José Galindo
It is ironic that he who said that men do not make history, but are made by it, has ended up being remembered as the sculptor of a watershed moment in the history of the 20th century. I am referring to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, which was both the culmination of a long process of struggles to consolidate the national states in Latin America, and the origin of a new cycle of popular struggles, this time against U.S. domination, which was, in turn, an expression of the final stage of development that capitalism had reached worldwide, in what Lenin called “imperialism”.
Knowing how to read history
The consequences of that event were so cataclysmic that the whole world was one step away from being destroyed during the Missile Crisis in October 1962, provoking a defensive response on the part of the White House that resulted in the multiplication of military dictatorships throughout the continent, until it consolidated itself as the first and only world power with the implosion of the Soviet Union. And although at Fidel’s side there stood a people led by their best representatives, including among them Ernesto Che Guevara, it is evident that the course of events would have been very different if his outstanding presence had not been there to awaken the enthusiasm of the multitudes.
But to be remembered by history is not a merit in itself, but that of having had a positive effect on its development, on the realization of certain principles and ideals to which humanity aspires. The revolution led by the Castro brothers not only liberated Cuba from a shameful neocolonial situation, but also inspired peoples throughout the region to promote their own national liberation movements, with their own victories and defeats, until reaching the current cycle of progressive governments that are undoubtedly children of their own causes and procurers of their own effects; but also heirs of that rebellious tradition that perhaps was not inaugurated by Fidel (let us remember that he himself pointed to José Martí as the intellectual author of his uprising against Batista), but that has until now had him as its best representative.
Perhaps it is due to the fact that Fidel Castro was not only an unparalleled political leader, but also a deep thinker, whose roots were nourished by the best of the tradition of universal political thought, both in the West and in these lands. He was able to read history like no other,.and thus to know where revolutionary action should be directed, as he once said: “With a sense of the historical moment”.
Latin America in its historical moment
And that historical moment was that of the consolidation of dependent capitalism in Latin America, following the gringo assault to regain control of what it had always considered its backyard, through the construction and consolidation of an international order designed to extract the maximum level of capital from the Region to the center of the developed world, with the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the main institutions in charge of guaranteeing the international division of labor between a developed North and a poverty-stricken South. And backing it up was aggressive U.S. militarism through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its Military Industrial Complex.
An unjust order that was imposed with the invasion and intimidation of any country in the Region in which a nationalist government emerged, and which was successfully challenged for the first time by the Cuban Revolution, after the failed attack on Playa Giron. Defeating Cuba militarily was not impossible; on the contrary, it was all too easy. The problem with this country was the example it could set for the rest of the continent, so it was not enough to drop another nuclear bomb on that small island, as was done against Japan; the unfeasibility of its project had to be demonstrated. With this objective in mind, the government of John F. Kennedy promoted the Alliance for Progress, which consisted of a series of loans, credits and financial transfers so that the governments would cut all ties with the insurgent country and promise to prevent similar movements from taking place in their territories, above all through the hypertrophy of their military apparatuses, which were quickly instrumentalized from Washington. An offensive against the Cuban Revolution that never ceased to be military, but had its main strategy in economic and diplomatic mechanisms, inaugurating a new stage of gringo interventions in the hemisphere.
A political thesis for continental emancipation
It is in this context that Fidel Castro delivered one of the most important speeches for Latin American political thought. It was February 1962 and Cuba had just been expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS), after a meeting of foreign ministers in Punta del Este, under pressure from the U.S. government, which accused the island of wanting to “export its revolution”.
The accusation, ridiculous in itself, was answered with a series of political theses on Latin American emancipation, historically and philosophically argued and constituting one of the first systematic expressions of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism in our America, as well as a critique of the world order and the international division of labor that relegated the continent to a dependent and neocolonial situation. A communist manifesto for Our America.
While the First Havana Declaration of September 1960 contained a similar message and was also a response to another OAS meeting in January of that year in which Soviet solidarity with the Cuban people was denounced as an act of foreign intervention, the Second Havana Declaration stands out for being more than a condemnation of U.S. interventionism, for being a sophisticatedly argued and radical challenge.
It goes beyond defensive anti-imperialism and chauvinist nationalism to explain the origin of the ills of our Region, the role of capitalism in the exploitation of our peoples, as well as its origin and the inevitability of new processes of rebellion in the continent, where revolutions were not exported, but sprouted locally under the influence of the conditions that had been imposed on it.
10 theses for Latin America
The discourse coherently exposes the distant and immediate causes of the subjugation and poverty of Latin America, from its role in the process of original accumulation through the plundering of its wealth and the oppression of its peoples during the colonial period, to the intervention mechanisms of the United States to perpetuate its domination over the region at the expense of the welfare of its inhabitants. These 10 political theses were masterfully presented by a man who transformed his discourse before the masses into a revolutionary pedagogical strategy.
First, the ratification of the independence and anti-imperialist spirit of José Martí, the greatest national hero of this country, who warned about the danger of the United States taking possession of the “pearl of the Caribbean”, so that, with that weight, it would fall on the entire region. An independence impetus inherited from the strategic lines inaugurated by Simón Bolívar and his dream of realizing the Gran Colombia in the Southern Cone, as a confederation of free States that would never again submit to any metropolis, while the United States was already expressing its imperial inclinations as early as the first decade of the 19th century;
Second, the description of the colonial subjugation and plundering of the continent under the colonial aegis, not only Spanish, but European in general, which laid the foundations of the original accumulation from which capitalism would emerge, from a process of dispossession and exploitation that victimized the indigenous peoples who inhabited the continent before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, as well as the black population uprooted from Africa to be enslaved in American haciendas and plantations. In other words, a denunciation against the colonialism of the European absolutist empires;
Third, the description of the emergence of capitalism in Europe and the class contradictions that it entailed, which was built on the backs of peasants who later became intensely exploited and dispossessed workers, whose reserve armies of labor would go on to organize themselves into the modern proletariat, to solve a class contradiction in the same way as had happened with the bourgeoisie against the feudal lords. An exposition of the theses of the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx, synthesized in the warning that, just as the thinkers who inspired the bourgeois revolution were persecuted, today the representatives of the emancipation of the proletariat would be stigmatized to the point of debasement;
Fourth, the evolution of that European capitalism to its imperial phase, characterized by the rivalry between monopoly capitals that had taken absolute control of their States and from which the United States would emerge as the main hegemonic power in the heat of the First and Second World War, and which unleashed, at the same time, a wave of independence and decolonization in the peoples that would become part of the Third World, with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as the first project of socialist State to confront imperial rapacity;
Fifth, the description of the objective conditions of dependence, poverty and underdevelopment of the Latin American continent, which make it prone to revolutions and have their origin in the imposition of neocolonial orders imposed under the imperial aegis first of England, and then consummated by the domination of U.S. imperialism. Neocolonial conditions that were the cause of underdevelopment, poverty and oppression resisted by the peoples of the South American continent, coinciding with the most radical versions that were being formulated at that time on the Theory of Dependence;
Sixth, the denouncement of the mechanisms of intervention, interference and oppression of U.S. imperialism in the Region, ranging from military intimidation to the instrumentalization of the national armies of the States over which relations of domination were established through indoctrination centers such as the School of the Americas, in addition to other methods such as economic blackmail and, of course, espionage and destabilization promoted by the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. An exposition that goes beyond political denunciation, being an almost taxonomical description of the way U.S. imperialism operates;
Seventh, the denunciation of the acts of intimidation and sabotage of the Cuban Revolution since the Bay of Pigs invasion, as an example to be drowned in blood, and then from economic blackmail and diplomatic isolation, which at the same time constituted a way of admitting the dangerousness of its example for the rest of the countries of the continent. But, above all, a reaffirmation of the dignity of the Cuban people, willing to make even the greatest sacrifices in order to achieve their independence and sovereignty;
Eighth, the condemnation of the situation of marginalization and exploitation to which various sectors of the Latin American peoples, such as the indigenous and black peoples, are subjected, even within their own States, in spite of the changes that should have taken place after the formal independence they had achieved in the first decades of the 19th century. A denouncement against the effects of colonialism and its present-day remnants, which inferiorized entire peoples to the point of dehumanization;
Ninth, the impossibility that their condition could improve through U.S. aid, at the same time that they are persecuted and repressed by their governments and U.S. imperialism, pointing out that it was precisely that situation of oppression and exploitation that made these peoples prone to promote revolutions, and not the crude accusation that such insubordination was an export product, as if it were a commodity for popular consumption;
And, tenth, the need for a revolution led by the proletariat, accompanied by the peasants, intellectuals and middle classes of the continent, for socialism and independence as the only way to break with the current order to which not only the peoples of Latin America, but also the peoples of Africa and Asia were subjected.
The declaration identifies the principal dilemma facing the region at that time, in which socialism was being debated as a possible route for the development of Latin America as U.S. oppression became more suffocating and violent, and which would later reach its climax with the imposition of military dictatorships backed by Washington.
Thus, although the clash between the interests of the North and the South had been apparent since the beginning of the 19th century, it was not until the second half of the 20th century, with the present declaration as one of its fundamental documents, that they were posed as a political problem to be overcome.
Translation by Miguel S. for Internationalist 360°
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 