The Declarations of Havana

By Fidel Castro and Tariq Ali

In response to the American administration's attempt to isolate Cuba, Fidel Castro delivered a series of speeches designed to radicalize Latin American society. As Latin America experiences more revolutions in Venezuela and Bolivia, and continues to upset America's plans for neo-liberal imperialism, renowned radical writer and activist Tariq Ali provides a searing analysis of the relevance of Castro's message for today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Nov 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788731393

Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro led Cuba from 1959 until February 2008.

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The Declarations of Havana

REVOLUTIONS

A series of classic texts by revolutionaries in both thought and deed.

Each book includes an introduction by a major contemporary writer

illustrating how these figures continue to speak to readers today.

The Declarations of Havana

Fidel Castro

INTRODUCTION BY TARIQ ALI

This edition published by Verso 2018

First published by Verso 2008

Introduction © Tariq Ali 2008, 2018

Collection © Verso 2008, 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-138-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-139-3 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-140-9 (US EBK)

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CONTENTS

Introduction: The Sling of David — Tariq Ali

Suggested Further Reading

Chronology

1History will absolve me

2First Declaration of Havana

3Second Declaration of Havana

Notes

Introduction

THE SLING OF DAVID

Tariq Ali

Explorations of the master—servant relationship have a long and distinguished pedigree in world literature, and its contradictions have been exposed in Al-Ma’ari, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe among others. In Cervantes’s masterwork, for example, a false oracle has informed the eponymous hero that his beloved Dulcinea can only be released if he is willing to sentence his servant Sancho Panza to receive thousands of lashes. Desperate for Dulcinea, the master agrees provided that he alone will administer the punishment. On a warm night his impatience gets the better of him. He rises from his bed and prepares to flog the unwitting Sancho Panza. Imagine the master’s astonishment when the servant, instead of submitting quietly to violence, knocks him down. Cervantes writes:

Don Quixote: So you would rebel against your lord and master, would you, and dare to raise your hand against the one who feeds you.

Sancho: I neither make nor unmake a king, but am simply standing up for myself, for I am my own lord.

Here in a nutshell is the story of the Cuban Revolution. With the ending of direct colonial rule in the decade that followed the end of the Second World War, the overwhelming majority of countries in the three exploited continents ceased to be colonies in the usual sense. The United States, unlike its European cousins, had always preferred the indirect mode of domination, one which soon became the norm: formally independent and sovereign states, but heavily dependent on their metropolitan masters. An overblown and parasitic bureaucratic machine inherited from the colonial period presided over a backward socio-economic structure.

The function of these formally independent states was to serve the economic needs of the imperial powers, at the cost of their own political and economic sovereignty. This often resulted in a plantation culture ruled by the production of a single commodity — sugarcane, in the case of Cuba — or the extraction of mineral and oil resources, as in Africa and the Middle East. This structure discouraged any real attempts to generate an autonomous process of industrialization. India and Brazil were exceptions in this regard, but the autonomy on display in these countries did little to affect the global structure of domination.

In South America a governing creole elite, ruling in most cases with US political and military support, held the continent with relative ease. Rebellions, such as that led by Sandino in Nicaragua, were isolated and crushed. Physical and cultural repression of the indigenous population (with the exception of Mexico) was regarded as normal. Populist experiments (Argentina and Brazil) did not last too long. Few thought of Cuba as the likely venue for the first anti-capitalist revolution. For one thing, it was too close to the United States; moreover, the scale of US investments on the island was such that the corporations were unlikely to relinquish their grip. And if there was real trouble the Marines would undoubtedly be despatched to calm the natives in time-honoured fashion.

It didn’t quite turn out like that. The small band of guerrillas led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos were initially seen as little more than an irritant. Batista, the Mafia-backed dictator in Havana, denied that there was any serious unrest in the country, and it was an enterprising US journalist who brought the first real news of armed struggle in the Sierra Maestra to the world. New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews practised his craft in a world slightly different to our own. For one thing, the ‘newspaper of record’, as the Times defined itself, generally permitted its journalists the creative freedom to explore new terrain or investigate the effect of US interventions in its South American backyard. His series of articles for the paper trumpeted the prologue of the Cuban Revolution.

The Cuba in which Matthews arrived in 1957 was the product of a turbulent past. ‘La Isla Fiel’ (The Faithful Island) of Spanish imperial folklore, it had, under the leadership of its landed gentry, united against Spanish rule in the 1860s. After a decade of savage Spanish repression, the revolt was crushed. The decline in sugar prices triggered a new uprising in 1895 as plantation owners rallied to the cause of independence. The Spanish fought bitterly, and herded hundreds of thousands of Cubans into reconcentrados, concentration camps (their first appearance on the globe), where they languished and died. Twenty per cent of Cuba’s population (350,000) died during the three years of conflict. US entry into the war led to a Spanish defeat, but the ordeal had seriously weakened Cuba’s landowning class, which became incapable of resisting the establishment of a de facto US protectorate, with a permanent military base at Guantánamo. The Catholic Church was weak (three-quarters of the priests were foreigners), and incapable of shoring up the new regime. The Cuban landed oligarchy had virtually disappeared from the political landscape after another catastrophic slump in sugar prices following the First World War. This removed the only local force that could have blocked a revolution, as it had done successfully elsewhere in the continent.

Lacking cohesion, the urban rich were initially happy sub-alterns of the US corporations that occupied the island. US capital invested in Cuba was seven times greater than in the rest of South America. In the 1950s a building boom helped create a new class of Cuban businessmen. Occasionally they dreamed of grandeur and used their large fortunes to buy back the old plantations from US companies, but always stressed their own subordination to the imperial presence. They were parasites and happy with the niche that had been granted them. The ennui that pervaded this class forms the subject matter of many Cuban novels of the period.

Cuba’s fake parliamentary regime was venal. Its politicians regularly looted the country’s exchequer, and gang wars ravaged the cities. It was, in short, a complete debacle. Unsurprisingly, General Batista’s second coup in 1952 met with no resistance from the political establishment, but nor did they give him fulsome support. He was regarded as an adventurer (in 1933 as a sergeant he had, together with student groups, organized a successful revolt against his own High Command) and considered untrustworthy. Because of his dark skin he was not permitted entry to the Havana Club, where the rich made business pleasurable.

The country’s situation continued to deteriorate and the Batista regime, detested by the population, without any serious support from the rich, over-dependent on Washington and the Mafia, rapidly became isolated. It was without doubt the weakest link in the chain of military regimes that criss-crossed Latin America.

On 26 July 1953 an angry young lawyer, Fidel Castro, led a small band of armed men in an attempt to seize the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, in Oriente province. Most of the guerrillas were killed. Castro was tried and defended himself with a masterly speech, reproduced as Chapter 1, below, replete with classical references and quotations from Balzac and Rousseau, that ended with the words: ‘Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.’ It won him both notoriety and popularity.

Released in an amnesty in 1954, Castro left the island and began to organize a rebellion in Mexico. For a time he stayed in the hacienda that had once belonged to the legendary Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. In late November 1956 eighty-two people including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara set sail from Mexico in a tiny vessel, the Granma, and headed for the impenetrable, forested hills of the Sierra Maestra in Oriente province. Ambushed by Batista’s men after they landed, twelve survivors reached the Sierra Maestra and began the guerrilla war. They were backed by a strong urban network of students, workers and public employees who became the backbone of the 26 July Movement. In 1958 the guerrilla armies began to move from the mountains to the plains: a column led by Fidel began to take towns in Oriente, while Che Guevara’s irregulars stormed and took the central Cuban city of Santa Clara. The day after, Batista and his Mafia chums fled the island as the Rebel Army, now greeted as liberators, marched across the island into Havana. The popularity of the Revolution was there for all to see.

Castro’s victory stunned the Americas. It soon became obvious that this was no ordinary event. Any doubts as to the Revolution’s intentions were dispelled by the First Declaration of Havana (Chapter 2, below), Castro’s declaration of total Independence from the US made in public before a million people in Revolution Square. Washington reacted angrily and hastily, trying to cordon off the new regime from the rest of the continent. This led to a radical response by the Cuban leadership. It decided to nationalize US-owned industries without compensation. Three months later, on 13 October 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations; subsequently, it armed Cuban exiles in Florida and launched an invasion of the island near the Bay of Pigs. It was defeated. President Kennedy then imposed a total economic blockade, pushing the Cubans in Moscow’s direction. On 4 February 1962, the Second Declaration of Havana (Chapter 3, below) denounced the US presence in South America and called for the liberation of the entire continent.

Forty years later Castro explained the necessity for the Declarations:

At the beginning of the Revolution … we made two statements, which we called the First Declaration of Havana and the Second Declaration of Havana. That was during a rally of over a million people in Revolution Square. Through these declarations, we were responding to the plans hatched in the United States against Cuba and against Latin America — because the United States forced every Latin American country to break off relations with Cuba … [These declarations] said that an armed struggle should not be embarked on if there existed legal and constitutional conditions for a peaceful civic struggle. That was our thesis in relation to Latin America…

While they were in the Sierra Maestra, the direction that the revolution would take was still not clear — even to Castro. Until that point, he had never been a socialist, and relations with the official Cuban Communist Party were often tense. It was the reaction of that noisy and powerful neighbour from the north that helped determine the orientation of the Revolution. The results were mixed. Politically, the dependence on the Soviet Union led to the mimicking of Soviet institutions and all that that entailed. Socially the Cuban Revolution created an education system and health service that remain the envy of much of the neo-liberal world. History will be the final judge, but Fidel Castro has already been elevated by a vast number of Latin Americans to the plinth occupied by those great liberators Bolivar, San Martín, Sucre and José Martí.

SUGGESTED

FURTHER READING

Azicri, M., Cuba. Politics, Economics and Society, London and New York, Pinter, 1988.

Bethell, L. (ed.), Cuba. A Short History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Blackburn, R., ‘Prologue to the Cuban Revolution’, New Left Review, 21, October 1963, pp. 52–91.

Castro, F., My Life (edited by Ignacio Ramonet), London, Allen Lane, 2007.

Domínguez, J. I., To Make a World Safe for Revolution. Cuba’s Foreign Policy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989.

Fagen, R. R., The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1969.

Gott, R., Cuba. A New History, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2004.

Huberman, L. and Sweezy, P., Socialism in Cuba, New York, Monthly Review, 1969.

Kapcia, A., Cuba. Island of Dreams, Oxford, Berg, 2000.

Karol, K. S., Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, New York, Hill & Wang, 1970.

Morley, M. H., Imperial State and Revolution. The United States and Cuba, 1952-1986, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987.

O’Connor, J., The Origins of Socialism in Cuba, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1970.

Seers, D. (ed.), Cuba. The Economic and Social Revolution, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1964.

Szulc, T., Fidel: A Critical Portrait, London, Melbourne, Auckland and Johannesburg, Hutchinson, 1986.

CHRONOLOGY OF CUBAN

HISTORY AND THE

REVOLUTION

PRE-REVOLUTIONARY CUBA: KEY DATES