It’s extremely important for us to touch on these current, tangible questions of our epoch, which is characterized by the voracity of imperialism, using all its economic, diplomatic, and military power to dominate the world. Likewise, the collapse of the meringue in the USSR and the socialist camp imposes on revolutionaries the challenge of defending and developing our ideas and programs, aimed at achieving the world of freedom and justice we have proclaimed—socialism—and for which we’re prepared to give our lives.
For us Cubans, who find ourselves 90 miles from the empire, now led by the most aggressive and fascist-like of the 10 administrations we’ve had to confront, the defense of the first socialist state in the Americas constitutes the number-one duty in a world where many renegades from Marxism go around dejected.
It’s important for us to be clear that defense of the socialist state as our number-one task is not a slogan. It’s a reality that conditions have imposed on us; not the one we have chosen. And our people face this task with dignity, renewed spirit, and intelligence.
As the last century began, we were defending the nation at a time when U.S. gunboats were in our waters and the U.S. army was on our soil, involved in the first imperialist war. This fact, which curtailed our independence, has marked our struggles up until today, the opening of the 21st century. We continue defending the sovereignty and freedoms that we won through blood and fire on January 1, 1959.1
A good part of this history is brought together and recounted with absolute truthfulness in the pages of Nueva Internacional, and in the dozens of titles containing accounts and writings by noted Cuban revolutionary combatants published by Pathfinder Press. What encourages us and deepens our commitment even more, however, is the demonstration of how revolutionaries in the United States are committed to and participate in this struggle from within the very belly of the beast, to use the words of the Apostle [José Martí]. They fight for Cuba. They fight for the Americas as a whole. They fight for their own people. They demonstrate to us that the patriotic and internationalist legacy of Henry Reeve is alive and becoming stronger.2
Imperialism’s unbridled war drive was given new impetus by the events of September 11. The world, stunned by what people were seeing on TV screens in their living rooms, watched the criminal spectacle unfold. At the same time, however, it was demonstrated that imperialism was vulnerable, very vulnerable.
That event did no more than accelerate the plans for world domination that were already being carried out, exploiting the shock and pain of the people of the United States. In the article in Nueva Internacional, “Their Transformation and Ours,” we see clearly the operational transformation of the U.S. army aimed at achieving a greater geographic reach and increasing its military operations, contributing to the profits of the military-industrial complex.
They are making good on their slogan that “peace will be the exception and war will be the norm for this army.” We see how they are not only looking for new weapons but pursuing new political and military alliances in different parts of the world that they aim to attack. Based on each new conflict, they proclaim, “The mission will define the coalition.”
In international language, new rhetoric abounds as well. By now we’ve become accustomed to the international press constantly referring to countries over which the bloodiest threats loom, from limited strikes all the way up to the use of nuclear weapons, as “rogue states” and “hostile regimes,” or as part of the “axis of evil.”
To all this we must add new fields of confrontation that are opening up. Fomenting religious hatred, intolerance, and xenophobia becomes a method of war against the Arab peoples. The specter of fascism is haunting the world. The international system of the United Nations is being torn apart.
It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether September 11 was a self-provocation. Why not, too, a new Reichstag fire?
Within the United States, the rights of citizens are being limited more and more. Foreigners are being persecuted. Backed, for example, by the Antiterrorist Law—which outdoes McCarthyism many times over—the U.S. Constitution and its Fifth Amendment are being ripped to shreds.
In face of these facts, we Cubans repeat Che’s words: “you can’t trust imperialism even this far” [indicating the very tip of his little finger].
We are strengthening our defenses, by becoming militarily invulnerable. Here there’s no doubt that the people as a whole will fight for socialism. It will be one giant Playa Girón.3
We are working to guarantee that our economy moves forward. We are advancing the energy revolution; we are strengthening our currency.
But the most important thing is that we are unifying the nation more and more. We are strengthening moral values: honesty, solidarity, and courage, which are elements that characterize our people. We are breaking the back of the remnants of practices alien to our society, such as theft, misappropriation, and cowardice.
We repeat along with Fidel [Castro] that what took place in the Soviet Union will never happen here. There will be no socialist camp dissolved or dispersed here. There will be no defeat here. We have always been very clear about the role of the masses as the main protagonists of the revolution.
By virtue of the invincible power of moral weapons, we possess arms as powerful as nuclear ones. Fidel tells us we have these today. We are fighting against death with thousands of doctors in all parts of the world. Confronting capitalist neoliberalism, which is suffocating the people, we seek forms of fair integration, equality, and development of our peoples.
The fundamental values of our nation are justice, equality, and freedom. With them our people have conquered the biggest victories of our nation.
Nueva Internacional takes up important theoretical questions with professionalism and accuracy. And the books published about the classics of the founders of Marxism and by revolutionaries who consistently applied these classics enrich the political-ideological arsenal not only of the working class, farmers, and youth of the United States, but of our country as well.
These questions have great importance today. When our ideas are attacked by those who point to the failure of the USSR, we must continue working tirelessly to awaken a knowledge of Marxism, to master its classics. We must fight scholasticism and the mindless following of others, evils that castrate the thirst for knowledge, inquisitiveness, and intellectual development—qualities that must characterize the revolutionary. Without these as our starting point we can contribute little to the work of transformation to which we have dedicated our lives.
In the forging of revolutionary cadres, this combination of theory and practice, of practice and theory, helps strengthen the party.
In our case there are important experiences that are specific to our history.
The first one leaps out immediately. It was José Martí, the apostle of our independence, who, when analyzing the causes of the Zanjón Pact and all the conflicts that took place in the Great War of 1868, understood the need for a party to wage the war for Cuba’s independence. The Cuban Revolutionary Party took root among tobacco workers in Tampa and mambises living abroad as well as here on Cuban territory—among those secretly making plans and remaining firm. Martí fell in Dos Ríos, but above all he fell as the leader of that party. And he passed on that historical legacy to all the generations that followed.4
These lessons, these experiences, lived on and defined Moncada.5 During the war of liberation they were cornerstones of the Rebel Army and in the clandestine struggle. Our Communist Party today is the guardian and legitimate heir of that historical legacy. Only this party is capable of transcending us all and continuing to pass on the work to new generations, until the final victory. To achieve that, we must continue to work tirelessly.
We express our thanks to compañera Mary-Alice and to all the compañeros here.
1. Jan. 1, 1959, was the day the regime of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista collapsed and he fled Cuba. As a general strike swept the country, the revolutionary forces led by the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army swiftly took control.
2. Henry Reeve was an American who fought in Cuba’s first war of independence against Spain, reaching the rank of brigadier general. He died in battle in 1876.
3. The April 1961 Cuban victory over a U.S.-organized mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs was sealed at Playa Girón.
4. Cuba’s first war of independence ended in defeat with the 1878 Zanjón Pact. José Martí, Cuba’s national hero, organized the Cuban Revolutionary Party and fought in the second independence war, falling in the battle of Dos Ríos in 1895. The Cuban independence fighters were known as mambises.
5. On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro led a group of revolutionaries in an attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba. This was the opening of the revolutionary war, led by the July 26 Movement and the Rebel Army, that culminated on Jan. 1, 1959, with the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship.
Related articles:
‘Tools to arm and be used by working people and youth’
Speakers at Havana event discuss two newest
issues of Marxist magazine ‘Nueva Internacional’
‘Out of great crises come great solutions’
Front page (for this issue) |
Home |
Text-version home