This article, written in the final weeks before victory, was published on January 1, 1959, in Patria, official organ of the Rebel Army in Las Villas Province.
Here in December, the month of the second anniversary of the Granma landing, it’s worth taking a look back over the years of armed struggle and the long revolutionary battle. The initial ferment was provided by Batista’s coup of March 10, 1952, and the first bell sounded on July 26, 1953, with the tragic battle of Moncada.
The road has been long and full of hardships and contradictions. In the course of every revolutionary process that is led honestly and not held back by those in positions of responsibility, there are a series of reciprocal interactions between the leaders and the revolutionary masses. The July 26 Movement has also felt the effects of this historical law. There is a gulf between the group of enthusiastic youths who attacked the Moncada garrison at dawn on July 26, 1953, and the Movement’s current leaders, even though many of the individuals are the same. The five years of head-on struggle — including two of open war — have molded the revolutionary spirit of us all in the course of daily clashes with reality and with the people’s instinctive wisdom.
Indeed, our contact with the peasant masses has taught us the great injustice that the current system of agrarian property relations entails. The peasants convinced us of the justice of a fundamental change in this property system. They enlightened us in daily practice about the Cuban peasant’s capacity for self-sacrifice and their unbounded nobility and loyalty.
But we have also taught. We have taught how to lose all fear of the enemy’s repression. We have taught that weapons in the hands of the people are superior to mercenary battalions. We have taught, in short, the popular maxim that can never be repeated enough: in unity there is strength.
And the peasant who became aware of his own strength pressed the Movement, his combative vanguard, to put forward ever more consciously bold demands that finally took shape in the recently issued Sierra Maestra Agrarian Reform Law No. 3.7 Today this law is our pride, our battle flag, our reason for existence as a revolutionary organization.
But this was not always our approach to social questions. Besieged in our bastion in the Sierra, without vital links with the mass of the people, we could sometimes begin to feel more confident in the might of our weapons than in the correctness of our ideas. Because of this, we had our April 9, a sad date to remember, a date that represents with regard to the social struggle what Alegría de Pío — our only defeat in the field of battle — signified in the development of the armed struggle.
From Alegría de Pío we drew the revolutionary lessons necessary to not lose a single other battle. From April 9 we have also learned that the strategy of mass struggle follows established laws that cannot be bent or evaded. The lesson is clearly learned. To the work among the peasant masses — whom we have united, regardless of affiliation, in the struggle for the land — we add today the raising of workers’ demands that unite the proletarian masses under a single banner of struggle, the United National Workers Front (FONU), and a single immediate tactical goal: the revolutionary general strike.
This does not represent the use of demagogic tactics in order to display political cleverness. We do not investigate the feelings of the masses out of simple scientific curiosity; we respond to their call. Because we, the combative vanguard of the workers and peasants who are shedding our blood in the mountains and plains of Cuba, are not elements isolated from the popular masses; we are very much part of the people. Our leadership role does not isolate us; rather it imposes obligations on us.
The fact that we are a Movement of all classes in Cuba, however, makes us also fight for the professional and the small businessperson who aspire to live in a framework of decent laws; for the Cuban industrialist whose efforts contribute to the nation by creating jobs; for every good man who wants to see a Cuba free from the daily sorrow of these painful times.
Now more than ever, the July 26 Movement, committed to the highest interests of the Cuban nation, wages its battle, without arrogance but without wavering, for the workers and peasants, for the professionals and small businessperson, for the national industrialists, for democracy and freedom, for the right to be the free children of a free people, for our daily bread to become the exact measure of our daily effort.
On this second anniversary, we are changing the formulation of our pledge. We will no longer “be free or be martyrs.” We will be free — free by the action of the entire people of Cuba, who are breaking chain after chain with the blood and suffering of their best sons and daughters.