This is a unique revolution, which for some does not fit in with one of the most orthodox premises of the revolutionary movement, expressed by Lenin: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”12 It should be said that revolutionary theory, as the expression of a social truth, stands above any particular presentation of it. In other words, one can make a revolution if historical reality is interpreted correctly and if the forces involved are utilized correctly, even without knowing theory.
In every revolution there is always involvement by people from very different tendencies who, nevertheless, come to agreement on action and on the most immediate objectives. It is clear that if the leaders have adequate theoretical knowledge prior to taking action, many errors can be avoided, as long as the adopted theory corresponds to reality.
The principal actors of this revolution had no coherent viewpoint. But it cannot be said that they were ignorant of the various concepts of history, society, economics and revolution being discussed in the world today. A profound knowledge of reality, a close relationship with the people, the firmness of the objective being sought, and the experience of revolutionary practice gave those leaders the opportunity to form a more complete theoretical conception.
The foregoing should be considered an introduction to the explanation of this curious phenomenon that has intrigued the entire world: the Cuban Revolution. How and why did a group of men, cut to ribbons by an army enormously superior in technique and equipment, manage first to survive, then to become strong, later to become stronger than the enemy in the battle zones, move into new combat zones still later, and finally defeat that enemy in pitched battles even though their troops were still vastly outnumbered? This is a deed that deserves to be studied in the history of the contemporary world.
Naturally we, who often do not show due concern for theory, will not proceed today to expound the truth of the Cuban Revolution as if we were its owners. We are simply trying to lay the foundation for being able to interpret this truth. In fact, the Cuban Revolution must be separated into two absolutely different stages: that of the armed action up to January 1, 1959; and the political, economic and social transformations from then on.
Even these two stages deserve further subdivisions. We will not deal with them from the viewpoint of historical exposition, however, but from the viewpoint of the evolution of the revolutionary thinking of its leaders through their contact with the people.
Incidentally, here we must introduce a general attitude toward one of the most controversial terms of the modern world: Marxism. When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurian.”
There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a “Marxist” with the same naturalness with which one is a “Newtonian” in physics or a “Pasteurian.” If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before. Such is the case, for example, of “Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that.
Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolívar, or with his and Engels’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today. But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought. This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanity’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument.
The advances in social and political science, as in other fields, belong to a long historical process whose links are constantly being connected, added up, bound together and perfected. In early human history, there existed Chinese, Arab or Hindu mathematics; today, mathematics has no frontiers. A Greek Pythagoras, an Italian Galileo, an English Newton, a German Gauss, a Russian Lobachevsky, an Einstein, etc., all have a place in the history of the peoples. Similarly, in the field of social and political sciences, a long series of thinkers, from Democritus to Marx, have added their original investigations and accumulated a body of experience and doctrines.
The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, foresees the future. But in addition to foreseeing it (by which he would meet his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: it is not enough to interpret the world, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and instrument of his environment and becomes an architect of his own destiny. At that moment Marx begins to put himself in a position where he becomes the necessary target of all those who have a special interest in maintaining the old — like what happened to Democritus, whose work was burned by Plato himself and his disciples, the ideologues of the Athenian slave-owning aristocracy. Beginning with the revolutionary Marx, a political group is established with concrete ideas, which, based on the giants, Marx and Engels, and developing through successive stages with individuals such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and the new Soviet and Chinese rulers, establishes a body of doctrine and, shall we say, examples to follow.
The Cuban Revolution takes up Marx at the point where he put aside science to pick up his revolutionary rifle. And it takes him up at that point not in a spirit of revisionism, of struggling against that which came after Marx, of reviving a “pure” Marx, but simply because up to that point Marx, the scientist, standing outside of history, studied and predicted. Afterward, Marx the revolutionary took up the fight as part of history.
We, practical revolutionaries, by initiating our struggle were simply fulfilling laws foreseen by Marx the scientist. Along that road of rebellion, by struggling against the old power structure, by basing ourselves on the people to destroy that structure, and by having the well-being of the people as the foundation of our struggle, we are simply fitting into the predictions of Marx the scientist. That is to say, and it is well to emphasize this once again: The laws of Marxism are present in the events of the Cuban Revolution, independently of whether its leaders profess or fully know those laws from a theoretical point of view.
To better understand the Cuban revolutionary movement up to January 1 [1959], we should divide it into the following stages: before the Granma landing; from the Granma landing until after the victories of La Plata and Arroyo del Infierno; from those days until El Uvero and the formation of the guerrillas’ second column; from then until the formation of the third and fourth columns, the invasion of the Sierra de Cristal, and the establishment of the Second Front; the April strike and its failure; the beating back of the enemy’s big offensive; the invasion of Las Villas.
Each one of those small historical moments of the guerrilla war framed different social concepts and different appraisals of Cuban reality. They shaped the thinking of the military leaders of the revolution, who in time would also reaffirm their status as political leaders.
Before the landing of the Granma, a mentality predominated that, to some degree, might be called subjectivist: blind confidence in a rapid popular explosion, enthusiasm and faith in being able to destroy Batista’s might by a swift uprising combined with spontaneous revolutionary strikes, and the subsequent fall of the dictator. The movement was the direct heir of the Orthodox Party and its main slogan: “Honor against money.” In other words, administrative honesty as the principal idea of the new Cuban Government.
Nevertheless, Fidel Castro had noted in History Will Absolve Me the foundations that the revolution has now almost completely fulfilled.13 The revolution has also gone beyond these foundations, moving toward a deepening in the economic arena. This in turn has brought about a parallel deepening in the political arena, both nationally and internationally.
After the landing comes the defeat, the almost total destruction of the forces, their regroupment and formation as a guerrilla force. The small numbers of survivors, survivors with the will to struggle, were characterized by their understanding of the falsehood of the imagined schema of spontaneous outbursts throughout the island. They understood also that the fight would have to be a long one and that it would need to have a large peasant participation. At this point too, the first peasants joined the guerrillas. Also, two clashes were fought, of little importance in terms of the number of combatants, but of great psychological value, since they erased the uneasiness toward the peasants felt by the guerrillas’ central group, made up of people from the cities. The peasants, in turn, distrusted the group and, above all, feared barbarous reprisals from the government. Two things were demonstrated at this stage, both very important for these interrelated factors: The peasants saw that the bestialities of the army and all the persecution would not be sufficient to put an end to the guerrillas, but would be capable of wiping out the peasants’ homes, crops and families. So a good solution was to take refuge with the guerrillas, where their lives would be safe. In turn, the guerrilla fighters learned the ever-greater necessity of winning the peasant masses. This obviously meant that we had to offer them something they yearned for with all their might. And there is nothing a peasant desires more than land.
What followed then was a nomadic stage in which the Rebel Army went about conquering zones of influence. It still could not remain in them very long, but neither could the enemy army, which could hardly even enter them. Various battles established a vaguely defined front between the two sides.
May 28, 1957, marked a milestone. We attacked El Uvero, a well-armed, quite well-entrenched garrison located by the sea and equipped with an airfield, which made possible rapid reinforcement. The victory of the Rebel forces in this battle, one of the bloodiest of the war — 30 percent of the forces that went into battle were killed or wounded — totally changed the picture. There was now a territory in which the Rebel Army did as it pleased, where no news of this army filtered out to the enemy and from where it could descend in force onto the plains in rapid, sudden attacks and strike at its adversary’s positions.
Shortly afterward, the first division of forces came about, and two guerrilla columns were established. The second took the name Column No. 4 in a quite infantile attempt at disguise. The two columns immediately showed signs of activity. On July 26, Estrada Palma was attacked, and five days later Bueycito, some 30 kilometers away. By then these shows of force became more important. On solid ground we would await the repressive forces, halting several of their attempts to go up into the Sierra. Battle fronts with wide no-man’s lands were established, punctured by punitive incursions from both sides although the fronts remained basically unchanged.
Nevertheless, the guerrillas kept enlarging their forces with substantial additions from among the peasants in the region and some members of the July 26 Movement from the cities. The guerrillas became more combative and their fighting spirit increased. In February 1958, after suffering a number of enemy offensives that were beaten back, [Juan] Almeida’s Column No. 3 left to take up positions close to Santiago, and during the first days of March Raúl [Castro]’s Column No. 6 — named after our hero Frank País, who had been killed a few months earlier — managed the feat of crossing the central highway. Going into the hills of Mayarí, it created the “Frank País” Second Front of Oriente.
News of the growing successes of our Rebel forces began to filter through the censorship, and the people were rapidly approaching the climax of revolutionary activity. At this point the proposal was raised, from Havana, of taking the struggle to the entire country through a revolutionary general strike, which was to destroy the enemy’s forces by attacking them at all points simultaneously.
The Rebel Army’s function in this case would be that of a catalyst or, perhaps, that of an “irritating thorn” that could unleash the movement. In those days our guerrillas stepped up their activity and Camilo Cienfuegos began creating his heroic legendary reputation, fighting for the first time in the Oriente plains, operating with a feel for organization and responding to a central leadership.
The revolutionary strike was not correctly approached, however, since the importance of working-class unity was ignored, and since no attempt was made to have the workers themselves, in exercising their own revolutionary activity, select the right moment. The strike was called over the radio in an attempt to clandestinely launch a rapid, sudden attack. Ignored was the fact that the secret of the appointed day and hour had filtered through to Batista’s henchmen, but not to the people. The strike movement failed, and many valuable revolutionary patriots were mercilessly murdered.
A curious fact that should be noted at some point in the revolution’s history is that Jules Dubois, the gossipmonger for the U.S. monopolies, knew ahead of time the day when the strike would break out.
At this point one of the most important qualitative changes in the war’s development occurred: we acquired the certainty that the triumph could be achieved only through a gradual increase in the guerrilla forces, until the defeat of the enemy army in pitched battles.
By then broad relations had been established with the peasantry. The Rebel Army had issued its penal and civil codes, dispensed justice, distributed food supplies and collected taxes in the zones it administered. The neighboring zones also felt the influence of the Rebel Army. The enemy prepared large-scale offensives, but the balance sheet of two months of battle was 1,000 casualties for the totally demoralized invading army and an increase of our fighting capacity by 600 weapons.
We had already shown that the army could not defeat us. There was definitely no force in Cuba capable of conquering the peaks of the Sierra Maestra and the hills of the “Frank País” Second Front of Oriente. For the dictatorship’s troops the roads of Oriente became impassable. With the enemy’s offensive defeated, Camilo Cienfuegos and his Column No. 2, and the author of these lines, with the Ciro Redondo Column No. 8, were assigned to cross Camagüey Province, establish ourselves in Las Villas, and cut the enemy’s communications. Camilo was supposed to later continue his advance in order to repeat the feat of the hero for whom his column was named, Antonio Maceo: an invasion across the entire island from east to west.
At this point the war shows a new characteristic: the relationship of forces turns in favor of the revolution. During a month and a half, two small columns, one of 80 and the other of 140 men, constantly surrounded and harassed by an army that mobilized thousands of soldiers, crossed the plains of Camagüey, arrived at Las Villas, and began the job of cutting the island in two.
At times it may seem strange, or incomprehensible, or even incredible that two columns of such small size — without communications, without transport, without the most elementary arms of modern warfare — could fight against well-trained, and above all, well-armed troops. The fundamental thing is the characteristic of each group. The fewer comforts the guerrilla fighter has, the more he is initiated into the rigors of nature, the more he feels at home, the higher his morale, the higher his sense of security. At the same time, under whatever circumstances, the guerrilla has come to put his life on the line, to trust it to the luck of a tossed coin. And in general, whether or not the individual guerrilla lives or dies weighs little in the final outcome of the battle.
The enemy soldier, in the Cuban example that we are now considering, is the junior partner of the dictator. He is the man who gets the last crumbs left by the next-to-last hanger-on in a long chain that begins on Wall Street and ends with him. He is ready to defend his privileges, but only to the degree that they are important. His salary and his benefits are worth some suffering and some dangers, but they are never worth his life. If that is the price of keeping them, better to give them up, in other words, to retreat from the guerrilla danger.
From these two concepts and these two morals springs the difference that would reach the crisis point on December 31, 1958.
The superiority of the Rebel Army was being established more and more clearly. Furthermore, the arrival of our columns in Las Villas showed the greater popularity of the July 26 Movement compared to all other groups: the Revolutionary Directorate, the Second Front of Las Villas, the Popular Socialist Party and some small guerrilla forces of the Authentic Organization. In large part this was due to the magnetic personality of its leader, Fidel Castro, but the greater correctness of its revolutionary line was also a factor.
Here ended the insurrection. But the men who arrive in Havana after two years of arduous struggle in the mountains and plains of Oriente, in the plains of Camagüey, and in the mountains, plains, and cities of Las Villas are not the same ideologically as the ones who landed on the beaches of Las Coloradas, or who joined in the first phase of the struggle. Their distrust of the peasant has turned into affection and respect for his virtues. Their total ignorance of life in the countryside has turned into a profound knowledge of the needs of our peasants. Their dabbling with statistics and with theory has been replaced by the firm cement of practice.
With agrarian reform as their banner, the implementation of which begins in the Sierra Maestra, these men come up against imperialism. They know that the agrarian reform is the basis upon which the new Cuba will be built. They know also that the agrarian reform will give land to all the dispossessed, but that it will dispossess its unjust possessors. And they know that the largest of the unjust possessors are also influential men in the State Department or in the government of the United States of America. They have learned to conquer difficulties with courage, with audacity, and above all, with the support of the people. And they have now seen the future of liberation that awaits us on the other side of our sufferings.
To reach this final understanding of our goals has been a long road, and many changes have taken place. Parallel to the successive qualitative changes that occurred on the battlefronts came the changes in the social composition of our guerrillas, and also the ideological transformations of its leaders. This came about because each one of these processes, of these changes, indeed constitutes a qualitative change in the composition, in the strength, in the revolutionary maturity of our army. The peasant contributes his vigor, his capacity to withstand suffering, his knowledge of the terrain, his love for the land, his hunger for agrarian reform. The intellectual, of whatever type, adds his small grain of sand beginning to sketch out a theory. The worker imparts his organizational sense, his innate tendency to band together and to unite.
Standing over all of this was the example of the Rebel forces themselves, who had already shown themselves to be much more than an “irritating thorn” and whose lessons aroused and awakened the masses until they lost their fear of the hangmen. Never before was the conception of this interaction as clear to us as now. We were able to feel how this interaction matured, as we taught the efficacy of armed insurrection, the strength that man has when he is called on to defend himself with a weapon in his hand and with the resolve to triumph in his eyes. And the peasant showed us the tricks of the Sierra, the strength necessary to live and triumph in it, and the dose of tenacity, of willingness to sacrifice, that it is necessary to have to be able to carry forward a people’s destiny.
That’s why, when the Rebel leader and his procession entered Havana, bathed in the peasants’ sweat, with a horizon of mountains and clouds, beneath the burning island sun, up a new “stairway of the winter garden, climbed history with the feet of the people.”