The Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution

FUNDAÇÃO EDITORA DA UNESP

Presidente do Conselho Curador

Mário Sérgio Vasconcelos

Diretor-Presidente

Jézio Hernani Bomfim Gutierre

Superintendente Administrativo e Financeiro

William de Souza Agostinho

Conselho Editorial Acadêmico

Danilo Rothberg

João Luís Cardoso Tápias Ceccantini

Luiz Fernando Ayerbe

Marcelo Takeshi Yamashita

Maria Cristina Pereira Lima

Milton Terumitsu Sogabe

Newton La Scala Júnior

Pedro Angelo Pagni

Renata Junqueira de Souza

Rosa Maria Feiteiro Cavalari

Editores-Adjuntos

Anderson Nobara

Leandro Rodrigues

Luis Fernando Ayerbe

The Cuban Revolution

Collection Revolutions of the Twentieth Century

Directed by Emília Viotti da Costa

Translated by

R. Jackson Wilson

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Introduction to the collection

The nineteenth century was the century of liberal revolutions; the twentieth was the century of socialist revolutions. What does the twenty-first century have in store for us? There are those who say that the age of revolutions has come to a close, and that the myth of THE revolution which has shaped the lives of people since the eighteenth century no longer can serve as a guide to our history. Even among people on the left, who have all along been the defenders of revolutionary ideas, it is sometimes said that revolution has been replaced by social movements. Given existing governments’ monopoly of the means of violence, and the enormous cost of weaponry, for many people it appears that it has become practically impossible to repeat the feats of the era of barricades.

Still, in every part of the world, from Seattle to Porto Alegre to Mumbai, there are signs that today, as in the past, there are young people who are not willing to accept the world as it is in our times. But no matter what forms of struggle they choose, it is essential to understand the revolutionary experiences of the past. As has been said over and over, those who do not learn from the errors of the past are doomed to repeat them. But many of the very young today are woefully ignorant of events very fundamental for comprehending the past and shaping the future. It was an awareness of this problem that led the Editora UNESP to decide to publish this collection. We hope that these books will be valuable resources for students all the way from high school to university, and for the general public as well.

The authors were selected among historians, social scientists, and journalists, North Americans and Brazilians, men and women with diverse political views that range from the political center to the political left. This great variety of backgrounds and political attitudes was deliberately sought after. Whatever we may have lost in consistency, we hope to have gained in a diversity of interpretations that invite reflection and dialogue.

To understand the revolutions of the twentieth century, we must place them in the context of the revolutionary movements that were unleashed from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, movements that resulted in the total destruction of both the Ancient régime and its old colonial system. Despite profound differences, these later revolutions sought to carry out a democratic project that had been temporarily obscured by the abstractions and contradictions of the French Revolution of 1789. From that point forward, this democratic project then became a grand peoples’ project that found that expression is a succession of revolutions inspired by the struggle for independence from the British colonies in North America, and by the French Revolution itself.

On July 4, 1776, the thirteen North American colonies, that would eventually become the United States of America, declared their independence and proclaimed the end of their colonial connection with Britain. They affirmed, in language that was inflammatory and profoundly subversive for the era, the equality of all men and preached their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They affirmed that the powers of governments were derived from the people they governed. Therefore, it fell to those very people to bring down a government that failed to protect those inalienable rights and swayed towards despotism.

These revolutionary concepts, which echoed throughout the Enlightenment, were reasserted with even greater vigor thirteen years later, in 1789, in France. If the Declaration of Independence of the American colonies threatened the colonial system, the revolution in France threatened the European regimes themselves, their entire social order, the monopolistic structures of power, the privileges of aristocracy, royal absolutism and the divine right of kings.

Not by chance, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, enacted by the National Assembly of France in 1789, was written by the Marquis de LaFayette, who had participated in the American Revolution. He had the help of Thomas Jefferson, who was in France at the time representing the United States. The Declaration affirmed the equality of all men before the law. It defined their inalienable individual rights to liberty, property, safety, and resistance to oppression. It defined the preservation of these rights as the only legitimate purpose of any political institution. It asserted the principle that no person could be deprived of property except in cases of evident and proven public necessity and with immediate and fair compensation. It affirmed the sovereignty of the nation (not its ruler) and the supremacy of its laws. These laws, it insisted, must be the product of the general will, and must apply equally to all citizens. The Declaration also guaranteed freedom of expression, of thought, and of religion, and made the law itself the protector of these freedoms against individual abuses. It provided for taxes that were applicable to all citizens, proportioned to their ability to pay. It conferred on citizens the right to participate, personally or through elected representatives, in the control of government expenditure,

and required public officials to render accounts of their conduct of their offices. Finally, the Declaration affirmed the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers.

These declarations, which clearly defined both the extent and the limits of liberal thought, reverberated in many parts of Europe and the Americas, bringing down monarchical regimes, implanting liberal-democratic systems of varying types, establishing equality before the law, adopting the separation of powers, forging nationalities and promoting the emancipation of slaves as well as the independence of Latin-American colonies.

The development of industry and commerce, the revolution in the means of transportation, urbanization, technological advances, the formation of a new social class – the proletariat –

and the imperialistic expansion of European nations into Asia and Africa, all generated dislocation, social conflicts and wars in various parts of the world. Everywhere, excluded social groups were confronted with new oligarchies that were unresponsive to their needs and deaf to their anxieties. These marginalized groups erupted in struggles that aimed to realize the promise of democracy, a promise that was increasingly shown to be fictitious by the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few to the detriment of the many.

Equality before the law did correspond to social realities; liberty without equality was transformed into a myth; representative governments actually represented only privileged minorities, and most of the people actually had no representation. One after another, the ideals proposed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man were revealing their illusory character. The response was not long in coming.

Socialist, anarchist, syndicalist, communist, or merely reformist ideas appeared to challenge the world created by capitalism and supposedly democratic liberalism. In fact, the earliest attacks on the new system emerged during the period of the French Revolution itself. At the time, these criticisms were confined to a few of the most radical revolutionaries, such as Gracchus Babeuf. But in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, condemnations of the social and political system, created by the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, became prominent in the works of utopian socialists like Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1861), Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), Louis Blanc (1812-1882), among many others. In England, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his comrade Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) threw themselves into a systematic attack on capitalism and bourgeois democracy, establishing class struggle as the fundamental engine of history and the proletariat as the force that could bring about a true social revolution. In 1848, their Communist Manifesto was published, calling on the workers of the world to unite.

In 1864, the First Workers’ International was created. Three years later, Marx published the first volume of his Capital. Meanwhile, syndicalists, reformers, and cooperativists of every stripe, such as Robert Owen, set out to attempt to humanize capitalism. In France, the contingent of radicals grew rapidly, and their programs began to mobilize more and more people, especially in urban areas. The socialists, defeated in revolutionary uprisings in 1848, gained leadership for a brief period during the Paris Commune of 1871, before being defeated yet again. Despite these setbacks and despite ideological divisions among its militants, socialism was winning followers in various parts of the world. In 1873, the First International was dissolved. Marx died ten years later, but his work continued to gain influence. The second volume of Capital was published two years after his death, in 1885, and the third volume was issued in 1894. A new International was founded in 1889. The movement for radical change continued to gain converts in many areas of the world, culminating in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which set the stage for a new era.

At the outset of the twentieth century, the cycle of liberal revolutions appeared to be definitively closed. The revolutionary process -now inspired chiefly by socialists and communists -transcended the frontiers of Europe and America, to become much more cosmopolitan in nature. Everywhere, in Africa and Asia as well as in Europe and America, the paths followed by the Soviet Union alarmed some and inspired others, provoking debate and confrontation, both internal and external, which deeply marked the history of the twentieth century. The Chinese Revolution of 1949, and the Cuban Revolution ten years later, enlarged the socialist bloc and provided new models for revolutionaries in diverse parts of the world.

Since then, millions of people have perished in the conflict between the worlds of socialism and capitalism. On both sides, historical writing was profoundly affected by political passions, inflamed by the cold war and distorted by propaganda. Now, after the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the participation of China in institutions once controlled exclusively by the capitalist countries, it might be possible to begin to make a serene evaluation of this turbulent history.

We hope that the books in this Collection will provide their readers with the first step in a long journey in search of a future in which liberty and equality will be compatible and democracy will be their form of expression.

Emília Viotti da Costa

For Julia and Jane

Contents

Introduction to the collection

Contents

Introduction

1. The Emergence of the Revolutionary Process

The Conquest of Power

From Rebellion to Revolution

2. Cuba – United States:From Monroe to Reagan

America for the Americans

The Challenges of a Bipolar World

3. The Construction of Socialism

The Presence of Ernesto Che Guevara

The Institutionalization of the Revolution

The Economic System

The Political Regime

4. The Cold War against Cuba:a History Without an End?

5. Cuba and the Revolution:the Legacy of the Twentieth Century

The Armed Struggle and the Conquest of Power

The