The Militant (logo) 
Vol.63/No.43      December 6, 1999 
 
 
'Making History': four generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces speak out  
New title from Pathfinder features interviews with leaders of the revolution 
 
 
Below we print the introduction by Mary-Alice Waters to Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, just released by Pathfinder Press. The book contains interviews with Cuban generals Néstor López Cuba, Enrique Carreras, José Ramón Fernández, and Harry Villegas.

The interviews took place in Havana with Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Martín Koppel. Barnes is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States. Waters is the president of Pathfinder Press and the editor of the Marxist magazine New International. Koppel is editor of the Spanish-language monthly magazine Perspectiva Mundial.

The Cuban publishing house Editora Política will release the Spanish edition of this book in early 2000. The introduction is copyright © Pathfinder Press 1999, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant. 
 
 
"We have been capable of making history but not of writing it." 
—Raúl Castro

On January 1, 1959, men and women of Cuba in their millions ceased being simply the objects of history and became its makers as well. In so doing they opened the door to the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

As the four interviews in this book highlight, the human beings who fought to accomplish that feat were ordinary working people. Overwhelmingly young, most still in their teens or early twenties—workers, farmers, students, shopkeepers—they didn't set out to change world history. They had merely decided to bring down by any means necessary the bloody tyranny of Fulgencio Batista—a dictatorship backed by the military might of Washington and the propertied interests it represents.

As the revolutionary war unfolded from late 1956 on, victory was decided by the caliber of the Rebel Army soldiers forged under the command of Fidel Castro. Where the men and women who emerged as the leading cadre of the Rebel Army came from, and what shaped them, is the real subject of this book. As generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) talk about their experiences, we get a glimpse of how the struggle itself transformed them, changing their understanding of the world and their place in it and creating the disciplined communist fighters whose unity has both led the Cuban people forward and held U.S. imperialism at bay for more than four decades.

"The Cuban revolution you see today continues, but is not the same as, the Cuban revolution of yesterday, even after the victory," the Argentine-born Cuban leader Ernesto Che Gueva-ra told a thousand young people from throughout the Americas gathered in Havana the summer of 1960 for the historic first Latin American Youth Congress.

Much less is it the Cuban insurrection prior to the victory, at the time when those eighty-two youth made the difficult crossing of the Gulf of Mexico in a boat taking on water, to reach the shores of the Sierra Maestra. Between those youth and the representatives of Cuba today there is a distance that cannot be measured in years—or at least not correctly measured in years, with twenty-four-hour days and sixty-minute hours.

All the members of the Cuban government—young in age, young in character, and young in the illusions they had—have nevertheless matured in the extraordinary school of experience, in living contact with the people, with their needs and aspirations.

The hope all of us had was to arrive one day somewhere in Cuba, and after a few shouts, a few heroic actions, a few deaths, and a few radio broadcasts, to take power and drive out the dictator Batista. History showed us it was much more difficult to overthrow a whole government backed by an army of murderers—murderers who were partners of that government and were backed by the greatest colonial power on earth.

That was how, little by little, all our ideas changed.  
 

*****
 
In April 1997 a team of reporters for the Militant newspaper and the Spanish-language magazine Perspectiva Mundial, both published in New York, visited Cuba. Reminiscences and analyses of the victory of the Cuban militias and Revolutionary Armed Forces at Playa Girón on the Bay of Pigs were in the news, as the thirty-sixth anniversary of that titanic accomplishment approached.

On April 17, 1961, an expeditionary force of some 1,500 Cu-ban mercenaries, armed, organized, and financed by the U.S. government, landed in an isolated area of south-central Cuba with the objective of establishing a beachhead, declaring a provisional government, and appealing to Washington for immediate military support. Within seventy-two hours the invad-ing troops were routed and virtually the entire force taken captive. The beachhead was never consolidated. Cuban com-man-der in chief Fidel Castro rightly referred to this battle as the first military defeat of Yankee imperialism in Latin America.

Our reporting team mentioned to colleagues in Cuba that we would like to write something for our readers commemorating that historic event. When asked if we would be interested in interviewing some veterans of the combat at Playa Girón, we said yes, enthusiastically. Within a matter of days, much to our surprise, the combatants with whom interviews had been arranged turned out to be three division and brigadier generals of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba—José Ramón Fernández, field commander of the Cuban forces at Playa Girón; Enrique Carreras, who commanded Cuba's air force in that battle; and Néstor López Cuba, one of the tank corps commanders.

The interviews actually occurred a few months later, in October 1997. By chance they coincided with the anniversary of the 1962 October Crisis, known in the United States as the "Missile" Crisis. Thirty-five years earlier, the administration of John F. Kennedy had pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war in a showdown with the governments of Cuba and the Soviet Union over the installation of Soviet nuclear weapons—accepted by Cuba in face of the need to defend the island from Washington's mounting invasion preparations. This anniversary, too, was much in the news, both in the United States and Cuba, and was an unexpected opportunity to ask the three generals not only about combat at the Bay of Pigs, but about their experiences at the time of the October Crisis as well.

October 1997 was an important moment in Cuba's history. Solemn ceremonies from Havana to Santa Clara and beyond commemorated the return to Cuba of the remains of Ernesto Che Guevara and six other internationalist combatants who had fought alongside him in Bolivia in 1966–67 in the effort he led to consolidate a revolutionary leadership nucleus in the Southern Cone of Latin America. In his speech to the main ceremony in Santa Clara where the remains of these internationalist fighters were laid to rest, President Fidel Castro said he viewed "Che and his men as reinforcements, as a detachment of invincible combatants that this time includes not just Cubans. It also includes Latin Americans who have come to fight at our side and to write new pages of history and glory."

In addition to the three commanders at Playa Girón, we were able to interview one of the combatants in the Bolivian campaign: Brigadier General Harry Villegas. "Pombo," as he is known worldwide, served on Guevara's general staff in Bolivia, and following Guevara's death commanded the Cuban and Bolivian revolutionaries who fought their way out of the military encirclement organized by the Bolivian army and U.S. special forces.

Generals of the FAR have given few interviews over the years to Cuban, let alone non-Cuban, reporters. The four generals placed no restrictions on the topics or questions to be posed to them, however, nor did they ask for questions in advance. The interviews at times took on the character of a conversation and exchange. Revolutionaries from the United States and Cuba talked about history-making events, some of which they had lived through in common from very different vantage points in the frontline trenches.

From their earliest political experiences in the struggle against the Batista dictatorship; to their participation in the epic combat of David against the Goliath of U.S. imperialism throughout the opening years of the revolution; to their internationalist missions in parts of the world as far removed from each other as Syria, Vietnam, Bolivia, the Congo, Nicaragua, and Angola; to their observations about the challenges facing the Cuban revolution today—the generals spoke with candor and clarity.  
 

Four things above all stand out

First, as Fidel Castro has often remarked, Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces didn't learn the art of war by reading manuals in the classrooms of a military academy. "They are forces whose roots are in history and whose apprenticeship was in combat," he noted on April 19, 1963, the second anniversary of the defeat of U.S. imperialism at the Bay of Pigs. Cuban men and women fought for something they believed in—and combined that experience, as soon as time permitted, with the study and training that have made the FAR among the most feared and most admired armies in the world, depending on one's class standpoint.

"This revolution has been characterized not by being a copier but by being a creator," Fidel told the July 26 rally in Santiago de Cuba in 1988. "Had we been willing to follow the schemas, we would not be gathered here today, we would not have had July 26, we would not have had a socialist revolution in this hemisphere. . . . Theory had it that no revolution could be made here. . . . That's what the manuals used to say."

Second, the fact that the majority of the cadres of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, including its officers, came from peasant and working-class origins is a product of the actual development of the Rebel Army over the course of the 1956–58 revolutionary war. The deliberate measures by Cuba's leadership to maintain that social composition are an expression of the class interests the FAR defends.

The heartfelt revulsion expressed in these interviews over the contemptuous and dehumanizing treatment of soldiers by officers in other armies, as witnessed by some of the generals, underscores the class character and composition of the FAR. This character is registered above all in the internationalism of the Cuban revolution. "Whoever is incapable of fighting for others will never be capable of fighting for himself," was the way Fidel Castro summarized this touchstone of the revolution in a speech to half a million people in Havana on Cuba's Armed Forces Day in December 1988.

Third, these interviews highlight the decisive place of youth in the forging of the revolutionary movement in Cuba. Two of the generals were themselves teenagers when they joined the Rebel Army in the Sierra Maestra. The preponderance of young fighters carrying the full range of military and political responsibilities in the revolutionary government following the triumph in 1959 is evident.

Fourth, the heroic days of the Cuban revolution are not past, but are present and future. The extremely difficult economic conditions since the early 1990s referred to in Cuba as the Special Period pose challenges as great as any the revolution has ever faced, especially political challenges. That is why the accurate history of the Cuban revolution and its Revolutionary Armed Forces, as told by living combatants, becomes even more important to the continuity needed so much by young revolutionary fighters.

As the generals interviewed here explain and exemplify, the seeds of the revolutionary discipline, selfless attitudes, and commitment to human solidarity that mark the vanguard in Cuba today were planted in the earliest years of the struggle against the Batista dictatorship. Many institutions, including the FAR itself, the militias, and the Union of Young Communists trace their origins in a straight line to the Rebel Army—which also gave birth to policies as wide-ranging as the revolution's priority to advancing the literacy and culture of the toilers, its measures to combat racial discrimination and promote women's equality, and its profound agrarian revolution.

In the initial years following the triumph in 1959, the cadres of Cuba's revolutionary movement did not have the leisure, nor did many of the workers and peasants who were making history yet have the cultural level, that would have enabled them to also write it down for others. That task is now consciously and deliberately being shouldered by the revolutionary leadership. The fruits of this endeavor are important not just for the people of Cuba, but for workers, farmers, and youth throughout the Americas and around the world who seek to emulate the example of the Cuban revolution. Making History, we hope, is a modest contribution to this effort.  
 

*****
 
A special note of appreciation is due to Santiago Dórquez, director of Editora Política, as well as Iraida Aguirrechu, Nora Madan, and others there whose aid and collaboration made possible not only the interviews in this volume but their careful editing as well.

Readers for whom the many historical references in these pages are largely new or unfamiliar will find the extensive combined glossary and notes at the end of the volume especially useful. Similarly, the notes on further reading will be an aid for those who wish to delve more deeply into the lessons of the modern working-class movement that form the historical framework assumed by the four Cuban generals and referred to in their remarks.

We dedicate this volume to the young people of Cuba and worldwide, for whom the men and women of the Rebel Army still point the way.

Mary-Alice Waters 
October 1999
 
 
 
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