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Aldabonazo, Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58 by
Armando Hart is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for April. Hart
was a founding member of the July 26 Movement, which led the successful
revolutionary struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed tyranny of Fulgencio
Batista in Cuba. Excerpted here is a document written in June 1958 by
Raúl Castro, commander of the Rebel Army’s Second Front in eastern Cuba,
titled, “To Cuban Youth, To All Latin American Youth, To the Youth of
the World.” It was circulated clandestinely among members of the July 26
Movement, including in the Principe Castle prison, where Hart was
incarcerated. Copyright © 2004 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by
permission.
BY RAÚL CASTRO
From the rebel mountains of this eastern province — Free Territory of
Cuba — on behalf of youth who, sacrificing everything, have promised to
win or die rather than live under such ignominious oppression at a
decisive moment of our history, we issue this urgent call to all young
people in the world to unite their efforts with ours, so as to help save
the youth of a brother people from destruction and extermination. We
call on them to help a defenseless people that is being cruelly
subjugated by the worst gang of criminals and murderers that any nation
has ever suffered. We will never abandon the fight, no matter how
unequal it might be.
On March 10, 1952, eighty days before general elections in which the
people were to freely choose their rulers, Mr. Fulgencio Batista assumed
military control of the country through a coup d’état. With a stroke of
the pen he swept away all democratic institutions, assumed control in an
autocratic way, and imposed the darkest despotism on the people. The
leaders of the traditional political parties betrayed the people and
abandoned them to their fate, taking refuge in their comfortable
positions to await better times, in order to reappear with the stupid
ambitions that have always helped characterize them as vultures over a
battlefield. In this situation, Batista prepared phony one-man
elections, electing himself president together with a housebroken congress.
Meanwhile, a people who suffer want to fight. It was then that Cuban
youth decided to take the reins of the resistance. Students, workers,
peasants, and professionals prepared to fight. On July 26, 1953, a youth
ready to conquer its own destiny waged a frontal attack on the second
most important fortress in the country. When the attack failed, a
hundred young people paid with their lives for their brave act of
rebellion after suffering horrendous tortures. The students, on a
struggle footing from the very first moment, saw their ranks diminished
with the fall of new martyrs, including José Antonio Echeverría, the
leader of the Cuban students. The sugar workers shook the country with
tremendous strikes for the conquest of their just demands and the
defense of violated liberties, facing the regime’s repressive apparatus
and the gangster machinery of the officialdom imposed on the trade
unions. New losses are being added to the already long list of
combatants of the Cuban proletariat
At the end of 1956, after several years of preparation, the insurrection
broke out in the countryside and the cities under the leadership of
Fidel Castro and Frank País, an insurrection that continues and grows
today. In mid-1957 the murder of Frank País in the streets of Santiago
de Cuba produced the most formidable explosion of popular indignation
ever witnessed in our country, and the general strike caused by his
premature death at twenty-three years of age was drowned in blood….
Batista has handed over great wealth to U.S. interests, but the Yankees
want more, and to obtain it they are employing the tactic of a
diplomatic shift. Now they are naming as ambassador Mr. [Earl] Smith,
who pretends to pester Batista and support the revolutionary opposition.
The goal was clear, and within a few days bore fruit: Batista, fearful
of losing Yankee support, delivered scandalous concessions: the Moa
cobalt mines, located in the territory of this Second Front; new
concessions to the Telephone Company, to the Electric Company, to the
oil companies, to the King Ranch cattle farm, and so on. We are so sure
of what we say that our denunciation is being confirmed as we write
these lines. This very morning, June 26, we heard on the radio that
Batista has signed a decree with new and more humiliating concessions of
Cuban subsoil to U.S. companies, in perpetuity no less. We have never
seen such great monstrosities done to the economy of a nation.
Undoubtedly these latest concessions come in exchange for the military
aid the U.S. government is giving Batista at this precise and terrible
moment.
As irrefutable proof of these charges, we point out the following facts:
Colonel Tabernilla Palmero, chief of the dictatorship’s air force and
responsible for the merciless bombings of the cities of Cienfuegos and
Sagua la Grande, was decorated by Major General Truman H. Landon, chief
of staff of the U.S. Air Command of the Caribbean, on the express orders
and on behalf of President Eisenhower himself. This event was recorded
in photographs by several newspapers of our country. At the end of May,
officers of our Department of Rebel Intelligence informed us that
throughout the month, the enemy air force had been supplied by bombs of
all types at the Caimanera U.S. naval base [at Guantánamo Bay].…
If you maintain an indifferent silence, you will become accomplices of
those who today murder us and tomorrow will murder you. It does not
matter if you are North American, Soviet, Chinese, or Venezuelan; we are
all brothers. Across borders, languages, political or religious beliefs,
we all belong to the great family of the world’s youth. We confront the
same problems, suffer the same consequences, and live under the same
threats. In face of that, arm in arm, with a firm footing and our heads
held high, let us all sing the same hymn of hope. Let us aspire to and
fight for peace and future happiness. And let us conquer the common good
for the well-being of all.
Finally, [José] Martí, whose road we follow, told us something that is
part of the body of ideas we put forward on behalf of Cuban youth who
await your determined support: “Every American of Our America is a
Cuban. In Cuba we do not fight only for human freedom, nor for a
well-being that is impossible under a government of conquest and bribes,
nor for the exclusive well-being of a revered island that inspires and
strengthens us with its simple name. In Cuba we fight to assure, with
our independence, the independence of Latin America.”
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