BY JACK BARNES  
On April 15, 1961, when the Yankee-organized mercenaries announced their imminent invasion by simultaneously bombing three Cuban airfields, the revolutionary government mobilized the people’s militias and other military units. In the declaration announcing that state of alert, Fidel Castro called on all Cubans to “occupy their assigned posts, whether in a military unit or a workplace”—and he added, in the same sentence, “with no interruption in production, the literacy campaign, or a single revolutionary task.”

Four days later, when the counterrevolutionary forces had been defeated, the communiqué signed by Fidel reporting that victory to the Cuban people was demonstratively dated: “April 19, 1961, Year of Education….”

Nineteen sixty-one in Cuba was the Year of Education in all the meanings of that word—capacity to learn, to produce, to become a more disciplined revolutionary soldier, to create, to develop. The Year of Education meant making culture more accessible. It meant bravery in serving the highest human goals. It meant extending a hand of solidarity to anyone fighting against injustice and oppression anywhere in the world. It meant offering your life to achieve these goals.

Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and other leaders of the Cuban Revolution were very much aware that the greatest obstacle to the line of march of the toilers is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth. That’s why revolutionists in Cuba were so proud that the literacy effort had continued with minimal disruption as the battle against the invaders—a battle for the very life of the revolution—was fought and won. “The literacy campaign has not stopped even during these days,” announced Fidel Castro in his April 23 report on the victory to the Cuban people.

Whatever any particular individual was doing over those three days, April 17-19—whether deployed at the front, working in the fields or factories, or helping someone learn to read and write—the Cuban people felt the bond of a common battle waged by equals. A common bond that provided a basis for discipline, a basis for the shared joy of construction, the joy of creation, and the joy of victory in battle over those who sought to destroy everything their revolution was making possible.

What a moment for the people of Cuba to announce to the world the socialist character of the revolution!…

Over the years, I’ve frequently heard the question: “Didn’t most top CIA and White House officials really know there would be no uprising by the Cuban people in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion?” The answer is, no. It’s not that simple….

The U.S. government’s “operation was well conceived from a military point of view,” Che [Guevara] said. “They did their mathematical calculations as if they were confronting the German army and coming to take a beachhead at Normandy.” They organized the invasion at the Bay of Pigs “with the efficiency they display in such matters.”

“But they failed to measure the moral relationship of forces,” Che added. “First, they mismeasured our ability to react, including not only our ability to react in face of aggression, our ability to react in the face of a danger, and to mobilize our forces and send them to the site of the battle—they mismeasured that. But they were also wrong in measuring the fighting capacity of the opposing sides.”

The U.S. rulers, Che said, figured they needed only 1,000 men to carry out a successful invasion and hold a beachhead in Cuba. “But they needed 1,000 men there who would fight to the death,” he emphasized, and that they did not have. “Someone whose daddy had 30,000 acres of land, and who comes here solely to show his presence so the 30,000 acres of land will be returned to him—you can’t ask him to die at the hand of a peasant who had nothing and who has a ferocious desire to kill him because they’re coming to take the peasant’s land away.”

“They have always been wrong about us,” Che concluded. “They have always arrived late.”
 
 
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