The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 68/No. 9           March 8, 2004  
 
 
Book by Cuban leader Armando Hart
is launched at three Havana meetings
(front page)
 
BY MARTÍN KOPPEL  
HAVANA—“The ideas contained in these pages come out of Cuba’s revolutionary struggle,” said Armando Hart at a February 15 meeting here. “Today we want to help spread the ideas of the Cuban Revolution, so that students and young people can take these ideas and develop them under today’s conditions.”

Hart was addressing an audience of 150 people gathered for the launching of Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58, A Participant’s Account, recently released in both English and Spanish editions by Pathfinder Press. The presentation of the book, which Hart authored, was a prominent feature of the 13th Havana International Book Fair.

In the week following the book fair Aldabonazo was also presented at two other meetings, one sponsored by the Federation of University Students (FEU) at the José Antonio Echeverría Polytechnic Institute and another organized by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. Coverage of the three meetings was featured by Cuban television, radio, and newspapers.

In addition, Hart also addressed a meeting organized by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) where some 90 copies of the book that had been purchased by the FAR were distributed.  
 
Revolutionary struggle
Hart is one of the generation of historic leaders of the Cuban revolutionary struggle, going back to the early 1950s. In Aldabonazo he tells the story of the men and women in cities and towns across Cuba who, following the March 1952 military coup by Fulgencio Batista, put concern about their lives behind them in order to organize to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship.

The urban underground movement led by the July 26 Movement, of which Hart was a central leader, waged a political battle, carried out sabotage actions, and organized funds, supplies, and reinforcements for Rebel Army forces based in the Sierra Maestra mountains of eastern Cuba. Under the leadership of Fidel Castro the revolutionary forces led a popular insurrection that toppled the Batista regime in January 1959 and opened the door to a socialist revolution.

Over the more than four decades since that victory, Armando Hart has continued to carry responsibilities as part of the central revolutionary leadership, serving as the first minister of education, as organization secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, and for 20 years as minister of culture. Today Hart is a member of Cuba’s Council of State and heads the Office of the José Martí Program. Martí, Cuba’s national hero, led the independence struggle in this country against Spanish colonial rule at the end of the 19th century, opposing U.S. imperialist designs on Latin America.

As at every book fair since 1986, a broad display of Pathfinder’s 400-plus titles on revolutionary working-class politics was presented at a booth organized by the Pathfinder Bookshop in London. Over the past decade, a number of these titles have been presented at the now-annual book fair. Many have been books of interviews, writings, and speeches by leaders of the Cuban Revolution, including Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War and The Bolivian Diary by Ernesto Che Guevara; Pombo: A Man of Che’s Guerrilla by Harry Villegas; Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces; Che Guevara Talks to Young People; From the Escambray to the Congo by Víctor Dreke; and Marianas in Combat: Teté Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon.

Of the three major public meetings presenting Aldabonazo this year, the program at the book fair was the most extensive. Speakers there included Eloísa Carreras, who edited the first edition of the book published in Cuba in 1997 and worked closely with Hart and Pathfinder to produce the new edition; Eliades Acosta, director of the José Martí National Library in Havana and author of the book’s preface; Joan Cabo, president of the Federation of University Students (FEU); Héctor Rodríguez Llompart, a veteran of the Cuban revolutionary underground in the 1950s; and Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the book and author of the publisher’s preface.

Among those attending the meeting were José Ramón Fernández, vice president of the Council of Ministers; a delegation from the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution headed by Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Harry Villegas, its executive secretary; Col. Raúl Izquierdo, director of the Cuban History Institute; Enrique Oltuski, vice minister of the fishing industry and head of the July 26 urban underground in Villa Clara province in the 1950s; and many others who fought in the revolutionary struggle.

A leadership delegation from the FEU also attended.

Eloísa Carreras, a researcher at the National Library, spoke about how the first edition of Aldabonazo, published by the Havana-based Letras Cubanas and out of print for half a decade, came into being. She described how she had discovered Hart’s writings about the Cuban Revolution after returning from several years of university studies in Moscow in the mid-1980s.  
 
‘Promote ideas of Cuban Revolution’
“After the crumbling of socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and the difficult beginnings of the Special Period, there was an intensified need to promote the ideas of the Cuban Revolution,” Carreras said. The Special Period is the term used here for the deep economic crisis precipitated in the early 1990s by the sudden cut-off of aid and trade on favorable terms that Cuba had enjoyed with the Soviet bloc countries, making it more dependent for both its imports and needed export earnings on brutal fluctuations of the world capitalist market.

Carreras explained that she and Hart first met Mary-Alice Waters, Pathfinder’s president, during the 2000 Havana book fair at the launching of Che Guevara Talks to Young People, which has a preface by Hart. That’s where the idea of a Pathfinder edition of Aldabonazo was first discussed, she said. Carreras described the close collaboration with Pathfinder to produce the new edition, which she said gave the text and documents the presentation and quality they deserved.

Hart’s narrative is supplemented by a wealth of letters, circulars, and other documents of the Cuban revolutionary movement, written in the heat of the struggle. The new edition includes 28 pages of historic photos as well as a glossary, chronology, and index.

Eliades Acosta said that, like Carreras, he belonged to a generation of Cubans who “matured a lot” as they went through the eye-opening experience of living and studying in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Acosta said that unlike what he and others had encountered in the USSR, they found in Cuban revolutionary leaders such as Armando Hart an approach toward new generations that encouraged their creativity rather than stifling it. As minister of culture from 1976 to 1997, Hart “established a very special dialog with young artists, creators, and thinkers, and avoided the repetition in Cuba of errors that in other parts of the world have been very costly to the world socialist and progressive movement.”

Today, Acosta said, referring to Washington, “the empire is in a period of decline, and therefore extremely dangerous,” both in its wars abroad as well as its attacks “against the American people—against their civil liberties and rights.” As procapitalist forces around the world “try to convince Cubans that we embody prehistoric, Jurassic Park-type ideas that have been left behind,” the need to “convey what the Cuban Revolution has represented and does represent takes on special meaning today.”

The fact that Pathfinder has published Aldabonazo, Acosta said, “is a good sign of the times” for those standing up to imperialism.  
 
‘A book young Cubans should read’
FEU president Joan Cabo told the audience that “this is a book all young Cubans should read.” Aldabonazo, he said, can help give members of the FEU a better understanding of Cuba’s revolutionary history. He noted that this is particularly important at a time when efforts are under way in Cuba to expand access to education by creating university extensions in every municipality of the country.

Also speaking was Héctor Rodríguez Llompart, who wrote a brief account published in Aldabonazo describing actions by the July 26 Movement in Havana in support of the landing of the Granma expedition that launched the revolutionary war at the end of 1956. He said the book introduced readers to how a vanguard of working people and youth “were educated as revolutionaries and internationalists” through the popular struggle led by the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement on multiple fronts—in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the urban underground, the university, and even the Batista dictatorship’s prisons.

Waters explained that Pathfinder has published Aldabonazo because it is one of the “weapons that working people in the United States and elsewhere in the world need to arm ourselves politically for class battles we all see coming toward us in the 21st century, battles that will determine the future—even the survival—of humanity.” (See text of Waters’s presentation linked below.)

The main presentation was made by Hart, who emphasized that Cubans need to reach “the American people and American society” with the ideas of the Cuban Revolution. He expressed deep appreciation for the work of Pathfinder in publishing Aldabonazo in both English and Spanish.  
 
How rebels became socialists
Hart explained how he and others of his generation became socialists as they got involved in the revolutionary struggle against the U.S.-backed dictatorship.

He recounted how Cuban president Fidel Castro had recently asked him when he had become a socialist and he had responded that he really didn’t know. He noted with humor that after reading the new edition of Aldabonazo he had a better idea of the answer. He said he was surprised to realize how early it was when he read a July 1956 letter he had sent Mexican president Adolfo Ruiz Cortines in response to the arrest in Mexico of Fidel Castro and 27 others involved in preparing an armed expedition to Cuba. The letter is included in the book, and a quote from it is highlighted in the photo signature.

Cuba, Hart wrote in the 1956 letter, “is on the verge of a revolution that will transform the social and political order and will lay the foundations of a socialist and revolutionary democracy. We represent the vanguard of that revolution.”

Referring to discussions with other members of the July 26 Movement, Hart said, “Someone told me one day, ‘In the 1950s you were anticommunist.’ I told him, ‘No, I was anti-Stalinist. Because what was presented as socialism at that time did not correspond to the reality of our revolution.” He and others, Hart said, “became socialists in spite of the Soviet Union.”

There were others like him, he said, pointing to the example of the Saíz brothers, ages 17 and 18, who in 1958 wrote a manifesto titled “Why We Are Fighting” that presented a revolutionary perspective and was critical of the Soviet leadership.

While not members of the pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party (PSP), which claimed the mantle of V.I. Lenin, he and many other members of the July 26 Movement “were enthusiastic about Lenin.” Then, as they read about the Bolshevik party in Russia, “I also discovered Trotsky,” Hart said, referring to Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

Hart outlined what he thought were the most important factors in the victory of the Cuban revolutionary struggle. These, he said, included the caliber of Fidel Castro as a revolutionary leader; the illegitimacy of the Batista regime; the moral high ground taken by the revolutionary forces; the fusion of the deep-going anti-imperialist traditions of the Cuban people with the struggle against the dictatorship; the weakness of the national bourgeoisie; and the popular insurrection that played a decisive role in bringing down the regime.

Hart concluded, “Fidel and the Cuban people gave our generation the opportunity to participate in one of the world’s great revolutions. If we benefited from the enormous influence of the revolutions of the 19th century and the anti-imperialist struggles of the 20th century, young people today also benefit from 50 years of revolution.” Those intertwined revolutionary traditions are a strength that the new generation can draw on. “Those are the lessons I would like to pass on to the next generations,” he said.

In the informal conversations following the event, where some 80 copies of the book were sold, some of the young people present said that many of Hart’s remarks, particularly about how he and others had become socialists, were new to them and that they appreciated hearing more about the real history of the ideas of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

It was out of that presentation that the Union of Young Communists and the Federation of University Students decided to organize the meeting several days later at the José Antonio Echeverría Polytechnic Institute.

About 100 people, mostly students and some professors, listened to the talks by Carreras, Waters, and Hart, who were introduced by a leader of the FEU, the organization that hosted the meeting. Among them were about half of the 15 or so Venezuelan students currently taking classes there.

Hart, enjoying the opportunity to have an exchange with students, elaborated on some of the same themes and fielded a number of questions. One student asked what “aldabonazo” referred to. Hart explained that the word, which in Spanish means a warning knock on the door, became a rallying cry of students and other rebels who went into the streets of Cuba to resist the March 1952 military coup by Batista.

Another youth said he had had an opportunity to talk with volunteers at the Pathfinder booth at the Havana book fair and noted the contribution made by Pathfinder in producing Aldabonazo. He said he favored deepening exchanges of political views and experiences between young people in Cuba and the United States, as well as holding more discussions on campus like this one.

Hart replied saying that he hoped to meet with FEU leaders to discuss organizing a seminar series on the campus.

A professor asked Hart about other books he had written, including one titled Marx and Martí and another on the roots of socialist ideas in Cuba. Hart promised he would send these books to students and professors at the campus to encourage further discussion.

Another student explained that “although the curriculum here is based on scientific and technical studies, we are also studying the ideas of José Martí.” Hart said he thought the expansion of the curriculum to include the study of the broadest questions, not just technical training, was essential. “We must include the study of Gramsci, Mella, and Marx too,” he said, referring to Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci and Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella.

At the end students lined up at a literature table and snapped up some 50 copies of Aldabonazo. Several also purchased a range of other Pathfinder titles, from Malcolm X Talks to Young People to Capitalism’s World Disorder by Jack Barnes.

On February 21 a third presentation of Aldabonazo was held, sponsored by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution at their national center in Havana. Carreras, Waters, and Hart spoke to some 125 people. Most were combatants from several generations of revolutionary struggles, from the Rebel Army in the 1950s to internationalist volunteers who had fought in Angola in the 1970s or ‘80s alongside Angolan troops to defeat an invasion by the South African apartheid regime’s army.

Also on the platform were several leaders of the Combatants Association—Gens. Gustavo Chui Beltrán, Sergio Pérez Lezcano, and Rolando Kindelán. Among the guests of honor were relatives of the five Cuban revolutionaries serving draconian sentences in U.S. prisons. Hart presented them copies of Aldabonazo dedicated to each of the five.

All three book presentations received media coverage. The February 15 event was covered by Cuban TV, Radio Rebelde, Radio Reloj, the news agencies Prensa Latina and AIN, Granma Internacional, and the magazine Bohemia.

Alex Alvarado contributed to this article.
 
 

Help fund ‘Militant’ reporting trip to Cuba

Róger Calero and Martín Koppel, editors of Perspectiva Mundial, Alex Alvarado, a Militant correspondent from Miami, and Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International are among the Militant/PM reporters who were recently in Cuba. The article above by these reporters on meetings to launch Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58 is part of their coverage on the Havana international book fair and on other political developments in Cuba. The fruits of such reporting teams include the two-part series on the radical reorganization of Cuba’s sugar industry published in the February 9 and February 16 issues of the Militant and the February and March issues of PM.

The costs of this reporting trip amount to $16,000. Please send your contribution to the Militant at 306 W. 37th St., 10th floor, New York, NY 10018, and earmark it “Travel Fund.”


 
 
Related articles:
‘Cuban Revolution must be understood by those in U.S. who seek to emulate it’
Pathfinder Press president speaks at Havana book fair launching of ‘Aldabonazo’
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home