At the same time, armed fighters from the July 26 Movement were taking over the streets of the city.

The triumph of the revolution that night surprised Cuba’s wealthy, and their North American patrons.

The capitalists are always surprised when their system begins coming unstuck. But they are even more surprised when working people finally stand up and say “No!” The rulers fear the working class. But they have also been bred to treat us with the utmost class contempt. So when we revolt, it comes as a shock. They try to convince themselves, and to convince us, that it’s not really happening. Only three weeks before Dec. 31, 1958, a U.S. senator on a trip to Havana had boasted to the press, “Is there a revolution here? I hadn’t noticed any trouble.”

Trouble did hit that class in Cuba. The rebels not only toppled the hated, U.S.-backed dictatorship and put in power a government of workers and farmers. In face of escalating hostility from Washington—which included the failed mercenary invasion in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs carried out by the Kennedy administration—Cuban working people expropriated the capitalists and landlords, opening the socialist revolution and creating the first free territory in the Americas.

Illiteracy was abolished. Agrarian reform was sweeping, guaranteeing land to all peasants who worked it. Since then, not a single working farmer has been driven off his or her land. And the active involvement of workers and farmers in fundamental decisions affecting society has marked Cuba for 46 years.

Despite a relentless economic war by Washington ever since, the Cuban people have stood their ground. They have defended the revolution and lent internationalist assistance to millions from Africa to the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America fighting to end imperialist domination and achieve national liberation. The most recent such example is the more than 15,000 doctors, literacy teachers, sports trainers, agricultural specialists, and others from Cuba volunteering in Venezuela. They have offered their selfless services there for half a decade as working people in Venezuela have fought off repeated attempts by local businessmen and their U.S. sponsors to turn back the clock by toppling the elected government of that country.

It is this example that’s a mortal threat to the property interests and privileges of the U.S. rulers and their imperialist allies. This is even more so today as economic and social conditions worldwide resemble the financial bubbles, underlying capitalist stagnation, and sharpening trade conflicts that gave rise to the Great Depression of the 1930s and culminated in a world war.

Since the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, some left critics of the Cuban Revolution have bemoaned the increased economic hardships and social inequalities that the Cuban people have faced as evidence of the revolution’s weakness. In fact, the revolution has emerged stronger over the last 15 years.

A decisive component of workers and farmers in Cuba, and broadening layers of young people for whom new alternatives are being created, have developed more confidence, more creativity, and taken more initiative in dealing with the contradictions and problems they confront. They are less isolated from the class struggle throughout the capitalist world, including its political, cultural, and artistic expressions. A new generation of revolutionary leadership is being tested and gaining experience in the process, answering in practice the often asked question, “What will happen after Fidel?”

The five working-class heroes serving draconian sentences in U.S. prisons—Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, René González, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González—on frame-up charges of conspiracy to commit espionage for Havana are such products of the Cuban Revolution. Three of them, for example, fought in Angola in the late 1980s as volunteer combatants when Cuba helped that African nation defeat invasions by the South African regime’s apartheid army.

The Cuban Revolution won’t be copied. But it does show that working people—including in the United States and other imperialist countries—can forge a revolutionary leadership, take political power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters, and join the worldwide struggle for a society based on human solidarity and the needs of the earth’s majority, not the dog-eat-dog reality and morality of the capitalism.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home