The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.22           June 3, 1996 
 
 
When Cuba Proclaimed Socialist Revolution
Fidel Castro speaks on 35th anniversary of U.S.-backed invasion at Bay of Pigs  

BY FIDEL CASTRO
The following are major excerpts from a speech by Cuban president Fidel Castro at the main ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of the victory of the Cuban revolutionary armed forces over a U.S.-backed mercenary invasion at Playa Girón, known in the United States as the Bay of Pigs. The 1,500 Cuban-born counterrevolutionaries launched their invasion April 17, 1961, and were crushed two days later. The ceremony where Castro gave the address below was held in Matanzas, Cuba, April 16, 1996. The excerpts are taken from the English-language translation that was published in the May 1 Cuban weekly Granma International, where the speech appears in its entirety. Subheadings are by the Militant. BY FIDEL CASTRO

We commemorate many things this afternoon, many important things. But in the first place, we should remember that on this date, in the afternoon, we proclaimed the socialist character of the revolution. [Applause] We could say that it was the first great artillery salvo in response to the aggression.

This afternoon we recall with infinite pain how we buried the comrades who died in the repugnant and cowardly bombing on April 15, a bombing carried out by planes painted with the insignia of our Air Force, to confuse us, to deceive us, to surprise us.

I recall the early morning of that day, because I had spent the whole night awake. A boat was approaching the eastern zone and the comrades from that region were on a state of alert, especially in the area between Maisí and Baracoa, and from the command post in a house in Nuevo Vedado [a neighborhood in Havana], we saw the planes that were going to bomb Ciudad Libertad flying low overhead.

They fired almost immediately, but I remember that no more than 20 seconds passed before our anti-aircraft artillery responded energetically to their fire, despite the fact that it was made up of young, inexperienced militiamen with no practice in the use of those arms. And one of those planes - as part of a deliberate enemy plan - flew off to Miami, landed there and said that it was deserting from the Cuban Air Force and that the revolution's aviation was up in arms.

They said that these were not U.S. planes with Cuban insignia, but rather planes piloted by insurgents. That same lie was proclaimed at the United Nations, and not even that country's representative in the United Nations was told the truth about what had happened....

Difficult days of the Bay of Pigs
Those days of the Bay of Pigs were difficult. We know that the United States would not pardon us for making a revolution.

What kind of a revolution was it? It was a revolution of justice. All those laws that were mentioned here and that [José Ramón] Fernández(1) mentioned were simply laws of justice, in a country that was enslaved, exploited, humiliated, where the peasants had no land, where the U.S. companies were the powerful owners of the country's best land, where theft was constant, where people were killed, tortured, assassinated, where the number of illiterate was enormous, where almost 60 children per 1,000 live births died every year, where there were no schools, where there lived a valiant, heroic people who had struggled a long time so that their powerful neighbor would not take them over, and because agrarian reform laws and urban reform laws had been passed, and because, in short, social justice was being done, that neighbor decided to immediately liquidate the revolution.

But first they thought they could liquidate it by taking away the sugar quota, or that they could liquidate it by eliminating the oil supplies - that is, not selling Cuba petroleum or permitting that any other country sell Cuba petroleum - and other similar measures, and the revolution found formulas to fight each one of these and to survive.

They were not going to allow our revolution to be an example for the peoples of Latin America living under similar conditions, and they believed, with disdain, that they could crush us. They did not realize that this was a different kind of revolution, that this was a popular revolution, a revolution of the people, by the people and for the people which defeated one of the best organized and best trained armies in the hemisphere.

They did not understand that, and immediately they took on the task of organizing subversive groups. Relying on the large landowners, the henchmen and others affected by the revolution, they managed to organize 300 groups, and supply them with arms, resources, money, political support, aid of all kinds. They began to carry out sabotage throughout the length and breadth of our national territory, in addition to the economic blockade aimed at starving us to death.

At that time, the socialist bloc existed - the USSR existed. We all know what happened, but despite that, as proof of what feelings of solidarity and internationalism meant, they helped us, they supported us, and although we disagree with most, if not all, of what they did later on, we are thankful for what they did for us at that moment. [Applause] It was extremely important.

Not willing to renounce the revolution
We did not want to mix up the international situation and the cold war with our revolution, but we were not willing to renounce our revolution.

We did not buy our first weapons from the socialist bloc; we went to Western countries to buy weapons. In some places we bought rifles, grenade launchers, ammunition, modern and automatic rifles, tens of thousands; in a European country we also bought cannons, munitions.

And what happened? When the second ship was landing, having been sabotaged while abroad, it exploded - and exploded twice, because the sabotage had been prepared for it to explode at least twice(2).... While they were planning their aggression against Cuba, they wanted to prohibit or impede our acquisition of arms.

At that time we didn't even have relations with the Soviets, there were no diplomatic relations, but we were determined to defend ourselves, we were determined to fight, and that was how we acquired the first weapons from the socialist bloc. Of course, they came from different places: some were Czech, others were weapons taken from the Germans during World War II and others were Soviet arms that arrived through Czechoslovakia....

Weapons arrived, but the people were not trained in the use of those weapons. We had learned how to handle a few cannons and tanks which had remained in Cuba when the revolution triumphed, and that's how we started to arm ourselves, but we had to organize the cadres....

When the United States saw that the revolution was resisting, it speeded up its plans for the mercenary invasion, and we knew -

after all the measures that they had taken against Cuba of every kind, including subversion, sabotage, armed actions - that as soon as they had the first opportunity or the first organized force, they would lash out, trying to do in Cuba something similar to what they had done in Guatemala. But no one could know when or how. We did know that they were going to use that variant, and in the meantime, we organized ourselves feverishly throughout the country.

We sent the first FAL rifles that arrived to the mountains. We were already preparing to fight in the mountains if aggression came; the concepts that we later developed on a large scale were already present. We already knew that if the U.S army arrived here, the Cuban people, with tens of thousands of rifles, could fight them off. No one doubted that.

But later a torrent, as we could call it, of arms of all kinds arrived - arms of a different type, hundreds of anti-aircraft weapons, hundreds of artillery weapons of all calibers, hundreds of tanks, or at least it seemed like hundreds to us. I couldn't say how many we had on April 17, 1961, but I can assure you enough to crush ten Bay of Pigs invasions simultaneously, in a slightly longer time, of course. When those arms arrived, the population was mobilized throughout the country and especially in Havana. Most of the arms were concentrated there because it was logical that any enemy aggression would try to take the capital of the country. Tens of thousand of militiamen were mobilized.

There were a few Czech and Soviet instructors and when they saw how things were, they said, "This is impossible. They need at least two years to train all these people." And we told them, "No, we have to train them all, and as fast as possible." That's when we invented something, which was to ask the trainees to teach in the afternoon what they had learned in the morning in regard to tanks, artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, whatever. And that's what they did. In the end, those small groups of instructors were convinced that in that way, it was possible to train hundreds of thousands.

We recruited many young people in the universities, in work places, everywhere, for the artillery, anti-aircraft units and infantry battalions, while we speeded up the instruction of the Rebel Army troops that had come down from the Sierra Maestra(3) or had been incorporated throughout the country. We really prepared the personnel very quickly, because we could say that most of those armaments arrived just a few weeks, or at most a few months before the Bay of Pigs invasion. As you know, Cubans learn quickly, and they learned how to handle those weapons.

As for aviation, they had left us some Sea Furies, other fighter jets whose name I don't recall at this moment, some B-26s and three training jets. But really, the aviation personnel -

except for a small patriotically spirited group which had been imprisoned because almost all of them refused to bomb the peasants in the Sierra Maestra - had fought on Batista's side, and therefore we had more planes than pilots, and training a pilot takes time....

Forces trained in all provinces
But when would they come? We didn't have such an extensive intelligence service as we do now; we picked up news, we read. But here's a glimpse of how they controlled the press when they wanted to: in the United States they gave the press instructions not to talk about the organization of the expedition, but something always leaked out. Which plan would it be? Would they attempt to form guerrilla groups in the different regions of the country? They had already formed them in the Escambray mountains, and we had cleaned out the Escambray more than once; actually, they brought in arms all over the island.

We wondered which plan it would be. A generalized guerrilla war? It's always harder to capture a small group than a troop; we wanted them to send them all together, of course. But what would they do? And we took steps, in each cove, on each small beach in the country we put a militia platoon; we left no place unguarded. And of course, forces were being trained in all of the provinces.

If they decided to go in one direction, which one would they choose? We thought, for example, that they might try to establish a sort of Taiwan on the Isle of Pines, now called the Isle of Youth. The prisons were there, filled with thousands of counterrevolutionary prisoners and war criminals, so what we did was send tanks, infantry, cannons there, and turn the Isle of Pines into a fortress.

Could it be in the Escambray mountains? There was a certain logic to that; there they had organized many groups and at one point had 1,000 armed men in the Escambray who were experts in evading our forces....

There was a moment in which the revolution concentrated 50,000 men in the Escambray - which gives you an idea of their strength - from all the provinces, most of them from Havana. The Escambray was completely surrounded, divided into four parts and we started to clean up, with squadrons going house to house.

At some point, the Escambray could have been their preferred spot for launching an invasion, a mountainous area, where motorized forces would have to go up the coast, an airport, and a certain base of internal support. But the Escambray became another indomitable fortress.

We kept thinking and we were left with the Bay of Pigs. There had been nothing there, and in the first year of the revolution we started building roads, in order to improve the lives of the charcoal makers and their families. Three fundamental roads were being built... we were also building schools and an airfield. The airfield was necessary for the enemy, for supplying arms and for bringing in the provisional government, which was the real plan to legitimize their crime....

If small groups arrived, we had to fight against all the groups that landed; if they concentrated them, we had to have sufficient forces to destroy them. That's what we were working on, and we were waiting for an invasion at any moment when the early morning bombing occurred on April 15. That was a whopping blunder on the part of the enemy, because by attacking us on the morning of April 15, by inventing that whole thing about the insurgent airplanes, by employing considerable air power, they immediately gave us the idea that the invasion was a question of 24 or 48 hours, and although we had part of the country mobilized, we immediately mobilized the whole country and all the arms.

On April 16, exactly 35 years ago, and I believe more or less at this same time of day, after we buried our comrades, we organized a large rally with tens of thousands of armed militia members on the corner of 12th and 23rd Streets; they filled up 23rd for many blocks. As you can imagine, there was a state of tremendous indignation; the people were inflamed. The revolution had advanced quite a bit; we knew that this was the price they wanted to make us pay for having our revolution, and although many of our measures were simple acts of social justice, they could also rightly be called socialist measures.

Assault speeded revolutionary changes
This whole process of aggressions against Cuba accelerated revolutionary changes. Some day, socialism had to come, but many things needed to be done first, it was not considered to be the moment to talk about socialism. There was an energetic battle against anticommunism, since anticommunism was the United States' principal ideological weapon with the cold war in full swing, but socialism was not discussed.

On that day, given the realities and the acceleration of that process, the enormous quantity of measures of social justice that we'd taken, we considered ourselves within our right to proclaim the socialist nature of the revolution. It was acclaimed throughout the length and breadth of the country by tens of thousands of armed Cubans, and if in the Sierra Maestra we were fighting to destroy the tyranny and we were also fighting for social justice - we were fighting, in short, for our country's liberation - from April 17, our people, with arms in their hand and at the cost of their blood, fought for socialism. [Applause]

Really, it was the moment to give that energetic, bold, defiant response, because the Bay of Pigs occurred when we were surrounded by the U.S. squadron, and as if to tell them: If you want to land, do it, we're not afraid of you, and this is our idea and our intention....

All our forces participated, cadets, militia instructors, militiamen, the police, who fought a very hard battle there, to the west of the Bay of Pigs; the campesino militiamen and campesino women also participated....

Within this whole framework, what were the decisive elements? Firstly, the air attack that took place 48 hours before, that gave us time; it can't be explained why they did this. They wanted to launch a second attack, but they had already failed in the initial attempt, they couldn't destroy any more aircraft because there were anti-aircraft guns protecting the three airports; for that reason they couldn't destroy all the airplanes, the airports were even more reinforced.

As I said, they were discussing and thinking about a second air attack on the morning of the 17th; they weren't able to carry it out, it was useless, because at dawn on the 17th all our planes had taken off for the Bay of Pigs to attack the enemy squadron, the fleet that brought the invaders. That was the decisive factor.

Rapid grasp of enemy's strategy
Another important factor was the rapid grasp of the enemy's strategy....

They launched their paratroopers and when they decided to do so, we immediately realized that was the main direction.

It was seen clearly, they dropped them over Covadonga, San Bias, Yaguaramas, Pálpite and some close to this side, they wanted to take and secure the three access routes with paratroopers, launching them to cover both directions of the Ciénaga de Zapata highways....

The most experienced unit we had at that moment was here in Matanzas, and Fernández was asked to lead it immediately to the zone of operations, to Playa Larga, which is the nearest point. But at that same moment, all the tanks in Havana were being mobilized, and all the cannons, all the aircraft weapons, all the battalions, everybody was mobilized. And the ships as well, every unit had to be ready to advance.

There were five transports only for the tanks, the rest to be pulled by their axles, and it was a good distance, the thruway didn't exist then, and so, they left at top speed; however, the problem was that the enemy air force was numerous and had an active presence.

We didn't know how many aircraft they had, we had no means of knowing that, if they were 20, 30, 40, or 100, nor who was piloting them, because when they ran out of Cuban pilots they started using U.S. pilots. For that reason, all our armaments, the tanks, artillery, infantry were accompanied by anti-aircraft guns, and there were a lot of them, and, moreover, with instructions to advance to Jovellanos. Not knowing the number of possible planes in the air, we couldn't risk sending that troop by day, beyond Jovellanos, towards the Bay of Pigs; we asked them to camouflage themselves as well as possible and to wait.

Our planes were attacking the squadron, our soldiers had to endure the air attacks, because we didn't have any more planes, and the important thing was to leave the enemy without a squadron. That's why we had casualties, for that reason and on account of the trick of using Cuban insignia.

We didn't give them a minute's respite
At dusk, the torrent of tanks, artillery and the rest began to advance in that direction, while the people of Villa Clara were also mobilizing; that's to say, what is now the Central Army - or it already was, founded on April 4 - was mobilizing with all its forces to attack in the direction of Covadonga and Yaguaramas; and, in fact, they fought without respite, because I believe that the third most important element was not to give them a minute's respite.

Since the idea was to bring in the provisional government, call on the OAS [Organization of American States] so that the OAS would intervene immediately - with only a few soldiers from each Latin American country, and the rest U.S. soldiers - we couldn't give them time to establish a beachhead to land their provisional government. That was the reason for not giving them one minute's respite throughout the battle.

They were lucky - and I'm not going to explain why now -
because we were without communications, we had to communicate by telephone from one town to another, nothing could be said over the radio. In fact, we didn't even have radios. The tanks, and some of the trucks had them, but with the rapid highway movements that had to be made, in civilian cars, and - apart from internal communications - those cars didn't have communications with the forces....

I sincerely believe that the Bay of Pigs battle was a great example of our people's prowess, and not only in terms of what they did, but because of what they were prepared to do, to ensure that the United States suffered a defeat in Cuba, even if the price for us would have been very high, even if we would have been the first Vietnam. [Applause]...

Our battle today is even more meritorious, if you like, because we are fighting on our own. Previously, there was a time when we were alone, but we believed we were accompanied [Laughter]; some lessons like the Missile Crisis(4) and others taught us otherwise.... Well, that was no secret at the time. For a long time, we knew that it was the Cubans, and only the Cubans who were going to defend the country, and who defend the country, using the correct tactics to defend the country, which is not that little wargame of Clausewitz, but the war of all the people, that's the truth. [Applause]

In that way we made the revolution, in that way we have defended it, and in that way we can continue defending it.

We are happy to celebrate this 35th anniversary; we are happy about all the lives that were saved; we are happy that our children have grown up healthy, educated and cultured; we are happy about our marvelous young people. Yes, may they live a long time! We already know that in order to live with dignity in this world, one has to struggle, and you see every day on television what is happening in the rest of the world.

U.S. beatings of Mexican immigrants
The other day we saw how some Mexican immigrants were savagely beaten [in the United States], which is something that makes us indignant, it's repulsive. One of the immigrants was a woman, and they didn't just hit them once or twice, but five, six, ten times. And all that in front of the television cameras. What must they do off camera?

Police cars, police, horses, dogs every where, strikes every day, people being beaten every day all over the place, in both developed and poor countries, but worse in the poor countries. Theft and more theft, drugs and more drugs, loss of sovereignty and more loss of sovereignty. It's a shame what goes on in the world, but it can't go on forever.

More and more people are gaining consciousness, rising up, getting bored, those who are sick and tired of seeing a world in which hegemony has been imposed by a power capable of telling the whole world lies, like it told during the Bay of Pigs invasion. It would be interminable to try to list all of the lies it has told, even though it would be an example of the lack of scruples and morality that exists within the heart of the empire.

But no matter what difficulties Cubans have, they could never be worse than those of others, when we compare our country's indices with the rest of the Latin American and Third World countries, which are so downtrodden and constantly repressed....

Our independence requires struggle, sacrifice; our dignity, our honor, our right to progress, our tomorrow, our future, everything they want to take away from us costs dearly. But all of us, men and women, boys and girls, all of us who have had the privilege of feeling pride, dignity, and honor, of feeling what our country is, of feeling all those beautiful things which are worth fighting for, are determined to pay the price, because we will never resign ourselves to living without them. [Applause]

Now we must face not the mercenaries who invaded at the Bay of Pigs, but another type at mercenary, mercenaries who want to tighten the blockade, who want to make our people more needy, who want to put up roadblocks on our path to recovering little by little from that great disaster, that tragedy which was the disappearance of the socialist bloc, and turn our people into solitary soldiers, and in this case I'm excluding the hundreds of millions of persons who sympathize with Cuba, who turned us into solitary soldiers of humanity's most just cause, and clean soldiers at that, pure soldiers.

We will stand firm
We will struggle and stand firm, despite those adversaries to whom I referred and who have threatened us for so many years.

They even dare to threaten us with arms in the Helms-Burton Act...

We don't want to fight, we don't want war. We don't have to play at being brave; I don't think even they doubt the courage of our people. We want peace, and I'm going to repeat the idea: we will work for peace to the extent that our country's honor and dignity and our sense of responsibility allow it, because we are not looking for a victory like at the Bay of Pigs, or even 100 victories like at the Bay of Pigs.

What we want is peace, our people's health, our people's well- being, our people's lives, which we will only risk unhesitatingly when the price is sovereignty, independence, honor, freedom, and I am completely sure that all of you agree with this principle, with this idea....

Let's state with pride today, the day on which we commemorate the anniversary in which the socialist nature of our revolution was proclaimed for the first time; let's reaffirm as in those days, certain of victory:

Socialism or death!
Free homeland or death! We shall win!

1. José Ramón Fernández is currently vice president of Cuba's Council of Ministers and brigadier general in the reserves of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR). He played a leading role in the army units that smashed the mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

2. On March 4, 1960, the French ship La Coubre, bringing Belgian munitions, blew up in the Havana harbor, killing 81 people.

3. The Rebel Army, founded by Fidel Castro and other combatants of the July 26 Movement in the Sierra Maestra mountains in eastern Cuba, led the revolutionary war that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in January 1959.

4. Throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1962, the U.S. military conducted a series of highly visible exercises simulating an invasion of Cuba. Under the circumstances, the governments of Cuba and the Soviet Union entered into a military pact, which included, at the suggestion of Moscow, the deployment of 42 medium-range nuclear missiles. The Cuban leadership urged that the military agreement be made public, but Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev insisted on keeping the matters secret.

On Oct. 22, 1962, Washington charged that there were "offensive missiles" in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy ordered a full naval blockade of the island, placed U.S. armed forces on war alert, and threatened military action against Cuba and the USSR. After an agreement with Kennedy on October 28, Khrushchev ordered the missiles withdrawn, without consulting the Cuban government.

In an October 1992 interview with NBC television interviewer Maria Shriver, Castro said that if Cuban revolutionaries had known in 1962 what they know now about the political orientation of the Soviet leadership, they would not have accepted the deployment of the Soviet missiles on Cuban soil.  
 
 
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