The Cuban Revolution: The 20th Century Plague comes to the Americas

(Translated from La Revolucion Cubana) The Cuban Revolution began when, Eduardo Chibás of the Orthodox Party, being the great winner of the 1952 elections, committed suicide by opening a political vacuum, which would cover Fulgencio Batista , who had participated in the Peace Movement, close to the Communist Party, and that to please the United States manifested an anti-communist line while increasing political repression against the left. In that context, Fidel Castro organized, on July 26, 1953, the assault on the Moncada barracks, in Santiago de Cuba, the second military garrison in the country, an action that would be the beginning of the popular insurrection to overthrow the dictatorship, but its failure momentarily reinforced the regime. The increase in repression isolated Batista, who in 1954 was appointed president after elections without competition, which distended political life, thanks, among other things, to Castro's liberation and his departure to exile.

Start of the Cuban revolution

In Mexico, Castro organized the expedition of the Gramma yacht that landed in Cuba in November 1956. Despite his initial defeat, Castro and his July 26 Movement (M-26) created a guerrilla focus in Sierra Maestra , province of Oriente, which It would be the base of the Rebel Army. The M-26 had emerged from the left of the Orthodox Party with an egalitarian, socializing, nationalist and anti-American ideology . While the guerrillas were consolidating in the mountains, the urban opposition also grew and began to develop armed actions in the cities, in a context in which the repression against anti-dictatorial militants did not stop growing.In 1957 Castro's guerrilla had achieved a certain entity, but he was not yet in a position to drive the insurrection that would end Batista . His proposal for a general strike failed in the midst of popular indifference and the lack of support from the official and communist unions. The Communist Party, known as the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), rejected the insurrectionary tactic. Slowly the guerrillas came out of their isolation thanks to a military offensive in the plains, with burning of cane fields and destruction of crops. The opening of two guerrilla fronts, under the command of Raúl Castro and Juan Almeida, and the coordination of military actions by Camilo cienfuegos and Ernesto Che Guevara, consolidated the revolutionary advance, while the military integration of the PSP in the M-26 increased agitation urban For their experience in the revolutionary struggle and their greater prominence, the communist cadres occupied key positions in the M-26 and controlled the Rebel Army with the endorsement of Fidel and Raúl Castro. This is one of the elements that explains the rapid pro-Soviet turn of the revolution after the seizure of power.

Batista's Fall

In July 1958, the Caracas Pact consolidated the anti-Batista coalition and accelerated the fall of the dictatorship , no longer supported by Washington, which since April did not send weapons. In August the final offensive began and on January 1, 1959, with the people on the street and flying the flags of moralization, nationalism and anti-imperialism, Castro's followers took Havana .

Fidel Castro takes power

The popular support of the M-26 allowed Castro to take control of the situation to promote political, social and economic transformations . Thus began a revolutionary process, characterized by traditional Cuban nationalism and with a great consensus among the population. However, in a very short time Castro promoted an authoritarian turn, with a strong personalist content and marked by his leadership and his charisma. Anti-imperialism and nationalism became the axes of revolutionary discourse("Homeland or death" is the main slogan of the regime), which adopted Marxism-Leninism, and Castro said that in Cuba you could only be revolutionary if you were a communist. After its integration into the Soviet bloc, Cuba launched egalitarian policies to build socialism, an objective it has not yet given up. Some explanations insist that the North American opposition to the socializing course of the Revolution explains the proso-Soviet turn, but the truth is that these tendencies were supported by Castro and very settled in part of the leading nucleus of the M-26.

Fidel Castro Trends and Reforms

The various trends that coexisted in the revolutionary movement were controlled by Fidel Castro. In the beginning, the revolution relied on the urban bourgeoisie, since urban and rural workers and sugar businessmen and landowners were not involved in the fight against Batista. At the beginning of 1959 the old Cuban Revolution had been reborn, with its nationalist, moralizing and antidictatorial flags, which was converted by Castro into a social revolution, which with its prosoviotic turn generated serious conflicts with the United States. Halperín Donghi points out that the novelty of this situation was not authoritarianism, something common in Latin America, but the march towards social revolution.In 1959 the first reforms took place, populist and scarcely revolutionary, followed by the nationalization of American interests and an urban reform that lowered and froze rents . These measures were complemented by literacy campaigns and a health network that guaranteed medical attention to the entire population. This initial moderation allowed the government to expand its popular support base.

Economic situation

The economy was controlled by young technocrats, with experience in international organizations and supporters of industrialization and development , an objective that would be achieved through state intervention and expanding the internal market. But when Che Guevara took over the industrial and banking sector, from where he tried to set up his socializing goals, those goals were set aside. Guevara wanted to quickly implant socialism and in his search for the "new man" the market economy had to be destroyed and any material incentive, either in money or in kind, had to be removed to replace them with moral incentives that would stimulate labor productivity, but experience failure. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, a communist leader linked to Castroism before the revolutionary triumph, was opposed to Guevara's industrialism, since he was in favor of greater gradualism, both because of the lack of cadres to boost Che's policy, and not to increase the number of the enemies of the revolution. While it was not heard,some low productivity primary products, such as nickel, were exploited again . Thus began a constant in Castro's economic policy: the continuous fluctuations between the plan and the market, between a centralized economy and another that responds to mercantile stimuli. In 1963, in a new pendulum strike, Castro rescued the insulted sugar sector, from which the resources to finance the revolution should come, pointing out that in 1970, "year of the decisive effort", the sugar economy, at full capacity, would obtain a harvest of 10 million tons, something unprecedented in the history of Cuba. Despite the great efforts made and the great mobilization of men and resources, the objectives could not be achieved, although the 1970 harvest was the largest in history. The erratic course of economic policy, once in favor of industry and another of agriculture, with its dilemmas between moral or material incentives, is the cause of the current difficult situation, since the structural crisis of the economy is prior to the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its aid to Castro.

Political and Military Situation

The United States, facing the Soviet Union in the Cold War, saw with concern the course of the revolution. Raúl Castro, related to the communists before the revolution, controlled the military apparatus and was put in charge of the Revolutionary Armed Forces , direct heir of the Rebel Army. The disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos, in a dubious accident not yet clarified, and the imprisonment of Hubert Matos, ended two of the most popular revolutionary commanders who could question the direction of Castro's revolution and management. In January of 1960, the workers' leaders opposed to the prosoviético turn were removed from the direction of the unions and in their place settled to old pictures of the PSP, in tune with the leading dome. Castro focused on the government and after a month of operation of the first revolutionary cabinet, the moderated José Miró Cardona ceased as prime minister. In July, after the resignation of President Manuel Urrutia, another moderate, appointed Osvaldo Dorticós, who remained in office until 1976.

Ties with the Soviet Union

The operation of exceptional courts to judge war crimes and Castro's request to change the Pan-American system and economic relations between Latin America and the United States, ended up distancing Cuba from Washington and Latin America. When the United States wanted to pressure Cuba with the threat of suppressing the sugar quota, its main source of foreign exchange, the conflict increased . It was then, in February 1960, when the Soviet delegate in Havana offered to acquire all the sugar necessary to sustain the regime and since then the ties between Cuba and the Soviet Union strengthened. A part of the Cuban exile in Miami, with the backing of the CIA, began conspiring against Castro and in 1961 they invaded the island. The landing of Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) was a disaster and a blow to anti-Castroism, which allowed Castro to fly the flag of anti-imperialism, increase his international support and show the solidity of his position and that it was not enough to disembark some hundreds of men to make him fall.

Impact of the Revolution in Latin America

The triumph of the revolution was a stimulus for the Latin American insurrectionary left , which, inspired by the Cuban model, tried to create rural guerrilla centers for the conquest of power. The example of Castro and Che Guevara lit in Central America (Guatemala and Honduras), in the Caribbean (the Dominican Republic), in the Andes (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru or Bolivia) and in Brazil. In some cases, the convergence of the revolutionary left, anti-imperialist nationalism and Christian supporters of the armed struggle led to the creation of pro-Castro parties, which contradict the pro-Soviet communist parties opposed to the armed struggle. At the end of 1964, Latin American communism held a secret conference in Havana to discuss the revolutionary methodology, which revealed the opposing positions. Since then, the regime redoubled its efforts to export the revolution to the continent and at the beginning of 1966 the First Tricontinental Conference of Revolutionary Solidarity met in Havana , with 500 delegates from governments and revolutionary movements from Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 1967, the OLAS (Latin American Organization of Solidarity) was created, whose first meeting resulted in the rupture between revolutionary Castroism and communist reformism and also showed the will of Latin American revolutionary organizations to extend the armed struggle for the countryside and cities .

Read the original story here