Cubans reflect on Moncada
Cubans reflect on Moncada
The launching of a paradigmatic revolution from the neocolonial situation
Cubans today view the generation of the revolution as a paradigmatic generation, as an example to follow, because it had the merit of making history and of converting a struggle of all the people into a personal battle, as each revolutionary embraced as their own personal agenda what was the cause of many and of the entire country. Cubans today, therefore, appropriate the certainties, truths, fidelity, and sacrifices of the generation of the revolution, making them their own. Moreover, it was the assault on the Moncada military barracks—seventy years ago on July 26—that was the protagonist that galvanized the generation of the revolution, empowering it to unify in the creation of the indispensable conditions for Cuban sovereignty and for freedom from the neocolonial situation. So it has been written by Leidys María Labrador Herrera in the July 25 issue of Granma, a daily newspaper that is the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba.
The 126 young men and women that were prepared to sacrifice their lives in that heroic action of July 26, 1953, represented all social sectors of the people. The urban and rural working classes were well represented, with urban workers disproportionately represented. Three were factory workers, two in a tile factory and one in a brewery. There were four construction workers; one worker in precious gems; two carpenters; one house painter; two cabinetmakers; one refrigerator mechanic; three chauffeurs; two dockworkers; two cooks; one manual laborer; one bartender; one baker; one auto bodyworker; one shoemaker, and one in boxing training. A few were unemployed at the moment, working temporarily as a parking attendant or as sellers of flowers and food in agricultural markets. There were nine agricultural workers or of agricultural worker family background.
Perhaps more than twenty percent of those in the clandestine organization were of the petit bourgeoisie, and they were among its most influential members. Two were lawyers. One commissioned commercial ships in a company owned by his father. One was the owner of a pharmaceutical laboratory. One was a doctor. Four had positions in commercial offices. One had a position in a bank. Two were union leaders. Three were traveling salesmen. One was a photographer. Two were teachers. Four were students. One was a homemaker.
The disproportionate representation of the petit bourgeois middle class and the urban working class was a consequence of the objective possibilities for revolutionary organizational, political, and ideological work in the three decades of the neocolonial republic prior to Moncada. Said conditions included the fact that in the neocolonial situation the middle class has an objective interest in a fundamental social transformation that would expand the possibilities for education and employment in science, medicine, education, and commerce. At the same time, the benefits of neocolonialism to the middle class relative to other social classes favor the dissemination of counterrevolutionary ideology in the middle class. This is why both the revolution and the counterrevolution are overrepresented in the middle class in the neocolonial situation.
Marta Rojas has written that the social composition of the Moncada combatants was consistent with the social sectors described by Fidel in his October 16 address to the court. The reader will perhaps recall that in History Will Absolve Me Fidel described the people as consisting of the unemployed, agricultural workers, industrial workers, tenant farmers, teachers and professors, small businessmen, and young professionals. And it was the people so conceived that were called to revolution by Fidel, not the workers, or workers and peasants, or workers and oppressed peoples. Fidel’s formulation, in addition to being accurate in social scientific terms, was politically intelligent, because it was a unifying formulation.
Jesus Arboleya has suggested that the revolution announced by Fidel in 1953 constituted Marxism-Leninism unannounced. Indeed so. But less recognized by analysts is the fact that the revolutionary project announced by Fidel was a reconstructed Marxism-Leninism unannounced. In identifying and convoking the various sectors of the people, Fidel ignored Marx’s stress on the working class and Marx’s view, formulated in The German Ideology, that the industrial worker’s necessary role in increasingly automated factories positioned it to lead the transition to socialism. Equally, Fidel paid no attention to Lenin’s view of a vanguard of workers and peasants led by workers, or Trotsky’s stress on the role of modern Western-owned factories in Russia in converting peasants into industrial workers with revolutionary consciousness, capable of forming and leading workers’ soviets. Fidel consciously ignored the great revolutionary masters, for he was compelled to formulate an unannounced practical Marxism that was adapted to the neocolonial conditions of Cuba.
Years later, in extensive autobiographical interviews, Fidel confessed the unorthodox character of his Marxism, driven as it was by a need to synthesize Marxism-Leninism with the revolutionary nationalism of José Martí. He acknowledged that he could not have persuaded members of the Communist Party of Cuba in the 1950s of the correctness of his views. He suggests that he did not even try, until after the triumph of the revolution, when he could speak of these questions with the moral and political authority of a leader who had led a triumphant revolution.
To be sure, Fidel’s unorthodox Marxism was definitively socialist. In his first two years at the University of Havana, his course of study, especially a course on the different types of economic systems, had led him to the conclusion that capitalism is absurd. Later, beginning in his third year, he read Marx, Engels, and Lenin outside his formal course of study in the library of the Communist Party of Cuba, through which he came to appreciate that socialism unfolds out of the dynamics of political, economic, and social contradictions. And he arrived to understand why politicians in the neocolonial situation behave so badly. They make promises to the people in order to win elections, but in the final analysis they attend to their class interests rather than to their campaign promises.
Nevertheless, in formulating a revolutionary strategy, Fidel saw the possibilities for taking political power through the unified action of the sectors of the people. He did not imagine any other road to power, dedicated as he was to the revolutionary taking of power by an underdog class in the particular conditions of neocolonial Cuba. In his conceptualization, he was reformulating the Marxist-Leninist concept of the working-class vanguard, adapting it to the neocolonial situation of Cuba. He envisioned a vanguard composed of all sectors of the people, recruited from the best elements of the people, and leading the entire people to unified political action in defense of its needs and interests.
The Cuban Revolution is indeed paradigmatic, not only for Cubans today, but for all the peoples of the Third World, because it is a paradigm of and for the Third World, formulated from the neocolonial situation that shapes the common objective conditions that the Third World today confronts. It is not a paradigm formulated from the conditions of Western Europe in the nineteenth century, Russia in the early twentieth century, or China in the middle of the twentieth century.
The central act in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Moncada assault was held in front of the Moncada barracks, which today has been converted into a museum and a public primary school. I often have wondered if the leaders of the generation of the revolution, many of whom had been educated in private Catholic schools, vaguely recalled the ancient religious vision of the conversion of swords into plowshares, and applied it by turning military barracks into schools, no doubt influenced by the woeful educational situation in neocolonial Cuba in the 1950s and the plentiful supply of buildings that had been used for military purposes.
Invited by the Santiago de Cuba provincial branch of the Communist Party to give the central words during the political-cultural act, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel declared that today history asks us to speak of a time in which young men who were twenty-something years of age arrived one early morning to change the course of the history of the nation, without they themselves knowing it. The assault on the Moncada Barracks, he declared, was a political action with which the young generation of that time would start a small engine that would put in march the great engine of the Revolution up to our days, so that they would be remembered for all time as the generation of the revolution.
The action of July 26, 1953, the Cuban President declared, was the beginning of the end of the last dictatorship installed in Cuba with the (im)moral and material support of the United States, and they cannot forgive us for bringing it to an end. They have persistently hoped that, with the death of the generation of the revolution, they would be able to break the Revolution’s quest for national independence and international solidarity as well as the Revolution’s defense of a socialist alternative to savage capitalism. But to their disappointment, the new generation came to power with mature revolutionary consciousness and with a dedication to continuity with the generation of the revolution.
Since 1868, Díaz-Canel observed, the revolution had been frustrated many times through the fracturing of unity and through foreign interference. But Moncada re-initiated the revolution so many times frustrated. The youth of 1953 launched the combat without fear, driven by conviction in the ideas of José Martí toward the attainment of social justice. The duty of our generation today, which is responsible for the immediate destiny of the nation, is to maintain and advance what the generation of the revolution attained.
As long as the United States maintains, the President declared, its blockade against Cuba and seeks to walk over our national dignity, “we have a Moncada to assault!” As long as we do not attain a degree of dignified prosperity for all Cubans, “we have a Moncada to assault! Each day, each hour, each minute, we have a Moncada to assault.”
Our powerful neighbor has used various imperialist methods against us, Díaz-Canel observed, from seduction to aggression. But regardless of method, its obsession to possess us has not ceased. It is driven in its conduct by the nature of imperialism, which is the natural enemy of the right of the people to self-determination and the right of any government to propose a development program dedicated to social justice. Imperialism is a ferocious and implacable adversary of the countries of the world, especially in our region, where the countries conduct their foreign policy with independence.
Today, Díaz-Canel declared, “we are much more than a few dozen brave youths against the Batista tyranny. We are a people that defends the Revolution and socialism as the right road to attain a just society for all.” There is no force in the world that is capable of making us renounce our Marxist, Martían, and Fidelist ideas.
The Cuban President concluded:
“As we discussed in the National Assembly, the people expect response with respect to issues that today affect the standard of living and the daily life of all, which we can begin resolving without waiting for them to lift the blockade. We can wage the battle against illegalities and crime, and above all, we can work to increase the supply of goods for use and for consumption, in order to combat inflation. These battles are a difficult Moncada that we have to assault in Santiago de Cuba and in the entire country. Cuba deserves it, and those that came to these barracks to change history and to change it for the good of all expect us to do it.
….
“We ratify here, before those who assaulted the Moncada barracks seventy years ago and who still accompany us, and upon the earth that conserves the blood and the ashes of those that no longer are here, that we will preserve and protect the memory of those who sacrificed their lives so that we would be definitively free, in that selfless action that still moves us.
“Since the 26 of July of 1953, the best of each generation have lived confronting the challenges and difficulties that the times impose on us, with the spirit that was revealed in Moncada, which was expressed by Fidel in an idea that we will never forget, which is that a setback can be converted into victory.”
What are the implications for the peoples of the West?
The peoples of the West have benefitted from the historic processes of colonialism and imperialism, and thus they have made their peace with them. Therefore, the economic and ideological conditions of the West are fundamentally different from the neocolonial situation. However, the objective conditions of the world are changing. Technological and political conditions are reducing the size and the influence of the industrial working class in the advanced economies, and they are obliterating the occupational and social differences between the working and middle classes. Moreover, Western imperialism is in decadence, and the world-system itself is no longer sustainable. These dynamics have created conditions in which the Western middle class now has an interest in revolutionary transformation.
With its accurate identification of the abuses endured by each of the popular sectors, with its scientific explanation of the structural sources of social problems, and with its unifying call of the people to revolution, the Cuban Revolution is a paradigmatic example for the peoples of the West as well. Let us be inspired by the example of Cuba, and let us imagine revolutions born from the condition of Western imperialism in decadence, with characteristics different from those preached by Marxist intellectuals.
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