Lessons of Cuba’s revolution can help us emulate its example
https://themilitant.com/2021/03/13/lessons-of-cubas-revolution-can-help-us-emulate-its-example/
March 22, 2021
University students march in Havana against Fulgencio Batista’s
U.S.-backed dictatorship, April 6, 1952, a month after he overthrew the
elected government in a coup. Armando Hart is sixth from left, looking
at the camera. Behind, waving Cuban flag, is Raúl Castro.
BOHEMIA/CONSTANTINO ARIAS
University students march in Havana against Fulgencio Batista’s
U.S.-backed dictatorship, April 6, 1952, a month after he overthrew the
elected government in a coup. Armando Hart is sixth from left, looking
at the camera. Behind, waving Cuban flag, is Raúl Castro.
One of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March is Aldabonazo: Inside
the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58, a Participant’s Account by
Armando Hart. He was a central organizer of the urban underground and
one of the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution. After overthrowing
the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959, Cuba’s toilers, led by
Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, established a workers and farmers
government and the first socialist revolution in the Americas. As
minister of education, Hart helped lead the mass literacy campaign in
1961, which taught a million Cubans to read and write. He was minister
of culture from 1976 to 1997. The excerpts are from the preface by
editor Mary-Alice Waters. Copyright © 2004 by Pathfinder Press.
Reprinted by permission.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
More than five decades ago, Armando Hart emerged as a leader of the
young generation of students and working people who burst into history
as they took to the streets in opposition to the 1952 military coup
d’état in Cuba that installed one of the most brutal dictatorships Latin
America had yet experienced. The Centennial Generation, as they became
known, refused to accept or compromise with the tyranny and corruption
that marked political life in Cuba. They asserted not only the right but
the obligation of the Cuban people to rise in armed insurrection if need
be to bring down a bloody, illegitimate regime that had usurped power by
force. And they set out to forge a revolutionary movement capable of
achieving their aims.
Aldabonazo — which in Spanish means a sharp, warning knock on the door —
became a rallying cry of that generation of youth who risked their lives
in defiance of the military regime. What distinguished them from the
various bourgeois political parties and associations that opposed the
Batista dictatorship was not primarily words, but deeds. Without fear of
consequences for themselves, or political hesitation over where the
struggle might lead, they fought for what they believed was right and
refused to settle for less.
Fewer than seven years later, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, the
July 26 Revolutionary Movement and its Rebel Army led the workers,
peasants, and revolutionary-minded youth of Cuba to victory. Some 20,000
had paid with their lives by the time Batista and his henchmen fled the
country on January 1, 1959. A new revolutionary government was installed
with the jubilant support of the overwhelming majority of the Cuban
people. Armando Hart was the first minister of education in that government.
Aldabonazo takes us into this history from the perspective of the cadres
who with courage and audacity led the struggle waged by the urban
underground. …
Through Hart’s account we begin to understand more fully and accurately
the day-by-day political struggle waged by the forces that came together
in 1955 under the leadership of Fidel Castro to form the July 26
Revolutionary Movement, named for the date of the 1953 assault on the
Moncada military garrison in Santiago de Cuba that marked the opening of
the popular insurrection against the dictatorship. We follow the men and
women of the July 26 Movement as they work to develop their political
program; as they struggle, through action and debate, to win the
leadership of the revolutionary vanguard; as they take advantage of
every opening to intervene in the broad political ferment, exposing the
empty posturing and pretensions of the traditional bourgeois opposition
parties; and as they clarify questions of strategy and tactics debated
not only among the revolutionary cadres … but throughout the
anti-Batista opposition.
Above all we come to appreciate the leadership capacities of Fidel
Castro as he pulls together and politically orients the revolutionary
cadres coming from diverse origins and experiences — exemplified by men
and women like Armando Hart and his brother Enrique, Celia Sánchez,
Frank País, Haydée Santamaría, Ñico López, Vilma Espín, and Faustino
Pérez — to name but a few of those whom we meet and begin to know in
these pages. We watch the core of the national leadership of the July 26
Movement in the Llano emerge, grow and recover from the blows of
repression, and transform themselves in the course of the struggle. …
We see how the men and women of the July 26 Movement fought to forge a
disciplined organization of cadres whose goal — as explained in the
leadership’s 1957 “Circular No. 1 to the membership,” printed here — was
“a) To overthrow Batista through popular action, [which] is not the same
as just overthrowing him,” and “b) To consolidate the revolutionary
instrument to ensure the fulfillment of the revolution’s program, also
through popular action, [which] is not the same as simply creating a new
party.”
Along this course the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army not only led the
working people of Cuba to bring down the dictatorship and establish the
first “free territory of the Americas.” They opened the road to the
first socialist revolution in our hemisphere as well. For the first time
since the Bolsheviks under Lenin led the workers, peasants, and soldiers
of the tsarist empire to power in October 1917, a leadership of the
toilers unpoisoned by the degeneration of the Russian Revolution emerged
on the world stage, bypassing obstacles and creating new possibilities
for struggle. A quarter century of revolution in the Americas ensued —
from the Southern Cone through the Andes, to Central America and the
Caribbean. The liberation of southern Africa became a reality.
Therein lies the root of the implacable hatred of the U.S. rulers for
the Cuban Revolution and for those who led — and lead — it. Therein lie
the reasons why for more than forty years Washington has never for an
instant ceased attempting to punish the Cuban people for their audacity,
to force them into submission. And why imperialism has failed. …
The Cuban Revolution in all its rich complexity is a vital, living part
of the present and future struggles of Our America, and the world. The
better we understand how that revolution was led to victory, the better
prepared we will be to emulate its example and meet the challenges posed
by the social and political explosions that will shape the twenty-first
century.
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Charles Bukowski “For those who believe in God, most of the big
questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the
God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to
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Charles Bukowski