BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
This new expanded publication of the First and Second Declarations of Havana, issued simultaneously in Spanish and English, was born at the November 2006 Venezuela International Book Fair. It is the product of wide-ranging political discussions surrounding the presentation in Caracas of the two most recent issues of Nueva Internacional, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory, and of several books published by Pathfinder Press.
Today in Venezuela substantial numbers of workers, farmers, and student youth, as well as oppressed national minorities of many origins—African, indigenous, Chinese, Indian, Arab, and more—are being politicized by popular struggles that have been a driving force in Venezuelan politics the last decade. Struggles for land, for greater workers control over the safety, pace, and conditions of work, for access to education, health care, water, electricity, and housing. Struggles to retake control over the country’s vast patrimony of natural resources. Defense of Venezuela’s sovereign right to extend a hand of solidarity to oppressed and embattled peoples throughout the Americas and the world, including collaboration with the revolutionary government and people of Cuba. Resistance to economic sabotage by entrenched capitalist owners of industry, financial institutions, land, and means of communication, as well as their multiple attempts to oust the popularly elected government of Venezuela. Struggles marked by a growing popular awareness of the powerful imperialist interests inextricably intertwined with, and ultimately calling the shots for, Venezuela’s capitalist class.
More than once since 1998, these conflicts have surged and ebbed and surged again over various issues and in different parts of the country, both exposing and being driven by deep social and political contradictions. Among the most committed of the popular forces, especially the youth, the thirst for a class perspective—a revolutionary socialist perspective—has grown, and along with it the thirst for a broader knowledge of the modern history of popular revolutionary movements. Why have some succeeded while others have failed?
This thirst was evident in the crowds thronging the stands and other events at the book fair. It marked the hours of nonstop political discussion and debate at the booth featuring books, pamphlets, and magazines distributed by Pathfinder Press, where the best-selling titles were the newest issues of Nueva Internacional featuring “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun” and “Our Politics Start with the World” by Jack Barnes.
Significant strategic questions
The questions debated were not insignificant.
Are the program and strategic course that resulted in the victory of workers and farmers in the Bolshevik-led 1917 October Revolution, as well as the debates that led to the formation in 1919 of a new revolutionary international— explained with such clarity by V.I. Lenin—still worth studying a century later? Or are the class forces shaping the world of the twenty-first century so fundamentally different that the Russian Revolution and the trajectory of the first five years of the Communist International are largely irrelevant? Are the political foundations of revolutionary activity today the same as those presented by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels?
Has the decreasing proportion of often landless rural toilers throughout Latin America relative to the growing size of the urban proletariat and layers of small traders and the jobless made the worker-farmer alliance an anachronism? Or does that alliance remain central to the very possibility of a successful revolutionary strategy for the working class?
Can capitalism be made to serve the interests of the toilers by establishing manufacturing cooperatives, comanagement ventures, and similar schemes? Or do the workings of capital, explained by Marx almost a century and a half ago, continue to dominate social relations so long as the working class has not taken power?
Are there progressive layers of the capitalist class in underdeveloped countries capable today of leading the militant toilers in struggle against imperialist domination? Or do these exploiters, no matter how rankled by the fetters of the imperialist masters, recoil from the revolutionary masses and act to suppress their struggles?
Has imperialism changed its spots? Or is a violent and bloody assault on the conquests of the working classes inevitable when the owners see a weakness that offers an opportunity to roll back inroads on their privileges and prerogatives?
Is socialism a set of ideas? Or is it—as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, and as has been confirmed in blood and sweat over a century and a half of popular struggles—the line of march of the working class toward power, a line of march “springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes”?
Clarity of two declarations
Nowhere are these kinds of questions that today confront men and women on the front lines of struggles in Latin America addressed with greater truthfulness and clarity than in the First and Second Declarations of Havana, presented by Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro and adopted by million-strong General Assemblies of the Cuban People on September 2, 1960, and February 4, 1962. That is why Pathfinder decided these declarations need to be broadly available today, presented in a way that helps make them and their interconnections more transparent and accessible to new generations of militants who did not live the tumultuous revolutionary events in the heat of which these documents were forged and signed on to by millions.
Included in this new Pathfinder book are more than a dozen pages of photos bringing those days alive and making them more understandable for readers today; a chronology situating in history the declarations themselves and the events they talk about, explaining references and inferences that those who heard or read these words nearly half a century ago understood without need of further comment; a glossary and notes identifying people and historical events otherwise unfamiliar to many readers today; and an index to aid those who will study and restudy these declarations with close attention.
While the Second Declaration of Havana has been more widely known since it was adopted some forty-five years ago, putting the First and Second Declarations together in the order they were presented is what makes it possible to place ourselves inside the historical turning points that linked them.
First Declaration of Havana
The first National General Assembly of the Cuban People was convoked on September 2, 1960, during the most intense period of mass mobilization the revolution had yet known. In the weeks before and after that outpouring, in response to the imperialists’ increasing acts of armed terror and economic sabotage, hundreds of thousands of workers were taking control of more and more industrial enterprises in Cuba—factory after factory was “intervened,” as Cuban workers termed it, and then nationalized by the revolutionary government.
In June 1960 three major imperialist-owned oil trusts in Cuba had announced their refusal to refine petroleum bought from the Soviet Union. Cuban workers responded by taking control of refineries owned by Texaco, Standard Oil, and Shell and refining the oil themselves. Within days U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered punitive action, slashing by 95 percent the quota of sugar Washington had earlier agreed to import during the remaining months of 1960. Within seventy-two hours, the Soviet Union announced it would purchase all Cuban sugar the U.S. refused to buy.
Across the island, Cubans responded by defiantly proclaiming “Sin cuota pero sin bota”—without the U.S. market, but with the imperial boot no longer on our neck.
On August 6, as the capitalists’ economic sabotage escalated, the revolutionary government adopted a decree expropriating the “assets and enterprises located on national territory … that are the property of residents and nationals of the United States.” The following days and nights became known in Cuba as the Week of National Jubilation. Tens of thousands of Cubans celebrated by marching through the streets of Havana bearing coffins containing the symbolic remains of U.S. companies such as the United Fruit Company and International Telephone and Telegraph, tossing them into the sea.
By the end of October, Cuban workers and peasants, supported by their government, had expropriated virtually all imperialist-owned banks and industry, as well as the largest holdings of Cuba’s capitalist class, including such icons as Bacardi rum. Together with the 1959 agrarian reform, which expropriated millions of acres of the largest landed estates and issued titles to some 100,000 landless peasants, property relations in city and countryside had been transformed, definitively establishing the character of the revolution as socialist—the first in the hemisphere—and making clear to all that state power now served the historic interests of working people.
‘Road pointed out by Marx’
Participating alongside the Cuban people in the events of this historic turning point were many of the nearly one thousand young people from across Latin America, as well as the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere, who had traveled to Cuba to take part in the First Latin American Youth Congress that opened July 26, 1960, in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Among those who that summer were convinced of the necessity, and the possibility, of emulating the revolutionary road traveled by the Cuban people were a good many of the future leaders of revolutionary struggles throughout the Americas. This included young leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance in the United States.
It was Che Guevara, in his welcoming speech to the youth congress delegates on July 28, who explained to them—and to the world—that “if this revolution is Marxist—and listen well that I say ‘Marxist’—it is because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx.”
As this tumultuous transformation was unfolding, the foreign ministers of the member countries of the Organization of American States met in San José, Costa Rica, at the end of August. Under the guiding hand of Washington, they adopted a resolution that, while never mentioning Cuba by name even once, condemned “energetically the intervention … by an extra-continental power in the affairs of the American republics”; rejected the “attempt of the Sino-Soviet powers to make use of the political, economic, or social situation of any American state,” as a course endangering “the peace and security of the hemisphere”; declared that the “inter-American system is incompatible with any form of totalitarianism” [one could only wish!]; and proclaimed that “all member states … are under obligation to submit to the discipline of the inter-American system.”
This was the “Declaration of San José” answered September 2 by the “Declaration of Havana.” Extending “the hand of friendship to the people of the United States—including Black people subjected to lynching, persecuted intellectuals, and workers forced to accept the leadership of gangsters,” the National General Assembly of the Cuban People searingly replied that imperialist domination of Latin America and the policies of the U.S. government were the reason “the peace and security of the hemisphere and the world” were endangered.
The assembly affirmed “that the unsolicited offer of the Soviet Union to aid Cuba if our country is attacked by imperialist military forces cannot be considered an act of intervention, but rather a clear act of solidarity.” And it proclaimed openly and publicly “before the Americas and the world that it accepts with gratitude the help of rockets from the Soviet Union should our territory be invaded by military forces of the United States.”
It rejected with indignation the self-serving, U.S.-instigated OAS document alleging that the Cuban Revolution was the product of Soviet or Chinese intervention in the Americas as opposed to “the just response of Cuba to crimes and injuries perpetrated by imperialism in Latin America.” It announced that the Cuban government would immediately establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and break all ties with Taiwan.
It condemned “the exploitation of man by man, and the exploitation of the underdeveloped countries by imperialist finance capital” as the real obstacle to democracy and freedom in the Americas and pledged that the Cuban people would not fail their brothers and sisters of Latin America who “take up the arms of liberty.”
“Politics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions. That is where serious politics begin,” Lenin reminded delegates to the 1918 congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) a few months after the triumph of the October Revolution. That is the power that speaks through the First and Second Declarations of Havana, the power evident in the photos included here of those immense concentrations of confident, joyous, and determined toilers in the midst of deciding their own future.
Between the two declarations
The year and a half between the First and Second Declarations was marked above all by the “serious politics” of millions.
“Now that they’re preparing the stage to carry out the puppets’ farce,” Fidel announced to a mass rally on January 2 celebrating the third anniversary of the victory over the tyranny, “let’s mobilize!”
When is the foreign ministers meeting? The twenty-second? Very well then, on the 22nd we are also going to mobilize here at the Plaza of the Revolution! [Prolonged applause] On the 22nd we’re going to convene the Second General Assembly of the Cuban People! [Applause] And we are going to proclaim the Second Declaration of Havana! [Applause] The entire people. It will not just be the people of Havana, it will come from other provinces, anyone who is able to come, and it will be the most gigantic event of the revolution, of the people [Applause] to present to the world the Second Declaration of Havana, and to show the imperialists our readiness to fight, and to show the puppets what a revolutionary people is, what a free people is, what a heroic people is! [Applause]
On February 4 over a million Cubans answered that call to arms, effectively repudiating the resolutions adopted four days earlier by what they referred to as the “Yankee ministry of colonies.” The OAS foreign ministers meeting in Punta del Este unanimously condemned a supposed “subversive offensive of communist governments” whose aim “is the destruction of democratic institutions and the establishment of totalitarian dictatorships at the service of extra-continental powers”; declared that “the present government of Cuba, which has officially identified itself as a Marxist-Leninist government, is incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system”; expelled Cuba from the OAS; established an Inter-American Defense Council watchdog committee against “subversion,” with executive powers; and urged that appropriate steps be taken by member states for their individual and collective self-defense.
Fear of revolution
As the National General Assembly of the Cuban People clarified: “For the Yankee imperialists, ‘subversion’ means the struggle of hungry people for bread, the struggle of peasants for land, the struggle of the peoples against imperialist exploitation. A watchdog committee with executive powers within the Inter-American Defense Council means a continental repressive force against the peoples, a force under the command of the Pentagon. ‘Collective measures’ means the landing of Yankee marines in any country of the Americas.”
“What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees’ hatred of the Cuban Revolution,” the assembly asked? What is it that unites
for the same aggressive ends the richest and most powerful imperialist power in the contemporary world and the oligarchies of an entire continent … against a small country of only 7 million inhabitants, economically underdeveloped, without financial or military means that could threaten the security or economy of any other country? …What unifies them and incites them is fear… . Not fear of the Cuban Revolution, but fear of the Latin American revolution… . Fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the arms from their oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free peoples of the Americas.
This perspective of the revolutionary struggle to take political power from the capitalists and defend it arms in hand is what lies at the center of the Second Declaration of Havana. The affirmation of the courage and political organization necessary to accomplish that task. The vista opened by a rising wave of revolutionary struggles throughout the Americas, and the example of the Cuban workers and farmers proving, “Yes, it can be done.”
The impact the Second Declaration of Havana had at the time is hard to appreciate without recalling that the necessity, and possibility, of the plundered peoples of the continent emulating the road to power of the Cuban workers and farmers was precisely what was denied—and feared—by the large majority of parties throughout Latin America that fraudulently wore the label worker, or communist, or socialist. “The duty of every revolutionist is to make the revolution,” not “sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by”—not to wait for supposedly unripe objective conditions to ripen, as many parties claimed to be doing. That ringing declaration was a fresh wind sweeping through the Americas.
As Fidel Castro, recalling the circumstances surrounding the First and Second Declarations of Havana, told CNN in a television interview on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the victory over the Batista tyranny, “Yes, we did want a revolution, and what’s more, we believed that such a revolution was possible—we were absolutely convinced that it was possible in Latin America. And that would probably have changed the course of history.”
What Second Declaration explains
Most important, the declaration effectively explained to the vanguard of workers, farmers, and revolutionary-minded youth increasingly engaged in struggles throughout the Americas, including the United States, why the possibilities of success were in their hands and none others.
And it pointed to the revolutionary victory at Playa Girón—Washington’s first military defeat in the Americas—as the example that the Cuban people gave to the world “that revolution is possible.”
These were lessons the Cuban people themselves were writing in blood with their own struggles in the months that linked the First and Second Declarations of Havana. They remain as true today as they were nearly fifty years ago, as true as they have been since 1848.
It is in that spirit that this new presentation of the First and Second Declarations of Havana is being published.
And it is to those who will use it in that manner that it is dedicated.
January 2007
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