By: Z. Pallo Jordan
Pretoria, August 11, 2022.- Sixty-nine years ago, on 26th July 1953, the 22-year-old Raul Castro was among a group of 153 youthful rebels who followed Raul’s elder brother, Fidel, in an assault on the Moncada Army barracks in Santiago de Cuba. A significant number of the contingent died in action. Others were captured and executed. Some died at the hands of torturers during “questioning”. Fidel, his brother, Raul and a few others who managed to escape after the disastrous attempt, were later captured and charged with sedition.
Both Fulgencio Batista, the US-backed dictator, and Fidel Castro regarded the trial that ensued as a political opportunity. Batista hoped for a show trial to discredit the youthful rebels. Fidel Castro, a trained lawyer, treated the trial as a political platform from which he explained his motives and the objectives of the rebellion. His address to the court, later immortalized by his supporters who succeeded in smuggling it out of prison and publishing it as a pamphlet titled “History Will Absolve Me”, became the manifesto of the movement he led.
Castro served only two of his fifteen-year prison sentence because he and his younger brother benefitted from an amnesty in 1955. The Castro brothers then went into exile in Mexico where, with the support of like-minded activists, they established the July 26th Movement, conceived as a guerrilla force to resume the armed struggle against Batista. A contingent numbering 82 men landed in Cuba on 2nd December 1956 to mount a second armed rebellion against the Batista regime. By January 1959 the July 26th Movement had gathered sufficient strength to overthrow it. Batista fled Cuba with a few of his henchmen and millions of dollars shortly after New Year’s day. Fidel Castro was able to stage a triumphant march across the length of Cuba from the Oriente province in the east, to Havana.
The July 26th Movement was one of many anti-Batista movements before 1959. It absorbed the university-based Revolutionary Directorate to form the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution in 1960. In 1965 it adopted the name Communist Party of Cuba, embracing Marxism-Leninism as its theoretical platform.
Despite continuing naval pressure from Britain, Spain had managed to hold onto the largest island in the Caribbean until 1898. An armed uprising for independence that commenced in 1895 gathered momentum and won the support of many in the United States. Cuba attained its independence in 1898 after the US threw its weight behind the rebels.
From then on an unequal relationship evolved between Cuba and its powerful neighbor. Though nominally independent, the US regarded and treated Cuba as a dependency. The July 26th Movement sought to change that relationship by radically transforming Cuba itself. It wanted to pursue a social revolution that would uplift the island’s poor with a land reform program, the redistribution of wealth and mass public education. The pursuance of these objectives set it on a collision course with the powerful US corporations that controlled Cuba’s economy. After an all-too-brief honeymoon that included a visit to Washington by Fidel Castro, the US adopted a hostile attitude towards Cuba, confirmed by an embargo the US imposed in October 1960, ostensibly in retaliation for the nationalization of property owned by US corporations in Cuba.
It will probably puzzle historians and commentators well into the future how an island, with a population smaller than that of New York City, managed to defy a super-power ninety miles away for more than sixty-three years.
US marines had regularly deposed Latin American governments Washington disapproved of. The ill-conceived counter-revolutionary invasion of April 1961 ended in an unprecedented humiliation of the US. Crushing the US backed rebel column raised the prestige of Cuba’s revolutionaries exponentially among the people of South America. In Cuba, the revolutionary government consolidated its support. In an encounter with one of Kennedy’s envoys, Che Guevara mockingly thanked him for the Bay of Pigs. The extension of the embargo to cover all imports in February 1962 was a clear indication of both US impotence and exasperation.
In imaginative social upliftment programs, that began with a campaign to wipe out illiteracy in 1961, the revolutionary government mounted a frontal attack on some of the worst features of under-development in Cuba. In the countryside, land reform emancipated peasants who had been reduced to peonage on large estates. An aggressive public health program accompanied by the training of doctors and nurses has given Cuba one of the best health services in Latin America.
Many of the incumbent power elites of South America did not hesitate to follow the US lead in isolating revolutionary Cuba. Because it posed, and actually pursued an alternative developmental path, all these elites came to regard revolutionary Cuba as a dangerous example. Despite that, Fidel Castro outlived the terms of ten US Presidents and died peacefully in his bed in Havana. The emergence of left-leaning governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia has finally broken the political embargo imposed on Cuba for the past sixty-two years.
At the age of 77, Raul Castro assumed leadership of Cuba when Fidel fell ill. He peacefully handed the Presidency over to Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2019.
History has indeed absolved the participants in that reckless assault on the Moncada barracks in July 1953. Under its revolutionary leadership Cuba became the only Caribbean state with the capacity to project its power beyond that region. The revolutionary audacity of that day raised Cuba from obscurity to a significant player in world affairs. The radical changes that have transformed their island are inconceivable without the heroism of those fighters.
¡Viva Cuba libre! ¡Viva Cuba socialista!