NOTES

1. HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE ME

¹The context for the trial was the attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago by over 150 (mostly young) Cubans, led by Fidel and Raúl Castro. This was their planned response to the coup which Fulgencio Batista sprang on 10 March 1952, a coup largely designed to prevent the likely election in April of the Cuban People’s Party (known as the Ortodoxos); this party, created in 1947 by disgruntled younger members of the ruling Auténticos (formally the Authentic Cuban Revolutionary Party) on a platform of nationalism, social reform and anti-corruption, had been led by the charismatic campaigner and former student rebel, Eduardo (Eddy) Chibás, until his public suicide (on radio) in 1951. Nonetheless, even without him, the party was likely to win the forth-coming elections, with Fidel Castro as one of its founding members and potential congressmen. Castro, already practising as a lawyer, sought initially to challenge the coup in the courts, and, when that failed, he embarked on a course of more radical action, firstly organizing student protests and then planning the 26 July attacks, designed to seize the initiative, stimulate opposition and acquire weapons for a violent popular response. The attacks failed, and were followed by a large number of arrests, including of the Castro brothers, and deaths. The trial of Fidel Castro and the other prisoners was held on 21 September 1953, with Castro himself, a trained and practising lawyer, choosing to defend himself; the final session was held in Santiago’s Civic Hospital, under close army guard, largely to prevent press attention. Castro later indicated that the basis of this speech (which, itself, was later published as the first manifesto of the new 26 July Movement) — i.e. the rebels’ programme and justification — had already been written as the communiqué and manifesto of the rebels if the attack on the Moncada barracks was successful.

2Castro had indeed been largely held in isolation, although able to communicate illegally with his other imprisoned comrades; however, he was to some extent protected by the intervention of, firstly, the officer who found and arrested him (Lieutenant Sarría), then of the Archbishop of Santiago, Monsignor Pérez Serantes (seeking to stop the bloodshed), and finally by Castro’s own sense of publicity in ensuring that the press knew of his arrest and arrival at the Boniato jail.

³The SIM (Servicio de Inteligencia Militar) was the name of the secret police organization which, under Manuel Ugalde Carrillo, was set up by Batista immediately after his 1952 coup and which, rather than the Army, meted out most of the active repression between 1952 and 1958. Ugalde Carrillo was, in 1953, Military Commander of Nicaro, in Oriente.

⁴The actual number of those involved in the two attacks (on the Moncada barracks in Santiago and on a smaller military post in Bayamo — the latter chosen specifically to enable the rebels, if successful, to cut off the local bridge carrying the Central Highway along which troop reinforcements might have arrived) varies considerably, according to different authors (including Castro himself), not helped by the diminution of the rebels’ numbers between the last stages of planning and the actual attacks. In this speech, Castro counted 164, but other estimates give 160; of these, about 80 were taken prisoner, most of whom counted among the 61 killed during or after the action, with 32 surviving to be brought to trial. Although two barracks were attacked, the whole episode is generally known as the assault on the Moncada.

⁵Despite Castro’s rhetoric, the Batistato (as Batista’s dictatorship was known) was not especially repressive until the reprisals after the Moncada attack, and had not been as violent as, for example, the rule of Gerardo Machado (1924-33), which eventually provoked the revolution of 1933, often seen as the precursor of the 1959 rebellion. The initial response of the opposition to Batista’s unexpected coup was in fact largely muted and certainly inactive, allowing Batista to presume that he could rule unchecked. This explains the ferocity of the police and army response to the attacks. Once the Revolution resumed, however, after the landing of eighty-two rebels aboard the yacht Granma, at the end of November 1956, repression grew and became more widespread, more random and, ultimately, more counter-productive.

6This refers to the reprisals carried out (largely by Captain Chaviano) in and around the nearby city of Manzanillo.

⁷El Maestro (the Master, or mentor) was one of common epithets for José Martí (another was El Apóstol). Martí had been the progenitor of Cuba’s independence, leading the final rebellion of 1895, until his death in battle after a few weeks, on 19 May. After being imprisoned (at the age of seventeen) by the Spanish colonial authorities in 1871 (for protesting against the unjust execution of seven Cuban students), he was exiled (to Spain) and then, apart from one brief return to Cuba, spent the rest of his life in exile, mostly in Latin America and the United States. From the late 1880s, he became prominent in the separatist movement abroad, using his journalistic talents and role to propagandize, travel widely, contact different emigrant groups (especially among the tobacco workers of Florida), and finally, in 1892, form the Cuban Revolutionary Party, which launched the 1895 rebellion. His ideas radicalized steadily during that process, moving from a Kraussist-influenced liberalism towards a more socially conscious awareness of the need for social reform and racial equality in liberated Cuba, but also increasingly aware of the threat posed to an independent Cuba by an increasingly imperialist and economically powerful United States. After the final rebellion was ended, by unilateral US intervention in 1898, and after this was followed by a US–Spanish treaty which excluded Cuban representatives and then by a forty-five-month US military occupation, only ended when the Cuban Constitutional Convention of 1901 was obliged to include in the Constitution the wording of the Platt Amendment which ensured continuing indirect US control of Cuba (see below), Martí’s importance grew. As Cuban politics disintegrated into patronage, electoral fraud and corruption (leading many subsequently to refer to the new Republic as ‘the Pseudo-Republic’), and as the US government exercised its constitutional rights to intervene militarily on three occasions, the figure of the ‘pure’, incorruptible and martyred Martí became a contrast to the sad reality of a neo-colonial ‘independence’. In the radicalization of dissent (anti-corruption and anti-Platt) between 1923 and 1933, and in the nationalist student-led revolution of 1933 (which followed the overthrow of the dictator Geraro Machado), Martí’s ideas, writings and image figured prominently, and the party created in 1934 by the student rebels took the name of his party, as the Auténticos. When the new, Castro-led rebels began their anti-Batista protests in January 1953, they adopted the mantle of Martí, calling themselves the ‘Generation of the Centenary’ (since 28 January was the 100th anniversary of Martí’s birth, commemorated widely with a plethora of publications and much media attention), once again contrasting his memory and ideas with the sordid reality of both the Batistato and the Republic, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 1952. Hence, it was logical that Castro’s defence speech, and the resulting movement, should identify itself so publicly and repeatedly with Martí.

8Melba Hernández was one of the original 1953 rebels who became one of the 26 July Movement’s main urban organizers in 1956–58.

⁹The model prison on the Isle of Pines to the south of Cuba (later, after 1976, renamed the Isle of Youth, the base for a sustained youth-focused educational and training campaign both at home and abroad) was a circular prison based on the principle of the panopticon. Under the dictator Machado, it became especially notorious, with its chief warden, Pedro Abraham Castells, being reputedly responsible for hundreds of murders.

¹⁰The essence of Castro’s legal defence was that he was being charged under the Code of Social Defence (effectively legitimizing a state of emergency) by a regime that had itself violated the 1940 Constitution by seizing power through arms.

¹¹Santiago specifically and, more generally, the province of Oriente and its inhabitants, the Oríentales, had a historical reputation for being more staunchly patriotic than other parts of the island, this reputation being based on the fact that all three nineteenth-century rebellions for independence — 1868–78 (the Ten Years War), 1879–80 (the Guerra Chiquita, or Little War) and 1895–98 (the War of Independence) — began in Oriente. In the 1940s and 1950s, one firm base for the new Ortodoxos was Oriente.

¹²Machado was president from 1924 to 1933, initially as a popularly elected nationalist but, from 1927, as an increasingly authoritarian dictator; his regime was challenged by student activists and radicals (from 1927) and labour unrest from 1930, until the Army removed him in August 1933. In September 1933, a rebellion by student radicals (in the DEU) in alliance with mutinous non commissioned officers (under Sergeant Fulgencio Batista) began a four-month nationalist ‘revolution’, under the presidency of (law professor) Ramón Grau San Martín, with Batista (rapidly promoted to colonel) ensuring law and order. In January 1934, to some extent at the behest of the United States (increasingly worried by the Cuban unrest and especially by the role of the new Communist Party in the continuing labour unrest), Batista removed Grau and began a ten-year domination of power, for six years ruling through a series of puppet presidents and then, from 1940, as an elected president. In 1944, after four years of popular nationalist and social reforms (in an unusual but effective alliance with the Communists, as the People’s Socialist Party or PSP), but also of growing corruption, he stood down, being succeeded by Grau’s new political force, the Auténticos, largely the ‘veterans’ of the 1923-33 student activism.

13Camp Columbia was the Army headquarters in Havana (from where Batista led the 1933 mutiny). After 1959, it was indeed converted into an educational institution, becoming the base from which the 1961 Literacy Campaign was organized.

¹⁴Pérez Dámera was chief of staff under the Auténtico presidents, Grau San Martin (1944–48) and Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948–52). Given the growth of corruption under the Auténticos, he was blamed for the increasing corruption in the Army itself.

¹⁵Francisco Tabernilla was Batista’s chief of staff after 1952. Castro’s focus on the moral dilemma facing the Armed Forces was a reference to the anti-corruption tradition within the post-1934 military, which had largely grown out of the NCOs’ rebellion in 1933 (partly protesting at their officers’ corruption). Indeed, to some extent, Batista’s 1952 coup was backed by veterans of 1933 who brought back their former leader in the hope of an end to the rampant corruption of 1944–52.

¹⁶This refers to the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, in which radical tin miners (in the largely socialist COB labour confederation) and the nationalist MNR party began a short-lived period of revolutionary rule.

¹⁷The mambises were the (largely black) guerrilla rebels of both the 1868–78 and 1895–98 rebellions for independence. Of all the generals of those wars, the mulato Maceo was the most popular and one of the most effective. After his death in battle in 1896, Miró Argenter wrote his biography.

18Yara was where, on 10 October 1868, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes launched the first war for independence with his declaration of rebellion, the Grito de Yara; likewise, Baire was where, on 24 February 1895, the final war was launched.

¹⁹Although pre-1959 Cuba was statistically better placed than many Latin American countries, those statistics concealed a depth of inequality and deprivation, especially in the countryside. Unemployment and underemployment were particular manifestations of these problems, especially as the sugar harvest relied on a pool of temporary labour being available for only four months a year, these workers often being unemployed for the remaining tiempo muerto (dead time).

²⁰Land inequality in Cuba was aggravated by the domination since the 1880s of large, often foreign-owned, agro-industrial complexes (centrales) which were in charge of the milling, refining and export of Cuba’s sugar crop, most of which was cultivated by independent but often poor sugar growers (colonos).

²¹The crisis referred to here was not as serious as Cuba’s historic economic crises of 1920–21 and 1929–33 (both of which dislocated the whole system), but derived from a downturn in world sugar prices at the end of the Korean War (after twelve years of war-generated high prices) and also from the post-1934 economic relationship between Cuba and the United States. Enshrined in both the United States’ new worldwide sugar quota system and the 1934 Reciprocity Treaty with Cuba, this system guaranteed a share of the US market for Cuban sugar but with several limitations which ensured permanent stagnation in an industry which — apart from periodic crises — had grown steadily since the late eighteenth century.

²²What follows is an outline of the de facto programme of the rebel movement which eventually became the real blueprint for the early measures enacted by the post-1959 revolutionary government.

²³The 1940 Constitution was a progressive and nationalist social document that largely reflected the aims of the 1933 revolution; it was enacted by a Constitutional Convention dominated by the Auténticos, Batista’s allies and the Communists. The restoration of the Constitution remained as the basis of the rebel movement’s platform for a new Cuba until well after 1959, when, in the light of the social changes needed and effected and in the process of radicalization since 1956, it was decided to legitimize the Revolution’s reforms through a series of Fundamental Laws until, following the first national elections in 1976, a new Constitution replaced the 1940 document.

24In fact, one of the Revolution’s first major reforms was the agrarian reform of May 1959, which decreed a minimum of 27 hectares (2 caballerías) to all tenant farmers; the expropriation of land was, ultimately, effected without compensation in many cases.

²⁵This law was never implemented since its intention was soon overtaken by events, as, by the end of 1960, most medium and large enterprises were expropriated and became state property.

²⁶An arroba was the equivalent of 45 pounds. This proposed measure was also overtaken by events, as, by 1963, all sugar land was state-owned.

²⁷The confiscation of the property of Batistianos was effected within the first few weeks of the rebels coming to power; thereafter, any property-owners who left Cuba for political exile forfeited their property, which went into public ownership.

²⁸In fact, the revolutionary government after 1959 soon embarked on such a policy in the region, encouraging attempts to overthrow the Trujillo regime in the neighbouring Dominican Republic and, in September 1960, issuing the First Declaration of Havana.

²⁹Besides the agrarian reform, the Revolution did make early progress in two of these areas. From the first few months of 1959, the government began building and opening new schools (often using property vacated by those who had chosen to leave Cuba), and in 1961 launched the nationwide Literacy Campaign, nationalizing all education in the same year. The nationalization of major utilities (most of them under the control of US capital) was effected in a series of moves in the summer of 1960.

³⁰The 1959 Agrarian Reform did stipulate a maximum of 30 caballerías (around 402 hectares) with a maximum of 100 caballeréas (1,340 hectares) for any enterprise whose productivity was 50 per cent greater than the national average; the subsequent reform, in October 1963, reduced this maximum to 5 caballerías (67 hectares), thereby completely eliminating all large private landholdings (latifundios).

³¹Because one of the most damning features of pre-1959 Cuba was unemployment, the provision of full employment became one of the Revolution’s main aims after 1959; in fact, by 1971, it was illegal to be deliberately unemployed.

³²On the remaining problems identified on this list, industrialization and health provision were to prove to be the most difficult to effect rapidly, principally because of the costs involved. After a false start and a failed strategy in 1960-63, industrialization was delayed until after 1970, when Cuba’s membership of the Socialist Bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (popularly known as Comecon) gave the country more resources for diversification. The immediate enactment of health reforms and provision was also hampered by the emigration of many of the qualified personnel. By the 1970s, this investment began to pay dividends, with an explosion in the number of doctors and nurses, and, with greater resources, able to fund the expansion of a health model that focused more on cure. Housing was addressed in the short term through two Urban Reforms, in 1959 and 1960 (see below), and in the long term, firstly by housing homeless families and those in overcrowded inner–city slums in large residential properties vacated by the middle-class families who emigrated between 1959 and 1971, and, secondly, in the 1970s, by the construction of large prefabricated apartment blocks built by voluntary labour ‘brigades’ (microbrigadas).

33It was indeed the problems of security of tenure, employment and underutilization of land, rather than land ownership, which most beset the Cuban countryside and most preoccupied Cuban farmers and agricultural workers; in fact, it was estimated that up to 40 per cent of Cuba’s crop land was unused at any one time, often being held in reserve in case of a rise in either the sugar price or the level of the annual US sugar quota. Therefore, the focus of the two agrarian reforms of 1959 and 1963 was more on these aspects than on the simple redistribution of land, helping to build a solid and enduring rural base of support for the Revolution.

³⁴A guajíro was a small farmer, but the term was also often pejorative, implying ignorance and coarseness.

³⁵Carlos Saladrigas, who was a former leader of the corporatist and nationalist ABC organization, opposed both Machado and the 1933 revolutionary government; he joined Batista’s cabinet after 1940, but was defeated in the 1944 elections. The Fifth Avenue referred to here is Havana’s Quinta Avenida in the wealthy residential area of Miramar, where many ministers and former politicians (including Grau) had their homes.

³⁶In fact, the two Urban Reforms (above) carried out most of these proposals; the 1959 decree reduced all rents by 50 per cent while the 1960 measure abolished all renting. By 1967, all former tenants had been granted hereditary title to their property, giving Cubaone of the world’s highest proportions of owner-occupied housing, although the new owners were unable to sell their property.

37Carlos Prío Socarrás, a former student rebel, founded the Auténticos with Grau, and was President of Cuba from 1948 to 1952, when he was deposed by Batista.

³⁸This refers to the episode (27 November 1871) when, during the first war of independence, eight university students were executed by the colonial authorities, falsely accused of desecrating the grave of a Spanish journalist. It was for having written a letter criticizing this that Martí was imprisoned.

³⁹Bohemia was one of Cuba’s oldest, most respected and popular weekly magazines. Largely progressive, it recorded many of the ills and violence of pre-revolutionary Cuba.

⁴⁰In two separate incidents in October and November 1933, officers from Machado’s army resisted the new revolutionary government. In October, a large number (390) took refuge in the newly opened and palatial Hotel Nacional, hoping to persuade the US Ambassador, Sumner Welles, to ask for US military intervention against the government; after a siege by the government forces, under Batista’s command, their surrender was negotiated, but, when they were leaving the building, they were shot at by some of those besieging the hotel, killing between six and fourteen. It was never clear who ordered the shooting, if indeed anyone did. In November, another group of officers, allied with the ABC group, rebelled at the Atarés barracks near the port; this time, the rebellion was repressed brutally, again by forces under Batista. Blas Hernández was one of the leading mutineers of September 1933 and a close ally of Batista.

⁴¹General Valeriano Weyler was the commander who was appointed by Madrid in both 1876 and 1895 in order to resist the rebel forces; his ruthlessness was legendary, as he was especially responsible for the notorious policy of ‘reconcentration’, by which, in order to isolate and defeat the mambises, the rural population was concentrated in special urban camps, where disease and malnutrition proceeded to exact a heavy toll in civilian lives. The reference to the 1935 crimes alludes to the repression during the general strike of March 1935, when the left united against Batista’s authoritarian rule; one of the most prominent casualties was Antonio Guiteras, an independent radical nationalist who, having been Grau’s popular interior minister during the 1933 revolution, established a new group, Joven Cuba (Young Cuba), to resist Batista, until he was killed by the army.

42The words quoted come from the Cuban national anthem.

⁴³In fact, Santa Ifigenia was a cemetery near Santiago.

⁴⁴Castro here refers to the fact that there was almost no opposition to Batista’s 1952 coup, not even from the formal political parties. It was this gap which Castro’s legal protest and then youth movement sought to fill.

⁴⁵José Ingenieros (1877–1925) was an Argentine socialist who theorized about the nature of Latin American identity.

⁴⁶The reference to castor oil alludes to the use of the medicine as a means of torture during the 1934–40 period; the Fugitive Law (Ley de Fuga) was a common legal pretext for eliminating prisoners on the grounds that they had been ‘killed while escaping’ (custody).

⁴⁷The PAU (Partido Acción Unitaria, or Party of Unified Action) was the party which Batista created in 1952.

⁴⁸The first two people referred to, Mario Kuchilán and Rubén Batista, were student victims of Batista’s repression; Rafael Garcia Bárcena led an abortive Catholic Action-inspired movement (the MNR) against Batista, many of whose members gravitated towards the 26 July Movement.

⁴⁹Cardinal Arteaga was Archbishop of Havana; active in seeking to mediate between Batista and the opposition, he left Cuba after 1959.

⁵⁰Ramón Infiesta lectured on law in Havana University while Castro was a student there; he argued that the Constitution allowed resistance to an oppressive regime.

⁵¹Leon Duguit was a French legal theorist who argued that all governments were answerable to what he called ‘natural law’, i.e. the rights of social need.

⁵²Almost all of Spain’s American colonies (and also Portuguese Brazil) gained their independence between 1810 and 1828, leaving only Cuba and Puerto Rico as the remaining Spanish colonies; their continuing colonial status was largely the result of the desire of Cuban criollos (locally born whites) to preserve their newly developing sugar-based wealth by maintaining slavery and the slave trade, which only Spain could guarantee, but was also attributable to the desire of both Britain and the United States to keep each other out of an independent Cuba, leading them to prefer continuing Spanish rule. Eventually, in the 1890s, after the final rebellions (criollos in both colonies having rebelled in the 1860s) and then the Spanish—American War of 1898 (through which the United States intervened unilaterally to end the Cuban War of Independence), Spanish troops left those two islands.

53The Guáimaro Constitution was the document drawn up by Cuban rebels in 1869, during the first war of independence (the Ten Years War); it reflected its time and its creators, being ambiguous on slavery and even on the possibility of Cuba becoming a state of the United States rather than an independent nation.

⁵⁴Interestingly, this reference to the United States is the only one in the whole speech and manifesto. Given the depth of historical Cuban resentment of the United States and the eventual mutual antagonism after 1959, this is perhaps surprising, although Castro himself later argued that he deliberately toned down any anti-Americanism for fear of alienating US political forces wary of anything that smacked of ‘Communism’. In fact, the absence of the United States as an explicit problem was probably also due to the reality that, after 1934 (when the US unilaterally abrogated the terms of the notorious Platt Amendment, which allowed it to exercise a neo-colonial hold over Cuba since 1902), the United States disappeared from the Cuban political culture as a definable and popular target for nationalism.

⁵⁵Igancio Agramonte and Máximo Gómez were generals in both the 1868–78 and 1895–98 rebellions.

⁵⁶‘The Golden Age’ (La Edad de Oro) was a magazine for young people which Martí wrote and published in the United States, largely consisting of prose, poetry and edifying advice.

⁵⁷Cuban references to the ‘lone star flag’ allude of course to the Cuban flag, but the design owed much to the Texan flag of 1836–45, since the annexationist movement which sought separation from Spain by making Cuba a state of the United States was inspired by the Texan example.

2. FIRST DECLARATION OF HAVANA

¹This declaration came after a noticeable radicalization of the process of revolution in Cuba, such as the series of nationalizations (of US-owned oil refineries, sugar mills and other enterprises) during the summer, and the expropriations of many large Cuban-owned enterprises. It also followed the United States’ imposition of limited commercial sanctions (subsequently escalated to full economic sanctions in a series of steps until 1963). It coincided with the creation of several mechanisms of mass participation, eventually vital to the structure of politics and involvement in Cuba: the Federation of Cuban Women, the neighbourhood Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, the National Revolutionary Militias, etc.

2The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba never existed after this, and was largely a gathering established for this purpose. In fact no national assembly was created in Cuba until 1976.

³Our America was one of the most seminal texts written by Martí, arguing (against notions of either an Anglo-Saxon-dominated American continent or a ‘Latin’ America, in opposition to this) for America outside the United States to be considered a racially and culturally mixed entity, essentially a mestizo America.

⁴The San José Declaration was the position adopted in August 1960 by a meeting of Latin American Foreign Ministers (in San José, Costa Rica), formally under the umbrella of the Organization of American States. It specifically condemned any attempts by outside powers to intervene in the region and declared ‘any form of totalitarianism’ as incompatible with the OAS Charter and with the region’s principles. Although this arose from US pressure it also reflected the fears of many governments, critical of many of the Revolution’s reforms but especially concerned at the possible implications for regional security of the recent Soviet offer of arms to defend the Revolution.

⁵This statement is significant for its use of the concept ‘imperialism’ well before any formal adoption by the Revolution’s leaders of any socialist or Communist epithet; it thus shows the depth of an implicitly radical anti-imperialist nationalism which underpinned the process from well before 1959 and which then fed into subsequent radicalization. The US actions mentioned here all predate the 1930s, referring either to the US annexation of Texas (1845) and the acquisition of Puerto Rico (1898) and the Panama Canal Zone (1903), or to military invasions and occupations in the ‘backyard’ during the 1904-33 period of ‘protective imperialism’ (or Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Big Stick’ policy).

⁶The reference here is to a controversial incident in March 1949 when two US Marines urinated on the Havana statue of Martí, leading to angry protests.

7Apart from Martí and Benito Juárez (the latter a Liberal and indigenous Mexican leader, who fought the French invasion and occupation of Mexico in 1861-67) all the individuals referred to here were leaders of independence movements in the colonies of Spanish America or in Brazil, during the 1808-26 period.

⁸The ‘Monroe Doctrine’, declared by President James Monroe in 1823, was in fact not an imperialist statement but, rather, an anticolonial declaration of long-term intent, warning European powers against extending their territory any further in the Americas. Principally directed against Britain (whose intentions the United States feared in an independent Cuba) and Russia (over the future of Alaska), it realistically accepted existing colonialism. However, in 1904, Theodore Roosevelt added his ‘corollary’ to it, adding the United States’ right and duty to exercise ‘an international police power’ in the region; this became the justification for the next three decades of intervention.

⁹The sequel to this was, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, stimulated by the actual US-backed invasion of the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón, to the Cubans) in April 1961, after which the Cuban leaders pressed Moscow to make good this largely rhetorical offer of rockets.

¹⁰By this stage, in fact, there had only really been commercial contact between Cuba and the Soviet Union, and some individual and secret contact at leadership level. Relations with China were even looser and more cautious, tempered by a lack of Chinese interest in Cuba.

¹¹Again, it is revealing that, before any move towards Communism, Castro here explicitly identified with leading victims of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

¹²This refers to the arguments between the Cuban leaders and Washington about the delays in arranging for the promised elections in Cuba. From 1953, the various rebel manifestos had promised a return to the 1940 Constitution, which implied regular, open and contested elections; however, by 1959, the rebel leaders and guerrilla activists had radicalized their views sufficiently, and had become sufficiently aware of the social problems facing Cuba and urgently needing attention, for them to perceive that social revolution was a greater priority for the Revolution than a pluralist electoral system and adversarial elections, arguing that, until Cubans could all read and write and until those problems were resolved, elections were meaningless. They particularly cited Cuba’s unfortunate experience of fraudulent elections during the 1902–34 ‘Pseudo–Republic’ and the elections which Batista stage-managed in 1954 and 1958. The US government, of course, opposed this delay and saw it as evidence of authoritarian, and possibly Communist, intentions on the Cubans’ part.

13These references to the ‘duty’ to fight against oppression and imperialism are interesting, as they prefigured the explicitly militant and combative tone of the Second Declaration and Cuba’s whole post-1966 Latin American strategy, and also indicated an existing shift towards a much more activist foreign policy by the Cubans in the region.

¹⁴The terms used all refer to poor rural labourers in different parts of Latin America (specifically in Chile, Peru, Argentina and Puerto Rico); Emiliano Zapata was an indigenous peasant leader during the radical early days of the Mexican Revolution, while Augusto Sandino was a Liberal general who led guerrilla resistance to the US Marine occupation of Nicaragua (1927–33).

3. THE SECOND DECLARATION OF HAVANA

¹The context for this declaration was one of rapid radicalization in both domestic politics and strategies and also external relationships. Between the First Declaration and the Second, the Cuban leaders had broken relations with the United States (January 1961), largely over the failure to compensate US citizens and companies for expropriated property, had defeated the US-backed invasion of April 1961, had declared the Revolution’s ‘socialist character’ and then Castro’s commitment to ‘Marxism-Leninism’, had begun the process of unifying the Revolution’s three political forces (Castro’s 26 July Movement, the smaller Revolutionary Student Directorate and the [Communist] PSP) into one single body, the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations, had seen the elite and middle class leave in droves, fearful of both Communism and the loss of their property, and had successfully and dramatically brought illiteracy down from around 23 per cent to around 4 per cent in the Literacy Campaign. What followed the Declaration was a further process of radicalization: in March certain prominent PSP members were publicly disgraced and expelled for seeking to take over the new unified party, leading to the start of a distancing from the Soviet Union and Soviet models, and the campaign to support armed revolution in the whole of Latin America had begun to take active and concrete shape, allowing Cuba to challenge both US imperialism and Soviet revisionism. The specific target of the Declaration was, however, the Organization of American States (OAS), which, on 31 January 1962 at Punta del Este in Uruguay, voted to expel Cuba from the organization for having violated the OAS principles in its ‘totalitarianism’ and its economic policies.

2The final words of this quotation from Martí are perhaps his most famous phrase, reflecting his growing fears of an essentially imperialist US intervention in Cuba (as a prelude to further involvement in the rest of Latin America) and also quoted enthusiastically by successive generations of Cuban nationalists. After 1961, the Revolution’s leaders and media frequently alluded to these words by equating Cuba’s solitary struggle against the United States to David’s fight against Goliath.

³The Platt Amendment was the legal instrument for the United States’ neo-colonial control of Cuba after its 1898–1902 military occupation of Cuba, i.e. for the period between independence in 1902 and 1934. Originally an amendment to an Army Appropriations Bill in the US Congress, proposed by Senator Orville Platt (in collaboration with the US Secretary for War, Elihu Root), the wording for this document was then inserted into the Cuban Constitution which was being framed by the Constitutional Convention. The pressure on the Cuban delegates to include the wording was long and bitter, and, ultimately, it was only accepted after two votes, the most recalcitrant nationalists being persuaded to accept it by the realization that, without the Amendment’s inclusion, there would be no agreement on independence. The clauses effectively gave the United States the right to three things: occupation of Cuban territory for military bases (ultimately only Guantínamo Bay remained); veto power over any Cuban treaties with, or loans from, other countries (therefore ensuring US financial control); and the unilateral freedom to intervene militarily in Cuba to restore order. The latter right was acted upon on three occasions (1906-9, 1912, 1917-23), and helped ensure a permanent instability in Cuban politics, whereby any opposition group could rebel in the hope that US intervention would remove the government; this motivated risings in 1906, 1917 and 1931.

⁴What is interesting in the paragraphs that follow is the explicitly socialist concepts that underpin the historical analysis, taking the Revolution’s inherent radicalism further along the road from the socially conscious and nationalist liberalism of the 1953 document (largely focused on the Batistato), through the incipient anti-imperialism of 1960 to areading of history clearly informed by Marxism.

5The inclusion of Latin America in the colonial world is indicative of the shift in Cuban thinking. In one sense, Cuba’s unusual geopolitical history had created a situation where Cubans’ perception of their national and global identity was unclear. After the 1820s, while many aspired to independence, the majority of criollos thought in terms of Cuba as either an overseas province of Spain or a state of the United States; after 1902, many Cubans (especially the elite and middle class) looked northwards and considered Cuba’s future to be as some sort of ‘Americanized’ satellite; by 1962, of course, many had shifted their aspirations towards the Socialist Bloc. However, a new awareness — of Cuba as both a Latin American and a Third World entity, and possibly as the vanguard of both, was beginning to emerge, eventually reinforced by Soviet behaviour and attitudes between 1962 and 1968.

⁶This reference to the inevitability of revolution in Latin America is interesting because it reflects the differences already emerging between a Cuban interpretation of Marxism and the Soviet (and Communist) orthodoxy. According to the latter, Latin America, being essentially still in the feudal (or, usually, ‘semifeudal’) stage, did not by definition have the objective conditions for socialist revolution, leading the local Communist parties to adopt gradualist strategies. Thus, even before Che Guevara outlined the Cuban view (that Latin America was ready, that revolution was both possible and necessary, via armed struggle and through an alliance of workers, peasants and students, and through what he called ‘subjective conditions’, i.e. the actions of revolutionaries), Castro was expressing an alternative interpretation.

⁷This refers to the School of the Americas where the United States’ counter-insurgency response to the Cuban threat was formalized and spread to the region’s militaries.

⁸In 1961, the Dominican dictator, Trujillo, was assassinated, resulting in a splintering of the forces which had supported him, and the emergence of one of his allies, Joaquin Balaguer, as the leader of the right. Against him was Juan Bosch, the established leftist who eventually came to power (in 1963), until he was removed by the military in 1965. It was in response to demonstrations and riots (protesting against this seizure) that the United States dispatched some 40,000 troops to the Dominican Republic to restore order, prevent Bosch being reinstated and, eventually, ensure the election of Balaguer. President Johnson was inspired by this episode to issue his ‘doctrine’, of the United States’ willingness to act to prevent the establishment of ‘another Communist state’ in the hemisphere; Che Guevara was inspired by it to issue his call, in 1966, for the creation of ‘two, three, many Vietnams’ in Latin America, to trap the United States into a series of unwinnable wars. 9The Rio Treaty (1947) was the United States’ measure to replicate NATO in the western hemisphere, enlisting all the Latin American countries in a military pact against any attempt to bring Communism to the region; the OAS, set up in 1948, was the political parallel to this.

¹⁰The reference to the death of literacy teachers alludes to the problems which faced such workers during Cuba’s 1961 Literacy Campaign, when they were occasionally targeted by counterrevolutionary guerrillas, especially in the southern mountains of the Sierrade Escambray.

¹¹La Coubre was a French boat carrying Belgian arms which mysteriously exploded in Havana, killing several.

¹²This is a specific reference to the Bay of Pigs invasion, when, although US air cover was denied by President Kennedy, other logistical support was given.

¹³Following the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, the United States shifted its strategy against Cuba to one of covert support for Cuban exiles to infiltrate Cuba and carry out a campaign of sabotage and guerrilla war; this was known as Operation Mongoose.

¹⁴This reference to blacks inside the United States is revealing, because, as the Cuban ‘Third Worldist’ strategy emerged and as the black campaign for civil rights grew and became more violent and radical, many Cuban intellectuals began to see the United States’ black population as part of the Third World struggle.

¹⁵The Alliance for Progress was the development aid scheme set up by the United States (principally by Robert Kennedy) from early in 1961 to try to immunize Latin America against the Cuban threat and example; it offered aid to democratic governments to carry out social programmes and even agrarian reform in the hope that people would not turn to more radical solutions.

¹⁶This emphasis on the relationship between culture and revolution was apposite at the time, since the previous year had seen conscious moves by the Revolution to determine a coherent policy for developing a culture that would be both revolutionary and national. This was especially expressed in Castro’s June 1961 speech, ‘Words to the Intellectuals’ (where he defined the parameters for culture as ‘inside the revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing’), but was also evident in the Revolution’s early cultural institutions, such as the Latin American-oriented Casa de las Américas, the film institute (ICAIC) — both set up in early 1959 — the National Cultural Council (to coordinate all cultural activity) and UNEAC, the Writers’ and Artists’ Union, as well as the creation of a cadre of ‘cultural instructors’ sent out into the fields, factories and schools to train Cubans to participate in the arts.

17The following words on the revolutionary role of the peasantry constituted an explicit challenge to the Soviet/Communist theory and policy on the region, and predate the public distancing from the Soviet orthodoxy.

¹⁸This reference to Catholicism is revealing, as it prefigured the emergence of ‘liberation theology’ in the continent and also Castro’s own later willingness to engage in dialogue with, and even be influenced by, many of the ‘liberationists’.

¹⁹These words became famous as they were adopted in 1966 as the slogan of the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. That event, organized initially by Moscow as part of its global strategy to woo the Third World (the ‘three continents’ of the title) away from China, was effectively won over by the Cubans to a policy of outright, active and armed opposition to imperialism. Hence the phrase about the duty of the revolutionary (and, even more, the following sentence about waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by) was an explicit challenge to the Soviet theory of revolution and to the practice of the continents’ Communist parties. Hence, this whole speech, which began as an anti-imperialist reaction to the United States, had become, by the end, an attack on both Superpowers, on one for its essential imperialism and on the other for its failure to act up to its principles and commitment to revolution. Taken together, therefore, these three documents — nine years apart — reflect the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution in all respects.