On July 26, revolutionaries around the world will celebrate the 44th anniversary of the storming of the Moncada Barracks in Cuba by young revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro.
To mark the event, the following is abridged from a talk on Che Guevara given by ZANNY BEGG to the Resistance national conference held in Melbourne earlier this month.
Describing his first meeting with Fidel Castro, in Mexico, Che recalled that they stayed up all night talking and by the morning he had agreed to join Castro in an expedition to Cuba.
"In reality, after all my experiences all over America ... it did not take much to arouse my interest in joining any revolution against tyranny. [Fidel] had an unshakeable faith that once we left Mexico and arrived in Cuba he would fight, and that in fighting he would win. I shared his optimism. It was imperative to do something, to struggle, to achieve. It was imperative to stop crying and fight", Che said.
In 1956, 82 militants crowded into a small yacht called the Granma and headed for Cuba. From the outside, this expedition seemed like madness. Eighty-two roughly trained and poorly armed guerillas, crammed into a 12-person boat, hoped to take on the might of the US-backed Cuban army. How could they hope to succeed?
Their success is now history, but it can only be understood in the context of the social conditions in Cuba under the rule of Fulgencio Batista and in light of the political strategy advanced by Castro and Che.
Batista carried out a military coup in 1952, when it appeared that he would lose the elections that year.
Batista had been the power behind the scenes during a succession of Cuban presidents since 1933. As Uncle Sam's man in Havana, he brutally suppressed political opposition and let his people live in appalling poverty.
US corporations dominated the Cuban economy, controlling 80% of Cuba's utilities, 90% of its mines, 100% of its oil refineries, 40% of the sugar industry and 90% of the cattle ranches. This brought little wealth to the Cuban people, 50% of whom did not have electricity; 40% were illiterate and 95% of the children in rural areas suffered from poverty-related diseases.
Batista crushed worker, peasant and student opposition. Between 1952 and 1959, 20,000 Cubans were assassinated by Batista's henchmen. The bodies of those assassinated were often dumped in public places with their eyes gouged out to intimidate the rest of the population.
Castro had led a rebellion against Batista in 1953. He and 150 other young rebels stormed the Moncada Barracks on July 26. Most of the combatants were killed, and Castro was jailed.
Castro used his trial to popularise his ideas about national liberation. His famous courtroom speech, which was widely distributed among the Cuban population, ended with the now famous phrase "History will absolve me".
Two years later, Castro was freed in an amnesty. He left to prepare a second assault against Batista. He was now regarded by thousands in Cuba as a national hero.
In 1956, Castro announced the formation of a new revolutionary organisation, the July 26th Movement. He broke from the bourgeois opposition to Batista, which he found vacillating and unreliable.
The method of the July 26th Movement was the overthrow of Batista through armed revolutionary struggle. The program at this stage remained bourgeois democratic, its central demands being democratic political reform and land reform.
By 1956, Fidel's team of rebels were under threat of arrest in Mexico and had to make a speedy exit on the Granma. During the first part of their journey, Granma was hit by a cyclone which blew the revolutionaries off course.
When they ran aground on a sandbar off the coast of Cuba, they put their lifeboat into the water only to watch it sink. They had to wade ashore, leaving behind many of their weapons and provisions.
To make matters worse, Batista had learned of their arrival, and the rebels were strafed by airplanes. Of the 82 on board the Grandma, only 12 survived. Batista boasted that Fidel had been killed and the rebellion crushed.
But both Fidel and Che had survived and, with the others, fled to safety in the Sierra Maestra mountains. There the small band of men and women established a base camp and started to rebuild the rebel army.
Castro's strategy relied on winning support from the peasants and building a base in Oriente province. By 1958, peasants had started to join the ranks of the rebel army.
The July 26th Movement also sought support from the urban working class, students and agricultural workers.
In April 1958, a general strike was called. The weakness of the revolutionary forces in the leadership of the working class caused the strike to fail, resulting in a wave of demoralisation in the working class. Batista took advantage of this, massing an army of 10,000 in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra in May to exterminate the rebels.
Fidel commanded only 300 troops. For 36 days Batista's soldiers pushed the rebel army back, dumping napalm to drive them out of hiding. But by mid-July, the rebels began not only to hold their position but to drive the enemy back. By August 18, Batista's offensive had collapsed and the army fled demoralised from the mountains.
Fidel used this opportunity to send out two guerilla columns to capture new ground. By October the rebels had established a base in the Escambray Mountains under Che's command. Another base was established in the Sierra Cristal Mountains, where Raul Castro implemented land reform and liberated an area with 500,000 inhabitants.
The rebels had grown into a mass army. In November, Fidel's troops came down from the mountains and struck out for Santiago, Cuba's second largest city. In December, Che marched into Santa Clara, to be greeted by a popular uprising organised by the July 26th Movement.
On December 28, the head of Batista's army met with Fidel and tried unsuccessfully to strike a deal. On January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba with US$7 million in his suitcase.
Military officers around Batista tried to stop the march of the revolution by declaring a new military government. Fidel responded by calling for a general strike in all areas not yet liberated. This time the strike was complete.
On January 2, Fidel marched into Santiago and occupied the Moncada Barracks he had tried to storm six years earlier, and Che marched into Havana. Masses of angry Cubans stormed the gambling parlours in Havana, destroying the roulette wheels, slot machines and dice tables. The prisons were opened and political prisoners rushed down the steps chanting "Freedom, freedom!".
Fidel entered Havana on January 9 to a spectacular welcome from more than a million people. A people's revolution had triumphed.
The rebel army's victory was indisputable, but the political direction Cuba was to take remained open. A coalition government was established led, not by Fidel, but by bourgeois opposition figures. Fidel later explained that this was because they still had the support of the people. But Castro and Che immediately disbanded the remnants of the Batista military and police force, establishing a people's army in their place.
Thus a situation of dual power developed: bourgeois opposition figures controlled the government, and rebel forces controlled the army, the courts and police force. This situation could not continue indefinitely.
The situation was resolved in July 1959, when Fidel launched a mass campaign, supported by a general strike, against the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to carry through the process of reform.
Fidel became prime minister, and the bourgeois forces were replaced by supporters of the July 26th Movement. The political, judicial and military arms of the state were now all controlled by a workers and farmers government.
The government forged ahead with land reform and pro-worker measures such as rent reductions and wage increases. The hostility of US imperialism prompted the Cubans to adopt more decisive measures. Towards the end of 1960, the Cuban government established a monopoly over foreign trade and nationalised virtually all Cuban and US capitalist holdings.
By 1960, Cuba had begun to implement a planned economy, and the property of the capitalist class had been expropriated. Capitalism had been defeated in the small island just off the coast of the most powerful imperialist country. The socialist phase of the Cuban revolution had begun.