The legacy of Fidel Castro

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F dent, and prime minister for five decades, died in idel Castro Ruz, Cuba’s revolutionary leader, presi­ Santiago de Cuba on Friday, Nov. 25. He was 90 years old. Although one of the most profound, clear-sight­ ed, honest, and dedicated revolutionary leaders of the past half-century, Castro has been demonized by the corporate media as a dictator, tyrant, murderer, and torturer.

These same critics—especially the government of the United States, whose 50-year illegal embargo/ blockade of Cuba has been condemned by virtually every other nation—have no qualms about support­ ing the world’s real tyrants, provided only that they offer zero resistance to the interests of the world’s dominant imperialist powers. In the minds of Fidel’s critics, his “original sin” was to challenge and over­ throw capitalist power and prerogatives in Cuba and to spread Cuba’s liberating message worldwide.

The 1959 establishment of the Cuban workers’ state on an island of only 11 million people shook the world and continues to do so.

“Fidel,” as he was referred to by friends and com­ rades around the world, was the son of a wealthy landowner. With a Jesuit secondary school educa­ tion, he graduated from the University of Havana in 1945 with a degree in law. He engaged in radical stu­ dent struggles, but was not yet dedicated to socialist revolution, and became a member of the traditional bourgeois opposition formation, the Orthodox Party. His 1952 candidacy for the Cuban national congress was cut short with the military coup of Coronel Ful­ gencio Batista, a former Cuban president (1940-44), who now abolished Cuba’s constitution and installed himself as dictator.

6 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2016 As a human rights attorney for the poor, Castro filed an unsuccessful lawsuit challenging Batista’s action on constitutional grounds. Not long afterward, he and a youthful band of radical followers, mostly students, organized a failed military attack on the Moncada and other police barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953. While Fidel and his young comrades were foiled in their expectations that the Moncada attack would spark a nationwide revolt, the date neverthe­ less became synonymous with and is celebrated as the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.

Fidel was tried before a Batista court and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Less than two years later, how­ ever, and on the occasion of Batista’s 1954 post-coup election victory, the dictator, seeking a modicum of le­ gitimacy for his regime, and facing broad opposition from working-class and bourgeois forces, declared an amnesty and freed all Cuba’s political prisoners, in­ cluding Fidel and his brother Raul.

Fidel represented himself in court and defended his attack on Moncada. His concluding statement, four hours in length, was a ringing denunciation of the Ba­ tista tyranny and a magnificent and prophetic state­ ment of what was to come. He concluded: “ I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who snuffed out the life of 70 brothers of mine. Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”

Indeed it did! Two years later, Castro and 80 revo­ lutionary fighters, including the Argentine doctor, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who had originally signed on as a medic, arrived in Cuba on a 61-foot well-worn wooden yacht built for a few dozen at best—the Gran­ ma. They set out to begin a two-year guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra, which defeated successive waves of U.S.-backed and armed Batista forces.

The guerrillas won the support of Cuba’s peasant masses and were aided by a well-organized underground support network in Cuba’s major cities. Their July 26 Movement, beginning with skirmishes at local Batista outposts, vanquished the main force of the Batista Army in Santiago de Cuba. In time, commanders of the revolution, including Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, led military columns that defeated qualitatively larger but increasingly demoralized and disin­ tegrating Batista forces across Cuba.

The rebels enter Havana In a speech from Santiago de Cuba, Fidel pro­ claimed the revolution’s victory on New Years Day, Jan. 1, 1959. Batista and his entourage fled to the Dominican Republic the following day. A week later, Fidel and his comrades, 10,000 strong, and having defeated an army five times their size, triumphantly entered Havana to be welcomed by hundreds of thousands of cheer­ ing Cubans.

But Cuba’s socialist course was not imme­ diately assured with the military victory of the July 26 Movement. The fundamentals of capitalist power, including the private, largely U.S., ownership of Cuba’s land and property, remained in the hands of foreigners or the Ba­ tista-era capitalist elite, including Cuba’s antiBatista capitalist supporters of the 1959 revo­ lution. The central question of which class shall rule—the masses of workers and peasants or the capitalist few—remained unresolved. Castro, still a revolutionary democrat, initially named key anti-Batista bourgeois figures to the central posts in the Cuban government, includ­ ing anti-Batista politician Juan Miro Cardona as prime minister, Judge Manuel Urrutia as provi­ sional president, and Cuban banker/economist Felipe Pazos, a one-time International Mon­ etary Fund official in Washington.

In short order, however, beginning a few weeks after their initial appointments, these capitalist figures proved incapable of meeting the ever growing aspirations of the Cuban masses for land and fundamental changes that advanced the well-being of the vast majority.

Thus, the modern history of the Cuban Revolu­ tion begins with the early and critical decisions of the Castro team as it confronted both U.S. im­ perialism and Cuba’s national capitalist class. Both forces fully expected that Castro and his followers would differ little from past idealistic and well-meaning bourgeois revolutionaries in other countries, who had illusions that their vi­ sions of justice, reform, and democracy could be achieved within the capitalist framework.

Castro himself had honestly explained to prominent U.S. journalists, like Herbert Mathews, a New York Times editorial writer who visited Castro and the July 26 Movement guerrilla fighters in the Sierras, that he was not a “communist” but merely a dedicated revo­ lutionary whose interests were not in conflict with those of the United States.

The conquest of military power in Cuba marked only the beginning of a transformation process that would unfold over the next two years. At each junc­ ture, the Castro team was confronted with decisions that would either return Cuba to the capitalist orbit or irrevocably embark it on a socialist course. Land reform The first steps along the socialist road were taken when the initial capitalist appointees proved inca­ pable of implementing the revolution’s most impor­ tant promises—including a land reform that would, as Che Guevara, the first Minister of Agrarian Reform, argued, employing the credo of the 1911 Mexican Revolution, “grant the land to the tillers.”

In May 1959, under Fidel’s leadership, Cuba began confiscating U.S.-owned land and distributing it to Cuba’s poor peasant masses. This had been the policy of the July 26 Movement before the formal conquest of power. Land in the countryside that had been liber­ ated during the course of battle with the Batista army was given to the affected peasants, thereby cement­ ing their loyalty to the revolution while winning new fighting forces for the revolutionary army.

In the course of the next two years Cuba’s land re­ form exceeded any in modern history since the great Russian Revolution of 1917, when the party of Lenin (continued on page 7)

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(continued from page 6) and Trotsky nationalized the land of a nation that was one-sixth of the earth’s surface and granted it to peasant committees for distri­ bution to Russia’s most oppressed, who rep­ resented 90 percent of the population.

Needless to say, Cuba’s evolving and everdeepening land reform program alienated both U.S. business interests that were the predominant owners of Cuba’s arable land, and landed interests of Cuba’s national capi­ talist class. The latter increasingly separated themselves from the Castro-led revolution­ ary process, including financing and arming, with U.S. support, short-lived counterrevolu­ tionary militias in the Escambray Mountains aimed at Fidel’s overthrow.

With every step toward implementing the revolutionary promises of July 26 Movement, the U.S. government countered with threats of dire consequences. Fidel and his evolving team consistently responded by deepening the ongoing revolutionary process. When the U.S.-owned oil refineries refused to process Soviet crude oil, they were nationalized. The U.S., under the Eisenhower administration, responded by cutting off Cuba’s sugar quota, which accounted for a huge portion of Cuba’s then largely “one-crop economy.”

With regard to the economy and the ouster of former Batista-era banker Felipe Pazos, the initial head of Cuba’s National Bank, Fidel, in search of a replacement, was said to have asked Cuba’s core leadership group if anyone in the room has experience as an economist. Che Guevara raised his hand and was so appointed. Soon afterward, this humorous but incisive episode reveals, when asked about his “economist” experi­ ence, Che responded, “I thought Fidel asked if there were ‘communists’ in the room.” As head of Cuba’s central bank Guevara proceeded to adopt a series of measures to centralize Cuba’s economy and organize Cuba’s wealth and industries to benefit the Cuban masses as opposed to the previous capitalist elite.

A critical choice was required when soon after the January 1959 victory, the Cuban masses organized mass tribunals and court martials to bring to justice some 500 of the worst of Batista’s murdering and rap­ ing death squad criminals. The ensuing public trials, often conducted in huge stadiums with thousands of Batista’s victims present, many of whom proffered un­ contested testimony as to the old regime’s monstrous crimes, were challenged by the U.S. government on the grounds that “due process” in the U.S. definition of the term, was denied. Few, if any, however, denied the guilt of Batista’s assassins.

U.S. officials demanded that Castro intervene to stop these trials with forces from the revolutionary army. Once again, he and his team refused. The murderers were shot before the firing squads of the revolution­ ary people when the mass verdict, “Al paredón por los terroristas!” (To the wall with the terrorists!) was pro­ claimed by Cuba’s aroused and participating masses. As with every serious revolution in history, including the 1776 American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, justice is rapidly dispensed by the long brutalized vic­ tims of ruling-class murder and tyranny. The Bay of Pigs invasion In addition to U.S.-backed military incursions, not to mention some 100 recorded U.S.-orchestrated efforts at Fidel’s assassination (some put the figure at 600), the U.S. terminated all diplomatic relations with Cuba and imposed soon afterwards a vicious and illegal embargo/blockade that continues to this day.

The U.S. break with Cuba was followed by the CIA’s secret training in Nicaragua and Guatemala, both U.S.-backed dictatorships, of some 1500 Miami and New Jersey-based Cuban exiles for the infamous April 17 invasion of Cuba at the remote Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs). Two days earlier, CIA pilots employed B-26 bombers in a failed effort to cripple Cuba’s modest air force. The attack signaled to Fidel and Cuba’s armed forces that an invasion was imminent.

U.S. intelligence agencies had predicted that their sponsored invaders would be immediately welcomed by what they conceived of as the “Communist-op­ pressed Cuban masses.” It never happened. In truth, the invasion was secretly conceived by the U.S. mili­ tary as a plan to enable the invaders to plant their counterrevolutionary flag as occupiers of Cuban terri­ tory, and immediately call for U.S. official recognition and military support.

Fidel himself, in a tank at the Bay of Pigs, and at the risk of his life, took command of Cuba’s defense. In less than three days, over a thousand invaders were captured and 100 were killed. Cuban government losses were also significant.

Whatever remnants of capitalist property remained at the time of the 1961 U.S. invasion were eliminated outright when, in the name of the Cuban people, Fidel announced that his revolution would proceed to na­ tionalize the holdings of the Cuban capitalist class and all foreign-owned capitalists, “down to the nails in the boots of their shoes.”

It was only after the Bay of Pigs that Fidel formally announced, on Dec. 2, 1961, that he was a Marxist-Leninist. The previous month, he had declared that Cuba’s revolution was socialist in character.

Cuba’s revolutionary internationalism included its sending thousands of Cuban fighters to support the Angolan government’s defense of its sovereignty when confronted with a massive armed invasion by South Africa’s military aimed at restoring a pro-U.S. regime in that country.

At the famous 1986-87 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, Cuban troops defeated the U.S.-backed South African invasion, in time contributing to the end of South Af­ rican rule of its protectorate in Namibia, and, in 1994 to the end of South Africa’s apartheid system. Nelson Mandela, in a subsequent address to the Cuban peo­ ple, stated that Cuito Cuanavale was “a turning point for the liberation of our continent and my people.” Fidel: the evolution of a revolutionary Fidel Castro was a bold and courageous revolution­ ary fighter who came to realize from direct experience that his democratic and egalitarian aspirations could not be realized within the framework of the capitalist system, which is inherently oppressive and predatory.

Under his leadership and with the massive politi­ cal and moral support of all Cuba’s oppressed and exploited, Fidel first led in the conquest of military power against a brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship. He proceeded to lead in the establishment of what he hoped would be an egalitarian capitalist democracy with equal rights for all. He quickly came to under­ stand that his initial liberal capitalist allies had no in­ tention of sharing their wealth and economic prerog­ atives with the Cuban masses, and they were quickly eliminated from formal government power.

For another six months, more or less, Cuban society existed in a contradictory form that revolutionary socialists characterize as a workers and farmers gov­ ernment—that is, a government in which the political forms are under the control of the representatives of the mass of workers and small farmers while the eco­ nomic forms remain dominated by capitalist property relations.

The Castro leadership resolved this contradiction early on, with each adopted measure increasingly limiting the economic power of Cuban capitalism— both the foreign and the native variant. By mid-1959 Cuban became a workers’ state, having effectively and qualitatively eliminated almost all capitalist private property relations.

For the first time in the Western Hemisphere, a free nation, revolutionary Cuba, devoted its resources to the advancement of the interests of the vast major­ ity. Cuba’s literacy program became of model for the world. On a volunteer basis, students—more than half were women—were encouraged to leave their schools and universities to head for the countryside. By day, the students joined the newly landed poor Tony Savino / Socialist Action peasant farmers to toil in the field; by night, in the still electricity-lacking rural areas, they taught these same poor farmers to read and write, in short order raising Cuba’s literacy levels to the highest in the world.

Cuba’s prostitutes (Havana had become infamous for its mafia-owned gambling casinos and brothels) were trained to take their place among Cuba’s finest teachers. Rent on all forms of housing was limited to 10 percent of income, and soon phased out complete­ ly. A qualitatively expanded and free system of quality health care and education was established through­ out the island. Cuba today graduates a higher percent­ age of its population with post-college degrees than any other nation.

All kinds of government financial support to Cuba’s peasant poor were advanced, including low or zerointerest loans for the purchase of seeds and machin­ ery. Cuba abolished all forms of institutional rac­ ism, established mass women’s organizations, trade unions and the famous Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. The latter were neighborhood-based and armed committees to defend Cuba against U.S.initiated terrorist activities. Indeed, revolutionary Cuba functioned as a nation of armed people with weapons in hand to defend their own interests. Fidel meets with Malcolm X Cuba, thoroughly racist and segregated under Batis­ ta rule, boldly brought its anti-racist message to the U.S. in 1961 when a Castro-led team attended a meet­ ing of the United Nations General Assembly. When news that a high end mid-town Manhattan hotel had refused rooms for the multi-racial Cuban delegation, Malcolm X, then a leader of the Nation of Islam, in­ vited the Cubans to stay in Harlem.

The New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Com­ mittee, led by Bertha Green, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, followed up on Malcolm’s challenge and reached an agreement with the Cubans to spend their days in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, where Fidel met with Malcolm—a stunning rebuke not only to U.S. rac­ ism but to a good portion of the U.S. socialist left who at that time rejected Malcolm’s revolutionary black nationalism as “racism in reverse.”

The Castro-team’s internationalism was not lim­ ited to words. Believing that Cuba’s guerrilla example could be extended to other countries, in the mid1960’s Cuba organized teams of fighters to establish guerrilla “foci” in every Latin American country ex­ cept Paraguay and Mexico.

Cuba and permanent revolution There was no doubt that Cuba’s revolutionary ideal­ ism and dedication to peasant centered rural revolu­ tionary struggle to remove Latin American dictator­ ships flew in the face of the Stalinist USSR’s view that socialist revolution in poor countries was not on the agenda.

But Fidel and his well-intentioned revolutionary fighters tended to underestimate the critical impor­ tance of constructing urban-based mass revolution­ ary workers’ parties of the Leninist type and instead focused on relatively isolated rural guerrilla warfare, not as an adjunct to the seizure of power but rather, as (continued on page 11, in “Nine defendants sentenced in ‘Minneapolis Terror trial’”)

SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2016 7

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What’s legal and what’s just are not necessarily the same thing. Many things we know to be unjust were once legal: slavery and Jim Crow segregation, for example. Many things we know to be just were once illegal: the right of women to vote, the right of workers to form unions, etc. Moreover, laws are not applied equally across the board. When it comes to interpreting and enforcing the law, the rich and pow­ erful are treated quite differently than the rest of us.

The law is not absolute, but is interpreted to fit the times. Just a few years ago, same-sex marriage was illegal in most states. Today, long-standing laws for­ bidding same-sex marriage have been struck down left and right. Woman’s right to abortion was pro­ claimed by a conservative Supreme Court during the Republican administration of Richard Nixon. What tipped the balance was a massive movement in the streets Even where the law appears to be clear-cut, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail. With the moral ledger for nation­ alizing the energy industry pointing so squarely to the need to place the rights of people and the planet ahead of the desire by a few for private profit, any law that might be used to block nationalization of the industry must be unjust.

What would it look like?