Armando Hart was a central organizer of the urban underground and is one of the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

This week’s feature—one of a series published in the Militant—appears in chapter 8, containing documents from the revolutionary struggle. Titled “Revolutionary proclamation of Santiago de Cuba and the Sierra Maestra” and dated November 1956, it presents the July 26 Movement’s program for the government to be formed after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, which had taken power in a coup on March 10, 1952.

On July 26, 1953, a group of 160 revolutionaries led by Castro launched simultaneous armed attacks on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba and the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks in Bayamo, both in eastern Cuba, aiming to spark a popular revolt. The attacks marked the beginning of a growing popular struggle against the regime.

Released from prison as a result of a broad amnesty campaign, Castro and other surviving veterans of the Moncada attack founded the July 26 Movement. In July 1955 Castro and other leaders left for Mexico, where they organized an expedition of 82 combatants that returned aboard the yacht Granma, landing in southeastern Cuba on Dec. 2, 1956. The proclamation below was to be released following the Granma landing and the Santiago de Cuba uprising of November 1956. It ends with an instruction to July 26 cadres to circulate it widely.

A base for the new Rebel Army was established in the Sierra Maestra mountains of eastern Cuba. The revolutionary war culminated in a popular insurrection leading to the overthrow of the dictatorship on Jan. 1, 1959. Workers and farmers took political power and opened the door to the first socialist revolution in the Americas. Copyright ©2004 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Material in brackets is added by the Militant.
 

The July 26 revolutionary movement, in fulfillment of its promise of Freedom or Death, is initiating the revolutionary struggle against the corrupt and criminal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and all the causes that produced it.

Invoking the most glorious battles of the peoples for their freedom, . . . we are exercising, as a duty to our generation and to Cuba’s history, the right of resistance to tyranny that is granted us by Article 40 of the Constitution of the Republic. . . . Below are the general lines of the governmental program [of the July 26 Movement]: . . .  
 
The revolution and the armed forces
Batista and a group of military leaders who have enriched themselves have put the armed forces in conflict with the nation, depriving the country of freedom and democratic life. To shake off this yoke, the blood of young Cuban revolutionaries and soldiers has had to be spilled. The shiny boots that from Camp Columbia command the soldiers to oppress the people while they receive millions from smuggling, illicit gambling, drugs, and dirty business dealings have not gone to the mountains of Turquino and Guantánamo to be with the soldiers. The revolution will embrace all officers, noncommissioned officers, and members of the armed forces in general who have not been complicit with the murders and mistreatment of citizens and who have maintained their honesty.

The revolutionary youth aspires to an army of the republic made up of soldiers who are brothers of the people, guardians of their liberties and rights. It will be possible to belong with pride to that army of the democratic government because it will not be a scourge to its people. On the contrary, it will be an instrument of national progress, defense of the homeland, co-executor of the government’s plans to distribute lands, test soil and subsoil, harmonize water resources, draw up maps, carry out a census of agricultural resources and cattle, give technical and financial assistance to farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs, and wage campaigns for literacy, hygiene, popular culture, and reforestation.

The soldier will teach how to drill artesian wells, drive and repair tractors, vaccinate cattle and fowls, and artificially inseminate cattle.

That soldier, an agent of economic and cultural progress, will not be confused by unfulfilled, demagogic promises of wage increases. By his own merits he will earn substantial per diem expenses paid for by the farmers and entrepreneurs who benefited, by the corresponding ministries, by autonomous development banks, or by the budget of the army itself.

The revolutionary youth aspires to a navy that does not protect smugglers and does not promote the Via-Cuba Canal treason. Rather, it aspires to a navy whose members—respected and admired in the spirit of the mambí naval leaders, General Emilio Núñez, Pérez Carbó, and Castillo Duany—help foster the merchant marine, establish centers of nautical training, build dams, construct shipyards, protect the natural riches of the coastal zones, prepare nautical charts, encourage systematic scientific research of the Cuban seas, look for marine species to catch and put to industrial use, and proudly carry the Cuban flag to fish for cod and other species in the open seas, waving the banner of the solitary star across the seven seas.

The revolutionary youth aspires to a national police that guarantees democratic coexistence, has true training schools, scientifically researches criminality, protects the citizen, helps instruct him in his civic duties, and saves lives through systematically studying and solving traffic problems. Such a police, steadfast and respected, would not allow its chief to connive with illicit gambling, drugs, and pimping. Thus, Cuba would not again have to bear the shame of the international press exposés that the chief of the national police received $50,000 a week from organized gambling alone.  
 
The revolutionary youth confront the nation’s basic problems
We will leave analysis of our ideology and position on each concrete question for the document that the July 26 Movement will address to the country, making a calm study of each of the vital issues in front of us. Here we put forward only in general terms some of our programs.

Ours is a country with an export economy, open and subject to the uncontrollable ups and downs of the world market. The supposed economic security of six million Cubans rests on the sugar industry, which is not capable of expanding to the same degree as the rate of growth of the population and cannot offer steady, productive employment to the unemployed and underemployed and to the thousands of Cubans who each year join the ranks of potential producers. The possibilities of economic expansion through industrialization and high-productivity farming are hindered by our economic relations with the United States of America. We need to end the frightful unemployment and underemployment figures and create new industries to employ more than 40,000 young people annually. We need to change Cuba’s economic structure, establishing industries to replace imports and produce for export. We need to change the nature of current U.S. imports and become less dependent on a single market. To achieve all this we must overthrow Batista and mobilize all the nation’s economic sectors, so that under the auspices of a revolutionary democratic government we can move toward rational planning of our economy and establish a program of economic development under effective state intervention that supports, finances, protects, subsidizes, or complements private initiative.

In face of economic crises, sectors opposed to Cuba’s economic development—sugar speculators, greedy importers, absentee corporations, and landgrabbers—have put in place overseers to wield the knife and the noose. From 1929 to 1933 Machado was kept in power at all costs. In 1935 and the following years Batista was placed in power, and this tropical Attila was utilized again in 1952. Batista is the assassin of workers and peasants, of merchants, industrialists, and small entrepreneurs in crisis, of professionals, of housewives, of unemployed youth.

To stay in power serving his masters, Batista has dangerously reduced reserves in dollars, gold, and foreign currency. He has given away the resources of the subsoil to foreign industry. He has attacked social conquests and facilitates private foreign investment in an indiscriminate way, compromising the economic and political future of generations to come. Thus, added to his political crimes against Cuban democracy is treason to the nation’s economy.

We believe that true democracy can be attained only with citizens who are free, equal, educated, and have dignified and productive jobs. The revolution’s educational policy will be based on the following main lines:

a) Turning the Ministry of Education into a technical body, taking up the old ideal of the 1940 constituent assembly of keeping this ministry free of corruption. The ministry’s mission will not be confined solely to scholastic purposes. Its wider tasks comprise national education as an entire process to be carried out jointly by all state bodies and directed not just to children and youth, but to adults and citizens in general.

The minister should be assisted by permanent technical commissions with a long-term policy. These will study in a rational and overall way the financial and economic implications of educational plans, keeping in mind educational statistics. Literacy campaigns will be carried out, together with basic education for adults who already know how to read and write. These will be complemented by a policy of creating or subsidizing libraries, museums, laboratories for scientific research (either their own or in collaboration with those at universities and other centers of higher education and research), theaters, art films, choruses, dance, symphony orchestras, and popular printshops. These are to be organized or created not just in the city of Havana but throughout the republic. To achieve these ends the most modern educational methods for the masses will be used, among them films, radio, press, and television.

b) Decentralizing the national bureaucratic apparatus, giving provincial and regional authorities more power of decision making within established general policy. This will eliminate a colonial scourge that is endemic to the structure of the Cuban state.

c) Restructuring our educational system, after a review of our school curricula, and establishing an organic relationship between primary, secondary, vocational, and university education. It should be guided by knowledge of the nation’s realities and adapted to the new demands of progress as well as the needs and interests of those whom educational policy is directed toward.

It goes without saying that classrooms will not be for sale at the Ministry of Education of the revolutionary government, since the organization of classroom study will be based on technical capacity and human dignity.

The nation can expect from the revolutionary youth a democratic government of honest and capable men, full of love for Cuba. The most authoritative specialists and the healthiest intellectuals in the country have already rendered their collaboration to the July 26 Movement for a calm and profound study of national issues.

Cuba possesses natural and human resources, capital, technology, and institutions that are necessary to transform us into a prosperous, democratic, and civilized nation that will shine in the constellation of peoples as a cultured and free republic, for which dictatorships and empires are anathema. We will head toward that great destiny through the revolutionary effort initiated November 30. . . .

Council of the Cuban Revolution

Don’t hold on to this, circulate it  
 
 
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