In August 1960, at Washington’s instigation, 19 of the 21 Organization of American States (OAS) members meeting in San José, Costa Rica, voted to censure Cuba for not rejecting aid from the Soviet Union and China. In response, a mass rally in Havana on September 2, 1960, adopted the “Declaration of Havana.” After Cuba was finally expelled from the OAS at a meeting in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in January 1962, and after Washington imposed a blockade on the island in February, another mass assembly took place in Havana, where Fidel Castro read this “Second Declaration of Havana,” asserting the right of the peoples of the Americas to sovereignty and independence.
From the people of Cuba to the peoples of the Americas and the world:
On May 18, 1895, on the eve of his death from a Spanish bullet through the heart, José Martí, the Apostle of our independence, wrote in an unfinished letter to his friend Manuel Mercado:
Now I am able to write… I am in danger each day now of giving my life for my country and for my duty… of preventing the United States, as Cuba obtains her independence, from extending its control over the Antilles and consequently falling with that much more force on the countries of our America. Whatever I have done so far, and whatever I will do, has been for that purpose…
The nations most vitally concerned in preventing the imperialist annexation of Cuba, which would make Cuba the starting point of that course—which must be blocked and which we are blocking with our blood—of the annexation of our American nations to the violent and brutal north that despises them, are being hindered by lesser and public commitments from the open and avowed espousal of this sacrifice, which is being made for our and their benefit.
I have lived inside the monster and know its entrails; and my sling is David’s.
In 1895, Martí had already pointed out the danger hovering over the Americas and called imperialism by its name: imperialism. He pointed out to the people of Latin America that more than anyone, they had a stake in seeing to it that Cuba did not succumb to the greed of the Yankees, scornful of the peoples of Latin America. And with his own blood, shed for Cuba and Latin America, he wrote the words that posthumously, in homage to his memory, the people of Cuba place at the top of this declaration.
Sixty-seven years have passed. Puerto Rico was converted into a colony and is still a colony burdened with military bases. Cuba also fell into the clutches of imperialism, whose troops occupied our territory. The Platt Amendment was imposed on our first constitution, as a humiliating clause that sanctioned the odious right of foreign intervention. Our riches passed into their hands, our history was falsified, and our government and our politics were entirely molded in the interests of the overseers. The nation was subjected to 60 years of political, economic and cultural suffocation.
But Cuba rose up. Cuba was able to redeem itself from the bastard tutelage. Cuba broke the chains that tied its fortunes to those of the imperial oppressor, redeemed its riches, reclaimed its culture, and unfurled its banner of Free Territory and People of the Americas.
Now the United States will never again be able to use Cuba’s strength against the Americas. Conversely, the United States, dominating the majority of the other Latin American states, is attempting to use the strength of the Americas against Cuba.
The history of Cuba is but the history of Latin America. The history of Latin America is but the history of Asia, Africa and Oceania. And the history of all these peoples is but the history of the most pitiless and cruel exploitation by imperialism throughout the world.
By the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, a handful of economically developed nations had finished partitioning the world among themselves, subjecting to their economic and political domination two-thirds of humanity, which was thus forced to work for the ruling classes of the economically advanced capitalist countries.
The historical circumstances that permitted a high level of industrial development to certain European countries and the United States placed them in a position to subject the rest of the world to their domination and exploitation.
What were the compelling motives behind the expansion of the industrial powers? Were they reasons of morality and civilization as they claim? No, the reasons were economic.
From the discovery of the Americas, which hurled the European conquerors across the seas to occupy and exploit the lands and inhabitants of other continents, the fundamental motive for their conduct was the desire for riches. The discovery of the Americas was carried out in search of shorter routes to the Orient, whose goods were highly paid for in Europe.
A new social class, the merchants and the producers of manufactured articles for commerce, arose from the womb of the feudal society of lords and serfs in the decline of the Middle Ages.
The thirst for gold was the cause that spurred the efforts of that new class. The desire for gain has been the incentive of its conduct throughout history. With the growth of manufacturing and commerce, its social influence also grew. The new productive forces that were developing in the womb of feudal society clashed more and more with feudalism’s relations of servitude, its laws, its institutions, its philosophy, its morality, its art and its political ideology.
New philosophical and political ideas, new concepts of rights and of the state were proclaimed by the intellectual representatives of the bourgeois class, which—because they responded to the new necessities of social life—gradually entered into the consciousness of the exploited masses. At that time, these were revolutionary ideas opposed to the worn-out ideas of feudal society. The peasants, the artisans, the workers in manufacturing, led by the bourgeoisie, overthrew the feudal order, its philosophy, its ideas, its institutions, its laws and the privileges of the ruling class, that is, the hereditary nobility.
At that time, the bourgeoisie considered revolution necessary and just. It did not think that the feudal order could and should be eternal—as it now thinks its capitalist social order is.
It encouraged the peasants to free themselves from feudal servitude; it encouraged the artisans to rebel against the medieval guilds and demanded the right to political power. The absolute monarchs, the nobility and the high clergy stubbornly defended their class privileges, proclaiming the divine right of kings and the immutability of the social order. To be liberal, to proclaim the ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the spokespeople for bourgeois philosophy, at that time constituted, in the eyes of the ruling classes, as serious a crime as it is today in the eyes of the bourgeoisie to be a socialist and to proclaim the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
The bourgeoisie took political power and established on the ruins of feudal society its capitalist mode of production; and on the basis of this mode of production it erected its state, its laws, its ideas and its institutions. Those institutions sanctified, above everything, the essence of its class rule: private property.
The new society based on the private ownership of the means of production and free competition was thus divided into two basic classes: one, the owners of the means of production, ever more modern and efficient; and the other, those deprived of all wealth, possessing only their labor power, to be sold on the market as just another commodity simply in order to live.
With the feudal bonds broken, the productive forces developed extraordinarily fast. Great factories arose in which greater and greater numbers of workers were assembled.
The most modern and technically efficient factories continually displaced from the market the less efficient competitors. The cost of industrial equipment continually rose. It became necessary to accumulate more and more capital. A greater portion of production passed into a smaller number of hands. Thus arose the great capitalist enterprises and later, according to the degree and character of the association, the great industrial conglomerates through cartels, syndicates, trusts and corporations, controlled by the owners of the major portion of the stock, that is to say, by the most powerful heads of industry. Free trade, characteristic of capitalism in its first phase, gave way to monopolies, which entered into agreements among themselves and controlled the markets.
Where did the colossal quantity of resources come from that permitted a handful of monopolists to accumulate billions of dollars? Simply from the exploitation of human labor. Millions of people, forced to work for a wage of bare subsistence, produced with their strength the gigantic capital of the monopolies. The workers amassed the fortunes for the privileged classes, ever richer, ever more powerful. Through the banking institutions these classes were able to make use not only of their own money but that of society as a whole.
Thus came about the fusion of the banks with big industry, and finance capital was born. What could they do with the great surplus of capital that was accumulating in ever greater quantities? Invade the world with it. Always in pursuit of profit, they began to seize the natural resources of all the economically weak countries and to exploit the human labor of their inhabitants with much more wretched wages than what they were forced to pay the workers of their own developed countries. Thus began the territorial and economic division of the world. By 1914, eight or 10 imperialist countries had subjugated territories beyond their own borders, covering more than 83.7 million square kilometers, with a population of 970 million inhabitants. They had simply divided up the world.
But as the world, limited in size, was divided up to the very last corner of the earth, a clash ensued among the different monopolistic nations. Struggles arose for new divisions, originating in the disproportionate distribution of industrial and economic power that the various monopolistic nations had attained in their uneven development. Imperialist wars broke out that would cost humanity 50 million dead, tens of millions wounded, and the destruction of incalculable material and cultural wealth. Even before this had happened, Karl Marx had written, “capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot and from every pore with blood and dirt.”
The capitalist system of production, once it had given all it was capable of giving, became an abysmal obstacle to the progress of humanity. But the bourgeoisie from its beginning carried within itself its antithesis. In its womb gigantic productive instruments were developed, but with time a new and vigorous social force developed: the proletariat, destined to change the old and worn-out social system of capitalism to a higher socioeconomic form in accordance with the historical possibilities of human society, converting into social property those gigantic means of production which the people—and no one else but the people—by their work had created and amassed. At such a stage of development of the productive forces, it became completely anachronistic and outmoded to have a regime based on private ownership and with it the economic subordination of millions and millions of human beings to the dictates of a small social minority.
The interests of humanity cried out for a halt to the anarchy of production, the waste, economic crises and the rapacious wars that are part of the capitalist system. The growing necessities of the human race, and the possibility of satisfying them, demanded the planned development of the economy and the rational utilization of its means of production and natural resources.
It was inevitable that imperialism and colonialism would experience a profound and insoluble crisis. The general crisis began with the outbreak of World War I, with the revolution of the workers and peasants that overthrew the czarist empire of Russia and founded, amid the most difficult conditions of capitalist encirclement and aggression, the world’s first socialist state, opening a new era in the history of humanity. From that time until today, the crisis and decomposition of the imperialist system has steadily worsened.
World War II, unleashed by the imperialist powers—into which were dragged the Soviet Union and other criminally invaded peoples of Asia and Europe, who engaged in a bloody struggle of liberation—culminated in the defeat of fascism, the formation of the world camp of socialism and the struggle of the colonial and dependent peoples for their sovereignty. Between 1945 and 1957 more than 1.2 billion human beings conquered their independence in Asia and Africa. The blood shed by the people was not in vain.
The movement of the dependent and colonial peoples is a phenomenon of a universal character that agitates the world and marks the final crisis of imperialism.
Cuba and Latin America are part of the world. Our problems form part of the problems engendered by the general crisis of imperialism and the struggle of the subjugated peoples, the clash between the world that is being born and the world that is dying. The odious and brutal campaign unleashed against our nation expresses the desperate as well as futile effort that the imperialists are making to prevent the liberation of the peoples.
Cuba hurts the imperialists in a special way. What is hidden behind the Yankees’ hatred of the Cuban revolution? What is it that rationally explains the conspiracy—uniting for the same aggressive purpose the richest and most powerful imperialist power in the contemporary world and the oligarchies of an entire continent, which together are supposed to represent a population of 350 million human beings—against a small country of only seven million inhabitants, economically underdeveloped, without financial or military means to threaten the security or economy of any other country?
What unites them and agitates them is fear. What explains it is fear. Not fear of the Cuban revolution but fear of the Latin American revolution. Not fear of the workers, peasants, intellectuals, students and progressive layers of the middle strata who by revolutionary means have taken power in Cuba; but fear that the workers, peasants, students, intellectuals and progressive sectors of the middle strata might take power by revolutionary means in the oppressed and hungry countries exploited by the Yankee monopolies and reactionary oligarchies of America; fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the arms from their oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free peoples of the Americas.
By crushing the Cuban revolution they hope to dispel the fear that torments them, the specter of revolution that threatens them. By liquidating the Cuban revolution, they hope to liquidate the revolutionary spirit of the people. They imagine in their delirium that Cuba is an exporter of revolutions. In their sleepless, merchants’ and usurers’ minds there is the idea that revolutions can be bought, sold, rented, loaned, exported and imported like some piece of merchandise. Ignorant of the objective laws that govern the development of human societies, they believe that their monopolistic, capitalistic and semi-feudal regimes are eternal. Educated in their own reactionary ideology, a mixture of superstition, ignorance, subjectivism, pragmatism and other mental aberrations, they have an image of the world and of the march of history that conforms to their interests as exploiting classes.
They imagine that revolutions are born or die in the brains of individuals or are caused by divine laws, and moreover that the gods are on their side. They have always thought that way—from the devout patrician pagans of Roman slave society who hurled the early Christians to the lions at the circus, and the inquisitors of the Middle Ages who, as guardians of feudalism and absolute monarchy, burned at the stake the first representatives of the liberal thought of the nascent bourgeoisie, up to today’s bishops who anathematize proletarian revolutions in defense of the bourgeois and monopolist regime.
All reactionary classes in all historical epochs, when the antagonism between exploiters and exploited reaches its highest peak, presaging the arrival of a new social regime, have turned to the worst weapons of repression and calumny against their adversaries. The primitive Christians were taken to their martyrdom accused of burning Rome and of sacrificing children on their altars. Philosophers like Giordano Bruno, reformers like Hus, and thousands of other nonconformists with the feudal order, were accused of heresy and taken by the inquisitors to be burned at the stake.
Today persecution rages against the proletarian fighters and this crime brings out the worst calumnies in the monopolist and bourgeois press. In every historical epoch, the ruling classes have always committed murder. They do so invoking the “defense of society, order, country”—their “society” of the privileged minority against the exploited majority; their class “order” maintained by blood and fire against the dispossessed; the “country,” whose fruits only they enjoy, depriving the rest of the people of them—all this to repress the revolutionaries who aspire to a new society, a just order, a country truly for all.
But the development of history, the ascending march of humanity cannot, and will not, be halted. The forces that impel the people, who are the real makers of history, are determined by the material conditions of their existence and by the aspirations for higher goals of well-being and liberty that emerge when the progress of humanity in the fields of science, technology and culture make it possible. These forces are superior to the will and the terror unleashed by the ruling oligarchies.
The subjective conditions of each country, that is to say, the factors of consciousness, organization, leadership, can accelerate or retard the revolution, according to its greater or lesser degree of development. But sooner or later, in every historical epoch, when the objective conditions mature, consciousness is acquired, the organization is formed, the leadership emerges and the revolution takes place.
Whether this takes place peacefully or through a painful birth does not depend on the revolutionaries; it depends on the reactionary forces of the old society, who resist the birth of the new society engendered by the contradictions carried in the womb of the old society. Revolution historically is like the doctor who assists at the birth of a new life. It does not needlessly use the tools of force, but will use them without hesitation whenever necessary to help the birth—a birth that brings to the enslaved and exploited masses the hope of a new and better life.
In many countries of Latin America, revolution is today inevitable. That fact is not determined by anyone’s will. It is determined by the horrifying conditions of exploitation in which Latin Americans live, the development of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, the world crisis of imperialism and the universal movement of struggle of the subjugated peoples.
The anxiety felt today is an unmistakable symptom of rebellion. The very depths of a continent are profoundly moved, a continent that has witnessed four centuries of slave, semi-slave and feudal exploitation beginning with its aboriginal inhabitants and slaves brought from Africa, up to the nuclei of nationalities that emerged later: white, black, mulatto, mestizo and Indian, who today are made brothers and sisters by scorn, humiliation and the Yankee yoke, and are brothers and sisters in their hope for a better tomorrow.
The peoples of Latin America liberated themselves from Spanish colonialism at the beginning of the last century, but they did not free themselves from exploitation. The feudal landowners assumed the authority of the Spanish rulers, the Indians continued in painful servitude, Latin Americans in one form or another continued to be slaves, and the tiniest hopes of the people gave way under the power of the oligarchies and the yoke of foreign capital. This has been the truth of Latin America—in one hue or another, in one variation or another. Today Latin America lies beneath an imperialism more ferocious, much more powerful and cruel than the Spanish colonial empire.
And in the face of the objective reality and the historically inexorable Latin American revolution, what is the attitude of Yankee imperialism? To prepare to wage a colonial war against the peoples of Latin America; to create an apparatus of force, the political pretexts and the pseudo-legal instruments subscribed to by the reactionary oligarchies to repress with blood and fire the struggle of the Latin American peoples.
The intervention of the US government in the internal politics of the countries of Latin America has become increasingly open and unbridled.
The Inter-American Defense Council, for example, has been and is the nest where the most reactionary and pro-Yankee officers of the Latin American armies are trained, for use later as shock troops in the service of the monopolies.
The US military missions in Latin America constitute a permanent apparatus of espionage in each nation directly tied to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), inculcating in officers the most reactionary sentiments and trying to convert the armies into instruments of US political and economic interests.
In the Panama Canal zone, the US high command has organized special courses to train Latin American officers in fighting against revolutionary guerrillas, with the aim of repressing the armed actions of the peasant masses against the feudal exploitation to which they are subjected.
In the United States itself the CIA has organized special schools to train Latin American agents in the most subtle forms of assassination; and in the Yankee military services the physical liquidation of anti-imperialist leaders is an accepted policy.
The Yankee embassies in the different Latin American countries are notorious for organizing, instructing and equipping fascist bands to spread terror and to attack labor, student and intellectual organizations. These bands—into which they recruit the sons of the oligarchies, lumpens and people of the lowest moral character—have already perpetrated a series of aggressive acts against the mass movements.
Nothing reveals more clearly and unequivocally the intentions of imperialism than its recent conduct in the events in Santo Domingo. Without any kind of justification, without even making use of diplomatic relations with that republic, after stationing its warships near the Dominican capital, the United States declared with its usual arrogance that if Balaguer’s government sought military aid, it would land troops in Santo Domingo against the insurgent Dominican people. The fact that Balaguer’s power was absolutely spurious, that each sovereign country of Latin America should have the right to resolve its internal problems without foreign intervention, that there exist international norms and world opinion, even that there exists an OAS, did not count at all in the considerations of the United States.
What did count were its designs for holding back the Dominican revolution, the reinstitution of its odious policy of landing marines, with no more basis or prerequisite for establishing this new, pirate-like concept of law than a tyrannical, illegitimate, crisis-ridden ruler’s request. The significance of this should not escape the peoples of Latin America. In Latin America there are more than enough of the kind of rulers who are ready to use Yankee troops against their own people when they find themselves in a crisis.
US imperialism’s declared policy of sending troops to fight the revolutionary movement of any country in Latin America, that is to say, to kill workers, students, peasants, Latin American men and women, has no other objective than the continued maintenance of its monopolistic interests and the privileges of the traitorous oligarchies that support it.
It can now be seen clearly that the military pacts signed by the US government with Latin American governments—often secret pacts and always behind the back of the people—invoking hypothetical foreign dangers that no one saw anywhere, have the sole and exclusive objective of preventing the struggle of the people. They were pacts against the people, against the sole danger—the local danger of the liberation movement—that would imperil the Yankee interests. It was not without reason that the people asked themselves: Why so many military agreements? Why the shipment of arms that although outmoded for modern war are still efficient for smashing strikes, repressing popular demonstrations, staining the land with blood? Why the military missions, the Rio de Janeiro Pact and the thousand and one international conferences?
Since the end of World War II, the countries of Latin America have become more and more impoverished; their exports have less and less value; their imports cost more; the per capita income falls; the frightful rate of infant mortality does not decrease; the number of illiterates is higher; the people lack jobs, land, adequate housing, schools, hospitals, means of communication and means of life. On the other hand, US investments exceed $10 billion. Latin America, moreover, is the provider of cheap raw materials, and the buyer of expensive finished articles. Like the first Spanish conquerors, who bartered mirrors and trinkets for gold and silver—that is how the United States trades with Latin America. To guard that torrent of riches, to gain ever more control of Latin America’s resources and exploit its suffering peoples—that is what is hidden behind the military pacts, the military missions and Washington’s diplomatic lobbying. This policy of gradual strangulation of the sovereignty of the Latin American nations and of a free hand to intervene in their internal affairs culminated in the recent meeting of foreign ministers at Punta del Este [in Uruguay]. Yankee imperialism gathered the ministers together to wrest from them—through political pressure and unprecedented economic blackmail in collusion with a group of the most discredited rulers of this continent—the renunciation of the national sovereignty of our peoples and the consecration of the Yankees’ odious right of intervention in the internal affairs of Latin America; the submission of the peoples entirely to the will of the United States of North America, against which all our great leaders, from [Simón] Bolívar to [Augusto] Sandino, fought. Neither the US government, nor the representatives of the exploiting oligarchies, nor the big reactionary press in the pay of the monopolies and feudal lords tried to disguise their aims. They openly demanded agreements that constituted the formal suppression of the right of self-determination of our peoples; abolishing it with the stroke of a pen at the most infamous conspiracy in this continent’s memory.
Behind closed doors, in reluctant meetings, where the Yankee minister of colonies devoted entire days to beating down the resistance and scruples of some ministers, bringing into play the Yankee treasury’s millions in a blatant buying and selling of votes, a handful of representatives of the oligarchies of countries that together barely add up to a third of the continent’s population, imposed agreements that served up to the Yankee master on a silver platter the head of a principle that has cost the blood of all our countries since the wars of independence.
The pyrrhic character of imperialism’s such sad and fraudulent accomplishments, its moral failure, the broken unanimity and the universal scandal do not diminish the grave danger that agreements imposed at such a price have brought to the peoples of Latin America. At that evil conclave, Cuba’s thundering voice was raised without weakness or fear, to indict the monstrous attempt before all the peoples of the Americas and the world, and to defend with a virility and dignity that will go down in the annals of history not only Cuba’s rights but the abandoned rights of all our sister nations of the American continent. Cuba’s voice could find no echo in that housebroken majority, but neither could it find a refutation; impotent silence was the only response to its demolishing arguments, the clarity and courage of its words. But Cuba did not speak for the ministers, Cuba spoke for the people and for history, where its words will be echoed and will find a response.
At Punta del Este a great ideological battle unfolded between the Cuban revolution and Yankee imperialism. Who did each side represent, for whom did each one speak? Cuba represented the people; the United States represented the monopolies. Cuba spoke for the exploited masses of Latin America; the United States for the exploiting, oligarchic and imperialist interests. Cuba for sovereignty; the United States for intervention. Cuba for the nationalization of foreign enterprises; the United States for new investments by foreign capital. Cuba for culture; the United States for ignorance. Cuba for agrarian reform; the United States for great landed estates. Cuba for the industrialization of the Americas; the United States for underdevelopment. Cuba for creative work; the United States for sabotage and counterrevolutionary terror practiced by its agents—the destruction of sugarcane fields and factories, bombing by their pirate planes of a peaceful people’s work. Cuba for the murdered literacy workers; the United States for the assassins. Cuba for bread; the United States for hunger. Cuba for equality; the United States for privilege and discrimination. Cuba for the truth; the United States for lies. Cuba for liberation; the United States for oppression. Cuba for the bright future of humanity; the United States for the past without hope. Cuba for the heroes who fell at the Bay of Pigs to save the country from foreign domination; the United States for the mercenaries and traitors who serve the foreigner against their own country. Cuba for peace among peoples; the United States for aggression and war. Cuba for socialism; the United States for capitalism.
The agreements obtained by the United States, through methods so shameful that the entire world criticizes them, do not diminish but increase the morality and justice of Cuba’s stand, which exposes the way the oligarchies sell out and betray national interests and shows the people the road to liberation. It reveals the corruption of the exploiting classes for whom their representatives spoke at Punta del Este. The OAS was revealed for what it really is—a Yankee ministry of colonies, a military alliance, an apparatus of repression against the liberation movement of the Latin American peoples.
Cuba has lived three years of revolution under the incessant harassment of Yankee intervention in our internal affairs. Pirate aircraft coming from the United States, dropping incendiary substances, have burned millions of arrobas of sugarcane. Acts of international sabotage perpetrated by Yankee agents, like the blowing up of the ship La Coubre, have cost dozens of Cuban lives. Thousands of US weapons have been dropped in parachutes by the US military services over our territory to promote subversion. Hundreds of tons of explosive materials and bombs have been secretly landed on our coast from US launches to promote sabotage and terrorism. A Cuban worker was tortured on the naval base of Guantánamo and deprived of his life with no due process and no explanation. Our sugar quota was abruptly cut and an embargo proclaimed on parts and raw materials for factories and US construction machinery, in order to ruin our economy. Cuban ports and installations have been subjected to surprise attacks by armed ships and bombers from bases prepared by the United States. Mercenary troops, organized and trained in Central America by the same government, have in a warlike manner invaded our territory, escorted by ships of the Yankee fleet and with air support from foreign bases, causing much loss of life as well as loss of material wealth. Counterrevolutionary Cubans are being trained in the US Army and new plans of aggression against Cuba are being made. All this has been going on incessantly for three years, before the eyes of the whole continent—and the OAS was not aware of it.
The ministers meet in Punta del Este and do not even admonish the US government or the governments that are material accomplices to these aggressions. They expel Cuba, the Latin American victim, the aggrieved nation.
The United States has military pacts with nations of all continents, military blocs with whatever fascist, militarist and reactionary government exists in the world: NATO, SEATO and CENTO, to which we now have to add the OAS. The United States intervenes in Laos, in Vietnam, in Korea, in Formosa, in Berlin. It openly sends ships to Santo Domingo in order to impose its law, its will, and announces its proposal to use its NATO allies to block commerce with Cuba. And the OAS is not aware of this! The ministers meet and expel Cuba, which has no military pacts with any country. Thus the government that organizes subversion throughout the world and forges military alliances on four continents, forces the expulsion of Cuba, accusing her of nothing other than subversion and ties beyond the continent!
Cuba is the Latin American nation that has made landowners of more than 100,000 peasants; ensured employment all year round on state farms and cooperatives to all agricultural workers. It has transformed garrisons into schools; given 70,000 scholarships to university, secondary and technical students; created classrooms for the entire population of children; totally eliminated illiteracy. It has quadrupled medical services; nationalized foreign interests; suppressed the abusive system that turned housing into a means of exploiting people. It has virtually eliminated unemployment; suppressed discrimination on account of race or sex; rid itself of gambling, vice and administrative corruption; and armed the people. It has made the enjoyment of human rights a living reality by freeing men and women from exploitation, lack of culture and social inequality. It has liberated itself from all foreign tutelage, acquired full sovereignty, and established the foundations for the development of its economy so as to no longer be a country producing a single crop and exporting only raw materials.
And yet it is Cuba that is expelled from the OAS by governments that have not achieved for their people any one of these objectives. How will they be able to justify their conduct before the peoples of the Americas and the world? How will they be able to deny that according to their conception the policy of land, of bread, of work, of health, of liberty, of equality and of culture, of accelerated development of the economy, of national dignity, of full self-determination and sovereignty, is incompatible with the hemisphere?
The people think very differently. The people think that the only thing incompatible with the destiny of Latin America is misery, feudal exploitation, illiteracy, starvation wages, unemployment; the policy of repression against the masses of workers, peasants and students; discrimination against women, blacks, Indians, mestizos; oppression by the oligarchies; the plundering of wealth by the Yankee monopolists; the moral stagnation of intellectuals and artists; the ruin of the small producers by foreign competition; economic underdevelopment; peoples without roads, without hospitals, without housing, without schools, without industries; the submission to imperialism; the renunciation of national sovereignty and the betrayal of the country.
How can the imperialists explain their conduct and their condemnation of Cuba? What words and what arguments are they going to use to speak to those whom they have exploited and ignored for so long?
Those who study the problems of Latin America are likely to ask: Which country has concentrated on—for the purpose of remedying—the situation of the idle, the poor, the Indians, the blacks, and the vulnerable infants, this immense number of infants—30 million in 1950 (that will be 50 million in eight more years). Yes, which country?
Thirty-two million Indians form the backbone—like the Andes—of the entire American continent. It is clear that for those who considered the Indian more as a thing than a person, this mass of humanity does not count, did not count, and, they thought, never would count. Of course, since they were considered a brute labor force, they had to be used like oxen or a tractor.
How could anyone believe in any benefit from imperialism, in any “Alliance for Progress”—under whatever oath—when under its saintly protection the natives of the south of the continent, like those in Patagonia, still experience its massacres and its persecutions, still live under strips of canvas as their ancestors did at the time the discoverers came almost 500 years ago? Those great races that populated northern Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, such as the Guaraní, who were savagely decimated, are hunted like animals and buried in the depths of the jungle. That reservoir of indigenous stock—which could have served as a basis for a great Latin American civilization—is seeing its extinction continually hastened. Across the Paraguayan swamps and desolate Bolivian highlands, deeper into itself, Latin America has driven these primitive, melancholy races, brutalized by alcohol and narcotics to which they became addicted, in order at least to survive in the subhuman conditions (not only of nutrition) in which they live.
A chain of hands stretches out almost in vain, and has done so for centuries. Over the Andean peaks and slopes, along great rivers and in the shadowy forests, this chain of hands stretches to unite their miseries with those of others who are slowly perishing—Brazilian tribes and those of the north of the continent and the coasts, reaching to the most incredibly backward and wild confines of the Amazon jungle or mountain ranges of Perija, to Venezuela’s 100,000 Indians, then to the isolated Vapicharnas, who await their end, now almost definitively lost to the human race, in the hot regions of the Guianas. Yes, all these 32 million Indians, who extend from the US border to the edges of the Southern Hemisphere, and the 45 million mestizos, who for the most part differ little from the Indians; all these natives, this formidable reservoir of labor, whose rights have been trampled on—yes, what can imperialism offer them? How can these people, ignored so long, be made to believe that any benefit will come from such bloodstained hands?
Entire tribes that live unclothed; others that are supposed to be cannibalistic; others whose members die like flies on their first contact with the conquering civilization; others who are banished, that is, thrown off their lands, pushed to the point of relocating in the jungles, mountains or most distant reaches of the plains, where not even the smallest particle of culture, light, bread or anything else penetrates.
In what “alliance”—other than one for their own more rapid extermination—are these native races to believe, these races who have been flogged for centuries, shot so their lands could be taken, beaten to death in their thousands for not working faster in their exploited labor for imperialism?
And the blacks? What “alliance” can the system of lynching and brutal exclusion of blacks in the United States offer to the 15 million blacks and 14 million mulattos of Latin America, who know with horror and rage that their brothers and sisters to the north cannot ride in the same vehicles as their white compatriots, or attend the same schools, or even die in the same hospitals?
How can these disinherited racial groups believe in this imperialism, in its benefits or in any “alliance” with it, other than an alliance for lynching and exploiting them as slaves? Those masses who have not been permitted to enjoy even modestly any cultural, social or professional benefits, who—even when they are in the majority or number millions—are mistreated by the imperialists in Ku Klux Klan garb, are confined to the most unsanitary neighborhoods, in the least comfortable tenements built expressly for them, are shoved into the most menial occupations, the hardest labor and the least lucrative professions. They cannot presume to reach the universities, advanced academies or private schools.
What “Alliance for Progress” can serve as encouragement to those 107 million men and women of our America, the backbone of labor in the cities and fields, whose dark skin—black, mestizo, mulatto, Indian—inspires scorn in the new colonialists? How are they—who with bitter impotence have seen how in Panama there is one wage scale for Yankees and another for Panamanians, who are regarded as an inferior race—going to put any trust in the supposed “alliance”?
What can the workers hope for, with their starvation wages, the hardest jobs, the most miserable conditions, lack of nutrition, illness and all the evils that foster misery?
What words can be said, what benefits can the imperialists offer to the copper, tin, iron and coal miners who cough up their lungs for the profits of merciless foreign masters, or to the fathers and sons of the lumberjacks and rubber plantation workers, to the harvesters of the fruit plantations, to the workers in the coffee and sugar mills, to the peons on the pampas and plains, who with their health and lives amass the fortunes of the exploiters?
What can those vast masses expect, those who produce the wealth, who create the value, who aid in bringing forth a new world everywhere? What can they expect from imperialism, that greedy mouth, that greedy hand, with no other vista than misery, the most absolute destitution, and, in the end, cold, unrecorded death? What can this class expect, a class that has changed the course of history, that in other places has revolutionized the world, which is the vanguard of all the humble and exploited? What can it expect from imperialism, its most irreconcilable enemy?
What can imperialism offer the teachers, professors, professionals, intellectuals, poets and artists? What kind of benefits, what chance for a better and more equitable life, what purpose, what inducement, what desire to excel, to gain mastery beyond the first simple steps? What can it offer those who devotedly care for the generations of children and young people on whom imperialism will later gorge itself? What can it offer these people who live on degrading wages in most countries, who almost everywhere suffer restrictions on their right of political and social expression, whose economic future does not exceed the bare limits of their shaky resources and compensation, who are buried in a gray life without prospects, one that ends on a pension not even meeting half the cost of living? What “benefits” or “alliances” can imperialism offer them, save those that are to its total advantage?
If imperialism provides sources of aid to the professions, the arts and publications, it is always well understood that their products must reflect its interests, aims and “nothingness.”
But what of the novels that attempt to reflect the reality of the world of imperialism’s rapacious deeds? The poems aspiring to translate protests against imperialism’s enslavement, its interference in life, in thought, in the very bodies of nations and peoples? The militant arts that try to express the forms and content of imperialism’s aggression; that try to capture the constant pressure on every progressive living and breathing thing and on all that is revolutionary? The arts that teach and which—full of light and conscience, of clarity and beauty—try to guide human beings and the peoples to better destinies, to the highest summits of life and justice? All these meet imperialism’s severest censure. They run into obstacles, condemnation and McCarthyite persecution. The presses are closed to them, their names are barred from its columns of print, and a campaign of the most atrocious silence is imposed against them—which is another contradiction of imperialism. For it is then that the writer, poet, painter, sculptor, the scientist—any creative person—begins truly to live in the tongue of the people, in the heart of millions of men and women throughout the world. Imperialism puts everything backwards, deforms it, diverts it into its own channels for profit, to multiply its dollars, buying words or paintings or stutterings, turning into silence the expression of revolutionaries, of progressives, of those who struggle for the people and their needs.
We cannot forget, in this sad picture, the underprivileged children, the neglected, the futureless children of the Americas.
America, a continent with a high birth rate, also has a high death rate. A few years ago the mortality of children under a year old in 11 countries was over 125 per 1,000, and in 17 others it was over 90 children. In 102 nations of the world, on the other hand, the rate is under 51. In sadly neglected Latin America, then, 74 out of 1,000 die in the first year after birth.
In some areas of Latin America that rate reaches 300 per 1,000; thousands and thousands of children up to seven years old die of incredible diseases in the Americas: diarrhea, pneumonia, malnutrition, hunger. Thousands and thousands are sick without hospital treatment or medicines; thousands and thousands walking about, victims of endemic mental deficiency, malaria, trachoma and other diseases caused by contamination and lack of water and other necessities. Diseases of this nature are common among those Latin American countries where thousands and thousands of children are in agony, children of outcasts, children of the poor and of the petit bourgeoisie with a hard life and precarious means. The statistics, which would be redundant here, are bloodcurdling. Any official publication of the international organizations collects them by the hundreds.
Regarding education, one becomes indignant merely thinking of what Latin America lacks on the cultural level. While the United States has a level of eight or nine years of schooling for those in its population 15 years and older, Latin America, plundered and pauperized by the United States, has a level of less than one year of approved schooling in the same age group.
It makes one even more indignant to know that of the children between five and 14 years, only 20 percent are enrolled in school in some countries, and even in the best countries the level is just 60 percent. That is to say, more than half the children of Latin America do not go to school. But the pain continues to grow when we learn that enrollment in the first three grades comprises more than 80 percent of those enrolled; and that in the sixth grade the enrollment fluctuates from a bare six to 22 pupils for each 100 who began in the first grade. Even in those countries that believe they have taken care of their children, the dropout rate between the first and sixth grade averages 73 percent. In Cuba, before the revolution, it was 74 percent. In Colombia, a “representative democracy,” it is 78 percent. And if one looks closely at the countryside, only 1 percent of the children reach the fifth grade in the best of cases.
When one investigates this disastrous student absenteeism, there is one cause that explains it: the economy of misery. Lack of schools, lack of teachers, lack of family resources, child labor—in the last analysis, imperialism and its product of oppression and backwardness.
To summarize this nightmare that America has lived, from one end to the other: On this continent of almost 200 million human beings, two-thirds are Indians, mestizos and blacks—the “discriminated.” On this continent of semi-colonies about four persons per minute die of hunger, of curable illnesses or premature old age, 5,500 per day, two million per year, 10 million every five years. These deaths could easily be avoided, but nevertheless they take place. Two-thirds of the Latin American population are short-lived and live under constant threat of death. A holocaust, which in 15 years has caused twice the number of deaths of World War I and which is ongoing. Meanwhile, from Latin America a continuous torrent of money flows to the United States: some $4,000 a minute, $5 million a day, $2 billion a year, $10 billion every five years. For each $1,000 that leaves us, one corpse remains. A thousand dollars per corpse—that is the price of imperialism! A thousand dollars per death, four times a minute!
But why did they meet at Punta del Este, despite this Latin American reality? Perhaps to take a small step toward alleviating these evils? No! The people know that at Punta del Este the ministers who expelled Cuba met to renounce national sovereignty. They know that the US government went there not only to establish the basis for aggression against Cuba, but the basis for intervention against the people’s liberation movement in any Latin American nation; that the United States is preparing a bloody drama for Latin America. They know that just as the exploiting oligarchies now renounce the principle of sovereignty, they will not hesitate to solicit the intervention of Yankee troops against their own people. And they know that for this purpose the US delegation proposed a watchdog committee against subversion in the Inter-American Defense Council with executive powers, and the adoption of collective measures. “Subversion” for the Yankee imperialists is the struggle of hungry people for bread, the struggle of peasants for land, the struggle of the peoples against imperialist exploitation.
A watchdog committee with executive powers in the Inter-American Defense Council means a continental repressive force against the peoples at the command of the Pentagon. Collective measures means the landing of Yankee marines in any country of the Americas.
To the accusation that Cuba wants to export its revolution, we reply: Revolutions are not exported, they are made by the people.
What Cuba can give to the peoples, and has already given, is its example.
And what does the Cuban revolution teach? That revolution is possible, that the people can make it, that in the contemporary world there are no forces capable of halting the liberation movement of the peoples.
Our triumph would never have been feasible if the revolution itself had not been inexorably destined to arise out of existing conditions in our socioeconomic reality, a reality that exists to an even greater degree in a good number of Latin American countries.
It inevitably occurs that in the nations where the control of the Yankee monopolies is strongest, the exploitation of the oligarchy cruelest, and the situation of the laboring and peasant masses most unbearable, the political power appears most solid. The state of siege becomes habitual, every manifestation of discontent by the masses is repressed by force. The democratic path is closed completely. The brutal character of dictatorship, the form of rule adopted by the ruling classes, reveals itself more clearly than ever. It is then that the revolutionary explosion of the peoples becomes inevitable.
Although it is true that in these underdeveloped countries of the Americas the working class generally is relatively small, there is a social class which, because of the subhuman conditions in which it lives, constitutes a potential force, which, led by the workers and the revolutionary intellectuals, has a decisive importance in the struggle for national liberation: the peasants.
Our countries combine the circumstances of an underdeveloped industry with those of an agrarian regime of a feudal character. That is why, with all the hardships of the living conditions of the urban workers, the rural population lives in even more horrible conditions of oppression and exploitation. But it is also, with exceptions, the absolute majority sector, at times exceeding 70 percent of the population in Latin America.
Not including the landlords, who often reside in the cities, the rest of that great mass gains its livelihood working as peons on the haciendas for the most miserable wages, or working the land under conditions of exploitation that in no way put the Middle Ages to shame. These circumstances determine that in Latin America the rural poor constitute a tremendous potential revolutionary force.
The armies, the forces on which the power of the exploiting classes rest, are built and equipped for conventional war. However, they become absolutely impotent when they have to confront the irregular struggle of the peasants on their own terrain. They lose 10 men for each revolutionary fighter who falls, and demoralization spreads rapidly among them from having to face an invisible and invincible enemy who does not offer them the opportunity to show off their academy tactics and their swaggering, which they use so much in military displays to curb the workers and students in the cities.
The initial struggle by small combat units is constantly fed by new forces, the mass movement begins, and the old order little by little starts to break into a thousand pieces. That is the moment when the working class and the urban masses decide the battle.
What is it that from the beginning of the struggle of those first nuclei, makes them invincible, regardless of the numbers, power and resources of their enemies? The aid of the people, and they will be able to count on the help of the people on an ever-increasing scale.
But the peasantry is a class which, because of the uncultured state in which it is kept and the isolation in which it lives, needs the revolutionary and political leadership of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals, for without them it would not by itself be able to plunge into the struggle and achieve victory.
In the actual historical conditions of Latin America, the national bourgeoisie cannot lead the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle. Experience shows that in our nations, that class, even when its interests conflict with those of Yankee imperialism, has been incapable of confronting it, for the national bourgeoisie is paralyzed by fear of social revolution and frightened by the cry of the exploited masses. Facing the dilemma of imperialism or revolution, only the most progressive layers will join with the people.
The current world correlation of forces and the universal movement for the liberation of the colonized and dependent peoples demonstrates to the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals of Latin America their true role, which is to place themselves resolutely in the vanguard of the struggle against imperialism and feudalism.
Imperialism, utilizing the great movie monopolies, its news services, its periodicals, books and reactionary newspapers, resorts to the most subtle lies to sow divisions and inculcate among the most ignorant people fear and superstition against revolutionary ideas, ideas that can and should frighten only the powerful exploiters, with their worldly interests and privileges.
Divisionism, a product of all kinds of prejudices, false ideas and lies; sectarianism, dogmatism, a lack of breadth in analyzing the role of each social layer, its parties, organizations and leaders—these obstruct the necessary united action of the democratic and progressive forces of our peoples. They are deficiencies of growth, infantile diseases of the revolutionary movement that must be left behind. In the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle it is possible to bring the majority of the people resolutely behind goals of liberation that unite the spirit of the working class, the peasants, the intellectual workers, the petit bourgeoisie and the most progressive layers of the national bourgeoisie. These sectors comprise the immense majority of the population and bring together great social forces capable of sweeping away the imperialist and reactionary feudal rule. In that broad movement they can and must struggle together for the good of our nations, for the good of our peoples, and for the good of the Americas, from the old Marxist militant, right up to the sincere Catholic who has nothing to do with the Yankee monopolists and the feudal lords of the land.
This movement can pull along with it the most progressive elements of the armed forces, which have also been humiliated by the Yankee military missions, the betrayal of national interests by the feudal oligarchies and the sacrifice of national sovereignty to Washington’s dictates.
Where the roads for the peoples of Latin America are closed, where the repression of workers and peasants is fierce, where the rule of the Yankee monopolists is strongest, the first and most important task is to understand that it is neither honorable nor correct to beguile people with the fallacious and convenient illusion of uprooting—by legal means that do not and will not exist—ruling classes that are entrenched in all the state institutions, monopolizing education, owning all the means of information, possessing infinite financial resources—power that the monopolies and oligarchies will defend with blood and fire and with the might of their police and armies.
The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution. It is understood that the revolution will triumph in the Americas and throughout the world, but it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by. The role of Job does not suit a revolutionary. Each year that the liberation of Latin America is speeded up will mean the lives of millions of children saved, millions of intellects saved for culture, an infinite amount of pain spared the people. Even if the Yankee imperialists prepare a bloody drama for Latin America, they will not succeed in crushing the peoples’ struggles; they will only arouse universal hatred against themselves. And such a drama will also mark the death of their greedy and carnivorous system.
No nation in Latin America is weak—because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers and sisters, who suffer the same miseries, who harbor the same sentiments, who have the same enemy, who dream about the same better future and who count on the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world.
Great as the epic struggle for Latin American independence was, heroic as that struggle was, today’s generation of Latin Americans is called on to engage in an epic that is even greater and more decisive for humanity. That struggle was for liberation from the Spanish colonial power, from a decadent Spain invaded by the armies of Napoleon. Today the battle cry is for liberation from the most powerful world imperialist center, from the strongest force of world imperialism, and to render humanity a greater service than that rendered by our predecessors.
But this struggle, to a greater extent than the earlier one, will be waged by the masses, will be carried out by the people; the people are going to play a much more important role now than they did then. The leaders are less important and will be less important in this struggle than in the earlier one.
This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly abound in our suffering Latin American lands. A struggle of masses and of ideas. An epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and scorned by imperialism; our peoples, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of that flock; a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers.
This toiling humanity, these inhumanly exploited, these paupers, controlled by the system of whip and overseer, have not been reckoned with or have been little reckoned with. From the dawn of independence their fate has been the same: Indians, gauchos, mestizos, zambos, quadroons, whites without property or income, all this human mass that formed the ranks of the “nation,” which never reaped any benefits, which fell by the millions, which was cut into bits, which won independence from the mother country for the bourgeoisie, which was shut out from its share of the rewards, which continued to occupy the lowest rung on the ladder of social benefits, continued to die of hunger, curable diseases and neglect, because for them there were never enough life-giving goods—ordinary bread, a hospital bed, medicine that cures, a hand that aids.
But now from one end of the continent to the other they are signaling with clarity that the hour has come—the hour of their redemption. Now this anonymous mass, this America of color, somber, taciturn America, which all over the continent sings with the same sadness and disillusionment, now this mass is beginning to enter definitively into its own history, it is beginning to write its history with its own blood, it is beginning to suffer and die for that history.
Because now in the fields and mountains of the Americas, on its plains and in its jungles, in the wilderness and in the traffic of its cities, on the banks of its great oceans and rivers, this world is beginning to tremble. Anxious hands are stretched forth, ready to die for what is theirs, to win those rights that were laughed at by one and all for 500 years. Yes, now history will have to take the poor of the Americas into account, the exploited and spurned of the Americas, who have decided to begin writing their history for themselves and for all time. Already they can be seen on the roads, on foot, day after day, in an endless march of hundreds of kilometers to the governmental “eminences,” there to obtain their rights.
Already they can be seen armed with stones, sticks, machetes, in one direction and another, each day occupying lands, sinking hooks into the land which belongs to them and defending it with their lives. They can be seen carrying signs, slogans, flags; letting them fly in the mountain or prairie winds. And the wave of anger, of demands for justice, of claims for rights trampled underfoot, which is beginning to sweep the lands of Latin America, will not stop. That wave will swell with every passing day. For that wave is composed of the greatest number, the majorities in every respect, those whose labor amasses the wealth and turns the wheels of history. Now they are awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected.
For this great mass of humanity has said “Enough!” and has begun to march. And their march of giants will not be halted until they conquer true independence—for which they have died in vain more than once. Today, however, those who die will die like the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs—they will die for their own, true, never-to-be-surrendered independence.
Patria o muerte! [Homeland or death!]
Venceremos! [We will win!]
[Signed] The people of Cuba
The National General Assembly of the people of Cuba resolves that this declaration be known as the Second Declaration of Havana, and be translated into the major languages and distributed throughout the world. It also resolves to urge all friends of the Cuban revolution in Latin America to distribute it widely among the masses of workers, peasants, students and intellectuals of this continent.
Havana, Cuba
Free Territory of the Americas
February 4, 1962