Vol. 71/No. 10 March 12, 2007
Waters is editor of The First and Second Declarations of Havana and president of Pathfinder Press.
Rodríguez is a member of the national leadership council of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. The association is made up of Cubans who have taken part in revolutionary struggles and internationalist missions over more than half a century.
Subheadings are by the Militant. The translation of the talks and footnotes are copyright © 2007 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission. Notes appear at the end of each page.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
On behalf of Pathfinder Press, thank you and a warm welcome to all the compañeras and compañeros here with us today for an activity that is in fact a celebration of the 45th anniversary of a momentous day in history.
On Feb. 4, 1962, the people of Cuba assembled in what was perhaps the most awe-inspiring mobilization of the Revolution. They gathered in their millions to adopt the manifesto of revolutionary struggle in the Americas they made known to the world as the Second Declaration of Havana.
I remember well the impact those words had on me at the time. A student in my third year of college, I had only recently begun to call myself a socialist. Needless to say, I had barely the foggiest notion what that meant. Like many of you, the Cuban Revolution had made me a Fidelista before I became a communist.
Lessons of struggle
It was two great working-class battles, one in Cuba, the other in the United States, however, that gave me my first concrete lessons in what socialism is. One was the crushing victory of the Cuban revolution-in-arms at Playa Girón.1 The other was the rising mass proletarian struggle in the United States to bring down Jim Crow—the institutionalized system of racist segregation established in the late 19th century in the U.S. South that is referred to throughout the pages of the First and Second Declarations of Havana. (This system was used as a model by the South African capitalists and their government in the late 1940s to institutionalize what became known as “apartheid.”)
From those battles I began to learn what communism is—not a set of preconceived ideas, but a course of struggle by the working class and its allies toward power, which the toilers must take and, if successful, defend arms in hand.
In February 1962 I was in Paris. Eager to explore the world, I had gone to study French art and literature at the Sorbonne. But my real education that year came from an even more powerful source of French culture—from the streets of Paris, where I was drawn into the almost daily street confrontations between the hated special police force known as the CRS and the youth mobilizations supporting the independence war of the Algerian people led by the Front de Libération Nationale, the FLN.2
When I read that powerful closing paragraph of the Second Declaration of Havana, proclaiming "this great mass of humanity has said 'enough,' and has begun to march," I had no doubt what the men and women of revolutionary Cuba were committing themselves to. And I had no doubt that I wanted to become a conscious, trustworthy part of that same great march of humanity.
Published in the ‘Militant’
In the United States, the Militant newspaper published the Second Declaration of Havana in a matter of days. Within a few more days the predecessor of Pathfinder Press had it on the streets as a pamphlet. In one form or another—usually together with the First Declaration of Havana as an appendix—it has not gone out of print for 45 years.
Available in English, Spanish, and French, that pamphlet has consistently been one of our most sought-after publications, one of the basic foundations of educational material we use to explain what imperialism is. To explain why imperialism can only be successfully faced down by a profoundly popular revolutionary struggle of the workers and peasants that breaks the military and economic power of the capitalist class and establishes a revolutionary government. One that defends the interests of working people and uses state power to help the toilers transform all economic and social relations.
That is the example the Cuban Revolution has given the world. In the words of the Second Declaration: "What does the Cuban Revolution teach? That revolution is possible."
Questions of revolutionary strategy
As the preface to The First and Second Declarations of Havana explains, this new book was born in Caracas, barely three months ago. During the nonstop political discussions that marked the Venezuela International Book Fair, it became clear that the real history of the Cuban Revolution is not well—or accurately—known by revolutionary-minded workers, farmers, and young people in Venezuela.
Many have great hopes and illusions that a violent confrontation with Washington can be avoided since Venezuela has oil and other strategic resources—resources that the imperialist world, including U.S. capitalism, needs. Illusions that the imperialist powers will have no choice but to accept inroads into what they consider their rights and prerogatives, as working people in Venezuela take control over more and more of their national patrimony and use the fruits of their labor and natural resources to better the lives of the majority rather than line the coffers of the ruling capitalist families of Venezuela and the imperialist centers.
Nowhere are these burning questions of revolutionary strategy addressed with greater clarity than in these declarations adopted by millions of Cubans in arms. That is why Pathfinder published it. Not as a museum piece, but because it is needed as a living guide to action by those on the front lines of the class struggle throughout the Americas—and the world—today.
Then as now, those who think they will be able to sit on their doorstep and watch the corpse of imperialism pass by are only inviting a bloody and costly defeat.
Some will object that too much has changed in the last 45 years for the example of the Cuban Revolution to be useful today. To them we answer, history teaches just the opposite.
Where else in our hemisphere has Washington been held at bay for nearly five decades?
Where else can working people proudly proclaim their country a free territory of the Americas?
Where else can working people defend that reality, as the men and women of Cuba have done from the beaches of Playa Girón to the challenges of the Special Period?3
Needed in United States above all
This book was not published for Venezuela or Cuba, however. Above all, it was published because it is needed by militant workers and revolutionary-minded youth in the United States.
The working class there has been strengthened over the last year by massive proletarian mobilizations that swept the country last spring demanding legalization of some 12 million immigrants who live and work in the United States without papers. Resistance by working people within the U.S. to the manifestations at home of Washington's "long war" is now stronger.
It was not just millions of immigrants who poured into the streets with confidence and pride last May Day, taking the ruling class completely by surprise. And when agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—la migra—raided meatpacking plants across the country two months ago, rounding up 1,300 workers for deportation and bringing criminal charges of "identity theft" against more than 200 of them, it was not just fellow immigrant workers who helped them hide in the plants to escape arrest and who took in children whose parents had been grabbed. Working-class solidarity was strong.
These massive actions in the streets, and tests under fire, are preparing working people in the United States to give a proletarian answer to the question that will increasingly decide the political fate of the entire working class and the very existence of a labor movement.
But it is also important to understand that Washington's “long war” against “terrorism” generates contradictory responses among working people. If the pollsters ask whether one is opposed to the current course of the U.S. government in Iraq, for example, the majority will answer “yes.” When asked, however, whether Washington should send in the forces necessary to "win" a new stability and then leave, a large percentage of the same individuals answer in the affirmative to that question too.
Many workers are influenced by imperialist rationalizations put forward by a wide spectrum of both ruling parties in the United States. They see the brutalities of the accelerating civil war and communal battles in Iraq not as a consequence of the U.S. invasion and war, but as an argument for maintaining the imperialist occupation, at least “for a time,” in order to prevent "ethnic cleansing."
This is the opposite of what happened during the Vietnam War, where the revolutionary course of the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people increasingly won the political battle for support worldwide, including within the United States, especially among the youth.
This is the world in which the political clarity of the Declarations of Havana and the revolutionary course they present are sorely needed.
To conclude, it is important to note that The First and Second Declarations of Havana is not just a new edition of a pamphlet long in print. It is genuinely a new book.
The two declarations are placed in their proper historical order, clarifying the events and the continuity that link them. They are accompanied by a chronology focused on developments in the world and in the Cuban Revolution that shaped them. By a glossary to identify names and historical events that were common knowledge at the time for those to whom the declarations were addressed. By 16 pages of photos that bring those names and events alive. By an index to help those who will be studying these documents. In short, by the things necessary for those who did not live those historic years to begin to understand the lessons of revolutionary struggle that the people of Cuba were writing with their own blood in the months that linked the First and Second Declarations of Havana.
Those lessons remain as true today as they were then, as true as they have been since the Communist Manifesto. It is in that spirit that this book has been published. And, as the preface says, “It is to those who will use it in that manner that it is dedicated.”
1. On April 17, 1961, 1,500 Cuban-born mercenaries invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast. The invaders were defeated in less than 72 hours by the militia and the revolutionary armed forces and police. On April 19 the last invaders surrendered at Playa Girón (Girón Beach), the name Cubans use to designate the battle.
2. The National Liberation Front (FLN) led the 1954-1962 revolutionary war to overturn French colonial rule in Algeria. Following the victory over Paris in 1962, a workers and farmers government came to power in Algiers, headed by Ahmed Ben Bella, one of the central leaders of the FLN. In 1965 Ben Bella's government was overthrown in a counterrevolutionary coup led by Col. Houari Boumédienne.
3. Special Period is the term used in Cuba to describe the economic and social crisis that exploded in Cuba in the early 1990s with the abrupt end of aid and trade in preferential terms with the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.
I want to speak about the people who proclaimed these declarations at the first and second National General Assemblies of the Cuban People. The Cuban people at the time were in the heat of an impassioned battle to consolidate revolutionary power. They were confronting the reality of a powerful enemy: U.S. imperialism and its lackeys in Latin America. An enemy who sought to block even the first measures we took: applying justice to the hangmen and murderers of our brothers and sisters killed in the struggle against the bloody tyranny of Fulgencio Batista.
Many of us were convinced we would apply justice without a lot of effort. But it did take a lot of effort. The cancellation of the sugar quota and the cutoff of oil supplies were precisely when the first imperialist campaigns of lies and threats to starve us began.1
'Nothing halted our advance'
Nothing, nothing halted our advance. The people applied revolutionary justice for the first time in Cuba and Latin America. We rose above the desire for revenge. No vendettas, no group vengeance. We established revolutionary power based on revolutionary justice, administered by duly constituted public tribunals.
As the military and civilian institutions of repression were demolished, the people organized into battalions and companies of popular militias. We trained our army of students, peasants, workers, and intellectuals, who for the first time in a Latin American country were taking up arms to defend their rights and their freedoms.
On March 4, 1960, the steamship La Coubre was blown to bits. Dock workers and other workers, rebel soldiers, members of the national police, militia members gave their lives. Even as the ruins of the El Encanto still smoldered, the people were organizing into their mass organizations, into their unions.2 The Rebel Army was becoming strengthened as an expression of the new power around which we all united and marched forward, making the revolution.
Teenagers and even children took part in the great endeavor of teaching peasants and workers to read and write. They too gave their generous quota of blood, simply to teach reading and writing in our mountains and our countryside. With the first steps in carrying out the agrarian reform law, land began to belong to those who worked it.3
In this environment, in this revolutionary atmosphere, on September 2 the First Declaration of Havana was proclaimed. We were proclaiming the sovereign right to establish relations with the People's Republic of China. To establish relations with the Soviet Union and accept its solidarity and aid in face of imperialist aggression and betrayal by the Latin American lackeys.4 That betrayal would take military form seven months later at Playa Girón, where the mercenary forces met a crushing defeat as a result of the courage and sacrifices of our combatants, who by now were consciously fighting and dying for socialism.5
The duty of every revolutionary
In February 1962 we proclaimed, before the Americas and the world, the duty of every revolutionary: to make the revolution. Whether this came about through peaceful or painful means depended on the forces of reaction. Today, in the processes under way in Venezuela and Bolivia, we have a tremendous historical basis to prove that whether or not revolutionaries in those countries have to use might to defend their work of liberation depends completely on the forces of reaction.
In 1962 our Union of Young Communists was born.6 And in March 1962, barely a month after the Second Declaration—which was in February—the Cuban Revolution defended, wisely and rigorously, the unity that was leading us to victory and that was being damaged from within. We attacked what separated us, what weakened us. We forcefully denounced an evil that had to be uprooted—the schematic and bureaucratic conception of society and how it is led, divorced from the masses who were making the revolution and divorced from their values. I'm referring to sectarianism.
Unity began to be strengthened among the masses of industrial workers of Havana, working people in city and countryside, intellectuals, and students who were fighting and proclaiming before the world that Cuba would not fail. This is precisely where the construction of the party came from, the party that was destined to build socialism and march in the vanguard of the masses' political and ideological thought and action, the party that would guide us to victory and provide continuity to the revolution.7
In October of that same year, as history willed it, came the first great test of fire in which we participated—the brilliant yet sad days of the October Crisis.8 Those political and moral values that served as foundations to build the party—values of solidarity, firmness of ideas, and leading by example—must continue to be the guarantee of the very existence of the revolution that the First and Second Declarations of Havana proclaimed.
Every single letter and sentence of the First and Second Declarations of Havana expresses this vast and just cause of Latin America, of Martí, Juárez, Bolívar, and Marx.9 These two documents can never become dead letters. They were conceived in the heat of historical experience, but forged primarily in the crucible of the earth-shaking power of the Cuban people, which was laying down the roots of the first socialist state that, in its search for new popular and democratic forms, was taking on the exploitation of man by man just 90 miles from the strongest imperialist power on earth.
Like the Communist Manifesto, the First and Second Declarations of Havana are an example that neither recipes nor manuals nor dogmas lead to the triumph of revolutionary ideas.
The Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution would like to thank Editora Política and Pathfinder for this invitation.
1. In the weeks after the victory of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, hundreds of the most notorious murderers of the U.S.-backed tyranny of Fulgencio Batista were arrested and tried by popular tribunals. Many who were found guilty were sentenced to death and executed. Washington seized on the vociferous, nearly hysterical opposition to the tribunals among Cuban counterrevolutionaries as a pretext to launch an international propaganda campaign against the new revolutionary government and to pave the way for increasing economic and political sanctions.
For many years Washington had maintained agreements with the Cuban government that a certain quota of sugar imports sold in the U.S. market would be from Cuba. In July 1960 the U.S. government slashed the quota by 95 percent, later eliminating sugar imports from Cuba altogether. In February 1962 Washington imposed a total embargo on trade with Cuba, which has been maintained and tightened, with bipartisan support, ever since.
2. On March 4, 1960, the French ship La Coubre, carrying munitions purchased by Cuba in Belgium, was blown up in Havana harbor, killing 101 people. On April 13, 1961, a fire set by counterrevolutionaries destroyed the El Encanto department store in Havana and killed a worker in the store. 3. During 1961 the revolutionary government waged a campaign to wipe out illiteracy in a single year. By the end of the year, more than 700,000 Cubans had learned to read and write. This was accomplished largely through the mobilization of 100,000 young people who went to the countryside and isolated working-class districts, where they lived with the peasants and workers who were learning to read. During the drive, counterrevolutionary bands organized by Washington murdered nine literacy volunteers and students and injured many others.
4. In August 1960 the Organization of American States—composed of all formally independent Latin American governments and the United States—voted to condemn Cuba’s revolutionary course. In January 1962 the OAS expelled Cuba and called for collective measures to counter the Cuban “threat.” Subsequently all Latin American governments except Mexico broke diplomatic relations with Cuba.
5. On the eve of the battle at Playa Girón, Fidel Castro had, for the first time, described the socialist character of the revolution the Cuban people were making, calling them to battle in defense of Cuba and socialism.
6. In April 1962 the Association of Rebel Youth, acting on a proposal by Fidel Castro, took the name Union of Young Communists (UJC). The Rebel Youth had been launched in December 1959 at the initiative of the Rebel Army’s Department of Instruction, headed by Ernesto Che Guevara. In October 1960 it had fused with the youth wings of the Popular Socialist Party and of the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate. In many ways its revolutionary trajectory prefigured the path being taken in replacing the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations with what, in 1965, would become the Communist Party of Cuba.
7. In December 1961 the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) was formed in Cuba, uniting the July 26 Movement, which led the fusion; the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate; and Cuba’s Moscow-oriented Popular Socialist Party (PSP). On March 26, 1962, less than two months after the Cuban people adopted the Second Declaration of Havana, Fidel Castro gave a televised speech rejecting the bureaucratic and sectarian course of ORI organization secretary Aníbal Escalante. If such practices were allowed to continue, Castro said, they would alienate masses of workers and peasants from the government and from building a revolutionary party. Fidel announced that Escalante, who had been a central PSP leader, was being removed from his post. The process of building a communist party began, and in 1965 it took the current name of Communist Party of Cuba. (The Militant ran excerpts from Fidel Castro’s March 1962 speech in its April 16, 1962, issue. The entire speech was published a few weeks later by Pathfinder’s predecessor under the title, Fidel Castro Denounces Bureaucracy and Sectarianism. Supporters of the Cuban Revolution in the United States campaigned with it widely, together with The Second Declaration of Havana, which the publishing house had also published.)
8. A reference to the Cuban "Missile Crisis." In face of Washington’s escalating preparations to invade Cuba, the Cuban government signed a mutual defense agreement with the Soviet Union under which nuclear missiles were deployed on the island. In October 1962 Washington ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, stepped up preparations to invade, and placed U.S. armed forces on nuclear alert. Cuban workers, farmers, and the entire people mobilized by the millions to defend the revolution. Following an exchange of communications between the governments of the United States and USSR, on October 28 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, without consulting the Cuban government, announced Moscow’s agreement with Washington to remove the missiles.
9. José Martí (1853-95), Cuba’s national hero, organized Cuba's war of independence against Spanish colonial rule at the end of the 19th century. Benito Juárez (1806-72), was Mexico's national hero, who fought French occupation of the country. Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) led a series of armed rebellions that helped win independence from Spain for much of Latin America. Karl Marx (1818-83) was a founding leader, from 1847, of the modern communist workers movement.
Related articles:
Declarations of Havana presented in Cuba at meeting of revolutionary combatants
Picket line held outside New York Times to protest its lack of coverage of Cuban 5 case
Donate to cover costs of ‘Militant’ reporting team to Cuba
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