BY FIDEL CASTRO
One hundred years ago Cuban patriots were on the verge of winning independence from Spanish colonialism when Washington stepped in to dominate the island, as well as seizing Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The excerpt below describing this history is from a report presented by Fidel Castro for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba to its First Congress in 1975, on December 17. Subheadings and footnotes are by the Militant.

Cuba was Spain's last colony in Latin America, and is now the first socialist country in this hemisphere. In order to accomplish this unique historical mission, our country had to overcome obstacles which at times appeared to be insurmountable.

When the great majority of Spanish-speaking peoples took the path of emancipation from the colonial yoke during the early years of the last century, under the favorable circumstances created by the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, Cuba was a country of tropical plantations worked by slave labor. It was therefore a typical slave-holding society. In defiance of the many international agreements of the time, the number of slaves increased from year to year with the growth of the material wealth and prosperity of the ruling classes. Spaniards dominated both trade and administration; rich Cubans owned the plantations. While this social class had an interest in overcoming the colonial obstacles that hindered the development of the economy and its access to political power, it could not do without the military force of the metropolis in order to keep slaves in submission.

Struggle to end slavery
They feared a repetition in Cuba of Haiti's heroic history,(1) and without hesitation subordinated the question of national independence to their interests as a slave-owning class. In 1841 those who were subjected to this terrible form of exploitation numbered more than 400,000 in a population of just over 1 million. Although our country came to be regarded by the Spanish monarchy as the "ever loyal Island of Cuba," this class interest also generated - within a section of the rich Cubans - the baneful trend toward annexation by the United States because, among other reasons, they feared that Spain itself would give in to international pressures and abolish slavery. This trend was strongly supported by U.S. slave- holding states in the South, in their conflict of interests with the industrial states of the North, and in their hope of having another slave-holding state on the island of Cuba.

The desire to annex Cuba was always, at the same time, strong among the rulers of the United States ever since the very beginning of that Republic and was voiced on many occasions by various rulers and politicians as a logical expression of the principles of the "manifest destiny,"(2) which the United States believed itself to be chosen to realize in this hemisphere.

This trend continued years after the abolition of slavery in that country and throughout the history of the relations between the United States and Cuba. But the Civil War in the United States and the subsequent abolition of slavery during the Lincoln administration dealt a heavy blow at the annexationist movement of the Cuban slave-holders. It is worthwhile recalling that in the face of these wretched and anti-patriotic aspirations of the exploiters, the exploited - that is, the slaves - gave innumerable examples of social and revolutionary struggle as expressed in the many heroic uprisings which were suppressed, as always happens, in the most brutal and bloody manner.

Once the annexationist trend was eclipsed and the Cuban landowners were themselves convinced that the slave-holding system had to be replaced by other, more modern forms of agricultural and industrial production, there emerged strong demands for a reform of the Spanish colonial system, which had already become an insurmountable obstacle to the country's further development. The brutal denial of these demands imposed upon our people the road of armed struggle.

The first war for independence in 1868 was initiated and led by Cuban patriots from wealthy families possessing the political culture, the contacts, and the economic resources for such a task....

The war drew in peasants, craftsmen, and slaves, and aroused fervent patriotism among students, professionals, and intellectuals, and the Cuban people in general, whose national feelings became a concrete and irreversible reality in the heat of struggle against Spanish domination.

Although Spanish repression affected all Cubans equally, regardless of their social class, the west - where the main wealth of the slavocracy was concentrated - kept aloof from the war and supplied the colonial army with its resources. The main burden in the war fell upon the poorest sections of the people, who in an unequal and incomparably heroic struggle, carried on the fight for 10 years before being defeated due more to divisions and intrigues than to enemy arms. It was then that Antonio Maceo - a man who had emerged from the poorest sections, rejecting the cease-fire and peace without independence - became the symbol of our people's spirit and indomitable will to fight on when he issued his immortal Protest of Baraguá.(3)

Shortly after, in 1886, slavery was abolished, among other reasons, as an inevitable sequel to the Ten Year War. Thus, we were the last country in the hemisphere where this baneful institution was officially suppressed. Men and women who experienced slavery on their own flesh are still alive in this country. In 1895, the Cubans were again up in arms. This time the struggle had been politically prepared through the course of long years.

Ideas of José Martí and V.I. Lenin
Under the leadership of [José] Martí,(4) whose political genius went beyond the boundaries of his country and his epoch, a party was organized to lead the revolution. This idea, which [Russian revolution leader V. I.] Lenin simultaneously developed to carry out the socialist revolution in the old empire of the czars, is one of Martí's most admirable contributions to political thought. A single revolutionary party was set up in our country. This party brought together the glorious veterans of the Ten Year War, symbolized by [Máximo] Gómez and Maceo, with new generations of peasants, workers, artisans and intellectuals, in order to carry out the revolution in Cuba.

Martí came to know the monster because he lived in its entrails. He knew of the monster's old urges to take possession of Cuba by means of the expansionist policy of "manifest destiny," now supplemented with the new imperial tendency resulting from capitalist development in the United States. Martí saw that tendency with amazing clarity: "I am already in daily danger of giving my life for my country and as my duty - because I am fully aware of it and am fully determined to do so - of preventing in time, by Cuba's independence, that the United States should expand through the Antilles and pounce with that added strength on our lands of America. Everything that I have done up to now and will do in the future shall be done for this purpose. It has to be in silence and as though indirectly, because there are things that to be attained have to be concealed and that, if proclaimed for what they are, could raise difficulties too unyielding to be surmounted to the end."

This was said by Martí on the eve of his death as he fought alongside the men of the Liberation Army on the fields of Cuba. It is in this thought and in Lenin's definition and interpretation of the Spanish-American war as the first imperialist war that two men from two distinct historical settings and two converging ideas - José Martí and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - clasp hands. The one is a symbol of national liberation from colonial domination and imperialism; the other, the architect of the first socialist revolution in the weakest link of the imperialist chain: national liberation and socialism, two closely interwoven causes in the modern world. Both with a solid and disciplined party to carry forward revolutionary aims, both founded almost simultaneously at the turn of the century.

Cuba was Vietnam of last century
Without resources, without supplies, without logistics, with a population of barely one and a half million, the people of Cuba fought against 300,000 colonial troops. At the time, Spain was one of the leading military powers of Europe. No other people of America had to carry on the struggle for independence in such hard and difficult conditions: Cuba was the Vietnam of the end of the last century. The Cuban people carried on the struggle with their own forces, without the participation of any other Latin American state, and in the face of the active hostility of the U.S. government to the efforts of the Cuban emigres seeking to supply arms to their fighting compatriots. Men of other fraternal peoples who came of their own free will to fight for our homeland's freedom did take an active part in the struggle for our independence. A symbol of all of these men was Máximo Gómez, an outstanding representative of the Dominican people, who became commander-in- chief of our army. These men inscribed brilliant pages of international solidarity into our country's history on the fields of Cuba.

Spain was exhausted, without resources or energy to continue the war. The Spanish army controlled only the major strongholds. The revolutionaries dominated the whole countryside and the inland communications. Many famous Spanish generals were routed in the war. It was then, in 1898, that U.S. military intervention took place. But not before preliminary attempts, on the eve of the launching of hostilities, to buy the territory of Cuba from Spain. If the stubbornness of Spain ever did render Cuba a kind of service, it was through the systematic refusals to agree to such a transaction, which the United States had repeatedly proposed to Spain in the past century.

The imperialist war ended with the occupation of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The Cuban struggle aroused broad sympathy throughout the world and in the heart of people in North America itself. Its heroic struggle commanded respect even among the ambitious foreign conquerors, and the island could not immediately be annexed. On May 20, 1902, it was granted formal independence with U.S. naval bases and also with a constitutional amendment, imposed by the United States, which, among other things, gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba. In that way a Yankee neocolony was established in our country. The Philippines was occupied right up to 1946. Today, it is an independent nation, but with 18 U.S. bases on its territory. Puerto Rico remains occupied, with dozens of bases on its territory. The United States has been shamelessly trying to incorporate it in its territory as yet another one of its states. It was a great, heroic, and fortunate course of history that spared our country and our people of the terrible destiny of being absorbed by the United States. This was due essentially to the firm resolve of its sons and daughters and to the rivers of blood they shed to uphold their national sovereignty.

1. In 1804 after years of slave revolts by Black guerrilla bands, Haitian rebels led by former slave Toussaint L'Overture defeated French troops, and Haiti became the first country in Latin America to win independence.

2. "Manifest Destiny" was the term used by the U.S. government in the mid-19th century to justify its aggressive policy of expansion from the East coast of the United States to the Pacific Ocean.

3. Antonio Maceo was a prominent military leader and strategist in the Cuban wars of independence from Spain in the 19th century. In 1878 Maceo issued the Baraguá Protest, condemning the terms that ended Cuba's first independence war and vowing to continue the struggle.

4. José Martí was a leader of the 1895 Cuban independence war against Spain. A noted poet, writer, and speaker, he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892 to fight for the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico.  
 
 
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