TO THE PEOPLE OF CUBA
Havana, Cuba
Free Territory of America
4 February 1962
On 18 May 1895, on the eve of his death from a Spanish bullet through the heart, José Martí, apostle of our independence, said 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 obligation … of preventing in time — through Cuba’s independence — the United States from extending its control over the Antilles and consequently falling with that much more force upon our countries of America. Whatever I have done till now, and whatever I shall do, has been with that aim …
The people 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 annexation of our American nations to the violent and brutal North which 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 guts; and my sling is the sling of David.2
In 1895, Martí already pointed out the danger hovering over America 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 Yankee, scornful of the peoples of Latin America. And with his own blood, shed for Cuba and America, he wrote the words which posthumously, in homage to his memory, the people of Cuba place at the head of this declaration.
HUMILIATION
Sixty-seven years have passed. Puerto Rico was converted into a colony and is still a colony saturated with military bases. Cuba also fell into the clutches of imperialism. Their troops occupied our territory. The Platt Amendment was imposed on our first Constitution, as a humiliating clause which sanctioned the odious right of foreign intervention.3 Our riches passed into their hands, our history was falsified, our government and our politics were entirely moulded in the interests of the overseers; the nation subjected to sixty years of political, economic and cultural suffocation.
But Cuba arose. Cuba was able to redeem itself from the bastard guardianship. Cuba broke the chains which 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 America.
Now the United States will never again be able to use Cuba’s strength against America, but conversely, dominating the majority of the other Latin American states, the United States is attempting to use the strength of America against Cuba.
What is the history of Cuba but the history of Latin America? And what is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the most pitiless and cruel exploitation by imperialism throughout the world?
At 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 its economic and political domination two-thirds of humanity, which was thus forced to work for the ruling classes of the economically advanced capitalist countries.
PRIVILEGED
The historical circumstances which permitted certain European countries and the United States of America a high level of industrial development placed them in a position to subject the rest of the world to their domination and exploitation.
What motives compelled the expansion of the industrial powers? Were they moral and civilizing as they claim? No: they were economic reasons.
From the discovery of America, 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 America itself was carried out in search of shorter routes to the Orient whose goods were highly priced 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 which spurred the efforts of that new class. The desire for gain was the incentive of its conduct through history. With the growth of manufacturing and commerce its social influence also grew. The new productive forces which were developing in the womb of feudal society clashed more and more with their subjection, its laws, its institutions, its philosophy, its morality, its art and its political ideology.
New philosophical and political ideas, new concepts of right 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. They were then revolutionary ideas opposed to those outworn ideas of feudal society. The peasants, the artisans, the workers in manufacture, 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.4
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 of its capitalist social order.
It encouraged the peasants to free themselves from feudal servitude, it encouraged the artisans 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, spokesmen for bourgeois philosophy, then 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.
When the bourgeoisie took political power and established upon the ruins of feudal society its capitalist mode of production, on this mode of production it erected its state, its laws, its ideas and institutions. Those institutions sanctified in the first instance 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 owner of the means of production, ever more modern and efficient; the other, deprived of all wealth, possessing only its labour-power, of necessity sold in the market as another piece of merchandise simply in order to live.
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
With the feudal bonds broken, the productive forces developed extraordinarily. 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 combines 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 competition, characteristic of capitalism in its first phase, gave way to monopolies which entered into agreements among themselves and controlled the markets.
EXPLOITATION
Where did the colossal quantity of resources come from which permitted a handful of monopolists to accumulate billions of dollars? Simply from the exploitation of human labour. Millions of men, forced to work for a wage of bare subsistence, produced with their strength the gigantic capital of the monopolies. The workers amassed the fortunes of 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 all society. Thus was brought about the fusion of the banks with great industry, and finance capital was born. What should they do with the great surplus of capital which 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 labour of their inhabitants with much more wretched wages than what they were forced to pay to the workers of their own developed countries. Thus began the territorial and economic division of the world. By 1914, eight or ten imperialist countries had subjugated territories beyond their own borders covering more than 83,700,000 square kilometres, with a population of 970,000,000 inhabitants. They had simply divided up the world.
But as the world, limited in size, was divided to the last corner of the earth, a clash ensued among the different monopolist nations and struggles arose for new divisions, originating in the disproportionate distribution of industrial and economic power which the various monopolistic nations had attained in their uneven development. Imperialist wars broke out which would cost humanity fifty million dead, tens of millions wounded and the destruction of incalculable material and cultural wealth. Even before this had happened Karl Marx wrote that ‘capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot from every pore with blood and mire’.
The capitalist system of production, once it had given all of which it was capable, became an abysmal obstacle to the progress of humanity. But the bourgeoisie from its origins carried within itself its contradiction. 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 superior socio-economic form in accordance with the historic 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, the productive forces made completely anachronistic and outmoded a regime which stood for private ownership and with it the economic subordination of millions and millions of human beings to the dictates of a small social minority.
RAPACIOUS WARS
The interests of humanity cried out for a halt to the anarchy of production, the waste, economic crises and the rapacious wars which 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 fall into a profound and insoluble crisis. The general crisis began with the outbreak of the First World War, with the revolution of the workers and peasants which overthrew the tsarist empire of Russia and founded, amidst 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 incessantly worsened.
THE IMPERIALIST POWERS
The Second World War, unleashed by the imperialist powers — and 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 won their independence in Asia and Africa. The bloodshed by the people was not in vain.
The movement of the dependent and colonial peoples is a phenomenon of universal character which is shaking the world and marks the final crisis of imperialism.
Cuba and Latin America are part of the world.5 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 which the imperialists are making to prevent the liberation of the peoples. Cuba hurts the imperialists in a special way. What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees’ hate of the Cuban Revolution? What is it that rationally explains the conspiracy, uniting for the same aggressive purpose the most powerful and rich 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 stirs them up 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 which by revolutionary means have taken power in Cuba; but fear that the workers, peasants, students, intellectuals and progressive sectors of the middle strata will by revolutionary means take power 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 people of America.
THE SPECTRE OF CUBA
By crushing the Cuban Revolution they hope to dispel the fear that torments them, the spectre of the 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 conforming 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 liberal thought of the nascent bourgeoisie, up to today’s bishops who anathematize proletarian revolutions in defence 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 Jan 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.
PERSECUTION
Today persecution rages over the proletarian fighters and this crime brings out the worst calumnies in the monopolist and bourgeois press. Always, in each historical epoch, the ruling classes have committed murder — invoking the defence of society, the country, order — to defend the privileged minorities against the exploited majorities: ‘their class rule’, maintained by blood and fire against the dispossessed; ‘the country’, whose fruits only they enjoy, depriving the rest of the people of those fruits, in order to repress the revolutionaries who aspire to a new society, a just order, a country truly for all.
THE MARCH OF HUMANITY
But the development of history, the ascending march of humanity, does not hold back, nor can it be held back. The forces which impel the people, who are the real makers of history, determined by the material conditions of their existence and the aspirations for higher goals of well-being and liberty, which emerge when the progress of man in the fields of science, technology and culture makes it possible, are superior to the will and the terror unleashed by the ruling oligarchies.
The subjective conditions of each country, that is to say, the conscious factor, organization, leadership, can accelerate or retard the revolution, according to its greater or lesser degree of development, but sooner or later, in each historic 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 in painful birth does not depend on the revolutionists, 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. The revolution is in history 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 which 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 American man lives, the development of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, the world crisis of imperialism and the universal movement of struggle of the subjugated peoples.6
The anxiety felt today is an unmistakable symptom of rebellion. The very depths of a continent are profoundly moved, a continent which 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 which emerged later: white, black, mulatto, mestizo and Indian, who today are made brothers by the scorn, humiliation and the Yankee yoke, and are brothers in their hope for a better tomorrow.
EXPLOITATION CONTINUES
The peoples of 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, the Latin American man in one form or another continued to be a slave, 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 America — in one hue or another, in one variation or another. Today Latin America lies beneath an imperialism fiercer, much more powerful and cruel than the Spanish colonial empire.
And before 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.
INTERVENTION
The intervention of the government of the United States in the internal politics of the countries of Latin America has become more open and unbridled each time.
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 North American military missions in Latin America constitute a permanent apparatus of espionage in each nation directly tied to the Central Intelligence Agency, inculcating in those officers the most reactionary sentiments and trying to convert the armies into instruments of its own political and economic interests.
Presently, in the Panama Canal Zone, the North American high command has organized special courses to train Latin American officers in fighting against revolutionary guerrillas, with the aim of repressing the armed action of the peasant masses against the feudal exploitation to which they are subjected.7
In the United States itself the Central Intelligence Agency 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 the anti-imperialist leaders is an accepted policy.
It is notorious that the Yankee embassies in the different Latin American countries are organizing, instructing and equipping fascist bands to spread terror and to attack labour, student and intellectual organizations. These bands, into which they recruit the sons of the oligarchies, the lumpen, and people of the lowest moral character, have already perpetrated a series of aggressive acts against the mass movements.
SANTO DOMINGO
Nothing is more evident and unequivocal about 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, the United States, after stationing its warships before the Dominican capital, declared with its usual arrogance that, if Balaguer’s government sought military aid, it would land troops in Santo Domingo to combat the insurgence of the Dominican people. 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 opinions, that there even 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 and for the reinstitution of its odious policy of landing Marines, with no more basis or prerequisite for establishing this new buccaneer concept of law than a tyrannical, illegitimate, crisis-ridden ruler’s simple 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 crisis.8
US POLICY
North American imperialism’s declared policy of sending soldiers 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 which support it.
It can now be seen clearly that the military pacts signed by the government of the United States with Latin American governments — often secret pacts and always behind the back of the people — invoking hypothetical foreign dangers which no one saw anywhere, had the sole and exclusive object of preventing the struggle of the people; they were pacts against the people; against the sole danger — the native 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 which, even though technically outmoded for modern war, are yet efficient for smashing strikes, repressing popular demonstrations, staining the land with blood? Why the military missions, the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro and the thousand and one international conferences?9
Since the end of the Second World War, the nations of Latin America have been ever more impoverished, their exports have less and less value, their imports cost more, per capita income falls, the awful 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, North American investments exceed ten billion dollars. 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. 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 men, from Bolivar to Sandino, fought. Neither the government of the United States, nor the representatives of the exploiting oligarchies, nor the big reactionary press, in the pay of the monopolies and feudal lords — they did not conceal themselves but openly demanded agreements which constituted formal suppression of the right of self-determination of our peoples; abolishing it with a stroke of the pen in the most infamous conspiracy in the memory of this continent.
Behind closed doors, in reluctant meetings, where the Yankee minister of colonies dedicated entire days to beating down the resistance and scruples of some ministers, bringing into play the millions of the Yankee Treasury in an undisguised buying and selling of votes, a handful of representatives of the oligarchies of countries which together barely add up to a third of the continent’s population, imposed agreements that served on a silver platter to the Yankee master the head of a principle which cost the blood of all our countries since the wars of independence. The Pyrrhic character of such sad and fraudulent accomplishments of imperialism, its moral failure, the broken unanimity and the universal scandal do not diminish the grave danger which agreements imposed at such a price have brought so close to the peoples of Latin America. At that evil conclave Cuba’s thundering voice was raised without weakness or fear to indict, before all the peoples of America and the world, the monstrous attempt to defend with a virility and dignity, which will be clear in the annals of history, not only Cuba’s rights but the deserted rights of all our sister nations of the American continent. The word of Cuba could find no echo in that housebroken majority, but neither could it find a refutation; only impotent silence met its demolishing arguments, the clearness 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 answered.
At Punta del Este a great ideological battle unfolded between the Cuban Revolution and Yankee imperialism. Who did they represent there, for whom did each speak? Cuba represented the people; the United States represented the monopolies. Cuba spoke for America’s exploited masses; the United States for the exploiting, oligarchical 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 America; the United States for underdevelopment. Cuba for creative work; the United States for the sabotage and counter-revolutionary terror practised by its agents — the destruction of sugarcane fields and factories, the bombing by their pirate planes of the labour of a peaceful people. Cuba for the murdered literacy workers; the United States for the assassins.10 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 Girón to save the country from foreign domination; the United States for the mercenaries and traitors who serve the foreigner against their country. Cuba for peace among peoples; the United States for aggression and war. Cuba for socialism; the United States for capitalism.
SHAMEFUL METHODS
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 force of reason of Cuba’s stand, which exposes the sell-out and treason of the oligarchies to the 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 the Revolution under the incessant harassment of Yankee intervention in our internal affairs. Pirate aeroplanes 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 North American weapons have been dropped in parachutes by the US military services onto our territory to promote subversion;11 hundreds of tons of explosive materials and bombs have been secretly landed on our coast from North American 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 before or any explanation later; our sugar quota was abruptly cut and an embargo proclaimed on parts and raw materials for factories and North American construction machinery in order to ruin our economy. Cuban ports and installations have been surprise-attacked by armed ships and bombers from bases prepared by the United States. Mercenary troops, organized and trained in countries of Central America by the same government, have in a warlike manner invaded our territories, escorted by ships of the Yankee fleet and with aerial support from foreign bases, causing much loss of life as well as of material wealth;12 counter-revolutionary Cubans are being trained in the US Army and new plans of aggression against Cuba are being made.13 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 who 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 the continents; military blocs with whatever fascist, militarist and reactionary government there is in the world: NATO, SEATO and CENTO, to which we now have to add the OAS; it 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! 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 no less of subversion and ties beyond the continent.
CUBA’S RECORD
Cuba, the Latin American nation which has made landowners of more than 100,000 small farmers, ensured employment all the year round on state farms and cooperatives to all agricultural workers, transformed forts into schools, has given 70,000 scholarships to university, secondary and technological students, created classrooms for the entire child population, totally liquidating illiteracy, quadrupling medical services, nationalizing foreign interests, suppressing the abusive system which turned housing into a means of exploiting people, virtually eliminating unemployment, suppressing discrimination due to race or sex, ridding itself of gambling, vice and administrative corruption, armed the people, making the enjoyment of human rights a living reality by freeing man and woman from exploitation, lack of culture and social inequality, which has liberated itself from all foreign tutelage, acquired full sovereignty, and established the bases for the development of its economy in order no longer to be a country producing only one crop and exporting only raw materials, is expelled from the Organization of American States by governments which have not achieved for their people one of these objectives. How will they be able to justify their conduct before the peoples of America and the world? How will they be able to deny that in their concept 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 Southern 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, Negroes, Indians, mestizos, oppression by the oligarchies, the plundering of their wealth by the Yankee monopolists, the moral stagnation of their 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 justify their conduct and condemnatory attitude towards Cuba? With what words and what argument are they going to speak to those whom, all the while exploiting, they ignored for so long?
Those who study the problems of America are accustomed to ask: What country, who, has concentrated upon — for the purpose of remedying — the situation of the underemployed, the poor, the Indians, the Negroes and the helpless infants, this immense number of infants — thirty million in 1950 (which will be fifty million in eight more years)? Yes, who? What country?
Thirty-two million Indians — like the Andes mountains — form the backbone 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 labour force, they had to be used like a yoke of oxen or a tractor.
How — under what oath — could anyone believe in any benefit, in any Alliance for Progress with imperialism, when under its saintly protection, its killings, its persecutions, the natives of the south of the continent, like those of Patagonia, still live under strips of canvas as did their ancestors at the time the discoverers came almost five hundred years ago? Where are those great races which populated northern Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, such as the Guarani who were savagely decimated, hunted like animals and buried in the depths of the jungle? Where is that reservoir of indigenous stock — whose extinction is continually hastened — which could have served as a base for a great American civilization? Across the Paraguayan swamps and desolate Bolivian highlands, deeper into itself, 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. Where does a chain of hands stretch out almost in vain, yet stretching out across centuries? Over the Andean peaks and slopes, along great rivers and in the shadowy forests, it stretches, uniting their miseries with those of others who are slowly perishing, Brazilian tribes and those of the north of the continent and the coasts, until in the most incredible and wild confines of the Amazonian jungle or mountain ranges of Perija, Venezuela’s hundred thousand indigenes are reached, then to the isolated Vapicharnas, who await their end, now almost definitively lost to the human race, in the hot regions of the Guyanas. Yes, all these thirty-two million Indians, who extend from the United States border to the limits of the Southern hemisphere, and the forty-five million mestizos, who for the most part differ little from the Indians; all these natives, this formidable reservoir of labour, whose rights have been trampled on, yes, what can imperialism offer them? How can these people, ignored for so long, be made to believe in any benefit to come from such bloodstained hands?
Entire tribes which live unclothed; others which are supposed to be cannibalistic; others whose members die like flies upon their first contact with the conquering civilization; others which are banished, that is, thrown off their lands, thrown into the jungles, mountains or most distant reaches of the prairies where not even the smallest particle of culture, light, bread, or anything penetrates.
In what ‘alliance’ — other than one for their own more rapid extermination — are these native races going to believe, these races who have been flogged for centuries, shot so their lands could be taken, beaten to death by the thousands for not working faster in their exploited labour for imperialism?
AN “ALLIANCE” FOR NEGROES?
And the Negro? What ‘alliance’ can the system of lynching and brutal exclusion of the Negro offer the fifteen million Negroes and fourteen million mulattos of Latin America, who know with horror and rage that their brothers in the North cannot ride in the same vehicles as their white compatriots, nor attend the same schools, nor even die in the same hospitals?14
How are these disinherited racial groups going to believe in this imperialism, in its benefits or in any ‘alliance’ with it (which is not for lynching and exploiting them as slaves)? Those masses who have not been permitted to enjoy even modest cultural, social or professional opportunities, who — even when they are in the majority or number millions — are mistreated by the imperialists in Ku Klux Klan costumes, are penned in the most insanitary neighbourhoods, in the least comfortable tenements built expressly for them, are shoved into the most menial occupations, the hardest labour and the least lucrative jobs. They cannot presume to reach the universities, advanced academies and private schools.
What Alliance for Progress can serve as encouragement to those 107 million men and women of our America, the backbone of labour 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?15
MISERY AND DEATH
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 which 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, and 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 — who produce the wealth, who create the values, who aid in bringing forth a new world in all places — expect? What can they expect from imperialism, that greedy mouth, that greedy hand, with no other vista than misery, the most absolute destitution and death, cold and unrecorded in the end?
What can this class expect which has changed the course of history, expect, which 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?
And to teachers, professors, professionals, intellectuals, poets and artists, what can imperialism offer? 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, can it offer to those who devotedly care for the generations of children and young people on whom imperialism will later gorge itself? What can it offer to 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 doesn’t exceed the bare limits of their shaky resources and compensation, who are buried in a grey life without prospects which ends on a pension not even meeting half the cost of living? What ‘benefits’ or ‘alliances’ can imperialism offer them save those which redound to its total advantage?
CULTURE UNDER IMPERIALISM
If imperialism provides sources of aid to the professions, arts and publications, it is always well understood that their products must reflect its interests, aims and ‘nothingness’. The novels which attempt to reflect the reality of the world of imperialism’s rapacious deeds; the poems aspiring to translate protests against its enslavement, its interference in life, in thought, in the very bodies of nations and peoples; and the militant arts which in their expression try to capture the forms and content of imperialism’s aggression and the constant pressure on every progressive living and breathing thing and on all that is revolutionary, which teaches, which — full of light and conscience, of clarity and beauty — tries to guide men and peoples to a better destiny, to the highest summits of life and justice — all these meet imperialism’s severest censure. They run into obstacles, condemnation and McCarthyite persecution. Its 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 creator in any material, the scientist, begins truly to live in the tongue of the people, in the heart of millions of men 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 or turning into silence the expression of revolutionaries, of progressive men, of those who struggle for the people and their needs.16
We cannot forget, in this sad picture, the underprivileged children, the neglected, the futureless children of America.
America, a continent with a high birth rate, also has a high death rate. The mortality of children under a year old in eleven countries a few years ago was over 125 per thousand, and in seventeen others it stood at 90 per thousand. In 102 nations of the world, on the other hand, the rate is 51. In Latin America, then, there die, sadly neglected, 74 out of a thousand in the first year after birth. In some areas of Latin American countries that rate reaches 300 per thousand; thousands and thousands of children up to seven years old die of incredible diseases in America: diarrhoea, pneumonia, malnutrition, hunger. Thousands and thousands of the sick are without hospital treatment or medicines; thousands and thousands are victims of endemic cretinism, malaria, trachoma, and other diseases caused by contamination, 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 petty bourgeoisie with a hard life and precarious means. The statistics, which would be redundant here, are blood-curdling. Any official publication of the international organizations gathers them by the hundreds.
MASS ILLITERACY
Regarding education, one becomes indignant merely to think of what America lacks on the cultural level. While the United States gives eight or nine years of schooling to those in its population aged fifteen years or older, Latin America, plundered and pauperized by the US, 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 fourteen years only 20 per cent are enrolled in some countries, and in those of the highest level, 60 per cent. 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 enrolment in the first three grades comprises more than 80 per cent of those enrolled; and that in the sixth grade the enrolment fluctuates from a bare six to twenty-two pupils for each hundred who began in the first grade. Even in those countries which believe they have taken care of their children, pupil drop-outs between the first and sixth grade averages 73 per cent. In Cuba, before the Revolution, it was 74 per cent. In Colombia, a ‘representative democracy’, it is 78 per cent. And if one looks closely at the countryside only 1 per cent of the children reach the fifth grade in the best of cases.
When one investigates this disastrous student absenteeism, there is one cause which explains it: the economy of misery. Lack of schools, lack of teachers, lack of family resources, child labour; in the last analysis, imperialism and its product of oppression and backwardness.
The summary of this nightmare which America, from one end to the other, has lived, is that on this continent of almost two hundred million human beings, two-thirds are Indians, mestizos and Negroes — the ‘discriminated against’; 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, ten 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 of lives, which in fifteen years has caused twice the number of deaths of the First World War and continues. Meanwhile, from Latin America a continuous torrent of money flows to the United States: some four thousand dollars a minute, five million dollars a day, two billion dollars a year, ten billion every five years. For each thousand dollars which leave us, there remains one corpse. A thousand dollars per corpse: that is the price of what is called imperialism! A thousand dollars per death, four times a minute!
PUNTA DEL ESTE
But why did they meet at Punta del Este despite this American reality? Perhaps to bring a single drop of alleviation to these evils? No!
The people know that at Punta del Este the ministers, who expelled Cuba, met to renounce national sovereignty; that the government of the United States 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 American nation; that the United States is preparing a bloody drama for Latin America; that just as the exploiting oligarchies now renounce the principle of sovereignty, they will not hesitate to solicit intervention of Yankee troops against their own people, and that for this end the North American 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 America.
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 people, 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 socio-economic reality, a reality which 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 cruellest and the situation of the labouring 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 those underdeveloped countries of America 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 that, led by the workers and the revolutionary intellectuals, has a decisive importance in the struggle for national liberation: the peasants.17
HARDSHIP
In our countries are met the circumstances of an underdeveloped industry with an agrarian regime of a feudal character. That is why, with all the hardships of the conditions of life 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 per cent of the Latin American population.
Discounting 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 it works the land under conditions of exploitation which in no manner put the Middle Ages to shame. These circumstances are those which determine that in Latin America the poor rural population constitutes a tremendous potential revolutionary force.
The armies, built and equipped for conventional war, which are the force on which the power of the exploiting classes rests, become absolutely impotent when they have to confront the irregular struggle of the peasants on their own terrain. They lose ten 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 of showing off their academy tactics and their braggadocio which they use so much in military displays to curb the city workers and the students.
The initial struggle by small combat units is incessantly fed by new forces, the mass movement begins to loosen its bonds, the old order, little by little, begins to break into a thousand pieces, and 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 that help of the people on an ever-growing scale.
THE ROLE OF THE PEASANTS
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 historic 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 are in contradiction to those of Yankee imperialism, has been incapable of confronting it, for it is paralysed by fear of social revolution and frightened by the cry of the exploited masses.
Facing the dilemma of imperialism or revolution, only its most progressive layers will be with the people.
The actual world correlation of forces and the universal movement for the liberation of the colonial and dependent peoples points out 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 cable-graphic agencies, its periodicals, books and reactionary newspapers, resorts to the most subtle lies to sow divisionism and inculcate among the most ignorant people fear and superstition against revolutionary ideas which 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 broadness in analysing the role of each social layer, its parties, organizations and leaders, make difficult the necessary unity of action of the democratic and progressive forces of our peoples. They are defects of growth, infantile sicknesses of the revolutionary movement which 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 which unite the spirit of the working class, the peasants, the intellectual workers, the petty bourgeoisie and the most progressive layers of the national bourgeoisie. These sectors comprise the immense majority of the population and join together great social forces capable of sweeping out 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 America, from the old militant Marxist, right to the sincere Catholic who has nothing to do with the Yankee monopolists and the feudal lords of the land.18
That movement would pull along with itself the most progressive elements of the armed forces, also humiliated by the Yankee military missions, the betrayal of national interests by the feudal oligarchies and the sacrifice of the national sovereignty to Washington’s dictates.
Where the roads for the peoples 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 honourable nor correct to beguile people with the fallacious and convenient illusion of uprooting — by legal means which don’t exist and won’t exist — ruling classes who are entrenched in all the state positions, monopolizing education, owning all media of information, possessing infinite financial resources — a power which the monopolies and oligarchies will defend with blood and fire and with the might of their police and armies.
THE DUTY OF REVOLUTIONARIES
It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution.19 It is known that the revolution will triumph in America and throughout the world, but it is not for revolutionary to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by. The role of Job doesn’t suit a revolutionary. Each year that the liberation of America is speeded up will mean the lives of millions of children saved, millions of intellects saved for culture, an infinite quantity of pain spared the people. Even if the Yankee imperialists prepare a bloody drama for America, they will not succeed in crushing the people’s struggles, they will only arouse universal hatred against themselves. And such a drama will also mark the death of their greedy and carnivorous system.
UNITY
No nation in Latin America is weak — because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers, who suffer the same miseries, who harbour the same sentiments, who have the same enemy, who dream about the same better future and who count upon the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world.
Great as was the epic of Latin American independence, heroic as was that struggle, today’s generation of Latin Americans is called upon to engage in an epic which is even greater and more decisive for humanity. For that struggle was for liberation from Spanish colonial power, from a decadent Spain invaded by the armies of Napoleon. Today the call for struggle is for liberation from the most powerful world imperialist centre, 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 one before.
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 countries. Struggles of masses and ideas. An epic which will be carried forward by our people, despised and maltreated by imperialism, our people, unreckoned with till 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 which 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 step 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, the medicine which cures, the hand which aids.
But now from one end of the continent to the other they are signalling with clarity that the hour has come — the hour of their redemption. Now this anonymous mass, this America of colour, sombre, taciturn America, which all over the continent sings with the same sadness and disillusionment, now this mass is beginning to enter conclusively into its own history, is beginning to write it with its own blood, is beginning to suffer and die for it.
A WAVE OF ANGER
Because now in the fields and mountains of America, on its slopes and prairies and in its jungles, in the wilderness or in the traffic of cities, this world is beginning with full cause to erupt. Anxious hands are stretched forth, ready to die for what is theirs, to win those rights which were laughed at by one and all for five hundred years. Yes, now history will have to take the poor of America into account, the exploited and spurned of Latin America, who have decided to begin writing history for themselves for all time. Already they can be seen on the roads, on foot, day after day, in an endless march of hundreds of kilometres 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 flap in the mountain or prairie winds. And the wave of anger, of demands for justice, of claims for rights, 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 labour 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 giant march 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 Playa Giron. They will die for their own, true and never-to-be-surrendered independence.
Patria o Muerte! Venceremos!