The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 75/No. 10      March 14, 2011

 
‘Arming ourselves
for coming battles’
Talk by Mary-Alice Waters,
editor of ‘Soldier of Cuban Revolution’
 
The following are remarks by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and a longtime National Committee member of the Socialist Workers Party, presented February 18 in Havana, Cuba. Waters was part of a panel there to launch the book Soldier of the Cuban Revolution: From the Cane Fields of Oriente to General of the Revolutionary Armed Forces by Luis Alfonso Zayas. The book was published in January by Pathfinder in English and Spanish.

The presentation of Soldier of the Cuban Revolution was one of some 800 book launches and other events during this year’s 11-day Havana International Book Fair (see article on the book launching on facing page). Waters, who edited and wrote the introduction to the book, is also the editor of New International magazine. The introduction was reprinted in the January 10 issue of the Militant.

The main speaker was Brig. Gen. Harry Villegas. Villegas fought alongside Zayas in the Rebel Army during Cuba’s 1956-58 revolutionary war and later served—under the nom de guerre Pombo, by which he is still widely known—in internationalist missions under the command of Ernesto Che Guevara in Congo in 1965 and in Bolivia in 1966-67. Villegas is currently executive vice president of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution (ACRC).

The panel was chaired by Iraida Aguirrechu of Editora Política, the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. Also speaking were Esmel Valera, vice president of the Federation of University Students (FEU) in Cuba, and Brigadier General Zayas, the author of the book.

Subheadings have been added by the Militant, as well as a few footnotes to explain events or names that may not be familiar to readers outside Cuba. Waters’s remarks are copyright © 2011 by Pathfinder Press and reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
First, a thank you to Iraida, not only for chairing this program today, but for all her work, without which the book we are presenting here would not have been possible.

It is an honor to share the platform today with compañero Pombo, as well as with our author, Alfonso Zayas. And we are especially happy to have with us Esmel Valera, vice president of FEU and himself a native of Las Tunas province, where he grew up not far from the cane fields in which compañero Zayas began his political life more than half a century ago.

On behalf of Pathfinder Press, I want to take advantage of this moment, on the eve of the coming congress of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution1 in March, to express our profound appreciation to all the compañeros y compañeras of the ACRC who have extended their collaboration and opened their lives to us over what is now approaching two decades of work together.

It is only your comradeship and help that has allowed us to publish a growing list of books and pamphlets, now numbering more than 20 titles, the big majority in both Spanish and English, that have one and only one aim: to allow the authentic voices of those who overturned the U.S.-backed tyranny of Fulgencio Batista and made the socialist revolution to be heard around the world. These accounts help bring the real history of the Cuban Revolution alive to new generations of revolutionary-minded working people and youth attracted to them.  
 
Arms us for coming battles
We do this to help those who did not live through these revolutionary struggles to understand what produces men and women for whom words such as “dignity” and “justice” mean dignity and justice for the oppressed and exploited of the world and dictate a course of proletarian action for a lifetime.

We do this to help those entering into struggles today to understand what a socialist revolution truly is.

We do this to prepare us all for the revolutionary battles to come, as we enter the most profound crisis the capitalist system has known in almost a century. What lies ahead is decades of economic and social convulsions, financial crises, and spreading wars. That future is inevitable, the product of capitalism itself.

Above all, however—and far more important—is the inevitable resistance this imperialist reality will generate.

Soldier of the Cuban Revolution helps arm us for these coming battles.  
 
Conditions of life and labor
There are four things in the story of Alfonso Zayas that readers outside of Cuba find striking.

First is the author’s description of conditions of life and labor growing up on one of the vast U.S.-owned sugar plantations in eastern Cuba before the revolution. Today those lands are part of the province of Las Tunas. It is the details of Zayas’s account that are so helpful.

To many of you here today, those details are common knowledge—you, too, were born and grew up under such conditions. But for the big majority who will read this book in Cuba and abroad, their concreteness gives us new understanding.

The narrow-gauge trolley, the buda, which isolated rural working people within the plantation’s borders.

The vast reserve army of unemployed in the countryside and the desperate competition for jobs.

How the colono system shifted onto the shoulders of the individual farmer—whether a small owner or a tenant—all the risks of capitalist cane cultivation.

The infamous “sugar quota”—the trade “agreement” imposed by Washington that set the yearly tonnage exported from Cuba to the United States—and how it, too, bore down on every single campesino. For the first time I understood the force of the popular cry—¡Sin cuota pero sin bota! (Without the quota, but without the boot!)—that greeted Washington’s opening shots in the ferocious 50-year economic war against the working people of Cuba.

These and many other details captured in the book give life to the class relations on the land before the revolution.  
 
Fighters used to physical labor
Second, through Zayas’s account of the battles and campaigns he was part of during the revolutionary war to bring down the Batista tyranny, the reader comes to appreciate one thing above all. Without the substantial numbers of men and women like Zayas who joined the Rebel Army—young rural toilers who knew the ways of the countryside, who knew how to work and were used to hard physical labor, who knew how to get things done—victory for the Rebel Army would have come at a much greater price, if at all.

I was particularly struck by the balance sheet drawn by Zayas of the hardships faced by Che’s Column 8, as the original 48-hour invasion plan turned into a grueling 47 days to reach the Escambray.2

“If we’d done it in 48 hours perhaps we would not have weeded out the quitters,” Zayas says in the interview, “those who didn’t have the willpower to continue.

“Perhaps we would never have been able to measure the capacities of those who did.”  
 
Revolutionary justice, not revenge
Third, Che named Zayas head of the prison at the La Cabaña fortress in Havana, where soon more than 1,000 of Batista’s thugs and assassins were being held awaiting trial by revolutionary tribunals.

From the opening days of the revolution, imperialist “democracy,” headquartered in Washington, sought to portray the trials and convictions of these torturers and murderers as a violation of their rights. Just as today the U.S. rulers still attempt to turn their hireling “dissidents” in Cuba into victims of “human rights” abuse.

Zayas reminds us that “had these individuals been released, they would have been lynched in the street” across liberated Cuba. His words echo Fidel’s observation that “this may have been the only revolution in which the main war criminals were tried and brought to justice, the only revolution that … didn’t take revenge.”3

It provides a powerful answer to what has been for decades the ongoing political line of attack against the socialist revolution by imperialist-minded forces claiming to represent “democracy” and “human rights.”

Fourth, Zayas served three tours of duty in Angola, primarily in civilian missions, responding to the requests of the Angolan government for aid.4 The last was in Cabinda province, in 1985-87, where he worked on development plans for that impoverished, oil-rich territory, drawing on his years of experience as party secretary in the Cuban provinces of Las Tunas and Holguín.

For readers in the United States, Zayas’s account of that experience is of special interest for two reasons.

First, because so little information on Cuba’s internationalist mission in Angola is available. Every window that opens onto it is a rare contribution.

Second, because it gives us an additional weapon to use in the battle for the freedom of our five Cuban compañeros, three of whom—René, Fernando, and Gerardo—served in Angola, and two of those, René and Gerardo, in Cabinda.5 In fact, Gerardo arrived in Cabinda, where he led a Cuban-Angolan scouting platoon, shortly after compañero Zayas had finished his third tour of duty there.

Soldier of the Cuban Revolution ends with a tribute by Zayas to the five heroes of Cuba as examples of the proletarian internationalism that marked the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who served in Angola and on other battlefronts.

A full page of photos of the five, in Angola and elsewhere, and of the international campaign to free them, will expand our use of the book as part of the ever-necessary work to involve new layers of working people and youth around the world in the fight until the freedom of the five is won.
 
Cover photo
I want to end by mentioning the photo by Raúl Corrales that makes the cover of this book so powerful.

It was taken on May 14, 1960, as the militia unit of workers, peasants, and Rebel Army combatants, organized by the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), was on its way to the headquarters of the United Fruit Company at the sugar mill then called Preston—and from that day forward known as “Guatemala.”6

Their mission was to inform United Fruit’s management that the property of this U.S.-owned corporation—notorious for exploiting rural toilers across the Americas—had been expropriated by the working people of Cuba and their revolutionary government.

A few years before his death, Corrales gave us the photo for use on some future cover of our choice. I say “gave” it to us, since he accepted only a token $25 for a photo the rights to which today go for a hundred times that. And Corrales added, “If $25 is too much for Pathfinder to pay, don’t worry about it.”

The photo is truly an example of the best of the photojournalism by Cuban photographers of the revolution, who are today known around the world. In fact, this very picture only a few weeks ago was the signature photo at an excellent exhibit on “Cuba in Revolution,” organized by the International Center of Photography smack dab in the middle of New York City.

That gesture by Corrales was yet another demonstration of the kind of solidarity that men and women whose lives are inseparable from the Cuban Revolution have extended to younger—and future—generations determined to emulate their actions.

It is the kind of solidarity that made this book possible. The kind of solidarity that will be expressed on April 16 in the massive celebration of the 50th anniversary of Fidel’s declaration to the world of the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution.

We are very happy to be able to publish Soldier of the Cuban Revolution as a small contribution to this living history.


1. Founded in 1993, the ACRC is as organization of fighters from the Rebel Army, the urban clandestine struggle, battles against counterrevolutionary bands and U.S. imperialist military threats and assaults, and Cuba’s internationalist missions from the Americas, to Africa, and beyond. Its more than 300,000 members work to help transmit the revolution’s history and lessons to new generations in Cuba.

2. The “invasion” is the name given in Cuba to the westward offensive in late 1958 of the Rebel Army’s Column 8, commanded by Ernesto Che Guevara, and Column 2, commanded by Camilo Cienfuegos. That offensive unified forces fighting in Las Villas province of central Cuba under the leadership of the Rebel Army and culminated in the liberation of the city of Santa Clara. The westward march coincided with the consolidation of the Second and Third Fronts in Eastern Cuba under the command of Raúl Castro and Juan Almeida respectively; the extension of the revolutionary war to other fronts in Oriente province; and the campaign led by forces under the command of Fidel Castro, closing in on Santiago de Cuba. This strategic offensive culminated in the victorious revolutionary insurrection and general strike that brought down the Batista regime on Jan. 1, 1959.

3. Fidel Castro, My Life (New York: Allen Lane, 2007), pp. 220-21.

4. Between late 1975 and early 1991, in response to requests from the newly independent Angolan government, Cuba sent 375,000 volunteer combatants and 50,000 civilian volunteers to that country to help defeat U.S.-backed military intervention deep inside its territory by the white supremacist regime in South Africa. The combined Angolan-Cuban forces turned back two major South African invasions and ongoing military assaults in those years, culminating in a crushing defeat of the South African forces at Cuito Cuanavale in March 1988.

5. Five Cuban revolutionaries arrested in Miami in September 1998 on frame-up charges of being a “Cuban spy network.” In June 2001 each of them was convicted on charges of “conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent.” Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino were also convicted of “conspiracy to commit espionage,” and Hernández of “conspiracy to commit murder.” They were given sentences from 15 years to double life plus 15 years. The five were monitoring counterrevolutionary groups in the United States to keep the Cuban government informed of plans for armed attacks. The life sentences against Labaniño and Guerrero have since been reduced to 30 and 21 years respectively, but Hernández is still condemned to two life sentences and each of the five has served more than 12 years in U.S. federal prisons. For the story of Hernández’s scouting platoon in Cabinda, see “‘12 men and 2 cats’: With Gerardo Hernández and his platoon in Angola” in the August 16, 2010, issue of the Militant.

6. The mill was given that name by INRA in honor of the people of Guatemala, whose government was overthrown in 1954 in a US-organized coup to reverse a land reform affecting holdings of United Fruit and other U.S. corporations.


 
Related articles:
Gen. Alfonso Zayas is ‘example of what we aspire to be’
Havana Book Fair presentation of book by peasant rebel who became leader of Cuban Revolution  
 
 
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