of communication, and we then had to use other methods of communication --with the embassy, with the Cuban cargo ship that is currently in Grenada, and through other methods, in order to maintain conventional means of communication. Sometimes the embassy could communicate with the personnel command. This is how we received various reports. It was in this way, for example, that we learned from the head of the Cuban personnel there that the U.S. troops had, after many hours of fighting, sent a construction worker who had been arrested to explain that they didn't want any problems with the Cubans.</p>
<p>That coincided with the official message that we received afterward. Also, it was reported at the same time that a group of hostages, that is, the personnel that had run out of ammunition, had been sent in front of jeeps armed with cannon and machineguns toward our positions.</p>
<p>We thought that perhaps they were trying to parley, to establish communication. The Cuban military commander, responding to the sentiment of all his comrades, stated that they would not surrender under any circumstances. The emissary had said they were to propose surrender, but the commander had his instructions. He was ordered not to surrender under any... [changes thought] first, he was congratulated, and then he was ordered, if the adversary sent an emissary, to listen to that emissary and report the information immediately to Cuba. I believe their reply was very courageous and responsible. They replied that they had received their instructions, and would never surrender, under any circumstances. That is what the commander of the Cuban military personnel reported.</p>
<p>Afterward, military actions continued. The Air Force and helicopters were used. They have used a lot of sophisticated military equipment.</p>
<p>By nightfall, the combat had become intense. There is relative calm now. Airplanes fly overhead, helicopters fly overhead, shots are heard, but the latest news is that no intense fighting is going on.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] Exactly how many Cubans are in Grenada? How many personnel and military advisers are there?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> Look, I can tell you this -- there is no secret about it. I am sorry I do not have here the exact figures, but there are more than 700 Cubans. A vast majority -- more than 550 -- are construction workers. There is a large group of doctors, as well as some teachers, agricultural technicians, and some 40 military advisers. I did not reveal this information earlier because the statement would have been too lengthy. There is absolutely no secret about this. Besides, it is easy to prove that these are not military personnel, that they are actually civilian workers. Of course, all the Cuban workers receive military training. Evidence of the fact that they are workers and construction personnel can be seen in the excellent landing strip that they have built in such a short time; dozens of U.S. airplanes have been able to land on the air strip even though the airport is unfinished. We were planning to finish it in March.</p>
<p>This is absolute proof that they are construction workers. Besides, the U.S. news media can talk freely with the prisoners or with the hostages who were used as a front. They will be able to ascertain if they are professional soldiers or construction workers -- that is, if the evidence of the airport is not enough.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] When do you expect the Cuban personnel to return?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> It is impossible to know what will happen because it does not depend on us alone. The ship, which was unarmed, was ordered to leave the bay. I understand that it is standing off by at least 12 miles. The ship has approximately a dozen crewmembers. The airplanes have been flying low over it all night -- perhaps this is psychological warfare. However, right now I could not attest to what will happen.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] Have you considered the possibility [passage indistinct] an honorable solution to the dilemma? What would your solution be?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> Well, as I explained in my message to the Grenadians, it was impossible to send reinforcements before the combat; besides, it was unthinkable. It was impossible because the U.S. squadrons and aircraft carriers were moving, and we had no means of transportation to send reinforcements. At any rate, no matter how many reinforcements we sent, they could not compare to the naval and air forces deployed by the United States. Thus, in practice this was impossible. But we also said that it was politically impossible, because, after the events which had taken place in Grenada and the mistakes committed by the revolutionaries themselves, there as no moral justification for sacrificing reinforcements that would never even have been able to reach their destination. For us, it would have, in essence, been a symbolic action, as it was absolutely impossible to send them from the practical point of view. From the political point of view, we did not consider it justifiable. While there exists an honorable solution, I would say that, first of all, the attacks on our forces must cease. I believe that the attacks on the Grenadian forces should also cease. Then we would be able to discuss some solution. However, while they are under fire, the only reply will be defense against attack if there is no other alternative. I have not pondered this, but there must be some kind of solution; the combat -- that is, the attacks -- must cease. Our forces have simply been defending themselves.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] Is there a possibility that you will sacrifice the Cubans?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> Well, it would not be us, but the United States who would be sacrificing the Cubans. They initiated the attack; they have maintained the attack. We, because of an elementary principle of honor and the legitimate right to self-defense, have been defending ourselves from these attacks. If our comrades must die under attack, they will be dying in an act of absolute and legitimate defense. What we cannot tell is to stop defending themselves if they are attacked.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] What can you tell us about the present government in Grenada and the participation of Grenadian troops in the fighting?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> Well, our opinion about the government... [changes thought] not really the government, because we have not wanted to pass judgment on the government. We have no right to pass judgment on the government. We based ourselves on the fact that there was a division within the revolution. It was painful and unpleasant. We foresaw that great damage would be done to the country because of this division. We even addressed the Grenadian leaders, the central committee, and asked them to try to solve these problems peacefully, without violence. We said that violence would greatly damage Grenada's image.</p>
<p>However, a popular uprising occurred in favor of Bishop. Passions flared and it ended in Bishop's dramatic death under circumstances about which we still have no exact knowledge. Sooner or later they will be known. However, we were strongly opposed to this division, we were aware of the damage it was causing, and we were deeply moved by Bishop's physical elimination. What was the other question?</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified journalist] [Question indistinct]</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> As far as we know, by late afternoon, the Grenada Government was still in office, the capital had not yet been taken, and the Grenadian people were resisting attacks at various points, although we had no information about what was happening with the Grenadian units.</p>
<p><b>[(Robert Hager), NBC] If the American motivation for this action was not its citizens, what do you believe the American motive was?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> Well, that is difficult to understand. I will tell you why. First, neither U.S. citizens nor those of any other country were in any danger, because the Grenadian people took special measures to give them guarantees for the very purpose of avoiding any pretexts for intervention. For instance, there is a group of 500 or 600 U.S. medical students, and the director of the university spoke with the government, with the authorities. They gave him every guarantee. They were completely calm. Only some 14 or 15 actually wanted to leave. It is my understanding, according to the public media, that the director or rector of the university was strongly opposed to and had strongly criticized the intervention. There was no reason for it.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the situation affecting the Grenadian revolutionary process itself was very difficult. Domestic events caused isolation internationally and brought great economic difficulties. It was not easy for the new Grenadian Government to maintain itself. Why, therefore? It can be clearly seen that the United States wanted to eliminate a process that already could scarcely survive and that had great problems.</p>
<p>I believe that it wanted to undertake a show of force, to implement a philosophy of force, an opportunistic policy, to take advantage of all of those difficulties in order to smash a symbol, because Grenada is definitely a very small country. It cannot be said, from any point of view, that it has any strategic importance. Nor could it possibly represent the slightest danger for the United States. Therefore, what reason could there have been except a show of force?</p>
<p>It seems even stranger because it coincides with the events in Lebanon, where more than 200 North Americans were just killed. What sense, what logic was there in diverting forces that were headed for Lebanon and sending them to Grenada instead? It seems absurd. I really feel that this was an enormous political error which will not benefit the United States in any way whatever.</p>
<p>The events of the Malvinas, which caused a commotion throughout Latin America, and in which the United States sided with England, are still fresh. It forgot the OAS and all of its agreements. Nevertheless, it has now invoked the agreements of a supposed group of Caribbean countries in order to intervene in Grenada. I feel that this deeply wounds the sensibilities of and causes considerable unrest in the countries of Latin America. I consider it an enormous, unnecessary, and unjustifiable error by the United States.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified journalist] The United States has suggested that the Cubans now move out of Grenada. If the attacks cease, would the Cubans agree to leave Grenada?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> But the Grenadian Government has not asked us to leave. On the contrary, it has asked us for more help. There is not even a new government in Grenada. I don't believe that the United States is the government of Grenada with the right to ask the Cubans to leave. We are there at the request of the government? It is not that we are interested in remaining there. We are even prepared to complete this airport independent of the domestic U.S. problems. Who is going to ask us to leave? It is unquestionable that we cannot remain in an invaded and occupied country. There is no need for anyone to ask us to leave an occupied and invaded country. We would have no need or reason to be there.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified journalist] What is your opinion of the reaction voiced throughout the day by different countries and, particularly, by the European countries?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> I have not had the opportunity to examine all of this in detail. However, I have noted that the British Government criticized the intervention in Grenada. I believe that this is a very significant fact which should be taken into consideration. The world's public will firmly and vigorously oppose the facts. It is my understanding that the majority of the Latin American countries have vigorously opposed the intervention because it involves an action by the world's most powerful country against one of the world's smallest countries. No one could sympathize with this.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] If there are wounded Cubans on the island, what do you plan to do?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> Well, there were Cuban doctors there. We have taken care of as many wounded as possible. We also have news that there were wounded prisoners. I believe that in response to a fundamental sense of humanity, the U.S. Government itself will be giving medical attention to those wounded.</p>
<p>In truth, according to the news we have -- and I must be quite honest -- the wounded we not being mistreated by the troops. In fact, I have even been informed by the Cubans of their impression that no one was being mistreated. They have had some contacts with a Cuban prisoner, who was allowed to talk with them. I have no reason to lie or to hide the trust. Besides, it would be illogical for the troops to turn against those wounded prisoners. We hope that they are taken care of properly, just as we would take care of any wounded U.S. soldier who might fall into our hands.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] The voice of America reported that Cuba and the Soviet Union were behind Coard in Grenada. What do you say to that?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> I don't think it is even worthwhile to reply to that. I believe that Cuba's attitude was clear in its relations with Bishop. In truth, Bishop was so decent and respectful that when he passed through Cuba he did not say a single word about his problems. Cuba's position afterward was made well known through its public statements. His death seemed meaningless, because it seemed that Bishop was an adequate leader for that country and had great international prestige. He was an intelligent person, and he was not an extremist; he was a revolutionary. Bishop understood the situation in his country very well and it seems to us that he was governing the country very well. He had brought about great achievements for Grenada, he was receiving great international collaboration. Grenada's GNP was growing and he seemed to be an exceptional person, the right one for Grenada's process. Besides, everything we said in our messages, the warnings we issued, proved that the division was tragic. Thus, there is absolutely no logic in the idea that his friendship with us could later he considered the reason for this absurd change.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] Mr President, a while ago you were talking about strange coincidences in the events taking place in Grenada. It is even being said that all of this is part of a great provocation in Central America and the Caribbean. What would you say to this?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> A great provocation in the area? I would say that it is the application of a philosophy and policy of force and gendarme in the area. It is an attempt to establish a precedent, but it is so absurd that I see no logic in it. A small country had a government that was experiencing problems, its survival. What was the point in interfering with it? Not a single U.S. citizen was wounded, their lives were not endangered, and there was no significant economic interest. It seems to me that this was an application of a philosophy and policy of force, and that attempts are being made to extend it to the entire world. However, this is absurd, and a great mistake. Instead, it looks like a provocation. We could not be provoked, because we have no means of going anywhere. We have no naval or air means of getting there. So, if this is a provocation aimed at us, what can it achieve if we do not intervene in the island's internal affairs? We scrupulously respected the decisions of the Grenada party and government. Even though we had combat capability and could have interfered, we upheld the principle of nonintervention. There was no pretext for attacking us. We were in our places of work. What will the United States gain internationally by attacking the Cuban workers who were there to help a small country, a Third World country? What would it gain by this? It can only turn a small country into a martyr, indeed, it can turn that small nation, and the Cuban workers there, into martyrs of the liberty and defense of Third World countries. Our attitude has been above reproach and beyond question. The message is there. I could not invent the message that, as I said here, was sent by the United States, because they also have it there. I could not invent the U.S. reply.</p>
<p>I could not invent the efforts carried out on 22 October to warn them that it was not necessary to stage an act of intervention, that they should not commit this grave mistake, that we were willing to cooperate in any way to safeguard the citizens' security, without resorting to violence or intervention. We might add that this was a most unusual action on our part, to directly address the United States about a real situation. I believe that we were doing the United States a service. We were trying to make then understand that this action was unnecessary, because we had information with which we were willing to cooperate in the search for a nonviolent solution, without resorting to intervention, thus guaranteeing the safety of the U.S. citizens in Grenada. So, I could not invent all of this, because it is fully documented. We are not in the habit of talking about messages; we are discreet. However, the United States said today that it sent us a message, warning us. And the secretary of state practically said that he had warned us about the events. The attack took place at 0630 Grenada time, 0530 Cuba time; and we received the U.S. reply at 0830 Cuba time, 0930 Grenada time. They had been fighting our personnel for 1 and ½ hours. In other words, there are unquestionable documents that prove this; I have not used arguments or adjectives or epithets. I have spoken with evidence that proves everything I have said. Absolutely no one can question my statements.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter] What has been the reply to Cuba's last message [words indistinct]?</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> Well, I really don't know. I hope that this message will have some influence. I have hopes that attacks will cease tomorrow, because the alternative would be trying to exterminate all those who are still resisting. Of course, I would not like this to happen, but if they demand our surrender, we will certainly resist, and they will have to exterminate us. Perhaps they will be tempted to use the 82nd Airborne Division. It would be a shame if they did, but no one knows what will happen, because we have seen so many mistakes; who knows what could happen tomorrow.</p>
<p>I wonder if there are many questions left. For my part, I have worked extensively today, but I am willing to continue. Two or three more – the moderators here can set a limit.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter]</b> Commander, would you give your opinion on the Central American crisis. For example, if Nicaragua were invaded, to what extent would Cuba support Nicaragua?</p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> We would try to do whatever we could for Nicaragua, but we would be facing the same problem as with Grenada. We have no naval or air means of sending direct aid to Grenada. We do not have an option here. However, this does not worry me. The Nicaraguan situation is quite different from that of Grenada. Grenada was 120,000 inhabitants; Nicaragua has 3.5 million inhabitants. Nicaragua has extensive fighting experience; it has tens of thousands of fighters. That is, the United States would have to face an armed people there. It would be an impossible struggle in which neither 1 nor 10 airborne divisions would be sufficient. This is a reality. People should not be underestimated. Nicaragua should not be underestimated.</p>
<p>I believe that it would be an error multiplied a hundred times to attempt invading Nicaragua, because the Nicaraguan people are courageous and combative. I believe that all the aggression sustained by Nicaragua has strengthened, rather than weakened, the revolution. It has given them experience. I believe that Nicaragua is a country that could not be occupied and could not be ruled by the United States. There is no technology or sophisticated weaponry that can solve the problems posed by an entire nation in arms.</p>
<p>This was not the situation in Grenada because, as a result of the domestic problems, the Army itself collected the weapons from the militias and could not muster an armed people for the resistance. This is not the case in Nicaragua. Let us hope that this great mistake will be helpful in preventing greater mistakes in Nicaragua.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter from L'HUMANlTE] I merely want an explanation about point 10 of the last message that was sent.</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> But which message? There were many.</p>
<p><b>[Unidentified reporter from L'HUMANITE] A message to the Cubans that the treatment should be the same for the Cuban workers who are fighting there as for the Grenadian people who are fighting.</b></p>
<p><b>Answer:</b> I cannot answer for the Grenadian people. That is their concern. However, as a point of honor, we cannot accept a solution for the Cuban personnel unless it is also a solution for the Grenadian fighters. We do not want to be treated differently from the Grenadian people because, despite our differences we had as a result of the events in Grenada, the joint struggle in these past hours has made us brothers. We cannot aspire to a different solution and treatment for us. I believe that any treatment we are given, regardless of the solution, will be honorable and will have to be discussed. This would also have to be applied to the Grenadian fighters.</p>
<p>It is presumed that this battle will not be won against the North Americans, but it is a battle that is being won morally. If the United States does not want any more useless bloodshed, it should find a solution). If the people are forced to surrender, there will be more useless bloodshed caused by the United States. It will not be caused by those who are defending their lives and honor.</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
Fidel Castro’s Press Conference on Grenada
Delivered: October 26, 1983
Source: Havana Television Service, obtained from Latin American Network Information Center
Transcribed: David Adams
Markup: Zdravko Saveski, 2021
We want to clear up all events and circumstances with respect to the topic to which I will be referring. I do not know how the coordination of the translation into in English has been organized. Maybe I can speak in Spanish while the translator speaks in English. We do not want to make it lengthy.
Declaration of the Cuban Party and Government on the Imperialist Intervention in Grenada:
The painful internal events in Grenada that resulted in the death of Comrade Bishop and other Grenadian leaders are known by all the people.
In the 20 October declaration, the Government of Cuba explained in detail the evolution of events and expressed the fear and worthy principled position of our country with respect to the events, and warned that imperialism would try to obtain the maximum benefit possible from the tragedy that had occurred.
But above all, Cuba's strict policy to fully abstain in every way from interfering in the internal affairs of the party, government, and people of Grenada was specifically stressed. The merits of that principled policy can be appreciated now more than ever as it becomes obvious that the Cuban personnel in Grenada had the fighting capability with which they could have attempted to influence the course of the domestic events.
The weapons in the hands of the Cuban construction workers and collaborations in Grenada had been assigned to them by Bishop and the leadership of the party and Government of Grenada so that they could defend themselves in case of external aggression against Grenada, as has unfortunately been the case. They were mainly light infantry weapons. Those weapons were under the custody of our own personnel in the area of residence. They were not supposed to be used in any internal conflict, and they were neither used nor would they ever be used for it.
No fortifications were built because it was not logical to do so in times of peace in an area of an airport, one exclusively of a civilian nature. Something else, when the invasion of Grenada took place, the weapons in the hands of the Cubans only had less than one magazine of ammunition per rifle.
After Bishop's death and Cuba's declaration, relations between our party and the new Grenadian leadership were extremely cold and in a certain way tense. But, we were not willing, under any circumstances, to play the game of imperialism and abandon the people of Grenada by suspending the cooperation and work of our construction workers, physicians, teachers, and other specialists. Actually, we did not even suspend the services of the military security advisers.
Future relations with the new leadership would be determined by the behavior of the new leaders, and their domestic and foreign policies, in the hope that the revolutionary process could be saved, even though it seemed possible only through a miracle of wisdom and serenity on the part of the Grenadian people themselves and the international progressive movement.
Relations with the new government had to be decided. But aside from the aforementioned reasons concerning our cooperation with the Grenadian people, at the very moment when it was announced that powerful U.S. naval forces were advancing toward Grenada, it was morally impossible to consider the evacuation of the Cuban personnel from Grenada. On the other hand, the new Grenadian leadership, because of the imminent danger it was facing, in the name of the security of the fatherland was requesting our cooperation, to which it was not easy to accede after the events that had taken place in the country. Many messages were exchanged on these matters between Cuba and our representative in Grenada, who was in turn expressing the Grenadian request.
Now a very important matter. In the face of an imminent aggression, on 22 October, Saturday, in the afternoon, Comrade Fidel sent the following message to the Cuban representative in Grenada: I feel that organizing our personnel's immediate evacuation at a time when U.S. forces were approaching would be highly demoralizing and dishonorable for our country in the eyes of world public opinion.
A large-scale Yankee aggression against us could take place at any time in Grenada against our collaborators, in Nicaragua against our physicians, teachers, technicians, builders, and others, in Angola against our troops and civilian personnel, or right here in Cuba. We must always be ready and keep our morale high in the face of that painful possibility. I can well understand how difficult it is for you, as well as for us here, to risk compatriots in Grenada after the gross mistakes made on the Grenadian side and the tragic developments that followed.
But our position has been unequivocally and honorably clarified, so much so that it has been received with great respect everywhere. It is not of the new Government of Grenada we must think now, but of Cuba, its honor, its people, its fighting morale.
I believe that in the face of this new situation we must strengthen our defenses, keeping in mind the possibility of a surprise attack by the Yankees. This danger that has been created fully justifies our doing so. If the United States intervenes, we must vigorously defend ourselves as if we were in Cuba, in our campsites, in our closest workplaces, [but] only if we are directly attacked. I repeat, only if we are directly attacked. Thus we would just be defending ourselves, not the government or its leaders.
If the Yankees land on the runway areas, near the university, or in the surrounding areas to evacuate their citizens, fully refrain from interfering. Advisors from the Army and the Ministry of the Interior are to. stay at their posts awaiting new orders, so as to receive information and try to exert as much positive influence as possible on the behavior of the Army and the security forces toward the people.
The Vietnam Heroico vessel is to be kept there by all means. An effort should be made to put children and people who are not essential to indispensable services and work there on the first plane that lands on the island.
To inform Grenadian leaders Austin and Layne verbally of the following answers to their statements:
That our force which is mainly made up of civilian collaborators is too small to be taken as a factor of military importance in the face of a large-scale invasion. That sending of reinforcements is impossible and unthinkable. That the political situation created inside the country due to conflicts with the people, due to events, the death of Bishop and that of other leaders, external isolation, and so forth, considerably weaken the defensive capacity of the country, a logical consequence of the grave errors committed by the Grenadian revolutionaries.
That because of this situation, the present military and political conditions are the worst to organize a solid and efficient resistance against the invaders which, without the participation of the people, is practically impossible. That they must think of some way of achieving a reconciliation with the people, maybe one of these could be clarifying Bishop's death and that of other leaders, clearly identifying those responsible.
That the Grenadian Government may try to avoid pretexts for intervention, offering and reiterating publicly basic guarantees and total facilities for evacuation of personnel from the United States, from England, and so forth. That nevertheless, should the invasion take place anyway, their duty is to die fighting, no matter how difficult and disadvantageous the conditions may be. That Cuban personnel have instructions to remain in their camps and continue the work on the airport. That they shall adopt defensive measures and shall fortify the place as much as possible in order to defend themselves effectively from a surprise attack from abroad.
That you are in constant communication with the leaders of our party and that if an imperialist attack takes place you will receive immediate instructions concerning what you should do [as heard]. That they must maintain maximum calmness and nerve under these circumstances if they wish to preserve the possibility of survival for the Grenadian revolutionary process. That Cuba shall try to launch, together with other progressive countries, a strong campaign against the threats of the United States against Grenada.
Something that is also very important: At 9 pm, on that very same Saturday, October 22, through the Interests Section, we sent the following message to the Government of the United States: That the U.S. side is aware of the developments in Grenada, that it is also aware of our position on these developments and of our determination of not interfering in the internal affairs of that country. That we are aware of their concern for the many U.S. residents there.
We are also concerned about the hundreds of Cuban collaborators who are working on various projects and about the reports that U.S. naval forces are approaching Grenada. According to our reports, no U.S. or foreign citizen has run into any problem, nor has our personnel met with problems.
It is convenient that we maintain contacts regarding this matter in order to cooperate if any type of difficulty arises and so that any measure regarding the security of these persons can be resolved favorably, without violence and without any type of interference in the country. This was the message that was sent to the U.S. Government at 2100 on Saturday 22 October.
As soon as the agreement of a group of Yankee satellite [countries] in the Caribbean region to send troops to Grenada was learned of, the new leadership of that country reiterated its request that Cuba send reinforcements.
Comrade Fidel on Sunday night, 23 October, sent the following message to Cuba's embassy in Grenada: Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Barbados do not have sufficient forces to invade Grenada. If this occurs, it is just a simple pretext of the Yankees so that they can interfere immediately afterward. In this case, you must strictly obey the instructions that you received yesterday.
You must verbally transmit the following answer to the Grenadian leadership: That Jamaica, St Lucia, and Barbados do not have sufficient forces to invade Grenada. If this occurs, they can defeat them with their own forces, without major difficulty. That, if this takes place, then it could be a pretext for the Yankees to act directly. If this is the case, then the Grenadian revolutionaries must try to win over the people in order to defend the country, they must be ready to fight to the last man, and they must create the conditions for a lengthy resistance against foreign invasion and occupation.
That, Cuba cannot send reinforcements, not only because it is materially impossible in face of the overwhelming superiority of U.S. air and naval forces in the region, but also because, politically, if it is a question of a struggle among Caribbeans, then it must not send reinforcements so as not to justify a U.S. intervention. That, on the other hand, the unfortunate events that have occurred in Grenada make it morally impossible before our people and the world the useless sacrifice of sending such reinforcements to fight against the United States.
That, in view of our country's honor, morality, and dignity, we are keeping Cuban personnel there at a time when powerful Yankee naval forces are approaching Grenada. That, if Grenada is invaded by the United States, Cuban personnel will defend its positions within its camps and work areas with all the energy and courage of which it is capable. That, due to the fact that it is a limited force, no other type of mission can be assigned to it.
That, the Grenadian revolutionaries have the exclusive responsibility for having created this difficult and unfavorable political and military situation for the revolutionary process in the political and military fields.
That, the Cuban personnel in Grenada, within the difficult conditions that have arisen, will know how to honorably obey the task that our revolution has assigned them under these circumstance. That, regarding the question of military advice, due to this situation, all possible cooperation will begiven the personnel in view of this situation.
That, it is necessary to continue with the adequate political and diplomatic efforts on their part to prevent intervention without the concession of principles on our part. That, we ourselves will make every possible effort in this respect.
After this message, the Grenadians continued to insist on plans that in our judgment were, in some aspects, unreal and not politically feasible. They also wanted to sign a formal agreement regarding what each involved party had to carry out in the military field and they also wanted to subordinate the Cuban construction workers and collaborators to the Grenadian Army.
During the course of the afternoon of 24 October the following essential points were transmitted to the Grenadian leadership: That, Cuban personnel will defend the positions in which they currently find themselves. In other words, the runway up to the fill-in of (Harvey) Bay and the area between Salines Point and Mount Rose if there is a largescale U.S. invasion.
That our personnel have neither the means nor the strength to fulfill any other mission; nor the moral and international justification under present circumstances to do so in any other location which is not their area of work.
That, it is clear to us that if it is a case of just the evacuation of foreign personnel, we would not be facing an invasion and, under those circumstances, we suppose they would find the solution with those involved.
That because of that, the American University and the surrounding area should be under the custody of Grenadians themselves, if they feel it is necessary and convenient. The American University is located near one of the ends of the runway the Cubans are building. Perhaps it would be better if that area were free of military personnel so it would not be regarded as a war zone, thereby justifying armed actions by imperialism under the pretext of evacuating its citizens.
That, there is no need for informal agreement between us.
That, the orders regarding what the Cuban personnel can do in case of war can only be given by the Government of Cuba. This message, which should have been delivered by 0800, 25 October, Tuesday, did not even reach the addresses. U.S. intervention in Grenada took place in early dawn.
The Cuban representative and personnel strictly abided by the orders of the party and Government of Cuba, which was to fight if they were attacked at their camp and working area. In the early hours of the day, while the U.S. troops were landing with helicopters in the area of the university, there was no combat with the Cubans who had taken a defensive position in the area referred to previously.
Around 0800, Grenadian time, 0700 Cuban time, U.S. troops started to advance from different directions toward the Cuban positions, and the combat started. At 0830, Cuban time, 25 October, the U.S. Government responded to the Cuban message sent on the evening of Saturday, 22 October -- that is, nearly 3 days later. The note read: "The United States of America Interest Section of the Embassy of Switzerland presents its compliments to the minister of foreign relations of the Republic of Cuba and has the honor to inform the minister that the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, acting out of great concern of its members for the anarchy, bloodshed, and callous disregard for human life of the island of Grenada, has asked the United States Government to assist the armed forces of its member states to restore security in Grenada. In response to this request, and taking into consideration the need to safeguard the lives of hundreds of U.S. citizens now in Grenada, the U.S. Government has agreed to the request.
"Consequently, armed forces from the member states of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, supported by those of the United States, Barbados, and Jamaica, have entered Grenada for the purpose of restoring order and public safety. The U.S. Government is aware that military and civilian personnel of the Republic of Cuba are present in Grenada. It has taken into full account the message on this subject which was delivered on the night of 22 October from the Ministry of Foreign Relations to the acting chief of U.S. Interest Section in Havana.
"It wishes to assure the Government of the Republic of Cuba that all efforts are being and will continue to be made to ensure the safety of each person while order is being restored. This personnel will be granted safe passage from Grenada as soon as conditions permit. The Government of the United States accepts the Cuban proposal of 22 October to maintain due respect concerning the safety of the personnel of each side.
"The appropriate civilian representative with the United States Armed Forces present in Grenada has been instructed to be in contact with the Cuban ambassador in Grenada to ensure that every consideration is given to the safety of Cuban personnel on the island and to facilitate the necessary steps with Grenadian authorities for their prompt evacuation.
"The U.S. Armed Forces will be prepared to assure this evacuation at the earliest possible moment on ships of third countries.
"On the other hand, should there be a vessel of the Cuban Merchant Marine, not a warship, in Grenadian waters at this time, that vessel may be authorized to conduct the evacuation of Cuban personnel. In addition, any Cuban views communicated to the U.S. Department of State through the Cuban Interests Section in Washington or through the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, will be given immediate attention.
"The Government of the United States calls upon the Government of the Republic of Cuba, in the interests of the personal safety of all concerned, to advise its citizens and forces in Grenada to remain calm and to cooperate fully with forces of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and with those of the United States, Jamaica, and Barbados. It asks that they be instructed to avoid any steps which might exacerbate the delicate situation in Grenada.
"Above all, the Government of the United States cautions the Government of the Republic of Cuba to refrain from sending any new military units or personnel to Grenada. The United States of America Interests Section of the Embassy of Switzerland avails itself of this opportunity to renew to the Ministry of Foreign Relations of the Republic of Cuba the assurances of its highest and most distinguished considerations."
When this note from the Government of the United States reached us, 1 and 1/2 hours had passed since U.S. troops had attacked Cuban personnel and 3 hours had passed since the landings had begun. Throughout today, Tuesday, 25 October, the people of Cuba have been kept informed as thoroughly as possible on the details of the fighting and of the resolute and heroic resistance put up by the Cuban construction workers and collaborators who had had practically no time to even dig trenches or fortify their positions on rocky terrain in the face of a naval, air, and ground attack from U.S. elite troops.
The people know of the message exchanged between the commander in chief and Colonel Tortolo, the man in charge of Cuban personnel. This man, who had barely been in the country 24 hours on a working visit, with deeds and words has written in our modern history page worthy of Antonio Maceo.
At 5 PM, while intense fighting prevailed, the Government of the United States, through Mr. Ferch, head of the U.S. Interests Section, sent the following message to Cuba:
"Cuban personnel stationed in Grenada are not the target of U.S. troop action there. The United States is ready to cooperate with Cuban authorities in evacuation of its personnel to Cuba. The United States is aware that the armed Cuban personnel have neither the armament nor the ammunition reserves required for a protracted action. Therefore, to maintain a belligerent position would only provoke a senseless loss of human life. The United States does not want to portray the withdrawal Cuban armed personnel as a surrender. Finally, it regrets the armed clashes between armed men from both countries and considers that they have occurred due confusion and accidents brought about by the fact that the Cubans were near the operational sites of the multinational troops."
At 8:30 pm, the following response to the Government of the United States was turned over to Mr. Ferch:
1. That we did everything possible to prevent the intervention. That in our note on Saturday we explained that no U.S. citizen or foreign national, according to our reports, was in any danger while at the same time expressed our willingness to cooperate in order to resolve problems without recourse to violence or intervention.
2. That the intervention is absolutely unjustifiable. That we had absolutely refrained from meddling in the country's internal affairs despite our friendship with and sympathy for Bishop.
3. That the response to our constructive note, delivered Saturday, 22 October at 9 pm, arrived on Tuesday, 25 October at 8:30 am, at the time when our personnel and installations at the airport had already been under attack by U.S. troops for 1 and 1/2 hours.
4. That we had no soldiers in Grenada but construction workers and civilian advisers, with the exception of a few tens of military advisers who were working with the Army security forces prior to Bishop's death. Our men had been instructed to fight back only if attacked, and they were not the first to fire. Furthermore, they had been given instructions not to obstruct any action aimed at the evacuation of U.S. citizens in the area of the runway near the U.S. University. It was clear that if any attempt to occupy Cuban installations was made clashes would occur.
5. That our personnel have suffered an as yet undetermined number of dead and wounded in today's fighting.
6. That the attack by U.S. troops cane as a surprise and there was no type of prior warning.
7. That although the Cuban personnel that are still in a position to resist are at a numerical, technical, and military disadvantage, their moral remains high and they are firmly prepared to continue to defend themselves if the attacks continue.
8. That, if there is a real intention to forestall further bloodshed, attacks against Grenadian and Cuban personnel who are still fighting should stop and an honorable way should be sought to put an end to a battle which far from honors the United States, a battle against small forces which, although unable to resist the overwhelming military superiority of U.S. forces -- even when losing the battle and sacrificing themselves – could still inflict a costly moral defeat on the United States, the most powerful country in the world engaged in a war against one of the smallest nations on earth.
9. That the Cuban commander in Grenada has instructions to receive anyone who approaches to parley, listen to his views and transmit those views to Cuba.
10. It must be taken into account that some Grenadian units are fighting and they must receive the same treatment that the Cubans receive.
This was the answer that we addressed to the United States today.
The Cuban constructors and collaborators were still entrenched in several of their positions this evening in an unequal and difficult fight, but their morale and strength is at a very high level.
Very few reports were being received this evening from Grenada and communication was very difficult. The courageous and heroic Cuban constructors and collaborators have written an indelible page in the history of international solidarity. They have also undertaken the battle in Grenada in the name of the world's small nations and in the name of all the nations of the Third World in the face of the brutal aggression of imperialism. They have also fought for America and for their own fatherland as though they were defending the first trench for the sovereignty and integrity of Cuba there in Grenada. For the Yankee imperialists, Grenada can become in Latin America and the Caribbean what the Moncada was for the Batista tyranny in Cuba.
Eternal glory for the fallen Cubans and for those who have fought and continue to fight, defending their honor, principles, their tasks for internationalism, the fatherland, and their own personal integrity threatened by the unjustified, treacherous, and criminal imperialist attack.
Fatherland or death, we shall win.
[At this point the announcer indicates that the question and answer session begins]
Question -- in English: What is the estimate of Cuban dead and wounded, and do you know whether prisoners have been taken?
Answer: We still do not have sufficient information to be able to determine the number of dead, because the Cubans were defending themselves from several positions. We did not have direct communication with the individual positions. We were in communication with the embassy, and the diplomats at times were in communication with the command post, but it was not possible to obtain information about each isolated position due to the intensive fighting that went on during the day.
Regarding prisoners, we know, as I have already explained, that Cuban personnel had light infantry weapons. Regrettably, no one believed that this would happen. Apparently there was a situation of peace.
No one had expected these events, first the domestic events, and then the external events. The rifles had ammunition quantities of 0.9 canisters [modulos]. Supposedly, three canisters are necessary for combat, in addition to several reserves. The Cubans had less than one canister; in other words, they had less than 300 rounds per rifle. After many hours of combat, they began to run out of ammunition. There might be a number of prisoners, but we are not certain; we don't know if there were 100 to 150. There were also women, non-military personnel, and almost the entire staff of the Cuban Embassy in Grenada. We don't have the exact figures at this time.
[Unidentified reporter] It is a follow-up question about a report. I believe it was AP, that there were Soviet advisers, and that some of them had been (captured?)?
Answer: I have no knowledge, not even the slightest knowledge, about the presence of Soviet military advisers or Soviet technical advisers. I really have no knowledge about this. I believe that there were no Soviet advisers; I know that there were no military advisers. As for civilians, I think that there was a Soviet diplomatic representation, a small group of Soviet diplomats, but it is not true that there were Soviet advisers there; at least I don't have such information.
[Unidentified reporter] Has the U.S. Government replied to the response given by Cuba yesterday, or does the Cuban Government expect it for January?
Answer: Well, a period of time always elapses between the arrival of a note, its translation into Spanish, and the preparation of a reply and its delivery. We received the note at approximately 1800. It was quickly translated, and we promptly sent our reply, which was delivered to the U.S. Government at 2030. I imagine that there was enough time to deliver it to the U.S. Government. It was very clear, concrete, and precise, and they have had enough time to analyze it. Now, what will they decide? Will they try to find a solution; will they stop fighting and attacking; will they try to arrive at an honorable solution there; will they try to eliminate all those who are resisting? This we don't know, but we have received news that they are mobilizing the 82nd Airborne Division, to launch it against Grenada tomorrow. What will their final decision be? We don't know, but the U.S. Government has had time to receive our reply. It will decide whether the fighting will continue tomorrow, or whether it will try to obtain a military victory, which would be a Pyrrhic victory and a disastrous defeat in terms of morale.
Gus Monroe of TIME magazine: You said that you had indirect communication with the Cuban workers in Grenada. When did you lost direct communication with the Cuban workers today?
Answer: A very strange thing happened. We had telephone communication with our representatives almost all the time at the embassy. At certain times, we also had communication with the command of the military personnel. However, when the fighting increased, they destroyed the means of communication, and we then had to use other methods of communication --with the embassy, with the Cuban cargo ship that is currently in Grenada, and through other methods, in order to maintain conventional means of communication. Sometimes the embassy could communicate with the personnel command. This is how we received various reports. It was in this way, for example, that we learned from the head of the Cuban personnel there that the U.S. troops had, after many hours of fighting, sent a construction worker who had been arrested to explain that they didn't want any problems with the Cubans.
That coincided with the official message that we received afterward. Also, it was reported at the same time that a group of hostages, that is, the personnel that had run out of ammunition, had been sent in front of jeeps armed with cannon and machineguns toward our positions.
We thought that perhaps they were trying to parley, to establish communication. The Cuban military commander, responding to the sentiment of all his comrades, stated that they would not surrender under any circumstances. The emissary had said they were to propose surrender, but the commander had his instructions. He was ordered not to surrender under any... [changes thought] first, he was congratulated, and then he was ordered, if the adversary sent an emissary, to listen to that emissary and report the information immediately to Cuba. I believe their reply was very courageous and responsible. They replied that they had received their instructions, and would never surrender, under any circumstances. That is what the commander of the Cuban military personnel reported.
Afterward, military actions continued. The Air Force and helicopters were used. They have used a lot of sophisticated military equipment.
By nightfall, the combat had become intense. There is relative calm now. Airplanes fly overhead, helicopters fly overhead, shots are heard, but the latest news is that no intense fighting is going on.
[Unidentified reporter] Exactly how many Cubans are in Grenada? How many personnel and military advisers are there?
Answer: Look, I can tell you this -- there is no secret about it. I am sorry I do not have here the exact figures, but there are more than 700 Cubans. A vast majority -- more than 550 -- are construction workers. There is a large group of doctors, as well as some teachers, agricultural technicians, and some 40 military advisers. I did not reveal this information earlier because the statement would have been too lengthy. There is absolutely no secret about this. Besides, it is easy to prove that these are not military personnel, that they are actually civilian workers. Of course, all the Cuban workers receive military training. Evidence of the fact that they are workers and construction personnel can be seen in the excellent landing strip that they have built in such a short time; dozens of U.S. airplanes have been able to land on the air strip even though the airport is unfinished. We were planning to finish it in March.
This is absolute proof that they are construction workers. Besides, the U.S. news media can talk freely with the prisoners or with the hostages who were used as a front. They will be able to ascertain if they are professional soldiers or construction workers -- that is, if the evidence of the airport is not enough.
[Unidentified reporter] When do you expect the Cuban personnel to return?
Answer: It is impossible to know what will happen because it does not depend on us alone. The ship, which was unarmed, was ordered to leave the bay. I understand that it is standing off by at least 12 miles. The ship has approximately a dozen crewmembers. The airplanes have been flying low over it all night -- perhaps this is psychological warfare. However, right now I could not attest to what will happen.
[Unidentified reporter] Have you considered the possibility [passage indistinct] an honorable solution to the dilemma? What would your solution be?
Answer: Well, as I explained in my message to the Grenadians, it was impossible to send reinforcements before the combat; besides, it was unthinkable. It was impossible because the U.S. squadrons and aircraft carriers were moving, and we had no means of transportation to send reinforcements. At any rate, no matter how many reinforcements we sent, they could not compare to the naval and air forces deployed by the United States. Thus, in practice this was impossible. But we also said that it was politically impossible, because, after the events which had taken place in Grenada and the mistakes committed by the revolutionaries themselves, there as no moral justification for sacrificing reinforcements that would never even have been able to reach their destination. For us, it would have, in essence, been a symbolic action, as it was absolutely impossible to send them from the practical point of view. From the political point of view, we did not consider it justifiable. While there exists an honorable solution, I would say that, first of all, the attacks on our forces must cease. I believe that the attacks on the Grenadian forces should also cease. Then we would be able to discuss some solution. However, while they are under fire, the only reply will be defense against attack if there is no other alternative. I have not pondered this, but there must be some kind of solution; the combat -- that is, the attacks -- must cease. Our forces have simply been defending themselves.
[Unidentified reporter] Is there a possibility that you will sacrifice the Cubans?
Answer: Well, it would not be us, but the United States who would be sacrificing the Cubans. They initiated the attack; they have maintained the attack. We, because of an elementary principle of honor and the legitimate right to self-defense, have been defending ourselves from these attacks. If our comrades must die under attack, they will be dying in an act of absolute and legitimate defense. What we cannot tell is to stop defending themselves if they are attacked.
[Unidentified reporter] What can you tell us about the present government in Grenada and the participation of Grenadian troops in the fighting?
Answer: Well, our opinion about the government... [changes thought] not really the government, because we have not wanted to pass judgment on the government. We have no right to pass judgment on the government. We based ourselves on the fact that there was a division within the revolution. It was painful and unpleasant. We foresaw that great damage would be done to the country because of this division. We even addressed the Grenadian leaders, the central committee, and asked them to try to solve these problems peacefully, without violence. We said that violence would greatly damage Grenada's image.
However, a popular uprising occurred in favor of Bishop. Passions flared and it ended in Bishop's dramatic death under circumstances about which we still have no exact knowledge. Sooner or later they will be known. However, we were strongly opposed to this division, we were aware of the damage it was causing, and we were deeply moved by Bishop's physical elimination. What was the other question?
[Unidentified journalist] [Question indistinct]
Answer: As far as we know, by late afternoon, the Grenada Government was still in office, the capital had not yet been taken, and the Grenadian people were resisting attacks at various points, although we had no information about what was happening with the Grenadian units.
[(Robert Hager), NBC] If the American motivation for this action was not its citizens, what do you believe the American motive was?
Answer: Well, that is difficult to understand. I will tell you why. First, neither U.S. citizens nor those of any other country were in any danger, because the Grenadian people took special measures to give them guarantees for the very purpose of avoiding any pretexts for intervention. For instance, there is a group of 500 or 600 U.S. medical students, and the director of the university spoke with the government, with the authorities. They gave him every guarantee. They were completely calm. Only some 14 or 15 actually wanted to leave. It is my understanding, according to the public media, that the director or rector of the university was strongly opposed to and had strongly criticized the intervention. There was no reason for it.
On the other hand, the situation affecting the Grenadian revolutionary process itself was very difficult. Domestic events caused isolation internationally and brought great economic difficulties. It was not easy for the new Grenadian Government to maintain itself. Why, therefore? It can be clearly seen that the United States wanted to eliminate a process that already could scarcely survive and that had great problems.
I believe that it wanted to undertake a show of force, to implement a philosophy of force, an opportunistic policy, to take advantage of all of those difficulties in order to smash a symbol, because Grenada is definitely a very small country. It cannot be said, from any point of view, that it has any strategic importance. Nor could it possibly represent the slightest danger for the United States. Therefore, what reason could there have been except a show of force?
It seems even stranger because it coincides with the events in Lebanon, where more than 200 North Americans were just killed. What sense, what logic was there in diverting forces that were headed for Lebanon and sending them to Grenada instead? It seems absurd. I really feel that this was an enormous political error which will not benefit the United States in any way whatever.
The events of the Malvinas, which caused a commotion throughout Latin America, and in which the United States sided with England, are still fresh. It forgot the OAS and all of its agreements. Nevertheless, it has now invoked the agreements of a supposed group of Caribbean countries in order to intervene in Grenada. I feel that this deeply wounds the sensibilities of and causes considerable unrest in the countries of Latin America. I consider it an enormous, unnecessary, and unjustifiable error by the United States.
[Unidentified journalist] The United States has suggested that the Cubans now move out of Grenada. If the attacks cease, would the Cubans agree to leave Grenada?
Answer: But the Grenadian Government has not asked us to leave. On the contrary, it has asked us for more help. There is not even a new government in Grenada. I don't believe that the United States is the government of Grenada with the right to ask the Cubans to leave. We are there at the request of the government? It is not that we are interested in remaining there. We are even prepared to complete this airport independent of the domestic U.S. problems. Who is going to ask us to leave? It is unquestionable that we cannot remain in an invaded and occupied country. There is no need for anyone to ask us to leave an occupied and invaded country. We would have no need or reason to be there.
[Unidentified journalist] What is your opinion of the reaction voiced throughout the day by different countries and, particularly, by the European countries?
Answer: I have not had the opportunity to examine all of this in detail. However, I have noted that the British Government criticized the intervention in Grenada. I believe that this is a very significant fact which should be taken into consideration. The world's public will firmly and vigorously oppose the facts. It is my understanding that the majority of the Latin American countries have vigorously opposed the intervention because it involves an action by the world's most powerful country against one of the world's smallest countries. No one could sympathize with this.
[Unidentified reporter] If there are wounded Cubans on the island, what do you plan to do?
Answer: Well, there were Cuban doctors there. We have taken care of as many wounded as possible. We also have news that there were wounded prisoners. I believe that in response to a fundamental sense of humanity, the U.S. Government itself will be giving medical attention to those wounded.
In truth, according to the news we have -- and I must be quite honest -- the wounded we not being mistreated by the troops. In fact, I have even been informed by the Cubans of their impression that no one was being mistreated. They have had some contacts with a Cuban prisoner, who was allowed to talk with them. I have no reason to lie or to hide the trust. Besides, it would be illogical for the troops to turn against those wounded prisoners. We hope that they are taken care of properly, just as we would take care of any wounded U.S. soldier who might fall into our hands.
[Unidentified reporter] The voice of America reported that Cuba and the Soviet Union were behind Coard in Grenada. What do you say to that?
Answer: I don't think it is even worthwhile to reply to that. I believe that Cuba's attitude was clear in its relations with Bishop. In truth, Bishop was so decent and respectful that when he passed through Cuba he did not say a single word about his problems. Cuba's position afterward was made well known through its public statements. His death seemed meaningless, because it seemed that Bishop was an adequate leader for that country and had great international prestige. He was an intelligent person, and he was not an extremist; he was a revolutionary. Bishop understood the situation in his country very well and it seems to us that he was governing the country very well. He had brought about great achievements for Grenada, he was receiving great international collaboration. Grenada's GNP was growing and he seemed to be an exceptional person, the right one for Grenada's process. Besides, everything we said in our messages, the warnings we issued, proved that the division was tragic. Thus, there is absolutely no logic in the idea that his friendship with us could later he considered the reason for this absurd change.
[Unidentified reporter] Mr President, a while ago you were talking about strange coincidences in the events taking place in Grenada. It is even being said that all of this is part of a great provocation in Central America and the Caribbean. What would you say to this?
Answer: A great provocation in the area? I would say that it is the application of a philosophy and policy of force and gendarme in the area. It is an attempt to establish a precedent, but it is so absurd that I see no logic in it. A small country had a government that was experiencing problems, its survival. What was the point in interfering with it? Not a single U.S. citizen was wounded, their lives were not endangered, and there was no significant economic interest. It seems to me that this was an application of a philosophy and policy of force, and that attempts are being made to extend it to the entire world. However, this is absurd, and a great mistake. Instead, it looks like a provocation. We could not be provoked, because we have no means of going anywhere. We have no naval or air means of getting there. So, if this is a provocation aimed at us, what can it achieve if we do not intervene in the island's internal affairs? We scrupulously respected the decisions of the Grenada party and government. Even though we had combat capability and could have interfered, we upheld the principle of nonintervention. There was no pretext for attacking us. We were in our places of work. What will the United States gain internationally by attacking the Cuban workers who were there to help a small country, a Third World country? What would it gain by this? It can only turn a small country into a martyr, indeed, it can turn that small nation, and the Cuban workers there, into martyrs of the liberty and defense of Third World countries. Our attitude has been above reproach and beyond question. The message is there. I could not invent the message that, as I said here, was sent by the United States, because they also have it there. I could not invent the U.S. reply.
I could not invent the efforts carried out on 22 October to warn them that it was not necessary to stage an act of intervention, that they should not commit this grave mistake, that we were willing to cooperate in any way to safeguard the citizens' security, without resorting to violence or intervention. We might add that this was a most unusual action on our part, to directly address the United States about a real situation. I believe that we were doing the United States a service. We were trying to make then understand that this action was unnecessary, because we had information with which we were willing to cooperate in the search for a nonviolent solution, without resorting to intervention, thus guaranteeing the safety of the U.S. citizens in Grenada. So, I could not invent all of this, because it is fully documented. We are not in the habit of talking about messages; we are discreet. However, the United States said today that it sent us a message, warning us. And the secretary of state practically said that he had warned us about the events. The attack took place at 0630 Grenada time, 0530 Cuba time; and we received the U.S. reply at 0830 Cuba time, 0930 Grenada time. They had been fighting our personnel for 1 and ½ hours. In other words, there are unquestionable documents that prove this; I have not used arguments or adjectives or epithets. I have spoken with evidence that proves everything I have said. Absolutely no one can question my statements.
[Unidentified reporter] What has been the reply to Cuba's last message [words indistinct]?
Answer: Well, I really don't know. I hope that this message will have some influence. I have hopes that attacks will cease tomorrow, because the alternative would be trying to exterminate all those who are still resisting. Of course, I would not like this to happen, but if they demand our surrender, we will certainly resist, and they will have to exterminate us. Perhaps they will be tempted to use the 82nd Airborne Division. It would be a shame if they did, but no one knows what will happen, because we have seen so many mistakes; who knows what could happen tomorrow.
I wonder if there are many questions left. For my part, I have worked extensively today, but I am willing to continue. Two or three more – the moderators here can set a limit.
[Unidentified reporter] Commander, would you give your opinion on the Central American crisis. For example, if Nicaragua were invaded, to what extent would Cuba support Nicaragua?
Answer: We would try to do whatever we could for Nicaragua, but we would be facing the same problem as with Grenada. We have no naval or air means of sending direct aid to Grenada. We do not have an option here. However, this does not worry me. The Nicaraguan situation is quite different from that of Grenada. Grenada was 120,000 inhabitants; Nicaragua has 3.5 million inhabitants. Nicaragua has extensive fighting experience; it has tens of thousands of fighters. That is, the United States would have to face an armed people there. It would be an impossible struggle in which neither 1 nor 10 airborne divisions would be sufficient. This is a reality. People should not be underestimated. Nicaragua should not be underestimated.
I believe that it would be an error multiplied a hundred times to attempt invading Nicaragua, because the Nicaraguan people are courageous and combative. I believe that all the aggression sustained by Nicaragua has strengthened, rather than weakened, the revolution. It has given them experience. I believe that Nicaragua is a country that could not be occupied and could not be ruled by the United States. There is no technology or sophisticated weaponry that can solve the problems posed by an entire nation in arms.
This was not the situation in Grenada because, as a result of the domestic problems, the Army itself collected the weapons from the militias and could not muster an armed people for the resistance. This is not the case in Nicaragua. Let us hope that this great mistake will be helpful in preventing greater mistakes in Nicaragua.
[Unidentified reporter from L'HUMANlTE] I merely want an explanation about point 10 of the last message that was sent.
Answer: But which message? There were many.
[Unidentified reporter from L'HUMANITE] A message to the Cubans that the treatment should be the same for the Cuban workers who are fighting there as for the Grenadian people who are fighting.
Answer: I cannot answer for the Grenadian people. That is their concern. However, as a point of honor, we cannot accept a solution for the Cuban personnel unless it is also a solution for the Grenadian fighters. We do not want to be treated differently from the Grenadian people because, despite our differences we had as a result of the events in Grenada, the joint struggle in these past hours has made us brothers. We cannot aspire to a different solution and treatment for us. I believe that any treatment we are given, regardless of the solution, will be honorable and will have to be discussed. This would also have to be applied to the Grenadian fighters.
It is presumed that this battle will not be won against the North Americans, but it is a battle that is being won morally. If the United States does not want any more useless bloodshed, it should find a solution). If the people are forced to surrender, there will be more useless bloodshed caused by the United States. It will not be caused by those who are defending their lives and honor.
Fidel Castro Internet Archive | Grenadian Revolution Archive
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<p class="storyheadline">The Annexation of Colombia</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p>
<p> Anyone with some information can immediately see that the sweetened “Complementation Agreement for Defense and Security Cooperation and Technical Assistance between the Governments of Colombia and the United States” signed on October 30, and made public in the evening of November 2, amounts to the annexation of Colombia to the United States.</p>
<p>The agreement puts theoreticians and politicians in a predicament. It wouldn’t be honest to keep silent now and speak later on sovereignty, democracy, human rights, freedom of opinion and other delights, when a country is being devoured by the empire as easy as lizards catch flies. This is the Colombian people—a self-sacrificing, industrious and combative people. I looked up in the hefty document for a digestible justification and I found none whatsoever. </p>
<p>Of 48 pages with 21 lines each, five are used to philosophize on the background of the shameful absorption that turns Colombia into an overseas territory. They are all based on the agreements signed with the United States after the murder of the distinguished progressive leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan on April 9, 1948, and the establishment, on April 30, 1948, of the Organization of American States debated by the foreign ministers of the hemisphere meeting in Bogota, with the U.S. as the boss, during the dramatic days when the Colombian oligarchy cut short the life of that leader thus paving the way to the onset of the armed struggle in that country.</p>
<p>The Agreement on Military Assistance between the Republic of Colombia and the United States of April 1952; the one related to Army, Naval and Air Missions from the U.S. Forces, signed on October 7, 1974; the 1988 UN Convention against the Illegal Trafficking of Drugs and Psychotropic Substances; the 2000 UN Convention against Organized Transnational Delinquency; the 2001 Security Council Resolution 1373 and the Inter-American Democratic Charter; the Democratic Security and Defense Policy resolution and others referred to in the abovementioned document, none of them can justify turning a 713,592.5 square mile country located in the heart of South America into a U.S. military base. Colombia’s territory is 1.6 times that of Texas, the second largest state of the Union taken away from Mexico and later used as a base to conquer with great violence more than half of that country.</p>
<p>On the other hand, over 59 years have passed since Colombian soldiers were sent to distant Asia, in October 1950, to fight alongside the Yankee troops against Chinese and Korean combatants. Now, the empire intends to send them to fight against their brothers in Venezuela, Ecuador and other Bolivarian and ALBA countries, to crush the Venezuelan Revolution as they tried to do with the Cuban Revolution in April 1961. </p>
<p>For more than one-and-a-half years before the invasion of Cuba, the Yankee administration fostered, armed and used counterrevolutionary bandits in the Escambray the same way it is now using the Colombian paramilitary forces against Venezuela.</p>
<p>At the time of the Giron [Bay of Pigs] attack, the Yankee B-26 aircrafts piloted by mercenaries operated from Nicaragua. Their fighter planes were brought to the theater of operations in an aircraft carrier and the invaders of Cuban descent who landed in our territory were escorted by U.S. warships and by the American marines. This time their war equipment and troops will be in Colombia posing a threat not only to Venezuela but to every country in Central and South America.</p>
<p>It is really cynical to claim that the infamous agreement is necessary to fight drug-trafficking and international terrorism. Cuba has shown that there is no need of foreign troops to prevent the cultivation and trafficking of drugs and to preserve domestic order, even though the United States—the mightiest power on Earth—has promoted, financed and armed the terrorists who for decades have attacked the Cuban Revolution. </p>
<p>The preservation of domestic peace is a basic prerogative of every government and the presence of Yankee troops in any Latin American country to do it on their behalf constitutes a blatant foreign interference in their internal affairs that will inevitably elicit the peoples’ rejection.</p>
<p>A simple reading of the document shows that not only the Colombian airbases will be in the Yankees’ hands but also the civilian airports and ultimately any facility that may be useful to their armed forces. The radio space is also available to that country with a different culture and other interests that have nothing in common with those of the Colombian people.</p>
<p>The U.S. Armed Forces will have exceptional prerogatives.</p>
<p>The occupants can commit any crime anywhere in Colombia against Colombian families, property and laws and still be unaccountable to the country’s authorities. Actually, they have taken diseases and scandalous behavior to many places like the Palmerola military base in Honduras. In Cuba, when they came to visit the neo-colony, they sat astride the neck of Jose Marti’s statue, in the capital’s Central Park. The limit set with regards to the total number of soldiers can be modified as requested by the United States, and with no restriction whatsoever. The aircraft carriers and warships visiting the naval bases given to them can take as large a crew as they choose, and this can be thousands in only one of their large aircraft carriers.</p>
<p>The Agreement, which will remain in force for successive 10-year periods, can’t be modified until the end of every period, with a one-year prior notice. What will the United States do if an administration as that of Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. or Bush Jr., and others like them, is asked to leave Colombia? The Yankees have ousted scores of governments in our hemisphere. How long would a government last in Colombia if it announced such intentions?</p>
<p>Now, the politicians in Latin America are faced with a sensitive issue: the fundamental duty of explaining their viewpoints on the annexation document. I am aware that what is happening in Honduras at this decisive moment draws the attention of the media and the foreign ministers of this hemisphere, but the Latin American governments cannot overlook the extremely serious and transcendental events taking place in Colombia.</p>
<p>I have no doubts about the reaction of the peoples; they will be sensitive to the dagger being shoved deep inside them, especially in Colombia: They will oppose! They will never cave in to such ignominy!</p>
<p>Today, the world is facing serious and pressing problems. The entire humanity is threatened by climate change. European leaders are almost begging on their knees for some kind of agreement in Copenhagen that will prevent the catastrophe. They practically concede that the Summit will fail to meet the objective of reaching an agreement that can drastically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and promise to continue struggling to attain it before 2012; however, there is a true risk that an agreement cannot be reached until it is too late.</p>
<p>The Third World countries are rightly claiming from the richest and most developed nations hundreds of billion dollars a year to pay for the climate battle.</p>
<p>Does it make sense for the United States government to invest time and money in building military bases in Colombia to impose on our peoples their hateful tyranny? Along that path, if a disaster is already threatening the world, a greater and faster disaster is threatening the empire and it would all be the consequence of the same exploiting and plundering system of the planet.</p>
<p><span class="italics">— <a href="http://periodico26.cu">periodico26.cu</a>,</span> November 6, 2009</p>
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The Annexation of Colombia
By Fidel Castro Ruz
Anyone with some information can immediately see that the sweetened “Complementation Agreement for Defense and Security Cooperation and Technical Assistance between the Governments of Colombia and the United States” signed on October 30, and made public in the evening of November 2, amounts to the annexation of Colombia to the United States.
The agreement puts theoreticians and politicians in a predicament. It wouldn’t be honest to keep silent now and speak later on sovereignty, democracy, human rights, freedom of opinion and other delights, when a country is being devoured by the empire as easy as lizards catch flies. This is the Colombian people—a self-sacrificing, industrious and combative people. I looked up in the hefty document for a digestible justification and I found none whatsoever.
Of 48 pages with 21 lines each, five are used to philosophize on the background of the shameful absorption that turns Colombia into an overseas territory. They are all based on the agreements signed with the United States after the murder of the distinguished progressive leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan on April 9, 1948, and the establishment, on April 30, 1948, of the Organization of American States debated by the foreign ministers of the hemisphere meeting in Bogota, with the U.S. as the boss, during the dramatic days when the Colombian oligarchy cut short the life of that leader thus paving the way to the onset of the armed struggle in that country.
The Agreement on Military Assistance between the Republic of Colombia and the United States of April 1952; the one related to Army, Naval and Air Missions from the U.S. Forces, signed on October 7, 1974; the 1988 UN Convention against the Illegal Trafficking of Drugs and Psychotropic Substances; the 2000 UN Convention against Organized Transnational Delinquency; the 2001 Security Council Resolution 1373 and the Inter-American Democratic Charter; the Democratic Security and Defense Policy resolution and others referred to in the abovementioned document, none of them can justify turning a 713,592.5 square mile country located in the heart of South America into a U.S. military base. Colombia’s territory is 1.6 times that of Texas, the second largest state of the Union taken away from Mexico and later used as a base to conquer with great violence more than half of that country.
On the other hand, over 59 years have passed since Colombian soldiers were sent to distant Asia, in October 1950, to fight alongside the Yankee troops against Chinese and Korean combatants. Now, the empire intends to send them to fight against their brothers in Venezuela, Ecuador and other Bolivarian and ALBA countries, to crush the Venezuelan Revolution as they tried to do with the Cuban Revolution in April 1961.
For more than one-and-a-half years before the invasion of Cuba, the Yankee administration fostered, armed and used counterrevolutionary bandits in the Escambray the same way it is now using the Colombian paramilitary forces against Venezuela.
At the time of the Giron [Bay of Pigs] attack, the Yankee B-26 aircrafts piloted by mercenaries operated from Nicaragua. Their fighter planes were brought to the theater of operations in an aircraft carrier and the invaders of Cuban descent who landed in our territory were escorted by U.S. warships and by the American marines. This time their war equipment and troops will be in Colombia posing a threat not only to Venezuela but to every country in Central and South America.
It is really cynical to claim that the infamous agreement is necessary to fight drug-trafficking and international terrorism. Cuba has shown that there is no need of foreign troops to prevent the cultivation and trafficking of drugs and to preserve domestic order, even though the United States—the mightiest power on Earth—has promoted, financed and armed the terrorists who for decades have attacked the Cuban Revolution.
The preservation of domestic peace is a basic prerogative of every government and the presence of Yankee troops in any Latin American country to do it on their behalf constitutes a blatant foreign interference in their internal affairs that will inevitably elicit the peoples’ rejection.
A simple reading of the document shows that not only the Colombian airbases will be in the Yankees’ hands but also the civilian airports and ultimately any facility that may be useful to their armed forces. The radio space is also available to that country with a different culture and other interests that have nothing in common with those of the Colombian people.
The U.S. Armed Forces will have exceptional prerogatives.
The occupants can commit any crime anywhere in Colombia against Colombian families, property and laws and still be unaccountable to the country’s authorities. Actually, they have taken diseases and scandalous behavior to many places like the Palmerola military base in Honduras. In Cuba, when they came to visit the neo-colony, they sat astride the neck of Jose Marti’s statue, in the capital’s Central Park. The limit set with regards to the total number of soldiers can be modified as requested by the United States, and with no restriction whatsoever. The aircraft carriers and warships visiting the naval bases given to them can take as large a crew as they choose, and this can be thousands in only one of their large aircraft carriers.
The Agreement, which will remain in force for successive 10-year periods, can’t be modified until the end of every period, with a one-year prior notice. What will the United States do if an administration as that of Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. or Bush Jr., and others like them, is asked to leave Colombia? The Yankees have ousted scores of governments in our hemisphere. How long would a government last in Colombia if it announced such intentions?
Now, the politicians in Latin America are faced with a sensitive issue: the fundamental duty of explaining their viewpoints on the annexation document. I am aware that what is happening in Honduras at this decisive moment draws the attention of the media and the foreign ministers of this hemisphere, but the Latin American governments cannot overlook the extremely serious and transcendental events taking place in Colombia.
I have no doubts about the reaction of the peoples; they will be sensitive to the dagger being shoved deep inside them, especially in Colombia: They will oppose! They will never cave in to such ignominy!
Today, the world is facing serious and pressing problems. The entire humanity is threatened by climate change. European leaders are almost begging on their knees for some kind of agreement in Copenhagen that will prevent the catastrophe. They practically concede that the Summit will fail to meet the objective of reaching an agreement that can drastically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and promise to continue struggling to attain it before 2012; however, there is a true risk that an agreement cannot be reached until it is too late.
The Third World countries are rightly claiming from the richest and most developed nations hundreds of billion dollars a year to pay for the climate battle.
Does it make sense for the United States government to invest time and money in building military bases in Colombia to impose on our peoples their hateful tyranny? Along that path, if a disaster is already threatening the world, a greater and faster disaster is threatening the empire and it would all be the consequence of the same exploiting and plundering system of the planet.
— periodico26.cu, November 6, 2009
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<p class="storyheadline">The United States’ Hemispheric Response: <br>A Fourth Intervention Fleet </p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz </p>
<p>It had come into being in 1943 as a means of combating Nazi submarines and protecting navigation routes during the Second World War. It was decommissioned in 1950, when it became superfluous. The South Command was designed to meet the United States’ hegemonic needs in our region at the time. After 48 years, however, it has recently been resurrected, and its interventionist aims need not be proved: U.S. military chiefs themselves divulge these in their declarations in a natural, spontaneous, at times discrete fashion. Overwhelmed by problems with food prices, energy, unequal trade, the economic recession, which affects the most important market their products have; inflation, climate change and the investments required to satisfy their consumer dreams, they mismanage the time and energy of leaders and subordinates alike.</p>
<p>Truth is the decision to reassemble the Fourth Fleet was announced the first week of April, almost a month after the Ecuadorian territory was attacked with U.S. bombs and technology and when, owing to U.S. pressures, citizens of different countries were killed or wounded. This was vigorously condemned by Latin American leaders at the Rio Group meeting held in the Dominican Republic’s capital.</p>
<p>But worst still is that this is taking place at a time when the dismemberment of Bolivia encouraged by the United States meets with nearly unanimous condemnation. U.S. military chiefs themselves have explained they will be responsible for over 30 countries and for covering 15.6 million square miles of neighboring waters in both Central and South America, the Caribbean Sea and its 12 islands, Mexico and the European territories this side of the Atlantic.</p>
<p>The United States has 10 Nimitz aircraft carriers whose parameters, more or less similar, are the following: maximum load capacity of between 101 and 104 thousand tons; 999-feet-long and 230.4-feet-wide deck; 2 nuclear reactors; maximum speed of 35 miles/hour; capacity for 90 war planes. The last to be commissioned bears the name of George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. It has already been baptized with a bottle of champagne by the progenitor himself and should be ready to join the other vessels in coming months.</p>
<p>No other country in the world can boast of a vessel like these, equipped with sophisticated nuclear weapons, able to get within a few miles of any of our countries. The next aircraft carrier to be commissioned, the USS Gerald Ford, will be a new type of vessel, which employs stealth technologies that cannot be detected by radars and electromagnetic weapons. The main manufacturer of the two types of vessels is Northrop Grumman, whose current president is also a member of the board of directors of the U.S. oil company Chevron-Texaco. The last Nimitz cost six million dollars. This did not include the cost of the planes, projectiles or operations, which can reach figures in the billions. It sounds like a science fiction story. With that money, the lives of millions of children could have been saved.</p>
<p>What is the declared objective of the 4th Fleet? “To combat terrorism and illegal activities such as drug trafficking”, not to mention sending a message to Venezuela and the rest of the region. It has been announced that it will begin operations next July 1.</p>
<p>Head of the South Command U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavrides has stated that the United States needs to work harder in “the market of ideas, to win over the hearts and minds” of the people in the region.</p>
<p>The United States has already deployed the Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh fleets in the Western Atlantic, Eastern Pacific, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Eastern Atlantic and Western Pacific Oceans. The Fourth Fleet was needed to patrol all the seas worldwide. The United States has a total of nine Nimitz aircraft carriers, active or nearly ready for combat, such as the George H.W. Bush. It has sufficient reserves to triple or quadruple the power of any of its fleets in a given theater of operations.</p>
<p>The aircraft carriers and nuclear bombs our countries are threatened with serve to spread terror and death, but not to combat terrorism and illegal activities.</p>
<p>They should also serve to fill the empire’s lackeys with shame and strengthen solidarity among the peoples.</p>
<p><span class="italics">—Granma,</span> May 4, 2008</p>
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May/Jun 2008 • Vol 8, No. 4
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The United States’ Hemispheric Response: A Fourth Intervention Fleet
By Fidel Castro Ruz
It had come into being in 1943 as a means of combating Nazi submarines and protecting navigation routes during the Second World War. It was decommissioned in 1950, when it became superfluous. The South Command was designed to meet the United States’ hegemonic needs in our region at the time. After 48 years, however, it has recently been resurrected, and its interventionist aims need not be proved: U.S. military chiefs themselves divulge these in their declarations in a natural, spontaneous, at times discrete fashion. Overwhelmed by problems with food prices, energy, unequal trade, the economic recession, which affects the most important market their products have; inflation, climate change and the investments required to satisfy their consumer dreams, they mismanage the time and energy of leaders and subordinates alike.
Truth is the decision to reassemble the Fourth Fleet was announced the first week of April, almost a month after the Ecuadorian territory was attacked with U.S. bombs and technology and when, owing to U.S. pressures, citizens of different countries were killed or wounded. This was vigorously condemned by Latin American leaders at the Rio Group meeting held in the Dominican Republic’s capital.
But worst still is that this is taking place at a time when the dismemberment of Bolivia encouraged by the United States meets with nearly unanimous condemnation. U.S. military chiefs themselves have explained they will be responsible for over 30 countries and for covering 15.6 million square miles of neighboring waters in both Central and South America, the Caribbean Sea and its 12 islands, Mexico and the European territories this side of the Atlantic.
The United States has 10 Nimitz aircraft carriers whose parameters, more or less similar, are the following: maximum load capacity of between 101 and 104 thousand tons; 999-feet-long and 230.4-feet-wide deck; 2 nuclear reactors; maximum speed of 35 miles/hour; capacity for 90 war planes. The last to be commissioned bears the name of George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. It has already been baptized with a bottle of champagne by the progenitor himself and should be ready to join the other vessels in coming months.
No other country in the world can boast of a vessel like these, equipped with sophisticated nuclear weapons, able to get within a few miles of any of our countries. The next aircraft carrier to be commissioned, the USS Gerald Ford, will be a new type of vessel, which employs stealth technologies that cannot be detected by radars and electromagnetic weapons. The main manufacturer of the two types of vessels is Northrop Grumman, whose current president is also a member of the board of directors of the U.S. oil company Chevron-Texaco. The last Nimitz cost six million dollars. This did not include the cost of the planes, projectiles or operations, which can reach figures in the billions. It sounds like a science fiction story. With that money, the lives of millions of children could have been saved.
What is the declared objective of the 4th Fleet? “To combat terrorism and illegal activities such as drug trafficking”, not to mention sending a message to Venezuela and the rest of the region. It has been announced that it will begin operations next July 1.
Head of the South Command U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavrides has stated that the United States needs to work harder in “the market of ideas, to win over the hearts and minds” of the people in the region.
The United States has already deployed the Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh fleets in the Western Atlantic, Eastern Pacific, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Eastern Atlantic and Western Pacific Oceans. The Fourth Fleet was needed to patrol all the seas worldwide. The United States has a total of nine Nimitz aircraft carriers, active or nearly ready for combat, such as the George H.W. Bush. It has sufficient reserves to triple or quadruple the power of any of its fleets in a given theater of operations.
The aircraft carriers and nuclear bombs our countries are threatened with serve to spread terror and death, but not to combat terrorism and illegal activities.
They should also serve to fill the empire’s lackeys with shame and strengthen solidarity among the peoples.
—Granma, May 4, 2008
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<p><i>Fidel Castro made this speech in the course of greeting former-President Jimmy Carter upon his arrival in Cuba on May 12, 2002. In a highly provocative manner a week before, Undersecretary of State John Bolton said he believed Cuba had developed a limited capacity to make biological weapons and had shared biotechnology with “rogue” states. Needing no further prompting, the U.S. media made much of this. A month later, on June 5, Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford admitted, “We never suggested that we had proof positive they had a program.”</i></p>
<hr>
<p><font color="black">Dear compatriots:</font></p>
<p>I will use just a few minutes to greet you and to say a few words, this time basically addressed to the American people.</p>
<p>Our struggle is not, and will never be, aimed against the American people. Perhaps, no other country receives Americans with the respect and hospitality displayed by Cuba.</p>
<p>We are men and women of ideas and not a community of bigots. In Cuba we have never cultivated hatred against the American people or blamed them for the aggressions perpetrated by the governments of that country. That would have run contrary to our political doctrines and our internationalist conscience, both well proven throughout many years, and increasingly rooted in our ideas.</p>
<p>If “Humanity is Homeland,” as Marti said, we are citizens of the world and brothers and sisters of all peoples on Earth; their children, their youth, their elders, their men and women are also ours, regardless of everyone’s economic, political, religious and cultural beliefs.</p>
<p>Relations between the Cuban people and the American people, although very much influenced for decades by a barrage of distorted and manipulated propaganda, have been improving every day, particularly after 80 percent of Americans supported the return of the kidnapped child to his family and homeland.</p>
<p>I have always felt, based on my reflection on the most recent history of that country, that the American people can support a bad cause—as it has done on not a few occasions—but only when it has been misled. Albeit in the case of the Vietnam war, the painful daily images of the dead American youths that were brought home highly contributed to build an awareness about how useless, unfair and absurd that war was, the situation with the child was different. However, when the American people learned, through its own media, of the cruel injustice being committed against that little child, it did not hesitate and took sides with justice. That, Cuba will never forget!</p>
<p>It hurts deeply to see the efforts made to mislead that essentially noble people with the diabolical fabrication that the laboratories where our dedicated scientists create, develop and produce new medicines and therapy treatments, that prevent or cure diseases, spare suffering and save countless lives, are developing bio-weapons research and production programs. At times, there is also talk about Cuba’s capacity to produce them.</p>
<p>All throughout history, any scientific or technical development has served for good or evil. In our country, however, no one has ever thought of producing such weapons. Our scientists have been educated for the sacred mission of protecting life and not for destroying it.</p>
<p>Cuba has twice as many doctors per capita as all of the highest developed nations. No country has given, or is giving, more support to other peoples’ health care services, free of charge, than Cuba and no other has saved more lives. Thus, our people do not have, nor could it have, any inclination to become a bio-weapons producer.</p>
<p>Sentiments are more important than knowledge, and above all, truth should be sacred.</p>
<p>Two weeks after the infamous slander, Cuba was arbitrarily included in a list of state sponsors of terrorism. Rather than [being] concerned over the moral or political damage that could derive from such an evil accusation, we are hurt to think that any American could be misled into believing that any damage to himself, his family or his people could come from Cuba.</p>
<p>Neither a single drop of blood has been shed in the United States, nor has an atom of wealth been lost there in the 43 years of the Cuban Revolution, due to a terrorist action originating in Cuba. The opposite is true, since thousands of lives have been lost as well as huge amounts of money due to material damages caused by actions against our homeland originated in the U.S. territory. The American people deserve to be informed about this, instead of being saturated with lies and slanders.</p>
<p></p>
<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" width="64">
<tbody><tr>
<td><img src="Dr.girl.jpg" width="250" height="379" border="0"></td>
</tr>
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<td><b>A Cuban doctor treats a superficial wound.</b></td>
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</tbody></table>
<p>The only truth is that the American people could receive from Cuba vaccines, medications and medical procedures that could surely save numerous lives, or help them recover their well being and health, once the absurd ban on trade is lifted. If this modest cooperation is possible, it is due to the fact that Cuba got rid of illiteracy a long time ago and it has attained a high educational level.</p>
<p>Cuba is increasingly becoming a country with not only great intellectual and artistic talents but also with many educators, scientists and hundreds of thousands of people capable of producing wealth with their learned minds. This is but a proof of what can be done despite the inherited underdevelopment and the longest economic and financial blockade that any people have ever endured!</p>
<p>We also hurt to see the American people suffering in a climate of terror that disrupts its life, limits its creative capacity, interferes with its normal life and impinges on its economy.</p>
<p>I do not wish to use this moment to make any criticism on what could have been done, but was not, to prevent the horrendous crime of September 11; I do not know the facts well enough.</p>
<p>Still, as a leader in a country that has had to defend itself, for more than four decades from thousands of terrorist actions I can assure you that the constant stirring up of panic is not the right way to proceed since it can psychologically affect the people and turn life in that immense country into an unbearable nightmare.</p>
<p>The risks of grave terrorist actions have existed and still exist in the United States as they do anywhere in the world, before or after September 11. Alienated persons overexcited by the prevailing climate of tension could even realize them. The leaders of nations should not be dragged into making mistakes for fear of facing reality. At the present time, many and very diverse realities threaten human society.</p>
<p>Of all the preventive measures that can be adopted against terrorism, some are basic such as: educating the people by keeping them informed of such realities and the dangers they bring; carrying to them a message of serenity and confidence; and, providing them with the necessary knowledge to obtain their maximum and most effective cooperation in this struggle.</p>
<p>The Cubans, who are used to waging battles together as a people, do not conceive of any victory without the people’s participation and support.</p>
<p>It is the primary duty of the overburdened leaders of our complex world—among many other obligations and without forgetting hunger, poverty, underdevelopment, the diseases that decimate entire regions, the climate changes and other calamities—to meditate and reflect on the causes and the sources of the dangerous pandemic of terrorism and to apply really effective methods to fight it.</p>
<p>Under the present difficulties and in the struggle against the scourge of terrorism, the American people can count on this friendly, fraternal and generous people.</p>
<p>Long live the political and economic system that has turned Cuba into an example of justice, full sovereignty, true freedom, dignity and heroism!</p>
<p>Long live the patriotic, united and learned people that no power on Earth will ever break!</p>
<p>We shall overcome!</p>
<p><i>—Information Office, Cuban Interests Section, May 25, 2002</i></p>
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June 2002 • Vol 2, No. 6 •
An Appeal to Americans
By Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro made this speech in the course of greeting former-President Jimmy Carter upon his arrival in Cuba on May 12, 2002. In a highly provocative manner a week before, Undersecretary of State John Bolton said he believed Cuba had developed a limited capacity to make biological weapons and had shared biotechnology with “rogue” states. Needing no further prompting, the U.S. media made much of this. A month later, on June 5, Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford admitted, “We never suggested that we had proof positive they had a program.”
Dear compatriots:
I will use just a few minutes to greet you and to say a few words, this time basically addressed to the American people.
Our struggle is not, and will never be, aimed against the American people. Perhaps, no other country receives Americans with the respect and hospitality displayed by Cuba.
We are men and women of ideas and not a community of bigots. In Cuba we have never cultivated hatred against the American people or blamed them for the aggressions perpetrated by the governments of that country. That would have run contrary to our political doctrines and our internationalist conscience, both well proven throughout many years, and increasingly rooted in our ideas.
If “Humanity is Homeland,” as Marti said, we are citizens of the world and brothers and sisters of all peoples on Earth; their children, their youth, their elders, their men and women are also ours, regardless of everyone’s economic, political, religious and cultural beliefs.
Relations between the Cuban people and the American people, although very much influenced for decades by a barrage of distorted and manipulated propaganda, have been improving every day, particularly after 80 percent of Americans supported the return of the kidnapped child to his family and homeland.
I have always felt, based on my reflection on the most recent history of that country, that the American people can support a bad cause—as it has done on not a few occasions—but only when it has been misled. Albeit in the case of the Vietnam war, the painful daily images of the dead American youths that were brought home highly contributed to build an awareness about how useless, unfair and absurd that war was, the situation with the child was different. However, when the American people learned, through its own media, of the cruel injustice being committed against that little child, it did not hesitate and took sides with justice. That, Cuba will never forget!
It hurts deeply to see the efforts made to mislead that essentially noble people with the diabolical fabrication that the laboratories where our dedicated scientists create, develop and produce new medicines and therapy treatments, that prevent or cure diseases, spare suffering and save countless lives, are developing bio-weapons research and production programs. At times, there is also talk about Cuba’s capacity to produce them.
All throughout history, any scientific or technical development has served for good or evil. In our country, however, no one has ever thought of producing such weapons. Our scientists have been educated for the sacred mission of protecting life and not for destroying it.
Cuba has twice as many doctors per capita as all of the highest developed nations. No country has given, or is giving, more support to other peoples’ health care services, free of charge, than Cuba and no other has saved more lives. Thus, our people do not have, nor could it have, any inclination to become a bio-weapons producer.
Sentiments are more important than knowledge, and above all, truth should be sacred.
Two weeks after the infamous slander, Cuba was arbitrarily included in a list of state sponsors of terrorism. Rather than [being] concerned over the moral or political damage that could derive from such an evil accusation, we are hurt to think that any American could be misled into believing that any damage to himself, his family or his people could come from Cuba.
Neither a single drop of blood has been shed in the United States, nor has an atom of wealth been lost there in the 43 years of the Cuban Revolution, due to a terrorist action originating in Cuba. The opposite is true, since thousands of lives have been lost as well as huge amounts of money due to material damages caused by actions against our homeland originated in the U.S. territory. The American people deserve to be informed about this, instead of being saturated with lies and slanders.
A Cuban doctor treats a superficial wound.
The only truth is that the American people could receive from Cuba vaccines, medications and medical procedures that could surely save numerous lives, or help them recover their well being and health, once the absurd ban on trade is lifted. If this modest cooperation is possible, it is due to the fact that Cuba got rid of illiteracy a long time ago and it has attained a high educational level.
Cuba is increasingly becoming a country with not only great intellectual and artistic talents but also with many educators, scientists and hundreds of thousands of people capable of producing wealth with their learned minds. This is but a proof of what can be done despite the inherited underdevelopment and the longest economic and financial blockade that any people have ever endured!
We also hurt to see the American people suffering in a climate of terror that disrupts its life, limits its creative capacity, interferes with its normal life and impinges on its economy.
I do not wish to use this moment to make any criticism on what could have been done, but was not, to prevent the horrendous crime of September 11; I do not know the facts well enough.
Still, as a leader in a country that has had to defend itself, for more than four decades from thousands of terrorist actions I can assure you that the constant stirring up of panic is not the right way to proceed since it can psychologically affect the people and turn life in that immense country into an unbearable nightmare.
The risks of grave terrorist actions have existed and still exist in the United States as they do anywhere in the world, before or after September 11. Alienated persons overexcited by the prevailing climate of tension could even realize them. The leaders of nations should not be dragged into making mistakes for fear of facing reality. At the present time, many and very diverse realities threaten human society.
Of all the preventive measures that can be adopted against terrorism, some are basic such as: educating the people by keeping them informed of such realities and the dangers they bring; carrying to them a message of serenity and confidence; and, providing them with the necessary knowledge to obtain their maximum and most effective cooperation in this struggle.
The Cubans, who are used to waging battles together as a people, do not conceive of any victory without the people’s participation and support.
It is the primary duty of the overburdened leaders of our complex world—among many other obligations and without forgetting hunger, poverty, underdevelopment, the diseases that decimate entire regions, the climate changes and other calamities—to meditate and reflect on the causes and the sources of the dangerous pandemic of terrorism and to apply really effective methods to fight it.
Under the present difficulties and in the struggle against the scourge of terrorism, the American people can count on this friendly, fraternal and generous people.
Long live the political and economic system that has turned Cuba into an example of justice, full sovereignty, true freedom, dignity and heroism!
Long live the patriotic, united and learned people that no power on Earth will ever break!
We shall overcome!
—Information Office, Cuban Interests Section, May 25, 2002
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="june_02.html">June 2002 • Vol 2, No. 6 •</a></b></font></p>
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<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5">Response to President Carter’s Speech</font></b></p>
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<p>By Fidel Castro</p>
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<p><img src="Castro_Carter.jpg" width="202" height="280" border="0" align="left"><font color="black">Distinguished former president of the United States, James Carter, Mrs. Carter and other members of his delegation;</font></p>
<p>Greetings, also, to the other guests, and to the dear students of the Latin American Medical School:</p>
<p>I was not sure if I should speak or not. Among other things, I did not want to endanger all of you here with a speech that might go on a bit longer than it should. But there was a complete hush and so I felt obliged, really I did, to come up to this podium for a few minutes.</p>
<p>I saw a program that read, “Finally, the keynote speech is introduced.” That is what they usually say in these public ceremonies, the open forums and so on. But I would say that in any case, if I were to say something, it would be the closing remarks, since the keynote speech was given by President Carter. Just to explain this thing about a former president and president, it is a matter of courtesy. In the United States, in friendly and informal settings, anyone who has been a president, even if he no longer is, continues to be called president, and that is the friendly manner in which we are speaking to him today.</p>
<p>I was thinking to myself, what is it really that we are doing here? Is this a medical school, or is it something else? One thinks in terms of numbers, percentages and so on. I was also calculating, for example, how many doctors we had at the time of the triumph of the Revolution, and it turns out that the number of students at this school today is greater than the number of doctors in Cuba at that time. And two or three year’s later only half of those doctors stayed in our country. Only 40 percent of our professors of medicine stayed too.</p>
<p>The results that I could present here today, and I do not say show because we do not show anything off, we present things that have been achieved with a tremendous effort, a 43 years effort. </p>
<p>With the doctors who stayed in our country, we were able to create what we have today, and what we have today is a little over 22 doctors for every doctor they left us. And the number of students enrolled in medical studies in our universities today is two and a half times the number of doctors who stayed in our country.</p>
<p>Yes, we faced a situation that posed a tremendous challenge. We either remained without doctors, or we would make the effort required to have all the doctors we needed.</p>
<p>Among our greatest hopes, when we thought about the future, when we dreamed of the future, was the hope that our country would have a good medical system.</p>
<p>I will never forget that when I was a grammar school student in grade five or six, and I went home to the farming estate where I lived, I would sometimes find that a third of the children had died. Nobody heard anything about it; it was not published in the newspapers. And what did they die of? Acidosis. And to this you would have to add, of course, all those who regularly died of tetanus, or any of the many other diseases that regularly afflicted the people in the countryside here.</p>
<p>We also dreamed of schools, because we observed the world around us, and realized that almost all of the young people and adults were illiterate. I remember that some of the few who could read and write made a living by writing letters for others who wanted to write to a girlfriend or a girl they wanted to court. But they did not dictate these letters, they had to ask from the letter writers to produce the content of the letter as well. They would ask them to say in the letter what they thought they would have to say to win over the girl, because in those days, it was the boys who courted the girls, there was not as much equality as today.</p>
<p>Those were two pillars we fought for, but they were not the two fundamental pillars. The fundamental pillar was something else: justice, equality of opportunities, true brotherhood among human beings. And what is a society without justice? What is a society of illiterates? What is a society where a small few have everything, and the rest have nothing? What freedom can be born of inequality and ignorance? What democracy? What human rights?</p>
<p>There are very profound things that our people hold dear. We are firmly convinced that there are many words and many concepts that must be redefined, if we truly want to advance towards a worthy future. The past cannot be the future, and to conceive of a future society genuinely requires rethinking many concepts that are prehistoric.</p>
<p>We all know, or many of us know, that the word democracy first originated in Greece. When we were young we were told, “There was a model of democracy, the citizens ran the government gathered in a public square,” which must have been quite small. In those days, Athens, for example, had about 20,000 free citizens—there must have been a bit fewer, because if they met in a square, and there were not even microphones back then, they all had to fit in what was actually a small park. Without these microphones, I could not be heard at the back of this group of people gathered here. And in addition to the 15,000 or 20,000 free citizens there were 50,000 or 60,000 people who had no rights whatsoever and around 80,000 human beings who were slaves.</p>
<p>When we look around the world today and we see that there are billions of human beings who live in conditions of inconceivable poverty, billions and billions of human beings who live in that Third World, we might ask ourselves what kind of world we are living in. When we see that there are countries where 90 percent of the people are illiterate and have no schools, and that their numbers grow larger every day; when we hear reports of the number of children who could be saved yet who die before the age of one, and we compare the countries where these deaths account for 5, 6, 7 or 8 children out of every 1000 born alive, while that figure is over 150 in other countries, we ask ourselves what kind of world we are living in.</p>
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<td><b><font size="-1">March 21, 2002<br>
Fidel Castro representing Cuba at the International Conference on Financing for Development held at Monterrey, Mexico, under United Nations auspices. The U.S. threatened to boycott the meeting unless Castro left Mexico before President Bush arrived!</font></b></td>
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<p>We often ask ourselves, in what century, in what millennium shall we be able to say that all human beings born into this world are truly born into it with an equality of opportunities in life?</p>
<p>We have made tremendous efforts to ensure that at least on this island, there can be an equality of opportunities for all human beings, and we still have not completely achieved this goal. You can imagine how difficult it is, and how much more difficult still when you are starting out from a situation of poverty, which is how our own country had to start out, and how over 140 countries are starting out today, to a greater or lesser extent. And if there is any satisfaction, as a reward for the efforts of so many compatriots who struggled, and many who fell in the battle or devoted all of their lives’ energies to an ideal of justice, to a noble dream, it is the fact that our country is moving ever closer to a society where all human beings have an equality of opportunities, but not just in theory, because only in theory can we speak about equality in the world today.</p>
<p>Only in theory, when you know, for example, that a country like Mozambique has a per capita gross domestic product of 80 dollars a year, while others have an annual GDP of 45,000 dollars. And I am not referring only to the difference between nations, but rather to the differences between individuals within the same nation, and our Latin American countries are Olympic champions in this regard.</p>
<p>We Latin Americans come from the region with the widest gap between the rich and the poor. We know that in many of them, the richest 10 percent of the population possesses 50 percent of the wealth and goods produced in these nations, while the poorest 10 percent have access to only 4 percent or 5 percent, or sometimes even less, of the gross domestic product.</p>
<p>When you walk through the streets you see them full of children cleaning windshields, shining shoes or working for a pittance in order to help support their families. You see children who do not go to school, because there are no schools, or children who do not even make it past fifth grade, because if I remember correctly, only 52 percent reach fifth grade, much less sixth grade or ninth grade. And we could ask ourselves why, and what degree of justice there is, what the future holds for some and what it holds for others.</p>
<p>And that is why, while many recognize the tremendous advances that our country has made in health care, education and sports, as if these were the only objectives, or the final objectives of our struggles or our lives, we would have to add: We are striving for something much more noble, we are striving for justice for all.</p>
<p>How can there be justice when people do not know how to read and write? How can there be freedom without justice or equality? How can there be a democracy like the democracy in Athens we mentioned earlier? How can we speak of human rights, and what kind of world are we living in, when the very country that in this era and in the face of unimaginable difficulties is moving closer, and at an ever faster rate, to this level, this dream of justice, true freedom, true democracy and true human rights, is condemned in Geneva as a violator of those rights?</p>
<p>I should not address such a thorny subject at a gathering like this, where I was not planning on speaking, but now that I have been obliged to speak .… When someone speaks, it should be to say something. I will add that today this is perhaps the most united country in the world, and the one with the deepest political conscience. Today this is perhaps the country that is most excited and full of hope for the future.</p>
<p>You all know that just a few days ago a million residents of Havana gathered together in Revolution Square. Yes, just a few days after that condemnation, they gathered infuriated by that colossal offense. And the most incredible thing of all is that those who condemned us can show no other image but that of hell, because those countries—and I am referring specifically to the countries of Latin America—are the complete antithesis of the rights we were talking about. Therefore, there is no reason to be upset. There will be a judge whose verdict cannot be appealed, and that judge will be history.</p>
<p>That is why I was saying that as I looked at all of you here, I asked myself, is this only a medical school? And what good would it do if you all went back to your countries to become part of institutions where, sadly, financial concerns, commercialism and selfishness prevail? What good would it do if no one were willing to go to work in the mountains, the plains, the remote corners of the countryside or marginal neighborhoods of the cities to practice the noble profession of medicine? More than a medical school, our most fervent hope is that this will be a school of solidarity, brotherhood and justice.</p>
<p>I am firmly convinced that it will be so, that it is not in vain that all of the ethnic groups and all of the most humble sectors of your countries are represented in the students of this school and the others, a total of 66 ethnic groups, as we have been told.</p>
<p>What a beautiful sight! Students from all of Latin America and the United States gathered here together, studying side by side. What great pleasure and satisfaction it gave us to listen to the young girl who spoke here, and the other young girl who sang. Just think of the hopes for friendship and brotherhood that could be realized if we all join together under the ideals of justice and equality expressed here by President Carter. The examples he cited were impressive, as when he said that one pill, just one pill, or maybe two, could contribute to eradicating terrible diseases. A noble effort, aimed at alleviating some of the tragedies afflicting human beings in this world, could succeed through the use of the simplest procedures.</p>
<p>And the question that came to my mind was, how much did all of this cost? And it is obvious that the resources invested are minimal. I was thinking of the billions of people on the planet with these same problems, or in danger of being afflicted by them. He did not mention malaria, for example, the tens of millions of people who contract malaria and the millions of people who die of malaria, or typhoid. It was not possible since he was referring specifically to efforts made in the field of medicine, although he mentioned other areas in which the Carter Foundation is working.</p>
<p>Dread was not mentioned; the evening was too lovely to speak of the dread and the dread is called AIDS. When we hear Africa mentioned, it is impossible not to think of the 26 or 28 million people infected with the AIDS virus, the 13 or 14 million children orphaned, the millions of children born HIV positive, which their mothers passed on to them. It is one of the worst tragedies in the history of humankind, and it threatens to exterminate entire nations, and even entire regions.</p>
<p>To any of these figures we would have to add the millions of illiterates, their growing number in the world; the millions of unemployed; the 60 percent or 70 percent of Latin Americans who work in the informal sector, with no security, no social protection whatsoever and no rights, because they have wiped out not only the workers movement and trade unions, but also the most basic rights of workers. How many calamities could be added up!</p>
<p>President Carter told us about the noble efforts of his wife in the study, research and coping with the problems of mental retardation, and that is a major issue. We know, because we are collecting precise data on all of the people who suffer from some sort of disability due to mental retardation. In the capital alone there are over 13,000 cases and each and every one must be studied. We are studying them, as well as training geneticists and equipping laboratories at an accelerated pace, especially since we have learned—and we are not only studying cases of mental retardation, but cases of disabilities due to any other cause—that there are a total of 48,000 people in the capital with some kind of disability.</p>
<p>Based on the information that over 80 different diseases are genetic in origin, we are undertaking a genetic study of all of the cases of mental retardation and of a number of other genetic disorders that children are not born with, but which can afflict them later, resulting from hypothyroidism or polio, another disease that has fortunately been eradicated for some time now, in this and other countries. But there are many cases of disability resulting from either genetic or environmental or accidental causes.</p>
<p>When you begin to look into these things and learn the figures involved, you get a better idea of the many tragedies suffered by human society, and often these people suffer alone, because many are not even aware that this is happening. This is yet another source of satisfaction from this visit today, when we see the efforts they are making to prevent these disorders, in the first place, and to do as much as possible to help those who suffer from them.</p>
<p>I do not want to say too much more on this matter, however, because it is something we could talk about until dawn.</p>
<p></p>
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<td><img src="Jimmy_Carter.jpg" width="400" height="273" border="0"></td>
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<td><font size="-1"><b>Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, visiting a special facility for handicapped people during his visit to Cuba in the mid-May, 2002.</b></font></td>
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</tbody></table>
<p>What I still need to address are the reasons for which we have welcomed, with respect, warm hospitality and great pleasure, former president Jimmy Carter, his wife, and the delegation accompanying him.</p>
<p>It is not a large delegation. The largest delegation visiting the country with him is the delegation of reporters and journalists, something entirely logical, of course.</p>
<p>Yesterday at the airport we spoke of his efforts to improve relations between the United States and Cuba, in the midst of seemingly insurmountable difficulties. Due to those difficulties, which I will not enumerate here, it was not possible to advance any further at that time. But we felt that acknowledging this fact was a matter of basic historical justice, in addition to acknowledging his courage in visiting our country.</p>
<p>He was courageous to try to improve relations; let no one think that this was an easy thing to do. He has been brave to visit Cuba despite the fact that there would always be those who opposed such a visit, and that he was exposing himself to criticism and slander.</p>
<p>We did not choose a program for his visit, he did it himself. He was primarily interested in the field of education; this was practically his number one interest. He was especially interested in this Latin American School of Medical Sciences, which is perfectly in keeping with what he told us about the efforts they are making in so many countries to promote health, to the extent that their resources allow. They must have acquired a great deal of experience on these matters.</p>
<p>I must say here, and not out of any pretense to personal flattery, that one thing that is clearly obvious is former president Carter’s remarkable intelligence. This is joined, to an even greater degree, by his personal and family ethics. This was truly one of the first things we perceived back during his first speeches as a candidate for president. These are two factors that have been closely linked to his entire history and his personality. And this explains his interest in visiting this school, and also the school for social workers, and other institutions devoted to special education, as well as gathering information on the efforts that our country has been making in the field of health, education, culture and medical research.</p>
<p>While he described the things he has done, I was thinking he has done them with very few resources, because he is an austere man. At the airport, I was expecting him to arrive on one of those big Boeings, and suddenly I saw a little twin-engine plane approach the runway, turn, land and draw up to us. That was why I said to him, and I think it was picked up by the microphones, I did not know there were so many microphones there, “I thought you were going to arrive in one of those big new Boeings.” He came on a modest plane with a small number of people.</p>
<p>As he explained all those programs that I was so glad to hear about and which you have been able to hear about as well as our people, I was thinking to myself that if it is possible to do so much good in the world with just a few dollars, or even a few cents, just think of how much more could be done with the hundreds of billions, or with the trillions of dollars spent around the world to produce weapons, or to produce and consume narcotics, or to produce luxury goods, perhaps one of the most terrible legacies they have passed down to humankind, and I hope they will not last forever, these so-called consumer societies.</p>
<p>A world like he dreams of when fighting diseases, a world like we dream of, a world like all of you dream of, is possible! Yes, it is entirely possible, when people have the knowledge, the education and the conscience needed to live and act with a true spirit of brotherhood, with a true spirit of justice. And I would not consider it to have been in vain, nor would I suffer from the enormous embarrassment I feel at this moment for having talked for a bit longer than I had promised myself, imposing on the patience of our visitors, if these words I have spoken with all my heart, with the greatest sincerity, and even, we could say, with passion, are remembered by you from time to time. Thank you very much.</p>
<p>—Information Office, Cuban Interests Section, May 13, 2002</p>
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June 2002 • Vol 2, No. 6 •
Response to President Carter’s Speech
By Fidel Castro
Distinguished former president of the United States, James Carter, Mrs. Carter and other members of his delegation;
Greetings, also, to the other guests, and to the dear students of the Latin American Medical School:
I was not sure if I should speak or not. Among other things, I did not want to endanger all of you here with a speech that might go on a bit longer than it should. But there was a complete hush and so I felt obliged, really I did, to come up to this podium for a few minutes.
I saw a program that read, “Finally, the keynote speech is introduced.” That is what they usually say in these public ceremonies, the open forums and so on. But I would say that in any case, if I were to say something, it would be the closing remarks, since the keynote speech was given by President Carter. Just to explain this thing about a former president and president, it is a matter of courtesy. In the United States, in friendly and informal settings, anyone who has been a president, even if he no longer is, continues to be called president, and that is the friendly manner in which we are speaking to him today.
I was thinking to myself, what is it really that we are doing here? Is this a medical school, or is it something else? One thinks in terms of numbers, percentages and so on. I was also calculating, for example, how many doctors we had at the time of the triumph of the Revolution, and it turns out that the number of students at this school today is greater than the number of doctors in Cuba at that time. And two or three year’s later only half of those doctors stayed in our country. Only 40 percent of our professors of medicine stayed too.
The results that I could present here today, and I do not say show because we do not show anything off, we present things that have been achieved with a tremendous effort, a 43 years effort.
With the doctors who stayed in our country, we were able to create what we have today, and what we have today is a little over 22 doctors for every doctor they left us. And the number of students enrolled in medical studies in our universities today is two and a half times the number of doctors who stayed in our country.
Yes, we faced a situation that posed a tremendous challenge. We either remained without doctors, or we would make the effort required to have all the doctors we needed.
Among our greatest hopes, when we thought about the future, when we dreamed of the future, was the hope that our country would have a good medical system.
I will never forget that when I was a grammar school student in grade five or six, and I went home to the farming estate where I lived, I would sometimes find that a third of the children had died. Nobody heard anything about it; it was not published in the newspapers. And what did they die of? Acidosis. And to this you would have to add, of course, all those who regularly died of tetanus, or any of the many other diseases that regularly afflicted the people in the countryside here.
We also dreamed of schools, because we observed the world around us, and realized that almost all of the young people and adults were illiterate. I remember that some of the few who could read and write made a living by writing letters for others who wanted to write to a girlfriend or a girl they wanted to court. But they did not dictate these letters, they had to ask from the letter writers to produce the content of the letter as well. They would ask them to say in the letter what they thought they would have to say to win over the girl, because in those days, it was the boys who courted the girls, there was not as much equality as today.
Those were two pillars we fought for, but they were not the two fundamental pillars. The fundamental pillar was something else: justice, equality of opportunities, true brotherhood among human beings. And what is a society without justice? What is a society of illiterates? What is a society where a small few have everything, and the rest have nothing? What freedom can be born of inequality and ignorance? What democracy? What human rights?
There are very profound things that our people hold dear. We are firmly convinced that there are many words and many concepts that must be redefined, if we truly want to advance towards a worthy future. The past cannot be the future, and to conceive of a future society genuinely requires rethinking many concepts that are prehistoric.
We all know, or many of us know, that the word democracy first originated in Greece. When we were young we were told, “There was a model of democracy, the citizens ran the government gathered in a public square,” which must have been quite small. In those days, Athens, for example, had about 20,000 free citizens—there must have been a bit fewer, because if they met in a square, and there were not even microphones back then, they all had to fit in what was actually a small park. Without these microphones, I could not be heard at the back of this group of people gathered here. And in addition to the 15,000 or 20,000 free citizens there were 50,000 or 60,000 people who had no rights whatsoever and around 80,000 human beings who were slaves.
When we look around the world today and we see that there are billions of human beings who live in conditions of inconceivable poverty, billions and billions of human beings who live in that Third World, we might ask ourselves what kind of world we are living in. When we see that there are countries where 90 percent of the people are illiterate and have no schools, and that their numbers grow larger every day; when we hear reports of the number of children who could be saved yet who die before the age of one, and we compare the countries where these deaths account for 5, 6, 7 or 8 children out of every 1000 born alive, while that figure is over 150 in other countries, we ask ourselves what kind of world we are living in.
March 21, 2002
Fidel Castro representing Cuba at the International Conference on Financing for Development held at Monterrey, Mexico, under United Nations auspices. The U.S. threatened to boycott the meeting unless Castro left Mexico before President Bush arrived!
We often ask ourselves, in what century, in what millennium shall we be able to say that all human beings born into this world are truly born into it with an equality of opportunities in life?
We have made tremendous efforts to ensure that at least on this island, there can be an equality of opportunities for all human beings, and we still have not completely achieved this goal. You can imagine how difficult it is, and how much more difficult still when you are starting out from a situation of poverty, which is how our own country had to start out, and how over 140 countries are starting out today, to a greater or lesser extent. And if there is any satisfaction, as a reward for the efforts of so many compatriots who struggled, and many who fell in the battle or devoted all of their lives’ energies to an ideal of justice, to a noble dream, it is the fact that our country is moving ever closer to a society where all human beings have an equality of opportunities, but not just in theory, because only in theory can we speak about equality in the world today.
Only in theory, when you know, for example, that a country like Mozambique has a per capita gross domestic product of 80 dollars a year, while others have an annual GDP of 45,000 dollars. And I am not referring only to the difference between nations, but rather to the differences between individuals within the same nation, and our Latin American countries are Olympic champions in this regard.
We Latin Americans come from the region with the widest gap between the rich and the poor. We know that in many of them, the richest 10 percent of the population possesses 50 percent of the wealth and goods produced in these nations, while the poorest 10 percent have access to only 4 percent or 5 percent, or sometimes even less, of the gross domestic product.
When you walk through the streets you see them full of children cleaning windshields, shining shoes or working for a pittance in order to help support their families. You see children who do not go to school, because there are no schools, or children who do not even make it past fifth grade, because if I remember correctly, only 52 percent reach fifth grade, much less sixth grade or ninth grade. And we could ask ourselves why, and what degree of justice there is, what the future holds for some and what it holds for others.
And that is why, while many recognize the tremendous advances that our country has made in health care, education and sports, as if these were the only objectives, or the final objectives of our struggles or our lives, we would have to add: We are striving for something much more noble, we are striving for justice for all.
How can there be justice when people do not know how to read and write? How can there be freedom without justice or equality? How can there be a democracy like the democracy in Athens we mentioned earlier? How can we speak of human rights, and what kind of world are we living in, when the very country that in this era and in the face of unimaginable difficulties is moving closer, and at an ever faster rate, to this level, this dream of justice, true freedom, true democracy and true human rights, is condemned in Geneva as a violator of those rights?
I should not address such a thorny subject at a gathering like this, where I was not planning on speaking, but now that I have been obliged to speak .… When someone speaks, it should be to say something. I will add that today this is perhaps the most united country in the world, and the one with the deepest political conscience. Today this is perhaps the country that is most excited and full of hope for the future.
You all know that just a few days ago a million residents of Havana gathered together in Revolution Square. Yes, just a few days after that condemnation, they gathered infuriated by that colossal offense. And the most incredible thing of all is that those who condemned us can show no other image but that of hell, because those countries—and I am referring specifically to the countries of Latin America—are the complete antithesis of the rights we were talking about. Therefore, there is no reason to be upset. There will be a judge whose verdict cannot be appealed, and that judge will be history.
That is why I was saying that as I looked at all of you here, I asked myself, is this only a medical school? And what good would it do if you all went back to your countries to become part of institutions where, sadly, financial concerns, commercialism and selfishness prevail? What good would it do if no one were willing to go to work in the mountains, the plains, the remote corners of the countryside or marginal neighborhoods of the cities to practice the noble profession of medicine? More than a medical school, our most fervent hope is that this will be a school of solidarity, brotherhood and justice.
I am firmly convinced that it will be so, that it is not in vain that all of the ethnic groups and all of the most humble sectors of your countries are represented in the students of this school and the others, a total of 66 ethnic groups, as we have been told.
What a beautiful sight! Students from all of Latin America and the United States gathered here together, studying side by side. What great pleasure and satisfaction it gave us to listen to the young girl who spoke here, and the other young girl who sang. Just think of the hopes for friendship and brotherhood that could be realized if we all join together under the ideals of justice and equality expressed here by President Carter. The examples he cited were impressive, as when he said that one pill, just one pill, or maybe two, could contribute to eradicating terrible diseases. A noble effort, aimed at alleviating some of the tragedies afflicting human beings in this world, could succeed through the use of the simplest procedures.
And the question that came to my mind was, how much did all of this cost? And it is obvious that the resources invested are minimal. I was thinking of the billions of people on the planet with these same problems, or in danger of being afflicted by them. He did not mention malaria, for example, the tens of millions of people who contract malaria and the millions of people who die of malaria, or typhoid. It was not possible since he was referring specifically to efforts made in the field of medicine, although he mentioned other areas in which the Carter Foundation is working.
Dread was not mentioned; the evening was too lovely to speak of the dread and the dread is called AIDS. When we hear Africa mentioned, it is impossible not to think of the 26 or 28 million people infected with the AIDS virus, the 13 or 14 million children orphaned, the millions of children born HIV positive, which their mothers passed on to them. It is one of the worst tragedies in the history of humankind, and it threatens to exterminate entire nations, and even entire regions.
To any of these figures we would have to add the millions of illiterates, their growing number in the world; the millions of unemployed; the 60 percent or 70 percent of Latin Americans who work in the informal sector, with no security, no social protection whatsoever and no rights, because they have wiped out not only the workers movement and trade unions, but also the most basic rights of workers. How many calamities could be added up!
President Carter told us about the noble efforts of his wife in the study, research and coping with the problems of mental retardation, and that is a major issue. We know, because we are collecting precise data on all of the people who suffer from some sort of disability due to mental retardation. In the capital alone there are over 13,000 cases and each and every one must be studied. We are studying them, as well as training geneticists and equipping laboratories at an accelerated pace, especially since we have learned—and we are not only studying cases of mental retardation, but cases of disabilities due to any other cause—that there are a total of 48,000 people in the capital with some kind of disability.
Based on the information that over 80 different diseases are genetic in origin, we are undertaking a genetic study of all of the cases of mental retardation and of a number of other genetic disorders that children are not born with, but which can afflict them later, resulting from hypothyroidism or polio, another disease that has fortunately been eradicated for some time now, in this and other countries. But there are many cases of disability resulting from either genetic or environmental or accidental causes.
When you begin to look into these things and learn the figures involved, you get a better idea of the many tragedies suffered by human society, and often these people suffer alone, because many are not even aware that this is happening. This is yet another source of satisfaction from this visit today, when we see the efforts they are making to prevent these disorders, in the first place, and to do as much as possible to help those who suffer from them.
I do not want to say too much more on this matter, however, because it is something we could talk about until dawn.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, visiting a special facility for handicapped people during his visit to Cuba in the mid-May, 2002.
What I still need to address are the reasons for which we have welcomed, with respect, warm hospitality and great pleasure, former president Jimmy Carter, his wife, and the delegation accompanying him.
It is not a large delegation. The largest delegation visiting the country with him is the delegation of reporters and journalists, something entirely logical, of course.
Yesterday at the airport we spoke of his efforts to improve relations between the United States and Cuba, in the midst of seemingly insurmountable difficulties. Due to those difficulties, which I will not enumerate here, it was not possible to advance any further at that time. But we felt that acknowledging this fact was a matter of basic historical justice, in addition to acknowledging his courage in visiting our country.
He was courageous to try to improve relations; let no one think that this was an easy thing to do. He has been brave to visit Cuba despite the fact that there would always be those who opposed such a visit, and that he was exposing himself to criticism and slander.
We did not choose a program for his visit, he did it himself. He was primarily interested in the field of education; this was practically his number one interest. He was especially interested in this Latin American School of Medical Sciences, which is perfectly in keeping with what he told us about the efforts they are making in so many countries to promote health, to the extent that their resources allow. They must have acquired a great deal of experience on these matters.
I must say here, and not out of any pretense to personal flattery, that one thing that is clearly obvious is former president Carter’s remarkable intelligence. This is joined, to an even greater degree, by his personal and family ethics. This was truly one of the first things we perceived back during his first speeches as a candidate for president. These are two factors that have been closely linked to his entire history and his personality. And this explains his interest in visiting this school, and also the school for social workers, and other institutions devoted to special education, as well as gathering information on the efforts that our country has been making in the field of health, education, culture and medical research.
While he described the things he has done, I was thinking he has done them with very few resources, because he is an austere man. At the airport, I was expecting him to arrive on one of those big Boeings, and suddenly I saw a little twin-engine plane approach the runway, turn, land and draw up to us. That was why I said to him, and I think it was picked up by the microphones, I did not know there were so many microphones there, “I thought you were going to arrive in one of those big new Boeings.” He came on a modest plane with a small number of people.
As he explained all those programs that I was so glad to hear about and which you have been able to hear about as well as our people, I was thinking to myself that if it is possible to do so much good in the world with just a few dollars, or even a few cents, just think of how much more could be done with the hundreds of billions, or with the trillions of dollars spent around the world to produce weapons, or to produce and consume narcotics, or to produce luxury goods, perhaps one of the most terrible legacies they have passed down to humankind, and I hope they will not last forever, these so-called consumer societies.
A world like he dreams of when fighting diseases, a world like we dream of, a world like all of you dream of, is possible! Yes, it is entirely possible, when people have the knowledge, the education and the conscience needed to live and act with a true spirit of brotherhood, with a true spirit of justice. And I would not consider it to have been in vain, nor would I suffer from the enormous embarrassment I feel at this moment for having talked for a bit longer than I had promised myself, imposing on the patience of our visitors, if these words I have spoken with all my heart, with the greatest sincerity, and even, we could say, with passion, are remembered by you from time to time. Thank you very much.
—Information Office, Cuban Interests Section, May 13, 2002
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1963.01.16 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h1>
At the Closing of the Congress of<br> Women of the Americans
</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> January 16, 1963 (0451 GMT)
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html">Castro Speech Database</a>
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="pagenote">
Castro arrived "a little late", after attending and speaking for good length at anoter meeting of the Congress...
</p>
<p>
Women of America, fraternal delegates — be patient — fraternal
delegates — can you hear? — of the countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa who
are visiting us. In the first place, I want to make clear — as I have
already told some of the lady comrades of the congress — that if this
function began a little late, it was not my fault. (Laughter) Because this
year is the year of organization (laughter), I was in the theater at 2057
(laughter), and we intend during this year of organization to be punctual.
What happened was that the comrades, the comrades of the congress talked a
lot. I think they were speaking till eight or nine more or less, until
eight and then some (laughter), and that is why this function began a
little late. I only want to make it clear that it was not my fault.
(Laughter)
</p>
<p>
It has been a very great honor for us, for our country, that Cuba is the
site of this congress. We understand that it has been a very positive
event, a serious event. We have tried to keep ourselves informed, to read
the material of the various reports presented to the congress, and our
impression is really that all of them have great value because of their
seriousness, the correct focusing of the problems, the enormous amount of
data they contribute about the realities of our continent.
</p>
<p>
Naturally, the topics of the congress were restricted to those sections
that relate to the interests of women, but what, really, does not interest
woman in modern society? What does not interest the Latin American woman,
the American woman regarding our social problems? When discussions are held
about the rights of women, of their aspirations, we see that there cannot
be rights of women in our America or rights of children, mothers, or wives
if there is no revolution. (Applause) The fact is that in the world in
which the American woman lives, the woman must necessarily be
revolutionary. (Applause) Why must she be revolutionary? Because woman, who
constitutes an essential part of every people, is, in the first place,
exploited as a worker and discriminated against as a woman.
</p>
<p>
And who are the revolutionaries in the society of man? Who were they
throughout history? In simple terms, the exploited and the discriminated.
Because woman is not only exploited as a worker when she works for an
exploiting monopoly, for a society of exploiting classes, but even as a
worker she is the most exploited worker, with the lowest salaries, the
worst conditions, with a series of contradictions among her social
functions — her condition as a woman and the exploitation to which she is
subjected.
</p>
<p>
Thus, logically, women are revolutionary, and on a continent like this,
they must be revolutionary. That is why in our country women are
revolutionary. (Applause) In our country many women were exploited. They
were exploited as workers who worked to enrich a class, and were also
discriminated against as workers. Many women did not even have access to
work, to the opportunity to work.
</p>
<p>
In Comrade Vilma's report, there appears a report on the activities of the
Cuban woman within the revolution and the benefits the Cuban woman has
received through the revolution. The report was long, but even so it is
possible that the report has some omissions, because the revolution has
done even more for woman. It does not believe it has done it all, not in
the least, but it intends to continue to work for the woman. And, in our
country, the woman, like the Negro, is no longer discriminated against.
</p>
<p>
In reality, the revolution has meant much to the Cuban woman. Within the
revolution, the revolutionary leadership makes efforts to make available
more and more opportunities to the woman. As an example we can cite the
fact that when the medium and large shoe, clothing, and hardware sales
instructed to select women as administrators of those firms. (Applause)
Some 4,000 administrators — (Castro now corrects himself — Ed.) that is,
administrators for some 4,000 centers — 90 percent or more are presently
administered by women.
</p>
<p>
There is another statistic, for example, that did not appear in the report
of the comrade president of the federation — and it is very
illustrative — about the increase of the participation of the woman in
activities that were practically closed to her: It is the fact that, for
example, in some professions, such as the medical profession, the number of
women who entered that university school was, possibly, less than 10
percent. At this time, in the institute of basic medical sciences, that is
to say the first year of medical schools, about 50 percent are women.
(Applause)
</p>
<p>
Those facts of evidence of how, in four years of revolution, the woman has
been incorporated into social life, the life of her country, the life of
the circle in which she lives and develops. For example, women also paraded
along with our soldiers on 2 January in contingents of women's military
battalions. In our army thee are a series of functions in which women work
and perform services. The bourgeois concept of womanhood is disappearing in
our country. The concepts of stigma, concepts of discrimination, have
really been disappearing in our country, and the masses of women have
realized this.
</p>
<p>
Prejudice is being replaced by a new concept in which the qualities of the
woman are valued for a series of social activities, in some of which they
demonstrate exceptional virtues. A broad field of action has been opened to
them. If you compare the report of the Cuban delegation with the reports of
the delegations of Latin America, you will be able to see the great
differences. The problems here now are, for example, how to free the woman
from domestic slavery, how to create conditions that would permit her to
participate as much as possible in production, from which the woman and the
revolution both profit.
</p>
<p>
Within a society like the capitalist society — one of unemployment, millions
of men without work — it is logical that women are many times relegated to
restricted economic activities. Within a society like ours, in which,
because of the complete development of all the resources of the nation and
our planned economy, more and more labor is needed for production, it is
logical that the revolution concern itself with creating those conditions.
And so today the revolution is concerned with the establishment of the
largest possible number of children's centers, student dining halls, and
with the creation of those circumstances that will enable the women not to
be a slave of the kitchen; and with the establishment of laundries.
</p>
<p>
It is clear that the increase of certain of those institutions, such as
children's centers, is restricted by the resources we may have under
certain circumstances. This year emphasis is being placed on the
establishment of workers' dining halls in the principal factories of the
country, and next year the accent will be placed on the establishment of
students' dining halls. The development of those institutions will enable
the woman to participate more in work, production, and the life of her
country — not only economic activities, but political and social activities
as well. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Today those are our concerns, because the women in our country are able to
be concerned with these solutions. The Cuban delegation has also spoken of
the gigantic effort made by the revolution on the education front. There is
hardly any need to speak; it is sufficient to see it. This movement can be
seen. It is a movement that is forging a great future for this country; it
is a movement that demonstrates the objectives of the revolution projected,
above all, toward the future. It has permitted the duplication of the
number of children in the schools, the duplication of the number of
students in secondary and superior schools, the eradication of illiteracy,
and it can enable this country to march forward in forging a magnificent
youth destined to inherit the conditions the revolution is creating for
that youth.
</p>
<p>
Our problem now is not how to win the right to do that, but how to do it as
perfectly as possible. There is a difference between the situation of the
women of America represented in this congress and the representation of the
Cuban women: Cuban women have the opportunity to do all that, and the
American women need that opportunity. Our problems are different in the
sense that it now is how we will do it and how best we can do it. For us it
is no longer a matter of the chance to have, let us say, nearly 100,000
youths studying under state scholarships, but rather how to organize them,
now to see to it that the schools where they study are more efficient, how
to train cadres of teachers, and how to do that task well.
</p>
<p>
That does not mean that we do not have much work. On the contrary, there is
more and more work all the time in the revolution. But the revolution is
creating resources and more resources along the march. An example of how
those resources are created is that fact that it recently was necessary to
receive in our capital nearly 10,000 young peasant girls from Oriente
Province. (Applause) Whom to give that task to? The federation of women had
been in charge of that work, but the federation of women had the work of
attending to all the boarding houses of the scholarship students. It did
not have enough cadres, but there was a teachers' school that was organized
by a group of brigadist girls who participated in 1961 in the great
literacy campaign, a school of 1,100 young girls who were studying to be
teachers. It is a good school.
</p>
<p>
The comrade who is in charge of that school, and who is a great pedagogue
because she knows how to each, Comrade Elena Gil, had begun with a group of
300 revolutionary instructors — that is, 300 female teachers formed from
groups of youths who volunteered to teach in the mountains. She began by
training 300 revolutionary instructors for the night schools for girls who
work in domestic service. This was the first school. First there were 300.
With those 300 girls, the night schools were organized.
</p>
<p>
Then there were another 300, and their number reached 600. With the help of
these girls, the Macarense pedagogic institute was organized. that trained
1,100 of whom 300 were selected for special courses, with those 300 the
rest of the girls, the schools for the 10,000 peasant girls who arrived
were organized. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
We already had cadres — girls from the literacy campaign, girls who had
already studied one year, girls who already have discipline, a sense of
responsibility. It is really impressive to cross one of these avenues where
millionaries once lived and find groups of girls in uniforms, peasant girls
going from one place to another-possibly to eat or to class. With them, in
her scholarship student uniform, a girl who was in some cases younger than
the peasant girls themselves, but they were (as heard) the leaders. They
were in charge of the group: they were in charge of the house in which they
live and were, in addition, their teachers. They work and study.
</p>
<p>
Consider how those girls are being trained, already receiving that
responsibility, already getting serious tasks, fulfilling them. They have a
system, and they combine study with work. This indicates that the number of
persons trained will be greater all the time. Now we must organize another
teachers' school. The revolution changed the method of selecting teachers,
because teachers used to be selected exclusively from persons from the
city. The revolution changed that procedure. It established a system of
selection and opportunity for all girls and boys who want to become
teachers, and the system begins in the mountains. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
That is why we now have 5,000 youths in the mountains who are entering
their first year of studies for the teaching profession. Later they will go
to school for two more years. Then they will go to a higher institute where
they will stay for another two years. Many of those female teachers will be
of peasant extraction, girls familiar with the mountains, with the rural
areas.
</p>
<p>
At the same time, we are organizing pre-university courses for peasant
girls who are in the fourth and fifth grades and want to begin studying to
be teachers. From those same 10,000 peasant girls we will select those with
the greatest vocational (aptitudes — Ed.) and prepare them to enter those
schools. Within a period of time we will have our higher institute for
teachers with 6,000 students, whom we can mobilize so that they in turn can
teach, combining studies, with work. This is being carried out with the
great effort of a certain number of persons who work on that front.
</p>
<p>
Are there many persons who are perfectly competent for that task? No,
unfortunately, there are not many. But when there is a competent person in
charge of any of those activities, he creates what we can call a school;
that is, a system of work. We do not have many Elesas now, but in the
future we will have hundreds of Elesas, because they will be the girls she
trained. Every day there will be more schools, superior schools, and we
need many cadres in education to organize and take charge of those schools.
Thus advances the revolution with its youth. It can do it. We have won the
opportunity to begin to do all that.
</p>
<p>
The comrades of Latin America present a realistic picture of the situation
of the continent. It is really frightening. We believe that all those
reports should be published in a pamphlet to be distributed here and
outside (applause) in Latin America. Those figures are really
depressing — the statistics about the number of children without schools or
teachers; undernourished; the shameful figures of the percentage of
children who reach the sixth grade, the percentage of those who can
undertake secondary studies, and the percentage of those who can undertake
university studies; the figures on infant mortality, the consequence of the
unhealthy conditions in which they live, the undernourishment, the lack of
medical programs.
</p>
<p>
Today, this is not our situation. Today, we can say that not a single child
is crippled by poliomyelitis; we can say that tens of thousands of children
are saved as a result of medial assistance. More and more national public
health programs continue to develop. The number of beds in our hospitals
has practically tripled. The resources assigned to public health have been
qunitupled. Today those are not our problems, but they are the problem of
an entire continent.
</p>
<p>
Our problem is how to create everything we need to satisfy so many needs,
to overcome the poverty which imperialist exploitation left us. That is our
problem. Our job is big, hard, difficult. And it is not easy to have to
carry out that task with the threatening claws of imperialism hanging over
us, with the ceaseless hostility of he most powerful and aggressive
imperialist nation of the world. How to carry out that work is our problem.
How to defend the revolution and the sovereignty of this country while at
the same time advancing, that is our problem.
</p>
<p>
But that, American women, is not your problem. Your problem, and that off
the peoples your represent, is how to win the opportunity to do this, which
we are doing. (Applause) We are certain we will advance — in some years
more, in some years less.
</p>
<p>
We are certain that we will overcome our difficulties at times with more
sacrifices than at others. We are certain that imperialism will not be able
to defeat us (applause), because there will never be any conquered in this
country. (Applause) There may be fallen, dead, but no defeated. (Chanting,
applause)
</p>
<p>
If the Yankee imperialists one day, using all their might and resources,
were to decide to destroy this country, the most they could ever say would
be "we have destroyed it," not "we have defeated it." (Applause) And we
know that that danger hangs over us, but we also know that there remains an
entire continent and an entire world. We are not just Cubans; we are Latin
Americans. (Applause, cheering) We are even more because we are not only
Latin Americans, we are human being who live on the planet Earth.
(Applause)
</p>
<p>
The important thing is the victory of mankind. We know that in resisting
the imperialists, being firm against the Yankee imperialists, we are
defending the rights of mankind. That is how we Cubans think.
</p>
<p>
I repeat, the problem for us today is to work and fight. Your problem is to
fight in order to work later. The figures are there, those cold, terrible
figures which, when UNESCO or FAO or any other U.N. organization complies
statistics, say so many millions of so much and so many millions of so much
more, so many millions of deaths from hunger or curable disease, or so many
millions of children without schools, or so many millions without homes, or
so many millions undernourished; life expectancy is so much, which is half
of the average life span in the highly industrialized and exploiting
countries.
</p>
<p>
The figures are there, including the figures of the dead, which are higher
than those of any revolution. The number of deaths per year in Latin
America, those who die of hunger and illness without assistance, is greater
than those who would die in the liberation of the peoples of Latin America.
(Applause) Here, the struggle cost 20,000 lives, but many times 20,000
lives have already been saved. We can wait, and the figures will continue
to pile up, as will the millions of unfortunates, exploited, dying. The
figures are there, the results of the feudal, imperialist exploitation.
</p>
<p>
The problem of the figures must not be restricted to writing them down in a
graph or a pamphlet. We must think about how to change that situation.
(Applause) There are persons who are experts on figures, but what is needed
are experts on changing the situation, experts on leading peoples on
revolutions. That is the art of the revolutionaries, the art that must be
learned and developed. How to bring the masses to the struggle?
</p>
<p>
It is the masses who make history, but for them to make history, the masses
must be taken to the battle. That is the duty of the leaders and the
revolutionary organizations: to make the masses march, to launch the masses
into battle. (Applause) That is what they did in Algeria. (Applause) And
that is what the patriots are doing in South Vietnam. (Applause) They have
sent the masses into battle with correct methods, correct tactics, and they
have brought the greatest amount of the masses into the battle.
</p>
<p>
That is what we did. The four, five, six, or seven of us who one day were
separated did not conquer power. It was the movement of the masses that the
struggle against the tyranny unleashed, which culminated in the victory of
the people.
</p>
<p>
With regard to this there is something we want to clear up, because there
have been some harebrained theoreticians who have declared that in Cuba
there was a peaceful change from capitalism to socialism. That is like
denying that thousands and thousands of militants feel in this country. It
is like denying that an army from the bosom of the people in this country
defeated a modern army, armed and instructed by Yankee imperialism.
(Applause)
</p>
<p>
That is like denying that explosive, incendiary bombs have fallen on our
peasants, cities, and towns, bearing the legend: Made in USA. That is like
denying the formidable struggle of our people. It is like denying Playa
Giron and those who fell there. It was not a peaceful transition; it was a
combat transition, without which there would not have been any transition
in our country. Without that heroic battle, that armed battle of the Cuban
people we would perhaps still have Senor Batista here, made in USA.
</p>
<p>
Those are the historic truths. And we believe that we at least have the
right to speak about our historic truths without some long-distance
theoreticians telling us what happened here without having ever come here.
One does not have to whisper about these things, nor must one say them in
low tones. They must be said in a loud voice so that they will be heard,
really heard. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
And let the peoples hear them, because those false interpretations of
history tend to create that conformism that also suits imperialism; it
tends to create that resignation and reformism and that policy of waiting
for the Greek calends to make revolutions. Those false interpretations of
history do not conform with the situation of the majority of the Latin
American countries, where objective conditions exist — and the imperialists
have clearly seen that objective conditions do exist — but where subjective
conditions are missing. Those subjective conditions must be created, and
they are created by historic truth, not by falsification of history.
(Applause)
</p>
<p>
Those subjective conditions are not created by saying that there was a
peaceful transition in Cuba. (One of the delegates shouts something about
cowards — Ed.) It is not a matter of cowards, but of confused, of mistaken
views. We do not deny the possibility of peaceful transition, but we are
still awaiting the first case. But we do not deny it, because we are not
dogmatists, and we understand the ceaseless change of historic conditions
and circumstances.
</p>
<p>
We do not deny it but we do say that there was no peaceful transition; and
we do protect against an attempt to use the case of Cuba to confuse the
revolutionaries of other countries where the objective conditions for the
revolution exist and where they can do the same thing Cuba did. It is
logical that imperialist theoreticians try to prevent revolutions, the
imperialists slander the Cuban revolution, sow lies, say the worst horrors,
create fear of revolutions among the people. But let no one from a
revolutionary position attempt to create conformism or fear of revolutions.
That is absurd. Let the imperialists theoreticians preach conformism. Let
the revolutionary theoreticians preach revolution without fear. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
That is what we think. That was what we said in the declaration of Havana,
which, in some fraternal countries, received from some revolutionary
organizations the honors of a desk drawer when it should have received the
just publicity it deserved. It would be like locking up everything you have
discussed here. Of course, if we do not want the masses to learn about it,
we must put it in a drawer. But if we tell the masses what the situation
is, they must also be told what the road is. We must bring them to the
struggle, because that road is much easier in many Latin American countries
than it was in Cuba.
</p>
<p>
I want to make it clear, so that the theoreticians will not get angry, that
we are not making an irresponsible generalization. I want to make it clear
that we know that each country has its specific conditions, and that is why
we do not generalize. But we say the majority. We know there are
exceptions. We know there are countries in which those objective conditions
do not exist. But they exist in the majority of the Latin American
countries. That is our opinion. To say it here is a duty, because we hope
that in 40 years we will not meet as today — the granddaughters of our
federated women with your granddaughters — to discuss the same problems.
(Applause)
</p>
<p>
Our country is facing difficult circumstances, great risks. There is no
reason to stick our heads into a hole like the ostrich. Things must be seen
realistically. Our country is experiencing a period of risks, of great
dangers.
</p>
<p>
On one side we have Yankee imperialism, imperialism's most aggressive and
most powerful nation, which has set as its basic aim the destruction of
this revolution, and on the other, we have circumstances that are adverse
to the world revolutionary movement.
</p>
<p>
First, I want to say that for us the crisis of the Caribbean is not
resolved. (Applause) I want to say that in our opinion, in the opinion of
the revolutionary leadership of our country, a war was avoided but peace
was not won. That is not the same thing. Do all the circumstances that
forced us to take the measures we took, the steps we took, not still exist?
Does the declared policy of hostility and aggression against our country of
the Yankee imperialists not still persist? We do not believe in the words
of Kennedy; but, moreover, Kennedy has not given any word. And if he gave
it, he has already retracted it. That is why we said that for us there was
no satisfactory guarantee without the five points we proposed as a result
of that crisis. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
We must be very clear on these controversial and subtle questions. We must
be clear on them. If it is said that we are here, that is, that we have not
been destroyed because of the solidarity of the socialist camp, it is the
truth. But if it said that we are here because of Kennedy's word, that is
not the truth. We have resisted for four years thanks to that solidarity.
</p>
<p>
Very well, what is peace to us? What peace is there for us? Since Kennedy
spoke in the Orange Bowl, the agents of imperialism have committed four
murders. They killed a peasant scholarship student on vacation in Trinidad.
They killed, by burning him alive, a worker in Las Villas Province, a
worker who worked in the reforestation service. They murdered an 11-year
old in San Antonio de Las Vegas. They murdered two CDR comrades in the
province of Matanzas.
</p>
<p>
Yankee agents with Yankee weapons, following Yankee orders! The policy of
subversion declared by the imperialists. What did we say? How could there
be a solution if the imperialists assumed the right of trying to strangle
our country with hunger, of trying to isolate our country and pressure all
shipping lines and airlines in order to deprive us of essential raw
materials and create hunger in this country. (How could there be a
solution — Ed.) if the imperialists assumed the right to maintain that
blockade policy against us and to create every imaginable obstacle outside
international law, outside the principles that regulate the United Nations;
if the imperialists assumed the right to subvert social order, introduce
weapons, saboteurs, train them, organize mercenaries; if the imperialists
assumed the right to violate our sea and air space; if the imperialists
assumed the right to organize pirate bands; if the imperialists assumed the
right to retain a piece of our territory, which points at the heart of our
country? what right can the imperialists have to demand the withdrawal of
friendly weapons while they maintain enemy weapons on Cuban territory?
</p>
<p>
What right have the imperialists to do that? In three statements, in the
one Mr. Kennedy made after the crisis, (as heard) he used threatening
language, maintaining his policy of using economic, political, and other
kinds of pressure and guaranteeing that he would not invade if we did not
promote subversion. But for Kennedy, this is subversion. You can't win!
(Estamos fritos.) That is a congress of women, who speak of hunger, the
frightening poverty of Latin America; that is subversion. When he spoke to
the mercenaries at the Orange Bowl, he said that he would deliver the
mercenary flag in Havana.
</p>
<p>
Recently, Mr. Rusk, the Yankee secretary of state, said that the United
States was not committed to refrain from invading Cuba and that if it had
committed itself, it had done so with regard to the immediate situation,
independent of its commitments with the other Latin American countries.
That is what they have said. Where is the commitment not to invade Cuba? It
is insolent for the Yankee secretary of state to say that they have not
committed themselves not to invade Cuba, as if international law, the U.N.
Charter, and all the norms that regulate relations between nations did not
commit them to not invade our country since, of course, they have no right
o invade Cuba. By speaking in that way, instead of promising not to invade,
they shirk the obligation they have under international law not to invade
Cuba. Moreover, they show that the Yankee leaders have the souls of
gangsters and pirates. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
I believe that many arguments are not necessary. The words and the deeds
are there. That is why we say that a war has been avoided, good; but peace
has not been won. This is bad. That is the situation.
</p>
<p>
The imperialists are somewhat optimistic. This is reflected in their words.
I do not think that optimism has any reason to exist other than the
underestimation of the realities of the world and the underestimation of
the strength of the peoples. It is clear that they do not want a finger
moved in Latin America. They do not want the peoples to fight. For
instance, the example of the heroic Venezuelan people (applause) is, for
them, a horrible nightmare. They want to be calmly permitted to establish
the bases of a long-lasting empire based on even more inhuman exploitation.
</p>
<p>
All those programs are always based on an alleged austerity which means
more privation for the workers, more sacrifice for the masses.
</p>
<p>
Let no one doubt it — the Alliance for Progress will not prosper because it
is simply a policy of domination, exploitation, and retreat. The partners
of that alliance are puppets like Stroessner, Guido, Romulo Betancourt, the
Somozas, the Peruvian gorilla junta. Those are the progressivists. The
alliance is with those progressivists — the most reactionary, backward, and
prehistoric people in Latin America. It (the Alliance for Progress — Ed.)
will not advance. It is doomed to failure. It is a desperate imperialist
attempt to deceive and confuse.
</p>
<p>
In one of those speeches, Mr. Kennedy said that we will compare Cuba with
the Alliance for Progress. If we make this comparison, Mr. Kennedy is lost,
because here, despite all the imperialist propaganda, there is the reality
that every child is guaranteed a quart of milk daily. We have had to ration
because employment increased extraordinarily.
</p>
<p>
Some half million people began to work, to have an income. The peasants no
longer had to pay rent. Rents were reduced 50 percent. All education became
free. Hospital service was qunitupled. The people had incomparably more
resources.
</p>
<p>
It was logical that under these circumstances we should have had to take
measures which would guarantee all families the articles they needed at a
just price, because there still remained here a sufficient number of
wealthy people to establish all kinds of speculation, if there were any
question of prices, as is the situation in the capitalist countries where
they set prices. A liter of mill goes up to two pesos and there is enough
for those who have the two pesos. A pound of rice goes up to three pesos
and then it suffices for those who have five pesos. There is no rationing;
there is something much worse: he who has gets everything and he who has
less gets nothing.
</p>
<p>
But they try to cause confusion with all these things. Let it be admitted
that our country faces a difficult situation, resulting from the
circumstances that it is, first of all, the basic, immediate target of
Yankee imperialism, and secondly, because of the divisions, or
disagreement, or however one may wish to call them, more or less
optimistically, within the socialist camp.
</p>
<p>
We have stated our position. We are not going to throw fuel on the fire of
these disagreements. I believe that anyone who throws fuel on the fire of
these disagreements is harming the interests of the world revolutionary
movement. (Mild applause) Against imperialism this reality is bitter,
harsh. We have stated our position, what — as we understand it — is our duty.
It is not to throw fuel on the fire of this disagreement, within its
principles, unity within its principles (Castro repeats himself — Ed.), and
to fight for this with Marxist-Leninist methods. (Louder applause)
</p>
<p>
Marxism-Leninism is sufficiently rich in ideological resources and in
experience to find adequate ways to overcome this difficultly, to overcome
this obstacle. It is a matter of resolving to do so, and I believe we must
fight for this. We must fight for this unity, and this we propose to do,
with our own criterion: Chauvinism, no, rather Marxism-Leninism.
</p>
<p>
Because imperialism, imperialism, exists and is there, dangerous and
aggressive. The underdeveloped world exists and is there. The liberating
movement of the peoples subject to colonialism and imperialism is there,
fighting, in Angola, in Vietnam, in Latin America, in every part of the
world, and this fight demands the united efforts of the socialist camp.
</p>
<p>
It is deplorable, most deplorable, that these differences should have
arisen, and we must fight against them, because the first thing is to
unite, and what Marx said was: "Proletariats of all nations, unite!" (Much
applause) Marx and Engels fought tirelessly, indefatigably for this unity
throughout their lives, and this is what we say, our political leadership,
our party, and our people, "Proletarians of all nations, let us unite!" Let
us be united against our class enemies, against the imperialist enemies,
against the aggressors, against the warmongers.
</p>
<p>
This is the position of our party and our people. This is the judgment of
our national directorate and our people, who have gone forward united in
difficult times, in difficult circumstance,s because our people endured
difficult tests in recent days, tests of courage in the face of Kennedy's
threat, in the face of his threat to turn us into an atomic target, with
the certainty that the nerves of this people were less affected than the
nerves of the generals of the Yankee Pentagon.
</p>
<p>
There were some isolated voices of criticism. As was logical, there were
some who, confused in good faith or confused in bad faith, criticized the
national directorate of the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations on the
matter of Cuba's attitude, immediately after the crisis, on the matter of
inspection and the pirate flights. For them, apparently, we should allow
ourselves to be inspected (shouts of 'no' — Ed.), as if to hallow the right
of the imperialists to say what arms we may or may not have and to bring
this country back to the times of the Platt Amendment, when the U.S.
Government decided for us.
</p>
<p>
To accept inspection would have been to accept, to agree to having to give
an account to the Yankee imperialists of what arms we might have or not
have within our territory. (Castro's voice now rising in indignation) This
implied for us a matter of principle. It would amount to a renunciation of
our sovereignty. It would amount to consenting to having our country made
inferior among all the other states of the world; we did not consent to
this, nor shall we consent to this. (Applause) Those who think that this is
acceptable would also consider acceptable a landing without the firing of a
shot (thunderous applause), because this is what this would lead to.
</p>
<p>
It was not by this road that the revolution rose to power. It was not in
this way that the revolution was defended at Playa Giron. It was by taking
other ways, of firmness and determination to fight against the
imperialists.
</p>
<p>
Apparently these individuals thought that we should allow ourselves to be
blown up, that we should allow Yankee planes to dive down over our
antiaircraft batteries without giving orders to fire. This can never be
expected of us either because the enemy always must expect, every time he
attacks us, that there will be a fight and no backing down. (Loud prolonged
applause)
</p>
<p>
There will be some who may say, who may try to insinuate that we were
against a policy of peace. The answer is the same; we want peace with
right, with sovereignty, and with dignity. (Applause) We want peace without
giving up being revolutionaries, without giving up the revolution.
</p>
<p>
When we fought the invaders at Playa Giron, when we fought those who bombed
us, who attacked us, no one will doubt that we were defending peace. When
this people organized and decided to fight to the last man or woman against
the imperialists if they attacked us, no one can deny that we are defending
peace, because to resist aggressors is to fight for peace; to surrender to
the aggressors is the way to war or the enslavement of peoples. By
defending our sovereignty and our rights, we are defending peace.
</p>
<p>
When we speak to the Latin Americans and tell them that the objective
conditions exist for revolution, we are defending peace, because the weaker
imperialism is, the less dangerous it will be. The weaker imperialism is,
the less aggressive it will be, and the liberation, the liberation movement
of the peoples, weakens the imperialists and makes them less aggressive,
less dangerous. The fight of the peoples for their sovereignty and their
independence is the fight for peace.
</p>
<p>
We indeed consider peace the fundamental objective of humanity. Let us
fight for it, following the paths of national sovereignty, of liberation
from the exploiters and the imperialists. By fighting against imperialist
exploitation we are fighting for peace.
</p>
<p>
We are enemies of war; it is the imperialists who impose wars on humanity,
and the stronger they feel, the more dangerous they will be. Therefore each
nation which fights for its sovereignty and its independence is defending
peace. this is what we believe, we closely united Cuban revolutionaries.
</p>
<p>
Those who believe that they are going to fish in troubled waters are
mistaken. Those who believe that in the face of this desire for unity, of
the firmness and dignity of our people, they can opportunistically try to
create confusion, to cast doubt on the rectitude of the Cuban revolutionary
directorate, they are lamentably mistaken. It would show that they do not
know this people, that they do not know the virtues of our people. Those
who, taking advantage of the difficult circumstances which our country has
had to face and must continue to face, foment division are committing a
deplorable offense of treason against the revolution, and the masses will
oppose them. They will oppose the intriguers, the divisionists, and they
will follow the line of our party and the line outlined for them by the
revolutionary directorate, because they will say: "This is our line; this
is the line of our leaders, and we have faith in it." (Applause)
</p>
<p>
This will be conduct of our people, the conduct of our revolutionary
militants, who do not become discouraged, who do not fear to fight, who do
not fear difficult circumstances, whatever they may be. Here there will be
no division. Here there will be unity because we need it, because we have
the imperialist enemy in front of us who wants to destroy us, and we need
unity to resist. We need unity to win. We need unity more than ever to go
forward, and with out unity, our firmness, and our line we shall continue
to go forward facing the difficulties, facing the inconveniences, whatever
they may be.
</p>
<p>
We shall exercise our right to think for ourselves, and we shall be
consistent with our revolutionary belief, and this belief has one motto
above all: To resist the imperialist enemy, to fight the imperialist enemy,
to go forward, without a single backward step in the history of our
country, without any vacillation in the revolutionary ranks (applause), to
continue forward against the imperialists. These are and will always be our
enemies. They are and will continue to be the enemies of America.
</p>
<p>
We shall continue to go forward on the road of the revolution, on the road
of socialism, on the road of Marxism-Leninism. Homeland or death! We shall
win! (Applause)
</p>
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Castro Internet Archive
At the Closing of the Congress of Women of the Americans
Spoken: January 16, 1963 (0451 GMT)
Source: Castro Speech Database
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
Castro arrived "a little late", after attending and speaking for good length at anoter meeting of the Congress...
Women of America, fraternal delegates — be patient — fraternal
delegates — can you hear? — of the countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa who
are visiting us. In the first place, I want to make clear — as I have
already told some of the lady comrades of the congress — that if this
function began a little late, it was not my fault. (Laughter) Because this
year is the year of organization (laughter), I was in the theater at 2057
(laughter), and we intend during this year of organization to be punctual.
What happened was that the comrades, the comrades of the congress talked a
lot. I think they were speaking till eight or nine more or less, until
eight and then some (laughter), and that is why this function began a
little late. I only want to make it clear that it was not my fault.
(Laughter)
It has been a very great honor for us, for our country, that Cuba is the
site of this congress. We understand that it has been a very positive
event, a serious event. We have tried to keep ourselves informed, to read
the material of the various reports presented to the congress, and our
impression is really that all of them have great value because of their
seriousness, the correct focusing of the problems, the enormous amount of
data they contribute about the realities of our continent.
Naturally, the topics of the congress were restricted to those sections
that relate to the interests of women, but what, really, does not interest
woman in modern society? What does not interest the Latin American woman,
the American woman regarding our social problems? When discussions are held
about the rights of women, of their aspirations, we see that there cannot
be rights of women in our America or rights of children, mothers, or wives
if there is no revolution. (Applause) The fact is that in the world in
which the American woman lives, the woman must necessarily be
revolutionary. (Applause) Why must she be revolutionary? Because woman, who
constitutes an essential part of every people, is, in the first place,
exploited as a worker and discriminated against as a woman.
And who are the revolutionaries in the society of man? Who were they
throughout history? In simple terms, the exploited and the discriminated.
Because woman is not only exploited as a worker when she works for an
exploiting monopoly, for a society of exploiting classes, but even as a
worker she is the most exploited worker, with the lowest salaries, the
worst conditions, with a series of contradictions among her social
functions — her condition as a woman and the exploitation to which she is
subjected.
Thus, logically, women are revolutionary, and on a continent like this,
they must be revolutionary. That is why in our country women are
revolutionary. (Applause) In our country many women were exploited. They
were exploited as workers who worked to enrich a class, and were also
discriminated against as workers. Many women did not even have access to
work, to the opportunity to work.
In Comrade Vilma's report, there appears a report on the activities of the
Cuban woman within the revolution and the benefits the Cuban woman has
received through the revolution. The report was long, but even so it is
possible that the report has some omissions, because the revolution has
done even more for woman. It does not believe it has done it all, not in
the least, but it intends to continue to work for the woman. And, in our
country, the woman, like the Negro, is no longer discriminated against.
In reality, the revolution has meant much to the Cuban woman. Within the
revolution, the revolutionary leadership makes efforts to make available
more and more opportunities to the woman. As an example we can cite the
fact that when the medium and large shoe, clothing, and hardware sales
instructed to select women as administrators of those firms. (Applause)
Some 4,000 administrators — (Castro now corrects himself — Ed.) that is,
administrators for some 4,000 centers — 90 percent or more are presently
administered by women.
There is another statistic, for example, that did not appear in the report
of the comrade president of the federation — and it is very
illustrative — about the increase of the participation of the woman in
activities that were practically closed to her: It is the fact that, for
example, in some professions, such as the medical profession, the number of
women who entered that university school was, possibly, less than 10
percent. At this time, in the institute of basic medical sciences, that is
to say the first year of medical schools, about 50 percent are women.
(Applause)
Those facts of evidence of how, in four years of revolution, the woman has
been incorporated into social life, the life of her country, the life of
the circle in which she lives and develops. For example, women also paraded
along with our soldiers on 2 January in contingents of women's military
battalions. In our army thee are a series of functions in which women work
and perform services. The bourgeois concept of womanhood is disappearing in
our country. The concepts of stigma, concepts of discrimination, have
really been disappearing in our country, and the masses of women have
realized this.
Prejudice is being replaced by a new concept in which the qualities of the
woman are valued for a series of social activities, in some of which they
demonstrate exceptional virtues. A broad field of action has been opened to
them. If you compare the report of the Cuban delegation with the reports of
the delegations of Latin America, you will be able to see the great
differences. The problems here now are, for example, how to free the woman
from domestic slavery, how to create conditions that would permit her to
participate as much as possible in production, from which the woman and the
revolution both profit.
Within a society like the capitalist society — one of unemployment, millions
of men without work — it is logical that women are many times relegated to
restricted economic activities. Within a society like ours, in which,
because of the complete development of all the resources of the nation and
our planned economy, more and more labor is needed for production, it is
logical that the revolution concern itself with creating those conditions.
And so today the revolution is concerned with the establishment of the
largest possible number of children's centers, student dining halls, and
with the creation of those circumstances that will enable the women not to
be a slave of the kitchen; and with the establishment of laundries.
It is clear that the increase of certain of those institutions, such as
children's centers, is restricted by the resources we may have under
certain circumstances. This year emphasis is being placed on the
establishment of workers' dining halls in the principal factories of the
country, and next year the accent will be placed on the establishment of
students' dining halls. The development of those institutions will enable
the woman to participate more in work, production, and the life of her
country — not only economic activities, but political and social activities
as well. (Applause)
Today those are our concerns, because the women in our country are able to
be concerned with these solutions. The Cuban delegation has also spoken of
the gigantic effort made by the revolution on the education front. There is
hardly any need to speak; it is sufficient to see it. This movement can be
seen. It is a movement that is forging a great future for this country; it
is a movement that demonstrates the objectives of the revolution projected,
above all, toward the future. It has permitted the duplication of the
number of children in the schools, the duplication of the number of
students in secondary and superior schools, the eradication of illiteracy,
and it can enable this country to march forward in forging a magnificent
youth destined to inherit the conditions the revolution is creating for
that youth.
Our problem now is not how to win the right to do that, but how to do it as
perfectly as possible. There is a difference between the situation of the
women of America represented in this congress and the representation of the
Cuban women: Cuban women have the opportunity to do all that, and the
American women need that opportunity. Our problems are different in the
sense that it now is how we will do it and how best we can do it. For us it
is no longer a matter of the chance to have, let us say, nearly 100,000
youths studying under state scholarships, but rather how to organize them,
now to see to it that the schools where they study are more efficient, how
to train cadres of teachers, and how to do that task well.
That does not mean that we do not have much work. On the contrary, there is
more and more work all the time in the revolution. But the revolution is
creating resources and more resources along the march. An example of how
those resources are created is that fact that it recently was necessary to
receive in our capital nearly 10,000 young peasant girls from Oriente
Province. (Applause) Whom to give that task to? The federation of women had
been in charge of that work, but the federation of women had the work of
attending to all the boarding houses of the scholarship students. It did
not have enough cadres, but there was a teachers' school that was organized
by a group of brigadist girls who participated in 1961 in the great
literacy campaign, a school of 1,100 young girls who were studying to be
teachers. It is a good school.
The comrade who is in charge of that school, and who is a great pedagogue
because she knows how to each, Comrade Elena Gil, had begun with a group of
300 revolutionary instructors — that is, 300 female teachers formed from
groups of youths who volunteered to teach in the mountains. She began by
training 300 revolutionary instructors for the night schools for girls who
work in domestic service. This was the first school. First there were 300.
With those 300 girls, the night schools were organized.
Then there were another 300, and their number reached 600. With the help of
these girls, the Macarense pedagogic institute was organized. that trained
1,100 of whom 300 were selected for special courses, with those 300 the
rest of the girls, the schools for the 10,000 peasant girls who arrived
were organized. (Applause)
We already had cadres — girls from the literacy campaign, girls who had
already studied one year, girls who already have discipline, a sense of
responsibility. It is really impressive to cross one of these avenues where
millionaries once lived and find groups of girls in uniforms, peasant girls
going from one place to another-possibly to eat or to class. With them, in
her scholarship student uniform, a girl who was in some cases younger than
the peasant girls themselves, but they were (as heard) the leaders. They
were in charge of the group: they were in charge of the house in which they
live and were, in addition, their teachers. They work and study.
Consider how those girls are being trained, already receiving that
responsibility, already getting serious tasks, fulfilling them. They have a
system, and they combine study with work. This indicates that the number of
persons trained will be greater all the time. Now we must organize another
teachers' school. The revolution changed the method of selecting teachers,
because teachers used to be selected exclusively from persons from the
city. The revolution changed that procedure. It established a system of
selection and opportunity for all girls and boys who want to become
teachers, and the system begins in the mountains. (Applause)
That is why we now have 5,000 youths in the mountains who are entering
their first year of studies for the teaching profession. Later they will go
to school for two more years. Then they will go to a higher institute where
they will stay for another two years. Many of those female teachers will be
of peasant extraction, girls familiar with the mountains, with the rural
areas.
At the same time, we are organizing pre-university courses for peasant
girls who are in the fourth and fifth grades and want to begin studying to
be teachers. From those same 10,000 peasant girls we will select those with
the greatest vocational (aptitudes — Ed.) and prepare them to enter those
schools. Within a period of time we will have our higher institute for
teachers with 6,000 students, whom we can mobilize so that they in turn can
teach, combining studies, with work. This is being carried out with the
great effort of a certain number of persons who work on that front.
Are there many persons who are perfectly competent for that task? No,
unfortunately, there are not many. But when there is a competent person in
charge of any of those activities, he creates what we can call a school;
that is, a system of work. We do not have many Elesas now, but in the
future we will have hundreds of Elesas, because they will be the girls she
trained. Every day there will be more schools, superior schools, and we
need many cadres in education to organize and take charge of those schools.
Thus advances the revolution with its youth. It can do it. We have won the
opportunity to begin to do all that.
The comrades of Latin America present a realistic picture of the situation
of the continent. It is really frightening. We believe that all those
reports should be published in a pamphlet to be distributed here and
outside (applause) in Latin America. Those figures are really
depressing — the statistics about the number of children without schools or
teachers; undernourished; the shameful figures of the percentage of
children who reach the sixth grade, the percentage of those who can
undertake secondary studies, and the percentage of those who can undertake
university studies; the figures on infant mortality, the consequence of the
unhealthy conditions in which they live, the undernourishment, the lack of
medical programs.
Today, this is not our situation. Today, we can say that not a single child
is crippled by poliomyelitis; we can say that tens of thousands of children
are saved as a result of medial assistance. More and more national public
health programs continue to develop. The number of beds in our hospitals
has practically tripled. The resources assigned to public health have been
qunitupled. Today those are not our problems, but they are the problem of
an entire continent.
Our problem is how to create everything we need to satisfy so many needs,
to overcome the poverty which imperialist exploitation left us. That is our
problem. Our job is big, hard, difficult. And it is not easy to have to
carry out that task with the threatening claws of imperialism hanging over
us, with the ceaseless hostility of he most powerful and aggressive
imperialist nation of the world. How to carry out that work is our problem.
How to defend the revolution and the sovereignty of this country while at
the same time advancing, that is our problem.
But that, American women, is not your problem. Your problem, and that off
the peoples your represent, is how to win the opportunity to do this, which
we are doing. (Applause) We are certain we will advance — in some years
more, in some years less.
We are certain that we will overcome our difficulties at times with more
sacrifices than at others. We are certain that imperialism will not be able
to defeat us (applause), because there will never be any conquered in this
country. (Applause) There may be fallen, dead, but no defeated. (Chanting,
applause)
If the Yankee imperialists one day, using all their might and resources,
were to decide to destroy this country, the most they could ever say would
be "we have destroyed it," not "we have defeated it." (Applause) And we
know that that danger hangs over us, but we also know that there remains an
entire continent and an entire world. We are not just Cubans; we are Latin
Americans. (Applause, cheering) We are even more because we are not only
Latin Americans, we are human being who live on the planet Earth.
(Applause)
The important thing is the victory of mankind. We know that in resisting
the imperialists, being firm against the Yankee imperialists, we are
defending the rights of mankind. That is how we Cubans think.
I repeat, the problem for us today is to work and fight. Your problem is to
fight in order to work later. The figures are there, those cold, terrible
figures which, when UNESCO or FAO or any other U.N. organization complies
statistics, say so many millions of so much and so many millions of so much
more, so many millions of deaths from hunger or curable disease, or so many
millions of children without schools, or so many millions without homes, or
so many millions undernourished; life expectancy is so much, which is half
of the average life span in the highly industrialized and exploiting
countries.
The figures are there, including the figures of the dead, which are higher
than those of any revolution. The number of deaths per year in Latin
America, those who die of hunger and illness without assistance, is greater
than those who would die in the liberation of the peoples of Latin America.
(Applause) Here, the struggle cost 20,000 lives, but many times 20,000
lives have already been saved. We can wait, and the figures will continue
to pile up, as will the millions of unfortunates, exploited, dying. The
figures are there, the results of the feudal, imperialist exploitation.
The problem of the figures must not be restricted to writing them down in a
graph or a pamphlet. We must think about how to change that situation.
(Applause) There are persons who are experts on figures, but what is needed
are experts on changing the situation, experts on leading peoples on
revolutions. That is the art of the revolutionaries, the art that must be
learned and developed. How to bring the masses to the struggle?
It is the masses who make history, but for them to make history, the masses
must be taken to the battle. That is the duty of the leaders and the
revolutionary organizations: to make the masses march, to launch the masses
into battle. (Applause) That is what they did in Algeria. (Applause) And
that is what the patriots are doing in South Vietnam. (Applause) They have
sent the masses into battle with correct methods, correct tactics, and they
have brought the greatest amount of the masses into the battle.
That is what we did. The four, five, six, or seven of us who one day were
separated did not conquer power. It was the movement of the masses that the
struggle against the tyranny unleashed, which culminated in the victory of
the people.
With regard to this there is something we want to clear up, because there
have been some harebrained theoreticians who have declared that in Cuba
there was a peaceful change from capitalism to socialism. That is like
denying that thousands and thousands of militants feel in this country. It
is like denying that an army from the bosom of the people in this country
defeated a modern army, armed and instructed by Yankee imperialism.
(Applause)
That is like denying that explosive, incendiary bombs have fallen on our
peasants, cities, and towns, bearing the legend: Made in USA. That is like
denying the formidable struggle of our people. It is like denying Playa
Giron and those who fell there. It was not a peaceful transition; it was a
combat transition, without which there would not have been any transition
in our country. Without that heroic battle, that armed battle of the Cuban
people we would perhaps still have Senor Batista here, made in USA.
Those are the historic truths. And we believe that we at least have the
right to speak about our historic truths without some long-distance
theoreticians telling us what happened here without having ever come here.
One does not have to whisper about these things, nor must one say them in
low tones. They must be said in a loud voice so that they will be heard,
really heard. (Applause)
And let the peoples hear them, because those false interpretations of
history tend to create that conformism that also suits imperialism; it
tends to create that resignation and reformism and that policy of waiting
for the Greek calends to make revolutions. Those false interpretations of
history do not conform with the situation of the majority of the Latin
American countries, where objective conditions exist — and the imperialists
have clearly seen that objective conditions do exist — but where subjective
conditions are missing. Those subjective conditions must be created, and
they are created by historic truth, not by falsification of history.
(Applause)
Those subjective conditions are not created by saying that there was a
peaceful transition in Cuba. (One of the delegates shouts something about
cowards — Ed.) It is not a matter of cowards, but of confused, of mistaken
views. We do not deny the possibility of peaceful transition, but we are
still awaiting the first case. But we do not deny it, because we are not
dogmatists, and we understand the ceaseless change of historic conditions
and circumstances.
We do not deny it but we do say that there was no peaceful transition; and
we do protect against an attempt to use the case of Cuba to confuse the
revolutionaries of other countries where the objective conditions for the
revolution exist and where they can do the same thing Cuba did. It is
logical that imperialist theoreticians try to prevent revolutions, the
imperialists slander the Cuban revolution, sow lies, say the worst horrors,
create fear of revolutions among the people. But let no one from a
revolutionary position attempt to create conformism or fear of revolutions.
That is absurd. Let the imperialists theoreticians preach conformism. Let
the revolutionary theoreticians preach revolution without fear. (Applause)
That is what we think. That was what we said in the declaration of Havana,
which, in some fraternal countries, received from some revolutionary
organizations the honors of a desk drawer when it should have received the
just publicity it deserved. It would be like locking up everything you have
discussed here. Of course, if we do not want the masses to learn about it,
we must put it in a drawer. But if we tell the masses what the situation
is, they must also be told what the road is. We must bring them to the
struggle, because that road is much easier in many Latin American countries
than it was in Cuba.
I want to make it clear, so that the theoreticians will not get angry, that
we are not making an irresponsible generalization. I want to make it clear
that we know that each country has its specific conditions, and that is why
we do not generalize. But we say the majority. We know there are
exceptions. We know there are countries in which those objective conditions
do not exist. But they exist in the majority of the Latin American
countries. That is our opinion. To say it here is a duty, because we hope
that in 40 years we will not meet as today — the granddaughters of our
federated women with your granddaughters — to discuss the same problems.
(Applause)
Our country is facing difficult circumstances, great risks. There is no
reason to stick our heads into a hole like the ostrich. Things must be seen
realistically. Our country is experiencing a period of risks, of great
dangers.
On one side we have Yankee imperialism, imperialism's most aggressive and
most powerful nation, which has set as its basic aim the destruction of
this revolution, and on the other, we have circumstances that are adverse
to the world revolutionary movement.
First, I want to say that for us the crisis of the Caribbean is not
resolved. (Applause) I want to say that in our opinion, in the opinion of
the revolutionary leadership of our country, a war was avoided but peace
was not won. That is not the same thing. Do all the circumstances that
forced us to take the measures we took, the steps we took, not still exist?
Does the declared policy of hostility and aggression against our country of
the Yankee imperialists not still persist? We do not believe in the words
of Kennedy; but, moreover, Kennedy has not given any word. And if he gave
it, he has already retracted it. That is why we said that for us there was
no satisfactory guarantee without the five points we proposed as a result
of that crisis. (Applause)
We must be very clear on these controversial and subtle questions. We must
be clear on them. If it is said that we are here, that is, that we have not
been destroyed because of the solidarity of the socialist camp, it is the
truth. But if it said that we are here because of Kennedy's word, that is
not the truth. We have resisted for four years thanks to that solidarity.
Very well, what is peace to us? What peace is there for us? Since Kennedy
spoke in the Orange Bowl, the agents of imperialism have committed four
murders. They killed a peasant scholarship student on vacation in Trinidad.
They killed, by burning him alive, a worker in Las Villas Province, a
worker who worked in the reforestation service. They murdered an 11-year
old in San Antonio de Las Vegas. They murdered two CDR comrades in the
province of Matanzas.
Yankee agents with Yankee weapons, following Yankee orders! The policy of
subversion declared by the imperialists. What did we say? How could there
be a solution if the imperialists assumed the right of trying to strangle
our country with hunger, of trying to isolate our country and pressure all
shipping lines and airlines in order to deprive us of essential raw
materials and create hunger in this country. (How could there be a
solution — Ed.) if the imperialists assumed the right to maintain that
blockade policy against us and to create every imaginable obstacle outside
international law, outside the principles that regulate the United Nations;
if the imperialists assumed the right to subvert social order, introduce
weapons, saboteurs, train them, organize mercenaries; if the imperialists
assumed the right to violate our sea and air space; if the imperialists
assumed the right to organize pirate bands; if the imperialists assumed the
right to retain a piece of our territory, which points at the heart of our
country? what right can the imperialists have to demand the withdrawal of
friendly weapons while they maintain enemy weapons on Cuban territory?
What right have the imperialists to do that? In three statements, in the
one Mr. Kennedy made after the crisis, (as heard) he used threatening
language, maintaining his policy of using economic, political, and other
kinds of pressure and guaranteeing that he would not invade if we did not
promote subversion. But for Kennedy, this is subversion. You can't win!
(Estamos fritos.) That is a congress of women, who speak of hunger, the
frightening poverty of Latin America; that is subversion. When he spoke to
the mercenaries at the Orange Bowl, he said that he would deliver the
mercenary flag in Havana.
Recently, Mr. Rusk, the Yankee secretary of state, said that the United
States was not committed to refrain from invading Cuba and that if it had
committed itself, it had done so with regard to the immediate situation,
independent of its commitments with the other Latin American countries.
That is what they have said. Where is the commitment not to invade Cuba? It
is insolent for the Yankee secretary of state to say that they have not
committed themselves not to invade Cuba, as if international law, the U.N.
Charter, and all the norms that regulate relations between nations did not
commit them to not invade our country since, of course, they have no right
o invade Cuba. By speaking in that way, instead of promising not to invade,
they shirk the obligation they have under international law not to invade
Cuba. Moreover, they show that the Yankee leaders have the souls of
gangsters and pirates. (Applause)
I believe that many arguments are not necessary. The words and the deeds
are there. That is why we say that a war has been avoided, good; but peace
has not been won. This is bad. That is the situation.
The imperialists are somewhat optimistic. This is reflected in their words.
I do not think that optimism has any reason to exist other than the
underestimation of the realities of the world and the underestimation of
the strength of the peoples. It is clear that they do not want a finger
moved in Latin America. They do not want the peoples to fight. For
instance, the example of the heroic Venezuelan people (applause) is, for
them, a horrible nightmare. They want to be calmly permitted to establish
the bases of a long-lasting empire based on even more inhuman exploitation.
All those programs are always based on an alleged austerity which means
more privation for the workers, more sacrifice for the masses.
Let no one doubt it — the Alliance for Progress will not prosper because it
is simply a policy of domination, exploitation, and retreat. The partners
of that alliance are puppets like Stroessner, Guido, Romulo Betancourt, the
Somozas, the Peruvian gorilla junta. Those are the progressivists. The
alliance is with those progressivists — the most reactionary, backward, and
prehistoric people in Latin America. It (the Alliance for Progress — Ed.)
will not advance. It is doomed to failure. It is a desperate imperialist
attempt to deceive and confuse.
In one of those speeches, Mr. Kennedy said that we will compare Cuba with
the Alliance for Progress. If we make this comparison, Mr. Kennedy is lost,
because here, despite all the imperialist propaganda, there is the reality
that every child is guaranteed a quart of milk daily. We have had to ration
because employment increased extraordinarily.
Some half million people began to work, to have an income. The peasants no
longer had to pay rent. Rents were reduced 50 percent. All education became
free. Hospital service was qunitupled. The people had incomparably more
resources.
It was logical that under these circumstances we should have had to take
measures which would guarantee all families the articles they needed at a
just price, because there still remained here a sufficient number of
wealthy people to establish all kinds of speculation, if there were any
question of prices, as is the situation in the capitalist countries where
they set prices. A liter of mill goes up to two pesos and there is enough
for those who have the two pesos. A pound of rice goes up to three pesos
and then it suffices for those who have five pesos. There is no rationing;
there is something much worse: he who has gets everything and he who has
less gets nothing.
But they try to cause confusion with all these things. Let it be admitted
that our country faces a difficult situation, resulting from the
circumstances that it is, first of all, the basic, immediate target of
Yankee imperialism, and secondly, because of the divisions, or
disagreement, or however one may wish to call them, more or less
optimistically, within the socialist camp.
We have stated our position. We are not going to throw fuel on the fire of
these disagreements. I believe that anyone who throws fuel on the fire of
these disagreements is harming the interests of the world revolutionary
movement. (Mild applause) Against imperialism this reality is bitter,
harsh. We have stated our position, what — as we understand it — is our duty.
It is not to throw fuel on the fire of this disagreement, within its
principles, unity within its principles (Castro repeats himself — Ed.), and
to fight for this with Marxist-Leninist methods. (Louder applause)
Marxism-Leninism is sufficiently rich in ideological resources and in
experience to find adequate ways to overcome this difficultly, to overcome
this obstacle. It is a matter of resolving to do so, and I believe we must
fight for this. We must fight for this unity, and this we propose to do,
with our own criterion: Chauvinism, no, rather Marxism-Leninism.
Because imperialism, imperialism, exists and is there, dangerous and
aggressive. The underdeveloped world exists and is there. The liberating
movement of the peoples subject to colonialism and imperialism is there,
fighting, in Angola, in Vietnam, in Latin America, in every part of the
world, and this fight demands the united efforts of the socialist camp.
It is deplorable, most deplorable, that these differences should have
arisen, and we must fight against them, because the first thing is to
unite, and what Marx said was: "Proletariats of all nations, unite!" (Much
applause) Marx and Engels fought tirelessly, indefatigably for this unity
throughout their lives, and this is what we say, our political leadership,
our party, and our people, "Proletarians of all nations, let us unite!" Let
us be united against our class enemies, against the imperialist enemies,
against the aggressors, against the warmongers.
This is the position of our party and our people. This is the judgment of
our national directorate and our people, who have gone forward united in
difficult times, in difficult circumstance,s because our people endured
difficult tests in recent days, tests of courage in the face of Kennedy's
threat, in the face of his threat to turn us into an atomic target, with
the certainty that the nerves of this people were less affected than the
nerves of the generals of the Yankee Pentagon.
There were some isolated voices of criticism. As was logical, there were
some who, confused in good faith or confused in bad faith, criticized the
national directorate of the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations on the
matter of Cuba's attitude, immediately after the crisis, on the matter of
inspection and the pirate flights. For them, apparently, we should allow
ourselves to be inspected (shouts of 'no' — Ed.), as if to hallow the right
of the imperialists to say what arms we may or may not have and to bring
this country back to the times of the Platt Amendment, when the U.S.
Government decided for us.
To accept inspection would have been to accept, to agree to having to give
an account to the Yankee imperialists of what arms we might have or not
have within our territory. (Castro's voice now rising in indignation) This
implied for us a matter of principle. It would amount to a renunciation of
our sovereignty. It would amount to consenting to having our country made
inferior among all the other states of the world; we did not consent to
this, nor shall we consent to this. (Applause) Those who think that this is
acceptable would also consider acceptable a landing without the firing of a
shot (thunderous applause), because this is what this would lead to.
It was not by this road that the revolution rose to power. It was not in
this way that the revolution was defended at Playa Giron. It was by taking
other ways, of firmness and determination to fight against the
imperialists.
Apparently these individuals thought that we should allow ourselves to be
blown up, that we should allow Yankee planes to dive down over our
antiaircraft batteries without giving orders to fire. This can never be
expected of us either because the enemy always must expect, every time he
attacks us, that there will be a fight and no backing down. (Loud prolonged
applause)
There will be some who may say, who may try to insinuate that we were
against a policy of peace. The answer is the same; we want peace with
right, with sovereignty, and with dignity. (Applause) We want peace without
giving up being revolutionaries, without giving up the revolution.
When we fought the invaders at Playa Giron, when we fought those who bombed
us, who attacked us, no one will doubt that we were defending peace. When
this people organized and decided to fight to the last man or woman against
the imperialists if they attacked us, no one can deny that we are defending
peace, because to resist aggressors is to fight for peace; to surrender to
the aggressors is the way to war or the enslavement of peoples. By
defending our sovereignty and our rights, we are defending peace.
When we speak to the Latin Americans and tell them that the objective
conditions exist for revolution, we are defending peace, because the weaker
imperialism is, the less dangerous it will be. The weaker imperialism is,
the less aggressive it will be, and the liberation, the liberation movement
of the peoples, weakens the imperialists and makes them less aggressive,
less dangerous. The fight of the peoples for their sovereignty and their
independence is the fight for peace.
We indeed consider peace the fundamental objective of humanity. Let us
fight for it, following the paths of national sovereignty, of liberation
from the exploiters and the imperialists. By fighting against imperialist
exploitation we are fighting for peace.
We are enemies of war; it is the imperialists who impose wars on humanity,
and the stronger they feel, the more dangerous they will be. Therefore each
nation which fights for its sovereignty and its independence is defending
peace. this is what we believe, we closely united Cuban revolutionaries.
Those who believe that they are going to fish in troubled waters are
mistaken. Those who believe that in the face of this desire for unity, of
the firmness and dignity of our people, they can opportunistically try to
create confusion, to cast doubt on the rectitude of the Cuban revolutionary
directorate, they are lamentably mistaken. It would show that they do not
know this people, that they do not know the virtues of our people. Those
who, taking advantage of the difficult circumstances which our country has
had to face and must continue to face, foment division are committing a
deplorable offense of treason against the revolution, and the masses will
oppose them. They will oppose the intriguers, the divisionists, and they
will follow the line of our party and the line outlined for them by the
revolutionary directorate, because they will say: "This is our line; this
is the line of our leaders, and we have faith in it." (Applause)
This will be conduct of our people, the conduct of our revolutionary
militants, who do not become discouraged, who do not fear to fight, who do
not fear difficult circumstances, whatever they may be. Here there will be
no division. Here there will be unity because we need it, because we have
the imperialist enemy in front of us who wants to destroy us, and we need
unity to resist. We need unity to win. We need unity more than ever to go
forward, and with out unity, our firmness, and our line we shall continue
to go forward facing the difficulties, facing the inconveniences, whatever
they may be.
We shall exercise our right to think for ourselves, and we shall be
consistent with our revolutionary belief, and this belief has one motto
above all: To resist the imperialist enemy, to fight the imperialist enemy,
to go forward, without a single backward step in the history of our
country, without any vacillation in the revolutionary ranks (applause), to
continue forward against the imperialists. These are and will always be our
enemies. They are and will continue to be the enemies of America.
We shall continue to go forward on the road of the revolution, on the road
of socialism, on the road of Marxism-Leninism. Homeland or death! We shall
win! (Applause)
Castro Internet Archive
|
./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1961.04.23 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h3>
We must defend our country
</h3>
<h2>
Denouncing U.S. Bay of Pigs Agression
</h2>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Written:</span> April 23, 1961
<br>
<span class="info">First Published:</span> April 24, 1961
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> Havana Domestic Service in Spanish 1830 GMT (
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>
The people know a great deal about the events which have taken
place as a result of our special reports, the newspaper accounts and the
interrogation of prisoners. The people know about the invasion, the details
of its organization, and the way in which it was crushed.
</p>
<p>
We can give you some general ideas about how their plans developed and how
ours were developed in the zone of operation. In the first place, we had
known for some time that a force was being formed to attack our country.
Since the revolution, we have been living amid a series of threats—all of
them from abroad. But there were differences in our enemies—that is,
imperialism was the only one strong enough to attack.
</p>
<p>
The aggression was indirect only in regard to the personnel. It was direct
aggression in that it came from camps of the North Americans, that North
American equipment was used, and that it included a convoy by the U.S. Navy
and the participation of the U.S. Air Force. It was a combined thing: they
used mercenaries amply supported by the navy and air force.
</p>
<p>
We were awaiting an indirect attack. But one type of indirect attack is the
type of attack made against the Arbenz government in Guatemala; it is known
that U.S. aircraft were used against him. We also thought of an indirect
attack utilizing the OAS to launch some type of collective action. And we
also were expecting a direct attack. The United States has always advocated
all three types of action.
</p>
<p>
It began to prepare immediately for direct action. But it was not able to
gather enough support in Latin America for collective action. The Mexican
Government has been very firm against intervention in Cuba. So have Quadros
and Colombia. So the United States has encountered powerful resistance
among the governments and people of Latin America in seeking to further its
desire for collective action in the OAS.
</p>
<p>
On whom could it count? Only on the most corrupt Latin American
governments. First the United States tried to work with Trujillo, and most
of the Cuban aggression came from the Dominican Republic.
</p>
<p>
Then it tried to enlist the so-called democratic governments, under the
guise of democracy, when they broke with Trujillo because, they said, he
was a dictator.
</p>
<p>
While the United States was taking action against Trujillo, it was
strengthening its ties with Somoza and Ydigoras, who are typically corrupt,
despotic, and reactionary. Those are the instruments on which the United
States can count. It cannot count on Brazil, Mexico, or any other decent
Latin American country. Its partners in this venture have been the most
reactionary and corrupt governments in Latin America, the governments of
Nicaragua and Guatemala.
</p>
<p>
We have always been in danger of direct aggression. We have been warning
about this in the United Nations: that they would find a pretext, that they
would organize some act of aggression so that they could intervene. That is
why we have followed a cautious policy in regard to Guantanamo Base.
</p>
<p>
We wish to avoid giving them a pretext for intervention. We made this known
in the United Nations. We said that we would never want to obtain the base
by force, only through international law, so that we would not provide a
pretext for direct aggression.
</p>
<h4>
Danger of World War
</h4>
<p>
Our position is that we will fight to the last man, but we do not want
direct aggression. We do not wish to suffer the destruction that aggression
would bring. If the aggression comes, it will meet the total resistance of
our people.
</p>
<p>
The danger of direct aggression could again gain momentum following this
failure. We have said that imperialism will disappear. We do not wish it to
commit suicide; we want it to die a natural death. If it dies the world
will live in peace. But it will die violently if it begins a world war.
</p>
<p>
If imperialism acts with a maximum of responsibility it will bring about a
war which it could survive only a relatively short time. As an economic
way of life, it will have to disappear through historical laws. (Applause)
We do not wish it to commit suicide by attacking us. If they attack us, we
would resist in an unbelievable manner. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
They are the ones who are bringing the world to the brink of war through
their warlike spirit, their own contradictions, and their economic problems
which cause them to provoke a series of crises in order to maintain their
war economy. Their factories run only when they are building war material.
Their regime is marching toward a crisis. It is not like our economy, which
is perfectly planned.
</p>
<p>
The economy of our country is based on an increase of 10 percent a year,
while in the United States the figure is only two percent. The U.S. economy
is managed in the interest of only a few groups; it is divorced from the
interests of the people. In war they have a cure for their crises.
</p>
<p>
They have the capacity to do all sorts of things for the benefit of their
people. But their system demands production for war, not peace. As a
result, there is extensive wasting of natural resources. Look at their
military budget. What they could do with this money for schools, industry,
homes! What good it could mean for the world!
</p>
<p>
And that is only part of the story. Some of their factories are working on
a part-time basis. How different from the Soviet Union, where everyone
works! If someone wants to build a factory in the United States, he does so
whether it is needed or not. This is the result of an unplanned economy. In
the United States, war militarizes the economy. They plan for that.
</p>
<p>
The government does not permit any monopoly to produce what they want—
they have to produce war materials. Then the government plans and controls
production—they produce fantastically. In time of war they plan, then all
the people work. They are not capable of solving the problem of
unemployment in producing for peace. Only in time of war can they resolve
their economic crisis. That is why there are groups who wish to go on a war
footing, if possible, with local wars. This has been the American policy
after World War II. With respect to our country, they have been holding
these ideas of aggression. We have been and are now facing that threat.
</p>
<p>
Concerning the type of aggression against us: How could they organize a
mercenary force against the united people, against our army and militia?
They did not think about that type of war. They thought of a frontal attack
with mercenaries and of taking over our country.
</p>
<h4>
First Step: Economic Aggression
</h4>
<p>
The first step was economic aggression—to weaken the revolution—that is
to say, they attacked on the economic front: they took away our sugar
quota. Our economy was based on one product—the export of sugar— with one
market: the United States.
</p>
<p>
When Guatemala tried to take over the United Fruit land, intervention took
place immediately. Since the days of Roosevelt, direct aggression has no
longer been used. Instead a puppet is sent. In Guatemala there is hunger
and oppression and a gentleman who dedicates himself to harboring
mercenaries to attack our country.
</p>
<p>
In our country, when reforms were initiated, a clash resulted with the
imperialists of the United States. Here they had no army directed by their
diplomats to turn against the people. Here the old army had been destroyed
and their weapons left in the hands of the people. The U.S. military
mission which had been here until the fall of Batista—when our troops
arrived in Camp Libertad were still there to see if perhaps they could
teach us, too. We told them to go home. (Laughter) I well recall I told one
of them "You taught Batista and we beat him. We don't wish to be taught by
you." (Laughter and applause).
</p>
<p>
Here they had no military organization to direct, and they found that the
interests of the government were directly opposed to the military
proposals. The Revolutionary Government has an army of the people. They
then began their economic aggression and their harrassment.
</p>
<p>
They said: Cuba depends on us economically. It is underdeveloped. Any
government from which we take the sugar quota will surely fall.
</p>
<p>
We were truly underdeveloped and our imports all came from the United
States. Our imports exceeded our exports. We then began a program of
economy but not for the poorer classes. They were not the ones who took
trips abroad and consumed luxuries—I understand that the import of cars
alone was 30 million dollars—agricultural machinery was only 5 million.
Much land was not being used. Many lived only during the few months of the
harvest, the rest of the time they piled up debts.
</p>
<p>
We began a program of lowering rents, giving land to cooperatives,
investing in programs which would give work to people. The country was
saving money, contrary to what the imperialists believed. They have a
policy of exploitation of the people. We established a policy of austerity
which affected only the social strata which lived in luxury. For their
trips abroad we only allowed them a few dollars. This austerity campaign
did not afflict the people but only the privileged ones. The revolution
imposed a program of austerity for the luxury- using class and not the
people. When they heard of the appointment of Che to the national banks
they waited for the country to fail. This did not come about.
</p>
<p>
Then, they took another step of aggression, and tried to leave us without
oil. Thanks to our agreement with the USSR, we agreed to sell the USSR
sugar in return for oil. Before that, we had had to pay for oil with
dollars. So then they decided not to refine Soviet oil. That was because
they had control of refining and exploitation of oil in other countries; it
was a real monopoly. When they learned that some oil for Cuba would come
from other sources, they refused to refine it. They thought if we had
anything against them we would be left without oil. But the refineries were
taken over, and the USSR made great efforts to give us all the oil we
needed. We got through that [U.S.] aggression thanks to the USSR. We get the oil
much more cheaply than from the U.S. monopolies, and we pay for it in
sugar, not dollars.
</p>
<p>
Faced with the revolution's success in regard to oil, they took another
step—cutting us off entirely from the U.S. market. Aggression like that
can be resisted only by a Revolutionary Government supported by the people.
When Cuba sold sugar to the U.S. market, most of the sugarmills and cane-
growing land belonged to North Americans. The Cuban workers received
miserable pay and had employment only part of the year. There was no profit
for our country; the profit was for the monopolies. When the agarian reform
went through and cooperatives were formed and year-around employment was
provided, then our people began to get profits from our economy. So then
the U.S. market was cut off in an effort to make our people yield.
</p>
<p>
The people responded with determination. The Soviet Union again, and other
socialist countries—even though they had plenty of sugar production of thier
own, made a great effort and agreed to buy four million tons of sugar from
us so the revolution could withstand the blow. The OAS, the American
system, this hemispheric system the United States talks about so much, had
a clause forbidding economic aggression. That clause said no country could
use economic pressure or aggression to gain its objectives or influence
affairs inside another country.
</p>
<p>
Economic aggression was banned expressly, and yet our country was brutally
attacked economically. Representatives of Latin American countries met at
Costa Rica, and did not condemn the aggressor; but there was a declaration
against the victim. The powerful country had violated the law against
economic aggression; but when the time came to condemn the shark, the
sardines met and condemned the other sardine. But this sardine was no
longer a sardine.
</p>
<p>
And some people ask why we distrust the OAS. How could we not distrust the
OAS? The other sardines were afraid. We got no protection from the
inter-American system. But, thanks to the USSR, China, and the other
socialist countries, we had the sale of millions of tons of sugar assured.
Our revolution could keep going.
</p>
<p>
Then they forbade the export of raw materials and parts to us. Almost all
equipment for transportation, construction, and our industries came from
the United States. So we were to be left without raw materials or parts to
keep our machinery in operation.
</p>
<p>
Not content with that, they blocked export of our molasses. Some U.S.
companies had already agreed to buy our molasses, but by using pressure,
they deprived us of millions of dollars we would have received from that.
It was not easy to sell molasses elsewhere.
</p>
<p>
It was one step after another designed to blockade us, to drive us in a
situation in which we would face shortages. The purpose was to defeat the
Revolutionary Government, which was working for the people, and return to
the old system of corruption, a system under which the monopolies got all
types of concessions and controlled the Cuban economy.
</p>
<p>
U.S. imperialism also used pressure in other countries to get them to
blockade us. In the midst of all this, the revolution was carrying out
education, reforestation, public beach programs, and so forth.
</p>
<h4>
Second Step: Terrorism
</h4>
<p>
Then they turned to backing terrorists and saboteurs. A campaign to destroy
our stores and factories began. Now that the people own the installations,
sabotage comes. When the wealthy owned them, there was no sabotage. But now
that people own the establishments, the CIA goes into action. There is a
sabotage campaign.
</p>
<p>
They organize sabotage against our wealth, they burn cane. They began to
send planes over to burn it, but there was so much scandal that they
changed tactics. They began to stir up counterrevolutionary groups, using
formed soldiers, the worst elements. The worst were those who directed the
second Escambray front. They sent them all kinds of arms. You have seen the
display of weapons in the Civil Plaza. These worms, in a few weeks, got a
thousand weapons, while we, in our battles, had to acquire arms one by one.
They sent arms by air, by sea. And we are [Unreadable text] seizing these
arms.
</p>
<p>
Aggression began economically, with maneuvers in sugar and an economic
blockade; then came sabotage and counterrevolutionary guerrillas.
</p>
<p>
The United States has no right to meddle in our domestic affairs. We do not
speak English and we do not chew gum. We have a different tradition, a
different culture, our own way of thinking. Our national characteristics
are different. We have no borders with anybody. Our frontiers are the sea,
very clearly defined.
</p>
<p>
Only because it is a big country did the United States take the right to
commit that series of brutalities against Cuba. How can the crooked
politicians and the exploiters have more rights than the people? What right
does a rich country have to impose its yoke on our people? Only because
they have might and no scruples; they do not respect international rules.
They should have been ashamed to be engaged in this battle of Goliath
against David—and to lose it besides.
</p>
<p>
What did we have against their might? First, we had a sense of dignity and
courage. We were not afraid. That is a big thing. Then, we were determined
to resist. No matter what they throw against us, we will fight. Our men
know how to die, and they have shown it during the past few days.
</p>
<h4>
Next Step: Direct Aggression
</h4>
<p>
So far they have gone from aggression to aggression without stopping to
think. Only direct aggression is left. Are we going to be afraid? No!
(Applause) Imperialism's soldiers are blood and flesh too, and bullets go
through them. Let them know they will meet with serious resistance. That
may be enough to make them reflect a little. Our people—men, women, and
children—must maintain that spirit. If they have no weapons they can take
the place of somebody who falls. Have no fear; be calm! After all, the
result of aggression against Cuba will be the start of a conflagration of
incalculable consequences, and they will be affected too. It will no longer
be a matter of them having a feast with us. They will get as much <!-- was: good --> as they
give.
</p>
<p>
To resist is to meet the enemy and fight him with whatever is at hand. To
resist is to prepare our spirit, our minds for what comes, for the bombs
they drop, because in such a case they would have superiority in the air.
We would have to dig many trenches to defend ourselves. They would not have
a bomb for each man in a hole.
</p>
<p>
We would most strongly defend our capital from house to house, as we have
said before, from position to position—above all, without retreat. We
would mine the fields. We would kill whatever parachutists fell in our zone
of control.
</p>
<p>
If they think they can take our territory by surprise, they are mistaken.
They would encounter firm resistance here and would awaken an unprecedented
feeling of solidarity with us throughout the world. The attack by the
mercenaries had demonstrated this. I am certain that such aggression would
be suicide for them. Of that I am completely sure!
</p>
<p>
I am sure that we would resist in the same spirit as the men who have
fallen up to today. In the fight in the Sierra Maestra and in the fight
with the mercenaries, many of our friends have fallen. They paid their
final tribute. They did their part. We all have the same obligation to act
with that spirit of duty, with that feeling of loyalty. None of us has the
right to save his life. That is to say, that our decision is firm. To
resist regardless of cost, in all ways. That is what we have to do under
the circumstances imposed on us through no fault of ours. We feel proud of
our position. We used to be the last card in the deck, now we are among the
first.
</p>
<p>
Throughout the whole world there are demonstrations in support of us and
against the United States. They are surprised because in less than 72 hours
we have destroyed the invasion which was prepared by the brains of the
Pentagon with all the tactics and preparations of a war. The leaders of the
invasion had great faith in the plans on which the United States placed its
prestige, and out of which they came without prestige. Their plans were
defeated. This they cannot accept. They fell into this ridiculous situation
through their own fault. They cannot stand that consequence, so now they
threaten with direct intervention, because they could not win. Well, who
doubts that if they were capable of making such a mistake, they may not
make a greater mistake? Who doubts that if they were capable of making this
mistake, they will not make another great mistake? We think that they are
capable of making even a greater mistake which will cost them not only
their prestige, but will cost them their very existence as well; and no one
knows what it may cost the world. The fact is that it is they who are
threatening the entire world. They are the gangsters who are threatening
the world peace, threatening the world with a war, threatening Cuba with
intervention, and threatening Latin America. What can Latin America say to
these threats? What they want is to bring back the right of intervention.
</p>
<p>
Our duty as a soldier in the trenches is to defend our country. All our
spirit, all our thoughts, all our energy should be concentrated on this
history-making period. We must defend our country. We defend the peace of
the entire world, because our defense of our country may perhaps make these
gentlemen stop and reflect. If they believe that we will run, they are
wrong—nobody ran. Our firm decision is that before they subdue us, they
will have to erase us from the map. Resistance will be strong in all
sectors, in the fields if they take the cities. Let's see how they take
Havana for example. We must look at all these things objectively because of
our experience—we cannot go to sleep and rest on our laurels, because
imperialism has received a rude blow and it is like an infuriated beast.
Let us see if they reconsider, this gentleman we have there now, let us see
how he acts.
</p>
<h4>
Kennedy Intensifies U.S. Aggression
</h4>
<p>
We awaited his inauguration to see if he would do something different. We
did not believe that he would continue with the errors of the previous
administration. He himself said: "Let us begin anew." He did not begin
anew; he began as of old. He not only followed the policy of Eisenhower,
but he was even more aggressive against us. This gentleman has brought this
problem on himself, through his lack of commonsense. He has earned this
discredit all by himself. While we waited for him to show what policy he
was going to follow, he increased the attacks against us. He increased in
intensity the aggression against our country.
</p>
<p>
"Now he must do what he has to do: to recognize his mistake. What he has to
do is to fire Mr. Allen Dulles. Because after a government has been placed
before the world in such a ridiculous position, as the Yankee intelligence
service has placed the U.S. Government, it is the least he can do now. What
he has to do is to fire the chief of the intelligence service. You know why
he should fire him? Well, because he `shipped' him too." (porque tambien lo
embarco—Sp.) (Laughter)
</p>
<p>
What was one of the most ridiculous things that ever happened in the
history of the United States, and they brought it on themselves. All we did
was defend ourselves. It is clear that to please Mr. Kennedy and Allen
Dulles we could not let ourselves be beaten by mercenaries. What did we do?
We threw them into the ocean. (Laughter) This invasion organized by the
United States was a species of Normandy which did not end in a Dunkirk
because they did not get off the beaches.
</p>
<h4>
Return to Trenches
</h4>
<p>
That is what happened and that is why they are now furious and threatening.
What are we going to do before the threats of Mr. Kennedy? Be frightened?
No, we smile, because there are many thousands of men in the trenches with
weapons in their hands. Once again we must take to the trenches. We have no
other alternative—once more we must wait to see what happens in this
crisis.
</p>
<p>
The defense of our country is what I wish to speak of first today. The
expedition should strive to warn us that these people make many mistakes
and that they are capable of committing the greatest imbecilities. As far
as we are concerned, we cannot stop them from meddling. We do all we can to
prevent it by arming ourselves and preparing for defense so that they may
reconsider. But if they make a mistake, we cannot stop them from making it.
Our duty is to maintain our firm position and be ready to defend ourselves
without alarm, without panic, just as our many comrades went to fight and
die. Nobody has the right to preserve his life. We all have the same
obligations. We must keep this thought ever-present, especially right now
when we have just finished a bloody battle where a great number of friends
and brothers of the people have fallen. Of that we want to speak first.
</p>
<p>
The lackeys that took part in this Yankee-planned invasion evidently had
confidence that the plan would not fail. They were so confident that they
even sent their sons. Now they are seeking for clemency for the prisoners.
Let them have clemency of the victims of their bombing. Let them cease
sending arms to Cuba; arms to murder and kill, and the send of explosives
and incendiaries. Let all this cease if they wish clemency.
</p>
<p>
Instead of defending the mercenaries, and there are some who do, they
should be defending the victims of aggression. That is the situation.
</p>
<h4>
Invasion Analyzed
</h4>
<p>
Let us now analyze the plan of attack by imperialism against Cuba, and why
they landed where they did, and why they did not land on the other side. In
the first place they exaggerated the number of mercenaries. Instead of four
or five thousand they did not have anywhere near that number. What they
landed here was the group they had in Guatemala.
</p>
<p>
They have another in Caimanera, but it is smaller and not armed as well.
The group that had the most arms, were better trained, and had air cover,
was the Guatemala group. At first it appeared that the intentions were to
take the Isle of Pines, to take it and free the war criminals imprisoned
there and add them to their ranks and to take a piece of national territory
and then give us the problem of dislodging them.
</p>
<p>
They were to direct their efforts toward gaining a piece of territory to
establish there a provisional government from which to operate. The
establishment of a base on our territory would have given them a base to
bomb our country and would have created a difficult situation for us. We
had to stop this at all costs. The Isle of Pines was ideal for the
establishment of a base on our territory which would open the road for aid
on territory of Cuba and make unnecessary to use of other countries to
launch aggressions. But here is what we did. We filled the Isle of Pines
with tens of batallions of cannon and tanks, we posted a force in the Isle
of Pines that make the Isle of Pines invulnerable. A huge army would have
been needed to attack it. They could not count on Escambray after it had
been cleaned out. Would imperialism land mercenaries with just one combat
force, or would it split its force into several groups, that was the
problem if faced. Would it try to introduce groups and send them arms from
the air, to establish many counterrevolutionary networks. We took measures
to counter multiple landings, concentrating on logical points, in case they
divided force into many groups. We concentrated especially on places giving
access to the mountains.
</p>
<p>
A few days before the aggression, many U.S. papers carried the report that
imperialism had decided on splitting up the force and opening different
fronts in Cuba. That could be true. It could also be true that the rumors
were intended to throw us off the track. Events later showed that they had
decided to send the whole force together and seize a point of our
territory. Among the rumors in the U.S. press, it was said that it was
risky to send all forces against one point and expose them to a crushing
defeat and strengthening the revolution.
</p>
<p>
If they had split up their forces in many landings, they could have used it
for much propaganda. A defeat in that case would have been diluted. I
believe they could have chosen either tactic. We trusted that we would
defeat them wherever, they came. For us it would be best if they all came
against the same point but we did not think they would do this. They chose
something that offered more but also was much more risky for morale and
prestige. They should have been worried about the blow to the morale of
imperialism and counterrevolution. For us it was better for them to come in
one force, but we thought they would avoid that mistake. But we were still
ready with adequate force if they all came together.
</p>
<h4>
Preparations for Invasion
</h4>
<p>
A series of facts showed that the time was near: statements; formation of
council of worms in exile; the famous White Book from Kennedy. A whole
series of political facts and statements plus the indications in the U.S.
press, including discrepancies about possible tactics. We heard that the
last shipments of arms and men had gone to Guatemala. We increased our
vigilance. On 15 April, because of a report from Oriente, we had not gone
to bed. Everything indicated the attack might come at any minute; we got
news from Oriente that many groups of ships were off Baracoa. Our forces
were put on the alert.
</p>
<p>
It was necessary to be very careful because American ships often came close
to the coast trying to cause trouble. One American ship without any flag
was very close to the coast. It was detained by our craft. Then U.S. planes
came, apparently to provoke an incident, so our vessel was ordered to let
the ship proceed to avoid an incident. In connection with the mercenary
landing, Americans carried out some ship movements to throw us off the
track. The Baracoa battalion was waiting for a landing so there could be no
doubt as to what kind of a ship it was. But in the end there was no landing
at Baracoa. We still did not know what group of ships that was. It may have
been mercenaries who never landed, it may have been U.S. ships; anyway,
nothing happened.
</p>
<p>
We heard bombs and ack-ack. We saw it was a bombing raid in Ciudad
Libertad. We decided it was definite that the aggression was beginning. We
tried to get in touch with San Antonio to get our planes up and found that
a simultaneous attack was going on there; and Santiago was attacked too.
</p>
<p>
We had taken measures at the air base. We have few planes and even fewer
pilots. We were taking care of those planes. We wanted to be sure they
would not be destroyed. So our planes were kept scattered. At San Antonio
they managed to destroy one transport plane and one fighter; that was not
much. At (Santiago?) they destroyed one fighter and several civilian
planes.
</p>
<p>
They had hoped to destroy our air force. Imperialist aggressions are
characterized by an attack on aviation to immobilize it. Our force is
small, but we expect to make good use of those few planes and pilots.
</p>
<p>
At San Antonio the ack-ack reaction was formidable. Planes were driven off
and our planes took off in pursuit of the enemy till he was on way to
Miami. The first step of aggression—to destroy our planes on the
ground—had failed. We reinforced our ack-ack but they did not come back.
They had attacked with six planes. Some did not get back, others were
riddled. Our air force was intact and ready. And our pilots wanted revenge.
That was Saturday. All forces were alerted. Sunday the funeral services
were held, our own planes kept guard.
</p>
<p>
An ammo truck has been set afire by the attack but the people kept calm.
They drove the other trucks away while the ammo on the first one was
exploding. (Applause) Of course no trucks with ammo should have been there
but those things do happen. We were alert all day Sunday. We slept in the
afternoon and not at night. We figured that the air raid was not just
harrassment but had a military objective, to destroy our air force.
Therefore we figured the aggression would come soon. We reinforced our
measures after the air attack.
</p>
<h4>
Invasion Comes
</h4>
<p>
Why was this attack made two days early? Tactically speaking it was an
error because we had a chance to take some measures. We mobilized all
combat units. On Sunday nothing happened. On Monday morning at 3:15 I was
informed that fighting was going on at Playa Giron and Playa Larga. We
confirmed this. Then came the report that an invading force was bombing
heavily with bazookas and cannons at the two beaches. There was no doubt of
a landing attempt at that point—one supported by heavy equipment.
Resistance began. Results of the attacks came. The microwave system was cut
off. Communications were then cut off. This was the situation.
</p>
<p>
Here is Cochino Bay and here is Cienfugeos. There was a Cienfugeos
battalion at the Central Australia. These were the first to meet the
aggression. Here is Playa Larga and here Playa Giron. Here is Zapata
Peninsula. This piece of impassible swamp land was the sole communication
available to peasants. This area bothered the revolution most.
</p>
<p>
(Editor's Note: At this point Castro discusses for approximately six
minutes the Zapata swamp area and tells what the revolution has done for it
and its people, the building of schools, roads, and medical facilities. He
then spends about five minutes giving in some detail a list of the weapons
captured in this area, apparently reading from a report. Then during a
period of bad reception of approximately 10 minutes, he discusses the
invader miscalculations of the Castro air force and, in some detail, the
battle plans and the tactical situation during the early stages of the
invasion. During much of the time Castro seems to be referring to maps.)
</p>
<p>
That was the plan. They put two battalions here, and five further back;
here were four and six, that was very early in the morning. Then planes
were to drop paratroops. They began landing very well. But at Playa Larga
and Playa Giron they met resistance. They began losing time. They got two
battalions ashore. Paratroops began operating. As they dropped paratroops
at these spots, our troops were caught between the main force and the
paratroops. Our first measures were to alert all commands and the air
force. Orders were given to disperse planes and have ack-ack ready if an
attack was made on the airstrip.
</p>
<p>
We had planes ready for defense against air attack. The battalion at the
Australia central was ordered to Playa Larga to fight. It was an infantry
battalion recently formed. At the same time an order given to mobilize
Matanzas militia battalion and advance to here. Orders were given to other
forces. We had two battalions in Las Villas. The problem first of all was
to keep a beachhead here. The main thing was to keep a bit of Playa Larga
here, on this side. The Cienfuegos battalion got there before dawn and
began fighting. But then came time another group of our forces was fighting
at Cayo Ramona. The air force was ordered to take before dawn and attack
all ships off Giron and Playa Larga. Our battalion prevented battalion five
from getting ashore. Our planes began attacking the ships and doing much
damage. Meanwhile our battalion was facing strong fire, and was taken from
the rear. It fell back fighting the paratroops. A battalion was sent from
Matanzas to reinforce it.
</p>
<p>
Enemy planes were painted with revolutionary armed forces insignia. They
attacked our advancing troops. We were most interested in keeping this bit
of territory. When we saw paratroops dropped we realized that the attack
would come against a single point and any other move would be for
diversion. Mobilization of two combat columns of the army was ordered; also
of a company of tanks and anti-tank batteries and mortars. Since they
controlled the air, the first day our forces had to wait till night to
advance. Our planes could not shift from attacking the ships.
</p>
<p>
Our planes continued to attack the ships. They did wonderful work. Besides
attacking the ships, they fought with enemy planes. But they kept hammering
the ships until not much was left of their fleet. We lost two planes the
first morning. Five enemy planes were downed. Four ships were sunk. That
was the first day.
</p>
<p>
They had an unexpected surprise. They had thought our air force was knocked
out, and so the first day ended. They lost more than half of their ships.
Our pilots acted with special courage. What they did was incredible.
</p>
<p>
The militia attacked the Playa Larga position. The battalion had only a
narrow road to attack from. On the first day they deployed forces. They
were attacking with planes here, and here. We tried to approach the enemy
as close as possible under B-26 fire. The battle was accompanied by tanks.
So we attacked them all day without respite, fighting constantly. An early
morning tank attack came from the same beach with antiair fire support. One
of our tanks was damaged. An antitank battery hit us and also another
entrenched tank. The goal was to take Playa Larga beach.
</p>
<h4>
U.S. Sabre Jets Involved
</h4>
<p>
They then began to flee. Here a tank surrendered. At dawn on 19 April the
planes bombed the Australia central. On the 19th we had antiaircraft in
position. This column, when in movement, was attached by American Sabre
planes. They (the invaders—Ed.) had B-26's, not jets. Then, this column of
ours, when it advanced between Playa Larga and Playa Giron during the
afternoon, suffered many casualties under attack of American Sabres. Those
planes were at high altitudes, and on that day when it was already dusk on
the 18th, they attacked our column, with Sabres, with jet planes, and they
caused many casualties in the column. That was one of the cases in which
American planes participated directly. They attacked the column coming from
Playa Larga to Giron. At dawn on 19 April a plane attacked the Australia
central and was downed and then two more planes. Our planes downed more
B-26's. We downed 10 planes during the entire fighting. On the 19th none of
their planes returned and we did not see the enemy anymore.
</p>
<h4>
List of Casualties
</h4>
<p>
On 19 April there were losses, as they were well entrenched. Our people had
to fight facing heavy mortar fire and anti-tank guns. There were 87 dead on
our side and 250 wounded. That means that our combat units paid a high
price in lives while they were on the offensive and that was due to the
fact that we were on the offensive constantly until the last position was
taken. It is possible that the dead on our side will amount to 100. That
indicates the heroism of our troops. They fought constantly without relief
against an enemy with relief and more planes than we had. (Castro confers
with one of his aides on figures—Ed.) An exact figure cannot yet be given
on losses because many of those who came in ships were drowned. According
to date here 88. One cannot count those lost in bombing and sunken ships.
This will be possible only after identification and a check of personnel
lost from each unit. There are some 450 prisoners. We cannot study all data
of units and determine how many men were in ships which were sunk. One
cannot give an exact figure on that. As I said, one of the basic principles
of battle was the courage with which our men fought. It is one thing to
defend a position and another to attack without protection under heavy
fire. Of course, under such circumstances the losses increase. In the
future, we shall be able to have more officers, Battalion chiefs are
learning more. The training of units and officers will be better. All kinds
of personnel—mortar, shell, cannon—will be specialized. The fact have
shown us the necessity of using our knowledge to defend the revolution. The
units have acquired considerable experience.
</p>
<h4>
Decorations and Pensions
</h4>
<p>
The government plans to create a decoration—to decorate as "Hero of the
Revolution" those who were outstanding for valor; and another type of
decoration to reward acts of valor in battle. Meanwhile the government will
pass a pension law to give a pension to kin of militia and soldiers who
fell in this fighting. The least the revolution can do for those who fell
is to protect their families who depended on them. This will be done as
soon as the cabinet meets.
</p>
<p>
If our troops had had more experience, we could have had fewer casualties.
When imperialism found what had happened, it had no army left here. The
enemy is still dumbfounded.
</p>
<h4>
Counterrevolutionary Suspects Rounded Up
</h4>
<p>
The committees for defense of the revolution acted too. There was a needed
to arrest anybody who for one reason or another might help the
counterrevolution. That kind of measure always entails some injustice, but
that is inevitable. The country faced aggression and had to take any
measure for defense. Those persons will be released unless there are
charges against them other than that they were considered suspect. Those
who have counterrevolutionary activity proven against them or are well
known will continue to be held. Since yesterday, those arrested as a
precaution have started being released. This does not mean that the danger
is past. We think the danger is great, especially of direct aggression from
the United States.
</p>
<p>
At Mesa, Arizona, Senator Goldwater said he had recommended direct
intervention if all else failed. That is the idea of right that this ultra
has. What respect for sovereignty of other countries and international law!
How calmly they speak of direct military intervention. They respect
nothing. And they talk as if it were so easy. They do not learn. They
should think of the sorrow military aggression causes—and all to restore
privileges here. What need was there to bring this bloodshed to our
country? What need to threaten us with intervention? They are so
irresponsible that after causing bloodshed here, they threaten with more
intervention. The reply is our determination to resist; and if they attack,
it will be the end of imperialism. Better to die than live under the yoke
of those gentlemen.
</p>
<h4>
First Imperialist Defeat in America
</h4>
<p>
Glorious death fighting to defeat imperialism deserves a monument. There
should be a big monument in Zapata swamps with the names of the fallen on
it, to tell the world that on that day Zapata imperialism sustained its
first great defeat in America. Precious lives were given in this battle.
The militia performed countless feats of prowess. The people defended their
land, honor, rights. They have earned the admiration of the world and
prestige. They waged a battle for peace.
</p>
<p>
Just think, during these past days the literacy campaign was not halted;
the lifestock fair is opening; the Conrado Benitez literacy brigade is
about to set forth. This work did not stop in the midst of tension. This
shows the stuff the revolution is made of.
</p>
<p>
The comrades who fell saved tens of thousands of lives. Their service to
the nation is incalculable. The pilots who fought so steadily and eagerly
have created the air force. I am sure no air force ever did before what
they have done. We believe 17 April should be made Cuban revolutionary air
force day.
</p>
<p>
Mansfield said the Cuban crisis is very grave. The Vermont senator said
Cuba is a permanent threat to the hemisphere. If that means they will
invade Cuba, nobody here is frightened at all. We will give them a great
reception. The might of an empire cannot go as far as the dignity of the
people. It will collapse when it runs into the will of the people.
</p>
<h4>
Latin American War
</h4>
<p>
It is regrettable that U.S. leaders make so many mistakes, such as this
one. Why did the U.S. Government need to make itself so ridiculous? It
calculated a lot but it calculated badly. In Latin America, there will be
war by all who support our revolution. Latin American forces would have a
hard time to protect U.S. ambassadors. They should reflect on that. It is
too bad they are playing with the idea of attacking us. Such a
mistake—nobody knows where it would end. It is too bad the world has to be
exposed to the mistakes of those men who know nothing about politics.
</p>
<p>
Kennedy's speeches and his threats are similar to Hitler's. Hitler
threatened the small neighboring countries, and Kennedy is threatening Cuba
and is saying that he will intervene. He says that his patience is coming
to an end. Well, what about our patience, with all the things we have had
to endure? In attacking Cuba, they shall unmask themselves more and arouse
more revolutionary spirit in Latin America and they will only increase
their own future worries. We want them to leave us alone. We want to live
in peace with our revolution without losing any more sons. They should stop
supplying the counterrevolutionaries with weapons. We will simply have to
use a heavy hand. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
The imperialist powers use the method of surprise attacks, the same method
of Hitler and Mussolini. We wish they would reconsider things, take a cold
or a hot shower, anything. Let humanity, let history, end a system which is
outdated now. Imperialism must pass just as feudalism did, just as slavery
did.
</p>
<p>
The wars of 1914 and 1940's were bad. Nazism didn't save itself. The forces
in the world in favor of peace are great. They know history is with them.
They need not fight against history to preserve their system and
privileges. It will be a sorry day for the world if those gentlemen are not
able to reconsider. This is the question we must consider quietly. Cuba is
part of the world today and there can be no discussion with Cuba that do
not effect the world. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
We shall keep all the revolutionary forces mobilized and we shall plan for
the May Day celebrations and we shall work for the victory of the
revolution. We shall prepare ourselves to make the necessary sacrifices.
The people have tasted victory. Victory is based upon sacrifices, on the
basis of the 87 who died to guarantee the future of the country. They
sacrificed themselves for the rest, for the independence and sovereignty of
the nation and to obtain a better nation. This joy of today we owe it to
those who fell and we hope that the future generations will enjoy their
lives for today's sacrifices.
</p>
<p>
The first prisoner, (Anzon Bayon?) said he was in training for two months
in Guatemala under American instructors and then went to Nicaragua but was
there only one day. He said that the situation in Cuba was pictured as
intolerable.
</p>
<p>
The second prisoner, whose name was not heard, said he was trained at the
Helvetia Ranch in Guatemala, that he saw the Guatemalan minister of war at
the Retalhuleu base in November and that President Ydigoras visited the
camp in December. When asked if he had joined or enlisted in Miami, he
replied, "In Mexico."
</p>
<p>
Questioned about the nationality of two destroyers which the prisoner said
served as an escort, he replied;
</p>
<p>
"They came in the area of the straits between Caiman Grande and Jamaica. I
could see in the distance that two destroyers escorted us. I could see the
number on one of them that came more to the North. The number was 507."
</p>
<p>
Question: "Did you understand what I asked about the destroyer?"
</p>
<p>
Answer: "It was of North American nationality. The destroyer accompanied us
from Caiman strait and Jamaica up to very near the Playa Giron."
</p>
<p>
Question: "What idea did you and those who were with you have about the
Cuban situation?"
</p>
<p>
Answer: "Our ideas were principally from information media we had from
(here?). We had bulletin board notices at the brigade headquarters, a
series of notes headed News about Cuba: That the militia was discontented;
that there was friction between the army and the militia, very great
friction—I do not have to tell you that that was not true; that the people
were discontented with the government, with the economic measures—the
propaganda was constant. They emphasized that the investigation services of
the government were...
</p>
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Castro Internet Archive
We must defend our country
Denouncing U.S. Bay of Pigs Agression
Written: April 23, 1961
First Published: April 24, 1961
Source: Havana Domestic Service in Spanish 1830 GMT (
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
The people know a great deal about the events which have taken
place as a result of our special reports, the newspaper accounts and the
interrogation of prisoners. The people know about the invasion, the details
of its organization, and the way in which it was crushed.
We can give you some general ideas about how their plans developed and how
ours were developed in the zone of operation. In the first place, we had
known for some time that a force was being formed to attack our country.
Since the revolution, we have been living amid a series of threats—all of
them from abroad. But there were differences in our enemies—that is,
imperialism was the only one strong enough to attack.
The aggression was indirect only in regard to the personnel. It was direct
aggression in that it came from camps of the North Americans, that North
American equipment was used, and that it included a convoy by the U.S. Navy
and the participation of the U.S. Air Force. It was a combined thing: they
used mercenaries amply supported by the navy and air force.
We were awaiting an indirect attack. But one type of indirect attack is the
type of attack made against the Arbenz government in Guatemala; it is known
that U.S. aircraft were used against him. We also thought of an indirect
attack utilizing the OAS to launch some type of collective action. And we
also were expecting a direct attack. The United States has always advocated
all three types of action.
It began to prepare immediately for direct action. But it was not able to
gather enough support in Latin America for collective action. The Mexican
Government has been very firm against intervention in Cuba. So have Quadros
and Colombia. So the United States has encountered powerful resistance
among the governments and people of Latin America in seeking to further its
desire for collective action in the OAS.
On whom could it count? Only on the most corrupt Latin American
governments. First the United States tried to work with Trujillo, and most
of the Cuban aggression came from the Dominican Republic.
Then it tried to enlist the so-called democratic governments, under the
guise of democracy, when they broke with Trujillo because, they said, he
was a dictator.
While the United States was taking action against Trujillo, it was
strengthening its ties with Somoza and Ydigoras, who are typically corrupt,
despotic, and reactionary. Those are the instruments on which the United
States can count. It cannot count on Brazil, Mexico, or any other decent
Latin American country. Its partners in this venture have been the most
reactionary and corrupt governments in Latin America, the governments of
Nicaragua and Guatemala.
We have always been in danger of direct aggression. We have been warning
about this in the United Nations: that they would find a pretext, that they
would organize some act of aggression so that they could intervene. That is
why we have followed a cautious policy in regard to Guantanamo Base.
We wish to avoid giving them a pretext for intervention. We made this known
in the United Nations. We said that we would never want to obtain the base
by force, only through international law, so that we would not provide a
pretext for direct aggression.
Danger of World War
Our position is that we will fight to the last man, but we do not want
direct aggression. We do not wish to suffer the destruction that aggression
would bring. If the aggression comes, it will meet the total resistance of
our people.
The danger of direct aggression could again gain momentum following this
failure. We have said that imperialism will disappear. We do not wish it to
commit suicide; we want it to die a natural death. If it dies the world
will live in peace. But it will die violently if it begins a world war.
If imperialism acts with a maximum of responsibility it will bring about a
war which it could survive only a relatively short time. As an economic
way of life, it will have to disappear through historical laws. (Applause)
We do not wish it to commit suicide by attacking us. If they attack us, we
would resist in an unbelievable manner. (Applause)
They are the ones who are bringing the world to the brink of war through
their warlike spirit, their own contradictions, and their economic problems
which cause them to provoke a series of crises in order to maintain their
war economy. Their factories run only when they are building war material.
Their regime is marching toward a crisis. It is not like our economy, which
is perfectly planned.
The economy of our country is based on an increase of 10 percent a year,
while in the United States the figure is only two percent. The U.S. economy
is managed in the interest of only a few groups; it is divorced from the
interests of the people. In war they have a cure for their crises.
They have the capacity to do all sorts of things for the benefit of their
people. But their system demands production for war, not peace. As a
result, there is extensive wasting of natural resources. Look at their
military budget. What they could do with this money for schools, industry,
homes! What good it could mean for the world!
And that is only part of the story. Some of their factories are working on
a part-time basis. How different from the Soviet Union, where everyone
works! If someone wants to build a factory in the United States, he does so
whether it is needed or not. This is the result of an unplanned economy. In
the United States, war militarizes the economy. They plan for that.
The government does not permit any monopoly to produce what they want—
they have to produce war materials. Then the government plans and controls
production—they produce fantastically. In time of war they plan, then all
the people work. They are not capable of solving the problem of
unemployment in producing for peace. Only in time of war can they resolve
their economic crisis. That is why there are groups who wish to go on a war
footing, if possible, with local wars. This has been the American policy
after World War II. With respect to our country, they have been holding
these ideas of aggression. We have been and are now facing that threat.
Concerning the type of aggression against us: How could they organize a
mercenary force against the united people, against our army and militia?
They did not think about that type of war. They thought of a frontal attack
with mercenaries and of taking over our country.
First Step: Economic Aggression
The first step was economic aggression—to weaken the revolution—that is
to say, they attacked on the economic front: they took away our sugar
quota. Our economy was based on one product—the export of sugar— with one
market: the United States.
When Guatemala tried to take over the United Fruit land, intervention took
place immediately. Since the days of Roosevelt, direct aggression has no
longer been used. Instead a puppet is sent. In Guatemala there is hunger
and oppression and a gentleman who dedicates himself to harboring
mercenaries to attack our country.
In our country, when reforms were initiated, a clash resulted with the
imperialists of the United States. Here they had no army directed by their
diplomats to turn against the people. Here the old army had been destroyed
and their weapons left in the hands of the people. The U.S. military
mission which had been here until the fall of Batista—when our troops
arrived in Camp Libertad were still there to see if perhaps they could
teach us, too. We told them to go home. (Laughter) I well recall I told one
of them "You taught Batista and we beat him. We don't wish to be taught by
you." (Laughter and applause).
Here they had no military organization to direct, and they found that the
interests of the government were directly opposed to the military
proposals. The Revolutionary Government has an army of the people. They
then began their economic aggression and their harrassment.
They said: Cuba depends on us economically. It is underdeveloped. Any
government from which we take the sugar quota will surely fall.
We were truly underdeveloped and our imports all came from the United
States. Our imports exceeded our exports. We then began a program of
economy but not for the poorer classes. They were not the ones who took
trips abroad and consumed luxuries—I understand that the import of cars
alone was 30 million dollars—agricultural machinery was only 5 million.
Much land was not being used. Many lived only during the few months of the
harvest, the rest of the time they piled up debts.
We began a program of lowering rents, giving land to cooperatives,
investing in programs which would give work to people. The country was
saving money, contrary to what the imperialists believed. They have a
policy of exploitation of the people. We established a policy of austerity
which affected only the social strata which lived in luxury. For their
trips abroad we only allowed them a few dollars. This austerity campaign
did not afflict the people but only the privileged ones. The revolution
imposed a program of austerity for the luxury- using class and not the
people. When they heard of the appointment of Che to the national banks
they waited for the country to fail. This did not come about.
Then, they took another step of aggression, and tried to leave us without
oil. Thanks to our agreement with the USSR, we agreed to sell the USSR
sugar in return for oil. Before that, we had had to pay for oil with
dollars. So then they decided not to refine Soviet oil. That was because
they had control of refining and exploitation of oil in other countries; it
was a real monopoly. When they learned that some oil for Cuba would come
from other sources, they refused to refine it. They thought if we had
anything against them we would be left without oil. But the refineries were
taken over, and the USSR made great efforts to give us all the oil we
needed. We got through that [U.S.] aggression thanks to the USSR. We get the oil
much more cheaply than from the U.S. monopolies, and we pay for it in
sugar, not dollars.
Faced with the revolution's success in regard to oil, they took another
step—cutting us off entirely from the U.S. market. Aggression like that
can be resisted only by a Revolutionary Government supported by the people.
When Cuba sold sugar to the U.S. market, most of the sugarmills and cane-
growing land belonged to North Americans. The Cuban workers received
miserable pay and had employment only part of the year. There was no profit
for our country; the profit was for the monopolies. When the agarian reform
went through and cooperatives were formed and year-around employment was
provided, then our people began to get profits from our economy. So then
the U.S. market was cut off in an effort to make our people yield.
The people responded with determination. The Soviet Union again, and other
socialist countries—even though they had plenty of sugar production of thier
own, made a great effort and agreed to buy four million tons of sugar from
us so the revolution could withstand the blow. The OAS, the American
system, this hemispheric system the United States talks about so much, had
a clause forbidding economic aggression. That clause said no country could
use economic pressure or aggression to gain its objectives or influence
affairs inside another country.
Economic aggression was banned expressly, and yet our country was brutally
attacked economically. Representatives of Latin American countries met at
Costa Rica, and did not condemn the aggressor; but there was a declaration
against the victim. The powerful country had violated the law against
economic aggression; but when the time came to condemn the shark, the
sardines met and condemned the other sardine. But this sardine was no
longer a sardine.
And some people ask why we distrust the OAS. How could we not distrust the
OAS? The other sardines were afraid. We got no protection from the
inter-American system. But, thanks to the USSR, China, and the other
socialist countries, we had the sale of millions of tons of sugar assured.
Our revolution could keep going.
Then they forbade the export of raw materials and parts to us. Almost all
equipment for transportation, construction, and our industries came from
the United States. So we were to be left without raw materials or parts to
keep our machinery in operation.
Not content with that, they blocked export of our molasses. Some U.S.
companies had already agreed to buy our molasses, but by using pressure,
they deprived us of millions of dollars we would have received from that.
It was not easy to sell molasses elsewhere.
It was one step after another designed to blockade us, to drive us in a
situation in which we would face shortages. The purpose was to defeat the
Revolutionary Government, which was working for the people, and return to
the old system of corruption, a system under which the monopolies got all
types of concessions and controlled the Cuban economy.
U.S. imperialism also used pressure in other countries to get them to
blockade us. In the midst of all this, the revolution was carrying out
education, reforestation, public beach programs, and so forth.
Second Step: Terrorism
Then they turned to backing terrorists and saboteurs. A campaign to destroy
our stores and factories began. Now that the people own the installations,
sabotage comes. When the wealthy owned them, there was no sabotage. But now
that people own the establishments, the CIA goes into action. There is a
sabotage campaign.
They organize sabotage against our wealth, they burn cane. They began to
send planes over to burn it, but there was so much scandal that they
changed tactics. They began to stir up counterrevolutionary groups, using
formed soldiers, the worst elements. The worst were those who directed the
second Escambray front. They sent them all kinds of arms. You have seen the
display of weapons in the Civil Plaza. These worms, in a few weeks, got a
thousand weapons, while we, in our battles, had to acquire arms one by one.
They sent arms by air, by sea. And we are [Unreadable text] seizing these
arms.
Aggression began economically, with maneuvers in sugar and an economic
blockade; then came sabotage and counterrevolutionary guerrillas.
The United States has no right to meddle in our domestic affairs. We do not
speak English and we do not chew gum. We have a different tradition, a
different culture, our own way of thinking. Our national characteristics
are different. We have no borders with anybody. Our frontiers are the sea,
very clearly defined.
Only because it is a big country did the United States take the right to
commit that series of brutalities against Cuba. How can the crooked
politicians and the exploiters have more rights than the people? What right
does a rich country have to impose its yoke on our people? Only because
they have might and no scruples; they do not respect international rules.
They should have been ashamed to be engaged in this battle of Goliath
against David—and to lose it besides.
What did we have against their might? First, we had a sense of dignity and
courage. We were not afraid. That is a big thing. Then, we were determined
to resist. No matter what they throw against us, we will fight. Our men
know how to die, and they have shown it during the past few days.
Next Step: Direct Aggression
So far they have gone from aggression to aggression without stopping to
think. Only direct aggression is left. Are we going to be afraid? No!
(Applause) Imperialism's soldiers are blood and flesh too, and bullets go
through them. Let them know they will meet with serious resistance. That
may be enough to make them reflect a little. Our people—men, women, and
children—must maintain that spirit. If they have no weapons they can take
the place of somebody who falls. Have no fear; be calm! After all, the
result of aggression against Cuba will be the start of a conflagration of
incalculable consequences, and they will be affected too. It will no longer
be a matter of them having a feast with us. They will get as much as they
give.
To resist is to meet the enemy and fight him with whatever is at hand. To
resist is to prepare our spirit, our minds for what comes, for the bombs
they drop, because in such a case they would have superiority in the air.
We would have to dig many trenches to defend ourselves. They would not have
a bomb for each man in a hole.
We would most strongly defend our capital from house to house, as we have
said before, from position to position—above all, without retreat. We
would mine the fields. We would kill whatever parachutists fell in our zone
of control.
If they think they can take our territory by surprise, they are mistaken.
They would encounter firm resistance here and would awaken an unprecedented
feeling of solidarity with us throughout the world. The attack by the
mercenaries had demonstrated this. I am certain that such aggression would
be suicide for them. Of that I am completely sure!
I am sure that we would resist in the same spirit as the men who have
fallen up to today. In the fight in the Sierra Maestra and in the fight
with the mercenaries, many of our friends have fallen. They paid their
final tribute. They did their part. We all have the same obligation to act
with that spirit of duty, with that feeling of loyalty. None of us has the
right to save his life. That is to say, that our decision is firm. To
resist regardless of cost, in all ways. That is what we have to do under
the circumstances imposed on us through no fault of ours. We feel proud of
our position. We used to be the last card in the deck, now we are among the
first.
Throughout the whole world there are demonstrations in support of us and
against the United States. They are surprised because in less than 72 hours
we have destroyed the invasion which was prepared by the brains of the
Pentagon with all the tactics and preparations of a war. The leaders of the
invasion had great faith in the plans on which the United States placed its
prestige, and out of which they came without prestige. Their plans were
defeated. This they cannot accept. They fell into this ridiculous situation
through their own fault. They cannot stand that consequence, so now they
threaten with direct intervention, because they could not win. Well, who
doubts that if they were capable of making such a mistake, they may not
make a greater mistake? Who doubts that if they were capable of making this
mistake, they will not make another great mistake? We think that they are
capable of making even a greater mistake which will cost them not only
their prestige, but will cost them their very existence as well; and no one
knows what it may cost the world. The fact is that it is they who are
threatening the entire world. They are the gangsters who are threatening
the world peace, threatening the world with a war, threatening Cuba with
intervention, and threatening Latin America. What can Latin America say to
these threats? What they want is to bring back the right of intervention.
Our duty as a soldier in the trenches is to defend our country. All our
spirit, all our thoughts, all our energy should be concentrated on this
history-making period. We must defend our country. We defend the peace of
the entire world, because our defense of our country may perhaps make these
gentlemen stop and reflect. If they believe that we will run, they are
wrong—nobody ran. Our firm decision is that before they subdue us, they
will have to erase us from the map. Resistance will be strong in all
sectors, in the fields if they take the cities. Let's see how they take
Havana for example. We must look at all these things objectively because of
our experience—we cannot go to sleep and rest on our laurels, because
imperialism has received a rude blow and it is like an infuriated beast.
Let us see if they reconsider, this gentleman we have there now, let us see
how he acts.
Kennedy Intensifies U.S. Aggression
We awaited his inauguration to see if he would do something different. We
did not believe that he would continue with the errors of the previous
administration. He himself said: "Let us begin anew." He did not begin
anew; he began as of old. He not only followed the policy of Eisenhower,
but he was even more aggressive against us. This gentleman has brought this
problem on himself, through his lack of commonsense. He has earned this
discredit all by himself. While we waited for him to show what policy he
was going to follow, he increased the attacks against us. He increased in
intensity the aggression against our country.
"Now he must do what he has to do: to recognize his mistake. What he has to
do is to fire Mr. Allen Dulles. Because after a government has been placed
before the world in such a ridiculous position, as the Yankee intelligence
service has placed the U.S. Government, it is the least he can do now. What
he has to do is to fire the chief of the intelligence service. You know why
he should fire him? Well, because he `shipped' him too." (porque tambien lo
embarco—Sp.) (Laughter)
What was one of the most ridiculous things that ever happened in the
history of the United States, and they brought it on themselves. All we did
was defend ourselves. It is clear that to please Mr. Kennedy and Allen
Dulles we could not let ourselves be beaten by mercenaries. What did we do?
We threw them into the ocean. (Laughter) This invasion organized by the
United States was a species of Normandy which did not end in a Dunkirk
because they did not get off the beaches.
Return to Trenches
That is what happened and that is why they are now furious and threatening.
What are we going to do before the threats of Mr. Kennedy? Be frightened?
No, we smile, because there are many thousands of men in the trenches with
weapons in their hands. Once again we must take to the trenches. We have no
other alternative—once more we must wait to see what happens in this
crisis.
The defense of our country is what I wish to speak of first today. The
expedition should strive to warn us that these people make many mistakes
and that they are capable of committing the greatest imbecilities. As far
as we are concerned, we cannot stop them from meddling. We do all we can to
prevent it by arming ourselves and preparing for defense so that they may
reconsider. But if they make a mistake, we cannot stop them from making it.
Our duty is to maintain our firm position and be ready to defend ourselves
without alarm, without panic, just as our many comrades went to fight and
die. Nobody has the right to preserve his life. We all have the same
obligations. We must keep this thought ever-present, especially right now
when we have just finished a bloody battle where a great number of friends
and brothers of the people have fallen. Of that we want to speak first.
The lackeys that took part in this Yankee-planned invasion evidently had
confidence that the plan would not fail. They were so confident that they
even sent their sons. Now they are seeking for clemency for the prisoners.
Let them have clemency of the victims of their bombing. Let them cease
sending arms to Cuba; arms to murder and kill, and the send of explosives
and incendiaries. Let all this cease if they wish clemency.
Instead of defending the mercenaries, and there are some who do, they
should be defending the victims of aggression. That is the situation.
Invasion Analyzed
Let us now analyze the plan of attack by imperialism against Cuba, and why
they landed where they did, and why they did not land on the other side. In
the first place they exaggerated the number of mercenaries. Instead of four
or five thousand they did not have anywhere near that number. What they
landed here was the group they had in Guatemala.
They have another in Caimanera, but it is smaller and not armed as well.
The group that had the most arms, were better trained, and had air cover,
was the Guatemala group. At first it appeared that the intentions were to
take the Isle of Pines, to take it and free the war criminals imprisoned
there and add them to their ranks and to take a piece of national territory
and then give us the problem of dislodging them.
They were to direct their efforts toward gaining a piece of territory to
establish there a provisional government from which to operate. The
establishment of a base on our territory would have given them a base to
bomb our country and would have created a difficult situation for us. We
had to stop this at all costs. The Isle of Pines was ideal for the
establishment of a base on our territory which would open the road for aid
on territory of Cuba and make unnecessary to use of other countries to
launch aggressions. But here is what we did. We filled the Isle of Pines
with tens of batallions of cannon and tanks, we posted a force in the Isle
of Pines that make the Isle of Pines invulnerable. A huge army would have
been needed to attack it. They could not count on Escambray after it had
been cleaned out. Would imperialism land mercenaries with just one combat
force, or would it split its force into several groups, that was the
problem if faced. Would it try to introduce groups and send them arms from
the air, to establish many counterrevolutionary networks. We took measures
to counter multiple landings, concentrating on logical points, in case they
divided force into many groups. We concentrated especially on places giving
access to the mountains.
A few days before the aggression, many U.S. papers carried the report that
imperialism had decided on splitting up the force and opening different
fronts in Cuba. That could be true. It could also be true that the rumors
were intended to throw us off the track. Events later showed that they had
decided to send the whole force together and seize a point of our
territory. Among the rumors in the U.S. press, it was said that it was
risky to send all forces against one point and expose them to a crushing
defeat and strengthening the revolution.
If they had split up their forces in many landings, they could have used it
for much propaganda. A defeat in that case would have been diluted. I
believe they could have chosen either tactic. We trusted that we would
defeat them wherever, they came. For us it would be best if they all came
against the same point but we did not think they would do this. They chose
something that offered more but also was much more risky for morale and
prestige. They should have been worried about the blow to the morale of
imperialism and counterrevolution. For us it was better for them to come in
one force, but we thought they would avoid that mistake. But we were still
ready with adequate force if they all came together.
Preparations for Invasion
A series of facts showed that the time was near: statements; formation of
council of worms in exile; the famous White Book from Kennedy. A whole
series of political facts and statements plus the indications in the U.S.
press, including discrepancies about possible tactics. We heard that the
last shipments of arms and men had gone to Guatemala. We increased our
vigilance. On 15 April, because of a report from Oriente, we had not gone
to bed. Everything indicated the attack might come at any minute; we got
news from Oriente that many groups of ships were off Baracoa. Our forces
were put on the alert.
It was necessary to be very careful because American ships often came close
to the coast trying to cause trouble. One American ship without any flag
was very close to the coast. It was detained by our craft. Then U.S. planes
came, apparently to provoke an incident, so our vessel was ordered to let
the ship proceed to avoid an incident. In connection with the mercenary
landing, Americans carried out some ship movements to throw us off the
track. The Baracoa battalion was waiting for a landing so there could be no
doubt as to what kind of a ship it was. But in the end there was no landing
at Baracoa. We still did not know what group of ships that was. It may have
been mercenaries who never landed, it may have been U.S. ships; anyway,
nothing happened.
We heard bombs and ack-ack. We saw it was a bombing raid in Ciudad
Libertad. We decided it was definite that the aggression was beginning. We
tried to get in touch with San Antonio to get our planes up and found that
a simultaneous attack was going on there; and Santiago was attacked too.
We had taken measures at the air base. We have few planes and even fewer
pilots. We were taking care of those planes. We wanted to be sure they
would not be destroyed. So our planes were kept scattered. At San Antonio
they managed to destroy one transport plane and one fighter; that was not
much. At (Santiago?) they destroyed one fighter and several civilian
planes.
They had hoped to destroy our air force. Imperialist aggressions are
characterized by an attack on aviation to immobilize it. Our force is
small, but we expect to make good use of those few planes and pilots.
At San Antonio the ack-ack reaction was formidable. Planes were driven off
and our planes took off in pursuit of the enemy till he was on way to
Miami. The first step of aggression—to destroy our planes on the
ground—had failed. We reinforced our ack-ack but they did not come back.
They had attacked with six planes. Some did not get back, others were
riddled. Our air force was intact and ready. And our pilots wanted revenge.
That was Saturday. All forces were alerted. Sunday the funeral services
were held, our own planes kept guard.
An ammo truck has been set afire by the attack but the people kept calm.
They drove the other trucks away while the ammo on the first one was
exploding. (Applause) Of course no trucks with ammo should have been there
but those things do happen. We were alert all day Sunday. We slept in the
afternoon and not at night. We figured that the air raid was not just
harrassment but had a military objective, to destroy our air force.
Therefore we figured the aggression would come soon. We reinforced our
measures after the air attack.
Invasion Comes
Why was this attack made two days early? Tactically speaking it was an
error because we had a chance to take some measures. We mobilized all
combat units. On Sunday nothing happened. On Monday morning at 3:15 I was
informed that fighting was going on at Playa Giron and Playa Larga. We
confirmed this. Then came the report that an invading force was bombing
heavily with bazookas and cannons at the two beaches. There was no doubt of
a landing attempt at that point—one supported by heavy equipment.
Resistance began. Results of the attacks came. The microwave system was cut
off. Communications were then cut off. This was the situation.
Here is Cochino Bay and here is Cienfugeos. There was a Cienfugeos
battalion at the Central Australia. These were the first to meet the
aggression. Here is Playa Larga and here Playa Giron. Here is Zapata
Peninsula. This piece of impassible swamp land was the sole communication
available to peasants. This area bothered the revolution most.
(Editor's Note: At this point Castro discusses for approximately six
minutes the Zapata swamp area and tells what the revolution has done for it
and its people, the building of schools, roads, and medical facilities. He
then spends about five minutes giving in some detail a list of the weapons
captured in this area, apparently reading from a report. Then during a
period of bad reception of approximately 10 minutes, he discusses the
invader miscalculations of the Castro air force and, in some detail, the
battle plans and the tactical situation during the early stages of the
invasion. During much of the time Castro seems to be referring to maps.)
That was the plan. They put two battalions here, and five further back;
here were four and six, that was very early in the morning. Then planes
were to drop paratroops. They began landing very well. But at Playa Larga
and Playa Giron they met resistance. They began losing time. They got two
battalions ashore. Paratroops began operating. As they dropped paratroops
at these spots, our troops were caught between the main force and the
paratroops. Our first measures were to alert all commands and the air
force. Orders were given to disperse planes and have ack-ack ready if an
attack was made on the airstrip.
We had planes ready for defense against air attack. The battalion at the
Australia central was ordered to Playa Larga to fight. It was an infantry
battalion recently formed. At the same time an order given to mobilize
Matanzas militia battalion and advance to here. Orders were given to other
forces. We had two battalions in Las Villas. The problem first of all was
to keep a beachhead here. The main thing was to keep a bit of Playa Larga
here, on this side. The Cienfuegos battalion got there before dawn and
began fighting. But then came time another group of our forces was fighting
at Cayo Ramona. The air force was ordered to take before dawn and attack
all ships off Giron and Playa Larga. Our battalion prevented battalion five
from getting ashore. Our planes began attacking the ships and doing much
damage. Meanwhile our battalion was facing strong fire, and was taken from
the rear. It fell back fighting the paratroops. A battalion was sent from
Matanzas to reinforce it.
Enemy planes were painted with revolutionary armed forces insignia. They
attacked our advancing troops. We were most interested in keeping this bit
of territory. When we saw paratroops dropped we realized that the attack
would come against a single point and any other move would be for
diversion. Mobilization of two combat columns of the army was ordered; also
of a company of tanks and anti-tank batteries and mortars. Since they
controlled the air, the first day our forces had to wait till night to
advance. Our planes could not shift from attacking the ships.
Our planes continued to attack the ships. They did wonderful work. Besides
attacking the ships, they fought with enemy planes. But they kept hammering
the ships until not much was left of their fleet. We lost two planes the
first morning. Five enemy planes were downed. Four ships were sunk. That
was the first day.
They had an unexpected surprise. They had thought our air force was knocked
out, and so the first day ended. They lost more than half of their ships.
Our pilots acted with special courage. What they did was incredible.
The militia attacked the Playa Larga position. The battalion had only a
narrow road to attack from. On the first day they deployed forces. They
were attacking with planes here, and here. We tried to approach the enemy
as close as possible under B-26 fire. The battle was accompanied by tanks.
So we attacked them all day without respite, fighting constantly. An early
morning tank attack came from the same beach with antiair fire support. One
of our tanks was damaged. An antitank battery hit us and also another
entrenched tank. The goal was to take Playa Larga beach.
U.S. Sabre Jets Involved
They then began to flee. Here a tank surrendered. At dawn on 19 April the
planes bombed the Australia central. On the 19th we had antiaircraft in
position. This column, when in movement, was attached by American Sabre
planes. They (the invaders—Ed.) had B-26's, not jets. Then, this column of
ours, when it advanced between Playa Larga and Playa Giron during the
afternoon, suffered many casualties under attack of American Sabres. Those
planes were at high altitudes, and on that day when it was already dusk on
the 18th, they attacked our column, with Sabres, with jet planes, and they
caused many casualties in the column. That was one of the cases in which
American planes participated directly. They attacked the column coming from
Playa Larga to Giron. At dawn on 19 April a plane attacked the Australia
central and was downed and then two more planes. Our planes downed more
B-26's. We downed 10 planes during the entire fighting. On the 19th none of
their planes returned and we did not see the enemy anymore.
List of Casualties
On 19 April there were losses, as they were well entrenched. Our people had
to fight facing heavy mortar fire and anti-tank guns. There were 87 dead on
our side and 250 wounded. That means that our combat units paid a high
price in lives while they were on the offensive and that was due to the
fact that we were on the offensive constantly until the last position was
taken. It is possible that the dead on our side will amount to 100. That
indicates the heroism of our troops. They fought constantly without relief
against an enemy with relief and more planes than we had. (Castro confers
with one of his aides on figures—Ed.) An exact figure cannot yet be given
on losses because many of those who came in ships were drowned. According
to date here 88. One cannot count those lost in bombing and sunken ships.
This will be possible only after identification and a check of personnel
lost from each unit. There are some 450 prisoners. We cannot study all data
of units and determine how many men were in ships which were sunk. One
cannot give an exact figure on that. As I said, one of the basic principles
of battle was the courage with which our men fought. It is one thing to
defend a position and another to attack without protection under heavy
fire. Of course, under such circumstances the losses increase. In the
future, we shall be able to have more officers, Battalion chiefs are
learning more. The training of units and officers will be better. All kinds
of personnel—mortar, shell, cannon—will be specialized. The fact have
shown us the necessity of using our knowledge to defend the revolution. The
units have acquired considerable experience.
Decorations and Pensions
The government plans to create a decoration—to decorate as "Hero of the
Revolution" those who were outstanding for valor; and another type of
decoration to reward acts of valor in battle. Meanwhile the government will
pass a pension law to give a pension to kin of militia and soldiers who
fell in this fighting. The least the revolution can do for those who fell
is to protect their families who depended on them. This will be done as
soon as the cabinet meets.
If our troops had had more experience, we could have had fewer casualties.
When imperialism found what had happened, it had no army left here. The
enemy is still dumbfounded.
Counterrevolutionary Suspects Rounded Up
The committees for defense of the revolution acted too. There was a needed
to arrest anybody who for one reason or another might help the
counterrevolution. That kind of measure always entails some injustice, but
that is inevitable. The country faced aggression and had to take any
measure for defense. Those persons will be released unless there are
charges against them other than that they were considered suspect. Those
who have counterrevolutionary activity proven against them or are well
known will continue to be held. Since yesterday, those arrested as a
precaution have started being released. This does not mean that the danger
is past. We think the danger is great, especially of direct aggression from
the United States.
At Mesa, Arizona, Senator Goldwater said he had recommended direct
intervention if all else failed. That is the idea of right that this ultra
has. What respect for sovereignty of other countries and international law!
How calmly they speak of direct military intervention. They respect
nothing. And they talk as if it were so easy. They do not learn. They
should think of the sorrow military aggression causes—and all to restore
privileges here. What need was there to bring this bloodshed to our
country? What need to threaten us with intervention? They are so
irresponsible that after causing bloodshed here, they threaten with more
intervention. The reply is our determination to resist; and if they attack,
it will be the end of imperialism. Better to die than live under the yoke
of those gentlemen.
First Imperialist Defeat in America
Glorious death fighting to defeat imperialism deserves a monument. There
should be a big monument in Zapata swamps with the names of the fallen on
it, to tell the world that on that day Zapata imperialism sustained its
first great defeat in America. Precious lives were given in this battle.
The militia performed countless feats of prowess. The people defended their
land, honor, rights. They have earned the admiration of the world and
prestige. They waged a battle for peace.
Just think, during these past days the literacy campaign was not halted;
the lifestock fair is opening; the Conrado Benitez literacy brigade is
about to set forth. This work did not stop in the midst of tension. This
shows the stuff the revolution is made of.
The comrades who fell saved tens of thousands of lives. Their service to
the nation is incalculable. The pilots who fought so steadily and eagerly
have created the air force. I am sure no air force ever did before what
they have done. We believe 17 April should be made Cuban revolutionary air
force day.
Mansfield said the Cuban crisis is very grave. The Vermont senator said
Cuba is a permanent threat to the hemisphere. If that means they will
invade Cuba, nobody here is frightened at all. We will give them a great
reception. The might of an empire cannot go as far as the dignity of the
people. It will collapse when it runs into the will of the people.
Latin American War
It is regrettable that U.S. leaders make so many mistakes, such as this
one. Why did the U.S. Government need to make itself so ridiculous? It
calculated a lot but it calculated badly. In Latin America, there will be
war by all who support our revolution. Latin American forces would have a
hard time to protect U.S. ambassadors. They should reflect on that. It is
too bad they are playing with the idea of attacking us. Such a
mistake—nobody knows where it would end. It is too bad the world has to be
exposed to the mistakes of those men who know nothing about politics.
Kennedy's speeches and his threats are similar to Hitler's. Hitler
threatened the small neighboring countries, and Kennedy is threatening Cuba
and is saying that he will intervene. He says that his patience is coming
to an end. Well, what about our patience, with all the things we have had
to endure? In attacking Cuba, they shall unmask themselves more and arouse
more revolutionary spirit in Latin America and they will only increase
their own future worries. We want them to leave us alone. We want to live
in peace with our revolution without losing any more sons. They should stop
supplying the counterrevolutionaries with weapons. We will simply have to
use a heavy hand. (Applause)
The imperialist powers use the method of surprise attacks, the same method
of Hitler and Mussolini. We wish they would reconsider things, take a cold
or a hot shower, anything. Let humanity, let history, end a system which is
outdated now. Imperialism must pass just as feudalism did, just as slavery
did.
The wars of 1914 and 1940's were bad. Nazism didn't save itself. The forces
in the world in favor of peace are great. They know history is with them.
They need not fight against history to preserve their system and
privileges. It will be a sorry day for the world if those gentlemen are not
able to reconsider. This is the question we must consider quietly. Cuba is
part of the world today and there can be no discussion with Cuba that do
not effect the world. (Applause)
We shall keep all the revolutionary forces mobilized and we shall plan for
the May Day celebrations and we shall work for the victory of the
revolution. We shall prepare ourselves to make the necessary sacrifices.
The people have tasted victory. Victory is based upon sacrifices, on the
basis of the 87 who died to guarantee the future of the country. They
sacrificed themselves for the rest, for the independence and sovereignty of
the nation and to obtain a better nation. This joy of today we owe it to
those who fell and we hope that the future generations will enjoy their
lives for today's sacrifices.
The first prisoner, (Anzon Bayon?) said he was in training for two months
in Guatemala under American instructors and then went to Nicaragua but was
there only one day. He said that the situation in Cuba was pictured as
intolerable.
The second prisoner, whose name was not heard, said he was trained at the
Helvetia Ranch in Guatemala, that he saw the Guatemalan minister of war at
the Retalhuleu base in November and that President Ydigoras visited the
camp in December. When asked if he had joined or enlisted in Miami, he
replied, "In Mexico."
Questioned about the nationality of two destroyers which the prisoner said
served as an escort, he replied;
"They came in the area of the straits between Caiman Grande and Jamaica. I
could see in the distance that two destroyers escorted us. I could see the
number on one of them that came more to the North. The number was 507."
Question: "Did you understand what I asked about the destroyer?"
Answer: "It was of North American nationality. The destroyer accompanied us
from Caiman strait and Jamaica up to very near the Playa Giron."
Question: "What idea did you and those who were with you have about the
Cuban situation?"
Answer: "Our ideas were principally from information media we had from
(here?). We had bulletin board notices at the brigade headquarters, a
series of notes headed News about Cuba: That the militia was discontented;
that there was friction between the army and the militia, very great
friction—I do not have to tell you that that was not true; that the people
were discontented with the government, with the economic measures—the
propaganda was constant. They emphasized that the investigation services of
the government were...
Castro Internet Archive
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="jan_04.html">January 2004 • Vol 4, No. 1 •<br>
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<p align="CENTER"><font size="4"><font color="black" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5"><b>A Better World Is Not a Utopian Dream</b></font></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font color="black" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular"><b>By Fidel Castro</b></font></p>
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<p>Speech given by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, president of the Republic of Cuba, at the Karl Marx Theater on January 3, 2004, for the 45th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.</p>
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<p>Dear fellow Cubans; Distinguished guests:</p>
<p>Many of us who had the privilege of witnessing that exciting day are still alive; many others are deceased. On January 1, 1959 the overwhelming majority of those here tonight were less than 10 years old or had not been born or there were still many years to go before they would be born. It was never our purpose to attain individual or collective glory, honors or recognition. However, those of us who today have a legitimate right to call ourselves Cuban revolutionaries found ourselves obliged to write what has turned out to be an unprecedented page in the annals of history.</p>
<p>Unhappy with the social and political situation in our country, we simply resolved to change it. This was not something new in Cuba; it had happened many times for almost a century. We believed in the rights of the peoples, including the right to independence and to rise up against tyranny. It was from the exercise of such rights in this hemisphere, conquered by European powers by fire and the sword, mass slaughter of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of millions of Africans, that a group of independent nations emerged, one of which was the United States of America.</p>
<p>When, on July 26 1953, the Cuban Revolution fought its first battle against an illegal, corrupt and bloody regime, eight years had not yet gone by since the end of World War II unleashed by fascism in 1939, which took the lives of more than 50 million people and brought about the destruction of the economies of all the then industrialized countries, with the exception of the United States, which was out of reach of enemy bombs and guns. The fascist ideas that were the cause of that colossal conflict were in total contradiction with the principles proclaimed by the 13 former British colonies in America on July 4, 1776 in their Declaration of Independence, which literally read:</p>
<p>“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”</p>
<p>The French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which resulted from the 1789 French Revolution, carried this point even further when it proclaimed: “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”</p>
<p>The fascist ideas also clashed head on with the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter after the gigantic battle that was World War II. Among the principles the Charter proclaimed to be essential prerequisites of a world political order are respect for the rights of the people to sovereignty and independence. Actually, the rights of the peoples have never been respected throughout humanity’s brief known history, so full of wars of conquest, empires and an infinite variety of forms of plunder and of ways for human beings to exploit other human beings.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, at that historic point in time and despite the reality that the victorious powers imposed a world political order with privileges for a minuscule group of the most powerful states that became ever more irritating, many nations, institutions and people were hopeful that a new and promising stage for humanity was beginning. More than 100 nations or groups of nations, including human groups that still lacked a national identity, were formally recognized as independent States.</p>
<p>It was a time that greatly favored illusions and deception. The overwhelming majority of countries that formally received the status of independent states were made up of former colonies, dominions, protectorates and other forms of oppressing and controlling countries that the most powerful nations have used for centuries. Their dependence on the former colonial powers was almost total; their struggle to attain greater sovereignty and act on it has been difficult and often heroic. The dreadful harassment to which they are submitted in Geneva to get them to support the U.S. resolutions or, as a last resort, to abstain from voting against them is proof of this.</p>
<p>The way these states behave in the United Nations General Assembly is admirable. An expression of this is the growing and almost unanimous support for Cuba against the blockade. The worst of all is that a considerable number of those countries that were supposedly independent before that conflict was unaware of just how little independence they really had, and Cuba was one of them. Almost all of the Latin American countries were on that sorry list, as would become blatantly clear.</p>
<p>As soon as our heroic people achieved real and full independence, almost all of their governing elites joined with the United States to destroy the Revolution and prevent the social and political accomplishments we were rapidly achieving. The aggression began as early as 1959 with the use of all possible economic and political measures, including violence, terrorism and the threat of the massive use of U.S. military might.</p>
<p>What happened to Cuba would help show all of the illusion and deception contained in those elegant texts about principles and rights proclaimed by the United Nations Organization. Might and not rights would continue to be the basic fact of human life, as has been the case through the millennia. All that has happened up until the present, since the first known historical facts were registered, is the result of the natural and spontaneous, torpid and disorderly evolution of human society.</p>
<p>Nobody can be blamed for the various economic and social systems that have followed one another over the course of five thousand years. The different civilizations which arose in the most distant regions of the world: China, India, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Central and South America obviously were, to a greater or lesser extent, ignorant of the others’ existence, were independent, although many things attest to the extraordinary range of their knowledge. Some are amazing like, for example, the Greek civilization with its art, philosophy, literature, its knowledge of history, physics, mathematics, astronomy and other subjects.</p>
<p>Our knowledge of Mayan and other pre-Incan civilizations is growing, and this knowledge shows that human beings, even when separated by tens of thousands of years in time and tens of thousands of kilometers in space were already creators and capable of extraordinary works. Yet, in all the civilizations that preceded us and even today, empires, wars of conquest, different kinds of slavery and feudalism, rich and poor, privileged, ruling social classes and exploited, marginalized and excluded classes have existed in one form or another. To ignore this fact would require enormous ignorance.</p>
<p>I must admit that Marx was right when he sketched out the idea that only when a truly rational, just and equitable social regime exists on this earth, will humankind have left prehistory behind. If the whole development of human society has inevitably been chaotic, disorderly, unpredictable, extremely cruel and unjust, the struggle to create a different and truly rational world, worthy of our species’ intelligence is, at this moment in its history, which bears no resemblance to any of humanity’s previous stages, something that was not possible or even imaginable in other circumstances: an attempt by human beings to plan their own destiny for the first time.</p>
<p>Dreaming of impossible things is called utopia; struggling for goals that cannot only be reached but which are essential if the species is to survive, is called realism. It would be wrong to assume that such an aim would be motivated by ideology alone. We are talking about something that goes beyond the noble and completely justifiable wishes for justice, beyond the deep desire that all human beings can live a free and decent life: we are talking about the survival of the species.</p>
<p>The big difference between the age of the Greeks and our age lies not in the intellectual capacity of our species but in the exponential and seemingly infinite development of science and technology that has taken place in the last 150 years, and which completely eclipses the negligible and ridiculous political capacity we have shown for facing up to the risk of perishing as a species, a risk which really is threatening humanity.</p>
<p>Less than 60 years ago, when the first nuclear device equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT exploded over Hiroshima, it became clear that technology had created a tool which, if developed, could bring about the obliteration of human life on this planet. From that day on, the development of such new weapons and weapons systems, hundreds of times more powerful, varied and accurate has not ceased, not for one day. Today, there are tens of thousands of them.</p>
<p>Actually, very few have been destroyed under deceptive and limited covenants. A small group of countries that have a monopoly over such weapons have taken upon themselves the exclusive right to produce and improve them. Meanwhile the contradictions and interests of its members change and humanity develops under a web of nuclear weapons that threaten its very existence. Someone could say something similar to what that Persian emperor said as he and his huge army closed in on the 300 Spartans defending the pass at Thermopiles: “Our nuclear weapons shall hide the sun.”</p>
<p>The lives of the billions of human beings who inhabit this planet depend on what a few think, believe and decide. The worst of it all is that those who wield such great power do not have psychiatrists to look after them. We cannot just accept this. We have the right to denounce it, to exercise pressure and demand changes and an end to such an absurd, unheard of situation, which makes hostages of us all. No one should ever have such powers or else no one on this earth will be able to talk of civilization again.</p>
<p>There is another lethal problem as well: nearly 40 years ago some people began to voice their concerns over what has come to be called the environment, because a barbarous civilization was destroying the natural conditions for life. This extremely sensitive issue was then put on the table for the first time. Quite a few people thought it was just some alarmists exaggerating, a kind of neo-Malthusianism, like in previous centuries. They were, in fact, well-informed and intelligent people who took to building a public awareness on this issue, at times worried sick that it was too late to take useful measures.</p>
<p>Regrettably, those who do to their great political responsibilities should have shown greater concern, showed only ignorance and disregard. More than ten years have passed since the UN-convened Rio de Janeiro Summit and despite the usual proliferation of speeches, pledges and promises, very little has been done. Nevertheless, there is a growing awareness of the mortal danger. And the struggle must grow and will grow. There is no option.</p>
<p>Recently, a conference was held in Havana on desertification and climate change, which was also convened by the UN. It was an important effort to inform, raise awareness and call people to join the struggle. In Rio de Janeiro, I was a witness to the deep concerns and fear of representatives from small islands in the Pacific and from other countries threatened by the risk of being either partially or totally submerged by the seas because of climate change. This is sad. The first to suffer the consequences of environmental damage are the poor. They do not have cars, or air conditioners; it is possible they do not even have furniture, if they have houses, that is.</p>
<p>The effects of huge emissions of carbon dioxide causing atmospheric warming and the destructive effect of the ultra violet rays that pass through the damaged ozone layer filter have a greater impact on them. When they fall ill, it is common knowledge that there are no hospitals, doctors or medicines for them or their relatives. A third problem: according to the most conservative estimates possible, world population took no less than 50,000 years to reach one billion. This happened around 1800, just as the 19th century was beginning. It reached two billion 130 years later, in 1930. It reached 3 billion in 1960, thirty years later; 4 billion in 1974, fourteen years later; 5 billion in 1987, thirteen years later; 6 billion in 1999 only 12 years later. Today, it stands at 6.3 billion. It is really amazing that in just 204 years world population increased by 6.4 times from the figure of one billion reached in 1800, after no less than 50 thousand years, calculated in a relatively arbitrary and conservative way so as to have a point of reference, but that should be further analyzed.</p>
<p>It could have taken many more years, if we limit ourselves only to the time it took to reach its current capacity. At what rate is it growing now? 1999: population 6,002 millions; growth 77 millions. 2000: population, 6,079 millions; growth 75 millions. 2001: population, 6,154 millions; growth 74 millions. 2002: population, 6,228 millions; growth 72 millions. 2003: population, 6,300 millions; growth 74 millions. 2004: estimated population, 6,374 millions; growth 74 millions. What will the world population be in the year 2050? The lowest estimates say it will be 7,409 millions; the highest say 10,633 millions. According to many experts, there will be around 9 billion inhabitants.</p>
<p>The enormous alarm generated by this colossal demographic explosion plus the accelerated degradation of the natural conditions needed for our species’ survival have caused people to react with true dismay in many countries, since almost one hundred per cent of the growth I mentioned will take place in Third World countries. Aware of the growing deterioration and reduction of land and water resources, of the famines in many countries, of the indifference and wastage in consumer societies and the educational and health problems facing the world population, one could imagine that if all of these problems are not solved our human society might become one where its members devour each other.</p>
<p>It would be a good idea to ask the Olympic champions of human rights in the West if they have ever used a single minute to reflect on these realities, which to a very large degree are the result of the current economic and social system. It would be worth asking them how they feel about a system that, instead of educating the masses as a fundamental element for making progress in the search for urgently needed, viable solutions, with the support of science, technology and culture, spends one trillion dollars every year on alienating consumerist advertising.</p>
<p>With the money spent in just one of those years to spread this peculiar poison, all the illiterate and semi-illiterate people in the world could be taught to read and write and even reach ninth grade in less than ten years and no poor child would have to go without schooling. Without education and other social services, crime and drug abuse can never be reduced or eradicated.</p>
<p>This we proclaim from Cuba, a country blockaded for 45 years, accused and condemned more than a few times in Geneva by the United States and their closest allies but which is about to provide health, education and cultural development services the like of which the developed and rich West has never even dreamed of and, what is more, these are absolutely free for all citizens, with no exceptions whatsoever.</p>
<p>The neoliberal globalization imposed on the world, designed to facilitate greater looting of the planet’s natural resources, has, in the wake of the fateful “Washington Consensus” led most of the countries in the Third World, and especially those in Latin America, into a desperate and unsustainable situation. The first fruit of this disastrous policy was the “lost decades of the 80s during which economic growth in the region only reached 1 percent; it rose to 2.7 percent between 1990 and 1998, much lower than false hopes and pressing needs, to drop again to 1 percent between 1998 and 2004.</p>
<p>The foreign debt, which in 1985, the year of that treacherous “Consensus” was $300 billion, today stands at more than $750 billion. Privatizations wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars worth of national assets that took many years to create but which evaporated with the speed at which capital fled from those countries to Europe and the United States. Unemployment reached record heights. Of every 100 new jobs created, 82 are in the so-called “informal sector” which includes a long list of those who earn their living any way they can without any kind of social or legal protection.</p>
<p>Poverty has grown alarmingly, especially extreme poverty; it has grown by 12.8 percent involving 44 percent of the population. Development is stagnant and social services are deteriorating by the day. Neoliberal globalization, as was to be expected, caused a veritable disaster in these services, first and foremost health and education.</p>
<p>If old and new forms of looting, such as unequal terms of trade, the unceasing, forced flight of capital, the brain drain, protectionism, subsidies and the WTO’s edicts are added to this, then no one should be surprised by the crises and other developments in South America. Latin America is the world region where neoliberal globalization was applied most rigorously and exactingly. Now it is facing the challenge of the FTAA which will sweep away national industries and turn the MERCOSUR and the Andean Pact into appendages of the U.S. economy: it is a last assault on the economic development, the unity and the independence of the Latin American peoples.</p>
<p>But, even if this attempt at annexation is successful, this economic order will still be unsustainable, both for the Latin American peoples and for the people in the United States whose jobs are threatened by plentiful cheap labor recruited by the maquilas from among those who were prevented by the existing poverty, educational disaster and unemployment from getting properly trained.</p>
<p>Cheap, unskilled labor is something that the Latin American oligarchies can offer on a grand scale. A summary of all that I have said shows my profound conviction that our species, and with it each one of our peoples, are at a turning point in their history: the course of events must change or else our species shall not survive. There is no other planet we can move to. There is no atmosphere, no air and no water on Mars, neither is there any transportation for us to emigrate there en masse.</p>
<p>Either we save this what we have, or many millions of years will have to go by before another intelligent species arises that can start all over again the adventure we have gone through. Pope John Paul II has already explained that the theory of evolution is not irreconcilable with the creation doctrine.</p>
<p>I must draw my talk to a close. There is much work awaiting us in 2004. I want to congratulate our people for everything it has done over all these years, for its heroism, its patriotism, its fighting spirit, its loyalty and its revolutionary fervor.</p>
<p>I want to offer special congratulations on this 45th anniversary to those who took part in glorious internationalist missions, today epitomized by the exemplary behavior of the five heroes imprisoned by the Empire who, with impressive dignity, have withstood the unjust, vengeful, cruel actions of the enemies of their homeland and their people; epitomized too by the 15,000 doctors who, making great sacrifices, taking risks and dangers carry out their internationalist duties anywhere in more than 64 countries, a human feat that the United States and Europe could never accomplish as they lack the human capital to demonstrate which human rights they are really defending.</p>
<p>Nobody can prevent with threats or aggressions that our doctors, teachers, sports instructors or any other collaborator show their solidarity; nobody can hold back the bravery of our sons and daughters because many are ready for the honor of taking the place of those who might fall victims of terrorist actions encouraged and promoted by extremist officials in the U.S. government.</p>
<p>I congratulate all those who struggle, those who never give up in the face of adversity; those who believe in humanity’s capacity to create, sow and cultivate values and ideas; those who bet on humanity; all of those who share the beautiful tenet that a better world is possible! We shall fight hand in hand with them and we shall overcome!</p>
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January 2004 • Vol 4, No. 1 •
From the Aresenal of Marxism
A Better World Is Not a Utopian Dream
By Fidel Castro
Speech given by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, president of the Republic of Cuba, at the Karl Marx Theater on January 3, 2004, for the 45th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.
Dear fellow Cubans; Distinguished guests:
Many of us who had the privilege of witnessing that exciting day are still alive; many others are deceased. On January 1, 1959 the overwhelming majority of those here tonight were less than 10 years old or had not been born or there were still many years to go before they would be born. It was never our purpose to attain individual or collective glory, honors or recognition. However, those of us who today have a legitimate right to call ourselves Cuban revolutionaries found ourselves obliged to write what has turned out to be an unprecedented page in the annals of history.
Unhappy with the social and political situation in our country, we simply resolved to change it. This was not something new in Cuba; it had happened many times for almost a century. We believed in the rights of the peoples, including the right to independence and to rise up against tyranny. It was from the exercise of such rights in this hemisphere, conquered by European powers by fire and the sword, mass slaughter of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of millions of Africans, that a group of independent nations emerged, one of which was the United States of America.
When, on July 26 1953, the Cuban Revolution fought its first battle against an illegal, corrupt and bloody regime, eight years had not yet gone by since the end of World War II unleashed by fascism in 1939, which took the lives of more than 50 million people and brought about the destruction of the economies of all the then industrialized countries, with the exception of the United States, which was out of reach of enemy bombs and guns. The fascist ideas that were the cause of that colossal conflict were in total contradiction with the principles proclaimed by the 13 former British colonies in America on July 4, 1776 in their Declaration of Independence, which literally read:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which resulted from the 1789 French Revolution, carried this point even further when it proclaimed: “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”
The fascist ideas also clashed head on with the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter after the gigantic battle that was World War II. Among the principles the Charter proclaimed to be essential prerequisites of a world political order are respect for the rights of the people to sovereignty and independence. Actually, the rights of the peoples have never been respected throughout humanity’s brief known history, so full of wars of conquest, empires and an infinite variety of forms of plunder and of ways for human beings to exploit other human beings.
Nevertheless, at that historic point in time and despite the reality that the victorious powers imposed a world political order with privileges for a minuscule group of the most powerful states that became ever more irritating, many nations, institutions and people were hopeful that a new and promising stage for humanity was beginning. More than 100 nations or groups of nations, including human groups that still lacked a national identity, were formally recognized as independent States.
It was a time that greatly favored illusions and deception. The overwhelming majority of countries that formally received the status of independent states were made up of former colonies, dominions, protectorates and other forms of oppressing and controlling countries that the most powerful nations have used for centuries. Their dependence on the former colonial powers was almost total; their struggle to attain greater sovereignty and act on it has been difficult and often heroic. The dreadful harassment to which they are submitted in Geneva to get them to support the U.S. resolutions or, as a last resort, to abstain from voting against them is proof of this.
The way these states behave in the United Nations General Assembly is admirable. An expression of this is the growing and almost unanimous support for Cuba against the blockade. The worst of all is that a considerable number of those countries that were supposedly independent before that conflict was unaware of just how little independence they really had, and Cuba was one of them. Almost all of the Latin American countries were on that sorry list, as would become blatantly clear.
As soon as our heroic people achieved real and full independence, almost all of their governing elites joined with the United States to destroy the Revolution and prevent the social and political accomplishments we were rapidly achieving. The aggression began as early as 1959 with the use of all possible economic and political measures, including violence, terrorism and the threat of the massive use of U.S. military might.
What happened to Cuba would help show all of the illusion and deception contained in those elegant texts about principles and rights proclaimed by the United Nations Organization. Might and not rights would continue to be the basic fact of human life, as has been the case through the millennia. All that has happened up until the present, since the first known historical facts were registered, is the result of the natural and spontaneous, torpid and disorderly evolution of human society.
Nobody can be blamed for the various economic and social systems that have followed one another over the course of five thousand years. The different civilizations which arose in the most distant regions of the world: China, India, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Central and South America obviously were, to a greater or lesser extent, ignorant of the others’ existence, were independent, although many things attest to the extraordinary range of their knowledge. Some are amazing like, for example, the Greek civilization with its art, philosophy, literature, its knowledge of history, physics, mathematics, astronomy and other subjects.
Our knowledge of Mayan and other pre-Incan civilizations is growing, and this knowledge shows that human beings, even when separated by tens of thousands of years in time and tens of thousands of kilometers in space were already creators and capable of extraordinary works. Yet, in all the civilizations that preceded us and even today, empires, wars of conquest, different kinds of slavery and feudalism, rich and poor, privileged, ruling social classes and exploited, marginalized and excluded classes have existed in one form or another. To ignore this fact would require enormous ignorance.
I must admit that Marx was right when he sketched out the idea that only when a truly rational, just and equitable social regime exists on this earth, will humankind have left prehistory behind. If the whole development of human society has inevitably been chaotic, disorderly, unpredictable, extremely cruel and unjust, the struggle to create a different and truly rational world, worthy of our species’ intelligence is, at this moment in its history, which bears no resemblance to any of humanity’s previous stages, something that was not possible or even imaginable in other circumstances: an attempt by human beings to plan their own destiny for the first time.
Dreaming of impossible things is called utopia; struggling for goals that cannot only be reached but which are essential if the species is to survive, is called realism. It would be wrong to assume that such an aim would be motivated by ideology alone. We are talking about something that goes beyond the noble and completely justifiable wishes for justice, beyond the deep desire that all human beings can live a free and decent life: we are talking about the survival of the species.
The big difference between the age of the Greeks and our age lies not in the intellectual capacity of our species but in the exponential and seemingly infinite development of science and technology that has taken place in the last 150 years, and which completely eclipses the negligible and ridiculous political capacity we have shown for facing up to the risk of perishing as a species, a risk which really is threatening humanity.
Less than 60 years ago, when the first nuclear device equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT exploded over Hiroshima, it became clear that technology had created a tool which, if developed, could bring about the obliteration of human life on this planet. From that day on, the development of such new weapons and weapons systems, hundreds of times more powerful, varied and accurate has not ceased, not for one day. Today, there are tens of thousands of them.
Actually, very few have been destroyed under deceptive and limited covenants. A small group of countries that have a monopoly over such weapons have taken upon themselves the exclusive right to produce and improve them. Meanwhile the contradictions and interests of its members change and humanity develops under a web of nuclear weapons that threaten its very existence. Someone could say something similar to what that Persian emperor said as he and his huge army closed in on the 300 Spartans defending the pass at Thermopiles: “Our nuclear weapons shall hide the sun.”
The lives of the billions of human beings who inhabit this planet depend on what a few think, believe and decide. The worst of it all is that those who wield such great power do not have psychiatrists to look after them. We cannot just accept this. We have the right to denounce it, to exercise pressure and demand changes and an end to such an absurd, unheard of situation, which makes hostages of us all. No one should ever have such powers or else no one on this earth will be able to talk of civilization again.
There is another lethal problem as well: nearly 40 years ago some people began to voice their concerns over what has come to be called the environment, because a barbarous civilization was destroying the natural conditions for life. This extremely sensitive issue was then put on the table for the first time. Quite a few people thought it was just some alarmists exaggerating, a kind of neo-Malthusianism, like in previous centuries. They were, in fact, well-informed and intelligent people who took to building a public awareness on this issue, at times worried sick that it was too late to take useful measures.
Regrettably, those who do to their great political responsibilities should have shown greater concern, showed only ignorance and disregard. More than ten years have passed since the UN-convened Rio de Janeiro Summit and despite the usual proliferation of speeches, pledges and promises, very little has been done. Nevertheless, there is a growing awareness of the mortal danger. And the struggle must grow and will grow. There is no option.
Recently, a conference was held in Havana on desertification and climate change, which was also convened by the UN. It was an important effort to inform, raise awareness and call people to join the struggle. In Rio de Janeiro, I was a witness to the deep concerns and fear of representatives from small islands in the Pacific and from other countries threatened by the risk of being either partially or totally submerged by the seas because of climate change. This is sad. The first to suffer the consequences of environmental damage are the poor. They do not have cars, or air conditioners; it is possible they do not even have furniture, if they have houses, that is.
The effects of huge emissions of carbon dioxide causing atmospheric warming and the destructive effect of the ultra violet rays that pass through the damaged ozone layer filter have a greater impact on them. When they fall ill, it is common knowledge that there are no hospitals, doctors or medicines for them or their relatives. A third problem: according to the most conservative estimates possible, world population took no less than 50,000 years to reach one billion. This happened around 1800, just as the 19th century was beginning. It reached two billion 130 years later, in 1930. It reached 3 billion in 1960, thirty years later; 4 billion in 1974, fourteen years later; 5 billion in 1987, thirteen years later; 6 billion in 1999 only 12 years later. Today, it stands at 6.3 billion. It is really amazing that in just 204 years world population increased by 6.4 times from the figure of one billion reached in 1800, after no less than 50 thousand years, calculated in a relatively arbitrary and conservative way so as to have a point of reference, but that should be further analyzed.
It could have taken many more years, if we limit ourselves only to the time it took to reach its current capacity. At what rate is it growing now? 1999: population 6,002 millions; growth 77 millions. 2000: population, 6,079 millions; growth 75 millions. 2001: population, 6,154 millions; growth 74 millions. 2002: population, 6,228 millions; growth 72 millions. 2003: population, 6,300 millions; growth 74 millions. 2004: estimated population, 6,374 millions; growth 74 millions. What will the world population be in the year 2050? The lowest estimates say it will be 7,409 millions; the highest say 10,633 millions. According to many experts, there will be around 9 billion inhabitants.
The enormous alarm generated by this colossal demographic explosion plus the accelerated degradation of the natural conditions needed for our species’ survival have caused people to react with true dismay in many countries, since almost one hundred per cent of the growth I mentioned will take place in Third World countries. Aware of the growing deterioration and reduction of land and water resources, of the famines in many countries, of the indifference and wastage in consumer societies and the educational and health problems facing the world population, one could imagine that if all of these problems are not solved our human society might become one where its members devour each other.
It would be a good idea to ask the Olympic champions of human rights in the West if they have ever used a single minute to reflect on these realities, which to a very large degree are the result of the current economic and social system. It would be worth asking them how they feel about a system that, instead of educating the masses as a fundamental element for making progress in the search for urgently needed, viable solutions, with the support of science, technology and culture, spends one trillion dollars every year on alienating consumerist advertising.
With the money spent in just one of those years to spread this peculiar poison, all the illiterate and semi-illiterate people in the world could be taught to read and write and even reach ninth grade in less than ten years and no poor child would have to go without schooling. Without education and other social services, crime and drug abuse can never be reduced or eradicated.
This we proclaim from Cuba, a country blockaded for 45 years, accused and condemned more than a few times in Geneva by the United States and their closest allies but which is about to provide health, education and cultural development services the like of which the developed and rich West has never even dreamed of and, what is more, these are absolutely free for all citizens, with no exceptions whatsoever.
The neoliberal globalization imposed on the world, designed to facilitate greater looting of the planet’s natural resources, has, in the wake of the fateful “Washington Consensus” led most of the countries in the Third World, and especially those in Latin America, into a desperate and unsustainable situation. The first fruit of this disastrous policy was the “lost decades of the 80s during which economic growth in the region only reached 1 percent; it rose to 2.7 percent between 1990 and 1998, much lower than false hopes and pressing needs, to drop again to 1 percent between 1998 and 2004.
The foreign debt, which in 1985, the year of that treacherous “Consensus” was $300 billion, today stands at more than $750 billion. Privatizations wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars worth of national assets that took many years to create but which evaporated with the speed at which capital fled from those countries to Europe and the United States. Unemployment reached record heights. Of every 100 new jobs created, 82 are in the so-called “informal sector” which includes a long list of those who earn their living any way they can without any kind of social or legal protection.
Poverty has grown alarmingly, especially extreme poverty; it has grown by 12.8 percent involving 44 percent of the population. Development is stagnant and social services are deteriorating by the day. Neoliberal globalization, as was to be expected, caused a veritable disaster in these services, first and foremost health and education.
If old and new forms of looting, such as unequal terms of trade, the unceasing, forced flight of capital, the brain drain, protectionism, subsidies and the WTO’s edicts are added to this, then no one should be surprised by the crises and other developments in South America. Latin America is the world region where neoliberal globalization was applied most rigorously and exactingly. Now it is facing the challenge of the FTAA which will sweep away national industries and turn the MERCOSUR and the Andean Pact into appendages of the U.S. economy: it is a last assault on the economic development, the unity and the independence of the Latin American peoples.
But, even if this attempt at annexation is successful, this economic order will still be unsustainable, both for the Latin American peoples and for the people in the United States whose jobs are threatened by plentiful cheap labor recruited by the maquilas from among those who were prevented by the existing poverty, educational disaster and unemployment from getting properly trained.
Cheap, unskilled labor is something that the Latin American oligarchies can offer on a grand scale. A summary of all that I have said shows my profound conviction that our species, and with it each one of our peoples, are at a turning point in their history: the course of events must change or else our species shall not survive. There is no other planet we can move to. There is no atmosphere, no air and no water on Mars, neither is there any transportation for us to emigrate there en masse.
Either we save this what we have, or many millions of years will have to go by before another intelligent species arises that can start all over again the adventure we have gone through. Pope John Paul II has already explained that the theory of evolution is not irreconcilable with the creation doctrine.
I must draw my talk to a close. There is much work awaiting us in 2004. I want to congratulate our people for everything it has done over all these years, for its heroism, its patriotism, its fighting spirit, its loyalty and its revolutionary fervor.
I want to offer special congratulations on this 45th anniversary to those who took part in glorious internationalist missions, today epitomized by the exemplary behavior of the five heroes imprisoned by the Empire who, with impressive dignity, have withstood the unjust, vengeful, cruel actions of the enemies of their homeland and their people; epitomized too by the 15,000 doctors who, making great sacrifices, taking risks and dangers carry out their internationalist duties anywhere in more than 64 countries, a human feat that the United States and Europe could never accomplish as they lack the human capital to demonstrate which human rights they are really defending.
Nobody can prevent with threats or aggressions that our doctors, teachers, sports instructors or any other collaborator show their solidarity; nobody can hold back the bravery of our sons and daughters because many are ready for the honor of taking the place of those who might fall victims of terrorist actions encouraged and promoted by extremist officials in the U.S. government.
I congratulate all those who struggle, those who never give up in the face of adversity; those who believe in humanity’s capacity to create, sow and cultivate values and ideas; those who bet on humanity; all of those who share the beautiful tenet that a better world is possible! We shall fight hand in hand with them and we shall overcome!
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="../nov_01/dec_01.html">December 2001 • Vol 1, No. 7 •</a></b></font></p>
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<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5">The War and the Global Economic Crisis</font></b></p>
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<p><i>by Fidel Castro</i><br>
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<p>The following is the transcript of the televised presentation by Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, on the present international situation, the economic and world crisis, and its impact on Cuba. The presentation was made in Havana, Cuba, on November 2, 2001. The official translation comes from the Cuban Mission to the United Nations, New York, NY, Nov. 2, 2001. </p>
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<p>My fellow countrymen:</p><p>
At the opening of the Social Workers Training School in Santiago de Cuba on October 24, I said that in the coming days I would speak about the international economic situation and how it could affect our country, which was carrying out an unprecedented social development program as it gradually recovered from the special period. I do not want to put that discussion off any longer.</p><p>
To characterize the current situation, one could say, by way of a very brief summary, that in the mid-1990s, when globalization was extending around the planet, the United States, as the absolute master of the international financial institutions and through its immense political, military and technological strength, achieved the most spectacular accumulation of wealth and power ever seen in history.</p><p>
But the world and capitalist society were entering into an entirely new phase. Only an insignificant part of economic operations were related to world production and trade. Every day three trillion dollars were involved in speculative operations including currencies and stocks. Stock prices on U.S. exchanges were rising like foam, often with no relation whatsoever to the actual profits and revenues of companies. A number of myths were created: there would never be another crisis; the system could regulate itself, because it had created the mechanisms needed to advance and grow unimpeded. The creation of purely imaginary wealth reached such an extent that there were cases of stocks whose value increased 800 times in a period of only eight years, with an initial investment of 1000 dollars. It was like an enormous balloon that could inflate to infinity.</p><p>
As this virtual wealth was created it was invested, spent and wasted. Historical experience was completely ignored. The world’s population had quadrupled in only 100 years. There were billions of human beings who neither participated in nor enjoyed this wealth in any way whatsoever. They supplied raw materials and cheap labor, but did not consume and could not be consumers. They did not constitute a market, nor the almost infinite sea fed by the immense river of products that flowed, in the midst of fierce competition, from factories that were ever more productive and created ever fewer jobs, based in a privileged and highly limited group of industrialized countries.</p><p>
An elementary analysis was sufficient to comprehend that this situation was unsustainable.</p><p>
Nobody seemed to realize that any apparently insignificant occurrence in the economy of one region of the world could shake the entire structure of the world economy.</p><p>
The architects, specialists and administrators of the new international economic order, economists and politicians, look on as their fantasy falls to pieces, yet they barely understand that they have lost control of events. Other forces are in control now: on the one hand, those of the large and increasingly powerful and independent transnationals and, on the other, the stubborn realities waiting for the world to truly change.</p><p>
In July of 1997, the first major crisis of the globalized, neoliberal world erupts. The tigers fall to pieces. Japan has still not managed to recover, and the world continues to suffer the consequences.</p><p>
In August of 1998 comes the so-called Russian crisis. Despite this country’s insignificant contribution to the worldwide gross domestic product, barely 2%, the stock markets of the United States were badly shaken, dropping by hundreds of points in a matter of hours.</p><p>
In January of 1999, only five months later, the Brazilian crisis breaks out.</p><p>
An all-out joint effort by the G-7, IMF and World Bank was needed to prevent the crisis from spreading throughout South America and dealing a devastating blow to the U. S. stock markets.</p><p>
This time, the inevitable has happened: the crisis began in the United States, almost imperceptibly at first. Beginning in mid-2000, the first symptoms began to be observed, with a sustained decrease in the rate of industrial production.</p><p>
In March of that year, the so-called high-tech NASDAQ index had already begun to drop.</p><p>
At the same time, the trade deficit showed an enormous growth, from 264.9 billion dollars in 1999 to 368.4 billion in 2000.</p><p>
In the second quarter of the year 2000, the gross domestic product registered growth of 5.7%; in the third quarter, it grew by only 1.3%.</p><p>
Industrial sector production began to fall in October of 2000.</p><p>
Nevertheless, at the end of the year 2000, opinions on the prospects and forecasts for the world economy were still rather optimistic. But reality soon reared its ugly head.</p><p>
Since the beginning of 2001, the IMF, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission, along with private institutions, have been obliged to downwardly adjust their growth predictions in the various regions of the world for 2001.</p><p>
In May, the IMF forecast 3.2% worldwide growth in 2001. For the United States in particular, projected growth was 1.5%, and 2.4% for the eurozone. Japan was facing its fourth recession in 10 years, leading to a prediction of 0.5% negative growth for the same year.</p><p>
IMF Managing Director Horst Kohler, during a speech to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in Geneva, on July 16, 2001, stated, “Growth is slowing throughout the world. This may be uncomfortable for the advanced economies (the developed and wealthy countries), but it will be a further source of hardship for many emerging markets and developing countries (the poor and underdeveloped countries), and a real setback in the fight against world poverty.”</p><p>
Production has dropped in the majority of the Southeast Asian countries, with the exception of China, and in Latin America, too. According to the World Bank, growth in Southeast Asia, which had begun to recover after its dramatic fall in 1997, would decline from 7.6% in 2000 to 4.5% this year, while Latin America’s growth would be around 2%, one half of the growth registered in 2000.</p><p>
Other institutions also made predictions. The Economist magazine estimated in April that world growth in 2001 would be only 2.7%, in contrast to the 4.6% growth registered in the year 2000, while world trade would grow by 3.5%, compared to the 13.4% growth in 2000.</p><p>
With regard to the eurozone, the OECD, in its quarterly report issued in early May of 2001, estimated that the European Union would experience growth of 2.6%, a figure 0.5% lower than its initial projection.</p><p>
On September 10, just one day before the events in New York and Washington, the IMF analyzed the evolution of growth predictions for the world economy and for the economies of the United States, Europe and Japan. Its findings were as follows:</p><p>
</p><table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="297">
<tbody><tr>
<td colspan="2">
<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">World Economy percentage growth: </font></b></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Autumn 2000</td>
<td>4.2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>March 2001</td>
<td>3.4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Spring 2001</td>
<td>3.2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>September 2001</td>
<td>
<p>2.7</p>
</td>
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</tbody></table>
<p>A progressive fall from 4.2 to 2.7 in less than a year.</p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="299">
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<td colspan="2">
<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">The United States percentage growth </font></b></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Autumn 2000 </td>
<td>3.2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>March 2001</td>
<td>1.7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Spring 2001</td>
<td>1.5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>September 2001</td>
<td>1.5</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>More of the same, from 3.2 to 1.5 over the same time period.</p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="300">
<tbody><tr>
<td colspan="2">
<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Japan </font></b></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Autumn 2000</td>
<td>1.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>March 2001</td>
<td>1.0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Spring 2001</td>
<td>
<p>0.6</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>September 2001</td>
<td>
<p>0.2</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>
The numbers speak for themselves.
</p><table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="302">
<tbody><tr>
<td colspan="2">
<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">The Eurozone:</font></b></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Autumn 2000</td>
<td>3.4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>March 2001</td>
<td>2.7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Spring 2001</td>
<td>2.4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>September 2001</td>
<td>1.9</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>
Without exception, the three major centers of the world economy saw their growth rates fall simultaneously, dropping to less than half of initial figures over the course of less than a year. In the case of Japan in particular, growth dropped to almost zero.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">The employment situation</font></b>:
</p><p>
At the end of the year 2000, the unemployment rate in the United States was only 3.9%. What happened in the year 2001?
</p><table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="322">
<tbody><tr>
<td colspan="2">
<p>Unemployment rate (percentage):</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>February</td>
<td>4.2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>March</td>
<td>4.3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>April</td>
<td>
<p>4.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>May</td>
<td>4.4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>June</td>
<td>4.5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>July</td>
<td>4.5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>August </td>
<td>
<p>4.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>
Although official statistics are not yet available, it is estimated that unemployment has now reached 5.1%, a rate that had not been registered in the United States for many years.</p><p>
Today, November 2, after this material had been drafted, the official figure was released: it is 5.4%. In just one month, 415 thousand jobs were lost.</p><p>
The increase of the unemployment rate is irrefutable evidence of the deterioration that the U.S. economy had been suffering prior to the terrorist attacks.
</p><p>
It should be kept in mind, as an important precedent, that over the last 50 years, when the unemployment rate has reached 5.1%, this has coincided with the beginning of a recession.
</p><table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="329">
<tbody><tr>
<td colspan="2">
<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Percentage of industrial capacity used in the United States in the year 2001:</font></b></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>February</td>
<td>79.2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>March</td>
<td>78.7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>April </td>
<td>
<p>78.4</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>May</td>
<td>
<p>78.0</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>June</td>
<td>77.1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>July</td>
<td>
<p>77.0</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>August</td>
<td>76.4</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>
In August, industrial production fell by 0.6% as compared to July. Over the previous 12 months, industrial production had shrunk by around 5%. August was the 11th consecutive month of economic contraction.
</p><p>
The figure registered in August is very close to the lowest level reached since 1983.</p><p>
Also registered in the month of August of 2001 was a budget deficit of 80 billion dollars.</p><p>
That same month, Democratic members of Congress were already pointing that predictions indicated that the government would have to use Social Security money to finance current expenditures.</p><p>
During the second quarter of 2001, U.S. imports shrank by 13.9 billion dollars, while the low level of trade activity in the rest of the world led to a 9.1 billion-dollar reduction in exports.
</p><p>
Stock values on the main indexes have suffered the following decreases in 2001:
</p><table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="302">
<tbody><tr>
<td>Dow Jones</td>
<td>18.06%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NASDAQ</td>
<td>66.42%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Standard and Poor’s (S&P)</td>
<td>28.48%</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>
This means the loss of trillions of dollars in less than a year.
</p><p>
The Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates nine times in 2001. The goal in doing so is to lower the cost of money, boost consumer confidence and thus promote economic activity. This frantic frequency clearly reflects desperation.</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">
Europe:</font></b></p><p>
Industrial production in the European region experienced a sustained decline in the first quarter of the year 2001 that obliged companies to reduce staff, and this, in turn, reduced consumption, thus creating a vicious downward circle.</p><p>
Investment and consumption are depressed, aggravating the trend towards recession.</p><p>
The European Commissioner for Monetary Affairs has stated that the European economy will grow by only 1.5% this year. Meanwhile, the six most prestigious economic research institutes in Germany have predicted that their country’s economy will grow by 0.7% this year and 1.3% next year, and announced that the German economy is on the verge of a recession. This will have a strong negative impact on the rest of Europe, given that Germany is considered the region’s “economic motor.”</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">
Japan:</font></b></p><p>
Japan’s real gross domestic product in the first quarter of the year 2001 dropped more dramatically than expected, with a decrease of 0.2% as compared to predictions of 0.1%, followed by an additional 0.8% drop in the second quarter.</p><p>
The decrease in industrial production that began in March reached 11.7% by August. This phenomenon of six consecutive months of decline in industrial production has not been witnessed in the Japanese economy since the period from December of 1991 to May of 1992, and it places industrial production at the lowest level of the last seven years. This means an even worse crisis than the financial crisis of 1997-1998, according to Japanese analysts.</p><p>
Japan’s trade surplus decreased 48% in July of this year.</p><p>
As a defensive measure, companies are cutting staff, leading to a rise in the unemployment rate, which reached an all-time high of 5% in August of this year, something never before seen in Japan.</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">
Latin America:</font></b></p><p>
In August, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reported that the region’s economy would grow by only 2% in 2001, a mere half of the growth registered the previous year (4%). In so doing, it retracted its prior prediction, made in May, forecasting a GDP growth of between 2.7% and 3%.</p><p>
According to ECLAC, this is the result of the worldwide economic weakening and instability in a number of the region’s key countries: Peru and Uruguay will experience no growth; Brazil has been affected by a scarcity of fuel supplies, which has hit its productive activity, and by an almost 40% devaluation of its currency this year; and Chile’s economic reactivation has come to a halt. In the case of Mexico, a feeble economic growth of 0.13% is predicted for this year, and 1.74% for 2002. The government had originally forecast 4.5% growth in the gross domestic product for 2001, but it has downscaled that figure a number of times due to the slowdown in the world economy, and particularly that of the United States.</p><p>
ECLAC estimates that unemployment in the region will reach at least 8.5%.</p><p>
There are people who calmly speak today about the “world economic crisis caused by the terrorist attacks that took place in the United States on September 11 and by the war against Afghanistan initiated on October 7.” Such statements are completely baseless. What I have just outlined irrefutably proves this. The crisis was already breaking out, uncontrollably.</p><p>
Every week I receive a bulletin with the most important economic news gathered from the most prestigious and reliable public sources of information, or statements made by specialists and political leaders. I remember in particular the bulletin I received on September 8, 2001, exactly three days before the terrible tragedy in New York. It had been many years since I had read so much bad news about the prospects for the international economy in just one bulletin.</p><p>
Curiosity led me to look it over once again. I have chosen a number of reports from it, which read as follows:</p><p>
“Hitachi Ltd., Japan’s biggest manufacturer of electronic products, announced that it will cut 14,700 jobs this year, or 4% of its staff, while preparing for a loss of over a billion dollars caused by the collapse of the high-tech sector.”</p><p>
“Rival Japanese conglomerates Toshiba Corp., NEC Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. have also announced that they plan to cut thousands of jobs.” (CNN, 31/08/2001)</p><p>
“The president of the United States Federal Reserve said that the rise in housing prices, at the same time that the stock market has collapsed, is making it difficult for the central bank to diagnose the state of the country’s economy. This divergence ‘could have significant implications for the country’s economic growth,’ he declared.” (The Wall Street Journal, 31/08/2001)</p><p>
“The U.S. Federal Reserve has warned in its latest report to the country’s banking institutions that they have not reinforced their risk management systems to the extent demanded by the economic slowdown facing the international economy.” (Spanish newspaper Cinco Días, 31/08/2001)</p><p>
“The European Commission admitted yesterday that the prediction for economic growth in the eurozone this year will be less than 2.5%. The monetary affairs commissioner, Pedro Solbes, who even noted that Brussels has ‘some doubts’ about this figure, acknowledged this. The drop in rates by a quarter of a point, announced last week by the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), was accompanied by an explicit acknowledgement of an error in calculation. ‘What we have underestimated is how long and severe the slowdown has turned out to be in the United States,’Duisenberg said. ‘If I may say so, we, and also the United States authorities, have tended to be too optimistic regarding the duration and depth of the slowdown,’ he said, recalling the opinions of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.</p><p>
“The ECB’s orientation difficulties are contained in this brief analysis, which comes a bit late after the gradual reduction from the 3.2% growth in the eurozone predicted in January to the 2% estimated in recent days.” (Spanish newspaper Cinco Días, 31/08/2001)</p><p>
“The president of the United States acknowledged his concern over the persistent decline in U.S. economic activity and its repercussions on the labor market. ‘I am aware of the problems being faced today by the families of workers affected by the economic crisis, but I am convinced that the economy will get back on its feet,’ he declared before a meeting of trade union groups.</p><p>
“With the economy on the brink of a recession, the president tried to convince U.S. workers that he was aware of their situation and that he is doing something to remedy it. The matter is complicated, given that the weakening of consumer confidence, the decline in financial markets and the lukewarm growth of the major world power have placed economic affairs at the top of the president’s agenda.”(Spanish newspaper Expansión, 04/09/2001)
</p><p>
Note that President Bush, who is not very partial to these subjects, made these declarations one week before September 11.
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December 2001 • Vol 1, No. 7 •
The War and the Global Economic Crisis
by Fidel Castro
The following is the transcript of the televised presentation by Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, on the present international situation, the economic and world crisis, and its impact on Cuba. The presentation was made in Havana, Cuba, on November 2, 2001. The official translation comes from the Cuban Mission to the United Nations, New York, NY, Nov. 2, 2001.
My fellow countrymen:
At the opening of the Social Workers Training School in Santiago de Cuba on October 24, I said that in the coming days I would speak about the international economic situation and how it could affect our country, which was carrying out an unprecedented social development program as it gradually recovered from the special period. I do not want to put that discussion off any longer.
To characterize the current situation, one could say, by way of a very brief summary, that in the mid-1990s, when globalization was extending around the planet, the United States, as the absolute master of the international financial institutions and through its immense political, military and technological strength, achieved the most spectacular accumulation of wealth and power ever seen in history.
But the world and capitalist society were entering into an entirely new phase. Only an insignificant part of economic operations were related to world production and trade. Every day three trillion dollars were involved in speculative operations including currencies and stocks. Stock prices on U.S. exchanges were rising like foam, often with no relation whatsoever to the actual profits and revenues of companies. A number of myths were created: there would never be another crisis; the system could regulate itself, because it had created the mechanisms needed to advance and grow unimpeded. The creation of purely imaginary wealth reached such an extent that there were cases of stocks whose value increased 800 times in a period of only eight years, with an initial investment of 1000 dollars. It was like an enormous balloon that could inflate to infinity.
As this virtual wealth was created it was invested, spent and wasted. Historical experience was completely ignored. The world’s population had quadrupled in only 100 years. There were billions of human beings who neither participated in nor enjoyed this wealth in any way whatsoever. They supplied raw materials and cheap labor, but did not consume and could not be consumers. They did not constitute a market, nor the almost infinite sea fed by the immense river of products that flowed, in the midst of fierce competition, from factories that were ever more productive and created ever fewer jobs, based in a privileged and highly limited group of industrialized countries.
An elementary analysis was sufficient to comprehend that this situation was unsustainable.
Nobody seemed to realize that any apparently insignificant occurrence in the economy of one region of the world could shake the entire structure of the world economy.
The architects, specialists and administrators of the new international economic order, economists and politicians, look on as their fantasy falls to pieces, yet they barely understand that they have lost control of events. Other forces are in control now: on the one hand, those of the large and increasingly powerful and independent transnationals and, on the other, the stubborn realities waiting for the world to truly change.
In July of 1997, the first major crisis of the globalized, neoliberal world erupts. The tigers fall to pieces. Japan has still not managed to recover, and the world continues to suffer the consequences.
In August of 1998 comes the so-called Russian crisis. Despite this country’s insignificant contribution to the worldwide gross domestic product, barely 2%, the stock markets of the United States were badly shaken, dropping by hundreds of points in a matter of hours.
In January of 1999, only five months later, the Brazilian crisis breaks out.
An all-out joint effort by the G-7, IMF and World Bank was needed to prevent the crisis from spreading throughout South America and dealing a devastating blow to the U. S. stock markets.
This time, the inevitable has happened: the crisis began in the United States, almost imperceptibly at first. Beginning in mid-2000, the first symptoms began to be observed, with a sustained decrease in the rate of industrial production.
In March of that year, the so-called high-tech NASDAQ index had already begun to drop.
At the same time, the trade deficit showed an enormous growth, from 264.9 billion dollars in 1999 to 368.4 billion in 2000.
In the second quarter of the year 2000, the gross domestic product registered growth of 5.7%; in the third quarter, it grew by only 1.3%.
Industrial sector production began to fall in October of 2000.
Nevertheless, at the end of the year 2000, opinions on the prospects and forecasts for the world economy were still rather optimistic. But reality soon reared its ugly head.
Since the beginning of 2001, the IMF, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission, along with private institutions, have been obliged to downwardly adjust their growth predictions in the various regions of the world for 2001.
In May, the IMF forecast 3.2% worldwide growth in 2001. For the United States in particular, projected growth was 1.5%, and 2.4% for the eurozone. Japan was facing its fourth recession in 10 years, leading to a prediction of 0.5% negative growth for the same year.
IMF Managing Director Horst Kohler, during a speech to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in Geneva, on July 16, 2001, stated, “Growth is slowing throughout the world. This may be uncomfortable for the advanced economies (the developed and wealthy countries), but it will be a further source of hardship for many emerging markets and developing countries (the poor and underdeveloped countries), and a real setback in the fight against world poverty.”
Production has dropped in the majority of the Southeast Asian countries, with the exception of China, and in Latin America, too. According to the World Bank, growth in Southeast Asia, which had begun to recover after its dramatic fall in 1997, would decline from 7.6% in 2000 to 4.5% this year, while Latin America’s growth would be around 2%, one half of the growth registered in 2000.
Other institutions also made predictions. The Economist magazine estimated in April that world growth in 2001 would be only 2.7%, in contrast to the 4.6% growth registered in the year 2000, while world trade would grow by 3.5%, compared to the 13.4% growth in 2000.
With regard to the eurozone, the OECD, in its quarterly report issued in early May of 2001, estimated that the European Union would experience growth of 2.6%, a figure 0.5% lower than its initial projection.
On September 10, just one day before the events in New York and Washington, the IMF analyzed the evolution of growth predictions for the world economy and for the economies of the United States, Europe and Japan. Its findings were as follows:
World Economy percentage growth:
Autumn 2000
4.2
March 2001
3.4
Spring 2001
3.2
September 2001
2.7
A progressive fall from 4.2 to 2.7 in less than a year.
The United States percentage growth
Autumn 2000
3.2
March 2001
1.7
Spring 2001
1.5
September 2001
1.5
More of the same, from 3.2 to 1.5 over the same time period.
Japan
Autumn 2000
1.8
March 2001
1.0
Spring 2001
0.6
September 2001
0.2
The numbers speak for themselves.
The Eurozone:
Autumn 2000
3.4
March 2001
2.7
Spring 2001
2.4
September 2001
1.9
Without exception, the three major centers of the world economy saw their growth rates fall simultaneously, dropping to less than half of initial figures over the course of less than a year. In the case of Japan in particular, growth dropped to almost zero.
The employment situation:
At the end of the year 2000, the unemployment rate in the United States was only 3.9%. What happened in the year 2001?
Unemployment rate (percentage):
February
4.2
March
4.3
April
4.5
May
4.4
June
4.5
July
4.5
August
4.9
Although official statistics are not yet available, it is estimated that unemployment has now reached 5.1%, a rate that had not been registered in the United States for many years.
Today, November 2, after this material had been drafted, the official figure was released: it is 5.4%. In just one month, 415 thousand jobs were lost.
The increase of the unemployment rate is irrefutable evidence of the deterioration that the U.S. economy had been suffering prior to the terrorist attacks.
It should be kept in mind, as an important precedent, that over the last 50 years, when the unemployment rate has reached 5.1%, this has coincided with the beginning of a recession.
Percentage of industrial capacity used in the United States in the year 2001:
February
79.2
March
78.7
April
78.4
May
78.0
June
77.1
July
77.0
August
76.4
In August, industrial production fell by 0.6% as compared to July. Over the previous 12 months, industrial production had shrunk by around 5%. August was the 11th consecutive month of economic contraction.
The figure registered in August is very close to the lowest level reached since 1983.
Also registered in the month of August of 2001 was a budget deficit of 80 billion dollars.
That same month, Democratic members of Congress were already pointing that predictions indicated that the government would have to use Social Security money to finance current expenditures.
During the second quarter of 2001, U.S. imports shrank by 13.9 billion dollars, while the low level of trade activity in the rest of the world led to a 9.1 billion-dollar reduction in exports.
Stock values on the main indexes have suffered the following decreases in 2001:
Dow Jones
18.06%
NASDAQ
66.42%
Standard and Poor’s (S&P)
28.48%
This means the loss of trillions of dollars in less than a year.
The Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates nine times in 2001. The goal in doing so is to lower the cost of money, boost consumer confidence and thus promote economic activity. This frantic frequency clearly reflects desperation.
Europe:
Industrial production in the European region experienced a sustained decline in the first quarter of the year 2001 that obliged companies to reduce staff, and this, in turn, reduced consumption, thus creating a vicious downward circle.
Investment and consumption are depressed, aggravating the trend towards recession.
The European Commissioner for Monetary Affairs has stated that the European economy will grow by only 1.5% this year. Meanwhile, the six most prestigious economic research institutes in Germany have predicted that their country’s economy will grow by 0.7% this year and 1.3% next year, and announced that the German economy is on the verge of a recession. This will have a strong negative impact on the rest of Europe, given that Germany is considered the region’s “economic motor.”
Japan:
Japan’s real gross domestic product in the first quarter of the year 2001 dropped more dramatically than expected, with a decrease of 0.2% as compared to predictions of 0.1%, followed by an additional 0.8% drop in the second quarter.
The decrease in industrial production that began in March reached 11.7% by August. This phenomenon of six consecutive months of decline in industrial production has not been witnessed in the Japanese economy since the period from December of 1991 to May of 1992, and it places industrial production at the lowest level of the last seven years. This means an even worse crisis than the financial crisis of 1997-1998, according to Japanese analysts.
Japan’s trade surplus decreased 48% in July of this year.
As a defensive measure, companies are cutting staff, leading to a rise in the unemployment rate, which reached an all-time high of 5% in August of this year, something never before seen in Japan.
Latin America:
In August, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reported that the region’s economy would grow by only 2% in 2001, a mere half of the growth registered the previous year (4%). In so doing, it retracted its prior prediction, made in May, forecasting a GDP growth of between 2.7% and 3%.
According to ECLAC, this is the result of the worldwide economic weakening and instability in a number of the region’s key countries: Peru and Uruguay will experience no growth; Brazil has been affected by a scarcity of fuel supplies, which has hit its productive activity, and by an almost 40% devaluation of its currency this year; and Chile’s economic reactivation has come to a halt. In the case of Mexico, a feeble economic growth of 0.13% is predicted for this year, and 1.74% for 2002. The government had originally forecast 4.5% growth in the gross domestic product for 2001, but it has downscaled that figure a number of times due to the slowdown in the world economy, and particularly that of the United States.
ECLAC estimates that unemployment in the region will reach at least 8.5%.
There are people who calmly speak today about the “world economic crisis caused by the terrorist attacks that took place in the United States on September 11 and by the war against Afghanistan initiated on October 7.” Such statements are completely baseless. What I have just outlined irrefutably proves this. The crisis was already breaking out, uncontrollably.
Every week I receive a bulletin with the most important economic news gathered from the most prestigious and reliable public sources of information, or statements made by specialists and political leaders. I remember in particular the bulletin I received on September 8, 2001, exactly three days before the terrible tragedy in New York. It had been many years since I had read so much bad news about the prospects for the international economy in just one bulletin.
Curiosity led me to look it over once again. I have chosen a number of reports from it, which read as follows:
“Hitachi Ltd., Japan’s biggest manufacturer of electronic products, announced that it will cut 14,700 jobs this year, or 4% of its staff, while preparing for a loss of over a billion dollars caused by the collapse of the high-tech sector.”
“Rival Japanese conglomerates Toshiba Corp., NEC Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. have also announced that they plan to cut thousands of jobs.” (CNN, 31/08/2001)
“The president of the United States Federal Reserve said that the rise in housing prices, at the same time that the stock market has collapsed, is making it difficult for the central bank to diagnose the state of the country’s economy. This divergence ‘could have significant implications for the country’s economic growth,’ he declared.” (The Wall Street Journal, 31/08/2001)
“The U.S. Federal Reserve has warned in its latest report to the country’s banking institutions that they have not reinforced their risk management systems to the extent demanded by the economic slowdown facing the international economy.” (Spanish newspaper Cinco Días, 31/08/2001)
“The European Commission admitted yesterday that the prediction for economic growth in the eurozone this year will be less than 2.5%. The monetary affairs commissioner, Pedro Solbes, who even noted that Brussels has ‘some doubts’ about this figure, acknowledged this. The drop in rates by a quarter of a point, announced last week by the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), was accompanied by an explicit acknowledgement of an error in calculation. ‘What we have underestimated is how long and severe the slowdown has turned out to be in the United States,’Duisenberg said. ‘If I may say so, we, and also the United States authorities, have tended to be too optimistic regarding the duration and depth of the slowdown,’ he said, recalling the opinions of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.
“The ECB’s orientation difficulties are contained in this brief analysis, which comes a bit late after the gradual reduction from the 3.2% growth in the eurozone predicted in January to the 2% estimated in recent days.” (Spanish newspaper Cinco Días, 31/08/2001)
“The president of the United States acknowledged his concern over the persistent decline in U.S. economic activity and its repercussions on the labor market. ‘I am aware of the problems being faced today by the families of workers affected by the economic crisis, but I am convinced that the economy will get back on its feet,’ he declared before a meeting of trade union groups.
“With the economy on the brink of a recession, the president tried to convince U.S. workers that he was aware of their situation and that he is doing something to remedy it. The matter is complicated, given that the weakening of consumer confidence, the decline in financial markets and the lukewarm growth of the major world power have placed economic affairs at the top of the president’s agenda.”(Spanish newspaper Expansión, 04/09/2001)
Note that President Bush, who is not very partial to these subjects, made these declarations one week before September 11.
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<p align="CENTER"><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5"><b>To An Ecuadorian Artist and Humanitarian</b></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">By Fidel Castro</font></p>
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<hr noshade="" size="3" width="75%" align="left">
<p></p>
<p><font color="black">Honorable Mr. President:<br>
</font>Authorities from Ecuador and from Quito:<br>
Dearest family:<br>
Distinguished guests:</p>
<p>I remember that at the very beginning of the Cuban Revolution, in the midst of all the turmoil, a man with indigenous features and a determined and inquisitive look, who was already famous and admired by many of our intellectuals, proposed to paint my portrait.</p>
<p>For the first time in my life, I was submitted to a tormenting experience. I should stand still. I did not know if this would last an hour or a century. I had never seen anyone move with such speed, squeezing out the paints contained in aluminum tubes, like toothpaste, mixing them with liquids while staring at me with persistent hawk eyes. There he was, stroking the canvas with his paintbrush from left to right, like flashes of lightning, and turning his eyes again and again to the astonished living object of his feverish activity, breathing heavily like a track and field athlete.</p>
<p>Finally, I could see the result of all that. It wasn’t me, it was what he wanted me to be, how he saw me: a combination of Don Quixote with features of famous personalities from Bolivar’s wars for Independence. But aware of the painter’s fame, I did not dare say a word. Maybe I eventually told him that the painting was “excellent”. I was embarrassed by my ignorance of the fine arts, as I was no less than in the presence of a great master painter and an extraordinary person, whom I later grew to know with increasing admiration and deep affection: Oswaldo Guayasamín. He was then about 42 years old.</p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Guayasamín was perhaps the most noble, </font></b><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">transparent and humane person </font></b><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">I have ever met</font></b></p>
<p>Three times I lived through the same memorable experience, throughout more than 35 years, and the last time we had several working sessions. He continued painting with the same passion, even when his eyesight began to experience severe limitations, which was particularly cruel for such an indefatigable painter. The last portrait showed a face more or less similar to the others, but with long bony hands that enhanced the image of the Knight of the Doleful Countenance that he still saw in me almost to the end of his life.</p>
<p>Guayasamín was perhaps the most noble, transparent and humane person I have ever met. He painted with the speed of light and his dimension, as a human being, was boundless.</p>
<p>I learned much from our talks, which enriched my conscience about the terrible drama of the conquest, colonization and genocide of the indigenous peoples in this hemisphere; a lacerating pain that he felt deep in his heart. He was an authority in the history of those terrible events.</p>
<p>One day, while we were in the studio at his residence here in Quito, I asked him how many indigenous lives he thought had been lost to the conquest and colonization. He was quick to respond without hesitation: “70 million.” His thirst for justice and vindication for those who survived that holocaust was the major drive of his life.</p>
<p>However, he felt it was necessary to struggle not only for these indigenous peoples but also for the peoples of North, Central and South America. He thought about the formerly Ibero American colonies that emerged from a crucible of martyrdom and from the mixing of victims and victimizers, who together with the descendents of enslaved Africans, as well as European and Asian immigrants, formed the Latin American societies of today. There, where ruthless exploitation, plundering and the imposition of an unsustainable, destructive and genocidal world order kills every 10 years —from hunger, poverty and disease— as many people as those 70 millions that according to Guayasamin died throughout centuries. I avoid mentioning the English colonies because in that case, there was no crucible or mixing, only extermination.</p>
<p>The social data on Latin America certified by authorized international organizations are terrifying. Suffice to mention those related to child labor and to the sexual exploitation of children.</p>
<p>Actually, 20 million children under 15 years of age must work for a living; most of them are girls, which contributes to the sexual exploitation that many girls and boys are subjected to. In a large number of countries almost half of the girls, usually very poor, have been victims of sexual abuse or violence in their own homes and become active in commercial sex between the ages of 9 and 13, while approximately 50% to 80% [of these] use drugs.</p>
<p>Hundreds of boys and girls live in the streets and many are also victims of sexual exploitation. In some cities 40% of the women working as prostitutes are not yet 16 years old. This is a small sample, among the dozens of shameful statistical figures of what it means to be the region of the world with the worst distribution of national income.</p>
<p>None of this escaped the profound thought, warmth and sense of human dignity of Oswaldo Guayasamín. He devoted his art to building an awareness, to denounce, fight, struggle and overcome these evils.</p>
<p>“I have been painting for three to five thousand years, more or less,” he told me one day with impressive conviction.</p>
<p>“I paint,” he confessed, “to hurt, to tear and to strike at the hearts of people, to show what man is doing against man.”</p>
<p>“Painting is for me a form of prayer as much as it is a cry and the loftiest consequence of love and solitude,” he sentenced.</p>
<p>Guayasamín wanted to leave an endurable work as a legacy to his indigenous ethnicity and to his mestizo and multiracial people.</p>
<p>Today, we inaugurate the first stage of one of his most cherished dreams: La Capilla del Hombre (The Chapel of Humankind) a majestic representation of truth, history and the destiny of our peoples from pre-Columbian times to date, which is an extraordinary feat of universal resonance.</p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">The social data on Latin America </font></b><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">certified by authorized international organizations are terrifying</font></b></p>
<p>This son of Ecuador born in Quito 83 years ago, whose father was an indigenous and his mother a mestizo was the first of the 10 children of a poor family that lived in La Tola. There, he learned from this legendary city, surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, until finally becoming a genius in fine arts, a gladiator of human dignity and a prophet of days to come. He placed his patrimony at the disposal of Ecuador, the Americas and the World.</p>
<p>How many geniuses like him may have been lost for culture and universal sciences among the millions of indigenous and mestizos who during the last two centuries never learned how to read and write!</p>
<p>I had the great privilege of being his friend and today I have the privilege to be here when, thanks to the endeavors of many, his most cherished dream has become a tangible reality. I can bear witness to his courage, which stirred the anger of the empire and to his social commitment as a man of the vanguard, intimately bounded with the humble of the world.</p>
<p>And since dying is a way to continue our journeys, in 1988, in this very treasured place, when I said a few words of greetings and humorously referred to death, he immediately reacted by saying: “We no longer die, we no longer die.” Thus, with the inauguration of the Capilla del Hombre, to which he devoted the last of his physical energies before departing, we can confirm that what he said in a moment of euphoria and fraternal joy was true for the author of that prophetic prediction.</p>
<p>Today, we can clearly see that both he and his work will endure in the conscience and hearts of present and future generations.</p>
<p>Thank you, my dearest brother Oswaldo Guayasamín, for your legacy to the world!</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<hr noshade="" width="75%" align="left" size="1">
<p>Speech given by dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, president of the Republic of Cuba, in Quito, Republic of Ecuador, at the inauguration ceremony of the Chapel of Humankind, November 29, 2002.</p>
<p>—<i>Granma</i>, December 2, 2002</p>
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December 2002 • Vol 2, No. 11 •
To An Ecuadorian Artist and Humanitarian
By Fidel Castro
Honorable Mr. President:
Authorities from Ecuador and from Quito:
Dearest family:
Distinguished guests:
I remember that at the very beginning of the Cuban Revolution, in the midst of all the turmoil, a man with indigenous features and a determined and inquisitive look, who was already famous and admired by many of our intellectuals, proposed to paint my portrait.
For the first time in my life, I was submitted to a tormenting experience. I should stand still. I did not know if this would last an hour or a century. I had never seen anyone move with such speed, squeezing out the paints contained in aluminum tubes, like toothpaste, mixing them with liquids while staring at me with persistent hawk eyes. There he was, stroking the canvas with his paintbrush from left to right, like flashes of lightning, and turning his eyes again and again to the astonished living object of his feverish activity, breathing heavily like a track and field athlete.
Finally, I could see the result of all that. It wasn’t me, it was what he wanted me to be, how he saw me: a combination of Don Quixote with features of famous personalities from Bolivar’s wars for Independence. But aware of the painter’s fame, I did not dare say a word. Maybe I eventually told him that the painting was “excellent”. I was embarrassed by my ignorance of the fine arts, as I was no less than in the presence of a great master painter and an extraordinary person, whom I later grew to know with increasing admiration and deep affection: Oswaldo Guayasamín. He was then about 42 years old.
Guayasamín was perhaps the most noble, transparent and humane person I have ever met
Three times I lived through the same memorable experience, throughout more than 35 years, and the last time we had several working sessions. He continued painting with the same passion, even when his eyesight began to experience severe limitations, which was particularly cruel for such an indefatigable painter. The last portrait showed a face more or less similar to the others, but with long bony hands that enhanced the image of the Knight of the Doleful Countenance that he still saw in me almost to the end of his life.
Guayasamín was perhaps the most noble, transparent and humane person I have ever met. He painted with the speed of light and his dimension, as a human being, was boundless.
I learned much from our talks, which enriched my conscience about the terrible drama of the conquest, colonization and genocide of the indigenous peoples in this hemisphere; a lacerating pain that he felt deep in his heart. He was an authority in the history of those terrible events.
One day, while we were in the studio at his residence here in Quito, I asked him how many indigenous lives he thought had been lost to the conquest and colonization. He was quick to respond without hesitation: “70 million.” His thirst for justice and vindication for those who survived that holocaust was the major drive of his life.
However, he felt it was necessary to struggle not only for these indigenous peoples but also for the peoples of North, Central and South America. He thought about the formerly Ibero American colonies that emerged from a crucible of martyrdom and from the mixing of victims and victimizers, who together with the descendents of enslaved Africans, as well as European and Asian immigrants, formed the Latin American societies of today. There, where ruthless exploitation, plundering and the imposition of an unsustainable, destructive and genocidal world order kills every 10 years —from hunger, poverty and disease— as many people as those 70 millions that according to Guayasamin died throughout centuries. I avoid mentioning the English colonies because in that case, there was no crucible or mixing, only extermination.
The social data on Latin America certified by authorized international organizations are terrifying. Suffice to mention those related to child labor and to the sexual exploitation of children.
Actually, 20 million children under 15 years of age must work for a living; most of them are girls, which contributes to the sexual exploitation that many girls and boys are subjected to. In a large number of countries almost half of the girls, usually very poor, have been victims of sexual abuse or violence in their own homes and become active in commercial sex between the ages of 9 and 13, while approximately 50% to 80% [of these] use drugs.
Hundreds of boys and girls live in the streets and many are also victims of sexual exploitation. In some cities 40% of the women working as prostitutes are not yet 16 years old. This is a small sample, among the dozens of shameful statistical figures of what it means to be the region of the world with the worst distribution of national income.
None of this escaped the profound thought, warmth and sense of human dignity of Oswaldo Guayasamín. He devoted his art to building an awareness, to denounce, fight, struggle and overcome these evils.
“I have been painting for three to five thousand years, more or less,” he told me one day with impressive conviction.
“I paint,” he confessed, “to hurt, to tear and to strike at the hearts of people, to show what man is doing against man.”
“Painting is for me a form of prayer as much as it is a cry and the loftiest consequence of love and solitude,” he sentenced.
Guayasamín wanted to leave an endurable work as a legacy to his indigenous ethnicity and to his mestizo and multiracial people.
Today, we inaugurate the first stage of one of his most cherished dreams: La Capilla del Hombre (The Chapel of Humankind) a majestic representation of truth, history and the destiny of our peoples from pre-Columbian times to date, which is an extraordinary feat of universal resonance.
The social data on Latin America certified by authorized international organizations are terrifying
This son of Ecuador born in Quito 83 years ago, whose father was an indigenous and his mother a mestizo was the first of the 10 children of a poor family that lived in La Tola. There, he learned from this legendary city, surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, until finally becoming a genius in fine arts, a gladiator of human dignity and a prophet of days to come. He placed his patrimony at the disposal of Ecuador, the Americas and the World.
How many geniuses like him may have been lost for culture and universal sciences among the millions of indigenous and mestizos who during the last two centuries never learned how to read and write!
I had the great privilege of being his friend and today I have the privilege to be here when, thanks to the endeavors of many, his most cherished dream has become a tangible reality. I can bear witness to his courage, which stirred the anger of the empire and to his social commitment as a man of the vanguard, intimately bounded with the humble of the world.
And since dying is a way to continue our journeys, in 1988, in this very treasured place, when I said a few words of greetings and humorously referred to death, he immediately reacted by saying: “We no longer die, we no longer die.” Thus, with the inauguration of the Capilla del Hombre, to which he devoted the last of his physical energies before departing, we can confirm that what he said in a moment of euphoria and fraternal joy was true for the author of that prophetic prediction.
Today, we can clearly see that both he and his work will endure in the conscience and hearts of present and future generations.
Thank you, my dearest brother Oswaldo Guayasamín, for your legacy to the world!
Thank you.
Speech given by dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, president of the Republic of Cuba, in Quito, Republic of Ecuador, at the inauguration ceremony of the Chapel of Humankind, November 29, 2002.
—Granma, December 2, 2002
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<p class="storyheadline">Politics and Sports</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
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<p>I am writing this quickly and a little late. I should do this because of the strong emphasis I have placed in the analysis of this matter.</p>
<p>Besides, the news is not disheartening. The wire services announced that the two boxers who had defected in Rio de Janeiro had been found and arrested by the authorities on a beach close to that city. Remember that they had been given up for missing. They were there without any documents.</p>
<p>They were not sent to prison. They remained in the same hotel where they were staying, under the surveillance of the Federal Police. The boxers told the police that they had made a mistake and regretted it.</p>
<p>They refused to see a German citizen who very promptly took interest in them, following instructions from a mafia company. We learned about this later.</p>
<p>The authorities asked us for their documents, and the Cuban consular representatives, following our Ambassador’s instructions, proceeded up to complete all relevant arrangements.</p>
<p>The news stating that the boxers were in Turkey while immigration matters were being looked after had obviously been released by the mafia as a smoke screen. There was even a German Member of Parliament who attempted to hit a home run with a fake ball. The company that had invested more than two million dollars in this grotesque business was talking about the “human rights” of the athletes’ families. What will the United Nations say about this unfair competition?</p>
<p>This is where sports and politics get together in the search for concrete and principled solutions, over and above fondness and bitterness.</p>
<p>Those citizens will not be submitted to any sort of arrest, much less the kinds of methods being used by the United States Government in Abu Ghraib and Guant�namo, which we have never used in this country. They will be temporarily transferred to a guesthouse and allowed family visits. The press will also be able to contact them if they so wish.</p>
<p>They will be offered decent jobs for the benefit of sports, given their knowledge and experience.</p>
<p>The Brazilian authorities should not be worried in the face of the inevitable campaigns being launched by our adversaries. Cuba’s behavior will rise to the occasion. I, for one, shall have a good sleep.</p>
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<p>—<i>Granma</i> (Cuba), August 4 2007</p>
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Sep/Oct 2007 • Vol 7, No. 5
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Politics and Sports
By Fidel Castro Ruz
I am writing this quickly and a little late. I should do this because of the strong emphasis I have placed in the analysis of this matter.
Besides, the news is not disheartening. The wire services announced that the two boxers who had defected in Rio de Janeiro had been found and arrested by the authorities on a beach close to that city. Remember that they had been given up for missing. They were there without any documents.
They were not sent to prison. They remained in the same hotel where they were staying, under the surveillance of the Federal Police. The boxers told the police that they had made a mistake and regretted it.
They refused to see a German citizen who very promptly took interest in them, following instructions from a mafia company. We learned about this later.
The authorities asked us for their documents, and the Cuban consular representatives, following our Ambassador’s instructions, proceeded up to complete all relevant arrangements.
The news stating that the boxers were in Turkey while immigration matters were being looked after had obviously been released by the mafia as a smoke screen. There was even a German Member of Parliament who attempted to hit a home run with a fake ball. The company that had invested more than two million dollars in this grotesque business was talking about the “human rights” of the athletes’ families. What will the United Nations say about this unfair competition?
This is where sports and politics get together in the search for concrete and principled solutions, over and above fondness and bitterness.
Those citizens will not be submitted to any sort of arrest, much less the kinds of methods being used by the United States Government in Abu Ghraib and Guant�namo, which we have never used in this country. They will be temporarily transferred to a guesthouse and allowed family visits. The press will also be able to contact them if they so wish.
They will be offered decent jobs for the benefit of sports, given their knowledge and experience.
The Brazilian authorities should not be worried in the face of the inevitable campaigns being launched by our adversaries. Cuba’s behavior will rise to the occasion. I, for one, shall have a good sleep.
—Granma (Cuba), August 4 2007
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<p><i>We print below the speech of Fidel Castro which he made September 22, 2001, in response to the address to a joint session of the United States Congress by President George Bush. The translation is from the Permanent Mission of The Republic of Cuba to the United Nations in New York City.</i></p>
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<p>Fellow countrymen:</p><p>
No one can deny that terrorism is today a dangerous and ethically indefensible phenomenon, which should be eradicated regardless of its deep origins, the economic and political factors that brought it to life and those responsible for it.</p><p>
The unanimous irritation caused by the human and psychological damage brought on the American people by the unexpected and shocking death of thousands of innocent people whose images have shaken the world is perfectly understandable. But who have profited? The extreme right, the most backward and right-wing forces, those in favor of crushing the growing world rebellion and sweeping away everything progressive that is still left on the planet. It was an enormous error, a huge injustice and a great crime, whomever they are who organized or are responsible for such action.</p><p>
However, the tragedy should not be used to recklessly start a war that could actually unleash an endless carnage of innocent people and all of this on behalf of justice and under the peculiar and bizarre name of “Infinite Justice.”</p><p>
In the last few days we have seen the hasty establishment of the basis, the concept, the true purposes, the spirit and the conditions for such a war. No one would be able to affirm that it was not something thought out well in advance, something that was just waiting for its chance to materialize. Those who after the so-called end of the cold war continued a military build-up and the development of the most sophisticated means to kill and exterminate human beings were aware that the large military investments would give them the privilege to impose an absolute and complete dominance over the other peoples of the world. The ideologists of the imperialist system knew very well what they were doing and why they were doing it.</p><p>
After the shock and sincere sorrow felt by every people on Earth for the atrocious and insane terrorist attack that targeted the American people, the most extremist ideologists and the most belligerent hawks, already set in privileged power positions, have taken command of the most powerful country in the world whose military and technological capabilities would seem infinite. Actually, its capacity to destroy and kill is enormous while its inclination towards equanimity, serenity, thoughtfulness and restrain is minimal.</p><p>
The combination of elements—including complicity and the common enjoyment of privileges—the prevailing opportunism, confusion and panic make it almost impossible to avoid a bloody and unpredictable outcome.</p><p>
The first victims of whatever military actions are undertaken will be the billions of people living in the poor and underdeveloped world with their unbelievable economic and social problems, their unpayable debts and the ruinous prices of their basic commodities; their growing natural and ecological catastrophes, their hunger and misery, the massive undernourishment of their children, teenagers and adults; their terrible AIDS epidemic, their malaria, their tuberculosis and their infectious diseases that threaten whole nations with extermination.</p><p>
The grave economic world crisis was already a real and irrefutable fact affecting absolutely every one of the big economic power centers. Such crisis will inevitably grow deeper under the new circumstances, and when it becomes unbearable for the overwhelming majority of the peoples, it will bring chaos, rebellion and the impossibility to govern.</p><p>
But the price will also be un-payable for the rich countries. For years to come it would be impossible to speak strongly enough about the environment and the ecology, or about ideas and research done and tested, or about projects for the protection of Nature because that space and possibility would be taken by military actions, war and crimes as infinite as “Infinite Justice,” that is, the name given to the war operation to be unleashed.</p><p>
Can there be any hope left after having listened, hardly 36 hours ago, to the speech made by the President before the U.S. Congress?
</p><p>
I will avoid the use of adjectives, qualifiers or offensive words towards the author of that speech. They would be absolutely unnecessary and untimely when the tensions and seriousness of the moment advise thoughtfulness and equanimity. I will limit myself to underline some short phrases that say it all:
</p><ul>
<li type="circle">We will use every necessary weapon of war.
</li><li type="circle">Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.
</li><li type="circle">Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
</li><li type="circle">I’ve called the armed forces to alert and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act and you will make us proud.
</li><li type="circle">This is the world’s fight, this is civilization’s fight.
</li><li type="circle">I ask for your patience [...] in what will be a long struggle.
</li><li type="circle">The great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depend on us.
</li><li type="circle">The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. [...] And we know that God is not neutral.
</li></ul>
<p>
I ask our fellow countrymen to meditate deeply and calmly on the ideas contained in several of the above-mentioned phrases:
</p><p>
“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” No nation of the world has been left out of the dilemma, not even the big and powerful states; none has escaped the threat of war or attacks.</p><p>
“We will use any weapon.” No procedure has been excluded, regardless of its ethics, or any threat, however fatal—either nuclear, chemical, biological or any other.</p><p>
“It will not be short combat but a lengthy war, lasting many years, unparalleled in history.”</p><p>
“It is the world’s fight; it is civilization’s fight.”</p><p>
“The achievements of our times and the hope of every time, now depend on us.”</p><p>
Finally, an unheard of confession in a political speech on the eve of a war, and no less than in times of apocalyptic risks: “The course of this conflict is not known; yet its outcome is certain. And we know that God is not neutral.”</p><p>
This is an amazing assertion. When I think about the real or imagined parties involved in that bizarre holy war that is about to begin, I find it difficult to make a distinction about where fanaticism is stronger.</p><p>
On Thursday, before the United States Congress, the idea was designed of a world military dictatorship under the exclusive rule of force, irrespective of any international laws or institutions. The United Nations Organization, simply ignored in the present crisis, would fail to have any authority or prerogative whatsoever. There would be only one boss, only one judge, and only one law.</p><p>
We have all been ordered to ally either with the United States government or with terrorism.</p><p>
Cuba, the country that has suffered the most and the longest from terrorist actions, the one whose people are not afraid of anything because there is no threat or power in the world that can intimidate it, with a high morale, Cuba claims that it is opposed to terrorism and opposed to war. Although the possibilities are now remote, Cuba reaffirms the need to avert a war of unpredictable consequences whose very authors have admitted not to have the least idea of how the events will unfold. Likewise, Cuba reiterates its willingness to cooperate with every country in the total eradication of terrorism.</p><p>
An objective and calm friend should advise the United States government against throwing the young American soldiers into an uncertain war in remote, isolated and inaccessible places, like a fight against ghosts, not knowing where they are or even if they exist or not, or whether the people they kill are or not responsible for the death of their innocent fellow countrymen killed in the United States.</p><p>
Cuba will never declare itself an enemy of the American people that is today subjected to an unprecedented campaign to sow hatred and a vengeful spirit, so much so that even the music that sings to peace has been banned. On the contrary, Cuba will make that music its own, and even our children will sing their songs to peace while the announced bloody war lasts.</p><p>
Whatever happens, the territory of Cuba will never be used for terrorist actions against the American people and we will do everything within our reach to prevent such actions against that people. Today we are expressing our solidarity while urging to peace and calmness. One day they will admit we were right.</p><p>
Our independence, our principles and our social achievements we will defend with honor to the last drop of blood, if we are attacked!</p><p>
It will not be easy to fabricate pretexts to do it. They are already talking about a war using all the necessary weapons but it will be good to recall that not even that would be a new experience. Almost four decades ago, hundreds of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons were aimed at Cuba and nobody remembers anyone of our countrymen sleepless over that.</p><p>
We are the same sons and daughters of that heroic people, with a patriotic and revolutionary conscience that is higher than ever. It is time for serenity and courage.</p><p>
The world will grow aware of this and will raise its voice in the face of the terrible threatening drama that it is about to suffer.</p><p>
As for Cubans, this is the right time to proclaim more proudly and resolutely than ever:</p><p>Socialism or death! Homeland or death! We shall overcome!
</p></div>
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Oct 2001 • Vol 1, No. 5 •
Castro’s Response to Bush’s War
We print below the speech of Fidel Castro which he made September 22, 2001, in response to the address to a joint session of the United States Congress by President George Bush. The translation is from the Permanent Mission of The Republic of Cuba to the United Nations in New York City.
Fellow countrymen:
No one can deny that terrorism is today a dangerous and ethically indefensible phenomenon, which should be eradicated regardless of its deep origins, the economic and political factors that brought it to life and those responsible for it.
The unanimous irritation caused by the human and psychological damage brought on the American people by the unexpected and shocking death of thousands of innocent people whose images have shaken the world is perfectly understandable. But who have profited? The extreme right, the most backward and right-wing forces, those in favor of crushing the growing world rebellion and sweeping away everything progressive that is still left on the planet. It was an enormous error, a huge injustice and a great crime, whomever they are who organized or are responsible for such action.
However, the tragedy should not be used to recklessly start a war that could actually unleash an endless carnage of innocent people and all of this on behalf of justice and under the peculiar and bizarre name of “Infinite Justice.”
In the last few days we have seen the hasty establishment of the basis, the concept, the true purposes, the spirit and the conditions for such a war. No one would be able to affirm that it was not something thought out well in advance, something that was just waiting for its chance to materialize. Those who after the so-called end of the cold war continued a military build-up and the development of the most sophisticated means to kill and exterminate human beings were aware that the large military investments would give them the privilege to impose an absolute and complete dominance over the other peoples of the world. The ideologists of the imperialist system knew very well what they were doing and why they were doing it.
After the shock and sincere sorrow felt by every people on Earth for the atrocious and insane terrorist attack that targeted the American people, the most extremist ideologists and the most belligerent hawks, already set in privileged power positions, have taken command of the most powerful country in the world whose military and technological capabilities would seem infinite. Actually, its capacity to destroy and kill is enormous while its inclination towards equanimity, serenity, thoughtfulness and restrain is minimal.
The combination of elements—including complicity and the common enjoyment of privileges—the prevailing opportunism, confusion and panic make it almost impossible to avoid a bloody and unpredictable outcome.
The first victims of whatever military actions are undertaken will be the billions of people living in the poor and underdeveloped world with their unbelievable economic and social problems, their unpayable debts and the ruinous prices of their basic commodities; their growing natural and ecological catastrophes, their hunger and misery, the massive undernourishment of their children, teenagers and adults; their terrible AIDS epidemic, their malaria, their tuberculosis and their infectious diseases that threaten whole nations with extermination.
The grave economic world crisis was already a real and irrefutable fact affecting absolutely every one of the big economic power centers. Such crisis will inevitably grow deeper under the new circumstances, and when it becomes unbearable for the overwhelming majority of the peoples, it will bring chaos, rebellion and the impossibility to govern.
But the price will also be un-payable for the rich countries. For years to come it would be impossible to speak strongly enough about the environment and the ecology, or about ideas and research done and tested, or about projects for the protection of Nature because that space and possibility would be taken by military actions, war and crimes as infinite as “Infinite Justice,” that is, the name given to the war operation to be unleashed.
Can there be any hope left after having listened, hardly 36 hours ago, to the speech made by the President before the U.S. Congress?
I will avoid the use of adjectives, qualifiers or offensive words towards the author of that speech. They would be absolutely unnecessary and untimely when the tensions and seriousness of the moment advise thoughtfulness and equanimity. I will limit myself to underline some short phrases that say it all:
We will use every necessary weapon of war.
Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.
Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
I’ve called the armed forces to alert and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act and you will make us proud.
This is the world’s fight, this is civilization’s fight.
I ask for your patience [...] in what will be a long struggle.
The great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depend on us.
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. [...] And we know that God is not neutral.
I ask our fellow countrymen to meditate deeply and calmly on the ideas contained in several of the above-mentioned phrases:
“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” No nation of the world has been left out of the dilemma, not even the big and powerful states; none has escaped the threat of war or attacks.
“We will use any weapon.” No procedure has been excluded, regardless of its ethics, or any threat, however fatal—either nuclear, chemical, biological or any other.
“It will not be short combat but a lengthy war, lasting many years, unparalleled in history.”
“It is the world’s fight; it is civilization’s fight.”
“The achievements of our times and the hope of every time, now depend on us.”
Finally, an unheard of confession in a political speech on the eve of a war, and no less than in times of apocalyptic risks: “The course of this conflict is not known; yet its outcome is certain. And we know that God is not neutral.”
This is an amazing assertion. When I think about the real or imagined parties involved in that bizarre holy war that is about to begin, I find it difficult to make a distinction about where fanaticism is stronger.
On Thursday, before the United States Congress, the idea was designed of a world military dictatorship under the exclusive rule of force, irrespective of any international laws or institutions. The United Nations Organization, simply ignored in the present crisis, would fail to have any authority or prerogative whatsoever. There would be only one boss, only one judge, and only one law.
We have all been ordered to ally either with the United States government or with terrorism.
Cuba, the country that has suffered the most and the longest from terrorist actions, the one whose people are not afraid of anything because there is no threat or power in the world that can intimidate it, with a high morale, Cuba claims that it is opposed to terrorism and opposed to war. Although the possibilities are now remote, Cuba reaffirms the need to avert a war of unpredictable consequences whose very authors have admitted not to have the least idea of how the events will unfold. Likewise, Cuba reiterates its willingness to cooperate with every country in the total eradication of terrorism.
An objective and calm friend should advise the United States government against throwing the young American soldiers into an uncertain war in remote, isolated and inaccessible places, like a fight against ghosts, not knowing where they are or even if they exist or not, or whether the people they kill are or not responsible for the death of their innocent fellow countrymen killed in the United States.
Cuba will never declare itself an enemy of the American people that is today subjected to an unprecedented campaign to sow hatred and a vengeful spirit, so much so that even the music that sings to peace has been banned. On the contrary, Cuba will make that music its own, and even our children will sing their songs to peace while the announced bloody war lasts.
Whatever happens, the territory of Cuba will never be used for terrorist actions against the American people and we will do everything within our reach to prevent such actions against that people. Today we are expressing our solidarity while urging to peace and calmness. One day they will admit we were right.
Our independence, our principles and our social achievements we will defend with honor to the last drop of blood, if we are attacked!
It will not be easy to fabricate pretexts to do it. They are already talking about a war using all the necessary weapons but it will be good to recall that not even that would be a new experience. Almost four decades ago, hundreds of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons were aimed at Cuba and nobody remembers anyone of our countrymen sleepless over that.
We are the same sons and daughters of that heroic people, with a patriotic and revolutionary conscience that is higher than ever. It is time for serenity and courage.
The world will grow aware of this and will raise its voice in the face of the terrible threatening drama that it is about to suffer.
As for Cubans, this is the right time to proclaim more proudly and resolutely than ever:Socialism or death! Homeland or death! We shall overcome!
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1953.10.16 | <body>
<p class="title">
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h1>
History Will Absolve Me
</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> 1953
<br>
<span class="info">Publisher:</span> Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, Cuba. 1975
<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> Pedro Álvarez Tabío & Andrew Paul Booth (who rechecked the translation with the Spanish La historia me absolverá, same publisher, in 1981)
<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/Markup:</span> Andrew Paul Booth/Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> 1997, Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2001
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="fst">
HONORABLE JUDGES:
</p>
<p>
Never has a lawyer had to practice his profession under such difficult conditions; never has such a number of
overwhelming irregularities been committed against an accused man. In this case, counsel and defendant are
one and the same. As attorney he has not even been able to take a look at the indictment. As accused, for the
past seventy-six days he has been locked away in solitary confinement, held totally and absolutely
incommunicado, in violation of every human and legal right.
</p>
<p>
He who speaks to you hates vanity with all his being, nor are his temperament or frame of mind inclined towards
courtroom poses or sensationalism of any kind. If I have had to assume my own defense before this Court it is
for two reasons. First: because I have been denied legal aid almost entirely, and second: only one who has
been so deeply wounded, who has seen his country so forsaken and its justice trampled so, can speak at a
moment like this with words that spring from the blood of his heart and the truth of his very gut.
</p>
<p>
There was no lack of generous comrades who wished to defend me, and the Havana Bar Association
appointed a courageous and competent jurist, Dr. Jorge Pagliery, Dean of the Bar in this city, to represent me
in this case. However, he was not permitted to carry out his task. As often as he tried to see me, the prison
gates were closed before him. Only after a month and a half, and through the intervention of the Court, was he
finally granted a ten minute interview with me in the presence of a sergeant from the Military Intelligence Agency
(SIM). One supposes that a lawyer has a right to speak with his defendant in private, and this right is respected
throughout the world, except in the case of a Cuban prisoner of war in the hands of an implacable tyranny that
abides by no code of law, be it legal or humane. Neither Dr. Pagliery nor I were willing to tolerate such dirty
spying upon our means of defense for the oral trial. Did they want to know, perhaps, beforehand, the methods
we would use in order to reduce to dust the incredible fabric of lies they had woven around the Moncada
Barracks events? How were we going to expose the terrible truth they would go to such great lengths to
conceal? It was then that we decided that, taking advantage of my professional rights as a lawyer, I would
assume my own defense.
</p>
<p>
This decision, overheard by the sergeant and reported by him to his superior, provoked a real panic. It looked
like some mocking little imp was telling them that I was going to ruin all their plans. You know very well,
Honorable Judges, how much pressure has been brought to bear on me in order to strip me as well of this right
that is ratified by long Cuban tradition. The Court could not give in to such machination, for that would have left
the accused in a state of total indefensiveness. The accused, who is now exercising this right to plead his own
case, will under no circumstances refrain from saying what he must say. I consider it essential that I explain, at
the onset, the reason for the terrible isolation in which I have been kept; what was the purpose of keeping me
silent; what was behind the plots to kill me, plots which the Court is familiar with; what grave events are being
hidden from the people; and the truth behind all the strange things which have taken place during this trial. I
propose to do all this with utmost clarity.
</p>
<p>
You have publicly called this case the most significant in the history of the Republic. If you sincerely believed
this, you should not have allowed your authority to be stained and degraded. The first court session was
September 21st. Among one hundred machine guns and bayonets, scandalously invading the hall of justice,
more than a hundred people were seated in the prisoner's dock. The great majority had nothing to do with what
had happened. They had been under preventive arrest for many days, suffering all kinds of insults and abuses in
the chambers of the repressive units. But the rest of the accused, the minority, were brave and determined,
ready to proudly confirm their part in the battle for freedom, ready to offer an example of unprecedented
self-sacrifice and to wrench from the jail's claws those who in deliberate bad faith had been included in the trial.
Those who had met in combat confronted one another again. Once again, with the cause of justice on our side,
we would wage the terrible battle of truth against infamy! Surely the regime was not prepared for the moral
catastrophe in store for it!
</p>
<p>
How to maintain all its false accusations? How to keep secret what had really happened, when so many young
men were willing to risk everything - prison, torture and death, if necessary - in order that the truth be told before
this Court?
</p>
<p>
I was called as a witness at that first session. For two hours I was questioned by the Prosecutor as well as by
twenty defense attorneys. I was able to prove with exact facts and figures the sums of money that had been
spent, the way this money was collected and the arms we had been able to round up. I had nothing to hide, for
the truth was: all this was accomplished through sacrifices without precedent in the history of our Republic. I
spoke of the goals that inspired us in our struggle and of the humane and generous treatment that we had at all
times accorded our adversaries. If I accomplished my purpose of demonstrating that those who were falsely
implicated in this trial were neither directly nor indirectly involved, I owe it to the complete support and backing
of my heroic comrades. For, as I said, the consequences they might be forced to suffer at no time caused them
to repent of their condition as revolutionaries and patriots, I was never once allowed to speak with these
comrades of mine during the time we were in prison, and yet we planned to do exactly the same. The fact is,
when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them - neither prison walls nor the sod of
cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain
them all.
</p>
<p>
From that moment on, the structure of lies the regime had erected about the events at Moncada Barracks
began to collapse like a house of cards. As a result, the Prosecutor realized that keeping all those persons
named as instigators in prison was completely absurd, and he requested their provisional release.
</p>
<p>
At the close of my testimony in that first session, I asked the Court to allow me to leave the dock and sit among
the counsel for the defense. This permission was granted. At that point what I consider my most important
mission in this trial began: to totally discredit the cowardly, miserable and treacherous lies which the regime
had hurled against our fighters; to reveal with irrefutable evidence the horrible, repulsive crimes they had
practiced on the prisoners; and to show the nation and the world the infinite misfortune of the Cuban people who
are suffering the cruelest, the most inhuman oppression of their history.
</p>
<p>
The second session convened on Tuesday, September 22nd. By that time only ten witnesses had testified, and
they had already cleared up the murders in the Manzanillo area, specifically establishing and placing on record
the direct responsibility of the captain commanding that post. There were three hundred more witnesses to
testify. What would happen if, with a staggering mass of facts and evidence, I should proceed to cross-examine
the very Army men who were directly responsible for those crimes? Could the regime permit me to go ahead
before the large audience attending the trial? Before journalists and jurists from all over the island? And before
the party leaders of the opposition, who they had stupidly seated right in the prisoner's dock where they could
hear so well all that might be brought out here? They would rather have blown up the court house, with all its
judges, than allow that!
</p>
<p>
And so they devised a plan by which they could eliminate me from the trial and they proceeded to do just that,
manu militari. On Friday night, September 25th, on the eve of the third session of the trial, two prison doctors
visited me in my cell. They were visibly embarrassed. 'We have come to examine you,' they said. I asked them,
'Who is so worried about my health?' Actually, from the moment I saw them I realized what they had come for.
They could not have treated me with greater respect, and they explained their predicament to me. That
afternoon Colonel Chaviano had appeared at the prison and told them I 'was doing the Government terrible
damage with this trial.' He had told them they must sign a certificate declaring that I was ill and was, therefore,
unable to appear in court. The doctors told me that for their part they were prepared to resign from their posts
and risk persecution. They put the matter in my hands, for me to decide. I found it hard to ask those men to
unhesitatingly destroy themselves. But neither could I, under any circumstances, consent that those orders be
carried out. Leaving the matter to their own consciences, I told them only: 'You must know your duty; I certainly
know mine.'
</p>
<p>
After leaving the cell they signed the certificate. I know they did so believing in good faith that this was the only
way they could save my life, which they considered to be in grave danger. I was not obliged to keep our
conversation secret, for I am bound only by the truth. Telling the truth in this instance may jeopardize those good
doctors in their material interests, but I am removing all doubt about their honor, which is worth much more. That
same night, I wrote the Court a letter denouncing the plot; requesting that two Court physicians be sent to certify
my excellent state of health, and to inform you that if to save my life I must take part in such deception, I would a
thousand times prefer to lose it. To show my determination to fight alone against this whole degenerate
frame-up, I added to my own words one of the Master's lines: 'A just cause even from the depths of a cave can
do more than an army.' As the Court knows, this was the letter Dr. Melba Hernández submitted at the third
session of the trial on September 26th. I managed to get it to her in spite of the heavy guard I was under. That
letter, of course, provoked immediate reprisals. Dr. Hernández was subjected to solitary confinement, and I -
since I was already incommunicado - was sent to the most inaccessible reaches of the prison. From that
moment on, all the accused were thoroughly searched from head to foot before they were brought into the
courtroom.
</p>
<p>
Two Court physicians certified on September 27th that I was, in fact, in perfect health. Yet, in spite of the
repeated orders from the Court, I was never again brought to the hearings. What's more, anonymous persons
daily circulated hundreds of apocryphal pamphlets which announced my rescue from jail. This stupid alibi was
invented so they could physically eliminate me and pretend I had tried to escape. Since the scheme failed as a
result of timely exposure by ever alert friends, and after the first affidavit was shown to be false, the regime
could only keep me away from the trial by open and shameless contempt of Court.
</p>
<p>
This was an incredible situation, Honorable Judges: Here was a regime literally afraid to bring an accused man
to Court; a regime of blood and terror that shrank in fear of the moral conviction of a defenseless man -
unarmed, slandered and isolated. And so, after depriving me of everything else, they finally deprived me even of
the trial in which I was the main accused. Remember that this was during a period in which individual rights
were suspended and the Public Order Act as well as censorship of radio and press were in full force. What
unbelievable crimes this regime must have committed to so fear the voice of one accused man!
</p>
<p>
I must dwell upon the insolence and disrespect which the Army leaders have at all times shown towards you. As
often as this Court has ordered an end to the inhuman isolation in which I was held; as often as it has ordered
my most elementary rights to be respected; as often as it has demanded that I be brought before it, this Court
has never been obeyed! Worse yet: in the very presence of the Court, during the first and second hearings, a
praetorian guard was stationed beside me to totally prevent me from speaking to anyone, even among the brief
recesses. In other words, not only in prison, but also in the courtroom and in your presence, they ignored your
decrees. I had intended to mention this matter in the following session, as a question of elementary respect for
the Court, but - I was never brought back. And if, in exchange for so much disrespect, they bring us before you
to be jailed in the name of a legality which they and they alone have been violating since March 10th, sad
indeed is the role they would force on you. The Latin maxim Cedant arma togae has certainly not been fulfilled
on a single occasion during this trial. I beg you to keep that circumstance well in mind.
</p>
<p>
What is more, these devices were in any case quite useless; my brave comrades, with unprecedented
patriotism, did their duty to the utmost.
</p>
<p>
'Yes, we set out to fight for Cuba's freedom and we are not ashamed of having done so,' they declared, one by
one, on the witness stand. Then, addressing the Court with impressive courage, they denounced the hideous
crimes committed upon the bodies of our brothers. Although absent from Court, I was able, in my prison cell, to
follow the trial in all its details. And I have the convicts at Boniato Prison to thank for this. In spite of all threats,
these men found ingenious means of getting newspaper clippings and all kinds of information to me. In this way
they avenged the abuses and immoralities perpetrated against them both by Taboada, the warden, and the
supervisor, Lieutenant Rozabal, who drove them from sun up to sun down building private mansions and
starved them by embezzling the prison food budget.
</p>
<p>
As the trial went on, the roles were reversed: those who came to accuse found themselves accused, and the
accused became the accusers! It was not the revolutionaries who were judged there; judged once and forever
was a man named Batista - monstruum horrendum! - and it matters little that these valiant and worthy young
men have been condemned, if tomorrow the people will condemn the Dictator and his henchmen! Our men
were consigned to the Isle of Pines Prison, in whose circular galleries Castells' ghost still lingers and where the
cries of countless victims still echo; there our young men have been sent to expiate their love of liberty, in bitter
confinement, banished from society, torn from their homes and exiled from their country. Is it not clear to you, as
I have said before, that in such circumstances it is difficult and disagreeable for this lawyer to fulfill his duty?
</p>
<p>
As a result of so many turbid and illegal machinations, due to the will of those who govern and the weakness of
those who judge, I find myself here in this little room at the Civilian Hospital, where I have been brought to be
tried in secret, so that I may not be heard and my voice may be stifled, and so that no one may learn of the
things I am going to say. Why, then, do we need that imposing Palace of Justice which the Honorable Judges
would without doubt find much more comfortable? I must warn you: it is unwise to administer justice from a
hospital room, surrounded by sentinels with fixed bayonets; the citizens might suppose that our justice is sick -
and that it is captive.
</p>
<p>
Let me remind you, your laws of procedure provide that trials shall be 'public hearings;' however, the people
have been barred altogether from this session of Court. The only civilians admitted here have been two
attorneys and six reporters, in whose newspapers the censorship of the press will prevent printing a word I say. I
see, as my sole audience in this chamber and in the corridors, nearly a hundred soldiers and officers. I am
grateful for the polite and serious attention they give me. I only wish I could have the whole Army before me! I
know, one day, this Army will seethe with rage to wash away the terrible, the shameful bloodstains splattered
across the military uniform by the present ruthless clique in its lust for power. On that day, oh what a fall awaits
those mounted in arrogance on their noble steeds! - provided that the people have not dismounted them long
before that!
</p>
<p>
Finally, I should like to add that no treatise on penal law was allowed me in my cell. I have at my disposal only
this tiny code of law lent to me by my learned counsel, Dr. Baudillo Castellanos, the courageous defender of my
comrades. In the same way they prevented me from receiving the books of Martí; it seems the prison
censorship considered them too subversive. Or is it because I said Martí was the inspirer of the 26th of July?
Reference books on any other subject were also denied me during this trial. But it makes no difference! I carry
the teachings of the Master in my heart, and in my mind the noble ideas of all men who have defended people's
freedom everywhere!
</p>
<p>
I am going to make only one request of this court; I trust it will be granted as a compensation for the many
abuses and outrages the accused has had to tolerate without protection of the law. I ask that my right to express
myself be respected without restraint. Otherwise, even the merest semblance of justice cannot be maintained,
and the final episode of this trial would be, more than all the others, one of ignominy and cowardice.
</p>
<p>
I must admit that I am somewhat disappointed. I had expected that the Honorable Prosecutor would come
forward with a grave accusation. I thought he would be ready to justify to the limit his contention, and his reasons
why I should be condemned in the name of Law and Justice - what law and what justice? - to 26 years in prison.
But no. He has limited himself to reading Article 148 of the Social Defense Code. On the basis of this, plus
aggravating circumstances, he requests that I be imprisoned for the lengthy term of 26 years! Two minutes
seems a very short time in which to demand and justify that a man be put behind bars for more than a quarter of
a century. Can it be that the Honorable Prosecutor is, perhaps, annoyed with the Court? Because as I see it, his
laconic attitude in this case clashes with the solemnity with which the Honorable Judges declared, rather
proudly, that this was a trial of the greatest importance! I have heard prosecutors speak ten times longer in a
simple narcotics case asking for a sentence of just six months. The Honorable Prosecutor has supplied not a
word in support of his petition. I am a just man. I realize that for a prosecuting attorney under oath of loyalty to the
Constitution of the Republic, it is difficult to come here in the name of an unconstitutional, statutory, de facto
government, lacking any legal much less moral basis, to ask that a young Cuban, a lawyer like himself - perhaps
as honorable as he, be sent to jail for 26 years. But the Honorable Prosecutor is a gifted man and I have seen
much less talented persons write lengthy diatribes in defense of this regime. How then can I suppose that he
lacks reason with which to defend it, at least for fifteen minutes, however contemptible that might be to any
decent person? It is clear that there is a great conspiracy behind all this.
</p>
<p>
Honorable Judges: Why such interest in silencing me? Why is every type of argument foregone in order to avoid
presenting any target whatsoever against which I might direct my own brief? Is it that they lack any legal, moral
or political basis on which to put forth a serious formulation of the question? Are they that afraid of the truth? Do
they hope that I, too, will speak for only two minutes and that I will not touch upon the points which have caused
certain people sleepless nights since July 26th? Since the prosecutor's petition was restricted to the mere
reading of five lines of an article of the Social Defense Code, might they suppose that I too would limit myself to
those same lines and circle round them like some slave turning a millstone? I shall by no means accept such a
gag, for in this trial there is much more than the freedom of a single individual at stake. Fundamental matters of
principle are being debated here, the right of men to be free is on trial, the very foundations of our existence as
a civilized and democratic nation are in the balance. When this trial is over, I do not want to have to reproach
myself for any principle left undefended, for any truth left unsaid, for any crime not denounced.
</p>
<p>
The Honorable Prosecutor's famous little article hardly deserves a minute of my time. I shall limit myself for the
moment to a brief legal skirmish against it, because I want to clear the field for an assault against all the endless
lies and deceits, the hypocrisy, conventionalism and moral cowardice that have set the stage for the crude
comedy which since the 10th of March - and even before then - has been called Justice in Cuba.
</p>
<p>
It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime
described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.
</p>
<p>
The article in question reads textually: 'A penalty of imprisonment of from three to ten years shall be imposed
upon the perpetrator of any act aimed at bringing about an armed uprising against the Constitutional Powers of
the State. The penalty shall be imprisonment for from five to twenty years, in the event that insurrection actually
be carried into effect.'
</p>
<p>
In what country is the Honorable Prosecutor living? Who has told him that we have sought to bring about an
uprising against the Constitutional Powers of the State? Two things are self-evident. First of all, the dictatorship
that oppresses the nation is not a constitutional power, but an unconstitutional one: it was established against
the Constitution, over the head of the Constitution, violating the legitimate Constitution of the Republic. The
legitimate Constitution is that which emanates directly from a sovereign people. I shall demonstrate this point
fully later on, notwithstanding all the subterfuges contrived by cowards and traitors to justify the unjustifiable.
Secondly, the article refers to Powers, in the plural, as in the case of a republic governed by a Legislative
Power, an Executive Power, and a Judicial Power which balance and counterbalance one another. We have
fomented a rebellion against one single power, an illegal one, which has usurped and merged into a single
whole both the Legislative and Executive Powers of the nation, and so has destroyed the entire system that was
specifically safeguarded by the Code now under our analysis. As to the independence of the Judiciary after the
10th of March, I shall not allude to that for I am in no mood for joking ... No matter how Article 148 may be
stretched, shrunk or amended, not a single comma applies to the events of July 26th. Let us leave this statute
alone and await the opportunity to apply it to those who really did foment an uprising against the Constitutional
Powers of the State. Later I shall come back to the Code to refresh the Honorable Prosecutor's memory about
certain circumstances he has unfortunately overlooked.
</p>
<p>
I warn you, I am just beginning! If there is in your hearts a vestige of love for your country, love for humanity, love
for justice, listen carefully. I know that I will be silenced for many years; I know that the regime will try to suppress
the truth by all possible means; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not
be stifled - it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous
cowards deny it.
</p>
<p>
From a shack in the mountains on Monday, July 27th, I listened to the dictator's voice on the air while there
were still 18 of our men in arms against the government. Those who have never experienced similar moments
will never know that kind of bitterness and indignation. While the long-cherished hopes of freeing our people lay
in ruins about us we heard those crushed hopes gloated over by a tyrant more vicious, more arrogant than ever.
The endless stream of lies and slanders, poured forth in his crude, odious, repulsive language, may only be
compared to the endless stream of clean young blood which had flowed since the previous night - with his
knowledge, consent, complicity and approval - being spilled by the most inhuman gang of assassins it is
possible to imagine. To have believed him for a single moment would have sufficed to fill a man of conscience
with remorse and shame for the rest of his life. At that time I could not even hope to brand his miserable
forehead with the mark of truth which condemns him for the rest of his days and for all time to come. Already a
circle of more than a thousand men, armed with weapons more powerful than ours and with peremptory orders
to bring in our bodies, was closing in around us. Now that the truth is coming out, now that speaking before you I
am carrying out the mission I set for myself, I may die peacefully and content. So I shall not mince my words
about those savage murderers.
</p>
<p>
I must pause to consider the facts for a moment. The government itself said the attack showed such precision
and perfection that it must have been planned by military strategists. Nothing could have been farther from the
truth! The plan was drawn up by a group of young men, none of whom had any military experience at all. I will
reveal their names, omitting two who are neither dead nor in prison: Abel Santamaría, José Luis Tasende,
Renato Guitart Rosell, Pedro Miret, Jesús Montané and myself. Half of them are dead, and in tribute to their
memory I can say that although they were not military experts they had enough patriotism to have given, had we
not been at such a great disadvantage, a good beating to that entire lot of generals together, those generals of
the 10th of March who are neither soldiers nor patriots. Much more difficult than the planning of the attack was
our organizing, training, mobilizing and arming men under this repressive regime with its millions of dollars
spent on espionage, bribery and information services. Nevertheless, all this was carried out by those men and
many others like them with incredible seriousness, discretion and discipline. Still more praiseworthy is the fact
that they gave this task everything they had; ultimately, their very lives.
</p>
<p>
The final mobilization of men who came to this province from the most remote towns of the entire island was
accomplished with admirable precision and in absolute secrecy. It is equally true that the attack was carried out
with magnificent coordination. It began simultaneously at 5:15 a.m. in both Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba; and
one by one, with an exactitude of minutes and seconds prepared in advance, the buildings surrounding the
barracks fell to our forces. Nevertheless, in the interest of truth and even though it may detract from our merit, I
am also going to reveal for the first time a fact that was fatal: due to a most unfortunate error, half of our forces,
and the better armed half at that, went astray at the entrance to the city and were not on hand to help us at the
decisive moment. Abel Santamaría, with 21 men, had occupied the Civilian Hospital; with him went a doctor
and two of our women comrades to attend to the wounded. Raúl Castro, with ten men, occupied the Palace of
Justice, and it was my responsibility to attack the barracks with the rest, 95 men. Preceded by an advance
group of eight who had forced Gate Three, I arrived with the first group of 45 men. It was precisely here that the
battle began, when my car ran into an outside patrol armed with machine guns. The reserve group which had
almost all the heavy weapons (the light arms were with the advance group), turned up the wrong street and lost
its way in an unfamiliar city. I must clarify the fact that I do not for a moment doubt the courage of those men; they
experienced great anguish and desperation when they realized they were lost. Because of the type of action it
was and because the contending forces were wearing identically colored uniforms, it was not easy for these
men to re-establish contact with us. Many of them, captured later on, met death with true heroism.
</p>
<p>
Everyone had instructions, first of all, to be humane in the struggle. Never was a group of armed men more
generous to the adversary. From the beginning we took numerous prisoners - nearly twenty - and there was one
moment when three of our men - Ramiro Valdés, José Suárez and Jesús Montané - managed to enter a
barrack and hold nearly fifty soldiers prisoners for a short time. Those soldiers testified before the Court, and
without exception they all acknowledged that we treated them with absolute respect, that we didn't even subject
them to one scoffing remark. In line with this, I want to give my heartfelt thanks to the Prosecutor for one thing in
the trial of my comrades: when he made his report he was fair enough to acknowledge as an incontestable fact
that we maintained a high spirit of chivalry throughout the struggle.
</p>
<p>
Discipline among the soldiers was very poor. They finally defeated us because of their superior numbers -
fifteen to one - and because of the protection afforded them by the defenses of the fortress. Our men were much
better marksmen, as our enemies themselves conceded. There was a high degree of courage on both sides.
</p>
<p>
In analyzing the reasons for our tactical failure, apart from the regrettable error already mentioned, I believe we
made a mistake by dividing the commando unit we had so carefully trained. Of our best trained men and
boldest leaders, there were 27 in Bayamo, 21 at the Civilian Hospital and 10 at the Palace of Justice. If our
forces had been distributed differently the outcome of the battle might have been different. The clash with the
patrol (purely accidental, since the unit might have been at that point twenty seconds earlier or twenty seconds
later) alerted the camp, and gave it time to mobilize. Otherwise it would have fallen into our hands without a shot
fired, since we already controlled the guard post. On the other hand, except for the .22 caliber rifles, for which
there were plenty of bullets, our side was very short of ammunition. Had we had hand grenades, the Army would
not have been able to resist us for fifteen minutes.
</p>
<p>
When I became convinced that all efforts to take the barracks were now useless, I began to withdraw our men in
groups of eight and ten. Our retreat was covered by six expert marksmen under the command of Pedro Miret
and Fidel Labrador; heroically they held off the Army's advance. Our losses in the battle had been insignificant;
95% of our casualties came from the Army's inhumanity after the struggle. The group at the Civilian Hospital
only had one casualty; the rest of that group was trapped when the troops blocked the only exit; but our youths
did not lay down their arms until their very last bullet was gone. With them was Abel Santamaría, the most
generous, beloved and intrepid of our young men, whose glorious resistance immortalizes him in Cuban history.
We shall see the fate they met and how Batista sought to punish the heroism of our youth.
</p>
<p>
We planned to continue the struggle in the mountains in case the attack on the regiment failed. In Siboney I was
able to gather a third of our forces; but many of these men were now discouraged. About twenty of them
decided to surrender; later we shall see what became of them. The rest, 18 men, with what arms and
ammunition were left, followed me into the mountains. The terrain was completely unknown to us. For a week
we held the heights of the Gran Piedra range and the Army occupied the foothills. We could not come down;
they didn't risk coming up. It was not force of arms, but hunger and thirst that ultimately overcame our resistance.
I had to divide the men into smaller groups. Some of them managed to slip through the Army lines; others were
surrendered by Monsignor Pérez Serantes. Finally only two comrades remained with me - José Suárez and
Oscar Alcalde. While the three of us were totally exhausted, a force led by Lieutenant Sarría surprised us in our
sleep at dawn. This was Saturday, August 1st. By that time the slaughter of prisoners had ceased as a result of
the people's protest. This officer, a man of honor, saved us from being murdered on the spot with our hands tied
behind us.
</p>
<p>
I need not deny here the stupid statements by Ugalde Carrillo and company, who tried to stain my name in an
effort to mask their own cowardice, incompetence, and criminality. The facts are clear enough.
</p>
<p>
My purpose is not to bore the court with epic narratives. All that I have said is essential for a more precise
understanding of what is yet to come.
</p>
<p>
Let me mention two important facts that facilitate an objective judgement of our attitude. First: we could have
taken over the regiment simply by seizing all the high ranking officers in their homes. This possibility was
rejected for the very humane reason that we wished to avoid scenes of tragedy and struggle in the presence of
their families. Second: we decided not to take any radio station over until the Army camp was in our power. This
attitude, unusually magnanimous and considerate, spared the citizens a great deal of bloodshed. With only ten
men I could have seized a radio station and called the people to revolt. There is no questioning the people's will
to fight. I had a recording of Eduardo Chibás' last message over the CMQ radio network, and patriotic poems
and battle hymns capable of moving the least sensitive, especially with the sounds of live battle in their ears. But
I did not want to use them although our situation was desperate.
</p>
<p>
The regime has emphatically repeated that our Movement did not have popular support. I have never heard an
assertion so naive, and at the same time so full of bad faith. The regime seeks to show submission and
cowardice on the part of the people. They all but claim that the people support the dictatorship; they do not know
how offensive this is to the brave Orientales. Santiago thought our attack was only a local disturbance between
two factions of soldiers; not until many hours later did they realize what had really happened. Who can doubt the
valor, civic pride and limitless courage of the rebel and patriotic people of Santiago de Cuba? If Moncada had
fallen into our hands, even the women of Santiago de Cuba would have risen in arms. Many were the rifles
loaded for our fighters by the nurses at the Civilian Hospital. They fought alongside us. That is something we will
never forget.
</p>
<p>
It was never our intention to engage the soldiers of the regiment in combat. We wanted to seize control of them
and their weapons in a surprise attack, arouse the people and call the soldiers to abandon the odious flag of
the tyranny and to embrace the banner of freedom; to defend the supreme interests of the nation and not the
petty interests of a small clique; to turn their guns around and fire on the people's enemies and not on the
people, among whom are their own sons and fathers; to unite with the people as the brothers that they are
instead of opposing the people as the enemies the government tries to make of them; to march behind the only
beautiful ideal worthy of sacrificing one's life - the greatness and happiness of one's country. To those who
doubt that many soldiers would have followed us, I ask: What Cuban does not cherish glory? What heart is not
set aflame by the promise of freedom?
</p>
<p>
The Navy did not fight against us, and it would undoubtedly have come over to our side later on. It is well known
that that branch of the Armed Forces is the least dominated by the Dictatorship and that there is a very intense
civic conscience among its members. But, as to the rest of the national armed forces, would they have fought
against a people in revolt? I declare that they would not! A soldier is made of flesh and blood; he thinks,
observes, feels. He is susceptible to the opinions, beliefs, sympathies and antipathies of the people. If you ask
his opinion, he may tell you he cannot express it; but that does not mean he has no opinion. He is affected by
exactly the same problems that affect other citizens - subsistence, rent, the education of his children, their future,
etc. Everything of this kind is an inevitable point of contact between him and the people and everything of this
kind relates him to the present and future situation of the society in which he lives. It is foolish to imagine that the
salary a soldier receives from the State - a modest enough salary at that - should resolve the vital problems
imposed on him by his needs, duties and feelings as a member of his community.
</p>
<p>
This brief explanation has been necessary because it is basic to a consideration to which few people, until now,
have paid any attention - soldiers have a deep respect for the feelings of the majority of the people! During the
Machado regime, in the same proportion as popular antipathy increased, the loyalty of the Army visibly
decreased. This was so true that a group of women almost succeeded in subverting Camp Columbia. But this
is proven even more clearly by a recent development. While Grau San Martín's regime was able to preserve its
maximum popularity among the people, unscrupulous ex-officers and power-hungry civilians attempted
innumerable conspiracies in the Army, although none of them found a following in the rank and file.
</p>
<p>
The March 10th coup took place at the moment when the civil government's prestige had dwindled to its lowest
ebb, a circumstance of which Batista and his clique took advantage. Why did they not strike their blow after the
first of June? Simply because, had they waited for the majority of the nation to express its will at the polls, the
troops would not have responded to the conspiracy!
</p>
<p>
Consequently, a second assertion can be made: the Army has never revolted against a regime with a popular
majority behind it. These are historic truths, and if Batista insists on remaining in power at all costs against the
will of the majority of Cubans, his end will be more tragic than that of Gerardo Machado.
</p>
<p>
I have a right to express an opinion about the Armed Forces because I defended them when everyone else was
silent. And I did this neither as a conspirator, nor from any kind of personal interest - for we then enjoyed full
constitutional prerogatives. I was prompted only by humane instincts and civic duty. In those days, the
newspaper Alerta was one of the most widely read because of its position on national political matters. In its
pages I campaigned against the forced labor to which the soldiers were subjected on the private estates of high
civil personages and military officers. On March 3rd, 1952 I supplied the Courts with data, photographs, films
and other proof denouncing this state of affairs. I also pointed out in those articles that it was elementary
decency to increase army salaries. I should like to know who else raised his voice on that occasion to protest
against all this injustice done to the soldiers. Certainly not Batista and company, living well-protected on their
luxurious estates, surrounded by all kinds of security measures, while I ran a thousand risks with neither
bodyguards nor arms.
</p>
<p>
Just as I defended the soldiers then, now - when all others are once more silent - I tell them that they allowed
themselves to be miserably deceived; and to the deception and shame of March 10th they have added the
disgrace, the thousand times greater disgrace, of the fearful and unjustifiable crimes of Santiago de Cuba.
From that time since, the uniform of the Army is splattered with blood. And as last year I told the people and
cried out before the Courts that soldiers were working as slaves on private estates, today I make the bitter
charge that there are soldiers stained from head to toe with the blood of the Cuban youths they have tortured
and slain. And I say as well that if the Army serves the Republic, defends the nation, respects the people and
protects the citizenry then it is only fair that the soldier should earn at least a hundred pesos a month. But if the
soldiers slay and oppress the people, betray the nation and defend only the interests of one small group, then
the Army deserves not a cent of the Republic's money and Camp Columbia should be converted into a school
with ten thousand orphans living there instead of soldiers.
</p>
<p>
I want to be just above all else, so I can't blame all the soldiers for the shameful crimes that stain a few evil and
treacherous Army men. But every honorable and upstanding soldier who loves his career and his uniform is
dutybound to demand and to fight for the cleansing of this guilt, to avenge this betrayal and to see the guilty
punished. Otherwise the soldier's uniform will forever be a mark of infamy instead of a source of pride.
</p>
<p>
Of course the March 10th regime had no choice but to remove the soldiers from the private estates. But it did
so only to put them to work as doormen, chauffeurs, servants and bodyguards for the whole rabble of petty
politicians who make up the party of the Dictatorship. Every fourth or fifth rank official considers himself entitled
to the services of a soldier to drive his car and to watch over him as if he were constantly afraid of receiving the
kick in the pants he so justly deserves.
</p>
<p>
If they had been at all interested in promoting real reforms, why did the regime not confiscate the estates and
the millions of men like Genovevo Pérez Dámera, who acquired their fortunes by exploiting soldiers, driving
them like slaves and misappropriating the funds of the Armed Forces? But no: Genovevo Pérez and others like
him no doubt still have soldiers protecting them on their estates because the March 10th generals, deep in their
hearts, aspire to the same future and can't allow that kind of precedent to be set.
</p>
<p>
The 10th of March was a miserable deception, yes ... After Batista and his band of corrupt and disreputable
politicians had failed in their electoral plan, they took advantage of the Army's discontent and used it to climb to
power on the backs of the soldiers. And I know there are many Army men who are disgusted because they have
been disappointed. At first their pay was raised, but later, through deductions and reductions of every kind, it
was lowered again. Many of the old elements, who had drifted away from the Armed Forces, returned to the
ranks and blocked the way of young, capable and valuable men who might otherwise have advanced. Good
soldiers have been neglected while the most scandalous nepotism prevails. Many decent military men are now
asking themselves what need that Armed Forces had to assume the tremendous historical responsibility of
destroying our Constitution merely to put a group of immoral men in power, men of bad reputation, corrupt,
politically degenerate beyond redemption, who could never again have occupied a political post had it not been
at bayonet-point; and they weren't even the ones with the bayonets in their hands ...
</p>
<p>
On the other hand, the soldiers endure a worse tyranny than the civilians. They are under constant surveillance
and not one of them enjoys the slightest security in his job. Any unjustified suspicion, any gossip, any intrigue, or
denunciation, is sufficient to bring transfer, dishonorable discharge or imprisonment. Did not Tabernilla, in a
memorandum, forbid them to talk with anyone opposed to the government, that is to say, with ninety-nine
percent of the people? ... What a lack of confidence! ... Not even the vestal virgins of Rome had to abide by
such a rule! As for the much publicized little houses for enlisted men, there aren't 300 on the whole Island; yet
with what has been spent on tanks, guns and other weaponry every soldier might have a place to live. Batista
isn't concerned with taking care of the Army, but that the Army take care of him! He increases the Army's power
of oppression and killing but does not improve living conditions for the soldiers. Triple guard duty, constant
confinement to barracks, continuous anxiety, the enmity of the people, uncertainty about the future - this is what
has been given to the soldier. In other words: 'Die for the regime, soldier, give it your sweat and blood. We shall
dedicate a speech to you and award you a posthumous promotion (when it no longer matters) and afterwards ...
we shall go on living luxuriously, making ourselves rich. Kill, abuse, oppress the people. When the people get
tired and all this comes to an end, you can pay for our crimes while we go abroad and live like kings. And if one
day we return, don't you or your children knock on the doors of our mansions, for we shall be millionaires and
millionaires do not mingle with the poor. Kill, soldier, oppress the people, die for the regime, give your sweat
and blood ...'
</p>
<p>
But if blind to this sad truth, a minority of soldiers had decided to fight the people, the people who were going to
liberate them from tyranny, victory still would have gone to the people. The Honorable Prosecutor was very
interested in knowing our chances for success. These chances were based on considerations of technical,
military and social order. They have tried to establish the myth that modern arms render the people helpless in
overthrowing tyrants. Military parades and the pompous display of machines of war are used to perpetuate this
myth and to create a complex of absolute impotence in the people. But no weaponry, no violence can vanquish
the people once they are determined to win back their rights. Both past and present are full of examples. The
most recent is the revolt in Bolivia, where miners with dynamite sticks smashed and defeated regular army
regiments.
</p>
<p>
Fortunately, we Cubans need not look for examples abroad. No example is as inspiring as that of our own land.
During the war of 1895 there were nearly half a million armed Spanish soldiers in Cuba, many more than the
Dictator counts upon today to hold back a population five times greater. The arms of the Spaniards were,
incomparably, both more up to date and more powerful than those of our mambises. Often the Spaniards were
equipped with field artillery and the infantry used breechloaders similar to those still in use by the infantry of
today. The Cubans were usually armed with no more than their machetes, for their cartridge belts were almost
always empty. There is an unforgettable passage in the history of our War of Independence, narrated by
General Miró Argenter, Chief of Antonio Maceo's General Staff. I managed to bring it copied on this scrap of
paper so I wouldn't have to depend upon my memory:
</p>
<p>
'Untrained men under the command of Pedro Delgado, most of them equipped only with machetes, were
virtually annihilated as they threw themselves on the solid rank of Spaniards. It is not an exaggeration to assert
that of every fifty men, 25 were killed. Some even attacked the Spaniards with their bare fists, without
machetes, without even knives. Searching through the reeds by the Hondo River, we found fifteen more dead
from the Cuban party, and it was not immediately clear what group they belonged to, They did not appear to
have shouldered arms, their clothes were intact and only tin drinking cups hung from their waists; a few steps
further on lay the dead horse, all its equipment in order. We reconstructed the climax of the tragedy. These men,
following their daring chief, Lieutenant Colonel Pedro Delgado, had earned heroes' laurels: they had thrown
themselves against bayonets with bare hands, the clash of metal which was heard around them was the sound
of their drinking cups banging against the saddlehorn. Maceo was deeply moved. This man so used to seeing
death in all its forms murmured this praise: "I had never seen anything like this, untrained and unarmed men
attacking the Spaniards with only drinking cups for weapons. And I called it impedimenta!"'
</p>
<p>
This is how peoples fight when they want to win their freedom; they throw stones at airplanes and overturn
tanks!
</p>
<p>
As soon as Santiago de Cuba was in our hands we would immediately have readied the people of Oriente for
war. Bayamo was attacked precisely to locate our advance forces along the Cauto River. Never forget that this
province, which has a million and a half inhabitants today, is the most rebellious and patriotic in Cuba. It was
this province that sparked the fight for independence for thirty years and paid the highest price in blood,
sacrifice and heroism. In Oriente you can still breathe the air of that glorious epic. At dawn, when the cocks crow
as if they were bugles calling soldiers to reveille, and when the sun rises radiant over the rugged mountains, it
seems that once again we will live the days of Yara or Baire!
</p>
<p>
I stated that the second consideration on which we based our chances for success was one of social order.
Why were we sure of the people's support? When we speak of the people we are not talking about those who
live in comfort, the conservative elements of the nation, who welcome any repressive regime, any dictatorship,
any despotism, prostrating themselves before the masters of the moment until they grind their foreheads into
the ground. When we speak of struggle and we mention the people we mean the vast unredeemed masses,
those to whom everyone makes promises and who are deceived by all; we mean the people who yearn for a
better, more dignified and more just nation; who are moved by ancestral aspirations to justice, for they have
suffered injustice and mockery generation after generation; those who long for great and wise changes in all
aspects of their life; people who, to attain those changes, are ready to give even the very last breath they have
when they believe in something or in someone, especially when they believe in themselves. The first condition
of sincerity and good faith in any endeavor is to do precisely what nobody else ever does, that is, to speak with
absolute clarity, without fear. The demagogues and professional politicians who manage to perform the miracle
of being right about everything and of pleasing everyone are, necessarily, deceiving everyone about everything.
The revolutionaries must proclaim their ideas courageously, define their principles and express their intentions
so that no one is deceived, neither friend nor foe.
</p>
<p>
In terms of struggle, when we talk about people we're talking about the six hundred thousand Cubans without
work, who want to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a
livelihood; the five hundred thousand farm laborers who live in miserable shacks, who work four months of the
year and starve the rest, sharing their misery with their children, who don't have an inch of land to till and whose
existence would move any heart not made of stone; the four hundred thousand industrial workers and laborers
whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose benefits are being taken away, whose homes are
wretched quarters, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender, whose future
is a pay reduction and dismissal, whose life is endless work and whose only rest is the tomb; the one hundred
thousand small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs, looking at it with the sadness of Moses
gazing at the promised land, to die without ever owning it, who like feudal serfs have to pay for the use of their
parcel of land by giving up a portion of its produce, who cannot love it, improve it, beautify it nor plant a cedar or
an orange tree on it because they never know when a sheriff will come with the rural guard to evict them from it;
the thirty thousand teachers and professors who are so devoted, dedicated and so necessary to the better
destiny of future generations and who are so badly treated and paid; the twenty thousand small business men
weighed down by debts, ruined by the crisis and harangued by a plague of grafting and venal officials; the ten
thousand young professional people: doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school teachers, dentists,
pharmacists, newspapermen, painters, sculptors, etc., who finish school with their degrees anxious to work and
full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end, all doors closed to them, and where no ears hear their
clamor or supplication. These are the people, the ones who know misfortune and, therefore, are capable of
fighting with limitless courage! To these people whose desperate roads through life have been paved with the
bricks of betrayal and false promises, we were not going to say: 'We will give you ...' but rather: 'Here it is, now
fight for it with everything you have, so that liberty and happiness may be yours!'
</p>
<p>
The five revolutionary laws that would have been proclaimed immediately after the capture of the Moncada
Barracks and would have been broadcast to the nation by radio must be included in the indictment. It is
possible that Colonel Chaviano may deliberately have destroyed these documents, but even if he has I
remember them.
</p>
<p>
The first revolutionary law would have returned power to the people and proclaimed the 1940 Constitution the
Supreme Law of the State until such time as the people should decide to modify or change it. And in order to
effect its implementation and punish those who violated it - there being no electoral organization to carry this out
- the revolutionary movement, as the circumstantial incarnation of this sovereignty, the only source of legitimate
power, would have assumed all the faculties inherent therein, except that of modifying the Constitution itself: in
other words, it would have assumed the legislative, executive and judicial powers.
</p>
<p>
This attitude could not be clearer nor more free of vacillation and sterile charlatanry. A government acclaimed
by the mass of rebel people would be vested with every power, everything necessary in order to proceed with
the effective implementation of popular will and real justice. From that moment, the Judicial Power - which since
March 10th had placed itself against and outside the Constitution - would cease to exist and we would proceed
to its immediate and total reform before it would once again assume the power granted it by the Supreme Law
of the Republic. Without these previous measures, a return to legality by putting its custody back into the hands
that have crippled the system so dishonorably would constitute a fraud, a deceit, one more betrayal.
</p>
<p>
The second revolutionary law would give non-mortgageable and non-transferable ownership of the land to all
tenant and subtenant farmers, lessees, share croppers and squatters who hold parcels of five caballerías of
land or less, and the State would indemnify the former owners on the basis of the rental which they would have
received for these parcels over a period of ten years.
</p>
<p>
The third revolutionary law would have granted workers and employees the right to share 30% of the profits of
all the large industrial, mercantile and mining enterprises, including the sugar mills. The strictly agricultural
enterprises would be exempt in consideration of other agrarian laws which would be put into effect.
</p>
<p>
The fourth revolutionary law would have granted all sugar planters the right to share 55% of sugar production
and a minimum quota of forty thousand arrobas for all small tenant farmers who have been established for three
years or more.
</p>
<p>
The fifth revolutionary law would have ordered the confiscation of all holdings and ill-gotten gains of those who
had committed frauds during previous regimes, as well as the holdings and ill-gotten gains of all their legates
and heirs. To implement this, special courts with full powers would gain access to all records of all corporations
registered or operating in this country, in order to investigate concealed funds of illegal origin, and to request
that foreign governments extradite persons and attach holdings rightfully belonging to the Cuban people. Half of
the property recovered would be used to subsidize retirement funds for workers and the other half would be
used for hospitals, asylums and charitable organizations.
</p>
<p>
Furthermore, it was declared that the Cuban policy in the Americas would be one of close solidarity with the
democratic peoples of this continent, and that all those politically persecuted by bloody tyrannies oppressing
our sister nations would find generous asylum, brotherhood and bread in the land of Martí; not the persecution,
hunger and treason they find today. Cuba should be the bulwark of liberty and not a shameful link in the chain of
despotism.
</p>
<p>
These laws would have been proclaimed immediately. As soon as the upheaval ended and prior to a detailed
and far reaching study, they would have been followed by another series of laws and fundamental measures,
such as the Agrarian Reform, the Integral Educational Reform, nationalization of the electric power trust and the
telephone trust, refund to the people of the illegal and repressive rates these companies have charged, and
payment to the treasury of all taxes brazenly evaded in the past.
</p>
<p>
All these laws and others would be based on the exact compliance of two essential articles of our Constitution:
one of them orders the outlawing of large estates, indicating the maximum area of land any one person or entity
may own for each type of agricultural enterprise, by adopting measures which would tend to revert the land to
the Cubans. The other categorically orders the State to use all means at its disposal to provide employment to
all those who lack it and to ensure a decent livelihood to each manual or intellectual laborer. None of these laws
can be called unconstitutional. The first popularly elected government would have to respect them, not only
because of moral obligations to the nation, but because when people achieve something they have yearned for
throughout generations, no force in the world is capable of taking it away again.
</p>
<p>
The problem of the land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of
unemployment, the problem of education and the problem of the people's health: these are the six problems we
would take immediate steps to solve, along with restoration of civil liberties and political democracy.
</p>
<p>
This exposition may seem cold and theoretical if one does not know the shocking and tragic conditions of the
country with regard to these six problems, along with the most humiliating political oppression.
</p>
<p>
Eighty-five per cent of the small farmers in Cuba pay rent and live under constant threat of being evicted from
the land they till. More than half of our most productive land is in the hands of foreigners. In Oriente, the largest
province, the lands of the United Fruit Company and the West Indian Company link the northern and southern
coasts. There are two hundred thousand peasant families who do not have a single acre of land to till to
provide food for their starving children. On the other hand, nearly three hundred thousand caballerías of
cultivable land owned by powerful interests remain uncultivated. If Cuba is above all an agricultural State, if its
population is largely rural, if the city depends on these rural areas, if the people from our countryside won our
war of independence, if our nation's greatness and prosperity depend on a healthy and vigorous rural
population that loves the land and knows how to work it, if this population depends on a State that protects and
guides it, then how can the present state of affairs be allowed to continue?
</p>
<p>
Except for a few food, lumber and textile industries, Cuba continues to be primarily a producer of raw materials.
We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows ... Everyone
agrees with the urgent need to industrialize the nation, that we need steel industries, paper and chemical
industries, that we must improve our cattle and grain production, the technology and processing in our food
industry in order to defend ourselves against the ruinous competition from Europe in cheese products,
condensed milk, liquors and edible oils, and the United States in canned goods; that we need cargo ships; that
tourism should be an enormous source of revenue. But the capitalists insist that the workers remain under the
yoke. The State sits back with its arms crossed and industrialization can wait forever.
</p>
<p>
Just as serious or even worse is the housing problem. There are two hundred thousand huts and hovels in
Cuba; four hundred thousand families in the countryside and in the cities live cramped in huts and tenements
without even the minimum sanitary requirements; two million two hundred thousand of our urban population pay
rents which absorb between one fifth and one third of their incomes; and two million eight hundred thousand of
our rural and suburban population lack electricity. We have the same situation here: if the State proposes the
lowering of rents, landlords threaten to freeze all construction; if the State does not interfere, construction goes
on so long as landlords get high rents; otherwise they would not lay a single brick even though the rest of the
population had to live totally exposed to the elements. The utilities monopoly is no better; they extend lines as
far as it is profitable and beyond that point they don't care if people have to live in darkness for the rest of their
lives. The State sits back with its arms crossed and the people have neither homes nor electricity.
</p>
<p>
Our educational system is perfectly compatible with everything I've just mentioned. Where the peasant doesn't
own the land, what need is there for agricultural schools? Where there is no industry, what need is there for
technical or vocational schools? Everything follows the same absurd logic; if we don't have one thing we can't
have the other. In any small European country there are more than 200 technological and vocational schools; in
Cuba only six such schools exist, and their graduates have no jobs for their skills. The little rural schoolhouses
are attended by a mere half of the school age children - barefooted, half-naked and undernourished - and
frequently the teacher must buy necessary school materials from his own salary. Is this the way to make a nation
great?
</p>
<p>
Only death can liberate one from so much misery. In this respect, however, the State is most helpful - in
providing early death for the people. Ninety per cent of the children in the countryside are consumed by
parasites which filter through their bare feet from the ground they walk on. Society is moved to compassion
when it hears of the kidnapping or murder of one child, but it is indifferent to the mass murder of so many
thousands of children who die every year from lack of facilities, agonizing with pain. Their innocent eyes, death
already shining in them, seem to look into some vague infinity as if entreating forgiveness for human
selfishness, as if asking God to stay His wrath. And when the head of a family works only four months a year,
with what can he purchase clothing and medicine for his children? They will grow up with rickets, with not a
single good tooth in their mouths by the time they reach thirty; they will have heard ten million speeches and will
finally die of misery and deception. Public hospitals, which are always full, accept only patients recommended
by some powerful politician who, in return, demands the votes of the unfortunate one and his family so that Cuba
may continue forever in the same or worse condition.
</p>
<p>
With this background, is it not understandable that from May to December over a million persons are jobless
and that Cuba, with a population of five and a half million, has a greater number of unemployed than France or
Italy with a population of forty million each?
</p>
<p>
When you try a defendant for robbery, Honorable Judges, do you ask him how long he has been unemployed?
Do you ask him how many children he has, which days of the week he ate and which he didn't, do you
investigate his social context at all? You just send him to jail without further thought. But those who burn
warehouses and stores to collect insurance do not go to jail, even though a few human beings may have gone
up in flames. The insured have money to hire lawyers and bribe judges. You imprison the poor wretch who
steals because he is hungry; but none of the hundreds who steal millions from the Government has ever spent a
night in jail. You dine with them at the end of the year in some elegant club and they enjoy your respect. In Cuba,
when a government official becomes a millionaire overnight and enters the fraternity of the rich, he could very
well be greeted with the words of that opulent character out of Balzac - Taillefer - who in his toast to the young
heir to an enormous fortune, said: 'Gentlemen, let us drink to the power of gold! Mr. Valentine, a millionaire six
times over, has just ascended the throne. He is king, can do everything, is above everyone, as all the rich are.
Henceforth, equality before the law, established by the Constitution, will be a myth for him; for he will not be
subject to laws: the laws will be subject to him. There are no courts nor are there sentences for millionaires.'
</p>
<p>
The nation's future, the solutions to its problems, cannot continue to depend on the selfish interests of a dozen
big businessmen nor on the cold calculations of profits that ten or twelve magnates draw up in their
air-conditioned offices. The country cannot continue begging on its knees for miracles from a few golden
calves, like the Biblical one destroyed by the prophet's fury. Golden calves cannot perform miracles of any kind.
The problems of the Republic can be solved only if we dedicate ourselves to fight for it with the same energy,
honesty and patriotism our liberators had when they founded it. Statesmen like Carlos Saladrigas, whose
statesmanship consists of preserving the statu quo and mouthing phrases like 'absolute freedom of enterprise,'
'guarantees to investment capital' and 'law of supply and demand,' will not solve these problems. Those
ministers can chat away in a Fifth Avenue mansion until not even the dust of the bones of those whose problems
require immediate solution remains. In this present-day world, social problems are not solved by spontaneous
generation.
</p>
<p>
A revolutionary government backed by the people and with the respect of the nation, after cleansing the
different institutions of all venal and corrupt officials, would proceed immediately to the country's
industrialization, mobilizing all inactive capital, currently estimated at about 1.5 billion pesos, through the
National Bank and the Agricultural and Industrial Development Bank, and submitting this mammoth task to
experts and men of absolute competence totally removed from all political machines for study, direction,
planning and realization.
</p>
<p>
After settling the one hundred thousand small farmers as owners on the land which they previously rented, a
revolutionary government would immediately proceed to settle the land problem. First, as set forth in the
Constitution, it would establish the maximum amount of land to be held by each type of agricultural enterprise
and would acquire the excess acreage by expropriation, recovery of swampland, planting of large nurseries,
and reserving of zones for reforestation. Secondly, it would distribute the remaining land among peasant
families with priority given to the larger ones, and would promote agricultural cooperatives for communal use of
expensive equipment, freezing plants and unified professional technical management of farming and cattle
raising. Finally, it would provide resources, equipment, protection and useful guidance to the peasants.
</p>
<p>
A revolutionary government would solve the housing problem by cutting all rents in half, by providing tax
exemptions on homes inhabited by the owners; by tripling taxes on rented homes; by tearing down hovels and
replacing them with modern apartment buildings; and by financing housing all over the island on a scale
heretofore unheard of, with the criterion that, just as each rural family should possess its own tract of land, each
city family should own its own house or apartment. There is plenty of building material and more than enough
manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand
years will have gone by and the problem will remain the same. On the other hand, today possibilities of taking
electricity to the most isolated areas on the island are greater than ever. The use of nuclear energy in this field
is now a reality and will greatly reduce the cost of producing electricity.
</p>
<p>
With these three projects and reforms, the problem of unemployment would automatically disappear and the
task of improving public health and fighting against disease would become much less difficult.
</p>
<p>
Finally, a revolutionary government would undertake the integral reform of the educational system, bringing it
into line with the projects just mentioned with the idea of educating those generations which will have the
privilege of living in a happier land. Do not forget the words of the Apostle: 'A grave mistake is being made in
Latin America: in countries that live almost completely from the produce of the land, men are being educated
exclusively for urban life and are not trained for farm life.' 'The happiest country is the one which has best
educated its sons, both in the instruction of thought and the direction of their feelings.' 'An educated country will
always be strong and free.'
</p>
<p>
The soul of education, however, is the teacher, and in Cuba the teaching profession is miserably underpaid.
Despite this, no one is more dedicated than the Cuban teacher. Who among us has not learned his three Rs in
the little public schoolhouse? It is time we stopped paying pittances to these young men and women who are
entrusted with the sacred task of teaching our youth. No teacher should earn less than 200 pesos, no secondary
teacher should make less than 350 pesos, if they are to devote themselves exclusively to their high calling
without suffering want. What is more, all rural teachers should have free use of the various systems of
transportation; and, at least once every five years, all teachers should enjoy a sabbatical leave of six months
with pay so they may attend special refresher courses at home or abroad to keep abreast of the latest
developments in their field. In this way, the curriculum and the teaching system can be easily improved. Where
will the money be found for all this? When there is an end to the embezzlement of government funds, when
public officials stop taking graft from the large companies that owe taxes to the State, when the enormous
resources of the country are brought into full use, when we no longer buy tanks, bombers and guns for this
country (which has no frontiers to defend and where these instruments of war, now being purchased, are used
against the people), when there is more interest in educating the people than in killing them there will be more
than enough money.
</p>
<p>
Cuba could easily provide for a population three times as great as it has now, so there is no excuse for the
abject poverty of a single one of its present inhabitants. The markets should be overflowing with produce,
pantries should be full, all hands should be working. This is not an inconceivable thought. What is inconceivable
is that anyone should go to bed hungry while there is a single inch of unproductive land; that children should die
for lack of medical attention; what is inconceivable is that 30% of our farm people cannot write their names and
that 99% of them know nothing of Cuba's history. What is inconceivable is that the majority of our rural people
are now living in worse circumstances than the Indians Columbus discovered in the fairest land that human eyes
had ever seen.
</p>
<p>
To those who would call me a dreamer, I quote the words of Martí: 'A true man does not seek the path where
advantage lies, but rather the path where duty lies, and this is the only practical man, whose dream of today will
be the law of tomorrow, because he who has looked back on the essential course of history and has seen
flaming and bleeding peoples seethe in the cauldron of the ages knows that, without a single exception, the
future lies on the side of duty.'
</p>
<p>
Only when we understand that such a high ideal inspired them can we conceive of the heroism of the young
men who fell in Santiago. The meager material means at our disposal was all that prevented sure success.
When the soldiers were told that Prío had given us a million pesos, they were told this in the regime's attempt to
distort the most important fact: the fact that our Movement had no link with past politicians: that this Movement is
a new Cuban generation with its own ideas, rising up against tyranny; that this Movement is made up of young
people who were barely seven years old when Batista perpetrated the first of his crimes in 1934. The lie about
the million pesos could not have been more absurd. If, with less than 20,000 pesos, we armed 165 men and
attacked a regiment and a squadron, then with a million pesos we could have armed 8,000 men, to attack 50
regiments and 50 squadrons - and Ugalde Carrillo still would not have found out until Sunday, July 26th, at 5:15
a.m. I assure you that for every man who fought, twenty well trained men were unable to fight for lack of
weapons. When these young men marched along the streets of Havana in the student demonstration of the
Martí Centennial, they solidly packed six blocks. If even 200 more men had been able to fight, or we had
possessed 20 more hand grenades, perhaps this Honorable Court would have been spared all this
inconvenience.
</p>
<p>
The politicians spend millions buying off consciences, whereas a handful of Cubans who wanted to save their
country's honor had to face death barehanded for lack of funds. This shows how the country, to this very day,
has been governed not by generous and dedicated men, but by political racketeers, the scum of our public life.
</p>
<p>
With the greatest pride I tell you that in accordance with our principles we have never asked a politician, past or
present, for a penny. Our means were assembled with incomparable sacrifice. For example, Elpidio Sosa, who
sold his job and came to me one day with 300 pesos 'for the cause;' Fernando Chenard, who sold the
photographic equipment with which he earned his living; Pedro Marrero, who contributed several months' salary
and who had to be stopped from actually selling the very furniture in his house; Oscar Alcalde, who sold his
pharmaceutical laboratory; Jesús Montané, who gave his five years' savings, and so on with many others, each
giving the little he had.
</p>
<p>
One must have great faith in one's country to do such a thing. The memory of these acts of idealism bring me
straight to the most bitter chapter of this defense - the price the tyranny made them pay for wanting to free Cuba
from oppression and injustice.
</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Beloved corpses, you that once<br>
Were the hope of my Homeland, <br>
Cast upon my forehead <br>
The dust of your decaying bones! <br>
Touch my heart with your cold hands! <br>
Groan at my ears! <br>
Each of my moans will <br>
Turn into the tears of one more tyrant! <br>
Gather around me! Roam about, <br>
That my soul may receive your spirits <br>
And give me the horror of the tombs <br>
For tears are not enough <br>
When one lives in infamous bondage!
</p>
<p>
Multiply the crimes of November 27th, 1871 by ten and you will have the monstrous and repulsive crimes of July
26th, 27th, 28th and 29th, 1953, in the province of Oriente. These are still fresh in our memory, but someday
when years have passed, when the skies of the nation have cleared once more, when tempers have calmed
and fear no longer torments our spirits, then we will begin to see the magnitude of this massacre in all its
shocking dimension, and future generations will be struck with horror when they look back on these acts of
barbarity unprecedented in our history. But I do not want to become enraged. I need clearness of mind and
peace in my heavy heart in order to relate the facts as simply as possible, in no sense dramatizing them, but
just as they took place. As a Cuban I am ashamed that heartless men should have perpetrated such unthinkable
crimes, dishonoring our nation before the rest of the world.
</p>
<p>
The tyrant Batista was never a man of scruples. He has never hesitated to tell his people the most outrageous
lies. To justify his treacherous coup of March 10th, he concocted stories about a fictitious uprising in the Army,
supposedly scheduled to take place in April, and which he 'wanted to avert so that the Republic might not be
drenched in blood.' A ridiculous little tale nobody ever believed! And when he himself did want to drench the
Republic in blood, when he wanted to smother in terror and torture the just rebellion of Cuba's youth, who were
not willing to be his slaves, then he contrived still more fantastic lies. How little respect one must have for a
people when one tries to deceive them so miserably! On the very day of my arrest I publicly assumed the
responsibility for our armed movement of July 26th. If there had been an iota of truth in even one of the many
statements the Dictator made against our fighters in his speech of July 27th, it would have been enough to
undermine the moral impact of my case. Why, then, was I not brought to trial? Why were medical certificates
forged? Why did they violate all procedural laws and ignore so scandalously the rulings of the Court? Why were
so many things done, things never before seen in a Court of Law, in order to prevent my appearance at all
costs? In contrast, I could not begin to tell you all I went through in order to appear. I asked the Court to bring me
to trial in accordance with all established principles, and I denounced the underhanded schemes that were afoot
to prevent it. I wanted to argue with them face to face. But they did not wish to face me. Who was afraid of the
truth, and who was not?
</p>
<p>
The statements made by the Dictator at Camp Columbia might be considered amusing if they were not so
drenched in blood. He claimed we were a group of hirelings and that there were many foreigners among us. He
said that the central part of our plan was an attempt to kill him - him, always him. As if the men who attacked the
Moncada Barracks could not have killed him and twenty like him if they had approved of such methods. He
stated that our attack had been planned by ex-President Prío, and that it had been financed with Prío's money. It
has been irrefutably proven that no link whatsoever existed between our Movement and the last regime. He
claimed that we had machine guns and hand-grenades. Yet the military technicians have stated right here in this
Court that we only had one machine gun and not a single hand-grenade. He said that we had beheaded the
sentries. Yet death certificates and medical reports of all the Army's casualties show not one death caused by
the blade. But above all and most important, he said that we stabbed patients at the Military Hospital. Yet the
doctors from that hospital - Army doctors - have testified that we never even occupied the building, that no
patient was either wounded or killed by us, and that the hospital lost only one employee, a janitor, who
imprudently stuck his head out of an open window.
</p>
<p>
Whenever a Chief of State, or anyone pretending to be one, makes declarations to the nation, he speaks not
just to hear the sound of his own voice. He always has some specific purpose and expects some specific
reaction, or has a given intention. Since our military defeat had already taken place, insofar as we no longer
represented any actual threat to the dictatorship, why did they slander us like that? If it is still not clear that this
was a blood-drenched speech, that it was simply an attempt to justify the crimes that they had been perpetrating
since the night before and that they were going to continue to perpetrate, then, let figures speak for me: On July
27th, in his speech from the military headquarters, Batista said that the assailants suffered 32 dead. By the end
of the week the number of dead had risen to more than 80 men. In what battles, where, in what clashes, did
these young men die? Before Batista spoke, more than 25 prisoners had been murdered. After Batista spoke
fifty more were massacred.
</p>
<p>
What a great sense of honor those modest Army technicians and professionals had, who did not distort the
facts before the Court, but gave their reports adhering to the strictest truth! These surely are soldiers who honor
their uniform; these, surely, are men! Neither a real soldier nor a true man can degrade his code of honor with
lies and crime. I know that many of the soldiers are indignant at the barbaric assassinations perpetrated. I know
that they feel repugnance and shame at the smell of homicidal blood that impregnates every stone of Moncada
Barracks.
</p>
<p>
Now that he has been contradicted by men of honor within his own Army, I defy the dictator to repeat his vile
slander against us. I defy him to try to justify before the Cuban people his July 27th speech. Let him not remain
silent. Let him speak. Let him say who the assassins are, who the ruthless, the inhumane. Let him tell us if the
medals of honor, which he went to pin on the breasts of his heroes of that massacre, were rewards for the
hideous crimes they had committed. Let him, from this very moment, assume his responsibility before history.
Let him not pretend, at a later date, that the soldiers were acting without direct orders from him! Let him offer
the nation an explanation for those 70 murders. The bloodshed was great. The nation needs an explanation.
The nation seeks it. The nation demands it.
</p>
<p>
It is common knowledge that in 1933, at the end of the battle at the National Hotel, some officers were
murdered after they surrendered. Bohemia Magazine protested energetically. It is also known that after the
surrender of Fort Atarés the besiegers' machine guns cut down a row of prisoners. And that one soldier, after
asking who Blas Hernández was, blasted him with a bullet directly in the face, and for this cowardly act was
promoted to the rank of officer. It is well-known in Cuban history that assassination of prisoners was fatally
linked with Batista's name. How naive we were not to foresee this! However, unjustifiable as those killings of
1933 were, they took place in a matter of minutes, in no more time than it took for a round of machine gun fire.
What is more, they took place while tempers were still on edge.
</p>
<p>
This was not the case in Santiago de Cuba. Here all forms of ferocious outrages and cruelty were deliberately
overdone. Our men were killed not in the course of a minute, an hour or a day. Throughout an entire week the
blows and tortures continued, men were thrown from rooftops and shot. All methods of extermination were
incessantly practiced by well-skilled artisans of crime. Moncada Barracks were turned into a workshop of
torture and death. Some shameful individuals turned their uniforms into butcher's aprons. The walls were
splattered with blood. The bullets imbedded in the walls were encrusted with singed bits of skin, brains and
human hair, the grisly reminders of rifle shots fired full in the face. The grass around the barracks was dark and
sticky with human blood. The criminal hands that are guiding the destiny of Cuba had written for the prisoners at
the entrance to that den of death the very inscription of Hell: 'Forsake all hope.'
</p>
<p>
They did not even attempt to cover appearances. They did not bother in the least to conceal what they were
doing. They thought they had deceived the people with their lies and they ended up deceiving themselves. They
felt themselves lords and masters of the universe, with power over life and death. So the fear they had
experienced upon our attack at daybreak was dissipated in a feast of corpses, in a drunken orgy of blood.
</p>
<p>
Chronicles of our history, down through four and a half centuries, tell us of many acts of cruelty: the slaughter of
defenseless Indians by the Spaniards; the plundering and atrocities of pirates along the coast; the barbarities of
the Spanish soldiers during our War of Independence; the shooting of prisoners of the Cuban Army by the
forces of Weyler; the horrors of the Machado regime, and so on through the bloody crimes of March, 1935. But
never has such a sad and bloody page been written in numbers of victims and in the viciousness of the
victimizers, as in Santiago de Cuba. Only one man in all these centuries has stained with blood two separate
periods of our history and has dug his claws into the flesh of two generations of Cubans. To release this river of
blood, he waited for the Centennial of the Apostle, just after the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic, whose
people fought for freedom, human rights and happiness at the cost of so many lives. Even greater is his crime
and even more condemnable because the man who perpetrated it had already, for eleven long years, lorded
over his people - this people who, by such deep-rooted sentiment and tradition, loves freedom and repudiates
evil. This man has furthermore never been sincere, loyal, honest or chivalrous for a single minute of his public
life.
</p>
<p>
He was not content with the treachery of January, 1934, the crimes of March, 1935 and the forty million dollar
fortune that crowned his first regime. He had to add the treason of March, 1952, the crimes of July, 1953, and all
the millions that only time will reveal. Dante divided his Inferno into nine circles. He put criminals in the seventh,
thieves in the eighth and traitors in the ninth. Difficult dilemma the devils will be faced with, when they try to find
an adequate spot for this man's soul - if this man has a soul. The man who instigated the atrocious acts in
Santiago de Cuba doesn't even have a heart.
</p>
<p>
I know many details of the way in which these crimes were carried out, from the lips of some of the soldiers who,
filled with shame, told me of the scenes they had witnessed.
</p>
<p>
When the fighting was over, the soldiers descended like savage beasts on Santiago de Cuba and they took
the first fury of their frustrations out against the defenseless population. In the middle of a street, and far from the
site of the fighting, they shot through the chest an innocent child who was playing by his doorstep. When the
father approached to pick him up, they shot him through his head. Without a word they shot 'Niño' Cala, who
was on his way home with a loaf of bread in his hands. It would be an endless task to relate all the crimes and
outrages perpetrated against the civilian population. And if the Army dealt thus with those who had had no part
at all in the action, you can imagine the terrible fate of the prisoners who had taken part or who were believed to
have taken part. Just as, in this trial, they accused many people not at all involved in our attack, they also killed
many prisoners who had no involvement whatsoever. The latter are not included in the statistics of victims
released by the regime; those statistics refer exclusively to our men. Some day the total number of victims will
be known.
</p>
<p>
The first prisoner killed has our doctor, Mario Muñoz, who bore no arms, wore no uniform, and was dressed in
the white smock of a physician. He was a generous and competent man who would have given the same
devoted care to the wounded adversary as to a friend. On the road from the Civilian Hospital to the barracks
they shot him in the back and left him lying there, face down in a pool of blood. But the mass murder of
prisoners did not begin until after three o'clock in the afternoon. Until this hour they awaited orders. Then
General Martín Díaz Tamayo arrived from Havana and brought specific instructions from a meeting he had
attended with Batista, along with the head of the Army, the head of the Military Intelligence, and others. He said:
'It is humiliating and dishonorable for the Army to have lost three times as many men in combat as the
insurgents did. Ten prisoners must be killed for each dead soldier.' This was the order!
</p>
<p>
In every society there are men of base instincts. The sadists, brutes, conveyors of all the ancestral atavisms go
about in the guise of human beings, but they are monsters, only more or less restrained by discipline and social
habit. If they are offered a drink from a river of blood, they will not be satisfied until they drink the river dry. All
these men needed was the order. At their hands the best and noblest Cubans perished: the most valiant, the
most honest, the most idealistic. The tyrant called them mercenaries. There they were dying as heroes at the
hands of men who collect a salary from the Republic and who, with the arms the Republic gave them to defend
her, serve the interests of a clique and murder her best citizens.
</p>
<p>
Throughout their torturing of our comrades, the Army offered them the chance to save their lives by betraying
their ideology and falsely declaring that Prío had given them money. When they indignantly rejected that
proposition, the Army continued with its horrible tortures. They crushed their testicles and they tore out their
eyes. But no one yielded. No complaint was heard nor a favor asked. Even when they had been deprived of
their vital organs, our men were still a thousand times more men than all their tormentors together. Photographs,
which do not lie, show the bodies torn to pieces, Other methods were used. Frustrated by the valor of the men,
they tried to break the spirit of our women. With a bleeding eye in their hands, a sergeant and several other men
went to the cell where our comrades Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría were held. Addressing the
latter, and showing her the eye, they said: 'This eye belonged to your brother. If you will not tell us what he
refused to say, we will tear out the other.' She, who loved her valiant brother above all things, replied full of
dignity: 'If you tore out an eye and he did not speak, much less will I.' Later they came back and burned their
arms with lit cigarettes until at last, filled with spite, they told the young Haydée Santamaría: 'You no longer have
a fiancé because we have killed him too.' But still imperturbable, she answered: 'He is not dead, because to die
for one's country is to live forever.' Never had the heroism and the dignity of Cuban womanhood reached such
heights.
</p>
<p>
There wasn't even any respect for the combat wounded in the various city hospitals. There they were hunted
down as prey pursued by vultures. In the Centro Gallego they broke into the operating room at the very moment
when two of our critically wounded were receiving blood transfusions. They pulled them off the tables and, as the
wounded could no longer stand, they were dragged down to the first floor where they arrived as corpses.
</p>
<p>
They could not do the same in the Spanish Clinic, where Gustavo Arcos and José Ponce were patients,
because they were prevented by Dr. Posada who bravely told them they could enter only over his dead body.
</p>
<p>
Air and camphor were injected into the veins of Pedro Miret, Abelardo Crespo and Fidel Labrador, in an
attempt to kill them at the Military Hospital. They owe their lives to Captain Tamayo, an Army doctor and true
soldier of honor who, pistol in hand, wrenched them out of the hands of their merciless captors and transferred
them to the Civilian Hospital. These five young men were the only ones of our wounded who survived.
</p>
<p>
In the early morning hours, groups of our men were removed from the barracks and taken in automobiles to
Siboney, La Maya, Songo, and elsewhere. Then they were led out - tied, gagged, already disfigured by the
torture - and were murdered in isolated spots. They are recorded as having died in combat against the Army.
This went on for several days, and few of the captured prisoners survived. Many were compelled to dig their
own graves. One of our men, while he was digging, wheeled around and slashed the face of one of his
assassins with his pick. Others were even buried alive, their hands tied behind their backs. Many solitary spots
became the graveyards of the brave. On the Army target range alone, five of our men lie buried. Some day
these men will be disinterred. Then they will be carried on the shoulders of the people to a place beside the
tomb of Martí, and their liberated land will surely erect a monument to honor the memory of the Martyrs of the
Centennial.
</p>
<p>
The last youth they murdered in the surroundings of Santiago de Cuba was Marcos Martí. He was captured with
our comrade Ciro Redondo in a cave at Siboney on the morning of Thursday the 30th. These two men were led
down the road, with their arms raised, and the soldiers shot Marcos Martí in the back. After he had fallen to the
ground, they riddled him with bullets. Redondo was taken to the camp. When Major Pérez Chaumont saw him
he exclaimed: 'And this one? Why have you brought him to me?' The Court heard this incident from Redondo
himself, the young man who survived thanks to what Pérez Chaumont called 'the soldiers' stupidity.'
</p>
<p>
It was the same throughout the province. Ten days after July 26th, a newspaper in this city printed the news that
two young men had been found hanged on the road from Manzanillo to Bayamo. Later the bodies were
identified as those of Hugo Camejo and Pedro Vélez. Another extraordinary incident took place there: There
were three victims - they had been dragged from Manzanillo Barracks at two that morning. At a certain spot on
the highway they were taken out, beaten unconscious, and strangled with a rope. But after they had been left for
dead, one of them, Andrés García, regained consciousness and hid in a farmer's house. Thanks to this the
Court learned the details of this crime too. Of all our men taken prisoner in the Bayamo area, this is the only
survivor.
</p>
<p>
Near the Cauto River, in a spot known as Barrancas, at the bottom of a pit, lie the bodies of Raúl de Aguiar,
Armando del Valle and Andrés Valdés. They were murdered at midnight on the road between Alto Cedro and
Palma Soriano by Sergeant Montes de Oca - in charge of the military post at Miranda Barracks - Corporal
Maceo, and the Lieutenant in charge of Alta Cedro where the murdered men were captured. In the annals of
crime, Sergeant Eulalio Gonzáles - better known as the 'Tiger' of Moncada Barracks - deserves a special
place. Later this man didn't have the slightest qualms in bragging about his unspeakable deeds. It was he who
with his own hands murdered our comrade Abel Santamaría. But that didn't satisfy him. One day as he was
coming back from the Puerto Boniato Prison, where he raises pedigree fighting cocks in the back courtyard, he
got on a bus on which Abel's mother was also traveling. When this monster realized who she was he began to
brag about his grisly deeds, and - in a loud voice so that the woman dressed in mourning could hear him - he
said: 'Yes, I have gouged many eyes out and I expect to continue gouging them out.' The unprecedented moral
degradation our nation is suffering is expressed beyond the power of words in that mother's sobs of grief
before the cowardly insolence of the very man who murdered her son. When these mothers went to Moncada
Barracks to ask about their sons, it was with incredible cynicism and sadism that they were told: 'Surely
madam, you may see him at the Santa Ifigenia Hotel where we have put him up for you.' Either Cuba is not
Cuba, or the men responsible for these acts will have to face their reckoning one day. Heartless men, they threw
crude insults at the people who bared their heads in reverence as the corpses of the revolutionaries were
carried by.
</p>
<p>
There were so many victims that the government still has not dared make public the complete list. They know
their figures are false. They have all the victims' names, because prior to every murder they recorded all the vital
statistics. The whole long process of identification through the National Identification Bureau was a huge farce,
and there are families still waiting for word of their sons' fate. Why has this not been cleared up, after three
months?
</p>
<p>
I wish to state for the record here that all the victims' pockets were picked to the very last penny and that all their
personal effects, rings and watches, were stripped from their bodies and are brazenly being worn today by their
assassins.
</p>
<p>
Honorable Judges, a great deal of what I have just related you already know, from the testimony of many of my
comrades. But please note that many key witnesses have been barred from this trial, although they were
permitted to attend the sessions of the previous trial. For example, I want to point out that the nurses of the
Civilian Hospital are absent, even though they work in the same place where this hearing is being held. They
were kept from this Court so that, under my questioning, they would not be able to testify that - besides Dr.
Mario Muñoz - twenty more of our men were captured alive. The regime fears that from the questioning of these
witnesses some extremely dangerous testimony could find its way into the official transcript.
</p>
<p>
But Major Pérez Chaumont did appear here and he could not elude my questioning. What we learned from this
man, a 'hero' who fought only against unarmed and handcuffed men, gives us an idea of what could have been
learned at the Courthouse if I had not been isolated from the proceedings. I asked him how many of our men
had died in his celebrated skirmishes at Siboney. He hesitated. I insisted and he finally said twenty-one. Since I
knew such skirmishes had never taken place, I asked him how many of our men had been wounded. He
answered: 'None. All of them were killed.' It was then that I asked him, in astonishment, if the soldiers were using
nuclear weapons. Of course, where men are shot point blank, there are no wounded. Then I asked him how
many casualties the Army had sustained. He replied that two of his men had been wounded. Finally I asked him
if either of these men had died, and he said no. I waited. Later, all of the wounded Army soldiers filed by and it
was discovered that none of them had been wounded at Siboney. This same Major Pérez Chaumont who
hardly flinched at having assassinated twenty-one defenseless young men has built a palatial home in
Ciudamar Beach. It's worth more than 100,000 pesos - his savings after only a few months under Batista's new
rule. And if this is the savings of a Major, imagine how much generals have saved!
</p>
<p>
Honorable Judges: Where are our men who were captured July 26th, 27th, 28th and 29th? It is known that more
than sixty men were captured in the area of Santiago de Cuba. Only three of them and the two women have
been brought before the Court. The rest of the accused were seized later. Where are our wounded? Only five of
them are alive; the rest were murdered. These figures are irrefutable. On the other hand, twenty of the soldiers
who we held prisoner have been presented here and they themselves have declared that they received not even
one offensive word from us. Thirty soldiers who were wounded, many in the street fighting, also appeared
before you. Not one was killed by us. If the Army suffered losses of nineteen dead and thirty wounded, how is it
possible that we should have had eighty dead and only five wounded? Who ever witnessed a battle with 21
dead and no wounded, like these famous battles described by Pérez Chaumont?
</p>
<p>
We have here the casualty lists from the bitter fighting sustained by the invasion troops in the war of 1895, both
in battles where the Cuban army was defeated and where it was victorious. The battle of Los Indios in Las
Villas: 12 wounded, none dead. The battle of Mal Tiempo: 4 dead, 23 wounded. Calimete: 16 dead, 64
wounded. La Palma: 39 dead, 88 wounded. Cacarajícara: 5 dead, 13 wounded. Descanso: 4 dead, 45
wounded. San Gabriel de Lombillo: 2 dead, 18 wounded ... In all these battles the number of wounded is twice,
three times and up to ten times the number of dead, although in those days there were no modern medical
techniques by which the percentage of deaths could be reduced. How then, now, can we explain the enormous
proportion of sixteen deaths per wounded man, if not by the government's slaughter of the wounded in the very
hospitals, and by the assassination of the other helpless prisoners they had taken? The figures are irrefutable.
</p>
<p>
'It is shameful and a dishonor to the Army to have lost three times as many men in combat as those lost by the
insurgents; we must kill ten prisoners for each dead soldier.' This is the concept of honor held by the petty
corporals who became generals on March 10th. This is the code of honor they wish to impose on the national
Army. A false honor, a feigned honor, an apparent honor based on lies, hypocrisy and crime; a mask of honor
molded by those assassins with blood. Who told them that to die fighting is dishonorable? Who told them the
honor of an army consists of murdering the wounded and prisoners of war?
</p>
<p>
In war time, armies that murder prisoners have always earned the contempt and abomination of the entire
world. Such cowardice has no justification, even in a case where national territory is invaded by foreign troops.
In the words of a South American liberator: 'Not even the strictest military obedience may turn a soldier's sword
into that of an executioner.' The honorable soldier does not kill the helpless prisoner after the fight, but rather,
respects him. He does not finish off a wounded man, but rather, helps him. He stands in the way of crime and if
he cannot prevent it, he acts as did that Spanish captain who, upon hearing the shots of the firing squad that
murdered Cuban students, indignantly broke his sword in two and refused to continue serving in that Army.
</p>
<p>
The soldiers who murdered their prisoners were not worthy of the soldiers who died. I saw many soldiers fight
with courage - for example, those in the patrols that fired their machine guns against us in almost hand-to-hand
combat, or that sergeant who, defying death, rang the alarm to mobilize the barracks. Some of them live. I am
glad. Others are dead. They believed they were doing their duty and in my eyes this makes them worthy of
admiration and respect. I deplore only the fact that valiant men should fall for an evil cause. When Cuba is freed,
we should respect, shelter and aid the wives and children of those courageous soldiers who perished fighting
against us. They are not to blame for Cuba's miseries. They too are victims of this nefarious situation.
</p>
<p>
But what honor was earned by the soldiers who died in battle was lost by the generals who ordered prisoners to
be killed after they surrendered. Men who became generals overnight, without ever having fired a shot; men
who bought their stars with high treason against their country; men who ordered the execution of prisoners
taken in battles in which they didn't even participate: these are the generals of the 10th of March - generals who
would not even have been fit to drive the mules that carried the equipment in Antonio Maceo's army.
</p>
<p>
The Army suffered three times as many casualties as we did. That was because our men were expertly trained,
as the Army men themselves have admitted; and also because we had prepared adequate tactical measures,
another fact recognized by the Army. The Army did not perform brilliantly; despite the millions spent on
espionage by the Military Intelligence Agency, they were totally taken by surprise, and their hand grenades
failed to explode because they were obsolete. And the Army owes all this to generals like Martín Díaz Tamayo
and colonels like Ugalde Carrillo and Albert del Río Chaviano. We were not 17 traitors infiltrated into the ranks
of the Army, as was the case on March 10th. Instead, we were 165 men who had traveled the length and
breadth of Cuba to look death boldly in the face. If the Army leaders had a notion of real military honor they
would have resigned their commands rather than trying to wash away their shame and incompetence in the
blood of their prisoners.
</p>
<p>
To kill helpless prisoners and then declare that they died in battle: that is the military capacity of the generals of
March 10th. That was the way the worst butchers of Valeriano Weyler behaved in the cruelest years of our War
of Independence. The Chronicles of War include the following story: 'On February 23rd, officer Baldomero
Acosta entered Punta Brava with some cavalry when, from the opposite road, a squad of the Pizarro regiment
approached, led by a sergeant known in those parts as Barriguilla (Pot Belly). The insurgents exchanged a few
shots with Pizarro's men, then withdrew by the trail that leads from Punta Brava to the village of Guatao.
Followed by another battalion of volunteers from Marianao, and a company of troops from the Public Order
Corps, who were led by Captain Calvo, Pizarro's squad of 50 men marched on Guatao ... As soon as their first
forces entered the village they commenced their massacre - killing twelve of the peaceful inhabitants ... The
troops led by Captain Calvo speedily rounded up all the civilians that were running about the village, tied them
up and took them as prisoners of war to Havana ... Not yet satisfied with their outrages, on the outskirts of
Guatao they carried out another barbaric action, killing one of the prisoners and horribly wounding the rest. The
Marquis of Cervera, a cowardly and palatine soldier, informed Weyler of the pyrrhic victory of the Spanish
soldiers; but Major Zugasti, a man of principles, denounced the incident to the government and officially called
the murders perpetrated by the criminal Captain Calvo and Sergeant Barriguilla an assassination of peaceful
citizens.
</p>
<p>
'Weyler's intervention in this horrible incident and his delight upon learning the details of the massacre may be
palpably deduced from the official dispatch that he sent to the Ministry of War concerning these cruelties. "Small
column organized by commander Marianao with forces from garrison, volunteers and firemen led by Captain
Calvo, fought and destroyed bands of Villanueva and Baldomero Acosta near Punta Brava, killing twenty of
theirs, who were handed over to Mayor of Guatao for burial, and taking fifteen prisoners, one of them wounded,
we assume there are many wounded among them. One of ours suffered critical wounds, some suffered light
bruises and wounds. Weyler."'
</p>
<p>
What is the difference between Weyler's dispatch and that of Colonel Chaviano detailing the victories of Major
Pérez Chaumont? Only that Weyler mentions one wounded soldier in his ranks. Chaviano mentions two. Weyler
speaks of one wounded man and fifteen prisoners in the enemy's ranks. Chaviano records neither wounded
men nor prisoners.
</p>
<p>
Just as I admire the courage of the soldiers who died bravely, I also admire the officers who bore themselves
with dignity and did not drench their hands in this blood. Many of the survivors owe their lives to the
commendable conduct of officers like Lieutenant Sarría, Lieutenant Campa, Captain Tamayo and others, who
were true gentlemen in their treatment of the prisoners. If men like these had not partially saved the name of the
Armed Forces, it would be more honorable today to wear a dishrag than to wear an Army uniform.
</p>
<p>
For my dead comrades, I claim no vengeance. Since their lives were priceless, the murderers could not pay for
them even with their own lives. It is not by blood that we may redeem the lives of those who died for their
country. The happiness of their people is the only tribute worthy of them.
</p>
<p>
What is more, my comrades are neither dead nor forgotten; they live today, more than ever, and their murderers
will view with dismay the victorious spirit of their ideas rise from their corpses. Let the Apostle speak for me:
'There is a limit to the tears we can shed at the graveside of the dead. Such limit is the infinite love for the
homeland and its glory, a love that never falters, loses hope nor grows dim. For the graves of the martyrs are the
highest altars of our reverence.'
</p>
<p class="quoteb">
... When one dies <br>
In the arms of a grateful country <br>
Agony ends, prison chains break - and <br>
At last, with death, life begins!
</p>
<p>
Up to this point I have confined myself almost exclusively to relating events. Since I am well aware that I am
before a Court convened to judge me, I will now demonstrate that all legal right was on our side alone, and that
the verdict imposed on my comrades - the verdict now being sought against me - has no justification in reason,
in social morality or in terms of true justice.
</p>
<p>
I wish to be duly respectful to the Honorable Judges, and I am grateful that you find in the frankness of my plea
no animosity towards you. My argument is meant simply to demonstrate what a false and erroneous position the
Judicial Power has adopted in the present situation. To a certain extent, each Court is nothing more than a cog
in the wheel of the system, and therefore must move along the course determined by the vehicle, although this
by no means justifies any individual acting against his principles. I know very well that the oligarchy bears most
of the blame. The oligarchy, without dignified protest, abjectly yielded to the dictates of the usurper and
betrayed their country by renouncing the autonomy of the Judicial Power. Men who constitute noble exceptions
have attempted to mend the system's mangled honor with their individual decisions. But the gestures of this
minority have been of little consequence, drowned as they were by the obsequious and fawning majority. This
fatalism, however, will not stop me from speaking the truth that supports my cause. My appearance before this
Court may be a pure farce in order to give a semblance of legality to arbitrary decisions, but I am determined to
wrench apart with a firm hand the infamous veil that hides so much shamelessness. It is curious: the very men
who have brought me here to be judged and condemned have never heeded a single decision of this Court.
</p>
<p>
Since this trial may, as you said, be the most important trial since we achieved our national sovereignty, what I
say here will perhaps be lost in the silence which the dictatorship has tried to impose on me, but posterity will
often turn its eyes to what you do here. Remember that today you are judging an accused man, but that you
yourselves will be judged not once, but many times, as often as these days are submitted to scrutiny in the
future. What I say here will be then repeated many times, not because it comes from my lips, but because the
problem of justice is eternal and the people have a deep sense of justice above and beyond the hairsplitting of
jurisprudence. The people wield simple but implacable logic, in conflict with all that is absurd and contradictory.
Furthermore, if there is in this world a people that utterly abhors favoritism and inequality, it is the Cuban people.
To them, justice is symbolized by a maiden with a scale and a sword in her hands. Should she cower before
one group and furiously wield that sword against another group, then to the people of Cuba the maiden of
justice will seem nothing more than a prostitute brandishing a dagger. My logic is the simple logic of the people.
</p>
<p>
Let me tell you a story: Once upon a time there was a Republic. It had its Constitution, its laws, its freedoms, a
President, a Congress and Courts of Law. Everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with
complete freedom. The people were not satisfied with the government officials at that time, but they had the
power to elect new officials and only a few days remained before they would do so. Public opinion was
respected and heeded and all problems of common interest were freely discussed. There were political parties,
radio and television debates and forums and public meetings. The whole nation pulsated with enthusiasm. This
people had suffered greatly and although it was unhappy, it longed to be happy and had a right to be happy. It
had been deceived many times and it looked upon the past with real horror. This country innocently believed
that such a past could not return; the people were proud of their love of freedom and they carried their heads
high in the conviction that liberty would be respected as a sacred right. They felt confident that no one would
dare commit the crime of violating their democratic institutions. They wanted a change for the better, aspired to
progress; and they saw all this at hand. All their hope was in the future.
</p>
<p>
Poor country! One morning the citizens woke up dismayed; under the cover of night, while the people slept, the
ghosts of the past had conspired and has seized the citizenry by its hands, its feet, and its neck. That grip,
those claws were familiar: those jaws, those death-dealing scythes, those boots. No; it was no nightmare; it was
a sad and terrible reality: a man named Fulgencio Batista had just perpetrated the appalling crime that no one
had expected.
</p>
<p>
Then a humble citizen of that people, a citizen who wished to believe in the laws of the Republic, in the integrity
of its judges, whom he had seen vent their fury against the underprivileged, searched through a Social Defense
Code to see what punishment society prescribed for the author of such a coup, and he discovered the following:
</p>
<p class="quote">
'Whosoever shall perpetrate any deed destined through violent means directly to change in whole or in part the
Constitution of the State or the form of the established government shall incur a sentence of six to ten years
imprisonment.
</p>
<p class="quote">
'A sentence of three to ten years imprisonment will be imposed on the author of an act directed to promote an
armed uprising against the Constitutional Powers of the State. The sentence increases from five to twenty years
if the insurrection is carried out.
</p>
<p class="quote">
'Whosoever shall perpetrate an act with the specific purpose of preventing, in whole or in part, even temporarily,
the Senate, the House of Representatives, the President, or the Supreme Court from exercising their
constitutional functions will incur a sentence of from six to ten years imprisonment.
</p>
<p class="quote">
'Whosoever shall attempt to impede or tamper with the normal course of general elections, will incur a sentence
of from four to eight years imprisonment.
</p>
<p class="quote">
'Whosoever shall introduce, publish, propagate or try to enforce in Cuba instructions, orders or decrees that
tend ... to promote the unobservance of laws in force, will incur a sentence of from two to six years
imprisonment.
</p>
<p class="quote">
'Whosoever shall assume command of troops, posts, fortresses, military camps, towns, warships, or military
aircraft, without the authority to do so, or without express government orders, will incur a sentence of from five to
ten years imprisonment.
</p>
<p class="quote">
'A similar sentence will be passed upon anyone who usurps the exercise of a function held by the Constitution
as properly belonging to the powers of State.'
</p>
<p>
Without telling anyone, Code in one hand and a deposition in the other, that citizen went to the old city building,
that old building which housed the Court competent and under obligation to bring cause against and punish
those responsible for this deed. He presented a writ denouncing the crimes and asking that Fulgencio Batista
and his seventeen accomplices be sentenced to 108 years in prison as decreed by the Social Defense Code;
considering also aggravating circumstances of secondary offense treachery, and acting under cover of night.
</p>
<p>
Days and months passed. What a disappointment! The accused remained unmolested: he strode up and down
the country like a great lord and was called Honorable Sir and General: he removed and replaced judges at will.
The very day the Courts opened, the criminal occupied the seat of honor in the midst of our august and
venerable patriarchs of justice.
</p>
<p>
Once more the days and the months rolled by, the people wearied of mockery and abuses. There is a limit to
tolerance! The struggle began against this man who was disregarding the law, who had usurped power by the
use of violence against the will of the people, who was guilty of aggression against the established order, had
tortured, murdered, imprisoned and prosecuted those who had taken up the struggle to defend the law and to
restore freedom to the people.
</p>
<p>
Honorable Judges: I am that humble citizen who one day demanded in vain that the Courts punish the
power-hungry men who had violated the law and torn our institutions to shreds. Now that it is I who am accused
for attempting to overthrow this illegal regime and to restore the legitimate Constitution of the Republic, I am
held incommunicado for 76 days and denied the right to speak to anyone, even to my son; between two heavy
machine guns I am led through the city. I am transferred to this hospital to be tried secretly with the greatest
severity; and the Prosecutor with the Code in his hand solemnly demands that I be sentenced to 26 years in
prison.
</p>
<p>
You will answer that on the former occasion the Courts failed to act because force prevented them from doing
so. Well then, confess, this time force will compel you to condemn me. The first time you were unable to punish
the guilty; now you will be compelled to punish the innocent. The maiden of justice twice raped.
</p>
<p>
And so much talk to justify the unjustifiable, to explain the inexplicable and to reconcile the irreconcilable! The
regime has reached the point of asserting that 'Might makes right' is the supreme law of the land. In other
words, that using tanks and soldiers to take over the presidential palace, the national treasury, and the other
government offices, and aiming guns at the heart of the people, entitles them to govern the people! The same
argument the Nazis used when they occupied the countries of Europe and installed their puppet governments.
</p>
<p>
I heartily believe revolution to be the source of legal right; but the nocturnal armed assault of March 10th
could never be considered a revolution. In everyday language, as José Ingenieros said, it is common to give the
name of revolution to small disorders promoted by a group of dissatisfied persons in order to grab, from those
in power, both the political sinecures and the economic advantages. The usual result is no more than a change
of hands, the dividing up of jobs and benefits. This is not the criterion of a philosopher, as it cannot be that of a
cultured man.
</p>
<p>
Leaving aside the problem of integral changes in the social system, not even on the surface of the public
quagmire were we able to discern the slightest motion that could lessen the rampant putrefaction. The previous
regime was guilty of petty politics, theft, pillage, and disrespect for human life; but the present regime has
increased political skullduggery five-fold, pillage ten-fold, and a hundred-fold the lack of respect for human life.
</p>
<p>
It was known that Barriguilla had plundered and murdered, that he was a millionaire, that he owned in Havana a
good many apartment houses, countless stock in foreign companies, fabulous accounts in American banks,
that he agreed to divorce settlements to the tune of eighteen million pesos, that he was a frequent guest in the
most lavishly expensive hotels for Yankee tycoons. But no one would ever think of Barriguilla as a revolutionary.
Barriguilla is that sergeant of Weyler's who assassinated twelve Cubans in Guatao. Batista's men murdered
seventy in Santiago de Cuba. De te fabula narratur.
</p>
<p>
Four political parties governed the country before the 10th of March: the Auténtico, Liberal, Democratic and
Republican parties. Two days after the coup, the Republican party gave its support to the new rulers. A year had
not yet passed before the Liberal and Democratic parties were again in power: Batista did not restore the
Constitution, did not restore civil liberties, did not restore Congress, did not restore universal suffrage, did not
restore in the last analysis any of the uprooted democratic institutions. But he did restore Verdeja, Guas Inclán,
Salvito García Ramos, Anaya Murillo and the top hierarchy of the traditional government parties, the most
corrupt, rapacious, reactionary and antediluvian elements in Cuban politics. So went the 'revolution' of
Barriguilla!.
</p>
<p>
Lacking even the most elementary revolutionary content, Batista's regime represents in every respect a 20 year
regression for Cuba. Batista's regime has exacted a high price from all of us, but primarily from the humble
classes which are suffering hunger and misery. Meanwhile the dictatorship has laid waste the nation with
commotion, ineptitude and anguish, and now engages in the most loathsome forms of ruthless politics,
concocting formula after formula to perpetuate itself in power, even if over a stack of corpses and a sea of
blood.
</p>
<p>
Batista's regime has not set in motion a single nationwide program of betterment for the people. Batista
delivered himself into the hands of the great financial interests. Little else could be expected from a man of his
mentality - utterly devoid as he is of ideals and of principles, and utterly lacking the faith, confidence and support
of the masses. His regime merely brought with it a change of hands and a redistribution of the loot among a
new group of friends, relatives, accomplices and parasitic hangers-on that constitute the political retinue of the
Dictator. What great shame the people have been forced to endure so that a small group of egoists, altogether
indifferent to the needs of their homeland, may find in public life an easy and comfortable modus vivendi.
</p>
<p>
How right Eduardo Chibás was in his last radio speech, when he said that Batista was encouraging the return
of the colonels, castor oil and the law of the fugitive! Immediately after March 10th, Cubans again began to
witness acts of veritable vandalism which they had thought banished forever from their nation. There was an
unprecedented attack on a cultural institution: a radio station was stormed by the thugs of the SIM, together with
the young hoodlums of the PAU, while broadcasting the 'University of the Air' program. And there was the case
of the journalist Mario Kuchilán, dragged from his home in the middle of the night and bestially tortured until he
was nearly unconscious. There was the murder of the student Rubén Batista and the criminal volleys fired at a
peaceful student demonstration next to the wall where Spanish volunteers shot the medical students in 1871.
And many cases such as that of Dr. García Bárcena, where right in the courtrooms men have coughed up blood
because of the barbaric tortures practiced upon them by the repressive security forces. I will not enumerate the
hundreds of cases where groups of citizens have been brutally clubbed - men, women, children and the aged.
All of this was being done even before July 26th. Since then, as everyone knows, even Cardinal Arteaga himself
was not spared such treatment. Everybody knows he was a victim of repressive agents. According to the
official story, he fell prey to a 'band of thieves'. For once the regime told the truth. For what else is this regime?
...
</p>
<p>
People have just contemplated with horror the case of the journalist who was kidnapped and subjected to
torture by fire for twenty days. Each new case brings forth evidence of unheard-of effrontery, of immense
hypocrisy: the cowardice of those who shirk responsibility and invariably blame the enemies of the regime.
Governmental tactics enviable only by the worst gangster mobs. Even the Nazi criminals were never so
cowardly. Hitler assumed responsibility for the massacres of June 30, 1934, stating that for 24 hours he himself
had been the German Supreme Court; the henchmen of this dictatorship which defies all comparison because
of its baseness, maliciousness and cowardice, kidnap, torture, murder and then loathsomely put the blame on
the adversaries of the regime. Typical tactics of Sergeant Barriguilla!
</p>
<p>
Not once in all the cases I have mentioned, Honorable Judges, have the agents responsible for these crimes
been brought to Court to be tried for them. How is this? Was this not to be the regime of public order, peace
and respect for human life?
</p>
<p>
I have related all this in order to ask you now: Can this state of affairs be called a revolution, capable of
formulating law and establishing rights? Is it or is it not legitimate to struggle against this regime? And must
there not be a high degree of corruption in the courts of law when these courts imprison citizens who try to rid
the country of so much infamy?
</p>
<p>
Cuba is suffering from a cruel and base despotism. You are well aware that resistance to despots is legitimate.
This is a universally recognized principle and our 1940 Constitution expressly makes it a sacred right, in the
second paragraph of Article 40: 'It is legitimate to use adequate resistance to protect previously granted
individual rights.' And even if this prerogative had not been provided by the Supreme Law of the Land, it is a
consideration without which one cannot conceive of the existence of a democratic collectivity. Professor
Infiesta, in his book on Constitutional Law, differentiates between the political and legal constitutions, and
states: 'Sometimes the Legal Constitution includes constitutional principles which, even without being so
classified, would be equally binding solely on the basis of the people's consent, for example, the principle of
majority rule or representation in our democracies.' The right of insurrection in the face of tyranny is one such
principle, and whether or not it be included in the Legal Constitution, it is always binding within a democratic
society. The presentation of such a case to a high court is one of the most interesting problems of general law.
Duguit has said in his Treatise on Constitutional Law: 'If an insurrection fails, no court will dare to rule that this
unsuccessful insurrection was technically no conspiracy, no transgression against the security of the State,
inasmuch as, the government being tyrannical, the intention to overthrow it was legitimate.' But please take
note: Duguit does not state, 'the court ought not to rule.' He says, 'no court will dare to rule.' More explicitly, he
means that no court will dare, that no court will have enough courage to do so, under a tyranny. If the court is
courageous and does its duty, then yes, it will dare.
</p>
<p>
Recently there has been a loud controversy concerning the 1940 Constitution. The Court of Social and
Constitutional Rights ruled against it in favor of the so-called Statutes. Nevertheless, Honorable Judges, I
maintain that the 1940 Constitution is still in force. My statement may seem absurd and extemporaneous to you.
But do not be surprised. It is I who am astonished that a court of law should have attempted to deal a death blow
to the legitimate Constitution of the Republic. Adhering strictly to facts, truth and reason - as I have done all
along - I will prove what I have just stated. The Court of Social and Constitutional Rights was instituted according
to Article 172 of the 1940 Constitution, and the supplementary Act of May 31, 1949. These laws, in virtue of
which the Court was created, granted it, insofar as problems of unconstitutionality are concerned, a specific and
clearly defined area of legal competence: to rule in all matters of appeals claiming the unconstitutionality of
laws, legal decrees, resolutions, or acts that deny, diminish, restrain or adulterate the constitutional rights and
privileges or that jeopardize the operations of State agencies. Article 194 established very clearly the following:
'All judges and courts are under the obligation to find solutions to conflicts between the Constitution and the
existing laws in accordance with the principle that the former shall always prevail over the latter.' Therefore,
according to the laws that created it, the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights should always rule in favor of
the Constitution. When this Court caused the Statutes to prevail above the Constitution of the Republic, it
completely overstepped its boundaries and its established field of competence, thereby rendering a decision
which is legally null and void. Furthermore, the decision itself is absurd, and absurdities have no validity in law
nor in fact, not even from a metaphysical point of view. No matter how venerable a court may be, it cannot
assert that circles are square or, what amounts to the same thing, that the grotesque offspring of the April 4th
Statutes should be considered the official Constitution of a State.
</p>
<p>
The Constitution is understood to be the basic and supreme law of the nation, to define the country's political
structure, regulate the functioning of its government agencies, and determine the limits of their activities. It must
be stable, enduring and, to a certain extent, inflexible. The Statutes fulfill none of these qualifications. To begin
with, they harbor a monstrous, shameless, and brazen contradiction in regard to the most vital aspect of all: the
integration of the Republican structure and the principle of national sovereignty. Article 1 reads: 'Cuba is a
sovereign and independent State constituted as a democratic Republic.' Article 2 reads: 'Sovereignty resides
in the will of the people, and all powers derive from this source.' But then comes Article 118, which reads: 'The
President will be nominated by the Cabinet.' So it is not the people who choose the President, but rather the
Cabinet. And who chooses the Cabinet? Article 120, section 13: 'The President will be authorized to nominate
and reappoint the members of the Cabinet and to replace them when occasion arises.' So, after all, who
nominates whom? Is this not the classical old problem of the chicken and the egg that no one has ever been
able to solve?
</p>
<p>
One day eighteen hoodlums got together. Their plan was to assault the Republic and loot its 350 million pesos
annual budget. Behind peoples' backs and with great treachery, they succeeded in their purpose. 'Now what do
we do next?' they wondered. One of them said to the rest: 'You name me Prime Minister, and I'll make you
generals.' When this was done, he rounded up a group of 20 men and told them: 'I will make you my Cabinet if
you make me President.' In this way they named each other generals, ministers and president, and then took
over the treasury and the Republic.
</p>
<p>
What is more, it was not simply a matter of usurping sovereignty at a given moment in order to name a Cabinet,
Generals and a President. This man ascribed to himself, through these Statutes, not only absolute control of the
nation, but also the power of life and death over every citizen - control, in fact, over the very existence of the
nation. Because of this, I maintain that the position of the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights is not only
treacherous, vile, cowardly and repugnant, but also absurd.
</p>
<p>
The Statutes contain an article which has not received much attention, but which gives us the key to this
situation and is the one from which we shall derive decisive conclusions. I refer specifically to the modifying
clause included in Article 257, which reads: 'This constitutional law is open to reform by the Cabinet with a
two-thirds quorum vote.' This is where mockery reaches its climax. Not only did they exercise sovereignty in
order to impose a Constitution upon a people without that people's consent, and to install a regime which
concentrates all power in their own hands, but also, through Article 257, they assume the most essential
attribute of sovereignty: the power to change the Basic and Supreme Law of the Land. And they have already
changed it several times since March 10th. Yet, with the greatest gall, they assert in Article 2 that sovereignty
resides in the will of the people and that the people are the source of all power. Since these changes may be
brought about by a vote of two-thirds of the Cabinet and the Cabinet is named by the President, then the right to
make and break Cuba is in the hands of one man, a man who is, furthermore, the most unworthy of all the
creatures ever to be born in this land. Was this then accepted by the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights?
And is all that derives from it valid and legal? Very well, you shall see what was accepted: 'This constitutional
law is open to reform by the Cabinet with a two-thirds quorum vote.' Such a power recognizes no limits. Under
its aegis, any article, any chapter, any section, even the whole law may be modified. For example, Article 1,
which I have just mentioned, says that Cuba is a sovereign and independent State constituted as a democratic
Republic, 'although today it is in fact a bloody dictatorship.' Article 3 reads: 'The national boundaries include the
island of Cuba, the Isle of Pines, and the neighboring keys ...' and so on. Batista and his Cabinet under the
provisions of Article 257 can modify all these other articles. They can say that Cuba is no longer a Republic but
a hereditary monarchy and he, Batista, can anoint himself king. He can dismember the national territory and sell
a province to a foreign country as Napoleon did with Louisiana. He may suspend the right to life itself, and like
Herod, order the decapitation of newborn children. All these measures would be legal and you would have to
incarcerate all those who opposed them, just as you now intend to do with me. I have put forth extreme
examples to show how sad and humiliating our present situation is. To think that all these absolute powers are
in the hands of men truly capable of selling our country along with all its citizens!
</p>
<p>
As the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights has accepted this state of affairs, what more are they waiting
for? They may as well hang up their judicial robes. It is a fundamental principle of general law that there can be
no constitutional status where the constitutional and legislative powers reside in the same body. When the
Cabinet makes the laws, the decrees and the rules - and at the same time has the power to change the
Constitution in a moment of time - then I ask you: why do we need a Court of Social and Constitutional Rights?
The ruling in favor of this Statute is irrational, inconceivable, illogical and totally contrary to the Republican laws
that you, Honorable Judges, swore to uphold. When the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights supported
Batista's Statutes against the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land was not abolished but rather the Court
of Social and Constitutional Rights placed itself outside the Constitution, renounced its autonomy and
committed legal suicide. May it rest in peace!
</p>
<p>
The right to rebel, established in Article 40 of the Constitution, is still valid. Was it established to function while
the Republic was enjoying normal conditions? No. This provision is to the Constitution what a lifeboat is to a
ship at sea. The lifeboat is only launched when the ship has been torpedoed by enemies laying wait along its
course. With our Constitution betrayed and the people deprived of all their prerogatives, there was only one way
open: one right which no power may abolish. The right to resist oppression and injustice. If any doubt remains,
there is an article of the Social Defense Code which the Honorable Prosecutor would have done well not to
forget. It reads, and I quote: 'The appointed or elected government authorities that fail to resist sedition with all
available means will be liable to a sentence of interdiction of from six to eight years.' The judges of our nation
were under the obligation to resist Batista's treacherous military coup of the 10th of March. It is understandable
that when no one has observed the law and when nobody else has done his duty, those who have observed the
law and have done their duty should be sent to prison.
</p>
<p>
You will not be able to deny that the regime forced upon the nation is unworthy of Cuba's history. In his book,
The Spirit of Laws, which is the foundation of the modern division of governmental power, Montesquieu makes
a distinction between three types of government according to their basic nature: 'The Republican form wherein
the whole people or a portion thereof has sovereign power; the Monarchical form where only one man governs,
but in accordance with fixed and well-defined laws; and the Despotic form where one man without regard for
laws nor rules acts as he pleases, regarding only his own will or whim.' And then he adds: 'A man whose five
senses constantly tell him that he is everything and that the rest of humanity is nothing is bound to be lazy,
ignorant and sensuous.' 'As virtue is necessary to democracy, and honor to a monarchy, fear is of the essence
to a despotic regime, where virtue is not needed and honor would be dangerous.'
</p>
<p>
The right of rebellion against tyranny, Honorable Judges, has been recognized from the most ancient times
to the present day by men of all creeds, ideas and doctrines.
</p>
<p>
It was so in the theocratic monarchies of remote antiquity. In China it was almost a constitutional principle that
when a king governed rudely and despotically he should be deposed and replaced by a virtuous prince.
</p>
<p>
The philosophers of ancient India upheld the principle of active resistance to arbitrary authority. They justified
revolution and very often put their theories into practice. One of their spiritual leaders used to say that 'an
opinion held by the majority is stronger than the king himself. A rope woven of many strands is strong enough to
hold a lion.'
</p>
<p>
The city states of Greece and republican Rome not only admitted, but defended the meting-out of violent death
to tyrants.
</p>
<p>
In the Middle Ages, John Salisbury in his Book of the Statesman says that when a prince does not govern
according to law and degenerates into a tyrant, violent overthrow is legitimate and justifiable. He recommends
for tyrants the dagger rather than poison.
</p>
<p>
Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, rejects the doctrine of tyrannicide, and yet upholds the
thesis that tyrants should be overthrown by the people.
</p>
<p>
Martin Luther proclaimed that when a government degenerates into a tyranny that violates the laws, its subjects
are released from their obligations to obey. His disciple, Philippe Melanchton, upholds the right of resistance
when governments become despotic. Calvin, the outstanding thinker of the Reformation with regard to political
ideas, postulates that people are entitled to take up arms to oppose any usurpation.
</p>
<p>
No less a man that Juan Mariana, a Spanish Jesuit during the reign of Philip II, asserts in his book, De Rege et
Regis Institutione, that when a governor usurps power, or even if he were elected, when he governs in a
tyrannical manner it is licit for a private citizen to exercise tyrannicide, either directly or through subterfuge with
the least possible disturbance.
</p>
<p>
The French writer, François Hotman, maintained that between the government and its subjects there is a bond
or contract, and that the people may rise in rebellion against the tyranny of government when the latter violates
that pact.
</p>
<p>
About the same time, a booklet - which came to be widely read - appeared under the title Vindiciae Contra
Tyrannos, and it was signed with the pseudonym Stephanus Junius Brutus. It openly declared that resistance to
governments is legitimate when rulers oppress the people and that it is the duty of Honorable Judges to lead
the struggle.
</p>
<p>
The Scottish reformers John Knox and John Poynet upheld the same points of view. And, in the most important
book of that movement, George Buchanan stated that if a government achieved power without taking into
account the consent of the people, or if a government rules their destiny in an unjust or arbitrary fashion, then
that government becomes a tyranny and can be divested of power or, in a final recourse, its leaders can be put
to death.
</p>
<p>
John Althus, a German jurist of the early 17th century, stated in his Treatise on Politics that sovereignty as the
supreme authority of the State is born from the voluntary concourse of all its members; that governmental
authority stems from the people and that its unjust, illegal or tyrannical function exempts them from the duty of
obedience and justifies resistance or rebellion.
</p>
<p>
Thus far, Honorable Judges, I have mentioned examples from antiquity, from the Middle Ages, and from the
beginnings of our times. I selected these examples from writers of all creeds. What is more, you can see that
the right to rebellion is at the very root of Cuba's existence as a nation. By virtue of it you are today able to
appear in the robes of Cuban Judges. Would it be that those garments really served the cause of justice!
</p>
<p>
It is well known that in England during the 17th century two kings, Charles I and James II, were dethroned for
despotism. These actions coincided with the birth of liberal political philosophy and provided the ideological
base for a new social class, which was then struggling to break the bonds of feudalism. Against divine right
autocracies, this new philosophy upheld the principle of the social contract and of the consent of the governed,
and constituted the foundation of the English Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1775 and the
French Revolution of 1789. These great revolutionary events ushered in the liberation of the Spanish colonies in
the New World - the final link in that chain being broken by Cuba. The new philosophy nurtured our own political
ideas and helped us to evolve our Constitutions, from the Constitution of Guáimaro up to the Constitution of
1940. The latter was influenced by the socialist currents of our time; the principle of the social function of
property and of man's inalienable right to a decent living were built into it, although large vested interests have
prevented fully enforcing those rights.
</p>
<p>
The right of insurrection against tyranny then underwent its final consecration and became a fundamental tenet
of political liberty.
</p>
<p>
As far back as 1649, John Milton wrote that political power lies with the people, who can enthrone and dethrone
kings and have the duty of overthrowing tyrants.
</p>
<p>
John Locke, in his essay on government, maintained that when the natural rights of man are violated, the people
have the right and the duty to alter or abolish the government. 'The only remedy against unauthorized force is
opposition to it by force.'
</p>
<p>
Jean-Jaques Rousseau said with great eloquence in his Social Contract: 'While a people sees itself forced to
obey and obeys, it does well; but as soon as it can shake off the yoke and shakes it off, it does better,
recovering its liberty through the use of the very right that has been taken away from it.' 'The strongest man is
never strong enough to be master forever, unless he converts force into right and obedience into duty. Force is
a physical power; I do not see what morality one may derive from its use. To yield to force is an act of necessity,
not of will; at the very least, it is an act of prudence. In what sense should this be called a duty?' 'To renounce
freedom is to renounce one's status as a man, to renounce one's human rights, including one's duties. There is
no possible compensation for renouncing everything. Total renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man
and to take away all free will is to take away all morality of conduct. In short, it is vain and contradictory to
stipulate on the one hand an absolute authority and on the other an unlimited obedience ...'
</p>
<p>
Thomas Paine said that 'one just man deserves more respect than a rogue with a crown.'
</p>
<p>
The people's right to rebel has been opposed only by reactionaries like that clergyman of Virginia, Jonathan
Boucher, who said: 'The right to rebel is a censurable doctrine derived from Lucifer, the father of rebellions.'
</p>
<p>
The Declaration of Independence of the Congress of Philadelphia, on July 4th, 1776, consecrated this right in a
beautiful paragraph which reads: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
Pursuit of Happiness; That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed; That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it and to institute a new Government, laying its
foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect
their Safety and Happiness.'
</p>
<p>
The famous French Declaration of the Rights of Man willed this principle to the coming generations: 'When the
government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for them the most sacred of rights and the most
imperative of duties.' 'When a person seizes sovereignty, he should be condemned to death by free men.'
</p>
<p>
I believe I have sufficiently justified my point of view. I have called forth more reasons than the Honorable
Prosecutor called forth to ask that I be condemned to 26 years in prison. All these reasons support men who
struggle for the freedom and happiness of the people. None support those who oppress the people, revile them,
and rob them heartlessly. Therefore I have been able to call forth many reasons and he could not adduce even
one. How can Batista's presence in power be justified when he gained it against the will of the people and by
violating the laws of the Republic through the use of treachery and force? How could anyone call legitimate a
regime of blood, oppression and ignominy? How could anyone call revolutionary a regime which has gathered
the most backward men, methods and ideas of public life around it? How can anyone consider legally valid the
high treason of a Court whose duty was to defend the Constitution? With what right do the Courts send to prison
citizens who have tried to redeem their country by giving their own blood, their own lives? All this is monstrous to
the eyes of the nation and to the principles of true justice!
</p>
<p>
Still there is one argument more powerful than all the others. We are Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty;
not to fulfill that duty is a crime, is treason. We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and
have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights. We were taught to venerate the glorious example
of our heroes and martyrs. Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Gómez and Martí were the first names engraved in
our minds. We were taught that the Titan once said that liberty is not begged for but won with the blade of a
machete. We were taught that for the guidance of Cuba's free citizens, the Apostle wrote in his book The
Golden Age: 'The man who abides by unjust laws and permits any man to trample and mistreat the country in
which he was born is not an honorable man ... In the world there must be a certain degree of honor just as there
must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without honor, there are always others who bear in
themselves the honor of many men. These are the men who rebel with great force against those who steal the
people's freedom, that is to say, against those who steal honor itself. In those men thousands more are
contained, an entire people is contained, human dignity is contained ...' We were taught that the 10th of October
and the 24th of February are glorious anniversaries of national rejoicing because they mark days on which
Cubans rebelled against the yoke of infamous tyranny. We were taught to cherish and defend the beloved flag
of the lone star, and to sing every afternoon the verses of our National Anthem: 'To live in chains is to live in
disgrace and in opprobrium,' and 'to die for one's homeland is to live forever!' All this we learned and will never
forget, even though today in our land there is murder and prison for the men who practice the ideas taught to
them since the cradle. We were born in a free country that our parents bequeathed to us, and the Island will first
sink into the sea before we consent to be the slaves of anyone.
</p>
<p>
It seemed that the Apostle would die during his Centennial. It seemed that his memory would be extinguished
forever. So great was the affront! But he is alive; he has not died. His people are rebellious. His people are
worthy. His people are faithful to his memory. There are Cubans who have fallen defending his doctrines. There
are young men who in magnificent selflessness came to die beside his tomb, giving their blood and their lives
so that he could keep on living in the heart of his nation. Cuba, what would have become of you had you let your
Apostle die?
</p>
<p>
I come to the close of my defense plea but I will not end it as lawyers usually do, asking that the accused be
freed. I cannot ask freedom for myself while my comrades are already suffering in the ignominious prison of the
Isle of Pines. Send me there to join them and to share their fate. It is understandable that honest men should be
dead or in prison in a Republic where the President is a criminal and a thief.
</p>
<p>
To you, Honorable Judges, my sincere gratitude for having allowed me to express myself free from
contemptible restrictions. I hold no bitterness towards you, I recognize that in certain aspects you have been
humane, and I know that the Chief Judge of this Court, a man of impeccable private life, cannot disguise his
repugnance at the current state of affairs that compels him to dictate unjust decisions. Still, a more serious
problem remains for the Court of Appeals: the indictments arising from the murders of seventy men, that is to
say, the greatest massacre we have ever known. The guilty continue at liberty and with weapons in their hands -
weapons which continually threaten the lives of all citizens. If all the weight of the law does not fall upon the guilty
because of cowardice or because of domination of the courts, and if then all the judges do not resign, I pity your
honor. And I regret the unprecedented shame that will fall upon the Judicial Power.
</p>
<p>
I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and
hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70
of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.
</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
History Will Absolve Me
Spoken: 1953
Publisher: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, Cuba. 1975
Translated: Pedro Álvarez Tabío & Andrew Paul Booth (who rechecked the translation with the Spanish La historia me absolverá, same publisher, in 1981)
Transcription/Markup: Andrew Paul Booth/Brian Baggins
Online Version: 1997, Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2001
HONORABLE JUDGES:
Never has a lawyer had to practice his profession under such difficult conditions; never has such a number of
overwhelming irregularities been committed against an accused man. In this case, counsel and defendant are
one and the same. As attorney he has not even been able to take a look at the indictment. As accused, for the
past seventy-six days he has been locked away in solitary confinement, held totally and absolutely
incommunicado, in violation of every human and legal right.
He who speaks to you hates vanity with all his being, nor are his temperament or frame of mind inclined towards
courtroom poses or sensationalism of any kind. If I have had to assume my own defense before this Court it is
for two reasons. First: because I have been denied legal aid almost entirely, and second: only one who has
been so deeply wounded, who has seen his country so forsaken and its justice trampled so, can speak at a
moment like this with words that spring from the blood of his heart and the truth of his very gut.
There was no lack of generous comrades who wished to defend me, and the Havana Bar Association
appointed a courageous and competent jurist, Dr. Jorge Pagliery, Dean of the Bar in this city, to represent me
in this case. However, he was not permitted to carry out his task. As often as he tried to see me, the prison
gates were closed before him. Only after a month and a half, and through the intervention of the Court, was he
finally granted a ten minute interview with me in the presence of a sergeant from the Military Intelligence Agency
(SIM). One supposes that a lawyer has a right to speak with his defendant in private, and this right is respected
throughout the world, except in the case of a Cuban prisoner of war in the hands of an implacable tyranny that
abides by no code of law, be it legal or humane. Neither Dr. Pagliery nor I were willing to tolerate such dirty
spying upon our means of defense for the oral trial. Did they want to know, perhaps, beforehand, the methods
we would use in order to reduce to dust the incredible fabric of lies they had woven around the Moncada
Barracks events? How were we going to expose the terrible truth they would go to such great lengths to
conceal? It was then that we decided that, taking advantage of my professional rights as a lawyer, I would
assume my own defense.
This decision, overheard by the sergeant and reported by him to his superior, provoked a real panic. It looked
like some mocking little imp was telling them that I was going to ruin all their plans. You know very well,
Honorable Judges, how much pressure has been brought to bear on me in order to strip me as well of this right
that is ratified by long Cuban tradition. The Court could not give in to such machination, for that would have left
the accused in a state of total indefensiveness. The accused, who is now exercising this right to plead his own
case, will under no circumstances refrain from saying what he must say. I consider it essential that I explain, at
the onset, the reason for the terrible isolation in which I have been kept; what was the purpose of keeping me
silent; what was behind the plots to kill me, plots which the Court is familiar with; what grave events are being
hidden from the people; and the truth behind all the strange things which have taken place during this trial. I
propose to do all this with utmost clarity.
You have publicly called this case the most significant in the history of the Republic. If you sincerely believed
this, you should not have allowed your authority to be stained and degraded. The first court session was
September 21st. Among one hundred machine guns and bayonets, scandalously invading the hall of justice,
more than a hundred people were seated in the prisoner's dock. The great majority had nothing to do with what
had happened. They had been under preventive arrest for many days, suffering all kinds of insults and abuses in
the chambers of the repressive units. But the rest of the accused, the minority, were brave and determined,
ready to proudly confirm their part in the battle for freedom, ready to offer an example of unprecedented
self-sacrifice and to wrench from the jail's claws those who in deliberate bad faith had been included in the trial.
Those who had met in combat confronted one another again. Once again, with the cause of justice on our side,
we would wage the terrible battle of truth against infamy! Surely the regime was not prepared for the moral
catastrophe in store for it!
How to maintain all its false accusations? How to keep secret what had really happened, when so many young
men were willing to risk everything - prison, torture and death, if necessary - in order that the truth be told before
this Court?
I was called as a witness at that first session. For two hours I was questioned by the Prosecutor as well as by
twenty defense attorneys. I was able to prove with exact facts and figures the sums of money that had been
spent, the way this money was collected and the arms we had been able to round up. I had nothing to hide, for
the truth was: all this was accomplished through sacrifices without precedent in the history of our Republic. I
spoke of the goals that inspired us in our struggle and of the humane and generous treatment that we had at all
times accorded our adversaries. If I accomplished my purpose of demonstrating that those who were falsely
implicated in this trial were neither directly nor indirectly involved, I owe it to the complete support and backing
of my heroic comrades. For, as I said, the consequences they might be forced to suffer at no time caused them
to repent of their condition as revolutionaries and patriots, I was never once allowed to speak with these
comrades of mine during the time we were in prison, and yet we planned to do exactly the same. The fact is,
when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them - neither prison walls nor the sod of
cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain
them all.
From that moment on, the structure of lies the regime had erected about the events at Moncada Barracks
began to collapse like a house of cards. As a result, the Prosecutor realized that keeping all those persons
named as instigators in prison was completely absurd, and he requested their provisional release.
At the close of my testimony in that first session, I asked the Court to allow me to leave the dock and sit among
the counsel for the defense. This permission was granted. At that point what I consider my most important
mission in this trial began: to totally discredit the cowardly, miserable and treacherous lies which the regime
had hurled against our fighters; to reveal with irrefutable evidence the horrible, repulsive crimes they had
practiced on the prisoners; and to show the nation and the world the infinite misfortune of the Cuban people who
are suffering the cruelest, the most inhuman oppression of their history.
The second session convened on Tuesday, September 22nd. By that time only ten witnesses had testified, and
they had already cleared up the murders in the Manzanillo area, specifically establishing and placing on record
the direct responsibility of the captain commanding that post. There were three hundred more witnesses to
testify. What would happen if, with a staggering mass of facts and evidence, I should proceed to cross-examine
the very Army men who were directly responsible for those crimes? Could the regime permit me to go ahead
before the large audience attending the trial? Before journalists and jurists from all over the island? And before
the party leaders of the opposition, who they had stupidly seated right in the prisoner's dock where they could
hear so well all that might be brought out here? They would rather have blown up the court house, with all its
judges, than allow that!
And so they devised a plan by which they could eliminate me from the trial and they proceeded to do just that,
manu militari. On Friday night, September 25th, on the eve of the third session of the trial, two prison doctors
visited me in my cell. They were visibly embarrassed. 'We have come to examine you,' they said. I asked them,
'Who is so worried about my health?' Actually, from the moment I saw them I realized what they had come for.
They could not have treated me with greater respect, and they explained their predicament to me. That
afternoon Colonel Chaviano had appeared at the prison and told them I 'was doing the Government terrible
damage with this trial.' He had told them they must sign a certificate declaring that I was ill and was, therefore,
unable to appear in court. The doctors told me that for their part they were prepared to resign from their posts
and risk persecution. They put the matter in my hands, for me to decide. I found it hard to ask those men to
unhesitatingly destroy themselves. But neither could I, under any circumstances, consent that those orders be
carried out. Leaving the matter to their own consciences, I told them only: 'You must know your duty; I certainly
know mine.'
After leaving the cell they signed the certificate. I know they did so believing in good faith that this was the only
way they could save my life, which they considered to be in grave danger. I was not obliged to keep our
conversation secret, for I am bound only by the truth. Telling the truth in this instance may jeopardize those good
doctors in their material interests, but I am removing all doubt about their honor, which is worth much more. That
same night, I wrote the Court a letter denouncing the plot; requesting that two Court physicians be sent to certify
my excellent state of health, and to inform you that if to save my life I must take part in such deception, I would a
thousand times prefer to lose it. To show my determination to fight alone against this whole degenerate
frame-up, I added to my own words one of the Master's lines: 'A just cause even from the depths of a cave can
do more than an army.' As the Court knows, this was the letter Dr. Melba Hernández submitted at the third
session of the trial on September 26th. I managed to get it to her in spite of the heavy guard I was under. That
letter, of course, provoked immediate reprisals. Dr. Hernández was subjected to solitary confinement, and I -
since I was already incommunicado - was sent to the most inaccessible reaches of the prison. From that
moment on, all the accused were thoroughly searched from head to foot before they were brought into the
courtroom.
Two Court physicians certified on September 27th that I was, in fact, in perfect health. Yet, in spite of the
repeated orders from the Court, I was never again brought to the hearings. What's more, anonymous persons
daily circulated hundreds of apocryphal pamphlets which announced my rescue from jail. This stupid alibi was
invented so they could physically eliminate me and pretend I had tried to escape. Since the scheme failed as a
result of timely exposure by ever alert friends, and after the first affidavit was shown to be false, the regime
could only keep me away from the trial by open and shameless contempt of Court.
This was an incredible situation, Honorable Judges: Here was a regime literally afraid to bring an accused man
to Court; a regime of blood and terror that shrank in fear of the moral conviction of a defenseless man -
unarmed, slandered and isolated. And so, after depriving me of everything else, they finally deprived me even of
the trial in which I was the main accused. Remember that this was during a period in which individual rights
were suspended and the Public Order Act as well as censorship of radio and press were in full force. What
unbelievable crimes this regime must have committed to so fear the voice of one accused man!
I must dwell upon the insolence and disrespect which the Army leaders have at all times shown towards you. As
often as this Court has ordered an end to the inhuman isolation in which I was held; as often as it has ordered
my most elementary rights to be respected; as often as it has demanded that I be brought before it, this Court
has never been obeyed! Worse yet: in the very presence of the Court, during the first and second hearings, a
praetorian guard was stationed beside me to totally prevent me from speaking to anyone, even among the brief
recesses. In other words, not only in prison, but also in the courtroom and in your presence, they ignored your
decrees. I had intended to mention this matter in the following session, as a question of elementary respect for
the Court, but - I was never brought back. And if, in exchange for so much disrespect, they bring us before you
to be jailed in the name of a legality which they and they alone have been violating since March 10th, sad
indeed is the role they would force on you. The Latin maxim Cedant arma togae has certainly not been fulfilled
on a single occasion during this trial. I beg you to keep that circumstance well in mind.
What is more, these devices were in any case quite useless; my brave comrades, with unprecedented
patriotism, did their duty to the utmost.
'Yes, we set out to fight for Cuba's freedom and we are not ashamed of having done so,' they declared, one by
one, on the witness stand. Then, addressing the Court with impressive courage, they denounced the hideous
crimes committed upon the bodies of our brothers. Although absent from Court, I was able, in my prison cell, to
follow the trial in all its details. And I have the convicts at Boniato Prison to thank for this. In spite of all threats,
these men found ingenious means of getting newspaper clippings and all kinds of information to me. In this way
they avenged the abuses and immoralities perpetrated against them both by Taboada, the warden, and the
supervisor, Lieutenant Rozabal, who drove them from sun up to sun down building private mansions and
starved them by embezzling the prison food budget.
As the trial went on, the roles were reversed: those who came to accuse found themselves accused, and the
accused became the accusers! It was not the revolutionaries who were judged there; judged once and forever
was a man named Batista - monstruum horrendum! - and it matters little that these valiant and worthy young
men have been condemned, if tomorrow the people will condemn the Dictator and his henchmen! Our men
were consigned to the Isle of Pines Prison, in whose circular galleries Castells' ghost still lingers and where the
cries of countless victims still echo; there our young men have been sent to expiate their love of liberty, in bitter
confinement, banished from society, torn from their homes and exiled from their country. Is it not clear to you, as
I have said before, that in such circumstances it is difficult and disagreeable for this lawyer to fulfill his duty?
As a result of so many turbid and illegal machinations, due to the will of those who govern and the weakness of
those who judge, I find myself here in this little room at the Civilian Hospital, where I have been brought to be
tried in secret, so that I may not be heard and my voice may be stifled, and so that no one may learn of the
things I am going to say. Why, then, do we need that imposing Palace of Justice which the Honorable Judges
would without doubt find much more comfortable? I must warn you: it is unwise to administer justice from a
hospital room, surrounded by sentinels with fixed bayonets; the citizens might suppose that our justice is sick -
and that it is captive.
Let me remind you, your laws of procedure provide that trials shall be 'public hearings;' however, the people
have been barred altogether from this session of Court. The only civilians admitted here have been two
attorneys and six reporters, in whose newspapers the censorship of the press will prevent printing a word I say. I
see, as my sole audience in this chamber and in the corridors, nearly a hundred soldiers and officers. I am
grateful for the polite and serious attention they give me. I only wish I could have the whole Army before me! I
know, one day, this Army will seethe with rage to wash away the terrible, the shameful bloodstains splattered
across the military uniform by the present ruthless clique in its lust for power. On that day, oh what a fall awaits
those mounted in arrogance on their noble steeds! - provided that the people have not dismounted them long
before that!
Finally, I should like to add that no treatise on penal law was allowed me in my cell. I have at my disposal only
this tiny code of law lent to me by my learned counsel, Dr. Baudillo Castellanos, the courageous defender of my
comrades. In the same way they prevented me from receiving the books of Martí; it seems the prison
censorship considered them too subversive. Or is it because I said Martí was the inspirer of the 26th of July?
Reference books on any other subject were also denied me during this trial. But it makes no difference! I carry
the teachings of the Master in my heart, and in my mind the noble ideas of all men who have defended people's
freedom everywhere!
I am going to make only one request of this court; I trust it will be granted as a compensation for the many
abuses and outrages the accused has had to tolerate without protection of the law. I ask that my right to express
myself be respected without restraint. Otherwise, even the merest semblance of justice cannot be maintained,
and the final episode of this trial would be, more than all the others, one of ignominy and cowardice.
I must admit that I am somewhat disappointed. I had expected that the Honorable Prosecutor would come
forward with a grave accusation. I thought he would be ready to justify to the limit his contention, and his reasons
why I should be condemned in the name of Law and Justice - what law and what justice? - to 26 years in prison.
But no. He has limited himself to reading Article 148 of the Social Defense Code. On the basis of this, plus
aggravating circumstances, he requests that I be imprisoned for the lengthy term of 26 years! Two minutes
seems a very short time in which to demand and justify that a man be put behind bars for more than a quarter of
a century. Can it be that the Honorable Prosecutor is, perhaps, annoyed with the Court? Because as I see it, his
laconic attitude in this case clashes with the solemnity with which the Honorable Judges declared, rather
proudly, that this was a trial of the greatest importance! I have heard prosecutors speak ten times longer in a
simple narcotics case asking for a sentence of just six months. The Honorable Prosecutor has supplied not a
word in support of his petition. I am a just man. I realize that for a prosecuting attorney under oath of loyalty to the
Constitution of the Republic, it is difficult to come here in the name of an unconstitutional, statutory, de facto
government, lacking any legal much less moral basis, to ask that a young Cuban, a lawyer like himself - perhaps
as honorable as he, be sent to jail for 26 years. But the Honorable Prosecutor is a gifted man and I have seen
much less talented persons write lengthy diatribes in defense of this regime. How then can I suppose that he
lacks reason with which to defend it, at least for fifteen minutes, however contemptible that might be to any
decent person? It is clear that there is a great conspiracy behind all this.
Honorable Judges: Why such interest in silencing me? Why is every type of argument foregone in order to avoid
presenting any target whatsoever against which I might direct my own brief? Is it that they lack any legal, moral
or political basis on which to put forth a serious formulation of the question? Are they that afraid of the truth? Do
they hope that I, too, will speak for only two minutes and that I will not touch upon the points which have caused
certain people sleepless nights since July 26th? Since the prosecutor's petition was restricted to the mere
reading of five lines of an article of the Social Defense Code, might they suppose that I too would limit myself to
those same lines and circle round them like some slave turning a millstone? I shall by no means accept such a
gag, for in this trial there is much more than the freedom of a single individual at stake. Fundamental matters of
principle are being debated here, the right of men to be free is on trial, the very foundations of our existence as
a civilized and democratic nation are in the balance. When this trial is over, I do not want to have to reproach
myself for any principle left undefended, for any truth left unsaid, for any crime not denounced.
The Honorable Prosecutor's famous little article hardly deserves a minute of my time. I shall limit myself for the
moment to a brief legal skirmish against it, because I want to clear the field for an assault against all the endless
lies and deceits, the hypocrisy, conventionalism and moral cowardice that have set the stage for the crude
comedy which since the 10th of March - and even before then - has been called Justice in Cuba.
It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime
described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.
The article in question reads textually: 'A penalty of imprisonment of from three to ten years shall be imposed
upon the perpetrator of any act aimed at bringing about an armed uprising against the Constitutional Powers of
the State. The penalty shall be imprisonment for from five to twenty years, in the event that insurrection actually
be carried into effect.'
In what country is the Honorable Prosecutor living? Who has told him that we have sought to bring about an
uprising against the Constitutional Powers of the State? Two things are self-evident. First of all, the dictatorship
that oppresses the nation is not a constitutional power, but an unconstitutional one: it was established against
the Constitution, over the head of the Constitution, violating the legitimate Constitution of the Republic. The
legitimate Constitution is that which emanates directly from a sovereign people. I shall demonstrate this point
fully later on, notwithstanding all the subterfuges contrived by cowards and traitors to justify the unjustifiable.
Secondly, the article refers to Powers, in the plural, as in the case of a republic governed by a Legislative
Power, an Executive Power, and a Judicial Power which balance and counterbalance one another. We have
fomented a rebellion against one single power, an illegal one, which has usurped and merged into a single
whole both the Legislative and Executive Powers of the nation, and so has destroyed the entire system that was
specifically safeguarded by the Code now under our analysis. As to the independence of the Judiciary after the
10th of March, I shall not allude to that for I am in no mood for joking ... No matter how Article 148 may be
stretched, shrunk or amended, not a single comma applies to the events of July 26th. Let us leave this statute
alone and await the opportunity to apply it to those who really did foment an uprising against the Constitutional
Powers of the State. Later I shall come back to the Code to refresh the Honorable Prosecutor's memory about
certain circumstances he has unfortunately overlooked.
I warn you, I am just beginning! If there is in your hearts a vestige of love for your country, love for humanity, love
for justice, listen carefully. I know that I will be silenced for many years; I know that the regime will try to suppress
the truth by all possible means; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not
be stifled - it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous
cowards deny it.
From a shack in the mountains on Monday, July 27th, I listened to the dictator's voice on the air while there
were still 18 of our men in arms against the government. Those who have never experienced similar moments
will never know that kind of bitterness and indignation. While the long-cherished hopes of freeing our people lay
in ruins about us we heard those crushed hopes gloated over by a tyrant more vicious, more arrogant than ever.
The endless stream of lies and slanders, poured forth in his crude, odious, repulsive language, may only be
compared to the endless stream of clean young blood which had flowed since the previous night - with his
knowledge, consent, complicity and approval - being spilled by the most inhuman gang of assassins it is
possible to imagine. To have believed him for a single moment would have sufficed to fill a man of conscience
with remorse and shame for the rest of his life. At that time I could not even hope to brand his miserable
forehead with the mark of truth which condemns him for the rest of his days and for all time to come. Already a
circle of more than a thousand men, armed with weapons more powerful than ours and with peremptory orders
to bring in our bodies, was closing in around us. Now that the truth is coming out, now that speaking before you I
am carrying out the mission I set for myself, I may die peacefully and content. So I shall not mince my words
about those savage murderers.
I must pause to consider the facts for a moment. The government itself said the attack showed such precision
and perfection that it must have been planned by military strategists. Nothing could have been farther from the
truth! The plan was drawn up by a group of young men, none of whom had any military experience at all. I will
reveal their names, omitting two who are neither dead nor in prison: Abel Santamaría, José Luis Tasende,
Renato Guitart Rosell, Pedro Miret, Jesús Montané and myself. Half of them are dead, and in tribute to their
memory I can say that although they were not military experts they had enough patriotism to have given, had we
not been at such a great disadvantage, a good beating to that entire lot of generals together, those generals of
the 10th of March who are neither soldiers nor patriots. Much more difficult than the planning of the attack was
our organizing, training, mobilizing and arming men under this repressive regime with its millions of dollars
spent on espionage, bribery and information services. Nevertheless, all this was carried out by those men and
many others like them with incredible seriousness, discretion and discipline. Still more praiseworthy is the fact
that they gave this task everything they had; ultimately, their very lives.
The final mobilization of men who came to this province from the most remote towns of the entire island was
accomplished with admirable precision and in absolute secrecy. It is equally true that the attack was carried out
with magnificent coordination. It began simultaneously at 5:15 a.m. in both Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba; and
one by one, with an exactitude of minutes and seconds prepared in advance, the buildings surrounding the
barracks fell to our forces. Nevertheless, in the interest of truth and even though it may detract from our merit, I
am also going to reveal for the first time a fact that was fatal: due to a most unfortunate error, half of our forces,
and the better armed half at that, went astray at the entrance to the city and were not on hand to help us at the
decisive moment. Abel Santamaría, with 21 men, had occupied the Civilian Hospital; with him went a doctor
and two of our women comrades to attend to the wounded. Raúl Castro, with ten men, occupied the Palace of
Justice, and it was my responsibility to attack the barracks with the rest, 95 men. Preceded by an advance
group of eight who had forced Gate Three, I arrived with the first group of 45 men. It was precisely here that the
battle began, when my car ran into an outside patrol armed with machine guns. The reserve group which had
almost all the heavy weapons (the light arms were with the advance group), turned up the wrong street and lost
its way in an unfamiliar city. I must clarify the fact that I do not for a moment doubt the courage of those men; they
experienced great anguish and desperation when they realized they were lost. Because of the type of action it
was and because the contending forces were wearing identically colored uniforms, it was not easy for these
men to re-establish contact with us. Many of them, captured later on, met death with true heroism.
Everyone had instructions, first of all, to be humane in the struggle. Never was a group of armed men more
generous to the adversary. From the beginning we took numerous prisoners - nearly twenty - and there was one
moment when three of our men - Ramiro Valdés, José Suárez and Jesús Montané - managed to enter a
barrack and hold nearly fifty soldiers prisoners for a short time. Those soldiers testified before the Court, and
without exception they all acknowledged that we treated them with absolute respect, that we didn't even subject
them to one scoffing remark. In line with this, I want to give my heartfelt thanks to the Prosecutor for one thing in
the trial of my comrades: when he made his report he was fair enough to acknowledge as an incontestable fact
that we maintained a high spirit of chivalry throughout the struggle.
Discipline among the soldiers was very poor. They finally defeated us because of their superior numbers -
fifteen to one - and because of the protection afforded them by the defenses of the fortress. Our men were much
better marksmen, as our enemies themselves conceded. There was a high degree of courage on both sides.
In analyzing the reasons for our tactical failure, apart from the regrettable error already mentioned, I believe we
made a mistake by dividing the commando unit we had so carefully trained. Of our best trained men and
boldest leaders, there were 27 in Bayamo, 21 at the Civilian Hospital and 10 at the Palace of Justice. If our
forces had been distributed differently the outcome of the battle might have been different. The clash with the
patrol (purely accidental, since the unit might have been at that point twenty seconds earlier or twenty seconds
later) alerted the camp, and gave it time to mobilize. Otherwise it would have fallen into our hands without a shot
fired, since we already controlled the guard post. On the other hand, except for the .22 caliber rifles, for which
there were plenty of bullets, our side was very short of ammunition. Had we had hand grenades, the Army would
not have been able to resist us for fifteen minutes.
When I became convinced that all efforts to take the barracks were now useless, I began to withdraw our men in
groups of eight and ten. Our retreat was covered by six expert marksmen under the command of Pedro Miret
and Fidel Labrador; heroically they held off the Army's advance. Our losses in the battle had been insignificant;
95% of our casualties came from the Army's inhumanity after the struggle. The group at the Civilian Hospital
only had one casualty; the rest of that group was trapped when the troops blocked the only exit; but our youths
did not lay down their arms until their very last bullet was gone. With them was Abel Santamaría, the most
generous, beloved and intrepid of our young men, whose glorious resistance immortalizes him in Cuban history.
We shall see the fate they met and how Batista sought to punish the heroism of our youth.
We planned to continue the struggle in the mountains in case the attack on the regiment failed. In Siboney I was
able to gather a third of our forces; but many of these men were now discouraged. About twenty of them
decided to surrender; later we shall see what became of them. The rest, 18 men, with what arms and
ammunition were left, followed me into the mountains. The terrain was completely unknown to us. For a week
we held the heights of the Gran Piedra range and the Army occupied the foothills. We could not come down;
they didn't risk coming up. It was not force of arms, but hunger and thirst that ultimately overcame our resistance.
I had to divide the men into smaller groups. Some of them managed to slip through the Army lines; others were
surrendered by Monsignor Pérez Serantes. Finally only two comrades remained with me - José Suárez and
Oscar Alcalde. While the three of us were totally exhausted, a force led by Lieutenant Sarría surprised us in our
sleep at dawn. This was Saturday, August 1st. By that time the slaughter of prisoners had ceased as a result of
the people's protest. This officer, a man of honor, saved us from being murdered on the spot with our hands tied
behind us.
I need not deny here the stupid statements by Ugalde Carrillo and company, who tried to stain my name in an
effort to mask their own cowardice, incompetence, and criminality. The facts are clear enough.
My purpose is not to bore the court with epic narratives. All that I have said is essential for a more precise
understanding of what is yet to come.
Let me mention two important facts that facilitate an objective judgement of our attitude. First: we could have
taken over the regiment simply by seizing all the high ranking officers in their homes. This possibility was
rejected for the very humane reason that we wished to avoid scenes of tragedy and struggle in the presence of
their families. Second: we decided not to take any radio station over until the Army camp was in our power. This
attitude, unusually magnanimous and considerate, spared the citizens a great deal of bloodshed. With only ten
men I could have seized a radio station and called the people to revolt. There is no questioning the people's will
to fight. I had a recording of Eduardo Chibás' last message over the CMQ radio network, and patriotic poems
and battle hymns capable of moving the least sensitive, especially with the sounds of live battle in their ears. But
I did not want to use them although our situation was desperate.
The regime has emphatically repeated that our Movement did not have popular support. I have never heard an
assertion so naive, and at the same time so full of bad faith. The regime seeks to show submission and
cowardice on the part of the people. They all but claim that the people support the dictatorship; they do not know
how offensive this is to the brave Orientales. Santiago thought our attack was only a local disturbance between
two factions of soldiers; not until many hours later did they realize what had really happened. Who can doubt the
valor, civic pride and limitless courage of the rebel and patriotic people of Santiago de Cuba? If Moncada had
fallen into our hands, even the women of Santiago de Cuba would have risen in arms. Many were the rifles
loaded for our fighters by the nurses at the Civilian Hospital. They fought alongside us. That is something we will
never forget.
It was never our intention to engage the soldiers of the regiment in combat. We wanted to seize control of them
and their weapons in a surprise attack, arouse the people and call the soldiers to abandon the odious flag of
the tyranny and to embrace the banner of freedom; to defend the supreme interests of the nation and not the
petty interests of a small clique; to turn their guns around and fire on the people's enemies and not on the
people, among whom are their own sons and fathers; to unite with the people as the brothers that they are
instead of opposing the people as the enemies the government tries to make of them; to march behind the only
beautiful ideal worthy of sacrificing one's life - the greatness and happiness of one's country. To those who
doubt that many soldiers would have followed us, I ask: What Cuban does not cherish glory? What heart is not
set aflame by the promise of freedom?
The Navy did not fight against us, and it would undoubtedly have come over to our side later on. It is well known
that that branch of the Armed Forces is the least dominated by the Dictatorship and that there is a very intense
civic conscience among its members. But, as to the rest of the national armed forces, would they have fought
against a people in revolt? I declare that they would not! A soldier is made of flesh and blood; he thinks,
observes, feels. He is susceptible to the opinions, beliefs, sympathies and antipathies of the people. If you ask
his opinion, he may tell you he cannot express it; but that does not mean he has no opinion. He is affected by
exactly the same problems that affect other citizens - subsistence, rent, the education of his children, their future,
etc. Everything of this kind is an inevitable point of contact between him and the people and everything of this
kind relates him to the present and future situation of the society in which he lives. It is foolish to imagine that the
salary a soldier receives from the State - a modest enough salary at that - should resolve the vital problems
imposed on him by his needs, duties and feelings as a member of his community.
This brief explanation has been necessary because it is basic to a consideration to which few people, until now,
have paid any attention - soldiers have a deep respect for the feelings of the majority of the people! During the
Machado regime, in the same proportion as popular antipathy increased, the loyalty of the Army visibly
decreased. This was so true that a group of women almost succeeded in subverting Camp Columbia. But this
is proven even more clearly by a recent development. While Grau San Martín's regime was able to preserve its
maximum popularity among the people, unscrupulous ex-officers and power-hungry civilians attempted
innumerable conspiracies in the Army, although none of them found a following in the rank and file.
The March 10th coup took place at the moment when the civil government's prestige had dwindled to its lowest
ebb, a circumstance of which Batista and his clique took advantage. Why did they not strike their blow after the
first of June? Simply because, had they waited for the majority of the nation to express its will at the polls, the
troops would not have responded to the conspiracy!
Consequently, a second assertion can be made: the Army has never revolted against a regime with a popular
majority behind it. These are historic truths, and if Batista insists on remaining in power at all costs against the
will of the majority of Cubans, his end will be more tragic than that of Gerardo Machado.
I have a right to express an opinion about the Armed Forces because I defended them when everyone else was
silent. And I did this neither as a conspirator, nor from any kind of personal interest - for we then enjoyed full
constitutional prerogatives. I was prompted only by humane instincts and civic duty. In those days, the
newspaper Alerta was one of the most widely read because of its position on national political matters. In its
pages I campaigned against the forced labor to which the soldiers were subjected on the private estates of high
civil personages and military officers. On March 3rd, 1952 I supplied the Courts with data, photographs, films
and other proof denouncing this state of affairs. I also pointed out in those articles that it was elementary
decency to increase army salaries. I should like to know who else raised his voice on that occasion to protest
against all this injustice done to the soldiers. Certainly not Batista and company, living well-protected on their
luxurious estates, surrounded by all kinds of security measures, while I ran a thousand risks with neither
bodyguards nor arms.
Just as I defended the soldiers then, now - when all others are once more silent - I tell them that they allowed
themselves to be miserably deceived; and to the deception and shame of March 10th they have added the
disgrace, the thousand times greater disgrace, of the fearful and unjustifiable crimes of Santiago de Cuba.
From that time since, the uniform of the Army is splattered with blood. And as last year I told the people and
cried out before the Courts that soldiers were working as slaves on private estates, today I make the bitter
charge that there are soldiers stained from head to toe with the blood of the Cuban youths they have tortured
and slain. And I say as well that if the Army serves the Republic, defends the nation, respects the people and
protects the citizenry then it is only fair that the soldier should earn at least a hundred pesos a month. But if the
soldiers slay and oppress the people, betray the nation and defend only the interests of one small group, then
the Army deserves not a cent of the Republic's money and Camp Columbia should be converted into a school
with ten thousand orphans living there instead of soldiers.
I want to be just above all else, so I can't blame all the soldiers for the shameful crimes that stain a few evil and
treacherous Army men. But every honorable and upstanding soldier who loves his career and his uniform is
dutybound to demand and to fight for the cleansing of this guilt, to avenge this betrayal and to see the guilty
punished. Otherwise the soldier's uniform will forever be a mark of infamy instead of a source of pride.
Of course the March 10th regime had no choice but to remove the soldiers from the private estates. But it did
so only to put them to work as doormen, chauffeurs, servants and bodyguards for the whole rabble of petty
politicians who make up the party of the Dictatorship. Every fourth or fifth rank official considers himself entitled
to the services of a soldier to drive his car and to watch over him as if he were constantly afraid of receiving the
kick in the pants he so justly deserves.
If they had been at all interested in promoting real reforms, why did the regime not confiscate the estates and
the millions of men like Genovevo Pérez Dámera, who acquired their fortunes by exploiting soldiers, driving
them like slaves and misappropriating the funds of the Armed Forces? But no: Genovevo Pérez and others like
him no doubt still have soldiers protecting them on their estates because the March 10th generals, deep in their
hearts, aspire to the same future and can't allow that kind of precedent to be set.
The 10th of March was a miserable deception, yes ... After Batista and his band of corrupt and disreputable
politicians had failed in their electoral plan, they took advantage of the Army's discontent and used it to climb to
power on the backs of the soldiers. And I know there are many Army men who are disgusted because they have
been disappointed. At first their pay was raised, but later, through deductions and reductions of every kind, it
was lowered again. Many of the old elements, who had drifted away from the Armed Forces, returned to the
ranks and blocked the way of young, capable and valuable men who might otherwise have advanced. Good
soldiers have been neglected while the most scandalous nepotism prevails. Many decent military men are now
asking themselves what need that Armed Forces had to assume the tremendous historical responsibility of
destroying our Constitution merely to put a group of immoral men in power, men of bad reputation, corrupt,
politically degenerate beyond redemption, who could never again have occupied a political post had it not been
at bayonet-point; and they weren't even the ones with the bayonets in their hands ...
On the other hand, the soldiers endure a worse tyranny than the civilians. They are under constant surveillance
and not one of them enjoys the slightest security in his job. Any unjustified suspicion, any gossip, any intrigue, or
denunciation, is sufficient to bring transfer, dishonorable discharge or imprisonment. Did not Tabernilla, in a
memorandum, forbid them to talk with anyone opposed to the government, that is to say, with ninety-nine
percent of the people? ... What a lack of confidence! ... Not even the vestal virgins of Rome had to abide by
such a rule! As for the much publicized little houses for enlisted men, there aren't 300 on the whole Island; yet
with what has been spent on tanks, guns and other weaponry every soldier might have a place to live. Batista
isn't concerned with taking care of the Army, but that the Army take care of him! He increases the Army's power
of oppression and killing but does not improve living conditions for the soldiers. Triple guard duty, constant
confinement to barracks, continuous anxiety, the enmity of the people, uncertainty about the future - this is what
has been given to the soldier. In other words: 'Die for the regime, soldier, give it your sweat and blood. We shall
dedicate a speech to you and award you a posthumous promotion (when it no longer matters) and afterwards ...
we shall go on living luxuriously, making ourselves rich. Kill, abuse, oppress the people. When the people get
tired and all this comes to an end, you can pay for our crimes while we go abroad and live like kings. And if one
day we return, don't you or your children knock on the doors of our mansions, for we shall be millionaires and
millionaires do not mingle with the poor. Kill, soldier, oppress the people, die for the regime, give your sweat
and blood ...'
But if blind to this sad truth, a minority of soldiers had decided to fight the people, the people who were going to
liberate them from tyranny, victory still would have gone to the people. The Honorable Prosecutor was very
interested in knowing our chances for success. These chances were based on considerations of technical,
military and social order. They have tried to establish the myth that modern arms render the people helpless in
overthrowing tyrants. Military parades and the pompous display of machines of war are used to perpetuate this
myth and to create a complex of absolute impotence in the people. But no weaponry, no violence can vanquish
the people once they are determined to win back their rights. Both past and present are full of examples. The
most recent is the revolt in Bolivia, where miners with dynamite sticks smashed and defeated regular army
regiments.
Fortunately, we Cubans need not look for examples abroad. No example is as inspiring as that of our own land.
During the war of 1895 there were nearly half a million armed Spanish soldiers in Cuba, many more than the
Dictator counts upon today to hold back a population five times greater. The arms of the Spaniards were,
incomparably, both more up to date and more powerful than those of our mambises. Often the Spaniards were
equipped with field artillery and the infantry used breechloaders similar to those still in use by the infantry of
today. The Cubans were usually armed with no more than their machetes, for their cartridge belts were almost
always empty. There is an unforgettable passage in the history of our War of Independence, narrated by
General Miró Argenter, Chief of Antonio Maceo's General Staff. I managed to bring it copied on this scrap of
paper so I wouldn't have to depend upon my memory:
'Untrained men under the command of Pedro Delgado, most of them equipped only with machetes, were
virtually annihilated as they threw themselves on the solid rank of Spaniards. It is not an exaggeration to assert
that of every fifty men, 25 were killed. Some even attacked the Spaniards with their bare fists, without
machetes, without even knives. Searching through the reeds by the Hondo River, we found fifteen more dead
from the Cuban party, and it was not immediately clear what group they belonged to, They did not appear to
have shouldered arms, their clothes were intact and only tin drinking cups hung from their waists; a few steps
further on lay the dead horse, all its equipment in order. We reconstructed the climax of the tragedy. These men,
following their daring chief, Lieutenant Colonel Pedro Delgado, had earned heroes' laurels: they had thrown
themselves against bayonets with bare hands, the clash of metal which was heard around them was the sound
of their drinking cups banging against the saddlehorn. Maceo was deeply moved. This man so used to seeing
death in all its forms murmured this praise: "I had never seen anything like this, untrained and unarmed men
attacking the Spaniards with only drinking cups for weapons. And I called it impedimenta!"'
This is how peoples fight when they want to win their freedom; they throw stones at airplanes and overturn
tanks!
As soon as Santiago de Cuba was in our hands we would immediately have readied the people of Oriente for
war. Bayamo was attacked precisely to locate our advance forces along the Cauto River. Never forget that this
province, which has a million and a half inhabitants today, is the most rebellious and patriotic in Cuba. It was
this province that sparked the fight for independence for thirty years and paid the highest price in blood,
sacrifice and heroism. In Oriente you can still breathe the air of that glorious epic. At dawn, when the cocks crow
as if they were bugles calling soldiers to reveille, and when the sun rises radiant over the rugged mountains, it
seems that once again we will live the days of Yara or Baire!
I stated that the second consideration on which we based our chances for success was one of social order.
Why were we sure of the people's support? When we speak of the people we are not talking about those who
live in comfort, the conservative elements of the nation, who welcome any repressive regime, any dictatorship,
any despotism, prostrating themselves before the masters of the moment until they grind their foreheads into
the ground. When we speak of struggle and we mention the people we mean the vast unredeemed masses,
those to whom everyone makes promises and who are deceived by all; we mean the people who yearn for a
better, more dignified and more just nation; who are moved by ancestral aspirations to justice, for they have
suffered injustice and mockery generation after generation; those who long for great and wise changes in all
aspects of their life; people who, to attain those changes, are ready to give even the very last breath they have
when they believe in something or in someone, especially when they believe in themselves. The first condition
of sincerity and good faith in any endeavor is to do precisely what nobody else ever does, that is, to speak with
absolute clarity, without fear. The demagogues and professional politicians who manage to perform the miracle
of being right about everything and of pleasing everyone are, necessarily, deceiving everyone about everything.
The revolutionaries must proclaim their ideas courageously, define their principles and express their intentions
so that no one is deceived, neither friend nor foe.
In terms of struggle, when we talk about people we're talking about the six hundred thousand Cubans without
work, who want to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a
livelihood; the five hundred thousand farm laborers who live in miserable shacks, who work four months of the
year and starve the rest, sharing their misery with their children, who don't have an inch of land to till and whose
existence would move any heart not made of stone; the four hundred thousand industrial workers and laborers
whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose benefits are being taken away, whose homes are
wretched quarters, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender, whose future
is a pay reduction and dismissal, whose life is endless work and whose only rest is the tomb; the one hundred
thousand small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs, looking at it with the sadness of Moses
gazing at the promised land, to die without ever owning it, who like feudal serfs have to pay for the use of their
parcel of land by giving up a portion of its produce, who cannot love it, improve it, beautify it nor plant a cedar or
an orange tree on it because they never know when a sheriff will come with the rural guard to evict them from it;
the thirty thousand teachers and professors who are so devoted, dedicated and so necessary to the better
destiny of future generations and who are so badly treated and paid; the twenty thousand small business men
weighed down by debts, ruined by the crisis and harangued by a plague of grafting and venal officials; the ten
thousand young professional people: doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school teachers, dentists,
pharmacists, newspapermen, painters, sculptors, etc., who finish school with their degrees anxious to work and
full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end, all doors closed to them, and where no ears hear their
clamor or supplication. These are the people, the ones who know misfortune and, therefore, are capable of
fighting with limitless courage! To these people whose desperate roads through life have been paved with the
bricks of betrayal and false promises, we were not going to say: 'We will give you ...' but rather: 'Here it is, now
fight for it with everything you have, so that liberty and happiness may be yours!'
The five revolutionary laws that would have been proclaimed immediately after the capture of the Moncada
Barracks and would have been broadcast to the nation by radio must be included in the indictment. It is
possible that Colonel Chaviano may deliberately have destroyed these documents, but even if he has I
remember them.
The first revolutionary law would have returned power to the people and proclaimed the 1940 Constitution the
Supreme Law of the State until such time as the people should decide to modify or change it. And in order to
effect its implementation and punish those who violated it - there being no electoral organization to carry this out
- the revolutionary movement, as the circumstantial incarnation of this sovereignty, the only source of legitimate
power, would have assumed all the faculties inherent therein, except that of modifying the Constitution itself: in
other words, it would have assumed the legislative, executive and judicial powers.
This attitude could not be clearer nor more free of vacillation and sterile charlatanry. A government acclaimed
by the mass of rebel people would be vested with every power, everything necessary in order to proceed with
the effective implementation of popular will and real justice. From that moment, the Judicial Power - which since
March 10th had placed itself against and outside the Constitution - would cease to exist and we would proceed
to its immediate and total reform before it would once again assume the power granted it by the Supreme Law
of the Republic. Without these previous measures, a return to legality by putting its custody back into the hands
that have crippled the system so dishonorably would constitute a fraud, a deceit, one more betrayal.
The second revolutionary law would give non-mortgageable and non-transferable ownership of the land to all
tenant and subtenant farmers, lessees, share croppers and squatters who hold parcels of five caballerías of
land or less, and the State would indemnify the former owners on the basis of the rental which they would have
received for these parcels over a period of ten years.
The third revolutionary law would have granted workers and employees the right to share 30% of the profits of
all the large industrial, mercantile and mining enterprises, including the sugar mills. The strictly agricultural
enterprises would be exempt in consideration of other agrarian laws which would be put into effect.
The fourth revolutionary law would have granted all sugar planters the right to share 55% of sugar production
and a minimum quota of forty thousand arrobas for all small tenant farmers who have been established for three
years or more.
The fifth revolutionary law would have ordered the confiscation of all holdings and ill-gotten gains of those who
had committed frauds during previous regimes, as well as the holdings and ill-gotten gains of all their legates
and heirs. To implement this, special courts with full powers would gain access to all records of all corporations
registered or operating in this country, in order to investigate concealed funds of illegal origin, and to request
that foreign governments extradite persons and attach holdings rightfully belonging to the Cuban people. Half of
the property recovered would be used to subsidize retirement funds for workers and the other half would be
used for hospitals, asylums and charitable organizations.
Furthermore, it was declared that the Cuban policy in the Americas would be one of close solidarity with the
democratic peoples of this continent, and that all those politically persecuted by bloody tyrannies oppressing
our sister nations would find generous asylum, brotherhood and bread in the land of Martí; not the persecution,
hunger and treason they find today. Cuba should be the bulwark of liberty and not a shameful link in the chain of
despotism.
These laws would have been proclaimed immediately. As soon as the upheaval ended and prior to a detailed
and far reaching study, they would have been followed by another series of laws and fundamental measures,
such as the Agrarian Reform, the Integral Educational Reform, nationalization of the electric power trust and the
telephone trust, refund to the people of the illegal and repressive rates these companies have charged, and
payment to the treasury of all taxes brazenly evaded in the past.
All these laws and others would be based on the exact compliance of two essential articles of our Constitution:
one of them orders the outlawing of large estates, indicating the maximum area of land any one person or entity
may own for each type of agricultural enterprise, by adopting measures which would tend to revert the land to
the Cubans. The other categorically orders the State to use all means at its disposal to provide employment to
all those who lack it and to ensure a decent livelihood to each manual or intellectual laborer. None of these laws
can be called unconstitutional. The first popularly elected government would have to respect them, not only
because of moral obligations to the nation, but because when people achieve something they have yearned for
throughout generations, no force in the world is capable of taking it away again.
The problem of the land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of
unemployment, the problem of education and the problem of the people's health: these are the six problems we
would take immediate steps to solve, along with restoration of civil liberties and political democracy.
This exposition may seem cold and theoretical if one does not know the shocking and tragic conditions of the
country with regard to these six problems, along with the most humiliating political oppression.
Eighty-five per cent of the small farmers in Cuba pay rent and live under constant threat of being evicted from
the land they till. More than half of our most productive land is in the hands of foreigners. In Oriente, the largest
province, the lands of the United Fruit Company and the West Indian Company link the northern and southern
coasts. There are two hundred thousand peasant families who do not have a single acre of land to till to
provide food for their starving children. On the other hand, nearly three hundred thousand caballerías of
cultivable land owned by powerful interests remain uncultivated. If Cuba is above all an agricultural State, if its
population is largely rural, if the city depends on these rural areas, if the people from our countryside won our
war of independence, if our nation's greatness and prosperity depend on a healthy and vigorous rural
population that loves the land and knows how to work it, if this population depends on a State that protects and
guides it, then how can the present state of affairs be allowed to continue?
Except for a few food, lumber and textile industries, Cuba continues to be primarily a producer of raw materials.
We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows ... Everyone
agrees with the urgent need to industrialize the nation, that we need steel industries, paper and chemical
industries, that we must improve our cattle and grain production, the technology and processing in our food
industry in order to defend ourselves against the ruinous competition from Europe in cheese products,
condensed milk, liquors and edible oils, and the United States in canned goods; that we need cargo ships; that
tourism should be an enormous source of revenue. But the capitalists insist that the workers remain under the
yoke. The State sits back with its arms crossed and industrialization can wait forever.
Just as serious or even worse is the housing problem. There are two hundred thousand huts and hovels in
Cuba; four hundred thousand families in the countryside and in the cities live cramped in huts and tenements
without even the minimum sanitary requirements; two million two hundred thousand of our urban population pay
rents which absorb between one fifth and one third of their incomes; and two million eight hundred thousand of
our rural and suburban population lack electricity. We have the same situation here: if the State proposes the
lowering of rents, landlords threaten to freeze all construction; if the State does not interfere, construction goes
on so long as landlords get high rents; otherwise they would not lay a single brick even though the rest of the
population had to live totally exposed to the elements. The utilities monopoly is no better; they extend lines as
far as it is profitable and beyond that point they don't care if people have to live in darkness for the rest of their
lives. The State sits back with its arms crossed and the people have neither homes nor electricity.
Our educational system is perfectly compatible with everything I've just mentioned. Where the peasant doesn't
own the land, what need is there for agricultural schools? Where there is no industry, what need is there for
technical or vocational schools? Everything follows the same absurd logic; if we don't have one thing we can't
have the other. In any small European country there are more than 200 technological and vocational schools; in
Cuba only six such schools exist, and their graduates have no jobs for their skills. The little rural schoolhouses
are attended by a mere half of the school age children - barefooted, half-naked and undernourished - and
frequently the teacher must buy necessary school materials from his own salary. Is this the way to make a nation
great?
Only death can liberate one from so much misery. In this respect, however, the State is most helpful - in
providing early death for the people. Ninety per cent of the children in the countryside are consumed by
parasites which filter through their bare feet from the ground they walk on. Society is moved to compassion
when it hears of the kidnapping or murder of one child, but it is indifferent to the mass murder of so many
thousands of children who die every year from lack of facilities, agonizing with pain. Their innocent eyes, death
already shining in them, seem to look into some vague infinity as if entreating forgiveness for human
selfishness, as if asking God to stay His wrath. And when the head of a family works only four months a year,
with what can he purchase clothing and medicine for his children? They will grow up with rickets, with not a
single good tooth in their mouths by the time they reach thirty; they will have heard ten million speeches and will
finally die of misery and deception. Public hospitals, which are always full, accept only patients recommended
by some powerful politician who, in return, demands the votes of the unfortunate one and his family so that Cuba
may continue forever in the same or worse condition.
With this background, is it not understandable that from May to December over a million persons are jobless
and that Cuba, with a population of five and a half million, has a greater number of unemployed than France or
Italy with a population of forty million each?
When you try a defendant for robbery, Honorable Judges, do you ask him how long he has been unemployed?
Do you ask him how many children he has, which days of the week he ate and which he didn't, do you
investigate his social context at all? You just send him to jail without further thought. But those who burn
warehouses and stores to collect insurance do not go to jail, even though a few human beings may have gone
up in flames. The insured have money to hire lawyers and bribe judges. You imprison the poor wretch who
steals because he is hungry; but none of the hundreds who steal millions from the Government has ever spent a
night in jail. You dine with them at the end of the year in some elegant club and they enjoy your respect. In Cuba,
when a government official becomes a millionaire overnight and enters the fraternity of the rich, he could very
well be greeted with the words of that opulent character out of Balzac - Taillefer - who in his toast to the young
heir to an enormous fortune, said: 'Gentlemen, let us drink to the power of gold! Mr. Valentine, a millionaire six
times over, has just ascended the throne. He is king, can do everything, is above everyone, as all the rich are.
Henceforth, equality before the law, established by the Constitution, will be a myth for him; for he will not be
subject to laws: the laws will be subject to him. There are no courts nor are there sentences for millionaires.'
The nation's future, the solutions to its problems, cannot continue to depend on the selfish interests of a dozen
big businessmen nor on the cold calculations of profits that ten or twelve magnates draw up in their
air-conditioned offices. The country cannot continue begging on its knees for miracles from a few golden
calves, like the Biblical one destroyed by the prophet's fury. Golden calves cannot perform miracles of any kind.
The problems of the Republic can be solved only if we dedicate ourselves to fight for it with the same energy,
honesty and patriotism our liberators had when they founded it. Statesmen like Carlos Saladrigas, whose
statesmanship consists of preserving the statu quo and mouthing phrases like 'absolute freedom of enterprise,'
'guarantees to investment capital' and 'law of supply and demand,' will not solve these problems. Those
ministers can chat away in a Fifth Avenue mansion until not even the dust of the bones of those whose problems
require immediate solution remains. In this present-day world, social problems are not solved by spontaneous
generation.
A revolutionary government backed by the people and with the respect of the nation, after cleansing the
different institutions of all venal and corrupt officials, would proceed immediately to the country's
industrialization, mobilizing all inactive capital, currently estimated at about 1.5 billion pesos, through the
National Bank and the Agricultural and Industrial Development Bank, and submitting this mammoth task to
experts and men of absolute competence totally removed from all political machines for study, direction,
planning and realization.
After settling the one hundred thousand small farmers as owners on the land which they previously rented, a
revolutionary government would immediately proceed to settle the land problem. First, as set forth in the
Constitution, it would establish the maximum amount of land to be held by each type of agricultural enterprise
and would acquire the excess acreage by expropriation, recovery of swampland, planting of large nurseries,
and reserving of zones for reforestation. Secondly, it would distribute the remaining land among peasant
families with priority given to the larger ones, and would promote agricultural cooperatives for communal use of
expensive equipment, freezing plants and unified professional technical management of farming and cattle
raising. Finally, it would provide resources, equipment, protection and useful guidance to the peasants.
A revolutionary government would solve the housing problem by cutting all rents in half, by providing tax
exemptions on homes inhabited by the owners; by tripling taxes on rented homes; by tearing down hovels and
replacing them with modern apartment buildings; and by financing housing all over the island on a scale
heretofore unheard of, with the criterion that, just as each rural family should possess its own tract of land, each
city family should own its own house or apartment. There is plenty of building material and more than enough
manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand
years will have gone by and the problem will remain the same. On the other hand, today possibilities of taking
electricity to the most isolated areas on the island are greater than ever. The use of nuclear energy in this field
is now a reality and will greatly reduce the cost of producing electricity.
With these three projects and reforms, the problem of unemployment would automatically disappear and the
task of improving public health and fighting against disease would become much less difficult.
Finally, a revolutionary government would undertake the integral reform of the educational system, bringing it
into line with the projects just mentioned with the idea of educating those generations which will have the
privilege of living in a happier land. Do not forget the words of the Apostle: 'A grave mistake is being made in
Latin America: in countries that live almost completely from the produce of the land, men are being educated
exclusively for urban life and are not trained for farm life.' 'The happiest country is the one which has best
educated its sons, both in the instruction of thought and the direction of their feelings.' 'An educated country will
always be strong and free.'
The soul of education, however, is the teacher, and in Cuba the teaching profession is miserably underpaid.
Despite this, no one is more dedicated than the Cuban teacher. Who among us has not learned his three Rs in
the little public schoolhouse? It is time we stopped paying pittances to these young men and women who are
entrusted with the sacred task of teaching our youth. No teacher should earn less than 200 pesos, no secondary
teacher should make less than 350 pesos, if they are to devote themselves exclusively to their high calling
without suffering want. What is more, all rural teachers should have free use of the various systems of
transportation; and, at least once every five years, all teachers should enjoy a sabbatical leave of six months
with pay so they may attend special refresher courses at home or abroad to keep abreast of the latest
developments in their field. In this way, the curriculum and the teaching system can be easily improved. Where
will the money be found for all this? When there is an end to the embezzlement of government funds, when
public officials stop taking graft from the large companies that owe taxes to the State, when the enormous
resources of the country are brought into full use, when we no longer buy tanks, bombers and guns for this
country (which has no frontiers to defend and where these instruments of war, now being purchased, are used
against the people), when there is more interest in educating the people than in killing them there will be more
than enough money.
Cuba could easily provide for a population three times as great as it has now, so there is no excuse for the
abject poverty of a single one of its present inhabitants. The markets should be overflowing with produce,
pantries should be full, all hands should be working. This is not an inconceivable thought. What is inconceivable
is that anyone should go to bed hungry while there is a single inch of unproductive land; that children should die
for lack of medical attention; what is inconceivable is that 30% of our farm people cannot write their names and
that 99% of them know nothing of Cuba's history. What is inconceivable is that the majority of our rural people
are now living in worse circumstances than the Indians Columbus discovered in the fairest land that human eyes
had ever seen.
To those who would call me a dreamer, I quote the words of Martí: 'A true man does not seek the path where
advantage lies, but rather the path where duty lies, and this is the only practical man, whose dream of today will
be the law of tomorrow, because he who has looked back on the essential course of history and has seen
flaming and bleeding peoples seethe in the cauldron of the ages knows that, without a single exception, the
future lies on the side of duty.'
Only when we understand that such a high ideal inspired them can we conceive of the heroism of the young
men who fell in Santiago. The meager material means at our disposal was all that prevented sure success.
When the soldiers were told that Prío had given us a million pesos, they were told this in the regime's attempt to
distort the most important fact: the fact that our Movement had no link with past politicians: that this Movement is
a new Cuban generation with its own ideas, rising up against tyranny; that this Movement is made up of young
people who were barely seven years old when Batista perpetrated the first of his crimes in 1934. The lie about
the million pesos could not have been more absurd. If, with less than 20,000 pesos, we armed 165 men and
attacked a regiment and a squadron, then with a million pesos we could have armed 8,000 men, to attack 50
regiments and 50 squadrons - and Ugalde Carrillo still would not have found out until Sunday, July 26th, at 5:15
a.m. I assure you that for every man who fought, twenty well trained men were unable to fight for lack of
weapons. When these young men marched along the streets of Havana in the student demonstration of the
Martí Centennial, they solidly packed six blocks. If even 200 more men had been able to fight, or we had
possessed 20 more hand grenades, perhaps this Honorable Court would have been spared all this
inconvenience.
The politicians spend millions buying off consciences, whereas a handful of Cubans who wanted to save their
country's honor had to face death barehanded for lack of funds. This shows how the country, to this very day,
has been governed not by generous and dedicated men, but by political racketeers, the scum of our public life.
With the greatest pride I tell you that in accordance with our principles we have never asked a politician, past or
present, for a penny. Our means were assembled with incomparable sacrifice. For example, Elpidio Sosa, who
sold his job and came to me one day with 300 pesos 'for the cause;' Fernando Chenard, who sold the
photographic equipment with which he earned his living; Pedro Marrero, who contributed several months' salary
and who had to be stopped from actually selling the very furniture in his house; Oscar Alcalde, who sold his
pharmaceutical laboratory; Jesús Montané, who gave his five years' savings, and so on with many others, each
giving the little he had.
One must have great faith in one's country to do such a thing. The memory of these acts of idealism bring me
straight to the most bitter chapter of this defense - the price the tyranny made them pay for wanting to free Cuba
from oppression and injustice.
Beloved corpses, you that once
Were the hope of my Homeland,
Cast upon my forehead
The dust of your decaying bones!
Touch my heart with your cold hands!
Groan at my ears!
Each of my moans will
Turn into the tears of one more tyrant!
Gather around me! Roam about,
That my soul may receive your spirits
And give me the horror of the tombs
For tears are not enough
When one lives in infamous bondage!
Multiply the crimes of November 27th, 1871 by ten and you will have the monstrous and repulsive crimes of July
26th, 27th, 28th and 29th, 1953, in the province of Oriente. These are still fresh in our memory, but someday
when years have passed, when the skies of the nation have cleared once more, when tempers have calmed
and fear no longer torments our spirits, then we will begin to see the magnitude of this massacre in all its
shocking dimension, and future generations will be struck with horror when they look back on these acts of
barbarity unprecedented in our history. But I do not want to become enraged. I need clearness of mind and
peace in my heavy heart in order to relate the facts as simply as possible, in no sense dramatizing them, but
just as they took place. As a Cuban I am ashamed that heartless men should have perpetrated such unthinkable
crimes, dishonoring our nation before the rest of the world.
The tyrant Batista was never a man of scruples. He has never hesitated to tell his people the most outrageous
lies. To justify his treacherous coup of March 10th, he concocted stories about a fictitious uprising in the Army,
supposedly scheduled to take place in April, and which he 'wanted to avert so that the Republic might not be
drenched in blood.' A ridiculous little tale nobody ever believed! And when he himself did want to drench the
Republic in blood, when he wanted to smother in terror and torture the just rebellion of Cuba's youth, who were
not willing to be his slaves, then he contrived still more fantastic lies. How little respect one must have for a
people when one tries to deceive them so miserably! On the very day of my arrest I publicly assumed the
responsibility for our armed movement of July 26th. If there had been an iota of truth in even one of the many
statements the Dictator made against our fighters in his speech of July 27th, it would have been enough to
undermine the moral impact of my case. Why, then, was I not brought to trial? Why were medical certificates
forged? Why did they violate all procedural laws and ignore so scandalously the rulings of the Court? Why were
so many things done, things never before seen in a Court of Law, in order to prevent my appearance at all
costs? In contrast, I could not begin to tell you all I went through in order to appear. I asked the Court to bring me
to trial in accordance with all established principles, and I denounced the underhanded schemes that were afoot
to prevent it. I wanted to argue with them face to face. But they did not wish to face me. Who was afraid of the
truth, and who was not?
The statements made by the Dictator at Camp Columbia might be considered amusing if they were not so
drenched in blood. He claimed we were a group of hirelings and that there were many foreigners among us. He
said that the central part of our plan was an attempt to kill him - him, always him. As if the men who attacked the
Moncada Barracks could not have killed him and twenty like him if they had approved of such methods. He
stated that our attack had been planned by ex-President Prío, and that it had been financed with Prío's money. It
has been irrefutably proven that no link whatsoever existed between our Movement and the last regime. He
claimed that we had machine guns and hand-grenades. Yet the military technicians have stated right here in this
Court that we only had one machine gun and not a single hand-grenade. He said that we had beheaded the
sentries. Yet death certificates and medical reports of all the Army's casualties show not one death caused by
the blade. But above all and most important, he said that we stabbed patients at the Military Hospital. Yet the
doctors from that hospital - Army doctors - have testified that we never even occupied the building, that no
patient was either wounded or killed by us, and that the hospital lost only one employee, a janitor, who
imprudently stuck his head out of an open window.
Whenever a Chief of State, or anyone pretending to be one, makes declarations to the nation, he speaks not
just to hear the sound of his own voice. He always has some specific purpose and expects some specific
reaction, or has a given intention. Since our military defeat had already taken place, insofar as we no longer
represented any actual threat to the dictatorship, why did they slander us like that? If it is still not clear that this
was a blood-drenched speech, that it was simply an attempt to justify the crimes that they had been perpetrating
since the night before and that they were going to continue to perpetrate, then, let figures speak for me: On July
27th, in his speech from the military headquarters, Batista said that the assailants suffered 32 dead. By the end
of the week the number of dead had risen to more than 80 men. In what battles, where, in what clashes, did
these young men die? Before Batista spoke, more than 25 prisoners had been murdered. After Batista spoke
fifty more were massacred.
What a great sense of honor those modest Army technicians and professionals had, who did not distort the
facts before the Court, but gave their reports adhering to the strictest truth! These surely are soldiers who honor
their uniform; these, surely, are men! Neither a real soldier nor a true man can degrade his code of honor with
lies and crime. I know that many of the soldiers are indignant at the barbaric assassinations perpetrated. I know
that they feel repugnance and shame at the smell of homicidal blood that impregnates every stone of Moncada
Barracks.
Now that he has been contradicted by men of honor within his own Army, I defy the dictator to repeat his vile
slander against us. I defy him to try to justify before the Cuban people his July 27th speech. Let him not remain
silent. Let him speak. Let him say who the assassins are, who the ruthless, the inhumane. Let him tell us if the
medals of honor, which he went to pin on the breasts of his heroes of that massacre, were rewards for the
hideous crimes they had committed. Let him, from this very moment, assume his responsibility before history.
Let him not pretend, at a later date, that the soldiers were acting without direct orders from him! Let him offer
the nation an explanation for those 70 murders. The bloodshed was great. The nation needs an explanation.
The nation seeks it. The nation demands it.
It is common knowledge that in 1933, at the end of the battle at the National Hotel, some officers were
murdered after they surrendered. Bohemia Magazine protested energetically. It is also known that after the
surrender of Fort Atarés the besiegers' machine guns cut down a row of prisoners. And that one soldier, after
asking who Blas Hernández was, blasted him with a bullet directly in the face, and for this cowardly act was
promoted to the rank of officer. It is well-known in Cuban history that assassination of prisoners was fatally
linked with Batista's name. How naive we were not to foresee this! However, unjustifiable as those killings of
1933 were, they took place in a matter of minutes, in no more time than it took for a round of machine gun fire.
What is more, they took place while tempers were still on edge.
This was not the case in Santiago de Cuba. Here all forms of ferocious outrages and cruelty were deliberately
overdone. Our men were killed not in the course of a minute, an hour or a day. Throughout an entire week the
blows and tortures continued, men were thrown from rooftops and shot. All methods of extermination were
incessantly practiced by well-skilled artisans of crime. Moncada Barracks were turned into a workshop of
torture and death. Some shameful individuals turned their uniforms into butcher's aprons. The walls were
splattered with blood. The bullets imbedded in the walls were encrusted with singed bits of skin, brains and
human hair, the grisly reminders of rifle shots fired full in the face. The grass around the barracks was dark and
sticky with human blood. The criminal hands that are guiding the destiny of Cuba had written for the prisoners at
the entrance to that den of death the very inscription of Hell: 'Forsake all hope.'
They did not even attempt to cover appearances. They did not bother in the least to conceal what they were
doing. They thought they had deceived the people with their lies and they ended up deceiving themselves. They
felt themselves lords and masters of the universe, with power over life and death. So the fear they had
experienced upon our attack at daybreak was dissipated in a feast of corpses, in a drunken orgy of blood.
Chronicles of our history, down through four and a half centuries, tell us of many acts of cruelty: the slaughter of
defenseless Indians by the Spaniards; the plundering and atrocities of pirates along the coast; the barbarities of
the Spanish soldiers during our War of Independence; the shooting of prisoners of the Cuban Army by the
forces of Weyler; the horrors of the Machado regime, and so on through the bloody crimes of March, 1935. But
never has such a sad and bloody page been written in numbers of victims and in the viciousness of the
victimizers, as in Santiago de Cuba. Only one man in all these centuries has stained with blood two separate
periods of our history and has dug his claws into the flesh of two generations of Cubans. To release this river of
blood, he waited for the Centennial of the Apostle, just after the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic, whose
people fought for freedom, human rights and happiness at the cost of so many lives. Even greater is his crime
and even more condemnable because the man who perpetrated it had already, for eleven long years, lorded
over his people - this people who, by such deep-rooted sentiment and tradition, loves freedom and repudiates
evil. This man has furthermore never been sincere, loyal, honest or chivalrous for a single minute of his public
life.
He was not content with the treachery of January, 1934, the crimes of March, 1935 and the forty million dollar
fortune that crowned his first regime. He had to add the treason of March, 1952, the crimes of July, 1953, and all
the millions that only time will reveal. Dante divided his Inferno into nine circles. He put criminals in the seventh,
thieves in the eighth and traitors in the ninth. Difficult dilemma the devils will be faced with, when they try to find
an adequate spot for this man's soul - if this man has a soul. The man who instigated the atrocious acts in
Santiago de Cuba doesn't even have a heart.
I know many details of the way in which these crimes were carried out, from the lips of some of the soldiers who,
filled with shame, told me of the scenes they had witnessed.
When the fighting was over, the soldiers descended like savage beasts on Santiago de Cuba and they took
the first fury of their frustrations out against the defenseless population. In the middle of a street, and far from the
site of the fighting, they shot through the chest an innocent child who was playing by his doorstep. When the
father approached to pick him up, they shot him through his head. Without a word they shot 'Niño' Cala, who
was on his way home with a loaf of bread in his hands. It would be an endless task to relate all the crimes and
outrages perpetrated against the civilian population. And if the Army dealt thus with those who had had no part
at all in the action, you can imagine the terrible fate of the prisoners who had taken part or who were believed to
have taken part. Just as, in this trial, they accused many people not at all involved in our attack, they also killed
many prisoners who had no involvement whatsoever. The latter are not included in the statistics of victims
released by the regime; those statistics refer exclusively to our men. Some day the total number of victims will
be known.
The first prisoner killed has our doctor, Mario Muñoz, who bore no arms, wore no uniform, and was dressed in
the white smock of a physician. He was a generous and competent man who would have given the same
devoted care to the wounded adversary as to a friend. On the road from the Civilian Hospital to the barracks
they shot him in the back and left him lying there, face down in a pool of blood. But the mass murder of
prisoners did not begin until after three o'clock in the afternoon. Until this hour they awaited orders. Then
General Martín Díaz Tamayo arrived from Havana and brought specific instructions from a meeting he had
attended with Batista, along with the head of the Army, the head of the Military Intelligence, and others. He said:
'It is humiliating and dishonorable for the Army to have lost three times as many men in combat as the
insurgents did. Ten prisoners must be killed for each dead soldier.' This was the order!
In every society there are men of base instincts. The sadists, brutes, conveyors of all the ancestral atavisms go
about in the guise of human beings, but they are monsters, only more or less restrained by discipline and social
habit. If they are offered a drink from a river of blood, they will not be satisfied until they drink the river dry. All
these men needed was the order. At their hands the best and noblest Cubans perished: the most valiant, the
most honest, the most idealistic. The tyrant called them mercenaries. There they were dying as heroes at the
hands of men who collect a salary from the Republic and who, with the arms the Republic gave them to defend
her, serve the interests of a clique and murder her best citizens.
Throughout their torturing of our comrades, the Army offered them the chance to save their lives by betraying
their ideology and falsely declaring that Prío had given them money. When they indignantly rejected that
proposition, the Army continued with its horrible tortures. They crushed their testicles and they tore out their
eyes. But no one yielded. No complaint was heard nor a favor asked. Even when they had been deprived of
their vital organs, our men were still a thousand times more men than all their tormentors together. Photographs,
which do not lie, show the bodies torn to pieces, Other methods were used. Frustrated by the valor of the men,
they tried to break the spirit of our women. With a bleeding eye in their hands, a sergeant and several other men
went to the cell where our comrades Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría were held. Addressing the
latter, and showing her the eye, they said: 'This eye belonged to your brother. If you will not tell us what he
refused to say, we will tear out the other.' She, who loved her valiant brother above all things, replied full of
dignity: 'If you tore out an eye and he did not speak, much less will I.' Later they came back and burned their
arms with lit cigarettes until at last, filled with spite, they told the young Haydée Santamaría: 'You no longer have
a fiancé because we have killed him too.' But still imperturbable, she answered: 'He is not dead, because to die
for one's country is to live forever.' Never had the heroism and the dignity of Cuban womanhood reached such
heights.
There wasn't even any respect for the combat wounded in the various city hospitals. There they were hunted
down as prey pursued by vultures. In the Centro Gallego they broke into the operating room at the very moment
when two of our critically wounded were receiving blood transfusions. They pulled them off the tables and, as the
wounded could no longer stand, they were dragged down to the first floor where they arrived as corpses.
They could not do the same in the Spanish Clinic, where Gustavo Arcos and José Ponce were patients,
because they were prevented by Dr. Posada who bravely told them they could enter only over his dead body.
Air and camphor were injected into the veins of Pedro Miret, Abelardo Crespo and Fidel Labrador, in an
attempt to kill them at the Military Hospital. They owe their lives to Captain Tamayo, an Army doctor and true
soldier of honor who, pistol in hand, wrenched them out of the hands of their merciless captors and transferred
them to the Civilian Hospital. These five young men were the only ones of our wounded who survived.
In the early morning hours, groups of our men were removed from the barracks and taken in automobiles to
Siboney, La Maya, Songo, and elsewhere. Then they were led out - tied, gagged, already disfigured by the
torture - and were murdered in isolated spots. They are recorded as having died in combat against the Army.
This went on for several days, and few of the captured prisoners survived. Many were compelled to dig their
own graves. One of our men, while he was digging, wheeled around and slashed the face of one of his
assassins with his pick. Others were even buried alive, their hands tied behind their backs. Many solitary spots
became the graveyards of the brave. On the Army target range alone, five of our men lie buried. Some day
these men will be disinterred. Then they will be carried on the shoulders of the people to a place beside the
tomb of Martí, and their liberated land will surely erect a monument to honor the memory of the Martyrs of the
Centennial.
The last youth they murdered in the surroundings of Santiago de Cuba was Marcos Martí. He was captured with
our comrade Ciro Redondo in a cave at Siboney on the morning of Thursday the 30th. These two men were led
down the road, with their arms raised, and the soldiers shot Marcos Martí in the back. After he had fallen to the
ground, they riddled him with bullets. Redondo was taken to the camp. When Major Pérez Chaumont saw him
he exclaimed: 'And this one? Why have you brought him to me?' The Court heard this incident from Redondo
himself, the young man who survived thanks to what Pérez Chaumont called 'the soldiers' stupidity.'
It was the same throughout the province. Ten days after July 26th, a newspaper in this city printed the news that
two young men had been found hanged on the road from Manzanillo to Bayamo. Later the bodies were
identified as those of Hugo Camejo and Pedro Vélez. Another extraordinary incident took place there: There
were three victims - they had been dragged from Manzanillo Barracks at two that morning. At a certain spot on
the highway they were taken out, beaten unconscious, and strangled with a rope. But after they had been left for
dead, one of them, Andrés García, regained consciousness and hid in a farmer's house. Thanks to this the
Court learned the details of this crime too. Of all our men taken prisoner in the Bayamo area, this is the only
survivor.
Near the Cauto River, in a spot known as Barrancas, at the bottom of a pit, lie the bodies of Raúl de Aguiar,
Armando del Valle and Andrés Valdés. They were murdered at midnight on the road between Alto Cedro and
Palma Soriano by Sergeant Montes de Oca - in charge of the military post at Miranda Barracks - Corporal
Maceo, and the Lieutenant in charge of Alta Cedro where the murdered men were captured. In the annals of
crime, Sergeant Eulalio Gonzáles - better known as the 'Tiger' of Moncada Barracks - deserves a special
place. Later this man didn't have the slightest qualms in bragging about his unspeakable deeds. It was he who
with his own hands murdered our comrade Abel Santamaría. But that didn't satisfy him. One day as he was
coming back from the Puerto Boniato Prison, where he raises pedigree fighting cocks in the back courtyard, he
got on a bus on which Abel's mother was also traveling. When this monster realized who she was he began to
brag about his grisly deeds, and - in a loud voice so that the woman dressed in mourning could hear him - he
said: 'Yes, I have gouged many eyes out and I expect to continue gouging them out.' The unprecedented moral
degradation our nation is suffering is expressed beyond the power of words in that mother's sobs of grief
before the cowardly insolence of the very man who murdered her son. When these mothers went to Moncada
Barracks to ask about their sons, it was with incredible cynicism and sadism that they were told: 'Surely
madam, you may see him at the Santa Ifigenia Hotel where we have put him up for you.' Either Cuba is not
Cuba, or the men responsible for these acts will have to face their reckoning one day. Heartless men, they threw
crude insults at the people who bared their heads in reverence as the corpses of the revolutionaries were
carried by.
There were so many victims that the government still has not dared make public the complete list. They know
their figures are false. They have all the victims' names, because prior to every murder they recorded all the vital
statistics. The whole long process of identification through the National Identification Bureau was a huge farce,
and there are families still waiting for word of their sons' fate. Why has this not been cleared up, after three
months?
I wish to state for the record here that all the victims' pockets were picked to the very last penny and that all their
personal effects, rings and watches, were stripped from their bodies and are brazenly being worn today by their
assassins.
Honorable Judges, a great deal of what I have just related you already know, from the testimony of many of my
comrades. But please note that many key witnesses have been barred from this trial, although they were
permitted to attend the sessions of the previous trial. For example, I want to point out that the nurses of the
Civilian Hospital are absent, even though they work in the same place where this hearing is being held. They
were kept from this Court so that, under my questioning, they would not be able to testify that - besides Dr.
Mario Muñoz - twenty more of our men were captured alive. The regime fears that from the questioning of these
witnesses some extremely dangerous testimony could find its way into the official transcript.
But Major Pérez Chaumont did appear here and he could not elude my questioning. What we learned from this
man, a 'hero' who fought only against unarmed and handcuffed men, gives us an idea of what could have been
learned at the Courthouse if I had not been isolated from the proceedings. I asked him how many of our men
had died in his celebrated skirmishes at Siboney. He hesitated. I insisted and he finally said twenty-one. Since I
knew such skirmishes had never taken place, I asked him how many of our men had been wounded. He
answered: 'None. All of them were killed.' It was then that I asked him, in astonishment, if the soldiers were using
nuclear weapons. Of course, where men are shot point blank, there are no wounded. Then I asked him how
many casualties the Army had sustained. He replied that two of his men had been wounded. Finally I asked him
if either of these men had died, and he said no. I waited. Later, all of the wounded Army soldiers filed by and it
was discovered that none of them had been wounded at Siboney. This same Major Pérez Chaumont who
hardly flinched at having assassinated twenty-one defenseless young men has built a palatial home in
Ciudamar Beach. It's worth more than 100,000 pesos - his savings after only a few months under Batista's new
rule. And if this is the savings of a Major, imagine how much generals have saved!
Honorable Judges: Where are our men who were captured July 26th, 27th, 28th and 29th? It is known that more
than sixty men were captured in the area of Santiago de Cuba. Only three of them and the two women have
been brought before the Court. The rest of the accused were seized later. Where are our wounded? Only five of
them are alive; the rest were murdered. These figures are irrefutable. On the other hand, twenty of the soldiers
who we held prisoner have been presented here and they themselves have declared that they received not even
one offensive word from us. Thirty soldiers who were wounded, many in the street fighting, also appeared
before you. Not one was killed by us. If the Army suffered losses of nineteen dead and thirty wounded, how is it
possible that we should have had eighty dead and only five wounded? Who ever witnessed a battle with 21
dead and no wounded, like these famous battles described by Pérez Chaumont?
We have here the casualty lists from the bitter fighting sustained by the invasion troops in the war of 1895, both
in battles where the Cuban army was defeated and where it was victorious. The battle of Los Indios in Las
Villas: 12 wounded, none dead. The battle of Mal Tiempo: 4 dead, 23 wounded. Calimete: 16 dead, 64
wounded. La Palma: 39 dead, 88 wounded. Cacarajícara: 5 dead, 13 wounded. Descanso: 4 dead, 45
wounded. San Gabriel de Lombillo: 2 dead, 18 wounded ... In all these battles the number of wounded is twice,
three times and up to ten times the number of dead, although in those days there were no modern medical
techniques by which the percentage of deaths could be reduced. How then, now, can we explain the enormous
proportion of sixteen deaths per wounded man, if not by the government's slaughter of the wounded in the very
hospitals, and by the assassination of the other helpless prisoners they had taken? The figures are irrefutable.
'It is shameful and a dishonor to the Army to have lost three times as many men in combat as those lost by the
insurgents; we must kill ten prisoners for each dead soldier.' This is the concept of honor held by the petty
corporals who became generals on March 10th. This is the code of honor they wish to impose on the national
Army. A false honor, a feigned honor, an apparent honor based on lies, hypocrisy and crime; a mask of honor
molded by those assassins with blood. Who told them that to die fighting is dishonorable? Who told them the
honor of an army consists of murdering the wounded and prisoners of war?
In war time, armies that murder prisoners have always earned the contempt and abomination of the entire
world. Such cowardice has no justification, even in a case where national territory is invaded by foreign troops.
In the words of a South American liberator: 'Not even the strictest military obedience may turn a soldier's sword
into that of an executioner.' The honorable soldier does not kill the helpless prisoner after the fight, but rather,
respects him. He does not finish off a wounded man, but rather, helps him. He stands in the way of crime and if
he cannot prevent it, he acts as did that Spanish captain who, upon hearing the shots of the firing squad that
murdered Cuban students, indignantly broke his sword in two and refused to continue serving in that Army.
The soldiers who murdered their prisoners were not worthy of the soldiers who died. I saw many soldiers fight
with courage - for example, those in the patrols that fired their machine guns against us in almost hand-to-hand
combat, or that sergeant who, defying death, rang the alarm to mobilize the barracks. Some of them live. I am
glad. Others are dead. They believed they were doing their duty and in my eyes this makes them worthy of
admiration and respect. I deplore only the fact that valiant men should fall for an evil cause. When Cuba is freed,
we should respect, shelter and aid the wives and children of those courageous soldiers who perished fighting
against us. They are not to blame for Cuba's miseries. They too are victims of this nefarious situation.
But what honor was earned by the soldiers who died in battle was lost by the generals who ordered prisoners to
be killed after they surrendered. Men who became generals overnight, without ever having fired a shot; men
who bought their stars with high treason against their country; men who ordered the execution of prisoners
taken in battles in which they didn't even participate: these are the generals of the 10th of March - generals who
would not even have been fit to drive the mules that carried the equipment in Antonio Maceo's army.
The Army suffered three times as many casualties as we did. That was because our men were expertly trained,
as the Army men themselves have admitted; and also because we had prepared adequate tactical measures,
another fact recognized by the Army. The Army did not perform brilliantly; despite the millions spent on
espionage by the Military Intelligence Agency, they were totally taken by surprise, and their hand grenades
failed to explode because they were obsolete. And the Army owes all this to generals like Martín Díaz Tamayo
and colonels like Ugalde Carrillo and Albert del Río Chaviano. We were not 17 traitors infiltrated into the ranks
of the Army, as was the case on March 10th. Instead, we were 165 men who had traveled the length and
breadth of Cuba to look death boldly in the face. If the Army leaders had a notion of real military honor they
would have resigned their commands rather than trying to wash away their shame and incompetence in the
blood of their prisoners.
To kill helpless prisoners and then declare that they died in battle: that is the military capacity of the generals of
March 10th. That was the way the worst butchers of Valeriano Weyler behaved in the cruelest years of our War
of Independence. The Chronicles of War include the following story: 'On February 23rd, officer Baldomero
Acosta entered Punta Brava with some cavalry when, from the opposite road, a squad of the Pizarro regiment
approached, led by a sergeant known in those parts as Barriguilla (Pot Belly). The insurgents exchanged a few
shots with Pizarro's men, then withdrew by the trail that leads from Punta Brava to the village of Guatao.
Followed by another battalion of volunteers from Marianao, and a company of troops from the Public Order
Corps, who were led by Captain Calvo, Pizarro's squad of 50 men marched on Guatao ... As soon as their first
forces entered the village they commenced their massacre - killing twelve of the peaceful inhabitants ... The
troops led by Captain Calvo speedily rounded up all the civilians that were running about the village, tied them
up and took them as prisoners of war to Havana ... Not yet satisfied with their outrages, on the outskirts of
Guatao they carried out another barbaric action, killing one of the prisoners and horribly wounding the rest. The
Marquis of Cervera, a cowardly and palatine soldier, informed Weyler of the pyrrhic victory of the Spanish
soldiers; but Major Zugasti, a man of principles, denounced the incident to the government and officially called
the murders perpetrated by the criminal Captain Calvo and Sergeant Barriguilla an assassination of peaceful
citizens.
'Weyler's intervention in this horrible incident and his delight upon learning the details of the massacre may be
palpably deduced from the official dispatch that he sent to the Ministry of War concerning these cruelties. "Small
column organized by commander Marianao with forces from garrison, volunteers and firemen led by Captain
Calvo, fought and destroyed bands of Villanueva and Baldomero Acosta near Punta Brava, killing twenty of
theirs, who were handed over to Mayor of Guatao for burial, and taking fifteen prisoners, one of them wounded,
we assume there are many wounded among them. One of ours suffered critical wounds, some suffered light
bruises and wounds. Weyler."'
What is the difference between Weyler's dispatch and that of Colonel Chaviano detailing the victories of Major
Pérez Chaumont? Only that Weyler mentions one wounded soldier in his ranks. Chaviano mentions two. Weyler
speaks of one wounded man and fifteen prisoners in the enemy's ranks. Chaviano records neither wounded
men nor prisoners.
Just as I admire the courage of the soldiers who died bravely, I also admire the officers who bore themselves
with dignity and did not drench their hands in this blood. Many of the survivors owe their lives to the
commendable conduct of officers like Lieutenant Sarría, Lieutenant Campa, Captain Tamayo and others, who
were true gentlemen in their treatment of the prisoners. If men like these had not partially saved the name of the
Armed Forces, it would be more honorable today to wear a dishrag than to wear an Army uniform.
For my dead comrades, I claim no vengeance. Since their lives were priceless, the murderers could not pay for
them even with their own lives. It is not by blood that we may redeem the lives of those who died for their
country. The happiness of their people is the only tribute worthy of them.
What is more, my comrades are neither dead nor forgotten; they live today, more than ever, and their murderers
will view with dismay the victorious spirit of their ideas rise from their corpses. Let the Apostle speak for me:
'There is a limit to the tears we can shed at the graveside of the dead. Such limit is the infinite love for the
homeland and its glory, a love that never falters, loses hope nor grows dim. For the graves of the martyrs are the
highest altars of our reverence.'
... When one dies
In the arms of a grateful country
Agony ends, prison chains break - and
At last, with death, life begins!
Up to this point I have confined myself almost exclusively to relating events. Since I am well aware that I am
before a Court convened to judge me, I will now demonstrate that all legal right was on our side alone, and that
the verdict imposed on my comrades - the verdict now being sought against me - has no justification in reason,
in social morality or in terms of true justice.
I wish to be duly respectful to the Honorable Judges, and I am grateful that you find in the frankness of my plea
no animosity towards you. My argument is meant simply to demonstrate what a false and erroneous position the
Judicial Power has adopted in the present situation. To a certain extent, each Court is nothing more than a cog
in the wheel of the system, and therefore must move along the course determined by the vehicle, although this
by no means justifies any individual acting against his principles. I know very well that the oligarchy bears most
of the blame. The oligarchy, without dignified protest, abjectly yielded to the dictates of the usurper and
betrayed their country by renouncing the autonomy of the Judicial Power. Men who constitute noble exceptions
have attempted to mend the system's mangled honor with their individual decisions. But the gestures of this
minority have been of little consequence, drowned as they were by the obsequious and fawning majority. This
fatalism, however, will not stop me from speaking the truth that supports my cause. My appearance before this
Court may be a pure farce in order to give a semblance of legality to arbitrary decisions, but I am determined to
wrench apart with a firm hand the infamous veil that hides so much shamelessness. It is curious: the very men
who have brought me here to be judged and condemned have never heeded a single decision of this Court.
Since this trial may, as you said, be the most important trial since we achieved our national sovereignty, what I
say here will perhaps be lost in the silence which the dictatorship has tried to impose on me, but posterity will
often turn its eyes to what you do here. Remember that today you are judging an accused man, but that you
yourselves will be judged not once, but many times, as often as these days are submitted to scrutiny in the
future. What I say here will be then repeated many times, not because it comes from my lips, but because the
problem of justice is eternal and the people have a deep sense of justice above and beyond the hairsplitting of
jurisprudence. The people wield simple but implacable logic, in conflict with all that is absurd and contradictory.
Furthermore, if there is in this world a people that utterly abhors favoritism and inequality, it is the Cuban people.
To them, justice is symbolized by a maiden with a scale and a sword in her hands. Should she cower before
one group and furiously wield that sword against another group, then to the people of Cuba the maiden of
justice will seem nothing more than a prostitute brandishing a dagger. My logic is the simple logic of the people.
Let me tell you a story: Once upon a time there was a Republic. It had its Constitution, its laws, its freedoms, a
President, a Congress and Courts of Law. Everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with
complete freedom. The people were not satisfied with the government officials at that time, but they had the
power to elect new officials and only a few days remained before they would do so. Public opinion was
respected and heeded and all problems of common interest were freely discussed. There were political parties,
radio and television debates and forums and public meetings. The whole nation pulsated with enthusiasm. This
people had suffered greatly and although it was unhappy, it longed to be happy and had a right to be happy. It
had been deceived many times and it looked upon the past with real horror. This country innocently believed
that such a past could not return; the people were proud of their love of freedom and they carried their heads
high in the conviction that liberty would be respected as a sacred right. They felt confident that no one would
dare commit the crime of violating their democratic institutions. They wanted a change for the better, aspired to
progress; and they saw all this at hand. All their hope was in the future.
Poor country! One morning the citizens woke up dismayed; under the cover of night, while the people slept, the
ghosts of the past had conspired and has seized the citizenry by its hands, its feet, and its neck. That grip,
those claws were familiar: those jaws, those death-dealing scythes, those boots. No; it was no nightmare; it was
a sad and terrible reality: a man named Fulgencio Batista had just perpetrated the appalling crime that no one
had expected.
Then a humble citizen of that people, a citizen who wished to believe in the laws of the Republic, in the integrity
of its judges, whom he had seen vent their fury against the underprivileged, searched through a Social Defense
Code to see what punishment society prescribed for the author of such a coup, and he discovered the following:
'Whosoever shall perpetrate any deed destined through violent means directly to change in whole or in part the
Constitution of the State or the form of the established government shall incur a sentence of six to ten years
imprisonment.
'A sentence of three to ten years imprisonment will be imposed on the author of an act directed to promote an
armed uprising against the Constitutional Powers of the State. The sentence increases from five to twenty years
if the insurrection is carried out.
'Whosoever shall perpetrate an act with the specific purpose of preventing, in whole or in part, even temporarily,
the Senate, the House of Representatives, the President, or the Supreme Court from exercising their
constitutional functions will incur a sentence of from six to ten years imprisonment.
'Whosoever shall attempt to impede or tamper with the normal course of general elections, will incur a sentence
of from four to eight years imprisonment.
'Whosoever shall introduce, publish, propagate or try to enforce in Cuba instructions, orders or decrees that
tend ... to promote the unobservance of laws in force, will incur a sentence of from two to six years
imprisonment.
'Whosoever shall assume command of troops, posts, fortresses, military camps, towns, warships, or military
aircraft, without the authority to do so, or without express government orders, will incur a sentence of from five to
ten years imprisonment.
'A similar sentence will be passed upon anyone who usurps the exercise of a function held by the Constitution
as properly belonging to the powers of State.'
Without telling anyone, Code in one hand and a deposition in the other, that citizen went to the old city building,
that old building which housed the Court competent and under obligation to bring cause against and punish
those responsible for this deed. He presented a writ denouncing the crimes and asking that Fulgencio Batista
and his seventeen accomplices be sentenced to 108 years in prison as decreed by the Social Defense Code;
considering also aggravating circumstances of secondary offense treachery, and acting under cover of night.
Days and months passed. What a disappointment! The accused remained unmolested: he strode up and down
the country like a great lord and was called Honorable Sir and General: he removed and replaced judges at will.
The very day the Courts opened, the criminal occupied the seat of honor in the midst of our august and
venerable patriarchs of justice.
Once more the days and the months rolled by, the people wearied of mockery and abuses. There is a limit to
tolerance! The struggle began against this man who was disregarding the law, who had usurped power by the
use of violence against the will of the people, who was guilty of aggression against the established order, had
tortured, murdered, imprisoned and prosecuted those who had taken up the struggle to defend the law and to
restore freedom to the people.
Honorable Judges: I am that humble citizen who one day demanded in vain that the Courts punish the
power-hungry men who had violated the law and torn our institutions to shreds. Now that it is I who am accused
for attempting to overthrow this illegal regime and to restore the legitimate Constitution of the Republic, I am
held incommunicado for 76 days and denied the right to speak to anyone, even to my son; between two heavy
machine guns I am led through the city. I am transferred to this hospital to be tried secretly with the greatest
severity; and the Prosecutor with the Code in his hand solemnly demands that I be sentenced to 26 years in
prison.
You will answer that on the former occasion the Courts failed to act because force prevented them from doing
so. Well then, confess, this time force will compel you to condemn me. The first time you were unable to punish
the guilty; now you will be compelled to punish the innocent. The maiden of justice twice raped.
And so much talk to justify the unjustifiable, to explain the inexplicable and to reconcile the irreconcilable! The
regime has reached the point of asserting that 'Might makes right' is the supreme law of the land. In other
words, that using tanks and soldiers to take over the presidential palace, the national treasury, and the other
government offices, and aiming guns at the heart of the people, entitles them to govern the people! The same
argument the Nazis used when they occupied the countries of Europe and installed their puppet governments.
I heartily believe revolution to be the source of legal right; but the nocturnal armed assault of March 10th
could never be considered a revolution. In everyday language, as José Ingenieros said, it is common to give the
name of revolution to small disorders promoted by a group of dissatisfied persons in order to grab, from those
in power, both the political sinecures and the economic advantages. The usual result is no more than a change
of hands, the dividing up of jobs and benefits. This is not the criterion of a philosopher, as it cannot be that of a
cultured man.
Leaving aside the problem of integral changes in the social system, not even on the surface of the public
quagmire were we able to discern the slightest motion that could lessen the rampant putrefaction. The previous
regime was guilty of petty politics, theft, pillage, and disrespect for human life; but the present regime has
increased political skullduggery five-fold, pillage ten-fold, and a hundred-fold the lack of respect for human life.
It was known that Barriguilla had plundered and murdered, that he was a millionaire, that he owned in Havana a
good many apartment houses, countless stock in foreign companies, fabulous accounts in American banks,
that he agreed to divorce settlements to the tune of eighteen million pesos, that he was a frequent guest in the
most lavishly expensive hotels for Yankee tycoons. But no one would ever think of Barriguilla as a revolutionary.
Barriguilla is that sergeant of Weyler's who assassinated twelve Cubans in Guatao. Batista's men murdered
seventy in Santiago de Cuba. De te fabula narratur.
Four political parties governed the country before the 10th of March: the Auténtico, Liberal, Democratic and
Republican parties. Two days after the coup, the Republican party gave its support to the new rulers. A year had
not yet passed before the Liberal and Democratic parties were again in power: Batista did not restore the
Constitution, did not restore civil liberties, did not restore Congress, did not restore universal suffrage, did not
restore in the last analysis any of the uprooted democratic institutions. But he did restore Verdeja, Guas Inclán,
Salvito García Ramos, Anaya Murillo and the top hierarchy of the traditional government parties, the most
corrupt, rapacious, reactionary and antediluvian elements in Cuban politics. So went the 'revolution' of
Barriguilla!.
Lacking even the most elementary revolutionary content, Batista's regime represents in every respect a 20 year
regression for Cuba. Batista's regime has exacted a high price from all of us, but primarily from the humble
classes which are suffering hunger and misery. Meanwhile the dictatorship has laid waste the nation with
commotion, ineptitude and anguish, and now engages in the most loathsome forms of ruthless politics,
concocting formula after formula to perpetuate itself in power, even if over a stack of corpses and a sea of
blood.
Batista's regime has not set in motion a single nationwide program of betterment for the people. Batista
delivered himself into the hands of the great financial interests. Little else could be expected from a man of his
mentality - utterly devoid as he is of ideals and of principles, and utterly lacking the faith, confidence and support
of the masses. His regime merely brought with it a change of hands and a redistribution of the loot among a
new group of friends, relatives, accomplices and parasitic hangers-on that constitute the political retinue of the
Dictator. What great shame the people have been forced to endure so that a small group of egoists, altogether
indifferent to the needs of their homeland, may find in public life an easy and comfortable modus vivendi.
How right Eduardo Chibás was in his last radio speech, when he said that Batista was encouraging the return
of the colonels, castor oil and the law of the fugitive! Immediately after March 10th, Cubans again began to
witness acts of veritable vandalism which they had thought banished forever from their nation. There was an
unprecedented attack on a cultural institution: a radio station was stormed by the thugs of the SIM, together with
the young hoodlums of the PAU, while broadcasting the 'University of the Air' program. And there was the case
of the journalist Mario Kuchilán, dragged from his home in the middle of the night and bestially tortured until he
was nearly unconscious. There was the murder of the student Rubén Batista and the criminal volleys fired at a
peaceful student demonstration next to the wall where Spanish volunteers shot the medical students in 1871.
And many cases such as that of Dr. García Bárcena, where right in the courtrooms men have coughed up blood
because of the barbaric tortures practiced upon them by the repressive security forces. I will not enumerate the
hundreds of cases where groups of citizens have been brutally clubbed - men, women, children and the aged.
All of this was being done even before July 26th. Since then, as everyone knows, even Cardinal Arteaga himself
was not spared such treatment. Everybody knows he was a victim of repressive agents. According to the
official story, he fell prey to a 'band of thieves'. For once the regime told the truth. For what else is this regime?
...
People have just contemplated with horror the case of the journalist who was kidnapped and subjected to
torture by fire for twenty days. Each new case brings forth evidence of unheard-of effrontery, of immense
hypocrisy: the cowardice of those who shirk responsibility and invariably blame the enemies of the regime.
Governmental tactics enviable only by the worst gangster mobs. Even the Nazi criminals were never so
cowardly. Hitler assumed responsibility for the massacres of June 30, 1934, stating that for 24 hours he himself
had been the German Supreme Court; the henchmen of this dictatorship which defies all comparison because
of its baseness, maliciousness and cowardice, kidnap, torture, murder and then loathsomely put the blame on
the adversaries of the regime. Typical tactics of Sergeant Barriguilla!
Not once in all the cases I have mentioned, Honorable Judges, have the agents responsible for these crimes
been brought to Court to be tried for them. How is this? Was this not to be the regime of public order, peace
and respect for human life?
I have related all this in order to ask you now: Can this state of affairs be called a revolution, capable of
formulating law and establishing rights? Is it or is it not legitimate to struggle against this regime? And must
there not be a high degree of corruption in the courts of law when these courts imprison citizens who try to rid
the country of so much infamy?
Cuba is suffering from a cruel and base despotism. You are well aware that resistance to despots is legitimate.
This is a universally recognized principle and our 1940 Constitution expressly makes it a sacred right, in the
second paragraph of Article 40: 'It is legitimate to use adequate resistance to protect previously granted
individual rights.' And even if this prerogative had not been provided by the Supreme Law of the Land, it is a
consideration without which one cannot conceive of the existence of a democratic collectivity. Professor
Infiesta, in his book on Constitutional Law, differentiates between the political and legal constitutions, and
states: 'Sometimes the Legal Constitution includes constitutional principles which, even without being so
classified, would be equally binding solely on the basis of the people's consent, for example, the principle of
majority rule or representation in our democracies.' The right of insurrection in the face of tyranny is one such
principle, and whether or not it be included in the Legal Constitution, it is always binding within a democratic
society. The presentation of such a case to a high court is one of the most interesting problems of general law.
Duguit has said in his Treatise on Constitutional Law: 'If an insurrection fails, no court will dare to rule that this
unsuccessful insurrection was technically no conspiracy, no transgression against the security of the State,
inasmuch as, the government being tyrannical, the intention to overthrow it was legitimate.' But please take
note: Duguit does not state, 'the court ought not to rule.' He says, 'no court will dare to rule.' More explicitly, he
means that no court will dare, that no court will have enough courage to do so, under a tyranny. If the court is
courageous and does its duty, then yes, it will dare.
Recently there has been a loud controversy concerning the 1940 Constitution. The Court of Social and
Constitutional Rights ruled against it in favor of the so-called Statutes. Nevertheless, Honorable Judges, I
maintain that the 1940 Constitution is still in force. My statement may seem absurd and extemporaneous to you.
But do not be surprised. It is I who am astonished that a court of law should have attempted to deal a death blow
to the legitimate Constitution of the Republic. Adhering strictly to facts, truth and reason - as I have done all
along - I will prove what I have just stated. The Court of Social and Constitutional Rights was instituted according
to Article 172 of the 1940 Constitution, and the supplementary Act of May 31, 1949. These laws, in virtue of
which the Court was created, granted it, insofar as problems of unconstitutionality are concerned, a specific and
clearly defined area of legal competence: to rule in all matters of appeals claiming the unconstitutionality of
laws, legal decrees, resolutions, or acts that deny, diminish, restrain or adulterate the constitutional rights and
privileges or that jeopardize the operations of State agencies. Article 194 established very clearly the following:
'All judges and courts are under the obligation to find solutions to conflicts between the Constitution and the
existing laws in accordance with the principle that the former shall always prevail over the latter.' Therefore,
according to the laws that created it, the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights should always rule in favor of
the Constitution. When this Court caused the Statutes to prevail above the Constitution of the Republic, it
completely overstepped its boundaries and its established field of competence, thereby rendering a decision
which is legally null and void. Furthermore, the decision itself is absurd, and absurdities have no validity in law
nor in fact, not even from a metaphysical point of view. No matter how venerable a court may be, it cannot
assert that circles are square or, what amounts to the same thing, that the grotesque offspring of the April 4th
Statutes should be considered the official Constitution of a State.
The Constitution is understood to be the basic and supreme law of the nation, to define the country's political
structure, regulate the functioning of its government agencies, and determine the limits of their activities. It must
be stable, enduring and, to a certain extent, inflexible. The Statutes fulfill none of these qualifications. To begin
with, they harbor a monstrous, shameless, and brazen contradiction in regard to the most vital aspect of all: the
integration of the Republican structure and the principle of national sovereignty. Article 1 reads: 'Cuba is a
sovereign and independent State constituted as a democratic Republic.' Article 2 reads: 'Sovereignty resides
in the will of the people, and all powers derive from this source.' But then comes Article 118, which reads: 'The
President will be nominated by the Cabinet.' So it is not the people who choose the President, but rather the
Cabinet. And who chooses the Cabinet? Article 120, section 13: 'The President will be authorized to nominate
and reappoint the members of the Cabinet and to replace them when occasion arises.' So, after all, who
nominates whom? Is this not the classical old problem of the chicken and the egg that no one has ever been
able to solve?
One day eighteen hoodlums got together. Their plan was to assault the Republic and loot its 350 million pesos
annual budget. Behind peoples' backs and with great treachery, they succeeded in their purpose. 'Now what do
we do next?' they wondered. One of them said to the rest: 'You name me Prime Minister, and I'll make you
generals.' When this was done, he rounded up a group of 20 men and told them: 'I will make you my Cabinet if
you make me President.' In this way they named each other generals, ministers and president, and then took
over the treasury and the Republic.
What is more, it was not simply a matter of usurping sovereignty at a given moment in order to name a Cabinet,
Generals and a President. This man ascribed to himself, through these Statutes, not only absolute control of the
nation, but also the power of life and death over every citizen - control, in fact, over the very existence of the
nation. Because of this, I maintain that the position of the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights is not only
treacherous, vile, cowardly and repugnant, but also absurd.
The Statutes contain an article which has not received much attention, but which gives us the key to this
situation and is the one from which we shall derive decisive conclusions. I refer specifically to the modifying
clause included in Article 257, which reads: 'This constitutional law is open to reform by the Cabinet with a
two-thirds quorum vote.' This is where mockery reaches its climax. Not only did they exercise sovereignty in
order to impose a Constitution upon a people without that people's consent, and to install a regime which
concentrates all power in their own hands, but also, through Article 257, they assume the most essential
attribute of sovereignty: the power to change the Basic and Supreme Law of the Land. And they have already
changed it several times since March 10th. Yet, with the greatest gall, they assert in Article 2 that sovereignty
resides in the will of the people and that the people are the source of all power. Since these changes may be
brought about by a vote of two-thirds of the Cabinet and the Cabinet is named by the President, then the right to
make and break Cuba is in the hands of one man, a man who is, furthermore, the most unworthy of all the
creatures ever to be born in this land. Was this then accepted by the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights?
And is all that derives from it valid and legal? Very well, you shall see what was accepted: 'This constitutional
law is open to reform by the Cabinet with a two-thirds quorum vote.' Such a power recognizes no limits. Under
its aegis, any article, any chapter, any section, even the whole law may be modified. For example, Article 1,
which I have just mentioned, says that Cuba is a sovereign and independent State constituted as a democratic
Republic, 'although today it is in fact a bloody dictatorship.' Article 3 reads: 'The national boundaries include the
island of Cuba, the Isle of Pines, and the neighboring keys ...' and so on. Batista and his Cabinet under the
provisions of Article 257 can modify all these other articles. They can say that Cuba is no longer a Republic but
a hereditary monarchy and he, Batista, can anoint himself king. He can dismember the national territory and sell
a province to a foreign country as Napoleon did with Louisiana. He may suspend the right to life itself, and like
Herod, order the decapitation of newborn children. All these measures would be legal and you would have to
incarcerate all those who opposed them, just as you now intend to do with me. I have put forth extreme
examples to show how sad and humiliating our present situation is. To think that all these absolute powers are
in the hands of men truly capable of selling our country along with all its citizens!
As the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights has accepted this state of affairs, what more are they waiting
for? They may as well hang up their judicial robes. It is a fundamental principle of general law that there can be
no constitutional status where the constitutional and legislative powers reside in the same body. When the
Cabinet makes the laws, the decrees and the rules - and at the same time has the power to change the
Constitution in a moment of time - then I ask you: why do we need a Court of Social and Constitutional Rights?
The ruling in favor of this Statute is irrational, inconceivable, illogical and totally contrary to the Republican laws
that you, Honorable Judges, swore to uphold. When the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights supported
Batista's Statutes against the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land was not abolished but rather the Court
of Social and Constitutional Rights placed itself outside the Constitution, renounced its autonomy and
committed legal suicide. May it rest in peace!
The right to rebel, established in Article 40 of the Constitution, is still valid. Was it established to function while
the Republic was enjoying normal conditions? No. This provision is to the Constitution what a lifeboat is to a
ship at sea. The lifeboat is only launched when the ship has been torpedoed by enemies laying wait along its
course. With our Constitution betrayed and the people deprived of all their prerogatives, there was only one way
open: one right which no power may abolish. The right to resist oppression and injustice. If any doubt remains,
there is an article of the Social Defense Code which the Honorable Prosecutor would have done well not to
forget. It reads, and I quote: 'The appointed or elected government authorities that fail to resist sedition with all
available means will be liable to a sentence of interdiction of from six to eight years.' The judges of our nation
were under the obligation to resist Batista's treacherous military coup of the 10th of March. It is understandable
that when no one has observed the law and when nobody else has done his duty, those who have observed the
law and have done their duty should be sent to prison.
You will not be able to deny that the regime forced upon the nation is unworthy of Cuba's history. In his book,
The Spirit of Laws, which is the foundation of the modern division of governmental power, Montesquieu makes
a distinction between three types of government according to their basic nature: 'The Republican form wherein
the whole people or a portion thereof has sovereign power; the Monarchical form where only one man governs,
but in accordance with fixed and well-defined laws; and the Despotic form where one man without regard for
laws nor rules acts as he pleases, regarding only his own will or whim.' And then he adds: 'A man whose five
senses constantly tell him that he is everything and that the rest of humanity is nothing is bound to be lazy,
ignorant and sensuous.' 'As virtue is necessary to democracy, and honor to a monarchy, fear is of the essence
to a despotic regime, where virtue is not needed and honor would be dangerous.'
The right of rebellion against tyranny, Honorable Judges, has been recognized from the most ancient times
to the present day by men of all creeds, ideas and doctrines.
It was so in the theocratic monarchies of remote antiquity. In China it was almost a constitutional principle that
when a king governed rudely and despotically he should be deposed and replaced by a virtuous prince.
The philosophers of ancient India upheld the principle of active resistance to arbitrary authority. They justified
revolution and very often put their theories into practice. One of their spiritual leaders used to say that 'an
opinion held by the majority is stronger than the king himself. A rope woven of many strands is strong enough to
hold a lion.'
The city states of Greece and republican Rome not only admitted, but defended the meting-out of violent death
to tyrants.
In the Middle Ages, John Salisbury in his Book of the Statesman says that when a prince does not govern
according to law and degenerates into a tyrant, violent overthrow is legitimate and justifiable. He recommends
for tyrants the dagger rather than poison.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, rejects the doctrine of tyrannicide, and yet upholds the
thesis that tyrants should be overthrown by the people.
Martin Luther proclaimed that when a government degenerates into a tyranny that violates the laws, its subjects
are released from their obligations to obey. His disciple, Philippe Melanchton, upholds the right of resistance
when governments become despotic. Calvin, the outstanding thinker of the Reformation with regard to political
ideas, postulates that people are entitled to take up arms to oppose any usurpation.
No less a man that Juan Mariana, a Spanish Jesuit during the reign of Philip II, asserts in his book, De Rege et
Regis Institutione, that when a governor usurps power, or even if he were elected, when he governs in a
tyrannical manner it is licit for a private citizen to exercise tyrannicide, either directly or through subterfuge with
the least possible disturbance.
The French writer, François Hotman, maintained that between the government and its subjects there is a bond
or contract, and that the people may rise in rebellion against the tyranny of government when the latter violates
that pact.
About the same time, a booklet - which came to be widely read - appeared under the title Vindiciae Contra
Tyrannos, and it was signed with the pseudonym Stephanus Junius Brutus. It openly declared that resistance to
governments is legitimate when rulers oppress the people and that it is the duty of Honorable Judges to lead
the struggle.
The Scottish reformers John Knox and John Poynet upheld the same points of view. And, in the most important
book of that movement, George Buchanan stated that if a government achieved power without taking into
account the consent of the people, or if a government rules their destiny in an unjust or arbitrary fashion, then
that government becomes a tyranny and can be divested of power or, in a final recourse, its leaders can be put
to death.
John Althus, a German jurist of the early 17th century, stated in his Treatise on Politics that sovereignty as the
supreme authority of the State is born from the voluntary concourse of all its members; that governmental
authority stems from the people and that its unjust, illegal or tyrannical function exempts them from the duty of
obedience and justifies resistance or rebellion.
Thus far, Honorable Judges, I have mentioned examples from antiquity, from the Middle Ages, and from the
beginnings of our times. I selected these examples from writers of all creeds. What is more, you can see that
the right to rebellion is at the very root of Cuba's existence as a nation. By virtue of it you are today able to
appear in the robes of Cuban Judges. Would it be that those garments really served the cause of justice!
It is well known that in England during the 17th century two kings, Charles I and James II, were dethroned for
despotism. These actions coincided with the birth of liberal political philosophy and provided the ideological
base for a new social class, which was then struggling to break the bonds of feudalism. Against divine right
autocracies, this new philosophy upheld the principle of the social contract and of the consent of the governed,
and constituted the foundation of the English Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1775 and the
French Revolution of 1789. These great revolutionary events ushered in the liberation of the Spanish colonies in
the New World - the final link in that chain being broken by Cuba. The new philosophy nurtured our own political
ideas and helped us to evolve our Constitutions, from the Constitution of Guáimaro up to the Constitution of
1940. The latter was influenced by the socialist currents of our time; the principle of the social function of
property and of man's inalienable right to a decent living were built into it, although large vested interests have
prevented fully enforcing those rights.
The right of insurrection against tyranny then underwent its final consecration and became a fundamental tenet
of political liberty.
As far back as 1649, John Milton wrote that political power lies with the people, who can enthrone and dethrone
kings and have the duty of overthrowing tyrants.
John Locke, in his essay on government, maintained that when the natural rights of man are violated, the people
have the right and the duty to alter or abolish the government. 'The only remedy against unauthorized force is
opposition to it by force.'
Jean-Jaques Rousseau said with great eloquence in his Social Contract: 'While a people sees itself forced to
obey and obeys, it does well; but as soon as it can shake off the yoke and shakes it off, it does better,
recovering its liberty through the use of the very right that has been taken away from it.' 'The strongest man is
never strong enough to be master forever, unless he converts force into right and obedience into duty. Force is
a physical power; I do not see what morality one may derive from its use. To yield to force is an act of necessity,
not of will; at the very least, it is an act of prudence. In what sense should this be called a duty?' 'To renounce
freedom is to renounce one's status as a man, to renounce one's human rights, including one's duties. There is
no possible compensation for renouncing everything. Total renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man
and to take away all free will is to take away all morality of conduct. In short, it is vain and contradictory to
stipulate on the one hand an absolute authority and on the other an unlimited obedience ...'
Thomas Paine said that 'one just man deserves more respect than a rogue with a crown.'
The people's right to rebel has been opposed only by reactionaries like that clergyman of Virginia, Jonathan
Boucher, who said: 'The right to rebel is a censurable doctrine derived from Lucifer, the father of rebellions.'
The Declaration of Independence of the Congress of Philadelphia, on July 4th, 1776, consecrated this right in a
beautiful paragraph which reads: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
Pursuit of Happiness; That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed; That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it and to institute a new Government, laying its
foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect
their Safety and Happiness.'
The famous French Declaration of the Rights of Man willed this principle to the coming generations: 'When the
government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for them the most sacred of rights and the most
imperative of duties.' 'When a person seizes sovereignty, he should be condemned to death by free men.'
I believe I have sufficiently justified my point of view. I have called forth more reasons than the Honorable
Prosecutor called forth to ask that I be condemned to 26 years in prison. All these reasons support men who
struggle for the freedom and happiness of the people. None support those who oppress the people, revile them,
and rob them heartlessly. Therefore I have been able to call forth many reasons and he could not adduce even
one. How can Batista's presence in power be justified when he gained it against the will of the people and by
violating the laws of the Republic through the use of treachery and force? How could anyone call legitimate a
regime of blood, oppression and ignominy? How could anyone call revolutionary a regime which has gathered
the most backward men, methods and ideas of public life around it? How can anyone consider legally valid the
high treason of a Court whose duty was to defend the Constitution? With what right do the Courts send to prison
citizens who have tried to redeem their country by giving their own blood, their own lives? All this is monstrous to
the eyes of the nation and to the principles of true justice!
Still there is one argument more powerful than all the others. We are Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty;
not to fulfill that duty is a crime, is treason. We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and
have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights. We were taught to venerate the glorious example
of our heroes and martyrs. Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Gómez and Martí were the first names engraved in
our minds. We were taught that the Titan once said that liberty is not begged for but won with the blade of a
machete. We were taught that for the guidance of Cuba's free citizens, the Apostle wrote in his book The
Golden Age: 'The man who abides by unjust laws and permits any man to trample and mistreat the country in
which he was born is not an honorable man ... In the world there must be a certain degree of honor just as there
must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without honor, there are always others who bear in
themselves the honor of many men. These are the men who rebel with great force against those who steal the
people's freedom, that is to say, against those who steal honor itself. In those men thousands more are
contained, an entire people is contained, human dignity is contained ...' We were taught that the 10th of October
and the 24th of February are glorious anniversaries of national rejoicing because they mark days on which
Cubans rebelled against the yoke of infamous tyranny. We were taught to cherish and defend the beloved flag
of the lone star, and to sing every afternoon the verses of our National Anthem: 'To live in chains is to live in
disgrace and in opprobrium,' and 'to die for one's homeland is to live forever!' All this we learned and will never
forget, even though today in our land there is murder and prison for the men who practice the ideas taught to
them since the cradle. We were born in a free country that our parents bequeathed to us, and the Island will first
sink into the sea before we consent to be the slaves of anyone.
It seemed that the Apostle would die during his Centennial. It seemed that his memory would be extinguished
forever. So great was the affront! But he is alive; he has not died. His people are rebellious. His people are
worthy. His people are faithful to his memory. There are Cubans who have fallen defending his doctrines. There
are young men who in magnificent selflessness came to die beside his tomb, giving their blood and their lives
so that he could keep on living in the heart of his nation. Cuba, what would have become of you had you let your
Apostle die?
I come to the close of my defense plea but I will not end it as lawyers usually do, asking that the accused be
freed. I cannot ask freedom for myself while my comrades are already suffering in the ignominious prison of the
Isle of Pines. Send me there to join them and to share their fate. It is understandable that honest men should be
dead or in prison in a Republic where the President is a criminal and a thief.
To you, Honorable Judges, my sincere gratitude for having allowed me to express myself free from
contemptible restrictions. I hold no bitterness towards you, I recognize that in certain aspects you have been
humane, and I know that the Chief Judge of this Court, a man of impeccable private life, cannot disguise his
repugnance at the current state of affairs that compels him to dictate unjust decisions. Still, a more serious
problem remains for the Court of Appeals: the indictments arising from the murders of seventy men, that is to
say, the greatest massacre we have ever known. The guilty continue at liberty and with weapons in their hands -
weapons which continually threaten the lives of all citizens. If all the weight of the law does not fall upon the guilty
because of cowardice or because of domination of the courts, and if then all the judges do not resign, I pity your
honor. And I regret the unprecedented shame that will fall upon the Judicial Power.
I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and
hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70
of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
|
./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.images.index | <body>
<h1>Fidel Castro Photo Collection</h1>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr>
<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="15" width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr align="center">
<td colspan="3" rowspan="1">
</td></tr><tr align="center">
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel.jpg" alt="fidel" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2> </h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/castro.jpg"><img src="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/castro.jpg" alt="fidel" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2> </h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="fidel-12.jpg"><img src="fidel-12.jpg" alt="fidel" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2> </h2>
</td>
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<tr align="center">
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<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/estrategia013.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/estrategia013.jpg" alt="fidel" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2> </h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/Castro_grain.jpg"><img src="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/Castro_grain.jpg" alt="Moncada Army Barracks on January 1, 1959" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>Fidel Castro addressing a crowd <br>at Moncada Army Barracks <br>on January 1, 1959</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../1964/07/misc/santiago-speech.jpg"><img src="../1964/07/misc/santiago-speech.jpg" alt="Santiago speech, July 1964" border="1" width="250"></a></h3>
<h2>Santiago speech, July 1964</h2>
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<tr align="center">
<td>
<h3><a href="fidel-11.jpg"><img src="fidel-11.jpg" alt="fidel" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2> </h2>
</td>
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<h3><a href="../../../../../chinese/images/castro.jpg"><img src="../../../../../chinese/images/castro.jpg" alt="fidel" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2> </h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/estrategia001.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/estrategia001.jpg" alt="fidel" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2> </h2>
</td>
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<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-sus-botas-de-eterno-guerrillero.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-sus-botas-de-eterno-guerrillero.jpg" alt="Fidel and his eternal guerrilla boots" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2>Fidel and his eternal guerrilla boots</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/celia-fidel-haydee.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/celia-fidel-haydee.jpg" alt="Celia, Fidel and Hayd�e, sitting for a coffee, April 1958" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>Celia, Fidel and Hayd�e, <br>sitting for a coffee, April 1958</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-en-la-sierra-maestra.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-en-la-sierra-maestra.jpg" alt="Fidel crosses a river in Sierra Maestra" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>Fidel crosses a river <br>in Sierra Maestra</h2>
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</tr>
<tr align="center">
<td>
<h3><a href="che-fidel3.jpg"><img src="che-fidel3.jpg" alt="che-fidel" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2>With Che Guevara</h2>
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<h3><a href="che-fidel2.jpg"><img src="che-fidel2.jpg" alt="che-fidel" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<br>
<h2>With Che Guevara</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="che-fidel.jpg"><img src="che-fidel.jpg" alt="che-fidel" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2>With Che Guevara</h2>
</td>
</tr>
<tr align="center">
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-almeida.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-almeida.jpg" alt="With Commander Juan Almeida Bosque" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>With Commander Juan Almeida Bosque</h2>
<br>
<br>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/pelando-a-fidel.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/pelando-a-fidel.jpg" alt="Fidel chatting at a makeshift barber shop in El Naranjo, Sierra Maestra" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>Fidel chatting <br>at a makeshift barber shop <br>in El Naranjo, Sierra Maestra</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-ninos.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-ninos.jpg" alt="In a ceasefire, Commander Fidel Castro receives peasant girls who have come to greet him" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>With peasant girls<br> who have come to greet him<br> during a ceasefire</h2>
</td>
</tr>
<tr align="center">
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/raul-y-fidel.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/raul-y-fidel.jpg" alt="R�ul, Fidel and Ren� Ramos Latour (Daniel)" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>R�ul, Fidel <br>and Ren� Ramos Latour (Daniel)</h2>
<br>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../glossary/people/c/pics/castro-fidel-1959.jpg"><img src="../../../../../glossary/people/c/pics/castro-fidel-1959.jpg" alt="Fidel in 1959" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2>Fidel in 1959</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/estrategia014.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/estrategia014.jpg" alt="Fidel victory" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2>Victory</h2>
</td>
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<tr align="center">
<td>
<h3><a href="together.jpg"><img src="together.jpg" alt="Together" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>Together</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../1965/misc/speaking-with-families.jpg"><img src="../1965/misc/speaking-with-families.jpg" alt="Speaking with families, 1965" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>Speaking with families, 1965</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../1961/06/26/gagarin-hug.jpg"><img src="../1961/06/26/gagarin-hug.jpg" alt="With Yuri Gagarin, 1961" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>With Yuri Gagarin, 1961</h2>
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<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../francais/broue/works/1963/00/img/khrou_castro.gif"><img src="../../../../../francais/broue/works/1963/00/img/khrou_castro.gif" alt="With Nikita Khrushchev" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>With Nikita Khrushchev</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../reference/archive/le-duan/leduan-castro.jpg"><img src="../../../../../reference/archive/le-duan/leduan-castro.jpg" alt="With Le Duan" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>With Le Duan</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/Castro_Tito.jpg"><img src="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/Castro_Tito.jpg" alt="With Josip Broz Tito" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>With Josip Broz Tito</h2>
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<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/tematica/album_fotos/prestes/img/040.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/tematica/album_fotos/prestes/img/040.jpg" alt="With Luiz Carlos Prestes, 1978" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>With Luiz Carlos Prestes, 1978</h2>
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<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/tematica/album_fotos/prestes/img/022.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/tematica/album_fotos/prestes/img/022.jpg" alt="With Luiz Carlos Prestes, 1985" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>With Luiz Carlos Prestes, 1985</h2>
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<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_01/castro.jpg"><img src="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_01/castro.jpg" alt="Speech, 2001" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>Speech, 2001</h2>
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<h3><a href="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/Castro_WCAR.jpg"><img src="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/Castro_WCAR.jpg" alt="At the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, 2001" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>At the World Conference Against Racism<br> in Durban, South Africa, 2001</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/april_02/monterrey_castro.jpg"><img src="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/april_02/monterrey_castro.jpg" alt="At the UN International Conference in Monterrey 2002" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2>At the UN International Conference <br>in Monterrey 2002</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/Castro_Monterrey.jpg"><img src="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/june_02/Castro_Monterrey.jpg" alt="At the UN International Conference in Monterrey 2002" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>At the UN International Conference <br>in Monterrey 2002</h2>
</td>
</tr>
<tr align="center">
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/jan_04/castro.jpg"><img src="../../../../etol/newspape/socialist-viewpoint-us/jan_04/castro.jpg" alt="Speech, 2004" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>Speech, 2004</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/foto02.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/foto02.jpg" alt="2012" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>2012</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/foto01.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/foto01.jpg" alt="2012" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>2012</h2>
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<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/foto03.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/foto03.jpg" alt="2012" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>2012</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/foto04.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/foto04.jpg" alt="2012" border="1" width="200"></a></h3>
<h2>2012</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-los-cinco-13.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-los-cinco-13.jpg" alt="2015" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>2015</h2>
</td>
</tr>
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<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-los-cinco-2.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-los-cinco-2.jpg" alt="2015" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>2015</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-los-cinco-4.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-los-cinco-4.jpg" alt="2015" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>2015</h2>
</td>
<td>
<h3><a href="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-los-cinco-7.jpg"><img src="../../../../../portugues/castro/img/fidel-y-los-cinco-7.jpg" alt="2015" border="1" width="300"></a></h3>
<h2>2015</h2>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
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Fidel Castro Photo Collection
Fidel Castro addressing a crowd at Moncada Army Barracks on January 1, 1959
Santiago speech, July 1964
Fidel and his eternal guerrilla boots
Celia, Fidel and Hayd�e, sitting for a coffee, April 1958
Fidel crosses a river in Sierra Maestra
With Che Guevara
With Che Guevara
With Che Guevara
With Commander Juan Almeida Bosque
Fidel chatting at a makeshift barber shop in El Naranjo, Sierra Maestra
With peasant girls who have come to greet him during a ceasefire
R�ul, Fidel and Ren� Ramos Latour (Daniel)
Fidel in 1959
Victory
Together
Speaking with families, 1965
With Yuri Gagarin, 1961
With Nikita Khrushchev
With Le Duan
With Josip Broz Tito
With Luiz Carlos Prestes, 1978
With Luiz Carlos Prestes, 1985
Speech, 2001
At the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, 2001
At the UN International Conference in Monterrey 2002
At the UN International Conference in Monterrey 2002
Speech, 2004
2012
2012
2012
2012
2015
2015
2015
2015
Fidel Castro Archive |
Cuban History
Marxist Internet Archive
Last updated on 23 April 2023
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1967.10.oct-18-1967 | <body>
<p class="title">Fidel Castro Internet Archive</p>
<hr>
<h1>Speech by the Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz at the solemn<br>evening in memory of Commander Ernesto Che Guevara, in the Plaza de la Revolución, on October 18, 1967</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> October 18, 1967<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version, Stenographic Versions – Council of State.<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> David Walters, 2019<br>
<span class="info">Online Version & translation:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en</p>
<hr>
<p>Revolutionary comrades:</p>
<p>It was a day in the month of July or August of 1955 when we met Che. And in one night - as he tells in his accounts - he became a future expeditionary of the "Granma". But at that time that expedition had no ship, no weapons, no troops. And it was like this, along with Raúl, Che joined the group of the first two on the list of "Granma".</p>
<p>Since then 12 years have passed; They have been 12 years full of struggle and history. Throughout those years, death cut short many valuable and irreplaceble lives; but, at the same time, throughout those years, extraordinary people emerged from our Revolution who and were forged among the men of the Revolution, and between men and the people, bonds of affection and bonds of friendship were built which go beyond all possible expression.</p>
<p>And tonight we gather, you and us, to try to somehow express those feelings in relation to who was one of the closest to us, one of the most admired, one of the most loved and, without a doubt, the most extraordinary of our revolutionary comrades; to express those feelings to him and to the heroes who have fought with him and to the heroes who have fallen with him, his internationalist army, which has been writing a glorious and indelible page in history.</p>
<p>Che was one of those persons to whom everyone immediately took affection, for his simplicity, for his character, for his sincerity, for his comradeship, for his personality, for his originality, even though we still did not know the other singular virtues which characterized him.</p>
<p>During those first moments he was our troop’s doctor. And so the bonds were forged and the comradeship feelings arose.</p>
<p>He was imbued with a deep spirit of hatred and contempt for imperialism, not only because his political background had already acquired a considerable degree of development, but because he had only recently had the opportunity to witness in Guatemala the criminal imperialist intervention through the mercenary soldiers who ruined the revolution in that country.</p>
<p>For a man like him, not so many arguments were necessary. It was enough for him to know that Cuba lived in a similar situation, it was enough for him to know that there were men determined to fight with weapons to change that situation, it was enough for him to know that those men were inspired by genuinely revolutionary and patriotic feelings. And that was more than enough.</p>
<p>This way, one day, by the end of November 1956, with us, he started the march towards Cuba. I remember that that journey was very hard for him since, given the circumstances in which it was the departure was organized, he could not even provide himself with the medicines he needed and he spent the whole voyage suffering a serious asthma attack without a single chance of relief, but also without a single complaint.</p>
<p>We arrived, we started the first walks, we suffered the first setback, and after a few weeks we met again - as you know - a group of those who remained from the "Granma" expedition. Che continued to be a doctor of our troop.</p>
<p>The first victorious combat took place and Che was already a soldier of our troop and, at the same time, he was still the doctor; the second victorious battle took place and Che was not only a soldier, but the most distinguished of the soldiers in that action, performing for the first time one of those singular feats that characterized him in all actions; Our strength continued to grow and a battle of extraordinary importance was fought at that time.</p>
<p>The situation was difficult. The information was in many ways wrong. We were going to attack in the middle of the day, at dawn, a strongly defended position, by the sea, well armed and with enemy troops to our rear. Not far away, and in the midst of that situation of confusion in which it was necessary to ask the men a supreme effort, once comrade Juan Almeida took up one of the most difficult missions. However one of the flanks was completely devoid of forces. So, one of the flanks was left without an attacking force, which could endanger the whole operation. And in that moment Che, who was still a doctor, asked for three or four men, among them a man with a machine-gun rifle, and in a matter of seconds he quickly set out to take the attack mission from that direction.</p>
<p>And on that occasion he was not only a distinguished combatant, but he was also a distinguished doctor, assisting wounded comrades, while assisting wounded enemy soldiers. And when it was necessary to leave that position, once all the weapons were seized and a long march began, harassed by different enemy forces, it was necessary to leave someone to stay with the wounded, and Che remained with the wounded. Helped by a small group of our soldiers, he took care of them, saved their lives and later those men joined the column.</p>
<p>From that moment he stood out as a capable and brave leader, the kind of men who, when faced with carrying out a difficult mission, do not wait to be asked to carry out the mission.</p>
<p>So he did during the combat of El Uvero, but had also done so on an occasion we hadn’t mentioned. It was during the early days when as a result of a betrayal, our small troop was attacked by surprise by several planes and when we retired under the bombing and had already walked a fair distance, we remember some of the rifles some peasant soldiers who had been with us in the first actions had left when they asked permission to visit their relatives at a time when there was still not much discipline in our incipient army. And at that moment the possibility was considered that those rifles were lost.</p>
<p>We remember how after we just raised the issue, and under the bombing, Che volunteered and by doing so he quickly left to recover those rifles.</p>
<p>That was one of its essential characteristics: the immediate, instantaneous willingness to offer himself to carry out the most dangerous mission. And that, of course, caused aroused the admiration, the double admiration towards that comrade who fought with us, who was not born on this land, who was a man of profound ideas, who was a man whose mind was full of dreams of struggle in other parts of the continent and yet, that altruism, that selflessness, that willingness to always do the most difficult, to risk your life constantly.</p>
<p>This is how he earned the rank of Commander and chief of the second column organized in the Sierra Maestra; This is how his prestige began to grow, as he began to acquire his reputation as a magnificent combatant which he took to the highest levels in the course of the war.</p>
<p>Che was an unsurpassable soldier; Che was an insuperable boss; Che was, from the military point of view, an extraordinarily capable man, extraordinarily courageous, extraordinarily aggressive. If as a guerrilla he had an Achilles heel, that Achilles heel was his excessive aggressiveness; it was his absolute contempt for danger.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The enemies try to draw conclusions from his death. Che was a master of the war, Che was an artist of the guerrilla struggle! And he showed it countless times but he showed it especially in two extraordinary feats, as was one of them the invasion leading a column, a column which was being pursued by thousands of soldiers through absolutely flat and unknown territory, carrying out - together with Camilo - a formidable military feat. But, in addition, he demonstrated it in his fulminating campaign in Las Villas; and he proved it, above all, in his audacious attack on the city of Santa Clara, penetrating with a column of barely 300 men in a city defended by tanks, artillery and several thousand infantrymen.</p>
<p>These two exploits consecrate him as an extraordinarily capable leader, as a teacher, as an artist of the revolutionary war.</p>
<p>However, after his heroic and glorious death others try to deny the truth and value of his ideas and guerrilla ideas.</p>
<p>The artist may die, especially when he is an artist of such dangerous art as the revolutionary struggle, but what will not die in any way is the art to which he dedicated his life and to which he devoted his intelligence.</p>
<p>What is strange about that artist dying in a fight? Still more extraordinary is the fact that on the countless occasions when he risked this life during our revolutionary struggle he would not have died in combat. And there were many times when it was necessary to act to prevent the loss of his life in actions of minor transcendence.</p>
<p>And so, in a fight, in one of the many battles he fought, he lost his life. We do not possess sufficient elements of judgment to be able to make any deduction about all the circumstances that preceded that combat, about the degree to which he could have acted in an excessively aggressive manner, but, we repeat, if as a guerrilla he had an Achilles heel, that heel Achilles was his excessive aggressiveness, his absolute contempt for danger.</p>
<p>mhat is what it is difficult to agree with him, since we understand that his life, his experience, his ability as a seasoned leader, his prestige and all that he meant in life, was much more, incomparably more, than the evaluation that maybe he made himself.</p>
<p>The idea that men have a relative value in history, the idea that causes are not defeated when men fall and the irrepressible march of history does not stop or stop before the fall, may have profoundly influenced their behavior of the leaders.</p>
<p>And that's true, that can not be doubted. That shows his faith in men, his faith in ideas, his faith in example. However, as I said a few days ago, we would have wished with all our heart to see him as the forger of the victories, forging our comrades and people under his leadership, forging victories under his direction, since the men of his experience, his caliber, his really singular capacity, They are rare men.</p>
<p>We are able to appreciate the full value of his example and we have the absolute conviction that this example will serve as encouragement and will serve to bring men similar to him from the bosom of the people.</p>
<p>It is not easy to combine in a person all the virtues that were conjugated in him. It is not easy for a person to spontaneously be able to develop a personality like his. I would say that he is one of those kind of men who are difficult to match and practically impossible to outclass. But we will also say that men like him are capable, with his example, of helping men similar to him to emerge.</p>
<p>The point is that it is not only the warrior what we admire in Che or the man capable of great feats. And what he did, and what he was doing, that fact in itself of facing with only a handful of men an entire oligarchic army, instructed by the Yankee advisers supplied by Yankee imperialism, supported by the oligarchies of all neighboring countries, that fact in itself constitutes an extraordinary feat.</p>
<p>And if you look in the pages of history, you will not possibly find any case in which someone with such a small number of men has undertaken a task of greater importance, in which someone with such a small number of men has undertaken the fight against such considerable forces. This proof of self-confidence, that proof of confidence in the people, that proof of faith in the ability of men to fight, can be sought in the pages of history, and yet nothing similar can be found</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And he fell.</p>
<p>The enemies believe they have defeated his ideas, defeated his guerrilla conception, defeated his views on the armed revolutionary struggle. And what they achieved was, with a stroke of luck, to eliminate his physical life; what they did was to achieve the accidental advantages that an enemy can achieve in war. And that stroke of luck, that stroke of fortune we do not know to what extent helped by that characteristic to which we referred before of excessive aggressiveness, of absolute contempt for danger, shown in a combat like so many combats.</p>
<p>As it happened also in our War of Independence. In a fight in Dos Ríos they killed the Apostle of our independence. In a fight in Punta Brava they killed Antonio Maceo, veteran of hundreds of combats. In similar combats, countless leaders died, countless patriots of our independence war. And yet, that was not the defeat of the Cuban cause.</p>
<p>The death of Che - as we said a few days ago - is a hard blow, it is a tremendous blow for the revolutionary movement, as it deprives it without any doubt of any kind, of his most experienced and capable leader.</p>
<p>But those who sing victory are wrong. Those who believe his death is the defeat of his ideas, the defeat of his tactics, the defeat of his guerrilla conceptions, and the defeat of his thesis are mistaken. Because that man who fell as a mortal man, as a man who was exposed many times to bullets, as a soldier, as a leader, is a thousand times more capable than those who killed him with a stroke of luck.</p>
<p>However, how should revolutionaries face this adverse blow? How should we face that loss? What would be the opinion of Che if he had to make a judgment on this matter? That opinion he already gave, that opinion expressed it clearly, when he wrote in his message to the solidarity conference of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America that if he was surprised by death anywhere, it was always welcome that his shout of war, has reached a receptive ear, and another hand is extended to take up the weapon.</p>
<p>And that, his war cry, will reach not a receptive ear, but millions of receptive ears! And not a hand, but millions of hands, inspired by his example, will be extended to take up arms!</p>
<p>New leaders will emerge. And the men, the receptive ears and the extending hands, will need leaders who will emerge from the ranks of the people, as the bosses have emerged in all the revolutions.</p>
<p>These hands will not more count with a leader of the extraordinary experience, the enormous capacity of Che. Those leaders will be formed and trained in the process of the struggle, those leaders will emerge from the bosom of the millions of receptive ears, from the millions of hands that, sooner or later, will reach out to take up arms.</p>
<p>It is not that we consider that in practical terms his death will have an immediate repercussion in the revolutionary struggle. that in practical terms for the development of the struggle his death may have an immediate repercussion. But it is that Che, when he took up arms again, was not thinking of an immediate victory, was not thinking of a quick victory against the forces of the oligarchies and imperialism. His experienced combatant mind was prepared for a long fight of 5, 10, 15, 20 if necessary. He was willing to fight five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, all his life if necessary!</p>
<p>And it is with that perspective in time, that his death, his example -which is what we should say-, will have a tremendous repercussion, will have an invincible force.</p>
<p>Those who cling to a stroke of luck try in vain to deny his capacity as leader as well as his experience. Che was an extraordinarily capable military leader. But when we remember Che, when we think of Che, we are not thinking mainly about his military virtues. No! War is a means and not an end, war is an instrument of the revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution, what matters is the revolutionary cause, the revolutionary ideas, the revolutionary objectives, the revolutionary feelings, the revolutionary virtues!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And it is in this field, in the field of ideas, in the field of feelings, in the field of revolutionary virtues, in the field of intelligence, apart from its military virtues, where we feel the tremendous loss his death has meant for the Revolutionary movement.</p>
<p>Because Che possessed, in his extraordinary personality, virtues that rarely appear together. He excelled as a man of insurmountable action, but Che was not only a man of insurmountable action: Che was a man of profound thinking, visionary intelligence, a man of great culture. That is to say, he had in himself the man of ideas and the man of action.</p>
<p>But it is not that he just had those two features of being a man of ideas, a man of profound ideas, and also a man of action, but Che had in himself as a revolutionary the virtues that can be defined as the most complete expression of the virtues of a revolutionary: an upright, righteous man to the full, a man of supreme honesty, of absolute sincerity, a man of Stoic and Spartan life, a man to whom it is almost impossible to find a single stain in his conduct. He is because of his virtues what can be called a true revolutionary model.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ordinarily, at the time of the death of men, speeches are made, virtues are highlighted, but rarely as it is the case today, it can be fairly said, seldom it can be spoken with more accuracy that a man was a man of virtue when we say of Che: That he was a true example of revolutionary virtues!</p>
<p>But we should also add to this another quality, which is not a quality of the intellect, which is not a quality of the will, a quality derived from experience, from the struggle, but a quality of the heart, because he was an extraordinarily human man, an extraordinarily sensitive human being!</p>
<p>That is why we say, when we think about his life, when we think about his conduct, that he was the singular case of a very strange man, as he was able to combine not only the characteristics of a man of action, but also those of a man of thought, in his personality. Of a man of immaculate revolutionary virtues and of extraordinary human sensibility, together with an iron forged character of iron, to a will of steel, to an indomitable tenacity.</p>
<p>And that is why he has bequeathed to future generations not only his experience, his knowledge as an outstanding soldier, but also the works of his intelligence. He wrote with the virtuosity of a classic. His narrations of the war are insurmountable. The depth of his thought is impressive. He never wrote about anything if he didn’t do it with absolute and extraordinary seriousness, with extraordinary depth; and we do not doubt that posterity will remember some of his writings as classic documents of revolutionary thinking.</p>
<p>And so, as a result of that vigorous and profound intelligence, he left us countless memories, countless stories that, without his work, without his effort, could have been forgotten for ever.</p>
<p>Unflagging worker, during the years he was at the service of our country he did not know a single day of respite. Many responsibilities were assigned to him: as President of the National Bank, as director of the Planning Board, as Minister of Industries, as Commander of military regions, as head of political, economic or fraternal delegations.</p>
<p>His multifaceted intelligence allowed him to undertake any task with confidence and certainty no matter how difficult. And so, he brilliantly represented our country in numerous international conferences, just as he brilliantly led the soldiers in combat, just as he was a model worker at the head of any of the institutions that he was assigned to run. , And for him there were no days of rest, for him there were no hours of rest! and if we looked to the windows of his offices, we could see the lights remained on until late at night, while he was studying, or rather, working and studying. Because he was a scholar of all problems, he was an tireless reader. His thirst to embrace human knowledge was practically insatiable, and the hours he snatched from sleep were devoted to study; and the days that were supposed to be days of rest were dedicated to volunteer work.</p>
<p>He was the inspirer and the greatest promoter of volunteer work which today is the activity of hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country, the driver of this activity which becomes stronger and stronger every day among the masses, among our people. And as a revolutionary, as a communist revolutionary, as a truly communist. He had an infinite faith in moral values, he had an infinite faith in the conscience of men. And we must say that in his conception he saw with absolute clarity tat in the building of communism in the human society moral incentives were to be the main driver.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Many things he thought, developed and wrote. And there is something that must be said on a day like today, and that is that the writings of Che, the political and revolutionary thinking of Che will have a permanent value in the Cuban revolutionary process and in the revolutionary process in Latin America. And we do not doubt that the value of his ideas, of his ideas as a man of action, as a man of thinking, as a man of moral virtues, as a man of unsurpassed human sensibility, as a man of irreproachable conduct, have and will have a universal value .</p>
<p>The imperialists chant voices of triumph in the face of the fact of the guerrilla killed in combat; the imperialists sing the triumph in face of the stroke of fortune that led them to eliminate such a formidable man of action. But the imperialists may ignore or pretend to ignore that the character of a man of action was one of the many facets of that combatant's personality. And if it is about pain, it hurts us not only that a man of action has been lost as, it hurts that a virtuous man has been lost , what hurts us is that a man of exquisite human sensibility and intelligence has been lost. It hurts us to think that he was only 39 years old at the time of his death, it hurts us to think of how many fruits of that intelligence and experience in growth we have missed the opportunity to witness in its full potential.</p>
<p>We can comprehend the dimension of the loss for the revolutionary movement. But, nevertheless, that is where the weak side of the imperialist enemy is: to believe that with the physical man they have killed they have liquidated his thinking, to believe that with the physical man he has liquidated his ideas, to believe that with the physical man he has killed his virtues, to believe that with the physical man they has killed his example. And they believe it in such an impudent manner that they do not hesitate to publish, as the most natural thing in the world, the circumstances almost universally accepted in which they killed him after having been seriously wounded in combat. They have not even noticed the repugnance of the procedure, they have not even noticed the impudence of recognition. And they have divulged as right of the henchmen, they have disclosed as right of the oligarchs and the mercenaries, the shooting against a revolutionary combatant seriously wounded.</p>
<p>And the worst is that they also explain why they did it, alleging that the trial in which they would have had to judge Che would have been tremendous, arguing that it would have been impossible to seat such a revolutionary on the bench.</p>
<p>And not only that, but also they have not hesitated to make his remains disappear. And be it true or lie, is the fact that they claim to have incinerated his body, with which they begin to show their fear, with which they begin to show they are not so convinced that killing the physical life of the fighter they killed his ideas and killed his example.</p>
<p>Che did not fall defending any other interest, defending any other cause but the cause of the exploited and the oppressed in this continent; Che did not fall defending any other cause but the cause of the poor and the humble of this Earth. And the exemplary and selfless way in which he defended that cause is something that not even his most bitter enemies dare to dispute.</p>
<p>and before history, men who act like him, men who do everything and give everything for the sake of the humble, become bigger and bigger every day get deeper and deeper into the hearts of the people .</p>
<p>And the imperialist enemies are already beginning to notice it, and it will not be long before they prove that his death will eventually be like a seed from which many men determined to emulate hid deeds will emerge, many men determined to follow his example.</p>
<p>And we are absolutely convinced that the revolutionary cause in this continent will recover from the blow, that the revolutionary cause in this continent will not be defeated by that blow.</p>
<p>From the revolutionary point of view, from the point of view of our people, how should we look at the example of Che? Do we think that we have lost him? It is true that we will not see new writings again, it is certain that we will not hear his voice again. But Che has left the world with a heritage, a great patrimony, and we, who knew him so closely, can be heirs of his heritage.</p>
<p>He left us his revolutionary thinking, he left us his revolutionary virtues, he left us his character, his will, his tenacity, his spirit of work. In a word, he left us his example! And the example of Che should be a model for our people, the example of Che should be the ideal model for our people!</p>
<p>If we want to express how we aspire our revolutionary combatants to be, our militants, our men, we must say without hesitation of any kind: Let them be like Che! If we want to express how we want the men of future generations to be, we must say: Let them be like Che! If we want to say how we want our children to be educated, we must say without hesitation: We want them to be educated in the spirit of Che! If we want a model of man, a model of man that does not belong to this time, a model of man that belongs to the future, I say with my heart that model without a single stain in his behavior, without a single stain in his attitude, Without a single blot on his performance, that model is Che! If we want to express how we want our children to be, we must say with the whole heart of vehement revolutionaries: We want them to be like Che!</p>
<p>Che has become a model of man not only for our people, but for any people in Latin America. Che brought to its highest expression the revolutionary stoicism, the spirit of revolutionary sacrifice, the combativeness of the revolutionary, the working spirit of the revolutionary, and Che took the ideas of Marxism-Leninism to its freshest, purest, most revolutionary expression.</p>
<p>No man like him in these times has taken the proletarian internationalist spirit to its highest level!</p>
<p>And when one speaks of proletarian internationalist, and when one looks for an example of proletarian internationalist, that example, above any other example, is the example of Che! In his mind and in his heart the flags, the prejudices, the chauvinisms, the selfishness had disappeared, and his generous blood he was willing to shed for the fate of any people, for the cause of any people, and willing to shed it spontaneously, and ready to pour it instantly!</p>
<p>And so, his blood was shed on this earth when he was wounded in various battles; His blood for the redemption of the exploited and the oppressed, of the humble and the poor, was shed in Bolivia. That blood was shed for all the exploited, for all the oppressed; that blood was shed for all the peoples of America and spilled over Viet Nam, because there, fighting against the oligarchies, fighting against imperialism, he knew that he was offering Viet Nam the highest expression of its solidarity!</p>
<p>That is why, comrades of the Revolution, we must firmly look to the future and with determination; That is why we should look with optimism at the future. And we will always look to Che's example for inspiration, inspiration in struggle, inspiration in tenacity, inspiration in intransigence against the enemy and inspiration in internationalist sentiment!</p>
<p>That's why we tonight, after this impressive demonstration, after this incredible -for its magnitude, for its discipline and for its devotion- massive demonstration of acknowledgement, which shows how this is a sensitive people, which shows how this is a grateful people, which shows how this people knows how to honor the memory of the brave men who fall in combat, that shows how this people knows how to recognize those who serve them, that demonstrates how this people stands in solidarity with the revolutionary struggle , how this people will always raise and maintain the revolutionary flags and the revolutionary principles aloft; today, in these moments of remembrance, we raise our thoughts and, with optimism in the future, with absolute optimism in the definitive victory of the peoples, let us say to Che, and with him the heroes who fought and fell with him: Ever onward to victory!</p>
<p>Homeland or Death!</p>
<p>We will be victorious!</p>
<p>(OVATION)</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
Speech by the Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz at the solemnevening in memory of Commander Ernesto Che Guevara, in the Plaza de la Revolución, on October 18, 1967
Delivered: October 18, 1967
Source: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version, Stenographic Versions – Council of State.
Markup: David Walters, 2019
Online Version & translation: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
Revolutionary comrades:
It was a day in the month of July or August of 1955 when we met Che. And in one night - as he tells in his accounts - he became a future expeditionary of the "Granma". But at that time that expedition had no ship, no weapons, no troops. And it was like this, along with Raúl, Che joined the group of the first two on the list of "Granma".
Since then 12 years have passed; They have been 12 years full of struggle and history. Throughout those years, death cut short many valuable and irreplaceble lives; but, at the same time, throughout those years, extraordinary people emerged from our Revolution who and were forged among the men of the Revolution, and between men and the people, bonds of affection and bonds of friendship were built which go beyond all possible expression.
And tonight we gather, you and us, to try to somehow express those feelings in relation to who was one of the closest to us, one of the most admired, one of the most loved and, without a doubt, the most extraordinary of our revolutionary comrades; to express those feelings to him and to the heroes who have fought with him and to the heroes who have fallen with him, his internationalist army, which has been writing a glorious and indelible page in history.
Che was one of those persons to whom everyone immediately took affection, for his simplicity, for his character, for his sincerity, for his comradeship, for his personality, for his originality, even though we still did not know the other singular virtues which characterized him.
During those first moments he was our troop’s doctor. And so the bonds were forged and the comradeship feelings arose.
He was imbued with a deep spirit of hatred and contempt for imperialism, not only because his political background had already acquired a considerable degree of development, but because he had only recently had the opportunity to witness in Guatemala the criminal imperialist intervention through the mercenary soldiers who ruined the revolution in that country.
For a man like him, not so many arguments were necessary. It was enough for him to know that Cuba lived in a similar situation, it was enough for him to know that there were men determined to fight with weapons to change that situation, it was enough for him to know that those men were inspired by genuinely revolutionary and patriotic feelings. And that was more than enough.
This way, one day, by the end of November 1956, with us, he started the march towards Cuba. I remember that that journey was very hard for him since, given the circumstances in which it was the departure was organized, he could not even provide himself with the medicines he needed and he spent the whole voyage suffering a serious asthma attack without a single chance of relief, but also without a single complaint.
We arrived, we started the first walks, we suffered the first setback, and after a few weeks we met again - as you know - a group of those who remained from the "Granma" expedition. Che continued to be a doctor of our troop.
The first victorious combat took place and Che was already a soldier of our troop and, at the same time, he was still the doctor; the second victorious battle took place and Che was not only a soldier, but the most distinguished of the soldiers in that action, performing for the first time one of those singular feats that characterized him in all actions; Our strength continued to grow and a battle of extraordinary importance was fought at that time.
The situation was difficult. The information was in many ways wrong. We were going to attack in the middle of the day, at dawn, a strongly defended position, by the sea, well armed and with enemy troops to our rear. Not far away, and in the midst of that situation of confusion in which it was necessary to ask the men a supreme effort, once comrade Juan Almeida took up one of the most difficult missions. However one of the flanks was completely devoid of forces. So, one of the flanks was left without an attacking force, which could endanger the whole operation. And in that moment Che, who was still a doctor, asked for three or four men, among them a man with a machine-gun rifle, and in a matter of seconds he quickly set out to take the attack mission from that direction.
And on that occasion he was not only a distinguished combatant, but he was also a distinguished doctor, assisting wounded comrades, while assisting wounded enemy soldiers. And when it was necessary to leave that position, once all the weapons were seized and a long march began, harassed by different enemy forces, it was necessary to leave someone to stay with the wounded, and Che remained with the wounded. Helped by a small group of our soldiers, he took care of them, saved their lives and later those men joined the column.
From that moment he stood out as a capable and brave leader, the kind of men who, when faced with carrying out a difficult mission, do not wait to be asked to carry out the mission.
So he did during the combat of El Uvero, but had also done so on an occasion we hadn’t mentioned. It was during the early days when as a result of a betrayal, our small troop was attacked by surprise by several planes and when we retired under the bombing and had already walked a fair distance, we remember some of the rifles some peasant soldiers who had been with us in the first actions had left when they asked permission to visit their relatives at a time when there was still not much discipline in our incipient army. And at that moment the possibility was considered that those rifles were lost.
We remember how after we just raised the issue, and under the bombing, Che volunteered and by doing so he quickly left to recover those rifles.
That was one of its essential characteristics: the immediate, instantaneous willingness to offer himself to carry out the most dangerous mission. And that, of course, caused aroused the admiration, the double admiration towards that comrade who fought with us, who was not born on this land, who was a man of profound ideas, who was a man whose mind was full of dreams of struggle in other parts of the continent and yet, that altruism, that selflessness, that willingness to always do the most difficult, to risk your life constantly.
This is how he earned the rank of Commander and chief of the second column organized in the Sierra Maestra; This is how his prestige began to grow, as he began to acquire his reputation as a magnificent combatant which he took to the highest levels in the course of the war.
Che was an unsurpassable soldier; Che was an insuperable boss; Che was, from the military point of view, an extraordinarily capable man, extraordinarily courageous, extraordinarily aggressive. If as a guerrilla he had an Achilles heel, that Achilles heel was his excessive aggressiveness; it was his absolute contempt for danger.
The enemies try to draw conclusions from his death. Che was a master of the war, Che was an artist of the guerrilla struggle! And he showed it countless times but he showed it especially in two extraordinary feats, as was one of them the invasion leading a column, a column which was being pursued by thousands of soldiers through absolutely flat and unknown territory, carrying out - together with Camilo - a formidable military feat. But, in addition, he demonstrated it in his fulminating campaign in Las Villas; and he proved it, above all, in his audacious attack on the city of Santa Clara, penetrating with a column of barely 300 men in a city defended by tanks, artillery and several thousand infantrymen.
These two exploits consecrate him as an extraordinarily capable leader, as a teacher, as an artist of the revolutionary war.
However, after his heroic and glorious death others try to deny the truth and value of his ideas and guerrilla ideas.
The artist may die, especially when he is an artist of such dangerous art as the revolutionary struggle, but what will not die in any way is the art to which he dedicated his life and to which he devoted his intelligence.
What is strange about that artist dying in a fight? Still more extraordinary is the fact that on the countless occasions when he risked this life during our revolutionary struggle he would not have died in combat. And there were many times when it was necessary to act to prevent the loss of his life in actions of minor transcendence.
And so, in a fight, in one of the many battles he fought, he lost his life. We do not possess sufficient elements of judgment to be able to make any deduction about all the circumstances that preceded that combat, about the degree to which he could have acted in an excessively aggressive manner, but, we repeat, if as a guerrilla he had an Achilles heel, that heel Achilles was his excessive aggressiveness, his absolute contempt for danger.
mhat is what it is difficult to agree with him, since we understand that his life, his experience, his ability as a seasoned leader, his prestige and all that he meant in life, was much more, incomparably more, than the evaluation that maybe he made himself.
The idea that men have a relative value in history, the idea that causes are not defeated when men fall and the irrepressible march of history does not stop or stop before the fall, may have profoundly influenced their behavior of the leaders.
And that's true, that can not be doubted. That shows his faith in men, his faith in ideas, his faith in example. However, as I said a few days ago, we would have wished with all our heart to see him as the forger of the victories, forging our comrades and people under his leadership, forging victories under his direction, since the men of his experience, his caliber, his really singular capacity, They are rare men.
We are able to appreciate the full value of his example and we have the absolute conviction that this example will serve as encouragement and will serve to bring men similar to him from the bosom of the people.
It is not easy to combine in a person all the virtues that were conjugated in him. It is not easy for a person to spontaneously be able to develop a personality like his. I would say that he is one of those kind of men who are difficult to match and practically impossible to outclass. But we will also say that men like him are capable, with his example, of helping men similar to him to emerge.
The point is that it is not only the warrior what we admire in Che or the man capable of great feats. And what he did, and what he was doing, that fact in itself of facing with only a handful of men an entire oligarchic army, instructed by the Yankee advisers supplied by Yankee imperialism, supported by the oligarchies of all neighboring countries, that fact in itself constitutes an extraordinary feat.
And if you look in the pages of history, you will not possibly find any case in which someone with such a small number of men has undertaken a task of greater importance, in which someone with such a small number of men has undertaken the fight against such considerable forces. This proof of self-confidence, that proof of confidence in the people, that proof of faith in the ability of men to fight, can be sought in the pages of history, and yet nothing similar can be found
And he fell.
The enemies believe they have defeated his ideas, defeated his guerrilla conception, defeated his views on the armed revolutionary struggle. And what they achieved was, with a stroke of luck, to eliminate his physical life; what they did was to achieve the accidental advantages that an enemy can achieve in war. And that stroke of luck, that stroke of fortune we do not know to what extent helped by that characteristic to which we referred before of excessive aggressiveness, of absolute contempt for danger, shown in a combat like so many combats.
As it happened also in our War of Independence. In a fight in Dos Ríos they killed the Apostle of our independence. In a fight in Punta Brava they killed Antonio Maceo, veteran of hundreds of combats. In similar combats, countless leaders died, countless patriots of our independence war. And yet, that was not the defeat of the Cuban cause.
The death of Che - as we said a few days ago - is a hard blow, it is a tremendous blow for the revolutionary movement, as it deprives it without any doubt of any kind, of his most experienced and capable leader.
But those who sing victory are wrong. Those who believe his death is the defeat of his ideas, the defeat of his tactics, the defeat of his guerrilla conceptions, and the defeat of his thesis are mistaken. Because that man who fell as a mortal man, as a man who was exposed many times to bullets, as a soldier, as a leader, is a thousand times more capable than those who killed him with a stroke of luck.
However, how should revolutionaries face this adverse blow? How should we face that loss? What would be the opinion of Che if he had to make a judgment on this matter? That opinion he already gave, that opinion expressed it clearly, when he wrote in his message to the solidarity conference of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America that if he was surprised by death anywhere, it was always welcome that his shout of war, has reached a receptive ear, and another hand is extended to take up the weapon.
And that, his war cry, will reach not a receptive ear, but millions of receptive ears! And not a hand, but millions of hands, inspired by his example, will be extended to take up arms!
New leaders will emerge. And the men, the receptive ears and the extending hands, will need leaders who will emerge from the ranks of the people, as the bosses have emerged in all the revolutions.
These hands will not more count with a leader of the extraordinary experience, the enormous capacity of Che. Those leaders will be formed and trained in the process of the struggle, those leaders will emerge from the bosom of the millions of receptive ears, from the millions of hands that, sooner or later, will reach out to take up arms.
It is not that we consider that in practical terms his death will have an immediate repercussion in the revolutionary struggle. that in practical terms for the development of the struggle his death may have an immediate repercussion. But it is that Che, when he took up arms again, was not thinking of an immediate victory, was not thinking of a quick victory against the forces of the oligarchies and imperialism. His experienced combatant mind was prepared for a long fight of 5, 10, 15, 20 if necessary. He was willing to fight five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, all his life if necessary!
And it is with that perspective in time, that his death, his example -which is what we should say-, will have a tremendous repercussion, will have an invincible force.
Those who cling to a stroke of luck try in vain to deny his capacity as leader as well as his experience. Che was an extraordinarily capable military leader. But when we remember Che, when we think of Che, we are not thinking mainly about his military virtues. No! War is a means and not an end, war is an instrument of the revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution, what matters is the revolutionary cause, the revolutionary ideas, the revolutionary objectives, the revolutionary feelings, the revolutionary virtues!
And it is in this field, in the field of ideas, in the field of feelings, in the field of revolutionary virtues, in the field of intelligence, apart from its military virtues, where we feel the tremendous loss his death has meant for the Revolutionary movement.
Because Che possessed, in his extraordinary personality, virtues that rarely appear together. He excelled as a man of insurmountable action, but Che was not only a man of insurmountable action: Che was a man of profound thinking, visionary intelligence, a man of great culture. That is to say, he had in himself the man of ideas and the man of action.
But it is not that he just had those two features of being a man of ideas, a man of profound ideas, and also a man of action, but Che had in himself as a revolutionary the virtues that can be defined as the most complete expression of the virtues of a revolutionary: an upright, righteous man to the full, a man of supreme honesty, of absolute sincerity, a man of Stoic and Spartan life, a man to whom it is almost impossible to find a single stain in his conduct. He is because of his virtues what can be called a true revolutionary model.
Ordinarily, at the time of the death of men, speeches are made, virtues are highlighted, but rarely as it is the case today, it can be fairly said, seldom it can be spoken with more accuracy that a man was a man of virtue when we say of Che: That he was a true example of revolutionary virtues!
But we should also add to this another quality, which is not a quality of the intellect, which is not a quality of the will, a quality derived from experience, from the struggle, but a quality of the heart, because he was an extraordinarily human man, an extraordinarily sensitive human being!
That is why we say, when we think about his life, when we think about his conduct, that he was the singular case of a very strange man, as he was able to combine not only the characteristics of a man of action, but also those of a man of thought, in his personality. Of a man of immaculate revolutionary virtues and of extraordinary human sensibility, together with an iron forged character of iron, to a will of steel, to an indomitable tenacity.
And that is why he has bequeathed to future generations not only his experience, his knowledge as an outstanding soldier, but also the works of his intelligence. He wrote with the virtuosity of a classic. His narrations of the war are insurmountable. The depth of his thought is impressive. He never wrote about anything if he didn’t do it with absolute and extraordinary seriousness, with extraordinary depth; and we do not doubt that posterity will remember some of his writings as classic documents of revolutionary thinking.
And so, as a result of that vigorous and profound intelligence, he left us countless memories, countless stories that, without his work, without his effort, could have been forgotten for ever.
Unflagging worker, during the years he was at the service of our country he did not know a single day of respite. Many responsibilities were assigned to him: as President of the National Bank, as director of the Planning Board, as Minister of Industries, as Commander of military regions, as head of political, economic or fraternal delegations.
His multifaceted intelligence allowed him to undertake any task with confidence and certainty no matter how difficult. And so, he brilliantly represented our country in numerous international conferences, just as he brilliantly led the soldiers in combat, just as he was a model worker at the head of any of the institutions that he was assigned to run. , And for him there were no days of rest, for him there were no hours of rest! and if we looked to the windows of his offices, we could see the lights remained on until late at night, while he was studying, or rather, working and studying. Because he was a scholar of all problems, he was an tireless reader. His thirst to embrace human knowledge was practically insatiable, and the hours he snatched from sleep were devoted to study; and the days that were supposed to be days of rest were dedicated to volunteer work.
He was the inspirer and the greatest promoter of volunteer work which today is the activity of hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country, the driver of this activity which becomes stronger and stronger every day among the masses, among our people. And as a revolutionary, as a communist revolutionary, as a truly communist. He had an infinite faith in moral values, he had an infinite faith in the conscience of men. And we must say that in his conception he saw with absolute clarity tat in the building of communism in the human society moral incentives were to be the main driver.
Many things he thought, developed and wrote. And there is something that must be said on a day like today, and that is that the writings of Che, the political and revolutionary thinking of Che will have a permanent value in the Cuban revolutionary process and in the revolutionary process in Latin America. And we do not doubt that the value of his ideas, of his ideas as a man of action, as a man of thinking, as a man of moral virtues, as a man of unsurpassed human sensibility, as a man of irreproachable conduct, have and will have a universal value .
The imperialists chant voices of triumph in the face of the fact of the guerrilla killed in combat; the imperialists sing the triumph in face of the stroke of fortune that led them to eliminate such a formidable man of action. But the imperialists may ignore or pretend to ignore that the character of a man of action was one of the many facets of that combatant's personality. And if it is about pain, it hurts us not only that a man of action has been lost as, it hurts that a virtuous man has been lost , what hurts us is that a man of exquisite human sensibility and intelligence has been lost. It hurts us to think that he was only 39 years old at the time of his death, it hurts us to think of how many fruits of that intelligence and experience in growth we have missed the opportunity to witness in its full potential.
We can comprehend the dimension of the loss for the revolutionary movement. But, nevertheless, that is where the weak side of the imperialist enemy is: to believe that with the physical man they have killed they have liquidated his thinking, to believe that with the physical man he has liquidated his ideas, to believe that with the physical man he has killed his virtues, to believe that with the physical man they has killed his example. And they believe it in such an impudent manner that they do not hesitate to publish, as the most natural thing in the world, the circumstances almost universally accepted in which they killed him after having been seriously wounded in combat. They have not even noticed the repugnance of the procedure, they have not even noticed the impudence of recognition. And they have divulged as right of the henchmen, they have disclosed as right of the oligarchs and the mercenaries, the shooting against a revolutionary combatant seriously wounded.
And the worst is that they also explain why they did it, alleging that the trial in which they would have had to judge Che would have been tremendous, arguing that it would have been impossible to seat such a revolutionary on the bench.
And not only that, but also they have not hesitated to make his remains disappear. And be it true or lie, is the fact that they claim to have incinerated his body, with which they begin to show their fear, with which they begin to show they are not so convinced that killing the physical life of the fighter they killed his ideas and killed his example.
Che did not fall defending any other interest, defending any other cause but the cause of the exploited and the oppressed in this continent; Che did not fall defending any other cause but the cause of the poor and the humble of this Earth. And the exemplary and selfless way in which he defended that cause is something that not even his most bitter enemies dare to dispute.
and before history, men who act like him, men who do everything and give everything for the sake of the humble, become bigger and bigger every day get deeper and deeper into the hearts of the people .
And the imperialist enemies are already beginning to notice it, and it will not be long before they prove that his death will eventually be like a seed from which many men determined to emulate hid deeds will emerge, many men determined to follow his example.
And we are absolutely convinced that the revolutionary cause in this continent will recover from the blow, that the revolutionary cause in this continent will not be defeated by that blow.
From the revolutionary point of view, from the point of view of our people, how should we look at the example of Che? Do we think that we have lost him? It is true that we will not see new writings again, it is certain that we will not hear his voice again. But Che has left the world with a heritage, a great patrimony, and we, who knew him so closely, can be heirs of his heritage.
He left us his revolutionary thinking, he left us his revolutionary virtues, he left us his character, his will, his tenacity, his spirit of work. In a word, he left us his example! And the example of Che should be a model for our people, the example of Che should be the ideal model for our people!
If we want to express how we aspire our revolutionary combatants to be, our militants, our men, we must say without hesitation of any kind: Let them be like Che! If we want to express how we want the men of future generations to be, we must say: Let them be like Che! If we want to say how we want our children to be educated, we must say without hesitation: We want them to be educated in the spirit of Che! If we want a model of man, a model of man that does not belong to this time, a model of man that belongs to the future, I say with my heart that model without a single stain in his behavior, without a single stain in his attitude, Without a single blot on his performance, that model is Che! If we want to express how we want our children to be, we must say with the whole heart of vehement revolutionaries: We want them to be like Che!
Che has become a model of man not only for our people, but for any people in Latin America. Che brought to its highest expression the revolutionary stoicism, the spirit of revolutionary sacrifice, the combativeness of the revolutionary, the working spirit of the revolutionary, and Che took the ideas of Marxism-Leninism to its freshest, purest, most revolutionary expression.
No man like him in these times has taken the proletarian internationalist spirit to its highest level!
And when one speaks of proletarian internationalist, and when one looks for an example of proletarian internationalist, that example, above any other example, is the example of Che! In his mind and in his heart the flags, the prejudices, the chauvinisms, the selfishness had disappeared, and his generous blood he was willing to shed for the fate of any people, for the cause of any people, and willing to shed it spontaneously, and ready to pour it instantly!
And so, his blood was shed on this earth when he was wounded in various battles; His blood for the redemption of the exploited and the oppressed, of the humble and the poor, was shed in Bolivia. That blood was shed for all the exploited, for all the oppressed; that blood was shed for all the peoples of America and spilled over Viet Nam, because there, fighting against the oligarchies, fighting against imperialism, he knew that he was offering Viet Nam the highest expression of its solidarity!
That is why, comrades of the Revolution, we must firmly look to the future and with determination; That is why we should look with optimism at the future. And we will always look to Che's example for inspiration, inspiration in struggle, inspiration in tenacity, inspiration in intransigence against the enemy and inspiration in internationalist sentiment!
That's why we tonight, after this impressive demonstration, after this incredible -for its magnitude, for its discipline and for its devotion- massive demonstration of acknowledgement, which shows how this is a sensitive people, which shows how this is a grateful people, which shows how this people knows how to honor the memory of the brave men who fall in combat, that shows how this people knows how to recognize those who serve them, that demonstrates how this people stands in solidarity with the revolutionary struggle , how this people will always raise and maintain the revolutionary flags and the revolutionary principles aloft; today, in these moments of remembrance, we raise our thoughts and, with optimism in the future, with absolute optimism in the definitive victory of the peoples, let us say to Che, and with him the heroes who fought and fell with him: Ever onward to victory!
Homeland or Death!
We will be victorious!
(OVATION)
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<p class="title">Fidel Castro Internet Archive</p>
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<h1>Address Speech by Commander-In-Chief Fidel Castro on his arrival in Havana on 8 January 1959</h1>
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<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> April 14, 1959<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version. Translation of the stenographic version, filed at the Prime Minister's offices.<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> David Walters, 2019<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
</p>
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<p class="fst">Fellow countrymen,</p>
<p>Speaking here tonight, I'm presented with perhaps one of the most difficult tasks in this long struggle, which began on November 30, 1956, in Santiago de Cuba.</p>
<p>The people are listening, the revolutionary fighters are listening, and the regular troops - whose fate is in our hands - are listening also.</p>
<p>I believe this to be a turning point in our history: the tyranny has been overthrown. The rejoicing is immense. But there is still much to be done. We mustn't fool ourselves into believing that the future will be easy; everything may be more difficult in the future.</p>
<p>Telling the truth is the first duty of all revolutionaries. Deceiving the people, raising false hopes, always brings the worst consequences, and I feel it's necessary to warn everyone against over-optimism.</p>
<p>How did the Rebel Army win the war? Telling the truth. How did the tyranny lose the war? Deceiving the troops.</p>
<p>When we suffered a setback, we announced it over Radio Rebelde, criticizing the mistakes any officer may have made, and warning all the comrades to make sure they didn't let the same thing happen to any other unit. That was not the way with the army units. Many of them repeated the same mistakes, because the officers and troops were never told the truth.</p>
<p>That's why I mean to start - or rather continue - with the same system: that of always telling the people the truth.</p>
<p>We have made headway, maybe taken a big step forward. Here we are in the capital, here we are in Columbia: the revolutionary forces have apparently prevailed; a government has been formed and recognized by several countries in the world; it seems the peace has been won. Nevertheless, we mustn't be complacent. While the people were laughing today, while the people were cheering, we were worrying; and the bigger the crowds that came to welcome us, and the greater the jubilation of the people, the more we worried, because also the greater was our obligation to history and to the people of Cuba.</p>
<p>The Revolution is still being led by an army in battle order. Who, now and in the future, may be the enemies of the Revolution? Who, standing before this victorious people, could be the future enemies of the Revolution? The worst enemies which the Cuban Revolution could face in the future are us, the revolutionaries.</p>
<p>This is what I always told the rebel fighters: when we no longer have the enemy before us, when the war is over, we ourselves are potentially the only enemies of the Revolution; that is why we said, and I repeat, that we will be tougher on the rebel soldiers than on anyone else, more demanding than with anyone else, because the triumph or failure of the Revolution will depend on them.</p>
<p>There are many kinds of revolutionaries. We have been hearing talk about revolution for a long time: up to 10th March, they were saying that a revolution was under way, "revolution" was on everyone's lips, and everything was "revolutionary". The soldiers were assembled here and were told about the "10th March Revolution" (LAUGHTER).</p>
<p>We've been hearing talk about revolutionaries for a long time. I remember my first notions of the revolutionary, before study and a certain maturity made me aware of what a revolution really was, and what a revolutionary really was. Our first impressions of revolutionaries were gained as children, and we were told: so-and-so was a revolutionary, fought in this or that engagement, or this or that operation, or placed bombs; or some other Joe was a revolutionary. "Revolutionary" even became a class. At that time there were revolutionaries who saw revolution as a living, who wanted a living based on having been a revolutionary, on having placed a bomb, or two bombs. And maybe those that talked the most were the ones who'd done least. But the fact is that they applied to the ministries for jobs, so as to live parasitic existences, to reap the rewards for what they had done at that time, for a revolution which sadly never got off the ground. It seems to me that the first revolution with a real chance of succeeding is this one, so long as we don't let it slip through our fingers... (SHOUTS OF "No!" AND APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>The revolutionary of my childhood went about with a .45-calibre gun in his belt and wanted to live on the respect it commanded. He was to be feared: he was capable of killing anyone. He would arrive at the office of high officials with the air of a man who must be listened to. In reality, we wondered: where is the revolution these people fought? Because there was no revolution, and very few revolutionaries.</p>
<p>The first thing that we, the protagonists of this Revolution, must ask ourselves, is what did we expect to achieve? Whether in any of us lurked ambition, a desire to command, some ignoble purpose; whether there was an idealist in each of those who fought in this revolution, or was it someone who was using idealism as a pretext for pursuing other ends; whether we undertook this revolution thinking that as soon as the tyranny was defeated, we would take over the reins of power; whether we were all going to drive around in limousines; whether we were all going to live like kings, whether we would all have mansions, and that life for us would be a stroll in the park, on the strength of having been revolutionaries and having vanquished the tyranny; whether what we were planning was to oust certain politicians; whether what we were planning was simply to remove certain men and put others in their place; or whether we were all truly disinterested, whether we all acted out of a spirit of self-sacrifice, whether all of us were willing to give our all and receive nothing in return, and whether, beforehand, we were ready to give up everything and continue on the austere path of the genuine revolutionary (PROLONGED APPLAUSE). We must address that question, because such soul-searching could have far-reaching implications for the future destiny of Cuba, of ourselves and of the people.</p>
<p>When I hear mention of columns, when I hear mention of battle fronts, when I hear mention of more-or-less heavy troop concentrations, I always think: I have our strongest column right here, our best troops - the only troops able to win the war alone - right here. Those troops are the people! (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>No general is a greater asset than the people; no army is a greater force than the people. If you asked me what troops I prefer to lead, I would say I prefer to command the people (APPLAUSE), because the people are invincible. And it was the people who won this war, because we had no tanks, we had no planes, we had no heavy artillery, we had no military academies, we had no recruitment and training camps, we had no divisions, or regiments, or companies, or platoons, or even squads (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Well then. Who won the war? The people, the people won the war. This war wasn't won by anyone except the people - I say that in case anyone thinks he won it, or if some troop unit thinks they won it (APPLAUSE). And so the victor's crown goes to the people.</p>
<p>But there's another thing: the Revolution doesn't affect me as a person, or any other commander as a person; or any captain, or any column, or any company. Who the Revolution affects is the people (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>It's the people who gain or lose with the Revolution. If it was the people who suffered the horrors of these seven years, it is the people who must now consider whether in 10, 15 or 20 years they, and their children, and their grandchildren, are going to go on suffering the horrors the Republic of Cuba has suffered from its inception, crowned with dictatorships like those of Machado and those of Batista (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>The people are greatly affected by whether we're going to make a good job of this revolution, or if we're going to make the same mistakes as in the last revolution, or the one before that, or the one before that. And so we'll suffer the consequences of our mistakes, since there are no mistakes which do not affect the people, no political mistake which does not have to be paid for, sooner or later.</p>
<p>Circumstances alter cases. For instance, I think the present opportunity offers more chances than ever before for the Revolution to fully meet its aims. Perhaps that's why the people are so jubilant, forgetting somewhat the toil and sweat that still lie ahead.</p>
<p>One of the nation's main desires, a reflection of the past horrors of the repression and the war, is the yearning for peace, for peace with freedom, for peace with justice, for peace with rights. Nobody wants peace on other terms: Batista talked about peace, about order, but no-one wanted that peace, because its price was subjugation.</p>
<p>Now the people have the sort of peace they wanted: peace without dictatorship, peace without censorship, peace without persecution (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Perhaps the greatest joy at this moment is felt by Cuban mothers. Mothers of soldiers, mothers of revolutionaries, mothers of any citizen, are now basking in the knowledge that their sons are finally out of danger (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>The worst crime that could be committed now in Cuba, would be a crime against the peace. The thing that nobody in Cuba could forgive now would be if someone conspired against the peace (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Anyone who acts now against the nation's peace, anyone who threatens the peace of mind and happiness of millions of Cuban mothers, is a criminal and a traitor (APPLAUSE). Anybody who is unwilling to give up something for the sake of peace, who is unwilling to give up everything for the sake of the nation's peace at this juncture, is a criminal and a traitor (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Since that's how I see things, I say and I swear before my compatriots that if any of my comrades, or our movement, or I myself, prove to be the slightest obstacle to the nation's peace, from this very moment the people may do with all of us what they will, and tell us what we must do (APPLAUSE). Because I'm a man capable of self-sacrifice, as I have demonstrated more than once in my life, and have passed on to my comrades; I believe I have earned the moral right and have the standing and authority to speak at such a moment as this (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF "Long live Fidel Castro!")</p>
<p>And those to whom I should speak first are the revolutionaries, in case of the need - or rather, because of the need - to get the message across early.</p>
<p>The decade following the Machado's fall is not far behind us. Perhaps one of the greatest evils of that struggle was the spawning of bands of revolutionaries, which promptly started shooting at each other (APPLAUSE). And as a result, what happened was the arrival of Batista, who stayed in power for 11 years.</p>
<p>When the 26th July Movement was organized, also when we started this war, I thought that although the sacrifices we were making were great, although the conflict would be long - and it has been: over two years, two years that were no picnic for us, two years of hard struggle, from when we restarted the campaign with a handful of men, until we arrived at the capital of the Republic. Despite the sacrifices that awaited us, we were comforted by an idea: it was clear that that the 26th July Movement had the overwhelming support and sympathy of the people (APPLAUSE); it was clear that the 26th July Movement had the almost unanimous support of Cuba's youth (APPLAUSE). It seemed that, this time, a large, powerful organization would be able to calm the anxieties of our people, and would forestall the terrible consequences of the proliferation of revolutionary organizations.</p>
<p>I think we should all have belonged to a single revolutionary organization from the outset, either ours or someone else's - the 26th, the 27th or the 50th or whatever. If in the last analysis we were all the same, whether we fought in the Sierra Maestra or in the Escambray or in Pinar del Río, and were young men, and men with the same ideals, what was the point of having half a dozen revolutionary organizations?</p>
<p>Ours was simply the first; our was simply the one which fought the first battle at the Moncada barracks, the one which landed from the 'Granma' on 2nd December (APPLAUSE), and which fought alone against the tyranny's entire force for over a year (APPLAUSE); which had a mere 12 men, kept the rebel flag flying, showed the people that it was possible to fight and to win; which put paid to all the false notions in the country about revolution. Because here everyone was conspiring with the corporal, with the sergeant, or bringing weapons into Havana, which were seized by the police (APPLAUSE), until we arrived and showed that that wasn't the way to fight, that a different approach was needed, that new tactics and strategies had to be invented, that it was the strategies and tactics which we had put into practice which led to the most remarkable victory in the history of the Cuban people (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>And I want the Cuban people to tell me honestly whether or not this is true (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF "Yes!")</p>
<p>And another question: the 26th July Movement had a clear majority of the people's support - is that true or not? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!"). And how did the struggle end? I'll tell you: the Rebel Army (which is what our army is called), from what was started in the Sierra Maestra, by time of the fall of the tyranny, had taken the whole of Oriente, the whole of Camagüey province, part of Las Villas, the whole of Matanzas, La Cabaña, Columbia, the police prefecture and Pinar del Río (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>The end of the conflict was determined by the coordination of our forces: not for nothing our columns crossed the Camagüey plains - pursued by thousands of troops with air support - and reached Las Villas; and because the Rebel Army had Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) at Las Villas, and because it had Comandante Ernesto Guevara at Las Villas (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) on 1st January, following Cantillo's treachery (SHOUTS OF "Down with traitors!")… Because it had them there, on the 1st , I was able to order Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos to advance with 500 men on the capital and attack Columbia (APPLAUSE); because it had Comandante Ernesto Guevara at Las Villas, I was able to tell him to advance on the capital and take La Cabaña (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>All the regiments, all the significant military strongholds, were in the hands of the Rebel Army. And nobody gave them to us; nobody said to us:"Go there, go there, go there". It was our efforts and our sacrifice, our experience and our organization, which led to those results (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Does this mean the others didn't fight? No. Does this mean that the others deserve no credit? No. Because we all of us fought, because the whole people fought. There was no Sierra in Havana, but there are hundreds of dead comrades, murdered for doing their revolutionary duty. There was no Sierra in Havana, but even so the general strike was a decisive factor in the completeness of the Revolutionary victory (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>In saying this, all I'm doing is putting things in context: the role of the 26th July Movement in this struggle, how it guided the people in those moments when elections and electioneering were talked about here. Once I had to write an article from Mexico entitled "Frente a Todos", because we were at odds with the general opinion, defending our revolutionary manifesto, the strategy of this revolution, which was drawn up by the Movement; and the culmination of this revolution, which was the crushing defeat of the tyranny, with its key strongholds in the hands of the Rebel Army, organized by the 26th July Movement.</p>
<p>The 26th July Movement not only devised the guidelines for war but also established how the enemy was to be treated during the hostilities. This has been perhaps the first revolution in history in which not a single prisoner of war has been murdered (PROLONGED APPLAUSE); in which no wounded have been abandoned, in which no-one has been tortured (APPLAUSE); because that was the standing order established by the rebel Army. And another thing: this is the only revolution in the world which has not produced a general (APPLAUSE) or even a colonel, because the rank I took or my comrades assigned to me was that of comandante [major], and I haven't changed it, despite our having won numerous battles and having won the war; I'm still a comandante, and I don't want any other rank (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>And the moral effect, the fact that we who started this war chose a particular rank within the military hierarchy, was that no-one dared to rank themselves above the level of comandante - although by the look of things, this has resulted in a surfeit of comandantes.</p>
<p>I think the people agree with my not mincing words, because having fought as I have for the rights of every citizen at least gives me the right to tell the truth out loud (APPLAUSE). And also because the interests of the homeland are in play: I won't countenance the slightest compromise with risks threatening the Cuban Revolution (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Does everyone have the same moral right to speak? I say that those to whom more credit is due have more right to speak than those less meritorious. I think that men who seek equality of moral prerogatives should first earn equality of merit. I believe the Revolution has culminated as it should, with Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos - veteran of two years and one month of fighting - (APPLAUSE), as the chief of Columbia; with comandante Efigenio Ameijeiras, who lost three brothers in this war and is a veteran of the 'Granma' and comandante by virtue of the battles he has waged (APPLAUSE), as the Republic's Chief of Police; and with Ernesto Guevara - true hero, member of the 'Granma' expedition and veteran of two years and one month of fighting in Cuba's highest and toughest mountain terrain - as chief of La Cabaña (APPLAUSE); and with each regiment in the various provinces commanded by the men who have sacrificed most and fought hardest for this revolution. And if that's the way things are, no-one has the right to object.</p>
<p>First and foremost, merit must be recognized; those who do not recognize merit are mere upstarts (APPLAUSE), lacking the merits of others but seeking the same prerogatives.</p>
<p>The Republic, or the Revolution, is entering a new stage. Would it be right for ambition or the cult of personality to emerge and threaten the destiny of the Revolution? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). What is it that interests the people, because it is the people who have the last word here? (SHOUTS OF "Freedom! Freedom!"). They are interested first and foremost in freedoms, in the rights they were deprived of, and in peace. And they've got them, because they now have all the freedoms, all the rights that the tyranny took from them, and they have peace (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>What do the people want? An honest government. An honest government: isn't that what the people want? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!"). They have it here: an upright judge as President of the Republic (APPLAUSE). What do they want - young and honest men as ministers in the revolutionary government? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!"). They have them here: examine the ministers of the revolutionary government one by one, and tell me whether there's a thief or a criminal or a scoundrel among them (SHOUTS OF "No!").</p>
<p>There are many men eligible to be ministers in Cuba by virtue of their integrity and ability, but they can't all be ministers, because there can be only 14, 15 or 16. And the people don't care who so-and-so is, but that whoever he is, that he is young and honest (APPLAUSE). And here the important thing is that those who've been appointed have those qualities, and not whether so-and-so is in or out, because the so-and-so's don't matter a damn at this juncture, to the Revolution or to the Republic (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Can anyone, aspiring to be a minister, seek to shed blood in this country? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). Can any group, having been denied three or four ministries, shed blood in this country or undermine the peace? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). If the governing team which the Cuban people have now is no good, the people will have the opportunity of throwing it out - not voting for it at the polls, but ousting it in an election (APPLAUSE). This isn't a case where the way to get rid of a mediocre government team is for someone start a revolution or carry out a coup d'état, since everybody knows that elections will be held and if the administration is no good, the people will have the last word, without let or hindrance. Not doing what Batista did, 80 days before an election, saying that he was fighting the government and making a series of accusations against that government, saying that it was his mission to get rid of it and that this was the patriotic thing to do. Coups d'état and attacks on the constitution and rule of law are gone forever from here (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>These things need to be said, to prevent the emergence of demagoguery and misinformation and attempts to divide us; to ensure that the first sign of vaunting ambition by anyone is recognized at once by the people (APPLAUSE). And for my part, I say that since who I want to command is the people, because they are the best troops, and that I prefer the people to all the armed columns put together; I say that the first thing I will always do when I see a threat to the Revolution, is to call on the people (APPLAUSE). Because by talking to the people, we can avoid bloodshed. Because here, we should call on the people a thousand times before firing a shot, and talk to the people so that the people, without shoot-outs, solve the problems. I have faith in the people, and I know what the people can do and I believe I have demonstrated it; and I say that if the people so choose, there will never be another shot fired in this country (APPLAUSE). Because public opinion has tremendous strength and has tremendous influence, especially when there's no dictatorship. Under dictatorship, public opinion is nothing; in times of freedom, public opinion is everything, and the guns must yield and kneel before public opinion (APPLAUSE). How am I doing, Camilo? (SHOUTS OF "Long live Camilo!")</p>
<p>I am speaking to the people in this way because I have always liked to look ahead, and I think that talking to the people ahead of events can protect the Revolution from the only remaining future threats; while these are not great, I want to make sure that the Revolution can take root without the shedding of another drop of Cuban blood (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>My main concern is that abroad, where the Revolution has caught the imagination of the whole world, it must not be said that, within three weeks, or four weeks, or a month, or one week, more Cuban blood has been shed to consolidate this Revolution, because in that case this Revolution would not be an example (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>I would not have talked like this when we were a group of 12 men, because when we were a group of 12 men all we had to look forward to was fighting, fighting, fighting. And in those circumstances, fighting was right. But now, when we've got the planes, the tanks, the artillery and the immense majority of men under arms, and a navy, several army companies and enormous military power (SHOUTS OF "And the people!" "And the people!") People … What I'm saying is: now that we have all that, I'm alarmed by the idea of fighting, because now there's no merit in fighting. I'd rather go back to the Sierra Maestra, with 12 men, to fight all the tanks, than come with all the tanks to shoot at anyone here (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>And those I ask to give us much help, those I beg to help me, are the people (APPLAUSE), public opinion, so as to disarm the power-hungry, to denounce immediately those who are now beginning to show their true colors (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>I'm not today going to embark on personal or specific attacks, because it's early days, too soon to start public controversies - although when the time comes, I don't mind, because I have no inhibitions about plain speaking when it's necessary - and because the people are rejoicing, and because among the body of fighters - I'm not saying among all their leaders, but certainly most of their leaders - and there's Carlos Prío Socarrás, for example, who came to Cuba with the aim of helping the Revolution with no strings attached, as he says, absolutely without any ulterior motive (APPLAUSE); he has made no protest about what's happened, not the slighted protest, has not made the least complaint, or expressed the least disagreement regarding the cabinet; he knows the cabinet is composed of honest men and of young men, who well deserve a vote of confidence in their work.</p>
<p>And then there are the leaders of other organizations, equally prepared. And there's another thing: the bodies of fighting men, the men who fought and who were motivated solely by ideals, the men who fought, in all the organizations: they are figures of high patriotism, with strongly revolutionary, noble sentiments, who will always think the way the people think; I'm sure that whoever commits the lunacy of trying to spark a civil war will incur the condemnation of the entire people (APPLAUSE) and will lose the support of the rank-and-file fighters, who will not follow him. And it would be lunacy indeed, to challenge not only our forces in their present condition, but also to defy reason, the law of the land and the entire Cuban people (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>And I'm saying all this because I want to ask the people a question: I want to ask the people a question that interests me greatly, and interests the people greatly; so tell me: To what end, at this juncture, are clandestine weapons being stockpiled? Why are weapons being hidden in various parts of Havana? What are weapons being smuggled in for, at this juncture? What for? I'm telling you there are elements of a certain revolutionary organization who are hiding weapons (SHOUTS OF "Let's find them!"), who are stockpiling arms and are smuggling arms. All the arms captured by the Rebel Army are in the barracks, where not a single weapon has been touched, nobody has taken any home, or hidden any. They are in the barracks under lock and key. It's the same in Pinar del Río, in La Cabaña, in Columbia, in Matanzas, in Santa Clara, in Camagüey, and in Oriente. Nobody has loaded up trucks with weapons to hide them anywhere: these weapons are in the barracks.</p>
<p>I'm going to ask you a question, because speaking frankly and analyzing problems is how you solve them, and I'm ready to do everything in my power to solve them as they should be solved: with reasoning and intelligence, and with the influence of public opinion, which is in charge, and not with force. Because if one believes in force, if problems had to be solved by the use of force, there would be no need to talk to the people, or to put this problem to them, but to go and look for those arms (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>And what we must try to do here is persuade the revolutionary fighters, the idealists, who could be misled by such machinations, to turn their backs on the treacherous honchos who are involved in these activities, and align themselves with those they serve first and foremost - the people.</p>
<p>I'm going to ask you a question: Weapons for what purpose? To fight whom? To fight the revolutionary government, which has the support of the entire people? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). Is the Republic's present Urrutia administration the same as the Batista administration? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). Weapons for what purpose? Is there a dictatorship here? (SHOUTS OF "No!") Are they going to attack a free government that respects the rights of the people? (SHOUTS OF "No!") Now, when there's no censorship, when the press is completely free, freer than it's ever been, and has the certainty of knowing that it will always be free, that censorship is gone forever? (APPLAUSE). Now, when the whole people can assemble freely? Now, when there's no torture, no political prisoners, no murders, no terror? Now, when there's nothing but joy, when all the traitorous union leaders have been sacked and we're on the point of holding elections in all the unions? (APPLAUSE). When all the citizen's rights have been restored, when elections are to be called as soon as possible - arms for what? Hiding arms to what end? To blackmail the President of the Republic? To threaten the peace? To set up gangster organizations? Are we to go back to daily shoot-outs in the streets of Havana? Arms for what?</p>
<p>Well, I can tell you that two days ago, elements of a certain organization went to a barracks - the San Antonio barracks which were under the jurisdiction of Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos and under my jurisdiction as Commander-In-Chief of all the forces - and made off with the arms stored there; they took 500 small arms, 6 machine guns and 80,000 cartridges (SHOUTS OF "Let's find them!").</p>
<p>And I tell you frankly there could not have been a worse provocation. Because to do this to men who've been fighting for this country for years, to men who are now tasked with keeping the nation's peace and are trying to do things properly, is a shameful act and an unjustifiable provocation.</p>
<p>And what we've done is not to go looking for those guns, exactly because - as I said earlier - what we want is to talk to the people, use the influence of public opinion, so that the honchos behind these criminal operations find themselves without men. So that the idealistic fighters - they're true idealists, the men who fought in all the organizations here - know about it, so they can demand accountability for these acts.</p>
<p>And that's why we haven't even allowed ourselves to be provoked, why we have kept our cool despite this stealing of weapons - an unjustifiable theft because here there is no dictatorship; no-one is afraid that we're going to turn into dictators - and I'll tell you why: those who become dictators are those who don't have the support of the people, who have to resort to force because they don't get votes at election time (APPLAUSE). We couldn't become dictators, we who have evoked such affection - universal, total and absolute affection - among the people. Not to mention our principles, which would never allow us the effrontery of holding onto a position by force, because that disgusts us - it's not for nothing that we have been the standard bearers in a struggle against an ugly, repellent tyranny (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>We will never need to use force, because the people are with us, and also because the day the people frown on us will be the last day they do so: we'll quit (APPLAUSE). Because we see this as duty, not as a pleasure; we see this as work, which may mean that we go without sleep, without rest, without food, traveling around the island and working honestly to serve our country. It means something that we have nothing, and that we will always be men who have nothing (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF: "You have the people!"). And the people will never see us commit acts of immorality or grant privileges to anybody or tolerate an injustice or steal or make ourselves rich or anything of the kind. Because we see power as self-sacrifice, and believe me, if it were not so, after all the show of affection I've had from the people, all this tremendous demonstration today, if one were not committed to performing a duty, one should depart, or retire, or die, because after so much affection and so much trust, not doing one's duty to this people is simply unthinkable! (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>And if it weren't for this duty, if it weren't for this duty - I'm telling you - what I would do now is take my leave of the people and keep with me always the affection I've received today, and have people address me with same terms of encouragement with which they have addressed me today.</p>
<p>However, I know that power is a burdensome, a complicated affair, that our missions and tasks are difficult, like this very problem which has confronted us, which is a really difficult one, a hard nut to crack, and one tackles it because the one thing one is not going to say to the people at this juncture is "I'm leaving". (SHOUTS OF "Long live the father of the homeland!" FOLLOWED BY AN OVATION).</p>
<p>There is another reason we're not interested in using force: on the day anyone takes up arms here, I would go so far as to call on my worst enemy, on the person who was the most inimical to me and, assuming he was prepared to do the will of the people, I would tell him: "Look, take all these forces, all these troops and all these arms" and I would be so easy in my mind, because I know that the day there's an armed uprising, I'll head straight back to the Sierra Maestra and we'd see how long the new dictatorship stayed in power (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>I think there are more than enough reasons for everyone to see that we have no interest in exercising power by the use of force.</p>
<p>The President of the Republic has entrusted me with the thorniest of tasks, that of reorganizing the Republic's armed institutions, and has assigned to me the post of Commander-In-Chief of all the nation's air, sea and land-based forces (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF "You deserve it!"). No, I don't deserve it, because it's a sacrifice for me, and it's absolutely no reason for pride, no reason for vanity; for me, it's a sacrifice. But I want the people to tell me whether they think I should take the job (PROLONGED APPLAUSE AND (SHOUTS OF "Yes!").</p>
<p>I think that if we created an army with 12 men, and those 12 men are now in positions of command, I think that if we taught our army that no prisoner can be murdered, that the wounded can never be abandoned, that no prisoner can ever be beaten, we are the men who can teach the Republic's armed institutions the same things that we taught that army (APPLAUSE). To have armed institutions in which not a single one of their men ever again beats a prisoner, or tortures one or kills one (APPLAUSE). And also because we can serve as a bridge between the revolutionaries and the decent soldiers, the ones who have not stolen or murdered, because those soldiers, the ones who have not stolen or murdered, have the right to remain in the armed forces (APPLAUSE); by the same token, there'll be no escape from the firing squad for those who have committed murder (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Moreover, all the revolutionary fighters who want to belong to the Republic's regular forces have the right, whatever organization they belong to, to keep their existing ranks … The doors are open to all the revolutionary fighting men who want to pitch in, who want to do something useful for the country. And if that's the case, if there are freedoms, if there is government by honest young men, if the country is satisfied, if it trusts that government and the men in command of the armed forces, if there are going to be elections, if the doors are open to everyone, why stockpile weapons?</p>
<p>I want you to tell me whether what the people want is that we make peace, or whether they want a guy with a gun on every street corner; I want you to tell me if the people are in agreement with or believe it to be right that everyone here who wants a private army can have one, and can stop following his superior's orders (SHOUTS OF "No!"); and whether that's the way to get order and peace in the Republic of Cuba (SHOUTS OF "No!").</p>
<p>(SOMEONE SHOUTS: "Purging of the armed forces!")</p>
<p>'Super-purging', not purging (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>(SHOUTS OF: "Tell us about Raúl"!). Raúl is at the Moncada barracks, which is where he should be now.</p>
<p>And these are the issues I wanted to raise with the people today. As soon as possible the guns must leave the streets, the guns must disappear from the streets (APPLAUSE). Because there is no longer an enemy confronting us, because there's no longer any reason to fight anybody. And if one day it becomes necessary to fight a foreign enemy or a movement that attacks the Revolution, it won't be some limited engagement, it'll be the entire people that fight (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>The weapons belong in the barracks. Nobody has the right to a private army here (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>The elements carrying on these suspicious operations have maybe found an excuse for these in the fact that I've been appointed, together with my comrades, to do a job assigned to us by the President, and have suggested the existence of a political army. A political army? As I've been saying, the entire people are with us; does that really make ours a political army?</p>
<p>I want the people to know, I want Cuban mothers to know, that I will always do whatever is in our power to solve the country's problems without shedding a drop of blood (APPLAUSE). I want Cuban mothers to know that not another shot will be fired here on our account; and I want to ask the people, and to ask the press, and to ask every sane, reasonable man in the country, to help us solve these problems with the support of public opinion; not with horse-trading, because when people arm themselves and make threats in order to get something, that is immoral and I'll never have truck with it (APPLAUSE). Now that certain elements have started stockpiling weapons, I can assure you that I won't accept the slightest concession, because that would be debasing the ideals of the Revolution (APPLAUSE). And what needs to be done is to get those who don't belong to the Republic's regular forces - to which every revolutionary fighting man has the right to belong - to return the weapons to the barracks, because weapons are superfluous here, now there's no tyranny, and it's been demonstrated that arms are only appropriate when there's a good reason for having them and the people are behind you; otherwise, all they're good for is murder and kidnapping (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>I want to tell the people also that they can be sure that the law of the land with be respected, that there'll be no gangsterism here, nor street gangs, nor banditry, simply because there will be zero tolerance. The Republic's weaponry is now in the hands of the revolutionaries. I hope those arms will never have to be used, but on the day when the people orders their deployment to ensure peace, law and order, or the exercise of their rights, when the people so order, when the people so desire, in the presence of a real need, then the arms will do their job, will do their duty, simply (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>Let no-one think that we're going to respond to provocation; because we're too level-headed to respond to provocation, because we have responsibilities too important for us ever to take hasty measures or engage in saber-rattling or anything of that kind, and because I'm acutely aware of the need to exhaust - and I will always exhaust - every means of persuasion, every reasonable means, every human means to avoid the shedding of another drop of blood in Cuba. So as far as provocations are concerned, no-one needs to worry that I'm going to go off the deep end; because when the patience of all of us has run out, we'll get some more patience, and when that runs out, we'll get even more. That will be our rule (APPLAUSE). And that must be among the standing orders of every man bearing arms and of those wielding power: never tire of forbearance, never tire of accepting abuse and provocations of all kinds, except in cases threatening the most sacrosanct interests of the people. But then only when the case is clear-cut, only when demanded by the whole nation, the press, the civic institutions, the workers' organizations, and the people as a whole; when they call for action, and only then. And what I will always do in these circumstances, is come to the people and explain: "Look, this has happened".</p>
<p>On this occasion, I've avoided naming names, because I don't want to poison the atmosphere, and because I don't want to add to the tension; all I want is, simply, to avoid these dangers to the people, because it would be very sad if this Revolution, bought at the price of so much sacrifice - not that it's going to be thwarted, because there's no way this Revolution could be thwarted, because it's known that the people are behind it, and given everything it offers to the people, there's not the slightest risk - but it would be very sad if after the example we have shown Latin America, another shot was fired here.</p>
<p>It's true that in almost every revolution, after the conflict ends, comes another, and another. Consider the history of all revolutions, in Mexico and everywhere. However, it seem that this one is going to be an exception, as it has been an exception in every other respect. It has been extraordinary in every other respect, and we would be gratified if it were extraordinary in the sense that not another shot was fired here. And I think that will be the case, I think the Revolution will triumph without another shot being fired. Do you know why? Because it is truly laudable, the degree of integrity which has evolved in this country, the civic-mindedness of this people, the discipline of this people, the spirit of this people; really, I'm proud of the entire people, I have tremendous faith in the people of Cuba (APPLAUSE). It's worthwhile, making sacrifices for this people.</p>
<p>Today I had the satisfaction of giving an example in front of the entire press. There was a crowd in front of the presidential palace, and they were telling me it would take 1,000 men to be able to get away from there. So I stopped, and I asked the people to form two ranks. There was no need for even one man, I said, and that I was going to get there by myself. And in a few minutes, the people formed two ranks, and we passed through without the slightest difficulty. That's the people of Cuba, and that demonstration was performed in front of the entire press corps (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>From now on, no more bouquets and ovations. From now on, for us: work. Tomorrow will be a day like any other, as will all the rest, and we'll get used to freedom. Now we are content, because we were without freedom for a long time, but within a week we'll be worrying about other things: whether we've got enough money to pay the rent, the electricity, to buy food. These are the problems the revolutionary government should really be solving, the million problems of the people of Cuba, and to that end it has a council of ministers composed of young men I know to be fired with enthusiasm, who I'm certain are going to change the Republic of Cuba - I'm certain (PROLONGED APPLAUSE). Also because there's a president who is securely installed in office, who is free of any danger, because the dangers I was talking about were not such as to overthrow the regime - nothing remotely of the kind - but the danger that another single drop of blood might be shed. But the President of the Republic is secure, already recognized by all the nations - well, not all, but he is quickly being recognized by all the countries in the world - and has the support of the people, and our support, the support of the revolutionary forces; and real support - support with no strings attached, support without asking for or claiming anything, because we have fought here for the foundations of civil power, and we are going to show that for us, principles take precedence over every other consideration and that we were not fighting out of personal ambition.</p>
<p>I think we've given enough proof of having fought without personal ambition. I don't think a single Cuban has the slightest doubt on that score.</p>
<p>So now we've got a lot of work to do. For my part, I'm ready to do everything I can for the benefit of my country, as I know all my comrades are, as I know are the President of the Republic and all the ministers, who will work tirelessly. And I can assure you that anyone who leaves Cuba today and comes back in two years' time, won't recognize this Republic.</p>
<p>I see a tremendous spirit of cooperation all over the country. I see the press, the journalists, all sectors of the nation, eager to help; and that's what's needed. The Cuban people have learned a lot: in these seven years, they've learned as if seventy years have gone by. It was said that the coup d'état set the country back 25 years; if that was the case - and it was indeed a setback of that magnitude - we've now brought about an advance of fifty. The Republic is unrecognizable: no politicking, no vice, no gambling, no stealing. We began just a few days ago, and already the Republic is virtually unrecognizable.</p>
<p>Now there remains a major job to be done. All the problems concerning the armed forces are issues with implications for our future activities, but, moreover, we will always do whatever is in our power for the entire people. I'm not a professional soldier, or a career soldier, or anything of that nature. I'll be here for the minimum time, and when I've finished here I'll move on to other things because, frankly, I won't be needed here for this (EXCLAMATIONS). I mean that I won't be needed within military-type operations, and that I have other aspirations of different kinds. And exactly that, among other things: the day I feel the urge to start shooting, fight, pursue a new interest, there's plenty of space here for doing stuff (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>(SHOUTS OF: "We need to create jobs!"). If we don't solve these problems, this is no Revolution, comrades, because I think the basic problem of the Republic at this juncture, which will soon be a necessity for the people, when the euphoria of victory has faded, is work - a decent means of earning a living (APPLAUSE).</p>
<p>But that's not all, comrades: there are a thousand other things which I've been discussing throughout these days, which I assume you, to varying degrees, have heard about through the radio and the press and otherwise, because we're not going to deal with all the issues in a single evening.</p>
<p>Let's confine ourselves to thinking about the problems I've talked about today, and wind up a long day - I may not be tired, but I know you have to get back to homes that are a long way away (SHOUTS OF:" It doesn't matter, carry on!").</p>
<p>I had a date to appear on the Ante la Prensa ["Face the Press"] program tonight at 10.30 or whatever time it was, and now it's 1.30 (SHOUTS OF: "Tomorrow!"). OK, I'll leave it till tomorrow.</p>
<p>You will get the opportunity to hear the ministers, through the press, the radio and all the media possible.</p>
<p>All the friends of mine of such a long time, wherever they've come from: from the school, from the neighborhood. I can almost say I know every Cuban …</p>
<p>I was saying you'll have the opportunity to hear the ministers, each of whom has his plans and will set out his program; all the men on the Council of Ministers have a close rapport with all the revolutionary elements.</p>
<p>The President of the Republic, with the rights attaching to his post - because he was elected without conditions - has filled most of the ministerial posts from the 26th July Movement. He exercised his right, and having asked for our cooperation, he received it fully, and we accepted responsibility for this revolutionary government.</p>
<p>Something I've said elsewhere: nobody should imagine that the issues will be resolved overnight. The war wasn't won in a day, or in two or in three days, and it was an uphill struggle; nor are we going to do everything that needs to be done in a day. Also, I've told the people on earlier occasions not to run away with the idea that these ministers are sages. For a start, none - or hardly any of them - has been a minister before. So none of them know how to be a minister - it's something new for them. What they are is full of good intentions. And in this I say the same as I say of the rebel commanders: look, Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos knew nothing about war, or how to handle a gun - absolutely nothing. Che Guevara knew nothing; when I met him in Mexico, his occupation was dissecting rabbits and doing medical research. Raúl didn't know anything either. Neither did Efigenio Ameijeiras. At the beginning, they knew nothing of war; at the end, I could say to them, as I in fact said, "Comrade, advance on Columbia, and take it", "Comrade, advance on La Cabaña, and take it, "Advance on Santiago, and take it", and I knew that they would succeed … (PROLONGED APPLAUSE). Why? Because they'd learned.</p>
<p>Perhaps the ministers will not be able to do great things now, but I'm sure that within a few months they'll know how to solve the problems posed to them by the people, because they have what counts most: the desire to get things right and to help the people. And above all, I'm sure that not one of them will ever commit one of the classic offenses of ministers. You know which, don't you? (SHOUTS OF "Stealing!", "Stealing!"). Aha! How did you know?</p>
<p>Well, above all, this: the morality, the integrity of these comrades. They may not be sages, because no-one here is a sage, but I can assure you there's no shortage of men of integrity, which is what the situation calls for. Isn't that what the people have always called for, an honest government? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!"). So then, let's give them a vote of confidence, let's do that and let's wait (SHOUTING). Yes, most of them are from the "26th" , but if they're no good, they'll be replaced by others from the 27th or the 28th. We know that there are a lot of qualified people in Cuba, but they can't all be ministers. Or maybe the 26th July Movement doesn't have the right to try its hand at governing the Republic? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!").</p>
<p>So that's all for today. Really, there's just one other thing … If you knew, that when I meet with the people, I lose the need for sleep, for food. You lose the need for sleep too, don't you? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!")</p>
<p>The important thing, or what I need to tell you, is my belief that what the people of Havana have done today, today's huge concentrations, this gathering stretching for miles - because this has been amazing, you saw it, it appeared in the films, in the photographs - I think, frankly, that the people have gone too far, because this is much more than we deserve (SHOUTS OF "No!").</p>
<p>I also know that never again in our lives will we see such a gathering, except on another occasion - on which I’m sure the crowds will mass again - and that's the day we die, because when the time comes to bury us, on that day, as many people as today will be here, because we will never disappoint our people!</p>
<p>(OVATION)</p>
<p class="fst">Translation of the stenographic version, filed at the Prime Minister's offices.</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
Address Speech by Commander-In-Chief Fidel Castro on his arrival in Havana on 8 January 1959
Delivered: April 14, 1959
Source: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version. Translation of the stenographic version, filed at the Prime Minister's offices.
Markup: David Walters, 2019
Online Version: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
Fellow countrymen,
Speaking here tonight, I'm presented with perhaps one of the most difficult tasks in this long struggle, which began on November 30, 1956, in Santiago de Cuba.
The people are listening, the revolutionary fighters are listening, and the regular troops - whose fate is in our hands - are listening also.
I believe this to be a turning point in our history: the tyranny has been overthrown. The rejoicing is immense. But there is still much to be done. We mustn't fool ourselves into believing that the future will be easy; everything may be more difficult in the future.
Telling the truth is the first duty of all revolutionaries. Deceiving the people, raising false hopes, always brings the worst consequences, and I feel it's necessary to warn everyone against over-optimism.
How did the Rebel Army win the war? Telling the truth. How did the tyranny lose the war? Deceiving the troops.
When we suffered a setback, we announced it over Radio Rebelde, criticizing the mistakes any officer may have made, and warning all the comrades to make sure they didn't let the same thing happen to any other unit. That was not the way with the army units. Many of them repeated the same mistakes, because the officers and troops were never told the truth.
That's why I mean to start - or rather continue - with the same system: that of always telling the people the truth.
We have made headway, maybe taken a big step forward. Here we are in the capital, here we are in Columbia: the revolutionary forces have apparently prevailed; a government has been formed and recognized by several countries in the world; it seems the peace has been won. Nevertheless, we mustn't be complacent. While the people were laughing today, while the people were cheering, we were worrying; and the bigger the crowds that came to welcome us, and the greater the jubilation of the people, the more we worried, because also the greater was our obligation to history and to the people of Cuba.
The Revolution is still being led by an army in battle order. Who, now and in the future, may be the enemies of the Revolution? Who, standing before this victorious people, could be the future enemies of the Revolution? The worst enemies which the Cuban Revolution could face in the future are us, the revolutionaries.
This is what I always told the rebel fighters: when we no longer have the enemy before us, when the war is over, we ourselves are potentially the only enemies of the Revolution; that is why we said, and I repeat, that we will be tougher on the rebel soldiers than on anyone else, more demanding than with anyone else, because the triumph or failure of the Revolution will depend on them.
There are many kinds of revolutionaries. We have been hearing talk about revolution for a long time: up to 10th March, they were saying that a revolution was under way, "revolution" was on everyone's lips, and everything was "revolutionary". The soldiers were assembled here and were told about the "10th March Revolution" (LAUGHTER).
We've been hearing talk about revolutionaries for a long time. I remember my first notions of the revolutionary, before study and a certain maturity made me aware of what a revolution really was, and what a revolutionary really was. Our first impressions of revolutionaries were gained as children, and we were told: so-and-so was a revolutionary, fought in this or that engagement, or this or that operation, or placed bombs; or some other Joe was a revolutionary. "Revolutionary" even became a class. At that time there were revolutionaries who saw revolution as a living, who wanted a living based on having been a revolutionary, on having placed a bomb, or two bombs. And maybe those that talked the most were the ones who'd done least. But the fact is that they applied to the ministries for jobs, so as to live parasitic existences, to reap the rewards for what they had done at that time, for a revolution which sadly never got off the ground. It seems to me that the first revolution with a real chance of succeeding is this one, so long as we don't let it slip through our fingers... (SHOUTS OF "No!" AND APPLAUSE).
The revolutionary of my childhood went about with a .45-calibre gun in his belt and wanted to live on the respect it commanded. He was to be feared: he was capable of killing anyone. He would arrive at the office of high officials with the air of a man who must be listened to. In reality, we wondered: where is the revolution these people fought? Because there was no revolution, and very few revolutionaries.
The first thing that we, the protagonists of this Revolution, must ask ourselves, is what did we expect to achieve? Whether in any of us lurked ambition, a desire to command, some ignoble purpose; whether there was an idealist in each of those who fought in this revolution, or was it someone who was using idealism as a pretext for pursuing other ends; whether we undertook this revolution thinking that as soon as the tyranny was defeated, we would take over the reins of power; whether we were all going to drive around in limousines; whether we were all going to live like kings, whether we would all have mansions, and that life for us would be a stroll in the park, on the strength of having been revolutionaries and having vanquished the tyranny; whether what we were planning was to oust certain politicians; whether what we were planning was simply to remove certain men and put others in their place; or whether we were all truly disinterested, whether we all acted out of a spirit of self-sacrifice, whether all of us were willing to give our all and receive nothing in return, and whether, beforehand, we were ready to give up everything and continue on the austere path of the genuine revolutionary (PROLONGED APPLAUSE). We must address that question, because such soul-searching could have far-reaching implications for the future destiny of Cuba, of ourselves and of the people.
When I hear mention of columns, when I hear mention of battle fronts, when I hear mention of more-or-less heavy troop concentrations, I always think: I have our strongest column right here, our best troops - the only troops able to win the war alone - right here. Those troops are the people! (APPLAUSE).
No general is a greater asset than the people; no army is a greater force than the people. If you asked me what troops I prefer to lead, I would say I prefer to command the people (APPLAUSE), because the people are invincible. And it was the people who won this war, because we had no tanks, we had no planes, we had no heavy artillery, we had no military academies, we had no recruitment and training camps, we had no divisions, or regiments, or companies, or platoons, or even squads (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).
Well then. Who won the war? The people, the people won the war. This war wasn't won by anyone except the people - I say that in case anyone thinks he won it, or if some troop unit thinks they won it (APPLAUSE). And so the victor's crown goes to the people.
But there's another thing: the Revolution doesn't affect me as a person, or any other commander as a person; or any captain, or any column, or any company. Who the Revolution affects is the people (APPLAUSE)
It's the people who gain or lose with the Revolution. If it was the people who suffered the horrors of these seven years, it is the people who must now consider whether in 10, 15 or 20 years they, and their children, and their grandchildren, are going to go on suffering the horrors the Republic of Cuba has suffered from its inception, crowned with dictatorships like those of Machado and those of Batista (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).
The people are greatly affected by whether we're going to make a good job of this revolution, or if we're going to make the same mistakes as in the last revolution, or the one before that, or the one before that. And so we'll suffer the consequences of our mistakes, since there are no mistakes which do not affect the people, no political mistake which does not have to be paid for, sooner or later.
Circumstances alter cases. For instance, I think the present opportunity offers more chances than ever before for the Revolution to fully meet its aims. Perhaps that's why the people are so jubilant, forgetting somewhat the toil and sweat that still lie ahead.
One of the nation's main desires, a reflection of the past horrors of the repression and the war, is the yearning for peace, for peace with freedom, for peace with justice, for peace with rights. Nobody wants peace on other terms: Batista talked about peace, about order, but no-one wanted that peace, because its price was subjugation.
Now the people have the sort of peace they wanted: peace without dictatorship, peace without censorship, peace without persecution (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).
Perhaps the greatest joy at this moment is felt by Cuban mothers. Mothers of soldiers, mothers of revolutionaries, mothers of any citizen, are now basking in the knowledge that their sons are finally out of danger (APPLAUSE).
The worst crime that could be committed now in Cuba, would be a crime against the peace. The thing that nobody in Cuba could forgive now would be if someone conspired against the peace (APPLAUSE).
Anyone who acts now against the nation's peace, anyone who threatens the peace of mind and happiness of millions of Cuban mothers, is a criminal and a traitor (APPLAUSE). Anybody who is unwilling to give up something for the sake of peace, who is unwilling to give up everything for the sake of the nation's peace at this juncture, is a criminal and a traitor (APPLAUSE).
Since that's how I see things, I say and I swear before my compatriots that if any of my comrades, or our movement, or I myself, prove to be the slightest obstacle to the nation's peace, from this very moment the people may do with all of us what they will, and tell us what we must do (APPLAUSE). Because I'm a man capable of self-sacrifice, as I have demonstrated more than once in my life, and have passed on to my comrades; I believe I have earned the moral right and have the standing and authority to speak at such a moment as this (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF "Long live Fidel Castro!")
And those to whom I should speak first are the revolutionaries, in case of the need - or rather, because of the need - to get the message across early.
The decade following the Machado's fall is not far behind us. Perhaps one of the greatest evils of that struggle was the spawning of bands of revolutionaries, which promptly started shooting at each other (APPLAUSE). And as a result, what happened was the arrival of Batista, who stayed in power for 11 years.
When the 26th July Movement was organized, also when we started this war, I thought that although the sacrifices we were making were great, although the conflict would be long - and it has been: over two years, two years that were no picnic for us, two years of hard struggle, from when we restarted the campaign with a handful of men, until we arrived at the capital of the Republic. Despite the sacrifices that awaited us, we were comforted by an idea: it was clear that that the 26th July Movement had the overwhelming support and sympathy of the people (APPLAUSE); it was clear that the 26th July Movement had the almost unanimous support of Cuba's youth (APPLAUSE). It seemed that, this time, a large, powerful organization would be able to calm the anxieties of our people, and would forestall the terrible consequences of the proliferation of revolutionary organizations.
I think we should all have belonged to a single revolutionary organization from the outset, either ours or someone else's - the 26th, the 27th or the 50th or whatever. If in the last analysis we were all the same, whether we fought in the Sierra Maestra or in the Escambray or in Pinar del Río, and were young men, and men with the same ideals, what was the point of having half a dozen revolutionary organizations?
Ours was simply the first; our was simply the one which fought the first battle at the Moncada barracks, the one which landed from the 'Granma' on 2nd December (APPLAUSE), and which fought alone against the tyranny's entire force for over a year (APPLAUSE); which had a mere 12 men, kept the rebel flag flying, showed the people that it was possible to fight and to win; which put paid to all the false notions in the country about revolution. Because here everyone was conspiring with the corporal, with the sergeant, or bringing weapons into Havana, which were seized by the police (APPLAUSE), until we arrived and showed that that wasn't the way to fight, that a different approach was needed, that new tactics and strategies had to be invented, that it was the strategies and tactics which we had put into practice which led to the most remarkable victory in the history of the Cuban people (APPLAUSE).
And I want the Cuban people to tell me honestly whether or not this is true (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF "Yes!")
And another question: the 26th July Movement had a clear majority of the people's support - is that true or not? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!"). And how did the struggle end? I'll tell you: the Rebel Army (which is what our army is called), from what was started in the Sierra Maestra, by time of the fall of the tyranny, had taken the whole of Oriente, the whole of Camagüey province, part of Las Villas, the whole of Matanzas, La Cabaña, Columbia, the police prefecture and Pinar del Río (APPLAUSE).
The end of the conflict was determined by the coordination of our forces: not for nothing our columns crossed the Camagüey plains - pursued by thousands of troops with air support - and reached Las Villas; and because the Rebel Army had Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) at Las Villas, and because it had Comandante Ernesto Guevara at Las Villas (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) on 1st January, following Cantillo's treachery (SHOUTS OF "Down with traitors!")… Because it had them there, on the 1st , I was able to order Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos to advance with 500 men on the capital and attack Columbia (APPLAUSE); because it had Comandante Ernesto Guevara at Las Villas, I was able to tell him to advance on the capital and take La Cabaña (APPLAUSE).
All the regiments, all the significant military strongholds, were in the hands of the Rebel Army. And nobody gave them to us; nobody said to us:"Go there, go there, go there". It was our efforts and our sacrifice, our experience and our organization, which led to those results (APPLAUSE).
Does this mean the others didn't fight? No. Does this mean that the others deserve no credit? No. Because we all of us fought, because the whole people fought. There was no Sierra in Havana, but there are hundreds of dead comrades, murdered for doing their revolutionary duty. There was no Sierra in Havana, but even so the general strike was a decisive factor in the completeness of the Revolutionary victory (APPLAUSE).
In saying this, all I'm doing is putting things in context: the role of the 26th July Movement in this struggle, how it guided the people in those moments when elections and electioneering were talked about here. Once I had to write an article from Mexico entitled "Frente a Todos", because we were at odds with the general opinion, defending our revolutionary manifesto, the strategy of this revolution, which was drawn up by the Movement; and the culmination of this revolution, which was the crushing defeat of the tyranny, with its key strongholds in the hands of the Rebel Army, organized by the 26th July Movement.
The 26th July Movement not only devised the guidelines for war but also established how the enemy was to be treated during the hostilities. This has been perhaps the first revolution in history in which not a single prisoner of war has been murdered (PROLONGED APPLAUSE); in which no wounded have been abandoned, in which no-one has been tortured (APPLAUSE); because that was the standing order established by the rebel Army. And another thing: this is the only revolution in the world which has not produced a general (APPLAUSE) or even a colonel, because the rank I took or my comrades assigned to me was that of comandante [major], and I haven't changed it, despite our having won numerous battles and having won the war; I'm still a comandante, and I don't want any other rank (APPLAUSE).
And the moral effect, the fact that we who started this war chose a particular rank within the military hierarchy, was that no-one dared to rank themselves above the level of comandante - although by the look of things, this has resulted in a surfeit of comandantes.
I think the people agree with my not mincing words, because having fought as I have for the rights of every citizen at least gives me the right to tell the truth out loud (APPLAUSE). And also because the interests of the homeland are in play: I won't countenance the slightest compromise with risks threatening the Cuban Revolution (APPLAUSE).
Does everyone have the same moral right to speak? I say that those to whom more credit is due have more right to speak than those less meritorious. I think that men who seek equality of moral prerogatives should first earn equality of merit. I believe the Revolution has culminated as it should, with Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos - veteran of two years and one month of fighting - (APPLAUSE), as the chief of Columbia; with comandante Efigenio Ameijeiras, who lost three brothers in this war and is a veteran of the 'Granma' and comandante by virtue of the battles he has waged (APPLAUSE), as the Republic's Chief of Police; and with Ernesto Guevara - true hero, member of the 'Granma' expedition and veteran of two years and one month of fighting in Cuba's highest and toughest mountain terrain - as chief of La Cabaña (APPLAUSE); and with each regiment in the various provinces commanded by the men who have sacrificed most and fought hardest for this revolution. And if that's the way things are, no-one has the right to object.
First and foremost, merit must be recognized; those who do not recognize merit are mere upstarts (APPLAUSE), lacking the merits of others but seeking the same prerogatives.
The Republic, or the Revolution, is entering a new stage. Would it be right for ambition or the cult of personality to emerge and threaten the destiny of the Revolution? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). What is it that interests the people, because it is the people who have the last word here? (SHOUTS OF "Freedom! Freedom!"). They are interested first and foremost in freedoms, in the rights they were deprived of, and in peace. And they've got them, because they now have all the freedoms, all the rights that the tyranny took from them, and they have peace (APPLAUSE).
What do the people want? An honest government. An honest government: isn't that what the people want? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!"). They have it here: an upright judge as President of the Republic (APPLAUSE). What do they want - young and honest men as ministers in the revolutionary government? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!"). They have them here: examine the ministers of the revolutionary government one by one, and tell me whether there's a thief or a criminal or a scoundrel among them (SHOUTS OF "No!").
There are many men eligible to be ministers in Cuba by virtue of their integrity and ability, but they can't all be ministers, because there can be only 14, 15 or 16. And the people don't care who so-and-so is, but that whoever he is, that he is young and honest (APPLAUSE). And here the important thing is that those who've been appointed have those qualities, and not whether so-and-so is in or out, because the so-and-so's don't matter a damn at this juncture, to the Revolution or to the Republic (APPLAUSE).
Can anyone, aspiring to be a minister, seek to shed blood in this country? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). Can any group, having been denied three or four ministries, shed blood in this country or undermine the peace? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). If the governing team which the Cuban people have now is no good, the people will have the opportunity of throwing it out - not voting for it at the polls, but ousting it in an election (APPLAUSE). This isn't a case where the way to get rid of a mediocre government team is for someone start a revolution or carry out a coup d'état, since everybody knows that elections will be held and if the administration is no good, the people will have the last word, without let or hindrance. Not doing what Batista did, 80 days before an election, saying that he was fighting the government and making a series of accusations against that government, saying that it was his mission to get rid of it and that this was the patriotic thing to do. Coups d'état and attacks on the constitution and rule of law are gone forever from here (APPLAUSE).
These things need to be said, to prevent the emergence of demagoguery and misinformation and attempts to divide us; to ensure that the first sign of vaunting ambition by anyone is recognized at once by the people (APPLAUSE). And for my part, I say that since who I want to command is the people, because they are the best troops, and that I prefer the people to all the armed columns put together; I say that the first thing I will always do when I see a threat to the Revolution, is to call on the people (APPLAUSE). Because by talking to the people, we can avoid bloodshed. Because here, we should call on the people a thousand times before firing a shot, and talk to the people so that the people, without shoot-outs, solve the problems. I have faith in the people, and I know what the people can do and I believe I have demonstrated it; and I say that if the people so choose, there will never be another shot fired in this country (APPLAUSE). Because public opinion has tremendous strength and has tremendous influence, especially when there's no dictatorship. Under dictatorship, public opinion is nothing; in times of freedom, public opinion is everything, and the guns must yield and kneel before public opinion (APPLAUSE). How am I doing, Camilo? (SHOUTS OF "Long live Camilo!")
I am speaking to the people in this way because I have always liked to look ahead, and I think that talking to the people ahead of events can protect the Revolution from the only remaining future threats; while these are not great, I want to make sure that the Revolution can take root without the shedding of another drop of Cuban blood (APPLAUSE).
My main concern is that abroad, where the Revolution has caught the imagination of the whole world, it must not be said that, within three weeks, or four weeks, or a month, or one week, more Cuban blood has been shed to consolidate this Revolution, because in that case this Revolution would not be an example (APPLAUSE).
I would not have talked like this when we were a group of 12 men, because when we were a group of 12 men all we had to look forward to was fighting, fighting, fighting. And in those circumstances, fighting was right. But now, when we've got the planes, the tanks, the artillery and the immense majority of men under arms, and a navy, several army companies and enormous military power (SHOUTS OF "And the people!" "And the people!") People … What I'm saying is: now that we have all that, I'm alarmed by the idea of fighting, because now there's no merit in fighting. I'd rather go back to the Sierra Maestra, with 12 men, to fight all the tanks, than come with all the tanks to shoot at anyone here (APPLAUSE).
And those I ask to give us much help, those I beg to help me, are the people (APPLAUSE), public opinion, so as to disarm the power-hungry, to denounce immediately those who are now beginning to show their true colors (APPLAUSE).
I'm not today going to embark on personal or specific attacks, because it's early days, too soon to start public controversies - although when the time comes, I don't mind, because I have no inhibitions about plain speaking when it's necessary - and because the people are rejoicing, and because among the body of fighters - I'm not saying among all their leaders, but certainly most of their leaders - and there's Carlos Prío Socarrás, for example, who came to Cuba with the aim of helping the Revolution with no strings attached, as he says, absolutely without any ulterior motive (APPLAUSE); he has made no protest about what's happened, not the slighted protest, has not made the least complaint, or expressed the least disagreement regarding the cabinet; he knows the cabinet is composed of honest men and of young men, who well deserve a vote of confidence in their work.
And then there are the leaders of other organizations, equally prepared. And there's another thing: the bodies of fighting men, the men who fought and who were motivated solely by ideals, the men who fought, in all the organizations: they are figures of high patriotism, with strongly revolutionary, noble sentiments, who will always think the way the people think; I'm sure that whoever commits the lunacy of trying to spark a civil war will incur the condemnation of the entire people (APPLAUSE) and will lose the support of the rank-and-file fighters, who will not follow him. And it would be lunacy indeed, to challenge not only our forces in their present condition, but also to defy reason, the law of the land and the entire Cuban people (APPLAUSE).
And I'm saying all this because I want to ask the people a question: I want to ask the people a question that interests me greatly, and interests the people greatly; so tell me: To what end, at this juncture, are clandestine weapons being stockpiled? Why are weapons being hidden in various parts of Havana? What are weapons being smuggled in for, at this juncture? What for? I'm telling you there are elements of a certain revolutionary organization who are hiding weapons (SHOUTS OF "Let's find them!"), who are stockpiling arms and are smuggling arms. All the arms captured by the Rebel Army are in the barracks, where not a single weapon has been touched, nobody has taken any home, or hidden any. They are in the barracks under lock and key. It's the same in Pinar del Río, in La Cabaña, in Columbia, in Matanzas, in Santa Clara, in Camagüey, and in Oriente. Nobody has loaded up trucks with weapons to hide them anywhere: these weapons are in the barracks.
I'm going to ask you a question, because speaking frankly and analyzing problems is how you solve them, and I'm ready to do everything in my power to solve them as they should be solved: with reasoning and intelligence, and with the influence of public opinion, which is in charge, and not with force. Because if one believes in force, if problems had to be solved by the use of force, there would be no need to talk to the people, or to put this problem to them, but to go and look for those arms (APPLAUSE).
And what we must try to do here is persuade the revolutionary fighters, the idealists, who could be misled by such machinations, to turn their backs on the treacherous honchos who are involved in these activities, and align themselves with those they serve first and foremost - the people.
I'm going to ask you a question: Weapons for what purpose? To fight whom? To fight the revolutionary government, which has the support of the entire people? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). Is the Republic's present Urrutia administration the same as the Batista administration? (SHOUTS OF "No!"). Weapons for what purpose? Is there a dictatorship here? (SHOUTS OF "No!") Are they going to attack a free government that respects the rights of the people? (SHOUTS OF "No!") Now, when there's no censorship, when the press is completely free, freer than it's ever been, and has the certainty of knowing that it will always be free, that censorship is gone forever? (APPLAUSE). Now, when the whole people can assemble freely? Now, when there's no torture, no political prisoners, no murders, no terror? Now, when there's nothing but joy, when all the traitorous union leaders have been sacked and we're on the point of holding elections in all the unions? (APPLAUSE). When all the citizen's rights have been restored, when elections are to be called as soon as possible - arms for what? Hiding arms to what end? To blackmail the President of the Republic? To threaten the peace? To set up gangster organizations? Are we to go back to daily shoot-outs in the streets of Havana? Arms for what?
Well, I can tell you that two days ago, elements of a certain organization went to a barracks - the San Antonio barracks which were under the jurisdiction of Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos and under my jurisdiction as Commander-In-Chief of all the forces - and made off with the arms stored there; they took 500 small arms, 6 machine guns and 80,000 cartridges (SHOUTS OF "Let's find them!").
And I tell you frankly there could not have been a worse provocation. Because to do this to men who've been fighting for this country for years, to men who are now tasked with keeping the nation's peace and are trying to do things properly, is a shameful act and an unjustifiable provocation.
And what we've done is not to go looking for those guns, exactly because - as I said earlier - what we want is to talk to the people, use the influence of public opinion, so that the honchos behind these criminal operations find themselves without men. So that the idealistic fighters - they're true idealists, the men who fought in all the organizations here - know about it, so they can demand accountability for these acts.
And that's why we haven't even allowed ourselves to be provoked, why we have kept our cool despite this stealing of weapons - an unjustifiable theft because here there is no dictatorship; no-one is afraid that we're going to turn into dictators - and I'll tell you why: those who become dictators are those who don't have the support of the people, who have to resort to force because they don't get votes at election time (APPLAUSE). We couldn't become dictators, we who have evoked such affection - universal, total and absolute affection - among the people. Not to mention our principles, which would never allow us the effrontery of holding onto a position by force, because that disgusts us - it's not for nothing that we have been the standard bearers in a struggle against an ugly, repellent tyranny (APPLAUSE).
We will never need to use force, because the people are with us, and also because the day the people frown on us will be the last day they do so: we'll quit (APPLAUSE). Because we see this as duty, not as a pleasure; we see this as work, which may mean that we go without sleep, without rest, without food, traveling around the island and working honestly to serve our country. It means something that we have nothing, and that we will always be men who have nothing (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF: "You have the people!"). And the people will never see us commit acts of immorality or grant privileges to anybody or tolerate an injustice or steal or make ourselves rich or anything of the kind. Because we see power as self-sacrifice, and believe me, if it were not so, after all the show of affection I've had from the people, all this tremendous demonstration today, if one were not committed to performing a duty, one should depart, or retire, or die, because after so much affection and so much trust, not doing one's duty to this people is simply unthinkable! (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).
And if it weren't for this duty, if it weren't for this duty - I'm telling you - what I would do now is take my leave of the people and keep with me always the affection I've received today, and have people address me with same terms of encouragement with which they have addressed me today.
However, I know that power is a burdensome, a complicated affair, that our missions and tasks are difficult, like this very problem which has confronted us, which is a really difficult one, a hard nut to crack, and one tackles it because the one thing one is not going to say to the people at this juncture is "I'm leaving". (SHOUTS OF "Long live the father of the homeland!" FOLLOWED BY AN OVATION).
There is another reason we're not interested in using force: on the day anyone takes up arms here, I would go so far as to call on my worst enemy, on the person who was the most inimical to me and, assuming he was prepared to do the will of the people, I would tell him: "Look, take all these forces, all these troops and all these arms" and I would be so easy in my mind, because I know that the day there's an armed uprising, I'll head straight back to the Sierra Maestra and we'd see how long the new dictatorship stayed in power (APPLAUSE).
I think there are more than enough reasons for everyone to see that we have no interest in exercising power by the use of force.
The President of the Republic has entrusted me with the thorniest of tasks, that of reorganizing the Republic's armed institutions, and has assigned to me the post of Commander-In-Chief of all the nation's air, sea and land-based forces (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF "You deserve it!"). No, I don't deserve it, because it's a sacrifice for me, and it's absolutely no reason for pride, no reason for vanity; for me, it's a sacrifice. But I want the people to tell me whether they think I should take the job (PROLONGED APPLAUSE AND (SHOUTS OF "Yes!").
I think that if we created an army with 12 men, and those 12 men are now in positions of command, I think that if we taught our army that no prisoner can be murdered, that the wounded can never be abandoned, that no prisoner can ever be beaten, we are the men who can teach the Republic's armed institutions the same things that we taught that army (APPLAUSE). To have armed institutions in which not a single one of their men ever again beats a prisoner, or tortures one or kills one (APPLAUSE). And also because we can serve as a bridge between the revolutionaries and the decent soldiers, the ones who have not stolen or murdered, because those soldiers, the ones who have not stolen or murdered, have the right to remain in the armed forces (APPLAUSE); by the same token, there'll be no escape from the firing squad for those who have committed murder (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).
Moreover, all the revolutionary fighters who want to belong to the Republic's regular forces have the right, whatever organization they belong to, to keep their existing ranks … The doors are open to all the revolutionary fighting men who want to pitch in, who want to do something useful for the country. And if that's the case, if there are freedoms, if there is government by honest young men, if the country is satisfied, if it trusts that government and the men in command of the armed forces, if there are going to be elections, if the doors are open to everyone, why stockpile weapons?
I want you to tell me whether what the people want is that we make peace, or whether they want a guy with a gun on every street corner; I want you to tell me if the people are in agreement with or believe it to be right that everyone here who wants a private army can have one, and can stop following his superior's orders (SHOUTS OF "No!"); and whether that's the way to get order and peace in the Republic of Cuba (SHOUTS OF "No!").
(SOMEONE SHOUTS: "Purging of the armed forces!")
'Super-purging', not purging (APPLAUSE).
(SHOUTS OF: "Tell us about Raúl"!). Raúl is at the Moncada barracks, which is where he should be now.
And these are the issues I wanted to raise with the people today. As soon as possible the guns must leave the streets, the guns must disappear from the streets (APPLAUSE). Because there is no longer an enemy confronting us, because there's no longer any reason to fight anybody. And if one day it becomes necessary to fight a foreign enemy or a movement that attacks the Revolution, it won't be some limited engagement, it'll be the entire people that fight (PROLONGED APPLAUSE).
The weapons belong in the barracks. Nobody has the right to a private army here (APPLAUSE).
The elements carrying on these suspicious operations have maybe found an excuse for these in the fact that I've been appointed, together with my comrades, to do a job assigned to us by the President, and have suggested the existence of a political army. A political army? As I've been saying, the entire people are with us; does that really make ours a political army?
I want the people to know, I want Cuban mothers to know, that I will always do whatever is in our power to solve the country's problems without shedding a drop of blood (APPLAUSE). I want Cuban mothers to know that not another shot will be fired here on our account; and I want to ask the people, and to ask the press, and to ask every sane, reasonable man in the country, to help us solve these problems with the support of public opinion; not with horse-trading, because when people arm themselves and make threats in order to get something, that is immoral and I'll never have truck with it (APPLAUSE). Now that certain elements have started stockpiling weapons, I can assure you that I won't accept the slightest concession, because that would be debasing the ideals of the Revolution (APPLAUSE). And what needs to be done is to get those who don't belong to the Republic's regular forces - to which every revolutionary fighting man has the right to belong - to return the weapons to the barracks, because weapons are superfluous here, now there's no tyranny, and it's been demonstrated that arms are only appropriate when there's a good reason for having them and the people are behind you; otherwise, all they're good for is murder and kidnapping (APPLAUSE).
I want to tell the people also that they can be sure that the law of the land with be respected, that there'll be no gangsterism here, nor street gangs, nor banditry, simply because there will be zero tolerance. The Republic's weaponry is now in the hands of the revolutionaries. I hope those arms will never have to be used, but on the day when the people orders their deployment to ensure peace, law and order, or the exercise of their rights, when the people so order, when the people so desire, in the presence of a real need, then the arms will do their job, will do their duty, simply (APPLAUSE).
Let no-one think that we're going to respond to provocation; because we're too level-headed to respond to provocation, because we have responsibilities too important for us ever to take hasty measures or engage in saber-rattling or anything of that kind, and because I'm acutely aware of the need to exhaust - and I will always exhaust - every means of persuasion, every reasonable means, every human means to avoid the shedding of another drop of blood in Cuba. So as far as provocations are concerned, no-one needs to worry that I'm going to go off the deep end; because when the patience of all of us has run out, we'll get some more patience, and when that runs out, we'll get even more. That will be our rule (APPLAUSE). And that must be among the standing orders of every man bearing arms and of those wielding power: never tire of forbearance, never tire of accepting abuse and provocations of all kinds, except in cases threatening the most sacrosanct interests of the people. But then only when the case is clear-cut, only when demanded by the whole nation, the press, the civic institutions, the workers' organizations, and the people as a whole; when they call for action, and only then. And what I will always do in these circumstances, is come to the people and explain: "Look, this has happened".
On this occasion, I've avoided naming names, because I don't want to poison the atmosphere, and because I don't want to add to the tension; all I want is, simply, to avoid these dangers to the people, because it would be very sad if this Revolution, bought at the price of so much sacrifice - not that it's going to be thwarted, because there's no way this Revolution could be thwarted, because it's known that the people are behind it, and given everything it offers to the people, there's not the slightest risk - but it would be very sad if after the example we have shown Latin America, another shot was fired here.
It's true that in almost every revolution, after the conflict ends, comes another, and another. Consider the history of all revolutions, in Mexico and everywhere. However, it seem that this one is going to be an exception, as it has been an exception in every other respect. It has been extraordinary in every other respect, and we would be gratified if it were extraordinary in the sense that not another shot was fired here. And I think that will be the case, I think the Revolution will triumph without another shot being fired. Do you know why? Because it is truly laudable, the degree of integrity which has evolved in this country, the civic-mindedness of this people, the discipline of this people, the spirit of this people; really, I'm proud of the entire people, I have tremendous faith in the people of Cuba (APPLAUSE). It's worthwhile, making sacrifices for this people.
Today I had the satisfaction of giving an example in front of the entire press. There was a crowd in front of the presidential palace, and they were telling me it would take 1,000 men to be able to get away from there. So I stopped, and I asked the people to form two ranks. There was no need for even one man, I said, and that I was going to get there by myself. And in a few minutes, the people formed two ranks, and we passed through without the slightest difficulty. That's the people of Cuba, and that demonstration was performed in front of the entire press corps (APPLAUSE).
From now on, no more bouquets and ovations. From now on, for us: work. Tomorrow will be a day like any other, as will all the rest, and we'll get used to freedom. Now we are content, because we were without freedom for a long time, but within a week we'll be worrying about other things: whether we've got enough money to pay the rent, the electricity, to buy food. These are the problems the revolutionary government should really be solving, the million problems of the people of Cuba, and to that end it has a council of ministers composed of young men I know to be fired with enthusiasm, who I'm certain are going to change the Republic of Cuba - I'm certain (PROLONGED APPLAUSE). Also because there's a president who is securely installed in office, who is free of any danger, because the dangers I was talking about were not such as to overthrow the regime - nothing remotely of the kind - but the danger that another single drop of blood might be shed. But the President of the Republic is secure, already recognized by all the nations - well, not all, but he is quickly being recognized by all the countries in the world - and has the support of the people, and our support, the support of the revolutionary forces; and real support - support with no strings attached, support without asking for or claiming anything, because we have fought here for the foundations of civil power, and we are going to show that for us, principles take precedence over every other consideration and that we were not fighting out of personal ambition.
I think we've given enough proof of having fought without personal ambition. I don't think a single Cuban has the slightest doubt on that score.
So now we've got a lot of work to do. For my part, I'm ready to do everything I can for the benefit of my country, as I know all my comrades are, as I know are the President of the Republic and all the ministers, who will work tirelessly. And I can assure you that anyone who leaves Cuba today and comes back in two years' time, won't recognize this Republic.
I see a tremendous spirit of cooperation all over the country. I see the press, the journalists, all sectors of the nation, eager to help; and that's what's needed. The Cuban people have learned a lot: in these seven years, they've learned as if seventy years have gone by. It was said that the coup d'état set the country back 25 years; if that was the case - and it was indeed a setback of that magnitude - we've now brought about an advance of fifty. The Republic is unrecognizable: no politicking, no vice, no gambling, no stealing. We began just a few days ago, and already the Republic is virtually unrecognizable.
Now there remains a major job to be done. All the problems concerning the armed forces are issues with implications for our future activities, but, moreover, we will always do whatever is in our power for the entire people. I'm not a professional soldier, or a career soldier, or anything of that nature. I'll be here for the minimum time, and when I've finished here I'll move on to other things because, frankly, I won't be needed here for this (EXCLAMATIONS). I mean that I won't be needed within military-type operations, and that I have other aspirations of different kinds. And exactly that, among other things: the day I feel the urge to start shooting, fight, pursue a new interest, there's plenty of space here for doing stuff (APPLAUSE).
(SHOUTS OF: "We need to create jobs!"). If we don't solve these problems, this is no Revolution, comrades, because I think the basic problem of the Republic at this juncture, which will soon be a necessity for the people, when the euphoria of victory has faded, is work - a decent means of earning a living (APPLAUSE).
But that's not all, comrades: there are a thousand other things which I've been discussing throughout these days, which I assume you, to varying degrees, have heard about through the radio and the press and otherwise, because we're not going to deal with all the issues in a single evening.
Let's confine ourselves to thinking about the problems I've talked about today, and wind up a long day - I may not be tired, but I know you have to get back to homes that are a long way away (SHOUTS OF:" It doesn't matter, carry on!").
I had a date to appear on the Ante la Prensa ["Face the Press"] program tonight at 10.30 or whatever time it was, and now it's 1.30 (SHOUTS OF: "Tomorrow!"). OK, I'll leave it till tomorrow.
You will get the opportunity to hear the ministers, through the press, the radio and all the media possible.
All the friends of mine of such a long time, wherever they've come from: from the school, from the neighborhood. I can almost say I know every Cuban …
I was saying you'll have the opportunity to hear the ministers, each of whom has his plans and will set out his program; all the men on the Council of Ministers have a close rapport with all the revolutionary elements.
The President of the Republic, with the rights attaching to his post - because he was elected without conditions - has filled most of the ministerial posts from the 26th July Movement. He exercised his right, and having asked for our cooperation, he received it fully, and we accepted responsibility for this revolutionary government.
Something I've said elsewhere: nobody should imagine that the issues will be resolved overnight. The war wasn't won in a day, or in two or in three days, and it was an uphill struggle; nor are we going to do everything that needs to be done in a day. Also, I've told the people on earlier occasions not to run away with the idea that these ministers are sages. For a start, none - or hardly any of them - has been a minister before. So none of them know how to be a minister - it's something new for them. What they are is full of good intentions. And in this I say the same as I say of the rebel commanders: look, Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos knew nothing about war, or how to handle a gun - absolutely nothing. Che Guevara knew nothing; when I met him in Mexico, his occupation was dissecting rabbits and doing medical research. Raúl didn't know anything either. Neither did Efigenio Ameijeiras. At the beginning, they knew nothing of war; at the end, I could say to them, as I in fact said, "Comrade, advance on Columbia, and take it", "Comrade, advance on La Cabaña, and take it, "Advance on Santiago, and take it", and I knew that they would succeed … (PROLONGED APPLAUSE). Why? Because they'd learned.
Perhaps the ministers will not be able to do great things now, but I'm sure that within a few months they'll know how to solve the problems posed to them by the people, because they have what counts most: the desire to get things right and to help the people. And above all, I'm sure that not one of them will ever commit one of the classic offenses of ministers. You know which, don't you? (SHOUTS OF "Stealing!", "Stealing!"). Aha! How did you know?
Well, above all, this: the morality, the integrity of these comrades. They may not be sages, because no-one here is a sage, but I can assure you there's no shortage of men of integrity, which is what the situation calls for. Isn't that what the people have always called for, an honest government? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!"). So then, let's give them a vote of confidence, let's do that and let's wait (SHOUTING). Yes, most of them are from the "26th" , but if they're no good, they'll be replaced by others from the 27th or the 28th. We know that there are a lot of qualified people in Cuba, but they can't all be ministers. Or maybe the 26th July Movement doesn't have the right to try its hand at governing the Republic? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!").
So that's all for today. Really, there's just one other thing … If you knew, that when I meet with the people, I lose the need for sleep, for food. You lose the need for sleep too, don't you? (SHOUTS OF "Yes!")
The important thing, or what I need to tell you, is my belief that what the people of Havana have done today, today's huge concentrations, this gathering stretching for miles - because this has been amazing, you saw it, it appeared in the films, in the photographs - I think, frankly, that the people have gone too far, because this is much more than we deserve (SHOUTS OF "No!").
I also know that never again in our lives will we see such a gathering, except on another occasion - on which I’m sure the crowds will mass again - and that's the day we die, because when the time comes to bury us, on that day, as many people as today will be here, because we will never disappoint our people!
(OVATION)
Translation of the stenographic version, filed at the Prime Minister's offices.
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
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<p class="storyheadline">In Spite of Everything</p>
<p class="storybyline"> By Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
<div class="feature">
<p>Do you think that you merely enjoy the Pan American Games? Think again, and you will realize that no matter your age, you run, jump, put the shots, throw javelins, discuses and hammers; soar above hurdles and tracks, relay batons, spike balls, score a basket, row, execute ippons, turn your rival over, follow strategies, splash water over yourself after running for two hours and even stop taking in the oxygen that your lungs are demanding. What a wonderful show the athletes put on for us!</p>
<p>But you do not just enjoy; you participate, especially when athletes from your country are competing. In our case, there is hardly any event where there is not a Cuban team or athlete present.</p>
<p>Besides, July and August are months filled with commemorative activities. This is also the warmest and most humid period of the year. Added to this there is a magic word: holidays! Your homes see millions of children, teenagers and young people getting together. People from all ages feel the obsessive need to relax in this stressful time in which we live.</p>
<p>This is the time of mothers, especially of grandmothers. With great love and determination they look after their children’s children and even after their grandchildren’s children. They are the heroines of the marathon that goes on year after year.</p>
<p>Commemorations would lack every sense if it were not for the advances achieved by our Revolution; these are the sum total of examples set forth and efforts carried out for a long time. Cuba is almost the only country offering free education, health and sports services.</p>
<p>A special tribute should go to a comrade who exactly 50 years ago gave up his life fighting the tyranny: the young 22-year-old hero Frank Pa�s [A Cuban revolutionary fighter killed by Santiago de Cuba police July 30, 1957].</p>
<p>Those who fought for these ideals made it possible for us to enjoy today’s levels of social justice, which includes full employment for all men and women in our country.</p>
<p>The most important achievement of the Revolution has been the capacity to resist a blockade for almost half century as well as privations of every sort. Restrictions in the variety and quality of foodstuffs and future threats of unaffordable prices that may result from the imperialist constraint of using much of this scarce and vital raw material to produce fuel are not ruled out.</p>
<p>We have come to the end of the Pan American Games; I am going to miss them.</p>
<p>Cuba won the first place in track and field, with 12 gold medals. As a country, it ranked second at the XV Pan American Games with a total of 59 gold medals, preceded only by the United States, which won 97; in other words, they won 1.64 gold medals for each one that was won by our country. But the United States has 26-times more inhabitants than Cuba. According to conservative figures, they won one medal per every 3.09 million inhabitants; we won one per every 195 thousand.</p>
<p>On 59 occasions we heard the spirited notes of the Cuban National Anthem playing. In spite of everything!</p>
<p> </p>
<p>—<i>Prensa Latina</i>, July 30, 2007</p>
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Sep/Oct 2007 • Vol 7, No. 5
Click Here to Return to the Index
Search the Site:
Enter term and click Go!
In Spite of Everything
By Fidel Castro Ruz
Do you think that you merely enjoy the Pan American Games? Think again, and you will realize that no matter your age, you run, jump, put the shots, throw javelins, discuses and hammers; soar above hurdles and tracks, relay batons, spike balls, score a basket, row, execute ippons, turn your rival over, follow strategies, splash water over yourself after running for two hours and even stop taking in the oxygen that your lungs are demanding. What a wonderful show the athletes put on for us!
But you do not just enjoy; you participate, especially when athletes from your country are competing. In our case, there is hardly any event where there is not a Cuban team or athlete present.
Besides, July and August are months filled with commemorative activities. This is also the warmest and most humid period of the year. Added to this there is a magic word: holidays! Your homes see millions of children, teenagers and young people getting together. People from all ages feel the obsessive need to relax in this stressful time in which we live.
This is the time of mothers, especially of grandmothers. With great love and determination they look after their children’s children and even after their grandchildren’s children. They are the heroines of the marathon that goes on year after year.
Commemorations would lack every sense if it were not for the advances achieved by our Revolution; these are the sum total of examples set forth and efforts carried out for a long time. Cuba is almost the only country offering free education, health and sports services.
A special tribute should go to a comrade who exactly 50 years ago gave up his life fighting the tyranny: the young 22-year-old hero Frank Pa�s [A Cuban revolutionary fighter killed by Santiago de Cuba police July 30, 1957].
Those who fought for these ideals made it possible for us to enjoy today’s levels of social justice, which includes full employment for all men and women in our country.
The most important achievement of the Revolution has been the capacity to resist a blockade for almost half century as well as privations of every sort. Restrictions in the variety and quality of foodstuffs and future threats of unaffordable prices that may result from the imperialist constraint of using much of this scarce and vital raw material to produce fuel are not ruled out.
We have come to the end of the Pan American Games; I am going to miss them.
Cuba won the first place in track and field, with 12 gold medals. As a country, it ranked second at the XV Pan American Games with a total of 59 gold medals, preceded only by the United States, which won 97; in other words, they won 1.64 gold medals for each one that was won by our country. But the United States has 26-times more inhabitants than Cuba. According to conservative figures, they won one medal per every 3.09 million inhabitants; we won one per every 195 thousand.
On 59 occasions we heard the spirited notes of the Cuban National Anthem playing. In spite of everything!
—Prensa Latina, July 30, 2007
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<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h1>
U.N. Demands of Cuba
</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">First Published:</span> November 2, 1962
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html">Castro Speech Database</a>
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<p>
(Live interview with Fidel Castro in television studios of station CMQ;
Luis Gomez Wanguermert, moderator)
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>
Wanguermert: Good evening televiewers. The Cuban radio and
television stations have joined the national hookup this evening in order
to broadcast the statement of the premier and commander in chief, Dr. Fidel
Castro, on the talks held in Havana with U.N. Secretary General U Thant and
other current subjects.
</p>
<p>
Commander Castro, what can you tell us about U Thant's visit to Havana?
</p>
<p>
Castro: Well, the talks held with U Thant, the U.N. secretary general,
lasted two days, and I thought that the best way to inform the people of
this matter was to read the copies of the conversations.
</p>
<p>
The following should be pointed out and considered: On the first day talks
of a general nature were held in which our country's position was set
forth. On the second day he wanted to discuss several confidential matters.
I then asked him if he minded if the shorthand version of the first day's
talks, in which the entire position of the Cuban revolution of the reasons
for Cuba's conduct is set forth — if he minded if I made it public. He
agreed. We also promised him that the points — the questions and the matters
of a confidential nature he might discuss, labeling them as such, not for
our sake but for his — would not be published for the time being. However,
everything that was discussed is right there. Therefore, I shall read the
shorthand version of the conversations held at the Presidential Palace on
30 October 1962 which began at 1510 hours.
</p>
<p>
U Thant — I shall read the names of the persons speaking — so U Thant — there
is one point I should like to bring up — (Castro explains — Ed.) he (U
Thant — Ed.) is speaking: In the discussions I had in New York, both with
the representatives of the Soviet Union and with the representatives of the
United States, General Rikhye was always present, and I feel that his
presence would be useful at this meeting with the Premier.
</p>
<p>
We: We do not mind. General Rikhye is invited to participate in the
interview.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: First of all, Mr. Premier, I should like to thank you and your
government for your invitation to visit Cuba, not only for this mission,
but also for the invitation given me earlier. As I informed you when I
accepted your invitation, I came as soon as possible. I am certain that
today and tomorrow we shall have very fruitful talks toward finding a
solution with regard to Cuba's sovereignty and independence.
</p>
<p>
We: We can talk for as long as is necessary. We have plenty of free time to
give you.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: As you well know the Cuban problem was presented to the Security
Council last week during the meetings of the 45 neutral countries,
principally those which had attended the Bandung and Belgrade conferences.
Two meetings were held, and they sent representatives to confer with
me — since I also belong to a neutral country and participated in the two
meetings — to ask me to take the initiative, the initiative which could
contribute to the peaceful solution of this problem.
</p>
<p>
On 24 October I decided to take this initiative. After I heard the
statements by the three delegations in the Security Council I came to the
conclusion that the immediate problem was to make an appeal to the three
powers and I called upon Premier Khrushchev to suspend the arms shipments
to Cuba voluntarily for two or three weeks and upon President Kennedy to
lift the quarantine voluntarily; and then I called upon Your Excellency to
voluntarily suspend the construction of the missile bases to give us an
opportunity to discuss the problem calmly. Immediately after my request the
Security Council suspended its meetings to give me a change to put my plans
into effect.
</p>
<p>
On the following day I learned that Soviet ships are approaching the
quarantine area. I sent a second appeal to Premier Khrushchev and to
President Kennedy asking them to avoid a direct confrontation on this
matter, so that I could have the few days necessary to discuss this matter.
On the same day I send you a letter to which you very kingly replied asking
me to visit Cuba. The subject of this letter was the suspension of missile
base construction in Cuba.
</p>
<p>
Since then there have been communications between Premier Khrushchev and
President Kennedy, between Premier Khrushchev and myself, between President
Kennedy and myself. Naturally, Your Excellency also replied to my letter of
27 October. The contents of this letter are already known to the public
because it has been published.
</p>
<p>
As I see the problem, Your Excellency, it is in two parts: one immediate
and the other long term. For the time being the Security Council wishes to
deal with the solution of the immediate problem. The object of my
negotiations with the three powers I mentioned concerns only the immediate
problem, naturally. However, the United National will have to be involved
in some way in the solution of the long term problem.
</p>
<p>
Several factors are involved in the immediate problem: The first is that
Premier Khrushchev responded to my request, giving instructions to the
Soviet ships to keep away from the quarantine area for the time being for
several days. President Kennedy replied that he was prepared to avoid a
direct confrontation with the Soviet ships if they were not carrying
armaments, and Premier Khrushchev told me very explicitly that the Soviet
ships are not carrying armaments at present.
</p>
<p>
If the two powers agree, no armaments will be sent to Cuba for two or three
weeks, and for two or three weeks if no arms are being shipped the United
States will lift the quarantine.
</p>
<p>
What the United States wants to be sure of is that the Soviet ships will
not carry armaments. What the United State wants is a machinery — an
arrangement — through the United Nations which would assure it that during
this period of two or three weeks no arms will enter Cuba.
</p>
<p>
The Soviet Union does not agree with this proposal. Yesterday the Soviet
Government proposed another solution, that is, that the Soviet ships would
permit inspections by the Red Cross, verification by the Red Cross that
they are not carrying weapons.
</p>
<p>
This reply by the Soviet Union was communicated to the United States last
evening. The Red Cross, which we contacted in Geneva by telephone
yesterday, replied that in the name of world peace and international
cooperation it would agree to take charge of this matter, either on the
high seas or in the ports of disembarkation, if the Cuban Government
agreed.
</p>
<p>
I cannot take sides at all. I am not empowered to associated myself with
any of the proposals. I only informed the Red Cross, the Soviet Union, and
the United States that, with due consideration to Cuba's sovereignty, I
would request this of the Red Cross, always subject to the consent of the
Cuban Government. The three parties were informed of this, and it was
reported that the Cuban Government would be informed of it.
</p>
<p>
Therefore, Your Excellency, the first point, which would help my work
considerably, would be to know the attitude of the Cuban Government to the
idea of the Red Cross checking the transportation of armaments on Soviet
ships for the next two or three weeks. The question is: What would Cuba's
attitude be to this proposal?
</p>
<p>
President Dorticos: Are you speaking of the high seas, or in Cuba?
</p>
<p>
U Thant: Of course, I informed the governments of the Soviet Union and the
United States of this proposal made by the Red Cross. The Soviet Government
replied that this is a matter pertaining to Cuban sovereignty. I have not
received a reply from the U.S. Government on the matter. Would Your
Excellency like to discuss the matter point by point or all together?
</p>
<p>
We: I would prefer you to continue your statement.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: The United States told me, and also said so during the
negotiations and during the Security Council meetings, that its main
concern lies with the launching pads rather than the armament. Its
principal concern is the missile launching pads. As is well known, last
Sunday Premier Khrushchev instructed the Soviet technicians to dismantle
the missile launching pads and to return the missiles to the Soviet Union.
He also said that he would ask the United Nations to send teams to verify
if this has actually been done.
</p>
<p>
I replied to the Soviet representatives that before a team could be sent to
check on this the most important point was to obtain the prior consent of
the Cuban Government. This matter could not be presented without the
knowledge and consent of the Cuban Government and no action could be taken
which would violate its sovereignty.
</p>
<p>
I also informed both the Soviet representative and the U.S. Government that
I would come to Cuba to present this viewpoint to Premier Castro and to his
colleagues. Of course, but the Soviet Government and the U.S. Government
agree on this point — that if the launching pads are removed tension will be
reduced. What the United States is seeking through me is a temporary
agreement prior to the conclusion of the dismantling of the pads.
</p>
<p>
I asked the Soviet representatives how long this would take. They asked
Moscow, but this morning they had not received a reply.
</p>
<p>
What the United States is looking for is a temporary agreement with the
United Nations, subject, naturally, to the authorization and consent of the
Cuban Government. Naturally, no one knows how long this will take — one or
two weeks, and perhaps more.
</p>
<p>
Thus, the first U.S. proposal is that if Cuba consents, a team of U.N.
representatives consists of persons whose nationalities are acceptable to
the Cuban Government would be suggested. The second proposal would be a
reconnaissance plane manned by persons acceptable to the Cuban, Russian,
and American Governments. A plane with a Cuban, a Russian, and a U.S.
representative on board for the two or three weeks this may last was also
suggested. I replied to the United States that this proposal would also be
presented to Premier Fidel Castro.
</p>
<p>
The United States informed me that as soon as this system has been put into
practice it would make a public statement, in the Security Council if
necessary, that it would harbor no aggressive intentions toward the Cuban
Government and would guarantee the territorial integrity of the nation. I
was asked to tell you this.
</p>
<p>
As I replied to the United States and to everyone, the most important thing
is that all these decisions cannot be reached without the consent of the
Cuban Government. I was told that if this decision was reached with
agreement of the Cuban Government and the United Nations, not only would
the United States make the statements in the Security Council but it would
also lift the blockade.
</p>
<p>
I informed the United States yesterday that while I was conferring with
premier Fidel Castro and the Cuban leaders, it would be ill advised for the
blockade to be maintained, and I asked that is be suspended. This morning
it was announced that the blockade had been suspended for the 48 hours of
my visit to the Republic of Cuba.
</p>
<p>
As Your Excellency knows, I said in the Security Council that this blockade
was highly unusual, not very common excepting in times of war. That is what
I told the Security Council. This viewpoint is shared by the 45 countries
which me and asked me to make this request.
</p>
<p>
Two of these 45 countries, who also have seats on the Security Council at
this time — the United Arab Republic and Ghana — made statements in this
connection during a meeting in the Security Council. Other countries of the
45 neutrals, particularly those which participated in the Belgrade
conference, will make similar statements if given an opportunity. So much
for the immediate problem.
</p>
<p>
Your Excellency, the Security Council did not authorize me to discuss the
longterm problems, although this is something which will have to be
discussed in the Security Council later. For the purposes of this first
conversation, this is all I have to say to you, Your Excellency.
</p>
<p>
We: There is one point which confuses me: it concerns your proposals on
inspection. They speak of two points here — a team and a plane. I should
like more explanation on this point. Please repeat to me the part referring
to the inspection proposal.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: Both proposals would come from the United Nations and would
consist of two units: one on land and the other from a plane for the period
of the dismantling of the bases, that is, about two weeks.
</p>
<p>
We: I do not understand why this is asked of us. Could you explain a little
better?
</p>
<p>
U Thant: The explanation given by the United States why it is making the
request is that it wants to be certain that the pads are actually
dismantled and that the missiles are returned to the Soviet Union.
</p>
<p>
We: What right has the United States to ask this? I mean, if this is based
upon a real right of if it is a demand based upon force, or a position of
strength.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: This is my viewpoint: it is not a right. Such a thing could only
be done with the approval and consent of the Cuban Government.
</p>
<p>
We: We do not exactly understand why this is asked of us because we have
not violated any right, we absolutely have not attacked anyone. All our
actions have been based upon international law. We have done absolutely
nothing outside the norms of international law.
</p>
<p>
On the other hand, we have been the victims first of all of a blockage,
which is an illegal act, and in the second place, of the attempt to
determine from another what we have a right to do or not to do within our
frontiers. It is our understanding that Cuba is a sovereign state no more
nor less than any member nation of the United Nations with all the
attributes inherent in any of these states.
</p>
<p>
Moreover, the United States has repeatedly been violating our airspace
without any right, committing an intolerable act of aggression against our
country which it has sought to justify by an OAS decision, but this
decision is not valid for us. We were even expelled from the OAS. We can
accept anything that is just, that does not imply a reduction of our
sovereignty. The rights violated by the United States have not been
reestablished, and we do not accept any imposition by force.
</p>
<p>
I believe that this question of inspection is one more attempt to humiliate
our country, therefore we do not accept it. This request for inspection is
to confirm their attempt to violate our right, to act within our frontiers
with complete freedom, to decide what we can or cannot do within our
frontiers. This line of ours is not a new one; it is a viewpoint we have
invariably and always maintained.
</p>
<p>
In Cuba's reply to the joint U.S. resolution we said textually: The threat
of a direct armed attack if Cuba strengthens itself militarily to a degree
to which the United States takes the liberty of deciding is absurd. We do
not have the slightest intention of giving an account or of consulting the
U.S. Senate or House of Representatives with regard to the weapons we deem
it advisable to acquire and the measures to take to fully defend our
country.
</p>
<p>
Do we not have the rights which the international norms, laws, and
principles recognize for every sovereign state anywhere in the world? We
have not granted and do not plan to grant the U.S. Congress any sovereign
prerogative. This viewpoint was confirmed in the United Nations by the
President of the Republic of Cuba, and also during many public statements
made by me as premier of the government, and this is a firm stand of the
Cuban Government.
</p>
<p>
All these steps were taken for the security of the country in the face of a
systematic policy of hostility and aggression. They were all taken in
accordance with the law and we have not abandoned our determination to
defend these rights.
</p>
<p>
We can negotiate in all sincerity and in all honor. However, we would not
be honorable if we were to consent to negotiate a sovereign right of our
country. We are prepared to pay the necessary price for these rights, and
this is not just so much talk, but an attitude very keenly felt by our
people.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: I understand Your Excellency's sentiments perfectly. That is why I
told the United States and others clearly: Any U.N. action in Cuban
territory can be undertaken only with the consent of the people and the
Government of Cuba. I told them that in the name of peace, which is
ardently desired by everybody and by all inhabitants of the world. I told
the 45 countries and I agreed to come to Cuba without having any commitment
to either side.
</p>
<p>
Last night and this morning, before I began my trip, certain press reports
said I was coming to settle the details of the United Nations' presence in
Cuba. That is completely erroneous. That would be a violation of the
sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba. I have come here only to present the
other side's viewpoints and explore the possibilities of finding a peaceful
solution. The 45 countries that asked me to come also know what position is
legal and what is not, but in the name of world peace, and for a period of
only one or two weeks, perhaps three, they asked me to come to try to find
a possible solution.
</p>
<p>
Your Excellency, my conscience is clear on this point. The United Nations
can only undertake an action of this sort when it has the consent of the
government involved. It is not the first time this has happened. In Laos,
when a situation existed there that threatened international peace, the
United Nations established itself in that territory only after obtaining
the consent of the Government of Laos. In 1956, in Egypt, in the UAR, a
situation arose and the United Nations established itself in Egypt, and
still is in Egypt, with the consent of the government. Similarly, in 1958,
in Lebanon, another situation threatening world peace arose, and the United
Nations went in only after it had obtained consent of the Government of
Lebanon. One condition is absolutely necessary: In order to undertake an
action of that nature, the consent of the government involved must be
obtained.
</p>
<p>
We: In the case of the Congo too?
</p>
<p>
U Thant: And in the case of Somalia.
</p>
<p>
We: In the case of the Congo I have understood they requested it of the
United Nations.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: In the Congo the petition was presented by the Government of the
Congo.
</p>
<p>
We: In the Congo the government that requested it is buried now. In the
first place, our government has not the slightest doubt of the fine
intentions and the disinterestedness and honesty with which the present
U.N. Secretary General is working. We have no doubts at all about his
intentions, his good faith, his extraordinary interest in finding a
solution for the problem. All of us hold his mission and his person in
great esteem. I say this in all sincerity. I understand the interest we all
should feel in peace, but the path of peace is not the path of sacrificing
the rights of peoples, of violating the rights of peoples; that is
precisely the path that leads to war. The path of peace is the path of
guarantees for the rights of peoples and the peoples' readiness to defend
those rights.
</p>
<p>
In every case mentioned by the Secretary General, Laos, Egypt, Lebanon, and
the Congo, which I just mentioned — in all of these cases we see nothing but
a series of aggressions against the rights of the peoples. All were caused
by the same thing. The road to the past world war was the road marked by
the annexation of Austria, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, tolerated
acts of German imperialism — and it led to that war. And we are keenly aware
of those dangers. We know the paths aggressors like to take. We guess the
path the United States wants to take with regard to us. Therefore it is
really hard to understand how it is possible to speak of immediate
solutions independently of future solutions, when the matter of greatest
interest is not to pay any price for peace now, but to guarantee peace
definitely, and not to by paying daily the price of an ephemeral peace.
</p>
<p>
And of course Cuba is not Austria, nor the Czechoslovak Sudetenland, nor
the Congo. We have the most resolute intention of defending our rights, in
the face of all difficulties and risks. And it is necessary for the U.N.
Secretary General to know this determination of ours so he can succeed in
his mission, or at least be able to work with a perfect knowledge of this
circumstance.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: I understand your sentiments perfectly, as well as the viewpoints
Your Excellency has expressed. As for the point of immediate solutions and
long-term solutions, I wish to say that the Security Council has authorized
me to seek means of obtaining peace in this area. I understand that
immediate solutions and long-term solutions are intimately interrelated,
and for those long-term solutions we should explore the possibilities in
the light of the situation as it exists now. The Security Council has given
me authorization for that. In practice, it is very hard to separate the
two. I believe that, if we find an immediate solution for this, it will
lead us to a permanent solution, not just for the United Nations but for
all interested parties.
</p>
<p>
In mentioning Laos and the other cases where the United Nations has
established itself, I agree with you, but I also want to say that the
United Nations, in those places, has succeeded in removing or averting
aggression from without. I thought, if you please, that the U.N. presence
in Cuba for a period of perhaps more than three weeks may likewise lessen
or eliminate the danger of aggression. It is my opinion that, in current
and future times, the presence of the United Nations in certain countries
will serve especially to remove and avert aggression.
</p>
<p>
President Dorticos: I would like to say something. I agree with what our
Premier has said about our full understanding of the high mission the
Secretary General is carrying out with such nobility. That mission, of
course, is none other than to seek means of guaranteeing peace in this
critical situation.
</p>
<p>
It seems there is a question to be defined: Where is the danger of war? In
the arms of one kind or another that Cuba has, or in the aggressive U.S.
designs against Cuba? We believe aggression is what can engender war. The
arms that exist in Cuba, regardless of what they may be, will never begin
an aggression. Therefore, we ask ourselves: Why is inspection, and an
acceptance of inspection, a condition for guaranteeing peace? To guarantee
peace it would suffice for the United States to pledge, with all necessary
guarantees through the United Nations, not to attack Cuba. That is why we
have set forth — and our Premier has repeated it here very clearly — that the
questions of a long-term solution, if they can be called that, are
intimately connected with the immediate solution of the crisis.
</p>
<p>
The immediate solution of the crisis would come as soon as the United
States offered guarantees against an attack on Cuba, minimum guarantees
that are contained in the declarations made by our Premier on 28 October
and which are surely known to the Secretary General. A U.N. stay in Cuba
for purposes of inspection, which the Revolutionary Government of Cuba does
not accept because of the reasons set forth by the Premier, would at most
mean a guarantee for two or three weeks of that peace, which he has rightly
called emphemeral. Immediately afterward, the danger of war would resume,
because the conditions that favor North American aggression against Cuba
would remain.
</p>
<p>
Let the United States give the guarantees that we demand as a minimum, and
the solution of the immediate problem will have begun. I would say, in the
last instance, that for the purpose of obtaining peace now, there are no
immediate questions or long-term questions to be discussed. We believe the
five points contained in the declarations made by our Premier are
ingredients that form part of the immediate discussion intended to
guarantee peace. We believe that these five points are not deferred for
long-term discussion, but that circumstances demand that they should be
part of the immediate discussion because, in our opinion, they are minimum
conditions for guaranteeing peace.
</p>
<p>
I repeat, peace is not endangered by our arms; peace is in danger because
of the aggressive conduct of the United States, and negotiations and
discussions covering these five points are what will immediately eliminate
the dangers of war. That is our understanding of the problem.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: First, I want to thank Your Excellencies, the President and the
Premier, for their kind words for my person and the post I occupy, and I am
in full agreement with both as to the solution we may find, for short-term
agreements should also include negotiations for long-term agreements. But
in terms of the United Nations, I believe the best solution — and in this I
believe the 110 member nations will agree — is for the United Nations,
through the Security Council, to provide U.N. representatives to seek and
find the long-term solution.
</p>
<p>
But right now, at this moment, I do not believe the United Nations, and its
Security Council, can arrive at a positive, acceptable long-term solution
in the best interests of everybody and world peace. If a long- term
solution if sound, it will be in the best interests of all and of world
peace, but I believe it is difficult to obtain at present in the United
Nations.
</p>
<p>
We: I understand that if that short-term solution of which the Secretary
speaks were not achieved, it would be simply because the United States does
not want it and would persist in demanding inspection as a humiliating act
for Cuba, because, for purposes of that unilateral security which the
United States demands, the Soviet Government's decision to withdraw the
arms of a strategic nature which had been brought for the defense of the
Republic of Cuba should have sufficed.
</p>
<p>
The Cuban Government has not hindered the withdrawal of those arms, and the
Soviet Government's decision is in itself a decision of a public nature.
The mere fact that it was made in this manner in the public view has had an
effect on world public opinion. The United States knows that that decision
was made seriously by the Soviet Union and that, in fact, the strategic
weapons are being withdrawn.
</p>
<p>
If what the United States wants, beside that, is to humiliate our country,
it will not get it. We have not hesitated an instant in the decision to
defend our rights. We cannot accept impositions that can be forced only on
a conquerered country. We have not desisted from our determination to
defend ourselves, even to such an extent that they will never be able to
impose conditions on us, because first they will have to destroy us and
annihilate us, and in any case they will not find anybody here on whom to
impose humiliating conditions. (Prolonged applause)
</p>
<p>
U Thant: On the subject of the U.S. declaration, the United States has said
that it will make a public declaration of nonaggression and respect for
Cuba's territorial integrity once the missiles have been dismantled and
withdrawn. In my opinion, on that there is no disagreement.
</p>
<p>
I am completely in agreement with the Premier that the U.N. actions involve
an invasion of the rights of a member state, and in this case, speaking of
Cuba, if it is not in agreement with accepting a U.N. action, then my
duty — what I must do — is to inform those who made the proposal of this. It
is not my intention here to impose anything. My duty is merely to explain
the possibilities for finding the means, the manner, or the form by which
we could find a peaceful solution, without making concrete proposals. I
shall take into account everything that has been said here this afternoon
and I shall return, I shall go back, to make my report to the parties
interested in this.
</p>
<p>
I feel that this meeting has been very useful, and if the Premier is
agreeable we can meet again tomorrow, before I leave. Meanwhile, I can be
thinking over carefully what the President and the Premier have said about
this matter.
</p>
<p>
We: To conclude, I should like to reply on the question of Red Cross
inspection. We also oppose that inspection in our ports. I wonder, if the
Soviet Union authorizes inspection of its ships on the high seas, why would
it then be necessary to inspect them again in Cuban ports? In the second
place, I see that the Secretary centers his interest on getting the United
States to make that public declaration, that pledge in the United Nations,
that it will not invade Cuba.
</p>
<p>
On this point, I wish to say first that the United States has no right to
invade Cuba and that it is impossible to negotiate with a promise not to
commit a crime, with a mere promise not to commit a crime, and that in the
face of that danger we trust more to our determination to defend ourselves
than to the words of the U.S. Government. But moreover, if the United
Nations attaches great value to a public commitment entered into in that
body by the United States, such as a commitment not to invade, why not
concede equal value to the public commitment to the United Nations made by
the USSR to withdraw the strategic weapons it send for the defense of the
Republic of Cuba?
</p>
<p>
These would be two equally public commitments. If one of them needs no
additional guarantee — that is, the U.S. commitment not to invade Cuba — why
does the Soviet Union's commitment to withdraw its strategic weapons need
the additional guarantee of inspecting us?
</p>
<p>
We shall meet with you again with pleasure as often as you wish and at the
time you choose.
</p>
<p>
U Thant: Many thanks, Your Excellency.
</p>
<p>
(Castro speaks for himself at this point — Ed.): And that was the end of the
first meeting. At the second meeting, he began by saying: "I want to thank
the government and the people for the hospitality and the facilities they
have afforded me in this country. The motive for this new meeting is to
exchange opinions on certain confidential matters I have in mind."
</p>
<p>
Thus, at this second meeting, he started off by saying it would deal with
matters of a confidential matter. We agreed with him not to make public the
things he said. Fundamentally, at this second meeting we maintained our
viewpoints from the first meeting and brought up a few things, such as the
danger inherent in the violations of our airspace, the danger of an
incident, and the fact that it was indispensable for the United States to
suspend those flights.
</p>
<p>
At the same time, the U.N. Secretary General asked us for information about
the plane which the U.S. Defense Department reported had disappeared on one
of its flights to Cuba. We gave him the information he requested, and, at
the same time, we agreed on acceding to his request to send the body of the
pilot, who died while on an illegal flight over our territory — we decided
for humane reasons to return the body.
</p>
<p>
As a matter of fact, we regretted that this North American had to die in
our country as a result of the illegal acts, in violation of our
sovereignty, ordered by the U.S. Government. We hope the circumstances that
resulted in that death will not be repeated; that is, that the causes that
resulted in that death will not be repeated.
</p>
<p>
In general terms, the opinion of the government regarding the U.N.
Secretary General is that he is an honest and impartial person who has a
real desire to struggle to find solutions for these problems. He also
appeared to be a competent person, and he, in reality, did inspire our
confidence. That is the conclusion we drew from the meeting we had with
him, from the way he expressed himself, from the respect he showed at all
times toward the ideas of our country and toward the rights of our country.
</p>
<p>
Moreover, we understand that at this moment the U.N. Secretary General is
carrying out a very important mission, which enhances the post he holds,
and, at the same time, if he achieves success in that effort, it will
undoubtedly increase the prestige of the United Nations. It is possible
that the institution will develop and carry out its work. It is at present
carrying out a very important task.
</p>
<p>
Undoubtedly, it is of interest that the United Nations constitutes an
institution guaranteeing the rights of countries, and particularly the
rights of the little countries. At this moment, it appears to us that the
United Nations is carrying out that role well. In that sense, we give the
United Nations all our support; that is, in the efforts and activities it
is carrying out in favor of peace and to find a solution. This is apart
from our having been intransigeant with regard to the problem of
inspection, because we consider that we cannot accept any inspection.
</p>
<p>
We cannot accept inspection for several reasons. First, because we have no
desire to sacrifice a sovereign principle of our country. A series of
rights has been violated. Freedom of the seas has been violated by the
United States. The United States is trying to meddle in things which we
have a right to do or not do within our borders. The United States, in an
open manner, has been violating the airspace of our country.
</p>
<p>
How, in the face of all those facts of aggression and violation, in the
face of those acts of force, are we going to accept inspection of our
country, an inspection which actually validates the pretensions of the
United States to decide what kind of weapons we have or do not have the
right to possess?
</p>
<p>
We have not renounced the right to possess the kinds of weapons we may
consider convenient in the exercise of the sovereign power of our country.
We have not renounced that right. We consider it one of our rights. How are
we to authorize an inspection to validate a pretension of a foreign
country? Therefore, we do not accept it.
</p>
<p>
In the second place, this constitutes a demand from a position of force, a
position of force of the United States, and we do not yield to that
position of force. We will never yield to positions of force. (Applause)
What Cuba defends in maintaining its position is not inconsiderable. It
defends the sovereign right of countries. Moreover, it defends peace,
because our position against the positions of force which is required by
these things, our firmness against the demands of the aggressors and those
who like to practice such a policy, is a position that will not encourage
the aggressors.
</p>
<p>
The aggressors can be aggressors; that is, the world may find that there
are aggressors, but the aggressors will find resistance in our country. The
aggressors will find resistance to all kinds of aggression which is being
attempted, or an aggression against a right. And they will not be
encouraged by the position of Cuba! We are absolutely in the right and we
are absolutely determined to defend that right.
</p>
<p>
Above all, as is clear in the explanation we gave the U.N. Secretary
General, more than anything else this is an attempt to humiliate us.
Therefore, the position of Cuba was and is that we do not accept
inspection.
</p>
<p>
We have noted the conditions that are needed, and we repeated to the U.N.
Secretary General in the second meeting that the Cuban view is that, if a
real solution is desired for the existing tensions and problems in the
Caribbean and on the continent, which also affect the entire world, it is
necessary that the guarantees that Cuba demands be granted. Those
guarantees have the virtue of being absolutely just demands, and all are
based on the indisputable rights of our country — the ending of the economic
blockade and all the measures of economic and commercial pressure which the
United States exerts against our country all over the world and which it
has been exercising against our country, aggressive acts that were part of
the ingredients that aggravated the situation to the point it reached this
time, aggressive acts they continue to commit at this moment.
</p>
<p>
We are constantly receiving reports of vessels which were coming to Cuba
and whose goods were left in Mediterranean, European, or Latin American
ports, goods that were destined for Cuba. Just yesterday a report came of
one or two ships, loaded with jute for our sugar production, which left
their cargoes in a Mediterranean port because of pressure by the United
States.
</p>
<p>
Moreover, we demand the cessation of all subversive activities and the
launching and landing of weapons and explosives by air and sea, the
organization of mercenary invasions, and the infiltration of spies and
saboteurs — all actions which are carried out from U.S. territory and some
accomplice countries. Do not a people have a right to demand guarantees
against those actions? The cessation of the pirate attacks that are carried
out from bases in the United States and Puerto Rico, the cessation of all
violations of our airspace and territorial waters by U.S. planes and
warships — that is to say, our country requests that crime not be committed
against it, that violations and illegal acts not be committed against it,
and, finally, that the naval base at Guanatanamo be withdrawn and the Cuban
territory occupied by the United States be returned.
</p>
<p>
It is absurd that the withdrawal of friendly weapons be requested and that
an enemy base be left in our country. That has absolutely no foundation!
This is absolutely absurd! No one in any place in the world would dispute
the right of our country to request the return of the territory on which
this base is situated, a base where, in these days of crisis, troops were
accumulating to attack our country. How are we going to be asked to
withdraw friendly weapons, while enemy weapons remain within the heart of
our country?
</p>
<p>
The United States says that is possesses that base by virtue of a treaty,
an agreement between the United States and a Cuban government — of course,
a Cuban government that emerged during the intervention. It was not through
any treaty; it was through a unilateral agreement in the U.S. Congress,
through an amendment they imposed on our constitution and imposed by the
United States, by the United States in a law of its Congress, Cuba was
warned that they would not depart the country if that amendment were not
accepted, and amendment which contained the question of the naval base!
</p>
<p>
If they call that agreement legitimate, even more legitimate are the
agreements between the Soviet Government and the most free government of
Cuba, by virtue of which those strategic missiles were situated in our
country and for our defense. And if the United States has placed the world
on the brink of war to demand the withdrawal of those missiles, then what
right and justification has it to refuse to abandon the territory it
occupies in our country?
</p>
<p>
We are not an obstacle to a solution of peace, a real solution of peace. We
are not a warrior or a warlike people. We are a peaceful people, and being
peaceful does not mean permitting oneself to be trampled upon. Not in the
least! When the trampling comes, then we are as warlike as we must be to
defend ourselves. Facts have demonstrated this.
</p>
<p>
We shall never obstruct a true solution of peace, and the conditions for a
true solution of peace are the guarantees of the five points established by
the Government of Cuba. The United States should begin by demonstrating its
good faith,not with a promise — deeds and not words.
</p>
<p>
A really convincing deed would be for the United States to return to us the
territory it occupies in the naval base of Guantanamo. That would be a much
more convincing deed than any word, than any promise the United States
could give.
</p>
<p>
If Cuba's guarantees are not complied with there will be no true solution
of peace, and then we shall all have to continue living in this same
atmosphere of tension in which we have been living up to now. We want
solutions of peace, but solutions of peace with dignity. Moreover, there
would be no peace without dignity, because the nations without dignity are
not respected. We have a right to peace, to one kind of peace or another,
to the peace which is neither peace nor war, simply because we were able to
resist and were able to have dignity. We have the right to a peace, to a
real solution of peace, and sooner or later we shall obtain it because we
have earned that right due to the spirit of our people, due to their
resistance and their dignity.
</p>
<p>
Our cause, and our right to peace, will continue to gain ground throughout
the world. Everyone also knows who is to blame for these problems, who is
to blame for all these tensions. And the people of the world will go on
giving support to our five points which are indispensable conditions for
peace. Our people have won and will keep on winning even more the right to
a worthy and to a just peace.
</p>
<p>
We must be allowed to work in peace. More than weapons we prefer to use
instruments of work. More than to kill and destroy, we prefer to create.
Our people are not permitted to create. They are constantly being forced to
mobilize, to put themselves on a war footing, to defend themselves, to
prepare themselves because they are forced to do so, not because we desire
this policy.
</p>
<p>
It is a policy imposed upon us by the aggressors against our country. What
our country wants is to work. What it wants is to develop its resources, to
develop the people, and to progress with its peaceful work.
</p>
<p>
Some things are amusing. A few days before the crisis, barely two days
earlier, we inaugurated the institute for basic sciences. Some 1,000 young
people were to enter it to begin studying medicine. Within three days the
institute for basic sciences was converted into an anti-aircraft artillery
school, and thus went everything else. Compare one thing with the other:
peaceful work and the desires and efforts of a nation to improve its well
being and health, to train all the doctors our peasants need, and to train
all the doctors our people need to raise their average life span and to
improve their health.
</p>
<p>
There were 800 young people who had entered and within three days 800,
1,000, or 2,000 youths had to enter to be taught to kill, to be taught to
handle not surgical instruments but cannon.
</p>
<p>
Our road, the desire of our people, is not the artillery school, but the
institute of basic sciences; the rest are bitter tasks which have been
imposed on us by the aggressors. Some days before this crisis, signs could
be seen everywhere how the work of the revolution had advanced. Supplies
were improving considerably — production, both agricultural and industrial,
and the plans — the entire creative work of the revolution — were advancing
at a high rate. And the organisms were devoted to creating the work
conditions for next year, 1963, with the hope of achieving a leap ahead in
the economy, a leap in the production.
</p>
<p>
But the crisis came, and the threat. Mobilization was necessary, the
abandonment of all the projects, the abandonment of all the tasks, in order
to assume under those circumstances the most sacred task, which is the
defense of the country. And we defend the fatherland because we want a
country in which to work, not a country of parasites but a country of
workers, a country of creators. And we want that country in order to work,
to create!
</p>
<p>
That is why we must defend it before all else. And the ardor with which the
people prepared to fight and to do whatever else was necessary demonstrates
the love the people feel, more every day, for creative work. What were they
defending in the trenches? What they are doing in the rural areas, what
they are doing in the universities,what they are doing in the factories,
what they are doing in the schools — that is what the people are going to
defend in the trenches! And the more awareness they have of what they are
doing, the more they love what they are doing, the more logical it is that
they go to the trenches with more love and more courage.
</p>
<p>
We will not be an obstacle to any real solution of peace. We gladly offer
our efforts toward that solution, to the effort being made by the United
Nations to find that real solution of peace, to the effort being made by
different neutralist countries to find that solution of real peace, a peace
with dignity and with absolutely no lessening of any of the sovereign
rights of our country. But if there is to be a lessening, we shall continue
as we are. We shall not accept it. How long? As long as necessary.
</p>
<p>
We shall have patience, all the patience necessary, so that as the climax
of all this struggle we shall some day attain that peace with all the
attributes of a state that is totally and absolutely sovereign, which has
always been the aspiration of our people. We must have patience.
</p>
<p>
We shall not accept just any little formula. We shall accept any formula of
peace that is truly worthy. And I think that, with such a formula, not only
we would profit, everyone would profit, the world would profit, American
would profit, the United States would profit; that is to say, the very ones
to blame for this situation would also profit from a solution of peace is
acceptable to our country.
</p>
<p>
And we express the view of our people when we say that we are ready to
fight and to cooperate for that peace. We have proposed it, we have said it
in all our proposals. Let us see if now, after this crisis which shook the
world for several days, the conditions or the circumstances are achieved in
order to attain that peace.
</p>
<p>
I still have some questions to deal with. In the course of this crisis, it
must be said that during the development of the crisis there arose some
differences between the Soviet Government and the Cuban Government. But I
want to say something to all Cubans. It is not here that we should discuss
those problems; it is not here, where our enemies might find it useful or
try to profit from those discussions. We must discuss this with the Soviets
at the level of government and party, sit down with them to discuss
everything that might be necessary in the light of reason and principles.
</p>
<p>
It must be said that, above all, we are Marxist-Leninists. (Prolonged
applause) Between the Soviet Union and Cuba there shall be no breaches!
</p>
<p>
We want to say another thing, that we have confidence in the policy of
principle of the Soviet Union and we have confidence in the leadership of
the Soviet Union; that is to say, in the government and the leading party
of the Soviet Union. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
If my compatriots were to ask me at this moment for an opinion, what should
I tell them, what advice amid confused situations, things that have not
been understood or are not well understood, what to do? I would say that
what must be done is to have confidence, that what must be done is to
understand that these international problems are extremely complex and
extremely delicate, and that our people, who have given evidence of great
maturity, of extraordinary maturity, should demonstrate it in this
way — taking care to analyze things, to make no premature judgments, to be
disciplined, and, above all, to have confidence; moreover, to have complete
faith in the revolutionary government, in the leadership of the
revolutionary government; to have complete confidence that everything — all
the problems, all the questions — will be discussed opportunely; to keep in
mind that elements of judgment needed to understand certain things could
even be missing; and to keep in mind that the dramatic and urgent
circumstances in which events took place must not be forgotten.
</p>
<p>
Now there is time in which to discuss all that completely, and we shall
discuss it. We must prevent the enemy from profiting from our impatience,
from our judgments, because an honest revolutionary may make judgments; he
has the right to form his opinions. But if the opinions he formed at a
given moment about certain things that he does not understand well are
voiced, there might also be someone around who is not a revolutionary,
someone interested in creating distrust, division, and resentment. That is
why the advice we must give is: Have confidence, be firm, and have faith;
be guided by what we have said here today — that is what must be done in
these circumstances and it is that which we must do.
</p>
<p>
Above all, and I say it with absolute sincerity — there are things I want to
say in these moments in which a certain disagreement may have been created
because of those misunderstandings or differences — it is good to remember,
above all, what the Soviet Union has done for us. It is good to remember,
above all, what it has done for us in every one of the difficult moments we
have had, how the friendly hand of the Soviet Union has been there with us
after each Yankee blow — economic aggression, the suppression of the sugar
quota, the suppression of the shipments of petroleum to our country — after
each of the aggressions we have endured, and we are grateful. We must say
that here loudly.
</p>
<p>
Moreover, there is another even more moving thing, at least it impresses me
extraordinarily — the Soviet men, the Soviet men we have met here, the
technicians who have come to work with us in our rural areas, the teachers,
professors, engineers, planners, technicians of all kinds, the interest,
the devotion, the fondness with which they have helped us.
</p>
<p>
Moreover, there are the military technicians, men who have been ready to
die here with us, who have helped us in the instruction, training, and
preparation of our fighting forces; who have worked with us for months and
years, teaching our men to fight; who have worked with us for months,
years, teaching our men to fight and organizing that formidable army we
have at this moment; all the weapons they have sent us, the basic weapons
of our armed forces which are all weapons that the Soviet Union has sent us
and for which the Soviet Union has not charged us! (Applause)
</p>
<p>
I should like to say that several months ago the Soviet Union decided to
cancel all the debts of our country for armaments. Some of these matters
are of a military nature, which must be treated with great care.
Nevertheless, I will explain something; for example, the strategic weapons
for our defense. Those weapons, the strategic weapons, were not the
property of Cuba. That is not the case with the tanks and an entire series
of weapons, which are our property. The strategic weapons were not our
property.
</p>
<p>
In the agreements by virtue of which they were sent to our country to
strengthen our defenses against the threats of attack, it was decided that
those strategic weapons, which are very complex and require very
specialized personnel, would continue under the direction of Soviet
personnel and continue being the property of the Soviet state. That is why,
when the Soviet Government decided to withdraw those weapons, which
belonged to it, we respected that decision.
</p>
<p>
I explain that so that the reasons why the withdrawal was decided on by the
Soviet Government can be understood. That is why I was saying that, even
though we may have some well-founded reason for discontent over some fact,
some detail, more than ever, we must remember how good, generous, noble,
and friendly the Soviets have been toward us, and I was precisely speaking
of the technicians, whom we have seen at our side, ready to die, to
sacrifice their lives in the defense of our country. They are magnificent
men. That is why another thing that we must feel at this moment more than
ever is appreciation, affection, respect, and gratitude toward those men. I
believe that that is the conduct which we must follow at this moment.
(Applause)
</p>
<p>
That is what we must show, and, above all, we must conduct ourselves better
than ever during these moments, with higher morale than ever and with more
greatness than ever.
</p>
<p>
Let it not be thought that the withdrawal of the strategic weapons disarms
us. This does not mean that we are disarmed. I can assure you that we have
formidable means of defense, powerful means of defense, extraordinary
resources with which to defend ourselves.
</p>
<p>
The strategic weapons are leaving, but all the other weapons — all the other
weapons are staying in our country, and they are very powerful means of
defense, with which we can face any situation. There is no reason for
confusion; there is not reason for confusion. The confusion will pass
little by little.
</p>
<p>
There is one matter I want to stress, one observation I want to make, and
it involves the people, the conduct of the people during these days. I want
to say that the action of the people has surpassed everything even the most
optimistic could ever have imagined in determination, valor, and
discipline. It must be said that thousands of men who were not militiamen,
who did not become militiamen during these four years of revolution, became
militiamen during this crisis. It must be said that thousands of persons
who did not belong to mass organizations or committees for the defense of
the revolution went to register in the mass organizations during these
days.
</p>
<p>
It must be said that the enemy was unable, inside our country, to count on
allies of any kind. It must be said that during these days of extreme
crisis it was not necessary to arrest anybody. Even men and women who
criticized the revolution — in this decisive hour the patriotic,
revolutionary core became apparent in them and they went to enlist, and
they went to enlist for a battle that according to every prospect was a
serious battle, a terrifying battle; a battle that could be fought with
conventional weapons or with atomic weapons.
</p>
<p>
The President of the United States tried to intimidate our people, these
people whom he called a captive people, when he spoke of how we might be a
target for atomic attacks, and the result was that there were more
militiamen than ever, more revolutionary militants than ever. It must be
told how the women went to work, and how the pensioners went to work to
replace the men in the trenches.
</p>
<p>
It must be noted that, although this was the greatest mobilization of all,
it was the one that affected production the least. Never during a
mobilization had production gone as it did. The people's discipline was
truly impressive, the people's ardor, the people's valor.
</p>
<p>
Impressive also was the organization acquired by our people, above all by
our revolutionary armed forces, and the efficiency with which the commands
operated. It was demonstrated how the revolution has been creating
discipline, has been shaping a people. By harassing us, the enemy has made
us disciplined, has made us organized, has made us battle-hardened. The
result of these four years of harassment has made a heroic people, a people
more than Spartan, for it is said that shield, or on it." And here, an
entire people, men, women, and children, young and old, told themselves,
"with our shield, or on it." (Prolonged applause)
</p>
<p>
A people like that are an invincible people. A people like that, who in
that manner so calmly, so admirably, confront such difficult situations,
are a people who have a right to win what they aspire to, which is peace,
respect, to keep inviolate their dignity and their prestige, because we
have long-range moral missiles that cannot be dismantled and will never be
dismantled! (Prolonged applause) And that is our most powerful strategic
weapon, of strategic defense and strategic offense!
</p>
<p>
And so here I want to bear witness today more than ever to our admiration
for our people. And all we revolutionaries should feel doubly obliged,
after this experience, to fight for our people, to work tirelessly for our
people. I want to say here today from the very bottom of my heart, in
conclusion I want to say, that today more than ever I feel proud of being a
son of this people.
</p>
<p>
Fatherland or death, we will win! (Applause)
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
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<a href="../../index.htm">Castro Internet Archive</a>
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Castro Internet Archive
U.N. Demands of Cuba
First Published: November 2, 1962
Source: Castro Speech Database
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
(Live interview with Fidel Castro in television studios of station CMQ;
Luis Gomez Wanguermert, moderator)
Wanguermert: Good evening televiewers. The Cuban radio and
television stations have joined the national hookup this evening in order
to broadcast the statement of the premier and commander in chief, Dr. Fidel
Castro, on the talks held in Havana with U.N. Secretary General U Thant and
other current subjects.
Commander Castro, what can you tell us about U Thant's visit to Havana?
Castro: Well, the talks held with U Thant, the U.N. secretary general,
lasted two days, and I thought that the best way to inform the people of
this matter was to read the copies of the conversations.
The following should be pointed out and considered: On the first day talks
of a general nature were held in which our country's position was set
forth. On the second day he wanted to discuss several confidential matters.
I then asked him if he minded if the shorthand version of the first day's
talks, in which the entire position of the Cuban revolution of the reasons
for Cuba's conduct is set forth — if he minded if I made it public. He
agreed. We also promised him that the points — the questions and the matters
of a confidential nature he might discuss, labeling them as such, not for
our sake but for his — would not be published for the time being. However,
everything that was discussed is right there. Therefore, I shall read the
shorthand version of the conversations held at the Presidential Palace on
30 October 1962 which began at 1510 hours.
U Thant — I shall read the names of the persons speaking — so U Thant — there
is one point I should like to bring up — (Castro explains — Ed.) he (U
Thant — Ed.) is speaking: In the discussions I had in New York, both with
the representatives of the Soviet Union and with the representatives of the
United States, General Rikhye was always present, and I feel that his
presence would be useful at this meeting with the Premier.
We: We do not mind. General Rikhye is invited to participate in the
interview.
U Thant: First of all, Mr. Premier, I should like to thank you and your
government for your invitation to visit Cuba, not only for this mission,
but also for the invitation given me earlier. As I informed you when I
accepted your invitation, I came as soon as possible. I am certain that
today and tomorrow we shall have very fruitful talks toward finding a
solution with regard to Cuba's sovereignty and independence.
We: We can talk for as long as is necessary. We have plenty of free time to
give you.
U Thant: As you well know the Cuban problem was presented to the Security
Council last week during the meetings of the 45 neutral countries,
principally those which had attended the Bandung and Belgrade conferences.
Two meetings were held, and they sent representatives to confer with
me — since I also belong to a neutral country and participated in the two
meetings — to ask me to take the initiative, the initiative which could
contribute to the peaceful solution of this problem.
On 24 October I decided to take this initiative. After I heard the
statements by the three delegations in the Security Council I came to the
conclusion that the immediate problem was to make an appeal to the three
powers and I called upon Premier Khrushchev to suspend the arms shipments
to Cuba voluntarily for two or three weeks and upon President Kennedy to
lift the quarantine voluntarily; and then I called upon Your Excellency to
voluntarily suspend the construction of the missile bases to give us an
opportunity to discuss the problem calmly. Immediately after my request the
Security Council suspended its meetings to give me a change to put my plans
into effect.
On the following day I learned that Soviet ships are approaching the
quarantine area. I sent a second appeal to Premier Khrushchev and to
President Kennedy asking them to avoid a direct confrontation on this
matter, so that I could have the few days necessary to discuss this matter.
On the same day I send you a letter to which you very kingly replied asking
me to visit Cuba. The subject of this letter was the suspension of missile
base construction in Cuba.
Since then there have been communications between Premier Khrushchev and
President Kennedy, between Premier Khrushchev and myself, between President
Kennedy and myself. Naturally, Your Excellency also replied to my letter of
27 October. The contents of this letter are already known to the public
because it has been published.
As I see the problem, Your Excellency, it is in two parts: one immediate
and the other long term. For the time being the Security Council wishes to
deal with the solution of the immediate problem. The object of my
negotiations with the three powers I mentioned concerns only the immediate
problem, naturally. However, the United National will have to be involved
in some way in the solution of the long term problem.
Several factors are involved in the immediate problem: The first is that
Premier Khrushchev responded to my request, giving instructions to the
Soviet ships to keep away from the quarantine area for the time being for
several days. President Kennedy replied that he was prepared to avoid a
direct confrontation with the Soviet ships if they were not carrying
armaments, and Premier Khrushchev told me very explicitly that the Soviet
ships are not carrying armaments at present.
If the two powers agree, no armaments will be sent to Cuba for two or three
weeks, and for two or three weeks if no arms are being shipped the United
States will lift the quarantine.
What the United States wants to be sure of is that the Soviet ships will
not carry armaments. What the United State wants is a machinery — an
arrangement — through the United Nations which would assure it that during
this period of two or three weeks no arms will enter Cuba.
The Soviet Union does not agree with this proposal. Yesterday the Soviet
Government proposed another solution, that is, that the Soviet ships would
permit inspections by the Red Cross, verification by the Red Cross that
they are not carrying weapons.
This reply by the Soviet Union was communicated to the United States last
evening. The Red Cross, which we contacted in Geneva by telephone
yesterday, replied that in the name of world peace and international
cooperation it would agree to take charge of this matter, either on the
high seas or in the ports of disembarkation, if the Cuban Government
agreed.
I cannot take sides at all. I am not empowered to associated myself with
any of the proposals. I only informed the Red Cross, the Soviet Union, and
the United States that, with due consideration to Cuba's sovereignty, I
would request this of the Red Cross, always subject to the consent of the
Cuban Government. The three parties were informed of this, and it was
reported that the Cuban Government would be informed of it.
Therefore, Your Excellency, the first point, which would help my work
considerably, would be to know the attitude of the Cuban Government to the
idea of the Red Cross checking the transportation of armaments on Soviet
ships for the next two or three weeks. The question is: What would Cuba's
attitude be to this proposal?
President Dorticos: Are you speaking of the high seas, or in Cuba?
U Thant: Of course, I informed the governments of the Soviet Union and the
United States of this proposal made by the Red Cross. The Soviet Government
replied that this is a matter pertaining to Cuban sovereignty. I have not
received a reply from the U.S. Government on the matter. Would Your
Excellency like to discuss the matter point by point or all together?
We: I would prefer you to continue your statement.
U Thant: The United States told me, and also said so during the
negotiations and during the Security Council meetings, that its main
concern lies with the launching pads rather than the armament. Its
principal concern is the missile launching pads. As is well known, last
Sunday Premier Khrushchev instructed the Soviet technicians to dismantle
the missile launching pads and to return the missiles to the Soviet Union.
He also said that he would ask the United Nations to send teams to verify
if this has actually been done.
I replied to the Soviet representatives that before a team could be sent to
check on this the most important point was to obtain the prior consent of
the Cuban Government. This matter could not be presented without the
knowledge and consent of the Cuban Government and no action could be taken
which would violate its sovereignty.
I also informed both the Soviet representative and the U.S. Government that
I would come to Cuba to present this viewpoint to Premier Castro and to his
colleagues. Of course, but the Soviet Government and the U.S. Government
agree on this point — that if the launching pads are removed tension will be
reduced. What the United States is seeking through me is a temporary
agreement prior to the conclusion of the dismantling of the pads.
I asked the Soviet representatives how long this would take. They asked
Moscow, but this morning they had not received a reply.
What the United States is looking for is a temporary agreement with the
United Nations, subject, naturally, to the authorization and consent of the
Cuban Government. Naturally, no one knows how long this will take — one or
two weeks, and perhaps more.
Thus, the first U.S. proposal is that if Cuba consents, a team of U.N.
representatives consists of persons whose nationalities are acceptable to
the Cuban Government would be suggested. The second proposal would be a
reconnaissance plane manned by persons acceptable to the Cuban, Russian,
and American Governments. A plane with a Cuban, a Russian, and a U.S.
representative on board for the two or three weeks this may last was also
suggested. I replied to the United States that this proposal would also be
presented to Premier Fidel Castro.
The United States informed me that as soon as this system has been put into
practice it would make a public statement, in the Security Council if
necessary, that it would harbor no aggressive intentions toward the Cuban
Government and would guarantee the territorial integrity of the nation. I
was asked to tell you this.
As I replied to the United States and to everyone, the most important thing
is that all these decisions cannot be reached without the consent of the
Cuban Government. I was told that if this decision was reached with
agreement of the Cuban Government and the United Nations, not only would
the United States make the statements in the Security Council but it would
also lift the blockade.
I informed the United States yesterday that while I was conferring with
premier Fidel Castro and the Cuban leaders, it would be ill advised for the
blockade to be maintained, and I asked that is be suspended. This morning
it was announced that the blockade had been suspended for the 48 hours of
my visit to the Republic of Cuba.
As Your Excellency knows, I said in the Security Council that this blockade
was highly unusual, not very common excepting in times of war. That is what
I told the Security Council. This viewpoint is shared by the 45 countries
which me and asked me to make this request.
Two of these 45 countries, who also have seats on the Security Council at
this time — the United Arab Republic and Ghana — made statements in this
connection during a meeting in the Security Council. Other countries of the
45 neutrals, particularly those which participated in the Belgrade
conference, will make similar statements if given an opportunity. So much
for the immediate problem.
Your Excellency, the Security Council did not authorize me to discuss the
longterm problems, although this is something which will have to be
discussed in the Security Council later. For the purposes of this first
conversation, this is all I have to say to you, Your Excellency.
We: There is one point which confuses me: it concerns your proposals on
inspection. They speak of two points here — a team and a plane. I should
like more explanation on this point. Please repeat to me the part referring
to the inspection proposal.
U Thant: Both proposals would come from the United Nations and would
consist of two units: one on land and the other from a plane for the period
of the dismantling of the bases, that is, about two weeks.
We: I do not understand why this is asked of us. Could you explain a little
better?
U Thant: The explanation given by the United States why it is making the
request is that it wants to be certain that the pads are actually
dismantled and that the missiles are returned to the Soviet Union.
We: What right has the United States to ask this? I mean, if this is based
upon a real right of if it is a demand based upon force, or a position of
strength.
U Thant: This is my viewpoint: it is not a right. Such a thing could only
be done with the approval and consent of the Cuban Government.
We: We do not exactly understand why this is asked of us because we have
not violated any right, we absolutely have not attacked anyone. All our
actions have been based upon international law. We have done absolutely
nothing outside the norms of international law.
On the other hand, we have been the victims first of all of a blockage,
which is an illegal act, and in the second place, of the attempt to
determine from another what we have a right to do or not to do within our
frontiers. It is our understanding that Cuba is a sovereign state no more
nor less than any member nation of the United Nations with all the
attributes inherent in any of these states.
Moreover, the United States has repeatedly been violating our airspace
without any right, committing an intolerable act of aggression against our
country which it has sought to justify by an OAS decision, but this
decision is not valid for us. We were even expelled from the OAS. We can
accept anything that is just, that does not imply a reduction of our
sovereignty. The rights violated by the United States have not been
reestablished, and we do not accept any imposition by force.
I believe that this question of inspection is one more attempt to humiliate
our country, therefore we do not accept it. This request for inspection is
to confirm their attempt to violate our right, to act within our frontiers
with complete freedom, to decide what we can or cannot do within our
frontiers. This line of ours is not a new one; it is a viewpoint we have
invariably and always maintained.
In Cuba's reply to the joint U.S. resolution we said textually: The threat
of a direct armed attack if Cuba strengthens itself militarily to a degree
to which the United States takes the liberty of deciding is absurd. We do
not have the slightest intention of giving an account or of consulting the
U.S. Senate or House of Representatives with regard to the weapons we deem
it advisable to acquire and the measures to take to fully defend our
country.
Do we not have the rights which the international norms, laws, and
principles recognize for every sovereign state anywhere in the world? We
have not granted and do not plan to grant the U.S. Congress any sovereign
prerogative. This viewpoint was confirmed in the United Nations by the
President of the Republic of Cuba, and also during many public statements
made by me as premier of the government, and this is a firm stand of the
Cuban Government.
All these steps were taken for the security of the country in the face of a
systematic policy of hostility and aggression. They were all taken in
accordance with the law and we have not abandoned our determination to
defend these rights.
We can negotiate in all sincerity and in all honor. However, we would not
be honorable if we were to consent to negotiate a sovereign right of our
country. We are prepared to pay the necessary price for these rights, and
this is not just so much talk, but an attitude very keenly felt by our
people.
U Thant: I understand Your Excellency's sentiments perfectly. That is why I
told the United States and others clearly: Any U.N. action in Cuban
territory can be undertaken only with the consent of the people and the
Government of Cuba. I told them that in the name of peace, which is
ardently desired by everybody and by all inhabitants of the world. I told
the 45 countries and I agreed to come to Cuba without having any commitment
to either side.
Last night and this morning, before I began my trip, certain press reports
said I was coming to settle the details of the United Nations' presence in
Cuba. That is completely erroneous. That would be a violation of the
sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba. I have come here only to present the
other side's viewpoints and explore the possibilities of finding a peaceful
solution. The 45 countries that asked me to come also know what position is
legal and what is not, but in the name of world peace, and for a period of
only one or two weeks, perhaps three, they asked me to come to try to find
a possible solution.
Your Excellency, my conscience is clear on this point. The United Nations
can only undertake an action of this sort when it has the consent of the
government involved. It is not the first time this has happened. In Laos,
when a situation existed there that threatened international peace, the
United Nations established itself in that territory only after obtaining
the consent of the Government of Laos. In 1956, in Egypt, in the UAR, a
situation arose and the United Nations established itself in Egypt, and
still is in Egypt, with the consent of the government. Similarly, in 1958,
in Lebanon, another situation threatening world peace arose, and the United
Nations went in only after it had obtained consent of the Government of
Lebanon. One condition is absolutely necessary: In order to undertake an
action of that nature, the consent of the government involved must be
obtained.
We: In the case of the Congo too?
U Thant: And in the case of Somalia.
We: In the case of the Congo I have understood they requested it of the
United Nations.
U Thant: In the Congo the petition was presented by the Government of the
Congo.
We: In the Congo the government that requested it is buried now. In the
first place, our government has not the slightest doubt of the fine
intentions and the disinterestedness and honesty with which the present
U.N. Secretary General is working. We have no doubts at all about his
intentions, his good faith, his extraordinary interest in finding a
solution for the problem. All of us hold his mission and his person in
great esteem. I say this in all sincerity. I understand the interest we all
should feel in peace, but the path of peace is not the path of sacrificing
the rights of peoples, of violating the rights of peoples; that is
precisely the path that leads to war. The path of peace is the path of
guarantees for the rights of peoples and the peoples' readiness to defend
those rights.
In every case mentioned by the Secretary General, Laos, Egypt, Lebanon, and
the Congo, which I just mentioned — in all of these cases we see nothing but
a series of aggressions against the rights of the peoples. All were caused
by the same thing. The road to the past world war was the road marked by
the annexation of Austria, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, tolerated
acts of German imperialism — and it led to that war. And we are keenly aware
of those dangers. We know the paths aggressors like to take. We guess the
path the United States wants to take with regard to us. Therefore it is
really hard to understand how it is possible to speak of immediate
solutions independently of future solutions, when the matter of greatest
interest is not to pay any price for peace now, but to guarantee peace
definitely, and not to by paying daily the price of an ephemeral peace.
And of course Cuba is not Austria, nor the Czechoslovak Sudetenland, nor
the Congo. We have the most resolute intention of defending our rights, in
the face of all difficulties and risks. And it is necessary for the U.N.
Secretary General to know this determination of ours so he can succeed in
his mission, or at least be able to work with a perfect knowledge of this
circumstance.
U Thant: I understand your sentiments perfectly, as well as the viewpoints
Your Excellency has expressed. As for the point of immediate solutions and
long-term solutions, I wish to say that the Security Council has authorized
me to seek means of obtaining peace in this area. I understand that
immediate solutions and long-term solutions are intimately interrelated,
and for those long-term solutions we should explore the possibilities in
the light of the situation as it exists now. The Security Council has given
me authorization for that. In practice, it is very hard to separate the
two. I believe that, if we find an immediate solution for this, it will
lead us to a permanent solution, not just for the United Nations but for
all interested parties.
In mentioning Laos and the other cases where the United Nations has
established itself, I agree with you, but I also want to say that the
United Nations, in those places, has succeeded in removing or averting
aggression from without. I thought, if you please, that the U.N. presence
in Cuba for a period of perhaps more than three weeks may likewise lessen
or eliminate the danger of aggression. It is my opinion that, in current
and future times, the presence of the United Nations in certain countries
will serve especially to remove and avert aggression.
President Dorticos: I would like to say something. I agree with what our
Premier has said about our full understanding of the high mission the
Secretary General is carrying out with such nobility. That mission, of
course, is none other than to seek means of guaranteeing peace in this
critical situation.
It seems there is a question to be defined: Where is the danger of war? In
the arms of one kind or another that Cuba has, or in the aggressive U.S.
designs against Cuba? We believe aggression is what can engender war. The
arms that exist in Cuba, regardless of what they may be, will never begin
an aggression. Therefore, we ask ourselves: Why is inspection, and an
acceptance of inspection, a condition for guaranteeing peace? To guarantee
peace it would suffice for the United States to pledge, with all necessary
guarantees through the United Nations, not to attack Cuba. That is why we
have set forth — and our Premier has repeated it here very clearly — that the
questions of a long-term solution, if they can be called that, are
intimately connected with the immediate solution of the crisis.
The immediate solution of the crisis would come as soon as the United
States offered guarantees against an attack on Cuba, minimum guarantees
that are contained in the declarations made by our Premier on 28 October
and which are surely known to the Secretary General. A U.N. stay in Cuba
for purposes of inspection, which the Revolutionary Government of Cuba does
not accept because of the reasons set forth by the Premier, would at most
mean a guarantee for two or three weeks of that peace, which he has rightly
called emphemeral. Immediately afterward, the danger of war would resume,
because the conditions that favor North American aggression against Cuba
would remain.
Let the United States give the guarantees that we demand as a minimum, and
the solution of the immediate problem will have begun. I would say, in the
last instance, that for the purpose of obtaining peace now, there are no
immediate questions or long-term questions to be discussed. We believe the
five points contained in the declarations made by our Premier are
ingredients that form part of the immediate discussion intended to
guarantee peace. We believe that these five points are not deferred for
long-term discussion, but that circumstances demand that they should be
part of the immediate discussion because, in our opinion, they are minimum
conditions for guaranteeing peace.
I repeat, peace is not endangered by our arms; peace is in danger because
of the aggressive conduct of the United States, and negotiations and
discussions covering these five points are what will immediately eliminate
the dangers of war. That is our understanding of the problem.
U Thant: First, I want to thank Your Excellencies, the President and the
Premier, for their kind words for my person and the post I occupy, and I am
in full agreement with both as to the solution we may find, for short-term
agreements should also include negotiations for long-term agreements. But
in terms of the United Nations, I believe the best solution — and in this I
believe the 110 member nations will agree — is for the United Nations,
through the Security Council, to provide U.N. representatives to seek and
find the long-term solution.
But right now, at this moment, I do not believe the United Nations, and its
Security Council, can arrive at a positive, acceptable long-term solution
in the best interests of everybody and world peace. If a long- term
solution if sound, it will be in the best interests of all and of world
peace, but I believe it is difficult to obtain at present in the United
Nations.
We: I understand that if that short-term solution of which the Secretary
speaks were not achieved, it would be simply because the United States does
not want it and would persist in demanding inspection as a humiliating act
for Cuba, because, for purposes of that unilateral security which the
United States demands, the Soviet Government's decision to withdraw the
arms of a strategic nature which had been brought for the defense of the
Republic of Cuba should have sufficed.
The Cuban Government has not hindered the withdrawal of those arms, and the
Soviet Government's decision is in itself a decision of a public nature.
The mere fact that it was made in this manner in the public view has had an
effect on world public opinion. The United States knows that that decision
was made seriously by the Soviet Union and that, in fact, the strategic
weapons are being withdrawn.
If what the United States wants, beside that, is to humiliate our country,
it will not get it. We have not hesitated an instant in the decision to
defend our rights. We cannot accept impositions that can be forced only on
a conquerered country. We have not desisted from our determination to
defend ourselves, even to such an extent that they will never be able to
impose conditions on us, because first they will have to destroy us and
annihilate us, and in any case they will not find anybody here on whom to
impose humiliating conditions. (Prolonged applause)
U Thant: On the subject of the U.S. declaration, the United States has said
that it will make a public declaration of nonaggression and respect for
Cuba's territorial integrity once the missiles have been dismantled and
withdrawn. In my opinion, on that there is no disagreement.
I am completely in agreement with the Premier that the U.N. actions involve
an invasion of the rights of a member state, and in this case, speaking of
Cuba, if it is not in agreement with accepting a U.N. action, then my
duty — what I must do — is to inform those who made the proposal of this. It
is not my intention here to impose anything. My duty is merely to explain
the possibilities for finding the means, the manner, or the form by which
we could find a peaceful solution, without making concrete proposals. I
shall take into account everything that has been said here this afternoon
and I shall return, I shall go back, to make my report to the parties
interested in this.
I feel that this meeting has been very useful, and if the Premier is
agreeable we can meet again tomorrow, before I leave. Meanwhile, I can be
thinking over carefully what the President and the Premier have said about
this matter.
We: To conclude, I should like to reply on the question of Red Cross
inspection. We also oppose that inspection in our ports. I wonder, if the
Soviet Union authorizes inspection of its ships on the high seas, why would
it then be necessary to inspect them again in Cuban ports? In the second
place, I see that the Secretary centers his interest on getting the United
States to make that public declaration, that pledge in the United Nations,
that it will not invade Cuba.
On this point, I wish to say first that the United States has no right to
invade Cuba and that it is impossible to negotiate with a promise not to
commit a crime, with a mere promise not to commit a crime, and that in the
face of that danger we trust more to our determination to defend ourselves
than to the words of the U.S. Government. But moreover, if the United
Nations attaches great value to a public commitment entered into in that
body by the United States, such as a commitment not to invade, why not
concede equal value to the public commitment to the United Nations made by
the USSR to withdraw the strategic weapons it send for the defense of the
Republic of Cuba?
These would be two equally public commitments. If one of them needs no
additional guarantee — that is, the U.S. commitment not to invade Cuba — why
does the Soviet Union's commitment to withdraw its strategic weapons need
the additional guarantee of inspecting us?
We shall meet with you again with pleasure as often as you wish and at the
time you choose.
U Thant: Many thanks, Your Excellency.
(Castro speaks for himself at this point — Ed.): And that was the end of the
first meeting. At the second meeting, he began by saying: "I want to thank
the government and the people for the hospitality and the facilities they
have afforded me in this country. The motive for this new meeting is to
exchange opinions on certain confidential matters I have in mind."
Thus, at this second meeting, he started off by saying it would deal with
matters of a confidential matter. We agreed with him not to make public the
things he said. Fundamentally, at this second meeting we maintained our
viewpoints from the first meeting and brought up a few things, such as the
danger inherent in the violations of our airspace, the danger of an
incident, and the fact that it was indispensable for the United States to
suspend those flights.
At the same time, the U.N. Secretary General asked us for information about
the plane which the U.S. Defense Department reported had disappeared on one
of its flights to Cuba. We gave him the information he requested, and, at
the same time, we agreed on acceding to his request to send the body of the
pilot, who died while on an illegal flight over our territory — we decided
for humane reasons to return the body.
As a matter of fact, we regretted that this North American had to die in
our country as a result of the illegal acts, in violation of our
sovereignty, ordered by the U.S. Government. We hope the circumstances that
resulted in that death will not be repeated; that is, that the causes that
resulted in that death will not be repeated.
In general terms, the opinion of the government regarding the U.N.
Secretary General is that he is an honest and impartial person who has a
real desire to struggle to find solutions for these problems. He also
appeared to be a competent person, and he, in reality, did inspire our
confidence. That is the conclusion we drew from the meeting we had with
him, from the way he expressed himself, from the respect he showed at all
times toward the ideas of our country and toward the rights of our country.
Moreover, we understand that at this moment the U.N. Secretary General is
carrying out a very important mission, which enhances the post he holds,
and, at the same time, if he achieves success in that effort, it will
undoubtedly increase the prestige of the United Nations. It is possible
that the institution will develop and carry out its work. It is at present
carrying out a very important task.
Undoubtedly, it is of interest that the United Nations constitutes an
institution guaranteeing the rights of countries, and particularly the
rights of the little countries. At this moment, it appears to us that the
United Nations is carrying out that role well. In that sense, we give the
United Nations all our support; that is, in the efforts and activities it
is carrying out in favor of peace and to find a solution. This is apart
from our having been intransigeant with regard to the problem of
inspection, because we consider that we cannot accept any inspection.
We cannot accept inspection for several reasons. First, because we have no
desire to sacrifice a sovereign principle of our country. A series of
rights has been violated. Freedom of the seas has been violated by the
United States. The United States is trying to meddle in things which we
have a right to do or not do within our borders. The United States, in an
open manner, has been violating the airspace of our country.
How, in the face of all those facts of aggression and violation, in the
face of those acts of force, are we going to accept inspection of our
country, an inspection which actually validates the pretensions of the
United States to decide what kind of weapons we have or do not have the
right to possess?
We have not renounced the right to possess the kinds of weapons we may
consider convenient in the exercise of the sovereign power of our country.
We have not renounced that right. We consider it one of our rights. How are
we to authorize an inspection to validate a pretension of a foreign
country? Therefore, we do not accept it.
In the second place, this constitutes a demand from a position of force, a
position of force of the United States, and we do not yield to that
position of force. We will never yield to positions of force. (Applause)
What Cuba defends in maintaining its position is not inconsiderable. It
defends the sovereign right of countries. Moreover, it defends peace,
because our position against the positions of force which is required by
these things, our firmness against the demands of the aggressors and those
who like to practice such a policy, is a position that will not encourage
the aggressors.
The aggressors can be aggressors; that is, the world may find that there
are aggressors, but the aggressors will find resistance in our country. The
aggressors will find resistance to all kinds of aggression which is being
attempted, or an aggression against a right. And they will not be
encouraged by the position of Cuba! We are absolutely in the right and we
are absolutely determined to defend that right.
Above all, as is clear in the explanation we gave the U.N. Secretary
General, more than anything else this is an attempt to humiliate us.
Therefore, the position of Cuba was and is that we do not accept
inspection.
We have noted the conditions that are needed, and we repeated to the U.N.
Secretary General in the second meeting that the Cuban view is that, if a
real solution is desired for the existing tensions and problems in the
Caribbean and on the continent, which also affect the entire world, it is
necessary that the guarantees that Cuba demands be granted. Those
guarantees have the virtue of being absolutely just demands, and all are
based on the indisputable rights of our country — the ending of the economic
blockade and all the measures of economic and commercial pressure which the
United States exerts against our country all over the world and which it
has been exercising against our country, aggressive acts that were part of
the ingredients that aggravated the situation to the point it reached this
time, aggressive acts they continue to commit at this moment.
We are constantly receiving reports of vessels which were coming to Cuba
and whose goods were left in Mediterranean, European, or Latin American
ports, goods that were destined for Cuba. Just yesterday a report came of
one or two ships, loaded with jute for our sugar production, which left
their cargoes in a Mediterranean port because of pressure by the United
States.
Moreover, we demand the cessation of all subversive activities and the
launching and landing of weapons and explosives by air and sea, the
organization of mercenary invasions, and the infiltration of spies and
saboteurs — all actions which are carried out from U.S. territory and some
accomplice countries. Do not a people have a right to demand guarantees
against those actions? The cessation of the pirate attacks that are carried
out from bases in the United States and Puerto Rico, the cessation of all
violations of our airspace and territorial waters by U.S. planes and
warships — that is to say, our country requests that crime not be committed
against it, that violations and illegal acts not be committed against it,
and, finally, that the naval base at Guanatanamo be withdrawn and the Cuban
territory occupied by the United States be returned.
It is absurd that the withdrawal of friendly weapons be requested and that
an enemy base be left in our country. That has absolutely no foundation!
This is absolutely absurd! No one in any place in the world would dispute
the right of our country to request the return of the territory on which
this base is situated, a base where, in these days of crisis, troops were
accumulating to attack our country. How are we going to be asked to
withdraw friendly weapons, while enemy weapons remain within the heart of
our country?
The United States says that is possesses that base by virtue of a treaty,
an agreement between the United States and a Cuban government — of course,
a Cuban government that emerged during the intervention. It was not through
any treaty; it was through a unilateral agreement in the U.S. Congress,
through an amendment they imposed on our constitution and imposed by the
United States, by the United States in a law of its Congress, Cuba was
warned that they would not depart the country if that amendment were not
accepted, and amendment which contained the question of the naval base!
If they call that agreement legitimate, even more legitimate are the
agreements between the Soviet Government and the most free government of
Cuba, by virtue of which those strategic missiles were situated in our
country and for our defense. And if the United States has placed the world
on the brink of war to demand the withdrawal of those missiles, then what
right and justification has it to refuse to abandon the territory it
occupies in our country?
We are not an obstacle to a solution of peace, a real solution of peace. We
are not a warrior or a warlike people. We are a peaceful people, and being
peaceful does not mean permitting oneself to be trampled upon. Not in the
least! When the trampling comes, then we are as warlike as we must be to
defend ourselves. Facts have demonstrated this.
We shall never obstruct a true solution of peace, and the conditions for a
true solution of peace are the guarantees of the five points established by
the Government of Cuba. The United States should begin by demonstrating its
good faith,not with a promise — deeds and not words.
A really convincing deed would be for the United States to return to us the
territory it occupies in the naval base of Guantanamo. That would be a much
more convincing deed than any word, than any promise the United States
could give.
If Cuba's guarantees are not complied with there will be no true solution
of peace, and then we shall all have to continue living in this same
atmosphere of tension in which we have been living up to now. We want
solutions of peace, but solutions of peace with dignity. Moreover, there
would be no peace without dignity, because the nations without dignity are
not respected. We have a right to peace, to one kind of peace or another,
to the peace which is neither peace nor war, simply because we were able to
resist and were able to have dignity. We have the right to a peace, to a
real solution of peace, and sooner or later we shall obtain it because we
have earned that right due to the spirit of our people, due to their
resistance and their dignity.
Our cause, and our right to peace, will continue to gain ground throughout
the world. Everyone also knows who is to blame for these problems, who is
to blame for all these tensions. And the people of the world will go on
giving support to our five points which are indispensable conditions for
peace. Our people have won and will keep on winning even more the right to
a worthy and to a just peace.
We must be allowed to work in peace. More than weapons we prefer to use
instruments of work. More than to kill and destroy, we prefer to create.
Our people are not permitted to create. They are constantly being forced to
mobilize, to put themselves on a war footing, to defend themselves, to
prepare themselves because they are forced to do so, not because we desire
this policy.
It is a policy imposed upon us by the aggressors against our country. What
our country wants is to work. What it wants is to develop its resources, to
develop the people, and to progress with its peaceful work.
Some things are amusing. A few days before the crisis, barely two days
earlier, we inaugurated the institute for basic sciences. Some 1,000 young
people were to enter it to begin studying medicine. Within three days the
institute for basic sciences was converted into an anti-aircraft artillery
school, and thus went everything else. Compare one thing with the other:
peaceful work and the desires and efforts of a nation to improve its well
being and health, to train all the doctors our peasants need, and to train
all the doctors our people need to raise their average life span and to
improve their health.
There were 800 young people who had entered and within three days 800,
1,000, or 2,000 youths had to enter to be taught to kill, to be taught to
handle not surgical instruments but cannon.
Our road, the desire of our people, is not the artillery school, but the
institute of basic sciences; the rest are bitter tasks which have been
imposed on us by the aggressors. Some days before this crisis, signs could
be seen everywhere how the work of the revolution had advanced. Supplies
were improving considerably — production, both agricultural and industrial,
and the plans — the entire creative work of the revolution — were advancing
at a high rate. And the organisms were devoted to creating the work
conditions for next year, 1963, with the hope of achieving a leap ahead in
the economy, a leap in the production.
But the crisis came, and the threat. Mobilization was necessary, the
abandonment of all the projects, the abandonment of all the tasks, in order
to assume under those circumstances the most sacred task, which is the
defense of the country. And we defend the fatherland because we want a
country in which to work, not a country of parasites but a country of
workers, a country of creators. And we want that country in order to work,
to create!
That is why we must defend it before all else. And the ardor with which the
people prepared to fight and to do whatever else was necessary demonstrates
the love the people feel, more every day, for creative work. What were they
defending in the trenches? What they are doing in the rural areas, what
they are doing in the universities,what they are doing in the factories,
what they are doing in the schools — that is what the people are going to
defend in the trenches! And the more awareness they have of what they are
doing, the more they love what they are doing, the more logical it is that
they go to the trenches with more love and more courage.
We will not be an obstacle to any real solution of peace. We gladly offer
our efforts toward that solution, to the effort being made by the United
Nations to find that real solution of peace, to the effort being made by
different neutralist countries to find that solution of real peace, a peace
with dignity and with absolutely no lessening of any of the sovereign
rights of our country. But if there is to be a lessening, we shall continue
as we are. We shall not accept it. How long? As long as necessary.
We shall have patience, all the patience necessary, so that as the climax
of all this struggle we shall some day attain that peace with all the
attributes of a state that is totally and absolutely sovereign, which has
always been the aspiration of our people. We must have patience.
We shall not accept just any little formula. We shall accept any formula of
peace that is truly worthy. And I think that, with such a formula, not only
we would profit, everyone would profit, the world would profit, American
would profit, the United States would profit; that is to say, the very ones
to blame for this situation would also profit from a solution of peace is
acceptable to our country.
And we express the view of our people when we say that we are ready to
fight and to cooperate for that peace. We have proposed it, we have said it
in all our proposals. Let us see if now, after this crisis which shook the
world for several days, the conditions or the circumstances are achieved in
order to attain that peace.
I still have some questions to deal with. In the course of this crisis, it
must be said that during the development of the crisis there arose some
differences between the Soviet Government and the Cuban Government. But I
want to say something to all Cubans. It is not here that we should discuss
those problems; it is not here, where our enemies might find it useful or
try to profit from those discussions. We must discuss this with the Soviets
at the level of government and party, sit down with them to discuss
everything that might be necessary in the light of reason and principles.
It must be said that, above all, we are Marxist-Leninists. (Prolonged
applause) Between the Soviet Union and Cuba there shall be no breaches!
We want to say another thing, that we have confidence in the policy of
principle of the Soviet Union and we have confidence in the leadership of
the Soviet Union; that is to say, in the government and the leading party
of the Soviet Union. (Applause)
If my compatriots were to ask me at this moment for an opinion, what should
I tell them, what advice amid confused situations, things that have not
been understood or are not well understood, what to do? I would say that
what must be done is to have confidence, that what must be done is to
understand that these international problems are extremely complex and
extremely delicate, and that our people, who have given evidence of great
maturity, of extraordinary maturity, should demonstrate it in this
way — taking care to analyze things, to make no premature judgments, to be
disciplined, and, above all, to have confidence; moreover, to have complete
faith in the revolutionary government, in the leadership of the
revolutionary government; to have complete confidence that everything — all
the problems, all the questions — will be discussed opportunely; to keep in
mind that elements of judgment needed to understand certain things could
even be missing; and to keep in mind that the dramatic and urgent
circumstances in which events took place must not be forgotten.
Now there is time in which to discuss all that completely, and we shall
discuss it. We must prevent the enemy from profiting from our impatience,
from our judgments, because an honest revolutionary may make judgments; he
has the right to form his opinions. But if the opinions he formed at a
given moment about certain things that he does not understand well are
voiced, there might also be someone around who is not a revolutionary,
someone interested in creating distrust, division, and resentment. That is
why the advice we must give is: Have confidence, be firm, and have faith;
be guided by what we have said here today — that is what must be done in
these circumstances and it is that which we must do.
Above all, and I say it with absolute sincerity — there are things I want to
say in these moments in which a certain disagreement may have been created
because of those misunderstandings or differences — it is good to remember,
above all, what the Soviet Union has done for us. It is good to remember,
above all, what it has done for us in every one of the difficult moments we
have had, how the friendly hand of the Soviet Union has been there with us
after each Yankee blow — economic aggression, the suppression of the sugar
quota, the suppression of the shipments of petroleum to our country — after
each of the aggressions we have endured, and we are grateful. We must say
that here loudly.
Moreover, there is another even more moving thing, at least it impresses me
extraordinarily — the Soviet men, the Soviet men we have met here, the
technicians who have come to work with us in our rural areas, the teachers,
professors, engineers, planners, technicians of all kinds, the interest,
the devotion, the fondness with which they have helped us.
Moreover, there are the military technicians, men who have been ready to
die here with us, who have helped us in the instruction, training, and
preparation of our fighting forces; who have worked with us for months and
years, teaching our men to fight; who have worked with us for months,
years, teaching our men to fight and organizing that formidable army we
have at this moment; all the weapons they have sent us, the basic weapons
of our armed forces which are all weapons that the Soviet Union has sent us
and for which the Soviet Union has not charged us! (Applause)
I should like to say that several months ago the Soviet Union decided to
cancel all the debts of our country for armaments. Some of these matters
are of a military nature, which must be treated with great care.
Nevertheless, I will explain something; for example, the strategic weapons
for our defense. Those weapons, the strategic weapons, were not the
property of Cuba. That is not the case with the tanks and an entire series
of weapons, which are our property. The strategic weapons were not our
property.
In the agreements by virtue of which they were sent to our country to
strengthen our defenses against the threats of attack, it was decided that
those strategic weapons, which are very complex and require very
specialized personnel, would continue under the direction of Soviet
personnel and continue being the property of the Soviet state. That is why,
when the Soviet Government decided to withdraw those weapons, which
belonged to it, we respected that decision.
I explain that so that the reasons why the withdrawal was decided on by the
Soviet Government can be understood. That is why I was saying that, even
though we may have some well-founded reason for discontent over some fact,
some detail, more than ever, we must remember how good, generous, noble,
and friendly the Soviets have been toward us, and I was precisely speaking
of the technicians, whom we have seen at our side, ready to die, to
sacrifice their lives in the defense of our country. They are magnificent
men. That is why another thing that we must feel at this moment more than
ever is appreciation, affection, respect, and gratitude toward those men. I
believe that that is the conduct which we must follow at this moment.
(Applause)
That is what we must show, and, above all, we must conduct ourselves better
than ever during these moments, with higher morale than ever and with more
greatness than ever.
Let it not be thought that the withdrawal of the strategic weapons disarms
us. This does not mean that we are disarmed. I can assure you that we have
formidable means of defense, powerful means of defense, extraordinary
resources with which to defend ourselves.
The strategic weapons are leaving, but all the other weapons — all the other
weapons are staying in our country, and they are very powerful means of
defense, with which we can face any situation. There is no reason for
confusion; there is not reason for confusion. The confusion will pass
little by little.
There is one matter I want to stress, one observation I want to make, and
it involves the people, the conduct of the people during these days. I want
to say that the action of the people has surpassed everything even the most
optimistic could ever have imagined in determination, valor, and
discipline. It must be said that thousands of men who were not militiamen,
who did not become militiamen during these four years of revolution, became
militiamen during this crisis. It must be said that thousands of persons
who did not belong to mass organizations or committees for the defense of
the revolution went to register in the mass organizations during these
days.
It must be said that the enemy was unable, inside our country, to count on
allies of any kind. It must be said that during these days of extreme
crisis it was not necessary to arrest anybody. Even men and women who
criticized the revolution — in this decisive hour the patriotic,
revolutionary core became apparent in them and they went to enlist, and
they went to enlist for a battle that according to every prospect was a
serious battle, a terrifying battle; a battle that could be fought with
conventional weapons or with atomic weapons.
The President of the United States tried to intimidate our people, these
people whom he called a captive people, when he spoke of how we might be a
target for atomic attacks, and the result was that there were more
militiamen than ever, more revolutionary militants than ever. It must be
told how the women went to work, and how the pensioners went to work to
replace the men in the trenches.
It must be noted that, although this was the greatest mobilization of all,
it was the one that affected production the least. Never during a
mobilization had production gone as it did. The people's discipline was
truly impressive, the people's ardor, the people's valor.
Impressive also was the organization acquired by our people, above all by
our revolutionary armed forces, and the efficiency with which the commands
operated. It was demonstrated how the revolution has been creating
discipline, has been shaping a people. By harassing us, the enemy has made
us disciplined, has made us organized, has made us battle-hardened. The
result of these four years of harassment has made a heroic people, a people
more than Spartan, for it is said that shield, or on it." And here, an
entire people, men, women, and children, young and old, told themselves,
"with our shield, or on it." (Prolonged applause)
A people like that are an invincible people. A people like that, who in
that manner so calmly, so admirably, confront such difficult situations,
are a people who have a right to win what they aspire to, which is peace,
respect, to keep inviolate their dignity and their prestige, because we
have long-range moral missiles that cannot be dismantled and will never be
dismantled! (Prolonged applause) And that is our most powerful strategic
weapon, of strategic defense and strategic offense!
And so here I want to bear witness today more than ever to our admiration
for our people. And all we revolutionaries should feel doubly obliged,
after this experience, to fight for our people, to work tirelessly for our
people. I want to say here today from the very bottom of my heart, in
conclusion I want to say, that today more than ever I feel proud of being a
son of this people.
Fatherland or death, we will win! (Applause)
Castro Internet Archive
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="sum_01.html">July/August 2001 • Vol 1, No. 3 •</a></b></font></p>
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<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5">“Without Socialism…”</font></b></p>
<p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4">Fidel Castro Defends Socialist Nature of Cuban Revolution</font></b></p>
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<p><i>Printed below are major excerpts from a speech delivered by President Fidel Castro Ruz, on the 40th anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution, in Havana, April 16, 2001. </i>
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<p>
Compatriots: Exactly 40 years ago, at this same time, in this same place, we proclaimed the socialist nature of our Revolution. We had just buried the men who had died victims of the perfidious attack made at daybreak on April 15, 1961.</p><p>
Forty years have passed. Nevertheless, the methods of lies and deception used by the empire and its mercenary allies remain unchanged. Barely four years ago, when bombs began to explode in Havana hotels, financed by the Cuban American National Foundation and brought to Cuba from Central America by bloodthirsty terrorists, the story they tried to spread was that these were actions carried out by members of the Cuban state security services disgruntled with the Revolution.</p><p>
Almost at the end of the speech I gave here 40 years ago, I said, what the imperialists cannot forgive us is that we are here. What they cannot forgive us is the dignity, the determination, the courage, the ideological firmness, the spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people, and the fact that we have undertaken a socialist revolution. And that socialist revolution we defend with these guns! We defend that socialist revolution with the same courage with which our antiaircraft artillery force riddled the attacking planes with bullets yesterday! We do not defend it with mercenaries; we defend it with the men and women of our people!</p><p>
[The many rhetorical questions that follow were posed by Fidel Castro to this mass rally of Cuban workers and peasants in Havana. They were all met by answered shouts.]</p><p>
Is it the millionaires who have the weapons? Is it the children of the rich who have the weapons? That is what I asked then, and this is what you answer now. </p><p>
Is it the overseers who have the weapons? Who has the weapons? Whose hands are those raising those weapons? Are they the hands of the rich kids? Are they the hands of the rich? Are they the hands of the exploiters? Whose hands are those raising those weapons? </p><p>
Are they not the hands of workers, are they not the hands of peasants, are they not hands callused by work, are they not creative hands, are they not the humble hands of the people? </p><p>
And who makes up the majority of the people, the millionaires or the workers? The exploiters or the exploited? The privileged or the humble? Do the privileged have them? </p><p>
Do the humble have them? </p><p>
Are the privileged the minority? Are the humble the majority? Is a revolution democratic when it is the humble who have the weapons? </p><p>
Comrades, workers and peasants: This is the socialist and democratic revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble! And for this revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble, we are willing to give our lives!</p><p>
Yesterday’s attack, which cost seven heroic lives, was aimed at destroying our planes on the ground. But they failed, they only destroyed three planes, and the bulk of the enemy planes were damaged or shot down.” </p><p>
Compatriots of yesterday, today and tomorrow: </p><p>
At the Bay of Pigs, our patriotic and heroic people, who had matured extraordinarily in barely two years of confrontation with the powerful empire, fought fearlessly and unwaveringly for socialism.
</p><p>
Once and for all, they crushed the absurd idea that the suffering endured, and the blood and tears spilled throughout almost a hundred years of struggle for independence and justice against Spanish colonialism and its slavery-based model of exploitation, and later against imperialist domination and the corrupt and bloody governments imposed on Cuba by the United States, were to serve for the rebuilding of a neocolonialist, capitalist and bourgeois society. It was essential to seek out loftier objectives in the political and social development of Cuba.
</p><p>
It was necessary, and it was possible. We did it at the exact and precise moment in history, not a minute before and not a minute later, and we were daring enough to attempt it.
</p><p>
When we see that south of the Rio Grande there is a whole collection of balkanized countries—although they all share the same language, culture, history and ethnic roots—about to be devoured by the mighty, expansionist and insatiable superpower of the turbulent and brutal north that scorns us, we Cubans can cry out to the top of our voices: Bless that day, a thousand times over, that we proclaimed our revolution to be socialist! Today it might have been too late. The victory of January 1, 1959, offered an exceptional opportunity to do it. </p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have been able to reduce the illiteracy rate to zero.</p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have schools and teachers for all our children, without a single exception, even in the most distant and remote corners of the country. Nor would we have special schools for those who need them, nor a primary schooling rate of 100 percent, nor a secondary schooling rate of 98.8 percent. We would not have exact science vocational schools, or senior high schools, or military schools, or sports training schools, or schools for physical education and sports instructors, or trade schools, or technological and polytechnic professional training institutes, or colleges for workers and peasants, or language schools, or art schools in every province of the country.</p><p>
Without socialism, Cuba today would not have 700,000 university graduates, 15 teacher-training colleges, 22 medical schools, a total of 51 higher education institutions, plus 12 affiliates and independent faculties, with 137,000 university students.</p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have 67,500 doctors, over 250,000 professors and teachers, and 34,000 physical education and sports instructors, the highest number per capita in all three categories among all countries in the world.</p><p>
Without socialism, sports would not be a right of the people, and Cuba would not win more Olympic gold medals per capita than any other country. </p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have been able to attain the level of political culture we have today.</p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have 30,133 family doctors, 436 polyclinics, 275 hospitals, both general and specialized, including surgical, pediatric and maternal hospitals, and 13 specialized medical institutes. </p><p>
Without socialism, our country would not have 133 scientific research centers and tens of thousands of either Masters or Ph.D. researchers. </p><p>
Without socialism, there would not be 1,012,000 retired workers, 325,500 pensioners and 120,000 people on social welfare receiving social security benefits, without a single exception, nor would those social security benefits be available to all of the country’s people when needed. </p><p>
Without socialism, 163,000 campesinos would not be the owners of their lands, whether in the form of individually owned parcels or cooperatives, nor would 252,000 agricultural workers be the owners of the facilities, machinery and crops in the basic units of cooperative production. </p><p>
Without socialism, 85 percent of families would not own their homes, nor would 95 percent of the population have access to electricity, and 95.3 percent to drinking water; 48,540 kilometers of highways would not have been built, nor would there be 1,005 water reservoirs, which hold almost all of the water that can be dammed for agricultural, industrial and domestic use. </p><p>
Without socialism, the infant mortality rate would not be less than eight per 1000 live births. Vaccines against 13 diseases would not protect our children, nor would our people’s life expectancy at birth be 76 years. The rate of HIV infection would not be 0.03 percent, as compared to 0.6 percent in the United States and other developed and wealthy countries; nor would 575,000 voluntary blood donations have been made in the year 2000.</p><p>
Without socialism, we would not be able to promise, as we are now doing, to provide decent employment to 100 percent of our youth under the sole condition that they be trained; nor would we be developing the programs that will offer them all the opportunity for training.</p><p>
Without socialism, manual laborers and intellectuals, whose works help fulfill the material and spiritual needs of our species, would never have taken the vanguard role they justly deserve in human society. </p><p>
Without socialism, Cuban women, formerly discriminated against and relegated to humiliating work, would not constitute 65 percent of the country’s technical work force today, nor would they enjoy the right to equal pay for equal work, a goal that has yet to be achieved in almost all of the developed capitalist countries.</p><p>
Without socialism, there would not be mass organizations, made up of workers and laborers, campesinos, women, neighborhood residents organized into Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, primary school, junior and senior high school students, university students, veterans of the Cuban Revolution. These organizations encompass the vast majority of our people and play a decisive role in the revolutionary process and the truly democratic participation of all the people in the leadership and destiny of the country.</p><p>
Without socialism, we could not have a society without beggars wandering the streets, without children going barefoot or begging, or absent from school because they need to work for a living, or subjected to sexual exploitation, or used for committing crimes, or joining gangs, things that are so common in other parts of the world, including the United States.</p><p>
Without socialism, Cuba would not have an outstanding place in its growing, tenacious and sustained struggle to preserve the environment. </p><p>
Without socialism, the country’s cultural heritage would be left unprotected, subjected to plunder or destruction. The historic parts of Cuba ‘s oldest cities would have been replaced with new buildings totally unrelated to their architectural surroundings. The oldest section of our capital, where visitors increasingly marvel at the painstaking care taken in its restoration and preservation, would not exist. The eyesore built behind the Palace of the Captains-General, where a centuries-old university building was torn down to put up a heliport in its place, provides ample evidence for these claims.</p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have been able to withstand the overpowering foreign influence progressively imposed on so many peoples around the world, nor would we be witnessing the vigorous cultural and artistic movement developing in our country today: the Higher Institute of Art, a prestigious institution created by the Revolution, is being restored and expanded; valuable knowledge is being passed on in the 43 vocational and professional art schools throughout the country, which will soon grow in number; and 4,000 young people have just entered the first year of study in 15 new art instructor training schools created last year. Every year, another 4,000 students will enter these schools, which have room for a total enrollment of 15,000, and they will graduate with a high school degree in humanities.</p><p>
Presently, we have 306 cultural centers, 292 museums, 368 public libraries open to the entire population, and 181 art galleries. </p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have the televised courses of University for All; its initial programming has had a tremendous impact, and it promises to contribute significantly to achieving a level of comprehensive general knowledge that will make Cubans the most educated people in the world. </p><p>
Three hundred Youth Computer Clubs are operating, and 20,000 personal computers are being distributed to junior and senior high schools. Computer skills will be taught on a mass basis from preschool all the way up to the university level.</p><p>
The list of comparisons and contrasts would be endless, but there are a few that I cannot fail to mention, given their patriotic, internationalist and human significance:</p><p>
Without socialism, Cuba would not have been able to endure 42 years of hostility, blockade and economic war imposed by imperialism, much less a 10-year special period that has still not ended. It would not have been able to achieve an appreciation of its currency from 150 pesos to the dollar in 1994 to just 20 pesos to the dollar in 1999, a feat unequalled by any other country. Nor would it have been possible, in the midst of inconceivable difficulties, to initiate modest yet sustained and sound economic growth.
</p><p>
Without socialism, Cuba would not be the only country in the world today that does not need trade with the United States in order to survive, and even to advance, both economically and socially. As to the latter, not even the wealthiest and most industrialized countries compare to Cuba.
</p><p>
Cuba is one of the few countries in the world that is not a member, and does not want to be a member, of the International Monetary Fund, which has become the zealous guardian of the empire’s interests. Nothing I have described here would have been possible if our hands and feet were tied to that sinister institution spawned at Bretton Woods, which politically crushes those who must turn to it, destabilizing and destroying governments. There is no escape for those tied to the double yoke of the IMF and neo-liberalism, both manifestations of the unfair and irrational economic order imposed on the world.
</p><p>
Without socialism, each and every person in our country would not have the same right to receive educational or health care services free of charge, regardless of the cost, and without anyone ever questioning him or her on religious or political beliefs.</p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have a country free of drugs, brothels, gambling casinos, organized crime, vanished people, death squads, lynching and out-of-court executions.</p><p>
Without socialism, Cuban families could not watch their children grow up healthy, educated and skilled, with no fear of them being lured into drugs or crime, or killed at school by their own classmates. </p><p>
Without socialism, Cuba would not be, as it is today, the most solid barrier in the hemisphere against drug trafficking, something that benefits even U.S. society.</p><p>
Without socialism, Cuba would not be a country in which, for 42 years, no one has suffered the repression and police brutality so commonly practiced in Europe and other parts of the world, where anti-riot vehicles and men dressed up in strange gear, like visitors from outer space, attack the population with clubs, shields, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper gas and other means.</p><p>
It is difficult for the West to understand why such things do not happen in Cuba. They do not have the slightest notion of the way human society can be enriched by the unity, political consciousness, solidarity, selflessness and generosity, patriotism, moral values and commitment built through education, culture and all the justice offered by a true revolution. </p><p>
Without socialism, hundreds of thousands of Cubans would not have undertaken internationalist missions; nor would our country have contributed even a grain of sand to the struggle against colonialism in Africa; nor would its people have shed a single drop of blood fighting against the seemingly invincible forces of the hateful system of apartheid, racism and fascism. </p><p>
Not one of the countries that traded and invested back then and still now possess enormous wealth in South Africa and other countries on the African continent—where Cuba neither sought, nor has, nor wants to have a single square inch of land—contributed the least share of sacrifice. Not even the enormous distance separating us from Africa could be an insurmountable obstacle for the spirit of solidarity of this small, blockaded and besieged island.</p><p>
Without socialism, over 40,000 Cuban health care workers would not have provided their noble internationalist cooperation in more than 90 countries, nor would they be helping to develop comprehensive health care programs today in 16 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, thanks to the immense human capital created by the Revolution. </p><p>
Without socialism, it would not have been possible for 15,600 students from the Third World to graduate in Cuban universities, nor would there be 11,000 students from those countries currently enrolled in higher studies in Cuba. </p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have the prestigious Latin American Medical School, where there are currently young people from 24 countries and 63 indigenous ethnic groups studying, and 2,000 new students will enroll every year.</p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have been able to establish the International School of Sports and Physical Education that can accommodate a total of 1,500 students, and where 588 youths from 50 countries are currently enrolled in the first year of studies. </p><p>
Without socialism, we would not have been able to provide medical treatment in Cuba for 19,000 children and adults from the three republics affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the majority of whom were treated in the midst of the special period, and for 53 people harmed by the radiation leak in the state of Goiás, in Brazil.</p><p>
What we have shared with other peoples has not prevented a single one of our compatriots from having the opportunity to be a part of the millions of mid-level technicians and university-educated professionals in Cuba today. This shows that much can be done with very little, and that everything could be done with much less resources than those spent today on commercial advertising, weapons, narcotics and luxury. </p><p>
Without socialism, Cuba would not have become, without actually trying, an example for many people in the world, and the loyal and constant voice for the most deserving causes; a small country that enjoys the enviable privilege of being almost the only one that can speak out at any international forum and freely denounce, with no fear of reprisals or aggression, the unfair economic order and the insatiable, rapacious, hypocritical and immoral policies of the hegemonic superpower’s government....</p><p>
On a day like today, as we look back over the accomplishments of the Revolution, it is amazing to discover that we are far from having achieved all the necessary and possible justice.</p><p>
The years that have passed have come to enrich our experience and knowledge tremendously. Four decades of struggle in the face of enormous difficulties have strengthened our convictions, and our confidence in human beings and their infinite potential.</p><p>
The socialism we conceive of today is far superior to our dreams back then. The special period forced us to walk back on a stretch of the road we had traveled. Painful inequalities emerged. Those who were willing to patiently endure, those most dedicated to the revolutionary cause above all else, our most loyal manual and intellectual workers, the most humble and faithful of the people, the most conscientious revolutionaries understood this inevitable circumstance. And as has always happened and always will happen in difficult times, they shouldered the bulk of the burden in the efforts to save the country and socialism at any cost. </p><p>
In the future we will not only achieve much higher goals than those we achieved in the past, but we will even surpass them. Today, we are advancing towards objectives we would not have even dreamed of 40 years ago, and much less in the extremely difficult stage that began 10 years ago, from which we are emerging victorious. A new dawn is beginning to shine on our future, a future that will shine more brightly on a more accomplished socialism, a more promising and profound revolutionary work. </p><p>
We did not come here today to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist nature of the Revolution, but rather we came here to ratify it, to swear our allegiance once again. </p><p>
Using the exact same words as on that unforgettable day 40 years ago, I will ask you, “Workers and peasants, humble men and women of the homeland, do you swear to defend to your last drop of blood this Revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble?” [Exclamations of, “We do!”] </p><p>
“Here, before the tomb of our fallen comrades; here, near the remains of those heroic young men, sons of workers and sons of humble families”—and today I will add two more things: in memory of all those who have died for the homeland and for justice in the last 133 years, and in the name of all those who have given their lives for humanity in heroic internationalist missions—”we reaffirm our determination that like those who stood up to the bullets, like those who gave their lives, no matter when the mercenaries come, all of us, proud of our Revolution, proud to defend this Revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble, will not waver, in the face of whoever they may be, in defending our Revolution to our last drop of blood.” </p><p>
Ever onward to victory! Patria o Muerte! Venceremos!
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July/August 2001 • Vol 1, No. 3 •
“Without Socialism…”
Fidel Castro Defends Socialist Nature of Cuban Revolution
Printed below are major excerpts from a speech delivered by President Fidel Castro Ruz, on the 40th anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution, in Havana, April 16, 2001.
Compatriots: Exactly 40 years ago, at this same time, in this same place, we proclaimed the socialist nature of our Revolution. We had just buried the men who had died victims of the perfidious attack made at daybreak on April 15, 1961.
Forty years have passed. Nevertheless, the methods of lies and deception used by the empire and its mercenary allies remain unchanged. Barely four years ago, when bombs began to explode in Havana hotels, financed by the Cuban American National Foundation and brought to Cuba from Central America by bloodthirsty terrorists, the story they tried to spread was that these were actions carried out by members of the Cuban state security services disgruntled with the Revolution.
Almost at the end of the speech I gave here 40 years ago, I said, what the imperialists cannot forgive us is that we are here. What they cannot forgive us is the dignity, the determination, the courage, the ideological firmness, the spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people, and the fact that we have undertaken a socialist revolution. And that socialist revolution we defend with these guns! We defend that socialist revolution with the same courage with which our antiaircraft artillery force riddled the attacking planes with bullets yesterday! We do not defend it with mercenaries; we defend it with the men and women of our people!
[The many rhetorical questions that follow were posed by Fidel Castro to this mass rally of Cuban workers and peasants in Havana. They were all met by answered shouts.]
Is it the millionaires who have the weapons? Is it the children of the rich who have the weapons? That is what I asked then, and this is what you answer now.
Is it the overseers who have the weapons? Who has the weapons? Whose hands are those raising those weapons? Are they the hands of the rich kids? Are they the hands of the rich? Are they the hands of the exploiters? Whose hands are those raising those weapons?
Are they not the hands of workers, are they not the hands of peasants, are they not hands callused by work, are they not creative hands, are they not the humble hands of the people?
And who makes up the majority of the people, the millionaires or the workers? The exploiters or the exploited? The privileged or the humble? Do the privileged have them?
Do the humble have them?
Are the privileged the minority? Are the humble the majority? Is a revolution democratic when it is the humble who have the weapons?
Comrades, workers and peasants: This is the socialist and democratic revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble! And for this revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble, we are willing to give our lives!
Yesterday’s attack, which cost seven heroic lives, was aimed at destroying our planes on the ground. But they failed, they only destroyed three planes, and the bulk of the enemy planes were damaged or shot down.”
Compatriots of yesterday, today and tomorrow:
At the Bay of Pigs, our patriotic and heroic people, who had matured extraordinarily in barely two years of confrontation with the powerful empire, fought fearlessly and unwaveringly for socialism.
Once and for all, they crushed the absurd idea that the suffering endured, and the blood and tears spilled throughout almost a hundred years of struggle for independence and justice against Spanish colonialism and its slavery-based model of exploitation, and later against imperialist domination and the corrupt and bloody governments imposed on Cuba by the United States, were to serve for the rebuilding of a neocolonialist, capitalist and bourgeois society. It was essential to seek out loftier objectives in the political and social development of Cuba.
It was necessary, and it was possible. We did it at the exact and precise moment in history, not a minute before and not a minute later, and we were daring enough to attempt it.
When we see that south of the Rio Grande there is a whole collection of balkanized countries—although they all share the same language, culture, history and ethnic roots—about to be devoured by the mighty, expansionist and insatiable superpower of the turbulent and brutal north that scorns us, we Cubans can cry out to the top of our voices: Bless that day, a thousand times over, that we proclaimed our revolution to be socialist! Today it might have been too late. The victory of January 1, 1959, offered an exceptional opportunity to do it.
Without socialism, we would not have been able to reduce the illiteracy rate to zero.
Without socialism, we would not have schools and teachers for all our children, without a single exception, even in the most distant and remote corners of the country. Nor would we have special schools for those who need them, nor a primary schooling rate of 100 percent, nor a secondary schooling rate of 98.8 percent. We would not have exact science vocational schools, or senior high schools, or military schools, or sports training schools, or schools for physical education and sports instructors, or trade schools, or technological and polytechnic professional training institutes, or colleges for workers and peasants, or language schools, or art schools in every province of the country.
Without socialism, Cuba today would not have 700,000 university graduates, 15 teacher-training colleges, 22 medical schools, a total of 51 higher education institutions, plus 12 affiliates and independent faculties, with 137,000 university students.
Without socialism, we would not have 67,500 doctors, over 250,000 professors and teachers, and 34,000 physical education and sports instructors, the highest number per capita in all three categories among all countries in the world.
Without socialism, sports would not be a right of the people, and Cuba would not win more Olympic gold medals per capita than any other country.
Without socialism, we would not have been able to attain the level of political culture we have today.
Without socialism, we would not have 30,133 family doctors, 436 polyclinics, 275 hospitals, both general and specialized, including surgical, pediatric and maternal hospitals, and 13 specialized medical institutes.
Without socialism, our country would not have 133 scientific research centers and tens of thousands of either Masters or Ph.D. researchers.
Without socialism, there would not be 1,012,000 retired workers, 325,500 pensioners and 120,000 people on social welfare receiving social security benefits, without a single exception, nor would those social security benefits be available to all of the country’s people when needed.
Without socialism, 163,000 campesinos would not be the owners of their lands, whether in the form of individually owned parcels or cooperatives, nor would 252,000 agricultural workers be the owners of the facilities, machinery and crops in the basic units of cooperative production.
Without socialism, 85 percent of families would not own their homes, nor would 95 percent of the population have access to electricity, and 95.3 percent to drinking water; 48,540 kilometers of highways would not have been built, nor would there be 1,005 water reservoirs, which hold almost all of the water that can be dammed for agricultural, industrial and domestic use.
Without socialism, the infant mortality rate would not be less than eight per 1000 live births. Vaccines against 13 diseases would not protect our children, nor would our people’s life expectancy at birth be 76 years. The rate of HIV infection would not be 0.03 percent, as compared to 0.6 percent in the United States and other developed and wealthy countries; nor would 575,000 voluntary blood donations have been made in the year 2000.
Without socialism, we would not be able to promise, as we are now doing, to provide decent employment to 100 percent of our youth under the sole condition that they be trained; nor would we be developing the programs that will offer them all the opportunity for training.
Without socialism, manual laborers and intellectuals, whose works help fulfill the material and spiritual needs of our species, would never have taken the vanguard role they justly deserve in human society.
Without socialism, Cuban women, formerly discriminated against and relegated to humiliating work, would not constitute 65 percent of the country’s technical work force today, nor would they enjoy the right to equal pay for equal work, a goal that has yet to be achieved in almost all of the developed capitalist countries.
Without socialism, there would not be mass organizations, made up of workers and laborers, campesinos, women, neighborhood residents organized into Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, primary school, junior and senior high school students, university students, veterans of the Cuban Revolution. These organizations encompass the vast majority of our people and play a decisive role in the revolutionary process and the truly democratic participation of all the people in the leadership and destiny of the country.
Without socialism, we could not have a society without beggars wandering the streets, without children going barefoot or begging, or absent from school because they need to work for a living, or subjected to sexual exploitation, or used for committing crimes, or joining gangs, things that are so common in other parts of the world, including the United States.
Without socialism, Cuba would not have an outstanding place in its growing, tenacious and sustained struggle to preserve the environment.
Without socialism, the country’s cultural heritage would be left unprotected, subjected to plunder or destruction. The historic parts of Cuba ‘s oldest cities would have been replaced with new buildings totally unrelated to their architectural surroundings. The oldest section of our capital, where visitors increasingly marvel at the painstaking care taken in its restoration and preservation, would not exist. The eyesore built behind the Palace of the Captains-General, where a centuries-old university building was torn down to put up a heliport in its place, provides ample evidence for these claims.
Without socialism, we would not have been able to withstand the overpowering foreign influence progressively imposed on so many peoples around the world, nor would we be witnessing the vigorous cultural and artistic movement developing in our country today: the Higher Institute of Art, a prestigious institution created by the Revolution, is being restored and expanded; valuable knowledge is being passed on in the 43 vocational and professional art schools throughout the country, which will soon grow in number; and 4,000 young people have just entered the first year of study in 15 new art instructor training schools created last year. Every year, another 4,000 students will enter these schools, which have room for a total enrollment of 15,000, and they will graduate with a high school degree in humanities.
Presently, we have 306 cultural centers, 292 museums, 368 public libraries open to the entire population, and 181 art galleries.
Without socialism, we would not have the televised courses of University for All; its initial programming has had a tremendous impact, and it promises to contribute significantly to achieving a level of comprehensive general knowledge that will make Cubans the most educated people in the world.
Three hundred Youth Computer Clubs are operating, and 20,000 personal computers are being distributed to junior and senior high schools. Computer skills will be taught on a mass basis from preschool all the way up to the university level.
The list of comparisons and contrasts would be endless, but there are a few that I cannot fail to mention, given their patriotic, internationalist and human significance:
Without socialism, Cuba would not have been able to endure 42 years of hostility, blockade and economic war imposed by imperialism, much less a 10-year special period that has still not ended. It would not have been able to achieve an appreciation of its currency from 150 pesos to the dollar in 1994 to just 20 pesos to the dollar in 1999, a feat unequalled by any other country. Nor would it have been possible, in the midst of inconceivable difficulties, to initiate modest yet sustained and sound economic growth.
Without socialism, Cuba would not be the only country in the world today that does not need trade with the United States in order to survive, and even to advance, both economically and socially. As to the latter, not even the wealthiest and most industrialized countries compare to Cuba.
Cuba is one of the few countries in the world that is not a member, and does not want to be a member, of the International Monetary Fund, which has become the zealous guardian of the empire’s interests. Nothing I have described here would have been possible if our hands and feet were tied to that sinister institution spawned at Bretton Woods, which politically crushes those who must turn to it, destabilizing and destroying governments. There is no escape for those tied to the double yoke of the IMF and neo-liberalism, both manifestations of the unfair and irrational economic order imposed on the world.
Without socialism, each and every person in our country would not have the same right to receive educational or health care services free of charge, regardless of the cost, and without anyone ever questioning him or her on religious or political beliefs.
Without socialism, we would not have a country free of drugs, brothels, gambling casinos, organized crime, vanished people, death squads, lynching and out-of-court executions.
Without socialism, Cuban families could not watch their children grow up healthy, educated and skilled, with no fear of them being lured into drugs or crime, or killed at school by their own classmates.
Without socialism, Cuba would not be, as it is today, the most solid barrier in the hemisphere against drug trafficking, something that benefits even U.S. society.
Without socialism, Cuba would not be a country in which, for 42 years, no one has suffered the repression and police brutality so commonly practiced in Europe and other parts of the world, where anti-riot vehicles and men dressed up in strange gear, like visitors from outer space, attack the population with clubs, shields, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper gas and other means.
It is difficult for the West to understand why such things do not happen in Cuba. They do not have the slightest notion of the way human society can be enriched by the unity, political consciousness, solidarity, selflessness and generosity, patriotism, moral values and commitment built through education, culture and all the justice offered by a true revolution.
Without socialism, hundreds of thousands of Cubans would not have undertaken internationalist missions; nor would our country have contributed even a grain of sand to the struggle against colonialism in Africa; nor would its people have shed a single drop of blood fighting against the seemingly invincible forces of the hateful system of apartheid, racism and fascism.
Not one of the countries that traded and invested back then and still now possess enormous wealth in South Africa and other countries on the African continent—where Cuba neither sought, nor has, nor wants to have a single square inch of land—contributed the least share of sacrifice. Not even the enormous distance separating us from Africa could be an insurmountable obstacle for the spirit of solidarity of this small, blockaded and besieged island.
Without socialism, over 40,000 Cuban health care workers would not have provided their noble internationalist cooperation in more than 90 countries, nor would they be helping to develop comprehensive health care programs today in 16 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, thanks to the immense human capital created by the Revolution.
Without socialism, it would not have been possible for 15,600 students from the Third World to graduate in Cuban universities, nor would there be 11,000 students from those countries currently enrolled in higher studies in Cuba.
Without socialism, we would not have the prestigious Latin American Medical School, where there are currently young people from 24 countries and 63 indigenous ethnic groups studying, and 2,000 new students will enroll every year.
Without socialism, we would not have been able to establish the International School of Sports and Physical Education that can accommodate a total of 1,500 students, and where 588 youths from 50 countries are currently enrolled in the first year of studies.
Without socialism, we would not have been able to provide medical treatment in Cuba for 19,000 children and adults from the three republics affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the majority of whom were treated in the midst of the special period, and for 53 people harmed by the radiation leak in the state of Goiás, in Brazil.
What we have shared with other peoples has not prevented a single one of our compatriots from having the opportunity to be a part of the millions of mid-level technicians and university-educated professionals in Cuba today. This shows that much can be done with very little, and that everything could be done with much less resources than those spent today on commercial advertising, weapons, narcotics and luxury.
Without socialism, Cuba would not have become, without actually trying, an example for many people in the world, and the loyal and constant voice for the most deserving causes; a small country that enjoys the enviable privilege of being almost the only one that can speak out at any international forum and freely denounce, with no fear of reprisals or aggression, the unfair economic order and the insatiable, rapacious, hypocritical and immoral policies of the hegemonic superpower’s government....
On a day like today, as we look back over the accomplishments of the Revolution, it is amazing to discover that we are far from having achieved all the necessary and possible justice.
The years that have passed have come to enrich our experience and knowledge tremendously. Four decades of struggle in the face of enormous difficulties have strengthened our convictions, and our confidence in human beings and their infinite potential.
The socialism we conceive of today is far superior to our dreams back then. The special period forced us to walk back on a stretch of the road we had traveled. Painful inequalities emerged. Those who were willing to patiently endure, those most dedicated to the revolutionary cause above all else, our most loyal manual and intellectual workers, the most humble and faithful of the people, the most conscientious revolutionaries understood this inevitable circumstance. And as has always happened and always will happen in difficult times, they shouldered the bulk of the burden in the efforts to save the country and socialism at any cost.
In the future we will not only achieve much higher goals than those we achieved in the past, but we will even surpass them. Today, we are advancing towards objectives we would not have even dreamed of 40 years ago, and much less in the extremely difficult stage that began 10 years ago, from which we are emerging victorious. A new dawn is beginning to shine on our future, a future that will shine more brightly on a more accomplished socialism, a more promising and profound revolutionary work.
We did not come here today to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist nature of the Revolution, but rather we came here to ratify it, to swear our allegiance once again.
Using the exact same words as on that unforgettable day 40 years ago, I will ask you, “Workers and peasants, humble men and women of the homeland, do you swear to defend to your last drop of blood this Revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble?” [Exclamations of, “We do!”]
“Here, before the tomb of our fallen comrades; here, near the remains of those heroic young men, sons of workers and sons of humble families”—and today I will add two more things: in memory of all those who have died for the homeland and for justice in the last 133 years, and in the name of all those who have given their lives for humanity in heroic internationalist missions—”we reaffirm our determination that like those who stood up to the bullets, like those who gave their lives, no matter when the mercenaries come, all of us, proud of our Revolution, proud to defend this Revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble, will not waver, in the face of whoever they may be, in defending our Revolution to our last drop of blood.”
Ever onward to victory! Patria o Muerte! Venceremos!
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1992.06.03 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h3>
El Nuevo Diario Interview with Fidel Castro: <br>
Blaming Stalin for everything would be historical simplism
</h3>
<h4>
By Tomas Borge
</h4>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">First Published:</span> El Nuevo Diario, Managua, 3 June 1992
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html">Castro Speech Database</a>
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> John Wagner
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>
Q: Montesquieu said history is the noise surrounding certain
events, but there are events that are simply not noise, like the
collapse of the socialist countries and the survival of the Cuban
revolution. Does this at mean you are going down in history?
</p>
<p>
A: I would say the simple fact that we decided to keep going
forward when the socialist bloc collapsed, and now that we have become
the only victim of a vicious imperialist attack, is a significant
event in history. The mere fact that Cuba has decided to keep going
forward and face the dangers and the challenges following the collapse
of the socialist bloc and the disappearance of the USSR is a
significant event in history.
</p>
<p>
Tomas, it is not a matter, however, of what we may have done up until
now or of what we may be capable of withstanding from here on. I
believe it all depends on what lies ahead because that will determine
the real significance of what we are doing today.
</p>
<p>
Q: Undoubtedly you have much confidence in that, and I share it.
Does that mean the Cuban revolution is the beginning of a resurrection
of a socialist option at the world level?
</p>
<p>
A: I believe we are defending certain principles that are
immensely, extraordinarily valuable at a moment of confusion in the
world. It is a time for opportunists, a time in which politicians are
trying to accommodate themselves, and we may say it is a time of
apotheosis for imperialist military and political power.
</p>
<p>
Mankind has never before experienced such a reactionary expansion and
empire building. That does not mean it will go on forever. That empire
is corroded by all types of contradictions. We are living in the
present and I believe that preserving our values is of great
importance for all men who want the best for humanity. I believe and I
have always believed that symbols are of great importance, flags are
of great value. I believe that even if we became a lonely island, that
would be of great value. If we were invaded and were capable of
resisting until the end, that would have great value. If we were
capable of prevailing, as we will undoubtedly prevail, because it
would be impossible to exterminate millions of men determined to
fight, that would have great value.
</p>
<p>
Q: You recently said, not referring to socialism in general but
to the USSR in particular, that socialism had been assassinated,
stabbed in the back. In this conspiracy of daggers that killed
socialism, would you say Gorbachev was one of the assassins?
</p>
<p>
A: No, I could not say that about Gorbachev because I have
another view of Gorbachev and it is not one of an assassin who plotted
the USSR's destruction.
</p>
<p>
The USSR self-destructed in an incredible way. The responsibility for
that self-destruction undoubtedly lies in the hands of the country's
leaders, those who led that nation. Now, some of them were aware they
were destroying it and others were not. That is what I was trying to
say, more or less, and we saw it all from the beginning.
</p>
<p>
I cannot say Gorbachev played a role in which he was aware of the
destruction of the USSR because I have no doubt that Gorbachev
intended to fight to improve socialism.
</p>
<p>
We approved of Soviet efforts to improve socialism in the USSR. But we
could not approve of, and never would have agreed to, not only the
destruction of socialism in the USSR, but also the destruction of the
USSR itself. That inflicted terrible damage on all peoples of the
world and created a bad situation for the Third World in particular.
</p>
<p>
Imperialism would have been able to disintegrate the Soviet Union, had
the Soviets not destroyed themselves, had those responsible for the
strategies and tactics and for the country's political and government
policies not destroyed the country. In other words, socialism did not
die from natural causes: it was a suicide, socialism was murdered.
That is what I meant.
</p>
<p>
Q: Fidel, for most Latin American revolutionary leaders, the
current crisis of socialism has a mastermind: Josef Stalin.
</p>
<p>
A: I believe Stalin made big mistakes but also showed great
wisdom.
</p>
<p>
In my opinion, blaming Stalin for everything that occurred in the
Soviet Union would be historical simplism, because no man by himself
could have created certain conditions. It would be the same as giving
Stalin all the credit for what the USSR once was. That is impossible!
I believe that the efforts of millions and millions of heroic people
contributed to the USSR's development and to its relevant role in the
world in favor of hundreds of millions of people.
</p>
<p>
I have criticized Stalin for a lot of things. First of all, I
criticized his violation of the legal framework.
</p>
<p>
I believe Stalin committed an enormous abuse of power. That is
another conviction I have always had.
</p>
<p>
I feel that Stalin's agricultural policy did not develop a progressive
process to socialize land. In my opinion, the land socialization
process should have begun earlier and should have been gradually
implemented. Because of its violent implementation, it had a very high
economic and human cost in a very brief period of history.
</p>
<p>
I also feel that Stalin's policy prior to the war was totally
erroneous. No one can deny that western powers promoted Hitler until
he became a monster, a real threat. The terrible weakness shown by
western powers before Hitler cannot be denied. This at encouraged
Hitler's expansionism and Stalin's fear, which led Stalin to do
something I will criticize all my life, because I believe that it was
a flagrant violation of principles: seek peace with Hitler at any
cost, stalling for time.
</p>
<p>
During our revolutionary life, during the relatively long history of
the Cuban Revolution, we have never negotiated a single principle to
gain time, or to obtain any practical advantage. Stalin fell for the
famous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact at a time when Germans were already
demanding the delivery of the Danzig Corridor.
</p>
<p>
I feel that, far from gaining time, the nonaggression pact reduced
time, because the war broke out anyway. Then, in my opinion, he made
another big mistake, because when Poland was being attacked, he sent
troops to occupy that territory, which was disputed because it had a
Ukrainian or Russian population, I am not sure.
</p>
<p>
I also believe that the little war against Finland was another
terrible mistake, from the standpoint of principles and international
law.
</p>
<p>
Stalin made a series of mistakes that were criticized by a large part
of the world, and which placed Communists - who were great friends of
the USSR - in a very difficult position by having to support each one of
those episodes.
</p>
<p>
Since we are discussing this topic, I must tell you that I have never
discussed it with any journalist (or on any other occasion, he added).
</p>
<p>
The things I mentioned are against principles and doctrine; they are
even contrary to political wisdom. Although it is true that there was
a period of one year and nine months from September 1939 to June 1941
during which the USSR could have rearmed itself, Hitler was the one
who got stronger.
</p>
<p>
If Hitler had declared war on the USSR in 1939, the destruction would
have been less than the destruction caused in 1941, and he would have
suffered the same fate as Napoleon Bonaparte. With the people's
participation in an irregular war, the USSR would have defeated
Hitler.
</p>
<p>
Finally, Stalin's character, his terrible distrust of everything, made
him commit several other mistakes: one of them was falling in the trap
of German intrigue and conducting a terrible, bloody purge of the
armed forces and practically beheading the Soviet Army on the eve of
war.
</p>
<p>
Q: What do you believe were Stalin's merits?
</p>
<p>
A: He established unity in the Soviet Union. He consolidated
what Lenin had begun: party unity. He gave the international
revolutionary movement a new impetus. The USSR's industrialization was
one of Stalin's wisest actions, and I believe it was a determining
factor in the USSR's capacity to resist.
</p>
<p>
One of Stalin's - and the team that supported him - greatest merits was
the plan to transfer the war industry and main strategic industries to
Siberia and deep into Soviet territory.
</p>
<p>
I believe Stalin led the USSR well during the war. According to many
generals, Zhukov and the most brilliant Soviet generals, Stalin played
an important role in defending the USSR and in the war against Nazism.
They all recognized it.
</p>
<p>
I think there should be an impartial analysis of Stalin. Blaming him
for everything that happened would be historical simplism.
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../index.htm">Castro Internet Archive</a>
</p>
</body> |
Castro Internet Archive
El Nuevo Diario Interview with Fidel Castro:
Blaming Stalin for everything would be historical simplism
By Tomas Borge
First Published: El Nuevo Diario, Managua, 3 June 1992
Source: Castro Speech Database
Markup: John Wagner
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002
Q: Montesquieu said history is the noise surrounding certain
events, but there are events that are simply not noise, like the
collapse of the socialist countries and the survival of the Cuban
revolution. Does this at mean you are going down in history?
A: I would say the simple fact that we decided to keep going
forward when the socialist bloc collapsed, and now that we have become
the only victim of a vicious imperialist attack, is a significant
event in history. The mere fact that Cuba has decided to keep going
forward and face the dangers and the challenges following the collapse
of the socialist bloc and the disappearance of the USSR is a
significant event in history.
Tomas, it is not a matter, however, of what we may have done up until
now or of what we may be capable of withstanding from here on. I
believe it all depends on what lies ahead because that will determine
the real significance of what we are doing today.
Q: Undoubtedly you have much confidence in that, and I share it.
Does that mean the Cuban revolution is the beginning of a resurrection
of a socialist option at the world level?
A: I believe we are defending certain principles that are
immensely, extraordinarily valuable at a moment of confusion in the
world. It is a time for opportunists, a time in which politicians are
trying to accommodate themselves, and we may say it is a time of
apotheosis for imperialist military and political power.
Mankind has never before experienced such a reactionary expansion and
empire building. That does not mean it will go on forever. That empire
is corroded by all types of contradictions. We are living in the
present and I believe that preserving our values is of great
importance for all men who want the best for humanity. I believe and I
have always believed that symbols are of great importance, flags are
of great value. I believe that even if we became a lonely island, that
would be of great value. If we were invaded and were capable of
resisting until the end, that would have great value. If we were
capable of prevailing, as we will undoubtedly prevail, because it
would be impossible to exterminate millions of men determined to
fight, that would have great value.
Q: You recently said, not referring to socialism in general but
to the USSR in particular, that socialism had been assassinated,
stabbed in the back. In this conspiracy of daggers that killed
socialism, would you say Gorbachev was one of the assassins?
A: No, I could not say that about Gorbachev because I have
another view of Gorbachev and it is not one of an assassin who plotted
the USSR's destruction.
The USSR self-destructed in an incredible way. The responsibility for
that self-destruction undoubtedly lies in the hands of the country's
leaders, those who led that nation. Now, some of them were aware they
were destroying it and others were not. That is what I was trying to
say, more or less, and we saw it all from the beginning.
I cannot say Gorbachev played a role in which he was aware of the
destruction of the USSR because I have no doubt that Gorbachev
intended to fight to improve socialism.
We approved of Soviet efforts to improve socialism in the USSR. But we
could not approve of, and never would have agreed to, not only the
destruction of socialism in the USSR, but also the destruction of the
USSR itself. That inflicted terrible damage on all peoples of the
world and created a bad situation for the Third World in particular.
Imperialism would have been able to disintegrate the Soviet Union, had
the Soviets not destroyed themselves, had those responsible for the
strategies and tactics and for the country's political and government
policies not destroyed the country. In other words, socialism did not
die from natural causes: it was a suicide, socialism was murdered.
That is what I meant.
Q: Fidel, for most Latin American revolutionary leaders, the
current crisis of socialism has a mastermind: Josef Stalin.
A: I believe Stalin made big mistakes but also showed great
wisdom.
In my opinion, blaming Stalin for everything that occurred in the
Soviet Union would be historical simplism, because no man by himself
could have created certain conditions. It would be the same as giving
Stalin all the credit for what the USSR once was. That is impossible!
I believe that the efforts of millions and millions of heroic people
contributed to the USSR's development and to its relevant role in the
world in favor of hundreds of millions of people.
I have criticized Stalin for a lot of things. First of all, I
criticized his violation of the legal framework.
I believe Stalin committed an enormous abuse of power. That is
another conviction I have always had.
I feel that Stalin's agricultural policy did not develop a progressive
process to socialize land. In my opinion, the land socialization
process should have begun earlier and should have been gradually
implemented. Because of its violent implementation, it had a very high
economic and human cost in a very brief period of history.
I also feel that Stalin's policy prior to the war was totally
erroneous. No one can deny that western powers promoted Hitler until
he became a monster, a real threat. The terrible weakness shown by
western powers before Hitler cannot be denied. This at encouraged
Hitler's expansionism and Stalin's fear, which led Stalin to do
something I will criticize all my life, because I believe that it was
a flagrant violation of principles: seek peace with Hitler at any
cost, stalling for time.
During our revolutionary life, during the relatively long history of
the Cuban Revolution, we have never negotiated a single principle to
gain time, or to obtain any practical advantage. Stalin fell for the
famous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact at a time when Germans were already
demanding the delivery of the Danzig Corridor.
I feel that, far from gaining time, the nonaggression pact reduced
time, because the war broke out anyway. Then, in my opinion, he made
another big mistake, because when Poland was being attacked, he sent
troops to occupy that territory, which was disputed because it had a
Ukrainian or Russian population, I am not sure.
I also believe that the little war against Finland was another
terrible mistake, from the standpoint of principles and international
law.
Stalin made a series of mistakes that were criticized by a large part
of the world, and which placed Communists - who were great friends of
the USSR - in a very difficult position by having to support each one of
those episodes.
Since we are discussing this topic, I must tell you that I have never
discussed it with any journalist (or on any other occasion, he added).
The things I mentioned are against principles and doctrine; they are
even contrary to political wisdom. Although it is true that there was
a period of one year and nine months from September 1939 to June 1941
during which the USSR could have rearmed itself, Hitler was the one
who got stronger.
If Hitler had declared war on the USSR in 1939, the destruction would
have been less than the destruction caused in 1941, and he would have
suffered the same fate as Napoleon Bonaparte. With the people's
participation in an irregular war, the USSR would have defeated
Hitler.
Finally, Stalin's character, his terrible distrust of everything, made
him commit several other mistakes: one of them was falling in the trap
of German intrigue and conducting a terrible, bloody purge of the
armed forces and practically beheading the Soviet Army on the eve of
war.
Q: What do you believe were Stalin's merits?
A: He established unity in the Soviet Union. He consolidated
what Lenin had begun: party unity. He gave the international
revolutionary movement a new impetus. The USSR's industrialization was
one of Stalin's wisest actions, and I believe it was a determining
factor in the USSR's capacity to resist.
One of Stalin's - and the team that supported him - greatest merits was
the plan to transfer the war industry and main strategic industries to
Siberia and deep into Soviet territory.
I believe Stalin led the USSR well during the war. According to many
generals, Zhukov and the most brilliant Soviet generals, Stalin played
an important role in defending the USSR and in the war against Nazism.
They all recognized it.
I think there should be an impartial analysis of Stalin. Blaming him
for everything that happened would be historical simplism.
Castro Internet Archive
|
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<p class="storyheadline">Reflections: A Brutal Reply</p>
<p class="storybyline">By President Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
<div class="feature">
<p>George W. Bush is undoubtedly the most genuine representative of a system of terror forced on the world by the technological, economic and political superiority of the most powerful country known to this planet. For this reason, we share the tragedy of the American people and their ethical values. The instructions for the verdict issued by Judge Kathleen Cardone, of the El Paso Federal Court last Friday, granting Luis Posada Carriles freedom on bail, could only have come from the White House.</p>
<p>It was President Bush himself who ignored at all times the criminal and terrorist nature of the defendant who was protected with a simple accusation of immigration violation leveled at him. The reply is brutal. The government of the United States and its most representative institutions had already decided to release the monster.</p>
<p>The backgrounds are well-known and reach far back. The people who trained him and ordered him to destroy a Cuban passenger plane in midair, with 73 athletes, students and other Cuban and foreign travelers on board, together with its dedicated crew; those who bought his freedom while the terrorist was held in prison in Venezuela, so that he could supply and practically conduct a dirty war against the people of Nicaragua, resulting in the loss of thousands of lives and the devastation of a country for decades to come; those who empowered him to smuggle with drugs and weapons making a mockery of the laws of Congress; those who collaborated with him to create the terrible Operation Condor and to internationalize terror; the same who brought torture, death and often the physical disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans, could not possibly act any different.</p>
<p>Even though Bush’s decision was to be expected, it is certainly no less humiliating for our people. Thanks to the revelations of <i>Por Esto!</i> a Mexican publication from the state of Quintana Roo later complemented by our own sources, Cuba knew with absolute precision how Posada Carriles entered from Central America, via Cancun, to the Isla Mujeres departing from there on board the Santrina, after the ship was inspected by the Mexican federal authorities, heading with other terrorists straight to Miami.</p>
<p>Denounced and publicly challenged with exact information on the matter, since April 15, 2005, it took the government of that country more than a month to arrest the terrorist, and a year and two months to admit that Luis Posada Carriles had entered through the Florida coast illegally on board the Santrina, a presumed school-ship licensed in the United States.</p>
<p>Not a single word is said of his countless victims, of the bombs he set off in tourist facilities in recent years, of his dozens of plans financed by the government of the United States to physically eliminate me.</p>
<p>It was not enough for Bush to offend the name of Cuba by installing a horrible torture center similar to Abu Ghraib on the territory illegally occupied in Guant�namo, horrifying the world with this procedure. The cruel actions of his predecessors seemed not enough for him. It was not enough to force a poor and underdeveloped country like Cuba to spend 100 billion dollars. To accuse Posada Carriles was tantamount to accusing himself.</p>
<p>Throughout almost half a century, everything was fair game against our small island lying 90 miles away from its coast, wanting to be independent. Florida saw the installation of the largest station for intelligence and subversion that ever existed on this planet.</p>
<p>It was not enough to send a mercenary invasion on the Bay of Pigs, costing us 176 dead and more than 300 wounded at a time when the few medical specialists they left us had no experience treating war wounds.</p>
<p>Earlier still, the French ship La Coubre carrying Belgian weapons and grenades for Cuba had exploded on the docks of Havana Harbor. The two well synchronized explosions caused the deaths of more than 100 workers and wounded others as many of them took part in the rescue attempts.</p>
<p>It was not enough to have the Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the world to the brink of an all-consuming thermonuclear war, at a time when there were bombs 50 times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.</p>
<p>It was not enough to introduce in our country viruses, bacteria and fungi to attack plantations and flocks; and incredible as it may seem, to attack human beings. Some of these pathogens came out of American laboratories and were brought to Cuba by well-known terrorists in the service of the United States government.</p>
<p>Add to all this the enormous injustice of keeping five heroic patriots imprisoned for supplying information about terrorist activities; they were condemned in a fraudulent manner to sentences that include two life sentences and they stoically withstand cruel mistreatment, each of them in a different prison.</p>
<p>Time and again the Cuban people have fearlessly faced the threat of death. They have demonstrated that with intelligence, using appropriate tactics and strategies, and especially preserving unity around their political and social vanguard, there can be no force on this earth capable of defeating them.</p>
<p>I think that the coming May Day celebration would be the ideal day for our people—using the minimum of fuel and transportation—to show their feelings to the workers and the poor of the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>— <i>Granma</i> (Cuba), April 10, 2007.</p>
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May/June 2007 • Vol 7, No. 3
Click Here to Return to the Index
Search the Site:
Enter term and click Go!
Reflections: A Brutal Reply
By President Fidel Castro Ruz
George W. Bush is undoubtedly the most genuine representative of a system of terror forced on the world by the technological, economic and political superiority of the most powerful country known to this planet. For this reason, we share the tragedy of the American people and their ethical values. The instructions for the verdict issued by Judge Kathleen Cardone, of the El Paso Federal Court last Friday, granting Luis Posada Carriles freedom on bail, could only have come from the White House.
It was President Bush himself who ignored at all times the criminal and terrorist nature of the defendant who was protected with a simple accusation of immigration violation leveled at him. The reply is brutal. The government of the United States and its most representative institutions had already decided to release the monster.
The backgrounds are well-known and reach far back. The people who trained him and ordered him to destroy a Cuban passenger plane in midair, with 73 athletes, students and other Cuban and foreign travelers on board, together with its dedicated crew; those who bought his freedom while the terrorist was held in prison in Venezuela, so that he could supply and practically conduct a dirty war against the people of Nicaragua, resulting in the loss of thousands of lives and the devastation of a country for decades to come; those who empowered him to smuggle with drugs and weapons making a mockery of the laws of Congress; those who collaborated with him to create the terrible Operation Condor and to internationalize terror; the same who brought torture, death and often the physical disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans, could not possibly act any different.
Even though Bush’s decision was to be expected, it is certainly no less humiliating for our people. Thanks to the revelations of Por Esto! a Mexican publication from the state of Quintana Roo later complemented by our own sources, Cuba knew with absolute precision how Posada Carriles entered from Central America, via Cancun, to the Isla Mujeres departing from there on board the Santrina, after the ship was inspected by the Mexican federal authorities, heading with other terrorists straight to Miami.
Denounced and publicly challenged with exact information on the matter, since April 15, 2005, it took the government of that country more than a month to arrest the terrorist, and a year and two months to admit that Luis Posada Carriles had entered through the Florida coast illegally on board the Santrina, a presumed school-ship licensed in the United States.
Not a single word is said of his countless victims, of the bombs he set off in tourist facilities in recent years, of his dozens of plans financed by the government of the United States to physically eliminate me.
It was not enough for Bush to offend the name of Cuba by installing a horrible torture center similar to Abu Ghraib on the territory illegally occupied in Guant�namo, horrifying the world with this procedure. The cruel actions of his predecessors seemed not enough for him. It was not enough to force a poor and underdeveloped country like Cuba to spend 100 billion dollars. To accuse Posada Carriles was tantamount to accusing himself.
Throughout almost half a century, everything was fair game against our small island lying 90 miles away from its coast, wanting to be independent. Florida saw the installation of the largest station for intelligence and subversion that ever existed on this planet.
It was not enough to send a mercenary invasion on the Bay of Pigs, costing us 176 dead and more than 300 wounded at a time when the few medical specialists they left us had no experience treating war wounds.
Earlier still, the French ship La Coubre carrying Belgian weapons and grenades for Cuba had exploded on the docks of Havana Harbor. The two well synchronized explosions caused the deaths of more than 100 workers and wounded others as many of them took part in the rescue attempts.
It was not enough to have the Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the world to the brink of an all-consuming thermonuclear war, at a time when there were bombs 50 times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was not enough to introduce in our country viruses, bacteria and fungi to attack plantations and flocks; and incredible as it may seem, to attack human beings. Some of these pathogens came out of American laboratories and were brought to Cuba by well-known terrorists in the service of the United States government.
Add to all this the enormous injustice of keeping five heroic patriots imprisoned for supplying information about terrorist activities; they were condemned in a fraudulent manner to sentences that include two life sentences and they stoically withstand cruel mistreatment, each of them in a different prison.
Time and again the Cuban people have fearlessly faced the threat of death. They have demonstrated that with intelligence, using appropriate tactics and strategies, and especially preserving unity around their political and social vanguard, there can be no force on this earth capable of defeating them.
I think that the coming May Day celebration would be the ideal day for our people—using the minimum of fuel and transportation—to show their feelings to the workers and the poor of the world.
— Granma (Cuba), April 10, 2007.
Home
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1960.09.26 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h2>
<em> To the U.N. General Assembly</em>
</h2>
<h1>
The Problem of Cuba and its Revolutionary Policy
</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> September 26, 1960 at the U.N. General Assembly
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html">Castro Speech Database</a> [Embassy of Cuba]
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<p class="pagenote">
Speech of Dr. Fidel Castro at the U.N. General Assembly, September 1960. <br>
No. 4. Issued by the Embassy of Cuba, Colombo.
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="fst">
Mr. President,<br>
Fellow Delegates
</p>
<p>
Although it has been said of us that we speak at great length, you may
rest assured that we shall endeavor to be brief and to put before you what
we consider it our duty to say. We shall also speak slowly in order to
co-operate with the interpreters.
</p>
<p>
Some people may think that we are very annoyed and upset by the
treatment the Cuban delegation has received. This is not the case. We
understand full well the reasons behind it. That is why we are not
irritated. Nor should anybody worry that Cuba will not continue to the
effort of achieving a worldwide understanding. That being so, we shall
speak openly.
</p>
<p>
It is extremely expensive to send a delegation to the United Nations.
We, the underdeveloped countries, do not have many resources to spend,
unless it is to speak openly at this meeting of representatives of almost
every country in the world.
</p>
<p>
The speakers who have preceded me on this rostrum have expressed their
concern about problems the whole world is concerned about. We too are
concerned about those problems and yet, in the case of Cuba, there is a
very special circumstance, and it is that, at this moment, Cuba itself must
be a concern for the world, because, as several delegates have rightly said
here, among the many current problems of the world, there is the problem of
Cuba. In addition to the problems facing the world today, Cuba has
problems of her own, problems which worry her people.
</p>
<p>
Much has been said of the universal desire for peace, which is the
desire of all peoples and, therefore, the desire of our people too, but the
peace which the world wishes to preserve is the peace that we Cuban have
been missing for quite some time. The dangers that other peoples of the
world can regard as more or less remote are dangers and preoccupations that
for us are very close. It has not been easy to come to this Assembly to
state the problems of Cuba. It has not been easy for us to come here.
</p>
<p>
I do not know whether we are privileged in this respect. Are we, the
Cuban delegates, the representatives of the worst type of Government in the
world? Do we, the representatives of the Cuban delegation, deserve the
maltreatment we have received? And why our delegation? Cuba has sent many
delegations to the United Nations, and yet it was we who were singled out
for such exceptional measures: confinement to the Island of Manhattan;
notice to all hotels not to rent rooms to us, hostility and, under the
pretense of security, isolation.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps not one among you, fellow delegates, you, who are not the
individual representatives of anybody, but the representatives of your
respective countries and, for that reason, whatever happens to each of you
must concern you because of what you represent, perhaps not one among you,
upon your arrival in this city of New York, has had to under go such
personally and physically humiliating treatment as that which the President
of Cuban delegation has received.
</p>
<p>
I am not trying to agitate in this Assembly. I am merely telling the
truth. It is about time we had an opportunity to speak. Much has been
said about us for many days now, the newspapers have referred to us, but we
have remained silent. We cannot defend ourselves from such attacks in this
country. Our day to state the truth has come, and we will not fail to
state it.
</p>
<p>
As I have said, we had to undergo degrading and humiliating treatment,
including eviction from the hotel in which we were living and efforts at
extortion. When we went to another hotel, we did all in our power to avoid
difficulties. We refrained from leaving our hotel rooms and went nowhere
except to this assembly hall of the United Nations, on the few occasions
when we have come to General Assembly. We also accepted an invitation to a
reception at the Soviet Embassy, yet this was not enough for them to leave
us in peace.
</p>
<p>
There has been considerable Cuban emigration to this country. There
are more than one hundred thousand Cubans who have come to this country
during the last twenty years. They have come to this country from their
own land, where they would have liked to remain for ever, and where they
wish to return, as is always the case with those who, for social or
economic reasons, are forced to abandon their homeland. These Cubans were
wholly devoted to their work; they respected and respect the laws of this
country, but they naturally harbored a feeling of love for their native
country and its Revolution. They never had any problems, but one day
another type of visitor began to arrive in this country, individuals who in
some cases had murdered hundreds of our compatriots. Soon they were
encouraged by publicity here. The authorities received them warmly and
soon encouraged them, and, naturally, that encouragement is reflected in
their conduct. They provoke frequent incidents with the Cuban population
which has worked honestly in this country for many years.
</p>
<p>
One of such incidents, provoked by those who feel supported by the
systematic campaigns against Cuba and by the authorities, caused the death
of a child. That was a lamentable event, and we should all regret such an
event. The guilty ones were not the Cubans who lived here. The guilty ones
were, even less, we, the members of the Cuban delegation, and yet
undoubtedly, you have all seen the headlines of the newspapers, which
stated that "pro-Castro groups" had killed a ten-year old girl. With the
characteristic hypocrisy of those who have a say in the relations between
Cuba and this country, a spokesman for the White House immediately made
declarations to the world pointing out the deed, in fact, almost fixing the
guilt on the Cuban delegation. And of course, His Excellency, the United
States Delegate to the Assembly, did not fail to join the farce, sending a
telegram of condolence to the Venezuelan Government, addressed to the
victim's relatives, as though he felt called upon to give some explanation
for something Cuban delegation was, in effect, responsible for.
</p>
<p>
But that was not all. When we were forced to leave one of the hotels
in this city, and came to the United National Headquarters while efforts
were being made to find accommodation for us, a hotel, a humble hotel of
this city, a Negro hotel in Harlem, offered to rent us rooms [where Castro met Malcolm X]. The reply
came when we were speaking to the Secretary General. Nevertheless, an
official of the State Department did all in his power to prevent our staying
at that hotel. At that moment, as though by magic, hotels began appearing
all over New York. Hotels which had previously refused lodgings to the
Cuban delegation offered us rooms, even free of charge. Out of simple
reciprocity we accepted the Harlem hotel. We felt then that we had earned
the right to be left in peace. But peace was not accorded us.
</p>
<p>
Once in Harlem, since it was impossible to prevent us from living
there, the slander and defamation campaigns began. They began spreading the
news all over the world that the Cuban delegation had lodged in a brothel.
For some humble hotel in Harlem, a hotel inhabited by Negroes of the United
States, must obviously be a brothel. Furthermore, they have tried to heap
infamy upon the Cuban delegation, without even respecting the female
members who work with us and are a part of the Cuban delegation.
</p>
<p>
If we were the kind of men they try to depict at all costs, imperialism
would not have lost all hope, as it did long ago, of somehow buying or
seducing us. But, since they lost that hope a long time ago — though they
never had reasons to sustain it — after having stated that the Cuban
delegation lodged in a brothel, they should at least realize that
imperialist financial capital is a prostitute that cannot seduce us — and
not precisely the "respectful" type of prostitute described by Jean Paul
Sarte.
</p>
<p>
Now, to the problem of Cuba. Perhaps some of you are well aware of the
facts, perhaps others are not. It all depends on the sources of
information, but, undoubtedly, the problem of Cuba, born within the last
two years, is a new problem for the world. The world had not had many
reasons to know that Cuba existed. For many, Cuba was something of an
appendix of the United States. Even for many citizens of this country, Cuba
was a colony of the United States. As far as the map was concerned, this
we not the case: our country had a different color from that of the
United States. But in reality Cuba was a colony of the United States.
</p>
<p>
How did our country became a colony of the United States? It was not
because of its origins; the same men did not colonize the United States and
Cuba. Cuba has a very different ethnical and cultural origin, and the
difference was widened over the centuries. Cuba was the last country in
America to free itself from Spanish colonial rule, to cast off, with due
respect to the representative of Spain, the Spanish colonial yoke; and
because it was the last, it also had to fight more fiercely.
</p>
<p>
Spain had only one small possession left in America and it defended it
with tooth and nail. Our people, small in numbers, scarcely a million
inhabitants at that time, had to face alone, for almost thirty years, an
army considered one of the strongest in Europe. Against our small national
population the Spanish Government mobilized an army as big as the total
forces that had fought against South American independence. Half a million
Spanish soldiers fought against the historic and unbreakable will of our
people to be free.
</p>
<p>
For thirty years the Cubans fought alone for their independence; thirty
years of struggle that strengthened our love for freedom and independence.
But Cuba was a fruit — according to the opinion of a President of the
United States at the beginning of the past century, John Adams — , it was
an apple hanging from the Spanish tree, destined to fall, as soon as it was
ripe enough, into the hands of the United States. Spanish power had worn
itself out in our country. Spain had neither the men nor the economic
resources to continue the war in Cuba; Spain had been defeated. Apparently
the apple was ripe, and the United States Government held out its open
hands.
</p>
<p>
Not one but several apples fell in to the hands of the United States.
Puerto Rico fell — heroic Puerto Rico, which had begun its struggle for
independence at the same time as Cuba. The Philippine Islands fell, and
several other possessions. However, the method of dominating our country
could not be the same. Our country had struggled fiercely, and thus had
gained the favor of world public opinion. Therefore the method of taking
our country had to be different.
</p>
<p>
The Cubans who fought for our independence and at that very moment were
giving their blood and their lives believed in good faith in the joint
resolution of the Congress of the United States of April 20, 1898, which
declared that "Cuba is, and by right ought to be, free and independent."
</p>
<p>
The people of the United States were sympathetic to the Cuban struggle
for liberty. That joint declaration was a law adopted by the Congress of
the United States through which war was declared on Spain. But that
illusion was followed by a rude awakening. After two years of military
occupation of our country, the unexpected happened: at the very moment
that the people of Cuba, through their Constituent Assembly, were drafting
the Constitution of the Republic, a new law was passed by the United States
Congress, a law proposed by Senator Platt, bearing such unhappy memories
for the Cubans. That law stated that the constitution of the Cuba must
have an appendix under which the United States would be granted the right
to intervent in Cuba's political affairs and, furthermore, to lease certain
parts of Cuba for naval bases or coal supply station.
</p>
<p>
In other words, under a law passed by the legislative body of a foreign
country, Cuban's Constitution had to contain an appendix with those
provisions. Our legislators were clearly told that if they did not accept
the amendment, the occupation forces would not be withdrawn. In other
words, an agreement to grant another country the right to intervene and to
lease naval bases was imposed by force upon my country by the legislative
body of a foreign country.
</p>
<p>
It is well, I think, for countries just entering this Organization,
countries just beginning their independent life, to bear in mind our
history and to note any similar conditions which they may find waiting for
them along their own road. And if it is not they, then those who came
after them, or their children, or grandchildren, although it seems to us
that we will not have to wait that long.
</p>
<p>
Then began the new colonization of our country, the acquisition of the
best agricultural lands by United States firms, concessions of Cuban
natural resources and mines, concessions of public utilities for
exploitation purposes, commercial concessions of all types. These
concessions, when linked with the constitutional right — constitutional by
force — of intervention in our country, turned it from a Spanish colony
into an American colony.
</p>
<p>
Colonies do not speak. Colonies are not known until they have the
opportunity to express themselves. That is why our colony and its problems
were unknown to the rest of the world. In geography books reference was
made to a flag and a coat of arms. There was an island with another color
on the maps, but it was not an independent republic. Let us not deceive
ourselves, since by doing so we only make ourselves ridiculous. Let no one
be mistaken. There was no independent republic; there was only a colony
where orders were given by the Ambassador of the United States.
</p>
<p>
We are not ashamed to have to declare this. On the contrary: we are
proud to say that today no embassy rules our country; our country is ruled
by its people!
</p>
<p>
Once against the Cuban people had to resort to fighting in order to
achieve independence, and that independence was finally attained after
seven bloody years of tyranny, who forced this tyranny upon us? Those who
in our country were nothing more than tools of the interests which
dominated our country economically.
</p>
<p>
How can an unpopular regime, inimical to the interests of the people,
stay in power unless it is by force? Will we have to explain to the
representatives of our sister republics of Latin America what military
tyrannies are? Will we have to outline to them how these tyrannies have
kept themselves in power? Will we have to explain the history of several
of those tyrannies which are already classical? Will we have to say what
forces, what national and international interests support them?
</p>
<p>
The military group which tyrannized our country was supported by the
most reactionary elements of the nation, and, above all, by the foreign
interests that dominated the economy of our country. Everybody knows, and
we understand that even the Government of the United States admits it, that
that was the type of government favored by the monopolies. Why? Because by
the use of force it was possible to check the demands of the people; by
the use of force it was possible to suppress strikes for improvement of
living standards; by the use of force it was possible to crush all
movements on the part of the peasants to own the land they worked; by the
use of force it was possible to curb the greatest and most deeply felt
aspirations of the nation.
</p>
<p>
That is why governments of force were favored by the ruling circles of
the United States. That is why governments of force stayed in power for so
long, and why there are governments of force still in power in America.
Naturally, it all depends on whether it is possible to secure the support
of the United States.
</p>
<p>
For instance, now they say they oppose one of these governments of
force; the Government of Trujillo. But they do not say they are against
other governments of force — that of Nicaragua, or Paraguay, for example.
The Nicaraguan one is no longer government of force; it is a monarchy that
is almost as constitutional as that of the United Kingdom, where the reins
of power are handed down from father to son. The same would have occurred
in my own country. It was the type of government of force — that of
Fulgencio Batista — which suited the American monopolies in Cuba, but it
was not, of course, the type of government which suited the Cuban people,
and the Cuban people, at a great cost in lives and sacrifices, over threw
the government.
</p>
<p>
What did the Revolution find when it came to power in Cuba? What
marvels did the Revolution find when it came to power in Cuba? First of
all the Revolution found that 600,000 able Cubans were unemployed — as
many, proportionately, as were unemployed in the United States at the time
of the great depression which shook this country and which almost created a
catastrophy in the United States. That was our permanent unemployment.
Three million out of a population of somewhat over 6,000,000 did not have
electric lights and did not enjoy the advantages and comforts of
electricity. Three and a half million out of a total of slightly more than
6,000,000 lived in huts, shacks and slums, without the slightest sanitary
facilities. In the cities, rents took almost one third of family incomes.
Electricity rates and rents were among the highest in the world.
Thirty-seven and one half percent of our population were illiterate; 70
per cent of the rural children had no teachers; 2 per cent of population,
that is, 100,000 persons out of a total of more than 6,000,000 suffered
from tuberculosis. Ninety-five per cent of the children in rural areas
were affected by parasites, and the infant mortality rate was therefore
very high, just the opposite of the average life span.
</p>
<p>
On the other hand, 85 per cent of the small farmers were paying rents
for the use of land to the tune of almost 30 per cent of their income,
while 1 1/2 percent of the landowners controlled 46 per cent of the total
area of the nation. Of course, the proportion of hospital beds to the
number of inhabitants of the country was ridiculous, when compared with
countries that only have halfway decent medical services.
</p>
<p>
Public utilities, electricity and telephone services all belonged to
the United States monopolies. A major portion of the banking business, of
the importing business and the oil refineries, the greater part of the
sugar production, the best land in Cuba, and the most important industries
in all fields belonged to American companies. The balance of payments in
the last ten years, from 1950 to 1960, had been favorable to the United
States with regard to Cuba to the extent of one thousand million dollars.
</p>
<p>
This is without taking in to account the hundreds of millions of
dollars that were extraeted from the treasury of the country by the corrupt
officials of the tyranny and were later deposited in United States or
European Banks.
</p>
<p>
One thousand million dollars in ten years. This poor and
underdeveloped Caribbean country, with 600,000 unemployed, was contributing
greatly to the economic development of the most highly industrialized
country in the world.
</p>
<p>
That was the situation we found, and it is probably not foreign to many
of the countries represented in this Assembly, because, when all is said
and done, what we have said about Cuba is like a diagnostic x-ray
applicable to many of the countries represented here.
</p>
<p>
What alternative was there for the Revolutionary Government? To betray
the people? Of course, as far as the President of the United States is
concerned, we have betrayed our people, but it would certainly not have
been considered so, if, instead of the Revolutionary Government being true
to its people, it had been loyal to the big American monopolies that
exploited the economy of our country. At least, let note be taken here of
the wonders the Revolution found when it came to power. They were no more
and no less than the usual wonder of imperialism, which are in themselves
the wonders of the free world as far as we, the colonies, are concerned!
</p>
<p>
We surely cannot be blamed if there were 600,000 unemployed in Cuba and
37.5 per cent of the population were illiterate. We surely cannot be held
responsible if 2 per cent of the population suffered from tuberculosis and
95 per cent were affected by parasites. Until that moment none of us had
anything to do with the destiny of our country; until that moment, those
who had something to do with the destiny of our country were the rulers who
served the interests of the monopolies; until that moment, monopolies had
been in control of our country. Did anyone hinder them? No one. Did
anyone trouble them? No one. They were able to do their work, and there
we found the result of their work.
</p>
<p>
What was the state of our reserved when the tyrant Batista came to
power. There was $500,000,000 in our national reserve, a goodly sum to
have invested in the industrial development of the country. When the
Revolution came to power there was only $70,000,000 in our reserves.
</p>
<p>
Was there any concern for the industrial development of our country?
No. That is why we are astonished and amazed when we hear of the
extraordinary concern shown by the United States Government for the Fate of
the countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia. We cannot overcome our
amazement, because after fifty years we have the result of their concern
before our eyes.
</p>
<p>
What has the Revolutionary Government done? What crime has the
Revolutionary Government committed to deserve the treatment we have
received here, and the powerful enemies that events have shown us we have?
</p>
<p>
Did problems with the United States Government arise from the first
moments? No. It is perhaps that when we reached power we were imbued with
the purpose of getting into international trouble? No. No Revolutionary
government wants international trouble when it comes to power. What a
revolutionary government wants to do is concentrate its efforts on solving
its own problems; what it wants to do is carry out a program for the
people, as is the desire of all governments that are interested in the
progress of their country.
</p>
<p>
The first unfriendly act perpetrated by the Government of the United
States was to throw open its doors to a gang of murders who had left our
country covered with blood. Men who had murdered hundreds of defenseless
peasants, who for many years never tired of torturing prisoners, who killed
right and left — were received in this country with open arms. To us,
this was amazing. Why this unfriendly act on the part of the Government of
the United States towards Cuba? Why this act of hostility? At that time
we could not quite understand; now we see the reason clearly. Was that the
proper policy as regards relations between the United States and Cuba?
Certainly not, because we were the injured party, inasmuch as the Batista
regime remained in power with the help of tanks, planes and arms furnished
by the Government of the United States; the Batista regime remained in
power thanks to the use of an army whose officers were trained by a
military mission sent by the United States Government; and we trust that no
official of the United States will dare to deny that truth.
</p>
<p>
Even when the Rebel Army arrived in Havana, the American military
mission was in the most important military camp of the city. That was a
broken army, an army that had been defeated and had surrendered. We could
very well have considered those foreign officers as prisoners of war, since
they had been there helping and training the enemies of the people.
However, we did not do so. We merely asked the members of that military
mission to return to their country, because after all, we did not need
their lessons; their pupils had been defeated.
</p>
<p>
I have with me a document. Do not be surprised as its appearance, for
it is a torn document. It is an old military pact, by virtue of which the
Batista tyranny received generous assistance from the Government of the
United States. And it is quite important to know the contents of Article 2
of this Agreement:
</p>
<p class="quote">
"The Government of the Republic of Cuba commits itself to make
efficient use of the assistance it receives from the United States,
pursuant to the present agreement, in order to carry out the plans of
defense accepted by both Governments, pursuant to which the two Governments
will take part in missions which are important for the defense of the
Western Hemisphere, and, unless permission is previously obtained from the
Government of the United States of America ..."
</p>
<p>
— I repeat:
</p>
<p class="quote">
"and unless permission is previously obtained from the Government of
the United States, such assistance will not be dedicated to other ends than
those for which such assistance has been granted."
</p>
<p>
That assistance was used to combat the Cuban revolutionaries; it was
therefore approved by the Government of the United States. And even when,
some months before the war was over, an embargo on arms for Batista was put
into effect, after more than six years of military help, once the arms
embargo had been solemnly declared, the Rebel Army had proof, documentary
proof, that the forces of the tyranny had been supplied with 300 rockets to
be fired from planes.
</p>
<p>
When our comrades living in this country laid these documents before
the public opinion of the United States, the Government of the United
States found no other explanation than to say that we were wrong, that they
had not sent new supplies to the army of the tyranny, but had just changed
some rockets that could not be used in their planes for another type of
rocket that could — and, by the way, they were fired at us while we were
in the mountains. I must say that this is a unique way of explaining a
contradiction when it can be neither justified nor explained. According to
the United States, then, this was not military assistance; it was probably
some sort of '"technical assistance."
</p>
<p>
Why, then, if all this existed and was a cause of resentment for our
people ... because everybody knows, even the most innocent and guileless,
that with the revolution that has taken place in military equipment, those
weapons from the last war have became throughly obsolete for a modern war.
</p>
<p>
Fifty tanks of armoured cars and a few outmoded aircraft cannot defend
a continent, much less a hemisphere. But on the other hand they are good
enough to oppress unarmed peoples. They are good for what they are used
for: to intimidate people and to defend monopolies. That is why these
hemisphere defense pacts might better be described as "defense pacts for
the protection of United States monopolies."
</p>
<p>
And so the Revolutionary Government began to take the first steps. The
first thing it did was to lower the rents paid by families by fifty per
cent, a just measure, since, as I said earlier, there were families paying
up to one third of their income. The people had been the victim of housing
speculation, and city lots had also been the subject of speculation at the
expense of the entire Cuban people. But when the Revolutionary Government
reduced the rents by fifty per cent, there were, of course, a few
individuals who became upset, the few who owned those apartment buildings,
but the people rushed into the streets rejoicing, as they would in any
country, even here in New York, if rents were reduced by fifty per cent.
But this was no problem to the monopolies. Some American monopolies owned
large buildings, but they were relatively few in number.
</p>
<p>
Then another law was passed, a law cancelling the concessions which had
been granted by the tyranny of Batista to the Telephone Company, an
American monopoly. Taking advantage of the fact our people were
defenseless, they had obtained valuable concessions. The Revolutionary
Government then cancelled these concessions and re-established normal
prices for telephone services. Thus began the first conflict with the
American monopolies.
</p>
<p>
The third measure was the reduction of electricity rates, which were
the highest in the world. Then followed the second conflict with the
American monopolies. We were beginning to appear communist; they were
beginning to daub us in red because we had clashed head on with the
interests of the United States monopolies.
</p>
<p>
Then followed the next law, an essential and inevitable law for our
country, and a law which sooner or later will have to be adopted by all
countries of the world, at least by those which have not yet adopted it:
the Agrarian Reform Law. Of course, in theory everybody agrees with the
Agrarian Reform Law. Nobody will deny the need for it unless he is a fool.
No one can deny that agrarian reform is one of the essential conditions for
the economic development of the country. In Cuba, even the big landowners
agreed about the agrarian reform — only they wanted their own kind of
reform, such as the one defended by many theoreticians; a reform which
would not harm their interests, and above all, one which would not be put
into effect as long as it could be avoided. This is something that is well
known to the economic bodies of the United Nations, something nobody even
cares to discuss any more. In my country it was absolutely necessary:
more than 200,000 peasant families lived in the countryside without land on
which to grow essential food crops.
</p>
<p>
Without an agrarian reform, our country would have been unable to take
that step; we made an agrarian reform. Was it a radical agrarian reform?
We think not. It was a reform adjusted to the needs of our development,
and in keeping with our own possibilities of agricultural development. In
other words, was an agrarian reform which was to solve the problems of the
landless peasants, the problem of supplying basic foodstuffs, the problem
of rural unemployment, and which was to end, once and for all, the ghastly
poverty which existed in the countryside of our native land.
</p>
<p>
And that is where the first major difficulty arose. In the neighboring
Republic of Guatemala a similar case had occurred. And I honestly warn my
colleagues of Latin America, Africa and Asia; whenever you set out to make
a just agrarian reform, you must be ready to face s similar situation,
especially if the best and largest tracts of land are owned by American
monopolies, as was the case in Cuba. (OVATION)
</p>
<p>
It is quite possible that we may later be accused of giving bad advice
in this Assembly. It is not our intention to disturb anybody's sleep. We
are simply stating the facts, although the facts are sufficient to disturb
everybody's sleep.
</p>
<p>
Then the problem of payment arose. Notes from the State Department
rained on our Government. They never asked about our problems, not even
out of sheer pity, or because of the great responsibility they had in
creating such problems. They never asked us how many died of starvation in
our country, or how many were suffering from tuberculosis, or how many were
unemployed. No, they never asked about that. A sympathetic attitude
towards our needs? Certainly not. All talks by the representatives of the
Government of the United States centered upon the Telephone Co., the
Electric Co., and the land owned by American Companies.
</p>
<p>
How could we solve the problem of payment? Of course, the first
question that should have been asked was what we were going to pay with,
rather than how. Can you gentlemen conceive of a poor underdeveloped
country, with 600,000 unemployed and such a large number of illiterates and
sick people, a country whose reserves have been exhausted, and which has
contributed to the economy of a powerful country with one thousand million
dollars in ten years — can you conceive of this country having the means
to pay for the land affected by the Agrarian Reform Law, or the means to
pay for it in the terms demanded?
</p>
<p>
What were the State Department aspirations regarding their affected
interests? They wanted prompt, efficient and just payment. Do you
understand that language? "Prompt, efficient, and just payment." That
means, "pay now, in dollars, and whatever we ask for our land." (APPLAUSE)
</p>
<p>
We were not 100 per cent communist yet (LAUGHS) We were just becoming
slightly pink. We did not confiscate land; we simply proposed to pay for it
in twenty years, and in the only way in which we could pay for it: in
bonds, which would mature in twenty years at 4 1/2 per cent, or amortized
yearly.
</p>
<p>
How could we pay for the land in dollars, and the amount they asked for
it? It was absurd. Anyone can readily understand that, under those
circumstances, we had to choose between making the agrarian reform, and not
making it. If we choose not to make it, the dreadful economic situation of
our country would last indefinitely. If we decided to make it, we exposed
ourselves to the hatred of the Government of the powerful neighbor of the
north.
</p>
<p>
We decided to go on with the agrarian reform. Of course, the limits
set to latifundia in Cuba would amaze a representative of the Netherlands,
for example, or of any country of Europe, because of their extent. The
maximum amount of land set forth in the Agrarian Reform Law is 400 hectares
(988 acres). In Europe, 40 hectares is practically a lati-fundium; in
Cuba, where there were American monopolies that had up to 200,000 hectares
— I repeat, in case someone thinks he has heard wrong, 200,000 hectares —
an agrarian reform law reducing the maximum limit to 400 hectares was
inadmissible.
</p>
<p>
But the truth is that in our country it was not only the land that was
the property of the agrarian monopolies. The largest and most important
mines were also owned by those monopolies. Cuba produces, for example, a
great deal of nickel. All of the nickel was exploited by American
interests, and under the tyranny of Batista, an American company, the Moa
Bay, had obtained such a juicy concession that in a mere five years — mark
my words, in a mere five years — it intended amortizing an investment of
$120,000,000. A $120,000,000 investment amortized in five years!
</p>
<p>
And who had given the Moa Bay company this concession through the
intervention of the Government of the United States? Quite simply, the
tyrannical government of Fulgencio Batista, which was there to defend the
interests of the monopolies. And this is an absolutely true fact. Exempt
from all taxes what were those companies going to leave for the Cubans?
The empty, worked out mines, the impoverished land, and not the slightest
contribution to the economic development of our country.
</p>
<p>
And so the Revolutionary Government passed a mining law which forced
those monopolies to pay a 25 per cent tax on the exportation of minerals.
The attitude of the Revolutionary Government already had been too bold. It
had clashed with the interests of the international electric trusts; it
had clashed with the interests of the international telephone trusts; it
had clashed with the interests of the mining trusts; it had clashed with
the interests of the United Fruit Co; and it had in effect, clashed with
the most powerful interests of the United States, which, as you know, are
very closely linked with each other. And that was more than the Government
of the United States — or rather, the representatives of the United States
monopolies — could possibly tolerate.
</p>
<p>
Then began a new period of harassment of the Revolution. Can anyone who
objectively analyzes the facts? Who is willing to think honestly, not as
the UP or the AP tell him, to think with his head and to draw conclusions
from his own reasoning and the facts without prejudice, sincerely and
honestly — would anyone who does this consider that things which the
Revolutionary Government did were such as to demand the destruction of the
Cuban Revolution? No. But the interests affected by the Cuban Revolution
were not concerned about the Cuban case; they were not being ruined by the
measures of the Cuban Revolutionary Government. That was not the problem.
The problem lay in the fact that those very interests owned the wealth and
the natural resources of the greater part of the peoples of the world.
</p>
<p>
The attitude of the Cuban Revolution therefore had to be punished.
Punitive actions of all sorts — even the destruction of those insolent
people — had to follow the audacity of the Revolutionary Government.
</p>
<p>
On our honor, we swear that up to that moment we had not had the
opportunity even to exchange letters with the distinguished Prime Minister
of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. That is to say that when, for the
North American press and the international news agencies that supply
information to the world, Cuba was already a Communist Government, a red
peril ninety miles from the United States with a Government dominated by
Communists, the Revolutionary Government had not even had the opportunity
of establishing diplomatic and commercial relations with the Soviet Union.
</p>
<p>
But hysteria can go to any length; hysteria is capable of making the
most unlikely and absurd claims. Of course, let no one think for a moment
that we are going to intone a mea culpa here. There will be no mea culpa.
We do not have to ask anyone's pardon. What we have done, we have done
consciously, and above all, fully convinced of our right to do it.
(PROLONGED APPLAUSE)
</p>
<p>
Then came the threats against our sugar quota, imperialism's cheap
philosophy of showing generosity, egoistical and exploiting generosity; and
they began showing kindness towards Cuba, declaring that they were paying
us a preferential price for sugar, which amounted to a subsidy to Cuban
sugar — a sugar which was not so sweet for Cubans, since we were not the
owners of the best sugar-producing land, nor the owners of the largest
sugar mills. Furthermore, in that affirmation lay hidden the true history
of Cuban sugar, of the sacrifices which had been imposed upon my country
during the periods when it was economically attacked.
</p>
<p>
However when quotas were established, our participation was reduced to
28 per cent, and the advantages which that law had granted us, the very few
advantages which that law had granted us, were gradually taken away in
successive laws, and, of course the colony depended on the colonial power.
The economy of the colony had been organized by the colonial power.
</p>
<p>
The colony had to be subjected to the colonial power, and if the colony
took measures to free itself from the colonial powers that country would
take measures to crush the colony. Conscious of the subordination of our
economy to their market, the Government of the United States began to issue
a series of warnings that our quota would be reduced further, and at the
same time, other activities were taking place in the United States of
America: the activities of counterrevolutionaries.
</p>
<p>
One afternoon an airplane coming from the north flew over one of the
sugar refineries and dropped a bomb. This was a strange and unheard-of
event, but we knew full well where that plane came from. On another
afternoon another plane flew over our sugar cane fields and dropped a few
incendiary bombs. These events which began sporadically continued
systematically.
</p>
<p>
One afternoon, when a number of American tourist agents were visiting
Cuba in response to an effort made by the Revolutionary Government to
promote tourism as one of the sources of national income, a plane
manufactured in the United States, of the type used in the Second World
War, flew over our capital dropping pamphlets and grenades. Of course,
some anti-aircraft guns went into action. The result was more than forty
victims, between the grenades dropped by the plane and the anti-aircraft
fire, because, as you know, some of the projectiles explode upon contacting
any object. As I said, the result was more than forty victims. There were
little girls on the street with their entrails torn out, old men and women
wantonly killed. Was this the first time it had happened in our country?
No. Children, old men and old women, young men and women, had often been
killed in the villages of Cuba by American bombs supplied to the tyrant
Batista. One one occasion, eighty workers died when a mysterious explosion
— too mysterious — took place in the harbor of Havana, the explosion of a
ship carrying Belgian weapons which had arrived in our country, after many
efforts by the United States Government to prevent the Belgian Government
from selling arms to us.
</p>
<p>
Dozens of victims of war; eighty families orphaned by the explosions.
Forty victims as a result of an airplane that brazenly flew over our
territory. The authorities of the United States Government denied the fact
that these planes came from American territory, but the plane was now
safely in a hangar in this country. When one of our magazines published a
photograph of it, the United States authorities seized the plane. A
version of the affair was issued to the effect that this was not very
important, and that these victims had not died because of the bombs, but
because of the anti-aircraft fire. Those responsible for this crime, those
who had caused these deaths were wandering about peacefully in the United
States, where they were not even prevented from committing further acts of
aggression.
</p>
<p>
May I take this opportunity of telling His Excellency the
Representative of the United States that there are many mothers in Cuba
still awaiting his telegrams of condolence for their children murdered by
the bombs of the United States (APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
Planes kept coming and going. But as far as they were concerned, there
was no evidence. Frankly, we don't know how they define the word
evidence. The plane was there, photographed and captured, and yet we were
told the plane did not drop any bombs. It is not known how the United
States authorities were so well informed.
</p>
<p>
Planes continued to fly over our territory dropping incendiary bombs.
Millions and millions of pesos were lost in the burning fields of sugar
cane. Many humble people of Cuba, who saw property destroyed, property
that was now truly their own, suffered burns in the struggle against those
persistent and tenacious bombings by pirate planes.
</p>
<p>
And then one day, while dropping a bomb on one of our sugar mills, a
plane exploded in mid air and the Revolutionary Government was able to
collect what was left of the pilot, who by the way, was an American. In
his documents were found, proof as to the place where the plane had taken
off from. On its way to Cuba, the plane had flown between two United States
military bases. This was a matter that could not be denied any longer: the
planes took off from the United States. Confronted with irrefutable
evidence the United States Government gave an explanation to the Cuban
Government. Its conduct in this case was not the same as in connection
with the U-2. When it was proved that the planes were taking off from the
United States, the Government of the United States did not proclaim its
right to burn over sugar cane fields. The United States Government
apologized and said it was sorry. We were lucky, after all, because after
the U - 2 incident the United States Government did not even apologize, it
proclaimed its right to carry out flights over Soviet territory. Bad luck
for the Soviets! (APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
But we do not have too many anti-aircraft batteries, and the planes
went on flying and bombing us until the harvest was over. When there was
no more sugar cane, the bombing stopped. We were the only country in the
world which had gone through a thing like this, although I do recall that
at the time of his visit to Cuba, President Sukarno told us that this was
not the case, for they, too, had had certain problems with American planes
flying over their territory.
</p>
<p>
But the truth is that in this peaceful hemisphere at least, we were a
country that, without being at war with anyone, had to stand the constant
attack of pirate planes. And could those planes come in and out of United
States territory unmolested? It has been stated that the defenses of the
world they call "free" are impregnable. If this is the case, how is it
that planes, not supersonic planes, but light planes with a velocity of
barely 150 miles per hour, how is it that these planes are able to fly in
and out of United States territory undetected.
</p>
<p>
The air raids ended, and then came economic aggression. What was one of
the arguments wielded by the enemies of the agrarian reform? They said
that the agrarian reform would bring chaos to agricultural production, that
production would diminish considerably, and that the Government of the
United States was concerned because Cuba might not be able to fulfill her
commitments to the American market. The first argument — and it is
appropriate that at least the new delegations in the General Assembly
should become familiar with some of the arguments, because some day they
may have to answer similar arguments — the first argument was that the
agrarian reform meant the ruin of the country. This was not the case. If
this had been so, and agricultural production had deceased, the American
Government would not have felt the need to carry on its economic
aggression.
</p>
<p>
Did they sincerely believe in what they said when they stated that the
agrarian reform would cause a drop in production? Perhaps they did.
Surely it is logical for each one to believe what his mind has been
conditioned to believe. It is quite possible they may have felt that
without the all-powerful monopolist companies, we Cubans would be unable to
produce sugar. perhaps they were even sure we would ruin the country. And
of course, if the Revolution had ruined the country, then the United States
would not have had to attack us; it would have left us alone, and the
United States Government would have appeared as a good and honourable
government, and we as people who ruined our own Nation, and as a great
example that Revolutions should not be made because they ruin countries.
Fortunately, that was not the case. There is proof that revolutions do not
ruin countries, and that proof has just been furnished by the Government of
the United States. Among other things, it has been proved that revolutions
do not ruin countries, and that imperialist governments do try to ruin
countries.
</p>
<p>
Cuba had not been ruined; she therefore had to be ruined. Cuba needed
new markets for its products, and we would honestly ask any delegation
present if it does not want its country to sell what it produces and its
export to increase. We wanted our exports to increase, and this is what all
countries wish; this must be a universal law. Only egotistical interests
can oppose the universal interest in trade and commercial exchange, which
surely is one of the most ancient aspirations and needs of mankind.
</p>
<p>
We wanted to sell our products and went in search of new markets. We
signed a trade treaty with the Soviet Union, according to which we would
sell one million tons of sugar and would purchase a certain amount of
Soviet products or articles. Surely no one can say that this is an
incorrect procedure. There may be some who would not do such a thing
because it might displease certain intersts. We really did not have to ask
permission from the State Department in order to sign a trade treaty with
the Soviet Union, because we considered ourselves, and we continue to
consider ourselves and we will always consider ourselves, a truly
independent and free country.
</p>
<p>
When the amount of sugar in stock began to diminish stimulating our
economy, we received the hard blow: at the request of the executive power
of the United States, Congress passed a law empowering the President or
Executive power to reduce the import quotas for Cuban sugar to whatever
limits might deem appropriate. The economic weapon was wielded against our
Revolution. The justification for that attitude had already been prepared
by publicity experts; the campaign had been on for a long time. You know
perfectly well that in this country monopolies and publicity are one and
the same thing. The economic weapon was wielded, our sugar quota was
suddenly cut by about one million tons — sugar that had already been
produced and prepared for the American market — in order to deprive our
country of resources for its development, and thus reduce it to a state of
impotence, with the natural political consequences. Such measures were
expressly banned by Regional International Law. Economic aggression, as
all Latin American delegates here know, is expressly condemned by Regional
International Law. However, the Government of the United States violated
that law, wielded its economic weapon, and cut our sugar quota by about one
million tons. They could do it.
</p>
<p>
What was Cuba's defense when confronted by that reality? It could
appeal to the United Nations. It could turn to the United Nations, in
order to denounce political and economic aggressions, the air attacks of
the pirate planes, besides the constant interference of the Government of
the United States in the political affairs of our country and the
subversive campaigns it carries out against the Revolutionary Government of
Cuba.
</p>
<p>
So we turned to the United Nations. The United Nations had power to
deal with these matters. The United Nations is, within the hierarchy of
international organizations, the highest authority. The United Nations'
authority is even above that of the OAS. And besides, we were interested
in bringing the problem to the United Nations, because we know quite well
the situation the economy of Latin America finds itself in; because we
understand the state of dependence of the economy of Latin America in
relation to the United States. The United Nations knew of the affair, it
requested the OAS to make an investigation, and the OAS met. Very well.
And what was to be expected? That the OAS would protect the country; that
the OAS would condemn the political aggression against Cuba, and above all
that would condemn the economic aggression against our country. That
should have been expected. But after all, we were a small people of the
Latin American community of nations. We were just another victim. And we
were neither the first or the last, because Mexico had already been
attacked more than once militarily. In one way they tore away from Mexico
a great part of its territory, and on that occasion the heroic sons of
Mexico leaped to their death from the Castle of Chapultepec enwrapped in
the Mexican flag rather than surrender. These were the heroic sons of
Mexico (APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
And that was not the only aggression. That was not the only time that
American infantry forces trod upon Mexican soil. Nicaragua was invaded and
for seven long years was heroically defended by Ceasar Augusto Sandino.
Cuba suffered intervention more than once, and so did Haiti and Santo
Domingo. Guatemala also suffered intervention. Who among you could
honestly deny the intervention of the United Fruit Co. and the State
Department of the United States when the legitimate government of Guatemala
was overthrown? I understand fully well that there may be some who
consider it their official duty to be discreet on this matter, and who
may even be willing to come here and deny this, but in their consciences
they know we are simply stating the truth.
</p>
<p>
Cuba was not the first victim of aggression; Cuba was not the first
country to be in danger of aggression. In this hemisphere everyone knows
that the Government of the United States has always imposed its own law —
the law of the strongest, in virtue of which they have destroyed Puerto
Rican nationhood and have imposed their domination on that friendly country
— law in accordance with which they seized and held the Panama Canal.
</p>
<p>
This was nothing new, our country should have been defended, but it was
never defended. Why? Let us get to the bottom of this matter, without
merely studying the from. If we stick to the dead letter of the law, then
we are protected; if we abide by reality, we have no protection whatsoever,
because reality imposes itself on the law set forth in international codes,
and that reality is, that a small nation attacked by a powerful country did
not have any defense and was not defended.
</p>
<p>
With all due respect to this organization, I must state here that, that
is why the people, our people, the people of Cuba, who have learned much
and are quite up to the role they are laying, to the heroic struggle they
are conducting ... our people who have learned in the school of
international events, know that in the last instance, when their rights
have been denied and aggressive forces are marshalled against them, they
still have the supreme and heroic resource of resisting when their rights
are not protected by either the OAS or the UN (OVATION).
</p>
<p>
That is why we, the small countries, do not yet feel too sure that our
rights will be preserved; that is why we, the small countries, whenever we
decide to become free, know that we become free at our own risk. In truth,
when people are united and are defending a just right, they can trust their
own energies. We are not, as we have been pictured, a mere group of men
governing the country. We are a whole people governing a country — a
whole people firmly united, with a great revolutionary consciousness,
defending its rights. And this should be known by the enemies of the
revolution and of Cuba, because if they ignore this fact, they will be
making a regretable error.
</p>
<p>
These are the circumstances in which the revolutionary process has
taken place in our country; that is how we found the country, and why
difficulties have arisen. And yet the Cuban Revolution is changing what
was yesterday a land without hope, a land of poverty and illiteracy, into
one of the most advanced and developed countries in this Continent.
</p>
<p>
The Revolutionary Government, in but twenty months, has created 10,000
new schools. In this brief period it has doubled the number of rural
schools that had been created in fifty years. Cuba is today, the first
country of America that has met all its school needs, that has a teacher in
the farthest corners of the mountains.
</p>
<p>
In this brief period of time, the Revolutionary Government has built
5,000 houses in the rural and urban areas. Fifty new towns are being built
at this moment. The most important military fortresses today house tens of
thousands of students, and, in the coming year, our people intend to fight
the great battle against illiteracy, with the ambitious goal of teaching
every single inhabitant of the country to read and write in one year, and,
with that end in mind, organizations of teachers, students and workers,
that is, the entire people, are preparing themselves for an intensive
campaign, and Cuba will be the first country of America which, after a few
months, will be able to say it does not have one single illiterate.
</p>
<p>
Our people are receiving today the assistance of hundreds of doctors
who have been sent to the fields to fight against illnesses and parasitic
ailments, and improve the sanitary conditions of the nation.
</p>
<p>
In another aspect, in the preservation of our natural resources, we can
also point with pride to the fact that in only one year, in the most
ambitious plan for the conservation of natural resources being carried out
on this continent, including the United States of America and Canada, we
have planted nearly fifty million timber-yielding trees.
</p>
<p>
Youths who were unemployed, who did not attend school, have been
organized by the Revolutionary Government and are today being gainfully
and usefully employed by the country, and at the same time being prepared
for productive work.
</p>
<p>
Agricultural production in our country has been able to perform an
almost unique feat, an increase in production from the very beginning. From
the very start we were able to increase agricultural production. Why? In
the first place, because the Revolutionary Government turned more than
10,000 agricultural workers, who formerly paid rent, to owners of their
land, at the same time maintaining large-scale production through
co-operatives. In other words production was maintained through
co-operatives, thanks to which we have been able to apply the most modern
technical methods to our agricultural production, causing a marked increase
in that production.
</p>
<p>
And all this social welfare work — teachers, housing, and hospitals —
has been carried out without sacrificing the resources that we have
earmarked for development. At this very moment the Revolutionary Government
is carrying out a program of industrialization of the country, and the
first plants are already being built.
</p>
<p>
We have utilized the resources of our country in a rational manner.
Formerly, for instance, thirty-five million dollars worth of cars were
imported into Cuba, and only five million dollars worth of tractors. A
country which is mainly agricultural imported seven times more cars than
tractors. We have changed this around, and we are now importing seven
times more tractors than cars.
*PG*
</p>
<p>
Close to five hundred million dollars was recovered from the
politicians who had enriched themselves during the tyranny of Batista —
close to five hundred million dollars in cash and other assets was the
total we were able to recover from the corrupt politicians who had been
sucking the blood of our country for seven years. It is the correct
investment of these assets which enables the Revolutionary Government,
while at the same time developing plans for industrialization and for the
development of agriculture, to build houses, schools, to send teachers to
the farthest corners of the country, and to give medical assistance to
everyone — in other words, to carry out a true program of social
development.
</p>
<p>
At the Bogota meeting, as you know, the Government of the United States
proposed a plan. Was it a plan for economic development? No. It was a
plan for social development. What is understood by this? Well, it was a
plan for building houses, building schools, and building roads. But does
this settle the problem at all? How can there be a solution to the social
problems without a plan for economic development? Do they want to make
fools of the Latin American countries? What are families going to live on
when they inhabit those houses, if those houses are really built? What
shoes, what clothes are they going to wear, and what food are children
going toe at when they attend those school? Is it not known that, when a
family does not have clothes or shoes for the children, the children are
not sent to schools? With what means are they going to pay the teachers
and the doctors? How are they going to pay for the medicine? Do you want
a good way of saving medicine? Improve the nutrition of the people, and
when they eat well you will not have to spend money on hospitals.
Therefore, in view of the tremendous reality of undevelopment, the
Government of the United States now comes out with a plan for social
development. Of course, it is stimulating to observe the United States
concerning itself with some of the problems of Latin America. Thus far
they had not concerned themselves at all. What a coincidence that, they
are not worried about those problems! And the fact that this concern
emerged after the Cuban Revolution will probably be labelled by them as
purely coincidental.
</p>
<p>
Thus far, the monopolies have certainly not cared very much, except
about exploiting the underdeveloped countries. But comes the Cuban
Revolution and suddenly the monopolists are worrying, and while they attack
us economically trying to crush us, they offer aims to the countries of
Latin America. The countries of Latin America are offered, not the
resources for development that Latin America needs, but resources for
social development — houses for men who have no work, schools where
children will not go, and hospitals that would not be necessary if there
were enough food to eat (APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
After all, although some of my Latin American colleagues may feel it
their duty to be discreet at the United Nations, they should all welcome a
revolution such as the Cuban Revolution which at any rate has forced the
monopolists to return at least a small part of what they have been
extracting from the natural resources and the sweat of the Latin American
peoples (APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
Although we are not included in that aid we are not worried about that;
we do not get angry about things like that, because we have been settling
those same problems of schools and housing and so on for quite some time.
But perhaps there may be some of you who feel we are using this rostrum to
make propaganda, because the President of the United Nations has said that
some come here for propaganda purposes. And, of course, all of my
colleagues in the United Nations have a standing invitation to visit Cuba.
We do not close, our doors to any one, now do we confine anyone. Any of my
colleagues in this assembly can fision Cuba whenever he wishes, in order to
see with his own eyes what is going on. You know the chapter in the Bible
that speaks of St. Thomas, who had to see in order to believe I think it
was St. Thomas.
</p>
<p>
And, after all, we can invite any newspapermen, and any member of any
delegation, to visit Cuba and see what a nation is capable of doing with
its own resources, when they are used with honesty and reason. But we are
not only solving our housing and school problems, we are solving our
development problems as well, because without the solution of the problems
of development there can be no settlement of the social problems
themselves.
</p>
<p>
Why is the United States Government unwilling to talk of development?
It is very simple: because the Government of the United States does not
want to oppose the monopolies, and the monopolies require natural resources
and markets for the investment of their capital. That is where the great
contradiction lies. That is why the real solution to this problem is not
sought. That is why planning for the development of underdeveloped
countries with public funds is not done.
</p>
<p>
It is good that this be stated frankly, because, after all, we the
underdeveloped countries, are a majority in this Assembly — in case anyone
is unaware of this fact — and we are witnesses to what is going on in the
underdeveloped countries.
</p>
<p>
Yet, the true solution of the problem is not sought, and much is said
about the participation of private capital. Of course, this means markets
for the investment of surplus capital, like the investment that was
amortized in five years.
</p>
<p>
The government of the United States cannot propose a plan for public
investment, because this would divorce it from the very reason for being
the Government of the United States, namely the American monopolies.
</p>
<p>
Let us not beat about the bush, the reason no real economic plan is
being promoted is simply this: to preserve our lands in Latin America,
Africa, and Asia for the investment of surplus capital.
</p>
<p>
Thus far we have referred to the problems of my own country and the
reason why those problems have not been solved. Is it perhaps because we
did not want to solve them? No. The Government of Cuba has always been
ready to discuss its problems with the Government of the United States, but
the Government of the United States has not been ready to discuss its
problems with Cuba, and it must have its reasons for not doing so.
</p>
<p>
The Government of the United States doe not deign to discuss its
differences with the small country of Cuba.
</p>
<p>
What hope can the people of Cuba maintain for the solution of these
problems? the facts that we have been able to note here so far conspire
against the solution of these problems, and the United Nations should
seriously take this into account, because the people and the Government of
Cuba are justifiably concerned at the aggressive turn in the policy of the
United States with regard to Cuba, and it is proper that we should be well
informed.
</p>
<p>
In the first place, the Government of the United States considers it
has the right to promote and encourage subversion in our country. The
Government of the United States is promoting the organization of subversive
movements against the Revolutionary Government of Cuba, and we wish to
denounce this fact in this General Assembly; we also wish to denounce
specifically the fact that, for instance, a territory which belongs to
Honduras, known as Islas Cisnes, the Swan Islands, has been seized "manu
militari" by the Government of the United States and that American marines
are there, despite the fact that this territory belongs to Honduras. Thus,
violating international law and despoiling a friendly people of a part of
its territory, the United States has established a powerful radio station
on one of those Islands, in violation of international radio agreements,
and has placed it at the disposal of the war criminals and subversive
groups supported in this country; furthermore, military training is being
conducted on that island, in order to promote subversion and the landing of
armed forces in our country.
</p>
<p>
Does the Government of the United States feel it has the right to
promote subversion on our country, violating all international treaties,
including those relating to radio frequency? Does this mean, by chance,
that the Cuban Government has the right to promote subversion in the United
States? Does the Government of the United States believe it has the right
to violate radio frequency agreements? Does this mean, by chance, that the
Cuban Government has the right to violate radio frequency agreements also?
What right can the Government of the United States have over us over our
island that permits it to act towards other nations in such a manner? Let
the United States return the Swan Islands to Honduras, since it never had
any jurisdiction over those Islands (APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
But there are even more alarming circumstances for our people. It is
well known that, in virtue of the Platt Amendment, imposed by force upon
our people, the Government of the United States assumed the right to
establish naval bases on our territory, a right forcefully imposed and
maintained. A naval base in the territory of any country is surely a
cause for concern. First of all, there is concern over the fact that a
country which follows an aggressive and warlike international policy has a
base in the heart of our country, which brings us the risk of being
involved in any international conflict, in any atomic conflict, without our
having anything to do with the problem, because we have absolutely nothing
to do with the problems of the United States and the crises provoked by the
Government of the United States. Yet, there is a base in the heart of our
Island which entails danger for us in case of war.
</p>
<p>
But is that only danger? No. There is another danger that concerns us
even more, since it is closer to home. The Revolutionary Government of
Cuba has repeatedly expressed its concern over the fact that the
imperialist government of the United States may use that base, located in
the heart of our national territory, as an excuse to promote a self -
aggression, in order to justify an attack on our country. I repeat: the
Revolutionary Government of Cuba is seriously concerned — and makes known
this concern — over the fact that the imperialist government of the United
States of America may use a self-aggression in order to justify an attack
on our country. And this concern on our part is becoming increasingly
greater because of the intensified aggressiveness that the United States is
displaying. For instance, I have here a United Press cable which came to
my country, and which reads as follows:,
</p>
<p class="quote">
"Admiral Arleigh Burke, United States Chief of Naval Operations says
that if Cuba attempts to take the Gunatanamo Naval base by force we will
fight back" In an interview for the magazine U.S. News and World Report
(please excuse my bad pronunciation), Admiral Burke was asked if the Navy
was concerned about the situation in Cuba under Premier Fidel Castro.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"Yes, our Navy is concerned — not about our base at Guantanamo, but
about the whole Cuban situation," Admiral Burke said. The Admiral added
that all the military services are concerned.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"Is that because of Cuba's strategic position in the Caribbean?" he
was asked.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"No, not particularly,' Admiral Burke said. 'Here are a people
normally very friendly to the United States, who like our people and were
also like by us. In spite of this, an individual as appeared with a small
group of fanatical communists, determined to change all that. Castro has
taught his people to hate the United States, and has done much to ruin his
country.'
</p>
<p class="quote">
"Admiral Burke said 'we will react very fast if Castro makes any move
against the Guantanamo base.'
</p>
<p class="quote">
"If they try to take the base by force, we will fight back", he added.
</p>
<p>
Asked whether Soviet Premier Krushchev's threat about retaliatonary
rockets gave Admiral Burke 'second thoughts about fighting in Cuba' the
Admiral said:
</p>
<p class="quote">
"No, because he is not going to send his rockets. He knows quite well
he will be destroyed if he does."
</p>
<p>
He means that Russia will be destroyed.
</p>
<p>
In the first place, I must emphasize that for this gently man, to have
increased industrial production in our country by 35 per cent, to have
given employment to more than 200,000 more Cubans, to have solved many of
the social problems of our country, constitutes the ruination of our
country. And in accordance with this line of reasoning they assume the
right to prepare the conditions for aggression.
</p>
<p>
So you see how conjectures are made — very dangerous conjectures,
because this gentleman, in effect, thinks that in case of an attack on us
we are to stand alone. This is just a conjecture by Mr. Burke, but let us
imagine that Mr. Burke is wrong, let us suppose for just a moment that Mr.
Burke, although an admiral, is mistaken.
</p>
<p>
Than Admiral Burke is playing with the fate of the world in a most
irresponsible manner. Admiral Burke and his aggressive militarist clique
are playing with the fate of the world, and it would really not be worth
our while to worry over the fate of each of us, but we feel that we, as
representatives of the various peoples of the world, have the duty to
concern ourselves with the fate of the world, and we also have the duty to
condemn all those who play irresponsibly with the fate of the world. They
are not only playing with the fate of our people; they are playing with the
fate of their people and with the fate of all the people's of the world or
does thus Admiral Burke think we are still living in the times of the
blunderbusses? Does he not realize, this Admiral Burke, that we are living
in the atomic age, in an age whose disastrous and cataclysmic destructive
forces could not even he imagined by Dante or Leonardo Da Vinci, with all
their imagination, because this goes beyond the imagination of man. Yet,
he made his conjectures, United Press International spread the news all
over the world, the magazine is about to come out, hysteria is being
created, the campaign is being prepared, the imaginary danger of an attack
on the base is beginning to be publicized.
</p>
<p>
And this is not all. Yesterday a United States news bulletin appeared
containing some declarations by the United States Senator Styles Bridges
who, I believe is a member of the Armed forces Committee of the Senate of
the United States. He said:
</p>
<p class="quote">
"The United States should maintain its naval base of Guantanamo in Cuba
at all costs"; and 'we must go as far as necessary to defend those
gigantic installations of the United States. We have naval forces there,
and we have the Marines, and if we were attacked I would defend it, of
course, because I believe it is the most important base in the Caribbean
area."
</p>
<p>
This member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee did not entirely
reject the use of the atomic weapons in the case of an attack against the
base.
</p>
<p>
What does this mean? This means that not only is hysteria being
created, not only is the atmosphere being systematically prepared, but we
are even threatened with the use of atomic weapons, and, of course, among
the many things that we can think of, one is to ask this Mr. Bridges
whether he is not ashamed of himself to threaten a small country like Cuba
with the use of atomic weapons (PROLONGS APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
As far as we are concerned, and with all due respect, we must tell him
that the problems of the world cannot be solved by the use of threats or by
sowing fear, and that our humble people, our little country, is there.
What can we do about? We are there, however much they dislike the idea,
and our Revolution will go ahead, however much they dislike that. And our
humble people must resign themselves to their fate. They are not afraid,
nor are they shaken by this threat of the use of atomic weapons.
</p>
<p>
What does all this mean? There are many countries that have American
bases in their territory, but they are not directed against the governments
that made these concessions — at least not as far as we know. Yet ours is
the most tragic case. There is a base on our island territory directed
against Cuba and the Revolutionary Government of Cuba, in the hands of
those who declare themselves enemies of our country, enemies of our
revolution, and enemies of our people. In the entire history of the
world's present-day bases, the most tragic case is that of Cuba; a base
imposed upon us by force, well within our territory, which is a good many
miles away from the coast of the United States, an instrument used against
Cuba and the Cuban people imposed by the use of force, and a constant
threat and a cause for concern for our people.
</p>
<p>
That is why we must state here that all these rumors of attacks are
intended to create hysteria and prepare the conditions for an aggression
against our country, that we have never spoken a single word implying the
thought of any type of attack on the Guantanamo base, because we are the
first in not wanting to give imperialism an excuse to attack us, and we
state this categorically. But we also declare that from the very moment
that base was turned into a threat to the security and peace of our
country, a danger to our country, the Revolutionary Government of Cuba has
been considering very seriously the requesting, within the framework of
international law, of the withdrawal of the naval and military forces of
the United States (THE SPEAKER IS INTERRUPTED BY PROLONGED APPLAUSE) from
that portion of our National territory.
</p>
<p>
But is is imperative that this Assembly be kept well informed
regarding the problems of Cuba, because we have to be on the alert against
deceit and confusion. We have to explain these problems very clearly
because with them go the security and the fate of our country. And that is
why we want exact note to be taken of the words I have spoken, particularly
when one takes into consideration the fact that the opinions or erroneous
ideas of the politicians of this country as regards Cuban problems do not
show any signs of improving. I have here some declarations by Mr. Kennedy
that would surprise anybody. On Cuba he says. "We must use all the power
of the Organization of American States to prevent Castro from interfering
in other Latin American countries, and we must use all that power to return
freedom to Cuba". They are going to give freedom back to Cuba!
</p>
<p class="quote">
"We must state our intention," he says, "of not allowing the Soviet
Union to turn Cuba into its Caribbean base, and of applying the Monroe
Doctrine". Half-way or more into the twentieth century, this gentleman
speaks of the Monroe doctrine!
</p>
<p class="quote">
"We must make Prime Minister Castro understand that we intend to defend
our right to the Naval Base of Guantanamo." He is the third who speaks of
the problem. "And we must make the Cuban people know that we sympathize
with their legitimate economic aspirations...." Why did they not feel
sympathetic before? "....that we know their love of freedom, and that we
shall never be happy until democracy is restored in Cuba...." What
democracy? The democracy "made" by the imperialist monopolies of the
Government of the United States?
</p>
<p class="quote">
"The forces in exile that are struggling for freedom," he says — note
this very carefully so that you will understand why there are planes flying
from American territory over Cuba: pay close attention to what this
gentleman has to say. "The forces that struggle for liberty in exile and
in the mountains of Cuba should be supported and assisted, and in other
countries of Latin America communism must be confined and not allowed to
expand."
</p>
<p>
If Kennedy were not an illiterate and ignorant millionaire
(APPLAUSE)...he would understand that is is not possible to carry out a
revolution supported by landowners against the peasant in the mountains,
and that every time imperialism has tried to encourage counterrevolutionary
groups, the peasant militia has captured them in the course of a few days.
But he seems to have read a novel, or seen a Hollywood film, about
guerrillas, and he thinks it is possible to carry on guerrilla warfare in a
country where the relations of the social forces are what they are in Cuba.
</p>
<p>
In any case, this is discouraging. Let no one think, however, that
these opinions as regards Kennedy's statements indicate that we feel any
sympathy towards the other one, Mr. Nixon...(LAUGHTER) who has made similar
statements. As far as we are concerned, both lack political brains.
</p>
<p>
Up to this point we have been dealing with the problem of our country,
a fundamental duty of ours when coming before the United Nations, but we
understand that it would be a little egoistical on our part if our concern
were to be limited to our specific case alone. It is also true that we
have used up the greater part of our time informing this Assembly about the
Cuban case, and that there is not much time left for us to deal with the
remaining questions, to which we wish to refer briefly.
</p>
<p>
The case of Cuba is not isolated case. It would be an error to think
of it only as the case of Cuba. The case of Cuba is the case of all
underdeveloped countries. The case of Cuba is like that of the Congo,
Egypt, Algeria, Iran...(APPLAUSE)...like that of Panama, which wishes
to have its canal; it is like that of Puerto Rico, whose national spirit
they are destroying; like that of Honduras, a portion of whose territory
has been alienated. In short, although we have not make specific
reference to other countries, the case of Cuba is the case of all
underdeveloped, colonialized countries.
</p>
<p>
The problems which we have been describing in relation to Cuba can be
applied just as well to all of Latin America. The control of Latin
American economic resources by the monopolies, which, when they do not own
the mines directly and are in charge of extraction, as the case with the
copper of Chile, Peru, or Mexico, and with the oil of Venezuela — when
this control is not exercised directly it is because they are the owners of
the public utility companies, as is the case in Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, or the owners of telephone services, which is
the case in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Paraguay and Bolivia, or they
commercialize our products, as is the case with coffee in Brazil, Colombia,
El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, or with the cultivation, marketing
and transportations of bananas by the United Fruit Co. in Guatemala, Costa
Rica, and Honduras, or with the Cotton in Mexico and Brazil. In other
words, the monopolies control the most important industries. Woe to those
countries, the day they try to make an agrarian reform! They will be asked
for immediate, efficient, and just payment. And if, in spite of everything
they make an agrarian reform, the representative of the friendly country
who comes to the United Nations will be confined to Manhattan; they will
not rent hotel space to him; insult will he heaped upon him, and it is even
possible that he may be physically mistreated by the police.
</p>
<p>
The problem of Cuba is just an example of the situation in Latin
America. And how long will Latin America wait for its development? It
will have to wait, according to the point of view of the monopolies, until
there are two Fridays in a week.
</p>
<p>
Who is going to industrialize Latin America? The monopolies?
Certainly not. There is a report by the economic Commission of the United
Nations which explains how private capital, instead of going to the
countries that need it most for the establishment of basic industries to
contribute to their development, is being channeled referentially to the
more industrialized countries, because there, according to their beliefs,
private capital finds greater security. And, of course, even the Economic
Secretariat of the United Nations has had to admit there there is no
possible chance for development through the investment of private
capital — that is, through the monopolies.
</p>
<p>
The development of Latin America will have to be achieved through
public investment, planned and granted unconditionally without any
political strings attached, because, naturally, we all like to be
representatives of free countries. None of us like to represent a country
that does not feel itself in full possession of its freedom.
</p>
<p>
None of us wants the independence of this country to be subjected to
any interest other than that of the country itself. That is why assistance
must be given without any political conditions.
</p>
<p>
That help has been denied to us does not matter. We have not asked for
it. However, in the interest of and for the benefit of the Latin American
peoples, we do feel duty bound out of solidarity, to stress the fact that
the assistance must be given without any political conditions whatsoever.
There should be more public investments for economic development, rather
than for "social development," which is the latest thing invented to hide
the true need for the economic development of countries.
</p>
<p>
The problems of Latin America are similar to those of the rest of the
world: to those of Africa and Asia. The world is divided up among the
monopolies; the same monopolies that we find in Latin America are also
found in the Middle East. There the oil is in the hands of monopolistic
companies that are controlled by France, the United States, the United
Kingdom the Netherlands....in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, in short,
in all corners of the world. The same thing is true, for instance, in the
Philippines, and in Africa. The world has been divided among the
monopolistic interests. Who would dare deny this historic truth? The
monopolistic interests do not want to see the development of countries and
the people themselves. And the sooner they recover or amortize the capital
invested, the better.
</p>
<p>
The problems the Cuban people have had to face with the imperialistic
government of the United States are the same which Saudi Arabia would face
if it nationalized its oil, and this also applies to Iran or Iraq; the same
problems that Egypt had when it quite justifiably nationalized the Suez
Canal; the very same problems that Indonesia had when it wanted to become
independent; the same surprise attacks as against Egypt and the Congo.
</p>
<p>
Have colonialists or imperialists ever lacked a pretext when they
wanted to invade a country? Never! Somehow they have always found a
pretext. And which are the colonialist and imperialists countries? Four
or five countries — no, four or five groups of monopolies are the owners
of the wealth of the world.
</p>
<p>
If a being from another planet were to come to this Assembly, one who
had read neither the Communist Menifesto of Karl Marx nor the cables of the
United Press or the Associated Press or other monopolist publications, if
he were to ask how the world had been divided, and he saw on a map that the
wealth of the world was divided among the monopolies of four or five
countries, he would say, without further consideration; "The wealth of this
world has been badly distributed, the world is being exploited."
</p>
<p>
Here in this Assembly, where the majority of the underdeveloped
countries are represented, he would say: "The majority of the peoples that
you represent are being exploited; they have been exploited for a long
time. The form of exploitation may have changed, but you are still being
exploited." That would be the verdict.
</p>
<p>
In the address made by Premier Khrushchev there is a statement that
attracted our attention because of the value of its contents. It was when
he said that "the Soviet Union has no colonies or investments in any
country."
</p>
<p>
How great our world would be today, our world which today is threatened
with catastrophe, if all the representatives of all nations were able to
say: "Our country has no colonies and no investments in any foreign
country"! (APPLAUSE)
</p>
<p>
There is no use in going all over the question again. This is
substance of the matter, the substance of peace and war, the substance of
the armaments race. Wars, since the beginning of mankind, have occurred
for one, fundamental reason; the desire of some to despoil others of their
wealth.
</p>
<p>
Do away with the philosophy of plunder and you will have done away
forever with the philosophy of war! (APPLAUSE) Do away with the colonies,
wipe out the exploitation of countries by monopolies, and mankind will have
reached a true era of progress!
</p>
<p>
As long s that step is not taken, as long as that stage is not reached,
the world will have to live constantly under the nightmare and fear of
being involved in any crisis, in an atomic conflagration. Why? Because
there are some who are interested in perpetuating this exploitation.
</p>
<p>
We have spoken here of the Cuban case. Our case has taught us because
of the problems we have had with our own imperialism, that is, the
particular imperialism that is ranged against us. But, since all
imperialism are alike, they are all allies. A country that exploits the
people of Latin America, or any other parts of the world, is an ally of the
exploiters of the rest of the world.
</p>
<p>
There are a number of problems which have already been discussed by
several delegations. For reasons of time, we should like merely to express
our opinion on the Congo problem. Of course, since we hold an
anti-colonialist position against the exploitation of underdeveloped
countries, we condemn the way in which the intervention by the United
Nations forces was carried out in the Congo. First of all, these forces
did not go there to act against the interventing forces, for which purpose
they were originally sent. All necessary time was given, so that the first
dissension could occur. And as that was not enough, further time was
given, and the way was opened for the second division. And finally, while
broadcasting stations and airfields were seized, the opportunity was
provided for the emergence of the third man, as they always call the
saviors who emerge in these circumstances. We know them only too well,
because in the year of 1943 one of these saviors appeared in our country,
and his name was Fulgenico Batista. In the Congo his name is Mobutu. In
Cuba, he paid a daily visit to the American Embassy, and it appears the
same thing is going on in the Congo. Is it because I say so? No, because
no less than a magazine which is one of the most fervent supporters of the
monopolies and therefore cannot be against them, is the one that says so.
It cannot favor Lumumba, because it favors Mobutu. But it explains who
Mobutu, is, how he began to work, and finally Time magazine says in its
latest issue: "Mobutu became a frequent visitor to the United States
Embassy and held long talks with officials there. One afternoon last week
Mobutu conferred with officers of Camp Leopold and got their enthusiastic
support. That night he went to Radio Congo — which Lumumba had not been
allowed to use — and abruptly announced that the army was assuming power."
</p>
<p>
In other words, all this occurred after frequent visits and lengthy
conversations with the officials of the United States Embassy. This Time
Magazine speaking, the defender of the monopolies.
</p>
<p>
In other words, the hand of the colonialist interest has been clear and
visible in the Congo, and our opinion is consequently that colonialist
interests have been favored and that every fact indicates that reason and
the people of the Congo are on the side of the only leader who remained
there to defend the interests of his country, and that leader is Lumumba
(APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
As regard the problem of Algeria, we are, I need hardly say, 100
percent in support of the right of the people of Algeria to independence
(APPLAUSE), and it is, furthermore, ridiculous — like so many ridiculous
things in the world which have been artificially created by vested
interests — to claim that Algeria is part of France. In the past, similar
claims have been made by other countries in an attempt to keep their
colonies.
</p>
<p>
However, these African people have been fighting a heroic battle
against the colonial power for many years. Perhaps, even while we are
calmly talking here, Algerian villages and hamlets are being bombed and
machinegunned by the French Army. Men may well be dying in a struggle in
which there is not the slightest doubt where the right lies, a struggle
that could be ended even without disregarding the interests of that
minority which is being used for denying nine-tenths of the population of
Algeria their right to independence. Yet we are doing nothing. So quick
to go to the Congo, and such lack of enthusiasm about going to Algeria!
(APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
We are, therefore, on the side of the Algerian people, as we are on the
remaining colonial peoples in Africa, and on the side of the Negroes who
are discriminated against in the Union of South Africa. Similarly, we are
on the side of those peoples that wish to be free, not only politically —
for it is very easy to acquire a flag, a coat of arms, an anthem, and a
color on the map — but also economically free, for there is one truth
which we should all recognize as being of primary importance, namely, that
there can be no political independence unless there is economic
independence, that political independence without economic independence is
a lie; we therefore support the aspirations of all countries to be free
politically and economically. Freedom does not consist in the possession
of a flag, a coat of arms, and representation in the United Nations.
</p>
<p>
We should like to draw attention here to another right: a right which
was proclaimed the Cuban people at a mass meeting quite recently, the right
of the underdeveloped countries to nationalize their natural resources and
the investments of the monopolies in their respective countries without
compensation; in other words, we advocate the nationalization of natural
resources and foreign investments in the underdeveloped countries.
</p>
<p>
And if the highly industrialized countries wish to do the same thing,
we shall not oppose them (APPLAUSE).
</p>
<p>
If countries are to be truly free, in political matters, they must be
truly free in economic matters, and we must lend them assistance. We shall
be asked about the value of the investments, as we in return will ask:
what about the value of the profits from those investments, the profits
which have been extracted from the colonized and underdeveloped peoples for
decades, if not for centuries?
</p>
<p>
We should like to support a proposal made by the President of the
Republic of Ghana, the proposal that Africa should be cleared of military
bases and thus of nuclear weapon bases, in other words, the proposal to
free from the perils of atomic war. Something has already been done with
regard to Antarctia. As we go forward on the path of disarmament, why
should we not also go forward towards freeing certain parts of the world
from the danger of nuclear war?
</p>
<p>
Let the other people, let the West make up a little for what it has
made Africa suffer, by preserving it from the danger of atomic war and
declaring it a free zone as far as this peril is concerned. Let no atomic
bases be established there! Even if we can do nothing else, let this
continent at least remain a sanctuary where human life may be preserved!
(PROLONGED APPLAUSE). We support this proposal warmly.
</p>
<p>
On the question of disarmament, we wholeheartedly support the Soviet
proposal, and we are not ashamed to do so. We regard as a correct,
precise, well-defined and clear proposal.
</p>
<p>
We have carefully studied the speech made here by President Eisenhower
— he made no real reference to disarmament, to the development of the
underdeveloped countries, or to the colonial problem. Really, it would be
worthwhile for the citizens of this country, who are so influenced by false
propaganda, to compare objectively the statements of the President of the
United States with those of the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, so that
they could see which speech contains genuine concern over the world's
problems, so that they could see who spoke clearly and sincerely, and so
they could see who really wants disarmament, and who is against it and why.
The Soviet proposal could not be clearer. Nothing could be added to the
Soviet explanation. Why should there be any reservations when no one has
every before spoken so clearly of so tremendous a problem?
</p>
<p>
The history of the world has taught us the tragic lesson that arms
races always lead to war; but never has the responsibility been greater,
for never has war signified so was a holocaust for mankind. And the Soviet
Union has made a proposal regarding that problem which so greatly concerns
mankind — whose very existence is at stake — a proposal for total and
complete disarmament. What more can be asked? If more can be asked, let
us ask it; if we can ask for more safeguards, let us do so; but the
proposal could not be clearer or better defined, and, at this stage of
history, it cannot be rejected without assuming the responsibility involved
in the danger of war and of war itself.
</p>
<p>
The representative of the Soviet Union has spoken openly — I say this
objectively — and I urge that these proposals be considered, and that
everybody put their cards on the table. Above all, this is not merely a
question of representatives, that is a matter of public opinion. The
warmongers and militarists must be exposed and condemned by the public
opinion of the world. This is not a problem for minorities only: it
concerns the world. The warmongers and militarists must be unmasked, and
this is the task of public opinion. This problem must be discussed not
only in the General Assembly, but before the entire world, before the great
assembly of the whole world, because in the event of a war not only the
leaders, but hundreds of millions of completely innocent persons will be
exterminated, and it is for this reason that we, who meet here as
representatives of the world — or part of the world, since this Assembly
is not yet complete, it will not be complete until the Peoples' Republic of
China is represented here — should take appropriate measures (APPLAUSE).
One-quarter of the world's population is of course absent, but we who are
here have the duty to speak openly and not to evade the issue. We must all
discuss it; this problem is too serious to be overlooked. It is more
important than economic aid and all other obligations, because this is the
obligation to preserve the life of mankind. Let us all discuss and speak
about this problem, and let us all fight to establish peace, or at least to
unmask the militarists and warmongers.
</p>
<p>
And, above all, if we, the underdeveloped countries, want to preserve
the hope of achieving progress, if we want to have a chance of seeing our
peoples enjoying a higher standard of living, let us struggle for peace,
let us struggle for disarmament; with a fifth of what the world spends on
armaments, we could promote the development of all the underdeveloped
countries at a rate of growth of 10 percent per annum. With a fifth of the
resources which countries spend on armaments, we could surely raise the
people's standard of living.
</p>
<p>
Now, what are the obstacles to disarmament? Who is interested in being
armed? Those who are interested in being armed to the teeth are those who
want to keep colonies, those who want to maintain their monopolies, those
who want to retain control of the oil of the Middle East; the natural
resources of Latin America, of Asia, of Africa, and who require military
strength to defend their interests. And it is well known that these
territories were occupied and colonized on the strength of the law of
force; by virtue of the law of force million of men were enslaved, and it
is force which sustains such exploitation in the world. Therefore, those
who want no disarmament are those interested in maintaining their military
strength in order to retain control of natural resources, the wealth of the
people of the world, and cheap labor in underdeveloped countries. We
promised to speak openly, and there is no other way of telling the truth.
</p>
<p>
The colonialists, therefore, are against disarmament. Using the weapon
of world public opinion, we must fight to force disarmament on them as we
must force them to respect the right of peoples to economic and political
liberation.
</p>
<p>
The monopolies are against disarmament, because, besides being able to
defend those interests with arms, the arms race has always been good
business for them. For example, it is well known that the great monopolies
in this country doubled their capital shortly after the Second World War.
Like vultures, the monopolies feed on the corpses which are the harvest of
war.
</p>
<p>
And war is a business. Those who trade in war, those who enrich
themselves war, by must be unmasked. We must open the eyes of the world
and expose those who trade in the destiny of mankind, in the danger of war,
particularly when the war may be so frightful that it leaves no hope of
salvation.
</p>
<p>
We, the small and underdeveloped countries, urge the whole Assembly and
especially the other small and underdeveloped nations to devote themselves
to this task and to have this problem discussed here, because afterwards we
will never forgive ourselves if, through our neglect or lack of firmness
and energy on this basic issue, the world becomes involved once again in
the perils of war.
</p>
<p>
We have just one more point to discuss, which, according to what we
have read in some newspapers, was one of the points the Cuban delegation
was going to raise. And this, of course, is the problem of the Peoples
Republic of China.
</p>
<p>
Other delegations have already spoken about this matter. We wish to
say that the fact that this problem has never been discussed is in reality
a denial of the "raison d'etre" and of the essential of nature of the
United Nations. Why has it never been discussed? Because the United
Nations Assembly going to renounce its right to discuss this problem?
</p>
<p>
Many countries have joined the United Nations in recent years. To
oppose discussion of the right to representation here of the People's
Republic of China, that is, of 99 percent of the inhabitants of a country
of more than 600,000,000 is to deny the reality of history, the facts of
life itself.
</p>
<p>
It is simply an absurdity; it is ridiculous that this problem is never
even discussed. How long are we going to continue the sad business of
never discussing this problem, when we have here representatives of Franco,
for instance?
</p>
<p>
At this point is its appropriate to ask by what right the navy of an
extra-continental country — and it is worth repeating this here, when so
much is being said about extra-continental interference — intervented in a
domestic affair of China. It would be interesting to have an explanation.
The sole purpose of this interference was to maintain a group of allies in
that place and to prevent the total liberation of the territory. That is
an absurd and unlawful state of affairs from any point of view, but it
constitutes the reason why the United States Government does not want the
question of the People's Republic of China to be discussed. And we want to
put it on record here that this is our position and that we support
discussion of this question, and that the United Nations General Assembly
should seat the legitimate representatives of the Chinese people, namely,
the representatives of the Government of the People's Republic of China.
</p>
<p>
I understand perfectly that is somewhat difficult for anybody here to
free himself of the stereotyped concepts by which the representatives of
nations are usually judged. I must say that we have come here free from
the prejudices, to analyze problems objectively, without fear of what
people will think and without fear of the consequences of our position.
</p>
<p>
We have been honest, we have been frank without being Fran coist
(APPLAUSE), because we do not want to be a party to the injustice committed
against a great number of Spaniards, still imprisoned in Spain after more
than twenty years, men who fought together with the Americans of the
Lincoln Brigade, as the comrades of those same Americans who were there to
do honor to the name of that great American, Lincoln.
</p>
<p>
In conclusion, we are going to place our trust in reason and in the
decency of all. We wish to sum up our ideas regarding some aspects of
these world problems about which there should be no doubt. The problem of
Cuba, which we have set forth here, is a part of the problems of the world.
Those who attack us today are those who are helping to attack others in
other parts of the world.
</p>
<p>
The United States Government cannot be on the side of the Algerian
people, it cannot be on the side of the Algerian people because it is
allied to metropolitan France. It cannot be on the side of the Congolese
people, because it is allied to Belgium. It cannot be on the side of the
Spanish people, because it is allied to Franco. It cannot be on the side
of the Puerto Rican people, whose nationhood it has been destroying for
fifty years. It cannot be on the side of the Panamanians, who claim the
Canal. It cannot support the ascendancy of civil power in Latin America,
Germany or Japan. It cannot be on the side of the peasants who want land,
because it is allied to the big landowners. It cannot be on the side of
the workers who are demanding better living conditions in all parts of the
world, because it is allied to the monopolies. It cannot be on the side
of the colonies which want their freedom, because it is allied to the
colonizers.
</p>
<p>
That is to say, it is for the Franco, for the colonization of Algeria
for the colonization of the Congo; it is for the maintenance of its
privileges and interests in the Panama Canal, for colonialism through the
world. It is for the German militarism and for the resurgence of German
militarism. It is for Japanese militarism and for the resurgence of
Japanese militarism.
</p>
<p>
The Government of the United States forgets the millions of Jews
murdered in European concentration camps by the Nazis, who are today
regaining their influence in the German army. It forgets the Frenchmen who
were killed in their heroic struggle against the occupation; it forgets the
American soldiers who died on the Seigfried Line, in the Ruhr, on the
Rhine, and on the Asian fronts. The United States Government cannot be for
the integrity and sovereignty of nations. Why? Because it must curtail
the sovereignty of nations in order to keep its military bases, and each
base is a dagger thrust into sovereignty; each base is a limitation on
sovereignty.
</p>
<p>
That is why it has to be against the sovereignty of nations, because it
must constantly limit sovereignty in order to maintain its policy of
encircling the Soviet Union with bases. We believe that these problems are
not properly explained to the American people. But the American people
need only imagine how uneasy they would feel if the Soviet Union began to
establish a ring of atomic bases in Cuba, Mexico, or Canada. The
population would not feel secure or calm. World opinion, including
American opinion, must be taught to see the other person's point of view.
The underdeveloped peoples should not always be represented as aggressors;
revolutionaries should not be presented as aggressors, as enemies of the
American people, because we have seen American like Carleton Beals, Waldo
Frank, and others, famous and distinguished intellectuals, shed tears at
the thought of the mistakes that are being made, at the breach of
hospitality towards us; there are many Americans, the most humane, the most
progressive, and the most esteemed writers, in whom I see the nobility of
this country's early leaders, the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, and the
Lincolns. I say this is no spirit of demegogy, but with the sincere
admiration that we feel for those who once succeeded in freeing their
people from colonial status and who did not fight in order that their
country might today be the ally of all the reactionaires, the gangsters,
the big landowners, the monopolists, the exploiters, the militarists, the
facists in the world, that is to say, the ally of the most reactionary
forces, but rather in order that their country might always be the champion
of noble and just ideals.
</p>
<p>
We know well what will be said about us, today, tomorrow, every day, to
deceive the American people. But is does not matter. We are doing our
duty by stating our views in, this historic Assembly.
</p>
<p>
We proclaim the right of people to freedom, the right of people to
nationhood; those who know that nationalism means the desire of the people
to regain what is rightly theirs, their wealth, their natural resources,
conspire against nationalism.
</p>
<p>
We are, in short, for all the noble aspirations of all the peoples.
That is our position. We are, and always shall be for everything that is
just: against colonialism, exploitation, monopolies, militarism, the
armaments race, and warmongering. We shall always be against such things.
That will be our position.
</p>
<p>
And to conclude, fulfilling what we regard as our duty, I am going to
quote to this Assembly the key part of the Declaration of Havana. As you
all know, the Declaration of Havana was the Cuban people's answer to the
Declaration of San Jose, Costa Rica. Nor 10, nor 100, nor 100,000, but
more than one million Cubans gathered together.
</p>
<p>
At that Assembly, which was convened as an answer to the Declaration of
San Jose, the following principles were proclaimed, in consultation with
the people and by acclamation of the people, as the principles of the Cuban
Revolution.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"The National General Assembly of the Cuban people condemns largescale
landowning as a source of poverty for the peasant and a backward and
inhuman system of agricultural production; it condemns starvation wages and
the iniquitous exploitation of human work by illegitimate and privileged
interests; it condemns illiteracy, the lack of teachers, of schools, doctor
and hospitals; the lack of old-age security in the countries of America; it
condemns discrimination against the Negro and the Indian'; it condemns the
inequality and the exploitation of women; it condemns political and
military oligarchies, which keep our peoples in poverty, prevent their
democratic development and the full exercise of their sovereignty; it
condemns concessions of the natural resources of our countries as a policy
of surrender which betrays the interests of the peoples; it condemns the
governments which ignore the demands of their people in order to obey
orders from abroad; it condemns the systematic deception of the people by
mass communications media which serve the interests of the oligarchies and
the policy of imperialist oppression; it condemns the monopoly held by
news agencies, which are instruments of monopolist trusts and agents of
such interests; it condemns the repressive laws which prevent the workers,
the peasants, the students and the intellectuals, the great majorities in
each country, from organizing themselves to fight for their social and
national rights; it condemns the imperialist monopolies and enterprises
which continually plunder our wealth, exploit our workers and peasants,
bleed our economies to keep them in a backward state, and subordinate Latin
American politics to their designs and interests.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"In short, The National General Assembly of the Cuban People condemns
the exploitation of man by man, and the exploitations of underdeveloped
countries by imperialists capital.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"Therefore, the National General Assembly of the Cuban People proclaims
before America, and proclaims here before the world, the right of the
peasants to the land; the right of the workers to the fruits of their
labor; the right of the children to education: the right of the sick to
medical care and hospitalization; the right of young people to work; the
right of students to free vocational training and scientific education; the
right of Negroes, and Indians to full human dignity; the right of women to
civil, social and political equality; the right of the elderly to security
in their old age; the right of intellectuals, artists and scientists so
fight through their works for a better world; the right of States to
nationalize imperialist monopolies, thus rescuing their national wealth and
resources; the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of
peoples to convert their military fortresses into schools, and to arm their
workers — because in this we too have to be arms-conscious, to arm our
people in defense against imperialist attacks — their peasants, their
students, their intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, women, young people, old
people, all the oppressed and exploited, so that they themselves can defend
their rights and their destinies."
</p>
<p>
Some people wanted to know what the policy of the Revolutionary
Government of Cuba was. Very well, them, this is our policy (OVATION).
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
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Castro Internet Archive
To the U.N. General Assembly
The Problem of Cuba and its Revolutionary Policy
Spoken: September 26, 1960 at the U.N. General Assembly
Source: Castro Speech Database [Embassy of Cuba]
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
Speech of Dr. Fidel Castro at the U.N. General Assembly, September 1960.
No. 4. Issued by the Embassy of Cuba, Colombo.
Mr. President,
Fellow Delegates
Although it has been said of us that we speak at great length, you may
rest assured that we shall endeavor to be brief and to put before you what
we consider it our duty to say. We shall also speak slowly in order to
co-operate with the interpreters.
Some people may think that we are very annoyed and upset by the
treatment the Cuban delegation has received. This is not the case. We
understand full well the reasons behind it. That is why we are not
irritated. Nor should anybody worry that Cuba will not continue to the
effort of achieving a worldwide understanding. That being so, we shall
speak openly.
It is extremely expensive to send a delegation to the United Nations.
We, the underdeveloped countries, do not have many resources to spend,
unless it is to speak openly at this meeting of representatives of almost
every country in the world.
The speakers who have preceded me on this rostrum have expressed their
concern about problems the whole world is concerned about. We too are
concerned about those problems and yet, in the case of Cuba, there is a
very special circumstance, and it is that, at this moment, Cuba itself must
be a concern for the world, because, as several delegates have rightly said
here, among the many current problems of the world, there is the problem of
Cuba. In addition to the problems facing the world today, Cuba has
problems of her own, problems which worry her people.
Much has been said of the universal desire for peace, which is the
desire of all peoples and, therefore, the desire of our people too, but the
peace which the world wishes to preserve is the peace that we Cuban have
been missing for quite some time. The dangers that other peoples of the
world can regard as more or less remote are dangers and preoccupations that
for us are very close. It has not been easy to come to this Assembly to
state the problems of Cuba. It has not been easy for us to come here.
I do not know whether we are privileged in this respect. Are we, the
Cuban delegates, the representatives of the worst type of Government in the
world? Do we, the representatives of the Cuban delegation, deserve the
maltreatment we have received? And why our delegation? Cuba has sent many
delegations to the United Nations, and yet it was we who were singled out
for such exceptional measures: confinement to the Island of Manhattan;
notice to all hotels not to rent rooms to us, hostility and, under the
pretense of security, isolation.
Perhaps not one among you, fellow delegates, you, who are not the
individual representatives of anybody, but the representatives of your
respective countries and, for that reason, whatever happens to each of you
must concern you because of what you represent, perhaps not one among you,
upon your arrival in this city of New York, has had to under go such
personally and physically humiliating treatment as that which the President
of Cuban delegation has received.
I am not trying to agitate in this Assembly. I am merely telling the
truth. It is about time we had an opportunity to speak. Much has been
said about us for many days now, the newspapers have referred to us, but we
have remained silent. We cannot defend ourselves from such attacks in this
country. Our day to state the truth has come, and we will not fail to
state it.
As I have said, we had to undergo degrading and humiliating treatment,
including eviction from the hotel in which we were living and efforts at
extortion. When we went to another hotel, we did all in our power to avoid
difficulties. We refrained from leaving our hotel rooms and went nowhere
except to this assembly hall of the United Nations, on the few occasions
when we have come to General Assembly. We also accepted an invitation to a
reception at the Soviet Embassy, yet this was not enough for them to leave
us in peace.
There has been considerable Cuban emigration to this country. There
are more than one hundred thousand Cubans who have come to this country
during the last twenty years. They have come to this country from their
own land, where they would have liked to remain for ever, and where they
wish to return, as is always the case with those who, for social or
economic reasons, are forced to abandon their homeland. These Cubans were
wholly devoted to their work; they respected and respect the laws of this
country, but they naturally harbored a feeling of love for their native
country and its Revolution. They never had any problems, but one day
another type of visitor began to arrive in this country, individuals who in
some cases had murdered hundreds of our compatriots. Soon they were
encouraged by publicity here. The authorities received them warmly and
soon encouraged them, and, naturally, that encouragement is reflected in
their conduct. They provoke frequent incidents with the Cuban population
which has worked honestly in this country for many years.
One of such incidents, provoked by those who feel supported by the
systematic campaigns against Cuba and by the authorities, caused the death
of a child. That was a lamentable event, and we should all regret such an
event. The guilty ones were not the Cubans who lived here. The guilty ones
were, even less, we, the members of the Cuban delegation, and yet
undoubtedly, you have all seen the headlines of the newspapers, which
stated that "pro-Castro groups" had killed a ten-year old girl. With the
characteristic hypocrisy of those who have a say in the relations between
Cuba and this country, a spokesman for the White House immediately made
declarations to the world pointing out the deed, in fact, almost fixing the
guilt on the Cuban delegation. And of course, His Excellency, the United
States Delegate to the Assembly, did not fail to join the farce, sending a
telegram of condolence to the Venezuelan Government, addressed to the
victim's relatives, as though he felt called upon to give some explanation
for something Cuban delegation was, in effect, responsible for.
But that was not all. When we were forced to leave one of the hotels
in this city, and came to the United National Headquarters while efforts
were being made to find accommodation for us, a hotel, a humble hotel of
this city, a Negro hotel in Harlem, offered to rent us rooms [where Castro met Malcolm X]. The reply
came when we were speaking to the Secretary General. Nevertheless, an
official of the State Department did all in his power to prevent our staying
at that hotel. At that moment, as though by magic, hotels began appearing
all over New York. Hotels which had previously refused lodgings to the
Cuban delegation offered us rooms, even free of charge. Out of simple
reciprocity we accepted the Harlem hotel. We felt then that we had earned
the right to be left in peace. But peace was not accorded us.
Once in Harlem, since it was impossible to prevent us from living
there, the slander and defamation campaigns began. They began spreading the
news all over the world that the Cuban delegation had lodged in a brothel.
For some humble hotel in Harlem, a hotel inhabited by Negroes of the United
States, must obviously be a brothel. Furthermore, they have tried to heap
infamy upon the Cuban delegation, without even respecting the female
members who work with us and are a part of the Cuban delegation.
If we were the kind of men they try to depict at all costs, imperialism
would not have lost all hope, as it did long ago, of somehow buying or
seducing us. But, since they lost that hope a long time ago — though they
never had reasons to sustain it — after having stated that the Cuban
delegation lodged in a brothel, they should at least realize that
imperialist financial capital is a prostitute that cannot seduce us — and
not precisely the "respectful" type of prostitute described by Jean Paul
Sarte.
Now, to the problem of Cuba. Perhaps some of you are well aware of the
facts, perhaps others are not. It all depends on the sources of
information, but, undoubtedly, the problem of Cuba, born within the last
two years, is a new problem for the world. The world had not had many
reasons to know that Cuba existed. For many, Cuba was something of an
appendix of the United States. Even for many citizens of this country, Cuba
was a colony of the United States. As far as the map was concerned, this
we not the case: our country had a different color from that of the
United States. But in reality Cuba was a colony of the United States.
How did our country became a colony of the United States? It was not
because of its origins; the same men did not colonize the United States and
Cuba. Cuba has a very different ethnical and cultural origin, and the
difference was widened over the centuries. Cuba was the last country in
America to free itself from Spanish colonial rule, to cast off, with due
respect to the representative of Spain, the Spanish colonial yoke; and
because it was the last, it also had to fight more fiercely.
Spain had only one small possession left in America and it defended it
with tooth and nail. Our people, small in numbers, scarcely a million
inhabitants at that time, had to face alone, for almost thirty years, an
army considered one of the strongest in Europe. Against our small national
population the Spanish Government mobilized an army as big as the total
forces that had fought against South American independence. Half a million
Spanish soldiers fought against the historic and unbreakable will of our
people to be free.
For thirty years the Cubans fought alone for their independence; thirty
years of struggle that strengthened our love for freedom and independence.
But Cuba was a fruit — according to the opinion of a President of the
United States at the beginning of the past century, John Adams — , it was
an apple hanging from the Spanish tree, destined to fall, as soon as it was
ripe enough, into the hands of the United States. Spanish power had worn
itself out in our country. Spain had neither the men nor the economic
resources to continue the war in Cuba; Spain had been defeated. Apparently
the apple was ripe, and the United States Government held out its open
hands.
Not one but several apples fell in to the hands of the United States.
Puerto Rico fell — heroic Puerto Rico, which had begun its struggle for
independence at the same time as Cuba. The Philippine Islands fell, and
several other possessions. However, the method of dominating our country
could not be the same. Our country had struggled fiercely, and thus had
gained the favor of world public opinion. Therefore the method of taking
our country had to be different.
The Cubans who fought for our independence and at that very moment were
giving their blood and their lives believed in good faith in the joint
resolution of the Congress of the United States of April 20, 1898, which
declared that "Cuba is, and by right ought to be, free and independent."
The people of the United States were sympathetic to the Cuban struggle
for liberty. That joint declaration was a law adopted by the Congress of
the United States through which war was declared on Spain. But that
illusion was followed by a rude awakening. After two years of military
occupation of our country, the unexpected happened: at the very moment
that the people of Cuba, through their Constituent Assembly, were drafting
the Constitution of the Republic, a new law was passed by the United States
Congress, a law proposed by Senator Platt, bearing such unhappy memories
for the Cubans. That law stated that the constitution of the Cuba must
have an appendix under which the United States would be granted the right
to intervent in Cuba's political affairs and, furthermore, to lease certain
parts of Cuba for naval bases or coal supply station.
In other words, under a law passed by the legislative body of a foreign
country, Cuban's Constitution had to contain an appendix with those
provisions. Our legislators were clearly told that if they did not accept
the amendment, the occupation forces would not be withdrawn. In other
words, an agreement to grant another country the right to intervene and to
lease naval bases was imposed by force upon my country by the legislative
body of a foreign country.
It is well, I think, for countries just entering this Organization,
countries just beginning their independent life, to bear in mind our
history and to note any similar conditions which they may find waiting for
them along their own road. And if it is not they, then those who came
after them, or their children, or grandchildren, although it seems to us
that we will not have to wait that long.
Then began the new colonization of our country, the acquisition of the
best agricultural lands by United States firms, concessions of Cuban
natural resources and mines, concessions of public utilities for
exploitation purposes, commercial concessions of all types. These
concessions, when linked with the constitutional right — constitutional by
force — of intervention in our country, turned it from a Spanish colony
into an American colony.
Colonies do not speak. Colonies are not known until they have the
opportunity to express themselves. That is why our colony and its problems
were unknown to the rest of the world. In geography books reference was
made to a flag and a coat of arms. There was an island with another color
on the maps, but it was not an independent republic. Let us not deceive
ourselves, since by doing so we only make ourselves ridiculous. Let no one
be mistaken. There was no independent republic; there was only a colony
where orders were given by the Ambassador of the United States.
We are not ashamed to have to declare this. On the contrary: we are
proud to say that today no embassy rules our country; our country is ruled
by its people!
Once against the Cuban people had to resort to fighting in order to
achieve independence, and that independence was finally attained after
seven bloody years of tyranny, who forced this tyranny upon us? Those who
in our country were nothing more than tools of the interests which
dominated our country economically.
How can an unpopular regime, inimical to the interests of the people,
stay in power unless it is by force? Will we have to explain to the
representatives of our sister republics of Latin America what military
tyrannies are? Will we have to outline to them how these tyrannies have
kept themselves in power? Will we have to explain the history of several
of those tyrannies which are already classical? Will we have to say what
forces, what national and international interests support them?
The military group which tyrannized our country was supported by the
most reactionary elements of the nation, and, above all, by the foreign
interests that dominated the economy of our country. Everybody knows, and
we understand that even the Government of the United States admits it, that
that was the type of government favored by the monopolies. Why? Because by
the use of force it was possible to check the demands of the people; by
the use of force it was possible to suppress strikes for improvement of
living standards; by the use of force it was possible to crush all
movements on the part of the peasants to own the land they worked; by the
use of force it was possible to curb the greatest and most deeply felt
aspirations of the nation.
That is why governments of force were favored by the ruling circles of
the United States. That is why governments of force stayed in power for so
long, and why there are governments of force still in power in America.
Naturally, it all depends on whether it is possible to secure the support
of the United States.
For instance, now they say they oppose one of these governments of
force; the Government of Trujillo. But they do not say they are against
other governments of force — that of Nicaragua, or Paraguay, for example.
The Nicaraguan one is no longer government of force; it is a monarchy that
is almost as constitutional as that of the United Kingdom, where the reins
of power are handed down from father to son. The same would have occurred
in my own country. It was the type of government of force — that of
Fulgencio Batista — which suited the American monopolies in Cuba, but it
was not, of course, the type of government which suited the Cuban people,
and the Cuban people, at a great cost in lives and sacrifices, over threw
the government.
What did the Revolution find when it came to power in Cuba? What
marvels did the Revolution find when it came to power in Cuba? First of
all the Revolution found that 600,000 able Cubans were unemployed — as
many, proportionately, as were unemployed in the United States at the time
of the great depression which shook this country and which almost created a
catastrophy in the United States. That was our permanent unemployment.
Three million out of a population of somewhat over 6,000,000 did not have
electric lights and did not enjoy the advantages and comforts of
electricity. Three and a half million out of a total of slightly more than
6,000,000 lived in huts, shacks and slums, without the slightest sanitary
facilities. In the cities, rents took almost one third of family incomes.
Electricity rates and rents were among the highest in the world.
Thirty-seven and one half percent of our population were illiterate; 70
per cent of the rural children had no teachers; 2 per cent of population,
that is, 100,000 persons out of a total of more than 6,000,000 suffered
from tuberculosis. Ninety-five per cent of the children in rural areas
were affected by parasites, and the infant mortality rate was therefore
very high, just the opposite of the average life span.
On the other hand, 85 per cent of the small farmers were paying rents
for the use of land to the tune of almost 30 per cent of their income,
while 1 1/2 percent of the landowners controlled 46 per cent of the total
area of the nation. Of course, the proportion of hospital beds to the
number of inhabitants of the country was ridiculous, when compared with
countries that only have halfway decent medical services.
Public utilities, electricity and telephone services all belonged to
the United States monopolies. A major portion of the banking business, of
the importing business and the oil refineries, the greater part of the
sugar production, the best land in Cuba, and the most important industries
in all fields belonged to American companies. The balance of payments in
the last ten years, from 1950 to 1960, had been favorable to the United
States with regard to Cuba to the extent of one thousand million dollars.
This is without taking in to account the hundreds of millions of
dollars that were extraeted from the treasury of the country by the corrupt
officials of the tyranny and were later deposited in United States or
European Banks.
One thousand million dollars in ten years. This poor and
underdeveloped Caribbean country, with 600,000 unemployed, was contributing
greatly to the economic development of the most highly industrialized
country in the world.
That was the situation we found, and it is probably not foreign to many
of the countries represented in this Assembly, because, when all is said
and done, what we have said about Cuba is like a diagnostic x-ray
applicable to many of the countries represented here.
What alternative was there for the Revolutionary Government? To betray
the people? Of course, as far as the President of the United States is
concerned, we have betrayed our people, but it would certainly not have
been considered so, if, instead of the Revolutionary Government being true
to its people, it had been loyal to the big American monopolies that
exploited the economy of our country. At least, let note be taken here of
the wonders the Revolution found when it came to power. They were no more
and no less than the usual wonder of imperialism, which are in themselves
the wonders of the free world as far as we, the colonies, are concerned!
We surely cannot be blamed if there were 600,000 unemployed in Cuba and
37.5 per cent of the population were illiterate. We surely cannot be held
responsible if 2 per cent of the population suffered from tuberculosis and
95 per cent were affected by parasites. Until that moment none of us had
anything to do with the destiny of our country; until that moment, those
who had something to do with the destiny of our country were the rulers who
served the interests of the monopolies; until that moment, monopolies had
been in control of our country. Did anyone hinder them? No one. Did
anyone trouble them? No one. They were able to do their work, and there
we found the result of their work.
What was the state of our reserved when the tyrant Batista came to
power. There was $500,000,000 in our national reserve, a goodly sum to
have invested in the industrial development of the country. When the
Revolution came to power there was only $70,000,000 in our reserves.
Was there any concern for the industrial development of our country?
No. That is why we are astonished and amazed when we hear of the
extraordinary concern shown by the United States Government for the Fate of
the countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia. We cannot overcome our
amazement, because after fifty years we have the result of their concern
before our eyes.
What has the Revolutionary Government done? What crime has the
Revolutionary Government committed to deserve the treatment we have
received here, and the powerful enemies that events have shown us we have?
Did problems with the United States Government arise from the first
moments? No. It is perhaps that when we reached power we were imbued with
the purpose of getting into international trouble? No. No Revolutionary
government wants international trouble when it comes to power. What a
revolutionary government wants to do is concentrate its efforts on solving
its own problems; what it wants to do is carry out a program for the
people, as is the desire of all governments that are interested in the
progress of their country.
The first unfriendly act perpetrated by the Government of the United
States was to throw open its doors to a gang of murders who had left our
country covered with blood. Men who had murdered hundreds of defenseless
peasants, who for many years never tired of torturing prisoners, who killed
right and left — were received in this country with open arms. To us,
this was amazing. Why this unfriendly act on the part of the Government of
the United States towards Cuba? Why this act of hostility? At that time
we could not quite understand; now we see the reason clearly. Was that the
proper policy as regards relations between the United States and Cuba?
Certainly not, because we were the injured party, inasmuch as the Batista
regime remained in power with the help of tanks, planes and arms furnished
by the Government of the United States; the Batista regime remained in
power thanks to the use of an army whose officers were trained by a
military mission sent by the United States Government; and we trust that no
official of the United States will dare to deny that truth.
Even when the Rebel Army arrived in Havana, the American military
mission was in the most important military camp of the city. That was a
broken army, an army that had been defeated and had surrendered. We could
very well have considered those foreign officers as prisoners of war, since
they had been there helping and training the enemies of the people.
However, we did not do so. We merely asked the members of that military
mission to return to their country, because after all, we did not need
their lessons; their pupils had been defeated.
I have with me a document. Do not be surprised as its appearance, for
it is a torn document. It is an old military pact, by virtue of which the
Batista tyranny received generous assistance from the Government of the
United States. And it is quite important to know the contents of Article 2
of this Agreement:
"The Government of the Republic of Cuba commits itself to make
efficient use of the assistance it receives from the United States,
pursuant to the present agreement, in order to carry out the plans of
defense accepted by both Governments, pursuant to which the two Governments
will take part in missions which are important for the defense of the
Western Hemisphere, and, unless permission is previously obtained from the
Government of the United States of America ..."
— I repeat:
"and unless permission is previously obtained from the Government of
the United States, such assistance will not be dedicated to other ends than
those for which such assistance has been granted."
That assistance was used to combat the Cuban revolutionaries; it was
therefore approved by the Government of the United States. And even when,
some months before the war was over, an embargo on arms for Batista was put
into effect, after more than six years of military help, once the arms
embargo had been solemnly declared, the Rebel Army had proof, documentary
proof, that the forces of the tyranny had been supplied with 300 rockets to
be fired from planes.
When our comrades living in this country laid these documents before
the public opinion of the United States, the Government of the United
States found no other explanation than to say that we were wrong, that they
had not sent new supplies to the army of the tyranny, but had just changed
some rockets that could not be used in their planes for another type of
rocket that could — and, by the way, they were fired at us while we were
in the mountains. I must say that this is a unique way of explaining a
contradiction when it can be neither justified nor explained. According to
the United States, then, this was not military assistance; it was probably
some sort of '"technical assistance."
Why, then, if all this existed and was a cause of resentment for our
people ... because everybody knows, even the most innocent and guileless,
that with the revolution that has taken place in military equipment, those
weapons from the last war have became throughly obsolete for a modern war.
Fifty tanks of armoured cars and a few outmoded aircraft cannot defend
a continent, much less a hemisphere. But on the other hand they are good
enough to oppress unarmed peoples. They are good for what they are used
for: to intimidate people and to defend monopolies. That is why these
hemisphere defense pacts might better be described as "defense pacts for
the protection of United States monopolies."
And so the Revolutionary Government began to take the first steps. The
first thing it did was to lower the rents paid by families by fifty per
cent, a just measure, since, as I said earlier, there were families paying
up to one third of their income. The people had been the victim of housing
speculation, and city lots had also been the subject of speculation at the
expense of the entire Cuban people. But when the Revolutionary Government
reduced the rents by fifty per cent, there were, of course, a few
individuals who became upset, the few who owned those apartment buildings,
but the people rushed into the streets rejoicing, as they would in any
country, even here in New York, if rents were reduced by fifty per cent.
But this was no problem to the monopolies. Some American monopolies owned
large buildings, but they were relatively few in number.
Then another law was passed, a law cancelling the concessions which had
been granted by the tyranny of Batista to the Telephone Company, an
American monopoly. Taking advantage of the fact our people were
defenseless, they had obtained valuable concessions. The Revolutionary
Government then cancelled these concessions and re-established normal
prices for telephone services. Thus began the first conflict with the
American monopolies.
The third measure was the reduction of electricity rates, which were
the highest in the world. Then followed the second conflict with the
American monopolies. We were beginning to appear communist; they were
beginning to daub us in red because we had clashed head on with the
interests of the United States monopolies.
Then followed the next law, an essential and inevitable law for our
country, and a law which sooner or later will have to be adopted by all
countries of the world, at least by those which have not yet adopted it:
the Agrarian Reform Law. Of course, in theory everybody agrees with the
Agrarian Reform Law. Nobody will deny the need for it unless he is a fool.
No one can deny that agrarian reform is one of the essential conditions for
the economic development of the country. In Cuba, even the big landowners
agreed about the agrarian reform — only they wanted their own kind of
reform, such as the one defended by many theoreticians; a reform which
would not harm their interests, and above all, one which would not be put
into effect as long as it could be avoided. This is something that is well
known to the economic bodies of the United Nations, something nobody even
cares to discuss any more. In my country it was absolutely necessary:
more than 200,000 peasant families lived in the countryside without land on
which to grow essential food crops.
Without an agrarian reform, our country would have been unable to take
that step; we made an agrarian reform. Was it a radical agrarian reform?
We think not. It was a reform adjusted to the needs of our development,
and in keeping with our own possibilities of agricultural development. In
other words, was an agrarian reform which was to solve the problems of the
landless peasants, the problem of supplying basic foodstuffs, the problem
of rural unemployment, and which was to end, once and for all, the ghastly
poverty which existed in the countryside of our native land.
And that is where the first major difficulty arose. In the neighboring
Republic of Guatemala a similar case had occurred. And I honestly warn my
colleagues of Latin America, Africa and Asia; whenever you set out to make
a just agrarian reform, you must be ready to face s similar situation,
especially if the best and largest tracts of land are owned by American
monopolies, as was the case in Cuba. (OVATION)
It is quite possible that we may later be accused of giving bad advice
in this Assembly. It is not our intention to disturb anybody's sleep. We
are simply stating the facts, although the facts are sufficient to disturb
everybody's sleep.
Then the problem of payment arose. Notes from the State Department
rained on our Government. They never asked about our problems, not even
out of sheer pity, or because of the great responsibility they had in
creating such problems. They never asked us how many died of starvation in
our country, or how many were suffering from tuberculosis, or how many were
unemployed. No, they never asked about that. A sympathetic attitude
towards our needs? Certainly not. All talks by the representatives of the
Government of the United States centered upon the Telephone Co., the
Electric Co., and the land owned by American Companies.
How could we solve the problem of payment? Of course, the first
question that should have been asked was what we were going to pay with,
rather than how. Can you gentlemen conceive of a poor underdeveloped
country, with 600,000 unemployed and such a large number of illiterates and
sick people, a country whose reserves have been exhausted, and which has
contributed to the economy of a powerful country with one thousand million
dollars in ten years — can you conceive of this country having the means
to pay for the land affected by the Agrarian Reform Law, or the means to
pay for it in the terms demanded?
What were the State Department aspirations regarding their affected
interests? They wanted prompt, efficient and just payment. Do you
understand that language? "Prompt, efficient, and just payment." That
means, "pay now, in dollars, and whatever we ask for our land." (APPLAUSE)
We were not 100 per cent communist yet (LAUGHS) We were just becoming
slightly pink. We did not confiscate land; we simply proposed to pay for it
in twenty years, and in the only way in which we could pay for it: in
bonds, which would mature in twenty years at 4 1/2 per cent, or amortized
yearly.
How could we pay for the land in dollars, and the amount they asked for
it? It was absurd. Anyone can readily understand that, under those
circumstances, we had to choose between making the agrarian reform, and not
making it. If we choose not to make it, the dreadful economic situation of
our country would last indefinitely. If we decided to make it, we exposed
ourselves to the hatred of the Government of the powerful neighbor of the
north.
We decided to go on with the agrarian reform. Of course, the limits
set to latifundia in Cuba would amaze a representative of the Netherlands,
for example, or of any country of Europe, because of their extent. The
maximum amount of land set forth in the Agrarian Reform Law is 400 hectares
(988 acres). In Europe, 40 hectares is practically a lati-fundium; in
Cuba, where there were American monopolies that had up to 200,000 hectares
— I repeat, in case someone thinks he has heard wrong, 200,000 hectares —
an agrarian reform law reducing the maximum limit to 400 hectares was
inadmissible.
But the truth is that in our country it was not only the land that was
the property of the agrarian monopolies. The largest and most important
mines were also owned by those monopolies. Cuba produces, for example, a
great deal of nickel. All of the nickel was exploited by American
interests, and under the tyranny of Batista, an American company, the Moa
Bay, had obtained such a juicy concession that in a mere five years — mark
my words, in a mere five years — it intended amortizing an investment of
$120,000,000. A $120,000,000 investment amortized in five years!
And who had given the Moa Bay company this concession through the
intervention of the Government of the United States? Quite simply, the
tyrannical government of Fulgencio Batista, which was there to defend the
interests of the monopolies. And this is an absolutely true fact. Exempt
from all taxes what were those companies going to leave for the Cubans?
The empty, worked out mines, the impoverished land, and not the slightest
contribution to the economic development of our country.
And so the Revolutionary Government passed a mining law which forced
those monopolies to pay a 25 per cent tax on the exportation of minerals.
The attitude of the Revolutionary Government already had been too bold. It
had clashed with the interests of the international electric trusts; it
had clashed with the interests of the international telephone trusts; it
had clashed with the interests of the mining trusts; it had clashed with
the interests of the United Fruit Co; and it had in effect, clashed with
the most powerful interests of the United States, which, as you know, are
very closely linked with each other. And that was more than the Government
of the United States — or rather, the representatives of the United States
monopolies — could possibly tolerate.
Then began a new period of harassment of the Revolution. Can anyone who
objectively analyzes the facts? Who is willing to think honestly, not as
the UP or the AP tell him, to think with his head and to draw conclusions
from his own reasoning and the facts without prejudice, sincerely and
honestly — would anyone who does this consider that things which the
Revolutionary Government did were such as to demand the destruction of the
Cuban Revolution? No. But the interests affected by the Cuban Revolution
were not concerned about the Cuban case; they were not being ruined by the
measures of the Cuban Revolutionary Government. That was not the problem.
The problem lay in the fact that those very interests owned the wealth and
the natural resources of the greater part of the peoples of the world.
The attitude of the Cuban Revolution therefore had to be punished.
Punitive actions of all sorts — even the destruction of those insolent
people — had to follow the audacity of the Revolutionary Government.
On our honor, we swear that up to that moment we had not had the
opportunity even to exchange letters with the distinguished Prime Minister
of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. That is to say that when, for the
North American press and the international news agencies that supply
information to the world, Cuba was already a Communist Government, a red
peril ninety miles from the United States with a Government dominated by
Communists, the Revolutionary Government had not even had the opportunity
of establishing diplomatic and commercial relations with the Soviet Union.
But hysteria can go to any length; hysteria is capable of making the
most unlikely and absurd claims. Of course, let no one think for a moment
that we are going to intone a mea culpa here. There will be no mea culpa.
We do not have to ask anyone's pardon. What we have done, we have done
consciously, and above all, fully convinced of our right to do it.
(PROLONGED APPLAUSE)
Then came the threats against our sugar quota, imperialism's cheap
philosophy of showing generosity, egoistical and exploiting generosity; and
they began showing kindness towards Cuba, declaring that they were paying
us a preferential price for sugar, which amounted to a subsidy to Cuban
sugar — a sugar which was not so sweet for Cubans, since we were not the
owners of the best sugar-producing land, nor the owners of the largest
sugar mills. Furthermore, in that affirmation lay hidden the true history
of Cuban sugar, of the sacrifices which had been imposed upon my country
during the periods when it was economically attacked.
However when quotas were established, our participation was reduced to
28 per cent, and the advantages which that law had granted us, the very few
advantages which that law had granted us, were gradually taken away in
successive laws, and, of course the colony depended on the colonial power.
The economy of the colony had been organized by the colonial power.
The colony had to be subjected to the colonial power, and if the colony
took measures to free itself from the colonial powers that country would
take measures to crush the colony. Conscious of the subordination of our
economy to their market, the Government of the United States began to issue
a series of warnings that our quota would be reduced further, and at the
same time, other activities were taking place in the United States of
America: the activities of counterrevolutionaries.
One afternoon an airplane coming from the north flew over one of the
sugar refineries and dropped a bomb. This was a strange and unheard-of
event, but we knew full well where that plane came from. On another
afternoon another plane flew over our sugar cane fields and dropped a few
incendiary bombs. These events which began sporadically continued
systematically.
One afternoon, when a number of American tourist agents were visiting
Cuba in response to an effort made by the Revolutionary Government to
promote tourism as one of the sources of national income, a plane
manufactured in the United States, of the type used in the Second World
War, flew over our capital dropping pamphlets and grenades. Of course,
some anti-aircraft guns went into action. The result was more than forty
victims, between the grenades dropped by the plane and the anti-aircraft
fire, because, as you know, some of the projectiles explode upon contacting
any object. As I said, the result was more than forty victims. There were
little girls on the street with their entrails torn out, old men and women
wantonly killed. Was this the first time it had happened in our country?
No. Children, old men and old women, young men and women, had often been
killed in the villages of Cuba by American bombs supplied to the tyrant
Batista. One one occasion, eighty workers died when a mysterious explosion
— too mysterious — took place in the harbor of Havana, the explosion of a
ship carrying Belgian weapons which had arrived in our country, after many
efforts by the United States Government to prevent the Belgian Government
from selling arms to us.
Dozens of victims of war; eighty families orphaned by the explosions.
Forty victims as a result of an airplane that brazenly flew over our
territory. The authorities of the United States Government denied the fact
that these planes came from American territory, but the plane was now
safely in a hangar in this country. When one of our magazines published a
photograph of it, the United States authorities seized the plane. A
version of the affair was issued to the effect that this was not very
important, and that these victims had not died because of the bombs, but
because of the anti-aircraft fire. Those responsible for this crime, those
who had caused these deaths were wandering about peacefully in the United
States, where they were not even prevented from committing further acts of
aggression.
May I take this opportunity of telling His Excellency the
Representative of the United States that there are many mothers in Cuba
still awaiting his telegrams of condolence for their children murdered by
the bombs of the United States (APPLAUSE).
Planes kept coming and going. But as far as they were concerned, there
was no evidence. Frankly, we don't know how they define the word
evidence. The plane was there, photographed and captured, and yet we were
told the plane did not drop any bombs. It is not known how the United
States authorities were so well informed.
Planes continued to fly over our territory dropping incendiary bombs.
Millions and millions of pesos were lost in the burning fields of sugar
cane. Many humble people of Cuba, who saw property destroyed, property
that was now truly their own, suffered burns in the struggle against those
persistent and tenacious bombings by pirate planes.
And then one day, while dropping a bomb on one of our sugar mills, a
plane exploded in mid air and the Revolutionary Government was able to
collect what was left of the pilot, who by the way, was an American. In
his documents were found, proof as to the place where the plane had taken
off from. On its way to Cuba, the plane had flown between two United States
military bases. This was a matter that could not be denied any longer: the
planes took off from the United States. Confronted with irrefutable
evidence the United States Government gave an explanation to the Cuban
Government. Its conduct in this case was not the same as in connection
with the U-2. When it was proved that the planes were taking off from the
United States, the Government of the United States did not proclaim its
right to burn over sugar cane fields. The United States Government
apologized and said it was sorry. We were lucky, after all, because after
the U - 2 incident the United States Government did not even apologize, it
proclaimed its right to carry out flights over Soviet territory. Bad luck
for the Soviets! (APPLAUSE).
But we do not have too many anti-aircraft batteries, and the planes
went on flying and bombing us until the harvest was over. When there was
no more sugar cane, the bombing stopped. We were the only country in the
world which had gone through a thing like this, although I do recall that
at the time of his visit to Cuba, President Sukarno told us that this was
not the case, for they, too, had had certain problems with American planes
flying over their territory.
But the truth is that in this peaceful hemisphere at least, we were a
country that, without being at war with anyone, had to stand the constant
attack of pirate planes. And could those planes come in and out of United
States territory unmolested? It has been stated that the defenses of the
world they call "free" are impregnable. If this is the case, how is it
that planes, not supersonic planes, but light planes with a velocity of
barely 150 miles per hour, how is it that these planes are able to fly in
and out of United States territory undetected.
The air raids ended, and then came economic aggression. What was one of
the arguments wielded by the enemies of the agrarian reform? They said
that the agrarian reform would bring chaos to agricultural production, that
production would diminish considerably, and that the Government of the
United States was concerned because Cuba might not be able to fulfill her
commitments to the American market. The first argument — and it is
appropriate that at least the new delegations in the General Assembly
should become familiar with some of the arguments, because some day they
may have to answer similar arguments — the first argument was that the
agrarian reform meant the ruin of the country. This was not the case. If
this had been so, and agricultural production had deceased, the American
Government would not have felt the need to carry on its economic
aggression.
Did they sincerely believe in what they said when they stated that the
agrarian reform would cause a drop in production? Perhaps they did.
Surely it is logical for each one to believe what his mind has been
conditioned to believe. It is quite possible they may have felt that
without the all-powerful monopolist companies, we Cubans would be unable to
produce sugar. perhaps they were even sure we would ruin the country. And
of course, if the Revolution had ruined the country, then the United States
would not have had to attack us; it would have left us alone, and the
United States Government would have appeared as a good and honourable
government, and we as people who ruined our own Nation, and as a great
example that Revolutions should not be made because they ruin countries.
Fortunately, that was not the case. There is proof that revolutions do not
ruin countries, and that proof has just been furnished by the Government of
the United States. Among other things, it has been proved that revolutions
do not ruin countries, and that imperialist governments do try to ruin
countries.
Cuba had not been ruined; she therefore had to be ruined. Cuba needed
new markets for its products, and we would honestly ask any delegation
present if it does not want its country to sell what it produces and its
export to increase. We wanted our exports to increase, and this is what all
countries wish; this must be a universal law. Only egotistical interests
can oppose the universal interest in trade and commercial exchange, which
surely is one of the most ancient aspirations and needs of mankind.
We wanted to sell our products and went in search of new markets. We
signed a trade treaty with the Soviet Union, according to which we would
sell one million tons of sugar and would purchase a certain amount of
Soviet products or articles. Surely no one can say that this is an
incorrect procedure. There may be some who would not do such a thing
because it might displease certain intersts. We really did not have to ask
permission from the State Department in order to sign a trade treaty with
the Soviet Union, because we considered ourselves, and we continue to
consider ourselves and we will always consider ourselves, a truly
independent and free country.
When the amount of sugar in stock began to diminish stimulating our
economy, we received the hard blow: at the request of the executive power
of the United States, Congress passed a law empowering the President or
Executive power to reduce the import quotas for Cuban sugar to whatever
limits might deem appropriate. The economic weapon was wielded against our
Revolution. The justification for that attitude had already been prepared
by publicity experts; the campaign had been on for a long time. You know
perfectly well that in this country monopolies and publicity are one and
the same thing. The economic weapon was wielded, our sugar quota was
suddenly cut by about one million tons — sugar that had already been
produced and prepared for the American market — in order to deprive our
country of resources for its development, and thus reduce it to a state of
impotence, with the natural political consequences. Such measures were
expressly banned by Regional International Law. Economic aggression, as
all Latin American delegates here know, is expressly condemned by Regional
International Law. However, the Government of the United States violated
that law, wielded its economic weapon, and cut our sugar quota by about one
million tons. They could do it.
What was Cuba's defense when confronted by that reality? It could
appeal to the United Nations. It could turn to the United Nations, in
order to denounce political and economic aggressions, the air attacks of
the pirate planes, besides the constant interference of the Government of
the United States in the political affairs of our country and the
subversive campaigns it carries out against the Revolutionary Government of
Cuba.
So we turned to the United Nations. The United Nations had power to
deal with these matters. The United Nations is, within the hierarchy of
international organizations, the highest authority. The United Nations'
authority is even above that of the OAS. And besides, we were interested
in bringing the problem to the United Nations, because we know quite well
the situation the economy of Latin America finds itself in; because we
understand the state of dependence of the economy of Latin America in
relation to the United States. The United Nations knew of the affair, it
requested the OAS to make an investigation, and the OAS met. Very well.
And what was to be expected? That the OAS would protect the country; that
the OAS would condemn the political aggression against Cuba, and above all
that would condemn the economic aggression against our country. That
should have been expected. But after all, we were a small people of the
Latin American community of nations. We were just another victim. And we
were neither the first or the last, because Mexico had already been
attacked more than once militarily. In one way they tore away from Mexico
a great part of its territory, and on that occasion the heroic sons of
Mexico leaped to their death from the Castle of Chapultepec enwrapped in
the Mexican flag rather than surrender. These were the heroic sons of
Mexico (APPLAUSE).
And that was not the only aggression. That was not the only time that
American infantry forces trod upon Mexican soil. Nicaragua was invaded and
for seven long years was heroically defended by Ceasar Augusto Sandino.
Cuba suffered intervention more than once, and so did Haiti and Santo
Domingo. Guatemala also suffered intervention. Who among you could
honestly deny the intervention of the United Fruit Co. and the State
Department of the United States when the legitimate government of Guatemala
was overthrown? I understand fully well that there may be some who
consider it their official duty to be discreet on this matter, and who
may even be willing to come here and deny this, but in their consciences
they know we are simply stating the truth.
Cuba was not the first victim of aggression; Cuba was not the first
country to be in danger of aggression. In this hemisphere everyone knows
that the Government of the United States has always imposed its own law —
the law of the strongest, in virtue of which they have destroyed Puerto
Rican nationhood and have imposed their domination on that friendly country
— law in accordance with which they seized and held the Panama Canal.
This was nothing new, our country should have been defended, but it was
never defended. Why? Let us get to the bottom of this matter, without
merely studying the from. If we stick to the dead letter of the law, then
we are protected; if we abide by reality, we have no protection whatsoever,
because reality imposes itself on the law set forth in international codes,
and that reality is, that a small nation attacked by a powerful country did
not have any defense and was not defended.
With all due respect to this organization, I must state here that, that
is why the people, our people, the people of Cuba, who have learned much
and are quite up to the role they are laying, to the heroic struggle they
are conducting ... our people who have learned in the school of
international events, know that in the last instance, when their rights
have been denied and aggressive forces are marshalled against them, they
still have the supreme and heroic resource of resisting when their rights
are not protected by either the OAS or the UN (OVATION).
That is why we, the small countries, do not yet feel too sure that our
rights will be preserved; that is why we, the small countries, whenever we
decide to become free, know that we become free at our own risk. In truth,
when people are united and are defending a just right, they can trust their
own energies. We are not, as we have been pictured, a mere group of men
governing the country. We are a whole people governing a country — a
whole people firmly united, with a great revolutionary consciousness,
defending its rights. And this should be known by the enemies of the
revolution and of Cuba, because if they ignore this fact, they will be
making a regretable error.
These are the circumstances in which the revolutionary process has
taken place in our country; that is how we found the country, and why
difficulties have arisen. And yet the Cuban Revolution is changing what
was yesterday a land without hope, a land of poverty and illiteracy, into
one of the most advanced and developed countries in this Continent.
The Revolutionary Government, in but twenty months, has created 10,000
new schools. In this brief period it has doubled the number of rural
schools that had been created in fifty years. Cuba is today, the first
country of America that has met all its school needs, that has a teacher in
the farthest corners of the mountains.
In this brief period of time, the Revolutionary Government has built
5,000 houses in the rural and urban areas. Fifty new towns are being built
at this moment. The most important military fortresses today house tens of
thousands of students, and, in the coming year, our people intend to fight
the great battle against illiteracy, with the ambitious goal of teaching
every single inhabitant of the country to read and write in one year, and,
with that end in mind, organizations of teachers, students and workers,
that is, the entire people, are preparing themselves for an intensive
campaign, and Cuba will be the first country of America which, after a few
months, will be able to say it does not have one single illiterate.
Our people are receiving today the assistance of hundreds of doctors
who have been sent to the fields to fight against illnesses and parasitic
ailments, and improve the sanitary conditions of the nation.
In another aspect, in the preservation of our natural resources, we can
also point with pride to the fact that in only one year, in the most
ambitious plan for the conservation of natural resources being carried out
on this continent, including the United States of America and Canada, we
have planted nearly fifty million timber-yielding trees.
Youths who were unemployed, who did not attend school, have been
organized by the Revolutionary Government and are today being gainfully
and usefully employed by the country, and at the same time being prepared
for productive work.
Agricultural production in our country has been able to perform an
almost unique feat, an increase in production from the very beginning. From
the very start we were able to increase agricultural production. Why? In
the first place, because the Revolutionary Government turned more than
10,000 agricultural workers, who formerly paid rent, to owners of their
land, at the same time maintaining large-scale production through
co-operatives. In other words production was maintained through
co-operatives, thanks to which we have been able to apply the most modern
technical methods to our agricultural production, causing a marked increase
in that production.
And all this social welfare work — teachers, housing, and hospitals —
has been carried out without sacrificing the resources that we have
earmarked for development. At this very moment the Revolutionary Government
is carrying out a program of industrialization of the country, and the
first plants are already being built.
We have utilized the resources of our country in a rational manner.
Formerly, for instance, thirty-five million dollars worth of cars were
imported into Cuba, and only five million dollars worth of tractors. A
country which is mainly agricultural imported seven times more cars than
tractors. We have changed this around, and we are now importing seven
times more tractors than cars.
*PG*
Close to five hundred million dollars was recovered from the
politicians who had enriched themselves during the tyranny of Batista —
close to five hundred million dollars in cash and other assets was the
total we were able to recover from the corrupt politicians who had been
sucking the blood of our country for seven years. It is the correct
investment of these assets which enables the Revolutionary Government,
while at the same time developing plans for industrialization and for the
development of agriculture, to build houses, schools, to send teachers to
the farthest corners of the country, and to give medical assistance to
everyone — in other words, to carry out a true program of social
development.
At the Bogota meeting, as you know, the Government of the United States
proposed a plan. Was it a plan for economic development? No. It was a
plan for social development. What is understood by this? Well, it was a
plan for building houses, building schools, and building roads. But does
this settle the problem at all? How can there be a solution to the social
problems without a plan for economic development? Do they want to make
fools of the Latin American countries? What are families going to live on
when they inhabit those houses, if those houses are really built? What
shoes, what clothes are they going to wear, and what food are children
going toe at when they attend those school? Is it not known that, when a
family does not have clothes or shoes for the children, the children are
not sent to schools? With what means are they going to pay the teachers
and the doctors? How are they going to pay for the medicine? Do you want
a good way of saving medicine? Improve the nutrition of the people, and
when they eat well you will not have to spend money on hospitals.
Therefore, in view of the tremendous reality of undevelopment, the
Government of the United States now comes out with a plan for social
development. Of course, it is stimulating to observe the United States
concerning itself with some of the problems of Latin America. Thus far
they had not concerned themselves at all. What a coincidence that, they
are not worried about those problems! And the fact that this concern
emerged after the Cuban Revolution will probably be labelled by them as
purely coincidental.
Thus far, the monopolies have certainly not cared very much, except
about exploiting the underdeveloped countries. But comes the Cuban
Revolution and suddenly the monopolists are worrying, and while they attack
us economically trying to crush us, they offer aims to the countries of
Latin America. The countries of Latin America are offered, not the
resources for development that Latin America needs, but resources for
social development — houses for men who have no work, schools where
children will not go, and hospitals that would not be necessary if there
were enough food to eat (APPLAUSE).
After all, although some of my Latin American colleagues may feel it
their duty to be discreet at the United Nations, they should all welcome a
revolution such as the Cuban Revolution which at any rate has forced the
monopolists to return at least a small part of what they have been
extracting from the natural resources and the sweat of the Latin American
peoples (APPLAUSE).
Although we are not included in that aid we are not worried about that;
we do not get angry about things like that, because we have been settling
those same problems of schools and housing and so on for quite some time.
But perhaps there may be some of you who feel we are using this rostrum to
make propaganda, because the President of the United Nations has said that
some come here for propaganda purposes. And, of course, all of my
colleagues in the United Nations have a standing invitation to visit Cuba.
We do not close, our doors to any one, now do we confine anyone. Any of my
colleagues in this assembly can fision Cuba whenever he wishes, in order to
see with his own eyes what is going on. You know the chapter in the Bible
that speaks of St. Thomas, who had to see in order to believe I think it
was St. Thomas.
And, after all, we can invite any newspapermen, and any member of any
delegation, to visit Cuba and see what a nation is capable of doing with
its own resources, when they are used with honesty and reason. But we are
not only solving our housing and school problems, we are solving our
development problems as well, because without the solution of the problems
of development there can be no settlement of the social problems
themselves.
Why is the United States Government unwilling to talk of development?
It is very simple: because the Government of the United States does not
want to oppose the monopolies, and the monopolies require natural resources
and markets for the investment of their capital. That is where the great
contradiction lies. That is why the real solution to this problem is not
sought. That is why planning for the development of underdeveloped
countries with public funds is not done.
It is good that this be stated frankly, because, after all, we the
underdeveloped countries, are a majority in this Assembly — in case anyone
is unaware of this fact — and we are witnesses to what is going on in the
underdeveloped countries.
Yet, the true solution of the problem is not sought, and much is said
about the participation of private capital. Of course, this means markets
for the investment of surplus capital, like the investment that was
amortized in five years.
The government of the United States cannot propose a plan for public
investment, because this would divorce it from the very reason for being
the Government of the United States, namely the American monopolies.
Let us not beat about the bush, the reason no real economic plan is
being promoted is simply this: to preserve our lands in Latin America,
Africa, and Asia for the investment of surplus capital.
Thus far we have referred to the problems of my own country and the
reason why those problems have not been solved. Is it perhaps because we
did not want to solve them? No. The Government of Cuba has always been
ready to discuss its problems with the Government of the United States, but
the Government of the United States has not been ready to discuss its
problems with Cuba, and it must have its reasons for not doing so.
The Government of the United States doe not deign to discuss its
differences with the small country of Cuba.
What hope can the people of Cuba maintain for the solution of these
problems? the facts that we have been able to note here so far conspire
against the solution of these problems, and the United Nations should
seriously take this into account, because the people and the Government of
Cuba are justifiably concerned at the aggressive turn in the policy of the
United States with regard to Cuba, and it is proper that we should be well
informed.
In the first place, the Government of the United States considers it
has the right to promote and encourage subversion in our country. The
Government of the United States is promoting the organization of subversive
movements against the Revolutionary Government of Cuba, and we wish to
denounce this fact in this General Assembly; we also wish to denounce
specifically the fact that, for instance, a territory which belongs to
Honduras, known as Islas Cisnes, the Swan Islands, has been seized "manu
militari" by the Government of the United States and that American marines
are there, despite the fact that this territory belongs to Honduras. Thus,
violating international law and despoiling a friendly people of a part of
its territory, the United States has established a powerful radio station
on one of those Islands, in violation of international radio agreements,
and has placed it at the disposal of the war criminals and subversive
groups supported in this country; furthermore, military training is being
conducted on that island, in order to promote subversion and the landing of
armed forces in our country.
Does the Government of the United States feel it has the right to
promote subversion on our country, violating all international treaties,
including those relating to radio frequency? Does this mean, by chance,
that the Cuban Government has the right to promote subversion in the United
States? Does the Government of the United States believe it has the right
to violate radio frequency agreements? Does this mean, by chance, that the
Cuban Government has the right to violate radio frequency agreements also?
What right can the Government of the United States have over us over our
island that permits it to act towards other nations in such a manner? Let
the United States return the Swan Islands to Honduras, since it never had
any jurisdiction over those Islands (APPLAUSE).
But there are even more alarming circumstances for our people. It is
well known that, in virtue of the Platt Amendment, imposed by force upon
our people, the Government of the United States assumed the right to
establish naval bases on our territory, a right forcefully imposed and
maintained. A naval base in the territory of any country is surely a
cause for concern. First of all, there is concern over the fact that a
country which follows an aggressive and warlike international policy has a
base in the heart of our country, which brings us the risk of being
involved in any international conflict, in any atomic conflict, without our
having anything to do with the problem, because we have absolutely nothing
to do with the problems of the United States and the crises provoked by the
Government of the United States. Yet, there is a base in the heart of our
Island which entails danger for us in case of war.
But is that only danger? No. There is another danger that concerns us
even more, since it is closer to home. The Revolutionary Government of
Cuba has repeatedly expressed its concern over the fact that the
imperialist government of the United States may use that base, located in
the heart of our national territory, as an excuse to promote a self -
aggression, in order to justify an attack on our country. I repeat: the
Revolutionary Government of Cuba is seriously concerned — and makes known
this concern — over the fact that the imperialist government of the United
States of America may use a self-aggression in order to justify an attack
on our country. And this concern on our part is becoming increasingly
greater because of the intensified aggressiveness that the United States is
displaying. For instance, I have here a United Press cable which came to
my country, and which reads as follows:,
"Admiral Arleigh Burke, United States Chief of Naval Operations says
that if Cuba attempts to take the Gunatanamo Naval base by force we will
fight back" In an interview for the magazine U.S. News and World Report
(please excuse my bad pronunciation), Admiral Burke was asked if the Navy
was concerned about the situation in Cuba under Premier Fidel Castro.
"Yes, our Navy is concerned — not about our base at Guantanamo, but
about the whole Cuban situation," Admiral Burke said. The Admiral added
that all the military services are concerned.
"Is that because of Cuba's strategic position in the Caribbean?" he
was asked.
"No, not particularly,' Admiral Burke said. 'Here are a people
normally very friendly to the United States, who like our people and were
also like by us. In spite of this, an individual as appeared with a small
group of fanatical communists, determined to change all that. Castro has
taught his people to hate the United States, and has done much to ruin his
country.'
"Admiral Burke said 'we will react very fast if Castro makes any move
against the Guantanamo base.'
"If they try to take the base by force, we will fight back", he added.
Asked whether Soviet Premier Krushchev's threat about retaliatonary
rockets gave Admiral Burke 'second thoughts about fighting in Cuba' the
Admiral said:
"No, because he is not going to send his rockets. He knows quite well
he will be destroyed if he does."
He means that Russia will be destroyed.
In the first place, I must emphasize that for this gently man, to have
increased industrial production in our country by 35 per cent, to have
given employment to more than 200,000 more Cubans, to have solved many of
the social problems of our country, constitutes the ruination of our
country. And in accordance with this line of reasoning they assume the
right to prepare the conditions for aggression.
So you see how conjectures are made — very dangerous conjectures,
because this gentleman, in effect, thinks that in case of an attack on us
we are to stand alone. This is just a conjecture by Mr. Burke, but let us
imagine that Mr. Burke is wrong, let us suppose for just a moment that Mr.
Burke, although an admiral, is mistaken.
Than Admiral Burke is playing with the fate of the world in a most
irresponsible manner. Admiral Burke and his aggressive militarist clique
are playing with the fate of the world, and it would really not be worth
our while to worry over the fate of each of us, but we feel that we, as
representatives of the various peoples of the world, have the duty to
concern ourselves with the fate of the world, and we also have the duty to
condemn all those who play irresponsibly with the fate of the world. They
are not only playing with the fate of our people; they are playing with the
fate of their people and with the fate of all the people's of the world or
does thus Admiral Burke think we are still living in the times of the
blunderbusses? Does he not realize, this Admiral Burke, that we are living
in the atomic age, in an age whose disastrous and cataclysmic destructive
forces could not even he imagined by Dante or Leonardo Da Vinci, with all
their imagination, because this goes beyond the imagination of man. Yet,
he made his conjectures, United Press International spread the news all
over the world, the magazine is about to come out, hysteria is being
created, the campaign is being prepared, the imaginary danger of an attack
on the base is beginning to be publicized.
And this is not all. Yesterday a United States news bulletin appeared
containing some declarations by the United States Senator Styles Bridges
who, I believe is a member of the Armed forces Committee of the Senate of
the United States. He said:
"The United States should maintain its naval base of Guantanamo in Cuba
at all costs"; and 'we must go as far as necessary to defend those
gigantic installations of the United States. We have naval forces there,
and we have the Marines, and if we were attacked I would defend it, of
course, because I believe it is the most important base in the Caribbean
area."
This member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee did not entirely
reject the use of the atomic weapons in the case of an attack against the
base.
What does this mean? This means that not only is hysteria being
created, not only is the atmosphere being systematically prepared, but we
are even threatened with the use of atomic weapons, and, of course, among
the many things that we can think of, one is to ask this Mr. Bridges
whether he is not ashamed of himself to threaten a small country like Cuba
with the use of atomic weapons (PROLONGS APPLAUSE).
As far as we are concerned, and with all due respect, we must tell him
that the problems of the world cannot be solved by the use of threats or by
sowing fear, and that our humble people, our little country, is there.
What can we do about? We are there, however much they dislike the idea,
and our Revolution will go ahead, however much they dislike that. And our
humble people must resign themselves to their fate. They are not afraid,
nor are they shaken by this threat of the use of atomic weapons.
What does all this mean? There are many countries that have American
bases in their territory, but they are not directed against the governments
that made these concessions — at least not as far as we know. Yet ours is
the most tragic case. There is a base on our island territory directed
against Cuba and the Revolutionary Government of Cuba, in the hands of
those who declare themselves enemies of our country, enemies of our
revolution, and enemies of our people. In the entire history of the
world's present-day bases, the most tragic case is that of Cuba; a base
imposed upon us by force, well within our territory, which is a good many
miles away from the coast of the United States, an instrument used against
Cuba and the Cuban people imposed by the use of force, and a constant
threat and a cause for concern for our people.
That is why we must state here that all these rumors of attacks are
intended to create hysteria and prepare the conditions for an aggression
against our country, that we have never spoken a single word implying the
thought of any type of attack on the Guantanamo base, because we are the
first in not wanting to give imperialism an excuse to attack us, and we
state this categorically. But we also declare that from the very moment
that base was turned into a threat to the security and peace of our
country, a danger to our country, the Revolutionary Government of Cuba has
been considering very seriously the requesting, within the framework of
international law, of the withdrawal of the naval and military forces of
the United States (THE SPEAKER IS INTERRUPTED BY PROLONGED APPLAUSE) from
that portion of our National territory.
But is is imperative that this Assembly be kept well informed
regarding the problems of Cuba, because we have to be on the alert against
deceit and confusion. We have to explain these problems very clearly
because with them go the security and the fate of our country. And that is
why we want exact note to be taken of the words I have spoken, particularly
when one takes into consideration the fact that the opinions or erroneous
ideas of the politicians of this country as regards Cuban problems do not
show any signs of improving. I have here some declarations by Mr. Kennedy
that would surprise anybody. On Cuba he says. "We must use all the power
of the Organization of American States to prevent Castro from interfering
in other Latin American countries, and we must use all that power to return
freedom to Cuba". They are going to give freedom back to Cuba!
"We must state our intention," he says, "of not allowing the Soviet
Union to turn Cuba into its Caribbean base, and of applying the Monroe
Doctrine". Half-way or more into the twentieth century, this gentleman
speaks of the Monroe doctrine!
"We must make Prime Minister Castro understand that we intend to defend
our right to the Naval Base of Guantanamo." He is the third who speaks of
the problem. "And we must make the Cuban people know that we sympathize
with their legitimate economic aspirations...." Why did they not feel
sympathetic before? "....that we know their love of freedom, and that we
shall never be happy until democracy is restored in Cuba...." What
democracy? The democracy "made" by the imperialist monopolies of the
Government of the United States?
"The forces in exile that are struggling for freedom," he says — note
this very carefully so that you will understand why there are planes flying
from American territory over Cuba: pay close attention to what this
gentleman has to say. "The forces that struggle for liberty in exile and
in the mountains of Cuba should be supported and assisted, and in other
countries of Latin America communism must be confined and not allowed to
expand."
If Kennedy were not an illiterate and ignorant millionaire
(APPLAUSE)...he would understand that is is not possible to carry out a
revolution supported by landowners against the peasant in the mountains,
and that every time imperialism has tried to encourage counterrevolutionary
groups, the peasant militia has captured them in the course of a few days.
But he seems to have read a novel, or seen a Hollywood film, about
guerrillas, and he thinks it is possible to carry on guerrilla warfare in a
country where the relations of the social forces are what they are in Cuba.
In any case, this is discouraging. Let no one think, however, that
these opinions as regards Kennedy's statements indicate that we feel any
sympathy towards the other one, Mr. Nixon...(LAUGHTER) who has made similar
statements. As far as we are concerned, both lack political brains.
Up to this point we have been dealing with the problem of our country,
a fundamental duty of ours when coming before the United Nations, but we
understand that it would be a little egoistical on our part if our concern
were to be limited to our specific case alone. It is also true that we
have used up the greater part of our time informing this Assembly about the
Cuban case, and that there is not much time left for us to deal with the
remaining questions, to which we wish to refer briefly.
The case of Cuba is not isolated case. It would be an error to think
of it only as the case of Cuba. The case of Cuba is the case of all
underdeveloped countries. The case of Cuba is like that of the Congo,
Egypt, Algeria, Iran...(APPLAUSE)...like that of Panama, which wishes
to have its canal; it is like that of Puerto Rico, whose national spirit
they are destroying; like that of Honduras, a portion of whose territory
has been alienated. In short, although we have not make specific
reference to other countries, the case of Cuba is the case of all
underdeveloped, colonialized countries.
The problems which we have been describing in relation to Cuba can be
applied just as well to all of Latin America. The control of Latin
American economic resources by the monopolies, which, when they do not own
the mines directly and are in charge of extraction, as the case with the
copper of Chile, Peru, or Mexico, and with the oil of Venezuela — when
this control is not exercised directly it is because they are the owners of
the public utility companies, as is the case in Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, or the owners of telephone services, which is
the case in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Paraguay and Bolivia, or they
commercialize our products, as is the case with coffee in Brazil, Colombia,
El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, or with the cultivation, marketing
and transportations of bananas by the United Fruit Co. in Guatemala, Costa
Rica, and Honduras, or with the Cotton in Mexico and Brazil. In other
words, the monopolies control the most important industries. Woe to those
countries, the day they try to make an agrarian reform! They will be asked
for immediate, efficient, and just payment. And if, in spite of everything
they make an agrarian reform, the representative of the friendly country
who comes to the United Nations will be confined to Manhattan; they will
not rent hotel space to him; insult will he heaped upon him, and it is even
possible that he may be physically mistreated by the police.
The problem of Cuba is just an example of the situation in Latin
America. And how long will Latin America wait for its development? It
will have to wait, according to the point of view of the monopolies, until
there are two Fridays in a week.
Who is going to industrialize Latin America? The monopolies?
Certainly not. There is a report by the economic Commission of the United
Nations which explains how private capital, instead of going to the
countries that need it most for the establishment of basic industries to
contribute to their development, is being channeled referentially to the
more industrialized countries, because there, according to their beliefs,
private capital finds greater security. And, of course, even the Economic
Secretariat of the United Nations has had to admit there there is no
possible chance for development through the investment of private
capital — that is, through the monopolies.
The development of Latin America will have to be achieved through
public investment, planned and granted unconditionally without any
political strings attached, because, naturally, we all like to be
representatives of free countries. None of us like to represent a country
that does not feel itself in full possession of its freedom.
None of us wants the independence of this country to be subjected to
any interest other than that of the country itself. That is why assistance
must be given without any political conditions.
That help has been denied to us does not matter. We have not asked for
it. However, in the interest of and for the benefit of the Latin American
peoples, we do feel duty bound out of solidarity, to stress the fact that
the assistance must be given without any political conditions whatsoever.
There should be more public investments for economic development, rather
than for "social development," which is the latest thing invented to hide
the true need for the economic development of countries.
The problems of Latin America are similar to those of the rest of the
world: to those of Africa and Asia. The world is divided up among the
monopolies; the same monopolies that we find in Latin America are also
found in the Middle East. There the oil is in the hands of monopolistic
companies that are controlled by France, the United States, the United
Kingdom the Netherlands....in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, in short,
in all corners of the world. The same thing is true, for instance, in the
Philippines, and in Africa. The world has been divided among the
monopolistic interests. Who would dare deny this historic truth? The
monopolistic interests do not want to see the development of countries and
the people themselves. And the sooner they recover or amortize the capital
invested, the better.
The problems the Cuban people have had to face with the imperialistic
government of the United States are the same which Saudi Arabia would face
if it nationalized its oil, and this also applies to Iran or Iraq; the same
problems that Egypt had when it quite justifiably nationalized the Suez
Canal; the very same problems that Indonesia had when it wanted to become
independent; the same surprise attacks as against Egypt and the Congo.
Have colonialists or imperialists ever lacked a pretext when they
wanted to invade a country? Never! Somehow they have always found a
pretext. And which are the colonialist and imperialists countries? Four
or five countries — no, four or five groups of monopolies are the owners
of the wealth of the world.
If a being from another planet were to come to this Assembly, one who
had read neither the Communist Menifesto of Karl Marx nor the cables of the
United Press or the Associated Press or other monopolist publications, if
he were to ask how the world had been divided, and he saw on a map that the
wealth of the world was divided among the monopolies of four or five
countries, he would say, without further consideration; "The wealth of this
world has been badly distributed, the world is being exploited."
Here in this Assembly, where the majority of the underdeveloped
countries are represented, he would say: "The majority of the peoples that
you represent are being exploited; they have been exploited for a long
time. The form of exploitation may have changed, but you are still being
exploited." That would be the verdict.
In the address made by Premier Khrushchev there is a statement that
attracted our attention because of the value of its contents. It was when
he said that "the Soviet Union has no colonies or investments in any
country."
How great our world would be today, our world which today is threatened
with catastrophe, if all the representatives of all nations were able to
say: "Our country has no colonies and no investments in any foreign
country"! (APPLAUSE)
There is no use in going all over the question again. This is
substance of the matter, the substance of peace and war, the substance of
the armaments race. Wars, since the beginning of mankind, have occurred
for one, fundamental reason; the desire of some to despoil others of their
wealth.
Do away with the philosophy of plunder and you will have done away
forever with the philosophy of war! (APPLAUSE) Do away with the colonies,
wipe out the exploitation of countries by monopolies, and mankind will have
reached a true era of progress!
As long s that step is not taken, as long as that stage is not reached,
the world will have to live constantly under the nightmare and fear of
being involved in any crisis, in an atomic conflagration. Why? Because
there are some who are interested in perpetuating this exploitation.
We have spoken here of the Cuban case. Our case has taught us because
of the problems we have had with our own imperialism, that is, the
particular imperialism that is ranged against us. But, since all
imperialism are alike, they are all allies. A country that exploits the
people of Latin America, or any other parts of the world, is an ally of the
exploiters of the rest of the world.
There are a number of problems which have already been discussed by
several delegations. For reasons of time, we should like merely to express
our opinion on the Congo problem. Of course, since we hold an
anti-colonialist position against the exploitation of underdeveloped
countries, we condemn the way in which the intervention by the United
Nations forces was carried out in the Congo. First of all, these forces
did not go there to act against the interventing forces, for which purpose
they were originally sent. All necessary time was given, so that the first
dissension could occur. And as that was not enough, further time was
given, and the way was opened for the second division. And finally, while
broadcasting stations and airfields were seized, the opportunity was
provided for the emergence of the third man, as they always call the
saviors who emerge in these circumstances. We know them only too well,
because in the year of 1943 one of these saviors appeared in our country,
and his name was Fulgenico Batista. In the Congo his name is Mobutu. In
Cuba, he paid a daily visit to the American Embassy, and it appears the
same thing is going on in the Congo. Is it because I say so? No, because
no less than a magazine which is one of the most fervent supporters of the
monopolies and therefore cannot be against them, is the one that says so.
It cannot favor Lumumba, because it favors Mobutu. But it explains who
Mobutu, is, how he began to work, and finally Time magazine says in its
latest issue: "Mobutu became a frequent visitor to the United States
Embassy and held long talks with officials there. One afternoon last week
Mobutu conferred with officers of Camp Leopold and got their enthusiastic
support. That night he went to Radio Congo — which Lumumba had not been
allowed to use — and abruptly announced that the army was assuming power."
In other words, all this occurred after frequent visits and lengthy
conversations with the officials of the United States Embassy. This Time
Magazine speaking, the defender of the monopolies.
In other words, the hand of the colonialist interest has been clear and
visible in the Congo, and our opinion is consequently that colonialist
interests have been favored and that every fact indicates that reason and
the people of the Congo are on the side of the only leader who remained
there to defend the interests of his country, and that leader is Lumumba
(APPLAUSE).
As regard the problem of Algeria, we are, I need hardly say, 100
percent in support of the right of the people of Algeria to independence
(APPLAUSE), and it is, furthermore, ridiculous — like so many ridiculous
things in the world which have been artificially created by vested
interests — to claim that Algeria is part of France. In the past, similar
claims have been made by other countries in an attempt to keep their
colonies.
However, these African people have been fighting a heroic battle
against the colonial power for many years. Perhaps, even while we are
calmly talking here, Algerian villages and hamlets are being bombed and
machinegunned by the French Army. Men may well be dying in a struggle in
which there is not the slightest doubt where the right lies, a struggle
that could be ended even without disregarding the interests of that
minority which is being used for denying nine-tenths of the population of
Algeria their right to independence. Yet we are doing nothing. So quick
to go to the Congo, and such lack of enthusiasm about going to Algeria!
(APPLAUSE).
We are, therefore, on the side of the Algerian people, as we are on the
remaining colonial peoples in Africa, and on the side of the Negroes who
are discriminated against in the Union of South Africa. Similarly, we are
on the side of those peoples that wish to be free, not only politically —
for it is very easy to acquire a flag, a coat of arms, an anthem, and a
color on the map — but also economically free, for there is one truth
which we should all recognize as being of primary importance, namely, that
there can be no political independence unless there is economic
independence, that political independence without economic independence is
a lie; we therefore support the aspirations of all countries to be free
politically and economically. Freedom does not consist in the possession
of a flag, a coat of arms, and representation in the United Nations.
We should like to draw attention here to another right: a right which
was proclaimed the Cuban people at a mass meeting quite recently, the right
of the underdeveloped countries to nationalize their natural resources and
the investments of the monopolies in their respective countries without
compensation; in other words, we advocate the nationalization of natural
resources and foreign investments in the underdeveloped countries.
And if the highly industrialized countries wish to do the same thing,
we shall not oppose them (APPLAUSE).
If countries are to be truly free, in political matters, they must be
truly free in economic matters, and we must lend them assistance. We shall
be asked about the value of the investments, as we in return will ask:
what about the value of the profits from those investments, the profits
which have been extracted from the colonized and underdeveloped peoples for
decades, if not for centuries?
We should like to support a proposal made by the President of the
Republic of Ghana, the proposal that Africa should be cleared of military
bases and thus of nuclear weapon bases, in other words, the proposal to
free from the perils of atomic war. Something has already been done with
regard to Antarctia. As we go forward on the path of disarmament, why
should we not also go forward towards freeing certain parts of the world
from the danger of nuclear war?
Let the other people, let the West make up a little for what it has
made Africa suffer, by preserving it from the danger of atomic war and
declaring it a free zone as far as this peril is concerned. Let no atomic
bases be established there! Even if we can do nothing else, let this
continent at least remain a sanctuary where human life may be preserved!
(PROLONGED APPLAUSE). We support this proposal warmly.
On the question of disarmament, we wholeheartedly support the Soviet
proposal, and we are not ashamed to do so. We regard as a correct,
precise, well-defined and clear proposal.
We have carefully studied the speech made here by President Eisenhower
— he made no real reference to disarmament, to the development of the
underdeveloped countries, or to the colonial problem. Really, it would be
worthwhile for the citizens of this country, who are so influenced by false
propaganda, to compare objectively the statements of the President of the
United States with those of the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, so that
they could see which speech contains genuine concern over the world's
problems, so that they could see who spoke clearly and sincerely, and so
they could see who really wants disarmament, and who is against it and why.
The Soviet proposal could not be clearer. Nothing could be added to the
Soviet explanation. Why should there be any reservations when no one has
every before spoken so clearly of so tremendous a problem?
The history of the world has taught us the tragic lesson that arms
races always lead to war; but never has the responsibility been greater,
for never has war signified so was a holocaust for mankind. And the Soviet
Union has made a proposal regarding that problem which so greatly concerns
mankind — whose very existence is at stake — a proposal for total and
complete disarmament. What more can be asked? If more can be asked, let
us ask it; if we can ask for more safeguards, let us do so; but the
proposal could not be clearer or better defined, and, at this stage of
history, it cannot be rejected without assuming the responsibility involved
in the danger of war and of war itself.
The representative of the Soviet Union has spoken openly — I say this
objectively — and I urge that these proposals be considered, and that
everybody put their cards on the table. Above all, this is not merely a
question of representatives, that is a matter of public opinion. The
warmongers and militarists must be exposed and condemned by the public
opinion of the world. This is not a problem for minorities only: it
concerns the world. The warmongers and militarists must be unmasked, and
this is the task of public opinion. This problem must be discussed not
only in the General Assembly, but before the entire world, before the great
assembly of the whole world, because in the event of a war not only the
leaders, but hundreds of millions of completely innocent persons will be
exterminated, and it is for this reason that we, who meet here as
representatives of the world — or part of the world, since this Assembly
is not yet complete, it will not be complete until the Peoples' Republic of
China is represented here — should take appropriate measures (APPLAUSE).
One-quarter of the world's population is of course absent, but we who are
here have the duty to speak openly and not to evade the issue. We must all
discuss it; this problem is too serious to be overlooked. It is more
important than economic aid and all other obligations, because this is the
obligation to preserve the life of mankind. Let us all discuss and speak
about this problem, and let us all fight to establish peace, or at least to
unmask the militarists and warmongers.
And, above all, if we, the underdeveloped countries, want to preserve
the hope of achieving progress, if we want to have a chance of seeing our
peoples enjoying a higher standard of living, let us struggle for peace,
let us struggle for disarmament; with a fifth of what the world spends on
armaments, we could promote the development of all the underdeveloped
countries at a rate of growth of 10 percent per annum. With a fifth of the
resources which countries spend on armaments, we could surely raise the
people's standard of living.
Now, what are the obstacles to disarmament? Who is interested in being
armed? Those who are interested in being armed to the teeth are those who
want to keep colonies, those who want to maintain their monopolies, those
who want to retain control of the oil of the Middle East; the natural
resources of Latin America, of Asia, of Africa, and who require military
strength to defend their interests. And it is well known that these
territories were occupied and colonized on the strength of the law of
force; by virtue of the law of force million of men were enslaved, and it
is force which sustains such exploitation in the world. Therefore, those
who want no disarmament are those interested in maintaining their military
strength in order to retain control of natural resources, the wealth of the
people of the world, and cheap labor in underdeveloped countries. We
promised to speak openly, and there is no other way of telling the truth.
The colonialists, therefore, are against disarmament. Using the weapon
of world public opinion, we must fight to force disarmament on them as we
must force them to respect the right of peoples to economic and political
liberation.
The monopolies are against disarmament, because, besides being able to
defend those interests with arms, the arms race has always been good
business for them. For example, it is well known that the great monopolies
in this country doubled their capital shortly after the Second World War.
Like vultures, the monopolies feed on the corpses which are the harvest of
war.
And war is a business. Those who trade in war, those who enrich
themselves war, by must be unmasked. We must open the eyes of the world
and expose those who trade in the destiny of mankind, in the danger of war,
particularly when the war may be so frightful that it leaves no hope of
salvation.
We, the small and underdeveloped countries, urge the whole Assembly and
especially the other small and underdeveloped nations to devote themselves
to this task and to have this problem discussed here, because afterwards we
will never forgive ourselves if, through our neglect or lack of firmness
and energy on this basic issue, the world becomes involved once again in
the perils of war.
We have just one more point to discuss, which, according to what we
have read in some newspapers, was one of the points the Cuban delegation
was going to raise. And this, of course, is the problem of the Peoples
Republic of China.
Other delegations have already spoken about this matter. We wish to
say that the fact that this problem has never been discussed is in reality
a denial of the "raison d'etre" and of the essential of nature of the
United Nations. Why has it never been discussed? Because the United
Nations Assembly going to renounce its right to discuss this problem?
Many countries have joined the United Nations in recent years. To
oppose discussion of the right to representation here of the People's
Republic of China, that is, of 99 percent of the inhabitants of a country
of more than 600,000,000 is to deny the reality of history, the facts of
life itself.
It is simply an absurdity; it is ridiculous that this problem is never
even discussed. How long are we going to continue the sad business of
never discussing this problem, when we have here representatives of Franco,
for instance?
At this point is its appropriate to ask by what right the navy of an
extra-continental country — and it is worth repeating this here, when so
much is being said about extra-continental interference — intervented in a
domestic affair of China. It would be interesting to have an explanation.
The sole purpose of this interference was to maintain a group of allies in
that place and to prevent the total liberation of the territory. That is
an absurd and unlawful state of affairs from any point of view, but it
constitutes the reason why the United States Government does not want the
question of the People's Republic of China to be discussed. And we want to
put it on record here that this is our position and that we support
discussion of this question, and that the United Nations General Assembly
should seat the legitimate representatives of the Chinese people, namely,
the representatives of the Government of the People's Republic of China.
I understand perfectly that is somewhat difficult for anybody here to
free himself of the stereotyped concepts by which the representatives of
nations are usually judged. I must say that we have come here free from
the prejudices, to analyze problems objectively, without fear of what
people will think and without fear of the consequences of our position.
We have been honest, we have been frank without being Fran coist
(APPLAUSE), because we do not want to be a party to the injustice committed
against a great number of Spaniards, still imprisoned in Spain after more
than twenty years, men who fought together with the Americans of the
Lincoln Brigade, as the comrades of those same Americans who were there to
do honor to the name of that great American, Lincoln.
In conclusion, we are going to place our trust in reason and in the
decency of all. We wish to sum up our ideas regarding some aspects of
these world problems about which there should be no doubt. The problem of
Cuba, which we have set forth here, is a part of the problems of the world.
Those who attack us today are those who are helping to attack others in
other parts of the world.
The United States Government cannot be on the side of the Algerian
people, it cannot be on the side of the Algerian people because it is
allied to metropolitan France. It cannot be on the side of the Congolese
people, because it is allied to Belgium. It cannot be on the side of the
Spanish people, because it is allied to Franco. It cannot be on the side
of the Puerto Rican people, whose nationhood it has been destroying for
fifty years. It cannot be on the side of the Panamanians, who claim the
Canal. It cannot support the ascendancy of civil power in Latin America,
Germany or Japan. It cannot be on the side of the peasants who want land,
because it is allied to the big landowners. It cannot be on the side of
the workers who are demanding better living conditions in all parts of the
world, because it is allied to the monopolies. It cannot be on the side
of the colonies which want their freedom, because it is allied to the
colonizers.
That is to say, it is for the Franco, for the colonization of Algeria
for the colonization of the Congo; it is for the maintenance of its
privileges and interests in the Panama Canal, for colonialism through the
world. It is for the German militarism and for the resurgence of German
militarism. It is for Japanese militarism and for the resurgence of
Japanese militarism.
The Government of the United States forgets the millions of Jews
murdered in European concentration camps by the Nazis, who are today
regaining their influence in the German army. It forgets the Frenchmen who
were killed in their heroic struggle against the occupation; it forgets the
American soldiers who died on the Seigfried Line, in the Ruhr, on the
Rhine, and on the Asian fronts. The United States Government cannot be for
the integrity and sovereignty of nations. Why? Because it must curtail
the sovereignty of nations in order to keep its military bases, and each
base is a dagger thrust into sovereignty; each base is a limitation on
sovereignty.
That is why it has to be against the sovereignty of nations, because it
must constantly limit sovereignty in order to maintain its policy of
encircling the Soviet Union with bases. We believe that these problems are
not properly explained to the American people. But the American people
need only imagine how uneasy they would feel if the Soviet Union began to
establish a ring of atomic bases in Cuba, Mexico, or Canada. The
population would not feel secure or calm. World opinion, including
American opinion, must be taught to see the other person's point of view.
The underdeveloped peoples should not always be represented as aggressors;
revolutionaries should not be presented as aggressors, as enemies of the
American people, because we have seen American like Carleton Beals, Waldo
Frank, and others, famous and distinguished intellectuals, shed tears at
the thought of the mistakes that are being made, at the breach of
hospitality towards us; there are many Americans, the most humane, the most
progressive, and the most esteemed writers, in whom I see the nobility of
this country's early leaders, the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, and the
Lincolns. I say this is no spirit of demegogy, but with the sincere
admiration that we feel for those who once succeeded in freeing their
people from colonial status and who did not fight in order that their
country might today be the ally of all the reactionaires, the gangsters,
the big landowners, the monopolists, the exploiters, the militarists, the
facists in the world, that is to say, the ally of the most reactionary
forces, but rather in order that their country might always be the champion
of noble and just ideals.
We know well what will be said about us, today, tomorrow, every day, to
deceive the American people. But is does not matter. We are doing our
duty by stating our views in, this historic Assembly.
We proclaim the right of people to freedom, the right of people to
nationhood; those who know that nationalism means the desire of the people
to regain what is rightly theirs, their wealth, their natural resources,
conspire against nationalism.
We are, in short, for all the noble aspirations of all the peoples.
That is our position. We are, and always shall be for everything that is
just: against colonialism, exploitation, monopolies, militarism, the
armaments race, and warmongering. We shall always be against such things.
That will be our position.
And to conclude, fulfilling what we regard as our duty, I am going to
quote to this Assembly the key part of the Declaration of Havana. As you
all know, the Declaration of Havana was the Cuban people's answer to the
Declaration of San Jose, Costa Rica. Nor 10, nor 100, nor 100,000, but
more than one million Cubans gathered together.
At that Assembly, which was convened as an answer to the Declaration of
San Jose, the following principles were proclaimed, in consultation with
the people and by acclamation of the people, as the principles of the Cuban
Revolution.
"The National General Assembly of the Cuban people condemns largescale
landowning as a source of poverty for the peasant and a backward and
inhuman system of agricultural production; it condemns starvation wages and
the iniquitous exploitation of human work by illegitimate and privileged
interests; it condemns illiteracy, the lack of teachers, of schools, doctor
and hospitals; the lack of old-age security in the countries of America; it
condemns discrimination against the Negro and the Indian'; it condemns the
inequality and the exploitation of women; it condemns political and
military oligarchies, which keep our peoples in poverty, prevent their
democratic development and the full exercise of their sovereignty; it
condemns concessions of the natural resources of our countries as a policy
of surrender which betrays the interests of the peoples; it condemns the
governments which ignore the demands of their people in order to obey
orders from abroad; it condemns the systematic deception of the people by
mass communications media which serve the interests of the oligarchies and
the policy of imperialist oppression; it condemns the monopoly held by
news agencies, which are instruments of monopolist trusts and agents of
such interests; it condemns the repressive laws which prevent the workers,
the peasants, the students and the intellectuals, the great majorities in
each country, from organizing themselves to fight for their social and
national rights; it condemns the imperialist monopolies and enterprises
which continually plunder our wealth, exploit our workers and peasants,
bleed our economies to keep them in a backward state, and subordinate Latin
American politics to their designs and interests.
"In short, The National General Assembly of the Cuban People condemns
the exploitation of man by man, and the exploitations of underdeveloped
countries by imperialists capital.
"Therefore, the National General Assembly of the Cuban People proclaims
before America, and proclaims here before the world, the right of the
peasants to the land; the right of the workers to the fruits of their
labor; the right of the children to education: the right of the sick to
medical care and hospitalization; the right of young people to work; the
right of students to free vocational training and scientific education; the
right of Negroes, and Indians to full human dignity; the right of women to
civil, social and political equality; the right of the elderly to security
in their old age; the right of intellectuals, artists and scientists so
fight through their works for a better world; the right of States to
nationalize imperialist monopolies, thus rescuing their national wealth and
resources; the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of
peoples to convert their military fortresses into schools, and to arm their
workers — because in this we too have to be arms-conscious, to arm our
people in defense against imperialist attacks — their peasants, their
students, their intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, women, young people, old
people, all the oppressed and exploited, so that they themselves can defend
their rights and their destinies."
Some people wanted to know what the policy of the Revolutionary
Government of Cuba was. Very well, them, this is our policy (OVATION).
Castro Internet Archive
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<p class="storyheadline">The English Submarine</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
<div class="feature">
<p>The press dispatches bring the news; it belongs to the Astute Class, the first of its kind to be constructed in Great Britain in more than two decades.</p>
<p>“A nuclear reactor will allow it to navigate without refueling during its 25 years of service. Since it makes its own oxygen and drinking water, it can circumnavigate the globe without needing to surface,” was the statement to the<i>BBC</i> by Nigel Ward, head of the shipyards.</p>
<p>“It’s a mean looking beast,” says another.</p>
<p>“Looming above us is a construction shed 12 stories high. Within it are 3 nuclear-powered submarines at different stages of construction,” assures yet another.</p>
<p>Someone says that “it can observe the movements of cruisers in New York harbor right from the English Channel, drawing close to the coast without being detected and listen to conversations on cell phones.” “In addition, it can transport special troops in mini-subs that, at the same time, will be able to fire lethal Tomahawk missiles for distances of 1,400 miles,” a fourth person declares.</p>
<p><i>El Mercurio</i>, the Chilean newspaper, emphatically spreads the news.</p>
<p>The UK Royal Navy declares that it will be one of the most advanced in the world. The first of them will be launched on June 8 and will go into service in January of 2009. It can transport up to 38 Tomahawk cruise missiles and Spearfish torpedoes, capable of destroying a large warship. It will possess a permanent crew of 98 sailors who will even be able to watch movies on giant plasma screens.</p>
<p>The new Astute will carry the latest generation of Block 4 Tomahawk torpedoes which can be reprogrammed in flight. It will be the first one not having a system of conventional periscopes and, instead, will be using fiber optics, infrared waves and thermal imaging.</p>
<p>“BAE Systems, the armaments manufacturer, will build two other submarines of the same class,”<i>AP</i> reported. The total cost of the three submarines, according to calculations that will certainly be below the mark, is 7.5 billion dollars.</p>
<p>What a feat for the British! The intelligent and tenacious people of that nation will surely not feel any sense of pride. What is most amazing is that with such an amount of money, 75 thousand doctors could be trained to care for 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States. You could build three thousand polyclinics, outfitted with sophisticated equipment, ten times what our country possesses.</p>
<p>Cuba is currently training thousands of young people from other countries as medical doctors.</p>
<p>In any remote African village, a Cuban doctor can impart medical knowledge to any youth from the village or from the surrounding municipality who has the equivalent of a grade twelve education, using videos and computers energized by a small solar panel; the youth does not even have to leave his hometown, nor does he need to be contaminated with the consumer habits of a large city.</p>
<p>The important thing is the patients who are suffering from malaria or any other of the typical and unmistakable diseases that the student will be seeing together with the doctor. The method has been tested with surprising results. The knowledge and practical experience accumulated for years have no possible comparison. The non-lucrative practice of medicine is capable of winning over all noble hearts.</p>
<p>Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba has been engaged in training doctors, teachers and other professionals; with a population of less than 12 million inhabitants, today we have more Comprehensive General Medicine specialists than all the doctors in sub-Saharan Africa where the population exceeds 700 million people.</p>
<p>We must bow our heads in awe after reading the news about the English submarine. It teaches us, among other things, about the sophisticated weapons that are needed to maintain the untenable order developed by the United States imperial system.</p>
<p>We cannot forget that for centuries, and until recently, England was called the Queen of the Seas. Today, what remains of that privileged position is merely a fraction of the hegemonic power of her ally and leader, the United States. Churchill said: Sink the Bismarck! Today Blair says: Sink whatever remains of Great Britain’s prestige!</p>
<p>For that purpose, or for the holocaust of the species, is what his “marvelous submarine” will be good for.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>—<i>Granma</i> (Cuba), May 21, 2007</p>
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Jul/Aug 2007 • Vol 7, No. 4
Click Here to Return to the Index
Search the Site:
Enter term and click Go!
The English Submarine
By Fidel Castro Ruz
The press dispatches bring the news; it belongs to the Astute Class, the first of its kind to be constructed in Great Britain in more than two decades.
“A nuclear reactor will allow it to navigate without refueling during its 25 years of service. Since it makes its own oxygen and drinking water, it can circumnavigate the globe without needing to surface,” was the statement to theBBC by Nigel Ward, head of the shipyards.
“It’s a mean looking beast,” says another.
“Looming above us is a construction shed 12 stories high. Within it are 3 nuclear-powered submarines at different stages of construction,” assures yet another.
Someone says that “it can observe the movements of cruisers in New York harbor right from the English Channel, drawing close to the coast without being detected and listen to conversations on cell phones.” “In addition, it can transport special troops in mini-subs that, at the same time, will be able to fire lethal Tomahawk missiles for distances of 1,400 miles,” a fourth person declares.
El Mercurio, the Chilean newspaper, emphatically spreads the news.
The UK Royal Navy declares that it will be one of the most advanced in the world. The first of them will be launched on June 8 and will go into service in January of 2009. It can transport up to 38 Tomahawk cruise missiles and Spearfish torpedoes, capable of destroying a large warship. It will possess a permanent crew of 98 sailors who will even be able to watch movies on giant plasma screens.
The new Astute will carry the latest generation of Block 4 Tomahawk torpedoes which can be reprogrammed in flight. It will be the first one not having a system of conventional periscopes and, instead, will be using fiber optics, infrared waves and thermal imaging.
“BAE Systems, the armaments manufacturer, will build two other submarines of the same class,”AP reported. The total cost of the three submarines, according to calculations that will certainly be below the mark, is 7.5 billion dollars.
What a feat for the British! The intelligent and tenacious people of that nation will surely not feel any sense of pride. What is most amazing is that with such an amount of money, 75 thousand doctors could be trained to care for 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States. You could build three thousand polyclinics, outfitted with sophisticated equipment, ten times what our country possesses.
Cuba is currently training thousands of young people from other countries as medical doctors.
In any remote African village, a Cuban doctor can impart medical knowledge to any youth from the village or from the surrounding municipality who has the equivalent of a grade twelve education, using videos and computers energized by a small solar panel; the youth does not even have to leave his hometown, nor does he need to be contaminated with the consumer habits of a large city.
The important thing is the patients who are suffering from malaria or any other of the typical and unmistakable diseases that the student will be seeing together with the doctor. The method has been tested with surprising results. The knowledge and practical experience accumulated for years have no possible comparison. The non-lucrative practice of medicine is capable of winning over all noble hearts.
Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba has been engaged in training doctors, teachers and other professionals; with a population of less than 12 million inhabitants, today we have more Comprehensive General Medicine specialists than all the doctors in sub-Saharan Africa where the population exceeds 700 million people.
We must bow our heads in awe after reading the news about the English submarine. It teaches us, among other things, about the sophisticated weapons that are needed to maintain the untenable order developed by the United States imperial system.
We cannot forget that for centuries, and until recently, England was called the Queen of the Seas. Today, what remains of that privileged position is merely a fraction of the hegemonic power of her ally and leader, the United States. Churchill said: Sink the Bismarck! Today Blair says: Sink whatever remains of Great Britain’s prestige!
For that purpose, or for the holocaust of the species, is what his “marvelous submarine” will be good for.
—Granma (Cuba), May 21, 2007
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<h2 id="pageName"><a href="mayjun_05.html" target="_self">May/June 2005 • Vol 4, No. 5 •</a></h2>
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<h3>Fidel Castro Defines the Theory of the Cuban Revolution</h3>
<hr>
<p><i>A group of professionals, technicians, and artists of the Chilean Popular Action Front visited Cuba to study its political, economic, and social organization. Below is given the questions the delegation put to Fidel Castro during an interview with him, and the answers he made in defining the theory of the Cuban Revolution. It first appeared in the Spanish-language Socialist Party weekly El Sol (The Sun), Montevideo, 10 May 1963. </i>
</p><h4>Stages of the Revolution</h4>
<p><i>Question</i>: Could you describe for us the principal steps of the dynamic process that took place between the triumph of the Revolution and the time when it could be defined as a Socialist Revolution, including your description of the ideological evolution of its team of leaders?
</p><p><i>Answer</i>: There was only one Revolution. It was like a child who passes through several stages of growth to become a man. It cannot be broken down into two distinct revolutions; it has only steps. The basic premises are conquest of the revolutionary power and, of course, creation of a military force to back up that power. The military conquest destroys the dominant classes. It must not be at the call of Imperialism and Oligarchy.
</p><p>Each revolutionary law is a link in the path of the Revolution. The Law of Agrarian Reform signified aggressive measures of the Imperialists in the economic field, which called forth new measures against them. The law against monopolies in electric power and telephones was followed by new aggressive efforts and new counter-measures�cancellation of the sugar quota. Imperialism, with the collaboration of the Oligarchy, resorted to military aggression, which led in turn to the nationalization of Yankee and pro-Yankee enterprises. The increasingly open collision with Imperialism led the Revolution to become more radical and ideology to become more advanced. And the Revolution has its base in the progressive forces of everyone.
</p><p>The open aggression of the mercenaries results in new attacks, and the declaration of the Socialist character of the Revolution is made after the bombardment that preceeds the invasion. And so, the battle of the free people at the Bay of Pigs is now a battle for Socialism.
</p><p>The Revolution is a developing, dynamic process. But there is only one Revolution. If it is not a revolution, there is no revolutionary process. And if it stops, it is not a revolution. If conditions exist to bring about a revolution, then it will continue its uninterrupted march. That is why it goes so far, as only a true revolution can do, because it carries within it the necessary roots for the development of a revolution. If it is a revolution from the first step, it will remain a revolution to the last one.
</p><p>Having conquered political power and destroyed the military forces of the dominant classes, the revolution continues its upward progress. All other divisions are artificial; revolution cannot be divided capriciously into steps.
</p><p>How is power attained? There are, of course, various ways. Suppose that power is attained through peaceful elections. This is not enough, unless armed forces are created immediately to support the new power.
</p><p>Once power has been achieved, revolutionary laws must be dictated. The reduction of rents is not a Socialist law, nor is the recovery of stolen funds. The nationalization of enterprises, the creation of collective farms and cooperatives, the nationalization of education, these are socialist institutions. There is, however, interdependence between the first and last laws, as there is between A and Z.
</p><p>Is there a terminology that should be used to pacify people (who are no longer heedless), a terminology that may be used to neutralize groups that are not revolutionaries? This is a mistake.
</p><p>How should we talk to the Latin-American bourgeoisie? Do not think for a minute that those people can be overcome by talking to them about steps in national liberation and steps in Socialism, while giving them hopes of the infinite prolongation of that first step. They must be told that social change is inevitable, and that it will be the more bitter in the measure that they fail to understand its inevitability.
</p><p>It will be more or less painful according to the degree in which they collaborate or resist the change. This is not the case here. They did not resign themselves; on the contrary, egged on by the Imperialists, they went to Miami and assured that the change would be even more drastic. It was in El Cano that the counter-revolution offered the greatest resistance by its belligerent attitude, going so far as to hinder the distribution of food. Everything had to be confiscated. The Revolution was not weakened; on the contrary, it was strengthened. If they had not adopted that attitude,they could have been indemnified instead of having everything confiscated. In other words, the situation of the bourgeoisie would be different if they offered less resistance to social change; their acceptance or collaboration would be beneficial to them.
</p><p>Social change�I must say it�is irreversible in Latin America. Even Kennedy is asking for it. It is an illusion to think that at a given moment certain classes are going to collaborate. If we were to pamper the bourgeois class at this moment, we would be committing a grave error. Nor should we let ourselves forget that the bourgeoisie and the middle class believed in Imperialism. It would have been a mistake not to have told them that the masses were ready to make hash of them at a given moment.
</p><p>A revolution is divided into stages for its study, just as a human body is divided into head, trunk, extremities, etc.; but such divisions are artificial. The National Revolution of Liberation is part of the Socialist revolution. If it remains in its first stage, it is nothing more than a bourgeois revolution, but that is impossible in the Twentieth Century.
</p><p><i>(A member of the Chilean delegation who took part in the commemorative festivities of 26 July interposes a question.) </i>
</p><h4>The Role of the bourgeoisie in the colonial revolution</h4>
<p><i>Question</i>: Is it the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat that is called upon at this time to fulfill the first stage of revolution; that is, national liberation?
</p><p><i>Answer</i>: Revolution can only be carried out by the dictatorship of the proletariat, because the State must be in the hands of the classes who have been oppressed up to this time.
</p><p>The State is a force at the service of the interests of the dominant class. For example, the Greek City State, that dawn of democracy, was the domain of a class that held the slaves under subjection by the repressive forces of the State. Rome did the same thing through her legions. Representative democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, who also use the State, and particularly the army, to defend their interests from the oppressed classes. In all such forms of government, the exploiters, who represent a minority, act as dictators for the class that they embody.
</p><p>We know that the State represents the domination of one class over another. If the State exists, it should be in the hands of a social class. And now at this time, the control of the State should be exercised by the majority class, which must suppress the capitalist class. The State passes thus into the hands of an organized proletariat as the governing class. This is absolute democracy, in which the proletariat exercises public authority and converts all means of production into the property of Society.
</p><p>What role does each person play in the revolutionary struggle? Who directs it? Who is in the vanguard? What revolutionary goals can be sacrificed? What does the proletariat gain if the struggle is left in the hands of the bourgeoisie, who then consolidate their position? What can be given up, and what not? This is a question of tactics. It is necessary to try to unite a number of different segments without sacrificing the fundamental objectives of the revolution. I am of the opinion that the revolutionary parties should not make concessions to the bourgeoisie, nor play their game. Let them play our game! Those that err in this matter will be aiding their class enemies.
</p><h4>The revolution and sectarianism</h4>
<p><i>Question</i>: Do you consider that sectarianism and bureaucratic deformation are inevitable in the first stage of the Socialist Revolution? And if they may not be inevitable, what do you think should be done to avoid them?
</p><p><i>Answer</i>: In our revolution, I think it was inevitable in the first stage. We had all our forces mustered in the fight against reaction and Imperialism, and we could not take the time to develop an ideology that would have prevented sectarianism.
</p><p>Sectarianism transforms itself into an evil and deadly principle. Bureaucratic deformation is not inevitable, but it is inevitable that we must combat it. In Cuba, it could have been inevitable in the first stage, but I do not think that this is necessarily so in other countries, particularly after our experience.
</p><p>There are persons in Latin America who are so sectarian that they do not understand such facts as sectarianism. Such persons should be exploited to the maximum, because they present a grave danger to the Revolution.
</p><p>Many did not understand the problem of Anibal (Escalante). Sectarianism has nothing to do with radicalism in a revolution; on the contrary, it is reactionary because it impedes the revolution. What permits revolution to spread? The force and the freshness imparted by overcoming sectarianism. Because problems had been created in every field�production, distribution, etc.
</p><p>Radicalism is not sectarianism. The Revolution at this moment is in full process of radicalization. Previously, 90 percent of the people were with the Revolution, but only 2 percent had a clear understanding of Imperialism, and less than 1 percent was Marxist. Now, on the other hand, if the immense majority of the public has evolved into Marxist-Leninism, it is absurd to be sectarian, because it results in a complete divorce from the Masses.
</p><p>The Masses were accused of errors committed by them in the past. Sectarianism did not forgive the masses for a past in which they had been nothing more than the victims. The anti-Masses line was a shield for the leaders. Because there is a Masses line and an anti-Masses line. The latter sets up a State that is in no way different from the form and methods of Fascism: distrust, terror, and so on, even though the appearance is given that a struggle to form a Socialist state is going on.
</p><p>Divorce from the Masses is part of sectarianism, because it does not use Marxist methods. The effect produced was one of resentment. The choice of directors, the designation of administrators, chiefs, etc., was made by guesswork. Cells kept themselves secret because of an anti-Masses spirit, not taking into account the will of the Masses to enter them. The vital point is to have faith in the Masses. If we had prolonged sectarian policies and had not adopted the methods of the Masses, the Revolution would have failed.
</p><p><i>Question</i>: In what form do you think democratic centralism will be applied to the United Revolution Party (PURS) that is now being set up?
</p><p><i>Answer</i>: Democratic centralism is not the same as bureaucratic centralism. These two terms are often confused.
</p><p>Democratic centralism does not imply the abandonment of internal democracy; on the contrary, there should be collective internal discussion, but without losing respect for the discipline and directives from higher authorities.
</p><p>Centralism should be more and more democratic as revolution advances. This is what is happening in Cuba. We are establishing a political organization by the most democratic means.
</p><p>The principle of selection is maintained, but selection is made from among those elected by the Masses as being exemplary workers. In this way, the decisive factor governing the entrance of a worker in the Party is the good opinion and support of the Masses. If a comrade is not known by his companions at his present working place, he should give them a frank explanation of his merits, so that they can elect him as an exemplary worker. We are sure that this method will prevent the bureaucratization of the Party and prevent it from becoming a caste that is completely separated from the Masses. Everyone who wishes to join the Party must realize that he must first count on the support of the Masses. It is not the same to gain mass support as to gain that of a civil servant.
</p><p>We started out with a caste spirit. Jobs, scholarships, and so on were given to children or relatives of our old revolutionary militia. Take the case of the 20 sons of old Communists that were chosen to go to the USSR to learn to be helicopter pilots. Nearly all were sent back because they were uneducated, or anti-Marxist, or undisciplined, etc. Should the son of a Communist be one too, as the son of a count who is also a count? Suppose the mother is an anti-revolutionary, what then?
</p><p>On the other hand, we shall use now the method of the Masses, and we shall choose the best ones. Recently, for example, the Masses chose 500 youths from 15 to 25 years old from humble origins to be trained as artillerymen. We put them through severe tests; we made them march 150 kilometers in a day; we sent 400 of this group to Soviet Russia, and they came back magnificent artillerymen, only one of them giving us any trouble.
</p><p>The caste system is criminal. When people are prepared to die�and the fact is that they are sent to die when they are mobilized indiscriminately from among the Masses to fight for their country�we cannot turn around and choose a son or relative of so-and-so for Party membership, for a scholarship, or something else.
</p><p>The Masses, not parties, make revolutions. An elementary principle of Marxism is to depend on the Masses for support. To separate ourselves from the Masses is like a general who would separate himself from his troops.
</p><p><i>Question</i>: In your opinion, what are the strategic and tactical lessons that the Cuban Socialist Revolution has brought�in the frame of its own situation�to help the workers in their goal of international revolution?
</p><p><i>Answe</i>r: In the first place, the myth was destroyed that revolution could not succeed against a professional army.
</p><p>Second, it demonstrated the importance of the peasant in under-developed countries where feudal conditions exist and where it is possible to fight. It was the peasants who faced the consequences of our revolution. In the same way, the proletariat of Latin America can count on the support of the peasants if they are properly led.
</p><p>Third, the value of military tactics in the fight against Imperialism was vindicated. If it proved possible on this island, it should be even easier in the expanse of an entire continent. We are convinced of the value of our military tactics; they are invincible.
</p><p>We are not dogmatic. In countries where there exists the possibility of success through elections, peaceful means may be tried. But care must be taken not to be carried away by appearances and to stretch things so far that everyone turns out to be a pacifist.
</p><p>Many times in practice, revolutionary parties do not adopt programs that make possible a change in tactics when it becomes necessary. While it is generally said that both tactics�military and pacific�are employed according to changing circumstances, in practice the use of only one of them may be planned for. The parties should be prepared for a change of tactics. But these puzzling things are the very devil. It is very difficult for us as actors in the drama to say definitely what we have contributed of value.
</p><p>Every revolution has its lessons. Like others, ours has enriched theory to some degree. But we have much to learn from other peoples; we must be able to understand correctly their experiences, and, on our part, not be vain. Reality has taught us to beware of chauvinism at the beginning. These problems must be viewed from a dialectical angle and not as part of a fixed posture. We must know how to discover what is new, we must seek changes, differences, national characteristics, etc. Life cannot be squeezed into a mold to which everything must adjust itself. For these reasons, some have �put their foot in it,� others have hit the mark. The important thing is the practical application of revolutionary theory, which is, in itself, a complex problem.
</p><p><i>Question</i>: In view of the present state of the revolutionary movement in Latin America, what do you think are the ways that offer the greatest possibilities for the Masses to seize power.
</p><p><i>Answer</i>: For the majority of Latin American countries, the only road is armed warfare. There is not the remotest possibility of being able to seize power through elections. On this point, we do not budge one iota from the Second Declaration of Havana. We believe blindly in it.
</p><p>The liberation of Latin America marks the end of Imperialism without the need for atomic war. It is the only chance we have of putting an end to misery without waiting forever and a day. An increase in living standards of the mass of people strengthens the struggle for peace and for disarmament. The hundreds of millions that are spent on arms would be used to accelerate the development of the under-developed countries. As Imperialism is weakened, the danger of war is lessened. Only the fight against Imperialism in Latin America will bring the peace that everyone longs for so earnestly.
</p><hr>
<p>�<i>Castro Speech Data Base</i> (Havana), May 10, 1963
</p></div>
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May/June 2005 • Vol 4, No. 5 •
Fidel Castro Defines the Theory of the Cuban Revolution
A group of professionals, technicians, and artists of the Chilean Popular Action Front visited Cuba to study its political, economic, and social organization. Below is given the questions the delegation put to Fidel Castro during an interview with him, and the answers he made in defining the theory of the Cuban Revolution. It first appeared in the Spanish-language Socialist Party weekly El Sol (The Sun), Montevideo, 10 May 1963.
Stages of the Revolution
Question: Could you describe for us the principal steps of the dynamic process that took place between the triumph of the Revolution and the time when it could be defined as a Socialist Revolution, including your description of the ideological evolution of its team of leaders?
Answer: There was only one Revolution. It was like a child who passes through several stages of growth to become a man. It cannot be broken down into two distinct revolutions; it has only steps. The basic premises are conquest of the revolutionary power and, of course, creation of a military force to back up that power. The military conquest destroys the dominant classes. It must not be at the call of Imperialism and Oligarchy.
Each revolutionary law is a link in the path of the Revolution. The Law of Agrarian Reform signified aggressive measures of the Imperialists in the economic field, which called forth new measures against them. The law against monopolies in electric power and telephones was followed by new aggressive efforts and new counter-measures�cancellation of the sugar quota. Imperialism, with the collaboration of the Oligarchy, resorted to military aggression, which led in turn to the nationalization of Yankee and pro-Yankee enterprises. The increasingly open collision with Imperialism led the Revolution to become more radical and ideology to become more advanced. And the Revolution has its base in the progressive forces of everyone.
The open aggression of the mercenaries results in new attacks, and the declaration of the Socialist character of the Revolution is made after the bombardment that preceeds the invasion. And so, the battle of the free people at the Bay of Pigs is now a battle for Socialism.
The Revolution is a developing, dynamic process. But there is only one Revolution. If it is not a revolution, there is no revolutionary process. And if it stops, it is not a revolution. If conditions exist to bring about a revolution, then it will continue its uninterrupted march. That is why it goes so far, as only a true revolution can do, because it carries within it the necessary roots for the development of a revolution. If it is a revolution from the first step, it will remain a revolution to the last one.
Having conquered political power and destroyed the military forces of the dominant classes, the revolution continues its upward progress. All other divisions are artificial; revolution cannot be divided capriciously into steps.
How is power attained? There are, of course, various ways. Suppose that power is attained through peaceful elections. This is not enough, unless armed forces are created immediately to support the new power.
Once power has been achieved, revolutionary laws must be dictated. The reduction of rents is not a Socialist law, nor is the recovery of stolen funds. The nationalization of enterprises, the creation of collective farms and cooperatives, the nationalization of education, these are socialist institutions. There is, however, interdependence between the first and last laws, as there is between A and Z.
Is there a terminology that should be used to pacify people (who are no longer heedless), a terminology that may be used to neutralize groups that are not revolutionaries? This is a mistake.
How should we talk to the Latin-American bourgeoisie? Do not think for a minute that those people can be overcome by talking to them about steps in national liberation and steps in Socialism, while giving them hopes of the infinite prolongation of that first step. They must be told that social change is inevitable, and that it will be the more bitter in the measure that they fail to understand its inevitability.
It will be more or less painful according to the degree in which they collaborate or resist the change. This is not the case here. They did not resign themselves; on the contrary, egged on by the Imperialists, they went to Miami and assured that the change would be even more drastic. It was in El Cano that the counter-revolution offered the greatest resistance by its belligerent attitude, going so far as to hinder the distribution of food. Everything had to be confiscated. The Revolution was not weakened; on the contrary, it was strengthened. If they had not adopted that attitude,they could have been indemnified instead of having everything confiscated. In other words, the situation of the bourgeoisie would be different if they offered less resistance to social change; their acceptance or collaboration would be beneficial to them.
Social change�I must say it�is irreversible in Latin America. Even Kennedy is asking for it. It is an illusion to think that at a given moment certain classes are going to collaborate. If we were to pamper the bourgeois class at this moment, we would be committing a grave error. Nor should we let ourselves forget that the bourgeoisie and the middle class believed in Imperialism. It would have been a mistake not to have told them that the masses were ready to make hash of them at a given moment.
A revolution is divided into stages for its study, just as a human body is divided into head, trunk, extremities, etc.; but such divisions are artificial. The National Revolution of Liberation is part of the Socialist revolution. If it remains in its first stage, it is nothing more than a bourgeois revolution, but that is impossible in the Twentieth Century.
(A member of the Chilean delegation who took part in the commemorative festivities of 26 July interposes a question.)
The Role of the bourgeoisie in the colonial revolution
Question: Is it the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat that is called upon at this time to fulfill the first stage of revolution; that is, national liberation?
Answer: Revolution can only be carried out by the dictatorship of the proletariat, because the State must be in the hands of the classes who have been oppressed up to this time.
The State is a force at the service of the interests of the dominant class. For example, the Greek City State, that dawn of democracy, was the domain of a class that held the slaves under subjection by the repressive forces of the State. Rome did the same thing through her legions. Representative democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, who also use the State, and particularly the army, to defend their interests from the oppressed classes. In all such forms of government, the exploiters, who represent a minority, act as dictators for the class that they embody.
We know that the State represents the domination of one class over another. If the State exists, it should be in the hands of a social class. And now at this time, the control of the State should be exercised by the majority class, which must suppress the capitalist class. The State passes thus into the hands of an organized proletariat as the governing class. This is absolute democracy, in which the proletariat exercises public authority and converts all means of production into the property of Society.
What role does each person play in the revolutionary struggle? Who directs it? Who is in the vanguard? What revolutionary goals can be sacrificed? What does the proletariat gain if the struggle is left in the hands of the bourgeoisie, who then consolidate their position? What can be given up, and what not? This is a question of tactics. It is necessary to try to unite a number of different segments without sacrificing the fundamental objectives of the revolution. I am of the opinion that the revolutionary parties should not make concessions to the bourgeoisie, nor play their game. Let them play our game! Those that err in this matter will be aiding their class enemies.
The revolution and sectarianism
Question: Do you consider that sectarianism and bureaucratic deformation are inevitable in the first stage of the Socialist Revolution? And if they may not be inevitable, what do you think should be done to avoid them?
Answer: In our revolution, I think it was inevitable in the first stage. We had all our forces mustered in the fight against reaction and Imperialism, and we could not take the time to develop an ideology that would have prevented sectarianism.
Sectarianism transforms itself into an evil and deadly principle. Bureaucratic deformation is not inevitable, but it is inevitable that we must combat it. In Cuba, it could have been inevitable in the first stage, but I do not think that this is necessarily so in other countries, particularly after our experience.
There are persons in Latin America who are so sectarian that they do not understand such facts as sectarianism. Such persons should be exploited to the maximum, because they present a grave danger to the Revolution.
Many did not understand the problem of Anibal (Escalante). Sectarianism has nothing to do with radicalism in a revolution; on the contrary, it is reactionary because it impedes the revolution. What permits revolution to spread? The force and the freshness imparted by overcoming sectarianism. Because problems had been created in every field�production, distribution, etc.
Radicalism is not sectarianism. The Revolution at this moment is in full process of radicalization. Previously, 90 percent of the people were with the Revolution, but only 2 percent had a clear understanding of Imperialism, and less than 1 percent was Marxist. Now, on the other hand, if the immense majority of the public has evolved into Marxist-Leninism, it is absurd to be sectarian, because it results in a complete divorce from the Masses.
The Masses were accused of errors committed by them in the past. Sectarianism did not forgive the masses for a past in which they had been nothing more than the victims. The anti-Masses line was a shield for the leaders. Because there is a Masses line and an anti-Masses line. The latter sets up a State that is in no way different from the form and methods of Fascism: distrust, terror, and so on, even though the appearance is given that a struggle to form a Socialist state is going on.
Divorce from the Masses is part of sectarianism, because it does not use Marxist methods. The effect produced was one of resentment. The choice of directors, the designation of administrators, chiefs, etc., was made by guesswork. Cells kept themselves secret because of an anti-Masses spirit, not taking into account the will of the Masses to enter them. The vital point is to have faith in the Masses. If we had prolonged sectarian policies and had not adopted the methods of the Masses, the Revolution would have failed.
Question: In what form do you think democratic centralism will be applied to the United Revolution Party (PURS) that is now being set up?
Answer: Democratic centralism is not the same as bureaucratic centralism. These two terms are often confused.
Democratic centralism does not imply the abandonment of internal democracy; on the contrary, there should be collective internal discussion, but without losing respect for the discipline and directives from higher authorities.
Centralism should be more and more democratic as revolution advances. This is what is happening in Cuba. We are establishing a political organization by the most democratic means.
The principle of selection is maintained, but selection is made from among those elected by the Masses as being exemplary workers. In this way, the decisive factor governing the entrance of a worker in the Party is the good opinion and support of the Masses. If a comrade is not known by his companions at his present working place, he should give them a frank explanation of his merits, so that they can elect him as an exemplary worker. We are sure that this method will prevent the bureaucratization of the Party and prevent it from becoming a caste that is completely separated from the Masses. Everyone who wishes to join the Party must realize that he must first count on the support of the Masses. It is not the same to gain mass support as to gain that of a civil servant.
We started out with a caste spirit. Jobs, scholarships, and so on were given to children or relatives of our old revolutionary militia. Take the case of the 20 sons of old Communists that were chosen to go to the USSR to learn to be helicopter pilots. Nearly all were sent back because they were uneducated, or anti-Marxist, or undisciplined, etc. Should the son of a Communist be one too, as the son of a count who is also a count? Suppose the mother is an anti-revolutionary, what then?
On the other hand, we shall use now the method of the Masses, and we shall choose the best ones. Recently, for example, the Masses chose 500 youths from 15 to 25 years old from humble origins to be trained as artillerymen. We put them through severe tests; we made them march 150 kilometers in a day; we sent 400 of this group to Soviet Russia, and they came back magnificent artillerymen, only one of them giving us any trouble.
The caste system is criminal. When people are prepared to die�and the fact is that they are sent to die when they are mobilized indiscriminately from among the Masses to fight for their country�we cannot turn around and choose a son or relative of so-and-so for Party membership, for a scholarship, or something else.
The Masses, not parties, make revolutions. An elementary principle of Marxism is to depend on the Masses for support. To separate ourselves from the Masses is like a general who would separate himself from his troops.
Question: In your opinion, what are the strategic and tactical lessons that the Cuban Socialist Revolution has brought�in the frame of its own situation�to help the workers in their goal of international revolution?
Answer: In the first place, the myth was destroyed that revolution could not succeed against a professional army.
Second, it demonstrated the importance of the peasant in under-developed countries where feudal conditions exist and where it is possible to fight. It was the peasants who faced the consequences of our revolution. In the same way, the proletariat of Latin America can count on the support of the peasants if they are properly led.
Third, the value of military tactics in the fight against Imperialism was vindicated. If it proved possible on this island, it should be even easier in the expanse of an entire continent. We are convinced of the value of our military tactics; they are invincible.
We are not dogmatic. In countries where there exists the possibility of success through elections, peaceful means may be tried. But care must be taken not to be carried away by appearances and to stretch things so far that everyone turns out to be a pacifist.
Many times in practice, revolutionary parties do not adopt programs that make possible a change in tactics when it becomes necessary. While it is generally said that both tactics�military and pacific�are employed according to changing circumstances, in practice the use of only one of them may be planned for. The parties should be prepared for a change of tactics. But these puzzling things are the very devil. It is very difficult for us as actors in the drama to say definitely what we have contributed of value.
Every revolution has its lessons. Like others, ours has enriched theory to some degree. But we have much to learn from other peoples; we must be able to understand correctly their experiences, and, on our part, not be vain. Reality has taught us to beware of chauvinism at the beginning. These problems must be viewed from a dialectical angle and not as part of a fixed posture. We must know how to discover what is new, we must seek changes, differences, national characteristics, etc. Life cannot be squeezed into a mold to which everything must adjust itself. For these reasons, some have �put their foot in it,� others have hit the mark. The important thing is the practical application of revolutionary theory, which is, in itself, a complex problem.
Question: In view of the present state of the revolutionary movement in Latin America, what do you think are the ways that offer the greatest possibilities for the Masses to seize power.
Answer: For the majority of Latin American countries, the only road is armed warfare. There is not the remotest possibility of being able to seize power through elections. On this point, we do not budge one iota from the Second Declaration of Havana. We believe blindly in it.
The liberation of Latin America marks the end of Imperialism without the need for atomic war. It is the only chance we have of putting an end to misery without waiting forever and a day. An increase in living standards of the mass of people strengthens the struggle for peace and for disarmament. The hundreds of millions that are spent on arms would be used to accelerate the development of the under-developed countries. As Imperialism is weakened, the danger of war is lessened. Only the fight against Imperialism in Latin America will bring the peace that everyone longs for so earnestly.
�Castro Speech Data Base (Havana), May 10, 1963
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.2002.07.26 | <body>
<p class="title">
Fidel Castro
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h4>
The barbaric world order that humanity endures today cannot last much longer
</h4>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> July 26, 2002 at the public rally held at the "Abel Santamaría Cuadrado" Revolution Square in Ciego de Avila on the occasion of the 49th anniversary of the attacks on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/index.html">Discursos e Intervenciones del Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz</a> (cuba.cu)
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> John Wagner
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>
Fellow Cubans:
</p>
<p>
History has proved that nothing could defeat our people in its noble endeavors and that weapons are no more powerful than ideas.
</p>
<p>
Gomez and Maceo, their tenacity and heroism, ride today like invincible horsemen through our fields; Céspedes and Agramonte bear with them the constitution and the justice for which they shed their blood in the free and sovereign republic they proclaimed in 1868. Martí�s ideals live on in the nation of workers that we are today, as nothing could prevent that, from the proletarian spirit of a country built over centuries with the blood and sweat of slaves and workers, the deepest yearning for freedom and justice that our national hero demanded would flow with inextinguishable strength, that is, our socialism. What we are today we have defended with honor and a sense of humanism and justice that will live on like an eternal flame.
</p>
<p>
Glory be especially to this July 26 and to those who on the same date forty-nine years ago shed their blood and gave their lives to resume with ever growing conscience the march down the road opened by their predecessors!
</p>
<p>
Glory be to the people that, educated in just ideas and heroic traditions, has stayed true to them until today and will stay true tomorrow and ever onwards to victory!
</p>
<p>
What are we, what shall we be if not one single history, one single idea, one single will for all times?
</p>
<p>
Ciego de Avila and Morón, yesterday a line of barricades that the enemy tried to use to divide the country the East from the West, what are they this July 26? They are an indestructible path linking the thought, the heroism and the will to struggle of that imperishable bulwark with whose independence Martí wanted to prevent and <em>did</em> prevent the powerful and expansionist neighbor to the North from spreading through the Antilles and falling with that additional force on our American lands.
</p>
<p>
People of Ciego de Avila and fellow Cubans from the former province of Camagüey, without the memory of your sacrifices of yesterday, our dreams of today would be impossible.
</p>
<p>
Hardly twelve years ago, many in the world expected to see Cuba, the last socialist state in the West, crumble. Not much time has gone by and today, instead, quite a number of us on this earth are waiting to see how the developed capitalist world led by the United States disengages from the colossal and chaotic economic mess in which it is enmeshed. Those who yesterday talked so much about the end of history might be wondering if this profound crisis is not the beginning of the end of the political, economic and social system it represents.
</p>
<p>
Nevertheless, being aware of the disaster affecting that system does not necessarily mean to be unrealistic, to indulge in excessive optimism or to see mirages in the midst of what is still an arid desert.
</p>
<p>
The men who to some degree foresaw a fragment of the future, as a rule perceived the demise of their eraís tragedies as closer and imminent. However, one would have to be really blind to fail to understand that the barbaric and cruel world order that humanity endures today cannot last much longer.
</p>
<p>
History has shown that new eras have always arisen from the profound crises of any dominant system.
</p>
<p>
The 21st century will not be like the century that just ended when the human population grew four times more that it had grown in the hundreds of thousands of years that man wandered through the woods, groves, rivers and lakes of the earth, seeking sustenance in obscure corners of the planet which are today threatened with pre-emptive and surprise attacks. Today, one could almost envy those noble barbaric predecessors!
</p>
<p>
When Marx wrote the <em>Communist Manifesto</em> in 1848, it seemed that almost the only limit to the inexhaustible fount of riches that would make possible a truly just and worthy social system for human beings was the exploitative and merciless capitalist system born from the bourgeois revolution. Not even his wondrous genius could imagine how much damage capitalism was yet to bring on humanity.
</p>
<p>
Lenin discovered and analyzed its imperialist phase.
</p>
<p>
Today, almost one hundred years later, humanity is suffering under the horrors of its neoliberal globalization.
</p>
<p>
New and enormous challenges have surfaced in each of these stages that lead it closer to its end.
</p>
<p>
Hardly 30 years ago, few people in the world discussed the environment. Ideas or themes linked to the destruction of the forests, soil erosion and salinity, climate change, the disappearing ozone layer, melting icecaps, whole cities and nations doomed to fatally disappear beneath the sea, polluted air and water; overexploited oceans seemed to be inventions of doomsday scientists and not pressing realities.
</p>
<p>
What does it mean for the overwhelming majority of humanity the spectacular breakthroughs of science, space flights, the possible colonization of Mars and suchlike things?
</p>
<p>
What is it they promise to the billions of starving and diseased people, total or functional illiterates, who live on this planet?
</p>
<p>
And what does the alleged existence of the United Nations Organization and the General Assembly mean to them, when the only thing that counts there is the Security Council, where five countries have veto power, and the real tyranny on any matter exerted by the dominant hegemonic superpower?
</p>
<p>
How can they be explained about the 200 million children who work for a living, others who are sold in the marketplaces of pleasure, or die by the millions every year when their lives could be saved with just a few cents?
</p>
<p>
What can we feel proud of?
</p>
<p>
What kind of humanity do we belong to?
</p>
<p>
It is necessary to build an awareness of these realities.
</p>
<p>
We should send this simple message of truth to the billions of people who in one way or another are experiencing this and are aware of it, so that no sophisticated weapons or mechanisms of deceit and lies that can destroy the conscience of our species.
</p>
<p>
Selfishness, ambition, hatred, envy, rivalries, the worst instincts are sown everywhere. Education is what the overwhelming majority of people on this planet mostly lack, and that is what turns newborn babies into human beings. A minimal amount of political education for young people and adults would allow them to understand the worldís realities.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps, of the evils brought about by developed capitalism none is so nefarious as the way of life and the consumerist habits, as unrealistic as they are unattainable, which advertising drums into the world population 365 days a year, 24 hours a day at a cost of a trillion dollars. If this amount were spent on instilling values and on rationally educating nations, the face of the earth would change.
</p>
<p>
Human beings are not educated to realistic patterns of consumption and distribution that include our infinite cultural and spiritual wealth. These could realistically be within humankindís reach without destroying nature, as could food, housing, and other essential material goods. Actually, the exact opposite is done, which constitutes an enormous tragedy.
</p>
<p>
Cuba is a modest example of what could be done with a minimum of resources. Our current struggle becomes especially important as we find ourselves up against the hostility and aggression of a government, which is the sum of the most overwhelming powers that have ever existed. It is, nevertheless, completely lacking in the ethical, social and humanist values which an endangered species like ours need to survive.
</p>
<p>
Twenty U.S. universities have introduced crash courses to explain the complicated tangles created by neoliberal capitalismís latest feat: accounting fraud. What is accounting fraud? It is barefaced robbery, a criminal swindling of millions and millions of Americans who had bought shares in big companies or had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in them. It is a fraud that directly affects retirees who had invested their money in these seemingly juicy shares.
</p>
<p>
The fraud scandal has given rise to controversies and direct and indirect accusations between political leaders in the United States. President Bush, in a recent speech given in Alabama, insinuated that the blame lay with the previous U.S. administration. He said that the U.S. economy was suffering a hangover from the economic binge of the 90s. He did not mention President Clinton by name but he criticized that culture of endless corporate profits in the stock markets where no one ever thought about the future.
</p>
<p>
The Democratic leadership has coincided with major newspapers in responding with harsh direct criticisms linking the current president with the same practices that he now pretends "to get rid of". They have mentioned the use of a company on the brink of a crisis, and how Mr. Bush, fully informed of the situation as a board member, sold his shares for $848,560, while the price was still high.
</p>
<p>
Additionally, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate has asked the body regulating the Stock Exchange to publish information about the privileged loans received by the president, at low interest rates, when he worked for the Harken Energy Company.
</p>
<p>
Accusations are flying while "millions of investors and pensioners have seen their savings and pensions reduced by more than one trillion dollars," to quote one prominent newspaper.
</p>
<p>
In the midst of the year 2000 crisis, the effects on the stock markets in the United States and Europe have been devastating and have had a serious impact on the world economy dealing a blow to hopes of a slight recovery in 2002.
</p>
<p>
More than 50% of U.S. consumers have shares in the stock market, which could negatively impact on the economic recovery
</p>
<p>
Unemployment in the United States has now risen to 6%.
</p>
<p>
Company profits have fallen in five consecutive quarters.
</p>
<p>
From March 2000 to date the Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices, the most important for the New York Stock Exchange had fallen, the former by around 31.6% and the latter by 73.9%. The New York Stock Exchange had lost $1.4 trillion in the last two weeks.
</p>
<p>
On Tuesday July 23, the New York Stock Exchange plummeted again because of the accounting fraud at WorldCom, the second largest world communications company. On Wednesday 24, it closed at a relatively high trend, and yesterday Thursday 25, it was announced that 12 investment banks were under investigation for possible links with the accounting frauds. Nobody knows what surprise tomorrow might bring.
</p>
<p>
After several years of high surpluses, the current administration is accused of bringing back budget deficits with its economic policy.
</p>
<p>
Public debt has risen to 6 trillion dollars, which is equivalent to a $66,000 per capita debt for every American.
</p>
<p>
The trade deficit continues to grow while the countryís spending in 2002 could exceed 500 billion dollars.
</p>
<p>
The external financing they receive has fallen to less than half the previous amount and so has foreign investment.
</p>
<p>
The dollar has been devalued against the Euro and the Yen.
</p>
<p>
The interest rate has fallen to its lowest level in 40 years, a symptom of uncertainty and insecurity.
</p>
<p>
There are some positive economic indicators, which do little to offset the set of overwhelmingly unfavorable factors just mentioned.
</p>
<p>
I have not said a word about what is happening in Latin America where, according to information known to our people, the economic and social situation is terrifying and getting worse.
</p>
<p>
Given the major significance of the U.S. economy for that of the rest of the world, including Cubaís, which in addition to the blockade suffers the indirect damage caused by the international economic crisis, the figures are far from encouraging for anyone. The set of problems that are piling up in the world point objectively to a disaster for neoliberal globalization and for that unsustainable economic order.
</p>
<p>
Since Cuba is a Third World country, it is also suffering from low sugar and nickel prices. The 10-year sustained growth of tourism of more than 15% annually was hit by the devastating terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, the effects of the world economic crisis on this industry and the growing cost of life insurance and fuel. Additionally submitted to an economic blockade by the United States for more than 40 years, but saving and managing its resources efficiently and honorably, there is no place here for murky businesses, the plundering of public funds, money laundering, drug trafficking or any other similar situations. There are no children who donít have a school. They donít go barefoot or panhandling. Thirteen vaccines protect their health. The infant mortality rate is one of the lowest in the world. All get immediate free medical care. All complete their sixth grade and almost one hundred percent their ninth grade. Today, all options for studying are within their reach. Their diet has improved. Their general education and art knowledge are growing. Our young people are guaranteed the continuation of their studies and a job when they turn 16.
</p>
<p>
Unemployment is not growing; it is falling, from 6% about 2 years ago and it will be 3.5% by the end of 2002. The number of drugs in short supply for the population is clearly decreasing. Medical services are improving and other new ones are being introduced. The people are protected in case of natural disasters and receive immediate assistance when have been affected; also, recovery after such events takes place in record time. Hundreds of thousands of televisions are supplied every year. Old schools are repaired and new ones are built. Audiovisual aids and computers are being introduced into school and general education on a massive scale. Programs such as the training of social workers and University for All are coming into being. Teachers and professors-training-on-the-job to increase the numbers of teaching staff and reduce classroom size are being educated. Computer skills teachers are teaching this subject from pre-school on. University education is advancing significantly while we continue to help other countries with education, health and sport, free of charge.
</p>
<p>
The social and humane advantages of our system are infinite. We are well ahead of many industrialized nations in many of the most important areas of life and ahead of all of them in some areas such as education, culture, scientific knowledge for the masses and other fields. Not all have been mentioned.
</p>
<p>
We have unity, a political culture, cohesion and strength. Nothing can even affect our brilliant future. In the battle of ideas no one can go up against our intelligent and ever more cultured people. We have been able to withstand the blockade for more than 40 years, including 11 of special period. We have just waged a sound struggle against lies, infamy, political subversion and the attempt to impose the fickle will of the masters of the most powerful empire that has ever existed on our people. We did so with such impressive strength and popular support that nobody should have any doubts that there is no way to break our invincible will to win or to die defending our socialism, which we think is the most just, humane and decent society that can be conceived of. And with every minute that passes the lies, the ignorance, the lack of culture and the threats will crash up against the invincible spirit of our people.
</p>
<p>
Hardly three days ago, the Miami terrorist Mob created, hand-fed, trained and supported by the U.S. administration openly declared the millions that it invests in interfering, destabilizing and terrorist actions against our people. One more proof of the lack of seriousness behind the declarations, the lies and the alleged policies of an administration that promises to fight terrorism.
</p>
<p>
Even if only out of a sense of political decency, the U.S. government should stop tolerating and supporting the extremist group which made it put on such a ridiculous show on May 20, which only led to greater unity, a strengthening of the revolutionary spirit and the patriotic conscience that the Cuban people has shown to the world.
</p>
<p>
The smallest municipality in Cuba is stronger than all the scum that met with Bush in the James L. Knight Center in Miami.
</p>
<p>
I have always said <em>and I shall never regret it</em> that the American people, idealist by nature due to its ethical values and its traditions of love of liberty will be one of the Cuban peopleís best friends when it learns the whole truth about Cubaís honest and heroic struggle. It showed this in an impressive way with its support for Eliánís return.
</p>
<p>
Scarcely 72 hours ago, the House of Representatives also made an important gesture when, based on various criteria and viewpoints, and even under assault by the hysterical screams and shouts of a little group of Miami mobsters, it paid no heed to the arguments of the supporters of the blockade and genocide against Cuba, voting with determination and courage for three amendments that bring glory to that institution. It does not matter if the executive as was already announced vetoes them, nor does it matter if new ruses and provocations are invented to annul them.
</p>
<p>
We shall always be grateful for that gesture. I would like to express our peopleís gratitude to both the Democratic and Republican legislators who on that day acted intelligently and strongly, following their own beliefs. We shall always be on the American peopleís side in its struggle to preserve the lives and interests of its citizens who might become innocent victims of criminal terrorist attacks.
</p>
<p>
On this historical date for Cubans, I can assure you that we wish for a sincere, respectful and fraternal friendship between the peoples of Cuba and the United States.
</p>
<p>
Long live socialism!
</p>
<p>
Patria o Muerte!
</p>
<p>
Venceremos!
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../index.htm">Castro Internet Archive</a>
</p>
</body> |
Fidel Castro
The barbaric world order that humanity endures today cannot last much longer
Spoken: July 26, 2002 at the public rally held at the "Abel Santamaría Cuadrado" Revolution Square in Ciego de Avila on the occasion of the 49th anniversary of the attacks on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks
Source: Discursos e Intervenciones del Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz (cuba.cu)
Markup: John Wagner
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002
Fellow Cubans:
History has proved that nothing could defeat our people in its noble endeavors and that weapons are no more powerful than ideas.
Gomez and Maceo, their tenacity and heroism, ride today like invincible horsemen through our fields; Céspedes and Agramonte bear with them the constitution and the justice for which they shed their blood in the free and sovereign republic they proclaimed in 1868. Martí�s ideals live on in the nation of workers that we are today, as nothing could prevent that, from the proletarian spirit of a country built over centuries with the blood and sweat of slaves and workers, the deepest yearning for freedom and justice that our national hero demanded would flow with inextinguishable strength, that is, our socialism. What we are today we have defended with honor and a sense of humanism and justice that will live on like an eternal flame.
Glory be especially to this July 26 and to those who on the same date forty-nine years ago shed their blood and gave their lives to resume with ever growing conscience the march down the road opened by their predecessors!
Glory be to the people that, educated in just ideas and heroic traditions, has stayed true to them until today and will stay true tomorrow and ever onwards to victory!
What are we, what shall we be if not one single history, one single idea, one single will for all times?
Ciego de Avila and Morón, yesterday a line of barricades that the enemy tried to use to divide the country the East from the West, what are they this July 26? They are an indestructible path linking the thought, the heroism and the will to struggle of that imperishable bulwark with whose independence Martí wanted to prevent and did prevent the powerful and expansionist neighbor to the North from spreading through the Antilles and falling with that additional force on our American lands.
People of Ciego de Avila and fellow Cubans from the former province of Camagüey, without the memory of your sacrifices of yesterday, our dreams of today would be impossible.
Hardly twelve years ago, many in the world expected to see Cuba, the last socialist state in the West, crumble. Not much time has gone by and today, instead, quite a number of us on this earth are waiting to see how the developed capitalist world led by the United States disengages from the colossal and chaotic economic mess in which it is enmeshed. Those who yesterday talked so much about the end of history might be wondering if this profound crisis is not the beginning of the end of the political, economic and social system it represents.
Nevertheless, being aware of the disaster affecting that system does not necessarily mean to be unrealistic, to indulge in excessive optimism or to see mirages in the midst of what is still an arid desert.
The men who to some degree foresaw a fragment of the future, as a rule perceived the demise of their eraís tragedies as closer and imminent. However, one would have to be really blind to fail to understand that the barbaric and cruel world order that humanity endures today cannot last much longer.
History has shown that new eras have always arisen from the profound crises of any dominant system.
The 21st century will not be like the century that just ended when the human population grew four times more that it had grown in the hundreds of thousands of years that man wandered through the woods, groves, rivers and lakes of the earth, seeking sustenance in obscure corners of the planet which are today threatened with pre-emptive and surprise attacks. Today, one could almost envy those noble barbaric predecessors!
When Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, it seemed that almost the only limit to the inexhaustible fount of riches that would make possible a truly just and worthy social system for human beings was the exploitative and merciless capitalist system born from the bourgeois revolution. Not even his wondrous genius could imagine how much damage capitalism was yet to bring on humanity.
Lenin discovered and analyzed its imperialist phase.
Today, almost one hundred years later, humanity is suffering under the horrors of its neoliberal globalization.
New and enormous challenges have surfaced in each of these stages that lead it closer to its end.
Hardly 30 years ago, few people in the world discussed the environment. Ideas or themes linked to the destruction of the forests, soil erosion and salinity, climate change, the disappearing ozone layer, melting icecaps, whole cities and nations doomed to fatally disappear beneath the sea, polluted air and water; overexploited oceans seemed to be inventions of doomsday scientists and not pressing realities.
What does it mean for the overwhelming majority of humanity the spectacular breakthroughs of science, space flights, the possible colonization of Mars and suchlike things?
What is it they promise to the billions of starving and diseased people, total or functional illiterates, who live on this planet?
And what does the alleged existence of the United Nations Organization and the General Assembly mean to them, when the only thing that counts there is the Security Council, where five countries have veto power, and the real tyranny on any matter exerted by the dominant hegemonic superpower?
How can they be explained about the 200 million children who work for a living, others who are sold in the marketplaces of pleasure, or die by the millions every year when their lives could be saved with just a few cents?
What can we feel proud of?
What kind of humanity do we belong to?
It is necessary to build an awareness of these realities.
We should send this simple message of truth to the billions of people who in one way or another are experiencing this and are aware of it, so that no sophisticated weapons or mechanisms of deceit and lies that can destroy the conscience of our species.
Selfishness, ambition, hatred, envy, rivalries, the worst instincts are sown everywhere. Education is what the overwhelming majority of people on this planet mostly lack, and that is what turns newborn babies into human beings. A minimal amount of political education for young people and adults would allow them to understand the worldís realities.
Perhaps, of the evils brought about by developed capitalism none is so nefarious as the way of life and the consumerist habits, as unrealistic as they are unattainable, which advertising drums into the world population 365 days a year, 24 hours a day at a cost of a trillion dollars. If this amount were spent on instilling values and on rationally educating nations, the face of the earth would change.
Human beings are not educated to realistic patterns of consumption and distribution that include our infinite cultural and spiritual wealth. These could realistically be within humankindís reach without destroying nature, as could food, housing, and other essential material goods. Actually, the exact opposite is done, which constitutes an enormous tragedy.
Cuba is a modest example of what could be done with a minimum of resources. Our current struggle becomes especially important as we find ourselves up against the hostility and aggression of a government, which is the sum of the most overwhelming powers that have ever existed. It is, nevertheless, completely lacking in the ethical, social and humanist values which an endangered species like ours need to survive.
Twenty U.S. universities have introduced crash courses to explain the complicated tangles created by neoliberal capitalismís latest feat: accounting fraud. What is accounting fraud? It is barefaced robbery, a criminal swindling of millions and millions of Americans who had bought shares in big companies or had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in them. It is a fraud that directly affects retirees who had invested their money in these seemingly juicy shares.
The fraud scandal has given rise to controversies and direct and indirect accusations between political leaders in the United States. President Bush, in a recent speech given in Alabama, insinuated that the blame lay with the previous U.S. administration. He said that the U.S. economy was suffering a hangover from the economic binge of the 90s. He did not mention President Clinton by name but he criticized that culture of endless corporate profits in the stock markets where no one ever thought about the future.
The Democratic leadership has coincided with major newspapers in responding with harsh direct criticisms linking the current president with the same practices that he now pretends "to get rid of". They have mentioned the use of a company on the brink of a crisis, and how Mr. Bush, fully informed of the situation as a board member, sold his shares for $848,560, while the price was still high.
Additionally, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate has asked the body regulating the Stock Exchange to publish information about the privileged loans received by the president, at low interest rates, when he worked for the Harken Energy Company.
Accusations are flying while "millions of investors and pensioners have seen their savings and pensions reduced by more than one trillion dollars," to quote one prominent newspaper.
In the midst of the year 2000 crisis, the effects on the stock markets in the United States and Europe have been devastating and have had a serious impact on the world economy dealing a blow to hopes of a slight recovery in 2002.
More than 50% of U.S. consumers have shares in the stock market, which could negatively impact on the economic recovery
Unemployment in the United States has now risen to 6%.
Company profits have fallen in five consecutive quarters.
From March 2000 to date the Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices, the most important for the New York Stock Exchange had fallen, the former by around 31.6% and the latter by 73.9%. The New York Stock Exchange had lost $1.4 trillion in the last two weeks.
On Tuesday July 23, the New York Stock Exchange plummeted again because of the accounting fraud at WorldCom, the second largest world communications company. On Wednesday 24, it closed at a relatively high trend, and yesterday Thursday 25, it was announced that 12 investment banks were under investigation for possible links with the accounting frauds. Nobody knows what surprise tomorrow might bring.
After several years of high surpluses, the current administration is accused of bringing back budget deficits with its economic policy.
Public debt has risen to 6 trillion dollars, which is equivalent to a $66,000 per capita debt for every American.
The trade deficit continues to grow while the countryís spending in 2002 could exceed 500 billion dollars.
The external financing they receive has fallen to less than half the previous amount and so has foreign investment.
The dollar has been devalued against the Euro and the Yen.
The interest rate has fallen to its lowest level in 40 years, a symptom of uncertainty and insecurity.
There are some positive economic indicators, which do little to offset the set of overwhelmingly unfavorable factors just mentioned.
I have not said a word about what is happening in Latin America where, according to information known to our people, the economic and social situation is terrifying and getting worse.
Given the major significance of the U.S. economy for that of the rest of the world, including Cubaís, which in addition to the blockade suffers the indirect damage caused by the international economic crisis, the figures are far from encouraging for anyone. The set of problems that are piling up in the world point objectively to a disaster for neoliberal globalization and for that unsustainable economic order.
Since Cuba is a Third World country, it is also suffering from low sugar and nickel prices. The 10-year sustained growth of tourism of more than 15% annually was hit by the devastating terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, the effects of the world economic crisis on this industry and the growing cost of life insurance and fuel. Additionally submitted to an economic blockade by the United States for more than 40 years, but saving and managing its resources efficiently and honorably, there is no place here for murky businesses, the plundering of public funds, money laundering, drug trafficking or any other similar situations. There are no children who donít have a school. They donít go barefoot or panhandling. Thirteen vaccines protect their health. The infant mortality rate is one of the lowest in the world. All get immediate free medical care. All complete their sixth grade and almost one hundred percent their ninth grade. Today, all options for studying are within their reach. Their diet has improved. Their general education and art knowledge are growing. Our young people are guaranteed the continuation of their studies and a job when they turn 16.
Unemployment is not growing; it is falling, from 6% about 2 years ago and it will be 3.5% by the end of 2002. The number of drugs in short supply for the population is clearly decreasing. Medical services are improving and other new ones are being introduced. The people are protected in case of natural disasters and receive immediate assistance when have been affected; also, recovery after such events takes place in record time. Hundreds of thousands of televisions are supplied every year. Old schools are repaired and new ones are built. Audiovisual aids and computers are being introduced into school and general education on a massive scale. Programs such as the training of social workers and University for All are coming into being. Teachers and professors-training-on-the-job to increase the numbers of teaching staff and reduce classroom size are being educated. Computer skills teachers are teaching this subject from pre-school on. University education is advancing significantly while we continue to help other countries with education, health and sport, free of charge.
The social and humane advantages of our system are infinite. We are well ahead of many industrialized nations in many of the most important areas of life and ahead of all of them in some areas such as education, culture, scientific knowledge for the masses and other fields. Not all have been mentioned.
We have unity, a political culture, cohesion and strength. Nothing can even affect our brilliant future. In the battle of ideas no one can go up against our intelligent and ever more cultured people. We have been able to withstand the blockade for more than 40 years, including 11 of special period. We have just waged a sound struggle against lies, infamy, political subversion and the attempt to impose the fickle will of the masters of the most powerful empire that has ever existed on our people. We did so with such impressive strength and popular support that nobody should have any doubts that there is no way to break our invincible will to win or to die defending our socialism, which we think is the most just, humane and decent society that can be conceived of. And with every minute that passes the lies, the ignorance, the lack of culture and the threats will crash up against the invincible spirit of our people.
Hardly three days ago, the Miami terrorist Mob created, hand-fed, trained and supported by the U.S. administration openly declared the millions that it invests in interfering, destabilizing and terrorist actions against our people. One more proof of the lack of seriousness behind the declarations, the lies and the alleged policies of an administration that promises to fight terrorism.
Even if only out of a sense of political decency, the U.S. government should stop tolerating and supporting the extremist group which made it put on such a ridiculous show on May 20, which only led to greater unity, a strengthening of the revolutionary spirit and the patriotic conscience that the Cuban people has shown to the world.
The smallest municipality in Cuba is stronger than all the scum that met with Bush in the James L. Knight Center in Miami.
I have always said and I shall never regret it that the American people, idealist by nature due to its ethical values and its traditions of love of liberty will be one of the Cuban peopleís best friends when it learns the whole truth about Cubaís honest and heroic struggle. It showed this in an impressive way with its support for Eliánís return.
Scarcely 72 hours ago, the House of Representatives also made an important gesture when, based on various criteria and viewpoints, and even under assault by the hysterical screams and shouts of a little group of Miami mobsters, it paid no heed to the arguments of the supporters of the blockade and genocide against Cuba, voting with determination and courage for three amendments that bring glory to that institution. It does not matter if the executive as was already announced vetoes them, nor does it matter if new ruses and provocations are invented to annul them.
We shall always be grateful for that gesture. I would like to express our peopleís gratitude to both the Democratic and Republican legislators who on that day acted intelligently and strongly, following their own beliefs. We shall always be on the American peopleís side in its struggle to preserve the lives and interests of its citizens who might become innocent victims of criminal terrorist attacks.
On this historical date for Cubans, I can assure you that we wish for a sincere, respectful and fraternal friendship between the peoples of Cuba and the United States.
Long live socialism!
Patria o Muerte!
Venceremos!
Castro Internet Archive
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><strong><a href="april_02.html">April 2002 • Vol 2, No. 4 •</a></strong></font></p>
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<p align="CENTER"><font size="5" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular"><strong>Speech by Fidel Castro </strong><strong><br>
</strong><strong>at the UN International Conference </strong><strong><br>
</strong><strong>in Monterrey</strong></font></p>
</div>
</div>
<div align="left">
<hr noshade="" size="3" width="75%" align="left">
<p><img src="monterrey_castro.jpg" width="180" height="221" border="1" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="4"><font color="black">Excellencies:</font></p>
<p>Not everyone here will share my thoughts. Still, I will respectfully say what I think.</p>
<p>The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.</p>
<p>The prestige of the international financial institutions rates less than zero.</p>
<p>The world economy is today a huge casino. Recent analyses indicate that for every dollar that goes into trade, over one hundred end up in speculative operations completely disconnected from the real economy.</p>
<p>As a result of this economic order, over 75 percent of the world population lives in underdevelopment, and extreme poverty has already reached 1.2 billion people in the Third World. So, far from narrowing the gap is widening.</p>
<p>The revenue of the richest nations that in 1960 was 37 times larger than that of the poorest is now 74 times larger. The situation has reached such extremes that the assets of the three wealthiest persons in the world amount to the GDP of the 48 poorest countries combined.</p>
<p>The number of people actually starving was 826 million in the year 2001. There are at the moment 854 million illiterate adults while 325 million children do not attend school. There are 2 billion people who have no access to low cost medications and 2.4 billion lack the basic sanitation conditions. No less than 11 million children under the age of 5 perish every year from preventable causes while half a million go blind for lack of vitamin A.</p>
<p>The life span of the population in the developed world is 30 years higher than that of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. A true genocide!</p>
<p>The poor countries should not be blamed for this tragedy. They neither conquered nor plundered entire continents for centuries; they did not establish colonialism, or re-established slavery; and, modern imperialism is not of their making. Actually, they have been its victims. Therefore, the main responsibility for financing their development lies with those states that, for obvious historical reasons, enjoy today the benefits of those atrocities.</p>
<p>The rich world should annul its foreign debt and grant them fresh soft credits to finance their development. The traditional offers of assistance, always scant and often ridiculous, are either inadequate or unfulfilled.</p>
<p>For a true and sustainable economic and social development to take place much more is required than is usually admitted. Measures as those suggested by the late James Tobin to curtail the irrepressible flow of currency speculation—albeit it was not his idea to foster development—would perhaps be the only ones capable of generating enough funds, which in the hands of the UN agencies and not of awful institutions like the IMF, could supply direct development assistance with a democratic participation of all countries and without the need to sacrifice the independence and sovereignty of the peoples.</p>
<p>The Consensus draft, which the masters of the world are imposing on this conference, intends that we accept humiliating, conditioned and interfering alms.</p>
<p>Everything created since Bretton Woods until today should be reconsidered. A farsighted vision was then missing, thus, the privileges and interests of the most powerful prevailed. In the face of the deep present crisis, a still worse future is offered where the economic, social and ecologic tragedy of an increasingly ungovernable world would never be resolved and where the number of the poor and the starving would grow higher, as if a large part of humanity were doomed.</p>
<p>It is high time for statesmen and politicians to calmly reflect on this. The belief that a social and economic order that has proven to be unsustainable can be forcibly imposed is really senseless.</p>
<p>As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.</p>
<p>It should definitely be said: “Farewell to arms.”</p>
<p>Something must be done to save Humanity!</p>
<p>A better world is possible!</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>—<em>Granma</em>, March 21, 2002</p>
<hr>
<p><a name="cuba"></a></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font size="4"><font color="black" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5"><strong>Cuban Participation in Monterrey UN Conference Excluded by U.S.</strong></font></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font color="black"><strong> </strong></font></p>
<p>Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, president of Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power and head of the Cuban delegation to the United Nations Conference on Financing for Development, revealed that President Fidel Castro’s early return to Cuba from the UN Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico was due to “brutal pressure placed on the Mexican government by the United States.”</p>
<p>In an article in the March 26 issue of the Cuban newspaper <em>Granma,</em> Alarcón was quoted saying, “Not only high-ranking officials, bu I would say very high-ranking persons in the Mexican government communicated to us before the conference began that they had been subjected to pressures by the United States to block Cuba’s participation in the conference, and specifically to keep its delegation from being headed by the president of the Council of State, Comrade Fidel Castro.”</p>
<p>Alarcón told <em>Granma</em> that the United Nations would lose its authority as a result of the incident with Cuba, “because no one there will understand or accept such a thing, which is completely contrary to the spirit and tradition of the organization. The United Nations demands that host countries of a meeting accept all members of the United Nations, based on a principle in the UN Charter’s first paragraph, establishing sovereign equality among states.”</p>
<p>The incident reveals two important facts. First, the United States uses and views the United Nations as a water boy for U.S. imperialism; in the case of this conference, as a rubber stamp for a completely useless “Monterrey Consensus” [See article entitled “The Threat of Economic Collapse and World Poverty” in this issue.] Second, and perhaps, more important, the U.S. is genuinely afraid of Fidel Castro’s socialist message—that another world<em> is</em> possible—reaching the working people of the world.</p>
<p>—<em>Carole Seligman</em></p>
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April 2002 • Vol 2, No. 4 •
Speech by Fidel Castro
at the UN International Conference
in Monterrey
Excellencies:
Not everyone here will share my thoughts. Still, I will respectfully say what I think.
The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.
The prestige of the international financial institutions rates less than zero.
The world economy is today a huge casino. Recent analyses indicate that for every dollar that goes into trade, over one hundred end up in speculative operations completely disconnected from the real economy.
As a result of this economic order, over 75 percent of the world population lives in underdevelopment, and extreme poverty has already reached 1.2 billion people in the Third World. So, far from narrowing the gap is widening.
The revenue of the richest nations that in 1960 was 37 times larger than that of the poorest is now 74 times larger. The situation has reached such extremes that the assets of the three wealthiest persons in the world amount to the GDP of the 48 poorest countries combined.
The number of people actually starving was 826 million in the year 2001. There are at the moment 854 million illiterate adults while 325 million children do not attend school. There are 2 billion people who have no access to low cost medications and 2.4 billion lack the basic sanitation conditions. No less than 11 million children under the age of 5 perish every year from preventable causes while half a million go blind for lack of vitamin A.
The life span of the population in the developed world is 30 years higher than that of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. A true genocide!
The poor countries should not be blamed for this tragedy. They neither conquered nor plundered entire continents for centuries; they did not establish colonialism, or re-established slavery; and, modern imperialism is not of their making. Actually, they have been its victims. Therefore, the main responsibility for financing their development lies with those states that, for obvious historical reasons, enjoy today the benefits of those atrocities.
The rich world should annul its foreign debt and grant them fresh soft credits to finance their development. The traditional offers of assistance, always scant and often ridiculous, are either inadequate or unfulfilled.
For a true and sustainable economic and social development to take place much more is required than is usually admitted. Measures as those suggested by the late James Tobin to curtail the irrepressible flow of currency speculation—albeit it was not his idea to foster development—would perhaps be the only ones capable of generating enough funds, which in the hands of the UN agencies and not of awful institutions like the IMF, could supply direct development assistance with a democratic participation of all countries and without the need to sacrifice the independence and sovereignty of the peoples.
The Consensus draft, which the masters of the world are imposing on this conference, intends that we accept humiliating, conditioned and interfering alms.
Everything created since Bretton Woods until today should be reconsidered. A farsighted vision was then missing, thus, the privileges and interests of the most powerful prevailed. In the face of the deep present crisis, a still worse future is offered where the economic, social and ecologic tragedy of an increasingly ungovernable world would never be resolved and where the number of the poor and the starving would grow higher, as if a large part of humanity were doomed.
It is high time for statesmen and politicians to calmly reflect on this. The belief that a social and economic order that has proven to be unsustainable can be forcibly imposed is really senseless.
As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.
It should definitely be said: “Farewell to arms.”
Something must be done to save Humanity!
A better world is possible!
Thank you.
—Granma, March 21, 2002
Cuban Participation in Monterrey UN Conference Excluded by U.S.
Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, president of Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power and head of the Cuban delegation to the United Nations Conference on Financing for Development, revealed that President Fidel Castro’s early return to Cuba from the UN Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico was due to “brutal pressure placed on the Mexican government by the United States.”
In an article in the March 26 issue of the Cuban newspaper Granma, Alarcón was quoted saying, “Not only high-ranking officials, bu I would say very high-ranking persons in the Mexican government communicated to us before the conference began that they had been subjected to pressures by the United States to block Cuba’s participation in the conference, and specifically to keep its delegation from being headed by the president of the Council of State, Comrade Fidel Castro.”
Alarcón told Granma that the United Nations would lose its authority as a result of the incident with Cuba, “because no one there will understand or accept such a thing, which is completely contrary to the spirit and tradition of the organization. The United Nations demands that host countries of a meeting accept all members of the United Nations, based on a principle in the UN Charter’s first paragraph, establishing sovereign equality among states.”
The incident reveals two important facts. First, the United States uses and views the United Nations as a water boy for U.S. imperialism; in the case of this conference, as a rubber stamp for a completely useless “Monterrey Consensus” [See article entitled “The Threat of Economic Collapse and World Poverty” in this issue.] Second, and perhaps, more important, the U.S. is genuinely afraid of Fidel Castro’s socialist message—that another world is possible—reaching the working people of the world.
—Carole Seligman
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1959.01.03 | <body>
<p class="title">
Fidel Castro
<br>
The Revolution Begins Now
</p>
<h3>The Revolution Begins Now</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> January 3, 1959 at the Cospedes Park in Santiago de Cuba,
<br>
<span class="info">Publisher:</span> Revolucion on 3, 4 and 5 of January, 1959.
<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> FBIS
<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/Markup:</span> Castro Speech Database/Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="fst">
People of Santiago, Compatriots of All Cuba,
</p>
<p>
We have finally reached Santiago de Cuba. The road was long and
difficult, but we finally arrived. It was rumored that they expected us in
the capital of the Republic at 2 p.m. today. No one was more amazed by
this than I, because I was the first one to be surprised by this
treacherous blow, which would place me in the capital of the Republic this
morning. Moreover, I intended to be in the capital of the Republic — that
is, in the new capital of the Republic — because Santiago de Cuba, in
accordance with the wishes of the Provisional President, in accordance with
the wishes of the Rebel Army, and in accordance with the wishes of the
people of Santiago de Cuba, who really deserved it, Santiago will be the
new capital of Cuba.
</p>
<p>
This measure may surprise some people. Admittedly, it is new, but
the revolution is characterized precisely by its newness, by the fact that
it will do things that have never been done before.
</p>
<p>
In making Santiago de Cuba the provisional capital of the
Republic, we are fully aware of our reason for doing so. This is no
attempt to cajole a specific area by demogogic means. It is simply that
Santiago de Cuba has been the strongest bulwark of the revolution, a
revolution that is beginning now. Our Revolution will be no easy task, but
a harsh and dangerous undertaking, particularly in the initial phases. And
in what better place could we establish the Government of the Republic than
in this fortress of the Revolution.
</p>
<p>
So that you may know that this will be a government solidly
supported by the people of this heroic city, located in the foothills of
the Sierra Maestra — because Santiago de Cuba is a part of the Sierra
Maestra — Santiago de Cuba and the Sierra Maestra will provide the two
strongest fortresses for the Revolution. However, there are other reasons
that motivate us, and one is the military revolutionary movement, the truly
military revolutionary movement which did not take place in [Camp] Colombia.
</p>
<h4>
[The Betrayal of General Cantillo]
</h4>
<p>
In Colombia they prepared a puny little uprising against the
revolution, principally with Batista's assistance. Since it is necessary
to tell the truth and since we came here with a view to orienting people, I
can tell you and I can assure you that the military uprising in Colombia
was an attempt to deprive the people in power, to rob the revolution of its
triumph and to allow Batista to escape, to allow the Tabernilla to escape,
to allow the Tabernillas to escape together with the Pilar Garcias, to
allow the Salas Canizares and the Venturas. The Colombian uprising was an
ambitious and treacherous blow that deserves the lowest epithets.
</p>
<p>
We must call a spade a spade and put the blame where it belongs.
I am not going to be diplomatic. I will say outright that General Cantillo
betrayed us and not only am I going to say it, but I am going to prove it
to you.
</p>
<p>
However, we had always said so. We had always said that there
would be no point in resolving this matter at the last moment with a puny
little military uprising, because if there is a military uprising,
concealed from the people, our Revolution will go forward nonetheless and
this time cannot be over the power. It will not be like 1895 when the
Americans came and took over, intervening at the last moment, and
afterwards did not even allow Calixto Garcia to assume leadership, although
he had fought at Santiago de Cuba for 30 years.
</p>
<p>
Nor will it be like 1933, when the people began to believe that
the revolution was going to triumph, and Mr. Batista came in to betray the
revolution, take over power, and establish an 11-year-long dictatorship.
</p>
<p>
Nor will it be like 1944, when the people took courage, believing
that they had finally reached a position where they could take over the
power, while those who did assume power proved to be thieves. We will have
no thievery, no treason, no intervention. This time it is truly the
revolution, even though some might not desire it. At the very moment that
the dictatorship fell, as a consequence of the military victories of our
Revolution, when they could not hold out even another 15 days, Mr. Cantillo
appears on the scene as a paladin of freedom. Naturally, we have never
been remiss in refusing any offer of collaboration that might prevent
bloodshed, providing the aims of our Revolution were not imperiled thereby.
Naturally, we have always appealed to the military in our search for peace,
but it must be peace for freedom and peace with the triumph of our
Revolution. This is the only way to obtain peace.
</p>
<p>
Hence, on December 24, when we were told of General Cantillo's
desire to meet us, we agreed to the interview. And I must confess to you
that, given the course of events, the extraordinary development of our
military operations, I had very little interest in speaking of military
movements. Nevertheless, I felt that it was the duty of those of us with
responsibility not to allow ourselves to be carried away by our feelings.
I also thought that if triumph could be achieved with the minimum
bloodshed, it was my duty to listen to the proposals made by the military.
</p>
<p>
I went to meet Mr. Cantillo, who spoke to me on behalf of the
Army. He met me on the 28th [December] at the Oriente mill, where he
arrived in a helicopter at 8 p.m. We talked for four hours and I will not
invent any stories about what took place, since there were several
exceptional witnesses to the interview. There was Dr. Raul Chibas, there
was a Catholic priest, there were several military men, whose evidence
cannot be questioned on any grounds whatsoever. After analyzing all of
Cuba's problems, and underlining all the minute details, General Cantillo
agreed to carry out a military revolutionary movement with us. The first
thing I said to him was this:
</p>
<p>
After carefully studying the situation, the situation of the
Army, the situation in which it had been placed by the
dictatorship, after explaining to him that he did not have to
concern himself with Batista, nor with the Tabernillas, nor with
the rest of those people because none of them had shown any
concern for the Cuban military forces, we showed him that those
people had lead the military into a campaign against the masses, a
campaign that can never be victorious because no one can win a war
against the mass of the population.
</p>
<p>
After telling him that the military forces were the victims
of the regime's immorality, that the budgetary allocations for the
purchase of arms were embezzled, that the soldiers were being
constantly defrauded, that those people did not deserve the
consideration of honorable military men, that the Army had no
reason to bear the blame for crimes committed by Batista's gangs
of villains, I told him quite clearly that I did not authorize any
type of movement that would enable Batista to escape. I warned
him that if Batista got away afterwards with the Tabernillas and
the rest of them it would be because we had been unable to prevent
it. We had to prevent Batista's flight.
</p>
<p>
Everyone knows that our first requirement in the event of a
military uprising — that is, a military uprising in conjunction with our
movement — was the surrender of the war criminals. This is an essential
condition. We could have captured Batista and all his accomplices and I
said it loudly and clearly that I was not in agreement with Batista's
escape. I explained to him quite clearly what course of action would have
to be taken and that I did not give any support [to Batista's escape] nor
would the 27th of July Movement, nor would the people support a coup d'etat
[on such terms], because the fact is that it was the people who obtained
their freedom by conquest and only the people who did it.
</p>
<p>
Our freedom was taken from us by a coup d'etat but in order to
finish once and for all with coups d'etat, it was necessary to achieve
freedom by dint of the people's sacrifice. We could achieve nothing by one
uprising today and another tomorrow and another two years later and another
three years after, because here in Cuba it is the people, and the people
alone, who must decide who is to govern them.
</p>
<p>
The military forces must unconditionally obey the people's orders
and be at the disposal of the people, of the constitution and of the Laws
of the Republic. If there is a poor government that embezzles and does
more than four wrong things, the only thing to do is to wait a little while
and when election time comes the bad government is turned out of office.
That is why in democratic, constitutional regimes governments have a fixed
mandate. If they are bad, they can be ousted by the people, who can vote
for a better government. The function of the military is not to elect
governments, but to guarantee laws and to guarantee the rights of the
citizens. That is why I warned him that a coup d'etat was out of the
question, but a military revolutionary movement was in order and it should
take place in Santiago de Cuba and not in Colombia.
</p>
<p>
I told him quite clearly that the only way of forming a link with
the people and joining them, of uniting the military and the
revolutionaries was not a coup d'etat in the early hours of the dawn in
Colombia — at 2 or 3 a.m. — about which no one would know anything, as is
the usual practice of the gentlemen. I told him it would be necessary to
arouse the garrison at Santiago de Cuba, which was quite strong and
adequately armed, in order to start the military movement, which would then
be joined by the people and the revolutionaries. Given the situation in
which the dictatorship found itself, such movement would prove irresistible
because all the other garrisons in the country would certainly join it at
once. That was what was agreed upon and not only was it what was agreed
upon but I made him promise it. He intended to go to Havana the next day
and we did not agree with this. I said to him, "It is risky for you to go
to Havana." And he replied, "No, no there is no risk in it." I insisted,
"You are running a great risk of arrest because if there is a conspiracy,
everyone knows about it here."
</p>
<p>
"No, I am sure they will not arrest me," he replied. And, of
course, why would they arrest him if this was a "coup d'etat of Batista?"
</p>
<p>
My thoughts were, "Well, all this seems so easy that it might well
be a suspicious movement," so I said to him, "Will you promise me that in
Havana you will not be persuaded by those interests which support you to
carry out a coup d'etat in the capital? Will you promise me that you will
not do it? His reply was, "I promise I won't." I insisted, "Will you
swear to me that you won't?" And his reply again, "I swear I won't!"
</p>
<p>
I believe that the prime requisite for a military man is honor,
that the prime requisite of a military man is his word. This gentleman not
only proved that he is dishonorable and that his word is worth nothing, but
that he also lacks intelligence. I say this because a movement which could
have been organized from the start with the support of the whole
population, with its victory assured from the outset, did nothing more than
dive into space. He believed that it would be only too easy to fool the
people and to mislead the Revolution. He knew some things. He knew, for
instance, that when we told the people that Batista had got hold of a plane
the people would flock into the streets, madly happy. They thought that
the people were not sufficiently mature to distinguish between Batista's
flight and the Revolution. Because if Batista goes and over there
Cantillo's friends assume command, it is quite likely that Dr. Urrutia
would also have to go within three months. Because just as they were
betraying us now, so would they betray us later and the truth of the matter
is that Mr. Cantillo betrayed us before the Revolution. He gave signs of
this and I can prove it. We agreed with General Cantillo that the uprising
would take place on the 31st at 3 p.m. and it was agreed that the armed
forces would give unconditional support to the revolutionary movement. The
President was to appoint the revolutionary leaders and establish the
positions to which the revolutionary leaders would assign the military.
They were offering unconditional support and every detail of the plan was
agreed upon. At 3 p.m. on the 31st the garrison at Santiago de Cuba was to
rise in revolt. Immediately after several rebel columns would enter the
city and the people would fraternize with the military and the rebels,
immediately submitting a revolutionary proclamation to the country as a
whole and calling on all honorable military men to join the movement. It
was agreed that the talks in the city would be placed at our disposal and I
personally offered to advance toward the capital with an armed column
preceded by the tanks. The tanks in the city would be placed at our
disposal and I personally offered to advance toward the capital with an
armed column preceded by the tanks. The tanks were to be handed to me at 3
p.m., not because it was felt that any fighting would be necessary but only
against the possibility that in Havana the Movement might fail, making it
necessary to place our vanguard as close as possible to the capital and to
prevent any such occurrences in Havana.
</p>
<p>
It was evident that with the hatred for the public forces created
by the horrendous crimes committed by Ventura and Pilar Garcia, Batista's
fall would create considerable upheaval among the people. Moreover, the
police force would inevitably feel that it lacked the moral strength to
contain the populace, as in fact happened. A series of excesses were
recorded in the capital. There was looting, shooting, fires, and all the
responsibility for it falls on the shoulders of General Cantillo, who
betrayed his word of honor, who failed to carry out the plan which had been
agreed upon. He believed that by appointing police captains and
commanders, many of whom had already deserted when they were appointed —
proof that they had a guilty conscience — would be enough to solve the
problem. How different things were in Santiago de Cuba! How orderly and
civic-minded! How disciplined the behavior of the masses! There was not a
single attempt to loot, not a single example of personal vengeance, not a
single man dragged through the streets, not a single fire! The behavior of
the population of Santiago de Cuba was admirable and exemplary despite two
factors. One of these was that Santiago de Cuba was the city which had
suffered the most, where there had been the greatest terrorism and where,
consequently, one would expect the people to be indignant. Moreover,
despite our statements of this morning that we were not in agreement with
the coup d'etat, the population in Santiago de Cuba behaved in an exemplary
fashion.... [A typing error makes the translation of the next two lines
impossible].... One can no longer say that revolution is anarchy and
disorder; it occurred in Havana because of treason, but that was not the
case in Santiago de Cuba, which we can hold out as a model every time the
Revolution is accused of anarchy and disorganization.
</p>
<p>
It is well that people should know of the negotiations between
General Cantillo and me. If the people are not too tired, I can tell you
that after the agreements were made, when we had already suspended
operations in Santiago de Cuba, since on the 28th our troops were quite
near to the city and had completed all the preparatory work necessary for
the attack on it, according to the interview we were to make a series of
changes, abandoning the operation at Santiago de Cuba. Instead, we were to
direct our troops elsewhere, in fact, to a place where it was believed that
the Movement might not be victorious from the outset.
</p>
<p>
When we had completed all our movements, the column which was to
march on the capital received the following note from General Cantillo,
just a few hours before it was due to leave. The text of the note read as
follows: "Circumstances have changed considerably and now are favorable to
a national solution, in accordance with all desires for Cuba." Yet, the
major factors could not be more favorable and every circumstance pointed to
triumph. It was therefore strange that he should come and say that
circumstances had changed greatly and favorably. The circumstances were
that Batista and Tabernilla had agreed and the success of the coup was
assured. I recommended that nothing should be done at the moment and that
we should await the course of events over the next weeks, up to [January]
6th. Obviously, given the indefinitely prolonged truce while they were
taking care of everything in Havana, my immediate reply was as follows:
"The tenor of the note is entirely in contradiction with our agreements.
Moreover, it is ambiguous and incomprehensible and has made me lose
confidence in the seriousness of the agreements. Hostilities will break
out tomorrow at 3 p.m., the date and time agreed upon for the launching of
the movement."
</p>
<p>
Something very curious happened immediately thereafter in addition
to the receipt of the very short note. I advised the commanding officer at
Santiago de Cuba, through the bearer of the message, that if hostilities
were to break out because the agreements were not fulfilled and we had to
attack the first at Santiago de Cuba, they could do nothing other than
surrender.
</p>
<p>
My phrase was that we demanded the surrender of the town if
hostilities were to break out and if we were to initiate the attack.
However, the bearer of the note did not interpret me correctly. He told
Colonel Rego Rubido that I demanded the surrender of the town as a
precondition to any agreement. He did not add that I had said, "in the
event of our launching an attack." However, I had not said that I demanded
the surrender of the town as a condition from General Cantillo. As a
result of this message, the commanding officer at Santiago de Cuba sent me
a very enigmatic and punctilious reply which I will read to you,
indicating, naturally, that he felt very offended with what had been said
to him in error. It read as follows: "The solution found is neither a
coup d'etat nor a military revolt and yet we believe that it is the most
advisable solution for Dr. Fidel Castro, in accordance with his ideas and
one which would place the destinies of the country in his hands within 48
hours. It is not a local but a national solution and any indiscretion
might compromise or destroy it, leading to chaos. Therefore, we hope you
will have confidence in our decisions and you will receive the solution
before the 6th. As for Santiago, owing to the note and to the words of the
messenger, it will be necessary to change the plan and not enter the city."
</p>
<p>
His words caused a certain amount of bad feeling among the key
personnel. It was argued that no arms would be surrendered without
fighting, that arms are not surrendered, that arms are not surrendered to
an ally, that arms cannot be surrendered without honor. All of which are
very beautiful phrases when spoken by the commander of the garrison of
Santiago de Cuba, if he has no confidence in us; or if Santiago de Cuba is
attacked, they will regard it as equivalent to breaking the agreements,
which will interrupt the negotiations for the solution offered, thereby
formally absolving us from any compromise. It was our hope that, given the
time required to act in one way or another, the reply would arrive in time
to be sent to Havana by the Viscount flying out in the afternoon. My
answer to Colonel Jose Rego Rubido's note was as follows:
</p>
<h4>
[Fidel's answer to Colonel Jose Rego Rubido's note]
</h4>
<p class="quote">
"In liberated Cuban Territory, 31 December 1958.<br>
Dear Colonel, a
regrettable error has occurred in the transmission of my message to you,
due perhaps to the haste with which I replied to your note. This is what I
surmise from the conversation I have since held with its bearer. I did not
tell him that the conditions we established in the agreement entered into
encompassed the surrender of the garrison of Santiago de Cuba to our
forces. This showed a lack of courtesy to our visitor and would have
constituted an unworthy and offensive proposal to the military forces who
so cordially sought us out. The question was entirely different. An
agreement was reached and a plan adopted between the leader of the military
movement and ourselves which was to go into effect as from 3 p.m. on 31
December. The plan included details established after careful analysis of
the problems to be faced, and was to begin with the revolt of the garrison
at Santiago de Cuba. I persuaded General Cantillo of the advantages to be
derived from beginning at Oriente rather than in Colombia because the mass
of the people greatly feared any coup starting in the barracks in the
Capital of the Republic, stressing how difficult it would be, in that case,
to insure that the people joined up with the movement. He stated that he
was in full agreement with my viewpoint on the matter and was only
concerned with maintaining order in the Capital, so we jointly agreed on
measures necessary to avoid that danger. These measures involved the
advance of our column toward Santiago de Cuba, to be exact. It was to be a
combined effort of the military, the people and ourselves, a sort of
revolutionary movement which, from the outset, would be backed by the
confidence of the whole nation. According to what was established, we
suspended the operations that were underway and undertook new displacements
of our forces in other directions — such as Holguin, where the presence of
well-known figureheads practically insured resistance to the revolutionary
military movement. When all our preparatory tasks were completed, I
received yesterday's message, indicating that the plan of action agreed
upon was not to be fulfilled."
</p>
<p class="quote">
"Apparently there were other plans but I was not to be informed of
them because, in fact, the matter was no longer in our hands. Therefore
all we could do was wait because one party was changing everything. Our
own forces were being endangered, although according to our understanding
and what was being said they were being sent off on difficult operations.
And we remained subject to the outcome of the risks which General Cantillo
took on his frequent trips to Havana. Militarily, these trips might well
prove to be a disaster for us. You must realize that everything is very
confused at this moment and Batista is an artful, crafty individual who
knows only too well how to make the best use of a risk that can prove
dangerous to others. All that can be asked is that we renounce all of the
advantages gained during the past few weeks, and stand by, waiting
patiently, for events to take their due course. I made it quite clear that
it could not be an operation on the part of the military alone. We didn't
have to undergo the horror of two years of war for this, and then stand
with our arms crossed, doing nothing, at the most critical moment. They
cannot expect this of men who have known no rest in the struggle against
oppression. This cannot be done even though it is your intention to hand
over the power to the revolutionaries. It is not power that is important
to us, but that the Revolution should fulfill its destiny. I am even
concerned by the fact that the military, through any unjustifiable excess
of scruples, should facilitate the flight of the principal criminals who
would be able to escape abroad with their vast fortunes, and then from some
foreign country do all the harm possible to our country. [Translator's
Note: This text involves some typographical errors. A rendering
compatible with the argument has been given.]
</p>
<p class="quote">
"I should add that, personally, I am not interested in power nor
do I envisage assuming it at any time. All that I will do is to make sure
that the sacrifices of so many compatriots should not be in vain, whatever
the future may hold in store for me.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"In all my dealings, I have always acted loyally and frankly. One
should never consider what has been obtained underhandedly and with
duplicity as a triumph and the language of honor which you have heard from
my lips is the only language I know. Never in the course of the meetings
with General Cantillo did we refer to the word 'surrender.' what I said
yesterday and what I repeat today is that, as of 3 p.m. of the 31st
[December], the date and time agreed upon, we could not cut short the truce
with Santiago de Cuba because that would have been exceedingly detrimental
to the people.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"Last night, the rumor circulated here that General Cantillo had
been arrested in Havana and that various young men had been found murdered
in the cemetery of Santiago de Cuba. I had the feeling that we had been
wasting our time most unhappily. And yet today, luckily enough, it seems
certain that the General is at his post. What is the need for such risks?
What I said to the messenger about surrender, and which was not
communicated literally — as would appear to have been confirmed by the
terms of his note today — was the following: that if hostilities were to
break out because the terms of the agreement had not been fulfilled, we
would be compelled t attack the garrison at Santiago de Cuba. This would
be inevitable, since that was the objective of our efforts over the past
few months. In this case, once the operation was under way, we would have
to demand the surrender of those defending the garrison. This does not
mean to imply that we think they will surrender without fighting because I
know that even when there is not reason to fight, Cuban military forces
will defend their positions adamantly and this has cost me many lives.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"All I meant was that once the blood of our forces had been shed
in the attempt to conquer a given objective, no other solution would be
acceptable. Even though the cost be extremely heavy, in view of the
present conditions of the forces defending the regime, and since these
forces cannot support the garrison of Santiago de Cuba, the latter must
inevitably fall into our hands.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"This was the basic objective of our whole campaign over the past
two months and a plan of such scale cannot be held up for a week without
giving rise to grave consequences, should the military movement fail.
Moreover, it would mean losing the most opportune time — which is the
present — when the dictatorship is suffering severe losses in the
provinces of Oriente and Las Villas. We are faced with the dilemma of
either waiving the advantages gained by our victory or exchanging an
assured victory for one that is otherwise. Do you believe that in the face
of yesterday's ambiguous and laconic note, containing a unilateral
decision, I could hold myself responsible for delaying the plans?
</p>
<p class="quote">
"As a military man, you must admit that too much is being asked of
us. You have not stopped digging trenches for a single moment and you
could well make use of those trenches against us... Some one like Pedraza,
or Pilar Garcia or Canizares... and if General Cantillo is relieved of his
command, and if his trusted lieutenants go with him, you cannot expect us
to remain idle. You see, they have promised us the absurd and although
they defend themselves valiantly with their arms, we have no alternative
but to attack, because we also have very sacred commitments to fulfill. We
desire that these honorable military men be much more than mere allies. We
want them to be our companions in a single cause, the cause of Cuba. Above
all, I wish you, yourself, my friend, not to misinterpret my attitude. Do
not believe that I am being overly rigid as regards the tactics involving
the holding off of an attack in the Santiago de Cuba area. In order that
no possible doubt whatever may persist, I will confirm that although at any
time before the fighting begins we can renew our negotiations, as of today
it must be made clear that the attack will take place momentarily and that
nothing will convince us to alter the plans again."
</p>
<h4>
[A Letter in Reply from Colonel Rego]
</h4>
<p>
Colonel Rego replied in a very punctilious note, worthy of the
greatest praise, which reads as follows:
</p>
<p class="quote">
"Sir, I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter of today's date,
and believe me, I wish to thank you most sincerely for the explanation
regarding the previous message. However, I must confess that I felt some
error of interpretation was involved since I have observed your line of
conduct for some time and know that you are a man of principle. I ignored
the details of the original plan because I was only informed of the first
part of it. I might add that I am also not aware of some of the details of
the present plan. I believe you are partly right in your analysis of the
first part of the original plan. However, I believe that a few more days
would be necessary before it could be consummated and we would never be
able to prevent some of the major, intermediary and minor guilty parties
from escaping. I am among those who believe it is absolutely essential to
give an example of Cuba of all those who take advantage of the positions of
power they occupy to commit every possible type of punishable offense.
Unfortunately, history is plagued with a series of similar cases ad rarely
do the criminals fall into the hands of the competent authorities.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"I am fully aware of your concern for the men who have the least
responsibility for the course of historical events."
</p>
<p class="quote">
"I have no reason whatsoever to believe that any person is
attempting to facilitate the escape of the guilty, and, personally, I
might add that I am opposed to their flight." That was Colonel Rego
Rubido's view. However, he also added that should such an event take
place, the historical responsibility for such an act would fall on the
shoulders of those who facilitated the escape, and never on those of anyone
else. "I believe," he said, "that everything will take place in accordance
with your ideas, and that it will be for the good of Cuba and of the
Revolution of which you are the leader. I heard of a young student who had
been murdered and whose body was in the cemetery. Today, I myself made
sure that every possible measure be taken to determine who was guilty of
those crimes and what the circumstances of his death were, and how it took
place, just as I had done a few days ago, not sparing any effort until I am
able to put the suspected authors of this crime at the disposal of the
competent authorities. Lastly, I should advise you that I sent a message
through to the General, letting him know that I had obtained a plane to
carry your note to him. Do not be impatient for I feel sure that even
before the date established as the maximum limit you will be in Havana.
When the General left here, I asked him to let me have the helicopter and a
pilot, just in case you might like to fly over Santiago de Cuba on Sunday
afternoon.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"With sincerest greetings and my warmest wishes for a Happy New
Year, (Signed) Colonel Rego Rubido."
</p>
<h4>
[Surprised by the Coup in Colombia]
</h4>
<p>
This was the state of our negotiations when Colonel Rego,
Commander of the garrison of Santiago de Cuba and I were equally surprised
by the coup d'etat in Colombia, which was completely in contradiction with
all that had been agreed upon. The first thing done and the most criminal
aspect of all was that Batista was allowed to escape, and with him
Tabernilla, and the other major criminals. They allowed them to escape
with their millions of pesos; yes, they allowed them to flee with the three
or four hundred million pesos they had stolen.
</p>
<p>
This will prove very costly for us because now, from Santo Domingo
and from other countries, they will be directing propaganda against the
Revolution, plotting all the harm they can against our cause and for a good
many years we will have them there, threatening our people, and causing the
people to remain in a constant state of alarm because they will be
conspiring against us and paying others to do so also. What did we do as
soon as we learned of the blow? We heard about it on Radio Progreso and by
that time, guessing what their plans were, as I was making a statement I
was told that Batista had left for Santo Domingo. Is it a rumor? I
wondered. Could it be a trick? I sent someone out to confirm the story
and was informed that Batista and Tabernilla had actually gone to Santo
Domingo. And the most astonishing thing of all was that General Cantillo
declared that this movement had taken place thanks to the patriotic
intentions of General Batista, who had resigned in order to avoid
bloodshed. What do you think about that?
</p>
<p>
There is something else I must tell you in order to let you see
what kind of a coup had been prepared. Pedraza had been appointed to
membership of the Junta and then he left. I don't think one need add
anything else to explain the nature of the aims of those responsible for
carrying out the coup. Subsequently, they did not appoint Urrutia to the
Presidency, that is, the man proclaimed by the movement and by all the
revolutionary organizations. The person they chose is no less than the
oldest member of the Supreme Court bench, and all his colleagues are quite
old themselves. And above all he is a man who has been a President up to
the present time: a President of a Supreme Court of Justice which never
dispenses any justice, which never did dispense any justice whatsoever.
</p>
<p>
What would the result of all this be? Only half a revolution. A
compromise, a caricature of a revolution. Mr. Jack Straw, or whatever name
you may wish to give this Mr. Piedra who, if he has not resigned by now
should be getting ready to do so, because we are going to make him resign
in Havana. I do not believe he will last twenty-four hours in office. It
will break all records. They appoint this gentleman and, isn't it perfect,
Cantillo becomes a national hero, the defender of Cuba's freedoms, the Lord
and Master of Cuba, and there is Mr. Piedra... It would simply mean
getting rid of one dictator to put another in his place.
</p>
<p>
Every order contained in the documents referring to the movement
in Colombia indicated that it was to be a counterrevolutionary uprising.
In all the orders, the general trend was away from the aims of the people,
and in all the orders there was an atmosphere of something suspect. Mr.
Piedra immediately made an appeal, or stated that he was going to make an
appeal to the rebels and to a peace commission. Meanwhile, we were
supposed to be so calm and trusting; we would put down our guns and abandon
everything and go and plead and pay homage to Mr. Piedra and Mr. Cantillo.
</p>
<p>
It is obvious that both Cantillo and Piedra were out of touch with
reality because I believe that the Cuban people have learned a great deal
and we rebels have also learned something. That was the situation this
morning but it is not the situation this evening, because many things have
changed. Given these facts, given this betrayal, I ordered all the rebel
commanders to continue marching on toward their targets, and in keeping
with this, I also immediately ordered all the columns allocated to the
Santiago de Cuba operations to advance against that garrison.
</p>
<p>
I want you to know that our forces were firmly determined to take
Santiago de Cuba by assault. This would have been regrettable because it
would have led to much bloodshed and tonight would not have been a night of
celebration and happiness, as it is, it would not have been a night of
peace and fraternization, as it is. I must acknowledge that if there was
not a bloody battle waged here in Santiago de Cuba, it is due largely to
the patriotic attitude of Army Colonel Jose Rego Rubido, to the commanders
of the frigates Maximo Gomez and Maceo and to the chief of the Santiago de
Cuba Naval District, as well as to the officer who was acting as Chief of
Police.
</p>
<h4>
[Avoiding a Bloody Battle]
</h4>
<p>
Citizens, it is only just that we should recognize these facts
here and now and be thankful to the men responsible for them. They
contributed to averting considerable bloodshed and to converting this
morning's counterrevolutionary movement into the revolutionary movement of
this afternoon.
</p>
<p>
We had no alternative other than to attack because we could not
allow the Colombia coup to be consolidated. Therefore, it was necessary to
attack. When the troops were already marching out against their targets,
Colonel Rego made use of a helicopter to try and locate me. The Navy
commanders contacted us and placed themselves unconditionally at the
service of the Revolution. Backed by the support of their two vessels,
equipped with heavy firing capacity, and by the Naval District and the
Police, I called a meeting of all the Army officers stationed at the
Santiago de Cuba garrison — and there are over a hundred of these
officers. I explained to them that I was not the least worried by the
thought of addressing them because I knew I was right, and I knew they
would understand my arguments and that we would reach an agreement in the
course of the meeting. Indeed, in the early evening, just at nightfall, I
went to the meeting at the Escande which was attended by nearly all the
Army officers in Santiago de Cuba. Many of them were young men who were
clearly anxious to struggle and fight for the good of their country. I met
with these military men and spoke to them of our aims for our country, of
what we wanted for the country, of the manner in which we had always dealt
with the military and of all the harm done to the army by the tyrants. I
said I did not think it fair that all military men be regarded equally,
that the criminals were only a small minority, that there were many
honorable men in the army who I knew repudiated criminal tactics, abuse and
injustice. I knew it was not easy for the military to develop a specific
type of action.
</p>
<p>
It was clear that when the highest positions in the army were in
the hands of the Tabernilla and the Pilar Garcia, relatives and
unconditional supporters of Batista, there was a generalized feel of great
fear in the Army. One could not ask an officer individually to accept any
responsibility. There were two kinds of military men and we know them
well. There were military men like Sosa Blanco, Canizares, Sanchez
Mosquera and Chaviano, known for their crimes and the cowardly murder of
unfortunate peasants; and then there are military men who have waged
honorable campaigns, who never murdered anyone, nor burned down houses, men
such as Commander Quevedo, who was our prisoner after his heroic resistance
at the Battle of Jibo and who is still an Army officer. Men like Commander
Sierra and many other officers who never in their lives burned down a
house. However, this type of officer got no promotion. Those who were
promoted were the criminals because Batista always made a point of
recompensing crime.
</p>
<p>
For example, we have the case of Colonel Rego Rubido who does not
owe his position to the dictatorship since he was already a Colonel when
the 10 March coup took place. The fact is that I was given the support of
the Army officers in Santiago de Cuba and the army officers in Santiago de
Cuba gave their unconditional backing to the Cuban Revolution. When the
Navy, Army and Police officers met together, they agreed to condemn the
Colombia uprising and to support the Legal Government of the Republic
because it has the backing of the majority of the population, and is
represented by Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleo, and they also agreed to support the
Cuban Revolution. Thanks to their attitude, we were able to prevent much
bloodshed; thanks to their attitude, this afternoon we saw the birth of a
truly revolutionary movement. I quite understand that among the people
there may be many justifiably passionate feelings. I appreciate the
concern for justice evinced by our people and I promise to give them
justice, but I want to ask the people, above all and before all else, to
remain calm.
</p>
<p>
At the present moment, power must be consolidated before we do
anything else. Before all else, power must be consolidated. After that,
we will appoint a commission, made up of reputable military men and
officers of the Rebel Army to take the necessary measures. These will
include establishing responsibilities where they are due. No one will
oppose such measures because it is precisely the army and the armed forces
who are most concerned in insuring that the guilt of a few should not be
borne by the whole corps. They are the ones most interested in insuring
that the wearing of a uniform not be regarded as degrading, and that the
guilty be punished in order that the innocent not be charged with the
disreputable acts of others. We would ask the people to have confidence in
us because we know how to fulfill our obligations. Those were the
circumstances surrounding the meeting held this afternoon — a meeting that
proved to be a truly revolutionary movement in which the people, the
military and the rebels participated.
</p>
<p>
Words fail us to describe the enthusiasm of the military in
Santiago de Cuba. As a proof of their trust, I asked the military to join
me in entering Santiago de Cuba, so that here I am with all the Army
officers. There are the tanks that are at the service of the Revolution.
there is the artillery and the service of the Revolution. And there are
the vessels, now at the service of the Revolution. And finally the people.
The people who at the outset... I need not add that the Revolution can
depend on the people because this is a well-known fact. However, the
people, who at the outset had only shotguns, now have artillery, tanks and
well-armed vessels, and many trained army technicians to help us handle
them. Now the people are properly armed. And let me assure you that if
when we were only 12 men, we never lost faith, now that we have 12 tanks
there, how are we going to lose faith? Let me tell you that today,
tonight, as of this dawn — because daybreak is at hand, the eminent
magistrate Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleo will take over the presidency of the
Republic. Does Dr. Urrutia have the support of the people or does he not
have the support of the people? What I really mean to say is that it is
the President of the Republic, the legal president, who has the support of
the people of Cuba and that is Dr. Manuel Urrutia. Who wants Mr. Piedra as
President? Then if no one wants Mr. Piedra as President, how are they
going to impose Mr. Piedra on us now?
</p>
<p>
Since those are the instructions given by the people of Santiago
de Cuba, and since they represent the feelings of all the people of all
Cuba, as soon as this meeting is over I will march with the veteran troops
of Sierra Maestra, with the tanks and the artillery, toward the Capital in
order to fulfill the will of people. We are here entirely at the request
of the people. The mandate of the people is the only legal mandate at
present. The President is elected by the people and not by a council in
Colombia, meeting at four o'clock in the morning.
</p>
<p>
The people have elected their President and this means that from
this moment on the most powerful legal authority in the Republic has been
established. Not a single one, not a single one of the appointments and
promotions made by the Military Junta in the early hours of today is at all
valid. All the appointments and promotions in the Army are annulled, all
the appointments and promotions, I mean, that were made at dawn today.
Anyone accepting a commission from the treacherous Junta which met this
morning is regarded as adopting a counterrevolutionary attitude, call it by
whatever name you wish, and as a result will be branded as an outlaw. I am
absolutely convinced that by tomorrow morning all the army commands
throughout the country will have accepted the decisions taken by the
President of the Republic. The President will immediately appoint the
chiefs of the Army, the Navy and the Police. Because of the very valuable
service rendered now to the Revolution and because he placed his thousands
of men at the service of the Revolution, we would recommend that colonel
Rego Rubido be made Chief of the Army. Similarly, the Chief of the Navy
will be one of the two commanders who first placed their vessels at the
orders of the Revolution. And I would recommend to the President of the
Republic that Commander Efigenio Almejeiras be appointed national Chief of
Police. He lost three brothers in the Revolution, was one of the members
of the gamma expeditionary force and one of the most able men in the
revolutionary army. Almejeiras is on duty in the Guantanamo operations but
will arrive here tomorrow.
</p>
<h4>
[Things Will Be the Way the People Want Them]
</h4>
<p>
All I can do is ask you to give us time and to allow time to the
civil powers of the Republic, so that we can do things the way the people
want them; but they must be done gradually, little by little. I would only
ask one thing of the people, and that is that you remain calm. (A voice is
heard shouting Oriente Federal!) No... no, the Republic, above all else,
must remain united. What you must demand is justice for Oriente
[province]. Time is a highly important factor in all things. The
Revolution cannot be completed in a single day but you may be sure that we
will carry the Revolution through to the full. You may be sure that for
the first time the Republic will be truly and entirely free and the people
will have their just recompense. Power was not achieved through politics,
but through the sacrifices of hundreds and thousands of our fellows. It is
not a promise we make to ourselves but to the people, the whole Cuban
nation; the man who has taken over power has no commitments with anyone
other than with the people. Che Guevara has been ordered to march on the
Capital, not on the provisional Capital of the Republic. Commander Camilo
Cienfuegos of Number 2 Column — the Antonio Maceo column — was likewise
ordered to march on Havana and to take over command of the Colombia
military camp. The orders issued by the President of the Republic were
carried out, as is required by the mandate of the Revolution. We must not
be blamed for the excesses occurring in Havana. General Cantillo and his
fellow-conspirators of this day's dawn are to blame for those. They
believed that they could overcome the situation there. In Santiago de
Cuba, where a genuine revolution took place, complete order has reigned.
In Santiago de Cuba, the people joined with the military and the
revolutionaries in a way I cannot describe. The head of the Government,
the head of the Army and the head of the Navy will be in Santiago de Cuba
and their orders must be obeyed by every authority in the country. It is
our hope that every honorable military man will respect these instructions.
</p>
<p>
It is important to remember that primarily the military forces are
at the service of law and of authority, not improperly constituted
authorities but the legitimate authority. No reputable Army man need fear
anything from the Revolution. In this struggle, there are no conquered
ones because the only conqueror is the people. There are men who have
fallen on one side and the other, but we have all joined together that the
victory may be the nation's. We have all joined together, the reputable
military and the revolutionaries. There will be no more bloodshed. I hope
that no group puts up any resistance because apart from such an attitude
proving foolhardy, it would be overcome in short shift. Moreover, it would
be resistance against the Law, against the Republic and against the
feelings of the whole Cuban nation. It was necessary to organize today's
movement in order to prevent another war taking place in six months' time.
What happened at the time of Machado's coup? Well one of machado's
generals also organized a coup d'etat, removed Machado from power and put
in a new President who remained in office for 15 days. Then the sergeants
came along and said those officers were responsible for Machado's
dictatorship and that they could not countenance them. The revolutionary
spirit spread and the officers were ousted. That cannot take place now.
those officers have the backing of the people and of the troops. They also
enjoy the prestige acquired by having joined a truly revolutionary
movement. The people will respect and esteem these officers and it will
not be necessary for them to use force nor to go about the streets armed
nor to attempt to strike fear in the hearts of the people.
</p>
<p>
True order is that based on freedom, on respect and on justice,
but at the same time that which precludes the use of force. Henceforward,
the people shall be entirely free and the people know how to conduct
themselves, as they have proven today. We have achieved the peace that our
country needs. Santiago de Cuba has paid for its freedom without
bloodshed. That is why happiness reigns supreme here. That is why the
military, today, condemned and repudiated the Colombia coup, in order to
join the revolution unconditionally. Therefore, they deserve our
acknowledgment of their motivation, our thanks and our respect.
</p>
<p>
In the future, the armed forces of the Republic will be regarded
as exemplary, given their ability, their training and the manner in which
they identified with the cause of the people and because, henceforward,
their rifles will be solely and always at the service of the people. There
will be no more coups d'etat, no more war, because we have now taken care
to prevent a repetition of what happened to Machado. To make the present
case — the one that took place at dawn today — resemble Machado's fall
even more closely, those gentlemen put a Carlos Manuel in office, just as a
Carlos Manuel had been put in office previously. What we will not have
this time is a Batista because there will be no need for a 4 September
which destroys the discipline in the Armed Forces. It will be remembered
that it was Batista who was responsible for the armed uprising at that
time. His policy consisted in cajoling the soldiers in order to disguise
the authority of the officers. The officers will have authority; there
will be discipline in the Army; there will be a military penal code, in
which any violation of human rights, any dishonorable or immoral acts by
any military personnel, will be severely punished.
</p>
<p>
There will be no privileges; there will be no privileges for
anyone; and the members of the Armed Forces who are capable and deserving
will be promoted. It will not be as it has been in the past — that is,
that relations and friends are promoted, regardless of grades. This sort
of thing will finish for the military as it will finish for laborers.
There will be no more exploitation or compulsory contributions, which for
the workers represent the trade union payments and for the military
represent a peso here for the First Lady and two pesos elsewhere for
something else and so all their pay dwindles away.
</p>
<p>
Naturally, the whole population can expect it of us and can count
on it. However, I have spoken of the military so that they will know that
they can also count on the Revolution for all the improvements which have
been lacking until now, because if the budgetary resources are not stolen,
the military will be in a much better position than at the present.
Moreover, the soldier will not be called upon to exercise the duty of a
policeman because he will be busy with his own training in the barracks;
the soldier will not be engaged in police work but will be busy being a
soldier. We will not have to resort to short-wave systems [Translator's
note: It is believed that the reference is to "bugging" devices]. I think
that I should add that we rebels make use of short-wave facilities because
this is advisable. However, the short-wave facilities have not made
reference to assassins, have not involved sudden stopping of cars in front
of houses nor ambushes at midnight.
</p>
<p>
I am certain that as soon as the President of the Republic takes
office and assumes command of the situation, he will decree the
re-establishment of all rights and freedoms, including the absolute freedom
of the press, of all individual rights, of all trade union rights, and of
the rights and demands of the rural workers and our own free people. We
will not forget our peasants in the Sierra Maestra and those in the
interior of the country. I will not go and live in Havana because I want
to live in Sierra Maestra, at least in that part for which I feel a very
deep sense of gratitude. I will never forget those country people and as
soon as I have a free moment we will see about building the first school
city with seats for 20,000 children. We will do it with the help of the
people and the rebels will work with them there. We will ask each citizen
for a bag of cement and a trowel. I know we will have the help of our
industry and of business and we will not forget any of the sectors of our
population.
</p>
<p>
The country's economy will be re-established immediately. This
year it is we who will take care of the sugar cane to prevent its being
burnt, because this year the tax on sugar is not going to be used for the
purchase of murderous weapons nor for planes and bombs with which to attack
the people. We will take care of communications and already from Jiguani
to Palma Soriano the telephone lines have been re-established, and the
railroad is being rebuilt. There will be a harvest all over the country
and there will be good wages because I know that this is the intention of
the President of the Republic. There will be good prices because the fear
that there would be no harvest has raised prices on the world market. The
peasants can sell their coffee and the cattle breeders can sell their fat
steers in Havana because fortunately we triumphed soon enough to prevent
their being ruins of any kind. It is not my place to say all these things.
You know that we keep our word, and what we promise we fulfill and we
promise less than what we intend to fulfill; we promise not more but less
and we intend to do more than we have offered the people of Cuba.
</p>
<p>
We do not believe that all the problems can be solved readily; we
know the road is sown with obstacles, but we are men of good faith and we
are always ready to face great difficulties. The people can be certain of
one thing, and that is that we may make one or even many mistakes. But the
only thing which cannot be said of us is that we have stolen, that we have
profited from our position, that we have betrayed the movement. I know
that the people can forgive mistakes but not dishonorable deeds, and what
we had here were dishonorable men.
</p>
<p>
In accepting the presidency, Dr. Manuel Urrutia, from the very
first moment when he was invested in office, from the moment when he swore
his oath before the people as President of the Republic, became the maximum
authority in the country. Let no one think that I intend to exercise any
power greater than that of the President of the Republic. I will be the
first to obey orders issued by the civilian authority of the Republic and I
will be the first to set an example. We will carry out his orders and
within the scope of the authority granted to us we will try to do the
utmost for our people without any personal ambition, because fortunately we
are immune to the temptations of such ambitions and such vanity. What
greater glory could we have than the affection of our people? What greater
reward could we envision than the thousands of arms waving before us, full
of hope, and faith in us and affection for us. We shall never allow
ourselves to be influenced by vanity or ambition because, in the words of
the Apostle, all the glory of the world can be contained within a single
ear of corn, and there is no greater reward or satisfaction than to fulfill
one's duty as we have been doing until the present time and as we shall
always continue to do. In saying this, I am not speaking in my own name
but in the name of the thousands and thousands of combatants who ensured
the victory of the people. I speak on behalf of our deep sentiments and of
our devotion for our people. I have in mind the respect we owe to our
dead, to the fallen, who shall not be forgotten and whose faithful
companions we shall always be. This time they shall not say of us as has
been said of others in the past that we betrayed the memory of those who
died because the years will still be given by those who died. Frank Pais
is not physically among us, nor are many others, but they are all
spiritually present and the mere knowledge that their sacrifice was not in
vain recompenses us in part for the immense emptiness which they left
behind them.
</p>
<p>
Fresh flowers will continue to adorn their tombstones; their
children shall not be forgotten because assistance will be given to the
families of the fallen. We rebels will not ask for retroactive pay over
the years during which we struggled because we feel proud not to be paid
for the services rendered to Cuba. Indeed, it is quite possible that we
should continue to fulfill our obligations without asking for pay because
this is immaterial if funds are lacking. What exists is goodwill and we
shall do everything necessary. However, I will repeat here what I have
already said, "and history will absolve me," that we shall insure that
maintenance, assistance, and education shall not be lacking for the
children of the military who died fighting against us because they are not
to blame for the errors of the tyrant. We shall be generous to everyone
because, as I have said before, here there are no vanquished, but only
victors. The war criminals will all be punished because it is the
irrevocable duty of the Revolution to do so and the people can be certain
that we shall fulfill that duty. The people should also be sure that when
justice reigns there will be no revenge because if on the morrow there are
to be no assaults made against anyone, justice must reign now. Since there
will be justice, there will be no revenge nor will there be hatred.
</p>
<p>
We shall exile hatred from the Republic, that hatred which is a
damned and evil shadow bequeathed to us by ambition and tyranny. The pity
is that the major criminals should have escaped. There are thousands of
men who would pursue them, but we must respect the laws of other countries.
It would be easy for us because we have more than enough volunteers to
pursue those delinquents, ready and willing to risk their lives. However,
we do not wish to give the appearance of a people who violate the laws of
other peoples; we shall respect these laws while ours are respected.
notwithstanding, I will issue one warning and that is that if in Santo
Domingo they begin to conspire against the Revolution, if Trujillo... makes
any mistake and directs any aggression against us, it will be a sorry day
for him. (At one time I said that Trijillo had harmed Batista by selling
him arms and the harm he did us not so much in selling arms but in selling
weapons of poor quality, so bad, in fact, that when they fell into our
hands they were no use at all.) However, he did sell bombs and those
served to murder many peasants. We have no wish to return the rifles
because they are worth nothing, but we would like to reciprocate with
something better. In the first place, it is logical that the political
refugees from Santo Domingo should have their safest asylum and most
comfortable home here and that the political refugees of every dictatorship
should find here their best protection, since we, too, have been refugees.
</p>
<p>
If Santo Domingo is to be converted into an arsenal of
counterrevolutionaries, if Santo Domingo is to be a base for conspiracies
against the Cuban Revolution and if these gentlemen devote themselves to
conspiracies over there, it would be better for them to leave Santo Domingo
immediately. We say this, because they will not be very safe there either
and it will not be because of us since we have no right to intervene in the
problems of Santo Domingo. It will be because the citizens of the
Dominican Republic have learnt from Cuba's example and conditions will be
very grave indeed there. The citizens of the Dominican Republic have
learned that one can struggle against tyranny and defeat and this is the
lesson dictatorships fear the most. Yet, it is a lesson which is
encouraging for the Americas; a lesson exemplified just now in our country.
All of America is watching the course of the fate of this revolution. All
the Americas are watching us and they follow our actions with their best
wishes for our triumph as they will all of them support us in our times of
need. Therefore, everything is joyful now, not only in Cuba but also in
the Americas. They rejoice as we have rejoiced when a dictator has fallen
in Latin America, so now they rejoice with the Cuban people. It is assumed
that there will be justice, as I was saying, despite the enormous
accumulation of sentiments and ideas stemming from the general disorder,
commotion, and feelings registered in our minds today. As I was saying, it
was a pity that the major criminals escaped. We now know who was
responsible because the people know who is to blame for their escape as
they know that they also left here not the most unfortunate but the
dullest, those who were penniless, the rank and file who took their orders
from the major criminals. They allowed the major criminals to escape so
that the people might state their anger and their indignation upon those
who were least to blame although it is only right that they should be
justly punished in order to learn their lesson. The same thing always
happens, the people tell this group that the "big shots" will get away and
they will be left behind and, nevertheless, though some of them may leave,
others remain and must be punished. The top men may go but they will also
have their punishment, a harsh punishment, for it is harsh to be exiled
from one's country for the rest of one's days because they will, even in
the best of circumstances, be ostracized for the rest of their lives as
criminals and thieves who fled precipitately.
</p>
<p>
If only one could see Mr. Batista now — through the eye of a
needle, as the people say. If only one could see the proud, handsome Mr.
Batista, who never made a single speech but that he described others as
cowards, wretched villains, etcetera. Here, we have not even used the
epithet of "villain" for anyone. Here we do not breathe hatred, nor are we
proud or disdainful as are those who made speeches during the dictatorship.
Like that man who claimed that he had a single bullet in his pistol when he
entered Colombia and who left in the early hours of the dawn, on a plane,
with a single bullet in his pistol. And it was proved that dictators are
not so frightening nor so likely to commit suicide, because when they have
lost the game, they immediately take flight like cowards. The sad part of
it is that they escaped when they could have been taken prisoners and had
we caught Batista, we could have taken the 200 million from him. But we
will claim the money, wherever he is hiding it, because they are not
political delinquents but common criminals. And we will see those who turn
up in the embassies, if Mr. Cantillo has not already given them
safe-conducts. We will distinguish then between the political prisoners
but nothing for the common criminals. They will have to go before the
courts and prove that they are political delinquents. However, if it
should be proved that they are common criminals, they will have to appear
before the proper authorities. For instance, Mujal, as big and as fat as
he is, nobody knows where he is hiding at the present time. I can't
understand how they got away. Nevertheless you will remember these
unfortunate wretches....
</p>
<h4>
[They May Speak Freely, Whether For or Against]
</h4>
<p>
At last the people have been able to free themselves from this
rabble. Now anyone may speak out, whether they are for or against. Anyone who wishes to do so may speak out. That was not the case here
previously because until the present time, they were the only ones
[allowed] to speak out; only they spoke out. And they spoke against us.
There will be freedom for those who speak in our favor and for those who
speak against us and criticize us. There will be freedom for all men
because we have achieved freedom for all men. We shall never feel
offended; we shall always defend ourselves and we shall follow a single
precept, that of respect for the rights and feelings of others.
</p>
<p>
Other names have been mentioned here. Those people! Heaven alone
knows in what embassy, on what beach, in what boat they now find
themselves. We were able to get rid of them. If they have a tiny shack,
or a small boat, or a tiny farm somewhere round here, we will naturally
have to confiscate it, because we must sound the warning that the employees
of tyranny, the representatives, the senators, etcetera, those who did not
necessarily steal but who accepted their remuneration, will have to pay
back, up to the last penny, what they received over these four years,
because they received it illegally. The will have to pay back to the
Republic the money they received as remuneration and if they do not
reimburse the national coffers, we will confiscate whatever property they
have. That is quite apart from what they may have stolen. Those who
robbed will not be allowed to retain any of the stolen goods. That is the
law of the Revolution. It is not fair to send a man to prison for stealing
a chicken or a turkey, and at the same time allow those who stole millions
of pesos to spend a delightful life wandering around.
</p>
<p>
Let the thieves of yesterday and today beware! Let them beware!
Because the Revolution's laws may reach out to draw in the guilty of every
period. Because the Revolution has triumphed and has no obligations to
anyone whatsoever. It's only obligation is to the people, to whom it owes
its victory.
</p>
<p>
I want to conclude for today. Remember that I must leave right
away. It is my duty. What is more, you have been standing there for a
good many hours. However, I see so many red and black flags on the dresses
of our women followers that it is really hard for us to leave this
platform, on which all of us here have felt the great emotion in all our
lives.
</p>
<p>
We would not do less than remember Santiago de Cuba with the
greatest warmth. The few times we have met here — a meeting on the
Alameda and another on Trocha Avenue, at which I said that if we were
deprived of our rights by force, we would recover them with our rifles in
hand, and yet they attributed the statement to Luis Orlando. I kept quiet
and at the time, while the newspapers made it seem as if Luis Orlando was
the one who had done the most, although it was I who did the most. Yet I
was not very sure whether or not things were well done because at that time
there was no... [Translator's note: The remainder of this sentence and the
beginning of the next is missing.]... and the result was that we had to
exchange everything, the books and the diagrams for rifles, while the
peasants exchanged their farm implements for rifles and we all had to
exchange everything for rifles. Fortunately the task that required rifles
is done; so let us keep the rifles where they are, far away from their
eyes, because they will have to defend our sovereignty and our rights.
Yet, when our people are threatened, it will not be only the thirty or
forty thousand armed men who will fight, but the three or four or five
hundred thousand Cubans, men and women, who can come here for their arms.
There will be arms for all those who wish to fight when the time comes to
defend our freedom. It has been proven that it is not only the men who
fight but that in Cuba the women also fight. The best evidence of this is
the Mariana Grajales platoon, which made such an outstanding showing in
numerous encounters. The women are as good soldiers as our best military
men and I wanted to prove that women can be good soldiers.
</p>
<p>
At the outset, this scheme gave me a lot of trouble because they
were very prejudiced. There were men who asked how on earth one could give
a rifle to a woman while there was still a man alive to carry one. Yet on
our front, women must be rescued because they are still the victims of
discrimination insofar as labor is concerned and in other aspects of their
lives. So we organized the women's units and these proved that women could
fight, and when the men fight in a village and the women can fight
alongside them, such villages are impregnable and the women of such
villages cannot be defeated. We have organized the feminine combatants or
militias and we will keep them trained — all of them on a voluntary basis
— all these young women I see here with their black and red dresses
recalled 26 July. And I ask all of you to learn to handle firearms.
</p>
<p>
My dear Compatriots, this Revolution carried out with such
sacrifice, our Revolution, the Revolution of the people, is now a
magnificent and indestructible reality, a cause for no uncertain nor
unjustified pride and a cause for the great joy that Cuba awaited. I know
that it is not only here in Santiago de Cuba, it is everywhere, from Punta
de Maisi to Cape San Antonio. I long to see our people all along our route
to the Capital, because I know I will encounter the same hopes, the same
faith, a single people, aroused, a people who patiently bore all the
sacrifices, who cared little for hunger, who when we gave them three days'
leave for the re-establishment of communications, in order not to suffer
hunger, the whole mass of the people protested because what they wanted was
victory at any price. Such a people deserves a better fate, and deserves
to achieve the happiness it has not had in 56 years of a Republican form of
government. It deserves to become one of the leading nations in the world
by reasons of its intelligence, its valor and the firmness of its decision.
</p>
<p>
No one can allege that I am speaking as a demagogue. No one can
charge that I am seeking to assuage the people. I have given ample proof
of my faith in the people because when I landed with 82 men on the beaches
of Cuba and people said we were mad, and asked us why we thought we could
win the war, we replied, "Because we have the people behind us!" And when
we were defeated for the first time, and only a handful of men were left
and yet we persisted in the struggle, we knew that this would be the
outcome because we had faith in the people. When they dispersed us five
times in forty-five days and we met up together again and renewed the
struggle, it was because we had faith in the people. Today is the most
palpable demonstration of the fact that our faith was justified. I have
the greatest satisfaction in the knowledge that I believed so deeply in the
people of Cuba and in having inspired my companions with this same faith.
This faith is more than faith. It is complete security. This same faith
that we have in you is the faith we wish you to have in us always.
</p>
<p>
The Republic was not freed in 1895 and the dream was frustrated at
the last minute. The Revolution did not take place in 1933 and was
frustrated by its enemies. However, this time the Revolution is backed by
the mass of the people, and has all the revolutionaries behind it. It also
has those who are honorable among the military. It is so vast and so
uncontainable in its strength that this time its triumph is assured. We
can say — and it is with joy that we do so — that in the four centuries
since our country was founded, this will be the first time that we are
entirely free and that the work of the first settlers will have been
completed.
</p>
<p>
A few days ago, I could not resist the temptation to go and visit
my Mother whom I had not seen for several years. On my return, as I was
traveling along the road that cuts through Mangos de Baragua, late at
night, the feelings of deep devotion, on the part of those of us who were
riding in that vehicle, made us stop at the monument raised to the memory
of those involved in the protest at Baragua and the beginning of the
Invasion. At that late hour, there was only our presence in that place,
the thought of the daring feats connected with our wars of independence,
the idea that these men fought for 30 years and in the end did not see
their dream come true, but witnessed only one more frustration of the
Republic. Yet they had a presentiment that very soon the Revolution of
which they dreamed, the mother country of which they dreamed, would be
transformed into reality, and this gave us one of the greatest emotions
possible. In my mind's eye, I saw these men relive their sacrifice,
sacrifices which we also underwent. I conjured up their dreams and their
aspirations, which were the same as our dreams and our aspirations and I
ventured to think that the present generation in Cuba must render and has
rendered homage, gratitude and loyalty, as well as fervent tribute to the
heroes of our independence.
</p>
<p>
The men who fell in our three wars of independence now join their
efforts to those of the men who fell in this war, and of all those who fell
in the struggle for freedom. We can tell them that their dreams are about
to be fulfilled and that the time has finally come when you, our people,
our noble people, our people who are so enthusiastic and have so much
faith, our people who demand nothing in return for their affection, who
demand nothing in return for their confidence, who reward men with a
kindness far beyond anything they might deserve, the time has come, I say,
when you will have everything you need. There is nothing left for me to
add, except, with modesty and sincerity to say, with the deepest emotion,
that you will always have in us, in the fighters of the Revolution, loyal
servants whose sole motto is service to you.
</p>
<p>
On this date, today, when Dr. Urrutia took over the Presidency of
the Republic Dr. Urrutia, the leader who declared that this was a just
Revolution — on territory that has been liberated, which by now is the
whole of our country, I declare that I will assume only those duties
assigned to me, by him. The full authority of the Republic is vested in
him. And our arms bow respectfully to the civil powers of the Civilian
Republic of Cuba. All I have to say is that we hope that he will fulfill
his duty because we naturally feel assured that he will know how to fulfill
his duty. I surrender my authority to the Provisional President of the
Republic of Cuba and with it I surrender to him the right to address the
people of Cuba.
</p>
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Fidel Castro
The Revolution Begins Now
The Revolution Begins Now
Spoken: January 3, 1959 at the Cospedes Park in Santiago de Cuba,
Publisher: Revolucion on 3, 4 and 5 of January, 1959.
Translated: FBIS
Transcription/Markup: Castro Speech Database/Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002
People of Santiago, Compatriots of All Cuba,
We have finally reached Santiago de Cuba. The road was long and
difficult, but we finally arrived. It was rumored that they expected us in
the capital of the Republic at 2 p.m. today. No one was more amazed by
this than I, because I was the first one to be surprised by this
treacherous blow, which would place me in the capital of the Republic this
morning. Moreover, I intended to be in the capital of the Republic — that
is, in the new capital of the Republic — because Santiago de Cuba, in
accordance with the wishes of the Provisional President, in accordance with
the wishes of the Rebel Army, and in accordance with the wishes of the
people of Santiago de Cuba, who really deserved it, Santiago will be the
new capital of Cuba.
This measure may surprise some people. Admittedly, it is new, but
the revolution is characterized precisely by its newness, by the fact that
it will do things that have never been done before.
In making Santiago de Cuba the provisional capital of the
Republic, we are fully aware of our reason for doing so. This is no
attempt to cajole a specific area by demogogic means. It is simply that
Santiago de Cuba has been the strongest bulwark of the revolution, a
revolution that is beginning now. Our Revolution will be no easy task, but
a harsh and dangerous undertaking, particularly in the initial phases. And
in what better place could we establish the Government of the Republic than
in this fortress of the Revolution.
So that you may know that this will be a government solidly
supported by the people of this heroic city, located in the foothills of
the Sierra Maestra — because Santiago de Cuba is a part of the Sierra
Maestra — Santiago de Cuba and the Sierra Maestra will provide the two
strongest fortresses for the Revolution. However, there are other reasons
that motivate us, and one is the military revolutionary movement, the truly
military revolutionary movement which did not take place in [Camp] Colombia.
[The Betrayal of General Cantillo]
In Colombia they prepared a puny little uprising against the
revolution, principally with Batista's assistance. Since it is necessary
to tell the truth and since we came here with a view to orienting people, I
can tell you and I can assure you that the military uprising in Colombia
was an attempt to deprive the people in power, to rob the revolution of its
triumph and to allow Batista to escape, to allow the Tabernilla to escape,
to allow the Tabernillas to escape together with the Pilar Garcias, to
allow the Salas Canizares and the Venturas. The Colombian uprising was an
ambitious and treacherous blow that deserves the lowest epithets.
We must call a spade a spade and put the blame where it belongs.
I am not going to be diplomatic. I will say outright that General Cantillo
betrayed us and not only am I going to say it, but I am going to prove it
to you.
However, we had always said so. We had always said that there
would be no point in resolving this matter at the last moment with a puny
little military uprising, because if there is a military uprising,
concealed from the people, our Revolution will go forward nonetheless and
this time cannot be over the power. It will not be like 1895 when the
Americans came and took over, intervening at the last moment, and
afterwards did not even allow Calixto Garcia to assume leadership, although
he had fought at Santiago de Cuba for 30 years.
Nor will it be like 1933, when the people began to believe that
the revolution was going to triumph, and Mr. Batista came in to betray the
revolution, take over power, and establish an 11-year-long dictatorship.
Nor will it be like 1944, when the people took courage, believing
that they had finally reached a position where they could take over the
power, while those who did assume power proved to be thieves. We will have
no thievery, no treason, no intervention. This time it is truly the
revolution, even though some might not desire it. At the very moment that
the dictatorship fell, as a consequence of the military victories of our
Revolution, when they could not hold out even another 15 days, Mr. Cantillo
appears on the scene as a paladin of freedom. Naturally, we have never
been remiss in refusing any offer of collaboration that might prevent
bloodshed, providing the aims of our Revolution were not imperiled thereby.
Naturally, we have always appealed to the military in our search for peace,
but it must be peace for freedom and peace with the triumph of our
Revolution. This is the only way to obtain peace.
Hence, on December 24, when we were told of General Cantillo's
desire to meet us, we agreed to the interview. And I must confess to you
that, given the course of events, the extraordinary development of our
military operations, I had very little interest in speaking of military
movements. Nevertheless, I felt that it was the duty of those of us with
responsibility not to allow ourselves to be carried away by our feelings.
I also thought that if triumph could be achieved with the minimum
bloodshed, it was my duty to listen to the proposals made by the military.
I went to meet Mr. Cantillo, who spoke to me on behalf of the
Army. He met me on the 28th [December] at the Oriente mill, where he
arrived in a helicopter at 8 p.m. We talked for four hours and I will not
invent any stories about what took place, since there were several
exceptional witnesses to the interview. There was Dr. Raul Chibas, there
was a Catholic priest, there were several military men, whose evidence
cannot be questioned on any grounds whatsoever. After analyzing all of
Cuba's problems, and underlining all the minute details, General Cantillo
agreed to carry out a military revolutionary movement with us. The first
thing I said to him was this:
After carefully studying the situation, the situation of the
Army, the situation in which it had been placed by the
dictatorship, after explaining to him that he did not have to
concern himself with Batista, nor with the Tabernillas, nor with
the rest of those people because none of them had shown any
concern for the Cuban military forces, we showed him that those
people had lead the military into a campaign against the masses, a
campaign that can never be victorious because no one can win a war
against the mass of the population.
After telling him that the military forces were the victims
of the regime's immorality, that the budgetary allocations for the
purchase of arms were embezzled, that the soldiers were being
constantly defrauded, that those people did not deserve the
consideration of honorable military men, that the Army had no
reason to bear the blame for crimes committed by Batista's gangs
of villains, I told him quite clearly that I did not authorize any
type of movement that would enable Batista to escape. I warned
him that if Batista got away afterwards with the Tabernillas and
the rest of them it would be because we had been unable to prevent
it. We had to prevent Batista's flight.
Everyone knows that our first requirement in the event of a
military uprising — that is, a military uprising in conjunction with our
movement — was the surrender of the war criminals. This is an essential
condition. We could have captured Batista and all his accomplices and I
said it loudly and clearly that I was not in agreement with Batista's
escape. I explained to him quite clearly what course of action would have
to be taken and that I did not give any support [to Batista's escape] nor
would the 27th of July Movement, nor would the people support a coup d'etat
[on such terms], because the fact is that it was the people who obtained
their freedom by conquest and only the people who did it.
Our freedom was taken from us by a coup d'etat but in order to
finish once and for all with coups d'etat, it was necessary to achieve
freedom by dint of the people's sacrifice. We could achieve nothing by one
uprising today and another tomorrow and another two years later and another
three years after, because here in Cuba it is the people, and the people
alone, who must decide who is to govern them.
The military forces must unconditionally obey the people's orders
and be at the disposal of the people, of the constitution and of the Laws
of the Republic. If there is a poor government that embezzles and does
more than four wrong things, the only thing to do is to wait a little while
and when election time comes the bad government is turned out of office.
That is why in democratic, constitutional regimes governments have a fixed
mandate. If they are bad, they can be ousted by the people, who can vote
for a better government. The function of the military is not to elect
governments, but to guarantee laws and to guarantee the rights of the
citizens. That is why I warned him that a coup d'etat was out of the
question, but a military revolutionary movement was in order and it should
take place in Santiago de Cuba and not in Colombia.
I told him quite clearly that the only way of forming a link with
the people and joining them, of uniting the military and the
revolutionaries was not a coup d'etat in the early hours of the dawn in
Colombia — at 2 or 3 a.m. — about which no one would know anything, as is
the usual practice of the gentlemen. I told him it would be necessary to
arouse the garrison at Santiago de Cuba, which was quite strong and
adequately armed, in order to start the military movement, which would then
be joined by the people and the revolutionaries. Given the situation in
which the dictatorship found itself, such movement would prove irresistible
because all the other garrisons in the country would certainly join it at
once. That was what was agreed upon and not only was it what was agreed
upon but I made him promise it. He intended to go to Havana the next day
and we did not agree with this. I said to him, "It is risky for you to go
to Havana." And he replied, "No, no there is no risk in it." I insisted,
"You are running a great risk of arrest because if there is a conspiracy,
everyone knows about it here."
"No, I am sure they will not arrest me," he replied. And, of
course, why would they arrest him if this was a "coup d'etat of Batista?"
My thoughts were, "Well, all this seems so easy that it might well
be a suspicious movement," so I said to him, "Will you promise me that in
Havana you will not be persuaded by those interests which support you to
carry out a coup d'etat in the capital? Will you promise me that you will
not do it? His reply was, "I promise I won't." I insisted, "Will you
swear to me that you won't?" And his reply again, "I swear I won't!"
I believe that the prime requisite for a military man is honor,
that the prime requisite of a military man is his word. This gentleman not
only proved that he is dishonorable and that his word is worth nothing, but
that he also lacks intelligence. I say this because a movement which could
have been organized from the start with the support of the whole
population, with its victory assured from the outset, did nothing more than
dive into space. He believed that it would be only too easy to fool the
people and to mislead the Revolution. He knew some things. He knew, for
instance, that when we told the people that Batista had got hold of a plane
the people would flock into the streets, madly happy. They thought that
the people were not sufficiently mature to distinguish between Batista's
flight and the Revolution. Because if Batista goes and over there
Cantillo's friends assume command, it is quite likely that Dr. Urrutia
would also have to go within three months. Because just as they were
betraying us now, so would they betray us later and the truth of the matter
is that Mr. Cantillo betrayed us before the Revolution. He gave signs of
this and I can prove it. We agreed with General Cantillo that the uprising
would take place on the 31st at 3 p.m. and it was agreed that the armed
forces would give unconditional support to the revolutionary movement. The
President was to appoint the revolutionary leaders and establish the
positions to which the revolutionary leaders would assign the military.
They were offering unconditional support and every detail of the plan was
agreed upon. At 3 p.m. on the 31st the garrison at Santiago de Cuba was to
rise in revolt. Immediately after several rebel columns would enter the
city and the people would fraternize with the military and the rebels,
immediately submitting a revolutionary proclamation to the country as a
whole and calling on all honorable military men to join the movement. It
was agreed that the talks in the city would be placed at our disposal and I
personally offered to advance toward the capital with an armed column
preceded by the tanks. The tanks in the city would be placed at our
disposal and I personally offered to advance toward the capital with an
armed column preceded by the tanks. The tanks were to be handed to me at 3
p.m., not because it was felt that any fighting would be necessary but only
against the possibility that in Havana the Movement might fail, making it
necessary to place our vanguard as close as possible to the capital and to
prevent any such occurrences in Havana.
It was evident that with the hatred for the public forces created
by the horrendous crimes committed by Ventura and Pilar Garcia, Batista's
fall would create considerable upheaval among the people. Moreover, the
police force would inevitably feel that it lacked the moral strength to
contain the populace, as in fact happened. A series of excesses were
recorded in the capital. There was looting, shooting, fires, and all the
responsibility for it falls on the shoulders of General Cantillo, who
betrayed his word of honor, who failed to carry out the plan which had been
agreed upon. He believed that by appointing police captains and
commanders, many of whom had already deserted when they were appointed —
proof that they had a guilty conscience — would be enough to solve the
problem. How different things were in Santiago de Cuba! How orderly and
civic-minded! How disciplined the behavior of the masses! There was not a
single attempt to loot, not a single example of personal vengeance, not a
single man dragged through the streets, not a single fire! The behavior of
the population of Santiago de Cuba was admirable and exemplary despite two
factors. One of these was that Santiago de Cuba was the city which had
suffered the most, where there had been the greatest terrorism and where,
consequently, one would expect the people to be indignant. Moreover,
despite our statements of this morning that we were not in agreement with
the coup d'etat, the population in Santiago de Cuba behaved in an exemplary
fashion.... [A typing error makes the translation of the next two lines
impossible].... One can no longer say that revolution is anarchy and
disorder; it occurred in Havana because of treason, but that was not the
case in Santiago de Cuba, which we can hold out as a model every time the
Revolution is accused of anarchy and disorganization.
It is well that people should know of the negotiations between
General Cantillo and me. If the people are not too tired, I can tell you
that after the agreements were made, when we had already suspended
operations in Santiago de Cuba, since on the 28th our troops were quite
near to the city and had completed all the preparatory work necessary for
the attack on it, according to the interview we were to make a series of
changes, abandoning the operation at Santiago de Cuba. Instead, we were to
direct our troops elsewhere, in fact, to a place where it was believed that
the Movement might not be victorious from the outset.
When we had completed all our movements, the column which was to
march on the capital received the following note from General Cantillo,
just a few hours before it was due to leave. The text of the note read as
follows: "Circumstances have changed considerably and now are favorable to
a national solution, in accordance with all desires for Cuba." Yet, the
major factors could not be more favorable and every circumstance pointed to
triumph. It was therefore strange that he should come and say that
circumstances had changed greatly and favorably. The circumstances were
that Batista and Tabernilla had agreed and the success of the coup was
assured. I recommended that nothing should be done at the moment and that
we should await the course of events over the next weeks, up to [January]
6th. Obviously, given the indefinitely prolonged truce while they were
taking care of everything in Havana, my immediate reply was as follows:
"The tenor of the note is entirely in contradiction with our agreements.
Moreover, it is ambiguous and incomprehensible and has made me lose
confidence in the seriousness of the agreements. Hostilities will break
out tomorrow at 3 p.m., the date and time agreed upon for the launching of
the movement."
Something very curious happened immediately thereafter in addition
to the receipt of the very short note. I advised the commanding officer at
Santiago de Cuba, through the bearer of the message, that if hostilities
were to break out because the agreements were not fulfilled and we had to
attack the first at Santiago de Cuba, they could do nothing other than
surrender.
My phrase was that we demanded the surrender of the town if
hostilities were to break out and if we were to initiate the attack.
However, the bearer of the note did not interpret me correctly. He told
Colonel Rego Rubido that I demanded the surrender of the town as a
precondition to any agreement. He did not add that I had said, "in the
event of our launching an attack." However, I had not said that I demanded
the surrender of the town as a condition from General Cantillo. As a
result of this message, the commanding officer at Santiago de Cuba sent me
a very enigmatic and punctilious reply which I will read to you,
indicating, naturally, that he felt very offended with what had been said
to him in error. It read as follows: "The solution found is neither a
coup d'etat nor a military revolt and yet we believe that it is the most
advisable solution for Dr. Fidel Castro, in accordance with his ideas and
one which would place the destinies of the country in his hands within 48
hours. It is not a local but a national solution and any indiscretion
might compromise or destroy it, leading to chaos. Therefore, we hope you
will have confidence in our decisions and you will receive the solution
before the 6th. As for Santiago, owing to the note and to the words of the
messenger, it will be necessary to change the plan and not enter the city."
His words caused a certain amount of bad feeling among the key
personnel. It was argued that no arms would be surrendered without
fighting, that arms are not surrendered, that arms are not surrendered to
an ally, that arms cannot be surrendered without honor. All of which are
very beautiful phrases when spoken by the commander of the garrison of
Santiago de Cuba, if he has no confidence in us; or if Santiago de Cuba is
attacked, they will regard it as equivalent to breaking the agreements,
which will interrupt the negotiations for the solution offered, thereby
formally absolving us from any compromise. It was our hope that, given the
time required to act in one way or another, the reply would arrive in time
to be sent to Havana by the Viscount flying out in the afternoon. My
answer to Colonel Jose Rego Rubido's note was as follows:
[Fidel's answer to Colonel Jose Rego Rubido's note]
"In liberated Cuban Territory, 31 December 1958.
Dear Colonel, a
regrettable error has occurred in the transmission of my message to you,
due perhaps to the haste with which I replied to your note. This is what I
surmise from the conversation I have since held with its bearer. I did not
tell him that the conditions we established in the agreement entered into
encompassed the surrender of the garrison of Santiago de Cuba to our
forces. This showed a lack of courtesy to our visitor and would have
constituted an unworthy and offensive proposal to the military forces who
so cordially sought us out. The question was entirely different. An
agreement was reached and a plan adopted between the leader of the military
movement and ourselves which was to go into effect as from 3 p.m. on 31
December. The plan included details established after careful analysis of
the problems to be faced, and was to begin with the revolt of the garrison
at Santiago de Cuba. I persuaded General Cantillo of the advantages to be
derived from beginning at Oriente rather than in Colombia because the mass
of the people greatly feared any coup starting in the barracks in the
Capital of the Republic, stressing how difficult it would be, in that case,
to insure that the people joined up with the movement. He stated that he
was in full agreement with my viewpoint on the matter and was only
concerned with maintaining order in the Capital, so we jointly agreed on
measures necessary to avoid that danger. These measures involved the
advance of our column toward Santiago de Cuba, to be exact. It was to be a
combined effort of the military, the people and ourselves, a sort of
revolutionary movement which, from the outset, would be backed by the
confidence of the whole nation. According to what was established, we
suspended the operations that were underway and undertook new displacements
of our forces in other directions — such as Holguin, where the presence of
well-known figureheads practically insured resistance to the revolutionary
military movement. When all our preparatory tasks were completed, I
received yesterday's message, indicating that the plan of action agreed
upon was not to be fulfilled."
"Apparently there were other plans but I was not to be informed of
them because, in fact, the matter was no longer in our hands. Therefore
all we could do was wait because one party was changing everything. Our
own forces were being endangered, although according to our understanding
and what was being said they were being sent off on difficult operations.
And we remained subject to the outcome of the risks which General Cantillo
took on his frequent trips to Havana. Militarily, these trips might well
prove to be a disaster for us. You must realize that everything is very
confused at this moment and Batista is an artful, crafty individual who
knows only too well how to make the best use of a risk that can prove
dangerous to others. All that can be asked is that we renounce all of the
advantages gained during the past few weeks, and stand by, waiting
patiently, for events to take their due course. I made it quite clear that
it could not be an operation on the part of the military alone. We didn't
have to undergo the horror of two years of war for this, and then stand
with our arms crossed, doing nothing, at the most critical moment. They
cannot expect this of men who have known no rest in the struggle against
oppression. This cannot be done even though it is your intention to hand
over the power to the revolutionaries. It is not power that is important
to us, but that the Revolution should fulfill its destiny. I am even
concerned by the fact that the military, through any unjustifiable excess
of scruples, should facilitate the flight of the principal criminals who
would be able to escape abroad with their vast fortunes, and then from some
foreign country do all the harm possible to our country. [Translator's
Note: This text involves some typographical errors. A rendering
compatible with the argument has been given.]
"I should add that, personally, I am not interested in power nor
do I envisage assuming it at any time. All that I will do is to make sure
that the sacrifices of so many compatriots should not be in vain, whatever
the future may hold in store for me.
"In all my dealings, I have always acted loyally and frankly. One
should never consider what has been obtained underhandedly and with
duplicity as a triumph and the language of honor which you have heard from
my lips is the only language I know. Never in the course of the meetings
with General Cantillo did we refer to the word 'surrender.' what I said
yesterday and what I repeat today is that, as of 3 p.m. of the 31st
[December], the date and time agreed upon, we could not cut short the truce
with Santiago de Cuba because that would have been exceedingly detrimental
to the people.
"Last night, the rumor circulated here that General Cantillo had
been arrested in Havana and that various young men had been found murdered
in the cemetery of Santiago de Cuba. I had the feeling that we had been
wasting our time most unhappily. And yet today, luckily enough, it seems
certain that the General is at his post. What is the need for such risks?
What I said to the messenger about surrender, and which was not
communicated literally — as would appear to have been confirmed by the
terms of his note today — was the following: that if hostilities were to
break out because the terms of the agreement had not been fulfilled, we
would be compelled t attack the garrison at Santiago de Cuba. This would
be inevitable, since that was the objective of our efforts over the past
few months. In this case, once the operation was under way, we would have
to demand the surrender of those defending the garrison. This does not
mean to imply that we think they will surrender without fighting because I
know that even when there is not reason to fight, Cuban military forces
will defend their positions adamantly and this has cost me many lives.
"All I meant was that once the blood of our forces had been shed
in the attempt to conquer a given objective, no other solution would be
acceptable. Even though the cost be extremely heavy, in view of the
present conditions of the forces defending the regime, and since these
forces cannot support the garrison of Santiago de Cuba, the latter must
inevitably fall into our hands.
"This was the basic objective of our whole campaign over the past
two months and a plan of such scale cannot be held up for a week without
giving rise to grave consequences, should the military movement fail.
Moreover, it would mean losing the most opportune time — which is the
present — when the dictatorship is suffering severe losses in the
provinces of Oriente and Las Villas. We are faced with the dilemma of
either waiving the advantages gained by our victory or exchanging an
assured victory for one that is otherwise. Do you believe that in the face
of yesterday's ambiguous and laconic note, containing a unilateral
decision, I could hold myself responsible for delaying the plans?
"As a military man, you must admit that too much is being asked of
us. You have not stopped digging trenches for a single moment and you
could well make use of those trenches against us... Some one like Pedraza,
or Pilar Garcia or Canizares... and if General Cantillo is relieved of his
command, and if his trusted lieutenants go with him, you cannot expect us
to remain idle. You see, they have promised us the absurd and although
they defend themselves valiantly with their arms, we have no alternative
but to attack, because we also have very sacred commitments to fulfill. We
desire that these honorable military men be much more than mere allies. We
want them to be our companions in a single cause, the cause of Cuba. Above
all, I wish you, yourself, my friend, not to misinterpret my attitude. Do
not believe that I am being overly rigid as regards the tactics involving
the holding off of an attack in the Santiago de Cuba area. In order that
no possible doubt whatever may persist, I will confirm that although at any
time before the fighting begins we can renew our negotiations, as of today
it must be made clear that the attack will take place momentarily and that
nothing will convince us to alter the plans again."
[A Letter in Reply from Colonel Rego]
Colonel Rego replied in a very punctilious note, worthy of the
greatest praise, which reads as follows:
"Sir, I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter of today's date,
and believe me, I wish to thank you most sincerely for the explanation
regarding the previous message. However, I must confess that I felt some
error of interpretation was involved since I have observed your line of
conduct for some time and know that you are a man of principle. I ignored
the details of the original plan because I was only informed of the first
part of it. I might add that I am also not aware of some of the details of
the present plan. I believe you are partly right in your analysis of the
first part of the original plan. However, I believe that a few more days
would be necessary before it could be consummated and we would never be
able to prevent some of the major, intermediary and minor guilty parties
from escaping. I am among those who believe it is absolutely essential to
give an example of Cuba of all those who take advantage of the positions of
power they occupy to commit every possible type of punishable offense.
Unfortunately, history is plagued with a series of similar cases ad rarely
do the criminals fall into the hands of the competent authorities.
"I am fully aware of your concern for the men who have the least
responsibility for the course of historical events."
"I have no reason whatsoever to believe that any person is
attempting to facilitate the escape of the guilty, and, personally, I
might add that I am opposed to their flight." That was Colonel Rego
Rubido's view. However, he also added that should such an event take
place, the historical responsibility for such an act would fall on the
shoulders of those who facilitated the escape, and never on those of anyone
else. "I believe," he said, "that everything will take place in accordance
with your ideas, and that it will be for the good of Cuba and of the
Revolution of which you are the leader. I heard of a young student who had
been murdered and whose body was in the cemetery. Today, I myself made
sure that every possible measure be taken to determine who was guilty of
those crimes and what the circumstances of his death were, and how it took
place, just as I had done a few days ago, not sparing any effort until I am
able to put the suspected authors of this crime at the disposal of the
competent authorities. Lastly, I should advise you that I sent a message
through to the General, letting him know that I had obtained a plane to
carry your note to him. Do not be impatient for I feel sure that even
before the date established as the maximum limit you will be in Havana.
When the General left here, I asked him to let me have the helicopter and a
pilot, just in case you might like to fly over Santiago de Cuba on Sunday
afternoon.
"With sincerest greetings and my warmest wishes for a Happy New
Year, (Signed) Colonel Rego Rubido."
[Surprised by the Coup in Colombia]
This was the state of our negotiations when Colonel Rego,
Commander of the garrison of Santiago de Cuba and I were equally surprised
by the coup d'etat in Colombia, which was completely in contradiction with
all that had been agreed upon. The first thing done and the most criminal
aspect of all was that Batista was allowed to escape, and with him
Tabernilla, and the other major criminals. They allowed them to escape
with their millions of pesos; yes, they allowed them to flee with the three
or four hundred million pesos they had stolen.
This will prove very costly for us because now, from Santo Domingo
and from other countries, they will be directing propaganda against the
Revolution, plotting all the harm they can against our cause and for a good
many years we will have them there, threatening our people, and causing the
people to remain in a constant state of alarm because they will be
conspiring against us and paying others to do so also. What did we do as
soon as we learned of the blow? We heard about it on Radio Progreso and by
that time, guessing what their plans were, as I was making a statement I
was told that Batista had left for Santo Domingo. Is it a rumor? I
wondered. Could it be a trick? I sent someone out to confirm the story
and was informed that Batista and Tabernilla had actually gone to Santo
Domingo. And the most astonishing thing of all was that General Cantillo
declared that this movement had taken place thanks to the patriotic
intentions of General Batista, who had resigned in order to avoid
bloodshed. What do you think about that?
There is something else I must tell you in order to let you see
what kind of a coup had been prepared. Pedraza had been appointed to
membership of the Junta and then he left. I don't think one need add
anything else to explain the nature of the aims of those responsible for
carrying out the coup. Subsequently, they did not appoint Urrutia to the
Presidency, that is, the man proclaimed by the movement and by all the
revolutionary organizations. The person they chose is no less than the
oldest member of the Supreme Court bench, and all his colleagues are quite
old themselves. And above all he is a man who has been a President up to
the present time: a President of a Supreme Court of Justice which never
dispenses any justice, which never did dispense any justice whatsoever.
What would the result of all this be? Only half a revolution. A
compromise, a caricature of a revolution. Mr. Jack Straw, or whatever name
you may wish to give this Mr. Piedra who, if he has not resigned by now
should be getting ready to do so, because we are going to make him resign
in Havana. I do not believe he will last twenty-four hours in office. It
will break all records. They appoint this gentleman and, isn't it perfect,
Cantillo becomes a national hero, the defender of Cuba's freedoms, the Lord
and Master of Cuba, and there is Mr. Piedra... It would simply mean
getting rid of one dictator to put another in his place.
Every order contained in the documents referring to the movement
in Colombia indicated that it was to be a counterrevolutionary uprising.
In all the orders, the general trend was away from the aims of the people,
and in all the orders there was an atmosphere of something suspect. Mr.
Piedra immediately made an appeal, or stated that he was going to make an
appeal to the rebels and to a peace commission. Meanwhile, we were
supposed to be so calm and trusting; we would put down our guns and abandon
everything and go and plead and pay homage to Mr. Piedra and Mr. Cantillo.
It is obvious that both Cantillo and Piedra were out of touch with
reality because I believe that the Cuban people have learned a great deal
and we rebels have also learned something. That was the situation this
morning but it is not the situation this evening, because many things have
changed. Given these facts, given this betrayal, I ordered all the rebel
commanders to continue marching on toward their targets, and in keeping
with this, I also immediately ordered all the columns allocated to the
Santiago de Cuba operations to advance against that garrison.
I want you to know that our forces were firmly determined to take
Santiago de Cuba by assault. This would have been regrettable because it
would have led to much bloodshed and tonight would not have been a night of
celebration and happiness, as it is, it would not have been a night of
peace and fraternization, as it is. I must acknowledge that if there was
not a bloody battle waged here in Santiago de Cuba, it is due largely to
the patriotic attitude of Army Colonel Jose Rego Rubido, to the commanders
of the frigates Maximo Gomez and Maceo and to the chief of the Santiago de
Cuba Naval District, as well as to the officer who was acting as Chief of
Police.
[Avoiding a Bloody Battle]
Citizens, it is only just that we should recognize these facts
here and now and be thankful to the men responsible for them. They
contributed to averting considerable bloodshed and to converting this
morning's counterrevolutionary movement into the revolutionary movement of
this afternoon.
We had no alternative other than to attack because we could not
allow the Colombia coup to be consolidated. Therefore, it was necessary to
attack. When the troops were already marching out against their targets,
Colonel Rego made use of a helicopter to try and locate me. The Navy
commanders contacted us and placed themselves unconditionally at the
service of the Revolution. Backed by the support of their two vessels,
equipped with heavy firing capacity, and by the Naval District and the
Police, I called a meeting of all the Army officers stationed at the
Santiago de Cuba garrison — and there are over a hundred of these
officers. I explained to them that I was not the least worried by the
thought of addressing them because I knew I was right, and I knew they
would understand my arguments and that we would reach an agreement in the
course of the meeting. Indeed, in the early evening, just at nightfall, I
went to the meeting at the Escande which was attended by nearly all the
Army officers in Santiago de Cuba. Many of them were young men who were
clearly anxious to struggle and fight for the good of their country. I met
with these military men and spoke to them of our aims for our country, of
what we wanted for the country, of the manner in which we had always dealt
with the military and of all the harm done to the army by the tyrants. I
said I did not think it fair that all military men be regarded equally,
that the criminals were only a small minority, that there were many
honorable men in the army who I knew repudiated criminal tactics, abuse and
injustice. I knew it was not easy for the military to develop a specific
type of action.
It was clear that when the highest positions in the army were in
the hands of the Tabernilla and the Pilar Garcia, relatives and
unconditional supporters of Batista, there was a generalized feel of great
fear in the Army. One could not ask an officer individually to accept any
responsibility. There were two kinds of military men and we know them
well. There were military men like Sosa Blanco, Canizares, Sanchez
Mosquera and Chaviano, known for their crimes and the cowardly murder of
unfortunate peasants; and then there are military men who have waged
honorable campaigns, who never murdered anyone, nor burned down houses, men
such as Commander Quevedo, who was our prisoner after his heroic resistance
at the Battle of Jibo and who is still an Army officer. Men like Commander
Sierra and many other officers who never in their lives burned down a
house. However, this type of officer got no promotion. Those who were
promoted were the criminals because Batista always made a point of
recompensing crime.
For example, we have the case of Colonel Rego Rubido who does not
owe his position to the dictatorship since he was already a Colonel when
the 10 March coup took place. The fact is that I was given the support of
the Army officers in Santiago de Cuba and the army officers in Santiago de
Cuba gave their unconditional backing to the Cuban Revolution. When the
Navy, Army and Police officers met together, they agreed to condemn the
Colombia uprising and to support the Legal Government of the Republic
because it has the backing of the majority of the population, and is
represented by Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleo, and they also agreed to support the
Cuban Revolution. Thanks to their attitude, we were able to prevent much
bloodshed; thanks to their attitude, this afternoon we saw the birth of a
truly revolutionary movement. I quite understand that among the people
there may be many justifiably passionate feelings. I appreciate the
concern for justice evinced by our people and I promise to give them
justice, but I want to ask the people, above all and before all else, to
remain calm.
At the present moment, power must be consolidated before we do
anything else. Before all else, power must be consolidated. After that,
we will appoint a commission, made up of reputable military men and
officers of the Rebel Army to take the necessary measures. These will
include establishing responsibilities where they are due. No one will
oppose such measures because it is precisely the army and the armed forces
who are most concerned in insuring that the guilt of a few should not be
borne by the whole corps. They are the ones most interested in insuring
that the wearing of a uniform not be regarded as degrading, and that the
guilty be punished in order that the innocent not be charged with the
disreputable acts of others. We would ask the people to have confidence in
us because we know how to fulfill our obligations. Those were the
circumstances surrounding the meeting held this afternoon — a meeting that
proved to be a truly revolutionary movement in which the people, the
military and the rebels participated.
Words fail us to describe the enthusiasm of the military in
Santiago de Cuba. As a proof of their trust, I asked the military to join
me in entering Santiago de Cuba, so that here I am with all the Army
officers. There are the tanks that are at the service of the Revolution.
there is the artillery and the service of the Revolution. And there are
the vessels, now at the service of the Revolution. And finally the people.
The people who at the outset... I need not add that the Revolution can
depend on the people because this is a well-known fact. However, the
people, who at the outset had only shotguns, now have artillery, tanks and
well-armed vessels, and many trained army technicians to help us handle
them. Now the people are properly armed. And let me assure you that if
when we were only 12 men, we never lost faith, now that we have 12 tanks
there, how are we going to lose faith? Let me tell you that today,
tonight, as of this dawn — because daybreak is at hand, the eminent
magistrate Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lleo will take over the presidency of the
Republic. Does Dr. Urrutia have the support of the people or does he not
have the support of the people? What I really mean to say is that it is
the President of the Republic, the legal president, who has the support of
the people of Cuba and that is Dr. Manuel Urrutia. Who wants Mr. Piedra as
President? Then if no one wants Mr. Piedra as President, how are they
going to impose Mr. Piedra on us now?
Since those are the instructions given by the people of Santiago
de Cuba, and since they represent the feelings of all the people of all
Cuba, as soon as this meeting is over I will march with the veteran troops
of Sierra Maestra, with the tanks and the artillery, toward the Capital in
order to fulfill the will of people. We are here entirely at the request
of the people. The mandate of the people is the only legal mandate at
present. The President is elected by the people and not by a council in
Colombia, meeting at four o'clock in the morning.
The people have elected their President and this means that from
this moment on the most powerful legal authority in the Republic has been
established. Not a single one, not a single one of the appointments and
promotions made by the Military Junta in the early hours of today is at all
valid. All the appointments and promotions in the Army are annulled, all
the appointments and promotions, I mean, that were made at dawn today.
Anyone accepting a commission from the treacherous Junta which met this
morning is regarded as adopting a counterrevolutionary attitude, call it by
whatever name you wish, and as a result will be branded as an outlaw. I am
absolutely convinced that by tomorrow morning all the army commands
throughout the country will have accepted the decisions taken by the
President of the Republic. The President will immediately appoint the
chiefs of the Army, the Navy and the Police. Because of the very valuable
service rendered now to the Revolution and because he placed his thousands
of men at the service of the Revolution, we would recommend that colonel
Rego Rubido be made Chief of the Army. Similarly, the Chief of the Navy
will be one of the two commanders who first placed their vessels at the
orders of the Revolution. And I would recommend to the President of the
Republic that Commander Efigenio Almejeiras be appointed national Chief of
Police. He lost three brothers in the Revolution, was one of the members
of the gamma expeditionary force and one of the most able men in the
revolutionary army. Almejeiras is on duty in the Guantanamo operations but
will arrive here tomorrow.
[Things Will Be the Way the People Want Them]
All I can do is ask you to give us time and to allow time to the
civil powers of the Republic, so that we can do things the way the people
want them; but they must be done gradually, little by little. I would only
ask one thing of the people, and that is that you remain calm. (A voice is
heard shouting Oriente Federal!) No... no, the Republic, above all else,
must remain united. What you must demand is justice for Oriente
[province]. Time is a highly important factor in all things. The
Revolution cannot be completed in a single day but you may be sure that we
will carry the Revolution through to the full. You may be sure that for
the first time the Republic will be truly and entirely free and the people
will have their just recompense. Power was not achieved through politics,
but through the sacrifices of hundreds and thousands of our fellows. It is
not a promise we make to ourselves but to the people, the whole Cuban
nation; the man who has taken over power has no commitments with anyone
other than with the people. Che Guevara has been ordered to march on the
Capital, not on the provisional Capital of the Republic. Commander Camilo
Cienfuegos of Number 2 Column — the Antonio Maceo column — was likewise
ordered to march on Havana and to take over command of the Colombia
military camp. The orders issued by the President of the Republic were
carried out, as is required by the mandate of the Revolution. We must not
be blamed for the excesses occurring in Havana. General Cantillo and his
fellow-conspirators of this day's dawn are to blame for those. They
believed that they could overcome the situation there. In Santiago de
Cuba, where a genuine revolution took place, complete order has reigned.
In Santiago de Cuba, the people joined with the military and the
revolutionaries in a way I cannot describe. The head of the Government,
the head of the Army and the head of the Navy will be in Santiago de Cuba
and their orders must be obeyed by every authority in the country. It is
our hope that every honorable military man will respect these instructions.
It is important to remember that primarily the military forces are
at the service of law and of authority, not improperly constituted
authorities but the legitimate authority. No reputable Army man need fear
anything from the Revolution. In this struggle, there are no conquered
ones because the only conqueror is the people. There are men who have
fallen on one side and the other, but we have all joined together that the
victory may be the nation's. We have all joined together, the reputable
military and the revolutionaries. There will be no more bloodshed. I hope
that no group puts up any resistance because apart from such an attitude
proving foolhardy, it would be overcome in short shift. Moreover, it would
be resistance against the Law, against the Republic and against the
feelings of the whole Cuban nation. It was necessary to organize today's
movement in order to prevent another war taking place in six months' time.
What happened at the time of Machado's coup? Well one of machado's
generals also organized a coup d'etat, removed Machado from power and put
in a new President who remained in office for 15 days. Then the sergeants
came along and said those officers were responsible for Machado's
dictatorship and that they could not countenance them. The revolutionary
spirit spread and the officers were ousted. That cannot take place now.
those officers have the backing of the people and of the troops. They also
enjoy the prestige acquired by having joined a truly revolutionary
movement. The people will respect and esteem these officers and it will
not be necessary for them to use force nor to go about the streets armed
nor to attempt to strike fear in the hearts of the people.
True order is that based on freedom, on respect and on justice,
but at the same time that which precludes the use of force. Henceforward,
the people shall be entirely free and the people know how to conduct
themselves, as they have proven today. We have achieved the peace that our
country needs. Santiago de Cuba has paid for its freedom without
bloodshed. That is why happiness reigns supreme here. That is why the
military, today, condemned and repudiated the Colombia coup, in order to
join the revolution unconditionally. Therefore, they deserve our
acknowledgment of their motivation, our thanks and our respect.
In the future, the armed forces of the Republic will be regarded
as exemplary, given their ability, their training and the manner in which
they identified with the cause of the people and because, henceforward,
their rifles will be solely and always at the service of the people. There
will be no more coups d'etat, no more war, because we have now taken care
to prevent a repetition of what happened to Machado. To make the present
case — the one that took place at dawn today — resemble Machado's fall
even more closely, those gentlemen put a Carlos Manuel in office, just as a
Carlos Manuel had been put in office previously. What we will not have
this time is a Batista because there will be no need for a 4 September
which destroys the discipline in the Armed Forces. It will be remembered
that it was Batista who was responsible for the armed uprising at that
time. His policy consisted in cajoling the soldiers in order to disguise
the authority of the officers. The officers will have authority; there
will be discipline in the Army; there will be a military penal code, in
which any violation of human rights, any dishonorable or immoral acts by
any military personnel, will be severely punished.
There will be no privileges; there will be no privileges for
anyone; and the members of the Armed Forces who are capable and deserving
will be promoted. It will not be as it has been in the past — that is,
that relations and friends are promoted, regardless of grades. This sort
of thing will finish for the military as it will finish for laborers.
There will be no more exploitation or compulsory contributions, which for
the workers represent the trade union payments and for the military
represent a peso here for the First Lady and two pesos elsewhere for
something else and so all their pay dwindles away.
Naturally, the whole population can expect it of us and can count
on it. However, I have spoken of the military so that they will know that
they can also count on the Revolution for all the improvements which have
been lacking until now, because if the budgetary resources are not stolen,
the military will be in a much better position than at the present.
Moreover, the soldier will not be called upon to exercise the duty of a
policeman because he will be busy with his own training in the barracks;
the soldier will not be engaged in police work but will be busy being a
soldier. We will not have to resort to short-wave systems [Translator's
note: It is believed that the reference is to "bugging" devices]. I think
that I should add that we rebels make use of short-wave facilities because
this is advisable. However, the short-wave facilities have not made
reference to assassins, have not involved sudden stopping of cars in front
of houses nor ambushes at midnight.
I am certain that as soon as the President of the Republic takes
office and assumes command of the situation, he will decree the
re-establishment of all rights and freedoms, including the absolute freedom
of the press, of all individual rights, of all trade union rights, and of
the rights and demands of the rural workers and our own free people. We
will not forget our peasants in the Sierra Maestra and those in the
interior of the country. I will not go and live in Havana because I want
to live in Sierra Maestra, at least in that part for which I feel a very
deep sense of gratitude. I will never forget those country people and as
soon as I have a free moment we will see about building the first school
city with seats for 20,000 children. We will do it with the help of the
people and the rebels will work with them there. We will ask each citizen
for a bag of cement and a trowel. I know we will have the help of our
industry and of business and we will not forget any of the sectors of our
population.
The country's economy will be re-established immediately. This
year it is we who will take care of the sugar cane to prevent its being
burnt, because this year the tax on sugar is not going to be used for the
purchase of murderous weapons nor for planes and bombs with which to attack
the people. We will take care of communications and already from Jiguani
to Palma Soriano the telephone lines have been re-established, and the
railroad is being rebuilt. There will be a harvest all over the country
and there will be good wages because I know that this is the intention of
the President of the Republic. There will be good prices because the fear
that there would be no harvest has raised prices on the world market. The
peasants can sell their coffee and the cattle breeders can sell their fat
steers in Havana because fortunately we triumphed soon enough to prevent
their being ruins of any kind. It is not my place to say all these things.
You know that we keep our word, and what we promise we fulfill and we
promise less than what we intend to fulfill; we promise not more but less
and we intend to do more than we have offered the people of Cuba.
We do not believe that all the problems can be solved readily; we
know the road is sown with obstacles, but we are men of good faith and we
are always ready to face great difficulties. The people can be certain of
one thing, and that is that we may make one or even many mistakes. But the
only thing which cannot be said of us is that we have stolen, that we have
profited from our position, that we have betrayed the movement. I know
that the people can forgive mistakes but not dishonorable deeds, and what
we had here were dishonorable men.
In accepting the presidency, Dr. Manuel Urrutia, from the very
first moment when he was invested in office, from the moment when he swore
his oath before the people as President of the Republic, became the maximum
authority in the country. Let no one think that I intend to exercise any
power greater than that of the President of the Republic. I will be the
first to obey orders issued by the civilian authority of the Republic and I
will be the first to set an example. We will carry out his orders and
within the scope of the authority granted to us we will try to do the
utmost for our people without any personal ambition, because fortunately we
are immune to the temptations of such ambitions and such vanity. What
greater glory could we have than the affection of our people? What greater
reward could we envision than the thousands of arms waving before us, full
of hope, and faith in us and affection for us. We shall never allow
ourselves to be influenced by vanity or ambition because, in the words of
the Apostle, all the glory of the world can be contained within a single
ear of corn, and there is no greater reward or satisfaction than to fulfill
one's duty as we have been doing until the present time and as we shall
always continue to do. In saying this, I am not speaking in my own name
but in the name of the thousands and thousands of combatants who ensured
the victory of the people. I speak on behalf of our deep sentiments and of
our devotion for our people. I have in mind the respect we owe to our
dead, to the fallen, who shall not be forgotten and whose faithful
companions we shall always be. This time they shall not say of us as has
been said of others in the past that we betrayed the memory of those who
died because the years will still be given by those who died. Frank Pais
is not physically among us, nor are many others, but they are all
spiritually present and the mere knowledge that their sacrifice was not in
vain recompenses us in part for the immense emptiness which they left
behind them.
Fresh flowers will continue to adorn their tombstones; their
children shall not be forgotten because assistance will be given to the
families of the fallen. We rebels will not ask for retroactive pay over
the years during which we struggled because we feel proud not to be paid
for the services rendered to Cuba. Indeed, it is quite possible that we
should continue to fulfill our obligations without asking for pay because
this is immaterial if funds are lacking. What exists is goodwill and we
shall do everything necessary. However, I will repeat here what I have
already said, "and history will absolve me," that we shall insure that
maintenance, assistance, and education shall not be lacking for the
children of the military who died fighting against us because they are not
to blame for the errors of the tyrant. We shall be generous to everyone
because, as I have said before, here there are no vanquished, but only
victors. The war criminals will all be punished because it is the
irrevocable duty of the Revolution to do so and the people can be certain
that we shall fulfill that duty. The people should also be sure that when
justice reigns there will be no revenge because if on the morrow there are
to be no assaults made against anyone, justice must reign now. Since there
will be justice, there will be no revenge nor will there be hatred.
We shall exile hatred from the Republic, that hatred which is a
damned and evil shadow bequeathed to us by ambition and tyranny. The pity
is that the major criminals should have escaped. There are thousands of
men who would pursue them, but we must respect the laws of other countries.
It would be easy for us because we have more than enough volunteers to
pursue those delinquents, ready and willing to risk their lives. However,
we do not wish to give the appearance of a people who violate the laws of
other peoples; we shall respect these laws while ours are respected.
notwithstanding, I will issue one warning and that is that if in Santo
Domingo they begin to conspire against the Revolution, if Trujillo... makes
any mistake and directs any aggression against us, it will be a sorry day
for him. (At one time I said that Trijillo had harmed Batista by selling
him arms and the harm he did us not so much in selling arms but in selling
weapons of poor quality, so bad, in fact, that when they fell into our
hands they were no use at all.) However, he did sell bombs and those
served to murder many peasants. We have no wish to return the rifles
because they are worth nothing, but we would like to reciprocate with
something better. In the first place, it is logical that the political
refugees from Santo Domingo should have their safest asylum and most
comfortable home here and that the political refugees of every dictatorship
should find here their best protection, since we, too, have been refugees.
If Santo Domingo is to be converted into an arsenal of
counterrevolutionaries, if Santo Domingo is to be a base for conspiracies
against the Cuban Revolution and if these gentlemen devote themselves to
conspiracies over there, it would be better for them to leave Santo Domingo
immediately. We say this, because they will not be very safe there either
and it will not be because of us since we have no right to intervene in the
problems of Santo Domingo. It will be because the citizens of the
Dominican Republic have learnt from Cuba's example and conditions will be
very grave indeed there. The citizens of the Dominican Republic have
learned that one can struggle against tyranny and defeat and this is the
lesson dictatorships fear the most. Yet, it is a lesson which is
encouraging for the Americas; a lesson exemplified just now in our country.
All of America is watching the course of the fate of this revolution. All
the Americas are watching us and they follow our actions with their best
wishes for our triumph as they will all of them support us in our times of
need. Therefore, everything is joyful now, not only in Cuba but also in
the Americas. They rejoice as we have rejoiced when a dictator has fallen
in Latin America, so now they rejoice with the Cuban people. It is assumed
that there will be justice, as I was saying, despite the enormous
accumulation of sentiments and ideas stemming from the general disorder,
commotion, and feelings registered in our minds today. As I was saying, it
was a pity that the major criminals escaped. We now know who was
responsible because the people know who is to blame for their escape as
they know that they also left here not the most unfortunate but the
dullest, those who were penniless, the rank and file who took their orders
from the major criminals. They allowed the major criminals to escape so
that the people might state their anger and their indignation upon those
who were least to blame although it is only right that they should be
justly punished in order to learn their lesson. The same thing always
happens, the people tell this group that the "big shots" will get away and
they will be left behind and, nevertheless, though some of them may leave,
others remain and must be punished. The top men may go but they will also
have their punishment, a harsh punishment, for it is harsh to be exiled
from one's country for the rest of one's days because they will, even in
the best of circumstances, be ostracized for the rest of their lives as
criminals and thieves who fled precipitately.
If only one could see Mr. Batista now — through the eye of a
needle, as the people say. If only one could see the proud, handsome Mr.
Batista, who never made a single speech but that he described others as
cowards, wretched villains, etcetera. Here, we have not even used the
epithet of "villain" for anyone. Here we do not breathe hatred, nor are we
proud or disdainful as are those who made speeches during the dictatorship.
Like that man who claimed that he had a single bullet in his pistol when he
entered Colombia and who left in the early hours of the dawn, on a plane,
with a single bullet in his pistol. And it was proved that dictators are
not so frightening nor so likely to commit suicide, because when they have
lost the game, they immediately take flight like cowards. The sad part of
it is that they escaped when they could have been taken prisoners and had
we caught Batista, we could have taken the 200 million from him. But we
will claim the money, wherever he is hiding it, because they are not
political delinquents but common criminals. And we will see those who turn
up in the embassies, if Mr. Cantillo has not already given them
safe-conducts. We will distinguish then between the political prisoners
but nothing for the common criminals. They will have to go before the
courts and prove that they are political delinquents. However, if it
should be proved that they are common criminals, they will have to appear
before the proper authorities. For instance, Mujal, as big and as fat as
he is, nobody knows where he is hiding at the present time. I can't
understand how they got away. Nevertheless you will remember these
unfortunate wretches....
[They May Speak Freely, Whether For or Against]
At last the people have been able to free themselves from this
rabble. Now anyone may speak out, whether they are for or against. Anyone who wishes to do so may speak out. That was not the case here
previously because until the present time, they were the only ones
[allowed] to speak out; only they spoke out. And they spoke against us.
There will be freedom for those who speak in our favor and for those who
speak against us and criticize us. There will be freedom for all men
because we have achieved freedom for all men. We shall never feel
offended; we shall always defend ourselves and we shall follow a single
precept, that of respect for the rights and feelings of others.
Other names have been mentioned here. Those people! Heaven alone
knows in what embassy, on what beach, in what boat they now find
themselves. We were able to get rid of them. If they have a tiny shack,
or a small boat, or a tiny farm somewhere round here, we will naturally
have to confiscate it, because we must sound the warning that the employees
of tyranny, the representatives, the senators, etcetera, those who did not
necessarily steal but who accepted their remuneration, will have to pay
back, up to the last penny, what they received over these four years,
because they received it illegally. The will have to pay back to the
Republic the money they received as remuneration and if they do not
reimburse the national coffers, we will confiscate whatever property they
have. That is quite apart from what they may have stolen. Those who
robbed will not be allowed to retain any of the stolen goods. That is the
law of the Revolution. It is not fair to send a man to prison for stealing
a chicken or a turkey, and at the same time allow those who stole millions
of pesos to spend a delightful life wandering around.
Let the thieves of yesterday and today beware! Let them beware!
Because the Revolution's laws may reach out to draw in the guilty of every
period. Because the Revolution has triumphed and has no obligations to
anyone whatsoever. It's only obligation is to the people, to whom it owes
its victory.
I want to conclude for today. Remember that I must leave right
away. It is my duty. What is more, you have been standing there for a
good many hours. However, I see so many red and black flags on the dresses
of our women followers that it is really hard for us to leave this
platform, on which all of us here have felt the great emotion in all our
lives.
We would not do less than remember Santiago de Cuba with the
greatest warmth. The few times we have met here — a meeting on the
Alameda and another on Trocha Avenue, at which I said that if we were
deprived of our rights by force, we would recover them with our rifles in
hand, and yet they attributed the statement to Luis Orlando. I kept quiet
and at the time, while the newspapers made it seem as if Luis Orlando was
the one who had done the most, although it was I who did the most. Yet I
was not very sure whether or not things were well done because at that time
there was no... [Translator's note: The remainder of this sentence and the
beginning of the next is missing.]... and the result was that we had to
exchange everything, the books and the diagrams for rifles, while the
peasants exchanged their farm implements for rifles and we all had to
exchange everything for rifles. Fortunately the task that required rifles
is done; so let us keep the rifles where they are, far away from their
eyes, because they will have to defend our sovereignty and our rights.
Yet, when our people are threatened, it will not be only the thirty or
forty thousand armed men who will fight, but the three or four or five
hundred thousand Cubans, men and women, who can come here for their arms.
There will be arms for all those who wish to fight when the time comes to
defend our freedom. It has been proven that it is not only the men who
fight but that in Cuba the women also fight. The best evidence of this is
the Mariana Grajales platoon, which made such an outstanding showing in
numerous encounters. The women are as good soldiers as our best military
men and I wanted to prove that women can be good soldiers.
At the outset, this scheme gave me a lot of trouble because they
were very prejudiced. There were men who asked how on earth one could give
a rifle to a woman while there was still a man alive to carry one. Yet on
our front, women must be rescued because they are still the victims of
discrimination insofar as labor is concerned and in other aspects of their
lives. So we organized the women's units and these proved that women could
fight, and when the men fight in a village and the women can fight
alongside them, such villages are impregnable and the women of such
villages cannot be defeated. We have organized the feminine combatants or
militias and we will keep them trained — all of them on a voluntary basis
— all these young women I see here with their black and red dresses
recalled 26 July. And I ask all of you to learn to handle firearms.
My dear Compatriots, this Revolution carried out with such
sacrifice, our Revolution, the Revolution of the people, is now a
magnificent and indestructible reality, a cause for no uncertain nor
unjustified pride and a cause for the great joy that Cuba awaited. I know
that it is not only here in Santiago de Cuba, it is everywhere, from Punta
de Maisi to Cape San Antonio. I long to see our people all along our route
to the Capital, because I know I will encounter the same hopes, the same
faith, a single people, aroused, a people who patiently bore all the
sacrifices, who cared little for hunger, who when we gave them three days'
leave for the re-establishment of communications, in order not to suffer
hunger, the whole mass of the people protested because what they wanted was
victory at any price. Such a people deserves a better fate, and deserves
to achieve the happiness it has not had in 56 years of a Republican form of
government. It deserves to become one of the leading nations in the world
by reasons of its intelligence, its valor and the firmness of its decision.
No one can allege that I am speaking as a demagogue. No one can
charge that I am seeking to assuage the people. I have given ample proof
of my faith in the people because when I landed with 82 men on the beaches
of Cuba and people said we were mad, and asked us why we thought we could
win the war, we replied, "Because we have the people behind us!" And when
we were defeated for the first time, and only a handful of men were left
and yet we persisted in the struggle, we knew that this would be the
outcome because we had faith in the people. When they dispersed us five
times in forty-five days and we met up together again and renewed the
struggle, it was because we had faith in the people. Today is the most
palpable demonstration of the fact that our faith was justified. I have
the greatest satisfaction in the knowledge that I believed so deeply in the
people of Cuba and in having inspired my companions with this same faith.
This faith is more than faith. It is complete security. This same faith
that we have in you is the faith we wish you to have in us always.
The Republic was not freed in 1895 and the dream was frustrated at
the last minute. The Revolution did not take place in 1933 and was
frustrated by its enemies. However, this time the Revolution is backed by
the mass of the people, and has all the revolutionaries behind it. It also
has those who are honorable among the military. It is so vast and so
uncontainable in its strength that this time its triumph is assured. We
can say — and it is with joy that we do so — that in the four centuries
since our country was founded, this will be the first time that we are
entirely free and that the work of the first settlers will have been
completed.
A few days ago, I could not resist the temptation to go and visit
my Mother whom I had not seen for several years. On my return, as I was
traveling along the road that cuts through Mangos de Baragua, late at
night, the feelings of deep devotion, on the part of those of us who were
riding in that vehicle, made us stop at the monument raised to the memory
of those involved in the protest at Baragua and the beginning of the
Invasion. At that late hour, there was only our presence in that place,
the thought of the daring feats connected with our wars of independence,
the idea that these men fought for 30 years and in the end did not see
their dream come true, but witnessed only one more frustration of the
Republic. Yet they had a presentiment that very soon the Revolution of
which they dreamed, the mother country of which they dreamed, would be
transformed into reality, and this gave us one of the greatest emotions
possible. In my mind's eye, I saw these men relive their sacrifice,
sacrifices which we also underwent. I conjured up their dreams and their
aspirations, which were the same as our dreams and our aspirations and I
ventured to think that the present generation in Cuba must render and has
rendered homage, gratitude and loyalty, as well as fervent tribute to the
heroes of our independence.
The men who fell in our three wars of independence now join their
efforts to those of the men who fell in this war, and of all those who fell
in the struggle for freedom. We can tell them that their dreams are about
to be fulfilled and that the time has finally come when you, our people,
our noble people, our people who are so enthusiastic and have so much
faith, our people who demand nothing in return for their affection, who
demand nothing in return for their confidence, who reward men with a
kindness far beyond anything they might deserve, the time has come, I say,
when you will have everything you need. There is nothing left for me to
add, except, with modesty and sincerity to say, with the deepest emotion,
that you will always have in us, in the fighters of the Revolution, loyal
servants whose sole motto is service to you.
On this date, today, when Dr. Urrutia took over the Presidency of
the Republic Dr. Urrutia, the leader who declared that this was a just
Revolution — on territory that has been liberated, which by now is the
whole of our country, I declare that I will assume only those duties
assigned to me, by him. The full authority of the Republic is vested in
him. And our arms bow respectfully to the civil powers of the Civilian
Republic of Cuba. All I have to say is that we hope that he will fulfill
his duty because we naturally feel assured that he will know how to fulfill
his duty. I surrender my authority to the Provisional President of the
Republic of Cuba and with it I surrender to him the right to address the
people of Cuba.
Castro History Archive
|
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<p class="storyheadline">A People Under Fire</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
<div class="feature">
<p>Venezuela, whose people are heirs to Bolivar’s ideas which transcend his era, is today facing a world tyranny a thousand times more powerful than that of Spain’s colonial strength added to that of the recently born United States which, through Monroe, proclaimed their right to the natural wealth of the continent and to the sweat of its people.</p>
<p>Marti denounced the brutal system and called it a monster, in whose entrails he had lived. His internationalist spirit shone as never before when, in a letter left unfinished due to his death in combat, he publicly revealed the objective of his restless struggle: “I am now every day risking my life for my country, and for my duty—since I understand it and have the courage to do it—to timely prevent, with the independence of Cuba, that the United States expand over the Antilles and that they fall, with this additional force, over our lands in America.”</p>
<p>It was not in vain that he stated in plain verse: “With the poor of this earth, my fate I wish to cast.” Later, he proclaimed categorically: “Humanity is homeland.” The Apostle of our independence wrote one day: “Let Venezuela call on me to serve her: I am her son.”</p>
<p>The most sophisticated media developed by technology, employed to kill human beings and to subjugate or exterminate peoples; the massive sowing of conditioned reflexes of the mind; consumerism and all available resources; these are being used today against the Venezuelans, with the intent of ripping the ideas of Bolivar and Marti to shreds.</p>
<p>The empire has created conditions conducive to violence and internecine conflicts. On Chavez’s recent visit last November 21, I seriously discussed with him the risks of assassination, as he is constantly out in the open in convertible vehicles. I said this because of my experience as a combatant trained in the use of an automatic weapon and a telescopic sight. Likewise, after the triumph, I became the target of assassination plots directly or indirectly ordered by almost every United States administration since 1959.</p>
<p>The irresponsible government of the empire does not stop for a minute to think that the assassination of Venezuela’s leader or a civil war in that country would blow up the globalized world economy, due to its huge reserves of hydrocarbons. Such circumstances are without precedent in the history of mankind.</p>
<p>Cuba developed close ties with the Bolivarian government of Venezuela during the hardest days resulting from the demise of the USSR and the tightening of the United States economic blockade. The exchange of goods and services grew from practically zero level to more than 7 billion dollars annually, with great economic and social benefits for both our peoples. Today that is where we receive the fundamental supplies of fuel needed for our country’s consumption, something that would be very difficult to obtain from other sources due to the shortage of light crude oil, the insufficient refining capacity, the United States’ power and the wars its has unleashed to seize the world oil and gas reserves.</p>
<p>Add to the high energy prices, the prices of foods destined by imperial policy to be transformed into fuel for the gas-guzzling cars of the United States and other industrial nations.</p>
<p>A victory of the Yes vote on December 2 would not be enough. The weeks and months following that date may very well prove to be extremely tough for many countries, Cuba for one; although, before that, the empire’s adventures could lead the planet into an atomic war, as their own leaders have confessed.</p>
<p>Our compatriots can rest assured that I have had time to think and to meditate at length on these problems.</p>
<p><i>—Prensa Latina</i>, November 29, 2007</p>
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Jan/Feb 2008 • Vol 8, No. 1
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A People Under Fire
By Fidel Castro Ruz
Venezuela, whose people are heirs to Bolivar’s ideas which transcend his era, is today facing a world tyranny a thousand times more powerful than that of Spain’s colonial strength added to that of the recently born United States which, through Monroe, proclaimed their right to the natural wealth of the continent and to the sweat of its people.
Marti denounced the brutal system and called it a monster, in whose entrails he had lived. His internationalist spirit shone as never before when, in a letter left unfinished due to his death in combat, he publicly revealed the objective of his restless struggle: “I am now every day risking my life for my country, and for my duty—since I understand it and have the courage to do it—to timely prevent, with the independence of Cuba, that the United States expand over the Antilles and that they fall, with this additional force, over our lands in America.”
It was not in vain that he stated in plain verse: “With the poor of this earth, my fate I wish to cast.” Later, he proclaimed categorically: “Humanity is homeland.” The Apostle of our independence wrote one day: “Let Venezuela call on me to serve her: I am her son.”
The most sophisticated media developed by technology, employed to kill human beings and to subjugate or exterminate peoples; the massive sowing of conditioned reflexes of the mind; consumerism and all available resources; these are being used today against the Venezuelans, with the intent of ripping the ideas of Bolivar and Marti to shreds.
The empire has created conditions conducive to violence and internecine conflicts. On Chavez’s recent visit last November 21, I seriously discussed with him the risks of assassination, as he is constantly out in the open in convertible vehicles. I said this because of my experience as a combatant trained in the use of an automatic weapon and a telescopic sight. Likewise, after the triumph, I became the target of assassination plots directly or indirectly ordered by almost every United States administration since 1959.
The irresponsible government of the empire does not stop for a minute to think that the assassination of Venezuela’s leader or a civil war in that country would blow up the globalized world economy, due to its huge reserves of hydrocarbons. Such circumstances are without precedent in the history of mankind.
Cuba developed close ties with the Bolivarian government of Venezuela during the hardest days resulting from the demise of the USSR and the tightening of the United States economic blockade. The exchange of goods and services grew from practically zero level to more than 7 billion dollars annually, with great economic and social benefits for both our peoples. Today that is where we receive the fundamental supplies of fuel needed for our country’s consumption, something that would be very difficult to obtain from other sources due to the shortage of light crude oil, the insufficient refining capacity, the United States’ power and the wars its has unleashed to seize the world oil and gas reserves.
Add to the high energy prices, the prices of foods destined by imperial policy to be transformed into fuel for the gas-guzzling cars of the United States and other industrial nations.
A victory of the Yes vote on December 2 would not be enough. The weeks and months following that date may very well prove to be extremely tough for many countries, Cuba for one; although, before that, the empire’s adventures could lead the planet into an atomic war, as their own leaders have confessed.
Our compatriots can rest assured that I have had time to think and to meditate at length on these problems.
—Prensa Latina, November 29, 2007
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1967.08.10 | <body>
<h4>Speech to the OLAS Conference</h4>
<hr>
<p class="information"><span class="info">Spoken:</span> August 10, 1967 in Havana’s Chaplin Theater.<br>
<span class="info">First publicly disseminated:</span> August 11, 1967.<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <em>International Socialist Review</em>, <a href="../../../../../etol/newspape/isr/index.htm#isr67_11" target="new">Vol.28 No.6</a>, November-December 1967, pp.12-49.<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> unknown <em>See Also:</em> An alternate translation by the US Government: Foreign Broadcast Information Service at the <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro/1967/19670811" target="new">University of Texas: Fidel Castro Speech Database</a>.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/Markup:</span> Daniel Gaido/Brian Baggins.<br>
<span class="info">Public Domain:</span> Castro Internet Archive 2006. This work is <a href="../../../../../../admin/legal/corights.htm#pd" target="new">completely free</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p class="fst">Delegates,<br>
Honored Guests,<br>
Comrades:</p>
<p class="fst">It is not easy to deliver the closing address of the First Latin American Conference of Solidarity. In the first place, what should our attitude be? To speak as a member of one of the organizations represented here? Or to speak somewhat more freely, simply as a guest speaker?</p>
<p>I wish to say that we intend to express here the opinion of our Party and our people, which is the same opinion and the same points of view defended by our delegation in OLAS. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Could we say that the Conference has achieved a great ideological victory? Yes, we believe so. Does this mean that the agreements were reached without ideological struggle? No, the agreements were not reached without ideological struggle. Were opinions unanimous? Was support of the Declaration read here unanimous? Yes, it was unanimous. Does it represent unanimous opinions? No, it does not represent unanimous opinions. Some of the delegations present here had reservations on various aspects, and they expressed their reservations.</p>
<p>Throughout the Conference, the international press has been trying to sound out to analyze, the development of the Conference. It has expressed various ideas on the ideological struggle that took place here. Some did so with more objectivity, others with less; some in a spirit of honest journalism, others without much journalistic honesty; some were jubilant when the opinions were unanimous and some were jubilant when they were not. And, of course, we must say that there were some within the Conference who were indiscreet; there were some indiscretions. For some agencies undoubtedly arranged to contact the delegations and various versions came out: some accurate, others less accurate, but undoubtedly revealing a certain lack of discretion on the part of delegates to the Conference.</p>
<p>Some things were discussed publicly while others, very few others, were not. In the case of those that were not discussed publicly, the objective was to come up with the most positive results possible. A deep sense of responsibility prevailed among many of the delegates to the Conference, for it sought to accomplish something useful and positive, beneficial to the revolutionary movement and adverse to imperialism. It was not because of the principles involved that some of the questions under discussion could not be made public. If some things were not discussed publicly, it was simply due to a sense of responsibility; to prevent public consideration of those questions from which the enemy could glean an advantage.</p>
<p>But, naturally, there were indiscretions, and nearly all the things discussed are known more or less. The agreements are clear and decisive.</p>
<p>The Conference was not the only event that took place during these days. There were certain events that made the delegates to this Conference not only participants in ideological and political discussions and agreements, but also witnesses to and judges of the activities of imperialism against our country.</p>
<p>Some will ask about our reason or reasons for setting these proofs before this Conference of OLAS. A few might consider this a strange coincidence. The most suspicious—principally those who represent a section of the press which has been continually hostile to the Revolution and, on many occasions, to the truth—might look quite skeptically upon the coincidence between the presence of counterrevolutionary infiltrators in our country and the OLAS Conference.</p>
<p>Some spokesmen of imperialism have said that we made these presentations simply to demonstrate that imperialism intervenes in Cuba, and with a view to the next Conference of Foreign Ministers. These ideas might be legitimate if a case of fair play were involved; but, on the part of imperialism, there can be no fair play. These men were presented simply because such infiltrations have occurred systematically and incessantly in our country since the beginning of the Revolution. If this Conference of the OLAS were to last some time more, it could be said that every week we could bring here proof of the number and the kind of agents and the kind of missions that imperialism carries out against our country. Every week! It is unusual for a week to go by without our capturing one of these individuals.</p>
<p>Is it, perhaps, necessary for us to prove that imperialism carries out subversive activities against our country? Is it, perhaps, necessary for us to prove that imperialism carries out all sorts of crimes against our country and that it has been, for over eight years, openly intervening in the affairs of Cuba?</p>
<p>Yesterday someone expressed doubts as to whether the CIA was so naive—so naive!—that, instead of sending food specially prepared for such missions, hydrophilized, dehydrated, it would be so foolish as to include ordinary canned fruit. We have no intention of using this rostrum to humiliate anyone in particular, even less, persons who have been authorized to enter the country. And simply, without any personal allusions, I want to refer to the doubts, the thoughts, the ideas. Is it not, perhaps, extreme naïveté to believe that the CIA is a perfect, wonderful, highly intelligent organization, incapable of making the slightest mistake? But was it not in a book written precisely by US journalists that we read sinister accounts of dozens and dozens of stupidities and crimes committed by the CIA? Are we to think that the CIA is so perfect that it cannot make mistakes? Wasn’t the mistake which the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, imperialism as a whole, made at Gir6n ten thousand times greater than that? Wasn’t that a much greater mistake? (APPLAUSE) It was a far greater mistake than the insignificant detail—probably done without consulting anyone—of picking up some canned fruit, or whatever it was, from the well-stocked pantry of the mother-ship! And to attempt—on such a flimsy excuse—to cover up evidence that anyone with a minimum of common sense and good judgment would deny! It is really extraordinary that there are people in the United States who believe such things; that the CIA is a good angel, incapable of committing misdeeds, or crimes; that the things the CIA does against Cuba are yet to be proved; that the CIA, moreover, is incapable of committing stupidities.</p>
<p>Perhaps the CIA commits crimes ... This they accept or they reject. But it is necessary to analyze from a moral standpoint—from a moral standpoint!—whether the crimes of the CIA or the imbecilities of the CIA are the heart of the matter.</p>
<p>We are not going to ask anybody in particular, but we ask ourselves, we ask those who are listening to us, if there is anyone in the world who can believe that the CIA is not a sinister, interventionist criminal organization, inconceivably unscrupulous?</p>
<p>The fact that we are used to imperialist acts of vandalism must not cloud our responsiveness or our ability to judge these facts from a moral standpoint. In one sense, these are simply things that happen to our country practically every day. But if we analyze the facts more deeply, how many principles, how many international laws, how many norms of civilization, how many moral standards does the United States Government officially violate through the CIA? Like vulgar pirates, using the flag of any country, yet more immoral than the pirates of old—for the pirates of old, we hear, used the pirate flag, and piratical Yankee imperialism uses the flag of any country in the world.</p>
<p>The use of any methods, the use of official documents, of official United States maps, the use of forged documents, the use of any resource or means whatsoever, to carry out their intentions. And of course, why speak of the moral or legal aspects of the aims of these activities?</p>
<p>When it became evident yesterday, that one of these individuals had been seen only a few days ago in a Miami restaurant by the clerk, Charles; the manager, Joe; the cook, Sam ... and even the cat, (LAUGHTER) when it was obviously too far fetched to believe that our imagination had put this man on the stand, then up cropped another theory: that perhaps, instead of the CIA, an organization of anti-Castro exiles was involved.</p>
<p>Is it that the United States Government does not consider itself responsible for the crimes committed by those organizations in the US? Are they now going to say that they are not responsible, when they are the ones who organized all those people, nourished them, indoctrinated them, trained them—trained them in US institutions? Does the fact that an exile organization may be involved exonerate the US Government from responsibility?</p>
<p>But unfortunately for certain interested persons, this did not concern a group of exiles working with the CIA, but rather it involved direct CIA organization. The embarrassing thing about this is that it was organized directly by the CIA, not indirectly through counterrevolutionary organizations. For the CIA works through counterrevolutionary organizations, but it also works — as was explained to you — directly.</p>
<p>Of course, CIA technique is superior when it works directly; when we say superior technique, we do not mean to say superior intelligence. Is there electronic equipment that never goes wrong? This simply shows that electronic equipment is much more intelligent than the CIA and much more infallible.</p>
<p>And as for the insinuation that markets and Five and Ten Cent Stores in the US come stocked with this automatic equipment that transmits long messages in a fraction of a second or a minute—one of the most modern electronic devices ... if they really sell CIA equipment in the United States, wonderful! Because, in that case, perhaps US revolutionaries will be able to buy stocks of such equipment for their inter-communications. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Since when, in which store, in which Five and Ten can one buy these ultramodern, ultrasensitive, tiny sets capable of automatically transmitting messages in code over thousands of kilometers? One must really be naive! I do not criticize anybody for vacillating before such evident facts and refraining from comment, such as the journalist who said he was not a judge. (LAUGHTER) What a great fellow! (LAUGHTER) Really, the AP educates its little cadres well! (LAUGHTER) If you want to know what kind of judges these fellows are, analyze what they write day by day and you will see how “impartial” they are.</p>
<p>There is only one thing which is true—their statement that they are not judges. They are not judges because they are partial, and they are absolutely incapable of judging anything. For eight years, we have been reading the news put out by that agency, which is always serving imperialist interests, always concealing something, always defending something that is never good—even by mistake!—distorting everything.</p>
<p>We Latin Americans know these facts only too well. All the representatives present here know them well. These facts are known, above all, to those who have to suffer these lies, this reporting, which while serving the worst imperialist causes, is the only information available, to whole nations on this continent. And that is part of the imperialist mechanism, because those lying, truculent, fraudulent news agencies are part and parcel—part and parcel!—of the imperialist machinery. They are part and parcel of the instruments used by imperialism to carry out its policies.</p>
<p>Courtesy compels us to treat individuals with politeness, but courtesy does not compel us to refrain from stating some truths which are only too well known. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Besides referring to some of those news dispatches, we might ask if they were written out of naïveté—if it is not perhaps naive to publish such dispatches—and why they do so. Of course, there is an agency here that tries to be objective very often—I wouldn’t say that it always is—and this is a British agency.</p>
<p>It says here:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A group of Cuban anti-Castro exiles called the Escambray Second Front stated today in this city that the contingent of men whose capture was announced on this date in Havana were guerrilla members of that organization. Andres Nazario, General Secretary of the Front, pointed out that the guerrilla fighters had left for Cuba about four weeks ago.</p>
<p class="quote">“He added, ‘They were going to infiltrate into Cuba to carry out a mission of subversion and guerrilla warfare, joining up afterwards with patriots inside Cuba.’”</p>
<p class="fst">That is, this news dispatch removes all doubt. It is official confirmation from the US by the gentlemen who sent the counterrevolutionaries presented here. But there is something else. Here is an AP dispatch:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Four of the captured exiles who were today presented in Havana as invaders were landed in Cuba by an anti-Castro military force based in Miami.</p>
<p class="quote">“The band of infiltrators was described today in Miami by its leader, Major Armando Fleites, as on a mission”—as on a mission—“to kill Prime Minister Fidel Castro. This would form part of a campaign of irregular warfare designed to overthrow the Communist regime.”</p>
<p class="fst">That is, we were not inventing anything when we stated the concrete mission of these men; we were not inventing anything when we presented, among other weapons, a 22 caliber pistol with silencer and bullets with potassium cyanide—a pistol that makes less noise than striking a match, with a silencer and bullets poisoned with potassium cyanide.</p>
<p>And what laws did that arrogant, incredible deed violate? What laws can we refer to, what principles, what norms? For even in all-out war, that type of bullet is absolutely banned.</p>
<p>And without anyone bothering him, the ringleader publicly declares to an imperialist news agency there, declares openly and calmly, in the name of an organization that has its own official shingle, that the group came to this country to assassinate a government leader.</p>
<p>Does the government of the United States not feel responsible for these acts? We directly accuse the US Government and hold it responsible for these acts. (APPLAUSE AND CRIES OF: “FIDEL, FOR SURE, HIT THE YANKEES HARD!”) We accuse President Johnson and hold him responsible for the fact that plans are drawn up with absolute impunity in the United States for the assassination of government leaders of another State, using the most abhorrent methods, and that these plans are not only put into operation—serious attempts are being made at this—but also brazenly made public.</p>
<p>These are certainly serious matters. They are more than serious; they are grave. And all these statements demonstrate the absolute truth regarding the charges and information offered to the people by the Revolutionary Government as normal procedure.</p>
<p>What is strange about that? What is strange about their sending other spies? What is strange about that? We could ask the CIA and see what they have to say about this man.</p>
<p>And, above all, we could ask the CIA what a US destroyer, a mother-ship, helicopter and a Neptune aircraft were doing today, anxiously searching for something 20 miles north of Pinar del Río Province.</p>
<p>And it so happens that at dawn yesterday, some fishermen ran into “Bichinche”—I think that’s his name.<sup class="anote"><a id="body-1" href="#foot-1" name="body-1">(1)</a></sup> (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>No, don’t harbor any illusions. I understand your desires to see “Bichinche” captured.</p>
<p>They were in a boat because they took to sea in a rubber raft in accordance with the emergency instructions they have.</p>
<p>The fishermen spotted them at dawn. And the fishermen might have done better, they might have taken them aboard, but their boat was small and they were unarmed. But they immediately reported what they had seen and we immediately drew the conclusion as to who they were.</p>
<p>And, naturally, today we were competing with the CIA. (LAUGHTER) Our reconnaissance plane and the Neptune were so close to one another that our crew photographed the Neptune. I presume that they photographed our plane, too.</p>
<p>The CIA and the government of the United States were looking for “Bichinche” today (LAUGHTER) at the same time that our planes and our ships were trying to find “Bichinche.” (LAUGHTER) “Bichinche” has become almost famous. (LAUGHTER)</p>
<p>But what happened? What happened? The means of escape was very difficult to detect because it is a rubber raft that can be easily hidden in the mangrove trees during the day. And they try to help themselves by moving with the currents until they are picked up, but the CIA didn’t know that “Bichinche” was in trouble. But, since a note came out in the Sunday papers saying that they had re-embarked—since that was the theory of our Security Department, after it found the things that had been left ashore, and based on all the information ...</p>
<p>It isn’t easy to locate a robber raft. We do not know if the CIA, the destroyer, the plane or the helicopter found “Bichinche”. We, unfortunately, couldn’t locate him. But we were both competing, 20 miles north of Cuba, to see who could find that “needle in a haystack.” (LAUGHTER)</p>
<p>Perhaps “Bichinche” will get away. We won’t be sad about that. We are not in a hurry. Didn’t they fall into our hands today? They will, tomorrow or the day after. (APPLAUSE) And there are quite a few of them.</p>
<p>At the time of Girón, quite a number of “big fish”—as the people say—were caught ... More than a thousand! And many individuals who certainly did not imagine they would be caught here, were caught—because that was their fate—as instruments of the CIA.</p>
<p>We could ask, by the way, if anyone can tell us if the maps—the maps brought in by those CIA agents—are also sold at Five and Ten Cent stores in the United States. (LAUGHTER) Because we should certainly like to have some of those maps, for they are detailed with minute precision. And that was a military map, a military blueprint, with every detail: the sentry boxes, munitions depots, bases for launching anti-aircraft missiles. One asks oneself why the CIA wants such minutely detailed maps of our military installations. What are their objectives?</p>
<p>And these drawings—are they by any chance sold at Five and Ten Cent stores? Without any doubt, the objectives of this type of espionage are belligerent, the aims are aggressive.</p>
<p>And, naturally, there is something that does not appear in the drawings, and that is the courage of those who defend these military positions! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Because that is something that certainly cannot be found either on the maps or in the imaginations of these gentlemen of the CIA.</p>
<p>But we believe the evidence is indisputable, and we are prepared to put it at the disposal of anyone.</p>
<p>And the capture of CIA agents has become commonplace here—it is a weekly occurrence. It isn’t even given publicity most of the time, because it is no longer news to anyone.</p>
<p>Is it necessary for us to prove that the imperialists are aggressors against Cuba? Does it have anything to do with the Foreign Ministers’ meeting of the OAS? To some extent, yes, and to some extent, no.</p>
<p>Is it our purpose to convince the OAS? Who is going to make such a joke? It is not our intention either to convince the OAS or to neutralize its agreements. We have other ways of neutralizing OAS agreements! (APPLAUSE) We intended, in any case, to demonstrate how cynical these gentlemen of the OAS are, we intended to demonstrate how brazen the gentlemen of the OAS, headed by the US Government, are. We intended simply to unmask them; we intended to demoralize them. That is one part of it. That’s why I say that it is true that it has some relation to the OAS meeting.</p>
<p>But we do not intend to use this as an excuse. The OAS does not have even an iota of self-respect, the OAS does not have one iota of morality. And none of the governments of this continent—which, with the exception of Mexico, (APPLAUSE) are admitted accomplices in acts of banditry against our country, just as they were in the intervention against the Dominican Republic and in all the misdeeds committed by imperialism—have the slightest right to invoke any law or to invoke any principle against Cuba’s acts in support of the revolutionary movement! (APPLAUSE) Because they have violated all norms, all rights, all principles. And this is their responsibility, not ours.</p>
<p>They are mistaken if they think that we are going to accept this imperialist order. Those who believe that we are going to accept this imperialist order, this law of “grabbing the lion’s share” that the imperialists are trying to impose on the world, this blackmail, they are very much mistaken, because our country will never be subjected to such an order.</p>
<p>The imperialists assume the right to commit every kind of misdeed in the world with entire impunity. They daily bomb North Viet Nam, utilizing hundreds of planes: that is the imperialist order, those are the laws of imperialism. They invade the fraternal Dominican Republic with 40,000 soldiers, they openly set up a puppet government there with their occupation troops; that is the order of imperialism, those are the laws of imperialism. A State such as Israel, at the service of the imperialist aggressors, gets hold of a large part of the territory of other countries, establishes itself there at the very edge of the Suez Canal and is already claiming the right to participate in the control of that Canal—so all that’s lacking now is for it to ask that a pipeline be installed to run from the Aswan Dam to irrigate the Sinai Peninsula. And there they are, and nobody knows how long they’ll stay, and the longer nothing is done, the longer they’ll stay: that is the order imperialism wants to establish, those are the laws imperialism wants to impose upon the world. To send murderers on missions with poisoned bullets to kill leaders of other States, to constantly send armed infiltration groups to a country they have been harassing for eight years. That is the imperialist order! Those are the laws imperialism wants to impose upon the world! And we are a small country, but we will not accept that order! We will not accept those laws! (PROLONGED APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We are not a country of adventurers, of provocateurs, of irresponsible people, as some have wanted to picture us. We simply refuse to accept that order and those laws of imperialism. And if the price of this attitude by our country were the sinking of this country in the Bartlett Deep<sup class="anote"><a id="body-2" href="#foot-2" name="body-2">(2)</a></sup> and the wiping of our entire population off the face of the earth—if that were possible—we would prefer this to accepting that order and those laws that imperialism wishes to impose upon the world. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF: “FIDEL, FOR SURE, HIT THE YANKEES HARD!”)</p>
<p>Go out into the streets and ask any Cuban citizen—young or old; father, son, or mother—ask him what he prefers, what he would choose: the acceptance of such a Draconian order, submission to the dictates of imperialism, or death. (SHOUTS OF “PATRIA O MUERTE!”) you will find that there are very few who think differently, who prefer to accept the imperialist order. But do not think that all of them will be counterrevolutionaries; there will also be some who, invoking Marxism-Leninism, will say that that is what has to be done—that is, that we should accept submission to the imperialist Draconian order. There are such persons, and they may be found anywhere.</p>
<p>Do you gentlemen of the press want information? You already have some, and there will be more if you are a little patient.</p>
<p>There are currents, there are attitudes. And we do not impose attitudes on our people. We have tried both to teach and learn; we have tried to educate ourselves as consistent revolutionaries and help the people also to educate themselves as consistent revolutionaries.</p>
<p>No one would affirm that the problems of this country are easily solved, that the dangers threatening this country are insignificant or minor. No one will be able to make light of the situations which this small country faces resolutely, without hesitation, at the very doorstep of the most powerful imperialist country in the world—and not only the most powerful one, but the most aggressive; and not only the most powerful and aggressive; but the bloodiest, the most cynical, the most arrogant of the imperialist powers in the world.</p>
<p>The very essence of imperialist thinking is revealed in what the imperialists publish. Of course, we should state—to avoid any misunderstanding, so no honest person will mistakenly think I am referring to him—that we know that, in spite of the infamous conditions that prevail there, there are some honest writers and journalists in the United States. (APPLAUSE) I am not talking about them. But there are so many of the other kind that I am afraid someone may think we do not know how to distinguish between them. But here is a case which expresses the essence of imperialist thinking. It is an article from the <em>New York Daily News</em> entitled “Stokely, Stay There.” We would indeed be honored if he wished to remain here ...! (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) But he himself doesn’t want to stay here, because he believes that the struggle is his fundamental duty. But he must know that, whatever the circumstances, this country will always be his home. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The article states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Stokely Carmichael, the Negro firebrand, is in Havana, capital of Red Cuba, after having stopped off at London and Prague, and we suggest that he remain in Havana, his spiritual home.</p>
<p class="quote">“As pointed out, we urge Stokely to remain in Red Cuba until this miserable island is rescued from communism, and then he can head for some other Red country. If Carmichael returns to the United States we think that the Department of Justice should throw the book at him.”</p>
<p class="fst">And in conclusion, after more of the same sort of thing, it states: While we are busy in Viet Nam, we can hardly crush Castro—although the Government could, and should, stop discouraging Cuban refugees who plan Castro’s destruction.”</p>
<p>Stop discouraging!—stop discouraging Cuban exiles who plan Castro’s destruction! Discouragement indeed! Discouragement indeed! “But let’s stick a reminder in Uncle Sam’s hat to trample Castro underfoot with all the force necessary to destroy his communist regime just as soon as we win the war in Viet Nam.” (JEERS AND BOOS)</p>
<p>If the danger posed in this country depended on a US victory in Viet Nam, we could all die of old age!</p>
<p>Observe how they express themselves, with what unbelievable exasperation, with what contempt, they speak of “a Negro firebrand,” of “the miserable island,” of “trampling underfoot.” Because it must be said that the imperialists are annoyed by many things, but most of all they are annoyed by the visit here of a Negro leader—of a leader of the most exploited and most oppressed sector of the United States—by the strengthening of relations between the revolutionary movement of Latin America and the revolutionary movement inside the United States. (PROLONGED APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>In the past few days, innumerable articles about Stokely’s trip have been published in the US press; some very insulting, others more subtle. They have elaborated a whole series of theories. Some say “Stokely is fooling Castro,” “Castro is fooling Stokely,” “Stokely wants to make him believe that he represents the Negro movement—the majority of the Negro movement—and Castro is using him.” Statements of that sort.</p>
<p>And they have gone still further. Some theorists have stated: “How strange that this country is not racist, and Stokely is a racist ... How strange! How strange!” Their aim is to create the impression that the Negro movement in the United States is a racist movement.</p>
<p>It is logical that the exploiters, who for centuries practiced racism against the Negro population, now label as racists all those who struggle against racism.</p>
<p>It is claimed that they have no program. Well, that shows that often a movement can begin before a program is drawn up. But it is also false that the movement has no program. What is happening is that the Negro sector of the population of the United States at this moment, overwhelmed by daily repression, has concentrated its energies on defending itself, on resisting, on struggle.</p>
<p>But it will not be long before they will discover something that is inevitable according to the law of society, the law of history. And that is that the revolutionary movement in the United States will arise from this Negro sector, (APPLAUSE) because it is the most exploited and repressed sector, the most brutally treated in the United States (APPLAUSE); the revolutionary vanguard within the United States will arise from the most mistreated, the most exploited and oppressed of the Negro sectors. The revolutionary movement within US society will arise from this sector by the law of history—not for racial reasons, but for social reasons, reasons of exploitation and oppression, because this sector is the most long-suffering and oppressed—as has been the case in all epochs of history: as occurred with the Roman plebeians, the glebe serfs of the Middle Ages and the workers and peasants of modern times.</p>
<p>This is a social truth, a historic truth. Have patience, and from that oppressed sector the revolutionary movement will arise—vanguard of a struggle—that will one day liberate all of US society!</p>
<p>That is why we must reject—as injurious and slanderous—the attempt to present the Negro movement of the United States as a problem of racism. We hope they will give up the illusion that anyone has deceived anyone. The drawing together of the revolutionaries of the United States and those of Latin America is the most natural thing in the world, and the most spontaneous. And our people have been very receptive to and very capable of admiring Stokely for the courageous statements he has made in the OLAS Conference, because we know that this requires valor, because we know what it means to make such statements within a society that applies the most cruel and brutal procedures of repression, that constantly practices the worst crimes against the Negro sector of its population; and we know how much hatred his statements will arouse among the oppressors.</p>
<p>And, for this reason, we believe that the revolutionary movements all over the world must give Stokely their utmost support as protection against the repression of the imperialists, so that it will be very clear that any crime committed against this leader will have serious repercussions throughout the world. And our solidarity can help to protect Stokely’s life. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And this is why—because all these inevitable events within the process are developing—revolutionaries are getting together, internationalism is being practiced. We believe that the attitude of this US revolutionary leader offers a great lesson, a great example of militant internationalism, something very characteristic of revolutionaries. We undoubtedly sympathize much more with this type of revolutionary than with the super-theoreticians, who are revolutionary in word but bourgeois in deed.</p>
<p>This internationalism cannot be merely proclaimed; it must be practiced! And the Negroes of the United States are offering resistance, they are offering armed resistance. They didn’t go around propounding theses, or talking about objective conditions before they seized weapons to defend their rights. They did not seek a philosophy—and, much less, a revolutionary philosophy—to justify inaction.</p>
<p>And we believe that if there is any country where the struggle is hard, where the struggle is difficult—that country is the United States. And here we have US revolutionaries setting an example and giving us lessons!</p>
<p>It always seems that we have to bring along some dispatches, certain papers, news items, especially to an event of this nature. We sincerely believe that we would not be fulfilling our duty if we did not express here that the OLAS Conference has been a victory of revolutionary ideas, though not a victory without a struggle.</p>
<p>A latent ideological struggle has been reflected in the OLAS. Should we hide the fact? No. What is gained by concealing it? Was it the aim of the OLAS to crush anyone, to harm anyone? No. That is not a revolutionary method; it is not in accord with the conscience of revolutionaries. But let us be clear about this—genuine revolutionaries!</p>
<p>We believe that revolutionary ideas must prevail. If revolutionary ideas should be defeated, the Revolution in Latin America would be lost or would be delayed indefinitely. Ideas can hasten a process—or they can delay it considerably.</p>
<p>We believe that the triumph of revolutionary ideas among the masses—not the masses in their entirety, but a sufficiently broad part of them—is an absolute requisite.</p>
<p>This does not mean that action must wait for the triumph of ideas, and this is one of the essential points of the matter. There are those who believe that it is necessary for ideas to triumph among the masses before initiating action, and there are others who understand that action is one of the most efficient instruments for bringing about the triumph of ideas among the masses.</p>
<p>Whoever hesitates while waiting for ideas to triumph among the greater part of the masses before initiating revolutionary action will never be a revolutionary. For, what is the difference between such a revolutionary and a rich landowner, a wealthy bourgeois? None whatsoever!</p>
<p>Humanity will, of course, change; human society will, of course, continue to develop — in spite of men and the errors of men. But that is not a revolutionary attitude.</p>
<p>If that had been our way of thinking, we would never have initiated a revolutionary process. It was enough for the ideas to take root in a sufficiently large number of men for revolutionary action to be initiated, and, through this action, the masses began to acquire these ideas; the masses began to acquire that awareness.</p>
<p>It is obvious that there are already in many places in Latin America a number of men who are convinced of such ideas, and who have begun revolutionary action. What distinguishes the true revolutionary from the false revolutionary is precisely this: one acts to move the masses, the other waits for the masses as a whole to acquire awareness before starting to act.</p>
<p>And a whole series of principles exists that one should not expect to be accepted without an argument, but which are essential truths, accepted by the majority, but with reserve by a few. This Byzantine discussion about the ways and means of struggle, whether it should be peaceful or non-peaceful, armed or unarmed—the essence of this discussion, which we call Byzantine because it is like an argument between two deaf and dumb people, is what distinguishes those who want to promote revolution, and those who do not want to promote it, those who want to curb it and those who want to promote it. Let no one be fooled.</p>
<p>Different terms have been employed: whether this is the only way, or not the only way; whether it is exclusive, or not exclusive. And the Conference has been very clear about this. It has not used the term, the only way, although it could be called the only way; it has referred, instead, to the fundamental way, to which the other forms of struggle must be subordinated. And, in the long run, it is the only way. To use the word “only”—although the sense of the word is understood and it is the right word—might lead to erroneous thinking about the immediacy of the struggle.</p>
<p>That is why we understand that the Declaration’s reference to the fundamental way, as the road that must be taken in the long run, is the correct formulation.</p>
<p>If we wish to express our way of thinking, that of our Party and our people, let no one harbor any illusions about seizing power by peaceful means in any country of this continent. Let no one harbor any such illusions. Anyone who tries to sell such an idea to the masses will be deceiving them completely.</p>
<p>This does not mean that one has to go out and grab a rifle tomorrow anywhere at all, and start fighting. That is not the question. It is a question of ideological conflict between those who want to make a revolution and those who do not want to make it. It is the conflict between those who want to act and those who want to hold back. Because essentially, it is not that difficult to decide if it is possible, if conditions are ripe, to take up arms or not.</p>
<p>No one can be so sectarian, so dogmatic, as to say that, everywhere, one has to go out and grab a rifle tomorrow. And we ourselves do not doubt that there are some countries in which this task is not an immediate task, but we are convinced that it will be a task in the long run.</p>
<p>There are some who have put forward theses that are even more radical than those of Cuba—that we Cubans believe that in such and such a country the conditions for armed struggle do not exist, and that this is not so. And the interesting thing is that this has been claimed in some cases by representatives who are not among those most in favor of the thesis of armed struggle. We will not be annoyed by this. We prefer that they make the mistake of wanting to make the revolution, although immediate conditions may be lacking, than that they make the mistake of never wanting to make the revolution. And let us hope that no one makes a mistake! But nobody who really wants to fight will ever have differences with us, and those who never want to fight will always have differences with us. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We understand the essence of this matter very well. It is the conflict between those who want to impel the revolution and those who are deadly enemies of the ideas of the revolution. A whole series of factors have contributed to these positions.</p>
<p>This does not always mean that it is enough to maintain a correct position and nothing more. No, even among those who really want to make revolution many mistakes are made. It is true that there are still many weaknesses. But logically we will never have profound differences with anyone—in spite of their mistakes—who honestly maintains a revolutionary position. It is our understanding that revolutionary thought must take on new impetus; it is our understanding that we must leave behind old vices: sectarian positions of all kinds and the positions of those who believe they have a monopoly on revolution or on revolutionary theory! And, poor theory, how it has had to suffer in these processes. Unhappy theory, how it has been abused, and how it is still being abused!</p>
<p>And these years have taught us all to meditate more and analyze better. We no longer accept any “self-evident’ truths. “Self-evident” truths belong to bourgeois philosophy. A whole series of old clichés must be abolished. Marxist literature itself, revolutionary political literature itself should be renewed because repeating the same old clichés, phraseology and verbiage that have been repeated for 35 years wins over no one, convinces no one at all. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>There are times when political documents, called Marxist, give the impression that someone has gone to an archive and asked for a form: form 14, form 13, form 12; they are all alike, with the same empty words, in language incapable of expressing real situations. Very often, these documents are divorced from real life. And then many people are told that this is Marxism ... and in what way is this different from a catechism, and in what way is it different from a litany, from a rosary? (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And anyone who considers himself a Marxist feels virtually obligated to go to this or that manifesto. And he reads 25 manifestos of 25 different organizations, and they are all alike, copied from models, incapable of convincing anyone.</p>
<p>And nothing was farther from the thought and style of the founder of Marxism than empty words, than putting a straightjacket on ideas. Because Marx was, undoubtedly, one of the greatest and most brilliant prose writers of all time. But, worse than the phrases are the ideas they often encompass. Meaningless phrases are bad, but so are the accepted meanings of certain phrases. Because there are theses that are 40 years old; for example, the famous thesis concerning the role of the national bourgeoisies. How hard it has been to become convinced, finally, that this idea is an absurdity on this continent; how much paper, how many phrases, how much empty talk has been wasted while waiting for a liberal, progressive, anti-imperialist bourgeois.</p>
<p>And we ask ourselves if there is anybody who, at this time, can believe in the revolutionary role of a single bourgeoisie on this continent?</p>
<p>All these ideas have been gaining strength, have been held for a long time — a long series of theses.</p>
<p>I am not going to say that the revolutionary movement and the communist movement in general have ceased to play a role—even an important role—in the history of the revolutionary process and of revolutionary ideas in Latin America. The communist movement developed a method, style, and in some aspects, even took on the characteristics of a religion. And we sincerely believe that that character should be left behind.</p>
<p>Of course to some of these “illustrious revolutionary thinkers” we are only petit-bourgeois adventurers without revolutionary maturity. We are lucky that the Revolution came before maturity! (APPLAUSE) Because at the end, the mature ones, the over-mature, have gotten so ripe that they are rotten. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>But we consider ours a Marxist-Leninist Party, we consider ours a Communist Party. (APPLAUSE) And this is not a matter of words, it is a matter of facts.</p>
<p>We do not consider ourselves the teachers, we do not consider ourselves the pace-setters, as some people say we do. But we have the right to consider ours a Marxist-Leninist Party, a Communist Party.</p>
<p>We are deeply satisfied, and it is with great joy, not nostalgia, with happiness, not sadness, that we see the ranks of the revolutionary movement increasing, the revolutionary organizations multiplying, Marxist-Leninist spirit making headway—that is, Marxist-Leninist ideas—and we felt deeply satisfied when the final resolution of this Conference proclaimed that the revolutionary movement in Latin America is being guided by Marxist-Leninist ideas. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>This means that convent-like narrow-mindedness must be overcome. And we, in our Communist Party, will fight to overcome that narrow concept, that narrow-mindedness. And we must say that, as a Marxist-Leninist Party, we belong to OLAS; as a Marxist Leninist Party, we belong not to a small group within the revolutionary movement, but to an organization which comprises all true revolutionaries, and we will not be prejudiced against any revolutionary.</p>
<p>That is, there is a much wider movement on this continent than that of just the Communist Parties of Latin America; we are committed to that wide movement, and we shall judge the conduct of organizations not by what they say they are, but by what they prove they are, by what they do, by their conduct.</p>
<p>And we feel very satisfied that our Party has wholeheartedly entered into this wider movement, the movement that has just held this first Conference.</p>
<p>The importance of the guerrilla, the vanguard role of the guerrilla ... Much could be said about the guerrilla, but it is not possible to do so in a meeting like this. But guerrilla experiences on this continent have taught us many things—among them the terrible mistake, the absurd concept that the guerrilla movement could be directed from the cities. This is the reason for the thesis that political and military commands must be united. This is the reason for our conviction that it is not only a stupidity but also a crime to want to direct the guerrillas from the city. And we have had the opportunity t appreciate the consequences of this absurdity many times. It is necessary that these ideas be overcome, and this is why we consider the resolution of this Conference of great importance. The guerrilla is bound to be the nucleus of the revolutionary movement. This does not mean that the guerrilla movement can rise without any previous work; it does not mean that the guerrilla movement is something that can exist without political direction. No! We do not deny the role of the leading organizations, we do not deny the role of the political organizations. The guerrilla is organized by a political movement, by a political organization. What we believe incompatible with correct ideas of guerrilla struggle is the idea of directing the guerrilla from the cities. And in the conditions of our continent it will be very difficult to suppress the role of the guerrilla.</p>
<p>There are some who ask themselves if it is possible in any country of Latin America to achieve power without armed struggle. And, of course, theoretically, hypothetically, when a great part of the continent has been liberated there is nothing surprising if, under those conditions a revolution succeeds without opposition—but this would be an exception. However, this does not mean that the revolution is going to succeed in any country without a struggle. The blood of the revolutionaries of a specific country may not be shed, but their victory will only be possible thanks to the efforts, the sacrifices and the blood of the revolutionaries of a whole continent. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>It would, therefore, be false to say that they had a revolution there without a struggle. That will always be a lie. And I believe that it is not correct for any revolutionary to wait with arms crossed until all the other peoples struggle and create the conditions for victory for him without struggle. That will never be an attribute of revolutionaries. There are those who believe that a peaceful transition is possible in some countries of this continent; we cannot understand what kind of peaceful transition they refer to, unless it is to a peaceful transition in agreement with imperialism. Because in order to achieve victory by peaceful means—if in practice such a thing were possible, considering that the mechanisms of the bourgeoisie, the oligarchies and imperialism control all the means for peaceful struggle ... And then you hear a revolutionary say: They crushed us; they organized 200 radio programs, so and so many newspapers, so and so many magazines, so and so many TV shows, so and so many of this and so and so many of that. And one wants to ask him: What did you expect? That they would put TV, radio, the magazines, the newspapers, the printing shops, all this at your disposal? Or are you unaware that those are the instruments of the ruling class designed explicitly for crushing the revolution? (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>They complain that the bourgeoisie and the oligarchies crush them with their campaigns, as if that were a surprise to anyone. The first thing that a revolutionary has to understand is that the ruling classes have organized the State so as to dedicate every possible means to maintaining themselves in power. And they use not only arms, not only physical instruments, not only guns, but all possible instruments to influence, to deceive, to confuse.</p>
<p>And those who believe that they are going to win against the imperialists in elections are just plain naive, and those who believe that the day will come when they will take over through elections are even more naive. It is necessary to have lived in a revolutionary process and to know just what the repressive apparatus is by which the ruling classes maintain the status quo, just how much one has to struggle, how difficult it is.</p>
<p>This does not imply the negation of forms of struggle. When someone writes a manifesto in a newspaper, attends a demonstration, holds a rally or propagates an idea, he may be using the so-called famous legal means. We must do away with the differentiation between legal and illegal means; methods should be classified as revolutionary or non-revolutionary.</p>
<p>The revolutionary employs various methods to achieve his ideal and his revolutionary aim. The essence of the question is whether the masses will be led to believe that the revolutionary movement, that socialism, can come to power without a struggle, that it can come to power peacefully. And that is a lie! And any persons in Latin America who assert that they will come to power peacefully are deceiving the masses. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We are talking about conditions in Latin America. We don’t want to involve ourselves in other problems which are already large enough—of those of the revolutionary organizations of other countries, such as in Europe. We are addressing Latin America. And of course, if they would only confine their mistakes to themselves ... But no, they try to encourage the errors of those of this continent who are mistaken! And to such an extent that part of the so-called revolutionary press has attacked Cuba for our revolutionary stand in Latin America. That’s a fine thing! They don’t know how to be revolutionaries over there, yet they want to teach us how to be revolutionaries over here. But we are not anxious to start arguments. We already have enough to think about But, of course, we will not overlook the direct or indirect, the overt or covert attacks of some neo-Social Democrats of Europe. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And these are clear ideas. We are absolutely convinced that, in the long run, there is only one solution, as expressed in the Resolution: guerrilla warfare in Latin America.</p>
<p>Does this mean that if a garrison rises in rebellion because there are revolutionaries in it we should not support the rebellion because it is not a guerrilla struggle? No! It is stupid to think, as one organization did, that the Revolution would be made with the rebellion of garrisons only. It is no less stupid to have a rebellion in a garrison and afterwards let it be crushed by overpowering forces. New situations are arising; new situations may arise—we do not deny that. For example, in Santo Domingo a typical case came up: a military uprising that began to take on a revolutionary character.</p>
<p>But, of course, this doesn’t mean that the revolutionary movement has to wait around for what may come up, for what may take place. Nobody was able to foresee, nobody was able to estimate the form, the character that the revolutionary movement would take on, especially as a result of imperialist intervention.</p>
<p>In other words, by stressing the role of the guerrilla as an immediate task in all those countries where true conditions exist, we do not discard other forms of revolutionary armed struggle.</p>
<p>The revolutionary movement must be ready to take advantage of, and support, any expression of struggle that may arise, that may develop or that may strengthen the position of the revolutionaries. What I do not believe is that anybody who considers himself a revolutionary can wait around for a garrison to rebel in order to carry out revolution, that any revolutionary can dream of making a revolution through the rebellion of garrisons. The uprising of military units may constitute a factor—one of those unforeseeable factors that may arise—but no really serious revolutionary movement would base itself on those eventualities. Guerrilla warfare is the main form of struggle, but it does not exclude any other expressions of armed struggle that may arise.</p>
<p>And it is necessary—most necessary—that these ideas be clarified, because we have had very bitter experiences; not the blows or reverses of a military nature, but rather the frustrations of a political nature, the consequences—sad and disastrous for the revolutionary movement in the long run—of a series of wrong concepts. The most painful case was that of Venezuela.</p>
<p>In Venezuela the revolutionary movement was growing. The revolutionary movement there has had to pay dearly the consequences of the absurd concept of trying to lead the guerrillas from the city, of trying to use the guerrilla movement as an instrument for political maneuvering, of trying to use the guerrilla movement as a tool of dirty politics: the consequences that can arise from incorrect attitudes, from wrong attitudes and, on many occasions, from immoral attitudes.</p>
<p>The case of Venezuela is well worth taking into consideration, for if we do not learn from the lessons of Venezuela, we will never learn.</p>
<p>Of course, in spite of treason, the guerrilla movement in Venezuela is far from being crushed. And we, gentlemen, have every right to use the word “treason.”</p>
<p>We know there are some who do not like this; some will even feel insulted. May those who do not also carry the seeds of treason in their hearts one day be convinced that they have no reason to feel insulted.</p>
<p>The case of Venezuela is eloquent in many aspects. For in Venezuela a group—which, with all these wrong concepts, was in the leadership of a Party—almost achieved what neither imperialism nor the repressive forces of the regime could achieve.</p>
<p>This Party, or rather the rightist leadership of the Venezuelan Party, has come to adopt a position which smacks of an enemy of revolutionaries, an instrument of imperialism and the oligarchy. And I do not say this for the sake of talking; I am not a slanderer, I am not a defamer.</p>
<p>We have some unfinished business with that group of traitors. We have not encouraged polemics; we have not incited conflicts; far from that for a long time we have kept silent while enduring a barrage of documents and attacks from that rightist leadership, as that leadership forsook the guerrilla fighters and took the road of conciliation and submission.</p>
<p>We were the victims of deceit. First they spoke to us about a strange thing—for many of these problems begin with a series of strange things —they began to talk of democratic peace. And we would say: What the devil does that democratic peace mean? What does that mean? It’s strange, very strange.” But they replied, “No, that’s a revolutionary slogan to widen the front, to unite forces, to present a broad front.” A broad front? Well, theoretically speaking, who would oppose this? “No, have faith in us.”</p>
<p>Then after a few months, they began to speak of tactical retreats. Tactical retreats? How odd! If they had told us the truth we might have disagreed, we might have had doubts, whatever the case; but never ...</p>
<p>A tactical retreat: that is what they said to the rank and file, that is what they said to the people. The tactical retreat was followed by an attempt to end the struggle, an attempt to suppress the guerrilla movement. For anyone knows that in a guerrilla movement there is no tactical retreat. A guerrilla group that retreats is like an airplane that cuts off its engine in mid-flight: it falls to the ground. Such a tactical retreat must have been the brainchild of some genius in high-flown revolutionary theories. Whoever has an idea of what a guerrilla group is, and begins to hear talk of retreat by the guerrillas, will say: “This man is talking a lot of nonsense.” There can be total withdrawal of guerrillas, but not retreat.</p>
<p>Gradually they let their mask slip, until one day they revealed themselves completely and said: “Let’s take part in the elections.” They spoke out in favor of elections.</p>
<p>But even before they declared themselves in favor of elections, they committed one of the vilest deeds that a revolutionary party can commit: they began to act as informers, as public accusers of the guerrillas. They took advantage of the case of Iribarren Borges.<sup class="anote"><a id="body-3" href="#foot-3" name="body-3">(3)</a></sup> They utilized that episode to begin speaking out openly and publicly against the guerrilla movement, practically throwing it into the claws of the government beasts. The government had the weapons and the soldiers with which to pursue the guerrillas who would not retreat; but the so-called Party or the rightist leadership of the Party which had assumed its command, took it upon itself to arm, both morally and politically, the repressive forces fighting the guerrillas. We have to ask ourselves honestly, how could we, a revolutionary party, cover up, in the name of an argument of a cloistered a cathedra type of thinking, the attitude of a party that was trying to morally arm the repressive forces fighting the guerrillas.</p>
<p>And so the phrasemaking began, the accusations began. They said that we were creating factionalism, that we were creating factionalism!</p>
<p>A group of charlatans weren’t under judgment here but a group of guerrilla fighters who had been in the mountains for years, who had gone there and had then suffered every form of neglect, of abandonment. Could revolutionaries have said, “Yes, once again you are right, you who have been deceiving us, you who began by telling us one thing, then another, and ended up by doing this.”</p>
<p>Naturally, we publicly expressed our condemnation —after a series of statements had already been issued by that rightist leadership against our Party—of the treacherous ways in which they were slandering and attacking the revolutionaries, using the Iribarren incident as a point of departure.</p>
<p>Logically, that provoked the irate and indignant protest of that rightist leadership, which made us the butt of a series of tirades. They did not answer a single one of our arguments; they were unable to answer even one, and they wrote a maudlin reply to the effect that we were ignoble, that we had attacked an underground Party, that we were fighting a most combative, a most heroic anti-imperialist organization. And they drafted a reply against us.</p>
<p>Why has it been necessary to bring that reply here? Because that document became the argument of a gang, a whole gang of detractors and slanderers of the Cuban Revolution. And that incident signaled the beginning of a real international conspiracy against the Cuban Revolution, a real conspiracy against our Revolution.</p>
<p>We feel that this is a problem that must be clarified; at least the truth must be clarified.</p>
<p>I am going to read this answer, if you’ll pardon me, even though it is rather lengthy. Of course, it is an answer full of phrases which are not at all kind to us, but if you’ll permit me I would like to read this answer, which has been made public, (APPLAUSE) the so-called “Reply of the Communist Party of Venezuela to Fidel Castro.” And may this be a starting point for refuting some things that have been said about Cuba and about the Revolution.</p>
<p>It reads:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Fidel Castro, Secretary General of the Communist Party (in power) of Cuba, and Prime Minister of the Socialist Government of Cuba, taking advantage of his comfortable position, has attacked the Communist Party of Venezuela, an underground Party, with hundreds of its militants in prison, dozens of them having been killed in the mountains and streets of the cities; and now subject to relentless persecution daily, while new victims fall even as Fidel Castro speaks.</p>
<p class="quote">“The man who is tolerated in all his verbal excesses, thanks to the fact that Cuba occupies the front line of the anti-imperialist struggle, should have the elementary finesse to be careful of his language when referring to the Communist Party struggling in the country which in all of Latin America is that most intervened by Yankee imperialism and is fighting it under the most difficult conditions. Knowing who he is and with the whole world listening, Fidel Castro has not hesitated to insult a Communist Party which is hardly able to answer due to repression.</p>
<p class="quote">“Therefore: Fidel Castro’s action is ignoble, takes unfair advantage and is treacherous and lacking the nobility and gallantry that have always characterized the Cuban Revolution.</p>
<p class="quote">“Second: Fidel Castro has expressed a negative judgment concerning the murder of Iribarren Borges, even claiming a right to express an opinion on this matter. Nevertheless, with surprising nerve, he wants to deny the same right to the CPV. Fidel Castro, evidently does not want the Communist Party of Venezuela, which acts in Venezuela, which is in Venezuela, to express an opinion, to pass judgment on a Venezuelan political event which took place on Venezuelan soil and closely affects the life of the CPV. On the other hand, he himself can do so from Cuba.</p>
<p class="quote">“According to his peculiar point of view, we are on speaking terms with and play up to the government. He does the same and pretends to be the voice of an intangible revolutionary oracle. This strange way of reasoning shows an irresponsible arrogance and self-sufficiency not appropriate in a Chief of State.</p>
<p class="quote">“As to the event itself, the CPV said exactly the same thing that Fidel Castro did, no more, no less. On the other hand, we assert that what does play up to reaction and imperialism are speeches such as that of Fidel Castro”—they don’t even thank me (LAUGHTER)—“slander like that which he has hurled against our Party, his efforts to divide it, and such matters as the murder of Iribarren Borges.</p>
<p class="quote">“Third: The CPV claims the right to plan its own policy without anybody’s interference. Cuba has marched along a hard, revolutionary road with honor, in this she is an example and inspiration to us. But the one thing that we have never been, are not, and never will be, is an agent of Cuba in Venezuela, or of any other Communist Party in the world.</p>
<p class="quote">“We are Venezuelan Communists, and we do not accept the tutelage of anyone, no matter how great his revolutionary merits may be.</p>
<p class="quote">“If there is any revolutionary group in Venezuela that submits with pleasure to the tutelage and patronage of Fidel Castro, that is its business. The CPV will never do it. If Fidel Castro does not like it, so much the worse for him. Now then: Why does Fidel Castro intervene precisely at this time against the CPV? Because the CPV has already begun to defeat in practice, and not only ideologically, the anti-Party faction of Douglas Bravo; because the Party and the Communist Youth have attained great political and organizational successes in applying their policy; because our recent feat, the rescue of comrades Pompeyo, Guillermo and Teodoro, has filled all the militant Communists of the country with enthusiasm and renewed energy; and because, finally, the anarchistic, adventurous policy of the anti-Party group has shown the inevitability of its failure and has helped enormously in the clarification of problems under discussion.</p>
<p class="quote">“That is precisely why Fidel Castro has thrown all the weight of his prestige against the CPV in a desperate attempt to help the anarchistic group of adventurers, which he sponsored and urged on so the CPV would go under.</p>
<p class="quote">“Nevertheless, our policy and the facts prove daily what the adjectives ‘hesitant’ ‘halting’ and ‘opportunist’—that Fidel Castro applied to the leadership of the CPV—are worth. And that is proved here in Venezuela, even in spite of the things Fidel Castro has done to us, and, surely, will continue doing to us.</p>
<p class="quote">“But let him and the whole CPV understand this clearly: we will not even discuss the sovereignty of the CPV.</p>
<p class="quote">“Fourth: Fidel Castro has described the leadership of the CPV as cowardly, in a new demonstration of that irritating tendency of his to believe himself possessed of a monopoly on bravery and courage. We Venezuelan Communists do not suffer from childish exhibitionism; we do not go around proclaiming our virtues in this field. When Fidel Castro was a child, that great patriarch of Venezuelan communism Gustavo Machado was already storming Curacao and invading Venezuela, arms in hand.</p>
<p class="quote">“And from then on, the history of the CPV, which is a political history, was also the history of the men who confronted Gómez’s terror and that of Pérez Jiménez; the men who directed the insurrection of January 23, 1958; the men who were responsible for Fidel Castro’s receiving a plane loaded with arms when he was still in the Sierra Maestra; and the men who, if they have hesitated in anything during the last eight years, have not faltered in risking their lives.</p>
<p class="quote">“This answer of ours is the best demonstration we can give Fidel Castro of what the leadership of the CPV is really like. Accustomed to believe in his power as a revolutionary High Pasha, he thought his speech would surely crush and confound us. He couldn’t be more mistaken, and now Fidel Castro will see why Yankee imperialism and its agents insist so much on liquidating this Venezuelan Communist Party.</p>
<p class="quote">“Fifth: In his speech, Fidel Castro shows that he wants to assume, once more, the role of a sort of arbiter of the revolutionary destiny of Latin America—a superrevolutionary who, if he had been in the place of all the Communists of Latin America, would have already made the Revolution.</p>
<p class="quote">“On another occasion we referred to the characteristics of the Cuban struggle and to the place where Fidel Castro would still be if it had occurred to him to hoist the red flag in the Sierra Maestra. At the moment we only want to reject the role of revolutionary “papa” that Fidel Castro adopts.</p>
<p class="quote">“We firmly reject his presuming to believe that he and only he can decide what is and what is not revolutionary in Latin America. In Venezuela this question is judged by the CPV, before itself and its people, before no one else. But of this Fidel Castro,—highest dispenser of revolutionary diplomas, who asks what North Viet Nam would say if Cuba were to trade with South Viet Nam—we only want to ask if he thinks about what the Spanish people have to say about his trading with Franco and the Spanish oligarchy, or what the Negro peoples of Zimbabwe, Rhodesia, and the patriots of Aden might say about his trading with imperialist Britain. Or is it that what Fidel Castro considers as opportunism in others, in him would be washed away by the holy waters of his own self-sufficiency?</p>
<p class="quote">“Sixth: This is an unpleasant polemic and one that makes the enemy jump with joy; but which evidently cannot be deferred any longer. Fidel Castro himself forced us to the limit with his speech. All right, then. We will argue. And just as we claim our descent from Simón Bolivar and the fathers of our homeland in our anti-imperialist struggle, so we tell Fidel Castro that the descendants of Simón Bolívar and Ezequiel Zamora will never tolerate anybody’s using language as insolent and provoking as that which he used in his speech on March 13.</p>
<p class="quote">“The Venezuelan believes himself neither above nor below anybody else; but if there is one thing that will provoke his fiery militant pride, it is an insult.</p>
<p class="quote">“And already Fidel Castro must have started to realize that he has stumbled against something different, that he has come UP against the Venezuelan Communists.</p>
<p class="quote">“Seventh: We realize that such acts as Fidel Castro’s will cause us difficulties but we do not despair.</p>
<p class="quote">“We have the calm conviction of those who know they are right, and we have the revolutionary passion to defend it.”</p>
<p class="quoter">March 15, 1967</p>
<p class="quotes">Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela:<br>
Pompeyo Márquez, Guillermo García Ponce, Alonso Ojeda Olaechea, Pedro Ortega Díaz, Eduardo Gallegos Mancera, Teodoro Petkoff, Germán Lairet.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Without comment,” it says above. “Answer of the Communist Party of Venezuela to Fidel Castro.” And below: “Please reproduce and distribute. Second Front-Alpha 66, 109 South West 12 Avenue, Miami, Florida. 33-130.”</p>
<p class="fst">Do not think that I have gotten this letter from a spokesman of a party or from a political newspaper. Thousands of copies of this letter were sent to Cuba from the United States by the Organization “Second Front-Alpha 66,” the same people who sent that gang with guns and bullets treated with cyanide to murder Prime Minister Fidel Castro, as they said. And this certainly requires some comment. In the first place, I am not going to refer now to what I said that night, because it would take too long. It is not true that we personally insulted anyone. We did not call anyone in that Party a coward; we said that the political line was cowardly. I was not insulting or offending anyone or saying so-and-so is a coward.</p>
<p>Naturally, far from answering any criticisms made, they drew up this document and published it. It was one of the many that they have written and, naturally, we have compiled. Our Party has been working on a document to answer this and all the intrigues of these gentlemen, which will be released at an opportune moment. But a series of imputations are made in this document, the same ones that have been made against the Revolution, against our Party, and not only by imperialism ... not only by imperialism. Among other things, these gentlemen did not hesitate in accusing us, in accusing our Party, of intervening in the internal affairs of the Venezuelan Party and of intervening in the internal affairs of Venezuela.</p>
<p>They accused us of having agent in Venezuela, they insinuated that the guerrilla group—the combatants who refused to retreat and surrender—was a group of Cuban agents. These were exactly the same as the slanderous accusations made by the US State Department.</p>
<p>In this document Cuba was also accused of trying to be an arbiter, of trying to direct the Latin American revolutionary movement: exactly the same accusations that imperialism makes against us. In this document they even include false statements, even mentioning arms which came from Venezuela—but these did not come when we were in the Sierra Maestra; they were 150 weapons that came when our troops were advancing on Santiago de Cuba, in December, when the columns of Camilo Cienfuegos and Ernesto Guevara had already taken an important part of Santa Clara. (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) They practically throw in our faces the sending of a planeload of arms which they claim they sent. They almost try to say that the war was won with these arms ... And they were not the ones who sent these arms. And they are so short of arguments, so short of arguments, that they have had to resort to such deceptions.</p>
<p>Perhaps someday the Venezuelan people will ask them about the millions of dollars they collected throughout the world on behalf of the guerrilla movement—which they abandoned, whose members they left without shoes, clothing, food, and even the bare necessities; and which they have accused and attacked without scruples of any kind. Some day—I repeat—the Venezuelan people may ask these swindlers how much they collected throughout the world: the figures, the numbers, the data.</p>
<p>And what did they do? For our part we do not ask them anything; we are not interested. When we help someone, we truly help him, we do not ask him for an accounting of what he did with this aid.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, there is one argument which has gone all the rounds, and is going to have a full answer. There was something that became the gang’s argument, the argument of the “Mafia.” (Perhaps, if it were not for these painful circumstances, we would not have to discuss this problem.) This is the argument of our trade with Spain, with England and the other capitalist countries. Of course, this argument, or this problem, was not originally under discussion at all. This was not what was being discussed. Why, then, did these gentlemen bring this problem into the discussion? Why did they bring this argument into the discussion? They did so in connection with our critical position on financial and technical aid extended to the Latin American oligarchies.</p>
<p>In the first place, there has been a deliberate attempt to distort our views. Furthermore, these gentlemen of the rightist leadership of the Communist Party of Venezuela had a goal, and they pursued it in a very immoral manner. Once, when Leoni’s administration was seeking to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, we were asked what we thought of it and we voiced our opinion; these gentlemen were also asked, and they also responded negatively to the idea.</p>
<p>Why do these gentlemen resort to this argument and drag in a problem that was not being discussed with them? It is very clear, it forms part of the plot of the conspiracy in which they and their fellows are participating with imperialism to create a serious conflict between the Cuban Revolution and the socialist countries. It is unquestionable that this argument is one of the basest, most despicable, most treacherous and most provocative. It is an attempt to find a contradiction between our position and our trade with capitalist countries. But this argument until very recently has been bruited about by the “Mafia,” and not only has it been published openly—the capitalist press also published it, and the counterrevolutionary organizations have circulated this letter—but this vile argument has also been spread about sotto voce in corridors and powwows by the detractors of and conspirators against the Cuban Revolution.</p>
<p>In the first place, they are lying when they state that Cuba is opposed to trade. In every international body, in every economic conference, in all organizations in which Cuba has taken part as a State, we have constantly denounced the imperialist policy of blockade, and we have denounced the acts of the government of the United States against our country as a violation of free trade and of the right of all countries to trade with each other. Cuba has inflexibly maintained that position at all times; that has been a policy pursued by our country and the entire history of the commercial relations of our country bears it out. Our position does not refer to commerce; it has never referred to commerce. And our position is known by the Soviet Union; we have stated our viewpoint to them.</p>
<p>We were talking about financial and technical help given by any socialist State to the Latin American oligarchies. These things must not be confused; one thing should not be confused with the other! Some socialist states even offered dollar loans to Sr. Lleras Restrepo<sup class="anote"><a id="body-4" href="#foot-4" name="body-4">(4)</a></sup> because he was in difficulties with the International Monetary Fund.</p>
<p>And we asked ourselves: How can this be? This is absurd! Dollar loans to an oligarchic government that is repressing the guerrillas, that is persecuting and assassinating guerrillas! And the war is carried out with money—among other things, because the oligarchies have nothing with which to wage war except money, with which they pay mercenary forces.</p>
<p>And such things seem absurd to us—as does everything that implies financial and technical aid to any country that is repressing the revolutionary movement, to countries that are accomplices in the imperialist blockade against Cuba. That we condemn. It is unfortunate that we have to go into this problem in detail, but, naturally, it is the number one argument employed by the “Mafia.” And it is logical. Cuba is a small country against which the United States practices a cruel blockade. At Gran Tierra we explained to some of those present here how the imperialists do everything within their power to prevent our obtaining even such insignificant things as handfuls of new seeds, varieties of rice, cotton or anything else, seeds for grain, vegetables, anything.</p>
<p>No one can imagine to what lengths the imperialists go to extend the economic blockade against our country. And all those governments are accomplices; all those governments have violated the most elemental principles of free trade, the right of peoples to trade freely; those governments help imperialism in its attempts to starve the people of Cuba.</p>
<p>And if that is true, if that is the case, and if internationalism exists, if solidarity is a word worthy of respect, the least that we can expect of any State of the socialist camp is that it refrains from giving any financial or technical aid to those regimes. (PROLONGED APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “FIDEL")</p>
<p>It is truly repugnant that this vile argument is used, as if to test the revolutionary steadfastness of this country, or to provoke conflicts with it. And, truly, this nation’s steadfastness, its policy based on principle, its decision, has been to act in a responsible way, yes! Carefully, yes! So as to prevent, wherever possible, polemics and conflicts. Yes. But never let it be believed that any circumstance, irrespective of its difficulty, any problem, no matter how great, will enable them to drive our dignity or our revolutionary conscience to the wall. Because if that were true, if the leadership of this Party were thus disposed, we would have given up long ago in the face of the greatest and most lethal danger, the danger to which our adamant political position toward imperialism has exposed us.</p>
<p>And it is equally repugnant that they try to find a contradiction between this position and Cuba’s commercial policy with the capitalist world. The imperialists have tried to maintain the blockade. And the question is not what countries we do trade with, but rather how many countries throughout the wide world we do not trade with, simply because, one by one, and under the incessant and growing pressure of the imperialists, they have broken trade relations with us.</p>
<p>We have never broken off those relations. Imperialism has taken care of that, in the same way that it has seen to it that these countries, one by one, broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba. We have never broken relations with anyone. That is a weapon that imperialism has used against the Cuban Revolution, in diplomatic relations, in commercial relations.</p>
<p>And it is worthwhile to speak about commercial relations, as well, for some of the “Mafia”—and how else can I describe those who so slanderously and basely attack our Revolution, without any serious and powerful argument—have spoken of our not having broken off diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. Neither did our country break off relations with Albania when a great number of countries from the socialist camp did so; we did not break off relations with Federal Germany, but Federal Germany did not want to accept our establishing relations with the German Democratic Republic. And even though we knew that the consequences would be the breaking off of diplomatic and commercial relations with the Federal Republic, this country had not the slightest hesitation in being among the first to establish diplomatic relations with the German Democratic Republic. (APPLAUSE) And this country has never hesitated to put political principles above economic interest. If this were not so, we should long since have found millions of reasons to reconcile ourselves with imperialism, especially in these times when it has become so fashionable to do so.</p>
<p>To make the slightest insinuation that we follow a selfish policy of self-interest in our international positions is to forget what this country has paid for its unyielding stands, its solidarity with a great number of countries—Algeria among them—notwithstanding the fact that this gave another country, one of the biggest buyers of Cuban sugar, an excuse to cede to the pressure exercised by imperialism and to stop buying our sugar. And there are many cases.</p>
<p>Our people always understood, and we believed that everybody understood quite clearly, that every time the imperialists failed in their pressures to keep others from purchasing from or selling to us, it meant a victory for our Revolution over the blockade. And we have always regarded as an expression of, in a certain sense, a position of self-defense—and we have spoken publicly about this, and stated it in the Plaza de la Revolución only a short time ago—the fact that the European countries could not accept, and why they could not accept imperialist pressuring. Why Europe, in spite of its economic and industrial development, must contend with competition from the Yankee monopolies, the attempts of the Yankee imperialists to take over their economies, and why—as a question of self-interest—it was impossible for them to yield to US imperialist pressuring. Moreover, since Cuba paid its bills and paid promptly, and since Cuba offered an expanding market the imperialists met with resounding failure in their attempts to force the entire capitalist world to break off trade relations with Cuba, as they had desired.</p>
<p>What has this to do with our arguments? What has it to do with our statements? If the imperialists had succeeded, the path of the Revolution would have been much more difficult.</p>
<p>Do we trade with the socialist camp? Yes, in trade which is practically all barter, on the so-called clearing basis, which has a value only in the country with which the agreement exists. But if our country needs certain things such as medicines of a certain kind, things essential for the life of our people, and the trading organizations in a socialist country say, We do not have them,” we must look for them in other markets and pay in the currency of that country. This is where imperialism tries to crush us. And if we have bought medicines in capitalist countries—because we cannot get them, or a similar product, in a socialist country, in order to save the lives of sick people, of children, to reduce—as we have reduced—the infant mortality rate, the mortality rate in general, (APPLAUSE) and attain the position Cuba has today, for instance in public health and in many other fields, apparently we are criminals; apparently we are people without principles; apparently we are immoral; apparently we are the opposite of what we claim to be.</p>
<p>The same applies to the argument concerning the breaking off of relations with the State of Israel. I think no one can have the slightest doubt regarding the position of Cuba in that painful problem: a position of principle, an uncompromising position, a firm position. It is just that we do not like fig leaves.</p>
<p>What is of a State which acts as an instrument of Yankee imperialism, which is, in turn, the instigator, the protector, of that State. And that is why I ask those of the “Mafia,” those who seek to slander Cuba with such arguments, why they don’t break relations with the United States? (APPLAUSE) It just happens that if we are not obedient “yes-men,” we are immoral, we are a people without principles, we are a people full of ideological contradictions ... And all this is simply part of a repugnant conspiracy to create a conflict between the Cuban Revolution and the states of the socialist camp.</p>
<p>We are not instigators of conflicts, we do not seek unnecessarily, gratuitously, to create conflicts of this nature. I believe that through confronting a powerful enemy, the interdependence among the movements, the parties, the revolutionary states, will grow to a high degree.</p>
<p>A country as small as ours, without any possibility of economic self-sufficiency, in need, principally, of the arms to defend itself from Yankee imperialism, must very much desire this. No one can picture us as acting in an irresponsible manner and creating problems that can be avoided. But between that position, the idea that this country can be intimidated with provocations of that sort, and Cuba’s position, there is a profound abyss.</p>
<p>And actually, behind all of this there is a conspiracy between these elements of the reactionary “Mafia” within the revolutionary movement and Yankee imperialism to create a conflict between our Revolution and the States of the socialist camp. Because what they, in fact, seek, what they demand, what they urge, is that the socialist camp also join in the imperialist blockade against Cuba.</p>
<p>This is exactly what they really want and they do not hide it. The same March 18, three days after their widely-publicized “reply,” an AP news dispatch came from Caracas—because a certain Party spokesman, who had frequent dealings with the AP, frequent conversations with the AP, became very much a figure-of-the-moment as spokesman for that rightist leadership, and the AP, overjoyed, reported: “Fidel Castro has no ideology. ‘He is a revolutionary but he is not a politician,’ a leader—now in the underground—of the Venezuelan Communist Party told the Associated Press today.”</p>
<p>I cannot imagine what interest Leoni could have in persecuting these clandestine gentlemen, yielding, cringing denouncers of the Cuban Revolution, or why they talk of the great feat involved in the liberation of the illustrious “Tom,” “Dick” and “Harry.” In fact, the only one who profited from that was Leoni and not the people of Venezuela nor the revolutionary movement, because Leoni gained from it a pack of bloodhounds, who only fall short of asking him to provide them with rifles so that they may set out to punish those criminal, bandit, factionist and divisionism agents of Cuba. And since these “journalists,” in connection with their missions, must often play the role of journalists, and occasionally like to promote certain contradictions, the journalist added: “When asked if the CPV was not siding with the enemy by trying to have the Soviet Union withdraw its support from Castro, the spokesman replied: ‘We coincide dangerously with the Venezuelan government, but remember that we support the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Communist Party.’” Evidently I am the bad man, the intruder, the provocateur, the revolutionary “Pasha,” etc., etc. (LAUGHTER) “‘Our attack is not against the Cuban Revolution, but against Castro, who has insulted us.’”</p>
<p>“He made it clear,”—he made it clear!—“that the Communist Party of Venezuela wished that the Soviet Union would get Castro out of the way.” They accuse me of trying to interfere in their internal affairs. And they say that nothing arouses their fury and their revolutionary ardor and their pride more than someone who tries to meddle with them—not that imperialism or Leoni meddle, but that somebody makes a criticism with all the justified reasons that I have explained here. “... that the Communist Party of Venezuela wished that the Soviet Union would get Castro out of the way.” And they put forth the thesis that someone could get Castro or anybody else out of the way, remove or install anybody.</p>
<p>Where did they get such farfetched theories? Although it is hardly strange, since we have a surfeit of farfetched theories.</p>
<p>This gentleman states that the Communist Party of Venezuela would like the Soviet Union “to get Castro out of the way.” Let’s forget Castro. Really, these gentlemen are naive, they are farfetched, they are ridiculous. It is not Castro but a Revolution that they must get out of the way! A simple head cold could get Castro out of the way. (LAUGHTER) But no one can get a genuine Revolution out of the way! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Am I perhaps a slanderer? In the “Mafia” there are some who will react just as those who doubted our witnesses and questioned our evidence, and who will say: “That is a lie, a slander.” But on August 1 of this year, an AP news dispatch datelined in Washington, from Ary Moleón—and these gentlemen play a role in all of this — reports: “The highest Venezuelan diplomatic official present here advised today against loosely labeling the Havana meeting of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity as communist, saying that those who attend it are, in effect, anarcho-Castroites.”</p>
<p>So now they borrow and exchange vocabulary among themselves! Pompeyo and his retinue saying that we intervene in the internal affairs of Venezuela. Tejera Paris and his clique saying: No, no, no. They aren’t Communists; they are anarcho-Castroites. Pure ideological exchange, ideological commerce between Tejera Paris and Pompeyo, between the State Department and the rightist leadership of the Communist Party of Venezuela. Now they borrow one another’s concepts and words.</p>
<p>When have we ever seen imperialism treating communists with so much delicacy? When has it ever used so much sweetness, decency, finesse, if the image it has tried to create of a Communist is the worst possible: the most heartless, degenerate, depraved, cruel and savage of human beings?</p>
<p>And suddenly: No! Be very careful! Don’t call those people Communists! Communist is a more sacred, more respectable, more venerable, more decent, friendly, conciliatory word. (APPLAUSE) Tejera Paris, the great ideologist of tropical communism! (LAUGHTER)</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Venezuelan Ambassador to the White House, Enrique Tejera Paris, said that this distinction is fundamental”—it is indeed fundamental; this theoretician knows what he is talking about!—“if we want to understand a situation that is more complex than the simple application of labels.”</p>
<p class="fst">What care, what exquisite delicacy, what subtlety, what differentiation! What? Call these people Communists? They are anarcho-Castroites. And they are really bad! (LAUGHTER)</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Tejera stressed that the present meeting in Havana is not only to protest against the other governments of the hemisphere, but against the established Communist Parties in Latin America.”</p>
<p class="fst">What a defense lawyer we have here, saying that this meeting was called to attack the parties! And since when have the imperialists been so exquisitely concerned about the Parties? And who appointed Tejera Paris defense counsel for the Parties?</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The diplomat recalled that the Communist Party of his country has accused Castro’s regime of intolerable intervention in the internal affairs of Venezuela and of appointing himself arbiter of the Latin American Revolution.”</p>
<p class="fst">Beware! Do not be confused; these are anarcho-Castroites; they are dangerous, they are bad; do not call these people Communists: do not forget that the Venezuelan Communist Party accused Castro of intervention in the internal affairs of Venezuela; do not forget that it accused him of trying to set himself up as an arbiter.</p>
<p>Have we ever seen the like before? Has anyone ever used such refined language and exquisite courtesy in speaking of the Communists of this continent?</p>
<p>I believe that what is intolerable is this, what is really painful is this: offense, diatribe and slander from imperialism are a thousand times preferable to praise from imperialism. Tell me who defends you, and I will tell you who you are! Tell me who attacks you, and I will tell you who you are! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>As far as we know, no one, no oligarch, no imperialist, no imperialist henchman, ever printed one of my speeches for distribution by the thousands. Never! Not a speech, not a phrase, not a line, not a word. Leoni did not have my speech printed; he did not distribute it; if he read it, he probably made a gesture of disgust. Alpha 66, a well-known organization of counterrevolutionaries in Miami, which, in complicity with the CIA, organizes personal attacks with potassium cyanide and silencers, had thousands of copies printed of the declaration made by that leadership and distributed them all over the world.</p>
<p>Heirs of Bolívar? What an offense to the memory of Bolívar! They would have accused Bolivar himself of being an interventionist. What accusations would they not have made against him?</p>
<p>They call themselves sons of Bolívar, followers of Bolívar, and speak of the hundreds of dead? What right have they to speak in the name of the dead, they who betray the dead? What right have they to invoke martyrs, they who are thinking of running for office as representatives, senators and mayors, and canvass for votes with pictures of the fallen and betrayed heroes?</p>
<p>Because that declaration against Cuba was made in March. In April they issued a long document. If you were to read it—it is long and I am not going to read it—you would see the cliché-ridden style. This was a hybrid product of three or four stock models, because it is long. It is the document in which they propose an alliance with the bourgeois parties, and which ends by saying—this is the final note:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Finally, the armed movement at this moment is unable to play a decisive role, because of the stagnation of the guerrilla fronts and the armed struggle in general, a situation made more serious by the false political ideas and operations prevailing in the anarcho-terrorist group.”</p>
<p class="fst">Anarcho-adventurist, anarcho-terrorist, anarcho-Castroite! Any day now, Johnson will be talking about the anarcho-terrorists!</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In view of this national movement, the Central Committee has resolved that the Party should take active part in the next elections, under the slogan ‘Neither continuation nor Caldera —a change’; a change favoring democratic freedom and national sovereignty, a change toward the independent development of Venezuela.</p>
<p class="quote">“The electoral campaign is being conducted under conditions of governmental advantage and repression. The Party will struggle against this situation, to turn the elections into a baffle against the reactionary clique that leads the AD and the government.”<sup class="anote"><a id="body-5" href="#foot-5" name="body-5">(5)</a></sup> Amen. (LAUGHTER)</p>
<p class="fst">That is, the dead will appear on campaign posters! And in this country, we know about these things, our people know about such things, and these things only produce nausea and repugnance, because we had our fill of this. The one thing that no one will ever be able to tell our people is that this is a Communist attitude, nobody; for even at the beginning of communism, in the middle of the last century, when the <em>Communist Manifesto</em> was written, Marx always said that Communists should support the most militant and progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie. These so-called Communists join the cheap politicians of the bourgeoisie to oppose the heroic guerrilla fighters. Our people and the Venezuelan people certainly have to know that this kind of apostasy, this trade in the blood of those who have fallen, this effrontery in sending men to die, in leading them wrongly, in order to present themselves afterwards on election posters ... our people know that history does not forgive this, that history will never forgive such a crime.</p>
<p>These gentlemen do not have to be destroyed; they just have to be left alone, because they will destroy themselves.</p>
<p>We know the environment we live in; the reactions, the temperaments, the characters of our peoples. And we know that the most shameful, the most abominable thing is to send men to their deaths in order, later on to solicit votes in the name of these betrayed dead. And here is the last dispatch, from yesterday, following the same line of thought, on which the “Mafia” and imperialism coincide:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The American nations are today considering a request from Venezuela to denounce the Cuban regime of Prime Minister Fidel Castro as harmful to the cause of peaceful coexistence which the Soviet Union propounds.</p>
<p class="quote">“The question—which could explode in the rear guard of Castro’s Moscow-supported regime—would be an answer to the call of the Conference of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity to fight for the seizure of power through armed struggle.”</p>
<p class="fst">It says that the Associated Press obtained a copy ... They’re very clever. They get copies from everywhere. This is point four of that document that they say has eleven points, which they publish in this dispatch:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“To express to the extra-continental governments who actively support the present government of Cuba the serious concern of the OAS member-states, inasmuch as such support tends to encourage the interventionist and aggressive activities of the Cuban regime against the other countries of the Western Hemisphere, and, until these activities cease, the cause of peaceful and active coexistence among the nations of the world will suffer.</p>
<p class="quote">“To this effect, it is recommended to the governments of the OAS member-states that joint or separate steps be taken concerning those States that actively support the present Government of Cuba, in order to reiterate this expression of concern.”</p>
<p class="fst">Peaceful coexistence? And this terminology in the mouths of the OAS and its clique? This terminology in the mouths of the OAS and its clique, of sending—in a few words—groups or commissions of the OAS to visit the governments of the socialist States so that they will withdraw their aid to Cuba. It’s incredible! It’s incredible to be seeing and hearing these things! What do these gentlemen base this on? How can they be so shameless? How do they dare to do such a thing?</p>
<p>And point five:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“To ask the governments which support the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America to withdraw their support of that organization as well as of the Second Tricontinental Conference, scheduled to be held in Cairo in January 1968; and reiterate the categorical repudiation of that organization by the member-States of the OAS; repudiation of that organization, whose purposes—as shown by the resolutions of its first Conference which took place in Havana in January 1966—are to promote the separation of the peoples into groups divided by sectarianism and violence.</p>
<p class="quote">“To that effect, it recommends that the governments of the member-States approach the American States and the organizations supporting the Tricontinental Organization, individually or as a group, in order to insist on this proposal.”</p>
<p class="fst">Since the governments of certain States belong and others do not belong to the organizations, it follows that these gentlemen feel inspired to approach the State organizations that have been at the Tri-continental and say to them: “They are no good; repudiate those people; leave the Tricontinental.”</p>
<p>If this doesn’t smell of imperialism ordering the world around, then what does it mean, gentlemen? What is it? What have we come to? What nerve these gentlemen have! What illusions, and what shameless pretensions!</p>
<p>But at any rate, the machinations of the “Mafia” and imperialism are very evidently trying to isolate Cuba completely, to proclaim the total blockade of Cuba, so that not even a grain of birdseed will enter this country. They coincide in their despair; they are dreaming, they are raving, they imagine atrocious, dreadful things. And this country is isolated, it is absolutely alone. Poor people! If that hypothesis were possible—and it isn’t—they’d have to suffer the shock of seeing that forsaken country, without a grain of birdseed, living, resisting, working and marching onward.</p>
<p>This small country has not accumulated enough merits in the eyes of the world, has not accumulated enough merits with regard to the Revolution. And often we have imagined the conditions under which imperialism would impose a total blockade on this country, surround Cuba with its ships, and prevent everything from coming in. Would they crush the Revolution? I am asking the people: Would they crush the Revolution? (EXCLAMATIONS OF: “NO!”)</p>
<p>That is a most solid ‘No,” coming from the heart of a revolutionary people. (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) In short: if we were not prepared for everything—for everything—we could not call ourselves revolutionaries.</p>
<p>We do not deliberately promote conflict, problems, difficult situations.</p>
<p>That will never be the attitude of the Revolution. They’ll never see an irresponsible, absurd attitude adopted by the Revolution, no! But neither will they see the Revolution hesitating, the Revolution giving up; they’ll never see the Revolution yielding one iota of its principles!</p>
<p>For Patria o Muerte has many meanings. It means being revolutionaries until death, it means being a proud people until death! And the fact that we speak about Patria o Muerte does not mean that we have a sense of fatalism. It is the expression of a certain determination. When we say “death,” we mean that not only we would be dead, but many of our enemies would be dead, as well. Destroy our people? No matter how many of its soldiers Yankee imperialism sends here to die, it cannot destroy this country! (PROLONGED APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>These incidents, these attitudes are calling us all to order; they are calling us all to reason, to clarify things. These attitudes are the result not of development, but of the deterioration of revolutionary ideas and of revolutionary conscience. The resolutions of OLAS do not mean that everything is done. They do not mean that the struggle has ceased. The Tricontinental, also, had resolutions, and there were those who signed the resolutions and forgot all about them afterwards.</p>
<p>There must be struggle. We have to struggle. And the statement that Cuba wants to set itself up as an arbiter, a head, a leader is more than ridiculous. I am going to tell you what we really think. There is no reason why there should be leading people and much less leading men! It is leading ideas that are needed! (APPLAUSE) And revolutionary ideas will be the sole, true guide of our peoples. We tight for our ideas! We defend ideas! But to defend ideas does not mean to claim to lead anyone. They are our ideas and we defend them, these revolutionary ideas. But nothing could be more ridiculous, because the world does not need countries which lead, Parties that lead, or men who lead. The world, and above all our Latin American world, needs ideas that lead.</p>
<p>And the ideas will arise in the process. We know the process. At the beginning, when a few of us began to think about the idea of an armed struggle in our country and we began to struggle, very few believed in this possibility—very few. And for a long time there were very few of us. And afterwards, little by little, these ideas began to gain prestige, began to catch on, and the moment came when everybody believed them and the Revolution won.</p>
<p>How difficult it was to get the idea accepted that the struggle of the people against modern professional armies was possible in order to make a revolution! And when that was finally demonstrated, after the triumph of the Revolution, what happened? Everybody believed in this truth in such a way that the counterrevolutionaries believed that it was also a truth for them, and there followed the organization of counterrevolutionary guerrilla groups and counterrevolutionary gangs, and even the most garrulous park-bench counterrevolutionaries grasped the idea, joined a gang and took to the hills. Then it be came necessary to show them they were mistaken, that this was true for revolutionary action against the oligarchies, but that a counterrevolution of oligarchs, guerrilla warfare of oligarchs and of reactionaries against a social revolution, was impossible. And how difficult it was! Until we finally showed that this was true. We have had to point out two facts: that it is impossible for oligarchs to defend themselves against the people’s struggle; and that it is impossible for the people to be defeated by counterrevolutionary guerrilla gangs. And the CIA knows that. Do you know who are probably the most convinced of the effectiveness of armed revolutionary guerrilla warfare and of the oligarchies’ incapacity to resist the armed guerrilla struggle by the people? Do you know who? The CIA, Johnson, McNamara, Dean Rusk, Yankee imperialism. They are the most convinced.</p>
<p>And one asks oneself: How is it possible that these counterrevolutionaries let themselves be confused and deceived and dragged into armed counterrevolutionary struggle against the Revolution, if it is impossible to win? The reason, we are forced to admit, gentlemen, is that these counterrevolutionaries are more consistent than many who call themselves superrevolutionaries.</p>
<p>They are most consistent. They wrongly believe in that and let themselves be dragged in ... Naturally, afterwards they always say the same thing, that is a rule without exception: that they had been fooled, that they had been deceived, that they believed that the army, that the militia ... All that. We’ve heard it over and over again. We know it ...</p>
<p>And, of course, the ideas in our country have had to develop dialectically, in struggle, in clashes. And it will be the same in every country; no country will be free from this clash of ideas. These clashes of ideas exist even in Cuba. No, the fact that we have a revolutionary people does not mean that there are no antagonisms, no contradictions. We are in contradiction here with the counterrevolution and imperialism; and there are also contradictions with those who share these ideas of the reactionary gentlemen of the Venezuelan Party.</p>
<p>And in this country we also have our micro-faction—we can’t call it a faction because it has no volume, it has no size, it has no possibilities, it has nothing—it is a micro-faction that has existed. Where does that micro-faction come from? From the old resentful sectarians. For our Revolution has its history; our Revolution has its history. I said that at the beginning very few believed in it; afterwards many did.</p>
<p>Our Revolution went through that process; it passed through the process of sectarianism. The sectarians created serious problems for us, with their ferocious opportunism, with their inexorable policy of persecution against many people. They brought elements of corruption into the Revolution. And naturally, the Revolution, with its methods, its patience, made criticisms; it was splendid, it was generous with that sectarianism.</p>
<p>And not only that. We had to be careful to prevent criticism of sectarianism from creating neo-sectarianism in the ranks of the Revolution; and that was also prevented. But some sectarian elements held on, they swallowed their resentment, and each time they have had a chance they have expressed it. There are those who never believed in the Revolution except in an opportunistic way, trying to profit by the efforts of the revolutionary people, trying to climb high in a shameful way. They never believed in the Revolution, they haven’t learned in eight years, nor will they learn in ten years. They will never learn.</p>
<p>Let this be clearly understood: I am not referring to old Communists, for the worst expression of sectarianism, of the activities of those sectarians, has been in trying to involve the concept of old Communists with their pseudo-revolutionary attitudes.</p>
<p>It should be stated that the Revolution counts, and has always counted, on the support of the real Communists in this country.</p>
<p>But logically, during the time of sectarianism, many cowards who had deserted the ranks of the old Party turned up again. Opportunism, sectarianism, brings on all this: isolated from the masses, it tries to gain strength through favoritism. And then followed enrollment after enrollment and privileges. Of course, afterward, when the Revolution called a halt to sectarianism, it prevented expressions of sectarianism of another kind. That has always been our stand, that has always been the stand of the revolutionary leadership, which has always tried to overcome those problems in the style characterizing our Revolution, without falling into excesses of any kind, preferring to sin by omission rather than by excess.</p>
<p>And here we also have our micro-faction made up of old sectarians, which is not the same as old Communists. And I repeat: the greatest harm is that they have tried, although in vain, to instill their unhealthy ideas, their resentful ideas, into the old, true revolutionaries. They were the ones, for example, who thought at the time of the October Crisis that we should have let Yankee imperialism inspect us, search us from head to foot, let the planes fly over low, all of that! They have been systematically opposed to all the concepts of the Revolution, to the deepest, sincerest, purest revolutionary attitudes of our people, to our concepts of socialism, of communism, of everything.</p>
<p>That is, no one will be exempt. And this micro-faction has the same attitudes as that “Mafia”; this splinter group constitutes a new form of counterrevolutionary activity, in that it has the same goals as Alpha, as Faria, as Pompeyo and Company, as McNamara, Johnson and that gang.</p>
<p>Now the CIA has a new thesis: why is it interested in planning so many assassination attempts and other things? Its thesis now is that Castro has to be eliminated in order to check the Revolution. For imperialism is losing ground. At the beginning it wanted to do away with everything revolutionary; now, the more ground it loses, the more frightened it gets. Now its thesis is to make the line of the Revolution more moderate, to change that line, to move Cuba into a more moderate position —and in this, Alpha, Johnson, Faria, the CIA, the micro-faction and political “Mafia” all coincide. And they are harboring illusions.</p>
<p>Really, I’m not interested in buying an insurance policy. I don’t care a fig what they believe! I’m not interested in being indebted to our enemies for their ceasing to consider me their true enemy. I’m not interested in being indebted to our enemies for calling their actions to a halt. They are within their rights; they are within their rights. I do not intend to buy any insurance policy.</p>
<p>But I think it is necessary to tell you that the line of this Revolution is not the “Castro line”; it is the line of a people, it is the line of a leading group with a real revolutionary history. (LONG APPLAUSE) And it is the essential line of this Revolution!</p>
<p>The “Mafia” groups encourage one another; the international “Mafia” has been encouraged, greatly encouraged, by the idea that insurmountable antagonisms, insurmountable conflicts, may arise between the Cuban Revolution and the socialist camp. Really, the only thing we can say is that it is an honor to our Revolution that our enemies think about it so much; likewise, all Latin American revolutionaries must regard it as an honor that imperialism has given so much attention to the problem of OLAS. They were quick with threats; they postponed the OAS conference; they said they were going to do a lot of things, they were going to “clean the place up,” that this meeting could not take place. And the OLAS Conference has been held—true representation of a genuine revolutionary movement, whose ideas are solid because they are based on reality. OLAS is the interpreter of tomorrow’s history, interpreter of the future, for OLAS is the wave of the future (Tr. N.: olas means “waves” in Spanish), symbol of the revolutionary waves sweeping a continent of 250 million.</p>
<p>This continent is pregnant with revolution. Sooner or later, it will be born. Its birth may be more or less complicated, but it is inevitable. We do not have the slightest doubt of this. There will be victories, there will be reverses, there will be advances, there will be retreats. But the dawn of a new era, the victory of the peoples in the face of injustice, in the face of exploitation, in the face of oligarchies, in the face of imperialism—whatever the mistakes that men may make, whatever the mistaken ideas that may be obstacles on the road—is inevitable.</p>
<p>We have spoken to you with complete and absolute frankness. We know that true revolutionaries will always feel solidarity with Cuba. We know that no true revolutionary, that no true Communist on this continent, as among our people, will ever let himself be drawn into those positions which would lead him to an alliance with imperialism, which would make him go hand in hand with the imperialist masters against the Cuban Revolution and against the Latin American Revolution.</p>
<p>We do not condemn anyone a priori, we do not close the doors to anyone, we do not attack any persons en masse, lumped together; we express our ideas, we defend our ideas, we debate these ideas. And we have absolute confidence in the revolutionaries, in the true revolutionaries, in the true Communists. They will not fail the Revolution, just as our Revolution will never fail the revolutionary movement of Latin America. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We do not know what awaits us, what vicissitudes, what dangers, what struggles. But we are prepared; each day we try to be better prepared; we will be better and better prepared. But one thing we can say; we are calm, we are secure, this little island will always be a revolutionary wall of granite and against it all conspiracies, all intrigues, all aggressions will be smashed to splinters. (APPLAUSE) And high upon this revolutionary wall there will fly forever a banner with the legend: Patria o Muerte! Venceremos! (OVATION)</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="fst"><sup class="anote"><a href="#body-1" id="foot-1" name="foot-1">(1)</a></sup> “Bichinche,” according to the testimony of one of the captured CIA agents, was the code name for the missing CIA agent Castro mentions. “Chinche” is Spanish for “bed bug,” hence “bichinche” would suggest “double bed bug.”</p>
<p class="fst"><sup class="anote"><a href="#body-2" id="foot-2" name="foot-2">(2)</a></sup> Bartlett Deep is the area of ocean floor between the Caymen Islands and Jamaica off the southern coast of Cuba.</p>
<p class="fst"><sup class="anote"><a href="#body-3" id="foot-3" name="foot-3">(3)</a></sup> Julio Irabarren Borges, a Venezuelan public official, was kidnapped March 1, 1967 and found killed March 3. The event teas used as a pretext for suspending constitutional rights and attacking the Cuban government. March 4, the Venezuelan Communist Party condemned the assassination as anarchistic and terrorist. March 6, <em>Granma</em>, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party central committee, carried a declaration by Venezuelan guerrilla leader Ellas Manuitt claiming responsibility for the assassination, as an “application of revolutionary justice.” Fidel Castro covered this whole history in his March 13 speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attack on the presidential palace, the full text of which is contained in a special issue of <em>World Outlook</em>, Vol.5 No.13. In the speech, Castro condemned the Venezuelan Communist Party for its opportunistic support of the government side, tantamount to demanding punishment of the guerrilla leaders.</p>
<p class="fst"><sup class="anote"><a href="#body-4" id="foot-4" name="foot-4">(4)</a></sup> Carlos Lleras Restrepo, President of Colombia.</p>
<p class="fst"><sup class="anote"><a href="#body-5" id="foot-5" name="foot-5">(5)</a></sup> Acción Democrática, the Venezuelan government party.</p>
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Speech to the OLAS Conference
Spoken: August 10, 1967 in Havana’s Chaplin Theater.
First publicly disseminated: August 11, 1967.
Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.28 No.6, November-December 1967, pp.12-49.
Translated: unknown See Also: An alternate translation by the US Government: Foreign Broadcast Information Service at the University of Texas: Fidel Castro Speech Database.
Transcription/Markup: Daniel Gaido/Brian Baggins.
Public Domain: Castro Internet Archive 2006. This work is completely free.
Delegates,
Honored Guests,
Comrades:
It is not easy to deliver the closing address of the First Latin American Conference of Solidarity. In the first place, what should our attitude be? To speak as a member of one of the organizations represented here? Or to speak somewhat more freely, simply as a guest speaker?
I wish to say that we intend to express here the opinion of our Party and our people, which is the same opinion and the same points of view defended by our delegation in OLAS. (APPLAUSE)
Could we say that the Conference has achieved a great ideological victory? Yes, we believe so. Does this mean that the agreements were reached without ideological struggle? No, the agreements were not reached without ideological struggle. Were opinions unanimous? Was support of the Declaration read here unanimous? Yes, it was unanimous. Does it represent unanimous opinions? No, it does not represent unanimous opinions. Some of the delegations present here had reservations on various aspects, and they expressed their reservations.
Throughout the Conference, the international press has been trying to sound out to analyze, the development of the Conference. It has expressed various ideas on the ideological struggle that took place here. Some did so with more objectivity, others with less; some in a spirit of honest journalism, others without much journalistic honesty; some were jubilant when the opinions were unanimous and some were jubilant when they were not. And, of course, we must say that there were some within the Conference who were indiscreet; there were some indiscretions. For some agencies undoubtedly arranged to contact the delegations and various versions came out: some accurate, others less accurate, but undoubtedly revealing a certain lack of discretion on the part of delegates to the Conference.
Some things were discussed publicly while others, very few others, were not. In the case of those that were not discussed publicly, the objective was to come up with the most positive results possible. A deep sense of responsibility prevailed among many of the delegates to the Conference, for it sought to accomplish something useful and positive, beneficial to the revolutionary movement and adverse to imperialism. It was not because of the principles involved that some of the questions under discussion could not be made public. If some things were not discussed publicly, it was simply due to a sense of responsibility; to prevent public consideration of those questions from which the enemy could glean an advantage.
But, naturally, there were indiscretions, and nearly all the things discussed are known more or less. The agreements are clear and decisive.
The Conference was not the only event that took place during these days. There were certain events that made the delegates to this Conference not only participants in ideological and political discussions and agreements, but also witnesses to and judges of the activities of imperialism against our country.
Some will ask about our reason or reasons for setting these proofs before this Conference of OLAS. A few might consider this a strange coincidence. The most suspicious—principally those who represent a section of the press which has been continually hostile to the Revolution and, on many occasions, to the truth—might look quite skeptically upon the coincidence between the presence of counterrevolutionary infiltrators in our country and the OLAS Conference.
Some spokesmen of imperialism have said that we made these presentations simply to demonstrate that imperialism intervenes in Cuba, and with a view to the next Conference of Foreign Ministers. These ideas might be legitimate if a case of fair play were involved; but, on the part of imperialism, there can be no fair play. These men were presented simply because such infiltrations have occurred systematically and incessantly in our country since the beginning of the Revolution. If this Conference of the OLAS were to last some time more, it could be said that every week we could bring here proof of the number and the kind of agents and the kind of missions that imperialism carries out against our country. Every week! It is unusual for a week to go by without our capturing one of these individuals.
Is it, perhaps, necessary for us to prove that imperialism carries out subversive activities against our country? Is it, perhaps, necessary for us to prove that imperialism carries out all sorts of crimes against our country and that it has been, for over eight years, openly intervening in the affairs of Cuba?
Yesterday someone expressed doubts as to whether the CIA was so naive—so naive!—that, instead of sending food specially prepared for such missions, hydrophilized, dehydrated, it would be so foolish as to include ordinary canned fruit. We have no intention of using this rostrum to humiliate anyone in particular, even less, persons who have been authorized to enter the country. And simply, without any personal allusions, I want to refer to the doubts, the thoughts, the ideas. Is it not, perhaps, extreme naïveté to believe that the CIA is a perfect, wonderful, highly intelligent organization, incapable of making the slightest mistake? But was it not in a book written precisely by US journalists that we read sinister accounts of dozens and dozens of stupidities and crimes committed by the CIA? Are we to think that the CIA is so perfect that it cannot make mistakes? Wasn’t the mistake which the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, imperialism as a whole, made at Gir6n ten thousand times greater than that? Wasn’t that a much greater mistake? (APPLAUSE) It was a far greater mistake than the insignificant detail—probably done without consulting anyone—of picking up some canned fruit, or whatever it was, from the well-stocked pantry of the mother-ship! And to attempt—on such a flimsy excuse—to cover up evidence that anyone with a minimum of common sense and good judgment would deny! It is really extraordinary that there are people in the United States who believe such things; that the CIA is a good angel, incapable of committing misdeeds, or crimes; that the things the CIA does against Cuba are yet to be proved; that the CIA, moreover, is incapable of committing stupidities.
Perhaps the CIA commits crimes ... This they accept or they reject. But it is necessary to analyze from a moral standpoint—from a moral standpoint!—whether the crimes of the CIA or the imbecilities of the CIA are the heart of the matter.
We are not going to ask anybody in particular, but we ask ourselves, we ask those who are listening to us, if there is anyone in the world who can believe that the CIA is not a sinister, interventionist criminal organization, inconceivably unscrupulous?
The fact that we are used to imperialist acts of vandalism must not cloud our responsiveness or our ability to judge these facts from a moral standpoint. In one sense, these are simply things that happen to our country practically every day. But if we analyze the facts more deeply, how many principles, how many international laws, how many norms of civilization, how many moral standards does the United States Government officially violate through the CIA? Like vulgar pirates, using the flag of any country, yet more immoral than the pirates of old—for the pirates of old, we hear, used the pirate flag, and piratical Yankee imperialism uses the flag of any country in the world.
The use of any methods, the use of official documents, of official United States maps, the use of forged documents, the use of any resource or means whatsoever, to carry out their intentions. And of course, why speak of the moral or legal aspects of the aims of these activities?
When it became evident yesterday, that one of these individuals had been seen only a few days ago in a Miami restaurant by the clerk, Charles; the manager, Joe; the cook, Sam ... and even the cat, (LAUGHTER) when it was obviously too far fetched to believe that our imagination had put this man on the stand, then up cropped another theory: that perhaps, instead of the CIA, an organization of anti-Castro exiles was involved.
Is it that the United States Government does not consider itself responsible for the crimes committed by those organizations in the US? Are they now going to say that they are not responsible, when they are the ones who organized all those people, nourished them, indoctrinated them, trained them—trained them in US institutions? Does the fact that an exile organization may be involved exonerate the US Government from responsibility?
But unfortunately for certain interested persons, this did not concern a group of exiles working with the CIA, but rather it involved direct CIA organization. The embarrassing thing about this is that it was organized directly by the CIA, not indirectly through counterrevolutionary organizations. For the CIA works through counterrevolutionary organizations, but it also works — as was explained to you — directly.
Of course, CIA technique is superior when it works directly; when we say superior technique, we do not mean to say superior intelligence. Is there electronic equipment that never goes wrong? This simply shows that electronic equipment is much more intelligent than the CIA and much more infallible.
And as for the insinuation that markets and Five and Ten Cent Stores in the US come stocked with this automatic equipment that transmits long messages in a fraction of a second or a minute—one of the most modern electronic devices ... if they really sell CIA equipment in the United States, wonderful! Because, in that case, perhaps US revolutionaries will be able to buy stocks of such equipment for their inter-communications. (APPLAUSE)
Since when, in which store, in which Five and Ten can one buy these ultramodern, ultrasensitive, tiny sets capable of automatically transmitting messages in code over thousands of kilometers? One must really be naive! I do not criticize anybody for vacillating before such evident facts and refraining from comment, such as the journalist who said he was not a judge. (LAUGHTER) What a great fellow! (LAUGHTER) Really, the AP educates its little cadres well! (LAUGHTER) If you want to know what kind of judges these fellows are, analyze what they write day by day and you will see how “impartial” they are.
There is only one thing which is true—their statement that they are not judges. They are not judges because they are partial, and they are absolutely incapable of judging anything. For eight years, we have been reading the news put out by that agency, which is always serving imperialist interests, always concealing something, always defending something that is never good—even by mistake!—distorting everything.
We Latin Americans know these facts only too well. All the representatives present here know them well. These facts are known, above all, to those who have to suffer these lies, this reporting, which while serving the worst imperialist causes, is the only information available, to whole nations on this continent. And that is part of the imperialist mechanism, because those lying, truculent, fraudulent news agencies are part and parcel—part and parcel!—of the imperialist machinery. They are part and parcel of the instruments used by imperialism to carry out its policies.
Courtesy compels us to treat individuals with politeness, but courtesy does not compel us to refrain from stating some truths which are only too well known. (APPLAUSE)
Besides referring to some of those news dispatches, we might ask if they were written out of naïveté—if it is not perhaps naive to publish such dispatches—and why they do so. Of course, there is an agency here that tries to be objective very often—I wouldn’t say that it always is—and this is a British agency.
It says here:
“A group of Cuban anti-Castro exiles called the Escambray Second Front stated today in this city that the contingent of men whose capture was announced on this date in Havana were guerrilla members of that organization. Andres Nazario, General Secretary of the Front, pointed out that the guerrilla fighters had left for Cuba about four weeks ago.
“He added, ‘They were going to infiltrate into Cuba to carry out a mission of subversion and guerrilla warfare, joining up afterwards with patriots inside Cuba.’”
That is, this news dispatch removes all doubt. It is official confirmation from the US by the gentlemen who sent the counterrevolutionaries presented here. But there is something else. Here is an AP dispatch:
“Four of the captured exiles who were today presented in Havana as invaders were landed in Cuba by an anti-Castro military force based in Miami.
“The band of infiltrators was described today in Miami by its leader, Major Armando Fleites, as on a mission”—as on a mission—“to kill Prime Minister Fidel Castro. This would form part of a campaign of irregular warfare designed to overthrow the Communist regime.”
That is, we were not inventing anything when we stated the concrete mission of these men; we were not inventing anything when we presented, among other weapons, a 22 caliber pistol with silencer and bullets with potassium cyanide—a pistol that makes less noise than striking a match, with a silencer and bullets poisoned with potassium cyanide.
And what laws did that arrogant, incredible deed violate? What laws can we refer to, what principles, what norms? For even in all-out war, that type of bullet is absolutely banned.
And without anyone bothering him, the ringleader publicly declares to an imperialist news agency there, declares openly and calmly, in the name of an organization that has its own official shingle, that the group came to this country to assassinate a government leader.
Does the government of the United States not feel responsible for these acts? We directly accuse the US Government and hold it responsible for these acts. (APPLAUSE AND CRIES OF: “FIDEL, FOR SURE, HIT THE YANKEES HARD!”) We accuse President Johnson and hold him responsible for the fact that plans are drawn up with absolute impunity in the United States for the assassination of government leaders of another State, using the most abhorrent methods, and that these plans are not only put into operation—serious attempts are being made at this—but also brazenly made public.
These are certainly serious matters. They are more than serious; they are grave. And all these statements demonstrate the absolute truth regarding the charges and information offered to the people by the Revolutionary Government as normal procedure.
What is strange about that? What is strange about their sending other spies? What is strange about that? We could ask the CIA and see what they have to say about this man.
And, above all, we could ask the CIA what a US destroyer, a mother-ship, helicopter and a Neptune aircraft were doing today, anxiously searching for something 20 miles north of Pinar del Río Province.
And it so happens that at dawn yesterday, some fishermen ran into “Bichinche”—I think that’s his name.(1) (APPLAUSE)
No, don’t harbor any illusions. I understand your desires to see “Bichinche” captured.
They were in a boat because they took to sea in a rubber raft in accordance with the emergency instructions they have.
The fishermen spotted them at dawn. And the fishermen might have done better, they might have taken them aboard, but their boat was small and they were unarmed. But they immediately reported what they had seen and we immediately drew the conclusion as to who they were.
And, naturally, today we were competing with the CIA. (LAUGHTER) Our reconnaissance plane and the Neptune were so close to one another that our crew photographed the Neptune. I presume that they photographed our plane, too.
The CIA and the government of the United States were looking for “Bichinche” today (LAUGHTER) at the same time that our planes and our ships were trying to find “Bichinche.” (LAUGHTER) “Bichinche” has become almost famous. (LAUGHTER)
But what happened? What happened? The means of escape was very difficult to detect because it is a rubber raft that can be easily hidden in the mangrove trees during the day. And they try to help themselves by moving with the currents until they are picked up, but the CIA didn’t know that “Bichinche” was in trouble. But, since a note came out in the Sunday papers saying that they had re-embarked—since that was the theory of our Security Department, after it found the things that had been left ashore, and based on all the information ...
It isn’t easy to locate a robber raft. We do not know if the CIA, the destroyer, the plane or the helicopter found “Bichinche”. We, unfortunately, couldn’t locate him. But we were both competing, 20 miles north of Cuba, to see who could find that “needle in a haystack.” (LAUGHTER)
Perhaps “Bichinche” will get away. We won’t be sad about that. We are not in a hurry. Didn’t they fall into our hands today? They will, tomorrow or the day after. (APPLAUSE) And there are quite a few of them.
At the time of Girón, quite a number of “big fish”—as the people say—were caught ... More than a thousand! And many individuals who certainly did not imagine they would be caught here, were caught—because that was their fate—as instruments of the CIA.
We could ask, by the way, if anyone can tell us if the maps—the maps brought in by those CIA agents—are also sold at Five and Ten Cent stores in the United States. (LAUGHTER) Because we should certainly like to have some of those maps, for they are detailed with minute precision. And that was a military map, a military blueprint, with every detail: the sentry boxes, munitions depots, bases for launching anti-aircraft missiles. One asks oneself why the CIA wants such minutely detailed maps of our military installations. What are their objectives?
And these drawings—are they by any chance sold at Five and Ten Cent stores? Without any doubt, the objectives of this type of espionage are belligerent, the aims are aggressive.
And, naturally, there is something that does not appear in the drawings, and that is the courage of those who defend these military positions! (APPLAUSE)
Because that is something that certainly cannot be found either on the maps or in the imaginations of these gentlemen of the CIA.
But we believe the evidence is indisputable, and we are prepared to put it at the disposal of anyone.
And the capture of CIA agents has become commonplace here—it is a weekly occurrence. It isn’t even given publicity most of the time, because it is no longer news to anyone.
Is it necessary for us to prove that the imperialists are aggressors against Cuba? Does it have anything to do with the Foreign Ministers’ meeting of the OAS? To some extent, yes, and to some extent, no.
Is it our purpose to convince the OAS? Who is going to make such a joke? It is not our intention either to convince the OAS or to neutralize its agreements. We have other ways of neutralizing OAS agreements! (APPLAUSE) We intended, in any case, to demonstrate how cynical these gentlemen of the OAS are, we intended to demonstrate how brazen the gentlemen of the OAS, headed by the US Government, are. We intended simply to unmask them; we intended to demoralize them. That is one part of it. That’s why I say that it is true that it has some relation to the OAS meeting.
But we do not intend to use this as an excuse. The OAS does not have even an iota of self-respect, the OAS does not have one iota of morality. And none of the governments of this continent—which, with the exception of Mexico, (APPLAUSE) are admitted accomplices in acts of banditry against our country, just as they were in the intervention against the Dominican Republic and in all the misdeeds committed by imperialism—have the slightest right to invoke any law or to invoke any principle against Cuba’s acts in support of the revolutionary movement! (APPLAUSE) Because they have violated all norms, all rights, all principles. And this is their responsibility, not ours.
They are mistaken if they think that we are going to accept this imperialist order. Those who believe that we are going to accept this imperialist order, this law of “grabbing the lion’s share” that the imperialists are trying to impose on the world, this blackmail, they are very much mistaken, because our country will never be subjected to such an order.
The imperialists assume the right to commit every kind of misdeed in the world with entire impunity. They daily bomb North Viet Nam, utilizing hundreds of planes: that is the imperialist order, those are the laws of imperialism. They invade the fraternal Dominican Republic with 40,000 soldiers, they openly set up a puppet government there with their occupation troops; that is the order of imperialism, those are the laws of imperialism. A State such as Israel, at the service of the imperialist aggressors, gets hold of a large part of the territory of other countries, establishes itself there at the very edge of the Suez Canal and is already claiming the right to participate in the control of that Canal—so all that’s lacking now is for it to ask that a pipeline be installed to run from the Aswan Dam to irrigate the Sinai Peninsula. And there they are, and nobody knows how long they’ll stay, and the longer nothing is done, the longer they’ll stay: that is the order imperialism wants to establish, those are the laws imperialism wants to impose upon the world. To send murderers on missions with poisoned bullets to kill leaders of other States, to constantly send armed infiltration groups to a country they have been harassing for eight years. That is the imperialist order! Those are the laws imperialism wants to impose upon the world! And we are a small country, but we will not accept that order! We will not accept those laws! (PROLONGED APPLAUSE)
We are not a country of adventurers, of provocateurs, of irresponsible people, as some have wanted to picture us. We simply refuse to accept that order and those laws of imperialism. And if the price of this attitude by our country were the sinking of this country in the Bartlett Deep(2) and the wiping of our entire population off the face of the earth—if that were possible—we would prefer this to accepting that order and those laws that imperialism wishes to impose upon the world. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF: “FIDEL, FOR SURE, HIT THE YANKEES HARD!”)
Go out into the streets and ask any Cuban citizen—young or old; father, son, or mother—ask him what he prefers, what he would choose: the acceptance of such a Draconian order, submission to the dictates of imperialism, or death. (SHOUTS OF “PATRIA O MUERTE!”) you will find that there are very few who think differently, who prefer to accept the imperialist order. But do not think that all of them will be counterrevolutionaries; there will also be some who, invoking Marxism-Leninism, will say that that is what has to be done—that is, that we should accept submission to the imperialist Draconian order. There are such persons, and they may be found anywhere.
Do you gentlemen of the press want information? You already have some, and there will be more if you are a little patient.
There are currents, there are attitudes. And we do not impose attitudes on our people. We have tried both to teach and learn; we have tried to educate ourselves as consistent revolutionaries and help the people also to educate themselves as consistent revolutionaries.
No one would affirm that the problems of this country are easily solved, that the dangers threatening this country are insignificant or minor. No one will be able to make light of the situations which this small country faces resolutely, without hesitation, at the very doorstep of the most powerful imperialist country in the world—and not only the most powerful one, but the most aggressive; and not only the most powerful and aggressive; but the bloodiest, the most cynical, the most arrogant of the imperialist powers in the world.
The very essence of imperialist thinking is revealed in what the imperialists publish. Of course, we should state—to avoid any misunderstanding, so no honest person will mistakenly think I am referring to him—that we know that, in spite of the infamous conditions that prevail there, there are some honest writers and journalists in the United States. (APPLAUSE) I am not talking about them. But there are so many of the other kind that I am afraid someone may think we do not know how to distinguish between them. But here is a case which expresses the essence of imperialist thinking. It is an article from the New York Daily News entitled “Stokely, Stay There.” We would indeed be honored if he wished to remain here ...! (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) But he himself doesn’t want to stay here, because he believes that the struggle is his fundamental duty. But he must know that, whatever the circumstances, this country will always be his home. (APPLAUSE)
The article states:
“Stokely Carmichael, the Negro firebrand, is in Havana, capital of Red Cuba, after having stopped off at London and Prague, and we suggest that he remain in Havana, his spiritual home.
“As pointed out, we urge Stokely to remain in Red Cuba until this miserable island is rescued from communism, and then he can head for some other Red country. If Carmichael returns to the United States we think that the Department of Justice should throw the book at him.”
And in conclusion, after more of the same sort of thing, it states: While we are busy in Viet Nam, we can hardly crush Castro—although the Government could, and should, stop discouraging Cuban refugees who plan Castro’s destruction.”
Stop discouraging!—stop discouraging Cuban exiles who plan Castro’s destruction! Discouragement indeed! Discouragement indeed! “But let’s stick a reminder in Uncle Sam’s hat to trample Castro underfoot with all the force necessary to destroy his communist regime just as soon as we win the war in Viet Nam.” (JEERS AND BOOS)
If the danger posed in this country depended on a US victory in Viet Nam, we could all die of old age!
Observe how they express themselves, with what unbelievable exasperation, with what contempt, they speak of “a Negro firebrand,” of “the miserable island,” of “trampling underfoot.” Because it must be said that the imperialists are annoyed by many things, but most of all they are annoyed by the visit here of a Negro leader—of a leader of the most exploited and most oppressed sector of the United States—by the strengthening of relations between the revolutionary movement of Latin America and the revolutionary movement inside the United States. (PROLONGED APPLAUSE)
In the past few days, innumerable articles about Stokely’s trip have been published in the US press; some very insulting, others more subtle. They have elaborated a whole series of theories. Some say “Stokely is fooling Castro,” “Castro is fooling Stokely,” “Stokely wants to make him believe that he represents the Negro movement—the majority of the Negro movement—and Castro is using him.” Statements of that sort.
And they have gone still further. Some theorists have stated: “How strange that this country is not racist, and Stokely is a racist ... How strange! How strange!” Their aim is to create the impression that the Negro movement in the United States is a racist movement.
It is logical that the exploiters, who for centuries practiced racism against the Negro population, now label as racists all those who struggle against racism.
It is claimed that they have no program. Well, that shows that often a movement can begin before a program is drawn up. But it is also false that the movement has no program. What is happening is that the Negro sector of the population of the United States at this moment, overwhelmed by daily repression, has concentrated its energies on defending itself, on resisting, on struggle.
But it will not be long before they will discover something that is inevitable according to the law of society, the law of history. And that is that the revolutionary movement in the United States will arise from this Negro sector, (APPLAUSE) because it is the most exploited and repressed sector, the most brutally treated in the United States (APPLAUSE); the revolutionary vanguard within the United States will arise from the most mistreated, the most exploited and oppressed of the Negro sectors. The revolutionary movement within US society will arise from this sector by the law of history—not for racial reasons, but for social reasons, reasons of exploitation and oppression, because this sector is the most long-suffering and oppressed—as has been the case in all epochs of history: as occurred with the Roman plebeians, the glebe serfs of the Middle Ages and the workers and peasants of modern times.
This is a social truth, a historic truth. Have patience, and from that oppressed sector the revolutionary movement will arise—vanguard of a struggle—that will one day liberate all of US society!
That is why we must reject—as injurious and slanderous—the attempt to present the Negro movement of the United States as a problem of racism. We hope they will give up the illusion that anyone has deceived anyone. The drawing together of the revolutionaries of the United States and those of Latin America is the most natural thing in the world, and the most spontaneous. And our people have been very receptive to and very capable of admiring Stokely for the courageous statements he has made in the OLAS Conference, because we know that this requires valor, because we know what it means to make such statements within a society that applies the most cruel and brutal procedures of repression, that constantly practices the worst crimes against the Negro sector of its population; and we know how much hatred his statements will arouse among the oppressors.
And, for this reason, we believe that the revolutionary movements all over the world must give Stokely their utmost support as protection against the repression of the imperialists, so that it will be very clear that any crime committed against this leader will have serious repercussions throughout the world. And our solidarity can help to protect Stokely’s life. (APPLAUSE)
And this is why—because all these inevitable events within the process are developing—revolutionaries are getting together, internationalism is being practiced. We believe that the attitude of this US revolutionary leader offers a great lesson, a great example of militant internationalism, something very characteristic of revolutionaries. We undoubtedly sympathize much more with this type of revolutionary than with the super-theoreticians, who are revolutionary in word but bourgeois in deed.
This internationalism cannot be merely proclaimed; it must be practiced! And the Negroes of the United States are offering resistance, they are offering armed resistance. They didn’t go around propounding theses, or talking about objective conditions before they seized weapons to defend their rights. They did not seek a philosophy—and, much less, a revolutionary philosophy—to justify inaction.
And we believe that if there is any country where the struggle is hard, where the struggle is difficult—that country is the United States. And here we have US revolutionaries setting an example and giving us lessons!
It always seems that we have to bring along some dispatches, certain papers, news items, especially to an event of this nature. We sincerely believe that we would not be fulfilling our duty if we did not express here that the OLAS Conference has been a victory of revolutionary ideas, though not a victory without a struggle.
A latent ideological struggle has been reflected in the OLAS. Should we hide the fact? No. What is gained by concealing it? Was it the aim of the OLAS to crush anyone, to harm anyone? No. That is not a revolutionary method; it is not in accord with the conscience of revolutionaries. But let us be clear about this—genuine revolutionaries!
We believe that revolutionary ideas must prevail. If revolutionary ideas should be defeated, the Revolution in Latin America would be lost or would be delayed indefinitely. Ideas can hasten a process—or they can delay it considerably.
We believe that the triumph of revolutionary ideas among the masses—not the masses in their entirety, but a sufficiently broad part of them—is an absolute requisite.
This does not mean that action must wait for the triumph of ideas, and this is one of the essential points of the matter. There are those who believe that it is necessary for ideas to triumph among the masses before initiating action, and there are others who understand that action is one of the most efficient instruments for bringing about the triumph of ideas among the masses.
Whoever hesitates while waiting for ideas to triumph among the greater part of the masses before initiating revolutionary action will never be a revolutionary. For, what is the difference between such a revolutionary and a rich landowner, a wealthy bourgeois? None whatsoever!
Humanity will, of course, change; human society will, of course, continue to develop — in spite of men and the errors of men. But that is not a revolutionary attitude.
If that had been our way of thinking, we would never have initiated a revolutionary process. It was enough for the ideas to take root in a sufficiently large number of men for revolutionary action to be initiated, and, through this action, the masses began to acquire these ideas; the masses began to acquire that awareness.
It is obvious that there are already in many places in Latin America a number of men who are convinced of such ideas, and who have begun revolutionary action. What distinguishes the true revolutionary from the false revolutionary is precisely this: one acts to move the masses, the other waits for the masses as a whole to acquire awareness before starting to act.
And a whole series of principles exists that one should not expect to be accepted without an argument, but which are essential truths, accepted by the majority, but with reserve by a few. This Byzantine discussion about the ways and means of struggle, whether it should be peaceful or non-peaceful, armed or unarmed—the essence of this discussion, which we call Byzantine because it is like an argument between two deaf and dumb people, is what distinguishes those who want to promote revolution, and those who do not want to promote it, those who want to curb it and those who want to promote it. Let no one be fooled.
Different terms have been employed: whether this is the only way, or not the only way; whether it is exclusive, or not exclusive. And the Conference has been very clear about this. It has not used the term, the only way, although it could be called the only way; it has referred, instead, to the fundamental way, to which the other forms of struggle must be subordinated. And, in the long run, it is the only way. To use the word “only”—although the sense of the word is understood and it is the right word—might lead to erroneous thinking about the immediacy of the struggle.
That is why we understand that the Declaration’s reference to the fundamental way, as the road that must be taken in the long run, is the correct formulation.
If we wish to express our way of thinking, that of our Party and our people, let no one harbor any illusions about seizing power by peaceful means in any country of this continent. Let no one harbor any such illusions. Anyone who tries to sell such an idea to the masses will be deceiving them completely.
This does not mean that one has to go out and grab a rifle tomorrow anywhere at all, and start fighting. That is not the question. It is a question of ideological conflict between those who want to make a revolution and those who do not want to make it. It is the conflict between those who want to act and those who want to hold back. Because essentially, it is not that difficult to decide if it is possible, if conditions are ripe, to take up arms or not.
No one can be so sectarian, so dogmatic, as to say that, everywhere, one has to go out and grab a rifle tomorrow. And we ourselves do not doubt that there are some countries in which this task is not an immediate task, but we are convinced that it will be a task in the long run.
There are some who have put forward theses that are even more radical than those of Cuba—that we Cubans believe that in such and such a country the conditions for armed struggle do not exist, and that this is not so. And the interesting thing is that this has been claimed in some cases by representatives who are not among those most in favor of the thesis of armed struggle. We will not be annoyed by this. We prefer that they make the mistake of wanting to make the revolution, although immediate conditions may be lacking, than that they make the mistake of never wanting to make the revolution. And let us hope that no one makes a mistake! But nobody who really wants to fight will ever have differences with us, and those who never want to fight will always have differences with us. (APPLAUSE)
We understand the essence of this matter very well. It is the conflict between those who want to impel the revolution and those who are deadly enemies of the ideas of the revolution. A whole series of factors have contributed to these positions.
This does not always mean that it is enough to maintain a correct position and nothing more. No, even among those who really want to make revolution many mistakes are made. It is true that there are still many weaknesses. But logically we will never have profound differences with anyone—in spite of their mistakes—who honestly maintains a revolutionary position. It is our understanding that revolutionary thought must take on new impetus; it is our understanding that we must leave behind old vices: sectarian positions of all kinds and the positions of those who believe they have a monopoly on revolution or on revolutionary theory! And, poor theory, how it has had to suffer in these processes. Unhappy theory, how it has been abused, and how it is still being abused!
And these years have taught us all to meditate more and analyze better. We no longer accept any “self-evident’ truths. “Self-evident” truths belong to bourgeois philosophy. A whole series of old clichés must be abolished. Marxist literature itself, revolutionary political literature itself should be renewed because repeating the same old clichés, phraseology and verbiage that have been repeated for 35 years wins over no one, convinces no one at all. (APPLAUSE)
There are times when political documents, called Marxist, give the impression that someone has gone to an archive and asked for a form: form 14, form 13, form 12; they are all alike, with the same empty words, in language incapable of expressing real situations. Very often, these documents are divorced from real life. And then many people are told that this is Marxism ... and in what way is this different from a catechism, and in what way is it different from a litany, from a rosary? (APPLAUSE)
And anyone who considers himself a Marxist feels virtually obligated to go to this or that manifesto. And he reads 25 manifestos of 25 different organizations, and they are all alike, copied from models, incapable of convincing anyone.
And nothing was farther from the thought and style of the founder of Marxism than empty words, than putting a straightjacket on ideas. Because Marx was, undoubtedly, one of the greatest and most brilliant prose writers of all time. But, worse than the phrases are the ideas they often encompass. Meaningless phrases are bad, but so are the accepted meanings of certain phrases. Because there are theses that are 40 years old; for example, the famous thesis concerning the role of the national bourgeoisies. How hard it has been to become convinced, finally, that this idea is an absurdity on this continent; how much paper, how many phrases, how much empty talk has been wasted while waiting for a liberal, progressive, anti-imperialist bourgeois.
And we ask ourselves if there is anybody who, at this time, can believe in the revolutionary role of a single bourgeoisie on this continent?
All these ideas have been gaining strength, have been held for a long time — a long series of theses.
I am not going to say that the revolutionary movement and the communist movement in general have ceased to play a role—even an important role—in the history of the revolutionary process and of revolutionary ideas in Latin America. The communist movement developed a method, style, and in some aspects, even took on the characteristics of a religion. And we sincerely believe that that character should be left behind.
Of course to some of these “illustrious revolutionary thinkers” we are only petit-bourgeois adventurers without revolutionary maturity. We are lucky that the Revolution came before maturity! (APPLAUSE) Because at the end, the mature ones, the over-mature, have gotten so ripe that they are rotten. (APPLAUSE)
But we consider ours a Marxist-Leninist Party, we consider ours a Communist Party. (APPLAUSE) And this is not a matter of words, it is a matter of facts.
We do not consider ourselves the teachers, we do not consider ourselves the pace-setters, as some people say we do. But we have the right to consider ours a Marxist-Leninist Party, a Communist Party.
We are deeply satisfied, and it is with great joy, not nostalgia, with happiness, not sadness, that we see the ranks of the revolutionary movement increasing, the revolutionary organizations multiplying, Marxist-Leninist spirit making headway—that is, Marxist-Leninist ideas—and we felt deeply satisfied when the final resolution of this Conference proclaimed that the revolutionary movement in Latin America is being guided by Marxist-Leninist ideas. (APPLAUSE)
This means that convent-like narrow-mindedness must be overcome. And we, in our Communist Party, will fight to overcome that narrow concept, that narrow-mindedness. And we must say that, as a Marxist-Leninist Party, we belong to OLAS; as a Marxist Leninist Party, we belong not to a small group within the revolutionary movement, but to an organization which comprises all true revolutionaries, and we will not be prejudiced against any revolutionary.
That is, there is a much wider movement on this continent than that of just the Communist Parties of Latin America; we are committed to that wide movement, and we shall judge the conduct of organizations not by what they say they are, but by what they prove they are, by what they do, by their conduct.
And we feel very satisfied that our Party has wholeheartedly entered into this wider movement, the movement that has just held this first Conference.
The importance of the guerrilla, the vanguard role of the guerrilla ... Much could be said about the guerrilla, but it is not possible to do so in a meeting like this. But guerrilla experiences on this continent have taught us many things—among them the terrible mistake, the absurd concept that the guerrilla movement could be directed from the cities. This is the reason for the thesis that political and military commands must be united. This is the reason for our conviction that it is not only a stupidity but also a crime to want to direct the guerrillas from the city. And we have had the opportunity t appreciate the consequences of this absurdity many times. It is necessary that these ideas be overcome, and this is why we consider the resolution of this Conference of great importance. The guerrilla is bound to be the nucleus of the revolutionary movement. This does not mean that the guerrilla movement can rise without any previous work; it does not mean that the guerrilla movement is something that can exist without political direction. No! We do not deny the role of the leading organizations, we do not deny the role of the political organizations. The guerrilla is organized by a political movement, by a political organization. What we believe incompatible with correct ideas of guerrilla struggle is the idea of directing the guerrilla from the cities. And in the conditions of our continent it will be very difficult to suppress the role of the guerrilla.
There are some who ask themselves if it is possible in any country of Latin America to achieve power without armed struggle. And, of course, theoretically, hypothetically, when a great part of the continent has been liberated there is nothing surprising if, under those conditions a revolution succeeds without opposition—but this would be an exception. However, this does not mean that the revolution is going to succeed in any country without a struggle. The blood of the revolutionaries of a specific country may not be shed, but their victory will only be possible thanks to the efforts, the sacrifices and the blood of the revolutionaries of a whole continent. (APPLAUSE)
It would, therefore, be false to say that they had a revolution there without a struggle. That will always be a lie. And I believe that it is not correct for any revolutionary to wait with arms crossed until all the other peoples struggle and create the conditions for victory for him without struggle. That will never be an attribute of revolutionaries. There are those who believe that a peaceful transition is possible in some countries of this continent; we cannot understand what kind of peaceful transition they refer to, unless it is to a peaceful transition in agreement with imperialism. Because in order to achieve victory by peaceful means—if in practice such a thing were possible, considering that the mechanisms of the bourgeoisie, the oligarchies and imperialism control all the means for peaceful struggle ... And then you hear a revolutionary say: They crushed us; they organized 200 radio programs, so and so many newspapers, so and so many magazines, so and so many TV shows, so and so many of this and so and so many of that. And one wants to ask him: What did you expect? That they would put TV, radio, the magazines, the newspapers, the printing shops, all this at your disposal? Or are you unaware that those are the instruments of the ruling class designed explicitly for crushing the revolution? (APPLAUSE)
They complain that the bourgeoisie and the oligarchies crush them with their campaigns, as if that were a surprise to anyone. The first thing that a revolutionary has to understand is that the ruling classes have organized the State so as to dedicate every possible means to maintaining themselves in power. And they use not only arms, not only physical instruments, not only guns, but all possible instruments to influence, to deceive, to confuse.
And those who believe that they are going to win against the imperialists in elections are just plain naive, and those who believe that the day will come when they will take over through elections are even more naive. It is necessary to have lived in a revolutionary process and to know just what the repressive apparatus is by which the ruling classes maintain the status quo, just how much one has to struggle, how difficult it is.
This does not imply the negation of forms of struggle. When someone writes a manifesto in a newspaper, attends a demonstration, holds a rally or propagates an idea, he may be using the so-called famous legal means. We must do away with the differentiation between legal and illegal means; methods should be classified as revolutionary or non-revolutionary.
The revolutionary employs various methods to achieve his ideal and his revolutionary aim. The essence of the question is whether the masses will be led to believe that the revolutionary movement, that socialism, can come to power without a struggle, that it can come to power peacefully. And that is a lie! And any persons in Latin America who assert that they will come to power peacefully are deceiving the masses. (APPLAUSE)
We are talking about conditions in Latin America. We don’t want to involve ourselves in other problems which are already large enough—of those of the revolutionary organizations of other countries, such as in Europe. We are addressing Latin America. And of course, if they would only confine their mistakes to themselves ... But no, they try to encourage the errors of those of this continent who are mistaken! And to such an extent that part of the so-called revolutionary press has attacked Cuba for our revolutionary stand in Latin America. That’s a fine thing! They don’t know how to be revolutionaries over there, yet they want to teach us how to be revolutionaries over here. But we are not anxious to start arguments. We already have enough to think about But, of course, we will not overlook the direct or indirect, the overt or covert attacks of some neo-Social Democrats of Europe. (APPLAUSE)
And these are clear ideas. We are absolutely convinced that, in the long run, there is only one solution, as expressed in the Resolution: guerrilla warfare in Latin America.
Does this mean that if a garrison rises in rebellion because there are revolutionaries in it we should not support the rebellion because it is not a guerrilla struggle? No! It is stupid to think, as one organization did, that the Revolution would be made with the rebellion of garrisons only. It is no less stupid to have a rebellion in a garrison and afterwards let it be crushed by overpowering forces. New situations are arising; new situations may arise—we do not deny that. For example, in Santo Domingo a typical case came up: a military uprising that began to take on a revolutionary character.
But, of course, this doesn’t mean that the revolutionary movement has to wait around for what may come up, for what may take place. Nobody was able to foresee, nobody was able to estimate the form, the character that the revolutionary movement would take on, especially as a result of imperialist intervention.
In other words, by stressing the role of the guerrilla as an immediate task in all those countries where true conditions exist, we do not discard other forms of revolutionary armed struggle.
The revolutionary movement must be ready to take advantage of, and support, any expression of struggle that may arise, that may develop or that may strengthen the position of the revolutionaries. What I do not believe is that anybody who considers himself a revolutionary can wait around for a garrison to rebel in order to carry out revolution, that any revolutionary can dream of making a revolution through the rebellion of garrisons. The uprising of military units may constitute a factor—one of those unforeseeable factors that may arise—but no really serious revolutionary movement would base itself on those eventualities. Guerrilla warfare is the main form of struggle, but it does not exclude any other expressions of armed struggle that may arise.
And it is necessary—most necessary—that these ideas be clarified, because we have had very bitter experiences; not the blows or reverses of a military nature, but rather the frustrations of a political nature, the consequences—sad and disastrous for the revolutionary movement in the long run—of a series of wrong concepts. The most painful case was that of Venezuela.
In Venezuela the revolutionary movement was growing. The revolutionary movement there has had to pay dearly the consequences of the absurd concept of trying to lead the guerrillas from the city, of trying to use the guerrilla movement as an instrument for political maneuvering, of trying to use the guerrilla movement as a tool of dirty politics: the consequences that can arise from incorrect attitudes, from wrong attitudes and, on many occasions, from immoral attitudes.
The case of Venezuela is well worth taking into consideration, for if we do not learn from the lessons of Venezuela, we will never learn.
Of course, in spite of treason, the guerrilla movement in Venezuela is far from being crushed. And we, gentlemen, have every right to use the word “treason.”
We know there are some who do not like this; some will even feel insulted. May those who do not also carry the seeds of treason in their hearts one day be convinced that they have no reason to feel insulted.
The case of Venezuela is eloquent in many aspects. For in Venezuela a group—which, with all these wrong concepts, was in the leadership of a Party—almost achieved what neither imperialism nor the repressive forces of the regime could achieve.
This Party, or rather the rightist leadership of the Venezuelan Party, has come to adopt a position which smacks of an enemy of revolutionaries, an instrument of imperialism and the oligarchy. And I do not say this for the sake of talking; I am not a slanderer, I am not a defamer.
We have some unfinished business with that group of traitors. We have not encouraged polemics; we have not incited conflicts; far from that for a long time we have kept silent while enduring a barrage of documents and attacks from that rightist leadership, as that leadership forsook the guerrilla fighters and took the road of conciliation and submission.
We were the victims of deceit. First they spoke to us about a strange thing—for many of these problems begin with a series of strange things —they began to talk of democratic peace. And we would say: What the devil does that democratic peace mean? What does that mean? It’s strange, very strange.” But they replied, “No, that’s a revolutionary slogan to widen the front, to unite forces, to present a broad front.” A broad front? Well, theoretically speaking, who would oppose this? “No, have faith in us.”
Then after a few months, they began to speak of tactical retreats. Tactical retreats? How odd! If they had told us the truth we might have disagreed, we might have had doubts, whatever the case; but never ...
A tactical retreat: that is what they said to the rank and file, that is what they said to the people. The tactical retreat was followed by an attempt to end the struggle, an attempt to suppress the guerrilla movement. For anyone knows that in a guerrilla movement there is no tactical retreat. A guerrilla group that retreats is like an airplane that cuts off its engine in mid-flight: it falls to the ground. Such a tactical retreat must have been the brainchild of some genius in high-flown revolutionary theories. Whoever has an idea of what a guerrilla group is, and begins to hear talk of retreat by the guerrillas, will say: “This man is talking a lot of nonsense.” There can be total withdrawal of guerrillas, but not retreat.
Gradually they let their mask slip, until one day they revealed themselves completely and said: “Let’s take part in the elections.” They spoke out in favor of elections.
But even before they declared themselves in favor of elections, they committed one of the vilest deeds that a revolutionary party can commit: they began to act as informers, as public accusers of the guerrillas. They took advantage of the case of Iribarren Borges.(3) They utilized that episode to begin speaking out openly and publicly against the guerrilla movement, practically throwing it into the claws of the government beasts. The government had the weapons and the soldiers with which to pursue the guerrillas who would not retreat; but the so-called Party or the rightist leadership of the Party which had assumed its command, took it upon itself to arm, both morally and politically, the repressive forces fighting the guerrillas. We have to ask ourselves honestly, how could we, a revolutionary party, cover up, in the name of an argument of a cloistered a cathedra type of thinking, the attitude of a party that was trying to morally arm the repressive forces fighting the guerrillas.
And so the phrasemaking began, the accusations began. They said that we were creating factionalism, that we were creating factionalism!
A group of charlatans weren’t under judgment here but a group of guerrilla fighters who had been in the mountains for years, who had gone there and had then suffered every form of neglect, of abandonment. Could revolutionaries have said, “Yes, once again you are right, you who have been deceiving us, you who began by telling us one thing, then another, and ended up by doing this.”
Naturally, we publicly expressed our condemnation —after a series of statements had already been issued by that rightist leadership against our Party—of the treacherous ways in which they were slandering and attacking the revolutionaries, using the Iribarren incident as a point of departure.
Logically, that provoked the irate and indignant protest of that rightist leadership, which made us the butt of a series of tirades. They did not answer a single one of our arguments; they were unable to answer even one, and they wrote a maudlin reply to the effect that we were ignoble, that we had attacked an underground Party, that we were fighting a most combative, a most heroic anti-imperialist organization. And they drafted a reply against us.
Why has it been necessary to bring that reply here? Because that document became the argument of a gang, a whole gang of detractors and slanderers of the Cuban Revolution. And that incident signaled the beginning of a real international conspiracy against the Cuban Revolution, a real conspiracy against our Revolution.
We feel that this is a problem that must be clarified; at least the truth must be clarified.
I am going to read this answer, if you’ll pardon me, even though it is rather lengthy. Of course, it is an answer full of phrases which are not at all kind to us, but if you’ll permit me I would like to read this answer, which has been made public, (APPLAUSE) the so-called “Reply of the Communist Party of Venezuela to Fidel Castro.” And may this be a starting point for refuting some things that have been said about Cuba and about the Revolution.
It reads:
“Fidel Castro, Secretary General of the Communist Party (in power) of Cuba, and Prime Minister of the Socialist Government of Cuba, taking advantage of his comfortable position, has attacked the Communist Party of Venezuela, an underground Party, with hundreds of its militants in prison, dozens of them having been killed in the mountains and streets of the cities; and now subject to relentless persecution daily, while new victims fall even as Fidel Castro speaks.
“The man who is tolerated in all his verbal excesses, thanks to the fact that Cuba occupies the front line of the anti-imperialist struggle, should have the elementary finesse to be careful of his language when referring to the Communist Party struggling in the country which in all of Latin America is that most intervened by Yankee imperialism and is fighting it under the most difficult conditions. Knowing who he is and with the whole world listening, Fidel Castro has not hesitated to insult a Communist Party which is hardly able to answer due to repression.
“Therefore: Fidel Castro’s action is ignoble, takes unfair advantage and is treacherous and lacking the nobility and gallantry that have always characterized the Cuban Revolution.
“Second: Fidel Castro has expressed a negative judgment concerning the murder of Iribarren Borges, even claiming a right to express an opinion on this matter. Nevertheless, with surprising nerve, he wants to deny the same right to the CPV. Fidel Castro, evidently does not want the Communist Party of Venezuela, which acts in Venezuela, which is in Venezuela, to express an opinion, to pass judgment on a Venezuelan political event which took place on Venezuelan soil and closely affects the life of the CPV. On the other hand, he himself can do so from Cuba.
“According to his peculiar point of view, we are on speaking terms with and play up to the government. He does the same and pretends to be the voice of an intangible revolutionary oracle. This strange way of reasoning shows an irresponsible arrogance and self-sufficiency not appropriate in a Chief of State.
“As to the event itself, the CPV said exactly the same thing that Fidel Castro did, no more, no less. On the other hand, we assert that what does play up to reaction and imperialism are speeches such as that of Fidel Castro”—they don’t even thank me (LAUGHTER)—“slander like that which he has hurled against our Party, his efforts to divide it, and such matters as the murder of Iribarren Borges.
“Third: The CPV claims the right to plan its own policy without anybody’s interference. Cuba has marched along a hard, revolutionary road with honor, in this she is an example and inspiration to us. But the one thing that we have never been, are not, and never will be, is an agent of Cuba in Venezuela, or of any other Communist Party in the world.
“We are Venezuelan Communists, and we do not accept the tutelage of anyone, no matter how great his revolutionary merits may be.
“If there is any revolutionary group in Venezuela that submits with pleasure to the tutelage and patronage of Fidel Castro, that is its business. The CPV will never do it. If Fidel Castro does not like it, so much the worse for him. Now then: Why does Fidel Castro intervene precisely at this time against the CPV? Because the CPV has already begun to defeat in practice, and not only ideologically, the anti-Party faction of Douglas Bravo; because the Party and the Communist Youth have attained great political and organizational successes in applying their policy; because our recent feat, the rescue of comrades Pompeyo, Guillermo and Teodoro, has filled all the militant Communists of the country with enthusiasm and renewed energy; and because, finally, the anarchistic, adventurous policy of the anti-Party group has shown the inevitability of its failure and has helped enormously in the clarification of problems under discussion.
“That is precisely why Fidel Castro has thrown all the weight of his prestige against the CPV in a desperate attempt to help the anarchistic group of adventurers, which he sponsored and urged on so the CPV would go under.
“Nevertheless, our policy and the facts prove daily what the adjectives ‘hesitant’ ‘halting’ and ‘opportunist’—that Fidel Castro applied to the leadership of the CPV—are worth. And that is proved here in Venezuela, even in spite of the things Fidel Castro has done to us, and, surely, will continue doing to us.
“But let him and the whole CPV understand this clearly: we will not even discuss the sovereignty of the CPV.
“Fourth: Fidel Castro has described the leadership of the CPV as cowardly, in a new demonstration of that irritating tendency of his to believe himself possessed of a monopoly on bravery and courage. We Venezuelan Communists do not suffer from childish exhibitionism; we do not go around proclaiming our virtues in this field. When Fidel Castro was a child, that great patriarch of Venezuelan communism Gustavo Machado was already storming Curacao and invading Venezuela, arms in hand.
“And from then on, the history of the CPV, which is a political history, was also the history of the men who confronted Gómez’s terror and that of Pérez Jiménez; the men who directed the insurrection of January 23, 1958; the men who were responsible for Fidel Castro’s receiving a plane loaded with arms when he was still in the Sierra Maestra; and the men who, if they have hesitated in anything during the last eight years, have not faltered in risking their lives.
“This answer of ours is the best demonstration we can give Fidel Castro of what the leadership of the CPV is really like. Accustomed to believe in his power as a revolutionary High Pasha, he thought his speech would surely crush and confound us. He couldn’t be more mistaken, and now Fidel Castro will see why Yankee imperialism and its agents insist so much on liquidating this Venezuelan Communist Party.
“Fifth: In his speech, Fidel Castro shows that he wants to assume, once more, the role of a sort of arbiter of the revolutionary destiny of Latin America—a superrevolutionary who, if he had been in the place of all the Communists of Latin America, would have already made the Revolution.
“On another occasion we referred to the characteristics of the Cuban struggle and to the place where Fidel Castro would still be if it had occurred to him to hoist the red flag in the Sierra Maestra. At the moment we only want to reject the role of revolutionary “papa” that Fidel Castro adopts.
“We firmly reject his presuming to believe that he and only he can decide what is and what is not revolutionary in Latin America. In Venezuela this question is judged by the CPV, before itself and its people, before no one else. But of this Fidel Castro,—highest dispenser of revolutionary diplomas, who asks what North Viet Nam would say if Cuba were to trade with South Viet Nam—we only want to ask if he thinks about what the Spanish people have to say about his trading with Franco and the Spanish oligarchy, or what the Negro peoples of Zimbabwe, Rhodesia, and the patriots of Aden might say about his trading with imperialist Britain. Or is it that what Fidel Castro considers as opportunism in others, in him would be washed away by the holy waters of his own self-sufficiency?
“Sixth: This is an unpleasant polemic and one that makes the enemy jump with joy; but which evidently cannot be deferred any longer. Fidel Castro himself forced us to the limit with his speech. All right, then. We will argue. And just as we claim our descent from Simón Bolivar and the fathers of our homeland in our anti-imperialist struggle, so we tell Fidel Castro that the descendants of Simón Bolívar and Ezequiel Zamora will never tolerate anybody’s using language as insolent and provoking as that which he used in his speech on March 13.
“The Venezuelan believes himself neither above nor below anybody else; but if there is one thing that will provoke his fiery militant pride, it is an insult.
“And already Fidel Castro must have started to realize that he has stumbled against something different, that he has come UP against the Venezuelan Communists.
“Seventh: We realize that such acts as Fidel Castro’s will cause us difficulties but we do not despair.
“We have the calm conviction of those who know they are right, and we have the revolutionary passion to defend it.”
March 15, 1967
Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela:
Pompeyo Márquez, Guillermo García Ponce, Alonso Ojeda Olaechea, Pedro Ortega Díaz, Eduardo Gallegos Mancera, Teodoro Petkoff, Germán Lairet.”
“Without comment,” it says above. “Answer of the Communist Party of Venezuela to Fidel Castro.” And below: “Please reproduce and distribute. Second Front-Alpha 66, 109 South West 12 Avenue, Miami, Florida. 33-130.”
Do not think that I have gotten this letter from a spokesman of a party or from a political newspaper. Thousands of copies of this letter were sent to Cuba from the United States by the Organization “Second Front-Alpha 66,” the same people who sent that gang with guns and bullets treated with cyanide to murder Prime Minister Fidel Castro, as they said. And this certainly requires some comment. In the first place, I am not going to refer now to what I said that night, because it would take too long. It is not true that we personally insulted anyone. We did not call anyone in that Party a coward; we said that the political line was cowardly. I was not insulting or offending anyone or saying so-and-so is a coward.
Naturally, far from answering any criticisms made, they drew up this document and published it. It was one of the many that they have written and, naturally, we have compiled. Our Party has been working on a document to answer this and all the intrigues of these gentlemen, which will be released at an opportune moment. But a series of imputations are made in this document, the same ones that have been made against the Revolution, against our Party, and not only by imperialism ... not only by imperialism. Among other things, these gentlemen did not hesitate in accusing us, in accusing our Party, of intervening in the internal affairs of the Venezuelan Party and of intervening in the internal affairs of Venezuela.
They accused us of having agent in Venezuela, they insinuated that the guerrilla group—the combatants who refused to retreat and surrender—was a group of Cuban agents. These were exactly the same as the slanderous accusations made by the US State Department.
In this document Cuba was also accused of trying to be an arbiter, of trying to direct the Latin American revolutionary movement: exactly the same accusations that imperialism makes against us. In this document they even include false statements, even mentioning arms which came from Venezuela—but these did not come when we were in the Sierra Maestra; they were 150 weapons that came when our troops were advancing on Santiago de Cuba, in December, when the columns of Camilo Cienfuegos and Ernesto Guevara had already taken an important part of Santa Clara. (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) They practically throw in our faces the sending of a planeload of arms which they claim they sent. They almost try to say that the war was won with these arms ... And they were not the ones who sent these arms. And they are so short of arguments, so short of arguments, that they have had to resort to such deceptions.
Perhaps someday the Venezuelan people will ask them about the millions of dollars they collected throughout the world on behalf of the guerrilla movement—which they abandoned, whose members they left without shoes, clothing, food, and even the bare necessities; and which they have accused and attacked without scruples of any kind. Some day—I repeat—the Venezuelan people may ask these swindlers how much they collected throughout the world: the figures, the numbers, the data.
And what did they do? For our part we do not ask them anything; we are not interested. When we help someone, we truly help him, we do not ask him for an accounting of what he did with this aid.
Nevertheless, there is one argument which has gone all the rounds, and is going to have a full answer. There was something that became the gang’s argument, the argument of the “Mafia.” (Perhaps, if it were not for these painful circumstances, we would not have to discuss this problem.) This is the argument of our trade with Spain, with England and the other capitalist countries. Of course, this argument, or this problem, was not originally under discussion at all. This was not what was being discussed. Why, then, did these gentlemen bring this problem into the discussion? Why did they bring this argument into the discussion? They did so in connection with our critical position on financial and technical aid extended to the Latin American oligarchies.
In the first place, there has been a deliberate attempt to distort our views. Furthermore, these gentlemen of the rightist leadership of the Communist Party of Venezuela had a goal, and they pursued it in a very immoral manner. Once, when Leoni’s administration was seeking to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, we were asked what we thought of it and we voiced our opinion; these gentlemen were also asked, and they also responded negatively to the idea.
Why do these gentlemen resort to this argument and drag in a problem that was not being discussed with them? It is very clear, it forms part of the plot of the conspiracy in which they and their fellows are participating with imperialism to create a serious conflict between the Cuban Revolution and the socialist countries. It is unquestionable that this argument is one of the basest, most despicable, most treacherous and most provocative. It is an attempt to find a contradiction between our position and our trade with capitalist countries. But this argument until very recently has been bruited about by the “Mafia,” and not only has it been published openly—the capitalist press also published it, and the counterrevolutionary organizations have circulated this letter—but this vile argument has also been spread about sotto voce in corridors and powwows by the detractors of and conspirators against the Cuban Revolution.
In the first place, they are lying when they state that Cuba is opposed to trade. In every international body, in every economic conference, in all organizations in which Cuba has taken part as a State, we have constantly denounced the imperialist policy of blockade, and we have denounced the acts of the government of the United States against our country as a violation of free trade and of the right of all countries to trade with each other. Cuba has inflexibly maintained that position at all times; that has been a policy pursued by our country and the entire history of the commercial relations of our country bears it out. Our position does not refer to commerce; it has never referred to commerce. And our position is known by the Soviet Union; we have stated our viewpoint to them.
We were talking about financial and technical help given by any socialist State to the Latin American oligarchies. These things must not be confused; one thing should not be confused with the other! Some socialist states even offered dollar loans to Sr. Lleras Restrepo(4) because he was in difficulties with the International Monetary Fund.
And we asked ourselves: How can this be? This is absurd! Dollar loans to an oligarchic government that is repressing the guerrillas, that is persecuting and assassinating guerrillas! And the war is carried out with money—among other things, because the oligarchies have nothing with which to wage war except money, with which they pay mercenary forces.
And such things seem absurd to us—as does everything that implies financial and technical aid to any country that is repressing the revolutionary movement, to countries that are accomplices in the imperialist blockade against Cuba. That we condemn. It is unfortunate that we have to go into this problem in detail, but, naturally, it is the number one argument employed by the “Mafia.” And it is logical. Cuba is a small country against which the United States practices a cruel blockade. At Gran Tierra we explained to some of those present here how the imperialists do everything within their power to prevent our obtaining even such insignificant things as handfuls of new seeds, varieties of rice, cotton or anything else, seeds for grain, vegetables, anything.
No one can imagine to what lengths the imperialists go to extend the economic blockade against our country. And all those governments are accomplices; all those governments have violated the most elemental principles of free trade, the right of peoples to trade freely; those governments help imperialism in its attempts to starve the people of Cuba.
And if that is true, if that is the case, and if internationalism exists, if solidarity is a word worthy of respect, the least that we can expect of any State of the socialist camp is that it refrains from giving any financial or technical aid to those regimes. (PROLONGED APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “FIDEL")
It is truly repugnant that this vile argument is used, as if to test the revolutionary steadfastness of this country, or to provoke conflicts with it. And, truly, this nation’s steadfastness, its policy based on principle, its decision, has been to act in a responsible way, yes! Carefully, yes! So as to prevent, wherever possible, polemics and conflicts. Yes. But never let it be believed that any circumstance, irrespective of its difficulty, any problem, no matter how great, will enable them to drive our dignity or our revolutionary conscience to the wall. Because if that were true, if the leadership of this Party were thus disposed, we would have given up long ago in the face of the greatest and most lethal danger, the danger to which our adamant political position toward imperialism has exposed us.
And it is equally repugnant that they try to find a contradiction between this position and Cuba’s commercial policy with the capitalist world. The imperialists have tried to maintain the blockade. And the question is not what countries we do trade with, but rather how many countries throughout the wide world we do not trade with, simply because, one by one, and under the incessant and growing pressure of the imperialists, they have broken trade relations with us.
We have never broken off those relations. Imperialism has taken care of that, in the same way that it has seen to it that these countries, one by one, broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba. We have never broken relations with anyone. That is a weapon that imperialism has used against the Cuban Revolution, in diplomatic relations, in commercial relations.
And it is worthwhile to speak about commercial relations, as well, for some of the “Mafia”—and how else can I describe those who so slanderously and basely attack our Revolution, without any serious and powerful argument—have spoken of our not having broken off diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. Neither did our country break off relations with Albania when a great number of countries from the socialist camp did so; we did not break off relations with Federal Germany, but Federal Germany did not want to accept our establishing relations with the German Democratic Republic. And even though we knew that the consequences would be the breaking off of diplomatic and commercial relations with the Federal Republic, this country had not the slightest hesitation in being among the first to establish diplomatic relations with the German Democratic Republic. (APPLAUSE) And this country has never hesitated to put political principles above economic interest. If this were not so, we should long since have found millions of reasons to reconcile ourselves with imperialism, especially in these times when it has become so fashionable to do so.
To make the slightest insinuation that we follow a selfish policy of self-interest in our international positions is to forget what this country has paid for its unyielding stands, its solidarity with a great number of countries—Algeria among them—notwithstanding the fact that this gave another country, one of the biggest buyers of Cuban sugar, an excuse to cede to the pressure exercised by imperialism and to stop buying our sugar. And there are many cases.
Our people always understood, and we believed that everybody understood quite clearly, that every time the imperialists failed in their pressures to keep others from purchasing from or selling to us, it meant a victory for our Revolution over the blockade. And we have always regarded as an expression of, in a certain sense, a position of self-defense—and we have spoken publicly about this, and stated it in the Plaza de la Revolución only a short time ago—the fact that the European countries could not accept, and why they could not accept imperialist pressuring. Why Europe, in spite of its economic and industrial development, must contend with competition from the Yankee monopolies, the attempts of the Yankee imperialists to take over their economies, and why—as a question of self-interest—it was impossible for them to yield to US imperialist pressuring. Moreover, since Cuba paid its bills and paid promptly, and since Cuba offered an expanding market the imperialists met with resounding failure in their attempts to force the entire capitalist world to break off trade relations with Cuba, as they had desired.
What has this to do with our arguments? What has it to do with our statements? If the imperialists had succeeded, the path of the Revolution would have been much more difficult.
Do we trade with the socialist camp? Yes, in trade which is practically all barter, on the so-called clearing basis, which has a value only in the country with which the agreement exists. But if our country needs certain things such as medicines of a certain kind, things essential for the life of our people, and the trading organizations in a socialist country say, We do not have them,” we must look for them in other markets and pay in the currency of that country. This is where imperialism tries to crush us. And if we have bought medicines in capitalist countries—because we cannot get them, or a similar product, in a socialist country, in order to save the lives of sick people, of children, to reduce—as we have reduced—the infant mortality rate, the mortality rate in general, (APPLAUSE) and attain the position Cuba has today, for instance in public health and in many other fields, apparently we are criminals; apparently we are people without principles; apparently we are immoral; apparently we are the opposite of what we claim to be.
The same applies to the argument concerning the breaking off of relations with the State of Israel. I think no one can have the slightest doubt regarding the position of Cuba in that painful problem: a position of principle, an uncompromising position, a firm position. It is just that we do not like fig leaves.
What is of a State which acts as an instrument of Yankee imperialism, which is, in turn, the instigator, the protector, of that State. And that is why I ask those of the “Mafia,” those who seek to slander Cuba with such arguments, why they don’t break relations with the United States? (APPLAUSE) It just happens that if we are not obedient “yes-men,” we are immoral, we are a people without principles, we are a people full of ideological contradictions ... And all this is simply part of a repugnant conspiracy to create a conflict between the Cuban Revolution and the states of the socialist camp.
We are not instigators of conflicts, we do not seek unnecessarily, gratuitously, to create conflicts of this nature. I believe that through confronting a powerful enemy, the interdependence among the movements, the parties, the revolutionary states, will grow to a high degree.
A country as small as ours, without any possibility of economic self-sufficiency, in need, principally, of the arms to defend itself from Yankee imperialism, must very much desire this. No one can picture us as acting in an irresponsible manner and creating problems that can be avoided. But between that position, the idea that this country can be intimidated with provocations of that sort, and Cuba’s position, there is a profound abyss.
And actually, behind all of this there is a conspiracy between these elements of the reactionary “Mafia” within the revolutionary movement and Yankee imperialism to create a conflict between our Revolution and the States of the socialist camp. Because what they, in fact, seek, what they demand, what they urge, is that the socialist camp also join in the imperialist blockade against Cuba.
This is exactly what they really want and they do not hide it. The same March 18, three days after their widely-publicized “reply,” an AP news dispatch came from Caracas—because a certain Party spokesman, who had frequent dealings with the AP, frequent conversations with the AP, became very much a figure-of-the-moment as spokesman for that rightist leadership, and the AP, overjoyed, reported: “Fidel Castro has no ideology. ‘He is a revolutionary but he is not a politician,’ a leader—now in the underground—of the Venezuelan Communist Party told the Associated Press today.”
I cannot imagine what interest Leoni could have in persecuting these clandestine gentlemen, yielding, cringing denouncers of the Cuban Revolution, or why they talk of the great feat involved in the liberation of the illustrious “Tom,” “Dick” and “Harry.” In fact, the only one who profited from that was Leoni and not the people of Venezuela nor the revolutionary movement, because Leoni gained from it a pack of bloodhounds, who only fall short of asking him to provide them with rifles so that they may set out to punish those criminal, bandit, factionist and divisionism agents of Cuba. And since these “journalists,” in connection with their missions, must often play the role of journalists, and occasionally like to promote certain contradictions, the journalist added: “When asked if the CPV was not siding with the enemy by trying to have the Soviet Union withdraw its support from Castro, the spokesman replied: ‘We coincide dangerously with the Venezuelan government, but remember that we support the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Communist Party.’” Evidently I am the bad man, the intruder, the provocateur, the revolutionary “Pasha,” etc., etc. (LAUGHTER) “‘Our attack is not against the Cuban Revolution, but against Castro, who has insulted us.’”
“He made it clear,”—he made it clear!—“that the Communist Party of Venezuela wished that the Soviet Union would get Castro out of the way.” They accuse me of trying to interfere in their internal affairs. And they say that nothing arouses their fury and their revolutionary ardor and their pride more than someone who tries to meddle with them—not that imperialism or Leoni meddle, but that somebody makes a criticism with all the justified reasons that I have explained here. “... that the Communist Party of Venezuela wished that the Soviet Union would get Castro out of the way.” And they put forth the thesis that someone could get Castro or anybody else out of the way, remove or install anybody.
Where did they get such farfetched theories? Although it is hardly strange, since we have a surfeit of farfetched theories.
This gentleman states that the Communist Party of Venezuela would like the Soviet Union “to get Castro out of the way.” Let’s forget Castro. Really, these gentlemen are naive, they are farfetched, they are ridiculous. It is not Castro but a Revolution that they must get out of the way! A simple head cold could get Castro out of the way. (LAUGHTER) But no one can get a genuine Revolution out of the way! (APPLAUSE)
Am I perhaps a slanderer? In the “Mafia” there are some who will react just as those who doubted our witnesses and questioned our evidence, and who will say: “That is a lie, a slander.” But on August 1 of this year, an AP news dispatch datelined in Washington, from Ary Moleón—and these gentlemen play a role in all of this — reports: “The highest Venezuelan diplomatic official present here advised today against loosely labeling the Havana meeting of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity as communist, saying that those who attend it are, in effect, anarcho-Castroites.”
So now they borrow and exchange vocabulary among themselves! Pompeyo and his retinue saying that we intervene in the internal affairs of Venezuela. Tejera Paris and his clique saying: No, no, no. They aren’t Communists; they are anarcho-Castroites. Pure ideological exchange, ideological commerce between Tejera Paris and Pompeyo, between the State Department and the rightist leadership of the Communist Party of Venezuela. Now they borrow one another’s concepts and words.
When have we ever seen imperialism treating communists with so much delicacy? When has it ever used so much sweetness, decency, finesse, if the image it has tried to create of a Communist is the worst possible: the most heartless, degenerate, depraved, cruel and savage of human beings?
And suddenly: No! Be very careful! Don’t call those people Communists! Communist is a more sacred, more respectable, more venerable, more decent, friendly, conciliatory word. (APPLAUSE) Tejera Paris, the great ideologist of tropical communism! (LAUGHTER)
“The Venezuelan Ambassador to the White House, Enrique Tejera Paris, said that this distinction is fundamental”—it is indeed fundamental; this theoretician knows what he is talking about!—“if we want to understand a situation that is more complex than the simple application of labels.”
What care, what exquisite delicacy, what subtlety, what differentiation! What? Call these people Communists? They are anarcho-Castroites. And they are really bad! (LAUGHTER)
“Tejera stressed that the present meeting in Havana is not only to protest against the other governments of the hemisphere, but against the established Communist Parties in Latin America.”
What a defense lawyer we have here, saying that this meeting was called to attack the parties! And since when have the imperialists been so exquisitely concerned about the Parties? And who appointed Tejera Paris defense counsel for the Parties?
“The diplomat recalled that the Communist Party of his country has accused Castro’s regime of intolerable intervention in the internal affairs of Venezuela and of appointing himself arbiter of the Latin American Revolution.”
Beware! Do not be confused; these are anarcho-Castroites; they are dangerous, they are bad; do not call these people Communists: do not forget that the Venezuelan Communist Party accused Castro of intervention in the internal affairs of Venezuela; do not forget that it accused him of trying to set himself up as an arbiter.
Have we ever seen the like before? Has anyone ever used such refined language and exquisite courtesy in speaking of the Communists of this continent?
I believe that what is intolerable is this, what is really painful is this: offense, diatribe and slander from imperialism are a thousand times preferable to praise from imperialism. Tell me who defends you, and I will tell you who you are! Tell me who attacks you, and I will tell you who you are! (APPLAUSE)
As far as we know, no one, no oligarch, no imperialist, no imperialist henchman, ever printed one of my speeches for distribution by the thousands. Never! Not a speech, not a phrase, not a line, not a word. Leoni did not have my speech printed; he did not distribute it; if he read it, he probably made a gesture of disgust. Alpha 66, a well-known organization of counterrevolutionaries in Miami, which, in complicity with the CIA, organizes personal attacks with potassium cyanide and silencers, had thousands of copies printed of the declaration made by that leadership and distributed them all over the world.
Heirs of Bolívar? What an offense to the memory of Bolívar! They would have accused Bolivar himself of being an interventionist. What accusations would they not have made against him?
They call themselves sons of Bolívar, followers of Bolívar, and speak of the hundreds of dead? What right have they to speak in the name of the dead, they who betray the dead? What right have they to invoke martyrs, they who are thinking of running for office as representatives, senators and mayors, and canvass for votes with pictures of the fallen and betrayed heroes?
Because that declaration against Cuba was made in March. In April they issued a long document. If you were to read it—it is long and I am not going to read it—you would see the cliché-ridden style. This was a hybrid product of three or four stock models, because it is long. It is the document in which they propose an alliance with the bourgeois parties, and which ends by saying—this is the final note:
“Finally, the armed movement at this moment is unable to play a decisive role, because of the stagnation of the guerrilla fronts and the armed struggle in general, a situation made more serious by the false political ideas and operations prevailing in the anarcho-terrorist group.”
Anarcho-adventurist, anarcho-terrorist, anarcho-Castroite! Any day now, Johnson will be talking about the anarcho-terrorists!
“In view of this national movement, the Central Committee has resolved that the Party should take active part in the next elections, under the slogan ‘Neither continuation nor Caldera —a change’; a change favoring democratic freedom and national sovereignty, a change toward the independent development of Venezuela.
“The electoral campaign is being conducted under conditions of governmental advantage and repression. The Party will struggle against this situation, to turn the elections into a baffle against the reactionary clique that leads the AD and the government.”(5) Amen. (LAUGHTER)
That is, the dead will appear on campaign posters! And in this country, we know about these things, our people know about such things, and these things only produce nausea and repugnance, because we had our fill of this. The one thing that no one will ever be able to tell our people is that this is a Communist attitude, nobody; for even at the beginning of communism, in the middle of the last century, when the Communist Manifesto was written, Marx always said that Communists should support the most militant and progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie. These so-called Communists join the cheap politicians of the bourgeoisie to oppose the heroic guerrilla fighters. Our people and the Venezuelan people certainly have to know that this kind of apostasy, this trade in the blood of those who have fallen, this effrontery in sending men to die, in leading them wrongly, in order to present themselves afterwards on election posters ... our people know that history does not forgive this, that history will never forgive such a crime.
These gentlemen do not have to be destroyed; they just have to be left alone, because they will destroy themselves.
We know the environment we live in; the reactions, the temperaments, the characters of our peoples. And we know that the most shameful, the most abominable thing is to send men to their deaths in order, later on to solicit votes in the name of these betrayed dead. And here is the last dispatch, from yesterday, following the same line of thought, on which the “Mafia” and imperialism coincide:
“The American nations are today considering a request from Venezuela to denounce the Cuban regime of Prime Minister Fidel Castro as harmful to the cause of peaceful coexistence which the Soviet Union propounds.
“The question—which could explode in the rear guard of Castro’s Moscow-supported regime—would be an answer to the call of the Conference of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity to fight for the seizure of power through armed struggle.”
It says that the Associated Press obtained a copy ... They’re very clever. They get copies from everywhere. This is point four of that document that they say has eleven points, which they publish in this dispatch:
“To express to the extra-continental governments who actively support the present government of Cuba the serious concern of the OAS member-states, inasmuch as such support tends to encourage the interventionist and aggressive activities of the Cuban regime against the other countries of the Western Hemisphere, and, until these activities cease, the cause of peaceful and active coexistence among the nations of the world will suffer.
“To this effect, it is recommended to the governments of the OAS member-states that joint or separate steps be taken concerning those States that actively support the present Government of Cuba, in order to reiterate this expression of concern.”
Peaceful coexistence? And this terminology in the mouths of the OAS and its clique? This terminology in the mouths of the OAS and its clique, of sending—in a few words—groups or commissions of the OAS to visit the governments of the socialist States so that they will withdraw their aid to Cuba. It’s incredible! It’s incredible to be seeing and hearing these things! What do these gentlemen base this on? How can they be so shameless? How do they dare to do such a thing?
And point five:
“To ask the governments which support the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America to withdraw their support of that organization as well as of the Second Tricontinental Conference, scheduled to be held in Cairo in January 1968; and reiterate the categorical repudiation of that organization by the member-States of the OAS; repudiation of that organization, whose purposes—as shown by the resolutions of its first Conference which took place in Havana in January 1966—are to promote the separation of the peoples into groups divided by sectarianism and violence.
“To that effect, it recommends that the governments of the member-States approach the American States and the organizations supporting the Tricontinental Organization, individually or as a group, in order to insist on this proposal.”
Since the governments of certain States belong and others do not belong to the organizations, it follows that these gentlemen feel inspired to approach the State organizations that have been at the Tri-continental and say to them: “They are no good; repudiate those people; leave the Tricontinental.”
If this doesn’t smell of imperialism ordering the world around, then what does it mean, gentlemen? What is it? What have we come to? What nerve these gentlemen have! What illusions, and what shameless pretensions!
But at any rate, the machinations of the “Mafia” and imperialism are very evidently trying to isolate Cuba completely, to proclaim the total blockade of Cuba, so that not even a grain of birdseed will enter this country. They coincide in their despair; they are dreaming, they are raving, they imagine atrocious, dreadful things. And this country is isolated, it is absolutely alone. Poor people! If that hypothesis were possible—and it isn’t—they’d have to suffer the shock of seeing that forsaken country, without a grain of birdseed, living, resisting, working and marching onward.
This small country has not accumulated enough merits in the eyes of the world, has not accumulated enough merits with regard to the Revolution. And often we have imagined the conditions under which imperialism would impose a total blockade on this country, surround Cuba with its ships, and prevent everything from coming in. Would they crush the Revolution? I am asking the people: Would they crush the Revolution? (EXCLAMATIONS OF: “NO!”)
That is a most solid ‘No,” coming from the heart of a revolutionary people. (PROLONGED APPLAUSE) In short: if we were not prepared for everything—for everything—we could not call ourselves revolutionaries.
We do not deliberately promote conflict, problems, difficult situations.
That will never be the attitude of the Revolution. They’ll never see an irresponsible, absurd attitude adopted by the Revolution, no! But neither will they see the Revolution hesitating, the Revolution giving up; they’ll never see the Revolution yielding one iota of its principles!
For Patria o Muerte has many meanings. It means being revolutionaries until death, it means being a proud people until death! And the fact that we speak about Patria o Muerte does not mean that we have a sense of fatalism. It is the expression of a certain determination. When we say “death,” we mean that not only we would be dead, but many of our enemies would be dead, as well. Destroy our people? No matter how many of its soldiers Yankee imperialism sends here to die, it cannot destroy this country! (PROLONGED APPLAUSE)
These incidents, these attitudes are calling us all to order; they are calling us all to reason, to clarify things. These attitudes are the result not of development, but of the deterioration of revolutionary ideas and of revolutionary conscience. The resolutions of OLAS do not mean that everything is done. They do not mean that the struggle has ceased. The Tricontinental, also, had resolutions, and there were those who signed the resolutions and forgot all about them afterwards.
There must be struggle. We have to struggle. And the statement that Cuba wants to set itself up as an arbiter, a head, a leader is more than ridiculous. I am going to tell you what we really think. There is no reason why there should be leading people and much less leading men! It is leading ideas that are needed! (APPLAUSE) And revolutionary ideas will be the sole, true guide of our peoples. We tight for our ideas! We defend ideas! But to defend ideas does not mean to claim to lead anyone. They are our ideas and we defend them, these revolutionary ideas. But nothing could be more ridiculous, because the world does not need countries which lead, Parties that lead, or men who lead. The world, and above all our Latin American world, needs ideas that lead.
And the ideas will arise in the process. We know the process. At the beginning, when a few of us began to think about the idea of an armed struggle in our country and we began to struggle, very few believed in this possibility—very few. And for a long time there were very few of us. And afterwards, little by little, these ideas began to gain prestige, began to catch on, and the moment came when everybody believed them and the Revolution won.
How difficult it was to get the idea accepted that the struggle of the people against modern professional armies was possible in order to make a revolution! And when that was finally demonstrated, after the triumph of the Revolution, what happened? Everybody believed in this truth in such a way that the counterrevolutionaries believed that it was also a truth for them, and there followed the organization of counterrevolutionary guerrilla groups and counterrevolutionary gangs, and even the most garrulous park-bench counterrevolutionaries grasped the idea, joined a gang and took to the hills. Then it be came necessary to show them they were mistaken, that this was true for revolutionary action against the oligarchies, but that a counterrevolution of oligarchs, guerrilla warfare of oligarchs and of reactionaries against a social revolution, was impossible. And how difficult it was! Until we finally showed that this was true. We have had to point out two facts: that it is impossible for oligarchs to defend themselves against the people’s struggle; and that it is impossible for the people to be defeated by counterrevolutionary guerrilla gangs. And the CIA knows that. Do you know who are probably the most convinced of the effectiveness of armed revolutionary guerrilla warfare and of the oligarchies’ incapacity to resist the armed guerrilla struggle by the people? Do you know who? The CIA, Johnson, McNamara, Dean Rusk, Yankee imperialism. They are the most convinced.
And one asks oneself: How is it possible that these counterrevolutionaries let themselves be confused and deceived and dragged into armed counterrevolutionary struggle against the Revolution, if it is impossible to win? The reason, we are forced to admit, gentlemen, is that these counterrevolutionaries are more consistent than many who call themselves superrevolutionaries.
They are most consistent. They wrongly believe in that and let themselves be dragged in ... Naturally, afterwards they always say the same thing, that is a rule without exception: that they had been fooled, that they had been deceived, that they believed that the army, that the militia ... All that. We’ve heard it over and over again. We know it ...
And, of course, the ideas in our country have had to develop dialectically, in struggle, in clashes. And it will be the same in every country; no country will be free from this clash of ideas. These clashes of ideas exist even in Cuba. No, the fact that we have a revolutionary people does not mean that there are no antagonisms, no contradictions. We are in contradiction here with the counterrevolution and imperialism; and there are also contradictions with those who share these ideas of the reactionary gentlemen of the Venezuelan Party.
And in this country we also have our micro-faction—we can’t call it a faction because it has no volume, it has no size, it has no possibilities, it has nothing—it is a micro-faction that has existed. Where does that micro-faction come from? From the old resentful sectarians. For our Revolution has its history; our Revolution has its history. I said that at the beginning very few believed in it; afterwards many did.
Our Revolution went through that process; it passed through the process of sectarianism. The sectarians created serious problems for us, with their ferocious opportunism, with their inexorable policy of persecution against many people. They brought elements of corruption into the Revolution. And naturally, the Revolution, with its methods, its patience, made criticisms; it was splendid, it was generous with that sectarianism.
And not only that. We had to be careful to prevent criticism of sectarianism from creating neo-sectarianism in the ranks of the Revolution; and that was also prevented. But some sectarian elements held on, they swallowed their resentment, and each time they have had a chance they have expressed it. There are those who never believed in the Revolution except in an opportunistic way, trying to profit by the efforts of the revolutionary people, trying to climb high in a shameful way. They never believed in the Revolution, they haven’t learned in eight years, nor will they learn in ten years. They will never learn.
Let this be clearly understood: I am not referring to old Communists, for the worst expression of sectarianism, of the activities of those sectarians, has been in trying to involve the concept of old Communists with their pseudo-revolutionary attitudes.
It should be stated that the Revolution counts, and has always counted, on the support of the real Communists in this country.
But logically, during the time of sectarianism, many cowards who had deserted the ranks of the old Party turned up again. Opportunism, sectarianism, brings on all this: isolated from the masses, it tries to gain strength through favoritism. And then followed enrollment after enrollment and privileges. Of course, afterward, when the Revolution called a halt to sectarianism, it prevented expressions of sectarianism of another kind. That has always been our stand, that has always been the stand of the revolutionary leadership, which has always tried to overcome those problems in the style characterizing our Revolution, without falling into excesses of any kind, preferring to sin by omission rather than by excess.
And here we also have our micro-faction made up of old sectarians, which is not the same as old Communists. And I repeat: the greatest harm is that they have tried, although in vain, to instill their unhealthy ideas, their resentful ideas, into the old, true revolutionaries. They were the ones, for example, who thought at the time of the October Crisis that we should have let Yankee imperialism inspect us, search us from head to foot, let the planes fly over low, all of that! They have been systematically opposed to all the concepts of the Revolution, to the deepest, sincerest, purest revolutionary attitudes of our people, to our concepts of socialism, of communism, of everything.
That is, no one will be exempt. And this micro-faction has the same attitudes as that “Mafia”; this splinter group constitutes a new form of counterrevolutionary activity, in that it has the same goals as Alpha, as Faria, as Pompeyo and Company, as McNamara, Johnson and that gang.
Now the CIA has a new thesis: why is it interested in planning so many assassination attempts and other things? Its thesis now is that Castro has to be eliminated in order to check the Revolution. For imperialism is losing ground. At the beginning it wanted to do away with everything revolutionary; now, the more ground it loses, the more frightened it gets. Now its thesis is to make the line of the Revolution more moderate, to change that line, to move Cuba into a more moderate position —and in this, Alpha, Johnson, Faria, the CIA, the micro-faction and political “Mafia” all coincide. And they are harboring illusions.
Really, I’m not interested in buying an insurance policy. I don’t care a fig what they believe! I’m not interested in being indebted to our enemies for their ceasing to consider me their true enemy. I’m not interested in being indebted to our enemies for calling their actions to a halt. They are within their rights; they are within their rights. I do not intend to buy any insurance policy.
But I think it is necessary to tell you that the line of this Revolution is not the “Castro line”; it is the line of a people, it is the line of a leading group with a real revolutionary history. (LONG APPLAUSE) And it is the essential line of this Revolution!
The “Mafia” groups encourage one another; the international “Mafia” has been encouraged, greatly encouraged, by the idea that insurmountable antagonisms, insurmountable conflicts, may arise between the Cuban Revolution and the socialist camp. Really, the only thing we can say is that it is an honor to our Revolution that our enemies think about it so much; likewise, all Latin American revolutionaries must regard it as an honor that imperialism has given so much attention to the problem of OLAS. They were quick with threats; they postponed the OAS conference; they said they were going to do a lot of things, they were going to “clean the place up,” that this meeting could not take place. And the OLAS Conference has been held—true representation of a genuine revolutionary movement, whose ideas are solid because they are based on reality. OLAS is the interpreter of tomorrow’s history, interpreter of the future, for OLAS is the wave of the future (Tr. N.: olas means “waves” in Spanish), symbol of the revolutionary waves sweeping a continent of 250 million.
This continent is pregnant with revolution. Sooner or later, it will be born. Its birth may be more or less complicated, but it is inevitable. We do not have the slightest doubt of this. There will be victories, there will be reverses, there will be advances, there will be retreats. But the dawn of a new era, the victory of the peoples in the face of injustice, in the face of exploitation, in the face of oligarchies, in the face of imperialism—whatever the mistakes that men may make, whatever the mistaken ideas that may be obstacles on the road—is inevitable.
We have spoken to you with complete and absolute frankness. We know that true revolutionaries will always feel solidarity with Cuba. We know that no true revolutionary, that no true Communist on this continent, as among our people, will ever let himself be drawn into those positions which would lead him to an alliance with imperialism, which would make him go hand in hand with the imperialist masters against the Cuban Revolution and against the Latin American Revolution.
We do not condemn anyone a priori, we do not close the doors to anyone, we do not attack any persons en masse, lumped together; we express our ideas, we defend our ideas, we debate these ideas. And we have absolute confidence in the revolutionaries, in the true revolutionaries, in the true Communists. They will not fail the Revolution, just as our Revolution will never fail the revolutionary movement of Latin America. (APPLAUSE)
We do not know what awaits us, what vicissitudes, what dangers, what struggles. But we are prepared; each day we try to be better prepared; we will be better and better prepared. But one thing we can say; we are calm, we are secure, this little island will always be a revolutionary wall of granite and against it all conspiracies, all intrigues, all aggressions will be smashed to splinters. (APPLAUSE) And high upon this revolutionary wall there will fly forever a banner with the legend: Patria o Muerte! Venceremos! (OVATION)
Footnotes
(1) “Bichinche,” according to the testimony of one of the captured CIA agents, was the code name for the missing CIA agent Castro mentions. “Chinche” is Spanish for “bed bug,” hence “bichinche” would suggest “double bed bug.”
(2) Bartlett Deep is the area of ocean floor between the Caymen Islands and Jamaica off the southern coast of Cuba.
(3) Julio Irabarren Borges, a Venezuelan public official, was kidnapped March 1, 1967 and found killed March 3. The event teas used as a pretext for suspending constitutional rights and attacking the Cuban government. March 4, the Venezuelan Communist Party condemned the assassination as anarchistic and terrorist. March 6, Granma, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party central committee, carried a declaration by Venezuelan guerrilla leader Ellas Manuitt claiming responsibility for the assassination, as an “application of revolutionary justice.” Fidel Castro covered this whole history in his March 13 speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attack on the presidential palace, the full text of which is contained in a special issue of World Outlook, Vol.5 No.13. In the speech, Castro condemned the Venezuelan Communist Party for its opportunistic support of the government side, tantamount to demanding punishment of the guerrilla leaders.
(4) Carlos Lleras Restrepo, President of Colombia.
(5) Acción Democrática, the Venezuelan government party.
Castro Archive
Last updated on 25 July 2023
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1961.02.01 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
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<h3>
L'Unita Interview with Fidel Castro: <br>
The Nature of Cuban Socialism
</h3>
<h4>
By Arminio Savioli
</h4>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">First Published:</span> L'Unita, Rome, No. 32, 1 February 1961, pages 1-2.
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html">Castro Speech Database</a>
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
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<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>
Havana, January — "Do you really want to write that this is
socialist revolution? All right, write it. We are not afraid of words.
Do not say, however — as Americans do — that there is communism here,
because communism cannot be found even in Russia, after forty years from
the overtaking of power... National middle classes? Forget about them, my
boy, forget it entirely that national middle classes can still play a
revolutionary role in Latin America... Yes, I studied Marx's and Lenin's
works even before launching the attack against Cuartel Moncada, in 1953...
A society is divided into classes, there is a class struggle: these are
unquestionable truths... No, the Americans will not attack us. Imperialism
is dying, anyway. It can choose between suicide and natural death. If it
attacks, it means suicide, a fast and certain death. If it does not
attack, it can hope to last a little longer..."
</p>
<p>
I am reporting these sentences, which are the most significant
among those which were told me last night by Fidel Castro, during a
conversation that started at 0200 hours and ended at 0530 this morning.
The Cuban Prime Minister had promised me an interview on last 3 January
during a reception at the presidential palace. However — overburdened as
he is by a huge amount of political, military, and diplomatic work, and
intolerant as he is of any formality and detailed planning before
meetings, — he was unable, or decided not to keep his promise. Last
night's conversation — which was very extensive, open-minded, and cordial
— happened by change. This is how it happened.
</p>
<p>
At 0100 hours I was at the El Caribe night club, located on the
second floor of the Havana Libre Hotel. Fifteen jazzmen, six singers, and
ten ballerinas were doing everything they could to entertain eight
customers, including me. The waiters were yawning all the time. Boredom
was supreme. At 0130, the night club glass door was pushed wide open.
Five athletic silhouettes in uniform, with pistols on their waists and
small submachine guns on their shoulders, came in in complete silence (the
carpet eliminated any noise made by the boots), sat around a table and
ordered Coca Cola.
</p>
<p>
In spite of the darkness (all Cuban night clubs and bars are
almost completely dark), I recognized the heavy and slightly round
shoulders, the tall size, and the black, Renaissance-like beard of Fidel
Castro. I moved closer to him, and impolitely lit up a match under his
eyes. It was me.
</p>
<p class="quote">
Comandante — I said — you promised me an interview. Let us
set a date right away.
</p>
<p class="quote">
No chico (chico means boy, and Fidel calls everybody chico,
at least all those who are his friends). No, please, I hate dates. Sit
down, let me/rest a while, tomorrow we'll talk about it...
</p>
<p>
The bodyguards (a fat one in shirt-sleeves, a slim one with an
immobile Velasquez-type Spanish face, and a Negro with a sweet melancholy
lock) were smoking in silence. Another soldier watched the door. Waiters
and ballerinas pretended not to see anybody. The boring performance went
on. From time to time, Fidel Castro applauded politely. At 0200 o'clock
he got up. Then a singer shouted "Viva el caballo!" El caballo, the
horse, is Fidel Castro. This is the people's affectionate way of referring
to him because of his indomitable strength. The Premier went out, thanking
him with a smile. I followed him.
</p>
<p class="quote">
Comandante, what about the interview?
</p>
<p class="quote">
Chico, there are scores of journalists who are waiting...
</p>
<p class="quote">
Comandante, I have been waiting for a month.
</p>
<p class="quote">
Ah? Yes, you are the Italian Communist, the Togliattiano...
[from the name, Togliatti, of the Italian Communist Party Chief].
</p>
<p>
Fidel Castro smiles, opens his arms and raises his shoulders (a
usual, slightly timid gesture of his).
</p>
<p class="quote">
All right, let's go.
</p>
<p>
We go to the Hall of Ambassadors, and sit down at a conference
table under a huge chandelier of unbelievable bad taste. In a second, ten,
thirty, forty people are around us: mulatto girl singers with bit eyes
pained in black and blue, waiters, casino croupiers, Latin American
delegates...
</p>
<p>
Q. Comandante, what is the character of the Cuban revolution?
</p>
<p>
Fidel Castro laughs, lights a cigar, handles it with his small
tanned hands and dark fingernails.
</p>
<p>
A. You newspapermen are crazy for definitions and neat schemes...
You're impossibly dogmatic. We are not dogmatic... At any rate, you wish
to write that this is a socialist revolution, right? And write it, then...
Yes, not only did we destroy a tyrannical system. We also destroyed the
philoimperialistic bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucracy, the police,
and a mercenary army. We abolished privileges, annihilated the great
landowners, threw out foreign monopolies for good, nationalized almost
every industry, and collectivized the land. We are fighting now to
liquidate once and for all the exploitation of man over man, and to build a
completely new society, with a new class contents. The Americans (Cubans
say just that, los americanos, to mean the United States) the Americans and
the priests say that this is communism. We know very well that it is not.
At any rates, the word does not frighten us. They can say whatever they
wish. There is a song, which is popular among our peasants, that goes more
or less like this: "Bird of ill omen — of treason and cowardice — that
are throwing at my joy — the word: communism! — I know nothing about
these 'isms' — Yet, if such a great welfare conquest — which can be been
by my own eyes — is communism, then — you can even call me a communist!
</p>
<p>
Q. Comandante, what do you think about the Popular Socialist
Party, which is the party of Castro communists?
</p>
<p>
A. It is the only Cuban party which has consistently called for a
radical change of social structures and relations. It is true that at the
beginning the communists distrusted me and us rebels. Their distrust was
justified, their position was absolutely correct, both ideologically and
politically. They were right in being distrustful because we of the Sierra
who were conducting the guerilla were still full of petit bourgeois
prejudices and defects, in spite of our Marxist readings. Our ideas were
not clear, although we wished to destroy tyranny and privileges with all
out strength. Then, we met with each other, we understood one another, and
started to work together. The communists have shed much blood and heroism
for the Cuban cause. At present, we continue to work together in a loyal
and brotherly way.
</p>
<p>
Q. According to your opinion, following the latest developments
of the Cuban revolution, has the historical outlook for Latin America
changed? In other words, do you believe that the Cuban example can and
must be followed by other peoples on the Continent?
</p>
<p>
A. Yes, I think so.
</p>
<p>
Q. Do you mean to say, then, that other peoples should take up
arms in order to overturn governments that are either dictatorial or sold
out to the United States?
</p>
<p>
A. yes, we hope that others will follow our example. In
conclusion, we are all one people, we speak the same language, from the Rio
Grande to Petagonia, and have shared a common history, which can be summed
up in a few words: exploited as colonies first by Spain, and then by the
United States. All that is going to stop. There are countries — hold it,
don't write this down, because I don't want to create international
incidents — there are countries where revolutionary spirit, patriotism
and hatred against imperialism are much stronger, livelier, and more
profound than they were in Cuba three years ago. A revolution will break
out simultaneously in many Latin American countries, which will destroy
prejudices, regionalism and provincialism. Latin America will then become
just one, great, free, civil and independent nation. The Chinese were more
divided among themselves than we are, with different dialects and even
languages, and a multiplicity of nationalities. And yet, the Chinese
revolution is one and indivisible.
</p>
<p>
Q. Much is being said on "national ways" and on alliances... Do
you believe that national-minded middle classes can still play a positive
role in Latin American revolutions?
</p>
<p>
A. I don't believe so, I never did. It is true that there are
groups of industrial bourgeoisie which are against, at times very much
against, imperialism, because of competition. But these same groups hate
the workers even more, for class reasons. Between U.S. monopolies and
national bourgeoisies there can be temporary conflicts and skirmishes, not
a true all-out struggle. There is no historical incompatibility between
them. Our national bourgeoisie here at home is complacent and coward, and
always ready to concede to imperialism which is conclusion keeps it alive
and gives it help and arms to be used against social revolutions. National
bourgeoisie sleep, just as the Cuban bourgeoisie used to sleep. Privileged
classes can no longer participate in true revolutions, least of all lead
them, in our century. Believe me, this is the truth.
</p>
<p>
Q. What are, then, in your opinion, the forces which have the
historical task of organizing revolutions in Latin America?
</p>
<p>
A. The industrial and agricultural proletariat, the peasants, the
small bourgeoisie, above all the intellectuals. I do not wish to encourage
factionalism. Nor do I deny that some layers of the national bourgeoisie
can support, in part and temporarily, certain revolutionary events. I
grant that some children of the bourgeoisie can enter the ranks of the
people, participate in revolutions, and even direct them, as conscious
individuals, armed with a revolutionary theory (after all, even I am the
son of great landowners!). Yet, I am reasoning from a class viewpoint.
There is no longer anything good we can expect from the national
bourgeoisie as a class. The same goes for national armies. Revolutionary
and patriotic officers can be found, but professional and caste armies are
like a cancer that must be uprooted from Latin America. If the armies are
not destroyed, there can be no true governments of the people, and social
reforms cannot be enacted. At the first smell of an even modest reform,
the army intervenes and paralyzes everything. And when a corrupt
government is on its way out, and a revolution is in sight, there comes the
army again with a state coup and with a new government which is worse that
the one that preceded it. These are the lessons of our history.
</p>
<p>
Q. In some countries, however, the national bourgeoisie is very
strong. It will not be easy to overturn it, together with the landowners,
the generals, the oligarchic cliques, and the overlords...
</p>
<p>
A. Also in Cuba, the feudal-bourgeois group way very strong. It
controlled everything: the army, the press, the judiciary, the radio,
schools, universities, the police, everything. Yet, we won. Armed and
well organized workers, peasants and students: this is the only
revolutionary force of this Continent.
</p>
<p>
Q. Comandante, what is the socialist camp's contribution to the
Cuban revolution:
</p>
<p>
A. My boy, what would have happened to us had Khruschev not sent
us oil and brought our sugar? And had the Czechs not sent weapons to
defend ourselves, and machines, spare parts and technicians? We have here
two or three hundred Soviet technicians, great workers, correct, kind, true
brothers. The USSR is gambling on her peace, in spite of here twenty
million dead of the last war, is compromising her peace and prestige in
order to defend us, a small island. And it is doing this with not strings
attached, without asking for anything. And you ask me what I think of the
socialist camp? They are our friends.
</p>
<p>
Fidel's voice is hoarse, but the indomitable caballo resists,
jokes, laughs, speaks rapidly, and concisely, by using vernacular
expressions which makes his eloquence more down to earth, and so different
from the solemn and slow eloquence of his official speeches.
</p>
<p>
Now, is it the others' turn in asking questions. They ask him
personal questions. One says with a certain pomposity: "What do you fool
when you awake in the morning and think that you are the great leader of
all Latin America?"
</p>
<p>
Fidel blushes and shrugs his shoulders.
</p>
<p>
"I am a man like any other. Here, for instance, this chico right
here (he points his finger at me) wakes up worrying that he will not be
able to write a good article. True? So I wake up with the feat that I may
not be able to do well my work as a revolutionary... And with the added
pain of having to execute people... What do you think, that we like to
kill? We are compelled to do it. The terrorists place bombs, and shoot
out militiamen. Do you remember when they blew up the French ship? There
were one hundred dead. [On March 4, 1960, the <em> Coubre </em>, a French freighter loaded with Belgian arms and ammunition, was blown up in Havana Harbor] Yet, it is terrible to have to execute people
(suddenly, Fidel's eyes are filled with tears, and his voice is upset).
Believe me, it's a death struggle. It is either us or them. We have to
defend the revolution and make it go forward. We cannot show any pity. And
yet it's terrible..."
</p>
<p>
It is 0530 hours. Fidel gets up, shakes hand with everybody,
patiently and modestly signs postcards, pictures and books, and finds again
his beautiful smile. "Adios, companeros, muchas gracias!"
</p>
<p>
Then, turning to me, he says: "Got your interview, Italiano? Now
you won't be on the look-out for me..."
</p>
<p class="quote">
On the contrary, Comandante, I still have many questions to ask
of you.
</p>
<p class="quote">
All right, all right, we'll see...
</p>
<p>
Then he leaves, walking slowly and in a slightly bent way, with
his armed escort, and in a big black car disappears in the Havana streets,
silent and deserted, and swept by a cold wind from the north.
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../index.htm">Castro Internet Archive</a>
</p>
</body> |
Castro Internet Archive
L'Unita Interview with Fidel Castro:
The Nature of Cuban Socialism
By Arminio Savioli
First Published: L'Unita, Rome, No. 32, 1 February 1961, pages 1-2.
Source: Castro Speech Database
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
Havana, January — "Do you really want to write that this is
socialist revolution? All right, write it. We are not afraid of words.
Do not say, however — as Americans do — that there is communism here,
because communism cannot be found even in Russia, after forty years from
the overtaking of power... National middle classes? Forget about them, my
boy, forget it entirely that national middle classes can still play a
revolutionary role in Latin America... Yes, I studied Marx's and Lenin's
works even before launching the attack against Cuartel Moncada, in 1953...
A society is divided into classes, there is a class struggle: these are
unquestionable truths... No, the Americans will not attack us. Imperialism
is dying, anyway. It can choose between suicide and natural death. If it
attacks, it means suicide, a fast and certain death. If it does not
attack, it can hope to last a little longer..."
I am reporting these sentences, which are the most significant
among those which were told me last night by Fidel Castro, during a
conversation that started at 0200 hours and ended at 0530 this morning.
The Cuban Prime Minister had promised me an interview on last 3 January
during a reception at the presidential palace. However — overburdened as
he is by a huge amount of political, military, and diplomatic work, and
intolerant as he is of any formality and detailed planning before
meetings, — he was unable, or decided not to keep his promise. Last
night's conversation — which was very extensive, open-minded, and cordial
— happened by change. This is how it happened.
At 0100 hours I was at the El Caribe night club, located on the
second floor of the Havana Libre Hotel. Fifteen jazzmen, six singers, and
ten ballerinas were doing everything they could to entertain eight
customers, including me. The waiters were yawning all the time. Boredom
was supreme. At 0130, the night club glass door was pushed wide open.
Five athletic silhouettes in uniform, with pistols on their waists and
small submachine guns on their shoulders, came in in complete silence (the
carpet eliminated any noise made by the boots), sat around a table and
ordered Coca Cola.
In spite of the darkness (all Cuban night clubs and bars are
almost completely dark), I recognized the heavy and slightly round
shoulders, the tall size, and the black, Renaissance-like beard of Fidel
Castro. I moved closer to him, and impolitely lit up a match under his
eyes. It was me.
Comandante — I said — you promised me an interview. Let us
set a date right away.
No chico (chico means boy, and Fidel calls everybody chico,
at least all those who are his friends). No, please, I hate dates. Sit
down, let me/rest a while, tomorrow we'll talk about it...
The bodyguards (a fat one in shirt-sleeves, a slim one with an
immobile Velasquez-type Spanish face, and a Negro with a sweet melancholy
lock) were smoking in silence. Another soldier watched the door. Waiters
and ballerinas pretended not to see anybody. The boring performance went
on. From time to time, Fidel Castro applauded politely. At 0200 o'clock
he got up. Then a singer shouted "Viva el caballo!" El caballo, the
horse, is Fidel Castro. This is the people's affectionate way of referring
to him because of his indomitable strength. The Premier went out, thanking
him with a smile. I followed him.
Comandante, what about the interview?
Chico, there are scores of journalists who are waiting...
Comandante, I have been waiting for a month.
Ah? Yes, you are the Italian Communist, the Togliattiano...
[from the name, Togliatti, of the Italian Communist Party Chief].
Fidel Castro smiles, opens his arms and raises his shoulders (a
usual, slightly timid gesture of his).
All right, let's go.
We go to the Hall of Ambassadors, and sit down at a conference
table under a huge chandelier of unbelievable bad taste. In a second, ten,
thirty, forty people are around us: mulatto girl singers with bit eyes
pained in black and blue, waiters, casino croupiers, Latin American
delegates...
Q. Comandante, what is the character of the Cuban revolution?
Fidel Castro laughs, lights a cigar, handles it with his small
tanned hands and dark fingernails.
A. You newspapermen are crazy for definitions and neat schemes...
You're impossibly dogmatic. We are not dogmatic... At any rate, you wish
to write that this is a socialist revolution, right? And write it, then...
Yes, not only did we destroy a tyrannical system. We also destroyed the
philoimperialistic bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucracy, the police,
and a mercenary army. We abolished privileges, annihilated the great
landowners, threw out foreign monopolies for good, nationalized almost
every industry, and collectivized the land. We are fighting now to
liquidate once and for all the exploitation of man over man, and to build a
completely new society, with a new class contents. The Americans (Cubans
say just that, los americanos, to mean the United States) the Americans and
the priests say that this is communism. We know very well that it is not.
At any rates, the word does not frighten us. They can say whatever they
wish. There is a song, which is popular among our peasants, that goes more
or less like this: "Bird of ill omen — of treason and cowardice — that
are throwing at my joy — the word: communism! — I know nothing about
these 'isms' — Yet, if such a great welfare conquest — which can be been
by my own eyes — is communism, then — you can even call me a communist!
Q. Comandante, what do you think about the Popular Socialist
Party, which is the party of Castro communists?
A. It is the only Cuban party which has consistently called for a
radical change of social structures and relations. It is true that at the
beginning the communists distrusted me and us rebels. Their distrust was
justified, their position was absolutely correct, both ideologically and
politically. They were right in being distrustful because we of the Sierra
who were conducting the guerilla were still full of petit bourgeois
prejudices and defects, in spite of our Marxist readings. Our ideas were
not clear, although we wished to destroy tyranny and privileges with all
out strength. Then, we met with each other, we understood one another, and
started to work together. The communists have shed much blood and heroism
for the Cuban cause. At present, we continue to work together in a loyal
and brotherly way.
Q. According to your opinion, following the latest developments
of the Cuban revolution, has the historical outlook for Latin America
changed? In other words, do you believe that the Cuban example can and
must be followed by other peoples on the Continent?
A. Yes, I think so.
Q. Do you mean to say, then, that other peoples should take up
arms in order to overturn governments that are either dictatorial or sold
out to the United States?
A. yes, we hope that others will follow our example. In
conclusion, we are all one people, we speak the same language, from the Rio
Grande to Petagonia, and have shared a common history, which can be summed
up in a few words: exploited as colonies first by Spain, and then by the
United States. All that is going to stop. There are countries — hold it,
don't write this down, because I don't want to create international
incidents — there are countries where revolutionary spirit, patriotism
and hatred against imperialism are much stronger, livelier, and more
profound than they were in Cuba three years ago. A revolution will break
out simultaneously in many Latin American countries, which will destroy
prejudices, regionalism and provincialism. Latin America will then become
just one, great, free, civil and independent nation. The Chinese were more
divided among themselves than we are, with different dialects and even
languages, and a multiplicity of nationalities. And yet, the Chinese
revolution is one and indivisible.
Q. Much is being said on "national ways" and on alliances... Do
you believe that national-minded middle classes can still play a positive
role in Latin American revolutions?
A. I don't believe so, I never did. It is true that there are
groups of industrial bourgeoisie which are against, at times very much
against, imperialism, because of competition. But these same groups hate
the workers even more, for class reasons. Between U.S. monopolies and
national bourgeoisies there can be temporary conflicts and skirmishes, not
a true all-out struggle. There is no historical incompatibility between
them. Our national bourgeoisie here at home is complacent and coward, and
always ready to concede to imperialism which is conclusion keeps it alive
and gives it help and arms to be used against social revolutions. National
bourgeoisie sleep, just as the Cuban bourgeoisie used to sleep. Privileged
classes can no longer participate in true revolutions, least of all lead
them, in our century. Believe me, this is the truth.
Q. What are, then, in your opinion, the forces which have the
historical task of organizing revolutions in Latin America?
A. The industrial and agricultural proletariat, the peasants, the
small bourgeoisie, above all the intellectuals. I do not wish to encourage
factionalism. Nor do I deny that some layers of the national bourgeoisie
can support, in part and temporarily, certain revolutionary events. I
grant that some children of the bourgeoisie can enter the ranks of the
people, participate in revolutions, and even direct them, as conscious
individuals, armed with a revolutionary theory (after all, even I am the
son of great landowners!). Yet, I am reasoning from a class viewpoint.
There is no longer anything good we can expect from the national
bourgeoisie as a class. The same goes for national armies. Revolutionary
and patriotic officers can be found, but professional and caste armies are
like a cancer that must be uprooted from Latin America. If the armies are
not destroyed, there can be no true governments of the people, and social
reforms cannot be enacted. At the first smell of an even modest reform,
the army intervenes and paralyzes everything. And when a corrupt
government is on its way out, and a revolution is in sight, there comes the
army again with a state coup and with a new government which is worse that
the one that preceded it. These are the lessons of our history.
Q. In some countries, however, the national bourgeoisie is very
strong. It will not be easy to overturn it, together with the landowners,
the generals, the oligarchic cliques, and the overlords...
A. Also in Cuba, the feudal-bourgeois group way very strong. It
controlled everything: the army, the press, the judiciary, the radio,
schools, universities, the police, everything. Yet, we won. Armed and
well organized workers, peasants and students: this is the only
revolutionary force of this Continent.
Q. Comandante, what is the socialist camp's contribution to the
Cuban revolution:
A. My boy, what would have happened to us had Khruschev not sent
us oil and brought our sugar? And had the Czechs not sent weapons to
defend ourselves, and machines, spare parts and technicians? We have here
two or three hundred Soviet technicians, great workers, correct, kind, true
brothers. The USSR is gambling on her peace, in spite of here twenty
million dead of the last war, is compromising her peace and prestige in
order to defend us, a small island. And it is doing this with not strings
attached, without asking for anything. And you ask me what I think of the
socialist camp? They are our friends.
Fidel's voice is hoarse, but the indomitable caballo resists,
jokes, laughs, speaks rapidly, and concisely, by using vernacular
expressions which makes his eloquence more down to earth, and so different
from the solemn and slow eloquence of his official speeches.
Now, is it the others' turn in asking questions. They ask him
personal questions. One says with a certain pomposity: "What do you fool
when you awake in the morning and think that you are the great leader of
all Latin America?"
Fidel blushes and shrugs his shoulders.
"I am a man like any other. Here, for instance, this chico right
here (he points his finger at me) wakes up worrying that he will not be
able to write a good article. True? So I wake up with the feat that I may
not be able to do well my work as a revolutionary... And with the added
pain of having to execute people... What do you think, that we like to
kill? We are compelled to do it. The terrorists place bombs, and shoot
out militiamen. Do you remember when they blew up the French ship? There
were one hundred dead. [On March 4, 1960, the Coubre , a French freighter loaded with Belgian arms and ammunition, was blown up in Havana Harbor] Yet, it is terrible to have to execute people
(suddenly, Fidel's eyes are filled with tears, and his voice is upset).
Believe me, it's a death struggle. It is either us or them. We have to
defend the revolution and make it go forward. We cannot show any pity. And
yet it's terrible..."
It is 0530 hours. Fidel gets up, shakes hand with everybody,
patiently and modestly signs postcards, pictures and books, and finds again
his beautiful smile. "Adios, companeros, muchas gracias!"
Then, turning to me, he says: "Got your interview, Italiano? Now
you won't be on the look-out for me..."
On the contrary, Comandante, I still have many questions to ask
of you.
All right, all right, we'll see...
Then he leaves, walking slowly and in a slightly bent way, with
his armed escort, and in a big black car disappears in the Havana streets,
silent and deserted, and swept by a cold wind from the north.
Castro Internet Archive
|
./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.etol.newspape.socialist-viewpoint-us.novdec_12.novdec_12_21 | <body>
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<div class="feature">
<p class="storyheadline">‘Fidel Castro is Dying’ </p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro</p>
<p>A message to the first graduating class from the Victoria de Girón Medical Sciences Institute was enough to prompt imperialist propaganda to go into overdrive and news agencies to voraciously launch themselves after the lie. Not only that but, in their cables, they attributed the most unheard of nonsense to the patient.</p>
<p>The <span class="italics">ABC</span> newspaper in Spain reported that a Venezuelan doctor from an unknown location revealed that Castro had suffered a massive embolism in the right cerebral artery; “I can state that we are not going to see him again in public.” The alleged doctor who, if he is in fact a doctor would no doubt first abandon his own compatriots, described Castro’s health as “very close to a neural-vegetative state.”</p>
<p>While many persons in the world are deceived by information agencies which publish this nonsense—almost all in the hands of the privileged and rich—people believe less and less in them. Nobody likes to be deceived; even the most incorrigible liar expects to be told the truth. In April of 1961, everyone believed the information published in the news agencies that the mercenary invaders of Girón or Bay of Pigs, whatever one wants to call it, were approaching Havana, when in fact some of them were fruitlessly trying by boat to reach the yankee warships escorting them.</p>
<p>The peoples are learning and resistance is growing, faced with the crisis of capitalism, which is recurring with greater frequency; no lies, repression or new weapons will be able to prevent the collapse of a production system which is increasingly unequal and unjust.</p>
<p>A few days ago, very close to the 50th anniversary of the October Crisis, news agencies pointed to three guilty parties: Kennedy, having recently become the leader of the empire, Khrushchev and Castro. Cuba did not have anything to do with nuclear weapons, nor with the unnecessary slaughter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki perpetrated by the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, thus establishing the tyranny of nuclear weapons. Cuba was defending its right to independence and social justice.</p>
<p>When we accepted Soviet aid in weapons, oil, foodstuffs and other resources, it was to defend ourselves from yankee plans to invade our homeland, subjected to a dirty and bloody war which that capitalist country imposed on us from the very first months, which left thousands of Cubans dead and maimed.</p>
<p>When Khrushchev proposed the installation here of medium range missiles similar to those the United States had in Turkey—far closer to the USSR than Cuba to the United States—as a solidarity necessity, Cuba did not hesitate to agree to such a risk. Our conduct was ethically irreproachable. We will never apologize to anyone for what we did. The fact is that half-a-century has gone by, and here we still are with our heads held high.</p>
<p>I like to write and I am writing; I like to study and I am studying. There are many tasks in the area of knowledge. For example, never before have the sciences advanced at such an astounding speed.</p>
<p>I stopped publishing “Reflections” because it is definitely not my role to take up pages in our press, dedicated to other tasks, which the country requires.</p>
<p>Birds of ill omen! I don’t even remember what a headache is. As evidence of what liars they are, I present them with the photos, which accompany this article.</p>
<p>Fidel Castro Ruz</p>
<p>October 21, 2012</p>
<p>—<span class="italics">Monthly Review</span>, October 22, 2012</p>
<p><span class="italics"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/castro/2012/10/22/fidel-castro-is-dying-by-fidel-castro/" target="_blank">http://monthlyreview.org/castro/2012/10/22/fidel-castro-is-dying-by-fidel-castro/</a></span></p>
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Nov/Dec 2012 • Vol 12, No. 6
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‘Fidel Castro is Dying’
By Fidel Castro
A message to the first graduating class from the Victoria de Girón Medical Sciences Institute was enough to prompt imperialist propaganda to go into overdrive and news agencies to voraciously launch themselves after the lie. Not only that but, in their cables, they attributed the most unheard of nonsense to the patient.
The ABC newspaper in Spain reported that a Venezuelan doctor from an unknown location revealed that Castro had suffered a massive embolism in the right cerebral artery; “I can state that we are not going to see him again in public.” The alleged doctor who, if he is in fact a doctor would no doubt first abandon his own compatriots, described Castro’s health as “very close to a neural-vegetative state.”
While many persons in the world are deceived by information agencies which publish this nonsense—almost all in the hands of the privileged and rich—people believe less and less in them. Nobody likes to be deceived; even the most incorrigible liar expects to be told the truth. In April of 1961, everyone believed the information published in the news agencies that the mercenary invaders of Girón or Bay of Pigs, whatever one wants to call it, were approaching Havana, when in fact some of them were fruitlessly trying by boat to reach the yankee warships escorting them.
The peoples are learning and resistance is growing, faced with the crisis of capitalism, which is recurring with greater frequency; no lies, repression or new weapons will be able to prevent the collapse of a production system which is increasingly unequal and unjust.
A few days ago, very close to the 50th anniversary of the October Crisis, news agencies pointed to three guilty parties: Kennedy, having recently become the leader of the empire, Khrushchev and Castro. Cuba did not have anything to do with nuclear weapons, nor with the unnecessary slaughter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki perpetrated by the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, thus establishing the tyranny of nuclear weapons. Cuba was defending its right to independence and social justice.
When we accepted Soviet aid in weapons, oil, foodstuffs and other resources, it was to defend ourselves from yankee plans to invade our homeland, subjected to a dirty and bloody war which that capitalist country imposed on us from the very first months, which left thousands of Cubans dead and maimed.
When Khrushchev proposed the installation here of medium range missiles similar to those the United States had in Turkey—far closer to the USSR than Cuba to the United States—as a solidarity necessity, Cuba did not hesitate to agree to such a risk. Our conduct was ethically irreproachable. We will never apologize to anyone for what we did. The fact is that half-a-century has gone by, and here we still are with our heads held high.
I like to write and I am writing; I like to study and I am studying. There are many tasks in the area of knowledge. For example, never before have the sciences advanced at such an astounding speed.
I stopped publishing “Reflections” because it is definitely not my role to take up pages in our press, dedicated to other tasks, which the country requires.
Birds of ill omen! I don’t even remember what a headache is. As evidence of what liars they are, I present them with the photos, which accompany this article.
Fidel Castro Ruz
October 21, 2012
—Monthly Review, October 22, 2012
http://monthlyreview.org/castro/2012/10/22/fidel-castro-is-dying-by-fidel-castro/
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© 2001-2012. Socialist Viewpoint Publishing
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1953.07.26-july-1953 | <body><p class="title">
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr>
<h1>Speech by Fidel Castro Ruz before Leaving for the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> July 26, 1953
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> David Walters, 2019
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst"><strong>Freedom or Death!</strong></p>
<p class="fst">Comrades:</p>
<p>You may be victorious or defeated in a few hours, but hear this well, comrades! This movement will triumph anyway. If you are victorious tomorrow, Martí’s aspirations will became true sooner. If not, the gesture will serve to set an example for the Cuban people to take up the flag and keep going forward. The people will support us in the Eastern region and in the entire island. We the Youth of the Centennial of the Apostle, just as in 1868 and in 1895, here in the East we cry out for the first time: FREEDOM OR DEATH!</p>
<p>You already know the objective of the plan. Without any doubt, it is a dangerous plan and everyone coming with me tonight must do it of their own free will. You still have time to decide. Anyway some of you may have to stay behind because there are not enough weapons. Those who are determined to go, take a step forward. The slogan is not to kill, only as a last resort.</p>
<p class="fst">(Typed version-Council of State)<br>
(Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado)</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr>
<p class="footer"><a href="../../index.htm">Fidel Castro Internet Archive</a></p>
</body> |
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
Speech by Fidel Castro Ruz before Leaving for the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953
Delivered: July 26, 1953
Source: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
Markup: David Walters, 2019
Online Version: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
Freedom or Death!
Comrades:
You may be victorious or defeated in a few hours, but hear this well, comrades! This movement will triumph anyway. If you are victorious tomorrow, Martí’s aspirations will became true sooner. If not, the gesture will serve to set an example for the Cuban people to take up the flag and keep going forward. The people will support us in the Eastern region and in the entire island. We the Youth of the Centennial of the Apostle, just as in 1868 and in 1895, here in the East we cry out for the first time: FREEDOM OR DEATH!
You already know the objective of the plan. Without any doubt, it is a dangerous plan and everyone coming with me tonight must do it of their own free will. You still have time to decide. Anyway some of you may have to stay behind because there are not enough weapons. Those who are determined to go, take a step forward. The slogan is not to kill, only as a last resort.
(Typed version-Council of State)
(Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado)
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
|
./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.etol.newspape.socialist-viewpoint-us.nov_04.nov_04_31 | <body bgcolor="#ffffff" link="#00008b" alink="#1e90ff" vlink="blue">
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<div align="center">
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</p><p align="center"><font size="5" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>The
New US Aggression Against Cuba</strong></font>
</p><p align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>A
Speech by Fidel Castro</strong></font>
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<div align="center">
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<p>Dear Fellow Cubans:
</p><p> On 10 May this year a cable from the BBC took note of a fine imposed
by the U.S. Federal Reserve on a Swiss bank for an alleged violation
of U.S. sanctions against Libya, Iran, Yugoslavia and Cuba. They accused
the Swiss bank of accepting U.S. dollar bills from or of sending them
to countries that were subject to United States government sanctions.
</p><p> A few days later, the NOTIMEX agency reported on statements made
by that crook Otto Reich in which, in reference to the measures recently
adopted by the United States government, he said that some were already
being implemented and that others were about to be implemented. Concretely,
he said in a threatening tone:
</p><p> “Many of them need regulations and some other bureaucratic
things to be put in place and government lawyers and other officials
are working on that and many more are on the way to being implemented.”
</p><p> On that same day, an article full of slanders and blatant lies appeared
in the <em>Miami El Nuevo Herald</em> under the headline “Cuba
Laundered $39 billion in Swiss Bank.” The article, not only
twisted everything to do with the normal trading operation that Cuba
sustains with foreign countries but also urged U.S. authorities to
take new action against our country, saying that:
</p><p> “We know that the Federal Reserve is autonomous and evidently
has no interest in applying the Helms Burton Act but the OFAC (Office
for Foreign Assets Control) is part of the executive branch and it
can demand a better explanation of the Cuban part of the USB’s
(Union of Swiss Banks) business which was elegantly swept under the
carpet by the Senate Banking Committee. Perhaps Cuban-American members
of Congress can convene hearings in the relevant House of Representatives’
committees so that light may be shed on this colossal scandal.”
</p><p> On June 8, the Cuban government, true to its habit of keeping our
people duly informed, published an explanatory note in the newspaper
<em>Granma</em>, which gave a detailed account of the origin of our
operations with foreign banks, through which the dollars in cash received
in Cuba are deposited in bank accounts so that we can settle the debts
derived from our foreign trade.
</p><p> Among other things, the Note read:
</p><p> “We have seen how in the last few days the ultra-right wing
of the Bush administration is taking steps clearly aimed at blocking
the income our country obtains from tourism and other services, at
reducing to zero the possibility that Cubans living in the United
States can send remittances to their relatives in Cuba by using the
most evil, devious, hypocritical method imaginable: simply by preventing
Cuba from making deposits in foreign banks of the dollars it obtains
from sales in hard currency shops, from activities related to tourism
and from other trade services. Thus, Cuba would not be able to use
these dollars to buy medicines or food or to import the stock needed
for the very shops where those who receive remittances from family
members living in the United States buy those products.”
</p><p> The United States government is using this sleazy method to put
pressure on foreign banks to not accept money from Cuba, the origin
of which is completely legal and honest. Moreover, it is encouraging
the Miami terrorist mob’s papers to publish the repulsive slander
that this money could even come from activities against which our
country wages a fierce battle, activities such as money laundering
and drug trafficking.”
</p><p> The note published in <em>Granma</em> reads on:
</p><p> “These actions are even more outrageous if one takes in account
the fact that the only reason tourists who visit Cuba must use cash
is that the Yankee blockade does not allow them to use credit cards
or travelers’ checks issued by U.S. banks and other financial
institutions that control this market. Moreover, they have granted
only one U.S. Company a license for processing remittances sent through
banks to Cuba so that Cubans living abroad need to go through an ordeal
to send economic assistance to their relatives and, in the end, most
of them are forced to send remittances in cash. These same persecutions
and threats, which hang permanently over those who send money from
the United States to their relatives in Cuba, means that they often
prefer to send cash, so there is no paper trail that could make them
liable to persecution from U.S. authorities and to the violent behavior
of the terrorists who live in Miami.
</p><p> The <em>Granma</em> note continues: “One cannot conceive of
a more cynical, evil formula: the United States forces remittances
and payment made by visitors to Cuba to be made in cash and now, with
this crude pressure, is trying to prevent Cuba from using this cash
to pay for its imports.”
</p><p> The note ends as follows:
</p><p> “All of these tricks are doomed to failure. With its usual
steadfastness and serenity, our heroic people will struggle against
and will be victorious over a powerful, but despicable, cowardly enemy
which is truly contemptible for its genocidal policies and its Nazi-fascist
methods.”
</p><p> We can add to this the fact that, in the seven-year period referred
to, Cuba has imported more than $30.9 billion worth of goods, so that
the $3.9 billion which they say were sent to the Swiss bank in question
and transferred to other beneficiaries, make up approximately 13 per
cent of the total amount of payments Cuba made in this period to meet
the cost of its imports, a substantial part of which are food, fuel
or medical necessities or raw material for its production, other intermediate
products for its new industries, articles sold in the chain of hard
currency outlets, etc.
</p><p> The next day, another article in <em>El Nuevo Herald</em> returned
to the subject and, with the utmost disregard for the truth, suggested
that the money deposited in the aforementioned Swiss Bank was in the
name of “unknown entities or persons in banks that were not
named,” when, in every single case, that money was used for
normal trade transactions with internationally recognized trading
and industrial companies. The Herald hysterically demanded:
</p><p> “We must learn what those names are. Florida congresspersons
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart must put pressure
so that people learn where this money went and where it came from.”
</p><p> On June 10, in a campaign obviously aimed at drawing international
attention to this matter, <em>El Nuevo Herald</em> once again said
that the Miami mob, through its best-known spokespersons, congresspersons
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart, was requesting
the federal government to investigate the origin and destination of
the aforementioned money. In this article <em>El Nuevo Herald</em>
reported that:
</p><p> “The United States must investigate the origin and destination
of some $3.9 billion that the Cuban government “laundered”
through an international program of the Federal Reserve, Florida congresspersons
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart said yesterday
in letters sent to the Federal Reserve and to the House’s Finance
Committee. “‘We are extremely puzzled as to how such a
serious violation of federal law by the USB (Union of Swiss Banks)
could have taken place’, the two wrote to the Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan. `We hope that the investigations can answer
the many questions we have about this matter.”
</p><p> In a press conference on June 22, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the big,
bad she-wolf, hysterically as usual, said:
</p><p> “I am shocked that a bank which was given the extremely important
responsibility of distributing the new American money should violate
our country’s regulations concerning a state identified as a
terrorist state.”
</p><p> And she made this demand in a most impertinent manner, saying that:
</p><p> “I am waiting for the result of the investigation. if the
USB (Union of Swiss Banks) is found guilty of violating U.S. restrictions
on transactions involving terrorist states such as Cuba, it is most
important that those responsible be fined appropriately.”
</p><p> On June 30, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, continuing with her campaign, addressed
a letter to the chairman of the House of Representatives’ International
Relations Committee demanding an investigation into the matter.
</p><p> Obviously, the aim of intimidating any bank which might have financial
relations with Cuba could clearly be seen behind this campaign and
blatant pressuring, the purpose being to prevent them from accepting
dollar bills which our country must send abroad at regular intervals
for the reasons explained above.
</p><p> At this point, it began to become clearly apparent that many banks
were being subject to pressure by U.S. authorities to try to block
those remittances and create an extremely critical situation for our
country.
</p><p> In these circumstances, we began to analyze all possible variants
in order to prevent any further criminal action by the United States
government from causing serious economic damage to our country by
impeding the use of the dollars in cash collected in Cuba for trade
purposes.
</p><p> While Cuba calmly and thoughtfully analyzed all its alternatives,
the lies and slanders about this subject continued to rain down.
</p><p> On June 3, <em>El Nuevo Herald</em> launched an attack on the Inter-American
Development bank and ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America
and the Caribbean) accusing them of inflating its estimates of family
remittances from the United States to Cuba, which, according to them,
would justify the legal origin of the $3.9 billion.
</p><p> With reference to this point they said: “This whole business
is what the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) and ECLAC are covering
up with their inflated figures on remittances, which they say come
from the Cuban-American community. This must be clarified. What is
more, this money laundering scandal shows that Cuba is a “safe
haven for money from terrorists and embezzlers.” This must be
exposed.
</p><p> On July 23, with the crass sensationalism characteristic of the
Miami riffraff, <em>El Nuevo Herald</em> published an article entitled
“Links to Cuban Money Sought in United States” which,
among other things reported that:
</p><p> “The United States has started a judicial investigation to
see if there are possible links between ‘U.S. bodies and persons’
and the $3.9 billion that Cuba infiltrated into the international
banking system using a Federal Reserve program. “The operation
was carried out through the Union of Swiss Banks (USB). “‘At
this time there is an investigation opened by the South East New York
district attorney’s office,’ Juan Zárate, the U.S.
Treasury undersecretary responsible for the fight against financing
terrorism said during a visit to <em>El Nuevo Herald</em> made yesterday.”
</p><p> Apparently the lies which were published every day in Miami on this
affair were so many and so outrageous that, in spite of the proverbial
discretion of Swiss banks, the banking institution involved in this
case felt itself obliged to publicly deny any accusation of money
laundering and a cable from <em>Agence France Press</em> published
in Zurich on July 25 said the following:</p></div>
</div>
<blockquote>
<div align="center">
<div align="left"> L’ Union des Banques Suisses (Union of Swiss
Banks, USB) the biggest Swiss bank denied having laundered money for
Cuba, as three members of the House of Representatives who are demanding
an investigation, have alleged.</div>
</div>
<div align="center">
<div align="left"> “A USB spokesperson in Zurich said that he
had no knowledge of a new investigation into the bank and denied all
accusations of money laundering.” “According to the USB
spokesperson, the U.S. Federal Reserve (FED) and the Swiss Federal
Banking Commission (FBC) have already looked into the case.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div align="center">
<div align="left">
<p> Statements like these did not prevent the Miami mobsters and the
newspapers from continuing with their lying campaign and on September
16 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen came out with more statements:
</p><p> “‘This is starting and it’s growing’, the
congresswoman remarked to <em>El Nuevo Herald</em>. She added: ‘There
are at least three persons who were involved in this money manipulation
and other banks are being looked into.’”
</p><p> Note the overt threat when she says “others banks are being
looked into.”
</p><p> On that day, I asked the Central Bank of Cuba to speed up work on
this matter and I said that they should concentrate on analyzing the
possibility of using the convertible peso instead of the dollar, so
that the country would not be vulnerable to the new pressure from
the mob and the United States government.
</p><p> Perhaps you remember that on September 28, during the second <em>Round
Table</em> on the subject of electricity, in my comments, I alerted
the public to these problems without giving many details. On this
point my actual words were:
</p><p> “We have an enemy that has been trying to destroy us with
any and every possible method for more than 45 years so that even
the money paid by a tourist cannot circulate through the world because,
since they are the owners of the most important currency and owners
of the world, they forbid the dollar to be used in any Cuban transaction.”
</p><p> And with regard to the measures we were working on, I hinted in
the <em>Round Table</em> on September 29 which was about energy that:</p></div>
</div>
<blockquote>
<div align="center">
<div align="left"> “They are making a big effort, and we are also
thinking about how we are going to defend ourselves, because we will
not be helpless. We are not going to tell them anything, let them
do whatever they want, let them hassle us, let them try to knock us
down, but any measure they take to blockade and then accuse the country
of laundering money—as if it were money earned from gambling,
from smuggling, from money laundering—they will not go unanswered.
It is our money earned with the sweat of our people, honorably. Then
they take measures so that their dollar can’t circulate, but
we shall see, we shall surely find a response to such measures, and
they will fail as they have always failed.”</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div align="center">
<div align="left">
<p> As recently as October 9, exactly 11 days before my accidental fall,
a speech given by Daniel W. Fisk, undersecretary for Western Hemispheric
Affairs at the U.S. State Department to the Cuban American veterans’
Association came to our attention. There, he bragged with boundless
cynicism about the alleged success of the criminal measures taken
by the Bush government against our country. The things he said included:
</p></div>
</div>
<blockquote>
<div align="center">
<div align="left"> Yet another pillar in our strategy is to identify
long-ignored revenue streams for the Castro regime and then move to
degrade them. For example, tourism, which has replaced sugar exports
as Cuba’s main foreign exchange earner.… As many of you
are aware, to continue to reduce the flow of resources that enable
Castro to keep the Cuban people repressed, we have tightened our policy
on remittances, gift parcels and family travel to the Island. These
avenues had generated an estimated $1.5 billion in funds and goods
sent to Cuba from those living outside the Island…we have deprived
the Castro regime of over $100 million in hard currency. That’s
$100 million less Castro has to repress his people and keep his grip
on power.</div>
</div>
<div align="center">
<div align="left"> Moreover, by projecting these numbers over a full
calendar year, we estimate a net annual loss to the regime of some
$375 million—and that’s just from reduced travel. When
factoring in the decline in all revenue flows, we estimate we will
have denied the regime at lest half a billion dollars that Castro
would have used to support his security and intelligence apparatus.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div align="center">
<div align="left">
<p> Among all that imperial arrogance and bragging, there was one specific
paragraph which needs careful consideration. Mr. Fisk said:
</p><p> “We have established a Cuban Assets Targeting Group staffed
by law enforcement officials from several agencies to investigate
and identify new ways hard currency moves in and out of Cuba; and
to stop it.”
</p><p> The relationship between the Miami mob’s dirty campaign on
the subject of alleged money laundering and this new, criminal action
by the United States government when it created a group to track down
hard currency flows into and out of Cuba couldn’t be clearer.
Thus the actions to protect our country’s interests against
this new attack had to be taken without any more delay. I immediately
instructed the Cuban Central Bank to prepare a timetable for having
the convertible peso circulate instead of the U.S. dollar as soon
as possible.
</p><p> That timetable has been drawn up and now we are in a position to
officially announce, that, as from November 8 the convertible peso
will begin to circulate instead of the U.S. dollar throughout Cuban
national territory.
</p><p> The first thing we need to make clear is that this does not mean
that the possession of U.S. dollars or any other freely convertible
currency will be penalized. The population can hold any amount of
dollars it wishes and this will not be a breach of the law. What this
means is that, as from the date mentioned earlier, November 8, the
U.S. dollar will not be accepted in our hard currency dealings; these
will only accept convertible pesos.
</p><p> As from November 8, any person in possession of freely convertible
currency, be that person Cuban or a visiting foreigner, will first
have to obtain convertible pesos in the Exchange Bureaus (CADECAS),
in bank chapters -and even in a large number of the very shops that
make sales in hard currency, who will also be offering this service—in
order to make purchases in the chain of outlets which use hard currency.
</p><p> As an additional element, it has been decided that as from that
date, November 8, anyone who wishes to obtain convertible pesos for
U.S. dollars in cash will have to pay a 10 percent tax. This tax will
serve as compensation for the risks and costs which derive from using
U.S. dollars in the Cuban economy as a result of the aforementioned
United States government measures which are trying to prevent our
country from using U.S. dollars in cash for normal trade purposes.
</p><p> So that not the slightest confusion exist, it is very important
to repeat that this tax will begin on November 8, so that those with
U.S. dollars have two weeks to exercise their right to exchange them
for convertible pesos at par and with no tax whatsoever; or if they
wish, they can also by goods in dollars before that date, as is done
now. If anyone has a U.S.-dollar-account in the bank, they can deposit
more dollars and withdraw them later in convertible pesos at par or
in U.S. dollars whenever they want them—also tax exempt. If
a person has no bank account, he or she can open one and deposit his
or her U.S. dollars in the bank and withdraw them whenever they wish
in the future as convertible pesos at par or in the same dollars,
also tax exempt.
</p><p> Those who usually receive money from abroad have two weeks from
today to coordinate, if they so wish, with their relatives so that
in the future the latter do not send their cash remittances in U.S.
dollars but in other currencies, such as the Euro, the Canadian dollar,
the pound sterling or the Swiss franc, which will not be subject to
the 10 percent tax.
</p><p> This means that we have looked for formulas, which ensure that no
one is harmed by this measure, since enough time has been allowed
for people to make the arrangements they wish with their U.S. dollars
in cash in order not to have to pay the required tax.
</p><p> I repeat, this is not a measure aimed at obtaining dollars by imposing
a tax, it is a response to a real threat posed by a criminal United
States government measure and a flagrant campaign to intimidate foreign
banks.
</p><p> I also want to stress that all U.S. dollars, convertible pesos or
any other currency bank accounts are totally guaranteed, and, as I
already said, no tax will be imposed on money deposited in banks,
no matter when clients wish to withdraw it, there being no time limits
of any kind.
</p><p> Perhaps, in order to make this easier to understand, Randy could
read the Central Bank resolution which will make this measure effective
and after that we can offer some clarification.
</p><p> As I already explained, the first thing the resolution establishes
is that the population can posses, as they can now and with no kind
of restriction, any amount of U.S. dollars or any other convertible
currency. Between tomorrow and November 7, everything will be as it
is now and U.S. dollars will continue to be accepted in the shops;
those who wish to change their U.S. dollars for convertible pesos
will not be charged the ten-percent tax and the exchange will be at
par. People may open new dollar bank accounts with no restrictions
of whatsoever or can make new deposits in existing accounts, and they
can withdraw these funds whenever they wish in the future in convertible
pesos at par or in U.S. dollars, the client may choose, without being
subject to any tax.
</p><p> The obligation to pay in convertible pesos in all establishments
that use dollars will come into effect on November 8, and the 10 percent
tax will be applied to any transaction that involves exchanging physical
U.S. dollars for convertible pesos. Remember, that this is not a change
in the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the convertible peso,
which continues to stand at par, but it is simply a tax on purchasing
convertible pesos with U.S. dollars in cash. If you have a convertible
peso, you can buy a U.S. dollar; but if you have a U.S. dollar and
want to buy a convertible peso, you will have to pay the 10 percent
tax, so that you will only receive 90 cents of a convertible peso
for your U.S. dollar.
</p><p> I remind you again that there is no kind of tax for the other currencies
that are accepted in the country—euros, Swiss francs, pounds
sterling and Canadian dollars. The ten percent tax will be applied
to U.S. dollars in cash because of the situation created by the United
States government’s new measures to asphyxiate our country.
</p><p> In order to make it easier to exchange money, this can be done as
from October 28 in the Exchange Bureaus (CADECAS), bank chapters,
hotels and shops, in the ways already read from the resolution.
</p><p> The resolution also sets forth that transactions made with credit
or debit cards will have no tax applied to them, no matter in which
currency they are made, including the U.S. dollar. The explanation
is that, when a transaction is made with a credit or debit card, no
movement of actual cash is involved, so that the costs and risks associated
with handling U.S. dollar bills do not exist.
</p><p> Some measures have been taken affecting the banking system to make
currency exchange easier. For example, banks will open on Saturday
and Sunday November 6 and 7, respectively, and from October 28 to
November 5 and from 12 noon onwards at that time, they will be totally
dedicated to currency exchange operations and during those hours will
not process any other transactions, in order to give more time to
the public, so that no one who wishes to exchange U.S. dollars for
convertible pesos before the 8th, [will not have to] pay the tax….
</p><p> Of course, we also want to make it clear, following the same rationale,
that those who wish to buy Cuban pesos at the CADECAS with U.S. dollars
will also be subject to the 10 percent tax, since we would be accepting
U.S. dollars in cash.
</p><p> I also want to make it clear that this measure will not prevent
nor hinder in any way whatsoever the guarantees issued by Cuban financial
institutions to foreign institutions, nor the availability of funds
in freely convertible currency to honor their obligations. This measure
is only domestic in scope and we are only regulating matters, which
pertain to the circulation of money within Cuban territory and protecting
ourselves from an external economic attack.</p>
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November
2004
• Vol 4, No. 10 •
The
New US Aggression Against Cuba
A
Speech by Fidel Castro
Dear Fellow Cubans:
On 10 May this year a cable from the BBC took note of a fine imposed
by the U.S. Federal Reserve on a Swiss bank for an alleged violation
of U.S. sanctions against Libya, Iran, Yugoslavia and Cuba. They accused
the Swiss bank of accepting U.S. dollar bills from or of sending them
to countries that were subject to United States government sanctions.
A few days later, the NOTIMEX agency reported on statements made
by that crook Otto Reich in which, in reference to the measures recently
adopted by the United States government, he said that some were already
being implemented and that others were about to be implemented. Concretely,
he said in a threatening tone:
“Many of them need regulations and some other bureaucratic
things to be put in place and government lawyers and other officials
are working on that and many more are on the way to being implemented.”
On that same day, an article full of slanders and blatant lies appeared
in the Miami El Nuevo Herald under the headline “Cuba
Laundered $39 billion in Swiss Bank.” The article, not only
twisted everything to do with the normal trading operation that Cuba
sustains with foreign countries but also urged U.S. authorities to
take new action against our country, saying that:
“We know that the Federal Reserve is autonomous and evidently
has no interest in applying the Helms Burton Act but the OFAC (Office
for Foreign Assets Control) is part of the executive branch and it
can demand a better explanation of the Cuban part of the USB’s
(Union of Swiss Banks) business which was elegantly swept under the
carpet by the Senate Banking Committee. Perhaps Cuban-American members
of Congress can convene hearings in the relevant House of Representatives’
committees so that light may be shed on this colossal scandal.”
On June 8, the Cuban government, true to its habit of keeping our
people duly informed, published an explanatory note in the newspaper
Granma, which gave a detailed account of the origin of our
operations with foreign banks, through which the dollars in cash received
in Cuba are deposited in bank accounts so that we can settle the debts
derived from our foreign trade.
Among other things, the Note read:
“We have seen how in the last few days the ultra-right wing
of the Bush administration is taking steps clearly aimed at blocking
the income our country obtains from tourism and other services, at
reducing to zero the possibility that Cubans living in the United
States can send remittances to their relatives in Cuba by using the
most evil, devious, hypocritical method imaginable: simply by preventing
Cuba from making deposits in foreign banks of the dollars it obtains
from sales in hard currency shops, from activities related to tourism
and from other trade services. Thus, Cuba would not be able to use
these dollars to buy medicines or food or to import the stock needed
for the very shops where those who receive remittances from family
members living in the United States buy those products.”
The United States government is using this sleazy method to put
pressure on foreign banks to not accept money from Cuba, the origin
of which is completely legal and honest. Moreover, it is encouraging
the Miami terrorist mob’s papers to publish the repulsive slander
that this money could even come from activities against which our
country wages a fierce battle, activities such as money laundering
and drug trafficking.”
The note published in Granma reads on:
“These actions are even more outrageous if one takes in account
the fact that the only reason tourists who visit Cuba must use cash
is that the Yankee blockade does not allow them to use credit cards
or travelers’ checks issued by U.S. banks and other financial
institutions that control this market. Moreover, they have granted
only one U.S. Company a license for processing remittances sent through
banks to Cuba so that Cubans living abroad need to go through an ordeal
to send economic assistance to their relatives and, in the end, most
of them are forced to send remittances in cash. These same persecutions
and threats, which hang permanently over those who send money from
the United States to their relatives in Cuba, means that they often
prefer to send cash, so there is no paper trail that could make them
liable to persecution from U.S. authorities and to the violent behavior
of the terrorists who live in Miami.
The Granma note continues: “One cannot conceive of
a more cynical, evil formula: the United States forces remittances
and payment made by visitors to Cuba to be made in cash and now, with
this crude pressure, is trying to prevent Cuba from using this cash
to pay for its imports.”
The note ends as follows:
“All of these tricks are doomed to failure. With its usual
steadfastness and serenity, our heroic people will struggle against
and will be victorious over a powerful, but despicable, cowardly enemy
which is truly contemptible for its genocidal policies and its Nazi-fascist
methods.”
We can add to this the fact that, in the seven-year period referred
to, Cuba has imported more than $30.9 billion worth of goods, so that
the $3.9 billion which they say were sent to the Swiss bank in question
and transferred to other beneficiaries, make up approximately 13 per
cent of the total amount of payments Cuba made in this period to meet
the cost of its imports, a substantial part of which are food, fuel
or medical necessities or raw material for its production, other intermediate
products for its new industries, articles sold in the chain of hard
currency outlets, etc.
The next day, another article in El Nuevo Herald returned
to the subject and, with the utmost disregard for the truth, suggested
that the money deposited in the aforementioned Swiss Bank was in the
name of “unknown entities or persons in banks that were not
named,” when, in every single case, that money was used for
normal trade transactions with internationally recognized trading
and industrial companies. The Herald hysterically demanded:
“We must learn what those names are. Florida congresspersons
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart must put pressure
so that people learn where this money went and where it came from.”
On June 10, in a campaign obviously aimed at drawing international
attention to this matter, El Nuevo Herald once again said
that the Miami mob, through its best-known spokespersons, congresspersons
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart, was requesting
the federal government to investigate the origin and destination of
the aforementioned money. In this article El Nuevo Herald
reported that:
“The United States must investigate the origin and destination
of some $3.9 billion that the Cuban government “laundered”
through an international program of the Federal Reserve, Florida congresspersons
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart said yesterday
in letters sent to the Federal Reserve and to the House’s Finance
Committee. “‘We are extremely puzzled as to how such a
serious violation of federal law by the USB (Union of Swiss Banks)
could have taken place’, the two wrote to the Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan. `We hope that the investigations can answer
the many questions we have about this matter.”
In a press conference on June 22, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the big,
bad she-wolf, hysterically as usual, said:
“I am shocked that a bank which was given the extremely important
responsibility of distributing the new American money should violate
our country’s regulations concerning a state identified as a
terrorist state.”
And she made this demand in a most impertinent manner, saying that:
“I am waiting for the result of the investigation. if the
USB (Union of Swiss Banks) is found guilty of violating U.S. restrictions
on transactions involving terrorist states such as Cuba, it is most
important that those responsible be fined appropriately.”
On June 30, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, continuing with her campaign, addressed
a letter to the chairman of the House of Representatives’ International
Relations Committee demanding an investigation into the matter.
Obviously, the aim of intimidating any bank which might have financial
relations with Cuba could clearly be seen behind this campaign and
blatant pressuring, the purpose being to prevent them from accepting
dollar bills which our country must send abroad at regular intervals
for the reasons explained above.
At this point, it began to become clearly apparent that many banks
were being subject to pressure by U.S. authorities to try to block
those remittances and create an extremely critical situation for our
country.
In these circumstances, we began to analyze all possible variants
in order to prevent any further criminal action by the United States
government from causing serious economic damage to our country by
impeding the use of the dollars in cash collected in Cuba for trade
purposes.
While Cuba calmly and thoughtfully analyzed all its alternatives,
the lies and slanders about this subject continued to rain down.
On June 3, El Nuevo Herald launched an attack on the Inter-American
Development bank and ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America
and the Caribbean) accusing them of inflating its estimates of family
remittances from the United States to Cuba, which, according to them,
would justify the legal origin of the $3.9 billion.
With reference to this point they said: “This whole business
is what the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) and ECLAC are covering
up with their inflated figures on remittances, which they say come
from the Cuban-American community. This must be clarified. What is
more, this money laundering scandal shows that Cuba is a “safe
haven for money from terrorists and embezzlers.” This must be
exposed.
On July 23, with the crass sensationalism characteristic of the
Miami riffraff, El Nuevo Herald published an article entitled
“Links to Cuban Money Sought in United States” which,
among other things reported that:
“The United States has started a judicial investigation to
see if there are possible links between ‘U.S. bodies and persons’
and the $3.9 billion that Cuba infiltrated into the international
banking system using a Federal Reserve program. “The operation
was carried out through the Union of Swiss Banks (USB). “‘At
this time there is an investigation opened by the South East New York
district attorney’s office,’ Juan Zárate, the U.S.
Treasury undersecretary responsible for the fight against financing
terrorism said during a visit to El Nuevo Herald made yesterday.”
Apparently the lies which were published every day in Miami on this
affair were so many and so outrageous that, in spite of the proverbial
discretion of Swiss banks, the banking institution involved in this
case felt itself obliged to publicly deny any accusation of money
laundering and a cable from Agence France Press published
in Zurich on July 25 said the following:
L’ Union des Banques Suisses (Union of Swiss
Banks, USB) the biggest Swiss bank denied having laundered money for
Cuba, as three members of the House of Representatives who are demanding
an investigation, have alleged.
“A USB spokesperson in Zurich said that he
had no knowledge of a new investigation into the bank and denied all
accusations of money laundering.” “According to the USB
spokesperson, the U.S. Federal Reserve (FED) and the Swiss Federal
Banking Commission (FBC) have already looked into the case.
Statements like these did not prevent the Miami mobsters and the
newspapers from continuing with their lying campaign and on September
16 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen came out with more statements:
“‘This is starting and it’s growing’, the
congresswoman remarked to El Nuevo Herald. She added: ‘There
are at least three persons who were involved in this money manipulation
and other banks are being looked into.’”
Note the overt threat when she says “others banks are being
looked into.”
On that day, I asked the Central Bank of Cuba to speed up work on
this matter and I said that they should concentrate on analyzing the
possibility of using the convertible peso instead of the dollar, so
that the country would not be vulnerable to the new pressure from
the mob and the United States government.
Perhaps you remember that on September 28, during the second Round
Table on the subject of electricity, in my comments, I alerted
the public to these problems without giving many details. On this
point my actual words were:
“We have an enemy that has been trying to destroy us with
any and every possible method for more than 45 years so that even
the money paid by a tourist cannot circulate through the world because,
since they are the owners of the most important currency and owners
of the world, they forbid the dollar to be used in any Cuban transaction.”
And with regard to the measures we were working on, I hinted in
the Round Table on September 29 which was about energy that:
“They are making a big effort, and we are also
thinking about how we are going to defend ourselves, because we will
not be helpless. We are not going to tell them anything, let them
do whatever they want, let them hassle us, let them try to knock us
down, but any measure they take to blockade and then accuse the country
of laundering money—as if it were money earned from gambling,
from smuggling, from money laundering—they will not go unanswered.
It is our money earned with the sweat of our people, honorably. Then
they take measures so that their dollar can’t circulate, but
we shall see, we shall surely find a response to such measures, and
they will fail as they have always failed.”
As recently as October 9, exactly 11 days before my accidental fall,
a speech given by Daniel W. Fisk, undersecretary for Western Hemispheric
Affairs at the U.S. State Department to the Cuban American veterans’
Association came to our attention. There, he bragged with boundless
cynicism about the alleged success of the criminal measures taken
by the Bush government against our country. The things he said included:
Yet another pillar in our strategy is to identify
long-ignored revenue streams for the Castro regime and then move to
degrade them. For example, tourism, which has replaced sugar exports
as Cuba’s main foreign exchange earner.… As many of you
are aware, to continue to reduce the flow of resources that enable
Castro to keep the Cuban people repressed, we have tightened our policy
on remittances, gift parcels and family travel to the Island. These
avenues had generated an estimated $1.5 billion in funds and goods
sent to Cuba from those living outside the Island…we have deprived
the Castro regime of over $100 million in hard currency. That’s
$100 million less Castro has to repress his people and keep his grip
on power.
Moreover, by projecting these numbers over a full
calendar year, we estimate a net annual loss to the regime of some
$375 million—and that’s just from reduced travel. When
factoring in the decline in all revenue flows, we estimate we will
have denied the regime at lest half a billion dollars that Castro
would have used to support his security and intelligence apparatus.
Among all that imperial arrogance and bragging, there was one specific
paragraph which needs careful consideration. Mr. Fisk said:
“We have established a Cuban Assets Targeting Group staffed
by law enforcement officials from several agencies to investigate
and identify new ways hard currency moves in and out of Cuba; and
to stop it.”
The relationship between the Miami mob’s dirty campaign on
the subject of alleged money laundering and this new, criminal action
by the United States government when it created a group to track down
hard currency flows into and out of Cuba couldn’t be clearer.
Thus the actions to protect our country’s interests against
this new attack had to be taken without any more delay. I immediately
instructed the Cuban Central Bank to prepare a timetable for having
the convertible peso circulate instead of the U.S. dollar as soon
as possible.
That timetable has been drawn up and now we are in a position to
officially announce, that, as from November 8 the convertible peso
will begin to circulate instead of the U.S. dollar throughout Cuban
national territory.
The first thing we need to make clear is that this does not mean
that the possession of U.S. dollars or any other freely convertible
currency will be penalized. The population can hold any amount of
dollars it wishes and this will not be a breach of the law. What this
means is that, as from the date mentioned earlier, November 8, the
U.S. dollar will not be accepted in our hard currency dealings; these
will only accept convertible pesos.
As from November 8, any person in possession of freely convertible
currency, be that person Cuban or a visiting foreigner, will first
have to obtain convertible pesos in the Exchange Bureaus (CADECAS),
in bank chapters -and even in a large number of the very shops that
make sales in hard currency, who will also be offering this service—in
order to make purchases in the chain of outlets which use hard currency.
As an additional element, it has been decided that as from that
date, November 8, anyone who wishes to obtain convertible pesos for
U.S. dollars in cash will have to pay a 10 percent tax. This tax will
serve as compensation for the risks and costs which derive from using
U.S. dollars in the Cuban economy as a result of the aforementioned
United States government measures which are trying to prevent our
country from using U.S. dollars in cash for normal trade purposes.
So that not the slightest confusion exist, it is very important
to repeat that this tax will begin on November 8, so that those with
U.S. dollars have two weeks to exercise their right to exchange them
for convertible pesos at par and with no tax whatsoever; or if they
wish, they can also by goods in dollars before that date, as is done
now. If anyone has a U.S.-dollar-account in the bank, they can deposit
more dollars and withdraw them later in convertible pesos at par or
in U.S. dollars whenever they want them—also tax exempt. If
a person has no bank account, he or she can open one and deposit his
or her U.S. dollars in the bank and withdraw them whenever they wish
in the future as convertible pesos at par or in the same dollars,
also tax exempt.
Those who usually receive money from abroad have two weeks from
today to coordinate, if they so wish, with their relatives so that
in the future the latter do not send their cash remittances in U.S.
dollars but in other currencies, such as the Euro, the Canadian dollar,
the pound sterling or the Swiss franc, which will not be subject to
the 10 percent tax.
This means that we have looked for formulas, which ensure that no
one is harmed by this measure, since enough time has been allowed
for people to make the arrangements they wish with their U.S. dollars
in cash in order not to have to pay the required tax.
I repeat, this is not a measure aimed at obtaining dollars by imposing
a tax, it is a response to a real threat posed by a criminal United
States government measure and a flagrant campaign to intimidate foreign
banks.
I also want to stress that all U.S. dollars, convertible pesos or
any other currency bank accounts are totally guaranteed, and, as I
already said, no tax will be imposed on money deposited in banks,
no matter when clients wish to withdraw it, there being no time limits
of any kind.
Perhaps, in order to make this easier to understand, Randy could
read the Central Bank resolution which will make this measure effective
and after that we can offer some clarification.
As I already explained, the first thing the resolution establishes
is that the population can posses, as they can now and with no kind
of restriction, any amount of U.S. dollars or any other convertible
currency. Between tomorrow and November 7, everything will be as it
is now and U.S. dollars will continue to be accepted in the shops;
those who wish to change their U.S. dollars for convertible pesos
will not be charged the ten-percent tax and the exchange will be at
par. People may open new dollar bank accounts with no restrictions
of whatsoever or can make new deposits in existing accounts, and they
can withdraw these funds whenever they wish in the future in convertible
pesos at par or in U.S. dollars, the client may choose, without being
subject to any tax.
The obligation to pay in convertible pesos in all establishments
that use dollars will come into effect on November 8, and the 10 percent
tax will be applied to any transaction that involves exchanging physical
U.S. dollars for convertible pesos. Remember, that this is not a change
in the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the convertible peso,
which continues to stand at par, but it is simply a tax on purchasing
convertible pesos with U.S. dollars in cash. If you have a convertible
peso, you can buy a U.S. dollar; but if you have a U.S. dollar and
want to buy a convertible peso, you will have to pay the 10 percent
tax, so that you will only receive 90 cents of a convertible peso
for your U.S. dollar.
I remind you again that there is no kind of tax for the other currencies
that are accepted in the country—euros, Swiss francs, pounds
sterling and Canadian dollars. The ten percent tax will be applied
to U.S. dollars in cash because of the situation created by the United
States government’s new measures to asphyxiate our country.
In order to make it easier to exchange money, this can be done as
from October 28 in the Exchange Bureaus (CADECAS), bank chapters,
hotels and shops, in the ways already read from the resolution.
The resolution also sets forth that transactions made with credit
or debit cards will have no tax applied to them, no matter in which
currency they are made, including the U.S. dollar. The explanation
is that, when a transaction is made with a credit or debit card, no
movement of actual cash is involved, so that the costs and risks associated
with handling U.S. dollar bills do not exist.
Some measures have been taken affecting the banking system to make
currency exchange easier. For example, banks will open on Saturday
and Sunday November 6 and 7, respectively, and from October 28 to
November 5 and from 12 noon onwards at that time, they will be totally
dedicated to currency exchange operations and during those hours will
not process any other transactions, in order to give more time to
the public, so that no one who wishes to exchange U.S. dollars for
convertible pesos before the 8th, [will not have to] pay the tax….
Of course, we also want to make it clear, following the same rationale,
that those who wish to buy Cuban pesos at the CADECAS with U.S. dollars
will also be subject to the 10 percent tax, since we would be accepting
U.S. dollars in cash.
I also want to make it clear that this measure will not prevent
nor hinder in any way whatsoever the guarantees issued by Cuban financial
institutions to foreign institutions, nor the availability of funds
in freely convertible currency to honor their obligations. This measure
is only domestic in scope and we are only regulating matters, which
pertain to the circulation of money within Cuban territory and protecting
ourselves from an external economic attack.
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1961.05.01 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h3>
May Day Celebration (1961): Cuba is a Socialist Nation
</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> May 1, 1961
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> Havana International Service in Spanish 0215 GMT 2 May 1961--E
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>
Distinguished visitors from Latin American and the entire world,
combatants of the armed forces of the people, workers: We have had 14 and a
half hours of parading. (Chanting) I think that only a people imbued with
infinite enthusiasm is capable of enduring such tests. Nevertheless, I will
try to be as brief as possible (Chanting)
</p>
<p>
We are very happy over this attitude by the people. I believe that today we
should outline the course to follow, analyze a little what we have done up
to now, and see at what point in our history we are, and what we have
ahead. We have all had a chance to see the parade. Maybe we who are on this
platform could appreciate it better than you in the square, maybe still
better than those who have paraded. This <a href="../../../../../../glossary/events/m/a.htm#may-day">May Day</a> tells a lot, it tells a
lot about what the revolution has been so far, what it has achieved so far;
but maybe it does not tell us as much as it tells our visitors.
</p>
<p>
We have been witnesses, all of us Cubans, of every step taken by the
revolution, so maybe we cannot realize how much we have advanced as fully
as can be understood by visitors, particularly those visitors from Latin
America, where today they are still living in a world very similar to the
one we lived in yesterday. It is as if they were suddenly transported from
the past to the present of our revolution, with all its extraordinary
progress as compared to the past. We do not intend tonight to stress the
merit of what we have done. We merely want to locate ourselves at the point
where we are at the present.
</p>
<p>
We had a chance today to see genuine results of the revolution on this May
Day, so different from the May Days of the past. Formerly that date was the
occasion for each sector of labor to set forth its demands, its aspirations
for improvement, to men who were deaf to the working class interests, men
who could not even accede to those basic demands because they did not
govern for the people, for the workers, for the peasants, or for the
humble; they governed solely for the privileged, the dominant economic
interests. Doing anything for the people would have meant harming the
interests that they represented, and so they could not accede to any just
demand from the people. The May Day parades of those days marked the
complaints and protest of the workers.
</p>
<p>
How different today's parade has been! How different even from the first
parades after the revolution triumphed. Today's parade shows us how much we
have advanced. The workers (Light applause) now do not have to submit
themselves to those trials; the workers now do not have to implore deaf
executives; the workers now are not subject to the domination of any
exploiting class; the workers no longer live in a country run by men
serving exploiting interests. The workers know now that everything the
revolution does, everything the government does or can do, has one goal:
helping the workers, helping the people. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Otherwise, there would be no explanation for the spontaneous sentiment of
support for the Revolutionary Government, that overflowing good will that
every man and woman has expressed today. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Fruits of the revolution are seen everywhere. The first to parade today
were the children of the Camilo Cienfuegos school center. We saw the
Pioneers parade by with the smile of hope, confidence, and affection. We
saw the young rebels parade by. We saw the women of the federation go by.
We saw children from numberless schools created by the revolution parade.
We saw 1,000 students from the 600 sugar-cane cooperatives who are studying
artificial insemination here in the capital. We saw young people, humble
people, parade with their uniforms of the school center where they are
learning to be diplomatic representatives of the future.
</p>
<p>
We saw the pupils of the schools for young peasants of the Zapata swamps
parade by, the swamps that the mercenaries chose for their attack. We saw
thousands and thousands of peasants who are studying in the capital and who
come from distant mountain areas or from cane cooperatives or from people's
farms parade. We saw the young girls studying for children's club work. And
here everyone of these groups staged scenes that are worthy of praise. And
we saw also what is going into the rural areas. The volunteer teachers
paraded and also representatives of the 100,000 young people on their way
to the interior to wipe out illiteracy. Where does this strength come from?
It comes from the people, and it is devoted to the people in return.
</p>
<p>
These young people are truly children of the people. When we saw them today
writing Long Live Our Socialist Revolution with their formations we
thought how hard it would have been to have all this without a revolution;
how hard for any of these children from the mountains to have paraded here
today, or any of these young people from the rural areas to have a chance
to get to know the capital, or to study in any of these schools, or to
parade with the joy and pride shown here today, or to march with the faith
in the future shown today, because schools, university professions, art,
culture, and honors were never for the children of poor families, in town
or in the country. They were never for the peasant of the remote rural
areas; they were never for the poor young fellow, black or white, or our
countryside and cities.
</p>
<p>
Art, culture, university professions, opportunities, honors, elegant
clothes were only the privilege of a small minority, a minority represented
today with that grace and humor shown by some worker federations in their
imitations of the rich. It is astounding to think that today more than
20,000 athletes paraded, if one remembers that we are just beginning. And
this, without touching on the most marvelous thing we had a chance to see
today, that is, this armed nation, this united people, which came to attend
these ceremonies.
</p>
<p>
How would it have been possible without a revolution? How can one compare
this present with the past? How can one avoid emotion on seeing endless
lines of workers, athletes, and militiamen parade by? At times all went to
intermingled. After all, workers, athletes, and soldiers are the same
thing. Anybody could understand why our people must emerge victorious in
any battle. We noted the many women in the ranks of the federations. The
men were in the artillery units, mortar units, ack-ack units, or militia
battalions. The women were the wives and sisters and sweethearts of the
militiamen who marched by later in the battalions and those young men of
the basic secondary schools, the Pioneers who paraded by were their sons.
</p>
<p>
And so one can see today the unity of the humble people who are fighting
for the poor. Workers of every profession; manual laborers and intellectual
workers; all were marching together, the writer, artist, actor, announcer,
doctor, nurse, clinical employer. Marching together in great numbers under
the flag of the national education workers union were the teachers,
employees of the Education Ministry. (Applause).
</p>
<p>
Today we have had a chance to see everything worthwhile in our country,
everything produced in our country. We have understood better than ever
that there are two classes of citizens, or rather there were two classes of
citizens; the citizens who worked, produced, and created and the citizens
who lived without working or producing. These latter were parasites.
(Applause)
</p>
<p>
In this young, fervent nation, who did not parade today, who could not
parade here today? The parasites! Today the working people paraded,
everybody who produces with his hands or his brain. I do not mean that
workers who did not have a chance to parade were parasites, because they
had to take care of their children, or were ill, or even just did not want
to parade today. I am speaking only of those who were not represented here
because they could not be represented by those who produce.
</p>
<p>
This is the people, the true people. He who lives as a parasite does not
belong to the people. Only the invalid, the sick, the old, and children are
entitled to live without working and are entitled to have us work for them
and to care for them, and from the work of everyone they can be benefited.
For the children, the old, the invalid, and the sick, we have the duty to
work, all of us. (Applause) What no moral law will be able to justify ever
is for the people to work for the parasites. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Those who paraded today were the working people who will never resign
themselves to work for the parasites. (Applause) In this manner our
national community has understood what the revolution is, and has
understood clearly what the meaning of a revolution is in which a nation
gets rid of parasites from the outside and those inside. (Applause) We
remember that because of the nationalization of the largest industries of
the nation, and just before the U.S. factories were nationalized, some
asked: Was not this factory a Cuban factory? Why should a Cuban factory be
nationalized? Well, such a factory did not belong to the people, it
belonged to some man. Now they belong to the nation. (Applause)
</p>
<h4>
New Concept of Motherland
</h4>
<p>
It was the custom to talk about the motherland; there were some who had a
wrong idea of the motherland. There was the motherland of the privileged
ones, of a man who has a large house, while the others live in hovels. What
motherland did you have in mind, sir? A motherland where a small group
lives from the work of others? A motherland of the barefoot child who is
asking for alms on the street? What kind of motherland is this? A
motherland which belonged to a small minority? Or the motherland of today?
The motherland of today where we have won the right to direct our destiny,
where we have learned to decide our destiny, a motherland which will be,
now and forever--as Marti wanted it--for the well-being of everyone and not
a motherland for few!
</p>
<p>
The motherland will be a place where such injustices will be eliminated,
now we can have the real concept of motherland. We are willing to die for a
motherland which belongs to all Cubans. (Applause) That is why the
exploiting classes could not have the real concept of motherland. For them,
the motherland was a privilege by which they took advantage of the work of
others. That is why when a Yankee monopolist (shouts of Out!) when a
leader, or a member of the U.S. ruling circles, talks about the motherland,
they refer to the motherland of monopolies, of the large banking
monopolies. And when they talk about the motherland, they are thinking
about sending the Negroes of the South, the workers, to be killed to defend
the motherland of monopolies. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
What kind of morality and what reason and what right do they have to make a
Negro die to defend the monopolies, the factories, and the mines of the
dominating classes? What right have they to send the Puerto Rican of Latin
blood, of Latin tradition, to the battlefields to defend the policy of
large capitalists and monopolies? This concept of motherland and this
danger to their security to which they refer is the danger of the
monopolies. You can understand what concept they have of morality, law, and
rights, to send the Negroes of the South and the Puerto Ricans to the
battlefields to fight for them. This is their concept of motherland. That
is why the people receive the real concept of motherland only when the
interests of the privileged classes are liquidated, and when a nation with
its wealth becomes a nation for everyone, the wealth for everyone, and
opportunity and happiness for everybody.
</p>
<p>
This happiness now belongs to those youths who paraded, and the families
who know that their children can have a school, receive scholarships, and
go to the best universities abroad, a privilege enjoyed only by the richest
families. And today any family, regardless of how poor, has the opportunity
to send its children to schools in the nation and abroad. Any family knows
that thanks to the revolution its children have all the opportunities which
formerly belonged only to the rich. A nation which works for itself,
whether it be in defense of or in achieving wealth can achieve what the
minorities cannot. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
The revolution can win the people with its fervor and enthusiasm. The
revolution can utilize all intelligence and creative spirit and take
everyone toward a path of well-being and progress. The people who spent 15
hours here today are the same people who formerly could not spend even one
hour at a public rally, or who were paid or forced to go to a public rally.
These enthusiastic people are the discouraged people of yesterday. The
difference is that yesterday they worked for others and today they work for
themselves. (Applause)
</p>
<h4>
Fight Against Imperialism
</h4>
<p>
Think of the men who died in recent battles and decide whether a single
drop of blood was worth being lost to defend the past. Consider that these
workers and youths, the children of workers, fell 10 or 12 days ago to
defend what we have seen today. They fell to defend this enthusiasm, this
hope, and this joy of today. That is why when today we saw a happy face or
a smile full of hope, we though that each smile of today was a flower over
the grave of the fallen hero.
</p>
<p>
It was like giving thanks to those who gave their lives in the battle
against imperialism. Without them we would not have had the May Day parade.
We would not have been able to see what passed in front of us today. What
would have happened to our antiaircraft batteries, what would have happened
to our cannons and our soldiers who marched here? What would have happened
to our workers, wives, sisters, and factories? What would have happened if
imperialism had established even a single beachhead on our territory? What
would have happened if the imperialists succeeded in taking one part of our
territory, and from there, with Yankee bombs, machineguns, and planes,
would have launched an armed attack against us.
</p>
<p>
Let us not talk about what would have happened if the imperialist had won.
There is no sadder picture than a defeated revolution. The uprising of
slaves in Rome <span class="inote"> [Spartacus uprising]</span> and their defeat should give us an idea of what a defeated
revolution is. The <a href="../../../../../../glossary/orgs/p/a.htm#paris-commune">Commune of Paris</a> should give us an idea of what a
defeated revolution is. History tells us that a defeated revolution must
pay the victors in blood. The victors not only collect the past debts but
also try to collect future debts. But under certain circumstances, it is
impossible to crush a revolution.
</p>
<p>
It has never happened in history that a revolutionary people who have
really taken over power have been defeated. What would have happened this
May Day if imperialism had won its game? That is why we were thinking of
all we owed those who fell. That is why we were thinking that every smile
today was like a tribute to those who made possible this hopeful day. The
blood that was shed was the blood of workers and peasants, the blood of
humble sons of the people, not blood of land- owners, millionaires,
thieves, criminals, or exploiters. The blood shed was the blood of the
exploited of yesterday, the free men of today. The blood shed was humble,
honest, working, creative blood--the blood of patriots not the blood of
mercenaries. It was the blood of militiamen who voluntarily came to defend
the revolution. It was spontaneously offered blood to defend an ideal.
</p>
<p>
This ideal was not the ideal with which the Yankees inclucated their
mercenaries. It was not an ideal of parrots. It was not an ideal of the
tongue, but of the heart. It was not an ideal of those who came to recover
their lost wealth. It was not the ideal of those who always lived at the
expense of others. It was not the ideal of those who sell their soul for
the gold of a powerful empire.
</p>
<p>
It was the ideal of the peasant who does not want to lose his land, the
Negro who does not want discrimination, the humble, those who never lived
from the sweat of others, and of those who never robbed from others, an
ideal that a poor man of the people can feel.
</p>
<p>
The revolution is all for him because he was mistreated and humilated. He
defends the revolution because the revolution is his life. Before
sacrificing this he prefers to lose his life. He knows that he may fall,
but never in vain, and that the cause for which he falls will serve for
millions of his brothers.
</p>
<p>
Humble, honest blood was shed by the fatherland in the struggle against the
mercenaires of imperialism. But what blood, what men did imperialism send
here to establish that beachhead, to bleed our revolution dry, to destroy
our achievements, to burn our cane? It was to be a war of destruction.
</p>
<h4>
U.S. Planned Aggression
</h4>
<p>
We can tell the people right here that at the same instant that three of
our airports were being bombed, the Yankee agencies were telling the world
that our airports had been attacked by planes from our own airforce. They
coldbloodedly bombed our nation and told the world that the bombing was
done by Cuban pilots with Cuban planes. This was done with planes on which
they painted our insignia.
</p>
<p>
If nothing else, this deed should be enough to demonstrate how miserable
are the actions of imperialism. It should be enough for us to realize what
Yankee imperialism really is and what its press and its government is. It
is possible that millions have heard only the report that Cuban planes
piloted by defectors had attacked our airports. This was planned, because
the imperialist studied the plan to bomb and the way to deceive the entire
world. This should serve to keep us alert and to understand that the
imperialists are capable of the most monstrous lies to cover the most
monstrous deeds.
</p>
<p>
U.S. leaders publicly confessed their participation--without any
explanation which they owe the world for the statements made by Kennedy
that they would never would participate in aggression--and save us the
effort of finding proof. Who were those who fought against those workers
and peasants? We will explain.
</p>
<h4>
Privileged Class Mercenaries
</h4>
<p>
Of the first mercenaries captured, we can say that, without counting ships'
crews, there were nearly 1,000 prisoners. Among that thousand we have the
following: About 800 came from well-to-do families. They had a total of
27,556 caballerias of land, 9,666 houses, 70 industries, 10 sugar centrals,
2 banks, and 5 mines. So 800 out of 1,000 had all that. Moreover, many
belonged to exclusive clubs and many were former soldiers for Batista.
</p>
<p>
Remember, during the prisoner interrogation that I asked who was a cane
cutter and only one said that he had cut cane once. That is the social
composition of the invaders.
</p>
<p>
We are sure that if we ask all those here how many owned sugar centrals,
there would not be even one. If we asked the combatants who died, members
of the milita or soldiers of the revolutionary army, if we compared the
wealth of those who fell, surely there would be no land, no banks, no sugar
centrals, or the like listed. And some of the shameless invaders said that
they came to fight for ideals!
</p>
<p>
The invaders came to fight for free enterprise! Imagine, at this time for
an idiot to come here to say that he fought for free enterprise! As if this
people did not know what free enterprise is! It was slums, unemployment,
begging. One hundred thousand families working the land to turn over 25
percent of their production to shareholders who never saw that land. How
can they come to speak about free enterprise to a country where there was
unemployment, illiteracy and where one had to beg to get into a hospital?
The people knew that free enterprise was social clubs, and bathing in mud
for the children because the beaches were fenced. The beaches were for the
wealthy. One could never dream of going to Varadero, for that was for a few
wealthy families. One could never dream of having a son study law. That was
only for the privileged. A worker could never dream that his son
might become a teacher or lawyer. Ninety percent of the sons of workers, or
at least 75 percent of those who lived in places were there were no
secondary schools had no chance to send their children to study. Not even
in a dream could the daughters of the peasants dance here or parade here.
</p>
<p>
How can one of those who never knew labor say that he came to shed the
people's blood to defend free enterprise? (Chanting, applause) And they did
not stop at their fathers' mention of free enterprise; they included the United
Fruit and the electrical company. Those were not free enterprises; they
were monopolies. So when they came here they were not fighting for free
enterprise; they came for the monopolies, for monopolies do not want free
enterprise. They were defending the monopolistic interests of the Yankees
here and abroad. How can they tell the Cuban people that they were coming
to defend free enterprise?
</p>
<p>
They also say that they came to defend the 1940 constitution. How curious!
That constitution was being torn into bits with the complicity of the U.S.
Embassy, the reactionary church, and the politicians. So it is cynical for
this group of privileged and Batista-type tyrants, criminals, and torturers
to tell the people that they were coming to defend the constitution of
1940, which has been advanced by the Revolutionary Government.
</p>
<p>
Who represented you in the congress? The corrupt politicians, the rich, the
big landholders. There was only a handful of workers in congress. They were
always in the minority. The means of disseminating ideas were all in the
hands of the rich. It was hard to learn about the horrible conditions
because of that. The death of thousands of children for lack of medicine
and doctors did not bother the free enterprise men. There was never an
agrarian reform law because congress was in the hands of the rich. Even
though the constitution said the land must be returned to the Cubans, and
even though in 1959 the 1940 constitution had been in effect 19 years, no
law took land from the Yankee monopolies, which had huge expanses.
</p>
<p>
Up to 200,000 hectares were held by some foreign monopolies. The
constitution which said that land must be returned to the Cubans and the
law setting a limit on landholdings were never enforced. There were
teachers without employment, while children lacked schooling.
</p>
<p>
The Batista group took over through a coup sponsored by imperialism and the
exploiting class; they needed such a man as Batista, so that the rural
guard would serve the landowners against the peasants. (Applause) It did
not matter to them that the nation was being plundered. The landowners did
not give anybody modern weapons to fight that regime; they gave arms to
that bloody regime itself, not caring about how it violated the
constitution. The Yankees did not give arms to anybody to fight Batista.
None of the fine little gentlemen fought, because they still had their
Cadillacs; they had a regime that guaranteed their frivolous life. They
cared nothing about politics, for they had a very good life. Now that their
privileges have ended, they found a Yankee government willing to give them
arms to come here and shed the blood of workers and peasants. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Those gentlemen spoke of elections. What elections did they want? The ones
of the corrupt politicians who bought votes? Those elections in which a
poor person had to turn over his ballot in return for work? Those fake
elections that were just a means for the exploiting class to stay in power?
Those elections which were not a military coup? There are many
pseudo-democracies in Latin America; what laws have they passed for the
peasants? Where is nationalization of industry? Where is their agarian
reform? (Applause)
</p>
<p>
A revolution expressing the will of the people is an election everyday, not
every four years; it is a constant meeting with the people, like this
meeting. The old politicians could never have gathered as many votes as
there are people here tonight to support the revolution. Revolution means a
thorough change.
</p>
<p>
What do they want? Elections with pictures on the posts. The revolution has
changed the conception of pseudo-democracy for direct government by the
people.
</p>
<h4>
No Time for Elections
</h4>
<p>
There had to be a period for abolition of the privileges. Do the people
have time now for elections? No! What were the political parties? Just an
expression of class interests. Here there is just one class, the humble;
that class is in power, and so it is not interested in the ambition of an
exploiting minority to get back in power. Those people would have no chance
at all in an election. The revolution has no time to waste in such
foolishness. There is no chance for the exploiting class to regain power.
The revolution and the people know that the revolution expressed their
will; the revolution does not come to power with Yankee arms. It comes to
power through the will of the people fighting against arms of all kinds,
Yankee arms.
</p>
<p>
The revolution keeps in power through the people. What are the people
interested in? In having the revolution go ahead without losing a minute.
(Applause) Can any government in America claim to have more popular support
than this one? Why should democracy be the pedantic, false democracy of the
others, rather than this direct expression of the will of the people? The
people go to die fighting instead of going to a poll to scratch names on
paper. The revolution has given every citizen a weapon, a weapon to every
man who wanted to enter the militia. So some fool comes along to ask if,
since we have a majority why don't we hold elections? Because the people do
not care to please fools and fine little gentlemen! The people are
interested in moving forward.
</p>
<p>
They have no time to waste. The people must spend tremendous amounts of
energy in preparing to meet aggression, when everybody knows we want to be
building schools, houses, and factories. We are not warlike. The Yankees
spend half of their budget on armaments; we are not warlike. We are obliged
to spend that energy, because of the imperialists. We have no expansionist
ambitions. We do not want to exploit any worker of another county. We are
not interested in aggressive plans; we have been forced to have tanks,
planes, machineguns, and a military force to defend ourselves.
</p>
<p>
The recent invasion shows how right we were to arm. At Playa Giron, they
came to kill peasants and workers. Imperialism forced us to arm for
defense. We have been forced to put energy and material and resources into
that, although we would prefer to put them into more schools, so that in
future parades there can be more athletes and school children. If our
people were not armed, they could not crush mercenaries coming with modern
equipment.
</p>
<p>
The imperialists would have hurled themselves on us long ago if we had not
been armed. But we prefer to die rather than surrender the country we have
now. They know that. They know they will meet resistance, and so the
aggressive circles of imperialism have to stop and think.
</p>
<p>
So we are forced, by the threat of aggression to proclaim to the four
corners of the world: All the peoples of American should rise in
indignation after the statement that a country can intervene in another
just because the first is strong. Such a policy would mean that the
powerful neighbor takes the right to intervene to keep a people from
governing themselves according to their own choice. It is inconceivable
that there should be such miserable governments; after the aggression that
killed peasants and workers, it is inconceivable that they have even begun
a policy of breaking with Cuba, instead of breaking with Somoza, Guatemala,
or the government in Washington that pays for planes, tanks, and arms to
come her and kill peasants.
</p>
<p>
The Costa Rican government has said that, if mercenaries are executed, it
will break with us. It has no reason at all for a break, so it seeks some
pretext, and hits on the idea of if there are executions. That
government, in insolent intervention, stated its disposal to break with us
if any of the mercenaries are executed. It does not break with Kennedy who
organized the expedition, or with Guatemala, or Nicaragua. We did not break
with it; we merely answered the note.
</p>
<p>
Those who promote the policy of isolating Cuba at the orders of imperialism
are miserable traitors to the interests and feelings of America. (Applause)
These facts show us the rotten politics that prevail in many Latin American
countries, and how the Cuban revolution has turned those corrupt forms
upside down to establish new forms in this country.
</p>
<h4>
New Socialist Constitution
</h4>
<p>
To those who talk to us about the 1940 constitution, we say that the 1940
constitution is already too outdated and old for us. We have advanced too
far for that short section of the 1940 constitution that was good for its
time but which was never carried out. That constitution has been left
behind by this revolution, which, as we have said, is a socialist
revolution. We must talk of a new constitution, yes, a new constitution,
but not a bourgeois constitution, not a constitution corresponding to the
domination of certain classes by exploiting classes, but a constitution
corresponding to a new social system without the exploitation of many by
man. That new social system is called socialism, and this constitution will
therefore be a socialist constitution.
</p>
<h4>
Kennedy's Protests
</h4>
<p>
If Mr. Kennedy does not like socialism, well we do not like imperialism!
We do not like capitalism! We have as much right to protest over the
existence of an imperialist-capitalist regime 90 miles from our coast as he
feels he has to protect over the existence of a socialist regime 90 miles
from his coast. Now then, we would not think of protesting over that,
because that is the business of the people of the United States. It would
be absurd for us to try to tell the people of the United States what system
of government they must have, for in that case we would be considering that
the United States is not a sovereign nation and that we have rights over
the domestic life of the United States.
</p>
<p>
Rights do not come from size. Right does not come from one country being
bigger than another. That does not matter. We have only limited territory,
a small nation, but our right is as respectable as that of any country,
regardless of its size. It does not occur to us to tell the people of the
United States what system of government they must have. Therefore it is
absurd for Mr. Kennedy to take it into his head to tell us what kind of
government he wants us to have here. That is absurd. It occurs to Mr.
Kennedy to do that only because he does not have a clear concept of
international law or sovereignty. Who had those notions before Kennedy?
Hitler and Mussolini!
</p>
<p>
They spoke the same language of force; it is the fascist language. We heard
it in the years before Germany's attack on Czechoslovakia. Hitler split it
up because it was governed by a reactionary government. The bourgeoisie,
reactionary and profascist, afraid of the advance of a socialist system,
preferred even domination by Hitler. We heard that language on the eve of
the invasion of Denmark, Belgium, Poland, and so forth. It is the right of
might. This is the only right Kennedy advances in claiming the right to
interfere in our country.
</p>
<p>
This is a socialist regime, yes! Yes, this is a socialist regime. It is
here, but the fault is not ours, the blame belongs to Columbus, the English
colonizers, the Spanish colonizers. The people of the U.S. will someday get
tired.
</p>
<h4>
No Threat to U.S.
</h4>
<p>
The U.S. Government says that a socialist regime here threatens U.S.
security. But what threatens the security of the North American people is
the aggressive policy of the warmongers of the United States. What
threatens the security of the North American family and people is the
violence, that aggressive policy, that policy that ignores the sovereignty
and the rights of other peoples. The one who is threatening the security of
the United States is Kennedy, with that aggressive policy. That aggressive
policy can give rise to a world war; and that world war can cost the lives
of tens of millions of North Americans. Therefore, the one who threatens
the security of the United States is not the Cuban Revolutionary Government
but the aggressor and aggressive government of the United States.
</p>
<p>
We do not endanger the security of a single North American. We do not
endanger the life or security of a single North American family. We, making
cooperatives, agrarian reform, people's ranches, houses, schools, literacy
campaigns, and sending thousands and thousands of teachers to the interior,
building hospitals, sending doctors, giving scholarships, building
factories, increasing the productive capacity of our country, creating
public beaches, converting fortresses into schools, and give the people the
right to a better future--we do not endanger a single U.S. family or a
single U.S. citizen.
</p>
<p>
The ones who endangers the lives of millions of families, of tens of
millions of North American are those who are playing with atomic war. It is
those who, as General Cardenas said, are playing with the possibility of
New York becoming a Hiroshima. The ones who are playing with atomic war,
with their aggressive war, with their policy that violated the rights of
people are the ones who are endangering the security of the North American
nation, the security of the lives of unknown millions of North Americans.
</p>
<p>
What do the monopolists fear? Why do they say that they are not secure with
the socialist revolution nearby. They are, as Khrushchev says, proving that
they know their system is inferior. They do not even believe in their own
system. Why don't they leave us alone when all our government wants is
peace.
</p>
<h4>
U.S. Refusal to Negotiate
</h4>
<p>
Recently, our government issued a statement that we were willing to
negotiate. Why? Because we are afraid? No! We are convinced that they fear
the revolution more than we fear them. They have a mentality that does not
permit them to sleep when they know that there is a revolution nearby.
</p>
<p>
Fear? No one has fear here. The people who struggle for their liberty are
never frightened. The frightened ones are the wealthy. The ones who have
been wealthy. We are not interested in having imperialism commit suicide at
our expense. They do not care about the death of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, or
Americans. But we do care about every Cuban life. We are interested in
peace.
</p>
<p>
We are ready to negotiate. They say that economic conditions can be
discussed, but no communism. Well, where did they get the idea we would
discuss that? We would discuss economic problems. But we are not even ready
to admit that these talks so much as brush a petal of a rose here. The
Cuban people are capable of establishing the regime they want there. We
have never been thought of the possibility of discussing our regime. We
will discuss only things that will not effect our sovereignty. We do want
to negotiate on behalf of peace.
</p>
<p>
Those who do not worry about taking American people to war are being led by
emotions. We have no fear. If they think so, let them get over that idea.
No Cuban is afraid. If they think we will discuss internal politics, let
them forget that, for one one will do that here. Let them discuss all
topics they want to discuss. We discussed things with invaders, did we not?
Well, we will debate with anyone. We are willing to talk. We are willing to
debate. But does that mean we are aching to negotiate? Of course not. We
are just taking a sensible step. Does that mean the revolution will slow
down? Of course not! We will continue, picking up speed as we can.
</p>
<h4>
Kill Foreign Invaders
</h4>
<p>
If they want to say that that they do not care about the sovereignty of
countries, let them. But we are ready to defend as well as to negotiate. We
are ready to fire a million shots at the first Yankee parachutist that
tries to land here. From the first moment they land on our soil they can be
sure that they have begun the most difficult war they ever heard of. That
war would be the beginning of the end for imperialism. With the same
willingness to negotiate, we will fight. Even the Pioneers will fight. Each
man, woman, and child has one duty in case of foreign attack--kill! If we
were attacked by foreigners there would be no prisoners. The invading
foreigners must know they must kill us all! While one lives, he has an
enemy! Death struggle! There is no middle ground! It would be a war without
prisoners!
</p>
<p>
If the invaders land on Cuban soil we will not want our lives. We will
fight to the last man against whoever sets foot on our land. All men and
women must know their duty. This duty will be fulfilled in simple and
natural manner as peoples fight in a righteous war.
</p>
<p>
It is a crime that our people are not left in peace to complete our work of
justice for those who once lived in humiliation and misery. It is too bad
that illegitimate interests have determined to harm our country. While they
tried to cut off our supplies, they were supplying mercenaries with weapons
to invade our country and shed the people's blood. And in this shameful
task, who participated?
</p>
<p>
I have already told you of the social composition. Well, the priests were
not missing either. Three of them came. None were Cubans, they were
Spanish. You remember that when we asked them they said they came on a
purely spiritual mission. They said they came on a Christian mission. But
reviewing their books we find this: An appeal to the people by Ismael de
Lugo: Attention Cuban Catholics: Liberating forces have landed on Cuban
beaches. We come in the name of God--as if Calvino came in the name of
God--justice, and democracy to reestablish trampled freedom; this must be a
lie. We come because of love, not hate. We come with thousands of Cubans,
all of whom are Catholics and Christians-- what a lie--their spirit is the
spirit of the crusades. (Editor's Notes: Castro continues reading the
message written by Father de Lugo.....)
</p>
<p>
And that gentlemen is not even a Cuban; he is a Falangist Spaniard. He
could have saved all those appeals and warlike energy by fighting against
the Moorish guard of Franco. Why should he come here with three other
Falangist Spanish priests instead of going to Spain to fight for freedom
against Franco, who has been oppressing Spanish people for 20 odd years and
who has sold out to Yankee imperialism? The Yankees are not fighting for
freedom in Spain, or Nicaragua, or Guatemala. They are great friends of
Franco. And these Falangist priests came here, when it is in Spain they
should fight for freedom for peasants and workers. That Falangist priest
comes here instead to preach against workers and peasants who have thrown
off exploitation. And there were three, not just one; and the fourth, in
the Escambray, is a Spanish priest too.
</p>
<h4>
Foreign Priests To Be Expelled
</h4>
<p>
We are going to announce here to the people that in the next few days the
Revolutionary Government will pass a law declaring void any permit to
remain in Cuba held by any foreign priest in our country. And this law will
have only one exception; do you know for whom? A foreign priest can remain
with special permission, provided the government approves, if he has not
been combatting the Cuban revolution; that is, if he has not displayed an
attitude opposed to the revolution; that is, there will be exceptions if a
priest has been honest, has not been combatting the revolution, has not
been carrying out counterrevolutionary activities. He can request
permission, and the government can grant it if it deems proper, because
there are some foreign priests, by way of exception, that have not taken a
stand against the revolution, although the general rule has been otherwise.
</p>
<p>
Of course, they will say we are impious, enemies of religion. Can they say
that after a leader of the ecclesiastic service, while proclaiming that he
is coming to give spiritual service, also signs a manifesto like this
one--of this political nature? Can the revolution go on allowing these acts
to go on with impunity?
</p>
<p>
And let these gentlemen come to bring hell here, to bring hell on earth
here, with their war criminals, their Calvinos, their Soler Puigs, their
big landowners, and their privileged sons, to bring hell on earth here to
the peasants and workers? Can we let the Spanish Falange go on promoting
bloodshed and conspiracy here through its priests? No, we are not disposed
to allow it. The Falangist priests know now, they can begin packing.
(Applause)
</p>
<p>
They have been waging counterrevolutionary activities in the schools, too,
poisoning the minds of pupils. They have found fertile soil in schools
usually attended by children of the rich. There they have been promoting
counterrevolutionary poison in the minds of the young. They have been
forming terrorist minds. They have been teaching hatred for the country.
Why should the revolution stand for that? We would be guilty if we let that
go on.
</p>
<h4>
Nationalization of Private Schools
</h4>
<p>
We announce here that in the next few days the Revolutionary Government
will pass a law nationalizing the private schools. This law cannot be a law
for one sector; it will be general. That means the private schools will be
nationalized; of course, not a little school where one teacher gives
classes, but private schools with several teachers.
</p>
<p>
Directors of private schools have displayed different types of conduct.
Many private school directors have not been instilling counterrevolutionary
poison. The revolution feels it is its duty to organize and establish the
principle of free education for all citizens. The people feel they have the
duty of training future generations in a spirit of love for the country,
for justice, for the revolution.
</p>
<p>
What shall be done in the case of private schools that have not displayed
counterrevolutionary conduce? The Revolutionary Government will indemnify
those directors or owners of schools whose attitude has not been
counterrevolutionary, whose attitude has been favorable to the revolution;
and the revolution will not indemnify any school whose directors have been
waging a counterrevolutionary campaign, who have been against the
revolution. That is, there will be indemnity for those schools that have
displayed a patriotic, decent attitude toward the revolution. They will be
indemnified, and their directors will be invited to work with the
Revolutionary Government in directing that school or another school. That
is to say, these directors will be called on to help in the field of
education, besides being indemnified.
</p>
<p>
The teachers and employees of all these schools, of a lay nature, will be
given work. That is, the employees and teachers of these schools will have
their work guaranteed. The pupils of these schools can go on attending
them, the educational standards will be kept up and even improved, and
furthermore they will have to pay absolutely nothing to attend these
schools.
</p>
<h4>
Religion Not Restricted
</h4>
<p>
Villanueva is included in this nationalization, of course. They will say
this impious government opposes religious instruction. No sir. What we
oppose are those shameless acts they have been committing, and this crime
against our country. The can teach religion, yes; in the churches they can
teach religion.
</p>
<p>
Religion is one thing, politics another. If those gentlemen were not
against the political interests of the people, we would not care at all
about their pastorals, their discussions of religious matters. The churches
can remain open; religion can be taught there. Would it not be much better
if they had stuck to their religious teaching? Would it not be much better
to have peace? They can have peace, within strict limits of the respect due
the revolutionary people and government. But they cannot make war on the
people in the service of the exploiters. That has nothing to do with
religion; it has to do with blood, with gold, with material interests. They
can have the consideration of the people, in the limits of that mutual
respect for rights.
</p>
<p>
Christianity arose as a religion of the poor, the slaves, and the oppressed
of Rome--the religion that flourished in the catacombs. It was the religion
of the poor, and it obtained the respect of the laws. It coexisted with the
Roman Empire. Then came feudalism. That church coexisted with feudalism,
later with absolute monarchies, later with bourgeois republics. Here the
bourgeois republic disappears; why should not that same church coexist with
a system of social justice that is far superior to those previous forms of
government? This system is much more like Christianity than Yankee
imperialism or bourgeois republics, or the Roman Empire. We believe
coexistence is perfectly possible. The revolution does not oppose religion.
They have used religion as a pretext to combat the poor. They forget what
Christ said about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a
needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.
</p>
<h4>
Small Business man Protected
</h4>
<p>
Those are the facts. We have spoken, as always, clearly. It means only that
we are prepared to defend the revolution and continue forward, convinced of
the justice of our cause.
</p>
<p>
We have spoken of our socialist revolution. It does not mean the little
businessman or little industrialist need worry. Mines, fuel, banking, sugar
mills, export and import trade--the bulk of the economy-- is in the hands
of the people. That way the people can develop our economy. The little
industralist and little businessman can coesxist with the revolution. The
revolution has always cared for the interests of the small owners.
</p>
<p>
Urban reform is a proof. This month all little landlords will be collecting
around 105,000 pesos. Formerly if the tenant did not pay his rent the
landlord did not collect; now a fund has been established to insure that
the little landlord will be paid. The revolution will have some 80 million
pesos a year for construction from the urban reform. And when rental is the
only income of these landlords, the revolution has ruled that after the
house is all paid for, the landlord will receive a pension. A socialist
revolution does not mean that interests of certain sectors are eliminated
without consideration. The interests of the big landholders, bankers, and
industrialists were eliminated. No social interest of the lesser levels of
society is to be condemned. The revolution will adhere to its word: No
middle interest will be affected without due consideration.
</p>
<p>
Little businessmen industrialists have credit today. The revolution has no
interest in nationalizing them. The revolution has enough to do with
developing the sources of wealth it now has at its disposal. The revolution
feels that there can be collaboration from the little businessman and
little industrialist. It believes that their interest can coincide with
those of the revolution. Counterrevolutionaries have claimed that
barbershops would be nationalized, even food stands. The revolution does
not aim at those. The solution of those problems will be the result of a
long evolution. There are some problems; sometimes tomatoes and pineapples
are sold in the city at far higher prices than in the country. There is
still a small plague of middlemen. The revolution still has measures to
take to do away with the middleman abuse, to improve consumption for the
people. But I do not want anybody to be confused. I want everybody to know
what to expect.
</p>
<h4>
Call for Collaboration
</h4>
<p>
Basically, the revolution has already passed its measures. Nobody need
worry. Why not join in this enthusiasm, in this prowess? Why are there
still Cubans bothered by this happiness? I asked myself that while watching
the parade. Why are some Cubans so incapable of understanding that his
happiness can also be theirs? Why do they no adapt to the revolution? Why
not see their children in the schools here also? Some people cannot adopt,
but the future society will be better than the old one.
</p>
<p>
This is the hour in which we, far from using the moment against those who
do not understand, should ask them if the time has not come for them to
join us. The revolution found it necessary to be detained. Perhaps they
have. The revolution does not want to use its force against a minority. The
revolution wants all Cubans to understand. We do not want all this
happiness and emotion all to ourselves. It is the glory of the people.
</p>
<p>
We say this to those who have lied in the past and have not understood. We
frankly say that our revolution should not be lessened by severe sanctions
against all the mercenaries. It might serve as a weapon for our enemies. We
say this because we tell the people all that will benefit the revolution.
We have had a moral victory and it will be greater if we do not besmirch
our victory.
</p>
<p>
The lives lost hurt us as much as they do others. But we must overcome that
and speak for our prestige and our cause. What is before us? The risks of
imperialist aggression! Big tasks! We have reached a point in which we
should realize that the time has come to make the greatest effort. The
coming months are very important. They will be months in which we must make
greater efforts in all fields. We all have the duty to do the utmost. no
one has a right to rest. With what we have seen today we must learn that
with efforts and courage we can harvest wonderful fruit. And today's fruits
are nothing compared to what can be done if we apply ourselves to the
maximum.
</p>
<p>
Before concluding, I want to recall what I said during the Moncada trial.
Here is a paragraph: The country cannot remain on its knees imploring
miracles from the golden calf. No social problem is resolved
spontaneously. At that time we expressed our views. The revolution has
followed the revolutionary ideas of those who had an important role in this
struggle.
</p>
<p>
That is why when one million Cubans met to proclaim the Havana Declaration,
the document expressed the essence of our revolution, our socialist
revolution. It said that it condemned landed estates, starvation wages,
illiteracy, absence of teachers, doctors, and hospitals, discrimination,
exploitation of women, oligarchies that hold our countries back,
governments that ignore the will of their people by obeying U.S. orders,
monopoly of news by Yankee agencies, laws that prevent the masses from
organizing, and imperialist monopolies which exploit our wealth. The
general assembly of the people condemns exploitation of man by man. The
general assembly proclaims the following: The right to work education, the
dignity of man, civil rights for women, secure old age, artistic freedom,
nationalization of monopolies, and the like. This is the program of our
socialist revolution.
</p>
<p>
Long live the Cuban working class! Long live the Latin American sister
nations! Long live the nation! Fatherland or death! We shall win!
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
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Castro Internet Archive
May Day Celebration (1961): Cuba is a Socialist Nation
Spoken: May 1, 1961
Source: Havana International Service in Spanish 0215 GMT 2 May 1961--E
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
Distinguished visitors from Latin American and the entire world,
combatants of the armed forces of the people, workers: We have had 14 and a
half hours of parading. (Chanting) I think that only a people imbued with
infinite enthusiasm is capable of enduring such tests. Nevertheless, I will
try to be as brief as possible (Chanting)
We are very happy over this attitude by the people. I believe that today we
should outline the course to follow, analyze a little what we have done up
to now, and see at what point in our history we are, and what we have
ahead. We have all had a chance to see the parade. Maybe we who are on this
platform could appreciate it better than you in the square, maybe still
better than those who have paraded. This May Day tells a lot, it tells a
lot about what the revolution has been so far, what it has achieved so far;
but maybe it does not tell us as much as it tells our visitors.
We have been witnesses, all of us Cubans, of every step taken by the
revolution, so maybe we cannot realize how much we have advanced as fully
as can be understood by visitors, particularly those visitors from Latin
America, where today they are still living in a world very similar to the
one we lived in yesterday. It is as if they were suddenly transported from
the past to the present of our revolution, with all its extraordinary
progress as compared to the past. We do not intend tonight to stress the
merit of what we have done. We merely want to locate ourselves at the point
where we are at the present.
We had a chance today to see genuine results of the revolution on this May
Day, so different from the May Days of the past. Formerly that date was the
occasion for each sector of labor to set forth its demands, its aspirations
for improvement, to men who were deaf to the working class interests, men
who could not even accede to those basic demands because they did not
govern for the people, for the workers, for the peasants, or for the
humble; they governed solely for the privileged, the dominant economic
interests. Doing anything for the people would have meant harming the
interests that they represented, and so they could not accede to any just
demand from the people. The May Day parades of those days marked the
complaints and protest of the workers.
How different today's parade has been! How different even from the first
parades after the revolution triumphed. Today's parade shows us how much we
have advanced. The workers (Light applause) now do not have to submit
themselves to those trials; the workers now do not have to implore deaf
executives; the workers now are not subject to the domination of any
exploiting class; the workers no longer live in a country run by men
serving exploiting interests. The workers know now that everything the
revolution does, everything the government does or can do, has one goal:
helping the workers, helping the people. (Applause)
Otherwise, there would be no explanation for the spontaneous sentiment of
support for the Revolutionary Government, that overflowing good will that
every man and woman has expressed today. (Applause)
Fruits of the revolution are seen everywhere. The first to parade today
were the children of the Camilo Cienfuegos school center. We saw the
Pioneers parade by with the smile of hope, confidence, and affection. We
saw the young rebels parade by. We saw the women of the federation go by.
We saw children from numberless schools created by the revolution parade.
We saw 1,000 students from the 600 sugar-cane cooperatives who are studying
artificial insemination here in the capital. We saw young people, humble
people, parade with their uniforms of the school center where they are
learning to be diplomatic representatives of the future.
We saw the pupils of the schools for young peasants of the Zapata swamps
parade by, the swamps that the mercenaries chose for their attack. We saw
thousands and thousands of peasants who are studying in the capital and who
come from distant mountain areas or from cane cooperatives or from people's
farms parade. We saw the young girls studying for children's club work. And
here everyone of these groups staged scenes that are worthy of praise. And
we saw also what is going into the rural areas. The volunteer teachers
paraded and also representatives of the 100,000 young people on their way
to the interior to wipe out illiteracy. Where does this strength come from?
It comes from the people, and it is devoted to the people in return.
These young people are truly children of the people. When we saw them today
writing Long Live Our Socialist Revolution with their formations we
thought how hard it would have been to have all this without a revolution;
how hard for any of these children from the mountains to have paraded here
today, or any of these young people from the rural areas to have a chance
to get to know the capital, or to study in any of these schools, or to
parade with the joy and pride shown here today, or to march with the faith
in the future shown today, because schools, university professions, art,
culture, and honors were never for the children of poor families, in town
or in the country. They were never for the peasant of the remote rural
areas; they were never for the poor young fellow, black or white, or our
countryside and cities.
Art, culture, university professions, opportunities, honors, elegant
clothes were only the privilege of a small minority, a minority represented
today with that grace and humor shown by some worker federations in their
imitations of the rich. It is astounding to think that today more than
20,000 athletes paraded, if one remembers that we are just beginning. And
this, without touching on the most marvelous thing we had a chance to see
today, that is, this armed nation, this united people, which came to attend
these ceremonies.
How would it have been possible without a revolution? How can one compare
this present with the past? How can one avoid emotion on seeing endless
lines of workers, athletes, and militiamen parade by? At times all went to
intermingled. After all, workers, athletes, and soldiers are the same
thing. Anybody could understand why our people must emerge victorious in
any battle. We noted the many women in the ranks of the federations. The
men were in the artillery units, mortar units, ack-ack units, or militia
battalions. The women were the wives and sisters and sweethearts of the
militiamen who marched by later in the battalions and those young men of
the basic secondary schools, the Pioneers who paraded by were their sons.
And so one can see today the unity of the humble people who are fighting
for the poor. Workers of every profession; manual laborers and intellectual
workers; all were marching together, the writer, artist, actor, announcer,
doctor, nurse, clinical employer. Marching together in great numbers under
the flag of the national education workers union were the teachers,
employees of the Education Ministry. (Applause).
Today we have had a chance to see everything worthwhile in our country,
everything produced in our country. We have understood better than ever
that there are two classes of citizens, or rather there were two classes of
citizens; the citizens who worked, produced, and created and the citizens
who lived without working or producing. These latter were parasites.
(Applause)
In this young, fervent nation, who did not parade today, who could not
parade here today? The parasites! Today the working people paraded,
everybody who produces with his hands or his brain. I do not mean that
workers who did not have a chance to parade were parasites, because they
had to take care of their children, or were ill, or even just did not want
to parade today. I am speaking only of those who were not represented here
because they could not be represented by those who produce.
This is the people, the true people. He who lives as a parasite does not
belong to the people. Only the invalid, the sick, the old, and children are
entitled to live without working and are entitled to have us work for them
and to care for them, and from the work of everyone they can be benefited.
For the children, the old, the invalid, and the sick, we have the duty to
work, all of us. (Applause) What no moral law will be able to justify ever
is for the people to work for the parasites. (Applause)
Those who paraded today were the working people who will never resign
themselves to work for the parasites. (Applause) In this manner our
national community has understood what the revolution is, and has
understood clearly what the meaning of a revolution is in which a nation
gets rid of parasites from the outside and those inside. (Applause) We
remember that because of the nationalization of the largest industries of
the nation, and just before the U.S. factories were nationalized, some
asked: Was not this factory a Cuban factory? Why should a Cuban factory be
nationalized? Well, such a factory did not belong to the people, it
belonged to some man. Now they belong to the nation. (Applause)
New Concept of Motherland
It was the custom to talk about the motherland; there were some who had a
wrong idea of the motherland. There was the motherland of the privileged
ones, of a man who has a large house, while the others live in hovels. What
motherland did you have in mind, sir? A motherland where a small group
lives from the work of others? A motherland of the barefoot child who is
asking for alms on the street? What kind of motherland is this? A
motherland which belonged to a small minority? Or the motherland of today?
The motherland of today where we have won the right to direct our destiny,
where we have learned to decide our destiny, a motherland which will be,
now and forever--as Marti wanted it--for the well-being of everyone and not
a motherland for few!
The motherland will be a place where such injustices will be eliminated,
now we can have the real concept of motherland. We are willing to die for a
motherland which belongs to all Cubans. (Applause) That is why the
exploiting classes could not have the real concept of motherland. For them,
the motherland was a privilege by which they took advantage of the work of
others. That is why when a Yankee monopolist (shouts of Out!) when a
leader, or a member of the U.S. ruling circles, talks about the motherland,
they refer to the motherland of monopolies, of the large banking
monopolies. And when they talk about the motherland, they are thinking
about sending the Negroes of the South, the workers, to be killed to defend
the motherland of monopolies. (Applause)
What kind of morality and what reason and what right do they have to make a
Negro die to defend the monopolies, the factories, and the mines of the
dominating classes? What right have they to send the Puerto Rican of Latin
blood, of Latin tradition, to the battlefields to defend the policy of
large capitalists and monopolies? This concept of motherland and this
danger to their security to which they refer is the danger of the
monopolies. You can understand what concept they have of morality, law, and
rights, to send the Negroes of the South and the Puerto Ricans to the
battlefields to fight for them. This is their concept of motherland. That
is why the people receive the real concept of motherland only when the
interests of the privileged classes are liquidated, and when a nation with
its wealth becomes a nation for everyone, the wealth for everyone, and
opportunity and happiness for everybody.
This happiness now belongs to those youths who paraded, and the families
who know that their children can have a school, receive scholarships, and
go to the best universities abroad, a privilege enjoyed only by the richest
families. And today any family, regardless of how poor, has the opportunity
to send its children to schools in the nation and abroad. Any family knows
that thanks to the revolution its children have all the opportunities which
formerly belonged only to the rich. A nation which works for itself,
whether it be in defense of or in achieving wealth can achieve what the
minorities cannot. (Applause)
The revolution can win the people with its fervor and enthusiasm. The
revolution can utilize all intelligence and creative spirit and take
everyone toward a path of well-being and progress. The people who spent 15
hours here today are the same people who formerly could not spend even one
hour at a public rally, or who were paid or forced to go to a public rally.
These enthusiastic people are the discouraged people of yesterday. The
difference is that yesterday they worked for others and today they work for
themselves. (Applause)
Fight Against Imperialism
Think of the men who died in recent battles and decide whether a single
drop of blood was worth being lost to defend the past. Consider that these
workers and youths, the children of workers, fell 10 or 12 days ago to
defend what we have seen today. They fell to defend this enthusiasm, this
hope, and this joy of today. That is why when today we saw a happy face or
a smile full of hope, we though that each smile of today was a flower over
the grave of the fallen hero.
It was like giving thanks to those who gave their lives in the battle
against imperialism. Without them we would not have had the May Day parade.
We would not have been able to see what passed in front of us today. What
would have happened to our antiaircraft batteries, what would have happened
to our cannons and our soldiers who marched here? What would have happened
to our workers, wives, sisters, and factories? What would have happened if
imperialism had established even a single beachhead on our territory? What
would have happened if the imperialists succeeded in taking one part of our
territory, and from there, with Yankee bombs, machineguns, and planes,
would have launched an armed attack against us.
Let us not talk about what would have happened if the imperialist had won.
There is no sadder picture than a defeated revolution. The uprising of
slaves in Rome [Spartacus uprising] and their defeat should give us an idea of what a defeated
revolution is. The Commune of Paris should give us an idea of what a
defeated revolution is. History tells us that a defeated revolution must
pay the victors in blood. The victors not only collect the past debts but
also try to collect future debts. But under certain circumstances, it is
impossible to crush a revolution.
It has never happened in history that a revolutionary people who have
really taken over power have been defeated. What would have happened this
May Day if imperialism had won its game? That is why we were thinking of
all we owed those who fell. That is why we were thinking that every smile
today was like a tribute to those who made possible this hopeful day. The
blood that was shed was the blood of workers and peasants, the blood of
humble sons of the people, not blood of land- owners, millionaires,
thieves, criminals, or exploiters. The blood shed was the blood of the
exploited of yesterday, the free men of today. The blood shed was humble,
honest, working, creative blood--the blood of patriots not the blood of
mercenaries. It was the blood of militiamen who voluntarily came to defend
the revolution. It was spontaneously offered blood to defend an ideal.
This ideal was not the ideal with which the Yankees inclucated their
mercenaries. It was not an ideal of parrots. It was not an ideal of the
tongue, but of the heart. It was not an ideal of those who came to recover
their lost wealth. It was not the ideal of those who always lived at the
expense of others. It was not the ideal of those who sell their soul for
the gold of a powerful empire.
It was the ideal of the peasant who does not want to lose his land, the
Negro who does not want discrimination, the humble, those who never lived
from the sweat of others, and of those who never robbed from others, an
ideal that a poor man of the people can feel.
The revolution is all for him because he was mistreated and humilated. He
defends the revolution because the revolution is his life. Before
sacrificing this he prefers to lose his life. He knows that he may fall,
but never in vain, and that the cause for which he falls will serve for
millions of his brothers.
Humble, honest blood was shed by the fatherland in the struggle against the
mercenaires of imperialism. But what blood, what men did imperialism send
here to establish that beachhead, to bleed our revolution dry, to destroy
our achievements, to burn our cane? It was to be a war of destruction.
U.S. Planned Aggression
We can tell the people right here that at the same instant that three of
our airports were being bombed, the Yankee agencies were telling the world
that our airports had been attacked by planes from our own airforce. They
coldbloodedly bombed our nation and told the world that the bombing was
done by Cuban pilots with Cuban planes. This was done with planes on which
they painted our insignia.
If nothing else, this deed should be enough to demonstrate how miserable
are the actions of imperialism. It should be enough for us to realize what
Yankee imperialism really is and what its press and its government is. It
is possible that millions have heard only the report that Cuban planes
piloted by defectors had attacked our airports. This was planned, because
the imperialist studied the plan to bomb and the way to deceive the entire
world. This should serve to keep us alert and to understand that the
imperialists are capable of the most monstrous lies to cover the most
monstrous deeds.
U.S. leaders publicly confessed their participation--without any
explanation which they owe the world for the statements made by Kennedy
that they would never would participate in aggression--and save us the
effort of finding proof. Who were those who fought against those workers
and peasants? We will explain.
Privileged Class Mercenaries
Of the first mercenaries captured, we can say that, without counting ships'
crews, there were nearly 1,000 prisoners. Among that thousand we have the
following: About 800 came from well-to-do families. They had a total of
27,556 caballerias of land, 9,666 houses, 70 industries, 10 sugar centrals,
2 banks, and 5 mines. So 800 out of 1,000 had all that. Moreover, many
belonged to exclusive clubs and many were former soldiers for Batista.
Remember, during the prisoner interrogation that I asked who was a cane
cutter and only one said that he had cut cane once. That is the social
composition of the invaders.
We are sure that if we ask all those here how many owned sugar centrals,
there would not be even one. If we asked the combatants who died, members
of the milita or soldiers of the revolutionary army, if we compared the
wealth of those who fell, surely there would be no land, no banks, no sugar
centrals, or the like listed. And some of the shameless invaders said that
they came to fight for ideals!
The invaders came to fight for free enterprise! Imagine, at this time for
an idiot to come here to say that he fought for free enterprise! As if this
people did not know what free enterprise is! It was slums, unemployment,
begging. One hundred thousand families working the land to turn over 25
percent of their production to shareholders who never saw that land. How
can they come to speak about free enterprise to a country where there was
unemployment, illiteracy and where one had to beg to get into a hospital?
The people knew that free enterprise was social clubs, and bathing in mud
for the children because the beaches were fenced. The beaches were for the
wealthy. One could never dream of going to Varadero, for that was for a few
wealthy families. One could never dream of having a son study law. That was
only for the privileged. A worker could never dream that his son
might become a teacher or lawyer. Ninety percent of the sons of workers, or
at least 75 percent of those who lived in places were there were no
secondary schools had no chance to send their children to study. Not even
in a dream could the daughters of the peasants dance here or parade here.
How can one of those who never knew labor say that he came to shed the
people's blood to defend free enterprise? (Chanting, applause) And they did
not stop at their fathers' mention of free enterprise; they included the United
Fruit and the electrical company. Those were not free enterprises; they
were monopolies. So when they came here they were not fighting for free
enterprise; they came for the monopolies, for monopolies do not want free
enterprise. They were defending the monopolistic interests of the Yankees
here and abroad. How can they tell the Cuban people that they were coming
to defend free enterprise?
They also say that they came to defend the 1940 constitution. How curious!
That constitution was being torn into bits with the complicity of the U.S.
Embassy, the reactionary church, and the politicians. So it is cynical for
this group of privileged and Batista-type tyrants, criminals, and torturers
to tell the people that they were coming to defend the constitution of
1940, which has been advanced by the Revolutionary Government.
Who represented you in the congress? The corrupt politicians, the rich, the
big landholders. There was only a handful of workers in congress. They were
always in the minority. The means of disseminating ideas were all in the
hands of the rich. It was hard to learn about the horrible conditions
because of that. The death of thousands of children for lack of medicine
and doctors did not bother the free enterprise men. There was never an
agrarian reform law because congress was in the hands of the rich. Even
though the constitution said the land must be returned to the Cubans, and
even though in 1959 the 1940 constitution had been in effect 19 years, no
law took land from the Yankee monopolies, which had huge expanses.
Up to 200,000 hectares were held by some foreign monopolies. The
constitution which said that land must be returned to the Cubans and the
law setting a limit on landholdings were never enforced. There were
teachers without employment, while children lacked schooling.
The Batista group took over through a coup sponsored by imperialism and the
exploiting class; they needed such a man as Batista, so that the rural
guard would serve the landowners against the peasants. (Applause) It did
not matter to them that the nation was being plundered. The landowners did
not give anybody modern weapons to fight that regime; they gave arms to
that bloody regime itself, not caring about how it violated the
constitution. The Yankees did not give arms to anybody to fight Batista.
None of the fine little gentlemen fought, because they still had their
Cadillacs; they had a regime that guaranteed their frivolous life. They
cared nothing about politics, for they had a very good life. Now that their
privileges have ended, they found a Yankee government willing to give them
arms to come here and shed the blood of workers and peasants. (Applause)
Those gentlemen spoke of elections. What elections did they want? The ones
of the corrupt politicians who bought votes? Those elections in which a
poor person had to turn over his ballot in return for work? Those fake
elections that were just a means for the exploiting class to stay in power?
Those elections which were not a military coup? There are many
pseudo-democracies in Latin America; what laws have they passed for the
peasants? Where is nationalization of industry? Where is their agarian
reform? (Applause)
A revolution expressing the will of the people is an election everyday, not
every four years; it is a constant meeting with the people, like this
meeting. The old politicians could never have gathered as many votes as
there are people here tonight to support the revolution. Revolution means a
thorough change.
What do they want? Elections with pictures on the posts. The revolution has
changed the conception of pseudo-democracy for direct government by the
people.
No Time for Elections
There had to be a period for abolition of the privileges. Do the people
have time now for elections? No! What were the political parties? Just an
expression of class interests. Here there is just one class, the humble;
that class is in power, and so it is not interested in the ambition of an
exploiting minority to get back in power. Those people would have no chance
at all in an election. The revolution has no time to waste in such
foolishness. There is no chance for the exploiting class to regain power.
The revolution and the people know that the revolution expressed their
will; the revolution does not come to power with Yankee arms. It comes to
power through the will of the people fighting against arms of all kinds,
Yankee arms.
The revolution keeps in power through the people. What are the people
interested in? In having the revolution go ahead without losing a minute.
(Applause) Can any government in America claim to have more popular support
than this one? Why should democracy be the pedantic, false democracy of the
others, rather than this direct expression of the will of the people? The
people go to die fighting instead of going to a poll to scratch names on
paper. The revolution has given every citizen a weapon, a weapon to every
man who wanted to enter the militia. So some fool comes along to ask if,
since we have a majority why don't we hold elections? Because the people do
not care to please fools and fine little gentlemen! The people are
interested in moving forward.
They have no time to waste. The people must spend tremendous amounts of
energy in preparing to meet aggression, when everybody knows we want to be
building schools, houses, and factories. We are not warlike. The Yankees
spend half of their budget on armaments; we are not warlike. We are obliged
to spend that energy, because of the imperialists. We have no expansionist
ambitions. We do not want to exploit any worker of another county. We are
not interested in aggressive plans; we have been forced to have tanks,
planes, machineguns, and a military force to defend ourselves.
The recent invasion shows how right we were to arm. At Playa Giron, they
came to kill peasants and workers. Imperialism forced us to arm for
defense. We have been forced to put energy and material and resources into
that, although we would prefer to put them into more schools, so that in
future parades there can be more athletes and school children. If our
people were not armed, they could not crush mercenaries coming with modern
equipment.
The imperialists would have hurled themselves on us long ago if we had not
been armed. But we prefer to die rather than surrender the country we have
now. They know that. They know they will meet resistance, and so the
aggressive circles of imperialism have to stop and think.
So we are forced, by the threat of aggression to proclaim to the four
corners of the world: All the peoples of American should rise in
indignation after the statement that a country can intervene in another
just because the first is strong. Such a policy would mean that the
powerful neighbor takes the right to intervene to keep a people from
governing themselves according to their own choice. It is inconceivable
that there should be such miserable governments; after the aggression that
killed peasants and workers, it is inconceivable that they have even begun
a policy of breaking with Cuba, instead of breaking with Somoza, Guatemala,
or the government in Washington that pays for planes, tanks, and arms to
come her and kill peasants.
The Costa Rican government has said that, if mercenaries are executed, it
will break with us. It has no reason at all for a break, so it seeks some
pretext, and hits on the idea of if there are executions. That
government, in insolent intervention, stated its disposal to break with us
if any of the mercenaries are executed. It does not break with Kennedy who
organized the expedition, or with Guatemala, or Nicaragua. We did not break
with it; we merely answered the note.
Those who promote the policy of isolating Cuba at the orders of imperialism
are miserable traitors to the interests and feelings of America. (Applause)
These facts show us the rotten politics that prevail in many Latin American
countries, and how the Cuban revolution has turned those corrupt forms
upside down to establish new forms in this country.
New Socialist Constitution
To those who talk to us about the 1940 constitution, we say that the 1940
constitution is already too outdated and old for us. We have advanced too
far for that short section of the 1940 constitution that was good for its
time but which was never carried out. That constitution has been left
behind by this revolution, which, as we have said, is a socialist
revolution. We must talk of a new constitution, yes, a new constitution,
but not a bourgeois constitution, not a constitution corresponding to the
domination of certain classes by exploiting classes, but a constitution
corresponding to a new social system without the exploitation of many by
man. That new social system is called socialism, and this constitution will
therefore be a socialist constitution.
Kennedy's Protests
If Mr. Kennedy does not like socialism, well we do not like imperialism!
We do not like capitalism! We have as much right to protest over the
existence of an imperialist-capitalist regime 90 miles from our coast as he
feels he has to protect over the existence of a socialist regime 90 miles
from his coast. Now then, we would not think of protesting over that,
because that is the business of the people of the United States. It would
be absurd for us to try to tell the people of the United States what system
of government they must have, for in that case we would be considering that
the United States is not a sovereign nation and that we have rights over
the domestic life of the United States.
Rights do not come from size. Right does not come from one country being
bigger than another. That does not matter. We have only limited territory,
a small nation, but our right is as respectable as that of any country,
regardless of its size. It does not occur to us to tell the people of the
United States what system of government they must have. Therefore it is
absurd for Mr. Kennedy to take it into his head to tell us what kind of
government he wants us to have here. That is absurd. It occurs to Mr.
Kennedy to do that only because he does not have a clear concept of
international law or sovereignty. Who had those notions before Kennedy?
Hitler and Mussolini!
They spoke the same language of force; it is the fascist language. We heard
it in the years before Germany's attack on Czechoslovakia. Hitler split it
up because it was governed by a reactionary government. The bourgeoisie,
reactionary and profascist, afraid of the advance of a socialist system,
preferred even domination by Hitler. We heard that language on the eve of
the invasion of Denmark, Belgium, Poland, and so forth. It is the right of
might. This is the only right Kennedy advances in claiming the right to
interfere in our country.
This is a socialist regime, yes! Yes, this is a socialist regime. It is
here, but the fault is not ours, the blame belongs to Columbus, the English
colonizers, the Spanish colonizers. The people of the U.S. will someday get
tired.
No Threat to U.S.
The U.S. Government says that a socialist regime here threatens U.S.
security. But what threatens the security of the North American people is
the aggressive policy of the warmongers of the United States. What
threatens the security of the North American family and people is the
violence, that aggressive policy, that policy that ignores the sovereignty
and the rights of other peoples. The one who is threatening the security of
the United States is Kennedy, with that aggressive policy. That aggressive
policy can give rise to a world war; and that world war can cost the lives
of tens of millions of North Americans. Therefore, the one who threatens
the security of the United States is not the Cuban Revolutionary Government
but the aggressor and aggressive government of the United States.
We do not endanger the security of a single North American. We do not
endanger the life or security of a single North American family. We, making
cooperatives, agrarian reform, people's ranches, houses, schools, literacy
campaigns, and sending thousands and thousands of teachers to the interior,
building hospitals, sending doctors, giving scholarships, building
factories, increasing the productive capacity of our country, creating
public beaches, converting fortresses into schools, and give the people the
right to a better future--we do not endanger a single U.S. family or a
single U.S. citizen.
The ones who endangers the lives of millions of families, of tens of
millions of North American are those who are playing with atomic war. It is
those who, as General Cardenas said, are playing with the possibility of
New York becoming a Hiroshima. The ones who are playing with atomic war,
with their aggressive war, with their policy that violated the rights of
people are the ones who are endangering the security of the North American
nation, the security of the lives of unknown millions of North Americans.
What do the monopolists fear? Why do they say that they are not secure with
the socialist revolution nearby. They are, as Khrushchev says, proving that
they know their system is inferior. They do not even believe in their own
system. Why don't they leave us alone when all our government wants is
peace.
U.S. Refusal to Negotiate
Recently, our government issued a statement that we were willing to
negotiate. Why? Because we are afraid? No! We are convinced that they fear
the revolution more than we fear them. They have a mentality that does not
permit them to sleep when they know that there is a revolution nearby.
Fear? No one has fear here. The people who struggle for their liberty are
never frightened. The frightened ones are the wealthy. The ones who have
been wealthy. We are not interested in having imperialism commit suicide at
our expense. They do not care about the death of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, or
Americans. But we do care about every Cuban life. We are interested in
peace.
We are ready to negotiate. They say that economic conditions can be
discussed, but no communism. Well, where did they get the idea we would
discuss that? We would discuss economic problems. But we are not even ready
to admit that these talks so much as brush a petal of a rose here. The
Cuban people are capable of establishing the regime they want there. We
have never been thought of the possibility of discussing our regime. We
will discuss only things that will not effect our sovereignty. We do want
to negotiate on behalf of peace.
Those who do not worry about taking American people to war are being led by
emotions. We have no fear. If they think so, let them get over that idea.
No Cuban is afraid. If they think we will discuss internal politics, let
them forget that, for one one will do that here. Let them discuss all
topics they want to discuss. We discussed things with invaders, did we not?
Well, we will debate with anyone. We are willing to talk. We are willing to
debate. But does that mean we are aching to negotiate? Of course not. We
are just taking a sensible step. Does that mean the revolution will slow
down? Of course not! We will continue, picking up speed as we can.
Kill Foreign Invaders
If they want to say that that they do not care about the sovereignty of
countries, let them. But we are ready to defend as well as to negotiate. We
are ready to fire a million shots at the first Yankee parachutist that
tries to land here. From the first moment they land on our soil they can be
sure that they have begun the most difficult war they ever heard of. That
war would be the beginning of the end for imperialism. With the same
willingness to negotiate, we will fight. Even the Pioneers will fight. Each
man, woman, and child has one duty in case of foreign attack--kill! If we
were attacked by foreigners there would be no prisoners. The invading
foreigners must know they must kill us all! While one lives, he has an
enemy! Death struggle! There is no middle ground! It would be a war without
prisoners!
If the invaders land on Cuban soil we will not want our lives. We will
fight to the last man against whoever sets foot on our land. All men and
women must know their duty. This duty will be fulfilled in simple and
natural manner as peoples fight in a righteous war.
It is a crime that our people are not left in peace to complete our work of
justice for those who once lived in humiliation and misery. It is too bad
that illegitimate interests have determined to harm our country. While they
tried to cut off our supplies, they were supplying mercenaries with weapons
to invade our country and shed the people's blood. And in this shameful
task, who participated?
I have already told you of the social composition. Well, the priests were
not missing either. Three of them came. None were Cubans, they were
Spanish. You remember that when we asked them they said they came on a
purely spiritual mission. They said they came on a Christian mission. But
reviewing their books we find this: An appeal to the people by Ismael de
Lugo: Attention Cuban Catholics: Liberating forces have landed on Cuban
beaches. We come in the name of God--as if Calvino came in the name of
God--justice, and democracy to reestablish trampled freedom; this must be a
lie. We come because of love, not hate. We come with thousands of Cubans,
all of whom are Catholics and Christians-- what a lie--their spirit is the
spirit of the crusades. (Editor's Notes: Castro continues reading the
message written by Father de Lugo.....)
And that gentlemen is not even a Cuban; he is a Falangist Spaniard. He
could have saved all those appeals and warlike energy by fighting against
the Moorish guard of Franco. Why should he come here with three other
Falangist Spanish priests instead of going to Spain to fight for freedom
against Franco, who has been oppressing Spanish people for 20 odd years and
who has sold out to Yankee imperialism? The Yankees are not fighting for
freedom in Spain, or Nicaragua, or Guatemala. They are great friends of
Franco. And these Falangist priests came here, when it is in Spain they
should fight for freedom for peasants and workers. That Falangist priest
comes here instead to preach against workers and peasants who have thrown
off exploitation. And there were three, not just one; and the fourth, in
the Escambray, is a Spanish priest too.
Foreign Priests To Be Expelled
We are going to announce here to the people that in the next few days the
Revolutionary Government will pass a law declaring void any permit to
remain in Cuba held by any foreign priest in our country. And this law will
have only one exception; do you know for whom? A foreign priest can remain
with special permission, provided the government approves, if he has not
been combatting the Cuban revolution; that is, if he has not displayed an
attitude opposed to the revolution; that is, there will be exceptions if a
priest has been honest, has not been combatting the revolution, has not
been carrying out counterrevolutionary activities. He can request
permission, and the government can grant it if it deems proper, because
there are some foreign priests, by way of exception, that have not taken a
stand against the revolution, although the general rule has been otherwise.
Of course, they will say we are impious, enemies of religion. Can they say
that after a leader of the ecclesiastic service, while proclaiming that he
is coming to give spiritual service, also signs a manifesto like this
one--of this political nature? Can the revolution go on allowing these acts
to go on with impunity?
And let these gentlemen come to bring hell here, to bring hell on earth
here, with their war criminals, their Calvinos, their Soler Puigs, their
big landowners, and their privileged sons, to bring hell on earth here to
the peasants and workers? Can we let the Spanish Falange go on promoting
bloodshed and conspiracy here through its priests? No, we are not disposed
to allow it. The Falangist priests know now, they can begin packing.
(Applause)
They have been waging counterrevolutionary activities in the schools, too,
poisoning the minds of pupils. They have found fertile soil in schools
usually attended by children of the rich. There they have been promoting
counterrevolutionary poison in the minds of the young. They have been
forming terrorist minds. They have been teaching hatred for the country.
Why should the revolution stand for that? We would be guilty if we let that
go on.
Nationalization of Private Schools
We announce here that in the next few days the Revolutionary Government
will pass a law nationalizing the private schools. This law cannot be a law
for one sector; it will be general. That means the private schools will be
nationalized; of course, not a little school where one teacher gives
classes, but private schools with several teachers.
Directors of private schools have displayed different types of conduct.
Many private school directors have not been instilling counterrevolutionary
poison. The revolution feels it is its duty to organize and establish the
principle of free education for all citizens. The people feel they have the
duty of training future generations in a spirit of love for the country,
for justice, for the revolution.
What shall be done in the case of private schools that have not displayed
counterrevolutionary conduce? The Revolutionary Government will indemnify
those directors or owners of schools whose attitude has not been
counterrevolutionary, whose attitude has been favorable to the revolution;
and the revolution will not indemnify any school whose directors have been
waging a counterrevolutionary campaign, who have been against the
revolution. That is, there will be indemnity for those schools that have
displayed a patriotic, decent attitude toward the revolution. They will be
indemnified, and their directors will be invited to work with the
Revolutionary Government in directing that school or another school. That
is to say, these directors will be called on to help in the field of
education, besides being indemnified.
The teachers and employees of all these schools, of a lay nature, will be
given work. That is, the employees and teachers of these schools will have
their work guaranteed. The pupils of these schools can go on attending
them, the educational standards will be kept up and even improved, and
furthermore they will have to pay absolutely nothing to attend these
schools.
Religion Not Restricted
Villanueva is included in this nationalization, of course. They will say
this impious government opposes religious instruction. No sir. What we
oppose are those shameless acts they have been committing, and this crime
against our country. The can teach religion, yes; in the churches they can
teach religion.
Religion is one thing, politics another. If those gentlemen were not
against the political interests of the people, we would not care at all
about their pastorals, their discussions of religious matters. The churches
can remain open; religion can be taught there. Would it not be much better
if they had stuck to their religious teaching? Would it not be much better
to have peace? They can have peace, within strict limits of the respect due
the revolutionary people and government. But they cannot make war on the
people in the service of the exploiters. That has nothing to do with
religion; it has to do with blood, with gold, with material interests. They
can have the consideration of the people, in the limits of that mutual
respect for rights.
Christianity arose as a religion of the poor, the slaves, and the oppressed
of Rome--the religion that flourished in the catacombs. It was the religion
of the poor, and it obtained the respect of the laws. It coexisted with the
Roman Empire. Then came feudalism. That church coexisted with feudalism,
later with absolute monarchies, later with bourgeois republics. Here the
bourgeois republic disappears; why should not that same church coexist with
a system of social justice that is far superior to those previous forms of
government? This system is much more like Christianity than Yankee
imperialism or bourgeois republics, or the Roman Empire. We believe
coexistence is perfectly possible. The revolution does not oppose religion.
They have used religion as a pretext to combat the poor. They forget what
Christ said about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a
needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.
Small Business man Protected
Those are the facts. We have spoken, as always, clearly. It means only that
we are prepared to defend the revolution and continue forward, convinced of
the justice of our cause.
We have spoken of our socialist revolution. It does not mean the little
businessman or little industrialist need worry. Mines, fuel, banking, sugar
mills, export and import trade--the bulk of the economy-- is in the hands
of the people. That way the people can develop our economy. The little
industralist and little businessman can coesxist with the revolution. The
revolution has always cared for the interests of the small owners.
Urban reform is a proof. This month all little landlords will be collecting
around 105,000 pesos. Formerly if the tenant did not pay his rent the
landlord did not collect; now a fund has been established to insure that
the little landlord will be paid. The revolution will have some 80 million
pesos a year for construction from the urban reform. And when rental is the
only income of these landlords, the revolution has ruled that after the
house is all paid for, the landlord will receive a pension. A socialist
revolution does not mean that interests of certain sectors are eliminated
without consideration. The interests of the big landholders, bankers, and
industrialists were eliminated. No social interest of the lesser levels of
society is to be condemned. The revolution will adhere to its word: No
middle interest will be affected without due consideration.
Little businessmen industrialists have credit today. The revolution has no
interest in nationalizing them. The revolution has enough to do with
developing the sources of wealth it now has at its disposal. The revolution
feels that there can be collaboration from the little businessman and
little industrialist. It believes that their interest can coincide with
those of the revolution. Counterrevolutionaries have claimed that
barbershops would be nationalized, even food stands. The revolution does
not aim at those. The solution of those problems will be the result of a
long evolution. There are some problems; sometimes tomatoes and pineapples
are sold in the city at far higher prices than in the country. There is
still a small plague of middlemen. The revolution still has measures to
take to do away with the middleman abuse, to improve consumption for the
people. But I do not want anybody to be confused. I want everybody to know
what to expect.
Call for Collaboration
Basically, the revolution has already passed its measures. Nobody need
worry. Why not join in this enthusiasm, in this prowess? Why are there
still Cubans bothered by this happiness? I asked myself that while watching
the parade. Why are some Cubans so incapable of understanding that his
happiness can also be theirs? Why do they no adapt to the revolution? Why
not see their children in the schools here also? Some people cannot adopt,
but the future society will be better than the old one.
This is the hour in which we, far from using the moment against those who
do not understand, should ask them if the time has not come for them to
join us. The revolution found it necessary to be detained. Perhaps they
have. The revolution does not want to use its force against a minority. The
revolution wants all Cubans to understand. We do not want all this
happiness and emotion all to ourselves. It is the glory of the people.
We say this to those who have lied in the past and have not understood. We
frankly say that our revolution should not be lessened by severe sanctions
against all the mercenaries. It might serve as a weapon for our enemies. We
say this because we tell the people all that will benefit the revolution.
We have had a moral victory and it will be greater if we do not besmirch
our victory.
The lives lost hurt us as much as they do others. But we must overcome that
and speak for our prestige and our cause. What is before us? The risks of
imperialist aggression! Big tasks! We have reached a point in which we
should realize that the time has come to make the greatest effort. The
coming months are very important. They will be months in which we must make
greater efforts in all fields. We all have the duty to do the utmost. no
one has a right to rest. With what we have seen today we must learn that
with efforts and courage we can harvest wonderful fruit. And today's fruits
are nothing compared to what can be done if we apply ourselves to the
maximum.
Before concluding, I want to recall what I said during the Moncada trial.
Here is a paragraph: The country cannot remain on its knees imploring
miracles from the golden calf. No social problem is resolved
spontaneously. At that time we expressed our views. The revolution has
followed the revolutionary ideas of those who had an important role in this
struggle.
That is why when one million Cubans met to proclaim the Havana Declaration,
the document expressed the essence of our revolution, our socialist
revolution. It said that it condemned landed estates, starvation wages,
illiteracy, absence of teachers, doctors, and hospitals, discrimination,
exploitation of women, oligarchies that hold our countries back,
governments that ignore the will of their people by obeying U.S. orders,
monopoly of news by Yankee agencies, laws that prevent the masses from
organizing, and imperialist monopolies which exploit our wealth. The
general assembly of the people condemns exploitation of man by man. The
general assembly proclaims the following: The right to work education, the
dignity of man, civil rights for women, secure old age, artistic freedom,
nationalization of monopolies, and the like. This is the program of our
socialist revolution.
Long live the Cuban working class! Long live the Latin American sister
nations! Long live the nation! Fatherland or death! We shall win!
Castro Internet Archive
|
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<p class="storyheadline">They Will Never Have Cuba</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
<div class="feature">
<p>I hope that no-one will say that I am gratuitously attacking Bush. Surely they will understand my reasons for strongly criticizing his policies.</p>
<p>Robert Woodward is an American journalist and writer who became famous for the series of articles published by<i>The Washington Post</i>, written by him and Carl Bernstein, and which eventually led to the investigation and resignation of Nixon. He is author and co-author of ten best-sellers. With his fearsome style he manages to wrench confessions from his interviewees. In his book,<i>State of Denial</i>, he says that on June 18, 2003, three months after the Iraq war had begun, as he was on the way out of his White House office following an important meeting, Bush slapped Jay Garner on the back and said to him:</p>
<p>“Hey, Jay, you want to do Iran?”</p>
<p>“Sir, the boys and I talked about that and we want to hold out for Cuba. We think the rum and the cigars are a little better.... The women are prettier.”</p>
<p>Bush laughed. “You got it. You got Cuba.”</p>
<p>Bush was betrayed by his subconscious. It was in his mind when he declared what scores of dark corners should be expecting to happen and Cuba occupies a special place among those dark corners.</p>
<p>Garner, a recently retired three-star general who had been appointed Head of the Post-War Planning Office for Iraq, created by a secret National Security Presidential Directive, was considered by Bush an exceptional man to carry out his war strategy. Appointed for the post on January 20, 2003, he was replaced on May 11 of that same year at the urging of Rumsfeld. He didn’t have the nerve to explain to Bush his strong disagreements on the matter of the strategy to be pursued in Iraq. He was thinking of another one with identical purpose. In the past few weeks, thousands of marines and a number of U.S. aircraft carriers, with their naval supporting forces, have been maneuvering in the Persian Gulf, a few miles off the Iranian territory.</p>
<h4>. . .</h4>
<p>It will very soon be 50 years since our people started suffering a cruel blockade; thousands of our sons and daughters have died or have been mutilated as a result of the dirty war against Cuba, the only country in the world to which a [U.S.-imposed] Adjustment Act has been applied inciting illegal emigration, yet another cause of death for Cuban citizens, including women and children. More than 15 years ago Cuba lost her principal markets and sources of supply for foods, energy, machinery, raw materials and long-term low-interest financing.</p>
<p>First the socialist bloc collapsed followed almost immediately by the USSR, dismantled piece by piece. The empire tightened and internationalized the blockade; the proteins and calories which were quite well distributed despite our deficiencies were reduced approximately by 40 percent; diseases such as optical neuritis and others appeared; the shortage of medicines, also a result of the blockade, became an everyday reality. Medicines were allowed to enter only as a charitable act, to demoralize us; these, in their turn, became a source of illegal business and black-market dealings.</p>
<p>Inevitably, the “special period” struck. This was the sum total of all the consequences of the aggression and it forced us to take desperate measures whose harmful effects were bolstered by the colossal media machine of the empire. Everyone was awaiting, some with sadness and others with oligarchic glee, the crumbling of the Cuban Revolution.</p>
<p>The access to convertible currency greatly harmed our social consciousness, to a greater or a lesser degree, due to the inequalities and ideological weaknesses it created.</p>
<p>Throughout its lifetime, the Revolution has taught the people, training hundreds of thousands of teachers, doctors, scientists, intellectuals, artists, computer engineers and other professionals with university and post-graduate degrees in dozens of professions. This storehouse of wealth has allowed us to reduce infant mortality to low levels, unthinkable in any Third World country, and to raise life expectancy as well as the average educational level of the population up to the ninth grade.</p>
<p>By offering Cuba oil under favorable terms of payment at a time when oil prices were escalating dramatically, the Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution brought a significant relief and opened up new possibilities, since our country was already beginning to produce her own energy in ever-growing amounts.</p>
<p>Concerned over its interests in that country, the empire had for years been planning to destroy that Revolution, and so it attempted to do it in April 2002, as it will attempt to do again as many times as it can. This is why the Bolivarian revolutionaries are preparing to resist.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Bush has intensified his plans for an occupation of Cuba, to the point of proclaiming laws and an interventionist government in order to install a direct imperial administration.</p>
<p>Based on the privileges granted to the United States in Bretton Woods and Nixon’s swindle when he removed the gold standard which placed a limit on the issuing of paper money, the empire bought and paid with paper tens of trillions of dollars, more than twelve digit figures. This is how it preserved an unsustainable economy. A large part of the world currency reserves are in U.S. Treasury bonds and bills. For this reason, many would rather not have a dollar crisis like the one in 1929 that would turn those paper bills into thin air. Today, the value of one dollar in gold is at least eighteen times less than what it was in the Nixon years. The same happens with the value of the reserves in that currency.</p>
<p>Those paper bills have kept their low current value because fabulous amounts of increasingly expensive and modern weapons can be purchased with them; weapons that produce nothing. The United States exports more weapons than anyone else in the world. With those same paper bills, the empire has developed a most sophisticated and deadly system of weapons of mass destruction with which it sustains its world tyranny.</p>
<p>Such power allows it to impose the idea of transforming foods into fuels and to shatter any initiative and commitment to avoid global warming, which is visibly accelerating.</p>
<p>Hunger and thirst, more violent hurricanes and the surge of the sea is what Tyranians and Trojans stand to suffer as a result of imperial policies. It is only through drastic energy savings that humanity will have a respite and hopes of survival for the species; but the consumer societies of the wealthy nations are absolutely heedless of that.</p>
<p>Cuba will continue to develop and improve the combative capacities of her people, including our modest but active and efficient defensive weapons industry which multiplies our capacity to face the invaders no matter where they may be, and the weapons they possess. We shall continue acquiring the necessary materials and the pertinent fire power, even though the notorious Gross Domestic Product as measured by capitalism may not be growing, for their GDP includes such things as the value of privatizations, drugs, sexual services and advertising, while it excludes many others like free educational and health services for all citizens.</p>
<p>From one year to the next the standard of living can be improved by raising knowledge, self-esteem and the dignity of people. It will be enough to reduce wastage and the economy will grow. In spite of everything, we will keep on growing as necessary and as possible.</p>
<p>“Freedom costs dearly, and it is necessary to either resign ourselves to live without it or to decide to buy it for its price,” said Mart�.</p>
<p>“Whoever attempts to conquer Cuba will only gather the dust of her soil soaked in blood, if he does not perish in the fight,” exclaimed Maceo.</p>
<p>We are not the first revolutionaries to think that way! And we shall not be the last!</p>
<p>One man may be bought, but never a people.</p>
<p>Fate decreed that I could survive the empire’s murderous machine. Shortly, it will be a year since I became ill and, while I hovered between life and death, I stated in the Proclamation of July 31, 2006: “I do not harbor the slightest doubt that our people and our Revolution will fight until the last drop of blood.”</p>
<p>Mr. Bush, don’t you doubt that either!</p>
<p>I assure you that you will never have Cuba!</p>
<p> </p>
<p>—<i>Granma</i> (Cuba), June 17, 2007
</p></div>
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Jul/Aug 2007 • Vol 7, No. 4
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Search the Site:
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They Will Never Have Cuba
By Fidel Castro Ruz
I hope that no-one will say that I am gratuitously attacking Bush. Surely they will understand my reasons for strongly criticizing his policies.
Robert Woodward is an American journalist and writer who became famous for the series of articles published byThe Washington Post, written by him and Carl Bernstein, and which eventually led to the investigation and resignation of Nixon. He is author and co-author of ten best-sellers. With his fearsome style he manages to wrench confessions from his interviewees. In his book,State of Denial, he says that on June 18, 2003, three months after the Iraq war had begun, as he was on the way out of his White House office following an important meeting, Bush slapped Jay Garner on the back and said to him:
“Hey, Jay, you want to do Iran?”
“Sir, the boys and I talked about that and we want to hold out for Cuba. We think the rum and the cigars are a little better.... The women are prettier.”
Bush laughed. “You got it. You got Cuba.”
Bush was betrayed by his subconscious. It was in his mind when he declared what scores of dark corners should be expecting to happen and Cuba occupies a special place among those dark corners.
Garner, a recently retired three-star general who had been appointed Head of the Post-War Planning Office for Iraq, created by a secret National Security Presidential Directive, was considered by Bush an exceptional man to carry out his war strategy. Appointed for the post on January 20, 2003, he was replaced on May 11 of that same year at the urging of Rumsfeld. He didn’t have the nerve to explain to Bush his strong disagreements on the matter of the strategy to be pursued in Iraq. He was thinking of another one with identical purpose. In the past few weeks, thousands of marines and a number of U.S. aircraft carriers, with their naval supporting forces, have been maneuvering in the Persian Gulf, a few miles off the Iranian territory.
. . .
It will very soon be 50 years since our people started suffering a cruel blockade; thousands of our sons and daughters have died or have been mutilated as a result of the dirty war against Cuba, the only country in the world to which a [U.S.-imposed] Adjustment Act has been applied inciting illegal emigration, yet another cause of death for Cuban citizens, including women and children. More than 15 years ago Cuba lost her principal markets and sources of supply for foods, energy, machinery, raw materials and long-term low-interest financing.
First the socialist bloc collapsed followed almost immediately by the USSR, dismantled piece by piece. The empire tightened and internationalized the blockade; the proteins and calories which were quite well distributed despite our deficiencies were reduced approximately by 40 percent; diseases such as optical neuritis and others appeared; the shortage of medicines, also a result of the blockade, became an everyday reality. Medicines were allowed to enter only as a charitable act, to demoralize us; these, in their turn, became a source of illegal business and black-market dealings.
Inevitably, the “special period” struck. This was the sum total of all the consequences of the aggression and it forced us to take desperate measures whose harmful effects were bolstered by the colossal media machine of the empire. Everyone was awaiting, some with sadness and others with oligarchic glee, the crumbling of the Cuban Revolution.
The access to convertible currency greatly harmed our social consciousness, to a greater or a lesser degree, due to the inequalities and ideological weaknesses it created.
Throughout its lifetime, the Revolution has taught the people, training hundreds of thousands of teachers, doctors, scientists, intellectuals, artists, computer engineers and other professionals with university and post-graduate degrees in dozens of professions. This storehouse of wealth has allowed us to reduce infant mortality to low levels, unthinkable in any Third World country, and to raise life expectancy as well as the average educational level of the population up to the ninth grade.
By offering Cuba oil under favorable terms of payment at a time when oil prices were escalating dramatically, the Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution brought a significant relief and opened up new possibilities, since our country was already beginning to produce her own energy in ever-growing amounts.
Concerned over its interests in that country, the empire had for years been planning to destroy that Revolution, and so it attempted to do it in April 2002, as it will attempt to do again as many times as it can. This is why the Bolivarian revolutionaries are preparing to resist.
Meanwhile, Bush has intensified his plans for an occupation of Cuba, to the point of proclaiming laws and an interventionist government in order to install a direct imperial administration.
Based on the privileges granted to the United States in Bretton Woods and Nixon’s swindle when he removed the gold standard which placed a limit on the issuing of paper money, the empire bought and paid with paper tens of trillions of dollars, more than twelve digit figures. This is how it preserved an unsustainable economy. A large part of the world currency reserves are in U.S. Treasury bonds and bills. For this reason, many would rather not have a dollar crisis like the one in 1929 that would turn those paper bills into thin air. Today, the value of one dollar in gold is at least eighteen times less than what it was in the Nixon years. The same happens with the value of the reserves in that currency.
Those paper bills have kept their low current value because fabulous amounts of increasingly expensive and modern weapons can be purchased with them; weapons that produce nothing. The United States exports more weapons than anyone else in the world. With those same paper bills, the empire has developed a most sophisticated and deadly system of weapons of mass destruction with which it sustains its world tyranny.
Such power allows it to impose the idea of transforming foods into fuels and to shatter any initiative and commitment to avoid global warming, which is visibly accelerating.
Hunger and thirst, more violent hurricanes and the surge of the sea is what Tyranians and Trojans stand to suffer as a result of imperial policies. It is only through drastic energy savings that humanity will have a respite and hopes of survival for the species; but the consumer societies of the wealthy nations are absolutely heedless of that.
Cuba will continue to develop and improve the combative capacities of her people, including our modest but active and efficient defensive weapons industry which multiplies our capacity to face the invaders no matter where they may be, and the weapons they possess. We shall continue acquiring the necessary materials and the pertinent fire power, even though the notorious Gross Domestic Product as measured by capitalism may not be growing, for their GDP includes such things as the value of privatizations, drugs, sexual services and advertising, while it excludes many others like free educational and health services for all citizens.
From one year to the next the standard of living can be improved by raising knowledge, self-esteem and the dignity of people. It will be enough to reduce wastage and the economy will grow. In spite of everything, we will keep on growing as necessary and as possible.
“Freedom costs dearly, and it is necessary to either resign ourselves to live without it or to decide to buy it for its price,” said Mart�.
“Whoever attempts to conquer Cuba will only gather the dust of her soil soaked in blood, if he does not perish in the fight,” exclaimed Maceo.
We are not the first revolutionaries to think that way! And we shall not be the last!
One man may be bought, but never a people.
Fate decreed that I could survive the empire’s murderous machine. Shortly, it will be a year since I became ill and, while I hovered between life and death, I stated in the Proclamation of July 31, 2006: “I do not harbor the slightest doubt that our people and our Revolution will fight until the last drop of blood.”
Mr. Bush, don’t you doubt that either!
I assure you that you will never have Cuba!
—Granma (Cuba), June 17, 2007
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1963.01.02 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h3>
Fourth Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution
</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> January 2, 1963, (1654 GMT) in the Plaza De Revolucion Jose Marti (Havana)
<br>
<span class="info">First Published:</span> January 2, 1963
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html">Castro Speech Database</a>
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>
Distinguished visitors, workers, peasants, students, all citizens:
Mr. Kennedy would say (applause for approximately two minutes) that I am
addressing the captive people of Cuba. (Applause) According to the concepts
of the imperialists, the concept in which exploitation is just and crime
and aggression are right, to be mercenary is right; according to the
concepts of imperialists this country is a captive country. If we start by
imagining things in this vein, nothing else they do is surprising.
</p>
<p>
Recently an event took place which, even if they try to ignore it, is an
historic event. Imperialism agreed to pay our country the indemnity fixed
by the revolutionary courts of the invaders of Playa Giron. The Government
of the United States tried by all means to avoid its official
responsibility, to elude the official acceptance of this fact. This is in
accordance with the pharasaical mentality of the leaders of imperialism.
This is in accordance with everything they do. For example, when they
attacked us on 15 April they sent airplanes with Cuban insignia. And when
Cuba denounced the aggression, they declared through their cable agencies
to the whole world that these were not planes from abroad but Cuban planes
(whose pilots — Ed.) had revolted. And they made this version known to the
whole world.
</p>
<p>
Fortunately, for them, a lie of that type was only one more lie. They have
always acted in this manner and for that reason it was not surprising that
on one side they were mobilizing to gather the funds and on the other side
they pretended that it was simply a committee of families that was carrying
out these negotiations. In the background, it was the Government of the
United States.
</p>
<p>
Now it has been learned that the brother of the President of the United
States had made the main arrangements to obtain the funds to pay the
indemnity. They, naturally, do not call it indemnity. They said it is
rescue. This, too, is logical for them to say. To the imperialists, who
jailed a Negro newspaperman for visiting Cuba and fined him 10,000 dollars
for exercising a constitutional right, this is justice. On the other hand,
the fact that a revolution has been generous to the criminals who attacked
us while serving a foreign power, the fact that the revolutionary courts,
instead of giving them a sentence which they deserved — capital punishment
for all of them — let them go with a fine, is not justice. To punish those
who attacked us one morning by surprise and cowardice, to punish those who
came escorted by foreign battle ships, to punish those who, in serving a
foreign power, committed an act of flagrant treason by all codes, that was
not justice. They call is rescue. But we do not care what they call it. The
fact is they that had to agree to pay indemnity and that for the first time
(short applause) in history, imperialism paid a war indemnity.
</p>
<p>
And why did they pay it? Because they were beaten, because in Playa Giron
the imperialists suffered their first great defeat in Latin America. (Short
applause) What did the President of the United States do? How has he acted?
First he assumed the responsibility for the attack to our country. However,
during 20 months, they avoided paying that indemnity. When at the end they
decided to pay, and the revolutionary government greed the invaders, what
was the conduct of the President of the United States? Was it the conduct
of a statesman. Was it the conduct of a responsible man? No. It was the
conduct of a pirate. It was the conduct of a chief of filibusters. Because,
really, never has a President of the United States degraded the dignity of
his office to such as did Mr. Kennedy on the day he met with the criminal
invaders of our country.
</p>
<p>
Here I have the little speech he made on that day. It is good that I have
no love for him, because reading these things teaches us to understand the
imperialists. He started by saying — I am going to read the most important
paragraphs, as some paragraphs lack pervasiveness; the most important
paragraphs — "I want to express my deepest thanks to the brigade for making
the United States the custodian of this flag. I can assure you that this
flag," and listen well "this flag will be returned to this brigade in a
free Havana." We do not know if there is a bar in Miami called Free Havana.
</p>
<p>
Then he says, and this is the height of ridiculousness and (word
indistinct), as we Cubans say: "I ask Mr. Miranda, who kept this flag for
20 months, to come forward so we can know him. I wanted to know the person
to whom I should return it." Perhaps that morning he had one drink too
many.
</p>
<p>
In the first place the story of the flag is a lie, a complete lie. Everyone
knows that the mercenaries that come here dressed as "silk worms," as the
people say, with camouflaged uniforms of the North American army, were
totally and absolutely surprised and captured. But not only that, everyone
knows that they left even their underwear.
</p>
<p>
Now they have invented the story that one escaped and carried the flag in
his clothes and that is the flag they delivered to Kennedy. In the first
place they have swindled Kennedy because no one could escape from that
cell. The best proof is that the whole brigade fell prisoner. They all said
they were cooks and aidmen.
</p>
<p>
Let them forget the "show" of the flag, and give this man (Kennedy — Ed.)
acting life a chief of pirates, a chance to meet with these criminals, with
these cowards, and there declare to the world that he can assume them that
this flag will returned in a free Havana. But there are more interesting
things. He says: "You members of the brigade and members of your families
are following a historic path, a path followed by other Cubans in other
times and by other patriots of our hemisphere in other years — Marti,
Bolivar, O'Higgins — all who fought for freedom, many of whom were defeated,
many of whom were exiled, and all of whom returned to their countries."
</p>
<p>
To compare these mercenaries with Marti, to compare these mercenaries with
the patriots of independence — all the world knows Marti's history, of that
Marti with ragged clothes, of that Marti who did not receive his funds from
the Yankee treasury, of that Marti who suffered this humble emigration, of
proletarians, of tobacco raisers, who gathered funds to buy weapons which
once acquired were taken away by the Yankee authorities. Of that Marti who
did not come escorted by the Yankee fleet, nor was he preceded in his
landing by Yankee bombers, of that Marti who on a stormy night landed in a
rowboat almost by himself on the western shores. To compare this integral,
anti-imperialist man, to compare the effort of these patriots with these
miserable individuals is an affront to the memory of those men.
</p>
<p>
Our liberators came to free slaves, to build a nation, a nation which
imperialism has frustrated, a nation which Yankee imperialism stepped upon
for 50 years. And who were these men? They were slave owners, latifundists,
exploiters of game and vice, millionaires, criminals, and robbers. All
exploiters are robbers. They came to enslave, to take from the country its
riches, to return to Yankee monopolies our factories and our lands. And
this man (Kennedy — Ed.) says that 60 years ago Marti, the first spirit of
independence, lived in this land. In 1889 the first international
conference took place. Cuba was not present.
</p>
<p>
Comrades, this man says: "Then Cuba was the only state in the hemisphere
still controlled by a foreign monarch. Then as now, Cuba was excluded from
the society of free nations. And then as now, brave men in Florida and New
York dedicated their lives and their energies to the liberation of their
country." Kennedy's "then as now" means "now as never before" to us.
</p>
<p>
We can wave the flag of the lone star with pride now more than ever. We are
respected now more than ever. And the best proof of this is the respect we
inspire in the imperialists themselves. It is the respect inspired by a
nation that has not been cowed by its power, that has not been cowed in
four years of heroic struggle. Now more than ever, Mr. Kennedy, we are free
and we are the free territory of America. (Applause, chanting)
</p>
<p>
This gentleman continues by saying things, some of which can cause us some
laughter. He says: "The brigade comes from behind the walls of a prison,
but you have left behind more than 6 million of your compatriots who are
also, in a very real sense, in a prison, (crowd boos) because Cuba today is
a prison surrounded by water." Which means that you are prisoners. (Crowd
shouts "no") Didn't you know that? Then he continued: "Your conduct and
your courage are proof that although Castro and his dictator colleagues may
govern nations, they do not govern peoples." (Crowd shouts "no") I do not
know what you are, then. I do not know what this impressive crowd that
gathered in this plaza behind their weapons could be. He says: "Bodies may
be imprisoned, but not spirits." You must be unimprisoned spirits.
(Laughter)
</p>
<p>
He says: "The revolution promised the Cuban people political freedom,
social justice, intellectual freedom, land for the peasants, and the end of
economic exploitation." He says we made a promise. He continued: "What they
have received is a police state, the elimination of the dignity of owning
lands, the destruction of the freedom of expression and of the press, and
the total subjugation of individual human well being to the service of the
state and of foreign states."
</p>
<p>
We have not carried out a single social reform, nor agrarian reform. Nor
have we taught a million illiterates, nor do we have nearly 100,000
scholarship students studying and creating a new intellectual generation.
(Applause) The intellectual freedom of which Kennedy speaks is the
intellectual freedom by virtue of which more than half a million children
did not have schools in our country. The intellectual freedom of which
Kennedy speaks are the 20 million Latin American children without teachers
and without schools.
</p>
<p>
But the curious thing is that this gentlemen says that we promised the end
of economic exploitation. To what exploitation does this gentleman refer?
Could it be that of the United Fruit Company? (Crowd shouts) Could it be
that of the electric company and the telephone company, that same company
that on the bloody day of 13 March, over the blood of the heroic students
who fell there, signed an exploiting and one-sided contract against our
country? Could it be that those companies are still exploiting our country?
</p>
<p>
But the curious thing, could Kennedy be changing? (Crowd laughs) The
curious thing is that he speaks of our offering an end to economic
exploitation and then immediately says: "Under the Alliance for Progress,
we support for Cuba and for all the countries of this hemisphere the right
to free elections and the right to the free exercise of basic human rights.
We support agrarian reform." (Crowd laughs) Could Kennedy be converting to
Marxism-Leninism? (Crowd laughs)
</p>
<p>
The fact is that in this country more than 100,000 peasant families paid
rents, which at times were 50 percent of their products. Who finds a
peasant along the length and breadth of the country paying rent now? More
than 100,000 exploited peasants became owners of their lands. (Applause)
But why does this gentleman think that the peasants are with the
revolution? What kind of a snarl has formed in the head of Mr. Kennedy when
he says that we have promised the end of economic exploitation and that we
have not kept our promise? And he speaks of agrarian reform? We already
know what their friends, the Latin American latifundistas, will tell them.
As the Chilean latifundists said: "Listen, you speak of distributing the
land. Why not talk about distributing the copper mines also?"
</p>
<p>
It is very curious that we hear the chief of the Yankee empire speak of
economic exploitation, agrarian reform, and such things. When, before, did
he speak of such things? Never, of course, they do not speak sincerely, but
how long have they been speaking this language? What taught them to speak
this language? (Crowd shouts) Who were their teachers? (Crowd shouts) The
Cubans. Too bad we have such bad disciples. (Applause) And this gentleman
uses a strange language, a revolutionary language. This is curious. He is
going to create some problems with the reactionaries because, although the
reactionaries know that what he says is a story, they also know that one
must not play with words. And the Latin American latifundistas are going to
say: "Well, if we will distribute our lands, you must distribute the oil,
the copper, the iron, and all the monopolies you have here." Those are the
irreconcilable contradictions of imperialism. How can they use this
language?
</p>
<p>
He then says: "We support the agrarian reform and the right of each peasant
to own the land he works." That is precisely what we said, but we are the
only ones who have done it. And, of course, we do not need the Alliance for
Progress. But the Yankee ambassador complained about that. Mr. Bonsal
protested about that every day, that we had nationalized the lands of the
United Fruit and the Atlantica del Golfo and all the Yankee companies, so
that the land would belong to those who work it, and all the peasants who
paid rent would be freed from rent. The Yankee ambassador protested about
that every day. When do you think the Playa Giron expedition was organized?
After the law of agrarian reform, which was rather kind because it left
them with 30 caballerias. When they left they lost that too.
</p>
<p>
The United Fruit Company had 10,000 cabellerias of land, and another
company had 17,000. Now they don't have it. Has the imperialist economic
exploitation ended or not? In the rural areas the men were without work
most of the time, desperately awaiting the sugar harvest or the harvest of
coffee. The lands were uncultivated. The big land holdings where
proletarian workers worked — not peasants, for the peasants were the ones
who worked the land on their own — began to be exploited. The results: rural
employment was eradicated. The layoff, which was the plague of our rural
areas, disappeared forever.
</p>
<p>
And now, who goes to harvest the peasant's coffee? The scholarship
students. That means that the revolution has not just made those peasants
owners of their lands and built them hospitals, roads, schools, sent them
teachers, made them literate; but now, as the result of the economic
development of the country, there are no more of those hungry pariahs who
used to collect coffee because there was nothing else to do. The revolution
sends them the youth, the students to harvest the coffee. There is no more
off-season in our rural areas. There is no more unemployment in our rural
areas. There is no more illiteracy. Children no longer die without medical
attention. (Applause) And cultural life is developing with giant strides.
How can they pretend to ignore these truths? In ignoring them they suffer
those tremendous mistakes into which they fall.
</p>
<p>
Then he says that he "supports the right of all free peoples to freely
transform their economic institutions." That is what we have done. We have
transformed as a free people our economic institutions. In words, this
gentleman is changing. But it is dangerous to change in words alone,
because this creates a confusion in the mind which no one can remove. He
said that he supports the right freely to transform economic
institutions — nothing more or less than exactly what we have done. And
because we did so we have the enmity of the imperialists. Who can they
deceive. Then he says: "There are principles of the Alliance for Progress,
the principles which we support for Cuba. These are the principles for
which men have fought and fallen." Yes, they have fallen, but on our side.
</p>
<p>
Then he tells those mercenaries, sons of latifundio-owners, bankers,
industrialists, usurers (garroteros), and crooked gamblers (tahures) — he
tells them: "These are the principles for which you fought and for which
some members of your brigade gave their lives." You might remember what
those men said. They talked about free enterprise. And all of them, in
their immense majority, those who were not henchmen, were sons of
latifundio-owners or wealthy men. Then this man comes and tells them they
came to fight for the economic change of society. But what he says next is
even better. He says: "I believe that these are the principles of the great
majority of the Cuban people today."
</p>
<p>
Yes, principles as we understand them, not as they see them! He says, and
listen well, he says: "I am certain that throughout the island of Cuba, in
the government, itself." How intriguing, how intriguing this Mr. Kennedy
is, because he says: "I am certain that within the government itself, in
the army and the militia, there are many who hold to a faith in freedom and
are filled with consternation at the destruction of freedom in their island
and are determined to restore that freedom so that the Cuban people can
again govern themselves." (Shouts from from the crowd)
</p>
<p>
It is fitting to tell Mr. Kennedy, the intriguing Kennedy, to change
sleeping positions. He speaks, but a funny thing, he speaks of the rebel
army and he speaks of the militia, those militiamen who have been the
terror of the imperialists, (applause) those soldiers, those heroic
soldiers who in 72 hours, or I should say in less than 72 hours, crushed
the pirates of the Yankee empire. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
How strange that the imperialists have tested all of the weapons and have
failed in all of them. They have failed because we have an armed people.
Today he speaks, and today he tries to intrigue and tries to make it appear
possible that those patriotic soldiers, those proletarian militiamen, can
place themselves at the service of Yankee imperialism. (Applause) Mr.
Kennedy, between us and you and between those revolutionary soldiers and
the Yankee empire there is much blood. (Applause) And that blood began to
flow many years ago. That blood began to flow in the Sierra Maestra, when
we fought against an army trained by Yankee military missions, under the
fire of Yankee arms, under bombardment by Yankee planes. And these soldiers
saw entire families die enveloped in the napalm of Yankee incendiary bombs.
They saw mutilated children assassinated by machine guns, and many comrades
dying in the fighting.
</p>
<p>
Mr. Kennedy, between our people and the imperialists, between our
combatants and the imperialists there is much blood. There is the blood of
the workers assassinated during the Le Courbre explosion, for a criminal
sabotage prepared by the Yankee agency. There is the blood of the workers
who died putting out the first in the sugar cane fields set aflame by small
planes from the United States. There is blood such as that of Fe Del Valle
who died when the Central Intelligence Agency terrorists set fire to one of
our work centers. Between those combatants and imperialism there is the
blood of more than 100 soldiers and militiamen who died gloriously at Playa
Giron. (Applause) There is the blood of the assassinated teachers, such as
Conrado Benitez. There is the blood of the cruelly assassinated brigade
members such as Manuel Ascunce Domenech. There is an abyss of blood between
us and you, messrs. imperialists.
</p>
<p>
But there is something more than blood. There is still a deeper abyss. It
is the abyss which separates the workers from the exploiters, the liberated
salves from the enslavers. There is the abyss of our ideas, the abyss which
separates our ideas, and there a profound abyss separating them from the
dignity of our people, the dignity of each Cuban man and woman (Applause).
The Cuban people are not that sort of people. They are not the group of
outcasts, of exploiters and traitors, of privileged people whom the
revolution deprived of their lands.
</p>
<p>
The Cuban people today are very different from that group of wretched
people. The dignity of these people has had an irrefutable test, and that
is, that despite the imperialists, despite their gold, their crimes, their
aggressions, their blockades, and despite all they have done to destroy our
revolution, today we celebrate, or rather yesterday we celebrated, our
fourth anniversary. Mr. Kennedy, we celebrated our fourth anniversary and
started on our fifth year. (Applause) We are speaking about the five
points, but I wanted to get out of the way of the matter of the little
meeting in Miami.
</p>
<p>
How did these men behave, these men who left? How could they behave like
rates, according to a man on the street. The entire world saw it over
television. There was not one single one who said he had not been shipped.
There was not one single one who did not admit he had made a mistake, that
they thought the militia would join them, that the army would not fight.
There was not one single one who did not believe it was going to be a
military parade, and then they became repentant Magdalenes before
television cameras. In prison, they wrote lengthy and unending letters of
repentance — their main chiefs (those who wrote the letters — Ed.), whom the
people know.
</p>
<p>
The revolution dealt with them generously not because they deserved it, but
because those are our principles. None of them was beaten. Almost all of
the lives of their wounded were saved in revolutionary hospitals. In
accordance with the law and by their actions, they deserved capital
punishment. However, the sentences given them were sentences that allowed
them to go free if damages to our country were indemnified.
</p>
<p>
What the imperialists do not say is that if they remained 20 months in
prison, it was due to the Yankee pharisee-like spirit, the Yankee hypocrisy
which prevented them from showing their face, which kept them from paying,
because scarcely two months or less following the attack, they could have
been released, if the imperialists had paid. The imperialists likewise have
not disclosed that the revolutionary Government had previously released,
many months ago, 60 wounded and sick, allowing them to pay indemnification
later, which they paid only now, that the Revolutionary Government acceded
to release the prisoners when they had paid only 20 percent. None of that
have they been willing to disclose.
</p>
<p>
And what have they done over there upon their arrival, all those wretched
ones, those cowards whom an entire population saw pleading for clemency,
trying to elude responsibility, describing themselves as cooks and nurses,
saying they had not fired one single shot. When they arrived there, their
first statements were to the effect they hoped to return, to come back, and
so forth and so forth. This gives the people an idea of the treatment
deserved by such pests (alimanas). However, if the Revolutionary Government
has released them through an agreement with the U.S. Red Cross for the
implementation of all of the agreements we have signed guaranteed by a
Canadian banking organization — guaranteed, if the revolution released
them — it is because the revolution can combat 50 expeditions such as that
one, not one gang like that (applause), but 50 gangs like it that would
land simultaneously on our national territory. We could destroy them even
more rapidly than we destroyed that one.
</p>
<p>
The security of our country is not affected in the least by the fact that
the gang of pests is out of the country. The U.S. Red Cross was in charge
of implementing the arrangements, and we must say that up to this moment,
it has been carrying out its duties satisfactorily. It is a pity that with
that botchery (chapuceria), that ridiculous attitude which is incompatible
with the dignity of the position, Mr. Kennedy sounded that sour note and
dropped a stain on an action which was motivated by a lofty humanitarian
spirit. But then, what else can be expected from the chief of the pirates.
</p>
<p>
He went there to be near his defeated army, near his pirates who left this
country with their heads hanging in shame. And what a moment that was for
us, the moment when at the same airport where the cowardly attack of 15
April took place, at the same airport where planes of Yankee make dropped
their load of bombs on 15 April, Yankee planes also alighted later as meek
peace doves leaving their cargo of medicines and baby food. Those of us who
lived through those two episodes, through the aggression and the unloading
of the indemnification, cannot forget it because they were not the haughty
and arrogant attackers who one day dropped bombs and, as a penalty for that
adventure, one day they had to come and bring other things to save lives
and to benefit our people. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
With respect to the encouragement that Mr. Kennedy tried to give them, we
say to him that if he wants to finance the economic development of the
Cuban socialist republic, let him continue to send expeditions such as this
one. (Applause) We must say that the Cuban Government demanded the entire
payment imposed by the sentences; that is, 62 million, the value of the
products delivered here. We hope that this is a lesson to the imperialists.
</p>
<p>
What is this that Kennedy says, as it says here, that he can assure that
that flag will be returned to the mercenaries in a free Havana? What does
Mr. Kennedy mean by this? What threat is implied in that statement? Why
does he dare say he assures such a thing? How is that compatible with a
promise of nonaggression against our country, a promise not to invade Cuba?
That is why we have maintained and we maintain that the guarantees offered
by imperialism must not be contained simply in words? They must be
accompanied by actions. We have more than good reason to mistrust the
imperialists and we know that guarantees can never be contained within the
mere word of the imperialists. Guarantees lie in our decision to fight, in
our decision to resist historically any attack from the enemy. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Guarantees lie in those arms you say in this parade and many more weapons
which were not shown in this parade. Guarantees lies in our hundreds of
thousands of fighters, guarantees lie in the heroism of our people who more
than proved their heroism during very difficult moments. When Mr. Kennedy
threatened to turn us into a nuclear target in efforts to intimidate us,
what happened then? The people shouted: fatherland or death! ((Applause
followed by rhythmic applause) More men and women than ever enlisted in the
militia. More men and women than ever asked to be inscribed in the mass
organizations. With a smile on their lips and with an impressive calm, an
entire population became determined to face the enemy, to die, if necessary
(applause), because among these revolutionary people, the imperialists will
never find weakness. We might die, yes, but never weaken. (Applause) We
might die, yes, but we will die free and in dignity. (Rhythmic applause)
</p>
<p>
We would die not because we have no regard for life, not because we have
disdain for the creative work our people are carrying out, not because we
have failed to love the luminous future to which we we have a right through
our work, but because all of our lives are indisolubly associated with that
idea and that future. Without a fatherland, we want no life. Without
freedom, we want no life. Without dignity, we want no life! (Applause)
Without justice, we want no life! Without bread for our children, we want
no life! (Applause) Without a future, we want no life! That is why we say:
Fatherland or death! (Applause)
</p>
<p>
That is why the hymn of our fighters for independence left it clearly
established that to live in chains is to live sunk in opprobrium and
affront and to die for the homeland is to live. (Applause) This explains
the attitude of our people, the wherefores of the measures we took in the
face of imperialist aggression and in the face of the imperialists'
threats, without hesitation, so that imperialists may know that these
people do not vacillate. That is why we took measures to arm ourselves, and
that is why we agreed with the Soviet Union (applause) on the weapons that
were set up here, (applause) because we understood that we were fulfilling
two obligations: one toward the country, fortifying its defenses in view of
imperialist threats, and one obligation toward the peoples of the socialist
camp; that is, an international proletarian duty. (Applause, about one
minute) We were fulfilling two duties: one toward the workers of the world,
our internationalist duties, in accordance with the principles of
proletarian internationalism because patriotism is proletarian
internationalism within socialist revolution. That was the thought that
preceded the conduct of Cuba revolution.
</p>
<p>
You know how the crisis started, developed, and culminated. We mean to say
that our people always reserve the rights in front of their imperialist
enemies to take all measures deemed pertinent and to possess the weapons
deemed necessary. (Applause) The Soviet Government, in search of peace,
arrived at certain agreements with the North American government, but this
does not mean that we have renounced this right, the right to possess the
weapons we deem proper and to take the international policy steps we deem
pertinent as a sovereign country. (Applause) And for that reason we do not
accept the unilateral inspection that they wanted to establish here with
the only purpose, of the imperialists, to humble us. And there was no
inspection and there will never be inspection. And if they want inspection
let them permit us to inspect them. What do they expect from a sovereign
country, a sovereign country (repeating — Ed.), we are as sovereign or more
than they are. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
We must know how cunning the imperialists are, what foxes they are in all
their acts and deeds. Therefore, we do not trust the imperialists. The
guarantees in which we have always believed, as I said, are the ones I
mentioned before and the solidarity of the socialist camp. They have always
been our guarantee. Without the solidarity of the socialist camp, we would
have been disarmed, this is clear because when we went to buy weapons in a
West European country they blew up our ship and killed about 50 workers and
soldiers. The imperialists demanded that weapons not be sold to us, and
while they were arming and training their mercenaries, they were preventing
us from acquiring weapons, and it was the countries of the socialist camp
who furnished us weapons. And thus the solidarity of the socialist camp is
an efficient weapon against imperialist aggression. (Applause) In that
guarantee we do believe, in this guarantee which gives us two things: our
will to fight to the last man and the solidarity of the socialist camp; and
not in the worlds of the imperialists. That is the reason we have presented
our five demands, so just, so logical, and so consubstantial with our
rights that no one could object to them.
</p>
<p>
What kind of peace are the imperialists complaining about? With their
economic pressures against our country, promoting subversion, organizing
piratical attacks, declaring their purpose of violating our airspace. What
peace can this be? What kind of peace?
</p>
<p>
Do the imperialists think by chance that we are going to accept violation
of our rights. What peace would that be? A peace that could be broken any
moment by a violation. In any moment an incident could occur, because of
that declared policy, because it is clear that if the imperialists are
permitted one of their tricks, they will then try others. And they showed
with their planes; in the days of the crisis, during a truce, they started
to fly over and buzz our bases and over our artillerymen until they
received orders to fire; then the Americans went as high as they could, and
they quit flying low.
</p>
<p>
What kind of peace would that be? A peace in which we would have to accept
these violations. We do not accept them. These violations could be sources
for incidents. We are acquiring better antiaircraft weapons as time goes
by. Today the first ground rocket training unit passed in review
(Applause), units that are in training. What kind of peace would that be, a
peace in which the imperialists expose us to incidents of this type through
their stated policy of violating our airspace. And lastly, what are they
doing in part of our territory, threatening us, making plans from there
against our country? That territory is ours and we have every right to
claim it. What right to the imperialists have to possess a base on our
territory?
</p>
<p>
These are the five points that we have presented as a just demand of our
people for a true solution of the Caribbean crisis. The imperialists as yet
have made no clear statements. They have spoken with reticence; they have
spoken in a threatening and insidious voice saying that if Cuba does not
promote subversion and such there will be no invasion. The statements they
made to the mercenaries are not declarations of peace. They do not imply a
guarantee for our country, because everyone knows that 50 or 100
expeditions like that one or any type of direct attack will be rapidly
repelled. What do the imperialists mean with this threat? What kind of
guarantees are these? They have not spoken clearly and openly. The Soviet
Union has fulfilled its part. The Government of the United States has not
fulfilled its promise.
</p>
<p>
It is superfluous to say that our position is not a position contrary to
solutions or against peaceful solutions. We agree with the policy of
discussion and negotiation of problems by peaceful means. We agree with
that basic principle. We agree, too, with the policy of concession for
concession. Our position maintained throughout this crisis is a position
strictly adjusted to principles. We refuse to accept inspection. We do so
because our country cannot renounce an absolutely sovereign prerogative.
And we have defended our integrity because the fact that we favor peace
does not mean that they are going to land on our shores and we not fire a
shot. We are for peace but if we are attacked we are going to repel them
with all our means. (Applause).
</p>
<p>
We know that in the present world the hands of the imperialists are not
free. If they had been free, we would have had to suffer the consequences
from the outset. It's a true fact that the world correlation of forces
permitted them to do what they pleased — what they did in Nicaragua, Mexico,
and Santo Domingo and in other small countries of Latin America. Their
hands are not free now and they are not in a position to act freely as they
did before. The irresponsible acts of Mr. Kennedy placed the world at the
brink of war.
</p>
<p>
Whom can they blame? Us? The Soviet Union? (Crowd shouts "no") Who were the
aggressors? Who has been baiting our country incessantly from the first? It
is they who have maintained a declared war against our country, ceaseless
aggression against our country. These are the facts that cannot be hidden
or denied. There was the meeting with the mercenaries he sent to invade our
country. They were the aggressors. They are the only ones to blame. Let
them stop their policy of aggression and the threat of war will end in the
Caribbean. Let them stop their policy of aggression and there will be peace
in the Caribbean. But let them not think they can attack us and that we
will not defend ourselves. Let them not think that we will fold our arms in
the face of their aggressions. The harm they try to cause us we will try to
cause them as well. If what the imperialists want in exchange for peace is
that we stop being revolutionary we will not stop being revolutionary. We
will never lower our flag.
</p>
<p>
We are examples for the brother peoples of America because the captives,
Mr. Kennedy, are not the Cubans. The captives are the millions of Indians
and Latin Americans who are exploited by the Yankee monopolies, exploited
by Yankee imperialism in Latin America. (Applause) When you, Mr. Kennedy,
when you speak of captives, you say Cubans, but you do not think of us. You
think of and fear the rebellion of the real captives, the rebellion of the
exploited. If the workers and peasants of Latin America had weapons as our
people do, we would see what would happen. We would see who are the real
captives, because these, whom you call captives, are armed captives, with
tanks, planes. (Applause) Give the workers and peasants of Latin America
tanks and planes and you will see who are the captives. That is the
irrefutable proof.
</p>
<p>
But there is no hurry. We did not have cannons either. We did not have
planes, but today we do. We were as disarmed as those captives of Latin
America, but that did not prevent the triumph of the people, the triumph of
the revolution. When the peoples decide to struggle, they can do what we
did, and the millions of Latin American exploited by the imperialists can
do what we did. (Applause) And the peoples are beginning to awake and
struggle.
</p>
<p>
Thus is the proof of solidarity with our country; the action of some
peoples, like the Venezuelan people who, while Betancourt, the puppet was
sending his ships, along with the puppets of Argentina and Santo Domingo to
blockade us, the Venezuelan people struggled and gave extraordinary
evidence of revolutionary spirit, led by the glorious Communist Party of
Venezuela (applause) and by the valiant militants of the leftist
revolutionary movement. The imperialists were given evidence of what
revolutionary solidarity is, and active solidarity of revolutionaries who
do not sit in their doorways to wait for the corpse of their enemy to pass
by, of revolutionaries who understand that the duty of all revolutionaries
is to create the revolution.
</p>
<p>
Comrades, we begin a fifth anniversary. With what spirit should be view
this new year? With an optimistic spirit, the spirit of a revolution, with
faith in the future. May are the tasks ahead of us. Tasks do not end with
years, but new tasks begin. Our problems today are not the same as four
years ago. New problems, new obligations, and new tasks are ahead of us.
Basically, it is our duty to create the riches that our country needs, to
create the means of production we need to raise our standard of living, to
satisfy the rising needs of our masses. Today everything belongs to the
people and the fruits of work are for the people; the first duty of the
people is to struggle to create all those means to satisfy all their needs.
We must do that amid a bitter situation, serious problems that concern us
all in the struggle against the common enemy, in the struggle against the
imperialists.
</p>
<p>
What are the discrepancies in the bosom of the socialist family, the public
discrepancies between large forces of the socialist camp? That concerns us
all. It concerns us because we see with clarity here, from this trench 90
miles from the Yankee empire, how much cause for concern these
discrepancies can be, how much unity is needed, how much all the strength
of the entire socialist camp is needed to face up to those enemies.
</p>
<p>
We have the great historic task of bringing this revolution forward, of
serving as an example for the revolution of Latin America, and within the
socialist camp, which is and always will be our family. (Applause) We
understand it to be our duty to struggle for unity under the principles of
the socialist family, of the socialist camp. That is to be the line of our
people, the line followed by the political leadership of the revolution.
There are many problems and very great tasks ahead of us — first of all, to
face up to imperialism. In that same situation are many peoples, the
colonialized peoples subjected to imperialism. That is why that unity is so
necessary. That is why it is so necessary to present a united front to the
imperialists and that, I am certain, will be the clamor of the threatened
peoples, the peoples who are fighting for their independence, the peoples
who are struggling against the aggressions of imperialism.
</p>
<p>
A guide for our people: our task is to unite inside and outside, to
eliminate everything that divides us inside and outside, to struggle for
everything that unites us inside and outside, the unity of all principles,
that is our line, fatherland or death, we will win!
</p>
<p>
This will be the year of organization. (Applause) Why? Because we must
place our main effort in organization; in the first place, organization of
the live party of socialist revolution, the development of the organization
of our masses; that is, our mass organizations, the organization of our
administrative agencies and the organization of economic agencies. This
does not imply that this year will not be for education. The principal
impetus will be for organization. All years are years for education and all
years will be years for organization. But this year we will place emphasis
on organization. And for that reason it will be called the year of
organization.
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
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Castro Internet Archive
Fourth Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution
Spoken: January 2, 1963, (1654 GMT) in the Plaza De Revolucion Jose Marti (Havana)
First Published: January 2, 1963
Source: Castro Speech Database
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
Distinguished visitors, workers, peasants, students, all citizens:
Mr. Kennedy would say (applause for approximately two minutes) that I am
addressing the captive people of Cuba. (Applause) According to the concepts
of the imperialists, the concept in which exploitation is just and crime
and aggression are right, to be mercenary is right; according to the
concepts of imperialists this country is a captive country. If we start by
imagining things in this vein, nothing else they do is surprising.
Recently an event took place which, even if they try to ignore it, is an
historic event. Imperialism agreed to pay our country the indemnity fixed
by the revolutionary courts of the invaders of Playa Giron. The Government
of the United States tried by all means to avoid its official
responsibility, to elude the official acceptance of this fact. This is in
accordance with the pharasaical mentality of the leaders of imperialism.
This is in accordance with everything they do. For example, when they
attacked us on 15 April they sent airplanes with Cuban insignia. And when
Cuba denounced the aggression, they declared through their cable agencies
to the whole world that these were not planes from abroad but Cuban planes
(whose pilots — Ed.) had revolted. And they made this version known to the
whole world.
Fortunately, for them, a lie of that type was only one more lie. They have
always acted in this manner and for that reason it was not surprising that
on one side they were mobilizing to gather the funds and on the other side
they pretended that it was simply a committee of families that was carrying
out these negotiations. In the background, it was the Government of the
United States.
Now it has been learned that the brother of the President of the United
States had made the main arrangements to obtain the funds to pay the
indemnity. They, naturally, do not call it indemnity. They said it is
rescue. This, too, is logical for them to say. To the imperialists, who
jailed a Negro newspaperman for visiting Cuba and fined him 10,000 dollars
for exercising a constitutional right, this is justice. On the other hand,
the fact that a revolution has been generous to the criminals who attacked
us while serving a foreign power, the fact that the revolutionary courts,
instead of giving them a sentence which they deserved — capital punishment
for all of them — let them go with a fine, is not justice. To punish those
who attacked us one morning by surprise and cowardice, to punish those who
came escorted by foreign battle ships, to punish those who, in serving a
foreign power, committed an act of flagrant treason by all codes, that was
not justice. They call is rescue. But we do not care what they call it. The
fact is they that had to agree to pay indemnity and that for the first time
(short applause) in history, imperialism paid a war indemnity.
And why did they pay it? Because they were beaten, because in Playa Giron
the imperialists suffered their first great defeat in Latin America. (Short
applause) What did the President of the United States do? How has he acted?
First he assumed the responsibility for the attack to our country. However,
during 20 months, they avoided paying that indemnity. When at the end they
decided to pay, and the revolutionary government greed the invaders, what
was the conduct of the President of the United States? Was it the conduct
of a statesman. Was it the conduct of a responsible man? No. It was the
conduct of a pirate. It was the conduct of a chief of filibusters. Because,
really, never has a President of the United States degraded the dignity of
his office to such as did Mr. Kennedy on the day he met with the criminal
invaders of our country.
Here I have the little speech he made on that day. It is good that I have
no love for him, because reading these things teaches us to understand the
imperialists. He started by saying — I am going to read the most important
paragraphs, as some paragraphs lack pervasiveness; the most important
paragraphs — "I want to express my deepest thanks to the brigade for making
the United States the custodian of this flag. I can assure you that this
flag," and listen well "this flag will be returned to this brigade in a
free Havana." We do not know if there is a bar in Miami called Free Havana.
Then he says, and this is the height of ridiculousness and (word
indistinct), as we Cubans say: "I ask Mr. Miranda, who kept this flag for
20 months, to come forward so we can know him. I wanted to know the person
to whom I should return it." Perhaps that morning he had one drink too
many.
In the first place the story of the flag is a lie, a complete lie. Everyone
knows that the mercenaries that come here dressed as "silk worms," as the
people say, with camouflaged uniforms of the North American army, were
totally and absolutely surprised and captured. But not only that, everyone
knows that they left even their underwear.
Now they have invented the story that one escaped and carried the flag in
his clothes and that is the flag they delivered to Kennedy. In the first
place they have swindled Kennedy because no one could escape from that
cell. The best proof is that the whole brigade fell prisoner. They all said
they were cooks and aidmen.
Let them forget the "show" of the flag, and give this man (Kennedy — Ed.)
acting life a chief of pirates, a chance to meet with these criminals, with
these cowards, and there declare to the world that he can assume them that
this flag will returned in a free Havana. But there are more interesting
things. He says: "You members of the brigade and members of your families
are following a historic path, a path followed by other Cubans in other
times and by other patriots of our hemisphere in other years — Marti,
Bolivar, O'Higgins — all who fought for freedom, many of whom were defeated,
many of whom were exiled, and all of whom returned to their countries."
To compare these mercenaries with Marti, to compare these mercenaries with
the patriots of independence — all the world knows Marti's history, of that
Marti with ragged clothes, of that Marti who did not receive his funds from
the Yankee treasury, of that Marti who suffered this humble emigration, of
proletarians, of tobacco raisers, who gathered funds to buy weapons which
once acquired were taken away by the Yankee authorities. Of that Marti who
did not come escorted by the Yankee fleet, nor was he preceded in his
landing by Yankee bombers, of that Marti who on a stormy night landed in a
rowboat almost by himself on the western shores. To compare this integral,
anti-imperialist man, to compare the effort of these patriots with these
miserable individuals is an affront to the memory of those men.
Our liberators came to free slaves, to build a nation, a nation which
imperialism has frustrated, a nation which Yankee imperialism stepped upon
for 50 years. And who were these men? They were slave owners, latifundists,
exploiters of game and vice, millionaires, criminals, and robbers. All
exploiters are robbers. They came to enslave, to take from the country its
riches, to return to Yankee monopolies our factories and our lands. And
this man (Kennedy — Ed.) says that 60 years ago Marti, the first spirit of
independence, lived in this land. In 1889 the first international
conference took place. Cuba was not present.
Comrades, this man says: "Then Cuba was the only state in the hemisphere
still controlled by a foreign monarch. Then as now, Cuba was excluded from
the society of free nations. And then as now, brave men in Florida and New
York dedicated their lives and their energies to the liberation of their
country." Kennedy's "then as now" means "now as never before" to us.
We can wave the flag of the lone star with pride now more than ever. We are
respected now more than ever. And the best proof of this is the respect we
inspire in the imperialists themselves. It is the respect inspired by a
nation that has not been cowed by its power, that has not been cowed in
four years of heroic struggle. Now more than ever, Mr. Kennedy, we are free
and we are the free territory of America. (Applause, chanting)
This gentleman continues by saying things, some of which can cause us some
laughter. He says: "The brigade comes from behind the walls of a prison,
but you have left behind more than 6 million of your compatriots who are
also, in a very real sense, in a prison, (crowd boos) because Cuba today is
a prison surrounded by water." Which means that you are prisoners. (Crowd
shouts "no") Didn't you know that? Then he continued: "Your conduct and
your courage are proof that although Castro and his dictator colleagues may
govern nations, they do not govern peoples." (Crowd shouts "no") I do not
know what you are, then. I do not know what this impressive crowd that
gathered in this plaza behind their weapons could be. He says: "Bodies may
be imprisoned, but not spirits." You must be unimprisoned spirits.
(Laughter)
He says: "The revolution promised the Cuban people political freedom,
social justice, intellectual freedom, land for the peasants, and the end of
economic exploitation." He says we made a promise. He continued: "What they
have received is a police state, the elimination of the dignity of owning
lands, the destruction of the freedom of expression and of the press, and
the total subjugation of individual human well being to the service of the
state and of foreign states."
We have not carried out a single social reform, nor agrarian reform. Nor
have we taught a million illiterates, nor do we have nearly 100,000
scholarship students studying and creating a new intellectual generation.
(Applause) The intellectual freedom of which Kennedy speaks is the
intellectual freedom by virtue of which more than half a million children
did not have schools in our country. The intellectual freedom of which
Kennedy speaks are the 20 million Latin American children without teachers
and without schools.
But the curious thing is that this gentlemen says that we promised the end
of economic exploitation. To what exploitation does this gentleman refer?
Could it be that of the United Fruit Company? (Crowd shouts) Could it be
that of the electric company and the telephone company, that same company
that on the bloody day of 13 March, over the blood of the heroic students
who fell there, signed an exploiting and one-sided contract against our
country? Could it be that those companies are still exploiting our country?
But the curious thing, could Kennedy be changing? (Crowd laughs) The
curious thing is that he speaks of our offering an end to economic
exploitation and then immediately says: "Under the Alliance for Progress,
we support for Cuba and for all the countries of this hemisphere the right
to free elections and the right to the free exercise of basic human rights.
We support agrarian reform." (Crowd laughs) Could Kennedy be converting to
Marxism-Leninism? (Crowd laughs)
The fact is that in this country more than 100,000 peasant families paid
rents, which at times were 50 percent of their products. Who finds a
peasant along the length and breadth of the country paying rent now? More
than 100,000 exploited peasants became owners of their lands. (Applause)
But why does this gentleman think that the peasants are with the
revolution? What kind of a snarl has formed in the head of Mr. Kennedy when
he says that we have promised the end of economic exploitation and that we
have not kept our promise? And he speaks of agrarian reform? We already
know what their friends, the Latin American latifundistas, will tell them.
As the Chilean latifundists said: "Listen, you speak of distributing the
land. Why not talk about distributing the copper mines also?"
It is very curious that we hear the chief of the Yankee empire speak of
economic exploitation, agrarian reform, and such things. When, before, did
he speak of such things? Never, of course, they do not speak sincerely, but
how long have they been speaking this language? What taught them to speak
this language? (Crowd shouts) Who were their teachers? (Crowd shouts) The
Cubans. Too bad we have such bad disciples. (Applause) And this gentleman
uses a strange language, a revolutionary language. This is curious. He is
going to create some problems with the reactionaries because, although the
reactionaries know that what he says is a story, they also know that one
must not play with words. And the Latin American latifundistas are going to
say: "Well, if we will distribute our lands, you must distribute the oil,
the copper, the iron, and all the monopolies you have here." Those are the
irreconcilable contradictions of imperialism. How can they use this
language?
He then says: "We support the agrarian reform and the right of each peasant
to own the land he works." That is precisely what we said, but we are the
only ones who have done it. And, of course, we do not need the Alliance for
Progress. But the Yankee ambassador complained about that. Mr. Bonsal
protested about that every day, that we had nationalized the lands of the
United Fruit and the Atlantica del Golfo and all the Yankee companies, so
that the land would belong to those who work it, and all the peasants who
paid rent would be freed from rent. The Yankee ambassador protested about
that every day. When do you think the Playa Giron expedition was organized?
After the law of agrarian reform, which was rather kind because it left
them with 30 caballerias. When they left they lost that too.
The United Fruit Company had 10,000 cabellerias of land, and another
company had 17,000. Now they don't have it. Has the imperialist economic
exploitation ended or not? In the rural areas the men were without work
most of the time, desperately awaiting the sugar harvest or the harvest of
coffee. The lands were uncultivated. The big land holdings where
proletarian workers worked — not peasants, for the peasants were the ones
who worked the land on their own — began to be exploited. The results: rural
employment was eradicated. The layoff, which was the plague of our rural
areas, disappeared forever.
And now, who goes to harvest the peasant's coffee? The scholarship
students. That means that the revolution has not just made those peasants
owners of their lands and built them hospitals, roads, schools, sent them
teachers, made them literate; but now, as the result of the economic
development of the country, there are no more of those hungry pariahs who
used to collect coffee because there was nothing else to do. The revolution
sends them the youth, the students to harvest the coffee. There is no more
off-season in our rural areas. There is no more unemployment in our rural
areas. There is no more illiteracy. Children no longer die without medical
attention. (Applause) And cultural life is developing with giant strides.
How can they pretend to ignore these truths? In ignoring them they suffer
those tremendous mistakes into which they fall.
Then he says that he "supports the right of all free peoples to freely
transform their economic institutions." That is what we have done. We have
transformed as a free people our economic institutions. In words, this
gentleman is changing. But it is dangerous to change in words alone,
because this creates a confusion in the mind which no one can remove. He
said that he supports the right freely to transform economic
institutions — nothing more or less than exactly what we have done. And
because we did so we have the enmity of the imperialists. Who can they
deceive. Then he says: "There are principles of the Alliance for Progress,
the principles which we support for Cuba. These are the principles for
which men have fought and fallen." Yes, they have fallen, but on our side.
Then he tells those mercenaries, sons of latifundio-owners, bankers,
industrialists, usurers (garroteros), and crooked gamblers (tahures) — he
tells them: "These are the principles for which you fought and for which
some members of your brigade gave their lives." You might remember what
those men said. They talked about free enterprise. And all of them, in
their immense majority, those who were not henchmen, were sons of
latifundio-owners or wealthy men. Then this man comes and tells them they
came to fight for the economic change of society. But what he says next is
even better. He says: "I believe that these are the principles of the great
majority of the Cuban people today."
Yes, principles as we understand them, not as they see them! He says, and
listen well, he says: "I am certain that throughout the island of Cuba, in
the government, itself." How intriguing, how intriguing this Mr. Kennedy
is, because he says: "I am certain that within the government itself, in
the army and the militia, there are many who hold to a faith in freedom and
are filled with consternation at the destruction of freedom in their island
and are determined to restore that freedom so that the Cuban people can
again govern themselves." (Shouts from from the crowd)
It is fitting to tell Mr. Kennedy, the intriguing Kennedy, to change
sleeping positions. He speaks, but a funny thing, he speaks of the rebel
army and he speaks of the militia, those militiamen who have been the
terror of the imperialists, (applause) those soldiers, those heroic
soldiers who in 72 hours, or I should say in less than 72 hours, crushed
the pirates of the Yankee empire. (Applause)
How strange that the imperialists have tested all of the weapons and have
failed in all of them. They have failed because we have an armed people.
Today he speaks, and today he tries to intrigue and tries to make it appear
possible that those patriotic soldiers, those proletarian militiamen, can
place themselves at the service of Yankee imperialism. (Applause) Mr.
Kennedy, between us and you and between those revolutionary soldiers and
the Yankee empire there is much blood. (Applause) And that blood began to
flow many years ago. That blood began to flow in the Sierra Maestra, when
we fought against an army trained by Yankee military missions, under the
fire of Yankee arms, under bombardment by Yankee planes. And these soldiers
saw entire families die enveloped in the napalm of Yankee incendiary bombs.
They saw mutilated children assassinated by machine guns, and many comrades
dying in the fighting.
Mr. Kennedy, between our people and the imperialists, between our
combatants and the imperialists there is much blood. There is the blood of
the workers assassinated during the Le Courbre explosion, for a criminal
sabotage prepared by the Yankee agency. There is the blood of the workers
who died putting out the first in the sugar cane fields set aflame by small
planes from the United States. There is blood such as that of Fe Del Valle
who died when the Central Intelligence Agency terrorists set fire to one of
our work centers. Between those combatants and imperialism there is the
blood of more than 100 soldiers and militiamen who died gloriously at Playa
Giron. (Applause) There is the blood of the assassinated teachers, such as
Conrado Benitez. There is the blood of the cruelly assassinated brigade
members such as Manuel Ascunce Domenech. There is an abyss of blood between
us and you, messrs. imperialists.
But there is something more than blood. There is still a deeper abyss. It
is the abyss which separates the workers from the exploiters, the liberated
salves from the enslavers. There is the abyss of our ideas, the abyss which
separates our ideas, and there a profound abyss separating them from the
dignity of our people, the dignity of each Cuban man and woman (Applause).
The Cuban people are not that sort of people. They are not the group of
outcasts, of exploiters and traitors, of privileged people whom the
revolution deprived of their lands.
The Cuban people today are very different from that group of wretched
people. The dignity of these people has had an irrefutable test, and that
is, that despite the imperialists, despite their gold, their crimes, their
aggressions, their blockades, and despite all they have done to destroy our
revolution, today we celebrate, or rather yesterday we celebrated, our
fourth anniversary. Mr. Kennedy, we celebrated our fourth anniversary and
started on our fifth year. (Applause) We are speaking about the five
points, but I wanted to get out of the way of the matter of the little
meeting in Miami.
How did these men behave, these men who left? How could they behave like
rates, according to a man on the street. The entire world saw it over
television. There was not one single one who said he had not been shipped.
There was not one single one who did not admit he had made a mistake, that
they thought the militia would join them, that the army would not fight.
There was not one single one who did not believe it was going to be a
military parade, and then they became repentant Magdalenes before
television cameras. In prison, they wrote lengthy and unending letters of
repentance — their main chiefs (those who wrote the letters — Ed.), whom the
people know.
The revolution dealt with them generously not because they deserved it, but
because those are our principles. None of them was beaten. Almost all of
the lives of their wounded were saved in revolutionary hospitals. In
accordance with the law and by their actions, they deserved capital
punishment. However, the sentences given them were sentences that allowed
them to go free if damages to our country were indemnified.
What the imperialists do not say is that if they remained 20 months in
prison, it was due to the Yankee pharisee-like spirit, the Yankee hypocrisy
which prevented them from showing their face, which kept them from paying,
because scarcely two months or less following the attack, they could have
been released, if the imperialists had paid. The imperialists likewise have
not disclosed that the revolutionary Government had previously released,
many months ago, 60 wounded and sick, allowing them to pay indemnification
later, which they paid only now, that the Revolutionary Government acceded
to release the prisoners when they had paid only 20 percent. None of that
have they been willing to disclose.
And what have they done over there upon their arrival, all those wretched
ones, those cowards whom an entire population saw pleading for clemency,
trying to elude responsibility, describing themselves as cooks and nurses,
saying they had not fired one single shot. When they arrived there, their
first statements were to the effect they hoped to return, to come back, and
so forth and so forth. This gives the people an idea of the treatment
deserved by such pests (alimanas). However, if the Revolutionary Government
has released them through an agreement with the U.S. Red Cross for the
implementation of all of the agreements we have signed guaranteed by a
Canadian banking organization — guaranteed, if the revolution released
them — it is because the revolution can combat 50 expeditions such as that
one, not one gang like that (applause), but 50 gangs like it that would
land simultaneously on our national territory. We could destroy them even
more rapidly than we destroyed that one.
The security of our country is not affected in the least by the fact that
the gang of pests is out of the country. The U.S. Red Cross was in charge
of implementing the arrangements, and we must say that up to this moment,
it has been carrying out its duties satisfactorily. It is a pity that with
that botchery (chapuceria), that ridiculous attitude which is incompatible
with the dignity of the position, Mr. Kennedy sounded that sour note and
dropped a stain on an action which was motivated by a lofty humanitarian
spirit. But then, what else can be expected from the chief of the pirates.
He went there to be near his defeated army, near his pirates who left this
country with their heads hanging in shame. And what a moment that was for
us, the moment when at the same airport where the cowardly attack of 15
April took place, at the same airport where planes of Yankee make dropped
their load of bombs on 15 April, Yankee planes also alighted later as meek
peace doves leaving their cargo of medicines and baby food. Those of us who
lived through those two episodes, through the aggression and the unloading
of the indemnification, cannot forget it because they were not the haughty
and arrogant attackers who one day dropped bombs and, as a penalty for that
adventure, one day they had to come and bring other things to save lives
and to benefit our people. (Applause)
With respect to the encouragement that Mr. Kennedy tried to give them, we
say to him that if he wants to finance the economic development of the
Cuban socialist republic, let him continue to send expeditions such as this
one. (Applause) We must say that the Cuban Government demanded the entire
payment imposed by the sentences; that is, 62 million, the value of the
products delivered here. We hope that this is a lesson to the imperialists.
What is this that Kennedy says, as it says here, that he can assure that
that flag will be returned to the mercenaries in a free Havana? What does
Mr. Kennedy mean by this? What threat is implied in that statement? Why
does he dare say he assures such a thing? How is that compatible with a
promise of nonaggression against our country, a promise not to invade Cuba?
That is why we have maintained and we maintain that the guarantees offered
by imperialism must not be contained simply in words? They must be
accompanied by actions. We have more than good reason to mistrust the
imperialists and we know that guarantees can never be contained within the
mere word of the imperialists. Guarantees lie in our decision to fight, in
our decision to resist historically any attack from the enemy. (Applause)
Guarantees lie in those arms you say in this parade and many more weapons
which were not shown in this parade. Guarantees lies in our hundreds of
thousands of fighters, guarantees lie in the heroism of our people who more
than proved their heroism during very difficult moments. When Mr. Kennedy
threatened to turn us into a nuclear target in efforts to intimidate us,
what happened then? The people shouted: fatherland or death! ((Applause
followed by rhythmic applause) More men and women than ever enlisted in the
militia. More men and women than ever asked to be inscribed in the mass
organizations. With a smile on their lips and with an impressive calm, an
entire population became determined to face the enemy, to die, if necessary
(applause), because among these revolutionary people, the imperialists will
never find weakness. We might die, yes, but never weaken. (Applause) We
might die, yes, but we will die free and in dignity. (Rhythmic applause)
We would die not because we have no regard for life, not because we have
disdain for the creative work our people are carrying out, not because we
have failed to love the luminous future to which we we have a right through
our work, but because all of our lives are indisolubly associated with that
idea and that future. Without a fatherland, we want no life. Without
freedom, we want no life. Without dignity, we want no life! (Applause)
Without justice, we want no life! Without bread for our children, we want
no life! (Applause) Without a future, we want no life! That is why we say:
Fatherland or death! (Applause)
That is why the hymn of our fighters for independence left it clearly
established that to live in chains is to live sunk in opprobrium and
affront and to die for the homeland is to live. (Applause) This explains
the attitude of our people, the wherefores of the measures we took in the
face of imperialist aggression and in the face of the imperialists'
threats, without hesitation, so that imperialists may know that these
people do not vacillate. That is why we took measures to arm ourselves, and
that is why we agreed with the Soviet Union (applause) on the weapons that
were set up here, (applause) because we understood that we were fulfilling
two obligations: one toward the country, fortifying its defenses in view of
imperialist threats, and one obligation toward the peoples of the socialist
camp; that is, an international proletarian duty. (Applause, about one
minute) We were fulfilling two duties: one toward the workers of the world,
our internationalist duties, in accordance with the principles of
proletarian internationalism because patriotism is proletarian
internationalism within socialist revolution. That was the thought that
preceded the conduct of Cuba revolution.
You know how the crisis started, developed, and culminated. We mean to say
that our people always reserve the rights in front of their imperialist
enemies to take all measures deemed pertinent and to possess the weapons
deemed necessary. (Applause) The Soviet Government, in search of peace,
arrived at certain agreements with the North American government, but this
does not mean that we have renounced this right, the right to possess the
weapons we deem proper and to take the international policy steps we deem
pertinent as a sovereign country. (Applause) And for that reason we do not
accept the unilateral inspection that they wanted to establish here with
the only purpose, of the imperialists, to humble us. And there was no
inspection and there will never be inspection. And if they want inspection
let them permit us to inspect them. What do they expect from a sovereign
country, a sovereign country (repeating — Ed.), we are as sovereign or more
than they are. (Applause)
We must know how cunning the imperialists are, what foxes they are in all
their acts and deeds. Therefore, we do not trust the imperialists. The
guarantees in which we have always believed, as I said, are the ones I
mentioned before and the solidarity of the socialist camp. They have always
been our guarantee. Without the solidarity of the socialist camp, we would
have been disarmed, this is clear because when we went to buy weapons in a
West European country they blew up our ship and killed about 50 workers and
soldiers. The imperialists demanded that weapons not be sold to us, and
while they were arming and training their mercenaries, they were preventing
us from acquiring weapons, and it was the countries of the socialist camp
who furnished us weapons. And thus the solidarity of the socialist camp is
an efficient weapon against imperialist aggression. (Applause) In that
guarantee we do believe, in this guarantee which gives us two things: our
will to fight to the last man and the solidarity of the socialist camp; and
not in the worlds of the imperialists. That is the reason we have presented
our five demands, so just, so logical, and so consubstantial with our
rights that no one could object to them.
What kind of peace are the imperialists complaining about? With their
economic pressures against our country, promoting subversion, organizing
piratical attacks, declaring their purpose of violating our airspace. What
peace can this be? What kind of peace?
Do the imperialists think by chance that we are going to accept violation
of our rights. What peace would that be? A peace that could be broken any
moment by a violation. In any moment an incident could occur, because of
that declared policy, because it is clear that if the imperialists are
permitted one of their tricks, they will then try others. And they showed
with their planes; in the days of the crisis, during a truce, they started
to fly over and buzz our bases and over our artillerymen until they
received orders to fire; then the Americans went as high as they could, and
they quit flying low.
What kind of peace would that be? A peace in which we would have to accept
these violations. We do not accept them. These violations could be sources
for incidents. We are acquiring better antiaircraft weapons as time goes
by. Today the first ground rocket training unit passed in review
(Applause), units that are in training. What kind of peace would that be, a
peace in which the imperialists expose us to incidents of this type through
their stated policy of violating our airspace. And lastly, what are they
doing in part of our territory, threatening us, making plans from there
against our country? That territory is ours and we have every right to
claim it. What right to the imperialists have to possess a base on our
territory?
These are the five points that we have presented as a just demand of our
people for a true solution of the Caribbean crisis. The imperialists as yet
have made no clear statements. They have spoken with reticence; they have
spoken in a threatening and insidious voice saying that if Cuba does not
promote subversion and such there will be no invasion. The statements they
made to the mercenaries are not declarations of peace. They do not imply a
guarantee for our country, because everyone knows that 50 or 100
expeditions like that one or any type of direct attack will be rapidly
repelled. What do the imperialists mean with this threat? What kind of
guarantees are these? They have not spoken clearly and openly. The Soviet
Union has fulfilled its part. The Government of the United States has not
fulfilled its promise.
It is superfluous to say that our position is not a position contrary to
solutions or against peaceful solutions. We agree with the policy of
discussion and negotiation of problems by peaceful means. We agree with
that basic principle. We agree, too, with the policy of concession for
concession. Our position maintained throughout this crisis is a position
strictly adjusted to principles. We refuse to accept inspection. We do so
because our country cannot renounce an absolutely sovereign prerogative.
And we have defended our integrity because the fact that we favor peace
does not mean that they are going to land on our shores and we not fire a
shot. We are for peace but if we are attacked we are going to repel them
with all our means. (Applause).
We know that in the present world the hands of the imperialists are not
free. If they had been free, we would have had to suffer the consequences
from the outset. It's a true fact that the world correlation of forces
permitted them to do what they pleased — what they did in Nicaragua, Mexico,
and Santo Domingo and in other small countries of Latin America. Their
hands are not free now and they are not in a position to act freely as they
did before. The irresponsible acts of Mr. Kennedy placed the world at the
brink of war.
Whom can they blame? Us? The Soviet Union? (Crowd shouts "no") Who were the
aggressors? Who has been baiting our country incessantly from the first? It
is they who have maintained a declared war against our country, ceaseless
aggression against our country. These are the facts that cannot be hidden
or denied. There was the meeting with the mercenaries he sent to invade our
country. They were the aggressors. They are the only ones to blame. Let
them stop their policy of aggression and the threat of war will end in the
Caribbean. Let them stop their policy of aggression and there will be peace
in the Caribbean. But let them not think they can attack us and that we
will not defend ourselves. Let them not think that we will fold our arms in
the face of their aggressions. The harm they try to cause us we will try to
cause them as well. If what the imperialists want in exchange for peace is
that we stop being revolutionary we will not stop being revolutionary. We
will never lower our flag.
We are examples for the brother peoples of America because the captives,
Mr. Kennedy, are not the Cubans. The captives are the millions of Indians
and Latin Americans who are exploited by the Yankee monopolies, exploited
by Yankee imperialism in Latin America. (Applause) When you, Mr. Kennedy,
when you speak of captives, you say Cubans, but you do not think of us. You
think of and fear the rebellion of the real captives, the rebellion of the
exploited. If the workers and peasants of Latin America had weapons as our
people do, we would see what would happen. We would see who are the real
captives, because these, whom you call captives, are armed captives, with
tanks, planes. (Applause) Give the workers and peasants of Latin America
tanks and planes and you will see who are the captives. That is the
irrefutable proof.
But there is no hurry. We did not have cannons either. We did not have
planes, but today we do. We were as disarmed as those captives of Latin
America, but that did not prevent the triumph of the people, the triumph of
the revolution. When the peoples decide to struggle, they can do what we
did, and the millions of Latin American exploited by the imperialists can
do what we did. (Applause) And the peoples are beginning to awake and
struggle.
Thus is the proof of solidarity with our country; the action of some
peoples, like the Venezuelan people who, while Betancourt, the puppet was
sending his ships, along with the puppets of Argentina and Santo Domingo to
blockade us, the Venezuelan people struggled and gave extraordinary
evidence of revolutionary spirit, led by the glorious Communist Party of
Venezuela (applause) and by the valiant militants of the leftist
revolutionary movement. The imperialists were given evidence of what
revolutionary solidarity is, and active solidarity of revolutionaries who
do not sit in their doorways to wait for the corpse of their enemy to pass
by, of revolutionaries who understand that the duty of all revolutionaries
is to create the revolution.
Comrades, we begin a fifth anniversary. With what spirit should be view
this new year? With an optimistic spirit, the spirit of a revolution, with
faith in the future. May are the tasks ahead of us. Tasks do not end with
years, but new tasks begin. Our problems today are not the same as four
years ago. New problems, new obligations, and new tasks are ahead of us.
Basically, it is our duty to create the riches that our country needs, to
create the means of production we need to raise our standard of living, to
satisfy the rising needs of our masses. Today everything belongs to the
people and the fruits of work are for the people; the first duty of the
people is to struggle to create all those means to satisfy all their needs.
We must do that amid a bitter situation, serious problems that concern us
all in the struggle against the common enemy, in the struggle against the
imperialists.
What are the discrepancies in the bosom of the socialist family, the public
discrepancies between large forces of the socialist camp? That concerns us
all. It concerns us because we see with clarity here, from this trench 90
miles from the Yankee empire, how much cause for concern these
discrepancies can be, how much unity is needed, how much all the strength
of the entire socialist camp is needed to face up to those enemies.
We have the great historic task of bringing this revolution forward, of
serving as an example for the revolution of Latin America, and within the
socialist camp, which is and always will be our family. (Applause) We
understand it to be our duty to struggle for unity under the principles of
the socialist family, of the socialist camp. That is to be the line of our
people, the line followed by the political leadership of the revolution.
There are many problems and very great tasks ahead of us — first of all, to
face up to imperialism. In that same situation are many peoples, the
colonialized peoples subjected to imperialism. That is why that unity is so
necessary. That is why it is so necessary to present a united front to the
imperialists and that, I am certain, will be the clamor of the threatened
peoples, the peoples who are fighting for their independence, the peoples
who are struggling against the aggressions of imperialism.
A guide for our people: our task is to unite inside and outside, to
eliminate everything that divides us inside and outside, to struggle for
everything that unites us inside and outside, the unity of all principles,
that is our line, fatherland or death, we will win!
This will be the year of organization. (Applause) Why? Because we must
place our main effort in organization; in the first place, organization of
the live party of socialist revolution, the development of the organization
of our masses; that is, our mass organizations, the organization of our
administrative agencies and the organization of economic agencies. This
does not imply that this year will not be for education. The principal
impetus will be for organization. All years are years for education and all
years will be years for organization. But this year we will place emphasis
on organization. And for that reason it will be called the year of
organization.
Castro Internet Archive
|
./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1966.01.15 | <body>
<h4>
At the Closing Session of the Tricontinental Conference
</h4>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> January 15, 1966 in Havana's Chaplin Theater
<br>
<span class="info">First publicly disseminated:</span> January 16, 1966
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro/1966/19660216">University of Texas: Fidel Castro Speech Database</a>.
<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> US Government: Foreign Broadcast Information Service from the Havana Domestic Radio and Television Service in Spanish 0249 GMT 16 January, 1966.
<br>
<span class="info">Transcription:</span> U.S. Information Agency; the Department of Research of the Radio Marti Program
<br>
<span class="info">HTML:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Subject Index:</span> <a href="#vietnam">Vietnam</a>, <a href="#cuban-support">Cuban Assitance to</a>; <a href="#guevara">Guevara's Departure</a>, <a href="#trotskyist-distortions">Trotskyist distortions of</a>
<br>
<span class="info">Public Domain:</span> Castro Internet Archive 2006. This work is <a href="../../../../../../admin/legal/corights.htm#pd">completely free</a>.
</p>
<hr>
<p>
Honored delegates, Cuban comrades: The importance of this event which has come to a climax tonight does not escape us. Contrary to all the auguries of imperialism, contrary to all its forecasts which revealed the great hope that this conference would not result in anything, that this conference involving the problems of the international communist movement was bound to be divided, that it was bound to be a great failure — what has happened is something that they least or perhaps never expected: that the conference has been a success; that this conference has created an organ tricontinental in nature; that it has arrived at accords which include the most heartfelt yearnings of the peoples who fight for their liberation; that a committee to aid the liberation movements has been created.
</p>
<p>
And that's not all: Something which unquestionably hurts the imperialists greatly is that Cuba has been chosen as the headquarters of the executive secretariat of the organization until the next Tricontinental conference is held. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
It is not that we are expressing here a feeling of national pride. Because of the peculiar circumstances surrounding the country, its geographic location, the efforts exerted by the imperialists to isolate it from the world, the measures adopted so that practically no one can visit us makes the fact that this conference has been held with such success in our country and defying all obstacles, defying all difficulties, that it has been considered an adequate location for the temporary operation of the headquarters, is something which doubtless must hurt the Yankee imperialists considerably.
</p>
<p>
Therefore, this has been a great victory for the revolutionary movement. Never has there been a gathering of such dimensions and of such magnitude, a gathering in which the revolutionary representations of 82 peoples have met to discuss problems of common interest. Never has there been such a large meeting, because the peoples of three continents have been here; the revolutionary movements of the peoples of three continents who have a common anti-imperialist stance; who represent the struggle of their peoples with differing philosophical ideas or positions, or with differing religious beliefs; who on many occasions represent differing ideologies. But they have something in common. What the peoples have most in common to unite the people of three continents and of all the world today is the struggle against imperialism (applause); the struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism, the struggle against racism and, in short, all the phenomena which are the contemporary expression we call imperialism, whose center, axis, and principal support of Yankee imperialism.
</p>
<p>
The meeting, agreements, and conclusions of this conference were all accomplished because the nations in this era have something in common. This was not an easy task; it may seem easy, but it was not and could not be an easy task. This is only natural, because when representatives from different nations and different movements, with special problems which express almost all current problems of the world, it was not easy...
</p>
<p>
The work on theses, on agreements acceptable to all could not be achieved without hard work. During these past few days we remember how different problems were discussed. When the final statement was being discussed, we remembered how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had worked and written the Communist Manifesto for several months, and how afterward they revised, retouched, and perfected it several times before it was finally issued. Naturally, in our conference which took two weeks — less than two weeks — a few days were needed to work on a document which would cover the different opinions and would be issued in a manner that would fully satisfy every one of the delegations. Despite these circumstances, a document was achieved which undoubtedly is the most profound, most complete, and most radical of many which have been worked on and agreed upon at a conference of this type.
</p>
<p>
For the first time the Latin American representatives participated with the African and Asian nations. Of course, in the case of Latin America, the majority or all the representatives came from the movements and nations which are fighting or will fight to free themselves. Our nation in this case represented the only nation free from Yankee domination and constituted in revolutionary power.
</p>
<p>
We believe that this conference will unquestionably occupy a place in the history of the nations that struggle for their freedom in the revolutionary movement. We also believe that the contacts which have been established, the ties which have been created between the world movements fighting against imperialism, and the organizations which have been created, will play an unquestionable role in the revolutionary struggle.
</p>
<p>
We have had the opportunity to become more familiar with the thinking and the concrete situation of each one of the movements which fight for their liberation at this hour. We have had the opportunity to know the concrete situation of each one of the peoples who struggle, and, above all, we have had the opportunity of seeing how the solidarity of the peoples has been growing; how the strength of the revolutionary movement grows on a world scale, and how the mutual assistance of the peoples grows and can grow in times to come; the assistance of all the peoples for each one of the peoples who struggle — the mutual assistance of the peoples on a scale and on a level which mankind has never before seen.
</p>
<a name="vietnam"></a>
<h4>
[Vietnam]
</h4>
<p>
(We have had the opportunity to see) how, despite the military and technical power of the imperialists, the united strength of the revolutionary peoples will be much more powerful. (Applause) Imperialism will inevitably be defeated. Who has taught us this lesson? It has been taught to us by the peoples. Who among the peoples has given us in these times the most extraordinary lesson? The people of Vietnam. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Vietnam is a small nation. The imperialists have split it in two, into North and South Vietnam. For revolutionaries, for us, there is but a single Vietnam. (Applause) Against the people of South Vietnam the Yankee imperialists have deployed a large part of their might — hundreds of thousands of regular soldiers of the imperialist armed forces, as well as hundreds of thousands of soldiers drafted by the puppet government; hundreds of planes; thousands of helicopters. Yet the Yankee imperialists have been unable to crush the people in this part of Vietnam.
</p>
<p>
Trying to intimidate their brothers in the other part of Vietnam, they began bombing with hundreds of planes every day to demand their surrender, to try to bring the Vietnamese to their knees. Yet, as the imperialists themselves admit, instead of gaining ground they have lost ground. Against the ever increasingly steadfast and heroic resistance, they used more and more planes and more and more bombs. To the amazement of the world, the people of Vietnam are furnishing the most extraordinary example of heroism the history of any liberation movement has ever seen, because a liberation movement has never had to face more powerful forces. The people of Vietnam are reversing these forces and defeating the might of the Yankee imperialists.
</p>
<p>
They not only bomb Vietnam but they also incessantly bomb the patriots of Laos. (Applause) They threaten to bomb and commit aggression against Cambodia. These attitudes and threats of the Yankee imperialists reveal their impotence; they reveal their despair. This is the result of a situation which is becoming more critical in that part of the world. This is due to the defeats they are suffering in that area of Asia, where a decisive battle is being waged by the people against imperialism — and not only against Yankee imperialism but against Yankee imperialism and its allies, Yankee imperialism and its daring associates in Asia — which is expressed by the formations of South Korean, Australian, and Thai soldiers — and which threatens to further involve either military or support forces of the greatest number of world governments.
</p>
<p>
That struggle against the Vietnamese people and Laos and the threats to Cambodia demonstrate a need to render maximum solidarity and help to those nations.
</p>
<p>
The Yankee imperialists have the support of Thailand, where there are many troops and bases and from where they carry out threats against Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. This does not mean that this situation will continue indefinitely. We are sure that for the peoples of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia the hour will come when the Thai people will demand an accounting from the Yankee imperialists. (Applause) The hour will also come when that suppressed and exploited people, inspired by its neighboring nations, will also join the struggle against the imperialists.
</p>
<p>
Meanwhile, the imperialists not only have carried out the war against Vietnam — all of Vietnam — and Laos, but also threaten Cambodia.
</p>
<a name="cuban-support"></a>
<h4>
[Cuban Assistance to Vietnam]
</h4>
<p>
Cambodia is a small nation which has not yet been attacked but is seriously threatened by Yankee imperialism. Therefore, it is necessary that the revolutionary states assist in the strengthening of the defenses of the small nation of Cambodia. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Talking with that country's representative, who was participating in the Tricontinental Conference, hearing from his lips about the situation in his country and the dangers that threaten it, we expressed that view to him; and we told him further that we Cubans, although we are a small nation and at an enormous distance from Cambodia, are prepared to contribute to the extent of our power to strengthening its defenses, and that all we need is to be advised, all we need is to be asked in any circumstance when it is considered advisable, for we are prepared to make our contribution.
</p>
<p>
And that is also our position on Laos, and North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. (Applause) We are a small nation, not too far from the shores of the imperialist homeland. Our arms are eminently defensive. But our men, wholeheartedly, our revolutionary militants, our fighters, are prepared to fight the imperialists in any part of the world. (Applause) Our country is a small one; our territory could even be partially occupied by the enemy; but that would never mean a cessation of our resistance.
</p>
<p>
But the world is big, and the imperialists are everywhere, and for the Cuban revolutionaries the field of battle against imperialism takes in the whole world. (Applause) Without boasting, without any kind of immodesty, that is how we Cuban revolutionaries understand our internationalist duty. That is the way our people understand their duty, because they realize that the enemy is one and indivisible; the one who attacks us along our shoes and on our land is the same who attacks the others. Hence we say and we declare that Cuban fighters can be counted on by the revolutionary movement in any corner of the earth. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Thousands and thousands of Cubans have expressed the desire and readiness to go anywhere in the world where they may be needed to help the revolutionary movement and this is logical. If the Yankee imperialist feel free to bomb anywhere they please and send their mercenary troops to put down the revolutionary movement anywhere in the world, then the revolutionary peoples feel they have the right, even with their physical presence, to help the peoples who are fighting the Yankee imperialists. And so, if each helps to the extent of his power, if each helps insofar as he can, the Yankee imperialists will be defeated, that place is Southeast Asia, for there it is impossible to establish a correlation of forces. It is possible to establish a correlation of forces incomparably superior to that of the Yankee imperialists.
</p>
<p>
Thus, we have not the slightest doubt that they will be defeated, crushed, by the peoples of that region, and — if they increase their forces and the forces of their reactionary allies — by the camp and the other peoples. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
This is why the Yankee imperialists launch their hypocritical peace offensives, in an attempt to confuse, to deceive. And that is why the peoples of Vietnam have said — and very rightly — that is the only peace, true peace, will be achieved only when the Yankee imperialists stop attacking, and when the Yankee imperialists stop occupying part of the territory of Vietnam, and when the Yankee imperialists take their mercenary troops and military bases out of Vietnamese territory. That is, the imperialists have been told the only thing that was proper to tell them under the circumstances: that true peace since they are the only disturbers of the peace will be achieved when they get out of Vietnam. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
It is evident that the imperialists are there fighting a hopeless fight; the imperialists are there fighting a fight in which they are doomed to inevitable defeat, and as a result, they want to swap defeat for a false peace. And it is logical for the people of Vietnam to refuse; it is logical for the people of Vietnam to be unwilling to exchange their victory for that kind of false peace. If we were in a similar situation, I am fully convinced that we would say exactly the same thing, and that we would refuse to negotiate under bombs, and we would refuse to negotiate under attack, and we would refuse to negotiate while our country was occupied. And therefore our people and the conference unanimously supported the positions and points upheld by the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the South Vietnam liberation movement. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
On this question, on this topic, the most burning one currently, there were practically unanimous views. And it is very well for the Yankee imperialists to know the degree of solidarity with Vietnam felt by all peoples of the world. It is well for the Yankee imperialists to understand the degree of support enjoyed by the people of Vietnam throughout the world. Hence we consider that this solidarity conference of the peoples of the three continents has acted and spoken in such a way that the support and feelings of solidarity for Vietnam has become evident, and in addition will grow. And as in the case of Vietnam, so it is for Laos and Cambodia, which are the nations being attacked or running the risk of being attacked.
</p>
<h4>
[Conference Unity]
</h4>
<p>
On all problems of Asia, Africa, and Latin America the conference took a similar stand. The peoples and the liberation movements of Africa — and in order to avoid an oversight I wish to say that a small country, too, there in that area of Asia, is fighting for its liberation, although it is not very well known, a people fighting courageously, the people of North Kalimantan — received the warm support of the conference, as did the people of Yemen and the people of Palestine. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
The African ones, I was saying, the liberation movements that were so worthily represented at this conference: the people of Portuguese-occupied Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, represented here by one of the most serious revolutionary movements in Africa and by one of the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, Comrade Am�lcar Cabral, who instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and the success of his struggle for liberation; the liberation movement of Angola and Mozambique, two more Portuguese colonies that are an armed conflict for their liberation; the Zimbabwe people, oppressed by the racist minority in Rhodesia; the people of the Congo Leopoldville; the oppressed people of South Africa; the protectorates of Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and Basutoland, whose nomenclature reveals the imperial profile of the country that colonized them; and in sum, all the African liberation movements were worthily represented at this conference and received warm support and solidarity from all the delegates.
</p>
<p>
In Africa the imperialists attempt to penetrate and divide and subjugate is increasingly manifest. During the past few weeks they have made coups fashionable. Coups in the Congo, coups in the Central African Republic, coups in Nigeria, as reported by dispatches, reveal imperialism's desperate efforts to strengthen its dominion in that part of the world. In Africa, too, a decisive battle is being fought, and the role of the revolutionary movements and the role of the new states that have not today been infected with the disease of neocolonialism will be of extraordinary importance in resisting this imperialist drive and penetration.
</p>
<p>
For there, aid to the revolutionary movement, determined aid to the liberation movements, determined aid to the majorities that are oppressed by the racists will be a decisive factor.
</p>
<p>
Equally decisive will be the sense of responsibility, seriousness, and union among the African revolutionary leaders. Some movements have sustained blows, some setbacks; but those setbacks must not discourage them. Those setbacks must serve as experience; those setbacks must serve as lessons, so that pertinent steps and measures may be adopted to overcome present difficulties, to overcome shortcomings and weaknesses of the revolutionary movement.
</p>
<p>
The solidarity movement, which began in Africa and Asia and has now extended to the third continent of the world that is oppressed and exploited by imperialism, will by a decision of the conference have its next event in Cairo, thereby accepting the invitation extended by President Nasser, who offered the UAR capital for the next Tricontinental Conference in 1968. And we are sure — and we must bend every effort to that end — that by that date, among the peoples that have freed themselves from imperialism or colonialism we will be able to greet a few more fraternal peoples of Africa. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
The problems of Latin America, beginning with the most burning and critical problem, the problem of the military occupation of Santo Domingo by regular troops of Yankee imperialism, earned the attention of this conference and the full support of the delegates representing their peoples. On the Dominican stage in the years ahead, Latin America faces one of the most serious battles of the next few years. The Dominican Republic, a small country occupied by tens of thousands of Yankee troops, faces a long, hard fight. The Dominican Republic, the Dominican people, must not be alone against the Yankee imperialists. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
In many other American nations every condition exists for revolutionary armed battle. This battle has already been going on for some time too in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala (Applause). In Latin America there must not be even one, or two, or three peoples fighting alone against imperialism.
</p>
<p>
The imperialists' correlation of forces on this continent, the nearness of their home territory, the zeal with which they will try to defend their dominions in this part of the world require, on this continent more than anywhere else, a common strategy, a joint, simultaneous struggle. (Applause) If the imperialists have to face not just the people of the Dominican Republic, or the people of Guatemala, or the people of Venezuela, or the people of Colombia, or the people of Peru, but have the fight, at the same time as in all these countries, against the other oppressed peoples, as in Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Argentina and other peoples in Central America; if the struggle is waged on a broad scale, if every revolutionary of this continent does his duty — and as the Havana Declaration says, the duty of every revolutionary is to effect the revolution, and effect it in deed not in word; not be a revolutionary in theory alone, but a revolutionary in practice — if revolutionaries spend less energy and time on theorizing and devote more energy and time to practical work; and if there is less of revolutions and possibilities and dilemmas and it is understood once and for all that sooner or later all or almost all peoples will have to take up arms to liberate themselves, then the hour of liberation for this continent will be advanced. What with the ones who theorize and the ones who criticize those who theorize while beginning to theorize themselves, much energy and time is unfortunately lost.
</p>
<p>
We believe that on this continent, in the case of all or almost all peoples, the battle will take on the most violent forms. And when this is realized, the only proper thing is to prepare for the time when the battle comes. Prepare! (Applause) Of course, that battle will break out first where — as the Havana Declaration says — conditions of imperialist oppression are the most naked, where every course is absolutely closed, as is the case in most countries of this continent. And even where the bourgeoisie and imperialist exercise their class rule through constitutionalist means, as is the case in Uruguay, the force of the mass movement and the people's revolutionary spirit are more and more evident. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
And we must express our people's great liking for Uruguay, because the latter is a tiny, tiny country that has no mountains and is surrounded by two reactionary colossi, and invariably, always, without exception, under every circumstance, its people have been on a par with the people of Venezuela in solidarity and support for the Cuban revolution. (Applause) We still remember how, because of the break in diplomatic relations with Cuba due to an OAS decision imposed by the United States as a penalty against Cuba, the people of Uruguay, led by their revolutionary organizations, took to the streets with incomparable vigor in protest against that servile, traitorous act against a nation of this continent.
</p>
<p>
Well, gentlemen, in this problem of Latin America you delegates will allow me to extend myself in a few observations, since we are situated on this continent, and since against us not only have the Yankee imperialists established the economic blockade, made use of armed aggression, threatened us mortally on certain occasions, committed every kind of sabotage, infiltrated spies, and launched piratical attacks, but also Yankee imperialism has used more subtle weapons against our country, such as the weapons of propaganda and slander. And not that alone — Yankee imperialism and its agents have sought to destroy the prestige of the Cuban revolution; they have tried to depict the Cuban revolution as being apart from the revolutionary struggles on this continent; they have tried in the basest and most slanderous way to discredit the revolution; and they have had recourse to every method, every fact, every weapon.
</p>
<p>
Of course, the imperialists would be interested in a concrete discussion of these problems. Any irresponsible person, any charlatan, any puppet cares nothing about making an irresponsible statement, a slanderous statement. It is well known that only the enemy would be interested in the manner of putting into practice the term “solidarity” with revolutionary peoples of the whole world as well as on this continent. (Applause) But what has happened?
</p>
<a name="guevara"></a>
<h4>
[Guevara's depature]
</h4>
<p>
There is a fact which I will take as an example to demonstrate how imperialism and its agents work. It is a very interesting fact. I refer to the campaign carried out by Yankee imperialism and its agents regarding the departure of our Comrade Ernesto Guevara. (Applause) I believe we must take this matter by the horns to clarify some things.
</p>
<p>
Comrade Ernesto Guevara and a few revolutionaries from this country and a few revolutionaries outside this country know when he left and what he has been doing during this period. The imperialists are, of course, very interested in learning all the details as to his whereabouts, what he is doing and how. Apparently they do not know, and if they do, they disguise it very well.
</p>
<p>
These are things, of course, that time, when circumstances so permit, will clarify. However, we revolutionaries do not need any clarifications. The enemy seizes upon these circumstances to try to conspire and to confound and to slander.
</p>
<p>
Comrade Guevara joined us when we were in exile in Mexico. From the very first day he always had the idea, clearly expressed, that when the struggle ended in Cuba he would still have other duties to fulfill elsewhere. We always gave him our word that no state or national interest, no circumstances, would make us request him to remain in our country, would make us obstruct the fulfillment of this wish or this vocation. And we fulfilled thoroughly and faithfully that promise which we made to Comrade Guevara. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Naturally, if Comrade Guevara was to leave the country, it would be logical for him to do this clandestinely. It would be logical for him to move clandestinely. It is logical that he is not calling newsmen. It is logical that he has not been granting press conferences. It is logical that he would carry out the tasks he had planned in the way he did.
</p>
<p>
However, how much capital have the imperialists tried to make from this situation, and how they have done it!
</p>
<p>
That is why I brought some papers. Do not be afraid that I am going to read all the papers here. I am only going to read some things. Because here we have what all the imperialists and bourgeois newspapers have written with respect to the case of Major Guevara, what the U.S. newspapers, their magazines, and their wire agencies have written, the Latin American bourgeois newspapers and (newspapers) of the entire world, and we are going to see who exactly have been the main spokesmen of the imperialist campaign of intrigue and calumnies against Cuba with respect to the case of Comrade Guevara.
</p>
<a name="trotskyist-distortions"></a>
<h4>
[Trotskyist Distortions of Guevara's Disappearance]
</h4>
<p>
In the first place there were certain elements who during the past decades have been used constantly against the revolutionary movement. And if you will give me a little time, I am going to look among all these papers for some very interesting ones. Ah, I found it; it is a UPI dispatch dated 6 December 1965: “Ernesto Guevara was murdered by Cuban Premier Fidel Castro on orders from the USSR, declared Felipe Albaguante, chief of the Mexican Trotskyists, in statements to El Universal.” He adds that Che was liquidated for insisting on placing Cuba on the Chinese line.
</p>
<p>
This, naturally, came at the same time as a campaign which the Trotskyist elements began in all places simultaneously. Likewise, dated 22 October 1965, in the weekly Marcha, an article is published in which a well-known Trotskyist theoretician, Adolfo Gilly, declares that Che left Cuba due to differences with Fidel on the Sino-Soviet conflict and that Che could not impose his opinion on the leadership. He says that Che in a confused manner proposed the extension of the revolution to the rest of Latin America in opposition to the Soviet line.
</p>
<p>
He says that the Cuban leadership is divided into a conservative wing which includes former leaders of the pact, the followers of Che, and Fidel and his team in a position of swinging back and forth between conciliation and opposition. He says that Che left Cuba because he lacked means of expressing himself, and that Fidel feared to face the masses to explain the case of Che.
</p>
<p>
This same Trotskyist theoretician on 31 October 1965, as a reporter for Nuovo Mondo, an Italian paper, writes an article calling the Cuban leadership “philo-Soviet” and accusing Fidel of not having politically explained what happened to Che. He says that Major Guevara was defeated by the pact and the Castro team. He criticizes Che for not having taken the struggle to impose his point of view to the masses, and he concludes that the Cuban state, paralyzed by its own policy, did not openly support the Dominican revolution. I am going to refer to this a little more extensively a little further on.
</p>
<p>
In its October 1965 number, the Spanish Trotskyist newspaper Batalla declares: “The mystery which surrounds the case of Che Guevara must be cleared up. Friends of Che suppose that the letter read by Castro is false, and it is asked whether the Cuban leadership is orienting itself toward submission to the bureaucracy of the Kremlin."
</p>
<p>
Around the same date, the official Trotskyist organ of Argentina publishes an article in which it avers that Che is dead or a prisoner in Cuba. It says: “He entered into conflict with Fidel Castro over the operation of the unions and the organization of the militia.” It adds that Che opposed the formation of the Central Committee with Castro's favorites, particularly army officers supporting the Moscow rightwing.
</p>
<p>
However, one of the filthiest articles, the most gross, the most indecent, is that written by the leader of the Latin American political bureau of the Fourth International, in the newspaper Lutta Operaria of Italy. Of this article, a long one for sure, I am only going to read three paragraphs. It begins by saying:
</p>
<p class="quote">
“One aspect of the worsening of the world crisis of bureaucracy is the expulsion of Guevara. Guevara was expelled now, not eight months ago. The discussion with Guevara has lasted eight months. These were not eight months spent drinking coffee. They have fought hard, and perhaps there have been deaths, perhaps they have argued with pistols. We cannot say whether or not they killed Guevara, but there exists the right to suppose that they killed him.
</p>
<p class="quote">
“Why does Guevara not appear? They have not presented him in Havana for fear of the consequences, the reaction of the population; but after all, by hiding him they cause the same effect. The people say, 'Why does Guevara not come out, why does he not appear?' It is not a political accusation. There are political praises for him. Why have they not presented Guevara? Why has he not spoken? How can it be possible that one of the founders of the Cuban worker state, who up until a short time ago toured the world in the name of the worker state, unexpectedly says: 'I am fed up with the Cuban Revolution. I am going to make revolution somewhere else.' Somewhere else, and they do not say where he has gone, and he does not appear. If there are no differences, why does he not appear? All the Cuban people understand that there is an enormous struggle and that this struggle had not ended.
</p>
<p class="quote">
“Guevara was not alone and is not alone. If they take these measures against Guevara, it is because there is great support, great support for him, and in addition to this great support the people are enormously preoccupied. A short while ago the Cuban government published a decree, very severe, saying that it was necessary to return all weapons to the state. At that time the situation was a bit confused. Now it is clear why this resolution was issued. It was against the Guevara partisans. They are afraid of an uprising.”
</p>
<p>
Here is another paragraph:
</p>
<p class="quote">
“Why have they silenced Guevara? The Fourth International must carry out a public campaign in this respect, demanding the appearance of Guevara, the right of Guevara to defend himself and to debate, to make an appeal to the masses not to trust the measures the Cuban state has taken because they are bureaucratic measures and perhaps those of murderers. They have eliminated Guevara to stop his struggle. They have silenced Guevara regardless of the fact that their position was not compatible with a revolutionary point of view, because it tended toward the harmonizing of their positions in the revolutionary tendency.”
</p>
<p>
Further on it says:
</p>
<p class="quote">
“This demonstrates not the power of Guevara, or of a Guevara group in Cuba, but the maturity of the conditions in the rest of the workers' states for the fructification of these positions within a short time. Bureaucracy is not deceived by maneuvers and measures of this type. The elimination of Guevara means for bureaucracy the attempt at the liquidation of a base for possible regrouping of revolutionary tendencies which continue to develop world revolution. This is the basis for the liquidation of Guevara. And not only is it a danger for Cuba, but it exerts influence on the rest of the Latin American revolution. Guatemala is at the side of Cuba; Guatemala is at the side of Cuba with the program of the socialist revolution. Despite its force and the speeches of its highest leader, Fidel Castro, it has not been able to prevent the 13 November Movement from turning into a socialist revolutionary movement fighting directly for socialism.”
</p>
<p>
It is not by coincidence that this gentleman, a leader of the Fourth International, mentions here very haughtily the case of Guatemala and of the 13 November Movement. Because, precisely in relation to this movement, Yankee imperialism has used one of the most subtle tactics to liquidate a revolutionary movement, which consisted of infiltrating the agents of the Fourth International who, by ignorance — political ignorance — made the main political leader of that movement adopt no less than that discredited thing, that anti-historic thing, that fraudulent thing which emanated from elements who without doubt serve imperialism, as did the program of the Fourth International.
</p>
<p>
How did this happen? Yon Sosa was undoubtedly a patriotic officer. Yon Sosa led the movement of a group of armed officers in the crushing of whom the mercenaries who later invaded Playa Gir�n participated. Through a businessman who took charge of the movement's political aspects, the Fourth International fixed it up so that that leader, who was ignorant of the profound problems of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought, would permit that agents of Trotskyism, about whom we do not have the slightest doubt that he is an agent of imperialism, to publish a newspaper which copies outright the program of the Fourth International. By doing this, the Fourth International committed a real crime against the revolutionary movement to isolate it from the rest of the people, to isolate it from the masses, when it contaminated it with the stupidities, the discredit, and the repugnant thing which Trotskyism today is in the field of politics. (Applause).
</p>
<p>
Even though at one time Trotskyism represented an erroneous position, but a position in the field of political ideas, Trotskyism became during the following years a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction. This is the way these gentlemen think. For example, in relation to South Vietnam, where a broad revolutionary front has united the overwhelming majority of the people and various sectors of the population, has united them closely around the liberation movement in the struggle against imperialism. For the Trotskyists that is absurd; that is counterrevolutionary. Yet these gentlemen who serve imperialism have the gall to do such an unusual thing in the face of the facts and realities of history and against the revolutionary movement and to express themselves in this manner.
</p>
<p>
Fortunately, in Guatemala the revolutionary movement is being saved, and it is being saved thanks to the clear vision of one of the officers who along with Sosa began the revolutionary movement and who, understanding that blunder, that stupidity, divorced himself from the 13 November Movement and with other progressive and revolutionary sectors organized the Guatemalan Rebel Armed Forces. (Applause) That officer, that young officer who had such a clear vision, who represented the Guatemalan revolutionary movement at this conference, is Major Turcios. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Major Turcios has to his credit not only having been one of the standard bearers of the armed struggle for the liberation of his oppressed nation, but also having saved the Guatemalan revolutionary movement from one of the most subtle and perfidious stratagems of Yankee imperialism. He also raised the revolutionary banners of Guatemala and of his anti-imperialist movement by snatching them from the dirty hands of these mercenaries at the service of Yankee imperialism.
</p>
<p>
We hope that Yon Sosa, whose patriotic intentions were questioned by no one when the struggle began and whose honesty is not questioned by anyone, even though we have strong reasons to doubt his attitudes as a revolutionary leader, will not delay in divorcing himself from these elements and will return to the Guatemalan revolutionary movement, but this time under a different leader, a different guide who demonstrated in such moments a clarity of vision and an attitude becoming a revolutionary leader. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
This position of the Trotskyists is the same which all newspapers and publicity agencies of Yankee imperialism adopted in relation to the cause of Comrade Ernesto Guevara. All the imperialist press of the United States, its news agencies, the Cuban counter-revolutionaries' press, the bourgeois press throughout the continent and the rest of the world — in other words, this campaign of slanders and intrigues against revolutionary Cuba in connection with the case of Comrade Guevara — coincided with precision with all imperialist bourgeois sectors, all the slanderers and all the conspirators against the Cuban revolution, for there is no doubt that only reaction and imperialism is interested in discrediting the Cuban revolution and in destroying the confidence of the revolutionary movements in the Cuban revolution, in destroying the confidence of the Latin American peoples in the Cuban revolution, in destroying their faith. Therefore, they have not hesitated to use the dirtiest and most indecent weapons.
</p>
<p>
This same man (Gilly), who once in a while poses among other North American intellectuals in the U.S. magazine (Monthly Review), had the villainy to write the following paragraph with regard to the Santo Domingo crisis which is worthy of analysis.
</p>
<p>
He said:
</p>
<p class="quote">
“A high point of this crisis had to be the Dominican revolution, where the Cuban worker state was left paralyzed by its own policy, without openly supporting the revolution, while in Cuba there was tremendous internal pressure for a policy of active support. If the crisis took place long before the Santo Domingo incident, then the Santo Domingo incident undoubtedly precipitated the revolution.”
</p>
<p>
This man has the villainy to accuse the Cuban revolution of not having actively supported the Dominican Revolution. While the imperialists accused Cuba, while the imperialists were trying to justify their intervention, saying that leftist and communist elements trained in Cuba were there leading the uprising, while imperialism was accusing Cuba and presenting the Dominican revolution not as an internal problem, but as an external problem, this man accuses the revolution of not having actively supported the Dominican revolution. What is the interpretation of active support? Could they perhaps think that Cuba, whose forces and resources are known, could prevent and had to prevent the landing of North American troops in Santo Domingo?
</p>
<p>
Cuba has weapons to defend itself in a relation infinitely inferior to the imperialists. Cuba has defensive arms. And these gentlemen are so miserable and shameless that they attempt to blame Cuba for not having prevented the landing, because, what else is the meaning of active support, because everything that Cuba could do under those circumstances, everything that Cuba could do and had to do was done. To ask Cuba to prevent the landing is tantamount to asking Cambodia in Southeast Asia to prevent the bombing of North Vietnam and to prevent the occupation of South Vietnam by the Yankee Marine Corps. (Applause) Unfortunately, Cuba's forces are limited, but to the measure of its strength and in the best manner possible, in the most determined manner and according to the circumstances, Cuba lends and will lend its maximum support to the revolution. Those who think that this country fears the imperialists, those who think with a spirit of superiority and with their insolent delirium of superiority that this country fears the imperialists, should have lived a few hours here during the October crisis, when for the first time such a small nation as ours was threatened with a massive rain of nuclear missiles over its territory, to see the attitude assumed by this nation and the revolutionary government. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Many stupid lies and blunders are written, and above all are written by irresponsible persons when certain documents cannot be released to the public. However, one day mankind will know. One day mankind will know all the facts. That day the miserable ones will find out that Comrade Guevara was not murdered, when each of his steps will be known in full detail, and when the position assumed by Cuba during those difficult days — and how calm our people were — will also be known. When that is understood there will be no one, regardless of how insolent he is, regardless of how provocative he is, who will dare question the feeling of solidarity of this nation and the worth of this nation, worth demonstrated by its conduct even though this country is located 90 miles from the imperialist metropolis.
</p>
<p>
In the coming years enormous dangers will weigh on our people's heads to see the same degree that the revolutionary movement grows, a revolutionary movement that grows above all because of the example of the Cuban revolution, a revolutionary movement that grows and becomes gigantic because of Cuba's example, because of Cuba's victories, because of Cuba's position against the enemy. It must be taken into account that when this nation defies that danger, this nation does not have millions of men under arms, this nation does not possess thermonuclear arms, because here we possess moral rockets and here.(Applause) millions do not represent the infinite, the number of men is not infinite, but the dignity and the decorum of this nation is infinite.
</p>
<p>
The coming years will speak for us, and the coming years will take care of crushing the slanderers, not those who are known agents of the imperialists, but the confused, the conspirators, who allow themselves to be involved in intrigues and serve as instruments for the lies against our revolution.
</p>
<h4>
[Successful Conference]
</h4>
<p>
A fact that was demonstrated in this conference is highly gratifying, because many things were demonstrated in this conference: it was demonstrated, in the first place, how discussions can be carried on beyond everything and around the things which basically interest us, above all, around those things that interest the people who are struggling. All peoples, regardless of their strength, of their resources, of their stature have a voice and an opinion. The people are capable of having their own opinions and independent voices. This was demonstrated in this conference. We Cubans and the revolutionary movements were always in identical positions, irrespective of continents. How a united force, how the revolutionary outlook, how the most honorable positions prevailed! And in this conference, as a compensation in the face of the conspirators and slanderers, the peoples and the revolutionary liberation movements always demonstrated a great and immense trust in Cuba and in its revolutionary party, and how this country, therefore, was given the honor of carrying the office of secretary general and the temporary headquarters of the organization!
</p>
<p>
And considering the task carried out by the Cuban delegation, by the Cuban Committee of Solidarity — working in favor of the conference, struggling ceaselessly to overcome all obstacles, maintaining at all times a position of principle, objective, just — which has even jeopardized Cuban relations with some countries, as was the case with Indonesia, due to the fact that it was up to the Cuban delegation to decide, and the Cuban delegation rejected the official delegation from Indonesia. Cuba risked its relations with a state which is important in that part of the world. And although for us all states are equally important and all peoples have equal rights, may this fact serve to show to what point Cuba was — or tried to be — fair, and tried to be objective, and tried to maintain a position of principle. We know how hard all of the delegations worked, because according to those who have been in several international conferences, this is one of the conferences for which more serious work was done more indefatigably.
</p>
<p>
That is why, when Cuba was assigned to be its temporary headquarters — and with the headquarters, the office of the secretary general of the organization — the Political Bureau of our party agreed to appoint Comrade Osmani Cienfuegos as secretary general of the organization. (Loud applause) All delegations have had an opportunity to learn about the efforts and the sincerity with which Comrade Osmani worked in the preliminary tasks and the development of the conference.
</p>
<p>
We must say that everyone cooperated, and that all contributed in one way or another to unite opinions and for the success of this conference. For as I said previously, opinions were not always in agreement, but all, in the final analysis, in a genuinely dispassionate interest, helped bring about its successes.
</p>
<p>
I do not want to close without mentioning two things.
</p>
<p>
One is a concern which affects us all in the face of the events in Indonesia, confronted with the reports reaching us from Indonesia that more than 100,000 revolutionary militant individuals have been savagely assassinated, with the report that Aidit and some other Communist Party leaders in Indonesia have been assassinated. We would like to register our reproach, our protest, and our solidarity with the Indonesian revolutionaries, today persecuted by militarist reaction, frightened by Yankee imperialism. Simultaneously, (we do this) as a tribute to those who had a great deal to do with the success of this conference.
</p>
<p>
We would like to acknowledge that Ben Barka was a decisive factor, with his constancy, his personal work, in the organization of this first Tricontinental Conference. His effort and his work were the cause of the problem which occurred. There is a general consensus that Ben Barka has been assassinated, cruelly and cowardly. If this conference of solidarity is duty bound to take a step forward precisely in loyalty and elementary obligation toward him, who so devotedly worked for its success, then it should demand that Ben Barka's assassination be investigated and Ben Barka's assassins be penalized.
</p>
<p>
Every indication points to the direct responsibility of the Moroccan minister of the interior, General Oufkir, upon whom all suspicion and all evidence rests. This conference should not rest until the facts are known clearly as to who planned and carried out Ben Barka's assassination — the assassination of the person who was the president of the preparatory committee for this Tricontinental Conference. This is a repugnant deed, monstrous! It demonstrated from the outset imperialism's interest in obstructing the conference and causing the conference to fail. However, the results of this conference demonstrate that Ben Barka's blood will not shed in vain, and that the Ben Barka crime — his assassination, like Lumumba's assassination, like Aidit's murder, like Sandino's assassination — that with none of its barbarous acts can imperialism contain the victorious march, the final liberation of the peoples!
</p>
<p>
It is but fair for us to dedicate our memories to those who have fallen as victims of imperialism in all continents. May we propose always to be loyal to that cause, always loyal in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the cause for which some died and gave their blood for the liberation of the peoples.
</p>
<p>
Our country, which, as you have been able, to see is made up of various ethnical groups, a result of the intermingling of people from the various continents — deeply linked to Latin America because of this fact, deeply linked with Africa, deeply linked to all of the people from all continents — has done its utmost to make pleasant the stay of the delegations here. It had displayed all of its enthusiasm and hospitality and all the warmth of which it is capable. Thousands of Cubans, incessantly, without rest or vacations, have worked for the success of this conference. They have worked to wait upon the representatives of the sister nations. Our entire people have lived during these days through a big feast of international solidarity. Our people have felt as their own each and every one of the problems of other people. Our people, as I said on 2 January, received them with open arms, and they bid them farewell with an embrace, as a symbol of a bond that will never break, and as a symbol of their sentiments of fraternity and solidarity toward the other people who struggle, and for whom they are ready, also, to offer their blood. Fatherland or death, we will win!
</p>
<hr>
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At the Closing Session of the Tricontinental Conference
Spoken: January 15, 1966 in Havana's Chaplin Theater
First publicly disseminated: January 16, 1966
Source: University of Texas: Fidel Castro Speech Database.
Translated: US Government: Foreign Broadcast Information Service from the Havana Domestic Radio and Television Service in Spanish 0249 GMT 16 January, 1966.
Transcription: U.S. Information Agency; the Department of Research of the Radio Marti Program
HTML: Brian Baggins
Subject Index: Vietnam, Cuban Assitance to; Guevara's Departure, Trotskyist distortions of
Public Domain: Castro Internet Archive 2006. This work is completely free.
Honored delegates, Cuban comrades: The importance of this event which has come to a climax tonight does not escape us. Contrary to all the auguries of imperialism, contrary to all its forecasts which revealed the great hope that this conference would not result in anything, that this conference involving the problems of the international communist movement was bound to be divided, that it was bound to be a great failure — what has happened is something that they least or perhaps never expected: that the conference has been a success; that this conference has created an organ tricontinental in nature; that it has arrived at accords which include the most heartfelt yearnings of the peoples who fight for their liberation; that a committee to aid the liberation movements has been created.
And that's not all: Something which unquestionably hurts the imperialists greatly is that Cuba has been chosen as the headquarters of the executive secretariat of the organization until the next Tricontinental conference is held. (Applause)
It is not that we are expressing here a feeling of national pride. Because of the peculiar circumstances surrounding the country, its geographic location, the efforts exerted by the imperialists to isolate it from the world, the measures adopted so that practically no one can visit us makes the fact that this conference has been held with such success in our country and defying all obstacles, defying all difficulties, that it has been considered an adequate location for the temporary operation of the headquarters, is something which doubtless must hurt the Yankee imperialists considerably.
Therefore, this has been a great victory for the revolutionary movement. Never has there been a gathering of such dimensions and of such magnitude, a gathering in which the revolutionary representations of 82 peoples have met to discuss problems of common interest. Never has there been such a large meeting, because the peoples of three continents have been here; the revolutionary movements of the peoples of three continents who have a common anti-imperialist stance; who represent the struggle of their peoples with differing philosophical ideas or positions, or with differing religious beliefs; who on many occasions represent differing ideologies. But they have something in common. What the peoples have most in common to unite the people of three continents and of all the world today is the struggle against imperialism (applause); the struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism, the struggle against racism and, in short, all the phenomena which are the contemporary expression we call imperialism, whose center, axis, and principal support of Yankee imperialism.
The meeting, agreements, and conclusions of this conference were all accomplished because the nations in this era have something in common. This was not an easy task; it may seem easy, but it was not and could not be an easy task. This is only natural, because when representatives from different nations and different movements, with special problems which express almost all current problems of the world, it was not easy...
The work on theses, on agreements acceptable to all could not be achieved without hard work. During these past few days we remember how different problems were discussed. When the final statement was being discussed, we remembered how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had worked and written the Communist Manifesto for several months, and how afterward they revised, retouched, and perfected it several times before it was finally issued. Naturally, in our conference which took two weeks — less than two weeks — a few days were needed to work on a document which would cover the different opinions and would be issued in a manner that would fully satisfy every one of the delegations. Despite these circumstances, a document was achieved which undoubtedly is the most profound, most complete, and most radical of many which have been worked on and agreed upon at a conference of this type.
For the first time the Latin American representatives participated with the African and Asian nations. Of course, in the case of Latin America, the majority or all the representatives came from the movements and nations which are fighting or will fight to free themselves. Our nation in this case represented the only nation free from Yankee domination and constituted in revolutionary power.
We believe that this conference will unquestionably occupy a place in the history of the nations that struggle for their freedom in the revolutionary movement. We also believe that the contacts which have been established, the ties which have been created between the world movements fighting against imperialism, and the organizations which have been created, will play an unquestionable role in the revolutionary struggle.
We have had the opportunity to become more familiar with the thinking and the concrete situation of each one of the movements which fight for their liberation at this hour. We have had the opportunity to know the concrete situation of each one of the peoples who struggle, and, above all, we have had the opportunity of seeing how the solidarity of the peoples has been growing; how the strength of the revolutionary movement grows on a world scale, and how the mutual assistance of the peoples grows and can grow in times to come; the assistance of all the peoples for each one of the peoples who struggle — the mutual assistance of the peoples on a scale and on a level which mankind has never before seen.
[Vietnam]
(We have had the opportunity to see) how, despite the military and technical power of the imperialists, the united strength of the revolutionary peoples will be much more powerful. (Applause) Imperialism will inevitably be defeated. Who has taught us this lesson? It has been taught to us by the peoples. Who among the peoples has given us in these times the most extraordinary lesson? The people of Vietnam. (Applause)
Vietnam is a small nation. The imperialists have split it in two, into North and South Vietnam. For revolutionaries, for us, there is but a single Vietnam. (Applause) Against the people of South Vietnam the Yankee imperialists have deployed a large part of their might — hundreds of thousands of regular soldiers of the imperialist armed forces, as well as hundreds of thousands of soldiers drafted by the puppet government; hundreds of planes; thousands of helicopters. Yet the Yankee imperialists have been unable to crush the people in this part of Vietnam.
Trying to intimidate their brothers in the other part of Vietnam, they began bombing with hundreds of planes every day to demand their surrender, to try to bring the Vietnamese to their knees. Yet, as the imperialists themselves admit, instead of gaining ground they have lost ground. Against the ever increasingly steadfast and heroic resistance, they used more and more planes and more and more bombs. To the amazement of the world, the people of Vietnam are furnishing the most extraordinary example of heroism the history of any liberation movement has ever seen, because a liberation movement has never had to face more powerful forces. The people of Vietnam are reversing these forces and defeating the might of the Yankee imperialists.
They not only bomb Vietnam but they also incessantly bomb the patriots of Laos. (Applause) They threaten to bomb and commit aggression against Cambodia. These attitudes and threats of the Yankee imperialists reveal their impotence; they reveal their despair. This is the result of a situation which is becoming more critical in that part of the world. This is due to the defeats they are suffering in that area of Asia, where a decisive battle is being waged by the people against imperialism — and not only against Yankee imperialism but against Yankee imperialism and its allies, Yankee imperialism and its daring associates in Asia — which is expressed by the formations of South Korean, Australian, and Thai soldiers — and which threatens to further involve either military or support forces of the greatest number of world governments.
That struggle against the Vietnamese people and Laos and the threats to Cambodia demonstrate a need to render maximum solidarity and help to those nations.
The Yankee imperialists have the support of Thailand, where there are many troops and bases and from where they carry out threats against Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. This does not mean that this situation will continue indefinitely. We are sure that for the peoples of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia the hour will come when the Thai people will demand an accounting from the Yankee imperialists. (Applause) The hour will also come when that suppressed and exploited people, inspired by its neighboring nations, will also join the struggle against the imperialists.
Meanwhile, the imperialists not only have carried out the war against Vietnam — all of Vietnam — and Laos, but also threaten Cambodia.
[Cuban Assistance to Vietnam]
Cambodia is a small nation which has not yet been attacked but is seriously threatened by Yankee imperialism. Therefore, it is necessary that the revolutionary states assist in the strengthening of the defenses of the small nation of Cambodia. (Applause)
Talking with that country's representative, who was participating in the Tricontinental Conference, hearing from his lips about the situation in his country and the dangers that threaten it, we expressed that view to him; and we told him further that we Cubans, although we are a small nation and at an enormous distance from Cambodia, are prepared to contribute to the extent of our power to strengthening its defenses, and that all we need is to be advised, all we need is to be asked in any circumstance when it is considered advisable, for we are prepared to make our contribution.
And that is also our position on Laos, and North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. (Applause) We are a small nation, not too far from the shores of the imperialist homeland. Our arms are eminently defensive. But our men, wholeheartedly, our revolutionary militants, our fighters, are prepared to fight the imperialists in any part of the world. (Applause) Our country is a small one; our territory could even be partially occupied by the enemy; but that would never mean a cessation of our resistance.
But the world is big, and the imperialists are everywhere, and for the Cuban revolutionaries the field of battle against imperialism takes in the whole world. (Applause) Without boasting, without any kind of immodesty, that is how we Cuban revolutionaries understand our internationalist duty. That is the way our people understand their duty, because they realize that the enemy is one and indivisible; the one who attacks us along our shoes and on our land is the same who attacks the others. Hence we say and we declare that Cuban fighters can be counted on by the revolutionary movement in any corner of the earth. (Applause)
Thousands and thousands of Cubans have expressed the desire and readiness to go anywhere in the world where they may be needed to help the revolutionary movement and this is logical. If the Yankee imperialist feel free to bomb anywhere they please and send their mercenary troops to put down the revolutionary movement anywhere in the world, then the revolutionary peoples feel they have the right, even with their physical presence, to help the peoples who are fighting the Yankee imperialists. And so, if each helps to the extent of his power, if each helps insofar as he can, the Yankee imperialists will be defeated, that place is Southeast Asia, for there it is impossible to establish a correlation of forces. It is possible to establish a correlation of forces incomparably superior to that of the Yankee imperialists.
Thus, we have not the slightest doubt that they will be defeated, crushed, by the peoples of that region, and — if they increase their forces and the forces of their reactionary allies — by the camp and the other peoples. (Applause)
This is why the Yankee imperialists launch their hypocritical peace offensives, in an attempt to confuse, to deceive. And that is why the peoples of Vietnam have said — and very rightly — that is the only peace, true peace, will be achieved only when the Yankee imperialists stop attacking, and when the Yankee imperialists stop occupying part of the territory of Vietnam, and when the Yankee imperialists take their mercenary troops and military bases out of Vietnamese territory. That is, the imperialists have been told the only thing that was proper to tell them under the circumstances: that true peace since they are the only disturbers of the peace will be achieved when they get out of Vietnam. (Applause)
It is evident that the imperialists are there fighting a hopeless fight; the imperialists are there fighting a fight in which they are doomed to inevitable defeat, and as a result, they want to swap defeat for a false peace. And it is logical for the people of Vietnam to refuse; it is logical for the people of Vietnam to be unwilling to exchange their victory for that kind of false peace. If we were in a similar situation, I am fully convinced that we would say exactly the same thing, and that we would refuse to negotiate under bombs, and we would refuse to negotiate under attack, and we would refuse to negotiate while our country was occupied. And therefore our people and the conference unanimously supported the positions and points upheld by the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the South Vietnam liberation movement. (Applause)
On this question, on this topic, the most burning one currently, there were practically unanimous views. And it is very well for the Yankee imperialists to know the degree of solidarity with Vietnam felt by all peoples of the world. It is well for the Yankee imperialists to understand the degree of support enjoyed by the people of Vietnam throughout the world. Hence we consider that this solidarity conference of the peoples of the three continents has acted and spoken in such a way that the support and feelings of solidarity for Vietnam has become evident, and in addition will grow. And as in the case of Vietnam, so it is for Laos and Cambodia, which are the nations being attacked or running the risk of being attacked.
[Conference Unity]
On all problems of Asia, Africa, and Latin America the conference took a similar stand. The peoples and the liberation movements of Africa — and in order to avoid an oversight I wish to say that a small country, too, there in that area of Asia, is fighting for its liberation, although it is not very well known, a people fighting courageously, the people of North Kalimantan — received the warm support of the conference, as did the people of Yemen and the people of Palestine. (Applause)
The African ones, I was saying, the liberation movements that were so worthily represented at this conference: the people of Portuguese-occupied Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, represented here by one of the most serious revolutionary movements in Africa and by one of the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, Comrade Am�lcar Cabral, who instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and the success of his struggle for liberation; the liberation movement of Angola and Mozambique, two more Portuguese colonies that are an armed conflict for their liberation; the Zimbabwe people, oppressed by the racist minority in Rhodesia; the people of the Congo Leopoldville; the oppressed people of South Africa; the protectorates of Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and Basutoland, whose nomenclature reveals the imperial profile of the country that colonized them; and in sum, all the African liberation movements were worthily represented at this conference and received warm support and solidarity from all the delegates.
In Africa the imperialists attempt to penetrate and divide and subjugate is increasingly manifest. During the past few weeks they have made coups fashionable. Coups in the Congo, coups in the Central African Republic, coups in Nigeria, as reported by dispatches, reveal imperialism's desperate efforts to strengthen its dominion in that part of the world. In Africa, too, a decisive battle is being fought, and the role of the revolutionary movements and the role of the new states that have not today been infected with the disease of neocolonialism will be of extraordinary importance in resisting this imperialist drive and penetration.
For there, aid to the revolutionary movement, determined aid to the liberation movements, determined aid to the majorities that are oppressed by the racists will be a decisive factor.
Equally decisive will be the sense of responsibility, seriousness, and union among the African revolutionary leaders. Some movements have sustained blows, some setbacks; but those setbacks must not discourage them. Those setbacks must serve as experience; those setbacks must serve as lessons, so that pertinent steps and measures may be adopted to overcome present difficulties, to overcome shortcomings and weaknesses of the revolutionary movement.
The solidarity movement, which began in Africa and Asia and has now extended to the third continent of the world that is oppressed and exploited by imperialism, will by a decision of the conference have its next event in Cairo, thereby accepting the invitation extended by President Nasser, who offered the UAR capital for the next Tricontinental Conference in 1968. And we are sure — and we must bend every effort to that end — that by that date, among the peoples that have freed themselves from imperialism or colonialism we will be able to greet a few more fraternal peoples of Africa. (Applause)
The problems of Latin America, beginning with the most burning and critical problem, the problem of the military occupation of Santo Domingo by regular troops of Yankee imperialism, earned the attention of this conference and the full support of the delegates representing their peoples. On the Dominican stage in the years ahead, Latin America faces one of the most serious battles of the next few years. The Dominican Republic, a small country occupied by tens of thousands of Yankee troops, faces a long, hard fight. The Dominican Republic, the Dominican people, must not be alone against the Yankee imperialists. (Applause)
In many other American nations every condition exists for revolutionary armed battle. This battle has already been going on for some time too in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala (Applause). In Latin America there must not be even one, or two, or three peoples fighting alone against imperialism.
The imperialists' correlation of forces on this continent, the nearness of their home territory, the zeal with which they will try to defend their dominions in this part of the world require, on this continent more than anywhere else, a common strategy, a joint, simultaneous struggle. (Applause) If the imperialists have to face not just the people of the Dominican Republic, or the people of Guatemala, or the people of Venezuela, or the people of Colombia, or the people of Peru, but have the fight, at the same time as in all these countries, against the other oppressed peoples, as in Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Argentina and other peoples in Central America; if the struggle is waged on a broad scale, if every revolutionary of this continent does his duty — and as the Havana Declaration says, the duty of every revolutionary is to effect the revolution, and effect it in deed not in word; not be a revolutionary in theory alone, but a revolutionary in practice — if revolutionaries spend less energy and time on theorizing and devote more energy and time to practical work; and if there is less of revolutions and possibilities and dilemmas and it is understood once and for all that sooner or later all or almost all peoples will have to take up arms to liberate themselves, then the hour of liberation for this continent will be advanced. What with the ones who theorize and the ones who criticize those who theorize while beginning to theorize themselves, much energy and time is unfortunately lost.
We believe that on this continent, in the case of all or almost all peoples, the battle will take on the most violent forms. And when this is realized, the only proper thing is to prepare for the time when the battle comes. Prepare! (Applause) Of course, that battle will break out first where — as the Havana Declaration says — conditions of imperialist oppression are the most naked, where every course is absolutely closed, as is the case in most countries of this continent. And even where the bourgeoisie and imperialist exercise their class rule through constitutionalist means, as is the case in Uruguay, the force of the mass movement and the people's revolutionary spirit are more and more evident. (Applause)
And we must express our people's great liking for Uruguay, because the latter is a tiny, tiny country that has no mountains and is surrounded by two reactionary colossi, and invariably, always, without exception, under every circumstance, its people have been on a par with the people of Venezuela in solidarity and support for the Cuban revolution. (Applause) We still remember how, because of the break in diplomatic relations with Cuba due to an OAS decision imposed by the United States as a penalty against Cuba, the people of Uruguay, led by their revolutionary organizations, took to the streets with incomparable vigor in protest against that servile, traitorous act against a nation of this continent.
Well, gentlemen, in this problem of Latin America you delegates will allow me to extend myself in a few observations, since we are situated on this continent, and since against us not only have the Yankee imperialists established the economic blockade, made use of armed aggression, threatened us mortally on certain occasions, committed every kind of sabotage, infiltrated spies, and launched piratical attacks, but also Yankee imperialism has used more subtle weapons against our country, such as the weapons of propaganda and slander. And not that alone — Yankee imperialism and its agents have sought to destroy the prestige of the Cuban revolution; they have tried to depict the Cuban revolution as being apart from the revolutionary struggles on this continent; they have tried in the basest and most slanderous way to discredit the revolution; and they have had recourse to every method, every fact, every weapon.
Of course, the imperialists would be interested in a concrete discussion of these problems. Any irresponsible person, any charlatan, any puppet cares nothing about making an irresponsible statement, a slanderous statement. It is well known that only the enemy would be interested in the manner of putting into practice the term “solidarity” with revolutionary peoples of the whole world as well as on this continent. (Applause) But what has happened?
[Guevara's depature]
There is a fact which I will take as an example to demonstrate how imperialism and its agents work. It is a very interesting fact. I refer to the campaign carried out by Yankee imperialism and its agents regarding the departure of our Comrade Ernesto Guevara. (Applause) I believe we must take this matter by the horns to clarify some things.
Comrade Ernesto Guevara and a few revolutionaries from this country and a few revolutionaries outside this country know when he left and what he has been doing during this period. The imperialists are, of course, very interested in learning all the details as to his whereabouts, what he is doing and how. Apparently they do not know, and if they do, they disguise it very well.
These are things, of course, that time, when circumstances so permit, will clarify. However, we revolutionaries do not need any clarifications. The enemy seizes upon these circumstances to try to conspire and to confound and to slander.
Comrade Guevara joined us when we were in exile in Mexico. From the very first day he always had the idea, clearly expressed, that when the struggle ended in Cuba he would still have other duties to fulfill elsewhere. We always gave him our word that no state or national interest, no circumstances, would make us request him to remain in our country, would make us obstruct the fulfillment of this wish or this vocation. And we fulfilled thoroughly and faithfully that promise which we made to Comrade Guevara. (Applause)
Naturally, if Comrade Guevara was to leave the country, it would be logical for him to do this clandestinely. It would be logical for him to move clandestinely. It is logical that he is not calling newsmen. It is logical that he has not been granting press conferences. It is logical that he would carry out the tasks he had planned in the way he did.
However, how much capital have the imperialists tried to make from this situation, and how they have done it!
That is why I brought some papers. Do not be afraid that I am going to read all the papers here. I am only going to read some things. Because here we have what all the imperialists and bourgeois newspapers have written with respect to the case of Major Guevara, what the U.S. newspapers, their magazines, and their wire agencies have written, the Latin American bourgeois newspapers and (newspapers) of the entire world, and we are going to see who exactly have been the main spokesmen of the imperialist campaign of intrigue and calumnies against Cuba with respect to the case of Comrade Guevara.
[Trotskyist Distortions of Guevara's Disappearance]
In the first place there were certain elements who during the past decades have been used constantly against the revolutionary movement. And if you will give me a little time, I am going to look among all these papers for some very interesting ones. Ah, I found it; it is a UPI dispatch dated 6 December 1965: “Ernesto Guevara was murdered by Cuban Premier Fidel Castro on orders from the USSR, declared Felipe Albaguante, chief of the Mexican Trotskyists, in statements to El Universal.” He adds that Che was liquidated for insisting on placing Cuba on the Chinese line.
This, naturally, came at the same time as a campaign which the Trotskyist elements began in all places simultaneously. Likewise, dated 22 October 1965, in the weekly Marcha, an article is published in which a well-known Trotskyist theoretician, Adolfo Gilly, declares that Che left Cuba due to differences with Fidel on the Sino-Soviet conflict and that Che could not impose his opinion on the leadership. He says that Che in a confused manner proposed the extension of the revolution to the rest of Latin America in opposition to the Soviet line.
He says that the Cuban leadership is divided into a conservative wing which includes former leaders of the pact, the followers of Che, and Fidel and his team in a position of swinging back and forth between conciliation and opposition. He says that Che left Cuba because he lacked means of expressing himself, and that Fidel feared to face the masses to explain the case of Che.
This same Trotskyist theoretician on 31 October 1965, as a reporter for Nuovo Mondo, an Italian paper, writes an article calling the Cuban leadership “philo-Soviet” and accusing Fidel of not having politically explained what happened to Che. He says that Major Guevara was defeated by the pact and the Castro team. He criticizes Che for not having taken the struggle to impose his point of view to the masses, and he concludes that the Cuban state, paralyzed by its own policy, did not openly support the Dominican revolution. I am going to refer to this a little more extensively a little further on.
In its October 1965 number, the Spanish Trotskyist newspaper Batalla declares: “The mystery which surrounds the case of Che Guevara must be cleared up. Friends of Che suppose that the letter read by Castro is false, and it is asked whether the Cuban leadership is orienting itself toward submission to the bureaucracy of the Kremlin."
Around the same date, the official Trotskyist organ of Argentina publishes an article in which it avers that Che is dead or a prisoner in Cuba. It says: “He entered into conflict with Fidel Castro over the operation of the unions and the organization of the militia.” It adds that Che opposed the formation of the Central Committee with Castro's favorites, particularly army officers supporting the Moscow rightwing.
However, one of the filthiest articles, the most gross, the most indecent, is that written by the leader of the Latin American political bureau of the Fourth International, in the newspaper Lutta Operaria of Italy. Of this article, a long one for sure, I am only going to read three paragraphs. It begins by saying:
“One aspect of the worsening of the world crisis of bureaucracy is the expulsion of Guevara. Guevara was expelled now, not eight months ago. The discussion with Guevara has lasted eight months. These were not eight months spent drinking coffee. They have fought hard, and perhaps there have been deaths, perhaps they have argued with pistols. We cannot say whether or not they killed Guevara, but there exists the right to suppose that they killed him.
“Why does Guevara not appear? They have not presented him in Havana for fear of the consequences, the reaction of the population; but after all, by hiding him they cause the same effect. The people say, 'Why does Guevara not come out, why does he not appear?' It is not a political accusation. There are political praises for him. Why have they not presented Guevara? Why has he not spoken? How can it be possible that one of the founders of the Cuban worker state, who up until a short time ago toured the world in the name of the worker state, unexpectedly says: 'I am fed up with the Cuban Revolution. I am going to make revolution somewhere else.' Somewhere else, and they do not say where he has gone, and he does not appear. If there are no differences, why does he not appear? All the Cuban people understand that there is an enormous struggle and that this struggle had not ended.
“Guevara was not alone and is not alone. If they take these measures against Guevara, it is because there is great support, great support for him, and in addition to this great support the people are enormously preoccupied. A short while ago the Cuban government published a decree, very severe, saying that it was necessary to return all weapons to the state. At that time the situation was a bit confused. Now it is clear why this resolution was issued. It was against the Guevara partisans. They are afraid of an uprising.”
Here is another paragraph:
“Why have they silenced Guevara? The Fourth International must carry out a public campaign in this respect, demanding the appearance of Guevara, the right of Guevara to defend himself and to debate, to make an appeal to the masses not to trust the measures the Cuban state has taken because they are bureaucratic measures and perhaps those of murderers. They have eliminated Guevara to stop his struggle. They have silenced Guevara regardless of the fact that their position was not compatible with a revolutionary point of view, because it tended toward the harmonizing of their positions in the revolutionary tendency.”
Further on it says:
“This demonstrates not the power of Guevara, or of a Guevara group in Cuba, but the maturity of the conditions in the rest of the workers' states for the fructification of these positions within a short time. Bureaucracy is not deceived by maneuvers and measures of this type. The elimination of Guevara means for bureaucracy the attempt at the liquidation of a base for possible regrouping of revolutionary tendencies which continue to develop world revolution. This is the basis for the liquidation of Guevara. And not only is it a danger for Cuba, but it exerts influence on the rest of the Latin American revolution. Guatemala is at the side of Cuba; Guatemala is at the side of Cuba with the program of the socialist revolution. Despite its force and the speeches of its highest leader, Fidel Castro, it has not been able to prevent the 13 November Movement from turning into a socialist revolutionary movement fighting directly for socialism.”
It is not by coincidence that this gentleman, a leader of the Fourth International, mentions here very haughtily the case of Guatemala and of the 13 November Movement. Because, precisely in relation to this movement, Yankee imperialism has used one of the most subtle tactics to liquidate a revolutionary movement, which consisted of infiltrating the agents of the Fourth International who, by ignorance — political ignorance — made the main political leader of that movement adopt no less than that discredited thing, that anti-historic thing, that fraudulent thing which emanated from elements who without doubt serve imperialism, as did the program of the Fourth International.
How did this happen? Yon Sosa was undoubtedly a patriotic officer. Yon Sosa led the movement of a group of armed officers in the crushing of whom the mercenaries who later invaded Playa Gir�n participated. Through a businessman who took charge of the movement's political aspects, the Fourth International fixed it up so that that leader, who was ignorant of the profound problems of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought, would permit that agents of Trotskyism, about whom we do not have the slightest doubt that he is an agent of imperialism, to publish a newspaper which copies outright the program of the Fourth International. By doing this, the Fourth International committed a real crime against the revolutionary movement to isolate it from the rest of the people, to isolate it from the masses, when it contaminated it with the stupidities, the discredit, and the repugnant thing which Trotskyism today is in the field of politics. (Applause).
Even though at one time Trotskyism represented an erroneous position, but a position in the field of political ideas, Trotskyism became during the following years a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction. This is the way these gentlemen think. For example, in relation to South Vietnam, where a broad revolutionary front has united the overwhelming majority of the people and various sectors of the population, has united them closely around the liberation movement in the struggle against imperialism. For the Trotskyists that is absurd; that is counterrevolutionary. Yet these gentlemen who serve imperialism have the gall to do such an unusual thing in the face of the facts and realities of history and against the revolutionary movement and to express themselves in this manner.
Fortunately, in Guatemala the revolutionary movement is being saved, and it is being saved thanks to the clear vision of one of the officers who along with Sosa began the revolutionary movement and who, understanding that blunder, that stupidity, divorced himself from the 13 November Movement and with other progressive and revolutionary sectors organized the Guatemalan Rebel Armed Forces. (Applause) That officer, that young officer who had such a clear vision, who represented the Guatemalan revolutionary movement at this conference, is Major Turcios. (Applause)
Major Turcios has to his credit not only having been one of the standard bearers of the armed struggle for the liberation of his oppressed nation, but also having saved the Guatemalan revolutionary movement from one of the most subtle and perfidious stratagems of Yankee imperialism. He also raised the revolutionary banners of Guatemala and of his anti-imperialist movement by snatching them from the dirty hands of these mercenaries at the service of Yankee imperialism.
We hope that Yon Sosa, whose patriotic intentions were questioned by no one when the struggle began and whose honesty is not questioned by anyone, even though we have strong reasons to doubt his attitudes as a revolutionary leader, will not delay in divorcing himself from these elements and will return to the Guatemalan revolutionary movement, but this time under a different leader, a different guide who demonstrated in such moments a clarity of vision and an attitude becoming a revolutionary leader. (Applause)
This position of the Trotskyists is the same which all newspapers and publicity agencies of Yankee imperialism adopted in relation to the cause of Comrade Ernesto Guevara. All the imperialist press of the United States, its news agencies, the Cuban counter-revolutionaries' press, the bourgeois press throughout the continent and the rest of the world — in other words, this campaign of slanders and intrigues against revolutionary Cuba in connection with the case of Comrade Guevara — coincided with precision with all imperialist bourgeois sectors, all the slanderers and all the conspirators against the Cuban revolution, for there is no doubt that only reaction and imperialism is interested in discrediting the Cuban revolution and in destroying the confidence of the revolutionary movements in the Cuban revolution, in destroying the confidence of the Latin American peoples in the Cuban revolution, in destroying their faith. Therefore, they have not hesitated to use the dirtiest and most indecent weapons.
This same man (Gilly), who once in a while poses among other North American intellectuals in the U.S. magazine (Monthly Review), had the villainy to write the following paragraph with regard to the Santo Domingo crisis which is worthy of analysis.
He said:
“A high point of this crisis had to be the Dominican revolution, where the Cuban worker state was left paralyzed by its own policy, without openly supporting the revolution, while in Cuba there was tremendous internal pressure for a policy of active support. If the crisis took place long before the Santo Domingo incident, then the Santo Domingo incident undoubtedly precipitated the revolution.”
This man has the villainy to accuse the Cuban revolution of not having actively supported the Dominican Revolution. While the imperialists accused Cuba, while the imperialists were trying to justify their intervention, saying that leftist and communist elements trained in Cuba were there leading the uprising, while imperialism was accusing Cuba and presenting the Dominican revolution not as an internal problem, but as an external problem, this man accuses the revolution of not having actively supported the Dominican revolution. What is the interpretation of active support? Could they perhaps think that Cuba, whose forces and resources are known, could prevent and had to prevent the landing of North American troops in Santo Domingo?
Cuba has weapons to defend itself in a relation infinitely inferior to the imperialists. Cuba has defensive arms. And these gentlemen are so miserable and shameless that they attempt to blame Cuba for not having prevented the landing, because, what else is the meaning of active support, because everything that Cuba could do under those circumstances, everything that Cuba could do and had to do was done. To ask Cuba to prevent the landing is tantamount to asking Cambodia in Southeast Asia to prevent the bombing of North Vietnam and to prevent the occupation of South Vietnam by the Yankee Marine Corps. (Applause) Unfortunately, Cuba's forces are limited, but to the measure of its strength and in the best manner possible, in the most determined manner and according to the circumstances, Cuba lends and will lend its maximum support to the revolution. Those who think that this country fears the imperialists, those who think with a spirit of superiority and with their insolent delirium of superiority that this country fears the imperialists, should have lived a few hours here during the October crisis, when for the first time such a small nation as ours was threatened with a massive rain of nuclear missiles over its territory, to see the attitude assumed by this nation and the revolutionary government. (Applause)
Many stupid lies and blunders are written, and above all are written by irresponsible persons when certain documents cannot be released to the public. However, one day mankind will know. One day mankind will know all the facts. That day the miserable ones will find out that Comrade Guevara was not murdered, when each of his steps will be known in full detail, and when the position assumed by Cuba during those difficult days — and how calm our people were — will also be known. When that is understood there will be no one, regardless of how insolent he is, regardless of how provocative he is, who will dare question the feeling of solidarity of this nation and the worth of this nation, worth demonstrated by its conduct even though this country is located 90 miles from the imperialist metropolis.
In the coming years enormous dangers will weigh on our people's heads to see the same degree that the revolutionary movement grows, a revolutionary movement that grows above all because of the example of the Cuban revolution, a revolutionary movement that grows and becomes gigantic because of Cuba's example, because of Cuba's victories, because of Cuba's position against the enemy. It must be taken into account that when this nation defies that danger, this nation does not have millions of men under arms, this nation does not possess thermonuclear arms, because here we possess moral rockets and here.(Applause) millions do not represent the infinite, the number of men is not infinite, but the dignity and the decorum of this nation is infinite.
The coming years will speak for us, and the coming years will take care of crushing the slanderers, not those who are known agents of the imperialists, but the confused, the conspirators, who allow themselves to be involved in intrigues and serve as instruments for the lies against our revolution.
[Successful Conference]
A fact that was demonstrated in this conference is highly gratifying, because many things were demonstrated in this conference: it was demonstrated, in the first place, how discussions can be carried on beyond everything and around the things which basically interest us, above all, around those things that interest the people who are struggling. All peoples, regardless of their strength, of their resources, of their stature have a voice and an opinion. The people are capable of having their own opinions and independent voices. This was demonstrated in this conference. We Cubans and the revolutionary movements were always in identical positions, irrespective of continents. How a united force, how the revolutionary outlook, how the most honorable positions prevailed! And in this conference, as a compensation in the face of the conspirators and slanderers, the peoples and the revolutionary liberation movements always demonstrated a great and immense trust in Cuba and in its revolutionary party, and how this country, therefore, was given the honor of carrying the office of secretary general and the temporary headquarters of the organization!
And considering the task carried out by the Cuban delegation, by the Cuban Committee of Solidarity — working in favor of the conference, struggling ceaselessly to overcome all obstacles, maintaining at all times a position of principle, objective, just — which has even jeopardized Cuban relations with some countries, as was the case with Indonesia, due to the fact that it was up to the Cuban delegation to decide, and the Cuban delegation rejected the official delegation from Indonesia. Cuba risked its relations with a state which is important in that part of the world. And although for us all states are equally important and all peoples have equal rights, may this fact serve to show to what point Cuba was — or tried to be — fair, and tried to be objective, and tried to maintain a position of principle. We know how hard all of the delegations worked, because according to those who have been in several international conferences, this is one of the conferences for which more serious work was done more indefatigably.
That is why, when Cuba was assigned to be its temporary headquarters — and with the headquarters, the office of the secretary general of the organization — the Political Bureau of our party agreed to appoint Comrade Osmani Cienfuegos as secretary general of the organization. (Loud applause) All delegations have had an opportunity to learn about the efforts and the sincerity with which Comrade Osmani worked in the preliminary tasks and the development of the conference.
We must say that everyone cooperated, and that all contributed in one way or another to unite opinions and for the success of this conference. For as I said previously, opinions were not always in agreement, but all, in the final analysis, in a genuinely dispassionate interest, helped bring about its successes.
I do not want to close without mentioning two things.
One is a concern which affects us all in the face of the events in Indonesia, confronted with the reports reaching us from Indonesia that more than 100,000 revolutionary militant individuals have been savagely assassinated, with the report that Aidit and some other Communist Party leaders in Indonesia have been assassinated. We would like to register our reproach, our protest, and our solidarity with the Indonesian revolutionaries, today persecuted by militarist reaction, frightened by Yankee imperialism. Simultaneously, (we do this) as a tribute to those who had a great deal to do with the success of this conference.
We would like to acknowledge that Ben Barka was a decisive factor, with his constancy, his personal work, in the organization of this first Tricontinental Conference. His effort and his work were the cause of the problem which occurred. There is a general consensus that Ben Barka has been assassinated, cruelly and cowardly. If this conference of solidarity is duty bound to take a step forward precisely in loyalty and elementary obligation toward him, who so devotedly worked for its success, then it should demand that Ben Barka's assassination be investigated and Ben Barka's assassins be penalized.
Every indication points to the direct responsibility of the Moroccan minister of the interior, General Oufkir, upon whom all suspicion and all evidence rests. This conference should not rest until the facts are known clearly as to who planned and carried out Ben Barka's assassination — the assassination of the person who was the president of the preparatory committee for this Tricontinental Conference. This is a repugnant deed, monstrous! It demonstrated from the outset imperialism's interest in obstructing the conference and causing the conference to fail. However, the results of this conference demonstrate that Ben Barka's blood will not shed in vain, and that the Ben Barka crime — his assassination, like Lumumba's assassination, like Aidit's murder, like Sandino's assassination — that with none of its barbarous acts can imperialism contain the victorious march, the final liberation of the peoples!
It is but fair for us to dedicate our memories to those who have fallen as victims of imperialism in all continents. May we propose always to be loyal to that cause, always loyal in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the cause for which some died and gave their blood for the liberation of the peoples.
Our country, which, as you have been able, to see is made up of various ethnical groups, a result of the intermingling of people from the various continents — deeply linked to Latin America because of this fact, deeply linked with Africa, deeply linked to all of the people from all continents — has done its utmost to make pleasant the stay of the delegations here. It had displayed all of its enthusiasm and hospitality and all the warmth of which it is capable. Thousands of Cubans, incessantly, without rest or vacations, have worked for the success of this conference. They have worked to wait upon the representatives of the sister nations. Our entire people have lived during these days through a big feast of international solidarity. Our people have felt as their own each and every one of the problems of other people. Our people, as I said on 2 January, received them with open arms, and they bid them farewell with an embrace, as a symbol of a bond that will never break, and as a symbol of their sentiments of fraternity and solidarity toward the other people who struggle, and for whom they are ready, also, to offer their blood. Fatherland or death, we will win!
Castro Archive
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="feb_03.html">February 2003 • Vol 3, No. 2 •</a></b></font></p>
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<p align="CENTER"><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5"><b>An Interview With Fidel Castro</b></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">By Andrea Mitchell</font></p>
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<p><i><font color="black">[NBC News has made editorial insertions. These are reproduced in italics with a credit.—Socialist Viewpoint.]</font></i></p>
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<p><i>NBC Editor’s note: Cuba’s absolute authority is Fidel Castro, chief of the Armed Forces, head of the ruling Communist Party and president of the island nation just 90 miles from American shores. At 76, Castro is the world’s longest-serving government leader. Cubans simply know him as “Fidel” or “El Comandante”—The Commander. And, he’s just as defiant as when he first seized power in 1959.</i></p>
<p><i>As his revolution turned 44, Castro gave a series of exclusive interviews to Andrea Mitchell, chief NBC News foreign affairs correspondent. Over the course of two days, Castro talked about his revolution, human rights, the global war on terrorism, Saddam Hussein, the U.S. embargo and much more. Here are highlights from those 20 hours of conversation.</i></p>
<p>Mitchell: We’ve spoken at length during our meetings about the situation in Cuba, the economic and social changes, the educational system, your health system, and I want to return to some of those issues tonight. But first I wanted to start with some issues of great urgency to the American people: the possibility of war with Iraq. What do you think the impact of a future war with Iraq would be on your need for oil and the obvious fact that oil prices would rise? What would be the impact of a war with Iraq on Cuba?</p>
<p>Castro: The impact is already being felt. The threat of war has already had a significant impact on many countries, including Cuba. Specifically, it has increased oil prices, very high for months now. That damages the economies of many countries around the world. It damages the world economy, except of course those countries earning huge revenues from their oil exports. Add to this the political situation in Venezuela. The conflict there has increased (oil) prices. So, everything impacts the existing situation. This is the kind of economic situation that has emerged.</p>
<p>You asked me about possible consequences [of war with Iraq]. It seems to me that it’s quite difficult to predict, to foresee. We don’t have enough elements to judge. There are always two sides. Technically speaking, if we may do that, the outcome of any military operation doesn’t depend on just one side. It depends on both sides.</p>
<p>Mitchell: What do you think Saddam Hussein should do? Should he make a bigger effort to open up his country and be honest about what weapons he might still have?</p>
<p>Castro: I wouldn’t like to use any adjectives, because adjectives could make it look like I’m taking sides in any potential conflict... That’s why, if I’m going to be honest, I’ll limit myself to condemning those who have announced military operations because if I label one of the sides, and then it’s attacked, it might seem I’m justifying the aggression. We do not wish to see a war. But I am also under the impression that if there’s no political solution, if the inspections fail to avert war, expect the Iraq people to resist any attack. This is what I think they will do.</p>
<p>I’m trying to imagine the situation based on the history of the last few years. They [the Iraqi people] are relatively used to war because they have been at war almost continuously. There have been many, many military operations, continuous air strikes. So, people have gotten use to military actions. Now, they’ll be forced to start all over again.</p>
<p>They were at war with Iran for years. They went through the so-called Gulf War. People’s mindsets adapt very easily to using weapons, no matter how destructive they may be. It’s only logical to expect them to resist. What would be the consequences of such resistance? It all depends on their tactics, strategies, and their concept of defense... It’s like a chess game..</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, in a chess game like this, is the United States justified in going to war with Iraq if there is proof that Saddam Hussein has weapons like nuclear or biological or chemical weapons?</p>
<p>Castro: Yes. If there is any proof of that, I believe the American administration is disposed to launching an attack. It’s willing to find any sort of pretext. And I doubt that [it] can abstain from an attack even if they don’t find a pretext. It all seems very much pre-planned.</p>
<p>Mitchell: You think that George Bush is looking for an excuse to go after Saddam Hussein?</p>
<p>Castro: I can’t say whether or not he’s looking for an excuse. But I have the impression that he’ll be frustrated or disappointed if they don’t manage to find a bottle with some kind of liquid that could be labeled biological, chemical or nuclear product. Given his mindset, the discovery of ten ounces of enriched uranium could be enough of a pretext. It’s almost certain that among this high level group of inspectors, some would be willing to find something and some others may hold different opinions. Some people would see imminent danger; others would not.</p>
<p>This said, if having such weapons is justification for launching war, you couldn’t forget that there are other countries in the region with nuclear weapons. One country in the Middle East has some 300 nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Israel?</p>
<p>Castro: And all the necessary means to sell them. Yet, it’s fairly unknown. I have publicly talked about how they got those weapons. For example, we know they supplied apartheid South Africa with seven nuclear weapons... And this was known by the whole world, by the United States. The regime there was extremely cruel—a fascist regime. They carried out genocide against the population. But, nobody ever threatened South Africa. I mention this as one example.</p>
<p>How many more countries have nuclear weapons or the capacity to develop them? Let me tell you: all nuclear weapons should have been destroyed at the end of World War II. It’s a miracle they haven’t been used in a war yet.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, in this situation, whom do you trust more? George Bush or Saddam Hussein?</p>
<p>Castro: Why should it be a matter of confidence in one or the other? Instead of talking about individuals, I prefer talking about concepts, ideas and rights—about whether or not the right exists to launch war just because a country may possess certain kinds of weapons. One country has some 10,000 nuclear weapons and the United States has even more. I believe that both sides have enormous deposits of chemical weapons, which are not easy to destroy. However, they have tried to avoid a war. There are other countries with few weapons. Non-industrialized countries. India had them. Does this give China the right to launch war against India? Or does it give India the right to attack China? Now, Pakistan has them. This no doubt poses a danger for India’s one billion people. Would this justify India attacking Pakistan just because it poses a potential danger? And the British have nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Many countries might see that as a danger. Despite the fact that we’ve advocated disarmament for 40 years, the possession of these weapons is not a justification for launching an attack or war. It’s true we had the Gulf War. It’s true the U.N. intervened. Then as members of the Security Council, we strongly condemned the occupation of Kuwait. However, we opposed some sanctions. Cuba could never support an embargo of medicines and food. This was our principled position. And we opposed a military solution.</p>
<p>Mitchell: If it were possible to avoid a war—if Saddam Hussein decided to leave his country to avoid a war—would you take him in if he’s seeking asylum?</p>
<p>Castro: Are you trying to trap me? We have no desire to get involved in that conflict.</p>
<p>Mitchell: This is a mere hypothesis.</p>
<p>Castro: We do not want to see war nor become a country that grants asylum to any of the sides in this conflict. I know only too well what would happen if we were to welcome someone out of humanitarian concerns.</p>
<p>For example, the U.S. occupies the Guantánamo naval base. Without prior consultation with Cuba, the U.S. decided unilaterally to bring in hundreds of prisoners from Afghanistan—the Taliban, members of Al Qaida, an organization with which we have never had any links or contacts.</p>
<p>The United States made that decision and only told us about it later. This is the second time this has happened. During the Balkans war, they informed us they were bringing in Albanians. It didn’t matter what position we took on that issue. They were bringing them in anyway. So, we said “Okay, send in the refugees.” We are eager to cooperate, provide medical services or help in controlling hygiene.</p>
<p>We are willing to provide humanitarian assistance to anyone who needs it. If asked, we would send medical teams to help the injured. If asked, we would send our vaccines against meningitis.</p>
<p>Mitchell: If the United States wants to launch war, nobody can stop the United States from doing that. Everybody knows how powerful it is and the weapons it has. But, on principle, we are against that war.</p>
<p>Castro: What did we do last time? Every time the issue came up at the U.N., we condemned Iraq. Nobody knows who led the Iraqi government to believe that the U.S. would tolerate that occupation. But, on the eve of war, I will refrain from voicing opinions that could be used as grist for somebody else’s mill. There are many people who think that it’s not fear for their own security but rather an attempt to control the world’s third-largest oil reserve—at a time when many people are becoming aware that the oil problem and hydro-carbons is far more serious than what’s being admitted...</p>
<p>At some point, [Iraq] must have had weapons because Europe helped them obtain missiles. They were supplied with the technology to be able to attack Israel. The Soviets sold them missiles. We know they had chemical weapons. I don’t know a lot about chemical weapons. And I don’t know if chemical weapons can be destroyed.</p>
<p>But analyzing this from a political angle, Iraq should have had the sense not to possess nuclear, chemical or biological weapons after invading Kuwait. It’s not enough just to have the weapons. You have to know how to use them and against whom. Logic indicates they should have destroyed those weapons.. It would be a huge mistake to use those weapons against someone who has 10 times your power.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Mr. President, you were talking about how it would make no sense for Saddam Hussein to use these weapons against such a powerful adversary, the United States?</p>
<p>Castro: It would be insane. After Kuwait, they should have destroyed all of those weapons. I don’t doubt they have tried to destroy them. I have no proof. But it’s elementary logic.</p>
<p>But men make mistakes. Saddam Hussein may be making a mistake or the United States government may be making a mistake. Even the American government cannot say for sure what the backlash may be—what cultural or religious conflicts may be unleashed. The United States has said that they will launch the war on their own even without Security Council approval. All of this by virtue of the power of the United States. So, I’d like to think about old problems—what risks the United States may be facing. For example, I know the U.S. is greatly concerned about terrorism.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I was going to ask you about this....</p>
<p>Castro: We have been subjected to terrorism for almost 44 years. No other country in the world has been harassed or subjected to the sabotage or terrorist actions that have befallen Cuba for over 40 years. The price of all these actions is well known. Without making an estimate, I can say that we’ve lost thousands of lives and billions of dollars in economic damages. Many have suffered. Thousands handicapped. Much destruction. Much damage. However, I can say that not one single American lost their life as a consequence of Cuban actions against the United States... Never has a single brick in the United States been destroyed as a consequence of Cuban “terrorist” actions. Not only is it a lie but also it’s cynical to include Cuba on the (State Department) list of terrorist countries because we are the Olympic champions in having endured more than 40 years of terrorism without ever having engaged in terrorist actions. Nor will we ever. It would have been stupid for us to take revenge against any American. Tens of thousands of Americans know that Cuba is the country where they are respectfully welcomed. We have not sowed any hatred against the American people….</p>
<p>Mitchell: I wanted to ask you about the war on terror. Does the attack on 9/11 justify the way the United States is pursuing the war on terror? Is there anything Cuba can do or has been able to do in terms of developing information that might be helpful to the United States about the spread of Al-Qaida?</p>
<p>Castro: You have asked me three questions in one. The right to defend itself—each country has the right to defend itself against terrorism. But, in practice, it seems that only the most powerful country has this right.</p>
<p>I once read a wire story saying that the U.S. Congress had suggested invading the Netherlands if the International Court of Justice (in the Hague) ruled against an American soldier. And I said, “Oh, good heavens, even a European industrialized country and a NATO member and U.S. ally isn’t safe from a U.S. preemptive attack.”</p>
<p>All countries have the right to defend themselves, including Cuba. But how can they defend themselves if the powerful countries can overrule every code, every rule. A small country like Cuba has to defend itself within its own territory, and to exercise every possible measure to neutralize (the enemy). A Cuban airliner was blown up in mid air, killing more than 70 young people aboard including Cuba’s junior fencing team. Everybody knows this story. But Orlando Bosch, the mastermind of that terrorist action, lives very happily in Miami making public statements about that action. Cuba has protected itself by developing sources of information. This was all Cuba could do. Cuba didn’t commit the stupidity of responding to those terrorist actions that were launched from U.S. territory.</p>
<p>At this moment, the situation is very complicated. The right to defend ourselves cannot be questioned. But, from an ethical point of view, you could question how to go about it. Also from a political, practical and realistic points of view. I have my own views on how an anti-terrorism policy should have been implemented. There was never a better occasion to create a real crusade against terrorism at every level. And this was not through war. As soon as we learned about the attacks on New York, we condemned those actions; we offered our airports for the thousands of planes in the air and forbidden to land at any U.S. airport. We offered medical aid, blood donations.</p>
<p>Mitchell: But the United States didn’t accept any of your offers. Did that surprise you?</p>
<p>Castro: No. Look, I can tell you the following. When California had that big earthquake, we made our usual offer of support. We don’t have search and rescue robots or dogs but we do have physicians and nurses. That was an act of good will and not new. We made the same offer to Nicaragua [after the 1972 earthquake] during Somoza’s rule—even though he lent his territory for the launching of the Bay of Pigs invasion. More than 30,000 Cubans have volunteered their services in Third World countries even at a time when we had a shortage of physicians. Now, we have the highest ratio per-capita of physicians—one physician for every 164 inhabitants. That’s double what the second best country has. This goes for education and other fields too. We sent teachers into Nicaragua’s mountains. Some were assassinated by the contras during the dirty war.</p>
<p>If you understand our philosophy on this, Andrea, it will help you understand Cuba. You may agree or not with our philosophy, just as you may or may not agree with a certain type of religion. But this doesn’t mean that people from one religion should be at war with people from a different religion. Europe spent centuries waging wars since the time of the Crusades—which had been condemned by the pope, including the inquisition of Galileo who said the earth moved around the sun.</p>
<p>But, Christianity, for the first time, offered a kind of ethical code. For me, the Old Testament differs from the New Testament in that the Old Testament recalls the history of man, the wars and everything that has happened while the New Testament preaches a generous code of behavior based on love for your neighbor, solidarity with the poor, and the miracle of fish and bread. We have tried to have enough fish and bread. And, a powerful country like yours with its abundant resources, should think about how to repeat the miracle of the fish and the bread instead of spending fabulous amounts of weapons….</p>
<p>You asked me about the right to defend ourselves against terrorism. What else did you want to know?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I was asking about Osama bin Laden?</p>
<p>Castro: You asked whether or not we had intelligence. All these questions are very delicate. But since day one, we declared publicly that our country would do its best to prevent our territory from being used against the U.S. people. And I can add that we will also do our best to prevent any harm to the American people from anywhere else. If we were to learn that someone planned to destroy an American city or commit an act of terrorism against the American people, we would do our best to prevent that….</p>
<p>Terrorism is a complex problem. We have to fight it first from an ethical point of view. What sparked those actions? We carried out an armed struggle [against the Batista dictatorship in 1959] but we never used terrorist methods. We never resorted to methods that cost the lives of innocent people. Look at the newspapers of the time. Read the history of the revolution. We attacked a military fortress. We fought in the mountains. We fought against an army that outnumbered us. We won through a combination of armed struggle and of gaining popular support. Batista helped in that by committing crimes against the population, by torturing people. We used explosives against soldiers and enemy tanks. We used mines against troops during combat. No one can deny this. Sometimes we destroyed a bridge used by enemy soldiers but never at the cost of any human life. So, we have authority to speak on this topic. Honestly, we are opposed to any action that jeopardizes the lives of innocent people—whomever they may be.</p>
<p>Much has been said whether or not it was right to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Ask the Japanese... That bomb was dropped on the eve of Soviet march through Manchuria. From the military point of view, there was no need to bomb those two cities. They could have bombed military bases. It would have been more than enough. There were many other targets. I would call the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki colossal acts of terrorism.</p>
<p>How many things have been done in history? How many Vietnamese died in air raids? Millions, Andrea. And they used chemicals that still cause damage. There’s a generation of Vietnamese affected by Agent Orange that has caused many problems.</p>
<p>Such events have happened in history. I don’t believe there’s any other way in this global world but to abide by ethical standards. There must be ethical reasons to struggle against terrorism. And I have said this to everybody including the revolutionary movement: We should condemn the use of methods that harm innocent people. Terrorism breeds hatred and rejection. No revolutionary movement will ever triumph by using terrorism and killing innocent people. I say this with the authority of having waged war. Not a big war, but a rather complicated war. And we were at a disadvantage. Our enemies outnumbered us. We had medical problems. But, we never resorted to such methods. If we had planted bombs, we never would have earned the support of over 90 percent of the people—not even 80 percent—not even 20 percent.</p>
<p>People reject crime. People reject such acts by their very nature. Many reject the death penalty because this touches them. They are affected by seeing people put to death in the electric chair or by being shot. Politically, no revolutionary movement will triumph by resorting to terrorism.</p>
<p>But you also need to struggle against terrorism from the religious point of view. Religion motivates or rules some people. Certain religious beliefs lead people to sacrifice their own lives. Some Iranians sacrificed their own lives to detonate land mines in Iraq.</p>
<p>We have to realize that certain religions carry their own code of ethics, rational or not. We have to struggle against all factors that may influence people. We suggest launching a major campaign against terrorism—creating a universal awareness against terrorism. It seems to me that this is the right way. That’s the path I would have taken if I were in America’s shoes. How can you get people to universally reject terrorism? Not through war. You can be absolutely sure of that. It creates hatred. José Martí (Cuba’s national independence hero) wrote: “Those who sow hatred, reap storms….”</p>
<p>Look, I will give you an example. Terrorist, operating from central America, considered blowing up some planes flying to Cuba. That was under Clinton. We spoke about this years later when Clinton was no longer president. I sent Clinton a letter through common friends. We never exchanged correspondence but I explained everything through a common friend. He responded in kind—taking it very seriously. He suggested we make the information public. I suggested that we should adopt other measures to discover what the terrorists were planning. (The Castro government sent Cuban security agents to infiltrate anti-Castro exile groups and gather intelligence on planned actions against the regime.). We passed on the information they gathered to U.S. authorities.</p>
<p>Do you know what happened? A few weeks later a group of Cuban patriots were arrested. Their main activities had been to obtain information about terrorist actions being plotted from inside the U.S. They have been condemned to life imprisonment. I wonder if the information we provided U.S. authorities was used to arrest and convict those who gathered the intelligence. Do you realize how strange all this is? And, these terrorist actions were carried out very recently. (Luis) Posada Carilles [one of Castro’s arch foes] attempted to assassinate me during the Ibero American summit with 40 kilograms of explosive. Once we learned that someone was ploting to kill (President Ronald) Reagan. Within hours, we relayed that information to the U.S. government. I doubt very much if any American administration sent us a message warning of the danger of any of the hundreds of attempts against my life. Where’s the ethics Andrea? Where’s the morals? This is not right.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I’m wondering Mr. President, do you think there could ever be an improvement in relations between our two countries with George Bush as President?</p>
<p>Castro: Yes.</p>
<p>Mitchell: How so?</p>
<p>Castro: Look, I believe that it’s too soon to reach a definite conclusion. He certainly took power as all the others—lacking information about Cuba, filled with biases against Cuba. There have been no exceptions since Kennedy came to office. I remember when Carter was elected. Carter, to me, has been the most noble and most ethical of all the Presidents that I have met.</p>
<p>Mitchell: And you’ve met nine of them? You’ve met nine presidents. You’ve outlasted nine presidents.</p>
<p>Castro: Are there nine? The present president is the 10th.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Since Eisenhower.</p>
<p>Castro: Yes. Eisenhower was in power when the Revolution triumphed. We have stood up against every campaign. First, of course, there was massive misinformation in the United States. But, we won’t look at the history of why.</p>
<p>Mitchell: But in the current time.</p>
<p>Castro: All of them when elected held many biases against Cuba—massive misinformation and underestimation, Andrea. Girón, (Bay of Pigs) for example, was a huge mistake, based on underestimation—believing the Cuban people would go and join an uprising. It seemed they really believed that. But this was not the plan. The real plan was to seize a piece of land as a beachhead in order to set up the government of Miro Cardona who would fly in and then be recognized as a “democratic patriotic government” with the recognition of the OAS (Organization of American States).</p>
<p>But you, as such a keen observer for so many years of American politics, do you think this president is unable or unwilling to reach out to the Cuban people because of Florida politics? There was a time when Florida had nothing to do with U.S. policy towards Cuba. It was the Cold War. But I wonder why they launched the Bay of Pigs expedition—just because we started agrarian reform. I’m not blaming Kennedy. Do you know who advised organizing the expedition? Nixon, who was then Eisenhower’s Vice President. The former administration organized the expedition. Kennedy took office and he was a man of certain qualities that I recognized and appreciated.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Why don’t you blame Kennedy? He tried to kill you. He tried to have you assassinated. He approved the invasion.</p>
<p>Castro: First, let me say that Kennedy already showed bias [against Cuba’s revolution] during his electoral campaign. Huge numbers of Americans thought as he did. Attacking Cuba was the political thing to do. Although there were two different mindsets: Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s. Look, we have to consider something when analyzing what happened.</p>
<p>People who fought for the revolution were not imbeciles but the Americans underestimated them. I’m not talking about myself but a whole group of popular leaders who emerged during the struggle and passed laws that benefited the average person. They won the overwhelming support of the Cuban people. A support they’ve never lost.</p>
<p>Still, some people believe or convince others to believe that most people oppose the Revolution. They ignore the fact that there’s more support for the Revolution now than ever. There are many who do know and understand this. If Nixon had been president instead of Kennedy, the U.S. military would have been deployed to rescue the (exile) brigade during the Bay of Pigs invasion.</p>
<p>But Kennedy behaved differently. Nixon would have sent support for the invasion. And in our country over 300,000 people took up arms. I can assure you even they (the U.S. military) could not have crushed the resistance. Of course, we’re talking about 1961 when most of today’s weapons didn’t exist. Then, we had no surveillance satellites, or sensors capable of gathering intelligence. Even today, and I believe that this was always the case, men are capable of going beyond technology. You might need to change your tactics, strategies, and modes of transportation but a country that resists can never be crushed. The Sahrawi people live in the desert and after 20 years they’ve not been crushed. They are a small country. The Russians, with all their power, have been unable to crush the resistance in Chechnya. That’s a real fact—which doesn’t mean to say we agree with the terrorism committed by the Chechens. We issued a very clear statement supporting the Soviet people and condemning the terrorist takeover of a Russian theater. We urged they do everything possible to avoid a massacre. But, in the end, there was a massacre when the decision-makers made a mistake.</p>
<p>Andrea, they make mistakes more often than not. But the reality is that there’s a religion, culture and nationality that rejects Russia’s occupation. They are very close and this country is very powerful. But I can tell you this: you cannot crush the resistance of a country with one million inhabitants. But, it’s all the more difficult when the country has 10 or 11 or 12 million.</p>
<p>We’re not looking for a fight. We weren’t looking for one back then. And Kennedy, newly elected and, as he put it, belonging to a new generation of Americans, did not want to begin his mandate by attacking a Latin American country. He wanted good relations with Latin America. He rejected the other and never gave the order to save the brigade because it would have meant engaging in war. Kennedy took full responsibility for that decision. “Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” That was a very courageous act... And there was also a bias against Socialism, against communism. He said that the best communist was a dead communist. That was a political slogan—that the best communist was a dead communist. But, I don’ t think that the best capitalist is a dead capitalist. I wouldn’t even say that the best neo-capitalist or neo-liberalist is a dead one. I wouldn’t even say that the best imperialist is a dead imperialist. We don’t think this way. But Kennedy had that style.</p>
<p>And there’s something else. The Soviets made a huge error around the events leading up to the October Crisis—even if they based their actions on solid information that [the Americans] had approved an invasion of Cuba. All the recently declassified documents prove this. So, the Soviets were right. During the discussion we had here, [this past October Cuba hosted a conference marking the 40th anniversary of the missile crisis], it was revealed that [the Soviets] had been very concerned about Cuba’s security. At the time of Girón [the Bay of Pigs invasion] they (the Soviets) raised the issue of missiles, because when the British and the French occupied Port Said at the Suez Canal, Khrushchev stopped the aggression by threatening to use his missiles. Khrushchev argued that Berlin was a powder keg. Remember that American troops and tanks faced-off with Soviet tanks and troops. That’s when they put up the Berlin Wall.</p>
<p>So Khrushchev didn’t want a war. I knew Khrushchev well—an intelligent and clever farmer, a very bold person but susceptible to mistakes. He had a great sense of humor. But then we noticed many things—political and even military errors. But we were new to politics and the USSR was one of the two big superpowers, which lost tens of millions fighting Fascism. Just as the French, British, and American lives lost. They (Soviets in WWII) carried out the counter attack, assuming the burden of the whole war. They occupied Berlin, the rest of that region. They had a vast military experience—all veterans while we could be considered newborns. They devised the defense of Cuba, based on their certainty that the U.S. would attack Cuba....</p>
<p>All of us made political mistakes as well as military mistakes. This almost triggered war. Khrushchev tricked Kennedy, playing word games. He said they would not send offensive weapons to Cuba. To Kennedy this meant medium range missiles that could reach American targets. But Khrushchev was being simplistic, defining “offensive” according to the intention of the user. He couldn’t imagine Kennedy’s concern, why Kennedy would feel tricked by the Cubans.</p>
<p>I argued that the agreement (Havana-Moscow military accord) be made public. Why hide something when right is on your side? After all, the U.S. had agreements with many countries stating that an aggression against any of those countries would be considered an aggression against the United States. I believed a similar announcement between Moscow and Havana would have been sufficient. The problem is that Kennedy took Khrushchev at his word while Khrushchev deployed surface to air missiles.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the U-2 (American spy plane) flew freely (over Cuban territory) and we ended up on the brink of a war. The country faced real danger, because the U.S. could have launched a surprise attack to destroy the missiles. The Americans were very sensitive because they had nuclear missiles in Turkey. They made the political mistake of suggesting to swap (remove) those missiles for the ones in Cuba. But we didn’t want any Soviet troops or nuclear weapons here. We were more concerned about Latin America and our image and prestige; we didn’t want to appear to be a Soviet base.</p>
<p>Mitchell: But you wanted to keep the battlefield, the tactical nuclear weapons that the United States states it didn’t even know you had. I think you wrote to Khrushchev saying you wanted to keep those weapons, the smaller nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Castro: You want to stay here talking until six in the morning? You want me to take all of the papers I have to prove to you this is nothing but conjecture? We could spend days talking about this. We just had a two-day discussion with McNamara [Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy] Kennedy advisors, and a key CIA player as well as the Soviet military officers who had been based here in Cuba and some of the Cuban leaders. My memory is still good. I remember the facts. In fact, we discussed this very issue in detail with a group of American historians who managed to have many of the documents declassified. Cuba behaved quite honestly through the entire crisis. But ultimately I had to be harsh with Khrushchev because he went ahead and reached a unilateral agreement (with Kennedy) for the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and Cuba. We issued a very strong statement expressing our indignation and presenting 5 demands (to resolve the crisis). We never opposed peace but we never imagined the Soviets would make concessions….</p>
<p>Mitchell: Let me bring you back to today. We have George Bush as President.</p>
<p>Castro: Choosing peace or choosing war. I explained which one I favor. This was a golden opportunity for the U.S. to strike a blow against terrorism. Instead, they are breeding hatred and more hatred. For over a year, images shown on TV are evoking indignation, hatred and fanaticism.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, but ….</p>
<p>Castro: They are creating bigotry. You will never be able to defeat terrorist violence with bigotry.</p>
<p>Mitchell: What are your thoughts about George Bush’s brother Jeb? A lot of people say he’s possibly the next President after Bush. How would that affect U.S./Cuban relations?</p>
<p>Castro: You mean his brother? First of all, let me say I don’t believe there’s any chance this will happen. Americans are very smart. They may be misinformed but they are smart people. You had his father; now you have the son; and then you have the brother? And later on, the grandson? and finally the great grandson? That would be an absolute monarchy. Can Americans imagine that? I don’t know him. He has a very noble face. Jeb reminds me of a boy from school who came from a family of coffee planters.</p>
<p>He has the face of a good-natured man. I have nothing against him. I have no antipathy toward him. I don’t know what he knows about politics. He’s recently been concerned about a scandal. The Haitian problem. After more than 200 Haitian men, women and children landed, many of the black residents (of Florida) questioned why they were being sent back to Haiti when there are Cubans, even those with criminal records, who automatically are granted residency and work permits. Even those who enter the U.S. with fake documents. The moment they set foot on U.S. soil, they can claim the right to reside and work there.</p>
<p>How can it be said that the United States is protected against terrorism when any Cuban with a criminal record or a history of mental illness is welcome with open arms? Andrea, don’t you think this is a contradiction? We’re the only country in the world treated this way. Makes me wonder if we’re the worset? I believe you even trade with North Korea. Is any other country in the same boat? We won’t be jealous if some other country shares this dubious honor!</p>
<p>Mitchell: Since your country is treated uniquely under American law, you’re the only country treated this way with this particular kind of embargo, a country that we’re not at war with, at least. What do you think the impact would be on your country if the embargo ended—if Americans could come here, if American products could be sold here—without any limits? What would be the impact on Cuba?</p>
<p>Castro: Well, sometimes joking around, I’ve said to let me know in advance so I can move. An invasion of hundreds of thousands of American is enough to make us move. I’ve said this as a joke. But, to answer your question: we’re not afraid. It’s good to say this because there may be some people who think we want a blockade. Clinton himself said that we shot down the planes that often violated our air space because we feared the end to the blockade. (In 1996, the Cuban military shot down two small planes, killing four Miami exiles. In retaliation, the White House signed the “Helms-Burton Act” that beefed up the trade embargo.) No one knows what would happen if a Cuban plane even just once violated America’s 12-mile sea limit. We have never feared the end to the blockade. We may have to set a quota limiting American visitors to 10,000 a week. That’s our right!</p>
<p>Mitchell: Couldn’t it threaten the revolution’s ideals, if the United States with a very different economic system all of a sudden flooded Cuba with products and ideas and ideas and people?</p>
<p>Castro: Andrea, nothing jeopardizes the destiny of this revolution. The Cuban people now possess a certain level of knowledge and education that surpasses the average of other countries. These are people who base their actions on values. Our people are very patriotic, very progressive and socialist. Andrea, our people have learned that the revolution turned them into real human beings. We can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we weren’t human before. A small group held all the privilege and power. What is an illiterate person, Andrea? What about the 15-year-old who has to pay a child to write a letter to his girlfriend. Can you imagine their lack of self-esteem? Thirty percent of our people were absolute illiterates and, added to that, functional illiterates, the figure rose to about 90 percent. And that’s being conservative. Only 422,000 of the island’s 7 million inhabitants (in 1959) had reached 6th grade. Today, we have 20 to 30 university graduates for every one we had at the beginning of the revolution.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Mr. President, as I’ve seen with my own eyes, you have the most literate country. You have a country that is immunized with 13 different vaccines. You have universal healthcare, education. Yet because of the embargo, some people say there has been a lot of suffering. Do you believe that the embargo is the only reason? Because you have made changes in your economic system. You have adopted some free market practices, the dollar economy. Why have you made these changes? Are you changing your views about the revolution? Or about socialism?</p>
<p>Castro: The revolution turned millions of people into real persons. Gave them self-esteem. And the revolution is that much stronger because of this. Now, we have done some things we didn’t like because of the unique situation we faced. No country has had to live with a double blockade: the U.S. trade sanctions, and the overnight disappearance of its major suppliers and markets.</p>
<p>Mitchell: And the Soviet Union collapsed which is...</p>
<p>Castro: Fuel. That’s vital. Nobody believed Cuba would survive the demise of the Soviet Union. I wonder why? And I wonder why.</p>
<p>Mitchell: You joked earlier today that the Soviet Union was the good old days because you had the economic support, of course, from the Soviet Union. Do you think the world would be better off if the Soviet Union had not collapsed?</p>
<p>Castro: First of all, we’d be better off. Ultimately, we would be much better, much better. If we had suffered through the “Special Period” [Castro’s euphemism for the post-Soviet economic crisis] during 1961, ‘62 and ‘63, we would never have survived. We would have died honorably, draped in our national flag. But we never would have survived economically. Society then was marked by illiteracy and less political awareness. There have been 30 years of revolution, more than 30 years. I would say that from 1959 to 1992—33 years of revolution—we passed laws and measures benefiting the millions of Cuba’s sons and daughters who were sub-human, treated worse than animals. We were lucky, we trusted people. We trusted our history, the examples of our independence fighters and patriots. Everybody thought Cuba would collapse. We didn’t. Ten years have elapsed. We will not collapse. People in Miami packed their bags to return to their houses that we had turned into schools. These people had not been thrown out of the country but left voluntarily for the United States with the authorization of the Cuban government. In fact, everyone who has left Cuba—with the exception of those who leave illegally—since the signing of the Migration Accords (1991) have done so because the Cuban government allows them to do.</p>
<p>Mitchell: But why do you think so many other socialist countries and communist countries have moved toward free markets? Why has China evolved the way it has? And Vietnam? There’s been, as American Presidents say, a march of democracy across the world and a free market. But not here in Cuba.</p>
<p>Castro: Well, that’s the opinion of the President of the United States. I respect that opinion but feel sorry if he wants to be wrong his whole life. But it’s not my problem. But seriously, I don’t want to say things that could hurt anyone’s feeling. You know I’m joking. And besides, there’s no arguments to justify these statements.</p>
<p>Although some people may disagree, I believe we have the most humane system in the world. I don’t like to say this, but I must because people say the world is moving towards democracy. I say the world is moving towards subordination to a single power. The world is moving towards submission to the hegemonic power of the United States.</p>
<p>Look, the world has a single boss and it’s not the people. I’m speaking about the whole world. They have only one boss. There’s a man who decides the fate of every country without prior consultation—not even about launching war. Take the United Nations today. It’s a beautiful memory of good intentions. And a good idea that some day may take hold.</p>
<p>Today, there’s a world government that hasn’t been adopted or approved by any of the more than 100 existing States. That’s the truth. It’s a joke to say the world’s moving towards democracy. It’s like saying Americans are moving towards a society with greater civil rights and more respect. The United States has lived through different times. They lived through McCarthyism; don’t forget the witch-hunts. Afterwards, they got passed that and the U.S. went through a period of tremendous ethnic and racial problems; there were struggles, progressive laws passed and then setbacks. Everything that could have been achieved wasn’t. Now, the terrorism committed against the American people has created a favorable climate to impose considerable restrictions on individual rights and liberties. A world in which a country can be victim of a surprise preemptive attack is not a world moving towards democracy. A world in which the bombers, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, the smart bombs have the last word, is not a world moving towards democracy. A world in which the president of a single country without even consulting his own Congress has the last word is not a world moving towards democracy. It would be like saying democracy ruled with the Caesars in Rome. It would be like saying that the empire was moving towards democracy….</p>
<p>The world is moving towards universal dictatorship. And, something else: we could affirm that the world is living under universal dictatorship—not an absolute dictatorship.</p>
<p>The United States dictates to the rest of the world. Who says no? China has not submitted to the United States. It’s too big and they have their own dignity. I respect the Chinese very much. Nor will I say that Vietnam has submitted to the United States. But, all of Europe has submitted, almost without exception—including the former socialist countries and the newly formed States. I wouldn’t say they are happy about this but it’s the result of having one country dominate the world. What’s the use of having the United Nations if every year 173 countries vote against that infamous embargo and the U.S. government just laughs at that vote? They ignore world public opinion. Is that democratic? Show me Andrea where democracy exists in the world. How can you say that the world is moving towards democracy? We should say quite the opposite.</p>
<p>So, they say the world is moving towards democracy because the Chinese introduced some reforms. The Chinese have a political system very similar to Cuba’s. They admit capitalists into the (Communist) Party. Our Party admits farmers earning a lot of money and religious people. Bush could just as well say that, based on what we’ve done here in Cuba, that we’re moving towards democracy. And that the world is moving towards democracy.</p>
<p>I believe we’re doing that. We’re moving more and more to a regime of equal opportunity and even greater equality. People need to go beyond their professional knowledge and gain a general comprehensive education. Those who don’t are functional illiterates. Without certain knowledge of history, you cannot understand the world. Without a basic knowledge of geography, you can ‘t understand how nearly 60 countries have come to independence in recent history. You need to know basic political economy to understand globalization and the international monetary crisis. Without a minimum knowledge of the arts, people won’t be able to understand newspapers. People need to know two to three languages, including English. That’s why we are teaching English in a massive way.</p>
<p>Mitchell: How do you see this country years from now? You have personified the social system and the revolution for millions of people. How do you see this living on? Who will you have lead this government?</p>
<p>Castro: I will not speak to you now about the system. But we want our people to have convictions. We want our people to possess knowledge and culture. You cannot speak about freedom without knowledge. You cannot speak about freedom without culture.</p>
<p>In a world with billions of illiterates, you cannot talk about freedom. It’s a lie to think you can be free without an education. You can’t let others think for you. You can’t allow specialists to bombard you with messages from the mass media and do your thinking for you. You can’t afford to let others to think on behalf of those around you. No wonder millions are influenced by commercials that convince people to smoke one brand of cigarettes over another, to drink one kind of soda or wear a certain type of shoe. If people were not at the mercy of others, commercials would not exist.</p>
<p>Herbert Marcuse said, “To be cultured is the only way to be free….” Through education, our people will become ever freer and live more humane lives. This doesn’t depend on the abundance of a consumer society. The consumption promoted by the developed world is unsustainable. Just imagine if China had the same amount of cars per capita as the U.S.? We should ask Bush what would happen in the world the day that China—with all its progress towards democracy, free markets and development—could have as many cars per capita as the U.S.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Mr. President, with George Bush and America, do you see better relations as possible between our two countries?</p>
<p>Castro: Quite often unexpected things happen. I remember when relations between the United States and China were not that good. Nobody could think that they would improve the way they did. Apparently nothing is impossible. Of course, I don’t have to be a pessimist, although I don’t have a lot to base my optimism on.</p>
<p>Mitchell: There are people in the United States, including this President, who say that things cannot improve until Cuba changes it’s system regarding human rights, the way elections are held, the ability to move from one place to the other without government permission?</p>
<p>Castro: First, what if we said that in order to improve relations with the U.S., you had to change your constitution. What if we said that the United States needed to change its political system? What if we said that the United States needed to change its economic system to improve relations with us? We’ve never said anything like that. It’s not logical to put those kinds of conditions on anyone else. Much less when you take into account that the United States does not put conditions on relations with other countries. The United States has relations with other countries without setting conditions.</p>
<p>Mitchell: There are international standards and the UN declaration of human rights, which you respect, says that people should have the right to free media without government involvement, the right to move from one place to another without government permission. Is the UN wrong, or is the rest of the world wrong?</p>
<p>Castro: I have my views about that... I think that our country has proven over a course of four decades that it has a very high conception of human rights. How do other countries in the world conceive of human rights? If there was a real understanding about human rights, 11 million children would not starve in the world every year. So many others would not die for lack of medicines and health care. And, practically one billion people in the world would not be illiterate. These things would not happen if there were real human rights in the world. And millions of people around the world have no access to schools or to an education; they lack the most basic elements of security. So, we respect human rights not only for the people of our country, but also for those in other countries around the world.</p>
<p>And this is nothing new. Even during the harshest years of the special period, thousands of students from other countries, poorer countries, came to study in Cuba on full scholarships. At the moment three thousand Cuban doctors are working for free in scores of countries around the world. We’ve also sent our teachers abroad. We have a universal concern for human rights.</p>
<p>Mitchell: That is universally acknowledged, and we have reported it, and many people have praised your educational system, your healthcare system, but still say, that dissidents should not be put in jail, that people should have more freedom of assembly, that there should be more freedom of speech here.</p>
<p>Castro: I should say here that I didn’t understand what you said earlier about freedom of movement. I don’t know where that comes from—the claim that we’ve taken measures to prevent what happens in other Latin American countries. The mega cities, shantytowns springing up around the big cities. Proof that there are few restrictions in Cuba is the fact that the city of Havana has doubled in size and population. People come and go freely in the country. There are no restrictions on travel inside the country. I think, Andrea, that is a simple fabrication. People move around freely.</p>
<p>I told you only yesterday that hundreds of thousands of people have left this country and a minority of them for political problems. Most are economic migrants—just as you find in Central America and Mexico. They are seeking a better standard of living. We’ll never be able to offer the same salaries that a wealthy nation can. Cuba has set no restrictions.</p>
<p>Mitchell: But if someone wants to move from one province to anther province, don’t they have to get government permission?</p>
<p>Castro: Andrea, of course, they are free to move about. You should travel around the country and ask people themselves. Ask them if they are free to move around the Island. It’s so absurd.</p>
<p>Mitchell: If I’m Cubana and I want to buy a car—a normal average Cuban without a special job or special status—don’t I have to get permission to buy and sell it at government rates? Many people can’t buy cars.</p>
<p>Castro: There are tens of thousands of cars in the country. Those people who have cars can sell it to each other. We don’t import cars, to commercialize them in the county. Over the past 40 years, we’ve imported very few cars because of gasoline and spare parts. That’s why there’s so many old cars and the Soviet-made Ladas.</p>
<p>But, we don’t want to become a consumer society. We’ve opened bicycle factories. In addition to public transit, bicycles are one of our main forms of transportation. Now the shops do not sell cars. There are things they don’t sell. Who here has the money to buy a car? Well, maybe the farmers because they make lots of money. It’s a question of economics. Cars cost convertible currency. And we have to consider very carefully what we spend our money on. Large fuel demands and spare parts are not easy for us to justify.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Can you see a time when you would move towards private property rights? There has been talk of this. Perhaps after the 6th party congress, you might move toward more property rights?</p>
<p>Castro: I don’t see that on the horizon. Maybe there’s some talk about it but I haven’t heard it. We have implemented a number of reforms but we’re not headed towards capitalism. Speaking honestly, we’ve implemented measures that have created inequality. There are now people who earn lots of money as compared to others. There’s some who have very little compared to others who own a car and earn lots of money or someone who owns a truck and can earn much more money than a doctor, including top surgeons. We cannot pay a surgeon as much as someone might earn by being self-employed. You also run into people getting fleeced by the private sector. Movers charge 1,000 pesos to move you in a day. That’s what the truck owner charges. So, we have these inequalities. Self-employment is allowed but it creates inequalities.</p>
<p>Education and culture are the most important properties people can own. If you want to ask me if we are headed towards capitalism, Andrea, I will tell you in all honesty that we are not. We are not marching towards capitalism. We are trying to have a more educated society, and to create better opportunities for everyone in order to narrow the gap between people who have lots of money and those who don’t. The workers, the ones who earn less money, are the backbone of the economy. We do not encourage parasites in this society.</p>
<p>Mitchell: You said this morning that one of the super- powers melted away. People around the world think it melted away because of the socialist or communist economic system.</p>
<p>Castro: Why haven’t we melted away—despite being blockaded during the “Special Period” and surrounded by all kinds of hostility? We’ve been threatened for 43 years with economic warfare. So, why didn’t we melt away? Our critics should know better.</p>
<p>I have my own ideas about what happened (in the socialist world). Those revolutions were important revolutions but imposed from the outside. In some cases, they lost the ideological battle. We haven’t. Rather, we’ve won it. Here, people live in socialism with the advantages socialism has brought them. Recently eight million people signed (a petition) making their socialist system untouchable. Eight million people support socialism in this country. And that’s our people’s reaction.</p>
<p>Mitchell: That’s because you are here. We see the way you are respected by the people who we visited. But, what happens as the future unfolds? What happens here in Cuba with the system to make sure your legacy continues? You told me once that your brother would succeed in the interim. Do you see a transition? Do you see a collective leadership?</p>
<p>Castro: Yes, my brother has seniority but we should talk about the next generation. Even my brother is not that young. We, the generation that made the revolution, hold the greatest authority and have the most influence because of our history and years of struggle. But when you talk to me about the future, I think of other generations, younger people.</p>
<p>There will be no problem if I die here tomorrow because we have lots of young people who are well trained, who know what to do, and we have comrades with great authority in this country. Yes, it’s true as you said. I have this prestige and authority but there are other comrades, too, younger people who have already won their stripes. But my brother and others are not so much younger than I am. We need to think about the future, when these key leaders are not here anymore—when the old leaders are gone. I am thinking about the younger generation and how they are prepared to preserve the future. Look, we have not had the conflicts other countries experience.</p>
<p>In China and the former Soviet Union, they’ve had major conflicts between the generations. That’s not been the case here. Here, the younger generations are better prepared than the old generation, than my generation. Wherever we go, we see lots of well-trained young people—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands capable of leading. We have over 600 deputies to the National Assembly (Parliament) from all over the country. Lots are young people who experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union. I’m not a fortuneteller but I’m confident they are better trained, better prepared, and better educated than we ever were. And they have sounder ideas to defend.</p>
<p>Mitchell: When you got out of jail, or when you were arrested for fighting Batista, your defense was, I think, was that “history would absolve me.” Do you have any regrets about the revolution you’ve led, the way you’ve governed? How will history judge Fidel Castro?</p>
<p>Castro: My one regret: that we should have done many more things before now. We could have done things better, and many more things if we had realized earlier all that we could do, and if we had all the experience that we have today. We could have done much more. The most important thing is that we have not changed our ideas, our principles, our values.</p>
<p>As for history, Andrea, that is really relative. It seems to me that it would be vain for an individual to think about his legacy. I feel that it is not fair that leaders take credit for everything that happens around them. Millions of people accomplish things. It hurts me because there are millions of people who build, who teach. You saw the teachers in that school yesterday. There are millions of people doing things. We take some credit in the sense that we laid the groundwork for millions of people to accomplish things. But, that’s very different from taking credit for everything.</p>
<p>Second, we’ve studied the biographies of many politicians. They have illusions about themselves. I read a phrase when I was a boy. Someone said: “All the glory of the world fits in a kernel of corn.” Believe me! That’s one of those phrases that stuck in my mind. Some people tend to be vain. We try to avoid that. Over the course of history, humanity has made many mistakes. If humanity can finally survive its own mistakes, if humanity is capable of stopping the systematic devastation of nature, if within 100 or 200 years humanity is still around—and that’s only possible if values, education, knowledge and culture prevail—then those living in the future will look back at us the way we regard the primitive clans and tribes that began the evolution of society. We’ll be relics for those people 100 years from now. So, I don’t waste my time worrying about “my legacy.”</p>
<p>People are just specks in the universe. We live for a very short time in this world. I do not share the concerns of many other politicians.</p>
<p>What you in America call the legacy. I try to be realistic and rational. People pass away and things pass away. Earning merits is relative, depending on being in the right place at the right time. Many of my comrades died along the way and did not live to see our victory. It pains me to think about them. But, they did not die in vain. Others took their places, and more will follow.</p>
<p>Like Che Guevara, for example. He was such an outstanding person. I knew him well. From our first meeting in Mexico in the wee hours one morning, he became a part of our movement. And he was a doctor by training but he was also a great military strategist. Tremendously generous and selfless.</p>
<p>I’ve said that by the time practically every politician has been forgotten, people will still be talking about artists—Michelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci. The same people who love these artists couldn’t provide the name of even one of their contemporary politicians. You talk about the Seven Wonders of the World. The artist outlives the statesman or politician. Philosophers too, like Aristotle. People still discuss the Odyssey and the Iliad. Poets and artists. Anyone who really wants to be remembered should avoid the thorny grounds of politics and instead go into the arts. Cervantes, Shakespeare. Even Julius Caesar is remembered for the book he wrote about the battles he fought and won in the early days of Rome.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I think you have answered everything. Thank you, Mr. President. I think history will not forget a man who led Cuba for more than four decades.</p>
<p><i>NBC Editor’s Note: During their formal interview, Castro wore a business suit. But he chose his traditional olive green army fatigues when he escorted Mitchell to some of his government’s most secret sites. One of their first stops: Cuban biological laboratories—the perfect setting for him to angrily deny U.S. charges he may be secretly producing germ weapons:</i></p>
<p>Castro: The problem here is not whether the equipment can be used to create one thing or another. But it totally lacks common sense. Absolutely. It makes no sense to use all these resources to theoretically produce biological weapons. And the scientists would not be willing to do that. Our people have been trained to discover vaccines and medicines. So it is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t care about such charges, because it’s stupid to think we would spend our resources on that. Those accusations have been made in bad faith. The ones making those charges know they are lying. They should be ignored and I ignore them.</p>
<p>Mitchell: They say the same technology could be use for evil purposes.</p>
<p>Castro: We are producing vaccines to protect our people. We don’t have to account to anyone. The fact that we let the Center for Disease Control and other scientists come here was to see for themselves. For dozens of years, we have been the victim of all kinds of biological attacks. Of course, we defend ourselves—with our doctors and our health care system. It makes no sense for us to begin producing the same weapons. That would even present a danger to our own people. A risk. It makes no sense to try and create a useless weapon against an enemy that is a thousand times more powerful. Saying we produce those weapons really insults our people’s intelligence. When they made those charges, we protested in a statement. We ridiculed them. We are too old, Andrea, to fear slander, lies and threats.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Does it concern you, Mr. President, that you could export to Iran, which is one of the contracts, and Iran could use what they receive from you, the technology, for bad purposes?</p>
<p>Castro: When you export a product, you cannot extract just anything from that product. We have some joint ventures to produce vaccines. Specific vaccines. Vaccines against Hepatitis B, interferon. These are very specific products, so it’s a ridiculous charge.</p>
<p>Mitchell: The Cuban economy is still communist—under state control. But, perhaps nothing better symbolizes the potential for economic change in Cuba than a grain mill now grinding Kansas wheat—the first to be imported under a humanitarian waiver to the U.S. embargo in four decades.</p>
<p>Do you want this to be the beginning of more with America?</p>
<p>Castro: There’s a growing number of Americans who want to trade with Cuba. The U.S. Congress passed quite a rational bill. But, in the end, the enemies of that bill began adding amendments and more amendments until they whittled it down to practically nothing. They set very difficult trade conditions. For example, we had to apply for a license for every product every time. That made it nearly impossible to import anything from the U.S.</p>
<p>On the other hand, it was humiliating. And, on top of that, too many strings attached. But, after the tragedy of 9-11, we offered our help to the American people. We offered our airports. Then in November, we were hit by a devastating hurricane that destroyed thousands of homes. Many people suffered. The U.S. Administration offered us this humanitarian assistance. And, our policy is to reciprocate to every positive gesture with one of our own. The hurricane depleted our grain reserves. We needed to replenish them. We agreed to buy food. We did not want to receive it as charity. Almost 870 thousand tons of products will arrive from the United States this year. We have contracted more than one million tons next year. We’ve been paying in cash. Some people said we wouldn’t pay. We have paid without a second’s delay. Of course we need to tread slowly along this path. We need to be cautious because we cannot be tied to only one source of supplies. It would be too risky so we continue purchasing commodities from our traditional suppliers.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Mr. President, I wanted to ask you, while we are talking about the economy, you have had to restructure the sugar industry. And one out of five workers are losing their jobs. You’ve cut 156 to 71 mills. What can you do for the unemployed?</p>
<p>Castro: None of them have been laid off. We continue to pay their full wages. And we send them to school.</p>
<p>Mitchell: How can Cuba afford to support these people?</p>
<p>Castro: With part of the money we save by not producing sugar due to sugar’s very low prices and the very high cost of the fuel. Our sugar harvest is completely mechanized, demanding a lot of fuel. And those mills were anything but efficient. It cost us more to produce sugar than what we could sell it for. That’s why we had to close those sugar mills. This restructuring meant closing 70 sugar mills that were unprofitable. We have left 71 that are cost efficient.</p>
<p>Mitchell: What will happen to those workers?</p>
<p>Castro: The workers are very happy because they continue to receive their full salaries and are being re-trained to work in industries that pay more. They are not receiving unemployment benefits. People on unemployment can be quite miserable. It undermines their self-esteem. In this case, it’s quite the opposite. People are being paid to study and be retrained. So, the sugar industry was so unproductive, that we can continue to pay these workers and still save money. That’s the secret.</p>
<p><i>NBC Editor’s Note: During the two days in Cuba, one visit overshadowed the rest. Castro showed NBC News a new computer college—built on the ruins of a top secret Russian spy station that eavesdropped on America until this past August. In a classroom once used by the KGB, Mitchell asks Castro about his spy at the Pentagon for 18 years—Ana Montes, who pleaded guilty to espionage and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.</i></p>
<p>Mitchell: You had a famous spy at the Pentagon?</p>
<p>Castro: No. I heard that she disagreed with the aggressions against Cuba, the blockade (embargo) and she spontaneously cooperated without being paid. It was a matter of conscience. She passed on some information, not strategic information. Just information of interest to Cuba.</p>
<p>What could we do? I think it was brave on her part, deciding to cooperate because she opposed U.S. policy. How many people in America might feel like that? Not all of them do the same. Their reactions are different. That’s what I’ve read in the newspapers.</p>
<p>Mitchell: But to you she is not a spy. She is a patriot.</p>
<p>Castro: I think she’s a noble, kind American opposed to a blockade that’s lasted over 40 years, plus all the terrorist actions committed against Cuba. Somebody who is capable of reacting that way is an exceptional person. I have not met her, nor have I been updated on the situation. This is what I have read about her. These are the statements she made at the trial and afterwards. She deserves to be respected and admired.</p>
<p>—MSNBC, January 23, 2003</p>
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February 2003 • Vol 3, No. 2 •
An Interview With Fidel Castro
By Andrea Mitchell
[NBC News has made editorial insertions. These are reproduced in italics with a credit.—Socialist Viewpoint.]
NBC Editor’s note: Cuba’s absolute authority is Fidel Castro, chief of the Armed Forces, head of the ruling Communist Party and president of the island nation just 90 miles from American shores. At 76, Castro is the world’s longest-serving government leader. Cubans simply know him as “Fidel” or “El Comandante”—The Commander. And, he’s just as defiant as when he first seized power in 1959.
As his revolution turned 44, Castro gave a series of exclusive interviews to Andrea Mitchell, chief NBC News foreign affairs correspondent. Over the course of two days, Castro talked about his revolution, human rights, the global war on terrorism, Saddam Hussein, the U.S. embargo and much more. Here are highlights from those 20 hours of conversation.
Mitchell: We’ve spoken at length during our meetings about the situation in Cuba, the economic and social changes, the educational system, your health system, and I want to return to some of those issues tonight. But first I wanted to start with some issues of great urgency to the American people: the possibility of war with Iraq. What do you think the impact of a future war with Iraq would be on your need for oil and the obvious fact that oil prices would rise? What would be the impact of a war with Iraq on Cuba?
Castro: The impact is already being felt. The threat of war has already had a significant impact on many countries, including Cuba. Specifically, it has increased oil prices, very high for months now. That damages the economies of many countries around the world. It damages the world economy, except of course those countries earning huge revenues from their oil exports. Add to this the political situation in Venezuela. The conflict there has increased (oil) prices. So, everything impacts the existing situation. This is the kind of economic situation that has emerged.
You asked me about possible consequences [of war with Iraq]. It seems to me that it’s quite difficult to predict, to foresee. We don’t have enough elements to judge. There are always two sides. Technically speaking, if we may do that, the outcome of any military operation doesn’t depend on just one side. It depends on both sides.
Mitchell: What do you think Saddam Hussein should do? Should he make a bigger effort to open up his country and be honest about what weapons he might still have?
Castro: I wouldn’t like to use any adjectives, because adjectives could make it look like I’m taking sides in any potential conflict... That’s why, if I’m going to be honest, I’ll limit myself to condemning those who have announced military operations because if I label one of the sides, and then it’s attacked, it might seem I’m justifying the aggression. We do not wish to see a war. But I am also under the impression that if there’s no political solution, if the inspections fail to avert war, expect the Iraq people to resist any attack. This is what I think they will do.
I’m trying to imagine the situation based on the history of the last few years. They [the Iraqi people] are relatively used to war because they have been at war almost continuously. There have been many, many military operations, continuous air strikes. So, people have gotten use to military actions. Now, they’ll be forced to start all over again.
They were at war with Iran for years. They went through the so-called Gulf War. People’s mindsets adapt very easily to using weapons, no matter how destructive they may be. It’s only logical to expect them to resist. What would be the consequences of such resistance? It all depends on their tactics, strategies, and their concept of defense... It’s like a chess game..
Mitchell: Well, in a chess game like this, is the United States justified in going to war with Iraq if there is proof that Saddam Hussein has weapons like nuclear or biological or chemical weapons?
Castro: Yes. If there is any proof of that, I believe the American administration is disposed to launching an attack. It’s willing to find any sort of pretext. And I doubt that [it] can abstain from an attack even if they don’t find a pretext. It all seems very much pre-planned.
Mitchell: You think that George Bush is looking for an excuse to go after Saddam Hussein?
Castro: I can’t say whether or not he’s looking for an excuse. But I have the impression that he’ll be frustrated or disappointed if they don’t manage to find a bottle with some kind of liquid that could be labeled biological, chemical or nuclear product. Given his mindset, the discovery of ten ounces of enriched uranium could be enough of a pretext. It’s almost certain that among this high level group of inspectors, some would be willing to find something and some others may hold different opinions. Some people would see imminent danger; others would not.
This said, if having such weapons is justification for launching war, you couldn’t forget that there are other countries in the region with nuclear weapons. One country in the Middle East has some 300 nuclear weapons.
Mitchell: Israel?
Castro: And all the necessary means to sell them. Yet, it’s fairly unknown. I have publicly talked about how they got those weapons. For example, we know they supplied apartheid South Africa with seven nuclear weapons... And this was known by the whole world, by the United States. The regime there was extremely cruel—a fascist regime. They carried out genocide against the population. But, nobody ever threatened South Africa. I mention this as one example.
How many more countries have nuclear weapons or the capacity to develop them? Let me tell you: all nuclear weapons should have been destroyed at the end of World War II. It’s a miracle they haven’t been used in a war yet.
Mitchell: Well, in this situation, whom do you trust more? George Bush or Saddam Hussein?
Castro: Why should it be a matter of confidence in one or the other? Instead of talking about individuals, I prefer talking about concepts, ideas and rights—about whether or not the right exists to launch war just because a country may possess certain kinds of weapons. One country has some 10,000 nuclear weapons and the United States has even more. I believe that both sides have enormous deposits of chemical weapons, which are not easy to destroy. However, they have tried to avoid a war. There are other countries with few weapons. Non-industrialized countries. India had them. Does this give China the right to launch war against India? Or does it give India the right to attack China? Now, Pakistan has them. This no doubt poses a danger for India’s one billion people. Would this justify India attacking Pakistan just because it poses a potential danger? And the British have nuclear weapons.
Many countries might see that as a danger. Despite the fact that we’ve advocated disarmament for 40 years, the possession of these weapons is not a justification for launching an attack or war. It’s true we had the Gulf War. It’s true the U.N. intervened. Then as members of the Security Council, we strongly condemned the occupation of Kuwait. However, we opposed some sanctions. Cuba could never support an embargo of medicines and food. This was our principled position. And we opposed a military solution.
Mitchell: If it were possible to avoid a war—if Saddam Hussein decided to leave his country to avoid a war—would you take him in if he’s seeking asylum?
Castro: Are you trying to trap me? We have no desire to get involved in that conflict.
Mitchell: This is a mere hypothesis.
Castro: We do not want to see war nor become a country that grants asylum to any of the sides in this conflict. I know only too well what would happen if we were to welcome someone out of humanitarian concerns.
For example, the U.S. occupies the Guantánamo naval base. Without prior consultation with Cuba, the U.S. decided unilaterally to bring in hundreds of prisoners from Afghanistan—the Taliban, members of Al Qaida, an organization with which we have never had any links or contacts.
The United States made that decision and only told us about it later. This is the second time this has happened. During the Balkans war, they informed us they were bringing in Albanians. It didn’t matter what position we took on that issue. They were bringing them in anyway. So, we said “Okay, send in the refugees.” We are eager to cooperate, provide medical services or help in controlling hygiene.
We are willing to provide humanitarian assistance to anyone who needs it. If asked, we would send medical teams to help the injured. If asked, we would send our vaccines against meningitis.
Mitchell: If the United States wants to launch war, nobody can stop the United States from doing that. Everybody knows how powerful it is and the weapons it has. But, on principle, we are against that war.
Castro: What did we do last time? Every time the issue came up at the U.N., we condemned Iraq. Nobody knows who led the Iraqi government to believe that the U.S. would tolerate that occupation. But, on the eve of war, I will refrain from voicing opinions that could be used as grist for somebody else’s mill. There are many people who think that it’s not fear for their own security but rather an attempt to control the world’s third-largest oil reserve—at a time when many people are becoming aware that the oil problem and hydro-carbons is far more serious than what’s being admitted...
At some point, [Iraq] must have had weapons because Europe helped them obtain missiles. They were supplied with the technology to be able to attack Israel. The Soviets sold them missiles. We know they had chemical weapons. I don’t know a lot about chemical weapons. And I don’t know if chemical weapons can be destroyed.
But analyzing this from a political angle, Iraq should have had the sense not to possess nuclear, chemical or biological weapons after invading Kuwait. It’s not enough just to have the weapons. You have to know how to use them and against whom. Logic indicates they should have destroyed those weapons.. It would be a huge mistake to use those weapons against someone who has 10 times your power.
Mitchell: Mr. President, you were talking about how it would make no sense for Saddam Hussein to use these weapons against such a powerful adversary, the United States?
Castro: It would be insane. After Kuwait, they should have destroyed all of those weapons. I don’t doubt they have tried to destroy them. I have no proof. But it’s elementary logic.
But men make mistakes. Saddam Hussein may be making a mistake or the United States government may be making a mistake. Even the American government cannot say for sure what the backlash may be—what cultural or religious conflicts may be unleashed. The United States has said that they will launch the war on their own even without Security Council approval. All of this by virtue of the power of the United States. So, I’d like to think about old problems—what risks the United States may be facing. For example, I know the U.S. is greatly concerned about terrorism.
Mitchell: I was going to ask you about this....
Castro: We have been subjected to terrorism for almost 44 years. No other country in the world has been harassed or subjected to the sabotage or terrorist actions that have befallen Cuba for over 40 years. The price of all these actions is well known. Without making an estimate, I can say that we’ve lost thousands of lives and billions of dollars in economic damages. Many have suffered. Thousands handicapped. Much destruction. Much damage. However, I can say that not one single American lost their life as a consequence of Cuban actions against the United States... Never has a single brick in the United States been destroyed as a consequence of Cuban “terrorist” actions. Not only is it a lie but also it’s cynical to include Cuba on the (State Department) list of terrorist countries because we are the Olympic champions in having endured more than 40 years of terrorism without ever having engaged in terrorist actions. Nor will we ever. It would have been stupid for us to take revenge against any American. Tens of thousands of Americans know that Cuba is the country where they are respectfully welcomed. We have not sowed any hatred against the American people….
Mitchell: I wanted to ask you about the war on terror. Does the attack on 9/11 justify the way the United States is pursuing the war on terror? Is there anything Cuba can do or has been able to do in terms of developing information that might be helpful to the United States about the spread of Al-Qaida?
Castro: You have asked me three questions in one. The right to defend itself—each country has the right to defend itself against terrorism. But, in practice, it seems that only the most powerful country has this right.
I once read a wire story saying that the U.S. Congress had suggested invading the Netherlands if the International Court of Justice (in the Hague) ruled against an American soldier. And I said, “Oh, good heavens, even a European industrialized country and a NATO member and U.S. ally isn’t safe from a U.S. preemptive attack.”
All countries have the right to defend themselves, including Cuba. But how can they defend themselves if the powerful countries can overrule every code, every rule. A small country like Cuba has to defend itself within its own territory, and to exercise every possible measure to neutralize (the enemy). A Cuban airliner was blown up in mid air, killing more than 70 young people aboard including Cuba’s junior fencing team. Everybody knows this story. But Orlando Bosch, the mastermind of that terrorist action, lives very happily in Miami making public statements about that action. Cuba has protected itself by developing sources of information. This was all Cuba could do. Cuba didn’t commit the stupidity of responding to those terrorist actions that were launched from U.S. territory.
At this moment, the situation is very complicated. The right to defend ourselves cannot be questioned. But, from an ethical point of view, you could question how to go about it. Also from a political, practical and realistic points of view. I have my own views on how an anti-terrorism policy should have been implemented. There was never a better occasion to create a real crusade against terrorism at every level. And this was not through war. As soon as we learned about the attacks on New York, we condemned those actions; we offered our airports for the thousands of planes in the air and forbidden to land at any U.S. airport. We offered medical aid, blood donations.
Mitchell: But the United States didn’t accept any of your offers. Did that surprise you?
Castro: No. Look, I can tell you the following. When California had that big earthquake, we made our usual offer of support. We don’t have search and rescue robots or dogs but we do have physicians and nurses. That was an act of good will and not new. We made the same offer to Nicaragua [after the 1972 earthquake] during Somoza’s rule—even though he lent his territory for the launching of the Bay of Pigs invasion. More than 30,000 Cubans have volunteered their services in Third World countries even at a time when we had a shortage of physicians. Now, we have the highest ratio per-capita of physicians—one physician for every 164 inhabitants. That’s double what the second best country has. This goes for education and other fields too. We sent teachers into Nicaragua’s mountains. Some were assassinated by the contras during the dirty war.
If you understand our philosophy on this, Andrea, it will help you understand Cuba. You may agree or not with our philosophy, just as you may or may not agree with a certain type of religion. But this doesn’t mean that people from one religion should be at war with people from a different religion. Europe spent centuries waging wars since the time of the Crusades—which had been condemned by the pope, including the inquisition of Galileo who said the earth moved around the sun.
But, Christianity, for the first time, offered a kind of ethical code. For me, the Old Testament differs from the New Testament in that the Old Testament recalls the history of man, the wars and everything that has happened while the New Testament preaches a generous code of behavior based on love for your neighbor, solidarity with the poor, and the miracle of fish and bread. We have tried to have enough fish and bread. And, a powerful country like yours with its abundant resources, should think about how to repeat the miracle of the fish and the bread instead of spending fabulous amounts of weapons….
You asked me about the right to defend ourselves against terrorism. What else did you want to know?
Mitchell: I was asking about Osama bin Laden?
Castro: You asked whether or not we had intelligence. All these questions are very delicate. But since day one, we declared publicly that our country would do its best to prevent our territory from being used against the U.S. people. And I can add that we will also do our best to prevent any harm to the American people from anywhere else. If we were to learn that someone planned to destroy an American city or commit an act of terrorism against the American people, we would do our best to prevent that….
Terrorism is a complex problem. We have to fight it first from an ethical point of view. What sparked those actions? We carried out an armed struggle [against the Batista dictatorship in 1959] but we never used terrorist methods. We never resorted to methods that cost the lives of innocent people. Look at the newspapers of the time. Read the history of the revolution. We attacked a military fortress. We fought in the mountains. We fought against an army that outnumbered us. We won through a combination of armed struggle and of gaining popular support. Batista helped in that by committing crimes against the population, by torturing people. We used explosives against soldiers and enemy tanks. We used mines against troops during combat. No one can deny this. Sometimes we destroyed a bridge used by enemy soldiers but never at the cost of any human life. So, we have authority to speak on this topic. Honestly, we are opposed to any action that jeopardizes the lives of innocent people—whomever they may be.
Much has been said whether or not it was right to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Ask the Japanese... That bomb was dropped on the eve of Soviet march through Manchuria. From the military point of view, there was no need to bomb those two cities. They could have bombed military bases. It would have been more than enough. There were many other targets. I would call the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki colossal acts of terrorism.
How many things have been done in history? How many Vietnamese died in air raids? Millions, Andrea. And they used chemicals that still cause damage. There’s a generation of Vietnamese affected by Agent Orange that has caused many problems.
Such events have happened in history. I don’t believe there’s any other way in this global world but to abide by ethical standards. There must be ethical reasons to struggle against terrorism. And I have said this to everybody including the revolutionary movement: We should condemn the use of methods that harm innocent people. Terrorism breeds hatred and rejection. No revolutionary movement will ever triumph by using terrorism and killing innocent people. I say this with the authority of having waged war. Not a big war, but a rather complicated war. And we were at a disadvantage. Our enemies outnumbered us. We had medical problems. But, we never resorted to such methods. If we had planted bombs, we never would have earned the support of over 90 percent of the people—not even 80 percent—not even 20 percent.
People reject crime. People reject such acts by their very nature. Many reject the death penalty because this touches them. They are affected by seeing people put to death in the electric chair or by being shot. Politically, no revolutionary movement will triumph by resorting to terrorism.
But you also need to struggle against terrorism from the religious point of view. Religion motivates or rules some people. Certain religious beliefs lead people to sacrifice their own lives. Some Iranians sacrificed their own lives to detonate land mines in Iraq.
We have to realize that certain religions carry their own code of ethics, rational or not. We have to struggle against all factors that may influence people. We suggest launching a major campaign against terrorism—creating a universal awareness against terrorism. It seems to me that this is the right way. That’s the path I would have taken if I were in America’s shoes. How can you get people to universally reject terrorism? Not through war. You can be absolutely sure of that. It creates hatred. José Martí (Cuba’s national independence hero) wrote: “Those who sow hatred, reap storms….”
Look, I will give you an example. Terrorist, operating from central America, considered blowing up some planes flying to Cuba. That was under Clinton. We spoke about this years later when Clinton was no longer president. I sent Clinton a letter through common friends. We never exchanged correspondence but I explained everything through a common friend. He responded in kind—taking it very seriously. He suggested we make the information public. I suggested that we should adopt other measures to discover what the terrorists were planning. (The Castro government sent Cuban security agents to infiltrate anti-Castro exile groups and gather intelligence on planned actions against the regime.). We passed on the information they gathered to U.S. authorities.
Do you know what happened? A few weeks later a group of Cuban patriots were arrested. Their main activities had been to obtain information about terrorist actions being plotted from inside the U.S. They have been condemned to life imprisonment. I wonder if the information we provided U.S. authorities was used to arrest and convict those who gathered the intelligence. Do you realize how strange all this is? And, these terrorist actions were carried out very recently. (Luis) Posada Carilles [one of Castro’s arch foes] attempted to assassinate me during the Ibero American summit with 40 kilograms of explosive. Once we learned that someone was ploting to kill (President Ronald) Reagan. Within hours, we relayed that information to the U.S. government. I doubt very much if any American administration sent us a message warning of the danger of any of the hundreds of attempts against my life. Where’s the ethics Andrea? Where’s the morals? This is not right.
Mitchell: I’m wondering Mr. President, do you think there could ever be an improvement in relations between our two countries with George Bush as President?
Castro: Yes.
Mitchell: How so?
Castro: Look, I believe that it’s too soon to reach a definite conclusion. He certainly took power as all the others—lacking information about Cuba, filled with biases against Cuba. There have been no exceptions since Kennedy came to office. I remember when Carter was elected. Carter, to me, has been the most noble and most ethical of all the Presidents that I have met.
Mitchell: And you’ve met nine of them? You’ve met nine presidents. You’ve outlasted nine presidents.
Castro: Are there nine? The present president is the 10th.
Mitchell: Since Eisenhower.
Castro: Yes. Eisenhower was in power when the Revolution triumphed. We have stood up against every campaign. First, of course, there was massive misinformation in the United States. But, we won’t look at the history of why.
Mitchell: But in the current time.
Castro: All of them when elected held many biases against Cuba—massive misinformation and underestimation, Andrea. Girón, (Bay of Pigs) for example, was a huge mistake, based on underestimation—believing the Cuban people would go and join an uprising. It seemed they really believed that. But this was not the plan. The real plan was to seize a piece of land as a beachhead in order to set up the government of Miro Cardona who would fly in and then be recognized as a “democratic patriotic government” with the recognition of the OAS (Organization of American States).
But you, as such a keen observer for so many years of American politics, do you think this president is unable or unwilling to reach out to the Cuban people because of Florida politics? There was a time when Florida had nothing to do with U.S. policy towards Cuba. It was the Cold War. But I wonder why they launched the Bay of Pigs expedition—just because we started agrarian reform. I’m not blaming Kennedy. Do you know who advised organizing the expedition? Nixon, who was then Eisenhower’s Vice President. The former administration organized the expedition. Kennedy took office and he was a man of certain qualities that I recognized and appreciated.
Mitchell: Why don’t you blame Kennedy? He tried to kill you. He tried to have you assassinated. He approved the invasion.
Castro: First, let me say that Kennedy already showed bias [against Cuba’s revolution] during his electoral campaign. Huge numbers of Americans thought as he did. Attacking Cuba was the political thing to do. Although there were two different mindsets: Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s. Look, we have to consider something when analyzing what happened.
People who fought for the revolution were not imbeciles but the Americans underestimated them. I’m not talking about myself but a whole group of popular leaders who emerged during the struggle and passed laws that benefited the average person. They won the overwhelming support of the Cuban people. A support they’ve never lost.
Still, some people believe or convince others to believe that most people oppose the Revolution. They ignore the fact that there’s more support for the Revolution now than ever. There are many who do know and understand this. If Nixon had been president instead of Kennedy, the U.S. military would have been deployed to rescue the (exile) brigade during the Bay of Pigs invasion.
But Kennedy behaved differently. Nixon would have sent support for the invasion. And in our country over 300,000 people took up arms. I can assure you even they (the U.S. military) could not have crushed the resistance. Of course, we’re talking about 1961 when most of today’s weapons didn’t exist. Then, we had no surveillance satellites, or sensors capable of gathering intelligence. Even today, and I believe that this was always the case, men are capable of going beyond technology. You might need to change your tactics, strategies, and modes of transportation but a country that resists can never be crushed. The Sahrawi people live in the desert and after 20 years they’ve not been crushed. They are a small country. The Russians, with all their power, have been unable to crush the resistance in Chechnya. That’s a real fact—which doesn’t mean to say we agree with the terrorism committed by the Chechens. We issued a very clear statement supporting the Soviet people and condemning the terrorist takeover of a Russian theater. We urged they do everything possible to avoid a massacre. But, in the end, there was a massacre when the decision-makers made a mistake.
Andrea, they make mistakes more often than not. But the reality is that there’s a religion, culture and nationality that rejects Russia’s occupation. They are very close and this country is very powerful. But I can tell you this: you cannot crush the resistance of a country with one million inhabitants. But, it’s all the more difficult when the country has 10 or 11 or 12 million.
We’re not looking for a fight. We weren’t looking for one back then. And Kennedy, newly elected and, as he put it, belonging to a new generation of Americans, did not want to begin his mandate by attacking a Latin American country. He wanted good relations with Latin America. He rejected the other and never gave the order to save the brigade because it would have meant engaging in war. Kennedy took full responsibility for that decision. “Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” That was a very courageous act... And there was also a bias against Socialism, against communism. He said that the best communist was a dead communist. That was a political slogan—that the best communist was a dead communist. But, I don’ t think that the best capitalist is a dead capitalist. I wouldn’t even say that the best neo-capitalist or neo-liberalist is a dead one. I wouldn’t even say that the best imperialist is a dead imperialist. We don’t think this way. But Kennedy had that style.
And there’s something else. The Soviets made a huge error around the events leading up to the October Crisis—even if they based their actions on solid information that [the Americans] had approved an invasion of Cuba. All the recently declassified documents prove this. So, the Soviets were right. During the discussion we had here, [this past October Cuba hosted a conference marking the 40th anniversary of the missile crisis], it was revealed that [the Soviets] had been very concerned about Cuba’s security. At the time of Girón [the Bay of Pigs invasion] they (the Soviets) raised the issue of missiles, because when the British and the French occupied Port Said at the Suez Canal, Khrushchev stopped the aggression by threatening to use his missiles. Khrushchev argued that Berlin was a powder keg. Remember that American troops and tanks faced-off with Soviet tanks and troops. That’s when they put up the Berlin Wall.
So Khrushchev didn’t want a war. I knew Khrushchev well—an intelligent and clever farmer, a very bold person but susceptible to mistakes. He had a great sense of humor. But then we noticed many things—political and even military errors. But we were new to politics and the USSR was one of the two big superpowers, which lost tens of millions fighting Fascism. Just as the French, British, and American lives lost. They (Soviets in WWII) carried out the counter attack, assuming the burden of the whole war. They occupied Berlin, the rest of that region. They had a vast military experience—all veterans while we could be considered newborns. They devised the defense of Cuba, based on their certainty that the U.S. would attack Cuba....
All of us made political mistakes as well as military mistakes. This almost triggered war. Khrushchev tricked Kennedy, playing word games. He said they would not send offensive weapons to Cuba. To Kennedy this meant medium range missiles that could reach American targets. But Khrushchev was being simplistic, defining “offensive” according to the intention of the user. He couldn’t imagine Kennedy’s concern, why Kennedy would feel tricked by the Cubans.
I argued that the agreement (Havana-Moscow military accord) be made public. Why hide something when right is on your side? After all, the U.S. had agreements with many countries stating that an aggression against any of those countries would be considered an aggression against the United States. I believed a similar announcement between Moscow and Havana would have been sufficient. The problem is that Kennedy took Khrushchev at his word while Khrushchev deployed surface to air missiles.
Meanwhile the U-2 (American spy plane) flew freely (over Cuban territory) and we ended up on the brink of a war. The country faced real danger, because the U.S. could have launched a surprise attack to destroy the missiles. The Americans were very sensitive because they had nuclear missiles in Turkey. They made the political mistake of suggesting to swap (remove) those missiles for the ones in Cuba. But we didn’t want any Soviet troops or nuclear weapons here. We were more concerned about Latin America and our image and prestige; we didn’t want to appear to be a Soviet base.
Mitchell: But you wanted to keep the battlefield, the tactical nuclear weapons that the United States states it didn’t even know you had. I think you wrote to Khrushchev saying you wanted to keep those weapons, the smaller nuclear weapons?
Castro: You want to stay here talking until six in the morning? You want me to take all of the papers I have to prove to you this is nothing but conjecture? We could spend days talking about this. We just had a two-day discussion with McNamara [Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy] Kennedy advisors, and a key CIA player as well as the Soviet military officers who had been based here in Cuba and some of the Cuban leaders. My memory is still good. I remember the facts. In fact, we discussed this very issue in detail with a group of American historians who managed to have many of the documents declassified. Cuba behaved quite honestly through the entire crisis. But ultimately I had to be harsh with Khrushchev because he went ahead and reached a unilateral agreement (with Kennedy) for the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and Cuba. We issued a very strong statement expressing our indignation and presenting 5 demands (to resolve the crisis). We never opposed peace but we never imagined the Soviets would make concessions….
Mitchell: Let me bring you back to today. We have George Bush as President.
Castro: Choosing peace or choosing war. I explained which one I favor. This was a golden opportunity for the U.S. to strike a blow against terrorism. Instead, they are breeding hatred and more hatred. For over a year, images shown on TV are evoking indignation, hatred and fanaticism.
Mitchell: Well, but ….
Castro: They are creating bigotry. You will never be able to defeat terrorist violence with bigotry.
Mitchell: What are your thoughts about George Bush’s brother Jeb? A lot of people say he’s possibly the next President after Bush. How would that affect U.S./Cuban relations?
Castro: You mean his brother? First of all, let me say I don’t believe there’s any chance this will happen. Americans are very smart. They may be misinformed but they are smart people. You had his father; now you have the son; and then you have the brother? And later on, the grandson? and finally the great grandson? That would be an absolute monarchy. Can Americans imagine that? I don’t know him. He has a very noble face. Jeb reminds me of a boy from school who came from a family of coffee planters.
He has the face of a good-natured man. I have nothing against him. I have no antipathy toward him. I don’t know what he knows about politics. He’s recently been concerned about a scandal. The Haitian problem. After more than 200 Haitian men, women and children landed, many of the black residents (of Florida) questioned why they were being sent back to Haiti when there are Cubans, even those with criminal records, who automatically are granted residency and work permits. Even those who enter the U.S. with fake documents. The moment they set foot on U.S. soil, they can claim the right to reside and work there.
How can it be said that the United States is protected against terrorism when any Cuban with a criminal record or a history of mental illness is welcome with open arms? Andrea, don’t you think this is a contradiction? We’re the only country in the world treated this way. Makes me wonder if we’re the worset? I believe you even trade with North Korea. Is any other country in the same boat? We won’t be jealous if some other country shares this dubious honor!
Mitchell: Since your country is treated uniquely under American law, you’re the only country treated this way with this particular kind of embargo, a country that we’re not at war with, at least. What do you think the impact would be on your country if the embargo ended—if Americans could come here, if American products could be sold here—without any limits? What would be the impact on Cuba?
Castro: Well, sometimes joking around, I’ve said to let me know in advance so I can move. An invasion of hundreds of thousands of American is enough to make us move. I’ve said this as a joke. But, to answer your question: we’re not afraid. It’s good to say this because there may be some people who think we want a blockade. Clinton himself said that we shot down the planes that often violated our air space because we feared the end to the blockade. (In 1996, the Cuban military shot down two small planes, killing four Miami exiles. In retaliation, the White House signed the “Helms-Burton Act” that beefed up the trade embargo.) No one knows what would happen if a Cuban plane even just once violated America’s 12-mile sea limit. We have never feared the end to the blockade. We may have to set a quota limiting American visitors to 10,000 a week. That’s our right!
Mitchell: Couldn’t it threaten the revolution’s ideals, if the United States with a very different economic system all of a sudden flooded Cuba with products and ideas and ideas and people?
Castro: Andrea, nothing jeopardizes the destiny of this revolution. The Cuban people now possess a certain level of knowledge and education that surpasses the average of other countries. These are people who base their actions on values. Our people are very patriotic, very progressive and socialist. Andrea, our people have learned that the revolution turned them into real human beings. We can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we weren’t human before. A small group held all the privilege and power. What is an illiterate person, Andrea? What about the 15-year-old who has to pay a child to write a letter to his girlfriend. Can you imagine their lack of self-esteem? Thirty percent of our people were absolute illiterates and, added to that, functional illiterates, the figure rose to about 90 percent. And that’s being conservative. Only 422,000 of the island’s 7 million inhabitants (in 1959) had reached 6th grade. Today, we have 20 to 30 university graduates for every one we had at the beginning of the revolution.
Mitchell: Mr. President, as I’ve seen with my own eyes, you have the most literate country. You have a country that is immunized with 13 different vaccines. You have universal healthcare, education. Yet because of the embargo, some people say there has been a lot of suffering. Do you believe that the embargo is the only reason? Because you have made changes in your economic system. You have adopted some free market practices, the dollar economy. Why have you made these changes? Are you changing your views about the revolution? Or about socialism?
Castro: The revolution turned millions of people into real persons. Gave them self-esteem. And the revolution is that much stronger because of this. Now, we have done some things we didn’t like because of the unique situation we faced. No country has had to live with a double blockade: the U.S. trade sanctions, and the overnight disappearance of its major suppliers and markets.
Mitchell: And the Soviet Union collapsed which is...
Castro: Fuel. That’s vital. Nobody believed Cuba would survive the demise of the Soviet Union. I wonder why? And I wonder why.
Mitchell: You joked earlier today that the Soviet Union was the good old days because you had the economic support, of course, from the Soviet Union. Do you think the world would be better off if the Soviet Union had not collapsed?
Castro: First of all, we’d be better off. Ultimately, we would be much better, much better. If we had suffered through the “Special Period” [Castro’s euphemism for the post-Soviet economic crisis] during 1961, ‘62 and ‘63, we would never have survived. We would have died honorably, draped in our national flag. But we never would have survived economically. Society then was marked by illiteracy and less political awareness. There have been 30 years of revolution, more than 30 years. I would say that from 1959 to 1992—33 years of revolution—we passed laws and measures benefiting the millions of Cuba’s sons and daughters who were sub-human, treated worse than animals. We were lucky, we trusted people. We trusted our history, the examples of our independence fighters and patriots. Everybody thought Cuba would collapse. We didn’t. Ten years have elapsed. We will not collapse. People in Miami packed their bags to return to their houses that we had turned into schools. These people had not been thrown out of the country but left voluntarily for the United States with the authorization of the Cuban government. In fact, everyone who has left Cuba—with the exception of those who leave illegally—since the signing of the Migration Accords (1991) have done so because the Cuban government allows them to do.
Mitchell: But why do you think so many other socialist countries and communist countries have moved toward free markets? Why has China evolved the way it has? And Vietnam? There’s been, as American Presidents say, a march of democracy across the world and a free market. But not here in Cuba.
Castro: Well, that’s the opinion of the President of the United States. I respect that opinion but feel sorry if he wants to be wrong his whole life. But it’s not my problem. But seriously, I don’t want to say things that could hurt anyone’s feeling. You know I’m joking. And besides, there’s no arguments to justify these statements.
Although some people may disagree, I believe we have the most humane system in the world. I don’t like to say this, but I must because people say the world is moving towards democracy. I say the world is moving towards subordination to a single power. The world is moving towards submission to the hegemonic power of the United States.
Look, the world has a single boss and it’s not the people. I’m speaking about the whole world. They have only one boss. There’s a man who decides the fate of every country without prior consultation—not even about launching war. Take the United Nations today. It’s a beautiful memory of good intentions. And a good idea that some day may take hold.
Today, there’s a world government that hasn’t been adopted or approved by any of the more than 100 existing States. That’s the truth. It’s a joke to say the world’s moving towards democracy. It’s like saying Americans are moving towards a society with greater civil rights and more respect. The United States has lived through different times. They lived through McCarthyism; don’t forget the witch-hunts. Afterwards, they got passed that and the U.S. went through a period of tremendous ethnic and racial problems; there were struggles, progressive laws passed and then setbacks. Everything that could have been achieved wasn’t. Now, the terrorism committed against the American people has created a favorable climate to impose considerable restrictions on individual rights and liberties. A world in which a country can be victim of a surprise preemptive attack is not a world moving towards democracy. A world in which the bombers, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, the smart bombs have the last word, is not a world moving towards democracy. A world in which the president of a single country without even consulting his own Congress has the last word is not a world moving towards democracy. It would be like saying democracy ruled with the Caesars in Rome. It would be like saying that the empire was moving towards democracy….
The world is moving towards universal dictatorship. And, something else: we could affirm that the world is living under universal dictatorship—not an absolute dictatorship.
The United States dictates to the rest of the world. Who says no? China has not submitted to the United States. It’s too big and they have their own dignity. I respect the Chinese very much. Nor will I say that Vietnam has submitted to the United States. But, all of Europe has submitted, almost without exception—including the former socialist countries and the newly formed States. I wouldn’t say they are happy about this but it’s the result of having one country dominate the world. What’s the use of having the United Nations if every year 173 countries vote against that infamous embargo and the U.S. government just laughs at that vote? They ignore world public opinion. Is that democratic? Show me Andrea where democracy exists in the world. How can you say that the world is moving towards democracy? We should say quite the opposite.
So, they say the world is moving towards democracy because the Chinese introduced some reforms. The Chinese have a political system very similar to Cuba’s. They admit capitalists into the (Communist) Party. Our Party admits farmers earning a lot of money and religious people. Bush could just as well say that, based on what we’ve done here in Cuba, that we’re moving towards democracy. And that the world is moving towards democracy.
I believe we’re doing that. We’re moving more and more to a regime of equal opportunity and even greater equality. People need to go beyond their professional knowledge and gain a general comprehensive education. Those who don’t are functional illiterates. Without certain knowledge of history, you cannot understand the world. Without a basic knowledge of geography, you can ‘t understand how nearly 60 countries have come to independence in recent history. You need to know basic political economy to understand globalization and the international monetary crisis. Without a minimum knowledge of the arts, people won’t be able to understand newspapers. People need to know two to three languages, including English. That’s why we are teaching English in a massive way.
Mitchell: How do you see this country years from now? You have personified the social system and the revolution for millions of people. How do you see this living on? Who will you have lead this government?
Castro: I will not speak to you now about the system. But we want our people to have convictions. We want our people to possess knowledge and culture. You cannot speak about freedom without knowledge. You cannot speak about freedom without culture.
In a world with billions of illiterates, you cannot talk about freedom. It’s a lie to think you can be free without an education. You can’t let others think for you. You can’t allow specialists to bombard you with messages from the mass media and do your thinking for you. You can’t afford to let others to think on behalf of those around you. No wonder millions are influenced by commercials that convince people to smoke one brand of cigarettes over another, to drink one kind of soda or wear a certain type of shoe. If people were not at the mercy of others, commercials would not exist.
Herbert Marcuse said, “To be cultured is the only way to be free….” Through education, our people will become ever freer and live more humane lives. This doesn’t depend on the abundance of a consumer society. The consumption promoted by the developed world is unsustainable. Just imagine if China had the same amount of cars per capita as the U.S.? We should ask Bush what would happen in the world the day that China—with all its progress towards democracy, free markets and development—could have as many cars per capita as the U.S.
Mitchell: Mr. President, with George Bush and America, do you see better relations as possible between our two countries?
Castro: Quite often unexpected things happen. I remember when relations between the United States and China were not that good. Nobody could think that they would improve the way they did. Apparently nothing is impossible. Of course, I don’t have to be a pessimist, although I don’t have a lot to base my optimism on.
Mitchell: There are people in the United States, including this President, who say that things cannot improve until Cuba changes it’s system regarding human rights, the way elections are held, the ability to move from one place to the other without government permission?
Castro: First, what if we said that in order to improve relations with the U.S., you had to change your constitution. What if we said that the United States needed to change its political system? What if we said that the United States needed to change its economic system to improve relations with us? We’ve never said anything like that. It’s not logical to put those kinds of conditions on anyone else. Much less when you take into account that the United States does not put conditions on relations with other countries. The United States has relations with other countries without setting conditions.
Mitchell: There are international standards and the UN declaration of human rights, which you respect, says that people should have the right to free media without government involvement, the right to move from one place to another without government permission. Is the UN wrong, or is the rest of the world wrong?
Castro: I have my views about that... I think that our country has proven over a course of four decades that it has a very high conception of human rights. How do other countries in the world conceive of human rights? If there was a real understanding about human rights, 11 million children would not starve in the world every year. So many others would not die for lack of medicines and health care. And, practically one billion people in the world would not be illiterate. These things would not happen if there were real human rights in the world. And millions of people around the world have no access to schools or to an education; they lack the most basic elements of security. So, we respect human rights not only for the people of our country, but also for those in other countries around the world.
And this is nothing new. Even during the harshest years of the special period, thousands of students from other countries, poorer countries, came to study in Cuba on full scholarships. At the moment three thousand Cuban doctors are working for free in scores of countries around the world. We’ve also sent our teachers abroad. We have a universal concern for human rights.
Mitchell: That is universally acknowledged, and we have reported it, and many people have praised your educational system, your healthcare system, but still say, that dissidents should not be put in jail, that people should have more freedom of assembly, that there should be more freedom of speech here.
Castro: I should say here that I didn’t understand what you said earlier about freedom of movement. I don’t know where that comes from—the claim that we’ve taken measures to prevent what happens in other Latin American countries. The mega cities, shantytowns springing up around the big cities. Proof that there are few restrictions in Cuba is the fact that the city of Havana has doubled in size and population. People come and go freely in the country. There are no restrictions on travel inside the country. I think, Andrea, that is a simple fabrication. People move around freely.
I told you only yesterday that hundreds of thousands of people have left this country and a minority of them for political problems. Most are economic migrants—just as you find in Central America and Mexico. They are seeking a better standard of living. We’ll never be able to offer the same salaries that a wealthy nation can. Cuba has set no restrictions.
Mitchell: But if someone wants to move from one province to anther province, don’t they have to get government permission?
Castro: Andrea, of course, they are free to move about. You should travel around the country and ask people themselves. Ask them if they are free to move around the Island. It’s so absurd.
Mitchell: If I’m Cubana and I want to buy a car—a normal average Cuban without a special job or special status—don’t I have to get permission to buy and sell it at government rates? Many people can’t buy cars.
Castro: There are tens of thousands of cars in the country. Those people who have cars can sell it to each other. We don’t import cars, to commercialize them in the county. Over the past 40 years, we’ve imported very few cars because of gasoline and spare parts. That’s why there’s so many old cars and the Soviet-made Ladas.
But, we don’t want to become a consumer society. We’ve opened bicycle factories. In addition to public transit, bicycles are one of our main forms of transportation. Now the shops do not sell cars. There are things they don’t sell. Who here has the money to buy a car? Well, maybe the farmers because they make lots of money. It’s a question of economics. Cars cost convertible currency. And we have to consider very carefully what we spend our money on. Large fuel demands and spare parts are not easy for us to justify.
Mitchell: Can you see a time when you would move towards private property rights? There has been talk of this. Perhaps after the 6th party congress, you might move toward more property rights?
Castro: I don’t see that on the horizon. Maybe there’s some talk about it but I haven’t heard it. We have implemented a number of reforms but we’re not headed towards capitalism. Speaking honestly, we’ve implemented measures that have created inequality. There are now people who earn lots of money as compared to others. There’s some who have very little compared to others who own a car and earn lots of money or someone who owns a truck and can earn much more money than a doctor, including top surgeons. We cannot pay a surgeon as much as someone might earn by being self-employed. You also run into people getting fleeced by the private sector. Movers charge 1,000 pesos to move you in a day. That’s what the truck owner charges. So, we have these inequalities. Self-employment is allowed but it creates inequalities.
Education and culture are the most important properties people can own. If you want to ask me if we are headed towards capitalism, Andrea, I will tell you in all honesty that we are not. We are not marching towards capitalism. We are trying to have a more educated society, and to create better opportunities for everyone in order to narrow the gap between people who have lots of money and those who don’t. The workers, the ones who earn less money, are the backbone of the economy. We do not encourage parasites in this society.
Mitchell: You said this morning that one of the super- powers melted away. People around the world think it melted away because of the socialist or communist economic system.
Castro: Why haven’t we melted away—despite being blockaded during the “Special Period” and surrounded by all kinds of hostility? We’ve been threatened for 43 years with economic warfare. So, why didn’t we melt away? Our critics should know better.
I have my own ideas about what happened (in the socialist world). Those revolutions were important revolutions but imposed from the outside. In some cases, they lost the ideological battle. We haven’t. Rather, we’ve won it. Here, people live in socialism with the advantages socialism has brought them. Recently eight million people signed (a petition) making their socialist system untouchable. Eight million people support socialism in this country. And that’s our people’s reaction.
Mitchell: That’s because you are here. We see the way you are respected by the people who we visited. But, what happens as the future unfolds? What happens here in Cuba with the system to make sure your legacy continues? You told me once that your brother would succeed in the interim. Do you see a transition? Do you see a collective leadership?
Castro: Yes, my brother has seniority but we should talk about the next generation. Even my brother is not that young. We, the generation that made the revolution, hold the greatest authority and have the most influence because of our history and years of struggle. But when you talk to me about the future, I think of other generations, younger people.
There will be no problem if I die here tomorrow because we have lots of young people who are well trained, who know what to do, and we have comrades with great authority in this country. Yes, it’s true as you said. I have this prestige and authority but there are other comrades, too, younger people who have already won their stripes. But my brother and others are not so much younger than I am. We need to think about the future, when these key leaders are not here anymore—when the old leaders are gone. I am thinking about the younger generation and how they are prepared to preserve the future. Look, we have not had the conflicts other countries experience.
In China and the former Soviet Union, they’ve had major conflicts between the generations. That’s not been the case here. Here, the younger generations are better prepared than the old generation, than my generation. Wherever we go, we see lots of well-trained young people—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands capable of leading. We have over 600 deputies to the National Assembly (Parliament) from all over the country. Lots are young people who experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union. I’m not a fortuneteller but I’m confident they are better trained, better prepared, and better educated than we ever were. And they have sounder ideas to defend.
Mitchell: When you got out of jail, or when you were arrested for fighting Batista, your defense was, I think, was that “history would absolve me.” Do you have any regrets about the revolution you’ve led, the way you’ve governed? How will history judge Fidel Castro?
Castro: My one regret: that we should have done many more things before now. We could have done things better, and many more things if we had realized earlier all that we could do, and if we had all the experience that we have today. We could have done much more. The most important thing is that we have not changed our ideas, our principles, our values.
As for history, Andrea, that is really relative. It seems to me that it would be vain for an individual to think about his legacy. I feel that it is not fair that leaders take credit for everything that happens around them. Millions of people accomplish things. It hurts me because there are millions of people who build, who teach. You saw the teachers in that school yesterday. There are millions of people doing things. We take some credit in the sense that we laid the groundwork for millions of people to accomplish things. But, that’s very different from taking credit for everything.
Second, we’ve studied the biographies of many politicians. They have illusions about themselves. I read a phrase when I was a boy. Someone said: “All the glory of the world fits in a kernel of corn.” Believe me! That’s one of those phrases that stuck in my mind. Some people tend to be vain. We try to avoid that. Over the course of history, humanity has made many mistakes. If humanity can finally survive its own mistakes, if humanity is capable of stopping the systematic devastation of nature, if within 100 or 200 years humanity is still around—and that’s only possible if values, education, knowledge and culture prevail—then those living in the future will look back at us the way we regard the primitive clans and tribes that began the evolution of society. We’ll be relics for those people 100 years from now. So, I don’t waste my time worrying about “my legacy.”
People are just specks in the universe. We live for a very short time in this world. I do not share the concerns of many other politicians.
What you in America call the legacy. I try to be realistic and rational. People pass away and things pass away. Earning merits is relative, depending on being in the right place at the right time. Many of my comrades died along the way and did not live to see our victory. It pains me to think about them. But, they did not die in vain. Others took their places, and more will follow.
Like Che Guevara, for example. He was such an outstanding person. I knew him well. From our first meeting in Mexico in the wee hours one morning, he became a part of our movement. And he was a doctor by training but he was also a great military strategist. Tremendously generous and selfless.
I’ve said that by the time practically every politician has been forgotten, people will still be talking about artists—Michelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci. The same people who love these artists couldn’t provide the name of even one of their contemporary politicians. You talk about the Seven Wonders of the World. The artist outlives the statesman or politician. Philosophers too, like Aristotle. People still discuss the Odyssey and the Iliad. Poets and artists. Anyone who really wants to be remembered should avoid the thorny grounds of politics and instead go into the arts. Cervantes, Shakespeare. Even Julius Caesar is remembered for the book he wrote about the battles he fought and won in the early days of Rome.
Mitchell: I think you have answered everything. Thank you, Mr. President. I think history will not forget a man who led Cuba for more than four decades.
NBC Editor’s Note: During their formal interview, Castro wore a business suit. But he chose his traditional olive green army fatigues when he escorted Mitchell to some of his government’s most secret sites. One of their first stops: Cuban biological laboratories—the perfect setting for him to angrily deny U.S. charges he may be secretly producing germ weapons:
Castro: The problem here is not whether the equipment can be used to create one thing or another. But it totally lacks common sense. Absolutely. It makes no sense to use all these resources to theoretically produce biological weapons. And the scientists would not be willing to do that. Our people have been trained to discover vaccines and medicines. So it is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t care about such charges, because it’s stupid to think we would spend our resources on that. Those accusations have been made in bad faith. The ones making those charges know they are lying. They should be ignored and I ignore them.
Mitchell: They say the same technology could be use for evil purposes.
Castro: We are producing vaccines to protect our people. We don’t have to account to anyone. The fact that we let the Center for Disease Control and other scientists come here was to see for themselves. For dozens of years, we have been the victim of all kinds of biological attacks. Of course, we defend ourselves—with our doctors and our health care system. It makes no sense for us to begin producing the same weapons. That would even present a danger to our own people. A risk. It makes no sense to try and create a useless weapon against an enemy that is a thousand times more powerful. Saying we produce those weapons really insults our people’s intelligence. When they made those charges, we protested in a statement. We ridiculed them. We are too old, Andrea, to fear slander, lies and threats.
Mitchell: Does it concern you, Mr. President, that you could export to Iran, which is one of the contracts, and Iran could use what they receive from you, the technology, for bad purposes?
Castro: When you export a product, you cannot extract just anything from that product. We have some joint ventures to produce vaccines. Specific vaccines. Vaccines against Hepatitis B, interferon. These are very specific products, so it’s a ridiculous charge.
Mitchell: The Cuban economy is still communist—under state control. But, perhaps nothing better symbolizes the potential for economic change in Cuba than a grain mill now grinding Kansas wheat—the first to be imported under a humanitarian waiver to the U.S. embargo in four decades.
Do you want this to be the beginning of more with America?
Castro: There’s a growing number of Americans who want to trade with Cuba. The U.S. Congress passed quite a rational bill. But, in the end, the enemies of that bill began adding amendments and more amendments until they whittled it down to practically nothing. They set very difficult trade conditions. For example, we had to apply for a license for every product every time. That made it nearly impossible to import anything from the U.S.
On the other hand, it was humiliating. And, on top of that, too many strings attached. But, after the tragedy of 9-11, we offered our help to the American people. We offered our airports. Then in November, we were hit by a devastating hurricane that destroyed thousands of homes. Many people suffered. The U.S. Administration offered us this humanitarian assistance. And, our policy is to reciprocate to every positive gesture with one of our own. The hurricane depleted our grain reserves. We needed to replenish them. We agreed to buy food. We did not want to receive it as charity. Almost 870 thousand tons of products will arrive from the United States this year. We have contracted more than one million tons next year. We’ve been paying in cash. Some people said we wouldn’t pay. We have paid without a second’s delay. Of course we need to tread slowly along this path. We need to be cautious because we cannot be tied to only one source of supplies. It would be too risky so we continue purchasing commodities from our traditional suppliers.
Mitchell: Mr. President, I wanted to ask you, while we are talking about the economy, you have had to restructure the sugar industry. And one out of five workers are losing their jobs. You’ve cut 156 to 71 mills. What can you do for the unemployed?
Castro: None of them have been laid off. We continue to pay their full wages. And we send them to school.
Mitchell: How can Cuba afford to support these people?
Castro: With part of the money we save by not producing sugar due to sugar’s very low prices and the very high cost of the fuel. Our sugar harvest is completely mechanized, demanding a lot of fuel. And those mills were anything but efficient. It cost us more to produce sugar than what we could sell it for. That’s why we had to close those sugar mills. This restructuring meant closing 70 sugar mills that were unprofitable. We have left 71 that are cost efficient.
Mitchell: What will happen to those workers?
Castro: The workers are very happy because they continue to receive their full salaries and are being re-trained to work in industries that pay more. They are not receiving unemployment benefits. People on unemployment can be quite miserable. It undermines their self-esteem. In this case, it’s quite the opposite. People are being paid to study and be retrained. So, the sugar industry was so unproductive, that we can continue to pay these workers and still save money. That’s the secret.
NBC Editor’s Note: During the two days in Cuba, one visit overshadowed the rest. Castro showed NBC News a new computer college—built on the ruins of a top secret Russian spy station that eavesdropped on America until this past August. In a classroom once used by the KGB, Mitchell asks Castro about his spy at the Pentagon for 18 years—Ana Montes, who pleaded guilty to espionage and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Mitchell: You had a famous spy at the Pentagon?
Castro: No. I heard that she disagreed with the aggressions against Cuba, the blockade (embargo) and she spontaneously cooperated without being paid. It was a matter of conscience. She passed on some information, not strategic information. Just information of interest to Cuba.
What could we do? I think it was brave on her part, deciding to cooperate because she opposed U.S. policy. How many people in America might feel like that? Not all of them do the same. Their reactions are different. That’s what I’ve read in the newspapers.
Mitchell: But to you she is not a spy. She is a patriot.
Castro: I think she’s a noble, kind American opposed to a blockade that’s lasted over 40 years, plus all the terrorist actions committed against Cuba. Somebody who is capable of reacting that way is an exceptional person. I have not met her, nor have I been updated on the situation. This is what I have read about her. These are the statements she made at the trial and afterwards. She deserves to be respected and admired.
—MSNBC, January 23, 2003
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<p class="storyheadline">Hard and Obvious Realities</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
<div class="feature">
<p>Because of its importance, I am prioritizing this subject, among others.</p>
<p>I am not going to deny that the prerogatives of power, whether real, relative or fictitious, have an influence on human beings, because they were all educated this way, right from the remotest of times of the species.</p>
<p>I did not arrive in just a minute at what I am thinking today about power, but I consider that this is a matter of consistent thinking. I attribute the modest contribution of our Revolution to the fact that our responses to questions have never regressed, despite the harsh reality imposed upon us by the empire’s brutal blockade.</p>
<p>In the reflection published on July 31st, I explained what it meant for me to have spent a year gathering information and meditating in depth on the vital problems which today threaten our species as never before.</p>
<p>On July 24th, the Russian news agency<i> Ria Novosti</i> published the following information:</p>
<p> “Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, a defense expert, stated that the main instrument of the U.S. policy is the economic, financial, technological and military dictate.</p>
<p>“By implementing this, the U.S. is trying to secure the world’s hegemony for itself. Its national security strategy explicitly indicates the necessity of guaranteeing sustainable access, in other words, controlled access, to the key regions of the planet, strategic communications and global resources. It is a strategy that has been turned into a law, and this brings us to the conclusion that in the future the United States will face even tougher conflicts with Russia, China and India.</p>
<p>“Washington insists on building a system capable of neutralizing the nuclear potential of Moscow and Peking, its strategic rivals, in order to achieve military superiority. The United States wants to deploy its anti-missile shield not just in Europe but also in other parts of the world, to see what is going on in Russia and China. Likewise, it is seeking to increase its offensive arsenal at a pace that surpasses even that which was followed during the Cold War.</p>
<p>“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO lost the status it had as a defensive organization when it was founded in 1949, and was transformed into a powerful and aggressive instrument at the service of the world oligarchy, eager to dominate the world. The new strategic concept of the Alliance, approved on April 1999 as a result of the efforts made by the United States, comprises new functions and expands its sphere of responsibilities to include the entire world, not just the North Atlantic. The current Secretary General of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, frequently visits Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The Alliance has started to ignore International Law and the UN Security Council. Meanwhile, the United States promotes the expansion of NATO and refuses to ratify the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), taking on the right to act outside of any limitations and disposing of troops as it wishes.</p>
<p>“The United States would do anything in its power to prevent Russia from being an autonomous player. The debates on anti-missile defense, Iran and Kosovo, have not generated any formulas for compromise.</p>
<p>“It is important for Russia to consolidate its positions and recover its geopolitical potential. Early in the 1970’s, when Moscow had achieved nuclear parity with Washington, the latter became aware of the fact that it could not beat Moscow militarily and accepted to negotiate on equal terms. Consequently, in 1972, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT) as well as all other subsequent Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties (SALT) were signed. Strength is the only thing that the United States cares about. If it feels to be in a stronger position, it will never make concessions to anyone.</p>
<p>“In order to neutralize the plans for world hegemony it is necessary to build an alternative pole, and we already have the foundations to do so: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).</p>
<p>“In fact, it appears to be rather incorrect to speak about the United States strength. The United States has military power, a vigorous economy and an enormous amount of hard currency, which it can mint in unlimited quantities, but the geopolitical level of the country is extremely low. The United States inspires very little political confidence in the rest of the world.</p>
<p>“In 1999, China and Russia stated before the UN General Assembly the need to preserve the Anti Missile Defense Treaty of 1972. All nations voted in favor of the proposal except for four: the United States, Israel, Albania and Micronesia. The result bears witness to the United States’ total international isolation.</p>
<p>“Without the participation of Russia, it would be impossible to resolve the situation that has taken shape in the Middle East, the Balkans, the Korean Peninsula and other regions of this planet. This also holds true for China, which is able to [counter] the pressures exerted by the United States. China enjoys great prestige in the world; it has a powerful economy and a strong currency.</p>
<p>“The SCO ought to recruit new allies and combine the potential of those countries, which want to and are capable of implementing an autonomous policy. First, it is necessary to officially proclaim the rejection [of U.S.] world hegemony. Second, China and Russia must denounce the deployment of the U.S. anti-missile defense system before the UN Security Council, as an action altering the architecture of global security and threatening the entire international community. China, India and Russia could form a united front in the face of the United States’ dictates. It is also possible to propose the stabilization of the global financial system as a task. Within the SCO framework, a novel philosophy could be formulated, based on the harmony among civilizations and on the rational use of natural resources. The majority of States will surely support such measures, of that I am convinced. Thus, a new political pole will come into being, the pole of peace. The SCO mission is to create a new model of development for human civilization.</p>
<p>“Only an alliance of civilizations could oppose the United States’ empire: the Russian civilization whose orbit includes the Community of Independent States (CIS); the Chinese, the Indian, the Islamic and the Latin American civilizations. It is an immense space where we could create more equitable markets, our own stable financial system, our collective security mechanisms and our philosophy, giving priority to the intellectual development of man in the face of modern western civilization, which emphasizes material goods, and measures success by the amounts of mansions, yachts and restaurants people have. Our mission is to reorient the world towards justice and intellectual and spiritual growth.”</p>
<p>So much for Ivashov’s essential thoughts, as published by<i> Ria Novosti.</i></p>
<p>We have been able to find out that General Leonid Ivashov is Vice President of the Academy on Geopolitical Affairs; he was Secretary of the Council of Defense Ministers of the Community of Independent States (CIS) and Chief of the Military Cooperation Department at the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense. On September 11, 2001, the day when the tragic events in New York occurred, which served as a pretext to define the basis of the genocidal policy of the United States almost 6 years ago, General Ivashov was the Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. He is a truly well informed man. It is worthwhile that our people know about his views.</p>
<p>The concern, which the Cuban Revolution has always had about the education of the people, is obvious. Judging by my own experience, I soon came across the idea that only conscience could prevail over the instincts that govern us. Technological advances today speak of the possibility of manipulating the functions of the cells in the human brain. What good would all this do in a world ruled by the commercial value of goods and services? Who will have the final say in this regard? By this means and through the shameless brain drain, a phenomenon we should adamantly continue to discuss, the most valuable part of the human being could be destroyed: a human being’s education via its conscience.</p>
<p>Laboratories can produce medicines to save lives, which could be something of great social value provided such products are available to all. But laboratories are also manufacturing all kinds of weapons that could put an end to human life.</p>
<p>Commercial advertising and consumerism are incompatible with the survival of the species. After all possible calculations, you will realize that natural resources, space, climate, weather, and the system cannot yield any other outcome, given their pace and the direction in which they are moving.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>—<i>Znet</i>, August 3, 2007</p>
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Hard and Obvious Realities
By Fidel Castro Ruz
Because of its importance, I am prioritizing this subject, among others.
I am not going to deny that the prerogatives of power, whether real, relative or fictitious, have an influence on human beings, because they were all educated this way, right from the remotest of times of the species.
I did not arrive in just a minute at what I am thinking today about power, but I consider that this is a matter of consistent thinking. I attribute the modest contribution of our Revolution to the fact that our responses to questions have never regressed, despite the harsh reality imposed upon us by the empire’s brutal blockade.
In the reflection published on July 31st, I explained what it meant for me to have spent a year gathering information and meditating in depth on the vital problems which today threaten our species as never before.
On July 24th, the Russian news agency Ria Novosti published the following information:
“Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, a defense expert, stated that the main instrument of the U.S. policy is the economic, financial, technological and military dictate.
“By implementing this, the U.S. is trying to secure the world’s hegemony for itself. Its national security strategy explicitly indicates the necessity of guaranteeing sustainable access, in other words, controlled access, to the key regions of the planet, strategic communications and global resources. It is a strategy that has been turned into a law, and this brings us to the conclusion that in the future the United States will face even tougher conflicts with Russia, China and India.
“Washington insists on building a system capable of neutralizing the nuclear potential of Moscow and Peking, its strategic rivals, in order to achieve military superiority. The United States wants to deploy its anti-missile shield not just in Europe but also in other parts of the world, to see what is going on in Russia and China. Likewise, it is seeking to increase its offensive arsenal at a pace that surpasses even that which was followed during the Cold War.
“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO lost the status it had as a defensive organization when it was founded in 1949, and was transformed into a powerful and aggressive instrument at the service of the world oligarchy, eager to dominate the world. The new strategic concept of the Alliance, approved on April 1999 as a result of the efforts made by the United States, comprises new functions and expands its sphere of responsibilities to include the entire world, not just the North Atlantic. The current Secretary General of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, frequently visits Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The Alliance has started to ignore International Law and the UN Security Council. Meanwhile, the United States promotes the expansion of NATO and refuses to ratify the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), taking on the right to act outside of any limitations and disposing of troops as it wishes.
“The United States would do anything in its power to prevent Russia from being an autonomous player. The debates on anti-missile defense, Iran and Kosovo, have not generated any formulas for compromise.
“It is important for Russia to consolidate its positions and recover its geopolitical potential. Early in the 1970’s, when Moscow had achieved nuclear parity with Washington, the latter became aware of the fact that it could not beat Moscow militarily and accepted to negotiate on equal terms. Consequently, in 1972, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT) as well as all other subsequent Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties (SALT) were signed. Strength is the only thing that the United States cares about. If it feels to be in a stronger position, it will never make concessions to anyone.
“In order to neutralize the plans for world hegemony it is necessary to build an alternative pole, and we already have the foundations to do so: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
“In fact, it appears to be rather incorrect to speak about the United States strength. The United States has military power, a vigorous economy and an enormous amount of hard currency, which it can mint in unlimited quantities, but the geopolitical level of the country is extremely low. The United States inspires very little political confidence in the rest of the world.
“In 1999, China and Russia stated before the UN General Assembly the need to preserve the Anti Missile Defense Treaty of 1972. All nations voted in favor of the proposal except for four: the United States, Israel, Albania and Micronesia. The result bears witness to the United States’ total international isolation.
“Without the participation of Russia, it would be impossible to resolve the situation that has taken shape in the Middle East, the Balkans, the Korean Peninsula and other regions of this planet. This also holds true for China, which is able to [counter] the pressures exerted by the United States. China enjoys great prestige in the world; it has a powerful economy and a strong currency.
“The SCO ought to recruit new allies and combine the potential of those countries, which want to and are capable of implementing an autonomous policy. First, it is necessary to officially proclaim the rejection [of U.S.] world hegemony. Second, China and Russia must denounce the deployment of the U.S. anti-missile defense system before the UN Security Council, as an action altering the architecture of global security and threatening the entire international community. China, India and Russia could form a united front in the face of the United States’ dictates. It is also possible to propose the stabilization of the global financial system as a task. Within the SCO framework, a novel philosophy could be formulated, based on the harmony among civilizations and on the rational use of natural resources. The majority of States will surely support such measures, of that I am convinced. Thus, a new political pole will come into being, the pole of peace. The SCO mission is to create a new model of development for human civilization.
“Only an alliance of civilizations could oppose the United States’ empire: the Russian civilization whose orbit includes the Community of Independent States (CIS); the Chinese, the Indian, the Islamic and the Latin American civilizations. It is an immense space where we could create more equitable markets, our own stable financial system, our collective security mechanisms and our philosophy, giving priority to the intellectual development of man in the face of modern western civilization, which emphasizes material goods, and measures success by the amounts of mansions, yachts and restaurants people have. Our mission is to reorient the world towards justice and intellectual and spiritual growth.”
So much for Ivashov’s essential thoughts, as published by Ria Novosti.
We have been able to find out that General Leonid Ivashov is Vice President of the Academy on Geopolitical Affairs; he was Secretary of the Council of Defense Ministers of the Community of Independent States (CIS) and Chief of the Military Cooperation Department at the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense. On September 11, 2001, the day when the tragic events in New York occurred, which served as a pretext to define the basis of the genocidal policy of the United States almost 6 years ago, General Ivashov was the Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. He is a truly well informed man. It is worthwhile that our people know about his views.
The concern, which the Cuban Revolution has always had about the education of the people, is obvious. Judging by my own experience, I soon came across the idea that only conscience could prevail over the instincts that govern us. Technological advances today speak of the possibility of manipulating the functions of the cells in the human brain. What good would all this do in a world ruled by the commercial value of goods and services? Who will have the final say in this regard? By this means and through the shameless brain drain, a phenomenon we should adamantly continue to discuss, the most valuable part of the human being could be destroyed: a human being’s education via its conscience.
Laboratories can produce medicines to save lives, which could be something of great social value provided such products are available to all. But laboratories are also manufacturing all kinds of weapons that could put an end to human life.
Commercial advertising and consumerism are incompatible with the survival of the species. After all possible calculations, you will realize that natural resources, space, climate, weather, and the system cannot yield any other outcome, given their pace and the direction in which they are moving.
—Znet, August 3, 2007
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<p class="storyheadline">The Empire’s Hypocritical Politics</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p>
<p>It would be dishonest of me to remain silent after hearing the speech Obama delivered on the afternoon of May 23 at the Cuban American National Foundation created by Ronald Reagan. I listened to his speech, as I did McCain’s and Bush’s. I feel no resentment towards him, for he is not responsible for the crimes perpetrated against Cuba and humanity. Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries an enormous favor. I have therefore no reservations about criticizing him and about expressing my points of view on his words frankly. </p>
<p>What were Obama’s statements? </p>
<p>“Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy… This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century—of elections that are anything but free or fair… I won’t stand for this injustice, you won’t stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba,” he told annexationists, adding: “It’s time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime… I will maintain the embargo.” </p>
<p>The content of these declarations by this strong candidate to the U.S. presidency spares me the work of having to explain the reason for this reflection.</p>
<p>José Hernandez, one of the Cuban American National Foundation directives who Obama praises in his speech, was none other than the owner of the 50-calibre automatic rifle, equipped with telescopic and infrared sights, which was confiscated, by chance, along with other deadly weapons while being transported by sea to Venezuela, where the Foundation had planned to assassinate the writer of these lines at an international meeting held in Margarita, in the Venezuelan state of Nueva Esparta.</p>
<p>Pepe Hernández’ group wanted to renegotiate a former pact with Clinton, betrayed by Mas Canosa’s clan, who secured Bush’s electoral victory in 2000 through fraud, because the latter had promised to assassinate Castro, something they all happily embraced. These are the kinds of political tricks inherent to the United States’ decadent and contradictory system.</p>
<p> Presidential candidate Obama’s speech may be formulated as follows: hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable hand-outs and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable way of life behind it.</p>
<p> How does he plan to address the extremely serious problem of the food crisis? The world’s grains must be distributed among human beings, pets and fish—which become smaller every year and more scarce in the seas that have been over-exploited by the large trawlers which no international organization could get in the way of. Producing meat from gas and oil is no easy feat. Even Obama overestimates technology’s potential in the fight against climate change, though he is more conscious of the risks and the limited margin of time than Bush. He could seek the advice of Gore, who is also a Democrat and is no longer a candidate, as he is aware of the accelerated pace at which global warming is advancing. His close political rival Bill Clinton, who is not running for the presidency, an expert on extra-territorial laws like the Helms-Burton and Torricelli Acts, can advice him on an issue like the blockade, which he promised to lift and never did.</p>
<p>What did he say in his speech in Miami, this man who is doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency? “For two hundred years,” he said, “the United States has made it clear that we won’t stand for foreign intervention in our hemisphere. But every day, all across the Americas, there is a different kind of struggle—not against foreign armies, but against the deadly threat of hunger and thirst, disease and despair. That is not a future that we have to accept—not for the child in Port au Prince or the family in the highlands of Peru. We can do better. We must do better… We cannot ignore suffering to our south, nor stand for the globalization of the empty stomach.” </p>
<p>A magnificent description of imperialist globalization: the globalization of empty stomachs! We ought to thank him for it. But, 200 years ago, Bolivar fought for Latin American unity and, more than 100 years ago, Martí gave his life in the struggle against the annexation of Cuba by the United States. What is the difference between what Monroe proclaimed and what Obama proclaims and resuscitates in his speech two centuries later?</p>
<p>“I will reinstate a Special Envoy for the Americas in my White House who will work with my full support. But we’ll also expand the Foreign Service, and open more consulates in the neglected regions of the Americas. We’ll expand the Peace Corps, and ask more young Americans to go abroad to deepen the trust and the ties among our people,” he said near the end, adding: “Together, we can choose the future over the past.” A beautiful phrase, for it attests to the idea, or at least the fear, that history makes figures what they are and not the other way around.</p>
<p>Today, the United States have nothing of the spirit behind the Philadelphia declaration of principles formulated by the 13 colonies that rebelled against English colonialism. Today, they are a gigantic empire undreamed of by the country’s founders at the time. Nothing, however, was to change for the natives and the slaves. The former were exterminated as the nation expanded; the latter continued to be auctioned at the marketplace—men, women and children—for nearly a century, despite the fact that “all men are born free and equal,” as the Declaration of Independence, affirms. The world’s objective conditions favored the development of that system.</p>
<p>In his speech, Obama portrays the Cuban revolution as anti-democratic and lacking in respect for freedom and human rights. It is the exact same argument, which, almost without exception, U.S. administrations have used again and again to justify their crimes against our country. The blockade, in and of itself, is an act of genocide. I don’t want to see U.S. children inculcated with those shameful values.</p>
<p>An armed revolution in our country might not have been needed without the military interventions, Platt Amendment and economic colonialism visited upon Cuba.</p>
<p>The revolution was the result of imperial domination. We cannot be accused of having imposed it upon the country. The true changes could have and ought to have been brought about in the United States. Its own workers, more than a century ago, voiced the demand for an eight-hour work shift, which stemmed from the development of productive forces.</p>
<p>The first thing the leaders of the Cuban revolution learned from Martí was to believe in and act on behalf of an organization founded for the purposes of bringing about a revolution. We were always bound by previous forms of power and, following the institutionalization of this organization, we were elected by more than 90 percent of voters, as has become customary in Cuba, a process which does not in the least resemble the ridiculous levels of electoral participation which, many a time, as in the case of the United States, stay short of 50 percent of the voters. No small and blockaded country like ours would have been able to hold its ground for so long on the basis of ambition, vanity, deceit or the abuse of power, the kind of power its neighbor has. To state otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of our heroic people.</p>
<p> I am not questioning Obama’s great intelligence, his debate skills or his work ethic. He is a talented orator and is ahead of his rivals in the electoral race. I feel sympathy for his wife and little girls, who accompany him and give him encouragement every Tuesday. It is indeed a touching human spectacle. Nevertheless, I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions. I do not expect answers; I wish only to raise them for the record. </p>
<p>1. Is it right for the president of the United States to order the assassination of any one person in the world, whatever the pretext may be? </p>
<p>2. Is it ethical for the president of the United States to order the torture of other human beings?</p>
<p>3. Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the United States as an instrument to bring about peace on the planet?</p>
<p>4. Is an Adjustment Act, applied as punishment on only one country, Cuba, in order to destabilize it, good and honorable, even when it costs innocent children and mothers their lives? If it is good, why is this right not automatically granted to Haitians, Dominicans, and other peoples of the Caribbean, and why isn’t the same Act applied to Mexicans and people from Central and South America, who die like flies against the Mexican border wall or in the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific? </p>
<p>5. Can the United States do without immigrants, who grow vegetables, fruits, almonds and other delicacies for U.S. citizens? Who would sweep their streets, work as servants in their homes or do the worst and lowest-paid jobs? </p>
<p>6. Are crackdowns on illegal residents fair, even as they affect children born in the United States? </p>
<p>7. Are the brain-drain and the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds in poor countries moral and justifiable? </p>
<p>8. You state, as I pointed out at the beginning of this reflection, that your country had long ago warned European powers that it would not tolerate any intervention in the hemisphere, reiterating that this right be respected while demanding the right to intervene anywhere in the world with the aid of hundreds of military bases and naval, aerial and spatial forces distributed across the planet. I ask: is that the way in which the United States expresses its respect for freedom, democracy and human rights? </p>
<p>9. Is it fair to stage pre-emptive attacks on sixty or more dark corners of the world, as Bush calls them, whatever the pretext may be? </p>
<p>10. Is it honorable and sound to invest millions and millions of dollars in the military industrial complex, to produce weapons that can destroy life on earth several times over?</p>
<p>Before judging our country, you should know that Cuba, with its education, health, sports, culture and sciences programs, implemented not only in its own territory but also in other poor countries around the world, and the blood that has been shed in acts of solidarity towards other peoples, in spite of the economic and financial blockade and the aggression of your powerful country, is proof that much can be done with very little. Not even our closest ally, the Soviet Union, was able to achieve what we have.</p>
<p>The only form of cooperation the United States can offer other nations consist in the sending of military professionals to those countries. It cannot offer anything else, for it lacks a sufficient number of people willing to sacrifice themselves for others and offer substantial aid to a country in need (though Cuba has known and relied on the cooperation of excellent U.S. doctors.) They are not to blame for this, for society does not inculcate such values in them on a massive scale.</p>
<p>We have never subordinated cooperation with other countries to ideological requirements. We offered the United States our help when hurricane Katrina lashed the city of New Orleans. Our internationalist medical brigade bears the glorious name of Henry Reeve, a young man, born in the United States, who fought and died for Cuba’s sovereignty in our first war of independence.</p>
<p>Our revolution can mobilize tens of thousands of doctors and health technicians. It can mobilize an equally vast number of teachers and citizens, who are willing to travel to any corner of the world to fulfill any noble purpose, not to usurp people’s rights or take possession of raw materials.</p>
<p>The good will and determination of people constitute limitless resources that cannot be kept and would not fit in a bank’s vault. They cannot spring from the hypocritical politics of an empire.</p>
<p><span class="italics">—Granma,</span> May 25, 2008</p>
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The Empire’s Hypocritical Politics
By Fidel Castro Ruz
It would be dishonest of me to remain silent after hearing the speech Obama delivered on the afternoon of May 23 at the Cuban American National Foundation created by Ronald Reagan. I listened to his speech, as I did McCain’s and Bush’s. I feel no resentment towards him, for he is not responsible for the crimes perpetrated against Cuba and humanity. Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries an enormous favor. I have therefore no reservations about criticizing him and about expressing my points of view on his words frankly.
What were Obama’s statements?
“Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy… This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century—of elections that are anything but free or fair… I won’t stand for this injustice, you won’t stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba,” he told annexationists, adding: “It’s time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime… I will maintain the embargo.”
The content of these declarations by this strong candidate to the U.S. presidency spares me the work of having to explain the reason for this reflection.
José Hernandez, one of the Cuban American National Foundation directives who Obama praises in his speech, was none other than the owner of the 50-calibre automatic rifle, equipped with telescopic and infrared sights, which was confiscated, by chance, along with other deadly weapons while being transported by sea to Venezuela, where the Foundation had planned to assassinate the writer of these lines at an international meeting held in Margarita, in the Venezuelan state of Nueva Esparta.
Pepe Hernández’ group wanted to renegotiate a former pact with Clinton, betrayed by Mas Canosa’s clan, who secured Bush’s electoral victory in 2000 through fraud, because the latter had promised to assassinate Castro, something they all happily embraced. These are the kinds of political tricks inherent to the United States’ decadent and contradictory system.
Presidential candidate Obama’s speech may be formulated as follows: hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable hand-outs and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable way of life behind it.
How does he plan to address the extremely serious problem of the food crisis? The world’s grains must be distributed among human beings, pets and fish—which become smaller every year and more scarce in the seas that have been over-exploited by the large trawlers which no international organization could get in the way of. Producing meat from gas and oil is no easy feat. Even Obama overestimates technology’s potential in the fight against climate change, though he is more conscious of the risks and the limited margin of time than Bush. He could seek the advice of Gore, who is also a Democrat and is no longer a candidate, as he is aware of the accelerated pace at which global warming is advancing. His close political rival Bill Clinton, who is not running for the presidency, an expert on extra-territorial laws like the Helms-Burton and Torricelli Acts, can advice him on an issue like the blockade, which he promised to lift and never did.
What did he say in his speech in Miami, this man who is doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency? “For two hundred years,” he said, “the United States has made it clear that we won’t stand for foreign intervention in our hemisphere. But every day, all across the Americas, there is a different kind of struggle—not against foreign armies, but against the deadly threat of hunger and thirst, disease and despair. That is not a future that we have to accept—not for the child in Port au Prince or the family in the highlands of Peru. We can do better. We must do better… We cannot ignore suffering to our south, nor stand for the globalization of the empty stomach.”
A magnificent description of imperialist globalization: the globalization of empty stomachs! We ought to thank him for it. But, 200 years ago, Bolivar fought for Latin American unity and, more than 100 years ago, Martí gave his life in the struggle against the annexation of Cuba by the United States. What is the difference between what Monroe proclaimed and what Obama proclaims and resuscitates in his speech two centuries later?
“I will reinstate a Special Envoy for the Americas in my White House who will work with my full support. But we’ll also expand the Foreign Service, and open more consulates in the neglected regions of the Americas. We’ll expand the Peace Corps, and ask more young Americans to go abroad to deepen the trust and the ties among our people,” he said near the end, adding: “Together, we can choose the future over the past.” A beautiful phrase, for it attests to the idea, or at least the fear, that history makes figures what they are and not the other way around.
Today, the United States have nothing of the spirit behind the Philadelphia declaration of principles formulated by the 13 colonies that rebelled against English colonialism. Today, they are a gigantic empire undreamed of by the country’s founders at the time. Nothing, however, was to change for the natives and the slaves. The former were exterminated as the nation expanded; the latter continued to be auctioned at the marketplace—men, women and children—for nearly a century, despite the fact that “all men are born free and equal,” as the Declaration of Independence, affirms. The world’s objective conditions favored the development of that system.
In his speech, Obama portrays the Cuban revolution as anti-democratic and lacking in respect for freedom and human rights. It is the exact same argument, which, almost without exception, U.S. administrations have used again and again to justify their crimes against our country. The blockade, in and of itself, is an act of genocide. I don’t want to see U.S. children inculcated with those shameful values.
An armed revolution in our country might not have been needed without the military interventions, Platt Amendment and economic colonialism visited upon Cuba.
The revolution was the result of imperial domination. We cannot be accused of having imposed it upon the country. The true changes could have and ought to have been brought about in the United States. Its own workers, more than a century ago, voiced the demand for an eight-hour work shift, which stemmed from the development of productive forces.
The first thing the leaders of the Cuban revolution learned from Martí was to believe in and act on behalf of an organization founded for the purposes of bringing about a revolution. We were always bound by previous forms of power and, following the institutionalization of this organization, we were elected by more than 90 percent of voters, as has become customary in Cuba, a process which does not in the least resemble the ridiculous levels of electoral participation which, many a time, as in the case of the United States, stay short of 50 percent of the voters. No small and blockaded country like ours would have been able to hold its ground for so long on the basis of ambition, vanity, deceit or the abuse of power, the kind of power its neighbor has. To state otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of our heroic people.
I am not questioning Obama’s great intelligence, his debate skills or his work ethic. He is a talented orator and is ahead of his rivals in the electoral race. I feel sympathy for his wife and little girls, who accompany him and give him encouragement every Tuesday. It is indeed a touching human spectacle. Nevertheless, I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions. I do not expect answers; I wish only to raise them for the record.
1. Is it right for the president of the United States to order the assassination of any one person in the world, whatever the pretext may be?
2. Is it ethical for the president of the United States to order the torture of other human beings?
3. Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the United States as an instrument to bring about peace on the planet?
4. Is an Adjustment Act, applied as punishment on only one country, Cuba, in order to destabilize it, good and honorable, even when it costs innocent children and mothers their lives? If it is good, why is this right not automatically granted to Haitians, Dominicans, and other peoples of the Caribbean, and why isn’t the same Act applied to Mexicans and people from Central and South America, who die like flies against the Mexican border wall or in the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific?
5. Can the United States do without immigrants, who grow vegetables, fruits, almonds and other delicacies for U.S. citizens? Who would sweep their streets, work as servants in their homes or do the worst and lowest-paid jobs?
6. Are crackdowns on illegal residents fair, even as they affect children born in the United States?
7. Are the brain-drain and the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds in poor countries moral and justifiable?
8. You state, as I pointed out at the beginning of this reflection, that your country had long ago warned European powers that it would not tolerate any intervention in the hemisphere, reiterating that this right be respected while demanding the right to intervene anywhere in the world with the aid of hundreds of military bases and naval, aerial and spatial forces distributed across the planet. I ask: is that the way in which the United States expresses its respect for freedom, democracy and human rights?
9. Is it fair to stage pre-emptive attacks on sixty or more dark corners of the world, as Bush calls them, whatever the pretext may be?
10. Is it honorable and sound to invest millions and millions of dollars in the military industrial complex, to produce weapons that can destroy life on earth several times over?
Before judging our country, you should know that Cuba, with its education, health, sports, culture and sciences programs, implemented not only in its own territory but also in other poor countries around the world, and the blood that has been shed in acts of solidarity towards other peoples, in spite of the economic and financial blockade and the aggression of your powerful country, is proof that much can be done with very little. Not even our closest ally, the Soviet Union, was able to achieve what we have.
The only form of cooperation the United States can offer other nations consist in the sending of military professionals to those countries. It cannot offer anything else, for it lacks a sufficient number of people willing to sacrifice themselves for others and offer substantial aid to a country in need (though Cuba has known and relied on the cooperation of excellent U.S. doctors.) They are not to blame for this, for society does not inculcate such values in them on a massive scale.
We have never subordinated cooperation with other countries to ideological requirements. We offered the United States our help when hurricane Katrina lashed the city of New Orleans. Our internationalist medical brigade bears the glorious name of Henry Reeve, a young man, born in the United States, who fought and died for Cuba’s sovereignty in our first war of independence.
Our revolution can mobilize tens of thousands of doctors and health technicians. It can mobilize an equally vast number of teachers and citizens, who are willing to travel to any corner of the world to fulfill any noble purpose, not to usurp people’s rights or take possession of raw materials.
The good will and determination of people constitute limitless resources that cannot be kept and would not fit in a bank’s vault. They cannot spring from the hypocritical politics of an empire.
—Granma, May 25, 2008
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1958.04.14-april-1958 | <body>
<p class="title">Fidel Castro Internet Archive</p>
<hr>
<h1>First Speech by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz on Radio Rebelde, April 14, 1958</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> April 14, 1958
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en and Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> David Walters, 2019
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
</p>
<hr>
<p>To public opinion in Cuba and to the free people in Latin America.</p>
<p>I have been marching day and night without rest from the Column No. 1area of operations under my command, to be present at this appointment with the rebel radio station.</p>
<p>It’s hard for me to leave my men at this time, even for just a few days. But speaking to the people is also a duty and a need that I could not fail to fulfill.</p>
<p>As hateful as tyranny is in all its aspects, none of them is so irritating and crudely cynical as the absolute control that it has imposed on all the media for disseminating printed, radio and television news.</p>
<p>Censure is so disgusting in itself, and it becomes much more disgusting when it’s used not only to try but also to hope to hide the truth from the people about what has happened, through the partial and exclusive use of all common means of communication, to make the people believe whatever better suits the safety of their executioners.</p>
<p>While they are concealing the truth at all costs, they report lies by all means.</p>
<p>The people do not hear news other than the dispatch by the Staff of the Dictatorship. The outrage of censorship is imposed on the press together with the outrage of lies. And those same newspapers and broadcasters, upon which a severe and vigilant inquisitor prevents the publication of any real news, are obliged to inform and issue all that the dictatorship reports. The organs of opinion are snatching the people to turn them into vehicles of oppression. Tyranny constantly tries to deceive the people, as if the mere fact of denying any information, which does not go to the people from official sources, were sufficient to invalidate all their information.</p>
<p>And whom will the people believe? The criminals who tyrannize the people, the traitors who snatched the Constitution and the people’s liberties, those who censure the press and prevent the free publication of the most insignificant news? Clumsy folks, if you think about it, because you can force a people to everything, but never to believe!</p>
<p>When the real history of this struggle will be written and every event that took place with the official dispatches of the regime will be confronted, then it will be understood to what extent tyranny is capable of corrupting and debasing the institutions of the Republic, to what extent the forces at the service of evil are capable of reaching the extremes of criminality and barbarism, to what extent a mercenary soldiery without ideology can be deceived by its own chiefs. What does it matter after all to the despots and executioners of the people to deny history? What worries them is to get out of the way and postpone the inevitable fall.</p>
<p>I do not think that the General Staff lies in shame.</p>
<p>The General Staff of the Cuban Army has shown it has no shame whatsoever.</p>
<p>The General Staff lies by interest; it lies to the people and to the army; it lies to avoid demoralization in the army’s ranks; the General Staff lies because it refuses to recognize before the world its military incapacity, its condition of mercenary chiefs, sold out to the most dishonorable cause that can be defended; it lies because it has been unable, despite its tens of thousands of soldiers and the immense material resources, to defeat a handful of men who rose up to defend the rights of the people. The mercenary rifles of the tyranny crashed against the idealistic rifles that do not collect any salary. Neither military technique, nor the academy, nor the most modern weapons were of any use to them.</p>
<p>The fact is that the military, when they do not defend the country but attack it instead, when they do not defend their people but instead they enslave the people, they cease to be an institution and they become an armed gang; they cease to be soldiers and become delinquents. And they stop deserving not only the salary they wrest from the sweat of the people, but even the sun that covers the earth they have bloodied with dishonor and cowardice.</p>
<p>These same military men who have never defended the Homeland from a foreign enemy, who have never won a medal on the battlefield, who owe their rank to treason, nepotism and crime, issue war dispatches announcing 10, 20, 30 and up to 50 compatriots killed by their homicidal weapons as if they were victories of the Homeland, as if every Cuban killed, because those are the casualties they announce, did not have brothers or children, a wife or parents. There would be enough people to wage a victorious war just with the relatives of those killed compatriots.</p>
<p>We have never murdered any enemy prisoners. We have never abandoned a wounded adversary on the battlefield; that is and always will be for us an honor and a mark of glory; we feel with pain the death of every adversary, even though our war is the fairest of wars because it is the war for freedom.</p>
<p>However, the Cuban people know that the struggle has been waged victoriously; the people of Cuba know that over seventeen months, since we disembarked with a handful of men who knew how to face up to the initial defeat without ceasing their patriotic enterprise, the Revolution has been growing incessantly; what was just a spark only one year ago is today an invincible blaze; the Cuban people know that we’re no longer fighting alone in the Sierra Maestra from Cabo Cruz to Santiago de Cuba, but that there are people also in the Sierra Cristal from Mayarí to Baracoa, in the plain of the Cauto from Bayamo to Victoria de las Tunas, in the province of Las Villas from the Escambray Mountains to the Trinidad Mountains and in the mountains of Pinar del Río; in the very streets of cities and towns the people are fighting heroically; but above all, the people of Cuba know that the will and determination with which we began this fight remains unshakeable, they know that we are an army which emerged from nothing, that adversity does not discourage us, that after each setback the Revolution has reemerged with more strength; they know that the destruction of the Granma expeditionary detachment would not be the end of the fight but the beginning. They know that the spontaneous strike that followed the assassination of our Comrade Frank País did not wipe out the tyranny but it marked the way for the organized strike; that no government can stay in power supported by the pile of corpses with whose blood the dictatorship drowns the new strike, because the hundreds of young people and workers who were killed during these days and the unprecedented repression unleashed against the people does not weaken the Revolution; it makes it stronger, more necessary, more invincible; that the blood spilled makes courage and indignation greater; that every comrade falling in the streets of the cities and on the battlefield awakens in their idealistic brothers an irresistible desire to also give their lives; every comrade who falls awakens the desire to fight in the indolent, it awakens the feeling of the Motherland bleeding for its dignity in the persons who are ambivalent and it awakens sympathy and the adhesion of all the peoples of the Americas.</p>
<p>No, those dispatches by the General Staff announcing clusters of corpses with tones of jubilation do not discourage anyone; they outrage the nation and stimulate it to fight.</p>
<p>They cannot discourage the people, not even when it’s known that they are undertaking the worst of the fight, that enemy troops are being beaten along the line, that the latest victorious battles of our forces were fought four kilometers from Manzanillo in full daylight and in plain sight, imposing enormous casualties on the dictatorship. Let’s not lie to ourselves; our worship of freedom and the decorum of man is the worship of truth as an additional right of the people, something that the despots do not know how to respect or fulfill.</p>
<p>Enemy casualties are in proportion of ten to one with respect to ours since this fight began.</p>
<p>When the General Staff announces the deaths of thirty, forty or even fifty rebels, they are invariably talking about defenseless peasants, arrested in their homes and mercilessly murdered. Many officers who command the dictatorship’s troops in the Sierra Maestra have received their ranks this way. Promoting these assassins because of massacres perpetrated against defenseless compatriots has been put into practice and it has stimulated one of the most repugnant and inhuman procedures that can be conceived of in a war.</p>
<p>There are other heroic deeds of the dictatorship that have nothing to do with courage and military honor.</p>
<p>Desperate and impotent, they have put into practice the criminal tactics of systematically bombing and machine-gunning family homes. This measure, unexpected because of its absurdity, surprised the population living in the north of the Sierra without anti-aircraft shelters, and it has caused many victims.</p>
<p>Last Thursday on April 10th, after the combat at Pozón where a detachment of the dictatorship was completely destroyed as it was leaving Yara to pursue a rebel patrol that had attacked a convoy on the Manzanillo-Bayamo highway, three B-26 aircrafts, a jet and two light aircraft mercilessly attacked the village of Cayo Espino for two hours; there was no military objective there. Not one single house escaped being hit by the shrapnel. An improvised blood bank and hospital in the rearguard with three doctors from the July 26th Moment provided medical care to the wounded who had to wait for night to be transferred. A five-year-old boy bled to death on the way lying on a crudely improvised surgical table, his legs ripped off by a 50-caliber bullet which had also wounded his two little sisters.</p>
<p>No spectacle has impressed us so much as that of the dying boy who, without crying, barely was able to call out to his grandmother to tell her that he had loved her very much, but "I could not love her anymore because I am going to die." It was as if this little child was aware of his sacrifice, as if he understood that he too was dying for detesting those barbarians who attack humble family homes with machine-guns.</p>
<p>Journalists from four countries witnessed, listened to and filmed that scene. Even though they were familiar with the toughness of this fight that event nevertheless infuriated them with indignation. Perhaps they were reminded of their own children. It was difficult to understand how Cuban hands were capable of perpetrating such a crime. What need was there for committing such barbarity? What military purpose could be achieved by attacking that defenseless hamlet many miles away from the scene of combat with machine-guns? What strange design guides the minds of barbarians who use the resources of the nation to carry out those horrors against their own people?</p>
<p>How much cowardice and cruelty of those pilots who, sitting comfortably in their aircraft, without any risk to their lives, murder innocent women and children!</p>
<p>But we have taken note of the day and the hour to demand the punishment they deserve when the moment comes to render accounts, and we mark their names and surnames with indelible stigma so that even their own children are ashamed of them. The pilots who machine-gunned Cayo Espino on April 10 at 3:40 p.m. are war criminals who dishonor the Cuban nation, but not the army which was shameless enough to be responsible for the crime of genocide it is committing against Cuba.</p>
<p>The defeats suffered aren’t revenged in such a way! A revolution is not crushed in such a way! The memory of the dying child will never be erased from the minds of the peasants or those of our men when they go to battle. When the tyranny falls, there in Cayo Espino, we will erect a monument to the child Orestes Gutiérrez Peña, symbol of the innocents who have fallen; it will be a tribute of tender remembrance from our Liberating Army to the heroism of the children in whose minds affection and devotion for our combatants are unanimously present.</p>
<p>And next to the name of the innocent who was murdered, posterity will read the names of the pilots who murdered him. The peasant population has been instructed to construct anti-aircraft shelters urgently against the shrapnel and "napalm" bombs being used by the dictatorship.</p>
<p>If these events can be perpetrated by an armed government against its own citizens and people, it is necessary to understand that mankind has advanced very little in the efforts of protecting people from barbarism. There are the United States, with the weapons for Continental Defense used by its friends, the dictators of America. These dictators will not tire of repeating the lie that we are "communists" to justify sending weapons as if they were the representatives of democracy, dignity and the most sacred rights of the men.</p>
<p>With the word democracy on the lips of tyrants, what a sad and shameless campaign they are carrying out against the oppressed peoples.</p>
<p>It is said that the sale of weapons to the Batista government has been canceled by the US State Department. But the results have not been changed in the least: the United States is selling arms to Somoza and Trujillo; Somoza and Trujillo sell arms to Batista. What does the Organization of American States do? Do the dictators have a right to conspire for massacring the Cuban people? And the democratic governments of America, the leaders and the democratic parties of the Continent, what are they doing with their arms crossed?</p>
<p>If dictators help each other, why shouldn’t the people help each other? Are we not obliged to help the sincere democrats in all the Americas? Have we not paid dearly enough for the sin of our indifference to the concert of tyrants who promote the destruction of our democracies? Is it not clear that Cuba is fighting a battle for the democratic ideal of our continent? Do you not realize that the last dictators have turned Cuba into one of their last trenches? In Cuba one does not fight for the redemption of a single people but for the defense of a principle that concerns America. If the dictators help Batista, it is fair that the peoples of America help Cuba.</p>
<p>On behalf of the people of Cuba who are fighting against the weapons of Batista, Trujillo and Somoza, we demand help from the democratic governments of America. A huge territory on the southern coast of Oriente (Eastern) Province, between Cabo Cruz and Santiago de Cuba, is in the hands of our forces. Weapons that are parachuted in ten kilometers from the coast along that wide area will inevitably fall into our hands without the dictatorship intercepting them. We need automatic rifles, heavy machine guns, bazookas and mortars to advance to the capital. The Provisional Revolutionary Government will defray all the expenses that these shipments cause and the people of Cuba will be eternally grateful. We the Cuban rebels do not ask for food, we do not even ask for medicines; we ask for weapons to fight, to firmly establish in America that the will of a people is more powerful than the consortium of the dictatorship and its mercenary armies.</p>
<p>The revolutionary forces of the July 26th Movement will continue the offensive that began several weeks ago. Communications will be kept interrupted by our forces on the highways and railways of Oriente. The militias of the July 26th Movement must extend this measure to the rest of national territory prohibiting civilian traffic and constantly inflicting casualties on military elements that will inevitably be forced to move through them or leave the island. The war against transportation must be total and permanent; food supplies must be cut off altogether. The people should not travel on roads or railways to avoid the risks of being shot. To be effective the order to shoot must be against any vehicle that travels day or night, since the dictatorship uses the procedure of transporting soldiers dressed as civilians and any prior identification is impossible.</p>
<p>All forces and resources of the July 26th Revolutionary Movement must concentrate on that goal.</p>
<p>The repressive forces of the regime, not even its legion of confidants and traitors will be able to counter this progressive and total standstill in the country. Tyranny will have to suffer from the standstill, suffocation and hunger.</p>
<p>With this slogan I say goodbye to return to my men.</p>
<p>To all the columns operating in Oriente Province and to their commanders, our warm congratulations for the successes obtained.</p>
<p>To the militias of the July 26th Revolutionary Movement, our recognition and admiration for the heroism with which they are fighting in towns and cities.</p>
<p>To the rebels in Las Villas and the other nuclei in the rest of the island, our fraternal and encouraging greeting. To the people of Cuba, the security that this fortress will never be defeated, and our oath that the country will be free or even the last combatant will die.</p>
<p>Fidel Castro Ruz</p>
<p>Commander in Chief of the July 26th Revolutionary Forces</p>
<p>
Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
First Speech by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz on Radio Rebelde, April 14, 1958
Delivered: April 14, 1958
Source: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en and Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado
Markup: David Walters, 2019
Online Version: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
To public opinion in Cuba and to the free people in Latin America.
I have been marching day and night without rest from the Column No. 1area of operations under my command, to be present at this appointment with the rebel radio station.
It’s hard for me to leave my men at this time, even for just a few days. But speaking to the people is also a duty and a need that I could not fail to fulfill.
As hateful as tyranny is in all its aspects, none of them is so irritating and crudely cynical as the absolute control that it has imposed on all the media for disseminating printed, radio and television news.
Censure is so disgusting in itself, and it becomes much more disgusting when it’s used not only to try but also to hope to hide the truth from the people about what has happened, through the partial and exclusive use of all common means of communication, to make the people believe whatever better suits the safety of their executioners.
While they are concealing the truth at all costs, they report lies by all means.
The people do not hear news other than the dispatch by the Staff of the Dictatorship. The outrage of censorship is imposed on the press together with the outrage of lies. And those same newspapers and broadcasters, upon which a severe and vigilant inquisitor prevents the publication of any real news, are obliged to inform and issue all that the dictatorship reports. The organs of opinion are snatching the people to turn them into vehicles of oppression. Tyranny constantly tries to deceive the people, as if the mere fact of denying any information, which does not go to the people from official sources, were sufficient to invalidate all their information.
And whom will the people believe? The criminals who tyrannize the people, the traitors who snatched the Constitution and the people’s liberties, those who censure the press and prevent the free publication of the most insignificant news? Clumsy folks, if you think about it, because you can force a people to everything, but never to believe!
When the real history of this struggle will be written and every event that took place with the official dispatches of the regime will be confronted, then it will be understood to what extent tyranny is capable of corrupting and debasing the institutions of the Republic, to what extent the forces at the service of evil are capable of reaching the extremes of criminality and barbarism, to what extent a mercenary soldiery without ideology can be deceived by its own chiefs. What does it matter after all to the despots and executioners of the people to deny history? What worries them is to get out of the way and postpone the inevitable fall.
I do not think that the General Staff lies in shame.
The General Staff of the Cuban Army has shown it has no shame whatsoever.
The General Staff lies by interest; it lies to the people and to the army; it lies to avoid demoralization in the army’s ranks; the General Staff lies because it refuses to recognize before the world its military incapacity, its condition of mercenary chiefs, sold out to the most dishonorable cause that can be defended; it lies because it has been unable, despite its tens of thousands of soldiers and the immense material resources, to defeat a handful of men who rose up to defend the rights of the people. The mercenary rifles of the tyranny crashed against the idealistic rifles that do not collect any salary. Neither military technique, nor the academy, nor the most modern weapons were of any use to them.
The fact is that the military, when they do not defend the country but attack it instead, when they do not defend their people but instead they enslave the people, they cease to be an institution and they become an armed gang; they cease to be soldiers and become delinquents. And they stop deserving not only the salary they wrest from the sweat of the people, but even the sun that covers the earth they have bloodied with dishonor and cowardice.
These same military men who have never defended the Homeland from a foreign enemy, who have never won a medal on the battlefield, who owe their rank to treason, nepotism and crime, issue war dispatches announcing 10, 20, 30 and up to 50 compatriots killed by their homicidal weapons as if they were victories of the Homeland, as if every Cuban killed, because those are the casualties they announce, did not have brothers or children, a wife or parents. There would be enough people to wage a victorious war just with the relatives of those killed compatriots.
We have never murdered any enemy prisoners. We have never abandoned a wounded adversary on the battlefield; that is and always will be for us an honor and a mark of glory; we feel with pain the death of every adversary, even though our war is the fairest of wars because it is the war for freedom.
However, the Cuban people know that the struggle has been waged victoriously; the people of Cuba know that over seventeen months, since we disembarked with a handful of men who knew how to face up to the initial defeat without ceasing their patriotic enterprise, the Revolution has been growing incessantly; what was just a spark only one year ago is today an invincible blaze; the Cuban people know that we’re no longer fighting alone in the Sierra Maestra from Cabo Cruz to Santiago de Cuba, but that there are people also in the Sierra Cristal from Mayarí to Baracoa, in the plain of the Cauto from Bayamo to Victoria de las Tunas, in the province of Las Villas from the Escambray Mountains to the Trinidad Mountains and in the mountains of Pinar del Río; in the very streets of cities and towns the people are fighting heroically; but above all, the people of Cuba know that the will and determination with which we began this fight remains unshakeable, they know that we are an army which emerged from nothing, that adversity does not discourage us, that after each setback the Revolution has reemerged with more strength; they know that the destruction of the Granma expeditionary detachment would not be the end of the fight but the beginning. They know that the spontaneous strike that followed the assassination of our Comrade Frank País did not wipe out the tyranny but it marked the way for the organized strike; that no government can stay in power supported by the pile of corpses with whose blood the dictatorship drowns the new strike, because the hundreds of young people and workers who were killed during these days and the unprecedented repression unleashed against the people does not weaken the Revolution; it makes it stronger, more necessary, more invincible; that the blood spilled makes courage and indignation greater; that every comrade falling in the streets of the cities and on the battlefield awakens in their idealistic brothers an irresistible desire to also give their lives; every comrade who falls awakens the desire to fight in the indolent, it awakens the feeling of the Motherland bleeding for its dignity in the persons who are ambivalent and it awakens sympathy and the adhesion of all the peoples of the Americas.
No, those dispatches by the General Staff announcing clusters of corpses with tones of jubilation do not discourage anyone; they outrage the nation and stimulate it to fight.
They cannot discourage the people, not even when it’s known that they are undertaking the worst of the fight, that enemy troops are being beaten along the line, that the latest victorious battles of our forces were fought four kilometers from Manzanillo in full daylight and in plain sight, imposing enormous casualties on the dictatorship. Let’s not lie to ourselves; our worship of freedom and the decorum of man is the worship of truth as an additional right of the people, something that the despots do not know how to respect or fulfill.
Enemy casualties are in proportion of ten to one with respect to ours since this fight began.
When the General Staff announces the deaths of thirty, forty or even fifty rebels, they are invariably talking about defenseless peasants, arrested in their homes and mercilessly murdered. Many officers who command the dictatorship’s troops in the Sierra Maestra have received their ranks this way. Promoting these assassins because of massacres perpetrated against defenseless compatriots has been put into practice and it has stimulated one of the most repugnant and inhuman procedures that can be conceived of in a war.
There are other heroic deeds of the dictatorship that have nothing to do with courage and military honor.
Desperate and impotent, they have put into practice the criminal tactics of systematically bombing and machine-gunning family homes. This measure, unexpected because of its absurdity, surprised the population living in the north of the Sierra without anti-aircraft shelters, and it has caused many victims.
Last Thursday on April 10th, after the combat at Pozón where a detachment of the dictatorship was completely destroyed as it was leaving Yara to pursue a rebel patrol that had attacked a convoy on the Manzanillo-Bayamo highway, three B-26 aircrafts, a jet and two light aircraft mercilessly attacked the village of Cayo Espino for two hours; there was no military objective there. Not one single house escaped being hit by the shrapnel. An improvised blood bank and hospital in the rearguard with three doctors from the July 26th Moment provided medical care to the wounded who had to wait for night to be transferred. A five-year-old boy bled to death on the way lying on a crudely improvised surgical table, his legs ripped off by a 50-caliber bullet which had also wounded his two little sisters.
No spectacle has impressed us so much as that of the dying boy who, without crying, barely was able to call out to his grandmother to tell her that he had loved her very much, but "I could not love her anymore because I am going to die." It was as if this little child was aware of his sacrifice, as if he understood that he too was dying for detesting those barbarians who attack humble family homes with machine-guns.
Journalists from four countries witnessed, listened to and filmed that scene. Even though they were familiar with the toughness of this fight that event nevertheless infuriated them with indignation. Perhaps they were reminded of their own children. It was difficult to understand how Cuban hands were capable of perpetrating such a crime. What need was there for committing such barbarity? What military purpose could be achieved by attacking that defenseless hamlet many miles away from the scene of combat with machine-guns? What strange design guides the minds of barbarians who use the resources of the nation to carry out those horrors against their own people?
How much cowardice and cruelty of those pilots who, sitting comfortably in their aircraft, without any risk to their lives, murder innocent women and children!
But we have taken note of the day and the hour to demand the punishment they deserve when the moment comes to render accounts, and we mark their names and surnames with indelible stigma so that even their own children are ashamed of them. The pilots who machine-gunned Cayo Espino on April 10 at 3:40 p.m. are war criminals who dishonor the Cuban nation, but not the army which was shameless enough to be responsible for the crime of genocide it is committing against Cuba.
The defeats suffered aren’t revenged in such a way! A revolution is not crushed in such a way! The memory of the dying child will never be erased from the minds of the peasants or those of our men when they go to battle. When the tyranny falls, there in Cayo Espino, we will erect a monument to the child Orestes Gutiérrez Peña, symbol of the innocents who have fallen; it will be a tribute of tender remembrance from our Liberating Army to the heroism of the children in whose minds affection and devotion for our combatants are unanimously present.
And next to the name of the innocent who was murdered, posterity will read the names of the pilots who murdered him. The peasant population has been instructed to construct anti-aircraft shelters urgently against the shrapnel and "napalm" bombs being used by the dictatorship.
If these events can be perpetrated by an armed government against its own citizens and people, it is necessary to understand that mankind has advanced very little in the efforts of protecting people from barbarism. There are the United States, with the weapons for Continental Defense used by its friends, the dictators of America. These dictators will not tire of repeating the lie that we are "communists" to justify sending weapons as if they were the representatives of democracy, dignity and the most sacred rights of the men.
With the word democracy on the lips of tyrants, what a sad and shameless campaign they are carrying out against the oppressed peoples.
It is said that the sale of weapons to the Batista government has been canceled by the US State Department. But the results have not been changed in the least: the United States is selling arms to Somoza and Trujillo; Somoza and Trujillo sell arms to Batista. What does the Organization of American States do? Do the dictators have a right to conspire for massacring the Cuban people? And the democratic governments of America, the leaders and the democratic parties of the Continent, what are they doing with their arms crossed?
If dictators help each other, why shouldn’t the people help each other? Are we not obliged to help the sincere democrats in all the Americas? Have we not paid dearly enough for the sin of our indifference to the concert of tyrants who promote the destruction of our democracies? Is it not clear that Cuba is fighting a battle for the democratic ideal of our continent? Do you not realize that the last dictators have turned Cuba into one of their last trenches? In Cuba one does not fight for the redemption of a single people but for the defense of a principle that concerns America. If the dictators help Batista, it is fair that the peoples of America help Cuba.
On behalf of the people of Cuba who are fighting against the weapons of Batista, Trujillo and Somoza, we demand help from the democratic governments of America. A huge territory on the southern coast of Oriente (Eastern) Province, between Cabo Cruz and Santiago de Cuba, is in the hands of our forces. Weapons that are parachuted in ten kilometers from the coast along that wide area will inevitably fall into our hands without the dictatorship intercepting them. We need automatic rifles, heavy machine guns, bazookas and mortars to advance to the capital. The Provisional Revolutionary Government will defray all the expenses that these shipments cause and the people of Cuba will be eternally grateful. We the Cuban rebels do not ask for food, we do not even ask for medicines; we ask for weapons to fight, to firmly establish in America that the will of a people is more powerful than the consortium of the dictatorship and its mercenary armies.
The revolutionary forces of the July 26th Movement will continue the offensive that began several weeks ago. Communications will be kept interrupted by our forces on the highways and railways of Oriente. The militias of the July 26th Movement must extend this measure to the rest of national territory prohibiting civilian traffic and constantly inflicting casualties on military elements that will inevitably be forced to move through them or leave the island. The war against transportation must be total and permanent; food supplies must be cut off altogether. The people should not travel on roads or railways to avoid the risks of being shot. To be effective the order to shoot must be against any vehicle that travels day or night, since the dictatorship uses the procedure of transporting soldiers dressed as civilians and any prior identification is impossible.
All forces and resources of the July 26th Revolutionary Movement must concentrate on that goal.
The repressive forces of the regime, not even its legion of confidants and traitors will be able to counter this progressive and total standstill in the country. Tyranny will have to suffer from the standstill, suffocation and hunger.
With this slogan I say goodbye to return to my men.
To all the columns operating in Oriente Province and to their commanders, our warm congratulations for the successes obtained.
To the militias of the July 26th Revolutionary Movement, our recognition and admiration for the heroism with which they are fighting in towns and cities.
To the rebels in Las Villas and the other nuclei in the rest of the island, our fraternal and encouraging greeting. To the people of Cuba, the security that this fortress will never be defeated, and our oath that the country will be free or even the last combatant will die.
Fidel Castro Ruz
Commander in Chief of the July 26th Revolutionary Forces
Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
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<p class="title">Fidel Castro Internet Archive</p>
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<h1>Speech delivered by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz during the funeral rites honoring the victims from the explosion of La Coubre Vessel, held in Colon cemetery on the 5th day of March 1960
</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> March 5, 1960<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version. Translation of the stenographic version, Stenographic Versions – Council of State.<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> David Walters, 2019<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en</p>
<hr>
<p class="fst">Comrades:</p>
<p>There are moments of great importance in the history of nations; there are extraordinary minutes, such as this tragic and bitter moment we are going through today.</p>
<p>Foremost, so that we are not thought of as carried away by emotion, so that it can be clearly seen that there is a people capable of standing with our head held high, with courage, a nation that knows to calmly analyze situations without resorting to lies or pretexts or base on absurd suppositions, but on obvious truths, the first thing we have to do to analyze the facts.</p>
<p>Yesterday afternoon, when we were all devoted to work – workers, State employees, Government officials, members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, students –, I mean, devoted to the most decent task a people can undertake, devoted to work in order to carry out the bigger jobs we have ahead, a huge explosion made our capital shudder.</p>
<p>Motivated by that instinct of getting inside the root of the problems, the comrades and I who were working at that time got immediately worried about a serious situation that may be occurring in the power plants, or in San Ambrosio police station, or in a vessel that had entered the capital port with ammunition and explosives very early that morning. And as a sort of premonition, we imagined that something serious had happened; that that explosion, no matter the place it had occurred, had had to cause catastrophic consequences and lots of victims, as it had indeed unfortunately happened.</p>
<p>About the subsequent event, everyone knows perfectly those next minutes of profound sorrow and anguish – though not fear – we lived in the city. In the first place, what was the reaction of the people? The people were not terrified by the explosion; they went to the place of the explosion. The people were not overwhelmed by fear, but by courage and, even though they did not know what had happened, they went there and found workers, the militia, solders and other members of the public force, all of them offering whatever help was in their power.</p>
<p>Events could not be more tragic: the vessel was anchored in the wharf, its cargo was being unloaded at the time of the explosion and half of it virtually disappeared, sweeping the workers and soldiers who were carrying out that operation.</p>
<p>People would wonder what the reason of that explosion was. Was it an accident? It is possible for those lacking of experience or knowledge on explosives to think of it as an accident. Explosives are known to explode and it is possible to imagine they can easily explode. However, that is not the case. It is not actually easy for explosives to explode; for them to explode they must be set off.</p>
<p>Then, what had happened? The other answer was that it might have been sabotage, but how and where can this happen? Can sabotage be carried out in the presence of many people? Can sabotage be carried out in the presence of rebel soldiers and dock workers, at high noon? If it was sabotage, how could this sabotage be carried out? And in the first place, why sabotage and not an accident?</p>
<p>What was the vessel carrying? That vessel was carrying bullets and also anti-tank and anti-personnel FAL rifle grenades. Bullets were already on the dock, there were no more bullets left in the ship. They had been carried in the hold of the stern, in the last division of the hold, that is, at the bottom of the hold, and workers had taken them out. There was an upper compartment that was the icebox of that hold, one of them had been turned in into the compartment holding the rifle grenades. The explosion did not occur while the bullets were being unloaded; the explosion occurred while the 30 tons of rifle grenades boxes were being uploaded.</p>
<p>If there was no fire on that ship – because an explosion can be caused by a fire on board –, if there was no fire on that ship, could the explosion occur because one the boxes fell off, for example? In the first place, it was unlikely a box would be dropped because the dock workers knew what they were carrying, and it wasn’t the first time they handled that type of cargo. For years, explosives and supplies have been handled in the port of Havana, and we do not remember any explosion. The workers had had years of experience with this type of cargo and knew how to handle it and took precautions, such as placing a mesh on the board to avoid the possibility of a box falling; they were especially careful because they knew it was ammunition to defend the revolution. Moreover, it was not the first time they had done so, since on previous occasions they had even done it voluntarily for free, without charging a penny, as a contribution to the defense of the country.</p>
<p>That is to say, those workers knew what they were carrying. It was unlikely a box would fall, but even if that slim possibility had occurred, even if one box had been dropped, does this mean that a box of grenades explodes when dropped, that it can explode if it falls? And all the less when they come from one of the best factories in the world manufacturing weapons and equipment that men have to manipulate in combat, and therefore they have to be covered with the greatest security, therefore it is practically impossible for them to explode when loaded, handled or preparing for shooting. As far as I recall, during all the war the worst that could happen was that a grenade did not explode when hitting the target, but we never knew of a grenade exploding in the rifle, since that grenade, when being propelled, receives the impact of the propelling charge, which is a strong impact, an impact that receives already without the safety catch, an impact the grenade receives already without the safety catch, and yet it does not explode. The worst that can happen is that, because it is defective, a grenade does not explode when hitting the target. We have never known of a grenade exploding at the end of a rifle barrel.</p>
<p>Then, what chance is there of grenades exploding when a box of them is dropped? Do grenades come without their safety catch? Are grenades loose inside the boxes? Are they transported without safety for the people who manipulate, load and upload them? Because it is necessary to calculate how many times these boxes are handled from the factory to the holds. Could it be considered logical in some sense that, even if unlikely events happened – the very unlikely event such as the fall of a box – an explosion could happen, that is, an explosion by accident? We can assure you that it is totally impossible!</p>
<p>But since theoretical interpretation was not enough, we arranged for the relevant tests to be made, and this morning we ordered army officers to take two boxes containing two different types of grenades, load them in an aircraft and launch them from 400 and 600 feet, respectively. And here there are the grenades launched from the aircraft at 400 and 600 feet high, grenades exactly the same as those on that vessel. (He shows the grenades to the public.)</p>
<p>Does it make any sense to suppose that grenades could explode when falling from 400 and 600 feet at eight feet high, taking into consideration all their safety conditions and the containers that are barely damaged with some dent, if any, at that height, plus the speed of the plane? To such an extent, that the boxes penetrated several feet into the ground as a result of the impact, and the wooden boxes were destroyed without the explosion of a single grenade out of the 50 grenades inside a box. I am sure that this test can be repeated a hundred or a thousand times, and the grenades will not explode, because for the explosives to explode, they must be set off. Many times during war bombs fell without exploding, and they served to supply us with explosives with which we made the mines, and we remember not a single case of accidental explosion by any of those weapons. They always had to be exploded. So it could not have been an accident, not by accident, it had to be intentional. It was necessary to dismiss all possibility of accident to accept the only reasonable explanation: an intentional explosion.</p>
<p>But how could an intentional explosion happen? Could there have been sabotage in the presence of rebel soldiers, veteran rebel soldiers who were watching the uploading? Could there have been sabotage in the presence of the workers who were working there? If all precautionary measures were taken when conducting these operations, how can anyone think that sabotage could be committed in broad daylight in the presence of workers and soldiers? That person would have had to be a worker but it is illogical for us to expect sabotage from a worker. No doubt workers are determined and ardent supporters of our Revolution.</p>
<p>But so as not to go only on theory, let us analyze the possibility of that sabotage. First of all, workers are searched to prevent them from carrying matches or cigarettes. They are searched to prevent them from being imprudent, and they have a delegate who observes the work they are doing. So they are not only searched, but watched out by soldiers and by their own delegates and comrades. Then sabotage in these conditions is practically impossible.</p>
<p>Furthermore, these workers are very well known by their comrades, because they are not so many, they may be around 12 or 18, and in such case they are a small group and know each other very well.</p>
<p>And another even more relevant factor is that the workers there did not know they were going to work on this ship. The vessel arrived in the morning. The first shift was from 11:00 a.m. to 1 p.m. and the persons in charge of it did not work in the compartment where the grenades were, but in a lower compartment in which the bullets were. They worked from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. When workers went to work, arrived the dock and there they were given their shifts without knowing in advance what ship they would work on, because more than 1,000 stevedores rotate on them and they can work in whatever ship.</p>
<p>The second shift of workers gets the tickets at 12:30, to begin working at 1:00. That group of workers, a small group out of more than 1,000, did not know they would unload the explosives. So premeditation, plan, or preparation in those difficult conditions is not reasonable to believe. That is to say that sabotage would have to be done by a fortune teller, a person who knew that on that precise day he would be selected among 1,000 workers to upload explosives. In order to carry out such acts of sabotage, he would have to have everything ready; he would have to evade the register and the vigilance of soldiers and the delegate. These are impossible conditions because it would be like supposing that the group of revolutionary workers, who for a few minutes undertake the task of unloading those weapons which are to be used to defend their interests and rights, might arouse the slightest suspicion. Then, not by questions of moral conviction, but from a careful analysis, a thorough investigation and a detailed conversation with all workers, temporary workers and stevedores, we reached the conclusion that the sabotage could not possibly have been prepared in Cuba. The explosives went off in Cuba, but the mechanism that detonated them was not installed in Cuba; the mechanism that exploded the ship could not by any means have been installed in Cuba.</p>
<p>This is why other possibilities had to be analyzed. Could it have been the workers, the crew of the ship? Very difficult, very unlikely, because we have questioned them one by one, and we were very careful with those whose work was somehow related to the holds, the cargo and the keys, in the first place, those who had keys that day and opened the holds for the unloading to begin perished in the explosion. The ship officers were on board when the explosion occurred and one cannot imagine that anybody would think it is possible to set off 30 tons of dynamite in a ship and escape unharmed. Many of the crewmembers were saved, but that does not mean that anybody could ensure that anyone could get out alive after setting off 30 tons of explosives in a ship.</p>
<p>Only four out of the 36 members of the crew were absent: three waiters, after they had served the food to the crew, and an oiler who was not on duty. This means that only four people were absent at that moment for absolutely logical reasons, the others were on board, including the two passengers. Then, it was unlikely the operation was perpetrated by any crewmember of the ship.</p>
<p>As we went further in the investigation, we reached the conclusion that the sabotage was perpetrated from far away; that it was not prepared and it could not have been prepared by no means in Cuba; that it was unlikely that it could have been perpetrated by any of the crewmembers; and that, nevertheless, the possibilities increased as we analyzed the ship cargo.</p>
<p>The unloading was watched very carefully because the weapons were of the interest of those soldiers and workers. We know our enemies and we take all possible pains. But thousands of miles away and far from knowing our problems, in countries that are not threatened by sabotage, explosions, stirred by revolutionary upheavals, or by the efforts of the counterrevolution, in a country like Belgium, the point of departure, how could an action like this be expected to be as difficult as here, where we are in permanent vigilance to avoid any act of sabotage?</p>
<p>From questioning the ship's officer responsible for the cargo, we found out that the merchandise had been loaded in the presence of this officer, or when he was away, in the presence of another crewmember that he was unable to identify.</p>
<p>Those loading conditions made much more easy and feasible the possibility of introducing some detonator to make the explosives go off. Therefore, we concluded that we should not look for the perpetrator of that sabotage here, but abroad, where conditions were much easier to prepare such an act. This means that there was an indisputable and proven fact: after 20 boxes had been taken out, the explosion occurred at the moment one of the remaining boxes was moved, it means, when that specific box was carried. When workers were to handle some new box – since they already had more than 20 boxes outside –, when they were going to carry some of the remaining boxes, the explosion occurred. That explosion could not have been an accident, that explosion had to be intentional. That is to say, the movement of a particular box activated the mechanism of some detonator, causing the explosion.</p>
<p>We all know, with more or less details, that there are infinite procedures for making such explosive traps that are used a lot in war, that when moving a cap, a pencil or a chair, an explosion occurs, since it is extremely easy for a technician to set up any of those mechanisms between two boxes or under one box, so that moving the box will set it off.</p>
<p>How did the boxes come along the way? The boxes came in compact rows, unable to shift, because boxes are placed very tight one against the other inside the hold or the icebox, so that they cannot move, meaning that they had no spare space to move. Such sabotage could be arranged without worry over an explosion before unloading. That is what happened. Workers had already removed the first boxed and when moving approximately box number 30 the explosion takes place, which could not be by accident, as we have shown. The explosion must have been prepared because those boxes were not in the first rows where any object could be seen, but in the second or third row. Thus, when moving a particular box in one of the rows the explosion occurs.</p>
<p>That is the conclusion we reached, which is not based on emotion or a whim, but on the analysis, the evidence, the research we have done, and even on the experiments we have conducted, in order to first draw the conclusion that we were dealing with sabotage rather than an accident. And I am sure that there is no doubt about it, because what else could it be expected?</p>
<p>Millions of tons of explosives are transported around the world every year and yet we do not hear of ships exploding. In our own country, for many years explosives have been transported and handled but we know of no explosion of this nature. And let us remember the Maine explosion, whose mysteries have not been perfectly explained by anyone. It even became the cause of a war because the nation to which the ship belonged – although it is supposed that it did not have a chance to investigate, it could not do as we did, to begin immediately with interrogations: talk to workers, crewmembers, everyone, although they did not have the chance to investigate – reached the conclusion that the ship had been blown up by an external mine, and declared war on Spain. Because the United States reached the conclusion that it had been an action perpetrated by Spain’s supporters moved by their hostility towards the United States, and based on no evidence or arguments and on mere suppositions, it went so far as to the transcendental act of declaring war on Spain.</p>
<p>We have not had to abuse our imagination that much. We have not had to draw conclusions with such little foundation, because it seems rather unrealistic to imagine Spain, with its difficult situation and hard struggle, blowing up the U.S. battleship. That did not seem logical. Instead, we have more than enough reasons to believe that ours was a case of sabotage and that we know what international forces are encouraging the enemies or our people and our Revolution. We do have reasons to think that there were interests trying to keep us from receiving weapons. We do have reasons to suppose, or think, that those who promoted this sabotage could not be others than those interested in avoiding us from getting such supplies. Because, what would be the interest of the authors of such an act, if not avoiding us from receiving those explosives? And we have to talk about that.</p>
<p>Those interested in us not receiving the explosives are the enemies of our Revolution, those who do not want our country to defend itself; those who do not want our country to be able to defend its sovereignty.</p>
<p>We know the efforts were made to keep us from buying those weapons. U.S. government officials were among the most interested ones in us not receiving those weapons. We can affirm it without this being a secret, because if it is a secret, it would be like those secrets that everyone knows. We are not the only ones to say this. The British Government said and stated that the U.S. Government did not want us to buy planes in Britain. U.S. authorities and spokespersons themselves have expressed their efforts to prevent Cuba from buying weapons. We have been fighting against such pressure. We have been fighting these obstacles.</p>
<p>So, a country, a government, makes use of its own powerful international influence and moves itself in diplomatic circles to prevent a small country from arming itself; a country that needs to defend its territory from its enemies, a nation that needs to defend itself against the criminals who want to return, or against colonizers who want to keep us under slavery and starvation. We must continue fighting the pressure of a powerful and influential government in order to buy weapons.</p>
<p>We can affirm that up to now we had achieved that a government and a European weapons factory, acting independently and firmly, opposed the pressure and sell us weapons. The Belgian weapons factory and the government of that country had opposed to pressures. Not once, but several times, the U.S. consul, a U.S. military attaché in Belgium and a military attaché working at the U.S. embassy in Belgium, had tried to prevent the factory and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from selling us these weapons.</p>
<p>That is to say that officials of the U.S. government had made repeated efforts to prevent our country from buying these weapons, and they cannot deny this reality. And this reality means that they did not want us to acquire those weapons and that one must look for the guilty ones among those interested in preventing us from buying those weapons. We have the right to think that those trying to prevent us from purchasing that equipment by diplomatic means, could do so by other means too.</p>
<p>We are not affirming they have done so, because we do not have conclusive evidence, and if we had them, we would be presenting them to the people and the world. I do say that we have the right to think that those who had not achieved their purposes by certain means, they could have tried by another. We have the right to think that we must look for the criminals among the interested ones. We do have the right to think that we must look for those responsible for the loss of the Cuban lives yesterday afternoon!</p>
<p>In the first place, what right does any government have to interfere with the efforts of another government in defense of its sovereignty? What right does any government have to assume the tutelage of any part of the world? What right does any government have to prevent Cubans from buying the weapons that all nations acquire to defend their sovereignty and integrity? What nation would we try to prevent from buying weapons? What weapons purchase do we interfere? What obstacles would we place in the way of any nation seeking to</p>
<p>arm itself? Who would think that a government living in peace, whose people live in peace with the other people, maintaining diplomatic and friendly relations – which must be friendly -, has the right to interfere in a way that that nation cannot acquire weapons? All the more if one considers that that country, represented by that government, is buying, in our territory, strategic materials it needs for its defense, without our interference in this acquisition of equipment, without our interference in their efforts to defend itself, without our interference in its affairs.</p>
<p>Why can’t we acquire the means to defend ourselves? Why this interest on preventing us from buying means to defend ourselves? Do they expect our people to fall again under the boots of the bunch of criminals who subjugated us for seven years? Are they instigating the return of the big criminals? Or even worst, are they perhaps planning to seize our land? They do not want our people to have the means to defend themselves. Our country is not a danger to any country. Our country is not and never will be a military danger to any other country. Our country will never be able to develop an offensive power against any other country, because the strength of our Revolution in the world lies not in the military power, but in our tremendous moral force, in our tremendous example for the brotherly nations, for our brethren of the race, enslaved and exploited throughout the Spanish speaking America. Our force will never be based on the military power. We are militarily strong to defend ourselves, but we are not, nor do we ever want to be militarily strong to attack anyone, because we do not aspire to submit or subjugate anyone. We are strong to defend ourselves. To defend one’s nation is another thing: it is a right, one of those rights the people know to defend against whatever power and force.</p>
<p>We would never be strong to attack anyone, not only because we would not have the necessary weapons, men or resources, but because we would not have the right to attack anyone. That is why we would never be strong, even if we had resources and weapons, simply because we would never have the right to do so. And instead, we feel strong enough to defend ourselves. We are sure that we are strong to defend ourselves because we would be defending a right and we would know how to defend it.</p>
<p>So, why shouldn’t we have the necessary means? Simply because they do not want us to defend ourselves, they want us to be defenseless. Why do they want us to be defenseless? Because they want to humble us, to subjugate us, so we do not resist the pressure, so we do not resist the aggressions. And do they have the right to hamper our efforts to acquire the means to defend ourselves against the authorities of a nation that has been unable to prevent its territory from being systematically used to bombard us?</p>
<p>Perhaps tomorrow, the newspapers of that country will say that analyzing these truths and reasons is an insult to the people of the United States. It is worth clarifying that we are not insulting the people of the United States. We never have. What happens is that they say the truths are insults, and they say so to the people in order to portrait our people as the enemy of the United States’ people. The reasons we discuss with the rulers – who are responsible for the policy of that country – are not insults to the people, because, on the contrary, we consider that those who harm the U.S. people are those making such mistakes. Those offending the U.S. people are those making such mistakes. They say that reasoning, calling things by their names and clarifying those truths to the people, are insults, because they want difficult relations between nations, and there are no difficult relations between nations here, because Cuba will never have difficult relations with any other nation of the world.</p>
<p>Nations are good, and they cannot be judged based on their rulers. It would not be fair to judge the Cubans, this magnificent people, based on the rulers the Revolution overthrew. The people are not to blame.</p>
<p>But it seems that the truths cannot even be insinuated in this continent where we, Cubans, have learned to tell the truth, fearless of anyone. And these are the truths: planes enemies of our people, planes piloted by criminal mercenaries depart the United States, and the government of that country, so worried about us buying weapons, has not been able to prevent those flights.</p>
<p>It has been seven years of bloody struggle and immense sacrifice since we achieved the triumph of the people. During those past days any citizen could be tortured or murdered in the streets of the cities or in the countryside. The most atrocious tyranny prevailed in our country. But all that was not an obstacle for ships loaded with bombs and ships loaded with shrapnel came from the United States, which did not explode in the port of Havana. However, we do not murder anyone, we do not torture anyone, and we do not hit a single human being. We have established respect for the human dignity and human sensitivity. Our Revolutionary government is characterized by that atmosphere of security, that feeling of peace, security and respect for the citizen. We do not torture and we do not murder, and yet the weapons that come to defend this regime explode upon reaching the port. On the other hand, the torturers of our people, the executioners of our people, those who ripped the lives of 20,000 compatriots, those who murdered students, peasants, workers, those who murdered men and women, those who murdered professionals, those who murdered any citizen, were directly receiving weapons and supplies that did not explode.</p>
<p>When it is about a just revolutionary regime – a human revolutionary regime, a regime that has striven so hard to defend the interests of the people, the interests of our suffered and exploited people, exploited by the monopolies, exploited by the latifundia, exploited by the privileged ones, a regime that has freed the people from these injustices, a regime most of the people support, a human regime – they fight it. When it is about a criminal and inhuman regime, a regime of monopolies and privileges, they support it. What kind of democracy is that which helps criminals and exploiters? Democracy is the one we have, where human being is appreciated and always will be more than money! Because we will never shed a single drop of blood for money; we will never sacrifice a single drop of human blood for money or selfish interests.</p>
<p>These facts are not isolated. Because who would be surprised that a ship explodes at the port while workers are working? Who would be surprised at a sabotage causing the death of workers? Who would be surprised if only a month ago – if it has been already a month – a U.S. aircraft coming from the U.S. territory with a U.S. bomb and piloted by a U.S. pilot, tried to drop a bomb on a workplace where with more than 200 workers in it? And on that occasion I said: “What would have been the pain of our people today and what would have been the tragedy of our people today if we would be burring dozens of workers instead of these two corpses of mercenaries?” And as if those words were a premonition, we have had to come here to burry some dozens of workers and rebel soldiers.</p>
<p>Who would be surprised that the perpetrators of that sabotage did not worry about the amount of victims they would cause, about the people they would kill? Who would be surprised about it if only a month ago they were going to drop a 100-pound bomb on a factory with over 200 workers in it? Who would be surprised if, when that event occurred, we calmly spoke to the people with proof in our hands, explaining what had happened, showing them the evidence, and even told them to send the technicians so that they verify the strict veracity of everything said. A month has passed and yet no one has been arrested in the United States, not a single person responsible for such acts has been found and no one has been bothered. On the contrary, few days after the incidents the light aircrafts came back and hardly a week later the town in which the Prime Minister of the Revolutionary Government lives was bombed.</p>
<p>What is so strange about the explosion of a ship loaded with workers if they were going to drop a bomb over a sugar factory and they did not worry about bombing an area with children, dropping 100-pound bombs in that region? What is so strange if yesterday the Bohemia magazine published photographs of the air fleet that peacefully rests in the U.S. airports without being disturbed by anyone? What is so strange if yesterday we received the news that José Eleuterio Pedraza was in Washington? What is so strange about all those things that have been happening? The only difference is that on this occasion the blow has been hard and bloody.</p>
<p>It was logical. Some months ago we had to go to the hospitals full of victims as a result of that incursion whose author still strolls through the U.S. towns and cities without anyone bothering him. What is so strange if a series of acts demonstrate the group of powerful interests conspiring against our Revolution; If only a few days ago large quantities of corn were released to replace Cuban honey in the manufacture of alcohol; If only a few days ago inspectors who observed the cultivation of fruits and vegetables we export to that country were retired; If everyone knows the law by which the sovereignty of our country is being subjected to the threat of not buying our sugar? I mean, if shortly the a law is going to be submitted to the Congress, by virtue of which the President of the Republic reserves the right at any time to remove, reduce or buy the sugar quote, if so considers.</p>
<p>What does that mean? It means that our country has a very weak economic structure. But, why does our country has a weak economic structure? Because that was the structure the foreign masters gave to our economy; a one-crop economy, an economy of latifundia, an economy of an underdeveloped nation, a weak economy as a consequence of the policy implemented by the foreign masters of our economy for 50 years. And now, taking advantage of this dependence, this situation which we are trying to get rid of – that is what economic independence means –, taking advantage of this dependence, they want to adopt systems which try to subjugate our rights and our sovereignty.</p>
<p>It means that if we make laws here, if we take action for the benefit of our people, they arrogate the right to starve our people. It means that, taking advantage of the economic situation they enjoy as a result of the policy of one-crop, latifundia and underdevelopment they applied here, and by threatening us with starvation, they try to restrict the rights of our people to be independent and sovereign.</p>
<p>What does this mean if not an economic Platt Amendment? What does this mean if not to warn that if we take measures against the latifundia, against monopolies – measures for the benefit of our people –, reprisals will be taken against us, because we are a small country with a weak economy? Does it mean that if we make efforts to become a strong economy, to have our own economy, we are threatened with starvation? What is this if not an attempt to undermine the sovereignty of a country, an attempt to restrict the independence of a country? What is this if not that a government arrogates the right to decide on the destinies of another country by means of retaliatory measures? These are not measures that are taken to defend national interests. These are not measures that are taken to defend the interests of the U.S. people. These are not measures that are taken to guarantee the supply. No, these measures, contrary to ours – which are to defend the people, to defend the national interests, not as reprisal –, are retaliatory measures. These are not measures to defend national interests, but retaliatory measures against another country, while our measures are taken to defend the national interests and for the benefit of the people. Because none of the measures we take are aimed at starving the U.S. people. On the contrary, the measures we take restrict the voracious pocket of a few U.S. monopolies, but we do not restrict the means of subsistence or work of the U.S. people. Our measures are against monopolies, against interests, not against the U.S. people. Their measures are not to defend the U.S. people, but measures of reprisal against the Cuban people.</p>
<p>And, of course, it was needed a Revolutionary Government to proclaim that, it was needed a government of the people to proclaim that, it was needed a government fearless to proclaim it, fearless of threats or reprisals; fearless of the military maneuvers. And we could say: What is the purpose of military maneuvers in the Caribbean? What is the purpose of using landing maneuvers against positions occupied by guerrillas? What is the purpose of using maneuvers of troops transported on planes, in offensive operations? Because, as far as we know, the problems of the world are discussed at the summits, as they call it. The problems of the world are understood to be problems of directed projectiles, advanced science and technology, but we have not heard that the problems of the world are problems of guerrillas, nor have we heard that the problems of the world are problems here in the Caribbean and that there are international difficulties in the Caribbean.</p>
<p>As far as we know the big nations do not think they can solve their military issues with guerrillas. We were the ones who had to use the guerrillas to fight the professional army of tyranny. We had to use such tactics against an army larger and better prepared than ours. But I have not heard that military issues are solved with guerrillas in the world. And when we see Marine Corps, landing maneuvers against guerrillas, we wonder why? Do they plan to land – I wonder myself – or just intimidate? Do they want to frighten us? Do they want to show us that we can be invaded at any time? Landings here are among the things being discussed by some spokesmen as possible.</p>
<p>Who said that anyone can land here? Who said anyone can simply land here? For the time being, among the probable things – it is good to say that a day like today, because in fact we are already quite experienced in terms of patriotism and civism so that those insinuations could be used against us – and among the possible things being discussed, allow me to say that we feel simply amazed when they calmly say they would send here, among the possible things, the Marine Corps, as if we did not count at all. As if the Cubans would just stand by in case of any contingency! As if Cubans would not resist any troops landing here to try to subjugate our people!</p>
<p>And it would be good to say, to say once and for all here, at this time when we come to deposit a considerable number of soldiers, workers and citizens in their tombs – who knows how many times we met them in our workplaces, in public gatherings or military facilities, or we met them in zones of operations; who knows how many times they were applauding and living, as you do now, full of noble hopes the Revolution has aroused in every humble Cuban, at a time when we come on a mournful pilgrimage to deposit their remains in the tombs, quietly and calmly, discharging a painful duty that we know well how to perform in a selfless manner, that we know how to comply knowing that tomorrow we can be others, as they were yesterday and as others were before them; because we, Cubans, have learned to look at death serenely and undisturbed; because Cubans have acquire a real sense of life, which begins by considering it unworthy when not living with freedom, when not living with decorum, when not living with justice, when not living for something great as it happens to Cubans at this moment –, before these dead people who were yesterday as we are today, the victims of who knows what murderous hands, we say that we are not afraid of any troop landings here. We would not delay for a single second in picking up our guns and taking up our positions, without even blinking or hesitating, to face any foreign troops landing in this country. We, I mean the Cuban people, its workers, peasants, students, women, young and old, even its children, will not hesitate to simply occupy their positions the day any foreign troops try to land in our beaches, either by ship, by plane or in parachutes, no matter how they come or how many they are.</p>
<p>And it is good that we say all these without fanfare, as those who are really determined to fulfill what has been promised. If anyone doubted this, yesterday furnished proof to the most skeptical. Whoever had seen the people yesterday, whoever had seen that episode both wonderful and horrific, whoever had seen the crowds advancing towards the fire, how soldiers, workers, policemen, sailors, firemen, the militia, went to that center of danger, how they advanced to that place of death, without hesitating; whoever had seen what Cubans saw yesterday, whoever had seen the soldiers and the people advancing toward danger to rescue the wounded, to rescue the victims in that burning ship, in an area that was on fire, when it was unknown how many more explosions might occur; whoever had seen that waves, swept by the explosions, those who died not in the first explosion, but in the second one; anyone observing the people’s conduct yesterday; whoever had seen the people controlling traffic; anyone observing the people establishing order; whoever had seen the people advancing towards that explosion that left behind like a fungus, reminiscent of the fungus of nuclear explosions; whoever had seen the people advancing towards that fungus without knowing what was actually happening, can be sure that our people are capable of defending themselves, a people capable of advancing against the fungi left by nuclear bombs.</p>
<p>And those were yesterday’s events. They were not an invention of our fantasy, but a reality that everyone could see. It is a reality we had to pay with dozens of valuable lives, of men who died when trying to save their comrades, who died quietly and calmly to save the lives trapped between the bend wreckage of that ship and among the buildings’ ruble, of firemen who were advancing without bothering to extinguishing the fire on buildings full of explosives. Whoever had seen scenes like those of yesterday, anyone who knows a people as dignified, forceful, generous and honest as ours, has the right to know that this is a people that will defend itself against any aggression.</p>
<p>May those who are disturbed in the most elementary common sense and dare to consider as possible any kind of invasion against our soil understand the monstrosity of their mistake, because this will save us many sacrifices. But unfortunately, had this happened, mostly to the dismay of those who attack us, let there be no doubt that here in this land called Cuba, here in the middle of this people called Cuban, they will have to fight against us as long as there is one drop of blood left in our veins. They will have to fight against us as long as there is an atom of life in us. We will never attack anyone and no one will ever need to be afraid of us, but anyone attacking us must know without fearing to be wrong that Cubans today – we are not anymore in the years 1898 or 1899, we are not living at the beginning of the century, or in the 1910s, 1920s or 1930s –, Cubans of this decade, Cubans of this generation, Cubans of this era – we are not better today, we are fortunate to have a better vision for the future, because we had the fortune to receive the example and lesson from the history, the lesson that cost so many sacrifices to our ancestors, the lesson that cost so much humiliation and pain to the past generations, because we have had the fortune of receiving that lesson –, this generation will fight in case of aggression until its last drop of blood, with the rifles we have, with the rifles we buy from those who want to sell them to us, plain and simple, with the bullets and weapons we buy where we seem best and with the weapons we know how to take off from our enemies during fight.</p>
<p>And without worrying about the threats, without worrying about the maneuvers, bearing in mind that one day we were only 12 men and that, comparing our force at the time with the one of the tyranny, our strength was so tiny and so insignificant that no one would have ever believed possible to resist. However, we believed that we were resisting at that moment, as we today believe that we can resist any aggression. We believe not only that we will know how to resist any aggression, but that we will know how to overcome any aggression, and that again we would have no other dilemma than that with which we began the revolutionary struggle: that of freedom or death. Only that freedom now means something else: freedom means homeland. And our dilemma now would be homeland or death.</p>
<p>On a day like today, sorrowful and tragic, painful for the people, painful for the government, painful for the families of the workers, soldiers and the citizens who died, in a moment so important like this, it would be good if we take these things for granted, and that our willingness to resist is not only the willingness to resist militarily. Maybe they think that we have the courage to die, that we have no courage to resist privations, but men have the courage to resist even the hardship they least imagine.</p>
<p>If those men who began the struggle in the mountains had had no courage to resist privations, they would have been defeated. However, that was not the case because they were strong enough to resist privations. Weak men are the ones who do not have the determination to resist privations. Strong men and women are the ones who have the determination to resist privations. If during combat a nation has the courage to make any sacrifice, it should have also the courage to resist any privation. They are also mistaken when thinking that they will defeat us by means of economic reprisals. And at this point one could say that it is better to starve in freedom than to live enslaved in opulence; that it is better to be poor but free, even though the development of our richness might have a high price and imply a long road. Much more when we were poor and enslaved here, but at least now we are poor, but free. Someday we will be free and rich.</p>
<p>No one can buy us with economic advantages, much less when economic benefits were never seen by anyone anywhere, because what everyone here saw was misery, injustice and exploitation. Those are the words that can be used to call the hundreds of thousands of children who have no school, or had no school, and that is what the miserable huts are called, that is what the months of dead time are called, that is what unemployment is called, and that is what the agony in which we live is called. And Cuba, our people, has done nothing but fight against these evils, has done nothing but strive to overcome those evils, we have done nothing but claim what is ours. We have done nothing but defend our possessions and ourselves. And that is, in the eyes of the international plutocracy, the wrongful act that Cuba has committed: to defend its possessions and its people against exploitation, against colonization. This is why the planes come, that is the reason for the ever-growing audacity of the criminals protected by that plutocracy. That is the reason why – while planes do not explode in other parts of the world, while planes do not launch bombs in other parts of the world –, in our homeland, workers are threatened in their workplaces by 100-pound bombs, or threatened in their workplaces by an apocalyptic explosion.</p>
<p>That is the cause of the hatred of the powerful oligarchy that fight us; that is the reason of the conspiracy against our homeland. We understand it well because it is necessary that we know how to understand our problems. We must know how to understand these truths, and we must proclaim them. Just as it is necessary that those interests and conspirators know what to expect and know that it is not about making plans from abroad on the problems of the country, its solutions, or the counterrevolutionary acts. They must know that in order to make plans on our country, in the first place, they have to count on us, because if they don’t, as if we do not exist, then they will face the consequences.</p>
<p>Today we have come to conclude one of our saddest days, but indeed one of the most firm and symbolic days of our homeland. Who would have guessed only 14 months ago – when we meet rebel soldiers on the streets of Oriente province, amidst the overflowing joy of that people –, that, one day like today, we would have to walk the same streets in the midst of the sadness and pain of that same people, to bury, among a group of workers, a group of those soldiers who passed by here carrying the national liberation banners? Who would have guessed that the perpetrators and accomplices of the murderers of so many thousands and thousands of Cubans would force us once more – and who knows how many times more – to come and weep beside the tombs of other victims, other citizens annihilated by the same criminals and the same allies? But however bitter it may be, it is true. And here we are fulfilling this painful duty, which we will fulfill as many times as necessary. We will fulfill it, one day as part of the procession and another day inside the coffin, if necessary. We will know to fulfill it because behind those who fell there will come others, behind those who fell there are others still standing!</p>
<p>Great has been the loss in these 14 months; dear and unforgettable comrades who are no longer among those who walked behind the coffins; comrades who have disappeared from our ranks while fulfilling their duty. However. The ranks continue to march. The people are still standing, and that is what matters! What an imposing spectacle of a standing people! What a wonderful and impressive spectacle of a standing people! What a spectacle like this one today! Some years ago it would have seemed a dream to watch them march together as they do today. Who could have dreamed some years ago that workers’ militias would be marching side by side with the university brigades, side by side with the soldiers of the Rebel Army, side by side with the navy and the police, side by side with a column of peasants forming their martial and compact ranks wearing their mambí hats and carrying a rifle on their shoulders; guajiros from the mountains who are accompanying us today in this moment of pain, so that no one be unrepresented, so that there, where ministers and citizens stand together, the whole nation stands together showing its generosity, fighting spirit and heroism. Who could have dreamed that one day soldiers and workers would not be enemies; that one day soldiers, workers, students, peasants and the people would not be enemies; that one day intellectuals would walk arm in arm with the soldiers; that one day the thought, the labor force and the guns would march together as it happened today!</p>
<p>They used to march separated, they used to be enemies, the homeland used to be divided into dissimilar interests, dissimilar groups, dissimilar institutions. Today the nation is a single feeling, the nation is a single force, the nation is a single group. Today, peasants and soldiers, students and the police, or the people and the armed forces do not fight between them. Today, we all emerge from the same yearning and aspiration. People and soldiers are identical. They used to fight each other, but today they fight together. They used to walk in different directions, but today the walk together. Today workers and soldiers march together, die together, help one each other, give their lives to save others, as dear brothers.</p>
<p>That is the reason why today I see our homeland stronger than ever, I see our Revolution more solid and invincible than ever, our people more gallant and heroic than ever. Today it is as if that blood, which was the blood of soldiers and workers, the blood of Cuban workers and French workers… French workers died fulfilling their duty while transporting those goods that will serve to defend our sovereignty, which is why we have not forgotten them when it comes to help our own people. When it comes to help the families of the Cubans who died, we have not forgotten those French workers who fell in that act of vandalism perpetrated by the murderous enemy hands. We have not forgotten workers here and from other parts of the world, who yesterday united their blood with the French blood, the same blood of those who cried out for freedom in the first great revolution of the modern history of humankind. The blood of Cuban workers was united to the blood of French workers. That is why we, who see them as brothers, have shown the same generosity when providing help for their families, because they also have wives, mothers and children. To us, a generous people as ours, this meant an act of elementary solidarity that we all feel for all peoples of the world.</p>
<p>As I said, today I see that our nation is more glorious, more heroic, that our people is more admirable, a people worthy of admiration as one admires a column coming back from battle, worthy of identity and solidarity as solders showing their solidarity after a battle.</p>
<p>What matters is not the reduction in the number of soldiers; what matters is the presence of mind of those who are still standing. More than once we experience a reduction in our ranks, in the ranks of our army. We saw painful reductions, as we see today in the ranks of the people, but what matters most is the determination of the people still standing.</p>
<p>And today, as we say farewell to the fallen, to those soldiers and workers, I have no other way to say goodbye, but with the idea which symbolizes this struggle and the essence of our people today: may they rest together in peace! Together, workers and soldiers, together in their graves, as they fought together, as they died together and as we are willing to die together.</p>
<p>And as we say goodbye in the threshold of the cemetery, we make this promise which, more like today’s promise, is a promise of yesterday and always: Cuba will not be intimidated!, Cuba will not recede!, the Revolution will not stop!, the Revolution will continue its unshakable path!</p>
<p>That is our promise, not to those who died, because to die for the homeland is to live, but to the comrades who will always remain in our memories. They will always remain, not in the memory of a man, or men, but in the only memory that can never be erased: the memory in the heart of a people.</p>
<p>Stenographic Versions – Council of State</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
Speech delivered by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz during the funeral rites honoring the victims from the explosion of La Coubre Vessel, held in Colon cemetery on the 5th day of March 1960
Delivered: March 5, 1960
Source: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version. Translation of the stenographic version, Stenographic Versions – Council of State.
Markup: David Walters, 2019
Online Version: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
Comrades:
There are moments of great importance in the history of nations; there are extraordinary minutes, such as this tragic and bitter moment we are going through today.
Foremost, so that we are not thought of as carried away by emotion, so that it can be clearly seen that there is a people capable of standing with our head held high, with courage, a nation that knows to calmly analyze situations without resorting to lies or pretexts or base on absurd suppositions, but on obvious truths, the first thing we have to do to analyze the facts.
Yesterday afternoon, when we were all devoted to work – workers, State employees, Government officials, members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, students –, I mean, devoted to the most decent task a people can undertake, devoted to work in order to carry out the bigger jobs we have ahead, a huge explosion made our capital shudder.
Motivated by that instinct of getting inside the root of the problems, the comrades and I who were working at that time got immediately worried about a serious situation that may be occurring in the power plants, or in San Ambrosio police station, or in a vessel that had entered the capital port with ammunition and explosives very early that morning. And as a sort of premonition, we imagined that something serious had happened; that that explosion, no matter the place it had occurred, had had to cause catastrophic consequences and lots of victims, as it had indeed unfortunately happened.
About the subsequent event, everyone knows perfectly those next minutes of profound sorrow and anguish – though not fear – we lived in the city. In the first place, what was the reaction of the people? The people were not terrified by the explosion; they went to the place of the explosion. The people were not overwhelmed by fear, but by courage and, even though they did not know what had happened, they went there and found workers, the militia, solders and other members of the public force, all of them offering whatever help was in their power.
Events could not be more tragic: the vessel was anchored in the wharf, its cargo was being unloaded at the time of the explosion and half of it virtually disappeared, sweeping the workers and soldiers who were carrying out that operation.
People would wonder what the reason of that explosion was. Was it an accident? It is possible for those lacking of experience or knowledge on explosives to think of it as an accident. Explosives are known to explode and it is possible to imagine they can easily explode. However, that is not the case. It is not actually easy for explosives to explode; for them to explode they must be set off.
Then, what had happened? The other answer was that it might have been sabotage, but how and where can this happen? Can sabotage be carried out in the presence of many people? Can sabotage be carried out in the presence of rebel soldiers and dock workers, at high noon? If it was sabotage, how could this sabotage be carried out? And in the first place, why sabotage and not an accident?
What was the vessel carrying? That vessel was carrying bullets and also anti-tank and anti-personnel FAL rifle grenades. Bullets were already on the dock, there were no more bullets left in the ship. They had been carried in the hold of the stern, in the last division of the hold, that is, at the bottom of the hold, and workers had taken them out. There was an upper compartment that was the icebox of that hold, one of them had been turned in into the compartment holding the rifle grenades. The explosion did not occur while the bullets were being unloaded; the explosion occurred while the 30 tons of rifle grenades boxes were being uploaded.
If there was no fire on that ship – because an explosion can be caused by a fire on board –, if there was no fire on that ship, could the explosion occur because one the boxes fell off, for example? In the first place, it was unlikely a box would be dropped because the dock workers knew what they were carrying, and it wasn’t the first time they handled that type of cargo. For years, explosives and supplies have been handled in the port of Havana, and we do not remember any explosion. The workers had had years of experience with this type of cargo and knew how to handle it and took precautions, such as placing a mesh on the board to avoid the possibility of a box falling; they were especially careful because they knew it was ammunition to defend the revolution. Moreover, it was not the first time they had done so, since on previous occasions they had even done it voluntarily for free, without charging a penny, as a contribution to the defense of the country.
That is to say, those workers knew what they were carrying. It was unlikely a box would fall, but even if that slim possibility had occurred, even if one box had been dropped, does this mean that a box of grenades explodes when dropped, that it can explode if it falls? And all the less when they come from one of the best factories in the world manufacturing weapons and equipment that men have to manipulate in combat, and therefore they have to be covered with the greatest security, therefore it is practically impossible for them to explode when loaded, handled or preparing for shooting. As far as I recall, during all the war the worst that could happen was that a grenade did not explode when hitting the target, but we never knew of a grenade exploding in the rifle, since that grenade, when being propelled, receives the impact of the propelling charge, which is a strong impact, an impact that receives already without the safety catch, an impact the grenade receives already without the safety catch, and yet it does not explode. The worst that can happen is that, because it is defective, a grenade does not explode when hitting the target. We have never known of a grenade exploding at the end of a rifle barrel.
Then, what chance is there of grenades exploding when a box of them is dropped? Do grenades come without their safety catch? Are grenades loose inside the boxes? Are they transported without safety for the people who manipulate, load and upload them? Because it is necessary to calculate how many times these boxes are handled from the factory to the holds. Could it be considered logical in some sense that, even if unlikely events happened – the very unlikely event such as the fall of a box – an explosion could happen, that is, an explosion by accident? We can assure you that it is totally impossible!
But since theoretical interpretation was not enough, we arranged for the relevant tests to be made, and this morning we ordered army officers to take two boxes containing two different types of grenades, load them in an aircraft and launch them from 400 and 600 feet, respectively. And here there are the grenades launched from the aircraft at 400 and 600 feet high, grenades exactly the same as those on that vessel. (He shows the grenades to the public.)
Does it make any sense to suppose that grenades could explode when falling from 400 and 600 feet at eight feet high, taking into consideration all their safety conditions and the containers that are barely damaged with some dent, if any, at that height, plus the speed of the plane? To such an extent, that the boxes penetrated several feet into the ground as a result of the impact, and the wooden boxes were destroyed without the explosion of a single grenade out of the 50 grenades inside a box. I am sure that this test can be repeated a hundred or a thousand times, and the grenades will not explode, because for the explosives to explode, they must be set off. Many times during war bombs fell without exploding, and they served to supply us with explosives with which we made the mines, and we remember not a single case of accidental explosion by any of those weapons. They always had to be exploded. So it could not have been an accident, not by accident, it had to be intentional. It was necessary to dismiss all possibility of accident to accept the only reasonable explanation: an intentional explosion.
But how could an intentional explosion happen? Could there have been sabotage in the presence of rebel soldiers, veteran rebel soldiers who were watching the uploading? Could there have been sabotage in the presence of the workers who were working there? If all precautionary measures were taken when conducting these operations, how can anyone think that sabotage could be committed in broad daylight in the presence of workers and soldiers? That person would have had to be a worker but it is illogical for us to expect sabotage from a worker. No doubt workers are determined and ardent supporters of our Revolution.
But so as not to go only on theory, let us analyze the possibility of that sabotage. First of all, workers are searched to prevent them from carrying matches or cigarettes. They are searched to prevent them from being imprudent, and they have a delegate who observes the work they are doing. So they are not only searched, but watched out by soldiers and by their own delegates and comrades. Then sabotage in these conditions is practically impossible.
Furthermore, these workers are very well known by their comrades, because they are not so many, they may be around 12 or 18, and in such case they are a small group and know each other very well.
And another even more relevant factor is that the workers there did not know they were going to work on this ship. The vessel arrived in the morning. The first shift was from 11:00 a.m. to 1 p.m. and the persons in charge of it did not work in the compartment where the grenades were, but in a lower compartment in which the bullets were. They worked from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. When workers went to work, arrived the dock and there they were given their shifts without knowing in advance what ship they would work on, because more than 1,000 stevedores rotate on them and they can work in whatever ship.
The second shift of workers gets the tickets at 12:30, to begin working at 1:00. That group of workers, a small group out of more than 1,000, did not know they would unload the explosives. So premeditation, plan, or preparation in those difficult conditions is not reasonable to believe. That is to say that sabotage would have to be done by a fortune teller, a person who knew that on that precise day he would be selected among 1,000 workers to upload explosives. In order to carry out such acts of sabotage, he would have to have everything ready; he would have to evade the register and the vigilance of soldiers and the delegate. These are impossible conditions because it would be like supposing that the group of revolutionary workers, who for a few minutes undertake the task of unloading those weapons which are to be used to defend their interests and rights, might arouse the slightest suspicion. Then, not by questions of moral conviction, but from a careful analysis, a thorough investigation and a detailed conversation with all workers, temporary workers and stevedores, we reached the conclusion that the sabotage could not possibly have been prepared in Cuba. The explosives went off in Cuba, but the mechanism that detonated them was not installed in Cuba; the mechanism that exploded the ship could not by any means have been installed in Cuba.
This is why other possibilities had to be analyzed. Could it have been the workers, the crew of the ship? Very difficult, very unlikely, because we have questioned them one by one, and we were very careful with those whose work was somehow related to the holds, the cargo and the keys, in the first place, those who had keys that day and opened the holds for the unloading to begin perished in the explosion. The ship officers were on board when the explosion occurred and one cannot imagine that anybody would think it is possible to set off 30 tons of dynamite in a ship and escape unharmed. Many of the crewmembers were saved, but that does not mean that anybody could ensure that anyone could get out alive after setting off 30 tons of explosives in a ship.
Only four out of the 36 members of the crew were absent: three waiters, after they had served the food to the crew, and an oiler who was not on duty. This means that only four people were absent at that moment for absolutely logical reasons, the others were on board, including the two passengers. Then, it was unlikely the operation was perpetrated by any crewmember of the ship.
As we went further in the investigation, we reached the conclusion that the sabotage was perpetrated from far away; that it was not prepared and it could not have been prepared by no means in Cuba; that it was unlikely that it could have been perpetrated by any of the crewmembers; and that, nevertheless, the possibilities increased as we analyzed the ship cargo.
The unloading was watched very carefully because the weapons were of the interest of those soldiers and workers. We know our enemies and we take all possible pains. But thousands of miles away and far from knowing our problems, in countries that are not threatened by sabotage, explosions, stirred by revolutionary upheavals, or by the efforts of the counterrevolution, in a country like Belgium, the point of departure, how could an action like this be expected to be as difficult as here, where we are in permanent vigilance to avoid any act of sabotage?
From questioning the ship's officer responsible for the cargo, we found out that the merchandise had been loaded in the presence of this officer, or when he was away, in the presence of another crewmember that he was unable to identify.
Those loading conditions made much more easy and feasible the possibility of introducing some detonator to make the explosives go off. Therefore, we concluded that we should not look for the perpetrator of that sabotage here, but abroad, where conditions were much easier to prepare such an act. This means that there was an indisputable and proven fact: after 20 boxes had been taken out, the explosion occurred at the moment one of the remaining boxes was moved, it means, when that specific box was carried. When workers were to handle some new box – since they already had more than 20 boxes outside –, when they were going to carry some of the remaining boxes, the explosion occurred. That explosion could not have been an accident, that explosion had to be intentional. That is to say, the movement of a particular box activated the mechanism of some detonator, causing the explosion.
We all know, with more or less details, that there are infinite procedures for making such explosive traps that are used a lot in war, that when moving a cap, a pencil or a chair, an explosion occurs, since it is extremely easy for a technician to set up any of those mechanisms between two boxes or under one box, so that moving the box will set it off.
How did the boxes come along the way? The boxes came in compact rows, unable to shift, because boxes are placed very tight one against the other inside the hold or the icebox, so that they cannot move, meaning that they had no spare space to move. Such sabotage could be arranged without worry over an explosion before unloading. That is what happened. Workers had already removed the first boxed and when moving approximately box number 30 the explosion takes place, which could not be by accident, as we have shown. The explosion must have been prepared because those boxes were not in the first rows where any object could be seen, but in the second or third row. Thus, when moving a particular box in one of the rows the explosion occurs.
That is the conclusion we reached, which is not based on emotion or a whim, but on the analysis, the evidence, the research we have done, and even on the experiments we have conducted, in order to first draw the conclusion that we were dealing with sabotage rather than an accident. And I am sure that there is no doubt about it, because what else could it be expected?
Millions of tons of explosives are transported around the world every year and yet we do not hear of ships exploding. In our own country, for many years explosives have been transported and handled but we know of no explosion of this nature. And let us remember the Maine explosion, whose mysteries have not been perfectly explained by anyone. It even became the cause of a war because the nation to which the ship belonged – although it is supposed that it did not have a chance to investigate, it could not do as we did, to begin immediately with interrogations: talk to workers, crewmembers, everyone, although they did not have the chance to investigate – reached the conclusion that the ship had been blown up by an external mine, and declared war on Spain. Because the United States reached the conclusion that it had been an action perpetrated by Spain’s supporters moved by their hostility towards the United States, and based on no evidence or arguments and on mere suppositions, it went so far as to the transcendental act of declaring war on Spain.
We have not had to abuse our imagination that much. We have not had to draw conclusions with such little foundation, because it seems rather unrealistic to imagine Spain, with its difficult situation and hard struggle, blowing up the U.S. battleship. That did not seem logical. Instead, we have more than enough reasons to believe that ours was a case of sabotage and that we know what international forces are encouraging the enemies or our people and our Revolution. We do have reasons to think that there were interests trying to keep us from receiving weapons. We do have reasons to suppose, or think, that those who promoted this sabotage could not be others than those interested in avoiding us from getting such supplies. Because, what would be the interest of the authors of such an act, if not avoiding us from receiving those explosives? And we have to talk about that.
Those interested in us not receiving the explosives are the enemies of our Revolution, those who do not want our country to defend itself; those who do not want our country to be able to defend its sovereignty.
We know the efforts were made to keep us from buying those weapons. U.S. government officials were among the most interested ones in us not receiving those weapons. We can affirm it without this being a secret, because if it is a secret, it would be like those secrets that everyone knows. We are not the only ones to say this. The British Government said and stated that the U.S. Government did not want us to buy planes in Britain. U.S. authorities and spokespersons themselves have expressed their efforts to prevent Cuba from buying weapons. We have been fighting against such pressure. We have been fighting these obstacles.
So, a country, a government, makes use of its own powerful international influence and moves itself in diplomatic circles to prevent a small country from arming itself; a country that needs to defend its territory from its enemies, a nation that needs to defend itself against the criminals who want to return, or against colonizers who want to keep us under slavery and starvation. We must continue fighting the pressure of a powerful and influential government in order to buy weapons.
We can affirm that up to now we had achieved that a government and a European weapons factory, acting independently and firmly, opposed the pressure and sell us weapons. The Belgian weapons factory and the government of that country had opposed to pressures. Not once, but several times, the U.S. consul, a U.S. military attaché in Belgium and a military attaché working at the U.S. embassy in Belgium, had tried to prevent the factory and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from selling us these weapons.
That is to say that officials of the U.S. government had made repeated efforts to prevent our country from buying these weapons, and they cannot deny this reality. And this reality means that they did not want us to acquire those weapons and that one must look for the guilty ones among those interested in preventing us from buying those weapons. We have the right to think that those trying to prevent us from purchasing that equipment by diplomatic means, could do so by other means too.
We are not affirming they have done so, because we do not have conclusive evidence, and if we had them, we would be presenting them to the people and the world. I do say that we have the right to think that those who had not achieved their purposes by certain means, they could have tried by another. We have the right to think that we must look for the criminals among the interested ones. We do have the right to think that we must look for those responsible for the loss of the Cuban lives yesterday afternoon!
In the first place, what right does any government have to interfere with the efforts of another government in defense of its sovereignty? What right does any government have to assume the tutelage of any part of the world? What right does any government have to prevent Cubans from buying the weapons that all nations acquire to defend their sovereignty and integrity? What nation would we try to prevent from buying weapons? What weapons purchase do we interfere? What obstacles would we place in the way of any nation seeking to
arm itself? Who would think that a government living in peace, whose people live in peace with the other people, maintaining diplomatic and friendly relations – which must be friendly -, has the right to interfere in a way that that nation cannot acquire weapons? All the more if one considers that that country, represented by that government, is buying, in our territory, strategic materials it needs for its defense, without our interference in this acquisition of equipment, without our interference in their efforts to defend itself, without our interference in its affairs.
Why can’t we acquire the means to defend ourselves? Why this interest on preventing us from buying means to defend ourselves? Do they expect our people to fall again under the boots of the bunch of criminals who subjugated us for seven years? Are they instigating the return of the big criminals? Or even worst, are they perhaps planning to seize our land? They do not want our people to have the means to defend themselves. Our country is not a danger to any country. Our country is not and never will be a military danger to any other country. Our country will never be able to develop an offensive power against any other country, because the strength of our Revolution in the world lies not in the military power, but in our tremendous moral force, in our tremendous example for the brotherly nations, for our brethren of the race, enslaved and exploited throughout the Spanish speaking America. Our force will never be based on the military power. We are militarily strong to defend ourselves, but we are not, nor do we ever want to be militarily strong to attack anyone, because we do not aspire to submit or subjugate anyone. We are strong to defend ourselves. To defend one’s nation is another thing: it is a right, one of those rights the people know to defend against whatever power and force.
We would never be strong to attack anyone, not only because we would not have the necessary weapons, men or resources, but because we would not have the right to attack anyone. That is why we would never be strong, even if we had resources and weapons, simply because we would never have the right to do so. And instead, we feel strong enough to defend ourselves. We are sure that we are strong to defend ourselves because we would be defending a right and we would know how to defend it.
So, why shouldn’t we have the necessary means? Simply because they do not want us to defend ourselves, they want us to be defenseless. Why do they want us to be defenseless? Because they want to humble us, to subjugate us, so we do not resist the pressure, so we do not resist the aggressions. And do they have the right to hamper our efforts to acquire the means to defend ourselves against the authorities of a nation that has been unable to prevent its territory from being systematically used to bombard us?
Perhaps tomorrow, the newspapers of that country will say that analyzing these truths and reasons is an insult to the people of the United States. It is worth clarifying that we are not insulting the people of the United States. We never have. What happens is that they say the truths are insults, and they say so to the people in order to portrait our people as the enemy of the United States’ people. The reasons we discuss with the rulers – who are responsible for the policy of that country – are not insults to the people, because, on the contrary, we consider that those who harm the U.S. people are those making such mistakes. Those offending the U.S. people are those making such mistakes. They say that reasoning, calling things by their names and clarifying those truths to the people, are insults, because they want difficult relations between nations, and there are no difficult relations between nations here, because Cuba will never have difficult relations with any other nation of the world.
Nations are good, and they cannot be judged based on their rulers. It would not be fair to judge the Cubans, this magnificent people, based on the rulers the Revolution overthrew. The people are not to blame.
But it seems that the truths cannot even be insinuated in this continent where we, Cubans, have learned to tell the truth, fearless of anyone. And these are the truths: planes enemies of our people, planes piloted by criminal mercenaries depart the United States, and the government of that country, so worried about us buying weapons, has not been able to prevent those flights.
It has been seven years of bloody struggle and immense sacrifice since we achieved the triumph of the people. During those past days any citizen could be tortured or murdered in the streets of the cities or in the countryside. The most atrocious tyranny prevailed in our country. But all that was not an obstacle for ships loaded with bombs and ships loaded with shrapnel came from the United States, which did not explode in the port of Havana. However, we do not murder anyone, we do not torture anyone, and we do not hit a single human being. We have established respect for the human dignity and human sensitivity. Our Revolutionary government is characterized by that atmosphere of security, that feeling of peace, security and respect for the citizen. We do not torture and we do not murder, and yet the weapons that come to defend this regime explode upon reaching the port. On the other hand, the torturers of our people, the executioners of our people, those who ripped the lives of 20,000 compatriots, those who murdered students, peasants, workers, those who murdered men and women, those who murdered professionals, those who murdered any citizen, were directly receiving weapons and supplies that did not explode.
When it is about a just revolutionary regime – a human revolutionary regime, a regime that has striven so hard to defend the interests of the people, the interests of our suffered and exploited people, exploited by the monopolies, exploited by the latifundia, exploited by the privileged ones, a regime that has freed the people from these injustices, a regime most of the people support, a human regime – they fight it. When it is about a criminal and inhuman regime, a regime of monopolies and privileges, they support it. What kind of democracy is that which helps criminals and exploiters? Democracy is the one we have, where human being is appreciated and always will be more than money! Because we will never shed a single drop of blood for money; we will never sacrifice a single drop of human blood for money or selfish interests.
These facts are not isolated. Because who would be surprised that a ship explodes at the port while workers are working? Who would be surprised at a sabotage causing the death of workers? Who would be surprised if only a month ago – if it has been already a month – a U.S. aircraft coming from the U.S. territory with a U.S. bomb and piloted by a U.S. pilot, tried to drop a bomb on a workplace where with more than 200 workers in it? And on that occasion I said: “What would have been the pain of our people today and what would have been the tragedy of our people today if we would be burring dozens of workers instead of these two corpses of mercenaries?” And as if those words were a premonition, we have had to come here to burry some dozens of workers and rebel soldiers.
Who would be surprised that the perpetrators of that sabotage did not worry about the amount of victims they would cause, about the people they would kill? Who would be surprised about it if only a month ago they were going to drop a 100-pound bomb on a factory with over 200 workers in it? Who would be surprised if, when that event occurred, we calmly spoke to the people with proof in our hands, explaining what had happened, showing them the evidence, and even told them to send the technicians so that they verify the strict veracity of everything said. A month has passed and yet no one has been arrested in the United States, not a single person responsible for such acts has been found and no one has been bothered. On the contrary, few days after the incidents the light aircrafts came back and hardly a week later the town in which the Prime Minister of the Revolutionary Government lives was bombed.
What is so strange about the explosion of a ship loaded with workers if they were going to drop a bomb over a sugar factory and they did not worry about bombing an area with children, dropping 100-pound bombs in that region? What is so strange if yesterday the Bohemia magazine published photographs of the air fleet that peacefully rests in the U.S. airports without being disturbed by anyone? What is so strange if yesterday we received the news that José Eleuterio Pedraza was in Washington? What is so strange about all those things that have been happening? The only difference is that on this occasion the blow has been hard and bloody.
It was logical. Some months ago we had to go to the hospitals full of victims as a result of that incursion whose author still strolls through the U.S. towns and cities without anyone bothering him. What is so strange if a series of acts demonstrate the group of powerful interests conspiring against our Revolution; If only a few days ago large quantities of corn were released to replace Cuban honey in the manufacture of alcohol; If only a few days ago inspectors who observed the cultivation of fruits and vegetables we export to that country were retired; If everyone knows the law by which the sovereignty of our country is being subjected to the threat of not buying our sugar? I mean, if shortly the a law is going to be submitted to the Congress, by virtue of which the President of the Republic reserves the right at any time to remove, reduce or buy the sugar quote, if so considers.
What does that mean? It means that our country has a very weak economic structure. But, why does our country has a weak economic structure? Because that was the structure the foreign masters gave to our economy; a one-crop economy, an economy of latifundia, an economy of an underdeveloped nation, a weak economy as a consequence of the policy implemented by the foreign masters of our economy for 50 years. And now, taking advantage of this dependence, this situation which we are trying to get rid of – that is what economic independence means –, taking advantage of this dependence, they want to adopt systems which try to subjugate our rights and our sovereignty.
It means that if we make laws here, if we take action for the benefit of our people, they arrogate the right to starve our people. It means that, taking advantage of the economic situation they enjoy as a result of the policy of one-crop, latifundia and underdevelopment they applied here, and by threatening us with starvation, they try to restrict the rights of our people to be independent and sovereign.
What does this mean if not an economic Platt Amendment? What does this mean if not to warn that if we take measures against the latifundia, against monopolies – measures for the benefit of our people –, reprisals will be taken against us, because we are a small country with a weak economy? Does it mean that if we make efforts to become a strong economy, to have our own economy, we are threatened with starvation? What is this if not an attempt to undermine the sovereignty of a country, an attempt to restrict the independence of a country? What is this if not that a government arrogates the right to decide on the destinies of another country by means of retaliatory measures? These are not measures that are taken to defend national interests. These are not measures that are taken to defend the interests of the U.S. people. These are not measures that are taken to guarantee the supply. No, these measures, contrary to ours – which are to defend the people, to defend the national interests, not as reprisal –, are retaliatory measures. These are not measures to defend national interests, but retaliatory measures against another country, while our measures are taken to defend the national interests and for the benefit of the people. Because none of the measures we take are aimed at starving the U.S. people. On the contrary, the measures we take restrict the voracious pocket of a few U.S. monopolies, but we do not restrict the means of subsistence or work of the U.S. people. Our measures are against monopolies, against interests, not against the U.S. people. Their measures are not to defend the U.S. people, but measures of reprisal against the Cuban people.
And, of course, it was needed a Revolutionary Government to proclaim that, it was needed a government of the people to proclaim that, it was needed a government fearless to proclaim it, fearless of threats or reprisals; fearless of the military maneuvers. And we could say: What is the purpose of military maneuvers in the Caribbean? What is the purpose of using landing maneuvers against positions occupied by guerrillas? What is the purpose of using maneuvers of troops transported on planes, in offensive operations? Because, as far as we know, the problems of the world are discussed at the summits, as they call it. The problems of the world are understood to be problems of directed projectiles, advanced science and technology, but we have not heard that the problems of the world are problems of guerrillas, nor have we heard that the problems of the world are problems here in the Caribbean and that there are international difficulties in the Caribbean.
As far as we know the big nations do not think they can solve their military issues with guerrillas. We were the ones who had to use the guerrillas to fight the professional army of tyranny. We had to use such tactics against an army larger and better prepared than ours. But I have not heard that military issues are solved with guerrillas in the world. And when we see Marine Corps, landing maneuvers against guerrillas, we wonder why? Do they plan to land – I wonder myself – or just intimidate? Do they want to frighten us? Do they want to show us that we can be invaded at any time? Landings here are among the things being discussed by some spokesmen as possible.
Who said that anyone can land here? Who said anyone can simply land here? For the time being, among the probable things – it is good to say that a day like today, because in fact we are already quite experienced in terms of patriotism and civism so that those insinuations could be used against us – and among the possible things being discussed, allow me to say that we feel simply amazed when they calmly say they would send here, among the possible things, the Marine Corps, as if we did not count at all. As if the Cubans would just stand by in case of any contingency! As if Cubans would not resist any troops landing here to try to subjugate our people!
And it would be good to say, to say once and for all here, at this time when we come to deposit a considerable number of soldiers, workers and citizens in their tombs – who knows how many times we met them in our workplaces, in public gatherings or military facilities, or we met them in zones of operations; who knows how many times they were applauding and living, as you do now, full of noble hopes the Revolution has aroused in every humble Cuban, at a time when we come on a mournful pilgrimage to deposit their remains in the tombs, quietly and calmly, discharging a painful duty that we know well how to perform in a selfless manner, that we know how to comply knowing that tomorrow we can be others, as they were yesterday and as others were before them; because we, Cubans, have learned to look at death serenely and undisturbed; because Cubans have acquire a real sense of life, which begins by considering it unworthy when not living with freedom, when not living with decorum, when not living with justice, when not living for something great as it happens to Cubans at this moment –, before these dead people who were yesterday as we are today, the victims of who knows what murderous hands, we say that we are not afraid of any troop landings here. We would not delay for a single second in picking up our guns and taking up our positions, without even blinking or hesitating, to face any foreign troops landing in this country. We, I mean the Cuban people, its workers, peasants, students, women, young and old, even its children, will not hesitate to simply occupy their positions the day any foreign troops try to land in our beaches, either by ship, by plane or in parachutes, no matter how they come or how many they are.
And it is good that we say all these without fanfare, as those who are really determined to fulfill what has been promised. If anyone doubted this, yesterday furnished proof to the most skeptical. Whoever had seen the people yesterday, whoever had seen that episode both wonderful and horrific, whoever had seen the crowds advancing towards the fire, how soldiers, workers, policemen, sailors, firemen, the militia, went to that center of danger, how they advanced to that place of death, without hesitating; whoever had seen what Cubans saw yesterday, whoever had seen the soldiers and the people advancing toward danger to rescue the wounded, to rescue the victims in that burning ship, in an area that was on fire, when it was unknown how many more explosions might occur; whoever had seen that waves, swept by the explosions, those who died not in the first explosion, but in the second one; anyone observing the people’s conduct yesterday; whoever had seen the people controlling traffic; anyone observing the people establishing order; whoever had seen the people advancing towards that explosion that left behind like a fungus, reminiscent of the fungus of nuclear explosions; whoever had seen the people advancing towards that fungus without knowing what was actually happening, can be sure that our people are capable of defending themselves, a people capable of advancing against the fungi left by nuclear bombs.
And those were yesterday’s events. They were not an invention of our fantasy, but a reality that everyone could see. It is a reality we had to pay with dozens of valuable lives, of men who died when trying to save their comrades, who died quietly and calmly to save the lives trapped between the bend wreckage of that ship and among the buildings’ ruble, of firemen who were advancing without bothering to extinguishing the fire on buildings full of explosives. Whoever had seen scenes like those of yesterday, anyone who knows a people as dignified, forceful, generous and honest as ours, has the right to know that this is a people that will defend itself against any aggression.
May those who are disturbed in the most elementary common sense and dare to consider as possible any kind of invasion against our soil understand the monstrosity of their mistake, because this will save us many sacrifices. But unfortunately, had this happened, mostly to the dismay of those who attack us, let there be no doubt that here in this land called Cuba, here in the middle of this people called Cuban, they will have to fight against us as long as there is one drop of blood left in our veins. They will have to fight against us as long as there is an atom of life in us. We will never attack anyone and no one will ever need to be afraid of us, but anyone attacking us must know without fearing to be wrong that Cubans today – we are not anymore in the years 1898 or 1899, we are not living at the beginning of the century, or in the 1910s, 1920s or 1930s –, Cubans of this decade, Cubans of this generation, Cubans of this era – we are not better today, we are fortunate to have a better vision for the future, because we had the fortune to receive the example and lesson from the history, the lesson that cost so many sacrifices to our ancestors, the lesson that cost so much humiliation and pain to the past generations, because we have had the fortune of receiving that lesson –, this generation will fight in case of aggression until its last drop of blood, with the rifles we have, with the rifles we buy from those who want to sell them to us, plain and simple, with the bullets and weapons we buy where we seem best and with the weapons we know how to take off from our enemies during fight.
And without worrying about the threats, without worrying about the maneuvers, bearing in mind that one day we were only 12 men and that, comparing our force at the time with the one of the tyranny, our strength was so tiny and so insignificant that no one would have ever believed possible to resist. However, we believed that we were resisting at that moment, as we today believe that we can resist any aggression. We believe not only that we will know how to resist any aggression, but that we will know how to overcome any aggression, and that again we would have no other dilemma than that with which we began the revolutionary struggle: that of freedom or death. Only that freedom now means something else: freedom means homeland. And our dilemma now would be homeland or death.
On a day like today, sorrowful and tragic, painful for the people, painful for the government, painful for the families of the workers, soldiers and the citizens who died, in a moment so important like this, it would be good if we take these things for granted, and that our willingness to resist is not only the willingness to resist militarily. Maybe they think that we have the courage to die, that we have no courage to resist privations, but men have the courage to resist even the hardship they least imagine.
If those men who began the struggle in the mountains had had no courage to resist privations, they would have been defeated. However, that was not the case because they were strong enough to resist privations. Weak men are the ones who do not have the determination to resist privations. Strong men and women are the ones who have the determination to resist privations. If during combat a nation has the courage to make any sacrifice, it should have also the courage to resist any privation. They are also mistaken when thinking that they will defeat us by means of economic reprisals. And at this point one could say that it is better to starve in freedom than to live enslaved in opulence; that it is better to be poor but free, even though the development of our richness might have a high price and imply a long road. Much more when we were poor and enslaved here, but at least now we are poor, but free. Someday we will be free and rich.
No one can buy us with economic advantages, much less when economic benefits were never seen by anyone anywhere, because what everyone here saw was misery, injustice and exploitation. Those are the words that can be used to call the hundreds of thousands of children who have no school, or had no school, and that is what the miserable huts are called, that is what the months of dead time are called, that is what unemployment is called, and that is what the agony in which we live is called. And Cuba, our people, has done nothing but fight against these evils, has done nothing but strive to overcome those evils, we have done nothing but claim what is ours. We have done nothing but defend our possessions and ourselves. And that is, in the eyes of the international plutocracy, the wrongful act that Cuba has committed: to defend its possessions and its people against exploitation, against colonization. This is why the planes come, that is the reason for the ever-growing audacity of the criminals protected by that plutocracy. That is the reason why – while planes do not explode in other parts of the world, while planes do not launch bombs in other parts of the world –, in our homeland, workers are threatened in their workplaces by 100-pound bombs, or threatened in their workplaces by an apocalyptic explosion.
That is the cause of the hatred of the powerful oligarchy that fight us; that is the reason of the conspiracy against our homeland. We understand it well because it is necessary that we know how to understand our problems. We must know how to understand these truths, and we must proclaim them. Just as it is necessary that those interests and conspirators know what to expect and know that it is not about making plans from abroad on the problems of the country, its solutions, or the counterrevolutionary acts. They must know that in order to make plans on our country, in the first place, they have to count on us, because if they don’t, as if we do not exist, then they will face the consequences.
Today we have come to conclude one of our saddest days, but indeed one of the most firm and symbolic days of our homeland. Who would have guessed only 14 months ago – when we meet rebel soldiers on the streets of Oriente province, amidst the overflowing joy of that people –, that, one day like today, we would have to walk the same streets in the midst of the sadness and pain of that same people, to bury, among a group of workers, a group of those soldiers who passed by here carrying the national liberation banners? Who would have guessed that the perpetrators and accomplices of the murderers of so many thousands and thousands of Cubans would force us once more – and who knows how many times more – to come and weep beside the tombs of other victims, other citizens annihilated by the same criminals and the same allies? But however bitter it may be, it is true. And here we are fulfilling this painful duty, which we will fulfill as many times as necessary. We will fulfill it, one day as part of the procession and another day inside the coffin, if necessary. We will know to fulfill it because behind those who fell there will come others, behind those who fell there are others still standing!
Great has been the loss in these 14 months; dear and unforgettable comrades who are no longer among those who walked behind the coffins; comrades who have disappeared from our ranks while fulfilling their duty. However. The ranks continue to march. The people are still standing, and that is what matters! What an imposing spectacle of a standing people! What a wonderful and impressive spectacle of a standing people! What a spectacle like this one today! Some years ago it would have seemed a dream to watch them march together as they do today. Who could have dreamed some years ago that workers’ militias would be marching side by side with the university brigades, side by side with the soldiers of the Rebel Army, side by side with the navy and the police, side by side with a column of peasants forming their martial and compact ranks wearing their mambí hats and carrying a rifle on their shoulders; guajiros from the mountains who are accompanying us today in this moment of pain, so that no one be unrepresented, so that there, where ministers and citizens stand together, the whole nation stands together showing its generosity, fighting spirit and heroism. Who could have dreamed that one day soldiers and workers would not be enemies; that one day soldiers, workers, students, peasants and the people would not be enemies; that one day intellectuals would walk arm in arm with the soldiers; that one day the thought, the labor force and the guns would march together as it happened today!
They used to march separated, they used to be enemies, the homeland used to be divided into dissimilar interests, dissimilar groups, dissimilar institutions. Today the nation is a single feeling, the nation is a single force, the nation is a single group. Today, peasants and soldiers, students and the police, or the people and the armed forces do not fight between them. Today, we all emerge from the same yearning and aspiration. People and soldiers are identical. They used to fight each other, but today they fight together. They used to walk in different directions, but today the walk together. Today workers and soldiers march together, die together, help one each other, give their lives to save others, as dear brothers.
That is the reason why today I see our homeland stronger than ever, I see our Revolution more solid and invincible than ever, our people more gallant and heroic than ever. Today it is as if that blood, which was the blood of soldiers and workers, the blood of Cuban workers and French workers… French workers died fulfilling their duty while transporting those goods that will serve to defend our sovereignty, which is why we have not forgotten them when it comes to help our own people. When it comes to help the families of the Cubans who died, we have not forgotten those French workers who fell in that act of vandalism perpetrated by the murderous enemy hands. We have not forgotten workers here and from other parts of the world, who yesterday united their blood with the French blood, the same blood of those who cried out for freedom in the first great revolution of the modern history of humankind. The blood of Cuban workers was united to the blood of French workers. That is why we, who see them as brothers, have shown the same generosity when providing help for their families, because they also have wives, mothers and children. To us, a generous people as ours, this meant an act of elementary solidarity that we all feel for all peoples of the world.
As I said, today I see that our nation is more glorious, more heroic, that our people is more admirable, a people worthy of admiration as one admires a column coming back from battle, worthy of identity and solidarity as solders showing their solidarity after a battle.
What matters is not the reduction in the number of soldiers; what matters is the presence of mind of those who are still standing. More than once we experience a reduction in our ranks, in the ranks of our army. We saw painful reductions, as we see today in the ranks of the people, but what matters most is the determination of the people still standing.
And today, as we say farewell to the fallen, to those soldiers and workers, I have no other way to say goodbye, but with the idea which symbolizes this struggle and the essence of our people today: may they rest together in peace! Together, workers and soldiers, together in their graves, as they fought together, as they died together and as we are willing to die together.
And as we say goodbye in the threshold of the cemetery, we make this promise which, more like today’s promise, is a promise of yesterday and always: Cuba will not be intimidated!, Cuba will not recede!, the Revolution will not stop!, the Revolution will continue its unshakable path!
That is our promise, not to those who died, because to die for the homeland is to live, but to the comrades who will always remain in our memories. They will always remain, not in the memory of a man, or men, but in the only memory that can never be erased: the memory in the heart of a people.
Stenographic Versions – Council of State
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="sept_03.html">September 2003 • Vol 3, No. 8 •</a></b></font></p>
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<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5"><font color="black">Cuba’s Revolution ‘In Permanence’</font></font><font color="black" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="5"><sup>1</sup></font></b></p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">By Fidel Castro</font></b></p>
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<p>“For decades, our people have confronted powers much greater than those possessed by the European Union; new forces are emerging everywhere, with tremendous vigor. The peoples are tired of guardians, interference and plunder, imposed through mechanisms that benefit the most developed and wealthy at the cost of the growing poverty and ruin of others. Some of these peoples are already advancing with unrestrainable force, and others will join them. Among them there are giants awakening. The future belongs to these peoples.”</p>
<p>It seems almost unreal to be here in this same place 50 years after the events we are commemorating today, which took place that morning of July 26, 1953. I was 26 years old back then; today, 50 more years of struggle have been added to my life.</p>
<p>Way back then, I could not have imagined for even a second that this evening, the few participants in that action who are still alive would be gathered here, together with those, gathered here or listening to us all around the country, who were influenced by, or participated directly in the Revolution; together with those who were children or teenagers back then; with those who were not even born yet and today are parents or even grandparents; with whole contingents of fully fledged men and women, full of revolutionary and internationalist glory and history, soldiers and officers in active duty or the reserves, civilians who have accomplished veritable feats; with a seemingly infinite number of young combatants; with dedicated workers or enthusiastic students, as well as some who are both at the same time; and with millions of children who fill our imagination of eternal dreamers. And once again, life has given me the unique privilege of addressing all of you.</p>
<p>I am not speaking here on my own behalf. I am doing it in the name of the heroic efforts of our people and the thousands of combatants who have given their lives throughout half a century. I am doing it too, with pride for the great work they have succeeded in carrying out, the obstacles they have overcome, and the impossible things they have made possible.</p>
<p>In the terribly sad days that followed the action, I explained to the court where I was tried the reasons that led us to undertake this struggle. At that time, Cuba had a population of less than six million people. Based on the information available back then, I gave a harsh description, with approximate statistics, of the situation facing our people 55 years after the U.S. intervention.</p>
<p>That intervention came when Spain had already been militarily defeated by the tenacity and heroism of the Cuban patriots, and [the U.S.] frustrated the goals of our long war of independence when in 1902 it established a complete political and economic control over Cuba.</p>
<p>The forceful imposition on our first Constitution of the right of the U.S. government to intervene in Cuba and the occupation of national territory by U.S. military bases, together with the total domination of our economy and natural resources, reduced our national sovereignty to practically nil.</p>
<p>I will quote just a few brief paragraphs from my statements at that trial on October 16, 1953:</p>
<p>“Six hundred thousand Cubans without work. Five hundred thousand farm laborers who work four months of the year and starve the rest….</p>
<p>“Four hundred thousand industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose homes are wretched quarters, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender, whose life is endless work and whose only rest is the tomb….</p>
<p>“Ten thousand young professionals: medical doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school teachers, dentists, pharmacists, journalists, painters, sculptors, etc., who finish school with their degrees anxious to work and full of hopes, only to find themselves at a dead end, with all doors closed to them….</p>
<p>“Eighty-five percent of the small farmers in Cuba pay a rent and live under constant threat of being evicted from the land they till. There are two hundred thousand peasant families who do not have a single acre of land to till to provide food for their starving children. More than half of our most productive land is in foreign hands. Nearly three hundred thousand caballerías (over three million hectares) of arable land owned by powerful interests remain idle. Two million two hundred thousand of our urban population pay rents that take between one fifth and one third of their incomes. Two million eight hundred thousand of our rural and suburban population lack electricity….</p>
<p>“The little rural schoolhouses are attended by a mere half of the school age children who go barefoot, half-naked and undernourished. Ninety per cent of the children in the countryside are sick with parasites….</p>
<p>“Society is indifferent to the mass murder of so many thousands of children who die every year from lack of resources. From May to December over a million people are jobless in Cuba, with a population of five and a half million. When the head of a family works only four months a year, how can he purchase clothing and medicine for his children? They will grow up with rickets, with not a single good tooth in their mouths by the time they reach thirty; they will have heard ten million speeches and will finally die of poverty and disillusion. Public hospitals, which are always full, accept only patients recommended by some powerful politician who, in return, demands the votes of the unfortunate one and his family so that Cuba may continue forever in the same or worse condition.”</p>
<p>Perhaps the most important statement I made about the economic and social situation was the following:</p>
<p>“The nation’s future, the solutions to its problems, cannot continue to depend on the selfish interests of a dozen big businessmen nor on the cold calculations of profits that ten or twelve magnates draw up in their air-conditioned offices. The country cannot continue begging on its knees for miracles from a golden fleece, like the one mentioned in the Old Testament, destroyed by the prophet’s fury. Golden fleece cannot perform miracles of any kind. [...] Statesmen whose statesmanship consists of preserving the status quo and mouthing phrases like ‘absolute freedom of enterprise,’ ‘guarantees to investment capital’ and ‘law of supply and demand,’ will not solve these problems.’ In this present-day world, social problems are not solved by spontaneous generation.”</p>
<p>These statements and ideas described a whole underlying thinking regarding the capitalist economic and social system that simply had to be eliminated. They expressed, in essence, the idea of a new political and social system for Cuba, although it may have been dangerous to propose such a thing in the midst of the sea of prejudices and ideological venom spread by the ruling classes, allied to the empire and imposed on a population where 90 percent of the people were illiterate or semi-literate, without even a sixth-grade education; discontent, combative and rebellious, yet unable to discern such an acute and profound problem. Since then, I have held the most solid and firm conviction that ignorance has been the most powerful and fearsome weapon of the exploiters throughout all of history.</p>
<p>Educating the people about the truth, with words and irrefutable facts, has perhaps been the fundamental factor in the grandiose feat that our people have achieved.</p>
<p>Those humiliating realities have been crushed, despite blockades, threats, aggressions, massive terrorism and the unrestrained use of the most powerful media in history against our Revolution. The statistics leave no room for doubt.</p>
<p>It has since been possible to more precisely determine that the real population of Cuba in 1953, according to the census taken that year, was 5,820,000. The current population, according to the census of September 2002, now in the final phase of data processing, is 11,177,743. The statistics tell us that in 1953, a total of 807,700 people were illiterate, meaning an illiteracy rate of 22.3 percent, a figure that undoubtedly grew later during the seven years of Batista’s tyranny. In the year 2002, the number was a mere 38,183, or 0.5 percent of the population.</p>
<p>The Ministry of Education estimates that the real figure is even lower, because in their thorough search for people who have not been given literacy training, […] in their sectors or neighborhoods, it has been very difficult to locate them. Their estimates, based on investigative methods even more precise than a census, reveal a total of 18,000, for a rate of 0.2 percent. Of course, neither figure includes those who cannot learn to read or write because of mental or physical disabilities.</p>
<p>In 1953, the number of people with junior or senior high school education was 139,984, or 3.2 percent of the population aged 10 and over. In 2002, the number had risen to 5,733,243, which is 41 times greater, equivalent to 58.9 percent of the population in the same age group. The number of university graduates grew from 53,490 in 1953 to 712,672 in 2002.</p>
<p>Unemployment, despite the fact that the 1953 census was taken in the middle of the sugar harvest—that is, the time of the highest demand for labor—was 8.4 percent of the economically active population. The 2002 census, taken in September, revealed that the unemployment rate in Cuba today is a mere 3.1 percent. And this was the case in spite of the fact that the active labor force in 1953 was only 2,059,659 people, whereas in 2002 it had reached 4,427,028. What is most striking is that next year, when unemployment is reduced to less than 3 percent, Cuba will enter the category of countries with full employment, something that is inconceivable in any other country of Latin America or even the so-called economically developed nations in the midst of the current worldwide economic situation.</p>
<p>Without going into other areas of noteworthy social advances, I will simply add that between 1953 and 2002, the population almost doubled, the number of homes tripled, and the number of persons per home was reduced from 4.46 in 1953 to 3.16 in 2002; 75.4 percent of these homes were built after the triumph of the Revolution.</p>
<p>Eighty five percent of the people own the houses they dwell in and they do not pay taxes; the remaining 15 percent pays a rather symbolic rent. Of the total number of homes in the country, the percentage of huts fell from 33.3 percent in 1953 to 5.7 percent in 2002, while the percentage of homes with electrical power service rose from 55.6 percent in 1953 to 95.5 percent in 2002.</p>
<p>These statistics, however, do not tell the full story. Cold figures cannot express quality, and it is in terms of quality that the most truly spectacular advances have been achieved by Cuba.</p>
<p>Today, by a wide margin, our country occupies first place worldwide in the number of teachers, professors and educators per capita. The country’s active teaching staff accounts for the incredible figure of 290,574.</p>
<p>According to studies analyzing a group of the main educational indicators, Cuba also occupies first place, above the developed countries. The maximum of 20 students per teacher in primary schools already attained, and the ratio of one teacher per 15 students in junior high school grades seven, eight and nine, that will be achieved this coming school year, are things that could not even be dreamed of in the world’s wealthiest, most developed countries.</p>
<p>The number of doctors is 67,079, of which 45,599 are specialists and 8,858 are in training. The number of nurses is 81,459, while that of healthcare technicians is 66,339, for a total of 214,877 doctors, nurses and technicians in the healthcare sector. Life expectancy is 76.15 years; infant mortality is 6.5 for 1000 live births during the first year of life, lower than any other Third World country and even some of the developed nations.</p>
<p>There are 35,902 physical education, sports and recreation instructors, a great many more than the total number of teachers and professors in all areas of education before the Revolution. Cuba is now fully engaged in the transformation of its own systems of education, culture and healthcare, through which it has attained so many achievements, in order to reach new levels of excellence never even imagined, based on the accumulated experience and new technological possibilities.</p>
<p>These programs are now fully underway, and it is estimated that the knowledge currently acquired by children, teenagers and young people will be tripled with each school year. At the same time, within five years at most, average life expectancy should rise to 80 years. The most developed and wealthy countries will never attain a ratio of 20 students in a classroom in primary school, or one teacher to 15 students in high school, or succeed in taking university education to every municipality throughout the country to place it within reach of the whole population, or in offering the highest quality educational and healthcare services to all of their citizens free of charge. Their economic and political systems are not designed for this.</p>
<p>In Cuba, the social and human nightmare denounced in 1953, which gave rise to our struggle, had been left behind just a few years after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. Soon, there were no longer peasants, sharecroppers or tenant farmers without land; all of them became the owners of the land they farmed. There were no longer undernourished, barefoot, parasite-ridden children, without schools or teachers, even if their schooling took place beneath the shade of a tree. They no longer died in massive numbers from hunger, disease, from lack of resources or medical care. No longer were the rural areas filled with unemployed men and women. A new stage began in the creation and construction of educational, healthcare, residential, sports and other public facilities, as well as thousands of kilometers of highways, dams, irrigation channels, agricultural facilities, electrical power plants and power lines, agricultural, mechanical and construction material industries, and everything essential for the sustained development of the country.</p>
<p>The labor demand was so great that for many years, large contingents of men and women from the cities were mobilized to work in agriculture, construction and industrial production, which laid the foundations for the extraordinary social development achieved by our country, which I mentioned earlier.</p>
<p>I am talking as if the country were an idyllic haven of peace, as if there had not been over four decades of a rigorous blockade and economic war, aggressions of all kinds, countless acts of sabotage and terrorism, assassination plots and an endless list of hostile actions against our country, which I do not wish to emphasize in this speech, so as to focus on essential ideas of the present. Suffice it to say that defense-related tasks alone required the permanent mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men and women and large material resources.</p>
<p>This hard-fought battle served to toughen our people, and taught them to fight simultaneously on many different fronts, to do a lot with very little, and to never be discouraged by obstacles.</p>
<p>Decisive proof of this was their heroic conduct, their tenacity and unshakably firm stance when the socialist bloc disappeared and the USSR splintered. The feat they accomplished then, when no one in the world would have bet a penny on the survival of the Revolution, will go down in history as one of the greatest ever achieved. They did it without violating a single one of the ethical and humanitarian principles of the Revolution, despite the shrieking and slander of our enemies. The Moncada Program was fulfilled, and over-fulfilled. For some time now, we have been pursuing even greater and previously unimaginable dreams.</p>
<p>Today, great battles are being waged in the area of ideas, while confronting problems associated with the world situation, perhaps the most critical to ever face humanity. I am obliged to devote a part of my speech to this.</p>
<p>Several weeks ago, in early June, the European Union adopted an infamous resolution, drafted by a small group of bureaucrats, without prior analysis by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs themselves, and promoted by an individual of markedly fascist lineage and ideology: José María Aznar. The adoption of this resolution constituted a cowardly and repugnant action that added to the hostility, threats and dangers posed for Cuba by the aggressive policy of the hegemonic superpower.</p>
<p>They decided to eliminate or reduce to a minimum what they define as “humanitarian aid” to Cuba.</p>
<p>How much of this aid has been provided in the past few years, which have been so very difficult for the economy of our country? In 2000 the so-called humanitarian aid received from the European Union was 3.6 million dollars; in 2001 it was 8.5 million; in 2002, 0.6 million. And this was before the application of the just measures that Cuba adopted, on fully legal grounds, to defend the security of our people against the serious threats of imperialist aggression, something that no one ignores.</p>
<p>As can be seen, the average was 4.2 million dollars annually, which was reduced to less than a million in 2002.</p>
<p>What does this amount really mean for a country that suffered the impact of three hurricanes between November of 2001 and October of 2002, resulting in 2.5 billion dollars in damages for our country, combined with the devastating effect on our revenues of the drop in tourism after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, the drop in sugar and nickel prices due to the international economic crisis, and the considerable rise in oil prices owing to various factors?</p>
<p>What does it mean in comparison with the 72 billion dollars in losses and damages resulting from the economic blockade imposed by the U.S. government for more than four decades, and with regards to which, as a result of the extraterritorial and brutal Helms-Burton Act, which threatened the economic interests of the European Union itself, the latter reached a shameful “understanding” where it pledged not to support its business people in their dealings with Cuba, in exchange for vague promises that the Act would not be applied to its investments in the United States?</p>
<p>Through its sugar subsidies, the countries of the European Union have caused billions of dollars in losses for the Cuban economy throughout the entire duration of the U.S. blockade.</p>
<p>Cuba’s payments to the countries of the European Union for goods imported over the last five years totaled some 7.5 billion dollars, or an approximate average of 1.5 billion dollars annually. On the other hand, over the last five years, these countries only purchased an average of 571 million dollars worth of imports from Cuba annually. Who is actually helping whom?</p>
<p>Moreover, this much-touted humanitarian aid usually comes with bureaucratic delays and unacceptable conditions, such as creating funds of an equal value in national currency, at the exchange rate of our currency exchange bureaus, to provide funding in national currency for other projects where decisions were to be adopted with the participation of third parties.</p>
<p>This means that if the European Commission were to hand over a million dollars, they want the Cuban side to put up 27 million Cuban pesos in exchange, to fund other projects in national currency for the same amount, and the execution of the projects would involve the participation of European non-governmental organizations in all decision-making processes. This absurd condition, which was never accepted, practically paralyzed the flow of aid for a number of projects for three years, and subsequently limited it considerably.</p>
<p>Between October 2000 and December 2002, the European Commission officially approved four projects for an approximate total amount of 10.6 million U.S. dollars (almost all of it for technical assistance in administrative, legal and economic matters) and only 1.9 million dollars for food security. None of this has been executed, due to the delays caused by the bureaucratic mechanisms of this institution. Nevertheless, in all European Union reports, these amounts appear as “approved for Cuba,” although the truth remains that until now not a penny of this funding has reached our country.</p>
<p>It should be remembered that additionally, in all of their reports on aid to Cuba, the European Commission and member countries include so-called indirect costs, such as airfares on their own airlines, accommodation, travel expenses, salaries and First World-standard luxuries. The portion of the supposed aid money that actually directly benefits the projects is whittled away through these expenditures, which do not help the country in any way, but are nonetheless calculated as part of their “generosity” for public relations purposes. It is truly outrageous to attempt to pressure and intimidate Cuba with these measures.</p>
<p>Cuba, a small country, besieged and blockaded, has not only been able to survive, but also to help many countries of the Third World, exploited throughout centuries by the European colonial powers.</p>
<p>In the course of 40 years, over 40,000 youths from more than 100 Third World countries, including 30,000 from Africa, have graduated in Cuba as university-educated professionals and qualified technical workers, at no cost to them whatsoever, and our country has not attempted to steal a single one of them, as the countries of the European Union do with many of the brightest minds. Throughout this time, on the other hand, over 52,000 Cuban doctors and health care workers, who have saved millions of lives, have provided their services voluntarily and free of charge in 93 countries.</p>
<p>Even though the country has still not completely left behind the special period, last year, 2002, there were already more than 16,000 youths from throughout the Third World undertaking higher studies in our country, free of charge, including over 8,000 being trained as doctors. If we were to calculate what they would have to pay for this education in the United States and Europe, the result would be the equivalent of a donation of more than 450 million dollars every year. If you include the 3,700 doctors providing their services abroad in the most far-flung and inhospitable locales, you would have to add almost 200 million U.S. dollars more, based on the annual salary paid to doctors by the WHO. All in all approximately 700 million dollars.</p>
<p>These things that our country can do, not on the basis of its financial resources, but rather the extraordinary human capital created by the Revolution, should serve as an example to the European Union, and make it feel ashamed of the measly and ineffective aid it offers these countries. While Cuban soldiers were shedding their blood fighting the forces of apartheid, the countries of the European Union exchanged billions of dollars worth of trade every year with the South African racists, and through their investments, reaped the benefits of the cheap, semi-slave labor of the South African natives.</p>
<p>This past July 20, less than a week ago, the European Union, in a much-trumpeted meeting to review its shameful common position on Cuba, ratified the infamous measures adopted against Cuba on June 5 and declared that political dialogue should continue “in order to more efficiently pursue the goals of the common position.”</p>
<p>The government of Cuba, out of a basic sense of dignity, relinquishes any aid or remnant of humanitarian aid that may be offered by the European Commission and the governments of the European Union. Our country would only accept this kind of aid, no matter how modest, from regional or local autonomous governments, non-governmental organizations, and solidarity movements, which do not impose political conditions on Cuba.</p>
<p>The European Union is fooling itself when it states that political dialogue should continue. The sovereignty and dignity of this people are not open to discussion with anyone, much less with a group of former colonial powers historically responsible for the slave trade, the plunder and even extermination of entire peoples, and the underdevelopment and poverty suffered today by billions of human beings whom they continue to plunder through unequal trade, the exploitation and exhaustion of their natural resources, an unpayable foreign debt, the brain drain, and other means.</p>
<p>The European Union lacks the necessary freedom to take part in a fully independent dialogue. Its commitments to NATO and the United States, and its conduct in Geneva, where it acts in league with those who want to destroy Cuba, render it incapable of engaging in a constructive exchange. Countries from the former socialist community will soon join the European Union, albeit the opportunistic leaders who govern them, more loyal to the interests of the United States than to those of Europe, will serve as Trojan horses of the superpower within the EU. These are full of hatred towards Cuba, which they left on its own and cannot forgive for having endured and proven that socialism is capable of achieving a society a thousand times more just and humane than the rotten system they have adopted.</p>
<p>When the European Union was created, we applauded it, because it was the only intelligent and useful thing they could do to counterbalance the hegemony of their powerful military ally and economic competitor. We also applauded the euro as something beneficial for the worldwide economy in the face of the suffocating and almost absolute power of the U.S. dollar.</p>
<p>But now, when the European Union adopts this arrogant and calculated attitude, in hope of reconciliation with the masters of the world, it insults Cuba, then, it does not deserve the slightest consideration and respect from our people.</p>
<p>Any dialogue should take place in public, in international forums, and should address the grave problems threatening the world. We shall not attempt to discuss the principles of the European Union or Disunion. In Cuba they will find a country that neither obeys masters, nor accepts threats, nor begs for charity, nor lacks the courage to speak out the truth.</p>
<p>They need someone to tell them a few truths, because there are many who flatter them out of self-interest, or are simply spellbound by the splendor of Europe’s past glories. Why do they not criticize or help Spain to improve the disastrous state of its educational system, which brings shame to Europe with its banana republic levels? Why do they not come to the aid of the United Kingdom, to prevent drugs from wiping out this proud nation? Why do they not analyze and help themselves, when they so obviously need it?</p>
<p>The European Union would do well to speak less and do more for the genuine human rights of the immense majority of the peoples of the world; to act with intelligence and dignity in the face of those who do not want to leave it with even the crumbs of the resources of the planet they aspire to conquer; to defend its cultural identity against the invasion and penetration of the powerful trans-nationals of the U.S. entertainment industry; to take care of its unemployed, who number in the tens of millions; to educate its functionally illiterate; to give humane treatment to immigrants; to guarantee true social security and medical care for all of its citizens, as Cuba does; to moderate its consumerist and wasteful habits; to guarantee that all of its members contribute 1 percent of their GDP, as some already do, to support development in the Third World or at least alleviate, without bureaucracy or demagoguery, the terrible situation of poverty, poor health and illiteracy; to compensate Africa and other regions for the damage wreaked throughout centuries by slavery and colonialism; to grant independence to the colonial enclaves still maintained in this hemisphere, from the Caribbean to the Falkland Islands, without denying them the economic aid they deserve for the historical damage and colonial exploitation they have suffered.</p>
<p>To a list that would be endless, I could add:</p>
<p>To undertake a genuine policy supporting human rights with actual deeds and not just hollow words; to investigate what really happened with the Basques murdered by GAL and demand that responsibility be taken; to tell the world how scientist Dr. David Kelly was brutally murdered, or how he was led to commit suicide; to respond at some point to the questions I posed to them in Rio de Janeiro regarding the new strategic conception of NATO as it relates to the countries of Latin America; to firmly and resolutely oppose the doctrine of preemptive strikes against any country in the world, proclaimed by the most formidable military power in all of history, for you know where the consequences for humanity will lead.</p>
<p>To slander and impose sanctions on Cuba is not only unfair and cowardly but ridiculous. Thanks to the great and selfless human capital it has created, which they lack, Cuba does not need the aid of the European Union to survive, develop and achieve what they will never achieve. The European Union should temper its arrogance and prepotency.</p>
<p>For decades, our people have confronted powers much greater than those possessed by the European Union; new forces are emerging everywhere, with tremendous vigor. The peoples are tired of guardians, interference and plunder, imposed through mechanisms that benefit the most developed and wealthy at the cost of the growing poverty and ruin of others. Some of these peoples are already advancing with unrestrainable force, and others will join them. Among them there are giants awakening. The future belongs to these peoples.</p>
<p>In the name of 50 years of resistance and relentless struggle in the face of a force many times greater than theirs, and of the social and human achievements attained by Cuba without any help whatsoever from the countries of the European Union, I invite them to reflect calmly on their errors, and to avoid being carried away by outbursts of anger or Euro-narcissistic inebriation. Neither Europe nor the United States will have the last word on the future of Humanity!</p>
<p>I could repeat here something similar to what I said in the spurious court where I was tried and sentenced for the struggle we initiated five decades ago today, but this time it will not be me who says it; it will be declared and foretold by a people that has carried out a profound, transcendental and historic Revolution, and has succeeded in defending it:</p>
<p>Condemn me. It does not matter. The peoples will have the last word! Eternal glory to those who have fallen during 50 years of struggle! Eternal glory to the people that turned its dreams into a reality! Venceremos!</p>
<p>Speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes garrisons, held in Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 2003.</p>
<hr noshade="" size="1" width="90%" align="left">
<p><sup>1</sup> An allusion to “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” by Karl Marx, London, March 1850.</p>
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September 2003 • Vol 3, No. 8 •
Cuba’s Revolution ‘In Permanence’1
By Fidel Castro
“For decades, our people have confronted powers much greater than those possessed by the European Union; new forces are emerging everywhere, with tremendous vigor. The peoples are tired of guardians, interference and plunder, imposed through mechanisms that benefit the most developed and wealthy at the cost of the growing poverty and ruin of others. Some of these peoples are already advancing with unrestrainable force, and others will join them. Among them there are giants awakening. The future belongs to these peoples.”
It seems almost unreal to be here in this same place 50 years after the events we are commemorating today, which took place that morning of July 26, 1953. I was 26 years old back then; today, 50 more years of struggle have been added to my life.
Way back then, I could not have imagined for even a second that this evening, the few participants in that action who are still alive would be gathered here, together with those, gathered here or listening to us all around the country, who were influenced by, or participated directly in the Revolution; together with those who were children or teenagers back then; with those who were not even born yet and today are parents or even grandparents; with whole contingents of fully fledged men and women, full of revolutionary and internationalist glory and history, soldiers and officers in active duty or the reserves, civilians who have accomplished veritable feats; with a seemingly infinite number of young combatants; with dedicated workers or enthusiastic students, as well as some who are both at the same time; and with millions of children who fill our imagination of eternal dreamers. And once again, life has given me the unique privilege of addressing all of you.
I am not speaking here on my own behalf. I am doing it in the name of the heroic efforts of our people and the thousands of combatants who have given their lives throughout half a century. I am doing it too, with pride for the great work they have succeeded in carrying out, the obstacles they have overcome, and the impossible things they have made possible.
In the terribly sad days that followed the action, I explained to the court where I was tried the reasons that led us to undertake this struggle. At that time, Cuba had a population of less than six million people. Based on the information available back then, I gave a harsh description, with approximate statistics, of the situation facing our people 55 years after the U.S. intervention.
That intervention came when Spain had already been militarily defeated by the tenacity and heroism of the Cuban patriots, and [the U.S.] frustrated the goals of our long war of independence when in 1902 it established a complete political and economic control over Cuba.
The forceful imposition on our first Constitution of the right of the U.S. government to intervene in Cuba and the occupation of national territory by U.S. military bases, together with the total domination of our economy and natural resources, reduced our national sovereignty to practically nil.
I will quote just a few brief paragraphs from my statements at that trial on October 16, 1953:
“Six hundred thousand Cubans without work. Five hundred thousand farm laborers who work four months of the year and starve the rest….
“Four hundred thousand industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose homes are wretched quarters, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender, whose life is endless work and whose only rest is the tomb….
“Ten thousand young professionals: medical doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school teachers, dentists, pharmacists, journalists, painters, sculptors, etc., who finish school with their degrees anxious to work and full of hopes, only to find themselves at a dead end, with all doors closed to them….
“Eighty-five percent of the small farmers in Cuba pay a rent and live under constant threat of being evicted from the land they till. There are two hundred thousand peasant families who do not have a single acre of land to till to provide food for their starving children. More than half of our most productive land is in foreign hands. Nearly three hundred thousand caballerías (over three million hectares) of arable land owned by powerful interests remain idle. Two million two hundred thousand of our urban population pay rents that take between one fifth and one third of their incomes. Two million eight hundred thousand of our rural and suburban population lack electricity….
“The little rural schoolhouses are attended by a mere half of the school age children who go barefoot, half-naked and undernourished. Ninety per cent of the children in the countryside are sick with parasites….
“Society is indifferent to the mass murder of so many thousands of children who die every year from lack of resources. From May to December over a million people are jobless in Cuba, with a population of five and a half million. When the head of a family works only four months a year, how can he purchase clothing and medicine for his children? They will grow up with rickets, with not a single good tooth in their mouths by the time they reach thirty; they will have heard ten million speeches and will finally die of poverty and disillusion. Public hospitals, which are always full, accept only patients recommended by some powerful politician who, in return, demands the votes of the unfortunate one and his family so that Cuba may continue forever in the same or worse condition.”
Perhaps the most important statement I made about the economic and social situation was the following:
“The nation’s future, the solutions to its problems, cannot continue to depend on the selfish interests of a dozen big businessmen nor on the cold calculations of profits that ten or twelve magnates draw up in their air-conditioned offices. The country cannot continue begging on its knees for miracles from a golden fleece, like the one mentioned in the Old Testament, destroyed by the prophet’s fury. Golden fleece cannot perform miracles of any kind. [...] Statesmen whose statesmanship consists of preserving the status quo and mouthing phrases like ‘absolute freedom of enterprise,’ ‘guarantees to investment capital’ and ‘law of supply and demand,’ will not solve these problems.’ In this present-day world, social problems are not solved by spontaneous generation.”
These statements and ideas described a whole underlying thinking regarding the capitalist economic and social system that simply had to be eliminated. They expressed, in essence, the idea of a new political and social system for Cuba, although it may have been dangerous to propose such a thing in the midst of the sea of prejudices and ideological venom spread by the ruling classes, allied to the empire and imposed on a population where 90 percent of the people were illiterate or semi-literate, without even a sixth-grade education; discontent, combative and rebellious, yet unable to discern such an acute and profound problem. Since then, I have held the most solid and firm conviction that ignorance has been the most powerful and fearsome weapon of the exploiters throughout all of history.
Educating the people about the truth, with words and irrefutable facts, has perhaps been the fundamental factor in the grandiose feat that our people have achieved.
Those humiliating realities have been crushed, despite blockades, threats, aggressions, massive terrorism and the unrestrained use of the most powerful media in history against our Revolution. The statistics leave no room for doubt.
It has since been possible to more precisely determine that the real population of Cuba in 1953, according to the census taken that year, was 5,820,000. The current population, according to the census of September 2002, now in the final phase of data processing, is 11,177,743. The statistics tell us that in 1953, a total of 807,700 people were illiterate, meaning an illiteracy rate of 22.3 percent, a figure that undoubtedly grew later during the seven years of Batista’s tyranny. In the year 2002, the number was a mere 38,183, or 0.5 percent of the population.
The Ministry of Education estimates that the real figure is even lower, because in their thorough search for people who have not been given literacy training, […] in their sectors or neighborhoods, it has been very difficult to locate them. Their estimates, based on investigative methods even more precise than a census, reveal a total of 18,000, for a rate of 0.2 percent. Of course, neither figure includes those who cannot learn to read or write because of mental or physical disabilities.
In 1953, the number of people with junior or senior high school education was 139,984, or 3.2 percent of the population aged 10 and over. In 2002, the number had risen to 5,733,243, which is 41 times greater, equivalent to 58.9 percent of the population in the same age group. The number of university graduates grew from 53,490 in 1953 to 712,672 in 2002.
Unemployment, despite the fact that the 1953 census was taken in the middle of the sugar harvest—that is, the time of the highest demand for labor—was 8.4 percent of the economically active population. The 2002 census, taken in September, revealed that the unemployment rate in Cuba today is a mere 3.1 percent. And this was the case in spite of the fact that the active labor force in 1953 was only 2,059,659 people, whereas in 2002 it had reached 4,427,028. What is most striking is that next year, when unemployment is reduced to less than 3 percent, Cuba will enter the category of countries with full employment, something that is inconceivable in any other country of Latin America or even the so-called economically developed nations in the midst of the current worldwide economic situation.
Without going into other areas of noteworthy social advances, I will simply add that between 1953 and 2002, the population almost doubled, the number of homes tripled, and the number of persons per home was reduced from 4.46 in 1953 to 3.16 in 2002; 75.4 percent of these homes were built after the triumph of the Revolution.
Eighty five percent of the people own the houses they dwell in and they do not pay taxes; the remaining 15 percent pays a rather symbolic rent. Of the total number of homes in the country, the percentage of huts fell from 33.3 percent in 1953 to 5.7 percent in 2002, while the percentage of homes with electrical power service rose from 55.6 percent in 1953 to 95.5 percent in 2002.
These statistics, however, do not tell the full story. Cold figures cannot express quality, and it is in terms of quality that the most truly spectacular advances have been achieved by Cuba.
Today, by a wide margin, our country occupies first place worldwide in the number of teachers, professors and educators per capita. The country’s active teaching staff accounts for the incredible figure of 290,574.
According to studies analyzing a group of the main educational indicators, Cuba also occupies first place, above the developed countries. The maximum of 20 students per teacher in primary schools already attained, and the ratio of one teacher per 15 students in junior high school grades seven, eight and nine, that will be achieved this coming school year, are things that could not even be dreamed of in the world’s wealthiest, most developed countries.
The number of doctors is 67,079, of which 45,599 are specialists and 8,858 are in training. The number of nurses is 81,459, while that of healthcare technicians is 66,339, for a total of 214,877 doctors, nurses and technicians in the healthcare sector. Life expectancy is 76.15 years; infant mortality is 6.5 for 1000 live births during the first year of life, lower than any other Third World country and even some of the developed nations.
There are 35,902 physical education, sports and recreation instructors, a great many more than the total number of teachers and professors in all areas of education before the Revolution. Cuba is now fully engaged in the transformation of its own systems of education, culture and healthcare, through which it has attained so many achievements, in order to reach new levels of excellence never even imagined, based on the accumulated experience and new technological possibilities.
These programs are now fully underway, and it is estimated that the knowledge currently acquired by children, teenagers and young people will be tripled with each school year. At the same time, within five years at most, average life expectancy should rise to 80 years. The most developed and wealthy countries will never attain a ratio of 20 students in a classroom in primary school, or one teacher to 15 students in high school, or succeed in taking university education to every municipality throughout the country to place it within reach of the whole population, or in offering the highest quality educational and healthcare services to all of their citizens free of charge. Their economic and political systems are not designed for this.
In Cuba, the social and human nightmare denounced in 1953, which gave rise to our struggle, had been left behind just a few years after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. Soon, there were no longer peasants, sharecroppers or tenant farmers without land; all of them became the owners of the land they farmed. There were no longer undernourished, barefoot, parasite-ridden children, without schools or teachers, even if their schooling took place beneath the shade of a tree. They no longer died in massive numbers from hunger, disease, from lack of resources or medical care. No longer were the rural areas filled with unemployed men and women. A new stage began in the creation and construction of educational, healthcare, residential, sports and other public facilities, as well as thousands of kilometers of highways, dams, irrigation channels, agricultural facilities, electrical power plants and power lines, agricultural, mechanical and construction material industries, and everything essential for the sustained development of the country.
The labor demand was so great that for many years, large contingents of men and women from the cities were mobilized to work in agriculture, construction and industrial production, which laid the foundations for the extraordinary social development achieved by our country, which I mentioned earlier.
I am talking as if the country were an idyllic haven of peace, as if there had not been over four decades of a rigorous blockade and economic war, aggressions of all kinds, countless acts of sabotage and terrorism, assassination plots and an endless list of hostile actions against our country, which I do not wish to emphasize in this speech, so as to focus on essential ideas of the present. Suffice it to say that defense-related tasks alone required the permanent mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men and women and large material resources.
This hard-fought battle served to toughen our people, and taught them to fight simultaneously on many different fronts, to do a lot with very little, and to never be discouraged by obstacles.
Decisive proof of this was their heroic conduct, their tenacity and unshakably firm stance when the socialist bloc disappeared and the USSR splintered. The feat they accomplished then, when no one in the world would have bet a penny on the survival of the Revolution, will go down in history as one of the greatest ever achieved. They did it without violating a single one of the ethical and humanitarian principles of the Revolution, despite the shrieking and slander of our enemies. The Moncada Program was fulfilled, and over-fulfilled. For some time now, we have been pursuing even greater and previously unimaginable dreams.
Today, great battles are being waged in the area of ideas, while confronting problems associated with the world situation, perhaps the most critical to ever face humanity. I am obliged to devote a part of my speech to this.
Several weeks ago, in early June, the European Union adopted an infamous resolution, drafted by a small group of bureaucrats, without prior analysis by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs themselves, and promoted by an individual of markedly fascist lineage and ideology: José María Aznar. The adoption of this resolution constituted a cowardly and repugnant action that added to the hostility, threats and dangers posed for Cuba by the aggressive policy of the hegemonic superpower.
They decided to eliminate or reduce to a minimum what they define as “humanitarian aid” to Cuba.
How much of this aid has been provided in the past few years, which have been so very difficult for the economy of our country? In 2000 the so-called humanitarian aid received from the European Union was 3.6 million dollars; in 2001 it was 8.5 million; in 2002, 0.6 million. And this was before the application of the just measures that Cuba adopted, on fully legal grounds, to defend the security of our people against the serious threats of imperialist aggression, something that no one ignores.
As can be seen, the average was 4.2 million dollars annually, which was reduced to less than a million in 2002.
What does this amount really mean for a country that suffered the impact of three hurricanes between November of 2001 and October of 2002, resulting in 2.5 billion dollars in damages for our country, combined with the devastating effect on our revenues of the drop in tourism after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, the drop in sugar and nickel prices due to the international economic crisis, and the considerable rise in oil prices owing to various factors?
What does it mean in comparison with the 72 billion dollars in losses and damages resulting from the economic blockade imposed by the U.S. government for more than four decades, and with regards to which, as a result of the extraterritorial and brutal Helms-Burton Act, which threatened the economic interests of the European Union itself, the latter reached a shameful “understanding” where it pledged not to support its business people in their dealings with Cuba, in exchange for vague promises that the Act would not be applied to its investments in the United States?
Through its sugar subsidies, the countries of the European Union have caused billions of dollars in losses for the Cuban economy throughout the entire duration of the U.S. blockade.
Cuba’s payments to the countries of the European Union for goods imported over the last five years totaled some 7.5 billion dollars, or an approximate average of 1.5 billion dollars annually. On the other hand, over the last five years, these countries only purchased an average of 571 million dollars worth of imports from Cuba annually. Who is actually helping whom?
Moreover, this much-touted humanitarian aid usually comes with bureaucratic delays and unacceptable conditions, such as creating funds of an equal value in national currency, at the exchange rate of our currency exchange bureaus, to provide funding in national currency for other projects where decisions were to be adopted with the participation of third parties.
This means that if the European Commission were to hand over a million dollars, they want the Cuban side to put up 27 million Cuban pesos in exchange, to fund other projects in national currency for the same amount, and the execution of the projects would involve the participation of European non-governmental organizations in all decision-making processes. This absurd condition, which was never accepted, practically paralyzed the flow of aid for a number of projects for three years, and subsequently limited it considerably.
Between October 2000 and December 2002, the European Commission officially approved four projects for an approximate total amount of 10.6 million U.S. dollars (almost all of it for technical assistance in administrative, legal and economic matters) and only 1.9 million dollars for food security. None of this has been executed, due to the delays caused by the bureaucratic mechanisms of this institution. Nevertheless, in all European Union reports, these amounts appear as “approved for Cuba,” although the truth remains that until now not a penny of this funding has reached our country.
It should be remembered that additionally, in all of their reports on aid to Cuba, the European Commission and member countries include so-called indirect costs, such as airfares on their own airlines, accommodation, travel expenses, salaries and First World-standard luxuries. The portion of the supposed aid money that actually directly benefits the projects is whittled away through these expenditures, which do not help the country in any way, but are nonetheless calculated as part of their “generosity” for public relations purposes. It is truly outrageous to attempt to pressure and intimidate Cuba with these measures.
Cuba, a small country, besieged and blockaded, has not only been able to survive, but also to help many countries of the Third World, exploited throughout centuries by the European colonial powers.
In the course of 40 years, over 40,000 youths from more than 100 Third World countries, including 30,000 from Africa, have graduated in Cuba as university-educated professionals and qualified technical workers, at no cost to them whatsoever, and our country has not attempted to steal a single one of them, as the countries of the European Union do with many of the brightest minds. Throughout this time, on the other hand, over 52,000 Cuban doctors and health care workers, who have saved millions of lives, have provided their services voluntarily and free of charge in 93 countries.
Even though the country has still not completely left behind the special period, last year, 2002, there were already more than 16,000 youths from throughout the Third World undertaking higher studies in our country, free of charge, including over 8,000 being trained as doctors. If we were to calculate what they would have to pay for this education in the United States and Europe, the result would be the equivalent of a donation of more than 450 million dollars every year. If you include the 3,700 doctors providing their services abroad in the most far-flung and inhospitable locales, you would have to add almost 200 million U.S. dollars more, based on the annual salary paid to doctors by the WHO. All in all approximately 700 million dollars.
These things that our country can do, not on the basis of its financial resources, but rather the extraordinary human capital created by the Revolution, should serve as an example to the European Union, and make it feel ashamed of the measly and ineffective aid it offers these countries. While Cuban soldiers were shedding their blood fighting the forces of apartheid, the countries of the European Union exchanged billions of dollars worth of trade every year with the South African racists, and through their investments, reaped the benefits of the cheap, semi-slave labor of the South African natives.
This past July 20, less than a week ago, the European Union, in a much-trumpeted meeting to review its shameful common position on Cuba, ratified the infamous measures adopted against Cuba on June 5 and declared that political dialogue should continue “in order to more efficiently pursue the goals of the common position.”
The government of Cuba, out of a basic sense of dignity, relinquishes any aid or remnant of humanitarian aid that may be offered by the European Commission and the governments of the European Union. Our country would only accept this kind of aid, no matter how modest, from regional or local autonomous governments, non-governmental organizations, and solidarity movements, which do not impose political conditions on Cuba.
The European Union is fooling itself when it states that political dialogue should continue. The sovereignty and dignity of this people are not open to discussion with anyone, much less with a group of former colonial powers historically responsible for the slave trade, the plunder and even extermination of entire peoples, and the underdevelopment and poverty suffered today by billions of human beings whom they continue to plunder through unequal trade, the exploitation and exhaustion of their natural resources, an unpayable foreign debt, the brain drain, and other means.
The European Union lacks the necessary freedom to take part in a fully independent dialogue. Its commitments to NATO and the United States, and its conduct in Geneva, where it acts in league with those who want to destroy Cuba, render it incapable of engaging in a constructive exchange. Countries from the former socialist community will soon join the European Union, albeit the opportunistic leaders who govern them, more loyal to the interests of the United States than to those of Europe, will serve as Trojan horses of the superpower within the EU. These are full of hatred towards Cuba, which they left on its own and cannot forgive for having endured and proven that socialism is capable of achieving a society a thousand times more just and humane than the rotten system they have adopted.
When the European Union was created, we applauded it, because it was the only intelligent and useful thing they could do to counterbalance the hegemony of their powerful military ally and economic competitor. We also applauded the euro as something beneficial for the worldwide economy in the face of the suffocating and almost absolute power of the U.S. dollar.
But now, when the European Union adopts this arrogant and calculated attitude, in hope of reconciliation with the masters of the world, it insults Cuba, then, it does not deserve the slightest consideration and respect from our people.
Any dialogue should take place in public, in international forums, and should address the grave problems threatening the world. We shall not attempt to discuss the principles of the European Union or Disunion. In Cuba they will find a country that neither obeys masters, nor accepts threats, nor begs for charity, nor lacks the courage to speak out the truth.
They need someone to tell them a few truths, because there are many who flatter them out of self-interest, or are simply spellbound by the splendor of Europe’s past glories. Why do they not criticize or help Spain to improve the disastrous state of its educational system, which brings shame to Europe with its banana republic levels? Why do they not come to the aid of the United Kingdom, to prevent drugs from wiping out this proud nation? Why do they not analyze and help themselves, when they so obviously need it?
The European Union would do well to speak less and do more for the genuine human rights of the immense majority of the peoples of the world; to act with intelligence and dignity in the face of those who do not want to leave it with even the crumbs of the resources of the planet they aspire to conquer; to defend its cultural identity against the invasion and penetration of the powerful trans-nationals of the U.S. entertainment industry; to take care of its unemployed, who number in the tens of millions; to educate its functionally illiterate; to give humane treatment to immigrants; to guarantee true social security and medical care for all of its citizens, as Cuba does; to moderate its consumerist and wasteful habits; to guarantee that all of its members contribute 1 percent of their GDP, as some already do, to support development in the Third World or at least alleviate, without bureaucracy or demagoguery, the terrible situation of poverty, poor health and illiteracy; to compensate Africa and other regions for the damage wreaked throughout centuries by slavery and colonialism; to grant independence to the colonial enclaves still maintained in this hemisphere, from the Caribbean to the Falkland Islands, without denying them the economic aid they deserve for the historical damage and colonial exploitation they have suffered.
To a list that would be endless, I could add:
To undertake a genuine policy supporting human rights with actual deeds and not just hollow words; to investigate what really happened with the Basques murdered by GAL and demand that responsibility be taken; to tell the world how scientist Dr. David Kelly was brutally murdered, or how he was led to commit suicide; to respond at some point to the questions I posed to them in Rio de Janeiro regarding the new strategic conception of NATO as it relates to the countries of Latin America; to firmly and resolutely oppose the doctrine of preemptive strikes against any country in the world, proclaimed by the most formidable military power in all of history, for you know where the consequences for humanity will lead.
To slander and impose sanctions on Cuba is not only unfair and cowardly but ridiculous. Thanks to the great and selfless human capital it has created, which they lack, Cuba does not need the aid of the European Union to survive, develop and achieve what they will never achieve. The European Union should temper its arrogance and prepotency.
For decades, our people have confronted powers much greater than those possessed by the European Union; new forces are emerging everywhere, with tremendous vigor. The peoples are tired of guardians, interference and plunder, imposed through mechanisms that benefit the most developed and wealthy at the cost of the growing poverty and ruin of others. Some of these peoples are already advancing with unrestrainable force, and others will join them. Among them there are giants awakening. The future belongs to these peoples.
In the name of 50 years of resistance and relentless struggle in the face of a force many times greater than theirs, and of the social and human achievements attained by Cuba without any help whatsoever from the countries of the European Union, I invite them to reflect calmly on their errors, and to avoid being carried away by outbursts of anger or Euro-narcissistic inebriation. Neither Europe nor the United States will have the last word on the future of Humanity!
I could repeat here something similar to what I said in the spurious court where I was tried and sentenced for the struggle we initiated five decades ago today, but this time it will not be me who says it; it will be declared and foretold by a people that has carried out a profound, transcendental and historic Revolution, and has succeeded in defending it:
Condemn me. It does not matter. The peoples will have the last word! Eternal glory to those who have fallen during 50 years of struggle! Eternal glory to the people that turned its dreams into a reality! Venceremos!
Speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes garrisons, held in Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 2003.
1 An allusion to “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” by Karl Marx, London, March 1850.
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1968.08.24 | <body>
<p class="title">Castro Internet Archive</p>
<h1>Comments on Czechoslovakia</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Spoken:</span> 1968.<br>
<span class="info">Publisher:</span> Havana Domestic Television and Radio Services in Spanish 0102 GMT 24 Aug 68.<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> US Government, Foreign Broadcast Information Service.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/Markup:</span> US Government/Steve Palmer.<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> Castro Speech Database.<br>
<span class="info">Proofread</span> Alvaro Miranda (April 2021).</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="c">[Speech by Cuban Prime Minister Maj Fidel Castro on the Czechoslovak situation – live]</p>
<p class="fst">[<em>Text</em>] As was announced today, my appearance here is to analyze the situation in Czechoslovakia. I am going to make this analysis in the light of revolutionary positions and of the international policy which our revolution and our party has sustained. Some of the things I am going to say here will in some cases run counter to the feelings of many people. In other cases, they will run counter to our own interests, and they will constitute serious risks to our country.</p>
<p>Even so, this is a moment of utmost importance to the revolutionary movement all over the world. It is our duty to analyze the facts objectively and to voice the opinion of our political leadership. It is the opinion of our Central Committee, of the leaders of our mass organizations, and of the members of our government, and I am sure that this opinion is deeply rooted in the tradition and sentiments of our people.</p>
<p>I think it is necessary in the first place to make at least a brief analysis of our position with regard to the events which have been taking place in Czechoslovakia. Our people have received sufficiently broad information on all these events. Although our party’s position with regard to these events has never been aired officially so to speak, because among other things, these events were in the process of development, and I am not obliged to analyze each one of the things happening every day in the world, I was keeping track of the development of the political process in that country.<br>
</p>
<h2>Analysis of Czech Crisis</h2>
<p class="fst">It was approximately at the beginning of this year that a number of changes began to occur in Czechoslovakia. There was talk, or rather, Mr Novotny did in fact resign as secretary of the party, although he remained as President of the Republic. Subsequently, an important military officer deserted to the United States. Then there were a number of demands for the President of the Republic to resign too, and a number of events and phenomena began to occur. A process began which they called a democratization process. The imperialist press invented another word, the word liberalization. They even began to label people progressives and conservatives. They called the supporters of a number of political reforms progressives, and the followers of the older leadership conservatives.</p>
<p>It was obvious over there – and I must give my opinion about both, the conservatives and the liberals; this reminds us a little of Cuba’s old history – that division existed between conservatives and liberals. A thing which of course was not supposed to happen in the political process of the socialist revolution. This had a number of implications in the world. Some began to sympathize with the so-called liberals or democratized persons. We observed what was happening. For example, on 24 April 1968 the newspaper <strong>Rude Pravo</strong> – organ of the Czechoslovak Communist Party – with the headline of favorable reaction by the U.S. press to events in Czechoslovakia, pointed out that the United States (?was following) a foreign policy more understanding of the new direction taken by Prague.<br>
</p>
<h2>Possible Western Economic Aid </h2>
<p class="fst">Here, [he loses his place] it seems that there is something missing, but in that dispatch it was told with some glee what had been the reaction of the U.S. press to the changes in Czechoslovakia, and in fact the U.S. press reaction – the capitalist press, the imperialist press – was very favorable to the changes in Czechoslovakia. Now everything that begins to receive the praise, support, enthusiasm, and applause of the imperialist press naturally begins to raise our suspicions. Later, on 2 May 1968, the press reiterates that Czechoslovakia and the United States are in a period when the return of Czechoslovak gold is requested. The Prague government repeated to Washington its request for the quick return of Czech gold held by the United States.</p>
<p>In a note sent on that date to the U.S. Embassy, the Czech Government describes the U.S. attitude as flippant, and pressed Washington to quickly remit a down payment of the 18,433 kilograms of gold that Washington was holding and that belonged indisputably to Czechoslovakia. It was gold stolen by the Nazis from the Czechs and confiscated by the United States as a guarantee of a settlement of affairs between the two countries.</p>
<p>Then on 11 June 1968, there was a possible loan by the United States to Czechoslovakia. That is, the possibility for Czechoslovakia. That is, the possibility for Czechoslovakia to receive a loan from the United States was planned on that date, according to reliable sources, by the vice president of the National Bank in New York in a conversation with Czech banking leaders. The vice president of the American [as heard] Bank, Miroslava (Kry) maintained that Poland and Yugoslavia had both received large loans from U.S. banks without changing the socialist principles of their societies. Here the argument advanced in favor of the loan was that other countries such as Poland, one of the countries that sent its troops to Czechoslovakia, had received large loans from U.S. banks. Something strange, don’t you think? [<em>chuckles</em>]</p>
<p>Hers is one dated 18 June 1968, a German magazine says that Czechoslovakia sought credits from the German Federal Republic. It says: The weekly <strong>Der Spiegel</strong> reveals today that Prague, fearing economic reprisals from Moscow, recently sought a loan from Bonn. The federal government however, according to the weekly, so as not to increase the existing tension with the Soviet Union, preferred to get off the hook with Czechoslovakia in a direct manner, and the Council of Ministers approved an idea of Minister of Economics Schiller to give Prague a guarantee for a World Bank loan. <strong>Der Spiegel</strong> writes that in exchange, Czechoslovakia has promised to give the GFR trade mission a wider scope in Prague and has also alluded to the possibility of normalizing diplomatic relations between both nations at the beginning of next year.</p>
<p>An economic conference between Czechoslovak and West German representatives began on 27 June – a 2-day conference began here today between Czechoslovakia and West German group is headed by the president of the above Bonn society, Ambassador Gebhardt von Walther, who was GFR ambassador in Moscow until the end of last year. Von Walther said that the West German representatives should know the needs and possibilities of the Czechoslovak economy.</p>
<p>He let it be understood that West Germany is ready to substantially increase economic relations with Czechoslovakia. Dr (Sejarik) said that the conference should serve to shed light on possibilities and be highly instrumental to the future development of economic relations between both nations, and so forth.</p>
<p>All of you may remember how, in the wake of the recognition of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the GFR drastically broke relations with us and this situation has continued all this time. In other words, I know how all these governments act, above all, how the GFR acts like Yankee imperialism’s principal pawn.<br>
</p>
<h2>Liberals and Imperialism </h2>
<p class="fst">Here we see a number of things, the beginning of a honeymoon in the relation between the liberals and imperialism. I have brought up some of this economic information on various dates simply because a number of political events transpired throughout this process. A veritable liberal hysteria began to develop over there. A number of political slogans began to be aired in favor of the creation of opposition parties, in favor of ideas which were frankly anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist, such as the idea that the party should cease to exercise the function which a party should exercise within a socialist society and that it should play the role of guide, reviewer, and the like – above all, a sort of spiritual director. In short, that power should cease to be a function of the Communist Party. [This was] revision of some alleged fundamentals on which a socialist regime, a transitional regime on the road to socialism and communism, that is to say, the so-called government of the dictatorship of the proletariat – in other words, a government in which power is exercised in the name of a class and against the old exploiting classes, which means that in a revolutionary process, political rights cannot be given away – the right to exercise political activities cannot be given to the old exploiters whose aim is to struggle precisely against the very essence and reason for the being of socialism.</p>
<p>A number of slogans and events began to appear and norms were adopted, such as (those pertaining) to bourgeois freedom of the press – in other words, the right of the counter-revolution and of the exploiters, and of the enemies of socialism themselves, to talk and write freely against socialism. Indeed, a process began in which key communications media were taken over and fell into the hands of reactionary elements. There were a number of slogans used in foreign policy which amounted to a frank rapprochement with capitalist ideas and theses, and to a rapprochement with the West.</p>
<p>Of course, all this linked to a number of slogans which were unquestionably correct. Some of these slogans won some sympathy for the liberalization or democratization movement. Even some European communist parties which were confronting their tragedy and their contradictions began to say that they were starting to look favorably upon the liberalization movement. It was a phenomenon is which everybody was trying to get a piece of the pie.</p>
<p>Then there were the problems in connection with incorrect methods of government, the bureaucratic policy, the alienation of the masses. In short, a number of errors for which they blamed the old leadership. There was also talk about the necessity of giving revolutionary orthodoxy to the development of the socialist revolution and the socialist system in Czechoslovakia.<br>
</p>
<h2>Move Toward Capitalism </h2>
<p class="fst">Thus did these undercurrents develop in tandem, one in justification of the change, another which transformed this change into a frankly reactionary policy. This caused a division of opinion. For our part, I did not have any doubt – and this is a very important thing – I did not have any doubt that the Czechoslovak regime was developing dangerously toward a substantial change in the system. In short, the Czechoslovak regime was moving toward capitalism and it was inexorably marching toward imperialism. About this we did not have the slightest doubt.</p>
<p>I want to start by discussing this because I also want to cover some other matters with regard to what was going on there. There are some in the world who do not have this opinion. Many thought this danger did not exist. Many looked favorably upon a certain freedom of artistic expression and some of these things because, naturally, there are many people in the world who are sensitive regarding these problems. Many errors have been committed concerning these problems and many blunders have been made. Logically, certain sectors, above all the intellectuals, are very sensitive about certain means for coping with this.</p>
<p>The intellectuals are also concerned about other problems. They have been very sensitive to Vietnam problems and all these matters, although it must be said that a part of the progressive thought of the world, which lives with their own problems – the general problems of Europe, the problems of the developed world, the problems of the developed society – places more emphasis on problems which are of less concern to a large part of the world.</p>
<p>The problems of a world which lives under imperialist oppression, neocolonialism, capitalist exploitation in the underdeveloped areas of the world, and billions of human beings who practically live under conditions of hunger and misery and without hope, are not the problems of intellectuals. They are more interested in questions such as whether they ought to let their grow long or not. It may well be a very debatable issue, but [<em>Castro chuckles</em>] it certainly is not an issue which is of concern to people who want to know whether they have a possibility or hope of eating. And thus, some emphasized the positive aspects which that evolution may have had and others emphasized negative aspects. Some favored new methods and placed their hopes in them and some did not have any hope. I reached that conclusion at the outset. I had no doubt that the Czechoslovak political situation was deteriorating and Czechoslovakia was sliding downhill to a return to capitalism and would inexorably fall into the hands of imperialism.<br>
</p>
<h2>Western Imperialists’ Campaign </h2>
<p class="fst">It is very important because I think that this opinion of mine, which I honestly held and still hold, is very important in order to determine what our position is in connection with these events. Of course, the imperialist world welcomed this situation with great satisfaction and abetted it in every way and without any question whatsoever. They rubbed their hands with satisfaction at the thought of the debacle which this would mean to the socialist world in one way or another.</p>
<p>The imperialists have abetted it and have publicly said many times what their policy is toward the East European socialist nations.</p>
<p>They have always talked in Congress and the newspapers about fanning the flames of liberalism, going so far as promoting and making viable selected types of economic aid and using as many forces as they could over there to create an opposition to socialism. The imperialists are waging this campaign not only in Czechoslovakia but in all East European nations including the Soviet Union. They try by every means to mount publicity campaigns in favor of the way of life of the developed industrial society and in favor of the tastes and the consumer goods of the developed bourgeois societies. They do this on the radio and through what they call cultural exchange programs. They very subtly try to awaken in the masses admiration and an appetite for such tastes, for such consumer habits.</p>
<p>They know full well that the development of these feelings run counter to the revolutionary sentiments of the masses and to the spirit of sacrifice of the masses. The imperialists make much use of the entire bourgeois facade, the utter luxury of a class society which has greatly developed the art and refinement of consumer tastes and luxury, which cannot ever be the aspirations of the socialist societies or of the peoples who seek to march toward communism.</p>
<p>They have a policy called the East European policy, through which they manage their resources, their commerce, with this in mind. They do not do this with Cuba. To Cuba they apply a policy of incessant persecution in all the markets so that we cannot buy, well, or acquire even a little seed, so that we cannot acquire anything. They are relentlessly executing this policy against Cuba. Why? We must ask why. They know that they have not the slightest possibility of penetrating our country with such maneuvers. The imperialists know this and they know it full well.</p>
<p>They have no chance of applying these maneuvers, to come here to crack or soften up the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people. Therefore, they carry out an implacable war incessantly, always trying to place us in the worst position. This has been its policy all this time. Everyone knows that there is not trade of any kind between Cuba and the United States, because even though they always had a policy to sell us medicines – it was always academic – what medicine can we by? They have prohibited even the sale of medicines to our country. The imperialists have forced us to spend much more money for many things. Their blockade puts us in a difficult situation to obtain essential products which cost us a fortune, and all those things we have mentioned on other occasions.<br>
</p>
<h2>Opinion on Intervention </h2>
<p class="fst">I wish to quickly make the first important statement that we considered Czechoslovakia to be heading toward a counter-revolutionary situation, toward capitalism and into the arms of imperialism. This is the operative concept in our first position toward the specific fact of the action taken by a group of socialist countries. That is, we consider that it was unavoidable to prevent this from happening – at any cost, in one way or another.</p>
<p>Of course, let us not become impatient, because we propose to analyze this in line with our ideas. Discussing the form is not really the most fundamental thing. The essential thing, whether we accept it or not, is whether the socialist bloc could permit the development of a political situation which lead to the breakdown of a socialist country and its fall into the arms of imperialism. From our viewpoint, it is not permissible and the socialist bloc has the right to prevent it in one way or another.</p>
<p>We first wish to begin by establishing what our opinion is about this essential matter. Now, it is not enough to explain simply that Czechoslovakia was heading toward a counterevolutionary situation and that it had to be stopped. It is not enough to conclude simply that the only alternative was to prevent it and nothing more. We must analyze the causes and determine the factors which made possible and necessary such a dramatic, drastic, and painful remedy. What are the factors which required a step unquestionably involving a violation of legal principles and of international standards, which have often served as shields for peoples against injustices and are so highly regarded in the world?</p>
<p>What is not appropriate here is to say that the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak state was not violated. That would be fiction and a lie. The violation was flagrant, and on this we are going to talk about the effect on sovereignty, and on legal and political principles. From the legal viewpoint, it cannot be justified. This is quite clear. In our judgment, the decision on Czechoslovakia can be explained only from the political viewpoint and not from a legal viewpoint. Frankly, it has absolutely no legality.</p>
<p>What are the circumstances that have permitted a remedy of this nature, a remedy which places in a difficult situation the entire world revolutionary movement, a remedy which constitutes a really traumatic situation for an entire people – as is the present case in Czechoslovakia – a remedy which implies that an entire nation has to pass through the most unpleasant circumstances of seeing the country occupied by armies of other countries, although they are armies of the socialist countries. A situation in which millions of beings of a country have to see themselves today in the tragic circumstance of electing and choosing either to be passive toward these circumstances and this event – which so much brings to mind previous episodes – or to struggle in comradeship with pro-Yankee agents and spies, the enemies of socialism, the agents of West Germany, and all that fascist and reactionary rabble that in the heat of these circumstances will try to present itself as champions of the sovereignty, patriotism, and freedom of Czechoslovakia?</p>
<p>Logically, for the Czechoslovak people this experience and this fact constitute a better and tragic situation. Therefore, it is not enough simply to conclude that it has arisen as an inexorable necessity and even, if you wish, as an unquestionable obligation of the socialist countries to prevent such events from happening. [One must inquire] what are the cases, the factors, and the circumstances that brought forth – after 20 years of communism in Czechoslovakia – a group of persons whose names do not even appear anywhere, and this petition directed to other countries of the socialist camp, asking them to send their armies to prevent the triumph of the counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia and the triumph of the intrigues and conspiracies of the imperialist countries interested in breaking Czechoslovakia from the community of socialist countries?</p>
<p>Could it be imagined, gentlemen, that at the end of 20 years of communism in our country – of communist revolution, of socialist revolution – that under any circumstances it could happen that a group of honest revolutionaries in this country, terrified at the prospects of an advance or, better said, of a retrogression toward counter-revolutionary positions and imperialism, would see the need of asking the aid of friendly armies to prevent such a situation from occurring?</p>
<p>What would have remained of the communist consciousness of this people? What would have remained of the revolutionary consciousness of this people, of the dignity of this people, of the revolutionary morale of this people? What would have remained of all those things that mean for us essentially the revolution if such circumstances should one day arise?</p>
<p>But no circumstances of that kind will ever occur in our country. First, because we believe that it is a duty and fundamental responsibility of those who direct a revolution to prevent deformations of such a nature that might make possible such circumstances. Secondly, gentlemen, for an unquestionably practical reason and not only a moral elemental reason, because we could ask if it would be worth the trouble if, after 20 years, to survive a revolution one had to resort to such procedures. And also, for a very simple practical reason: who would false personalities of this country ask to send armies? The only armies that we have in our vicinity are the Yankee army and the armies of the puppets allied with the Yankee imperialists, the because we are too alone in this part of the world for there ever to exist the most remote possibility of saving this revolution by asking aid of allied armies.</p>
<p>And it must be said that I do not know anyone capable of having enough shame to do such a thing if they had the need and opportunity to do it, because what kind of communists would we be and what kind of communist revolution would this be if at the end of 20 years we found ourselves having to do such a thing to save it?</p>
<p>Always, when we have thought about foreign aid, we have never had the idea of foreign aid to fight against the imperialist soldiers and against the imperialist armies. I simply analyze these facts because I know that, legally, our people are concerned with an explanation of these concepts. Such things are not in our idea of the revolution.</p>
<p>I do not think that a person can justify the appeal of high-ranking persons, because the justification can only be the political fact in itself – that Czechoslovakia was marching toward a counterrevolutionary situation and this was seriously affecting the entire socialist community. And besides, there is no lack of figleaves of any kind. It is the political fact in itself, with all its consequences and all its importance. (?As) we were saying, recognizing that and nothing else is simply enough.</p>
<p>Or if it is obligatory, it is elementary to draw from this most bitter experience all the political conclusions. And as it is possible, we repeat: In these circumstances, an analysis must be made of all the factors. For the communist movement, there is the unavoidable duty of investigating deeply the causes leading to such a situation, a situation inconceivable for us, the Cuban revolutionaries. If such action is impossible for us Cuban revolutionaries – we who saw the necessity for carrying out this revolution 90 miles from imperialism – we also know that we cannot fall into these circumstances because it would mean the very end of the revolution and falling into the worst situation, [<em>word indistinct</em>] by our enemies, full of hatred. But this is not the reason for making or trying to make this profound analysis.<br>
</p>
<h2>Communist Ideals </h2>
<p class="fst">We can enunciate some of the facts and concepts, such as the bureaucratic methods for the direction of the country; the lack of contact with the masses, an essential question of all really revolutionary movements; and the forgetting of communist ideals, and what is meant by the forgetting of the communist ideals – forgetting that men is class societies, that the exploited ones in the society of classes, the enslaved ones, fight for a whole series of ideals.</p>
<p>When they talk of socialism, when they talk of communism, they talk not only of a society in which exploitation disappears de facto, and poverty resulting from this exploitation disappears, and underdevelopment resulting from this exploitation disappears, but also of all those beautiful aspirations which constitute the communist ideal and a classless society.</p>
<p>They speak of a society without selfishness, of a society in which man ceases being a miserable slave of poverty, in which society ceases to work for profits and all society begins to work for necessities and to establish among men the reign of justice, fraternity, equality, and all the ideals of human society and peoples who have always aspired to attain these possible objectives as we have explained on other occasions, as we were fully explaining precisely on 26 July.</p>
<p>If in later stages it were necessary for our revolutionary people to go deeply into these concepts of what is meant by the communist society, [it would be found that] the ideal of the communist society cannot be the ideal of the industrialized bourgeois society. It can in no way be the ideal of the society of capitalist bourgeois consumption.</p>
<p>The communist ideal cannot for a single instant omit internationalism. Those who struggle for communism in any country of the world can never forget the rest of the world and the situation of misery, underdevelopment, poverty, ignorance, exploitation in the rest of the world. What misery has accumulated, what poverty! Not for an instant can one forget the needs and realities of this world.</p>
<p>We understand that the masses of the people cannot be educated in a really internationalist awareness, in a really communist awareness, if one is permitted to forget these realities of the world, the threats these realities involve – realities of confrontation with imperialism, of the dangers of softening up involved in the drawing away from the mind of the people all these real problems so as to try to move the masses only through incentives and only through aspirations of consumption.<br>
</p>
<h2>European Socialism </h2>
<p class="fst">We can say – and today it is necessary to speak sincerely and frankly – that we have observed to what point these ideals and these internationalist sentiments, and that state of alert, that awareness of world problems have disappeared or have been manifested only in a very subtle manner in some socialist countries of Europe. We are not going to say that these have manifested themselves in all socialist countries, but [simply] in more than one socialist country of Europe.</p>
<p>Cuban visitors and scholarship students have many times returned saturated with dissatisfaction and disgust, and have said: The youth there are not being educated in the ideals of communism; the youth there are not educated in the principles of internationalism; the youth there are highly influenced by all the ideas and by all tastes of the Western European countries; in many places there they speak only about money; in many places all they talk about is incentives, about material incentives of all sorts, about profits, and wages; and really an internationalist, a communist awareness is not being developed.</p>
<p>Some have told us with astonishment: Well, volunteer work does not exist; people are paid for performing volunteer work; payment for volunteer work is [word indistinct]; it is almost a heresy from the Marxist viewpoint on simple volunteer work. All sorts of practices are followed, including: if a plane makes a good landing or another plane does not land well; if a man makes a good or poor parachute jump – there goes an incentive or something else. Many of our people, many of our men have more than once suffered trauma because of this vulgarization of material incentives of that making of men’s awareness vulgarly materialistic.<br>
</p>
<h2>Peace Advocates </h2>
<p class="fst">In addition to all this, there has been the preaching which advocates peace. Within the socialist countries there has been a constant and widespread preaching. And we ask ourselves: What is behind all these campaigns? Do we say this because we are advocates of war? Do we say this because we consider ourselves enemies of peace? We are not advocates of war; we are not advocates of universal holocausts. We have to say this because the analysis of these matters leads to clinches, schemes, charges of warmongering, of being incendiaries of war and of irresponsibility, and so forth and so on.</p>
<p>On this matter we hold a position. The dangers posed to the world by the existence and aggressiveness of imperialism are unquestionable. The threat handing over the world because of the tremendous contradiction existing between the fact of a great part of the world being dominated by imperialism and the people’s desire and need to liberate themselves from the imperialist yoke is unquestionable. Those who are incendiaries of war are the imperialists; the imperialists are the adventurers.</p>
<p>Very well, these threats are realities – realities – and these realities are not erased simply by preaching in our own homes, by an excessive desire for peace. In any event, they can preach peace in the enemy camp, but never in their own camp, because this will only bring about the disappearance of combat spirit, a weakening of the people’s readiness to face risk, sacrifices, and all the consequences that the international reality entails. That international reality imposes all sorts of sacrifices, not only the danger of sacrificing our blood but also sacrifices of a material nature. When the peoples know that the realities of the world, the independence of the country, and their internationalist duties, demand making investments and sacrifices to strengthen the country’s defenses, the masses will be much better prepared to work enthusiastically in this direction – to make sacrifices and to understand this need, being aware of the dangers caused by their unwillingness to make these sacrifices when their minds have been influenced and softened by an incessant, senseless, and unexplainable campaign for peace.</p>
<p>That is a very strange way to defend peace. It was for that reason that at the outset we committed so many blunders – either through ignorance or ingenuousness. It has been a long time since we have painted signs saying: “Long live peace! Long live this or that!” At the beginning, either to mimic or to imitate, everything that came here was repeated, until the time came when we said: What sense does the sign “Long live peace” make? Let us place this sign in New York: “Long live peace in New York! Long live peace in Washington!” Let us preach peace there in the midst of the only ones responsible for the fact that peace is not secure, in the midst of the only ones who are really belicose, in the midst of the only ones responsible for war, the only ones among whom the preaching of peace could at least help to weaken the tremendous taxes imposed upon the people to finance adventuresome, aggressive, colonizing, imperialist, and exploiting war – and not here in our camp.<br>
</p>
<h2>Softening of Revolutionary Spirit </h2>
<p class="fst">A series of opinions, ideas, and practices which we do not understand has really contributed to the relaxation and softening up of revolutionary spirit in the socialist countries, to ignoring the problems facing the underdeveloped world, to ignoring the ghastly poverty which exists; to a tendency to maintain with the underdeveloped world trade practices that are the same trade practices followed by the capitalist, bourgeois, and developed world. This does not prevail in all countries, but it does in several countries.</p>
<p>Technical aid – gentlemen, as you know, our country has great need for technicians, great need for technicians. However, when we render some technical assistance, we do not think of sending anyone a bill. We think that the least that an underdeveloped country, a socialist and revolutionary country can do, the least way in which it can help the underdeveloped world is with technology. It does not enter our mind to send anyone a bill for arms that we give or to send anyone a bill for technical assistance. It does not even enter our minds to mention it. If we are going to give aid and we are going to mention it every day, what we are going to do is constantly humiliate those to whom we are giving aid. I believe that one should not talk about it too much. But that is the way we are, and it is no virtue. One cannot claim it as a virtue. It is a basic thing. The day we have thousands and thousands of technicians, surely, gentlemen, the most basic of our duties is to contribute at least technical aid to the countries that achieve their liberation after us or that need our assistance.</p>
<p>All these ideas have never been brought up. All these problems that have a great bearing on communist awareness, internationalist awareness, and which are not given the place they should have in the education of the masses in the socialist camp – have much to do with the terrible softening up which explains these situations.</p>
<p>We all know that the leadership that Czechoslovakia generally had for 20 years was a leadership saturated with many vices of dogmatism, bureaucracy, and in sum, many things which cannot be considered a model of a truly revolutionary leadership. When we here present our views on the pseudoliberal nature of this group, which has been praised so much by imperialism, it does not at all mean that we are expressing our support for that [former] leadership. We must keep in mind that that leadership, with which we maintained relations from the beginning, sold us many arms that were war booty captured from the Nazis and we have been paying and are still paying for weapons that belonged to the Hitlerite troops that occupied Czechoslovakia. Naturally, I am not referring to the weapons which a country has to manufacture as an industrial and commercial product, especially if it is a country with a limited economy. We do not pretend to say: Give away the arms you manufacture in your industry as part of the social production and trade exchange to a country with relatively few resources. But they sold to us many weapons that belonged to the Nazi armies, and we have to pay for them and we are still paying for them. That is a reality.</p>
<p>It is the same as if any country that liberated itself from imperialism needed the rifles that we took from Batista, and we were not rushing to given them away, and then were to charge it – a country ridden with poverty, with many needs, an underdeveloped country – for the rifles. It is as if any country liberated itself tomorrow and we sent it some weapons – the San Cristobal carbines, the Springfield rifles and all such things belonging to Batista’s army – and we charged for them as if it were a great trade transaction. Does there exist doubt that this deviates from the most basic concept regarding the duty of a revolutionary country toward other countries?</p>
<p>On many occasions they sold us industries whose technology was very backward. We have seen the results of many of the economic ideas about trade transactions carried out in desperation to sell old weapons. There is no need to say that such practices led to circumstances under which a country that has carried out a revolution and needs to develop was sold old and obsolete weapons.</p>
<p>I am not going to say that this was always the case. However, all the concepts about financing, benefits, profits, and material incentives that were applied to foreign trade organizations led to desperation to sell an underdeveloped country any old weapon, and this naturally leads to discontent, disgust, misunderstandings, and a deterioration of relations with the underdeveloped world.</p>
<p>These are truths, and today we have to say bitter truths and to admit some bitter truths. We are going to take advantage of the occasion, not as an opportunity, but as a need to explain to ourselves some of things that otherwise would be inexplicable.</p>
<p>It would be very unfair if I did not say that we have known, and our country has known, many technicians from various countries, many Czechoslovak technicians, many good men, who have worked in this country loyally and enthusiastically. I am not referring to men but to institutions, and especially the institutions that deform men. even though there are institutions that deform men, many times we have seen men who have not been deformed by institutions.</p>
<p>Before learning this experience that we are analyzing today, we learned other experiences that explain how one phenomena led to another, another, and another, and at a given time in a society, revolutionary and communist awareness were far from developing; individualism, egoism, and indifference of the masses developed; the cooling of enthusiasm increased. For that reason, some as, if in Cuba enthusiasm is going to decrease or increase – if it is going to increase now, decrease later, and then increase. This has never worried us because experience has taught us that as one goes deeper into the revolution, enthusiasm becomes more conscious, and conscious enthusiasm increases and does not decrease.<br>
</p>
<h2>Spirit of Sacrifice, Suffering </h2>
<p class="fst">The spirit of sacrifice of the people increases – the discipline, the work capacity, the willingness – everything increases. That is what our own revolutionary experience has shown us, and we cannot imagine it diminishing. And we think that as we advance it will have to become greater and greater, and that when our country arrives a a higher stage, becomes a communist society, that enthusiasm, that awareness will reach incomparably higher degrees that any we have ever known. We have seen the attitude of the workers, the willingness to work, to accomplish difficult tasks, the willingness to do voluntary labor, the giving up of overtime, and a whole series of all kinds of activities; and there are no longer activities of 10 or 50 or 1,000 persons, but rather there are activities of hundreds of thousands of persons in this country – dozens of thousands of workers that go off to effect the harvests, leaving their families behind; dozens of thousands of young people who go wherever they are sent – Isle of Pines, Pinar del Rio, Camaguey – anywhere – to live under difficult conditions, under difficult housing conditions; and we have seen that this has increased in our country year by year, as awareness grows. Thousands of youth always willing to go anywhere as technicians, as anything; thousands of youths always saying that they are ready to go struggle where they are needed.</p>
<p>Our constant problem here is that everybody wants, everybody dreams of one day being permitted to leave the country so they can help the revolutionary movement anywhere. Our country has an internationalist awareness. Our country’s communist awareness has been growing – it has been growing day by day. And this is a real unquestionable asset of this revolution – for this revolution deals with and lives in world realities.</p>
<p>Perhaps, too, the fact of having the enemy only too close is favorable for us. Perhaps the fact that we are not protected by great armies favors us, the fact that we know that here we depend on our ability to resist, on our people’s willingness to fight and to make sacrifices, on our people’s willingness to give their lives; and because not only was the revolution effected through the effort of this people, not only was this revolution not imported in any way, not only is it a very autochthonous revolution, but also it has had to defend itself in tight spots with an enemy that is very near, and a very powerful enemy.</p>
<p>Our people have been developing that spirit of struggle, that spirit of combat, that willingness to challenge any danger that they have always had. And naturally, all those factors have contributed to the development of our revolutionary awareness. For surely – from the point of view of socialist ideas, from the point of view of revolutionary ideas – not a justification, but rather an explanation, an analysis of why such circumstances might arise in a country like Czechoslovakia is required. And they did indeed occur, and the need did indeed arise, the undeniable need – it is undeniable that there was only one alternative – to prevent it. But to prevent it, of course, the price that has to be paid is a very high price. For a people such as ours, with such a historical revolutionary tradition, who for many years had to face the problems of intervention and struggled against all of Yankee imperialism’s policies, it is logical that there be an emotional reaction. Many people, in the face of that fact that armies from outside the country’s borders have had to enter in order to prevent a catastrophe, and since logically, for different reasons, awareness, concepts, and repudiation of those actions have been formed, only the development of our people’s political awareness can given the ability to analyze when analysis becomes necessary.</p>
<p>And even when this – it is necessary to admit it – even when it violates rights such as the right of sovereignty, our judgment considers as the more important interest the rights of the world revolutionary movement and of the people’s struggle against imperialism, which is in our judgment the fundamental question, and without any doubt, the tearing away of Czechoslovakia and its fall into the arms of imperialism would have constituted a very hard blow – harder still – to the interests of the world revolutionary movement.<br>
</p>
<h2>Bourgeois Liberal Economic Reforms </h2>
<p class="fst">And we must learn to analyze these realities, and [to learn] when one interest must give way to another interest in order that romantic and idealistic positions that do not in with these realities may be avoided. We are against all those bourgeois liberal reforms within Czechoslovakia, but we are also against the liberal economic reforms that wee taking place in Czechoslovakia and that have also been taking place in other socialist camp countries. Of course, we have the criterion that we should not tell them how they should realize the building of socialism. But in the face of the occurrences: analysis.</p>
<p>A whole series of reforms were tending more and more to accentuate mercantile relations within the socialist society – profits, benefits, and all those things. In an article – there is an article around here somewhere, or maybe, with so many papers, the article has been misplaced – let’s look for it, well – Ah! Here it is; it hasn’t been lost – an article published in the newspaper <strong>Pravda</strong> regarding Czechoslovakia, the fact that – the following fact is pointed out: It says if the CPSU is constantly perfecting the style, the form and the method of the building of the party of the state – stresses <strong>Pravda</strong> – this same task is being effected in other socialist countries. It is being effected with tranquility, based on the fundamentals of the socialist system. But this observation is very interesting: <strong>Pravda</strong> says – unfortunately, it was on another basis that discussion of the matter of economic reform in Czechoslovakia developed. During that discussion, on one hand overall criticism of the entire earlier development of the socialist economy was presented, and on the other hand replacement of the principles of planning with spontaneous mercantile relations, leaving a wide margin for action (?by) private capital, was proposed.</p>
<p>Does this mean that they are also going to brake certain trends in the field of economy in the Soviet Union, too? Do they advocate putting the accent more and more on mercantile relations and on the effects of spontaneity on those relations – on those criteria that have been defending even the existence of the market and the beneficial effect of that market’s prices? This means that the Soviet Union is becoming aware of the need to brake that trend, for more than one imperialist press article speaks jubilantly of those trends, that have also appeared within the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>On reading these statements, we ask ourselves if this means that an awareness of the problem has been reached. In any case, we find it very interesting that this was noted in the <strong>Pravda</strong> editorial.</p>
<p>There is a series of matters worrying us. We are concerned that up to now, in the statements of the countries that sent their divisions to Czechoslovakia and in the explanation of the occurrences, no direct accusation of Yankee imperialism has been made. There has been exhaustive talk about all the antecedents, of all the occurrences, of all the deviations, of all the rightist group, of all that liberal group – there has been talk about everything they did. The activities of the imperialists, they intrigues of the imperialists are known, and we are nevertheless worried that neither the Communist Party nor the Soviet Government, nor the governments of the other countries that sent their troops to Czechoslovakia, have made any direct accusation of Yankee imperialism for its responsibility in the occurrences in Czechoslovakia. Certain vague references to world imperialism, to imperialist circles of the world, have been made, and certain more concrete references to West German imperialists circles. But who can fail to know that West Germany is simply a pawn of Yankee imperialism in Europe – the most aggressive, the most notorious? It is the CIA’s pawn, the Pentagon’s pawn, and the pawn of the imperialist government of the United States, and we certainly wish to express our concern that none of the statements has made a direct accusation of Yankee imperialism, the main cause of the machinations and the worldwide conspiracy against the imperialist [as heard] camp – against the socialist camp. And it is only elementary that we express this concern. <br>
</p>
<h2>Yugoslav Problem </h2>
<p class="fst">The occurrences in Czechoslovakia only serve to confirm to us the correctness of the positions and the theses that our revolution and our party have been maintaining – our position at the Tricontinental Conference, our positions in the Latin American Solidarity Organization, and our positions regarding all the international problems – there is a series of facts that confirm this point of view. It is known, for example, that one of the factors that we have explained – which explains – which has been a constant element of irritation in our relations with many countries of the socialist camp and with many communist parties is the problem of Yugoslavia.</p>
<p>Some people must have asked themselves the reason for that attitude – why Cuba is always emphasizing the role that the Yugoslav League of Communists Party plays in the world. What is the role of an instrument of imperialism that that party plays in the world?</p>
<p>Now, in relation to the occurrences in Czechoslovakia, the main promoter of all that bourgeois liberal policy – the main defender, the main promoter – was the organization of the so-called Yugoslav communists. They applauded with both hands all those liberal reforms, that whole concept of the party ceasing to be the instrument of revolutionary power, of power ceasing to be a function of the party – because this is very closely linked to the entire outlook of the Yugoslav League of Communists. All those criteria of political nature that completely deviate from Marxism, those criteria of an economic nature, are intimately linked with the Yugoslav League of Communists’ ideology.</p>
<p>However, (?it has happened) recently in many countries that the communist parties, including the communist parties of the Warsaw Pact, have begun quite to forget the role and nature of the Yugoslav League of Communists. They began to call Yugoslavia a communist country, they began to call it a communist party, to invite the Yugoslav League of Communists to meetings of the socialist countries, to meetings of base organizations of the communist parties; and this evoked our constant opposition, our constant disagreement, our constant taking or exception, expressed on various occasions.</p>
<p>And here we have the facts. It was this organization that was one of the principal promoters of the deformations of the political process in Czechoslovakia as the agent – that is what this organization is – of the imperialists.</p>
<p>Some will say that (?I err, but) I am going to show at least some facts. Tito was received as a hero in Prague a few weeks ago. This was the result of what? Of the ideological weakening, of the political weakness in the consciousness of the masses. And were we not saying, how this can be? And to what extremes we are going, when this element – known to be revisionist, condemned historically by the revolutionary movement, which has taken the role of an agent of imperialism – was received by a nation practically as a hero? Now, of course, Tito is one of those most scandalized by this event of the participation of Warsaw Pact countries in Czechoslovakia.<br>
</p>
<h2>Cuban Purchase of Yugoslav Arms </h2>
<p class="fst">I was saying that some will ask why have we been so tenacious in our attitude toward the Yugoslav League of Communists. We want to point out a fact, a very important fact from the beginning of the revolution regarding our relations with Yugoslavia. It was in the year 1959, when our country had already made the first laws, when not only had we begun in our country the agrarian reform that brought us into confrontation with imperialism, but also, in the United States, the first plot against us was already being hatched.</p>
<p>At that time we did not have relations as yet with the USSR or with other countries of the socialist camp. And we had to buy our arms in some capitalist countries. We made our first purchases of arms in Belgium and Italy. Because of pressure by the imperialists, and first not by pressure but by CIA conspiracy, there was an explosion on one of the ships coming from Belgium with arms, which resulted in around 80 victims. Later, the Belgian Government, under pressure from the U.S. Government, stopped selling arms.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the United States was preparing its mercenaries against us and on the other hand was carrying out its policy of blockading our purchase of arms. The Italian Government at that time was under such pressures. We recall that we were trying to buy 16 mortars – 16 mortars from Italy, and they had already sold us four and (?some parts) of the other 12. But under pressure of the Yankee imperialists, they stopped the sale of the 12 pieces. That left us practically with four pieces and (?parts) of the others, but without the cannon.</p>
<p>In this situation, we turned to the Yugoslav Government to try to buy some arms, including the 12 cannon and some 120 mortars and some other pieces. And here we have a report by the comrade in charge of that mission, Maj. Jose M. Fernandez Alvarez.</p>
<p>And here is it in synthesis; I am going to read this information. It says:</p>
<p class="fst">In 1959, as the Batista tyranny was defeated, after the defeat of the tyranny, military equipment had to be acquired. This equipment was needed urgently and immediately to defend the revolution, whose laws and measures in process of being promulgated would surely cause hate among its logical enemies, who would try to destroy it.</p>
<p>On a tip that was given us, we got in touch with the ambassador of the Yugoslav republic at the end of 1959 and at the beginning of 1960, in a very superficial manner. Later, we went to visit him in the Yugoslav Embassy on 42nd Street and (Tercera) Miramar, accompanies by Maj Raul Castro. On this visit, the minister of the armed forces informed the ambassador of Cuba’s interest in buying arms and equipment, especially light infantry arms, rifles, machineguns, rocket launchers, mortars, and ammunition. The ambassador was evasive in general, and when the minister said something about payments, he said that the matter of arms was a different matter in regard to payments and that many details (?were involved). The minister indicated to the ambassador that I should stay in contact with him to learn about prices and the arms available, and to carry forward negotiations in this regard.</p>
<p>It as extraordinarily difficult to carry out this task since the lists were delayed. Evasive answers were constantly given us. It was said that there were no arms available and that they had to be manufactured, that the prices had not arrived; and when the prices were finally in our possession, they dealt especially with small caliber arms at extraordinarily high prices, even on the international market. Before this and afterward, when we tried to get arms in Yugoslavia, some comrades went to Yugoslavia and also tried to arrange for the purchase of arms with the same results, with the presentation of other obstacles.</p>
<p>We can say that in no operation could we make progress, despite our negotiations and great interest, since the Yugoslav representation here in Cuba did not make it feasible. As a conclusion to the foregoing, we can say that Yugoslavia’s attitude was markedly opportunistic, since it wanted to be paid in dollars and at black market prices for the few lines that it offered, and said that the total amount of the operation did not justify the difficulties that they would have with the United States over selling us arms. And they were reluctant to give us the lists and prices. They proposed that discussions be carried out through a private Yugoslav commercial company as a screen, in order that the operation should not appear under that country’s name, and in general little cooperation was shown. But it appeared that Yugoslavia did not want to make the sale to us, and on the other hand it appeared opportunist or at least intended to dissuade us from the conditions stipulated.</p>
<p>This was the attitude of that socialist, communist, revolutionary country when our country, in the face of the first dangers of imperialist aggression, wanted to buy arms from it, and that is why there is not one Yugoslav bullet here.</p>
<p>Imagine our surprise some months later when, one day, poking around in the archives, in the archives of the Batista government, we found the text of this document:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“From the military attache to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico, Mexico, D.F., 13 December 1958; Gen. Francisco Tabernilla Dolz, (?MP), Military City, Marianoa.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“My dear friend, I enclose various photographs which have been given me by the Yugoslav ambassador in this country – a great friend of mine. On a certain occasion I talked to him when I had been told that private negotiations were taking place about the possibility of acquiring armaments. He tells me that in fact he can supply us with various types of armaments that we might need, such as .30 06 rifles and so forth, and he talked about a type of boat like those in the photographs that could be of great use to us.</p>
<p class="quote">“He explains that he has an ample quantity of these torpedo boats, which would be very economical, since they produce with very cheap labor and have the best naval shipyards today, after the English. These boats have a speed of over 40 kilometers an hour. They have two antiaircraft machineguns, an antiaircraft gun, and torpedo launchers. There is also a great abundance of these torpedoes, which are very cheap. Although I explained to him that at this time the negotiations for any kind of armaments were suspended because we had acquired enough in other places, he told me that at any rate he would give me a list with exact specifications, cost, date of delivery, and freight charge to our ports. As soon as he gives me these data, I shall send them to you immediately.”</p>
<p class="fst">After talking about other matters, he signs it “Col. Chief A. P. Chaumon, military attache.”</p>
<p>Those who have read the history of Moncada know that this Chaumon was precisely the officer who perpetrated tens of assassinations in the Moncada garrison after the attack. He was the most criminal of all the officers, who assassinated tens of prisoners, and he was later sent to Mexico and was a “great friend” of the Yugoslav ambassador, to whom, 18 days before the triumph of the revolution in December 1958, when thousands of Cubans had been here – we had been fighting for 2 years – this ambassador, in the name of Yugoslavia, and after consulting, was offering all kinds of arms – cheap, economical, launches, everything.</p>
<p>How great, I say, was our indignation and surprise when we found this document in the archives, signed by the person who signed it, especially when we needed arms to defend ourselves from the imperialists, and they had put all kinds of obstacles in our way and did not sell us a single weapon, and they were offering arms to Batista just as the war was ending. As we are not going to hold the worst opinion, we are not going to have the worst concept of the role that this party played, when even the imperialists would not sell arms to Batista, when not even the Yankees would sell them arms, these gentlemen were offering good and cheap arms.</p>
<p>The communist movement for a long time – with much justification – kept that party ostracized. An infinity of articles written by all the parties appeared in publication against that movement, denouncing it, pointing a finger at it.</p>
<p>Afterward, naturally, some parties forgot this, and the friends, followers, the unconditionals, began also to forget this in the face of all the political preaching about the ideological resurgence of the revolutionary movement, which has led to these most dolorous situations.</p>
<p>And we wonder whether, perhaps, this bitter experience with Czechoslovakia will not lead to a rectification of these errors, and whether the party of the League of Yugoslav Communists will cease to be accepted as a communist party, as a revolutionary party, and will cease to be invited to mass meetings and the political organizations of the socialist camp.</p>
<p>We are seeing many interesting things as a result of these events. It is explained that the countries of the Warsaw Pact sent armies to put down on imperialist plot and the development of counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia. However, it has caused us to disagree and be discontented and to protest over the fact that these same countries have been fomenting relations and a rapprochement of an economic, cultural, and political nature with the oligarchical governments of Latin America, which are not simply reactionary governments, exploiters of their peoples, but are shameful accomplices in the imperialist aggressions against Cuba and shameful accomplices in the economic blockage against Cuba. And these countries have seen themselves stimulated and encouraged by the fact that our friends, our natural allies, have forgotten this cavalier role, this traitorous role, that these governments carry out against a socialist country, the blockage policy which those countries carry out against a socialist country.<br>
</p>
<h2>Communist Relations With Latin America </h2>
<p class="fst">And when we see that they explain the necessity for an internationalist spirit and for giving aid with troops to a brother country against the intrigues of the imperialists, we ask ourselves whether perhaps this policy of economic, political, and cultural rapprochement with these oligarchical governments, these accomplices of the imperialist blockade against Cuba, is not going to cease.</p>
<p>It is well to see now how those countries react to this situation. They say that all the Latin American bloc expressed, in the forum of the nations of the world, their unanimous repudiation of this Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia. A spokesman for the group said that “we all receive this intervention with sadness and we feel sympathy with the Czechs.</p>
<p>“The political result that this Soviet intrusion into Czechoslovak internal affairs will strengthen the anti-Soviet tendency in Latin America,” said the informant, and so on.</p>
<p>Then they said, “The source said that this Soviet attitude, the theory about areas influence that they have criticized so much, would enable the United States to claim the right to invade Cuba, inasmuch as it falls within its area of security.” These puppet governments have already begun to draw up the theory that Cuba should be invaded because it falls within an area of security. All these countries – there is a single exception, Mexico, which has been the only government that has not participated in plans for the blockade, aggressions, and imperialist actions against Cuba – all these same oligarchic governments that have received great consideration, delicate treatment, are the standardbearers in the United Nations of scandals and attacks against the socialist countries in connection with events in Czechoslovakia; these countries belonging to the Latin American bloc are even proposing a meeting of the General Assembly and are the most rabid accusers and critics of the Soviet Union and socialist countries because of these events.</p>
<p>These countries have been accomplices in the aggressions against Cuba; they are countries that have no right to speak of sovereignty or anything of that nature, countries that have no right to speak of intervention because they have been accomplices in all the wicked actions committed by imperialism against the people; the savage counterrevolutionary action executed in Santo Domingo, the aggressions against Cuba and many other Latin American nations. Such oligarchic governments as Brazil, Paraguay, and others sent troops there to Santo Domingo and are now the standardbearers of attacks and condemnation of the socialist camp because of the Czechoslovak events.</p>
<p>What magnificent justification! How well this shows the fairness of the positions that the Cuban Revolution has held regarding these events! And we also ask ourselves if this policy will be rectified or if the path of political, economic, and cultural rapprochement toward these countries will continue to be followed.</p>
<p>Some of them, such as Argentina, even shelled a Soviet fishing vessel – yes, shelled. I believe that they even wounded a crew member and then awaited the other vessels like fierce beasts. They have carried out gross and indecent actions against everyone, and yet this soft policy has been followed, a policy has been followed, a policy which in our judgment only encourages their attitude as accomplices in the aggressions against Cuba.</p>
<p>I have a very interesting press dispatch which says that Venezuela decided [<em>does not finish sentence</em>]: Caracas, 21 August – Venezuela has decided to suspend its talks with the Soviet Union and the communist bloc aimed at the resumption of diplomatic relations, in protest over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The announcement was made by Foreign Minister Ignacio Irribaren Borges. The declaration says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In view of reports about the invasion of Czechoslovakia by troops of the Soviet Union and other East European countries, the Venezuelan Government declares that this act against the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of that country represents an open violation of the principles of nonaggression and of free determination of peoples included in the United Nations Charter and the principle of nonintervention set forth in Resolution 2131 of the General Assembly and invariably defended by Venezuela.</p>
<p class="quote">“The events that have occurred are a source of serious concern to the Venezuelan Government because they constitute a disturbance of international juridical order, an open employment of superior force, and a serious setback to the people’s aspirations for peaceful coexistence.</p>
<p class="quote">“The Venezuelan Government considers that the invading troops must withdraw immediately and unconditionally.</p>
<p class="quote">“The Venezuelan Government interprets the sentiments of the Venezuelan people by expressing its profound support for and solidarity with the Czechoslovak people.”</p>
<p class="fst">The Venezuelan Government did not assume such an attitude, did not make such a statement, did none of these things when the Yankee troops landed in Santo Domingo. There was no break of relations, no interruption of trade or economic activities – absolutely nothing. And now it takes the luxury of throwing in the face of the socialist countries that type of relations which they have been begging, in reality, that type of relations which they have been begging from that government, which is among the most reactionary and one of the best accomplices of Yankee imperialism; and now it insults [restriega] the socialist countries. These are the results of such a policy when the hour of events, the hour of truth arrives.</p>
<p>The same occurs with the communist parties of Europe that at this time have fallen prey to vacillation. We ask if perhaps in the future the relations with communist parties will be based on their principles or will continue to be governed by their degree of submissiveness, satellitism, and lackeyism, and if only those who unconditionally accept everything and are unable to express absolutely no disagreement with anything will be considered friends. Observe those who have criticized us many times, how under these circumstances they have now fallen confused in the midst of the great hesitations.</p>
<p>Our party did not hesitate to help the Venezuelan guerrillas when a rightist and traitorous leadership, deviating from the revolutionary line, abandoned the guerrillas and entered into shameful connivance with the regime. At that time we analyzed who was right – the group committed to maneuvering and political chicanery, which betrayed the fighters, which betrayed the dead, or those who continued to uphold the banner of rebelliousness. We did not take into account the numbers involved in the rightist group; we took into consideration who was right. We did not take into account how many members of the Central Committee or Politburo were involved, because right has nothing to do with numbers.</p>
<p>At that time the revolutionaries remained in the minority, keeping the banner of guerrilla warfare flying. We were loyal to the same positions that we hold today when we supported guerrillas over and above the rightist leadership in Venezuela, when for the same reason we supported the Guatemalan guerrillas over and above the maneuvers and betrayals of the rightist leadership in Guatemala, and when we supported the Bolivian guerrillas over and above the maneuvers and betrayal of the rightist leadership in Bolivia.</p>
<p>However, we were accused of being adventurers, of intervening in the affairs of other countries and in the affairs of other parties. I ask, in the light of the facts and in the light of the bitter reality which led the Warsaw Pact countries to send their forces to crush a counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia and to support a minority there – so it is said – against a majority with rightist positions; I ask if they will cease supporting also in Latin America those rightist, reformist, submissive, and conciliatory leaderships, enemies of revolutionary armed struggle who oppose the people’s liberation struggle.</p>
<p>In the face of this example, in the face of this bitter experience, I ask if the parties of those countries which support the decision made in Czechoslovakia will cease supporting those rightist groups which are betraying the revolutionary movement in Latin America. Surely we do not believe in the possibilities of improvement [of relations] by the socialist camp with imperialism under present conditions, and really under no conditions so long as such imperialism exists. We do not and cannot believe in the possibilities of improvement between the socialist camp and the imperialist U.S. Government so long as that country represents the role of international gendarme, an enemy of the revolution throughout the world, an aggressor against the people and a systematic opponent of revolution throughout the entire world. And much less do we believe in that improvement in the midst of such a criminal and cowardly aggression as the aggression against Vietnam.<br>
</p>
<h2>Position on East-West Relation</h2>
<p class="fst">Certainly our position on this is very clear: Either one faces the reality of the world – either one is really internationalist and really and resolutely supports the revolutionary movement in the world, and relations then with the imperialist U.S. Government cannot be improved; or relations with the imperialist U.S. Government are improved, but only at the expense of ceasing to loyally support the world revolutionary movement. <br>
</p>
<h2>This is our thesis, this is our position</h2>
<p class="fst">Here is a press dispatch from Washington – 22 August – “The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia hinders any rapprochement between East and West, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk stated here publicly today. The situation created can compromise ratification of the nonproliferation treaty by the U.S. Senate, the chief U.S. diplomatic official added. He issued this press statement upon leaving a cabinet meeting at the White House, a meeting devoted to the Czechoslovak problem and the Vietnam situation.”</p>
<p>We can only express our happiness over this. Our people are aware of the position assumed by the Cuban delegation toward this famous nonproliferation treaty, a treaty which amounted to a permanent concession of monopoly of a technology of a power source which will be essential to the future of mankind.</p>
<p>We were especially concerned over the fact that this meant that many countries of the world would accept an imperialist U.S. Government monopoly over those weapons, which could be used at any time against any nation, since, in addition, that draft treaty was accompanied by an astounding declaration in defense of the countries signing the treaty which were threatened by nuclear arms. Such countries as Vietnam and Cuba, if they desired to differ and not agree with that type of treaty and even less to sign it under circumstances in which the aggression against Vietnam was being carried out in the sharpest manner, were deprived of any protection. Theoretically the imperialists could even have the right to attack us with nuclear weapons. Of course, all are aware of our position.</p>
<p>In the light of events, in the fact of an imperialism that is always plotting, always conspiring against the socialist camp, we ask if we should continue maintaining idyllic hopes of an improvement in relations with the imperialist government of the United States. We ask, in line with the events in Czechoslovakia – in the relations with Yankee imperialism – a position will not be adopted that will imply the renunciation of such idyllic hopes. And it is said here that this will make rapprochement more difficult, and that the new ratification is endangered. In our opinion, the best thing that can happen is for it not be ratified.</p>
<p>The statement by TASS explaining the decision of the governments of the Warsaw Pact says in its final paragraph: “The brother nations firmly and resolutely oppose their unbreakable solidarity against any threat from abroad. They will never permit anyone to snatch away even a single link of the socialist community.” We ask: Does this statement include Vietnam? Does this statement include Korea? Does this statement include Cuba? Does it consider Vietnam, Korea, and Cuba as links in the socialist camp that cannot be snatched away by the imperialists?</p>
<p>On the basis of this declaration, Warsaw Pact divisions were sent to Czechoslovakia, and we ask: Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to Vietnam also if the imperialists increase their aggression against that country and the people of Vietnam ask for this aid? Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent the the Korean Democratic Republic if the Yankee imperialists attach that country? Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to Cuba if the Yankee imperialists attack our country, or simply if, in the face of the threat of an attack by the Yankee imperialists, our country requests it? [<em>long applause</em>]</p>
<p>We accept the bitter necessity which demanded the sending of troops to Czechoslovakia. We do not condemn the socialist countries that adopted this decision; but we, as revolutionaries, and on the basis of principles, have the right to demand that a consistent policy of adopted in all the other questions that affect the revolutionary movement in the world.<br>
</p>
<h2>Defense of Cuban Revolution </h2>
<p class="fst">Regarding our country, why hide [the fact] that many dangers will arise? The partisans of armed military attack on Cuba almost rub their hands with joy. Even today we have a cable to this effect. We must say how we see things. It is perhaps the principle of sovereignty, is it perhaps the law, that has protected and continues to protect our country in the fact of Yankee invasion? No one believes this. If it were the law, if it were the principle of sovereignty that was protecting our country, it is certain that this revolution would have disappeared from the face of the earth.</p>
<p>What has protected this revolution, what made it possible, was the blood of the sons of this country, the bloody fighting against the bailiffs and against the armies of Batista, the bloody fighting against the mercenaries, the willingness here to fight to the last man in defense of the revolution – as shown in the October crisis – and the conviction of the imperialists that here they will never be able to execute a maneuver or military parade. What defends this revolution is not a simple abstract legal principle that is recognized internationally.</p>
<p>What defends this revolution is the unity of our people, their revolutionary consciousness, their combative spirit, and their decision to die to the last man in defense of the revolution and the country. I do not believe that even our enemies have any doubts about the mettle and the spirit of this people. What defends the sovereignty of a country or a just cause is a people who are capable of feeling this cause as its own, capable of having a profound conviction about the justice of this cause, and the decision to defend it at any price. This is precisely what protects our revolution and what protects the sovereignty of our country in the face of the imperialist threat that has always existed here.<br>
</p>
<h2>Cuban-U.S. Relations </h2>
<p class="fst">Now, the imperialist have not ceased for a single instant to dream of the destruction of our country. These dangers will now naturally increase. Well, now, precisely now – because we must talk of things at the necessary moment – once again we are going to set forth our position – the position of our revolutionary government – in regard to the United States. To say it now, precisely when to say things has a real and not simply a declamatory or theoretical significance. It is all the more necessary to express our position, because some speculations have been made about possible improvement of relations between Cuba and the United States.</p>
<p>The revolutionary government has at no time expressed the slightest interest in improving its relations with the imperialist U.S. Government. It has not shown, nor will it show, nor will it pay the least attention or express directly or indirectly, tacitly or expressly, any kind of consent to discuss with that government as long as it is a government which represents the bulwark, of reaction in the world, the international gendarme, enemy of revolutionary movements, aggressor in Vietnam, aggressor in Santo Domingo, and interventionist in revolutionary movement. This has been, is, and will be unquestionably the position of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba.</p>
<p>Never, under no circumstances – the comrades of our Central Committee know this, they know that this is the line adopted by our committee – that never, under no circumstances, even in the most difficult circumstances, will this country approach the imperialist government of the United States, even if one day it puts us in the position of having to choose between keeping the revolution alive or taking such a step. Because gentlemen, beginning at that movement, no revolution would continue living.</p>
<p>If one day this revolution, in order to survive, has to pay for its security and survival the price of concession to Yankee imperialists, we would prefer – as our Central Committee unanimously prefers and as our people prefer – that this people sink with out revolution rather than survive at such a price. [<em>applause</em>]</p>
<p>In the United States there are honest and progressive people, people who oppose blockades, aggressions, and all those things. Naturally, we have always maintained a friendly attitude toward those who honestly have held such a position, toward those who oppose the Vietnam war and the imperialist policies of the United States. Well, regarding the government of that country, our position is clear, absolutely unmistakable. We are not interested in economic relations and we are not yet interested in diplomatic relations of any kind.</p>
<p>Their criminal blockade has been in effect for 10 years. They have taught us to defend ourselves and to form a revolutionary conscience. They know that it will not be easy to sink us. They know that they will not be able to scare us with their threats or to subdue us. They know it will not be easy to starve us to death under any circumstances. We have struggled these 10 years, making enormous efforts. The time is not far when we shall begin to reap the fruits of our efforts. We are prepared to live 20 years – a whole lifetime – without relations of any sort with them. We repeat, regardless of the circumstances, we will wait until Yankee imperialism ceases to be Yankee imperialism, and we will have enough patience and courage to persevere for as long as is necessary. This is our position. This is the only revolutionary position.</p>
<p>We know that they will start trying th threaten us. They will not be successful in this. It is difficult for them to instill fear or dread in this country because this country has learned to live for 10 years in the face of this enemy and its threats. Let us say sincerely that we prefer this clear situation. We prefer this position of risk to those indefinite positions that can lead to a weakening of our spirit of defense. We have not had a war alarm for a long time. We have not had any tense situation for a long time. Now, because of these incidents, several cables have reported that our armed forces have been placed partially on the alert. Yes, immediately; our forces will never be taken by surprise. Our philosophy of struggle includes the basic concept that we will never be taken by surprise. We prefer to be excessively on the alert than to be surprised. Under all circumstances we have always been on the alert and ready, and never have been surprised. The following is our philosophy; we shall never have to give the order to fight, because that order has been permanently given. It is unnecessary to give the order.</p>
<p>One will never be able to enter this country against our will. The circumstances will never exist, no one will ever enter here without at the very start encountering a closed and implacable battle. It is not necessary to sound the alarm for battle. Neither will the order to stop firing ever be given in the face of an aggression. Never will a surrender be accepted. These are three basic concepts of our philosophy against the Yankee imperialist forces.</p>
<p>This philosophy has been drilled into our people who are prepared to fight to the very last man. This also is part of our philosophy. Man has to die one way or another. The only sad way to die is to die shamefully with one’s back to the enemy. We are not warmongers, but revolutionaries prefer to die fighting rather than from natural death. This does not mean that we shall provoke wars to avoid a natural death. Not even revolutionaries can always do what they prefer. Duty will always come first. This – and everybody knows this – is what really defends our sovereignty.</p>
<p>A phase of threats will begin. We will be more occupied in the future than we have been in the past. We will not abandon our work or our development plans; not even this will they achieve. Our present organizational level will go forward. We will carry out our plans and we will strengthen our defense and increase our fighting ability.</p>
<p>Well, here already is the cable from Brazil. A paper that serves as one of the greatest spokesman of the oligarchy there says: “The Soviet interference in an internal matter of Czechoslovakia reopens the Cuban question, which had appeared to be healed, and of which no more was being said.” Thus begins an extensive editorial of <strong>Jornal do Brazil</strong> in its yesterday’s edition. In a story entitled, <em>Here and There</em>, the paper says textually:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“With the entrance of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia, several points of equilibrium in the world balance of power need to be automatically reappraised. We cannot fail to recognize that the Cuban presence now takes on a new meaning in the light of the cold and brutal realism that led the Soviet Union to feel insecure simply because one country of the communist orbit decided to debate the need for freedom.</p>
<p class="quote">“Moscow intolerance was obvious in its hushing all the words of order so that it could give the floor to brute force. If the USSR can soil the principle of selfdetermination of the peoples simply because it considers that Czechoslovakia is a territory under its ideological jurisdiction, then there is no way of invoking the same doctrine to prevent the Cuba case from being studied in the light of the specific interest of continental unity.</p>
<p class="quote">“There are notorious differences in the two cases. First, Czechoslovakia has not broken with socialist principles, nor has it opposed politically the bloc to which it belongs. Only in the internal plane did it eliminate the rigidity of the suffocating dictatorship and permit itself to be led to a discussion in which the word freedom came to be considered a dimension without which socialism is a farce. Cuba’s situation is very different. The Havana government is out of step with the ensemble of the continental countries, whose commitments are to democracy and freedom. The Havana communist regime, besides being an exception, is assuming the mission of exporting subversion to the point of financing groups that perturb democratic order in Latin America.</p>
<p class="quote">“As long as the Soviet Union was capable of permitting the breeze of freedom that blew in Czechoslovakia, the world had the impression that finally the large nations, the captains of the blocs, were playing in a more tolerant manner than with the automatism of military interventions. But the panorama brutally and unexpectedly changed. The brunt of Soviet violence was brought to bear against the Czechoslovak attempt to practice freedom.</p>
<p class="quote">“The situation automatically changes as far as Cuba is concerned. Not because of the effect of any compensation, but rather because of the simple fact that it is necessary to reevaluate the balance of power on the world scale. The Cuban problem will be reopened, and Brazil, which rose to the defense of the principle of nonintervention, will have to keep in mind that the Rio de Janeiro Treaty is the appropriate legal document for reexamination of the problem.</p>
<p class="quote">“The Cuban question is thus converted, since the early hours of yesterday morning, into a current matter, and should be reconsidered without the wrong connotations which reported it in a rather unrealistic manner. The Soviet aggression on Cuba is exposing its flank in Latin America to inevitable investigation.”</p>
<p class="fst">So concludes the editorial in <strong>Jornal do Brasil</strong> in its edition of yesterday, 22 August.</p>
<p>And it pretends to say that this is a realistic examination. There is a wee difference, gentlemen of <strong>Jornal do Brasil</strong> and of Brazil and other oligarchs; and this is that we Cuban revolutionaries would drive Brazil’s best divisions out of Cuba in a matter of hours with kicks in the ass. [<em>prolonged applause</em>]</p>
<p>And the same goes for the best divisions of the imperialist Government of the United States. We are ready, like the Vietnamese, to struggle for 100 years if necessary [<em>applause</em>]. That is the only slight difference, imperialist and oligarchic gentlemen. We willingly maintain our positions and will always maintain them without being frightened by any kind of threat.</p>
<p class="c"><strong>Fatherland or death!</strong> </p> <p class="c"><strong>We will win!</strong></p>
<br>
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Comments on Czechoslovakia
Spoken: 1968.
Publisher: Havana Domestic Television and Radio Services in Spanish 0102 GMT 24 Aug 68.
Translated: US Government, Foreign Broadcast Information Service.
Transcription/Markup: US Government/Steve Palmer.
Source: Castro Speech Database.
Proofread Alvaro Miranda (April 2021).
[Speech by Cuban Prime Minister Maj Fidel Castro on the Czechoslovak situation – live]
[Text] As was announced today, my appearance here is to analyze the situation in Czechoslovakia. I am going to make this analysis in the light of revolutionary positions and of the international policy which our revolution and our party has sustained. Some of the things I am going to say here will in some cases run counter to the feelings of many people. In other cases, they will run counter to our own interests, and they will constitute serious risks to our country.
Even so, this is a moment of utmost importance to the revolutionary movement all over the world. It is our duty to analyze the facts objectively and to voice the opinion of our political leadership. It is the opinion of our Central Committee, of the leaders of our mass organizations, and of the members of our government, and I am sure that this opinion is deeply rooted in the tradition and sentiments of our people.
I think it is necessary in the first place to make at least a brief analysis of our position with regard to the events which have been taking place in Czechoslovakia. Our people have received sufficiently broad information on all these events. Although our party’s position with regard to these events has never been aired officially so to speak, because among other things, these events were in the process of development, and I am not obliged to analyze each one of the things happening every day in the world, I was keeping track of the development of the political process in that country.
Analysis of Czech Crisis
It was approximately at the beginning of this year that a number of changes began to occur in Czechoslovakia. There was talk, or rather, Mr Novotny did in fact resign as secretary of the party, although he remained as President of the Republic. Subsequently, an important military officer deserted to the United States. Then there were a number of demands for the President of the Republic to resign too, and a number of events and phenomena began to occur. A process began which they called a democratization process. The imperialist press invented another word, the word liberalization. They even began to label people progressives and conservatives. They called the supporters of a number of political reforms progressives, and the followers of the older leadership conservatives.
It was obvious over there – and I must give my opinion about both, the conservatives and the liberals; this reminds us a little of Cuba’s old history – that division existed between conservatives and liberals. A thing which of course was not supposed to happen in the political process of the socialist revolution. This had a number of implications in the world. Some began to sympathize with the so-called liberals or democratized persons. We observed what was happening. For example, on 24 April 1968 the newspaper Rude Pravo – organ of the Czechoslovak Communist Party – with the headline of favorable reaction by the U.S. press to events in Czechoslovakia, pointed out that the United States (?was following) a foreign policy more understanding of the new direction taken by Prague.
Possible Western Economic Aid
Here, [he loses his place] it seems that there is something missing, but in that dispatch it was told with some glee what had been the reaction of the U.S. press to the changes in Czechoslovakia, and in fact the U.S. press reaction – the capitalist press, the imperialist press – was very favorable to the changes in Czechoslovakia. Now everything that begins to receive the praise, support, enthusiasm, and applause of the imperialist press naturally begins to raise our suspicions. Later, on 2 May 1968, the press reiterates that Czechoslovakia and the United States are in a period when the return of Czechoslovak gold is requested. The Prague government repeated to Washington its request for the quick return of Czech gold held by the United States.
In a note sent on that date to the U.S. Embassy, the Czech Government describes the U.S. attitude as flippant, and pressed Washington to quickly remit a down payment of the 18,433 kilograms of gold that Washington was holding and that belonged indisputably to Czechoslovakia. It was gold stolen by the Nazis from the Czechs and confiscated by the United States as a guarantee of a settlement of affairs between the two countries.
Then on 11 June 1968, there was a possible loan by the United States to Czechoslovakia. That is, the possibility for Czechoslovakia. That is, the possibility for Czechoslovakia to receive a loan from the United States was planned on that date, according to reliable sources, by the vice president of the National Bank in New York in a conversation with Czech banking leaders. The vice president of the American [as heard] Bank, Miroslava (Kry) maintained that Poland and Yugoslavia had both received large loans from U.S. banks without changing the socialist principles of their societies. Here the argument advanced in favor of the loan was that other countries such as Poland, one of the countries that sent its troops to Czechoslovakia, had received large loans from U.S. banks. Something strange, don’t you think? [chuckles]
Hers is one dated 18 June 1968, a German magazine says that Czechoslovakia sought credits from the German Federal Republic. It says: The weekly Der Spiegel reveals today that Prague, fearing economic reprisals from Moscow, recently sought a loan from Bonn. The federal government however, according to the weekly, so as not to increase the existing tension with the Soviet Union, preferred to get off the hook with Czechoslovakia in a direct manner, and the Council of Ministers approved an idea of Minister of Economics Schiller to give Prague a guarantee for a World Bank loan. Der Spiegel writes that in exchange, Czechoslovakia has promised to give the GFR trade mission a wider scope in Prague and has also alluded to the possibility of normalizing diplomatic relations between both nations at the beginning of next year.
An economic conference between Czechoslovak and West German representatives began on 27 June – a 2-day conference began here today between Czechoslovakia and West German group is headed by the president of the above Bonn society, Ambassador Gebhardt von Walther, who was GFR ambassador in Moscow until the end of last year. Von Walther said that the West German representatives should know the needs and possibilities of the Czechoslovak economy.
He let it be understood that West Germany is ready to substantially increase economic relations with Czechoslovakia. Dr (Sejarik) said that the conference should serve to shed light on possibilities and be highly instrumental to the future development of economic relations between both nations, and so forth.
All of you may remember how, in the wake of the recognition of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the GFR drastically broke relations with us and this situation has continued all this time. In other words, I know how all these governments act, above all, how the GFR acts like Yankee imperialism’s principal pawn.
Liberals and Imperialism
Here we see a number of things, the beginning of a honeymoon in the relation between the liberals and imperialism. I have brought up some of this economic information on various dates simply because a number of political events transpired throughout this process. A veritable liberal hysteria began to develop over there. A number of political slogans began to be aired in favor of the creation of opposition parties, in favor of ideas which were frankly anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist, such as the idea that the party should cease to exercise the function which a party should exercise within a socialist society and that it should play the role of guide, reviewer, and the like – above all, a sort of spiritual director. In short, that power should cease to be a function of the Communist Party. [This was] revision of some alleged fundamentals on which a socialist regime, a transitional regime on the road to socialism and communism, that is to say, the so-called government of the dictatorship of the proletariat – in other words, a government in which power is exercised in the name of a class and against the old exploiting classes, which means that in a revolutionary process, political rights cannot be given away – the right to exercise political activities cannot be given to the old exploiters whose aim is to struggle precisely against the very essence and reason for the being of socialism.
A number of slogans and events began to appear and norms were adopted, such as (those pertaining) to bourgeois freedom of the press – in other words, the right of the counter-revolution and of the exploiters, and of the enemies of socialism themselves, to talk and write freely against socialism. Indeed, a process began in which key communications media were taken over and fell into the hands of reactionary elements. There were a number of slogans used in foreign policy which amounted to a frank rapprochement with capitalist ideas and theses, and to a rapprochement with the West.
Of course, all this linked to a number of slogans which were unquestionably correct. Some of these slogans won some sympathy for the liberalization or democratization movement. Even some European communist parties which were confronting their tragedy and their contradictions began to say that they were starting to look favorably upon the liberalization movement. It was a phenomenon is which everybody was trying to get a piece of the pie.
Then there were the problems in connection with incorrect methods of government, the bureaucratic policy, the alienation of the masses. In short, a number of errors for which they blamed the old leadership. There was also talk about the necessity of giving revolutionary orthodoxy to the development of the socialist revolution and the socialist system in Czechoslovakia.
Move Toward Capitalism
Thus did these undercurrents develop in tandem, one in justification of the change, another which transformed this change into a frankly reactionary policy. This caused a division of opinion. For our part, I did not have any doubt – and this is a very important thing – I did not have any doubt that the Czechoslovak regime was developing dangerously toward a substantial change in the system. In short, the Czechoslovak regime was moving toward capitalism and it was inexorably marching toward imperialism. About this we did not have the slightest doubt.
I want to start by discussing this because I also want to cover some other matters with regard to what was going on there. There are some in the world who do not have this opinion. Many thought this danger did not exist. Many looked favorably upon a certain freedom of artistic expression and some of these things because, naturally, there are many people in the world who are sensitive regarding these problems. Many errors have been committed concerning these problems and many blunders have been made. Logically, certain sectors, above all the intellectuals, are very sensitive about certain means for coping with this.
The intellectuals are also concerned about other problems. They have been very sensitive to Vietnam problems and all these matters, although it must be said that a part of the progressive thought of the world, which lives with their own problems – the general problems of Europe, the problems of the developed world, the problems of the developed society – places more emphasis on problems which are of less concern to a large part of the world.
The problems of a world which lives under imperialist oppression, neocolonialism, capitalist exploitation in the underdeveloped areas of the world, and billions of human beings who practically live under conditions of hunger and misery and without hope, are not the problems of intellectuals. They are more interested in questions such as whether they ought to let their grow long or not. It may well be a very debatable issue, but [Castro chuckles] it certainly is not an issue which is of concern to people who want to know whether they have a possibility or hope of eating. And thus, some emphasized the positive aspects which that evolution may have had and others emphasized negative aspects. Some favored new methods and placed their hopes in them and some did not have any hope. I reached that conclusion at the outset. I had no doubt that the Czechoslovak political situation was deteriorating and Czechoslovakia was sliding downhill to a return to capitalism and would inexorably fall into the hands of imperialism.
Western Imperialists’ Campaign
It is very important because I think that this opinion of mine, which I honestly held and still hold, is very important in order to determine what our position is in connection with these events. Of course, the imperialist world welcomed this situation with great satisfaction and abetted it in every way and without any question whatsoever. They rubbed their hands with satisfaction at the thought of the debacle which this would mean to the socialist world in one way or another.
The imperialists have abetted it and have publicly said many times what their policy is toward the East European socialist nations.
They have always talked in Congress and the newspapers about fanning the flames of liberalism, going so far as promoting and making viable selected types of economic aid and using as many forces as they could over there to create an opposition to socialism. The imperialists are waging this campaign not only in Czechoslovakia but in all East European nations including the Soviet Union. They try by every means to mount publicity campaigns in favor of the way of life of the developed industrial society and in favor of the tastes and the consumer goods of the developed bourgeois societies. They do this on the radio and through what they call cultural exchange programs. They very subtly try to awaken in the masses admiration and an appetite for such tastes, for such consumer habits.
They know full well that the development of these feelings run counter to the revolutionary sentiments of the masses and to the spirit of sacrifice of the masses. The imperialists make much use of the entire bourgeois facade, the utter luxury of a class society which has greatly developed the art and refinement of consumer tastes and luxury, which cannot ever be the aspirations of the socialist societies or of the peoples who seek to march toward communism.
They have a policy called the East European policy, through which they manage their resources, their commerce, with this in mind. They do not do this with Cuba. To Cuba they apply a policy of incessant persecution in all the markets so that we cannot buy, well, or acquire even a little seed, so that we cannot acquire anything. They are relentlessly executing this policy against Cuba. Why? We must ask why. They know that they have not the slightest possibility of penetrating our country with such maneuvers. The imperialists know this and they know it full well.
They have no chance of applying these maneuvers, to come here to crack or soften up the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people. Therefore, they carry out an implacable war incessantly, always trying to place us in the worst position. This has been its policy all this time. Everyone knows that there is not trade of any kind between Cuba and the United States, because even though they always had a policy to sell us medicines – it was always academic – what medicine can we by? They have prohibited even the sale of medicines to our country. The imperialists have forced us to spend much more money for many things. Their blockade puts us in a difficult situation to obtain essential products which cost us a fortune, and all those things we have mentioned on other occasions.
Opinion on Intervention
I wish to quickly make the first important statement that we considered Czechoslovakia to be heading toward a counter-revolutionary situation, toward capitalism and into the arms of imperialism. This is the operative concept in our first position toward the specific fact of the action taken by a group of socialist countries. That is, we consider that it was unavoidable to prevent this from happening – at any cost, in one way or another.
Of course, let us not become impatient, because we propose to analyze this in line with our ideas. Discussing the form is not really the most fundamental thing. The essential thing, whether we accept it or not, is whether the socialist bloc could permit the development of a political situation which lead to the breakdown of a socialist country and its fall into the arms of imperialism. From our viewpoint, it is not permissible and the socialist bloc has the right to prevent it in one way or another.
We first wish to begin by establishing what our opinion is about this essential matter. Now, it is not enough to explain simply that Czechoslovakia was heading toward a counterevolutionary situation and that it had to be stopped. It is not enough to conclude simply that the only alternative was to prevent it and nothing more. We must analyze the causes and determine the factors which made possible and necessary such a dramatic, drastic, and painful remedy. What are the factors which required a step unquestionably involving a violation of legal principles and of international standards, which have often served as shields for peoples against injustices and are so highly regarded in the world?
What is not appropriate here is to say that the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak state was not violated. That would be fiction and a lie. The violation was flagrant, and on this we are going to talk about the effect on sovereignty, and on legal and political principles. From the legal viewpoint, it cannot be justified. This is quite clear. In our judgment, the decision on Czechoslovakia can be explained only from the political viewpoint and not from a legal viewpoint. Frankly, it has absolutely no legality.
What are the circumstances that have permitted a remedy of this nature, a remedy which places in a difficult situation the entire world revolutionary movement, a remedy which constitutes a really traumatic situation for an entire people – as is the present case in Czechoslovakia – a remedy which implies that an entire nation has to pass through the most unpleasant circumstances of seeing the country occupied by armies of other countries, although they are armies of the socialist countries. A situation in which millions of beings of a country have to see themselves today in the tragic circumstance of electing and choosing either to be passive toward these circumstances and this event – which so much brings to mind previous episodes – or to struggle in comradeship with pro-Yankee agents and spies, the enemies of socialism, the agents of West Germany, and all that fascist and reactionary rabble that in the heat of these circumstances will try to present itself as champions of the sovereignty, patriotism, and freedom of Czechoslovakia?
Logically, for the Czechoslovak people this experience and this fact constitute a better and tragic situation. Therefore, it is not enough simply to conclude that it has arisen as an inexorable necessity and even, if you wish, as an unquestionable obligation of the socialist countries to prevent such events from happening. [One must inquire] what are the cases, the factors, and the circumstances that brought forth – after 20 years of communism in Czechoslovakia – a group of persons whose names do not even appear anywhere, and this petition directed to other countries of the socialist camp, asking them to send their armies to prevent the triumph of the counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia and the triumph of the intrigues and conspiracies of the imperialist countries interested in breaking Czechoslovakia from the community of socialist countries?
Could it be imagined, gentlemen, that at the end of 20 years of communism in our country – of communist revolution, of socialist revolution – that under any circumstances it could happen that a group of honest revolutionaries in this country, terrified at the prospects of an advance or, better said, of a retrogression toward counter-revolutionary positions and imperialism, would see the need of asking the aid of friendly armies to prevent such a situation from occurring?
What would have remained of the communist consciousness of this people? What would have remained of the revolutionary consciousness of this people, of the dignity of this people, of the revolutionary morale of this people? What would have remained of all those things that mean for us essentially the revolution if such circumstances should one day arise?
But no circumstances of that kind will ever occur in our country. First, because we believe that it is a duty and fundamental responsibility of those who direct a revolution to prevent deformations of such a nature that might make possible such circumstances. Secondly, gentlemen, for an unquestionably practical reason and not only a moral elemental reason, because we could ask if it would be worth the trouble if, after 20 years, to survive a revolution one had to resort to such procedures. And also, for a very simple practical reason: who would false personalities of this country ask to send armies? The only armies that we have in our vicinity are the Yankee army and the armies of the puppets allied with the Yankee imperialists, the because we are too alone in this part of the world for there ever to exist the most remote possibility of saving this revolution by asking aid of allied armies.
And it must be said that I do not know anyone capable of having enough shame to do such a thing if they had the need and opportunity to do it, because what kind of communists would we be and what kind of communist revolution would this be if at the end of 20 years we found ourselves having to do such a thing to save it?
Always, when we have thought about foreign aid, we have never had the idea of foreign aid to fight against the imperialist soldiers and against the imperialist armies. I simply analyze these facts because I know that, legally, our people are concerned with an explanation of these concepts. Such things are not in our idea of the revolution.
I do not think that a person can justify the appeal of high-ranking persons, because the justification can only be the political fact in itself – that Czechoslovakia was marching toward a counterrevolutionary situation and this was seriously affecting the entire socialist community. And besides, there is no lack of figleaves of any kind. It is the political fact in itself, with all its consequences and all its importance. (?As) we were saying, recognizing that and nothing else is simply enough.
Or if it is obligatory, it is elementary to draw from this most bitter experience all the political conclusions. And as it is possible, we repeat: In these circumstances, an analysis must be made of all the factors. For the communist movement, there is the unavoidable duty of investigating deeply the causes leading to such a situation, a situation inconceivable for us, the Cuban revolutionaries. If such action is impossible for us Cuban revolutionaries – we who saw the necessity for carrying out this revolution 90 miles from imperialism – we also know that we cannot fall into these circumstances because it would mean the very end of the revolution and falling into the worst situation, [word indistinct] by our enemies, full of hatred. But this is not the reason for making or trying to make this profound analysis.
Communist Ideals
We can enunciate some of the facts and concepts, such as the bureaucratic methods for the direction of the country; the lack of contact with the masses, an essential question of all really revolutionary movements; and the forgetting of communist ideals, and what is meant by the forgetting of the communist ideals – forgetting that men is class societies, that the exploited ones in the society of classes, the enslaved ones, fight for a whole series of ideals.
When they talk of socialism, when they talk of communism, they talk not only of a society in which exploitation disappears de facto, and poverty resulting from this exploitation disappears, and underdevelopment resulting from this exploitation disappears, but also of all those beautiful aspirations which constitute the communist ideal and a classless society.
They speak of a society without selfishness, of a society in which man ceases being a miserable slave of poverty, in which society ceases to work for profits and all society begins to work for necessities and to establish among men the reign of justice, fraternity, equality, and all the ideals of human society and peoples who have always aspired to attain these possible objectives as we have explained on other occasions, as we were fully explaining precisely on 26 July.
If in later stages it were necessary for our revolutionary people to go deeply into these concepts of what is meant by the communist society, [it would be found that] the ideal of the communist society cannot be the ideal of the industrialized bourgeois society. It can in no way be the ideal of the society of capitalist bourgeois consumption.
The communist ideal cannot for a single instant omit internationalism. Those who struggle for communism in any country of the world can never forget the rest of the world and the situation of misery, underdevelopment, poverty, ignorance, exploitation in the rest of the world. What misery has accumulated, what poverty! Not for an instant can one forget the needs and realities of this world.
We understand that the masses of the people cannot be educated in a really internationalist awareness, in a really communist awareness, if one is permitted to forget these realities of the world, the threats these realities involve – realities of confrontation with imperialism, of the dangers of softening up involved in the drawing away from the mind of the people all these real problems so as to try to move the masses only through incentives and only through aspirations of consumption.
European Socialism
We can say – and today it is necessary to speak sincerely and frankly – that we have observed to what point these ideals and these internationalist sentiments, and that state of alert, that awareness of world problems have disappeared or have been manifested only in a very subtle manner in some socialist countries of Europe. We are not going to say that these have manifested themselves in all socialist countries, but [simply] in more than one socialist country of Europe.
Cuban visitors and scholarship students have many times returned saturated with dissatisfaction and disgust, and have said: The youth there are not being educated in the ideals of communism; the youth there are not educated in the principles of internationalism; the youth there are highly influenced by all the ideas and by all tastes of the Western European countries; in many places there they speak only about money; in many places all they talk about is incentives, about material incentives of all sorts, about profits, and wages; and really an internationalist, a communist awareness is not being developed.
Some have told us with astonishment: Well, volunteer work does not exist; people are paid for performing volunteer work; payment for volunteer work is [word indistinct]; it is almost a heresy from the Marxist viewpoint on simple volunteer work. All sorts of practices are followed, including: if a plane makes a good landing or another plane does not land well; if a man makes a good or poor parachute jump – there goes an incentive or something else. Many of our people, many of our men have more than once suffered trauma because of this vulgarization of material incentives of that making of men’s awareness vulgarly materialistic.
Peace Advocates
In addition to all this, there has been the preaching which advocates peace. Within the socialist countries there has been a constant and widespread preaching. And we ask ourselves: What is behind all these campaigns? Do we say this because we are advocates of war? Do we say this because we consider ourselves enemies of peace? We are not advocates of war; we are not advocates of universal holocausts. We have to say this because the analysis of these matters leads to clinches, schemes, charges of warmongering, of being incendiaries of war and of irresponsibility, and so forth and so on.
On this matter we hold a position. The dangers posed to the world by the existence and aggressiveness of imperialism are unquestionable. The threat handing over the world because of the tremendous contradiction existing between the fact of a great part of the world being dominated by imperialism and the people’s desire and need to liberate themselves from the imperialist yoke is unquestionable. Those who are incendiaries of war are the imperialists; the imperialists are the adventurers.
Very well, these threats are realities – realities – and these realities are not erased simply by preaching in our own homes, by an excessive desire for peace. In any event, they can preach peace in the enemy camp, but never in their own camp, because this will only bring about the disappearance of combat spirit, a weakening of the people’s readiness to face risk, sacrifices, and all the consequences that the international reality entails. That international reality imposes all sorts of sacrifices, not only the danger of sacrificing our blood but also sacrifices of a material nature. When the peoples know that the realities of the world, the independence of the country, and their internationalist duties, demand making investments and sacrifices to strengthen the country’s defenses, the masses will be much better prepared to work enthusiastically in this direction – to make sacrifices and to understand this need, being aware of the dangers caused by their unwillingness to make these sacrifices when their minds have been influenced and softened by an incessant, senseless, and unexplainable campaign for peace.
That is a very strange way to defend peace. It was for that reason that at the outset we committed so many blunders – either through ignorance or ingenuousness. It has been a long time since we have painted signs saying: “Long live peace! Long live this or that!” At the beginning, either to mimic or to imitate, everything that came here was repeated, until the time came when we said: What sense does the sign “Long live peace” make? Let us place this sign in New York: “Long live peace in New York! Long live peace in Washington!” Let us preach peace there in the midst of the only ones responsible for the fact that peace is not secure, in the midst of the only ones who are really belicose, in the midst of the only ones responsible for war, the only ones among whom the preaching of peace could at least help to weaken the tremendous taxes imposed upon the people to finance adventuresome, aggressive, colonizing, imperialist, and exploiting war – and not here in our camp.
Softening of Revolutionary Spirit
A series of opinions, ideas, and practices which we do not understand has really contributed to the relaxation and softening up of revolutionary spirit in the socialist countries, to ignoring the problems facing the underdeveloped world, to ignoring the ghastly poverty which exists; to a tendency to maintain with the underdeveloped world trade practices that are the same trade practices followed by the capitalist, bourgeois, and developed world. This does not prevail in all countries, but it does in several countries.
Technical aid – gentlemen, as you know, our country has great need for technicians, great need for technicians. However, when we render some technical assistance, we do not think of sending anyone a bill. We think that the least that an underdeveloped country, a socialist and revolutionary country can do, the least way in which it can help the underdeveloped world is with technology. It does not enter our mind to send anyone a bill for arms that we give or to send anyone a bill for technical assistance. It does not even enter our minds to mention it. If we are going to give aid and we are going to mention it every day, what we are going to do is constantly humiliate those to whom we are giving aid. I believe that one should not talk about it too much. But that is the way we are, and it is no virtue. One cannot claim it as a virtue. It is a basic thing. The day we have thousands and thousands of technicians, surely, gentlemen, the most basic of our duties is to contribute at least technical aid to the countries that achieve their liberation after us or that need our assistance.
All these ideas have never been brought up. All these problems that have a great bearing on communist awareness, internationalist awareness, and which are not given the place they should have in the education of the masses in the socialist camp – have much to do with the terrible softening up which explains these situations.
We all know that the leadership that Czechoslovakia generally had for 20 years was a leadership saturated with many vices of dogmatism, bureaucracy, and in sum, many things which cannot be considered a model of a truly revolutionary leadership. When we here present our views on the pseudoliberal nature of this group, which has been praised so much by imperialism, it does not at all mean that we are expressing our support for that [former] leadership. We must keep in mind that that leadership, with which we maintained relations from the beginning, sold us many arms that were war booty captured from the Nazis and we have been paying and are still paying for weapons that belonged to the Hitlerite troops that occupied Czechoslovakia. Naturally, I am not referring to the weapons which a country has to manufacture as an industrial and commercial product, especially if it is a country with a limited economy. We do not pretend to say: Give away the arms you manufacture in your industry as part of the social production and trade exchange to a country with relatively few resources. But they sold to us many weapons that belonged to the Nazi armies, and we have to pay for them and we are still paying for them. That is a reality.
It is the same as if any country that liberated itself from imperialism needed the rifles that we took from Batista, and we were not rushing to given them away, and then were to charge it – a country ridden with poverty, with many needs, an underdeveloped country – for the rifles. It is as if any country liberated itself tomorrow and we sent it some weapons – the San Cristobal carbines, the Springfield rifles and all such things belonging to Batista’s army – and we charged for them as if it were a great trade transaction. Does there exist doubt that this deviates from the most basic concept regarding the duty of a revolutionary country toward other countries?
On many occasions they sold us industries whose technology was very backward. We have seen the results of many of the economic ideas about trade transactions carried out in desperation to sell old weapons. There is no need to say that such practices led to circumstances under which a country that has carried out a revolution and needs to develop was sold old and obsolete weapons.
I am not going to say that this was always the case. However, all the concepts about financing, benefits, profits, and material incentives that were applied to foreign trade organizations led to desperation to sell an underdeveloped country any old weapon, and this naturally leads to discontent, disgust, misunderstandings, and a deterioration of relations with the underdeveloped world.
These are truths, and today we have to say bitter truths and to admit some bitter truths. We are going to take advantage of the occasion, not as an opportunity, but as a need to explain to ourselves some of things that otherwise would be inexplicable.
It would be very unfair if I did not say that we have known, and our country has known, many technicians from various countries, many Czechoslovak technicians, many good men, who have worked in this country loyally and enthusiastically. I am not referring to men but to institutions, and especially the institutions that deform men. even though there are institutions that deform men, many times we have seen men who have not been deformed by institutions.
Before learning this experience that we are analyzing today, we learned other experiences that explain how one phenomena led to another, another, and another, and at a given time in a society, revolutionary and communist awareness were far from developing; individualism, egoism, and indifference of the masses developed; the cooling of enthusiasm increased. For that reason, some as, if in Cuba enthusiasm is going to decrease or increase – if it is going to increase now, decrease later, and then increase. This has never worried us because experience has taught us that as one goes deeper into the revolution, enthusiasm becomes more conscious, and conscious enthusiasm increases and does not decrease.
Spirit of Sacrifice, Suffering
The spirit of sacrifice of the people increases – the discipline, the work capacity, the willingness – everything increases. That is what our own revolutionary experience has shown us, and we cannot imagine it diminishing. And we think that as we advance it will have to become greater and greater, and that when our country arrives a a higher stage, becomes a communist society, that enthusiasm, that awareness will reach incomparably higher degrees that any we have ever known. We have seen the attitude of the workers, the willingness to work, to accomplish difficult tasks, the willingness to do voluntary labor, the giving up of overtime, and a whole series of all kinds of activities; and there are no longer activities of 10 or 50 or 1,000 persons, but rather there are activities of hundreds of thousands of persons in this country – dozens of thousands of workers that go off to effect the harvests, leaving their families behind; dozens of thousands of young people who go wherever they are sent – Isle of Pines, Pinar del Rio, Camaguey – anywhere – to live under difficult conditions, under difficult housing conditions; and we have seen that this has increased in our country year by year, as awareness grows. Thousands of youth always willing to go anywhere as technicians, as anything; thousands of youths always saying that they are ready to go struggle where they are needed.
Our constant problem here is that everybody wants, everybody dreams of one day being permitted to leave the country so they can help the revolutionary movement anywhere. Our country has an internationalist awareness. Our country’s communist awareness has been growing – it has been growing day by day. And this is a real unquestionable asset of this revolution – for this revolution deals with and lives in world realities.
Perhaps, too, the fact of having the enemy only too close is favorable for us. Perhaps the fact that we are not protected by great armies favors us, the fact that we know that here we depend on our ability to resist, on our people’s willingness to fight and to make sacrifices, on our people’s willingness to give their lives; and because not only was the revolution effected through the effort of this people, not only was this revolution not imported in any way, not only is it a very autochthonous revolution, but also it has had to defend itself in tight spots with an enemy that is very near, and a very powerful enemy.
Our people have been developing that spirit of struggle, that spirit of combat, that willingness to challenge any danger that they have always had. And naturally, all those factors have contributed to the development of our revolutionary awareness. For surely – from the point of view of socialist ideas, from the point of view of revolutionary ideas – not a justification, but rather an explanation, an analysis of why such circumstances might arise in a country like Czechoslovakia is required. And they did indeed occur, and the need did indeed arise, the undeniable need – it is undeniable that there was only one alternative – to prevent it. But to prevent it, of course, the price that has to be paid is a very high price. For a people such as ours, with such a historical revolutionary tradition, who for many years had to face the problems of intervention and struggled against all of Yankee imperialism’s policies, it is logical that there be an emotional reaction. Many people, in the face of that fact that armies from outside the country’s borders have had to enter in order to prevent a catastrophe, and since logically, for different reasons, awareness, concepts, and repudiation of those actions have been formed, only the development of our people’s political awareness can given the ability to analyze when analysis becomes necessary.
And even when this – it is necessary to admit it – even when it violates rights such as the right of sovereignty, our judgment considers as the more important interest the rights of the world revolutionary movement and of the people’s struggle against imperialism, which is in our judgment the fundamental question, and without any doubt, the tearing away of Czechoslovakia and its fall into the arms of imperialism would have constituted a very hard blow – harder still – to the interests of the world revolutionary movement.
Bourgeois Liberal Economic Reforms
And we must learn to analyze these realities, and [to learn] when one interest must give way to another interest in order that romantic and idealistic positions that do not in with these realities may be avoided. We are against all those bourgeois liberal reforms within Czechoslovakia, but we are also against the liberal economic reforms that wee taking place in Czechoslovakia and that have also been taking place in other socialist camp countries. Of course, we have the criterion that we should not tell them how they should realize the building of socialism. But in the face of the occurrences: analysis.
A whole series of reforms were tending more and more to accentuate mercantile relations within the socialist society – profits, benefits, and all those things. In an article – there is an article around here somewhere, or maybe, with so many papers, the article has been misplaced – let’s look for it, well – Ah! Here it is; it hasn’t been lost – an article published in the newspaper Pravda regarding Czechoslovakia, the fact that – the following fact is pointed out: It says if the CPSU is constantly perfecting the style, the form and the method of the building of the party of the state – stresses Pravda – this same task is being effected in other socialist countries. It is being effected with tranquility, based on the fundamentals of the socialist system. But this observation is very interesting: Pravda says – unfortunately, it was on another basis that discussion of the matter of economic reform in Czechoslovakia developed. During that discussion, on one hand overall criticism of the entire earlier development of the socialist economy was presented, and on the other hand replacement of the principles of planning with spontaneous mercantile relations, leaving a wide margin for action (?by) private capital, was proposed.
Does this mean that they are also going to brake certain trends in the field of economy in the Soviet Union, too? Do they advocate putting the accent more and more on mercantile relations and on the effects of spontaneity on those relations – on those criteria that have been defending even the existence of the market and the beneficial effect of that market’s prices? This means that the Soviet Union is becoming aware of the need to brake that trend, for more than one imperialist press article speaks jubilantly of those trends, that have also appeared within the Soviet Union.
On reading these statements, we ask ourselves if this means that an awareness of the problem has been reached. In any case, we find it very interesting that this was noted in the Pravda editorial.
There is a series of matters worrying us. We are concerned that up to now, in the statements of the countries that sent their divisions to Czechoslovakia and in the explanation of the occurrences, no direct accusation of Yankee imperialism has been made. There has been exhaustive talk about all the antecedents, of all the occurrences, of all the deviations, of all the rightist group, of all that liberal group – there has been talk about everything they did. The activities of the imperialists, they intrigues of the imperialists are known, and we are nevertheless worried that neither the Communist Party nor the Soviet Government, nor the governments of the other countries that sent their troops to Czechoslovakia, have made any direct accusation of Yankee imperialism for its responsibility in the occurrences in Czechoslovakia. Certain vague references to world imperialism, to imperialist circles of the world, have been made, and certain more concrete references to West German imperialists circles. But who can fail to know that West Germany is simply a pawn of Yankee imperialism in Europe – the most aggressive, the most notorious? It is the CIA’s pawn, the Pentagon’s pawn, and the pawn of the imperialist government of the United States, and we certainly wish to express our concern that none of the statements has made a direct accusation of Yankee imperialism, the main cause of the machinations and the worldwide conspiracy against the imperialist [as heard] camp – against the socialist camp. And it is only elementary that we express this concern.
Yugoslav Problem
The occurrences in Czechoslovakia only serve to confirm to us the correctness of the positions and the theses that our revolution and our party have been maintaining – our position at the Tricontinental Conference, our positions in the Latin American Solidarity Organization, and our positions regarding all the international problems – there is a series of facts that confirm this point of view. It is known, for example, that one of the factors that we have explained – which explains – which has been a constant element of irritation in our relations with many countries of the socialist camp and with many communist parties is the problem of Yugoslavia.
Some people must have asked themselves the reason for that attitude – why Cuba is always emphasizing the role that the Yugoslav League of Communists Party plays in the world. What is the role of an instrument of imperialism that that party plays in the world?
Now, in relation to the occurrences in Czechoslovakia, the main promoter of all that bourgeois liberal policy – the main defender, the main promoter – was the organization of the so-called Yugoslav communists. They applauded with both hands all those liberal reforms, that whole concept of the party ceasing to be the instrument of revolutionary power, of power ceasing to be a function of the party – because this is very closely linked to the entire outlook of the Yugoslav League of Communists. All those criteria of political nature that completely deviate from Marxism, those criteria of an economic nature, are intimately linked with the Yugoslav League of Communists’ ideology.
However, (?it has happened) recently in many countries that the communist parties, including the communist parties of the Warsaw Pact, have begun quite to forget the role and nature of the Yugoslav League of Communists. They began to call Yugoslavia a communist country, they began to call it a communist party, to invite the Yugoslav League of Communists to meetings of the socialist countries, to meetings of base organizations of the communist parties; and this evoked our constant opposition, our constant disagreement, our constant taking or exception, expressed on various occasions.
And here we have the facts. It was this organization that was one of the principal promoters of the deformations of the political process in Czechoslovakia as the agent – that is what this organization is – of the imperialists.
Some will say that (?I err, but) I am going to show at least some facts. Tito was received as a hero in Prague a few weeks ago. This was the result of what? Of the ideological weakening, of the political weakness in the consciousness of the masses. And were we not saying, how this can be? And to what extremes we are going, when this element – known to be revisionist, condemned historically by the revolutionary movement, which has taken the role of an agent of imperialism – was received by a nation practically as a hero? Now, of course, Tito is one of those most scandalized by this event of the participation of Warsaw Pact countries in Czechoslovakia.
Cuban Purchase of Yugoslav Arms
I was saying that some will ask why have we been so tenacious in our attitude toward the Yugoslav League of Communists. We want to point out a fact, a very important fact from the beginning of the revolution regarding our relations with Yugoslavia. It was in the year 1959, when our country had already made the first laws, when not only had we begun in our country the agrarian reform that brought us into confrontation with imperialism, but also, in the United States, the first plot against us was already being hatched.
At that time we did not have relations as yet with the USSR or with other countries of the socialist camp. And we had to buy our arms in some capitalist countries. We made our first purchases of arms in Belgium and Italy. Because of pressure by the imperialists, and first not by pressure but by CIA conspiracy, there was an explosion on one of the ships coming from Belgium with arms, which resulted in around 80 victims. Later, the Belgian Government, under pressure from the U.S. Government, stopped selling arms.
Meanwhile, the United States was preparing its mercenaries against us and on the other hand was carrying out its policy of blockading our purchase of arms. The Italian Government at that time was under such pressures. We recall that we were trying to buy 16 mortars – 16 mortars from Italy, and they had already sold us four and (?some parts) of the other 12. But under pressure of the Yankee imperialists, they stopped the sale of the 12 pieces. That left us practically with four pieces and (?parts) of the others, but without the cannon.
In this situation, we turned to the Yugoslav Government to try to buy some arms, including the 12 cannon and some 120 mortars and some other pieces. And here we have a report by the comrade in charge of that mission, Maj. Jose M. Fernandez Alvarez.
And here is it in synthesis; I am going to read this information. It says:
In 1959, as the Batista tyranny was defeated, after the defeat of the tyranny, military equipment had to be acquired. This equipment was needed urgently and immediately to defend the revolution, whose laws and measures in process of being promulgated would surely cause hate among its logical enemies, who would try to destroy it.
On a tip that was given us, we got in touch with the ambassador of the Yugoslav republic at the end of 1959 and at the beginning of 1960, in a very superficial manner. Later, we went to visit him in the Yugoslav Embassy on 42nd Street and (Tercera) Miramar, accompanies by Maj Raul Castro. On this visit, the minister of the armed forces informed the ambassador of Cuba’s interest in buying arms and equipment, especially light infantry arms, rifles, machineguns, rocket launchers, mortars, and ammunition. The ambassador was evasive in general, and when the minister said something about payments, he said that the matter of arms was a different matter in regard to payments and that many details (?were involved). The minister indicated to the ambassador that I should stay in contact with him to learn about prices and the arms available, and to carry forward negotiations in this regard.
It as extraordinarily difficult to carry out this task since the lists were delayed. Evasive answers were constantly given us. It was said that there were no arms available and that they had to be manufactured, that the prices had not arrived; and when the prices were finally in our possession, they dealt especially with small caliber arms at extraordinarily high prices, even on the international market. Before this and afterward, when we tried to get arms in Yugoslavia, some comrades went to Yugoslavia and also tried to arrange for the purchase of arms with the same results, with the presentation of other obstacles.
We can say that in no operation could we make progress, despite our negotiations and great interest, since the Yugoslav representation here in Cuba did not make it feasible. As a conclusion to the foregoing, we can say that Yugoslavia’s attitude was markedly opportunistic, since it wanted to be paid in dollars and at black market prices for the few lines that it offered, and said that the total amount of the operation did not justify the difficulties that they would have with the United States over selling us arms. And they were reluctant to give us the lists and prices. They proposed that discussions be carried out through a private Yugoslav commercial company as a screen, in order that the operation should not appear under that country’s name, and in general little cooperation was shown. But it appeared that Yugoslavia did not want to make the sale to us, and on the other hand it appeared opportunist or at least intended to dissuade us from the conditions stipulated.
This was the attitude of that socialist, communist, revolutionary country when our country, in the face of the first dangers of imperialist aggression, wanted to buy arms from it, and that is why there is not one Yugoslav bullet here.
Imagine our surprise some months later when, one day, poking around in the archives, in the archives of the Batista government, we found the text of this document:
“From the military attache to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico, Mexico, D.F., 13 December 1958; Gen. Francisco Tabernilla Dolz, (?MP), Military City, Marianoa.
“My dear friend, I enclose various photographs which have been given me by the Yugoslav ambassador in this country – a great friend of mine. On a certain occasion I talked to him when I had been told that private negotiations were taking place about the possibility of acquiring armaments. He tells me that in fact he can supply us with various types of armaments that we might need, such as .30 06 rifles and so forth, and he talked about a type of boat like those in the photographs that could be of great use to us.
“He explains that he has an ample quantity of these torpedo boats, which would be very economical, since they produce with very cheap labor and have the best naval shipyards today, after the English. These boats have a speed of over 40 kilometers an hour. They have two antiaircraft machineguns, an antiaircraft gun, and torpedo launchers. There is also a great abundance of these torpedoes, which are very cheap. Although I explained to him that at this time the negotiations for any kind of armaments were suspended because we had acquired enough in other places, he told me that at any rate he would give me a list with exact specifications, cost, date of delivery, and freight charge to our ports. As soon as he gives me these data, I shall send them to you immediately.”
After talking about other matters, he signs it “Col. Chief A. P. Chaumon, military attache.”
Those who have read the history of Moncada know that this Chaumon was precisely the officer who perpetrated tens of assassinations in the Moncada garrison after the attack. He was the most criminal of all the officers, who assassinated tens of prisoners, and he was later sent to Mexico and was a “great friend” of the Yugoslav ambassador, to whom, 18 days before the triumph of the revolution in December 1958, when thousands of Cubans had been here – we had been fighting for 2 years – this ambassador, in the name of Yugoslavia, and after consulting, was offering all kinds of arms – cheap, economical, launches, everything.
How great, I say, was our indignation and surprise when we found this document in the archives, signed by the person who signed it, especially when we needed arms to defend ourselves from the imperialists, and they had put all kinds of obstacles in our way and did not sell us a single weapon, and they were offering arms to Batista just as the war was ending. As we are not going to hold the worst opinion, we are not going to have the worst concept of the role that this party played, when even the imperialists would not sell arms to Batista, when not even the Yankees would sell them arms, these gentlemen were offering good and cheap arms.
The communist movement for a long time – with much justification – kept that party ostracized. An infinity of articles written by all the parties appeared in publication against that movement, denouncing it, pointing a finger at it.
Afterward, naturally, some parties forgot this, and the friends, followers, the unconditionals, began also to forget this in the face of all the political preaching about the ideological resurgence of the revolutionary movement, which has led to these most dolorous situations.
And we wonder whether, perhaps, this bitter experience with Czechoslovakia will not lead to a rectification of these errors, and whether the party of the League of Yugoslav Communists will cease to be accepted as a communist party, as a revolutionary party, and will cease to be invited to mass meetings and the political organizations of the socialist camp.
We are seeing many interesting things as a result of these events. It is explained that the countries of the Warsaw Pact sent armies to put down on imperialist plot and the development of counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia. However, it has caused us to disagree and be discontented and to protest over the fact that these same countries have been fomenting relations and a rapprochement of an economic, cultural, and political nature with the oligarchical governments of Latin America, which are not simply reactionary governments, exploiters of their peoples, but are shameful accomplices in the imperialist aggressions against Cuba and shameful accomplices in the economic blockage against Cuba. And these countries have seen themselves stimulated and encouraged by the fact that our friends, our natural allies, have forgotten this cavalier role, this traitorous role, that these governments carry out against a socialist country, the blockage policy which those countries carry out against a socialist country.
Communist Relations With Latin America
And when we see that they explain the necessity for an internationalist spirit and for giving aid with troops to a brother country against the intrigues of the imperialists, we ask ourselves whether perhaps this policy of economic, political, and cultural rapprochement with these oligarchical governments, these accomplices of the imperialist blockade against Cuba, is not going to cease.
It is well to see now how those countries react to this situation. They say that all the Latin American bloc expressed, in the forum of the nations of the world, their unanimous repudiation of this Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia. A spokesman for the group said that “we all receive this intervention with sadness and we feel sympathy with the Czechs.
“The political result that this Soviet intrusion into Czechoslovak internal affairs will strengthen the anti-Soviet tendency in Latin America,” said the informant, and so on.
Then they said, “The source said that this Soviet attitude, the theory about areas influence that they have criticized so much, would enable the United States to claim the right to invade Cuba, inasmuch as it falls within its area of security.” These puppet governments have already begun to draw up the theory that Cuba should be invaded because it falls within an area of security. All these countries – there is a single exception, Mexico, which has been the only government that has not participated in plans for the blockade, aggressions, and imperialist actions against Cuba – all these same oligarchic governments that have received great consideration, delicate treatment, are the standardbearers in the United Nations of scandals and attacks against the socialist countries in connection with events in Czechoslovakia; these countries belonging to the Latin American bloc are even proposing a meeting of the General Assembly and are the most rabid accusers and critics of the Soviet Union and socialist countries because of these events.
These countries have been accomplices in the aggressions against Cuba; they are countries that have no right to speak of sovereignty or anything of that nature, countries that have no right to speak of intervention because they have been accomplices in all the wicked actions committed by imperialism against the people; the savage counterrevolutionary action executed in Santo Domingo, the aggressions against Cuba and many other Latin American nations. Such oligarchic governments as Brazil, Paraguay, and others sent troops there to Santo Domingo and are now the standardbearers of attacks and condemnation of the socialist camp because of the Czechoslovak events.
What magnificent justification! How well this shows the fairness of the positions that the Cuban Revolution has held regarding these events! And we also ask ourselves if this policy will be rectified or if the path of political, economic, and cultural rapprochement toward these countries will continue to be followed.
Some of them, such as Argentina, even shelled a Soviet fishing vessel – yes, shelled. I believe that they even wounded a crew member and then awaited the other vessels like fierce beasts. They have carried out gross and indecent actions against everyone, and yet this soft policy has been followed, a policy has been followed, a policy which in our judgment only encourages their attitude as accomplices in the aggressions against Cuba.
I have a very interesting press dispatch which says that Venezuela decided [does not finish sentence]: Caracas, 21 August – Venezuela has decided to suspend its talks with the Soviet Union and the communist bloc aimed at the resumption of diplomatic relations, in protest over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The announcement was made by Foreign Minister Ignacio Irribaren Borges. The declaration says:
“In view of reports about the invasion of Czechoslovakia by troops of the Soviet Union and other East European countries, the Venezuelan Government declares that this act against the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of that country represents an open violation of the principles of nonaggression and of free determination of peoples included in the United Nations Charter and the principle of nonintervention set forth in Resolution 2131 of the General Assembly and invariably defended by Venezuela.
“The events that have occurred are a source of serious concern to the Venezuelan Government because they constitute a disturbance of international juridical order, an open employment of superior force, and a serious setback to the people’s aspirations for peaceful coexistence.
“The Venezuelan Government considers that the invading troops must withdraw immediately and unconditionally.
“The Venezuelan Government interprets the sentiments of the Venezuelan people by expressing its profound support for and solidarity with the Czechoslovak people.”
The Venezuelan Government did not assume such an attitude, did not make such a statement, did none of these things when the Yankee troops landed in Santo Domingo. There was no break of relations, no interruption of trade or economic activities – absolutely nothing. And now it takes the luxury of throwing in the face of the socialist countries that type of relations which they have been begging, in reality, that type of relations which they have been begging from that government, which is among the most reactionary and one of the best accomplices of Yankee imperialism; and now it insults [restriega] the socialist countries. These are the results of such a policy when the hour of events, the hour of truth arrives.
The same occurs with the communist parties of Europe that at this time have fallen prey to vacillation. We ask if perhaps in the future the relations with communist parties will be based on their principles or will continue to be governed by their degree of submissiveness, satellitism, and lackeyism, and if only those who unconditionally accept everything and are unable to express absolutely no disagreement with anything will be considered friends. Observe those who have criticized us many times, how under these circumstances they have now fallen confused in the midst of the great hesitations.
Our party did not hesitate to help the Venezuelan guerrillas when a rightist and traitorous leadership, deviating from the revolutionary line, abandoned the guerrillas and entered into shameful connivance with the regime. At that time we analyzed who was right – the group committed to maneuvering and political chicanery, which betrayed the fighters, which betrayed the dead, or those who continued to uphold the banner of rebelliousness. We did not take into account the numbers involved in the rightist group; we took into consideration who was right. We did not take into account how many members of the Central Committee or Politburo were involved, because right has nothing to do with numbers.
At that time the revolutionaries remained in the minority, keeping the banner of guerrilla warfare flying. We were loyal to the same positions that we hold today when we supported guerrillas over and above the rightist leadership in Venezuela, when for the same reason we supported the Guatemalan guerrillas over and above the maneuvers and betrayals of the rightist leadership in Guatemala, and when we supported the Bolivian guerrillas over and above the maneuvers and betrayal of the rightist leadership in Bolivia.
However, we were accused of being adventurers, of intervening in the affairs of other countries and in the affairs of other parties. I ask, in the light of the facts and in the light of the bitter reality which led the Warsaw Pact countries to send their forces to crush a counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia and to support a minority there – so it is said – against a majority with rightist positions; I ask if they will cease supporting also in Latin America those rightist, reformist, submissive, and conciliatory leaderships, enemies of revolutionary armed struggle who oppose the people’s liberation struggle.
In the face of this example, in the face of this bitter experience, I ask if the parties of those countries which support the decision made in Czechoslovakia will cease supporting those rightist groups which are betraying the revolutionary movement in Latin America. Surely we do not believe in the possibilities of improvement [of relations] by the socialist camp with imperialism under present conditions, and really under no conditions so long as such imperialism exists. We do not and cannot believe in the possibilities of improvement between the socialist camp and the imperialist U.S. Government so long as that country represents the role of international gendarme, an enemy of the revolution throughout the world, an aggressor against the people and a systematic opponent of revolution throughout the entire world. And much less do we believe in that improvement in the midst of such a criminal and cowardly aggression as the aggression against Vietnam.
Position on East-West Relation
Certainly our position on this is very clear: Either one faces the reality of the world – either one is really internationalist and really and resolutely supports the revolutionary movement in the world, and relations then with the imperialist U.S. Government cannot be improved; or relations with the imperialist U.S. Government are improved, but only at the expense of ceasing to loyally support the world revolutionary movement.
This is our thesis, this is our position
Here is a press dispatch from Washington – 22 August – “The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia hinders any rapprochement between East and West, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk stated here publicly today. The situation created can compromise ratification of the nonproliferation treaty by the U.S. Senate, the chief U.S. diplomatic official added. He issued this press statement upon leaving a cabinet meeting at the White House, a meeting devoted to the Czechoslovak problem and the Vietnam situation.”
We can only express our happiness over this. Our people are aware of the position assumed by the Cuban delegation toward this famous nonproliferation treaty, a treaty which amounted to a permanent concession of monopoly of a technology of a power source which will be essential to the future of mankind.
We were especially concerned over the fact that this meant that many countries of the world would accept an imperialist U.S. Government monopoly over those weapons, which could be used at any time against any nation, since, in addition, that draft treaty was accompanied by an astounding declaration in defense of the countries signing the treaty which were threatened by nuclear arms. Such countries as Vietnam and Cuba, if they desired to differ and not agree with that type of treaty and even less to sign it under circumstances in which the aggression against Vietnam was being carried out in the sharpest manner, were deprived of any protection. Theoretically the imperialists could even have the right to attack us with nuclear weapons. Of course, all are aware of our position.
In the light of events, in the fact of an imperialism that is always plotting, always conspiring against the socialist camp, we ask if we should continue maintaining idyllic hopes of an improvement in relations with the imperialist government of the United States. We ask, in line with the events in Czechoslovakia – in the relations with Yankee imperialism – a position will not be adopted that will imply the renunciation of such idyllic hopes. And it is said here that this will make rapprochement more difficult, and that the new ratification is endangered. In our opinion, the best thing that can happen is for it not be ratified.
The statement by TASS explaining the decision of the governments of the Warsaw Pact says in its final paragraph: “The brother nations firmly and resolutely oppose their unbreakable solidarity against any threat from abroad. They will never permit anyone to snatch away even a single link of the socialist community.” We ask: Does this statement include Vietnam? Does this statement include Korea? Does this statement include Cuba? Does it consider Vietnam, Korea, and Cuba as links in the socialist camp that cannot be snatched away by the imperialists?
On the basis of this declaration, Warsaw Pact divisions were sent to Czechoslovakia, and we ask: Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to Vietnam also if the imperialists increase their aggression against that country and the people of Vietnam ask for this aid? Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent the the Korean Democratic Republic if the Yankee imperialists attach that country? Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to Cuba if the Yankee imperialists attack our country, or simply if, in the face of the threat of an attack by the Yankee imperialists, our country requests it? [long applause]
We accept the bitter necessity which demanded the sending of troops to Czechoslovakia. We do not condemn the socialist countries that adopted this decision; but we, as revolutionaries, and on the basis of principles, have the right to demand that a consistent policy of adopted in all the other questions that affect the revolutionary movement in the world.
Defense of Cuban Revolution
Regarding our country, why hide [the fact] that many dangers will arise? The partisans of armed military attack on Cuba almost rub their hands with joy. Even today we have a cable to this effect. We must say how we see things. It is perhaps the principle of sovereignty, is it perhaps the law, that has protected and continues to protect our country in the fact of Yankee invasion? No one believes this. If it were the law, if it were the principle of sovereignty that was protecting our country, it is certain that this revolution would have disappeared from the face of the earth.
What has protected this revolution, what made it possible, was the blood of the sons of this country, the bloody fighting against the bailiffs and against the armies of Batista, the bloody fighting against the mercenaries, the willingness here to fight to the last man in defense of the revolution – as shown in the October crisis – and the conviction of the imperialists that here they will never be able to execute a maneuver or military parade. What defends this revolution is not a simple abstract legal principle that is recognized internationally.
What defends this revolution is the unity of our people, their revolutionary consciousness, their combative spirit, and their decision to die to the last man in defense of the revolution and the country. I do not believe that even our enemies have any doubts about the mettle and the spirit of this people. What defends the sovereignty of a country or a just cause is a people who are capable of feeling this cause as its own, capable of having a profound conviction about the justice of this cause, and the decision to defend it at any price. This is precisely what protects our revolution and what protects the sovereignty of our country in the face of the imperialist threat that has always existed here.
Cuban-U.S. Relations
Now, the imperialist have not ceased for a single instant to dream of the destruction of our country. These dangers will now naturally increase. Well, now, precisely now – because we must talk of things at the necessary moment – once again we are going to set forth our position – the position of our revolutionary government – in regard to the United States. To say it now, precisely when to say things has a real and not simply a declamatory or theoretical significance. It is all the more necessary to express our position, because some speculations have been made about possible improvement of relations between Cuba and the United States.
The revolutionary government has at no time expressed the slightest interest in improving its relations with the imperialist U.S. Government. It has not shown, nor will it show, nor will it pay the least attention or express directly or indirectly, tacitly or expressly, any kind of consent to discuss with that government as long as it is a government which represents the bulwark, of reaction in the world, the international gendarme, enemy of revolutionary movements, aggressor in Vietnam, aggressor in Santo Domingo, and interventionist in revolutionary movement. This has been, is, and will be unquestionably the position of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba.
Never, under no circumstances – the comrades of our Central Committee know this, they know that this is the line adopted by our committee – that never, under no circumstances, even in the most difficult circumstances, will this country approach the imperialist government of the United States, even if one day it puts us in the position of having to choose between keeping the revolution alive or taking such a step. Because gentlemen, beginning at that movement, no revolution would continue living.
If one day this revolution, in order to survive, has to pay for its security and survival the price of concession to Yankee imperialists, we would prefer – as our Central Committee unanimously prefers and as our people prefer – that this people sink with out revolution rather than survive at such a price. [applause]
In the United States there are honest and progressive people, people who oppose blockades, aggressions, and all those things. Naturally, we have always maintained a friendly attitude toward those who honestly have held such a position, toward those who oppose the Vietnam war and the imperialist policies of the United States. Well, regarding the government of that country, our position is clear, absolutely unmistakable. We are not interested in economic relations and we are not yet interested in diplomatic relations of any kind.
Their criminal blockade has been in effect for 10 years. They have taught us to defend ourselves and to form a revolutionary conscience. They know that it will not be easy to sink us. They know that they will not be able to scare us with their threats or to subdue us. They know it will not be easy to starve us to death under any circumstances. We have struggled these 10 years, making enormous efforts. The time is not far when we shall begin to reap the fruits of our efforts. We are prepared to live 20 years – a whole lifetime – without relations of any sort with them. We repeat, regardless of the circumstances, we will wait until Yankee imperialism ceases to be Yankee imperialism, and we will have enough patience and courage to persevere for as long as is necessary. This is our position. This is the only revolutionary position.
We know that they will start trying th threaten us. They will not be successful in this. It is difficult for them to instill fear or dread in this country because this country has learned to live for 10 years in the face of this enemy and its threats. Let us say sincerely that we prefer this clear situation. We prefer this position of risk to those indefinite positions that can lead to a weakening of our spirit of defense. We have not had a war alarm for a long time. We have not had any tense situation for a long time. Now, because of these incidents, several cables have reported that our armed forces have been placed partially on the alert. Yes, immediately; our forces will never be taken by surprise. Our philosophy of struggle includes the basic concept that we will never be taken by surprise. We prefer to be excessively on the alert than to be surprised. Under all circumstances we have always been on the alert and ready, and never have been surprised. The following is our philosophy; we shall never have to give the order to fight, because that order has been permanently given. It is unnecessary to give the order.
One will never be able to enter this country against our will. The circumstances will never exist, no one will ever enter here without at the very start encountering a closed and implacable battle. It is not necessary to sound the alarm for battle. Neither will the order to stop firing ever be given in the face of an aggression. Never will a surrender be accepted. These are three basic concepts of our philosophy against the Yankee imperialist forces.
This philosophy has been drilled into our people who are prepared to fight to the very last man. This also is part of our philosophy. Man has to die one way or another. The only sad way to die is to die shamefully with one’s back to the enemy. We are not warmongers, but revolutionaries prefer to die fighting rather than from natural death. This does not mean that we shall provoke wars to avoid a natural death. Not even revolutionaries can always do what they prefer. Duty will always come first. This – and everybody knows this – is what really defends our sovereignty.
A phase of threats will begin. We will be more occupied in the future than we have been in the past. We will not abandon our work or our development plans; not even this will they achieve. Our present organizational level will go forward. We will carry out our plans and we will strengthen our defense and increase our fighting ability.
Well, here already is the cable from Brazil. A paper that serves as one of the greatest spokesman of the oligarchy there says: “The Soviet interference in an internal matter of Czechoslovakia reopens the Cuban question, which had appeared to be healed, and of which no more was being said.” Thus begins an extensive editorial of Jornal do Brazil in its yesterday’s edition. In a story entitled, Here and There, the paper says textually:
“With the entrance of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia, several points of equilibrium in the world balance of power need to be automatically reappraised. We cannot fail to recognize that the Cuban presence now takes on a new meaning in the light of the cold and brutal realism that led the Soviet Union to feel insecure simply because one country of the communist orbit decided to debate the need for freedom.
“Moscow intolerance was obvious in its hushing all the words of order so that it could give the floor to brute force. If the USSR can soil the principle of selfdetermination of the peoples simply because it considers that Czechoslovakia is a territory under its ideological jurisdiction, then there is no way of invoking the same doctrine to prevent the Cuba case from being studied in the light of the specific interest of continental unity.
“There are notorious differences in the two cases. First, Czechoslovakia has not broken with socialist principles, nor has it opposed politically the bloc to which it belongs. Only in the internal plane did it eliminate the rigidity of the suffocating dictatorship and permit itself to be led to a discussion in which the word freedom came to be considered a dimension without which socialism is a farce. Cuba’s situation is very different. The Havana government is out of step with the ensemble of the continental countries, whose commitments are to democracy and freedom. The Havana communist regime, besides being an exception, is assuming the mission of exporting subversion to the point of financing groups that perturb democratic order in Latin America.
“As long as the Soviet Union was capable of permitting the breeze of freedom that blew in Czechoslovakia, the world had the impression that finally the large nations, the captains of the blocs, were playing in a more tolerant manner than with the automatism of military interventions. But the panorama brutally and unexpectedly changed. The brunt of Soviet violence was brought to bear against the Czechoslovak attempt to practice freedom.
“The situation automatically changes as far as Cuba is concerned. Not because of the effect of any compensation, but rather because of the simple fact that it is necessary to reevaluate the balance of power on the world scale. The Cuban problem will be reopened, and Brazil, which rose to the defense of the principle of nonintervention, will have to keep in mind that the Rio de Janeiro Treaty is the appropriate legal document for reexamination of the problem.
“The Cuban question is thus converted, since the early hours of yesterday morning, into a current matter, and should be reconsidered without the wrong connotations which reported it in a rather unrealistic manner. The Soviet aggression on Cuba is exposing its flank in Latin America to inevitable investigation.”
So concludes the editorial in Jornal do Brasil in its edition of yesterday, 22 August.
And it pretends to say that this is a realistic examination. There is a wee difference, gentlemen of Jornal do Brasil and of Brazil and other oligarchs; and this is that we Cuban revolutionaries would drive Brazil’s best divisions out of Cuba in a matter of hours with kicks in the ass. [prolonged applause]
And the same goes for the best divisions of the imperialist Government of the United States. We are ready, like the Vietnamese, to struggle for 100 years if necessary [applause]. That is the only slight difference, imperialist and oligarchic gentlemen. We willingly maintain our positions and will always maintain them without being frightened by any kind of threat.
Fatherland or death! We will win!
Castro Archive
Last updated: 10 April 2021
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive</p>
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<h1>Speech delivered by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz during the presentation of the<br> Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, at the “Chaplin” theater October 3, 1965.</h1>
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<span class="info">Delivered:</span> October 3, 1965<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version, Stenographic Versions – Council of State.<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> David Walters, 2019<br>
<span class="info">Online Version & translation:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en</p>
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<p class="fst">Distinguished guests;</p>
<p class="fst">Comrades of the Central Committee.</p>
<p class="fst">Comrades of the provincial, regional and sectional committees.</p>
<p class="fst">Comrade Secretaries of the cells of our party.</p>
<p>I am compelled to begin with a topic which has not direct relation with the purpose of this meeting but since it is a topical question and one of a political interest, I cannot refrain from referring to it.</p>
<p>It is the outcome of the proposal made on September 28, with regard to events that had been taking place for the last three years, and which has been treacherously manipulated by the enemy to wage a campaign against our Revolution. It is the case of people who, upon the suspension of flights between Cuba and Miami, were left with one foot here and the other one there.</p>
<p>In order to unmask Yankee imperialism once and for all in this regard, we made the statement on September 28, which you know about. And when they later said that the statement was somewhat vague and ambiguous, and that it had not been delivered through diplomatic channels, we made a second and very clear and very concrete statement so we could settle the dispute once and for all.</p>
<p>Today, the cables carry the news regarding the final reply by the United States Government in this respect.</p>
<p>I am going to read the news brought by these cables.</p>
<p>In short, it reads:</p>
<p>“President Johnson”–this is an AP cable–“President Johnson announced today that he will strive for a diplomatic understanding with Cuba so Cubans who want to leave their country can take asylum in the United States.”</p>
<p>This thing about “diplomatic understandings” means an agreement through diplomatic channels with regard to this problem.</p>
<p>It reads: “I have requested the State Department to seek through the Swiss Embassy, entrusted with U.S. affairs, the consent of the Government of Cuba in a request to the president of the International Red Cross.” It also says: “I have given instructions to the Departments of State, Justice, Health, Education, and Welfare, to make the necessary arrangements to enable those who seek freedom in Cuba to enter the United States in an orderly manner.”</p>
<p>In another cable with more news, it adds: Mr. Johnson also stated:</p>
<p>“`Once more this has revealed the mark of defeat of a regime. When many of its citizens freely elect to leave the nation where they were born to go to a home of hope, the future harbors little hope for any government when the present does not permit hopes for its people.'” He said that “the refugees would be welcome with the thought that someday they can return to their country to find it rid of terror and free from fear.”</p>
<p>In other words, they apparently did not have any other alternative, nor any other way out. It means, in the first place, that we have won a battle for freedom. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Mr. Johnson, would not be Johnson, nor would he be President of the United States, nor would he be a Yankee, if he did not use this proverbial pharisaic discourse to accompany this statement with all this condiment regarding the hopes of those who will leave for the United States in search of freedom and which can offer nothing to their future when at the present time they only offer the prospect for the citizens of a country of having to abandon their nation of origin. He also talks about the Red Cross. Therefore, we consider it necessary to reply to Mr. Johnson on these matters which have nothing to do with the matter itself which we proposed. And we should make some pertinent remarks on all this.</p>
<p>First of all, the Yankee news agencies and many of that country’s officials as well as some news agencies which are not Yankee, but which apparently through hearing these arguments over and over, such as Reuters and France Press, have echoed the statement that this meant a change in the policy with regard to those who wanted to leave the nation–and this is absolutely false. Since its outset of the Revolution, there has been only one policy in regard to this. From the beginning of the Revolution, until the Missile crisis, all who wished to leave this country and who had received permission from the United States were leaving without being stopped.</p>
<p>And when as a result of the Missile crisis they stopped the flights to Cuba there was not a change in the policy of the Revolutionary Government, because through the other routes, that is the route of Spain and the route of Mexico, nearly 300 persons continued to leave monthly, in other words, more than 3,000 persons per year. There has not been the slightest change in the policy about those who wish to leave the country. What we have done is to unmask the bad faith and the hypocrisy of Yankee imperialism, the only responsible for the routes to leave normally being closed in order to promote a certain type of clandestine and risky departures with the only purpose of making propaganda.</p>
<p>Mr. Johnson probably ignores that during the in the United States war of independence to break free from English colonial rule, thousands upon thousands of North Americans left their country after the independence and went to Canada.</p>
<p>In all Revolutions whether it be the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution or the Cuban Revolution, this occurrence of departure or migration of the privileged classes is a historical fact. If the departure from a country, if the departure of men and women who are born in a country to another country could be an indication of the characteristics of a social regime, the best example is the case would be Puerto Rico, an island which the Yankee imperialism took over and which it has maintained under an exploiting, colonial regime and therefore the reason for which more than one million of the men and women born in that country have had to migrate to the United States. And Mr. Johnson forgot about Puerto Rico and the more than one million Puerto Ricans who live in New York under the hardest living conditions in the poorest neighborhoods and doing the most humiliating jobs.</p>
<p>Naturally, this talk about the Red Cross is a trick of Mr. Johnson in order to dramatize the matter. Now, who really has said that to process passports and grant permission for some planes to land in Miami, the Red Cross must intervene? What does the Red Cross have to do with this? This does not have anything to do with an earthquake, a catastrophe or a war, but simple proceedings to authorize the arrival to the United States, authorizing the landing of the planes or the arrival of the ships.</p>
<p>We do not need the Red Cross at all for this. The Red Cross in any case, could intervene to propose to the United States the lift of the criminal measure through which the sale of medications to Cuba is banned. For that the International Red Cross would be really useful. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>In any case, the Red Cross could do a better job in South Vietnam (APPLAUSE) where the Yankee soldiers murder thousands, murder and torture the citizens of that nation by the thousands, or in North Vietnam where the criminal Yankee bombings do not distinguish one thing from another. They bomb cities just like they bomb villages, schools, and hospitals.</p>
<p>The Red Cross could have to do something in Santo Domingo where the invading soldiers commit all kinds of outrages against the people while occupy the students’ schools. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The Red Cross could intervene in the United States to prevent the massacres of Negro citizens like the one that took place recently in Los Angeles, California. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>However, for this matter, Mr. Johnson, the Red Cross need not be present. It is enough for us to hold discussions with the representatives of the Swiss Embassy, who are the representatives for the U.S. interests in Cuba, and we can perfectly make agreements with them on any proceeding. No one else need be present; we accept the sincerity and responsibility of the Swiss officials. Now, if the U.S. Government does not have confidence or does not believe in the ability of the Swiss Embassy, that is the problem of the U.S. Government. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Now, speaking very seriously, on these questions of freedom, I would like to know if Mr. Johnson would like to answer a couple of questions. Since we have permitted all those who wish to leave Cuba since the beginning of the Revolution to do so, inasmuch as we have never denied permission to those who have wanted to leave to visit their relatives and return, also if there are Cubans who have relatives in the United States and wish to be reunited with them, there are also Cubans who have relatives in the United States and they do not wish to abandon their country. (APPLAUSE) And inasmuch as Mr. Johnson stood by the Statue of Liberty and took the trouble to sprinkle his statements with this nonsense about liberty, I ask him if the United States will allow Cubans in the United States to visit their relatives in Cuba and then return to the United States. (APPLAUSE) If the United States is willing to permit Cubans who do not wish to live in the United States to visit their relatives in the United States and return to Cuba, and finally if the United States is disposed to allow U.S. citizens to visit Cuba. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Because that same government which says that a country travels the wrong path if its citizens leave that nation, we can tell them that a nation could travel a worse path, despite the fact that it is a nation which publicizes a great deal and thinks itself as a nation of liberties. Despite the fact that it has been able to attain the standard of economic development they have reached, they are afraid to grant permission for U.S. citizens to visit this country, which is so slandered about fear and terror–as they call it. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Therefore, here is the second question to the U.S. Government: We call upon you also to permit those Cubans who live in the United States to come to Cuba to visit their relatives who do not wish to go live in the United States, and to permit those relative who live in Cuba and do not want to leave Cuba, to go to the United States and return. Finally, we ask that they permit the students or any U.S. citizens to come to visit Cuba in the same manner that we permit any Cuban citizen to leave or return (APPLAUSE); that the U.S. Government permit the Negro representatives of the U.S. Negro organizations to visit Cuba, or the organizations of the defenders of civil rights to see how, with the disappearance of the exploitation of man, to see how racial discrimination had ended for good in our nation. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And let us see if Mr. Johnson, before the world and the U.S. people has an answer to this call which is not gibberish. We compel him to respond.</p>
<p>We maintain our position, we maintain our declaration and we wait for the relevant meeting on this matter to be requested by the Swiss representatives from the Swiss Embassy when they receive the pertinent instructions from the U.S. Government. But we hope to see whether Mr. Johnson has a way of reply to this call.</p>
<p>And since they talk so much, since they brag so much about freedom, enough of this talk about false freedoms; enough of this talk about abstract freedoms. The facts have shown that it is here where we are creating a world of freedom, not there. (APPLAUSE) It is such a free world that we do not want to force anyone to live in this society against his will, because our socialist society, our communist society, must be eminently a truly free association of citizens. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And although it is true that certain citizens educated in those ideas of the past and in that way of life of the past prefer to go to the United States, it is also true that this country has become the sanctuary of the Revolutionaries of this continent. (APPLAUSE) It is also true that we consider worthy of the hospitality of this people and this land, not only those born here but also all men and women who share our own tongue and of our own culture–and even when they do m not share our own tongue, of similar historical and ethnic origins, or similar history of exploitation. And they have a right to come to this country and, all those who have wanted to, have made use of this right–those pursued by bloody and imperialist oligarchies. Many man and women who were born in other sister nations of this continent have come to this country to live permanently or temporarily. Many technicians and many professional from various parts of America have come to live and work in this country for many years.</p>
<p>This is not just a country of Cubans–this is a country of revolutionaries. (APPLAUSE) The Revolutionaries of the continent have a right to consider themselves our brothers, and they are worthy of this right. This includes North American Revolutionaries (APPLAUSE), because some leaders, like Robert Williams, fiercely persecuted there, found asylum in this land. Thus, just as he, so can those being persecuted by reactionaries and exploiters find asylum here. It does not matter if they speak English and are born in the United States. This is the motherland of the revolutionaries of this continent, just as the United States is the inevitable asylum of all the henchman, of all the embezzlers (APPLAUSE), of all the exploiters (APPLAUSE), of all the reactionaries of this continent. Because there is not a thief, there is not an exploiter, there is not a reactionary, and there is not a criminal, for whom the United States does not keep its gates open.</p>
<p>And with this, we have replied to Mr. Johnson’s words spoken under his discolored Statue of Liberty), which no one knows what it represents, that hodgepodge of stone and hypocrisy, unless it is what Yankee imperialism means to the world today.</p>
<p>Now we are going to turn to our business, to matters of our party. Because I think that the news reports coming from here, those regarding our social successes, our economic successes, and our political successes, are very bad news for the Yankee imperialists.</p>
<p>Naturally, anything which strengthens and advances the Revolution, anything that allows us to make the best progress, is of very high concern to them. Because of this, they will return–yes, some day they will long to come back, repentant, a large portion of the ones that left. But when Johnson talks about returning here as liberators we could tell him that this is an “autumn night’s dream.” (laughs)</p>
<p>All the nation has received with joy and enthusiasm the news of the constitution of our Central Committee. The names of the comrades which make up this committee as well as their history are well known. If all of them are not known by all our people, all are known by a large and important part of the nation. We have committed ourselves to choosing those who in our judgment represent in the most complete manner the history of our Revolution. Those who in addition to the struggle for the Revolution, as well as the struggle for the consolidation, defense, and development of the Revolution have worked and have fought with determination and tirelessly.</p>
<p>There is no heroic episode in the history of our country during the last years where they have not been present. There is no sacrifice, there is no fight, there is no prowess, civilian or military, heroic or creative, in which they are not represented. There is no social revolutionary sector which is not represented. I do not speak about organizations.</p>
<p>There are men who for a long time were bearers of the socialist ideas, just like founder of the first communist party, Comrade Fabio Grobart. (APPLAUSE) Cases like that of Comrade Helena Gil, (APPLAUSE) whose extraordinary work leading the schools, were more than 40,000 peasant women from the mountain have studied, and where thousands of teachers have been trained, where today more than 50,000 youths and children study, and which we consider a truly exemplary job. Or the case of comrade Arteaga (APPLAUSE), who besides his history of struggle, has worked for seven years in the agriculture sector and has developed successful plans, in some cases successful plans like the Escambray agricultural plan. (APPLAUSE) Cases of comrades like Lieutenant Tarrao, whom many have not heard of, but who is a comrade the Ministry of Interior placed at the head of the rehabilitation plans at the Isle of Pines (APPLAUSE) where he has developed with an exemplary and unselfish attitude, a brilliant job about which a lot will be said and written someday.</p>
<p>I have mentioned cases of comrades, some well-known and other less known. The list of the comrades from the Revolutionary Armed Forces would be endless. (APPLAUSE) For their history before and after the triumph, as an example of model revolutionaries, of tireless workers, as an example of excellent students, in the development of culture, in improving the standards in education and general culture and of the political preparedness, comrades of extraordinary modesty, in whose hands the defense of the motherland has fundamentally been placed during the last seven years of dangers and of threats.</p>
<p>It is not necessary to talk about the best known comrades. This does not mean that the only valuable people of the nation are here, far from that. Our nation has many outstanding people, and above all, a promotion of new comrades in full progress, which one day without a doubt will come to hold that responsibility and that honor.</p>
<p>It we ask ourselves who is missing, without a doubt we would say that there are some comrades missing. It would be impossible to constitute a Central Committee with 100 revolutionary comrades without many cadres who are not included. However, what matters is not those who are missing–they will come later. What matters is those who are here and what they represent. We know that the party and the people have welcomed with satisfaction the Central Committee which has been constituted. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>This committee, meeting yesterday, adopted several agreements.</p>
<p>Firstly, it ratified the measures adopted by the former national leadership, ratified the politburo, the secretariat, and the working commissions, as well as the comrade elected to the office of organization secretary. (APPLAUSE) Moreover, it adapted to important agreements, which had also been suggested by the former national leadership.</p>
<p>One of them relates to our official newspaper: instead of two newspapers or a political nature, as were being published, we will concentrate the human resources, concentrate machinery and paper, in order to publish a new, single morning newspaper of a political nature, in addition to the newspaper EL MUNDO, which is not precisely a political orientation newspaper; to combine all these resources and to make a new daily newspaper which will bear the name of GRANMA, (APPLAUSE) the symbol of our Revolutionary concept and of our path.</p>
<p>The other agreement is even more important, dealing with the name of our party. First we were the ORI (Spanish language acronym for Integrated Revolutionary Organizations), during the first stages in the unification of the Revolutionary forces, with its positive and negative aspects. Then we were the United Party of the Socialist Revolution, which represented extraordinary progress, an extraordinary advance in the creation of our political apparatus, an effort of three years in which, from the unlimited pool militants from our people, countless new party members coming from within the ranks of our workers, enabling us to become today what we represent in numbers, but, above all, what we represent in terms of quality. The name United Party of the Socialist Revolution says much, but is does not say it all. The name still gives the idea of something that had to be united, that still recalls the origins of each one. Since we fell that we have already reached a stage in which all types of labels and things that distinguish some Revolutionaries from others must disappear once and for all and forever and that we have already reached the fortunate point in the history of our Revolution in which we can say that there is only one kind of Revolutionary, and since it is necessary that the name of or party say, not what we were yesterday, but what we are today and what we will be tomorrow, what, in your opinion, is the name our party should have? (Crows makes tumultuous indistinct response of Communist)</p>
<p>What is it, what is, comrades? what is it a comrade from here, ? The comrades from there, the comrades over there, the comrades over there? The Cuban Communist Party! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Well, that is the name which, by interpreting the development of our Party, the revolutionary conscience of its members, and the objectives of our Revolution, our first Central Committee adopted yesterday.</p>
<p>And that is quite proper, as we explained to the comrades of the committee yesterday; the word “communist” has been much slued and much denigrated throughout centuries. There have been communists throughout history, men of communist ideas, men who conceived a way of living different from the society in which they were born. Those who thought in a communist manner in other times were considered, for example, utopian communists who 500 years ago because in their idealistic approach aspired for a type of society which was not possible at that time given the very poor stage of development of productive forces. Of course man could not return to the communist from which primitive man originated, to live in a primitive form of communism, unless there was such a degree of development of his productive forces and such a method for the utilization of those forces, a social mode of using those forces, so that material goods and services could be produced in more than sufficient quantities to satisfy the needs of man.</p>
<p>All the exploiters, all the privileged always hated the word “communist” as if it were a crime. They anathematized the word “communist” and that is why when Marx and Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto which gave origin to a new Revolutionary theory, to a scientific interpretation of human society, human history, they said “a phantom is sweeping Europe, and that is the phantom of communism,” because privileged classes viewed those ideas as a phantom, with true fear. Moreover the privileged classes in any era of history always viewed new ideas with extraordinary fear.</p>
<p>Roman society was also terrorized in its era by the Christian ideas when these ideas rose in the world. And they were at one time the ideas of the poor and the slaves of those times. It was as a result of their hatred against these new ideas the Roman society casted countless numbers of human beings into the flames, and into the circus. In like fashion, during the Middle Ages, in the era of feudalism, new ideas were persecuted and their originators slandered and treated in the worst possible manner. The new ideas that came to exist with the emergence of bourgeoisie during feudalism, whether those ideas adopted political, philosophical, or religious positions, they were cruelly anathematized and persecuted. The reactionary classes have used all means to anathematize and slander new ideas.</p>
<p>Thus all the power and all the means at their disposal are not enough for their purposes of slandering communist ideas, as if the desire for a society where man will not be an exploiter of man but a true brother of man, as if the dream of a society in which all human beings are equal in fact and in law, not just a simple constitutional clause such as those contained in the bourgeois constitutions where they say that all men are born free and equal, as if that could be said equally of a child born in a slum, in a poor cradle, and of a child born in a golden cradle, as if it could ever be said in a society of exploiters and exploited, or rich and poor, that all men are born free and equal, as if all those men were called upon in life to have the same opportunity.</p>
<p>The perennial dream of men, a dream possible today, of a society-without exploiters or exploited, has drawn the hate and the acrimony of all the exploiters.</p>
<p>The imperialists, as if they were offending us, as if it were an offense, speak of the communist Government of Cuba just as the work “Mambi”(as the Cuban independence fighters were called) was used against our liberators as an offense, in like fashion they attempt to use the work “communist” as an offense. And the work “communist” is not an offense for us but an honor. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>It is the word which symbolizes the aspiration of a large party of humanity and hundreds and hundreds of millions of human beings are concretely working for it today, within 100-years, there will be no greater honor nor will there by anything more natural and logical than to be called “communists.” (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We are headed toward a communist society and if the imperialists were asking for it, well now they got it. (APPLAUSE) From now on, gentlemen of the UP and AP, when you call us “communists” you know you are calling us the most honorable thing you can call us. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>There is an absence in our Central Committee of one who possess all the merits and all the virtues in the highest degree to belong to it and who, however, is not among the members of the Central Committee.</p>
<p>Around this the enemy had weave a thousand conjectures. The enemy has tried to confuse and to instill discord and doubt. And patiently, because it was necessary to wait, we have waited.</p>
<p>That is the difference between the Revolutionary and the counterrevolutionary, between the Revolutionary and the imperialist. We Revolutionaries know how to wait. We know how to be patient. We never despair and the reactionaries, the counterrevolutionaries, the imperialists continue in perennial desperation. They live in perennial anguish, in a perennial lying of the most ridiculous, of the most childish manner.</p>
<p>When we read some of the things said by those officials, some of those Yankee Senators, one wanders: “How is it possible that this gentlemen is not in a stable instead of being a member of what is called “Congress.” (APPLAUSE) Some of them speak real nonsense. Any they have an incredible appetite for lying. They cannot live without lying. They live in anguish.</p>
<p>If the Revolutionary government states something, which is what it has always been doing, such as that to which I referred at the beginning, they see truculent things, terrible things, and a plan behind all that.</p>
<p>How ludicrous. How can they live in such fear? One asks oneself: “Do they believe that? “Do they believe that other thing?: “Could they believe all they say?” “Or is it that they have a need to believe all they say? Or is it that they cannot live without believing all they say or is it that they say all that they do not believe?”</p>
<p>It is difficult to understand. It would be a question for doctors and psychologists. What do they have in this minds? What anguish is that? They see a maneuver in everything, a truculent, dark, terrible plan. It seems they do not know that there is not better tactic, nor a better strategy than to fight with clean weapons, than to fight with the truth, because those are the only weapons which inspire trust. These are the only weapons which inspire faith. These are the only weapons which inspire safety, moral dignity. And it has been with those weapons that we Revolutionaries have been vanquishing and crushing our enemies.</p>
<p>You will never here a lie from the mouth of a Revolutionary. There are weapons which do not benefit any revolutionary, and no serious Revolutionary needs to resort to lies–ever. His weapon is reason, the truth, and the ability to have an idea, a purpose, and a position.</p>
<p>In short, the moral spectacle of our adversaries in truly lamentable. And thus, the diviners, the interpreters, the specialists on Cuban affairs, and the electronic brains have been working incessantly to solve this mystery, whether Ernesto Guevara has been purges, (APPLAUSE) whether Ernesto Guevara was ill, whether Ernesto Guevara had had differences, and other questions of the same ilk.</p>
<p>Naturally, the people have confidence. The people have faith, but enemies will say these things, especially abroad, to slander him. Behold, the communist regime, dark, terrible things, men disappear, they do not leave a trace; they do not leave prints; there is no explanation; and we told the people at this time, when the people began to notice this absence, that in due time we would talk. We would have some reasons to wait,</p>
<p>We are living surrounded by imperialist forces. The world is not operating in normal conditions. As long as the criminal bombs of Yankee imperialists are falling on the people of Vietnam, we cannot say that we are living under normal circumstances. When more than 100,000 Yankee soldiers land there to try to smash the liberation movement, when the soldiers of imperialism land in a republic which has equality of rights, just as legally, as do all the rest of the republics of the world, as is the case in Santo Domingo, when imperialism intervenes to trample its sovereignty, (APPLAUSE) the world if not living under normal conditions. When around our country, the imperialists are training mercenaries and organizing vandalistic attacks, in the most unpunished manner, as in the case of Sierra Aránzazu, when the imperialists threatens to intervene in any country of Latin America or the world, we are not living under normal circumstances.</p>
<p>And when we were fighting in clandestine conditions against the Batista tyranny, we Revolutionaries did not live in normal conditions. We had to adjust to the struggle. In the same way, although the Revolutionary power exists in our country, in regard to the realities of the world, we do not live in normal conditions, and we shall have to adjust to this situation.</p>
<p>And to explain this, we are going to read a letter here, it is handwritten, here copied by typewriter, from Comrade Ernesto Guevara, (APPLAUSE) which is self-explanatory. I was trying to decide whether to tell the story of our friendship and our comradeship, how it began and under what conditions it began and how it developed, but it is not necessary. I am going to limit myself to reading the letter.</p>
<p>It says:</p>
<p>Havana–The date was not written down because this letter was to be read at the moment we felt it most convenient, but keeping to strict reality, it was delivered on April 1st this year, exactly six months and two days ago, and it reads:</p>
<p>HAVANA</p>
<p>Year of Agriculture</p>
<p>Fidel:</p>
<p>I remember many things in this hour—how I met you in the house of Maria Antonia, and how you proposed that I come along with you, and all the tensions involved in the preparations.</p>
<p>One day they came by and asked who should be notified in case of death, and the real possibility of it struck us all. Later we learned that it was true, that in a Revolution one triumphs or dies (if it be a true one). Many comrades fell along the road to victory.</p>
<p>Today everything has a less dramatic tone, for we are more mature, but the event is repeats itself. I feel that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that bound me to the Cuban Revolution on its territory, and I say farewell to you, my comrades and your people who are now my people.</p>
<p>I formally renounce my posts in the leadership of the Party, my post as Minister, my rank as Major, my status as a Cuban citizen. Nothing legal binds me to Cuba, only ties of another kind that cannot be broken, as can official appointments. Looking back over my past life, I believe that I have worked with sufficient faithfulness and dedication in order to consolidate the revolutionary triumph. My only deficiency of any importance is not to have trusted you more from those first moments in the Sierra Maestra and in not having understood soon enough your qualities of leader and revolutionary.</p>
<p>I have lived through magnificent days and at your side I felt the pride of belonging to our people in the luminous and sad days of the Caribbean Crisis. Rarely has any statesman shone more brilliantly than you did in those days. I feel pride, too, in having followed you without hesitation, identifying myself with your way of thinking and seeing and of judging dangers and motives.</p>
<p>Other regions of the world claim the support of my modest efforts. I can do what is forbidden to you because of your responsibility to Cuba, and the time has come for us to separate.</p>
<p>Let it be known that I do it with a mixture of joy and sorrow: I am leaving here the purest of my hopes as a builder and the most loved among my beloved creatures, and I leave a people who accepted me as a son; this rends a part of my spirit. On new battlefields I will carry with me the faith that you inculcated in me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of having fulfilled the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever it may be; this comforts and heals any wound to a great extent.</p>
<p>I say once more that I free Cuba of any responsibility save that which stems from its example: that if the final hour comes upon me under other skies, my last thought will be for this people and especially for you, that I am thankful to you for your teachings and your example, and that I will try to be faithful up to the final consequences of my acts; that I have at all times been identified with the foreign policy of our Revolution, and I continue to be so; that wherever I may end up I will feel the responsibility of being a Cuban revolutionary, and I will act as one; that I leave nothing material to my children and my wife, and this does not grieve me: I am glad that it be so; that I ask nothing for them, since the State will give them sufficient to live and will educate them.</p>
<p>I would have many things to say to you and to our people, but I feel that they are unnecessary; words cannot express what I would want them to, and it isn’t worthwhile wasting more sheets of paper with my scribbling.</p>
<p>To victory forever.</p>
<p>Homeland or Death!</p>
<p>I embrace you with all my revolutionary fervor!</p>
<p>Che”</p>
<p>Those who talk about the revolutionaries, those who consider revolutionaries as cold men, men without feelings, or men without a heart, will have in this letter the example of all the sentiment, of all the feeling, of all the purity a revolutionary heart can hold,</p>
<p>And we could answer, all of us: Comrade Guevara, it is not responsibility wheat we are concerned about. We have a responsibility to the Revolution and we are responsible for assisting the revolutionary movement to the best of our strength (APPLAUSE) and we assume the responsibility and the consequences and the risks. For almost seven years it has been that way and we know that as long as imperialism exists and while there are exploited and colonized peoples, we shall continue running these risks, and we shall continue serenely assuming these responsibilities.</p>
<p>And we had the duty to conform; we had the duty to respect this sentiment of this comrade, that freedom and that right, and this is indeed freedom, not that of those who are going to take on chains but that of those who are going to take up a rifle against the chains of slavery. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And that is another of the freedom, Mr. Johnson, which our Revolution proclaims. And if those who want to leave to go live with the imperialists are at times recruited by the imperialists to fight in Vietnam and the Congo, let it be known also that all the citizens of this country, when they ask for permission, not to go fight alongside the imperialists, but to fight alongside the Revolutionaries will not be denied permission by this Revolution. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>This country is free, Mr. Johnson; really free for everybody!</p>
<p>And this was not the only letter. Along with this letter, and for the occasion when this letter should be used, various other letters were left with us, of greetings to various comrades, and in addition, as it says here, “to my children, to my parents, and other comrades,” a letter written by him for his children, and for his parents. We will pass these letters on to the comrades and family; and we ask them to donate than to the Revolution, for we consider them to be documents worthy of a place in history.</p>
<p>And we feel that this explains everything. As for the rest, let the enemies worry. We have enough tasks, enough things to do, in our country and in connection with the world; enough duties to fulfill and we will fulfill them.</p>
<p>We will carry on our path, we will develop our ideas, we will develop our methods, and we will develop our system. We will utilize all experiences that may prove useful to us, and we will develop fresh experiences.</p>
<p>A completely new era is arising in the history of our country, a different form of society, a different system of government, the government of a party, the party of the workers, made up of the best workers, formed with the full participation of the masses, so it can justly and rightly be said that it is the vanguard of the workers and represent the workers, in our workers’ Revolutionary democracy. And it will be a thousand time more democratic than bourgeois democracy, for we will progress toward administrative and political forms that will imply the masses’ constant involvement in solving the problems of society through the suitable organizations, through the party, at all levels. And we will go on developing these new forms as only a Revolution can. We will continue creating the conscience and habits of these new forms. And we will not stop, our people will not stop until they have attained their ultimate goals.</p>
<p>This step means a great deal. It represents one of the most vitally significant steps in the history of our country. It is a historic moment when the unifying forces were superior to the forces that diffuse and divide. It represents the historic moment when a whole revolutionary nation united strongly, when the sense of duty prevailed over everything else, when the collective spirit triumphed over all individualisms, when the interests of the motherland prevailed fully and definitively over all individual or group interest. It means having attained the highest degree of union and organization, with the most modern, most scientific, and most Revolutionary and human of political concepts.</p>
<p>And we are the first country of this continent, in addition to being, in the view of the imperialist U.S. Government, the only independent country. For if the House of Representatives proclaims a right to intervene in any country to avert the danger of a communist Revolution. Well, here there is a communist Revolution in power. (APPLAUSE) So we are considered the only independent country. To be sure, when the monopolies’ representatives gave that slap in the face to all the republics in America by issuing the declaration of non-independence, a few– or rather, many–persons reddened with shame. Many were scandalized when the United States declared its right to intervene unilaterally.</p>
<p>They should be reminded of the agreements they entered into against Cuba; they should be reminded of their complicity in the evil deeds concocted against our country by imperialism. At that time we were the only ones; we stood firm, ready to die, and we said we were defending not just Cuba’s rights, but the independence of the other peoples of Latin America. (APPLAUSE) They who sow the wind reap the whirlwind, and they who sowed interventionism against Cuba, collective breaks with Cuba, blockades of Cuba, are reaping the whirlwind of interventionism and threats directed at them.</p>
<p>They are astonished, they are panic-stricken, and the parliaments meet, and the bourgeois parties cry to the heavens. There they have the results of complicity with the imperialists. There they see what imperialism is. And so, with every passing day, the people will see more clearly who is right, who during these historic years defended true independence, true freedom, true sovereignty, defended it with her blood, and defended it against imperialism and all its accomplices. The imperialists themselves are teaching the peoples. The scarecrow of communism was constantly brandished, and in the name of the battle against that scarecrow the Yankee imperialists have declared their right to land in any country of this continent, except Cuba. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The progress we have made, but above all the progress we will make in the years to come, utilizing all our country’s potential, utilizing the tremendous forces we have organized and created, utilizing them in organized, efficient fashion–that is our party’s task.</p>
<p>We will forge ahead tremendously. We will move at dazzling speed toward the future with a party that must lead, that must see to every front, because our party must attend to all fronts, all problems must be studied; and for this purpose we have created the committees, and new ones will be created. And there will not be a single problem that fails to get thorough study and analysis by the party, so that each analysis may provide guidance, the proper guidance, the best guidance.</p>
<p>I was saying we will make our way toward communism, and we will attain communism. We are as sure of that as of having come this far.</p>
<p>And amid the difficulties of every kind that accompany this moment in the history of the world, faced with an ever-mightier enemy, faced with the sad fact of the split in world revolutionary ranks, our policy will be one of the closer unity. Our policy will be that of a small but free and independent nation.</p>
<p>Our party will educate the masses; our party will educate its militants. Let it be well understood; our party–no other party, but our party, and its Central Committee. (APPLAUSE) And the prerogative of educating and guiding the revolutionary masses in an unwavering prerogative of our party. We will be very zealous guardians of that right.</p>
<p>In ideological matters it will be the party which will say what must be said. And if we do not accede, do not want, and just do not feel like letting the differences that divide the socialist block divide us, no one will be able to impose such a thing upon us. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And all material of a political nature, unless is has to do with enemies, will only be able to reach the people through our party at the time and on the occasion that our party decides. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We know quite well where the enemy is, who the only and true enemy is. We know this quite well. We more than know it. We have had to struggle against the enemy under difficult conditions. In order to confront that enemy, we have needed the solidarity and aid of many. In order to defeat the aggressive policy of that enemy, to continue to oppose it, we need resources and weapons because here, thousands of miles away from any other socialist country, thousands of miles away from any other socialist country, thousands of miles away without being able to depend on anything other than our own forces and our own weapons in the decisive moments, and since we were aware of the risks we are running today and of the risks we will continue to run, we must be armed to the teeth (APPLAUSE) and fully prepared.</p>
<p>We can disagree with any party on any issue. It is impossible to hope that in such a heterogeneous world, under such diverse circumstance –a world made of countries in the most dissimilar situations and having the most unequal levels of material, technical, and cultural development– that we could conceive Marxism as something similar to a church, a religious doctrine with its Rome, its Pope, and its Ecumenical Council.</p>
<p>This is a revolutionary and dialectic doctrine, not a philosophical doctrine. It is a guide for revolutionary action, not a dogma. Trying to frame Marxism as a type of catechism in anti-Marxist.</p>
<p>The diversity of situations will inevitably produce an infinite number of interpretations. Those who make the correct interpretations will be able to call themselves Revolutionaries. Those who make the right interpretations and apply them in a responsible manner will triumph. Those who make mistakes or do not abide by revolutionary thinking will fail. They will be defeated and even replaced, because Marxism is not copyrighted private property. It is a doctrine of revolutionaries written by a revolutionary, developed by other revolutionaries, for revolutionaries.</p>
<p>We will know how to distinguish ourselves by our self-confidence, by our confidence in our ability to continue and advance our evolutionary path. We may disagree with any party on one matter, on one issue, or on several issues. Disagreements, when honest, are bound to be temporary. What we will never do is to insult with one hand and ask with another. And we will know how to maintain any disagreement within the confines of decency with any party, and we will know how to be friends to those who know how to be friends. We will know to respect those who respect us.</p>
<p>These norms will always determine our most free conduct, and we will never ask anyone’s permission to do anything. We will never ask anyone for permission to go anywhere. We will never ask permission from anyone to become the friend of any party or country.</p>
<p>We know the transitory nature of problems, and problems pass. Peoples live on, peoples remain; men pass, peoples remain; leadership passes, Revolutions persist. We see something more than temporary relations in the relations between parties and revolutionary people, we see durable relations and permanent relations. Nothing will ever come from us that tends to create differences between men, let along countries.</p>
<p>We will be guided by that elementary principle because we know that it is the right thing to do, that it is a just principle, and nothing will prevent us from devoting all our energy to the fight against the enemy of humanity, imperialism, Because we will never say that those who have helped us defeat the imperialists are accomplices of the imperialists. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We aspire not only to a communist society but to a communist world in which all nations will have equal rights. We aspire to a communist world in which no nation will have the right to veto. And we aspire that the communist world of tomorrow will never display the same picture of a bourgeois world torn by internal squabbles. We aspire to a free society of free nations in which all the countries, large and small, will have equal rights.</p>
<p>We will defend our points of view as we have defended them up to now, as well as our positions and our path and we will stand firm to be measured by our actions and our deeds. And nothing can turn us away from that path.</p>
<p>It is not an easy thing to do in the midst of today’s problems complexities in the world today. It is difficult to maintain that inflexible opinion, maintain this inflexible independence, but we will maintain it. This Revolution was not imported from anywhere. It is a genuine product of this country. Nobody told us how we must do it, and we have carried it out. (APPLAUSE) And nobody will have to tell us how we must continue to carry it out, and we will continue to carry it out. We have learned to write history and we will continue to write it. Let no one doubt it.</p>
<p>We live in a complex and dangerous world. The risks of this world we will face with dignity and serenity. Our fate will be the fate of the other countries and our fate will be the fate of the world.</p>
<p>I ask all the comrades here present, all the representatives of our party, all the secretaries of the cells of this type of extensive congress, I ask those who are here to represent the will of the party, the party which represents the workers, I ask the ratification of the agreements of the national leadership. (APPLAUSE) I ask you for the full and unanimous ratification of the Central Committee of our party. (APPLAUSE) I ask for your full support for the line followed by the revolutionary leadership up to here. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Long live the Cuban Communist Party! (Shouts of “Long live”)</p>
<p>Long live the Central Committee! (Shouts of “Long live”)</p>
<p>Long live our socialist, communist Revolution! (Shouts of “Long live”)</p>
<p>Motherland or death!</p>
<p>We will be victorious!</p>
<p>Standing ovation<br>
Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
Speech delivered by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz during the presentation of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, at the “Chaplin” theater October 3, 1965.
Delivered: October 3, 1965
Source: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from a short hand version, Stenographic Versions – Council of State.
Markup: David Walters, 2019
Online Version & translation: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
Distinguished guests;
Comrades of the Central Committee.
Comrades of the provincial, regional and sectional committees.
Comrade Secretaries of the cells of our party.
I am compelled to begin with a topic which has not direct relation with the purpose of this meeting but since it is a topical question and one of a political interest, I cannot refrain from referring to it.
It is the outcome of the proposal made on September 28, with regard to events that had been taking place for the last three years, and which has been treacherously manipulated by the enemy to wage a campaign against our Revolution. It is the case of people who, upon the suspension of flights between Cuba and Miami, were left with one foot here and the other one there.
In order to unmask Yankee imperialism once and for all in this regard, we made the statement on September 28, which you know about. And when they later said that the statement was somewhat vague and ambiguous, and that it had not been delivered through diplomatic channels, we made a second and very clear and very concrete statement so we could settle the dispute once and for all.
Today, the cables carry the news regarding the final reply by the United States Government in this respect.
I am going to read the news brought by these cables.
In short, it reads:
“President Johnson”–this is an AP cable–“President Johnson announced today that he will strive for a diplomatic understanding with Cuba so Cubans who want to leave their country can take asylum in the United States.”
This thing about “diplomatic understandings” means an agreement through diplomatic channels with regard to this problem.
It reads: “I have requested the State Department to seek through the Swiss Embassy, entrusted with U.S. affairs, the consent of the Government of Cuba in a request to the president of the International Red Cross.” It also says: “I have given instructions to the Departments of State, Justice, Health, Education, and Welfare, to make the necessary arrangements to enable those who seek freedom in Cuba to enter the United States in an orderly manner.”
In another cable with more news, it adds: Mr. Johnson also stated:
“`Once more this has revealed the mark of defeat of a regime. When many of its citizens freely elect to leave the nation where they were born to go to a home of hope, the future harbors little hope for any government when the present does not permit hopes for its people.'” He said that “the refugees would be welcome with the thought that someday they can return to their country to find it rid of terror and free from fear.”
In other words, they apparently did not have any other alternative, nor any other way out. It means, in the first place, that we have won a battle for freedom. (APPLAUSE)
Mr. Johnson, would not be Johnson, nor would he be President of the United States, nor would he be a Yankee, if he did not use this proverbial pharisaic discourse to accompany this statement with all this condiment regarding the hopes of those who will leave for the United States in search of freedom and which can offer nothing to their future when at the present time they only offer the prospect for the citizens of a country of having to abandon their nation of origin. He also talks about the Red Cross. Therefore, we consider it necessary to reply to Mr. Johnson on these matters which have nothing to do with the matter itself which we proposed. And we should make some pertinent remarks on all this.
First of all, the Yankee news agencies and many of that country’s officials as well as some news agencies which are not Yankee, but which apparently through hearing these arguments over and over, such as Reuters and France Press, have echoed the statement that this meant a change in the policy with regard to those who wanted to leave the nation–and this is absolutely false. Since its outset of the Revolution, there has been only one policy in regard to this. From the beginning of the Revolution, until the Missile crisis, all who wished to leave this country and who had received permission from the United States were leaving without being stopped.
And when as a result of the Missile crisis they stopped the flights to Cuba there was not a change in the policy of the Revolutionary Government, because through the other routes, that is the route of Spain and the route of Mexico, nearly 300 persons continued to leave monthly, in other words, more than 3,000 persons per year. There has not been the slightest change in the policy about those who wish to leave the country. What we have done is to unmask the bad faith and the hypocrisy of Yankee imperialism, the only responsible for the routes to leave normally being closed in order to promote a certain type of clandestine and risky departures with the only purpose of making propaganda.
Mr. Johnson probably ignores that during the in the United States war of independence to break free from English colonial rule, thousands upon thousands of North Americans left their country after the independence and went to Canada.
In all Revolutions whether it be the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution or the Cuban Revolution, this occurrence of departure or migration of the privileged classes is a historical fact. If the departure from a country, if the departure of men and women who are born in a country to another country could be an indication of the characteristics of a social regime, the best example is the case would be Puerto Rico, an island which the Yankee imperialism took over and which it has maintained under an exploiting, colonial regime and therefore the reason for which more than one million of the men and women born in that country have had to migrate to the United States. And Mr. Johnson forgot about Puerto Rico and the more than one million Puerto Ricans who live in New York under the hardest living conditions in the poorest neighborhoods and doing the most humiliating jobs.
Naturally, this talk about the Red Cross is a trick of Mr. Johnson in order to dramatize the matter. Now, who really has said that to process passports and grant permission for some planes to land in Miami, the Red Cross must intervene? What does the Red Cross have to do with this? This does not have anything to do with an earthquake, a catastrophe or a war, but simple proceedings to authorize the arrival to the United States, authorizing the landing of the planes or the arrival of the ships.
We do not need the Red Cross at all for this. The Red Cross in any case, could intervene to propose to the United States the lift of the criminal measure through which the sale of medications to Cuba is banned. For that the International Red Cross would be really useful. (APPLAUSE)
In any case, the Red Cross could do a better job in South Vietnam (APPLAUSE) where the Yankee soldiers murder thousands, murder and torture the citizens of that nation by the thousands, or in North Vietnam where the criminal Yankee bombings do not distinguish one thing from another. They bomb cities just like they bomb villages, schools, and hospitals.
The Red Cross could have to do something in Santo Domingo where the invading soldiers commit all kinds of outrages against the people while occupy the students’ schools. (APPLAUSE)
The Red Cross could intervene in the United States to prevent the massacres of Negro citizens like the one that took place recently in Los Angeles, California. (APPLAUSE)
However, for this matter, Mr. Johnson, the Red Cross need not be present. It is enough for us to hold discussions with the representatives of the Swiss Embassy, who are the representatives for the U.S. interests in Cuba, and we can perfectly make agreements with them on any proceeding. No one else need be present; we accept the sincerity and responsibility of the Swiss officials. Now, if the U.S. Government does not have confidence or does not believe in the ability of the Swiss Embassy, that is the problem of the U.S. Government. (APPLAUSE)
Now, speaking very seriously, on these questions of freedom, I would like to know if Mr. Johnson would like to answer a couple of questions. Since we have permitted all those who wish to leave Cuba since the beginning of the Revolution to do so, inasmuch as we have never denied permission to those who have wanted to leave to visit their relatives and return, also if there are Cubans who have relatives in the United States and wish to be reunited with them, there are also Cubans who have relatives in the United States and they do not wish to abandon their country. (APPLAUSE) And inasmuch as Mr. Johnson stood by the Statue of Liberty and took the trouble to sprinkle his statements with this nonsense about liberty, I ask him if the United States will allow Cubans in the United States to visit their relatives in Cuba and then return to the United States. (APPLAUSE) If the United States is willing to permit Cubans who do not wish to live in the United States to visit their relatives in the United States and return to Cuba, and finally if the United States is disposed to allow U.S. citizens to visit Cuba. (APPLAUSE)
Because that same government which says that a country travels the wrong path if its citizens leave that nation, we can tell them that a nation could travel a worse path, despite the fact that it is a nation which publicizes a great deal and thinks itself as a nation of liberties. Despite the fact that it has been able to attain the standard of economic development they have reached, they are afraid to grant permission for U.S. citizens to visit this country, which is so slandered about fear and terror–as they call it. (APPLAUSE)
Therefore, here is the second question to the U.S. Government: We call upon you also to permit those Cubans who live in the United States to come to Cuba to visit their relatives who do not wish to go live in the United States, and to permit those relative who live in Cuba and do not want to leave Cuba, to go to the United States and return. Finally, we ask that they permit the students or any U.S. citizens to come to visit Cuba in the same manner that we permit any Cuban citizen to leave or return (APPLAUSE); that the U.S. Government permit the Negro representatives of the U.S. Negro organizations to visit Cuba, or the organizations of the defenders of civil rights to see how, with the disappearance of the exploitation of man, to see how racial discrimination had ended for good in our nation. (APPLAUSE)
And let us see if Mr. Johnson, before the world and the U.S. people has an answer to this call which is not gibberish. We compel him to respond.
We maintain our position, we maintain our declaration and we wait for the relevant meeting on this matter to be requested by the Swiss representatives from the Swiss Embassy when they receive the pertinent instructions from the U.S. Government. But we hope to see whether Mr. Johnson has a way of reply to this call.
And since they talk so much, since they brag so much about freedom, enough of this talk about false freedoms; enough of this talk about abstract freedoms. The facts have shown that it is here where we are creating a world of freedom, not there. (APPLAUSE) It is such a free world that we do not want to force anyone to live in this society against his will, because our socialist society, our communist society, must be eminently a truly free association of citizens. (APPLAUSE)
And although it is true that certain citizens educated in those ideas of the past and in that way of life of the past prefer to go to the United States, it is also true that this country has become the sanctuary of the Revolutionaries of this continent. (APPLAUSE) It is also true that we consider worthy of the hospitality of this people and this land, not only those born here but also all men and women who share our own tongue and of our own culture–and even when they do m not share our own tongue, of similar historical and ethnic origins, or similar history of exploitation. And they have a right to come to this country and, all those who have wanted to, have made use of this right–those pursued by bloody and imperialist oligarchies. Many man and women who were born in other sister nations of this continent have come to this country to live permanently or temporarily. Many technicians and many professional from various parts of America have come to live and work in this country for many years.
This is not just a country of Cubans–this is a country of revolutionaries. (APPLAUSE) The Revolutionaries of the continent have a right to consider themselves our brothers, and they are worthy of this right. This includes North American Revolutionaries (APPLAUSE), because some leaders, like Robert Williams, fiercely persecuted there, found asylum in this land. Thus, just as he, so can those being persecuted by reactionaries and exploiters find asylum here. It does not matter if they speak English and are born in the United States. This is the motherland of the revolutionaries of this continent, just as the United States is the inevitable asylum of all the henchman, of all the embezzlers (APPLAUSE), of all the exploiters (APPLAUSE), of all the reactionaries of this continent. Because there is not a thief, there is not an exploiter, there is not a reactionary, and there is not a criminal, for whom the United States does not keep its gates open.
And with this, we have replied to Mr. Johnson’s words spoken under his discolored Statue of Liberty), which no one knows what it represents, that hodgepodge of stone and hypocrisy, unless it is what Yankee imperialism means to the world today.
Now we are going to turn to our business, to matters of our party. Because I think that the news reports coming from here, those regarding our social successes, our economic successes, and our political successes, are very bad news for the Yankee imperialists.
Naturally, anything which strengthens and advances the Revolution, anything that allows us to make the best progress, is of very high concern to them. Because of this, they will return–yes, some day they will long to come back, repentant, a large portion of the ones that left. But when Johnson talks about returning here as liberators we could tell him that this is an “autumn night’s dream.” (laughs)
All the nation has received with joy and enthusiasm the news of the constitution of our Central Committee. The names of the comrades which make up this committee as well as their history are well known. If all of them are not known by all our people, all are known by a large and important part of the nation. We have committed ourselves to choosing those who in our judgment represent in the most complete manner the history of our Revolution. Those who in addition to the struggle for the Revolution, as well as the struggle for the consolidation, defense, and development of the Revolution have worked and have fought with determination and tirelessly.
There is no heroic episode in the history of our country during the last years where they have not been present. There is no sacrifice, there is no fight, there is no prowess, civilian or military, heroic or creative, in which they are not represented. There is no social revolutionary sector which is not represented. I do not speak about organizations.
There are men who for a long time were bearers of the socialist ideas, just like founder of the first communist party, Comrade Fabio Grobart. (APPLAUSE) Cases like that of Comrade Helena Gil, (APPLAUSE) whose extraordinary work leading the schools, were more than 40,000 peasant women from the mountain have studied, and where thousands of teachers have been trained, where today more than 50,000 youths and children study, and which we consider a truly exemplary job. Or the case of comrade Arteaga (APPLAUSE), who besides his history of struggle, has worked for seven years in the agriculture sector and has developed successful plans, in some cases successful plans like the Escambray agricultural plan. (APPLAUSE) Cases of comrades like Lieutenant Tarrao, whom many have not heard of, but who is a comrade the Ministry of Interior placed at the head of the rehabilitation plans at the Isle of Pines (APPLAUSE) where he has developed with an exemplary and unselfish attitude, a brilliant job about which a lot will be said and written someday.
I have mentioned cases of comrades, some well-known and other less known. The list of the comrades from the Revolutionary Armed Forces would be endless. (APPLAUSE) For their history before and after the triumph, as an example of model revolutionaries, of tireless workers, as an example of excellent students, in the development of culture, in improving the standards in education and general culture and of the political preparedness, comrades of extraordinary modesty, in whose hands the defense of the motherland has fundamentally been placed during the last seven years of dangers and of threats.
It is not necessary to talk about the best known comrades. This does not mean that the only valuable people of the nation are here, far from that. Our nation has many outstanding people, and above all, a promotion of new comrades in full progress, which one day without a doubt will come to hold that responsibility and that honor.
It we ask ourselves who is missing, without a doubt we would say that there are some comrades missing. It would be impossible to constitute a Central Committee with 100 revolutionary comrades without many cadres who are not included. However, what matters is not those who are missing–they will come later. What matters is those who are here and what they represent. We know that the party and the people have welcomed with satisfaction the Central Committee which has been constituted. (APPLAUSE)
This committee, meeting yesterday, adopted several agreements.
Firstly, it ratified the measures adopted by the former national leadership, ratified the politburo, the secretariat, and the working commissions, as well as the comrade elected to the office of organization secretary. (APPLAUSE) Moreover, it adapted to important agreements, which had also been suggested by the former national leadership.
One of them relates to our official newspaper: instead of two newspapers or a political nature, as were being published, we will concentrate the human resources, concentrate machinery and paper, in order to publish a new, single morning newspaper of a political nature, in addition to the newspaper EL MUNDO, which is not precisely a political orientation newspaper; to combine all these resources and to make a new daily newspaper which will bear the name of GRANMA, (APPLAUSE) the symbol of our Revolutionary concept and of our path.
The other agreement is even more important, dealing with the name of our party. First we were the ORI (Spanish language acronym for Integrated Revolutionary Organizations), during the first stages in the unification of the Revolutionary forces, with its positive and negative aspects. Then we were the United Party of the Socialist Revolution, which represented extraordinary progress, an extraordinary advance in the creation of our political apparatus, an effort of three years in which, from the unlimited pool militants from our people, countless new party members coming from within the ranks of our workers, enabling us to become today what we represent in numbers, but, above all, what we represent in terms of quality. The name United Party of the Socialist Revolution says much, but is does not say it all. The name still gives the idea of something that had to be united, that still recalls the origins of each one. Since we fell that we have already reached a stage in which all types of labels and things that distinguish some Revolutionaries from others must disappear once and for all and forever and that we have already reached the fortunate point in the history of our Revolution in which we can say that there is only one kind of Revolutionary, and since it is necessary that the name of or party say, not what we were yesterday, but what we are today and what we will be tomorrow, what, in your opinion, is the name our party should have? (Crows makes tumultuous indistinct response of Communist)
What is it, what is, comrades? what is it a comrade from here, ? The comrades from there, the comrades over there, the comrades over there? The Cuban Communist Party! (APPLAUSE)
Well, that is the name which, by interpreting the development of our Party, the revolutionary conscience of its members, and the objectives of our Revolution, our first Central Committee adopted yesterday.
And that is quite proper, as we explained to the comrades of the committee yesterday; the word “communist” has been much slued and much denigrated throughout centuries. There have been communists throughout history, men of communist ideas, men who conceived a way of living different from the society in which they were born. Those who thought in a communist manner in other times were considered, for example, utopian communists who 500 years ago because in their idealistic approach aspired for a type of society which was not possible at that time given the very poor stage of development of productive forces. Of course man could not return to the communist from which primitive man originated, to live in a primitive form of communism, unless there was such a degree of development of his productive forces and such a method for the utilization of those forces, a social mode of using those forces, so that material goods and services could be produced in more than sufficient quantities to satisfy the needs of man.
All the exploiters, all the privileged always hated the word “communist” as if it were a crime. They anathematized the word “communist” and that is why when Marx and Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto which gave origin to a new Revolutionary theory, to a scientific interpretation of human society, human history, they said “a phantom is sweeping Europe, and that is the phantom of communism,” because privileged classes viewed those ideas as a phantom, with true fear. Moreover the privileged classes in any era of history always viewed new ideas with extraordinary fear.
Roman society was also terrorized in its era by the Christian ideas when these ideas rose in the world. And they were at one time the ideas of the poor and the slaves of those times. It was as a result of their hatred against these new ideas the Roman society casted countless numbers of human beings into the flames, and into the circus. In like fashion, during the Middle Ages, in the era of feudalism, new ideas were persecuted and their originators slandered and treated in the worst possible manner. The new ideas that came to exist with the emergence of bourgeoisie during feudalism, whether those ideas adopted political, philosophical, or religious positions, they were cruelly anathematized and persecuted. The reactionary classes have used all means to anathematize and slander new ideas.
Thus all the power and all the means at their disposal are not enough for their purposes of slandering communist ideas, as if the desire for a society where man will not be an exploiter of man but a true brother of man, as if the dream of a society in which all human beings are equal in fact and in law, not just a simple constitutional clause such as those contained in the bourgeois constitutions where they say that all men are born free and equal, as if that could be said equally of a child born in a slum, in a poor cradle, and of a child born in a golden cradle, as if it could ever be said in a society of exploiters and exploited, or rich and poor, that all men are born free and equal, as if all those men were called upon in life to have the same opportunity.
The perennial dream of men, a dream possible today, of a society-without exploiters or exploited, has drawn the hate and the acrimony of all the exploiters.
The imperialists, as if they were offending us, as if it were an offense, speak of the communist Government of Cuba just as the work “Mambi”(as the Cuban independence fighters were called) was used against our liberators as an offense, in like fashion they attempt to use the work “communist” as an offense. And the work “communist” is not an offense for us but an honor. (APPLAUSE)
It is the word which symbolizes the aspiration of a large party of humanity and hundreds and hundreds of millions of human beings are concretely working for it today, within 100-years, there will be no greater honor nor will there by anything more natural and logical than to be called “communists.” (APPLAUSE)
We are headed toward a communist society and if the imperialists were asking for it, well now they got it. (APPLAUSE) From now on, gentlemen of the UP and AP, when you call us “communists” you know you are calling us the most honorable thing you can call us. (APPLAUSE)
There is an absence in our Central Committee of one who possess all the merits and all the virtues in the highest degree to belong to it and who, however, is not among the members of the Central Committee.
Around this the enemy had weave a thousand conjectures. The enemy has tried to confuse and to instill discord and doubt. And patiently, because it was necessary to wait, we have waited.
That is the difference between the Revolutionary and the counterrevolutionary, between the Revolutionary and the imperialist. We Revolutionaries know how to wait. We know how to be patient. We never despair and the reactionaries, the counterrevolutionaries, the imperialists continue in perennial desperation. They live in perennial anguish, in a perennial lying of the most ridiculous, of the most childish manner.
When we read some of the things said by those officials, some of those Yankee Senators, one wanders: “How is it possible that this gentlemen is not in a stable instead of being a member of what is called “Congress.” (APPLAUSE) Some of them speak real nonsense. Any they have an incredible appetite for lying. They cannot live without lying. They live in anguish.
If the Revolutionary government states something, which is what it has always been doing, such as that to which I referred at the beginning, they see truculent things, terrible things, and a plan behind all that.
How ludicrous. How can they live in such fear? One asks oneself: “Do they believe that? “Do they believe that other thing?: “Could they believe all they say?” “Or is it that they have a need to believe all they say? Or is it that they cannot live without believing all they say or is it that they say all that they do not believe?”
It is difficult to understand. It would be a question for doctors and psychologists. What do they have in this minds? What anguish is that? They see a maneuver in everything, a truculent, dark, terrible plan. It seems they do not know that there is not better tactic, nor a better strategy than to fight with clean weapons, than to fight with the truth, because those are the only weapons which inspire trust. These are the only weapons which inspire faith. These are the only weapons which inspire safety, moral dignity. And it has been with those weapons that we Revolutionaries have been vanquishing and crushing our enemies.
You will never here a lie from the mouth of a Revolutionary. There are weapons which do not benefit any revolutionary, and no serious Revolutionary needs to resort to lies–ever. His weapon is reason, the truth, and the ability to have an idea, a purpose, and a position.
In short, the moral spectacle of our adversaries in truly lamentable. And thus, the diviners, the interpreters, the specialists on Cuban affairs, and the electronic brains have been working incessantly to solve this mystery, whether Ernesto Guevara has been purges, (APPLAUSE) whether Ernesto Guevara was ill, whether Ernesto Guevara had had differences, and other questions of the same ilk.
Naturally, the people have confidence. The people have faith, but enemies will say these things, especially abroad, to slander him. Behold, the communist regime, dark, terrible things, men disappear, they do not leave a trace; they do not leave prints; there is no explanation; and we told the people at this time, when the people began to notice this absence, that in due time we would talk. We would have some reasons to wait,
We are living surrounded by imperialist forces. The world is not operating in normal conditions. As long as the criminal bombs of Yankee imperialists are falling on the people of Vietnam, we cannot say that we are living under normal circumstances. When more than 100,000 Yankee soldiers land there to try to smash the liberation movement, when the soldiers of imperialism land in a republic which has equality of rights, just as legally, as do all the rest of the republics of the world, as is the case in Santo Domingo, when imperialism intervenes to trample its sovereignty, (APPLAUSE) the world if not living under normal conditions. When around our country, the imperialists are training mercenaries and organizing vandalistic attacks, in the most unpunished manner, as in the case of Sierra Aránzazu, when the imperialists threatens to intervene in any country of Latin America or the world, we are not living under normal circumstances.
And when we were fighting in clandestine conditions against the Batista tyranny, we Revolutionaries did not live in normal conditions. We had to adjust to the struggle. In the same way, although the Revolutionary power exists in our country, in regard to the realities of the world, we do not live in normal conditions, and we shall have to adjust to this situation.
And to explain this, we are going to read a letter here, it is handwritten, here copied by typewriter, from Comrade Ernesto Guevara, (APPLAUSE) which is self-explanatory. I was trying to decide whether to tell the story of our friendship and our comradeship, how it began and under what conditions it began and how it developed, but it is not necessary. I am going to limit myself to reading the letter.
It says:
Havana–The date was not written down because this letter was to be read at the moment we felt it most convenient, but keeping to strict reality, it was delivered on April 1st this year, exactly six months and two days ago, and it reads:
HAVANA
Year of Agriculture
Fidel:
I remember many things in this hour—how I met you in the house of Maria Antonia, and how you proposed that I come along with you, and all the tensions involved in the preparations.
One day they came by and asked who should be notified in case of death, and the real possibility of it struck us all. Later we learned that it was true, that in a Revolution one triumphs or dies (if it be a true one). Many comrades fell along the road to victory.
Today everything has a less dramatic tone, for we are more mature, but the event is repeats itself. I feel that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that bound me to the Cuban Revolution on its territory, and I say farewell to you, my comrades and your people who are now my people.
I formally renounce my posts in the leadership of the Party, my post as Minister, my rank as Major, my status as a Cuban citizen. Nothing legal binds me to Cuba, only ties of another kind that cannot be broken, as can official appointments. Looking back over my past life, I believe that I have worked with sufficient faithfulness and dedication in order to consolidate the revolutionary triumph. My only deficiency of any importance is not to have trusted you more from those first moments in the Sierra Maestra and in not having understood soon enough your qualities of leader and revolutionary.
I have lived through magnificent days and at your side I felt the pride of belonging to our people in the luminous and sad days of the Caribbean Crisis. Rarely has any statesman shone more brilliantly than you did in those days. I feel pride, too, in having followed you without hesitation, identifying myself with your way of thinking and seeing and of judging dangers and motives.
Other regions of the world claim the support of my modest efforts. I can do what is forbidden to you because of your responsibility to Cuba, and the time has come for us to separate.
Let it be known that I do it with a mixture of joy and sorrow: I am leaving here the purest of my hopes as a builder and the most loved among my beloved creatures, and I leave a people who accepted me as a son; this rends a part of my spirit. On new battlefields I will carry with me the faith that you inculcated in me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of having fulfilled the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever it may be; this comforts and heals any wound to a great extent.
I say once more that I free Cuba of any responsibility save that which stems from its example: that if the final hour comes upon me under other skies, my last thought will be for this people and especially for you, that I am thankful to you for your teachings and your example, and that I will try to be faithful up to the final consequences of my acts; that I have at all times been identified with the foreign policy of our Revolution, and I continue to be so; that wherever I may end up I will feel the responsibility of being a Cuban revolutionary, and I will act as one; that I leave nothing material to my children and my wife, and this does not grieve me: I am glad that it be so; that I ask nothing for them, since the State will give them sufficient to live and will educate them.
I would have many things to say to you and to our people, but I feel that they are unnecessary; words cannot express what I would want them to, and it isn’t worthwhile wasting more sheets of paper with my scribbling.
To victory forever.
Homeland or Death!
I embrace you with all my revolutionary fervor!
Che”
Those who talk about the revolutionaries, those who consider revolutionaries as cold men, men without feelings, or men without a heart, will have in this letter the example of all the sentiment, of all the feeling, of all the purity a revolutionary heart can hold,
And we could answer, all of us: Comrade Guevara, it is not responsibility wheat we are concerned about. We have a responsibility to the Revolution and we are responsible for assisting the revolutionary movement to the best of our strength (APPLAUSE) and we assume the responsibility and the consequences and the risks. For almost seven years it has been that way and we know that as long as imperialism exists and while there are exploited and colonized peoples, we shall continue running these risks, and we shall continue serenely assuming these responsibilities.
And we had the duty to conform; we had the duty to respect this sentiment of this comrade, that freedom and that right, and this is indeed freedom, not that of those who are going to take on chains but that of those who are going to take up a rifle against the chains of slavery. (APPLAUSE)
And that is another of the freedom, Mr. Johnson, which our Revolution proclaims. And if those who want to leave to go live with the imperialists are at times recruited by the imperialists to fight in Vietnam and the Congo, let it be known also that all the citizens of this country, when they ask for permission, not to go fight alongside the imperialists, but to fight alongside the Revolutionaries will not be denied permission by this Revolution. (APPLAUSE)
This country is free, Mr. Johnson; really free for everybody!
And this was not the only letter. Along with this letter, and for the occasion when this letter should be used, various other letters were left with us, of greetings to various comrades, and in addition, as it says here, “to my children, to my parents, and other comrades,” a letter written by him for his children, and for his parents. We will pass these letters on to the comrades and family; and we ask them to donate than to the Revolution, for we consider them to be documents worthy of a place in history.
And we feel that this explains everything. As for the rest, let the enemies worry. We have enough tasks, enough things to do, in our country and in connection with the world; enough duties to fulfill and we will fulfill them.
We will carry on our path, we will develop our ideas, we will develop our methods, and we will develop our system. We will utilize all experiences that may prove useful to us, and we will develop fresh experiences.
A completely new era is arising in the history of our country, a different form of society, a different system of government, the government of a party, the party of the workers, made up of the best workers, formed with the full participation of the masses, so it can justly and rightly be said that it is the vanguard of the workers and represent the workers, in our workers’ Revolutionary democracy. And it will be a thousand time more democratic than bourgeois democracy, for we will progress toward administrative and political forms that will imply the masses’ constant involvement in solving the problems of society through the suitable organizations, through the party, at all levels. And we will go on developing these new forms as only a Revolution can. We will continue creating the conscience and habits of these new forms. And we will not stop, our people will not stop until they have attained their ultimate goals.
This step means a great deal. It represents one of the most vitally significant steps in the history of our country. It is a historic moment when the unifying forces were superior to the forces that diffuse and divide. It represents the historic moment when a whole revolutionary nation united strongly, when the sense of duty prevailed over everything else, when the collective spirit triumphed over all individualisms, when the interests of the motherland prevailed fully and definitively over all individual or group interest. It means having attained the highest degree of union and organization, with the most modern, most scientific, and most Revolutionary and human of political concepts.
And we are the first country of this continent, in addition to being, in the view of the imperialist U.S. Government, the only independent country. For if the House of Representatives proclaims a right to intervene in any country to avert the danger of a communist Revolution. Well, here there is a communist Revolution in power. (APPLAUSE) So we are considered the only independent country. To be sure, when the monopolies’ representatives gave that slap in the face to all the republics in America by issuing the declaration of non-independence, a few– or rather, many–persons reddened with shame. Many were scandalized when the United States declared its right to intervene unilaterally.
They should be reminded of the agreements they entered into against Cuba; they should be reminded of their complicity in the evil deeds concocted against our country by imperialism. At that time we were the only ones; we stood firm, ready to die, and we said we were defending not just Cuba’s rights, but the independence of the other peoples of Latin America. (APPLAUSE) They who sow the wind reap the whirlwind, and they who sowed interventionism against Cuba, collective breaks with Cuba, blockades of Cuba, are reaping the whirlwind of interventionism and threats directed at them.
They are astonished, they are panic-stricken, and the parliaments meet, and the bourgeois parties cry to the heavens. There they have the results of complicity with the imperialists. There they see what imperialism is. And so, with every passing day, the people will see more clearly who is right, who during these historic years defended true independence, true freedom, true sovereignty, defended it with her blood, and defended it against imperialism and all its accomplices. The imperialists themselves are teaching the peoples. The scarecrow of communism was constantly brandished, and in the name of the battle against that scarecrow the Yankee imperialists have declared their right to land in any country of this continent, except Cuba. (APPLAUSE)
The progress we have made, but above all the progress we will make in the years to come, utilizing all our country’s potential, utilizing the tremendous forces we have organized and created, utilizing them in organized, efficient fashion–that is our party’s task.
We will forge ahead tremendously. We will move at dazzling speed toward the future with a party that must lead, that must see to every front, because our party must attend to all fronts, all problems must be studied; and for this purpose we have created the committees, and new ones will be created. And there will not be a single problem that fails to get thorough study and analysis by the party, so that each analysis may provide guidance, the proper guidance, the best guidance.
I was saying we will make our way toward communism, and we will attain communism. We are as sure of that as of having come this far.
And amid the difficulties of every kind that accompany this moment in the history of the world, faced with an ever-mightier enemy, faced with the sad fact of the split in world revolutionary ranks, our policy will be one of the closer unity. Our policy will be that of a small but free and independent nation.
Our party will educate the masses; our party will educate its militants. Let it be well understood; our party–no other party, but our party, and its Central Committee. (APPLAUSE) And the prerogative of educating and guiding the revolutionary masses in an unwavering prerogative of our party. We will be very zealous guardians of that right.
In ideological matters it will be the party which will say what must be said. And if we do not accede, do not want, and just do not feel like letting the differences that divide the socialist block divide us, no one will be able to impose such a thing upon us. (APPLAUSE)
And all material of a political nature, unless is has to do with enemies, will only be able to reach the people through our party at the time and on the occasion that our party decides. (APPLAUSE)
We know quite well where the enemy is, who the only and true enemy is. We know this quite well. We more than know it. We have had to struggle against the enemy under difficult conditions. In order to confront that enemy, we have needed the solidarity and aid of many. In order to defeat the aggressive policy of that enemy, to continue to oppose it, we need resources and weapons because here, thousands of miles away from any other socialist country, thousands of miles away from any other socialist country, thousands of miles away without being able to depend on anything other than our own forces and our own weapons in the decisive moments, and since we were aware of the risks we are running today and of the risks we will continue to run, we must be armed to the teeth (APPLAUSE) and fully prepared.
We can disagree with any party on any issue. It is impossible to hope that in such a heterogeneous world, under such diverse circumstance –a world made of countries in the most dissimilar situations and having the most unequal levels of material, technical, and cultural development– that we could conceive Marxism as something similar to a church, a religious doctrine with its Rome, its Pope, and its Ecumenical Council.
This is a revolutionary and dialectic doctrine, not a philosophical doctrine. It is a guide for revolutionary action, not a dogma. Trying to frame Marxism as a type of catechism in anti-Marxist.
The diversity of situations will inevitably produce an infinite number of interpretations. Those who make the correct interpretations will be able to call themselves Revolutionaries. Those who make the right interpretations and apply them in a responsible manner will triumph. Those who make mistakes or do not abide by revolutionary thinking will fail. They will be defeated and even replaced, because Marxism is not copyrighted private property. It is a doctrine of revolutionaries written by a revolutionary, developed by other revolutionaries, for revolutionaries.
We will know how to distinguish ourselves by our self-confidence, by our confidence in our ability to continue and advance our evolutionary path. We may disagree with any party on one matter, on one issue, or on several issues. Disagreements, when honest, are bound to be temporary. What we will never do is to insult with one hand and ask with another. And we will know how to maintain any disagreement within the confines of decency with any party, and we will know how to be friends to those who know how to be friends. We will know to respect those who respect us.
These norms will always determine our most free conduct, and we will never ask anyone’s permission to do anything. We will never ask anyone for permission to go anywhere. We will never ask permission from anyone to become the friend of any party or country.
We know the transitory nature of problems, and problems pass. Peoples live on, peoples remain; men pass, peoples remain; leadership passes, Revolutions persist. We see something more than temporary relations in the relations between parties and revolutionary people, we see durable relations and permanent relations. Nothing will ever come from us that tends to create differences between men, let along countries.
We will be guided by that elementary principle because we know that it is the right thing to do, that it is a just principle, and nothing will prevent us from devoting all our energy to the fight against the enemy of humanity, imperialism, Because we will never say that those who have helped us defeat the imperialists are accomplices of the imperialists. (APPLAUSE)
We aspire not only to a communist society but to a communist world in which all nations will have equal rights. We aspire to a communist world in which no nation will have the right to veto. And we aspire that the communist world of tomorrow will never display the same picture of a bourgeois world torn by internal squabbles. We aspire to a free society of free nations in which all the countries, large and small, will have equal rights.
We will defend our points of view as we have defended them up to now, as well as our positions and our path and we will stand firm to be measured by our actions and our deeds. And nothing can turn us away from that path.
It is not an easy thing to do in the midst of today’s problems complexities in the world today. It is difficult to maintain that inflexible opinion, maintain this inflexible independence, but we will maintain it. This Revolution was not imported from anywhere. It is a genuine product of this country. Nobody told us how we must do it, and we have carried it out. (APPLAUSE) And nobody will have to tell us how we must continue to carry it out, and we will continue to carry it out. We have learned to write history and we will continue to write it. Let no one doubt it.
We live in a complex and dangerous world. The risks of this world we will face with dignity and serenity. Our fate will be the fate of the other countries and our fate will be the fate of the world.
I ask all the comrades here present, all the representatives of our party, all the secretaries of the cells of this type of extensive congress, I ask those who are here to represent the will of the party, the party which represents the workers, I ask the ratification of the agreements of the national leadership. (APPLAUSE) I ask you for the full and unanimous ratification of the Central Committee of our party. (APPLAUSE) I ask for your full support for the line followed by the revolutionary leadership up to here. (APPLAUSE)
Long live the Cuban Communist Party! (Shouts of “Long live”)
Long live the Central Committee! (Shouts of “Long live”)
Long live our socialist, communist Revolution! (Shouts of “Long live”)
Motherland or death!
We will be victorious!
Standing ovation
Versiones Taquigráficas - Consejo de Estado
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="june_01.html">June 2001 • Vol 1, No. 2 •</a></b></font></p>
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<p><font size="5" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular"><b>Fidel Castro Speaks on Globalization</b></font></p>
<p>The following is the full text of the speech given by President Fidel Castro Ruz at the May Day, 2001, rally in Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba.</p>
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<p><b>Distinguished Guests, Workers, Compatriots:</b></p>
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Exactly one year ago today, we gathered here for an historic rally. On that day, for the first time in 41 years, the traditional May Day march was changed to a public forum. It was an unforgettable moment in an unforgettable struggle.
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The filmed images of that memorable day must be carefully preserved, so that future generations can see how their parents and grandparents achieved victory, and so that they may relive in part the emotion of the time.
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The struggle did not cease when the boy returned with his father; it had barely just begun. We realized that the reasons behind that tragedy and others remained intact, and decided that we would not give up the fight, as we swore in Baraguá, until they had all been removed. After 42 years of heroic resistance to a cruel and genocidal blockade, we have entered the new millennium with renewed energy and greater strength.
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A new era of struggle was opening. The empire, much more powerful than ever before, had become the sole superpower. But our people, recently freed from neocolonial status, saturated with McCarthyist propaganda and lies, poorly educated and almost illiterate politically, have made a colossal leap in history: they have eradicated illiteracy and graduated in universities hundreds of thousands of professionals with a far greater level of political consciousness than their historical adversary.
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Our people have now achieved the highest degree of unity ever, and gained vast political experience and moral, patriotic and internationalist strength. These are the people who resolutely endured the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Missile Crisis, the dirty war, an ever more rigorous economic blockade, the demise of the USSR and the socialist bloc, and predictions of the impossibility of survival and an inevitable collapse.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">A Powerful Enemy Except for Ethics and Ideas</font></b>
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Today, we are facing an enemy that is powerful in every way, except for ethics and ideas, with no message or response for the grave political, economic and social problems weighing down on the world today.
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Internationally, there has never been such confusion, discontent and insecurity. On the brink of a profound political and economic crisis, imperialism cannot escape from its own shadow. It is condemned to plundering the rest of the world to an ever-greater extent, thus fomenting universal discontent and rebellion even among its own allies.
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Throughout almost two centuries, the indigenous population and other peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have been the victims of the United States’ policy of expansion to the west and south of the original 13 colonies that declared their independence from British rule in 1776. First, in their advance towards the west they practically exterminated the indigenous peoples. Later, in 1835, they promoted the independence of Texas, where US settlers were already living in large numbers. In 1847, they invaded Mexico, unleashing a brutal war; as a result, in February of 1848, they took possession of 55 percent of Mexico’s territory. And so they continued, exterminating the native peoples or displacing them from the lands they had lived on for centuries, and buying up territories of former European colonial powers to annex them as they had done with Texas or conquer them like the territory stolen from Mexico.
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Thus, the United States, nurtured by large migrations from Europe in the second half of the 19th century, had become a powerful and prosperous nation, while the states from the Patagonia to the Canadian border that had rid themselves of Spanish colonial domination after the independence struggles begun by Venezuela in 1810, remained divided and isolated.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">A History of US Colonialism and Neocolonialism</font></b>
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On June 20, 1898, the United States launched a military intervention in Cuba, at a moment when, after an heroic and lengthy struggle by its finest sons and daughters, our country was on the verge of achieving its independence from an exhausted and bankrupt Spain. Our country remained occupied by the US forces for almost four years.
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In 1902, the troops of the United States of America left the island, after the establishment of a neocolony whose natural resources, lands and services it would retain under control with the additional support of an amendment imposed on our Constitution granting the United States the legal right to military intervention in our country. The glorious party created by Martí had been dismantled; the Liberation Army, which had fought throughout 30 years, was disarmed, only to be replaced with an army organized and trained by the United States in the image and likeness of its own. The arbitrary and unfair right to intervene under any pretext was used on more than one occasion.
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Puerto Rico, Cuba’s twin sister in the liberation struggle, like “the two wings of a bird,” was turned into an US colony, and retains this unfortunate status until today. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua and other Central American nations, and even Mexico, have been the victims of direct or indirect military intervention by the United States on repeated occasions. The Isthmus of Panama was occupied in order to complete construction of and guarantee access to the strategic canal that the United States controlled for almost a century. The US pervasive presence in the rest of the South American nations was achieved through large investments, coups, military regimes and growing political, ideological and cultural interference. After World War II, the United States ran them all to its liking.
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The first major curb on US expansionism and political and economic control of Latin America came about in Cuba with the triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959. This ushered in a new stage in the history of the hemisphere. The price paid by our country up until today is well known, and it was almost dragged into a nuclear war.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Four Decades of Cuban Revolutionary Resistance</font></b>
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Everything that has been done in this hemisphere by successive US administrations, right up until now, has been strongly influenced by their obsession and fear over the troubling presence of the Cuban Revolution, from the days of the mercenary invasion of the Bay of Pigs and the Alliance for Progress, to Bush’s statements from the bunker in Quebec, where he invoked the name of José Martí, attributing to him a misinterpreted quote about freedom. Actually, although the triumph of the Revolution troubled them, its remarkable resistance for over four decades sometimes creates the impression of having driven them insane.
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With a despicable wretchedness that will go down in history as an unprecedented example of infamy, all of the governments of Latin America, with the exception of Mexico, joined more or less willingly in the isolation and blockade of Cuba. The OAS was so severely damaged that it has never recovered. Today, when a massive annexation of Latin American countries to the United States is being plotted, no one can explain the continued existence and spending of money on that repugnant institution, morally bankrupt forever by such an unscrupulous and treacherous behavior.
</p><p>
What the OAS did back then, as an instrument of the United States, is what the United States wants to do today with the FTAA, not to isolate Cuba but rather to liquidate sovereignty, to prevent integration, to devour the resources and frustrate the destinies of a group of peoples who—leaving out the English speakers—add up to a total population of more than 500 million, with a shared Latin-based language, culture and history.
</p><p>
If the OAS sold its soul to the devil back then, betraying and selling out Cuba, so that the Latin American countries could receive, as a reward, the Cuban sugar quota on the US market totaling several million tons, along with other favors, then what can be expected today of those bourgeois and oligarchic governments, devoid of any political or ethical principles, who voted alongside the United States in Geneva? Out of opportunism or cowardice, they provided the extreme right US government with the pretexts and justifications needed to maintain the genocidal blockade, and even a potential excuse for aggression against the people of Cuba, all served up on a silver platter.
</p><p>
Dragged along by the ill-fated annexationist current, it is only logical that many others, in the desperation created by enormous and unpayable debts and total economic dependence, will be led to the suicide of the FTAA.
</p><p>
There are Latin American politicians for whom talk of free trade is music to their ears, as if they were still living in the middle of last century, depending solely on the export of basic commodities and clamoring for the removal of US tariff barriers. They have not realized that the world has changed, that many of those commodities, like fibers, rubber and other materials, have been replaced by synthetics, or foodstuffs like sugar by high fructose corn syrup, with a higher sweetening power and fewer calories which is thus preferred by many people; or artificial flavors like vanilla, strawberry and many others that imitate tropical and semi-tropical fruits. Their mindsets are frozen on the demands of half a century ago. Neoliberal poison and other lies have definitely blinded them, and still have large sectors of the population stultified; they do not understand the basics of the problems they suffer, because nothing is explained to them, or information is hidden from them.
</p><p>
There is absolutely no doubt that the governments of at least two of the most important countries in Latin America, those of Bolivar’s Venezuela and of Brazil, the largest and most highly populated Latin American nation, understand these realities, and are heading up the resistance.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">FTAA Would Lead to US Annexation of Latin America</font></b>
</p><p>
For Cuba, it is positively clear that the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas, under the terms, the timetable, the strategy, objectives and procedures imposed by the United States, would inexorably lead to Latin America’s annexation to the United States. This kind of association between an enormous industrial, technological and financial power and countries that suffer tearing poverty, underdevelopment and financial dependence on institutions under the aegis of the United States, which controls, directs and makes the decisions in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and others, imposes such inequality that it is tantamount to nothing less than the total absorption of the economies of the Latin American and Caribbean countries by that of the United States.
</p><p>
All of the banks, insurance companies, telecommunications, shipping services and airlines will be US-owned. All business will pass into the hands of US companies, from the big retail store chains to pizza outlets and McDonald’s.
</p><p>
The chemical, automotive, machinery and equipment industries, as well as other basic industries will all be US-owned.
</p><p>
US transnational companies will own the major research, biotechnology and genetic engineering centers and large pharmaceutical companies. The patents and technologies, almost without exception, will be US-owned. The best Latin American scientists will work in US laboratories. The big hotel chains will be US-owned.
</p><p>
The so-called entertainment industry will be an almost complete US monopoly. As an almost exclusive supplier, Hollywood will produce movies and television series for the movie theaters, television networks and videocassette market of Latin America. Our countries, where consumption of these products is already around 80 percent, will see an even greater growth in their prevalence, as destructive to their values and national cultures as they are. But, how very wonderful that two or three Disneylands will surely be built in Central and South America!
</p><p>
The Latin American nations would continue to serve basically as sources of raw materials, producers of primary commodities and enormous profits for big transnational capital.
</p><p>
The US agricultural sector receives some $80 billion USD in subsidies and will continue receiving them in the future, whatever the disguise, although its per capita and per hectare productivity is much higher, due to the use of large and sophisticated machinery and abundant fertilization. It will grow genetically modified grains, with much higher crop yields, heedless of its implications for human health.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Latin American Food Production Threatened</font></b>
</p><p>
As a consequence, crops of corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and other grains will practically disappear from many Latin American countries that will be left with no food security.
</p><p>
When a major drought or other disasters affect agricultural production in entire regions of the world, in large countries like China, with abundant hard currency reserves, or India, with fewer reserves but a certain amount of financial resources, they could find themselves obliged to buy tens of millions of tons of grains. If this happened, the prices of these products could reach unattainable levels for many Latin American countries, if their own grain production is wiped out by the FTAA. No matter how large the crop yields are, the United States can only produce a small percentage of the food needed by a growing world population, which is now over 6.1 billion. A decrease in food production in Latin America would affect not only the Latin American countries, but also the rest of the world.
</p><p>
Latin America will continue, under ever more difficult and intolerable conditions, to play the sad role of a supplier of raw materials and increasingly cheap labor, as compared to the salaries paid in the United States, which are 15 or 20 times higher than what the big transnational companies pay in the factories they have opened throughout the region. What is more, these factories employ fewer and fewer people as automation expands and productivity grows. Therefore, the notion that large numbers of jobs will be created is an illusion. The agricultural sector, which tends to provide employment for a higher number of workers, will be affected by the elements mentioned earlier. As a result, unemployment will grow considerably. Germany and other European countries have unemployment rates of up to 10 percent, despite the enormously high number of industries and services there.
</p><p>
The Latin American nations will be compelled to become large free trade areas with low taxes or none. These countries have begun to compete with each other, seeking foreign investment at any cost. They are invited to produce seasonal vegetables and tropical fruit that could supply the whole US market with less than a million hectares of well-cultivated lands.
</p><p>
Perhaps they will be visited by a larger number of American tourists who will travel throughout the vast territory of Central and South America, staying in US-owned hotels, traveling on US-owned airlines and cruise ships, using US-owned communications services, eating in US-owned restaurants, and shopping in US-owned stores, where they will buy goods produced by US-owned companies with Latin American petroleum and raw materials. Latin America will export oil, copper, bauxite, meat (as long as it is free of hoof-and-mouth disease), bananas and other fruits, if there are no non-tariff protectionist measures in place, and perhaps a few handicrafts.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">The Fruits of Neoliberalism</font></b>
</p><p>
What will be left? The worst paid and most grueling jobs in US-owned companies, or employment as servants in the homes of US executives and managers, highly qualified professionals, or what is left of the local bourgeoisie. Only a minority of the privileged bourgeoisie and the working aristocracy will stand to gain anything. Large masses of workers will be laid off, as is the case today in Argentina, where the unemployment rate is between 15 percent and 20 percent, and this without any kind of unemployment benefits. These are the fruits of neoliberalism, despite the tens of billions of dollars of foreign capital invested, the privatization and sale to foreign companies of almost all state companies, and the enormous debt contracted through the large loans received.
</p><p>
The FTAA will mean more neoliberalism, less protection of the national industry and interests, more unemployment, and more social problems.
</p><p>
It is absolutely certain that national currencies will be lost. None of them will survive; they will all be replaced by the US dollar. Even without the FTAA, there is already such a rising trend involving numerous countries that follow in the steps of the decision adopted by Ecuador. The US Federal Reserve will dictate the monetary policy of every one of them. The FTAA, which will only benefit big transnational capital, will not benefit American workers either, as many will be laid off. That is why their representatives protested so strongly in Quebec, just as they had fiercely protested before against the WTO in Seattle.
</p><p>
If Cuba did not have an independent monetary policy, it would never have achieved the sevenfold appreciation in the value of the peso between 1994 and 1999, nor would it have been possible to endure the special period.
</p><p>
Two decisive elements were at play: non-membership in the International Monetary Fund and an independent monetary policy.
</p><p>
The minute that everything I have said until now about the FTAA happens, it will no longer be possible to speak of independence, and annexation will begin to be a reality. And this is absolutely not an overstatement.
</p><p><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">The Nations Will Rise from their Ashes and Unite for a Dignified Destiny</font></b>
</p><p>
The worst, saddest, most shameless and hypocritical thing of all is that they intend to take this monstrous step without consulting their peoples. This is all the democracy that can be expected from the imperialist power and its lackeys.
</p><p>
I am firmly convinced that Latin America and the Caribbean can be devoured, albeit never digested, by the decadent empire, because the peoples will ensure that our continent’s nations rise up from their ashes and integrate, as they must integrate and unite in search of a greater, more dignified destiny. However, it would be much better if the hundreds of millions of Latin American and Caribbean citizens were spared the difficult stage of the subsequent struggle for our liberation.
</p><p>
We must prevent annexation, and resolutely demand, from this moment forward, that no government be allowed to sell out a nation behind its people’s back! There can be no annexation without a plebiscite! We must build an awareness of the dangers and of what the FTAA will entail.
</p><p>
We must revive Bolívar’s dignity and his dreams, and the dignity and dreams of San Martín, O’Higgins, Sucre, Morazán, Hidalgo, Morelos, Juárez and Martí. (APPLAUSE)
</p><p>
Let nobody be fooled into thinking that the peoples will sit back doing nothing and allow themselves to be sold like slaves at an auction!
</p><p>
Today, we will stage the first protest. Within a few minutes, we will set out with hundreds of thousands of Cubans, on a Latin American protest march on the United States Interests Section, shouting this slogan: Annexation no, plebiscite yes! Annexation no, plebiscite yes! Annexation no, plebiscite yes! (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “ANNEXATION NO, PLEBISCITE YES!”) Let it ring out loud and clear, and be heard all the way up in Washington!
</p><p>
Today, in the company of hundreds of leaders and representatives of the workers of Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, we say: Latin American and Caribbean Independence or Death!
</p><p>Hasta la victoria siempre!
</p><p>(APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “FIDEL! FIDEL!”)</p>
<p>
</p><p>
Venceremos!
</p><p>
</p><p>
© Copyright. 1996-2001. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
</p><p>
GRANMA INTERNATIONAL/ ONLINE EDITION
</p><p>
(http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html)
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June 2001 • Vol 1, No. 2 •
Fidel Castro Speaks on Globalization
The following is the full text of the speech given by President Fidel Castro Ruz at the May Day, 2001, rally in Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba.
Distinguished Guests, Workers, Compatriots:
Exactly one year ago today, we gathered here for an historic rally. On that day, for the first time in 41 years, the traditional May Day march was changed to a public forum. It was an unforgettable moment in an unforgettable struggle.
The filmed images of that memorable day must be carefully preserved, so that future generations can see how their parents and grandparents achieved victory, and so that they may relive in part the emotion of the time.
The struggle did not cease when the boy returned with his father; it had barely just begun. We realized that the reasons behind that tragedy and others remained intact, and decided that we would not give up the fight, as we swore in Baraguá, until they had all been removed. After 42 years of heroic resistance to a cruel and genocidal blockade, we have entered the new millennium with renewed energy and greater strength.
A new era of struggle was opening. The empire, much more powerful than ever before, had become the sole superpower. But our people, recently freed from neocolonial status, saturated with McCarthyist propaganda and lies, poorly educated and almost illiterate politically, have made a colossal leap in history: they have eradicated illiteracy and graduated in universities hundreds of thousands of professionals with a far greater level of political consciousness than their historical adversary.
Our people have now achieved the highest degree of unity ever, and gained vast political experience and moral, patriotic and internationalist strength. These are the people who resolutely endured the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Missile Crisis, the dirty war, an ever more rigorous economic blockade, the demise of the USSR and the socialist bloc, and predictions of the impossibility of survival and an inevitable collapse.
A Powerful Enemy Except for Ethics and Ideas
Today, we are facing an enemy that is powerful in every way, except for ethics and ideas, with no message or response for the grave political, economic and social problems weighing down on the world today.
Internationally, there has never been such confusion, discontent and insecurity. On the brink of a profound political and economic crisis, imperialism cannot escape from its own shadow. It is condemned to plundering the rest of the world to an ever-greater extent, thus fomenting universal discontent and rebellion even among its own allies.
Throughout almost two centuries, the indigenous population and other peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have been the victims of the United States’ policy of expansion to the west and south of the original 13 colonies that declared their independence from British rule in 1776. First, in their advance towards the west they practically exterminated the indigenous peoples. Later, in 1835, they promoted the independence of Texas, where US settlers were already living in large numbers. In 1847, they invaded Mexico, unleashing a brutal war; as a result, in February of 1848, they took possession of 55 percent of Mexico’s territory. And so they continued, exterminating the native peoples or displacing them from the lands they had lived on for centuries, and buying up territories of former European colonial powers to annex them as they had done with Texas or conquer them like the territory stolen from Mexico.
Thus, the United States, nurtured by large migrations from Europe in the second half of the 19th century, had become a powerful and prosperous nation, while the states from the Patagonia to the Canadian border that had rid themselves of Spanish colonial domination after the independence struggles begun by Venezuela in 1810, remained divided and isolated.
A History of US Colonialism and Neocolonialism
On June 20, 1898, the United States launched a military intervention in Cuba, at a moment when, after an heroic and lengthy struggle by its finest sons and daughters, our country was on the verge of achieving its independence from an exhausted and bankrupt Spain. Our country remained occupied by the US forces for almost four years.
In 1902, the troops of the United States of America left the island, after the establishment of a neocolony whose natural resources, lands and services it would retain under control with the additional support of an amendment imposed on our Constitution granting the United States the legal right to military intervention in our country. The glorious party created by Martí had been dismantled; the Liberation Army, which had fought throughout 30 years, was disarmed, only to be replaced with an army organized and trained by the United States in the image and likeness of its own. The arbitrary and unfair right to intervene under any pretext was used on more than one occasion.
Puerto Rico, Cuba’s twin sister in the liberation struggle, like “the two wings of a bird,” was turned into an US colony, and retains this unfortunate status until today. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua and other Central American nations, and even Mexico, have been the victims of direct or indirect military intervention by the United States on repeated occasions. The Isthmus of Panama was occupied in order to complete construction of and guarantee access to the strategic canal that the United States controlled for almost a century. The US pervasive presence in the rest of the South American nations was achieved through large investments, coups, military regimes and growing political, ideological and cultural interference. After World War II, the United States ran them all to its liking.
The first major curb on US expansionism and political and economic control of Latin America came about in Cuba with the triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959. This ushered in a new stage in the history of the hemisphere. The price paid by our country up until today is well known, and it was almost dragged into a nuclear war.
Four Decades of Cuban Revolutionary Resistance
Everything that has been done in this hemisphere by successive US administrations, right up until now, has been strongly influenced by their obsession and fear over the troubling presence of the Cuban Revolution, from the days of the mercenary invasion of the Bay of Pigs and the Alliance for Progress, to Bush’s statements from the bunker in Quebec, where he invoked the name of José Martí, attributing to him a misinterpreted quote about freedom. Actually, although the triumph of the Revolution troubled them, its remarkable resistance for over four decades sometimes creates the impression of having driven them insane.
With a despicable wretchedness that will go down in history as an unprecedented example of infamy, all of the governments of Latin America, with the exception of Mexico, joined more or less willingly in the isolation and blockade of Cuba. The OAS was so severely damaged that it has never recovered. Today, when a massive annexation of Latin American countries to the United States is being plotted, no one can explain the continued existence and spending of money on that repugnant institution, morally bankrupt forever by such an unscrupulous and treacherous behavior.
What the OAS did back then, as an instrument of the United States, is what the United States wants to do today with the FTAA, not to isolate Cuba but rather to liquidate sovereignty, to prevent integration, to devour the resources and frustrate the destinies of a group of peoples who—leaving out the English speakers—add up to a total population of more than 500 million, with a shared Latin-based language, culture and history.
If the OAS sold its soul to the devil back then, betraying and selling out Cuba, so that the Latin American countries could receive, as a reward, the Cuban sugar quota on the US market totaling several million tons, along with other favors, then what can be expected today of those bourgeois and oligarchic governments, devoid of any political or ethical principles, who voted alongside the United States in Geneva? Out of opportunism or cowardice, they provided the extreme right US government with the pretexts and justifications needed to maintain the genocidal blockade, and even a potential excuse for aggression against the people of Cuba, all served up on a silver platter.
Dragged along by the ill-fated annexationist current, it is only logical that many others, in the desperation created by enormous and unpayable debts and total economic dependence, will be led to the suicide of the FTAA.
There are Latin American politicians for whom talk of free trade is music to their ears, as if they were still living in the middle of last century, depending solely on the export of basic commodities and clamoring for the removal of US tariff barriers. They have not realized that the world has changed, that many of those commodities, like fibers, rubber and other materials, have been replaced by synthetics, or foodstuffs like sugar by high fructose corn syrup, with a higher sweetening power and fewer calories which is thus preferred by many people; or artificial flavors like vanilla, strawberry and many others that imitate tropical and semi-tropical fruits. Their mindsets are frozen on the demands of half a century ago. Neoliberal poison and other lies have definitely blinded them, and still have large sectors of the population stultified; they do not understand the basics of the problems they suffer, because nothing is explained to them, or information is hidden from them.
There is absolutely no doubt that the governments of at least two of the most important countries in Latin America, those of Bolivar’s Venezuela and of Brazil, the largest and most highly populated Latin American nation, understand these realities, and are heading up the resistance.
FTAA Would Lead to US Annexation of Latin America
For Cuba, it is positively clear that the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas, under the terms, the timetable, the strategy, objectives and procedures imposed by the United States, would inexorably lead to Latin America’s annexation to the United States. This kind of association between an enormous industrial, technological and financial power and countries that suffer tearing poverty, underdevelopment and financial dependence on institutions under the aegis of the United States, which controls, directs and makes the decisions in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and others, imposes such inequality that it is tantamount to nothing less than the total absorption of the economies of the Latin American and Caribbean countries by that of the United States.
All of the banks, insurance companies, telecommunications, shipping services and airlines will be US-owned. All business will pass into the hands of US companies, from the big retail store chains to pizza outlets and McDonald’s.
The chemical, automotive, machinery and equipment industries, as well as other basic industries will all be US-owned.
US transnational companies will own the major research, biotechnology and genetic engineering centers and large pharmaceutical companies. The patents and technologies, almost without exception, will be US-owned. The best Latin American scientists will work in US laboratories. The big hotel chains will be US-owned.
The so-called entertainment industry will be an almost complete US monopoly. As an almost exclusive supplier, Hollywood will produce movies and television series for the movie theaters, television networks and videocassette market of Latin America. Our countries, where consumption of these products is already around 80 percent, will see an even greater growth in their prevalence, as destructive to their values and national cultures as they are. But, how very wonderful that two or three Disneylands will surely be built in Central and South America!
The Latin American nations would continue to serve basically as sources of raw materials, producers of primary commodities and enormous profits for big transnational capital.
The US agricultural sector receives some $80 billion USD in subsidies and will continue receiving them in the future, whatever the disguise, although its per capita and per hectare productivity is much higher, due to the use of large and sophisticated machinery and abundant fertilization. It will grow genetically modified grains, with much higher crop yields, heedless of its implications for human health.
Latin American Food Production Threatened
As a consequence, crops of corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and other grains will practically disappear from many Latin American countries that will be left with no food security.
When a major drought or other disasters affect agricultural production in entire regions of the world, in large countries like China, with abundant hard currency reserves, or India, with fewer reserves but a certain amount of financial resources, they could find themselves obliged to buy tens of millions of tons of grains. If this happened, the prices of these products could reach unattainable levels for many Latin American countries, if their own grain production is wiped out by the FTAA. No matter how large the crop yields are, the United States can only produce a small percentage of the food needed by a growing world population, which is now over 6.1 billion. A decrease in food production in Latin America would affect not only the Latin American countries, but also the rest of the world.
Latin America will continue, under ever more difficult and intolerable conditions, to play the sad role of a supplier of raw materials and increasingly cheap labor, as compared to the salaries paid in the United States, which are 15 or 20 times higher than what the big transnational companies pay in the factories they have opened throughout the region. What is more, these factories employ fewer and fewer people as automation expands and productivity grows. Therefore, the notion that large numbers of jobs will be created is an illusion. The agricultural sector, which tends to provide employment for a higher number of workers, will be affected by the elements mentioned earlier. As a result, unemployment will grow considerably. Germany and other European countries have unemployment rates of up to 10 percent, despite the enormously high number of industries and services there.
The Latin American nations will be compelled to become large free trade areas with low taxes or none. These countries have begun to compete with each other, seeking foreign investment at any cost. They are invited to produce seasonal vegetables and tropical fruit that could supply the whole US market with less than a million hectares of well-cultivated lands.
Perhaps they will be visited by a larger number of American tourists who will travel throughout the vast territory of Central and South America, staying in US-owned hotels, traveling on US-owned airlines and cruise ships, using US-owned communications services, eating in US-owned restaurants, and shopping in US-owned stores, where they will buy goods produced by US-owned companies with Latin American petroleum and raw materials. Latin America will export oil, copper, bauxite, meat (as long as it is free of hoof-and-mouth disease), bananas and other fruits, if there are no non-tariff protectionist measures in place, and perhaps a few handicrafts.
The Fruits of Neoliberalism
What will be left? The worst paid and most grueling jobs in US-owned companies, or employment as servants in the homes of US executives and managers, highly qualified professionals, or what is left of the local bourgeoisie. Only a minority of the privileged bourgeoisie and the working aristocracy will stand to gain anything. Large masses of workers will be laid off, as is the case today in Argentina, where the unemployment rate is between 15 percent and 20 percent, and this without any kind of unemployment benefits. These are the fruits of neoliberalism, despite the tens of billions of dollars of foreign capital invested, the privatization and sale to foreign companies of almost all state companies, and the enormous debt contracted through the large loans received.
The FTAA will mean more neoliberalism, less protection of the national industry and interests, more unemployment, and more social problems.
It is absolutely certain that national currencies will be lost. None of them will survive; they will all be replaced by the US dollar. Even without the FTAA, there is already such a rising trend involving numerous countries that follow in the steps of the decision adopted by Ecuador. The US Federal Reserve will dictate the monetary policy of every one of them. The FTAA, which will only benefit big transnational capital, will not benefit American workers either, as many will be laid off. That is why their representatives protested so strongly in Quebec, just as they had fiercely protested before against the WTO in Seattle.
If Cuba did not have an independent monetary policy, it would never have achieved the sevenfold appreciation in the value of the peso between 1994 and 1999, nor would it have been possible to endure the special period.
Two decisive elements were at play: non-membership in the International Monetary Fund and an independent monetary policy.
The minute that everything I have said until now about the FTAA happens, it will no longer be possible to speak of independence, and annexation will begin to be a reality. And this is absolutely not an overstatement.
The Nations Will Rise from their Ashes and Unite for a Dignified Destiny
The worst, saddest, most shameless and hypocritical thing of all is that they intend to take this monstrous step without consulting their peoples. This is all the democracy that can be expected from the imperialist power and its lackeys.
I am firmly convinced that Latin America and the Caribbean can be devoured, albeit never digested, by the decadent empire, because the peoples will ensure that our continent’s nations rise up from their ashes and integrate, as they must integrate and unite in search of a greater, more dignified destiny. However, it would be much better if the hundreds of millions of Latin American and Caribbean citizens were spared the difficult stage of the subsequent struggle for our liberation.
We must prevent annexation, and resolutely demand, from this moment forward, that no government be allowed to sell out a nation behind its people’s back! There can be no annexation without a plebiscite! We must build an awareness of the dangers and of what the FTAA will entail.
We must revive Bolívar’s dignity and his dreams, and the dignity and dreams of San Martín, O’Higgins, Sucre, Morazán, Hidalgo, Morelos, Juárez and Martí. (APPLAUSE)
Let nobody be fooled into thinking that the peoples will sit back doing nothing and allow themselves to be sold like slaves at an auction!
Today, we will stage the first protest. Within a few minutes, we will set out with hundreds of thousands of Cubans, on a Latin American protest march on the United States Interests Section, shouting this slogan: Annexation no, plebiscite yes! Annexation no, plebiscite yes! Annexation no, plebiscite yes! (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “ANNEXATION NO, PLEBISCITE YES!”) Let it ring out loud and clear, and be heard all the way up in Washington!
Today, in the company of hundreds of leaders and representatives of the workers of Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, we say: Latin American and Caribbean Independence or Death!
Hasta la victoria siempre!
(APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “FIDEL! FIDEL!”)
Venceremos!
© Copyright. 1996-2001. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
GRANMA INTERNATIONAL/ ONLINE EDITION
(http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html)
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1983.11.grenada | <body>
<p class="title">
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr>
<h1>The Bells Tolling Today for Grenada May Toll Tomorrow For the Whole World</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> November 14, 1983
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <em>The African Communist</em>, no. 97; Second Quarter, 1984
<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: David Adams
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Zdravko Saveski, 2021
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p><b>Speech given by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and president of the Councils of State and of Ministers, at the eulogy for the heroes killed in unequal combat against U.S. Imperialism in Grenada. Held in Havana on November 14, 1983.</b></p>
<p>On October 15, 1976, a little over seven years ago, we gathered here, in this same place to deliver a funeral address for the 57 Cubans who were vilely murdered in the Barbados plane sabotage, carried out by men who had been trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Today we have come once again to bid farewell — this time to 24 Cubans who died in Grenada, another island not very far from Barbados, as a result of U.S. military actions.</p>
<p>Grenada was one of the smallest independent states in the world, both in territory and population. Even though Cuba is a small, underdeveloped country, it was able to help Grenada considerably, because our efforts — which were modest in quantity though high in quality — meant a lot for a country less than 400 square kilometers in size, with a population of just over 100,000.</p>
<p>For instance, the value of our contribution to Grenada in the form of materials, designs and labour in building the new airport came to $60 million at international prices — over $500 per inhabitant. It is as if Cuba -— with a population of almost 10 million — received a project worth $5000 million as a donation. In addition, there was the cooperation of our doctors, teachers and technicians in diverse specialties, plus an annual contribution of Cuban products worth about $3 million. This meant an additional annual contribution of $40 per inhabitant. It is impossible for Cuba to render material assistance on that scale to countries with significantly large populations and territories, but we were able to offer great assistance to a country like tiny Grenada.</p>
<p>Many other small Caribbean nations, used to the gross economic and strategic interests of colonialism and imperialism, were amazed by Cuba’s generous assistance to that fraternal people. They may have thought that Cuba’s selfless action was extraordinary; in the midst of the U.S. government’s dirty propaganda, some may even have found it difficult to understand.</p>
<p>Our people felt such deep friendship for Bishop and Grenada, and our respect for that country and its sovereignty was so irreproachable, that we never dared to express any opinions about what was being done there or how it was being done. In Grenada, we followed the same principles we apply to all revolutionary nations and movements: full respect for their policies, criteria and decisions; expressing our views on any matter only when asked to do so. Imperialism is incapable of understanding that the secret of our excellent relations with revolutionary countries and movements in the world lies precisely in this respect.</p>
<p>The U.S. government looked down on Grenada and hated Bishop. It wanted to destroy Grenada’s process and obliterate its example. It had even prepared military plans for invading the island — as Bishop had charged nearly two years ago — but it lacked pretext.</p>
<p>Socio-economically, Grenada was actually advancing satisfactorily. The people had received many benefits, in spite of the hostile policy of the United States, and Grenada’s Gross National Product was growing at a good rate in the midst of the world crisis. Bishop was not an extremist; rather, he was a true revolutionary — conscientious and honest. Far from disagreeing with his intelligent and realistic policy, we fully sympathized with it, since it was rigorously adapted to his country’s specific conditions and possibilities. Grenada had become a true symbol of independence and progress in the Caribbean.</p>
<h4>Internal Conflict</h4>
<p>No one could have foreseen the tragedy that was drawing near. Attention was focused on other parts of the world. Unfortunately, the Grenadian revolutionaries themselves unleashed the events that opened the door to imperialist aggression.</p>
<p>Hyenas emerged from the revolutionary ranks. Today no one can yet say whether those who used the dagger of division and internal confrontation did so motu proprio or were inspired and egged on by imperialism. It is something that could have been done by the CIA — and, if somebody else was responsible, the CIA could not have done it any better. The fact is that allegedly revolutionary arguments were used, invoking the purest principles of Marxism-Leninism and charging Bishop with practising a personality cult and drawing away from the Leninist norms and methods of leadership.</p>
<p>In our view, nothing could be more absurd than to attribute such tendencies to Bishop. It was impossible to imagine anyone more noble, modest and unselfish. He could never have been guilty of being authoritarian; if he had any defect, it was his excessive tolerance and trust.</p>
<p>Were those who conspired against him within the Grenadian Party, army and security, by any chance, a group of extremists drunk on political theory? Were they simply a group of ambitious, opportunistic individuals, or were they enemy agents who wanted to destroy the Grenadian Revolution? History alone will have the last word, but it would not be the first time that such things occurred in a revolutionary process.</p>
<p>In our view, Coard’s group objectively destroyed the Revolution and opened the door to imperialist aggression. Whatever their intentions, the brutal assassination of Bishop and his most loyal closest comrades is a fact that can never be justified in that or any other revolution. As the October 20 statement by the Cuban Party and government put it, “No crime can be committed in the name of revolution and liberty.”</p>
<p>In spite of his very close and affectionate links with our Party’s leadership, Bishop never said anything about the internal dissensions that were developing. To the contrary, in his last conversation with us he was self-critical about his work regarding attention to the armed forces and the mass organizations. Nearly all of our Party and state leaders spent many friendly, fraternal hours with him on the evening of October 7, before his return trip to Grenada.</p>
<p>Coard’s group never had such relations nor such intimacy and trust with us. Actually, we did not even know that group existed. It is to our Revolution’s credit that, in spite of our profound indignation over Bishop’s removal from office and arrest, we fully refrained from interfering in Grenada’s internal affairs, even though our construction workers and all our other cooperation personnel in Grenada — who did not hesitate to confront the Yankee soldiers with the weapons Bishop himself had given them for their defense in case of an attack from abroad — could have been a decisive factor in those internal events. Those weapons were never meant to be used in an internal conflict in Grenada and we would never have allowed them to be so used; we would never have been willing to use them to shed a single drop of Grenadian blood.</p>
<p>On October 12, Bishop was removed from office by the Central Committee, on which the conspirators had attained a majority. On the 13th, he was placed under house arrest. On the 19th, the people took to the streets and freed Bishop. Whiteman, Jacqueline Creft and other excellent revolutionary leaders were murdered. As soon as the internal dissensions which came to light on October 12 were manifest the Yankee imperialists decided to invade.</p>
<p>The message sent by the leadership of the Cuban Party to Coard’s group on October 15 has been made public: in it, we expressed our deep concern over both the internal and external consequences of the split and appealed to the common sense, serenity, wisdom and generosity of revolutionaries. This reference to generosity was an appeal not to use violence against Bishop and his followers. This group of Coard’s that seized power in Grenada expressed serious reservations regarding Cuba from the very beginning because of our well-known and unquestionable friendship with Bishop. The national and international press has published our strong denunciation of the events of October 19, the day Bishop was murdered. Our relations with Austin’s short-lived government, in which Coard was really in charge, were actually cold and tense, so that, at the time of the criminal Yankee aggression, there was no coordination whatsoever between the Grenadian army and the Cuban construction workers and other cooperation personnel. The basic points of the messages sent to our embassy in Grenada on October 12 through 25, the day on which the invasion took place, have been made public. These documents stand in history as irrefutable proof of our clean principled position regarding Grenada. Imperialism, however, presented the events as the coming to power of a group of hard-line Communists, loyal allies of Cuba. Were they really Communists? Were they really hard-liners? Could they really be loyal allies of Cuba? Or were they rather conscious or unconscious tools of Yankee imperialism?</p>
<h4>The Ultra-Left</h4>
<p>Look at the history of the revolutionary movement, and you will find more than one connection between imperialism and those who take positions that appear to be on the extreme left.</p>
<p>Aren’t Pol Pot and Ieng Sary — the ones responsible for the genocide in Kampuchea — the most loyal allies Yankee imperialism has in Southeast Asia at present? In Cuba, ever since the Grenadian crisis began, we have called Coard’s group — to give it a name — the “Pol Pot group.”</p>
<p>Our relations with the new leaders of Grenada were to be subjected to profound analysis, as was set forth in the October 20 statement by the Party and government of Cuba. In it, we also stated that due to our basic regard for the Grenadian people, we would not rush to “take any steps regarding technical and economic cooperation which may jeopardize the basic services and vital economic interests of the people of Grenada.” We could not accept the idea of leaving the Grenadians without doctors or leaving the airport, which was vital to the nation’s economy, unfinished. Most certainly, our construction workers were to leave Grenada when that project was completed, and the weapons that Bishop had given them were to be returned to the government. It was even possible that our very bad relations with the new government would make it necessary for us to leave much earlier.</p>
<p>The thing that placed Cuba in a morally complex, difficult situation was the announcement that Yankee naval forces were en route to Grenada. Under those circumstances, we couldn’t possibly leave the country. If the imperialists really intended to attack Grenada, it was our duty to stay there. To withdraw at that time would have been dishonorable and could even have triggered aggression in that country then and in Cuba later on. In addition, events unfolded with such incredible speed that if the evacuation had been planned for, there would not have been time to carry it out.</p>
<p>In Grenada however, the government was morally indefensible, and, since the Party, the government and the army had divorced themselves from the people, it was also impossible to defend the nation militarily, because a revolutionary war is only feasible and justifiable when united with the people. We could only fight, therefore, if we were directly attacked. There was no alternative.</p>
<p>It should nevertheless be noted that, despite these adverse circumstances, a number of Grenadian soldiers died in heroic combat against the invaders. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The internal events, however, in no way justified Yankee intervention. Since when has the government of the United States become the arbiter of internal conflicts between revolutionaries in any given country? What right did Reagan have to rend his made over the death of Bishop, whom he so hated and opposed? What reason could there be for its brutal violation of the sovereignty of Grenada — a small independent nation that was a respected and acknowledged member of the international community? It would be the same as if another country believed it had the right to intervene in the United States because of the repulsive assassination of Martin Luther King or so many other outrages, such as those that have been committed against the black Hispanic minorities in the United States, or to intervene because John Kennedy was murdered.</p>
<p>The same may be said of the argument that the lives of 1000 Americans were in danger. There are many times more U.S. citizens in dozens of other countries in the world. Does this, perchance, imply the right to intervene when internal conflicts arise in those countries? There are tens of thousands of Grenadians in the United States, England and Trinidad. Could tiny Grenada intervene if domestic policy problems arose that pose some threat to its compatriots in any of those countries? Putting aside the fallacy and falseness of such pretexts for invading Grenada, is this really an international norm that can be sustained?</p>
<p>A thousand lessons in Marxism could not teach us any better the dirty, perfidious and aggressive nature of imperialism than the attack unleashed against Grenada at dawn on October 25 and its later development.</p>
<p>In order to justify its invasion of Grenada and its subsequent actions, the U.S. government and its spokesmen told lies; Reagan personally told the first 13.</p>
<p>1. Cuba had to do with the coup d’etat and the death of Bishop. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>2. The American students were in danger of being taken hostage. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>3. The main purpose of the invasion was to protect the lives of American citizens. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>4. The invasion was a multinational operation undertaken at the request of Mr. Scoon and the eastern Caribbean nations. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>5. Cuba was planning to invade and occupy Grenada. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>6. Grenada was being turned into an important Soviet-Cuban military base. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>7. The airport under construction was not civilian but military. (SH0UTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>8. The weapons in Grenada would be used to export subversion and terrorism. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>9. The Cubans fired first. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>10. There were over 1000 Cubans in Grenada. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>11. Most of the Cubans were not construction workers but professional soldiers. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>12. The invading forces took care not to destroy civilian property or inflict civilian casualties. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>13. The U.S. troops would remain in Grenada for a week. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>14. Missile silos were being built in Grenada. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>15. The vessel <em>Viet Nam Heroico</em> was transporting special weapons. (SHOUTS OF “THAT S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>16. Cuba was warned of the invasion. (SHOUTS OF “THAT S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>17. Five hundred Cubans are fighting in the mountains of Grenada. (SHOUTS OF “THAT S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>18. Cuba has issued instructions for reprisals to be taken against U.S. citizens. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)</p>
<p>19. The journalists were excluded for their own protection. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “LIARS!” “FIDEL, FIDEL, GIVE ‘EM HELL; LET’S MAKE ‘EM RESPECT US WELL!”)</p>
<p>None of these assertions were proved, none are true and all have been refuted by the facts. This cynical way of lying in order to justify invading a tiny country reminds us of the methods Adolf Hitler used during the years leading up to World War II.</p>
<p>The U.S. students and officials of the medical school located there acknowledged that they were given full guarantees for U.S. citizens and the necessary facilities for those who wanted to leave the country. Moreover, Cuba had informed the U.S. government on October 22 that no foreign citizens, including Cubans, had been disturbed, and it offered to cooperate in solving any difficulty that might arise, so that problems could be settled without violence or intervention in that country.</p>
<p>No U.S. citizen had been disturbed at all prior to the invasion, and if anything endangered them, it was the war unleashed by the United States. Cuba’s instructions to its personnel not to interfere with any actions to evacuate U.S. citizens in the area of the runway under construction near the university contributed to protecting tie U.S. citizens residing in that country. Reagan’s reference to the possibility that Grenada might turn into another Iran — a reference calculated to appeal to the U.S. feelings wounded in that episode — is a demagogic, politicking, dishonest argument.</p>
<p>The assertion that the new airport was a military one — an old lie that the Reagan administration had dwelt on a lot — was categorically refuted by the English capitalist firm that supplied and installed the electrical and technical equipment for that airport. The British technicians of the Plessey company, which has made a name for itself internationally as a specialist in this field, worked alongside the Cuban construction workers, to whose civilian worker status they attest. Several countries of the European community that are members of the Atlantic alliance cooperated in one way or another with the airport. How can anyone •imagine them helping Cuba to build a military airport in Grenada?</p>
<p>However, the idea that Grenada was being turned into a Soviet-Cuban base is refuted by the proved fact that there wasn’t even one Soviet military adviser on the island.</p>
<h4>Agreements for Co-operation</h4>
<p>The supposedly secret documents that fell into the hands of the United States and were published by the Yankee administration a few days after the invasion refer to the agreement between the governments of Cuba and Grenada by virtue of which our country was to send Grenada 27 military advisers, which could later be increased to 40 — figures that coincide with the ones Cuba published on the number of advisers, which was 22 on the day of the attack, to which were added a similar number of translators and service personnel from the mission. Nowhere in those documents that they have been crowing over is there something that has anything to do with the idea of military bases in Grenada. What they do show is that the weapons that the Soviet Union supplied to the government of Grenada for the army and the militia were subject to an article that prohibited their export to third countries, which refutes the idea that Grenada had been turned into an arsenal for supplying weapons to subversive, terrorist organizations, as the present administration likes to call all the revolutionary and national liberation movements. No weapons ever left Grenada for any other country, and, therefore, Reagan can never prove that any did.</p>
<p>The assertion that Cuba was about to invade and occupy Grenada is so unrealistic, absurd, crazy and alien to our principles and international policy that it cannot even be taken seriously. What has been proved is the absolutely scrupulous way in which we refrained from meddling in the internal affairs of that country, in spite of our deep affection for Bishop and our total rejection of Coard and his group’s conspiracy and coup, which could serve only the interests of imperialism and its plans for destroying the Grenadian Revolution. The messages containing precise, categorical instructions to our embassy in Grenada, which have been widely publicized by the government of Cuba, constitute irrefutable proof of the clear position of principles maintained by the leadership of our Party and state with regard to the internal events in Grenada.</p>
<p>The civilian status of the vast majority of the Cuban cooperation personnel in Grenada has been shown to the whole world by the hundreds of foreign journalists who saw them arriving in our country and who were able to interview each and every one of them. Nearly 50 percent of them were over 40 years old. Who could question their status as civilian cooperation personnel and workers with long years of experience on their jobs?</p>
<h4>Cuba Told The Truth</h4>
<p>When the U.S. government spokesmen asserted that there were from 1,000 to 1,500 Cubans in Grenada at the time of the invasion and that hundreds of them were still fighting in the mountains, Cuba published the exact number of Cuban citizens who were in Grenada on the day of the invasion: 784, including diplomatic personnel with their children and other relatives. The agencies that sent them and the kind of work they did were also reported, as well as the instructions given them to fight in their work areas and camps if attacked, and the fact that it was impossible — according to the information we had — for hundreds to remain in the mountains. Later, the names and jobs of all cooperation workers were published, as well as the known or probable situation of each one. The facts have shown that the information provided by Cuba was absolutely true. There isn’t a single fact in all that information that could be proven false.</p>
<p>The assertion that the Cubans initiated the acts of hostility is equally false and cynical. The irrefutable truth is that the Cubans were sleeping and their weapons were stored at the time of the air drop on the runway and around the camps. They had not been distributed. There weren’t enough to go around, and they weren’t distributed until the landing was already under way, and that is when the Cuban personnel went to the places assigned to them for that emergency. Even so, our personnel, now organized and armed, had time to see the U.S. paratroopers regrouping on the runway and the first planes landing. That was the invaders’ weakest moment. If the Cubans had fired first, they would have killed or wounded dozens — perhaps hundreds — of U.S. soldiers in those early hours. (APPLAUSE) What is strictly historical and strictly true is that the fighting began when the U.S. troops advanced toward the Cubans in a belligerent way. It is also true that when a group of unarmed cooperation personnel was captured, they were used as hostages and forced to lead the way in front of the U.S. soldiers.</p>
<h4>No Warning</h4>
<p>The invasion of Grenada was a treacherous surprise attack, with no previous warning at all — just like Pearl Harbour, just like the Nazis. The note from the government of the United States to the government of Cuba on Tuesday, October 24, in an attempted response to our note of Saturday, October 22, was delivered at 8:30 in the morning, three hours after the landing had taken place and an hour and a half after the U.S. troops began attacking our compatriots in Grenada. Actually, on the afternoon of the 25th, the U.S. government sent the government of Cuba a deceitful note that led us to believe that the fighting would cease in a reasonable and honorable manner, thus avoiding greater bloodshed. Although we immediately responded to that note, accepting that possibility, what the U.S. government did was to land the 82nd Airborne Division at dawn on the 26th and attack with all its forces the Cuban position that was still resisting. Is this the way a serious government behaves? Is this the way to warn of an attack? Was this the way to avoid greater bloodshed?</p>
<p>Mr. Scoon blatantly declared that he approved of the invasion but that he had not previously asked anyone to invade Grenada. A few days after the landing, Mr. Scoon — lodged in the Guam helicopter-carrier — signed a letter officially requesting the intervention. Reagan could not prove any of his false assertions.</p>
<p>When as a pretext for keeping the <em>Vietnam Heroico</em> — which was in the port of St. George’s on the day of the invasion — from being used as a means of transportation for evacuating the Cuban hostages from Grenada, it was alleged that it carried special weapons, its captain was immediately asked if by any chance he carried weapons on board, and the only thing that was determined was that it had just one fearful weapon — its name: Vietnam. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The slanderous charge that Cuba had given instructions to carry out actions against U.S. citizens in other countries was given a worthy, official and public reply based on reality, proven by the history of the Revolution, that Cuba has always been opposed to acts of reprisal against innocent people.</p>
<p>The government of the United States has not condescended to offer the number of people arrested nor the figure of Grenadian losses, including civilian losses. A hospital for the mentally ill was bombed, killing dozens of patients.</p>
<p>And where is Mr. Reagan’s promise that U.S. troops would withdraw in a week? President Reagan himself in his first address to the U.S. people, at 8:30 a.m. on the day of the invasion, in a speech prepared before the landing, stated that the situation was under control. That same day, his own spokesmen described the resistance the invading forces were facing. The military ride the Pentagon had planned would take four hours did not take into account the tenacious and heroic resistance of the Cuban cooperation personnel and the Grenadian soldiers. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<h4>Twisting the Truth</h4>
<p>Who, then, has told the truth, and who has cynically lied about the events in Grenada? No foreign journalists — not even those from the United States — were allowed to see and report on the events on the spot. The pretext that this prohibition was a security measure for the journalists is both superficial and ridiculous. What they obviously wanted was to monopolize and manipulate the information so they could lie without any let or hindrance to world public opinion, including the people of the United States. This was the only way they could spread deliberate lies and falsehoods of all kinds — which would be difficult to clear up and refute after their initial impact and effect on the people of the United States. Even in this, the method used by the U.S. administration was fascist.</p>
<p>What is left now, objectively, of those 19 assertions? Where are the silos for strategic missiles that were being built in Grenada? But all those lies that the world did not believe, told by the U.S. president and his spokesmen, made a tremendous impact on U.S. public opinion.</p>
<p>Moreover, the invasion of Grenada was presented to the U.S. people as a great victory for Reagan’s foreign policy against the socialist camp and the revolutionary movement. It was linked to the tragic death of 240 U.S. soldiers in Beirut, to the memory of the hostages in Iran, to the humiliating defeat in Vietnam and to the resurgence of the United States as an influential power on the world scene. A dirty, dishonest appeal was made to U.S. patriotism, to national pride, to the grandeur and glory of the nation. This was how they got a majority of the U.S. people — it is said that it was 65 percent at first and then 71 percent — to support the monstrous crime of invading a sovereign country without any justification, the reprehensible method of launching a surprise attack, the press censorship and all the other similar procedures the U.S. government used for invading and justifying its invasion of Grenada. Hitler acted the same way when he occupied Austria in 1938 and annexed Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, in the name of German pride, German grandeur and glory and the happiness and security of German subjects. If a poll had been taken in Hitler Germany at that time, in the midst of the chauvinistic wave unleashed by the Nazis, around 80 or 90 percent of the people would have approved of those aggressions.</p>
<p>The deplorable, truly dangerous fact — not only for the peoples of the Caribbean, Central America and Latin America, but for all the peoples of the world — is that, when world opinion unanimously denounced the warmongering, aggressive, unjustifiable action that violated a people’s sovereignty and all international norms and principles, most of the people of the United States- manipulated, disinformed and deceived-supported the monstrous crime committed by the government.</p>
<p>There is something even more disturbing: when this about-face was effected in U.S. public opinion, many U.S. politicians who initially had opposed these events ended up by condoning Reagan’s actions, and the press — censored, humiliated and kept at a distance from the events — ended up moderating its complaints and criticisms.</p>
<p>Are these, perchance, the virtues of a society where the opinion and the political and informational institutions can be grossly manipulated by its rulers, as they were in German society in the time of fascism? Where is the glory, the grandeur and the victory in invading and defeating one of the tiniest countries in the world, of no economic or strategic significance? Where is the heroism in fighting a handful of workers and other civilian cooperation personnel whose heroic resistance — in spite of the surprise element; the shortage of ammunition; and their disadvantages in terms offered in, arms and numbers — against the air, sea and land forces of the most powerful imperialist country in the world forced it to bring in the 82nd Airborne Division, when the last stronghold was being defended at dawn on October 26 by barely 50 fighters? (APPLAUSE) The United States did not achieve any victory at all — not political or military or moral. If anything, it was a Pyrrhic military victory and a profound moral defeat, as we pointed out on another occasion.</p>
<p>The imperialist government of the United States wanted to kill the symbol of the Grenadian Revolution, but the symbol was already dead. The Grenadian revolutionaries themselves destroyed it with their split and their colossal errors. We believe that, after the death of Bishop and his closest comrades, after the army fired on the people and after the Party and the government divorced themselves from the masses and isolated themselves from the world, the Grenadian revolutionary process could not survive.</p>
<p>In its efforts to destroy a symbol, the United States killed a corpse and brought the symbol back to life at the same time. (APPLAUSE) Was it for this that it challenged international law and won the repudiation and condemnation of the world?</p>
<p>Does it feel such contempt for the rest of mankind? Is that contempt really so great that Mr. Reagan’s appetite for breakfast on November 3 was not at all affected, as he declared before the press?</p>
<h4>Threat to World Peace</h4>
<p>If unfortunately all this were true — and it seems to be — the invasion of Grenada should lead us to an awareness of the realities and dangers that threaten the world. Mr. O’Neill, speaker of the House of Representatives, said that it was sinful that a man who was totally uninformed and ignorant about the international problems and who doesn’t even read the documents was president of the United States. If we consider that the United States has powerful sophisticated means of conventional and nuclear warfare and that the president of that country can declare war without consulting anyone, it is not only sinful but truly dramatic and tragic for all mankind.</p>
<p>An air of triumph reigns in the Reagan administration. The echoes of the last shots in Grenada have barely died away and there is talk of intervening in El Salvador, Nicaragua and even Cuba.</p>
<p>In the Middle East and Southern Africa imperialism’s acts of interference and military aggression against progressive countries and, national liberation movements continue unabated.</p>
<p>In Europe, the first of the 572 Pershing and Cruise missiles are already being deployed, surrounding the USSR and other socialist countries with a deadly ring of nuclear weapons that can reach their territories in a matter of minutes.</p>
<p>Not just the small countries, but all mankind is threatened. The bells tolling today for Grenada may toll tomorrow for the whole world.</p>
<p>The most prestigious and experienced scientists and doctors assure us that man could not survive a global nuclear conflict. The destructive power of these stockpiled weapons is a million times greater than that of the unsophisticated bombs, that wiped out the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in just a few seconds. This is what the Reagan administration’s aggressive, warmongering policy can lead to.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the arms race is already a reality in the midst of the worst economic crisis the world has witnessed since the ’30s. And, with the problems of development of the vast majority of the peoples in the world still to be solved, who can feel confidence in a government that acts as precipitately, rashly and cynically as the U.S. government did in Grenada? Reagan did not even bother to listen to the advice of a government as closely linked to him politically, ideologically and militarily as the British government. It is not strange that, in a poll taken just a few days ago, more than 90 percent of the British were categorically opposed to• the United States’ having the unilateral prerogative of using the Cruise missiles that are being deployed there.</p>
<p>In our hemisphere, just a year and a half ago, a NATO power used sophisticated war means to shed Argentine blood in the Malvinas. The Reagan administration supported that action. It did not even consider the Organization of American States or the so-called security pacts and agreements, but scornfully pushed them aside. Now, basing itself on the alleged request of a phantasmagoric Organization of Eastern Caribbean states, it has invaded Grenada and shed Caribbean blood and Cuban blood. Nicaragua paid a price of over forty thousand lives for freedom, and nearly a thousand more sons of that noble people have been killed in the attacks made by mercenary bands organized, trained and equipped by the U.S. government. In El Salvador, over 50,000 people have been murdered by a genocidal regime whose army is equipped trained and directed by the United States. In Guatemala, more than 100,000 have died at the hands of the repressive system installed by the CIA in 1954 when it overthrew the progressive Arbenz government. How many have died in Chile since imperialism staged the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende? How many have died in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay. Brazil and Bolivia in the last 15 years?</p>
<p>What a high price our people have paid in blood, sacrifice, poverty and mourning for imperialist domination and the unjust social system it has imposed on our nations!</p>
<p>Our Ideas Will Multiply
</p><p>Imperialism is bent on destroying symbols, because it knows the value of symbols, of examples and of ideas. It wanted to destroy them in Grenada and it wants to destroy them in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba; but symbols, examples and ideas cannot be destroyed. When their enemies think they have destroyed them, what they have actually done is made them multiply. (APPLAUSE) In trying to wipe out the first Christians, the Roman emperors spread Christianity throughout the world. Likewise, all attempts to destroy our ideas will only multiply them.</p>
<p>Grenada has already multiplied the Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and Cuban revolutionaries’ patriotic conviction and fighting spirit. (APPLAUSE) It has been proved that the best U.S. troops can be fought and that they are not feared. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS) The imperialists must not ignore the fact that they will encounter fierce resistance wherever they attack a revolutionary people. Let us hope that their Pyrrhic victory in Grenada and their air of triumph don’t go to their heads, leading them to commit serious, irreversible errors.</p>
<p>They will not find in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba the particular circumstances of revolutionaries divided among themselves and divorced from the people that they found in tiny Grenada. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS)</p>
<p>In more than three years of heroic struggle, the Salvadoran revolutionaries have become experienced, fearsome and invincible fighters. There are thousands of them who know the land inch by inch, veterans of dozens of victorious combats who are accustomed to fighting-and winning when the odds are one to ten against elite troops, trained, armed and advised by the United States. Their unity is more solid and indestructible than ever.</p>
<p>In Nicaragua, the imperialists would have to confront a deeply patriotic and revolutionary people that is united, organized, armed and ready to fight and that can never be subjugated. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>With regard to Cuba, if in Grenada, the imperialists had to bring in an elite division to fight against a handful of isolated men struggling in a small stronghold, lacking fortifications, a thousand miles from their homeland, how many divisions would they need against millions of combatants fighting on their own soil alongside their own people? (PROLONGED APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS)</p>
<p>Our country — as we have already said on other occasions — might be wiped off the face of the earth, but it will never be conquered and subjugated (PROLONGED APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “COMMANDER IN CHIEF WE AWAIT YOUR ORDERS!”)</p>
<p>In the present conditions of our continent, a U.S. war against a Latin American people would raise the morale of all the peoples of Latin America and turn their feelings against the aggressors. A bottomless abyss would be opened between peoples that, because they are in the same hemisphere, are called upon to live in peace, friendship and mutual respect, and cooperate with one another.</p>
<p>The experiences of Grenada will be examined in detail to extract the utmost benefit from them for use in case of another attack against a country where there are Cuban cooperation personnel or on our own homeland. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS)</p>
<p>The Cubans who were captured and virtually turned into hostages had an unforgettable experience of what a country occupied by Yankee invading troops is like. The physical and psychological treatment given the cooperation personnel who were taken prisoner was insulting and a cause for indignation, and promises of all kinds were made to each of them to try to get them to go to the United States. But they were not able to break their steel like staunchness. Not a single one deserted his homeland. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS)</p>
<p>There was no manipulation of the news, nothing was hidden from the people, in our country. All reports concerning the invasion that were received directly from Grenada were transmitted to our population just as they arrived, even though the ones on October 26 turned out to be exaggerated. As a matter of principle, at no time were efforts made to play down the seriousness of the situation or to minimize the magnitude of the dangers facing our compatriots.</p>
<p>We are deeply grateful to the International Committee of the Red Cross (APPLAUSE) for its interest, dedication and efficient efforts to identify and evacuate the wounded, sick and other prisoners and the dead as quickly as possible. We are also grateful to the governments of Spain and Colombia for the immediate efforts they made in this regard. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>In bidding farewell to our beloved brothers who died heroically in combat, fulfilling with honour their patriotic and internationalist duties, and in expressing our deepest solidarity to their loved ones, we do not forget that there are Grenadian mothers and U.S. mothers who are crying for their sons who died in Grenada. (APPLAUSE) We send our condolences to the mothers and other relatives of the Grenadians who were killed and also to the mothers and other relatives of the U.S. soldiers who died because — they, who also suffer from the loss of close relatives, are not to blame for their government’s warmongering, aggressive, irresponsible actions; they, too, are its victims. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Every day, every hour, every minute — at work, at our study and combat positions — we will remember our comrades who died in Grenada. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The men whom we will bury this afternoon fought for us and for the world. They may seem to be corpses. Reagan wants to make corpses of all our people, men, women, the elderly and the children; he wants to make a corpse out of all mankind. But the people shall struggle to preserve their becoming a huge cemetery; they will struggle and pay the price necessary for mankind to survive.</p>
<p>However, they are not corpses; they are symbols. They did not even die in the land where they were born. There, far away from Cuba, where they were contributing with the noble sweat of their internationalist work in a country poorer and smaller than ours, they were also capable of shedding their blood and offering their lives. But in that trench, they knew they were also defending their own people and their own homeland.</p>
<p>It is impossible to express the generosity of human beings and their willingness to make sacrifices in a more pure way. Their example will be multiplied, their ideas will be multiplied and they themselves will be multiplied in us. No power, no weapons, no forces can ever prevail over the patriotism, internationalism, feelings of human brotherhood and communist consciousness which they embody.</p>
<p>We shall be like them, in work and in combat! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Patria o Muerte! Venceremos! (OVATION)</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
The Bells Tolling Today for Grenada May Toll Tomorrow For the Whole World
Delivered: November 14, 1983
Source: The African Communist, no. 97; Second Quarter, 1984
Transcribed: David Adams
Markup: Zdravko Saveski, 2021
Speech given by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and president of the Councils of State and of Ministers, at the eulogy for the heroes killed in unequal combat against U.S. Imperialism in Grenada. Held in Havana on November 14, 1983.
On October 15, 1976, a little over seven years ago, we gathered here, in this same place to deliver a funeral address for the 57 Cubans who were vilely murdered in the Barbados plane sabotage, carried out by men who had been trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Today we have come once again to bid farewell — this time to 24 Cubans who died in Grenada, another island not very far from Barbados, as a result of U.S. military actions.
Grenada was one of the smallest independent states in the world, both in territory and population. Even though Cuba is a small, underdeveloped country, it was able to help Grenada considerably, because our efforts — which were modest in quantity though high in quality — meant a lot for a country less than 400 square kilometers in size, with a population of just over 100,000.
For instance, the value of our contribution to Grenada in the form of materials, designs and labour in building the new airport came to $60 million at international prices — over $500 per inhabitant. It is as if Cuba -— with a population of almost 10 million — received a project worth $5000 million as a donation. In addition, there was the cooperation of our doctors, teachers and technicians in diverse specialties, plus an annual contribution of Cuban products worth about $3 million. This meant an additional annual contribution of $40 per inhabitant. It is impossible for Cuba to render material assistance on that scale to countries with significantly large populations and territories, but we were able to offer great assistance to a country like tiny Grenada.
Many other small Caribbean nations, used to the gross economic and strategic interests of colonialism and imperialism, were amazed by Cuba’s generous assistance to that fraternal people. They may have thought that Cuba’s selfless action was extraordinary; in the midst of the U.S. government’s dirty propaganda, some may even have found it difficult to understand.
Our people felt such deep friendship for Bishop and Grenada, and our respect for that country and its sovereignty was so irreproachable, that we never dared to express any opinions about what was being done there or how it was being done. In Grenada, we followed the same principles we apply to all revolutionary nations and movements: full respect for their policies, criteria and decisions; expressing our views on any matter only when asked to do so. Imperialism is incapable of understanding that the secret of our excellent relations with revolutionary countries and movements in the world lies precisely in this respect.
The U.S. government looked down on Grenada and hated Bishop. It wanted to destroy Grenada’s process and obliterate its example. It had even prepared military plans for invading the island — as Bishop had charged nearly two years ago — but it lacked pretext.
Socio-economically, Grenada was actually advancing satisfactorily. The people had received many benefits, in spite of the hostile policy of the United States, and Grenada’s Gross National Product was growing at a good rate in the midst of the world crisis. Bishop was not an extremist; rather, he was a true revolutionary — conscientious and honest. Far from disagreeing with his intelligent and realistic policy, we fully sympathized with it, since it was rigorously adapted to his country’s specific conditions and possibilities. Grenada had become a true symbol of independence and progress in the Caribbean.
Internal Conflict
No one could have foreseen the tragedy that was drawing near. Attention was focused on other parts of the world. Unfortunately, the Grenadian revolutionaries themselves unleashed the events that opened the door to imperialist aggression.
Hyenas emerged from the revolutionary ranks. Today no one can yet say whether those who used the dagger of division and internal confrontation did so motu proprio or were inspired and egged on by imperialism. It is something that could have been done by the CIA — and, if somebody else was responsible, the CIA could not have done it any better. The fact is that allegedly revolutionary arguments were used, invoking the purest principles of Marxism-Leninism and charging Bishop with practising a personality cult and drawing away from the Leninist norms and methods of leadership.
In our view, nothing could be more absurd than to attribute such tendencies to Bishop. It was impossible to imagine anyone more noble, modest and unselfish. He could never have been guilty of being authoritarian; if he had any defect, it was his excessive tolerance and trust.
Were those who conspired against him within the Grenadian Party, army and security, by any chance, a group of extremists drunk on political theory? Were they simply a group of ambitious, opportunistic individuals, or were they enemy agents who wanted to destroy the Grenadian Revolution? History alone will have the last word, but it would not be the first time that such things occurred in a revolutionary process.
In our view, Coard’s group objectively destroyed the Revolution and opened the door to imperialist aggression. Whatever their intentions, the brutal assassination of Bishop and his most loyal closest comrades is a fact that can never be justified in that or any other revolution. As the October 20 statement by the Cuban Party and government put it, “No crime can be committed in the name of revolution and liberty.”
In spite of his very close and affectionate links with our Party’s leadership, Bishop never said anything about the internal dissensions that were developing. To the contrary, in his last conversation with us he was self-critical about his work regarding attention to the armed forces and the mass organizations. Nearly all of our Party and state leaders spent many friendly, fraternal hours with him on the evening of October 7, before his return trip to Grenada.
Coard’s group never had such relations nor such intimacy and trust with us. Actually, we did not even know that group existed. It is to our Revolution’s credit that, in spite of our profound indignation over Bishop’s removal from office and arrest, we fully refrained from interfering in Grenada’s internal affairs, even though our construction workers and all our other cooperation personnel in Grenada — who did not hesitate to confront the Yankee soldiers with the weapons Bishop himself had given them for their defense in case of an attack from abroad — could have been a decisive factor in those internal events. Those weapons were never meant to be used in an internal conflict in Grenada and we would never have allowed them to be so used; we would never have been willing to use them to shed a single drop of Grenadian blood.
On October 12, Bishop was removed from office by the Central Committee, on which the conspirators had attained a majority. On the 13th, he was placed under house arrest. On the 19th, the people took to the streets and freed Bishop. Whiteman, Jacqueline Creft and other excellent revolutionary leaders were murdered. As soon as the internal dissensions which came to light on October 12 were manifest the Yankee imperialists decided to invade.
The message sent by the leadership of the Cuban Party to Coard’s group on October 15 has been made public: in it, we expressed our deep concern over both the internal and external consequences of the split and appealed to the common sense, serenity, wisdom and generosity of revolutionaries. This reference to generosity was an appeal not to use violence against Bishop and his followers. This group of Coard’s that seized power in Grenada expressed serious reservations regarding Cuba from the very beginning because of our well-known and unquestionable friendship with Bishop. The national and international press has published our strong denunciation of the events of October 19, the day Bishop was murdered. Our relations with Austin’s short-lived government, in which Coard was really in charge, were actually cold and tense, so that, at the time of the criminal Yankee aggression, there was no coordination whatsoever between the Grenadian army and the Cuban construction workers and other cooperation personnel. The basic points of the messages sent to our embassy in Grenada on October 12 through 25, the day on which the invasion took place, have been made public. These documents stand in history as irrefutable proof of our clean principled position regarding Grenada. Imperialism, however, presented the events as the coming to power of a group of hard-line Communists, loyal allies of Cuba. Were they really Communists? Were they really hard-liners? Could they really be loyal allies of Cuba? Or were they rather conscious or unconscious tools of Yankee imperialism?
The Ultra-Left
Look at the history of the revolutionary movement, and you will find more than one connection between imperialism and those who take positions that appear to be on the extreme left.
Aren’t Pol Pot and Ieng Sary — the ones responsible for the genocide in Kampuchea — the most loyal allies Yankee imperialism has in Southeast Asia at present? In Cuba, ever since the Grenadian crisis began, we have called Coard’s group — to give it a name — the “Pol Pot group.”
Our relations with the new leaders of Grenada were to be subjected to profound analysis, as was set forth in the October 20 statement by the Party and government of Cuba. In it, we also stated that due to our basic regard for the Grenadian people, we would not rush to “take any steps regarding technical and economic cooperation which may jeopardize the basic services and vital economic interests of the people of Grenada.” We could not accept the idea of leaving the Grenadians without doctors or leaving the airport, which was vital to the nation’s economy, unfinished. Most certainly, our construction workers were to leave Grenada when that project was completed, and the weapons that Bishop had given them were to be returned to the government. It was even possible that our very bad relations with the new government would make it necessary for us to leave much earlier.
The thing that placed Cuba in a morally complex, difficult situation was the announcement that Yankee naval forces were en route to Grenada. Under those circumstances, we couldn’t possibly leave the country. If the imperialists really intended to attack Grenada, it was our duty to stay there. To withdraw at that time would have been dishonorable and could even have triggered aggression in that country then and in Cuba later on. In addition, events unfolded with such incredible speed that if the evacuation had been planned for, there would not have been time to carry it out.
In Grenada however, the government was morally indefensible, and, since the Party, the government and the army had divorced themselves from the people, it was also impossible to defend the nation militarily, because a revolutionary war is only feasible and justifiable when united with the people. We could only fight, therefore, if we were directly attacked. There was no alternative.
It should nevertheless be noted that, despite these adverse circumstances, a number of Grenadian soldiers died in heroic combat against the invaders. (APPLAUSE)
The internal events, however, in no way justified Yankee intervention. Since when has the government of the United States become the arbiter of internal conflicts between revolutionaries in any given country? What right did Reagan have to rend his made over the death of Bishop, whom he so hated and opposed? What reason could there be for its brutal violation of the sovereignty of Grenada — a small independent nation that was a respected and acknowledged member of the international community? It would be the same as if another country believed it had the right to intervene in the United States because of the repulsive assassination of Martin Luther King or so many other outrages, such as those that have been committed against the black Hispanic minorities in the United States, or to intervene because John Kennedy was murdered.
The same may be said of the argument that the lives of 1000 Americans were in danger. There are many times more U.S. citizens in dozens of other countries in the world. Does this, perchance, imply the right to intervene when internal conflicts arise in those countries? There are tens of thousands of Grenadians in the United States, England and Trinidad. Could tiny Grenada intervene if domestic policy problems arose that pose some threat to its compatriots in any of those countries? Putting aside the fallacy and falseness of such pretexts for invading Grenada, is this really an international norm that can be sustained?
A thousand lessons in Marxism could not teach us any better the dirty, perfidious and aggressive nature of imperialism than the attack unleashed against Grenada at dawn on October 25 and its later development.
In order to justify its invasion of Grenada and its subsequent actions, the U.S. government and its spokesmen told lies; Reagan personally told the first 13.
1. Cuba had to do with the coup d’etat and the death of Bishop. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
2. The American students were in danger of being taken hostage. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
3. The main purpose of the invasion was to protect the lives of American citizens. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
4. The invasion was a multinational operation undertaken at the request of Mr. Scoon and the eastern Caribbean nations. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
5. Cuba was planning to invade and occupy Grenada. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
6. Grenada was being turned into an important Soviet-Cuban military base. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
7. The airport under construction was not civilian but military. (SH0UTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
8. The weapons in Grenada would be used to export subversion and terrorism. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
9. The Cubans fired first. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
10. There were over 1000 Cubans in Grenada. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
11. Most of the Cubans were not construction workers but professional soldiers. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
12. The invading forces took care not to destroy civilian property or inflict civilian casualties. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
13. The U.S. troops would remain in Grenada for a week. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
14. Missile silos were being built in Grenada. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
15. The vessel Viet Nam Heroico was transporting special weapons. (SHOUTS OF “THAT S A LIE!”)
16. Cuba was warned of the invasion. (SHOUTS OF “THAT S A LIE!”)
17. Five hundred Cubans are fighting in the mountains of Grenada. (SHOUTS OF “THAT S A LIE!”)
18. Cuba has issued instructions for reprisals to be taken against U.S. citizens. (SHOUTS OF “THAT’S A LIE!”)
19. The journalists were excluded for their own protection. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “LIARS!” “FIDEL, FIDEL, GIVE ‘EM HELL; LET’S MAKE ‘EM RESPECT US WELL!”)
None of these assertions were proved, none are true and all have been refuted by the facts. This cynical way of lying in order to justify invading a tiny country reminds us of the methods Adolf Hitler used during the years leading up to World War II.
The U.S. students and officials of the medical school located there acknowledged that they were given full guarantees for U.S. citizens and the necessary facilities for those who wanted to leave the country. Moreover, Cuba had informed the U.S. government on October 22 that no foreign citizens, including Cubans, had been disturbed, and it offered to cooperate in solving any difficulty that might arise, so that problems could be settled without violence or intervention in that country.
No U.S. citizen had been disturbed at all prior to the invasion, and if anything endangered them, it was the war unleashed by the United States. Cuba’s instructions to its personnel not to interfere with any actions to evacuate U.S. citizens in the area of the runway under construction near the university contributed to protecting tie U.S. citizens residing in that country. Reagan’s reference to the possibility that Grenada might turn into another Iran — a reference calculated to appeal to the U.S. feelings wounded in that episode — is a demagogic, politicking, dishonest argument.
The assertion that the new airport was a military one — an old lie that the Reagan administration had dwelt on a lot — was categorically refuted by the English capitalist firm that supplied and installed the electrical and technical equipment for that airport. The British technicians of the Plessey company, which has made a name for itself internationally as a specialist in this field, worked alongside the Cuban construction workers, to whose civilian worker status they attest. Several countries of the European community that are members of the Atlantic alliance cooperated in one way or another with the airport. How can anyone •imagine them helping Cuba to build a military airport in Grenada?
However, the idea that Grenada was being turned into a Soviet-Cuban base is refuted by the proved fact that there wasn’t even one Soviet military adviser on the island.
Agreements for Co-operation
The supposedly secret documents that fell into the hands of the United States and were published by the Yankee administration a few days after the invasion refer to the agreement between the governments of Cuba and Grenada by virtue of which our country was to send Grenada 27 military advisers, which could later be increased to 40 — figures that coincide with the ones Cuba published on the number of advisers, which was 22 on the day of the attack, to which were added a similar number of translators and service personnel from the mission. Nowhere in those documents that they have been crowing over is there something that has anything to do with the idea of military bases in Grenada. What they do show is that the weapons that the Soviet Union supplied to the government of Grenada for the army and the militia were subject to an article that prohibited their export to third countries, which refutes the idea that Grenada had been turned into an arsenal for supplying weapons to subversive, terrorist organizations, as the present administration likes to call all the revolutionary and national liberation movements. No weapons ever left Grenada for any other country, and, therefore, Reagan can never prove that any did.
The assertion that Cuba was about to invade and occupy Grenada is so unrealistic, absurd, crazy and alien to our principles and international policy that it cannot even be taken seriously. What has been proved is the absolutely scrupulous way in which we refrained from meddling in the internal affairs of that country, in spite of our deep affection for Bishop and our total rejection of Coard and his group’s conspiracy and coup, which could serve only the interests of imperialism and its plans for destroying the Grenadian Revolution. The messages containing precise, categorical instructions to our embassy in Grenada, which have been widely publicized by the government of Cuba, constitute irrefutable proof of the clear position of principles maintained by the leadership of our Party and state with regard to the internal events in Grenada.
The civilian status of the vast majority of the Cuban cooperation personnel in Grenada has been shown to the whole world by the hundreds of foreign journalists who saw them arriving in our country and who were able to interview each and every one of them. Nearly 50 percent of them were over 40 years old. Who could question their status as civilian cooperation personnel and workers with long years of experience on their jobs?
Cuba Told The Truth
When the U.S. government spokesmen asserted that there were from 1,000 to 1,500 Cubans in Grenada at the time of the invasion and that hundreds of them were still fighting in the mountains, Cuba published the exact number of Cuban citizens who were in Grenada on the day of the invasion: 784, including diplomatic personnel with their children and other relatives. The agencies that sent them and the kind of work they did were also reported, as well as the instructions given them to fight in their work areas and camps if attacked, and the fact that it was impossible — according to the information we had — for hundreds to remain in the mountains. Later, the names and jobs of all cooperation workers were published, as well as the known or probable situation of each one. The facts have shown that the information provided by Cuba was absolutely true. There isn’t a single fact in all that information that could be proven false.
The assertion that the Cubans initiated the acts of hostility is equally false and cynical. The irrefutable truth is that the Cubans were sleeping and their weapons were stored at the time of the air drop on the runway and around the camps. They had not been distributed. There weren’t enough to go around, and they weren’t distributed until the landing was already under way, and that is when the Cuban personnel went to the places assigned to them for that emergency. Even so, our personnel, now organized and armed, had time to see the U.S. paratroopers regrouping on the runway and the first planes landing. That was the invaders’ weakest moment. If the Cubans had fired first, they would have killed or wounded dozens — perhaps hundreds — of U.S. soldiers in those early hours. (APPLAUSE) What is strictly historical and strictly true is that the fighting began when the U.S. troops advanced toward the Cubans in a belligerent way. It is also true that when a group of unarmed cooperation personnel was captured, they were used as hostages and forced to lead the way in front of the U.S. soldiers.
No Warning
The invasion of Grenada was a treacherous surprise attack, with no previous warning at all — just like Pearl Harbour, just like the Nazis. The note from the government of the United States to the government of Cuba on Tuesday, October 24, in an attempted response to our note of Saturday, October 22, was delivered at 8:30 in the morning, three hours after the landing had taken place and an hour and a half after the U.S. troops began attacking our compatriots in Grenada. Actually, on the afternoon of the 25th, the U.S. government sent the government of Cuba a deceitful note that led us to believe that the fighting would cease in a reasonable and honorable manner, thus avoiding greater bloodshed. Although we immediately responded to that note, accepting that possibility, what the U.S. government did was to land the 82nd Airborne Division at dawn on the 26th and attack with all its forces the Cuban position that was still resisting. Is this the way a serious government behaves? Is this the way to warn of an attack? Was this the way to avoid greater bloodshed?
Mr. Scoon blatantly declared that he approved of the invasion but that he had not previously asked anyone to invade Grenada. A few days after the landing, Mr. Scoon — lodged in the Guam helicopter-carrier — signed a letter officially requesting the intervention. Reagan could not prove any of his false assertions.
When as a pretext for keeping the Vietnam Heroico — which was in the port of St. George’s on the day of the invasion — from being used as a means of transportation for evacuating the Cuban hostages from Grenada, it was alleged that it carried special weapons, its captain was immediately asked if by any chance he carried weapons on board, and the only thing that was determined was that it had just one fearful weapon — its name: Vietnam. (APPLAUSE)
The slanderous charge that Cuba had given instructions to carry out actions against U.S. citizens in other countries was given a worthy, official and public reply based on reality, proven by the history of the Revolution, that Cuba has always been opposed to acts of reprisal against innocent people.
The government of the United States has not condescended to offer the number of people arrested nor the figure of Grenadian losses, including civilian losses. A hospital for the mentally ill was bombed, killing dozens of patients.
And where is Mr. Reagan’s promise that U.S. troops would withdraw in a week? President Reagan himself in his first address to the U.S. people, at 8:30 a.m. on the day of the invasion, in a speech prepared before the landing, stated that the situation was under control. That same day, his own spokesmen described the resistance the invading forces were facing. The military ride the Pentagon had planned would take four hours did not take into account the tenacious and heroic resistance of the Cuban cooperation personnel and the Grenadian soldiers. (APPLAUSE)
Twisting the Truth
Who, then, has told the truth, and who has cynically lied about the events in Grenada? No foreign journalists — not even those from the United States — were allowed to see and report on the events on the spot. The pretext that this prohibition was a security measure for the journalists is both superficial and ridiculous. What they obviously wanted was to monopolize and manipulate the information so they could lie without any let or hindrance to world public opinion, including the people of the United States. This was the only way they could spread deliberate lies and falsehoods of all kinds — which would be difficult to clear up and refute after their initial impact and effect on the people of the United States. Even in this, the method used by the U.S. administration was fascist.
What is left now, objectively, of those 19 assertions? Where are the silos for strategic missiles that were being built in Grenada? But all those lies that the world did not believe, told by the U.S. president and his spokesmen, made a tremendous impact on U.S. public opinion.
Moreover, the invasion of Grenada was presented to the U.S. people as a great victory for Reagan’s foreign policy against the socialist camp and the revolutionary movement. It was linked to the tragic death of 240 U.S. soldiers in Beirut, to the memory of the hostages in Iran, to the humiliating defeat in Vietnam and to the resurgence of the United States as an influential power on the world scene. A dirty, dishonest appeal was made to U.S. patriotism, to national pride, to the grandeur and glory of the nation. This was how they got a majority of the U.S. people — it is said that it was 65 percent at first and then 71 percent — to support the monstrous crime of invading a sovereign country without any justification, the reprehensible method of launching a surprise attack, the press censorship and all the other similar procedures the U.S. government used for invading and justifying its invasion of Grenada. Hitler acted the same way when he occupied Austria in 1938 and annexed Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, in the name of German pride, German grandeur and glory and the happiness and security of German subjects. If a poll had been taken in Hitler Germany at that time, in the midst of the chauvinistic wave unleashed by the Nazis, around 80 or 90 percent of the people would have approved of those aggressions.
The deplorable, truly dangerous fact — not only for the peoples of the Caribbean, Central America and Latin America, but for all the peoples of the world — is that, when world opinion unanimously denounced the warmongering, aggressive, unjustifiable action that violated a people’s sovereignty and all international norms and principles, most of the people of the United States- manipulated, disinformed and deceived-supported the monstrous crime committed by the government.
There is something even more disturbing: when this about-face was effected in U.S. public opinion, many U.S. politicians who initially had opposed these events ended up by condoning Reagan’s actions, and the press — censored, humiliated and kept at a distance from the events — ended up moderating its complaints and criticisms.
Are these, perchance, the virtues of a society where the opinion and the political and informational institutions can be grossly manipulated by its rulers, as they were in German society in the time of fascism? Where is the glory, the grandeur and the victory in invading and defeating one of the tiniest countries in the world, of no economic or strategic significance? Where is the heroism in fighting a handful of workers and other civilian cooperation personnel whose heroic resistance — in spite of the surprise element; the shortage of ammunition; and their disadvantages in terms offered in, arms and numbers — against the air, sea and land forces of the most powerful imperialist country in the world forced it to bring in the 82nd Airborne Division, when the last stronghold was being defended at dawn on October 26 by barely 50 fighters? (APPLAUSE) The United States did not achieve any victory at all — not political or military or moral. If anything, it was a Pyrrhic military victory and a profound moral defeat, as we pointed out on another occasion.
The imperialist government of the United States wanted to kill the symbol of the Grenadian Revolution, but the symbol was already dead. The Grenadian revolutionaries themselves destroyed it with their split and their colossal errors. We believe that, after the death of Bishop and his closest comrades, after the army fired on the people and after the Party and the government divorced themselves from the masses and isolated themselves from the world, the Grenadian revolutionary process could not survive.
In its efforts to destroy a symbol, the United States killed a corpse and brought the symbol back to life at the same time. (APPLAUSE) Was it for this that it challenged international law and won the repudiation and condemnation of the world?
Does it feel such contempt for the rest of mankind? Is that contempt really so great that Mr. Reagan’s appetite for breakfast on November 3 was not at all affected, as he declared before the press?
Threat to World Peace
If unfortunately all this were true — and it seems to be — the invasion of Grenada should lead us to an awareness of the realities and dangers that threaten the world. Mr. O’Neill, speaker of the House of Representatives, said that it was sinful that a man who was totally uninformed and ignorant about the international problems and who doesn’t even read the documents was president of the United States. If we consider that the United States has powerful sophisticated means of conventional and nuclear warfare and that the president of that country can declare war without consulting anyone, it is not only sinful but truly dramatic and tragic for all mankind.
An air of triumph reigns in the Reagan administration. The echoes of the last shots in Grenada have barely died away and there is talk of intervening in El Salvador, Nicaragua and even Cuba.
In the Middle East and Southern Africa imperialism’s acts of interference and military aggression against progressive countries and, national liberation movements continue unabated.
In Europe, the first of the 572 Pershing and Cruise missiles are already being deployed, surrounding the USSR and other socialist countries with a deadly ring of nuclear weapons that can reach their territories in a matter of minutes.
Not just the small countries, but all mankind is threatened. The bells tolling today for Grenada may toll tomorrow for the whole world.
The most prestigious and experienced scientists and doctors assure us that man could not survive a global nuclear conflict. The destructive power of these stockpiled weapons is a million times greater than that of the unsophisticated bombs, that wiped out the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in just a few seconds. This is what the Reagan administration’s aggressive, warmongering policy can lead to.
Meanwhile, the arms race is already a reality in the midst of the worst economic crisis the world has witnessed since the ’30s. And, with the problems of development of the vast majority of the peoples in the world still to be solved, who can feel confidence in a government that acts as precipitately, rashly and cynically as the U.S. government did in Grenada? Reagan did not even bother to listen to the advice of a government as closely linked to him politically, ideologically and militarily as the British government. It is not strange that, in a poll taken just a few days ago, more than 90 percent of the British were categorically opposed to• the United States’ having the unilateral prerogative of using the Cruise missiles that are being deployed there.
In our hemisphere, just a year and a half ago, a NATO power used sophisticated war means to shed Argentine blood in the Malvinas. The Reagan administration supported that action. It did not even consider the Organization of American States or the so-called security pacts and agreements, but scornfully pushed them aside. Now, basing itself on the alleged request of a phantasmagoric Organization of Eastern Caribbean states, it has invaded Grenada and shed Caribbean blood and Cuban blood. Nicaragua paid a price of over forty thousand lives for freedom, and nearly a thousand more sons of that noble people have been killed in the attacks made by mercenary bands organized, trained and equipped by the U.S. government. In El Salvador, over 50,000 people have been murdered by a genocidal regime whose army is equipped trained and directed by the United States. In Guatemala, more than 100,000 have died at the hands of the repressive system installed by the CIA in 1954 when it overthrew the progressive Arbenz government. How many have died in Chile since imperialism staged the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende? How many have died in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay. Brazil and Bolivia in the last 15 years?
What a high price our people have paid in blood, sacrifice, poverty and mourning for imperialist domination and the unjust social system it has imposed on our nations!
Our Ideas Will Multiply
Imperialism is bent on destroying symbols, because it knows the value of symbols, of examples and of ideas. It wanted to destroy them in Grenada and it wants to destroy them in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba; but symbols, examples and ideas cannot be destroyed. When their enemies think they have destroyed them, what they have actually done is made them multiply. (APPLAUSE) In trying to wipe out the first Christians, the Roman emperors spread Christianity throughout the world. Likewise, all attempts to destroy our ideas will only multiply them.
Grenada has already multiplied the Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and Cuban revolutionaries’ patriotic conviction and fighting spirit. (APPLAUSE) It has been proved that the best U.S. troops can be fought and that they are not feared. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS) The imperialists must not ignore the fact that they will encounter fierce resistance wherever they attack a revolutionary people. Let us hope that their Pyrrhic victory in Grenada and their air of triumph don’t go to their heads, leading them to commit serious, irreversible errors.
They will not find in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba the particular circumstances of revolutionaries divided among themselves and divorced from the people that they found in tiny Grenada. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS)
In more than three years of heroic struggle, the Salvadoran revolutionaries have become experienced, fearsome and invincible fighters. There are thousands of them who know the land inch by inch, veterans of dozens of victorious combats who are accustomed to fighting-and winning when the odds are one to ten against elite troops, trained, armed and advised by the United States. Their unity is more solid and indestructible than ever.
In Nicaragua, the imperialists would have to confront a deeply patriotic and revolutionary people that is united, organized, armed and ready to fight and that can never be subjugated. (APPLAUSE)
With regard to Cuba, if in Grenada, the imperialists had to bring in an elite division to fight against a handful of isolated men struggling in a small stronghold, lacking fortifications, a thousand miles from their homeland, how many divisions would they need against millions of combatants fighting on their own soil alongside their own people? (PROLONGED APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS)
Our country — as we have already said on other occasions — might be wiped off the face of the earth, but it will never be conquered and subjugated (PROLONGED APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS OF “COMMANDER IN CHIEF WE AWAIT YOUR ORDERS!”)
In the present conditions of our continent, a U.S. war against a Latin American people would raise the morale of all the peoples of Latin America and turn their feelings against the aggressors. A bottomless abyss would be opened between peoples that, because they are in the same hemisphere, are called upon to live in peace, friendship and mutual respect, and cooperate with one another.
The experiences of Grenada will be examined in detail to extract the utmost benefit from them for use in case of another attack against a country where there are Cuban cooperation personnel or on our own homeland. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS)
The Cubans who were captured and virtually turned into hostages had an unforgettable experience of what a country occupied by Yankee invading troops is like. The physical and psychological treatment given the cooperation personnel who were taken prisoner was insulting and a cause for indignation, and promises of all kinds were made to each of them to try to get them to go to the United States. But they were not able to break their steel like staunchness. Not a single one deserted his homeland. (APPLAUSE AND SHOUTS)
There was no manipulation of the news, nothing was hidden from the people, in our country. All reports concerning the invasion that were received directly from Grenada were transmitted to our population just as they arrived, even though the ones on October 26 turned out to be exaggerated. As a matter of principle, at no time were efforts made to play down the seriousness of the situation or to minimize the magnitude of the dangers facing our compatriots.
We are deeply grateful to the International Committee of the Red Cross (APPLAUSE) for its interest, dedication and efficient efforts to identify and evacuate the wounded, sick and other prisoners and the dead as quickly as possible. We are also grateful to the governments of Spain and Colombia for the immediate efforts they made in this regard. (APPLAUSE)
In bidding farewell to our beloved brothers who died heroically in combat, fulfilling with honour their patriotic and internationalist duties, and in expressing our deepest solidarity to their loved ones, we do not forget that there are Grenadian mothers and U.S. mothers who are crying for their sons who died in Grenada. (APPLAUSE) We send our condolences to the mothers and other relatives of the Grenadians who were killed and also to the mothers and other relatives of the U.S. soldiers who died because — they, who also suffer from the loss of close relatives, are not to blame for their government’s warmongering, aggressive, irresponsible actions; they, too, are its victims. (APPLAUSE)
Every day, every hour, every minute — at work, at our study and combat positions — we will remember our comrades who died in Grenada. (APPLAUSE)
The men whom we will bury this afternoon fought for us and for the world. They may seem to be corpses. Reagan wants to make corpses of all our people, men, women, the elderly and the children; he wants to make a corpse out of all mankind. But the people shall struggle to preserve their becoming a huge cemetery; they will struggle and pay the price necessary for mankind to survive.
However, they are not corpses; they are symbols. They did not even die in the land where they were born. There, far away from Cuba, where they were contributing with the noble sweat of their internationalist work in a country poorer and smaller than ours, they were also capable of shedding their blood and offering their lives. But in that trench, they knew they were also defending their own people and their own homeland.
It is impossible to express the generosity of human beings and their willingness to make sacrifices in a more pure way. Their example will be multiplied, their ideas will be multiplied and they themselves will be multiplied in us. No power, no weapons, no forces can ever prevail over the patriotism, internationalism, feelings of human brotherhood and communist consciousness which they embody.
We shall be like them, in work and in combat! (APPLAUSE)
Patria o Muerte! Venceremos! (OVATION)
Fidel Castro Internet Archive | Grenadian Revolution Archive
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<p class="storyheadline">Nobody Wants to Take the Bull by the Horns</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
<div class="feature">
<p>On March 28, less than two months ago, when Bush proclaimed his diabolical idea of producing fuel from food, after a meeting with the most important U.S. automobile manufacturers, I wrote my first reflection. The head of the empire was bragging that the United States was now the first world producer of ethanol, using corn as raw material. Hundreds of factories were being built or enlarged in the United States just for that purpose.</p>
<p>During those days, the industrialized and rich nations were already toying with the same idea of using all kinds of cereals and oil seeds, including sunflower and soy which are excellent sources of proteins and oils. That’s why I chose to title that reflection: “More Than 3 Billion People in the World Are Being Condemned to a Premature Death from Hunger and Thirst.”</p>
<p>The dangers for the environment and for the human species were a topic that I had been meditating on for years. What I never imagined was the imminence of the danger. We as yet were not aware of the new scientific information about the celerity of climatic changes and their immediate consequences.</p>
<p>On April 3, after Bush’s visit to Brazil, I wrote my reflections about “The internationalization of genocide.” At the same time, I warned that the deadly and sophisticated weapons that were being produced in the United States and in other countries could annihilate the life of the human species in a matter of days.</p>
<p>To give humanity a respite and an opportunity to science and to the dubious good sense of the decision-makers, it is not necessary to take food away from two-thirds of the inhabitants of the planet.</p>
<p>We have supplied information about the savings that could be made simply by replacing incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent ones, using approximate calculations. They are numbers followed by 11 and 12 zeros. The first corresponds to hundreds of billions of dollars saved in fuel each year, and the second to trillions of dollars in necessary investments to produce that electricity by merely changing light bulbs, meaning less than 10 percent of the total expenses and a considerable saving of time.</p>
<p>With complete clarity, we have expressed that CO<sub>2</sub> emissions, besides other pollutant gases, have been leading us quickly towards a rapid and inexorable climatic change.</p>
<p>It was not easy to deal with these topics because of their dramatic and almost fatal content.</p>
<p>The fourth reflection was titled: “It is imperative to immediately have an energy revolution.” Proof of the waste of energy in the United States and of the inequality of its distribution in the world is that in the year 2005, there were less than 15 automobiles for each thousand people in China; there were 514 in Europe and 940 in the United States.</p>
<p>The last of these countries, one of the richest territories in hydrocarbons, today suffers from a large deficit of oil and gas. According to Bush, these fuels must be extracted from foods, which are needed for the more and more hungry bellies of the poor of this Earth.</p>
<p>On May Day 2006, I ended my speech to the people with the following words: “If the efforts being made by Cuba today were imitated by all the other countries in the world, the following would happen:</p>
<p>“First, the proved and potential hydrocarbon reserves would last twice as long.</p>
<p>“Second, the pollution unleashed on the environment by these hydrocarbons would be halved.</p>
<p>“Third, the world economy would have a break, since the enormous volume of transportation means and electrical appliances should be recycled.</p>
<p>“Fourth, a fifteen-year moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants could be declared.”</p>
<p>Changing light bulbs was the first thing we did in Cuba, and we have cooperated with various Caribbean nations to do the same. In Venezuela, the government has replaced 53 million incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent in more than 95 percent of the homes receiving electrical power. All the other measures to save energy are being resolutely carried out.</p>
<p>Everything I am saying has been proven.</p>
<p>Why is it that we just hear rumors without the leadership of industrialized countries openly committing to an energy revolution, which implies changes in concepts and hopes about growth and consumerism that have contaminated quite a few poor nations? Could it be that there is some other way of confronting the extremely serious dangers threatening us all?</p>
<p>Nobody wants to take the bull by the horns.</p>
<p>—<i>CubaNews</i>, May 22, 2007</p>
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Jul/Aug 2007 • Vol 7, No. 4
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Nobody Wants to Take the Bull by the Horns
By Fidel Castro Ruz
On March 28, less than two months ago, when Bush proclaimed his diabolical idea of producing fuel from food, after a meeting with the most important U.S. automobile manufacturers, I wrote my first reflection. The head of the empire was bragging that the United States was now the first world producer of ethanol, using corn as raw material. Hundreds of factories were being built or enlarged in the United States just for that purpose.
During those days, the industrialized and rich nations were already toying with the same idea of using all kinds of cereals and oil seeds, including sunflower and soy which are excellent sources of proteins and oils. That’s why I chose to title that reflection: “More Than 3 Billion People in the World Are Being Condemned to a Premature Death from Hunger and Thirst.”
The dangers for the environment and for the human species were a topic that I had been meditating on for years. What I never imagined was the imminence of the danger. We as yet were not aware of the new scientific information about the celerity of climatic changes and their immediate consequences.
On April 3, after Bush’s visit to Brazil, I wrote my reflections about “The internationalization of genocide.” At the same time, I warned that the deadly and sophisticated weapons that were being produced in the United States and in other countries could annihilate the life of the human species in a matter of days.
To give humanity a respite and an opportunity to science and to the dubious good sense of the decision-makers, it is not necessary to take food away from two-thirds of the inhabitants of the planet.
We have supplied information about the savings that could be made simply by replacing incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent ones, using approximate calculations. They are numbers followed by 11 and 12 zeros. The first corresponds to hundreds of billions of dollars saved in fuel each year, and the second to trillions of dollars in necessary investments to produce that electricity by merely changing light bulbs, meaning less than 10 percent of the total expenses and a considerable saving of time.
With complete clarity, we have expressed that CO2 emissions, besides other pollutant gases, have been leading us quickly towards a rapid and inexorable climatic change.
It was not easy to deal with these topics because of their dramatic and almost fatal content.
The fourth reflection was titled: “It is imperative to immediately have an energy revolution.” Proof of the waste of energy in the United States and of the inequality of its distribution in the world is that in the year 2005, there were less than 15 automobiles for each thousand people in China; there were 514 in Europe and 940 in the United States.
The last of these countries, one of the richest territories in hydrocarbons, today suffers from a large deficit of oil and gas. According to Bush, these fuels must be extracted from foods, which are needed for the more and more hungry bellies of the poor of this Earth.
On May Day 2006, I ended my speech to the people with the following words: “If the efforts being made by Cuba today were imitated by all the other countries in the world, the following would happen:
“First, the proved and potential hydrocarbon reserves would last twice as long.
“Second, the pollution unleashed on the environment by these hydrocarbons would be halved.
“Third, the world economy would have a break, since the enormous volume of transportation means and electrical appliances should be recycled.
“Fourth, a fifteen-year moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants could be declared.”
Changing light bulbs was the first thing we did in Cuba, and we have cooperated with various Caribbean nations to do the same. In Venezuela, the government has replaced 53 million incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent in more than 95 percent of the homes receiving electrical power. All the other measures to save energy are being resolutely carried out.
Everything I am saying has been proven.
Why is it that we just hear rumors without the leadership of industrialized countries openly committing to an energy revolution, which implies changes in concepts and hopes about growth and consumerism that have contaminated quite a few poor nations? Could it be that there is some other way of confronting the extremely serious dangers threatening us all?
Nobody wants to take the bull by the horns.
—CubaNews, May 22, 2007
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<p><a name="top"></a><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="4"><b><a href="may_02.html">May 2002 • Vol 2, No. 5 •</a></b></font></p>
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<p align="CENTER"><b><font color="black" size="5" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Speech by Fidel Castro President of Cuba at the International Workers’ Day Celebration in</font></b></p>
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<p align="CENTER"><b><font size="5" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Revolution Square, Havana,</font></b></p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font size="5" face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">May 1, 2002</font></b></p>
<hr noshade="" size="3" width="75%">
<p>Distinguished guests;</p>
<p>Dear countrymen:</p>
<p>We were condemned in Geneva by those who believe that this sea of people gathered here, which can be seen from every corner of the globe, has been deprived of its human rights. I am certain that not one of those Latin American countries that promoted, co-sponsored or supported this project could gather even 5 percent of the number here in their respective capitals</p>
<p>Are these fanatic, ignorant and uncultured individuals who lack any historical or political knowledge? If we were to ask this mass of people if there were any amongst them who could not read or write; or if there were any functional illiterate people who had never studied beyond grammar school, not one person could raise their hand. But if we were to ask how many of this same mass have the education of a ninth grader or above, more than 90 percent, would raise their hands. The only ones who wouldn’t raise their hands would be the students who haven’t yet reached their 15th birthdays.</p>
<p>Our people’s glorious tradition of rebellion and patriotic struggle, to which we must today add a full and profound understanding of freedom, equality and human dignity; their solidarity and internationalist spirit; their self-confidence and heroic conduct; 43 years of tenacious and unrelenting struggle against the powerful empire; a broad and solid political culture and an extraordinary humanism—all of these qualities cultivated by the Revolution—have made Cuba a unique country.</p>
<p>Wretched indeed is the destiny of hundreds of millions of people in this part of the world who, from a truly human perspective, have been as yet unable to emerge from humanity’s prehistory. And it will not be possible for them to escape such condition while the pillage that slaughtered tens of millions of their native ancestors, successively turning their countries into colonies, neo-colonies and economically dependent and underdeveloped countries, continues to govern their destiny.</p>
<p>Events prior to, during and after Geneva are barely distinguishable from the shameful history with which our people have been more than familiar since the very first days after the triumph of the Revolution on January 1st, 1959.</p>
<p>Cuba was the last Latin American country to free itself from Spanish colonialism after a heroic and lone struggle. Yet, it was unable to enjoy that victory, as it immediately fell in the hands of the fledgling North American empire, from which it once again liberated itself with the same determination and heroism 61 years later although it would be disgracefully abandoned and betrayed by every other Latin American government.</p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Every oligarchy and bourgeois government joined against Cuba</font></b></p>
<p>No book by Marx or Lenin could illustrate the anti-national, submissive and treacherous nature of the Latin American oligarchies and the true significance of imperialism for the destiny of our people as clearly as the last 43 years of our Revolution’s history. Every oligarchic and bourgeois government joined in the imperialist policy of isolation, blockade and aggression against Cuba, the sole exception being a country that had experienced its own great social revolution some decades before, the same that brought justice and real progress to the people of a nation mutilated by the insatiable expansionism of its northern neighbor and made the martyr on numerous occasions throughout its hazardous and painful history of foreign intervention and conquest. Tragically, this time the exception has become rule.</p>
<p>Cuba is no longer the illiterate, uncultured and inexperienced country of those early days. Today, the Latin American population, that numbered 208 millions at that time including the English-speaking Caribbean nations, have swelled to 526 millions. They have also had the opportunity to learn firsthand the meaning of imperialist domination, exploitation, injustice and pillage. Despite the deluge of slander and lies against our exemplary people and their admirable struggle, and in the face of countless capitulations across the globe, there are ever more people who realize that Cuba is a powerful moral force, that defends the truth and shows its solidarity with other people of the world.</p>
<p>Our Latin American brothers have repeatedly been told stories as fantastic as those in the “Arabian nights,” in which they believe less and less every day. For 50 years they have been told that the hundreds of thousands of children that die every year due to neglect and hunger; the millions that work for pitiful salaries cleaning car windshields or shoes, or being traded or sexually exploited instead of going to school, represent democracy and respect for human rights.</p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Real nature of capitalist rule in Latin American “democracies”</font></b></p>
<p>That the hundreds of millions of human beings living in poverty despite the immense wealth and natural resources that surround them; the vast number of unemployed and underemployed people and informal laborers who survive without the slightest aid, social security or protection; the medical neglect of mothers, children, old people and the poor population in general; the marginalization, drugs, lack of security and crime, are called democracy; are called respect for human rights. That the death squads, summary executions, torture, and the vanishing and murder of people; that the bribery, misappropriation, diversion and bare-faced robbery of public funds while schools and hospitals are closed, national assets and resources are privatized or often given away to domestic and foreign friends and partners in crime and corruption, constitute the fullest expression of democracy and human rights. It doesn’t occur to them that the economic, political and social system that they defend is a total negation of all possibility of equality, freedom, democracy, human dignity and justice.</p>
<p>An illiterate person or one whose education barely surpasses 4th grade, or one who lives in poverty or extreme poverty, or is unemployed or lives in shanty towns where the most unimaginable conditions are rife, or a person who wanders the streets exposed to the constant poison of commercial advertising sowing the seeds of fantasies, illusions and the desire for impossible consumption, a person such as this, that indeed could include vast numbers of people in the desperate daily fight for survival, could be the victim of every kind of abuse, blackmail, pressure and deceit and could lack any representative organization or see these crushed. It is certainly unlikely that such a person could be in a position to understand the complex problems of the world and the society in which they live. They are in no position to exercise their democratic rights, nor decide which is the most honest or demagogic or hypocritical candidate, this under a torrent of propaganda and lies where those with the most resources spout the most lies and deceit.</p>
<p>No freedom of expression can exist where the principal and most effective media are an exclusive monopoly in the hands of the richest and most privileged sectors, sworn enemies of any economic, political or social change. The enjoyment of wealth, education, knowledge and culture are the preserve of those who, accounting for a tiny fraction of the population, receive the larger part of the goods produced in their countries. It is no coincidence that Latin America exhibits the greatest differences between the richest and the poorest.</p>
<p>What kind of democracy and human rights could exist in these conditions? It would be like trying to grow flowers in the middle of the Sahara desert.</p>
<p>On the other hand, when the total stripping of natural resources and the appropriation of human labor is presented as the ideal social and development model and the FTAA, i.e. the annexation and absorption of Latin America by the United States and dollarization are offered as the only way, it is clear that the prevailing political and economic system is approaching total crisis.</p>
<p>Events in Argentina, that is today embroiled in an unbelievable economic and political chaos that has reduced the country to hunger, with more than 20 percent unemployment among the working population and where the people’s bank savings—especially those of the middle and lower income classes—have been practically confiscated, point to nothing less than the swan song of neoliberal globalization. Such a crisis inevitably produces a complete lack of ethics and values.</p>
<p>The behavior of many leaders as they watch their model economies collapse like so many houses of cards is truly obnoxious.</p>
<p>People’s protests are crushed with amazing violence. Tear gas, people dragged through the streets, brutality exercised against masses by the police armed with shields and swathed in the strangest helmets and outfits giving them the appearance of recent arrivals from a distant planet, are the methods used to defend that democracy and their citizen’s human rights.</p>
<p>Similar scenes have never been witnessed in our country. Never, over more than four decades, has force been used against our people. The revolutionary process grows out of the closest unity and cooperation of all our people, under a consensus without precedent in any other country in the world, unworkable and even unimaginable in a society of exploiters and exploited.</p>
<p>A cultured, rebellious, brave and heroic people such as the Cuban could never be ruled by force, nor a force exist that would rule it because the Cuban people is the force. Never would our people stir up rebellion against themselves because they are the revolution, they are the government, they are the power. It is with their courage, intelligence and ideas that they have defended themselves from the most powerful empire the world has ever known.</p>
<p>Such a political phenomenon had never before occurred in our hemisphere.</p>
<p>Force has always been used by the oligarchs and the empire against the people.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">A statistical comparison of crucial indices</font></b></p>
<p>Each and every one of the Latin American countries that condemned us in Geneva or co-sponsored the draft resolution against Cuba are well below achieving the educational, cultural and social rates that are essential for a healthy, decent and just life of their citizens. Not one can match Cuba in a single one of these rates.</p>
<p>For the sake of time, I will outline just a few figures for Latin America as a whole as compared to Cuba.</p>
<p>Illiteracy rate: Latin America, 11.7 percent; Cuba, 0.2 percent</p>
<p>Inhabitants per teacher: Latin America, 98.4; Cuba, 43, in other words, 2.3 times as many teachers per capita</p>
<p>Primary education enrollment ratio: Latin America, 92 percent; Cuba, 100 percent</p>
<p>Secondary education enrollment ratio: Latin America, 52 percent; Cuba, 99.7 percent</p>
<p>Primary school students reaching Fifth Grade: Latin America, 76 percent; Cuba, 100 percent</p>
<p>Infant mortality per thousand live births: Latin America, 32; Cuba, 6.2</p>
<p>Medical doctors per hundred thousand inhabitants: Latin America, 160; Cuba, 590</p>
<p>Dentists per hundred thousand inhabitants: Latin America, 63; Cuba, 89</p>
<p>Nurses per hundred thousand inhabitants: Latin America, 69; Cuba, 743</p>
<p>Hospital beds per 100 thousand inhabitants: Latin America, 220; Cuba, 631.6</p>
<p>Medically attended births: Latin America, 86.5 percent; Cuba, 100 percent</p>
<p>Life expectancy at birth: Latin America, 70 years; Cuba, 76 years</p>
<p>Population between 15 and 49 years of age infected with HIV/AIDS: Latin America, 0.5 percent; Cuba, 0.05 percent</p>
<p>Annual AIDS infection rate per million inhabitants, i.e. those who develop the disease: Latin America, 65.25; Cuba, 15.6</p>
<p>The first international study of the Latin American Laboratory of Evaluation of Educational Quality, carried out in 12 Latin American countries including Cuba, produced the following results.</p>
<p>Although these data have been already mentioned, I would like to briefly refer to them in detail:</p>
<p>In Language, 3rd Grade: Cuba, 85.74 points; the remaining 11 countries, 59.11 points</p>
<p>In Language, 4th Grade: Cuba, 87.25; the rest, 63.75</p>
<p>In Mathematics, 3rd Grade: Cuba, 87.75; the rest, 58.31</p>
<p>In Mathematics, 4th Grade: Cuba, 88.25; the rest, 62.04</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">What is or will be the future of those countries?</font></b></p>
<p>According to these figures, of the seven Latin American countries that voted against Cuba, four—Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay—that had boasted in the past of being the most advanced in the region, fall well behind Cuban figures. In some of these, they reach or scrape past the half way mark in comparison to Cuba, but in others they are very well below. This is the case of pre-school education for 0-5 year olds, for example, that only reaches 15.8 percent of the children in that age group in Chile as compared to Cuba’s 99.2 percent.</p>
<p>It requires a truly cynical person to join such a Mafia-style adventure, in which they have been involved at the urge of the imperial overlords.</p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Events in Venezuela</font></b></p>
<p>The response to the emergence of the Bolivarian Revolution in which the people and the military joined together to unleash a revolutionary and democratic process that is also unprecedented, was a fascist coup d’état.</p>
<p>The privileged oligarchy, that enjoys the bulk of the country’s income and owns the most powerful media, set its followers on the Bolivarian people and the headquarters of the President himself under the influence and support of imperialism. Their goal was a bloody encounter that could be used to justify the coordinated actions of a small but extremely well-placed military force. Miraculously a bloody civil war was averted, thanks to the reasonable and sensible behavior of President Chávez, the support of the Bolivarian people and the loyalty of the vast majority of the officers and men of the Armed Forces in that sister nation. A new page in America’s complex and arduous history has been turned by the very people that began the process of independence from Spain in this hemisphere.</p>
<p>The stripping of Cuba’s right to representation in Monterrey, the fascist coup in Venezuela and the disgraceful behavior in Geneva in the order in which they occurred have exposed and offered evidence of the dirty and hypocritical politics of the empire’s lackeys. I must point out that the Presidents of Brazil, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the English-speaking Caribbean countries did not join the celebrations of the coup. In the same way, Bolivia and Colombia joined the above countries in rejecting the deplorable behavior in Geneva.</p>
<p>As for the fascist coup, not one condemned it except for the Argentinean President who was perhaps nervous considering his delicate political situation in which even a police sergeant could easily overthrow him.</p>
<p>One month later, when the scandal broke out after the shameful Monterrey episode, some leaders maintained a decent silence. Not so the distinguished Secretary General of the discredited and repulsive OAS, as if that organization really existed. He threw poison darts with his support for the abuse sustained by Cuba.</p>
<p>What trash are many of those who pretend to be sovereign governors!</p>
<p>The honorable history of our Motherland, that once stood alone in battle against practically every one of the predecessors to those governments that voted against Cuba, who had allied themselves to the United States at that time in support of the Bay of Pigs invasion; that heroically resisted without a moment’s weakness on the brink of being wiped off the face of the Earth in the October Crisis of 1962; should shame those conspiring with the United States in Geneva, if they still have at least, the freedom to be ashamed of themselves. Neither will they be able to deny without blushing that when the socialist camp collapsed, the USSR disintegrated, the Yankee blockade was tightened to include the sale of medicines and food, classified as a crime of genocide by the 1948 and 1949 Conventions, and all believed that the Cuban Revolution would be on its knees in just a few weeks, our people endured with unprecedented heroism and resilience.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p align="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">Cuba will never bow before the hegemonic superpower</font></b></p>
<p>Cuba, after withstanding the most unbelievable difficulties and threats, terrorist attacks and risks of all kinds, has never and will never lower its flags before the hegemonic superpower that today hands out orders to its lackeys and bootlickers in this unfortunate hemisphere through a terrorist made Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, showing an utter lack of respect by the United States government and an utter lack of modesty by its lackeys.</p>
<p>When Cuba’s honor, morale and credibility were called into question by the disagreement with the host country, it became very clear that hypocrisy and lies are inseparable and almost unique tools of the prevailing political and economic system in Latin America.</p>
<p>My decency and ethics were under question when, placed in the dilemma of being loyal to a lie or loyal to the truth; loyal to deceit and slandering manipulation of the facts, or loyal to our people and all peoples of the world, I was loyal to the truth and to the people.</p>
<p>The vestal virgins of the temple of hypocrisy tore their clothes in the name of privacy. Even honest men who had been outraged witnesses in the past to electoral incidents and dishonest traps of political adversaries were led to believe that my behavior was inappropriate.</p>
<p>I did not invent anything, I called no-one nor laid any trap for anyone. I gave as much warning as I could to those who had challenged me for more than a month with their demands for evidence, evidence and more evidence. Although by no means did I feel bound by what was later proved, in the course of events, to be a deceitful trick to force me into silence and confidentiality over such a significant issue, I clearly demanded the cessation of all offenses. Then, when the lies, slander and demands for proof continued over several weeks, I fulfilled the warning I had made.</p>
<p>I was also accused of being vengeful because of the unfulfilled promise related to Geneva. All my life I have been a gentleman to my adversaries, even in war situations surrounded by death. I’ve never humiliated, offended nor wreaked revenge on a single prisoner, not even in the case of the Bay of Pigs while my comrades lay mortally wounded or dead around me. But I do know how to distinguish the ethical from the unethical. I delayed presentation of the evidence demanded from me only out of the desire to cause no harm to a sister country I admire and respect. Representatives from some friendly governments that participated in the Summit chastised me for not having presented the evidence in the conference itself. Lying is and will always be unjustifiable from a political, ethical and religious perspective. From what I remember of the catechism lessons I received in 1st Grade in a catholic school, it violates the eighth commandment of God’s law. One must be honorable.</p>
<p>I did not seek any pretexts, and I did not hesitate in expressing the need and duty to leave a historical record of that conversation which they asked me to keep private only once it had already begun. My personal letter to the President was also private, however, it was published without consulting me 48 hours later, on the very same day I left Monterrey.</p>
<p>I truly regret having to include this issue in my speech, but I felt it was my duty to do so. High ranking officials from that country continue to attack us on a daily basis over this subject, which is still too fresh to consign it to the wastebasket of forgetfulness.</p>
<p>To those who so foolishly speak and repeat the imperialists slogan that no democracy and no respect for human rights exist in Cuba, let me repeat: no-one can question the fact that, despite being very small, our country today is the freest, fairest and most supportive country on the planet. It is also by far the most democratic. There is only one Party, but this neither nominates nor elects candidates. This is completely forbidden: it is the citizens from the grassroots level who propose, nominate and elect candidates. Our country enjoys an enviable and ever more solid and indestructible unity. The media is public and does not and cannot belong to private individuals. It carries no commercial advertisements and it does not promote consumerism; it entertains and informs, educates and never alienates.</p>
<p>Cuba already occupies world-wide outstanding and hard-to-surpass positions in a growing number of fields essential to guarantee life and the most fundamental political, civil, social, and human rights to ensure the well-being and future of our people. The mass political knowledge of the Cuban people is unrivaled in any other country. Its cultural and social programs and achievements advance at an unprecedented pace.</p>
<p>Our dreams become reality. A more humane society is possible, lies and slander notwithstanding. History will bear this out.</p>
<p>Long Live Socialism!</p>
<p>Motherland or Death!</p>
<p>We shall overcome!</p>
<p></p>
<hr>
<p>Official translation </p>
<p>—NY Transfer News Collective, May 3, 2002</p>
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May 2002 • Vol 2, No. 5 •
Speech by Fidel Castro President of Cuba at the International Workers’ Day Celebration in
Revolution Square, Havana,
May 1, 2002
Distinguished guests;
Dear countrymen:
We were condemned in Geneva by those who believe that this sea of people gathered here, which can be seen from every corner of the globe, has been deprived of its human rights. I am certain that not one of those Latin American countries that promoted, co-sponsored or supported this project could gather even 5 percent of the number here in their respective capitals
Are these fanatic, ignorant and uncultured individuals who lack any historical or political knowledge? If we were to ask this mass of people if there were any amongst them who could not read or write; or if there were any functional illiterate people who had never studied beyond grammar school, not one person could raise their hand. But if we were to ask how many of this same mass have the education of a ninth grader or above, more than 90 percent, would raise their hands. The only ones who wouldn’t raise their hands would be the students who haven’t yet reached their 15th birthdays.
Our people’s glorious tradition of rebellion and patriotic struggle, to which we must today add a full and profound understanding of freedom, equality and human dignity; their solidarity and internationalist spirit; their self-confidence and heroic conduct; 43 years of tenacious and unrelenting struggle against the powerful empire; a broad and solid political culture and an extraordinary humanism—all of these qualities cultivated by the Revolution—have made Cuba a unique country.
Wretched indeed is the destiny of hundreds of millions of people in this part of the world who, from a truly human perspective, have been as yet unable to emerge from humanity’s prehistory. And it will not be possible for them to escape such condition while the pillage that slaughtered tens of millions of their native ancestors, successively turning their countries into colonies, neo-colonies and economically dependent and underdeveloped countries, continues to govern their destiny.
Events prior to, during and after Geneva are barely distinguishable from the shameful history with which our people have been more than familiar since the very first days after the triumph of the Revolution on January 1st, 1959.
Cuba was the last Latin American country to free itself from Spanish colonialism after a heroic and lone struggle. Yet, it was unable to enjoy that victory, as it immediately fell in the hands of the fledgling North American empire, from which it once again liberated itself with the same determination and heroism 61 years later although it would be disgracefully abandoned and betrayed by every other Latin American government.
Every oligarchy and bourgeois government joined against Cuba
No book by Marx or Lenin could illustrate the anti-national, submissive and treacherous nature of the Latin American oligarchies and the true significance of imperialism for the destiny of our people as clearly as the last 43 years of our Revolution’s history. Every oligarchic and bourgeois government joined in the imperialist policy of isolation, blockade and aggression against Cuba, the sole exception being a country that had experienced its own great social revolution some decades before, the same that brought justice and real progress to the people of a nation mutilated by the insatiable expansionism of its northern neighbor and made the martyr on numerous occasions throughout its hazardous and painful history of foreign intervention and conquest. Tragically, this time the exception has become rule.
Cuba is no longer the illiterate, uncultured and inexperienced country of those early days. Today, the Latin American population, that numbered 208 millions at that time including the English-speaking Caribbean nations, have swelled to 526 millions. They have also had the opportunity to learn firsthand the meaning of imperialist domination, exploitation, injustice and pillage. Despite the deluge of slander and lies against our exemplary people and their admirable struggle, and in the face of countless capitulations across the globe, there are ever more people who realize that Cuba is a powerful moral force, that defends the truth and shows its solidarity with other people of the world.
Our Latin American brothers have repeatedly been told stories as fantastic as those in the “Arabian nights,” in which they believe less and less every day. For 50 years they have been told that the hundreds of thousands of children that die every year due to neglect and hunger; the millions that work for pitiful salaries cleaning car windshields or shoes, or being traded or sexually exploited instead of going to school, represent democracy and respect for human rights.
Real nature of capitalist rule in Latin American “democracies”
That the hundreds of millions of human beings living in poverty despite the immense wealth and natural resources that surround them; the vast number of unemployed and underemployed people and informal laborers who survive without the slightest aid, social security or protection; the medical neglect of mothers, children, old people and the poor population in general; the marginalization, drugs, lack of security and crime, are called democracy; are called respect for human rights. That the death squads, summary executions, torture, and the vanishing and murder of people; that the bribery, misappropriation, diversion and bare-faced robbery of public funds while schools and hospitals are closed, national assets and resources are privatized or often given away to domestic and foreign friends and partners in crime and corruption, constitute the fullest expression of democracy and human rights. It doesn’t occur to them that the economic, political and social system that they defend is a total negation of all possibility of equality, freedom, democracy, human dignity and justice.
An illiterate person or one whose education barely surpasses 4th grade, or one who lives in poverty or extreme poverty, or is unemployed or lives in shanty towns where the most unimaginable conditions are rife, or a person who wanders the streets exposed to the constant poison of commercial advertising sowing the seeds of fantasies, illusions and the desire for impossible consumption, a person such as this, that indeed could include vast numbers of people in the desperate daily fight for survival, could be the victim of every kind of abuse, blackmail, pressure and deceit and could lack any representative organization or see these crushed. It is certainly unlikely that such a person could be in a position to understand the complex problems of the world and the society in which they live. They are in no position to exercise their democratic rights, nor decide which is the most honest or demagogic or hypocritical candidate, this under a torrent of propaganda and lies where those with the most resources spout the most lies and deceit.
No freedom of expression can exist where the principal and most effective media are an exclusive monopoly in the hands of the richest and most privileged sectors, sworn enemies of any economic, political or social change. The enjoyment of wealth, education, knowledge and culture are the preserve of those who, accounting for a tiny fraction of the population, receive the larger part of the goods produced in their countries. It is no coincidence that Latin America exhibits the greatest differences between the richest and the poorest.
What kind of democracy and human rights could exist in these conditions? It would be like trying to grow flowers in the middle of the Sahara desert.
On the other hand, when the total stripping of natural resources and the appropriation of human labor is presented as the ideal social and development model and the FTAA, i.e. the annexation and absorption of Latin America by the United States and dollarization are offered as the only way, it is clear that the prevailing political and economic system is approaching total crisis.
Events in Argentina, that is today embroiled in an unbelievable economic and political chaos that has reduced the country to hunger, with more than 20 percent unemployment among the working population and where the people’s bank savings—especially those of the middle and lower income classes—have been practically confiscated, point to nothing less than the swan song of neoliberal globalization. Such a crisis inevitably produces a complete lack of ethics and values.
The behavior of many leaders as they watch their model economies collapse like so many houses of cards is truly obnoxious.
People’s protests are crushed with amazing violence. Tear gas, people dragged through the streets, brutality exercised against masses by the police armed with shields and swathed in the strangest helmets and outfits giving them the appearance of recent arrivals from a distant planet, are the methods used to defend that democracy and their citizen’s human rights.
Similar scenes have never been witnessed in our country. Never, over more than four decades, has force been used against our people. The revolutionary process grows out of the closest unity and cooperation of all our people, under a consensus without precedent in any other country in the world, unworkable and even unimaginable in a society of exploiters and exploited.
A cultured, rebellious, brave and heroic people such as the Cuban could never be ruled by force, nor a force exist that would rule it because the Cuban people is the force. Never would our people stir up rebellion against themselves because they are the revolution, they are the government, they are the power. It is with their courage, intelligence and ideas that they have defended themselves from the most powerful empire the world has ever known.
Such a political phenomenon had never before occurred in our hemisphere.
Force has always been used by the oligarchs and the empire against the people.
A statistical comparison of crucial indices
Each and every one of the Latin American countries that condemned us in Geneva or co-sponsored the draft resolution against Cuba are well below achieving the educational, cultural and social rates that are essential for a healthy, decent and just life of their citizens. Not one can match Cuba in a single one of these rates.
For the sake of time, I will outline just a few figures for Latin America as a whole as compared to Cuba.
Illiteracy rate: Latin America, 11.7 percent; Cuba, 0.2 percent
Inhabitants per teacher: Latin America, 98.4; Cuba, 43, in other words, 2.3 times as many teachers per capita
Primary education enrollment ratio: Latin America, 92 percent; Cuba, 100 percent
Secondary education enrollment ratio: Latin America, 52 percent; Cuba, 99.7 percent
Primary school students reaching Fifth Grade: Latin America, 76 percent; Cuba, 100 percent
Infant mortality per thousand live births: Latin America, 32; Cuba, 6.2
Medical doctors per hundred thousand inhabitants: Latin America, 160; Cuba, 590
Dentists per hundred thousand inhabitants: Latin America, 63; Cuba, 89
Nurses per hundred thousand inhabitants: Latin America, 69; Cuba, 743
Hospital beds per 100 thousand inhabitants: Latin America, 220; Cuba, 631.6
Medically attended births: Latin America, 86.5 percent; Cuba, 100 percent
Life expectancy at birth: Latin America, 70 years; Cuba, 76 years
Population between 15 and 49 years of age infected with HIV/AIDS: Latin America, 0.5 percent; Cuba, 0.05 percent
Annual AIDS infection rate per million inhabitants, i.e. those who develop the disease: Latin America, 65.25; Cuba, 15.6
The first international study of the Latin American Laboratory of Evaluation of Educational Quality, carried out in 12 Latin American countries including Cuba, produced the following results.
Although these data have been already mentioned, I would like to briefly refer to them in detail:
In Language, 3rd Grade: Cuba, 85.74 points; the remaining 11 countries, 59.11 points
In Language, 4th Grade: Cuba, 87.25; the rest, 63.75
In Mathematics, 3rd Grade: Cuba, 87.75; the rest, 58.31
In Mathematics, 4th Grade: Cuba, 88.25; the rest, 62.04
What is or will be the future of those countries?
According to these figures, of the seven Latin American countries that voted against Cuba, four—Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay—that had boasted in the past of being the most advanced in the region, fall well behind Cuban figures. In some of these, they reach or scrape past the half way mark in comparison to Cuba, but in others they are very well below. This is the case of pre-school education for 0-5 year olds, for example, that only reaches 15.8 percent of the children in that age group in Chile as compared to Cuba’s 99.2 percent.
It requires a truly cynical person to join such a Mafia-style adventure, in which they have been involved at the urge of the imperial overlords.
Events in Venezuela
The response to the emergence of the Bolivarian Revolution in which the people and the military joined together to unleash a revolutionary and democratic process that is also unprecedented, was a fascist coup d’état.
The privileged oligarchy, that enjoys the bulk of the country’s income and owns the most powerful media, set its followers on the Bolivarian people and the headquarters of the President himself under the influence and support of imperialism. Their goal was a bloody encounter that could be used to justify the coordinated actions of a small but extremely well-placed military force. Miraculously a bloody civil war was averted, thanks to the reasonable and sensible behavior of President Chávez, the support of the Bolivarian people and the loyalty of the vast majority of the officers and men of the Armed Forces in that sister nation. A new page in America’s complex and arduous history has been turned by the very people that began the process of independence from Spain in this hemisphere.
The stripping of Cuba’s right to representation in Monterrey, the fascist coup in Venezuela and the disgraceful behavior in Geneva in the order in which they occurred have exposed and offered evidence of the dirty and hypocritical politics of the empire’s lackeys. I must point out that the Presidents of Brazil, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the English-speaking Caribbean countries did not join the celebrations of the coup. In the same way, Bolivia and Colombia joined the above countries in rejecting the deplorable behavior in Geneva.
As for the fascist coup, not one condemned it except for the Argentinean President who was perhaps nervous considering his delicate political situation in which even a police sergeant could easily overthrow him.
One month later, when the scandal broke out after the shameful Monterrey episode, some leaders maintained a decent silence. Not so the distinguished Secretary General of the discredited and repulsive OAS, as if that organization really existed. He threw poison darts with his support for the abuse sustained by Cuba.
What trash are many of those who pretend to be sovereign governors!
The honorable history of our Motherland, that once stood alone in battle against practically every one of the predecessors to those governments that voted against Cuba, who had allied themselves to the United States at that time in support of the Bay of Pigs invasion; that heroically resisted without a moment’s weakness on the brink of being wiped off the face of the Earth in the October Crisis of 1962; should shame those conspiring with the United States in Geneva, if they still have at least, the freedom to be ashamed of themselves. Neither will they be able to deny without blushing that when the socialist camp collapsed, the USSR disintegrated, the Yankee blockade was tightened to include the sale of medicines and food, classified as a crime of genocide by the 1948 and 1949 Conventions, and all believed that the Cuban Revolution would be on its knees in just a few weeks, our people endured with unprecedented heroism and resilience.
Cuba will never bow before the hegemonic superpower
Cuba, after withstanding the most unbelievable difficulties and threats, terrorist attacks and risks of all kinds, has never and will never lower its flags before the hegemonic superpower that today hands out orders to its lackeys and bootlickers in this unfortunate hemisphere through a terrorist made Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, showing an utter lack of respect by the United States government and an utter lack of modesty by its lackeys.
When Cuba’s honor, morale and credibility were called into question by the disagreement with the host country, it became very clear that hypocrisy and lies are inseparable and almost unique tools of the prevailing political and economic system in Latin America.
My decency and ethics were under question when, placed in the dilemma of being loyal to a lie or loyal to the truth; loyal to deceit and slandering manipulation of the facts, or loyal to our people and all peoples of the world, I was loyal to the truth and to the people.
The vestal virgins of the temple of hypocrisy tore their clothes in the name of privacy. Even honest men who had been outraged witnesses in the past to electoral incidents and dishonest traps of political adversaries were led to believe that my behavior was inappropriate.
I did not invent anything, I called no-one nor laid any trap for anyone. I gave as much warning as I could to those who had challenged me for more than a month with their demands for evidence, evidence and more evidence. Although by no means did I feel bound by what was later proved, in the course of events, to be a deceitful trick to force me into silence and confidentiality over such a significant issue, I clearly demanded the cessation of all offenses. Then, when the lies, slander and demands for proof continued over several weeks, I fulfilled the warning I had made.
I was also accused of being vengeful because of the unfulfilled promise related to Geneva. All my life I have been a gentleman to my adversaries, even in war situations surrounded by death. I’ve never humiliated, offended nor wreaked revenge on a single prisoner, not even in the case of the Bay of Pigs while my comrades lay mortally wounded or dead around me. But I do know how to distinguish the ethical from the unethical. I delayed presentation of the evidence demanded from me only out of the desire to cause no harm to a sister country I admire and respect. Representatives from some friendly governments that participated in the Summit chastised me for not having presented the evidence in the conference itself. Lying is and will always be unjustifiable from a political, ethical and religious perspective. From what I remember of the catechism lessons I received in 1st Grade in a catholic school, it violates the eighth commandment of God’s law. One must be honorable.
I did not seek any pretexts, and I did not hesitate in expressing the need and duty to leave a historical record of that conversation which they asked me to keep private only once it had already begun. My personal letter to the President was also private, however, it was published without consulting me 48 hours later, on the very same day I left Monterrey.
I truly regret having to include this issue in my speech, but I felt it was my duty to do so. High ranking officials from that country continue to attack us on a daily basis over this subject, which is still too fresh to consign it to the wastebasket of forgetfulness.
To those who so foolishly speak and repeat the imperialists slogan that no democracy and no respect for human rights exist in Cuba, let me repeat: no-one can question the fact that, despite being very small, our country today is the freest, fairest and most supportive country on the planet. It is also by far the most democratic. There is only one Party, but this neither nominates nor elects candidates. This is completely forbidden: it is the citizens from the grassroots level who propose, nominate and elect candidates. Our country enjoys an enviable and ever more solid and indestructible unity. The media is public and does not and cannot belong to private individuals. It carries no commercial advertisements and it does not promote consumerism; it entertains and informs, educates and never alienates.
Cuba already occupies world-wide outstanding and hard-to-surpass positions in a growing number of fields essential to guarantee life and the most fundamental political, civil, social, and human rights to ensure the well-being and future of our people. The mass political knowledge of the Cuban people is unrivaled in any other country. Its cultural and social programs and achievements advance at an unprecedented pace.
Our dreams become reality. A more humane society is possible, lies and slander notwithstanding. History will bear this out.
Long Live Socialism!
Motherland or Death!
We shall overcome!
Official translation
—NY Transfer News Collective, May 3, 2002
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1959.05.17 | <body>
<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h3>
On the promulgation of the Agrarian Law
</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> May 17, 1959
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> FBIS
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<h4>
TWO MILLION CUBANS WILL FIND THERE INCOME INCREASED
</h4>
<p class="pagenote">
*We do not make laws by hate.<br>
*It is not fair that our country keeps on
marching toward misery.<br>
*Great landowners must adapt themselves to
the new times.<br>
*Nobody has the right to distribute land by
his own initiative.<br>
*Cuba will have the honor to be in first
place among latinamerican countries.
</p>
<p>
We believe that this Law initiates an entirely new era in our
economical life, and that a wonderful future awaits our country, if we
dedicate ourselves to work with all our might.
</p>
<p>
We are aware that this law will affect some private interests; we are
aware that it will find strong opposition, as all revolutionary measures.
Of course, we are conscious of our duties to the citizens and of all the
advantages that this law may offer.
</p>
<p>
However, we must declare, as we always have under such circumstances,
that we make laws only for the benefit of the nation, even if these laws
must some times damage certain interests. We do not make laws by - hate,
as we do not hate anybody. We understand perfectly that we are a
consequence of the past, we have the obligation to correct past mistakes.
</p>
<p>
What we have done, what we are, what we represent and what we do, are
mainly consequences of the past. In fact, anybody in Cuba who thinks about
what this country has been up to now, about the destiny which - would have
been Cuba's destiny if changes were not introduced, if this person who
thinks is conscious and honest, she will have to a admit that these
measures are absolutely necessary. It was not fair that our country
continue to go toward misery, toward chaos.
</p>
<p>
It is not our fault if the nation is what it has been up to now; the
mistakes of the past generations are not ours. You do not understand this
until you go to the country, until you visit the peasant's houses, until
you see shoeless, hungry, sick children who cannot read nor write. In
spite of all this, you are surprised to see how much kindness remains in
the hearts of our peasants. When you notice those things you fell the
absolute conviction of the justice of the measures we are taking, which are
necessary and of benefit for the country.
</p>
<p>
These measures pretend to eliminate a situation that was legated to us
and of which we are not responsible.
</p>
<p>
The Agrarian Law damages an insignificant section of the people but
even these persons are not entirely sacrificed, as they will keep a
considerable amount of land; their standard of living will not be seriously
affected, and at the same time thousands of poor families will be
benefited. We can very conservatively estimate that two hundred thousand
families will receive these benefits.
</p>
<p>
.. What I can say today is this: when the Agrarian Law be entirely -
applicated, two million Cubans will have their income increased and they
will become buyers in the domestic market, which will be the basis of our
industrial development. Through this, we expect to solve the economical
problem of Cuba. On the other hand, the owners of the lands we intend to
distribute shall not be robbed; they will be compensated. They will be
paid in government bonds, payable in 20 years, which will produce 4.50%
interest yearly.
</p>
<p>
Cuba will have the honor of being in first place among all
latin-american nations, thanks to this Law, so rich in consequences.
</p>
<p>
Great landowners must understand that their duty is to adapt themselves
to the new circumstances. They shall have to produce more in reduced
extensions of land. They will have to produce technically, economically,
trying to obtain all which is possible to obtain from the land, because
this measure is fair, because not a single Cuban must suffer from hunger.
It is criminal that there be uncultivated land in a country where people is
hungry. These landowners must not allow selfishness to blind them. Nobody
has the right to be selfish when his people is hungry. Nobody feeling like
a Cuban, no real patriot, can fail to understand that this measure will be
of benefit to the Nation.
</p>
<p>
The Agrarian Law does not mean of course that a man has a right to grab
the piece of land he likes, that anybody has the right to distribute land
by his own initiative. It does not mean disorder. Now, more than ever, we
need absolute discipline, nobody has the right to act ignoring the
authority of the National Institute for the Agrarian Reform. Those who
have taken lands without permission will have to give them back. We make
this warning because we do not want our peasants to make mistakes.
</p>
<p>
The benefits of the Agrarian Law will attain the remotest places of
our country. It is not necessary to speak more about it, because this Law
speaks by itself and because it will provoke a lot of discussion in days to
come. We wish that all Cubans accept it as a fair measure which will offer
extraordinary benefits to our Country.
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../index.htm">Castro Internet Archive</a>
</p>
</body> |
Castro Internet Archive
On the promulgation of the Agrarian Law
Spoken: May 17, 1959
Source: FBIS
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
TWO MILLION CUBANS WILL FIND THERE INCOME INCREASED
*We do not make laws by hate.
*It is not fair that our country keeps on
marching toward misery.
*Great landowners must adapt themselves to
the new times.
*Nobody has the right to distribute land by
his own initiative.
*Cuba will have the honor to be in first
place among latinamerican countries.
We believe that this Law initiates an entirely new era in our
economical life, and that a wonderful future awaits our country, if we
dedicate ourselves to work with all our might.
We are aware that this law will affect some private interests; we are
aware that it will find strong opposition, as all revolutionary measures.
Of course, we are conscious of our duties to the citizens and of all the
advantages that this law may offer.
However, we must declare, as we always have under such circumstances,
that we make laws only for the benefit of the nation, even if these laws
must some times damage certain interests. We do not make laws by - hate,
as we do not hate anybody. We understand perfectly that we are a
consequence of the past, we have the obligation to correct past mistakes.
What we have done, what we are, what we represent and what we do, are
mainly consequences of the past. In fact, anybody in Cuba who thinks about
what this country has been up to now, about the destiny which - would have
been Cuba's destiny if changes were not introduced, if this person who
thinks is conscious and honest, she will have to a admit that these
measures are absolutely necessary. It was not fair that our country
continue to go toward misery, toward chaos.
It is not our fault if the nation is what it has been up to now; the
mistakes of the past generations are not ours. You do not understand this
until you go to the country, until you visit the peasant's houses, until
you see shoeless, hungry, sick children who cannot read nor write. In
spite of all this, you are surprised to see how much kindness remains in
the hearts of our peasants. When you notice those things you fell the
absolute conviction of the justice of the measures we are taking, which are
necessary and of benefit for the country.
These measures pretend to eliminate a situation that was legated to us
and of which we are not responsible.
The Agrarian Law damages an insignificant section of the people but
even these persons are not entirely sacrificed, as they will keep a
considerable amount of land; their standard of living will not be seriously
affected, and at the same time thousands of poor families will be
benefited. We can very conservatively estimate that two hundred thousand
families will receive these benefits.
.. What I can say today is this: when the Agrarian Law be entirely -
applicated, two million Cubans will have their income increased and they
will become buyers in the domestic market, which will be the basis of our
industrial development. Through this, we expect to solve the economical
problem of Cuba. On the other hand, the owners of the lands we intend to
distribute shall not be robbed; they will be compensated. They will be
paid in government bonds, payable in 20 years, which will produce 4.50%
interest yearly.
Cuba will have the honor of being in first place among all
latin-american nations, thanks to this Law, so rich in consequences.
Great landowners must understand that their duty is to adapt themselves
to the new circumstances. They shall have to produce more in reduced
extensions of land. They will have to produce technically, economically,
trying to obtain all which is possible to obtain from the land, because
this measure is fair, because not a single Cuban must suffer from hunger.
It is criminal that there be uncultivated land in a country where people is
hungry. These landowners must not allow selfishness to blind them. Nobody
has the right to be selfish when his people is hungry. Nobody feeling like
a Cuban, no real patriot, can fail to understand that this measure will be
of benefit to the Nation.
The Agrarian Law does not mean of course that a man has a right to grab
the piece of land he likes, that anybody has the right to distribute land
by his own initiative. It does not mean disorder. Now, more than ever, we
need absolute discipline, nobody has the right to act ignoring the
authority of the National Institute for the Agrarian Reform. Those who
have taken lands without permission will have to give them back. We make
this warning because we do not want our peasants to make mistakes.
The benefits of the Agrarian Law will attain the remotest places of
our country. It is not necessary to speak more about it, because this Law
speaks by itself and because it will provoke a lot of discussion in days to
come. We wish that all Cubans accept it as a fair measure which will offer
extraordinary benefits to our Country.
Castro Internet Archive
|
./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1955.10.30-oct-1955 | <body><p class="title">
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr>
<h1>Speech delivered by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz at the Palm Garden Room in New York on October 30, 1955</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> October 30, 1955
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from an incomplete recording.
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> David Walters, 2019
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
</p>
<hr>
<p>There are few times when the human word would appear to be as limited and deficient as it does today, to express the series of feelings, emotions, and ideas born in the heat of the great display of patriotism we have witnessed this morning, moments of emotions similar to those experienced on other occasions when we have had the chance to meet with large crowds.</p>
<p>There are moments in my life that I will never be able to forget, like that early morning on July 26th at 4:00 am when for the last time I addressed many of the people who died in that action; when I addressed those who fell fighting, when I talked for the last time to those of us who were going to fight, when I exhorted my comrades in the last pep talk, the most beautiful pep talk, the pep talk that is the summary of all the speeches delivered until that moment, the pep talk which precedes battle. I remember that as I remember another moment in front of three judges who said they represented justice, when I denounced the crimes that Comrade Marcos read out.</p>
<p>The audience was in fact the enemy. The soldiers of the army were there; our audience was made up of more than 100 soldiers and officers who were attending the trial out of curiosity or God knows why. And I was speaking to those soldiers, our alleged enemies, to those soldiers more than to the judges; I was telling those soldiers what kind of men were commanding them, I was telling them what kind of stain they had put on the uniform, I was telling them how ignominious and cowardly the attitude of those who wrote that nameless, shameful page in the history of Cuba had been.</p>
<p>I spoke to those soldiers certain that when they were confronted with reason, the reason that is our shield, they would also honour it in reverence because I know that it only takes being Cuban, even though they may be mistaken, it’s enough to be Cuban to have faith in the possibility that they may understand reason and be ashamed of their crimes, in the possibility they will be sorry and in the possibility that they will also come together under the flags of justice.</p>
<p>But there was no occasion like the one today, no moment has seemed to me to be like it; not when I was giving my comrades a pep talk before the battle and not when I was condemning the murderers of my comrades.</p>
<p>Today, these Cubans who have gathered together in response to the call of the Homeland, these Cubans who, even a thousand leagues away, don’t forget it for a minute; these Cubans who have come from Connecticut, from Newark, from Union City, who have come from more than a hundred kilometres away; this event today, because of what it means for Cuba, because of what it means for its prestige, because of what the people filling up this rooms say about Cuba, because of what this event says about the merits of our people, I swear that this is the most moving event I have witnessed in my life. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And when the sceptics, those who have no faith in their Homeland, ask me how we are going to overthrow a regime like Batista’s, how we are going to restore freedom to our people, when those who have no faith ask that question, the answer is right here for them!</p>
<p>Today’s event, organized in five days, without any publicity or ads in the newspapers, only a very small news item, with no money to pay for an ad, with the rain flooding the streets of New York, Union City, Newark early this morning, against nature, with no resources, this event has been organized in five days which, according to the well-informed, is the largest event that Cubans have held in New York since 1895. (Applause) And, Cuban men and women, here is the answer for the sceptics.</p>
<p>Those who know the background of this event, those who have worked incessantly for its success, are aware that on Tuesday, five days ago, we were looking for a place where we could gather together; we went to some different places. An event took place here; hundreds of people came, five hundred, two hundred, two hundred and fifty people came here. However, we were not satisfied in that search with the idea that the event which was going to bring Cubans together this Sunday should be held in any of those places.</p>
<p>As we searched, we found the Palm Garden and we saw that the place was roomy. Anyone would have been discouraged by the fear of failure, the fear of being ridiculous, the fear of having empty chairs. But we who have such great faith in our people, we who think as Martí did that the man who has no faith in his compatriots is an incomplete man, one who was born at seven months. We didn’t hesitate one moment in saying: Yes! This is the place which will be filled with Cubans in five days; it will be filled with Cubans even though we cannot afford any advertising; this place will be filled with Cubans even if it rains, even if there is an earthquake or a cataclysm in the city of New York. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>And that is the answer for those who ask how we are going to overthrow Batista. That is the answer for those who do not believe. We are as certain that the regime will fall as we were certain, even though nobody believed it, that the Palm Garden was going to be filled tonight. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We consider tonight’s event as a victory for Cuba, a victory for Cubans. And the fame of the virtue and the patriotism of our people will grow throughout New York and the prestige of Cuba will grow. Those who have tried to boycott this event, the bunch of poor wretches, the mercenaries, who were surely counting on having some empty chairs tonight even though chairs would never be actually empty because they would be filled by the spirit of those who died, of those who lost their lives in action; (APPLAUSE) those who thought that spreading rumors about the Migration Services visiting the place, as if Cubans were breaking the law and if they weren’t obeying the law as they are, as if a powerful State was going to serve as the instrument to their petty plans, they thought they would scare Cubans off. And we have heard about a man who said he was a consul, not for Cuba though, (APPLAUSE) who has devoted himself to thwarting this event. And I don’t want to tell you, out of discretion, about some of the steps this man took in terms of the event; I don’t want to be indiscreet, but I tell you he was all set to sabotage the event. And I understand that he even prepared an event on his own, I don’t know what kind, some gluttonous event, I think it was a lunch, a dinner, or something like that, and that he was deeply concerned about the event and he had even sent his agents to spread word of the event.</p>
<p>But there is something else. We arrived at Union City yesterday to meet with a group of Cubans from Placetas, Cienfuegos, and other places in Cuba who were waiting for us. It was really interesting that a minute and half after our arrival, a captain, four patrol cars, a handful of detectives and all the police forces they could muster in that town showed up there.</p>
<p>The fact is that we are abiding by the law; the fact is that we respect the laws of the country we are in and likewise, we want them to respect our laws. (APPLAUSE) And we understood that all that mobilization could only be a consequence and a product of those people with evil intentions who were trying to sabotage that meeting; that some consul from who knows where had filed a complaint against us; that they were trying to hunt us down. So once more in this lifetime I have to suffer persecution, although it would have been involuntary on the part of those doing it and they would have had no other obligation but to investigate any complaint made. That situation however was quite odd.</p>
<p>It is really sad that those who are throwing Cubans out of their own land, thrown Cubans into this country to earn here with their hard work and the sweat of their brows the bread being denied them there, it is very sad that, not content with that, they devote themselves to hunting down Cubans over here; they devote themselves to threatening them with sending this country’s authorities after them. Because, ladies and gentlemen, if there would be one single Cuban here, only one Cuban who has been thrown into this country by necessity without undertaking all the required formalities, there can only be one explanation for this and that would be the excess of poverty and hunger that exists in Cuba. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>In addition they hound him, they use him and they attempt to make his life bitter. I have really found the attitude of that Mr. Consul a little silly.</p>
<p>(THE AUDIENCE ASKS: "What country is he from?")</p>
<p>FIDEL CASTRO. - From the country of the smugglers, comrade. (APPLAUSE) Because, it would be like burying your head in the sand; it would be like believing that this Cuban resurrection miracle could be held back with intrigues, when by now there are no intrigues or bayonets that can hold it back! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>This country’s immigration authorities should not be hounding the Cubans who come here to work honestly; they should not be hounding the Cubans who have shown and given proof of their faith in democracy, of their love of freedom and of the decorum of the peoples, of the peoples’ right to govern themselves, for which millions of men shed their blood in the last War. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>The immigration authorities should pursue those who disguise their criminal intentions under the diplomatic cloak. Because that Consul, let’s say it out loud, is shameful for Cuba. (APPLAUSE) That Consul is a silken master smuggler; let everyone know it. (APPLAUSE) That Consul couldn’t stop the advance of the people with his petty, treacherous hand. And as Martí said, I would say to that Mr. Consul whom I rather despise with a bit of pity but with no hatred whatsoever, that we pay friendship with friendship, steel with steel. (APPLAUSE) If we are paid respect, we will respect in turn; if we are attacked, we will attack in turn. (APPLAUSE) </p>
<p>And finally, very soon, perhaps sooner than he may imagine, although not as soon as some impatient people would wish, we’ll be sending a Consul to the United States who will not be a disgrace but a source of pride; (APPLAUSE) a Consul who assists Cubans instead of hounding them; a Consul who can attend patriotic rallies and meet with the Cuban people (APPLAUSE) instead of a Consul who is a disgrace for our suppressed, humiliated nation, a Consul who, one glorious day for Cuba, won’t have to hide in shame like Porras in his lair. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Enough already; I haven’t wanted to take it out on that poor fellow, I just wanted to symbolize all the shamelessness he embodies; that is what the Cuban Consul represents here, the shamelessness that rules Cuba. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Having said these healthy words of clarification, I want to be more precise. Applause encourages us, lifts up our spirits and we see it as a tribute to the Homeland, to the fallen and as the expression of our people’s faith. However, there is something more important for us than the applause: we care about the work that is yet to be done. We don’t come here seeking applause. We came to do the work that our National Hero José Martí taught us back in 1895; among many others we came here to do the work that only a giant could do; we came to speak to the Cuban emigrants in New York and the United States.</p>
<p>Because exactly the same thing is happening in Cuba and one would have to be blind not to see it; it’s happening exactly the same way as it did in 1868 and 1895. The reasons why you are here, and I know that if you could be in Cuba you would be in Cuba or you wouldn’t be applauding Cuba; (APPLAUSE) if we asked every one of you why you are in this country, the answer would be exactly the same as the one given by those emigrants who in 1868 and 1895 gathered together to listen to the liberators’ words. As it happened then, Cubans have to emigrate from their land because they are unable to earn an honest livelihood there. Before earning their livelihood in a shameful manner, Cubans prefer to leave their country and go somewhere else in the world to earn their livelihood honestly. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Many who have not been forced to emigrate live there, I know because I know the value of men; everybody here, everyone who has tirelessly worked to organize this event, all of you, any one of you, don’t need some local political boss or corrupt politician to give them two or three hundred pesos to be part of their political machinery. I know that with their working capacity, determination and energy they could solve the problem, just like a bunch of mercenaries solve it now in Cuba.</p>
<p>Is there a shortage of wealth in Cuba? Is there a shortage of fertile land and extraordinary riches in Cuba to shelter not only you but six million Cubans, to shelter twenty million Cubans? No. Belgium, the Netherlands or any other country in Europe has a third of Cuba’s land and it is covered by snow for many months; they have three times as many inhabitants as Cuba has, inch by inch they steal land from the sea, they build dikes and they live there and even compete with our wealth. Their condensed milk and their butter and a series of their products compete with Cuban products, even though the Cubans have land to spare, huge extensions of uncultivated land, extraordinary possibilities of being one of the most prosperous nations in the world. Oh yes! Cuba does not lack wealth, and the best proof is in the millions that are stolen every year. If there was a shortage of wealth in Cuba how could we explain there have been rulers who have left the country taking 50 and 60 million of pesos with them? How do we explain that Batista has distributed assets worth twenty million pesos? How do we explain the trips his relatives take every month, as rumor has it, to deposit certain amounts of money taken from the Republic into American banks? If Cuba lacked wealth how come so many millions of Cuban money has been invested in the United States? How is it possible that so many apartment buildings have been bought in New York? How is it possible that so much business can be done by these crafty people? These people are sniffing out that the people would get tired of them, that the people are already getting tired of them (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) and when that happens they won’t have the time to get their suitcases out. They can smell it in the air! They must be hearing a subterranean rumbling which is now like running lava on the surface. Because how can they conceal what is happening here in New York? How can they conceal the people’s mood? How can they refuse to see it? Even if they hide their heads three meters underground like an ostrich, how can they refuse to understand what is happening with the people of Cuba? How can they refuse to see that the end is nigh?</p>
<p>The end of the dictatorship? Yes! The end of the dictatorship; but not only the end of the dictatorship. The end of today’s thieves? Yes, but not only the end of today’s thieves. The end of the dictatorship, of today’s thieves and yesterday’s thieves! (APPLAUSE) The end of oppression and also the end of political maneuvering; the end of the betrayal of those who seized power on March 10th and the end of those who have been betraying it since 1902.</p>
<p>Because they are to blame for this entire sad spectacle we are witnessing, of this spectacle of hundreds and thousands of Cubans being forced to leave their Homeland.</p>
<p>If any argument was needed, about an occurrence that would be decisive enough to demonstrate what is happening in Cuba, you, your presence here today, the presence of these people here, is the most irrefutable of arguments. Because some have been here for two years, some for six months, some for three years, some for ten, some for fifteen or even twenty; but you have all come for the same reason, you all left Cuba because you could not make a living there. You all left Cuba and did it with the feeling of having twenty daggers of loneliness lodged in your hearts and feeling great homesickness. You all have left Cuba and you all wish to return.</p>
<p>I’ve heard it from the lips of many Cubans, I’ve heard those soul-wrenching words, I’ve heard Cubans who have told me with their arms raised to the sky: I’m not a lazy person! I’m a working man! I could have earned a living there! But it is so sad to go knocking door to door, house to house, looking for a job so that you don’t have to steal, just to be able to feed your children. And if it’s not you then it’s your wife, mother, or brother, or your children, and nobody gives you work, nobody gives you work!</p>
<p>What I was also saying in this speech, what I said to the judges happened, what Comrade Marquez could not read because he only read a part, what I told the Court in Santiago de Cuba: “When someone accused of stealing appears before you, you send them to jail without thinking twice. You don’t ask how many days he has been unemployed, how long it’s been since his family had something to eat. No! You send him to jail. But nobody who has stolen millions and millions from the Government has ever spent one night behind bars. (APPLAUSE) You dine with them at some posh place on New Year’s Eve and they have all your respect. When some miserly wealthy man burns down his business to collect the insurance, even though a number of unfortunate workers are burned to death in the process, they don’t go to jail because they have plenty of money to bribe the judges and lawyers.”</p>
<p>And that’s the truth that nobody wants to talk about, the truth we’ve been telling the people, the need to cure the Republic, a timely cure before the tumor becomes malignant and the Republic dies; (APPALUSE) a cure even if it means amputation, even if it means cutting really deep, a radical cure. So that no Cuban comes to me, ladies and gentlemen, as one did yesterday, a man who is surely sitting among you, and tells me that he has been here for several months and has not seen his wife since he left, nor has he met his youngest child who was born in Cuba.</p>
<p>So that this hard life, because your lives are hard, I know this very well, I know how each of your lives is, I know how lonely you are amidst this mass of steel and concrete, how lonely you feel among the many millions of people, how lonely you feel in those houses, your homes, in those lonely apartments, where you cannot even dream of having a child there because they would not have the sun, they would not have the sun of their land, they would not have “waiting brides”, the palm trees, to whose height Martí wanted to put justice; (APPLAUSE) they would lack the pure skies of the Homeland and they would lack the air to grow.</p>
<p>Because you, the men and women working here from seven in the morning to seven at night, you cannot have children because there would be nobody to look after them; either you would have to stop working and not have enough to eat or you would have to not have any children.</p>
<p>I have witnessed this tragedy and I often wonder: is it possible that some of these Cubans have to live here for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years? Is it be possible to resist this hellish life, is it possible to resign yourselves to it? And I also think that there are brothers and sisters and parents who are even worse off than them. Is resignation possible? Is happiness possible? Because José Martí rightly stated that there is no happiness without Homeland and without honor. Did he say “without Homeland”? Because, fellow Cubans, they have taken from us more than freedom. They have taken not only our freedom, they have taken away our Homeland; they have taken away from us the land where we were born.</p>
<p>And in this struggle we are trying to recover the Homeland that has been taken away from us, that Homeland which belongs to us as well, as much as it belongs to them; but it’s more ours than theirs because we do not exploit it, because we love it. We love it so that we can live there, not submit it to oppression, not degrade it. And the Homeland, as Martí said, belongs to nobody; if it belonged to anyone it would be to those who love it selflessly and those who would be willing to make all manner of sacrifice on its behalf.</p>
<p>And we Cubans hurt not just because our Homeland has been taken from us; because they have ripped it from us, because we cannot live there, because they have separated us from our families, from our love and our feelings, they have disgracefully ripped it from us, they have taken it by force, they have ripped it from us by the only painful manner and furthermore they have humiliated us.</p>
<p>When human beings have something ripped from them, it is sad and unbearable. They have ripped it from us by force and they don’t want to give it back. As you know every day there are more and more Cubans arriving, and the queues at the American Consulate are endless and more and more people keep arriving. Entire towns like La Esperanza where there was a tobacco factory, two shoe factories and where everything shut down after March 10th and the entire town emigrated; like Placetas, Fomento, Cienfuegos and, in brief, (APPLAUSE) all over Cuba where everything is in ruins. Cuba where the traitors who seized power that morning said they were going to establish a government of peace, of respect for human life and for work. And they did! Batista has given jobs every year to ten thousand Cubans, in New York! (APPLAUSE) Batista is solving unemployment by working with the [US] Consulate to issue more visas every year; Batista is solving Cuba’s problem by leaving Cuba without inhabitants. (LAUGHTER) Even with the most basic common sense one can understand that Cuba is steadily on its way to bankruptcy; even people with a minimum of understanding of economics know that the peso not earned in the factory, the peso not earned by a worker in his workshop, is the peso that no longer circulates in the stores, the shops and the pharmacies. It is one peso less being spent by the man who manufactures shoes or clothing. It is one peso less for the entire economy of the nation.</p>
<p>And I would like them to explain to me how are they going to solve the problem of Cuba by leaving hundreds and thousands of men unemployed, men who no longer produce and earn pesos, who increase the numbers of people who have to leave the country. Because even though there are many interests created to support such anachronistic theories, I cannot believe that the Railway Company, for example, needs to fire 500 or 600 workers, that this could be a healthy solution for the country. It might be a healthy solution for that Company for a few months or even for a few years, but those 600 workers are 600 fewer people buying in the country, it means 600 fewer people benefitting all the industries of the country, 600 fewer people going shopping, to sports events, to movie theaters or anywhere. It means 600 fewer people whose absence would be noticed in a year’s time in other stores, in other factories, in other work sectors. And the consequences would be that in a year or a year and half they would have to fire 500, 1000 or 1,500 and from there it’s a straight fall. That’s why the Cuban economy today is falling.</p>
<p>Batista is not only a traitor; Batista is not only a dictator, a wretch who oppresses his people, who harangues his soldiers to kill Cubans with weapons paid for by Cubans; no! Batista is also an incompetent, one of the clumsiest rulers Cuba has ever had. In a word, ladies and gentleman, he is completely clueless.</p>
<p>Because as Martí said it’s not the same thing “to govern a Republic as it is to command an encampment.” Martí said this to Gómez: “General, a Republic is not founded in the same way as an encampment is founded.” Gómez had been fighting for ten, thirty years and Martí told him that a Republic could not be governed in the same way as a military camp. And after fifty years, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic, during the centenary of Cuba’s National Hero, one individual, a bold sergeant, would like to govern the Republic as if it were a military camp. And this individual has done nothing in ten years, thirty years, ten months, ten days, a day, one minute or one single second for the independence of Cuba. This is a Mr. General who earned his stripes the same way as those other generals to whom we have said, not from here because it would have no merit, but over there in Cuba, right to their faces, over there from the jail, we have told them they are not even worthy of leading the mules carrying the clothing of General Antonio Maceo’s army.</p>
<p>Maceo, one of Cuba´s most glorious military personalities, earned his General’s insignia after over 500 battles, after risking his life every day, after fighting for eight years. And these men, these good-for-nothings with a few stars on their shoulders who were captains devoted to illegal gambling and exploiting everybody (it is well known what these people do: they take money from this sugar mill or from that famer to defend the interests of the owners and to crush those who oppose them; that’s their job), those men became generals overnight, in fifty minutes, without shooting once. They became generals, overnight generals who have never taken a risk, generals who are now millionaires.</p>
<p>Oh, yes! Those crimes have explanations. Because as Martí said, there is hatred that is born drooling from the bellies of man. Only low-born hatred, born from those who see their enjoyment of those millions being threatened, can take it out so cruelly on young people who have never stolen anything from anyone, honest young people, the young people who without bragging about it quietly and discreetly turned the Moncada Barracks into a torch in the early morning one day, without anyone knowing. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>They could not show any mercy because this was a dangerous example. They had to teach those youths a terrible lesson. They had to teach a lesson that would make sure no other young Cubans would ever even think of taking up arms to fight oppression and tyranny again.</p>
<p>They thought they would crush the rebellious spirit of the people because they had not encountered any resistance since March 10. Since March 10 they were gloating about having seized the Republic without firing even one shot and they were gloating about how that traditional rebellious spirit of the people had died. They could not tolerate that outburst. They had to pull it out by the roots and as dim-witted as they were they thought they could cut it out by killing and torturing those involved, by gouging out their eyes and by burying men alive. They were so dim-witted they couldn’t understand that within a few years there would be 100,000 youths willing to die, that the people would rise up, a people like this one. I see in these people the embodiment of the words I spoke after spending 16 days in solitary in a prison cell; I spoke there from impotence, physical impotence but moral omnipotence. (APPLAUSE) I told them, despite the slander with which they tried to flood and bury us because they thought the truth would never come to light, they never thought the people there would have enough courage and determination and faith to make truth prevail. They imagined that the massacre could be covered up for a long time. I told them they would see the victorious specters of ideas rise up from the bodies of my dead comrades. They are not dead! Those specters terrify the tyranny, those specters give that miserable consul sleepless nights, those specters keep those generals awake during the night because they know of the crushing defeat that’s coming; these specters don’t give the tyranny a moment of peace.</p>
<p>Because this cannot be ignored; Cuba will know about all this because it will be written in the media, this picture will be published in the media. But if censorship and terror prevent this picture from being made public, this picture together with our people will circulate throughout Cuba via the 2,000 Cubans who are part of the underground apparatus of the 26th of July Revolutionary Movement propaganda distribution. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Cubans: that money being collected there is a specter lingering like a ghost. Those pesos collected there are terrifying; those pesos make the tyrants tremble because those pesos you saw being collected into a Mambí hat were not for me; nobody thought that of course. Those pesos were put there for Cuba; those pesos were put there to tell the regime and to tell Cuba that these are the pesos earned by the sweat of our brows, earned by our daily labor and with which we are going to conquer the freedom of Cuba. (applause)</p>
<p>Ladies and gentlemen; now they won’t be able to say as they once did that a liberation movement is being carried out with money stolen from the people. Now they cannot dub it as immoral, just as they could not dub it immoral before. Since it began, from the very first day, this Movement began well; it started with clean money. We don’t want sullied money because the first law of the Revolutionary Government will be in place to confiscate everything from the thieves; we do not want to ask for favors from any thief.</p>
<p>And with those stolen goods we are going to do the first great works of the Republic and we will set up the first factories and the first industries we need so that there are no more Cuban emigrants abroad. (applause)</p>
<p>And we do not want commitment, nor will we have it; and nobody will come here to buy favors from the Revolution because the Revolution doesn’t sell favors. (applause) And instead of having to thank a handful of people for freedom, we will want to thank the entire nation. (applause)</p>
<p>Now they cannot say we are going to overthrow the regime. Yes, because we are going to overthrow it and I do not hide it. We exercise the right that all peoples have had to be free; we exercise the right of Washington and of all the American liberators who drew up that Declaration of Rights in Philadelphia in which it says that the most evident truth is that all men are born free and equal and their Creator granted all of them certain rights; and to safeguard rights, governments were established. And when governments did not fulfill the purposes for which they had been created, the people had the right to remove them and to institute another.</p>
<p>All the peoples of America have been liberated in the name of that right to freedom, of that right to fight against oppression; and these American peoples were liberated from the oppression of a foreign monarch. For that reason I trust that here in this country there will be many people who sympathize with freedom for Cuba, who sympathize with those who exercise the right that they exercised to be free.</p>
<p>We are going to get rid of that gentleman; we are going to remove him without violating any law anywhere. Here we will be preaching, raising funds and knowing what we have to do; here we will be preaching the idea and respecting the laws of countries which give us their hospitality. Here we are preparing today the most terrible psychological weapon that can be wielded against the regime that oppresses and debases Cuba because when the regime in Cuba sees this pile of bills, when the regime witnesses that spectacle, then it will be convinced that its end is nigh.</p>
<p>And the people over there who wait for the guide, the people over there even though they may earn a peso per day if they have a job, and not ten pesos every day, those people will also willingly give their peso because the 26th of July Movement will send the Manifesto to the people seeking their help; we want this Manifesto to be preceded by the photo of the contribution that our New York emigrants have made today. That’s why they have been placed here, on the table, so that the contribution can be seen, to make it look great and to serve as encouragement for all Cubans.</p>
<p>Because the regime hopes that we cannot do anything; we have organization, they know that and we are decided, they know that too. They also know we are not millionaires because they know that we have not stolen a cent from the Republic, because they know that we will not ask a thief for one single cent. Now hear this as well; they will know that we will have the necessary help; they will know of the people's willingness to help this cause.</p>
<p>Oh, yes! And if the example of those who have come to contribute there has been admirable, the example of many Cubans contributing over there is also admirable; Cubans who earn twelve pesos a month, cooking, working, anywhere, and still they contribute a peso; Cuban workers who at the first meeting with our militant comrades contributed one hundred pesos of their savings; Cubans who have mimeographed this brochure at their own expense; Cubans who copy the manifestos and sell them.</p>
<p>Because, ladies and gentlemen, in Cuba a true miracle of resurrection is taking place; it understands that this is a struggle of sincere and honest men, whose souls are not tainted by corruption. (APPLAUSE) Because the people are intuitive, the people are not so easily deceived, the people allow themselves to be deceived whenever they want, the people will guess who their loyal servants are and the people know how much love we have put into this cause.</p>
<p>And sometimes I give an example to explain this: the man who falls in love with a beautiful and virtuous woman and loves her with all his soul would not be able to prostitute her, would not be able to rent her, would not be able to sell or exploit her. He wouldn’t even allow others to look at her or offend her. Likewise we are incapable of exploiting, renting, or selling our blessed idea of the Homeland! (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>We are in love with our Homeland. We have fought for it tirelessly, fought for it without rest and we go from one town to another for it; we will continue this pilgrimage for our Homeland, Cubans, until the day when the time has come to call on the regime to render accountability.</p>
<p>Because this time it will not be like July 26th; this time it will not be a handful of ignored youths; this time it will be the people; this time we have come to do what we unfortunately could not do before. Then our hopes were placed on other men, at that time we were looking at another series of Cubans who were well known in their homeland, from whom the Nation expected the miracle of liberation from the dictatorship. I would have expected these Cubans who in normal times would have stood at a podium and beat their chests and asked us to vote for them because they were willing to give the last drop of their blood for Cuba. They are ready to do it all; they are ready to be Spartans in the defense of the ideals of the people. And when a situation like March 10 occurs, when it’s time to give the last drop of blood and even the last penny, those politicians who spend ten thousand and twenty thousand and a hundred thousand pesos to leave, mortgaging their homes and doing everything to leave, these people do not appear at any meeting, nor do they contribute one single cent to the country; and so a group of youths has to go to die with empty hands because they lacked the resources. (applause)</p>
<p>That is why I was telling you (and Comrade Márquez read it) that this is why the underworld of Cuban politicking has been governing the Republic; they are the thug politicians, they do not deserve any other name because I am one of those who thinks that the law-defying thugs who come face-to-face with authority are braver than those who steal there with impunity, without risk of any kind, those are the ones who have been governing the Republic. And here we are promoting a change on every front: first of all a moral revolution. It will also be a creative revolution, the revolution that knows what it will do, that has its program contained in this pamphlet and in the manifestos, a program that will take Cuba with facts and not with words to the place that corresponds to the country in America, because of the extraordinary richness of its soil, because of the virtues of its people. They are people such as you here, capable of meeting in five days, in the rain, coming together by themselves and with that enthusiasm which we have heard here listening for ten minutes to a standing comrade. These people deserve more than the dishonor in which they are living.</p>
<p>And if others should harbor any doubts about these people, should others offend them, should they intimidate them and lash them to a yoke, we can see their suffering, we can see their fight, we can see how they strive for freedom and we say: Blessed be the Cuban people. Only skeptics who will never do anything in the world, those who will never write a page in history, can have doubts about these people. If you had doubts you would not be meeting over there, if you had doubts we would have stalled at the first step when there were three of us at the beginning; and then we were a hundred, and then we were a thousand.</p>
<p>And there in the solitary prison cell on the Isla de Pinos where they set themselves against us in a cowardly manner, I never lost faith. I was there a year ago. There we were alone; there we were seemingly impotent and forgotten; a year ago we were very far from what we have here today. We were offered provisional liberty, and we reject conditional liberty. We said that freedom belonged to us because it was our right. We would remain there for one thousand years before accepting dishonorable liberty. And the people brought us out onto the street! A year ago we were there and now we are here today.</p>
<p>We are with the people. The 22 months did not discourage us; the 22 months did not make us lose heart or faith for one single minute. Here we are, at the base of the flag; here we are at the base of the idea; here we are at the base of the trench which we set up with ideas because, as the Cuban woman spoke to us: "Trenches made of ideas are worth more than trenches made of stone."</p>
<p>Here we are setting up trenches of ideas but we are also setting up stone trenches. (APPLAUSE)</p>
<p>Cubans: at this meeting Cuba will know about that generous and admirable contribution; Cuba will know about those pesos that are pesos from ‘95. And from here, from New York, I say it with the faith that always accompanies us, we are sure that Cuban emigrants, like the emigrants of ‘95, will help take the country back to freedom. Here we must have an apostle in every Cuban, in every Cuban who stood up here, in every Cuban who took an oath here, in every Cuban who will leave here with the idea of the Homeland utmost in his mind; we must have an apostle in every Cuban. Such apostles would not be satisfied with the applause that has been heard here; they are apostles who will go out and win over those who are not here, who will go to conquer those who went partying last night and so today they are not here, to those undecided or tired Cubans, or to those lazy Cubans forgotten by the Homeland. They will go out and wake them up with voices of love and voices of conviction.</p>
<p>Just the Cubans who are in New York, because we know what we need, only we Cubans in New York could overthrow that regime if we wanted to, that regime whose crimes horrified the crowd, and just New York (and it would not be New York alone because it would be Miami, Tampa, Key West and 127 places in Cuba), just New York can defeat Batista. With how much sacrifice? With what one spends on going to the movies for six months. Just New York can pay for the freedom of Cuba, New York alone, if two thousand Cubans can get together, two thousand Cubans who give two pesos every week, give two hours of work a week, the money to go to the movies, the money to buy a whiskey.</p>
<p>I tell you with all responsibility that six months of well-paid help given by the Cubans of New York would be enough to win over Cuba's freedom.</p>
<p>And what cruel revenge, the revenge of those who threw them out of their Homeland, the revenge against those who brought all of you here to this land, that is the cruelest revenge! The people overthrowing a tyrant with the money it takes to go to the movies for six months.</p>
<p>Engrave these words in your souls, for they are true. I have enormous faith that you will understand them, that you will measure the value of the virtues you have for constancy, for faith and for the seriousness and discipline with which you help. A modest and poor Cuban comes to ask you this, a Cuban who isn’t having fun, who nobody will see having a drink or going to a night club, or spending even one penny on anything that isn’t essential to his survival; as if we had to spend that because wherever we go we find generous Cubans who give us their homes and who feed us; we do not need anything for ourselves, we will never need it. The first manifesto came about, to our honor, as the product of a pawned overcoat; that first manifesto is with us thanks to the money we got for a pawned overcoat. In Cuba we now have 40,000 young people belonging to the Revolutionary Movement, youth committed to paying a monthly fee and money is raised as we go from town to town. Because we need those funds so that the same thing doesn’t happen as it did the last time, so that the hands which will buy our freedom with clean blood and clean money will never again have to do it unarmed. (APPLAUSE) We do not ask Cuban emigrants for their blood, although I know they want to give it; we ask for a few drops of sweat every week. We will buy freedom with the sweat of their brows, and we will buy it with clean money, so that there are no commitments, so that the triumph is not stained by the interests of those who have wanted to help it unselfishly, so that we can fulfill our obligations with these people, so that we feel more obligated. For that, Cubans, we ask for your help.</p>
<p>We say here today, just as Marti did, reaffirming our faith that we will find magnanimous help in all these honorable hearts, that we will knock on door after door and to ask for alms for the country, town to town; and it shall be given to us because we will ask with honor.</p>
<p>As the Apostle said, help the martyr, the martyr who asks for help, who awaits help, who relies on help, who wants to redeem himself with help. (APPLAUSE) Not just today, but every day, not with the patriotism of a single day but with the pure patriotism of an entire lifetime, not just in a moment of fleeting enthusiasm.</p>
<p>We leave all of you here today with a mission: as we leave here, we ask one thing of these Cubans who have been so excited today, those Cubans who stood to applaud Comrade Márquez. We ask you to keep something for us, that you keep the enthusiasm of today, that you will keep in every one of your hearts...</p>
<p>(Incomplete recording)</p>
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Fidel Castro Internet Archive
Speech delivered by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz at the Palm Garden Room in New York on October 30, 1955
Delivered: October 30, 1955
Source: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en from an incomplete recording.
Markup: David Walters, 2019
Online Version: http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en
There are few times when the human word would appear to be as limited and deficient as it does today, to express the series of feelings, emotions, and ideas born in the heat of the great display of patriotism we have witnessed this morning, moments of emotions similar to those experienced on other occasions when we have had the chance to meet with large crowds.
There are moments in my life that I will never be able to forget, like that early morning on July 26th at 4:00 am when for the last time I addressed many of the people who died in that action; when I addressed those who fell fighting, when I talked for the last time to those of us who were going to fight, when I exhorted my comrades in the last pep talk, the most beautiful pep talk, the pep talk that is the summary of all the speeches delivered until that moment, the pep talk which precedes battle. I remember that as I remember another moment in front of three judges who said they represented justice, when I denounced the crimes that Comrade Marcos read out.
The audience was in fact the enemy. The soldiers of the army were there; our audience was made up of more than 100 soldiers and officers who were attending the trial out of curiosity or God knows why. And I was speaking to those soldiers, our alleged enemies, to those soldiers more than to the judges; I was telling those soldiers what kind of men were commanding them, I was telling them what kind of stain they had put on the uniform, I was telling them how ignominious and cowardly the attitude of those who wrote that nameless, shameful page in the history of Cuba had been.
I spoke to those soldiers certain that when they were confronted with reason, the reason that is our shield, they would also honour it in reverence because I know that it only takes being Cuban, even though they may be mistaken, it’s enough to be Cuban to have faith in the possibility that they may understand reason and be ashamed of their crimes, in the possibility they will be sorry and in the possibility that they will also come together under the flags of justice.
But there was no occasion like the one today, no moment has seemed to me to be like it; not when I was giving my comrades a pep talk before the battle and not when I was condemning the murderers of my comrades.
Today, these Cubans who have gathered together in response to the call of the Homeland, these Cubans who, even a thousand leagues away, don’t forget it for a minute; these Cubans who have come from Connecticut, from Newark, from Union City, who have come from more than a hundred kilometres away; this event today, because of what it means for Cuba, because of what it means for its prestige, because of what the people filling up this rooms say about Cuba, because of what this event says about the merits of our people, I swear that this is the most moving event I have witnessed in my life. (APPLAUSE)
And when the sceptics, those who have no faith in their Homeland, ask me how we are going to overthrow a regime like Batista’s, how we are going to restore freedom to our people, when those who have no faith ask that question, the answer is right here for them!
Today’s event, organized in five days, without any publicity or ads in the newspapers, only a very small news item, with no money to pay for an ad, with the rain flooding the streets of New York, Union City, Newark early this morning, against nature, with no resources, this event has been organized in five days which, according to the well-informed, is the largest event that Cubans have held in New York since 1895. (Applause) And, Cuban men and women, here is the answer for the sceptics.
Those who know the background of this event, those who have worked incessantly for its success, are aware that on Tuesday, five days ago, we were looking for a place where we could gather together; we went to some different places. An event took place here; hundreds of people came, five hundred, two hundred, two hundred and fifty people came here. However, we were not satisfied in that search with the idea that the event which was going to bring Cubans together this Sunday should be held in any of those places.
As we searched, we found the Palm Garden and we saw that the place was roomy. Anyone would have been discouraged by the fear of failure, the fear of being ridiculous, the fear of having empty chairs. But we who have such great faith in our people, we who think as Martí did that the man who has no faith in his compatriots is an incomplete man, one who was born at seven months. We didn’t hesitate one moment in saying: Yes! This is the place which will be filled with Cubans in five days; it will be filled with Cubans even though we cannot afford any advertising; this place will be filled with Cubans even if it rains, even if there is an earthquake or a cataclysm in the city of New York. (APPLAUSE)
And that is the answer for those who ask how we are going to overthrow Batista. That is the answer for those who do not believe. We are as certain that the regime will fall as we were certain, even though nobody believed it, that the Palm Garden was going to be filled tonight. (APPLAUSE)
We consider tonight’s event as a victory for Cuba, a victory for Cubans. And the fame of the virtue and the patriotism of our people will grow throughout New York and the prestige of Cuba will grow. Those who have tried to boycott this event, the bunch of poor wretches, the mercenaries, who were surely counting on having some empty chairs tonight even though chairs would never be actually empty because they would be filled by the spirit of those who died, of those who lost their lives in action; (APPLAUSE) those who thought that spreading rumors about the Migration Services visiting the place, as if Cubans were breaking the law and if they weren’t obeying the law as they are, as if a powerful State was going to serve as the instrument to their petty plans, they thought they would scare Cubans off. And we have heard about a man who said he was a consul, not for Cuba though, (APPLAUSE) who has devoted himself to thwarting this event. And I don’t want to tell you, out of discretion, about some of the steps this man took in terms of the event; I don’t want to be indiscreet, but I tell you he was all set to sabotage the event. And I understand that he even prepared an event on his own, I don’t know what kind, some gluttonous event, I think it was a lunch, a dinner, or something like that, and that he was deeply concerned about the event and he had even sent his agents to spread word of the event.
But there is something else. We arrived at Union City yesterday to meet with a group of Cubans from Placetas, Cienfuegos, and other places in Cuba who were waiting for us. It was really interesting that a minute and half after our arrival, a captain, four patrol cars, a handful of detectives and all the police forces they could muster in that town showed up there.
The fact is that we are abiding by the law; the fact is that we respect the laws of the country we are in and likewise, we want them to respect our laws. (APPLAUSE) And we understood that all that mobilization could only be a consequence and a product of those people with evil intentions who were trying to sabotage that meeting; that some consul from who knows where had filed a complaint against us; that they were trying to hunt us down. So once more in this lifetime I have to suffer persecution, although it would have been involuntary on the part of those doing it and they would have had no other obligation but to investigate any complaint made. That situation however was quite odd.
It is really sad that those who are throwing Cubans out of their own land, thrown Cubans into this country to earn here with their hard work and the sweat of their brows the bread being denied them there, it is very sad that, not content with that, they devote themselves to hunting down Cubans over here; they devote themselves to threatening them with sending this country’s authorities after them. Because, ladies and gentlemen, if there would be one single Cuban here, only one Cuban who has been thrown into this country by necessity without undertaking all the required formalities, there can only be one explanation for this and that would be the excess of poverty and hunger that exists in Cuba. (APPLAUSE)
In addition they hound him, they use him and they attempt to make his life bitter. I have really found the attitude of that Mr. Consul a little silly.
(THE AUDIENCE ASKS: "What country is he from?")
FIDEL CASTRO. - From the country of the smugglers, comrade. (APPLAUSE) Because, it would be like burying your head in the sand; it would be like believing that this Cuban resurrection miracle could be held back with intrigues, when by now there are no intrigues or bayonets that can hold it back! (APPLAUSE)
This country’s immigration authorities should not be hounding the Cubans who come here to work honestly; they should not be hounding the Cubans who have shown and given proof of their faith in democracy, of their love of freedom and of the decorum of the peoples, of the peoples’ right to govern themselves, for which millions of men shed their blood in the last War. (APPLAUSE)
The immigration authorities should pursue those who disguise their criminal intentions under the diplomatic cloak. Because that Consul, let’s say it out loud, is shameful for Cuba. (APPLAUSE) That Consul is a silken master smuggler; let everyone know it. (APPLAUSE) That Consul couldn’t stop the advance of the people with his petty, treacherous hand. And as Martí said, I would say to that Mr. Consul whom I rather despise with a bit of pity but with no hatred whatsoever, that we pay friendship with friendship, steel with steel. (APPLAUSE) If we are paid respect, we will respect in turn; if we are attacked, we will attack in turn. (APPLAUSE)
And finally, very soon, perhaps sooner than he may imagine, although not as soon as some impatient people would wish, we’ll be sending a Consul to the United States who will not be a disgrace but a source of pride; (APPLAUSE) a Consul who assists Cubans instead of hounding them; a Consul who can attend patriotic rallies and meet with the Cuban people (APPLAUSE) instead of a Consul who is a disgrace for our suppressed, humiliated nation, a Consul who, one glorious day for Cuba, won’t have to hide in shame like Porras in his lair. (APPLAUSE)
Enough already; I haven’t wanted to take it out on that poor fellow, I just wanted to symbolize all the shamelessness he embodies; that is what the Cuban Consul represents here, the shamelessness that rules Cuba. (APPLAUSE)
Having said these healthy words of clarification, I want to be more precise. Applause encourages us, lifts up our spirits and we see it as a tribute to the Homeland, to the fallen and as the expression of our people’s faith. However, there is something more important for us than the applause: we care about the work that is yet to be done. We don’t come here seeking applause. We came to do the work that our National Hero José Martí taught us back in 1895; among many others we came here to do the work that only a giant could do; we came to speak to the Cuban emigrants in New York and the United States.
Because exactly the same thing is happening in Cuba and one would have to be blind not to see it; it’s happening exactly the same way as it did in 1868 and 1895. The reasons why you are here, and I know that if you could be in Cuba you would be in Cuba or you wouldn’t be applauding Cuba; (APPLAUSE) if we asked every one of you why you are in this country, the answer would be exactly the same as the one given by those emigrants who in 1868 and 1895 gathered together to listen to the liberators’ words. As it happened then, Cubans have to emigrate from their land because they are unable to earn an honest livelihood there. Before earning their livelihood in a shameful manner, Cubans prefer to leave their country and go somewhere else in the world to earn their livelihood honestly. (APPLAUSE)
Many who have not been forced to emigrate live there, I know because I know the value of men; everybody here, everyone who has tirelessly worked to organize this event, all of you, any one of you, don’t need some local political boss or corrupt politician to give them two or three hundred pesos to be part of their political machinery. I know that with their working capacity, determination and energy they could solve the problem, just like a bunch of mercenaries solve it now in Cuba.
Is there a shortage of wealth in Cuba? Is there a shortage of fertile land and extraordinary riches in Cuba to shelter not only you but six million Cubans, to shelter twenty million Cubans? No. Belgium, the Netherlands or any other country in Europe has a third of Cuba’s land and it is covered by snow for many months; they have three times as many inhabitants as Cuba has, inch by inch they steal land from the sea, they build dikes and they live there and even compete with our wealth. Their condensed milk and their butter and a series of their products compete with Cuban products, even though the Cubans have land to spare, huge extensions of uncultivated land, extraordinary possibilities of being one of the most prosperous nations in the world. Oh yes! Cuba does not lack wealth, and the best proof is in the millions that are stolen every year. If there was a shortage of wealth in Cuba how could we explain there have been rulers who have left the country taking 50 and 60 million of pesos with them? How do we explain that Batista has distributed assets worth twenty million pesos? How do we explain the trips his relatives take every month, as rumor has it, to deposit certain amounts of money taken from the Republic into American banks? If Cuba lacked wealth how come so many millions of Cuban money has been invested in the United States? How is it possible that so many apartment buildings have been bought in New York? How is it possible that so much business can be done by these crafty people? These people are sniffing out that the people would get tired of them, that the people are already getting tired of them (SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE) and when that happens they won’t have the time to get their suitcases out. They can smell it in the air! They must be hearing a subterranean rumbling which is now like running lava on the surface. Because how can they conceal what is happening here in New York? How can they conceal the people’s mood? How can they refuse to see it? Even if they hide their heads three meters underground like an ostrich, how can they refuse to understand what is happening with the people of Cuba? How can they refuse to see that the end is nigh?
The end of the dictatorship? Yes! The end of the dictatorship; but not only the end of the dictatorship. The end of today’s thieves? Yes, but not only the end of today’s thieves. The end of the dictatorship, of today’s thieves and yesterday’s thieves! (APPLAUSE) The end of oppression and also the end of political maneuvering; the end of the betrayal of those who seized power on March 10th and the end of those who have been betraying it since 1902.
Because they are to blame for this entire sad spectacle we are witnessing, of this spectacle of hundreds and thousands of Cubans being forced to leave their Homeland.
If any argument was needed, about an occurrence that would be decisive enough to demonstrate what is happening in Cuba, you, your presence here today, the presence of these people here, is the most irrefutable of arguments. Because some have been here for two years, some for six months, some for three years, some for ten, some for fifteen or even twenty; but you have all come for the same reason, you all left Cuba because you could not make a living there. You all left Cuba and did it with the feeling of having twenty daggers of loneliness lodged in your hearts and feeling great homesickness. You all have left Cuba and you all wish to return.
I’ve heard it from the lips of many Cubans, I’ve heard those soul-wrenching words, I’ve heard Cubans who have told me with their arms raised to the sky: I’m not a lazy person! I’m a working man! I could have earned a living there! But it is so sad to go knocking door to door, house to house, looking for a job so that you don’t have to steal, just to be able to feed your children. And if it’s not you then it’s your wife, mother, or brother, or your children, and nobody gives you work, nobody gives you work!
What I was also saying in this speech, what I said to the judges happened, what Comrade Marquez could not read because he only read a part, what I told the Court in Santiago de Cuba: “When someone accused of stealing appears before you, you send them to jail without thinking twice. You don’t ask how many days he has been unemployed, how long it’s been since his family had something to eat. No! You send him to jail. But nobody who has stolen millions and millions from the Government has ever spent one night behind bars. (APPLAUSE) You dine with them at some posh place on New Year’s Eve and they have all your respect. When some miserly wealthy man burns down his business to collect the insurance, even though a number of unfortunate workers are burned to death in the process, they don’t go to jail because they have plenty of money to bribe the judges and lawyers.”
And that’s the truth that nobody wants to talk about, the truth we’ve been telling the people, the need to cure the Republic, a timely cure before the tumor becomes malignant and the Republic dies; (APPALUSE) a cure even if it means amputation, even if it means cutting really deep, a radical cure. So that no Cuban comes to me, ladies and gentlemen, as one did yesterday, a man who is surely sitting among you, and tells me that he has been here for several months and has not seen his wife since he left, nor has he met his youngest child who was born in Cuba.
So that this hard life, because your lives are hard, I know this very well, I know how each of your lives is, I know how lonely you are amidst this mass of steel and concrete, how lonely you feel among the many millions of people, how lonely you feel in those houses, your homes, in those lonely apartments, where you cannot even dream of having a child there because they would not have the sun, they would not have the sun of their land, they would not have “waiting brides”, the palm trees, to whose height Martí wanted to put justice; (APPLAUSE) they would lack the pure skies of the Homeland and they would lack the air to grow.
Because you, the men and women working here from seven in the morning to seven at night, you cannot have children because there would be nobody to look after them; either you would have to stop working and not have enough to eat or you would have to not have any children.
I have witnessed this tragedy and I often wonder: is it possible that some of these Cubans have to live here for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years? Is it be possible to resist this hellish life, is it possible to resign yourselves to it? And I also think that there are brothers and sisters and parents who are even worse off than them. Is resignation possible? Is happiness possible? Because José Martí rightly stated that there is no happiness without Homeland and without honor. Did he say “without Homeland”? Because, fellow Cubans, they have taken from us more than freedom. They have taken not only our freedom, they have taken away our Homeland; they have taken away from us the land where we were born.
And in this struggle we are trying to recover the Homeland that has been taken away from us, that Homeland which belongs to us as well, as much as it belongs to them; but it’s more ours than theirs because we do not exploit it, because we love it. We love it so that we can live there, not submit it to oppression, not degrade it. And the Homeland, as Martí said, belongs to nobody; if it belonged to anyone it would be to those who love it selflessly and those who would be willing to make all manner of sacrifice on its behalf.
And we Cubans hurt not just because our Homeland has been taken from us; because they have ripped it from us, because we cannot live there, because they have separated us from our families, from our love and our feelings, they have disgracefully ripped it from us, they have taken it by force, they have ripped it from us by the only painful manner and furthermore they have humiliated us.
When human beings have something ripped from them, it is sad and unbearable. They have ripped it from us by force and they don’t want to give it back. As you know every day there are more and more Cubans arriving, and the queues at the American Consulate are endless and more and more people keep arriving. Entire towns like La Esperanza where there was a tobacco factory, two shoe factories and where everything shut down after March 10th and the entire town emigrated; like Placetas, Fomento, Cienfuegos and, in brief, (APPLAUSE) all over Cuba where everything is in ruins. Cuba where the traitors who seized power that morning said they were going to establish a government of peace, of respect for human life and for work. And they did! Batista has given jobs every year to ten thousand Cubans, in New York! (APPLAUSE) Batista is solving unemployment by working with the [US] Consulate to issue more visas every year; Batista is solving Cuba’s problem by leaving Cuba without inhabitants. (LAUGHTER) Even with the most basic common sense one can understand that Cuba is steadily on its way to bankruptcy; even people with a minimum of understanding of economics know that the peso not earned in the factory, the peso not earned by a worker in his workshop, is the peso that no longer circulates in the stores, the shops and the pharmacies. It is one peso less being spent by the man who manufactures shoes or clothing. It is one peso less for the entire economy of the nation.
And I would like them to explain to me how are they going to solve the problem of Cuba by leaving hundreds and thousands of men unemployed, men who no longer produce and earn pesos, who increase the numbers of people who have to leave the country. Because even though there are many interests created to support such anachronistic theories, I cannot believe that the Railway Company, for example, needs to fire 500 or 600 workers, that this could be a healthy solution for the country. It might be a healthy solution for that Company for a few months or even for a few years, but those 600 workers are 600 fewer people buying in the country, it means 600 fewer people benefitting all the industries of the country, 600 fewer people going shopping, to sports events, to movie theaters or anywhere. It means 600 fewer people whose absence would be noticed in a year’s time in other stores, in other factories, in other work sectors. And the consequences would be that in a year or a year and half they would have to fire 500, 1000 or 1,500 and from there it’s a straight fall. That’s why the Cuban economy today is falling.
Batista is not only a traitor; Batista is not only a dictator, a wretch who oppresses his people, who harangues his soldiers to kill Cubans with weapons paid for by Cubans; no! Batista is also an incompetent, one of the clumsiest rulers Cuba has ever had. In a word, ladies and gentleman, he is completely clueless.
Because as Martí said it’s not the same thing “to govern a Republic as it is to command an encampment.” Martí said this to Gómez: “General, a Republic is not founded in the same way as an encampment is founded.” Gómez had been fighting for ten, thirty years and Martí told him that a Republic could not be governed in the same way as a military camp. And after fifty years, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic, during the centenary of Cuba’s National Hero, one individual, a bold sergeant, would like to govern the Republic as if it were a military camp. And this individual has done nothing in ten years, thirty years, ten months, ten days, a day, one minute or one single second for the independence of Cuba. This is a Mr. General who earned his stripes the same way as those other generals to whom we have said, not from here because it would have no merit, but over there in Cuba, right to their faces, over there from the jail, we have told them they are not even worthy of leading the mules carrying the clothing of General Antonio Maceo’s army.
Maceo, one of Cuba´s most glorious military personalities, earned his General’s insignia after over 500 battles, after risking his life every day, after fighting for eight years. And these men, these good-for-nothings with a few stars on their shoulders who were captains devoted to illegal gambling and exploiting everybody (it is well known what these people do: they take money from this sugar mill or from that famer to defend the interests of the owners and to crush those who oppose them; that’s their job), those men became generals overnight, in fifty minutes, without shooting once. They became generals, overnight generals who have never taken a risk, generals who are now millionaires.
Oh, yes! Those crimes have explanations. Because as Martí said, there is hatred that is born drooling from the bellies of man. Only low-born hatred, born from those who see their enjoyment of those millions being threatened, can take it out so cruelly on young people who have never stolen anything from anyone, honest young people, the young people who without bragging about it quietly and discreetly turned the Moncada Barracks into a torch in the early morning one day, without anyone knowing. (APPLAUSE)
They could not show any mercy because this was a dangerous example. They had to teach those youths a terrible lesson. They had to teach a lesson that would make sure no other young Cubans would ever even think of taking up arms to fight oppression and tyranny again.
They thought they would crush the rebellious spirit of the people because they had not encountered any resistance since March 10. Since March 10 they were gloating about having seized the Republic without firing even one shot and they were gloating about how that traditional rebellious spirit of the people had died. They could not tolerate that outburst. They had to pull it out by the roots and as dim-witted as they were they thought they could cut it out by killing and torturing those involved, by gouging out their eyes and by burying men alive. They were so dim-witted they couldn’t understand that within a few years there would be 100,000 youths willing to die, that the people would rise up, a people like this one. I see in these people the embodiment of the words I spoke after spending 16 days in solitary in a prison cell; I spoke there from impotence, physical impotence but moral omnipotence. (APPLAUSE) I told them, despite the slander with which they tried to flood and bury us because they thought the truth would never come to light, they never thought the people there would have enough courage and determination and faith to make truth prevail. They imagined that the massacre could be covered up for a long time. I told them they would see the victorious specters of ideas rise up from the bodies of my dead comrades. They are not dead! Those specters terrify the tyranny, those specters give that miserable consul sleepless nights, those specters keep those generals awake during the night because they know of the crushing defeat that’s coming; these specters don’t give the tyranny a moment of peace.
Because this cannot be ignored; Cuba will know about all this because it will be written in the media, this picture will be published in the media. But if censorship and terror prevent this picture from being made public, this picture together with our people will circulate throughout Cuba via the 2,000 Cubans who are part of the underground apparatus of the 26th of July Revolutionary Movement propaganda distribution. (APPLAUSE)
Cubans: that money being collected there is a specter lingering like a ghost. Those pesos collected there are terrifying; those pesos make the tyrants tremble because those pesos you saw being collected into a Mambí hat were not for me; nobody thought that of course. Those pesos were put there for Cuba; those pesos were put there to tell the regime and to tell Cuba that these are the pesos earned by the sweat of our brows, earned by our daily labor and with which we are going to conquer the freedom of Cuba. (applause)
Ladies and gentlemen; now they won’t be able to say as they once did that a liberation movement is being carried out with money stolen from the people. Now they cannot dub it as immoral, just as they could not dub it immoral before. Since it began, from the very first day, this Movement began well; it started with clean money. We don’t want sullied money because the first law of the Revolutionary Government will be in place to confiscate everything from the thieves; we do not want to ask for favors from any thief.
And with those stolen goods we are going to do the first great works of the Republic and we will set up the first factories and the first industries we need so that there are no more Cuban emigrants abroad. (applause)
And we do not want commitment, nor will we have it; and nobody will come here to buy favors from the Revolution because the Revolution doesn’t sell favors. (applause) And instead of having to thank a handful of people for freedom, we will want to thank the entire nation. (applause)
Now they cannot say we are going to overthrow the regime. Yes, because we are going to overthrow it and I do not hide it. We exercise the right that all peoples have had to be free; we exercise the right of Washington and of all the American liberators who drew up that Declaration of Rights in Philadelphia in which it says that the most evident truth is that all men are born free and equal and their Creator granted all of them certain rights; and to safeguard rights, governments were established. And when governments did not fulfill the purposes for which they had been created, the people had the right to remove them and to institute another.
All the peoples of America have been liberated in the name of that right to freedom, of that right to fight against oppression; and these American peoples were liberated from the oppression of a foreign monarch. For that reason I trust that here in this country there will be many people who sympathize with freedom for Cuba, who sympathize with those who exercise the right that they exercised to be free.
We are going to get rid of that gentleman; we are going to remove him without violating any law anywhere. Here we will be preaching, raising funds and knowing what we have to do; here we will be preaching the idea and respecting the laws of countries which give us their hospitality. Here we are preparing today the most terrible psychological weapon that can be wielded against the regime that oppresses and debases Cuba because when the regime in Cuba sees this pile of bills, when the regime witnesses that spectacle, then it will be convinced that its end is nigh.
And the people over there who wait for the guide, the people over there even though they may earn a peso per day if they have a job, and not ten pesos every day, those people will also willingly give their peso because the 26th of July Movement will send the Manifesto to the people seeking their help; we want this Manifesto to be preceded by the photo of the contribution that our New York emigrants have made today. That’s why they have been placed here, on the table, so that the contribution can be seen, to make it look great and to serve as encouragement for all Cubans.
Because the regime hopes that we cannot do anything; we have organization, they know that and we are decided, they know that too. They also know we are not millionaires because they know that we have not stolen a cent from the Republic, because they know that we will not ask a thief for one single cent. Now hear this as well; they will know that we will have the necessary help; they will know of the people's willingness to help this cause.
Oh, yes! And if the example of those who have come to contribute there has been admirable, the example of many Cubans contributing over there is also admirable; Cubans who earn twelve pesos a month, cooking, working, anywhere, and still they contribute a peso; Cuban workers who at the first meeting with our militant comrades contributed one hundred pesos of their savings; Cubans who have mimeographed this brochure at their own expense; Cubans who copy the manifestos and sell them.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, in Cuba a true miracle of resurrection is taking place; it understands that this is a struggle of sincere and honest men, whose souls are not tainted by corruption. (APPLAUSE) Because the people are intuitive, the people are not so easily deceived, the people allow themselves to be deceived whenever they want, the people will guess who their loyal servants are and the people know how much love we have put into this cause.
And sometimes I give an example to explain this: the man who falls in love with a beautiful and virtuous woman and loves her with all his soul would not be able to prostitute her, would not be able to rent her, would not be able to sell or exploit her. He wouldn’t even allow others to look at her or offend her. Likewise we are incapable of exploiting, renting, or selling our blessed idea of the Homeland! (APPLAUSE)
We are in love with our Homeland. We have fought for it tirelessly, fought for it without rest and we go from one town to another for it; we will continue this pilgrimage for our Homeland, Cubans, until the day when the time has come to call on the regime to render accountability.
Because this time it will not be like July 26th; this time it will not be a handful of ignored youths; this time it will be the people; this time we have come to do what we unfortunately could not do before. Then our hopes were placed on other men, at that time we were looking at another series of Cubans who were well known in their homeland, from whom the Nation expected the miracle of liberation from the dictatorship. I would have expected these Cubans who in normal times would have stood at a podium and beat their chests and asked us to vote for them because they were willing to give the last drop of their blood for Cuba. They are ready to do it all; they are ready to be Spartans in the defense of the ideals of the people. And when a situation like March 10 occurs, when it’s time to give the last drop of blood and even the last penny, those politicians who spend ten thousand and twenty thousand and a hundred thousand pesos to leave, mortgaging their homes and doing everything to leave, these people do not appear at any meeting, nor do they contribute one single cent to the country; and so a group of youths has to go to die with empty hands because they lacked the resources. (applause)
That is why I was telling you (and Comrade Márquez read it) that this is why the underworld of Cuban politicking has been governing the Republic; they are the thug politicians, they do not deserve any other name because I am one of those who thinks that the law-defying thugs who come face-to-face with authority are braver than those who steal there with impunity, without risk of any kind, those are the ones who have been governing the Republic. And here we are promoting a change on every front: first of all a moral revolution. It will also be a creative revolution, the revolution that knows what it will do, that has its program contained in this pamphlet and in the manifestos, a program that will take Cuba with facts and not with words to the place that corresponds to the country in America, because of the extraordinary richness of its soil, because of the virtues of its people. They are people such as you here, capable of meeting in five days, in the rain, coming together by themselves and with that enthusiasm which we have heard here listening for ten minutes to a standing comrade. These people deserve more than the dishonor in which they are living.
And if others should harbor any doubts about these people, should others offend them, should they intimidate them and lash them to a yoke, we can see their suffering, we can see their fight, we can see how they strive for freedom and we say: Blessed be the Cuban people. Only skeptics who will never do anything in the world, those who will never write a page in history, can have doubts about these people. If you had doubts you would not be meeting over there, if you had doubts we would have stalled at the first step when there were three of us at the beginning; and then we were a hundred, and then we were a thousand.
And there in the solitary prison cell on the Isla de Pinos where they set themselves against us in a cowardly manner, I never lost faith. I was there a year ago. There we were alone; there we were seemingly impotent and forgotten; a year ago we were very far from what we have here today. We were offered provisional liberty, and we reject conditional liberty. We said that freedom belonged to us because it was our right. We would remain there for one thousand years before accepting dishonorable liberty. And the people brought us out onto the street! A year ago we were there and now we are here today.
We are with the people. The 22 months did not discourage us; the 22 months did not make us lose heart or faith for one single minute. Here we are, at the base of the flag; here we are at the base of the idea; here we are at the base of the trench which we set up with ideas because, as the Cuban woman spoke to us: "Trenches made of ideas are worth more than trenches made of stone."
Here we are setting up trenches of ideas but we are also setting up stone trenches. (APPLAUSE)
Cubans: at this meeting Cuba will know about that generous and admirable contribution; Cuba will know about those pesos that are pesos from ‘95. And from here, from New York, I say it with the faith that always accompanies us, we are sure that Cuban emigrants, like the emigrants of ‘95, will help take the country back to freedom. Here we must have an apostle in every Cuban, in every Cuban who stood up here, in every Cuban who took an oath here, in every Cuban who will leave here with the idea of the Homeland utmost in his mind; we must have an apostle in every Cuban. Such apostles would not be satisfied with the applause that has been heard here; they are apostles who will go out and win over those who are not here, who will go to conquer those who went partying last night and so today they are not here, to those undecided or tired Cubans, or to those lazy Cubans forgotten by the Homeland. They will go out and wake them up with voices of love and voices of conviction.
Just the Cubans who are in New York, because we know what we need, only we Cubans in New York could overthrow that regime if we wanted to, that regime whose crimes horrified the crowd, and just New York (and it would not be New York alone because it would be Miami, Tampa, Key West and 127 places in Cuba), just New York can defeat Batista. With how much sacrifice? With what one spends on going to the movies for six months. Just New York can pay for the freedom of Cuba, New York alone, if two thousand Cubans can get together, two thousand Cubans who give two pesos every week, give two hours of work a week, the money to go to the movies, the money to buy a whiskey.
I tell you with all responsibility that six months of well-paid help given by the Cubans of New York would be enough to win over Cuba's freedom.
And what cruel revenge, the revenge of those who threw them out of their Homeland, the revenge against those who brought all of you here to this land, that is the cruelest revenge! The people overthrowing a tyrant with the money it takes to go to the movies for six months.
Engrave these words in your souls, for they are true. I have enormous faith that you will understand them, that you will measure the value of the virtues you have for constancy, for faith and for the seriousness and discipline with which you help. A modest and poor Cuban comes to ask you this, a Cuban who isn’t having fun, who nobody will see having a drink or going to a night club, or spending even one penny on anything that isn’t essential to his survival; as if we had to spend that because wherever we go we find generous Cubans who give us their homes and who feed us; we do not need anything for ourselves, we will never need it. The first manifesto came about, to our honor, as the product of a pawned overcoat; that first manifesto is with us thanks to the money we got for a pawned overcoat. In Cuba we now have 40,000 young people belonging to the Revolutionary Movement, youth committed to paying a monthly fee and money is raised as we go from town to town. Because we need those funds so that the same thing doesn’t happen as it did the last time, so that the hands which will buy our freedom with clean blood and clean money will never again have to do it unarmed. (APPLAUSE) We do not ask Cuban emigrants for their blood, although I know they want to give it; we ask for a few drops of sweat every week. We will buy freedom with the sweat of their brows, and we will buy it with clean money, so that there are no commitments, so that the triumph is not stained by the interests of those who have wanted to help it unselfishly, so that we can fulfill our obligations with these people, so that we feel more obligated. For that, Cubans, we ask for your help.
We say here today, just as Marti did, reaffirming our faith that we will find magnanimous help in all these honorable hearts, that we will knock on door after door and to ask for alms for the country, town to town; and it shall be given to us because we will ask with honor.
As the Apostle said, help the martyr, the martyr who asks for help, who awaits help, who relies on help, who wants to redeem himself with help. (APPLAUSE) Not just today, but every day, not with the patriotism of a single day but with the pure patriotism of an entire lifetime, not just in a moment of fleeting enthusiasm.
We leave all of you here today with a mission: as we leave here, we ask one thing of these Cubans who have been so excited today, those Cubans who stood to applaud Comrade Márquez. We ask you to keep something for us, that you keep the enthusiasm of today, that you will keep in every one of your hearts...
(Incomplete recording)
Fidel Castro Internet Archive
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<p class="storyheadline">Message to the National Assembly</p>
<p class="storybyline">By Fidel Castro Ruz</p><br>
<div class="feature">
<p>Comrades of the National Assembly:</p>
<p>You have no easy task on your hands. On January 1st, 1959, surrounded by the accumulated and deepening grievances that our society inherited from its neo-colonial past under U.S. domination, many of us dreamed of creating a fully independent nation where justice prevailed. In the arduous and uneven struggle, there came the moment when we were left completely alone.</p>
<p>Nearly 50 years since the triumph of the Revolution, we can justifiably feel proud of ourselves, as we have held our ground, for almost half a century, in the struggle against the most powerful empire ever to exist in history. In the Proclamation I signed on July 31, 2006, none of you saw any signs of nepotism or an attempt to usurp parliamentary powers. That year, at once difficult and promising for the Revolution, the unity of the people, the Party and State were essential to continue moving forward and to face the declared threat of a military action by the United States.</p>
<p>This past December 24, during his visit to the various districts of the municipality, which honored me with the nomination of candidate to parliament, Ra�l noted that all of the numerous candidates proposed by the people of a district famous for its combativeness, but with a low educational level, had completed their higher education. This, as he said on Cuban television, made a profound impression in him.</p>
<p>Party, State and Government cadres and grassroots organizations face new problems in their work with an intelligent, watchful and educated people who detest bureaucratic hurdles and inconsiderate justifications. Deep down, every citizen wages an individual battle against humanity’s innate tendency to stick to its survival instincts, a natural law which governs all life. We are all born marked by that instinct, which science defines as primary. Coming face to face with this instinct is rewarding because it leads us to a dialectical process and to a constant and altruistic struggle, bringing us closer to Mart� and making us true communists.</p>
<p>What the international press has emphasized most in its reports on Cuba in recent days is the statement I made on the 17th of this month, in a letter to the director of Cuban television’s <i>Round Table</i> program, where I said that I am not clinging to power. I could add that for some time I did, due to my youth and lack of awareness, when, without any guidance, I started to leave my political ignorance behind and became a utopian socialist. It was a stage in my life when I believed I knew what had to be done and wanted to be in a position to do it! What made me change? Life did, delving more deeply into Mart�’s ideas and those of the classics of socialism. The more deeply I became involved in the struggle, the stronger was my identification with those aims and, well before the revolutionary victory I was already convinced that it was my duty to fight for these aims or to die in combat.</p>
<p>We also face great risks that threaten the human species as a whole. This has become more and more evident to me since I predicted, for the first time in Rio de Janeiro—over 15 years ago, in June 1992—that a species was threatened with extinction as a result of the destruction of its natural habitat. Today, the number of people who understand the real danger of this grows every day.</p>
<p>A recent book by Joseph Stiglitz, former Vice-President of the World Bank and President Clinton’s chief economic advisor until 2002, Nobel Prize laureate and bestselling author in the United States, offers up-to-date and irrefutable facts on the subject. He criticizes the United States, a country that did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, for being the largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, with annual emissions of 6 billion tons of this gas, which disturbs the atmosphere without which life is impossible. In addition to this, the United States is the largest producer of other greenhouse gases.</p>
<p>Few people are aware of these facts. The same economic system which forced this unsustainable wastefulness on us impedes the distribution of Stiglitz’ book. Only a few thousand copies of an excellent edition have been published, enough to guarantee a margin of profit. This responds to a market demand, which the publishing house cannot ignore if it is to survive.</p>
<p>Today, we know that life on Earth has been protected by the ozone layer, located in the atmosphere’s outer ring, at an altitude between 15 to 50 kilometers, in the region known as the stratosphere, which acts as the planet’s shield against the type of solar radiation, which can prove harmful. There are greenhouse gases whose warming potential is higher than that of carbon dioxide and which widen the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, which loses as much as 70 percent of its volume every spring. The effects of this phenomenon, which is gradually taking place, are humanity’s responsibility.</p>
<p>To have a clear sense of this phenomenon, suffice it to say that the world produces an average of 4.37 metric tons of carbon dioxide per capita. In the case of the United States, the average is 20.14, nearly 5 times as much. In Africa, it is 1.17, while in Asia and Oceania it is 2.87.</p>
<p>The ozone layer, in brief, protects us from ultraviolet and heat radiation, which affects the immune system, sight, skin and life of human beings. Under extreme conditions, the destruction of that layer by human beings would affect all forms of life on the planet. Other problems, foreign to our nation and many others under similar conditions, also threaten us. A victorious counterrevolution would spell a disaster for us, worse than Indonesia’s tragedy. Sukarno, overthrown in 1967, was a nationalist leader who, loyal to Indonesia, headed the guerrillas who fought the Japanese.</p>
<p>General Suharto, who overthrew him, had been trained by Japanese occupation forces. At the conclusion of World War II, Holland, a U.S. ally, re-established control over that distant, extensive and populated territory. Suharto maneuvered. He hoisted the banners of U.S. imperialism. He committed an atrocious act of genocide. Today we know that, under instructions from the CIA, he not only killed hundreds of thousands but also imprisoned a million communists and deprived them and their relatives of all properties or rights; his family amassed a fortune of 40 billion dollars—which, at today’s exchange rate, would be equivalent to hundreds of billions—by handing over the country’s natural resources, the sweat of Indonesians, to foreign investors. The West paid up. Texan-born Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, was then the President of the United States.</p>
<p>The news on the events in Pakistan we received today also attests to the dangers that threaten our species: internal conflict in a country that possesses nuclear weapons. This is a consequence of the adventurous policies of and the wars aimed at securing the world’s natural resources unleashed by the United States.</p>
<p>Pakistan, involved in a conflict it did not unleash, faced the threat of being taken back to the Stone Age.</p>
<p>The extraordinary circumstances faced by Pakistan had an immediate effect on oil prices and stock exchange shares. No country or region in the world can disassociate itself from the consequences. We must be prepared for anything.</p>
<p>There hasn’t been a day in my life in which I haven’t learned something.</p>
<p>Mart� taught us that “all of the world’s glory fits in a kernel of corn.” Many times have I said and repeated this phrase, which carries in eleven words a veritable school of ethics. Cuba’s Five Heroes, imprisoned by the empire, are to be held up as examples for the new generations.</p>
<p>Fortunately, exemplary conducts will continue to flourish with the consciousness of our peoples as long as our species exists.</p>
<p>I am certain that many young Cubans, in their struggle against the Giant in the Seven-League Boots, would do as they did. Money can buy everything save the soul of a people who has never gone down on its knees.</p>
<p>I read the brief and concise report, which Ra�l wrote and sent me. We must not waste a minute as we continue to move forward. I will raise my hand, next to you, to show my support.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><i>—Granma,</i> December 27, 2007</p>
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Message to the National Assembly
By Fidel Castro Ruz
Comrades of the National Assembly:
You have no easy task on your hands. On January 1st, 1959, surrounded by the accumulated and deepening grievances that our society inherited from its neo-colonial past under U.S. domination, many of us dreamed of creating a fully independent nation where justice prevailed. In the arduous and uneven struggle, there came the moment when we were left completely alone.
Nearly 50 years since the triumph of the Revolution, we can justifiably feel proud of ourselves, as we have held our ground, for almost half a century, in the struggle against the most powerful empire ever to exist in history. In the Proclamation I signed on July 31, 2006, none of you saw any signs of nepotism or an attempt to usurp parliamentary powers. That year, at once difficult and promising for the Revolution, the unity of the people, the Party and State were essential to continue moving forward and to face the declared threat of a military action by the United States.
This past December 24, during his visit to the various districts of the municipality, which honored me with the nomination of candidate to parliament, Ra�l noted that all of the numerous candidates proposed by the people of a district famous for its combativeness, but with a low educational level, had completed their higher education. This, as he said on Cuban television, made a profound impression in him.
Party, State and Government cadres and grassroots organizations face new problems in their work with an intelligent, watchful and educated people who detest bureaucratic hurdles and inconsiderate justifications. Deep down, every citizen wages an individual battle against humanity’s innate tendency to stick to its survival instincts, a natural law which governs all life. We are all born marked by that instinct, which science defines as primary. Coming face to face with this instinct is rewarding because it leads us to a dialectical process and to a constant and altruistic struggle, bringing us closer to Mart� and making us true communists.
What the international press has emphasized most in its reports on Cuba in recent days is the statement I made on the 17th of this month, in a letter to the director of Cuban television’s Round Table program, where I said that I am not clinging to power. I could add that for some time I did, due to my youth and lack of awareness, when, without any guidance, I started to leave my political ignorance behind and became a utopian socialist. It was a stage in my life when I believed I knew what had to be done and wanted to be in a position to do it! What made me change? Life did, delving more deeply into Mart�’s ideas and those of the classics of socialism. The more deeply I became involved in the struggle, the stronger was my identification with those aims and, well before the revolutionary victory I was already convinced that it was my duty to fight for these aims or to die in combat.
We also face great risks that threaten the human species as a whole. This has become more and more evident to me since I predicted, for the first time in Rio de Janeiro—over 15 years ago, in June 1992—that a species was threatened with extinction as a result of the destruction of its natural habitat. Today, the number of people who understand the real danger of this grows every day.
A recent book by Joseph Stiglitz, former Vice-President of the World Bank and President Clinton’s chief economic advisor until 2002, Nobel Prize laureate and bestselling author in the United States, offers up-to-date and irrefutable facts on the subject. He criticizes the United States, a country that did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, for being the largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, with annual emissions of 6 billion tons of this gas, which disturbs the atmosphere without which life is impossible. In addition to this, the United States is the largest producer of other greenhouse gases.
Few people are aware of these facts. The same economic system which forced this unsustainable wastefulness on us impedes the distribution of Stiglitz’ book. Only a few thousand copies of an excellent edition have been published, enough to guarantee a margin of profit. This responds to a market demand, which the publishing house cannot ignore if it is to survive.
Today, we know that life on Earth has been protected by the ozone layer, located in the atmosphere’s outer ring, at an altitude between 15 to 50 kilometers, in the region known as the stratosphere, which acts as the planet’s shield against the type of solar radiation, which can prove harmful. There are greenhouse gases whose warming potential is higher than that of carbon dioxide and which widen the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, which loses as much as 70 percent of its volume every spring. The effects of this phenomenon, which is gradually taking place, are humanity’s responsibility.
To have a clear sense of this phenomenon, suffice it to say that the world produces an average of 4.37 metric tons of carbon dioxide per capita. In the case of the United States, the average is 20.14, nearly 5 times as much. In Africa, it is 1.17, while in Asia and Oceania it is 2.87.
The ozone layer, in brief, protects us from ultraviolet and heat radiation, which affects the immune system, sight, skin and life of human beings. Under extreme conditions, the destruction of that layer by human beings would affect all forms of life on the planet. Other problems, foreign to our nation and many others under similar conditions, also threaten us. A victorious counterrevolution would spell a disaster for us, worse than Indonesia’s tragedy. Sukarno, overthrown in 1967, was a nationalist leader who, loyal to Indonesia, headed the guerrillas who fought the Japanese.
General Suharto, who overthrew him, had been trained by Japanese occupation forces. At the conclusion of World War II, Holland, a U.S. ally, re-established control over that distant, extensive and populated territory. Suharto maneuvered. He hoisted the banners of U.S. imperialism. He committed an atrocious act of genocide. Today we know that, under instructions from the CIA, he not only killed hundreds of thousands but also imprisoned a million communists and deprived them and their relatives of all properties or rights; his family amassed a fortune of 40 billion dollars—which, at today’s exchange rate, would be equivalent to hundreds of billions—by handing over the country’s natural resources, the sweat of Indonesians, to foreign investors. The West paid up. Texan-born Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, was then the President of the United States.
The news on the events in Pakistan we received today also attests to the dangers that threaten our species: internal conflict in a country that possesses nuclear weapons. This is a consequence of the adventurous policies of and the wars aimed at securing the world’s natural resources unleashed by the United States.
Pakistan, involved in a conflict it did not unleash, faced the threat of being taken back to the Stone Age.
The extraordinary circumstances faced by Pakistan had an immediate effect on oil prices and stock exchange shares. No country or region in the world can disassociate itself from the consequences. We must be prepared for anything.
There hasn’t been a day in my life in which I haven’t learned something.
Mart� taught us that “all of the world’s glory fits in a kernel of corn.” Many times have I said and repeated this phrase, which carries in eleven words a veritable school of ethics. Cuba’s Five Heroes, imprisoned by the empire, are to be held up as examples for the new generations.
Fortunately, exemplary conducts will continue to flourish with the consciousness of our peoples as long as our species exists.
I am certain that many young Cubans, in their struggle against the Giant in the Seven-League Boots, would do as they did. Money can buy everything save the soul of a people who has never gone down on its knees.
I read the brief and concise report, which Ra�l wrote and sent me. We must not waste a minute as we continue to move forward. I will raise my hand, next to you, to show my support.
—Granma, December 27, 2007
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<p class="storyheadline">Fidel Castro on the 50th Anniversary<br>of the Chinese Revolution</p>
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<p><i>Speech delivered by the President of the Council of State of the Republic of Cuba, Fidel Castro Ruz, on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Foundation of the People's Republic of China, in the Universal Hall of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), on September 29, 1999</i></p>
<p>As you can see, they were closing the curtains [laughter], but I looked at my watch and noticed we had a little time left. That's why I thought it would be worthwhile to use these minutes to add a few brief thoughts about what was said here.</p>
<p>A few days ago we were busy with a great number of activities but we often thought that it would now be 50 years since the Chinese Revolution, not only the revolution, but also the independence of China. And that was of really great historical importance.</p>
<p>Similar words are often used, but now we are faced with a real event, a date of real historical importance. And I asked myself: How are we going to commemorate it, what relevance are we going to give it? That's why I asked about the program they were going to have. I asked the Ambassador and first he told me there would be a reception in the Embassy on the evening of the 30th and warmly invited me.</p>
<p>I answered, "Ambassador, the evening of the 30th is not the anniversary of the triumph of the Chinese Revolution!"</p>
<p>And he said, "Yes, because at that hour on the 30th in China it's already the 1st of October."</p>
<p>And, actually, the reception was not being organized for the 2nd, which would have been the result of organizing it, as is traditionally done, on the first. By doing it tomorrow night, on the 30th, it would coincide perfectly with the day of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Also, I know that they have set up television screens so that the guests can view the parade and the commemoration in Tiananmen Square.</p>
<p>I was very pleased that the Ambassador remembered that Cuba was the first Latin American country to recognize the People's Republic of China and to establish relations with it, because there was a very strong blockade, an effort of total isolation. In fact, there was total obedience to the United States in our hemisphere, where there were even many countries, like the Caribbean sister islands of Anglophone extraction still not independent. The independence of those islands increased the strength and spirit of independence in this hemisphere, but no one here in Latin America then had relations with the People's Republic of China, and that was the case in many parts of the world.</p>
<p>Since we also became independent on January 1, 1959, it did not take long to establish relations with the People's Republic of China.</p>
<p>But he remembered something more, and that is that when the Cuban Revolution triumphed, China was represented in the Security Council and the United Nations by Taiwan. At the time, only the Soviet Union, one of the permanent members of the Security Council, was not an ally of the United States. And as an example of imperialist imposition, the most populous country in the world was ignored completely. The oldest country in the world, we could say, of the modern ones, the most ancient civilization in the world was not represented in the Security Council, as was its right according to all the agreements made during the Second World War.</p>
<p>They kept Taiwan there, the defeated puppet government, which continued to be an ally of the United States. We had to fight hard, every year, many countries, mostly of the Third World, including Cuba, just as today, we fight the blockade. We fought for the recognition of the People's Republic of China and for it to occupy its rightful seat on the Security Council as one of its permanent members.</p>
<p>This was achieved in 1971 when it was no longer possible to resist world public opinion and the growing membership of the United Nations. At that time, many African countries and other areas of the world won their political independence-countries of great weight. After the Second World War, India, another of the most populous countries in the world besides China, achieved independence. Indonesia, also a heavily populated Asian country, achieved its independence. Japan was occupied for many years and gradually achieved the rights of a sovereign nation. Many others in the Middle East received independence, as did many in the South Pacific. I have already mentioned the Caribbean. Consequently many countries were added, and it was the determination and tenacity of this struggle that finally won China its basic rights.</p>
<p>Today, 26 years later, I would say that event achieved its full significance within the present world situation due to China's importance and weight. Today China is incomparably greater than it was when its status as a member of the Security Council was finally accepted.</p>
<p>China has been the country that has least used its veto power in the Security Council. China has used it only on exceptional occasions-perhaps Alarcon knows how many. On the other hand, the "master of the world," because it does not own the world but almost all the world, has used this right an infinite number of times.</p>
<p>Today, the Third World has a country that is a friend, that Third World, which supported China so often, has a friend among the Security Council's permanent members.</p>
<p>I remembered something that was not mentioned here: the suffering of the Chinese people, the enormous sacrifices of that people after the triumph of their revolution and their independence. I have to say it that way, because the country was not fully independent, just as Cuba was not, until the day of the Revolution's triumph. For example, they were economically blockaded for a long time, almost totally isolated.</p>
<p>During the earlier years it had the collaboration of the Soviet Union-to some extent, because the Soviet Union had just come out of a terrible war where its industry, its agriculture, its infrastructure were practically destroyed-a support the U.S.SR offered, a determined support that I know the Chinese appreciated very much, until differences and difficulties arose between them.</p>
<p>I do not want to dwell on these subjects but I recall the years of the economic blockade of China. And I also remember the U.S. troops under the command of MacArthur, their intervention in the Korean conflict, a country that they divided and that is still divided; and they reached the Chinese border. Very soon after their war of liberation, no less than one million Chinese volunteers took up arms and participated in that conflict together with the Korean people. They inflicted a severe and terrible blow to the interventionist troops of the United States and its allies until reestablishing the situation that existed before that war, that is, the present border between the two parts of Korea. This event cannot be forgotten nor can the thousands of lives Chinese troops lost.</p>
<p>I have talked to some who participated in that counter-attack. It was during a severe cold, crossing mountains, without mechanical means, with total air control by the United States and its allies and even threatening to use nuclear weapons. In the desperation of their defeat, there were many in the United States who favored attacking beyond the Chinese border. The advance of the Chinese troops was uncontainable in spite of the enormous differences in military power, until they reached the point that is still today that line-a tremendous battle.</p>
<p>Later the economic blockade continued. The Yankee imperialists also intervened in Viet Nam and unleashed a genocidal war. There, the Chinese expressed solidarity with the Vietnamese people. At the time, there were two countries, China and the Soviet Union, who supplied weapons and gave political support to the Vietnamese who fought heroically and were victorious. This victory was obtained during the 1970s. Cuba also made its modest contribution of a free annual supply of sugar for the Vietnamese during the war years. It's worth mentioning, but only as an expression of the good will and the spirit of solidarity of our people who also offered total political support. There was also an enormous feeling of solidarity with Viet Nam by our people.</p>
<p>The Chinese had to endure so many hardships after the war, and for how long! But imperialism was repeatedly defeated. The lesson of Viet Nam marked important turning points. I would say that Cuba's resistance to the blockades, the mercenary invasions, the threats of nuclear war and all that, marked other little points that were also important in that struggle. They demonstrated to the world that it was possible to fight and win against imperialism. They suffered a harsh economic blockade for many years, a little less than us, but at the time it was a record. They were blockaded for 28 years, and we are now going on 40 years.</p>
<p>The events mentioned are irrefutable proof that this lunacy, these criminal policies, cannot last forever.</p>
<p>After all the blows it has received from many parts, the United States began to understand that its position on China was unsustainable from the point of view of rights, of political principles, of the United Nations Charter and everything else. But it was also unsustainable according to its own economic interests. China was an enormous potential market. In fact, they have advantages in many things. In one sense in particular they have an enormous advantage compared to Cuba, and that is the fact that their population-they are have a little more-their population was about one hundred and twenty times more than that of Cuba, and a territory, as mentioned here, of 9.6 million square kilometers, almost one hundred times ours and, undoubtedly a country of great natural resources.</p>
<p>I could add other advantages: They did not live in the West as we do. We are bearing, to a large extent, the culture inherited from the West. China had a millennia-long culture. The Chinese people's great advantage is its language, its own very complex writing. It is not an easy language, not precisely of Latin origin nor, we must say, of Western origin. They had a millennial language. I have no way of knowing how much it evolved since the period before our times. These cultural features are a very important force with which to defend the identity, the integrity, and independence of a great country and are less susceptible to penetration by the western culture that surrounds us.</p>
<p>You can see what the Ambassador explained: after 25 years of conflicts, wars, and blockades, they had recovered important rights such as that seat in the Security Council, a growing respect in the world, and in spite of errors, as the Ambassador pointed out, of various kinds of difficulties that occurred in its own internal policy at a time when the West had no other choice but to acknowledge the rights of China. And when all the blockades ended, you can see the extraordinary rhythm of progress in the country.</p>
<p>What he read here-I was just looking over a copy of the speech and had already heard about some appearances of the Ambassador-a sustained average growth of 9.8 percent for 21 years has no precedent in the history of any human society.</p>
<p>I did some calculations of how many times it doubled its economic production during that period. By then, they had already achieved important advances. I remember that after the revolutionary triumph, the Chinese built great seawalls rock by rock to prevent flooding and promote irrigation. Many social programs were begun from the very triumph of the Revolution. But undoubtedly the economic advances were slowed down considerably by the economic blockade to which subjective factors were added as well.</p>
<p>When, as I said, they had to recognize the rights of China and all the blockades disappeared and they rectified some errors-I don't call them errors but rather their points of view, we would have no right to judge each internal event in China-but, as the Ambassador explained, they had made certain corrections, had overcome certain errors and everyone commits errors and that cannot be denied. After this, they achieved this impressive record because, as he pointed out, and above all, they grew since 1978, for 21 years. There is no precedent; there has never existed anything like this figure.</p>
<p>It is truly very satisfying to listen to the Ambassador reaffirm that these successes were possible due to the political ideology, to a political science, to Marxism-Leninism, to which they added important theoretical contributions of Mao Zedong, theoretical contributions to the revolutionary struggle, theoretical contributions to Marxism to which they later added theoretical and practical contributions of Deng Xiaoping. Added to this is the undeniably hard-working characteristic of the Chinese people. They are a people, really very hardworking. That is recognized everywhere in the world and, in Cuba, it is acknowledged because, dedicated to agriculture, specifically vegetable production, they greatly contribute to the supply of fresh produce in the city.</p>
<p>So, this spirit of labor is an important factor that, in my opinion, also contributed to the advances of the Chinese people, along with a theory and through a revolution that won, together with deep social changes, the independence of that great nation; a true and exemplary revolution when you analyze its roots, from the beginning when it organized its first nucleus of the Chinese Communist Party during the twenties, its rich history and, among the outstanding events, the long march, a military achievement that is unparalleled in history-and history has many military achievements.</p>
<p>We have read some books on what constituted that advance, day by day, surrounded by large enemy units of the puppet government that was supplied with all the weapons it needed, with hundreds of divisions. And that great military achievement occurred in very difficult conditions, always surrounded by large forces, constantly outmaneuvering the enemy, overcoming natural barriers. At times these included snow-capped mountains, and other times, wide and rushing rivers, until they reached the base that would be their permanent site during the war of liberation.</p>
<p>There was a time that the others, the so-called nationalists, the Puppets and reactionaries were fighting a foreign invasion, a war against the Japanese militarists and, to some extent, joined forces with the revolutionary Chinese. However, they were not serving the people nor the true independence of the country and they made all kinds of errors and had all kinds of weaknesses. Many times the Communists had to fight against the nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek and against Japanese troops. In spite of this, they made a decisive contribution to the defeat of the Japanese militarists. These events are also in the pages of modern Chinese history.</p>
<p>And those who served reaction and Yankee imperialism at the end of the Second World War, who were crushingly and irreversibly defeated, took refuge on the little island of Taiwan, which is an integral part of Chinese territory because it was a part of China for an infinite length of time, like the keys to the north of Cuba, more so than the Isle of Youth is ours. Those who live there are of Chinese nationality, speak the Chinese language and have Chinese culture in spite of the western penetration they have received. This possession is an unquestionable right of the Chinese nation. It absolutely cannot be denied that it is an internal problem of China. No one has the right to interfere, and that is what they demand: respect for the sovereignty of their country, the universal recognition of this right. They are not demanding the union of two different nations, of different ethnicities, and different cultures.</p>
<p>Even the Taiwanese, until recently, and especially in the Security Council, spoke for 22 years of only one China completely integrated. Until recently they have been speaking in this language.</p>
<p>Ah! What was the first military intervention by the United States to secure Taiwan? I remember. During the days of the Korean War, the U.S. fleet took up a position between the continent and the island of Taiwan. This cannot be forgotten. That position was maintained by force. The country did not have conditions for that battle, nor did the country want to wage this battle. The country demanded its rights, demanded recognition, and wanted to solve the problem peacefully. What it determined with all its rights was that it would not admit the loss of part of its territory, the tearing up of its country through the declaration and recognition of an independent republic of Taiwan. They have said it categorically, that they will not permit it, and I am sure that they will not, as I have the hope that this problem and the recognition of the theory and the practice of the inalienable rights of China occur without any form of war or loss of blood.</p>
<p>What is really happening today is that the United States and other western countries, while they talk of only one China, supply the separatist government of the island with the most modern and sophisticated weapons and nourish the movement against the integrity of China.</p>
<p>The Ambassador recalled and Machadito also mentioned the problem of Hong Kong. They knew how to have the necessary patience until the day came when the West and the world had no other choice but to acknowledge the right of the People's Republic of China to the reintegration of this piece of its territory seized by colonial wars, disgraceful colonial wars.</p>
<p>Today much is said against drug trafficking. Then, the British Empire took over that territory and the West unleashed a war and sent troops who reached Beijing to impose the rights of the Western powers over the opium trade with China. That is a historical truth.</p>
<p>They recalled that this same year Macao would be returned, the little piece that was in the hands of a European country and it would be done peacefully through an agreement made thanks to Chinese patience, a patience we should all learn from and that, partially, we have. And if we have not learned from it we have figured out on our own because the duty of all revolutionaries it to also act with the necessary wisdom.</p>
<p>They waited and that year took possession of the territory. To make things easier, they thought of a country with two systems. They promised those who stayed in Hong Kong the existing economic and social systems, the existing institutions but under Chinese sovereignty. They have also made this offer to Taiwan, with an even broader scope. The proof of the peaceful spirit of China is the fact that, even though the Portuguese enclave of Macao had no form of defense, they did not take advantage of the circumstance or any situation to take over the enclave.</p>
<p>India, a neighboring country, also very populated, did not have so much patience and, at a certain time, took over a Portuguese enclave that was on Indian territory. It is a good example of the peaceful spirit of the People's Republic of China. They did not use force to recover that territory and with the help of time and international support they are recovering all the rights they were stripped of.</p>
<p>The Ambassador mentioned how they had broken up the country. He could mention many other things. I mentioned the history of opium. How many crimes were committed against that great nation until mid-century, and how many rights were denied and ignored until they were reestablished in the course of the final two-thirds of this century!</p>
<p>Respect the people! Respect territorial integrity! This is not the time to break up nations. At a time when many peoples, separated by borders, by flags and hymns fight for integration, join together, and peacefully wipe out borders, the countries of the Caribbean fight for integration. The countries of Central America fight for integration. The countries of South America fight for integration. Latin America fights for it. In the future, no small nation can exist isolated in practice.</p>
<p>I will say more: Switzerland a country traditionally very protective of its sovereignty that, due to its excellent geographic position in the heart of the Alps, could maintain neutrality during the First and Second World Wars. And Switzerland, I know because I went there and spoke with leaders who were, along with 49 percent of the people, in favor of integration into the European Economic Community, only a small fraction is lacking to make a majority-could not live alone in the Alps, isolated from the rest of the European community. The move is inexorably toward integration in that community.</p>
<p>Who has the right to support the disintegration of China? Who has the right to deny China's demand for acknowledgment of its sovereignty over Taiwan? It is absurd that when the entire world is integrating that someone should call for the disintegration of a piece of China.</p>
<p>You can see the disaster of disintegration of the Soviet Union countries; a disintegration that became a race of all to run, primarily the United States, to invest and establish its hegemony, its domination and its possession of the fundamental resources of the former republics, mainly gas and oil, products of which they are very rich, as well as other minerals.</p>
<p>The world doesn't move towards disintegration, it moves towards integration. It is not only a historical fact but also a principle of the modern world, a necessity of modern life. That is what the People's Republic of China demands. And now, the People's Republic of China of today, of this millennium, or of this century about to begin, is very different from that republic that arose 50 years ago in a country devastated by many years of war, against foreign invasion.</p>
<p>Added to this was the revolutionary war. More than 20 years of fierce battles against the internal and external enemies of the Chinese people. The country destroyed, a country that was poor, a country that had been exploited by external and internal exploiters. Everything needed to be built. I already mentioned under what conditions.</p>
<p>It is a country whose economy strongly moves forward. It's curious; Machadito mentioned their contribution during the Asian crisis. There is something more: the People's Republic of China gave an extraordinary service to the world in recent months, especially since 1998 in that crisis that began in Southeast Asia and that lead the second world power in the field of economy, Japan, into a deep crisis, that later spread to Russia and was seriously affecting the stocks and shares of the United States exchanges and which threatened to wipe out the economy of Latin America.</p>
<p>You can see how great the danger was that Latin America as a whole grew, if it grew at all, by 0.5 percent in 1999; and if it grew 0.5 percent it is because the countries with an important weight in the region produced greater growth. Mexico was between 4 percent and 5 percent. There are countries with growth below zero, negative in several countries, several important countries. It was a very serious world economic threat that has not yet been overcome, and it is not known with certainty if it will soon be overcome and there is the certainty-at least I have it-that when it recovers it will not be for long.</p>
<p>China had made an enormous economic sacrifice without which the crisis would not have been stopped. It was in a complicated situation because its exports grew year by year, but when the Asian crisis devaluated the currencies in many countries with a certain level of development-the so-called Asian tigers, pride of the neoliberal economy, pride of imperialism as an example of what can be achieved through their adverse formulas-and when they fell in a matter of days, since one after the other economy of those countries collapsed with terrible consequences, both for the economy of the world, especially for the countries of the Third World that are totally unprotected in this crisis, the Chinese found themselves at a disadvantage because the prices of the merchandize of all these countries cheapened amazingly because with the devaluation of their currency they could export whatever they wanted at low prices.</p>
<p>China could have devaluated the yuan to protect itself against that competition, to maintain the rhythm of increase in its exports and with this maintain an uninterrupted rise in growth. The world was shaking-the world! Not just the Third World but also the industrialized world was shaking thinking of the idea that China, with its rights, and to protect its exports and economic growth could devaluate the yuan. It did not and still there has been no acknowledgement that the People's Republic of China deserves for this service it gave to the world and at the cost of its own economy.</p>
<p>In other words, it acted with a great sense of responsibility; the prestige of the country grew last year more than the 7.8 percent that Machadito mentioned referring to the growth of the Chinese economy. The prestige of China must have grown, for this reason alone, at least by 20 percent or 30 percent. But I think its prestige deserved a growth of 200 percent because no one can imagine the consequences of a measure of this kind by China. However, they are haggling over its membership in the World Trade Organization and we are all fighting for the membership of China to the WTO.</p>
<p>Europe and the United States assume the right to decide who becomes a member and who does not. The battle in the United Nations repeats itself. And the WTO is frightful because it can be a terrible instrument against the interests of the Third World.</p>
<p>The Third World is interested to have China in the World Trade Organization, which is responsible for regulating this activity; an instrument created, undoubtedly-the same as other instruments that already exist such as the IMF and similar institutions that have imposed the famous neoliberalism whose consequences our compatriots know about through the thousands of visitors who come from all over the world and the press releases regarding this ever increasing loss of prestige and more damaging-like an instrument of domination. All that imperialism has created since the fall of the socialist camp have been instruments to strengthen its domination in all fields. In the economic sphere it enjoys some incredible privileges that cannot continue to survive. They are the ones who print the money reserves of the world, investing only in the paper. The Europeans are trying to create another to protect itself from these super-privileges that exists at the cost of the interests of the rest of the world and benefit, to a certain extent, by sharing them.</p>
<p>All these subjects are part of the issues that must be discussed to change the existing world order that has been established for that reason.</p>
<p>The club of the rich, a group of rich countries-there are around twenty something, I think it is 29 now-invented a multilateral agreement project of investments to make it an international treaty. Today there are bilateral agreements, but the member countries of this club known as the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) invented a project that was shrouded in silence. They discussed it behind closed doors and were getting ready to release it when some people-I think it was in France-discovered the text that, although it was known and being discussed the contents were unknown. They mounted a great scandal and the authors had to put a stop to it.</p>
<p>Where this had to be discussed was in the WTO because over a hundred countries were there and not the 30 richest countries. They did not want to discuss it in the WTO although the WTO was set up as an instrument to strengthen the economic, political and all other forms of United States hegemony. They imposed the conditions of that organization as an instrument of imperialism. That's why it was created although it could be sidetracked to become an instrument of the peoples where we of the Third World are a wide majority. But the peoples of the Third World are very divided because of their poverty they depend heavily on the United States and the trade institutions and financial organizations it created and that, often, breaks the unity.</p>
<p>Acting in unity, the Third World with China in the WTO could become an instrument of justice, an instrument of resistance to the hegemony of the United States, for a new economic order, against the current economic order they have imposed which is the important reason to reform the United Nations. All this is linked. The WTO could be an instrument of justice. We are a majority. We are the majority in the United Nations as you can see from some of the votes in the UN General Assembly, for example, those against the blockade.</p>
<p>One day the General Assembly managed to impose the recognition of China's rights-the real China, the only China that exists-in the Security Council. Ah, that is why we also call for more powers for the UN General Assembly. That institution must change.</p>
<p>The Chinese ambassador clearly explained and mentioned all the concepts of limited sovereignty, global threats, right to intervention like the one in Yugoslavia, to which is added the new strategic concept of NATO, approved days before that genocidal war, a right that NATO assigns itself of intervening whenever it wants in any country.</p>
<p>As I said, all these problems are linked; the intention of ignoring the United Nations, that is all we have; a world organization that exists, that was founded after the Second World War. It no longer corresponds to the present situation in the world, having almost 200 independent states. It began with around thirty or forty something states controlled by the victorious powers after the Second World War. It definitely needs to be restructured and democratized, but this requires tactics and strategies. At least it is very clear for me the importance of the ties of the Third World with China and the need for the support of China in that restructuring that can no longer be delayed because China is a permanent member with the right to veto.</p>
<p>Under certain limits the United States can try to prevent it and will do so for a long time. But it will have to discuss it, as it has had to discuss other things. It refused to discuss it for many years and will be unable, also, to prevent the democratization of the United Nations, as a result of the mobilization of world public opinion, through the unity of the nations.</p>
<p>He mentioned those principles that imperialism wants to wipe out. It is very important to listen here to the Chinese Ambassador asserting that these principles must be defended and that is a fundamental factor of Chinese foreign policy.</p>
<p>Fortunately, yesterday, we had the opportunity to listen to the Russian Chancellor-because Russia exists. It is not a superpower but still is a great power.</p>
<p>What is my opinion about the difference between a superpower and a great power? That the former has the power to destroy the latter fifteen times over and the latter has the power to destroy the other three or four times, but one is enough, and hopefully that will never happen!</p>
<p>Russia is a great power. China is a great power in a different way, and in some ways a much greater power than Russia; but Russia is a great nuclear power. It has a nuclear military power that China does not. China does not yet have it and hopefully it will not need it.</p>
<p>What forces China to maintain a technical development in the military field is simply the aggressive policy against it, the interference in its internal affairs, the denial of its fundamental rights, and strategic concepts that amount to threats. At any time, NATO could intervene because it decides that China posed a global threat due to some internal problem-any kind of problem that might arise. It is inconceivable that they assume that right. That is why I say I hope they never have to become a great nuclear power!</p>
<p>But what do the others do? Invest increasingly in weapons, in the development of military technology. Recently, we read the declaration of one of the nominees to the presidency of the United States who promised to invest enormous sums in military research to improve conventional weapons, among other things. What is the purpose of all this improvement? Why all that technological development when the Cold War has been long dead? What is the justification for all this weaponry but the clear intention of dominating the world, not only through political and economic measures but also military ones, to maintain discipline in this chaotic world? I am not going to try to explain why, but we know very well all the details and the hundreds of arguments for why the world is chaotic. And those cannot be solved with nuclear or conventional weapons. It is their desperation that makes them take this course, to hold everything in their hands: military, political, and economic.</p>
<p>Even Europe was humiliated by its ridiculous role in the war against Yugoslavia since 100 percent of the bombs were made in the United States and 90 percent of the operations were made by U.S. aviation and missiles. Europe felt so humiliated that the ambition to have its own European forces has taken wing because of the crushing superiority created by its ally. What a difficult ally Europe has and what a dangerous one in every way.</p>
<p>I already told you how pleased I was to listen to the Russian Chancellor-I didn't say Soviet, right? I said Russian because sometimes we make mistakes out of an old habit. Now it is not Soviet, it is not a socialist country. Today The International would not be sung in an event to commemorate something related to Russia. But Russia is a country threatened by NATO, which is moving towards its borders. Russia is a threatened country that U.S. imperialism wants to see weakened and even torn apart, to take over its enormous natural resources. The great capital of the United States is not satisfied with the investments it has made in all parts of the defunct U.S.S.R, above all in the area of the Caspian Sea where there are said to be enormous oil and gas reserves, and in other republics in the region. They are not satisfied with their ambitious program of taking over and controlling all that wealth. They also want to take over and control all the wealth of Russia, apply conditions, even upbraiding it a few days ago when they scolded the country in a meeting of the G-7 regarding the financial scandal.</p>
<p>That is not a socialist nation. It has common interests, many common interests with other countries. It has them with Europe, and Europe is neither calm nor happy. Above all, Europe does not like adventures imposed from the other side of the ocean, like the Yugoslav adventure and any others the United States might think up.</p>
<p>Since that last experience of the genocidal war, more proclamations are made of the new strategic-military doctrines and enthusiastic political theories intended to ravage the United Nations Charter and establish the rights of the powerful to intervene in any part of the world. The world feels threatened and we know that well.</p>
<p>It's very good, we have read, that relations between Russia and China are improving. That's very good. We have read that they have adopted similar positions concerning the barbarous war against Yugoslavia. That's good. We know that they have taken common positions against the alleged right to dismantle whatever it wants to, like they dismantled Yugoslavia and succeeded in dismantling the U.S.S.R.</p>
<p>All these are issues that worry many nations in the world.</p>
<p>And in Europe there wasn't only the disintegration of the U.S.S.R but U.S. capital, which as I said, is taking over the economies of the old socialist countries. They want to take over everything there. Ah, but we are living in new times, a new century that will begin in something over a year-because 2000 is the last year of this century, lets not forget this-there are great challenges and tasks for the nations of the Third World, for countries like China, for countries like Russia.</p>
<p>We know that Russia tries to develop relations not only with Europe but also with the Third World. And we heard from the Russian Chancellor words similar to those said today by the Chinese Ambassador referring to the principles that I mentioned previously, intending to sweep away the rights of the peoples who form part of the United Nations and the principles that provided some measure of relative protection for their sovereignty independence. I say relative because we know that, in spite of these rights, the United States has intervened in a group of countries during these last decades without anyone's permission-we know that-but always clashing with international law and now they want to do as they please without troubling with any international law or any established principles.</p>
<p>A hard battle must be waged in the United Nations, like the one our delegation waged. There is much to do battle about and there are many common interests among some of the nations that are members of the Security Council and the rest of the world.</p>
<p>For various reasons, the world is becoming aware of these problems and it is visible. There is sufficient strength to resist, to move forward, more so backed by the laws of history and the reality of a system and world economic order that is unsustainable; that is collapsing and that is capable of collapsing by itself, although this collapse must be helped along. And more than aiding in the collapse, the world must be made aware of these realities so that the peoples can resist this order with more strength and contribute to its progressive disappearance. Although one is sure that the disappearance will not be very progressive, because when a catastrophic economic crisis occurs, like the one that almost occurred, and being greater, because the more the delay the stronger the crisis will be, the spirit of struggle of the peoples must be lifted, their will to resist. We must make them aware that they must prepare for new concepts, a new concept of the world, a new world economic order, truly fair, that must come about as the result of the struggle of the peoples.</p>
<p>The peoples must struggle not only to protect their economy and Rights, but also must struggle to defend their own survival. They wipe out the environment; they destroy it. Scarcely a year ago Mitch hit Central America with devastating damage and now we see images of colossal floods, a visible climactic change and that no one denies. Who does it hit first? The poor countries; the nations of the Third World.</p>
<p>That is why I thought it was necessary to express these thoughts because I feel they are very important questions, worthy to be taken into consideration on a day such as today. But, I also wanted to say that, during these difficult years, when we suddenly lost our markets, we had the Chinese market. When it was difficult to acquire some supplies, we acquired some of them in the Chinese People's Republic. Our ships come and go, they take and bring products. They have a very developed pharmaceutical industry, many raw materials for our drug industry, many raw materials for our pharmaceutical industry; some that are very difficult to acquire we find in China and at good prices. They have cooperated with our country. They have developed exchanges and economic relations with Cuba. They have also developed political relations with Cuba during the special period. Most of its leaders have visited our country.</p>
<p>We had the honor of receiving President Jiang Zemin and, in our fist contact, we were not wrong in appraising his intelligence, his political and human conditions, his capacity as a responsible leader and statesman with solid principles.</p>
<p>We also see in China, because we read the news cables every day, the other country where western propaganda is furious. A day doesn't pass where international cables do not appear about internal questions and affairs in China. If China arrests someone for breaking the law, the outcry follows immediately. If China forbids a small splinter group because they are endangering the stability and union of the country or because of a policy that is treasonable to the interests of this great people, the outcry follows. Today the propaganda concentrates mostly against Cuba, but there is also strong propaganda against China, a diversionist propaganda using all the mass media possible creating new stations transmitting western ideas, western consumer habits or U.S. madness to the 1.25 billion Chinese people-against a country with which it is waging, as much as possible, an ideological battle.</p>
<p>That is why, today, aware of our forces, the potential forces of the world, the potential allies of the Third World, the possibility of our peoples, thinking about this, listening to the words of the Ambassador, I felt a deep satisfaction and was very pleased to attend this event although I had not thought of speaking. I've extended myself a little more than what I had promised-and to listen to the Ambassador here speak the phrase that received so much applause and in Spanish because he spoke with precision in Spanish. He knows Cuba. He lived and worked in Cuba several years ago. That is why he speaks Spanish so clearly, like any one of us, when he said: "Socialismo o muerte" and when he added "Venceremos" he said something that we are absolutely convinced about.</p>
<p>Also, that is why I was so deeply moved to hear The International in this event endorsed by what was said here, expressed with exact data that was outlined here to demonstrate that only socialism can solve the problems of the world. Only socialism can feed 1.25 billion Chinese, give them a home, a television for each Chinese family, and many other household articles, and especially the essential resources for life. That is to say, that country feeds approximately 22 percent of the world's population with 7 percent of the world's agricultural lands.</p>
<p>Another great example: The country went through periods of starvation under the domination of the feudal lords and capitalism, always allied with colonial and dominating powers when the population was only 400 million or 500 million. Today the population has tripled and hunger has been eradicated forever. And here the Ambassador explained that they have been capable of producing 40 percent of the eggs produced in the world, 490 million tons of cereals, and other similar statistics.</p>
<p>And we could say that China is just beginning, that 7.8 percent growth was by brute force. How could they manage that if the rhythm of exports fell considerably? Ah! Because of the resources they have been accumulating. High reserves of convertible currencies allowed them not only to make the contribution I spoke of about the yuan but of maintaining a rhythm of growth that, if it was not going to depend so much on exports, would depend on the increase of internal consumption and maintain the rhythm of development for employment, because in all these tasks of restructuring, logically there is an important need to create jobs. They must also confront the movement from the countryside to the city as the former increases productivity and produces a surplus of hand labor.</p>
<p>They were able to maintain the yuan. It would have been easier to devaluate the yuan but they did not do it. Instead, they maintained their reserves, managed their economy with wisdom and managed a 7.8 percent growth under these conditions. They not only endured the Southeastern Asian crisis in those countries where the owners of capital took their money, where the owners of world finances plundered the last dollar of their reserves creating the ideal conditions for the large U.S. transnationals to acquire companies and factories in any of those countries at a low cost. They not only endured the crisis and without devaluating the yuan but also performed an incredible service to the world. And in spite of that, they grew by 7.8 percent. They are able to continue the battle, in spite of the difficulties that oppress the world today.</p>
<p>All that has been said today of this story is the fruit of something that is called socialism. It is the fruit of a doctrine that arose to shake the world, a Marxist doctrine, of scientific socialism, a revolution of the poor, by the poor, and for the poor, that has, also made possible this incredible heroic exploit of resisting 40 years of blockade and almost 10 years of special period.</p>
<p>That is why I repeat the slogan with which the Ambassador ended his speech:</p>
<p>�Socialismo o Muerte!</p>
<p>�Venceremos!</p>
<p>A CubaNews translation by Ana Portela</p>
<p>Edited by Walter Lippmann and Robert Sandels</p>
<p>Notes on the seventh anniversary of this speech: 9/30/2005:</p>
<p><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/42823">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/42823</a></p>
<p>Original Spanish transcript:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1999/esp/f290999e.html">http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1999/esp/f290999e.html</a></p>
<p>(Shorthand Version-Council of State)</p>
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May/June 2007 • Vol 7, No. 3
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Fidel Castro on the 50th Anniversaryof the Chinese Revolution
Speech delivered by the President of the Council of State of the Republic of Cuba, Fidel Castro Ruz, on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Foundation of the People's Republic of China, in the Universal Hall of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), on September 29, 1999
As you can see, they were closing the curtains [laughter], but I looked at my watch and noticed we had a little time left. That's why I thought it would be worthwhile to use these minutes to add a few brief thoughts about what was said here.
A few days ago we were busy with a great number of activities but we often thought that it would now be 50 years since the Chinese Revolution, not only the revolution, but also the independence of China. And that was of really great historical importance.
Similar words are often used, but now we are faced with a real event, a date of real historical importance. And I asked myself: How are we going to commemorate it, what relevance are we going to give it? That's why I asked about the program they were going to have. I asked the Ambassador and first he told me there would be a reception in the Embassy on the evening of the 30th and warmly invited me.
I answered, "Ambassador, the evening of the 30th is not the anniversary of the triumph of the Chinese Revolution!"
And he said, "Yes, because at that hour on the 30th in China it's already the 1st of October."
And, actually, the reception was not being organized for the 2nd, which would have been the result of organizing it, as is traditionally done, on the first. By doing it tomorrow night, on the 30th, it would coincide perfectly with the day of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Also, I know that they have set up television screens so that the guests can view the parade and the commemoration in Tiananmen Square.
I was very pleased that the Ambassador remembered that Cuba was the first Latin American country to recognize the People's Republic of China and to establish relations with it, because there was a very strong blockade, an effort of total isolation. In fact, there was total obedience to the United States in our hemisphere, where there were even many countries, like the Caribbean sister islands of Anglophone extraction still not independent. The independence of those islands increased the strength and spirit of independence in this hemisphere, but no one here in Latin America then had relations with the People's Republic of China, and that was the case in many parts of the world.
Since we also became independent on January 1, 1959, it did not take long to establish relations with the People's Republic of China.
But he remembered something more, and that is that when the Cuban Revolution triumphed, China was represented in the Security Council and the United Nations by Taiwan. At the time, only the Soviet Union, one of the permanent members of the Security Council, was not an ally of the United States. And as an example of imperialist imposition, the most populous country in the world was ignored completely. The oldest country in the world, we could say, of the modern ones, the most ancient civilization in the world was not represented in the Security Council, as was its right according to all the agreements made during the Second World War.
They kept Taiwan there, the defeated puppet government, which continued to be an ally of the United States. We had to fight hard, every year, many countries, mostly of the Third World, including Cuba, just as today, we fight the blockade. We fought for the recognition of the People's Republic of China and for it to occupy its rightful seat on the Security Council as one of its permanent members.
This was achieved in 1971 when it was no longer possible to resist world public opinion and the growing membership of the United Nations. At that time, many African countries and other areas of the world won their political independence-countries of great weight. After the Second World War, India, another of the most populous countries in the world besides China, achieved independence. Indonesia, also a heavily populated Asian country, achieved its independence. Japan was occupied for many years and gradually achieved the rights of a sovereign nation. Many others in the Middle East received independence, as did many in the South Pacific. I have already mentioned the Caribbean. Consequently many countries were added, and it was the determination and tenacity of this struggle that finally won China its basic rights.
Today, 26 years later, I would say that event achieved its full significance within the present world situation due to China's importance and weight. Today China is incomparably greater than it was when its status as a member of the Security Council was finally accepted.
China has been the country that has least used its veto power in the Security Council. China has used it only on exceptional occasions-perhaps Alarcon knows how many. On the other hand, the "master of the world," because it does not own the world but almost all the world, has used this right an infinite number of times.
Today, the Third World has a country that is a friend, that Third World, which supported China so often, has a friend among the Security Council's permanent members.
I remembered something that was not mentioned here: the suffering of the Chinese people, the enormous sacrifices of that people after the triumph of their revolution and their independence. I have to say it that way, because the country was not fully independent, just as Cuba was not, until the day of the Revolution's triumph. For example, they were economically blockaded for a long time, almost totally isolated.
During the earlier years it had the collaboration of the Soviet Union-to some extent, because the Soviet Union had just come out of a terrible war where its industry, its agriculture, its infrastructure were practically destroyed-a support the U.S.SR offered, a determined support that I know the Chinese appreciated very much, until differences and difficulties arose between them.
I do not want to dwell on these subjects but I recall the years of the economic blockade of China. And I also remember the U.S. troops under the command of MacArthur, their intervention in the Korean conflict, a country that they divided and that is still divided; and they reached the Chinese border. Very soon after their war of liberation, no less than one million Chinese volunteers took up arms and participated in that conflict together with the Korean people. They inflicted a severe and terrible blow to the interventionist troops of the United States and its allies until reestablishing the situation that existed before that war, that is, the present border between the two parts of Korea. This event cannot be forgotten nor can the thousands of lives Chinese troops lost.
I have talked to some who participated in that counter-attack. It was during a severe cold, crossing mountains, without mechanical means, with total air control by the United States and its allies and even threatening to use nuclear weapons. In the desperation of their defeat, there were many in the United States who favored attacking beyond the Chinese border. The advance of the Chinese troops was uncontainable in spite of the enormous differences in military power, until they reached the point that is still today that line-a tremendous battle.
Later the economic blockade continued. The Yankee imperialists also intervened in Viet Nam and unleashed a genocidal war. There, the Chinese expressed solidarity with the Vietnamese people. At the time, there were two countries, China and the Soviet Union, who supplied weapons and gave political support to the Vietnamese who fought heroically and were victorious. This victory was obtained during the 1970s. Cuba also made its modest contribution of a free annual supply of sugar for the Vietnamese during the war years. It's worth mentioning, but only as an expression of the good will and the spirit of solidarity of our people who also offered total political support. There was also an enormous feeling of solidarity with Viet Nam by our people.
The Chinese had to endure so many hardships after the war, and for how long! But imperialism was repeatedly defeated. The lesson of Viet Nam marked important turning points. I would say that Cuba's resistance to the blockades, the mercenary invasions, the threats of nuclear war and all that, marked other little points that were also important in that struggle. They demonstrated to the world that it was possible to fight and win against imperialism. They suffered a harsh economic blockade for many years, a little less than us, but at the time it was a record. They were blockaded for 28 years, and we are now going on 40 years.
The events mentioned are irrefutable proof that this lunacy, these criminal policies, cannot last forever.
After all the blows it has received from many parts, the United States began to understand that its position on China was unsustainable from the point of view of rights, of political principles, of the United Nations Charter and everything else. But it was also unsustainable according to its own economic interests. China was an enormous potential market. In fact, they have advantages in many things. In one sense in particular they have an enormous advantage compared to Cuba, and that is the fact that their population-they are have a little more-their population was about one hundred and twenty times more than that of Cuba, and a territory, as mentioned here, of 9.6 million square kilometers, almost one hundred times ours and, undoubtedly a country of great natural resources.
I could add other advantages: They did not live in the West as we do. We are bearing, to a large extent, the culture inherited from the West. China had a millennia-long culture. The Chinese people's great advantage is its language, its own very complex writing. It is not an easy language, not precisely of Latin origin nor, we must say, of Western origin. They had a millennial language. I have no way of knowing how much it evolved since the period before our times. These cultural features are a very important force with which to defend the identity, the integrity, and independence of a great country and are less susceptible to penetration by the western culture that surrounds us.
You can see what the Ambassador explained: after 25 years of conflicts, wars, and blockades, they had recovered important rights such as that seat in the Security Council, a growing respect in the world, and in spite of errors, as the Ambassador pointed out, of various kinds of difficulties that occurred in its own internal policy at a time when the West had no other choice but to acknowledge the rights of China. And when all the blockades ended, you can see the extraordinary rhythm of progress in the country.
What he read here-I was just looking over a copy of the speech and had already heard about some appearances of the Ambassador-a sustained average growth of 9.8 percent for 21 years has no precedent in the history of any human society.
I did some calculations of how many times it doubled its economic production during that period. By then, they had already achieved important advances. I remember that after the revolutionary triumph, the Chinese built great seawalls rock by rock to prevent flooding and promote irrigation. Many social programs were begun from the very triumph of the Revolution. But undoubtedly the economic advances were slowed down considerably by the economic blockade to which subjective factors were added as well.
When, as I said, they had to recognize the rights of China and all the blockades disappeared and they rectified some errors-I don't call them errors but rather their points of view, we would have no right to judge each internal event in China-but, as the Ambassador explained, they had made certain corrections, had overcome certain errors and everyone commits errors and that cannot be denied. After this, they achieved this impressive record because, as he pointed out, and above all, they grew since 1978, for 21 years. There is no precedent; there has never existed anything like this figure.
It is truly very satisfying to listen to the Ambassador reaffirm that these successes were possible due to the political ideology, to a political science, to Marxism-Leninism, to which they added important theoretical contributions of Mao Zedong, theoretical contributions to the revolutionary struggle, theoretical contributions to Marxism to which they later added theoretical and practical contributions of Deng Xiaoping. Added to this is the undeniably hard-working characteristic of the Chinese people. They are a people, really very hardworking. That is recognized everywhere in the world and, in Cuba, it is acknowledged because, dedicated to agriculture, specifically vegetable production, they greatly contribute to the supply of fresh produce in the city.
So, this spirit of labor is an important factor that, in my opinion, also contributed to the advances of the Chinese people, along with a theory and through a revolution that won, together with deep social changes, the independence of that great nation; a true and exemplary revolution when you analyze its roots, from the beginning when it organized its first nucleus of the Chinese Communist Party during the twenties, its rich history and, among the outstanding events, the long march, a military achievement that is unparalleled in history-and history has many military achievements.
We have read some books on what constituted that advance, day by day, surrounded by large enemy units of the puppet government that was supplied with all the weapons it needed, with hundreds of divisions. And that great military achievement occurred in very difficult conditions, always surrounded by large forces, constantly outmaneuvering the enemy, overcoming natural barriers. At times these included snow-capped mountains, and other times, wide and rushing rivers, until they reached the base that would be their permanent site during the war of liberation.
There was a time that the others, the so-called nationalists, the Puppets and reactionaries were fighting a foreign invasion, a war against the Japanese militarists and, to some extent, joined forces with the revolutionary Chinese. However, they were not serving the people nor the true independence of the country and they made all kinds of errors and had all kinds of weaknesses. Many times the Communists had to fight against the nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek and against Japanese troops. In spite of this, they made a decisive contribution to the defeat of the Japanese militarists. These events are also in the pages of modern Chinese history.
And those who served reaction and Yankee imperialism at the end of the Second World War, who were crushingly and irreversibly defeated, took refuge on the little island of Taiwan, which is an integral part of Chinese territory because it was a part of China for an infinite length of time, like the keys to the north of Cuba, more so than the Isle of Youth is ours. Those who live there are of Chinese nationality, speak the Chinese language and have Chinese culture in spite of the western penetration they have received. This possession is an unquestionable right of the Chinese nation. It absolutely cannot be denied that it is an internal problem of China. No one has the right to interfere, and that is what they demand: respect for the sovereignty of their country, the universal recognition of this right. They are not demanding the union of two different nations, of different ethnicities, and different cultures.
Even the Taiwanese, until recently, and especially in the Security Council, spoke for 22 years of only one China completely integrated. Until recently they have been speaking in this language.
Ah! What was the first military intervention by the United States to secure Taiwan? I remember. During the days of the Korean War, the U.S. fleet took up a position between the continent and the island of Taiwan. This cannot be forgotten. That position was maintained by force. The country did not have conditions for that battle, nor did the country want to wage this battle. The country demanded its rights, demanded recognition, and wanted to solve the problem peacefully. What it determined with all its rights was that it would not admit the loss of part of its territory, the tearing up of its country through the declaration and recognition of an independent republic of Taiwan. They have said it categorically, that they will not permit it, and I am sure that they will not, as I have the hope that this problem and the recognition of the theory and the practice of the inalienable rights of China occur without any form of war or loss of blood.
What is really happening today is that the United States and other western countries, while they talk of only one China, supply the separatist government of the island with the most modern and sophisticated weapons and nourish the movement against the integrity of China.
The Ambassador recalled and Machadito also mentioned the problem of Hong Kong. They knew how to have the necessary patience until the day came when the West and the world had no other choice but to acknowledge the right of the People's Republic of China to the reintegration of this piece of its territory seized by colonial wars, disgraceful colonial wars.
Today much is said against drug trafficking. Then, the British Empire took over that territory and the West unleashed a war and sent troops who reached Beijing to impose the rights of the Western powers over the opium trade with China. That is a historical truth.
They recalled that this same year Macao would be returned, the little piece that was in the hands of a European country and it would be done peacefully through an agreement made thanks to Chinese patience, a patience we should all learn from and that, partially, we have. And if we have not learned from it we have figured out on our own because the duty of all revolutionaries it to also act with the necessary wisdom.
They waited and that year took possession of the territory. To make things easier, they thought of a country with two systems. They promised those who stayed in Hong Kong the existing economic and social systems, the existing institutions but under Chinese sovereignty. They have also made this offer to Taiwan, with an even broader scope. The proof of the peaceful spirit of China is the fact that, even though the Portuguese enclave of Macao had no form of defense, they did not take advantage of the circumstance or any situation to take over the enclave.
India, a neighboring country, also very populated, did not have so much patience and, at a certain time, took over a Portuguese enclave that was on Indian territory. It is a good example of the peaceful spirit of the People's Republic of China. They did not use force to recover that territory and with the help of time and international support they are recovering all the rights they were stripped of.
The Ambassador mentioned how they had broken up the country. He could mention many other things. I mentioned the history of opium. How many crimes were committed against that great nation until mid-century, and how many rights were denied and ignored until they were reestablished in the course of the final two-thirds of this century!
Respect the people! Respect territorial integrity! This is not the time to break up nations. At a time when many peoples, separated by borders, by flags and hymns fight for integration, join together, and peacefully wipe out borders, the countries of the Caribbean fight for integration. The countries of Central America fight for integration. The countries of South America fight for integration. Latin America fights for it. In the future, no small nation can exist isolated in practice.
I will say more: Switzerland a country traditionally very protective of its sovereignty that, due to its excellent geographic position in the heart of the Alps, could maintain neutrality during the First and Second World Wars. And Switzerland, I know because I went there and spoke with leaders who were, along with 49 percent of the people, in favor of integration into the European Economic Community, only a small fraction is lacking to make a majority-could not live alone in the Alps, isolated from the rest of the European community. The move is inexorably toward integration in that community.
Who has the right to support the disintegration of China? Who has the right to deny China's demand for acknowledgment of its sovereignty over Taiwan? It is absurd that when the entire world is integrating that someone should call for the disintegration of a piece of China.
You can see the disaster of disintegration of the Soviet Union countries; a disintegration that became a race of all to run, primarily the United States, to invest and establish its hegemony, its domination and its possession of the fundamental resources of the former republics, mainly gas and oil, products of which they are very rich, as well as other minerals.
The world doesn't move towards disintegration, it moves towards integration. It is not only a historical fact but also a principle of the modern world, a necessity of modern life. That is what the People's Republic of China demands. And now, the People's Republic of China of today, of this millennium, or of this century about to begin, is very different from that republic that arose 50 years ago in a country devastated by many years of war, against foreign invasion.
Added to this was the revolutionary war. More than 20 years of fierce battles against the internal and external enemies of the Chinese people. The country destroyed, a country that was poor, a country that had been exploited by external and internal exploiters. Everything needed to be built. I already mentioned under what conditions.
It is a country whose economy strongly moves forward. It's curious; Machadito mentioned their contribution during the Asian crisis. There is something more: the People's Republic of China gave an extraordinary service to the world in recent months, especially since 1998 in that crisis that began in Southeast Asia and that lead the second world power in the field of economy, Japan, into a deep crisis, that later spread to Russia and was seriously affecting the stocks and shares of the United States exchanges and which threatened to wipe out the economy of Latin America.
You can see how great the danger was that Latin America as a whole grew, if it grew at all, by 0.5 percent in 1999; and if it grew 0.5 percent it is because the countries with an important weight in the region produced greater growth. Mexico was between 4 percent and 5 percent. There are countries with growth below zero, negative in several countries, several important countries. It was a very serious world economic threat that has not yet been overcome, and it is not known with certainty if it will soon be overcome and there is the certainty-at least I have it-that when it recovers it will not be for long.
China had made an enormous economic sacrifice without which the crisis would not have been stopped. It was in a complicated situation because its exports grew year by year, but when the Asian crisis devaluated the currencies in many countries with a certain level of development-the so-called Asian tigers, pride of the neoliberal economy, pride of imperialism as an example of what can be achieved through their adverse formulas-and when they fell in a matter of days, since one after the other economy of those countries collapsed with terrible consequences, both for the economy of the world, especially for the countries of the Third World that are totally unprotected in this crisis, the Chinese found themselves at a disadvantage because the prices of the merchandize of all these countries cheapened amazingly because with the devaluation of their currency they could export whatever they wanted at low prices.
China could have devaluated the yuan to protect itself against that competition, to maintain the rhythm of increase in its exports and with this maintain an uninterrupted rise in growth. The world was shaking-the world! Not just the Third World but also the industrialized world was shaking thinking of the idea that China, with its rights, and to protect its exports and economic growth could devaluate the yuan. It did not and still there has been no acknowledgement that the People's Republic of China deserves for this service it gave to the world and at the cost of its own economy.
In other words, it acted with a great sense of responsibility; the prestige of the country grew last year more than the 7.8 percent that Machadito mentioned referring to the growth of the Chinese economy. The prestige of China must have grown, for this reason alone, at least by 20 percent or 30 percent. But I think its prestige deserved a growth of 200 percent because no one can imagine the consequences of a measure of this kind by China. However, they are haggling over its membership in the World Trade Organization and we are all fighting for the membership of China to the WTO.
Europe and the United States assume the right to decide who becomes a member and who does not. The battle in the United Nations repeats itself. And the WTO is frightful because it can be a terrible instrument against the interests of the Third World.
The Third World is interested to have China in the World Trade Organization, which is responsible for regulating this activity; an instrument created, undoubtedly-the same as other instruments that already exist such as the IMF and similar institutions that have imposed the famous neoliberalism whose consequences our compatriots know about through the thousands of visitors who come from all over the world and the press releases regarding this ever increasing loss of prestige and more damaging-like an instrument of domination. All that imperialism has created since the fall of the socialist camp have been instruments to strengthen its domination in all fields. In the economic sphere it enjoys some incredible privileges that cannot continue to survive. They are the ones who print the money reserves of the world, investing only in the paper. The Europeans are trying to create another to protect itself from these super-privileges that exists at the cost of the interests of the rest of the world and benefit, to a certain extent, by sharing them.
All these subjects are part of the issues that must be discussed to change the existing world order that has been established for that reason.
The club of the rich, a group of rich countries-there are around twenty something, I think it is 29 now-invented a multilateral agreement project of investments to make it an international treaty. Today there are bilateral agreements, but the member countries of this club known as the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) invented a project that was shrouded in silence. They discussed it behind closed doors and were getting ready to release it when some people-I think it was in France-discovered the text that, although it was known and being discussed the contents were unknown. They mounted a great scandal and the authors had to put a stop to it.
Where this had to be discussed was in the WTO because over a hundred countries were there and not the 30 richest countries. They did not want to discuss it in the WTO although the WTO was set up as an instrument to strengthen the economic, political and all other forms of United States hegemony. They imposed the conditions of that organization as an instrument of imperialism. That's why it was created although it could be sidetracked to become an instrument of the peoples where we of the Third World are a wide majority. But the peoples of the Third World are very divided because of their poverty they depend heavily on the United States and the trade institutions and financial organizations it created and that, often, breaks the unity.
Acting in unity, the Third World with China in the WTO could become an instrument of justice, an instrument of resistance to the hegemony of the United States, for a new economic order, against the current economic order they have imposed which is the important reason to reform the United Nations. All this is linked. The WTO could be an instrument of justice. We are a majority. We are the majority in the United Nations as you can see from some of the votes in the UN General Assembly, for example, those against the blockade.
One day the General Assembly managed to impose the recognition of China's rights-the real China, the only China that exists-in the Security Council. Ah, that is why we also call for more powers for the UN General Assembly. That institution must change.
The Chinese ambassador clearly explained and mentioned all the concepts of limited sovereignty, global threats, right to intervention like the one in Yugoslavia, to which is added the new strategic concept of NATO, approved days before that genocidal war, a right that NATO assigns itself of intervening whenever it wants in any country.
As I said, all these problems are linked; the intention of ignoring the United Nations, that is all we have; a world organization that exists, that was founded after the Second World War. It no longer corresponds to the present situation in the world, having almost 200 independent states. It began with around thirty or forty something states controlled by the victorious powers after the Second World War. It definitely needs to be restructured and democratized, but this requires tactics and strategies. At least it is very clear for me the importance of the ties of the Third World with China and the need for the support of China in that restructuring that can no longer be delayed because China is a permanent member with the right to veto.
Under certain limits the United States can try to prevent it and will do so for a long time. But it will have to discuss it, as it has had to discuss other things. It refused to discuss it for many years and will be unable, also, to prevent the democratization of the United Nations, as a result of the mobilization of world public opinion, through the unity of the nations.
He mentioned those principles that imperialism wants to wipe out. It is very important to listen here to the Chinese Ambassador asserting that these principles must be defended and that is a fundamental factor of Chinese foreign policy.
Fortunately, yesterday, we had the opportunity to listen to the Russian Chancellor-because Russia exists. It is not a superpower but still is a great power.
What is my opinion about the difference between a superpower and a great power? That the former has the power to destroy the latter fifteen times over and the latter has the power to destroy the other three or four times, but one is enough, and hopefully that will never happen!
Russia is a great power. China is a great power in a different way, and in some ways a much greater power than Russia; but Russia is a great nuclear power. It has a nuclear military power that China does not. China does not yet have it and hopefully it will not need it.
What forces China to maintain a technical development in the military field is simply the aggressive policy against it, the interference in its internal affairs, the denial of its fundamental rights, and strategic concepts that amount to threats. At any time, NATO could intervene because it decides that China posed a global threat due to some internal problem-any kind of problem that might arise. It is inconceivable that they assume that right. That is why I say I hope they never have to become a great nuclear power!
But what do the others do? Invest increasingly in weapons, in the development of military technology. Recently, we read the declaration of one of the nominees to the presidency of the United States who promised to invest enormous sums in military research to improve conventional weapons, among other things. What is the purpose of all this improvement? Why all that technological development when the Cold War has been long dead? What is the justification for all this weaponry but the clear intention of dominating the world, not only through political and economic measures but also military ones, to maintain discipline in this chaotic world? I am not going to try to explain why, but we know very well all the details and the hundreds of arguments for why the world is chaotic. And those cannot be solved with nuclear or conventional weapons. It is their desperation that makes them take this course, to hold everything in their hands: military, political, and economic.
Even Europe was humiliated by its ridiculous role in the war against Yugoslavia since 100 percent of the bombs were made in the United States and 90 percent of the operations were made by U.S. aviation and missiles. Europe felt so humiliated that the ambition to have its own European forces has taken wing because of the crushing superiority created by its ally. What a difficult ally Europe has and what a dangerous one in every way.
I already told you how pleased I was to listen to the Russian Chancellor-I didn't say Soviet, right? I said Russian because sometimes we make mistakes out of an old habit. Now it is not Soviet, it is not a socialist country. Today The International would not be sung in an event to commemorate something related to Russia. But Russia is a country threatened by NATO, which is moving towards its borders. Russia is a threatened country that U.S. imperialism wants to see weakened and even torn apart, to take over its enormous natural resources. The great capital of the United States is not satisfied with the investments it has made in all parts of the defunct U.S.S.R, above all in the area of the Caspian Sea where there are said to be enormous oil and gas reserves, and in other republics in the region. They are not satisfied with their ambitious program of taking over and controlling all that wealth. They also want to take over and control all the wealth of Russia, apply conditions, even upbraiding it a few days ago when they scolded the country in a meeting of the G-7 regarding the financial scandal.
That is not a socialist nation. It has common interests, many common interests with other countries. It has them with Europe, and Europe is neither calm nor happy. Above all, Europe does not like adventures imposed from the other side of the ocean, like the Yugoslav adventure and any others the United States might think up.
Since that last experience of the genocidal war, more proclamations are made of the new strategic-military doctrines and enthusiastic political theories intended to ravage the United Nations Charter and establish the rights of the powerful to intervene in any part of the world. The world feels threatened and we know that well.
It's very good, we have read, that relations between Russia and China are improving. That's very good. We have read that they have adopted similar positions concerning the barbarous war against Yugoslavia. That's good. We know that they have taken common positions against the alleged right to dismantle whatever it wants to, like they dismantled Yugoslavia and succeeded in dismantling the U.S.S.R.
All these are issues that worry many nations in the world.
And in Europe there wasn't only the disintegration of the U.S.S.R but U.S. capital, which as I said, is taking over the economies of the old socialist countries. They want to take over everything there. Ah, but we are living in new times, a new century that will begin in something over a year-because 2000 is the last year of this century, lets not forget this-there are great challenges and tasks for the nations of the Third World, for countries like China, for countries like Russia.
We know that Russia tries to develop relations not only with Europe but also with the Third World. And we heard from the Russian Chancellor words similar to those said today by the Chinese Ambassador referring to the principles that I mentioned previously, intending to sweep away the rights of the peoples who form part of the United Nations and the principles that provided some measure of relative protection for their sovereignty independence. I say relative because we know that, in spite of these rights, the United States has intervened in a group of countries during these last decades without anyone's permission-we know that-but always clashing with international law and now they want to do as they please without troubling with any international law or any established principles.
A hard battle must be waged in the United Nations, like the one our delegation waged. There is much to do battle about and there are many common interests among some of the nations that are members of the Security Council and the rest of the world.
For various reasons, the world is becoming aware of these problems and it is visible. There is sufficient strength to resist, to move forward, more so backed by the laws of history and the reality of a system and world economic order that is unsustainable; that is collapsing and that is capable of collapsing by itself, although this collapse must be helped along. And more than aiding in the collapse, the world must be made aware of these realities so that the peoples can resist this order with more strength and contribute to its progressive disappearance. Although one is sure that the disappearance will not be very progressive, because when a catastrophic economic crisis occurs, like the one that almost occurred, and being greater, because the more the delay the stronger the crisis will be, the spirit of struggle of the peoples must be lifted, their will to resist. We must make them aware that they must prepare for new concepts, a new concept of the world, a new world economic order, truly fair, that must come about as the result of the struggle of the peoples.
The peoples must struggle not only to protect their economy and Rights, but also must struggle to defend their own survival. They wipe out the environment; they destroy it. Scarcely a year ago Mitch hit Central America with devastating damage and now we see images of colossal floods, a visible climactic change and that no one denies. Who does it hit first? The poor countries; the nations of the Third World.
That is why I thought it was necessary to express these thoughts because I feel they are very important questions, worthy to be taken into consideration on a day such as today. But, I also wanted to say that, during these difficult years, when we suddenly lost our markets, we had the Chinese market. When it was difficult to acquire some supplies, we acquired some of them in the Chinese People's Republic. Our ships come and go, they take and bring products. They have a very developed pharmaceutical industry, many raw materials for our drug industry, many raw materials for our pharmaceutical industry; some that are very difficult to acquire we find in China and at good prices. They have cooperated with our country. They have developed exchanges and economic relations with Cuba. They have also developed political relations with Cuba during the special period. Most of its leaders have visited our country.
We had the honor of receiving President Jiang Zemin and, in our fist contact, we were not wrong in appraising his intelligence, his political and human conditions, his capacity as a responsible leader and statesman with solid principles.
We also see in China, because we read the news cables every day, the other country where western propaganda is furious. A day doesn't pass where international cables do not appear about internal questions and affairs in China. If China arrests someone for breaking the law, the outcry follows immediately. If China forbids a small splinter group because they are endangering the stability and union of the country or because of a policy that is treasonable to the interests of this great people, the outcry follows. Today the propaganda concentrates mostly against Cuba, but there is also strong propaganda against China, a diversionist propaganda using all the mass media possible creating new stations transmitting western ideas, western consumer habits or U.S. madness to the 1.25 billion Chinese people-against a country with which it is waging, as much as possible, an ideological battle.
That is why, today, aware of our forces, the potential forces of the world, the potential allies of the Third World, the possibility of our peoples, thinking about this, listening to the words of the Ambassador, I felt a deep satisfaction and was very pleased to attend this event although I had not thought of speaking. I've extended myself a little more than what I had promised-and to listen to the Ambassador here speak the phrase that received so much applause and in Spanish because he spoke with precision in Spanish. He knows Cuba. He lived and worked in Cuba several years ago. That is why he speaks Spanish so clearly, like any one of us, when he said: "Socialismo o muerte" and when he added "Venceremos" he said something that we are absolutely convinced about.
Also, that is why I was so deeply moved to hear The International in this event endorsed by what was said here, expressed with exact data that was outlined here to demonstrate that only socialism can solve the problems of the world. Only socialism can feed 1.25 billion Chinese, give them a home, a television for each Chinese family, and many other household articles, and especially the essential resources for life. That is to say, that country feeds approximately 22 percent of the world's population with 7 percent of the world's agricultural lands.
Another great example: The country went through periods of starvation under the domination of the feudal lords and capitalism, always allied with colonial and dominating powers when the population was only 400 million or 500 million. Today the population has tripled and hunger has been eradicated forever. And here the Ambassador explained that they have been capable of producing 40 percent of the eggs produced in the world, 490 million tons of cereals, and other similar statistics.
And we could say that China is just beginning, that 7.8 percent growth was by brute force. How could they manage that if the rhythm of exports fell considerably? Ah! Because of the resources they have been accumulating. High reserves of convertible currencies allowed them not only to make the contribution I spoke of about the yuan but of maintaining a rhythm of growth that, if it was not going to depend so much on exports, would depend on the increase of internal consumption and maintain the rhythm of development for employment, because in all these tasks of restructuring, logically there is an important need to create jobs. They must also confront the movement from the countryside to the city as the former increases productivity and produces a surplus of hand labor.
They were able to maintain the yuan. It would have been easier to devaluate the yuan but they did not do it. Instead, they maintained their reserves, managed their economy with wisdom and managed a 7.8 percent growth under these conditions. They not only endured the Southeastern Asian crisis in those countries where the owners of capital took their money, where the owners of world finances plundered the last dollar of their reserves creating the ideal conditions for the large U.S. transnationals to acquire companies and factories in any of those countries at a low cost. They not only endured the crisis and without devaluating the yuan but also performed an incredible service to the world. And in spite of that, they grew by 7.8 percent. They are able to continue the battle, in spite of the difficulties that oppress the world today.
All that has been said today of this story is the fruit of something that is called socialism. It is the fruit of a doctrine that arose to shake the world, a Marxist doctrine, of scientific socialism, a revolution of the poor, by the poor, and for the poor, that has, also made possible this incredible heroic exploit of resisting 40 years of blockade and almost 10 years of special period.
That is why I repeat the slogan with which the Ambassador ended his speech:
�Socialismo o Muerte!
�Venceremos!
A CubaNews translation by Ana Portela
Edited by Walter Lippmann and Robert Sandels
Notes on the seventh anniversary of this speech: 9/30/2005:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/42823
Original Spanish transcript:
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1999/esp/f290999e.html
(Shorthand Version-Council of State)
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./articles/Castro-Fidel/https:..www.marxists.org.history.cuba.archive.castro.1980.05.01 | <body>
<p class="title">
Fidel Castro
</p>
<h3>
Our Criminals are Leaving to their Allies in the US
</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> <a href="../../../../../../glossary/events/m/a.htm#may-day">May Day</a>, 1980 at Jose Marti Revolution Square
<br>
<span class="info">Publisher:</span> Havana Domestic Service in Spanish 2359 GMT
<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> FBIS
<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/Markup:</span> Castro Speech Database/Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="fst">
Compatriots, We know how many hours you already have spent standing
on this square. We only ask one more effort from you.
</p>
<p>
<span class="inote">[rhythmic applause, prolonged chanting of "Fidel, friend, the people are with you"]</span>... When ... <span class="inote">[prolonged chanting of "Fidel, Fidel, Fidel," and
applause]</span> Well, let us now give another demonstration of discipline. Let us
be silent.
</p>
<p>
As I was saying, or trying to say, when we were coming to this rally this
afternoon we could again see the incredible spectacle of absolutely
deserted streets. We could imagine, or rather, I ask myself if we could
imagine, the magnitude of this rally. We thought it must be a big one. We
thought it would be the biggest over the 21 years of the revolution.
Actually, however, it was impossible to imagine the magnitude of this
rally. Perhaps only from the tower <span class="inote">[presumably from the Jose Marti
Monument]</span>, perhaps from the air, perhaps only graphically by means of the
movies, television or photographs we will be able to see this rally. <span class="inote">[in
distance chanting, applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
I do not say this or make this observation thinking of what it means in
support for us. I say it and I think it, thinking of what it means in
support for our noble and just revolutionary ideas, <span class="inote">[applause]</span> what it
means in support for our revolutionary cause. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
It was a case of showing our strength, but not just to merely show it. A
battle of the masses has been waged over recent days as never before in the
history of the revolution, as much by its volume as by its intensity. The
facts are known; it was necessary to do it. It was necessary to do this
<span class="inote">[applause, chanting of "Let them go, Let them go"]</span>
</p>
<p>
The enemy had to be shown and the enemy had to be taught that there can be
no fooling around with the people. The enemy had to be shown that there can
be no fooling around with the revolution. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> The enemy had to be
shown that a people cannot be offered with impunity, <span class="inote">[applause]</span> that a
people cannot be threatened with impunity. <span class="inote">[shouts of `No"]</span> And this image,
this image is what they dreamed of destroying, the image of what the people
are, the true revolutionary people, the proletarian people, the working
people, the peasant people, the combatant people, the student people.
<span class="inote">[prolonged applause, indistinct chanting]</span>
</p>
<p>
Perhaps they thought the revolution has weakened and you can see what
weakness of the revolution they have uncovered. <span class="inote">[rhythmic applause,
indistinct chanting]</span> You can see what type of a revolution they have found.
That is why it was necessary to wage this battle.
</p>
<p>
As you know, over recent months our party and our people have been waging a
tenacious and selfless struggle for exigency, to overcome inefficiencies,
to overcome difficulties. This work was being done quietly and insistently
for months. It could be said that our revolution, our people and our party
were devoted to this work and to productive activities, especially the
sugar harvest and the planting <span class="inote">[of sugarcane]</span>, coping with the problems of
the diseases of tobacco and sugarcane and the swine fever which
mysteriously, mysteriously appeared almost simultaneously in our country.
We were tackling various problems of our revolutionary process. We were
struggling for development, struggling to improve everything within our
material capabilities, and preparing for the congress of our party. We were
involved in that task. But, why does this situation emerge? It is not a
coincidence; it is not a coincidence.
</p>
<p>
What happens is that, as in all previous circumstances, every time they
have messed with us they have come the worse for it; every time they have
provoked us they have come out the losers. You know the facts. And if it
were not for the presence of foreign journalists, it would not be necessary
to speak much about the background. But the issue was unleashed as a result
of the provocations at the embassies of Peru and Venezuela. Everyone knows
that imperialism wanted to affect relations between Cuba and Venezuela and
between Cuba and Peru. It had that idea for a long time and was planning
things.
</p>
<p>
We cannot forget that is what precisely in Venezuela and with the
participation of Venezuelans that the monstrous crime of Barbados <span class="inote">[sabotage
of Cuban airlines]</span> was planned and executed. It was one of the most
indignant actions that has ever happened over all time. We all know that
all those people have not even been tried and that frequently there is even
talk that they are going to be released because they, some of them, have
old relations with the ruling party of Venezuela.
</p>
<p>
We cannot forget that in Peru it was the navy of that country, the navy of
that country--and we know this and I do not think they dare disagree--the
navy of that country, agents of the navy that sank our two fishing
boats--the Rio Jobabo and Rio Danuji. It was an incredible provocation.
</p>
<p>
Furthermore, neither can we can forget how the existing fishing agreement
between Cuba and Peru, which had been in effect a long time and was
functioning perfectly well and was useful, very useful for the Peruvians
and helped to produce food for the Peruvians and also food for us, was
unilaterally canceled. This was also a result of impositions by the navy,
to make private agreements by virtue of which an individual without giving
anything, just his signature, could become a millionaire.
</p>
<p>
We cannot forget how the Government of Peru did not fulfill a contract for
the construction of 20 tuna fishing boats which we signed with them and by
virtue of which our country spent tens of millions of dollars on a fish
processing plant. Nevertheless, the contract was not fulfilled. The boats
were not built and we were left with the plant and without the boats.
</p>
<p>
All this has its history and background. Logically, these things began to
cool the relations which at one time were warm and close with the
revolutionary government of Velasco Alvarado. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> These were
relations that began those difficult days for Peru, when our people, at the
request of the <span class="inote">[Peruvian]</span> revolution, although no diplomatic relations
existed, made 100,000 blood donations in 10 days. And our doctors and
nurses volunteered, and our construction workers volunteered, and our
people volunteered to help the fraternal people of Peru, <span class="inote">[applause]</span> the
fraternal people of Peru, yes, because we call and always will call the
people of Peru and Venezuela our fraternal people of Peru and Venezuela.
<span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
That is how our people are. That is the people who are here, <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
these people of workers, of soldiers, <span class="inote">[applause]</span> the internationalist
people, the people of the glorious combatants in Angola and Ethiopia, the
people from whom more than 100,000 combatants of their armed forces already
have performed internationalist missions. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> <span class="inote">[These are]</span> the people
who, when teachers are requested for Nicaraguan, offer 29,500 teachers.
That is the people, not the lumpens who want to represent them with those
scum who entered the Peruvian Embassy.
</p>
<p>
<span class="inote">[Applause, shouts of "scum," other indistinct chanting]</span> That was what
offered our people the most. That dust and other dust brought this mud, and
those winds brought these storms. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span>
</p>
<p>
And then, something strange, something strange which did not occur at any
other embassy. They had thugs, delinquents and lumpens who went to request
visas and they <span class="inote">[at the embassy]</span> would not grant them even if they were
crazy because if they had wanted to grant the visas, well, they would have
known that we know enough <span class="inote">[of these elements]</span>. They were not granted visas.
</p>
<p>
When they used violence to enter, crashing a truck or bus through the
fence, then they would be received with all honors, protected, granted
refugee, have their fare paid and received as heroes. This could do nothing
except encourage lumpens to undertake such activities. It could not have
had other results.
</p>
<p>
And the patience we displayed, practically for years in some cases, was of
no use. We explained to them that it was incorrect, that it was going to
have bad consequences, that it was going to stimulate violence against
diplomatic missions, that such a policy should not continue. We resolved
the problem for them on repeated occasions because they said they could not
live with those elements inside. We could have said: Let them stay there
forever. But <span class="inote">[they said]</span> please, we do not want to live with these people;
we have these problems. And we authorized the departure of such elements.
We did it repeatedly. And always the things we foresaw happened.
Immediately after a group left, another one entered <span class="inote">[the embassy]</span>. That is
how it was.
</p>
<p>
But why the embassies of Venezuela and Peru? Why did this not happen at the
Mexican Embassy, for example? Why did it not happen at the Guyanese Embassy
or the Panamanian Embassy or the Jamaican Embassy, not to mention the
Nicaraguan or Grenadian? It remains to be seen if there is some insane
person who dares enter them either with a tank or a truck of whatever. No,
they do not consider, they do not consider that because the lumpen knows
governments almost as well as we do. And they know that Mexico has a
friendly attitude toward Cuba and was not going to permit such despicable
actions and such irregularities. Neither was Panama going to allow it, nor
Guyana nor Jamaica.
</p>
<p>
Why were these things happening precisely in the embassies of Venezuela and
Peru? Of course, it is clear that behind all this--behind the Barbados
<span class="inote">[plane sabotage]</span>, behind the sunken ships in Peru, behind the cancellation
of the fishing agreement, behind the unfulfilled contract for the
construction of 20 tuna fishing boats, behind all this--is the CIA. And the
CIA is behind all these provocations.
</p>
<p>
And the disorder stopped with the death of soldier Ortiz Cabrera.
<span class="inote">[applause]</span> That was the point when we could not take any more and we said
that at any cost, and let this be understood clearly, at any cost--we even
recalled that at one time everyone had broken <span class="inote">[relations]</span> with us and that,
of course, could not be repeated again--we were prepared, at any cost, to
put an end to those provocations. And when the revolution says that it is
prepared to end something at any cost, everyone can be assured that it puts
an end to it at any cost. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
We simply removed the guards from the embassy. And we knew what was going
to happen. We knew what was going to happen because imperialism and its
lackeys cannot encourage lumpens for such a long time by offering them the
moon or however the saying goes, offering them everything, filling them
with illusions, while on the other hand they close the door to these people
and encourage them to enter <span class="inote">[the embassy]</span> illegally by force. They are
encouraged to leave illegally. But they are not granted entry. <span class="inote">[as heard]</span>
We knew that when the guards were removed, and when the lumpens knew there
were no guards, that the embassy would be filled with lumpens. And that is
exactly what happened. It could be said that the lumpens did what was
expected they would do.
</p>
<p>
A provisional guard had to be reestablished, because the guard at that
embassy is provisional. I want to warn about this because the problem of
what we do, what they are going to do and the situation of the persons who
enter embassies by force remains to be resolved. There is not much
importance now to removing such a guard because we have removed the guard
from the Florida peninsula, and that is much bigger. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> We have had
to remove the guard from the Florida peninsula. They have an easier path to
leave. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
Imperialism immediately took advantage of this problem. <span class="inote">[It used]</span> all the
bourgeois and rightist press of this hemisphere and the world to launch a
deluge of slander against Cuba and propaganda against Cuba. We expected
that. But this battle is won, is being won and is going to be won
completely, completely because we defy not only the Yankee military
threats, we also defy the Yankee press monopolies or rather the imperialist
press monopolies.
</p>
<p>
We defy this barrage; we defy the campaign with absolute imperturbability.
If we are not willing to defy risks of any kind, the risks of aggression as
well as the risks of their propaganda, if we are intimidated by the
propaganda--to be intimidated by propaganda is like being intimidated by
enemy guns. It is the same thing. We should not be afraid at all. We have
learned that perfectly well during 21 years.
</p>
<p>
But they unleashed it in the belief that the people wanted to leave; that
there were many dissidents, especially this belief--that there were
dissidents. There is lumpen there in that embassy. You were able to see it
in the film documentary. They do not know what the word dissidence means,
they would not know the meaning of this word. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span> Then, they built
up their campaign around this idea and of course, first it was the
imperialist press and then, as can be imagined, the reactionary and
rightist press against socialism, against communism, against the Cuban
revolution.
</p>
<p>
Simultaneously, the Yankees were doing exactly the same thing. In recent
months, there was an increase in illegal departures. People commandeered
boats, often took the crew as hostages. Then they were received in Florida
as heroes, as dissidents, as patriots, and so forth. And we warned them. We
repeatedly warned them through diplomatic channels. We warned them. We also
warned them publicly because we talked about this very point on 8 March,
International Women's Day, at the closing of the congress. We warned them
of the consequences this might bring. And we told them that Camarioca could
be opened once more. On that day we set forth what the revolution's policy
was, is and will be. And the thing is that the work of a revolution and the
construction of socialism is a task of absolutely free and willing men and
women. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
He who has no revolutionary genes, he who has no revolutionary blood, he
who does not have a mind that adapt to the idea of a revolution, he who
does not have a heart that can adapt to the effort of heroism required by a
revolution: We do not want them; we do not need them. <span class="inote">[cheers and applause]</span>
And at any rate, they are an insignificant part of the people, because what
the imperialists do not want, what they want to hide, what hurts them to
acknowledge are some truths. For instance, that there is no revolution with
the mass strength of the Cuban revolution. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> There is no
revolution, that is, our revolution; well, it is not good to make
comparisons; it is not good. But, the mass strength, the moral strength,
the political strength, the ideological strength of the revolution is
tremendous. And when it is put to the test, you saw the 19 April march; you
see this rally today. But it is not only numbers that count. You can see
the quality and the spirit of the people. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
This is the image that imperialism would like to hide because it does not
suit them. They want the people to lose faith in Cuba. They want the people
to grow discouraged with Cuba. In addition, in this whole hemisphere, well,
let's exclude Nicaragua and Grenada. Or maybe they would admit it; they
would agree with us.
</p>
<p>
In spite of everything, in spite of the fact that we have lumpen, that
unfortunately we still have lumpen among us, in spite of the fact that we
will have declassed individuals, that we still have antisocial individuals,
we are the nationa that has the least number of antisocial individuals and
lumpen in the hemisphere. We are the nation with the lowest rate of theft,
although there were thieves. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span> The lowest theft and crime rate. A
minimal rate of drug abuse. There is no prostitution, no gambling nothing.
The Grenadians and the Nicaraguans have not yet been able to solve these
problems and it will take them a lot of time to solve them, because we were
unable to solve them in the first or the second year of the revolution
either. But there is no society with a healthier moral atmosphere than our
society in all this hemisphere <span class="inote">[applause]</span> There is no society with more
moral values than those achieved by our society at the end of 21 years of
revolution. None with such a sense of justice, with such a sense of
justice, with such a sense of honor, with such a sense of dignity, with
such an appreciation and admiration for merit, for work, for sacrifice.
</p>
<p>
And this is very much in evidence each time it is put to the test. And as
we have often said, during the Angolan and Ethiopian wars, hundreds of
thousands of Cubans volunteered to participate in those struggles. It is
shown by the fact that we have 50,000 military and civilian compatriots
abroad. It is shown by the fact that Cuban technicians are working in 35
countries. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> And the lumpen have no allies remaining here. At
first, they <span class="inote">[the imperialists]</span> had the bourgeoisie, the landowners. They
had vacillating individuals of the middle classes, including those of the
petit bourgeoisie. But now, where are they going to find allies? Among the
workers" <span class="inote">[shouts of "No"!]</span>
</p>
<p>
At first they sought out those classes because they existed as such in our
country and they were their allies. Now they only have the lumpen. They are
the only potential allies for imperialism. The lumpen. And some who have
the mentality of lumpen or get mixed up with them. As simple as that. But
they are the only potential allies left to imperialism. And this lumpen is
where they have to get their refugees, their asylum seekers, their
dissidents.
</p>
<p>
As I was saying, along with this, the United States was encouraging illegal
departures from the country. And therefore, Mariel was opened. Mariel,
which has surpassed Camarioca by far. Camarioca was nothing compared with
Mariel.
</p>
<p>
<span class="inote">[Shout from a man in the crowd]</span> He is saying: Lovely Mariel, you have been
wounded. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span> But look, rather than a wound, it was more of a
self-inflicted wound. Let me explain. The funny thing is that this time it
was not ourselves who proposed opening Mariel. No. The initiative was taken
over there. In the heat of the situation and the campaign created in the
United States itself in connection with the events at the Florida embassy
<span class="inote">[corrects himself]</span> the Peruvian Embassy. In Florida, the idea of sending
boats to pick up this lumpen was spontaneous. And then we simply limited
ourselves to declaring that we would not receive them with guns and that
they would be treated with complete courtesy. And we opened it. I do not
know if this is hara-kiri or a wound or what. <span class="inote">[laughs]</span> The thing is that it
was opened. Now we are going to see how we close it, how we can close it.
<span class="inote">[laughter]</span> We'll see. <span class="inote">[shouts from the crowd]</span>
</p>
<p>
They are doing an excellent sanitation job for us. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span> The best. Now
they are complaining. They say there are delinquents. As if this was a
great discovery. As if they were amazed to find some delinquents. Now, who
do they think broke into and took refuge in the Peruvian Embassy? Did they
think they were intellectuals, artists, technicians, engineers? What did
they think? That it was propaganda on our part? They thought that we were
doing an injustice and calling poor dissidents lumpen. <span class="inote">[shouts of "trash!']</span>
And that was the type of individual making up the large majority of those
who took refuge at the Peruvian Embassy.
</p>
<p>
Of course, some of them took their relatives. We cannot say that a child is
a lumpen. It is tragic for a child to be the child of lumpen, a terrible
tragedy.
</p>
<p>
But the large majority of the people there were of that kind: Lumpen. Some
limp wrists <span class="inote">[flojito]</span>. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span> Some shameless creatures who had been
covering up. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span> You know it; the committees <span class="inote">[for the Defense of the
Revolution]</span> know it better than anyone. They know that some of those
managed to slip through. By the way, they are the ones that produce the
most irritation. Those who cover up. <span class="inote">[shouts from the crowd]</span>. Well now
Mariel has opened. And we are strictly complying with our stand: That all
who want to leave for a country that will receive them an leave. The
building of socialism, revolutionary work is a task of free men and women.
We must not forget this principle. It entails huge moral value. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
Now, we have not granted a passport and safe conduct only to lumpen who
took refuge in the embassy. No, we are giving them to all lumpen that
request them. To all who request them. And of course, the lumpen say: "This
is international lumpen day!" <span class="inote">[laughter]</span> When they heard that, all lumpen
wanted their passports and their safeconducts.
</p>
<p>
And what are we going to do? Why should we refuse them? As GRANMA says, it
is unfair and unconstitutional. What do they think they are going to
receive there? Of course, at first they took the refined bourgeois, the
well-dressed landowner. And then they took the physician, the professional.
And remember they took half of our country's doctors. We had 3,000 and they
took 6,000 <span class="inote">[as heard]</span>. Now it is very difficult, very difficult to take a
doctor away, because the ones that stayed behind were the best ones, and
doctors who trained along other lines, with a solidarity and human spirit,
doctors who are not money-minded. And we have more. Well, the proof is that
there are about 1,500 doctors on internationalist missions. And there are
no longer engineers, architects and teachers of the kind we had in the
early days of the revolution. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
Because we must say that in this battle many interesting things have been
demonstrated. I would start by mentioning the incredible participation of
the young. The combativeness and zeal of our young. Because this has been
the first battle of a whole generation of youths, the first battle.
<span class="inote">[applause]</span> The massive participation of women <span class="inote">[applause]</span>. Something
remarkable. Beside, the attitude of intellectuals, of journalists, writers,
artists, technicians, professionals, doctors has been an excellent
attitude. It must be said that they have been on the frontline in this
battle. Not to mention the students. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
Of course, imperialism used to be able to select. Now, how is it going to
be selective now? As (Nuez) says, they have no choice but to swallow the
sword to the hilt. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span> That is the situation. But this was not all
the problem. This was part of the problem. At the same time, there was the
announcement of military maneuvers in the Caribbean. That was more serious.
Air and naval landings at Guantanamo base. That was more serious, more
serious.
</p>
<p>
And even more serious if we thought of the world situation. More serious if
we analyzed the increasingly aggressive policy of imperialism toward us.
Because maybe in the early days of this administration there were some
gestures that could be thought of as positive, but later on--and
increasingly so--the more reactionary elements, the so-called hawks in the
U.S. Government were imposing their line of thinking and that line was
increasingly aggressive toward Cuba. This did not start just now. This
started with the Sixth Nonaligned Countries Summit. They were irritated by
Cuba's strength, by Cuba's prestige, and by Cuba's position and victories
within the nonaligned movement. And in the midst of the summit conference,
they unleashed an excessive and hypocritical campaign against Soviet
personnel in Cuba, Soviet personnel that had been in Cuba for 16 years,
since the October crisis. Something that had nothing to do with the October
crisis agreements. Soviet military personnel. The Yankees knew that. They
knew it.
</p>
<p>
They knew it since then and all the presidents knew it. And all of a sudden
they discover Soviet military personnel. They said it was a brigade. We did
not call it a brigade. We had another name for it. I believe it was Study
Center No 12. Who cares? The name is not important. We did not deny that
those personnel were here and that we were very happy that those personnel
had been here for 17 years. We are sorry that there are not more Study
Center 12's. That there is no No 13, 14, 15. We would be even happier
<span class="inote">[applause]</span> if we had available some more of these study centers. Because
they are excellent study centers, I am telling you. <span class="inote">[laughter]</span>. But they
knew it. That is where the hypocrisy, the phariseeism of imperialists lies.
In the midst of the conference they stirred up a big scandal with all that.
And they started a large-scale campaign. Later, it turned out that the U.S.
Government's prestige was affected by all this because to discover it at
such a late date forced it to adopt certain measures. But at the same time
they organized a command of troops for the Caribbean. And they stationed it
somewhere in Florida, in Key West. They established a troop command. Their
fundamental concern was determined by the revolutionary victory in
Nicaragua and the upsurge of the revolutionary movement in Central America.
</p>
<p>
They started to prepare intervention forces. And, of course, they used the
Soviet military personnel in Cuba as a pretext. They also used it to exert
pressure on us and other maneuver was bigger, more extensive, better
equipped, more soldiers, stronger. Oh, no. We could not just sit here
watching them organize this maneuver. As has been said, this maneuver is
simply a rehearsal to invade our country; a shameless rehearsal of
invasion. And on our own territory to boot. It is really intolerable. It is
unacceptable. A maneuver on how to invade Cuba in our own territory.
</p>
<p>
The maneuvers turned into a serious problem. And we were not going to stand
there with our arms crossed. We immediately adopted measures to mobilize
the Eastern Army with reinforcements from other provinces to organize
maneuvers of Cuba's armed forces in view of the Yankee maneuvers. <span class="inote">[applause
and chanting]</span> It was only logical for the hurricane to turn around toward
the United States. And so it did.
</p>
<p>
The United States has imposed on Cuba a blockade that has lasted over 20
years, a harsh economic blockade, which forbids even the sale of food and
medicine--even medicine. A brutal thing that has been going on for 21
years. The United States is occupying part of our territory by force and
against the will of our people. Now, what doctrine, principle, law,
legality can be used as the basis for a naval base on the territory of
another country against the will of the people? That has no legal or
juridical or moral or principled basis. It is simply an act of force.
</p>
<p>
The United States sends over Cuban territory the very modern SR-71, which
fly at an altitude of between 25,000 and 30,000 meters at very high speed.
Those are the explosions which you hear every so often all over the
country, because the breaking of the speed of sound creates these noises.
Walls shake, glass windows shake each time the SR-71 goes by. It is not so
easy to bring them down. Technically, it is not easy. Now, is this legal?
Is it legal to blockade our country? Is it legal to have a naval base on
our territory? Is it legal to violate our airspace? <span class="inote">[shouts of "no!"]</span> They
are doing it. And in addition, the maneuvers.
</p>
<p>
But that was not all. Many of the comrades who have spoken today have
mentioned it. They spoke of La Couvre, Giron, Escambray, the sabotage, the
subversion plans, the introduction of agricultural diseases, the plans to
assassinate the leaders of the revolution, Barbados. They recalled many
things because there are many things of which the United States need be
reminded.
</p>
<p>
It was not that we capriciously turned the hurricane that began at the
Peruvian Embassy against the United States. The natural course of the
hurricane was the United States. And the natural course of the struggle
against these violations and blackmail was to remove the guard from
Florida. It was the natural course and it should not have surprised them so
much. They knew it could be done. And, as I said, in a formal sense we were
not the ones who opened up Mariel.
</p>
<p>
They opened it from over there. We do not have policemen over there. That
is their own affair. If people want to disobey their orders, that is their
problem. We are free and legally able to do what we do within our own
territory and to authorize the departure of the antisocial individuals who
want to leave. We are not forcing anyone at all. Let this be understood. We
have never deported anyone. But we have an absolute right to authorize the
departure of the antisocial individuals. And that is what we are doing.
Well, the battle is becoming interesting.
</p>
<p>
Yesterday, or rather today, we started getting reports this morning that
the Yankees has suspended the naval landing in Guantanamo. <span class="inote">[cheers]</span> A U.S.
radio station early this morning reported that the naval landing had been
suspended but not the air landing. But this afternoon we had complete
reports and we were able to confirm through the U.S. interests Section in
Havana and Washington, which sent this open cable. It says: We have just
spoken to Mr Miles Frechette, head of the Cuban Affairs Bureau at the State
Department, who confirmed that the military maneuvers planned for
Guantanamo have been completely canceled. <span class="inote">[prolonged applause]</span> Frechette
commented that he had contacted the Voice of America to point out its
mistake regarding a broadcast announcing that the past of the maneuvers
involving parachute jumping would still be conducted.
</p>
<p>
Apparently they say the maneuvers will now be conducted somewhere along the
Florida coast and the eastern U.S. coast. We know these maneuvers, their
intentions, are prepared maneuvers that definitely threaten us, Central
American and the Caribbean. But, of course, we are not going to discuss
their right to conduct maneuvers on U.S. territory. What we discuss is the
right to state maneuvers on Cuban territory.
</p>
<p>
If this is so, there is no doubt that this is a notable success for the
struggle of the people and of international solidarity. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> For this
reason, the Cuban Government will suspend the special Giron 19 maneuvers
that the Eastern Army was to have staged beginning on 7 May. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
But the combating march is still on! <span class="inote">[shouts]</span> The combating march is still
on! <span class="inote">[applause]</span> Because the combating march was to be staged against the
maneuvers, against the blockade, against Guantanamo Base and against the
SR-71 spy flights. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> Lest the Yankees try to take advantage of the
fact that the people have been demoralized <span class="inote">[shouts]</span> in the middle of the
battle.
</p>
<p>
The combative people's march must go and it must go with even more strength
than the 19 April march. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> It is a mobilization of the people
against the blockade, against Guantanamo Base, the existence of a Yankee
military base on our territory and against the violations of our airspace,
for we must not remain silent. <span class="inote">[shouts]</span> We simply want to express before
world public opinion our rejection and spirit of struggle against this.
Now, if the U.S. Government announced that it has suspended the blockade
against Cuba, that it will return our occupied territory in Guantanamo and
that it will suspend the SR-71 flights, then we will gladly suspend the
combative people's march. <span class="inote">[shouts, applause]</span> But they will not do it! They
will not do it; they will not do it, but they will respect us a bit more;
they will learn a bit more about Cuba. They will learn to respect Cuba
more. <span class="inote">[applause, slogans]</span>
</p>
<p>
The United States has suspended the maneuver but it has not given up the
right they give themselves to carry them out in 3, 4 or 5 months, whenever
they believe there are more favorable international or other types of
circumstances. Therefore, what they have to renounce is their presence in
that piece of our national territory. That is why we will maintain these
three (?banners) and we will organize the march.
</p>
<p>
They say I have organized it. The truth is that I wasn't the one who
organized it. The march wasn't organized by Castro but by the mass
organization. Of course, the masses have their political leaders and the
masses have their party. We don't go around with hypocrisies of any type.
Just as we are here, we are in everything.
</p>
<p>
<span class="inote">[Applause, shouts]</span> We aren't going around creating fiction. We are united
and we have a party and a leadership. But of course, the party cannot
organize the march. It cannot. Only through the mass organizations can the
march be held. Only through the unity of a revolution can the enthusiasm of
an event such as this be created. Those are realities. Now then, all the
people have participated in this. All the people have participated just as
we are participating in this event.
</p>
<p>
Therefore, the march will be held on Saturday, 17 May, not on the 8th
because that was when the maneuvers were going to start, but not the exact
day when they were going to land those ships. So on Saturday, 18 May <span class="inote">[as
heard]</span>, the people's combative march will be held throughout the country.
On this occasion it will not be 1 million. I estimate that around 5 million
people will march that day. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> But of course, we should not boast
of the success. It is not a time for boasting.
</p>
<p>
The enemy still exists. It is strong. It harasses us. It blockades us and
threatens us and much more now in view of a new world situation in which we
are practically at the threshold or already in an arms race and a cold war.
That is why we cannot let down our guard. We cannot stop being alert.
Therefore, the party has instructed the armed forces to form the militias
of territorial troops as one more force. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> They will be made up of
men, women, workers, peasants, students, everyone who is able to fight.
They will be organized so they can defend every part of the national
territory. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
All those who are able to fight are not in the reserve units of the regular
troops, all those who are not in the reserves or in the regular units of
the armed forces, will make up the territorial troop militias.
</p>
<p>
Because <span class="inote">[word indistinct]</span> that Cuba like Nicaragua--although Cuba has a
much stronger army than Nicaragua, logically because it has existed for a
longer time and has a larger population--not only a regular war would
confront a virtual aggression against Cuba. The enemy would have to face a
people's war. It would have to face both things, the resistance of the
regular units and the resistance of all the people.
</p>
<p>
You know what makes us, Nicaragua and Grenada strong? It is the fact that
these are popular revolutions. They are revolutions with great popular
support. And any enemy has to think that it is madness to invade a country
like this one. It is madness because they are going to experience what
occurred to Napoleon's troops in Spain; they went in but then they couldn't
get out. Or Napoleon in old Russia; they went in but then they could not
find a way out. It is easy to enter. But if they are going to face a people
like this one, if they face a people like this one, it is later very
difficult to get out of that problem. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
We have to prepare for two types of war, for the conventional war and for
the people's war, for both wars. This what forces them to think a few times
before committing the blunder of invading our country. But there are
threats against us. Some of them have begun to speak in more aggressive
terms. Some of them have proposed that the 1962 agreements be disregarded,
that is, to once again bring up the thesis of their right to invade us.
Others have cynically said that if there is a conflict in another part of
the world, they would have the right to carry out actions wherever it is
more advantageous to them. In sum, they were referring to Cuba in view of
the fact that Cuba is very far away from the Soviet Union and the socialist
camp. But we have to be realistic. We have to be realistic because we have
those dangers of the increasing imperialist aggression and its theories and
those things they are proposing.
</p>
<p>
However, they should know what they will find. That is why we said that
this rally was so important. This shows imperialism that here we have a
people and it shows them what kind of people we have here.
</p>
<p>
I would say that we have waged a battle today in defense of the integrity
of our fatherland. <span class="inote">[applause]</span> Your mere presence <span class="inote">[applause]</span>, your mere
presence in this plaza is an important battle in defense of the integrity
and the security of Cuba because the dangerous thing is for the enemy to be
confused. The dangerous thing is for the enemy to be deceived.
</p>
<p>
But we should do something more. Work has already begun on the drafting of
plans on what the country should to to survive and withstand a total
blockade, on what each one of us must do in case of a total blockade. What
we must do to survive if no food or fuels come in. They are also talking of
these possibilities. That is, not to undertake a military action against
the country but to mine the ports. One of the objectives of those maneuvers
was the mining of the ports. Not mining them but studying how it should be
done. They speak of naval blockades, knowing how difficult it would be for
a country without petroleum to survive a naval blockade. We have to draft
the plans on what to do in that situation. By the way, Reagan or `Rigin,' I
don't know how you pronounce it, who is the certain candidate of the
Republican Party, has expressed support for a naval blockade against Cuba.
Of course, none of this is easy I must warn them. But as revolutionaries
and as a realistic people we have the duty of having a reply for each of
these problems. But the one thing they cannot imagine is for Cuba to
surrender ever. Because we will never surrender. We will never surrender.
<span class="inote">[applause, shouts]</span>
</p>
<p>
If a climate of peace does not exist in the Caribbean, it is not our fault
but theirs. Suppress you blockade, suppress you base in Guantanamo, stop
overlying Cuba, respect Nicaragua, respect Grenada and do not interfere. If
to this we add noninterference in the domestic affairs of other Latin
American peoples, then a climate of peace and detente might be created.
</p>
<p>
Now, the one thing we must fight for, the one thing there is the duty to
fight for, is the development of peace and cooperation among the peoples.
But the one thing we will never do is fall on our knees at the feet of
imperialism to beg for peace. <span class="inote">[shouts, slogans]</span>
</p>
<p>
The international situation tends to become complicated. I would like to
take advantage of this occasion to talk about the situation in Iran. All of
us are interested in this problem, (?and if) the Yankees <span class="inote">[words indistinct]</span>
someplace else might lead to certain actions by them. Everything that
happens anywhere is of interest to us. These things interest us as
revolutionaries; they interest us as conscientious men; they also interest
us for ourselves. What happens in the world is of interest to us.
</p>
<p>
In Iran, as you know, the shah's dynasty lasted more than 30 years. The
people lived under a fierce tyranny for dozens of years. The people had
already overthrown the shah once but, just like it did in Guatemala, the
CIA <span class="inote">[words indistinct]</span> and reestablished him in the government. This is a
known fact; it is a historical fact. All the documents, all the evidence
exists. <span class="inote">[The shah]</span> assassinated hundreds of thousands of Iranians; he
imprisoned them, tortured them and committed all kinds of horrors.
</p>
<p>
With great bravery, with great patriotism, almost without weapons and
despite the fact that the shah had the most powerful army in the region,
the Iranian people overthrew the shah. And naturally an irritation against
and a marked rejection of U.S. policy resulted.
</p>
<p>
When, in addition, the United States made the mistake of taking the shah to
the United States, that elicited a popular outburst, an outburst of
indignation that gave rise to the incidents at the U.S. Embassy in
Iran--the seizure of the embassy and the capture of a group of officials.
The imperious U.S. response to developments of this type is force. (?This
was provoked) because it was the CIA's action, installing the shah there,
which elicited that hatred from the masses. It was the U.S. support for the
shah which elicited that hatred against the United States. It was the
shah's arrival in the United States which caused the explosion of the
masses. And we have always held the position that this problem must be
resolved by political and diplomatic means instead of by force--the problem
of the embassy and the problem of the hostages.
</p>
<p>
But, the United States has made a number of mistakes. The first was
practically confiscating--embargoing and seizing in other words--thousands
of millions of dollars that the Iranian state had deposited in U.S. banks.
</p>
<p>
This measure of force, of imperious behavior, this illegal measure, had to
irritate the Iranians even further. And each thing the Americans have done
has contributed to further irritating the Iranians. They mobilize big
forces, aircraft carriers, dozens of military units near Iran; they
threaten it and naturally, this further irritates the Iranians.
</p>
<p>
In addition to this, they announce they will carry out military actions
before July. And indeed, they did stage some operations such as the
commando attack, the attempt to carry out a commando attack. Seeking to
resolve the problem in Iran through force and surprise, they have further
complicated the problem. Now the students have dispersed the so-called
hostages.
</p>
<p>
In short, any action of force carried out against the Iranian people would
be very serious. But in addition, the United States has banned trade with
Iran, has established a kind of blockade against Iran and is now
threatening to adopt new measures. And it is trying to drag Western Europe
and Japan into the economic blockade against Iran, that is, the attempt to
make Iran surrender through hunger. Something similar to the things they
did to us.
</p>
<p>
We must also work in order to put an end to the conflicts between our Iraqi
and Iranian brothers. We must work so that their problems are resolved by
diplomatic means, because those conflicts only carry water to the mill of
imperialism.
</p>
<p>
Now, what will happen if the United States manages to impose that blockade
against Iran, trying to make it surrender through hunger? Iran is a Third
World country; it belongs to the nonaligned movement, and it is a member of
OPEC, that is, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. OPEC has
in its hands the ability to prevent an economic blockade against Iran. It
has this in its hands. It has warned that oil supplies will be suspended to
those countries that join the blockade against Iran. <span class="inote">[applause]</span>
</p>
<p>
The West does not have the ability to impose an economic blockade against
Iran if OPEC does not want and refuses to do it, and if it warms with
justifiable reasons about its possible consequences. OPEC can say: You want
to starve 35 million human beings to death; I will not send you fuel for
you to use to ride around in your car. This is the hour of truth for OPEC.
This organization should not only increase prices and amass huge fortunes.
This is the hour of truth for OPEC and the nonaligned and Third World
countries.
</p>
<p>
This is very interesting since we do not expect OPEC to do as the OAS did,
when the imperialists established their aggressive blockades against Cuba.
This is a problem we must follow closely. We must urge our internationalist
friend to support Iran.
</p>
<p>
Naturally Iran is now the victim, but here very close to use we have the
case of El Salvador, where genocide is being committed against the people
and where thousands of patriots are being murdered. In order to understand
the diverging policies of some states, we have the example of what the
Andean Pact did regarding the <span class="inote">[words indistinct]</span> and other problems.
</p>
<p>
We are not opposed to the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean.
On the contrary we are in favor of it and, together with Mexico, we helped
to create the Latin American Economic System <span class="inote">[LAES]</span>. But we are opposed to
political deals in this hemisphere because they lead to nothing.
</p>
<p>
We would have liked a progressive and revolutionary Andean Pact, and as a
placard said during the fighting march, a real pact of Bolivar and Sandino.
But what did the Andean Pact do? It said nothing regarding the maneuvers
being organized by the Yankees, not even a statement. What has it done in
regard to the blockade of Cuba, which is a crime? It has not issued a
declaration condemning the blockade. What has it done in regard to the
Guantanamo Base? It has not made a single statement demanding that the base
be returned to us. This is our territory. What has it done regarding the
spy flights over Cuba, which are a shameless violation of our sovereignty?
It has not issued a single statement condemning it. What has it done about
Puerto Rico, a brother country which imperialism wants to devour, which the
United States wants to annex? It has not said a single word. What has it
said abut Iran and the blockade of Iran? Not a single word that we know of.
What has it said about the genocide in El Salvador? Not a single word. In
that country thousands of persons have died during the past months. The
Andean Pact launched a deluge of propaganda against us, referring to events
in which there was not even a single wounded person. There was a great
bomb, the march, but we were confident the bomb would not explode and it
did not.
</p>
<p>
Let us say that there, were thousands of patriots are dying, the Andean
Pact does not say a word. This is logical. The Venezuelan ruling party
supports the genocide Government of El Salvador and also supports the
so-called Christian democracy in Panama which is really a group of rightist
reactionaries which conspires against the progressive government of that
country.
</p>
<p>
These are things related to problems where the Andean Pact assumes a
demagogic attitude toward Cuba. I will not say that the conduct of all of
the member countries was alike. There were differences among the, but the
Andean Pact is good for only some things.
</p>
<p>
We have, as I said, the Salvadoran situation which demands the most ample
international support to halt the hands of the imperialists.
Demonstrations, like this one today are part of the struggle, not only for
the defense of our own integrity, but also for the defense of the integrity
of Grenada, Nicaragua, the sovereignty of the Caribbean countries and
Central America. It is part of our struggle.
</p>
<p>
This is why this rally has a special meaning. It has really been an
International Labor Day. For us, it has been a great honor and
satisfaction. We have felt very stimulated and strengthened by the presence
of Companero Bishop in this rally. He had his rally this morning in Grenada
and his rally this afternoon in Havana. We have with us Companero Daniel
Ortega, whom you know from the Sixth Summit; president of the World Peace
Council, Companero Chandra <span class="inote">[applause]</span>; the leader of the world workers'
organization, Companero Pastorino <span class="inote">[applause]</span>; we have been honored with the
presence of the best of the Latin American intellectuals, Companero Juan
Bosch, <span class="inote">[applause]</span> and Companero Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
</p>
<p>
This has meant a lot for us, this gives a truly historical meaning to the
greatest rally of the revolution. We, besides maintaining the mobilization,
and preparing for the march on the 17th must turn this energy not only into
political or military energy, but also into a productive energy. As <span class="inote">[word
indistinct]</span> explained, the coming weeks are decisive, for the conclusion of
the sugarcane harvest as well as for the great amount of sugarcane that
must be planted and weeded. We must turn this energy into a productive
force. We must turn this tremendous force, created by this colossal mass
struggle, this people's revolutionary definition, and the hatred expressed
against the idle, the parasite, the lumpen and the antisocial--we must turn
this into a force of awareness. We must turn it into an instrument in the
struggle for achievements and to overcome deficiencies and the struggle to
overcome difficulties.
</p>
<p>
This is very important if we are going to be able to transform this
incredible, gigantic, force in the struggle against our own deficiencies,
in the struggle against our own weaknesses.
</p>
<p>
Today, many things have been packed with emotion. Those things have been
stimulating. The most essential, the most fundamental factor has been the
people.
</p>
<p>
This afternoon will have an everlasting impression on all of us, an
impression that cannot be erased. I say this without demagoguery, without
the purpose of flattering and with a profound, sincere and heartfelt spirit
of justice.
</p>
<p>
I dare say that such a people deserve a place in history, a place in glory,
that such a people deserve deserve victory. Fatherland or death? We shall
win! <span class="inote">[crowd shouts: "We shall win" and applauds.]</span>
-END-
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Fidel Castro
Our Criminals are Leaving to their Allies in the US
Spoken: May Day, 1980 at Jose Marti Revolution Square
Publisher: Havana Domestic Service in Spanish 2359 GMT
Translated: FBIS
Transcription/Markup: Castro Speech Database/Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002
Compatriots, We know how many hours you already have spent standing
on this square. We only ask one more effort from you.
[rhythmic applause, prolonged chanting of "Fidel, friend, the people are with you"]... When ... [prolonged chanting of "Fidel, Fidel, Fidel," and
applause] Well, let us now give another demonstration of discipline. Let us
be silent.
As I was saying, or trying to say, when we were coming to this rally this
afternoon we could again see the incredible spectacle of absolutely
deserted streets. We could imagine, or rather, I ask myself if we could
imagine, the magnitude of this rally. We thought it must be a big one. We
thought it would be the biggest over the 21 years of the revolution.
Actually, however, it was impossible to imagine the magnitude of this
rally. Perhaps only from the tower [presumably from the Jose Marti
Monument], perhaps from the air, perhaps only graphically by means of the
movies, television or photographs we will be able to see this rally. [in
distance chanting, applause]
I do not say this or make this observation thinking of what it means in
support for us. I say it and I think it, thinking of what it means in
support for our noble and just revolutionary ideas, [applause] what it
means in support for our revolutionary cause. [applause]
It was a case of showing our strength, but not just to merely show it. A
battle of the masses has been waged over recent days as never before in the
history of the revolution, as much by its volume as by its intensity. The
facts are known; it was necessary to do it. It was necessary to do this
[applause, chanting of "Let them go, Let them go"]
The enemy had to be shown and the enemy had to be taught that there can be
no fooling around with the people. The enemy had to be shown that there can
be no fooling around with the revolution. [applause] The enemy had to be
shown that a people cannot be offered with impunity, [applause] that a
people cannot be threatened with impunity. [shouts of `No"] And this image,
this image is what they dreamed of destroying, the image of what the people
are, the true revolutionary people, the proletarian people, the working
people, the peasant people, the combatant people, the student people.
[prolonged applause, indistinct chanting]
Perhaps they thought the revolution has weakened and you can see what
weakness of the revolution they have uncovered. [rhythmic applause,
indistinct chanting] You can see what type of a revolution they have found.
That is why it was necessary to wage this battle.
As you know, over recent months our party and our people have been waging a
tenacious and selfless struggle for exigency, to overcome inefficiencies,
to overcome difficulties. This work was being done quietly and insistently
for months. It could be said that our revolution, our people and our party
were devoted to this work and to productive activities, especially the
sugar harvest and the planting [of sugarcane], coping with the problems of
the diseases of tobacco and sugarcane and the swine fever which
mysteriously, mysteriously appeared almost simultaneously in our country.
We were tackling various problems of our revolutionary process. We were
struggling for development, struggling to improve everything within our
material capabilities, and preparing for the congress of our party. We were
involved in that task. But, why does this situation emerge? It is not a
coincidence; it is not a coincidence.
What happens is that, as in all previous circumstances, every time they
have messed with us they have come the worse for it; every time they have
provoked us they have come out the losers. You know the facts. And if it
were not for the presence of foreign journalists, it would not be necessary
to speak much about the background. But the issue was unleashed as a result
of the provocations at the embassies of Peru and Venezuela. Everyone knows
that imperialism wanted to affect relations between Cuba and Venezuela and
between Cuba and Peru. It had that idea for a long time and was planning
things.
We cannot forget that is what precisely in Venezuela and with the
participation of Venezuelans that the monstrous crime of Barbados [sabotage
of Cuban airlines] was planned and executed. It was one of the most
indignant actions that has ever happened over all time. We all know that
all those people have not even been tried and that frequently there is even
talk that they are going to be released because they, some of them, have
old relations with the ruling party of Venezuela.
We cannot forget that in Peru it was the navy of that country, the navy of
that country--and we know this and I do not think they dare disagree--the
navy of that country, agents of the navy that sank our two fishing
boats--the Rio Jobabo and Rio Danuji. It was an incredible provocation.
Furthermore, neither can we can forget how the existing fishing agreement
between Cuba and Peru, which had been in effect a long time and was
functioning perfectly well and was useful, very useful for the Peruvians
and helped to produce food for the Peruvians and also food for us, was
unilaterally canceled. This was also a result of impositions by the navy,
to make private agreements by virtue of which an individual without giving
anything, just his signature, could become a millionaire.
We cannot forget how the Government of Peru did not fulfill a contract for
the construction of 20 tuna fishing boats which we signed with them and by
virtue of which our country spent tens of millions of dollars on a fish
processing plant. Nevertheless, the contract was not fulfilled. The boats
were not built and we were left with the plant and without the boats.
All this has its history and background. Logically, these things began to
cool the relations which at one time were warm and close with the
revolutionary government of Velasco Alvarado. [applause] These were
relations that began those difficult days for Peru, when our people, at the
request of the [Peruvian] revolution, although no diplomatic relations
existed, made 100,000 blood donations in 10 days. And our doctors and
nurses volunteered, and our construction workers volunteered, and our
people volunteered to help the fraternal people of Peru, [applause] the
fraternal people of Peru, yes, because we call and always will call the
people of Peru and Venezuela our fraternal people of Peru and Venezuela.
[applause]
That is how our people are. That is the people who are here, [applause]
these people of workers, of soldiers, [applause] the internationalist
people, the people of the glorious combatants in Angola and Ethiopia, the
people from whom more than 100,000 combatants of their armed forces already
have performed internationalist missions. [applause] [These are] the people
who, when teachers are requested for Nicaraguan, offer 29,500 teachers.
That is the people, not the lumpens who want to represent them with those
scum who entered the Peruvian Embassy.
[Applause, shouts of "scum," other indistinct chanting] That was what
offered our people the most. That dust and other dust brought this mud, and
those winds brought these storms. [laughter]
And then, something strange, something strange which did not occur at any
other embassy. They had thugs, delinquents and lumpens who went to request
visas and they [at the embassy] would not grant them even if they were
crazy because if they had wanted to grant the visas, well, they would have
known that we know enough [of these elements]. They were not granted visas.
When they used violence to enter, crashing a truck or bus through the
fence, then they would be received with all honors, protected, granted
refugee, have their fare paid and received as heroes. This could do nothing
except encourage lumpens to undertake such activities. It could not have
had other results.
And the patience we displayed, practically for years in some cases, was of
no use. We explained to them that it was incorrect, that it was going to
have bad consequences, that it was going to stimulate violence against
diplomatic missions, that such a policy should not continue. We resolved
the problem for them on repeated occasions because they said they could not
live with those elements inside. We could have said: Let them stay there
forever. But [they said] please, we do not want to live with these people;
we have these problems. And we authorized the departure of such elements.
We did it repeatedly. And always the things we foresaw happened.
Immediately after a group left, another one entered [the embassy]. That is
how it was.
But why the embassies of Venezuela and Peru? Why did this not happen at the
Mexican Embassy, for example? Why did it not happen at the Guyanese Embassy
or the Panamanian Embassy or the Jamaican Embassy, not to mention the
Nicaraguan or Grenadian? It remains to be seen if there is some insane
person who dares enter them either with a tank or a truck of whatever. No,
they do not consider, they do not consider that because the lumpen knows
governments almost as well as we do. And they know that Mexico has a
friendly attitude toward Cuba and was not going to permit such despicable
actions and such irregularities. Neither was Panama going to allow it, nor
Guyana nor Jamaica.
Why were these things happening precisely in the embassies of Venezuela and
Peru? Of course, it is clear that behind all this--behind the Barbados
[plane sabotage], behind the sunken ships in Peru, behind the cancellation
of the fishing agreement, behind the unfulfilled contract for the
construction of 20 tuna fishing boats, behind all this--is the CIA. And the
CIA is behind all these provocations.
And the disorder stopped with the death of soldier Ortiz Cabrera.
[applause] That was the point when we could not take any more and we said
that at any cost, and let this be understood clearly, at any cost--we even
recalled that at one time everyone had broken [relations] with us and that,
of course, could not be repeated again--we were prepared, at any cost, to
put an end to those provocations. And when the revolution says that it is
prepared to end something at any cost, everyone can be assured that it puts
an end to it at any cost. [applause]
We simply removed the guards from the embassy. And we knew what was going
to happen. We knew what was going to happen because imperialism and its
lackeys cannot encourage lumpens for such a long time by offering them the
moon or however the saying goes, offering them everything, filling them
with illusions, while on the other hand they close the door to these people
and encourage them to enter [the embassy] illegally by force. They are
encouraged to leave illegally. But they are not granted entry. [as heard]
We knew that when the guards were removed, and when the lumpens knew there
were no guards, that the embassy would be filled with lumpens. And that is
exactly what happened. It could be said that the lumpens did what was
expected they would do.
A provisional guard had to be reestablished, because the guard at that
embassy is provisional. I want to warn about this because the problem of
what we do, what they are going to do and the situation of the persons who
enter embassies by force remains to be resolved. There is not much
importance now to removing such a guard because we have removed the guard
from the Florida peninsula, and that is much bigger. [applause] We have had
to remove the guard from the Florida peninsula. They have an easier path to
leave. [applause]
Imperialism immediately took advantage of this problem. [It used] all the
bourgeois and rightist press of this hemisphere and the world to launch a
deluge of slander against Cuba and propaganda against Cuba. We expected
that. But this battle is won, is being won and is going to be won
completely, completely because we defy not only the Yankee military
threats, we also defy the Yankee press monopolies or rather the imperialist
press monopolies.
We defy this barrage; we defy the campaign with absolute imperturbability.
If we are not willing to defy risks of any kind, the risks of aggression as
well as the risks of their propaganda, if we are intimidated by the
propaganda--to be intimidated by propaganda is like being intimidated by
enemy guns. It is the same thing. We should not be afraid at all. We have
learned that perfectly well during 21 years.
But they unleashed it in the belief that the people wanted to leave; that
there were many dissidents, especially this belief--that there were
dissidents. There is lumpen there in that embassy. You were able to see it
in the film documentary. They do not know what the word dissidence means,
they would not know the meaning of this word. [laughter] Then, they built
up their campaign around this idea and of course, first it was the
imperialist press and then, as can be imagined, the reactionary and
rightist press against socialism, against communism, against the Cuban
revolution.
Simultaneously, the Yankees were doing exactly the same thing. In recent
months, there was an increase in illegal departures. People commandeered
boats, often took the crew as hostages. Then they were received in Florida
as heroes, as dissidents, as patriots, and so forth. And we warned them. We
repeatedly warned them through diplomatic channels. We warned them. We also
warned them publicly because we talked about this very point on 8 March,
International Women's Day, at the closing of the congress. We warned them
of the consequences this might bring. And we told them that Camarioca could
be opened once more. On that day we set forth what the revolution's policy
was, is and will be. And the thing is that the work of a revolution and the
construction of socialism is a task of absolutely free and willing men and
women. [applause]
He who has no revolutionary genes, he who has no revolutionary blood, he
who does not have a mind that adapt to the idea of a revolution, he who
does not have a heart that can adapt to the effort of heroism required by a
revolution: We do not want them; we do not need them. [cheers and applause]
And at any rate, they are an insignificant part of the people, because what
the imperialists do not want, what they want to hide, what hurts them to
acknowledge are some truths. For instance, that there is no revolution with
the mass strength of the Cuban revolution. [applause] There is no
revolution, that is, our revolution; well, it is not good to make
comparisons; it is not good. But, the mass strength, the moral strength,
the political strength, the ideological strength of the revolution is
tremendous. And when it is put to the test, you saw the 19 April march; you
see this rally today. But it is not only numbers that count. You can see
the quality and the spirit of the people. [applause]
This is the image that imperialism would like to hide because it does not
suit them. They want the people to lose faith in Cuba. They want the people
to grow discouraged with Cuba. In addition, in this whole hemisphere, well,
let's exclude Nicaragua and Grenada. Or maybe they would admit it; they
would agree with us.
In spite of everything, in spite of the fact that we have lumpen, that
unfortunately we still have lumpen among us, in spite of the fact that we
will have declassed individuals, that we still have antisocial individuals,
we are the nationa that has the least number of antisocial individuals and
lumpen in the hemisphere. We are the nation with the lowest rate of theft,
although there were thieves. [laughter] The lowest theft and crime rate. A
minimal rate of drug abuse. There is no prostitution, no gambling nothing.
The Grenadians and the Nicaraguans have not yet been able to solve these
problems and it will take them a lot of time to solve them, because we were
unable to solve them in the first or the second year of the revolution
either. But there is no society with a healthier moral atmosphere than our
society in all this hemisphere [applause] There is no society with more
moral values than those achieved by our society at the end of 21 years of
revolution. None with such a sense of justice, with such a sense of
justice, with such a sense of honor, with such a sense of dignity, with
such an appreciation and admiration for merit, for work, for sacrifice.
And this is very much in evidence each time it is put to the test. And as
we have often said, during the Angolan and Ethiopian wars, hundreds of
thousands of Cubans volunteered to participate in those struggles. It is
shown by the fact that we have 50,000 military and civilian compatriots
abroad. It is shown by the fact that Cuban technicians are working in 35
countries. [applause] And the lumpen have no allies remaining here. At
first, they [the imperialists] had the bourgeoisie, the landowners. They
had vacillating individuals of the middle classes, including those of the
petit bourgeoisie. But now, where are they going to find allies? Among the
workers" [shouts of "No"!]
At first they sought out those classes because they existed as such in our
country and they were their allies. Now they only have the lumpen. They are
the only potential allies for imperialism. The lumpen. And some who have
the mentality of lumpen or get mixed up with them. As simple as that. But
they are the only potential allies left to imperialism. And this lumpen is
where they have to get their refugees, their asylum seekers, their
dissidents.
As I was saying, along with this, the United States was encouraging illegal
departures from the country. And therefore, Mariel was opened. Mariel,
which has surpassed Camarioca by far. Camarioca was nothing compared with
Mariel.
[Shout from a man in the crowd] He is saying: Lovely Mariel, you have been
wounded. [laughter] But look, rather than a wound, it was more of a
self-inflicted wound. Let me explain. The funny thing is that this time it
was not ourselves who proposed opening Mariel. No. The initiative was taken
over there. In the heat of the situation and the campaign created in the
United States itself in connection with the events at the Florida embassy
[corrects himself] the Peruvian Embassy. In Florida, the idea of sending
boats to pick up this lumpen was spontaneous. And then we simply limited
ourselves to declaring that we would not receive them with guns and that
they would be treated with complete courtesy. And we opened it. I do not
know if this is hara-kiri or a wound or what. [laughs] The thing is that it
was opened. Now we are going to see how we close it, how we can close it.
[laughter] We'll see. [shouts from the crowd]
They are doing an excellent sanitation job for us. [laughter] The best. Now
they are complaining. They say there are delinquents. As if this was a
great discovery. As if they were amazed to find some delinquents. Now, who
do they think broke into and took refuge in the Peruvian Embassy? Did they
think they were intellectuals, artists, technicians, engineers? What did
they think? That it was propaganda on our part? They thought that we were
doing an injustice and calling poor dissidents lumpen. [shouts of "trash!']
And that was the type of individual making up the large majority of those
who took refuge at the Peruvian Embassy.
Of course, some of them took their relatives. We cannot say that a child is
a lumpen. It is tragic for a child to be the child of lumpen, a terrible
tragedy.
But the large majority of the people there were of that kind: Lumpen. Some
limp wrists [flojito]. [laughter] Some shameless creatures who had been
covering up. [laughter] You know it; the committees [for the Defense of the
Revolution] know it better than anyone. They know that some of those
managed to slip through. By the way, they are the ones that produce the
most irritation. Those who cover up. [shouts from the crowd]. Well now
Mariel has opened. And we are strictly complying with our stand: That all
who want to leave for a country that will receive them an leave. The
building of socialism, revolutionary work is a task of free men and women.
We must not forget this principle. It entails huge moral value. [applause]
Now, we have not granted a passport and safe conduct only to lumpen who
took refuge in the embassy. No, we are giving them to all lumpen that
request them. To all who request them. And of course, the lumpen say: "This
is international lumpen day!" [laughter] When they heard that, all lumpen
wanted their passports and their safeconducts.
And what are we going to do? Why should we refuse them? As GRANMA says, it
is unfair and unconstitutional. What do they think they are going to
receive there? Of course, at first they took the refined bourgeois, the
well-dressed landowner. And then they took the physician, the professional.
And remember they took half of our country's doctors. We had 3,000 and they
took 6,000 [as heard]. Now it is very difficult, very difficult to take a
doctor away, because the ones that stayed behind were the best ones, and
doctors who trained along other lines, with a solidarity and human spirit,
doctors who are not money-minded. And we have more. Well, the proof is that
there are about 1,500 doctors on internationalist missions. And there are
no longer engineers, architects and teachers of the kind we had in the
early days of the revolution. [applause]
Because we must say that in this battle many interesting things have been
demonstrated. I would start by mentioning the incredible participation of
the young. The combativeness and zeal of our young. Because this has been
the first battle of a whole generation of youths, the first battle.
[applause] The massive participation of women [applause]. Something
remarkable. Beside, the attitude of intellectuals, of journalists, writers,
artists, technicians, professionals, doctors has been an excellent
attitude. It must be said that they have been on the frontline in this
battle. Not to mention the students. [applause]
Of course, imperialism used to be able to select. Now, how is it going to
be selective now? As (Nuez) says, they have no choice but to swallow the
sword to the hilt. [laughter] That is the situation. But this was not all
the problem. This was part of the problem. At the same time, there was the
announcement of military maneuvers in the Caribbean. That was more serious.
Air and naval landings at Guantanamo base. That was more serious, more
serious.
And even more serious if we thought of the world situation. More serious if
we analyzed the increasingly aggressive policy of imperialism toward us.
Because maybe in the early days of this administration there were some
gestures that could be thought of as positive, but later on--and
increasingly so--the more reactionary elements, the so-called hawks in the
U.S. Government were imposing their line of thinking and that line was
increasingly aggressive toward Cuba. This did not start just now. This
started with the Sixth Nonaligned Countries Summit. They were irritated by
Cuba's strength, by Cuba's prestige, and by Cuba's position and victories
within the nonaligned movement. And in the midst of the summit conference,
they unleashed an excessive and hypocritical campaign against Soviet
personnel in Cuba, Soviet personnel that had been in Cuba for 16 years,
since the October crisis. Something that had nothing to do with the October
crisis agreements. Soviet military personnel. The Yankees knew that. They
knew it.
They knew it since then and all the presidents knew it. And all of a sudden
they discover Soviet military personnel. They said it was a brigade. We did
not call it a brigade. We had another name for it. I believe it was Study
Center No 12. Who cares? The name is not important. We did not deny that
those personnel were here and that we were very happy that those personnel
had been here for 17 years. We are sorry that there are not more Study
Center 12's. That there is no No 13, 14, 15. We would be even happier
[applause] if we had available some more of these study centers. Because
they are excellent study centers, I am telling you. [laughter]. But they
knew it. That is where the hypocrisy, the phariseeism of imperialists lies.
In the midst of the conference they stirred up a big scandal with all that.
And they started a large-scale campaign. Later, it turned out that the U.S.
Government's prestige was affected by all this because to discover it at
such a late date forced it to adopt certain measures. But at the same time
they organized a command of troops for the Caribbean. And they stationed it
somewhere in Florida, in Key West. They established a troop command. Their
fundamental concern was determined by the revolutionary victory in
Nicaragua and the upsurge of the revolutionary movement in Central America.
They started to prepare intervention forces. And, of course, they used the
Soviet military personnel in Cuba as a pretext. They also used it to exert
pressure on us and other maneuver was bigger, more extensive, better
equipped, more soldiers, stronger. Oh, no. We could not just sit here
watching them organize this maneuver. As has been said, this maneuver is
simply a rehearsal to invade our country; a shameless rehearsal of
invasion. And on our own territory to boot. It is really intolerable. It is
unacceptable. A maneuver on how to invade Cuba in our own territory.
The maneuvers turned into a serious problem. And we were not going to stand
there with our arms crossed. We immediately adopted measures to mobilize
the Eastern Army with reinforcements from other provinces to organize
maneuvers of Cuba's armed forces in view of the Yankee maneuvers. [applause
and chanting] It was only logical for the hurricane to turn around toward
the United States. And so it did.
The United States has imposed on Cuba a blockade that has lasted over 20
years, a harsh economic blockade, which forbids even the sale of food and
medicine--even medicine. A brutal thing that has been going on for 21
years. The United States is occupying part of our territory by force and
against the will of our people. Now, what doctrine, principle, law,
legality can be used as the basis for a naval base on the territory of
another country against the will of the people? That has no legal or
juridical or moral or principled basis. It is simply an act of force.
The United States sends over Cuban territory the very modern SR-71, which
fly at an altitude of between 25,000 and 30,000 meters at very high speed.
Those are the explosions which you hear every so often all over the
country, because the breaking of the speed of sound creates these noises.
Walls shake, glass windows shake each time the SR-71 goes by. It is not so
easy to bring them down. Technically, it is not easy. Now, is this legal?
Is it legal to blockade our country? Is it legal to have a naval base on
our territory? Is it legal to violate our airspace? [shouts of "no!"] They
are doing it. And in addition, the maneuvers.
But that was not all. Many of the comrades who have spoken today have
mentioned it. They spoke of La Couvre, Giron, Escambray, the sabotage, the
subversion plans, the introduction of agricultural diseases, the plans to
assassinate the leaders of the revolution, Barbados. They recalled many
things because there are many things of which the United States need be
reminded.
It was not that we capriciously turned the hurricane that began at the
Peruvian Embassy against the United States. The natural course of the
hurricane was the United States. And the natural course of the struggle
against these violations and blackmail was to remove the guard from
Florida. It was the natural course and it should not have surprised them so
much. They knew it could be done. And, as I said, in a formal sense we were
not the ones who opened up Mariel.
They opened it from over there. We do not have policemen over there. That
is their own affair. If people want to disobey their orders, that is their
problem. We are free and legally able to do what we do within our own
territory and to authorize the departure of the antisocial individuals who
want to leave. We are not forcing anyone at all. Let this be understood. We
have never deported anyone. But we have an absolute right to authorize the
departure of the antisocial individuals. And that is what we are doing.
Well, the battle is becoming interesting.
Yesterday, or rather today, we started getting reports this morning that
the Yankees has suspended the naval landing in Guantanamo. [cheers] A U.S.
radio station early this morning reported that the naval landing had been
suspended but not the air landing. But this afternoon we had complete
reports and we were able to confirm through the U.S. interests Section in
Havana and Washington, which sent this open cable. It says: We have just
spoken to Mr Miles Frechette, head of the Cuban Affairs Bureau at the State
Department, who confirmed that the military maneuvers planned for
Guantanamo have been completely canceled. [prolonged applause] Frechette
commented that he had contacted the Voice of America to point out its
mistake regarding a broadcast announcing that the past of the maneuvers
involving parachute jumping would still be conducted.
Apparently they say the maneuvers will now be conducted somewhere along the
Florida coast and the eastern U.S. coast. We know these maneuvers, their
intentions, are prepared maneuvers that definitely threaten us, Central
American and the Caribbean. But, of course, we are not going to discuss
their right to conduct maneuvers on U.S. territory. What we discuss is the
right to state maneuvers on Cuban territory.
If this is so, there is no doubt that this is a notable success for the
struggle of the people and of international solidarity. [applause] For this
reason, the Cuban Government will suspend the special Giron 19 maneuvers
that the Eastern Army was to have staged beginning on 7 May. [applause]
But the combating march is still on! [shouts] The combating march is still
on! [applause] Because the combating march was to be staged against the
maneuvers, against the blockade, against Guantanamo Base and against the
SR-71 spy flights. [applause] Lest the Yankees try to take advantage of the
fact that the people have been demoralized [shouts] in the middle of the
battle.
The combative people's march must go and it must go with even more strength
than the 19 April march. [applause] It is a mobilization of the people
against the blockade, against Guantanamo Base, the existence of a Yankee
military base on our territory and against the violations of our airspace,
for we must not remain silent. [shouts] We simply want to express before
world public opinion our rejection and spirit of struggle against this.
Now, if the U.S. Government announced that it has suspended the blockade
against Cuba, that it will return our occupied territory in Guantanamo and
that it will suspend the SR-71 flights, then we will gladly suspend the
combative people's march. [shouts, applause] But they will not do it! They
will not do it; they will not do it, but they will respect us a bit more;
they will learn a bit more about Cuba. They will learn to respect Cuba
more. [applause, slogans]
The United States has suspended the maneuver but it has not given up the
right they give themselves to carry them out in 3, 4 or 5 months, whenever
they believe there are more favorable international or other types of
circumstances. Therefore, what they have to renounce is their presence in
that piece of our national territory. That is why we will maintain these
three (?banners) and we will organize the march.
They say I have organized it. The truth is that I wasn't the one who
organized it. The march wasn't organized by Castro but by the mass
organization. Of course, the masses have their political leaders and the
masses have their party. We don't go around with hypocrisies of any type.
Just as we are here, we are in everything.
[Applause, shouts] We aren't going around creating fiction. We are united
and we have a party and a leadership. But of course, the party cannot
organize the march. It cannot. Only through the mass organizations can the
march be held. Only through the unity of a revolution can the enthusiasm of
an event such as this be created. Those are realities. Now then, all the
people have participated in this. All the people have participated just as
we are participating in this event.
Therefore, the march will be held on Saturday, 17 May, not on the 8th
because that was when the maneuvers were going to start, but not the exact
day when they were going to land those ships. So on Saturday, 18 May [as
heard], the people's combative march will be held throughout the country.
On this occasion it will not be 1 million. I estimate that around 5 million
people will march that day. [applause] But of course, we should not boast
of the success. It is not a time for boasting.
The enemy still exists. It is strong. It harasses us. It blockades us and
threatens us and much more now in view of a new world situation in which we
are practically at the threshold or already in an arms race and a cold war.
That is why we cannot let down our guard. We cannot stop being alert.
Therefore, the party has instructed the armed forces to form the militias
of territorial troops as one more force. [applause] They will be made up of
men, women, workers, peasants, students, everyone who is able to fight.
They will be organized so they can defend every part of the national
territory. [applause]
All those who are able to fight are not in the reserve units of the regular
troops, all those who are not in the reserves or in the regular units of
the armed forces, will make up the territorial troop militias.
Because [word indistinct] that Cuba like Nicaragua--although Cuba has a
much stronger army than Nicaragua, logically because it has existed for a
longer time and has a larger population--not only a regular war would
confront a virtual aggression against Cuba. The enemy would have to face a
people's war. It would have to face both things, the resistance of the
regular units and the resistance of all the people.
You know what makes us, Nicaragua and Grenada strong? It is the fact that
these are popular revolutions. They are revolutions with great popular
support. And any enemy has to think that it is madness to invade a country
like this one. It is madness because they are going to experience what
occurred to Napoleon's troops in Spain; they went in but then they couldn't
get out. Or Napoleon in old Russia; they went in but then they could not
find a way out. It is easy to enter. But if they are going to face a people
like this one, if they face a people like this one, it is later very
difficult to get out of that problem. [applause]
We have to prepare for two types of war, for the conventional war and for
the people's war, for both wars. This what forces them to think a few times
before committing the blunder of invading our country. But there are
threats against us. Some of them have begun to speak in more aggressive
terms. Some of them have proposed that the 1962 agreements be disregarded,
that is, to once again bring up the thesis of their right to invade us.
Others have cynically said that if there is a conflict in another part of
the world, they would have the right to carry out actions wherever it is
more advantageous to them. In sum, they were referring to Cuba in view of
the fact that Cuba is very far away from the Soviet Union and the socialist
camp. But we have to be realistic. We have to be realistic because we have
those dangers of the increasing imperialist aggression and its theories and
those things they are proposing.
However, they should know what they will find. That is why we said that
this rally was so important. This shows imperialism that here we have a
people and it shows them what kind of people we have here.
I would say that we have waged a battle today in defense of the integrity
of our fatherland. [applause] Your mere presence [applause], your mere
presence in this plaza is an important battle in defense of the integrity
and the security of Cuba because the dangerous thing is for the enemy to be
confused. The dangerous thing is for the enemy to be deceived.
But we should do something more. Work has already begun on the drafting of
plans on what the country should to to survive and withstand a total
blockade, on what each one of us must do in case of a total blockade. What
we must do to survive if no food or fuels come in. They are also talking of
these possibilities. That is, not to undertake a military action against
the country but to mine the ports. One of the objectives of those maneuvers
was the mining of the ports. Not mining them but studying how it should be
done. They speak of naval blockades, knowing how difficult it would be for
a country without petroleum to survive a naval blockade. We have to draft
the plans on what to do in that situation. By the way, Reagan or `Rigin,' I
don't know how you pronounce it, who is the certain candidate of the
Republican Party, has expressed support for a naval blockade against Cuba.
Of course, none of this is easy I must warn them. But as revolutionaries
and as a realistic people we have the duty of having a reply for each of
these problems. But the one thing they cannot imagine is for Cuba to
surrender ever. Because we will never surrender. We will never surrender.
[applause, shouts]
If a climate of peace does not exist in the Caribbean, it is not our fault
but theirs. Suppress you blockade, suppress you base in Guantanamo, stop
overlying Cuba, respect Nicaragua, respect Grenada and do not interfere. If
to this we add noninterference in the domestic affairs of other Latin
American peoples, then a climate of peace and detente might be created.
Now, the one thing we must fight for, the one thing there is the duty to
fight for, is the development of peace and cooperation among the peoples.
But the one thing we will never do is fall on our knees at the feet of
imperialism to beg for peace. [shouts, slogans]
The international situation tends to become complicated. I would like to
take advantage of this occasion to talk about the situation in Iran. All of
us are interested in this problem, (?and if) the Yankees [words indistinct]
someplace else might lead to certain actions by them. Everything that
happens anywhere is of interest to us. These things interest us as
revolutionaries; they interest us as conscientious men; they also interest
us for ourselves. What happens in the world is of interest to us.
In Iran, as you know, the shah's dynasty lasted more than 30 years. The
people lived under a fierce tyranny for dozens of years. The people had
already overthrown the shah once but, just like it did in Guatemala, the
CIA [words indistinct] and reestablished him in the government. This is a
known fact; it is a historical fact. All the documents, all the evidence
exists. [The shah] assassinated hundreds of thousands of Iranians; he
imprisoned them, tortured them and committed all kinds of horrors.
With great bravery, with great patriotism, almost without weapons and
despite the fact that the shah had the most powerful army in the region,
the Iranian people overthrew the shah. And naturally an irritation against
and a marked rejection of U.S. policy resulted.
When, in addition, the United States made the mistake of taking the shah to
the United States, that elicited a popular outburst, an outburst of
indignation that gave rise to the incidents at the U.S. Embassy in
Iran--the seizure of the embassy and the capture of a group of officials.
The imperious U.S. response to developments of this type is force. (?This
was provoked) because it was the CIA's action, installing the shah there,
which elicited that hatred from the masses. It was the U.S. support for the
shah which elicited that hatred against the United States. It was the
shah's arrival in the United States which caused the explosion of the
masses. And we have always held the position that this problem must be
resolved by political and diplomatic means instead of by force--the problem
of the embassy and the problem of the hostages.
But, the United States has made a number of mistakes. The first was
practically confiscating--embargoing and seizing in other words--thousands
of millions of dollars that the Iranian state had deposited in U.S. banks.
This measure of force, of imperious behavior, this illegal measure, had to
irritate the Iranians even further. And each thing the Americans have done
has contributed to further irritating the Iranians. They mobilize big
forces, aircraft carriers, dozens of military units near Iran; they
threaten it and naturally, this further irritates the Iranians.
In addition to this, they announce they will carry out military actions
before July. And indeed, they did stage some operations such as the
commando attack, the attempt to carry out a commando attack. Seeking to
resolve the problem in Iran through force and surprise, they have further
complicated the problem. Now the students have dispersed the so-called
hostages.
In short, any action of force carried out against the Iranian people would
be very serious. But in addition, the United States has banned trade with
Iran, has established a kind of blockade against Iran and is now
threatening to adopt new measures. And it is trying to drag Western Europe
and Japan into the economic blockade against Iran, that is, the attempt to
make Iran surrender through hunger. Something similar to the things they
did to us.
We must also work in order to put an end to the conflicts between our Iraqi
and Iranian brothers. We must work so that their problems are resolved by
diplomatic means, because those conflicts only carry water to the mill of
imperialism.
Now, what will happen if the United States manages to impose that blockade
against Iran, trying to make it surrender through hunger? Iran is a Third
World country; it belongs to the nonaligned movement, and it is a member of
OPEC, that is, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. OPEC has
in its hands the ability to prevent an economic blockade against Iran. It
has this in its hands. It has warned that oil supplies will be suspended to
those countries that join the blockade against Iran. [applause]
The West does not have the ability to impose an economic blockade against
Iran if OPEC does not want and refuses to do it, and if it warms with
justifiable reasons about its possible consequences. OPEC can say: You want
to starve 35 million human beings to death; I will not send you fuel for
you to use to ride around in your car. This is the hour of truth for OPEC.
This organization should not only increase prices and amass huge fortunes.
This is the hour of truth for OPEC and the nonaligned and Third World
countries.
This is very interesting since we do not expect OPEC to do as the OAS did,
when the imperialists established their aggressive blockades against Cuba.
This is a problem we must follow closely. We must urge our internationalist
friend to support Iran.
Naturally Iran is now the victim, but here very close to use we have the
case of El Salvador, where genocide is being committed against the people
and where thousands of patriots are being murdered. In order to understand
the diverging policies of some states, we have the example of what the
Andean Pact did regarding the [words indistinct] and other problems.
We are not opposed to the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean.
On the contrary we are in favor of it and, together with Mexico, we helped
to create the Latin American Economic System [LAES]. But we are opposed to
political deals in this hemisphere because they lead to nothing.
We would have liked a progressive and revolutionary Andean Pact, and as a
placard said during the fighting march, a real pact of Bolivar and Sandino.
But what did the Andean Pact do? It said nothing regarding the maneuvers
being organized by the Yankees, not even a statement. What has it done in
regard to the blockade of Cuba, which is a crime? It has not issued a
declaration condemning the blockade. What has it done in regard to the
Guantanamo Base? It has not made a single statement demanding that the base
be returned to us. This is our territory. What has it done regarding the
spy flights over Cuba, which are a shameless violation of our sovereignty?
It has not issued a single statement condemning it. What has it done about
Puerto Rico, a brother country which imperialism wants to devour, which the
United States wants to annex? It has not said a single word. What has it
said abut Iran and the blockade of Iran? Not a single word that we know of.
What has it said about the genocide in El Salvador? Not a single word. In
that country thousands of persons have died during the past months. The
Andean Pact launched a deluge of propaganda against us, referring to events
in which there was not even a single wounded person. There was a great
bomb, the march, but we were confident the bomb would not explode and it
did not.
Let us say that there, were thousands of patriots are dying, the Andean
Pact does not say a word. This is logical. The Venezuelan ruling party
supports the genocide Government of El Salvador and also supports the
so-called Christian democracy in Panama which is really a group of rightist
reactionaries which conspires against the progressive government of that
country.
These are things related to problems where the Andean Pact assumes a
demagogic attitude toward Cuba. I will not say that the conduct of all of
the member countries was alike. There were differences among the, but the
Andean Pact is good for only some things.
We have, as I said, the Salvadoran situation which demands the most ample
international support to halt the hands of the imperialists.
Demonstrations, like this one today are part of the struggle, not only for
the defense of our own integrity, but also for the defense of the integrity
of Grenada, Nicaragua, the sovereignty of the Caribbean countries and
Central America. It is part of our struggle.
This is why this rally has a special meaning. It has really been an
International Labor Day. For us, it has been a great honor and
satisfaction. We have felt very stimulated and strengthened by the presence
of Companero Bishop in this rally. He had his rally this morning in Grenada
and his rally this afternoon in Havana. We have with us Companero Daniel
Ortega, whom you know from the Sixth Summit; president of the World Peace
Council, Companero Chandra [applause]; the leader of the world workers'
organization, Companero Pastorino [applause]; we have been honored with the
presence of the best of the Latin American intellectuals, Companero Juan
Bosch, [applause] and Companero Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
This has meant a lot for us, this gives a truly historical meaning to the
greatest rally of the revolution. We, besides maintaining the mobilization,
and preparing for the march on the 17th must turn this energy not only into
political or military energy, but also into a productive energy. As [word
indistinct] explained, the coming weeks are decisive, for the conclusion of
the sugarcane harvest as well as for the great amount of sugarcane that
must be planted and weeded. We must turn this energy into a productive
force. We must turn this tremendous force, created by this colossal mass
struggle, this people's revolutionary definition, and the hatred expressed
against the idle, the parasite, the lumpen and the antisocial--we must turn
this into a force of awareness. We must turn it into an instrument in the
struggle for achievements and to overcome deficiencies and the struggle to
overcome difficulties.
This is very important if we are going to be able to transform this
incredible, gigantic, force in the struggle against our own deficiencies,
in the struggle against our own weaknesses.
Today, many things have been packed with emotion. Those things have been
stimulating. The most essential, the most fundamental factor has been the
people.
This afternoon will have an everlasting impression on all of us, an
impression that cannot be erased. I say this without demagoguery, without
the purpose of flattering and with a profound, sincere and heartfelt spirit
of justice.
I dare say that such a people deserve a place in history, a place in glory,
that such a people deserve deserve victory. Fatherland or death? We shall
win! [crowd shouts: "We shall win" and applauds.]
-END-
Castro Internet Archive
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<h2 id="pageName"><a href="marapr_06.html" target="_self">March/April • Vol 6, No. 2 •</a></h2>
<div class="feature">
<h3>Message to Evo Morales from Cuba</h3>
<h6>By Ricardo Alarc�n and Fidel Castro</h6>
<p><em>The following message to Evo Morales appears on the Granma web site over the signatures of Ricardo Alarc�n and Fidel. I was struck most by its evaluation of what December 18 represented historically: America—our America, as Jos� Mart� said—is rising up and in so doing discovering its true face, its indigenous face, its Black face, its Mestizo face. And then by the evaluation it projects of Evo Morales as a leader and combatant in the revolutionary struggle.</em></p>
<p><em>Without a doubt, the Cuban leadership, although they addressed this message to Evo Morales, and through him the Bolivian people, really had a different intended audience. The intended audience, I believe, is people like us—revolutionary and progressive forces of the entire world—to help us become conscious of the tremendous, historic significance of this moment, nothing less than �a new history.� And to help us have faith and trust in the leadership that the Bolivian people—and above all the indigenous peoples of Bolivia—have raised up at this moment in the person of compa�ero Evo Morales and the team around him.</em></p>
<p><em>You will find many nice-sounding diplomatic statements of congratulations from Cuba to dignitaries of various countries over the past decades, but you will not find many like this one. Fidel�s statement upon arriving in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez�s first inauguration did not even refer to Ch�vez personally, but said that he wanted to share this moment with the Bolivarian people of Venezuela, a moment, he said, that could mark a turning point like July 26, 1953 marked in Cuba, that is, marking the beginning of a revolutionary struggle.</em></p>
<p><em>There were undoubtedly political and diplomatic considerations involved in Fidel�s deliberate understatedness at that moment, as there are today in relation to the outspoken character of this statement. What needs to be kept in mind, I think, is not just that Cuba felt it could speak so freely today, but also that such seasoned revolutionaries as the Cuban leaders felt it necessary and useful to throw the full weight of their own prestige behind Evo Morales and his comrades, and not just the cause he represents, but his leadership personally.</em></p>
<p><em>That message is not for the people of Bolivia—not the working people, the indigenous people, the oppressed people, who backed Evo massively—but for us. My own surmise is that the Cuban leadership understands that a very sharp struggle may soon break out around Bolivia, and it is necessary to begin rallying the revolutionary and progressive forces into battle formation.</em></p>
<p><em>[This is my translation of the original message in Granma since I have been unable to find the full text in English elsewhere.]</em></p>
<p><em>—Joaqu�n Bustelo</em></p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p>Dear compa�ero Evo Morales:</p>
<p>We have received with profound joy the historic victory of the people of Bolivia in Sunday�s election, and your proclamation, by a crushing and indisputable majority, as President of Bolivia.</p>
<p>For months we have followed with interest the news coming from your country and were aware of the tremendous obstacles that were being erected to frustrate the will of your people. We knew of the pressures of the Empire, of the maneuvers and intrigues of those who would continue to strip Bolivia of its immense natural resources and who are the ones responsible for the tremendous misery, oppression and discrimination imposed for centuries on a noble and rebellious people that has never stopped fighting for freedom and justice.</p>
<p>Millions of Quechuas, Aymaras, Guaranies, Chiquitanos and other native peoples of your country had been always excluded from a political system that was the legacy and continuation of colonial servitude. Many of them were arbitrarily denied the right to vote on December 18, and in that way they snatched hundreds of thousands of votes from you.</p>
<p>But on that day, despite everything, the people won. The magnitude of their victory was so great and eloquent that all were forced to recognize it, even those who for years have slandered you, have distorted the aspirations and sacrifices of the social movements you have known how to lead with wisdom and dignity, and until the eve of the elections were determined to hide the tremendous support for your candidacy.</p>
<p>With your victory, a new history is born, the history of the emancipation of the peoples whom colonialism and racism wanted to crush and wipe out. Finally, after half a millennium of genocide, they come to power with you. It is the hour of the true discovery of America, of indigenous America, of Black America, of mestizo America, of the America of Bol�var and Mart�, that today is everywhere proclaiming its definitive and unrenounceable independence.</p>
<p>You and your people have before you new and great challenges. It is necessary that you be accompanied, from right now, by the full solidarity of the entire world.</p>
<p>We send you the solidarity of the Government and People of Cuba. In greeting you and celebrating with you this victory that we feel as our own, we call on all peoples to reject imperialist threats and to unfold the most energetic and firm backing of the government you will lead with the determination and dignity that have characterized your life as a selfless fighter.</p>
<p>Thank you, Evo, thanks to the Bolivian people for having demonstrated with the clarity of the sun that another, better world is possible.</p>
<p>Receive the embrace of a Cuba that is always revolutionary and in solidarity.</p>
<p>[Signed]</p>
<p>Ricardo Alarc�n, National Assembly of People�s Power of Cuba</p>
<p>Fidel Castro Ruz, Council of State of the Republic of Cuba</p>
<p>
</p><p>—<i>Granma</i> (Havana), December 28, 2005</p>
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March/April • Vol 6, No. 2 •
Message to Evo Morales from Cuba
By Ricardo Alarc�n and Fidel Castro
The following message to Evo Morales appears on the Granma web site over the signatures of Ricardo Alarc�n and Fidel. I was struck most by its evaluation of what December 18 represented historically: America—our America, as Jos� Mart� said—is rising up and in so doing discovering its true face, its indigenous face, its Black face, its Mestizo face. And then by the evaluation it projects of Evo Morales as a leader and combatant in the revolutionary struggle.
Without a doubt, the Cuban leadership, although they addressed this message to Evo Morales, and through him the Bolivian people, really had a different intended audience. The intended audience, I believe, is people like us—revolutionary and progressive forces of the entire world—to help us become conscious of the tremendous, historic significance of this moment, nothing less than �a new history.� And to help us have faith and trust in the leadership that the Bolivian people—and above all the indigenous peoples of Bolivia—have raised up at this moment in the person of compa�ero Evo Morales and the team around him.
You will find many nice-sounding diplomatic statements of congratulations from Cuba to dignitaries of various countries over the past decades, but you will not find many like this one. Fidel�s statement upon arriving in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez�s first inauguration did not even refer to Ch�vez personally, but said that he wanted to share this moment with the Bolivarian people of Venezuela, a moment, he said, that could mark a turning point like July 26, 1953 marked in Cuba, that is, marking the beginning of a revolutionary struggle.
There were undoubtedly political and diplomatic considerations involved in Fidel�s deliberate understatedness at that moment, as there are today in relation to the outspoken character of this statement. What needs to be kept in mind, I think, is not just that Cuba felt it could speak so freely today, but also that such seasoned revolutionaries as the Cuban leaders felt it necessary and useful to throw the full weight of their own prestige behind Evo Morales and his comrades, and not just the cause he represents, but his leadership personally.
That message is not for the people of Bolivia—not the working people, the indigenous people, the oppressed people, who backed Evo massively—but for us. My own surmise is that the Cuban leadership understands that a very sharp struggle may soon break out around Bolivia, and it is necessary to begin rallying the revolutionary and progressive forces into battle formation.
[This is my translation of the original message in Granma since I have been unable to find the full text in English elsewhere.]
—Joaqu�n Bustelo
Dear compa�ero Evo Morales:
We have received with profound joy the historic victory of the people of Bolivia in Sunday�s election, and your proclamation, by a crushing and indisputable majority, as President of Bolivia.
For months we have followed with interest the news coming from your country and were aware of the tremendous obstacles that were being erected to frustrate the will of your people. We knew of the pressures of the Empire, of the maneuvers and intrigues of those who would continue to strip Bolivia of its immense natural resources and who are the ones responsible for the tremendous misery, oppression and discrimination imposed for centuries on a noble and rebellious people that has never stopped fighting for freedom and justice.
Millions of Quechuas, Aymaras, Guaranies, Chiquitanos and other native peoples of your country had been always excluded from a political system that was the legacy and continuation of colonial servitude. Many of them were arbitrarily denied the right to vote on December 18, and in that way they snatched hundreds of thousands of votes from you.
But on that day, despite everything, the people won. The magnitude of their victory was so great and eloquent that all were forced to recognize it, even those who for years have slandered you, have distorted the aspirations and sacrifices of the social movements you have known how to lead with wisdom and dignity, and until the eve of the elections were determined to hide the tremendous support for your candidacy.
With your victory, a new history is born, the history of the emancipation of the peoples whom colonialism and racism wanted to crush and wipe out. Finally, after half a millennium of genocide, they come to power with you. It is the hour of the true discovery of America, of indigenous America, of Black America, of mestizo America, of the America of Bol�var and Mart�, that today is everywhere proclaiming its definitive and unrenounceable independence.
You and your people have before you new and great challenges. It is necessary that you be accompanied, from right now, by the full solidarity of the entire world.
We send you the solidarity of the Government and People of Cuba. In greeting you and celebrating with you this victory that we feel as our own, we call on all peoples to reject imperialist threats and to unfold the most energetic and firm backing of the government you will lead with the determination and dignity that have characterized your life as a selfless fighter.
Thank you, Evo, thanks to the Bolivian people for having demonstrated with the clarity of the sun that another, better world is possible.
Receive the embrace of a Cuba that is always revolutionary and in solidarity.
[Signed]
Ricardo Alarc�n, National Assembly of People�s Power of Cuba
Fidel Castro Ruz, Council of State of the Republic of Cuba
—Granma (Havana), December 28, 2005
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<p class="title">
Castro Internet Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h2>
<span class="context"> Abstract of: </span>
</h2>
<h1>
Establishing Revolutionary Vigilance in Cuba
</h1>
<h4>
On the Formation of Committees for the Defense of the Revolution
</h4>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Spoken:</span> September 29, 1960, Havana
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html">Castro Speech Database</a>
<br>
<span class="info">Markup:</span> Brian Baggins
<br>
<span class="info">Online Version:</span> Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="fst">
Cubans,
</p>
<p>
.... We observed honor and hospitality and generous conduct and decency among
the humble Negroes of Harlem. (Applause and Singing)
</p>
<p>
<span class="term">[A bomb explodes in the crowd — Ed.]</span>
</p>
<p>
That little bomb; everybody knows who paid for it; it is one of
imperialism's. Tomorrow you will read — note this well — that the bomb went
off just as they were talking about imperialism. (Crowd cheers again for
several minutes. Music played to quiet the crowd — Ed.)
</p>
<p>
How naive they are. When
they fired 500 to 1000-pound bombs marked made in USA they couldn't do a
thing; not even when they fired napalm bombs, and their planes couldn't do
anything. They had to surrender. They couldn't take the Sierra Maestra. how
are they going to advance now behind the little explosives. <!--(Crowd calls
out "Paredon, Paredon, Paredon, — to the wall — Ed.)-->
</p>
<p>
How are they going to impress the people with little bombs, if the people
here are preparing to resist not just little bombs. The people are
prepared to resist anything that falls, even atomic bombs.
</p>
<p>
For every little bomb of the imperialists, we build 500 houses. For every
little bomb they make in a year, we construct three cooperative houses.
For every little bomb, we nationalize a Yankee estate. For every little
bomb of the imperialists, we refine hundreds of thousands of barrels of
oil. For every little bomb we will build a plant to give employment in our
country. For every little bomb the imperialists pay for, we convert a
garrison into a school. For every little bomb the imperialists pay for, we
arm at least 1,000 militiamen. (Applause) Comrade (Pani?) had a good idea;
he says we should dedicate a new labor circle, a regiment to this little
bomb. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
We are going to establish a system of collective vigilance and we shall see
how the lackeys of imperialism are going to get around this. We shall see
if there is a single district not well represented here. We shall set up a
collective revolutionary vigilance system and everyone on the block will be
known, what his activities are. If they think they are going to have to
deal with the people they will get a tremendous scare. We are going to set
up a revolutionary vigilance committee on every block so that the people
can see what is going on.
</p>
<p>
The imperialists and their lackeys will not be able to make a move. They
are dealing with the people, and they do not know yet the tremendous
revolutionary power of the people. Therefore, new steps must be taken in
the organization of the militia. Malitia battalions will be created
throughout Cuba. Each man for each weapon will be selected. A structure
will be given to the entire mass of militiamen so that as soon as possible
our combat units will be perfectly formed and trained. One thing is clear:
We do not have to tighten up before the time comes. There is nothing to
worry about. One must not worry. Let them do the worrying. We will
conserve our serenity and our march; it is a firm but sure march.
</p>
<p>
One of our impressions on this trip, this important trip, is the amount of
hatred felt toward our revolutionary people by imperialism, the degree of
hysteria which imperialism has reached, the degree of demoralization that
imperialism has reached. And you have seen it. They are still thinking
about the Cuban charges because they really do not have anything with which
to reply.
</p>
<p>
It is, however, important that all of us be very conscious of the struggle
undertaken by revolution. It is necessary for all of us to know perfectly
well that it will be a long, long and hard struggle. (Applause) It is
important for us to realize that our revolution has faced up to the most
powerful empire in he world. Of all the colonialist and imperialists
countries, Yankee imperialism is the most powerful in diplomatic influence
and military resources. It is also an imperialism that is not like the
English, which is more mature, more experienced, it is proud imperialism,
barbarous,and many of its leaders are barbarous men who have nothing to
envy of the first cavemen. Many of their leaders are men with fangs. It
is the most aggressive, most warlike, and most stupid imperialism.
</p>
<p>
We are on the frontline, a small country with few economic resources giving
battle on the frontline for our sovereignty, destiny, and right. It is
necessary to be very conscious that our country is facing the most fierce
empire of the contemporary times. It must also be realized that
imperialism will not stop trying to destroy the revolution, hinder the
revolution. It must always be borne in mind that imperialism hates us with
the hatred of the masters for the rebellious slaves. And we will defend
ourselves with the fierceness of slaves who have rebelled.
</p>
<p>
There is nothing more fierce than the hatred of the master for the
rebellious slave. And to that must be added the fact that they see their
interests endangered — not only here but throughout the world. We brought
our case to the United Nations, but our case was the case of all
underdeveloped countries — the case of Latin America, Africa, the Middle
East, the case of the Asian countries. Our case was one that could be
applied to the rest of the world. The rest of the underdeveloped world is
also being exploited by the monopolies. We told them that the property of
the monopolies must be nationalized without any indemnification. We told
the other countries: Do what we have done; do not continue to be victims of
aggression.
</p>
<p>
Therefore, there is a universal interest in our struggle. A battle is
taking place for the liberation of Cuba and all the other exploited nations
of the world. It is necessary for us to know what we are doing, the
interests we are affecting. Those interests will not raise the white flag
easily. It will be a long fight. Not only do we have to defend ourselves
from aggression, but we must also advance, we must progress on all fronts.
The clearest impression we brought back is that we must redouble our
efforts (Applause), that we must be aware of the great role we are playing
in the world. Actions are worth more than words. We have spoken of some of
the things we have done. The important thing is action, deeds. We must make
our country forward. To do this we must devote ourselves to our task. We
all have a task.
</p>
<p>
We went there to speak on behalf of all of you. We went because we have the
support of all of you. We could do this because we took with us the moral
support of all the men and women of our country. We took with us the moral
strength of a people. That is why we could go there to denounce
imperialism, and that is why our country is admired — not for the words, but
for the deeds; not for what a Cuban may say there, but for what all the
Cuban may do and can do.
</p>
<p>
The world is forming an idea of us, a better idea than it ever had — if the
world ever had an idea of our existence. And what is behind that opinion
is a people, what makes that opinion is the efforts of a people. We urge
each and every one of you to form an image of the great responsibility each
of us has. We are not individuals, we are part of a people, we are part of
humanity, at a decisive hour for the human race. We are an idea, we are a
hope, we are an example, and when the premier of the revolutionary
government appeared at the United Nations (Applause) it was not a man
appearing, it was a nation. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Every one of you appeared there; every one of you was there. We went there
with the force we receive from being able to count on the support and
effort of every one of you. We felt very obligated to the people; we feel
we have a great responsibility to the people. And so, every one of you must
feel — and keep this in mind — the work we are doing, we are all doing it
together.
</p>
<p>
<span class="term">(Editor's Note: Another bomb explodes in the crowd. There are shouts
from the crowd. After the dust settles, the national anthem is played and sung)</span>
</p>
<p>
Let them explode; that way they are training the people to become
accustomed to all kinds of noise. (Shouts of "unity" heard) these things just confirm what we have been saying: The
revolution has a long battle ahead, a hard battle. Therefore, we reiterate
that every one of us should taken to heart his role and his responsibility.
Easy things are not those that give the best fruits in the long run. The
worthwhile things in the life of nations and people are the difficult
things, for these are the ones worth doing. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Knowing the might of the empire we face does not discourage us. On the
contrary, it encourages us. The one that should be demoralized is the
empire, because of the battle being waged against it by a small nation.
Let nobody think that the years ahead will be years of tranquility and
east. The greatest interest in the years ahead is the work and the battle
we have ahead of us. That is the extraordinary interest which the future
holds for us. That is what liberates us from the sorrows and shame of the
past. That is what makes our people happy, above all, knowing that on Jan.
1 the revolution did not end, but was just beginning. That is what makes
our people happy, thinking that if the first stage was the fruit of effort
by part of the nation, the future, tomorrow's victory, will be the fruit of
the effort of the entire nation.
</p>
<p>
And tomorrow no one need feel shame, because the future is full of riches,
there is a place for each of us. In the future there is a place for every
one of us, and we ourselves feel that we are beginning, that we have
barely begun, that we are on the first pages of the great book of the
history which the Cuban people are wiring. (Applause) And this victory we
will win with two things: Intelligence and courage. (Applause) Neither
intelligence nor courage must get ahead; both must march together on the
road to victory. (Applause) Up to today, those have been the main
essentials of the successes we have achieved.
</p>
<p>
It would be a mistake to underestimate the imperialistic enemy. He made
the mistake of underestimating us. (Applause) In our people there has been
a greater revolutionary force than they ever imagined. In our people there
has been a greater moral force than they ever imagined.
</p>
<p>
We must not commit the mistake of underestimating the imperialist enemy.
We will correctly estimate his power and do what is necessary to be
victories in this battle for the liberation of our country. We want to
know every moment what they are planning, what they are doing and how to
combat it, as we are doing right now in denouncing their hysteria and how
to combat it, as we are doing right now in denouncing the hysteria they are
creating about the base, and the reports about our attacking the base. We
asked the president of the assembly to take note of our concern over the
campaigns they have been undertaking in order to create a pretext for
aggression against our country.
</p>
<p>
We don't want them to invade our country. We don't want to give them a
pretext for invading it. What they would like is that we allow ourselves
to do as they wish. We should do what we want to do and what is beneficial
for us, not them. Marti said: Never do what the enemy wants you to do.
That is why we have always explained, as we did at the United Nations, that
we would demand our sovereignty by legal means, through international law,
not through international law, not through arms. Our arms are not to serve
the enemy but to combat it. Our weapons should always be ready for what
the enemy does not want — for our defense, for resistance.
</p>
<p class="quote">
"It is necessary that the people who have listened to our words in the
United Nations know that one of the most delicate problems, one in which we
must act with the most intelligence, one in which we must overcome the
imperialist enemy, is that of the Caimanera Base because that base is the
one they will try to use as a pretext. Our position must be clear to the
people and to the entire world: That when we go to reclaim it we will
reclaim it in accordance with international law as one of our deniable
rights which they will have to acknowledge."
</p>
<p>
Against the imperialist enemy the best thing to do is to bar its path when
it seeks a pretext and tell it: Seek another way, for that one will not be
open to you.
</p>
<p>
The imperialist enemy is capable of the unimaginable. The enemy uses any
weapons — from the murder of leaders to military invasions, always seeking
the murdering hand, the gangster, the pretext. And we should not only be
valiant but also intelligent. We must win the battle, we must be victorious
against the imperialist enemy. We must win all battles, as we have won in
the United Nations.
</p>
<p>
The imperialist enemy is being defeated at the United Nations. The
supporters of armaments, the enemies of peace, the militarists are
receiving rough blows at the United Nations. The imperialist enemy must be
demoralized before a war. The enemies of peace, those who play with the
fate of all humanity, must be defeated on all fronts.
</p>
<p>
We must go on orienting ourselves, preparing ourselves mentally, and
educating ourselves on these questions. Our interest in international
problems must not flag. Previously we did not care about international
problems because we were only interested in what the Yankee delegate used
to say. We were always silent and obedient. That is why no one worried.
They would say: This is a Yankee problem, let the Americans worry about
it. What were we? That is why no one worried. But now that we also have
opinions in the world, now that we are also in the world, it is good for us
to know what is happening in Latin America, Asia, Africa; what peoples live
there, what are their problems, what are the positions of their
governments.
</p>
<p>
That is why it is good for many books to be published and for us to
continue to study. All of us have the duty to learn, to know, and to
teach. The opportunity must be taken to learn of the problems, to know of
the economic and social problems of Cuba and outside of Cuba. Otherwise we
will never be more than bachelors of revolution; we will never become
doctors of revolution. Books should be read at social circles, in military
camps, in unions — everywhere. We must learn what we must know. All can be
sure that what the Cuban cannot learn cannot be learned by anyone.
</p>
<p>
We consider that from our impressions on our trip, these are the most
important conclusions: The role of Cuba, the idea of the struggle ahead,
the need for intelligence and valor, the need to work harder. We must be
able to tell what we have done. We are building a great land and we are
proud of it. We alone are responsible for what we have done and what we
are doing. We will not do it for the sake of vanity. We will do it
because it is good for our people. We will try to do the most perfect work
possible, so that it will be our best defense, so that we can say: Come to
see our cooperatives, houses, schools, and universities. (Applause)
</p>
<p>
Let them come. We will always have something to show. We will show the
militia, the youth brigades, the great reforestation projects, the school
cities we are building, we will show what our country is. Those who have
come to see what we are doing are astonished that a small nation, facing so
many obstacles, can do so much. And this will always be a reason of pride
for us. It is what sustains the spirits of our copatriots in New York. It
is the pride that sustains our delegates anywhere in the world. It is the
basic idea we wanted to expose here tonight.
</p>
<p>
And thanks for the two little bombs, for they have been valuable in regard
to what we have been explaining. They demonstrated the mettle of our
people, the courage of our people (Applause) for not a single woman budged
from her place (Applause) not a single man budged (Applause) nor will
anyone budge from his post in face of any danger, any attack. We are
soldiers of the country. We do not belong to ourselves: We belong to our
country. (Applause) It does not matter if any one of us falls; what
matters is that this flag shall remain high, the idea shall go forward, our
country shall live. (Applause)
</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../index.htm">Castro Internet Archive</a>
</p>
</body> |
Castro Internet Archive
Abstract of:
Establishing Revolutionary Vigilance in Cuba
On the Formation of Committees for the Defense of the Revolution
Spoken: September 29, 1960, Havana
Source: Castro Speech Database
Markup: Brian Baggins
Online Version: Castro Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
Cubans,
.... We observed honor and hospitality and generous conduct and decency among
the humble Negroes of Harlem. (Applause and Singing)
[A bomb explodes in the crowd — Ed.]
That little bomb; everybody knows who paid for it; it is one of
imperialism's. Tomorrow you will read — note this well — that the bomb went
off just as they were talking about imperialism. (Crowd cheers again for
several minutes. Music played to quiet the crowd — Ed.)
How naive they are. When
they fired 500 to 1000-pound bombs marked made in USA they couldn't do a
thing; not even when they fired napalm bombs, and their planes couldn't do
anything. They had to surrender. They couldn't take the Sierra Maestra. how
are they going to advance now behind the little explosives.
How are they going to impress the people with little bombs, if the people
here are preparing to resist not just little bombs. The people are
prepared to resist anything that falls, even atomic bombs.
For every little bomb of the imperialists, we build 500 houses. For every
little bomb they make in a year, we construct three cooperative houses.
For every little bomb, we nationalize a Yankee estate. For every little
bomb of the imperialists, we refine hundreds of thousands of barrels of
oil. For every little bomb we will build a plant to give employment in our
country. For every little bomb the imperialists pay for, we convert a
garrison into a school. For every little bomb the imperialists pay for, we
arm at least 1,000 militiamen. (Applause) Comrade (Pani?) had a good idea;
he says we should dedicate a new labor circle, a regiment to this little
bomb. (Applause)
We are going to establish a system of collective vigilance and we shall see
how the lackeys of imperialism are going to get around this. We shall see
if there is a single district not well represented here. We shall set up a
collective revolutionary vigilance system and everyone on the block will be
known, what his activities are. If they think they are going to have to
deal with the people they will get a tremendous scare. We are going to set
up a revolutionary vigilance committee on every block so that the people
can see what is going on.
The imperialists and their lackeys will not be able to make a move. They
are dealing with the people, and they do not know yet the tremendous
revolutionary power of the people. Therefore, new steps must be taken in
the organization of the militia. Malitia battalions will be created
throughout Cuba. Each man for each weapon will be selected. A structure
will be given to the entire mass of militiamen so that as soon as possible
our combat units will be perfectly formed and trained. One thing is clear:
We do not have to tighten up before the time comes. There is nothing to
worry about. One must not worry. Let them do the worrying. We will
conserve our serenity and our march; it is a firm but sure march.
One of our impressions on this trip, this important trip, is the amount of
hatred felt toward our revolutionary people by imperialism, the degree of
hysteria which imperialism has reached, the degree of demoralization that
imperialism has reached. And you have seen it. They are still thinking
about the Cuban charges because they really do not have anything with which
to reply.
It is, however, important that all of us be very conscious of the struggle
undertaken by revolution. It is necessary for all of us to know perfectly
well that it will be a long, long and hard struggle. (Applause) It is
important for us to realize that our revolution has faced up to the most
powerful empire in he world. Of all the colonialist and imperialists
countries, Yankee imperialism is the most powerful in diplomatic influence
and military resources. It is also an imperialism that is not like the
English, which is more mature, more experienced, it is proud imperialism,
barbarous,and many of its leaders are barbarous men who have nothing to
envy of the first cavemen. Many of their leaders are men with fangs. It
is the most aggressive, most warlike, and most stupid imperialism.
We are on the frontline, a small country with few economic resources giving
battle on the frontline for our sovereignty, destiny, and right. It is
necessary to be very conscious that our country is facing the most fierce
empire of the contemporary times. It must also be realized that
imperialism will not stop trying to destroy the revolution, hinder the
revolution. It must always be borne in mind that imperialism hates us with
the hatred of the masters for the rebellious slaves. And we will defend
ourselves with the fierceness of slaves who have rebelled.
There is nothing more fierce than the hatred of the master for the
rebellious slave. And to that must be added the fact that they see their
interests endangered — not only here but throughout the world. We brought
our case to the United Nations, but our case was the case of all
underdeveloped countries — the case of Latin America, Africa, the Middle
East, the case of the Asian countries. Our case was one that could be
applied to the rest of the world. The rest of the underdeveloped world is
also being exploited by the monopolies. We told them that the property of
the monopolies must be nationalized without any indemnification. We told
the other countries: Do what we have done; do not continue to be victims of
aggression.
Therefore, there is a universal interest in our struggle. A battle is
taking place for the liberation of Cuba and all the other exploited nations
of the world. It is necessary for us to know what we are doing, the
interests we are affecting. Those interests will not raise the white flag
easily. It will be a long fight. Not only do we have to defend ourselves
from aggression, but we must also advance, we must progress on all fronts.
The clearest impression we brought back is that we must redouble our
efforts (Applause), that we must be aware of the great role we are playing
in the world. Actions are worth more than words. We have spoken of some of
the things we have done. The important thing is action, deeds. We must make
our country forward. To do this we must devote ourselves to our task. We
all have a task.
We went there to speak on behalf of all of you. We went because we have the
support of all of you. We could do this because we took with us the moral
support of all the men and women of our country. We took with us the moral
strength of a people. That is why we could go there to denounce
imperialism, and that is why our country is admired — not for the words, but
for the deeds; not for what a Cuban may say there, but for what all the
Cuban may do and can do.
The world is forming an idea of us, a better idea than it ever had — if the
world ever had an idea of our existence. And what is behind that opinion
is a people, what makes that opinion is the efforts of a people. We urge
each and every one of you to form an image of the great responsibility each
of us has. We are not individuals, we are part of a people, we are part of
humanity, at a decisive hour for the human race. We are an idea, we are a
hope, we are an example, and when the premier of the revolutionary
government appeared at the United Nations (Applause) it was not a man
appearing, it was a nation. (Applause)
Every one of you appeared there; every one of you was there. We went there
with the force we receive from being able to count on the support and
effort of every one of you. We felt very obligated to the people; we feel
we have a great responsibility to the people. And so, every one of you must
feel — and keep this in mind — the work we are doing, we are all doing it
together.
(Editor's Note: Another bomb explodes in the crowd. There are shouts
from the crowd. After the dust settles, the national anthem is played and sung)
Let them explode; that way they are training the people to become
accustomed to all kinds of noise. (Shouts of "unity" heard) these things just confirm what we have been saying: The
revolution has a long battle ahead, a hard battle. Therefore, we reiterate
that every one of us should taken to heart his role and his responsibility.
Easy things are not those that give the best fruits in the long run. The
worthwhile things in the life of nations and people are the difficult
things, for these are the ones worth doing. (Applause)
Knowing the might of the empire we face does not discourage us. On the
contrary, it encourages us. The one that should be demoralized is the
empire, because of the battle being waged against it by a small nation.
Let nobody think that the years ahead will be years of tranquility and
east. The greatest interest in the years ahead is the work and the battle
we have ahead of us. That is the extraordinary interest which the future
holds for us. That is what liberates us from the sorrows and shame of the
past. That is what makes our people happy, above all, knowing that on Jan.
1 the revolution did not end, but was just beginning. That is what makes
our people happy, thinking that if the first stage was the fruit of effort
by part of the nation, the future, tomorrow's victory, will be the fruit of
the effort of the entire nation.
And tomorrow no one need feel shame, because the future is full of riches,
there is a place for each of us. In the future there is a place for every
one of us, and we ourselves feel that we are beginning, that we have
barely begun, that we are on the first pages of the great book of the
history which the Cuban people are wiring. (Applause) And this victory we
will win with two things: Intelligence and courage. (Applause) Neither
intelligence nor courage must get ahead; both must march together on the
road to victory. (Applause) Up to today, those have been the main
essentials of the successes we have achieved.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the imperialistic enemy. He made
the mistake of underestimating us. (Applause) In our people there has been
a greater revolutionary force than they ever imagined. In our people there
has been a greater moral force than they ever imagined.
We must not commit the mistake of underestimating the imperialist enemy.
We will correctly estimate his power and do what is necessary to be
victories in this battle for the liberation of our country. We want to
know every moment what they are planning, what they are doing and how to
combat it, as we are doing right now in denouncing their hysteria and how
to combat it, as we are doing right now in denouncing the hysteria they are
creating about the base, and the reports about our attacking the base. We
asked the president of the assembly to take note of our concern over the
campaigns they have been undertaking in order to create a pretext for
aggression against our country.
We don't want them to invade our country. We don't want to give them a
pretext for invading it. What they would like is that we allow ourselves
to do as they wish. We should do what we want to do and what is beneficial
for us, not them. Marti said: Never do what the enemy wants you to do.
That is why we have always explained, as we did at the United Nations, that
we would demand our sovereignty by legal means, through international law,
not through international law, not through arms. Our arms are not to serve
the enemy but to combat it. Our weapons should always be ready for what
the enemy does not want — for our defense, for resistance.
"It is necessary that the people who have listened to our words in the
United Nations know that one of the most delicate problems, one in which we
must act with the most intelligence, one in which we must overcome the
imperialist enemy, is that of the Caimanera Base because that base is the
one they will try to use as a pretext. Our position must be clear to the
people and to the entire world: That when we go to reclaim it we will
reclaim it in accordance with international law as one of our deniable
rights which they will have to acknowledge."
Against the imperialist enemy the best thing to do is to bar its path when
it seeks a pretext and tell it: Seek another way, for that one will not be
open to you.
The imperialist enemy is capable of the unimaginable. The enemy uses any
weapons — from the murder of leaders to military invasions, always seeking
the murdering hand, the gangster, the pretext. And we should not only be
valiant but also intelligent. We must win the battle, we must be victorious
against the imperialist enemy. We must win all battles, as we have won in
the United Nations.
The imperialist enemy is being defeated at the United Nations. The
supporters of armaments, the enemies of peace, the militarists are
receiving rough blows at the United Nations. The imperialist enemy must be
demoralized before a war. The enemies of peace, those who play with the
fate of all humanity, must be defeated on all fronts.
We must go on orienting ourselves, preparing ourselves mentally, and
educating ourselves on these questions. Our interest in international
problems must not flag. Previously we did not care about international
problems because we were only interested in what the Yankee delegate used
to say. We were always silent and obedient. That is why no one worried.
They would say: This is a Yankee problem, let the Americans worry about
it. What were we? That is why no one worried. But now that we also have
opinions in the world, now that we are also in the world, it is good for us
to know what is happening in Latin America, Asia, Africa; what peoples live
there, what are their problems, what are the positions of their
governments.
That is why it is good for many books to be published and for us to
continue to study. All of us have the duty to learn, to know, and to
teach. The opportunity must be taken to learn of the problems, to know of
the economic and social problems of Cuba and outside of Cuba. Otherwise we
will never be more than bachelors of revolution; we will never become
doctors of revolution. Books should be read at social circles, in military
camps, in unions — everywhere. We must learn what we must know. All can be
sure that what the Cuban cannot learn cannot be learned by anyone.
We consider that from our impressions on our trip, these are the most
important conclusions: The role of Cuba, the idea of the struggle ahead,
the need for intelligence and valor, the need to work harder. We must be
able to tell what we have done. We are building a great land and we are
proud of it. We alone are responsible for what we have done and what we
are doing. We will not do it for the sake of vanity. We will do it
because it is good for our people. We will try to do the most perfect work
possible, so that it will be our best defense, so that we can say: Come to
see our cooperatives, houses, schools, and universities. (Applause)
Let them come. We will always have something to show. We will show the
militia, the youth brigades, the great reforestation projects, the school
cities we are building, we will show what our country is. Those who have
come to see what we are doing are astonished that a small nation, facing so
many obstacles, can do so much. And this will always be a reason of pride
for us. It is what sustains the spirits of our copatriots in New York. It
is the pride that sustains our delegates anywhere in the world. It is the
basic idea we wanted to expose here tonight.
And thanks for the two little bombs, for they have been valuable in regard
to what we have been explaining. They demonstrated the mettle of our
people, the courage of our people (Applause) for not a single woman budged
from her place (Applause) not a single man budged (Applause) nor will
anyone budge from his post in face of any danger, any attack. We are
soldiers of the country. We do not belong to ourselves: We belong to our
country. (Applause) It does not matter if any one of us falls; what
matters is that this flag shall remain high, the idea shall go forward, our
country shall live. (Applause)
Castro Internet Archive
|
./articles/Bienstock-Gregory/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.bienstock.1939.stalin-alliances | <body>
<p class="title">Gregory Bienstock 1939</p>
<h3>Stalin’s <em>Renversement Des Alliances</em></h3>
<hr class="end"><p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>The Nineteenth Century and After</em>, October 1939. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.</p><hr class="end">
<p>The <em>renversement des alliances </em>brought about by the Russo-German Pact of 23 August 1939 signifies without any doubt a new adjustment of forces in Europe and in world policy. The astonishment aroused by the pact between Hitler and Stalin can only be compared with that felt by Europe in 1756 when France broke away from her traditional anti-Habsburg policy and made an alliance with Austria. Is it not possible, on the other hand, to identify in the history of Russo-German relations a certain tradition of approach?</p>
<p>Friendship with the Habsburgs was already an integral part of Russian foreign policy before the time of Peter the Great. Peter, who clearly discerned the Swedish, Polish and Turkish problems as the three most important in Russian foreign policy, laid at the same time great value on good relations with both German Great Powers – Austria and Prussia. He also actually succeeded in establishing very friendly relations between Russia and these two powers.</p>
<p>It is very questionable if Peter, a crass empiricist, had any particular system of foreign policy. Ideas were subsequently ascribed to him of which he could hardly have been aware. For instance, AP Bestuzhev-Riumin, foreign minister of the Empress Elisabeth (1741-1761), formulated the foreign political system of Peter the Great as follows: ‘One must never leave one’s allies in the lurch. These are, however, the maritime powers of England and Holland, the King of Poland and the Queen of Hungary. This is the system of Peter the Great.’</p>
<p>In reality neither Peter nor his successors had a ‘system’ of any kind. Peter I, who inaugurated the acceptance by Russia of European civilisation, was fundamentally as sceptical towards Europe as the Czars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The declaration: ‘The European powers need me but I can do quite well without them’, is authentic. Petersburg was like ancient Moscow in regarding herself as an outsider in Europe. The policy of Imperial Russia towards the European state system vacillated in accordance with the momentary necessities of the Petersburg government. Empress Elisabeth was drawn into the Seven Years’ War and fought on the side of Austria against Prussia. Her nephew and successor, Peter III, a worshipper of Frederick the Great, strove for an alliance with Prussia, while Katharine II reverted to neutrality but very soon afterwards concluded a formal alliance with Frederick II (1764). At the end of her reign, however, she returned to the traditional friendship with Austria.</p>
<p>In the nineteenth century friendship with the two German powers, especially Prussia, was part of the iron schedule of Russian foreign policy. Both Alexander I and Nicholas I were in close touch with the Court of Berlin. One may say that this was as much a ‘geo-political’ as an ‘ideological’ friendship. Ideologically since the French Revolution a certain tension had begun and had become more and more noticeable during the first half of the nineteenth century, between conservative Russia and the two liberal Western powers of England and France. On the other side, Russia was, historically speaking, linked with the German powers by the common wrong done to Poland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. (The three partitions of Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria between 1772 and 1795.)</p>
<p>But already since the beginning of the nineteenth century a further line of Russian foreign policy manifested itself: Russia gradually rose to the position of a World Power, and thus encountered the other two World Powers of the period – England and France. In judging the European constellation at any given time one must always take into consideration the world political situation in which the European situation is imbedded. This has today become a platitude, but also in judging of past history one must always see the European situation in relation to the world situation of the period. There has always been a world policy which has influenced the European situation, but it is only in the last quarter-century that Europe has become aware of her dependence on world policy.</p>
<p>In its relation to world policy, that is to England and France, Russian policy felt its way painfully and with many hesitations to an independent attitude. Radical <em>renversements des alliances </em>occurred repeatedly during the process and seem to be, in general, a tradition of Russian foreign Policy. Paul I (1796-1801) cut loose from the alliance with England against France and formed a union with the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte which had as its object to destroy English power in Europe and the whole world. His successor, Alexander I, went back to the English alliance, only to forsake it a few years later with apparent finality and agree with the French Emperor upon a partition of Europe. This new alliance of the two continental Empires against England was inaugurated in Tilsit in 1807. Alexander at that time received from Napoleon Finland, Bessarabia and a part of Eastern Galicia. Russia kept the two first for more than a century and only lost them after the war of 1914-18. It is significant for the permanency of the geo-political tendency that Russia’s aspirations towards Finland and Bessarabia are again being discussed, and are said to have been the subject of an agreement between the rulers in Moscow and Berlin in case of a new division of Europe.</p>
<p>As we know, however, Alexander I, at last uneasy in his friendship with Napoleon, swung back to England – a third <em>renversement des alliances </em>in fifteen years!</p>
<p>With Nicholas I (1825-1855) the ideological motive of legitimism played a decisive role in his relations to Prussia and Austria. This ideology robbed him of any understanding of the world political situation, so that he finally found himself against an alliance of the two European Great Powers, England and France. Enmity against these two powers was opposed both to the old tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which prescribed friendship with England, and to the new tradition of friendly relations with at least one of these powers at any given time. In the Crimean War, in which Russia was fighting against an English – French – Italian – Turkish coalition, the two German powers attacked her diplomatically in the rear. This was the thanks paid by the Germans to Nicholas for his support of the monarchic principle in Europe. After that time the friendship between Berlin and Vienna on the one hand and Petersburg on the other cooled noticeably.</p>
<p>With Alexander II (1855-1881) a withdrawal of Russia from European politics took place hand in hand with an expansion in Central Asia. The British Empire emerges at this time as Russia’s chief antagonist. From this situation sprang the efforts towards an approach both to France and Germany. The Petersburg Cabinet at this time sought to play the part of arbitrator between France and the new German Empire with the object of covering Russia’s rear in Europe in order to realise her plans in Asia and the Balkans.</p>
<p>The triangle France – Germany – Russia might, in Petersburg’s opinion, serve at a critical moment as an instrument for paralysing Britain. There were, however, many objections at this period to an approach to France. Far more important than the ideological barriers to friendship between a republic and an absolute monarchy, and the popular idea of France as the arch-enemy who had attacked Russia twice in half a century, was the ancient geo-political fact of the friendship between France and Poland. Poland since the seventeenth century had played an important role in the French system of East European ‘counterpoises’, to which Turkey and Sweden also belonged. In the Napoleonic plans for dominating Germany the idea which Siey�s proposed to the Comit� de Salut Public could for a time be discerned: ‘To drown Prussia in the sea of Slavism, dissolving its connection with Germany and setting it against Russia.’ After Jena Napoleon wished to offer Frederick William III the crown of Poland to compensate him for the loss of Westphalia. Nothing came of these plans, but the Polish question remained until well past the middle of the nineteenth century a wedge between Russia and France. It was one of the chief hindrances to the development of an alliance between Napoleon I and Alexander I. The Polish rising against Russia in 1863, which nearly led to French intervention on Poland’s behalf, left behind it a tension between Paris and Petersburg of which Bismarck later felt the advantage. The Russian foreign minister Sazonov reminded the French ambassador Pal�ologue as late as 1916 of the fateful consequences of the French friendship for Poland. ‘Remember what her Polish sympathies cost France of the Second Empire – the destruction of Franco-Russian friendship, our approach to Prussia and then Sadowa and Sedan...’</p>
<p>Alexander III (1881-1894) was successful in definitely improving relations with France and finally in making the Russo-French alliance one of the chief props of the European system. At the same time, however, the Petersburg government remained on the best terms with Berlin and Vienna. The Franco-Russian understanding counterbalanced the Triple Alliance but could equally well be considered as directed against England. For the opposition to England remained into the first decade of the twentieth century the basis of Russian foreign policy.</p>
<p>Russia’s consciousness of herself as a World Power grew ever stronger. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century she became more and more an Asiatic power. Petersburg’s European policy expanded into the world political framework. In this framework Germany appeared firstly less as a rival than as chief antagonist of the actual world political rival of Russia – the British Empire. From this position sprang at first a friendly attitude to Berlin, thus bringing Germany and Russia together on the common ground of opposition to Britain. But still more important is the fact that under Alexander III’s successor, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the centre of gravity of Russia’s foreign policy changed for a time from the Balkans and Central Asia to the Far East. In Berlin this transference of Russian foreign policy was welcomed. At the beginning of the twentieth century William II, ‘Admiral of the Atlantic’, greeted his friend Nicholas II as ‘Admiral of the Pacific’, thereby alluding to a new partition of the world – Asia for the Russians, Europe for the Germans.</p>
<p>Between Paul I and Nicholas II the world situation fundamentally changed. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia had to choose between two World Powers in the world political arena – Britain and France. At the beginning of the twentieth she had once more to choose between two World Powers, two world political systems – the British and the German. It must be said that the Petersburg government wavered considerably before finally deciding with whom to cast in her lot. Britain, we know, put out feelers towards Petersburg at the end of the nineteenth century. The Salisbury government played with the idea of a very comprehensive <em>entente </em>with Russia, which actually aimed at a partition of Asia between the two powers. At the same time in Japan an influential circle of men under Marquis Ito Hirobumi’s leadership were striving for an alliance with Russia. The Petersburg Cabinet, however, probably under the influence of Berlin, let slip the alliances both with Britain and Japan. In the year 1902 Marshal Yamagata, against the will of Marquis Ito, concluded an alliance with England which was directed against Russia. In 1905 Czarist Russia was defeated by Japan.</p>
<p>Meantime the situation in Europe had once more fundamentally changed. France approached Britain. The Franco-British Entente became a decisive factor in European and world policy. We have not forgotten, however, that the already century-old tradition of Russian foreign policy carefully avoided antagonising both Western powers at the same time. The Russo-French alliance, a leading idea in Petersburg policy since the 1890s, could only continue to exist if completed by a Russo-British Entente. After defeat in the Far East the swing of the pendulum from Asia to Europe, repeatedly noticeable in Russian history, took place, while the opposite swing from Europe to Asia was only just completed.</p>
<p>The <em>entente </em>with England (1907) was in the end also a <em>renversement des alliances. </em>It destroyed the <em>entente </em>with Berlin. The dream of William II of holding his friend ‘Niki’ on the bridle, and thus ensuring that Russia in the coming conflict would at least remain neutral, came to nothing. But during the whole World War the strands between Berlin and Petersburg were not all broken. The Berlin Cabinet strove for a separate peace both with Russia and Japan. The possibility of a Eurasiatic ‘axis’ – Berlin – Petersburg – Tokyo – was seen, though indistinctly, on the horizon. Such an axis could only have had an anti-Anglo-Saxon aim. The last agreement between the Czarist Government and the Tokyo Cabinet (3 July 1916) had already a definitely anti-American tendency. One must not forget here that the Wilson administration showed a more than benevolent neutrality towards the <em>entente </em>of which Russia and Japan were members.</p>
<p>The next <em>renversement des alliances </em>was brought about by the Lenin government in November, 1917. Soviet Russia left the <em>entente </em>and concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers. She remained nominally neutral, but the fact of her leaving the war meant a considerable easing of the military and economic position of the Central Powers. Lenin and Trotsky, however, never regarded Germany as an ally, and speculated on a future defeat of the Central Powers. Their defeat and the German Revolution brought Russia and Germany once more together. They both found themselves on the losing side, outside the League of Nations and the Franco-British condominion over Europe.</p>
<p>England and France first tried to destroy the Soviet government by supporting all anti-Bolshevik forces. Later an attempt was made to draw Soviet Russia by one means or another into the economic and possibly also the political system of the Franco-British Entente. The culminating point of these efforts was reached at the Conference of Genoa in 1922, at which a great fuss was made of the Soviet government, especially by Mr Lloyd George. At the same time, however, secret negotiations were on foot between Germany and the Soviet Union, and into the midst of the friendly conversations between England and the Soviets crashed the bomb of the Treaty of Rapallo, concluded by the then German Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, and the Soviet Commissar, Chicherin.</p>
<p>The two treaties of Rapallo (1922) and Berlin (1926) were aimed on Russia’s part at isolating Germany from the Western powers and making her, should occasion require, into an operation base for Russia against Western Europe. On the other side Germany was to play the part of a dam against intervention by the Western powers in Russian affairs. In this the Soviet government carried on the tradition particularly of Nicholas I, who was interested in keeping Germany weak and divided in order to draw this weakened Germany into his anti-European plans.</p>
<p>Germany, on the other hand, even after the signing of the Locarno Treaty, was keenly interested in keeping her relations with Russia on a friendly footing. For the turn which German foreign policy had taken since 1924, after the final settlement of all Communist <em>putsches</em>, and economic stabilisation with the help of America and the Western powers, consisted in making use of Anglo-French help in order to grow strong, politically, economically and militarily. Gustav Stresemann saw the Locarno Pact merely as a step to the re-ascension of Germany to the position of a World Power. In this ascent, however, Germany needed, above all on the military side, the help of Soviet Russia. Relations between Berlin and Moscow in this period presented a most remarkable picture: on the one hand the German government, supported by the <em>Reichswehr</em>, suppressed the Communist rising; on the other hand, this same government found itself in an alliance with the Comintern government of Moscow, while the <em>Reichswehr </em>lived in closest friendship with the Red Army and was energetically supported by the Red General Staff in its secret reconstruction. Actually, German rearmament, in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, was carried out with the help of Moscow. Parallel with it a political flirtation was going on between the most gifted Soviet publicist, Karl Radek, and the most honest journalist of the radical wing of the National Socialist movement, Count Reventlow.</p>
<p>Naturally Berlin not only coquetted with Paris and London, as Stresemann admitted in his famous letters to the Crown Prince, but also with Moscow. On the other hand, the friendship with Germany was also in Moscow linked up with a considerable number of mental reservations. Moscow was acting according to Lenin’s famous prescription: ‘Who whom?’ (Who will prevail?’) As is well known, Lenin issued this watchword when inaugurating his great economic retreat before capitalism. Lenin preached at that time close cooperation with capitalism inside and outside the Soviet state in the hope of winning by means of this cooperation the upper hand and destroying his one-time allies.</p>
<p>This peculiar relationship between Berlin and Moscow outlasted all changes in the internal policy of the two powers. The Liberal – Socialist government of the Weimar period gradually changed to the reactionary ‘emergency’ government of Br�ning, Papen and Schleicher. Finally, Germany drifted into the extreme nationalism and totalitarianism of Adolf Hitler. At the same time the Soviet republic completed her evolution from the liberal NEP (New Economic Policy) policy of Lenin, Rykov and Bukharin to the ‘pan-Socialism’ of Stalin. During this whole period Germany, as well as Russia, remained in the real sense of the word outside the larger European policy. Neither the Berlin nor the Moscow government was regarded by the Franco-British condominion as an equal partner; and it was this that threw them together. But this ‘aloofness’ from European policy, linked on the German side with certain wistful glances westward, made it impossible for the Russo-German friendship to become a decisive factor in Europe. The Berlin-Moscow Entente was a ‘static’ phenomenon, serving chiefly the defensive of the two powers, behind which, certainly, a strategic deployment was taking place. Neither Moscow nor Berlin, least of all Berlin, was resolute enough to turn the German-Russian Entente into an offensive instrument against the West.</p>
<p>It was left for Adolf Hitler to take the decisive step, wrench Germany free from her traditional connection with Russia, and decide for the British Empire against Moscow. In doing this Hitler hoped to strike out a new path in German foreign policy and complete the breakthrough to world power already attempted unsuccessfully by William II. The latter failed because he built on the foundation laid by Bismarck’s principle, elevated to a dogma by his successors, of keeping in with both England and Russia and playing the two powers against each other. Hitler decided for Britain against Russia. It would be an interesting task to analyse this turn in German foreign policy which also represents a <em>renversement des alliances</em>. But it is not with Hitler’s <em>renversements des alliances </em>that we are here concerned, but with Stalin’s. We may, however, say at this point that it was probably not a genuine alliance with Britain that Hitler had in mind, but to use Britain to crush Russia, to make himself into a paramount continental power and then to take up the struggle with Britain for world power.</p>
<p>Stalin’s <em>renversement des alliances </em>of 1934, the approach to France, entry into the League of Nations and the decisive turn against Germany was the consequence of the turn in Hitler’s policy. It is possible that with this whole policy, including the beginning of the discussions with England and France over the military alliance, Stalin merely wished to exert pressure on Germany in order to bring her back to the <em>entente </em>with Russia. Stalin is a thoroughgoing opportunist who has brought the art of suiting himself to the situation of the moment, to the point of open cynicism. He is not the man to be debarred by any ideological considerations whatever.</p>
<p>It is, however, equally possible that Stalin, for whom Germany was growing too strong, actually had in mind a turn to the West and a union with Britain. If so, the plan was broken against the rigidity of the Western European powers, that of Britain in particular. London probably took too seriously the world revolutionary ideology of Moscow. Perhaps also the idea of diverting Germany to the east and ‘drowning her in the Sea of Slavism’ (Siey�s) played a part. In any case, Russia was to play second fiddle in the future coalition, a part naturally objectionable to the awakened self-consciousness of the Russians.</p>
<p>In judging of Moscow’s actions one must not forget that the aim of her whole European policy has been to secure her rear in order to be free for the inevitable settlement with Japan in the Far East. Britain, however, hoping if occasion arose to detach Japan from the Fascist Axis, was not prepared to bind herself to Russia in respect of the Far East. Stalin was probably not clear to the last what attitude Britain would take in case of a Russo-Japanese War. The old antagonism between Russia and the British Empire in Asia might at any time become acute. The only possibility of preventing this old rivalry from coming to life again was a general understanding between Moscow and London about all Asiatic matters, somewhat as proposed by the Salisbury government at the end of the nineteenth century, and as actually took place in 1907. At that time London succeeded, if not in doing away with Russo-Japanese opposition, at least in bringing it into the framework of a general Pax Asiatica under British patronage. The greatest mistake of the Chamberlain government in regard to Russia was probably the idea of a European alliance with Moscow, leaving out of consideration the Asiatic relations of the two powers. London, strangely enough, once more forgot that Russia is an Asiatic power, and definitely more so today than thirty years ago.</p>
<p>We are living in a world of romanesque fantasy in which grotesque detective-fiction heroes are ordering the destinies of mankind in unbelievably cruel fashion. It is therefore not astonishing if one credits Stalin with the devilish idea of provoking a world war in order to plunge Europe and the world into revolution. This idea cannot be entirely excluded, though the whole evolution of Stalin makes it appear somewhat improbable. Stalin has done away with the Communist ideology in Russia, and seems to be inclined to regard the Russian Revolution as ended. His chief aim is to consolidate the power in his own hands and in those of his circle. In this he is relying on a recently arisen class having nothing in common with revolutionary traditions. A world revolution would discredit the whole edifice of the Russian stabilised ‘Total State’ and the whole theory of ‘Socialism in One Land’.</p>
<p>No, Stalin is not guided either in his foreign or internal policy by ideological considerations, but by those of power politics. He was not prepared for Russia to become a member on sufferance of a coalition under British leadership. In his eyes Germany is the weaker and therefore the less dangerous partner.</p>
<p>With his <em>renversement des alliances </em>Stalin has executed one of those brutal turns which are so characteristic of Russian foreign policy. It must not be forgotten that between 1796 and 1811 – that is, in the course of fifteen years – the Petersburg Cabinet three times engaged in a radical <em>renversement des alliances. </em>Other turns in Russian foreign policy, equally brusque, we have also already mentioned in this article. But Stalin could not have brought off this <em>volte-face </em>if Hitler had not met him half-way. Hitler, however, had completely to reorganise his policy when he saw that England and France had at last seen through him. It is interesting, moreover, that, according to the revelations of the <em>Frankfurter Zeitung</em>, the secret negotiations between Moscow and Berlin began in March of this year – that is, before Hitler’s occupation of Prague – and that the final destruction of Czechoslovakia did not in the least disturb the course of these negotiations.</p>
<p>The advantages of the German – Soviet Pact for Hitler are clear: it neutralises Russia and places the economic riches of that country at the disposal of German military administration. Whether the pact will have still other unforeseen advantages for the Nazis we shall probably soon know.</p>
<p>Now, what <em>Realpolitik </em>aims is Stalin pursuing in the Moscow Pact of 23 August 1939? We cannot of course refuse in advance to consider the possibility that by concluding the pact Stalin wished to unchain a European war. As a matter of fact, the Russo-German Entente signified the removal of the last hindrance to such a war. One comes much nearer to probability, however, if one ascribes to Stalin the <em>dolus eventualis</em>: <sup class="enote"><a href="#n1">[1]</a></sup> he signed the Pact with Hitler, not <em>because</em>, but <em>although </em>he foresaw that it would inevitably lead to the unchaining of war. For Stalin it was a case of making once for all impossible the coalition between Germany and the Western powers, so fraught with danger for Russia. This aim he has certainly achieved.</p>
<p>Now Russia is free to follow her own aims while Europe is torn by war. Above all, Stalin now has a free hand in Asia. He can use this freedom either to settle accounts with Japan once and for all, or, on the other hand, to achieve a far-reaching <em>entente </em>with Japan necessarily aimed at Britain. In one way or the other Stalin will consolidate his position in Asia.</p>
<p>It is open to question whether the pact of 23 August 1939 foreshadows a partition of Eastern Europe between Germany and Russia. Such a partition would be thoroughly in line with traditional relations between the two countries. Russia would thereby obtain a common frontier with the Reich. Whether this idea is particularly attractive to Moscow is another question. An over-powerful Germany is hardly in line with Stalin’s interests. It is doubtful whether Moscow will remain a passive onlooker at Hitler’s attempt at smashing the Western powers. It seems that in case of such an emergency a further radical turning in the policy of Moscow is highly probable. One thing is certain: the course of Moscow’s foreign policy is unlikely to be influenced by any sort of ideological considerations. It will in the most completely cynical manner represent the power political interests of Russia as Stalin conceives them. That this policy is anti-European and anti-democratic is perfectly clear. In the end it will prove also to be anti-Russian. The best men of Russia – her thinkers and poets – have always seen the historical mission of the country as intimately linked up with the destiny of Europe. Sixty years ago the very nationalistically minded Dostoyevsky said:</p>
<p class="indentb">Yes, the destiny of the Russian man is without any doubt all-European and all-World. To become a true Russian, fully and completely a Russian, means perhaps nothing less than to be the brother of all mankind... For a true Russian Europe... is as dear as Russia itself...</p>
<p>How far the present policy of the Moscow government has wandered from the ideal of this great Russian seer!</p>
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<h3>Note</h3>
<p class="information"><a name="n1"><span class="info">1.</span></a> <em>Dolus eventualis</em> – where the perpetrator of an act recognises the possibility of a particular consequence occurring, but recklessly disregards whether it ensues or not – MIA.</p>
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Gregory Bienstock 1939
Stalin’s Renversement Des Alliances
Source: The Nineteenth Century and After, October 1939. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
The renversement des alliances brought about by the Russo-German Pact of 23 August 1939 signifies without any doubt a new adjustment of forces in Europe and in world policy. The astonishment aroused by the pact between Hitler and Stalin can only be compared with that felt by Europe in 1756 when France broke away from her traditional anti-Habsburg policy and made an alliance with Austria. Is it not possible, on the other hand, to identify in the history of Russo-German relations a certain tradition of approach?
Friendship with the Habsburgs was already an integral part of Russian foreign policy before the time of Peter the Great. Peter, who clearly discerned the Swedish, Polish and Turkish problems as the three most important in Russian foreign policy, laid at the same time great value on good relations with both German Great Powers – Austria and Prussia. He also actually succeeded in establishing very friendly relations between Russia and these two powers.
It is very questionable if Peter, a crass empiricist, had any particular system of foreign policy. Ideas were subsequently ascribed to him of which he could hardly have been aware. For instance, AP Bestuzhev-Riumin, foreign minister of the Empress Elisabeth (1741-1761), formulated the foreign political system of Peter the Great as follows: ‘One must never leave one’s allies in the lurch. These are, however, the maritime powers of England and Holland, the King of Poland and the Queen of Hungary. This is the system of Peter the Great.’
In reality neither Peter nor his successors had a ‘system’ of any kind. Peter I, who inaugurated the acceptance by Russia of European civilisation, was fundamentally as sceptical towards Europe as the Czars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The declaration: ‘The European powers need me but I can do quite well without them’, is authentic. Petersburg was like ancient Moscow in regarding herself as an outsider in Europe. The policy of Imperial Russia towards the European state system vacillated in accordance with the momentary necessities of the Petersburg government. Empress Elisabeth was drawn into the Seven Years’ War and fought on the side of Austria against Prussia. Her nephew and successor, Peter III, a worshipper of Frederick the Great, strove for an alliance with Prussia, while Katharine II reverted to neutrality but very soon afterwards concluded a formal alliance with Frederick II (1764). At the end of her reign, however, she returned to the traditional friendship with Austria.
In the nineteenth century friendship with the two German powers, especially Prussia, was part of the iron schedule of Russian foreign policy. Both Alexander I and Nicholas I were in close touch with the Court of Berlin. One may say that this was as much a ‘geo-political’ as an ‘ideological’ friendship. Ideologically since the French Revolution a certain tension had begun and had become more and more noticeable during the first half of the nineteenth century, between conservative Russia and the two liberal Western powers of England and France. On the other side, Russia was, historically speaking, linked with the German powers by the common wrong done to Poland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. (The three partitions of Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria between 1772 and 1795.)
But already since the beginning of the nineteenth century a further line of Russian foreign policy manifested itself: Russia gradually rose to the position of a World Power, and thus encountered the other two World Powers of the period – England and France. In judging the European constellation at any given time one must always take into consideration the world political situation in which the European situation is imbedded. This has today become a platitude, but also in judging of past history one must always see the European situation in relation to the world situation of the period. There has always been a world policy which has influenced the European situation, but it is only in the last quarter-century that Europe has become aware of her dependence on world policy.
In its relation to world policy, that is to England and France, Russian policy felt its way painfully and with many hesitations to an independent attitude. Radical renversements des alliances occurred repeatedly during the process and seem to be, in general, a tradition of Russian foreign Policy. Paul I (1796-1801) cut loose from the alliance with England against France and formed a union with the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte which had as its object to destroy English power in Europe and the whole world. His successor, Alexander I, went back to the English alliance, only to forsake it a few years later with apparent finality and agree with the French Emperor upon a partition of Europe. This new alliance of the two continental Empires against England was inaugurated in Tilsit in 1807. Alexander at that time received from Napoleon Finland, Bessarabia and a part of Eastern Galicia. Russia kept the two first for more than a century and only lost them after the war of 1914-18. It is significant for the permanency of the geo-political tendency that Russia’s aspirations towards Finland and Bessarabia are again being discussed, and are said to have been the subject of an agreement between the rulers in Moscow and Berlin in case of a new division of Europe.
As we know, however, Alexander I, at last uneasy in his friendship with Napoleon, swung back to England – a third renversement des alliances in fifteen years!
With Nicholas I (1825-1855) the ideological motive of legitimism played a decisive role in his relations to Prussia and Austria. This ideology robbed him of any understanding of the world political situation, so that he finally found himself against an alliance of the two European Great Powers, England and France. Enmity against these two powers was opposed both to the old tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which prescribed friendship with England, and to the new tradition of friendly relations with at least one of these powers at any given time. In the Crimean War, in which Russia was fighting against an English – French – Italian – Turkish coalition, the two German powers attacked her diplomatically in the rear. This was the thanks paid by the Germans to Nicholas for his support of the monarchic principle in Europe. After that time the friendship between Berlin and Vienna on the one hand and Petersburg on the other cooled noticeably.
With Alexander II (1855-1881) a withdrawal of Russia from European politics took place hand in hand with an expansion in Central Asia. The British Empire emerges at this time as Russia’s chief antagonist. From this situation sprang the efforts towards an approach both to France and Germany. The Petersburg Cabinet at this time sought to play the part of arbitrator between France and the new German Empire with the object of covering Russia’s rear in Europe in order to realise her plans in Asia and the Balkans.
The triangle France – Germany – Russia might, in Petersburg’s opinion, serve at a critical moment as an instrument for paralysing Britain. There were, however, many objections at this period to an approach to France. Far more important than the ideological barriers to friendship between a republic and an absolute monarchy, and the popular idea of France as the arch-enemy who had attacked Russia twice in half a century, was the ancient geo-political fact of the friendship between France and Poland. Poland since the seventeenth century had played an important role in the French system of East European ‘counterpoises’, to which Turkey and Sweden also belonged. In the Napoleonic plans for dominating Germany the idea which Siey�s proposed to the Comit� de Salut Public could for a time be discerned: ‘To drown Prussia in the sea of Slavism, dissolving its connection with Germany and setting it against Russia.’ After Jena Napoleon wished to offer Frederick William III the crown of Poland to compensate him for the loss of Westphalia. Nothing came of these plans, but the Polish question remained until well past the middle of the nineteenth century a wedge between Russia and France. It was one of the chief hindrances to the development of an alliance between Napoleon I and Alexander I. The Polish rising against Russia in 1863, which nearly led to French intervention on Poland’s behalf, left behind it a tension between Paris and Petersburg of which Bismarck later felt the advantage. The Russian foreign minister Sazonov reminded the French ambassador Pal�ologue as late as 1916 of the fateful consequences of the French friendship for Poland. ‘Remember what her Polish sympathies cost France of the Second Empire – the destruction of Franco-Russian friendship, our approach to Prussia and then Sadowa and Sedan...’
Alexander III (1881-1894) was successful in definitely improving relations with France and finally in making the Russo-French alliance one of the chief props of the European system. At the same time, however, the Petersburg government remained on the best terms with Berlin and Vienna. The Franco-Russian understanding counterbalanced the Triple Alliance but could equally well be considered as directed against England. For the opposition to England remained into the first decade of the twentieth century the basis of Russian foreign policy.
Russia’s consciousness of herself as a World Power grew ever stronger. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century she became more and more an Asiatic power. Petersburg’s European policy expanded into the world political framework. In this framework Germany appeared firstly less as a rival than as chief antagonist of the actual world political rival of Russia – the British Empire. From this position sprang at first a friendly attitude to Berlin, thus bringing Germany and Russia together on the common ground of opposition to Britain. But still more important is the fact that under Alexander III’s successor, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the centre of gravity of Russia’s foreign policy changed for a time from the Balkans and Central Asia to the Far East. In Berlin this transference of Russian foreign policy was welcomed. At the beginning of the twentieth century William II, ‘Admiral of the Atlantic’, greeted his friend Nicholas II as ‘Admiral of the Pacific’, thereby alluding to a new partition of the world – Asia for the Russians, Europe for the Germans.
Between Paul I and Nicholas II the world situation fundamentally changed. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia had to choose between two World Powers in the world political arena – Britain and France. At the beginning of the twentieth she had once more to choose between two World Powers, two world political systems – the British and the German. It must be said that the Petersburg government wavered considerably before finally deciding with whom to cast in her lot. Britain, we know, put out feelers towards Petersburg at the end of the nineteenth century. The Salisbury government played with the idea of a very comprehensive entente with Russia, which actually aimed at a partition of Asia between the two powers. At the same time in Japan an influential circle of men under Marquis Ito Hirobumi’s leadership were striving for an alliance with Russia. The Petersburg Cabinet, however, probably under the influence of Berlin, let slip the alliances both with Britain and Japan. In the year 1902 Marshal Yamagata, against the will of Marquis Ito, concluded an alliance with England which was directed against Russia. In 1905 Czarist Russia was defeated by Japan.
Meantime the situation in Europe had once more fundamentally changed. France approached Britain. The Franco-British Entente became a decisive factor in European and world policy. We have not forgotten, however, that the already century-old tradition of Russian foreign policy carefully avoided antagonising both Western powers at the same time. The Russo-French alliance, a leading idea in Petersburg policy since the 1890s, could only continue to exist if completed by a Russo-British Entente. After defeat in the Far East the swing of the pendulum from Asia to Europe, repeatedly noticeable in Russian history, took place, while the opposite swing from Europe to Asia was only just completed.
The entente with England (1907) was in the end also a renversement des alliances. It destroyed the entente with Berlin. The dream of William II of holding his friend ‘Niki’ on the bridle, and thus ensuring that Russia in the coming conflict would at least remain neutral, came to nothing. But during the whole World War the strands between Berlin and Petersburg were not all broken. The Berlin Cabinet strove for a separate peace both with Russia and Japan. The possibility of a Eurasiatic ‘axis’ – Berlin – Petersburg – Tokyo – was seen, though indistinctly, on the horizon. Such an axis could only have had an anti-Anglo-Saxon aim. The last agreement between the Czarist Government and the Tokyo Cabinet (3 July 1916) had already a definitely anti-American tendency. One must not forget here that the Wilson administration showed a more than benevolent neutrality towards the entente of which Russia and Japan were members.
The next renversement des alliances was brought about by the Lenin government in November, 1917. Soviet Russia left the entente and concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers. She remained nominally neutral, but the fact of her leaving the war meant a considerable easing of the military and economic position of the Central Powers. Lenin and Trotsky, however, never regarded Germany as an ally, and speculated on a future defeat of the Central Powers. Their defeat and the German Revolution brought Russia and Germany once more together. They both found themselves on the losing side, outside the League of Nations and the Franco-British condominion over Europe.
England and France first tried to destroy the Soviet government by supporting all anti-Bolshevik forces. Later an attempt was made to draw Soviet Russia by one means or another into the economic and possibly also the political system of the Franco-British Entente. The culminating point of these efforts was reached at the Conference of Genoa in 1922, at which a great fuss was made of the Soviet government, especially by Mr Lloyd George. At the same time, however, secret negotiations were on foot between Germany and the Soviet Union, and into the midst of the friendly conversations between England and the Soviets crashed the bomb of the Treaty of Rapallo, concluded by the then German Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, and the Soviet Commissar, Chicherin.
The two treaties of Rapallo (1922) and Berlin (1926) were aimed on Russia’s part at isolating Germany from the Western powers and making her, should occasion require, into an operation base for Russia against Western Europe. On the other side Germany was to play the part of a dam against intervention by the Western powers in Russian affairs. In this the Soviet government carried on the tradition particularly of Nicholas I, who was interested in keeping Germany weak and divided in order to draw this weakened Germany into his anti-European plans.
Germany, on the other hand, even after the signing of the Locarno Treaty, was keenly interested in keeping her relations with Russia on a friendly footing. For the turn which German foreign policy had taken since 1924, after the final settlement of all Communist putsches, and economic stabilisation with the help of America and the Western powers, consisted in making use of Anglo-French help in order to grow strong, politically, economically and militarily. Gustav Stresemann saw the Locarno Pact merely as a step to the re-ascension of Germany to the position of a World Power. In this ascent, however, Germany needed, above all on the military side, the help of Soviet Russia. Relations between Berlin and Moscow in this period presented a most remarkable picture: on the one hand the German government, supported by the Reichswehr, suppressed the Communist rising; on the other hand, this same government found itself in an alliance with the Comintern government of Moscow, while the Reichswehr lived in closest friendship with the Red Army and was energetically supported by the Red General Staff in its secret reconstruction. Actually, German rearmament, in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, was carried out with the help of Moscow. Parallel with it a political flirtation was going on between the most gifted Soviet publicist, Karl Radek, and the most honest journalist of the radical wing of the National Socialist movement, Count Reventlow.
Naturally Berlin not only coquetted with Paris and London, as Stresemann admitted in his famous letters to the Crown Prince, but also with Moscow. On the other hand, the friendship with Germany was also in Moscow linked up with a considerable number of mental reservations. Moscow was acting according to Lenin’s famous prescription: ‘Who whom?’ (Who will prevail?’) As is well known, Lenin issued this watchword when inaugurating his great economic retreat before capitalism. Lenin preached at that time close cooperation with capitalism inside and outside the Soviet state in the hope of winning by means of this cooperation the upper hand and destroying his one-time allies.
This peculiar relationship between Berlin and Moscow outlasted all changes in the internal policy of the two powers. The Liberal – Socialist government of the Weimar period gradually changed to the reactionary ‘emergency’ government of Br�ning, Papen and Schleicher. Finally, Germany drifted into the extreme nationalism and totalitarianism of Adolf Hitler. At the same time the Soviet republic completed her evolution from the liberal NEP (New Economic Policy) policy of Lenin, Rykov and Bukharin to the ‘pan-Socialism’ of Stalin. During this whole period Germany, as well as Russia, remained in the real sense of the word outside the larger European policy. Neither the Berlin nor the Moscow government was regarded by the Franco-British condominion as an equal partner; and it was this that threw them together. But this ‘aloofness’ from European policy, linked on the German side with certain wistful glances westward, made it impossible for the Russo-German friendship to become a decisive factor in Europe. The Berlin-Moscow Entente was a ‘static’ phenomenon, serving chiefly the defensive of the two powers, behind which, certainly, a strategic deployment was taking place. Neither Moscow nor Berlin, least of all Berlin, was resolute enough to turn the German-Russian Entente into an offensive instrument against the West.
It was left for Adolf Hitler to take the decisive step, wrench Germany free from her traditional connection with Russia, and decide for the British Empire against Moscow. In doing this Hitler hoped to strike out a new path in German foreign policy and complete the breakthrough to world power already attempted unsuccessfully by William II. The latter failed because he built on the foundation laid by Bismarck’s principle, elevated to a dogma by his successors, of keeping in with both England and Russia and playing the two powers against each other. Hitler decided for Britain against Russia. It would be an interesting task to analyse this turn in German foreign policy which also represents a renversement des alliances. But it is not with Hitler’s renversements des alliances that we are here concerned, but with Stalin’s. We may, however, say at this point that it was probably not a genuine alliance with Britain that Hitler had in mind, but to use Britain to crush Russia, to make himself into a paramount continental power and then to take up the struggle with Britain for world power.
Stalin’s renversement des alliances of 1934, the approach to France, entry into the League of Nations and the decisive turn against Germany was the consequence of the turn in Hitler’s policy. It is possible that with this whole policy, including the beginning of the discussions with England and France over the military alliance, Stalin merely wished to exert pressure on Germany in order to bring her back to the entente with Russia. Stalin is a thoroughgoing opportunist who has brought the art of suiting himself to the situation of the moment, to the point of open cynicism. He is not the man to be debarred by any ideological considerations whatever.
It is, however, equally possible that Stalin, for whom Germany was growing too strong, actually had in mind a turn to the West and a union with Britain. If so, the plan was broken against the rigidity of the Western European powers, that of Britain in particular. London probably took too seriously the world revolutionary ideology of Moscow. Perhaps also the idea of diverting Germany to the east and ‘drowning her in the Sea of Slavism’ (Siey�s) played a part. In any case, Russia was to play second fiddle in the future coalition, a part naturally objectionable to the awakened self-consciousness of the Russians.
In judging of Moscow’s actions one must not forget that the aim of her whole European policy has been to secure her rear in order to be free for the inevitable settlement with Japan in the Far East. Britain, however, hoping if occasion arose to detach Japan from the Fascist Axis, was not prepared to bind herself to Russia in respect of the Far East. Stalin was probably not clear to the last what attitude Britain would take in case of a Russo-Japanese War. The old antagonism between Russia and the British Empire in Asia might at any time become acute. The only possibility of preventing this old rivalry from coming to life again was a general understanding between Moscow and London about all Asiatic matters, somewhat as proposed by the Salisbury government at the end of the nineteenth century, and as actually took place in 1907. At that time London succeeded, if not in doing away with Russo-Japanese opposition, at least in bringing it into the framework of a general Pax Asiatica under British patronage. The greatest mistake of the Chamberlain government in regard to Russia was probably the idea of a European alliance with Moscow, leaving out of consideration the Asiatic relations of the two powers. London, strangely enough, once more forgot that Russia is an Asiatic power, and definitely more so today than thirty years ago.
We are living in a world of romanesque fantasy in which grotesque detective-fiction heroes are ordering the destinies of mankind in unbelievably cruel fashion. It is therefore not astonishing if one credits Stalin with the devilish idea of provoking a world war in order to plunge Europe and the world into revolution. This idea cannot be entirely excluded, though the whole evolution of Stalin makes it appear somewhat improbable. Stalin has done away with the Communist ideology in Russia, and seems to be inclined to regard the Russian Revolution as ended. His chief aim is to consolidate the power in his own hands and in those of his circle. In this he is relying on a recently arisen class having nothing in common with revolutionary traditions. A world revolution would discredit the whole edifice of the Russian stabilised ‘Total State’ and the whole theory of ‘Socialism in One Land’.
No, Stalin is not guided either in his foreign or internal policy by ideological considerations, but by those of power politics. He was not prepared for Russia to become a member on sufferance of a coalition under British leadership. In his eyes Germany is the weaker and therefore the less dangerous partner.
With his renversement des alliances Stalin has executed one of those brutal turns which are so characteristic of Russian foreign policy. It must not be forgotten that between 1796 and 1811 – that is, in the course of fifteen years – the Petersburg Cabinet three times engaged in a radical renversement des alliances. Other turns in Russian foreign policy, equally brusque, we have also already mentioned in this article. But Stalin could not have brought off this volte-face if Hitler had not met him half-way. Hitler, however, had completely to reorganise his policy when he saw that England and France had at last seen through him. It is interesting, moreover, that, according to the revelations of the Frankfurter Zeitung, the secret negotiations between Moscow and Berlin began in March of this year – that is, before Hitler’s occupation of Prague – and that the final destruction of Czechoslovakia did not in the least disturb the course of these negotiations.
The advantages of the German – Soviet Pact for Hitler are clear: it neutralises Russia and places the economic riches of that country at the disposal of German military administration. Whether the pact will have still other unforeseen advantages for the Nazis we shall probably soon know.
Now, what Realpolitik aims is Stalin pursuing in the Moscow Pact of 23 August 1939? We cannot of course refuse in advance to consider the possibility that by concluding the pact Stalin wished to unchain a European war. As a matter of fact, the Russo-German Entente signified the removal of the last hindrance to such a war. One comes much nearer to probability, however, if one ascribes to Stalin the dolus eventualis: [1] he signed the Pact with Hitler, not because, but although he foresaw that it would inevitably lead to the unchaining of war. For Stalin it was a case of making once for all impossible the coalition between Germany and the Western powers, so fraught with danger for Russia. This aim he has certainly achieved.
Now Russia is free to follow her own aims while Europe is torn by war. Above all, Stalin now has a free hand in Asia. He can use this freedom either to settle accounts with Japan once and for all, or, on the other hand, to achieve a far-reaching entente with Japan necessarily aimed at Britain. In one way or the other Stalin will consolidate his position in Asia.
It is open to question whether the pact of 23 August 1939 foreshadows a partition of Eastern Europe between Germany and Russia. Such a partition would be thoroughly in line with traditional relations between the two countries. Russia would thereby obtain a common frontier with the Reich. Whether this idea is particularly attractive to Moscow is another question. An over-powerful Germany is hardly in line with Stalin’s interests. It is doubtful whether Moscow will remain a passive onlooker at Hitler’s attempt at smashing the Western powers. It seems that in case of such an emergency a further radical turning in the policy of Moscow is highly probable. One thing is certain: the course of Moscow’s foreign policy is unlikely to be influenced by any sort of ideological considerations. It will in the most completely cynical manner represent the power political interests of Russia as Stalin conceives them. That this policy is anti-European and anti-democratic is perfectly clear. In the end it will prove also to be anti-Russian. The best men of Russia – her thinkers and poets – have always seen the historical mission of the country as intimately linked up with the destiny of Europe. Sixty years ago the very nationalistically minded Dostoyevsky said:
Yes, the destiny of the Russian man is without any doubt all-European and all-World. To become a true Russian, fully and completely a Russian, means perhaps nothing less than to be the brother of all mankind... For a true Russian Europe... is as dear as Russia itself...
How far the present policy of the Moscow government has wandered from the ideal of this great Russian seer!
Note
1. Dolus eventualis – where the perpetrator of an act recognises the possibility of a particular consequence occurring, but recklessly disregards whether it ensues or not – MIA.
Gregory Bienstock Archive
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<h4>Gregory Bienstock</h4>
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<p class="information">Gregory Osipovich Bienstock (1884-1954) was trained as a lawyer. He was a Bolshevik during 1904-07 and then adhered to the Mensheviks, becoming one of the ‘liquidators’ in that faction. During the First World War, he and other Russian socialists, including his wife Judith Grinfeld and fellow Menshevik David Dallin, worked in the Institute for the Study of the Social Consequences of the War in Copenhagen that was run by Alexander Helfand (Parvus). He returned to Russia in 1917, and worked with the future Bolshevik economist Yuri Larin. He left the Soviet republic in 1918, but returned to live in Odessa in 1921-22, and was then arrested and deported from Soviet territory. He was a contributor to the Mensheviks’ paper, the <em>Sotsialistichesky Vestnik</em> under the name G Osipov.</p>
<p class="information">Bienstock settled in Germany, and became active in the German Social Democratic Party in Berlin. Somewhat oddly, whilst he stood on the right wing of the Mensheviks, he adhered to the left wing of the SPD, joined the Zukunft grouping, and at one point sought a personal meeting with Trotsky. He also held a keen interest in mysticism and eastern religion, as can be seen in at least one of the six essays reproduced below. </p>
<p class="information">Bienstock wrote several books and pamphlets, including <em>Deutschland und die Weltwirtschaft</em> (Dietz, Berlin, 1931), <em>Volk und Sozialdemokratie. Die innen- und aussenpolitischen Erfolge der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands</em> (Dietz, Berlin, 1932), <em>Deutschland und Frankreich. Eine Europ�ische Auseinandersetzung</em> (<em>Werk und Wirtschaft</em>, Berlin, 1932), <em>Kampf um die Macht. Zur neuen Politik der Sozialdemocratie </em>(Laubsche, Berlin, 1932), <em>Zwischen den Weltkriegen</em> (<em>Zentralstelle fur das Bildungswesen</em>, Prague, 1934, <em>Europa und die Weltpolitik Die Zonen der Kriegsgefahr </em>(Graphia, Karlsbad, 1936), The Struggle For The Pacific (Allen and Unwin, London, 1937 – available on-line at <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=10186261">http://www.questia.com/</a>), provided a foreword to B Irlen (pen-name of the Menshevik Boris Sapir), Marx gegen Hitler (Vienna, 1933), and contributed, along with fellow Mensheviks Solomon Schwarz and Aaron Yugow, chapters in Arthur Feiler and Jacob Marschak (eds), Management in Russian Industry and Agriculture (Oxford University Press, London, 1944). The essays below appeared in the long-defunct journal <i>The Nineteenth Century and After</i>, which was published in London from 1877 to 1972, taking, somewhat belatedly, the title The Twentieth Century in 1951.</p>
<p class="information">The above biographical details are drawn mainly from Andr� Liebich, <em>From the Other Shore: Russian Social-Democracy After 1921</em> (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997).</p>
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Gregory Bienstock
Gregory Osipovich Bienstock (1884-1954) was trained as a lawyer. He was a Bolshevik during 1904-07 and then adhered to the Mensheviks, becoming one of the ‘liquidators’ in that faction. During the First World War, he and other Russian socialists, including his wife Judith Grinfeld and fellow Menshevik David Dallin, worked in the Institute for the Study of the Social Consequences of the War in Copenhagen that was run by Alexander Helfand (Parvus). He returned to Russia in 1917, and worked with the future Bolshevik economist Yuri Larin. He left the Soviet republic in 1918, but returned to live in Odessa in 1921-22, and was then arrested and deported from Soviet territory. He was a contributor to the Mensheviks’ paper, the Sotsialistichesky Vestnik under the name G Osipov.
Bienstock settled in Germany, and became active in the German Social Democratic Party in Berlin. Somewhat oddly, whilst he stood on the right wing of the Mensheviks, he adhered to the left wing of the SPD, joined the Zukunft grouping, and at one point sought a personal meeting with Trotsky. He also held a keen interest in mysticism and eastern religion, as can be seen in at least one of the six essays reproduced below.
Bienstock wrote several books and pamphlets, including Deutschland und die Weltwirtschaft (Dietz, Berlin, 1931), Volk und Sozialdemokratie. Die innen- und aussenpolitischen Erfolge der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Dietz, Berlin, 1932), Deutschland und Frankreich. Eine Europ�ische Auseinandersetzung (Werk und Wirtschaft, Berlin, 1932), Kampf um die Macht. Zur neuen Politik der Sozialdemocratie (Laubsche, Berlin, 1932), Zwischen den Weltkriegen (Zentralstelle fur das Bildungswesen, Prague, 1934, Europa und die Weltpolitik Die Zonen der Kriegsgefahr (Graphia, Karlsbad, 1936), The Struggle For The Pacific (Allen and Unwin, London, 1937 – available on-line at http://www.questia.com/), provided a foreword to B Irlen (pen-name of the Menshevik Boris Sapir), Marx gegen Hitler (Vienna, 1933), and contributed, along with fellow Mensheviks Solomon Schwarz and Aaron Yugow, chapters in Arthur Feiler and Jacob Marschak (eds), Management in Russian Industry and Agriculture (Oxford University Press, London, 1944). The essays below appeared in the long-defunct journal The Nineteenth Century and After, which was published in London from 1877 to 1972, taking, somewhat belatedly, the title The Twentieth Century in 1951.
The above biographical details are drawn mainly from Andr� Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social-Democracy After 1921 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997).
Gregory Bienstock Archive
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<p class="title">Gregory Bienstock 1939</p>
<h3>Four Hundred Years of Russian Foreign Policy</h3>
<hr class="end"><p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>The Nineteenth Century and After</em>, June 1939. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.</p><hr class="end">
<p>The foreign and internal policies of a country tend to act and react upon each other. The internal development of a state must exercise a great influence upon its relations with other states, and it is equally certain that profound changes in foreign policy must also lead to changes in the internal structure of the state. It is on that account impossible to describe the foreign policy of a state without also considering developments in its internal policy. It would, however, not be right to represent foreign policy alone in its relation to internal policy. It would seem that the development of the outward relationships of any state is defined by certain relatively immutable factors, partly of a geographical, partly of an historical character. It is important to follow this line of development, without, of course, exaggerating its ‘immutability’. Every hypothesis is useful provided that in employing it one keeps its conditional nature in mind. It would, for example, be dangerous to trace the foreign policy of Bolshevism exclusively to the ‘immutable’ tendencies in the development of Russia’s foreign relations. But it is impossible, on the other hand, to understand this policy if it is regarded merely as issuing from the internal policy of revolutionary Russia. In what follows an attempt is made to set forth what is relatively immutable in Russian policy. This obliges us to go back several centuries.</p>
<p>The fifteenth century was one of decisive importance in Russian policy. Up to then Muscovy had felt herself to be merely the most westerly province of the great Mongol Empire extending from the Pacific to the upper course of the Volga. But in the fifteenth century began the decay of the Golden Horde, to whose sphere of power the Muscovite Principality belonged. Hand in hand with this decay went the emancipation of Muscovy from Mongol suzerainty. The struggle against the Mongols promoted the development of a national consciousness which until then had hardly existed. For the first time the question arises of the meaning and content of Muscovite foreign policy – a question which in the fifteenth, and still more clearly in the sixteenth, century was answered in a purely Maximalist fashion. Moscow is represented in the official publicity of the time as the ‘Third Rome’, destined, after the fall of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, to embody the true Christendom. Here already the Messianic motive is superimposed on the ancient Muscovite policy.</p>
<p>Besides this Messianic motive, however, furnishing its material background, is the elementary geographical fact that Muscovy was situated in an intermediate region where Asiatic and European influences met and mingled. Muscovy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was, on the one hand, the extreme Western spur of the Eurasiatic Mongol Empire and, on the other, the most easterly territory of the European Germanic-Slav cultural sphere. In Central and Eastern Europe, Muscovy was sometimes regarded as an outpost of Mongol Asia. At the same time, however, the Pope and the Kaiser attempted to enlist the Russian princedoms, and especially Muscovy, into the Crusade against Islam.</p>
<p>Russian princes, such as Alexander Nevsky, employed Tartar-Mongolian auxiliaries in their struggles against Sweden and the Knights of the Teutonic Order advancing from the West. On the other hand, the idea of using European forces in taking action against Asia had already emerged in the time of Ivan III (1462-1505).</p>
<p>By the sixteenth century the foreign political programme of the Muscovite Czars appears to have been relatively settled. The aim of their policy was to unite all Russian races under Muscovite sovereignty and to abolish the remains of Mongol domination in the Russian plain – an expansion policy, therefore, in two directions – to the West and to the East.</p>
<p>Apart from this, however, a further objective may be observed – a breaking through to the sea, both to the Baltic and the Black Sea. This motive of rounding off and consolidating their continental dominions is firmly anchored in Russian foreign policy. The first Russian state was founded in the ninth century in the Valley of the Dnieper by the Scandinavian Varangians. The dominant idea in this foundation was the conquest of the great river way from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Moscow, too, owes her rise to her geographical position at the junction of the upper courses of the Volga, Oka and Dnieper. The statecraft of Muscovy has been directed since its beginnings to the domination of the connections between three seas – the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Caspian.</p>
<p>The foreign policy of Ivan IV (1530-1584) swung between the three directions – east, west and south. He succeeded in bringing the whole course of the Volga as far as the Caspian Sea under his sway by the conquest of the two Tartar czardoms of Kazan and Astrakhan. Public opinion pressed Ivan to continue the policy of abolishing Tartar domination by conquering the Khanate of Crimea, which would give him a firmer foothold on the Black Sea. War against the Crimea, however, would have involved him of necessity in a conflict with the strongest power in the Eastern Europe of that time, namely, Turkey. For this Muscovy’s strength was insufficient. In order to go to war with the Turks adaptation to European military technique would first be necessary, and this involved direct contact with Europe. Ivan turned to the West, against the Knights of the German Order and later against their protector, Poland.</p>
<p>Ivan’s war against Poland ended in catastrophe. Russia was thrown back from the Baltic for more than a century, the people’s strength was exhausted, a powerful revolution was approaching.</p>
<p>While Ivan IV was harnessing all the forces of the nation in order to advance against the West, an opposing tendency gradually became apparent. The Russian masses, ground down by merciless military recruiting and the pressure of taxation, fled, mainly in a southerly and easterly direction. The colonisation of the ‘New Russia’, the fertile steppes between the Oka and the Black Sea, began. At the same time the first Russian adventurers and conquerors crossed the Ural Mountains and started the subjugation of Siberia under Russian domination.</p>
<p>A hundred years after the death of Ivan IV, on the accession of Peter the Great (1682), Russia was facing approximately the same problems of foreign policy as had been left behind by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the union under the sway of Moscow of the West Russian peoples living within the Polish-Lithuanian state; attainment of an outlet to the sea; domination of the connections between the Baltic, the Caspian and the Black Sea. The eighteenth century was an epoch of uninterrupted Russian advance to the West and South. Under Peter, Russia annexed a considerable portion of the Baltic Coast and became the leading power in Northern Europe and on the Baltic.</p>
<p>The wall which up to now had separated Russia from Europe collapsed, the ‘window on to Europe’ was flung wide open. Russia became a sea-power, and thereby a European Great Power. The breath of ocean transformed Muscovy into Russia, into a European Great Power with European interests and aspirations. But this Europeanised Russia, which now took active part in European combinations and intrigues, remained at the same time an Asiatic state. The same Peter the Great, who employed the whole strength of the nation in order to fling open the ‘window on to Europe’, never for a moment forgot that Russia had another face – turned towards Asia. In the last years of the great Northern War (1700-21) Peter displayed great interest in exploring the waterways to India. He also, after a victorious war with Persia, annexed the whole of the western shores of the Caspian Sea. Thereby Russia gained not only a base for the development of her trade with South-west Asia, but also a point of departure for all her later conquests in Middle Asia, which took place in the nineteenth century and led to the creation of a huge sub-tropical colonial empire.</p>
<p>At the end of the eighteenth century, under Catharine II (1762-1796), Russia in Europe had attained her ‘natural frontiers’. The whole of the valley of the Dnieper was conquered, the West Russian territories were torn from the Polish state, and, in alliance with Prussia and Austria, this state itself was destroyed. The last remnants of Mongol dominion in South Russia were dissolved and the northern shore of the Black Sea was incorporated in the Russian Empire. It was here, at the Black Sea, that Russia and Turkey met. Here was the starting point for those power struggles for the domination of the Black Sea and the lower course of the Donau <sup class="enote"><a href="#n1">[1]</a></sup> between Russia and Turkey which were fought out in the first half of the nineteenth century.</p>
<p>Relations with Europe, in the eighteenth as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were decided by the inherent aims of Russian foreign policy. The Habsburg monarchy appeared as the natural ally of Russia. In approaching the Habsburgs the axiom was obviously applied: alliance with the further to fight the nearer. Ivan IV wished to have the Romish-German Emperor as ally in his struggles against Poland. In the seventeenth century the Romanoffs and the Habsburgs had a common enemy in Turkey. Friendship with the Habsburgs thus became a traditional part of Russian foreign policy.</p>
<p>Beside the Austrian friendship all other relationships sank into the background. Relations with England were friendly as a whole, and on Russia’s side a political entente had actually been sought since the sixteenth century. This, however, had been skilfully avoided by England. Relations with France, on the other hand, were from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century inimical. France was, on principle, supporting Russia’s three most dangerous neighbours – Sweden, Poland and Turkey.</p>
<p>The primitive nature of Russian policy towards Europe can be explained by the fact that at this time Russia had no actual European interests, and this accounts for her desire to remain at a distance from the complicated game of European politics. About the middle of the eighteenth century Russia had a great surprise, namely, the alliance of her traditional Habsburg friend with her traditional enemy, France (<em>renversement des alliances</em>). Russia, against her will, became a member of the Austro-French coalition against Prussia, and thus also against England, which was a direct contradiction of Russian policy since Ivan IV.</p>
<p>Russian foreign policy, however, had already begun to take a more conscious attitude towards the European game. Her relationship to the Habsburgs ceased to be the axis of her policy. During the Seven Years’ War of the Coalition she learned to know the complicated mainsprings of European politics. Above all she acquired a greater understanding of English and French policy, and the struggle of these two powers for supremacy in Europe. Catharine II dissolved the Russian partnership in the anti-Prussian coalition from the feeling that this partnership had no importance from the point of view of Russian interests. On the other hand, approach was made to the two German powers at the point of immediate significance for Russia, namely, the dissolution of the Polish heritage.</p>
<p>Since the great French Revolution and the beginning of the last French offensive, both against the Continent and against England, Russia’s relations with the two Western European Powers, France and England, were of decisive significance in the formation of Russian foreign policy. The St Petersburg Cabinet swung between an alliance with England against France’s attempts at hegemony, and a continental hegemony in alliance with France with the object of completely eliminating English influence from the Continent and undermining the British Colonial Empire. Catharine II and Paul I dreamed of conquering India. Paul I, at the end of his brief reign (1796-1801), had made a formal alliance with Napoleon and set apart an army of Cossacks for a campaign against India. In the archives of the Russian Foreign Office is said to be a letter from Napoleon of 2 February 1808, in which he proposed to the Czar Alexander I to send a Franco-Russian army to conquer India.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire, together with Great Britain, represented the rock against which Napoleon’s dream of continental domination was shattered. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century Europe, or rather the continental mass of Europe, had proved itself too weak to prevail against the two European wing powers, Russia and England, with their extra-European reserves.</p>
<p>With the destruction of the Napoleonic domination and the annexation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Russia had attained her maximum expansion in the West. By the annexation of Finland the Gulf of Finland became a Russian inland sea, and the Gulf of Bothnia also entered the Russian sphere of influence. It is true that the remainder of the West Russian territory, Galicia, remained ‘unredeemed’.</p>
<p>The western territorial boundaries of the Russian Empire, however, in no way represented the boundaries of her political influence. In the first half of the nineteenth century Russia was without question by far the strongest military power in Europe. The disunion of Germany, the struggle between Prussia and Austria for ascendancy in Central Europe, the weakening of France – all these factors augmented the influence of the Czars in European politics. Nicholas I became in fact the arbitrator of Central Europe. Russia’s territorial aspirations, however, were no longer concerned with Europe.</p>
<p>The movement of Russia towards the South led inevitably to conflict with Turkey, who dominated the connections between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Russian policy aimed at settling the ‘Straits Question’ in a manner favourable to Russia. This method of solution, however, would have meant the appearance of Russia in the eastern Mediterranean. England set herself against the extension of Russia’s sphere of power in this direction, and succeeded in forming a coalition against it with France, Sardinia and Turkey. After her defeat in the Crimean War, Russia, it is true, remained a Great Power, but suffered a weakening of her influence in the Black Sea and the Balkans, and was forced to renounce her aspirations to dominate the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.</p>
<p>After the Treaty of Paris (1856) the Eurasiatic line of Russian foreign policy faced south. West of this line, on the Russian frontier between the Baltic and the Black Sea, her policy was defensive and aimed at maintaining the European <em>status quo</em>. On the Eurasian line, however, between the lower course of the Donau and the valley of the Amur, between the Carpathians and the great Hingan Range (Manchuria), the foreign political energies of the Czarist Empire were concentrated. To understand Russian foreign policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it is necessary to know the internal connection between the separate sectors of this politico-strategic line. In general it may be said that the basic tendency of Russian expansion points to the South – to the ‘warm waters’, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The sum of foreign political energy was divided in different periods irregularly over different sectors of this line. There were periods in which it was concentrated more on one segment, in other periods on another, but the continuity between the different sectors remained unbroken.</p>
<p>The great Eurasian line of Russian foreign policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be divided fundamentally into three principal sectors: the Near Eastern, including the whole of the Black Sea and the Dardanelles; the Central Asiatic sector, and, finally, the Far Eastern sphere. The western sector of Russian foreign policy was at the same time the most ancient, and developed directly out of the struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the domination of the Dnieper Valley and the northern shores of the Black Sea.</p>
<p>Here, however, in the western sector of her foreign policy, Russia met with the opposition of Europe under the leadership of England (Crimean War, 1853-56). Twenty-two years after the Peace of Paris in 1856 which closed the Crimean War, during the Berlin Congress of 1878, this European front against the Russian advance to the Bosphorus appeared once more. On this occasion, too, it was British foreign policy which organised the resistance to Russia’s advance to the ‘warm seas’. The Russian offensive on the western sector of the Eurasiatic line was quiescent for more than a quarter of a century after the, for Russia, somewhat ineffectual war against Turkey of 1877-78. It was resumed after the unfortunate outcome of the Russo-Japanese War.</p>
<p>Russian advances on the Central Asiatic sector also had a long previous history. The conquest of West Turkestan, the key position of all Central Asia, from both sides at once, namely, from the West, from the Caspian Sea, and from the North via the valley of the Irtysch, was already under consideration by Peter the Great. The fulfilment of this plan, however, was delayed for a century and a half. The conquest of West Turkestan and, in general, of Middle Asia to the north of Hindukusch and Pamir, fell into the sixties and seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, after the Caucasus and the Transcaspian had, following long-drawn-out struggles with the mountain peoples, been occupied by Russian troops. The conquest of Middle Asia was completed by the annexation of the Mery Oasis in present-day Southern Turkmenistan, on the watershed between the Caspian Sea and the Arabian Gulf. The building of the Transcaspian railway in 1885-88 secured the strategic and economic connections between the Empire and her newly-conquered provinces.</p>
<p>Russian expansion on the Central Asiatic Continent between 1860 and 1885 can be regarded as a direct consequence of England’s opposition, during the Crimean War and the Berlin Congress, to her advance on the western sector of the Eurasiatic line. The foreign political energy of Russia, barred at the Black Sea, sought other outlets.</p>
<p>Here, however, on the Central Asiatic sector, Russian expansion once more came against British opposition. England answered Russia’s penetration of Middle Asia by announcing her protectorate of Afghanistan and Baluchistan. In 1885 a border scrap on the Afghan frontier nearly ended in war between England and Russia. Ten years later a frontier agreement was made between Russia and Afghanistan which to some extent put a stop to Russian expansion in Middle Asia. From now on Afghanistan acted as a buffer state between India and the Czarist Empire and in this way the zone of conflict between the two World Empires was narrowed. In the meantime the centre of gravity of the Russian foreign policy was already shifting towards the Pacific.</p>
<p>At the end of the seventeenth century the Russian government was obliged to renounce in favour of China all further penetration into the valley of the Amur (Treaty of Nertschinsk, 1689). It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the Russian advance in the Amur Valley began once more, and led in 1860 to the annexation of the whole left bank of the Amur and the coastal territory (Treaty of Peking; Founding of Vladivostok, 1860). Thus Russia achieved a firm foothold on the Sea of Japan.</p>
<p>After the Treaty of Peking, however, a break of at least three decades occurred in Russian expansion in the Far East. Russian foreign political activity was concentrated in this period partly in the western sector (Russo-Turkish War, 1877-88), and partly on the Central Asiatic sector (conquest of Turkestan). Not until the end of the nineteenth century did Russia once more press her advance along the shores of the Pacific. At this time it seemed to the statesmen in St Petersburg that the prospects for expansion in a far easterly direction were more favourable than in the other two sectors of Russian foreign policy. For towards the end of the 1890s Russian activity on the western sector was obstructed by the so-called Eastern Triple Alliance between Great Britain, Austria-Hungary and Italy, a new edition of the coalition created by English diplomacy during the Crimean War and the Berlin Congress, while in Central Asia Russian expansion also came against firm opposition.</p>
<p>In 1897 Russia concluded with the Habsburg monarchy an agreement on the delimitation of mutual spheres of influence in the Balkans, which amounted to a renunciation by Russia of an active policy in the Donau Valley and the Black Sea territory. The Czarist Empire sought to cover her rear in Europe while pursuing the path of ruthless expansion in the Far East. In this period also the Franco-Russian Alliance (since 1891) signified, above all for Russia, protection against German aggression, and thus the security of her western frontiers. That this alliance was also aimed at Britain became evident at the end of the Sino-Japanese War and during the Boer War. <sup class="enote"><a href="#n2">[2]</a></sup></p>
<hr class="end">
<br><h3>Note</h3>
<p class="information"><a name="n1"><span class="info">1.</span></a> That is, the River Danube – MIA.</p>
<p class="information"><a name="n2"><span class="info">2.</span></a> The article was followed by the words: ‘To be concluded.’ However, the next article by Bienstock in <em>The Nineteenth Century and After</em> was ‘Stalin’s <em>Renversement Des Alliances</em>’ in the issue for October 1939. One might hazard that Bienstock reworked his account of the development of Russian foreign policy to give some historical background to the topical drama of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact – MIA.</p>
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<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../index.htm"> Gregory Bienstock Archive</a>
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Gregory Bienstock 1939
Four Hundred Years of Russian Foreign Policy
Source: The Nineteenth Century and After, June 1939. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
The foreign and internal policies of a country tend to act and react upon each other. The internal development of a state must exercise a great influence upon its relations with other states, and it is equally certain that profound changes in foreign policy must also lead to changes in the internal structure of the state. It is on that account impossible to describe the foreign policy of a state without also considering developments in its internal policy. It would, however, not be right to represent foreign policy alone in its relation to internal policy. It would seem that the development of the outward relationships of any state is defined by certain relatively immutable factors, partly of a geographical, partly of an historical character. It is important to follow this line of development, without, of course, exaggerating its ‘immutability’. Every hypothesis is useful provided that in employing it one keeps its conditional nature in mind. It would, for example, be dangerous to trace the foreign policy of Bolshevism exclusively to the ‘immutable’ tendencies in the development of Russia’s foreign relations. But it is impossible, on the other hand, to understand this policy if it is regarded merely as issuing from the internal policy of revolutionary Russia. In what follows an attempt is made to set forth what is relatively immutable in Russian policy. This obliges us to go back several centuries.
The fifteenth century was one of decisive importance in Russian policy. Up to then Muscovy had felt herself to be merely the most westerly province of the great Mongol Empire extending from the Pacific to the upper course of the Volga. But in the fifteenth century began the decay of the Golden Horde, to whose sphere of power the Muscovite Principality belonged. Hand in hand with this decay went the emancipation of Muscovy from Mongol suzerainty. The struggle against the Mongols promoted the development of a national consciousness which until then had hardly existed. For the first time the question arises of the meaning and content of Muscovite foreign policy – a question which in the fifteenth, and still more clearly in the sixteenth, century was answered in a purely Maximalist fashion. Moscow is represented in the official publicity of the time as the ‘Third Rome’, destined, after the fall of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, to embody the true Christendom. Here already the Messianic motive is superimposed on the ancient Muscovite policy.
Besides this Messianic motive, however, furnishing its material background, is the elementary geographical fact that Muscovy was situated in an intermediate region where Asiatic and European influences met and mingled. Muscovy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was, on the one hand, the extreme Western spur of the Eurasiatic Mongol Empire and, on the other, the most easterly territory of the European Germanic-Slav cultural sphere. In Central and Eastern Europe, Muscovy was sometimes regarded as an outpost of Mongol Asia. At the same time, however, the Pope and the Kaiser attempted to enlist the Russian princedoms, and especially Muscovy, into the Crusade against Islam.
Russian princes, such as Alexander Nevsky, employed Tartar-Mongolian auxiliaries in their struggles against Sweden and the Knights of the Teutonic Order advancing from the West. On the other hand, the idea of using European forces in taking action against Asia had already emerged in the time of Ivan III (1462-1505).
By the sixteenth century the foreign political programme of the Muscovite Czars appears to have been relatively settled. The aim of their policy was to unite all Russian races under Muscovite sovereignty and to abolish the remains of Mongol domination in the Russian plain – an expansion policy, therefore, in two directions – to the West and to the East.
Apart from this, however, a further objective may be observed – a breaking through to the sea, both to the Baltic and the Black Sea. This motive of rounding off and consolidating their continental dominions is firmly anchored in Russian foreign policy. The first Russian state was founded in the ninth century in the Valley of the Dnieper by the Scandinavian Varangians. The dominant idea in this foundation was the conquest of the great river way from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Moscow, too, owes her rise to her geographical position at the junction of the upper courses of the Volga, Oka and Dnieper. The statecraft of Muscovy has been directed since its beginnings to the domination of the connections between three seas – the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Caspian.
The foreign policy of Ivan IV (1530-1584) swung between the three directions – east, west and south. He succeeded in bringing the whole course of the Volga as far as the Caspian Sea under his sway by the conquest of the two Tartar czardoms of Kazan and Astrakhan. Public opinion pressed Ivan to continue the policy of abolishing Tartar domination by conquering the Khanate of Crimea, which would give him a firmer foothold on the Black Sea. War against the Crimea, however, would have involved him of necessity in a conflict with the strongest power in the Eastern Europe of that time, namely, Turkey. For this Muscovy’s strength was insufficient. In order to go to war with the Turks adaptation to European military technique would first be necessary, and this involved direct contact with Europe. Ivan turned to the West, against the Knights of the German Order and later against their protector, Poland.
Ivan’s war against Poland ended in catastrophe. Russia was thrown back from the Baltic for more than a century, the people’s strength was exhausted, a powerful revolution was approaching.
While Ivan IV was harnessing all the forces of the nation in order to advance against the West, an opposing tendency gradually became apparent. The Russian masses, ground down by merciless military recruiting and the pressure of taxation, fled, mainly in a southerly and easterly direction. The colonisation of the ‘New Russia’, the fertile steppes between the Oka and the Black Sea, began. At the same time the first Russian adventurers and conquerors crossed the Ural Mountains and started the subjugation of Siberia under Russian domination.
A hundred years after the death of Ivan IV, on the accession of Peter the Great (1682), Russia was facing approximately the same problems of foreign policy as had been left behind by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the union under the sway of Moscow of the West Russian peoples living within the Polish-Lithuanian state; attainment of an outlet to the sea; domination of the connections between the Baltic, the Caspian and the Black Sea. The eighteenth century was an epoch of uninterrupted Russian advance to the West and South. Under Peter, Russia annexed a considerable portion of the Baltic Coast and became the leading power in Northern Europe and on the Baltic.
The wall which up to now had separated Russia from Europe collapsed, the ‘window on to Europe’ was flung wide open. Russia became a sea-power, and thereby a European Great Power. The breath of ocean transformed Muscovy into Russia, into a European Great Power with European interests and aspirations. But this Europeanised Russia, which now took active part in European combinations and intrigues, remained at the same time an Asiatic state. The same Peter the Great, who employed the whole strength of the nation in order to fling open the ‘window on to Europe’, never for a moment forgot that Russia had another face – turned towards Asia. In the last years of the great Northern War (1700-21) Peter displayed great interest in exploring the waterways to India. He also, after a victorious war with Persia, annexed the whole of the western shores of the Caspian Sea. Thereby Russia gained not only a base for the development of her trade with South-west Asia, but also a point of departure for all her later conquests in Middle Asia, which took place in the nineteenth century and led to the creation of a huge sub-tropical colonial empire.
At the end of the eighteenth century, under Catharine II (1762-1796), Russia in Europe had attained her ‘natural frontiers’. The whole of the valley of the Dnieper was conquered, the West Russian territories were torn from the Polish state, and, in alliance with Prussia and Austria, this state itself was destroyed. The last remnants of Mongol dominion in South Russia were dissolved and the northern shore of the Black Sea was incorporated in the Russian Empire. It was here, at the Black Sea, that Russia and Turkey met. Here was the starting point for those power struggles for the domination of the Black Sea and the lower course of the Donau [1] between Russia and Turkey which were fought out in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Relations with Europe, in the eighteenth as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were decided by the inherent aims of Russian foreign policy. The Habsburg monarchy appeared as the natural ally of Russia. In approaching the Habsburgs the axiom was obviously applied: alliance with the further to fight the nearer. Ivan IV wished to have the Romish-German Emperor as ally in his struggles against Poland. In the seventeenth century the Romanoffs and the Habsburgs had a common enemy in Turkey. Friendship with the Habsburgs thus became a traditional part of Russian foreign policy.
Beside the Austrian friendship all other relationships sank into the background. Relations with England were friendly as a whole, and on Russia’s side a political entente had actually been sought since the sixteenth century. This, however, had been skilfully avoided by England. Relations with France, on the other hand, were from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century inimical. France was, on principle, supporting Russia’s three most dangerous neighbours – Sweden, Poland and Turkey.
The primitive nature of Russian policy towards Europe can be explained by the fact that at this time Russia had no actual European interests, and this accounts for her desire to remain at a distance from the complicated game of European politics. About the middle of the eighteenth century Russia had a great surprise, namely, the alliance of her traditional Habsburg friend with her traditional enemy, France (renversement des alliances). Russia, against her will, became a member of the Austro-French coalition against Prussia, and thus also against England, which was a direct contradiction of Russian policy since Ivan IV.
Russian foreign policy, however, had already begun to take a more conscious attitude towards the European game. Her relationship to the Habsburgs ceased to be the axis of her policy. During the Seven Years’ War of the Coalition she learned to know the complicated mainsprings of European politics. Above all she acquired a greater understanding of English and French policy, and the struggle of these two powers for supremacy in Europe. Catharine II dissolved the Russian partnership in the anti-Prussian coalition from the feeling that this partnership had no importance from the point of view of Russian interests. On the other hand, approach was made to the two German powers at the point of immediate significance for Russia, namely, the dissolution of the Polish heritage.
Since the great French Revolution and the beginning of the last French offensive, both against the Continent and against England, Russia’s relations with the two Western European Powers, France and England, were of decisive significance in the formation of Russian foreign policy. The St Petersburg Cabinet swung between an alliance with England against France’s attempts at hegemony, and a continental hegemony in alliance with France with the object of completely eliminating English influence from the Continent and undermining the British Colonial Empire. Catharine II and Paul I dreamed of conquering India. Paul I, at the end of his brief reign (1796-1801), had made a formal alliance with Napoleon and set apart an army of Cossacks for a campaign against India. In the archives of the Russian Foreign Office is said to be a letter from Napoleon of 2 February 1808, in which he proposed to the Czar Alexander I to send a Franco-Russian army to conquer India.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire, together with Great Britain, represented the rock against which Napoleon’s dream of continental domination was shattered. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century Europe, or rather the continental mass of Europe, had proved itself too weak to prevail against the two European wing powers, Russia and England, with their extra-European reserves.
With the destruction of the Napoleonic domination and the annexation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Russia had attained her maximum expansion in the West. By the annexation of Finland the Gulf of Finland became a Russian inland sea, and the Gulf of Bothnia also entered the Russian sphere of influence. It is true that the remainder of the West Russian territory, Galicia, remained ‘unredeemed’.
The western territorial boundaries of the Russian Empire, however, in no way represented the boundaries of her political influence. In the first half of the nineteenth century Russia was without question by far the strongest military power in Europe. The disunion of Germany, the struggle between Prussia and Austria for ascendancy in Central Europe, the weakening of France – all these factors augmented the influence of the Czars in European politics. Nicholas I became in fact the arbitrator of Central Europe. Russia’s territorial aspirations, however, were no longer concerned with Europe.
The movement of Russia towards the South led inevitably to conflict with Turkey, who dominated the connections between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Russian policy aimed at settling the ‘Straits Question’ in a manner favourable to Russia. This method of solution, however, would have meant the appearance of Russia in the eastern Mediterranean. England set herself against the extension of Russia’s sphere of power in this direction, and succeeded in forming a coalition against it with France, Sardinia and Turkey. After her defeat in the Crimean War, Russia, it is true, remained a Great Power, but suffered a weakening of her influence in the Black Sea and the Balkans, and was forced to renounce her aspirations to dominate the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
After the Treaty of Paris (1856) the Eurasiatic line of Russian foreign policy faced south. West of this line, on the Russian frontier between the Baltic and the Black Sea, her policy was defensive and aimed at maintaining the European status quo. On the Eurasian line, however, between the lower course of the Donau and the valley of the Amur, between the Carpathians and the great Hingan Range (Manchuria), the foreign political energies of the Czarist Empire were concentrated. To understand Russian foreign policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it is necessary to know the internal connection between the separate sectors of this politico-strategic line. In general it may be said that the basic tendency of Russian expansion points to the South – to the ‘warm waters’, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The sum of foreign political energy was divided in different periods irregularly over different sectors of this line. There were periods in which it was concentrated more on one segment, in other periods on another, but the continuity between the different sectors remained unbroken.
The great Eurasian line of Russian foreign policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be divided fundamentally into three principal sectors: the Near Eastern, including the whole of the Black Sea and the Dardanelles; the Central Asiatic sector, and, finally, the Far Eastern sphere. The western sector of Russian foreign policy was at the same time the most ancient, and developed directly out of the struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the domination of the Dnieper Valley and the northern shores of the Black Sea.
Here, however, in the western sector of her foreign policy, Russia met with the opposition of Europe under the leadership of England (Crimean War, 1853-56). Twenty-two years after the Peace of Paris in 1856 which closed the Crimean War, during the Berlin Congress of 1878, this European front against the Russian advance to the Bosphorus appeared once more. On this occasion, too, it was British foreign policy which organised the resistance to Russia’s advance to the ‘warm seas’. The Russian offensive on the western sector of the Eurasiatic line was quiescent for more than a quarter of a century after the, for Russia, somewhat ineffectual war against Turkey of 1877-78. It was resumed after the unfortunate outcome of the Russo-Japanese War.
Russian advances on the Central Asiatic sector also had a long previous history. The conquest of West Turkestan, the key position of all Central Asia, from both sides at once, namely, from the West, from the Caspian Sea, and from the North via the valley of the Irtysch, was already under consideration by Peter the Great. The fulfilment of this plan, however, was delayed for a century and a half. The conquest of West Turkestan and, in general, of Middle Asia to the north of Hindukusch and Pamir, fell into the sixties and seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, after the Caucasus and the Transcaspian had, following long-drawn-out struggles with the mountain peoples, been occupied by Russian troops. The conquest of Middle Asia was completed by the annexation of the Mery Oasis in present-day Southern Turkmenistan, on the watershed between the Caspian Sea and the Arabian Gulf. The building of the Transcaspian railway in 1885-88 secured the strategic and economic connections between the Empire and her newly-conquered provinces.
Russian expansion on the Central Asiatic Continent between 1860 and 1885 can be regarded as a direct consequence of England’s opposition, during the Crimean War and the Berlin Congress, to her advance on the western sector of the Eurasiatic line. The foreign political energy of Russia, barred at the Black Sea, sought other outlets.
Here, however, on the Central Asiatic sector, Russian expansion once more came against British opposition. England answered Russia’s penetration of Middle Asia by announcing her protectorate of Afghanistan and Baluchistan. In 1885 a border scrap on the Afghan frontier nearly ended in war between England and Russia. Ten years later a frontier agreement was made between Russia and Afghanistan which to some extent put a stop to Russian expansion in Middle Asia. From now on Afghanistan acted as a buffer state between India and the Czarist Empire and in this way the zone of conflict between the two World Empires was narrowed. In the meantime the centre of gravity of the Russian foreign policy was already shifting towards the Pacific.
At the end of the seventeenth century the Russian government was obliged to renounce in favour of China all further penetration into the valley of the Amur (Treaty of Nertschinsk, 1689). It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the Russian advance in the Amur Valley began once more, and led in 1860 to the annexation of the whole left bank of the Amur and the coastal territory (Treaty of Peking; Founding of Vladivostok, 1860). Thus Russia achieved a firm foothold on the Sea of Japan.
After the Treaty of Peking, however, a break of at least three decades occurred in Russian expansion in the Far East. Russian foreign political activity was concentrated in this period partly in the western sector (Russo-Turkish War, 1877-88), and partly on the Central Asiatic sector (conquest of Turkestan). Not until the end of the nineteenth century did Russia once more press her advance along the shores of the Pacific. At this time it seemed to the statesmen in St Petersburg that the prospects for expansion in a far easterly direction were more favourable than in the other two sectors of Russian foreign policy. For towards the end of the 1890s Russian activity on the western sector was obstructed by the so-called Eastern Triple Alliance between Great Britain, Austria-Hungary and Italy, a new edition of the coalition created by English diplomacy during the Crimean War and the Berlin Congress, while in Central Asia Russian expansion also came against firm opposition.
In 1897 Russia concluded with the Habsburg monarchy an agreement on the delimitation of mutual spheres of influence in the Balkans, which amounted to a renunciation by Russia of an active policy in the Donau Valley and the Black Sea territory. The Czarist Empire sought to cover her rear in Europe while pursuing the path of ruthless expansion in the Far East. In this period also the Franco-Russian Alliance (since 1891) signified, above all for Russia, protection against German aggression, and thus the security of her western frontiers. That this alliance was also aimed at Britain became evident at the end of the Sino-Japanese War and during the Boer War. [2]
Note
1. That is, the River Danube – MIA.
2. The article was followed by the words: ‘To be concluded.’ However, the next article by Bienstock in The Nineteenth Century and After was ‘Stalin’s Renversement Des Alliances’ in the issue for October 1939. One might hazard that Bienstock reworked his account of the development of Russian foreign policy to give some historical background to the topical drama of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact – MIA.
Gregory Bienstock Archive
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<p class="title">Gregory Bienstock 1939</p>
<h3>Russia and Japan in the Pacific</h3>
<hr class="end"><p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>The Nineteenth Century and After</em>, April 1939. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.</p><hr class="end">
<p>In these days when all that is most changeful, evanescent and self-destructive in history thrusts itself more and more upon the mind, it may perhaps be of value to remember that the fabric of this world is woven not alone by chance but also by necessity. The noise of the European conflict is today so deafening, the vibration of the telegraph wires so shrill, that it is certainly none too easy to catch beneath all the confusion of sounds the rhythm of world history. Half a century ago this was much easier. At that time two Anglo-Saxon statesmen had very clearly realised the significance of Asiatic policy in world events. ‘He who understands China’, said John Hay in 1890, ‘holds in his hand the key to international politics in the next five hundred years.’ And about the same time George N Curzon, then a young member of the Lower House, pointed out that:</p>
<p class="indentb">... the future of Great Britain... will be decided not in Europe, not even upon the seas and oceans which are swept by her flag, or in the Greater Britain that has been called into existence by her offspring, but in the continent whence our emigrant stock first came, and to which as conquerors their descendants have returned.</p>
<p>There are obvious things which tend to be overlooked simply because of their obviousness. The relatively peaceful development of the world in the century between the Napoleonic wars and 1914 was based on the naval supremacy of Britain, a fact which was accepted by all as a matter of course. After the World War, world equilibrium, in other words the, to a certain extent, peaceful and continuous development of our planet, rested on the fact of the silently acknowledged condominion of the two Anglo-Saxon world powers over the seas. It is Anglo-Saxon naval supremacy which is now questioned in the Far East.</p>
<p>Relations between Europe and Asia in the course of centuries took the form of thrust and counter-thrust, of mutual interpenetration, of cultural cooperation and of sanguinary conflict. Even in the times of Genghiz Khan and Tamerlane, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century of our era, and up to the time of the last Turkish wars in the seventeenth century, it had been by no means decided whether Asia should dominate Europe or whether the great Motherland should be conquered by its European peninsula. The decisive factor in the issue of this struggle was the fact that by the sixteenth century Europe had achieved the conquest of the seas.</p>
<p>Asiatic conquerors have been essentially bound to the land. As Gibbon, for example, remarks about Tamerlane: </p>
<p class="indentb">Asia was in the hand of Timour: his armies were invincible, his ambition was boundless... He touched the utmost verge of the land; but an insuperable, though narrow, sea rolled between the two continents of Europe and Asia, and the lord of so many thomans, or myriads, of horse was not master of a single galley.</p>
<p>It was, however, not possible to conquer even Asia by means of a frontal land attack. The circumnavigation of the African Continent and the subsequent advance of the Europeans into the sphere of the Indian Ocean, and later of the Pacific, represent a large-scale flanking manoeuvre. The colonial empires founded by the Portuguese, Dutch and British are Ocean Empires, created from the sea. The existence of these empires rests today upon one hypothesis – Anglo-Saxon naval supremacy.</p>
<p>In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, the white colonial powers were confronted by an entirely new phenomenon. A thalassocracy of purely Asiatic origin arose in the Pacific, and became at the same time the centre of an opposition colonisation’ ('<em>Gegen-Kolonisation</em>’) of the first rank. A hundred and fifty years after Russia, Japan accepted European civilisation in order to beat Europe at her own game. For the first time for 300 years an Asiatic power once more set out to achieve world conquest.</p>
<p>Japan, like every thalassocracy, sought to influence the neighbouring continent, and here the Island Kingdom came up against two Great Powers – China and Russia. The substance of modern Japan’s foreign policy consists essentially of the adjustment of relations with these two continental opponents. But this foreign policy, although no doubt displaying certain ‘amphibian’ characteristics, has as its goal, in accordance with tradition, the actual domination of the East Asiatic Continent.</p>
<p>To the Occident, which came into close contact with Japan for the first time in the middle of the nineteenth century, everything that took place in the following eighty years, the whole mighty uprising to the position of a world power, appeared as an example of the economic, social, cultural and political transformation brought about by European-American capitalism in the backward Orient. In this connection, however, it remains inexplicable that while Japan’s reaction to Occidental capitalism was the development of power on a vast scale, the other two Asiatic kingdoms, China and Korea, through contact with the same capitalism, have declined and forfeited all or part of their independence. It must be assumed that the Japanese have brought out of their long history into modern times a certain mental attitude which has made possible their unique success.</p>
<p>‘To be widely open on the one hand to outside impressions, and on the other to turn them to good account in the safe shelter of a closed personality’ – it is thus that Friedrich Ratzel characterises one of the historical advantages of the Island State. In the course of their thousand years’ history the Japanese have succeeded in absorbing various foreign ideas and forms of organisation, have tested them and skilfully tried out one against the other. Statesmen of imposing pattern have appeared at decisive turning points of Japanese history, men who have not been afraid to oppose the passive resistance of the masses, and, despising the old, deep-rooted prejudices, have led the state into new paths.</p>
<p>The astounding elasticity and adaptability of the Japanese, their capacity for absorbing outside ideas while at the same time preserving their own personality, these traits in the national character, which explain Japan’s remarkable success, are the result of the history of this island people. The Japanese, racially and culturally, are a mixed people. Malays of the South Seas, Altaic Mongols, Caucasian Ainus, colonised Japan in prehistoric times and helped to build up the Japanese national type. Still more heterogeneous are the influences which have shaped Japanese culture. Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism, Catholicism of the Jesuitical type, have formed and influenced Japanese life in the course of the centuries. As, therefore, in the middle of the nineteenth century Japan adopted European civilisation, she had already had considerable experience in assimilating foreign influences.</p>
<p>Tension in two directions – continental and oceanic – has always defined Japan’s attitude to world politics. The influence of the Continent on the Island Kingdom has not been merely cultural: in the thirteenth century the Mongol Chinese dynasty attempted to extend their dominion to the Japanese islands. Decisive factors in the failure of this grandiose campaign were, first, the breakdown in the unaccustomed conditions of the ‘amphibian’ warfare, of the military technique of the Mongol cavalry, planned for land warfare, and, secondly, the unexpected toughness of the Japanese resistance. The invasion of the Island Kingdom by the Continent was thus finished once and for all. Three hundred years later came Japan’s attack on the Continent. In the meantime, however, the former’s political horizon had been greatly enlarged. In 1542 the Islands for the first time saw ‘Southern barbarians’ in their harbours: the Portuguese landed on the Japanese islands.</p>
<p>The sixteenth century is, generally speaking, the epoch in which Japan’s political energy reached its first culminating point. In this period the Japanese first appeared as an oceangoing people, as pirates and traders, and attempted, using the southern island Kiushu as base, to obtain a footing in the whole of the Western Pacific. This was the first foreign political appearance of the Satsuma Clan. The Malakka Peninsula represents the most southerly point of the oceanic advance of the Satsuma people. Here, however, the Japanese sailors already came against the Europeans advancing from the west (the Portuguese Indian traveller, Albuquerque, in 1511).</p>
<p>The elasticity of the Island Kingdom’s foreign policy at this time can be judged from the ocean-encompassing plans of the Japanese statesmen of the period. On the one hand the attempt was made to extend Japanese trade to Mexico in the East Pacific where Spain had already established a sphere of influence. The South Japanese embassy to the Pope (Hazekura Tsunenaga), an attempt to establish friendly relations with the Occident, above all with Spain and Portugal, also falls into this period. On the other hand, Japan at this time was straining every nerve to subdue the Chinese-Korean Continent (Hideyoshi, 1536-1598). This tension between ocean and continent in the sixteenth century contains the kernel of the whole future foreign policy of the Island State even to the present day.</p>
<p>Japan has twice adopted European arms technique in order to turn it against China. In 1542 occurred the first importation of Portuguese firearms into Japan. Fifty years later, in 1592, the Japanese troops in their continental campaigns were already equipped both with European firearms and those manufactured at home from European models. Three hundred years later the same process was repeated. In 1853, after a long interruption, Japan again came into contact with European arms technique, and with this same technique just forty years later succeeded in overwhelming China.</p>
<p>For Hideyoshi the conquest of China and Korea was in line with ancient tradition: already in the seventh century Japan made an unsuccessful effort to establish herself in South Korea. After the repulsion of the Mongol Chinese Emperor Kublai Khan’s attack on Japan at the end of the thirteenth century, the plan for a counter-attack on the Continent at once emerged. This plan, however, could not be carried out owing to the incessant feudal disputes in which Japan was engaged for forty years after the last Mongol invasion. It was only after Hideyoshi succeeded, in the second half of the sixteenth century, in settling the feudal wars that he could once more turn his attention to the conquest of China and Korea.</p>
<p>For Hideyoshi, however, the subduing of China and Korea was only a stage. His aim was the conquest of the whole of the Indo-Pacific area. Apart from the Far East, India, the East Indies and Persia were to fall to the Japanese conquerors. The capital of this pan-Asiatic kingdom was to be Peking. Hideyoshi may be regarded as the spiritual father of Giichi Tanaka (1863-1929) whose famous <em>Testament </em>of 1927 repeats more or less accurately this programme of Japanese imperialism.</p>
<p>The Seven Years War (1591-98) waged by Hideyoshi against China and Korea ended with a disaster in which the Sino-Korean fleet defeated the Japanese armada in the Yellow Sea. Naval supremacy is as necessary to continental domination in the Far East as elsewhere.</p>
<p>Japan at that time, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, escaped the fate of India because Spain, the world power which might have threatened her, then suffered defeat at the hands of England and France. Philip II’s Armada was destroyed in 1588; nine years later the Chinese general Li Yu-sung defeated the Japanese fleet. Shortly afterwards began the Thirty Years’ War in which the energies of all European powers were fully engaged. The colonial wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took place in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the role of the Western Pacific being of little or no importance in this connection. Japan therefore remained in these centuries outside the circle of European world policy, and was able undisturbed to devote herself to the experiment of self-consolidation and political and economic ‘autarky’.</p>
<p>The epoch of seclusion (1637-1853) which covers seven generations, is the time of the final formation of the Japanese national character. It was ushered in by vast anti-ideological struggles: both ideologies which claimed domination were eventually discarded. Political Buddhism first received a death blow, in dealing which the government claimed the support of Christianity, which was already exerting a powerful influence upon the masses. In its turn, however, Christianity was suppressed, foreigners thrown out of the country, and all communication with the outside world cut off. The sense of national disappointment at the failure of Hideyoshi’s pan-Asiatic plans produced in a hypersensitive nation the tendency to self-examination and self-consciousness. Thus are explained the turning against foreign ideologies and in general the inclination to self-limitation. The outward manifestations of life were toned down, increase of population checked by abortion and child murder. The apparatus of a centralised bureaucracy was planted on a feudal social order, spiritual life was dominated by a scholasticism imported from China which attained in Japan its highest florescence towards the end of the eighteenth century. In the epoch which for the West was the period of discovery and invention, of the first great victories over Nature, of English empirical philosophy and French encyclopaedism, Japan remained in the fetters of scholasticism. But feudalism and scholasticism were a good school for the Japanese spirit as they had formerly been for that of Europe.</p>
<p>Japan’s ‘awakening’, or rather a powerful rousing by American cannon in the year 1853, forced the acceptance of European-American civilisation. But this acceptance was simply used as a stick with which to beat Europe. Hideyoshi’s pan-Asiatic programme once more came to the front. Japan now began where Hideyoshi left off, and made up for the defeat of 1597 by a blow at the Chinese ‘hereditary foe’ in 1894-95. It turned out, however, that in these two and a half centuries the world situation had fundamentally altered: between the victorious Island Kingdom and defenceless China stood Russia, backed by France and Germany. Japan was thus robbed of the fruits of her victory over China.</p>
<p>The advance of the Island Kingdom towards the Continent, the pan-Asiatic doctrine of Hideyoshi, was countered, as 250 years before, by a Eurasiatic programme. The Russians appeared as the political heirs of the Mongols.</p>
<p>The Mongol Empire, founded in the thirteenth century by Genghiz Khan and his successors, included on its extreme west the Russian principalities; on its extreme east this Empire sought to incorporate the Japanese islands. In the fifteenth century the Russian principalities, under the leadership of Moscow, threw off the Mongol yoke; in direct connection with this the Russian counter-offensive began right across the whole Eurasian Continent from the Volga to the Pacific. Moscow gathered under her overlordship the northern part of the decaying Mongol Empire. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Russian conquerors marched across the Ural mountains; a century later the coasts of the Pacific had already been reached by Russian adventurers and traders.</p>
<p>In the middle of the nineteenth century (1858-60), China, greatly weakened by the war against England and France, was forced to relinquish the Amur Province and the coastal territory to Russia. The Russians, however, were no more prepared than their Mongol predecessors to be satisfied with conquests on the Asiatic Continent. At the end of the eighteenth and the first thirty years of the nineteenth centuries Russian sailors and adventurers displayed exceptional activity in the north and south of the Western Pacific. In 1798 the Russo-American Company on the lines of the English and Dutch Colonial Companies was formed, and proceeded to annex and administer Alaska in the name of the Russian Empire. Russian explorers appeared on the Marshall and Caroline Islands. In 1812 Russian agencies were started in California which at that time belonged to Spain; in 1815 an attempt was made to bring the Hawaiian Islands under a Russian protectorate. As late as 1821 the Czar Alexander I raised a claim to the Oregon province which lay like a wedge between British and American spheres of influence. When, in the summer of 1823, George Canning made to the American Ambassador, Richard Rush, the proposals for common diplomatic action which led soon afterwards to the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, it was this Russian offensive in the Pacific, too, which was foremost in his mind.</p>
<p>Russia’s oceanic ambitions were far-reaching: the Bering Sea was to become a Russian inland sea; in 1825 Russia and Spain made an agreement on the division of their spheres of influence in California. This, however, proved to be the summit of Russia’s achievements in the oceanic sphere. The proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine was the first Anglo-Saxon counter-stroke with the aim of finally pushing Russia off the American Continent. With the sale of Alaska in 1867 the dream of a Pacific ocean kingdom under Russian domination faded once and for all. It is true that seven years earlier Vladivostok – ‘Stronghold of the East’ – had been built on the coast of the Sea of Japan. The geographical position, however, of this sea fortress proves that Russia had given up extensive oceanic ambitions: Vladivostok was in no sense planned as a point of departure for oceanic conquests, but rather as a base for continental development and defence against possible attack from the sea.</p>
<p>Russian world policy unfolded itself along a strategically powerful line from the Carpathians to the Great Hingan Range (Manchuria), from the Black Sea to the Pacific. Behind this line lie the Eurasian steppes, and the immanent tendency of Mongolo-Russian ‘steppe-imperialism’ is to seek an outlet in a southerly direction towards the ‘warm waters’ – the Mediterranean, the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Russia’s world political energies have in the course of centuries been concentrated now on one, now on another section of this colossal curve. Russian advance towards the Black Sea was paralysed by the British counter-attack between 1853 (Crimean War) and 1878 (Congress of Berlin). The Central Asiatic expansion of the Czarist Empire which between 1860 and 1885 reached its most successful period, was also halted by British counter-activity in Afghanistan and Baluchistan. In 1885 border conflicts between Russia and Afghanistan nearly ended in a war between Russia and England.</p>
<p>In the 1890s the Russian offensive on the shores of the Pacific, brought to a halt between 1860 and 1870, was renewed. Checked on both the other sectors of her world political arc, in the west on the Black Sea, and in the centre in Central Asia, she turned her attention to the Pacific sector. Here, however, the Czarist Empire came into conflict with Japan, substantially supported by Anglo-American cooperation.</p>
<p>The conflict between Russia and Japan in the Pacific was a typical power conflict, economic difficulties between the two powers being merely of secondary importance. The Japanese as well as the Russians had proved indifferent colonisers on the coasts of the Northern Pacific. The real colonisers had been the Chinese, whose settlement of the North Pacific territories had, however, been checked by political considerations. From a purely political point of view both Moscow and Tokyo had favoured grandiose projects for colonising the North Pacific territories with, respectively, Russian and Japanese settlers. Nothing came of these plans, however, owing lack of colonising energy in the settlers themselves.</p>
<p>The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 left Japan an Asiatic Great Power, and gave her dominion over Southern Manchuria and Korea. The victory of Japan was only made possible by Anglo-Saxon support, chiefly that of England (the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902). After this time, however, a shifting in the direction of Japanese foreign policy is noticeable: from an attitude of acute opposition to Russia, covered by an alliance with the strongest ocean power, Tokyo’s policy veered gradually towards an understanding with Russia, while attachment to the Anglo-Saxon powers was loosened. Russia and Japan approached each other on a programme of the partition of China. Agreements on the division of spheres of influence in North China were made no less than four times – in 1907, 1910, 1911 and 1916. In 1910 a perfectly definite Russo-Japanese front was formed against the American attempt to make Manchuria a buffer state under American control (Taft-Knox proposals). The Russo-Japanese approach reached its closest point during the World War, in the last year of Czarism, with the Sazonov-Motono Agreement of 3 July 1916, which was clearly directed against America. In the same year Berlin, as well as Tokyo, played with the idea of a separate peace and a threefold Russo-Germano-Japanese entente.</p>
<p>During the World War and in 1919-20 Japanese expansion in the Far East reached its highest point. China and Russia were completely paralysed, the whole Russian Far Eastern possessions as far as Lake Baikal were occupied by Japan. Only the intervention of England and America (Washington, 1922) forced Japan to evacuate the occupied positions. A new Japanese approach to Russia, at this time similarly isolated, became possible in 1925 with the Karakhan-Yoshizava Agreement. The problem of China, however, then as now, stood between Tokyo and Moscow. The unification of China was carried out between 1923 and 1926 with Russian help, and this unification was directed not only against the Western powers but against Japan. Still, even in 1926 the tendency to an approach of Russia and Japan was clearly noticeable, and even the old idea of a triple entente between Japan, Russia and Germany seemed to be coming to fruition. The close relations between Berlin and Moscow as shown in the Berlin Treaty of 1926, could only be favourable to the ‘Eurasian Axis’ (Berlin – Moscow – Tokyo).</p>
<p>With the advent to power of Baron Giichi Tanaka in the summer of 1927, the pan-Asiatic tendency once more asserted itself, combined first with an attempt at an approach to England, but after 1931 with gradual dissociation from all connection with the Anglo-Saxon powers. This ‘totalitarian’ continental policy beginning with the occupation of Manchuria presupposed a more or less complete ‘aloofness’ on the part of England and America towards any Western Pacific policy. Tokyo assumed this Anglo-Saxon aloofness as a matter of course, but reckoned equally as a matter of course with Russian ‘presence’ ('<em>presenza</em>’ – Italian) in the Western Pacific.</p>
<p>The fate of Asia will in all probability be decided by Asiatic power factors. The intervention of the Anglo-Saxon powers, if it ever comes, can be expected only at a much later stage, when the combinations of power in the Western Pacific will be more clearly discernible. The alternatives which there remain to be settled are the old ones, those which were set by Kublai Khan in the thirteenth, and Hideyoshi in the sixteenth centuries: Eurasia or Panasia. The further the Chinese armies are pushed to the West and cut off from all access to the sea, the more will they be thrown back on help from Russia and the more probable will become a close political and military cooperation between Moscow and the government of Marshal Chiang.</p>
<p>The incorporation of China in the Japanese sphere of power will ruin Russia’s position as an Asiatic Great Power. And Russia today, in view on the one hand of the industrialisation of the huge district between the Ural and Altai Mountains and on the other of the actual incorporation of Chinese East Turkestan and Outer Mongolia (together nearly 1,500,000 square miles) feels much more an Asiatic power than she did twenty years ago. A Sino-Russian alliance, the victory of which would realise the old Eurasian Mongolian Empire of Genghiz Khan and Kublai Khan, is therefore within the bounds of possibility.</p>
<p>The Pan-Asiatic solution, as envisaged by Hideyoshi and Tanaka, could only be achieved by the overthrow of Russia and her destruction as an Asiatic power. The incorporation of Eastern Turkestan and Outer Mongolia in the Japanese sphere of control would threaten Russian domination in South Siberia and Central Asia. There is, however, another possibility, namely the partition of China between Japan and Russia. As things are today this would mean a complete elimination of Russia from the Pacific Coast and thus the conversion of the Sea of Japan into a Japanese inland sea, the relinquishment of the coast territories and possibly also the Amur province to Japan, Russia, however, retaining her lordship over the Mongolian-Turkestan provinces. This would, according to past experience, lead to a stronger pressure of Russia in Central Asia and in the direction of the Indian Ocean.</p>
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Gregory Bienstock 1939
Russia and Japan in the Pacific
Source: The Nineteenth Century and After, April 1939. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
In these days when all that is most changeful, evanescent and self-destructive in history thrusts itself more and more upon the mind, it may perhaps be of value to remember that the fabric of this world is woven not alone by chance but also by necessity. The noise of the European conflict is today so deafening, the vibration of the telegraph wires so shrill, that it is certainly none too easy to catch beneath all the confusion of sounds the rhythm of world history. Half a century ago this was much easier. At that time two Anglo-Saxon statesmen had very clearly realised the significance of Asiatic policy in world events. ‘He who understands China’, said John Hay in 1890, ‘holds in his hand the key to international politics in the next five hundred years.’ And about the same time George N Curzon, then a young member of the Lower House, pointed out that:
... the future of Great Britain... will be decided not in Europe, not even upon the seas and oceans which are swept by her flag, or in the Greater Britain that has been called into existence by her offspring, but in the continent whence our emigrant stock first came, and to which as conquerors their descendants have returned.
There are obvious things which tend to be overlooked simply because of their obviousness. The relatively peaceful development of the world in the century between the Napoleonic wars and 1914 was based on the naval supremacy of Britain, a fact which was accepted by all as a matter of course. After the World War, world equilibrium, in other words the, to a certain extent, peaceful and continuous development of our planet, rested on the fact of the silently acknowledged condominion of the two Anglo-Saxon world powers over the seas. It is Anglo-Saxon naval supremacy which is now questioned in the Far East.
Relations between Europe and Asia in the course of centuries took the form of thrust and counter-thrust, of mutual interpenetration, of cultural cooperation and of sanguinary conflict. Even in the times of Genghiz Khan and Tamerlane, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century of our era, and up to the time of the last Turkish wars in the seventeenth century, it had been by no means decided whether Asia should dominate Europe or whether the great Motherland should be conquered by its European peninsula. The decisive factor in the issue of this struggle was the fact that by the sixteenth century Europe had achieved the conquest of the seas.
Asiatic conquerors have been essentially bound to the land. As Gibbon, for example, remarks about Tamerlane:
Asia was in the hand of Timour: his armies were invincible, his ambition was boundless... He touched the utmost verge of the land; but an insuperable, though narrow, sea rolled between the two continents of Europe and Asia, and the lord of so many thomans, or myriads, of horse was not master of a single galley.
It was, however, not possible to conquer even Asia by means of a frontal land attack. The circumnavigation of the African Continent and the subsequent advance of the Europeans into the sphere of the Indian Ocean, and later of the Pacific, represent a large-scale flanking manoeuvre. The colonial empires founded by the Portuguese, Dutch and British are Ocean Empires, created from the sea. The existence of these empires rests today upon one hypothesis – Anglo-Saxon naval supremacy.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, the white colonial powers were confronted by an entirely new phenomenon. A thalassocracy of purely Asiatic origin arose in the Pacific, and became at the same time the centre of an opposition colonisation’ ('Gegen-Kolonisation’) of the first rank. A hundred and fifty years after Russia, Japan accepted European civilisation in order to beat Europe at her own game. For the first time for 300 years an Asiatic power once more set out to achieve world conquest.
Japan, like every thalassocracy, sought to influence the neighbouring continent, and here the Island Kingdom came up against two Great Powers – China and Russia. The substance of modern Japan’s foreign policy consists essentially of the adjustment of relations with these two continental opponents. But this foreign policy, although no doubt displaying certain ‘amphibian’ characteristics, has as its goal, in accordance with tradition, the actual domination of the East Asiatic Continent.
To the Occident, which came into close contact with Japan for the first time in the middle of the nineteenth century, everything that took place in the following eighty years, the whole mighty uprising to the position of a world power, appeared as an example of the economic, social, cultural and political transformation brought about by European-American capitalism in the backward Orient. In this connection, however, it remains inexplicable that while Japan’s reaction to Occidental capitalism was the development of power on a vast scale, the other two Asiatic kingdoms, China and Korea, through contact with the same capitalism, have declined and forfeited all or part of their independence. It must be assumed that the Japanese have brought out of their long history into modern times a certain mental attitude which has made possible their unique success.
‘To be widely open on the one hand to outside impressions, and on the other to turn them to good account in the safe shelter of a closed personality’ – it is thus that Friedrich Ratzel characterises one of the historical advantages of the Island State. In the course of their thousand years’ history the Japanese have succeeded in absorbing various foreign ideas and forms of organisation, have tested them and skilfully tried out one against the other. Statesmen of imposing pattern have appeared at decisive turning points of Japanese history, men who have not been afraid to oppose the passive resistance of the masses, and, despising the old, deep-rooted prejudices, have led the state into new paths.
The astounding elasticity and adaptability of the Japanese, their capacity for absorbing outside ideas while at the same time preserving their own personality, these traits in the national character, which explain Japan’s remarkable success, are the result of the history of this island people. The Japanese, racially and culturally, are a mixed people. Malays of the South Seas, Altaic Mongols, Caucasian Ainus, colonised Japan in prehistoric times and helped to build up the Japanese national type. Still more heterogeneous are the influences which have shaped Japanese culture. Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism, Catholicism of the Jesuitical type, have formed and influenced Japanese life in the course of the centuries. As, therefore, in the middle of the nineteenth century Japan adopted European civilisation, she had already had considerable experience in assimilating foreign influences.
Tension in two directions – continental and oceanic – has always defined Japan’s attitude to world politics. The influence of the Continent on the Island Kingdom has not been merely cultural: in the thirteenth century the Mongol Chinese dynasty attempted to extend their dominion to the Japanese islands. Decisive factors in the failure of this grandiose campaign were, first, the breakdown in the unaccustomed conditions of the ‘amphibian’ warfare, of the military technique of the Mongol cavalry, planned for land warfare, and, secondly, the unexpected toughness of the Japanese resistance. The invasion of the Island Kingdom by the Continent was thus finished once and for all. Three hundred years later came Japan’s attack on the Continent. In the meantime, however, the former’s political horizon had been greatly enlarged. In 1542 the Islands for the first time saw ‘Southern barbarians’ in their harbours: the Portuguese landed on the Japanese islands.
The sixteenth century is, generally speaking, the epoch in which Japan’s political energy reached its first culminating point. In this period the Japanese first appeared as an oceangoing people, as pirates and traders, and attempted, using the southern island Kiushu as base, to obtain a footing in the whole of the Western Pacific. This was the first foreign political appearance of the Satsuma Clan. The Malakka Peninsula represents the most southerly point of the oceanic advance of the Satsuma people. Here, however, the Japanese sailors already came against the Europeans advancing from the west (the Portuguese Indian traveller, Albuquerque, in 1511).
The elasticity of the Island Kingdom’s foreign policy at this time can be judged from the ocean-encompassing plans of the Japanese statesmen of the period. On the one hand the attempt was made to extend Japanese trade to Mexico in the East Pacific where Spain had already established a sphere of influence. The South Japanese embassy to the Pope (Hazekura Tsunenaga), an attempt to establish friendly relations with the Occident, above all with Spain and Portugal, also falls into this period. On the other hand, Japan at this time was straining every nerve to subdue the Chinese-Korean Continent (Hideyoshi, 1536-1598). This tension between ocean and continent in the sixteenth century contains the kernel of the whole future foreign policy of the Island State even to the present day.
Japan has twice adopted European arms technique in order to turn it against China. In 1542 occurred the first importation of Portuguese firearms into Japan. Fifty years later, in 1592, the Japanese troops in their continental campaigns were already equipped both with European firearms and those manufactured at home from European models. Three hundred years later the same process was repeated. In 1853, after a long interruption, Japan again came into contact with European arms technique, and with this same technique just forty years later succeeded in overwhelming China.
For Hideyoshi the conquest of China and Korea was in line with ancient tradition: already in the seventh century Japan made an unsuccessful effort to establish herself in South Korea. After the repulsion of the Mongol Chinese Emperor Kublai Khan’s attack on Japan at the end of the thirteenth century, the plan for a counter-attack on the Continent at once emerged. This plan, however, could not be carried out owing to the incessant feudal disputes in which Japan was engaged for forty years after the last Mongol invasion. It was only after Hideyoshi succeeded, in the second half of the sixteenth century, in settling the feudal wars that he could once more turn his attention to the conquest of China and Korea.
For Hideyoshi, however, the subduing of China and Korea was only a stage. His aim was the conquest of the whole of the Indo-Pacific area. Apart from the Far East, India, the East Indies and Persia were to fall to the Japanese conquerors. The capital of this pan-Asiatic kingdom was to be Peking. Hideyoshi may be regarded as the spiritual father of Giichi Tanaka (1863-1929) whose famous Testament of 1927 repeats more or less accurately this programme of Japanese imperialism.
The Seven Years War (1591-98) waged by Hideyoshi against China and Korea ended with a disaster in which the Sino-Korean fleet defeated the Japanese armada in the Yellow Sea. Naval supremacy is as necessary to continental domination in the Far East as elsewhere.
Japan at that time, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, escaped the fate of India because Spain, the world power which might have threatened her, then suffered defeat at the hands of England and France. Philip II’s Armada was destroyed in 1588; nine years later the Chinese general Li Yu-sung defeated the Japanese fleet. Shortly afterwards began the Thirty Years’ War in which the energies of all European powers were fully engaged. The colonial wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took place in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the role of the Western Pacific being of little or no importance in this connection. Japan therefore remained in these centuries outside the circle of European world policy, and was able undisturbed to devote herself to the experiment of self-consolidation and political and economic ‘autarky’.
The epoch of seclusion (1637-1853) which covers seven generations, is the time of the final formation of the Japanese national character. It was ushered in by vast anti-ideological struggles: both ideologies which claimed domination were eventually discarded. Political Buddhism first received a death blow, in dealing which the government claimed the support of Christianity, which was already exerting a powerful influence upon the masses. In its turn, however, Christianity was suppressed, foreigners thrown out of the country, and all communication with the outside world cut off. The sense of national disappointment at the failure of Hideyoshi’s pan-Asiatic plans produced in a hypersensitive nation the tendency to self-examination and self-consciousness. Thus are explained the turning against foreign ideologies and in general the inclination to self-limitation. The outward manifestations of life were toned down, increase of population checked by abortion and child murder. The apparatus of a centralised bureaucracy was planted on a feudal social order, spiritual life was dominated by a scholasticism imported from China which attained in Japan its highest florescence towards the end of the eighteenth century. In the epoch which for the West was the period of discovery and invention, of the first great victories over Nature, of English empirical philosophy and French encyclopaedism, Japan remained in the fetters of scholasticism. But feudalism and scholasticism were a good school for the Japanese spirit as they had formerly been for that of Europe.
Japan’s ‘awakening’, or rather a powerful rousing by American cannon in the year 1853, forced the acceptance of European-American civilisation. But this acceptance was simply used as a stick with which to beat Europe. Hideyoshi’s pan-Asiatic programme once more came to the front. Japan now began where Hideyoshi left off, and made up for the defeat of 1597 by a blow at the Chinese ‘hereditary foe’ in 1894-95. It turned out, however, that in these two and a half centuries the world situation had fundamentally altered: between the victorious Island Kingdom and defenceless China stood Russia, backed by France and Germany. Japan was thus robbed of the fruits of her victory over China.
The advance of the Island Kingdom towards the Continent, the pan-Asiatic doctrine of Hideyoshi, was countered, as 250 years before, by a Eurasiatic programme. The Russians appeared as the political heirs of the Mongols.
The Mongol Empire, founded in the thirteenth century by Genghiz Khan and his successors, included on its extreme west the Russian principalities; on its extreme east this Empire sought to incorporate the Japanese islands. In the fifteenth century the Russian principalities, under the leadership of Moscow, threw off the Mongol yoke; in direct connection with this the Russian counter-offensive began right across the whole Eurasian Continent from the Volga to the Pacific. Moscow gathered under her overlordship the northern part of the decaying Mongol Empire. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Russian conquerors marched across the Ural mountains; a century later the coasts of the Pacific had already been reached by Russian adventurers and traders.
In the middle of the nineteenth century (1858-60), China, greatly weakened by the war against England and France, was forced to relinquish the Amur Province and the coastal territory to Russia. The Russians, however, were no more prepared than their Mongol predecessors to be satisfied with conquests on the Asiatic Continent. At the end of the eighteenth and the first thirty years of the nineteenth centuries Russian sailors and adventurers displayed exceptional activity in the north and south of the Western Pacific. In 1798 the Russo-American Company on the lines of the English and Dutch Colonial Companies was formed, and proceeded to annex and administer Alaska in the name of the Russian Empire. Russian explorers appeared on the Marshall and Caroline Islands. In 1812 Russian agencies were started in California which at that time belonged to Spain; in 1815 an attempt was made to bring the Hawaiian Islands under a Russian protectorate. As late as 1821 the Czar Alexander I raised a claim to the Oregon province which lay like a wedge between British and American spheres of influence. When, in the summer of 1823, George Canning made to the American Ambassador, Richard Rush, the proposals for common diplomatic action which led soon afterwards to the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, it was this Russian offensive in the Pacific, too, which was foremost in his mind.
Russia’s oceanic ambitions were far-reaching: the Bering Sea was to become a Russian inland sea; in 1825 Russia and Spain made an agreement on the division of their spheres of influence in California. This, however, proved to be the summit of Russia’s achievements in the oceanic sphere. The proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine was the first Anglo-Saxon counter-stroke with the aim of finally pushing Russia off the American Continent. With the sale of Alaska in 1867 the dream of a Pacific ocean kingdom under Russian domination faded once and for all. It is true that seven years earlier Vladivostok – ‘Stronghold of the East’ – had been built on the coast of the Sea of Japan. The geographical position, however, of this sea fortress proves that Russia had given up extensive oceanic ambitions: Vladivostok was in no sense planned as a point of departure for oceanic conquests, but rather as a base for continental development and defence against possible attack from the sea.
Russian world policy unfolded itself along a strategically powerful line from the Carpathians to the Great Hingan Range (Manchuria), from the Black Sea to the Pacific. Behind this line lie the Eurasian steppes, and the immanent tendency of Mongolo-Russian ‘steppe-imperialism’ is to seek an outlet in a southerly direction towards the ‘warm waters’ – the Mediterranean, the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Russia’s world political energies have in the course of centuries been concentrated now on one, now on another section of this colossal curve. Russian advance towards the Black Sea was paralysed by the British counter-attack between 1853 (Crimean War) and 1878 (Congress of Berlin). The Central Asiatic expansion of the Czarist Empire which between 1860 and 1885 reached its most successful period, was also halted by British counter-activity in Afghanistan and Baluchistan. In 1885 border conflicts between Russia and Afghanistan nearly ended in a war between Russia and England.
In the 1890s the Russian offensive on the shores of the Pacific, brought to a halt between 1860 and 1870, was renewed. Checked on both the other sectors of her world political arc, in the west on the Black Sea, and in the centre in Central Asia, she turned her attention to the Pacific sector. Here, however, the Czarist Empire came into conflict with Japan, substantially supported by Anglo-American cooperation.
The conflict between Russia and Japan in the Pacific was a typical power conflict, economic difficulties between the two powers being merely of secondary importance. The Japanese as well as the Russians had proved indifferent colonisers on the coasts of the Northern Pacific. The real colonisers had been the Chinese, whose settlement of the North Pacific territories had, however, been checked by political considerations. From a purely political point of view both Moscow and Tokyo had favoured grandiose projects for colonising the North Pacific territories with, respectively, Russian and Japanese settlers. Nothing came of these plans, however, owing lack of colonising energy in the settlers themselves.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 left Japan an Asiatic Great Power, and gave her dominion over Southern Manchuria and Korea. The victory of Japan was only made possible by Anglo-Saxon support, chiefly that of England (the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902). After this time, however, a shifting in the direction of Japanese foreign policy is noticeable: from an attitude of acute opposition to Russia, covered by an alliance with the strongest ocean power, Tokyo’s policy veered gradually towards an understanding with Russia, while attachment to the Anglo-Saxon powers was loosened. Russia and Japan approached each other on a programme of the partition of China. Agreements on the division of spheres of influence in North China were made no less than four times – in 1907, 1910, 1911 and 1916. In 1910 a perfectly definite Russo-Japanese front was formed against the American attempt to make Manchuria a buffer state under American control (Taft-Knox proposals). The Russo-Japanese approach reached its closest point during the World War, in the last year of Czarism, with the Sazonov-Motono Agreement of 3 July 1916, which was clearly directed against America. In the same year Berlin, as well as Tokyo, played with the idea of a separate peace and a threefold Russo-Germano-Japanese entente.
During the World War and in 1919-20 Japanese expansion in the Far East reached its highest point. China and Russia were completely paralysed, the whole Russian Far Eastern possessions as far as Lake Baikal were occupied by Japan. Only the intervention of England and America (Washington, 1922) forced Japan to evacuate the occupied positions. A new Japanese approach to Russia, at this time similarly isolated, became possible in 1925 with the Karakhan-Yoshizava Agreement. The problem of China, however, then as now, stood between Tokyo and Moscow. The unification of China was carried out between 1923 and 1926 with Russian help, and this unification was directed not only against the Western powers but against Japan. Still, even in 1926 the tendency to an approach of Russia and Japan was clearly noticeable, and even the old idea of a triple entente between Japan, Russia and Germany seemed to be coming to fruition. The close relations between Berlin and Moscow as shown in the Berlin Treaty of 1926, could only be favourable to the ‘Eurasian Axis’ (Berlin – Moscow – Tokyo).
With the advent to power of Baron Giichi Tanaka in the summer of 1927, the pan-Asiatic tendency once more asserted itself, combined first with an attempt at an approach to England, but after 1931 with gradual dissociation from all connection with the Anglo-Saxon powers. This ‘totalitarian’ continental policy beginning with the occupation of Manchuria presupposed a more or less complete ‘aloofness’ on the part of England and America towards any Western Pacific policy. Tokyo assumed this Anglo-Saxon aloofness as a matter of course, but reckoned equally as a matter of course with Russian ‘presence’ ('presenza’ – Italian) in the Western Pacific.
The fate of Asia will in all probability be decided by Asiatic power factors. The intervention of the Anglo-Saxon powers, if it ever comes, can be expected only at a much later stage, when the combinations of power in the Western Pacific will be more clearly discernible. The alternatives which there remain to be settled are the old ones, those which were set by Kublai Khan in the thirteenth, and Hideyoshi in the sixteenth centuries: Eurasia or Panasia. The further the Chinese armies are pushed to the West and cut off from all access to the sea, the more will they be thrown back on help from Russia and the more probable will become a close political and military cooperation between Moscow and the government of Marshal Chiang.
The incorporation of China in the Japanese sphere of power will ruin Russia’s position as an Asiatic Great Power. And Russia today, in view on the one hand of the industrialisation of the huge district between the Ural and Altai Mountains and on the other of the actual incorporation of Chinese East Turkestan and Outer Mongolia (together nearly 1,500,000 square miles) feels much more an Asiatic power than she did twenty years ago. A Sino-Russian alliance, the victory of which would realise the old Eurasian Mongolian Empire of Genghiz Khan and Kublai Khan, is therefore within the bounds of possibility.
The Pan-Asiatic solution, as envisaged by Hideyoshi and Tanaka, could only be achieved by the overthrow of Russia and her destruction as an Asiatic power. The incorporation of Eastern Turkestan and Outer Mongolia in the Japanese sphere of control would threaten Russian domination in South Siberia and Central Asia. There is, however, another possibility, namely the partition of China between Japan and Russia. As things are today this would mean a complete elimination of Russia from the Pacific Coast and thus the conversion of the Sea of Japan into a Japanese inland sea, the relinquishment of the coast territories and possibly also the Amur province to Japan, Russia, however, retaining her lordship over the Mongolian-Turkestan provinces. This would, according to past experience, lead to a stronger pressure of Russia in Central Asia and in the direction of the Indian Ocean.
Gregory Bienstock Archive
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./articles/Bienstock-Gregory/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.bienstock.1940.stalin | <body>
<p class="title">Gregory Bienstock 1940</p>
<h3>Stalin</h3>
<hr class="end"><p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>The Nineteenth Century and After</em>, January 1940. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.</p><hr class="end">
<p>On 21 December 1939, Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili had his sixtieth birthday.</p>
<p>A genius? Or a criminal on the largest scale? Or perhaps the ‘most eminent mediocrity’ in the Party, as Trotsky once called him in a private conversation.</p>
<p>Russia’s dictator has already become a legend, his name is a symbol for which men fight and die. It is difficult here not to write a panegyric or a satire. One may take comfort in the thought of the ‘historian of the future’. But will this historian not depend on our legends and judgements? It therefore becomes a duty of contemporaries to try and pierce through the veil of legend to the real core of personality. First, however, we must ascertain and analyse the different elements in the legend. And for that matter the Stalin of legend, the Stalin as he appears in the fantasy of his people is at least as important as the real man. The core of reality is not essential to a legend, and indeed need have no actual existence at all. It is of no importance for the symbol Stalin that the actual man should have certain characteristics. Yet the Stalin legend is built up on the Bolshevik legend and is a variant of it.</p>
<p>Books will one day be written about the Bolshevik legend. Its point of departure is the self-glorification of a revolutionary community and their founder. The growth of such a legend is a phenomenon which has been fairly often repeated in world history. The Bolshevist community attributed to itself from the first a Messianic and magic significance. It alone was in a position to rescue Russia and lead her to happiness. This Messianic idea was later extended to the whole world.</p>
<p>For the growth of a legend the person of its founder may be of essential importance. The Messianism and the magic of a community finds its concrete expression in this Person. Its propaganda value is increased. An impersonal community can have nothing like the fascination for the imagination of the masses as can the living personality.</p>
<p>Lenin as founder of the Bolshevist Sect was what Max Weber called a ‘charismatic leader’. Charisma – Grace – is always to be found in greater or less degree in every political leader. Leadership cannot be based merely upon election. It must contain a certain measure of Charisma. But the true charismatic leader is essentially other than the leader who emerges from the functional apparatus of the Party. The charismatic leader removes every intermediary between himself and the mass of his disciples, sets himself above the apparatus, destroys it if it suits him, and constructs another which becomes his obedient tool. His authority comes not from his election but from the magic of his appearance, from his luck and his success. Lenin was such a leader. The magic of his personality had an overpowering effect upon his nearest surroundings and later upon the great mass of his disciples. During his lifetime, however, it was not possible for the legend to take possession of his person, as he himself was too much a realist to allow of such a proceeding. After his death the circle of his nearest disciples and, in particular the triumvirate Stalin – Kamenev – Zinoviev, who took over directly from him, were able to draw from Lenin’s person advantages not only for the prestige of the Party, but also, what was more important, for their own authority. Lenin became a fetish, a supernatural protector of the Party and the Party State. He was revered as the invisible Head of the Bolshevik Church, his embalmed mummy on the Red Square in Moscow was merely a material symbol of this immaterial relationship.</p>
<p>Under the principate of Stalin, the Bolshevik metaphysics received its final formulation, became a dogma, which had nothing to do with the materialistic starting-point of the doctrine. But it must not be forgotten that Stalin merely brought to grotesque evolution germs which were already present in the original legend. Thus the motif of self-glorification and Messianic uniqueness which appears in the Stalinist epoch as coarse braggadocio was one of the essential elements of the original Bolshevik legend.</p>
<p>The legend of Bolshevism was transformed into the Stalinist legend, while the whole history of the Party, of the country and even of the world was represented merely as a preparation for the appearance of Stalin. This evolution was fostered consciously and with all the tricks of modern propaganda. His contemporaries were in the happy position of being able to watch the process of ‘manufacturing’ a demigod.</p>
<p>There is, according to the legend, one doctrine alone that can bring salvation, that has already turned one country into an earthly paradise, and that will save the whole world if only the nations will be obedient and teachable. This doctrine is called ‘Marxism’ or ‘historical materialism’ or ‘dialectical materialism’ – abbreviated to ‘Diamat’. But the important thing is that the interpretation of this doctrine is in the hands of a mystic dynasty: Marx – Engels – Lenin – Stalin. In these heroes or saints the spirit of the doctrine is embodied, the virtue descends mystically from one hero to another, until the holy spirit of ‘Diamat’ finds its highest embodiment in Stalin, whose earthly name is Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Stalin is no longer a hero, he is far more – a demi-god! One peasant girl said to another: ‘I have deep in my heart a great desire – to see Stalin.’ The other girl thought a moment and then, turning her big shining eyes to her friend she said in a low tone: ‘But Stalin is always with us. At this very moment he sees us and rejoices in our friendship. You are Stalin, and I, and all of us.’, pointing to her friend. ‘Stalin is – everything!’, and she embraced with a movement of her hand the whole big wonderful garden surrounding her. Thus was the conversation reported by the official organ of the Soviet government (<em>Izvestia</em>, 5 August 1939).</p>
<p>It must not be understood by this that reverence for Stalin as a divine being is widespread among the population of the Soviet Union. It is, however, a fact that the government and the Party, press and propaganda do everything possible to promote this cult of the personality of the ‘Leader of the Nations’. The deification of the ruler is in any case a tradition of the Orient, so that Stalin has not thereby instituted anything new, but has gone back to ancient tradition. That Caesar may not require those things which are God’s is a Jewish-Christian idea. In the Orient and in the Orientalised late Roman Empire there was no such dilemma because Caesar <em>was </em>God.</p>
<p>Marx and Engels were spiritual rulers. Lenin who took over their heritage was the first of the dynasty to grasp the earthly sword. Stalin unites completely in himself the two powers, the earthly and the spiritual. Stalin’s earthly dominion over the Russian Empire rests neither on conquest nor on election. He rules over the Empire by virtue of his mystic claim to be the last member of the ‘Marxist’ dynasty. The Soviet Union is an ideocratic state, in other words the actual power in this land is wielded by the bearer of an idea. Russia is dominated by ‘Marxism’, that is by a community or sect which is held together by faith in the doctrine. This community, however, has, by a remarkable psychological and sociological process, relinquished all its rights to its head. The bearer of the Marxist idea thus becomes the earthly ruler of the land, the Party Pope becomes an Imperator.</p>
<p>Emperor Stalin needs a pedestal to increase his somewhat inconsiderable stature. With this in view Party history and the history of the Civil War have been falsified, documents disappear, books are rewritten, libraries revised, witnesses removed. In a conversation with Bukharin, wishing in his usual way to paralyse him by blatant flattery, Stalin said: ‘We two are Himalayas, the others are nothing.’ So as really to be a Himalaya Stalin was obliged to send Bukharin and the other Party leaders into the next world. The head of the community destroyed the community itself so that all the antecedents of his own rise to power might be buried in oblivion. Stalin, who grew out of the Party apparatus himself, destroyed the apparatus in order to appear as a charismatic leader.</p>
<p>The true Stalin, Josif Dzhugashvili, was not born to be a prophet. The fact alone that he was a provincial obstructed his rise. Beyond this is the fact that he is half-educated and knows nothing whatever of European culture. Lenin and his immediate circle were not only men of European education, but also more or less gifted literati. Bolshevism itself grew out of the editorial office of an �migr� newspaper. Russian Social Democracy, the mother-party of Bolshevism, was for many years less a political party than a communion of faith, an association of literati and propagandists. A non-literate like Stalin could not possibly play an important role in such a party, and he made no claim to do so. At this period he contented himself with a second- or even third-rank post within the party apparatus. He never has expressed independent ideas, or invented anything original. Conscious of his intellectual weakness he always sought to attach himself to a stronger intellect than his own, or tacked about between various intellectual tendencies. Lenin was, during his lifetime, his guiding star, although Stalin never stood in any intimate relationship with him. Lenin, however, valued Stalin as an obedient executive under his direction, and as a daring and ruthless revolutionary. These qualities gained him his place on the Bolshevik General Staff even before the revolution.</p>
<p>Stalin has always been the man behind the scenes. He shuns the limelight. The revolution of 1917 was dominated by the double star of Lenin and Trotsky, but Stalin doubtless played an important organising role. Without mixing in the theoretical discussions of the Party literati, he managed successfully to create for himself a basis for future power struggles. In this period, when no one in the Party ever mentioned Stalin, he was building up the foundations of his power by creating for himself his own clique of followers.</p>
<p>Stalin is an ‘apparatchik’, a man of the Party apparatus, with all such a man’s virtues and vices. His whole political <em>Weltanschauung</em>, his routine, his technique, arise out of the political working of the apparatus. Administration is his element. He is deeply convinced of the absolute power of the administrative order. And that is why Socialism is to him, at bottom, completely alien. Stalin is no Socialist, and that is probably the explanation of the riddle which he presents. Modern Socialism is generally hostile to ‘Statism’. That is particularly true of Marx and Lenin. In his brochure <em>State and Revolution </em>(1917) Lenin, shortly before he came to power, affirmed the dying out of the state as an immanent tendency of Socialist development. In this he followed Marx and and Engels. Socialism will free society from the state and bring to consummation those social forces which are hindered by the bourgeois state. Lenin regarded the overgrowth of state power in its coarsest form which developed during the civil war as a temporary phase, and himself pointed out the dangers of this growth of the Socialist idea. It is possible to be of divergent opinions as to Lenin’s sincerity. One can see in the state-bureaucratic caricature of Socialism which marks the Russian Revolution an inevitable development; but it is a fact that before Stalin it had never occurred to any Socialist to represent state despotism as a positive good.</p>
<p>Stalin believes neither in personality nor in society; he despises both. He only believes in the state machine. Personality and society are in themselves faulty; the state apparatus is in itself good. While Socialism in its final result postulates the replacement of the state by a free society, Stalin sees in the future the state devouring society and with it human personality. One cannot deny a certain majesty to this Utopia, it is the dream of the ‘Apparatchik’ to deprive mankind and society of its soul and to substitute for the free play of social forces the automatism of the state machinery.</p>
<p>In his self-satisfaction Stalin does not notice that he is exactly following the development foreseen by Dostoyevsky seventy years ago in his satiric Vision. ‘I am perplexed by my own data, and my own conclusion is a direct contradiction to the original idea with which I start’, says the Socialist Shigalev (<em>The Possessed</em>, first published 1871). Starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism. And Shigalev suggests ‘the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd...’</p>
<p>From the school of the ‘apparatus’ Stalin has drawn an endless contempt for mankind. The human type known to Stalin is the conscienceless striver; in the world of the apparatus there is only one ethic – intrigue. To be successful one must learn the art of flattery, of defamation and of setting one against another. Out of the struggle of the ‘Apparatchiki’ who fought over the Lenin’s heritage, Stalin, as past master of intrigue, came victoriously to the fore. Aware of his own mediocrity, he surrounded himself with nobodies. One has only to study the photographs of the notables of the Kremlin. Every impartial observer will admit that their faces are not those of intellectuals. They are anti-intellectuals, men whose very existence, and above all their success, is a denial of intellect. And why intellect, anyway? The Apparatus requires only obedience. Thought on the part of subalterns is not only superfluous but dangerous, and in Russia everyone except the Dictator is a subaltern. The Emperor Paul I once said: ‘In Russia the only important man is the one I am speaking to, and only as long as I am speaking to him.’</p>
<p>How is it that the mediocrity, Josif Dzhugashvili, has been transformed into Stalin, the legendary hero? I must confess that I cannot answer this question. The case of Stalin is, however, only a special case, perhaps particularly crass, of the victory of mediocrity and philistinism which is so often seen in history, particularly after periods of great changes in which all outstanding personalities are exhausted. The rise of Stalin was also facilitated by the fact that apart from Lenin and perhaps Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky, there was no other man of strong will, no single brutal, iron-nerved daredevil in the ranks of the Bolshevik General Staff. They were all – Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev – fundamentally no more than literati and talkers. Trotsky, the only one who could compete with Stalin, was obviously not disposed to dispute power with him, for reasons which are still not clear.</p>
<p>Stalin’s occidental admirers are impressed by his success. The root of European Stalinism must, at bottom, be sought in the respect for brute force and success founded upon it. The man who calls himself a ‘Leftist’ and a ‘Progressive’ finds something imposing in success as such, regardless of what is achieved, and at what sacrifice. These words ‘Left and ‘Progress’, by the way, express remarkable geometric-sociological ideas. Left of what? Of what central point? Progress whither? Marxism, which, on the Continent of Europe, in the last decade before 1914 was completely domesticated and derevolutionised, has received new power by contact with the great Russo-Asiatic peasant and workers’ revolution. Now, however, the ghost of this Marxism, having become the ideological trimming of a vast national upheaval, has come back to Europe and is again exercising its power of attraction upon those who cannot and will not see that it is something new and alien.</p>
<p>Stalin’s successes? In internal politics they consist in this: he has transformed Russia into a concentration camp, a slave state, robbed millions of peasant families of their possessions and their lives, trodden underfoot the ideas of personal freedom and human dignity; banished truth from his realm and made lies the daily bread of his subjects and his worshippers inside and outside the country.</p>
<p>Even with those of his admirers who venture on an occasional timid criticism of the demigod, it has become a reflex to speak of his ‘brilliant successes’ in the realm of industrial construction. Apart from the fact that independent experts are very sceptical of Stalin’s ‘successes’ in the economic sphere, apart from the colossal sacrifices in lives and possessions that these ‘successes’ have cost in every case, can it not be said here as in the Gospel of Luke (ix:25): ‘For what is a man advantaged if he gain the whole world and lose himself or be cast away?’ Stalin is in truth seeking with Satanic guile to buy the soul of the Russian man with the illusion of material wealth.</p>
<p>The same timid Western European critic might humbly venture to point out to Stalin, the Benefactor, that his ‘imperialistic’ foreign policy of the last months is in contradiction to his internal policy. But the humble critic is wrong. Stalin’s foreign policy is not in contradiction to his internal policy. Both policies are built up upon brute force and shameless hypocrisy. Twenty years ago, moreover, the Soviet government, with the leading collaboration of Stalin, treated the little country of Georgia in the same callous and hypocritical manner as Finland today. It is remarkable that it never occurs to these members of his Stalinist Majesty’s Opposition that only a completely amoral despot with a contempt for mankind could follow a foreign policy such as Stalin’s. And at the same time he appears in the eyes of these loyal critics as a brilliant builder of social democracy in Russia. One really has the right to ask what these people understand by democracy and socialism.</p>
<p>The Stalin – Hitler alliance naturally appears in the eyes of the two confederates as a means to an end. It needs no proof that the two rightly mistrust each other and ultimately wish to ruin each other. This is regarded by ‘Leftists’ of every shade as a sign of Stalin’s great genius. Apart, however, from transient and superficial combinations, these two men must in some way feel themselves spiritually akin. Their total amorality and the equally total brutality that derives from it, have a common root in the satanic arrogance with which both lay claim to a godless messianism.</p>
<p>The thing Stalin most hates is personal freedom, and, in general, the free human personality. It contradicts his passion for levelling, his goal, the automatising and mechanising of society. Stalin hates the human soul. It is his greatest enemy because it is free and divine. He hates God because God is the father of human freedom, of the free human spirit. In his hatred of Christianity and of the Western civilisation which is built upon it, he and Hitler come together. This remarkable fact should give Western European Stalinists who are trying to explain away the alliance between the two despots and to treat it as of no consequence, furiously to think.</p>
<p>Dostoyevsky, who felt and prophetically saw the Russian spirit in its deepest fall and its highest glory, takes as motto for his <em>Possessed</em>, that deepest study of the problem of the revolutionary man, the strange story from the Gospel of Luke (viii:27-35) of the devils that left the body of the possessed man and went into the swine. And at the end of the novel one of the heroes says of this Bible story:</p>
<p class="indentb">Those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine are all the sins, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils, great and small, that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages. But a great idea and a great will will encompass it from on high, as with the lunatic possessed of devils. And the sick man will be healed and I ‘will sit at the feet of Jesus’ and all will look upon him with astonishment.</p>
<p>The time is perhaps not far off when Russia will be healed of all her devils great and small, and will sit at the feet of Christ. Is it not time, however, that intellectual Europe should free herself from her devil, the devil of satanic <em>Hybris </em>and amorality that has revealed itself in such alarming fashion in the worship of Stalinism?</p>
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Gregory Bienstock 1940
Stalin
Source: The Nineteenth Century and After, January 1940. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
On 21 December 1939, Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili had his sixtieth birthday.
A genius? Or a criminal on the largest scale? Or perhaps the ‘most eminent mediocrity’ in the Party, as Trotsky once called him in a private conversation.
Russia’s dictator has already become a legend, his name is a symbol for which men fight and die. It is difficult here not to write a panegyric or a satire. One may take comfort in the thought of the ‘historian of the future’. But will this historian not depend on our legends and judgements? It therefore becomes a duty of contemporaries to try and pierce through the veil of legend to the real core of personality. First, however, we must ascertain and analyse the different elements in the legend. And for that matter the Stalin of legend, the Stalin as he appears in the fantasy of his people is at least as important as the real man. The core of reality is not essential to a legend, and indeed need have no actual existence at all. It is of no importance for the symbol Stalin that the actual man should have certain characteristics. Yet the Stalin legend is built up on the Bolshevik legend and is a variant of it.
Books will one day be written about the Bolshevik legend. Its point of departure is the self-glorification of a revolutionary community and their founder. The growth of such a legend is a phenomenon which has been fairly often repeated in world history. The Bolshevist community attributed to itself from the first a Messianic and magic significance. It alone was in a position to rescue Russia and lead her to happiness. This Messianic idea was later extended to the whole world.
For the growth of a legend the person of its founder may be of essential importance. The Messianism and the magic of a community finds its concrete expression in this Person. Its propaganda value is increased. An impersonal community can have nothing like the fascination for the imagination of the masses as can the living personality.
Lenin as founder of the Bolshevist Sect was what Max Weber called a ‘charismatic leader’. Charisma – Grace – is always to be found in greater or less degree in every political leader. Leadership cannot be based merely upon election. It must contain a certain measure of Charisma. But the true charismatic leader is essentially other than the leader who emerges from the functional apparatus of the Party. The charismatic leader removes every intermediary between himself and the mass of his disciples, sets himself above the apparatus, destroys it if it suits him, and constructs another which becomes his obedient tool. His authority comes not from his election but from the magic of his appearance, from his luck and his success. Lenin was such a leader. The magic of his personality had an overpowering effect upon his nearest surroundings and later upon the great mass of his disciples. During his lifetime, however, it was not possible for the legend to take possession of his person, as he himself was too much a realist to allow of such a proceeding. After his death the circle of his nearest disciples and, in particular the triumvirate Stalin – Kamenev – Zinoviev, who took over directly from him, were able to draw from Lenin’s person advantages not only for the prestige of the Party, but also, what was more important, for their own authority. Lenin became a fetish, a supernatural protector of the Party and the Party State. He was revered as the invisible Head of the Bolshevik Church, his embalmed mummy on the Red Square in Moscow was merely a material symbol of this immaterial relationship.
Under the principate of Stalin, the Bolshevik metaphysics received its final formulation, became a dogma, which had nothing to do with the materialistic starting-point of the doctrine. But it must not be forgotten that Stalin merely brought to grotesque evolution germs which were already present in the original legend. Thus the motif of self-glorification and Messianic uniqueness which appears in the Stalinist epoch as coarse braggadocio was one of the essential elements of the original Bolshevik legend.
The legend of Bolshevism was transformed into the Stalinist legend, while the whole history of the Party, of the country and even of the world was represented merely as a preparation for the appearance of Stalin. This evolution was fostered consciously and with all the tricks of modern propaganda. His contemporaries were in the happy position of being able to watch the process of ‘manufacturing’ a demigod.
There is, according to the legend, one doctrine alone that can bring salvation, that has already turned one country into an earthly paradise, and that will save the whole world if only the nations will be obedient and teachable. This doctrine is called ‘Marxism’ or ‘historical materialism’ or ‘dialectical materialism’ – abbreviated to ‘Diamat’. But the important thing is that the interpretation of this doctrine is in the hands of a mystic dynasty: Marx – Engels – Lenin – Stalin. In these heroes or saints the spirit of the doctrine is embodied, the virtue descends mystically from one hero to another, until the holy spirit of ‘Diamat’ finds its highest embodiment in Stalin, whose earthly name is Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Stalin is no longer a hero, he is far more – a demi-god! One peasant girl said to another: ‘I have deep in my heart a great desire – to see Stalin.’ The other girl thought a moment and then, turning her big shining eyes to her friend she said in a low tone: ‘But Stalin is always with us. At this very moment he sees us and rejoices in our friendship. You are Stalin, and I, and all of us.’, pointing to her friend. ‘Stalin is – everything!’, and she embraced with a movement of her hand the whole big wonderful garden surrounding her. Thus was the conversation reported by the official organ of the Soviet government (Izvestia, 5 August 1939).
It must not be understood by this that reverence for Stalin as a divine being is widespread among the population of the Soviet Union. It is, however, a fact that the government and the Party, press and propaganda do everything possible to promote this cult of the personality of the ‘Leader of the Nations’. The deification of the ruler is in any case a tradition of the Orient, so that Stalin has not thereby instituted anything new, but has gone back to ancient tradition. That Caesar may not require those things which are God’s is a Jewish-Christian idea. In the Orient and in the Orientalised late Roman Empire there was no such dilemma because Caesar was God.
Marx and Engels were spiritual rulers. Lenin who took over their heritage was the first of the dynasty to grasp the earthly sword. Stalin unites completely in himself the two powers, the earthly and the spiritual. Stalin’s earthly dominion over the Russian Empire rests neither on conquest nor on election. He rules over the Empire by virtue of his mystic claim to be the last member of the ‘Marxist’ dynasty. The Soviet Union is an ideocratic state, in other words the actual power in this land is wielded by the bearer of an idea. Russia is dominated by ‘Marxism’, that is by a community or sect which is held together by faith in the doctrine. This community, however, has, by a remarkable psychological and sociological process, relinquished all its rights to its head. The bearer of the Marxist idea thus becomes the earthly ruler of the land, the Party Pope becomes an Imperator.
Emperor Stalin needs a pedestal to increase his somewhat inconsiderable stature. With this in view Party history and the history of the Civil War have been falsified, documents disappear, books are rewritten, libraries revised, witnesses removed. In a conversation with Bukharin, wishing in his usual way to paralyse him by blatant flattery, Stalin said: ‘We two are Himalayas, the others are nothing.’ So as really to be a Himalaya Stalin was obliged to send Bukharin and the other Party leaders into the next world. The head of the community destroyed the community itself so that all the antecedents of his own rise to power might be buried in oblivion. Stalin, who grew out of the Party apparatus himself, destroyed the apparatus in order to appear as a charismatic leader.
The true Stalin, Josif Dzhugashvili, was not born to be a prophet. The fact alone that he was a provincial obstructed his rise. Beyond this is the fact that he is half-educated and knows nothing whatever of European culture. Lenin and his immediate circle were not only men of European education, but also more or less gifted literati. Bolshevism itself grew out of the editorial office of an �migr� newspaper. Russian Social Democracy, the mother-party of Bolshevism, was for many years less a political party than a communion of faith, an association of literati and propagandists. A non-literate like Stalin could not possibly play an important role in such a party, and he made no claim to do so. At this period he contented himself with a second- or even third-rank post within the party apparatus. He never has expressed independent ideas, or invented anything original. Conscious of his intellectual weakness he always sought to attach himself to a stronger intellect than his own, or tacked about between various intellectual tendencies. Lenin was, during his lifetime, his guiding star, although Stalin never stood in any intimate relationship with him. Lenin, however, valued Stalin as an obedient executive under his direction, and as a daring and ruthless revolutionary. These qualities gained him his place on the Bolshevik General Staff even before the revolution.
Stalin has always been the man behind the scenes. He shuns the limelight. The revolution of 1917 was dominated by the double star of Lenin and Trotsky, but Stalin doubtless played an important organising role. Without mixing in the theoretical discussions of the Party literati, he managed successfully to create for himself a basis for future power struggles. In this period, when no one in the Party ever mentioned Stalin, he was building up the foundations of his power by creating for himself his own clique of followers.
Stalin is an ‘apparatchik’, a man of the Party apparatus, with all such a man’s virtues and vices. His whole political Weltanschauung, his routine, his technique, arise out of the political working of the apparatus. Administration is his element. He is deeply convinced of the absolute power of the administrative order. And that is why Socialism is to him, at bottom, completely alien. Stalin is no Socialist, and that is probably the explanation of the riddle which he presents. Modern Socialism is generally hostile to ‘Statism’. That is particularly true of Marx and Lenin. In his brochure State and Revolution (1917) Lenin, shortly before he came to power, affirmed the dying out of the state as an immanent tendency of Socialist development. In this he followed Marx and and Engels. Socialism will free society from the state and bring to consummation those social forces which are hindered by the bourgeois state. Lenin regarded the overgrowth of state power in its coarsest form which developed during the civil war as a temporary phase, and himself pointed out the dangers of this growth of the Socialist idea. It is possible to be of divergent opinions as to Lenin’s sincerity. One can see in the state-bureaucratic caricature of Socialism which marks the Russian Revolution an inevitable development; but it is a fact that before Stalin it had never occurred to any Socialist to represent state despotism as a positive good.
Stalin believes neither in personality nor in society; he despises both. He only believes in the state machine. Personality and society are in themselves faulty; the state apparatus is in itself good. While Socialism in its final result postulates the replacement of the state by a free society, Stalin sees in the future the state devouring society and with it human personality. One cannot deny a certain majesty to this Utopia, it is the dream of the ‘Apparatchik’ to deprive mankind and society of its soul and to substitute for the free play of social forces the automatism of the state machinery.
In his self-satisfaction Stalin does not notice that he is exactly following the development foreseen by Dostoyevsky seventy years ago in his satiric Vision. ‘I am perplexed by my own data, and my own conclusion is a direct contradiction to the original idea with which I start’, says the Socialist Shigalev (The Possessed, first published 1871). Starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism. And Shigalev suggests ‘the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd...’
From the school of the ‘apparatus’ Stalin has drawn an endless contempt for mankind. The human type known to Stalin is the conscienceless striver; in the world of the apparatus there is only one ethic – intrigue. To be successful one must learn the art of flattery, of defamation and of setting one against another. Out of the struggle of the ‘Apparatchiki’ who fought over the Lenin’s heritage, Stalin, as past master of intrigue, came victoriously to the fore. Aware of his own mediocrity, he surrounded himself with nobodies. One has only to study the photographs of the notables of the Kremlin. Every impartial observer will admit that their faces are not those of intellectuals. They are anti-intellectuals, men whose very existence, and above all their success, is a denial of intellect. And why intellect, anyway? The Apparatus requires only obedience. Thought on the part of subalterns is not only superfluous but dangerous, and in Russia everyone except the Dictator is a subaltern. The Emperor Paul I once said: ‘In Russia the only important man is the one I am speaking to, and only as long as I am speaking to him.’
How is it that the mediocrity, Josif Dzhugashvili, has been transformed into Stalin, the legendary hero? I must confess that I cannot answer this question. The case of Stalin is, however, only a special case, perhaps particularly crass, of the victory of mediocrity and philistinism which is so often seen in history, particularly after periods of great changes in which all outstanding personalities are exhausted. The rise of Stalin was also facilitated by the fact that apart from Lenin and perhaps Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky, there was no other man of strong will, no single brutal, iron-nerved daredevil in the ranks of the Bolshevik General Staff. They were all – Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev – fundamentally no more than literati and talkers. Trotsky, the only one who could compete with Stalin, was obviously not disposed to dispute power with him, for reasons which are still not clear.
Stalin’s occidental admirers are impressed by his success. The root of European Stalinism must, at bottom, be sought in the respect for brute force and success founded upon it. The man who calls himself a ‘Leftist’ and a ‘Progressive’ finds something imposing in success as such, regardless of what is achieved, and at what sacrifice. These words ‘Left and ‘Progress’, by the way, express remarkable geometric-sociological ideas. Left of what? Of what central point? Progress whither? Marxism, which, on the Continent of Europe, in the last decade before 1914 was completely domesticated and derevolutionised, has received new power by contact with the great Russo-Asiatic peasant and workers’ revolution. Now, however, the ghost of this Marxism, having become the ideological trimming of a vast national upheaval, has come back to Europe and is again exercising its power of attraction upon those who cannot and will not see that it is something new and alien.
Stalin’s successes? In internal politics they consist in this: he has transformed Russia into a concentration camp, a slave state, robbed millions of peasant families of their possessions and their lives, trodden underfoot the ideas of personal freedom and human dignity; banished truth from his realm and made lies the daily bread of his subjects and his worshippers inside and outside the country.
Even with those of his admirers who venture on an occasional timid criticism of the demigod, it has become a reflex to speak of his ‘brilliant successes’ in the realm of industrial construction. Apart from the fact that independent experts are very sceptical of Stalin’s ‘successes’ in the economic sphere, apart from the colossal sacrifices in lives and possessions that these ‘successes’ have cost in every case, can it not be said here as in the Gospel of Luke (ix:25): ‘For what is a man advantaged if he gain the whole world and lose himself or be cast away?’ Stalin is in truth seeking with Satanic guile to buy the soul of the Russian man with the illusion of material wealth.
The same timid Western European critic might humbly venture to point out to Stalin, the Benefactor, that his ‘imperialistic’ foreign policy of the last months is in contradiction to his internal policy. But the humble critic is wrong. Stalin’s foreign policy is not in contradiction to his internal policy. Both policies are built up upon brute force and shameless hypocrisy. Twenty years ago, moreover, the Soviet government, with the leading collaboration of Stalin, treated the little country of Georgia in the same callous and hypocritical manner as Finland today. It is remarkable that it never occurs to these members of his Stalinist Majesty’s Opposition that only a completely amoral despot with a contempt for mankind could follow a foreign policy such as Stalin’s. And at the same time he appears in the eyes of these loyal critics as a brilliant builder of social democracy in Russia. One really has the right to ask what these people understand by democracy and socialism.
The Stalin – Hitler alliance naturally appears in the eyes of the two confederates as a means to an end. It needs no proof that the two rightly mistrust each other and ultimately wish to ruin each other. This is regarded by ‘Leftists’ of every shade as a sign of Stalin’s great genius. Apart, however, from transient and superficial combinations, these two men must in some way feel themselves spiritually akin. Their total amorality and the equally total brutality that derives from it, have a common root in the satanic arrogance with which both lay claim to a godless messianism.
The thing Stalin most hates is personal freedom, and, in general, the free human personality. It contradicts his passion for levelling, his goal, the automatising and mechanising of society. Stalin hates the human soul. It is his greatest enemy because it is free and divine. He hates God because God is the father of human freedom, of the free human spirit. In his hatred of Christianity and of the Western civilisation which is built upon it, he and Hitler come together. This remarkable fact should give Western European Stalinists who are trying to explain away the alliance between the two despots and to treat it as of no consequence, furiously to think.
Dostoyevsky, who felt and prophetically saw the Russian spirit in its deepest fall and its highest glory, takes as motto for his Possessed, that deepest study of the problem of the revolutionary man, the strange story from the Gospel of Luke (viii:27-35) of the devils that left the body of the possessed man and went into the swine. And at the end of the novel one of the heroes says of this Bible story:
Those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine are all the sins, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils, great and small, that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages. But a great idea and a great will will encompass it from on high, as with the lunatic possessed of devils. And the sick man will be healed and I ‘will sit at the feet of Jesus’ and all will look upon him with astonishment.
The time is perhaps not far off when Russia will be healed of all her devils great and small, and will sit at the feet of Christ. Is it not time, however, that intellectual Europe should free herself from her devil, the devil of satanic Hybris and amorality that has revealed itself in such alarming fashion in the worship of Stalinism?
Gregory Bienstock Archive
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<p class="title">Gregory Bienstock 1939</p>
<h3>Lenin as Philosopher</h3>
<hr class="end"><p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>The Nineteenth Century and After</em>, December 1939. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.</p><hr class="end">
<p>The appearance of the twelfth volume of the <em>Selected Works</em> of VI Lenin completes the task undertaken by Messrs Lawrence and Wishart, in collaboration with the Marx – Engels Institute in Moscow, of introducing the English-speaking public to the most important political and scientific works of the founder of Bolshevism. <sup class="enote"><a href="#n1">[1]</a></sup> The varied ideological storms experienced by Leninism during the few years since the beginning of the publication of the English translation of Lenin’s works find an echo, though a faint one, in the work of the editor, about which, of course, only surmises are permitted. The first volume of the ‘Extracts’ is arranged by the Editor, Mr IB Fineberg, the last volume by Mr I Lenin. <sup class="enote"><a href="#n2">[2]</a></sup> No reason is given for this change. On the other hand it is stated in the preface to the ninth volume that ‘developments during the past few years... imperatively called for a thorough revision’ of the explanatory notes given in the preceding volumes. <sup class="enote"><a href="#n3">[3]</a></sup> For this reason subsequent volumes were held up until the Moscow Institute of Leninism had put together new observations corresponding to the circumstances of the period.</p>
<p>It can of course not be the task of a short review to discuss exhaustively the significance of Lenin in the development of Russian Socialism or in the history of the Socialist idea. For Communists Lenin’s works are a kind of revelation of which every letter is imbued with sacred meaning. One of the oldest suras of the Koran begins with the words: ‘No doubt is there about this Book: It is a guidance to the God-fearing.’ This approximately describes the attitude of the believing Bolshevik to the words of the Master. It can be truly said that few thinkers in history have evolved to such a limited extent as Lenin. In spite of unavoidable contradictions one must say that Lenin’s <em>Weltanschauung </em>bears in fact a monolithic character. He succumbed in earliest youth to the magic of the Marxian metaphysic, with its unequivocal directness so attractive to the primitive mind, and remained true to it to the end of his life.</p>
<p>Lenin at first accepted the metaphysical implications of Marxism as a matter of course. To him, the political publicist and revolutionary leader, ‘philosophy’ appeared, if not superfluous, still as a <em>cura posterior</em>. <sup class="enote"><a href="#n4">[4]</a></sup> During his Siberian exile, however, Lenin studied philosophy, above all the French materialism of the eighteenth century and the classics of German idealism. But it was not until after the 1905 revolution that the concern for philosophical problems presented itself to him as an actual political duty. In this period of reaction after 1905 Lenin found himself forced to destroy idealistic tendencies within his own party and particularly in its left wing. To Lenin the Party appeared as a Sect with a <em>Weltanschauung</em>, not merely uniform but absolutely identical. Philosophical materialism was regarded by him as the dogma of the Party, any deviation therefrom as a betrayal of the Party.</p>
<p>AA Bogdanov (Malinovsky), the old Bolshevik and comrade in arms of Lenin, appeared as chief theoretician of the idealistic opposition, who, without adjuring historical materialism subjected the whole methodology of the Marxist philosophy to revision. He was deeply under the influence of Ernst Mach and Avenarius, the founders of the empirio-critical school which achieved great popularity at the turn of the century.</p>
<p>Bogdanov, around whom such old Bolsheviks as Bazarov, Lunacharsky and others grouped themselves, raised the banner of rebellion against philosophical materialism in the name of an ‘Empiriomonism’ which was to signify the overcoming both of materialism and of idealism. Actually Bogdanov created nothing new; his teaching is simply a shade of the agnosticism of Mach and Avenarius which had its roots as far back as Berkeley and Hume. Machism led in its further development to the mathematical logic of Wittgenstein, and the philosophically founded scepticism of Bertrand Russell and to the ‘Logistic’ of Carnap and Philip Frank. These teachings can be defined as dominant in the natural philosophy of today. The controversy, therefore, between Bogdanov and Lenin has kept its actuality even in the present time.</p>
<p>Lenin’s significance as a political leader and statesman has long been recognised, his sociology is less well known and as a philosopher he may be said to be practically unknown. We take the occasion of the appearance of the now complete <em>Selected Works</em> to give a sketch of the metaphysical background of the founder of Bolshevism, with special reference to the eleventh volume which contains Lenin’s great philosophical polemic.</p>
<p>Lenin’s metaphysic is as little original as that of Bogdanov. While the latter was a pupil of Mach and Avenarius the former popularised the primitive materialistic metaphysic of Feuerbach and Engels. For Lenin’s conscientiousness it is significant that with the object of consolidating his polemic against the Russian ‘Machists’ he not only studied the whole of contemporary German, English and French empirio-critical literature, but for the founding of his philosophical counter-offensive went to the original source of dialectic, namely, Hegel. The only great – even the only complete – philosophical work of Lenin, <em>Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy</em>, which appeared in 1908 and which fills the greater part of the eleventh volume of the <em>Selected Works</em>, is completely under the charm of the Hegelian dialectic. Among Lenin’s papers was found, with other philosophical excerpts, a very detailed summary of Hegel’s <em>Logic</em>, together with numerous critical and admiring observations. From this it can be seen what exceptional significance Lenin ascribed to the Hegelian metaphysic. Hegel is, in fact, the only ‘bourgeois’ philosopher the study of whom in present day Russia is not only permitted but practically obligatory.</p>
<p>Bogdanov, in his polemic against Lenin, <em>Faith and Science</em>, which represented an answer to Lenin’s <em>Materialism and Empirio-Criticism</em>, defines Lenin as a metaphysician who believes, religiously, in Absolute Truth. What Lenin really believed in was ‘Holy Matter’. It seemed to him the only reality, and Motion as its only function. The study of the contemporary atomic and electronic theories certainly convinced him that the old ‘material’ conception of matter was obsolescent. Matter was becoming immaterial, transforming itself into energy and taking on the nature of a symbol. Thus by the end of the nineteenth century Natural Science was diverted into an agnostic and relativist channel. In Lenin’s opinion, however, this shook historical materialism to its foundations and therewith also the whole theory of the Messianic role of the revolutionary proletariat. The idea of preserving <em>historical </em>materialism as a basis for revolutionary messianism by renouncing the obviously untenable <em>philosophical </em>materialism, the tendency which lay at the root of all Bogdanov’s and Lunacharsky’s endeavours, was revolting to Lenin.</p>
<p>It was a question of defending at all costs the old philosophical basis of historical materialism: ‘Holy Matter’ must be preserved for the believing Marxist, even at the cost of transforming this conception into a completely empty symbol. Lenin was finally forced to the following definition of matter: ‘... the <em>sole “</em>property” of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of <em>being an objective reality</em>, of existing outside our mind.’ The sole property of matter therefore consists in the fact that it exists! This Lenin affirms still more clearly: </p>
<p class="indentb">... nature is infinite, but it infinitely <em>exists. </em>And it is this sole categorical, this sole unconditional recognition of nature’s <em>existence </em>outside the mind and perceptions of man that distinguishes dialectical materialism from relativist agnosticism and idealism.</p>
<p>The existence of matter is thus for Lenin a dogma which needs no proof. He decisively attacks agnosticism and pragmatism. It is interesting, too, that in his metaphysic and epistemology he closely follows Engels without taking into consideration the utterances of Marx which show a more or less clearly defined tendency to pragmatism and agnosticism. In the famous <em>Theses on Feuerbach </em>Marx expresses the opinion that ‘the controversy over the reality or unreality of thought if isolated from practice appears as a purely scholastic question’, whilst for Lenin, ‘knowledge is only biologically useful if it mirrors the objective truth which is independent of the human mind’.</p>
<p>Lenin recognises time and space as well as causality as objectively present. There is an absolute Truth which mirrors itself in human minds. Certainly the mind can only occasionally and approximately reflect absolute truth. Only in this way will Lenin admit relatively in human knowledge.</p>
<p>In all these assertions Lenin shows himself purely as a dogmatic materialist, a disciple of the French materialism of the eighteenth century. But he is at the same time an Hegelian and as such a ‘dialectician’. For him dialectic is in the first place nothing but the ‘epistemology of Marxism’. With Hegel, however, dialectic is not only epistemology but at the same time ontology. For the ‘spiritual alone is the real’ and reality is according to Hegel only the ‘<em>Selbstbewegung des Begriffes</em>’. Marx and Engels claim, as we know, to have put the Hegelian dialectic which, in their opinion, was upside down, on to its feet. For Lenin, too, dialectic as epistemology was simply the reflection of dialectic as the theory of the laws of Being. The real world exists – this postulate of Leninist materialism, which after all has no other proof than the ‘unconquerable tendency of our understanding’, is supplemented by the other equally undemonstrable postulate: this real world exists according to the laws of dialectics. While the Hegelian dialectic of the Spirit has in any case as its point of departure a deep psychological experience, the Marxist dialectic of Being is a purely hypothetical assumption which has its roots in an arbitrary generalisation of the results of the natural scientific research of the nineteenth century. Precisely with Lenin it can be seen how the necessities of a political system led to the construction of a corresponding metaphysic. Lenin, the political revolutionary, needed a metaphysic which raised revolution to a cosmic principle. That is the explanation of his partisanship of ‘Dialectic’. But why did he turn so sharply against Bogdanov, who was also a dialectician, but abjured dogmatic materialism? Bogdanov in no way ceased to be a revolutionary through his renunciation of materialism. Quite on the contrary! He and his school advocated much more drastic methods of political struggle than Lenin. The Bogdanov metaphysic was also revolutionary in the sense of the Heraclitean ‘<span class="greek">panta rei</span>’ ‘????? ???’, which lies finally at the base of all dialectic. But Lenin was not only a revolutionary, but also an <em>authoritarian </em>revolutionary, and as such he had to decline the extreme relativism of the Bogdanov school.</p>
<p>With sure instinct Lenin perceived in the relativism of Bogdanov, which was inseparably connected with the agnosticism of Mach and Avenarius, the danger of ‘Fideism’. The disciple of Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, who later returned to the bosom of orthodox Leninism and became a member of the first Bolshevik government, quite openly entertained the idea of founding a new religion of the worship of mankind. Such a religion appeared in Lenin’s eyes as a dangerous innovation. Why a new religion when the old religion of ‘Holy Matter’ was sufficient for all claims of revolutionary theory and practice? This religion was on the one hand dialectic and thus revolutionary, and on the other dogmatic and thus authoritarian. It was not relativist as it recognised an absolute, namely, eternal and undying Matter. Lenin knew that a political Church – and as such he regarded the Bolshevik Party – could only be founded on Authority. This highest Authority he saw in himself. But the corresponding metaphysic must also have a firmly rooted dogma as point of departure, namely, ‘Matter’.</p>
<p>One of Dostoyevsky’s characters, an officer given to brooding, finally flung out the question: ‘If there is no God, how can I be a Major?’ In similar manner Lenin feared that the removal of dogmatism in revolutionary metaphysics would lead to the destruction of his authority as Pope of the Party.</p>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<hr class="end"><p class="information">Notes are provided by the author and the MIA as noted.</p>
<p class="information"><a name="n1"><span class="info">1.</span></a> VI Lenin, <em>Selected Works in Twelve Volumes </em>(Lawrence and Wishart, about 60/-) [Author’s note]. Volume 12 of the <em>Selected Works</em> contains <a href="../../../archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/index.htm"><em>Marxism and Empirio-Criticism</em></a>, <a href="../../../archive/lenin/works/1894/friends/index.htm"><em>What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats</em></a>, ‘<a href="../../../archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/index.htm">Karl Marx</a>’, ‘<a href="../../../archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm">The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism</a>’, ‘<a href="../../../archive/lenin/works/1915/misc/x02.htm">On the Question of Dialectics</a>’, ‘<a href="../../../archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm">On the Significance of Militant Materialism</a>’ and various others of Lenin’s philosophical works – MIA.</p>
<p class="information"><a name="n2"><span class="info">2.</span></a> Sic, the editor of the latter volumes is actually I Levin – MIA.</p>
<p class="information"><a name="n3"><span class="info">3.</span></a> The first eight volumes of this series of Lenin’s <em>Selected Works</em> contained extensive explanatory notes; the ninth, which featured the explanatory preface cited above, and the following volumes contained no explanatory notes – MIA. </p>
<p class="information"><a name="n4"><span class="info">4.</span></a> <em>Cura posterior – </em>a later concern – MIA.</p>
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Gregory Bienstock 1939
Lenin as Philosopher
Source: The Nineteenth Century and After, December 1939. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
The appearance of the twelfth volume of the Selected Works of VI Lenin completes the task undertaken by Messrs Lawrence and Wishart, in collaboration with the Marx – Engels Institute in Moscow, of introducing the English-speaking public to the most important political and scientific works of the founder of Bolshevism. [1] The varied ideological storms experienced by Leninism during the few years since the beginning of the publication of the English translation of Lenin’s works find an echo, though a faint one, in the work of the editor, about which, of course, only surmises are permitted. The first volume of the ‘Extracts’ is arranged by the Editor, Mr IB Fineberg, the last volume by Mr I Lenin. [2] No reason is given for this change. On the other hand it is stated in the preface to the ninth volume that ‘developments during the past few years... imperatively called for a thorough revision’ of the explanatory notes given in the preceding volumes. [3] For this reason subsequent volumes were held up until the Moscow Institute of Leninism had put together new observations corresponding to the circumstances of the period.
It can of course not be the task of a short review to discuss exhaustively the significance of Lenin in the development of Russian Socialism or in the history of the Socialist idea. For Communists Lenin’s works are a kind of revelation of which every letter is imbued with sacred meaning. One of the oldest suras of the Koran begins with the words: ‘No doubt is there about this Book: It is a guidance to the God-fearing.’ This approximately describes the attitude of the believing Bolshevik to the words of the Master. It can be truly said that few thinkers in history have evolved to such a limited extent as Lenin. In spite of unavoidable contradictions one must say that Lenin’s Weltanschauung bears in fact a monolithic character. He succumbed in earliest youth to the magic of the Marxian metaphysic, with its unequivocal directness so attractive to the primitive mind, and remained true to it to the end of his life.
Lenin at first accepted the metaphysical implications of Marxism as a matter of course. To him, the political publicist and revolutionary leader, ‘philosophy’ appeared, if not superfluous, still as a cura posterior. [4] During his Siberian exile, however, Lenin studied philosophy, above all the French materialism of the eighteenth century and the classics of German idealism. But it was not until after the 1905 revolution that the concern for philosophical problems presented itself to him as an actual political duty. In this period of reaction after 1905 Lenin found himself forced to destroy idealistic tendencies within his own party and particularly in its left wing. To Lenin the Party appeared as a Sect with a Weltanschauung, not merely uniform but absolutely identical. Philosophical materialism was regarded by him as the dogma of the Party, any deviation therefrom as a betrayal of the Party.
AA Bogdanov (Malinovsky), the old Bolshevik and comrade in arms of Lenin, appeared as chief theoretician of the idealistic opposition, who, without adjuring historical materialism subjected the whole methodology of the Marxist philosophy to revision. He was deeply under the influence of Ernst Mach and Avenarius, the founders of the empirio-critical school which achieved great popularity at the turn of the century.
Bogdanov, around whom such old Bolsheviks as Bazarov, Lunacharsky and others grouped themselves, raised the banner of rebellion against philosophical materialism in the name of an ‘Empiriomonism’ which was to signify the overcoming both of materialism and of idealism. Actually Bogdanov created nothing new; his teaching is simply a shade of the agnosticism of Mach and Avenarius which had its roots as far back as Berkeley and Hume. Machism led in its further development to the mathematical logic of Wittgenstein, and the philosophically founded scepticism of Bertrand Russell and to the ‘Logistic’ of Carnap and Philip Frank. These teachings can be defined as dominant in the natural philosophy of today. The controversy, therefore, between Bogdanov and Lenin has kept its actuality even in the present time.
Lenin’s significance as a political leader and statesman has long been recognised, his sociology is less well known and as a philosopher he may be said to be practically unknown. We take the occasion of the appearance of the now complete Selected Works to give a sketch of the metaphysical background of the founder of Bolshevism, with special reference to the eleventh volume which contains Lenin’s great philosophical polemic.
Lenin’s metaphysic is as little original as that of Bogdanov. While the latter was a pupil of Mach and Avenarius the former popularised the primitive materialistic metaphysic of Feuerbach and Engels. For Lenin’s conscientiousness it is significant that with the object of consolidating his polemic against the Russian ‘Machists’ he not only studied the whole of contemporary German, English and French empirio-critical literature, but for the founding of his philosophical counter-offensive went to the original source of dialectic, namely, Hegel. The only great – even the only complete – philosophical work of Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, which appeared in 1908 and which fills the greater part of the eleventh volume of the Selected Works, is completely under the charm of the Hegelian dialectic. Among Lenin’s papers was found, with other philosophical excerpts, a very detailed summary of Hegel’s Logic, together with numerous critical and admiring observations. From this it can be seen what exceptional significance Lenin ascribed to the Hegelian metaphysic. Hegel is, in fact, the only ‘bourgeois’ philosopher the study of whom in present day Russia is not only permitted but practically obligatory.
Bogdanov, in his polemic against Lenin, Faith and Science, which represented an answer to Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, defines Lenin as a metaphysician who believes, religiously, in Absolute Truth. What Lenin really believed in was ‘Holy Matter’. It seemed to him the only reality, and Motion as its only function. The study of the contemporary atomic and electronic theories certainly convinced him that the old ‘material’ conception of matter was obsolescent. Matter was becoming immaterial, transforming itself into energy and taking on the nature of a symbol. Thus by the end of the nineteenth century Natural Science was diverted into an agnostic and relativist channel. In Lenin’s opinion, however, this shook historical materialism to its foundations and therewith also the whole theory of the Messianic role of the revolutionary proletariat. The idea of preserving historical materialism as a basis for revolutionary messianism by renouncing the obviously untenable philosophical materialism, the tendency which lay at the root of all Bogdanov’s and Lunacharsky’s endeavours, was revolting to Lenin.
It was a question of defending at all costs the old philosophical basis of historical materialism: ‘Holy Matter’ must be preserved for the believing Marxist, even at the cost of transforming this conception into a completely empty symbol. Lenin was finally forced to the following definition of matter: ‘... the sole “property” of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our mind.’ The sole property of matter therefore consists in the fact that it exists! This Lenin affirms still more clearly:
... nature is infinite, but it infinitely exists. And it is this sole categorical, this sole unconditional recognition of nature’s existence outside the mind and perceptions of man that distinguishes dialectical materialism from relativist agnosticism and idealism.
The existence of matter is thus for Lenin a dogma which needs no proof. He decisively attacks agnosticism and pragmatism. It is interesting, too, that in his metaphysic and epistemology he closely follows Engels without taking into consideration the utterances of Marx which show a more or less clearly defined tendency to pragmatism and agnosticism. In the famous Theses on Feuerbach Marx expresses the opinion that ‘the controversy over the reality or unreality of thought if isolated from practice appears as a purely scholastic question’, whilst for Lenin, ‘knowledge is only biologically useful if it mirrors the objective truth which is independent of the human mind’.
Lenin recognises time and space as well as causality as objectively present. There is an absolute Truth which mirrors itself in human minds. Certainly the mind can only occasionally and approximately reflect absolute truth. Only in this way will Lenin admit relatively in human knowledge.
In all these assertions Lenin shows himself purely as a dogmatic materialist, a disciple of the French materialism of the eighteenth century. But he is at the same time an Hegelian and as such a ‘dialectician’. For him dialectic is in the first place nothing but the ‘epistemology of Marxism’. With Hegel, however, dialectic is not only epistemology but at the same time ontology. For the ‘spiritual alone is the real’ and reality is according to Hegel only the ‘Selbstbewegung des Begriffes’. Marx and Engels claim, as we know, to have put the Hegelian dialectic which, in their opinion, was upside down, on to its feet. For Lenin, too, dialectic as epistemology was simply the reflection of dialectic as the theory of the laws of Being. The real world exists – this postulate of Leninist materialism, which after all has no other proof than the ‘unconquerable tendency of our understanding’, is supplemented by the other equally undemonstrable postulate: this real world exists according to the laws of dialectics. While the Hegelian dialectic of the Spirit has in any case as its point of departure a deep psychological experience, the Marxist dialectic of Being is a purely hypothetical assumption which has its roots in an arbitrary generalisation of the results of the natural scientific research of the nineteenth century. Precisely with Lenin it can be seen how the necessities of a political system led to the construction of a corresponding metaphysic. Lenin, the political revolutionary, needed a metaphysic which raised revolution to a cosmic principle. That is the explanation of his partisanship of ‘Dialectic’. But why did he turn so sharply against Bogdanov, who was also a dialectician, but abjured dogmatic materialism? Bogdanov in no way ceased to be a revolutionary through his renunciation of materialism. Quite on the contrary! He and his school advocated much more drastic methods of political struggle than Lenin. The Bogdanov metaphysic was also revolutionary in the sense of the Heraclitean ‘panta rei’ ‘????? ???’, which lies finally at the base of all dialectic. But Lenin was not only a revolutionary, but also an authoritarian revolutionary, and as such he had to decline the extreme relativism of the Bogdanov school.
With sure instinct Lenin perceived in the relativism of Bogdanov, which was inseparably connected with the agnosticism of Mach and Avenarius, the danger of ‘Fideism’. The disciple of Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, who later returned to the bosom of orthodox Leninism and became a member of the first Bolshevik government, quite openly entertained the idea of founding a new religion of the worship of mankind. Such a religion appeared in Lenin’s eyes as a dangerous innovation. Why a new religion when the old religion of ‘Holy Matter’ was sufficient for all claims of revolutionary theory and practice? This religion was on the one hand dialectic and thus revolutionary, and on the other dogmatic and thus authoritarian. It was not relativist as it recognised an absolute, namely, eternal and undying Matter. Lenin knew that a political Church – and as such he regarded the Bolshevik Party – could only be founded on Authority. This highest Authority he saw in himself. But the corresponding metaphysic must also have a firmly rooted dogma as point of departure, namely, ‘Matter’.
One of Dostoyevsky’s characters, an officer given to brooding, finally flung out the question: ‘If there is no God, how can I be a Major?’ In similar manner Lenin feared that the removal of dogmatism in revolutionary metaphysics would lead to the destruction of his authority as Pope of the Party.
Notes
Notes are provided by the author and the MIA as noted.
1. VI Lenin, Selected Works in Twelve Volumes (Lawrence and Wishart, about 60/-) [Author’s note]. Volume 12 of the Selected Works contains Marxism and Empirio-Criticism, What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, ‘Karl Marx’, ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’, ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’ and various others of Lenin’s philosophical works – MIA.
2. Sic, the editor of the latter volumes is actually I Levin – MIA.
3. The first eight volumes of this series of Lenin’s Selected Works contained extensive explanatory notes; the ninth, which featured the explanatory preface cited above, and the following volumes contained no explanatory notes – MIA.
4. Cura posterior – a later concern – MIA.
Gregory Bienstock Archive
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<p class="title">Gregory Bienstock 1940</p>
<h3>Church and God-Manhood in Russian Religious Philosophy</h3>
<hr class="end"><p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>The Nineteenth Century and After</em>, February 1940. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.</p><hr class="end">
<p class="information">Religion is faith in God and at the same time faith in man. If life is to have meaning for man he must believe in his own absolute dignity. He must learn to believe in himself as a potential partaker of the divine eternal life. – Vladimir Soloviev
</p><p>The term ‘Russian religious philosophy’ is a pleonasm, as the whole of Russian philosophy is penetrated by the religious idea. The exponents of this religious philosophy are not ecclesiastical but secular, and the philosophy itself has developed in a direction opposed to the spirit of the official Greek Orthodox Church. The central conception of God-manhood is given by the philosophers, in contradistinction to the official Church, a cosmogonal and not a soteriological meaning. According to the Church’s interpretation the incarnation of Christ has as its object the salvation of man from original sin. Thus the incarnation appears, fundamentally, as an accident evoked by Adam’s fall. This soteriological interpretation makes man himself an accident, a mere object of the Grace of God. Russian religious philosophy, however, rests fundamentally upon another standpoint. The Divine Incarnation here appears as included from the beginning in the plan of creation; a cosmogonal process and at the same time the content of the history of mankind.</p>
<p>An equally fundamental difference exists between the conceptions of official dogma and of religious philosophy on the subject of the Church. The official idea of the Church is of an institution created by Christ which, in spite of her mystical origin, bears an essentially mundane character. For religious philosophy, however, the Church is less an institution than a living organism. In this organism the mystical process of Incarnation is taking place. ‘For the Church’s life the most significant thing is the inseparable union of the Divine with the human... the Church is the ladder between heaven and earth, upon which God is descending to earth and man is ascending to Heaven.’ (Rev S Bulgakov)</p>
<p>Finally, the eschatological mood, the ‘Expectation of the End’ is characteristic. And here again this philosophy is distinct from the conception of the official Church, to which this mood is fundamentally alien.</p>
<p>These three central ideas – God-manhood, Church and Expectation of the End – represent the essential content of Russian religious philosophy. Our task cannot consist in examining the sources of this philosophy. It can be traced back on the one hand to early medieval Gnosis, on the other to German mysticism (Jakob B�hme, F Baader). German idealistic philosophy, above all of Hegel and Schelling, has exercised influence on the formation of religious thought in Russia. Decisive, however, is the fact that Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a galaxy of persons of exceptional religious gifts. Khomyakov, Soloviev, Fedorov, Bulgakov, Berdyaev – to mention only those writers especially concerned with theology. Besides these must also be mentioned poets such as Lermontov and Dostoyevsky, whose influence on the development of the religious <em>Weltanschauung </em>and the deepening of the religious consciousness was of decisive importance.</p>
<p>It would be false to overestimate the significance of Russian positivism particularly in its last Marxist phase, or to regard positivism as the dominant Russian ideology. In reality a struggle has for centuries been going on in Russia between rationalism or positivism and mysticism. Basically one can trace this struggle between rationalism and mysticism to the controversy which raged inside the Byzantine Church in the fourteenth century between the Hesychasts <sup class="enote"><a href="#n1">[1]</a></sup> on the one hand, who depended on Plato, and the neoplatonists, and, on the other hand, Western religious rationalism which employed Aristotelian methods. This peculiar controversy between the ‘Easterns’ and the ‘Westerns’ inside the Greek-Byzantine Church had a decisive effect on the destiny of this Church and her relationship to Roman Catholicism.</p>
<p>On Russian soil this age-old dispute, in direct connection with the discussions in the Byzantine Church, first appeared in the struggle in the fifteenth century between Nil Sorskii, the ascetic, mystic and rebel on the one hand and Josif Volotski, the rationalist and Caesaro-papist on the other, then between the patriarch Nikon and the ‘Raskolniki’ in the seventeenth century, between the Voltairists and the Freemasons in the eighteenth century, the Slavophiles and Westerners in the first half of the nineteenth, and the idealists and Marxists in the twentieth. This ancient dispute appeared in many disguises and perhaps reflected the eternal contradiction between the primitive elements in the human soul – reason and emotion. At the moment rationalism and materialism have the upper hand, at least outwardly. What is happening in the depths of the people’s soul can only be surmised. But it may safely be assumed that it has little in common with the official ideological fa�ade.</p>
<p>The central idea of Russian religious philosophy is the idea of God-manhood. This idea formed the chief subject of the greatest Russian thinker, Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900). God-manhood is the complete unification of the Godhead with Man and through him with the whole creation. There are three phases of God-manhood: the creation of man as the crown of the Universe; the incarnation of God in Christ, and finally the union of the Godhead with humanity and the whole creation at the end of the ages. The first theophany is Adam, the second theophany is Christ. The whole of Nature strives towards Man, the whole history of Mankind strives towards God-manhood.</p>
<p>Here, however, the Platonic character of Russian religious philosophy becomes manifest. The realisation of the idea of God-manhood in human history is only possible because this idea existed before all history and before all experience. For this idea is contained in the personality of God as Trinity. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity reveals its ontological content first in the idea of God-manhood. God the son as the second Person of the Trinity already represents the urge of the Godhead towards self-realisation or self-revelation. God the Son has existed before all eternity, but his fulfilment he finds only in his incarnation as Christ. ‘And the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was <em>in the beginning </em>with God... And the Word was made flesh.’</p>
<p>The theory of the Logos as the bridge from God to Man is characteristic of Russian religious philosophy. By its means the idea is expressed that God is not only transcendent but immanent in the world and especially in man. God, it is true, is conceivable without man, but not man without God. Fundamentally man can only imagine God in a relationship to himself. God, world and man are through a mystery bound up with each other. God has created the world for man, but God created man in order to have a friend, in order to make him a son of God and partaker of the Divine Life (Rev S Bulgakov). Speaking subjectively, man represents the union of the Divine Logos with earthly nature; the task of mankind, however, consists in realising objectively, in the material world, this union between God and his creation.</p>
<p>In the Christian philosophy of Soloviev the humanising of the Godhead and the sanctification of humanity receives its final expression. Here one feels most deeply the opposition of modern Russian religious ideas to the Western Catholic Thomism, and also to the neo-Thomism of our days as expressed, for instance, in the works of Maritain. There is for us, says Nicholas Berdyaev, no hard and fast boundary line between the natural and the supernatural (as it exists in Thomas Aquinas); we believe rather that the world and man and all real Being is rooted in God, that the divine energy penetrates the natural world.</p>
<p>This doctrine affirms in the first place the impossibility of a godless humanitarianism such as has been preached by positivism since the eighteenth century. Soloviev thus sums up, sarcastically, the dogma of Godless humanitarianism: there is nothing beyond force and matter; the struggle for existence first brought the pterodactyl and then the ape, from whose variation men appeared; therefore let every man lay down his life for his friends! Inside this syllogism the attempt is disclosed to establish humanitarian morality apart from the God idea and that of the immanent union of man with the Godhead.</p>
<p>The doctrine of God-manhood receives its final completion in the doctrine of the Sophia. In the German mystics, from whom Russian philosophy has borrowed this conception, Sophia appears as the ‘<em>jungfrau der Weisheit Gottes</em>’ (Jakob B�hme). Baader sees in the Sophia, in purely Platonic form, ‘the world of prototypes’, but at the same time he speaks of the Sophia as of the ‘true and eternal manhood’. Here the relation to God-manhood is already indicated. For Soloviev the Sophia is first the expression of the humanity of the divine. Logos is the direct expression of the Absolute as the unconditionally existing; Sophia on the other hand is in relation to the Absolute its eternal Otherness, in other words Sophia is the expression of the Logos, the realised Idea. Sophia, Soloviev remarks in another place, is the matter of the Godhead. It is the feminine principle of the cosmogony in opposition to the Logos which represents the masculine principle. Sophia exists from all eternity, like God. It is fundamentally nothing other than the ideal humanity as conceived by God, the ideal society consisting in absolute oneness between God and men, the final embodiment of the eternal wisdom.</p>
<p>The doctrine of the Church was first formulated in Russian religious philosophy by A Khomyakov (1804-1860). It is in closest connection with his whole philosophy. The foundation of this philosophy is the doctrine of the Soul. According to it there is in the soul of man a kernel which is of much more value than the understanding and the consciousness. It is through the channel of this kernel that man becomes united to God. The highest knowledge is the recognition of absolute Being, but it is no logical recognition but a mystical. The logical recognition is ethically indifferent, it is beyond good and evil. Therefore the internal ordering of human personality cannot be achieved through the development of logical thought. On the contrary logic leads us away from absolute Being. Russian folk-culture is completely based on the Soul, while occidental culture is purely formal. The West is rationalist and individualist, while the Russian people is emotionally and collectively constituted.</p>
<p>All these ideas represent the common property of that Russian School which is generally designated Slavophile, although this name is partly misleading. Khomyakov is the most important representative of this school, which has been exceptionally significant in the development of Russian ideology, and which has been characterised above all by its emphasis on the close connection between the national and the religious motive in Russian life. The Church appears in this doctrine as the ideal society in which the national and at the same time the human peculiarity of the Russian people is coming or must come to its full unfolding.</p>
<p>The Church, says Khomyakov, is neither a system nor an institution. The Church is a living organism of truth and love, or rather it is itself truth and love as an organism. The greatest mystery is the union of the absolutely free human personality with the Church which is itself a living and free personality. Freedom, according to Khomyakov, is not a right but a duty. Freedom is a burden which must be carried for the sake of the highest dignity and Godlikeness of Man. To be able to achieve oneness with God, to be partaker of the Divine nature, man must be free.</p>
<p>The absolute freedom of man will suffer no subjection to any sort of earthly authority, either of Priest or of human understanding. Therefore Khomyakov refuses ecclesiastical doctrines both Catholic and Protestant. The union of man with the Church is realised in the <em>Sobornosti</em>, which represents the actual content of ecclesiasticism. <em>Sobornosti </em>is a mystical society, consisting of all believers, living and dead, and is penetrated by the Holy Spirit. In the Russian word <em>Sobornosti </em>are two ideas: on the one hand the idea of the Council, <em>Sobor</em>, by which is emphasised that the highest authority of the Church community is embodied in the ecumenical councils, in as far as these councils truly comprise the whole of Christendom and not just one part of it. Thus they must be considered as manifestations of the Holy Ghost. On the other hand a further idea is included, that of Community, of collective thinking and vision. Thereby the idea is expressed that the vision of the Godhead and union with Him is no individual affair. The mystery of Love is indicated. Love, Khomyakov teaches, is a category of knowing. Love has for so long been preached to the nations as a duty, man has forgotten that Love is not only a duty but also a Divine Grace, by which man receives the knowledge of absolute truth. The Church is not an authority but it is the Truth which is perceived by the love of men who are united in the Church.</p>
<p>Khomyakov’s doctrine of the Church accords with certain Protestant ways of thought. He is one of those modern Russian religious thinkers who place the least emphasis on the other-worldly character of the Church and at the same time understand least of its eschatological and prophetic significance. With Soloviev and his pupil Bulgakov, however, this character and this significance are particularly emphasised.</p>
<p>The mystic character of the Church is best expressed in the following formula of Bulgakov’s: the Church is the oneness of transcendent and immanent Being. For the Church as a mystical organism three elements are essential: liberty, love and the Divine Grace. The Church is there where men, united in mutual brotherly love and free like-mindedness, become worthy vessels of the Divine Grace which is the true essence and living Principle of the Church and which makes her a unified spiritual organism (Soloviev).</p>
<p>The world is created for the Church, yes, the world must become the Church, otherwise it has no meaning at all. Man as Priest has the task of sanctifying the world; as God’s Son man is a mediator between God and his creatures.</p>
<p>The doctrine of the Church represents the connection between the doctrine of God-manhood and that of the end of the world. God-manhood finds its fulfilment in the Church as a mystical organism, but the Church is at the same time the consummation of human history and the cosmogony in general. The eschatological idea is the third and probably also the most intimate conception of Russian religious philosophy. The idea that human history must have an end is immanent in Christian doctrine, but the official Church of all three Christian denominations, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Protestant, takes a purely superficial attitude to this idea. In the official Church is necessarily inherent an optimism, an affirmation of life and of the Here, and therewith a refusal of the ‘End’, which can mean nothing but the destruction of this world. On the other hand the eschatological idea as it is expressed, say, in 2 Peter iii:10, is fully congenial to Russian religious philosophy: ‘But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burnt up.’ The end of the world is the necessary condition of that ‘new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness’ (2 Peter iii:13).</p>
<p>The end of this world is necessary so that the mystic Kingdom of love and truth may begin. Destruction is the necessary condition of resurrection. Without eschatology no ethic is possible. The Christian ethic has as a condition the belief in the conquest of the greatest evil, of evil itself, namely, of death. For him who does not believe in the resurrection of Christ and in his future Kingdom, the conquest of death remains an impossibility. As long, however, as death reigns, this greatest of all evils, life cannot triumph, and so long, too, man cannot believe in the final victory of the Good. Without this belief, however, every ethic is untenable. Evil, death, is there to be overcome. At the end of history the final struggle between life and death, good and evil, Christ and antichrist, will take place. The historical process consists in preparing man for this final struggle by spiritualising him through the inner assimilation of the Divine Principle.</p>
<p>The Expectation of the End is a characteristic not only of Russian religious philosophy but also of the whole spiritual make-up of the Russian intellectual. Russian thought in all its shades has always been unfriendly to this present world. The Russian nihilist, however, opposes to this world his own godless eschatology. The end of history here synchronises with the beginning of anthropocracy, the reign of the godless who pronounces himself a god. The collectivist idea is inherent in this anthropocracy. The individual appears as an atom of nothingness, but through some godless mystery collective humanity is deified. That is the religion of collectivism, the worship of the godless, that is the soulless, humanity.</p>
<p>Russian religious philosophy, particularly Soloviev, emphasises the universal character of the Church. Christendom cannot be national; national limitation contradicts the divine-human and eschatological character of the Church. The Russian people were honoured by the Slavophiles and later by Soloviev and his school as the people who most adequately expressed the universality of the Christian spirit, and was therefore chosen by God as His special instrument. Actually, according to the Slavophile K Aksakov, the Russian people was no nation, but humanity itself.</p>
<p>The nation is something that must be superseded, but not by a soulless cosmopolitanism representing the carrying over of the godless anthropocracy into the universal, but through Christian universalism, that is through the realisation of the Church on earth. The two Christian civilisations – the Roman occidental and the Russian oriental – are perishing through mutual estrangement and contempt. Occidental Christianity is deadened by rationalism, Russian Christianity is under the yoke of a godless anthropocracy. But the universalistic idea remains alive in the Russian man, only there is a danger that this idea may receive a false and unchristian direction. The Russian Orient bears in itself two opposite possibilities. It can become the Orient of Xerxes or the Orient of Christ. Soloviev placed this alternative before Russia at the turn of the century in a wonderful poem. The tension between the rationalistic Occident and the mystical Orient is a basic element of world history. This tension is probably the most fruitful known to human history and perhaps even the existence of humanity without this tension would have been so impoverished that it would be able to lay no claims to attention. The greatest danger for the destiny of European humanity lies in the attempt to dig a great gulf between the Romano-Germanic Occident and the Russian Orient. Stalin-Xerxes seeks to divide Russia from the West and make it an Asiatic country. Thereby he will cut off the Russian people from its transcendent mission which draws Russia to the West, and will make this God-inspired people into a prophet of a godless anthropocracy in Asia and throughout the world. Stalin wants to make Central Europe, above all, Germany, an outpost of a Russian Orient robbed of its Christian soul. Hitlerism is merely another form of the same anti-Christian and anti-European power. Will Western Europe, in face of this last danger which quite apart from the issue of the present struggle is threatening her civilisation, realise her duty towards the Russian Orient and Christian universality?</p>
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<h3>Note</h3>
<p class="information"><a name="n1"><span class="info">1.</span></a> The Hesychasts continued the great tradition of Greek mysticism, particularly Simon of Studion (died 1092). According to it the highest aim of life is union with God by means of a mystical contemplation of the Godhead. Characteristic of Hesychastic doctrine is the distinction between Essence (<span class="greek">ousia</span>) and Emanation (<span class="greek">energeia</span>). The essence of God cannot be seen by any man, what can be seen is the ‘Uncreated Light’, which is no other than the manifestation of the Divine Essence [Author’s note].</p>
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Gregory Bienstock 1940
Church and God-Manhood in Russian Religious Philosophy
Source: The Nineteenth Century and After, February 1940. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Religion is faith in God and at the same time faith in man. If life is to have meaning for man he must believe in his own absolute dignity. He must learn to believe in himself as a potential partaker of the divine eternal life. – Vladimir Soloviev
The term ‘Russian religious philosophy’ is a pleonasm, as the whole of Russian philosophy is penetrated by the religious idea. The exponents of this religious philosophy are not ecclesiastical but secular, and the philosophy itself has developed in a direction opposed to the spirit of the official Greek Orthodox Church. The central conception of God-manhood is given by the philosophers, in contradistinction to the official Church, a cosmogonal and not a soteriological meaning. According to the Church’s interpretation the incarnation of Christ has as its object the salvation of man from original sin. Thus the incarnation appears, fundamentally, as an accident evoked by Adam’s fall. This soteriological interpretation makes man himself an accident, a mere object of the Grace of God. Russian religious philosophy, however, rests fundamentally upon another standpoint. The Divine Incarnation here appears as included from the beginning in the plan of creation; a cosmogonal process and at the same time the content of the history of mankind.
An equally fundamental difference exists between the conceptions of official dogma and of religious philosophy on the subject of the Church. The official idea of the Church is of an institution created by Christ which, in spite of her mystical origin, bears an essentially mundane character. For religious philosophy, however, the Church is less an institution than a living organism. In this organism the mystical process of Incarnation is taking place. ‘For the Church’s life the most significant thing is the inseparable union of the Divine with the human... the Church is the ladder between heaven and earth, upon which God is descending to earth and man is ascending to Heaven.’ (Rev S Bulgakov)
Finally, the eschatological mood, the ‘Expectation of the End’ is characteristic. And here again this philosophy is distinct from the conception of the official Church, to which this mood is fundamentally alien.
These three central ideas – God-manhood, Church and Expectation of the End – represent the essential content of Russian religious philosophy. Our task cannot consist in examining the sources of this philosophy. It can be traced back on the one hand to early medieval Gnosis, on the other to German mysticism (Jakob B�hme, F Baader). German idealistic philosophy, above all of Hegel and Schelling, has exercised influence on the formation of religious thought in Russia. Decisive, however, is the fact that Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a galaxy of persons of exceptional religious gifts. Khomyakov, Soloviev, Fedorov, Bulgakov, Berdyaev – to mention only those writers especially concerned with theology. Besides these must also be mentioned poets such as Lermontov and Dostoyevsky, whose influence on the development of the religious Weltanschauung and the deepening of the religious consciousness was of decisive importance.
It would be false to overestimate the significance of Russian positivism particularly in its last Marxist phase, or to regard positivism as the dominant Russian ideology. In reality a struggle has for centuries been going on in Russia between rationalism or positivism and mysticism. Basically one can trace this struggle between rationalism and mysticism to the controversy which raged inside the Byzantine Church in the fourteenth century between the Hesychasts [1] on the one hand, who depended on Plato, and the neoplatonists, and, on the other hand, Western religious rationalism which employed Aristotelian methods. This peculiar controversy between the ‘Easterns’ and the ‘Westerns’ inside the Greek-Byzantine Church had a decisive effect on the destiny of this Church and her relationship to Roman Catholicism.
On Russian soil this age-old dispute, in direct connection with the discussions in the Byzantine Church, first appeared in the struggle in the fifteenth century between Nil Sorskii, the ascetic, mystic and rebel on the one hand and Josif Volotski, the rationalist and Caesaro-papist on the other, then between the patriarch Nikon and the ‘Raskolniki’ in the seventeenth century, between the Voltairists and the Freemasons in the eighteenth century, the Slavophiles and Westerners in the first half of the nineteenth, and the idealists and Marxists in the twentieth. This ancient dispute appeared in many disguises and perhaps reflected the eternal contradiction between the primitive elements in the human soul – reason and emotion. At the moment rationalism and materialism have the upper hand, at least outwardly. What is happening in the depths of the people’s soul can only be surmised. But it may safely be assumed that it has little in common with the official ideological fa�ade.
The central idea of Russian religious philosophy is the idea of God-manhood. This idea formed the chief subject of the greatest Russian thinker, Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900). God-manhood is the complete unification of the Godhead with Man and through him with the whole creation. There are three phases of God-manhood: the creation of man as the crown of the Universe; the incarnation of God in Christ, and finally the union of the Godhead with humanity and the whole creation at the end of the ages. The first theophany is Adam, the second theophany is Christ. The whole of Nature strives towards Man, the whole history of Mankind strives towards God-manhood.
Here, however, the Platonic character of Russian religious philosophy becomes manifest. The realisation of the idea of God-manhood in human history is only possible because this idea existed before all history and before all experience. For this idea is contained in the personality of God as Trinity. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity reveals its ontological content first in the idea of God-manhood. God the son as the second Person of the Trinity already represents the urge of the Godhead towards self-realisation or self-revelation. God the Son has existed before all eternity, but his fulfilment he finds only in his incarnation as Christ. ‘And the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God... And the Word was made flesh.’
The theory of the Logos as the bridge from God to Man is characteristic of Russian religious philosophy. By its means the idea is expressed that God is not only transcendent but immanent in the world and especially in man. God, it is true, is conceivable without man, but not man without God. Fundamentally man can only imagine God in a relationship to himself. God, world and man are through a mystery bound up with each other. God has created the world for man, but God created man in order to have a friend, in order to make him a son of God and partaker of the Divine Life (Rev S Bulgakov). Speaking subjectively, man represents the union of the Divine Logos with earthly nature; the task of mankind, however, consists in realising objectively, in the material world, this union between God and his creation.
In the Christian philosophy of Soloviev the humanising of the Godhead and the sanctification of humanity receives its final expression. Here one feels most deeply the opposition of modern Russian religious ideas to the Western Catholic Thomism, and also to the neo-Thomism of our days as expressed, for instance, in the works of Maritain. There is for us, says Nicholas Berdyaev, no hard and fast boundary line between the natural and the supernatural (as it exists in Thomas Aquinas); we believe rather that the world and man and all real Being is rooted in God, that the divine energy penetrates the natural world.
This doctrine affirms in the first place the impossibility of a godless humanitarianism such as has been preached by positivism since the eighteenth century. Soloviev thus sums up, sarcastically, the dogma of Godless humanitarianism: there is nothing beyond force and matter; the struggle for existence first brought the pterodactyl and then the ape, from whose variation men appeared; therefore let every man lay down his life for his friends! Inside this syllogism the attempt is disclosed to establish humanitarian morality apart from the God idea and that of the immanent union of man with the Godhead.
The doctrine of God-manhood receives its final completion in the doctrine of the Sophia. In the German mystics, from whom Russian philosophy has borrowed this conception, Sophia appears as the ‘jungfrau der Weisheit Gottes’ (Jakob B�hme). Baader sees in the Sophia, in purely Platonic form, ‘the world of prototypes’, but at the same time he speaks of the Sophia as of the ‘true and eternal manhood’. Here the relation to God-manhood is already indicated. For Soloviev the Sophia is first the expression of the humanity of the divine. Logos is the direct expression of the Absolute as the unconditionally existing; Sophia on the other hand is in relation to the Absolute its eternal Otherness, in other words Sophia is the expression of the Logos, the realised Idea. Sophia, Soloviev remarks in another place, is the matter of the Godhead. It is the feminine principle of the cosmogony in opposition to the Logos which represents the masculine principle. Sophia exists from all eternity, like God. It is fundamentally nothing other than the ideal humanity as conceived by God, the ideal society consisting in absolute oneness between God and men, the final embodiment of the eternal wisdom.
The doctrine of the Church was first formulated in Russian religious philosophy by A Khomyakov (1804-1860). It is in closest connection with his whole philosophy. The foundation of this philosophy is the doctrine of the Soul. According to it there is in the soul of man a kernel which is of much more value than the understanding and the consciousness. It is through the channel of this kernel that man becomes united to God. The highest knowledge is the recognition of absolute Being, but it is no logical recognition but a mystical. The logical recognition is ethically indifferent, it is beyond good and evil. Therefore the internal ordering of human personality cannot be achieved through the development of logical thought. On the contrary logic leads us away from absolute Being. Russian folk-culture is completely based on the Soul, while occidental culture is purely formal. The West is rationalist and individualist, while the Russian people is emotionally and collectively constituted.
All these ideas represent the common property of that Russian School which is generally designated Slavophile, although this name is partly misleading. Khomyakov is the most important representative of this school, which has been exceptionally significant in the development of Russian ideology, and which has been characterised above all by its emphasis on the close connection between the national and the religious motive in Russian life. The Church appears in this doctrine as the ideal society in which the national and at the same time the human peculiarity of the Russian people is coming or must come to its full unfolding.
The Church, says Khomyakov, is neither a system nor an institution. The Church is a living organism of truth and love, or rather it is itself truth and love as an organism. The greatest mystery is the union of the absolutely free human personality with the Church which is itself a living and free personality. Freedom, according to Khomyakov, is not a right but a duty. Freedom is a burden which must be carried for the sake of the highest dignity and Godlikeness of Man. To be able to achieve oneness with God, to be partaker of the Divine nature, man must be free.
The absolute freedom of man will suffer no subjection to any sort of earthly authority, either of Priest or of human understanding. Therefore Khomyakov refuses ecclesiastical doctrines both Catholic and Protestant. The union of man with the Church is realised in the Sobornosti, which represents the actual content of ecclesiasticism. Sobornosti is a mystical society, consisting of all believers, living and dead, and is penetrated by the Holy Spirit. In the Russian word Sobornosti are two ideas: on the one hand the idea of the Council, Sobor, by which is emphasised that the highest authority of the Church community is embodied in the ecumenical councils, in as far as these councils truly comprise the whole of Christendom and not just one part of it. Thus they must be considered as manifestations of the Holy Ghost. On the other hand a further idea is included, that of Community, of collective thinking and vision. Thereby the idea is expressed that the vision of the Godhead and union with Him is no individual affair. The mystery of Love is indicated. Love, Khomyakov teaches, is a category of knowing. Love has for so long been preached to the nations as a duty, man has forgotten that Love is not only a duty but also a Divine Grace, by which man receives the knowledge of absolute truth. The Church is not an authority but it is the Truth which is perceived by the love of men who are united in the Church.
Khomyakov’s doctrine of the Church accords with certain Protestant ways of thought. He is one of those modern Russian religious thinkers who place the least emphasis on the other-worldly character of the Church and at the same time understand least of its eschatological and prophetic significance. With Soloviev and his pupil Bulgakov, however, this character and this significance are particularly emphasised.
The mystic character of the Church is best expressed in the following formula of Bulgakov’s: the Church is the oneness of transcendent and immanent Being. For the Church as a mystical organism three elements are essential: liberty, love and the Divine Grace. The Church is there where men, united in mutual brotherly love and free like-mindedness, become worthy vessels of the Divine Grace which is the true essence and living Principle of the Church and which makes her a unified spiritual organism (Soloviev).
The world is created for the Church, yes, the world must become the Church, otherwise it has no meaning at all. Man as Priest has the task of sanctifying the world; as God’s Son man is a mediator between God and his creatures.
The doctrine of the Church represents the connection between the doctrine of God-manhood and that of the end of the world. God-manhood finds its fulfilment in the Church as a mystical organism, but the Church is at the same time the consummation of human history and the cosmogony in general. The eschatological idea is the third and probably also the most intimate conception of Russian religious philosophy. The idea that human history must have an end is immanent in Christian doctrine, but the official Church of all three Christian denominations, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Protestant, takes a purely superficial attitude to this idea. In the official Church is necessarily inherent an optimism, an affirmation of life and of the Here, and therewith a refusal of the ‘End’, which can mean nothing but the destruction of this world. On the other hand the eschatological idea as it is expressed, say, in 2 Peter iii:10, is fully congenial to Russian religious philosophy: ‘But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burnt up.’ The end of the world is the necessary condition of that ‘new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness’ (2 Peter iii:13).
The end of this world is necessary so that the mystic Kingdom of love and truth may begin. Destruction is the necessary condition of resurrection. Without eschatology no ethic is possible. The Christian ethic has as a condition the belief in the conquest of the greatest evil, of evil itself, namely, of death. For him who does not believe in the resurrection of Christ and in his future Kingdom, the conquest of death remains an impossibility. As long, however, as death reigns, this greatest of all evils, life cannot triumph, and so long, too, man cannot believe in the final victory of the Good. Without this belief, however, every ethic is untenable. Evil, death, is there to be overcome. At the end of history the final struggle between life and death, good and evil, Christ and antichrist, will take place. The historical process consists in preparing man for this final struggle by spiritualising him through the inner assimilation of the Divine Principle.
The Expectation of the End is a characteristic not only of Russian religious philosophy but also of the whole spiritual make-up of the Russian intellectual. Russian thought in all its shades has always been unfriendly to this present world. The Russian nihilist, however, opposes to this world his own godless eschatology. The end of history here synchronises with the beginning of anthropocracy, the reign of the godless who pronounces himself a god. The collectivist idea is inherent in this anthropocracy. The individual appears as an atom of nothingness, but through some godless mystery collective humanity is deified. That is the religion of collectivism, the worship of the godless, that is the soulless, humanity.
Russian religious philosophy, particularly Soloviev, emphasises the universal character of the Church. Christendom cannot be national; national limitation contradicts the divine-human and eschatological character of the Church. The Russian people were honoured by the Slavophiles and later by Soloviev and his school as the people who most adequately expressed the universality of the Christian spirit, and was therefore chosen by God as His special instrument. Actually, according to the Slavophile K Aksakov, the Russian people was no nation, but humanity itself.
The nation is something that must be superseded, but not by a soulless cosmopolitanism representing the carrying over of the godless anthropocracy into the universal, but through Christian universalism, that is through the realisation of the Church on earth. The two Christian civilisations – the Roman occidental and the Russian oriental – are perishing through mutual estrangement and contempt. Occidental Christianity is deadened by rationalism, Russian Christianity is under the yoke of a godless anthropocracy. But the universalistic idea remains alive in the Russian man, only there is a danger that this idea may receive a false and unchristian direction. The Russian Orient bears in itself two opposite possibilities. It can become the Orient of Xerxes or the Orient of Christ. Soloviev placed this alternative before Russia at the turn of the century in a wonderful poem. The tension between the rationalistic Occident and the mystical Orient is a basic element of world history. This tension is probably the most fruitful known to human history and perhaps even the existence of humanity without this tension would have been so impoverished that it would be able to lay no claims to attention. The greatest danger for the destiny of European humanity lies in the attempt to dig a great gulf between the Romano-Germanic Occident and the Russian Orient. Stalin-Xerxes seeks to divide Russia from the West and make it an Asiatic country. Thereby he will cut off the Russian people from its transcendent mission which draws Russia to the West, and will make this God-inspired people into a prophet of a godless anthropocracy in Asia and throughout the world. Stalin wants to make Central Europe, above all, Germany, an outpost of a Russian Orient robbed of its Christian soul. Hitlerism is merely another form of the same anti-Christian and anti-European power. Will Western Europe, in face of this last danger which quite apart from the issue of the present struggle is threatening her civilisation, realise her duty towards the Russian Orient and Christian universality?
Note
1. The Hesychasts continued the great tradition of Greek mysticism, particularly Simon of Studion (died 1092). According to it the highest aim of life is union with God by means of a mystical contemplation of the Godhead. Characteristic of Hesychastic doctrine is the distinction between Essence (ousia) and Emanation (energeia). The essence of God cannot be seen by any man, what can be seen is the ‘Uncreated Light’, which is no other than the manifestation of the Divine Essence [Author’s note].
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>A Letter to a Comrade</h1>
<h3>(Spring 1970)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 1970.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><strong>Dear Comrade</strong></p>
<p class="fst">Your letter was of great interest because it raised quite a number of points that need to be clarified.</p>
<p>You say that you are ‘not sure’ that cadre building is the ‘<em>vital</em> thing’ and suggest that it is more important to get young workers and students involved in activity. I can well understand your impatience on this question, because it seems there is a dichotomy between these two functions. However, I would suggest that this dichotomy is not – or should not be – a real one. Our point of departure must be ‘how can we advance the fight against capitalism and bring it to a successful conclusion’. The point I was trying to make in my article <em>The Making of Revolutionaries: Cadre or Sect</em> was that many people start from this generalised and abstract proposition only to arrive at a dead-end, even though for a time they seem to have made some progress. Some knowledge of the British labour movement will tell us that it is littered with many attempts to find a way out of the impasse. In the event – up to now – they have all failed, and to say this is not to disparage the devotion and sincerity of those involved. The proposition that I advanced was that – leaving aside the objective conditions, which have played a large part in this failure – they all fell down either because they were unable to create a revolutionary cadre or did not understand the nature of such a cadre. This is why I devoted so much space to examining this question.</p>
<p>However – and this must be clearly understood – cadres cannot be created in an ivory tower, separate and apart from the actual struggles that are taking place at any given time. On the other hand, participation in such struggles does not <em>automatically</em> create cadres. What is involved here is: what does one mean by cadres? I repeat what I said in my original article, one must not confuse activists and cadres, to do so means to have an administrative and manipulative concept of cadres. Cadres in the Leninist or Gramscian sense of the term are revolutionary intellectuals, or intellectuals of a new type. That is not to say, therefore, that one must hand out labels to those who participate in a movement and accord them some differing and exalted status, in the last analysis people will decide <em>for themselves</em> what their role is by their contribution.</p>
<p>I agree that the activist approach should be given as much importance as cadre building – <em>if</em> one sees them as being separate, but I do not. In my article I attempted to point out that for genuine revolutionary activity to take place, and by this I mean that the situation has materially affected the relative position of the various classes within society, then there must be a fusion of theory and practice, that is, praxis. What I wanted to drive home was that only rarely has this been the case up to now, rather we have been faced by sects that have produced activists, and sometimes unthinking ones. The essence of this point is that we must get away from seeing some sort of dichotomy between activity and intellectual effort. I made the point by asking was Marx merely (!) theorising when he was writing <strong>Capital</strong>, and was Castro merely (!) being an activist when he landed from the <em>Granma</em>? It is only by understanding the fundamental unity of such apparently diverse ‘activities’ that one grasps the concept of praxis.</p>
<p>If I understand the drift of your next point, you are saying that in the last <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> two years or so the most important thing is to create activities and demonstrations around student and Vietnam issues because you ‘think that with involvement in activities and raising revolutionary consciousness ideology would follow, more easily and quickly’. First let me deal with the question of Vietnam. There can be no denying that until recently this issue was one that aroused a great deal of feeling and enthusiasm among wide layers of students and young workers. Moreover, from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint it is one’s duty to defend the Vietnamese struggle and if possible expand the movement once more. This is doubly important because (a) it is an elementary duty to defend those who are under attack by imperialism, and (b) because the Vietnamese have shown in practice that it is possible to stop imperialist aggression and defeat it. However, to predicate the <em>whole</em> of one’s strategy on this (or any other single) issue – in practice, if not in theory – is to fall into a trap. Whilst it may be true that many people were drawn into activity by the issue of Vietnam, many were not. To have concentrated on this one issue (or today upon student struggles) almost to the exclusion of others is to ignore the very real law of combined and <em>uneven</em> development, one that operates not only internationally, but also nationally. For the proper development of cadres there has to be a number of areas of work and issues in which one operates. Of course it is necessary that there should be priorities, but these have to be worked out on the basis of a full and rounded-out analysis, not by empirical reaction to events. Secondly, on the question of involvement. I would not deny that it is possible to raise the consciousness of many by bringing them into such activities as the anti-Vietnam War campaign. But for this to be utilised properly it is necessary to have a cadre that is conscious of its own role, one cannot rely upon spontaneity. This was the most dangerous aspect of VSC <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> and the present round of student militancy. There seems to have developed the idea that demonstrations and clashes with the police and/or university authorities is all that is necessary to develop revolutionary consciousness. But, to avoid any misunderstanding, let me say that such demonstrations <em>are</em> necessary, and I would be the last to disparage the tremendous work that has been done by such demonstrations.</p>
<p>I find your remarks about the <strong>New Left Review</strong> and ‘intellectual chatter’ most interesting and revealing. I think it indicates the general anti-intellectual character of British society, and also of the British labour movement. You obviously equate ‘intellectual chatter’ with idle chatter. Such attitudes are of great service to the bourgeoisie in helping to maintain their ideological grip upon the working class. The greatest asset that the bourgeoisie have in keeping their society afloat is the ‘common sense’ of the working class who don’t listen to ‘them… long-haired intellectuals’. As for <strong>NLR</strong> not being ‘exactly proletarian’, neither was Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, etc. It is a mistake to try to type people by their class origins. There is nothing particularly sanctifying about the proletarian condition, as Marxists we want to abolish it. What we have to separate out is how certain <em>classes</em> act and not to confuse this with how individuals, or even relatively small groups of people, act. If we were to seize upon the activities of individuals or those of small groups and use this to characterise a whole class or stratum of society, how would we characterise the working class after those dockers had marched to Parliament to support Enoch Powell? Again, please do not misunderstand me, I do not think the sun shines out of all intellectuals’ big toe. But I think to dismiss people one must have some knowledge upon which to base this. All too often in the Marxist movement one hears of ideas being dismissed because they are ‘bourgeois’ or ‘petty-bourgeois’ (apparently a most horrible thing to be), nothing is more indicative of a closed mind than the use of clichés to answer problems.</p>
<p>Are there so many cadres around? I would think that this is a slightly more complex question than appears at first sight and also how you pose it. On the one hand there is certainly not a revolutionary cadre formed as yet, taking Gramsci’s definition as one’s criterion. On the other hand there are certainly many people around who would and could form the basis for such a cadre. But it is not a question of lumping together a certain number of people and when one reaches a certain arithmetic number saying that a revolutionary cadre has been formed. The formation of a cadre is a dialectical process. The collective impact of such a cadre is much greater than the mere summation of individual efforts. Therefore the problem is not merely grouping together the largest number of people possible, perhaps by using a low common denominator, but of grouping together talents as will have a revolutionary impact upon society. Initially such a grouping can be relatively quite small, but their impact and success will generate further growth.</p>
<p>I do not think you are being ‘naive’ when you say ‘some sensible person talked about the immediate necessity of <em>making</em> revolution not talking about it’, you were merely misquoting him. The sensible person I presume you refer to is Fidel Castro, now as far as I know he has talked about the duty of revolutionaries to make revolution. I do not recall his saying anything about immediately. Now of course Castro was not saying this is something we can put off into the distant future. I take him to mean that no matter what the <em>present</em> conditions revolutionaries must clearly have a perspective of revolution, one on which we base all our activities. But it would be absolute nonsense to say that all revolutionaries must rush out now and start the revolution. There is a small item called the objective circumstances which have to be taken into account. If I correctly interpret Castro’s slogan (and we should remember it is a slogan) I take him to mean that revolutionaries by their activities help to change these objective circumstances, because they are not god-given and immutable. Looked at in this way this slogan begins to take on a deeper significance than a mere tautology, which it may appear to be at first sight.</p>
<p>And now to your last point. The French events of May–June 1968 were unexpected in the precise way in which they developed, and the rapidity with which they became a pre-revolutionary situation. I would not suggest that Marxists are able to forecast the precise timetable of mass movements, we are not crystal-ball gazers. Yet at the same time such mass upsurges should not have taken Marxists by surprise to the extent of being disoriented by them. Marxists should not only respond to circumstances, they must also help to shape them. If our theory does not allow us to do this then it <em>is</em> ‘intellectual chatter’. Revolutions are only unpredictable if one stands passively watching, if one enters into the mass movement and attempts to help shape them, then the unpredictability becomes much less. The scale and effectiveness of such interventions depend largely upon the preparations that precede such situations. This is why a revolutionary party is both a subjective and an objective factor within any such situations. Men make their own history, but they do so with all the weight of the past and present bearing down on them.</p>
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<p class="fst">Yours fraternally<br>
<em>Ken Tarbuck</em></p>
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<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> The word ‘next’ seems to be more apt here – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> VSC – Vietnam Solidarity Campaign – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
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<p class="updat">Last updated: 14 October 2014</p>
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Ken Tarbuck | ETOL Main Page
Ken Tarbuck
A Letter to a Comrade
(Spring 1970)
From Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 1970.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Dear Comrade
Your letter was of great interest because it raised quite a number of points that need to be clarified.
You say that you are ‘not sure’ that cadre building is the ‘vital thing’ and suggest that it is more important to get young workers and students involved in activity. I can well understand your impatience on this question, because it seems there is a dichotomy between these two functions. However, I would suggest that this dichotomy is not – or should not be – a real one. Our point of departure must be ‘how can we advance the fight against capitalism and bring it to a successful conclusion’. The point I was trying to make in my article The Making of Revolutionaries: Cadre or Sect was that many people start from this generalised and abstract proposition only to arrive at a dead-end, even though for a time they seem to have made some progress. Some knowledge of the British labour movement will tell us that it is littered with many attempts to find a way out of the impasse. In the event – up to now – they have all failed, and to say this is not to disparage the devotion and sincerity of those involved. The proposition that I advanced was that – leaving aside the objective conditions, which have played a large part in this failure – they all fell down either because they were unable to create a revolutionary cadre or did not understand the nature of such a cadre. This is why I devoted so much space to examining this question.
However – and this must be clearly understood – cadres cannot be created in an ivory tower, separate and apart from the actual struggles that are taking place at any given time. On the other hand, participation in such struggles does not automatically create cadres. What is involved here is: what does one mean by cadres? I repeat what I said in my original article, one must not confuse activists and cadres, to do so means to have an administrative and manipulative concept of cadres. Cadres in the Leninist or Gramscian sense of the term are revolutionary intellectuals, or intellectuals of a new type. That is not to say, therefore, that one must hand out labels to those who participate in a movement and accord them some differing and exalted status, in the last analysis people will decide for themselves what their role is by their contribution.
I agree that the activist approach should be given as much importance as cadre building – if one sees them as being separate, but I do not. In my article I attempted to point out that for genuine revolutionary activity to take place, and by this I mean that the situation has materially affected the relative position of the various classes within society, then there must be a fusion of theory and practice, that is, praxis. What I wanted to drive home was that only rarely has this been the case up to now, rather we have been faced by sects that have produced activists, and sometimes unthinking ones. The essence of this point is that we must get away from seeing some sort of dichotomy between activity and intellectual effort. I made the point by asking was Marx merely (!) theorising when he was writing Capital, and was Castro merely (!) being an activist when he landed from the Granma? It is only by understanding the fundamental unity of such apparently diverse ‘activities’ that one grasps the concept of praxis.
If I understand the drift of your next point, you are saying that in the last [1] two years or so the most important thing is to create activities and demonstrations around student and Vietnam issues because you ‘think that with involvement in activities and raising revolutionary consciousness ideology would follow, more easily and quickly’. First let me deal with the question of Vietnam. There can be no denying that until recently this issue was one that aroused a great deal of feeling and enthusiasm among wide layers of students and young workers. Moreover, from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint it is one’s duty to defend the Vietnamese struggle and if possible expand the movement once more. This is doubly important because (a) it is an elementary duty to defend those who are under attack by imperialism, and (b) because the Vietnamese have shown in practice that it is possible to stop imperialist aggression and defeat it. However, to predicate the whole of one’s strategy on this (or any other single) issue – in practice, if not in theory – is to fall into a trap. Whilst it may be true that many people were drawn into activity by the issue of Vietnam, many were not. To have concentrated on this one issue (or today upon student struggles) almost to the exclusion of others is to ignore the very real law of combined and uneven development, one that operates not only internationally, but also nationally. For the proper development of cadres there has to be a number of areas of work and issues in which one operates. Of course it is necessary that there should be priorities, but these have to be worked out on the basis of a full and rounded-out analysis, not by empirical reaction to events. Secondly, on the question of involvement. I would not deny that it is possible to raise the consciousness of many by bringing them into such activities as the anti-Vietnam War campaign. But for this to be utilised properly it is necessary to have a cadre that is conscious of its own role, one cannot rely upon spontaneity. This was the most dangerous aspect of VSC [2] and the present round of student militancy. There seems to have developed the idea that demonstrations and clashes with the police and/or university authorities is all that is necessary to develop revolutionary consciousness. But, to avoid any misunderstanding, let me say that such demonstrations are necessary, and I would be the last to disparage the tremendous work that has been done by such demonstrations.
I find your remarks about the New Left Review and ‘intellectual chatter’ most interesting and revealing. I think it indicates the general anti-intellectual character of British society, and also of the British labour movement. You obviously equate ‘intellectual chatter’ with idle chatter. Such attitudes are of great service to the bourgeoisie in helping to maintain their ideological grip upon the working class. The greatest asset that the bourgeoisie have in keeping their society afloat is the ‘common sense’ of the working class who don’t listen to ‘them… long-haired intellectuals’. As for NLR not being ‘exactly proletarian’, neither was Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, etc. It is a mistake to try to type people by their class origins. There is nothing particularly sanctifying about the proletarian condition, as Marxists we want to abolish it. What we have to separate out is how certain classes act and not to confuse this with how individuals, or even relatively small groups of people, act. If we were to seize upon the activities of individuals or those of small groups and use this to characterise a whole class or stratum of society, how would we characterise the working class after those dockers had marched to Parliament to support Enoch Powell? Again, please do not misunderstand me, I do not think the sun shines out of all intellectuals’ big toe. But I think to dismiss people one must have some knowledge upon which to base this. All too often in the Marxist movement one hears of ideas being dismissed because they are ‘bourgeois’ or ‘petty-bourgeois’ (apparently a most horrible thing to be), nothing is more indicative of a closed mind than the use of clichés to answer problems.
Are there so many cadres around? I would think that this is a slightly more complex question than appears at first sight and also how you pose it. On the one hand there is certainly not a revolutionary cadre formed as yet, taking Gramsci’s definition as one’s criterion. On the other hand there are certainly many people around who would and could form the basis for such a cadre. But it is not a question of lumping together a certain number of people and when one reaches a certain arithmetic number saying that a revolutionary cadre has been formed. The formation of a cadre is a dialectical process. The collective impact of such a cadre is much greater than the mere summation of individual efforts. Therefore the problem is not merely grouping together the largest number of people possible, perhaps by using a low common denominator, but of grouping together talents as will have a revolutionary impact upon society. Initially such a grouping can be relatively quite small, but their impact and success will generate further growth.
I do not think you are being ‘naive’ when you say ‘some sensible person talked about the immediate necessity of making revolution not talking about it’, you were merely misquoting him. The sensible person I presume you refer to is Fidel Castro, now as far as I know he has talked about the duty of revolutionaries to make revolution. I do not recall his saying anything about immediately. Now of course Castro was not saying this is something we can put off into the distant future. I take him to mean that no matter what the present conditions revolutionaries must clearly have a perspective of revolution, one on which we base all our activities. But it would be absolute nonsense to say that all revolutionaries must rush out now and start the revolution. There is a small item called the objective circumstances which have to be taken into account. If I correctly interpret Castro’s slogan (and we should remember it is a slogan) I take him to mean that revolutionaries by their activities help to change these objective circumstances, because they are not god-given and immutable. Looked at in this way this slogan begins to take on a deeper significance than a mere tautology, which it may appear to be at first sight.
And now to your last point. The French events of May–June 1968 were unexpected in the precise way in which they developed, and the rapidity with which they became a pre-revolutionary situation. I would not suggest that Marxists are able to forecast the precise timetable of mass movements, we are not crystal-ball gazers. Yet at the same time such mass upsurges should not have taken Marxists by surprise to the extent of being disoriented by them. Marxists should not only respond to circumstances, they must also help to shape them. If our theory does not allow us to do this then it is ‘intellectual chatter’. Revolutions are only unpredictable if one stands passively watching, if one enters into the mass movement and attempts to help shape them, then the unpredictability becomes much less. The scale and effectiveness of such interventions depend largely upon the preparations that precede such situations. This is why a revolutionary party is both a subjective and an objective factor within any such situations. Men make their own history, but they do so with all the weight of the past and present bearing down on them.
Yours fraternally
Ken Tarbuck
Notes
1. The word ‘next’ seems to be more apt here – MIA.
2. VSC – Vietnam Solidarity Campaign – MIA.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Trotsky’s Marxism: A Reply to Nicolas Krassó</h1>
<h3>(Autumn 1968)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Bulletin of Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 1 No. 2, Autumn 1968.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><small><strong>Editor’s Note</strong>: This article was first written in October 1967 in response to an essay that appeared in <strong>New Left Review</strong>, No. 44. Although it was submitted for publication in <strong>NLR</strong> – and tentatively accepted – it has not yet been published. One reply to Nicolas Krassó has been published in <strong>NLR</strong>, No. 47, by Ernest Mandel and it is well worthwhile for readers to obtain this and the original essay. The present article stands in its own right, since the points in dispute have a significance beyond the pages of <strong>NLR</strong>. The place of Trotsky in the history of Marxism is one that still has topical import.</small></p>
<p><small>Since the original article and the reply were written major events have taken place that demonstrate both the validity of Trotsky’s contribution <em>and</em> of its relevance for politics today. Both the French events and the Czechoslovakian events, each in their own way, have shown the relevance of Trotskyism to today’s world.</small></p>
<p><small>The present article has been amended slightly from that version which was first submitted to the <strong>NLR</strong> in October 1967. However, in the main it still stands as it was written then.</small></p>
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<p class="fst">Nicolas Krassó’s article attempting to appraise Trotsky’s place in the history of Marxism was both too long and too short. It was too long in the sense that it tried to cover such a long time-span, one that was explosively full of history-making events; too short because the nature of the material handled meant that nearly every point could only be touched upon in a generalised way. Perhaps this is the price that is paid for initiating such a discussion. However, this has raised certain problems in the writing of this reply, it has meant that not every point could be taken up and argued but only those that seem to have an important bearing on the central issues.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Permanent Revolution</h4>
<p class="fst">The first point I would like to take up is the question of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Nicolas Krassó calls this an ‘inept designation which by evoking the idea of a continuous conflagration at all times and at all places – a metaphysical carnival of insurrection – it lent itself to distortion in the polemic both of Trotsky’s opponents and his followers’. We are told that Trotsky’s formula conflated two quite distinct problems, the character of the Russian revolution and its ability to maintain itself without an international extension of the revolution. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p>Nicolas Krassó contends that ‘the illegitimate nature of this process is all too obvious’, but is it? The illegitimate posing of the problem only arises if one views the question from a formal logical position. The question of the survival, or otherwise, of a successful revolution in a hostile capitalist world <em>did</em> hinge on the character of that revolution. If one compares the reaction of the capitalist world generally, and the Allied powers in particular, to the February revolution and the reaction to the October revolution, one sees the conflation that is objected to taking place in real life. Nor was this hostility manifested merely because the Bolsheviks sued for peace, interventions continued and grew in intensity after the defeat of Germany. Is Nicolas Krassó going to suggest that had Kerensky continued in office, with all that that would have implied, that there would have still been interventions; or on the other hand that the interventions that did (and still do) take place were merely fortuitous? To attempt to separate the two aspects of any revolution today, after all the experience that we have of imperialist interventions, is to take the discussion back half a century.</p>
<p>Moreover, it can be seen from living experience, that of Cuba, that the international conditions at a given time and place help to <em>determine</em> the nature and scope of a revolution. Any examination of this experience will show that the particular course of this revolution has been profoundly influenced by the intervention of US imperialism and the support for the revolutionary regime gathered from the workers’ states. There is another aspect to be considered, this is the international effects a victorious workers’ revolution would and does have. This side of the theory of permanent revolution implies that revolutions do not take place in isolation, but are part of an international process. Again one can point to living experience for the validity of this proposition since 1945. The victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and the Cuban revolution in 1959 are not two separate disconnected events, rather they form parts of that permanent revolution that Marx and Trotsky wrote about. Nicolas Krassó injected the phrase ‘metaphysical carnival of insurrection’ and then proceeds on the assumption that this <em>was</em> also Trotsky’s view. This is an <em>utter</em> distortion of Trotsky’s real views. It is interesting that Trotsky was not allowed to ‘speak’ for himself about this matter, perhaps because no quotation could be dug up to prove that he ever said that the Soviet Union could only be saved by ‘simultaneous revolutions in Western Europe’. Such nonsense will <em>not</em> be found in Trotsky’s writings. Deutscher presented a balanced synthesis of the permanent revolution when he wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Trotsky’s theory is in truth a profound and comprehensive conception in which all the overturns that the world has been undergoing (in this late capitalist era) are represented as interconnected and interdependent parts of a single revolutionary process. To put it in the broadest terms, the social upheaval of our century is seen by Trotsky as global in scope and character, even though it proceeds on various levels of civilisation and in the most diverse social structures, and even though its various phases are separated from one another in time and space. (<em>Introduction</em> to <strong>The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology</strong>, p. 19) <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Nicolas Krassó’s attempt to refute the theory of permanent revolution is an attempt to refute the process of life in the modern world. The theory is no longer one that lives solely between the pages of a book. Since 1917 it has been subject to empirical verification and has been endorsed in the process.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Socialism in One Country</h4>
<p class="fst">Nicolas Krassó’s muddled thinking on the question of permanent revolution leads him to serve up an historical and theoretical pastiche on the question of ‘Socialism in One Country’. We are told:</p>
<p class="quoteb">It was naive to speculate whether revolutions would or would not occur in the West, in general. Bolshevik strategy should not be based on the presumption of an occurrence of a European revolution; but nor should the possibility of one be discarded. After Lenin’s death, however, this dialectical position disintegrated ...</p>
<p class="fst">This imputes a view to Lenin that he did not hold. Lenin said very specifically on a number of occasions that ‘world imperialism cannot live side by side with a victorious advancing social revolution’. On 23 April 1918 Lenin said: ‘Our backwardness has thrust us forward and we shall perish if we are unable to hold out until we meet the mighty support of the insurrectionary workers of other countries.’ <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a> These and many more references put him without question in the camp of those who thought that an isolated workers’ state would not survive for long. If, as Nicolas Krassó implies, the Bolsheviks had a non-committal attitude (it is a misuse of language to call it dialectical) to revolution in the West why was there such enthusiasm for the creation of the Third International? Moreover, the Third International did not ‘speculate’ about revolutions in the West but was viewed by nearly all the leading Bolsheviks, Lenin included, as being the world party of revolution in a very concrete and active way. Indeed <em>any</em> reading of the early days of the Russian Revolution makes it very clear that it was seen as a <em>prelude</em> to revolution in the West.</p>
<p>However, this was not the only aspect of ‘Socialism in One Country’ that was opposed by the Left Opposition in the 1920s. The other aspect concerned the type of society that was envisaged when one spoke about socialism. The point of departure for the Opposition was the fact that capitalism had created a world market, world economy and a worldwide division of labour. Therefore in the age of imperialism national boundaries become more and more restricting on the development of productive forces. If socialism is to develop the productive forces on such a scale that standards of material well-being are far superior to those under capitalism and men freed from routine drudgery then this international division of labour will have to be carried to a much higher pitch. To talk about the building of socialism in backward Russia was an essentially reactionary and utopian idea, it implied the <em>abandonment</em> of a perspective of international revolution, and along with it the best defence for a backward workers’ state.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">The Intelligentsia and Socialism</h4>
<p class="fst">The line of argument pursued by Nicolas Krassó in this section is rather obscure. He accused Trotsky of bitter hostility towards intellectuals, bringing forward an article written in 1910 as evidence. Trotsky is said to view the intelligentsia in a ‘wholly pre-Leninist manner’ and hence his views are un-Marxist! Apart from the setting up of Lenin as an icon, this interpretation is very misleading. Trotsky, in the article in question, was analysing the role of intellectuals as a <em>social layer</em> within capitalist society. Lenin, in contrast, wrote about and directed his activity towards intellectuals breaking from this environment and becoming revolutionaries. Trotsky <em>did not</em> dismiss the intelligentsia <em>in toto</em>, he postulated conditions under which they would move towards socialism. He said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The intelligentsia might go over to collectivism if it were given reason to see as probable the <em>immediate</em> victory of collectivism, if collectivism rose before it not as an ideal of a different, remote and alien class but as a near and tangible reality; finally, if – and this is not the least important condition – a political break with the bourgeoisie did not threaten each brain-worker taken separately with grave material and moral consequences. <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a></p>
<p class="fst">It is obvious that here Trotsky was concerned with the conditions which went to mould the intelligentsia, and the forces that operated against its allying with the working class. It certainly could be argued that such conditions are today not so pressing, particularly here in Britain. But it would be unwise to assume that such conditions are no longer operative at all.</p>
<p>It would also be well to recall that Trotsky was writing in 1910 and that his assessment of the role and attitudes of the intelligentsia in relation to the working class was a realistic one. Looking at the British labour movement of 1910, for instance, one could see that intellectuals <em>as a social layer</em> played a minimal role, the Webbs <em>et al.</em> notwithstanding. When numbers of the intelligentsia did move into the Labour Party, after 1918, they further debased the dominant labourism. However, it must be noted that even today the intelligentsia, <em>as a social layer</em>, have not decisively gone over to socialism here in Britain, even of the Labour variety let alone revolutionary socialism. It is clear that only when individual members of the intelligentsia commit themselves to a working-class party does their role <em>inside</em> become a critical one. If today more individual intellectuals commit themselves to socialism, does this prove Trotsky wrong? It certainly does if one attempts to read him as a sort of Gospel or Holy Writ. However, it does not prove him wrong if one takes into account the October, Chinese and Cuban revolutions. Collectivism is no longer a remote ideal but a living reality. On the other hand, one of the lessons of all three revolutions is that, along with the dispossessed ruling class, large numbers of the intelligentsia also flee and take up hostile positions to the new regimes. Even those that stayed in Russia after 1917 had to be wooed by special privileges. One is not being bitterly hostile to them because one acknowledges the truth about their position in society. This position is that they are dominated by the hegemonic ideology of the ruling class and help to perpetuate it.</p>
<p>To try to insert Gramsci’s concept of a <em>new</em> type of intellectual produced by a revolutionary party into a discussion about intellectuals as a social layer is to befog the issue. The roles of the individual intellectual and that of the intelligentsia <em>are</em> separate problems, even though obviously related. Nicolas Krassó writes that ‘the party ... an autonomous structure ... recombines and transforms two different phenomena – the intelligentsia and the working class’. This is indeed an odd way of putting it. How can an <em>autonomous</em> structure – the party – recombine two <em>classes</em>? If this autonomous structure were to carry out this feat it would not <em>be</em> autonomous and class and party would be synonymous! The charge of identifying class and party which is laid at Trotsky’s feet should be laid elsewhere. The <em>modified</em> elements which engage in new political practice, that is, the revolutionary party, are not the intelligentsia and the working class but only individuals and perhaps sections from these two social formations. To say otherwise is precisely to confuse class and party as Nicolas Krassó does.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">1917–1921</h4>
<p class="fst">It is necessary to have a clear factual understanding of history if one sets out to interpret it. Unfortunately Nicolas Krassó does not have this. This is evident when he says: ‘Trotsky was determined to strengthen the power of professional military officers with a Tsarist past in the Red Army, and he fought the imposition of control over them by political commissars appointed by the party.’ This is very far wide of what the real situation was. The dispute over the employment of the ex-Tsarist officers was if they should be used <em>at all</em>, and this was only a subsidiary question to the wider one of a centralised army versus militia. This was debated at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky wanted to use these officers in their capacity of military experts, but at the same time made a specific request to the Central Committee to supply him with reliable Communists to act as commissars. Deutscher says that Trotsky ‘implored’ the Central Committee for these men. There was never any question of the ex-Tsarist officers having <em>more</em> power since <em>all</em> their orders had to be countersigned by their political commissars.</p>
<p>Nicolas Krassó uses these unfounded assertions to insert the idea that Trotsky was an essentially military figure, more at ease in a command situation. He says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">He [Trotsky] had authority <em>ab initio</em> to organise the army; as People’s Commissar for War he had all the prestige of Lenin and the Soviet state behind him. He did not have to <em>win</em> this authority in a political arena by persuading his peers to accept him.</p>
<p class="fst">Again, this is a perversion of the real situation. Deutscher puts the matter differently:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The new campaigning season was approaching, but even now, a year after Trotsky had become Commissar of War, his military policy had not yet received the party’s blessing – he carried it out as if on his own responsibility. (<strong>The Prophet Armed</strong>, p. 429)</p>
<p class="fst">It was not until the Eighth Congress that the party formally endorsed this military policy of Trotsky. But even then it would be grossly misleading to suggest that the role of a military leader was only one of command. In any civil war situation appeals and persuasion play a far greater role than routine authority or command. In the case of the <em>creation</em> of the Red Army this was particularly so. There was no tradition, no historical precedents, no hegemonic ideology holding undisputed sway. It is in this light that Trotsky’s role must be viewed, and this was essentially a political one. The early formations of the Red Army were entirely voluntary, only when a reliable proletarian military cadre had been formed was it possible to resort to conscription. Even when conscription was used it must be seen in a very different way to ‘normal’ induction. In a civil war there is no guarantee that your conscripts will not desert in large numbers to the other side, or perhaps just desert, if there is not a firm political basis laid.</p>
<p>Nicolas Krassó tells us that ‘the voluntarist is in his element haranguing crowds or dispatching troops – but these roles should not be confused with the ability to lead a revolutionary party’. What he forgets is that before anyone can ‘dispatch troops’ he must have them at hand. Therefore the art of a revolutionary military leader is the gathering of the troops and convincing them of the need to be ‘dispatched’. This is where Nicolas Krassó utterly fails to see the similarity, and at times identity (Cuba), between a revolutionary army and party.</p>
<p>Again, Nicolas Krassó misunderstands the reality of the early days of the Soviet Republic and the nature of the military policy. He says that Trotsky:</p>
<p class="quoteb">... as a pillar of the Soviet state ... had to give orders to his subordinates for precise purposes. His task in either role was to ensure the means to a previously determined end. This is a different task from that of ensuring that a novel end prevails among various competing opinions in a political organisation.</p>
<p class="fst">This improperly assumes that the end of a civil, or any other, war is predetermined. This is not so, the only end predetermined in a war situation is that the enemy should be defeated. Also in a revolutionary party the only end predetermined is that there should be revolution. In both situations the means, methods, tactics, etc., will be subject to discussion and debate. This is not to suggest that in a civil war the debate will be conducted at all levels within the army, but neither will it be in the party; the nature of the situation sometimes precludes it. Furthermore, even if one assumes that for the Red Army <em>per se</em> ends were predetermined by the Central Committee, Trotsky played a part in arriving at the decisions. He was not a passive onlooker waiting for his orders to be handed down to him.</p>
<p>Trotsky could hardly be called a pillar of the Soviet <em>state</em> until late in the civil war, because no such state existed in the accepted use of the term. The term pillar is misleading; it conjures up a picture of a solid, well-founded and established regime, when in fact very often the continued existence of the regime hung in the balance. What we are given, by implication, is a picture of Trotsky moving in an orderly, established structure of known and given dimensions, when in fact society and every subordinate structure, including the revolutionary party, was in a condition of flux. Only holding a static and unreal vision of revolution could lead one to see Trotsky, or any other Bolshevik leader, in a command situation in those early days.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">1921–1929</h4>
<p class="fst">Nicolas Krassó here turns to the theme of substitution and identity in the relations between party and class, implying that Trotsky fell into the ‘error’ of identity, that is, of seeing the party and class as identical. He presents us with a quotation from <strong>The New Course</strong> which seems to bear him out; but it would have been better had he completed the quotation. It would have given an accurate picture of what Trotsky said. Here is the quotation with the missing sentences restored:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The different needs of the working class, of the peasantry, of the state apparatus and its membership, act upon our party, through whose medium they seek to find a political expression. The difficulties and contradictions in our epoch, the temporary discord in the interests of the different layers of the proletariat, or of the proletariat as a whole and the peasantry, act upon the party through the medium of its worker and peasant cells, of the state apparatus, of the student youth. Even episodic differences in views and nuances of opinion may express the remote pressure of distinct social interests and, in certain circumstances, be transformed into stable groupings; the latter may, in turn, sooner or later take the form of organised factions which, opposing themselves to the rest of the party, undergo by that very fact even greater external pressure. <em>Such is the dialectics of inner-party groupings in an epoch when the Communist Party is obliged to monopolise the direction of political life.</em> (<strong>The New Course</strong>, p. 27, emphasis added) <a href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a></p>
<p class="fst">The emphasised sentence is the key to a proper understanding of what Trotsky was discussing; only by leaving it out was Nicolas Krassó able to present his interpretation to an unwary reader. The chapter that this comes from is <em>Groups and Factional Formation</em>s. In this Trotsky was discussing the politics of a one-party state, as the above makes clear. He was not talking about parties in general, nor was there any suggestion that party and class are identical. What he was doing was to <em>explore</em> the nature of groups and factions in a situation where only one party was the prescribed form of political activity, and in so doing was breaking new ground. For socialists and Marxists the situation in the Soviet Union was a novel and unprecedented one. Certainly in 1917 no one foresaw such a situation. The subsequent developments in the 1920s seem to have borne out what Trotsky was saying in 1923. Indeed, later on the experience of the <em>monolithic</em> one-party state indicates that unless the party does reflect these differences then it ceases to be a party in the accepted use of the term.</p>
<p>We are also told that Trotsky was guilty of ‘sociologism’, and this first led him into the trap of equating party and class in the theoretical field; and in practical politics urging the proletarianisation of the party as an antidote to bureaucracy. Further, we are told that Stalin followed this advice with disastrous results for – Trotsky! However, Deutscher puts the matter rather differently:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The triumvirs [Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev] resolved to open at once a spectacular recruiting drive in the factories. But while Trotsky had advised a careful selection, they decided to recruit <em>en masse</em>, to accept any worker who cared to join, and to waive all customary tests and conditions. At the Thirteenth Conference they recommended the recruitment at a stroke of 100,000 workers ... This was a mockery of Bolshevik principle of organisation which required that, as the élite and vanguard of the proletariat, the party should only accept the politically advanced and the politically battle-hardened. (<strong>The Prophet Unarmed</strong>, p. 135)</p>
<p class="fst">Trotsky indeed made the point that the process of recruitment of workers should be slow and then ‘only under conditions of noteworthy economic advance’ (<strong>The New Course</strong>, pp. 20–21). <a href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a> Here a different picture emerges from that of a primitive sociologism – workers good, bureaucrats bad – here we see Trotsky grappling with a real problem, that of declining worker membership, and its implications for the future of the party. Nicolas Krassó seems to imply that the social composition of a revolutionary socialist party is of no consequence. Perhaps what he means is that such a party should be <em>for</em> the workers but not necessarily <em>of</em> them. Surely, Trotsky was making the point that the socialist revolutionary party, especially one in power, with only a minority of workers was a long-term determinant contradiction. Therefore he urged that steps should be taken to rectify the situation. It is somewhat bizarre to imply that Trotsky had an idyllic view of workers in Russia at this time. He wrote a considerable amount about the low level of culture during this period, and had a lively appreciation of the political problems this posed.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Collectivisation and Industrialisation</h4>
<p class="fst">The question of industrial development in underdeveloped countries is still one that has a burning topicality, especially for those countries which have broken free of the capitalist orbit. In such circumstances the question will arise – ‘Where will the surplus come from?’ This is indeed a crucial point. However, Nicolas Krassó paints far too black and white a picture:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Bukharin advocated an ultra-right policy of private peasant enrichment at the expense of the towns: ‘We shall move forward by tiny, tiny steps pulling behind us our large peasant cart.’ Preobrazhensky urged the exploitation of the peasantry (in the technical economic sense) to accumulate a surplus for rapid industrialisation.</p>
<p class="fst">Of course it is possible to show <em>these</em> formulations as being violently contradictory, since they are men of straw. To talk of Lenin’s policy is, in this context, misleading, since he did not have time to formulate a fully coherent and articulated one before his death. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky are presented in a way which belies their respective attitudes. Another point should be added – Trotsky was not wholly in agreement with Preobrazhensky’s ideas as put forward in <strong>The New Economics</strong>; but there is no doubt that they were in agreement on the practical policies put forward by the Opposition. Therefore one should make some distinction between Trotsky and Preobrazhensky.</p>
<p>Bukharin, essentially, argued that the development of industry should be geared to rural demand, and that light or consumer goods industry should be given priority. Such a policy did in fact encourage the revival of capitalist elements in the countryside, and meant that in practice the state industries became subordinated to the market. However, it would be wrong to say that Bukharin urged the enrichment of the peasants at the <em>expense</em> of the towns, since this would have meant the exploitation of the working class. What he no doubt intended was that his policy would generate the surplus in the countryside and this would lead eventually to accumulation. He failed to appreciate that an agricultural surplus does not necessarily lead to accumulation, and indeed the evidence is that in underdeveloped countries in the capitalist orbit this surplus is largely squandered or invested in land and usury. Only by consciously breaking the law of value (not ignoring it) can this be overcome.</p>
<p>Preobrazhensky’s analysis was, originally, a theoretical one which posed the conflict between the private sector of the economy (mainly agricultural) which was the majority and the small state-owned industrial sector; and the need for a fast rate of industrial accumulation. He designated a law of primitive socialist accumulation in this way:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The more backward economically, petty-bourgeois, peasant, a particular country is which has gone over to the socialist organisation of production, and the smaller the inheritance received by the socialist accumulation fund of the proletariat of this country when the social revolution takes place, by so much the more, in proportion, will socialist accumulation be obliged to rely on alienating part of the surplus product of pre-socialist forms of economy. (<strong>The New Economics</strong>, p. 124)</p>
<p class="fst">He argued that because of the small absolute and relative amount of surplus available in Soviet industry the main contribution must come from agriculture. This does imply ‘technical exploitation’ of the peasants, but this process should be explained since it is possible to forget one half of the term – technical – and concentrate on the other – exploitation. Preobrazhensky explained the matter very clearly:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The task of the socialist state consists here not in taking from the petty-bourgeois producers less than capitalism took, but in taking more <em>from the still larger</em> incomes which will be secured to the petty producers by the rationalisation of the whole economy, including petty production, on the basis of industrialising the country and intensifying agriculture. (<strong>The New Economics</strong>, p. 89, emphasis in original)</p>
<p class="fst">Nicolas Krassó injects into this debate an essentially static view of economics when he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">For the poorer the peasantry was, the less surplus it had over and beyond what it consumed itself, and the less it was ‘exploitable’ for industrialisation. Bukharin’s conciliation of peasantry and Preobrazhensky’s counterposition of it to the proletariat were equally distortions of Lenin’s policy, which was to collectivise but not crush the peasantry, not wage war on them.</p>
<p class="fst">Now clearly, if one views national income, or the social product, as a given quantity, then one is justified in arguing that an increase in one class’s share is based on another class’s share decreasing. However, if one views national income as a stream that is increasing in size through time, then it is possible for all to have an increasing total consumption, but at the same time one section of society may have a smaller percentage share than previously. <a href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a> However, this is a very simplified approach to the particular problem.</p>
<p>A first approach to a proper understanding of the problem is clearly to distinguish accumulation between <em>maximum</em> and <em>optimum</em> rates of accumulation in the short run. This is where Nicolas Krassó is mistaken in assuming that Stalin took over (and denatured) the Left Opposition’s economic policies. The first Five-Year Plans were in fact based on the premise of a maximum rate of accumulation but turned out to be increasing production at a slower lower rate than if an optimum rate had been aimed for.</p>
<p>Some would consider an optimum rate of accumulation in purely economic terms to be that rate which increases the social product by a maximum amount in a given period. But no Marxist could accept such a definition because it leaves out the class forces involved. A policy which reduces the living standards of the working class, creating demoralisation and political apathy would be totally unacceptable. Moreover, one could not accept any assumption which postulated that productivity of labour was independent of the level of consumption. This is what the Stalinist bureaucracy did with disastrous results for Soviet agriculture and for the Soviet working class in the first two Five-Year Plans. In the frenzy to achieve a maximum rate of accumulation there was in fact a lowering of the maximum increase of the social product that could have been gained, had an optimum rate of accumulation been adopted.</p>
<p>Another point is that Nicolas Krassó uses the term peasantry indiscriminately; none of the protagonists in the original discussion made such an error. If he looks at the <strong>Platform of the Left Opposition 1927</strong> he will see that an analysis was made of the ‘class differentiation among the peasants’. In trying to assess the situation in rural Russia in the mid-1920s such a mistake as Nicolas Krassó’s is impermissible. The Left Opposition had a policy of support for the poor landless and middle peasants along with proposals for generous credit terms and a speedy introduction of mechanisation into agriculture; and of course collectivisation via cooperatives. They certainly had a policy of containing and finally eliminating the Kulaks (as a class), who were becoming the basis of a new capitalist development within the Soviet Union. Does Nicolas Krassó think this wrong? Stalin, to whom Nicolas Krassó accords the accolade of being ‘confirmed by history’, had, along with Bukharin, pooh-poohed the warnings of the Opposition, but was later thrown into a panic by the growing power and resistance of the Kulaks. This problem was ‘solved’ in a brutal and bloody repression. To suggest that the policy of the Left Opposition had any connection with this is to stretch credibility too far.</p>
<p>Perhaps the biggest mistake that Nicolas Krassó makes over the debate on industrialisation is to suggest that this was primarily concerned with <em>administrative</em> options, whereas the debate over ‘Socialism in One Country’ only concerned international articulations. Planning in any transitional regime will be essentially the ‘allocation of scarce resources’. This commonplace of bourgeois economics will then become a reality, for the allocation will then be done by conscious decision and not by the anarchy of the market. Nevertheless, the basis for political economy will still be the relationship of men (and classes) <em>to each other</em> in the distribution of scarce resources, that is, to the means of production. It is this fundamentally different approach that distinguishes Marxist economics. Nicolas Krassó makes the error of assuming that economics is a ‘technical’ or ‘administrative’ subject, and thereby confuses techniques and ideology. The debate in Cuba over moral versus material incentives was an interesting example of the fusion between economics and politics. The particular techniques that are used or that are chosen, will, by and large, reflect (even if only in a diffused way) the political decisions they are based on. For instance, the decision by Wilson in 1964 not to devalue the pound debarred him from using a number of techniques for grappling with the economic crisis. The original decision was a political one. It is possible to argue about this or that aspect of policy since then, and indeed we should, but unless one takes into account the central political decision then one can get lost.</p>
<p>Therefore, to suggest that the debates on economic policy and ‘Socialism in One Country’ were separate and unconnected does not stand up to investigation. The economic debate was around how much surplus was to be generated and who would benefit. ‘Socialism in One Country’ was the reaction of the bureaucrats wanting to hang on to their share. <em>Both</em> arose from the backwardness and isolation of the Soviet Union.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">1927–1940</h4>
<p class="fst">Despite some notable theoretical writings in this period we are told that Trotsky led an imaginary political movement and therefore the activities of these years were futile. I am not concerned here to argue the merits or demerits of the Fourth International. What I want to do is pose some questions myself. How is it that 30 years after it was founded, this body – the Fourth International – exists at all? When one considers a) that it was founded at a time of working-class defeats, b) that many of its small cadre were killed in Europe, either by the Gestapo or the Stalinists, and c) that in the years immediately after 1945 Stalinism seemed to be greatly strengthened, then one perhaps begins to ask the right questions. When one looks around the international scene for the other numerous anti-Stalinist groupings that existed in the 1930s and 1940s one looks in vain. When one examines the pathetic attempts to create a Maoist ‘International’ with the resources of a great state behind the venture, one can begin to measure the real strength and resilience of the international Trotskyist movement. Nor is this body a group of ageing cultists (despite certain bizarre manifestations in England), on the contrary there has been a steady replacement by youth, which in recent years has increased and this has been a worldwide phenomenon. The question remains: why? I think this is best answered by reference to Che Guevara when he wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">How soon we could look into a bright future, should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and increasing hatred of all peoples of the world? (<em>Vietnam Must Not Stand Alone</em>, <strong>New Left Review</strong>, No. 43, p. 90)</p>
<p class="fst">What Che Guevara demanded was an <em>international</em> strategy against imperialism. The time and the situation demand it. The concept of proletarian internationalism is not an abstract theory. The maimed, the dying and the fighters in Asia, Africa and Latin America cry out for, and are testimony to, the need for such a strategy. The question of the formation of a new revolutionary International was implicit in the holding of the OLAS conference, even if such an International has yet to emerge. It is this that gives the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 its historical validity; all the sneers about a mythical movement cannot erase it. Trotsky was too much of a realist to assume that the small body that gathered round him in 1938 would be <em>the</em> International. What the Fourth International does offer to new and rising generations of revolutionists is an historical continuity with the best of classical Marxism and a programmatic analysis of the modern world that is unrivalled on the international scene.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">The Dead Dogs of Stalin</h4>
<p class="fst">The picture that Nicolas Krassó presented of Trotsky was remarkable only for its rigidity, its lack of development, and its pedestrian quality. It was a lifeless picture and we are given no feeling that Trotsky learned, profited or matured from his mistakes.</p>
<p>Reading the article one is left with the impression that Trotsky sprang on to the stage of politics fully equipped, warts and all, and that there were no real changes. As such the figure is a cardboard one.</p>
<p>The portrait of Lenin is painted in the same style. Lenin is made to appear as some sort of <em>deus ex machina</em> that popped up at the right moment and pulled his muddle-headed party out of trouble. This puts Lenin in the role of a political Svengali, not of a leader. There is no doubt that Lenin played a tremendous role in the Bolshevik Party, and at times this was crucial, but one should not fall victim to a one-sided appraisal. In the last analysis such a picture does no credit to Lenin and certainly not to the Bolsheviks.</p>
<p>But why discuss Trotsky’s concept of the party now? What was the object of the exercise? Above all the other faults in Nicolas Krassó’s article the absence of conclusions is the most startling. Can it be that this long essay was only an exercise in ‘historical’ analysis? Not only here in Britain under the Wilson government, but internationally the question of a Marxist party has a burning topicality. Yet on this Nicolas Krassó is silent. Implicit in the article is the view that there is a need for a Leninist party here and now, and leaving aside the implied difference between this and Trotsky’s concept of the party, one would have thought that if this was the case then it should have been stated. But on this important question we are left, not even with a question mark, but a blank. This brings into question, not Trotsky’s Marxism, but Nicolas Krassó’s. For what is the object of Marxist theory? Is it merely to hone and bring to razor edge individual intellects or should it have as its aim a guide to action? One need not espouse a vulgar interpretation of this axiom, yet any perspective must also incorporate a programme. And this is where Nicolas Krassó’s essay shows its grave deficiencies – there is no programme.</p>
<p>Another aspect of this deficiency is the lack of any analysis of Lenin’s or Trotsky’s concept of an <em>international</em> party; a very strange omission for someone who delved so deeply into a relatively minor article such as the one Trotsky wrote on the intelligentsia. How can this be squared? Such scholarly searchings must have disclosed something on the question of an International, but a reader of the original article would find no hint of this. Only Nicolas Krassó would be able to explain this absence but it would be unwise for the reader to conjecture at it.</p>
<p>A discussion of Trotsky’s contribution to Marxism could have been stimulating and rewarding. It certainly should have been critical, but criticism should be tempered with knowledge and understanding. Unfortunately, we were presented with undigested historical data laced with a Lenin ‘fixation’; neither help in arriving at a sober assessment. In the preface to <strong>The Prophet Armed</strong> Isaac Deutscher referred to the ‘mountain of dead dogs’ that covered Trotsky’s place in history, and that the events of 1956 (Hungary, etc.) saw half that mountain blown to the winds. Unwittingly, Nicolas Krassó is throwing a few of the canine corpses back onto the remains of the mountain. Looking at the world around us today it would seem that he engaged in a rather Canute-like occupation. His obvious talents deserve a better use.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> On the point of a ‘metaphysical carnival’ it might be pertinent to point out that Marx himself originated the phrase permanent revolution in <strong>The Class Struggles in France</strong> when he wrote: ‘This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution ...’ (<a href="../../../../../../archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch03.htm" target="new"><strong>The Class Struggles in France</strong></a> (Moscow 1952), p. 196) If Trotsky was guilty of being inept then he erred along with Marx.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> <a href="../../../../../../archive/deutscher/1964/introduction-trotsky.htm" target="new"><em>Introduction</em></a>, <strong>The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology</strong> (Dell Publishing, New York 1964). – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> V.I. Lenin, <a href="../../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1918/apr/23.htm" target="new"><em>Speech in the Moscow Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army Deputies</em></a>, <strong>Collected Works</strong>, Vol. 27.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> L.D. Trotsky, <a href="../../../../../../archive/trotsky/1910/xx/intell.htm" target="new"><strong>The Intelligentsia and Socialism</strong></a>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> L.D. Trotsky, <a href="../../../../../../archive/trotsky/1923/newcourse/ch02.htm" target="new"><strong>The New Course</strong></a>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> L.D. Trotsky, <a href="../../../../../../archive/trotsky/1923/newcourse/ch02.htm" target="new"><strong>The New Course</strong></a>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> This may sound like the familiar arguments put forward by Wilson & Co with their appeals for higher productivity. Formally it is a correct argument, in the short run, but for Marxists the real question is, who does what with the surplus? If the extra surplus is privately appropriated or bureaucratically misused that is where the fight should begin. We have no argument <em>per se</em> against increased production.</p>
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Trotsky’s Marxism: A Reply to Nicolas Krassó
(Autumn 1968)
From Bulletin of Marxist Studies, Vol. 1 No. 2, Autumn 1968.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Editor’s Note: This article was first written in October 1967 in response to an essay that appeared in New Left Review, No. 44. Although it was submitted for publication in NLR – and tentatively accepted – it has not yet been published. One reply to Nicolas Krassó has been published in NLR, No. 47, by Ernest Mandel and it is well worthwhile for readers to obtain this and the original essay. The present article stands in its own right, since the points in dispute have a significance beyond the pages of NLR. The place of Trotsky in the history of Marxism is one that still has topical import.
Since the original article and the reply were written major events have taken place that demonstrate both the validity of Trotsky’s contribution and of its relevance for politics today. Both the French events and the Czechoslovakian events, each in their own way, have shown the relevance of Trotskyism to today’s world.
The present article has been amended slightly from that version which was first submitted to the NLR in October 1967. However, in the main it still stands as it was written then.
Nicolas Krassó’s article attempting to appraise Trotsky’s place in the history of Marxism was both too long and too short. It was too long in the sense that it tried to cover such a long time-span, one that was explosively full of history-making events; too short because the nature of the material handled meant that nearly every point could only be touched upon in a generalised way. Perhaps this is the price that is paid for initiating such a discussion. However, this has raised certain problems in the writing of this reply, it has meant that not every point could be taken up and argued but only those that seem to have an important bearing on the central issues.
Permanent Revolution
The first point I would like to take up is the question of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Nicolas Krassó calls this an ‘inept designation which by evoking the idea of a continuous conflagration at all times and at all places – a metaphysical carnival of insurrection – it lent itself to distortion in the polemic both of Trotsky’s opponents and his followers’. We are told that Trotsky’s formula conflated two quite distinct problems, the character of the Russian revolution and its ability to maintain itself without an international extension of the revolution. [1]
Nicolas Krassó contends that ‘the illegitimate nature of this process is all too obvious’, but is it? The illegitimate posing of the problem only arises if one views the question from a formal logical position. The question of the survival, or otherwise, of a successful revolution in a hostile capitalist world did hinge on the character of that revolution. If one compares the reaction of the capitalist world generally, and the Allied powers in particular, to the February revolution and the reaction to the October revolution, one sees the conflation that is objected to taking place in real life. Nor was this hostility manifested merely because the Bolsheviks sued for peace, interventions continued and grew in intensity after the defeat of Germany. Is Nicolas Krassó going to suggest that had Kerensky continued in office, with all that that would have implied, that there would have still been interventions; or on the other hand that the interventions that did (and still do) take place were merely fortuitous? To attempt to separate the two aspects of any revolution today, after all the experience that we have of imperialist interventions, is to take the discussion back half a century.
Moreover, it can be seen from living experience, that of Cuba, that the international conditions at a given time and place help to determine the nature and scope of a revolution. Any examination of this experience will show that the particular course of this revolution has been profoundly influenced by the intervention of US imperialism and the support for the revolutionary regime gathered from the workers’ states. There is another aspect to be considered, this is the international effects a victorious workers’ revolution would and does have. This side of the theory of permanent revolution implies that revolutions do not take place in isolation, but are part of an international process. Again one can point to living experience for the validity of this proposition since 1945. The victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and the Cuban revolution in 1959 are not two separate disconnected events, rather they form parts of that permanent revolution that Marx and Trotsky wrote about. Nicolas Krassó injected the phrase ‘metaphysical carnival of insurrection’ and then proceeds on the assumption that this was also Trotsky’s view. This is an utter distortion of Trotsky’s real views. It is interesting that Trotsky was not allowed to ‘speak’ for himself about this matter, perhaps because no quotation could be dug up to prove that he ever said that the Soviet Union could only be saved by ‘simultaneous revolutions in Western Europe’. Such nonsense will not be found in Trotsky’s writings. Deutscher presented a balanced synthesis of the permanent revolution when he wrote:
Trotsky’s theory is in truth a profound and comprehensive conception in which all the overturns that the world has been undergoing (in this late capitalist era) are represented as interconnected and interdependent parts of a single revolutionary process. To put it in the broadest terms, the social upheaval of our century is seen by Trotsky as global in scope and character, even though it proceeds on various levels of civilisation and in the most diverse social structures, and even though its various phases are separated from one another in time and space. (Introduction to The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, p. 19) [2]
Nicolas Krassó’s attempt to refute the theory of permanent revolution is an attempt to refute the process of life in the modern world. The theory is no longer one that lives solely between the pages of a book. Since 1917 it has been subject to empirical verification and has been endorsed in the process.
Socialism in One Country
Nicolas Krassó’s muddled thinking on the question of permanent revolution leads him to serve up an historical and theoretical pastiche on the question of ‘Socialism in One Country’. We are told:
It was naive to speculate whether revolutions would or would not occur in the West, in general. Bolshevik strategy should not be based on the presumption of an occurrence of a European revolution; but nor should the possibility of one be discarded. After Lenin’s death, however, this dialectical position disintegrated ...
This imputes a view to Lenin that he did not hold. Lenin said very specifically on a number of occasions that ‘world imperialism cannot live side by side with a victorious advancing social revolution’. On 23 April 1918 Lenin said: ‘Our backwardness has thrust us forward and we shall perish if we are unable to hold out until we meet the mighty support of the insurrectionary workers of other countries.’ [3] These and many more references put him without question in the camp of those who thought that an isolated workers’ state would not survive for long. If, as Nicolas Krassó implies, the Bolsheviks had a non-committal attitude (it is a misuse of language to call it dialectical) to revolution in the West why was there such enthusiasm for the creation of the Third International? Moreover, the Third International did not ‘speculate’ about revolutions in the West but was viewed by nearly all the leading Bolsheviks, Lenin included, as being the world party of revolution in a very concrete and active way. Indeed any reading of the early days of the Russian Revolution makes it very clear that it was seen as a prelude to revolution in the West.
However, this was not the only aspect of ‘Socialism in One Country’ that was opposed by the Left Opposition in the 1920s. The other aspect concerned the type of society that was envisaged when one spoke about socialism. The point of departure for the Opposition was the fact that capitalism had created a world market, world economy and a worldwide division of labour. Therefore in the age of imperialism national boundaries become more and more restricting on the development of productive forces. If socialism is to develop the productive forces on such a scale that standards of material well-being are far superior to those under capitalism and men freed from routine drudgery then this international division of labour will have to be carried to a much higher pitch. To talk about the building of socialism in backward Russia was an essentially reactionary and utopian idea, it implied the abandonment of a perspective of international revolution, and along with it the best defence for a backward workers’ state.
The Intelligentsia and Socialism
The line of argument pursued by Nicolas Krassó in this section is rather obscure. He accused Trotsky of bitter hostility towards intellectuals, bringing forward an article written in 1910 as evidence. Trotsky is said to view the intelligentsia in a ‘wholly pre-Leninist manner’ and hence his views are un-Marxist! Apart from the setting up of Lenin as an icon, this interpretation is very misleading. Trotsky, in the article in question, was analysing the role of intellectuals as a social layer within capitalist society. Lenin, in contrast, wrote about and directed his activity towards intellectuals breaking from this environment and becoming revolutionaries. Trotsky did not dismiss the intelligentsia in toto, he postulated conditions under which they would move towards socialism. He said:
The intelligentsia might go over to collectivism if it were given reason to see as probable the immediate victory of collectivism, if collectivism rose before it not as an ideal of a different, remote and alien class but as a near and tangible reality; finally, if – and this is not the least important condition – a political break with the bourgeoisie did not threaten each brain-worker taken separately with grave material and moral consequences. [4]
It is obvious that here Trotsky was concerned with the conditions which went to mould the intelligentsia, and the forces that operated against its allying with the working class. It certainly could be argued that such conditions are today not so pressing, particularly here in Britain. But it would be unwise to assume that such conditions are no longer operative at all.
It would also be well to recall that Trotsky was writing in 1910 and that his assessment of the role and attitudes of the intelligentsia in relation to the working class was a realistic one. Looking at the British labour movement of 1910, for instance, one could see that intellectuals as a social layer played a minimal role, the Webbs et al. notwithstanding. When numbers of the intelligentsia did move into the Labour Party, after 1918, they further debased the dominant labourism. However, it must be noted that even today the intelligentsia, as a social layer, have not decisively gone over to socialism here in Britain, even of the Labour variety let alone revolutionary socialism. It is clear that only when individual members of the intelligentsia commit themselves to a working-class party does their role inside become a critical one. If today more individual intellectuals commit themselves to socialism, does this prove Trotsky wrong? It certainly does if one attempts to read him as a sort of Gospel or Holy Writ. However, it does not prove him wrong if one takes into account the October, Chinese and Cuban revolutions. Collectivism is no longer a remote ideal but a living reality. On the other hand, one of the lessons of all three revolutions is that, along with the dispossessed ruling class, large numbers of the intelligentsia also flee and take up hostile positions to the new regimes. Even those that stayed in Russia after 1917 had to be wooed by special privileges. One is not being bitterly hostile to them because one acknowledges the truth about their position in society. This position is that they are dominated by the hegemonic ideology of the ruling class and help to perpetuate it.
To try to insert Gramsci’s concept of a new type of intellectual produced by a revolutionary party into a discussion about intellectuals as a social layer is to befog the issue. The roles of the individual intellectual and that of the intelligentsia are separate problems, even though obviously related. Nicolas Krassó writes that ‘the party ... an autonomous structure ... recombines and transforms two different phenomena – the intelligentsia and the working class’. This is indeed an odd way of putting it. How can an autonomous structure – the party – recombine two classes? If this autonomous structure were to carry out this feat it would not be autonomous and class and party would be synonymous! The charge of identifying class and party which is laid at Trotsky’s feet should be laid elsewhere. The modified elements which engage in new political practice, that is, the revolutionary party, are not the intelligentsia and the working class but only individuals and perhaps sections from these two social formations. To say otherwise is precisely to confuse class and party as Nicolas Krassó does.
1917–1921
It is necessary to have a clear factual understanding of history if one sets out to interpret it. Unfortunately Nicolas Krassó does not have this. This is evident when he says: ‘Trotsky was determined to strengthen the power of professional military officers with a Tsarist past in the Red Army, and he fought the imposition of control over them by political commissars appointed by the party.’ This is very far wide of what the real situation was. The dispute over the employment of the ex-Tsarist officers was if they should be used at all, and this was only a subsidiary question to the wider one of a centralised army versus militia. This was debated at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky wanted to use these officers in their capacity of military experts, but at the same time made a specific request to the Central Committee to supply him with reliable Communists to act as commissars. Deutscher says that Trotsky ‘implored’ the Central Committee for these men. There was never any question of the ex-Tsarist officers having more power since all their orders had to be countersigned by their political commissars.
Nicolas Krassó uses these unfounded assertions to insert the idea that Trotsky was an essentially military figure, more at ease in a command situation. He says:
He [Trotsky] had authority ab initio to organise the army; as People’s Commissar for War he had all the prestige of Lenin and the Soviet state behind him. He did not have to win this authority in a political arena by persuading his peers to accept him.
Again, this is a perversion of the real situation. Deutscher puts the matter differently:
The new campaigning season was approaching, but even now, a year after Trotsky had become Commissar of War, his military policy had not yet received the party’s blessing – he carried it out as if on his own responsibility. (The Prophet Armed, p. 429)
It was not until the Eighth Congress that the party formally endorsed this military policy of Trotsky. But even then it would be grossly misleading to suggest that the role of a military leader was only one of command. In any civil war situation appeals and persuasion play a far greater role than routine authority or command. In the case of the creation of the Red Army this was particularly so. There was no tradition, no historical precedents, no hegemonic ideology holding undisputed sway. It is in this light that Trotsky’s role must be viewed, and this was essentially a political one. The early formations of the Red Army were entirely voluntary, only when a reliable proletarian military cadre had been formed was it possible to resort to conscription. Even when conscription was used it must be seen in a very different way to ‘normal’ induction. In a civil war there is no guarantee that your conscripts will not desert in large numbers to the other side, or perhaps just desert, if there is not a firm political basis laid.
Nicolas Krassó tells us that ‘the voluntarist is in his element haranguing crowds or dispatching troops – but these roles should not be confused with the ability to lead a revolutionary party’. What he forgets is that before anyone can ‘dispatch troops’ he must have them at hand. Therefore the art of a revolutionary military leader is the gathering of the troops and convincing them of the need to be ‘dispatched’. This is where Nicolas Krassó utterly fails to see the similarity, and at times identity (Cuba), between a revolutionary army and party.
Again, Nicolas Krassó misunderstands the reality of the early days of the Soviet Republic and the nature of the military policy. He says that Trotsky:
... as a pillar of the Soviet state ... had to give orders to his subordinates for precise purposes. His task in either role was to ensure the means to a previously determined end. This is a different task from that of ensuring that a novel end prevails among various competing opinions in a political organisation.
This improperly assumes that the end of a civil, or any other, war is predetermined. This is not so, the only end predetermined in a war situation is that the enemy should be defeated. Also in a revolutionary party the only end predetermined is that there should be revolution. In both situations the means, methods, tactics, etc., will be subject to discussion and debate. This is not to suggest that in a civil war the debate will be conducted at all levels within the army, but neither will it be in the party; the nature of the situation sometimes precludes it. Furthermore, even if one assumes that for the Red Army per se ends were predetermined by the Central Committee, Trotsky played a part in arriving at the decisions. He was not a passive onlooker waiting for his orders to be handed down to him.
Trotsky could hardly be called a pillar of the Soviet state until late in the civil war, because no such state existed in the accepted use of the term. The term pillar is misleading; it conjures up a picture of a solid, well-founded and established regime, when in fact very often the continued existence of the regime hung in the balance. What we are given, by implication, is a picture of Trotsky moving in an orderly, established structure of known and given dimensions, when in fact society and every subordinate structure, including the revolutionary party, was in a condition of flux. Only holding a static and unreal vision of revolution could lead one to see Trotsky, or any other Bolshevik leader, in a command situation in those early days.
1921–1929
Nicolas Krassó here turns to the theme of substitution and identity in the relations between party and class, implying that Trotsky fell into the ‘error’ of identity, that is, of seeing the party and class as identical. He presents us with a quotation from The New Course which seems to bear him out; but it would have been better had he completed the quotation. It would have given an accurate picture of what Trotsky said. Here is the quotation with the missing sentences restored:
The different needs of the working class, of the peasantry, of the state apparatus and its membership, act upon our party, through whose medium they seek to find a political expression. The difficulties and contradictions in our epoch, the temporary discord in the interests of the different layers of the proletariat, or of the proletariat as a whole and the peasantry, act upon the party through the medium of its worker and peasant cells, of the state apparatus, of the student youth. Even episodic differences in views and nuances of opinion may express the remote pressure of distinct social interests and, in certain circumstances, be transformed into stable groupings; the latter may, in turn, sooner or later take the form of organised factions which, opposing themselves to the rest of the party, undergo by that very fact even greater external pressure. Such is the dialectics of inner-party groupings in an epoch when the Communist Party is obliged to monopolise the direction of political life. (The New Course, p. 27, emphasis added) [5]
The emphasised sentence is the key to a proper understanding of what Trotsky was discussing; only by leaving it out was Nicolas Krassó able to present his interpretation to an unwary reader. The chapter that this comes from is Groups and Factional Formations. In this Trotsky was discussing the politics of a one-party state, as the above makes clear. He was not talking about parties in general, nor was there any suggestion that party and class are identical. What he was doing was to explore the nature of groups and factions in a situation where only one party was the prescribed form of political activity, and in so doing was breaking new ground. For socialists and Marxists the situation in the Soviet Union was a novel and unprecedented one. Certainly in 1917 no one foresaw such a situation. The subsequent developments in the 1920s seem to have borne out what Trotsky was saying in 1923. Indeed, later on the experience of the monolithic one-party state indicates that unless the party does reflect these differences then it ceases to be a party in the accepted use of the term.
We are also told that Trotsky was guilty of ‘sociologism’, and this first led him into the trap of equating party and class in the theoretical field; and in practical politics urging the proletarianisation of the party as an antidote to bureaucracy. Further, we are told that Stalin followed this advice with disastrous results for – Trotsky! However, Deutscher puts the matter rather differently:
The triumvirs [Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev] resolved to open at once a spectacular recruiting drive in the factories. But while Trotsky had advised a careful selection, they decided to recruit en masse, to accept any worker who cared to join, and to waive all customary tests and conditions. At the Thirteenth Conference they recommended the recruitment at a stroke of 100,000 workers ... This was a mockery of Bolshevik principle of organisation which required that, as the élite and vanguard of the proletariat, the party should only accept the politically advanced and the politically battle-hardened. (The Prophet Unarmed, p. 135)
Trotsky indeed made the point that the process of recruitment of workers should be slow and then ‘only under conditions of noteworthy economic advance’ (The New Course, pp. 20–21). [6] Here a different picture emerges from that of a primitive sociologism – workers good, bureaucrats bad – here we see Trotsky grappling with a real problem, that of declining worker membership, and its implications for the future of the party. Nicolas Krassó seems to imply that the social composition of a revolutionary socialist party is of no consequence. Perhaps what he means is that such a party should be for the workers but not necessarily of them. Surely, Trotsky was making the point that the socialist revolutionary party, especially one in power, with only a minority of workers was a long-term determinant contradiction. Therefore he urged that steps should be taken to rectify the situation. It is somewhat bizarre to imply that Trotsky had an idyllic view of workers in Russia at this time. He wrote a considerable amount about the low level of culture during this period, and had a lively appreciation of the political problems this posed.
Collectivisation and Industrialisation
The question of industrial development in underdeveloped countries is still one that has a burning topicality, especially for those countries which have broken free of the capitalist orbit. In such circumstances the question will arise – ‘Where will the surplus come from?’ This is indeed a crucial point. However, Nicolas Krassó paints far too black and white a picture:
Bukharin advocated an ultra-right policy of private peasant enrichment at the expense of the towns: ‘We shall move forward by tiny, tiny steps pulling behind us our large peasant cart.’ Preobrazhensky urged the exploitation of the peasantry (in the technical economic sense) to accumulate a surplus for rapid industrialisation.
Of course it is possible to show these formulations as being violently contradictory, since they are men of straw. To talk of Lenin’s policy is, in this context, misleading, since he did not have time to formulate a fully coherent and articulated one before his death. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky are presented in a way which belies their respective attitudes. Another point should be added – Trotsky was not wholly in agreement with Preobrazhensky’s ideas as put forward in The New Economics; but there is no doubt that they were in agreement on the practical policies put forward by the Opposition. Therefore one should make some distinction between Trotsky and Preobrazhensky.
Bukharin, essentially, argued that the development of industry should be geared to rural demand, and that light or consumer goods industry should be given priority. Such a policy did in fact encourage the revival of capitalist elements in the countryside, and meant that in practice the state industries became subordinated to the market. However, it would be wrong to say that Bukharin urged the enrichment of the peasants at the expense of the towns, since this would have meant the exploitation of the working class. What he no doubt intended was that his policy would generate the surplus in the countryside and this would lead eventually to accumulation. He failed to appreciate that an agricultural surplus does not necessarily lead to accumulation, and indeed the evidence is that in underdeveloped countries in the capitalist orbit this surplus is largely squandered or invested in land and usury. Only by consciously breaking the law of value (not ignoring it) can this be overcome.
Preobrazhensky’s analysis was, originally, a theoretical one which posed the conflict between the private sector of the economy (mainly agricultural) which was the majority and the small state-owned industrial sector; and the need for a fast rate of industrial accumulation. He designated a law of primitive socialist accumulation in this way:
The more backward economically, petty-bourgeois, peasant, a particular country is which has gone over to the socialist organisation of production, and the smaller the inheritance received by the socialist accumulation fund of the proletariat of this country when the social revolution takes place, by so much the more, in proportion, will socialist accumulation be obliged to rely on alienating part of the surplus product of pre-socialist forms of economy. (The New Economics, p. 124)
He argued that because of the small absolute and relative amount of surplus available in Soviet industry the main contribution must come from agriculture. This does imply ‘technical exploitation’ of the peasants, but this process should be explained since it is possible to forget one half of the term – technical – and concentrate on the other – exploitation. Preobrazhensky explained the matter very clearly:
The task of the socialist state consists here not in taking from the petty-bourgeois producers less than capitalism took, but in taking more from the still larger incomes which will be secured to the petty producers by the rationalisation of the whole economy, including petty production, on the basis of industrialising the country and intensifying agriculture. (The New Economics, p. 89, emphasis in original)
Nicolas Krassó injects into this debate an essentially static view of economics when he says:
For the poorer the peasantry was, the less surplus it had over and beyond what it consumed itself, and the less it was ‘exploitable’ for industrialisation. Bukharin’s conciliation of peasantry and Preobrazhensky’s counterposition of it to the proletariat were equally distortions of Lenin’s policy, which was to collectivise but not crush the peasantry, not wage war on them.
Now clearly, if one views national income, or the social product, as a given quantity, then one is justified in arguing that an increase in one class’s share is based on another class’s share decreasing. However, if one views national income as a stream that is increasing in size through time, then it is possible for all to have an increasing total consumption, but at the same time one section of society may have a smaller percentage share than previously. [7] However, this is a very simplified approach to the particular problem.
A first approach to a proper understanding of the problem is clearly to distinguish accumulation between maximum and optimum rates of accumulation in the short run. This is where Nicolas Krassó is mistaken in assuming that Stalin took over (and denatured) the Left Opposition’s economic policies. The first Five-Year Plans were in fact based on the premise of a maximum rate of accumulation but turned out to be increasing production at a slower lower rate than if an optimum rate had been aimed for.
Some would consider an optimum rate of accumulation in purely economic terms to be that rate which increases the social product by a maximum amount in a given period. But no Marxist could accept such a definition because it leaves out the class forces involved. A policy which reduces the living standards of the working class, creating demoralisation and political apathy would be totally unacceptable. Moreover, one could not accept any assumption which postulated that productivity of labour was independent of the level of consumption. This is what the Stalinist bureaucracy did with disastrous results for Soviet agriculture and for the Soviet working class in the first two Five-Year Plans. In the frenzy to achieve a maximum rate of accumulation there was in fact a lowering of the maximum increase of the social product that could have been gained, had an optimum rate of accumulation been adopted.
Another point is that Nicolas Krassó uses the term peasantry indiscriminately; none of the protagonists in the original discussion made such an error. If he looks at the Platform of the Left Opposition 1927 he will see that an analysis was made of the ‘class differentiation among the peasants’. In trying to assess the situation in rural Russia in the mid-1920s such a mistake as Nicolas Krassó’s is impermissible. The Left Opposition had a policy of support for the poor landless and middle peasants along with proposals for generous credit terms and a speedy introduction of mechanisation into agriculture; and of course collectivisation via cooperatives. They certainly had a policy of containing and finally eliminating the Kulaks (as a class), who were becoming the basis of a new capitalist development within the Soviet Union. Does Nicolas Krassó think this wrong? Stalin, to whom Nicolas Krassó accords the accolade of being ‘confirmed by history’, had, along with Bukharin, pooh-poohed the warnings of the Opposition, but was later thrown into a panic by the growing power and resistance of the Kulaks. This problem was ‘solved’ in a brutal and bloody repression. To suggest that the policy of the Left Opposition had any connection with this is to stretch credibility too far.
Perhaps the biggest mistake that Nicolas Krassó makes over the debate on industrialisation is to suggest that this was primarily concerned with administrative options, whereas the debate over ‘Socialism in One Country’ only concerned international articulations. Planning in any transitional regime will be essentially the ‘allocation of scarce resources’. This commonplace of bourgeois economics will then become a reality, for the allocation will then be done by conscious decision and not by the anarchy of the market. Nevertheless, the basis for political economy will still be the relationship of men (and classes) to each other in the distribution of scarce resources, that is, to the means of production. It is this fundamentally different approach that distinguishes Marxist economics. Nicolas Krassó makes the error of assuming that economics is a ‘technical’ or ‘administrative’ subject, and thereby confuses techniques and ideology. The debate in Cuba over moral versus material incentives was an interesting example of the fusion between economics and politics. The particular techniques that are used or that are chosen, will, by and large, reflect (even if only in a diffused way) the political decisions they are based on. For instance, the decision by Wilson in 1964 not to devalue the pound debarred him from using a number of techniques for grappling with the economic crisis. The original decision was a political one. It is possible to argue about this or that aspect of policy since then, and indeed we should, but unless one takes into account the central political decision then one can get lost.
Therefore, to suggest that the debates on economic policy and ‘Socialism in One Country’ were separate and unconnected does not stand up to investigation. The economic debate was around how much surplus was to be generated and who would benefit. ‘Socialism in One Country’ was the reaction of the bureaucrats wanting to hang on to their share. Both arose from the backwardness and isolation of the Soviet Union.
1927–1940
Despite some notable theoretical writings in this period we are told that Trotsky led an imaginary political movement and therefore the activities of these years were futile. I am not concerned here to argue the merits or demerits of the Fourth International. What I want to do is pose some questions myself. How is it that 30 years after it was founded, this body – the Fourth International – exists at all? When one considers a) that it was founded at a time of working-class defeats, b) that many of its small cadre were killed in Europe, either by the Gestapo or the Stalinists, and c) that in the years immediately after 1945 Stalinism seemed to be greatly strengthened, then one perhaps begins to ask the right questions. When one looks around the international scene for the other numerous anti-Stalinist groupings that existed in the 1930s and 1940s one looks in vain. When one examines the pathetic attempts to create a Maoist ‘International’ with the resources of a great state behind the venture, one can begin to measure the real strength and resilience of the international Trotskyist movement. Nor is this body a group of ageing cultists (despite certain bizarre manifestations in England), on the contrary there has been a steady replacement by youth, which in recent years has increased and this has been a worldwide phenomenon. The question remains: why? I think this is best answered by reference to Che Guevara when he wrote:
How soon we could look into a bright future, should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and increasing hatred of all peoples of the world? (Vietnam Must Not Stand Alone, New Left Review, No. 43, p. 90)
What Che Guevara demanded was an international strategy against imperialism. The time and the situation demand it. The concept of proletarian internationalism is not an abstract theory. The maimed, the dying and the fighters in Asia, Africa and Latin America cry out for, and are testimony to, the need for such a strategy. The question of the formation of a new revolutionary International was implicit in the holding of the OLAS conference, even if such an International has yet to emerge. It is this that gives the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 its historical validity; all the sneers about a mythical movement cannot erase it. Trotsky was too much of a realist to assume that the small body that gathered round him in 1938 would be the International. What the Fourth International does offer to new and rising generations of revolutionists is an historical continuity with the best of classical Marxism and a programmatic analysis of the modern world that is unrivalled on the international scene.
The Dead Dogs of Stalin
The picture that Nicolas Krassó presented of Trotsky was remarkable only for its rigidity, its lack of development, and its pedestrian quality. It was a lifeless picture and we are given no feeling that Trotsky learned, profited or matured from his mistakes.
Reading the article one is left with the impression that Trotsky sprang on to the stage of politics fully equipped, warts and all, and that there were no real changes. As such the figure is a cardboard one.
The portrait of Lenin is painted in the same style. Lenin is made to appear as some sort of deus ex machina that popped up at the right moment and pulled his muddle-headed party out of trouble. This puts Lenin in the role of a political Svengali, not of a leader. There is no doubt that Lenin played a tremendous role in the Bolshevik Party, and at times this was crucial, but one should not fall victim to a one-sided appraisal. In the last analysis such a picture does no credit to Lenin and certainly not to the Bolsheviks.
But why discuss Trotsky’s concept of the party now? What was the object of the exercise? Above all the other faults in Nicolas Krassó’s article the absence of conclusions is the most startling. Can it be that this long essay was only an exercise in ‘historical’ analysis? Not only here in Britain under the Wilson government, but internationally the question of a Marxist party has a burning topicality. Yet on this Nicolas Krassó is silent. Implicit in the article is the view that there is a need for a Leninist party here and now, and leaving aside the implied difference between this and Trotsky’s concept of the party, one would have thought that if this was the case then it should have been stated. But on this important question we are left, not even with a question mark, but a blank. This brings into question, not Trotsky’s Marxism, but Nicolas Krassó’s. For what is the object of Marxist theory? Is it merely to hone and bring to razor edge individual intellects or should it have as its aim a guide to action? One need not espouse a vulgar interpretation of this axiom, yet any perspective must also incorporate a programme. And this is where Nicolas Krassó’s essay shows its grave deficiencies – there is no programme.
Another aspect of this deficiency is the lack of any analysis of Lenin’s or Trotsky’s concept of an international party; a very strange omission for someone who delved so deeply into a relatively minor article such as the one Trotsky wrote on the intelligentsia. How can this be squared? Such scholarly searchings must have disclosed something on the question of an International, but a reader of the original article would find no hint of this. Only Nicolas Krassó would be able to explain this absence but it would be unwise for the reader to conjecture at it.
A discussion of Trotsky’s contribution to Marxism could have been stimulating and rewarding. It certainly should have been critical, but criticism should be tempered with knowledge and understanding. Unfortunately, we were presented with undigested historical data laced with a Lenin ‘fixation’; neither help in arriving at a sober assessment. In the preface to The Prophet Armed Isaac Deutscher referred to the ‘mountain of dead dogs’ that covered Trotsky’s place in history, and that the events of 1956 (Hungary, etc.) saw half that mountain blown to the winds. Unwittingly, Nicolas Krassó is throwing a few of the canine corpses back onto the remains of the mountain. Looking at the world around us today it would seem that he engaged in a rather Canute-like occupation. His obvious talents deserve a better use.
Notes
1. On the point of a ‘metaphysical carnival’ it might be pertinent to point out that Marx himself originated the phrase permanent revolution in The Class Struggles in France when he wrote: ‘This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution ...’ (The Class Struggles in France (Moscow 1952), p. 196) If Trotsky was guilty of being inept then he erred along with Marx.
2. Introduction, The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology (Dell Publishing, New York 1964). – MIA.
3. V.I. Lenin, Speech in the Moscow Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army Deputies, Collected Works, Vol. 27.
4. L.D. Trotsky, The Intelligentsia and Socialism.
5. L.D. Trotsky, The New Course.
6. L.D. Trotsky, The New Course.
7. This may sound like the familiar arguments put forward by Wilson & Co with their appeals for higher productivity. Formally it is a correct argument, in the short run, but for Marxists the real question is, who does what with the surplus? If the extra surplus is privately appropriated or bureaucratically misused that is where the fight should begin. We have no argument per se against increased production.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Review: Tony Cliff, <em>The Employers’ Offensive</em></h1>
<h3>(Spring 1970)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 1970.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Tony Cliff,<br>
<a href="../../../../../../archive/cliff/works/1970/offensive/index.htm" target="new"><strong>The Employers’ Offensive: Productivity Deals and How To Fight Them</strong></a>,<br>
<em>Pluto Press</em></p>
<p class="fst">Tony Cliff has done a very thorough and well-documented job in exposing the dangers and pitfalls inherent in the present wave of productivity deals that is being unleashed. This is a book of over 200 pages, the bulk of which deals in some detail with various aspects of productivity bargaining. As the ‘blurb’ on the front says: ‘A concise and thorough explanation of the many pitfalls which exist for workers under the guise of productivity bargaining. A book that every trade unionist ought to read.’ This is an opinion that I would agree with.</p>
<p>Cliff deals with measured day work, greater flexibility in the deployment of labour, job evaluation, time and motion study, redundancy and much more besides. This gives one an idea of the scope of the book. In particular his exposure of the so-called ‘science’ of time and motion study is a very valuable addition to any shop stewards’ armoury. His quotation from the ‘father’ of time and motion study is a gem:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. (F.W. Taylor, <strong>Principles of Scientific Management</strong>, 1911)</p>
<p class="fst">It is precisely the hope of the bosses to reduce their employees to this bovine state by productivity deals, not in such a crude or blatant manner perhaps, but nevertheless they want workers who are amenable as oxen.</p>
<p>One of the other valuable features of this book is the large number of workers who have given evidence directly to the author, as well as his quotations from official documents and agreements. Many of the comments in these items from shop-floor workers are revealing in more ways than one. Firstly, many of them reveal the <em>worsening</em> of conditions where productivity deals have been in operation, and secondly they show that the workers may have to work like oxen, but they don’t think like them.</p>
<p>The picture emerges of an overall offensive by the employers to prop up sagging profit rates, at the expense of the workers. Peter Jay, who gave a lengthy review of this book in <strong>The Times</strong> <em>Business Section</em>, tries to pass off the evidence presented as so much ‘drivel’, but it is noticeable that he makes no attempt to challenge even <em>one</em> item of fact in the whole book. This either means that he has not done his homework or could not come up with anything worthwhile. However, the fact that <strong>The Times</strong> chose to pay so much attention to this book means that it views the contents seriously, and so should every worker.</p>
<p>Cliff has made an excellent job of cataloguing the many pitfalls in this field for the unwary worker. However, when he comes to attempt to prescribe an answer he is not so successful. Quite correctly he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">In productivity bargaining the traditional form of negotiations – workers making demands on their employers for better wages and conditions – is reversed. Now it is the employers who are demanding changes, and in doing so try to force the workers into taking a purely passive role and simply responding to these demands. (p. 211)</p>
<p class="fst">This sums up the position very well indeed, but what is Cliff’s answer?</p>
<p class="quoteb">Now comes the 64,000 dollar question – how do we fight a productivity deal? I hope no one who has read this book so far will be in any doubt where I stand on the question of productivity dealing – bitterly and unalterably opposed to it. But this does not in itself solve the problem of developing a strategy for fighting them. Any fool can denounce a productivity deal and say we should have nothing to do with it. It is an entirely different matter to lead a group of workers in successfully resisting such a deal. (p. 215)</p>
<p class="fst">That is clear and to the point, and eminently sensible, because it is not an easy task to fight the present methods of employers’ attacks, when they are so well gilded with what seems to be large increases in pay. But we turn over the page and Cliff says this:</p>
<p class="quoteb">We must always start by opposing the productivity deal completely and then later, if necessary, retreat to a position where we try to get the best out of the deal we can. (p. 216) [!!]</p>
<p class="fst">And on the next page we have:</p>
<p class="quoteb">... any steward has to remember the first rule of negotiation – the girl who starts by saying ‘No’ gets a higher price for her virtue than the girl who talks money at the outset. (p. 217)</p>
<p class="fst">In other words if you cannot beat them join them! Despite all the good intentions Cliff is unable to come up with a coherent counter-strategy. True enough that he has some very useful ideas about <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> productivity deals should be dealt with <em>once they are entered into</em>, but he presents no overall <em>strategy</em> which will take the workers on to the offensive before the bosses make their move. This is the missing link, since right here and now this is precisely what workers need. The rising tide of militancy will be beaten back unless such a strategy is adopted. The only concrete answer that Cliff comes up with is to sell the ‘rule-book’ as dearly as possible, despite his good intentions and protestations. That is exactly what the employers want. He explains this himself in earlier sections of the book, so that his alleged answer is a let-down.</p>
<p>However, despite the grave shortcomings of the last chapter, this book is still worth buying, because it can supply a great deal of ammunition to those who care to extract it from its pages.</p>
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<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> The word ‘how’ seems to be missing here – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
Review: Tony Cliff, The Employers’ Offensive
(Spring 1970)
From Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 1970.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Tony Cliff,
The Employers’ Offensive: Productivity Deals and How To Fight Them,
Pluto Press
Tony Cliff has done a very thorough and well-documented job in exposing the dangers and pitfalls inherent in the present wave of productivity deals that is being unleashed. This is a book of over 200 pages, the bulk of which deals in some detail with various aspects of productivity bargaining. As the ‘blurb’ on the front says: ‘A concise and thorough explanation of the many pitfalls which exist for workers under the guise of productivity bargaining. A book that every trade unionist ought to read.’ This is an opinion that I would agree with.
Cliff deals with measured day work, greater flexibility in the deployment of labour, job evaluation, time and motion study, redundancy and much more besides. This gives one an idea of the scope of the book. In particular his exposure of the so-called ‘science’ of time and motion study is a very valuable addition to any shop stewards’ armoury. His quotation from the ‘father’ of time and motion study is a gem:
Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. (F.W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 1911)
It is precisely the hope of the bosses to reduce their employees to this bovine state by productivity deals, not in such a crude or blatant manner perhaps, but nevertheless they want workers who are amenable as oxen.
One of the other valuable features of this book is the large number of workers who have given evidence directly to the author, as well as his quotations from official documents and agreements. Many of the comments in these items from shop-floor workers are revealing in more ways than one. Firstly, many of them reveal the worsening of conditions where productivity deals have been in operation, and secondly they show that the workers may have to work like oxen, but they don’t think like them.
The picture emerges of an overall offensive by the employers to prop up sagging profit rates, at the expense of the workers. Peter Jay, who gave a lengthy review of this book in The Times Business Section, tries to pass off the evidence presented as so much ‘drivel’, but it is noticeable that he makes no attempt to challenge even one item of fact in the whole book. This either means that he has not done his homework or could not come up with anything worthwhile. However, the fact that The Times chose to pay so much attention to this book means that it views the contents seriously, and so should every worker.
Cliff has made an excellent job of cataloguing the many pitfalls in this field for the unwary worker. However, when he comes to attempt to prescribe an answer he is not so successful. Quite correctly he says:
In productivity bargaining the traditional form of negotiations – workers making demands on their employers for better wages and conditions – is reversed. Now it is the employers who are demanding changes, and in doing so try to force the workers into taking a purely passive role and simply responding to these demands. (p. 211)
This sums up the position very well indeed, but what is Cliff’s answer?
Now comes the 64,000 dollar question – how do we fight a productivity deal? I hope no one who has read this book so far will be in any doubt where I stand on the question of productivity dealing – bitterly and unalterably opposed to it. But this does not in itself solve the problem of developing a strategy for fighting them. Any fool can denounce a productivity deal and say we should have nothing to do with it. It is an entirely different matter to lead a group of workers in successfully resisting such a deal. (p. 215)
That is clear and to the point, and eminently sensible, because it is not an easy task to fight the present methods of employers’ attacks, when they are so well gilded with what seems to be large increases in pay. But we turn over the page and Cliff says this:
We must always start by opposing the productivity deal completely and then later, if necessary, retreat to a position where we try to get the best out of the deal we can. (p. 216) [!!]
And on the next page we have:
... any steward has to remember the first rule of negotiation – the girl who starts by saying ‘No’ gets a higher price for her virtue than the girl who talks money at the outset. (p. 217)
In other words if you cannot beat them join them! Despite all the good intentions Cliff is unable to come up with a coherent counter-strategy. True enough that he has some very useful ideas about [1] productivity deals should be dealt with once they are entered into, but he presents no overall strategy which will take the workers on to the offensive before the bosses make their move. This is the missing link, since right here and now this is precisely what workers need. The rising tide of militancy will be beaten back unless such a strategy is adopted. The only concrete answer that Cliff comes up with is to sell the ‘rule-book’ as dearly as possible, despite his good intentions and protestations. That is exactly what the employers want. He explains this himself in earlier sections of the book, so that his alleged answer is a let-down.
However, despite the grave shortcomings of the last chapter, this book is still worth buying, because it can supply a great deal of ammunition to those who care to extract it from its pages.
Notes
1. The word ‘how’ seems to be missing here – MIA.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Review: A New Annual?</h1>
<h3>(Winter 1969/70)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 No. 1, Winter 1969–70.<br>
Signed ‘JW’ that is, John Walters.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Ken Coates, Tony Topham and Michael Barratt Brown (<em>eds.</em>),<br>
<strong>Trade Union Register</strong>,<br>
<em>Merlin Press Ltd, price £2 hardback, £1 paperback</em></p>
<p class="fst">Merlin Press have this year published a stable-mate to <strong>Socialist Register</strong>, it is the <strong>Trade Union Register</strong>. The new <strong>Register</strong> is edited by Ken Coates, Tony Topham and Michael Barratt Brown. There is an impressive list of contributors, which seems to cover many shades of the left (and centre?). The book claims to be ‘a symposium designed for active trade unionists’. However, one can hardly imagine that an ‘active trade unionist’ would find time to read all the material collected in these 350 pages. If future issues are to live up to the stated aim they will need to be slimmed down somewhat. One has the feeling that the editors were a little unsure of their own aims when assembling the material and hence the large selection. Some of the essays are more suitable for publication in journals than in a book, which presumably is meant to be partly a reference volume. Also some of the essays are so heavily annotated that the references serve to impede one’s progress.</p>
<p>These are however minor criticisms compared with the real value of the book. All the contributions are of a fairly high standard, and many introduce new ideas on perennial topics. Janet Blackman’s contribution on the Campaign for Women’s Rights is a must for all those who are interested in this subject (and shame on you if you are not). Her point about there being <em>two</em> labour forces – men’s and women’s – is a very useful idea. She points out that far from women gaining equal rights what is really happening is that a small number of women are jumping into the male labour force without changing its character, and the vast majority of women <em>still</em> work in what is classified as women’s work. Men do <em>not</em> join this labour force under any circumstances.</p>
<p>Tony Topham writes a very solid item on productivity bargaining, tracing its development since the early 1960s, and demonstrates how this has now become the central part of the employers’ and government’s insidious attack on the unions. He also examines the reactions to this development by the trade-union movement, ranging from full cooperation to outright rejection. He also demonstrates that this is a method of keeping the proportions of the division of the national income either static or pushing it in favour of profits. Quite cogently argued is the need for an offensive strategy by the unions in face of this development.</p>
<p>John Hughes, Ken Coates and Richard Silburn all contribute essays on low pay, and John Hughes analyses the unemployment trends since 1964 bringing out some very disturbing and little-noticed factors.</p>
<p>One essay in particular makes this volume significant. This is Andrée Hoyles’ item on the occupation of factories in France, May 1968, which is based upon on-the-spot research, the basis for which was an extensive questionnaire which was used in selected factories. This seems to be the <em>only</em> attempt so far to find out what was actually happening in the factories and among the rank-and-file workers. Most writings that have appeared so far on the French events have concentrated upon the political-cum-student aspects, not surprising in view of the ease with which material can be gathered on these aspect and the fact that the students in particular were very articulate. However, in many ways Andrée Hoyles’ research presents a more fundamental picture of what was actually going on during those very hectic days, it is much closer to the grass-roots. No one who wants to obtain a full picture can afford to miss this vital piece of research.</p>
<p>It is not possible in a short review to mention any more of the contributions, but most of them are worth study. One final point, the book contains a very useful diary for 1968 and several statistical tables, both of which are useful for those who do not have the time to hunt around for such information.</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
Review: A New Annual?
(Winter 1969/70)
From Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 1, Winter 1969–70.
Signed ‘JW’ that is, John Walters.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Ken Coates, Tony Topham and Michael Barratt Brown (eds.),
Trade Union Register,
Merlin Press Ltd, price £2 hardback, £1 paperback
Merlin Press have this year published a stable-mate to Socialist Register, it is the Trade Union Register. The new Register is edited by Ken Coates, Tony Topham and Michael Barratt Brown. There is an impressive list of contributors, which seems to cover many shades of the left (and centre?). The book claims to be ‘a symposium designed for active trade unionists’. However, one can hardly imagine that an ‘active trade unionist’ would find time to read all the material collected in these 350 pages. If future issues are to live up to the stated aim they will need to be slimmed down somewhat. One has the feeling that the editors were a little unsure of their own aims when assembling the material and hence the large selection. Some of the essays are more suitable for publication in journals than in a book, which presumably is meant to be partly a reference volume. Also some of the essays are so heavily annotated that the references serve to impede one’s progress.
These are however minor criticisms compared with the real value of the book. All the contributions are of a fairly high standard, and many introduce new ideas on perennial topics. Janet Blackman’s contribution on the Campaign for Women’s Rights is a must for all those who are interested in this subject (and shame on you if you are not). Her point about there being two labour forces – men’s and women’s – is a very useful idea. She points out that far from women gaining equal rights what is really happening is that a small number of women are jumping into the male labour force without changing its character, and the vast majority of women still work in what is classified as women’s work. Men do not join this labour force under any circumstances.
Tony Topham writes a very solid item on productivity bargaining, tracing its development since the early 1960s, and demonstrates how this has now become the central part of the employers’ and government’s insidious attack on the unions. He also examines the reactions to this development by the trade-union movement, ranging from full cooperation to outright rejection. He also demonstrates that this is a method of keeping the proportions of the division of the national income either static or pushing it in favour of profits. Quite cogently argued is the need for an offensive strategy by the unions in face of this development.
John Hughes, Ken Coates and Richard Silburn all contribute essays on low pay, and John Hughes analyses the unemployment trends since 1964 bringing out some very disturbing and little-noticed factors.
One essay in particular makes this volume significant. This is Andrée Hoyles’ item on the occupation of factories in France, May 1968, which is based upon on-the-spot research, the basis for which was an extensive questionnaire which was used in selected factories. This seems to be the only attempt so far to find out what was actually happening in the factories and among the rank-and-file workers. Most writings that have appeared so far on the French events have concentrated upon the political-cum-student aspects, not surprising in view of the ease with which material can be gathered on these aspect and the fact that the students in particular were very articulate. However, in many ways Andrée Hoyles’ research presents a more fundamental picture of what was actually going on during those very hectic days, it is much closer to the grass-roots. No one who wants to obtain a full picture can afford to miss this vital piece of research.
It is not possible in a short review to mention any more of the contributions, but most of them are worth study. One final point, the book contains a very useful diary for 1968 and several statistical tables, both of which are useful for those who do not have the time to hunt around for such information.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Some Notes on British Trotskyist History</h1>
<h3>(Winter 1969/70)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 No. 1, Winter 1969–70.<br>
Signed ‘John Walters’.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">It is clear from Comrade Greenlark’s comments in the last issue of <strong>Marxist Studies</strong> that he is not familiar with the history of the British Trotskyist movement because he refers to the Socialist Labour League (SLL) as though this had had a continuous existence for over 20 years. The SLL was in fact launched in 1959, and the group which he referred to as the one that the Cliff tendency broke from was only one of the component parts of the SLL in 1959.</p>
<p>However, that is a minor aspect of the question. What I am concerned about is to examine the proposition that the Cliff tendency came into existence because of the pressures of the Cold War, and in particular its hot phase, that is, the Korean War. Unfortunately for those who like their history and politics handed out in neat simple packages, the truth was far more complicated and to understand it, it is necessary to go back a little further than 1950.</p>
<p>The situation after 1944 was that for the first time in the history of British Trotskyism there was one united organisation, that is, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). After the advent of the Labour government to office in 1945 there arose a dispute within the organisation on the question of entry into the Labour Party. Gerry Healy was the leader of the minority faction in favour of entry, whilst the majority faction which opposed entry was led by Jock Haston.</p>
<p>This particular dispute was waged fiercely for three years, but the minority still remained the minority. In 1947 the Executive of the Fourth International stepped in and decided that this dispute could only be settled in <em>practice</em>. It decided to allow the minority to enter the Labour Party as a separate organisation under the direction of the International. This was done despite protests from the leadership of the RCP. <em>De facto</em> this once more split the British Trotskyist movement, although in theory there was supposed to be still only one section. (Incidentally, it was in the same year that Cliff issued his theses on Stalinist Russia <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a>, and hardly caused a ripple either in the majority or the minority faction because they were locked in combat over the Labour Party question.)</p>
<p>Therefore, from 1947 there were two official British sections of the Fourth International, the RCP and the Healy Group inside the Labour Party. This situation caused relations between the factions, and between the RCP leadership and the International, to become even more embittered.</p>
<p>The Healy Group were instrumental in the publication of a monthly (later weekly) newspaper — <strong>Socialist Outlook</strong> — which gradually gathered support inside the Labour Party and trade unions, but no spectacular results were obtained in the first three years or so. At the same time the RCP gradually declined in numbers and influence, and the circulation of its publications declined considerably. The RCP leadership, which had pinned its hopes of a turn to the left of the rank and file of the Labour Party and an eventual split, gradually became disillusioned and began to capitulate intellectually to reformism. As they had previously exaggerated the prospects for revolution now they exaggerated the real changes brought about by reformism.</p>
<p>In 1949 the majority of the RCP leadership decided to recommend entry into the Labour Party, and even those who were against it decided not to fight on the issue. Therefore when a special congress of the party was held in 1949 the leadership won the day fairly easily, despite misgivings on the part of even their own supporters. At the same time it should be noted that the demoralisation amongst the leadership had been carefully screened from the membership even by those who were not capitulating to reformism.</p>
<p>When this had been accomplished, the RCP and the Healy Group fused, once more becoming a united organisation. <em>But</em> with this difference, the Healy faction demanded, and were given, a majority on the executive bodies of the fused organisation. Shortly after this fusion took place Haston and others of the old leadership resigned from the organisation, renouncing their Trotskyism. This was a tremendous blow to the morale of those they had led. Moreover, the regime of the unified organisation was a very authoritarian one, with many members being expelled for formal infractions of discipline, or on trumped-up charges.</p>
<p>There is another factor that has to be considered. Trotskyism as an international and national political tendency had been forged in a battle against Stalinism. Therefore, much of the propaganda of the movement was directed to criticising Stalinism. Having sprung from the world communist movement Trotskyism was therefore very largely oriented towards it. The transition to entry work was for many members a very difficult change to make, because the mode of operation, priorities and milieu were radically different to that of an open party. The pages of <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong> (the RCP’s twice-monthly newspaper) were studded with biting attacks upon Stalinism, but in contrast the entry paper <strong>Socialist Outlook</strong> made only the most passing and muted reference to this question.</p>
<p>It was with this background that the outbreak of the Korean War made its impact upon the organisation. This war was partially a civil war and partially an imperialist attack upon North Korea. In such circumstances it was the duty of revolutionary Marxists to support and defend the North Korean state but at the same time it was necessary to distinguish between support for such a state under attack from imperialism and the particular regime of that state. The North Korean state was a Stalinist police regime, which should have been criticised, Trotsky always emphasised that whilst one’s support for a workers’ state was unconditional, this in no way meant that one gave unconditional support to the <em>regime</em>. In the case of Korea the line pursued by the Healy leadership was completely uncritical of the Stalinists. This meant that <strong>Socialist Outlook</strong> was indistinguishable from the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> (now <strong>Morning Star</strong>) and to many people outside the organisation (and inside) it seemed that a Stalinist policy was being pursued.</p>
<p><em>This</em> was the final cause of the crisis inside British Trotskyism in 1950. It was in this situation that Cliff emerged from the obscurity that he had rested in since 1947, and proceeded to argue his case. The logic of his case was fairly simple, in essence he said: ‘If you continue to call these states workers’ states you end up carrying out semi-Stalinist or Stalinist policies and practices.’ The evidence he presented was very real, firstly there was the internal regime of the organisation which seemed designed to drive out all those who opposed the leadership; secondly there was the complete lack of criticism of Stalinism in the public policies of the organisation. In a situation where many members felt betrayed first by Haston and then by Healy, Cliff for once found fertile ground for his ideas. If one were to examine this situation in detail one would understand that for many people Cliff was merely carrying on the traditions that they had known, but carried them to their ‘logical’ conclusion.</p>
<p>When the SLL today thunder about the iniquities of ‘Pabloism’, it is conveniently forgotten by them that it was Healy that first introduced this dread virus into British Trotskyist body politic. Cliff was not the only person to break from the British section at this period. A smaller group of people who were not state-capitalists also broke, and they too argued that Healy was giving in to the pressures of Stalinism. But perhaps even more important is the fact that most of the people who actually joined the Cliff group at this period did not leave the British section of their own accord, but were expelled because they opposed the leadership.</p>
<p>Therefore, to argue in such simplistic terms as that ‘the Cliff group was formed because of pressures from the general anti-communist feeling at the time’ is to say the least inaccurate. The complex of pressures was much greater than allowed for. Personally I think it fair to say that the person who did most to create the Cliff Group was — Gerry Healy.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> Tony Cliff, <a href="../../../../../../archive/cliff/works/1948/stalruss/index.htm" target="new"><strong>The Nature of Stalinist Russia</strong></a>.</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
Some Notes on British Trotskyist History
(Winter 1969/70)
From Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 1, Winter 1969–70.
Signed ‘John Walters’.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
It is clear from Comrade Greenlark’s comments in the last issue of Marxist Studies that he is not familiar with the history of the British Trotskyist movement because he refers to the Socialist Labour League (SLL) as though this had had a continuous existence for over 20 years. The SLL was in fact launched in 1959, and the group which he referred to as the one that the Cliff tendency broke from was only one of the component parts of the SLL in 1959.
However, that is a minor aspect of the question. What I am concerned about is to examine the proposition that the Cliff tendency came into existence because of the pressures of the Cold War, and in particular its hot phase, that is, the Korean War. Unfortunately for those who like their history and politics handed out in neat simple packages, the truth was far more complicated and to understand it, it is necessary to go back a little further than 1950.
The situation after 1944 was that for the first time in the history of British Trotskyism there was one united organisation, that is, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). After the advent of the Labour government to office in 1945 there arose a dispute within the organisation on the question of entry into the Labour Party. Gerry Healy was the leader of the minority faction in favour of entry, whilst the majority faction which opposed entry was led by Jock Haston.
This particular dispute was waged fiercely for three years, but the minority still remained the minority. In 1947 the Executive of the Fourth International stepped in and decided that this dispute could only be settled in practice. It decided to allow the minority to enter the Labour Party as a separate organisation under the direction of the International. This was done despite protests from the leadership of the RCP. De facto this once more split the British Trotskyist movement, although in theory there was supposed to be still only one section. (Incidentally, it was in the same year that Cliff issued his theses on Stalinist Russia [1], and hardly caused a ripple either in the majority or the minority faction because they were locked in combat over the Labour Party question.)
Therefore, from 1947 there were two official British sections of the Fourth International, the RCP and the Healy Group inside the Labour Party. This situation caused relations between the factions, and between the RCP leadership and the International, to become even more embittered.
The Healy Group were instrumental in the publication of a monthly (later weekly) newspaper — Socialist Outlook — which gradually gathered support inside the Labour Party and trade unions, but no spectacular results were obtained in the first three years or so. At the same time the RCP gradually declined in numbers and influence, and the circulation of its publications declined considerably. The RCP leadership, which had pinned its hopes of a turn to the left of the rank and file of the Labour Party and an eventual split, gradually became disillusioned and began to capitulate intellectually to reformism. As they had previously exaggerated the prospects for revolution now they exaggerated the real changes brought about by reformism.
In 1949 the majority of the RCP leadership decided to recommend entry into the Labour Party, and even those who were against it decided not to fight on the issue. Therefore when a special congress of the party was held in 1949 the leadership won the day fairly easily, despite misgivings on the part of even their own supporters. At the same time it should be noted that the demoralisation amongst the leadership had been carefully screened from the membership even by those who were not capitulating to reformism.
When this had been accomplished, the RCP and the Healy Group fused, once more becoming a united organisation. But with this difference, the Healy faction demanded, and were given, a majority on the executive bodies of the fused organisation. Shortly after this fusion took place Haston and others of the old leadership resigned from the organisation, renouncing their Trotskyism. This was a tremendous blow to the morale of those they had led. Moreover, the regime of the unified organisation was a very authoritarian one, with many members being expelled for formal infractions of discipline, or on trumped-up charges.
There is another factor that has to be considered. Trotskyism as an international and national political tendency had been forged in a battle against Stalinism. Therefore, much of the propaganda of the movement was directed to criticising Stalinism. Having sprung from the world communist movement Trotskyism was therefore very largely oriented towards it. The transition to entry work was for many members a very difficult change to make, because the mode of operation, priorities and milieu were radically different to that of an open party. The pages of Socialist Appeal (the RCP’s twice-monthly newspaper) were studded with biting attacks upon Stalinism, but in contrast the entry paper Socialist Outlook made only the most passing and muted reference to this question.
It was with this background that the outbreak of the Korean War made its impact upon the organisation. This war was partially a civil war and partially an imperialist attack upon North Korea. In such circumstances it was the duty of revolutionary Marxists to support and defend the North Korean state but at the same time it was necessary to distinguish between support for such a state under attack from imperialism and the particular regime of that state. The North Korean state was a Stalinist police regime, which should have been criticised, Trotsky always emphasised that whilst one’s support for a workers’ state was unconditional, this in no way meant that one gave unconditional support to the regime. In the case of Korea the line pursued by the Healy leadership was completely uncritical of the Stalinists. This meant that Socialist Outlook was indistinguishable from the Daily Worker (now Morning Star) and to many people outside the organisation (and inside) it seemed that a Stalinist policy was being pursued.
This was the final cause of the crisis inside British Trotskyism in 1950. It was in this situation that Cliff emerged from the obscurity that he had rested in since 1947, and proceeded to argue his case. The logic of his case was fairly simple, in essence he said: ‘If you continue to call these states workers’ states you end up carrying out semi-Stalinist or Stalinist policies and practices.’ The evidence he presented was very real, firstly there was the internal regime of the organisation which seemed designed to drive out all those who opposed the leadership; secondly there was the complete lack of criticism of Stalinism in the public policies of the organisation. In a situation where many members felt betrayed first by Haston and then by Healy, Cliff for once found fertile ground for his ideas. If one were to examine this situation in detail one would understand that for many people Cliff was merely carrying on the traditions that they had known, but carried them to their ‘logical’ conclusion.
When the SLL today thunder about the iniquities of ‘Pabloism’, it is conveniently forgotten by them that it was Healy that first introduced this dread virus into British Trotskyist body politic. Cliff was not the only person to break from the British section at this period. A smaller group of people who were not state-capitalists also broke, and they too argued that Healy was giving in to the pressures of Stalinism. But perhaps even more important is the fact that most of the people who actually joined the Cliff group at this period did not leave the British section of their own accord, but were expelled because they opposed the leadership.
Therefore, to argue in such simplistic terms as that ‘the Cliff group was formed because of pressures from the general anti-communist feeling at the time’ is to say the least inaccurate. The complex of pressures was much greater than allowed for. Personally I think it fair to say that the person who did most to create the Cliff Group was — Gerry Healy.
Notes
1. Tony Cliff, The Nature of Stalinist Russia.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Review: <em>Condemned From the Dock</em></h1>
<h3>(Winter 1969/70)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 No. 1, Winter 1969–70.<br>
Signed ‘JW’ that is, John Walters.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>Condemned from the Dock:<br>
John Maclean’s Speech to the Court in 1918</strong> <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p class="fst">The reprinting of this speech is a step that is very welcome at the present time. John Maclean has long been a neglected figure in British working-class history; both the Labour Party and the Communist Party, each for their own reasons, have tended to bury his memory. However, it is well that workers should be reminded what red-blooded Marxist leaders are like. Having suffered over the last few decades from a surfeit of boneless wonders, Maclean’s words come as a breath of fresh air: ‘I am not here as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.’ Little wonder that Lenin was happy to have such a man as the first Soviet Consul in Britain. As Nan Milton says in the <em>Foreword</em>: ‘His speech ... was a vivid exposition of international socialism, and should be preserved as a part of the socialist tradition.’</p>
<p>I certainly recommend this pamphlet as a ‘good buy’.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> Obtainable from Smith, 61 Fergus Drive, Glasgow NW, 2/− post free.</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
Review: Condemned From the Dock
(Winter 1969/70)
From Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 1, Winter 1969–70.
Signed ‘JW’ that is, John Walters.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Condemned from the Dock:
John Maclean’s Speech to the Court in 1918 [1]
The reprinting of this speech is a step that is very welcome at the present time. John Maclean has long been a neglected figure in British working-class history; both the Labour Party and the Communist Party, each for their own reasons, have tended to bury his memory. However, it is well that workers should be reminded what red-blooded Marxist leaders are like. Having suffered over the last few decades from a surfeit of boneless wonders, Maclean’s words come as a breath of fresh air: ‘I am not here as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.’ Little wonder that Lenin was happy to have such a man as the first Soviet Consul in Britain. As Nan Milton says in the Foreword: ‘His speech ... was a vivid exposition of international socialism, and should be preserved as a part of the socialist tradition.’
I certainly recommend this pamphlet as a ‘good buy’.
Notes
1. Obtainable from Smith, 61 Fergus Drive, Glasgow NW, 2/− post free.
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<h2>Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Ethiopia and Socialist Theory: The Blood on the Wall</h1>
<h3>(1993)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info"><strong>Source:</strong> Pamphlet published by Marken Press, Worthing 1993.<br>
Chapter II: <em>Ethiopia and Socialist Theory: The Blood on the Wall</em> was originally published in <strong>New Interventions</strong>, Vol. 3 no. 4, January 1993.<br>
Chapter III: <em>Bonapartism and the Nature of the State</em> was originally published in <strong>Red Banner</strong>, no. 5, February 1993.<br>
Chapter IV: <em>The Rise and Fall of Mengistu</em>, was originally published in <strong>New Interventions</strong>, Vol. 4 no. 2, July 1993.<br>
Scanned and prepared by Paul Flewers for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h4><a href="chap1.html">I: Preface</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="chap2.html">II: Ethiopia and Socialist Theory: The Blood on the Wall</a><br>
<small><br>
<a href="chap2.html#app1">Appendix 1: Reading, In Order of Quality</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap2.html#app2">Appendix 2: Ethiopia: Some Basic Facts Circa 1973–74</a></small><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="chap3.html">III: Bonapartism and the Nature of the State</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="chap4.html">IV: The Rise and Fall of Mengistu</a></h4>
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Ken Tarbuck
Ethiopia and Socialist Theory: The Blood on the Wall
(1993)
Source: Pamphlet published by Marken Press, Worthing 1993.
Chapter II: Ethiopia and Socialist Theory: The Blood on the Wall was originally published in New Interventions, Vol. 3 no. 4, January 1993.
Chapter III: Bonapartism and the Nature of the State was originally published in Red Banner, no. 5, February 1993.
Chapter IV: The Rise and Fall of Mengistu, was originally published in New Interventions, Vol. 4 no. 2, July 1993.
Scanned and prepared by Paul Flewers for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
I: Preface
II: Ethiopia and Socialist Theory: The Blood on the Wall
Appendix 1: Reading, In Order of Quality
Appendix 2: Ethiopia: Some Basic Facts Circa 1973–74
III: Bonapartism and the Nature of the State
IV: The Rise and Fall of Mengistu
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Review: Ernest Mandel, <em>Europe versus America?</em></h1>
<h3>(Autumn 1970)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 No. 3, Autumn 1970.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Ernest Mandel,<br>
<strong>Europe <em>versus</em> America? Contradictions of Imperialism</strong>,<br>
<em>New Left Books, London</em></p>
<p class="fst">In this short book (139 pages) Ernest Mandel sets out to examine the problems and contradictions facing the West European bourgeoisie in its attempts to compete with US imperialism. Also he examines the <em>relative</em> decline of US imperialism in the last decade. The book is extremely well documented with references and illustrative examples of the points Mandel wants to drive home.</p>
<p>One of the most important phenomena that have arisen in the postwar world and especially in the last decade has been the international concentration of capital. (Mandel seems to use this term rather indiscriminately to cover concentration, that is, growth of individual capitals by accumulation, and centralisation, that is, the bringing together of two or more existing capitals by way of mergers, etc.) Mandel distinguishes four forms which this concentration takes:</p>
<ol type="a">
<li>The complete takeover of a nation’s industry, or at least the most significant portions, by outside capitalists. Thus the country is reduced to a semi-colony.<br>
</li>
<li>Where only certain sectors of industry are taken over by foreign capital.<br>
</li>
<li>Interpenetration of various capitals without any one country predominating.<br>
</li>
<li>Concentration purely within the national boundaries.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">He argues, and brings forward material to back up, that <em>all</em> of these processes are taking place, but that the one that is being pushed forward most vigorously is the interpenetration of capital. He convincingly demonstrates that the very nature of capitalism today urges on this process via international competition and technological innovations that this induces on an expanding scale. He writes about the third industrial revolution that we have witnessed since the end of the last war (which comprises atomic power, automation, computers, etc.) and points out how this has been part cause and part effect of this capital concentration. This arises today because there are some projects that need such vast amounts of capital to get them off the ground.</p>
<p>Mandel also brings into his analysis the thesis that since the last war we have lived through an upward movement of a Kondratiev ‘long wave’, and now we are moving into a downward movement. This would partly account for the long and sustained boom in the capitalist world since the early 1950s. However, this does somewhat contradict Mandel’s references to the ‘permanent arms economy’ which are thrown in without any explanation of what he means by this phrase. One can only presume that he means something different from what the Cliff–Kidron school infers from this, since he is at some pains throughout to snipe at Kidron in his extensive footnotes.</p>
<p>We can see then that the main theme of the book relates to the question of whether American imperialism will dominate West Europe completely in the coming decade or whether the West European bourgeoisie can extend the EEC and develop large and powerful units with which they can not only survive but also compete. In the process it becomes abundantly clear that the nation state is no longer a viable instrument for the protection of capitalism in Europe.</p>
<p>However, Mandel does not deal adequately with the question raised by Servan-Schreiber (<strong>The American Challenge</strong>, Pelican Books): the tremendous expansion of US capital <em>inside</em> Europe and the prospect of its becoming the third largest industrial power in the world within the next decade. Mandel’s treatment of this point is somewhat cursory.</p>
<p>Although there is a chapter devoted to the division of the world market and some very useful material provided regarding the relative decline of the importance of the ‘Third World’ in international trade, there is no attempt to analyse the real changes that this indicates as to the nature of imperialism. One sentence points to very important problems that this trend brings: ‘It is evidence of the increasing trend of industrial nations to exchange their industrial products amongst themselves, thus denying the safety valve of the export of industrial goods to non-industrialised countries.’ Yet this point is never taken up and developed. This is rather disappointing because the whole process raises quite fundamental questions about the <em>theory</em> of imperialism and also the <em>concrete</em> one of the continued impoverishment of the colonial world.</p>
<p>At one point when writing about the working class and inter-imperialist conflict Mandel gives an indication of how out of touch he is regarding the realities of the British scene when he writes: ‘... it should be noted that the attempt by Enoch Powell in England to exploit racist currents politically has so far only found an echo among the most demoralised and backward sectors of the British working class.’ If Mandel does not understand that Powell has in fact found quite wide echoes in most strata of the population and that he (Powell) has in fact <em>legitimised</em> racial prejudice to some extent then he is whistling in the dark.</p>
<p>The above is perhaps indicative of the rather sweeping generalities which are scattered through this short book. It is merely a skeleton on which much more could have been built. There is a great deal of information here but it has been compressed to the extent that it cannot deal with all the questions it raises. At the end of the book there is an impressive list of sources quoted, but unfortunately no index. Whilst it is a book that should be read because of the questions it raises, it is overpriced at 35 shillings.</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
Review: Ernest Mandel, Europe versus America?
(Autumn 1970)
From Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 3, Autumn 1970.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Ernest Mandel,
Europe versus America? Contradictions of Imperialism,
New Left Books, London
In this short book (139 pages) Ernest Mandel sets out to examine the problems and contradictions facing the West European bourgeoisie in its attempts to compete with US imperialism. Also he examines the relative decline of US imperialism in the last decade. The book is extremely well documented with references and illustrative examples of the points Mandel wants to drive home.
One of the most important phenomena that have arisen in the postwar world and especially in the last decade has been the international concentration of capital. (Mandel seems to use this term rather indiscriminately to cover concentration, that is, growth of individual capitals by accumulation, and centralisation, that is, the bringing together of two or more existing capitals by way of mergers, etc.) Mandel distinguishes four forms which this concentration takes:
The complete takeover of a nation’s industry, or at least the most significant portions, by outside capitalists. Thus the country is reduced to a semi-colony.
Where only certain sectors of industry are taken over by foreign capital.
Interpenetration of various capitals without any one country predominating.
Concentration purely within the national boundaries.
He argues, and brings forward material to back up, that all of these processes are taking place, but that the one that is being pushed forward most vigorously is the interpenetration of capital. He convincingly demonstrates that the very nature of capitalism today urges on this process via international competition and technological innovations that this induces on an expanding scale. He writes about the third industrial revolution that we have witnessed since the end of the last war (which comprises atomic power, automation, computers, etc.) and points out how this has been part cause and part effect of this capital concentration. This arises today because there are some projects that need such vast amounts of capital to get them off the ground.
Mandel also brings into his analysis the thesis that since the last war we have lived through an upward movement of a Kondratiev ‘long wave’, and now we are moving into a downward movement. This would partly account for the long and sustained boom in the capitalist world since the early 1950s. However, this does somewhat contradict Mandel’s references to the ‘permanent arms economy’ which are thrown in without any explanation of what he means by this phrase. One can only presume that he means something different from what the Cliff–Kidron school infers from this, since he is at some pains throughout to snipe at Kidron in his extensive footnotes.
We can see then that the main theme of the book relates to the question of whether American imperialism will dominate West Europe completely in the coming decade or whether the West European bourgeoisie can extend the EEC and develop large and powerful units with which they can not only survive but also compete. In the process it becomes abundantly clear that the nation state is no longer a viable instrument for the protection of capitalism in Europe.
However, Mandel does not deal adequately with the question raised by Servan-Schreiber (The American Challenge, Pelican Books): the tremendous expansion of US capital inside Europe and the prospect of its becoming the third largest industrial power in the world within the next decade. Mandel’s treatment of this point is somewhat cursory.
Although there is a chapter devoted to the division of the world market and some very useful material provided regarding the relative decline of the importance of the ‘Third World’ in international trade, there is no attempt to analyse the real changes that this indicates as to the nature of imperialism. One sentence points to very important problems that this trend brings: ‘It is evidence of the increasing trend of industrial nations to exchange their industrial products amongst themselves, thus denying the safety valve of the export of industrial goods to non-industrialised countries.’ Yet this point is never taken up and developed. This is rather disappointing because the whole process raises quite fundamental questions about the theory of imperialism and also the concrete one of the continued impoverishment of the colonial world.
At one point when writing about the working class and inter-imperialist conflict Mandel gives an indication of how out of touch he is regarding the realities of the British scene when he writes: ‘... it should be noted that the attempt by Enoch Powell in England to exploit racist currents politically has so far only found an echo among the most demoralised and backward sectors of the British working class.’ If Mandel does not understand that Powell has in fact found quite wide echoes in most strata of the population and that he (Powell) has in fact legitimised racial prejudice to some extent then he is whistling in the dark.
The above is perhaps indicative of the rather sweeping generalities which are scattered through this short book. It is merely a skeleton on which much more could have been built. There is a great deal of information here but it has been compressed to the extent that it cannot deal with all the questions it raises. At the end of the book there is an impressive list of sources quoted, but unfortunately no index. Whilst it is a book that should be read because of the questions it raises, it is overpriced at 35 shillings.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Review: Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution</h1>
<h3>(Summer 1977)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>International</strong>, Vol. 3 No. 4, Summer 1977.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Stephen F. Cohen,<br>
<strong>Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938</strong>,<br>
<em>Wildwood House, £4.50</em></p>
<p class="fst">Like most of the other leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, Bukharin has, for the last 40 years, been in the shadows cast by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. It is only of recent date that Bukharin’s ideas and legacy are being re-examined and with a little more objectivity. The biography of Bukharin by Stephen F. Cohen fills a gap and has been much needed; from this point of view the book is very welcome.</p>
<p>One of the problems facing any biographer of a Bolshevik leader is the inaccessibility of Soviet archives and of private papers located in the Soviet Union. As Cohen points out, only Trotsky’s private archives are open to inspection (and until 1980 some of these will remain closed); the remainder of the Bolshevik leaders’ private papers are still under lock and key in the Soviet Union. This problem has meant that anyone wishing to write such a book as Cohen’s must, of necessity, largely rely on published records. Cohen recognises these limitations when he remarks: ‘When Soviet scholars are eventually able to study and write freely about their revolutionary founders and their formative history, the account in this book will presumably be supplemented and some judgements revised.’ Any such biography is even more of a work of detection than biographical researchers normally have to face. But I do not think we have to wait until the Soviet archives are opened before some of Cohen’s judgements are revised, but more on that later.</p>
<p>Such a biography of Bukharin is long overdue, since it helps to restore a proper perspective to what for many is now rather a remote period. Moreover, a biography of Bukharin is doubly welcome, since it also serves as a signal reminder of the central place that he occupied in the development of Bolshevik theory and practice. The true stature of Bukharin has been overlaid and obscured by the attention focused upon the latter part of his life, ending in the obscene farce of the 1938 Moscow trial. Among revolutionary Marxists Bukharin has largely been ignored, partly because his name has tended to become synonymous with the appellation ‘right-wing’ that was justly bestowed on him in the last decade of his life. However, it might be pertinent to remind ourselves that, firstly, Bukharin did not always carry such a label and, secondly, that even in his right-wing days he was the leader of Bolshevik-Communists, even if right-wing ones. Because of this neglect it has been left to liberal academics to rescue Bukharin from his undeserved obscurity.</p>
<p>Cohen documents much of Bukharin’s pioneering work in the theoretical field on such questions as imperialism and the imperialist state, and how he related to both these phenomena developments in modern capitalism (circa 1916). Among the Bolsheviks and Russian socialists generally, Bukharin was among the first to develop ideas about the nature of imperialism and the consequences of monopolisation upon the state. Lenin drew heavily on Bukharin’s work when he came to write his own much more widely-known book <strong>Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism</strong>, although it is wrong – as Cohen indicates – to suggest that there were no differences in the approach of the two. The differences substantially revolved around the question of the role and nature of the imperialist state, Lenin tending to think that Bukharin was showing semi-anarchist tendencies. The war and the collapse of the Second International, however, forced Lenin to reappraise a number of previous positions. In this sense Bukharin’s writing on the imperialist state prefigures and points the direction for Lenin’s <strong>State and Revolution</strong>. After a period of disagreement on the subject of the state, Lenin came to acknowledge the correctness of Bukharin’s ideas, and embodied them in his own work of 1917.</p>
<p>Bukharin also pioneered study of the theoretical implications of the transition to socialism in his work <strong>The Economics of the Transition Period</strong>. Cohen has not given an adequate treatment of this book, which is a highly compressed text – Bukharin himself admitted that it was written ‘in almost algebraic form’. A proper consideration of this text would have enabled Cohen to understand many of the constants in Bukharin’s subsequent evolution during the 1920s.</p>
<p>However, Cohen gives an interesting description of Bukharin’s independent cast of mind in his relations with Lenin. It shows a finely balanced relationship, being a mixture of affection and heated exchanges. Whatever Bukharin’s faults, he was not a sycophant with Lenin, in fact of all Lenin’s close collaborators Bukharin seems to have disagreed with him most often; and Lenin does not always emerge with credit from Cohen’s account.</p>
<p>Bukharin was the youngest of the top Bolshevik leaders in 1917, and this point needs to be weighed when assessing his subsequent evolution. The Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd has always claimed the overwhelming attention of those who study the revolution of October 1917. Cohen’s account brings out two important points that have tended to be obscured in this respect. Firstly, in the period leading up to October, from April 1917, Lenin relied heavily upon the younger Bolsheviks in winning the party to his position, firstly in the struggle to get his <strong>April Theses</strong> adopted and then to take the decision to seize power. Bukharin played a key role in this process, since he was the leader of the younger generation in the Moscow organisation, and it was he and his peer group who overturned the older, established Bolsheviks in the Moscow region. In the discussions of the actual seizure of power it seemed likely that Moscow would be the first to take the uprising from the sphere of discussion to that of action. In the event it was Petrograd that led the way. However, it is worthwhile to note that Bukharin was only 29 years old when he led the uprising in Moscow. Unlike the Petrograd events, there was fairly heavy fighting in Moscow in which 500 party members lost their lives. Bukharin is usually portrayed as being wholly intellectual – not a ‘practical’ man – yet his role in Moscow in 1917 does not bear out this assessment. The second point that emerges from Cohen’s account is that it was Trotsky and his group, who only joined the Bolsheviks in June 1917, who dominated events in Petrograd during the period of preparation and actual seizure of power. Almost without exception the old guard of Leninist Bolsheviks played subordinate roles or actually opposed the party in the October revolution. Cohen quite skilfully and concretely demonstrates the validity of these two propositions.</p>
<p>Insofar as Cohen has written only a one-volume biography he has been forced to be selective. However, even allowing for the lack of Bukharin’s private papers, I feel that there are certain important areas and points that are missing. The most notable absence is any real treatment of Bukharin’s role in the Comintern. From its inception in 1919 Bukharin played a leading role in the functions of that body. It is true that, until his fall from power in 1925, Zinoviev played the central <em>public</em> role, and only after 1925 did Bukharin occupy the centre of the Comintern stage. But Bukharin’s involvement was on a continuing basis for 10 years. Cohen’s failure to make more than a passing reference to these activities seems to me to flow from more than the need to compress. From the year 1920 onwards Cohen has concentrated his attention on Bukharin’s relationship to internal Soviet and party affairs, and in particular his role in the industrialisation debate. Coupled with this is an inadequate analysis of the social forces behind the debating positions.</p>
<p>This is where Cohen’s treatment falls down: without an adequate analysis of international events, particularly the failure of the German revolution and the débâcle of the Chinese Communist Party under the tutelage of Bukharin and Stalin, one cannot grapple with the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy and its subsequent victory. It is true that internal Soviet conditions were themselves alone sufficient for the rise of such a social formation, but there was no inevitability about its victory and Cohen does not really try to explain the rise of this formation and its relationship to external factors. Nor can one divorce the triumph of the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ from the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy. Cohen makes no attempt at such an analysis and because of this muffs his discussion of the origins of the theory. It is true that some of the phrases and ideas that he pinpoints from Bukharin seem to be the first utterance of the theory, but one feels that had events taken another course one would not remark upon them now. Cohen does not ask why, despite what seem to be hints and allusions from Bukharin, it was Stalin who first articulated the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ in its most rounded manner. If Cohen had examined this point he might have been led on to the question of the bureaucracy. And if he had done so he would have been forced to look at Bukharin’s relationship with that particular force. In this respect Cohen’s treatment of Bukharin’s fear of the ‘new Leviathan’ is devoid of class content and as such tends to downgrade Bukharin to a liberal-democrat.</p>
<p>Whilst there is, obviously, a fairly full treatment of Bukharin’s economic ideas in the 1920s, Cohen does less than justice to Bukharin’s opponents and this often tends to obscure the discussion. Every now and again Cohen admits that the ideas of the Left Opposition were distorted, but he makes no attempt to present a balanced picture. Nor is this accidental, as we shall see.</p>
<p>There is another aspect with which Cohen has failed to deal, namely Bukharin’s role in the campaign against ‘Trotskyism’ in the mid-1920s. Bukharin and his Red Professors unleashed a deluge of lies and distortions upon the left – and Trotsky in particular – which played no small part in rallying a large part of the new intake of raw party members (the Lenin levy) around the Central Committee majority. (I leave aside the particular ‘skills’ which Stalin used at the same time.) To write a biography of Bukharin with such omissions vitiates its overall usefulness. Bukharin helped to perfect the techniques which were later to lead to his own rout by Stalin in 1928–29, but Cohen passes this over. Was he perhaps afraid that it would detract from his hero? I say hero deliberately, for that is how Bukharin appears in Cohen’s account. Perhaps all good biographers have this tendency, but Cohen seems to have allowed it to obscure his judgement.</p>
<p>Cohen started out to write this biography with a particular thesis which he wanted to prove. In the preface he writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Much of what follows will suggest that by the mid-1920s Bukharin ... and his allies were more important in Bolshevik politics and thinking than Trotsky or Trotskyism. It will suggest, in short, that the view of Trotsky ‘as the representative figure of pre-Stalinist communism and the precursor of post-Stalinist communism’ is a serious misconception. (p. xvi)</p>
<p class="fst">This theme is linked, right at the end of the book, to the idea that Bukharinism is the underlying ideology of ‘socialism with a human face’ in Eastern Europe. In trying to prove his thesis, Cohen is trying to prove too much. If Trotsky was not the precursor of post-Stalinist communism, how does Cohen account for the enduring and increasing appeal of Trotsky’s ideas to the youth of the world? Every time there has been a radical upsurge Trotsky’s ideas have gained currency. One may not like some of the ways that Trotsky’s ideas are presented, but I have not seen any <em>Bukharinist</em> organisation propagating its ideas recently. Any groups that owed allegiance to Bukharin faded away in the late 1930s. To say this does not in any way detract from Bukharin’s merits, but it does mean that in the scales of history Trotsky weighs far more than Bukharin. For history is not made by Professors of History writing books, but by people – such as the 29-year-old Bukharin – acting it out in actual struggle. (Incidentally, I feel that only an academic could talk of Stalinist communism, there is no way these two terms can be coupled in reality, since they stand in constant opposition to each other.)</p>
<p>But, it may be said, in Eastern Europe, in the ‘socialist’ countries, Bukharin and his ideas inspire the ‘liberalisers’. Suffice it to say here that it is among the <em>bureaucrats</em> that a bowdlerised version of his ideas are popular. However, serious consideration must be given to the idea of the <em>convergence</em> of basic ideas between the Bukharinist opposition and the Trotskyist one, particularly in 1929–30. Moshe Lewin, in his <strong>Political Undercurrents in the Soviet Economic Debate</strong>, provides much evidence to support this thesis. Cohen, on the other hand, does not seriously consider this question, and this arises from his determination to ‘prove’ his thesis that Bukharin was more realistic than Trotsky. However, it must be admitted that any serious reading of the <em>economic</em> ideas advanced by both Trotsky and Bukharin in this period does show considerable agreement when faced with the excesses and irrationalities of Stalin’s industrialisation and collectivisation drive.</p>
<p>The fact that many Left Oppositionists capitulated to Stalin at this period (1929–30) is usually taken as a sign that they thought that Stalin was adopting, albeit in a bureaucratic manner, the economic policies of the Left Opposition. After some momentary initial hesitation, Trotsky came to the conclusion that this was not the case, and remained firmly in opposition to the <em>whole</em> of Stalin’s policies. And Trotsky, who for a number of years had appeared to be the radical on economic questions, was now forced into the role of moderate. It seems to me that Trotsky did this because he realised that without, as a first step, the restoration of inner-party democracy, the vastly increased tempo of industrialisation and wholesale unprepared collectivisation of agriculture presented as many dangers, if not more, than the previous snail’s pace tempo. The fact that Trotsky was prepared to consider a bloc with Bukharin against Stalin, to fight for the restoration of inner-party democracy, indicates Trotsky’s appreciation of the seminal importance of an <em>overall</em>, and not one-sided, strategy of development for the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>In this respect it has to be considered whether Trotsky merely stood firm on his previous positions when faced with capitulations within his own ranks, or whether he came to realise that the Left Opposition had not been so homogeneous as had been (and still is) assumed. The fact that Preobrazhensky, the leading economist of the Left Opposition, capitulated to Stalin, while Trotsky remained firmly opposed, should provide some ground for reconsideration of the period and the evolution of Trotsky and Bukharin. The years 1929-30 presents a picture of two ships that pass in the night, both seeming to be on the same course, but this did not last.</p>
<p>Cohen consistently fails to come to grips with these problems, since it would tend to detract from the picture he wishes to present of Bukharin. There was a clear shift on the part of Bukharin in 1928–30, which brought the possibility of a bloc with the Left Opposition within sight. The fact that it did not take place is not only important in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Left Opposition, but even more so in examining the Right Opposition and Bukharin in particular. Cohen does not even attempt to deal with such problems, since for him Trotsky and the Left Opposition are merely a small band crying in the wilderness, whilst Bukharin apparently represented a broad, if diffused, opposition within all sections of Soviet society. What Cohen forgets is that the social base of the Left Opposition – the Soviet working class – has been enormously increased since 1930, whilst the social strata that the Right Opposition reflected – the small peasants – has all but disappeared from Soviet society. The Left Opposition may have been crying in the wilderness by 1930, but in the last analysis all that Bukharin could do was to cry in anguish at the actions of the predatory monster he had helped to victory.</p>
<p>The historic merit of Trotsky lies precisely in the fact that he did not capitulate, that he was prepared to carry on a principled struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy against all odds. In the process he forged many of the intellectual weapons that are needed, firstly to understand this phenomenon and secondly to combat it. Bukharin’s <em>consistent</em> refusal to take up the struggle against Stalin in public meant that he always had to compromise to Stalin’s advantage. It was of little consequence after 1930 that Bukharin’s <em>private</em> views sometimes coincided with Trotsky’s <em>public</em> positions, because Bukharin never <em>did</em> anything about them, while Trotsky did.</p>
<p>If this review has seemed overly critical, it is because the matters dealt with are not merely ones of historical interpretation or judgement, they are central to politics here and now. And as such the omissions and failures cannot go unnoticed. This is not to say that those who are interested in uncovering the real heritage of revolutionary Marxism should not rescue Bukharin from his undeserved oblivion, but at the same time it may be necessary to rescue him from his more uncritical admirers. A study of Bukharin’s writings is necessary for us to reappropriate our heritage, those who do so will be richly rewarded. But they have to study critically. Cohen’s book needs to be used in the same way.</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
Review: Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution
(Summer 1977)
From International, Vol. 3 No. 4, Summer 1977.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Stephen F. Cohen,
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938,
Wildwood House, £4.50
Like most of the other leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, Bukharin has, for the last 40 years, been in the shadows cast by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. It is only of recent date that Bukharin’s ideas and legacy are being re-examined and with a little more objectivity. The biography of Bukharin by Stephen F. Cohen fills a gap and has been much needed; from this point of view the book is very welcome.
One of the problems facing any biographer of a Bolshevik leader is the inaccessibility of Soviet archives and of private papers located in the Soviet Union. As Cohen points out, only Trotsky’s private archives are open to inspection (and until 1980 some of these will remain closed); the remainder of the Bolshevik leaders’ private papers are still under lock and key in the Soviet Union. This problem has meant that anyone wishing to write such a book as Cohen’s must, of necessity, largely rely on published records. Cohen recognises these limitations when he remarks: ‘When Soviet scholars are eventually able to study and write freely about their revolutionary founders and their formative history, the account in this book will presumably be supplemented and some judgements revised.’ Any such biography is even more of a work of detection than biographical researchers normally have to face. But I do not think we have to wait until the Soviet archives are opened before some of Cohen’s judgements are revised, but more on that later.
Such a biography of Bukharin is long overdue, since it helps to restore a proper perspective to what for many is now rather a remote period. Moreover, a biography of Bukharin is doubly welcome, since it also serves as a signal reminder of the central place that he occupied in the development of Bolshevik theory and practice. The true stature of Bukharin has been overlaid and obscured by the attention focused upon the latter part of his life, ending in the obscene farce of the 1938 Moscow trial. Among revolutionary Marxists Bukharin has largely been ignored, partly because his name has tended to become synonymous with the appellation ‘right-wing’ that was justly bestowed on him in the last decade of his life. However, it might be pertinent to remind ourselves that, firstly, Bukharin did not always carry such a label and, secondly, that even in his right-wing days he was the leader of Bolshevik-Communists, even if right-wing ones. Because of this neglect it has been left to liberal academics to rescue Bukharin from his undeserved obscurity.
Cohen documents much of Bukharin’s pioneering work in the theoretical field on such questions as imperialism and the imperialist state, and how he related to both these phenomena developments in modern capitalism (circa 1916). Among the Bolsheviks and Russian socialists generally, Bukharin was among the first to develop ideas about the nature of imperialism and the consequences of monopolisation upon the state. Lenin drew heavily on Bukharin’s work when he came to write his own much more widely-known book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, although it is wrong – as Cohen indicates – to suggest that there were no differences in the approach of the two. The differences substantially revolved around the question of the role and nature of the imperialist state, Lenin tending to think that Bukharin was showing semi-anarchist tendencies. The war and the collapse of the Second International, however, forced Lenin to reappraise a number of previous positions. In this sense Bukharin’s writing on the imperialist state prefigures and points the direction for Lenin’s State and Revolution. After a period of disagreement on the subject of the state, Lenin came to acknowledge the correctness of Bukharin’s ideas, and embodied them in his own work of 1917.
Bukharin also pioneered study of the theoretical implications of the transition to socialism in his work The Economics of the Transition Period. Cohen has not given an adequate treatment of this book, which is a highly compressed text – Bukharin himself admitted that it was written ‘in almost algebraic form’. A proper consideration of this text would have enabled Cohen to understand many of the constants in Bukharin’s subsequent evolution during the 1920s.
However, Cohen gives an interesting description of Bukharin’s independent cast of mind in his relations with Lenin. It shows a finely balanced relationship, being a mixture of affection and heated exchanges. Whatever Bukharin’s faults, he was not a sycophant with Lenin, in fact of all Lenin’s close collaborators Bukharin seems to have disagreed with him most often; and Lenin does not always emerge with credit from Cohen’s account.
Bukharin was the youngest of the top Bolshevik leaders in 1917, and this point needs to be weighed when assessing his subsequent evolution. The Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd has always claimed the overwhelming attention of those who study the revolution of October 1917. Cohen’s account brings out two important points that have tended to be obscured in this respect. Firstly, in the period leading up to October, from April 1917, Lenin relied heavily upon the younger Bolsheviks in winning the party to his position, firstly in the struggle to get his April Theses adopted and then to take the decision to seize power. Bukharin played a key role in this process, since he was the leader of the younger generation in the Moscow organisation, and it was he and his peer group who overturned the older, established Bolsheviks in the Moscow region. In the discussions of the actual seizure of power it seemed likely that Moscow would be the first to take the uprising from the sphere of discussion to that of action. In the event it was Petrograd that led the way. However, it is worthwhile to note that Bukharin was only 29 years old when he led the uprising in Moscow. Unlike the Petrograd events, there was fairly heavy fighting in Moscow in which 500 party members lost their lives. Bukharin is usually portrayed as being wholly intellectual – not a ‘practical’ man – yet his role in Moscow in 1917 does not bear out this assessment. The second point that emerges from Cohen’s account is that it was Trotsky and his group, who only joined the Bolsheviks in June 1917, who dominated events in Petrograd during the period of preparation and actual seizure of power. Almost without exception the old guard of Leninist Bolsheviks played subordinate roles or actually opposed the party in the October revolution. Cohen quite skilfully and concretely demonstrates the validity of these two propositions.
Insofar as Cohen has written only a one-volume biography he has been forced to be selective. However, even allowing for the lack of Bukharin’s private papers, I feel that there are certain important areas and points that are missing. The most notable absence is any real treatment of Bukharin’s role in the Comintern. From its inception in 1919 Bukharin played a leading role in the functions of that body. It is true that, until his fall from power in 1925, Zinoviev played the central public role, and only after 1925 did Bukharin occupy the centre of the Comintern stage. But Bukharin’s involvement was on a continuing basis for 10 years. Cohen’s failure to make more than a passing reference to these activities seems to me to flow from more than the need to compress. From the year 1920 onwards Cohen has concentrated his attention on Bukharin’s relationship to internal Soviet and party affairs, and in particular his role in the industrialisation debate. Coupled with this is an inadequate analysis of the social forces behind the debating positions.
This is where Cohen’s treatment falls down: without an adequate analysis of international events, particularly the failure of the German revolution and the débâcle of the Chinese Communist Party under the tutelage of Bukharin and Stalin, one cannot grapple with the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy and its subsequent victory. It is true that internal Soviet conditions were themselves alone sufficient for the rise of such a social formation, but there was no inevitability about its victory and Cohen does not really try to explain the rise of this formation and its relationship to external factors. Nor can one divorce the triumph of the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ from the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy. Cohen makes no attempt at such an analysis and because of this muffs his discussion of the origins of the theory. It is true that some of the phrases and ideas that he pinpoints from Bukharin seem to be the first utterance of the theory, but one feels that had events taken another course one would not remark upon them now. Cohen does not ask why, despite what seem to be hints and allusions from Bukharin, it was Stalin who first articulated the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ in its most rounded manner. If Cohen had examined this point he might have been led on to the question of the bureaucracy. And if he had done so he would have been forced to look at Bukharin’s relationship with that particular force. In this respect Cohen’s treatment of Bukharin’s fear of the ‘new Leviathan’ is devoid of class content and as such tends to downgrade Bukharin to a liberal-democrat.
Whilst there is, obviously, a fairly full treatment of Bukharin’s economic ideas in the 1920s, Cohen does less than justice to Bukharin’s opponents and this often tends to obscure the discussion. Every now and again Cohen admits that the ideas of the Left Opposition were distorted, but he makes no attempt to present a balanced picture. Nor is this accidental, as we shall see.
There is another aspect with which Cohen has failed to deal, namely Bukharin’s role in the campaign against ‘Trotskyism’ in the mid-1920s. Bukharin and his Red Professors unleashed a deluge of lies and distortions upon the left – and Trotsky in particular – which played no small part in rallying a large part of the new intake of raw party members (the Lenin levy) around the Central Committee majority. (I leave aside the particular ‘skills’ which Stalin used at the same time.) To write a biography of Bukharin with such omissions vitiates its overall usefulness. Bukharin helped to perfect the techniques which were later to lead to his own rout by Stalin in 1928–29, but Cohen passes this over. Was he perhaps afraid that it would detract from his hero? I say hero deliberately, for that is how Bukharin appears in Cohen’s account. Perhaps all good biographers have this tendency, but Cohen seems to have allowed it to obscure his judgement.
Cohen started out to write this biography with a particular thesis which he wanted to prove. In the preface he writes:
Much of what follows will suggest that by the mid-1920s Bukharin ... and his allies were more important in Bolshevik politics and thinking than Trotsky or Trotskyism. It will suggest, in short, that the view of Trotsky ‘as the representative figure of pre-Stalinist communism and the precursor of post-Stalinist communism’ is a serious misconception. (p. xvi)
This theme is linked, right at the end of the book, to the idea that Bukharinism is the underlying ideology of ‘socialism with a human face’ in Eastern Europe. In trying to prove his thesis, Cohen is trying to prove too much. If Trotsky was not the precursor of post-Stalinist communism, how does Cohen account for the enduring and increasing appeal of Trotsky’s ideas to the youth of the world? Every time there has been a radical upsurge Trotsky’s ideas have gained currency. One may not like some of the ways that Trotsky’s ideas are presented, but I have not seen any Bukharinist organisation propagating its ideas recently. Any groups that owed allegiance to Bukharin faded away in the late 1930s. To say this does not in any way detract from Bukharin’s merits, but it does mean that in the scales of history Trotsky weighs far more than Bukharin. For history is not made by Professors of History writing books, but by people – such as the 29-year-old Bukharin – acting it out in actual struggle. (Incidentally, I feel that only an academic could talk of Stalinist communism, there is no way these two terms can be coupled in reality, since they stand in constant opposition to each other.)
But, it may be said, in Eastern Europe, in the ‘socialist’ countries, Bukharin and his ideas inspire the ‘liberalisers’. Suffice it to say here that it is among the bureaucrats that a bowdlerised version of his ideas are popular. However, serious consideration must be given to the idea of the convergence of basic ideas between the Bukharinist opposition and the Trotskyist one, particularly in 1929–30. Moshe Lewin, in his Political Undercurrents in the Soviet Economic Debate, provides much evidence to support this thesis. Cohen, on the other hand, does not seriously consider this question, and this arises from his determination to ‘prove’ his thesis that Bukharin was more realistic than Trotsky. However, it must be admitted that any serious reading of the economic ideas advanced by both Trotsky and Bukharin in this period does show considerable agreement when faced with the excesses and irrationalities of Stalin’s industrialisation and collectivisation drive.
The fact that many Left Oppositionists capitulated to Stalin at this period (1929–30) is usually taken as a sign that they thought that Stalin was adopting, albeit in a bureaucratic manner, the economic policies of the Left Opposition. After some momentary initial hesitation, Trotsky came to the conclusion that this was not the case, and remained firmly in opposition to the whole of Stalin’s policies. And Trotsky, who for a number of years had appeared to be the radical on economic questions, was now forced into the role of moderate. It seems to me that Trotsky did this because he realised that without, as a first step, the restoration of inner-party democracy, the vastly increased tempo of industrialisation and wholesale unprepared collectivisation of agriculture presented as many dangers, if not more, than the previous snail’s pace tempo. The fact that Trotsky was prepared to consider a bloc with Bukharin against Stalin, to fight for the restoration of inner-party democracy, indicates Trotsky’s appreciation of the seminal importance of an overall, and not one-sided, strategy of development for the Soviet Union.
In this respect it has to be considered whether Trotsky merely stood firm on his previous positions when faced with capitulations within his own ranks, or whether he came to realise that the Left Opposition had not been so homogeneous as had been (and still is) assumed. The fact that Preobrazhensky, the leading economist of the Left Opposition, capitulated to Stalin, while Trotsky remained firmly opposed, should provide some ground for reconsideration of the period and the evolution of Trotsky and Bukharin. The years 1929-30 presents a picture of two ships that pass in the night, both seeming to be on the same course, but this did not last.
Cohen consistently fails to come to grips with these problems, since it would tend to detract from the picture he wishes to present of Bukharin. There was a clear shift on the part of Bukharin in 1928–30, which brought the possibility of a bloc with the Left Opposition within sight. The fact that it did not take place is not only important in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Left Opposition, but even more so in examining the Right Opposition and Bukharin in particular. Cohen does not even attempt to deal with such problems, since for him Trotsky and the Left Opposition are merely a small band crying in the wilderness, whilst Bukharin apparently represented a broad, if diffused, opposition within all sections of Soviet society. What Cohen forgets is that the social base of the Left Opposition – the Soviet working class – has been enormously increased since 1930, whilst the social strata that the Right Opposition reflected – the small peasants – has all but disappeared from Soviet society. The Left Opposition may have been crying in the wilderness by 1930, but in the last analysis all that Bukharin could do was to cry in anguish at the actions of the predatory monster he had helped to victory.
The historic merit of Trotsky lies precisely in the fact that he did not capitulate, that he was prepared to carry on a principled struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy against all odds. In the process he forged many of the intellectual weapons that are needed, firstly to understand this phenomenon and secondly to combat it. Bukharin’s consistent refusal to take up the struggle against Stalin in public meant that he always had to compromise to Stalin’s advantage. It was of little consequence after 1930 that Bukharin’s private views sometimes coincided with Trotsky’s public positions, because Bukharin never did anything about them, while Trotsky did.
If this review has seemed overly critical, it is because the matters dealt with are not merely ones of historical interpretation or judgement, they are central to politics here and now. And as such the omissions and failures cannot go unnoticed. This is not to say that those who are interested in uncovering the real heritage of revolutionary Marxism should not rescue Bukharin from his undeserved oblivion, but at the same time it may be necessary to rescue him from his more uncritical admirers. A study of Bukharin’s writings is necessary for us to reappropriate our heritage, those who do so will be richly rewarded. But they have to study critically. Cohen’s book needs to be used in the same way.
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>I.S. Writes Its Own History</h1>
<h3>(February 1972)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Workers Fight</strong>, No. 3, February 1972, pp. 10–11.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of the International Socialism Group – Some Documents<br>
</strong><em>Pluto Press, £1.00</em></p>
<table width="80%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst"><strong>Reviewed by KEN TARBUCK, who was during the period covered by these documents the Secretary of the Socialist Review Group.</strong></p> </td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">WHAT, ONE MAY ASK, is the purpose this small selection of <strong>Some Documents</strong> relating to the history of IS?</p>
<p>To the uninformed it may appear to be an exercise in educating the present membership, to help round out their picture of how the organisation came into being.</p>
<p>Unfortunately Pluto Press have engaged the services of a person to introduce the documents whose only gifts seem to be an ability to falsify and to develop a defective memory when convenient.</p>
<p>All the tortuous political arguments on Trotsky’s views on the nature of the Soviet Union – as seen by Hallas – are, in fact, merely a preamble to some rather clumsy falsifications.<br>
</p>
<h4>East Europe</h4>
<p class="fst">In the late 1940s a vital discussion took place in the Fourth International on the class nature of the East European states.</p>
<p>Hallas attempts to distort the developing position of the F.I. in order to claim that there had been a somersault from regarding the East European states as capitalist, to regarding them as workers’ states. Thus he alleges that as well as the FI characterising the state capitalist analysis of these states as revisionism, it also characterised as revisionist the view that they were workers’ states.</p>
<p>The <a href="../../../../document/fi/1938-1949/fi-2ndcongress/1948-congress02.htm" target="new">document</a> to which Hallas refers, using a single phrase torn out of context, is a lengthy resolution passed by the 2nd World Congress in 1948. As to the actual position taken in this document, we find the following:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The peculiarity of the buffer-zone countries consists in this, that the Soviet bureaucracy has succeeded, for the time being, in orienting the capitalist economy in a sense corresponding, in the first instance, to its own interests. This situation can only be transitional. It must end either in the bureaucracy’s withdrawal from its position, under the pressure of imperialism, or in the real destruction of capitalism ... The Stalinist state apparatus has acquired a great deal of independence in relation to the bourgeoisie and proletariat, not alone owing to the balance between and the growing prostration of both these classes; but above all to its intimate ties with the Soviet state apparatus and the overwhelming weight of the latter in Eastern Europe, amid the existing world relations.” (p. 119, <strong>Fourth International</strong>, June 1948)</p>
<p class="fst">It is certainly true that there was some initial confusion, and the resolution quoted above reflected this ambiguity. But what does this prove? Merely, that when faced with an unprecedented situation the F.I. refused to rush in with ready made answers.</p>
<p>In this connection it is pertinent to point out that Cliff did rush in, as his document on the <a href="../../../../../../archive/cliff/works/1950/07/index.htm" target="new"><em>Class Nature of the Peoples Democracies</em></a> (included in this selection) shows.</p>
<p>Any examination of this and the current reality in Eastern Europe will show that what Cliff described (largely correct factually at the time) no longer obtains. All of the special companies and other economic forms which he attributes to “Soviet Imperialism” have long since disappeared.</p>
<p>The 1948 resolution of the Fourth International has been vindicated in this respect, since it emphasised the transitional nature of the regimes at the time.</p>
<p>Finally, what of the “workers’ statist Revisionism”? A reading of the actual resolution makes clear that it refers to ... pro-Stalinists outside the Fourth International!<br>
</p>
<h4>Korea</h4>
<p class="fst">Given that it was the issue of the Korean war that was the catalyst which broke a number of members away from the Healy group (the forerunner of the present Socialist Labour League), the bulk of whom went on to form the SOCIALIST REVIEW GROUP – parent of today’s I.S. – it strikes one as odd, to say the least, that the article chosen to represent this group’s point of view on the war is one taken from the second issue of the journal, one, moreover, which originated in India.</p>
<p>(Incidentally Hallas’ claim that it was Cliff’s document on the”Peoples Democracies” that rallied people is just not true – see <em>Some Notes on the History of British Trotskyism</em>, in <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 no. 1, Winter 1969–70.)</p>
<p>Didn’t the group have anything to say on such an important issue in the <a href="../../../../newspape/soc-rev-srg/index.html#sr50_11" target="new">first number</a> of <strong>Socialist Review</strong>? After all any journal worth its salt must say something on such a burning current issue in its first number.</p>
<p>In fact TWO articles appeared on this question in the first issue of <strong>Socialist Review</strong>. The very first article in the journal was <a href="../../../../../../archive/cliff/works/1950/11/powers.html" target="new"><em>The Struggle of the Powers</em></a> by R. Tennant (Tony Cliff). This devoted two pages to criticising American imperialism – and nearly five pages to attacking “Russian imperialism”.</p>
<p>The other article on this question was entitled <em>Whither <strong>Socialist Outlook</strong>?</em> (the Healy group’s paper in the Labour Party). This is a scathing attack on the “pro-Stalinist” policy being pursued by <strong>Socialist Outlook</strong> (which supported North Korea against US imperialism). It very clearly parted <strong>Socialist Review</strong> from such policies, and took an uncompromising ‘third camp’ position.</p>
<p>Why then select an article written in India to represent the Socialist Review group policy on this key issue?</p>
<p>Quite correctly Hallas repudiates the slander that the SR group in any way supported American imperialism. Yet there is no doubt that, given the support for the Vietnamese revolution by IS today, Hallas and the other leaders of today’s IS feel very uncomfortable about the Korean war and the stand taken on it. Yet they dared not leave it out of this collection.</p>
<p>Therefore the choice was made to republish an article that is short and comparatively mild in tone compared with the articles in the first issue of <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, which were a real reflection of the feelings on the Group.</p>
<p>And of course so anxious are the present leaders of IS to put distance between themselves and Shachtman – given his present support for US imperialism in Vietnam – that they fail to mention that <strong>Labor Action</strong> (the paper which the article came from) was Shachtman’s paper!<br>
</p>
<h4>China & Yugoslavia</h4>
<p class="fst">A claim is made that “Cliff’s forecast of the political development of the FI was rapidly confirmed. The majority adopted Michael Pablo’s notorious (<em>sic</em>) document <a href="../../../../../../archive/pablo/1953/11/stalinism.html" target="new"><em>The Rise and Decline of Stalinism</em></a> ... which represented a return to the reformist Trotskyism of the twenties with respect to Stalinist states where these happened to be in actual or potential conflict with Russia”.</p>
<p>We are served up a short paragraph which does NOT talk about reforming the Chinese and Yugoslav parties or states, but says Trotskyists should strive to create revolutionary currents within these parties.</p>
<p>However, this point of view was not predicated upon the view that these states were in conflict with Russia, but on the fact that they were the two Communist Parties that had carried through an overturn in property relations within their respective countries, independent of, and against the advice of, Stalin.</p>
<p>It was precisely because these two parties had had to mobilise the masses in their struggles that led the FI to argue at that time that these parties were still capable of responding to mass pressure and actions. It was this aspect that led to the particular judgment being made at the time. One, incidentally, that I now feel was wrong, but has been corrected by the test of events.</p>
<p>But, on the main issue of the Stalinist states, the document in question is clear and unequivocal –</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Our sections ought to resolutely combat any tendency towards apology or justification for the present regime in the Soviet Union ... The smashing of the dictatorship and the privileges of the bureaucracy, the task of a new political revolution IN THE SOVIET UNION remains more burning than ever.” (p. 43, <strong>Fourth International</strong> (Paris), Winter 1958, emphasis in original, passed at World Congress, 1954.)</p>
<p class="fst">The so-called ‘notorious’ document of Pablo, if read as a whole, has in fact stood the test of time far better than Cliff’s liberal use of statistics as a substitute for analysis.<br>
</p>
<h4>Western Europe</h4>
<p class="fst">But where is the relapse into ‘reformist Trotskyism’ that Hallas writes about? It is another figment of his imagination.</p>
<p>He alleges that the Fourth International indulged in some “fantasy” of a perspective of reforming the mass Stalinist parties in Western Europe, and like the proverbial children’s party conjuror he pulls a quotation out of the hat.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“These organisations cannot be smashed and replaced by others in the relatively short time between now and the decisive conflict. All the more so since these organisations will be obliged, whether they wish it or not, to give a leftward turn to the whole or at least part of the leadership.”</p>
<p class="fst">The reference Hallas gives for this quotation is <em>The Decline and Fall of Stalinism</em>, a document adopted in 1954 by the world congress of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International and reproduced in 1970 by the Socialist Workers Party (USA).</p>
<p>Unfortunately for anyone wishing to check the validity of this quotation they will not find it anywhere in the 1970 edition, nor in the 1958 edition; the reason is quite simple. The quotation does not come from this document at all.</p>
<p>It seems to be one of the laws of politics that the worse the mistake or falsification the more likely it is to be repeated.</p>
<p>Hallas is no exception.</p>
<p>He had previously used exactly the same quote in his article <a href="../../../../../../archive/hallas/works/1969/xx/building.htm" target="new"><em>Building the Leadership</em></a> in <strong>I.S.</strong> journal No. 40, Unfortunately it is taken, at second hand, from a source other than that which he cites. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p>If all that was at stake was some confusion over the correct source of a quotation, it would not merit such a lengthy explanation. But a proper reading of <a href="../../../../document/fi/iib-1951-69/1959-Autumn-Recall-To-Order-FI-n7-pages-55-67.pdf" target="new"><em>A Recall to Order</em></a> (Hallas’ actual source) makes it quite clear that the quotation is not talking about the Communist Parties at all! The reference was in fact to the mass social democratic parties.</p>
<p>It must be recalled that at the time in question, i.e. 1952, nearly every tendency on the left thought that a third world war was not only possible but imminent.</p>
<p>If one reads the above In this contest one can see that the report was based upon the assumption of a quicker tempo of development than subsequently occurred and that it posed a very real and legitimate possibility of some social democratic leaderships or sections of them being forced in a revolutionary direction by the pressure and activity of the masses.</p>
<p>The report in fact says –</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In all these countries it is extremely probable, except for some new and at the moment unforeseeable developments, that the radicalisation of the masses and the first stages of the revolution, of the objective revolutionary situation, will manifest themselves within these organisations, The main forces of the revolutionary party of these countries will spring up by differentiation or disintegration of these organisations.”</p>
<p class="fst">Does Hallas actually think (even in these brave new days of the 12-page <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> ...) that there can be a complete by-passing of the existing organisations of the working class in the building of a revolutionary party, or that it is not reasonable to suppose that ferment within them and splits and disintegration will be a part of the process?</p>
<p>Finally, lest Hallas and his ilk think that only the “Pabloites” thought a third world war was imminent, let me quote from a <strong>Socialist Review Youth Supplement</strong> of the same period: </p>
<p class="quoteb">“The world today is divided by and large into two vast imperialist Power blocs, both striving for world supremacy. You may be quite ignorant of the coal and steel production figures of these countries but of one thing you can be certain. Both power blocs threaten world peace, and war between them is inevitable.”</p>
<p class="fst">How, then, does this fit in now with the picture of IS being right all the time and everyone else wrong? Perhaps readers will now understand why only “some documents” were republished, and others left to moulder in the archives.<br>
</p>
<h4>Smokescreen</h4>
<p class="fst">The question that has to be asked now is why these particular documents were reproduced at this time, and why Hallas has to write such a falsified <a href="../../../../../../archive/hallas/works/1971/xx/introis.htm" target="new"><em>Introduction</em></a> to them?</p>
<p>Certainly new members of IS will want to know about the origins of IS and its present leaders. In this respect both the selection and introduction serve as a smoke screen to cover up far more than was intended to reveal.</p>
<p>That Cliff was the main driving force of the organisation’s ideas and has remained with it all along cannot be doubted.</p>
<p>But the inclusion of Hallas’ <a href="../../../../../../archive/hallas/works/1951/xx/stalparty.htm" target="new">document from 1951</a> (dressed up as the Group’s main policy document but in fact only a rehash – “for use on contacts” – of a Secretariat resolution endorsed two months previously) along with his introduction serve as camouflage to prevent new comrades wondering where Hallas was during the intervening years.</p>
<p>Certainly he cannot claim a continuous membership of the organisation since its inception. (Indeed even in the first two years of its existence his membership was put in question. There is a note in the Nov. 1952 minutes of the NC where it was moved that Hallas be dropped to the rank of sympathiser for non-payment of dues.)</p>
<p>It would be instructive for new members of IS to look through the issues of <strong>Socialist Review</strong> during the 1950s. They will be hard put to it to find any contribution by Hallas. The book <strong>A Socialist Review</strong> published in 1965, which was a selection from articles over the years from the paper, contains not one contribution from Hallas.</p>
<p>The whole of the present exercise is like someone trying to answer the question “what did you do in the war Daddy?”</p>
<p>In fact during those long hard cold years during the 1950s and early 1960s Hallas seemed to have dropped from sight. It must all be a bit embarrassing for someone who now has the temerity to describe Trotsky as a bigger revisionist than Bernstein.</p>
<p>If such antics were not despicable they would be funny. There are always those with a glib tongue and pen who come flocking into the revolutionary movement when it is expanding and winning some victories. Then the movement is a relatively warm and cheerful place to be.</p>
<p>Hallas is one of the clowns who has come from out of the cold.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> The original being a report of the Xth plenum of the International Executive Committee of the FI, published in the Feb./April 1952 issue of <strong>Quatrième Internationale</strong>.</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
I.S. Writes Its Own History
(February 1972)
From Workers Fight, No. 3, February 1972, pp. 10–11.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of the International Socialism Group – Some Documents
Pluto Press, £1.00
Reviewed by KEN TARBUCK, who was during the period covered by these documents the Secretary of the Socialist Review Group.
WHAT, ONE MAY ASK, is the purpose this small selection of Some Documents relating to the history of IS?
To the uninformed it may appear to be an exercise in educating the present membership, to help round out their picture of how the organisation came into being.
Unfortunately Pluto Press have engaged the services of a person to introduce the documents whose only gifts seem to be an ability to falsify and to develop a defective memory when convenient.
All the tortuous political arguments on Trotsky’s views on the nature of the Soviet Union – as seen by Hallas – are, in fact, merely a preamble to some rather clumsy falsifications.
East Europe
In the late 1940s a vital discussion took place in the Fourth International on the class nature of the East European states.
Hallas attempts to distort the developing position of the F.I. in order to claim that there had been a somersault from regarding the East European states as capitalist, to regarding them as workers’ states. Thus he alleges that as well as the FI characterising the state capitalist analysis of these states as revisionism, it also characterised as revisionist the view that they were workers’ states.
The document to which Hallas refers, using a single phrase torn out of context, is a lengthy resolution passed by the 2nd World Congress in 1948. As to the actual position taken in this document, we find the following:
“The peculiarity of the buffer-zone countries consists in this, that the Soviet bureaucracy has succeeded, for the time being, in orienting the capitalist economy in a sense corresponding, in the first instance, to its own interests. This situation can only be transitional. It must end either in the bureaucracy’s withdrawal from its position, under the pressure of imperialism, or in the real destruction of capitalism ... The Stalinist state apparatus has acquired a great deal of independence in relation to the bourgeoisie and proletariat, not alone owing to the balance between and the growing prostration of both these classes; but above all to its intimate ties with the Soviet state apparatus and the overwhelming weight of the latter in Eastern Europe, amid the existing world relations.” (p. 119, Fourth International, June 1948)
It is certainly true that there was some initial confusion, and the resolution quoted above reflected this ambiguity. But what does this prove? Merely, that when faced with an unprecedented situation the F.I. refused to rush in with ready made answers.
In this connection it is pertinent to point out that Cliff did rush in, as his document on the Class Nature of the Peoples Democracies (included in this selection) shows.
Any examination of this and the current reality in Eastern Europe will show that what Cliff described (largely correct factually at the time) no longer obtains. All of the special companies and other economic forms which he attributes to “Soviet Imperialism” have long since disappeared.
The 1948 resolution of the Fourth International has been vindicated in this respect, since it emphasised the transitional nature of the regimes at the time.
Finally, what of the “workers’ statist Revisionism”? A reading of the actual resolution makes clear that it refers to ... pro-Stalinists outside the Fourth International!
Korea
Given that it was the issue of the Korean war that was the catalyst which broke a number of members away from the Healy group (the forerunner of the present Socialist Labour League), the bulk of whom went on to form the SOCIALIST REVIEW GROUP – parent of today’s I.S. – it strikes one as odd, to say the least, that the article chosen to represent this group’s point of view on the war is one taken from the second issue of the journal, one, moreover, which originated in India.
(Incidentally Hallas’ claim that it was Cliff’s document on the”Peoples Democracies” that rallied people is just not true – see Some Notes on the History of British Trotskyism, in Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 no. 1, Winter 1969–70.)
Didn’t the group have anything to say on such an important issue in the first number of Socialist Review? After all any journal worth its salt must say something on such a burning current issue in its first number.
In fact TWO articles appeared on this question in the first issue of Socialist Review. The very first article in the journal was The Struggle of the Powers by R. Tennant (Tony Cliff). This devoted two pages to criticising American imperialism – and nearly five pages to attacking “Russian imperialism”.
The other article on this question was entitled Whither Socialist Outlook? (the Healy group’s paper in the Labour Party). This is a scathing attack on the “pro-Stalinist” policy being pursued by Socialist Outlook (which supported North Korea against US imperialism). It very clearly parted Socialist Review from such policies, and took an uncompromising ‘third camp’ position.
Why then select an article written in India to represent the Socialist Review group policy on this key issue?
Quite correctly Hallas repudiates the slander that the SR group in any way supported American imperialism. Yet there is no doubt that, given the support for the Vietnamese revolution by IS today, Hallas and the other leaders of today’s IS feel very uncomfortable about the Korean war and the stand taken on it. Yet they dared not leave it out of this collection.
Therefore the choice was made to republish an article that is short and comparatively mild in tone compared with the articles in the first issue of Socialist Review, which were a real reflection of the feelings on the Group.
And of course so anxious are the present leaders of IS to put distance between themselves and Shachtman – given his present support for US imperialism in Vietnam – that they fail to mention that Labor Action (the paper which the article came from) was Shachtman’s paper!
China & Yugoslavia
A claim is made that “Cliff’s forecast of the political development of the FI was rapidly confirmed. The majority adopted Michael Pablo’s notorious (sic) document The Rise and Decline of Stalinism ... which represented a return to the reformist Trotskyism of the twenties with respect to Stalinist states where these happened to be in actual or potential conflict with Russia”.
We are served up a short paragraph which does NOT talk about reforming the Chinese and Yugoslav parties or states, but says Trotskyists should strive to create revolutionary currents within these parties.
However, this point of view was not predicated upon the view that these states were in conflict with Russia, but on the fact that they were the two Communist Parties that had carried through an overturn in property relations within their respective countries, independent of, and against the advice of, Stalin.
It was precisely because these two parties had had to mobilise the masses in their struggles that led the FI to argue at that time that these parties were still capable of responding to mass pressure and actions. It was this aspect that led to the particular judgment being made at the time. One, incidentally, that I now feel was wrong, but has been corrected by the test of events.
But, on the main issue of the Stalinist states, the document in question is clear and unequivocal –
“Our sections ought to resolutely combat any tendency towards apology or justification for the present regime in the Soviet Union ... The smashing of the dictatorship and the privileges of the bureaucracy, the task of a new political revolution IN THE SOVIET UNION remains more burning than ever.” (p. 43, Fourth International (Paris), Winter 1958, emphasis in original, passed at World Congress, 1954.)
The so-called ‘notorious’ document of Pablo, if read as a whole, has in fact stood the test of time far better than Cliff’s liberal use of statistics as a substitute for analysis.
Western Europe
But where is the relapse into ‘reformist Trotskyism’ that Hallas writes about? It is another figment of his imagination.
He alleges that the Fourth International indulged in some “fantasy” of a perspective of reforming the mass Stalinist parties in Western Europe, and like the proverbial children’s party conjuror he pulls a quotation out of the hat.
“These organisations cannot be smashed and replaced by others in the relatively short time between now and the decisive conflict. All the more so since these organisations will be obliged, whether they wish it or not, to give a leftward turn to the whole or at least part of the leadership.”
The reference Hallas gives for this quotation is The Decline and Fall of Stalinism, a document adopted in 1954 by the world congress of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International and reproduced in 1970 by the Socialist Workers Party (USA).
Unfortunately for anyone wishing to check the validity of this quotation they will not find it anywhere in the 1970 edition, nor in the 1958 edition; the reason is quite simple. The quotation does not come from this document at all.
It seems to be one of the laws of politics that the worse the mistake or falsification the more likely it is to be repeated.
Hallas is no exception.
He had previously used exactly the same quote in his article Building the Leadership in I.S. journal No. 40, Unfortunately it is taken, at second hand, from a source other than that which he cites. [1]
If all that was at stake was some confusion over the correct source of a quotation, it would not merit such a lengthy explanation. But a proper reading of A Recall to Order (Hallas’ actual source) makes it quite clear that the quotation is not talking about the Communist Parties at all! The reference was in fact to the mass social democratic parties.
It must be recalled that at the time in question, i.e. 1952, nearly every tendency on the left thought that a third world war was not only possible but imminent.
If one reads the above In this contest one can see that the report was based upon the assumption of a quicker tempo of development than subsequently occurred and that it posed a very real and legitimate possibility of some social democratic leaderships or sections of them being forced in a revolutionary direction by the pressure and activity of the masses.
The report in fact says –
“In all these countries it is extremely probable, except for some new and at the moment unforeseeable developments, that the radicalisation of the masses and the first stages of the revolution, of the objective revolutionary situation, will manifest themselves within these organisations, The main forces of the revolutionary party of these countries will spring up by differentiation or disintegration of these organisations.”
Does Hallas actually think (even in these brave new days of the 12-page Socialist Worker ...) that there can be a complete by-passing of the existing organisations of the working class in the building of a revolutionary party, or that it is not reasonable to suppose that ferment within them and splits and disintegration will be a part of the process?
Finally, lest Hallas and his ilk think that only the “Pabloites” thought a third world war was imminent, let me quote from a Socialist Review Youth Supplement of the same period:
“The world today is divided by and large into two vast imperialist Power blocs, both striving for world supremacy. You may be quite ignorant of the coal and steel production figures of these countries but of one thing you can be certain. Both power blocs threaten world peace, and war between them is inevitable.”
How, then, does this fit in now with the picture of IS being right all the time and everyone else wrong? Perhaps readers will now understand why only “some documents” were republished, and others left to moulder in the archives.
Smokescreen
The question that has to be asked now is why these particular documents were reproduced at this time, and why Hallas has to write such a falsified Introduction to them?
Certainly new members of IS will want to know about the origins of IS and its present leaders. In this respect both the selection and introduction serve as a smoke screen to cover up far more than was intended to reveal.
That Cliff was the main driving force of the organisation’s ideas and has remained with it all along cannot be doubted.
But the inclusion of Hallas’ document from 1951 (dressed up as the Group’s main policy document but in fact only a rehash – “for use on contacts” – of a Secretariat resolution endorsed two months previously) along with his introduction serve as camouflage to prevent new comrades wondering where Hallas was during the intervening years.
Certainly he cannot claim a continuous membership of the organisation since its inception. (Indeed even in the first two years of its existence his membership was put in question. There is a note in the Nov. 1952 minutes of the NC where it was moved that Hallas be dropped to the rank of sympathiser for non-payment of dues.)
It would be instructive for new members of IS to look through the issues of Socialist Review during the 1950s. They will be hard put to it to find any contribution by Hallas. The book A Socialist Review published in 1965, which was a selection from articles over the years from the paper, contains not one contribution from Hallas.
The whole of the present exercise is like someone trying to answer the question “what did you do in the war Daddy?”
In fact during those long hard cold years during the 1950s and early 1960s Hallas seemed to have dropped from sight. It must all be a bit embarrassing for someone who now has the temerity to describe Trotsky as a bigger revisionist than Bernstein.
If such antics were not despicable they would be funny. There are always those with a glib tongue and pen who come flocking into the revolutionary movement when it is expanding and winning some victories. Then the movement is a relatively warm and cheerful place to be.
Hallas is one of the clowns who has come from out of the cold.
* * *
Footnote
1. The original being a report of the Xth plenum of the International Executive Committee of the FI, published in the Feb./April 1952 issue of Quatrième Internationale.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>The Time-Bomb in the Engine Room:<br>
International Liquidity and the Crisis of Imperialism</h1>
<h3>(Winter 1968/69)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Bulletin of Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 1 No. 3, Winter 1968–69.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h3>I</h3>
<p class="fst">The problem of international liquidity <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> has been the grumbling appendix of imperialism for a number of years now, one that has been nagging and insistent. With the devaluation of the pound sterling last autumn it seemed to be in imminent danger of assuming unmanageable proportions. Therefore it is necessary to analyse what this means and the possible consequences.</p>
<p>A significant indication that this question was reaching crisis point was that in the year 1966 no new gold was added to world (that is, capitalist world) reserves. The January 1967 <strong>Economic Letter</strong> of the United States First National Bank pointed out that this was the first time in modern times that this had happened. All the new gold that came on to the market went into the hands of private speculators or was used for industrial purposes. The letter said ‘during the first nine months of 1966 official gold stock, as published, actually declined by some $50m, as compared with a gain of $250m in 1965’. From 1955 to 1964 the average growth of official gold stocks each year was in the order of $600m. Since 1966 official gold stocks have actually declined. <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> ‘The situation became dramatic when official stocks of gold after the devaluation of the pound lost over $3000m to private speculators.’ <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a> The largest loser of gold has been, of course, the United States, which had $23,000m in gold reserves in 1957, but today this has sunk to $10,000m.</p>
<p>To understand the full significance of all this it is necessary to retrace our steps a little and examine how the present international monetary system came into being. Up to the early 1930s there operated in most countries what was known as the Gold Standard. This was the system whereby the amount of currency in circulation was in a ratio to the quantity of gold held, and gold was also used to settle outstanding international debts. Therefore when a country had a balance of payments deficit and it lost gold from its reserves there was supposed to be an automatic reduction in the amount of money in circulation, and ultimately there would be deflation, unemployment, decreased imports, etc. <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a></p>
<p>Because of the great slump in the early 1930s, Britain and nearly all other capitalist countries went off the Gold Standard and there ensued a period of floating exchange rates and devaluations in a period which was dominated by what Joan Robinson has aptly described as ‘beggar my neighbour policies’.</p>
<p>After the Second World War there was devised what is known as the Gold Exchange Standard. Under this system the only country whose money was directly related to gold was that of the US. <a href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a> However, all currencies are now linked together via the dollar and gold. The US Treasury set the price for gold at $35 per ounce in 1934, and has not increased this price since. Therefore there is now a system where the rest of the capitalist world currencies are only <em>indirectly</em> linked with gold, and this for international purposes only, since exchange rates are quoted in dollars or gold. But for internal usage the limits put upon the quantity of money circulating by the old Gold Standard no longer obtain. An integral part of the Gold Exchange Standard is that the dollar and sterling have played the role of key or reserve currencies, in other words they were accorded a special status, but it should be noted that as far as sterling is concerned this has been by courtesy of the US.</p>
<p>Due to the greatly expanded world trade since the end of the Second World War there is no longer sufficient gold supplies to maintain an adequate reserve. World trade itself has grown at a staggering pace in the postwar period, more than trebling in the last 20 years, and more than doubling over the last 10. <a href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a> Between 1950 and 1966 world trade increased at the rate of 7.5 per cent per annum, gold stocks by less than 1.5 per cent. This led to an extension of the use of the two key currencies, particularly of dollars, as reserves. Central banks have been willing to hold these two currencies as part of their reserve. Since both are on the Gold Exchange Standard this has meant that in theory both could be regarded as being as ‘good as gold’.</p>
<p>This was fine so long as both currencies were strong. But one of the major problems has been that sterling has <em>not</em> been strong. Given the high ratio of liabilities to reserves (running at approximately four to one since 1945, as against one to one before the war) it has meant that the British contribution to international liquidity has been declining, and an unstable element. Similarly the decline in US reserves has been matched by a rise in its liabilities to overseas creditors. In the period 1957–68 these liabilities rose from $10,000m to $33,000m. <a href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a></p>
<p>The Gold Exchange Standard was able to function quite well so long as all the capitalist countries outside the US were short of dollars. These were needed to buy goods and capital equipment which in the immediate postwar years only the US could supply. During this period dollars were eagerly sought after, and the US had a surplus on its balance of payments. The situation began to change in the mid-1950s when the boom in Western Europe and Japan really got into its stride. These areas began to build up large dollar balances, and the US found itself running into balance of payments difficulties. In some respects there is a similarity between the US’s and Britain’s problems, but they are more apparent than real. The US has a favourable balance of trade, that is, it is still selling more overseas that it imports, its balance of payments deficits arise from other sources. (There is some indication that the balance of trade may turn against the US this year.) The British problem is that along with some of the factors that relate to the US it also has an <em>unfavourable</em> balance of trade, that is, it imports more than it exports. This has been usual for Britain historically.</p>
<p>The deficit of the US has two aspects. On the one hand it is an expression of the increasing strength of its competitors. On the other hand it is an expression of its still great superiority in economic and technological terms. The US has still a favourable balance of trade as can be seen from the following.</p>
<ul>
<li>Export of goods: 1958: $16 billion; 1965: $26 billion.</li>
<li>Import of goods: 1958: $14 billion; 1965: $21 billion. <a href="#n8" name="f8">[8]</a></li>
<li>Goods and services Imports, 1967: $26.99 billion.</li>
<li>Goods and services Exports, 1967: $30.47 billion. <a href="#n9" name="f9">[9]</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="fst">Where does the deficit come from then? From two main sources, overseas investment and military expenditure overseas. In much the same way as Britain, the US has increased its overseas investments tremendously since 1945. The value of this investment has risen from $19 billion in 1955 to well over $50 billion in 1966. <a href="#n10" name="f10">[10]</a> The reason for this is not hard to find, it has been estimated that the rate of profit for overseas investment for US corporations is 15 per cent as compared with 10 per cent at home. Moreover, this capital export helps maintain sagging profit rates at home, that is, all things being equal, if the capital exported were to be invested at home it would further depress the existing rate of profit. Military and other US government overseas grants amounted to $3.4 billion in 1965, in the same year the net private overseas investment was $3.7 billion. In that year the US had a balance of payments deficit of $1.4 billion.</p>
<p>Similarly, Britain has increased the export of capital on a great scale since the end of the last war, the latest estimate puts it at £6,000m, and the latest total for British overseas investment is now estimated to be in the order of £11,500m. <a href="#n11" name="f11">[11]</a></p>
<p>However, certain factors have to be noted about this. Investment income for 1950 was gross £271m, and net £159m. By 1961 these figures were £676m and £252m respectively. <a href="#n12" name="f12">[12]</a> This would seem to be a healthy trend. But net property income as a percentage of means of payments for imports declined from 14.0 per cent in 1950 to 6.0 per cent in 1961, that is, although the total amount has increased the specific weight of this item in the balance of payments has declined. (Historically the decline has been much greater, in 1913 this item accounted for 25 per cent.) <a href="#n13" name="f13">[13]</a> Another element has to be noted, this is the increase in the Government Account in the balance of payments figures; in 1950 this stood at £136m, by 1964 it had swollen to £439m. In this way both of the major imperialist powers have a common pattern, that is, rising foreign investment, rising overseas military expenditure, and continual balance of payments deficits. Military expenditure overseas has been a big factor in both cases. The British government deficit on current account, that is, the amount it spends overseas less any amount of income from such activities, rose from £67m in 1955 to £273m in 1966, there being some reduction in 1967 to £258m. <a href="#n14" name="f14">[14]</a></p>
<p>Although there is no close correlation between capital exports and overseas military expenditure in the sense that the two items do not necessarily take place in the same countries, it is obvious that the intensity and extent of the colonial revolution since 1945 must account for a large part of overseas military expenditure. Therefore, it can be seen as a necessary cost in an overall way for the maintenance of overseas investments. This is why both the US and Britain have been putting pressure on their allies in recent years to share some of the cost involved.<br>
</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p class="fst">I said earlier that the deficit of the US was an expression of its own superior economy and the relative strengthening of its capitalist competitors. This can be explained in this way. The large dollar reserves accumulated by Western European countries are an indication of their recovery from the prostration of the immediate postwar years and their increasing role as competitors. The contradiction arises because the dollar reserves are only one side of the coin, the other side is that these reserves represent a large penetration of US capital into Western Europe. In 1957 there was approximately $500m US investments in Western Germany, by 1965 this had risen to around $2400m. Since 1958 US investment in Western Europe as a whole has been over £10,000m, which represents more than a third of the total US overseas investment in that period. In Britain, in 1957 US investments stood at a little under $2000m, by 1965 this had risen to $5000m. <a href="#n15" name="f15">[15]</a> What has been taking place has been a massive invasion by US capital and the taking over of some dominant sectors in some industries. For instance, in Britain 80 per cent of the typewriter industry is owned by foreign-based companies, mainly US; 50 per cent of the British automobile industry is now controlled by US firms. In the field of computers, a key industry in the development of modern technology, the industry is becoming dominated by US giants such as IBM. In the field of electronics, US companies hold a dominating place in all Western Europe. One writer has put the position in these terms: ‘Fifteen years from now it is quite possible that the world’s third largest industrial power, just after the US and Russia, will not be Europe, <em>but American industry in Europe</em>.’ <a href="#n16" name="f16">[16]</a></p>
<p>This invasion, and dominance, is one of the major questions at the heart of the ‘liquidity dispute’. The French have been the most vocal and persistent critics of the large American deficits, and until this year had been converting their dollars into gold. They were not the only ones, most of the other Western European countries have been doing the same, but without such fanfare. Hence the steady decline in US gold stocks. There are two aspects to this resistance to US capital inflow. Firstly, there is the fact that the Europeans have been largely paying for this themselves. Only 10 per cent of the $4000m invested by US firms in Europe in 1965 came from direct transfers from the US. <a href="#n17" name="f17">[17]</a> In other words by holding large amounts of dollars the West European countries help to finance the US balance of payments deficit and indirectly US investments in their own countries. The second aspect is the fear that vital parts of the economies will be completely subordinated to US interests. The problem here is that there is a fear that in the event of a general recession it will be European subsidiaries that will suffer cutbacks, rather than the US parent company; and also that research will more and more be concentrated in the US and Europeans will become even more dependent than they are today for technical advance. Given the fulfilment of the above projection it would mean the transformation of Western Europe from a position of relative vassalage to one of absolute dependence. De Gaulle’s ‘anti-Americanism’ is therefore far more than the whim of an old man. (In the same way the French attitude to British entry into the Common Market can be viewed not as something irrational but because they see Britain as the Trojan horse of US imperialism.)</p>
<p>The accumulation of gold has led to an intensification of the quest for a settlement of the liquidity problem. At the moment the large dollar balances that have accumulated in Europe and the rest of the capitalist world have helped to lubricate international trade. These dollar reserves also have the advantage of earning interest, since they are largely held in the form of short-term US government bills. The exchange of these into gold means that no interest is earned. Therefore the larger the amount of reserves held in gold the larger the amount of capital that is frozen and unremunerative.</p>
<p>At present the official gold price of $35 per ounce fixed in 1934 is one of the big disputes within the liquidity problem. The US was until recently willing to buy or sell gold at this price to any non-American citizen or government. However, since this is a fixed price it means that because of inflation the value of gold in real terms has declined over the years. In this situation where large holdings of dollars have accumulated with overseas creditors it has entailed a transfer of value to the US, that is, the longer you hold a dollar in a situation of rising prices the less you will be able to obtain for it. The French, and others, have been arguing that one solution to the present shortage of international liquidity would be to increase the price of gold, even suggesting $70 per ounce would be a proper price today. In effect this would mean a devaluation of the dollar and all other currencies in relation to gold. This the US has strongly resisted. One reason for this opposition is that at present the US dollar is probably over-valued in relation to other currencies <a href="#n18" name="f18">[18]</a> and any tampering with it would probably entail this being corrected to the further detriment of the US. Along with the suggested price increase for gold there has been great pressure put on the Americans to reduce their balance of payments deficit, since it is argued that these continual deficits have an inflationary effect upon the rest of the world economy. Of course behind these arguments is the dispute about power and US hegemony.</p>
<p>The uncertainty engendered by these discussions explains the disappearance of gold into private hoards, the speculators were hoping for a price increase and so make a ‘killing’ when they unloaded it back on to the market, or back to the US Treasury.</p>
<p>When sterling was devalued last November (1967) the pressure on the gold market became very great indeed. Therefore earlier this year there was a hurried compromise reached between the US and the other central banks of the capitalist world. This compromise in effect decided that there would be <em>two</em> prices for gold. The first was the old rate of $35 per ounce at which the central banks would buy and sell gold to each other, but <em>not</em> to private speculators; the second price would be a free-market price which would be determined by supply and demand on the world market. This decision helped to ease the situation somewhat, since the free-market price for gold rose above the fixed price and some of the speculators unloaded their gold taking a much more modest (but still considerable) profit than they had anticipated. However, most commentators agreed that this was only a temporary measure.</p>
<p>Alternative ideas for increasing liquidity have been circulating for a number of years now. One that both the US and Britain favoured seems to have won out in the end. This was that the International Monetary Fund should create new international reserve units which would be acceptable to all countries in the settlement of debts. The crucial problem of such a plan is who is to control the creation of this new unit, and how will it be distributed and on what terms.</p>
<p>The whole point in having reserves is to enable one to continue buying when one’s income is reduced, or when one wants to buy more than current income will allow. If the IMF is to control the use of such reserves it means that it will be able to dictate economic policy to those who wish to borrow. This in fact has been happening already, particularly with the underdeveloped countries. Since those who put most into the fund also get the most say, this has in effect meant that America has controlled the fund. On the one hand America has been following a policy of deficits for itself, paying its creditors with paper dollars; on the other hand it has, through the IMF, been forcing the small fry of the world (including Britain) to adopt deflationary policies when they run into balance of payments problems. Therefore the US has been getting the best of all possible worlds. Should a new international unit of money be created which has been cut off from its gold base the stage will be set for the complete domination by the US, and an orgy of inflation. This is what the other capitalist powers are afraid of.</p>
<p>However, the urgency of the situation was becoming evident some two years ago. The editorial of the <strong>Financial Times</strong> of 3 January 1967 said: ‘The pressure on gold supplies in general ... and the possibility that it may increase makes it even more urgently necessary to agree some means of stretching these supplies to support the continued growth of world trade.’ Further on, talking about the conflict between the US and France it said: ‘ ... it may be necessary to devise some compromise scheme in which composite units are created for use as a supplement to gold in international settlement.’ This compromise was in fact reached at a meeting of the IMF in September 1967. Then a scheme was agreed to create Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). SDRs have been said to be some kind of new international currency, and their creation was trumpeted as a solution to the liquidity problem. However, on closer examination their real value is much more limited. Member countries will be able to pay off external debts by transferring their claims on the Fund to other nations. In this way they are a form of overdraft to which they will be entitled to over and above their normal quotas, which depend upon their contributions to the Fund. Therefore the ability of the IMF to create SDRs will depend upon the amount of gold and national currencies it holds, in just the same way as any commercial bank is limited in the amount of overdrafts that it can grant by the amount of reserves it holds. In both cases there is a definite ratio. Even when SDRs become fully operative in 1969 they will only be creating new reserves at a rate of one to two billion dollars per year, while trade grows at the rate of seven billion dollars per year. Therefore the gap between reserves and needs will not be appreciably narrowed. <a href="#n19" name="f19">[19]</a><br>
</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p class="fst">There is one aspect of the problem that I have not yet dealt with, this is the question of the underdeveloped countries, that is, the colonial and semi-colonial world. Reading the general and financial press this aspect is rarely mentioned, nor is this surprising since control of international liquidity is an aspect of imperialist domination of these countries. On this aspect all the capitalist powers are united.</p>
<p>If the situation between the imperialist powers is contradictory, then the relationship between them collectively and the colonial world is doubly so. The problem is not only that the imperialist powers want to obtain raw materials and food products as cheaply as possible, but they also need to sell their exports to such countries as dearly as possible. Despite the fact that the largest increase in world trade since the end of the Second World War has been between the advanced countries, this does not mean that the trade between the ‘two worlds’ has declined; far from it, it also has increased. To attempt to overcome the problem of realisation of surplus value the imperialists will look more and more to the underdeveloped world. It is in the process of world trade that much of the exploitation of the colonial world takes place, even after formal independence has been granted:</p>
<p>Trade between industrialised and underdeveloped countries at ‘world market prices’ is not based upon an equal exchange of value, but on a constant <em>transfer of value</em> (surplus profit) from the underdeveloped to the industrialised countries, exactly in the same way as exchange between firms, some of which enjoy monopolies of technical know-how (and so produce at a level of productivity <em>above</em> the national average), transfer surplus profits to those firms on the national market of a capitalist country. <a href="#n20" name="f20">[20]</a></p>
<p>In a crude way this can be seen from the balance of trade figures for the primary-producing countries over the years 1956 to 1967. <a href="#n21" name="f21">[21]</a></p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr valign="top">
<th>
<p class="smc">Year</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="13">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">Exports<br>
in $ billion</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="13">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">Imports<br>
in $ billion</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="13">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">Balance<br>
in $ billion</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1956</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 7.15</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 7.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−0.49</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1957</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 7.38</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−1.16</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1958</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 7.03</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.09</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−1.06</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1959</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 7.46</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 7.96</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−0.50</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1960</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 7.87</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.89</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−1.02</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1961</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.03</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9.03</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−1.00</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1962</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9.19</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−0.78</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1963</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9.22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9.65</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−0.43</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1964</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.08</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.73</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−0.65</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1965</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">11.52</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−0.96</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1966</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">11.27</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.07</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−0.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="smc">1967</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">11.65</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.65</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">−1.00</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Thus we can see for the whole period the primary-producing countries were in deficit, and since such countries have very little in the way of invisible earnings this is important. One point should be made, such countries as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand are included in this category. Also world prices have moved against primary-producers during this period, so that to obtain an equivalent amount of exchange more products would have to be exported. Henry Vallin, in the Summer 1966 issue of <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, makes the point tellingly in relation to Nkrumah’s downfall:</p>
<p class="quoteb">... the real conspiracy that brought Nkrumah down was not the military one ... The real conspiracy was the <em>catastrophic decline in the price of cocoa during the last seven years to nearly one-fifth of what it was in the late 1950s</em>. From a peak of over $1,000 a ton in 1957–58, the price dropped to $504 in 1963–64 and down as low as $210 last summer ... <a href="#n22" name="f22">[22]</a></p>
<p class="fst">This of course reveals one side of the picture, the transfer of surplus value to the imperialist powers and the unbalanced trade of the colonial countries. However, this itself presents a contradiction because the lower the income of these countries the less they are able to import. Ernest Mandel indicates how this is partially overcome:</p>
<p class="quoteb">... the adverse evolution of the terms of trade is no absolute check on the imports of manufactured goods by underdeveloped countries, so long as supplementary purchasing power can be found: a) in the <em>revenue</em> of the native ruling classes, exchanged for imported luxury goods (which might imply a drain of gold and silver, if the adverse trend of the terms of the trade creates balance of payments deficit); b) through the increase in the quantities of primary products produced and exported, which might offset the effects of the adverse movements of the terms of trade on balance of payments; c) through a development of capital exports by industrialised countries, which play the role of credit, enabling the underdeveloped countries to increase their imports of manufactured goods ... <a href="#n23" name="f23">[23]</a></p>
<p class="fst">It is this last point that has special relevance here.</p>
<p>Referring back to the table of the primary-producing countries trade balances we can see why the provision of credit assumes such an important part of the question of international liquidity. Allowing for some effect from Mandel’s a) and recognising that the ultimate outcome of b) will probably be a further decline of income per unit, and possibly a decline in total income, the question of credit assumes an overwhelmingly predominant place not only for the underdeveloped countries but also for the imperialist powers. In this context it is interesting to note that immediately after the coup in Ghana European banks advanced a loan to the military regime, and the IMF moved in a little later with a larger loan. This had been previously refused to Nkrumah, for obvious reasons, but the imperialists were very anxious that the economy of Ghana should not grind to a halt, for this would imply a cessation of imports.</p>
<p>Total reserves of gold and foreign currencies for the industrial countries in 1955 stood at $37.50 billion, by 1966 they had risen to $49.72 billion. However, those of the primary-producing countries had only risen from $10.69 billion in 1955 to $13.98 billion in 1966. <a href="#n24" name="f24">[24]</a> Therefore as a whole world liquidity was becoming smaller in relation to the increased trade, and the primary-producing countries were actually slipping back, that is, although total reserves have risen their ratio to trade declined. From the point of view of the <em>needs</em> of the primary-producers they should have had access to <em>more</em> liquidity. Balogh explains this so:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Poor countries will probably have a greater need for holding reserves than richer ones, and this for two reasons. On the one hand, the instability of primary-products markets and the harvest is notorious, and they mostly depend on a few products of this type, which increases their risk. On the other hand their capacity to obtain credits on reasonable terms is much less than that of the richer countries. Unless purposive international institutional arrangements are made ... the limitations on the choice of policy (for example, the prohibition of direct control over imports and exports) imposes disproportionate burdens on poor countries. Their acceptance of such burdens is rational only if international arrangements are made to offset this burden by special grants or credit arrangements. <a href="#n25" name="f25">[25]</a></p>
<p class="fst">However, from the point of view of the underdeveloped countries the suggested remedies are at best only palliatives that cannot basically alter their situation. Their poverty and slow development remains a function of imperialism just so long as that relationship exists. Loans can only be short-term measures, nor should the cost of them be ignored. But from the imperialists’ point of view the grants and loans are very profitable. The profitability of loans needs no explanation, both in terms of interest and induced exports. Grants need a word or so more. Seen from the point of view of the ‘national interest’ the grants of aid by the imperialist powers to underdeveloped countries seem to be very altruistic. However, seen from the point of view of the monopolists who are interested in exporting either consumer or capital goods, these grants to colonial countries are a permanent subsidy to the metropolitan exporters. In just the same way overseas military expenditure can be seen as a debit in the balance of payments account but as a gift to the monopolists. The point here is that the whole of the economy, via taxation, pays for aid and military expenditure whilst the monopolists make the profit. True enough that they also pay taxes but this is only a fraction of the cost of either of these two items, particularly in Britain where the incidence of taxation on consumption has risen far more than that on companies since the mid-1950s.</p>
<p>Another aspect of this question is that more and more developed countries who give aid are tying the loans, so that the recipient country is forced to buy from the donor. The US has recently been in conflict with the International Development Agency over making the quota that it subscribes to the Agency tied, and because of the balance of payments deficits it is encountering now insists on 95 per cent of its aid being tied.<br>
</p>
<h3>IV</h3>
<p class="fst">At the moment it is difficult to hazard any prediction as to how the imperialist powers will resolve the related problems of international liquidity. Without the massive American deficits the situation would be catastrophic for the capitalist world there would be a tremendous contraction of international trade. Therefore the French suggestion of a return to the Gold Standard which implies a drastic <em>reduction</em> of international liquidity in present circumstances – can only be seen as an extreme bargaining position. No matter how much they twist and turn the West Europeans are caught in a dilemma that they will have to face up to; this is the fact that despite their improved financial position since the mid-1950s they are in no position as yet to have a direct confrontation with the US. The overwhelming technological and economic superiority of the US ensures its eventual domination in the financial sphere, even though it appears to be somewhat weakened at the moment; for as I have tried to indicate this apparent weakness flows from its basic strength. Moreover, since Congress has at last passed new tax increases this will take some steam out of the US economy, which in turn will affect its balance of payments.</p>
<p>The devaluation of sterling last November opened a phase in the postwar world financial structure. Steps are now being taken to end sterling’s role as a reserve currency. The Basle $2,000m credit that was arranged this September does in the words of <strong>The Times</strong> indicate ‘an epoch-making plan’. <a href="#n26" name="f26">[26]</a> In essence this plan is one that will allow Britain gradually to divest itself of the large sterling balances that are held as reserves by a number of countries. This loan will enable Britain to meet these obligations if need arises without undue strain on British reserves, of course the money will have to be repaid but over a period, so it gives time to put matters in order.</p>
<p>But with the gradual rundown of sterling as a reserve currency comes ever nearer the problem of expanding international liquidity. In some ways the international capitalists are in a cleft stick. On the one side it is argued that to put matters right both Britain and the US have to reduce deficits, on the other hand it is recognised that they cannot do this without some other form of international liquidity being found, for the removal of the deficits means a contraction of liquid funds. Given the fundamental irrationality of the present system, where international reserves are still tied to gold, and there is sufficient of this commodity to serve its dual function as a measure of value and an industrial material, it seems that the problem is almost insuperable. Moreover, if the Vietnam war is ended within the foreseeable future this will mean a further reduction in the US deficit and the predictable consequences. This will further strengthen US imperialism, since it will be better equipped to exert its economic superiority over its rivals. This liquidity question partially explains the reasons for the desire of the US to pull out of Vietnam. It is not only that it has been unable to defeat the NLF, but their very efforts to defend imperialist interests has actually led to a weakening of its own position <em>vis à vis</em> its imperialist rivals. This very exertion of tremendous military strength has paradoxically exposed the system to unforeseen strains, thereby exposing the limits to which Keynesian ‘solutions’ to capitalism’s problems can be pushed.</p>
<p>Those who advocate the creation of an international dollar issued by the IMF <a href="#n27" name="f27">[27]</a> fail to realise that such a dollar will merely be the US dollar with a different hat on. The creation of such a monetary unit, one that is divorced from a gold base, would lead to US imperialism getting a firmer grip than it has already, and further international inflation, and all things being equal it is always the poor who suffer more from inflation than the rich.</p>
<p>For the underdeveloped countries an increase in world liquidity may mean further loans and a little more ‘aid’, but this will only be to chain them more firmly to the imperialist system. And this implies their further slide into poverty.</p>
<p>The editors of <strong>Monthly Review</strong> wrote in December 1966 that ‘the United States balance of payments deficit is a powerful time-bomb ticking away in the financial engine-room of the world capitalist system. Unless the bomb is defused in good time a shattering explosion is inevitable ...’ It is to defuse this bomb that finance ministers scurry around the world. That the bomb is still ticking away we should be in no doubt, Malcolm Crawford writing in <strong>The Sunday Times</strong> of 29 September 1968 said that unless a solution was found ‘the chances are still that there will be one unholy explosion in the engine shed, and the existing monetary set-up will blow itself to pieces’. The apparent stability of world capitalism is today more threatened than at any time since the great crash of 1929. Not only does it have the ‘time-bomb’ ticking away, revolution reaches new heights each year. The end of an epoch for sterling, France May–June 1968, Vietnam, gold crises, all these things are interconnected. They are not separate phenomena but merely different facets of the same system, and that system is one of semi-permanent crisis.</p>
<p class="date"><strong>20 October 1968</strong></p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Postscript</h3>
<p class="fst">The new exchange controls introduced by the Treasury and the Bank of England in October, which prohibits sterling being used to provide credits for trade between non-sterling countries, is a further blow to world liquidity. When all such credits that are outstanding are repaid the reserves will improve by about £100m. However the actual loss to world liquidity will be much greater since trade credits are usually three or six months, that is, this £100m could have financed trade of between £200m to £400m in any one year. This measure, along with the Basle credits, is an indication of the changing role of sterling in the international economy. It also indicates the continuing instability of sterling, and indeed the international monetary system.</p>
<p class="date"><strong>6 November 1968</strong></p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Appendix</h3>
<p class="fst">Readers should clarify in their own minds the difference between a trade deficit and a balance of payments deficit. The trade balance is the difference between <em>physical</em> imports and exports. The balance of <em>payments</em> is made up from a number of items, of which the trade balance is only one item. Such items as invisible earnings, that is, insurance, shipping, etc., enter into balance of payments, also earnings from overseas investments, and capital account.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> Liquidity can be described, briefly, as command over money or near money, that is, those assets that one’s creditors will accept in payment for a debt, or that one can easily turn into money. For instance if one holds a bill of exchange that is due to be paid to you in three days’ time this is much more a liquid asset than a bill that is not due to be paid for 12 months. In this sense international liquidity is the reserve of ‘money’ that is available in the capitalist world that is acceptable for international debt settlement. It is a very important element within the system, because it partially regulates the flow of trade.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> <strong>Financial Times</strong>, 2 July 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> Dr F. Aschinger, economic adviser to the Swiss Bank Corporation, <strong>Financial Times</strong>, 2 July 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> See appendix for definitions.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> There are moves afoot to dispense with this link now.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> See <strong>The Sunday Times</strong>, 20 September 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> <strong>Financial Times</strong>, 2 July 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f8" name="n8">8.</a> Quoted by D. Michaels in <strong>Monthly Review</strong>, December 1966.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f9" name="n9">9.</a> <strong>National Institute Economic Review</strong>, August 1968, Table 5, p. 22.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f10" name="n10">10.</a> D. Michaels in <strong>Monthly Review</strong>, December 1966.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f11" name="n11">11.</a> Bank of England report quoted in <strong>The Sunday Times</strong>, 19 September 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f12" name="n12">12.</a> See A.R. Conan, <strong>The Problem of Sterling</strong> (Macmillan, 1966).</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f13" name="n13">13.</a> M. Barrett-Brown, <strong>After Imperialism</strong> (Heinemann, 1963).</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f14" name="n14">14.</a> M. Panic, <em>Britain’s Invisible Balance</em>, <strong>Lloyds Bank Review</strong>, July 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f15" name="n15">15.</a> See Geoffrey Owen, <strong>Financial Times</strong>, 2 January 1967.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f16" name="n16">16.</a> See extract from J.J. Servan-Schreiber, <strong>The American Challenge</strong>, <strong>The Times</strong>, 15 July 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f17" name="n17">17.</a> See extract from J.J. Servan-Schreiber, <strong>The American Challenge</strong>, <strong>The Times</strong>, 15 July 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f18" name="n18">18.</a> P.M. Oppenheimer, <em>Economic Welfare and the Price of Gold</em>, <strong>Westminster Bank Review</strong>, August 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f19" name="n19">19.</a> See Malcolm Crawford, <strong>The Sunday Times</strong>, 29 September 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f20" name="n20">20.</a> Ernest Mandel, <em>Contemporary Imperialism</em>, <strong>New Left Review</strong>, No. 25.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f21" name="n21">21.</a> NIER, <strong>National Institute Economic Review</strong>, August 1968, Table 26.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f22" name="n22">22.</a> <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, Summer 1966, original emphasis.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f23" name="n23">23.</a> Ernest Mandel, <em>Contemporary Imperialism</em>, <strong>New Left Review</strong>, No. 25.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f24" name="n24">24.</a> NIER, <strong>National Institute Economic Review</strong>, November 1966 and August 1968, Table 29.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f25" name="n25">25.</a> T. Balogh, <strong>Unequal Partners</strong>, Vol. 2 (Blackwell, 1963), pp. 243–44.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f26" name="n26">26.</a> <strong>The Times</strong>, 9 September 1968.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f27" name="n27">27.</a> For example, Paul Derrick, <strong>World Liquidity and the Price of Gold</strong> (City Labour Discussion Circle, 1968).</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
The Time-Bomb in the Engine Room:
International Liquidity and the Crisis of Imperialism
(Winter 1968/69)
From Bulletin of Marxist Studies, Vol. 1 No. 3, Winter 1968–69.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
I
The problem of international liquidity [1] has been the grumbling appendix of imperialism for a number of years now, one that has been nagging and insistent. With the devaluation of the pound sterling last autumn it seemed to be in imminent danger of assuming unmanageable proportions. Therefore it is necessary to analyse what this means and the possible consequences.
A significant indication that this question was reaching crisis point was that in the year 1966 no new gold was added to world (that is, capitalist world) reserves. The January 1967 Economic Letter of the United States First National Bank pointed out that this was the first time in modern times that this had happened. All the new gold that came on to the market went into the hands of private speculators or was used for industrial purposes. The letter said ‘during the first nine months of 1966 official gold stock, as published, actually declined by some $50m, as compared with a gain of $250m in 1965’. From 1955 to 1964 the average growth of official gold stocks each year was in the order of $600m. Since 1966 official gold stocks have actually declined. [2] ‘The situation became dramatic when official stocks of gold after the devaluation of the pound lost over $3000m to private speculators.’ [3] The largest loser of gold has been, of course, the United States, which had $23,000m in gold reserves in 1957, but today this has sunk to $10,000m.
To understand the full significance of all this it is necessary to retrace our steps a little and examine how the present international monetary system came into being. Up to the early 1930s there operated in most countries what was known as the Gold Standard. This was the system whereby the amount of currency in circulation was in a ratio to the quantity of gold held, and gold was also used to settle outstanding international debts. Therefore when a country had a balance of payments deficit and it lost gold from its reserves there was supposed to be an automatic reduction in the amount of money in circulation, and ultimately there would be deflation, unemployment, decreased imports, etc. [4]
Because of the great slump in the early 1930s, Britain and nearly all other capitalist countries went off the Gold Standard and there ensued a period of floating exchange rates and devaluations in a period which was dominated by what Joan Robinson has aptly described as ‘beggar my neighbour policies’.
After the Second World War there was devised what is known as the Gold Exchange Standard. Under this system the only country whose money was directly related to gold was that of the US. [5] However, all currencies are now linked together via the dollar and gold. The US Treasury set the price for gold at $35 per ounce in 1934, and has not increased this price since. Therefore there is now a system where the rest of the capitalist world currencies are only indirectly linked with gold, and this for international purposes only, since exchange rates are quoted in dollars or gold. But for internal usage the limits put upon the quantity of money circulating by the old Gold Standard no longer obtain. An integral part of the Gold Exchange Standard is that the dollar and sterling have played the role of key or reserve currencies, in other words they were accorded a special status, but it should be noted that as far as sterling is concerned this has been by courtesy of the US.
Due to the greatly expanded world trade since the end of the Second World War there is no longer sufficient gold supplies to maintain an adequate reserve. World trade itself has grown at a staggering pace in the postwar period, more than trebling in the last 20 years, and more than doubling over the last 10. [6] Between 1950 and 1966 world trade increased at the rate of 7.5 per cent per annum, gold stocks by less than 1.5 per cent. This led to an extension of the use of the two key currencies, particularly of dollars, as reserves. Central banks have been willing to hold these two currencies as part of their reserve. Since both are on the Gold Exchange Standard this has meant that in theory both could be regarded as being as ‘good as gold’.
This was fine so long as both currencies were strong. But one of the major problems has been that sterling has not been strong. Given the high ratio of liabilities to reserves (running at approximately four to one since 1945, as against one to one before the war) it has meant that the British contribution to international liquidity has been declining, and an unstable element. Similarly the decline in US reserves has been matched by a rise in its liabilities to overseas creditors. In the period 1957–68 these liabilities rose from $10,000m to $33,000m. [7]
The Gold Exchange Standard was able to function quite well so long as all the capitalist countries outside the US were short of dollars. These were needed to buy goods and capital equipment which in the immediate postwar years only the US could supply. During this period dollars were eagerly sought after, and the US had a surplus on its balance of payments. The situation began to change in the mid-1950s when the boom in Western Europe and Japan really got into its stride. These areas began to build up large dollar balances, and the US found itself running into balance of payments difficulties. In some respects there is a similarity between the US’s and Britain’s problems, but they are more apparent than real. The US has a favourable balance of trade, that is, it is still selling more overseas that it imports, its balance of payments deficits arise from other sources. (There is some indication that the balance of trade may turn against the US this year.) The British problem is that along with some of the factors that relate to the US it also has an unfavourable balance of trade, that is, it imports more than it exports. This has been usual for Britain historically.
The deficit of the US has two aspects. On the one hand it is an expression of the increasing strength of its competitors. On the other hand it is an expression of its still great superiority in economic and technological terms. The US has still a favourable balance of trade as can be seen from the following.
Export of goods: 1958: $16 billion; 1965: $26 billion.
Import of goods: 1958: $14 billion; 1965: $21 billion. [8]
Goods and services Imports, 1967: $26.99 billion.
Goods and services Exports, 1967: $30.47 billion. [9]
Where does the deficit come from then? From two main sources, overseas investment and military expenditure overseas. In much the same way as Britain, the US has increased its overseas investments tremendously since 1945. The value of this investment has risen from $19 billion in 1955 to well over $50 billion in 1966. [10] The reason for this is not hard to find, it has been estimated that the rate of profit for overseas investment for US corporations is 15 per cent as compared with 10 per cent at home. Moreover, this capital export helps maintain sagging profit rates at home, that is, all things being equal, if the capital exported were to be invested at home it would further depress the existing rate of profit. Military and other US government overseas grants amounted to $3.4 billion in 1965, in the same year the net private overseas investment was $3.7 billion. In that year the US had a balance of payments deficit of $1.4 billion.
Similarly, Britain has increased the export of capital on a great scale since the end of the last war, the latest estimate puts it at £6,000m, and the latest total for British overseas investment is now estimated to be in the order of £11,500m. [11]
However, certain factors have to be noted about this. Investment income for 1950 was gross £271m, and net £159m. By 1961 these figures were £676m and £252m respectively. [12] This would seem to be a healthy trend. But net property income as a percentage of means of payments for imports declined from 14.0 per cent in 1950 to 6.0 per cent in 1961, that is, although the total amount has increased the specific weight of this item in the balance of payments has declined. (Historically the decline has been much greater, in 1913 this item accounted for 25 per cent.) [13] Another element has to be noted, this is the increase in the Government Account in the balance of payments figures; in 1950 this stood at £136m, by 1964 it had swollen to £439m. In this way both of the major imperialist powers have a common pattern, that is, rising foreign investment, rising overseas military expenditure, and continual balance of payments deficits. Military expenditure overseas has been a big factor in both cases. The British government deficit on current account, that is, the amount it spends overseas less any amount of income from such activities, rose from £67m in 1955 to £273m in 1966, there being some reduction in 1967 to £258m. [14]
Although there is no close correlation between capital exports and overseas military expenditure in the sense that the two items do not necessarily take place in the same countries, it is obvious that the intensity and extent of the colonial revolution since 1945 must account for a large part of overseas military expenditure. Therefore, it can be seen as a necessary cost in an overall way for the maintenance of overseas investments. This is why both the US and Britain have been putting pressure on their allies in recent years to share some of the cost involved.
II
I said earlier that the deficit of the US was an expression of its own superior economy and the relative strengthening of its capitalist competitors. This can be explained in this way. The large dollar reserves accumulated by Western European countries are an indication of their recovery from the prostration of the immediate postwar years and their increasing role as competitors. The contradiction arises because the dollar reserves are only one side of the coin, the other side is that these reserves represent a large penetration of US capital into Western Europe. In 1957 there was approximately $500m US investments in Western Germany, by 1965 this had risen to around $2400m. Since 1958 US investment in Western Europe as a whole has been over £10,000m, which represents more than a third of the total US overseas investment in that period. In Britain, in 1957 US investments stood at a little under $2000m, by 1965 this had risen to $5000m. [15] What has been taking place has been a massive invasion by US capital and the taking over of some dominant sectors in some industries. For instance, in Britain 80 per cent of the typewriter industry is owned by foreign-based companies, mainly US; 50 per cent of the British automobile industry is now controlled by US firms. In the field of computers, a key industry in the development of modern technology, the industry is becoming dominated by US giants such as IBM. In the field of electronics, US companies hold a dominating place in all Western Europe. One writer has put the position in these terms: ‘Fifteen years from now it is quite possible that the world’s third largest industrial power, just after the US and Russia, will not be Europe, but American industry in Europe.’ [16]
This invasion, and dominance, is one of the major questions at the heart of the ‘liquidity dispute’. The French have been the most vocal and persistent critics of the large American deficits, and until this year had been converting their dollars into gold. They were not the only ones, most of the other Western European countries have been doing the same, but without such fanfare. Hence the steady decline in US gold stocks. There are two aspects to this resistance to US capital inflow. Firstly, there is the fact that the Europeans have been largely paying for this themselves. Only 10 per cent of the $4000m invested by US firms in Europe in 1965 came from direct transfers from the US. [17] In other words by holding large amounts of dollars the West European countries help to finance the US balance of payments deficit and indirectly US investments in their own countries. The second aspect is the fear that vital parts of the economies will be completely subordinated to US interests. The problem here is that there is a fear that in the event of a general recession it will be European subsidiaries that will suffer cutbacks, rather than the US parent company; and also that research will more and more be concentrated in the US and Europeans will become even more dependent than they are today for technical advance. Given the fulfilment of the above projection it would mean the transformation of Western Europe from a position of relative vassalage to one of absolute dependence. De Gaulle’s ‘anti-Americanism’ is therefore far more than the whim of an old man. (In the same way the French attitude to British entry into the Common Market can be viewed not as something irrational but because they see Britain as the Trojan horse of US imperialism.)
The accumulation of gold has led to an intensification of the quest for a settlement of the liquidity problem. At the moment the large dollar balances that have accumulated in Europe and the rest of the capitalist world have helped to lubricate international trade. These dollar reserves also have the advantage of earning interest, since they are largely held in the form of short-term US government bills. The exchange of these into gold means that no interest is earned. Therefore the larger the amount of reserves held in gold the larger the amount of capital that is frozen and unremunerative.
At present the official gold price of $35 per ounce fixed in 1934 is one of the big disputes within the liquidity problem. The US was until recently willing to buy or sell gold at this price to any non-American citizen or government. However, since this is a fixed price it means that because of inflation the value of gold in real terms has declined over the years. In this situation where large holdings of dollars have accumulated with overseas creditors it has entailed a transfer of value to the US, that is, the longer you hold a dollar in a situation of rising prices the less you will be able to obtain for it. The French, and others, have been arguing that one solution to the present shortage of international liquidity would be to increase the price of gold, even suggesting $70 per ounce would be a proper price today. In effect this would mean a devaluation of the dollar and all other currencies in relation to gold. This the US has strongly resisted. One reason for this opposition is that at present the US dollar is probably over-valued in relation to other currencies [18] and any tampering with it would probably entail this being corrected to the further detriment of the US. Along with the suggested price increase for gold there has been great pressure put on the Americans to reduce their balance of payments deficit, since it is argued that these continual deficits have an inflationary effect upon the rest of the world economy. Of course behind these arguments is the dispute about power and US hegemony.
The uncertainty engendered by these discussions explains the disappearance of gold into private hoards, the speculators were hoping for a price increase and so make a ‘killing’ when they unloaded it back on to the market, or back to the US Treasury.
When sterling was devalued last November (1967) the pressure on the gold market became very great indeed. Therefore earlier this year there was a hurried compromise reached between the US and the other central banks of the capitalist world. This compromise in effect decided that there would be two prices for gold. The first was the old rate of $35 per ounce at which the central banks would buy and sell gold to each other, but not to private speculators; the second price would be a free-market price which would be determined by supply and demand on the world market. This decision helped to ease the situation somewhat, since the free-market price for gold rose above the fixed price and some of the speculators unloaded their gold taking a much more modest (but still considerable) profit than they had anticipated. However, most commentators agreed that this was only a temporary measure.
Alternative ideas for increasing liquidity have been circulating for a number of years now. One that both the US and Britain favoured seems to have won out in the end. This was that the International Monetary Fund should create new international reserve units which would be acceptable to all countries in the settlement of debts. The crucial problem of such a plan is who is to control the creation of this new unit, and how will it be distributed and on what terms.
The whole point in having reserves is to enable one to continue buying when one’s income is reduced, or when one wants to buy more than current income will allow. If the IMF is to control the use of such reserves it means that it will be able to dictate economic policy to those who wish to borrow. This in fact has been happening already, particularly with the underdeveloped countries. Since those who put most into the fund also get the most say, this has in effect meant that America has controlled the fund. On the one hand America has been following a policy of deficits for itself, paying its creditors with paper dollars; on the other hand it has, through the IMF, been forcing the small fry of the world (including Britain) to adopt deflationary policies when they run into balance of payments problems. Therefore the US has been getting the best of all possible worlds. Should a new international unit of money be created which has been cut off from its gold base the stage will be set for the complete domination by the US, and an orgy of inflation. This is what the other capitalist powers are afraid of.
However, the urgency of the situation was becoming evident some two years ago. The editorial of the Financial Times of 3 January 1967 said: ‘The pressure on gold supplies in general ... and the possibility that it may increase makes it even more urgently necessary to agree some means of stretching these supplies to support the continued growth of world trade.’ Further on, talking about the conflict between the US and France it said: ‘ ... it may be necessary to devise some compromise scheme in which composite units are created for use as a supplement to gold in international settlement.’ This compromise was in fact reached at a meeting of the IMF in September 1967. Then a scheme was agreed to create Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). SDRs have been said to be some kind of new international currency, and their creation was trumpeted as a solution to the liquidity problem. However, on closer examination their real value is much more limited. Member countries will be able to pay off external debts by transferring their claims on the Fund to other nations. In this way they are a form of overdraft to which they will be entitled to over and above their normal quotas, which depend upon their contributions to the Fund. Therefore the ability of the IMF to create SDRs will depend upon the amount of gold and national currencies it holds, in just the same way as any commercial bank is limited in the amount of overdrafts that it can grant by the amount of reserves it holds. In both cases there is a definite ratio. Even when SDRs become fully operative in 1969 they will only be creating new reserves at a rate of one to two billion dollars per year, while trade grows at the rate of seven billion dollars per year. Therefore the gap between reserves and needs will not be appreciably narrowed. [19]
III
There is one aspect of the problem that I have not yet dealt with, this is the question of the underdeveloped countries, that is, the colonial and semi-colonial world. Reading the general and financial press this aspect is rarely mentioned, nor is this surprising since control of international liquidity is an aspect of imperialist domination of these countries. On this aspect all the capitalist powers are united.
If the situation between the imperialist powers is contradictory, then the relationship between them collectively and the colonial world is doubly so. The problem is not only that the imperialist powers want to obtain raw materials and food products as cheaply as possible, but they also need to sell their exports to such countries as dearly as possible. Despite the fact that the largest increase in world trade since the end of the Second World War has been between the advanced countries, this does not mean that the trade between the ‘two worlds’ has declined; far from it, it also has increased. To attempt to overcome the problem of realisation of surplus value the imperialists will look more and more to the underdeveloped world. It is in the process of world trade that much of the exploitation of the colonial world takes place, even after formal independence has been granted:
Trade between industrialised and underdeveloped countries at ‘world market prices’ is not based upon an equal exchange of value, but on a constant transfer of value (surplus profit) from the underdeveloped to the industrialised countries, exactly in the same way as exchange between firms, some of which enjoy monopolies of technical know-how (and so produce at a level of productivity above the national average), transfer surplus profits to those firms on the national market of a capitalist country. [20]
In a crude way this can be seen from the balance of trade figures for the primary-producing countries over the years 1956 to 1967. [21]
Year
Exports
in $ billion
Imports
in $ billion
Balance
in $ billion
1956
7.15
7.64
−0.49
1957
7.38
8.54
−1.16
1958
7.03
8.09
−1.06
1959
7.46
7.96
−0.50
1960
7.87
8.89
−1.02
1961
8.03
9.03
−1.00
1962
8.41
9.19
−0.78
1963
9.22
9.65
−0.43
1964
10.08
10.73
−0.65
1965
10.56
11.52
−0.96
1966
11.27
12.07
−0.80
1967
11.65
12.65
−1.00
Thus we can see for the whole period the primary-producing countries were in deficit, and since such countries have very little in the way of invisible earnings this is important. One point should be made, such countries as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand are included in this category. Also world prices have moved against primary-producers during this period, so that to obtain an equivalent amount of exchange more products would have to be exported. Henry Vallin, in the Summer 1966 issue of International Socialist Review, makes the point tellingly in relation to Nkrumah’s downfall:
... the real conspiracy that brought Nkrumah down was not the military one ... The real conspiracy was the catastrophic decline in the price of cocoa during the last seven years to nearly one-fifth of what it was in the late 1950s. From a peak of over $1,000 a ton in 1957–58, the price dropped to $504 in 1963–64 and down as low as $210 last summer ... [22]
This of course reveals one side of the picture, the transfer of surplus value to the imperialist powers and the unbalanced trade of the colonial countries. However, this itself presents a contradiction because the lower the income of these countries the less they are able to import. Ernest Mandel indicates how this is partially overcome:
... the adverse evolution of the terms of trade is no absolute check on the imports of manufactured goods by underdeveloped countries, so long as supplementary purchasing power can be found: a) in the revenue of the native ruling classes, exchanged for imported luxury goods (which might imply a drain of gold and silver, if the adverse trend of the terms of the trade creates balance of payments deficit); b) through the increase in the quantities of primary products produced and exported, which might offset the effects of the adverse movements of the terms of trade on balance of payments; c) through a development of capital exports by industrialised countries, which play the role of credit, enabling the underdeveloped countries to increase their imports of manufactured goods ... [23]
It is this last point that has special relevance here.
Referring back to the table of the primary-producing countries trade balances we can see why the provision of credit assumes such an important part of the question of international liquidity. Allowing for some effect from Mandel’s a) and recognising that the ultimate outcome of b) will probably be a further decline of income per unit, and possibly a decline in total income, the question of credit assumes an overwhelmingly predominant place not only for the underdeveloped countries but also for the imperialist powers. In this context it is interesting to note that immediately after the coup in Ghana European banks advanced a loan to the military regime, and the IMF moved in a little later with a larger loan. This had been previously refused to Nkrumah, for obvious reasons, but the imperialists were very anxious that the economy of Ghana should not grind to a halt, for this would imply a cessation of imports.
Total reserves of gold and foreign currencies for the industrial countries in 1955 stood at $37.50 billion, by 1966 they had risen to $49.72 billion. However, those of the primary-producing countries had only risen from $10.69 billion in 1955 to $13.98 billion in 1966. [24] Therefore as a whole world liquidity was becoming smaller in relation to the increased trade, and the primary-producing countries were actually slipping back, that is, although total reserves have risen their ratio to trade declined. From the point of view of the needs of the primary-producers they should have had access to more liquidity. Balogh explains this so:
Poor countries will probably have a greater need for holding reserves than richer ones, and this for two reasons. On the one hand, the instability of primary-products markets and the harvest is notorious, and they mostly depend on a few products of this type, which increases their risk. On the other hand their capacity to obtain credits on reasonable terms is much less than that of the richer countries. Unless purposive international institutional arrangements are made ... the limitations on the choice of policy (for example, the prohibition of direct control over imports and exports) imposes disproportionate burdens on poor countries. Their acceptance of such burdens is rational only if international arrangements are made to offset this burden by special grants or credit arrangements. [25]
However, from the point of view of the underdeveloped countries the suggested remedies are at best only palliatives that cannot basically alter their situation. Their poverty and slow development remains a function of imperialism just so long as that relationship exists. Loans can only be short-term measures, nor should the cost of them be ignored. But from the imperialists’ point of view the grants and loans are very profitable. The profitability of loans needs no explanation, both in terms of interest and induced exports. Grants need a word or so more. Seen from the point of view of the ‘national interest’ the grants of aid by the imperialist powers to underdeveloped countries seem to be very altruistic. However, seen from the point of view of the monopolists who are interested in exporting either consumer or capital goods, these grants to colonial countries are a permanent subsidy to the metropolitan exporters. In just the same way overseas military expenditure can be seen as a debit in the balance of payments account but as a gift to the monopolists. The point here is that the whole of the economy, via taxation, pays for aid and military expenditure whilst the monopolists make the profit. True enough that they also pay taxes but this is only a fraction of the cost of either of these two items, particularly in Britain where the incidence of taxation on consumption has risen far more than that on companies since the mid-1950s.
Another aspect of this question is that more and more developed countries who give aid are tying the loans, so that the recipient country is forced to buy from the donor. The US has recently been in conflict with the International Development Agency over making the quota that it subscribes to the Agency tied, and because of the balance of payments deficits it is encountering now insists on 95 per cent of its aid being tied.
IV
At the moment it is difficult to hazard any prediction as to how the imperialist powers will resolve the related problems of international liquidity. Without the massive American deficits the situation would be catastrophic for the capitalist world there would be a tremendous contraction of international trade. Therefore the French suggestion of a return to the Gold Standard which implies a drastic reduction of international liquidity in present circumstances – can only be seen as an extreme bargaining position. No matter how much they twist and turn the West Europeans are caught in a dilemma that they will have to face up to; this is the fact that despite their improved financial position since the mid-1950s they are in no position as yet to have a direct confrontation with the US. The overwhelming technological and economic superiority of the US ensures its eventual domination in the financial sphere, even though it appears to be somewhat weakened at the moment; for as I have tried to indicate this apparent weakness flows from its basic strength. Moreover, since Congress has at last passed new tax increases this will take some steam out of the US economy, which in turn will affect its balance of payments.
The devaluation of sterling last November opened a phase in the postwar world financial structure. Steps are now being taken to end sterling’s role as a reserve currency. The Basle $2,000m credit that was arranged this September does in the words of The Times indicate ‘an epoch-making plan’. [26] In essence this plan is one that will allow Britain gradually to divest itself of the large sterling balances that are held as reserves by a number of countries. This loan will enable Britain to meet these obligations if need arises without undue strain on British reserves, of course the money will have to be repaid but over a period, so it gives time to put matters in order.
But with the gradual rundown of sterling as a reserve currency comes ever nearer the problem of expanding international liquidity. In some ways the international capitalists are in a cleft stick. On the one side it is argued that to put matters right both Britain and the US have to reduce deficits, on the other hand it is recognised that they cannot do this without some other form of international liquidity being found, for the removal of the deficits means a contraction of liquid funds. Given the fundamental irrationality of the present system, where international reserves are still tied to gold, and there is sufficient of this commodity to serve its dual function as a measure of value and an industrial material, it seems that the problem is almost insuperable. Moreover, if the Vietnam war is ended within the foreseeable future this will mean a further reduction in the US deficit and the predictable consequences. This will further strengthen US imperialism, since it will be better equipped to exert its economic superiority over its rivals. This liquidity question partially explains the reasons for the desire of the US to pull out of Vietnam. It is not only that it has been unable to defeat the NLF, but their very efforts to defend imperialist interests has actually led to a weakening of its own position vis à vis its imperialist rivals. This very exertion of tremendous military strength has paradoxically exposed the system to unforeseen strains, thereby exposing the limits to which Keynesian ‘solutions’ to capitalism’s problems can be pushed.
Those who advocate the creation of an international dollar issued by the IMF [27] fail to realise that such a dollar will merely be the US dollar with a different hat on. The creation of such a monetary unit, one that is divorced from a gold base, would lead to US imperialism getting a firmer grip than it has already, and further international inflation, and all things being equal it is always the poor who suffer more from inflation than the rich.
For the underdeveloped countries an increase in world liquidity may mean further loans and a little more ‘aid’, but this will only be to chain them more firmly to the imperialist system. And this implies their further slide into poverty.
The editors of Monthly Review wrote in December 1966 that ‘the United States balance of payments deficit is a powerful time-bomb ticking away in the financial engine-room of the world capitalist system. Unless the bomb is defused in good time a shattering explosion is inevitable ...’ It is to defuse this bomb that finance ministers scurry around the world. That the bomb is still ticking away we should be in no doubt, Malcolm Crawford writing in The Sunday Times of 29 September 1968 said that unless a solution was found ‘the chances are still that there will be one unholy explosion in the engine shed, and the existing monetary set-up will blow itself to pieces’. The apparent stability of world capitalism is today more threatened than at any time since the great crash of 1929. Not only does it have the ‘time-bomb’ ticking away, revolution reaches new heights each year. The end of an epoch for sterling, France May–June 1968, Vietnam, gold crises, all these things are interconnected. They are not separate phenomena but merely different facets of the same system, and that system is one of semi-permanent crisis.
20 October 1968
Postscript
The new exchange controls introduced by the Treasury and the Bank of England in October, which prohibits sterling being used to provide credits for trade between non-sterling countries, is a further blow to world liquidity. When all such credits that are outstanding are repaid the reserves will improve by about £100m. However the actual loss to world liquidity will be much greater since trade credits are usually three or six months, that is, this £100m could have financed trade of between £200m to £400m in any one year. This measure, along with the Basle credits, is an indication of the changing role of sterling in the international economy. It also indicates the continuing instability of sterling, and indeed the international monetary system.
6 November 1968
Appendix
Readers should clarify in their own minds the difference between a trade deficit and a balance of payments deficit. The trade balance is the difference between physical imports and exports. The balance of payments is made up from a number of items, of which the trade balance is only one item. Such items as invisible earnings, that is, insurance, shipping, etc., enter into balance of payments, also earnings from overseas investments, and capital account.
Notes
1. Liquidity can be described, briefly, as command over money or near money, that is, those assets that one’s creditors will accept in payment for a debt, or that one can easily turn into money. For instance if one holds a bill of exchange that is due to be paid to you in three days’ time this is much more a liquid asset than a bill that is not due to be paid for 12 months. In this sense international liquidity is the reserve of ‘money’ that is available in the capitalist world that is acceptable for international debt settlement. It is a very important element within the system, because it partially regulates the flow of trade.
2. Financial Times, 2 July 1968.
3. Dr F. Aschinger, economic adviser to the Swiss Bank Corporation, Financial Times, 2 July 1968.
4. See appendix for definitions.
5. There are moves afoot to dispense with this link now.
6. See The Sunday Times, 20 September 1968.
7. Financial Times, 2 July 1968.
8. Quoted by D. Michaels in Monthly Review, December 1966.
9. National Institute Economic Review, August 1968, Table 5, p. 22.
10. D. Michaels in Monthly Review, December 1966.
11. Bank of England report quoted in The Sunday Times, 19 September 1968.
12. See A.R. Conan, The Problem of Sterling (Macmillan, 1966).
13. M. Barrett-Brown, After Imperialism (Heinemann, 1963).
14. M. Panic, Britain’s Invisible Balance, Lloyds Bank Review, July 1968.
15. See Geoffrey Owen, Financial Times, 2 January 1967.
16. See extract from J.J. Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge, The Times, 15 July 1968.
17. See extract from J.J. Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge, The Times, 15 July 1968.
18. P.M. Oppenheimer, Economic Welfare and the Price of Gold, Westminster Bank Review, August 1968.
19. See Malcolm Crawford, The Sunday Times, 29 September 1968.
20. Ernest Mandel, Contemporary Imperialism, New Left Review, No. 25.
21. NIER, National Institute Economic Review, August 1968, Table 26.
22. International Socialist Review, Summer 1966, original emphasis.
23. Ernest Mandel, Contemporary Imperialism, New Left Review, No. 25.
24. NIER, National Institute Economic Review, November 1966 and August 1968, Table 29.
25. T. Balogh, Unequal Partners, Vol. 2 (Blackwell, 1963), pp. 243–44.
26. The Times, 9 September 1968.
27. For example, Paul Derrick, World Liquidity and the Price of Gold (City Labour Discussion Circle, 1968).
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>The Making of Revolutionaries: Cadre or Sect</h1>
<h3>(Summer 1968)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Bulletin of Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 1 No. 1, Summer 1968.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The present time is a very disturbing one for Marxists in Britain, it is full of questions and many seem imponderable. The election of the Labour government to office has once again thrown both the Social-Democratic left and the Marxist movement into a state of confusion and tension. At a time when advances for socialism seemingly could be made, all is inverted, stood on its head. In a period of acute crisis for British capitalism Marxists stand unarmed, without the means to intervene and not knowing how to. Only the most marginal victories are being won by the left, if any are being won at all. The question therefore poses itself very sharply – ‘Why is this?’ It is the purpose of this essay to examine and explore certain facets of this question, not to attempt to give definitive answers – few exist in the abstract.</p>
<p>Two other points should be made. Firstly, this essay makes no attempt to argue the need for a revolutionary Marxist party, this is assumed. Secondly, it does not deal with the more general or objective factors relating to the failure of such a party to emerge in Britain. There have been many such discussions and I have not attempted to pass any judgement on them.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">First Approximations</h4>
<p class="fst">Among those who have attempted to grapple with the present situation have been the <strong>New Left Review</strong> editorial team. All credit must go to them for their efforts over the past few years in trying to break out of the vicious circle that British Marxists are in. With some remarkable insights and a great élan they have attempted to unlock the present. It is not to their discredit that they have not entirely succeeded, and they would not claim to have done so. However, it is up to those who disagree with certain aspects of their work to take up the issues and discuss them.</p>
<p>To help clarify matters I intend to carry out a part of the discussion around the article by Perry Anderson entitled <em>Problems of Socialist Strategy</em>. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p>Let us begin with a quotation from this article:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Two strategic models have dominated our history, and divided the socialist movement in Europe from the turn of the century to our time. The momentous schism between Social-Democracy and Communism directly derives from them. They can be called the parliamentary and the insurrectionary roads to socialism. (p. 233)</p>
<p class="fst">Perry Anderson posits these two paths as being the basic difference within the socialist movement, and much of his analysis seems to be grounded on this one point. Unfortunately this cannot be accepted as a tenable thesis. The division that runs deep within the labour movement, not only in Britain but also internationally, is <em>not</em> predicated upon such a simplistic dichotomy. The real and fundamental difference is related to the need, or otherwise, for a thoroughgoing and basic change within society. That is, whether as socialists we want to abolish wage slavery and its accompanying alienation, and establish a free <em>human</em> society in which man is truly his own master and not the adjunct of capital. If this was not immediately apparent before 1945 (and I would argue that it was) then it has become increasingly so since. With the advent of relatively full employment and the amelioration of certain aspects of poverty, the real and substantive differences between reformists and revolutionaries has become increasingly clear. That this is not apparent to many is an indication of the vulgar economic materialism that passes for Marxism in many quarters, not least amongst the bourgeois ‘Marxologists’. Those who want to smooth down rough edges, establish ‘good industrial relations’, etc, etc, are the reformists. Those who want to <em>abolish</em> industrial relations and replace them with human relations are the socialists, the revolutionaries.</p>
<p>This, above all, is the essence of the dispute, not insurrectionary versus parliamentary roads. <em>Not</em> that such disputes are unimportant, on the contrary, they sometimes become crucial. But at this point of time to allow oneself to get bogged down in what would be an essentially abstract dispute would be fruitless. No one who considers themselves to be Marxist could quibble over the question of violence. We do not live in an age of peace, the violence of imperialism is endemic, it cannot survive without it. However, one must realise that such disputes are secondary and subordinate to the key question – ‘Do we reform capitalism or do we build socialism?’ Moreover, a dispute over methods very often only serves to cover a dispute over aims.</p>
<p>Even before 1914 this was a subject of controversy within the labour movement, when Bernstein wrote his <strong>Evolutionary Socialism</strong>. Rosa Luxemburg saw this distinction clearly in 1900 when she wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">... the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social-Democratic movement from the bourgeois democracy and bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order – the question of ‘Reform or Revolution?’ as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the Social-Democracy the question: ‘To be or not to be?’ In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or of the use of this or that set of tactics, but the very existence of the Social-Democratic movement. (<strong>Social Reform or Revolution?</strong>) <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a></p>
<p class="fst">These words still hold true today over half a century later, only perhaps more so.</p>
<p>The year 1917 and the October revolution drew a line – an indelible one – through the labour movement. It true that old habits are hard to shake off, for example, German Social-Democracy only finally sloughed off the vestiges of its Marxism in the late 1950s. But the truth was that Bernstein only articulated existing <em>practice</em> when he began his attack, as the First World War revealed. In the same way the struggle in the Labour Party over the attempted revision of Clause Four of the constitution saw a defeat for Gaitskell, so in Germany earlier in the century Kautsky came out to defend the prevailing orthodoxy and won. In neither case was the victory real or enduring, both parties today are open proponents of the mixed economy and the rule of market economics, that is, both parties openly proclaim that they only want to reform capitalism, that is, if they deign to mention such an ‘outmoded’ expression. To pose the question as did Perry Anderson is to have a wholly pre-1914 conception of Social-Democracy, and is to try to grapple with ghosts of those long since departed.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">The Party</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>Centralism Versus Democracy?</strong> Following through this line of thought Perry Anderson examines the question of the role of the party in the struggle for socialism. True, this is done obliquely, rather than directly, nevertheless there does emerge a concept of the Leninist party that is erroneous. Unless this problem is cleared up no discussion on socialist strategy can be meaningful.</p>
<p>What does Anderson say?</p>
<p class="quoteb">For Lenin, the road to socialism was short but sheer: it required the armed insurrection of the proletariat against the established state, its capture and destruction. (p. 224)</p>
<p class="quote">Leninism has been ... a success in its own terms and context. It won power in Russia, carried out the expropriation of capitalism and totally transformed the economy and society of the largest country in Europe ... What was the secret of this success? The answer is surely this: Leninism was almost perfectly adapted to the specific conditions of its time and place. <em>It is precisely in backward inchoate societies, dominated by scarcity and integrated by the state, that such a strategy has its meaning.</em> (pp. 227–28, emphasis in original)</p>
<p class="quote">But its very adaption to its Eastern environment, which has been the secret of its success, radically <em>dis-adapts</em> it from the Western milieu where capitalism remains supreme today. For the societies of Western Europe constitute a wholly different universe from those of Eastern Europe ... For the moment it is important to emphasise that a Leninist strategy in the West is fundamentally <em>regressive</em>: it threatens to destroy a vital historical creation ... (p. 230, emphasis in original)</p>
<p class="fst">What is this heritage that Leninism allegedly threatens? Without doubt Perry Anderson means liberal-democracy, as a reading of his essay indicates. I think he is completely mistaken in this assumption; and in <em>also</em> assuming that liberal-democracy is the pattern for Western Europe. At the time that he wrote the essay it would have only been necessary to point to Spain and Portugal to show the error of such an assertion. Moreover, the France of De Gaulle is not a liberal-democracy, but rather an authoritarian regime with electoral plumage. Western Germany cannot be blessed with the accolade either, since the Communist Party is legally banned. And of course since the essay was written the military regime has been installed in Greece, and on the bones of a regime it would have been difficult to describe as liberal-democracy. The universe of liberal-democracy becomes contracted under examination.</p>
<p>Does this mean there is no validity in Anderson’s contention and concern? Yes, there is validity, in the sense that no Marxist would wish for any diminution of the civil and political liberties that have been won within certain countries. Therefore we can share his concern, insofar as it is legitimate. However, it would be exceedingly naive not to understand that such liberties are conditional and somewhat precarious. One has only to look at the mounting attack on the trades unions here in Britain to understand this. And equally the threat to radicals and revolutionaries implied in the Race Relations Act, for example, the imprisonment of Michael X.</p>
<p>The answer to the question must be ‘no’, in the sense that Leninism as such is not and never was a threat to civil liberty or the working class. To attempt to equate the <em>Stalinist</em> police regimes with Leninism is to fall into the same trap as many bourgeois liberals have done. For them the terror directed against counter-revolutionary White Guards was the same as the terror of the Stalinist bureaucracy against the Bolshevik Old Guard. The whole spirit and ethos of Leninism is directly antithetical to any suppression of liberty, indeed it was directed towards the release of enthusiasm and tremendous self-activity. Any reading of <strong>State and Revolution</strong> should clear this matter up because Lenin there visualised a workers’ state which was only a semi-state, one that was beginning to prepare the ground for its own demise.</p>
<p>A further error creeps into Perry Anderson’s explanation of Leninism, he seems to suggest that Lenin’s concept of the party was predicated on the fact of Russia’s backwardness and the autocracy of the Tsarist regime. This is misleading and blurs the issue. It is true that the specific conditions that Lenin visualised, and created, the Bolshevik Party under were conditions of repression. Therefore, Lenin emphasised certain features because of these particular conditions, but it is an error to construe certain facets as the whole of Leninism. In this context we should also note that Gramsci – that most neglected of Marxists – is also misunderstood because he wrote under conditions of Fascist dictatorship. Neither Lenin or Gramsci predicated their views of the party on these conditions of backward economies or autocracy. Rather the <em>leitmotif</em> of their views is to be found in their struggle against economism and theories of spontaneity, and their emphasis of the role of consciousness. This is the inner logic, core and historic value of their contribution. The role of consciousness assumes tremendous significance in the struggle to create a Marxist party. Those who today demote the role of the conscious elements within the working class could do well to ponder these words of Lenin:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Any belittling of the role of ‘the conscious element’, of the role of Social-Democracy, <em>means ipso facto (quite irrespective of whether the belittler intends it or not) the strengthening of the influence of the bourgeois ideology upon the workers.</em> All those who talk about ‘overestimating the importance of ideology’, about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc, imagine that the purely workers’ movement by itself can and will work out an independent ideology for itself, if only workers ‘tear their fate from the hands of the leaders’ ... the <em>spontaneous</em> development of the labour movement leads precisely to its subordination to the bourgeois ideology ..., because a spontaneous labour movement is trade unionism ...</p>
<p class="quote">This does not mean, of course, that the workers do not participate in working it [the ideology] out. But they participate not as workers but as theorists of socialism, Proudons or Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when, and in so far as, they succeed to a greater or lesser extent in acquiring the knowledge of their age and in advancing this knowledge. And in order that working men <em>may succeed in this more often</em>, it is necessary to concern oneself as far as possible with raising the level of consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers should not confine themselves to artificially restricted limits of ‘literature for workers’, but should learn more and more to master the <em>general literature</em>. It would be even more correct to say confined instead of ‘confine themselves’, because workers themselves read and want to read everything that is written for the intelligentsia, and some (bad) intellectuals think that ‘for the workers’ it is sufficient to tell them about factory conditions and chew over and over again what has long been known. (<strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong>, pp. 70–71, emphasis in original) <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Two very important points emerge from this. Firstly, the spontaneous drives of the working class are only capable of producing trade-union consciousness. Yet trade unions, by their very nature, are an <em>expression</em> of the division within existing society between capital and labour; and are a <em>recognition</em> of this division. Capitalist commodity production here, it must be emphasised, is not a given set of techniques but a set of social relations, therefore any attempt to overcome them must of necessity be a partial withdrawal from these relations. Trade unions on the contrary must take them as given and seek to obtain a better bargain for the sellers of labour, and <em>only</em> by a tacit or open acknowledgement of these relations do they carry out their functions as <em>trade unions</em>. This trade-union mentality is not confined to narrow trade-union affairs, on the contrary, it spills over, pervades and dominates the whole labour movement. Its political expression is reformism. Therefore, secondly the question of the role of intellectuals becomes a key one. These intellectuals must bring <em>socialist</em> consciousness into the working class. <em>But</em>, these intellectuals must be of a <em>new</em> type. One of the misunderstandings current on this point is that such intellectuals must of necessity come from the traditional intelligentsia. It is true that initially members of the intelligentsia can and do play a vital role in bringing conscious socialist theory into the ranks of the working class; and as the Petőfi circle of Budapest showed in Hungary in 1956, they can act as a catalysing agent at times of crisis. Moreover, note what Lenin said above. Such intellectuals ‘of the new type’ must by definition have broken with bourgeois ideology in all its forms, but they can equally come from the ranks of the working class as from the ranks of the intelligentsia. Moreover, without these intellectuals being drawn from the ranks of the working class any attempts at creating a vanguard solely from the intelligentsia will end in ‘intellectualism’ of the worst kind. Those who think that Lenin had any great affection for intellectuals or accorded them some special place should familiarise themselves with <strong>One Step Forward, Two Steps Back</strong>, it is littered with withering phrases about ‘whining intellectuals’, ‘unstable elements’, etc., etc. These should be understood in the <em>class</em> context in which they are used. Lenin was using the term intellectuals here as a social description indicating the general characteristics that intellectuals displayed as a social class.</p>
<p>The role of the intellectuals of the new type is not to satisfy their own ego or literary ambitions, but to challenge concretely the ideological dominance of the bourgeoisie and to prepare the instrument for its demise. Gramsci points this out when he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Marxism does not seek to sustain ‘simple people’ in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but instead to lead them to a higher view of life. If it asserts the need for contact between intellectual and the simple people it does so, not in order to limit scientific activity and maintain unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to build an intellectual-moral bloc which makes possible the progress of the masses and not only for a few groups of intellectuals. (<strong>The Modern Prince</strong>, p. 66)</p>
<p class="fst">Herein is the significance of the concept of the intellectuals of the new type. Members of the intelligentsia and the working class have to be remade into revolutionary intellectuals. And this re-moulding is <em>not</em> a process carried out on ‘inert’ material, it has nothing in common with the ‘brainwashing’ so beloved of the vulgar Marxologists. It is a process that can only succeed to the extent that the individual participates and furthers it.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>What Are Cadres?</strong> I want now to pose this question – What do we mean when we speak about Marxist cadres? If the new type of intellectuals are the cadres of a Marxist party, what has been the practice of all those groups on the left that claimed to be creating cadres?</p>
<p>Gramsci lays down three essential elements for building a Marxist party, they are:</p>
<p class="quoteb">i) A widespread element of common, average men, whose participation is provided by discipline and faith, not by creative and highly organisational spirit. Without these the party would not exist, it is true, but it is also true that the party would not exist ‘only’ with these. They are a force as far as there is someone who centralises, organises, disciplines them, and in the absence of this force they would break up and cancel each other out in scattered impotence.</p>
<p class="quoteb">ii) The principal cohesive element, which centralises in the national field, which render effective and powerful the totality of forces which left to themselves would count for nothing or very little, this element is endowed with a highly cohesive, centralising and disciplinary power which is also, perhaps because of this, inventive (if what is meant is ‘inventive’ in a certain direction according to certain lines of forces, certain perspectives or certain premises). It is also true that this element alone would not form a party, but it would do so more than the first element. They would be generals without an army, but in reality it is easier to create an army than to create generals ...</p>
<p class="quoteb">iii) A middle element, which links the first element with the second and puts them into contact, not only ‘physically’ but also morally and intellectually ... (<strong>The Modern Prince</strong>, pp. 49–50)</p>
<p class="fst">Let us now look at my question in the light of what Gramsci says. It is my contention that all the present groups of the revolutionary left in Britain have up to now been intent on producing the third element, yet they have little or none of the second. Moreover, it has to be understood that a party can only emerge from a movement, one that embraces wider and more heterogeneous elements than a party.</p>
<p>Concretely this has meant that it is activists or agitators that have been produced, and not cadres or intellectuals of the new type. Gramsci, here, has refined Lenin and brought this question into a closer focus. Looking at the question from this standpoint one can see that the quest to build a revolutionary party by many small groups has foundered to a large extent because of a lack of understanding of this key question (there are other factors and some are discussed later). It may be objected that the Communist Party has had (relatively) large numbers of intellectuals within its ranks, this is true and these were largely from the intelligentsia. However, at no time have these been in any position fundamentally to influence or guide the party, even if they so desired. Moreover, most of them have been in the grip of Stalinist orthodoxy and because of this were mental cripples. Those that broke with the CP in the middle 1950s have, in the main, been destroyed as Marxist cadres, either dropping into passivity or – in reaction to Stalinist orthodoxy – become enamoured with populism. (A certain small segment of this generation having taken their intellect out of pawn from King Street went with all due haste to Clapham High Street, unfortunately for them with similar results to their previous visit to ‘uncle’.) <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a></p>
<p>No other group on the Marxist left has collected any appreciable number of intellectuals, either from the intelligentsia or the working class. This is not surprising since none of these groups have the concept of building Marxist cadres in the Leninist or Gramscian sense.</p>
<p>Indeed one of the characteristics of all these groups is that they are anti-intellectual in the ‘best’ British tradition. Because of this they are all to some extent prisoners of the corporative consciousness of the working class, deferring to it and taking it as the level of their departure. <em>In this they are fatally mistaken.</em> Marxists cannot <em>start</em> at the level of consciousness of the working class, they must be the bearers of the highest and most advanced theory and consciousness. Certainly any Marxist must take cognisance of the level of consciousness of the mass of the people, otherwise one falls into the crassest voluntarism. However, this does <em>not</em> mean that one accepts this level. It is the acceptance of this level that has meant <em>in practice</em> that all the Marxist groups have been content to ‘produce’ the third element of Gramsci. Trotsky was well aware of this problem when he wrote: ‘A pedagogical adaption to the more backward layers of the proletariat must not become transformed into a political adaption to the conservative bureaucracy of the trade unions.’ (<strong>In Defence of Marxism</strong>, p. 146) <a href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a> No doubt many will be offended by my saying this, and there will perhaps be cries of ‘prove it’. The answer is all around you, unfortunately in a negative form. Where is the cadre that should be challenging Wilson’s government, or that has even cracked the shell of the British working class’s corporate world? To ask the question is to answer it. And sad to say even our ‘generals’ of the left are almost indistinguishable from the army.</p>
<p>Now whilst it is true that the revolutionary party creates intellectuals, it is only done on an expanded basis. Initially it is the intellectuals who create the party, even if this is only an embryo party. They constitute the grain of sand around which the pearl forms. <em>Therefore the most critical task is to assemble this grain of sand.</em> This cannot be done on an activist basis alone, it can only be done on the basis of ideas, that is, of theory. But this theory must be expounded in practice, and at a number of levels, not in a single-issue campaign. The ‘mere’ literary exposition of theory leads to intellectualism. This may sound as though what is being said is that ‘the chicken and the egg’ arrive simultaneously, but this is not so. One of the truisms of the Marxist movement is that there should be unity of theory and practice. This is a necessary and valid truism, nevertheless the danger is that activism is equated with practice, and theory becomes subordinated to activity. When this happens theory becomes a badge, an adornment, a suit of clothes, which can be changed to fit the mood. Theory then becomes <em>ex post</em> a justification for practice or has no relation to it. However, for Marxists theory is not something that is empirically made up as we go along, <em>past</em> experience provides an approximation which we abstract and turn into theory and this should guide our present practice. The badge approach to theory is a <em>bowing</em> to the division of labour imposed by class society. This is because intellectual <em>activities</em> are not seen as activities as such, but as something that takes place outside of the collective. There arises in small political groups the practice of each having its own ‘theorist’ who hands down the ‘line’. It does not occur to such leaders that a major part of their task is to train people to replace them.</p>
<p>For Marxists, within the concept of practice is embodied theory, therefore the truism ‘unity of theory and practice’ can become a barrier to our understanding of this. Let me elaborate this point a little. Was Marx theorising or practising when he was writing <em>Capital</em>? Were Castro and Che practising or theorising when they landed from the <em>Granma</em>? These are, of course, dramatic examples, and few of us can aspire to reach such historical proportions; yet unless we envisage a revolutionary party in this way we do not have the perspective of revolutionaries. Therefore, it is very necessary that in the process of gathering the ‘grain of sand’ a vulgar interpretation is not given to the word activity. Practice must be understood as encompassing many, many things. It must be a genuine praxis.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Which Crisis of Leadership?</strong> One of the factors that has contributed towards an activist concept of cadres has been the phrase ‘the working class suffers from a crisis of leadership’. What is understood by this, and what should be understood by it? A mechanical and undialectical application of this idea implies that the working class is straining at the leash, only waiting for the call to revolution or on a more mundane level only waiting for the right charismatic leader to speak at a Labour Party conference to rout the demon Wilson. Now it is true that at certain times this can be and has been correct because the mass of the working class has moved further and faster than its existing leadership, and at such times these leaders become an absolute brake. The Spanish Civil War was one example of such a situation. But such situations are rare, pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situations do not come round like the date on the calendar in orderly succession to be waited for with patience.</p>
<p>Such situations have to be ‘made’, not in the sense of exploiting favourable situations, that is an elementary task for Marxists. No, revolutions have to be ‘made’ by a process that stretches far back beyond particular situations.</p>
<p>Yet even in ‘normal’ times this crisis of leadership <em>does</em> exist. This particular crisis manifests itself at these times by the reformist leadership <em>accurately</em> reflecting the false consciousness of the masses. Seen in this way it is not the reformist leaders who have to be ‘exposed’, rather it is the corporate consciousness of the working class (needless to say the reformists need to be opposed tooth and nail). But our task as Marxists is not to denounce reformists as though the working class had a clear-sighted vision of socialism which was being impaired by using reformist spectacles. Rather it is our task to convince the working class of its ‘defective’ eyesight. Only in the process of doing this does the question of using Marxist ‘spectacles’ arise. But this should not be seen as a series of stages, both tasks have to be carried out simultaneously.</p>
<p>If one does not understand this process one falls into a world of demonology and good men versus bad men. This is the world of the super-voluntarist who thinks that if only he can blow his trumpet loud enough the walls of reformist Jericho will fall down.</p>
<p>The crisis of leadership is much more complex, pervasive and subtle, resting on the mystification engendered by bourgeois ideology. To combat this much more than activism is required, there has to be an ideological assault on the institutions that mediate it.</p>
<p>The dialectical novelty of the crisis of leadership is that it besets all groups and organisations of the working class. Each of these reveals an inner dynamic and rhythm of development which – unless it is able to burst asunder the integument of bourgeois hegemony – reaches an apogee and then declines, leaving it subject to that which it set out to destroy. This subjection may take many forms, each of them expresses a failure to grapple with the reality in which they exist, and an adaption to the false consciousness of that reality.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Sects and Sectarianism</strong>: Much of the foregoing helps to explain why, instead of Marxist cadres being created, there has been a proliferation of <em>sects</em>. Most of the existing groups started their life as a fraction <a href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a> within an already existing organisation. This gives us part of the reason for the subsequent evolution.</p>
<p>A fraction is a grouping that arises within a party or group often over a single issue and is turned inwards hoping to achieve a clear-cut ideological resolution of that issue. For this reason a fraction should be considered to be a temporary and short-lived formation. Initially there is no counterposing of an entire programme to that of the existing formation. The issues are seen as being the correction of an error of tactics or strategy, or even merely the consistent and energetic application of an existing programme.</p>
<p>The party, in contrast, sets out to group within its ranks all those who subscribe to its programme, but at the same time allows wide divergences of opinion on tactics and strategy, always with the proviso that the dissentients should subordinate themselves in activity to the majority decisions. This in no way demands of the dissentients that they should renounce their views, merely that they accept majority decisions and work in accordance with them. But a fraction has a different internal regime to that of the party. Because of the narrow basis for its existence it draws the dividing line between members and non-members with hair-line precision, even transitory tactical differences can make it impossible to coexist within the same fraction. For example if there arises a difference within a party over a tactical orientation, for example, whether an election should be boycotted or not, then two fractions may arise and many in the party may be undecided. Obviously the question of adherence to one of the fractions is a very clear-cut matter, any wavering immediately puts one outside of the fraction. There is no need for a formal decision in that situation, the doubter is just dropped from the fraction, which itself may not be a formal one.</p>
<p>Very few parties start out in life as such, they normally begin as fractions within existing organisations. But such fractions become parties in the process of political struggle; and because of this it is an objective fact, and not their own subjective view of themselves, which makes them parties.</p>
<p>A sect is usually a fraction that has failed to become a party, and has maintained the internal life of a fraction. That discipline which is necessary for an internal struggle is carried over into its independent existence and because of this it becomes burdensome and repulsive as the <em>sect</em> takes shape. The specific features usually take the form of near hysteria to the raising of any meaningful criticisms (not to be confused with the type of ‘self-criticism’ sometimes practised) of the strategy or tactics being pursued. Because at this stage the initial reasons for the sect’s existence (in reality as a fraction) has become ossified into dogma, they manifest violent reactions to any challenge. To be present at such confrontations is to witness a most bizarre scene. The critics will be subjected to such treatment as one would think only the class enemy deserves. In such an emotionally-charged atmosphere nearly all differences can lead, and usually do, to an eventual split or the expulsion of the minority opinion.</p>
<p>Such situations and results have little to do with the personalities involved. Certainly, the personal characteristics displayed can exacerbate or moderate the clash, but only to a degree. The basic response is structured within the subordinated and alienated life of the sect. Even those fractions which consciously set out not to perpetuate the regime of a fraction, and hence to slide into a sect existence, will fall prey to this condition if they fail to transform themselves into parties or embryo parties. Good intentions are not enough.</p>
<p>Each fraction announces itself to the world by flourishing certain characteristics that proclaim its identity. At its inception these may be valid and legitimate weapons to free itself from a past that had acted as a brake. The transformation into a sect, which may be a long or short period of time, witnesses a transmogrification of these points, characteristics or attributes into totems or fetishes. The closer any criticisms come to these totems the more violent is likely to be the reaction. This, I believe, goes some way to explain that strange phenomena of the left, that is, the closer two groups appear to be in programme the more bitter the hostility displayed, either publically or privately, to each other. Lest anyone feel smug, let me point out that no group or organisation, no matter how large, is immune from this process. Nor has it ever been known for a sectarian to recognise himself in the mirror. Only life and political activity can say, after the event, which is and which is not a sect.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">What Should We Do?</h4>
<p class="fst">Any group or party that sets out to be revolutionary must break out of the corporate shell of the working class and adopt an hegemonic, worldwide vision of reality. Only conscious elements can do this, not merely conscious of the poverty, misery and inequalities of capitalism and imperialism, this consciousness must also incorporate knowledge of the precise ways in which bourgeois hegemony is exercised; not merely in the general sense but in the particular and concrete conditions of a given society. Although Marxism arms one with a universal and hegemonic viewpoint, this, if it is to be transformed into an instrument of liberation, must be applied in the particular situation one is confronted with. It is not sufficient to understand that capitalism is an irrational and contradictory society, one must know <em>how</em> and where these irrationalities and contradictions exhibit themselves within any particular society. The most general contradiction in any capitalist society is that between labour and capital. However, one must also understand certain structures within any society gain a certain <em>relative</em> autonomy. Because of this autonomy the basic and determinant contradiction may well express itself through the apparent over-determination of subsidiary contradictions. It is by an evaluation of these <em>relatively</em> autonomous structures and their relationship to the basic contradiction within society that Marxists are able to develop a programmatic perspective.</p>
<p>The hegemony of the British bourgeoisie is <em>mainly</em>, but not wholly, maintained by the mystification of the realities of the world we live in. This, at a vulgar level, takes the form of common sense and Galbraith’s ‘conventional wisdom’. Therefore, the false consciousness that we speak of is not something that <em>appears</em> to have been imposed from outside of the individual, but rather it manifests itself as internalised norms, etc. As such – because they are unconsciously imbibed – they present themselves as spontaneous expressions of ‘human nature’. This process is continually reinforced by the manipulation of the means of communication. This mystification is mediated by intellectuals of all ranks, who operate in the educational system, the press, television and radio, etc. In present-day conditions the organs of repression, which some Marxists unfortunately see as being the main or only instrument of bourgeois hegemony, are subordinated in their role. They only are brought into play when other means have failed to produce the required results. This is not to say that these organs are unimportant, or that they can be dismissed, on the contrary it is likely that they will be used more in the coming period than has been the case during the last 20 years or so. There has certainly been a weakening of the fear of those in authority since 1945, and this is indicated in a number of ways. Perhaps the most commented-on aspect is the attitude of workers to authority within the factories, but this is only a particular expression of a more general phenomenon. But this phenomenon is at best inchoate, and has yet to find a generalised positive expression; common sense still rules the mental universe of the working class. Such a situation is no doubt irritating for the ‘establishment’ and even at times worrying, but as yet not decisively so. Such situations are manifestations of the general crisis of British capitalism, which has been chronic since 1945, and the particular conditions relating to full employment. Such a crisis can drag on for decades, as Gramsci points out, unless a cohesive and well-organised force appears to challenge the hegemony of the ruling class.</p>
<p>Régis Debray, in his book <strong>Revolution in the Revolution</strong>, makes the point that it is important to strike at the enemy’s élite troops, because they are the key element in holding all the forces together. The question for us here in Britain is – Who are our enemy’s élite troops? I have pointed out that the mystification process is mediated via the intelligentsia, and this group constitutes the ‘élite troops’ of the British bourgeoisie. This stratum carries out this role in a very concrete manner, at many levels of society, but it is in the higher reaches of the educational system, communications system and industry that it constitutes a real caste. It is in the sphere of the production of these intellectuals that the state plays an important role. It is important in this context to understand why there is such hostility displayed towards those students who demand a voice and vote in the running of institutions of higher learning. This area of life is one of extreme sensitivity for the dominance of bourgeois ideology.</p>
<p>The aim of Marxists in this situation must be the creation of cadres (intellectuals of the new type) drawn both from the working class and the intelligentsia who will ‘attack’ this élite corps. Such an attack must not only have the element of destruction but also one of positive affirmation. To do this there must be a separation, dividing lines must be very sharply drawn. A weak cadre cannot afford to enter alliances, because it will be absorbed by its allies. This weakness does not only refer to numbers but also to ideological quality. Only in irreconcilable struggle can Marxist cadres be gathered and maintained. Lenin said: ‘... we declare that before we can unite and in order that we may unite, we must first draw firm and definite lines of demarcation.’ (<strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong>, p. 56) <a href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a> Note the phrase ‘and in order that we may unite’, this process of demarcation does not mean a withdrawal into isolation and literary Marxism, it means that one must be very clear on who is an ally, who is a cadre and who must be opposed. All alliances seen from this point of view must have the aim of enlarging the numbers and influence of the Marxist cadre. But for this to take place there must be a period of separation. In practice, here in Britain this means that the Marxist cadres must be ideologically formed in opposition to and outside of the Social-Democratic milieu. This is not to be construed as a rejection of the need for Marxist cadres to participate in the labour movement as we find it. But one cannot properly carry out the ideological struggle necessary by only using Aesopian language or looking over one’s shoulder in fear of expulsion.</p>
<p>The key areas for the gathering of the ‘grain of sand’ (not to be confused with the building of a mass movement) must be where the material is most likely to be found, and these are in the educational system and the rank-and-file activities of the working class. These areas are very sensitive. Within the educational system students represent a volatile and impressionable segment of society, because of their age and the fact that they are in the process of equipping themselves with certain techniques. Many of them today are seeing themselves as workers who have to fight for better wages and conditions. It is no accident that in an age of mass technology the intellectuals are becoming proletarianised. Far from becoming a substitute for the working class they are becoming a part of it as never before. The rank-and-file militants on the other hand represent the best and most active section of the working class. Because of their experiences these militants have begun to react to the bureaucracy in the trade unions. Such people must be gathered and have their ideological vision widened and a fruitful interaction brought about.</p>
<p>Marxists should not allow the enemy to dictate the field of action, when this happens one can be sure that it is done because the enemy feels confident of victory. Bourgeois <em>morality</em> must be used and transgressed. All of the existing Marxist groups, in practice, accept the dictation of the field of action by the bourgeoisie. <em>In doing so they accept their subordination.</em> The monopolist control of the means of communication is accepted, and Marxists only participate on such conditions as usually to emasculate their message. What are needed are open and unfettered means of communication which are outside the present monopolist system.</p>
<p>Régis Debray analyses the idea of the revolutionary <em>foco</em> within the context of Latin America. Briefly, the <em>foco</em> implies that the cadres choose their own field of battle away from the ruling-class strongholds and concentration of fire-power of the cadres so that the superiority of the enemy is lessened and possibly overcome. However, it should be clear that such <em>focos</em> are not intended to defeat the enemy on a military level but rather to act as sparks that set the inflammable material surrounding them alight. Is there a lesson for us here? I think so. Firstly, in the first stages of gathering together a cadre there must be a concentration of the few available people. Secondly, a concentration enlarges the ‘fire-power’ of such a cadre. Given sufficient concentration there is a qualitative enlargement of the abilities of all the component members. In a period of ‘social peace’ the spreading of cadres over large areas, either geographically or in spheres of activity, inevitably leads to a dilution of effort and effectiveness. The concentration must not be seen as being for the cadres’ comfort and mutual solace, it is for its <em>external</em> effects in acting as a polarising force that it must be undertaken.</p>
<p>The process of forming such an initial cadre will not be an easy or short task, it can only be achieved by a continuous and conscious effort of will. If this sounds like voluntarism, the answer is that <em>all</em> Marxist activity at this period has a large element of this, without it we remain captives of ‘common sense’. Gramsci makes the point:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Too much (and therefore superficial and mechanical) political realism often leads to the assertion that the man of state must only work within the sphere of ‘effective reality’, not interest himself in ‘what should be’ but only in ‘what is’. This would mean that the man of state must have no perspective longer than his nose.</p>
<p class="fst">Engels’ phrase ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’ cannot be understood in a <em>passive</em> way, recognition here implies an <em>active</em> and creative participation in the making of that freedom. In this way, to have a perspective or knowledge of the future implies action that is incorporated in it. If one refuses to take positive and meaningful action, one remains passive in the face of the objectivity that dominates instead of being transformed and transcended by revolutionary praxis. In the sphere of building a Marxist cadre this means that old, subordinate and anti-intellectualist methods have to be replaced. The cadre will not be built by drawing a large periphery around an indeterminate centre, but like a pearl which is built up layer by layer around a hard core. It is because the process must evolve in this way that a confrontation with bourgeois ideology must take place in <em>all</em> spheres. Lenin made this point when he said: ‘In order to bring the <em>worker</em> political knowledge, Social-Democrats must <em>go into all classes of the population</em>, must send out units of their army in <em>all directions</em>.’ (<strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong>, p. 102) <a href="#n8" name="f8">[8]</a></p>
<p>All directions means in all spheres of life, and that Marxists do not only concern themselves with the problems of the working class but with all the oppressed. It is only by creating a mirror of the whole society that the working class can perceive itself. The Marxist critique must be articulated at all levels of society, in history, science, economics, sociology, art, sport, etc., etc. Any such critique must be creative, not formalised or ritualised. Lenin said that Marxists have to impart a very clear idea of the totality of the universe we inhabit:</p>
<p class="quoteb">And this ‘clear idea’ cannot be obtained from any book. It can only be supplied by vivid pictures and arraignments compiled on the basis of fresh evidence of what is happening around us at a given moment, of what everyone is talking, in his own way, or at least whispering about, of what is expressed in such and such events, such and such figures, such and such court judgements, etc., etc. These all-embracing political arraignments are a necessary and <em>fundamental</em> condition for educating the masses in revolutionary activity. (<strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong>, pp. 95–96) <a href="#n9" name="f9">[9]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Unless one <em>starts</em> from this premise then one loses one’s way, for a cadre – even a ‘grain of sand’ – does not start its activities from an abstract and remote plane, but from the very real and material prerequisites that already exist; <em>even though at times it is necessary to raise these to the level of abstraction to reveal their inner content</em>. Such a critique can only start with the material at hand both objectively and subjectively, that is, it is not possible to cover the whole range of possibilities initially. First and foremost a Marxist cadre must be consistently oriented towards the working class. The struggle against bourgeois ideology must be fought in that sphere above all. It matters not one whit if one only defeats bourgeois ideologists in well-mannered debates before middle-class audiences if this is not transmitted to the working class. Marxist ideology must become a living material force within society and it must seek this force within the working class.</p>
<p>Any process of clarification means sloughing off the old outworn elements. Similarly, to achieve as pure a product as possible it is necessary to exclude impurities. Therefore cadres can only be built on the basis of the strictest selection. This selection must be emphasised. In the recruitment of new people there has to be a high standard of competence demanded. The door to membership of a Marxist cadre organisation cannot be wide open. If the cadre is to do its work properly there must be a deep rapport. This rapport must be very different to the type of uniformity imposed by subordination to one or two ‘theoreticians’. Such rapport must arise from a meticulous attention to theory and education, plus meaningful activity. Such education <em>cannot</em> be seen as something <em>handed down</em>, rather it must be seen as a continuing process for all concerned. Moreover, such education, whilst having as its basis the texts of the Marxist movement, must have its content continually enriched by actual struggle.</p>
<p>I want now briefly to mention the question of internationalism. No Marxist cadres can be created on a narrow national basis. It is true that we have to work in the situation in which we move and much of our experience will be drawn from this. But there can be no relapse into narrow national solipsism. Lenin, again, has something very useful to say on this point:</p>
<p class="quoteb">... the Social-Democratic movement is essentially international. This does not only mean that we must fight national chauvinism, but also that a movement starting in a young country can only be successful if it absorbs the experience of other countries ... it is not sufficient merely to be acquainted with it, or just to copy the latest resolutions. It requires the ability to treat this experience critically and to test it independently. (<strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong>, p. 9) <a href="#n10" name="f10">[10]</a></p>
<p class="fst">There you have three key words – absorb, criticise and test – only thus armed can one approach the question of internationalism, any undue weight given to one of them leads to a one-sided and stunted appraisal. Internationalism is not a one-way process, the benefits that accrue from international collaboration will increase manifold only to the extent that each participant contributes. The need for a mass revolutionary International is more pressing today than it was in 1919. As in other matters, its creation will not be completely dependent on objective circumstances, the recognition of the need implies active work for its creation now. (This subject will be given a more extended treatment in the next article.)<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Conclusion</h4>
<p class="fst">There may appear to be a lack of very concrete propositions for action put forward in this essay. This, of necessity, must be the case because concrete and detailed propositions relating to the subject-matter can only be made after thorough discussion on the main postulates, and these have been to some extent a critical analysis of the past. The tasks that need to be carried out will not automatically present themselves from this analysis, but the main areas of activity have. Moreover, tasks cannot be discussed in a vacuum or suggested to disembodied spirits, they can only be discussed with real people. Certainly the most concrete action initially is the publication of this essay with the intention of beginning a discussion around the analysis. But this can only be a first step, although a continuing one, as the discussion unfolds actions will be initiated.</p>
<p>Precisely because I have attempted to raise the discussion along unfamiliar lines it may appear to be somewhat abstract, nevertheless it is grounded, indeed very firmly so, in the actual conditions that have been traversed and still face us here and now. What we make of these depends on each and every one of us.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> See <strong>Towards Socialism</strong> (London 1965).</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> Rosa Luxemburg, <a href="../../../../../../archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/intro.htm" target="new"><strong>Social Reform or Revolution?</strong></a>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> V.I. Lenin, <a href="../../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm" target="new"><strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong></a>, <strong>Collected Works</strong>, Vol. 5.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> The headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain was for many years in King Street in the Covent Garden area of London; the Socialist Labour League had its headquarters at this juncture in Clapham High Street. The author’s reference to ‘uncle’ is referring to the change of allegiance of these intellectuals from ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin to Gerry Healy – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> L.D. Trotsky, <a href="../../../../../../archive/trotsky/idom/dm/22-scratch2.htm" target="new"></a><em>From a Scratch To the Danger of Gangrene</em>, <strong>In Defence of Marxism</strong>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> It seems that the word ‘faction’ is meant here and in the following paragraphs – MIA.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> V.I. Lenin, <a href="../../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm" target="new"><strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong></a>, <strong>Collected Works</strong>, Vol. 5.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f8" name="n8">8.</a> V.I. Lenin, <a href="../../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm" target="new"><strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong></a>, <strong>Collected Works</strong>, Vol. 5.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f9" name="n9">9.</a> V.I. Lenin, <a href="../../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm" target="new"><strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong></a>, <strong>Collected Works</strong>, Vol. 5.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f10" name="n10">10.</a> V.I. Lenin, <a href="../../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm" target="new"><strong>What Is To Be Done?</strong></a>, <strong>Collected Works</strong>, Vol. 5.</p>
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The Making of Revolutionaries: Cadre or Sect
(Summer 1968)
From Bulletin of Marxist Studies, Vol. 1 No. 1, Summer 1968.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The present time is a very disturbing one for Marxists in Britain, it is full of questions and many seem imponderable. The election of the Labour government to office has once again thrown both the Social-Democratic left and the Marxist movement into a state of confusion and tension. At a time when advances for socialism seemingly could be made, all is inverted, stood on its head. In a period of acute crisis for British capitalism Marxists stand unarmed, without the means to intervene and not knowing how to. Only the most marginal victories are being won by the left, if any are being won at all. The question therefore poses itself very sharply – ‘Why is this?’ It is the purpose of this essay to examine and explore certain facets of this question, not to attempt to give definitive answers – few exist in the abstract.
Two other points should be made. Firstly, this essay makes no attempt to argue the need for a revolutionary Marxist party, this is assumed. Secondly, it does not deal with the more general or objective factors relating to the failure of such a party to emerge in Britain. There have been many such discussions and I have not attempted to pass any judgement on them.
First Approximations
Among those who have attempted to grapple with the present situation have been the New Left Review editorial team. All credit must go to them for their efforts over the past few years in trying to break out of the vicious circle that British Marxists are in. With some remarkable insights and a great élan they have attempted to unlock the present. It is not to their discredit that they have not entirely succeeded, and they would not claim to have done so. However, it is up to those who disagree with certain aspects of their work to take up the issues and discuss them.
To help clarify matters I intend to carry out a part of the discussion around the article by Perry Anderson entitled Problems of Socialist Strategy. [1]
Let us begin with a quotation from this article:
Two strategic models have dominated our history, and divided the socialist movement in Europe from the turn of the century to our time. The momentous schism between Social-Democracy and Communism directly derives from them. They can be called the parliamentary and the insurrectionary roads to socialism. (p. 233)
Perry Anderson posits these two paths as being the basic difference within the socialist movement, and much of his analysis seems to be grounded on this one point. Unfortunately this cannot be accepted as a tenable thesis. The division that runs deep within the labour movement, not only in Britain but also internationally, is not predicated upon such a simplistic dichotomy. The real and fundamental difference is related to the need, or otherwise, for a thoroughgoing and basic change within society. That is, whether as socialists we want to abolish wage slavery and its accompanying alienation, and establish a free human society in which man is truly his own master and not the adjunct of capital. If this was not immediately apparent before 1945 (and I would argue that it was) then it has become increasingly so since. With the advent of relatively full employment and the amelioration of certain aspects of poverty, the real and substantive differences between reformists and revolutionaries has become increasingly clear. That this is not apparent to many is an indication of the vulgar economic materialism that passes for Marxism in many quarters, not least amongst the bourgeois ‘Marxologists’. Those who want to smooth down rough edges, establish ‘good industrial relations’, etc, etc, are the reformists. Those who want to abolish industrial relations and replace them with human relations are the socialists, the revolutionaries.
This, above all, is the essence of the dispute, not insurrectionary versus parliamentary roads. Not that such disputes are unimportant, on the contrary, they sometimes become crucial. But at this point of time to allow oneself to get bogged down in what would be an essentially abstract dispute would be fruitless. No one who considers themselves to be Marxist could quibble over the question of violence. We do not live in an age of peace, the violence of imperialism is endemic, it cannot survive without it. However, one must realise that such disputes are secondary and subordinate to the key question – ‘Do we reform capitalism or do we build socialism?’ Moreover, a dispute over methods very often only serves to cover a dispute over aims.
Even before 1914 this was a subject of controversy within the labour movement, when Bernstein wrote his Evolutionary Socialism. Rosa Luxemburg saw this distinction clearly in 1900 when she wrote:
... the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social-Democratic movement from the bourgeois democracy and bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order – the question of ‘Reform or Revolution?’ as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the Social-Democracy the question: ‘To be or not to be?’ In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or of the use of this or that set of tactics, but the very existence of the Social-Democratic movement. (Social Reform or Revolution?) [2]
These words still hold true today over half a century later, only perhaps more so.
The year 1917 and the October revolution drew a line – an indelible one – through the labour movement. It true that old habits are hard to shake off, for example, German Social-Democracy only finally sloughed off the vestiges of its Marxism in the late 1950s. But the truth was that Bernstein only articulated existing practice when he began his attack, as the First World War revealed. In the same way the struggle in the Labour Party over the attempted revision of Clause Four of the constitution saw a defeat for Gaitskell, so in Germany earlier in the century Kautsky came out to defend the prevailing orthodoxy and won. In neither case was the victory real or enduring, both parties today are open proponents of the mixed economy and the rule of market economics, that is, both parties openly proclaim that they only want to reform capitalism, that is, if they deign to mention such an ‘outmoded’ expression. To pose the question as did Perry Anderson is to have a wholly pre-1914 conception of Social-Democracy, and is to try to grapple with ghosts of those long since departed.
The Party
Centralism Versus Democracy? Following through this line of thought Perry Anderson examines the question of the role of the party in the struggle for socialism. True, this is done obliquely, rather than directly, nevertheless there does emerge a concept of the Leninist party that is erroneous. Unless this problem is cleared up no discussion on socialist strategy can be meaningful.
What does Anderson say?
For Lenin, the road to socialism was short but sheer: it required the armed insurrection of the proletariat against the established state, its capture and destruction. (p. 224)
Leninism has been ... a success in its own terms and context. It won power in Russia, carried out the expropriation of capitalism and totally transformed the economy and society of the largest country in Europe ... What was the secret of this success? The answer is surely this: Leninism was almost perfectly adapted to the specific conditions of its time and place. It is precisely in backward inchoate societies, dominated by scarcity and integrated by the state, that such a strategy has its meaning. (pp. 227–28, emphasis in original)
But its very adaption to its Eastern environment, which has been the secret of its success, radically dis-adapts it from the Western milieu where capitalism remains supreme today. For the societies of Western Europe constitute a wholly different universe from those of Eastern Europe ... For the moment it is important to emphasise that a Leninist strategy in the West is fundamentally regressive: it threatens to destroy a vital historical creation ... (p. 230, emphasis in original)
What is this heritage that Leninism allegedly threatens? Without doubt Perry Anderson means liberal-democracy, as a reading of his essay indicates. I think he is completely mistaken in this assumption; and in also assuming that liberal-democracy is the pattern for Western Europe. At the time that he wrote the essay it would have only been necessary to point to Spain and Portugal to show the error of such an assertion. Moreover, the France of De Gaulle is not a liberal-democracy, but rather an authoritarian regime with electoral plumage. Western Germany cannot be blessed with the accolade either, since the Communist Party is legally banned. And of course since the essay was written the military regime has been installed in Greece, and on the bones of a regime it would have been difficult to describe as liberal-democracy. The universe of liberal-democracy becomes contracted under examination.
Does this mean there is no validity in Anderson’s contention and concern? Yes, there is validity, in the sense that no Marxist would wish for any diminution of the civil and political liberties that have been won within certain countries. Therefore we can share his concern, insofar as it is legitimate. However, it would be exceedingly naive not to understand that such liberties are conditional and somewhat precarious. One has only to look at the mounting attack on the trades unions here in Britain to understand this. And equally the threat to radicals and revolutionaries implied in the Race Relations Act, for example, the imprisonment of Michael X.
The answer to the question must be ‘no’, in the sense that Leninism as such is not and never was a threat to civil liberty or the working class. To attempt to equate the Stalinist police regimes with Leninism is to fall into the same trap as many bourgeois liberals have done. For them the terror directed against counter-revolutionary White Guards was the same as the terror of the Stalinist bureaucracy against the Bolshevik Old Guard. The whole spirit and ethos of Leninism is directly antithetical to any suppression of liberty, indeed it was directed towards the release of enthusiasm and tremendous self-activity. Any reading of State and Revolution should clear this matter up because Lenin there visualised a workers’ state which was only a semi-state, one that was beginning to prepare the ground for its own demise.
A further error creeps into Perry Anderson’s explanation of Leninism, he seems to suggest that Lenin’s concept of the party was predicated on the fact of Russia’s backwardness and the autocracy of the Tsarist regime. This is misleading and blurs the issue. It is true that the specific conditions that Lenin visualised, and created, the Bolshevik Party under were conditions of repression. Therefore, Lenin emphasised certain features because of these particular conditions, but it is an error to construe certain facets as the whole of Leninism. In this context we should also note that Gramsci – that most neglected of Marxists – is also misunderstood because he wrote under conditions of Fascist dictatorship. Neither Lenin or Gramsci predicated their views of the party on these conditions of backward economies or autocracy. Rather the leitmotif of their views is to be found in their struggle against economism and theories of spontaneity, and their emphasis of the role of consciousness. This is the inner logic, core and historic value of their contribution. The role of consciousness assumes tremendous significance in the struggle to create a Marxist party. Those who today demote the role of the conscious elements within the working class could do well to ponder these words of Lenin:
Any belittling of the role of ‘the conscious element’, of the role of Social-Democracy, means ipso facto (quite irrespective of whether the belittler intends it or not) the strengthening of the influence of the bourgeois ideology upon the workers. All those who talk about ‘overestimating the importance of ideology’, about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc, imagine that the purely workers’ movement by itself can and will work out an independent ideology for itself, if only workers ‘tear their fate from the hands of the leaders’ ... the spontaneous development of the labour movement leads precisely to its subordination to the bourgeois ideology ..., because a spontaneous labour movement is trade unionism ...
This does not mean, of course, that the workers do not participate in working it [the ideology] out. But they participate not as workers but as theorists of socialism, Proudons or Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when, and in so far as, they succeed to a greater or lesser extent in acquiring the knowledge of their age and in advancing this knowledge. And in order that working men may succeed in this more often, it is necessary to concern oneself as far as possible with raising the level of consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers should not confine themselves to artificially restricted limits of ‘literature for workers’, but should learn more and more to master the general literature. It would be even more correct to say confined instead of ‘confine themselves’, because workers themselves read and want to read everything that is written for the intelligentsia, and some (bad) intellectuals think that ‘for the workers’ it is sufficient to tell them about factory conditions and chew over and over again what has long been known. (What Is To Be Done?, pp. 70–71, emphasis in original) [3]
Two very important points emerge from this. Firstly, the spontaneous drives of the working class are only capable of producing trade-union consciousness. Yet trade unions, by their very nature, are an expression of the division within existing society between capital and labour; and are a recognition of this division. Capitalist commodity production here, it must be emphasised, is not a given set of techniques but a set of social relations, therefore any attempt to overcome them must of necessity be a partial withdrawal from these relations. Trade unions on the contrary must take them as given and seek to obtain a better bargain for the sellers of labour, and only by a tacit or open acknowledgement of these relations do they carry out their functions as trade unions. This trade-union mentality is not confined to narrow trade-union affairs, on the contrary, it spills over, pervades and dominates the whole labour movement. Its political expression is reformism. Therefore, secondly the question of the role of intellectuals becomes a key one. These intellectuals must bring socialist consciousness into the working class. But, these intellectuals must be of a new type. One of the misunderstandings current on this point is that such intellectuals must of necessity come from the traditional intelligentsia. It is true that initially members of the intelligentsia can and do play a vital role in bringing conscious socialist theory into the ranks of the working class; and as the Petőfi circle of Budapest showed in Hungary in 1956, they can act as a catalysing agent at times of crisis. Moreover, note what Lenin said above. Such intellectuals ‘of the new type’ must by definition have broken with bourgeois ideology in all its forms, but they can equally come from the ranks of the working class as from the ranks of the intelligentsia. Moreover, without these intellectuals being drawn from the ranks of the working class any attempts at creating a vanguard solely from the intelligentsia will end in ‘intellectualism’ of the worst kind. Those who think that Lenin had any great affection for intellectuals or accorded them some special place should familiarise themselves with One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, it is littered with withering phrases about ‘whining intellectuals’, ‘unstable elements’, etc., etc. These should be understood in the class context in which they are used. Lenin was using the term intellectuals here as a social description indicating the general characteristics that intellectuals displayed as a social class.
The role of the intellectuals of the new type is not to satisfy their own ego or literary ambitions, but to challenge concretely the ideological dominance of the bourgeoisie and to prepare the instrument for its demise. Gramsci points this out when he says:
Marxism does not seek to sustain ‘simple people’ in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but instead to lead them to a higher view of life. If it asserts the need for contact between intellectual and the simple people it does so, not in order to limit scientific activity and maintain unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to build an intellectual-moral bloc which makes possible the progress of the masses and not only for a few groups of intellectuals. (The Modern Prince, p. 66)
Herein is the significance of the concept of the intellectuals of the new type. Members of the intelligentsia and the working class have to be remade into revolutionary intellectuals. And this re-moulding is not a process carried out on ‘inert’ material, it has nothing in common with the ‘brainwashing’ so beloved of the vulgar Marxologists. It is a process that can only succeed to the extent that the individual participates and furthers it.
What Are Cadres? I want now to pose this question – What do we mean when we speak about Marxist cadres? If the new type of intellectuals are the cadres of a Marxist party, what has been the practice of all those groups on the left that claimed to be creating cadres?
Gramsci lays down three essential elements for building a Marxist party, they are:
i) A widespread element of common, average men, whose participation is provided by discipline and faith, not by creative and highly organisational spirit. Without these the party would not exist, it is true, but it is also true that the party would not exist ‘only’ with these. They are a force as far as there is someone who centralises, organises, disciplines them, and in the absence of this force they would break up and cancel each other out in scattered impotence.
ii) The principal cohesive element, which centralises in the national field, which render effective and powerful the totality of forces which left to themselves would count for nothing or very little, this element is endowed with a highly cohesive, centralising and disciplinary power which is also, perhaps because of this, inventive (if what is meant is ‘inventive’ in a certain direction according to certain lines of forces, certain perspectives or certain premises). It is also true that this element alone would not form a party, but it would do so more than the first element. They would be generals without an army, but in reality it is easier to create an army than to create generals ...
iii) A middle element, which links the first element with the second and puts them into contact, not only ‘physically’ but also morally and intellectually ... (The Modern Prince, pp. 49–50)
Let us now look at my question in the light of what Gramsci says. It is my contention that all the present groups of the revolutionary left in Britain have up to now been intent on producing the third element, yet they have little or none of the second. Moreover, it has to be understood that a party can only emerge from a movement, one that embraces wider and more heterogeneous elements than a party.
Concretely this has meant that it is activists or agitators that have been produced, and not cadres or intellectuals of the new type. Gramsci, here, has refined Lenin and brought this question into a closer focus. Looking at the question from this standpoint one can see that the quest to build a revolutionary party by many small groups has foundered to a large extent because of a lack of understanding of this key question (there are other factors and some are discussed later). It may be objected that the Communist Party has had (relatively) large numbers of intellectuals within its ranks, this is true and these were largely from the intelligentsia. However, at no time have these been in any position fundamentally to influence or guide the party, even if they so desired. Moreover, most of them have been in the grip of Stalinist orthodoxy and because of this were mental cripples. Those that broke with the CP in the middle 1950s have, in the main, been destroyed as Marxist cadres, either dropping into passivity or – in reaction to Stalinist orthodoxy – become enamoured with populism. (A certain small segment of this generation having taken their intellect out of pawn from King Street went with all due haste to Clapham High Street, unfortunately for them with similar results to their previous visit to ‘uncle’.) [4]
No other group on the Marxist left has collected any appreciable number of intellectuals, either from the intelligentsia or the working class. This is not surprising since none of these groups have the concept of building Marxist cadres in the Leninist or Gramscian sense.
Indeed one of the characteristics of all these groups is that they are anti-intellectual in the ‘best’ British tradition. Because of this they are all to some extent prisoners of the corporative consciousness of the working class, deferring to it and taking it as the level of their departure. In this they are fatally mistaken. Marxists cannot start at the level of consciousness of the working class, they must be the bearers of the highest and most advanced theory and consciousness. Certainly any Marxist must take cognisance of the level of consciousness of the mass of the people, otherwise one falls into the crassest voluntarism. However, this does not mean that one accepts this level. It is the acceptance of this level that has meant in practice that all the Marxist groups have been content to ‘produce’ the third element of Gramsci. Trotsky was well aware of this problem when he wrote: ‘A pedagogical adaption to the more backward layers of the proletariat must not become transformed into a political adaption to the conservative bureaucracy of the trade unions.’ (In Defence of Marxism, p. 146) [5] No doubt many will be offended by my saying this, and there will perhaps be cries of ‘prove it’. The answer is all around you, unfortunately in a negative form. Where is the cadre that should be challenging Wilson’s government, or that has even cracked the shell of the British working class’s corporate world? To ask the question is to answer it. And sad to say even our ‘generals’ of the left are almost indistinguishable from the army.
Now whilst it is true that the revolutionary party creates intellectuals, it is only done on an expanded basis. Initially it is the intellectuals who create the party, even if this is only an embryo party. They constitute the grain of sand around which the pearl forms. Therefore the most critical task is to assemble this grain of sand. This cannot be done on an activist basis alone, it can only be done on the basis of ideas, that is, of theory. But this theory must be expounded in practice, and at a number of levels, not in a single-issue campaign. The ‘mere’ literary exposition of theory leads to intellectualism. This may sound as though what is being said is that ‘the chicken and the egg’ arrive simultaneously, but this is not so. One of the truisms of the Marxist movement is that there should be unity of theory and practice. This is a necessary and valid truism, nevertheless the danger is that activism is equated with practice, and theory becomes subordinated to activity. When this happens theory becomes a badge, an adornment, a suit of clothes, which can be changed to fit the mood. Theory then becomes ex post a justification for practice or has no relation to it. However, for Marxists theory is not something that is empirically made up as we go along, past experience provides an approximation which we abstract and turn into theory and this should guide our present practice. The badge approach to theory is a bowing to the division of labour imposed by class society. This is because intellectual activities are not seen as activities as such, but as something that takes place outside of the collective. There arises in small political groups the practice of each having its own ‘theorist’ who hands down the ‘line’. It does not occur to such leaders that a major part of their task is to train people to replace them.
For Marxists, within the concept of practice is embodied theory, therefore the truism ‘unity of theory and practice’ can become a barrier to our understanding of this. Let me elaborate this point a little. Was Marx theorising or practising when he was writing Capital? Were Castro and Che practising or theorising when they landed from the Granma? These are, of course, dramatic examples, and few of us can aspire to reach such historical proportions; yet unless we envisage a revolutionary party in this way we do not have the perspective of revolutionaries. Therefore, it is very necessary that in the process of gathering the ‘grain of sand’ a vulgar interpretation is not given to the word activity. Practice must be understood as encompassing many, many things. It must be a genuine praxis.
Which Crisis of Leadership? One of the factors that has contributed towards an activist concept of cadres has been the phrase ‘the working class suffers from a crisis of leadership’. What is understood by this, and what should be understood by it? A mechanical and undialectical application of this idea implies that the working class is straining at the leash, only waiting for the call to revolution or on a more mundane level only waiting for the right charismatic leader to speak at a Labour Party conference to rout the demon Wilson. Now it is true that at certain times this can be and has been correct because the mass of the working class has moved further and faster than its existing leadership, and at such times these leaders become an absolute brake. The Spanish Civil War was one example of such a situation. But such situations are rare, pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situations do not come round like the date on the calendar in orderly succession to be waited for with patience.
Such situations have to be ‘made’, not in the sense of exploiting favourable situations, that is an elementary task for Marxists. No, revolutions have to be ‘made’ by a process that stretches far back beyond particular situations.
Yet even in ‘normal’ times this crisis of leadership does exist. This particular crisis manifests itself at these times by the reformist leadership accurately reflecting the false consciousness of the masses. Seen in this way it is not the reformist leaders who have to be ‘exposed’, rather it is the corporate consciousness of the working class (needless to say the reformists need to be opposed tooth and nail). But our task as Marxists is not to denounce reformists as though the working class had a clear-sighted vision of socialism which was being impaired by using reformist spectacles. Rather it is our task to convince the working class of its ‘defective’ eyesight. Only in the process of doing this does the question of using Marxist ‘spectacles’ arise. But this should not be seen as a series of stages, both tasks have to be carried out simultaneously.
If one does not understand this process one falls into a world of demonology and good men versus bad men. This is the world of the super-voluntarist who thinks that if only he can blow his trumpet loud enough the walls of reformist Jericho will fall down.
The crisis of leadership is much more complex, pervasive and subtle, resting on the mystification engendered by bourgeois ideology. To combat this much more than activism is required, there has to be an ideological assault on the institutions that mediate it.
The dialectical novelty of the crisis of leadership is that it besets all groups and organisations of the working class. Each of these reveals an inner dynamic and rhythm of development which – unless it is able to burst asunder the integument of bourgeois hegemony – reaches an apogee and then declines, leaving it subject to that which it set out to destroy. This subjection may take many forms, each of them expresses a failure to grapple with the reality in which they exist, and an adaption to the false consciousness of that reality.
Sects and Sectarianism: Much of the foregoing helps to explain why, instead of Marxist cadres being created, there has been a proliferation of sects. Most of the existing groups started their life as a fraction [6] within an already existing organisation. This gives us part of the reason for the subsequent evolution.
A fraction is a grouping that arises within a party or group often over a single issue and is turned inwards hoping to achieve a clear-cut ideological resolution of that issue. For this reason a fraction should be considered to be a temporary and short-lived formation. Initially there is no counterposing of an entire programme to that of the existing formation. The issues are seen as being the correction of an error of tactics or strategy, or even merely the consistent and energetic application of an existing programme.
The party, in contrast, sets out to group within its ranks all those who subscribe to its programme, but at the same time allows wide divergences of opinion on tactics and strategy, always with the proviso that the dissentients should subordinate themselves in activity to the majority decisions. This in no way demands of the dissentients that they should renounce their views, merely that they accept majority decisions and work in accordance with them. But a fraction has a different internal regime to that of the party. Because of the narrow basis for its existence it draws the dividing line between members and non-members with hair-line precision, even transitory tactical differences can make it impossible to coexist within the same fraction. For example if there arises a difference within a party over a tactical orientation, for example, whether an election should be boycotted or not, then two fractions may arise and many in the party may be undecided. Obviously the question of adherence to one of the fractions is a very clear-cut matter, any wavering immediately puts one outside of the fraction. There is no need for a formal decision in that situation, the doubter is just dropped from the fraction, which itself may not be a formal one.
Very few parties start out in life as such, they normally begin as fractions within existing organisations. But such fractions become parties in the process of political struggle; and because of this it is an objective fact, and not their own subjective view of themselves, which makes them parties.
A sect is usually a fraction that has failed to become a party, and has maintained the internal life of a fraction. That discipline which is necessary for an internal struggle is carried over into its independent existence and because of this it becomes burdensome and repulsive as the sect takes shape. The specific features usually take the form of near hysteria to the raising of any meaningful criticisms (not to be confused with the type of ‘self-criticism’ sometimes practised) of the strategy or tactics being pursued. Because at this stage the initial reasons for the sect’s existence (in reality as a fraction) has become ossified into dogma, they manifest violent reactions to any challenge. To be present at such confrontations is to witness a most bizarre scene. The critics will be subjected to such treatment as one would think only the class enemy deserves. In such an emotionally-charged atmosphere nearly all differences can lead, and usually do, to an eventual split or the expulsion of the minority opinion.
Such situations and results have little to do with the personalities involved. Certainly, the personal characteristics displayed can exacerbate or moderate the clash, but only to a degree. The basic response is structured within the subordinated and alienated life of the sect. Even those fractions which consciously set out not to perpetuate the regime of a fraction, and hence to slide into a sect existence, will fall prey to this condition if they fail to transform themselves into parties or embryo parties. Good intentions are not enough.
Each fraction announces itself to the world by flourishing certain characteristics that proclaim its identity. At its inception these may be valid and legitimate weapons to free itself from a past that had acted as a brake. The transformation into a sect, which may be a long or short period of time, witnesses a transmogrification of these points, characteristics or attributes into totems or fetishes. The closer any criticisms come to these totems the more violent is likely to be the reaction. This, I believe, goes some way to explain that strange phenomena of the left, that is, the closer two groups appear to be in programme the more bitter the hostility displayed, either publically or privately, to each other. Lest anyone feel smug, let me point out that no group or organisation, no matter how large, is immune from this process. Nor has it ever been known for a sectarian to recognise himself in the mirror. Only life and political activity can say, after the event, which is and which is not a sect.
What Should We Do?
Any group or party that sets out to be revolutionary must break out of the corporate shell of the working class and adopt an hegemonic, worldwide vision of reality. Only conscious elements can do this, not merely conscious of the poverty, misery and inequalities of capitalism and imperialism, this consciousness must also incorporate knowledge of the precise ways in which bourgeois hegemony is exercised; not merely in the general sense but in the particular and concrete conditions of a given society. Although Marxism arms one with a universal and hegemonic viewpoint, this, if it is to be transformed into an instrument of liberation, must be applied in the particular situation one is confronted with. It is not sufficient to understand that capitalism is an irrational and contradictory society, one must know how and where these irrationalities and contradictions exhibit themselves within any particular society. The most general contradiction in any capitalist society is that between labour and capital. However, one must also understand certain structures within any society gain a certain relative autonomy. Because of this autonomy the basic and determinant contradiction may well express itself through the apparent over-determination of subsidiary contradictions. It is by an evaluation of these relatively autonomous structures and their relationship to the basic contradiction within society that Marxists are able to develop a programmatic perspective.
The hegemony of the British bourgeoisie is mainly, but not wholly, maintained by the mystification of the realities of the world we live in. This, at a vulgar level, takes the form of common sense and Galbraith’s ‘conventional wisdom’. Therefore, the false consciousness that we speak of is not something that appears to have been imposed from outside of the individual, but rather it manifests itself as internalised norms, etc. As such – because they are unconsciously imbibed – they present themselves as spontaneous expressions of ‘human nature’. This process is continually reinforced by the manipulation of the means of communication. This mystification is mediated by intellectuals of all ranks, who operate in the educational system, the press, television and radio, etc. In present-day conditions the organs of repression, which some Marxists unfortunately see as being the main or only instrument of bourgeois hegemony, are subordinated in their role. They only are brought into play when other means have failed to produce the required results. This is not to say that these organs are unimportant, or that they can be dismissed, on the contrary it is likely that they will be used more in the coming period than has been the case during the last 20 years or so. There has certainly been a weakening of the fear of those in authority since 1945, and this is indicated in a number of ways. Perhaps the most commented-on aspect is the attitude of workers to authority within the factories, but this is only a particular expression of a more general phenomenon. But this phenomenon is at best inchoate, and has yet to find a generalised positive expression; common sense still rules the mental universe of the working class. Such a situation is no doubt irritating for the ‘establishment’ and even at times worrying, but as yet not decisively so. Such situations are manifestations of the general crisis of British capitalism, which has been chronic since 1945, and the particular conditions relating to full employment. Such a crisis can drag on for decades, as Gramsci points out, unless a cohesive and well-organised force appears to challenge the hegemony of the ruling class.
Régis Debray, in his book Revolution in the Revolution, makes the point that it is important to strike at the enemy’s élite troops, because they are the key element in holding all the forces together. The question for us here in Britain is – Who are our enemy’s élite troops? I have pointed out that the mystification process is mediated via the intelligentsia, and this group constitutes the ‘élite troops’ of the British bourgeoisie. This stratum carries out this role in a very concrete manner, at many levels of society, but it is in the higher reaches of the educational system, communications system and industry that it constitutes a real caste. It is in the sphere of the production of these intellectuals that the state plays an important role. It is important in this context to understand why there is such hostility displayed towards those students who demand a voice and vote in the running of institutions of higher learning. This area of life is one of extreme sensitivity for the dominance of bourgeois ideology.
The aim of Marxists in this situation must be the creation of cadres (intellectuals of the new type) drawn both from the working class and the intelligentsia who will ‘attack’ this élite corps. Such an attack must not only have the element of destruction but also one of positive affirmation. To do this there must be a separation, dividing lines must be very sharply drawn. A weak cadre cannot afford to enter alliances, because it will be absorbed by its allies. This weakness does not only refer to numbers but also to ideological quality. Only in irreconcilable struggle can Marxist cadres be gathered and maintained. Lenin said: ‘... we declare that before we can unite and in order that we may unite, we must first draw firm and definite lines of demarcation.’ (What Is To Be Done?, p. 56) [7] Note the phrase ‘and in order that we may unite’, this process of demarcation does not mean a withdrawal into isolation and literary Marxism, it means that one must be very clear on who is an ally, who is a cadre and who must be opposed. All alliances seen from this point of view must have the aim of enlarging the numbers and influence of the Marxist cadre. But for this to take place there must be a period of separation. In practice, here in Britain this means that the Marxist cadres must be ideologically formed in opposition to and outside of the Social-Democratic milieu. This is not to be construed as a rejection of the need for Marxist cadres to participate in the labour movement as we find it. But one cannot properly carry out the ideological struggle necessary by only using Aesopian language or looking over one’s shoulder in fear of expulsion.
The key areas for the gathering of the ‘grain of sand’ (not to be confused with the building of a mass movement) must be where the material is most likely to be found, and these are in the educational system and the rank-and-file activities of the working class. These areas are very sensitive. Within the educational system students represent a volatile and impressionable segment of society, because of their age and the fact that they are in the process of equipping themselves with certain techniques. Many of them today are seeing themselves as workers who have to fight for better wages and conditions. It is no accident that in an age of mass technology the intellectuals are becoming proletarianised. Far from becoming a substitute for the working class they are becoming a part of it as never before. The rank-and-file militants on the other hand represent the best and most active section of the working class. Because of their experiences these militants have begun to react to the bureaucracy in the trade unions. Such people must be gathered and have their ideological vision widened and a fruitful interaction brought about.
Marxists should not allow the enemy to dictate the field of action, when this happens one can be sure that it is done because the enemy feels confident of victory. Bourgeois morality must be used and transgressed. All of the existing Marxist groups, in practice, accept the dictation of the field of action by the bourgeoisie. In doing so they accept their subordination. The monopolist control of the means of communication is accepted, and Marxists only participate on such conditions as usually to emasculate their message. What are needed are open and unfettered means of communication which are outside the present monopolist system.
Régis Debray analyses the idea of the revolutionary foco within the context of Latin America. Briefly, the foco implies that the cadres choose their own field of battle away from the ruling-class strongholds and concentration of fire-power of the cadres so that the superiority of the enemy is lessened and possibly overcome. However, it should be clear that such focos are not intended to defeat the enemy on a military level but rather to act as sparks that set the inflammable material surrounding them alight. Is there a lesson for us here? I think so. Firstly, in the first stages of gathering together a cadre there must be a concentration of the few available people. Secondly, a concentration enlarges the ‘fire-power’ of such a cadre. Given sufficient concentration there is a qualitative enlargement of the abilities of all the component members. In a period of ‘social peace’ the spreading of cadres over large areas, either geographically or in spheres of activity, inevitably leads to a dilution of effort and effectiveness. The concentration must not be seen as being for the cadres’ comfort and mutual solace, it is for its external effects in acting as a polarising force that it must be undertaken.
The process of forming such an initial cadre will not be an easy or short task, it can only be achieved by a continuous and conscious effort of will. If this sounds like voluntarism, the answer is that all Marxist activity at this period has a large element of this, without it we remain captives of ‘common sense’. Gramsci makes the point:
Too much (and therefore superficial and mechanical) political realism often leads to the assertion that the man of state must only work within the sphere of ‘effective reality’, not interest himself in ‘what should be’ but only in ‘what is’. This would mean that the man of state must have no perspective longer than his nose.
Engels’ phrase ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’ cannot be understood in a passive way, recognition here implies an active and creative participation in the making of that freedom. In this way, to have a perspective or knowledge of the future implies action that is incorporated in it. If one refuses to take positive and meaningful action, one remains passive in the face of the objectivity that dominates instead of being transformed and transcended by revolutionary praxis. In the sphere of building a Marxist cadre this means that old, subordinate and anti-intellectualist methods have to be replaced. The cadre will not be built by drawing a large periphery around an indeterminate centre, but like a pearl which is built up layer by layer around a hard core. It is because the process must evolve in this way that a confrontation with bourgeois ideology must take place in all spheres. Lenin made this point when he said: ‘In order to bring the worker political knowledge, Social-Democrats must go into all classes of the population, must send out units of their army in all directions.’ (What Is To Be Done?, p. 102) [8]
All directions means in all spheres of life, and that Marxists do not only concern themselves with the problems of the working class but with all the oppressed. It is only by creating a mirror of the whole society that the working class can perceive itself. The Marxist critique must be articulated at all levels of society, in history, science, economics, sociology, art, sport, etc., etc. Any such critique must be creative, not formalised or ritualised. Lenin said that Marxists have to impart a very clear idea of the totality of the universe we inhabit:
And this ‘clear idea’ cannot be obtained from any book. It can only be supplied by vivid pictures and arraignments compiled on the basis of fresh evidence of what is happening around us at a given moment, of what everyone is talking, in his own way, or at least whispering about, of what is expressed in such and such events, such and such figures, such and such court judgements, etc., etc. These all-embracing political arraignments are a necessary and fundamental condition for educating the masses in revolutionary activity. (What Is To Be Done?, pp. 95–96) [9]
Unless one starts from this premise then one loses one’s way, for a cadre – even a ‘grain of sand’ – does not start its activities from an abstract and remote plane, but from the very real and material prerequisites that already exist; even though at times it is necessary to raise these to the level of abstraction to reveal their inner content. Such a critique can only start with the material at hand both objectively and subjectively, that is, it is not possible to cover the whole range of possibilities initially. First and foremost a Marxist cadre must be consistently oriented towards the working class. The struggle against bourgeois ideology must be fought in that sphere above all. It matters not one whit if one only defeats bourgeois ideologists in well-mannered debates before middle-class audiences if this is not transmitted to the working class. Marxist ideology must become a living material force within society and it must seek this force within the working class.
Any process of clarification means sloughing off the old outworn elements. Similarly, to achieve as pure a product as possible it is necessary to exclude impurities. Therefore cadres can only be built on the basis of the strictest selection. This selection must be emphasised. In the recruitment of new people there has to be a high standard of competence demanded. The door to membership of a Marxist cadre organisation cannot be wide open. If the cadre is to do its work properly there must be a deep rapport. This rapport must be very different to the type of uniformity imposed by subordination to one or two ‘theoreticians’. Such rapport must arise from a meticulous attention to theory and education, plus meaningful activity. Such education cannot be seen as something handed down, rather it must be seen as a continuing process for all concerned. Moreover, such education, whilst having as its basis the texts of the Marxist movement, must have its content continually enriched by actual struggle.
I want now briefly to mention the question of internationalism. No Marxist cadres can be created on a narrow national basis. It is true that we have to work in the situation in which we move and much of our experience will be drawn from this. But there can be no relapse into narrow national solipsism. Lenin, again, has something very useful to say on this point:
... the Social-Democratic movement is essentially international. This does not only mean that we must fight national chauvinism, but also that a movement starting in a young country can only be successful if it absorbs the experience of other countries ... it is not sufficient merely to be acquainted with it, or just to copy the latest resolutions. It requires the ability to treat this experience critically and to test it independently. (What Is To Be Done?, p. 9) [10]
There you have three key words – absorb, criticise and test – only thus armed can one approach the question of internationalism, any undue weight given to one of them leads to a one-sided and stunted appraisal. Internationalism is not a one-way process, the benefits that accrue from international collaboration will increase manifold only to the extent that each participant contributes. The need for a mass revolutionary International is more pressing today than it was in 1919. As in other matters, its creation will not be completely dependent on objective circumstances, the recognition of the need implies active work for its creation now. (This subject will be given a more extended treatment in the next article.)
Conclusion
There may appear to be a lack of very concrete propositions for action put forward in this essay. This, of necessity, must be the case because concrete and detailed propositions relating to the subject-matter can only be made after thorough discussion on the main postulates, and these have been to some extent a critical analysis of the past. The tasks that need to be carried out will not automatically present themselves from this analysis, but the main areas of activity have. Moreover, tasks cannot be discussed in a vacuum or suggested to disembodied spirits, they can only be discussed with real people. Certainly the most concrete action initially is the publication of this essay with the intention of beginning a discussion around the analysis. But this can only be a first step, although a continuing one, as the discussion unfolds actions will be initiated.
Precisely because I have attempted to raise the discussion along unfamiliar lines it may appear to be somewhat abstract, nevertheless it is grounded, indeed very firmly so, in the actual conditions that have been traversed and still face us here and now. What we make of these depends on each and every one of us.
Notes
1. See Towards Socialism (London 1965).
2. Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution?.
3. V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Collected Works, Vol. 5.
4. The headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain was for many years in King Street in the Covent Garden area of London; the Socialist Labour League had its headquarters at this juncture in Clapham High Street. The author’s reference to ‘uncle’ is referring to the change of allegiance of these intellectuals from ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin to Gerry Healy – MIA.
5. L.D. Trotsky, From a Scratch To the Danger of Gangrene, In Defence of Marxism.
6. It seems that the word ‘faction’ is meant here and in the following paragraphs – MIA.
7. V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Collected Works, Vol. 5.
8. V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Collected Works, Vol. 5.
9. V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Collected Works, Vol. 5.
10. V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Collected Works, Vol. 5.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Productivity Deals and Workers’ Control</h1>
<h3>(Spring 1970)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 1970.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Since the ‘prices and incomes policy’ of the Labour government has been a relative failure we have witnessed the growth of the demand by the bosses for ‘productivity deals’ and this has had the full backing of the present government.</p>
<p>The question we have to pose here is: why the emphasis on such bargains? There are two main answers to this. Firstly – like all of the measures taken over the last six years – it is an attempt to stop the tendency of the <em>rate</em> of profit to decline, or to use the euphemism of the employers ‘to reduce labour costs’. Secondly it is a question of power. This is intimately linked with the first aspect, because the underlying reasons behind productivity deals is that since the end of the war in 1945, workers have managed to wrest some degree of control over their wages <em>and</em> conditions of employment, that is, there has been a decline in managerial control over certain aspects of the work situation. Productivity deals are meant to whittle away the controls established by the workers and once more reassert full managerial control over the whole productive process.</p>
<p>The demands of the employers of course vary from one plant to another, depending upon which aspect of control they feel to be the most important to reassert their authority over. In some factories this has taken the form of a drive to introduce Measured Day Work, that is, the abolition of piece-rates. In other situations it has been an attempt to regain control over the allocation of overtime, but above all there is the demand for ‘flexibility of labour’. This essentially means that the management can move men or women around at will, and <em>also</em> determine the manning of productive lines. Each case is decided on in an empirical way, the criterion being where do the shop stewards have the most control and then attempting to reduce it.</p>
<p>The employers and the Labour government have common aims in this drive, Barbara Castle urging on the employers to push for these sort of deals. However, this spills over into the political arena, because along with productivity deals there have been the attacks on the right to strike, as was witnessed last year in the notorious document <em>In Place of Strife</em> (sic). The present Labour government has done all that it could to assist such deals, particularly in the creation of a postwar record number of unemployed. This is another aspect of productivity deals that has to be taken into account, and that they ultimately help reduce the demand for labour in any given area that they <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> implemented on a large scale. There have been a number of productivity deals agreed to that in the first instance produce no redundancy, <em>but</em> as ‘natural wastage’ takes place the actual number of workers taken on to replace this declines, so that the net effect is to reduce the demand for labour and reinforce the upward trend in unemployment. Along with this higher unemployment has gone the attempt to absorb even further the trade unions into the state machine and to make them pliant tools of the employers. Also the same thing is being attempted at shop-floor level where shop stewards are being drawn into collaboration with the management in the implementation of productivity deals and the ‘disciplining’ of any workers who kick over the traces.</p>
<p>The response of the trade-union movement as a whole has been uneven and fragmented, there has been no cohesive strategy worked out. On one extreme there has been downright opposition but with no counter-strategy to them, to one of whole-hearted welcoming. In between these two extremes there are several stances taken up. The Transport and General Workers Union have a potentially useful approach, in that <em>on paper</em> they put forward the idea that productivity deals should be concluded in such a way as to increase workers’ take-home pay and extend shop stewards’ control. However, the reality of how this union has operated leaves a great deal to be desired. The TGWU method could rebound painfully upon its members if this is taken to be a form of conditional <em>support</em> for productivity deals.</p>
<p>The aims of productivity deals are summed very well in the Prices and Incomes Board report of 1968 when it said: ‘A change in the method of working is an essential part of any productivity agreement… The calculations of management must show that the total cost per unit of output will be reduced.’ <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> That is very clear and to the point, because in simple language it means that each individual worker must be exploited to a greater degree, that there must be an increase in the surplus value extracted from the worker. Under no conditions can Marxists support such deals under capitalism. It may well be that the individual worker seems to be better off in monetary terms, but this is only so under conditions of speed-up, tighter supervision and great effort, the lion’s share of which will go to the bosses. Furthermore with the rate of inflationary price increases as they are today it means that the extra monetary ‘reward’ will soon be swallowed up, but leaving the bosses with the gains in reduced costs and greater control over the worker.</p>
<p>What has been the real effect of the prices and incomes policy and productivity bargaining? In 1967 productivity in manufacturing industry rose by 5.9 per cent, average wages by 5.3 per cent, <em>but</em> retail prices rose by 2.5 per cent, thus leaving the workers worse off in real terms than before. In 1968 the corresponding figures were, productivity up by 6.9 per cent, wages 8.1 per cent, prices 5.6 per cent. <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a> So that once again any gains in monetary terms were considerably reduced. The nett result of the combined policies of the government and the employers mean that at the <em>very least</em> the share of wages in the national income has been limited to its previous level, but it is more likely that the nett effect really has been to reduce this proportion.</p>
<p>In essence if trade unions accept productivity bargaining on the terms laid down by the government and employers it means that they accept the present division of the national product, and the present distribution of wealth, that is, they accept status quo in this area. But in fact things do not stand still, the ultimate logic is to <em>increase</em> the share of the national wealth going to property and the capitalist class. What has happened in certain cases where productivity deals have been accepted has been that while the wage <em>rates</em> have increased the actual take-home pay has been reduced! This is because there has been a loss of overtime, bonus payments, or piece work.</p>
<p>I mentioned earlier that under certain conditions the introduction of productivity deals has resulted in the reduction of demand for labour; coupled with all the other effects this puts further power into the hands of the employers, because it helps swell the pool of men and women seeking employment, and therefore puts those who are working at a disadvantage because they can feel the pressure of those without work breathing down their necks, and tends to make them more pliable as far as the bosses are concerned.</p>
<p>There is another aspect of productivity bargaining that has to be considered. This is, that it tends to break down solidarity among the workers. Because productivity bargains are usually negotiated at local or plant level, this gives the employers a further lever. Previously minimum wage rates have been usually negotiated at national level, thus at a minimum level giving some feeling of solidarity. Now with productivity bargaining the employers can take the offensive and attempt to play off one plant or section of workers against another. All the time this process goes on it means a reduction of the small elements of control that workers have fought for in the postwar years.</p>
<p>This is why I said that the question of productivity bargaining was <em>a question of power</em>.</p>
<p>What should the workers’ response be to this developing situation? A straightforward rejection, which stays at that level merely leaves the initiative in the hands of the employers. What is needed is a counter-strategy which will take the offensive into the employers’ camp. The very first demand that any group of workers should make is an opening of the books thus getting the information needed to assess the real potential for wage increases or improvements of conditions. Secondly they should frame their demands in such a manner as will give to the workers an <em>increased</em> share of any new wealth created. Coupled with these measures should be the demand that workers will have the right to veto any changes in conditions that they do not agree with. To carry out such demands means that industry-wide rank-and-file committees need to be set up to police both the employers and the full-time officials of the unions. And since we are in the age of the international firm these committees must coordinate their activities with those of workers in the same industry in other countries.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> The word ‘are’ seems to be missing here – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> Quoted by Tony Topham, <strong>Trade Union Register</strong> (Merlin Press, 1969).</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> Quoted by Tony Topham, <strong>Trade Union Register</strong> (Merlin Press, 1969).</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
Productivity Deals and Workers’ Control
(Spring 1970)
From Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 1970.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Since the ‘prices and incomes policy’ of the Labour government has been a relative failure we have witnessed the growth of the demand by the bosses for ‘productivity deals’ and this has had the full backing of the present government.
The question we have to pose here is: why the emphasis on such bargains? There are two main answers to this. Firstly – like all of the measures taken over the last six years – it is an attempt to stop the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, or to use the euphemism of the employers ‘to reduce labour costs’. Secondly it is a question of power. This is intimately linked with the first aspect, because the underlying reasons behind productivity deals is that since the end of the war in 1945, workers have managed to wrest some degree of control over their wages and conditions of employment, that is, there has been a decline in managerial control over certain aspects of the work situation. Productivity deals are meant to whittle away the controls established by the workers and once more reassert full managerial control over the whole productive process.
The demands of the employers of course vary from one plant to another, depending upon which aspect of control they feel to be the most important to reassert their authority over. In some factories this has taken the form of a drive to introduce Measured Day Work, that is, the abolition of piece-rates. In other situations it has been an attempt to regain control over the allocation of overtime, but above all there is the demand for ‘flexibility of labour’. This essentially means that the management can move men or women around at will, and also determine the manning of productive lines. Each case is decided on in an empirical way, the criterion being where do the shop stewards have the most control and then attempting to reduce it.
The employers and the Labour government have common aims in this drive, Barbara Castle urging on the employers to push for these sort of deals. However, this spills over into the political arena, because along with productivity deals there have been the attacks on the right to strike, as was witnessed last year in the notorious document In Place of Strife (sic). The present Labour government has done all that it could to assist such deals, particularly in the creation of a postwar record number of unemployed. This is another aspect of productivity deals that has to be taken into account, and that they ultimately help reduce the demand for labour in any given area that they [1] implemented on a large scale. There have been a number of productivity deals agreed to that in the first instance produce no redundancy, but as ‘natural wastage’ takes place the actual number of workers taken on to replace this declines, so that the net effect is to reduce the demand for labour and reinforce the upward trend in unemployment. Along with this higher unemployment has gone the attempt to absorb even further the trade unions into the state machine and to make them pliant tools of the employers. Also the same thing is being attempted at shop-floor level where shop stewards are being drawn into collaboration with the management in the implementation of productivity deals and the ‘disciplining’ of any workers who kick over the traces.
The response of the trade-union movement as a whole has been uneven and fragmented, there has been no cohesive strategy worked out. On one extreme there has been downright opposition but with no counter-strategy to them, to one of whole-hearted welcoming. In between these two extremes there are several stances taken up. The Transport and General Workers Union have a potentially useful approach, in that on paper they put forward the idea that productivity deals should be concluded in such a way as to increase workers’ take-home pay and extend shop stewards’ control. However, the reality of how this union has operated leaves a great deal to be desired. The TGWU method could rebound painfully upon its members if this is taken to be a form of conditional support for productivity deals.
The aims of productivity deals are summed very well in the Prices and Incomes Board report of 1968 when it said: ‘A change in the method of working is an essential part of any productivity agreement… The calculations of management must show that the total cost per unit of output will be reduced.’ [2] That is very clear and to the point, because in simple language it means that each individual worker must be exploited to a greater degree, that there must be an increase in the surplus value extracted from the worker. Under no conditions can Marxists support such deals under capitalism. It may well be that the individual worker seems to be better off in monetary terms, but this is only so under conditions of speed-up, tighter supervision and great effort, the lion’s share of which will go to the bosses. Furthermore with the rate of inflationary price increases as they are today it means that the extra monetary ‘reward’ will soon be swallowed up, but leaving the bosses with the gains in reduced costs and greater control over the worker.
What has been the real effect of the prices and incomes policy and productivity bargaining? In 1967 productivity in manufacturing industry rose by 5.9 per cent, average wages by 5.3 per cent, but retail prices rose by 2.5 per cent, thus leaving the workers worse off in real terms than before. In 1968 the corresponding figures were, productivity up by 6.9 per cent, wages 8.1 per cent, prices 5.6 per cent. [3] So that once again any gains in monetary terms were considerably reduced. The nett result of the combined policies of the government and the employers mean that at the very least the share of wages in the national income has been limited to its previous level, but it is more likely that the nett effect really has been to reduce this proportion.
In essence if trade unions accept productivity bargaining on the terms laid down by the government and employers it means that they accept the present division of the national product, and the present distribution of wealth, that is, they accept status quo in this area. But in fact things do not stand still, the ultimate logic is to increase the share of the national wealth going to property and the capitalist class. What has happened in certain cases where productivity deals have been accepted has been that while the wage rates have increased the actual take-home pay has been reduced! This is because there has been a loss of overtime, bonus payments, or piece work.
I mentioned earlier that under certain conditions the introduction of productivity deals has resulted in the reduction of demand for labour; coupled with all the other effects this puts further power into the hands of the employers, because it helps swell the pool of men and women seeking employment, and therefore puts those who are working at a disadvantage because they can feel the pressure of those without work breathing down their necks, and tends to make them more pliable as far as the bosses are concerned.
There is another aspect of productivity bargaining that has to be considered. This is, that it tends to break down solidarity among the workers. Because productivity bargains are usually negotiated at local or plant level, this gives the employers a further lever. Previously minimum wage rates have been usually negotiated at national level, thus at a minimum level giving some feeling of solidarity. Now with productivity bargaining the employers can take the offensive and attempt to play off one plant or section of workers against another. All the time this process goes on it means a reduction of the small elements of control that workers have fought for in the postwar years.
This is why I said that the question of productivity bargaining was a question of power.
What should the workers’ response be to this developing situation? A straightforward rejection, which stays at that level merely leaves the initiative in the hands of the employers. What is needed is a counter-strategy which will take the offensive into the employers’ camp. The very first demand that any group of workers should make is an opening of the books thus getting the information needed to assess the real potential for wage increases or improvements of conditions. Secondly they should frame their demands in such a manner as will give to the workers an increased share of any new wealth created. Coupled with these measures should be the demand that workers will have the right to veto any changes in conditions that they do not agree with. To carry out such demands means that industry-wide rank-and-file committees need to be set up to police both the employers and the full-time officials of the unions. And since we are in the age of the international firm these committees must coordinate their activities with those of workers in the same industry in other countries.
Notes
1. The word ‘are’ seems to be missing here – MIA.
2. Quoted by Tony Topham, Trade Union Register (Merlin Press, 1969).
3. Quoted by Tony Topham, Trade Union Register (Merlin Press, 1969).
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>The Workers’ Control Movement<br>
and the Building of a Revolutionary Cadre</h1>
<h3>(Spring 1970)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Marxist Studies</strong>, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 1970.<br>
Signed ‘John Walters’.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">In order to discuss and assess the perspectives for the workers’ control movement, and to indicate the role that cadres play within it, it is necessary to make a brief survey of the main features of the development of the campaign since 1964 – when the campaign began – up to the present time. This is not to say of course that the ideas of workers’ control only started in 1964, but it was in that year that a serious campaign began once more to inject the whole concept back into the living labour movement.</p>
<p>It is possible to distinguish three phases, so far, in the development of the present movement.</p>
<p>The initial stage ran from 1964 to 1966, during which the movement sought to define its central strategy, and during which it attracted the support and active participation of some small groups of workers, and several key individual worker militants. Sponsorship and organisation of conferences plus publications were at this stage carried out by the group around <strong>The Week</strong> in Nottingham, together with the editors of <strong>Union Voice</strong> and <strong>Labour’s Voice</strong> in London and Manchester respectively. <strong>Tribune</strong> was usually involved as a sponsor, though without any real participation in the practical work. The London Cooperative Society was involved as a sponsor in the important second conference in 1965, which was held in London. The various left tendency journals participated in the early conferences and considerable effort was expended in debating between the groups, particularly between the IS <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> and <strong>The Week</strong>. The later controversy centred between possibilist oppositional militancy and activity, advocated by IS, and the transitional demand for opening the books of the bosses, advocated by <strong>The Week</strong> tendency. This was an important clarifying debate for many of the participants. It is now possible to characterise the IS position of that period as representing the apolitical, or economist local spontaneity of the stewards’ groups of the 1950s, whilst the programmatic approach which was advanced by <strong>The Week</strong> was an anticipation of the politicised trade unionism which has emerged under the impact of the Labour government with its ‘incomes policy’ and productivity bargaining, anti-union drive generally which has been thrust upon the government and employers by the sharper economic crisis of the mid and late 1960s. In this sense the period since 1964 – with its enormous balance of payments deficit – can be viewed as a turning point in postwar history in this country. In this phase too, the practice of organising conferences and activities along seminar lines, which at first sight might have appeared somewhat ‘academic’, forged the continuing alliance between socialist cadres and workers – at first in small numbers – which has given the movement its resonance and living quality. There was also the conscious attempt to pick up the thread of the historical tradition in the British labour movement, reaching back to the 1910–26 period, when a genuinely hegemonic ambition prevailed among large sections of the British working class in its industrial politics, and to re-establish the authenticity of that tradition. However, this tradition was never more than the expression of a minority, albeit a large one. Critics sometimes saw this as a rather academic or nostalgic exercise, yet no movement which aims at hegemony can neglect the historical roots of consciousness, if it hopes to build upon and in the mass labour movement.</p>
<p>Even without any conscious stimulus, it was inevitable that anarchism, syndicalism, guild socialism, utopianism and participationist reformism would emerge and struggle with revolutionary Marxism within the movement, as soon as a class-based strategy for the transition to socialism was reopened. So it proved. And therefore the necessity of establishing and preserving an <em>open</em> movement, in which the debate between all tendencies and views could <em>continue</em>. This meant that there should be no premature search for a formal closing of the debate on issues. For it is of fundamental importance that this debate engages workers and revolutionary cadres together. A didactic and consciousness-forming process is generated by such a debate, both for the worker-militants <em>and</em> for the revolutionary cadres who are formed and developed as the movement grows. (And this will be a continuing process just as long as the movement draws to it new and wider layers of workers.) Indeed, in the process, the gulf fixed by the capitalist division of labour between the intellectual and the worker is narrowed. The problem of overcoming that gulf must be high on the agenda of any discussion about the future development of cadres in the workers’ control movement. It should be obvious that after five years of development and expansion, it cannot be overcome by any narrowing of the debate on the issues themselves, or by establishing a rigid orthodoxy for the cadres.</p>
<p>At the end of the first phase then, a general strategy of transitional demands existed, alongside other tendencies, and an important start had been made in specific research and programme-building in one or two industries. Notably steel, docks and road transport. The demand for opening of the books had been taken up by the seamen during their national strike in a genuinely mass campaign.</p>
<p>The second phase of the movement, from 1966 to 1968, was characterised by more intensive programme-building, by responses from the official labour organisations (for example, the Labour Party’s <strong>Report on Industrial Democracy</strong>), by the widening of the working-class base, and by an attempt (not wholly related to the needs of the workers’ control movement) to build an organisational structure to link the various activities together. At the end of this phase 500 delegates were assembled at the 1968 Nottingham conference, it was quite clear that a more structured organisation was necessary to continue the expansion of the movement. This point had really been indicated by the 1967 conference, when Bill Jones, a London busman and lay member of the TUC General Council, took the chair, and there was the first appearance of Hugh Scanlon – then campaigning for the AEF Presidency – brought together significant forces from the left wing of the trade-union leadership, and also rank-and-file militants from transport, engineering and vehicle production, who recognised that the movement was serious, and was attempting to base itself on an appreciation of their problems. These problems were in themselves, of course, becoming more acute in the period of wage freeze and compulsory incomes policy. The Labour Party response – policy document already referred to – was also debated at the 1967 conference, and partly as a result of this the movement was involved in a debate that still continues on the distinction between <em>participation</em> and <em>control</em>. (The debate on definitions was indeed widened beyond these two terms, since the whole question of <em>self-management</em> in a socialised economy was and is a continuous preoccupation for us. A cadre force in this field must study this issue in general, theoretical terms, must examine experiences in such countries as Yugoslavia, Algeria, etc, and must use its expertise in its participation in such actual political situations as have developed in, for example, Czechoslovakia.) The protagonists of participation do not form, in this debate, a single ‘school’. There are at one extreme, the authors and practitioners of a deliberately corporate strategy to be found amongst employers, right-wing academics, and the Labour government. But there are also genuine reformers who are motivated by the idealistic version of industrial democracy, and who aim to reform institutions and structures within the existing social framework. Judgement on the latter category cannot be made <em>a priori</em>, since in certain circumstances they represent a crippling ‘institutionalisation’ of workers’ control demands, whilst in others they do create embryonic situations of dual power. In the first category, we might place some of the recently created ‘productivity committees’ set up by joint management–union agreement in factories; in the second, especially at the present time, we should certainly place the joint control exercised by dockers over the system of discipline, hiring and firing, in the Dock Labour Scheme. This example – in the context of a different country – occurred to Ernest Mandel when he wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Where is the dividing line between ‘institutionalisation’ and dual power? That is the real problem and the real difficulty. It is very hard to advance a fool-proof formula. Tentatively I would say that every form of ‘effective demand’ whose realisation is compatible with a more or less ‘smooth’ functioning of the capitalist system, which does not create a situation of explosive crisis… is a situation of ‘institutionalisation’ which should be avoided. At the contrary, every effective demand whose realisation creates a permanent crisis for the system, a situation of permanent conflict, is an embryonic element of dual power.</p>
<p class="quote">You might say that this doesn’t give you a concrete answer in each and every case – especially where local industries are concerned (one should take into consideration however the great sensitiveness of the employers and the bourgeois state to problems of ‘principle’ and of ‘bad examples’). You can also say that it becomes a matter of subjective judgement – whether or not a given effective demand could be normally ‘assimilated’ by the system or not. I agree. As in so many other questions, here applies this eternal truth of Marxist dialectics: the real test of knowledge is <em>praxis</em>; the ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’. It is only in practice that you can find out whether you have campaigned for ‘dual power’, or whether inadvertently you have permitted neo-capitalism to ‘integrate’ a radical group of workers.</p>
<p class="quote">But this should not inhibit you in the least. If you don’t risk anything and limit yourself to abstract preaching you won’t get one inch forward to socialism, under the given conditions. So my advice would be: full speed ahead, while bearing in mind the dangers I tried to underline.</p>
<p class="quote">While writing this letter, a good example just comes to my mind. The Antwerp shipyard and dockworkers made a huge conquest some 20 years ago. A definite number of workers would get a card as ‘stable workers’ under union control, and receive minimum pay, whether there was work for them or not. This demand, born of the experiences of the years 1929–38, would have been revolutionary and ‘unassimilable’ for capitalism under condition of crisis; under conditions of 20 years of nearly uninterrupted ‘boom’ in the docks, it became undoubtedly a means of corrupting a radical sector of the workers, creating in addition a dangerous division between the ‘permanently employed’ and privileged ones, and the ‘temporarily employed’ who have to go back on the dole each time the jobs are slightly reduced.</p>
<p class="fst">The above should in many respects be a key text for any Marxist cadre engaged in practical political work, especially in the field of workers’ control. The business of the workers’ control campaign is the ‘making of puddings, and the subsequent eating of them’, in docks, cars, education, communications, etc., etc. However, there are obvious dangers here in two directions, firstly adventurism, which could lead certain groups of workers into untenable positions. Secondly opportunism, that is, deluding oneself into accepting certain situations as being victories, when in fact they are merely participationist assimilation. The dividing line in each case can be very narrow, that is why it is the responsibility of Marxists both to give a lead and to remain with feet firmly planted on the ground of reality.</p>
<p>Before leaving the question of participation, however, it is necessary to describe a third sense in which the term is used. Ernie Roberts <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> was quick to point out (at the 1967 conference) that workers themselves may demand ‘participation’; but they may well mean by that word something much closer to what we mean by <em>control</em> than what the employers and government mean by participation.</p>
<p>An argument parallel to this question of control or participation arose in the context of the 1967 conference, and was resumed in a slightly different setting in 1968. This was the question of the efficacy of pursuing demands for legislative reform through parliament. Here again, it would be wrong to adopt a dogmatic anti-parliamentary position; gains which feed the appetite for, and consciousness of, control may be adopted in certain critical circumstances by a bourgeois legislature. Just as the conscious revolutionary forces may make mistakes in the direction of ‘assimilation’ so may <em>hard-pressed</em> governments, looking for concessions, err in the opposite direction. And we should bear in mind that reforms at one moment are on one side of the dividing line, yet fall on the other in different circumstances. Who, for instance, would have called one-man, one-vote a revolutionary demand before the events in Northern Ireland over the last 18 months? It would have been dismissed as a reformist demand, yet it (and other similar demands) sparked off a situation which had elements of a pre-revolutionary situation within it. When the Derry workers drove the police out of Bogside, that was <em>not</em> a reformist move. However, it remains axiomatic that the major breakthrough will most probably occur in industrial struggle, and our problem here is to make the transition from propagandist activity, or an educational role, to the work of <em>initiation</em>. That problem is most intimately connected with an earlier point – that our cadre-building <em>must</em> solve the division between workers and ‘politicos’. Our cadre must contain the worker militant leaders at the very core of its structure or it will fail. When that is achieved the solution to the propaganda–action dichotomy will probably follow. Yet perhaps this is a little too mechanistic; we should recognise that action for workers’ control demands can and probably will occur at any time, before any neat solution to this problem is found (GEC-EE Merseyside). <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a> We should not underestimate the degree to which workers’ control is already a part of the conscious programme in several key industries.</p>
<p>So much for the second stage of development and its principle controversies. Of course we should expect that newly-recruited activists and whole sectors will continue to work their way through these phases anew: no one will come to the workers’ control movement fully appraised and conscious of this development. However, as the process takes place we may perhaps expect the transitions to be more rapid, as the movement learns to assimilate new groups of workers.</p>
<p>The third stage of development was marked by the conferences of 1968 and 1969, and the formation and work of the Institute of Workers’ Control. It is not difficult to identify a qualitative change in the movement, as a result of these events and developments. The numbers participating at the conferences, the increased representation of the industrial trade-union rank and file, the greatly expanded range of publications, all point to this change.</p>
<p>As the movement has grown in size and significance, it has attracted the attention of the left political groups. Some of them are wholly negative in their attitude, yet as organised forces they may find it possible to achieve some presence and exercise a divisive influence. It is now necessary to coordinate the thinking and the work of all those whose positive attitudes to the movement include a determination to protect it from such ultra-left forays, and also protect the movement from the place-seekers who wish to have some of the glamour of ‘leftism’ cast about them without in reality being committed. Neither of these tasks will be carried out by bans and proscriptions, but only by open and honest debate and discussion. But this debate must not be one-sided. The Lawrence Dalys <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a> of this world must be told that the workers’ control campaign is <em>not</em> a vehicle for their own advancement.</p>
<p>No ready-made group at present has lived through this whole building process. It is therefore necessary to construct a Marxist cadre which is flexible enough, yet also committed enough, to carry the movement beyond its propagandist role into its activist one. This process must be a dialectical one, the present workers’ control movement will run into the sands of opportunism or ultra-leftism if no viable Marxist cadre is formed within, conversely no Marxist cadre <em>can</em> be created unless it participates in the building of this movement. Workers’ control is not <em>just</em> another campaign, it is central to the thinking of creative Marxists, those who are deeply committed to a vision of society that is self-managed.</p>
<p>We are now about to enter a new phase of industrial struggles, as we have seen by the wave of militancy over the last six months or so. One of the big questions looming ahead (indeed is here now) is that of productivity bargaining. The left must have an answer that is more than mere rejection, for at the heart of productivity bargaining is the question of <em>power</em>, and this is what the workers’ control campaign is also about.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> IS – International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers Party – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> Ernie Roberts (1912–1994) was a left-wing militant in the engineering industry; he became Assistant General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers in 1957, and was the Labour MP for Hackney North during 1979–87 – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> GEC-EE – General Electric Company/English Electric, a major engineering company – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> Lawrence Daly (1924–2009) was a left-wing militant in the National Union of Mineworkers; he became General Secretary of the Scottish section of the NUM in 1965, and was General Secretary of the NUM during 1968–84. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain during 1940–56, the Fife Socialist League during 1957–64, and after that the Labour Party – <em>MIA</em>.</p>
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Ken Tarbuck
The Workers’ Control Movement
and the Building of a Revolutionary Cadre
(Spring 1970)
From Marxist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 1970.
Signed ‘John Walters’.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Minor spelling errors have been corrected without indication.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In order to discuss and assess the perspectives for the workers’ control movement, and to indicate the role that cadres play within it, it is necessary to make a brief survey of the main features of the development of the campaign since 1964 – when the campaign began – up to the present time. This is not to say of course that the ideas of workers’ control only started in 1964, but it was in that year that a serious campaign began once more to inject the whole concept back into the living labour movement.
It is possible to distinguish three phases, so far, in the development of the present movement.
The initial stage ran from 1964 to 1966, during which the movement sought to define its central strategy, and during which it attracted the support and active participation of some small groups of workers, and several key individual worker militants. Sponsorship and organisation of conferences plus publications were at this stage carried out by the group around The Week in Nottingham, together with the editors of Union Voice and Labour’s Voice in London and Manchester respectively. Tribune was usually involved as a sponsor, though without any real participation in the practical work. The London Cooperative Society was involved as a sponsor in the important second conference in 1965, which was held in London. The various left tendency journals participated in the early conferences and considerable effort was expended in debating between the groups, particularly between the IS [1] and The Week. The later controversy centred between possibilist oppositional militancy and activity, advocated by IS, and the transitional demand for opening the books of the bosses, advocated by The Week tendency. This was an important clarifying debate for many of the participants. It is now possible to characterise the IS position of that period as representing the apolitical, or economist local spontaneity of the stewards’ groups of the 1950s, whilst the programmatic approach which was advanced by The Week was an anticipation of the politicised trade unionism which has emerged under the impact of the Labour government with its ‘incomes policy’ and productivity bargaining, anti-union drive generally which has been thrust upon the government and employers by the sharper economic crisis of the mid and late 1960s. In this sense the period since 1964 – with its enormous balance of payments deficit – can be viewed as a turning point in postwar history in this country. In this phase too, the practice of organising conferences and activities along seminar lines, which at first sight might have appeared somewhat ‘academic’, forged the continuing alliance between socialist cadres and workers – at first in small numbers – which has given the movement its resonance and living quality. There was also the conscious attempt to pick up the thread of the historical tradition in the British labour movement, reaching back to the 1910–26 period, when a genuinely hegemonic ambition prevailed among large sections of the British working class in its industrial politics, and to re-establish the authenticity of that tradition. However, this tradition was never more than the expression of a minority, albeit a large one. Critics sometimes saw this as a rather academic or nostalgic exercise, yet no movement which aims at hegemony can neglect the historical roots of consciousness, if it hopes to build upon and in the mass labour movement.
Even without any conscious stimulus, it was inevitable that anarchism, syndicalism, guild socialism, utopianism and participationist reformism would emerge and struggle with revolutionary Marxism within the movement, as soon as a class-based strategy for the transition to socialism was reopened. So it proved. And therefore the necessity of establishing and preserving an open movement, in which the debate between all tendencies and views could continue. This meant that there should be no premature search for a formal closing of the debate on issues. For it is of fundamental importance that this debate engages workers and revolutionary cadres together. A didactic and consciousness-forming process is generated by such a debate, both for the worker-militants and for the revolutionary cadres who are formed and developed as the movement grows. (And this will be a continuing process just as long as the movement draws to it new and wider layers of workers.) Indeed, in the process, the gulf fixed by the capitalist division of labour between the intellectual and the worker is narrowed. The problem of overcoming that gulf must be high on the agenda of any discussion about the future development of cadres in the workers’ control movement. It should be obvious that after five years of development and expansion, it cannot be overcome by any narrowing of the debate on the issues themselves, or by establishing a rigid orthodoxy for the cadres.
At the end of the first phase then, a general strategy of transitional demands existed, alongside other tendencies, and an important start had been made in specific research and programme-building in one or two industries. Notably steel, docks and road transport. The demand for opening of the books had been taken up by the seamen during their national strike in a genuinely mass campaign.
The second phase of the movement, from 1966 to 1968, was characterised by more intensive programme-building, by responses from the official labour organisations (for example, the Labour Party’s Report on Industrial Democracy), by the widening of the working-class base, and by an attempt (not wholly related to the needs of the workers’ control movement) to build an organisational structure to link the various activities together. At the end of this phase 500 delegates were assembled at the 1968 Nottingham conference, it was quite clear that a more structured organisation was necessary to continue the expansion of the movement. This point had really been indicated by the 1967 conference, when Bill Jones, a London busman and lay member of the TUC General Council, took the chair, and there was the first appearance of Hugh Scanlon – then campaigning for the AEF Presidency – brought together significant forces from the left wing of the trade-union leadership, and also rank-and-file militants from transport, engineering and vehicle production, who recognised that the movement was serious, and was attempting to base itself on an appreciation of their problems. These problems were in themselves, of course, becoming more acute in the period of wage freeze and compulsory incomes policy. The Labour Party response – policy document already referred to – was also debated at the 1967 conference, and partly as a result of this the movement was involved in a debate that still continues on the distinction between participation and control. (The debate on definitions was indeed widened beyond these two terms, since the whole question of self-management in a socialised economy was and is a continuous preoccupation for us. A cadre force in this field must study this issue in general, theoretical terms, must examine experiences in such countries as Yugoslavia, Algeria, etc, and must use its expertise in its participation in such actual political situations as have developed in, for example, Czechoslovakia.) The protagonists of participation do not form, in this debate, a single ‘school’. There are at one extreme, the authors and practitioners of a deliberately corporate strategy to be found amongst employers, right-wing academics, and the Labour government. But there are also genuine reformers who are motivated by the idealistic version of industrial democracy, and who aim to reform institutions and structures within the existing social framework. Judgement on the latter category cannot be made a priori, since in certain circumstances they represent a crippling ‘institutionalisation’ of workers’ control demands, whilst in others they do create embryonic situations of dual power. In the first category, we might place some of the recently created ‘productivity committees’ set up by joint management–union agreement in factories; in the second, especially at the present time, we should certainly place the joint control exercised by dockers over the system of discipline, hiring and firing, in the Dock Labour Scheme. This example – in the context of a different country – occurred to Ernest Mandel when he wrote:
Where is the dividing line between ‘institutionalisation’ and dual power? That is the real problem and the real difficulty. It is very hard to advance a fool-proof formula. Tentatively I would say that every form of ‘effective demand’ whose realisation is compatible with a more or less ‘smooth’ functioning of the capitalist system, which does not create a situation of explosive crisis… is a situation of ‘institutionalisation’ which should be avoided. At the contrary, every effective demand whose realisation creates a permanent crisis for the system, a situation of permanent conflict, is an embryonic element of dual power.
You might say that this doesn’t give you a concrete answer in each and every case – especially where local industries are concerned (one should take into consideration however the great sensitiveness of the employers and the bourgeois state to problems of ‘principle’ and of ‘bad examples’). You can also say that it becomes a matter of subjective judgement – whether or not a given effective demand could be normally ‘assimilated’ by the system or not. I agree. As in so many other questions, here applies this eternal truth of Marxist dialectics: the real test of knowledge is praxis; the ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’. It is only in practice that you can find out whether you have campaigned for ‘dual power’, or whether inadvertently you have permitted neo-capitalism to ‘integrate’ a radical group of workers.
But this should not inhibit you in the least. If you don’t risk anything and limit yourself to abstract preaching you won’t get one inch forward to socialism, under the given conditions. So my advice would be: full speed ahead, while bearing in mind the dangers I tried to underline.
While writing this letter, a good example just comes to my mind. The Antwerp shipyard and dockworkers made a huge conquest some 20 years ago. A definite number of workers would get a card as ‘stable workers’ under union control, and receive minimum pay, whether there was work for them or not. This demand, born of the experiences of the years 1929–38, would have been revolutionary and ‘unassimilable’ for capitalism under condition of crisis; under conditions of 20 years of nearly uninterrupted ‘boom’ in the docks, it became undoubtedly a means of corrupting a radical sector of the workers, creating in addition a dangerous division between the ‘permanently employed’ and privileged ones, and the ‘temporarily employed’ who have to go back on the dole each time the jobs are slightly reduced.
The above should in many respects be a key text for any Marxist cadre engaged in practical political work, especially in the field of workers’ control. The business of the workers’ control campaign is the ‘making of puddings, and the subsequent eating of them’, in docks, cars, education, communications, etc., etc. However, there are obvious dangers here in two directions, firstly adventurism, which could lead certain groups of workers into untenable positions. Secondly opportunism, that is, deluding oneself into accepting certain situations as being victories, when in fact they are merely participationist assimilation. The dividing line in each case can be very narrow, that is why it is the responsibility of Marxists both to give a lead and to remain with feet firmly planted on the ground of reality.
Before leaving the question of participation, however, it is necessary to describe a third sense in which the term is used. Ernie Roberts [2] was quick to point out (at the 1967 conference) that workers themselves may demand ‘participation’; but they may well mean by that word something much closer to what we mean by control than what the employers and government mean by participation.
An argument parallel to this question of control or participation arose in the context of the 1967 conference, and was resumed in a slightly different setting in 1968. This was the question of the efficacy of pursuing demands for legislative reform through parliament. Here again, it would be wrong to adopt a dogmatic anti-parliamentary position; gains which feed the appetite for, and consciousness of, control may be adopted in certain critical circumstances by a bourgeois legislature. Just as the conscious revolutionary forces may make mistakes in the direction of ‘assimilation’ so may hard-pressed governments, looking for concessions, err in the opposite direction. And we should bear in mind that reforms at one moment are on one side of the dividing line, yet fall on the other in different circumstances. Who, for instance, would have called one-man, one-vote a revolutionary demand before the events in Northern Ireland over the last 18 months? It would have been dismissed as a reformist demand, yet it (and other similar demands) sparked off a situation which had elements of a pre-revolutionary situation within it. When the Derry workers drove the police out of Bogside, that was not a reformist move. However, it remains axiomatic that the major breakthrough will most probably occur in industrial struggle, and our problem here is to make the transition from propagandist activity, or an educational role, to the work of initiation. That problem is most intimately connected with an earlier point – that our cadre-building must solve the division between workers and ‘politicos’. Our cadre must contain the worker militant leaders at the very core of its structure or it will fail. When that is achieved the solution to the propaganda–action dichotomy will probably follow. Yet perhaps this is a little too mechanistic; we should recognise that action for workers’ control demands can and probably will occur at any time, before any neat solution to this problem is found (GEC-EE Merseyside). [3] We should not underestimate the degree to which workers’ control is already a part of the conscious programme in several key industries.
So much for the second stage of development and its principle controversies. Of course we should expect that newly-recruited activists and whole sectors will continue to work their way through these phases anew: no one will come to the workers’ control movement fully appraised and conscious of this development. However, as the process takes place we may perhaps expect the transitions to be more rapid, as the movement learns to assimilate new groups of workers.
The third stage of development was marked by the conferences of 1968 and 1969, and the formation and work of the Institute of Workers’ Control. It is not difficult to identify a qualitative change in the movement, as a result of these events and developments. The numbers participating at the conferences, the increased representation of the industrial trade-union rank and file, the greatly expanded range of publications, all point to this change.
As the movement has grown in size and significance, it has attracted the attention of the left political groups. Some of them are wholly negative in their attitude, yet as organised forces they may find it possible to achieve some presence and exercise a divisive influence. It is now necessary to coordinate the thinking and the work of all those whose positive attitudes to the movement include a determination to protect it from such ultra-left forays, and also protect the movement from the place-seekers who wish to have some of the glamour of ‘leftism’ cast about them without in reality being committed. Neither of these tasks will be carried out by bans and proscriptions, but only by open and honest debate and discussion. But this debate must not be one-sided. The Lawrence Dalys [4] of this world must be told that the workers’ control campaign is not a vehicle for their own advancement.
No ready-made group at present has lived through this whole building process. It is therefore necessary to construct a Marxist cadre which is flexible enough, yet also committed enough, to carry the movement beyond its propagandist role into its activist one. This process must be a dialectical one, the present workers’ control movement will run into the sands of opportunism or ultra-leftism if no viable Marxist cadre is formed within, conversely no Marxist cadre can be created unless it participates in the building of this movement. Workers’ control is not just another campaign, it is central to the thinking of creative Marxists, those who are deeply committed to a vision of society that is self-managed.
We are now about to enter a new phase of industrial struggles, as we have seen by the wave of militancy over the last six months or so. One of the big questions looming ahead (indeed is here now) is that of productivity bargaining. The left must have an answer that is more than mere rejection, for at the heart of productivity bargaining is the question of power, and this is what the workers’ control campaign is also about.
Notes
1. IS – International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers Party – MIA.
2. Ernie Roberts (1912–1994) was a left-wing militant in the engineering industry; he became Assistant General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers in 1957, and was the Labour MP for Hackney North during 1979–87 – MIA.
3. GEC-EE – General Electric Company/English Electric, a major engineering company – MIA.
4. Lawrence Daly (1924–2009) was a left-wing militant in the National Union of Mineworkers; he became General Secretary of the Scottish section of the NUM in 1965, and was General Secretary of the NUM during 1968–84. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain during 1940–56, the Fife Socialist League during 1957–64, and after that the Labour Party – MIA.
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<h2 class="western">Ken Tarbuck</h2>
<h1>Ten Years Without Deutscher</h1>
<h3>(Autumn 1977)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>International</strong>, Vol. 4 No. 1, Autumn 1977.<br>
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Isaac Deutscher died on 19 August 1967, yet his influence and achievement still illuminate modern Marxism. How should we remember him? Merely as the biographer of Stalin and Trotsky? No, for to remember Deutscher merely for his historico-biographies would deny us the pleasure and education which can be derived from his many other writings. Nor should we solely remember him as a writer, for in his early youth he was a political activist and leader who worked in illegal conditions in pre-war Poland, and in his later years he also became an active political educator. The pleasure that we can derive from his writings arises from the clarity, precision, richness and culture with which he used the English language. Moreover, even in his English prose there is at times a lyricism that hints at his success as a poet in his very early youth. Inevitably, comparisons can be made between Deutscher and Conrad – both were Polish by birth and both wrote their finest works in English. But Deutscher’s achievement is the greater of the two since he not only gave (and gives) us pleasure, he informed and taught – a rare combination. Moreover, his achievement has to be set against the fact that he had to hew his way forward, not only against the Stalinist perversions of Marxism, but also against the bourgeois environment that grudgingly tolerated him.</p>
<p>Deutscher was born in Chrzanów, which is nearly 20 miles from Cracow. The year was 1907, 10 years before the Bolshevik revolution, the study and interpretation of which was to become the major, but not only, focus of his mature writings. The place of his birth was near the point of congruence of three empires, Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungary. His parents were Jewish and his father ran a printing business, given the overall situation he had a relatively educated environment in which to grow up, although he and his family were subject to all the disabilities and pogroms that befell the Jews. In this respect there is an affinity between Deutscher and Rosa Luxemburg. Both of them came from a cultural background that was truly European, and both extended their influence far beyond their original homelands. Moreover, both Deutscher and Luxemburg had more than a touch of the heretic in their personality and works.</p>
<p>I personally first became aware of Deutscher with the publication of his biography of Stalin in 1949. It was a major event in many respects, it marked his emergence as a writer of international significance and was the first appraisal of Stalin’s career (up to that point) which came from an avowed Marxist who did not worship in Stalin’s church. (I say this in spite of Trotsky’s earlier book on the same subject, since it is incomplete and its published form is marred by its fragmentary nature and the long and politically vulgar incursions of the translator.) This is not to say, of course, that one was uncritical of Deutscher’s work on Stalin. It has always seemed to me that in his desire for objectivity Deutscher was often prepared to give Stalin the benefit of the doubt when it was not warranted. However, this did not detract from the overall value and importance of the work. We should appreciate the courage of Deutscher in publishing this work when he did. The times were hardly propitious for scholarly and objective works about Stalin and the Soviet Union. With the outbreak of the Cold War in 1946, initiated by Churchill’s Fulton speech, there was released a flood of vulgar and shallow writings on Soviet life, lies being judiciously mixed with the undoubted truth about the horrors of Stalin’s rule. Moreover, all aspects of – and adherents of – Marxism were subjected to renewed assault by professional Kremlinologists. The more debased forms of this flood have only abated within the last decade. In this respect Deutscher stood out in stark contrast to the intellectual warriors of the Cold War. With his <strong>Stalin</strong> he firmly nailed his Marxist colours to the mast. He not only manned the ‘watch-tower’ – as he modestly put it – but he also helped to keep alight the torch of Marxist scholarship in a world that seemed to be all but totally dominated by imperialism and Stalinism.</p>
<p>However, it was with the publication of the first part of his Trotsky trilogy, <strong>The Prophet Armed</strong>, in 1954 that Deutscher could be seen in his full maturity. I will not go into the disputes on this or that point in his work, since such disputes could only be marginal to his overall achievement. Stalin was by now dead, but he had yet to be dethroned by his acolytes, and the myths created in earlier times still subsisted. But Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky began clearing away the ‘mountain of dead dogs’ which had been heaped on his grave. For those of my generation this book was both a fulfilment and a promise. It fulfilled our needs at many levels, it presented an overall account of Trotsky’s titanic contribution to Marxism and the Russian revolution (up to 1921) and gave a panoramic view of the times in which Trotsky lived and moved. Deutscher also gave promise that Trotsky’s ideas and struggles were neither irrelevant nor in vain. The account given was like a window being suddenly opened on a world that had almost been forgotten. It was the world of classical Marxism, of a truly Euro-Marxism that existed before 1914. The heirs to this classical Marxism had been the Bolsheviks and for the most part they had perished at the hands of Stalin. Moreover, the Euro-Marxism of this era was not intellectually bounded by the geographical contours of Europe but rather drew its sources from and analysed these on a world scale. It was also fitting that this biography of Trotsky should have been published in the year that French imperialism was decisively defeated at Dien Bien Phu (in North Vietnam), since this event – coming five years after the victory of the Chinese revolution – was a striking confirmation, if in an unforeseen manner, of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.</p>
<p>Furthermore, this book restored Trotsky’s rightful place in the history of the Russian revolution. In years to come Stalinist falsifiers, in the capitalist world at least, would have to try to come to terms with Deutscher’s account. On this point Deutscher said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">My account of Trotsky’s role in the Russian revolution will come as a surprise to some. For nearly 30 years the powerful propaganda machine of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky’s name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor ... Trotsky’s life story is already like an Egyptian sepulchre which is known to have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved with gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers have plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace is found of the record it once contained. The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of the independent Western historians and scholars. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Deutscher had originally intended to write a one- or two-volume biography of Trotsky; in the event, as he later explained, the complexity and scale of his subject’s life forced him to extend the work to a trilogy. We can see the foundations being laid in the above passage, taken from the preface of the first volume. Nearly a quarter of a century later it may, in turn, now seem strange and come as a surprise that Deutscher had to make these points, so changed has the intellectual climate become. Yet his work can be seen as part of the process of change itself, since it initiated innumerable young militants into the true history of their inheritance.</p>
<p>The trilogy was completed in 1963, and the last volume – <strong>The Prophet Outcast</strong> – was probably the most controversial as far as the Trotskyist movement was concerned. Deutscher had actually participated in some of the events he described in the book. He had been expelled from the Polish Communist Party in 1932 for his opposition to the suicidal ‘Third Period’ policies of the Comintern, and for his attempts – like Trotsky – to sound the tocsin against the advance of the Nazi barbarians in Germany. For a period Deutscher was associated with the International Left Opposition, forerunner of the Fourth International. However, he and the other Polish oppositionists disagreed with the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 and thus they parted company. But this disagreement did not mean a retreat from Marxism as in many other cases. The disagreement stemmed basically from a different evaluation of the viability of such a new International in a period of working-class defeats, since the previous Internationals had been founded in periods of rising working-class activity.</p>
<p>It is a curious contradiction in Deutscher’s make-up that he should have failed to understand the <em>necessity</em> for the Fourth International precisely <em>because</em> of the working-class defeats of the period, since in many ways it had to try to do collectively what he had tried to do individually by his withdrawal into the ‘watch-tower’. The Fourth International could never be a mere repeat – even in a different form – of any of the other three Internationals. This is not to say, of course, that Trotsky and the other founders of the Fourth International started out with the intention of such a withdrawal, but this was to be its historic role for many years. Nor did Deutscher understand that without such an organisation his own work would have been largely shouting in the wind, since those young people who were stirred by his writings could not have turned their message into meaningful activity without the prior existence of a political organisation.</p>
<p>Given his own evolution it comes as no surprise that Deutscher was highly critical of the last period of Trotsky’s life, seeing all his efforts doomed to failure. One wonders if Deutscher’s view of Trotsky’s last struggle – to found and build the Fourth International – was not coloured by a desire, unconscious no doubt, to justify his own retreat from active politics into the ‘watch-tower’. Such a justification was hardly necessary since the corpus of his writings are ample testimony to his prodigious efforts and his unswerving commitment to socialism. Nor was his retreat complete or long-lasting; his activities, speaking, teaching and encouraging young people in their attempts to cleave a way towards a scientific understanding of the world they lived in, were manifold. In his last years Deutscher was a powerful catalyst upon the American scene and the burgeoning anti-Vietnam War movement in particular. Nor should his work upon the International War Crimes Tribunal be overlooked, since participation in that body meant an unequivocal stand against imperialist barbarism.</p>
<p>The only time I heard Isaac Deutscher speak was revealing of the man and his power. It was in the winter of 1963–64, and he had been invited to speak at a student meeting in Oxford. This was, of course, before the big surge forward in student activity that occurred a few years later, so there were probably only 50 to 75 people present. (In later years he was to address audiences of thousands.) Deutscher stood up after the chairperson had introduced him and apologised for not coming as well prepared as he thought he should have. He told us he had been suffering, and still was, from a heavy cold. He asked our indulgence and read us the script of the introduction to the Trotsky anthology he had recently completed. <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> Despite the obvious handicap he was under, his voice, slightly hoarse, gradually swept up and along his audience as he gave an incisive survey of Trotsky the man and his ideas, and their relevance to the modern world. We all sat rapt as Deutscher took us in our collective mind’s eye out of that small room, away from the pervading dampness of an English winter, into the world of Trotsky, the man of action, of ideas and of classical Marxism. When he stopped there was a slight pause, as though no one wanted to break the spell that Deutscher’s words had woven, and then enthusiastic applause which seemed to last a long time. He sat down and rather deprecatingly blew his nose. The lecture and the gesture seemed to sum up the man: immense intellectual power, the use of language that enchanted, and modesty.</p>
<p>There was a passage in the lecture that struck me forcibly as being a powerful, yet simple exposition of Trotsky’s theory of, and vision of, permanent revolution:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Trotsky’s theory is in truth a profound and comprehensive conception in which all the overturns that the world has been undergoing (in this late capitalist era) are represented as interconnected and interdependent parts of a single revolutionary process. To put it in the broadest terms, the social upheaval of our century is seen by Trotsky as global in scope and character, even though it proceeds on various levels of civilisation and in the most diverse social structures, and even though its various phases are separated from one another in time and space. <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p class="fst">I am not suggesting that the above contains the whole of Trotsky’s theory, but I feel that it does contain the essence. It brings out the essentially visionary quality of Trotsky’s theory, but indicates that the vision is based on the grasp of the real and material processes taking place in the world system.</p>
<p>Needless to say, the book to which Deutscher referred has had a place among my own books ever since I was able to buy it. I doubly value it for Deutscher’s contribution and Trotsky’s.</p>
<p>If I seem to have mentioned classical Marxism several times so far, it is because it is a recurring theme in Deutscher’s writings. Given his own intellectual roots this is hardly surprising. He explained what he meant by classical Marxism as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">I hope I have explained in what sense I am using these terms – classical Marxism and vulgar Marxism. I shall perhaps sum up my argument: classical Marxism offers deep historical insight into the working of capitalism, into the prospects of the dissolution of capitalism, and, broader still, into man’s relation under this system with other men, with his own class and other classes, his relationship and attitude to the technology of his age. Vulgar Marxism does not need all that insight; it is fully satisfied with a small fraction of all that understanding, which it places in the severely limited orbit of practical needs, practical striving, and practical tasks. We have here an historic hypertrophy of practice and an atrophy of thought. <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Here, again, Deutscher was able to convey in simple, concise language both the essentials and panorama of classical Marxism and contrast it with the withered and desiccated <em>ideology</em> that is embodied in vulgar Marxism. As is clear from all his writings, neither the warp nor the weft on their own can make the cloth whole. In this way he imparted a surer, deeper and more subtle understanding to what he undertook to analyse and explain.</p>
<p>Some clue to Deutscher’s concern to ensure some unity in the traditions of classical Marxism can be apprised from his essays <em>The Non-Jewish Jew</em> and <em>Who is a Jew?</em>. <a href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a> There he touches upon the liquidation of the Yiddish-Jewish culture of Poland and Central Europe by the extermination programme of the Nazis. Perhaps he worried that Stalinism would have the same effect upon the Marxist tradition that he drew his resources and inspiration from – and was a part of, enlarging it and endowing it with his own works. Deutscher’s own understanding of the historical processes would, of course, have provided him with an assurance on this point, since the material foundations upon which the Yiddish culture grew could not be recalled from the dead; while the material foundations of Marxism are re-created every day under capitalism. Nevertheless, it must have been as agonising for him as for Trotsky to witness the destruction of the Bolshevik old guard and of the foreign exiles in Moscow by Stalinism; and at the same time the equally destructive rampage of fascism throughout the rest of Europe. Deutscher was also to witness the obscene trials that took place in the so-called ‘People’s Democracies’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s of alleged ‘Titoists’. He certainly had an understanding of the terrible dilemmas and traumas inflicted upon many others by this period. He says, for instance, of Orwell’s <strong>Nineteen Eighty-Four</strong>: ‘<strong>Nineteen Eighty-Four</strong> is in effect not so much a warning as a piercing shriek announcing the advent of the Black Millennium, the Millennium of damnation.’ <a href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a> Perhaps in his dreams he also gave such a shriek. If he did, he did not listen to it in his writings.</p>
<p>Given the nature of the times, Deutscher and the tradition that he cherished were driven into the margins of history. However, he was fortunate enough to live to see those margins once more begin to widen. Deutscher’s own margin was particularly narrow at certain times in his life. Whilst working upon the research for and writing his books he had to earn his living as a journalist. This seemed to be his loss, since such work took him away from his major preoccupations, but to some extent it was our gain, since even the most hurriedly written articles had his particular stamp on them. Had he not been forced by circumstances he probably would not have written as much of the analysis of current events that he did, but against these gains we have to set the unwritten biography of Lenin.</p>
<p>Despite the apparent ease with which he used the tools of Marxist analysis he only came to his understanding and skill through an essentially auto-didactic process, as he told us in <em>Discovering <strong>Das Kapital</strong></em>. <a href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a> Like many others who tread this path his first approach was not fruitful, since he attempted to study <strong>Capital</strong> more as a duty than a necessity. And, like many others, he failed at his first attempt, but later, when it did become a political necessity because of his expulsion from the Polish Communist Party, Marx’s work began to fall into place:</p>
<p class="quoteb">I felt the need to re-examine my own political thinking and the principles of communism and Marxism. I decided to take nothing for granted. Could Stalinist policies and practices be justified in terms of Marxism? Has Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism stood up to the events of our time? These were the questions which troubled me. I made up my mind to plough through the whole of <strong>Das Kapital</strong>, all three volumes of it, and also the many-volumed <strong>Theorien über den Mehrwert</strong>, Marx’s history of economic doctrines. I was determined to scrutinise this whole intellectual structure coolly and sceptically and keep my eyes open to its possible flaws and cracks. <a href="#n8" name="f8">[8]</a></p>
<p class="fst">It was with this questing need for solutions to burning problems that Deutscher came to grapple with Marx. In reality there is no other way to do this, Marxism cannot be understood as a mere academic study – it has to be situated within the class struggle. Without the class dimension and the quest for answers, the visions of Marx elude one and the ‘boundless horizons’ that Deutscher found are constricted by academic anaemia. Whilst it may be possible to appreciate the soaring architectonics of Marx’s writings as a work of art, a full appreciation can only come about by using them as a tool to unlock past, present and future. This Deutscher did. Moreover, if we are to unlock the future we must engage the present in unremitting struggle; and it is a measure of Deutscher’s commitment to the socialist future that the present continually called him away from his interrogation of the past:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The study of <strong>Das Kapital</strong> did not merely confirm me in my Marxist conviction ... It also revealed to me the full depth of the gulf that lay between classical Marxism and the cynical expediences, the dull scholasticism, and the inquisitorial methods of Stalinism. Ever since, it has seemed as incongruous to blame Marx for Stalin as it would be to blame the Bible and Aristotle for the dogmas of the mediaeval church and the Inquisition. It was as a Marxist that I went on opposing Stalinism. <a href="#n9" name="f9">[9]</a></p>
<p class="fst">How apt that Deutscher should draw the parallel between the Inquisition and the methods of Stalinism. In so doing he illustrated the power of the tool that <strong>Capital</strong> becomes when its methodology is mastered. And, in addition, Deutscher also discovered another essential truth when at a later stage he went back to re-read parts of <strong>Capital</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Only in the last few weeks have I begun reading it anew. I have so far gone through the first three chapters, those reputed to be exceptionally involved and abstruse ... I still find myself fascinated by the old familiar pages; but what strikes me about them now, as it never did before, is their essential simplicity. <a href="#n10" name="f10">[10]</a></p>
<p class="fst">The truth of this simplicity is something each reader, or rather those who are questing, discover with the same surprise. The puzzle is why is Marx considered to be difficult? The difficulties that new readers encounter are well known, they often quail when confronted with <strong>Capital</strong>. Yet the essential simplicity that Deutscher perceived is also evident. How do we explain these apparent contradictions? A part of the problem for English readers was offered by Deutscher when he maintains that Marx is not easily translatable: ‘Marx’s style and language cannot easily be anglicised, although existing translations are far more clumsy and stiff than they need have been.’ <a href="#n11" name="f11">[11]</a> However, this cannot be the whole explanation for these problems. We must also seek them in the dominance of bourgeois ideology, with its reified forms of intellectual activity.</p>
<p>Deutscher was able to extract what he saw as the essence of Marxism from his study. He claimed that it was:</p>
<p class="quoteb">... not in this or that aspect of his [Marx’s] analysis of the trade cycle or even in his views on the impoverishment, relative or absolute, of the working class, important though these views were politically ... for me the essence of his analysis lay in what he says about the central contradiction of our social system, the conflict between the socialised process of production and the unsocial character of the control which capitalist ownership exercises over the process. Inherent in this is the worker’s estrangement from his own labour, from the products of his labour, and from the structure of society which his labour perpetuates. <a href="#n12" name="f12">[12]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Here he gets to the heart of the matter, since he emphasises the totalising capacity of Marx’s theory, its ability to combine numerous aspects and different levels into a comprehensible whole, including the contradictions within that whole. This stands in sharp contrast to bourgeois ideology, which tries to atomise scientific thought, as the bourgeoisie continually tries to atomise the working class. Since no one arrives on the scene as a fully-developed Marxist (not even Marx did) the difficulties of <strong>Capital</strong> resolve themselves into the problems of the struggle to subvert and cast off bourgeois ideology. Moreover, this subversion can only take place through practical as well as intellectual struggle. If, today, looking at Deutscher’s life with the ‘superior’ wisdom of hindsight we feel that he did not always seem able truly to combine these two aspects, we should remember this ‘superior’ wisdom is due in part to his own efforts.</p>
<p>Despite his proven anti-Stalinism there was an undoubted ambiguity in Deutscher’s attitude towards the Soviet bureaucracy. By this I do not mean that he in any way doubted its reactionary essence, rather that he seemed to suggest at times that this bureaucracy might be peacefully put aside. In 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, he wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The economic progress made during the Stalin era at last brought within reach of the people a measure of well-being which should make possible an orderly winding-up of Stalinism and a gradual democratic evolution. <a href="#n13" name="f13">[13]</a></p>
<p class="fst">This evolutionist-cum-reformist perspective of the restoration of Soviet democracy has been confounded by the course of events in the last 24 years. In fact it had been largely confounded in Deutscher’s lifetime, yet he never wholly gave up his hopes for this type of solution. In his last book which was published before he died he still said: ‘What seems possible in the near future is that society should be able to retrieve its civil liberties and establish political control over the state.’ <a href="#n14" name="f14">[14]</a></p>
<p>What Deutscher did not face up to was <em>how</em> these civil liberties were to be retrieved; it was not as though they had been accidentally mislaid and were just waiting for someone to come along and pick them up, there was the no small matter of the whole repressive apparatus of the bureaucracy to be dealt with. Where he was correct was to understand that the growth, education and consolidation of the Soviet working class, along with an extension of revolution, provide the material base for the destruction of the bureaucracy. However, as we have seen, these are necessary conditions for political revolution but in and of themselves they are not sufficient. Here we can see the other issues which divided Deutscher from Trotsky. While Trotsky had firmly set his face against the possibility of such a peaceful evolution, Deutscher clung to this idea as though afraid of the effects of a new revolution. His problem was that despite some very perceptive insights he was unable either to accept or to reject Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy. There is an undoubted change in nuance between his formulation of 1953 and that of 1967, but this basic ambiguity remains.</p>
<p>Despite his brilliance and scholarship Deutscher was firmly barred from an academic post that would have given him the financial security and conditions that he needed, so he worked on – praised but shut out. <a href="#n15" name="f15">[15]</a> Perhaps the academics really understood that Deutscher was a dangerous man – he was a man of principles, Marxist ones to boot, a rare combination in the wintry days of the Cold War. It was a measure of Deutscher’s magnanimity that when the academic world finally deigned to give him token recognition – he gave the <em>George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures</em> in Cambridge in 1967 – he did not spurn it.</p>
<p>The title of these Cambridge lectures, when published, was <strong>The Unfinished Revolution</strong> and it is also perhaps a comment upon Deutscher himself. He was working on a biography of Lenin when he died, and in this respect his own life’s work was unfinished. All that we have of this work is the fragment that was published as <strong>Lenin’s Childhood</strong>. <a href="#n16" name="f16">[16]</a> It can only give the faintest hint at what the completed work would have been like. Had he finished it there is no doubt that it would have equalled his Trotsky trilogy, and probably been the pinnacle of his endeavours. He was not an old man when he died – at least by today’s standards – and still had a great deal to contribute to both history and politics. Revolutionists make sacrifices in many ways, some die in heroic circumstances, others suffer great physical pain and hardship, still others sacrifice careers and families. Deutscher, also, paid the penalty for his devotion to Marxism, partly by the lack of security in his career, and partly by the intolerable strains created by the constant struggle against the stream – very often in isolation – in a hostile environment. He saw many of his family disappear in the death camps of Hitler, and was to be an exile from 1939 to the year of his death; and in the end his heart gave out.</p>
<p>The 10 years that have passed since his death have only served to emphasise the debt we owe to Deutscher for his long years in the ‘watch-tower’. They have underscored the unique place he had, and still does have, in modern Marxism. It will be a long time before we see his like again. Meanwhile let us not mourn him, let us celebrate him in our individual and collective efforts.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <strong>The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879–1921</strong> (Oxford University Press, London 1954), pp. v–vi.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> See <a href="../../../../../../archive/deutscher/1964/introduction-trotsky.htm" target="new">[<em>Introduction</em>]</a>, <strong>The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology</strong> (Dell Publishing, New York 1964).</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> <a href="../../../../../../archive/deutscher/1964/introduction-trotsky.htm" target="new">[<em>Introduction</em>]</a>, <strong>The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology</strong> (Dell Publishing, New York 1964), p. 19.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <a href="../../../../../../archive/deutscher/1965/marxism.htm" target="new"><em>Marxism in Our Time</em></a>, <strong>Marxism in Our Time</strong> (Cape, London 1972), pp. 19–20.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <em>The Non-Jewish Jew</em> and <em>Who is a Jew?</em>, <strong>The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays</strong> (OUP, London 1968).</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <a href="../../../../../../archive/deutscher/1955/1984.htm" target="new"></a><em><strong>1984</strong> – The Mysticism of Cruelty</em>, <strong>Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays</strong> (Hamish Hamilton, London 1955).</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <em>Discovering <strong>Das Kapital</strong></em>, <strong>Marxism in Our Time</strong> (Cape, London 1972).</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f8" name="n8">8.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <em>Discovering <strong>Das Kapital</strong></em>, <strong>Marxism in Our Time</strong> (Cape, London 1972), pp. 257–58.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f9" name="n9">9.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <em>Discovering <strong>Das Kapital</strong></em>, <strong>Marxism in Our Time</strong> (Cape, London 1972), p. 260.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f10" name="n10">10.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <em>Discovering <strong>Das Kapital</strong></em>, <strong>Marxism in Our Time</strong> (Cape, London 1972), p. 263.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f11" name="n11">11.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <em>Discovering <strong>Das Kapital</strong></em>, <strong>Marxism in Our Time</strong> (Cape, London 1972), p. 263.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f12" name="n12">12.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <em>Discovering <strong>Das Kapital</strong></em>, <strong>Marxism in Our Time</strong> (Cape, London 1972), p. 260.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f13" name="n13">13.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <a href="../../../../../../archive/deutscher/1953/russiaafterstalin.htm#h13" target="new"><strong>Russia After Stalin</strong></a> (second edition with an introduction by Marcel Liebman, Cape, London 1969), p. 168.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f14" name="n14">14.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <strong>The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967</strong> (OUP, London 1967), p. 107.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f15" name="n15">15.</a> See the reference to the offer and then withdrawal of the offer of a post at Sussex University in Daniel Singer’s essay <em>Armed with a Pen</em>, in David Horowitz (<em>ed.</em>), <strong>Isaac Deutscher: The Man and his Work</strong> (Macdonald, London 1971). There is also a useful select bibliography of Deutscher’s works in this volume.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f16" name="n16">16.</a> Isaac Deutscher, <strong>Lenin’s Childhood</strong> (OUP, London 1970).</p>
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Ten Years Without Deutscher
(Autumn 1977)
From International, Vol. 4 No. 1, Autumn 1977.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Isaac Deutscher died on 19 August 1967, yet his influence and achievement still illuminate modern Marxism. How should we remember him? Merely as the biographer of Stalin and Trotsky? No, for to remember Deutscher merely for his historico-biographies would deny us the pleasure and education which can be derived from his many other writings. Nor should we solely remember him as a writer, for in his early youth he was a political activist and leader who worked in illegal conditions in pre-war Poland, and in his later years he also became an active political educator. The pleasure that we can derive from his writings arises from the clarity, precision, richness and culture with which he used the English language. Moreover, even in his English prose there is at times a lyricism that hints at his success as a poet in his very early youth. Inevitably, comparisons can be made between Deutscher and Conrad – both were Polish by birth and both wrote their finest works in English. But Deutscher’s achievement is the greater of the two since he not only gave (and gives) us pleasure, he informed and taught – a rare combination. Moreover, his achievement has to be set against the fact that he had to hew his way forward, not only against the Stalinist perversions of Marxism, but also against the bourgeois environment that grudgingly tolerated him.
Deutscher was born in Chrzanów, which is nearly 20 miles from Cracow. The year was 1907, 10 years before the Bolshevik revolution, the study and interpretation of which was to become the major, but not only, focus of his mature writings. The place of his birth was near the point of congruence of three empires, Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungary. His parents were Jewish and his father ran a printing business, given the overall situation he had a relatively educated environment in which to grow up, although he and his family were subject to all the disabilities and pogroms that befell the Jews. In this respect there is an affinity between Deutscher and Rosa Luxemburg. Both of them came from a cultural background that was truly European, and both extended their influence far beyond their original homelands. Moreover, both Deutscher and Luxemburg had more than a touch of the heretic in their personality and works.
I personally first became aware of Deutscher with the publication of his biography of Stalin in 1949. It was a major event in many respects, it marked his emergence as a writer of international significance and was the first appraisal of Stalin’s career (up to that point) which came from an avowed Marxist who did not worship in Stalin’s church. (I say this in spite of Trotsky’s earlier book on the same subject, since it is incomplete and its published form is marred by its fragmentary nature and the long and politically vulgar incursions of the translator.) This is not to say, of course, that one was uncritical of Deutscher’s work on Stalin. It has always seemed to me that in his desire for objectivity Deutscher was often prepared to give Stalin the benefit of the doubt when it was not warranted. However, this did not detract from the overall value and importance of the work. We should appreciate the courage of Deutscher in publishing this work when he did. The times were hardly propitious for scholarly and objective works about Stalin and the Soviet Union. With the outbreak of the Cold War in 1946, initiated by Churchill’s Fulton speech, there was released a flood of vulgar and shallow writings on Soviet life, lies being judiciously mixed with the undoubted truth about the horrors of Stalin’s rule. Moreover, all aspects of – and adherents of – Marxism were subjected to renewed assault by professional Kremlinologists. The more debased forms of this flood have only abated within the last decade. In this respect Deutscher stood out in stark contrast to the intellectual warriors of the Cold War. With his Stalin he firmly nailed his Marxist colours to the mast. He not only manned the ‘watch-tower’ – as he modestly put it – but he also helped to keep alight the torch of Marxist scholarship in a world that seemed to be all but totally dominated by imperialism and Stalinism.
However, it was with the publication of the first part of his Trotsky trilogy, The Prophet Armed, in 1954 that Deutscher could be seen in his full maturity. I will not go into the disputes on this or that point in his work, since such disputes could only be marginal to his overall achievement. Stalin was by now dead, but he had yet to be dethroned by his acolytes, and the myths created in earlier times still subsisted. But Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky began clearing away the ‘mountain of dead dogs’ which had been heaped on his grave. For those of my generation this book was both a fulfilment and a promise. It fulfilled our needs at many levels, it presented an overall account of Trotsky’s titanic contribution to Marxism and the Russian revolution (up to 1921) and gave a panoramic view of the times in which Trotsky lived and moved. Deutscher also gave promise that Trotsky’s ideas and struggles were neither irrelevant nor in vain. The account given was like a window being suddenly opened on a world that had almost been forgotten. It was the world of classical Marxism, of a truly Euro-Marxism that existed before 1914. The heirs to this classical Marxism had been the Bolsheviks and for the most part they had perished at the hands of Stalin. Moreover, the Euro-Marxism of this era was not intellectually bounded by the geographical contours of Europe but rather drew its sources from and analysed these on a world scale. It was also fitting that this biography of Trotsky should have been published in the year that French imperialism was decisively defeated at Dien Bien Phu (in North Vietnam), since this event – coming five years after the victory of the Chinese revolution – was a striking confirmation, if in an unforeseen manner, of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
Furthermore, this book restored Trotsky’s rightful place in the history of the Russian revolution. In years to come Stalinist falsifiers, in the capitalist world at least, would have to try to come to terms with Deutscher’s account. On this point Deutscher said:
My account of Trotsky’s role in the Russian revolution will come as a surprise to some. For nearly 30 years the powerful propaganda machine of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky’s name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor ... Trotsky’s life story is already like an Egyptian sepulchre which is known to have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved with gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers have plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace is found of the record it once contained. The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of the independent Western historians and scholars. [1]
Deutscher had originally intended to write a one- or two-volume biography of Trotsky; in the event, as he later explained, the complexity and scale of his subject’s life forced him to extend the work to a trilogy. We can see the foundations being laid in the above passage, taken from the preface of the first volume. Nearly a quarter of a century later it may, in turn, now seem strange and come as a surprise that Deutscher had to make these points, so changed has the intellectual climate become. Yet his work can be seen as part of the process of change itself, since it initiated innumerable young militants into the true history of their inheritance.
The trilogy was completed in 1963, and the last volume – The Prophet Outcast – was probably the most controversial as far as the Trotskyist movement was concerned. Deutscher had actually participated in some of the events he described in the book. He had been expelled from the Polish Communist Party in 1932 for his opposition to the suicidal ‘Third Period’ policies of the Comintern, and for his attempts – like Trotsky – to sound the tocsin against the advance of the Nazi barbarians in Germany. For a period Deutscher was associated with the International Left Opposition, forerunner of the Fourth International. However, he and the other Polish oppositionists disagreed with the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 and thus they parted company. But this disagreement did not mean a retreat from Marxism as in many other cases. The disagreement stemmed basically from a different evaluation of the viability of such a new International in a period of working-class defeats, since the previous Internationals had been founded in periods of rising working-class activity.
It is a curious contradiction in Deutscher’s make-up that he should have failed to understand the necessity for the Fourth International precisely because of the working-class defeats of the period, since in many ways it had to try to do collectively what he had tried to do individually by his withdrawal into the ‘watch-tower’. The Fourth International could never be a mere repeat – even in a different form – of any of the other three Internationals. This is not to say, of course, that Trotsky and the other founders of the Fourth International started out with the intention of such a withdrawal, but this was to be its historic role for many years. Nor did Deutscher understand that without such an organisation his own work would have been largely shouting in the wind, since those young people who were stirred by his writings could not have turned their message into meaningful activity without the prior existence of a political organisation.
Given his own evolution it comes as no surprise that Deutscher was highly critical of the last period of Trotsky’s life, seeing all his efforts doomed to failure. One wonders if Deutscher’s view of Trotsky’s last struggle – to found and build the Fourth International – was not coloured by a desire, unconscious no doubt, to justify his own retreat from active politics into the ‘watch-tower’. Such a justification was hardly necessary since the corpus of his writings are ample testimony to his prodigious efforts and his unswerving commitment to socialism. Nor was his retreat complete or long-lasting; his activities, speaking, teaching and encouraging young people in their attempts to cleave a way towards a scientific understanding of the world they lived in, were manifold. In his last years Deutscher was a powerful catalyst upon the American scene and the burgeoning anti-Vietnam War movement in particular. Nor should his work upon the International War Crimes Tribunal be overlooked, since participation in that body meant an unequivocal stand against imperialist barbarism.
The only time I heard Isaac Deutscher speak was revealing of the man and his power. It was in the winter of 1963–64, and he had been invited to speak at a student meeting in Oxford. This was, of course, before the big surge forward in student activity that occurred a few years later, so there were probably only 50 to 75 people present. (In later years he was to address audiences of thousands.) Deutscher stood up after the chairperson had introduced him and apologised for not coming as well prepared as he thought he should have. He told us he had been suffering, and still was, from a heavy cold. He asked our indulgence and read us the script of the introduction to the Trotsky anthology he had recently completed. [2] Despite the obvious handicap he was under, his voice, slightly hoarse, gradually swept up and along his audience as he gave an incisive survey of Trotsky the man and his ideas, and their relevance to the modern world. We all sat rapt as Deutscher took us in our collective mind’s eye out of that small room, away from the pervading dampness of an English winter, into the world of Trotsky, the man of action, of ideas and of classical Marxism. When he stopped there was a slight pause, as though no one wanted to break the spell that Deutscher’s words had woven, and then enthusiastic applause which seemed to last a long time. He sat down and rather deprecatingly blew his nose. The lecture and the gesture seemed to sum up the man: immense intellectual power, the use of language that enchanted, and modesty.
There was a passage in the lecture that struck me forcibly as being a powerful, yet simple exposition of Trotsky’s theory of, and vision of, permanent revolution:
Trotsky’s theory is in truth a profound and comprehensive conception in which all the overturns that the world has been undergoing (in this late capitalist era) are represented as interconnected and interdependent parts of a single revolutionary process. To put it in the broadest terms, the social upheaval of our century is seen by Trotsky as global in scope and character, even though it proceeds on various levels of civilisation and in the most diverse social structures, and even though its various phases are separated from one another in time and space. [3]
I am not suggesting that the above contains the whole of Trotsky’s theory, but I feel that it does contain the essence. It brings out the essentially visionary quality of Trotsky’s theory, but indicates that the vision is based on the grasp of the real and material processes taking place in the world system.
Needless to say, the book to which Deutscher referred has had a place among my own books ever since I was able to buy it. I doubly value it for Deutscher’s contribution and Trotsky’s.
If I seem to have mentioned classical Marxism several times so far, it is because it is a recurring theme in Deutscher’s writings. Given his own intellectual roots this is hardly surprising. He explained what he meant by classical Marxism as follows:
I hope I have explained in what sense I am using these terms – classical Marxism and vulgar Marxism. I shall perhaps sum up my argument: classical Marxism offers deep historical insight into the working of capitalism, into the prospects of the dissolution of capitalism, and, broader still, into man’s relation under this system with other men, with his own class and other classes, his relationship and attitude to the technology of his age. Vulgar Marxism does not need all that insight; it is fully satisfied with a small fraction of all that understanding, which it places in the severely limited orbit of practical needs, practical striving, and practical tasks. We have here an historic hypertrophy of practice and an atrophy of thought. [4]
Here, again, Deutscher was able to convey in simple, concise language both the essentials and panorama of classical Marxism and contrast it with the withered and desiccated ideology that is embodied in vulgar Marxism. As is clear from all his writings, neither the warp nor the weft on their own can make the cloth whole. In this way he imparted a surer, deeper and more subtle understanding to what he undertook to analyse and explain.
Some clue to Deutscher’s concern to ensure some unity in the traditions of classical Marxism can be apprised from his essays The Non-Jewish Jew and Who is a Jew?. [5] There he touches upon the liquidation of the Yiddish-Jewish culture of Poland and Central Europe by the extermination programme of the Nazis. Perhaps he worried that Stalinism would have the same effect upon the Marxist tradition that he drew his resources and inspiration from – and was a part of, enlarging it and endowing it with his own works. Deutscher’s own understanding of the historical processes would, of course, have provided him with an assurance on this point, since the material foundations upon which the Yiddish culture grew could not be recalled from the dead; while the material foundations of Marxism are re-created every day under capitalism. Nevertheless, it must have been as agonising for him as for Trotsky to witness the destruction of the Bolshevik old guard and of the foreign exiles in Moscow by Stalinism; and at the same time the equally destructive rampage of fascism throughout the rest of Europe. Deutscher was also to witness the obscene trials that took place in the so-called ‘People’s Democracies’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s of alleged ‘Titoists’. He certainly had an understanding of the terrible dilemmas and traumas inflicted upon many others by this period. He says, for instance, of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four is in effect not so much a warning as a piercing shriek announcing the advent of the Black Millennium, the Millennium of damnation.’ [6] Perhaps in his dreams he also gave such a shriek. If he did, he did not listen to it in his writings.
Given the nature of the times, Deutscher and the tradition that he cherished were driven into the margins of history. However, he was fortunate enough to live to see those margins once more begin to widen. Deutscher’s own margin was particularly narrow at certain times in his life. Whilst working upon the research for and writing his books he had to earn his living as a journalist. This seemed to be his loss, since such work took him away from his major preoccupations, but to some extent it was our gain, since even the most hurriedly written articles had his particular stamp on them. Had he not been forced by circumstances he probably would not have written as much of the analysis of current events that he did, but against these gains we have to set the unwritten biography of Lenin.
Despite the apparent ease with which he used the tools of Marxist analysis he only came to his understanding and skill through an essentially auto-didactic process, as he told us in Discovering Das Kapital. [7] Like many others who tread this path his first approach was not fruitful, since he attempted to study Capital more as a duty than a necessity. And, like many others, he failed at his first attempt, but later, when it did become a political necessity because of his expulsion from the Polish Communist Party, Marx’s work began to fall into place:
I felt the need to re-examine my own political thinking and the principles of communism and Marxism. I decided to take nothing for granted. Could Stalinist policies and practices be justified in terms of Marxism? Has Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism stood up to the events of our time? These were the questions which troubled me. I made up my mind to plough through the whole of Das Kapital, all three volumes of it, and also the many-volumed Theorien über den Mehrwert, Marx’s history of economic doctrines. I was determined to scrutinise this whole intellectual structure coolly and sceptically and keep my eyes open to its possible flaws and cracks. [8]
It was with this questing need for solutions to burning problems that Deutscher came to grapple with Marx. In reality there is no other way to do this, Marxism cannot be understood as a mere academic study – it has to be situated within the class struggle. Without the class dimension and the quest for answers, the visions of Marx elude one and the ‘boundless horizons’ that Deutscher found are constricted by academic anaemia. Whilst it may be possible to appreciate the soaring architectonics of Marx’s writings as a work of art, a full appreciation can only come about by using them as a tool to unlock past, present and future. This Deutscher did. Moreover, if we are to unlock the future we must engage the present in unremitting struggle; and it is a measure of Deutscher’s commitment to the socialist future that the present continually called him away from his interrogation of the past:
The study of Das Kapital did not merely confirm me in my Marxist conviction ... It also revealed to me the full depth of the gulf that lay between classical Marxism and the cynical expediences, the dull scholasticism, and the inquisitorial methods of Stalinism. Ever since, it has seemed as incongruous to blame Marx for Stalin as it would be to blame the Bible and Aristotle for the dogmas of the mediaeval church and the Inquisition. It was as a Marxist that I went on opposing Stalinism. [9]
How apt that Deutscher should draw the parallel between the Inquisition and the methods of Stalinism. In so doing he illustrated the power of the tool that Capital becomes when its methodology is mastered. And, in addition, Deutscher also discovered another essential truth when at a later stage he went back to re-read parts of Capital:
Only in the last few weeks have I begun reading it anew. I have so far gone through the first three chapters, those reputed to be exceptionally involved and abstruse ... I still find myself fascinated by the old familiar pages; but what strikes me about them now, as it never did before, is their essential simplicity. [10]
The truth of this simplicity is something each reader, or rather those who are questing, discover with the same surprise. The puzzle is why is Marx considered to be difficult? The difficulties that new readers encounter are well known, they often quail when confronted with Capital. Yet the essential simplicity that Deutscher perceived is also evident. How do we explain these apparent contradictions? A part of the problem for English readers was offered by Deutscher when he maintains that Marx is not easily translatable: ‘Marx’s style and language cannot easily be anglicised, although existing translations are far more clumsy and stiff than they need have been.’ [11] However, this cannot be the whole explanation for these problems. We must also seek them in the dominance of bourgeois ideology, with its reified forms of intellectual activity.
Deutscher was able to extract what he saw as the essence of Marxism from his study. He claimed that it was:
... not in this or that aspect of his [Marx’s] analysis of the trade cycle or even in his views on the impoverishment, relative or absolute, of the working class, important though these views were politically ... for me the essence of his analysis lay in what he says about the central contradiction of our social system, the conflict between the socialised process of production and the unsocial character of the control which capitalist ownership exercises over the process. Inherent in this is the worker’s estrangement from his own labour, from the products of his labour, and from the structure of society which his labour perpetuates. [12]
Here he gets to the heart of the matter, since he emphasises the totalising capacity of Marx’s theory, its ability to combine numerous aspects and different levels into a comprehensible whole, including the contradictions within that whole. This stands in sharp contrast to bourgeois ideology, which tries to atomise scientific thought, as the bourgeoisie continually tries to atomise the working class. Since no one arrives on the scene as a fully-developed Marxist (not even Marx did) the difficulties of Capital resolve themselves into the problems of the struggle to subvert and cast off bourgeois ideology. Moreover, this subversion can only take place through practical as well as intellectual struggle. If, today, looking at Deutscher’s life with the ‘superior’ wisdom of hindsight we feel that he did not always seem able truly to combine these two aspects, we should remember this ‘superior’ wisdom is due in part to his own efforts.
Despite his proven anti-Stalinism there was an undoubted ambiguity in Deutscher’s attitude towards the Soviet bureaucracy. By this I do not mean that he in any way doubted its reactionary essence, rather that he seemed to suggest at times that this bureaucracy might be peacefully put aside. In 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, he wrote:
The economic progress made during the Stalin era at last brought within reach of the people a measure of well-being which should make possible an orderly winding-up of Stalinism and a gradual democratic evolution. [13]
This evolutionist-cum-reformist perspective of the restoration of Soviet democracy has been confounded by the course of events in the last 24 years. In fact it had been largely confounded in Deutscher’s lifetime, yet he never wholly gave up his hopes for this type of solution. In his last book which was published before he died he still said: ‘What seems possible in the near future is that society should be able to retrieve its civil liberties and establish political control over the state.’ [14]
What Deutscher did not face up to was how these civil liberties were to be retrieved; it was not as though they had been accidentally mislaid and were just waiting for someone to come along and pick them up, there was the no small matter of the whole repressive apparatus of the bureaucracy to be dealt with. Where he was correct was to understand that the growth, education and consolidation of the Soviet working class, along with an extension of revolution, provide the material base for the destruction of the bureaucracy. However, as we have seen, these are necessary conditions for political revolution but in and of themselves they are not sufficient. Here we can see the other issues which divided Deutscher from Trotsky. While Trotsky had firmly set his face against the possibility of such a peaceful evolution, Deutscher clung to this idea as though afraid of the effects of a new revolution. His problem was that despite some very perceptive insights he was unable either to accept or to reject Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy. There is an undoubted change in nuance between his formulation of 1953 and that of 1967, but this basic ambiguity remains.
Despite his brilliance and scholarship Deutscher was firmly barred from an academic post that would have given him the financial security and conditions that he needed, so he worked on – praised but shut out. [15] Perhaps the academics really understood that Deutscher was a dangerous man – he was a man of principles, Marxist ones to boot, a rare combination in the wintry days of the Cold War. It was a measure of Deutscher’s magnanimity that when the academic world finally deigned to give him token recognition – he gave the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures in Cambridge in 1967 – he did not spurn it.
The title of these Cambridge lectures, when published, was The Unfinished Revolution and it is also perhaps a comment upon Deutscher himself. He was working on a biography of Lenin when he died, and in this respect his own life’s work was unfinished. All that we have of this work is the fragment that was published as Lenin’s Childhood. [16] It can only give the faintest hint at what the completed work would have been like. Had he finished it there is no doubt that it would have equalled his Trotsky trilogy, and probably been the pinnacle of his endeavours. He was not an old man when he died – at least by today’s standards – and still had a great deal to contribute to both history and politics. Revolutionists make sacrifices in many ways, some die in heroic circumstances, others suffer great physical pain and hardship, still others sacrifice careers and families. Deutscher, also, paid the penalty for his devotion to Marxism, partly by the lack of security in his career, and partly by the intolerable strains created by the constant struggle against the stream – very often in isolation – in a hostile environment. He saw many of his family disappear in the death camps of Hitler, and was to be an exile from 1939 to the year of his death; and in the end his heart gave out.
The 10 years that have passed since his death have only served to emphasise the debt we owe to Deutscher for his long years in the ‘watch-tower’. They have underscored the unique place he had, and still does have, in modern Marxism. It will be a long time before we see his like again. Meanwhile let us not mourn him, let us celebrate him in our individual and collective efforts.
Notes
1. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879–1921 (Oxford University Press, London 1954), pp. v–vi.
2. See [Introduction], The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology (Dell Publishing, New York 1964).
3. [Introduction], The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology (Dell Publishing, New York 1964), p. 19.
4. Isaac Deutscher, Marxism in Our Time, Marxism in Our Time (Cape, London 1972), pp. 19–20.
5. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Who is a Jew?, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (OUP, London 1968).
6. Isaac Deutscher, 1984 – The Mysticism of Cruelty, Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays (Hamish Hamilton, London 1955).
7. Isaac Deutscher, Discovering Das Kapital, Marxism in Our Time (Cape, London 1972).
8. Isaac Deutscher, Discovering Das Kapital, Marxism in Our Time (Cape, London 1972), pp. 257–58.
9. Isaac Deutscher, Discovering Das Kapital, Marxism in Our Time (Cape, London 1972), p. 260.
10. Isaac Deutscher, Discovering Das Kapital, Marxism in Our Time (Cape, London 1972), p. 263.
11. Isaac Deutscher, Discovering Das Kapital, Marxism in Our Time (Cape, London 1972), p. 263.
12. Isaac Deutscher, Discovering Das Kapital, Marxism in Our Time (Cape, London 1972), p. 260.
13. Isaac Deutscher, Russia After Stalin (second edition with an introduction by Marcel Liebman, Cape, London 1969), p. 168.
14. Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967 (OUP, London 1967), p. 107.
15. See the reference to the offer and then withdrawal of the offer of a post at Sussex University in Daniel Singer’s essay Armed with a Pen, in David Horowitz (ed.), Isaac Deutscher: The Man and his Work (Macdonald, London 1971). There is also a useful select bibliography of Deutscher’s works in this volume.
16. Isaac Deutscher, Lenin’s Childhood (OUP, London 1970).
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Bernstein</a></p>
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<h2>Eduard Bernstein</h2>
<h1>Ferdinand Lassalle<br>
<small>as a social reformer</small></h1>
<h3>(1893)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">First published as the introduction to <strong>Ferdinand Lassalles Gesammelte Reden und Schriften</strong>, vol. 1, Berlin 1893.<br>
Published in English by Swan Sonnenschein, London 1893.<br>
Translated By Eleanor Marx-Aveling. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a><br>
The German edition published in 1904 under the title <strong>Ferdinand Lassalle und seine Bedeutung für die Arbeiterklasse</strong>, Berlin 1904, is a radically revised version of this book, reflecting Bernstein’s conversion from Marxism to revisionism.<br>
Transcribed by Ted Crawford. (<a href="trans.htm">note</a>)<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<table align="center" width="75%">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="link"><big><a href="00-pref.htm">Preface</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap01.htm">I. The political position in Germany at the beginning of Lassalle’s agitation</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap02.htm">II. Lassalle’s youth and early manhood – The Hatzfeld lawsuit, 1848 – <em>Franz von Sickingen</em></a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap03.htm">III. Lassalle and the Italian War</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap04.htm">IV. <em>The System of Acquired Rights</em>, and other minor works (1860-1861)</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap05.htm">V. The struggle for a constitution in Prussia – Lassalle and the “Progressist Party” – <em>The Worker’s Programme</em></a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap06.htm">VI. Breach with the Progressist Party – The <em>Open Reply Letter</em>; its political portion</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap07.htm">VII. The <em>Open Reply Letter</em>; its economic portion – The iron law of wages, and productive co-operative societies with state-help</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap08.htm">VIII. Lassalle as agitator and leader of the Association</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap09.htm">IX. Vain attempts to compel immediate political success – Approaching the reactionary government of Prince Bismarck – Lassalle’s death</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap10.htm">X. Conclusion – Lassalle’s legacy to the German working class movement</a></big></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p> </p>
<h3>Note</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> In this text Eleanor Marx uses the term “middle class” to translate the German words “bürgerlich” and “Bürgertum”. In the Victorian period this term was used to refer to the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. In modern Marxist terminology the words “middle class” would be replaced by “bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie“ as appropriate.</p>
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<p class="updat">Last updated on 8 February 2017</p>
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MIA > Bernstein
Eduard Bernstein
Ferdinand Lassalle
as a social reformer
(1893)
First published as the introduction to Ferdinand Lassalles Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, vol. 1, Berlin 1893.
Published in English by Swan Sonnenschein, London 1893.
Translated By Eleanor Marx-Aveling. [1]
The German edition published in 1904 under the title Ferdinand Lassalle und seine Bedeutung für die Arbeiterklasse, Berlin 1904, is a radically revised version of this book, reflecting Bernstein’s conversion from Marxism to revisionism.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford. (note)
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Preface
I. The political position in Germany at the beginning of Lassalle’s agitation
II. Lassalle’s youth and early manhood – The Hatzfeld lawsuit, 1848 – Franz von Sickingen
III. Lassalle and the Italian War
IV. The System of Acquired Rights, and other minor works (1860-1861)
V. The struggle for a constitution in Prussia – Lassalle and the “Progressist Party” – The Worker’s Programme
VI. Breach with the Progressist Party – The Open Reply Letter; its political portion
VII. The Open Reply Letter; its economic portion – The iron law of wages, and productive co-operative societies with state-help
VIII. Lassalle as agitator and leader of the Association
IX. Vain attempts to compel immediate political success – Approaching the reactionary government of Prince Bismarck – Lassalle’s death
X. Conclusion – Lassalle’s legacy to the German working class movement
Note
1. In this text Eleanor Marx uses the term “middle class” to translate the German words “bürgerlich” and “Bürgertum”. In the Victorian period this term was used to refer to the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. In modern Marxist terminology the words “middle class” would be replaced by “bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie“ as appropriate.
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Last updated on 8 February 2017
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<p><a id="top" href="../../../index.htm">MIA</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../index.htm">Lassalle</a></p>
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<h3>Voices of Revolt:</h3>
<h1>Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Written: </span>In German as political speeches, delivered in 1862 and 1863.<br>
Appeared in print as contemporary political pamphlets.<br>
<span class="info">Published in English: </span>1927.<br>
<span class="info">Translated by: </span>Jakob Altmaier (presumed). <a id="fnt1" href="#fnb1">[note]</a><br>
<span class="info">Source: </span><i>Voices of Revolt: Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle.</i> International Publishers, first edition, 1927, New York, USA. 94 pages.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription and Markup: </span>Bill Wright for marxists.org, February, 2023<br>
</p>
<hr class="infobot">
<h4>
<a href="0-intro.html">Introduction by Jakob Altmaier</a><br>
<br>
<a href="1-to-german-workers.html">To the German Workers</a><br>
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<a href="2-be-not-deceived.html">Be Not Deceived</a><br>
<br>
<a href="3-starvation.html">Starvation and Starvation</a><br>
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<a href="4-unclear-thinkers.html">The Unclear Thinkers</a><br>
<br>
<a href="5-the-press.html">The Press</a><br>
<br>
<a href="6-artificers.html">The Artificers of the Constitution</a><br>
<br>
<a href="7-deliverers.html">The Deliverers of the Constitution</a><br>
<br>
<a href="8-no-compromise.html">No Compromise</a><br>
<br>
<a href="9-body-politic.html">Coalition or Revolution?</a><br>
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<a href="10-spartacus.html">Spartacus or Saturnalia</a><br>
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<a href="11-class-struggle.html">The Class Struggle</a><br>
<br>
<a href="12-reactionary.html">Lassalle a Reactionary!</a><br>
<br>
<a href="13-flags.html">Black, Red and Gold, or Black, White and Red?</a><br>
<br>
<a href="14-sunrise.html">The Sunrise of the Future</a><br>
<br>
<a href="15-right-to-revolution.html">The Right to Revolution; The Duty of the Workers</a><br>
<br>
<a href="16-supreme-court.html">To the Supreme Court</a>
</h4>
<p> </p>
<hr>
<h3>Transcriber’s Note</h3>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnb1" href="#fnt1"><b>Note:</b></a> The translator of the speeches in this volume was not formally named;
I have assumed that they were translated by Jakob Altmaier, the author of the 1927 Introduction.
<br>
<br>
Likewise, I suspect that the titles of the excerpts were created by the editor for this 1927 collection;
they are nowhere to be seen in the German-language original texts. It might be possible that the excerpts
were published as leaflets and newspaper articles under these titles by Lassalle’s posthumous followers, but I can find
no direct evidence of this theory.
<br>
<br>
For this MIA online edition, the original footnotes have been linked with numbers,
while explanatory footnotes created for the glossary of this 1927 collection have been linked with letters.
I have also added a few extra explanatory footnotes of my own, which will be identified as such in the text.
</p>
<p class="footer"><a href="0-intro.html">Critical Introduction</a> | <a href="#top">Top of page</a></p>
<hr>
<p class="updat">Last updated on 26 February 2023</p>
</body> |
MIA > Archive > Lassalle
Voices of Revolt:
Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle
Written: In German as political speeches, delivered in 1862 and 1863.
Appeared in print as contemporary political pamphlets.
Published in English: 1927.
Translated by: Jakob Altmaier (presumed). [note]
Source: Voices of Revolt: Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle. International Publishers, first edition, 1927, New York, USA. 94 pages.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for marxists.org, February, 2023
Introduction by Jakob Altmaier
To the German Workers
Be Not Deceived
Starvation and Starvation
The Unclear Thinkers
The Press
The Artificers of the Constitution
The Deliverers of the Constitution
No Compromise
Coalition or Revolution?
Spartacus or Saturnalia
The Class Struggle
Lassalle a Reactionary!
Black, Red and Gold, or Black, White and Red?
The Sunrise of the Future
The Right to Revolution; The Duty of the Workers
To the Supreme Court
Transcriber’s Note
Note: The translator of the speeches in this volume was not formally named;
I have assumed that they were translated by Jakob Altmaier, the author of the 1927 Introduction.
Likewise, I suspect that the titles of the excerpts were created by the editor for this 1927 collection;
they are nowhere to be seen in the German-language original texts. It might be possible that the excerpts
were published as leaflets and newspaper articles under these titles by Lassalle’s posthumous followers, but I can find
no direct evidence of this theory.
For this MIA online edition, the original footnotes have been linked with numbers,
while explanatory footnotes created for the glossary of this 1927 collection have been linked with letters.
I have also added a few extra explanatory footnotes of my own, which will be identified as such in the text.
Critical Introduction | Top of page
Last updated on 26 February 2023
|
./articles/Lassalle-Ferdinand/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.lassalle.works.whatiscapital | <body>
<p class="title">Ferdinand Lassalle</p>
<h3>What is Capital?</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <a href="http://www.slp.org/pdf/others/capital_fl.pdf">"Socialist Labor Party of America"</a><a name="f0" href="#n0">[*]</a><br>
<span class="info">Translated</span>: by F. Keddell<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: and edited by Robert Bills for the official Web site of the Socialist Labor Party of America. Uploaded by Donna Bills, October 2005<br>
<span class="info">Markup</span>: by Chris Clayton<br>
<span class="info">Proofread</span>: by <a href="http://punkerslut.com" target="_blank">Andy Carloff</a> 2010.</p>
<hr class="end">
<h4>I. <br>
Capitalist Fallacies.</h4>
<p>Let us take the definition of capital which has hitherto passed muster; not, of
course, that childish definition of Bastiat’s, that capital is “the saved portion of a
man’s income,” for that is manifestly too absurd and ridiculous; but the other
definition that “capital is the instruments of labor”; or the one which is universally
given by all economists, that “capital is hoarded labor”; or, if you like, a third, that
“capital consists of products which are continually applied to further production.”</p>
<p>Now look at this Red Indian in the primeval forests of America, who is out
hunting for his subsistence with his bow and arrow. Is this man a capitalist? Is this
bow and arrow capital? You see all the three definitions are fulfilled. The bow and
arrow are unquestionably an instrument of labor. Nobody, too, can deny that it is
the result of expended labor. What is more, it is a product which is continually used
for further production. Yet it would be flying in the face of common sense to call that
Red Indian a capitalist! You see, therefore, that somehow or other all these
definitions must be incorrect.
</p><p>Or perhaps you will say—and the man who would say this would say
anything—“Yes, the bow and arrow is capital, and the Indian is consequently a
capitalist.” Then I can easily show you that that bow and arrow is not capital.</p>
<p>Neither is the Red Indian a capitalist.</p>
<p>To make this quite clear, imagine yourself for a moment out in the woods with
just such a bow and arrow. The bow and arrow will serve to shoot game. It
will,—since it is an instrument of labor,—also help you to carry on your work of
providing for your own subsistence. But if, as I am afraid would be the case, you
were to get tired in struggling through the forest with your moccasins on after the
game, you will find no chance to lay out your bow and arrow at interest; and that, as
all the world knows, is the distinguishing characteristic of capital. So you see that
this bow and arrow, after all, is an instrument of labor, but it is not capital.</p>
<p>But assuming, under the impression that it was merely because your bow and
arrow was hoarded labor in the form of bow and arrow that you could not make it do
duty as capital—assuming, I say, that you wished to exchange it, and went, for this
purpose, to barter with our original Indian. Very likely this Indian, if your bow and
arrow suits him, will do a bargain with you. He will give you in exchange, say, a
deer he has killed, or some furs, or, if in a gold-bearing region, he may even hand
you—just think of it!—a great nugget of gold. But you have no possibility whatever
of making profit out of these articles where you are. In order to make these goods
productive—interest or profit bearing—you must just betake yourself to other
countries where matters stand on a very different, in short, on a European footing.
But mark you this: in the assumed historical conditions in which you are placed you
cannot possibly do any such thing. Not only so, but now, with the things for which
you have bartered away your bow and arrow—your game, your furs, your fine
nugget of gold—you are a deal worse off than you were with the bow and arrow,
which would at least enable you to keep yourself—if you shot straight. You can
grasp now—and I advise you to hold fast to it—that there are historical conditions
in which there are instruments of labor, in which you may even barter or exchange,
but in which, nevertheless, there is no capital.</p>
<p>Following, then, upon these explanations which all readers of socialist economy
know well, we can say that, although we have here instruments of labor, there is yet
no capital because there is no division of labor, since the instruments of labor—the
means of production on a very small scale—are in the hands of the laborer himself
or at his command, or, in the other words, labor alone is itself productive. Here,
then, aptly comes the statement that the independent productivity of capital, its
breeding, as Shylock says, its profit-making apart from labor, is possible only under
a system of division of labor, and is the consequence of that division of labor.</p>
<h4>II. <br>
Industrial Society in Civilized Antiquity.</h4>
<p>Now let us take a look at the condition of civilized antiquity. Here we already
have a certain amount of division of labor and greater wealth, however small it may
be in comparison with ours of to-day. But you can see, in this case, that the ancient
owner of property was the combined possessor of landed property, slaves, and all
the products of labor, as well as of all the instruments of labor. Is this man a
capitalist any more than the Red Indian? Not at all. If you take a Shah of Persia in
olden times, to whom belonged the country over which he ruled to the full extent of
his will together with all the wealth and people in it, would you say that this man
was “a great capitalist”? Most assuredly not.</p>
<p>Just the same with the ancient owners of property. The person to whom belong,
as of lawful possession, not only the instruments of labor, but the very laborer
himself, cannot be a capitalist. His share of the result of the social production comes
to him, not because the instruments of labor belong to him, but because the laborer
himself belongs to him. The slave, by whose agency he allows the labor to be done, is
only another sort of tool for him, and the tool only another kind of slave. This
absence of separation and distinction has for its result that we have here masters,
but not capitalists; articles of value and wealth, but not capital. You can trace this
farther if you bear in mind the determining characteristics of the ancient economy.</p>
<p>The ancient landowner and slaveowner commanded that articles of use for his
own household needs should be produced in the first place. He sold only the surplus
of such articles. Or if he carried on manufacture with his slaves—an exceptional
case, by the way, and one peculiar to citizens of low social rank—he sold the
industrial products so obtained. With the money paid him he purchased articles of
luxury for his own consumption from all the countries within his reach. But he
accumulated the gold remaining over, after his luxurious tastes had been gratified
for the time being, in order that he might purchase luxuries in the future. So much
of it he hoarded, that is to say, as he did not use to acquire more landed property
and more slaves, which served for the extension of that “natural” form of production
in which he was “lord” and “master,” but not capitalist. At first, and indeed long
afterwards, he had no opportunity of laying out this, his gold, at interest in foreign
production.</p>
<p>For this very foreign production was itself the natural growth of the surplus of
another “natural” system of production, and did not call for the modern system of
credit, which can only be set on foot in a society where values in exchange
(commodities) are exclusively produced. When openings for such an investment of
gold begin to manifest themselves, the moral sense of the people—public
opinion—declares against it; this public opinion being in turn only the consequence
of the long continued, and, to all appearance, permanent, economic conditions just
described. You can easily see why usury or interest on capital made way with such
extreme difficulty against the public opinion of the ancients. You can easily
comprehend why it was considered, according to their view, shameful, mean, low,
dishonest, in the ancient sense, to lend at interest.</p>
<p>If Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, the Fathers of the Church, and the Canon Law, one
and all, consider interest on capital shameful, and meaning the same as usury; if,
under the Roman Republic, the taking of interest was legally forbidden; if Cato
lauds that decision of his ancestors, according to which the thief was fined twice the
amount stolen, but the man who took interest four times the amount; if the Catholic
Church refused to the usurer the sacrament, the right of bequest, and Christian
burial; and if, on the other hand, Jeremy Bentham, and with him the whole precious
school of Liberal political economists, can see in usury only the most indefeasible
and “natural right” of mankind—why, henceforth, surely the reason for this striking
contradiction must stare us in the face, and the discrepancy can be explained with
the greatest ease.</p>
<p>The jurist, say the Roman jurists, “notices only what generally happens.” Still
more true is this of the moral views of the people which grow out of their economic
conditions. They, too, notice only that which generally happens.</p>
<p>Borrowing went on in antiquity as it does with us. But so long as the
inducement and the opportunities for investing loans in foreign production were
lacking—and, as we have seen, this very foreign production was based only on its
own natural economy and the surplus thence arising—loans of money were taken
only for purposes of consumption. They were, therefore, incurred on account of
personal neediness and embarrassment; though this embarrassment might be only
that of the Roman edile, who wanted to deck the circus with purple for the public
games and hadn’t the necessary sum at command.<a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p>To take advantage of the need and necessities of a borrower, who devoted his
loan exclusively to purposes of consumption, and was not an atom the richer for it
than he was before he incurred it, is on every ground shameful; and this, antiquity
and the Church have both justly recognized. But loans for purposes of production
are now overwhelmingly preponderant—loans which the borrower at once applies to
productive undertakings. Such a loan is contracted, beyond question, by reason of
embarrassment; but only out of that single and perplexing embarrassment: how to
get richer. And, quite naturally, this sort of embarrassment the lender gladly shares
with the borrower! In other words, the productive loan is, economically speaking, a
share in the profit of the business; and the contradiction between the ancient and
the bourgeois view of the loan-monger and usurer—both of them, observe, arrived at
in consequence of the dominant economic character of loans peculiar to the
respective periods—is thus cleared up by the consideration of the actual historical
conditions. As, therefore, the opportunity for lending money for productive
investment begins to extend more and more in one direction, actual prohibition is
enforced in another; public opinion is increasingly hostile and struggles against its
introduction in practice. The investment of wealth in foreign production (and by its
investment in his own natural sphere of production the investor remains, always
“master,” never as yet “capitalist”) therefore always forms a relatively insignificant
part of the ancient investment of wealth.</p>
<p>“Almost wholly in landed possession, a trifle out at interest.” Such, even at so
late a period as that of Pliny, is the statement of the wealth of a Roman senator.
Even of so proverbially wealthy a man as Crassus, Plutarch says, when he
enumerates his various properties, silver mines, landed estates, agricultural slaves,
etc., “all this is really nothing in comparison with the value of his domestic slaves,
so many and so admirable were they, readers, writers, silver-testers, overseers,
attendants, &c.”</p>
<p>Almost all these slaves were means of enjoyment. The ancient economic system,
which in its active shape is “lordship,” not “capital,” develops into such means of
enjoyment, not into “capital.” There were instruments of labor, means of enjoyment,
values and riches in the ancient world, but still no “capital.” Estimated by this
dominant form of the entire system, there was still no “productivity of capital”
when, for instance, Sophocles makes his slaves carry on a sword factory. In this case
of manufacture with a view to trade the “natural” character of the economic system
first disappears. But, on the other hand, the characteristic of actual personal
mastership remains unchanged in this form of production; and, secondly, this
manufacture is first carried on only in commerce, which, as already stated, is
already sufficiently developed. These slaves now produce all the articles of
consumption which their owner wants in the form of swords, which are exchanged
for those articles of direct consumption; but these swords fulfill their function as
articles of use or enjoyment, or, in the shape of money, act as the means of
purchasing all articles of use or enjoyment, and thus represent only these latter.
But the swords do not yet appear in the form of prolific capital in its own free and
independent productiveness, in its power; that is, of piling up interest for its
possessor.</p>
<p>No doubt the first step is already taken in this manufacture with direct
reference to the value in exchange of what is produced. But this first step itself finds
a stumbling block in the way of its further progress in the shape of the entire social
and economic environment of the ancient world. The wealth and gold of antiquity
formed the capitalist embryo out of which capital itself was later developed. But the
development of that wealth into the specific and individual form of capital had not
as yet by any means taken place.</p>
<h4>III. <br>
Industrial Society in the Middle Ages.</h4>
<p>Glance at another period of culture. Contemplate the owner of the soil in the
Middle Ages, the noble seigneur with his castles and halls, serfs and subjects,
villages and towns. Was this man a capitalist?</p>
<p>Do not entertain the common, crude notion that in those days people lived on
the produce of the fields alone. Production was then well developed, comfort was
great, the means of enjoyment were numerous, varied and refined. Ulrich of
Lichtenstein in the 13th century, describing a reception by his wife, says she was
clothed in a garment of silk and gold trimmed with ermine: eight women waited on
her, all well clothed; her bedroom had a hundred lights, the mattress was covered
with velvet, and the sheets were of silk. Ulrich, in describing a lady’s wardrobe,
counts up twelve dresses, ten caps adorned with pearls, three mantles of white
velvet, and a saddle white with silver. The lady had twelve pages all clothed in
white, and her horses were covered with cloths of velvet. Was, however, the owner
of all these fine things—was the lord of the Middle Ages a capitalist? By no means,
and I will prove this as clearly of the Middle Ages as I did of ancient times.</p>
<p>In the Middle Ages slavery did not exist, and the serfdom which took its place
gradually softened down to a system of personal bondage, running through many
degrees and stages, until it became a patchwork of services. This gave the Middle
Ages their special feature. The actual living man was no longer regarded as private
property, but particular acts to be performed by him were so regarded. It was a
system of particular services to be rendered, a system of rights due to one man from
another man, and these rights included the performance of particular acts and the
delivery of particular products. <em>This</em> is distinctive of the Middle Ages.</p>
<p>Let us look at the economy of the feudal landlord a little more closely. Apart
from the work of the serfs, we find the fields of the lord tilled and sown by those
from whom socage was due. The services rendered varied in every possible manner
and degree, for the dwellers on the free farms, as well as those on other homesteads
had each and all to do their part; the former worked for the lord from five to six
weeks in the year, and the latter three days a week, without payment.</p>
<p>Over and above the actual work in the fields, let us see what the feudal lord
received in other ways. Let us look at what happened on the day when the dues
were paid. They consisted of rye, barley, hares, bacon, oxen, pigs, eggs, butter, oil,
fruits, wax, honey, etc., etc. Those who lived in the villages and towns under the
sway of the lord had to work for him according to their trades without payment. The
women also paid their dues: pieces of linen, woolen stuffs, etc., etc.; some gave their
work only; others had to find the raw material and to work it up as well.</p>
<p>Nor were the dues confined to mechanical labor or to furnishing material
objects. Advice was due to the feudal lord on all occasions when he asked for it. If
the lord wished to hear a song or see a dance, there were those who had to sing and
dance for him. Taste in those days was rather low, and some of the services that the
feudal lord could and did exact can hardly be described at the present time.</p>
<p>What, then, was this feudal lord? He was a rich, a very rich man; but he
differed from, say, the Rothschilds of the present day, because he could not
capitalize his dues.</p>
<p>The feudal lord could consume, or keep for future consumption, all the means of
enjoyment which the age placed at his command; but he could not employ them in
such a way that they increased; his position rested upon <em>value in use</em>, or, what is the
same thing, upon services, and had nothing to do with <em>exchange value</em> or money. It
is true that he drew interest from part of his wealth, but this was devoted to
procure those luxuries which were not purchased in his own country. Even if he had
superfluous money and interest he could not capitalize and increase them by
employing them in the production carried on in his own country; for everything was
so neatly and regularly arranged, so stable and immovable in this system of
services, where labor, duties and burdens were so accurately defined that there was
no possibility of change.</p>
<p>Superficially, the burghers and masters in the cities and towns of the Middle
Ages would appear to have been in a very different position from that occupied by
the noble landlord; but, as a matter of fact, we find the same social arrangements
bringing about the same results. Let us look at the later part of the Middle Ages,
when the guilds had reached their highest development. The master in a guild,
whose right to be a master could rest either upon his father having belonged to the
guild, or upon his being a citizen, or upon any of those circumstances with which in
the Middle Ages the right to become a master was bound up—the master pursued
his craft in virtue of a particular right. He stood, therefore, on the same footing with
the landlord so far as what they both owned was based on particular rights, whilst
the factory lord of to-day exercises only a business relationship. But if this master
were privileged, if he, as a particular individual, possessed particular rights, then of
necessity there were others around him who had also their particular rights, which
limited and circumscribed the rights and privileges of each and every master at
every point.</p>
<p>In this idea we find the source of the innumerable regulations of the Middle
Ages which determined what particular material the master should use, what plan
of work he should follow, the hours of work to which he should be limited, the wages
he should pay, the quality he should make, the prices he should charge, etc., etc. All
this and more is to be found in the statutes and decrees of the Middle Ages.</p>
<p>The master has the privileges of a master as a particular individual, and he
stands face to face with two groups of equally privileged individuals. In the first
place we have the group formed by all the other industries or crafts, the masters of
which also have their rights; and for this reason no master can unite two industries,
however closely related they may be, or however beneficial to production their union
might be. In the second place we have the group formed by other masters of the
craft, and for this reason no master is allowed to employ more labor than any other
master in that craft; that is to say, the number of apprentices in every town and in
every craft is duly determined and settled. These two limitations rendered the
capitalization of the produce of industry in the Middle Ages impossible.</p>
<p>In the Middle Ages, therefore, the industrial classes and the landed classes
stood on practically the same economic footing: what was produced could be
consumed or be kept for future consumption, but could not be used as capital. There
was, however, one particular point at which we find capital commencing to develop,
namely, in the world-commerce which was carried on principally through Venice
and with the East. Here the limitations imposed by the statutes of the Middle Ages
broke down and exercised little or no influence; for, even so long as they remained
in force, they failed to reach the productive power of capital at its root.</p>
<p>When the way to India round the Cape of Good Hope was discovered by the
Portuguese, the rich family of the Fuggers, of Augsburg, sent an expedition thither
on which they made a profit of 175 per cent. The profits of the world-commerce were
enormous, and to them must be added the gains of the usurers, who, in the Middle
Ages, carried on their business through mortgages and advances on agricultural
products.</p>
<p>Thus what was in embryo in ancient times developed in the Middle Ages and
became full-grown capital. The tendencies of the time, the rise of the Middle Class,
were all in the direction of invention and discovery, of division of labor, of economy
in production, increase of sale, that is, in the direction of developing and perfecting
those instruments and aids of production which were powerless in the olden times.</p>
<p>Thus, gradually, capital threw off the fetters that had hitherto confined it, and
at the end of the last century all limitations and regulations of the period of rights
and services had disappeared, free competition was assured, and capital appeared
in its gigantic strength. “Liberty,” as the middle class understood it, was
established; each and every one was free to become a millionaire—if he could!</p>
<p>A single glance at the distinctive features of this period will show that they are
all summed up in “free competition.” The bourgeois producer, in industrial as well
as in agricultural production, knows nothing of particular rights. All the
distinctions and conditions which arose out of the recognition of “rights” have
disappeared; in their place we find the one essential condition: that of having
capital in hand to make the necessary advances without which there is no
production. All the old limitations having been removed the principle of division of
labor comes to the front and production is divided up into a never-ending series of
partial operations and of production for the world-commerce. All is now exchange
value; everyone produces that which he does not want and cannot use; and, as
opposed to the services and the production of value in use of the Middle Ages, we
have now the products of industry exchanging with each other in the money form.</p>
<p>This is as much the case with agricultural as with industrial production; for the
latter form stamps the character of the age. Anyone who now, for example, produces
corn does so not for his own consumption, but for the world market; and he can no
longer discharge his liabilities with the product of his work, whether he uses large
capital and incurs great expenses, or is only a small producer with liabilities that
press even more severely upon him; he depends upon the prices quoted in the great
markets of London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam; so that even in the supply of food
he produces only exchange value and the production of use value sinks into a
shadow.</p>
<h4>IV. <br>
Industrial Society under Capitalism.</h4>
<p>The law of Ricardo that the prices of products are regulated by the cost of
production is now in full force. In the Middle Ages prices were fixed by the producer,
who could always insist upon a regular profit. But under the influence of capital all
this is altered. Each one underbids the other to obtain fresh custom or to retain that
which he already has. For the consumer this is a benefit in the shape of cheapness.
But this lowering of prices is only obtained by an increase of sale; the small profit
obtained on each article is only compensated by the sale of a larger number of
articles. The natural result is that production is carried on upon a larger scale, with
greater concentration of work, larger supply of raw material, and an augmented
output. In other words: under free competition the greater the capitalist the more
he overpowers and swallows up smaller capitalists.</p>
<p>Here we have the productive power of capital; the pound of to-day produces
another pound. Here also we find the origin of our complicated system of credit; the
capital which is in excess of the requirements of a business, whether temporarily or
permanently, is employed by way of loan, partnerships, shares, etc., in other forms
of production.</p>
<p>Up to the present we have regarded the producer simply as a producer. Let us
now look at him in his two capacities: employer or contractor, and worker; and
distinguish the particular features which free competition imposes. The fate of both
is determined by the price of the product in its sale, and by the proportion of it
which free competition gives to each. The value of the product is at first to be found
in the market price; that is, it depends at each and every moment upon the relation
between the supply of the article and the demand for it. But this in its turn is
subject to the fundamental law that, in the long run{,} the price of a product is the
same as its cost of production. Say, for example, that the supply of an article is so
great that the price falls below the cost of production, then the production of that
article will either cease or be moderated; on the other hand, if the price of an article
be so high as to yield more than the usual profit, then by virtue of free competition
capital will be attracted to that particular industry, and the supply will be increased
until the price is brought down to the cost of production.</p>
<p>The market price of a product oscillates like a pendulum, but with great
irregularities, and its many changes very often have unpleasant and ruinous
consequences for the individual capitalist; for he may be forced to sell his wares
when prices are low and may not be able to place his wares on the market when
prices are high. But this only concerns the individual; the capitalist class, as a class,
is not affected by it; for it is at such times that the smaller capitalists are crushed,
and the supremacy of large capitals over small capitals is established.</p>
<p>As regards capital, these oscillations in prices compensate one another on the
average, and not a single hour of labor, not one drop of the sweat of the worker is
lost to capital; they are all paid back to capital by the consumer. If this be the
position of the capitalist as regards the consumer, what is it that determines the
proportion of the proceeds of the product which shall come to the worker? What is it
that determines and settles the wages of the worker?</p>
<p>Under the present system of production the average wages are limited by an
iron law to the necessary means of subsistence, to the minimum of food, etc. This
has been disputed by certain political economists. In opposition they assert that the
price of labor is regulated by the demand for it as compared with the supply of it.
The people who assert this look upon labor as they do upon any other kind of
merchandise, and they do this quite rightly, for it is with labor as with merchandise
or wares, its price is determined by demand and supply. But what is it that
regulates, that determines, the market price between demand and supply? As we
have already seen, this is determined by the cost of production. There is only one
measure for everything that comes on the market, whether it be Chinese porcelain,
American cotton, asafetida, Circassian slave-girls, or European workers; that
measure is to be found in the demand for and the supply of the article, and the
average relation of demand and supply is ultimately determined by the cost of
production.</p>
<p>How much, then, does it cost to produce a worker? Evidently just so much as is
required to enable another worker to obtain the absolutely necessary means of
subsistence for himself and his family. Give him this and he will provide the
youngster fast enough, though not solely, perhaps, for the capitalist’s sake, and will
not even require to be tempted by a profit, as do the producers of other wares. In
short, wages under free competition, or the cost of production of labor, consist solely
of the cost of producing workers.</p>
<p>Where it is customary to employ children in the factories, then a fresh
calculation is made. It is very soon found that the father does not require the means
of subsistence, say, for a family of average number, but can do with less, as the
children themselves contribute towards their own support.</p>
<p>It requires no explanation to show that of all producers the seller of labor is
most unfavorably situated under the system of competition. Where would the sellers
of other wares be if they could not keep their produce back when the demand was
slack? The seller of labor cannot do this. He <em>must</em> sell. Hunger compels him.
Further, when the price of labor rises, it only makes the lot of the workers
ultimately worse, for it brings about an increase in the number of the workers.
Neither need we explain how it is that no charitable employer can alter this.
Whoever attempts to do so is struck down by the dagger of competition.</p>
<p>Under free competition the relation of an employer to the employed is the same
as to any other merchandise. The worker is work, and work is the cost of its
production. This is the leading feature of the present age. In former times the
relations were those of man to man: after all, the relations of the slaveowner to the
slave, and of the feudal lord to the serf, were human. The relations in former times
were human, for they were those of rulers to be ruled; they were relations between
one man and another man. Even the ill-treatment of the slaves and serfs proves
this; for anger and love are human passions; and those ill-treated in anger were still
treated as men. The cold, impersonal relation of the employer to the employed, as to
a thing which is produced like any other ware on the market, is the specific and
thoroughly inhuman feature of the Middle Class Age.</p>
<p>The Middle Class hate the idea of a State; they would replace the State by a
Middle Class society permeated with free competition; for in a State, workers are
still treated as man, while under the Middle Class regime the workers are like any
other merchandise, and are only taken into consideration according to the cost of
production.</p>
<p>Ancient civilization is shown by what Plutarch wrote of Marcus Crassus and his
slaves: “He (Crassus) used to attend to their education and often gave them lessons
himself; esteeming it the principal part of the business of a master to inspect and
take care of his servants, whom he considered as the living instruments of economy.
In this he was certainly right if he thought, as he frequently said, that other
matters should be managed by servants, but the servants by the master.” Contrast
this with the words of a Liberal professor: “Swiss manufacturers boast that they can
manufacture at less cost than the Germans because the Swiss have no compulsory
education.”</p>
<p>We have seen that wages, on the average, are reduced to the necessary means
of subsistence. But if this be the reward of labor, what becomes of the excess of
prices paid for the articles produced over the cost of subsistence of the workers
whilst the articles are being made? This excess is divided between the employer and
other capitalists, pure and simple, such as the holders of land, bankers, etc.</p>
<p>We said that there is not a single drop of the sweat of the workers that is not
paid back to capital in the price of product, and that every pound in the hands of the
employers produces another pound. With this increase the power of capital
increases, so that every effort of the workers enables the capitalist to compel the
workers to further toil. And when it is possible to reduce the prices of the products
and thus cheapen the means of subsistence, then the increase of the workers does
not increase with the increased produce of labor, but the power of capital does.</p>
<p>Take all those who have worked together in the production of some
article—those who have worked with their brains as well as those who have worked
with their hands; add together what they have received for their work, and they will
not be able to recover the product of their labor! And when machinery is employed,
thus causing a greater production with the same amount of labor, then it becomes
more and more impossible for the workers to buy back with their wages the product
of their work, and they become poorer and poorer.</p>
<p>But the capitalists say that the profit of capital is really the recompense of the
brainwork of the capitalist, the reward for his management. In reality, however,
only a very small portion of the income of the capitalist can come under this head;
and the English economists have always treated the profits of the employers as the
premium of capital, and have left unnoticed the reward for brain work on account of
its smallness. If you want to know how small it is, look at the salaries paid to
stewards of estates, to managers of factories, etc., etc., who do the brain work, while
the principals travel for pleasure or attend to other matters. Only the amount so
paid for management can be regarded as the recompense for such work when the
employer or capitalist does this work himself. This feature is still more strongly
marked in the case of railways, joint stock banks, and industrial companies. Here,
those who possess the capital are many, and they live on their dividends, whilst the
“brain work” of the business is being done by salaried officials. Of course, some of
these salaries are absurdly high; but take them all together and compare the total
with the amount paid away in dividends, and then you will have some idea of the
smallness of the amount paid for brain work and management.</p>
<p>Say that the total amount of the produce of labor during one year is £100,000,
and that the cost of the subsistence of the workers—in other words, their wages—is
£20,000. Now whether the employers are sharp or stupid, idle or industrious, the
remaining £80,000 will fall to the share of the employers, as a class, and how much
each individual employer will receive will depend upon his personal qualities.</p>
<p>Economics can only deal with the question of how much of the produce of labor
the employers as a class can obtain for themselves, how much the workers as a class
can obtain for themselves, and what quantity of the products of labor the individual
worker can obtain. The question as to how one individual employer can get more for
himself than other individual employers is really a part of practical business, and in
no way comes under economics. All this shows that capital is not ever-present, that
it is not a law of nature, but is the effect of certain historical conditions; and that its
productivity in altered surroundings must and will disappear.</p>
<p>Let us contrast the commencement of this historical analysis with the end. In
the primitive state of individual, isolated labor with which we commenced, the
instrument or tool—the bow and arrow of the Indian—was in the hands of the
worker, and thus work alone was productive. Under the system of division of labor,
work and production became social, although the distribution of the result of the
work remained individualistic; and through division of labor, the system of
exchange values and free competition, this result is rapidly brought about, viz.: the
separation of the instruments or tools from the worker becomes complete, the
productivity of labor is appropriated by the holders of the tools, and the reward of
the worker is reduced to that which will keep him alive whilst he works.</p>
<p>Formerly labor was productive; now the instrument is alone productive. The
instrument of production which has been snatched from the worker, which has
changed parts with the worker, is capital, the worker has become the dead,
unproductive instrument, while the instrument now alone is productive.</p>
<p>Division of labor is the source of all fortunes. The only economic law which
forms a parallel with a law of nature is that production can only become more
productive and cheaper by division of labor. The law is, so to say, a social law of
nature. A handful of individuals have appropriated the social law of nature, and
used it for their individual benefit; the masses are bound with the chains of the
ever-increasing products of industry and virtually receive in return for their labor
no more than the Indian did under favorable circumstances before civilization
commenced. Just as well might these individuals appropriate the force of gravity,
the power of steam, and the warmth of the sun. They feed the people, as they oil
their machines, to keep them in good working order, and the food of the people is
only an item in the cost of production.</p>
<p>We have learned from the great English economists that the consumer pays for
the work of man, and not for the forces of nature, but we have also learned that this
payment for the work of man reaches the wrong quarter; the work of man is paid
for, but the worker is not paid, and has to be content with the necessary means of
existence, that being all that capital will allow him. Capital has not appropriated
the sun, but it has possessed itself of the division of labor and its constantly
increasing productivity. After all the sun was made by no man, and is the property
of no man; but capital is grasping the advantages of the social law of nature,
constantly appropriating the produce of the labor of others, and has turned the
power of work into private property. Thus a social state of property has arisen in
which each calls that “his” which is not the product of his labor.</p>
<h4>* * * * * * *</h4>
<p>But the profit of capital <em>is the reward of abstinence</em>. Truly a happy phrase!
European millionaires are ascetics, Indian penitents, modern St. Simon Stylites,
who, perched on their columns, with withered features and arms and body thrust
forward, hold out a plate to the passers-by that they may receive the wages of their
privations! In the midst of this sacrosanct group, high above its fellow mortifiers of
the flesh, supreme ascetic and martyr, stands the Holy House of Rothschild. That is
the real truth about our present society! How could I have hitherto blundered on
this point as I have?</p>
<p>What debauched rascals, what impure rakes, the workers must be, since they
manifestly receive no <em>reward of abstinence</em>. Doubtless the truth is that these are
they, not the others, who secretly keep mistresses and own villas and country
houses where they indulge in frightful orgies!</p>
<p>But, joking apart—for it is no longer possible to jest about this, and the
bitterest irony involuntarily breaks into open revolt!—it is time, it is high time, to
drown the squeaking pipe of these eunuchs by the deep voice of a fully-developed
man. Is it possible when the profit of capital is due to what we have seen, when
capital is the octopus which sucks up the entire surplus of the toil and sweat of the
worker, leaving him only what are the bare necessaries of existence—is it possible
that any one can still have the courage to speak in the presence of the workers of
the profit on capital as the <em>reward of abstinence</em> of capitalists who mortify
themselves? Yes, there are those who still have the hardihood to flout the workers,
to insult these luckless proletarians, with these jeers, with these monstrous
sarcasms. Has conscience, then, died out from among us? Has shame taken refuge
with the brutes?</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: center;">The End.</p>
<p class="fst">______________</p>
<p class="index">Notes</p>
<p class="information"><a name="n0" href="#f0">*</a> This text was originally part of the fourth chapter of
Lasalle's <b><i>Herr Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, der ökonomische Julian,
oder: Capital und Arbeit</i></b>, published in Berlin in 1864 by Reinhold
<span dir="ltr">Schlingmann. </span>—<span dir="ltr"><i> marxists.org</i></span></p>
<p class="information"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> In the
days of small production, the usurer was simply a leech, who profited by
the distress or the improvidence of others to suck their blood. The
money which he loaned to others was, as a rule, put only to unproductive
uses. If, for instance, a nobleman borrowed money, he did so to spend it
in debauch; if a farmer or mechanic borrowed money, it was mainly to pay
his taxes, or some other government dues; neither, as a rule, needed any
money for productive purposes: they owned their own instruments of
production, or acquired them by barter. In those days interest was
considered immoral, and was everywhere condemned.—The Capitalist
Class, p. 2. New York: New York Labor News Company.</p>
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Ferdinand Lassalle
What is Capital?
Source: "Socialist Labor Party of America"[*]
Translated: by F. Keddell
Transcribed: and edited by Robert Bills for the official Web site of the Socialist Labor Party of America. Uploaded by Donna Bills, October 2005
Markup: by Chris Clayton
Proofread: by Andy Carloff 2010.
I.
Capitalist Fallacies.
Let us take the definition of capital which has hitherto passed muster; not, of
course, that childish definition of Bastiat’s, that capital is “the saved portion of a
man’s income,” for that is manifestly too absurd and ridiculous; but the other
definition that “capital is the instruments of labor”; or the one which is universally
given by all economists, that “capital is hoarded labor”; or, if you like, a third, that
“capital consists of products which are continually applied to further production.”
Now look at this Red Indian in the primeval forests of America, who is out
hunting for his subsistence with his bow and arrow. Is this man a capitalist? Is this
bow and arrow capital? You see all the three definitions are fulfilled. The bow and
arrow are unquestionably an instrument of labor. Nobody, too, can deny that it is
the result of expended labor. What is more, it is a product which is continually used
for further production. Yet it would be flying in the face of common sense to call that
Red Indian a capitalist! You see, therefore, that somehow or other all these
definitions must be incorrect.
Or perhaps you will say—and the man who would say this would say
anything—“Yes, the bow and arrow is capital, and the Indian is consequently a
capitalist.” Then I can easily show you that that bow and arrow is not capital.
Neither is the Red Indian a capitalist.
To make this quite clear, imagine yourself for a moment out in the woods with
just such a bow and arrow. The bow and arrow will serve to shoot game. It
will,—since it is an instrument of labor,—also help you to carry on your work of
providing for your own subsistence. But if, as I am afraid would be the case, you
were to get tired in struggling through the forest with your moccasins on after the
game, you will find no chance to lay out your bow and arrow at interest; and that, as
all the world knows, is the distinguishing characteristic of capital. So you see that
this bow and arrow, after all, is an instrument of labor, but it is not capital.
But assuming, under the impression that it was merely because your bow and
arrow was hoarded labor in the form of bow and arrow that you could not make it do
duty as capital—assuming, I say, that you wished to exchange it, and went, for this
purpose, to barter with our original Indian. Very likely this Indian, if your bow and
arrow suits him, will do a bargain with you. He will give you in exchange, say, a
deer he has killed, or some furs, or, if in a gold-bearing region, he may even hand
you—just think of it!—a great nugget of gold. But you have no possibility whatever
of making profit out of these articles where you are. In order to make these goods
productive—interest or profit bearing—you must just betake yourself to other
countries where matters stand on a very different, in short, on a European footing.
But mark you this: in the assumed historical conditions in which you are placed you
cannot possibly do any such thing. Not only so, but now, with the things for which
you have bartered away your bow and arrow—your game, your furs, your fine
nugget of gold—you are a deal worse off than you were with the bow and arrow,
which would at least enable you to keep yourself—if you shot straight. You can
grasp now—and I advise you to hold fast to it—that there are historical conditions
in which there are instruments of labor, in which you may even barter or exchange,
but in which, nevertheless, there is no capital.
Following, then, upon these explanations which all readers of socialist economy
know well, we can say that, although we have here instruments of labor, there is yet
no capital because there is no division of labor, since the instruments of labor—the
means of production on a very small scale—are in the hands of the laborer himself
or at his command, or, in the other words, labor alone is itself productive. Here,
then, aptly comes the statement that the independent productivity of capital, its
breeding, as Shylock says, its profit-making apart from labor, is possible only under
a system of division of labor, and is the consequence of that division of labor.
II.
Industrial Society in Civilized Antiquity.
Now let us take a look at the condition of civilized antiquity. Here we already
have a certain amount of division of labor and greater wealth, however small it may
be in comparison with ours of to-day. But you can see, in this case, that the ancient
owner of property was the combined possessor of landed property, slaves, and all
the products of labor, as well as of all the instruments of labor. Is this man a
capitalist any more than the Red Indian? Not at all. If you take a Shah of Persia in
olden times, to whom belonged the country over which he ruled to the full extent of
his will together with all the wealth and people in it, would you say that this man
was “a great capitalist”? Most assuredly not.
Just the same with the ancient owners of property. The person to whom belong,
as of lawful possession, not only the instruments of labor, but the very laborer
himself, cannot be a capitalist. His share of the result of the social production comes
to him, not because the instruments of labor belong to him, but because the laborer
himself belongs to him. The slave, by whose agency he allows the labor to be done, is
only another sort of tool for him, and the tool only another kind of slave. This
absence of separation and distinction has for its result that we have here masters,
but not capitalists; articles of value and wealth, but not capital. You can trace this
farther if you bear in mind the determining characteristics of the ancient economy.
The ancient landowner and slaveowner commanded that articles of use for his
own household needs should be produced in the first place. He sold only the surplus
of such articles. Or if he carried on manufacture with his slaves—an exceptional
case, by the way, and one peculiar to citizens of low social rank—he sold the
industrial products so obtained. With the money paid him he purchased articles of
luxury for his own consumption from all the countries within his reach. But he
accumulated the gold remaining over, after his luxurious tastes had been gratified
for the time being, in order that he might purchase luxuries in the future. So much
of it he hoarded, that is to say, as he did not use to acquire more landed property
and more slaves, which served for the extension of that “natural” form of production
in which he was “lord” and “master,” but not capitalist. At first, and indeed long
afterwards, he had no opportunity of laying out this, his gold, at interest in foreign
production.
For this very foreign production was itself the natural growth of the surplus of
another “natural” system of production, and did not call for the modern system of
credit, which can only be set on foot in a society where values in exchange
(commodities) are exclusively produced. When openings for such an investment of
gold begin to manifest themselves, the moral sense of the people—public
opinion—declares against it; this public opinion being in turn only the consequence
of the long continued, and, to all appearance, permanent, economic conditions just
described. You can easily see why usury or interest on capital made way with such
extreme difficulty against the public opinion of the ancients. You can easily
comprehend why it was considered, according to their view, shameful, mean, low,
dishonest, in the ancient sense, to lend at interest.
If Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, the Fathers of the Church, and the Canon Law, one
and all, consider interest on capital shameful, and meaning the same as usury; if,
under the Roman Republic, the taking of interest was legally forbidden; if Cato
lauds that decision of his ancestors, according to which the thief was fined twice the
amount stolen, but the man who took interest four times the amount; if the Catholic
Church refused to the usurer the sacrament, the right of bequest, and Christian
burial; and if, on the other hand, Jeremy Bentham, and with him the whole precious
school of Liberal political economists, can see in usury only the most indefeasible
and “natural right” of mankind—why, henceforth, surely the reason for this striking
contradiction must stare us in the face, and the discrepancy can be explained with
the greatest ease.
The jurist, say the Roman jurists, “notices only what generally happens.” Still
more true is this of the moral views of the people which grow out of their economic
conditions. They, too, notice only that which generally happens.
Borrowing went on in antiquity as it does with us. But so long as the
inducement and the opportunities for investing loans in foreign production were
lacking—and, as we have seen, this very foreign production was based only on its
own natural economy and the surplus thence arising—loans of money were taken
only for purposes of consumption. They were, therefore, incurred on account of
personal neediness and embarrassment; though this embarrassment might be only
that of the Roman edile, who wanted to deck the circus with purple for the public
games and hadn’t the necessary sum at command.[1]
To take advantage of the need and necessities of a borrower, who devoted his
loan exclusively to purposes of consumption, and was not an atom the richer for it
than he was before he incurred it, is on every ground shameful; and this, antiquity
and the Church have both justly recognized. But loans for purposes of production
are now overwhelmingly preponderant—loans which the borrower at once applies to
productive undertakings. Such a loan is contracted, beyond question, by reason of
embarrassment; but only out of that single and perplexing embarrassment: how to
get richer. And, quite naturally, this sort of embarrassment the lender gladly shares
with the borrower! In other words, the productive loan is, economically speaking, a
share in the profit of the business; and the contradiction between the ancient and
the bourgeois view of the loan-monger and usurer—both of them, observe, arrived at
in consequence of the dominant economic character of loans peculiar to the
respective periods—is thus cleared up by the consideration of the actual historical
conditions. As, therefore, the opportunity for lending money for productive
investment begins to extend more and more in one direction, actual prohibition is
enforced in another; public opinion is increasingly hostile and struggles against its
introduction in practice. The investment of wealth in foreign production (and by its
investment in his own natural sphere of production the investor remains, always
“master,” never as yet “capitalist”) therefore always forms a relatively insignificant
part of the ancient investment of wealth.
“Almost wholly in landed possession, a trifle out at interest.” Such, even at so
late a period as that of Pliny, is the statement of the wealth of a Roman senator.
Even of so proverbially wealthy a man as Crassus, Plutarch says, when he
enumerates his various properties, silver mines, landed estates, agricultural slaves,
etc., “all this is really nothing in comparison with the value of his domestic slaves,
so many and so admirable were they, readers, writers, silver-testers, overseers,
attendants, &c.”
Almost all these slaves were means of enjoyment. The ancient economic system,
which in its active shape is “lordship,” not “capital,” develops into such means of
enjoyment, not into “capital.” There were instruments of labor, means of enjoyment,
values and riches in the ancient world, but still no “capital.” Estimated by this
dominant form of the entire system, there was still no “productivity of capital”
when, for instance, Sophocles makes his slaves carry on a sword factory. In this case
of manufacture with a view to trade the “natural” character of the economic system
first disappears. But, on the other hand, the characteristic of actual personal
mastership remains unchanged in this form of production; and, secondly, this
manufacture is first carried on only in commerce, which, as already stated, is
already sufficiently developed. These slaves now produce all the articles of
consumption which their owner wants in the form of swords, which are exchanged
for those articles of direct consumption; but these swords fulfill their function as
articles of use or enjoyment, or, in the shape of money, act as the means of
purchasing all articles of use or enjoyment, and thus represent only these latter.
But the swords do not yet appear in the form of prolific capital in its own free and
independent productiveness, in its power; that is, of piling up interest for its
possessor.
No doubt the first step is already taken in this manufacture with direct
reference to the value in exchange of what is produced. But this first step itself finds
a stumbling block in the way of its further progress in the shape of the entire social
and economic environment of the ancient world. The wealth and gold of antiquity
formed the capitalist embryo out of which capital itself was later developed. But the
development of that wealth into the specific and individual form of capital had not
as yet by any means taken place.
III.
Industrial Society in the Middle Ages.
Glance at another period of culture. Contemplate the owner of the soil in the
Middle Ages, the noble seigneur with his castles and halls, serfs and subjects,
villages and towns. Was this man a capitalist?
Do not entertain the common, crude notion that in those days people lived on
the produce of the fields alone. Production was then well developed, comfort was
great, the means of enjoyment were numerous, varied and refined. Ulrich of
Lichtenstein in the 13th century, describing a reception by his wife, says she was
clothed in a garment of silk and gold trimmed with ermine: eight women waited on
her, all well clothed; her bedroom had a hundred lights, the mattress was covered
with velvet, and the sheets were of silk. Ulrich, in describing a lady’s wardrobe,
counts up twelve dresses, ten caps adorned with pearls, three mantles of white
velvet, and a saddle white with silver. The lady had twelve pages all clothed in
white, and her horses were covered with cloths of velvet. Was, however, the owner
of all these fine things—was the lord of the Middle Ages a capitalist? By no means,
and I will prove this as clearly of the Middle Ages as I did of ancient times.
In the Middle Ages slavery did not exist, and the serfdom which took its place
gradually softened down to a system of personal bondage, running through many
degrees and stages, until it became a patchwork of services. This gave the Middle
Ages their special feature. The actual living man was no longer regarded as private
property, but particular acts to be performed by him were so regarded. It was a
system of particular services to be rendered, a system of rights due to one man from
another man, and these rights included the performance of particular acts and the
delivery of particular products. This is distinctive of the Middle Ages.
Let us look at the economy of the feudal landlord a little more closely. Apart
from the work of the serfs, we find the fields of the lord tilled and sown by those
from whom socage was due. The services rendered varied in every possible manner
and degree, for the dwellers on the free farms, as well as those on other homesteads
had each and all to do their part; the former worked for the lord from five to six
weeks in the year, and the latter three days a week, without payment.
Over and above the actual work in the fields, let us see what the feudal lord
received in other ways. Let us look at what happened on the day when the dues
were paid. They consisted of rye, barley, hares, bacon, oxen, pigs, eggs, butter, oil,
fruits, wax, honey, etc., etc. Those who lived in the villages and towns under the
sway of the lord had to work for him according to their trades without payment. The
women also paid their dues: pieces of linen, woolen stuffs, etc., etc.; some gave their
work only; others had to find the raw material and to work it up as well.
Nor were the dues confined to mechanical labor or to furnishing material
objects. Advice was due to the feudal lord on all occasions when he asked for it. If
the lord wished to hear a song or see a dance, there were those who had to sing and
dance for him. Taste in those days was rather low, and some of the services that the
feudal lord could and did exact can hardly be described at the present time.
What, then, was this feudal lord? He was a rich, a very rich man; but he
differed from, say, the Rothschilds of the present day, because he could not
capitalize his dues.
The feudal lord could consume, or keep for future consumption, all the means of
enjoyment which the age placed at his command; but he could not employ them in
such a way that they increased; his position rested upon value in use, or, what is the
same thing, upon services, and had nothing to do with exchange value or money. It
is true that he drew interest from part of his wealth, but this was devoted to
procure those luxuries which were not purchased in his own country. Even if he had
superfluous money and interest he could not capitalize and increase them by
employing them in the production carried on in his own country; for everything was
so neatly and regularly arranged, so stable and immovable in this system of
services, where labor, duties and burdens were so accurately defined that there was
no possibility of change.
Superficially, the burghers and masters in the cities and towns of the Middle
Ages would appear to have been in a very different position from that occupied by
the noble landlord; but, as a matter of fact, we find the same social arrangements
bringing about the same results. Let us look at the later part of the Middle Ages,
when the guilds had reached their highest development. The master in a guild,
whose right to be a master could rest either upon his father having belonged to the
guild, or upon his being a citizen, or upon any of those circumstances with which in
the Middle Ages the right to become a master was bound up—the master pursued
his craft in virtue of a particular right. He stood, therefore, on the same footing with
the landlord so far as what they both owned was based on particular rights, whilst
the factory lord of to-day exercises only a business relationship. But if this master
were privileged, if he, as a particular individual, possessed particular rights, then of
necessity there were others around him who had also their particular rights, which
limited and circumscribed the rights and privileges of each and every master at
every point.
In this idea we find the source of the innumerable regulations of the Middle
Ages which determined what particular material the master should use, what plan
of work he should follow, the hours of work to which he should be limited, the wages
he should pay, the quality he should make, the prices he should charge, etc., etc. All
this and more is to be found in the statutes and decrees of the Middle Ages.
The master has the privileges of a master as a particular individual, and he
stands face to face with two groups of equally privileged individuals. In the first
place we have the group formed by all the other industries or crafts, the masters of
which also have their rights; and for this reason no master can unite two industries,
however closely related they may be, or however beneficial to production their union
might be. In the second place we have the group formed by other masters of the
craft, and for this reason no master is allowed to employ more labor than any other
master in that craft; that is to say, the number of apprentices in every town and in
every craft is duly determined and settled. These two limitations rendered the
capitalization of the produce of industry in the Middle Ages impossible.
In the Middle Ages, therefore, the industrial classes and the landed classes
stood on practically the same economic footing: what was produced could be
consumed or be kept for future consumption, but could not be used as capital. There
was, however, one particular point at which we find capital commencing to develop,
namely, in the world-commerce which was carried on principally through Venice
and with the East. Here the limitations imposed by the statutes of the Middle Ages
broke down and exercised little or no influence; for, even so long as they remained
in force, they failed to reach the productive power of capital at its root.
When the way to India round the Cape of Good Hope was discovered by the
Portuguese, the rich family of the Fuggers, of Augsburg, sent an expedition thither
on which they made a profit of 175 per cent. The profits of the world-commerce were
enormous, and to them must be added the gains of the usurers, who, in the Middle
Ages, carried on their business through mortgages and advances on agricultural
products.
Thus what was in embryo in ancient times developed in the Middle Ages and
became full-grown capital. The tendencies of the time, the rise of the Middle Class,
were all in the direction of invention and discovery, of division of labor, of economy
in production, increase of sale, that is, in the direction of developing and perfecting
those instruments and aids of production which were powerless in the olden times.
Thus, gradually, capital threw off the fetters that had hitherto confined it, and
at the end of the last century all limitations and regulations of the period of rights
and services had disappeared, free competition was assured, and capital appeared
in its gigantic strength. “Liberty,” as the middle class understood it, was
established; each and every one was free to become a millionaire—if he could!
A single glance at the distinctive features of this period will show that they are
all summed up in “free competition.” The bourgeois producer, in industrial as well
as in agricultural production, knows nothing of particular rights. All the
distinctions and conditions which arose out of the recognition of “rights” have
disappeared; in their place we find the one essential condition: that of having
capital in hand to make the necessary advances without which there is no
production. All the old limitations having been removed the principle of division of
labor comes to the front and production is divided up into a never-ending series of
partial operations and of production for the world-commerce. All is now exchange
value; everyone produces that which he does not want and cannot use; and, as
opposed to the services and the production of value in use of the Middle Ages, we
have now the products of industry exchanging with each other in the money form.
This is as much the case with agricultural as with industrial production; for the
latter form stamps the character of the age. Anyone who now, for example, produces
corn does so not for his own consumption, but for the world market; and he can no
longer discharge his liabilities with the product of his work, whether he uses large
capital and incurs great expenses, or is only a small producer with liabilities that
press even more severely upon him; he depends upon the prices quoted in the great
markets of London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam; so that even in the supply of food
he produces only exchange value and the production of use value sinks into a
shadow.
IV.
Industrial Society under Capitalism.
The law of Ricardo that the prices of products are regulated by the cost of
production is now in full force. In the Middle Ages prices were fixed by the producer,
who could always insist upon a regular profit. But under the influence of capital all
this is altered. Each one underbids the other to obtain fresh custom or to retain that
which he already has. For the consumer this is a benefit in the shape of cheapness.
But this lowering of prices is only obtained by an increase of sale; the small profit
obtained on each article is only compensated by the sale of a larger number of
articles. The natural result is that production is carried on upon a larger scale, with
greater concentration of work, larger supply of raw material, and an augmented
output. In other words: under free competition the greater the capitalist the more
he overpowers and swallows up smaller capitalists.
Here we have the productive power of capital; the pound of to-day produces
another pound. Here also we find the origin of our complicated system of credit; the
capital which is in excess of the requirements of a business, whether temporarily or
permanently, is employed by way of loan, partnerships, shares, etc., in other forms
of production.
Up to the present we have regarded the producer simply as a producer. Let us
now look at him in his two capacities: employer or contractor, and worker; and
distinguish the particular features which free competition imposes. The fate of both
is determined by the price of the product in its sale, and by the proportion of it
which free competition gives to each. The value of the product is at first to be found
in the market price; that is, it depends at each and every moment upon the relation
between the supply of the article and the demand for it. But this in its turn is
subject to the fundamental law that, in the long run{,} the price of a product is the
same as its cost of production. Say, for example, that the supply of an article is so
great that the price falls below the cost of production, then the production of that
article will either cease or be moderated; on the other hand, if the price of an article
be so high as to yield more than the usual profit, then by virtue of free competition
capital will be attracted to that particular industry, and the supply will be increased
until the price is brought down to the cost of production.
The market price of a product oscillates like a pendulum, but with great
irregularities, and its many changes very often have unpleasant and ruinous
consequences for the individual capitalist; for he may be forced to sell his wares
when prices are low and may not be able to place his wares on the market when
prices are high. But this only concerns the individual; the capitalist class, as a class,
is not affected by it; for it is at such times that the smaller capitalists are crushed,
and the supremacy of large capitals over small capitals is established.
As regards capital, these oscillations in prices compensate one another on the
average, and not a single hour of labor, not one drop of the sweat of the worker is
lost to capital; they are all paid back to capital by the consumer. If this be the
position of the capitalist as regards the consumer, what is it that determines the
proportion of the proceeds of the product which shall come to the worker? What is it
that determines and settles the wages of the worker?
Under the present system of production the average wages are limited by an
iron law to the necessary means of subsistence, to the minimum of food, etc. This
has been disputed by certain political economists. In opposition they assert that the
price of labor is regulated by the demand for it as compared with the supply of it.
The people who assert this look upon labor as they do upon any other kind of
merchandise, and they do this quite rightly, for it is with labor as with merchandise
or wares, its price is determined by demand and supply. But what is it that
regulates, that determines, the market price between demand and supply? As we
have already seen, this is determined by the cost of production. There is only one
measure for everything that comes on the market, whether it be Chinese porcelain,
American cotton, asafetida, Circassian slave-girls, or European workers; that
measure is to be found in the demand for and the supply of the article, and the
average relation of demand and supply is ultimately determined by the cost of
production.
How much, then, does it cost to produce a worker? Evidently just so much as is
required to enable another worker to obtain the absolutely necessary means of
subsistence for himself and his family. Give him this and he will provide the
youngster fast enough, though not solely, perhaps, for the capitalist’s sake, and will
not even require to be tempted by a profit, as do the producers of other wares. In
short, wages under free competition, or the cost of production of labor, consist solely
of the cost of producing workers.
Where it is customary to employ children in the factories, then a fresh
calculation is made. It is very soon found that the father does not require the means
of subsistence, say, for a family of average number, but can do with less, as the
children themselves contribute towards their own support.
It requires no explanation to show that of all producers the seller of labor is
most unfavorably situated under the system of competition. Where would the sellers
of other wares be if they could not keep their produce back when the demand was
slack? The seller of labor cannot do this. He must sell. Hunger compels him.
Further, when the price of labor rises, it only makes the lot of the workers
ultimately worse, for it brings about an increase in the number of the workers.
Neither need we explain how it is that no charitable employer can alter this.
Whoever attempts to do so is struck down by the dagger of competition.
Under free competition the relation of an employer to the employed is the same
as to any other merchandise. The worker is work, and work is the cost of its
production. This is the leading feature of the present age. In former times the
relations were those of man to man: after all, the relations of the slaveowner to the
slave, and of the feudal lord to the serf, were human. The relations in former times
were human, for they were those of rulers to be ruled; they were relations between
one man and another man. Even the ill-treatment of the slaves and serfs proves
this; for anger and love are human passions; and those ill-treated in anger were still
treated as men. The cold, impersonal relation of the employer to the employed, as to
a thing which is produced like any other ware on the market, is the specific and
thoroughly inhuman feature of the Middle Class Age.
The Middle Class hate the idea of a State; they would replace the State by a
Middle Class society permeated with free competition; for in a State, workers are
still treated as man, while under the Middle Class regime the workers are like any
other merchandise, and are only taken into consideration according to the cost of
production.
Ancient civilization is shown by what Plutarch wrote of Marcus Crassus and his
slaves: “He (Crassus) used to attend to their education and often gave them lessons
himself; esteeming it the principal part of the business of a master to inspect and
take care of his servants, whom he considered as the living instruments of economy.
In this he was certainly right if he thought, as he frequently said, that other
matters should be managed by servants, but the servants by the master.” Contrast
this with the words of a Liberal professor: “Swiss manufacturers boast that they can
manufacture at less cost than the Germans because the Swiss have no compulsory
education.”
We have seen that wages, on the average, are reduced to the necessary means
of subsistence. But if this be the reward of labor, what becomes of the excess of
prices paid for the articles produced over the cost of subsistence of the workers
whilst the articles are being made? This excess is divided between the employer and
other capitalists, pure and simple, such as the holders of land, bankers, etc.
We said that there is not a single drop of the sweat of the workers that is not
paid back to capital in the price of product, and that every pound in the hands of the
employers produces another pound. With this increase the power of capital
increases, so that every effort of the workers enables the capitalist to compel the
workers to further toil. And when it is possible to reduce the prices of the products
and thus cheapen the means of subsistence, then the increase of the workers does
not increase with the increased produce of labor, but the power of capital does.
Take all those who have worked together in the production of some
article—those who have worked with their brains as well as those who have worked
with their hands; add together what they have received for their work, and they will
not be able to recover the product of their labor! And when machinery is employed,
thus causing a greater production with the same amount of labor, then it becomes
more and more impossible for the workers to buy back with their wages the product
of their work, and they become poorer and poorer.
But the capitalists say that the profit of capital is really the recompense of the
brainwork of the capitalist, the reward for his management. In reality, however,
only a very small portion of the income of the capitalist can come under this head;
and the English economists have always treated the profits of the employers as the
premium of capital, and have left unnoticed the reward for brain work on account of
its smallness. If you want to know how small it is, look at the salaries paid to
stewards of estates, to managers of factories, etc., etc., who do the brain work, while
the principals travel for pleasure or attend to other matters. Only the amount so
paid for management can be regarded as the recompense for such work when the
employer or capitalist does this work himself. This feature is still more strongly
marked in the case of railways, joint stock banks, and industrial companies. Here,
those who possess the capital are many, and they live on their dividends, whilst the
“brain work” of the business is being done by salaried officials. Of course, some of
these salaries are absurdly high; but take them all together and compare the total
with the amount paid away in dividends, and then you will have some idea of the
smallness of the amount paid for brain work and management.
Say that the total amount of the produce of labor during one year is £100,000,
and that the cost of the subsistence of the workers—in other words, their wages—is
£20,000. Now whether the employers are sharp or stupid, idle or industrious, the
remaining £80,000 will fall to the share of the employers, as a class, and how much
each individual employer will receive will depend upon his personal qualities.
Economics can only deal with the question of how much of the produce of labor
the employers as a class can obtain for themselves, how much the workers as a class
can obtain for themselves, and what quantity of the products of labor the individual
worker can obtain. The question as to how one individual employer can get more for
himself than other individual employers is really a part of practical business, and in
no way comes under economics. All this shows that capital is not ever-present, that
it is not a law of nature, but is the effect of certain historical conditions; and that its
productivity in altered surroundings must and will disappear.
Let us contrast the commencement of this historical analysis with the end. In
the primitive state of individual, isolated labor with which we commenced, the
instrument or tool—the bow and arrow of the Indian—was in the hands of the
worker, and thus work alone was productive. Under the system of division of labor,
work and production became social, although the distribution of the result of the
work remained individualistic; and through division of labor, the system of
exchange values and free competition, this result is rapidly brought about, viz.: the
separation of the instruments or tools from the worker becomes complete, the
productivity of labor is appropriated by the holders of the tools, and the reward of
the worker is reduced to that which will keep him alive whilst he works.
Formerly labor was productive; now the instrument is alone productive. The
instrument of production which has been snatched from the worker, which has
changed parts with the worker, is capital, the worker has become the dead,
unproductive instrument, while the instrument now alone is productive.
Division of labor is the source of all fortunes. The only economic law which
forms a parallel with a law of nature is that production can only become more
productive and cheaper by division of labor. The law is, so to say, a social law of
nature. A handful of individuals have appropriated the social law of nature, and
used it for their individual benefit; the masses are bound with the chains of the
ever-increasing products of industry and virtually receive in return for their labor
no more than the Indian did under favorable circumstances before civilization
commenced. Just as well might these individuals appropriate the force of gravity,
the power of steam, and the warmth of the sun. They feed the people, as they oil
their machines, to keep them in good working order, and the food of the people is
only an item in the cost of production.
We have learned from the great English economists that the consumer pays for
the work of man, and not for the forces of nature, but we have also learned that this
payment for the work of man reaches the wrong quarter; the work of man is paid
for, but the worker is not paid, and has to be content with the necessary means of
existence, that being all that capital will allow him. Capital has not appropriated
the sun, but it has possessed itself of the division of labor and its constantly
increasing productivity. After all the sun was made by no man, and is the property
of no man; but capital is grasping the advantages of the social law of nature,
constantly appropriating the produce of the labor of others, and has turned the
power of work into private property. Thus a social state of property has arisen in
which each calls that “his” which is not the product of his labor.
* * * * * * *
But the profit of capital is the reward of abstinence. Truly a happy phrase!
European millionaires are ascetics, Indian penitents, modern St. Simon Stylites,
who, perched on their columns, with withered features and arms and body thrust
forward, hold out a plate to the passers-by that they may receive the wages of their
privations! In the midst of this sacrosanct group, high above its fellow mortifiers of
the flesh, supreme ascetic and martyr, stands the Holy House of Rothschild. That is
the real truth about our present society! How could I have hitherto blundered on
this point as I have?
What debauched rascals, what impure rakes, the workers must be, since they
manifestly receive no reward of abstinence. Doubtless the truth is that these are
they, not the others, who secretly keep mistresses and own villas and country
houses where they indulge in frightful orgies!
But, joking apart—for it is no longer possible to jest about this, and the
bitterest irony involuntarily breaks into open revolt!—it is time, it is high time, to
drown the squeaking pipe of these eunuchs by the deep voice of a fully-developed
man. Is it possible when the profit of capital is due to what we have seen, when
capital is the octopus which sucks up the entire surplus of the toil and sweat of the
worker, leaving him only what are the bare necessaries of existence—is it possible
that any one can still have the courage to speak in the presence of the workers of
the profit on capital as the reward of abstinence of capitalists who mortify
themselves? Yes, there are those who still have the hardihood to flout the workers,
to insult these luckless proletarians, with these jeers, with these monstrous
sarcasms. Has conscience, then, died out from among us? Has shame taken refuge
with the brutes?
The End.
______________
Notes
* This text was originally part of the fourth chapter of
Lasalle's Herr Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, der ökonomische Julian,
oder: Capital und Arbeit, published in Berlin in 1864 by Reinhold
Schlingmann. — marxists.org
1. In the
days of small production, the usurer was simply a leech, who profited by
the distress or the improvidence of others to suck their blood. The
money which he loaned to others was, as a rule, put only to unproductive
uses. If, for instance, a nobleman borrowed money, he did so to spend it
in debauch; if a farmer or mechanic borrowed money, it was mainly to pay
his taxes, or some other government dues; neither, as a rule, needed any
money for productive purposes: they owned their own instruments of
production, or acquired them by barter. In those days interest was
considered immoral, and was everywhere condemned.—The Capitalist
Class, p. 2. New York: New York Labor News Company.
Ferdinand Lassalle Archive
|
./articles/Lassalle-Ferdinand/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.lassalle.1906.04.workshops-1848 | <body>
<p class="title">Ferdinand Lassalle 1863</p>
<h3>The French National Workshops of 1848</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>Social Democrat</em>, Vol. 10, no. 4, 15 April 1906, pp. 236-242;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Ted Crawford.<br>
<span class="info">Proofread</span>: Andy Carloff, 2010</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>The attitude of members of the present Government, notably Mr. John Morley, towards the demand of the unemployed for the “right to work,” and their gross misrepresentation of the experiment of ‘48, gives occasion for the following. Liberal statesmen, like their predecessors, assert that the so-called “National Workshops” of Paris were a failure, and use this as an argument against any attempt at the State organisation of labour. Even if their representation of the facts were true, it would not be conclusive evidence of the impossibility of the national organisation of the labour of the unemployed, but this historical retrospect shows that they have misrepresented the whole of the facts, and have thus destroyed their own case.</p>
<h4>The French National Workshops of 1848<br>
<span class="term">A Historical Retrospect, by FERDINAND LASSALLE.<br>
(Reprint from “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.”)</span></h4>
<p>The lie is a European power!</p>
<p>Hardly had my “Letter to the Leipzig Working-men’s Committee” appeared, when the learned Mr. Faucher declared, in a meeting at Leipzig, that I was merely dishing up again the French National Workshops of Louis Blanc, which were already condemned by their miserable fiasco in 1848.</p>
<p>The even more learned talmudist of the “Volkszeitung,” in his yesterday’s leader, in No. 95, delivers himself as follows:-</p>
<p>“After these ideas (‘to establish in the name of the State and with State funds workshops which would guarantee employment, regulate wages and satisfy the needs of the workman’) had been widely disseminated from France during the forties, the Paris revolution of February, 1848, brought the opportunity to put them to a practical test. Louis Blanc, a very able writer, who had up till then propagated these ideas as a means of political agitation, was, in consequence of the Revolution, made a member of the Provisional Government, and had in this capacity to attempt a realisation of his proposals. The attempt failed entirely, and the causes of the failure have been clearly discerned by science. The attempt failed so thoroughly, that in France the direct universal suffrage could be abolished, even under the Republican regime (!) though it had been adopted as the only means of safety for the majority of the propertyless classes. The attempt failed so thoroughly, that, though after the Coup d’�tat universal direct suffrage was re- established, the fantastic proposals of Louis Blanc remained a dead letter, and hitherto, neither in France nor elsewhere, no thinking person has dreamt of reviving them.”</p>
<p>And what Mr. Faucher and the “Volkszeitung” said, I believe Mr. Wirth said also. I am not certain about it, because I have to read day by day so many attacks upon me, that the recollection of them all gets a trifle mixed, and I do not rightly know what to put to the account of one or of another. I am afraid I shall have to prepare a “herring’s salad,” in which I have to cut up all my learned opponents, and to make them suffer all for each, and each for all, leaving it to them to sort out what properly applies to one or the other, just as State Governments do when raising contributions from a number of communities.</p>
<p>But at any rate I have read variants of the same theme in at least a score of papers, and from north and south, from west and east, comes the cry: “But these are the national workshops of Louis Blanc of 1848! They have been finally judged and condemned in 1848.</p>
<p>It would almost appear as if hardly anybody in Germany was correctly informed as to the true facts concerning the French National Workshops of 1848!</p>
<p>How diverting this sort of argumentation must he for those who know the true facts, who are aware (1) that the “National Workshops” were not set up by Louis Blanc, but by his enemies, the most vehement opponents of Socialism in the Provisional Government, the Minister for Public Works, Marie, and others who had the majority in the Provisional Government (2) that they were expressly intended for use <em>against</em> Louis Blanc, so as to oppose to his following, the Socialist workmen, both during the elections and on other more decisive occasions, a paid working class army devoted to the Government majority; (3) that in the National Workshops, precisely because there was no intention of competing with private industry, only unproductive work was done, that, in fact, they only served to dole out to the workmen, rendered unemployed, alms from public funds, disguised by a system of unproductive occupation, lest the men should succumb to the consequences of utterly idle loafing.</p>
<p>How diverting, I say, must it be for anyone, who knows the ascertained facts, to hear this victorious argumentation resounding throughout Germany! How diverting, and yet depressing! For it shows, what in truth was unavoidable, that along with public opinion, public lying and calumny has become a power in Europe. In France, in 1848, during the time of the most bitter party struggles, newspapers have uttered this calumny against Louis Blanc, that the national workshops were organised by him and according to his principles! In vain did Louis Banc, speaking from the tribune of the national assembly, half kill himself in protesting against this calumny! He was not believed then.</p>
<p>Afterwards, the historical works of the enemies of Louie Blanc have been published, also the proceedings of the Parliamentary Commissions of Enquiry, dealing with the risings of 1848.</p>
<p>From the mouths of the bitterest enemies of Louis Blanc the truth has been brought to light. As far as France is concerned, that calumny is done with. But for Germany it continues, and serves as a basis for the most pathetic argumentations, put forward with the most impudent assurance.</p>
<p>Of course, my learned opponents have not the remotest idea that they are telling lies. They have read something about it at the time in French journals, or in German papers copying from them, and which of these learned gentlemen would have either inclination or leisure for reading up the historical works and minutes of evidence since published?</p>
<p>I have no occasion to identify myself with Louis Blanc. In my “letter of reply” I did not ask for an organisation of labour by the State. What I have advocated is a credit operation of the State, whereby it would be made possible for the working men to establish a voluntary association emanating from their own action.</p>
<p>Besides, I believe that between Louis Blanc’s and my own view on political economy there is a considerable amount of divergence.</p>
<p>But against that calumny of a man whose name is well-known all over Europe, and against the use which is now being made of it in Germany, it is the duty, and, I believe, also to the interest of public journals and the proper time to make known now the historical truth about those events. I shall prove my case by quotations from enemies of Louis Blanc, and as shortly as the limited space of public journals demands.</p>
<p>Monsieur Fran�ois Arago, member of the Provisional Government (the only one of the witnesses to be quoted, who, though a political opponent of Louis Blanc, was a personal friend of his), Arago, the greatest savant of France, the friend of Humboldt, giving evidence on July 5, 1848, before the Commission of Enquiry, says (“Rapport de la Commission d’Enqu�te,” I, 288): “C’est M. Marie qui s’est occup� de l’organisation des at�liers nationaux.” “It is M. Marie (known as a most bitter opponent of Louis Blanc and of the Socialist minority in the Provisional Government in general) who has occupied himself with the organisation of the National Workshops.”</p>
<p>The director of the National Workshops appointed by M. Marie was M. Emile Thomas, a tool entirely devoted to M. Marie, and, as we shall hear now, decidedly hostile to Louis Blanc. This director of the National Workshops gives evidence on oath before the Commission of Enquiry, July 28, 18:18 (Rapport de la Commission d’ Enqu�te, I., 352, 358) “Jamais je n’ai parl� a M. Louis Blanc de ma vie; je ne le connais pas.” Also: “Pendant clue j’ai �t� aux ateliers, j’ai vu M. Marie tous les jours, souvent deux fois par jour MM. Recurt, Buchez et Marrast presque tous les jours j’ai vu une seule fois M. de Lamartine, jamais M. Ledru Rollin, jamais M. Louis Blanc, jamais M. Flocon, jamais M. Albert.” (I have never in my life spoken to M. Louis Blanc; I do not know him. Whilst I was at the workshops I have seen M. Marie every day, sometimes twice a day Messrs. Recurt, Buchez and Marrast [all anti-Socialists] almost every day. I have seen M. de Lamartine once never M. Louis Ledru-Rollin; never M. Louis Blanc; never M. Flocon never M. Albert.) The last mentioned three formed the Socialist minority of the Government Ledru-Rollin stood between the two parties.</p>
<p>In his further evidence on June 28, 1848, this same director of the National Workshops, says (Rapport, etc., I. 353): “J’ai toujours march� avec la Mairie de Paris contre l’influence de MM. Ledru Rollin, Flocon et autres. J’�tais en hostilit� ouverte avec le Luxembourg. Je combattais ouvertement l’influence de M. Louis Blanc.” (I have always worked along with the Mairie against the influence of Ledru-Rollin, Flocon, and the others. I was in open hostility with the Luxembourg (meaning Louis Blanc). I have fought openly against the influence of M. Louis Blanc.)</p>
<p>The decrees of February 27 and March 6, 18.18, by which the National Workshops were organised, bear the signature of only one man, M. Marie.</p>
<p>This director of the National Workshops, M. Emile Thomas, has written a book, “The History of the National Workshops,” in which he makes the following confession (“L’Histoire des At�liers Nationaux,” page 200): “M. Marie me fit mander � l’h�tel de ville. Apres la seance du gouvernernent, je m’y rendis et re�us la nouvelle qu’un credit de cinq millions etait ouvert aux at�liers nationaux et que le service des finances s’accomplerait des lors avec plus de facilit�. M. Marie me prit ensuite � part et me demanda si je pouvais compter sur les ouvriers. Je le pense, repondis-je; cependant, le nombre s’en accroit tellement qu il me devient bien difficile de poss�der sur eux une action aussi directe que je le souhaiterais. Ne vous inqui�tez pas du nombre, me dit le ministre. Si vous les tenez, il ne sera jamais trop grand; mais trouvez un moyen de vous les attacher sinc�rement. Ne m�nagez pas l’argent, au b�soin m�me on vous accorderait des fonds secrets. Je ne pense pas en avoir b�soin ce serait pent �tre ensuite une source de difficult�s assez graves mais dans quel but autre que celui de la tranquillit� publique me faites-vous yes recommendations? Dans le but du salut public! Croyez-vous parvenir � commander enti�rement � vos hommes? Le jour n’est peut-�tre pas loin ou il faudrait les faire descendre dans la rue.”</p>
<p>(M. Marie had me called to the Hotel de Ville. After the sitting of the Government, I went there, and received the news that a credit of five million francs had been voted for the National Workshops, and that the financial arrangements would now work with the greatest ease. M. Marie then took me aside and asked me very quietly whether I could count upon the workmen. “I think so,” I replied “nevertheless, their number increases so much, that it becomes very difficult for me to exercise such a direct influence on them as I should like.” “Don’t worry about their number,” said the Minister. “If you have a firm hold on them, their number will never be too great but you should find some means of attaching them sincerely to yourself. Don’t spare the money if necessary, we might grant you secret funds.” “I don’t think I shall need them; that might later on be a source of serious trouble. But for what other purpose than that of public tranquillity do you make these recommendations?” “For the purpose of public safety. Do you think you will be able to rely entirely on your men? The day may not be distant when it may be necessary to call them out into the streets.”) Now let us listen to M. de Lamartine, an opponent of the Socialists, who, in his “Histoire de la R�volution de F�vrier,” part II, writes as follows about the National Workshops:</p>
<p class="quote">“Some Socialists, then moderate and politicians, but since become extreme partisans, demanded in this respect the initiative of the Government. A great campaign at home, with tools instead of arms, like the campaigns of the Romans and Egyptians for cutting canals and for draining the Pontinian swamps, seemed to them the most appropriate remedy for a republic, which intended to maintain peace, and while protecting and lifting up the proletarian, would also safeguard property. A great Ministry of Public Works would have opened the era of a policy adequate to the situation. It was one of the greatest mistakes of the Government to have deferred too long the realisation of these ideas. While it waited, the National Workshops, swollen by misery and idleness, became, day-by-day, slacker, more fruitless and menacing to the public peace. At that moment they were not so. They were only an expedient adopted in the interests of public order, and a first attempt of public assistance (une �bauche d’assistance publique), called into existence the day after the Revolution by the necessity of feeding the people, and not keeping it in idleness, so as to avoid the disorders which idleness brings about. M. Marie organised them with great insight, but without utility for productive work (mais sans utilit� pour le travail productif). He divided them into brigades, gave them leaders, and inspired them with the ideas of discipline and order. During the four months he turned them from a body devoted to the Socialists and given to riots, into a Pretorian army, but an idle one, in the hands of the Government (une arm�e pretorienne, mais oisive, dans les mains du pouvoir). Commanded, directed and maintained by chiefs, who were privy to the secret thoughts of the anti-Socialist wing of the Government, these National Workshops formed, till the National Assembly arrived, a counterpoise to the schismatic workmen of the Luxembourg (Louis Blanc’s following), and to the disorderly workmen of the clubs. They scandalised by their numbers and by the uselessness of their work (par leur masse et l’inutilit� de leurs travaux) the eyes of Paris, but they saved it several times without its knowledge. Far from being in the pay of Louis Blanc, as has been said, they were inspired by the spirit of his opponents (Bien loin d’�tre la solde de Louis Blanc comme l’on a dit, ils �taient inspir�s par l’esprit de ses adversaires).”</p>
<p>Do you wish to know exactly all the purposes that the National Workshops were intended to serve? Their director, M. Emile Thomas, is quite frank about the matter (“L’Histoire des At�liers Nationaux,” page 200) “M. Marie told me that it had been the firm resolve of the Government to let this experiment, the Government Commission for the workmen, run its course (de laisser s’accomplir cette exp�rience, la commission de gouvernement pour les travailleurs), that in itself, it could only have beneficial results, by showing the work men the utter hollowness and falsity of these unrealisable theories, and by making them feel their doleful consequences for themselves. Then, disillusioned in the future, their idolatry of Louis Blanc would disappear, and he would thus lose all his authority, all his power, and would cease for good and all to be a danger.”</p>
<p>Such were the intentions which they had in view in the establishment of “Louis Blanc’s National Workshops.” And so that this purpose was more surely attained, and that this “experiment” should be more certainly accomplished, the workmen were employed on unproductive works only. The works which were carried out are specified in a letter of the director (M. Emile Thomas) to the Minister Marie:</p>
<p>“R�parations des chemins de ronde et rues non pav�es de Paris. Terrassements rues les rampes d’I�na, la pelouse des Champs Elys�es et l’abattoir Montmartre. Extraction de cailloux sur les communes de Clichy et de Gennevilliers. Cr�ation du chemin de halage de Neuilly.” (Garnier-Pages, “Histoire de la R�volution de 1848,” VIII., 154.) Repairs of the military roads for patrols, and of the unpaved roads of Paris. Earthworks (levelling) on the Jena slopes, on the lawns in the Champs Elysees’ and the slaughter-house of Montmartre. Extracting stones in the communes of Clichy and Gennevilliers. Making the towing-path of Neuilly.)</p>
<p>As these works were only undertaken because they did not want to let the men whom it was intended to feed, loaf about altogether, they were put to work turn and turn about, two or three days per week (“Ils ne travaillaient qu’a tour de r�le deux ou trois jours par semaine.” (Gamier-Pag�s).</p>
<p>Thus, indeed, was it possible to attain the purpose of that intentional calumny. And this purpose was so well attained, that as we have seen, even to-day, 15 years later, everybody in Germany is quite positive that Louis Blanc had started National Workshops on Socialist principles, which had miserably failed!</p>
<p>We see calumny is a European power, aye even one of the great powers! This calumny, at the time, was by the newspapers carried all over Europe, was readily believed, repeated, and though Louis Blanc has refuted it hundreds of times, it still rules supreme in public opinion in Germany. Shall we draw an obvious moral from this?</p>
<p>This, then, is the historical truth about “Louis Blanc’s National Workshops of 1848.”</p>
<p>In conclusion, Lassalle repeats, with personal remarks, the extract front the “Volkszeitung” given at the commencement of the article, and winds up as follows:- </p>
<p>“So, I shall make my apologies to Mr. Julian Schmidt before long! Instead of taking him to task, I ought really to have turned my attention to individuals who work far greater havoc in the minds of the people.”</p>
<p class="fst">F. LASSALLE. <br>
Berlin, April 24, 1863.</p>
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Ferdinand Lassalle 1863
The French National Workshops of 1848
Source: Social Democrat, Vol. 10, no. 4, 15 April 1906, pp. 236-242;
Transcribed: by Ted Crawford.
Proofread: Andy Carloff, 2010
The attitude of members of the present Government, notably Mr. John Morley, towards the demand of the unemployed for the “right to work,” and their gross misrepresentation of the experiment of ‘48, gives occasion for the following. Liberal statesmen, like their predecessors, assert that the so-called “National Workshops” of Paris were a failure, and use this as an argument against any attempt at the State organisation of labour. Even if their representation of the facts were true, it would not be conclusive evidence of the impossibility of the national organisation of the labour of the unemployed, but this historical retrospect shows that they have misrepresented the whole of the facts, and have thus destroyed their own case.
The French National Workshops of 1848
A Historical Retrospect, by FERDINAND LASSALLE.
(Reprint from “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.”)
The lie is a European power!
Hardly had my “Letter to the Leipzig Working-men’s Committee” appeared, when the learned Mr. Faucher declared, in a meeting at Leipzig, that I was merely dishing up again the French National Workshops of Louis Blanc, which were already condemned by their miserable fiasco in 1848.
The even more learned talmudist of the “Volkszeitung,” in his yesterday’s leader, in No. 95, delivers himself as follows:-
“After these ideas (‘to establish in the name of the State and with State funds workshops which would guarantee employment, regulate wages and satisfy the needs of the workman’) had been widely disseminated from France during the forties, the Paris revolution of February, 1848, brought the opportunity to put them to a practical test. Louis Blanc, a very able writer, who had up till then propagated these ideas as a means of political agitation, was, in consequence of the Revolution, made a member of the Provisional Government, and had in this capacity to attempt a realisation of his proposals. The attempt failed entirely, and the causes of the failure have been clearly discerned by science. The attempt failed so thoroughly, that in France the direct universal suffrage could be abolished, even under the Republican regime (!) though it had been adopted as the only means of safety for the majority of the propertyless classes. The attempt failed so thoroughly, that, though after the Coup d’�tat universal direct suffrage was re- established, the fantastic proposals of Louis Blanc remained a dead letter, and hitherto, neither in France nor elsewhere, no thinking person has dreamt of reviving them.”
And what Mr. Faucher and the “Volkszeitung” said, I believe Mr. Wirth said also. I am not certain about it, because I have to read day by day so many attacks upon me, that the recollection of them all gets a trifle mixed, and I do not rightly know what to put to the account of one or of another. I am afraid I shall have to prepare a “herring’s salad,” in which I have to cut up all my learned opponents, and to make them suffer all for each, and each for all, leaving it to them to sort out what properly applies to one or the other, just as State Governments do when raising contributions from a number of communities.
But at any rate I have read variants of the same theme in at least a score of papers, and from north and south, from west and east, comes the cry: “But these are the national workshops of Louis Blanc of 1848! They have been finally judged and condemned in 1848.
It would almost appear as if hardly anybody in Germany was correctly informed as to the true facts concerning the French National Workshops of 1848!
How diverting this sort of argumentation must he for those who know the true facts, who are aware (1) that the “National Workshops” were not set up by Louis Blanc, but by his enemies, the most vehement opponents of Socialism in the Provisional Government, the Minister for Public Works, Marie, and others who had the majority in the Provisional Government (2) that they were expressly intended for use against Louis Blanc, so as to oppose to his following, the Socialist workmen, both during the elections and on other more decisive occasions, a paid working class army devoted to the Government majority; (3) that in the National Workshops, precisely because there was no intention of competing with private industry, only unproductive work was done, that, in fact, they only served to dole out to the workmen, rendered unemployed, alms from public funds, disguised by a system of unproductive occupation, lest the men should succumb to the consequences of utterly idle loafing.
How diverting, I say, must it be for anyone, who knows the ascertained facts, to hear this victorious argumentation resounding throughout Germany! How diverting, and yet depressing! For it shows, what in truth was unavoidable, that along with public opinion, public lying and calumny has become a power in Europe. In France, in 1848, during the time of the most bitter party struggles, newspapers have uttered this calumny against Louis Blanc, that the national workshops were organised by him and according to his principles! In vain did Louis Banc, speaking from the tribune of the national assembly, half kill himself in protesting against this calumny! He was not believed then.
Afterwards, the historical works of the enemies of Louie Blanc have been published, also the proceedings of the Parliamentary Commissions of Enquiry, dealing with the risings of 1848.
From the mouths of the bitterest enemies of Louis Blanc the truth has been brought to light. As far as France is concerned, that calumny is done with. But for Germany it continues, and serves as a basis for the most pathetic argumentations, put forward with the most impudent assurance.
Of course, my learned opponents have not the remotest idea that they are telling lies. They have read something about it at the time in French journals, or in German papers copying from them, and which of these learned gentlemen would have either inclination or leisure for reading up the historical works and minutes of evidence since published?
I have no occasion to identify myself with Louis Blanc. In my “letter of reply” I did not ask for an organisation of labour by the State. What I have advocated is a credit operation of the State, whereby it would be made possible for the working men to establish a voluntary association emanating from their own action.
Besides, I believe that between Louis Blanc’s and my own view on political economy there is a considerable amount of divergence.
But against that calumny of a man whose name is well-known all over Europe, and against the use which is now being made of it in Germany, it is the duty, and, I believe, also to the interest of public journals and the proper time to make known now the historical truth about those events. I shall prove my case by quotations from enemies of Louis Blanc, and as shortly as the limited space of public journals demands.
Monsieur Fran�ois Arago, member of the Provisional Government (the only one of the witnesses to be quoted, who, though a political opponent of Louis Blanc, was a personal friend of his), Arago, the greatest savant of France, the friend of Humboldt, giving evidence on July 5, 1848, before the Commission of Enquiry, says (“Rapport de la Commission d’Enqu�te,” I, 288): “C’est M. Marie qui s’est occup� de l’organisation des at�liers nationaux.” “It is M. Marie (known as a most bitter opponent of Louis Blanc and of the Socialist minority in the Provisional Government in general) who has occupied himself with the organisation of the National Workshops.”
The director of the National Workshops appointed by M. Marie was M. Emile Thomas, a tool entirely devoted to M. Marie, and, as we shall hear now, decidedly hostile to Louis Blanc. This director of the National Workshops gives evidence on oath before the Commission of Enquiry, July 28, 18:18 (Rapport de la Commission d’ Enqu�te, I., 352, 358) “Jamais je n’ai parl� a M. Louis Blanc de ma vie; je ne le connais pas.” Also: “Pendant clue j’ai �t� aux ateliers, j’ai vu M. Marie tous les jours, souvent deux fois par jour MM. Recurt, Buchez et Marrast presque tous les jours j’ai vu une seule fois M. de Lamartine, jamais M. Ledru Rollin, jamais M. Louis Blanc, jamais M. Flocon, jamais M. Albert.” (I have never in my life spoken to M. Louis Blanc; I do not know him. Whilst I was at the workshops I have seen M. Marie every day, sometimes twice a day Messrs. Recurt, Buchez and Marrast [all anti-Socialists] almost every day. I have seen M. de Lamartine once never M. Louis Ledru-Rollin; never M. Louis Blanc; never M. Flocon never M. Albert.) The last mentioned three formed the Socialist minority of the Government Ledru-Rollin stood between the two parties.
In his further evidence on June 28, 1848, this same director of the National Workshops, says (Rapport, etc., I. 353): “J’ai toujours march� avec la Mairie de Paris contre l’influence de MM. Ledru Rollin, Flocon et autres. J’�tais en hostilit� ouverte avec le Luxembourg. Je combattais ouvertement l’influence de M. Louis Blanc.” (I have always worked along with the Mairie against the influence of Ledru-Rollin, Flocon, and the others. I was in open hostility with the Luxembourg (meaning Louis Blanc). I have fought openly against the influence of M. Louis Blanc.)
The decrees of February 27 and March 6, 18.18, by which the National Workshops were organised, bear the signature of only one man, M. Marie.
This director of the National Workshops, M. Emile Thomas, has written a book, “The History of the National Workshops,” in which he makes the following confession (“L’Histoire des At�liers Nationaux,” page 200): “M. Marie me fit mander � l’h�tel de ville. Apres la seance du gouvernernent, je m’y rendis et re�us la nouvelle qu’un credit de cinq millions etait ouvert aux at�liers nationaux et que le service des finances s’accomplerait des lors avec plus de facilit�. M. Marie me prit ensuite � part et me demanda si je pouvais compter sur les ouvriers. Je le pense, repondis-je; cependant, le nombre s’en accroit tellement qu il me devient bien difficile de poss�der sur eux une action aussi directe que je le souhaiterais. Ne vous inqui�tez pas du nombre, me dit le ministre. Si vous les tenez, il ne sera jamais trop grand; mais trouvez un moyen de vous les attacher sinc�rement. Ne m�nagez pas l’argent, au b�soin m�me on vous accorderait des fonds secrets. Je ne pense pas en avoir b�soin ce serait pent �tre ensuite une source de difficult�s assez graves mais dans quel but autre que celui de la tranquillit� publique me faites-vous yes recommendations? Dans le but du salut public! Croyez-vous parvenir � commander enti�rement � vos hommes? Le jour n’est peut-�tre pas loin ou il faudrait les faire descendre dans la rue.”
(M. Marie had me called to the Hotel de Ville. After the sitting of the Government, I went there, and received the news that a credit of five million francs had been voted for the National Workshops, and that the financial arrangements would now work with the greatest ease. M. Marie then took me aside and asked me very quietly whether I could count upon the workmen. “I think so,” I replied “nevertheless, their number increases so much, that it becomes very difficult for me to exercise such a direct influence on them as I should like.” “Don’t worry about their number,” said the Minister. “If you have a firm hold on them, their number will never be too great but you should find some means of attaching them sincerely to yourself. Don’t spare the money if necessary, we might grant you secret funds.” “I don’t think I shall need them; that might later on be a source of serious trouble. But for what other purpose than that of public tranquillity do you make these recommendations?” “For the purpose of public safety. Do you think you will be able to rely entirely on your men? The day may not be distant when it may be necessary to call them out into the streets.”) Now let us listen to M. de Lamartine, an opponent of the Socialists, who, in his “Histoire de la R�volution de F�vrier,” part II, writes as follows about the National Workshops:
“Some Socialists, then moderate and politicians, but since become extreme partisans, demanded in this respect the initiative of the Government. A great campaign at home, with tools instead of arms, like the campaigns of the Romans and Egyptians for cutting canals and for draining the Pontinian swamps, seemed to them the most appropriate remedy for a republic, which intended to maintain peace, and while protecting and lifting up the proletarian, would also safeguard property. A great Ministry of Public Works would have opened the era of a policy adequate to the situation. It was one of the greatest mistakes of the Government to have deferred too long the realisation of these ideas. While it waited, the National Workshops, swollen by misery and idleness, became, day-by-day, slacker, more fruitless and menacing to the public peace. At that moment they were not so. They were only an expedient adopted in the interests of public order, and a first attempt of public assistance (une �bauche d’assistance publique), called into existence the day after the Revolution by the necessity of feeding the people, and not keeping it in idleness, so as to avoid the disorders which idleness brings about. M. Marie organised them with great insight, but without utility for productive work (mais sans utilit� pour le travail productif). He divided them into brigades, gave them leaders, and inspired them with the ideas of discipline and order. During the four months he turned them from a body devoted to the Socialists and given to riots, into a Pretorian army, but an idle one, in the hands of the Government (une arm�e pretorienne, mais oisive, dans les mains du pouvoir). Commanded, directed and maintained by chiefs, who were privy to the secret thoughts of the anti-Socialist wing of the Government, these National Workshops formed, till the National Assembly arrived, a counterpoise to the schismatic workmen of the Luxembourg (Louis Blanc’s following), and to the disorderly workmen of the clubs. They scandalised by their numbers and by the uselessness of their work (par leur masse et l’inutilit� de leurs travaux) the eyes of Paris, but they saved it several times without its knowledge. Far from being in the pay of Louis Blanc, as has been said, they were inspired by the spirit of his opponents (Bien loin d’�tre la solde de Louis Blanc comme l’on a dit, ils �taient inspir�s par l’esprit de ses adversaires).”
Do you wish to know exactly all the purposes that the National Workshops were intended to serve? Their director, M. Emile Thomas, is quite frank about the matter (“L’Histoire des At�liers Nationaux,” page 200) “M. Marie told me that it had been the firm resolve of the Government to let this experiment, the Government Commission for the workmen, run its course (de laisser s’accomplir cette exp�rience, la commission de gouvernement pour les travailleurs), that in itself, it could only have beneficial results, by showing the work men the utter hollowness and falsity of these unrealisable theories, and by making them feel their doleful consequences for themselves. Then, disillusioned in the future, their idolatry of Louis Blanc would disappear, and he would thus lose all his authority, all his power, and would cease for good and all to be a danger.”
Such were the intentions which they had in view in the establishment of “Louis Blanc’s National Workshops.” And so that this purpose was more surely attained, and that this “experiment” should be more certainly accomplished, the workmen were employed on unproductive works only. The works which were carried out are specified in a letter of the director (M. Emile Thomas) to the Minister Marie:
“R�parations des chemins de ronde et rues non pav�es de Paris. Terrassements rues les rampes d’I�na, la pelouse des Champs Elys�es et l’abattoir Montmartre. Extraction de cailloux sur les communes de Clichy et de Gennevilliers. Cr�ation du chemin de halage de Neuilly.” (Garnier-Pages, “Histoire de la R�volution de 1848,” VIII., 154.) Repairs of the military roads for patrols, and of the unpaved roads of Paris. Earthworks (levelling) on the Jena slopes, on the lawns in the Champs Elysees’ and the slaughter-house of Montmartre. Extracting stones in the communes of Clichy and Gennevilliers. Making the towing-path of Neuilly.)
As these works were only undertaken because they did not want to let the men whom it was intended to feed, loaf about altogether, they were put to work turn and turn about, two or three days per week (“Ils ne travaillaient qu’a tour de r�le deux ou trois jours par semaine.” (Gamier-Pag�s).
Thus, indeed, was it possible to attain the purpose of that intentional calumny. And this purpose was so well attained, that as we have seen, even to-day, 15 years later, everybody in Germany is quite positive that Louis Blanc had started National Workshops on Socialist principles, which had miserably failed!
We see calumny is a European power, aye even one of the great powers! This calumny, at the time, was by the newspapers carried all over Europe, was readily believed, repeated, and though Louis Blanc has refuted it hundreds of times, it still rules supreme in public opinion in Germany. Shall we draw an obvious moral from this?
This, then, is the historical truth about “Louis Blanc’s National Workshops of 1848.”
In conclusion, Lassalle repeats, with personal remarks, the extract front the “Volkszeitung” given at the commencement of the article, and winds up as follows:-
“So, I shall make my apologies to Mr. Julian Schmidt before long! Instead of taking him to task, I ought really to have turned my attention to individuals who work far greater havoc in the minds of the people.”
F. LASSALLE.
Berlin, April 24, 1863.
Ferdinand Lassalle Archive
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<h2>Karl Kautsky</h2>
<h1>Ferdinand Lassalle: A 25-year memorial</h1>
<h3>(August 1889)</h3>
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<p class="info"><strong>Source:</strong> Karl Kautsky, <em>Ferdinand Lassalle: A 25-year memorial</em>, <strong>Cosmonaut</strong>, 31. August 2020.<br>
Translated by Emma Anderson.<br>
Copied with thanks from the <a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2020/08/ferdinand-lassalle-a-25-year-memorial-by-karl-kautsky/" target="new"><em>Cosmonaut Website</em></a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">On the 31st of August, a quarter of a century will have passed since the guardian of the German proletariat closed his eyes for the last time. Everywhere there are German workers, or even, everywhere there is a labor movement who have been influenced by German socialism, will on this day gratefully remember the late Lassalle, who with both large success and courage stood up for rights of the proletariat as one of the few who understood the power, endurance and heroism that the working-class can show while for others it seemed hopeless, desperate really, to spend time on this class.</p>
<p>To try and give a sketch of Ferdinand Lassalle’s life and actions for the working-class here would be a waste of time. There are few who have become so popular and whose life story has become so known to the masses. Maybe there is no other socialist whose greatness is admitted by both sides, by enemies as well as friends.</p>
<p>It is not without its issues that the enemy praises Lassalle. They do it to mark him with tendencies to make him out to be a nationalist, royalist state-socialist as opposed to the international, republican social-democracy; they want to play Marx and Lassalle against each other.</p>
<p>This is of course only possible by using false facts. Lassalle never showed any opposition against internationalism and never hid his republican convictions. The spirit that carried his agitation was the same spirit that permeated the <strong>Communist Manifesto</strong> and dominated the International.</p>
<p>His demands for universal suffrage and for state-supported worker-owned production associations, his struggle against the Progressive Party and Manchester Liberalism, these are all aligned with the essence of modern socialism as they proceed from the fundamental understanding that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself, through class-struggle, which is by necessity also a political struggle that must have to goal of seizing state power to use it in the interest of the working class for the socialist transformation of society.</p>
<p>But if Lassalle’s agitation and demands were filled with the same thought as the <strong>Communist Manifesto</strong> it follows that it was adjusted to the period that he was active; it corresponds to Germany during the 1860s, more specifically the turbulent time in Prussia. Alongside the genius and fiery passion of Lassalle it was not the least of all the adjustment of his agitation that produced such surprising and great results that gave rise to a real legend that still distorts the image of the great agitator.</p>
<p>But this adjustment to a specific time and place was only meant to be provisional; Lassalle’s program was as half-baked as the country he wanted to change. To the misfortune of both his work and our party he died right before the great upheavals in Germany started, which would surely have led him to develop and expand his program. Modern Germany first came to be in the political revolutions in 1866 and 1870, alongside the industrial revolution, and which is still developing.</p>
<p>Lassalle’s primary political demand, universal suffrage, has long since been carried out. The Manchester rule is dead, the Progressive Party has shrunk and become marginalized, and the production associations of one-off workers, which Lassalle never put too much emphasis on, in the age of international production no longer make up a transitional form to a higher mode of production but instead the last elements of a dying mode of production. But the economic workers’ organizations, which were in Lassalle’s time not known by name in Germany or anywhere on the continent for that matter, but Marx advocated their importance for the class-struggle already in 1847 – we mean of course the trade unions.</p>
<p>That all these revolutions must firstly benefit the most revolutionary of all parties, social-democracy, is a simple fact. They did not simply expand the number of members but also the goal. It became more than Lassallieanism.</p>
<p>It is no wonder that the opposition against Social-Democracy, weary in the face of its success, long for the time of Lassalle’s beautiful agitation. These fools don’t understand that that the course of events is always stronger than its largest genius, they also forget that Lassalle stood on the same groundings as modern Social-Democracy when he started his agitation; he would have been the first to develop his program after the changing conditions; that his work for a free and united Germany would never have brought him to see the modern Bismarckian as the realization of his goals; and his ideas for state cooperatives would have made him a resolute enemy to the “social-kingdom” of Wilhelm the First and Second, who without a doubt would have taken up the demands of Lassalle but changed its meaning to something else entirely.</p>
<p>But the state-socialists don’t have a real reason to wish that Lassalle was still alive, or even a real reason to appeal to the dead Lassalle against modern and living social-Democracy, differences of opinions notwithstanding in their expressions. Even if Lassalle’s agitation was made for a specific time and place they are still to this day the best propaganda texts that Social-Democracy has. Here we can see the real greatness of the man. It pulls every reader in, regardless if one is a worker, scientist, an experienced politician or an illusion filled young one. The clarity and depth of his thinking, expressed with sharp and certitude, the proud superiority and fiery passion – all work together to make for inspiring and overwhelming agitation.</p>
<p>As a politician, and no less a theoretician, Lassalle already belongs to history and has been tried through its critique. But as an agitator he still lives in his youth among all German-speaking workers, still brings fire to the heart of the working-class struggle for emancipation, and still hardens one’s character against persecution and oppression. When we remember Lassalle we should not only remember the fallen hero, who fought for our cause and has been a role model, let us also remember the immortal Lassalle – “the fighter and the thinker”, as is written on his gravestone – that which lives inside and with us: the spirit which is communicated through his texts. And what better way to celebrate his memory than to occupy ourselves fully with his spirit and spreading it among the proletariat, “the rock on which the future church will be built.”</p>
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MIA > Archive > Kautsky
Karl Kautsky
Ferdinand Lassalle: A 25-year memorial
(August 1889)
Source: Karl Kautsky, Ferdinand Lassalle: A 25-year memorial, Cosmonaut, 31. August 2020.
Translated by Emma Anderson.
Copied with thanks from the Cosmonaut Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
On the 31st of August, a quarter of a century will have passed since the guardian of the German proletariat closed his eyes for the last time. Everywhere there are German workers, or even, everywhere there is a labor movement who have been influenced by German socialism, will on this day gratefully remember the late Lassalle, who with both large success and courage stood up for rights of the proletariat as one of the few who understood the power, endurance and heroism that the working-class can show while for others it seemed hopeless, desperate really, to spend time on this class.
To try and give a sketch of Ferdinand Lassalle’s life and actions for the working-class here would be a waste of time. There are few who have become so popular and whose life story has become so known to the masses. Maybe there is no other socialist whose greatness is admitted by both sides, by enemies as well as friends.
It is not without its issues that the enemy praises Lassalle. They do it to mark him with tendencies to make him out to be a nationalist, royalist state-socialist as opposed to the international, republican social-democracy; they want to play Marx and Lassalle against each other.
This is of course only possible by using false facts. Lassalle never showed any opposition against internationalism and never hid his republican convictions. The spirit that carried his agitation was the same spirit that permeated the Communist Manifesto and dominated the International.
His demands for universal suffrage and for state-supported worker-owned production associations, his struggle against the Progressive Party and Manchester Liberalism, these are all aligned with the essence of modern socialism as they proceed from the fundamental understanding that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself, through class-struggle, which is by necessity also a political struggle that must have to goal of seizing state power to use it in the interest of the working class for the socialist transformation of society.
But if Lassalle’s agitation and demands were filled with the same thought as the Communist Manifesto it follows that it was adjusted to the period that he was active; it corresponds to Germany during the 1860s, more specifically the turbulent time in Prussia. Alongside the genius and fiery passion of Lassalle it was not the least of all the adjustment of his agitation that produced such surprising and great results that gave rise to a real legend that still distorts the image of the great agitator.
But this adjustment to a specific time and place was only meant to be provisional; Lassalle’s program was as half-baked as the country he wanted to change. To the misfortune of both his work and our party he died right before the great upheavals in Germany started, which would surely have led him to develop and expand his program. Modern Germany first came to be in the political revolutions in 1866 and 1870, alongside the industrial revolution, and which is still developing.
Lassalle’s primary political demand, universal suffrage, has long since been carried out. The Manchester rule is dead, the Progressive Party has shrunk and become marginalized, and the production associations of one-off workers, which Lassalle never put too much emphasis on, in the age of international production no longer make up a transitional form to a higher mode of production but instead the last elements of a dying mode of production. But the economic workers’ organizations, which were in Lassalle’s time not known by name in Germany or anywhere on the continent for that matter, but Marx advocated their importance for the class-struggle already in 1847 – we mean of course the trade unions.
That all these revolutions must firstly benefit the most revolutionary of all parties, social-democracy, is a simple fact. They did not simply expand the number of members but also the goal. It became more than Lassallieanism.
It is no wonder that the opposition against Social-Democracy, weary in the face of its success, long for the time of Lassalle’s beautiful agitation. These fools don’t understand that that the course of events is always stronger than its largest genius, they also forget that Lassalle stood on the same groundings as modern Social-Democracy when he started his agitation; he would have been the first to develop his program after the changing conditions; that his work for a free and united Germany would never have brought him to see the modern Bismarckian as the realization of his goals; and his ideas for state cooperatives would have made him a resolute enemy to the “social-kingdom” of Wilhelm the First and Second, who without a doubt would have taken up the demands of Lassalle but changed its meaning to something else entirely.
But the state-socialists don’t have a real reason to wish that Lassalle was still alive, or even a real reason to appeal to the dead Lassalle against modern and living social-Democracy, differences of opinions notwithstanding in their expressions. Even if Lassalle’s agitation was made for a specific time and place they are still to this day the best propaganda texts that Social-Democracy has. Here we can see the real greatness of the man. It pulls every reader in, regardless if one is a worker, scientist, an experienced politician or an illusion filled young one. The clarity and depth of his thinking, expressed with sharp and certitude, the proud superiority and fiery passion – all work together to make for inspiring and overwhelming agitation.
As a politician, and no less a theoretician, Lassalle already belongs to history and has been tried through its critique. But as an agitator he still lives in his youth among all German-speaking workers, still brings fire to the heart of the working-class struggle for emancipation, and still hardens one’s character against persecution and oppression. When we remember Lassalle we should not only remember the fallen hero, who fought for our cause and has been a role model, let us also remember the immortal Lassalle – “the fighter and the thinker”, as is written on his gravestone – that which lives inside and with us: the spirit which is communicated through his texts. And what better way to celebrate his memory than to occupy ourselves fully with his spirit and spreading it among the proletariat, “the rock on which the future church will be built.”
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<h2>Ferdinand Lassalle</h2>
<h1>To the German Workers</h1>
<h4>(1863)</h4>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Written: </span>As a speech in German, May 17<sup>th</sup>, 1863.<br>
<span class="info">Published in English: </span>1927.<br>
<span class="info">Translated by: </span>Jakob Altmeier (presumed).<br>
<span class="info">Source: </span><i>Voices of Revolt: Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle.</i> International Publishers, first edition, 1927, New York, USA. 94 pages.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription and Markup: </span>Bill Wright for marxists.org, February, 2023<br>
</p>
<hr class="infobot">
<p class="fst">
You German workers
are funny fellows! When one addresses meetings of French and English
workers, one tells them how they may remedy their sad situation; but,
in talking to <i>you,</i> one must first make you see that your
situation is a sad one. As long as you still have a piece of cheap
sausage and a glass of beer, you are blind to your surroundings and
do not even know that there is anything wrong! This is what comes of
this damned frugality of yours! How — will be your answer —
is not frugality a virtue? No doubt, in the eyes of the Christian
preachers of morals, no doubt frugality is a virtue! Frugality is a
virtue of the Hindu saint on his pillar, and of the Christian monk;
but the virtue that is appreciated by the historian and the political
economist is a far different one. Ask any political economist what is
the greatest misfortune of a people and he will answer: to be
over-frugal in its requirements! For its needs and requirements are
the goads to its evolution and culture. . . .
</p>
<p>
The virtue of the
present-day — the day of political economy — is to have
as many needs as possible and to fulfill them in an honest and decent
manner! Until you understand this fact I shall have preached to you
in vain!
</p>
<p class="from">
—From a
speech delivered at Frankfort-on-the-Main, May 17, 1863
</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > Lassalle > Voices of Revolt
Ferdinand Lassalle
To the German Workers
(1863)
Written: As a speech in German, May 17th, 1863.
Published in English: 1927.
Translated by: Jakob Altmeier (presumed).
Source: Voices of Revolt: Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle. International Publishers, first edition, 1927, New York, USA. 94 pages.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for marxists.org, February, 2023
You German workers
are funny fellows! When one addresses meetings of French and English
workers, one tells them how they may remedy their sad situation; but,
in talking to you, one must first make you see that your
situation is a sad one. As long as you still have a piece of cheap
sausage and a glass of beer, you are blind to your surroundings and
do not even know that there is anything wrong! This is what comes of
this damned frugality of yours! How — will be your answer —
is not frugality a virtue? No doubt, in the eyes of the Christian
preachers of morals, no doubt frugality is a virtue! Frugality is a
virtue of the Hindu saint on his pillar, and of the Christian monk;
but the virtue that is appreciated by the historian and the political
economist is a far different one. Ask any political economist what is
the greatest misfortune of a people and he will answer: to be
over-frugal in its requirements! For its needs and requirements are
the goads to its evolution and culture. . . .
The virtue of the
present-day — the day of political economy — is to have
as many needs as possible and to fulfill them in an honest and decent
manner! Until you understand this fact I shall have preached to you
in vain!
—From a
speech delivered at Frankfort-on-the-Main, May 17, 1863
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<h2>Rosa Luxemburg</h2>
<h1>Lassalle and the Revolution</h1>
<h3>(March 1904)</h3>
<hr class="fst">
<p class="information">Originally written for a volume commemorating Ferdinantd Lassalle. <a id="fa" href="#na" name="fa">[1*]</a><br>
<span class="info">This version:</span> <strong>Weekly Worker</strong>, <a href="https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/752/rosa-luxemburg-in-her-own-words/" target="new">No. 752</a>, 15 January 2009.<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> Ben Lewis.<br>
Copied with thanks from the <a href="http://www.cpgb.org.uk/" target="new">CPGB/Weekly Worker Website</a>.<br>
<span class="info">Marked up:</span> <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Lassalle’s immediate relationship with the March [1848] revolution has remained a mere fragmentary, almost fleeting, one.</p>
<p>This is partly because of his still relatively young age, but above all because of the peculiar concatenation of circumstances in his life which – for almost a decade – chained him to the individual fate of a woman badly abused by the dominant feudal powers and which have made his energy to the service of the revolution highly disputed in this period. <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> Not until the November crisis of 1848 was Lassalle able to play an exemplary part in the revolutionary struggles of the Rhineland. Immediately, however, he was snared by the Prussian judiciary, which only released him when the revolution was over.</p>
<p>But Lassalle’s historical connection with the March revolution does not end with his direct agitation during the ‘great year’: it was not even the main thing about it. Rather, it was the fact that Lassalle put into practice the most important historical consequence of the March revolution by finally releasing the German working class from the political conscription of the bourgeoisie and organising it into an independent class party.</p>
<p>As is well known, the specific manner in which Lassalle carried out this immortal task has been met with sharp and often well deserved criticism from Marx.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“He made big mistakes,” wrote Marx to Schweitzer in 1868. “He allowed himself to be influenced too much by the immediate circumstances of the time. He made the minor starting point, his opposition to the dwarf-like Schulze-Delitzsch, the central point of his agitation – state aid versus self-help. The ‘state’ was, therefore, transformed into the Prussian state. He was thus forced to make concessions to the Prussian monarchy, to Prussian reaction (the feudal party) and even to the clerics.” <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Yet Lassalle’s great deed – accomplished both in spite of and through these mistakes – is not reduced, but actually grows in significance with the historical perspective from which we observe it. That Lassalle understood how to see through the inner misery of bourgeois liberalism and to expose this ruthlessly and almost brutally in front of the working class – especially at a time when this liberalism was still, after all, daring to engage in something akin to a struggle with the crown and the Junker reaction – this service will in this sense be ever greater in the eyes of the historians and the politicians, for since then the bourgeoisie has achieved the miracle of sliding, year on year, further down beyond the depths where it stood even back then.</p>
<p>And if still today, until quite recently, if only sporadically and fleetingly, illusions in a new upswing, an Indian summer of bourgeois liberalism, the cooperation and common struggle of the proletariat were conceivable, the more groundbreaking Lassalle’s noble deed will become, as he did not hesitate for a second in showing the German proletariat the way to independent class politics through the rubble of liberalism stemming from the time of conflict – a liberalism that, of course, towers above the liberalism of today.</p>
<p>In his tactics of struggle, Lassalle certainly did make mistakes. Yet emphasising mistakes in a great life’s work is the trite pleasure of petty peddlars of historical research. Far more important in judging someone’s personality and the impact of their work is to ascertain the actual cause or the specific source from which both their errors and virtues resulted. In many cases, Lassalle transgressed in his tendency to ‘diplomacy’ or ‘ploys’, such as in his deals with Bismarck on the introduction from above of general suffrage or in his plans for cooperatives funded with state credit. In his political struggles with bourgeois society, as well as in his judicial struggles with the Prussian judiciary, he happily fought on the enemy’s territory, appearing to make concessions in his point of view. A sassy, noble acrobat, as Johann Phillip Becker wrote, he often dared to jump right to the edge of the abyss that separates a revolutionary tactic from collaboration with reaction.</p>
<p>But the cause that led him to these audacious leaps was not inner insecurity, an inner doubt of the strength and practicability of the revolutionary cause that he represented, but on the contrary an excess of confident belief in the unconquerable power of this cause. Lassalle sometimes went over to the ground of the opponent in the fight, not in order to relinquish something of his revolutionary goals, but, on the contrary, in the deluded belief that his strong personality would suffice to wrest away so much from his opponent for those revolutionary goals, that the ground beneath his opponent’s feet would cave in.</p>
<p>When, for example, Lassalle grafted his idea of cooperatives funded by state credit onto an idealistic, unhistorical fiction of the ‘state’, the great danger of this fiction was that in reality he merely idealised the wretched Prussian state. But what Lassalle wanted to impose on it in terms of the tasks and duties of the working class would not only have shaken the miserable shack that is the Prussian state, but the bourgeois state in general.</p>
<p>The wrong – one might say the opportunistic – aspect of the Lassallean tactic was that he aimed his demands at the wrong audience. Yet his demands did not as a result diminish and disintegrate in his hands: they grew more and more. And if he preferred to reduce the whole fight to a few militant slogans – on the general right to vote and the productive associations, for example – then it was not an excess of patience, which would have meant abandoning the sea of socialist demands for piecemeal bourgeois reforms, but his impatience, on the contrary, which drove him to concentrate all forces on one or a few particular points of attack in order to cut short the long historic process.</p>
<p>So the mistakes of Lassallean tactics are those of an aggressive attacker, not a ditherer. They are those of a daring revolutionary, not a fainthearted diplomat.</p>
<p>In every period there are people – and there are also such people today – who only believe in the possibility and the timeliness of a revolution when it has already happened. Such people grasp world history not by observing its face, so to speak, but its behind. Lassalle belonged to that great generation, at the top of which Karl Marx shone, in which belief in the revolution was alive in all its power. Not merely in the sense that in the 1850s Lassalle, like Marx and Engels, still confidently expected the return of the March revolutionary wave in Europe, but above all in the sense that he lived in the rock-solid conviction of the validity and inevitability of the proletarian revolution.</p>
<p>He constantly listened to the ‘the march of worker-battalions’ in the historical storming of the bourgeois order of society, right in the middle of the everyday struggle and the guerrilla war with the Prussian judiciary and police. And he knew perfectly well that the only adequate guarantee of the victorious course of this struggle lay in the proletarian mass itself. Even if he did not arrive at this conclusion by way of historical materialist research, as Marx did, but rather by way of philosophic-idealistic speculation, he provided the German working class, in complete harmony with Marx’s teaching, with one of its most important signposts in their class struggle when he, in contrasting parliamentary reformism to revolutionary mass action, said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A legislative assembly never has overthrown and never will overthrow the existing order. All that [such an] assembly has ever done and ever been able to do is proclaim the existing order outside, sanction the already completed overthrow of society and elaborate on its individual consequences, laws and so forth … Spoken more realistically, in the last instance revolutions can only be made with the masses and their passionate devotion” (my emphasis – <em>RL</em>). <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p class="fst">In a few months, on August 31, to be precise, 40 years will have passed since Lassalle’s death. He and his life’s work, judged for so long in a varied and sometimes contradictory manner, are now available for the German working class in full and exhaustive clarity – and indeed both in mortal and immortal forms – in Bernstein’s commentary and in Mehring’s works.</p>
<p>Had his sudden death not taken him away after such a short and bright life, it is doubtful whether Lassalle would be have been able to orient himself in today’s movement and claim his position as a leading and powerful spirit in this completely changed environment. “Events”, he wrote shortly before his death, “will develop very slowly, I fear, and my glowing soul takes no pleasure in these children’s illnesses and chronic tasks.” <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a> Yet history has hardly ever suffered from a more disgusting infantile illness than the current period of bourgeois-feudal parliamentarianism, which the modern proletariat in Germany and all capitalist countries is damned to wade through and penetrate if it is to overcome it. Lassalle’s personality was simply not made for this period of the struggle.</p>
<p>But the contemporary proletarian mass movement needs that “glowing soul”, which shone in Lassalle and still breathes in each of his written words, all the more today. That soul, in Lassalle’s words, will alone be able to “clench the whole power into a fist”, and, at the crucial moment, overcome bourgeois society and achieve victory.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> This refers to Sophie Gräfin von Hartzfeld, who sought to divorce her cheating husband. Lassalle met her at the age of 20 and took up her case in 36 court cases between 1846 and 1854.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> <a href="../../../marx/works/1868/letters/68_10_13.htm" target="new">Marx to J.B. Schweitzer</a>, October 13, 1868.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> F. Mehring (<em>ed.</em>), <strong>Der Literarische Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle</strong>, Vol.4, Stuttgart 1902.</p>
<p class="note"><a href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> E. Bernstein (<em>ed.</em>), <strong>Lassalles Reden und Schriften</strong>, Vol.1, Berlin 1892, p.179.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Note by Weekly Worker</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="na" href="#fa" name="na">1*.</a> This March 1904 article was written for a volume commemorating Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64). He founded the General German Workers’ Association in 1863, the first German workers’ party. This organisation merged with the Social Democratic Workers Party headed by Willhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel in 1875, later becoming the Social Democratic Party</p>
<br>
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<p class="updat">Last updated on: 8 May 2021</p>
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Rosa Luxemburg
Lassalle and the Revolution
(March 1904)
Originally written for a volume commemorating Ferdinantd Lassalle. [1*]
This version: Weekly Worker, No. 752, 15 January 2009.
Translated: Ben Lewis.
Copied with thanks from the CPGB/Weekly Worker Website.
Marked up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Lassalle’s immediate relationship with the March [1848] revolution has remained a mere fragmentary, almost fleeting, one.
This is partly because of his still relatively young age, but above all because of the peculiar concatenation of circumstances in his life which – for almost a decade – chained him to the individual fate of a woman badly abused by the dominant feudal powers and which have made his energy to the service of the revolution highly disputed in this period. [1] Not until the November crisis of 1848 was Lassalle able to play an exemplary part in the revolutionary struggles of the Rhineland. Immediately, however, he was snared by the Prussian judiciary, which only released him when the revolution was over.
But Lassalle’s historical connection with the March revolution does not end with his direct agitation during the ‘great year’: it was not even the main thing about it. Rather, it was the fact that Lassalle put into practice the most important historical consequence of the March revolution by finally releasing the German working class from the political conscription of the bourgeoisie and organising it into an independent class party.
As is well known, the specific manner in which Lassalle carried out this immortal task has been met with sharp and often well deserved criticism from Marx.
“He made big mistakes,” wrote Marx to Schweitzer in 1868. “He allowed himself to be influenced too much by the immediate circumstances of the time. He made the minor starting point, his opposition to the dwarf-like Schulze-Delitzsch, the central point of his agitation – state aid versus self-help. The ‘state’ was, therefore, transformed into the Prussian state. He was thus forced to make concessions to the Prussian monarchy, to Prussian reaction (the feudal party) and even to the clerics.” [2]
Yet Lassalle’s great deed – accomplished both in spite of and through these mistakes – is not reduced, but actually grows in significance with the historical perspective from which we observe it. That Lassalle understood how to see through the inner misery of bourgeois liberalism and to expose this ruthlessly and almost brutally in front of the working class – especially at a time when this liberalism was still, after all, daring to engage in something akin to a struggle with the crown and the Junker reaction – this service will in this sense be ever greater in the eyes of the historians and the politicians, for since then the bourgeoisie has achieved the miracle of sliding, year on year, further down beyond the depths where it stood even back then.
And if still today, until quite recently, if only sporadically and fleetingly, illusions in a new upswing, an Indian summer of bourgeois liberalism, the cooperation and common struggle of the proletariat were conceivable, the more groundbreaking Lassalle’s noble deed will become, as he did not hesitate for a second in showing the German proletariat the way to independent class politics through the rubble of liberalism stemming from the time of conflict – a liberalism that, of course, towers above the liberalism of today.
In his tactics of struggle, Lassalle certainly did make mistakes. Yet emphasising mistakes in a great life’s work is the trite pleasure of petty peddlars of historical research. Far more important in judging someone’s personality and the impact of their work is to ascertain the actual cause or the specific source from which both their errors and virtues resulted. In many cases, Lassalle transgressed in his tendency to ‘diplomacy’ or ‘ploys’, such as in his deals with Bismarck on the introduction from above of general suffrage or in his plans for cooperatives funded with state credit. In his political struggles with bourgeois society, as well as in his judicial struggles with the Prussian judiciary, he happily fought on the enemy’s territory, appearing to make concessions in his point of view. A sassy, noble acrobat, as Johann Phillip Becker wrote, he often dared to jump right to the edge of the abyss that separates a revolutionary tactic from collaboration with reaction.
But the cause that led him to these audacious leaps was not inner insecurity, an inner doubt of the strength and practicability of the revolutionary cause that he represented, but on the contrary an excess of confident belief in the unconquerable power of this cause. Lassalle sometimes went over to the ground of the opponent in the fight, not in order to relinquish something of his revolutionary goals, but, on the contrary, in the deluded belief that his strong personality would suffice to wrest away so much from his opponent for those revolutionary goals, that the ground beneath his opponent’s feet would cave in.
When, for example, Lassalle grafted his idea of cooperatives funded by state credit onto an idealistic, unhistorical fiction of the ‘state’, the great danger of this fiction was that in reality he merely idealised the wretched Prussian state. But what Lassalle wanted to impose on it in terms of the tasks and duties of the working class would not only have shaken the miserable shack that is the Prussian state, but the bourgeois state in general.
The wrong – one might say the opportunistic – aspect of the Lassallean tactic was that he aimed his demands at the wrong audience. Yet his demands did not as a result diminish and disintegrate in his hands: they grew more and more. And if he preferred to reduce the whole fight to a few militant slogans – on the general right to vote and the productive associations, for example – then it was not an excess of patience, which would have meant abandoning the sea of socialist demands for piecemeal bourgeois reforms, but his impatience, on the contrary, which drove him to concentrate all forces on one or a few particular points of attack in order to cut short the long historic process.
So the mistakes of Lassallean tactics are those of an aggressive attacker, not a ditherer. They are those of a daring revolutionary, not a fainthearted diplomat.
In every period there are people – and there are also such people today – who only believe in the possibility and the timeliness of a revolution when it has already happened. Such people grasp world history not by observing its face, so to speak, but its behind. Lassalle belonged to that great generation, at the top of which Karl Marx shone, in which belief in the revolution was alive in all its power. Not merely in the sense that in the 1850s Lassalle, like Marx and Engels, still confidently expected the return of the March revolutionary wave in Europe, but above all in the sense that he lived in the rock-solid conviction of the validity and inevitability of the proletarian revolution.
He constantly listened to the ‘the march of worker-battalions’ in the historical storming of the bourgeois order of society, right in the middle of the everyday struggle and the guerrilla war with the Prussian judiciary and police. And he knew perfectly well that the only adequate guarantee of the victorious course of this struggle lay in the proletarian mass itself. Even if he did not arrive at this conclusion by way of historical materialist research, as Marx did, but rather by way of philosophic-idealistic speculation, he provided the German working class, in complete harmony with Marx’s teaching, with one of its most important signposts in their class struggle when he, in contrasting parliamentary reformism to revolutionary mass action, said:
“A legislative assembly never has overthrown and never will overthrow the existing order. All that [such an] assembly has ever done and ever been able to do is proclaim the existing order outside, sanction the already completed overthrow of society and elaborate on its individual consequences, laws and so forth … Spoken more realistically, in the last instance revolutions can only be made with the masses and their passionate devotion” (my emphasis – RL). [3]
In a few months, on August 31, to be precise, 40 years will have passed since Lassalle’s death. He and his life’s work, judged for so long in a varied and sometimes contradictory manner, are now available for the German working class in full and exhaustive clarity – and indeed both in mortal and immortal forms – in Bernstein’s commentary and in Mehring’s works.
Had his sudden death not taken him away after such a short and bright life, it is doubtful whether Lassalle would be have been able to orient himself in today’s movement and claim his position as a leading and powerful spirit in this completely changed environment. “Events”, he wrote shortly before his death, “will develop very slowly, I fear, and my glowing soul takes no pleasure in these children’s illnesses and chronic tasks.” [4] Yet history has hardly ever suffered from a more disgusting infantile illness than the current period of bourgeois-feudal parliamentarianism, which the modern proletariat in Germany and all capitalist countries is damned to wade through and penetrate if it is to overcome it. Lassalle’s personality was simply not made for this period of the struggle.
But the contemporary proletarian mass movement needs that “glowing soul”, which shone in Lassalle and still breathes in each of his written words, all the more today. That soul, in Lassalle’s words, will alone be able to “clench the whole power into a fist”, and, at the crucial moment, overcome bourgeois society and achieve victory.
Notes
1. This refers to Sophie Gräfin von Hartzfeld, who sought to divorce her cheating husband. Lassalle met her at the age of 20 and took up her case in 36 court cases between 1846 and 1854.
2. Marx to J.B. Schweitzer, October 13, 1868.
3. F. Mehring (ed.), Der Literarische Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Vol.4, Stuttgart 1902.
4. E. Bernstein (ed.), Lassalles Reden und Schriften, Vol.1, Berlin 1892, p.179.
Note by Weekly Worker
1*. This March 1904 article was written for a volume commemorating Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64). He founded the General German Workers’ Association in 1863, the first German workers’ party. This organisation merged with the Social Democratic Workers Party headed by Willhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel in 1875, later becoming the Social Democratic Party
Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive
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<p><a id="top" href="../../../index.htm">MIA</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../index.htm">Lassalle</a> > <a href="index.html">Voices of Revolt</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Voices of Revolt:</h3>
<h1>Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle</h1>
<hr class="section">
<p> </p>
<h1>Critical Introduction</h1>
<p> </p>
<p class="fst">
At the beginning of the modern German labor movement stands Lassalle!
</p>
<p>
He was the sword, he
was the flame. Gerhart Hauptmann’s<a id="fnta" href="#fnba">[a]</a> words concerning Florian
Geyer<a id="fntb" href="#fnbb">[b]</a> are just as appropriate to the first leader of the
industrial proletariat: an ardent sense of right coursed through his
veins! His burning sense of justice dragged him by way of Fichte<a id="fntc" href="#fnbc">[c]</a>
and Hegel<a id="fntd" href="#fnbd">[d]</a> into the domain of Karl Marx,<a id="fnte" href="#fnbe">[e]</a> made him the awakener
of the German workers, and the most fiery sounder of the tocsin in
the struggle for liberation by the proletariat.
</p>
<p>
Lassalle was not a
“Prussian” and not a “Bavarian.” He was a
German, and a Jew and a revolutionary into the bargain. To this day
each of these three attributes is a curse for those that have been
born between the Moselle<a id="fntf" href="#fnbf">[f]</a> and the Memel,<a id="fntg" href="#fnbg">[g]</a> and are condemned to
live and work in this territory. This is perhaps not the least of the
reasons for that portion of the politics and tactics of Lassalle that
has always remained foreign and inaccessible to us. Let us not dwell
here on time-honored disputed questions. We know how Marx and Engels
judged Lassalle, but we also know that the writers of the <i>Communist
Manifesto</i><a id="fnth" href="#fnbh">[h]</a> in this relation frequently overshot the mark. Franz
Mehring<a id="fnti" href="#fnbi">[i]</a> has given an exhaustive treatment of this subject,<a id="fnt1" href="#fnb1">[1.]</a> and
even Karl Marx in a letter to the Countess Hatzfeld,<a id="fntj" href="#fnbj">[j]</a> written by
Marx after Lassalle’s death, makes the following admission:
</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“You are quite
right in your suggestion that no one was better equipped than I to
appreciate the great and significant qualities in Lassalle. . . .
But, altogether apart from this equipment of mine, I loved him
personally. The unfortunate thing always was that we continually
concealed our affection for each other, as if we were destined to
live forever.”
</p>
<p>
In another letter,
written by Marx to J. B. von Schweitzer,<a id="fntk" href="#fnbk">[k]</a> Marx eulogizes Lassalle
for having reawakened the German workers’ movement to life
after a slumber of fifteen years, in spite of any tactical errors he
might have made in the course of his propaganda work.
</p>
<p>
But the most
adequate estimate of Lassalle, of his “mistakes and errors,”
is that afforded by Franz Mehring, in his <i>Geschichte der deutschen
Sozialdemokratie</i> (vol. ii, p. 247):
</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“Lassalle was
a convinced communist in the sense of the <i>Communist Manifesto,</i>
and his many errors and miscalculations were due only to the fact
that he translated the economic conceptions of the Manifesto into
legal and philosophical terms before putting them to his own uses.
Owing to the fact that he understood the proletarian class struggle,
the worship of the State carried on by our classical philosophy could
not possibly attain the formalistic rigidity which it developed under
the hands of Rodbertus,<a id="fntl" href="#fnbl">[l]</a> but since Lassalle never completely abandoned
the idealistic modes of thought, he was never able to relinquish the
cult of the State. There is no doubt that he felt far more secure on
legal and philosophical ground than in the economic field, though it
would be an exaggeration to declare — as do some — that
he had made no real, independent study of this subject. His studies
in this field were so real and so effective that a whole university
full of academic big-wigs might find adequate material for
investigation in his work. But he did not dominate the field with the
sure mastery of a Marx or an Engels, since his idealistic formulas of
thought too frequently impeded his path. In the press of battle he
would then resort to whatever weapons were at hand, following the
theory of Lessing’s<a id="fntm" href="#fnbm">[m]</a> old dictum: ‘It is not he that
made the ladder, but he that ascends it, who will scale the wall; and
even an unsafe ladder will support a bold and agile man.’ No
doubt the bourgeois economists are right in maintaining that Lassalle
was not an epoch-making Socialist theorist. If only these moles, who
feel so much at home in the dark, had also an eye for what is to be
seen in the light of day!
</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“Though
Lassalle’s idealism was his weakness, it also constituted his
strength. It was this idealism which imparted to him his rock-bound
confidence in the power of the ideal, a confidence that enabled
Lassalle to produce such great results. It may be necessary to state
in advance that Lassalle did not appreciate so keenly and profoundly
the laws of motion and evolution of modern bourgeois society as did
Marx and Engels; yet it would be an error to attempt to estimate
Lassalle’s historical importance exclusively by this criterion
in any other field than in the case of the defect which is mentioned.
Such a procedure would be equivalent to regarding historical problems
as class room exercises, for such exercises need only be gone through
to discover their errors. Every historical character finds his
historical justification only by reason of his historical
environment.
</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“If we compare
Lassalle with Marx and Engels, who grew up under quite different
historical conditions, he may in a certain sense be overshadowed by
these two men, if only for the reason that the path of his life was
beset with darker shadows than theirs. But if we compare him with his
contemporaries living in about the same or even more favorable
circumstances, let us say, for instance, with the Young Hegelians<a id="fntn" href="#fnbn">[n]</a>
in the philosophical field, with Rodbertus in the economic field,
with Johann Jacobi<a id="fnto" href="#fnbo">[o]</a> in the political field, he gains immensely in
breadth and in height. In spite of the idealistic <i>Weltanschauung</i>
which he had in common with these men, he was able to penetrate to
the core of scientific communism — and none of these men did
that — thanks to his great mental gifts, thanks to his
revolutionary instincts, and also — more particularly —
thanks to his honest and untiring wish for the truth.”
</p>
<p>
Lassalle’s
errors were therefore not only inherent in the character of the great
agitator; they were in part the product of the political and economic
circumstances prevailing at the time in Prussia and Germany, where it
was the agitator’s most prominent duty to engage in practical
work and struggle.
</p>
<p>
The French
bourgeoisie succeeded in putting through its claims in the Great
Revolution of 1789. The German bourgeoisie arose after the defeat of
1806 and after the so called “Wars of Liberation,” which
smoothed a way simultaneously for an economic revival, as well as for
a hale and hearty infantile reaction. Accordingly, the year 1848 in
Germany was but a faint echo of the French Revolutions. When Lassalle
entered the lists, the dream of German unity, of 1848, which had been
swiftly dissipated, lay behind him.
</p>
<p>
The Hellpachs<a id="fntp" href="#fnbp">[p]</a>
were cavorting about on their wooden horses and spurring them on
against Bismarck,<a id="fntq" href="#fnbq">[q]</a> and everywhere the Men of Progress
(Fortschrittsmänner),<a id="fntr" href="#fnbr">[r]</a>
were bustling and busying about, “the June bugs of the
springtime of the nations,” as Heinrich Heine<a id="fnts" href="#fnbs">[s]</a> once called
them. The bourgeoisie was incapable of recognizing its own historical
mission, to say nothing of carrying it out. It permitted its princes
and diplomats, after the wars they had forced upon it (the wars of
1864, 1866 and 1871), to confer upon it through the “revolution
from above” what it should have acquired for itself, in its own
class interest, from below, in 1848, against the opposition of the
Prussian Junkers<a id="fntt" href="#fnbt">[t]</a> and the German Princes. The immediate consequence
was the black, red, and white<a id="fntu" href="#fnbu">[u]</a> Empire of the Hohenzollerns: the
ultimate disaster, a defeat in the World War.
</p>
<p>
The German workers
at that time stood in the ranks of the so-called Progressives. It was
Lassalle’s accomplishment to have cut them off from this
connection and made them independent by the forming of the
<i>Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein</i> (The General German
Workers’ Union)<a id="fntv" href="#fnbv">[v]</a>. It was the tragedy of his position to have
suffered from the delusion — in spite of this great task, and
in spite of all his theoretical knowledge — that he might make
use of the working class to force the bourgeoisie also to discharge
its historical mission. How can any one oblige John Quince, the
carpenter, to be a true lion, for all the lion’s skin he may
drape about him? How can any one force a democratic Secretary of War
to be a republican in spite of his black, red and gold<a id="fntw" href="#fnbw">[w]</a> cockade?
</p>
<p>
It is the cruel
irony of our period, in which falls the one hundredth anniversary
(1925) of the birth of Lassalle, that it repeats on a more
disastrous, on a more all-embracing scale, the same political events,
the same political relations, and the same political parties as
prevailed in the days of Lassalle’s fiery activity. His
speeches are, therefore, as if they had been pronounced yesterday.
One need only to change a few figures and names; the rest remains the
same. The parties and their leaders have merely moved up a few seats,
and the Progressives of Lassalle are the Social-Democrats of to-day.
The general suffrage right is no longer a battle-slogan. The
reactionary forces are perfectly well able to live with and by the
aid of the bourgeois democracy. Lassalle is no longer proscribed; on
the contrary, he has been elevated to the position of an economic
theorist, with the assistance of whose alleged doctrines the German
worker is fed the saccharine pap of human kindness.
</p>
<p>
In reproducing in
the following pages a few thoughts taken from those of Lassalle’s
speeches which are valid even to-day, we are pursuing the object of
calling to account all those unclean elements who, like the
Social-Democrats on the occasion of their hundredth anniversary of
his birth, make use of his name for impure ends, as a means of
cloaking their policy and their hostility to the cause. Lassalle was
different from his present-day inheritors; his expressions were
different from theirs. “He died young, in battle, as Achilles!”
was Karl Marx’s lament on Lassalle, from London. His successors
are accumulating adipose tissue and rotting on the unclean couch of
bourgeois coalitions. It is as if Lassalle had never lived and had
never shouted to the workers: “The proletariat alone is the
rock on which the church of the future shall be founded.” Now,
as then, the question of a proletarian revolution is the truly
national question. And no duty is, therefore, more imperative than
that of freeing the working class from all bourgeois illusions, and
leading them into the class struggle, into the revolution. To serve
the purpose of bringing about an understanding of the true Lassalle,
these pages have been compiled. For it was Lassalle who once said to
one of his adherents after the delivery of a speech at Frankfort:
“Whenever I say ‘general suffrage right’ you must
understand me as meaning ‘revolution’ and ‘revolution’
and again ‘revolution’!”
</p>
<p>
It is <i>this</i>
Lassalle whom the Progressives hated like sin. It is <i>this</i>
Lassalle whom they denounced as an agent of the reaction, as a
catspaw of Bismarck. The Progressives, Realpolitikers,<a id="fntx" href="#fnbx">[x]</a>
compromisers and the dupes of conciliation, who were his
contemporaries, may be found again in this volume. We see rising
before us the complete political slough of despond of that period,
the same miserable subterfuges and follies, the same clowns and
millennial prophets as we find to-day. There is not much difference
between 1848 and 1918; the counterrevolution of the former year is
remarkably similar to that of the latter year. Furthermore, we find
the proletariat faced with the same tasks and duties, and, therefore,
we again find the Lassalle whom we love. For he beat the drum on the
march of revolution.
</p>
<p>
He was the sword, he was the flame!
</p>
<p class="sig">
Jakob Altmaier.
</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="footer"><a href="1-to-german-workers.html">First Speech</a> | <a href="#top">Top of page</a></p>
<hr>
<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnb1" href="#fnt1">[1.]</a> In his <i>Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie;</i>
see his <i>Social Forces in German History,</i>
and D. Riazanov’s <i>Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.</i>
</p>
<hr>
<h3>Explanatory Notes</h3>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnba" href="#fnta">[a]</a> <b>Hauptmann, Gerhart</b> (born 1862 [and died 1946]): Living German dramatist;
the author of a number of social dramas in prose and verse, including the prose drama <i>Die Weber</i> (“The Weavers”), 1892.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbb" href="#fntb">[b]</a> <b>Florian Geyer</b> (1490-1525): A German knight who, despite his aristocratic class background,
led a revolutionary armed uprising of peasants against both Catholic and Protestant armies. In addition to the 1896 stage drama by Hauptmann
mentioned above, Geyer was also memorialized by Frederick Engels in his 1850 pamphlet
<a href="../../marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/index.htm">The Peasant War in Germany.</a>
—<i>New note by Bill Wright, transcriber.</i>
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbc" href="#fntc">[c]</a> <b>Fichte, Johann Gottlieb</b> (1762-1814): German philosopher;
see Franz Mehring: <i>Social Forces in German History,</i> 1927.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbd" href="#fntd">[d]</a> <b>Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich</b> (1770-1831): German philosopher.
His philosophy is characterized by the so-called Hegelian dialectic,
or principle which enables reflective thinking to
arrange all the categories, or necessary conceptions of reason, in
an order of development that corresponds to the actual order, in
development, of all reality.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbe" href="#fnte">[e]</a> <b>Marx, Karl</b> (1818-1883): For a study of his life and work, see
D. Riazanov: <i>Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,</i> 1927.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbf" href="#fntf">[f]</a> <b>Moselle</b> (Ger. <i>Mosel</i>): A river in eastern France and western
Germany, joining the Rhine at Coblenz.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbg" href="#fntg">[g]</a> <b>Memel:</b> A river formerly marking the eastern boundary of
Germany (up to 1919). Its mouth, which empties into the Baltic
Sea, is now in Lithuania.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbh" href="#fnth">[h]</a> <b>Communist Manifesto:</b> The first popular declaration of the
principles and program of Scientific Socialism, written by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels and printed in 1847.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbi" href="#fnti">[i]</a> <b>Mehring, Franz</b> (1846-1919): German revolutionary socialist,
publicist and historian; author of <i>Social Forces in German History,</i> 1927,
and of a history of the German Social-Democracy,
and a life of Karl Marx (in German).
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbj" href="#fntj">[j]</a> <b>Hatzfeld, Sophie, Countess of</b> (1805-1881): Married Count
Hatzfeld in 1822, divorced in 1851; Lassalle’s friendship for her
was the cause of his devoting to her service many years which
might otherwise have gone to the revolutionary movement.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbk" href="#fntk">[k]</a> <b>Schweitzer, J. B. von</b>
(1833-1875): German socialist, publicist,
editor of the periodical <i>Der Sozialdemokrat</i> beginning January 1, 1865.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbl" href="#fntl">[l]</a> <b>Rodbertus, Karl</b> (1805-1875): German economic writer; author
of a book, <i>Das Kapital,</i> with the same title as Karl Marx’s great
work; see Bukharin: <i>The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class,</i> 1927.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbm" href="#fntm">[m]</a> <b>Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim</b> (1728-1781): German critic, dramatist and philosopher;
author of <i>Nathan der Weise, Emilia Gallotti, Minna von Barnhelm,</i> etc.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbn" href="#fntn">[n]</a> <b>Young Hegelians:</b> A trend within German Idealist philosophy in the 1830s and 40s
that drew atheist and politically radical conclusions from Hegel’s works. Originally counting Marx and Engels
as adherents, they later broke with the philosophical outlook of the Young Hegelians in works such as
<a href="../../../archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm">The German Ideology (1845).</a>
—<i>New note by Bill Wright, transcriber.</i>
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbo" href="#fnto">[o]</a> <b>Jacobi, Johann</b> (1805-1877): German democratic leader, participated
in the Revolution of 1848 in Germany, imprisoned many
times. A few years before his death, he joined the socialist
movement.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbp" href="#fntp">[p]</a> <b>Hellpach, Willy</b> (living Badensian statesman, born 1877): One
of the founders of the German “Democratic Party” in 1918.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbq" href="#fntq">[q]</a> <b>Bismarck, Prince Otto von</b> (1815-1898): German statesman;
founder of the German Empire; famous for his “Exception
Laws” directed against the socialist movement in Germany.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbr" href="#fntr">[r]</a> <b>Fortschrittspartei</b> (“Progressive Party,” also called <i>Fortschrittsmänner,</i>
“Men of Progress”): A liberal party founded in Prussia in 1861 and predominant in the Prussian Diet until 1866, when
the National Liberal Party was formed from it.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbs" href="#fnts">[s]</a> <b>Heine, Heinrich</b> (1797-1856): German lyricist, also the most
fluent prose writer of Germany. While not a member of any
revolutionary movement, Heine was impelled by his ardent hatred
of tyranny to favor many indications of political discontent.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbt" href="#fntt">[t]</a> <b>Junker</b> (A German word, from the Middle High German <i>junc
herre,</i> “young sir”): A member of the landed gentry; a country
gentleman of the nobility; the German equivalent to the landed
nobility of England.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbu" href="#fntu">[u]</a> <b>Black, White and Red:</b> The colors of the German national
ensign since 1871; symbolically, therefore, an imperialistic and
nationalistic attitude.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbv" href="#fntv">[v]</a> <b>Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein</b> (“General German
Workers’ Union”): An organization founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbw" href="#fntw">[w]</a> <b>Black, Red and Gold:</b> The colors proposed for the national
German Flag by the Frankfort Assembly of 1848; symbolically,
therefore, a liberal or progressive attitude in politics.
</p>
<p class="endnote">
<a id="fnbx" href="#fntx">[x]</a> <b>Realpolitiker</b> (A German compound noun): A statesman who
is proud that, though he may be governed by ideals in part, he
nevertheless faces the <i>real</i> situation as it is. A realist in politics.
</p>
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MIA > Archive > Lassalle > Voices of Revolt
Voices of Revolt:
Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle
Critical Introduction
At the beginning of the modern German labor movement stands Lassalle!
He was the sword, he
was the flame. Gerhart Hauptmann’s[a] words concerning Florian
Geyer[b] are just as appropriate to the first leader of the
industrial proletariat: an ardent sense of right coursed through his
veins! His burning sense of justice dragged him by way of Fichte[c]
and Hegel[d] into the domain of Karl Marx,[e] made him the awakener
of the German workers, and the most fiery sounder of the tocsin in
the struggle for liberation by the proletariat.
Lassalle was not a
“Prussian” and not a “Bavarian.” He was a
German, and a Jew and a revolutionary into the bargain. To this day
each of these three attributes is a curse for those that have been
born between the Moselle[f] and the Memel,[g] and are condemned to
live and work in this territory. This is perhaps not the least of the
reasons for that portion of the politics and tactics of Lassalle that
has always remained foreign and inaccessible to us. Let us not dwell
here on time-honored disputed questions. We know how Marx and Engels
judged Lassalle, but we also know that the writers of the Communist
Manifesto[h] in this relation frequently overshot the mark. Franz
Mehring[i] has given an exhaustive treatment of this subject,[1.] and
even Karl Marx in a letter to the Countess Hatzfeld,[j] written by
Marx after Lassalle’s death, makes the following admission:
“You are quite
right in your suggestion that no one was better equipped than I to
appreciate the great and significant qualities in Lassalle. . . .
But, altogether apart from this equipment of mine, I loved him
personally. The unfortunate thing always was that we continually
concealed our affection for each other, as if we were destined to
live forever.”
In another letter,
written by Marx to J. B. von Schweitzer,[k] Marx eulogizes Lassalle
for having reawakened the German workers’ movement to life
after a slumber of fifteen years, in spite of any tactical errors he
might have made in the course of his propaganda work.
But the most
adequate estimate of Lassalle, of his “mistakes and errors,”
is that afforded by Franz Mehring, in his Geschichte der deutschen
Sozialdemokratie (vol. ii, p. 247):
“Lassalle was
a convinced communist in the sense of the Communist Manifesto,
and his many errors and miscalculations were due only to the fact
that he translated the economic conceptions of the Manifesto into
legal and philosophical terms before putting them to his own uses.
Owing to the fact that he understood the proletarian class struggle,
the worship of the State carried on by our classical philosophy could
not possibly attain the formalistic rigidity which it developed under
the hands of Rodbertus,[l] but since Lassalle never completely abandoned
the idealistic modes of thought, he was never able to relinquish the
cult of the State. There is no doubt that he felt far more secure on
legal and philosophical ground than in the economic field, though it
would be an exaggeration to declare — as do some — that
he had made no real, independent study of this subject. His studies
in this field were so real and so effective that a whole university
full of academic big-wigs might find adequate material for
investigation in his work. But he did not dominate the field with the
sure mastery of a Marx or an Engels, since his idealistic formulas of
thought too frequently impeded his path. In the press of battle he
would then resort to whatever weapons were at hand, following the
theory of Lessing’s[m] old dictum: ‘It is not he that
made the ladder, but he that ascends it, who will scale the wall; and
even an unsafe ladder will support a bold and agile man.’ No
doubt the bourgeois economists are right in maintaining that Lassalle
was not an epoch-making Socialist theorist. If only these moles, who
feel so much at home in the dark, had also an eye for what is to be
seen in the light of day!
“Though
Lassalle’s idealism was his weakness, it also constituted his
strength. It was this idealism which imparted to him his rock-bound
confidence in the power of the ideal, a confidence that enabled
Lassalle to produce such great results. It may be necessary to state
in advance that Lassalle did not appreciate so keenly and profoundly
the laws of motion and evolution of modern bourgeois society as did
Marx and Engels; yet it would be an error to attempt to estimate
Lassalle’s historical importance exclusively by this criterion
in any other field than in the case of the defect which is mentioned.
Such a procedure would be equivalent to regarding historical problems
as class room exercises, for such exercises need only be gone through
to discover their errors. Every historical character finds his
historical justification only by reason of his historical
environment.
“If we compare
Lassalle with Marx and Engels, who grew up under quite different
historical conditions, he may in a certain sense be overshadowed by
these two men, if only for the reason that the path of his life was
beset with darker shadows than theirs. But if we compare him with his
contemporaries living in about the same or even more favorable
circumstances, let us say, for instance, with the Young Hegelians[n]
in the philosophical field, with Rodbertus in the economic field,
with Johann Jacobi[o] in the political field, he gains immensely in
breadth and in height. In spite of the idealistic Weltanschauung
which he had in common with these men, he was able to penetrate to
the core of scientific communism — and none of these men did
that — thanks to his great mental gifts, thanks to his
revolutionary instincts, and also — more particularly —
thanks to his honest and untiring wish for the truth.”
Lassalle’s
errors were therefore not only inherent in the character of the great
agitator; they were in part the product of the political and economic
circumstances prevailing at the time in Prussia and Germany, where it
was the agitator’s most prominent duty to engage in practical
work and struggle.
The French
bourgeoisie succeeded in putting through its claims in the Great
Revolution of 1789. The German bourgeoisie arose after the defeat of
1806 and after the so called “Wars of Liberation,” which
smoothed a way simultaneously for an economic revival, as well as for
a hale and hearty infantile reaction. Accordingly, the year 1848 in
Germany was but a faint echo of the French Revolutions. When Lassalle
entered the lists, the dream of German unity, of 1848, which had been
swiftly dissipated, lay behind him.
The Hellpachs[p]
were cavorting about on their wooden horses and spurring them on
against Bismarck,[q] and everywhere the Men of Progress
(Fortschrittsmänner),[r]
were bustling and busying about, “the June bugs of the
springtime of the nations,” as Heinrich Heine[s] once called
them. The bourgeoisie was incapable of recognizing its own historical
mission, to say nothing of carrying it out. It permitted its princes
and diplomats, after the wars they had forced upon it (the wars of
1864, 1866 and 1871), to confer upon it through the “revolution
from above” what it should have acquired for itself, in its own
class interest, from below, in 1848, against the opposition of the
Prussian Junkers[t] and the German Princes. The immediate consequence
was the black, red, and white[u] Empire of the Hohenzollerns: the
ultimate disaster, a defeat in the World War.
The German workers
at that time stood in the ranks of the so-called Progressives. It was
Lassalle’s accomplishment to have cut them off from this
connection and made them independent by the forming of the
Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (The General German
Workers’ Union)[v]. It was the tragedy of his position to have
suffered from the delusion — in spite of this great task, and
in spite of all his theoretical knowledge — that he might make
use of the working class to force the bourgeoisie also to discharge
its historical mission. How can any one oblige John Quince, the
carpenter, to be a true lion, for all the lion’s skin he may
drape about him? How can any one force a democratic Secretary of War
to be a republican in spite of his black, red and gold[w] cockade?
It is the cruel
irony of our period, in which falls the one hundredth anniversary
(1925) of the birth of Lassalle, that it repeats on a more
disastrous, on a more all-embracing scale, the same political events,
the same political relations, and the same political parties as
prevailed in the days of Lassalle’s fiery activity. His
speeches are, therefore, as if they had been pronounced yesterday.
One need only to change a few figures and names; the rest remains the
same. The parties and their leaders have merely moved up a few seats,
and the Progressives of Lassalle are the Social-Democrats of to-day.
The general suffrage right is no longer a battle-slogan. The
reactionary forces are perfectly well able to live with and by the
aid of the bourgeois democracy. Lassalle is no longer proscribed; on
the contrary, he has been elevated to the position of an economic
theorist, with the assistance of whose alleged doctrines the German
worker is fed the saccharine pap of human kindness.
In reproducing in
the following pages a few thoughts taken from those of Lassalle’s
speeches which are valid even to-day, we are pursuing the object of
calling to account all those unclean elements who, like the
Social-Democrats on the occasion of their hundredth anniversary of
his birth, make use of his name for impure ends, as a means of
cloaking their policy and their hostility to the cause. Lassalle was
different from his present-day inheritors; his expressions were
different from theirs. “He died young, in battle, as Achilles!”
was Karl Marx’s lament on Lassalle, from London. His successors
are accumulating adipose tissue and rotting on the unclean couch of
bourgeois coalitions. It is as if Lassalle had never lived and had
never shouted to the workers: “The proletariat alone is the
rock on which the church of the future shall be founded.” Now,
as then, the question of a proletarian revolution is the truly
national question. And no duty is, therefore, more imperative than
that of freeing the working class from all bourgeois illusions, and
leading them into the class struggle, into the revolution. To serve
the purpose of bringing about an understanding of the true Lassalle,
these pages have been compiled. For it was Lassalle who once said to
one of his adherents after the delivery of a speech at Frankfort:
“Whenever I say ‘general suffrage right’ you must
understand me as meaning ‘revolution’ and ‘revolution’
and again ‘revolution’!”
It is this
Lassalle whom the Progressives hated like sin. It is this
Lassalle whom they denounced as an agent of the reaction, as a
catspaw of Bismarck. The Progressives, Realpolitikers,[x]
compromisers and the dupes of conciliation, who were his
contemporaries, may be found again in this volume. We see rising
before us the complete political slough of despond of that period,
the same miserable subterfuges and follies, the same clowns and
millennial prophets as we find to-day. There is not much difference
between 1848 and 1918; the counterrevolution of the former year is
remarkably similar to that of the latter year. Furthermore, we find
the proletariat faced with the same tasks and duties, and, therefore,
we again find the Lassalle whom we love. For he beat the drum on the
march of revolution.
He was the sword, he was the flame!
Jakob Altmaier.
First Speech | Top of page
Footnote
[1.] In his Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie;
see his Social Forces in German History,
and D. Riazanov’s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Explanatory Notes
[a] Hauptmann, Gerhart (born 1862 [and died 1946]): Living German dramatist;
the author of a number of social dramas in prose and verse, including the prose drama Die Weber (“The Weavers”), 1892.
[b] Florian Geyer (1490-1525): A German knight who, despite his aristocratic class background,
led a revolutionary armed uprising of peasants against both Catholic and Protestant armies. In addition to the 1896 stage drama by Hauptmann
mentioned above, Geyer was also memorialized by Frederick Engels in his 1850 pamphlet
The Peasant War in Germany.
—New note by Bill Wright, transcriber.
[c] Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814): German philosopher;
see Franz Mehring: Social Forces in German History, 1927.
[d] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831): German philosopher.
His philosophy is characterized by the so-called Hegelian dialectic,
or principle which enables reflective thinking to
arrange all the categories, or necessary conceptions of reason, in
an order of development that corresponds to the actual order, in
development, of all reality.
[e] Marx, Karl (1818-1883): For a study of his life and work, see
D. Riazanov: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1927.
[f] Moselle (Ger. Mosel): A river in eastern France and western
Germany, joining the Rhine at Coblenz.
[g] Memel: A river formerly marking the eastern boundary of
Germany (up to 1919). Its mouth, which empties into the Baltic
Sea, is now in Lithuania.
[h] Communist Manifesto: The first popular declaration of the
principles and program of Scientific Socialism, written by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels and printed in 1847.
[i] Mehring, Franz (1846-1919): German revolutionary socialist,
publicist and historian; author of Social Forces in German History, 1927,
and of a history of the German Social-Democracy,
and a life of Karl Marx (in German).
[j] Hatzfeld, Sophie, Countess of (1805-1881): Married Count
Hatzfeld in 1822, divorced in 1851; Lassalle’s friendship for her
was the cause of his devoting to her service many years which
might otherwise have gone to the revolutionary movement.
[k] Schweitzer, J. B. von
(1833-1875): German socialist, publicist,
editor of the periodical Der Sozialdemokrat beginning January 1, 1865.
[l] Rodbertus, Karl (1805-1875): German economic writer; author
of a book, Das Kapital, with the same title as Karl Marx’s great
work; see Bukharin: The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 1927.
[m] Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1728-1781): German critic, dramatist and philosopher;
author of Nathan der Weise, Emilia Gallotti, Minna von Barnhelm, etc.
[n] Young Hegelians: A trend within German Idealist philosophy in the 1830s and 40s
that drew atheist and politically radical conclusions from Hegel’s works. Originally counting Marx and Engels
as adherents, they later broke with the philosophical outlook of the Young Hegelians in works such as
The German Ideology (1845).
—New note by Bill Wright, transcriber.
[o] Jacobi, Johann (1805-1877): German democratic leader, participated
in the Revolution of 1848 in Germany, imprisoned many
times. A few years before his death, he joined the socialist
movement.
[p] Hellpach, Willy (living Badensian statesman, born 1877): One
of the founders of the German “Democratic Party” in 1918.
[q] Bismarck, Prince Otto von (1815-1898): German statesman;
founder of the German Empire; famous for his “Exception
Laws” directed against the socialist movement in Germany.
[r] Fortschrittspartei (“Progressive Party,” also called Fortschrittsmänner,
“Men of Progress”): A liberal party founded in Prussia in 1861 and predominant in the Prussian Diet until 1866, when
the National Liberal Party was formed from it.
[s] Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856): German lyricist, also the most
fluent prose writer of Germany. While not a member of any
revolutionary movement, Heine was impelled by his ardent hatred
of tyranny to favor many indications of political discontent.
[t] Junker (A German word, from the Middle High German junc
herre, “young sir”): A member of the landed gentry; a country
gentleman of the nobility; the German equivalent to the landed
nobility of England.
[u] Black, White and Red: The colors of the German national
ensign since 1871; symbolically, therefore, an imperialistic and
nationalistic attitude.
[v] Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (“General German
Workers’ Union”): An organization founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.
[w] Black, Red and Gold: The colors proposed for the national
German Flag by the Frankfort Assembly of 1848; symbolically,
therefore, a liberal or progressive attitude in politics.
[x] Realpolitiker (A German compound noun): A statesman who
is proud that, though he may be governed by ideals in part, he
nevertheless faces the real situation as it is. A realist in politics.
First Speech | Top of page
Last updated on 13 October 2023
|
./articles/Lassalle-Ferdinand/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.luxemburg.1913.xx.lassalle | <body>
<h2>Rosa Luxemburg</h2>
<h1>Lassalle’s Legacy</h1>
<h3>(1913)</h3>
<hr class="fst">
<p class="information"><span class="info">First published:</span> <strong>Die Gleichheit</strong>, No.18, 1913, pp.275-77.<br>
<span class="info">This translation:</span> <strong>Weekly Worker</strong>, <a href="https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/752/rosa-luxemburg-in-her-own-words/" target="new">No.752</a>, 15 January 2009.<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> Ben Lewis.<br>
Copied with thanks from the <a href="http://www.cpgb.org.uk/" target="new">CPGB/Weekly Worker Website</a>.<br>
<span class="info">Marked up:</span> <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="quoteb">“Hutten’s error was merely that of all prophetic natures: namely to view and desire at once a shining ideal, which humanity can only achieve step by step and bit by bit after centuries of struggle.”</p>
<p class="fst">With these words, David Friedrich Strauss closes his novel <strong>Hutten</strong>. And what applies to Hutten also applies to Lassalle in the same degree. Of course, centuries do not come into consideration in the speedy development of contemporary capitalist development. But what Lassalle managed to wrestle from history in two years of flaming agitation needed many decades to come about. Yet it is precisely this optical illusion – which all prophetic natures succumb to, and causes them like giants from the top of their mountain to imagine the far away horizons to be within their grasp – we must thank for the bold deed from which German social democracy emerged.</p>
<p>The emergence of an independent class party of the proletariat was an historical necessity, stemming from the capitalist economic system and the political nature of the bourgeois class state. German social democracy would have arisen with or without Lassalle, just as the class struggle of the international proletariat would have become the predominant factor of recent history with or without Marx and Engels. Yet the fact that the German proletarian class party already appeared at the gates with such radiance and splendour 50 years ago, more than two decades before all other countries, and acted as a role model for them, is thanks to Lassalle’s life work and his maxim: ‘I dared!’</p>
<p>Class struggle has been the driving force at the core of world history ever since private property separated human society into exploiters and exploited. The modern proletariat’s struggle is merely the last in the series of class struggles running like a red thread through written history. And yet the last 50 years offers something that world history had not seen before: for the first time the spectacle of the great mass of the exploited emerging in an organised and purposeful struggle for the liberation of their class. All previous revolutions were those of minorities in the interest of minorities. And, as the first movements of the proletariat in England and France initiated modern class struggle, the masses would step onto the stage only for a few moments and then melt away in the revolutionary downturn and become absorbed in bourgeois society over and over again.</p>
<p>Brought into existence by Lassalle, German social democracy was the first historic attempt to create a permanent organisation of the masses, the majority of the people, for class struggle. Thanks to Lassalle’s political action and thanks to Marx’s theory, German social democracy has radiantly solved this new task. Its 50-year history has proved that on the basis of proletarian class interests it is possible to unite the ultimate goal of revolution with patient day-to-day struggle, to unite scientific theory with the most sober praxis, to unite tight and disciplined organisation with the mass character of the movement, to unite insight into historic necessity with conscious, dynamic will. The present-day size and power of social democracy is the fruit of this unity.</p>
<p>The history of social democracy hitherto can be quickly summarised as the utilisation of bourgeois parliamentarianism for the enlightenment and centralisation of the proletariat into its class party. On this track, from which it never allowed itself to be lured either by brutal emergency laws or demagogic cunning, our party has advanced decade after decade to become by far the strongest political party in the German empire and the strongest workers’ party in the world. In this sense, the last 50 years have seen the implementation of Lassalle’s action programme, which was concentrated on two closely linked aims: the creation of a class organisation of the workers, independent of the liberal bourgeoisie; and the achievement of universal suffrage, in order to put it to the service of the workers.</p>
<p>The construction of this organisation and the systematic utilisation of universal suffrage – this was more or less Lassalle’s legacy, and the lifeblood of social democracy over the last 50 years.</p>
<p>This programme has just about been pushed to its limits, where, according to the law of the historical dialectic, quantity must transform into quality, where the unstoppable growth of social democracy, on the ground of and in the framework of bourgeois parliamentarianism, must eventually transcend this.</p>
<p>Germany’s capitalist development, like that of the entire world economy, has now reached a point where the conditions in which Lassalle accomplished his great task appear as a clumsy child. Whereas back then in Europe, the framework of bourgeois national states was still being fashioned to suit the unrestricted rule of capital, today the last non-capitalist lands are being swallowed up by the imperialist monster, and capital is crowning its world dominance with a chain of bloody expansionist wars.</p>
<p>From its birth onwards, bourgeois parliamentarianism on the European continent was ridden with impotence through fear of the red spectre of the revolutionary proletariat. Today, it is being crushed by the iron hooves of rampantly galloping imperialism; it becomes a hollow shell, degraded to an impotent appendage of militarism.</p>
<p>In 50 years of exemplary work, social democracy has pretty much taken everything it could from the now stony soil in terms of material profit for the working class and class enlightenment. The most recent, biggest electoral victory of our party <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> has now made it clear to all that a 110-person-strong social democratic faction in the era of imperialist delirium and parliamentary impotence, far from achieving more in terms of agitation and social reforms than a faction the quarter of its size in the past, will achieve less.</p>
<p>And the hopeless foundering of the hub of Germany’s internal political development today – voting rights in Prussia – has destroyed all prospects of parliamentary reform through mere pressure of electoral action.</p>
<p>Both in Prussia and in the empire, social democracy in its entire force is rendered powerless as it comes up against the barrier which Lassalle already foresaw in 1851:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A legislative assembly never has overthrown and never will overthrow the existing order. All that [such an] assembly has ever done and ever been able to do is proclaim the existing order outside, sanction the already completed overthrow of society and elaborate on its individual consequences, laws, etc. Yet such an assembly will always be impotent to overthrow the society which it itself represents.” <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a></p>
<p class="fst">We, however, have arrived at a level of development where the most pressing and imperative defensive demand of the proletariat – the right to vote in Prussia and the people’s militia in the empire – signify an actual overthrow of existing Prussian-German class relations. If the working class wants to pursue its life interests in parliament today, then it has to carry out this actual overthrow “outside”. If it wants to make parliamentarianism fertile again, then it has to lead the masses themselves onto the political stage through non-parliamentary action.</p>
<p>The last decade – with the mass strike resolution in Jena under the influence of the Russian Revolution and the campaign of street demonstrations in the struggle for the right to vote in Prussia three years ago – clearly shows that the transition from purely parliamentary to unstoppable mass action will force its way through – even if the consciousness of the party in Germany, as elsewhere, only follows this path unevenly, encountering many setbacks.</p>
<p>The 50th anniversary of German social democracy represents a proud, victorious completion of Lassalle’s political testament. Yet simultaneously it is also a warning to the socialist proletariat to become fully conscious that nothing would be more contrary to Lassalle’s spirit than following its well-worn routine at its usual steady pace and stubbornly clinging to a tactical programme which has already been overtaken by the course of history.</p>
<p>Lassalle’s great creative work consisted in recognising the correct task of the proletariat at the right historical hour and daring to fulfil this with bold action. What is today the just continuation of Lassalle’s work? Not clinging to Lassalle’s political programme, but rather recognising the new great tasks of the contemporary situation and boldly tackling them at the right moment. Then, in the spirit of Lassalle, it can also say of itself: ‘I dared!’</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> F. Mehring (ed.), <strong>Der Literarische Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle</strong>, Vol.4, Stuttgart 1902, p.38.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> The resolution passed at the SPD conference from September 17-23 1905 in Jena characterised the most extensive use of the mass withdrawal of labour as one of the most effective working class methods of struggle, but nevertheless restricted the use of the political mass strike to a considerable extent to defending the right to vote to the Reichstag and freedom of assembly.</p>
<br>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer"><a href="../../index.htm">Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive</a></p>
<p class="updat">Last updated on: 8 May 2021</p>
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Rosa Luxemburg
Lassalle’s Legacy
(1913)
First published: Die Gleichheit, No.18, 1913, pp.275-77.
This translation: Weekly Worker, No.752, 15 January 2009.
Translated: Ben Lewis.
Copied with thanks from the CPGB/Weekly Worker Website.
Marked up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
“Hutten’s error was merely that of all prophetic natures: namely to view and desire at once a shining ideal, which humanity can only achieve step by step and bit by bit after centuries of struggle.”
With these words, David Friedrich Strauss closes his novel Hutten. And what applies to Hutten also applies to Lassalle in the same degree. Of course, centuries do not come into consideration in the speedy development of contemporary capitalist development. But what Lassalle managed to wrestle from history in two years of flaming agitation needed many decades to come about. Yet it is precisely this optical illusion – which all prophetic natures succumb to, and causes them like giants from the top of their mountain to imagine the far away horizons to be within their grasp – we must thank for the bold deed from which German social democracy emerged.
The emergence of an independent class party of the proletariat was an historical necessity, stemming from the capitalist economic system and the political nature of the bourgeois class state. German social democracy would have arisen with or without Lassalle, just as the class struggle of the international proletariat would have become the predominant factor of recent history with or without Marx and Engels. Yet the fact that the German proletarian class party already appeared at the gates with such radiance and splendour 50 years ago, more than two decades before all other countries, and acted as a role model for them, is thanks to Lassalle’s life work and his maxim: ‘I dared!’
Class struggle has been the driving force at the core of world history ever since private property separated human society into exploiters and exploited. The modern proletariat’s struggle is merely the last in the series of class struggles running like a red thread through written history. And yet the last 50 years offers something that world history had not seen before: for the first time the spectacle of the great mass of the exploited emerging in an organised and purposeful struggle for the liberation of their class. All previous revolutions were those of minorities in the interest of minorities. And, as the first movements of the proletariat in England and France initiated modern class struggle, the masses would step onto the stage only for a few moments and then melt away in the revolutionary downturn and become absorbed in bourgeois society over and over again.
Brought into existence by Lassalle, German social democracy was the first historic attempt to create a permanent organisation of the masses, the majority of the people, for class struggle. Thanks to Lassalle’s political action and thanks to Marx’s theory, German social democracy has radiantly solved this new task. Its 50-year history has proved that on the basis of proletarian class interests it is possible to unite the ultimate goal of revolution with patient day-to-day struggle, to unite scientific theory with the most sober praxis, to unite tight and disciplined organisation with the mass character of the movement, to unite insight into historic necessity with conscious, dynamic will. The present-day size and power of social democracy is the fruit of this unity.
The history of social democracy hitherto can be quickly summarised as the utilisation of bourgeois parliamentarianism for the enlightenment and centralisation of the proletariat into its class party. On this track, from which it never allowed itself to be lured either by brutal emergency laws or demagogic cunning, our party has advanced decade after decade to become by far the strongest political party in the German empire and the strongest workers’ party in the world. In this sense, the last 50 years have seen the implementation of Lassalle’s action programme, which was concentrated on two closely linked aims: the creation of a class organisation of the workers, independent of the liberal bourgeoisie; and the achievement of universal suffrage, in order to put it to the service of the workers.
The construction of this organisation and the systematic utilisation of universal suffrage – this was more or less Lassalle’s legacy, and the lifeblood of social democracy over the last 50 years.
This programme has just about been pushed to its limits, where, according to the law of the historical dialectic, quantity must transform into quality, where the unstoppable growth of social democracy, on the ground of and in the framework of bourgeois parliamentarianism, must eventually transcend this.
Germany’s capitalist development, like that of the entire world economy, has now reached a point where the conditions in which Lassalle accomplished his great task appear as a clumsy child. Whereas back then in Europe, the framework of bourgeois national states was still being fashioned to suit the unrestricted rule of capital, today the last non-capitalist lands are being swallowed up by the imperialist monster, and capital is crowning its world dominance with a chain of bloody expansionist wars.
From its birth onwards, bourgeois parliamentarianism on the European continent was ridden with impotence through fear of the red spectre of the revolutionary proletariat. Today, it is being crushed by the iron hooves of rampantly galloping imperialism; it becomes a hollow shell, degraded to an impotent appendage of militarism.
In 50 years of exemplary work, social democracy has pretty much taken everything it could from the now stony soil in terms of material profit for the working class and class enlightenment. The most recent, biggest electoral victory of our party [1] has now made it clear to all that a 110-person-strong social democratic faction in the era of imperialist delirium and parliamentary impotence, far from achieving more in terms of agitation and social reforms than a faction the quarter of its size in the past, will achieve less.
And the hopeless foundering of the hub of Germany’s internal political development today – voting rights in Prussia – has destroyed all prospects of parliamentary reform through mere pressure of electoral action.
Both in Prussia and in the empire, social democracy in its entire force is rendered powerless as it comes up against the barrier which Lassalle already foresaw in 1851:
“A legislative assembly never has overthrown and never will overthrow the existing order. All that [such an] assembly has ever done and ever been able to do is proclaim the existing order outside, sanction the already completed overthrow of society and elaborate on its individual consequences, laws, etc. Yet such an assembly will always be impotent to overthrow the society which it itself represents.” [2]
We, however, have arrived at a level of development where the most pressing and imperative defensive demand of the proletariat – the right to vote in Prussia and the people’s militia in the empire – signify an actual overthrow of existing Prussian-German class relations. If the working class wants to pursue its life interests in parliament today, then it has to carry out this actual overthrow “outside”. If it wants to make parliamentarianism fertile again, then it has to lead the masses themselves onto the political stage through non-parliamentary action.
The last decade – with the mass strike resolution in Jena under the influence of the Russian Revolution and the campaign of street demonstrations in the struggle for the right to vote in Prussia three years ago – clearly shows that the transition from purely parliamentary to unstoppable mass action will force its way through – even if the consciousness of the party in Germany, as elsewhere, only follows this path unevenly, encountering many setbacks.
The 50th anniversary of German social democracy represents a proud, victorious completion of Lassalle’s political testament. Yet simultaneously it is also a warning to the socialist proletariat to become fully conscious that nothing would be more contrary to Lassalle’s spirit than following its well-worn routine at its usual steady pace and stubbornly clinging to a tactical programme which has already been overtaken by the course of history.
Lassalle’s great creative work consisted in recognising the correct task of the proletariat at the right historical hour and daring to fulfil this with bold action. What is today the just continuation of Lassalle’s work? Not clinging to Lassalle’s political programme, but rather recognising the new great tasks of the contemporary situation and boldly tackling them at the right moment. Then, in the spirit of Lassalle, it can also say of itself: ‘I dared!’
Notes
1. F. Mehring (ed.), Der Literarische Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Vol.4, Stuttgart 1902, p.38.
2. The resolution passed at the SPD conference from September 17-23 1905 in Jena characterised the most extensive use of the mass withdrawal of labour as one of the most effective working class methods of struggle, but nevertheless restricted the use of the political mass strike to a considerable extent to defending the right to vote to the Reichstag and freedom of assembly.
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Last updated on: 8 May 2021
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