https://themilitant.com/2018/12/22/60-years-of-cuban-revolution-has-changed-the-world/
‘What does Cuba teach? That revolution is possible’
Fidel Castro presents ‘Second Declaration of Havana’ to over a million
people in the capital Feb. 4, 1962
Vol. 83/No. 1
January 7, 2019
People in Colón, Cuba, greet Fidel Castro, above left, Jan. 7, 1959, as
“Liberty Caravan” went to Havana. Castro led Rebel Army, Cuban workers
and farmers to victory, then led millions to carry out, defend socialist
revolution.
AP/Harold Valentine
People in Colón, Cuba, greet Fidel Castro, above left, Jan. 7, 1959, as
“Liberty Caravan” went to Havana. Castro led Rebel Army, Cuban workers
and farmers to victory, then led millions to carry out, defend socialist
revolution.
On the 60th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the
Militant is reprinting excerpts from The Second Declaration of Havana.
This manifesto was presented by Fidel Castro, the central leader of the
revolution, to over 1 million people gathered in Havana’s Plaza of the
Revolution, Feb. 4, 1962. In the following days, hundreds of thousands
more adopted the document at rallies as well as in workplaces, fields
and schools around the island. Copyright © 2007 by Pathfinder Press.
Reprinted by permission.
Cuba affronts the imperialists in a special way. What is it that is
hidden behind the Yankees’ hatred of the Cuban Revolution? What is it
that rationally explains the conspiracy — uniting for the same
aggressive ends the richest and most powerful imperialist power in the
contemporary world and the oligarchies of an entire continent, which
together are supposed to represent a population of 350 million human
beings — against a small country of only 7 million inhabitants,
economically underdeveloped, without financial or military means that
could threaten the security or economy of any other country?
What unifies them and incites them is fear. What explains it is fear.
Not fear of the Cuban Revolution, but fear of the Latin American
revolution. Not fear of the workers, peasants, intellectuals, students,
and progressive layers of the middle strata who by revolutionary means
have taken power in Cuba, but fear that the workers, peasants, students,
intellectuals, and progressive sectors of the middle strata will take
power by revolutionary means in the oppressed and hungry countries
exploited by the Yankee monopolies and reactionary oligarchies of the
Americas; fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the
arms from their oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free
peoples of the Americas.
By crushing the Cuban Revolution they hope to dispel the fear that
torments them, the specter of revolution that threatens them. By
eliminating the Cuban Revolution, they hope to eliminate the
revolutionary spirit of the people. They imagine in their delirium that
Cuba is an exporter of revolutions. In their sleepless merchants’ and
money lenders’ minds lives the idea that revolutions can be bought,
sold, rented, loaned, exported and imported like a piece of merchandise.
Ignorant of the objective laws that govern the development of human
societies, they believe that their monopolistic, capitalistic, and
semifeudal regimes are eternal. Educated in their own reactionary
ideology — a mixture of superstition, ignorance, subjectivism,
pragmatism, and other mental aberrations — they have an image of the
world and of the march of history conforming to their interests as
exploiting classes. …
Cuba is the Latin American nation that has made landowners of more than
100,000 small farmers and ensured year-round employment on state farms
and cooperatives to all agricultural workers. It has transformed
garrisons into schools; given seventy thousand scholarships to
university, secondary, and technical students; created classrooms for
the entire population of children; totally wiped out illiteracy. It has
quadrupled medical services; nationalized foreign interests; suppressed
the abusive system that turned housing into a means of exploiting
people. It has virtually eliminated unemployment; suppressed
discrimination on account of race or sex; rid itself of gambling, vice,
and administrative corruption; armed the people. It has made the
enjoyment of human rights a living reality by freeing men and women from
exploitation, lack of culture, and social inequality. It has liberated
itself from all foreign tutelage, acquired full sovereignty, and
established the foundations to develop its economy in order, no longer,
to be a country producing only one crop, sugar, and exporting only raw
materials.
And yet it is Cuba that is expelled from the Organization of American
States by governments that have not realized for their people any one of
these achievements. How will they be able to justify their conduct
before the peoples of the Americas and the world? How will they be able
to deny that, according to their political conceptions, it is the policy
of land, bread, work, health, liberty, equality, and culture; of
accelerated development of the economy, of national dignity, of full
self-determination and sovereignty that is incompatible with the
principles of the hemisphere?
The people think very differently. The people think the only thing
incompatible with the destiny of Latin America is misery, feudal
exploitation, illiteracy, starvation wages, unemployment; the policy of
repression against the masses of workers, peasants, and students;
discrimination against women, Blacks, Indians, mestizos; oppression by
the oligarchies, the plundering of their countries’ wealth by the Yankee
monopolists; the moral suffocation of their intellectuals and artists;
the ruin of the small producers by foreign competition; economic
underdevelopment; peoples without roads, without hospitals, without
housing, without schools, without industries; submission to imperialism;
renunciation of national sovereignty and betrayal of the country.
How can the imperialists make their conduct toward and condemnation of
Cuba understood? What words and what arguments will they use to speak to
those whom, all the while exploiting them, they have ignored for so long? …
To the accusation that Cuba wants to export its revolution, we reply:
Revolutions are not exported, they are made by the peoples.
What Cuba can give to the peoples, and has already given, is its example.
And what does the Cuban Revolution teach? That revolution is possible,
that the peoples can make it, that in the contemporary world there are
no forces capable of halting the liberation movement of the people.
In This Issue
Front Page Articles •‘Yellow vest’ protests force gov’t concessions
•New Year’s greetings to our readers behind bars!
•Join SWP in taking books, ‘Militant’ to workers doors
•‘We are human beings, not robots!’ Amazon workers protest conditions
•Turkish rulers threaten to attack Kurds seeking autonomy in Syria
•Rail bosses push crew cuts, longer trains, risk lives in drive for profit
Feature Articles •‘What does Cuba teach? That revolution is possible’
Also In This Issue •Hungary protests oppose law letting bosses force
overtime
•Workers donate ‘blood money’ bribes to build SWP
•Celebrate Nan Bailey’s five decades building SWP
•UK out of EU is best terrain for workers’ struggles there
•Join fight against prison censorship of ‘Militant’!
On the Picket Line •Mental health clinicians strike across California
•United flight attendants protest crew size cuts, grueling schedules
•Oakland teachers rally for smaller class sizes, higher wages
•Walmart worker hits bosses’ abuses over intercom
Books of the Month •Workers take political power or face ‘Iron Heel’ of
capitalist rule
25, 50 and 75 years ago
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