Moncada
In a manifesto released on July 23, 1953, Fidel Castro, at the time a Havana lawyer known for defending the poor, called upon the people to “continue the unfinished revolution that Céspedes initiated in 1868, Martí continued in 1895, and Guiteras and Chibás made current in the republican epoch.” The revolution, he maintained, was the revolution of Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Martí, Mella, Guiteras, and Chibás. This single revolution, having evolved through different stages, now was entering a “new period of war.”
The initiation of the new stage was proclaimed dramatically three days later, on July 26, when Fidel led an attack on the Moncada military garrison in Santiago de Cuba. The intention of the assault was to seize weapons for the launching of a guerrilla struggle in the mountains. The assault failed, and 70 of the 126 assailants were killed, 95% of them murdered after capture by Batista’s soldiers in a four-day period following the assault.
Although the Cuban intellectual class during the period 1934 to 1953 had kept alive an ethical attitude in the face of the cynicism and fatalism generated by the neocolonial republic, there had emerged among the people by 1953 the sentiment that an ethical attitude is not enough; one must act. In this context, the Moncada attack threw itself on the political scene as a great act, which broke the barriers that were confining the movement to the verbal expression of an attitude, and which opened the possibility for a new stage in the Cuban Revolution.
Moncada, moreover, was a heroic act, which by its example called into being a new stage of struggle that would advance through personal courage and sacrifice. In his address at his trial for the attack, Fidel expressed the significance of the emergence of a young generation of Cubans prepared to sacrifice in defense of the nation.
It seemed that Martí would die during the centennial year of his birth, that his memory would be extinguished forever. . . . But he lives; he has not died; his people are rebellious; his people are dignified; his people are faithful to his memory. There are Cubans that have died defending his doctrines. There are youth who in magnificent selflessness have come to die beside his tomb, to give their blood and their lives in order that he would continue living in the soul of the country.
The Moncada assault, therefore, brought to the political foreground the Cuban tradition of personal and collective sacrifice in defense of national dignity. Moncada responded to the needs of the people and the revolution in that historic moment, providing an example of heroic struggle that the people were able to understand and were ready to support. Moncada was an “enormous, ripping and creative new force that would project itself over the future of Cuba in an irresistible form,” as was expressed by the Cuban essayist Cintio Vitier. And it lifted Fidel to the position of the charismatic leader of the new stage of the revolutionary struggle, a role assumed in earlier historical moments by Martí, Mella, Martínez Villena, and Guiteras.
Following the failed assault, Fidel was arrested and placed in solitary confinement, and he was brought to trial in a procedure separate from his comrades, which was not open to the public. He was permitted to address the court, and his address of October 16, 1953, was delivered from memory. A written version of the address was smuggled out of his prison cell, and it subsequently was distributed clandestinely. Fidel concluded the address by saying, “History Will Absolve Me,” and the underground document became known by that phrase.
In his October 16, 1953, address to the tribunal, Fidel described the organization and the carrying out of the assault, its intentions, the reasons for its failure, and his capture. He condemned the soldiers who had tortured and murdered captured revolutionaries, maintaining that they had degraded the uniform of the army. He harshly criticized the career of Batista and his deceitful message to the people on July 27. He praised the courage and heroism of the young insurrectionists who had carried out the attack.
In addition, Fidel argued that the assault of the Moncada garrison was legal. He maintained that in early 1952, although the people were not satisfied with government officials, they had the power to elect new officials, and they were in the process of doing so. They were engaged actively and enthusiastically in public debates in anticipation of elections. The Batista coup of March 10, 1952, ended this process. Fidel referred to a writ that he had submitted to the Court on March 12, two days following the coup d’état, which argued that the coup was a criminal act that violated several laws of the Social Defense Code, and which asked that Batista and his seventeen accomplices be sentenced to 108 years of imprisonment, in accordance with the Social Defense Code. But, he noted, the Court took no action, and instead, the criminal strides up and down the country like a great lord. The assault on the Moncada garrison, he maintained, was an attempt “to overthrow an illegal regime and to restore the legitimate Constitution.”
In the October 16 address, Fidel noted that Batista established the so-called “Constitutional Statutes” to function as a replacement to the 1940 Constitution, and in this Batista was supported by the Court of Social and Constitutional Rights, which was established by the 1940 Constitution. But, Fidel argued, said Court violated the Constitutional article that established it, and thus its ruling is not valid or constitutional. Fidel maintained that the 1940 Constitution remains in force, including Article 40, which affirms the right of insurrection against tyranny. And the Batista regime, he maintained, is tyrannical. It has eliminated civil liberties and suffrage, and it has uprooted democratic institutions. In “using tanks and soldiers to take over the Presidential Palace, the national treasury, and other governmental offices, and aiming guns at the heart of the people,” Batista has established “Might makes right” as the supreme law of the land. As soon as it took power, the regime engaged in repression against popular organizations, cultural institutions, and journalists, including arbitrary arrests, beatings, torture, and murder. Furthermore, the regime placed in top positions the most corrupt members of the traditional political parties. The previous regime was guilty of plunder of the public treasury and disrespect for human life, but the Batista regime increased pillage tenfold, and disrespect for human life a hundredfold. It served the great financial interests, and it redistributed loot to the Batista clique.
Fidel proceeded to remind the tribunal that the right of the people to revolt against tyranny was recognized by the theocratic monarchies of Ancient China, the city-states of Greece, and Republican Rome, and it was affirmed by the philosophers of Ancient India. In the Middle Ages, the right of the people to violently overthrow a tyrant was confirmed by John Salisbury, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. In the early modern era, it was sustained by the Spanish Jesuit Juan Mariana, the Scottish reformers John Knox and John Poynet, and the German jurist John Althus. The right of the people to overthrow despotic kings was the foundation of the English Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1775, and the French Revolution of 1789, and it was affirmed by John Milton, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, the US Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Fidel provided succinct summaries or quotations from these mentioned sources, with the most extensive quotation being from the US Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776.
Fidel expressed the patriotism of the young people who assaulted the Moncada garrison.
We are Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty, not to fulfill that duty is a crime, is treason. We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of liberty, justice, and human rights. We were taught from an early age to venerate the glorious example of our heroes and martyrs. Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Gomez and Martí were the first names engraved in our minds; we were taught that Maceo had said that one does not beg for liberty but takes it with the blade of a machete. . . . We were taught to cherish and defend the beloved flag of the lone star, and to sing every afternoon our National Anthem, whose verses say that to live in chains is to live submerged in an affront and dishonor, and to die for the country is to live. All this we learned and will never forget.
Fidel maintained that if the assault had succeeded, the revolutionaries would have had the support of the people. He described the people in the following terms.
When we speak of the people, we do not mean the comfortable and conservative sectors of the nation, who welcome any regime of oppression, any dictatorship, any despotism, prostrating themselves before the master of the moment until they grind their foreheads into the ground. We understand by people, when we are speaking of struggle, to mean the vast unredeemed masses, to whom all make promises and who are deceived and betrayed by all; who yearn for a better, more dignified and more just nation; who are moved by ancestral aspirations of justice, having suffered injustice and mockery generation after generation; and who long for significant and sound transformations in all aspects of life, and who, to attain them, are ready to give even the very last breath of their lives, when they believe in something or in someone, and above all when they believe sufficiently in themselves.
Fidel described the sectors that comprise the people: 600,000 unemployed; 500,000 agricultural workers who work only four months of the year and who live in miserable shacks; 400,000 industrial workers without adequate salary, pension, or housing; 100,000 tenant farmers, working on land that is not theirs; 30,000 teachers and professors who are poorly paid; 20,000 small businessmen who are weighed down by debt and plagued by graft imposed by corrupt public officials; and ten thousand young professionals in health, education, engineering, law, and journalism, who find that their recently attained degrees do not enable them to find work.
Fidel maintained that if the Moncada garrison had been successfully taken, five revolutionary laws would have been immediately broadcast by radio. (1) The re-establishment of the Constitution of 1940, with the executive, legislative, and judicial functions assumed by the revolutionary government, in order that the government would be able to implement the popular will and true justice, until these governmental structures, presently distorted by dictatorship and corruption, can be restored legitimately. (2) The ceding of land to tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and squatters who occupy parcels of land of less than five caballerías (67 hectares or 165 acres), with compensation for the former owners. (3) The granting of the right of workers and employees in commercial, industrial, and commercial enterprises to 30% of the profits. (4) The granting of the right of tenant farmers to 55% of the yield of sugar production, and a guarantee to small tenant farmers of their participation in the sugar commerce. (5) The confiscation of property that was fraudulently obtained as a result of government corruption, with the establishment of special tribunals with full powers to investigate and to solicit the extradition of persons from foreign governments. Fidel explained that these five revolutionary laws would have been followed by other laws, based on further study. These further laws would have included agrarian reform, the integral reform of education, the nationalization of (US-owned) electric and telephone companies, the return to the people of the excessive money that these companies have collected through high rates, and the payment to the government of taxes that have been evaded.
Fidel explained the structural roots of the social problems of Cuba. Cuba is an agricultural country, an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods; it has limited industrial capacity. More than half of the productive land is foreign-owned. Eighty-five percent of small farmers pay rent, and many peasant families do not have land to use for the production of food for their families. These economic conditions generate inadequate housing, low levels of education, and high levels of unemployment. The solution to these problems, Fidel maintained, cannot be based in strategies that protect the interests of the economic and financial elite. A revolutionary government would ignore such interests and would act decisively in defense of the needs of the people. It would mobilize capital to develop industry; distribute land to peasants; stimulate the development of agricultural cooperatives; establish limits to the amount of land that can be owned by an agricultural enterprise, expropriating the excess acreage; reduce rents; and expand and reform the educational system.
In formulating a program for the next stage of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro did not mention US imperialism, nor did he cite Marxist thinkers or mention Lenin or the Russian Revolution. Cuban scholar and former diplomat Jesus Arboleya writes of “History will absolve me:”
Although some historians consider it a manifesto less radical than that of the Joven Cuba of Guiteras in 1935, in which the anti-imperialist and socialist ends of the revolution were clearly expressed, the key to the genius of Fidel Castro lies precisely in his explaining the anti-neocolonial project on the basis of a unifying proposal, avoiding ideological prejudices that would have limited its reach.
Given the ideological distortions that are integral to the subjective conditions of the neocolonial situation, Fidel focused on the unjust conditions that are experienced by the people in their everyday lives and on the concrete steps to be taken to resolve these problems. Only later, more than two years after the triumph of the revolution, having implemented concrete steps in defense of the people, did Fidel proclaim that the Cuban Revolution was a socialist revolution. So Fidel used an intelligent strategy for educating the people concerning the meaning of revolution and of socialism, focusing first on practice and later on theory.
Fidel’s capacity to develop an effective strategy of popular education, moving from practice to theory, was a consequence of his exceptional capacity to think both theoretically and concretely. On the one hand, he understood issues in historical and theoretical terms, and thus he possessed a solid grasping of the structural roots of problems and the steps necessary for their solution. But on the other hand, he did not explain to the people in historical and theoretical terminology, except briefly and succinctly. He primarily explained in concrete language that connects to the worldview of the people. He possessed not only understanding of the historical development of social dynamics, but he also had what the philosopher Bernard Lonergan called the intelligence of “common sense.”
Fidel’s commonsense intelligence is rooted in his appreciation that the perspective of the people is based on their experience of problems: “subsistence, rent, the education of the children and their future.” The solutions proposed in “History will absolve me” responded to these concrete problems: the ceding of land to tenant farmers, the sharing of profits by workers in industry and mining, and increasing the small farmer’s share of the sugar yield. When the proposal goes beyond addressing concrete popular needs, it connects to resentments that are felt and expressed by the people: nationalization of foreign companies that charge exorbitant rates and just punishment for corrupt government officials. And the proposal that the revolutionary government assume executive, legislative, and judicial functions, in order to act decisively to implement the popular will, was fully consistent with the frustrations of the people, who have experienced that governments do not respond to popular will but to the interests of the powerful. The Moncada program was a proposal that was full of commonsense intelligence, and as such, it was connected to the sentiments and the understanding of the people.
But the Moncada program also was rooted in an understanding of the objective conditions of the neocolonial republic and a philosophical concept of social justice. It was based in an understanding of the structural roots of the problems of the nation and the kinds of concrete measures that would be necessary in order to transform the neocolonial reality into an alternative more just and democratic reality. Fidel understood what the most advanced intellectuals of the time understood: the historical development on a global scale of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism; and the emergence of revolutions that must necessarily be socialist, if they are to transform unjust structures. This advanced understanding was revealed in his explanation of the structural roots of the problems of Cuba. But his explanation was succinct. He understood that one does not begin with a lecture in philosophical historical social science. That would come later in the reconstruction of the society and the cultural formation of the people,
Fidel combined theoretical and historical understanding with connection to the people, and thus he was able to express proposals in concrete terms, in the context of a continually unfolding process that includes the theoretical and practical education of the people. Although these exceptional qualities reflect unique personal characteristics, they also were shaped by the social context of Latin American popular movements. In Latin America, higher education has been less fragmented than in the USA, and the popular movements have been more connected to the academic world and intellectual work. As Cintio Vitier explains, Fidel inherited, appropriated, and drove to a more advanced stage a social ethic that had been developing in Cuba since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The author of “History will absolve me” also was a person of exceptional moral qualities, who analyzed social dynamics from a vantage point rooted in the conditions of the exploited and the oppressed, and who was committed without compromise to justice for the oppressed. Like his intellectual perspective, these moral qualities also were formed by Latin American and Cuban popular movements, and in addition, they were a consequence of family influences and of the impact of his education in private Catholic primary and secondary schools.
Fidel concluded “History will absolve me” not by asking for freedom. He requested to be sent to the prison on the Isle of Pines, where he would be able to join his comrades and share their fate. “It is understandable,” he proclaimed, “that honest men should be dead or in prison in a Republic where the President is a criminal and a thief. . . . Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”
When the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution died on November 25, 2016, at the age of 90, hundreds of thousands of people lined the roadside—I among them—as his ashes were brought from Havana to Santiago de Cuba. The remarkable mass demonstration of affection prompted one Cuban journalist to say that the Cuban people have declared Fidel to be sacred. Many of those along the roadside lifted a sign with the simple message of “Promise delivered.”
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