History will hold up Fidel Castro as one of the world's great leaders.
Simply put, Fidel Castro entered the rank of Leader, an honest man.
And he has remained true to the People of Cuba in spite of tempting
opportunities that have turned the heads of other world leaders. True
to his convictions. True to his People. True to the end. And in all
of that, Fidel Castro remains a mere mortal.
Can you define a noble man in two words?
Fidel Castro!
Carl Jarvis
On 8/18/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2016/8031/803150.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 31 August 22, 2016
(feature article)
‘History will absolve me’: program of Cuban Revolution
Excerpt from Fidel Castro’s defense speech at trial after 1953 Moncada
attack
Below is an excerpt from Fidel Castro’s famous defense speech “History
Will Absolve Me,” delivered at the close of the trial where he and 31
others were sentenced to prison for the July 26, 1953, assault on the
Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba. The speech was printed
clandestinely and distributed all across the island, helping to assemble
the cadres that overthrew the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship
in 1959, bringing Cuba’s workers and farmers to power.
Thousands rallied in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, July 26 — and many more
across the island and worldwide — to celebrate the 63rd anniversary of
that action, and the Cuban Revolution, which stands as a powerful
example for working people worldwide. Other events are being organized
in Cuba and elsewhere to mark Castro’s 90th birthday Aug. 13.
The excerpts are from a new translation prepared by Pathfinder Press.
Subheadings are by the Militant.
The indictment for this trial should have included five revolutionary
laws — the laws that we planned to proclaim immediately after the
capture of the Moncada garrison and broadcast to the nation by radio. …
The first revolutionary law would have returned sovereign rule to the
people. The 1940 constitution would have been proclaimed the supreme law
of the land until such time as the people decided to modify or change
it. It’s a fact that no popularly elected bodies exist at present to
implement the constitution and punish those who betray it. Therefore,
the revolutionary movement — the living incarnation of this sovereignty,
the only source of legitimate power — would have assumed all powers
inherent within the constitution, except that of modifying the basic law
itself. That is, the revolutionary movement would have assumed
legislative, executive and judicial powers.
This approach could not be more transparent or free of sterile
absurdities and fakery. A government proclaimed by the mass of
combatants would be vested with all necessary powers to implement the
will of the people and bring about true justice. …
The second revolutionary law would have given ownership of the land —
under the condition that it couldn’t be mortgaged or transferred — to
all small farmers, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and squatters who work
five caballerías [165 acres] of land or less. …
The third revolutionary law would have granted workers and employees the
right to share 30 percent of the profits of all large industrial,
commercial, and mining enterprises, including sugar mills. …
The fourth revolutionary law would have granted all small sugar farmers
a 55 percent share of the sugar their cane yields. …
The fifth revolutionary law would have ordered the confiscation of the
holdings of those who had embezzled money from any previous regime. …
Solidarity with peoples of continent
Furthermore, it was to be declared that Cuba’s policy in the Americas
would be one of close solidarity with the democratic peoples of the
continent, and that all those politically persecuted by bloody tyrannies
oppressing sister nations would find generous asylum, brotherhood, and
sustenance in the land of Martí. …
These laws would have been proclaimed immediately. … They would have
been followed by another series of fundamental laws and measures. These
would have included agrarian reform, a complete overhaul of the
educational system, nationalization of the electric and telephone
monopolies, refund to the people of the illegal and excessive rates
these companies charged in the past, and payment to the treasury of all
taxes they brazenly evaded in the past.
All these laws and others would have been based on strict compliance
with two essential new articles of our constitution.
The first article would ban large landed estates. To end them, the
maximum area of land any one person or entity might own for each type of
agricultural enterprise would be stipulated by law. Measures would be
adopted to return land to the people of Cuba.
The second article would categorically order the state to use all means
at its disposal to provide employment for all who lack it and to ensure
a decent livelihood to each manual or intellectual worker.
None of these laws could be called unconstitutional. The first popularly
elected government that came to power after these decrees would have to
respect them, not only because of moral obligations to the nation but
because when people achieve something they have yearned for over
generations, no force in the world is capable of taking it away.
Land, industrialization, housing, unemployment, education, and public
health: these are the six problems we would have taken resolute steps to
solve, along with restoring civil liberties and political democracy. …
Eighty-five percent of small farmers in Cuba pay rent and live under the
constant threat of being evicted from their plots of land.
More than half of our best farmland is in the hands of foreign owners.
In Oriente, our biggest province, the holdings of the United Fruit
Company and the West Indian Company extend coast to coast from north to
south.
Some 200,000 peasant families don’t have a square meter of land to till
to provide food for their starving children.
On the other hand, nearly 300,000 caballerías [10 million acres] of
productive land owned by powerful interests remain uncultivated. …
Except for a few food processing plants, lumber mills, and textile
factories, 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 ore to import plows. …
Just as serious or even worse is the tragedy in housing. There are
200,000 huts and hovels in Cuba. Some 400,000 families in the
countryside and in cities are crowded into barracks-style housing and
shacks that lack even the most elementary sanitary facilities.
Some 2.2 million of our urban population pay rents that absorb between
one-fifth and one-third of their incomes.
Some 2.8 million of our rural population and those who live on the
outskirts of our cities lack electricity. …
Death is the only liberation from such poverty and here, yes, the state
is most helpful. Ninety percent of children in the countryside are
devoured by parasites that enter under the nails of their bare feet. …
Crime of unemployment
When the father of a family works only four months a year, how can he
buy clothing and medicine for his children? They will grow up with
rickets. At age thirty they won’t have a single healthy tooth in their
mouths. They will have heard ten million speeches and will finally die
of poverty and deception. Public hospitals, which are always full,
accept only patients recommended by some powerful politician who demands
in return the vote of the unfortunate person and his entire family so
that Cuba may continue forever in the same or worse condition.
In face of these facts, is it not understandable that from May to
December over a million people are jobless? …
When you try a defendant for robbery, honorable judges, you don’t ask
him how long he has been unemployed. How many children he has. Which
days of the week he ate, which he didn’t. You aren’t concerned at all
with the social conditions he faces. You send him to jail without
further thought. But the rich man who burns warehouses and stores to
collect insurance doesn’t go to jail — even though a few human beings
may have gone up in flames as well — because he has more than enough
money to hire lawyers and bribe judges.
You imprison the poor wretch who steals because he is hungry. Yet not
one of the hundreds of thieves who steal millions from the government
has ever spent a night behind bars. You dine with them at the end of the
year in an aristocratic 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 wealthy character in Balzac — Taillefer — who in his
toast to the young heir to an enormous fortune, says:
Gentlemen, let us drink to the power of gold. M. de Valentin, who has
become a millionaire six times over, has become a power. He is a king,
he can do anything; he is above everyone, as are all who are rich. For
him from now on, the statement that “All Frenchmen are equal before the
law” is a lie inscribed at the opening of the legal code. He is not
going to obey the law; the law is going to obey him. There are neither
scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires.*
* From 1831 novel by Honoré de Balzac La peau de chagrin (The wild ass’s
skin).
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