‘History will absolve me’: program of Cuban Revolution

Excerpt from Fidel Castro’s defense speech at trial after 1953 Moncada attack

Below is an excerpt from Fidel Castro’s famous defense speech “History Will Absolve Me,” delivered at the close of the trial where he and 31 others were sentenced to prison for the July 26, 1953, assault on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba. The speech was printed clandestinely and distributed all across the island, helping to assemble the cadres that overthrew the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in 1959, bringing Cuba’s workers and farmers to power.

Thousands rallied in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, July 26 — and many more across the island and worldwide — to celebrate the 63rd anniversary of that action, and the Cuban Revolution, which stands as a powerful example for working people worldwide. Other events are being organized in Cuba and elsewhere to mark Castro’s 90th birthday Aug. 13.

The excerpts are from a new translation prepared by Pathfinder Press. Subheadings are by the Militant.

The indictment for this trial should have included five revolutionary laws — the laws that we planned to proclaim immediately after the capture of the Moncada garrison and broadcast to the nation by radio. …

The first revolutionary law would have returned sovereign rule to the people. The 1940 constitution would have been proclaimed the supreme law of the land until such time as the people decided to modify or change it. It’s a fact that no popularly elected bodies exist at present to implement the constitution and punish those who betray it. Therefore, the revolutionary movement — the living incarnation of this sovereignty, the only source of legitimate power — would have assumed all powers inherent within the constitution, except that of modifying the basic law itself. That is, the revolutionary movement would have assumed legislative, executive and judicial powers.

This approach could not be more transparent or free of sterile absurdities and fakery. A government proclaimed by the mass of combatants would be vested with all necessary powers to implement the will of the people and bring about true justice. …

The second revolutionary law would have given ownership of the land — under the condition that it couldn’t be mortgaged or transferred — to all small farmers, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and squatters who work five caballerías [165 acres] of land or less. …

The third revolutionary law would have granted workers and employees the right to share 30 percent of the profits of all large industrial, commercial, and mining enterprises, including sugar mills. …

The fourth revolutionary law would have granted all small sugar farmers a 55 percent share of the sugar their cane yields. …

The fifth revolutionary law would have ordered the confiscation of the holdings of those who had embezzled money from any previous regime. …

Solidarity with peoples of continent

Furthermore, it was to be declared that Cuba’s policy in the Americas would be one of close solidarity with the democratic peoples of the continent, and that all those politically persecuted by bloody tyrannies oppressing sister nations would find generous asylum, brotherhood, and sustenance in the land of Martí. …

These laws would have been proclaimed immediately. … They would have been followed by another series of fundamental laws and measures. These would have included agrarian reform, a complete overhaul of the educational system, nationalization of the electric and telephone monopolies, refund to the people of the illegal and excessive rates these companies charged in the past, and payment to the treasury of all taxes they brazenly evaded in the past.

All these laws and others would have been based on strict compliance with two essential new articles of our constitution.

The first article would ban large landed estates. To end them, the maximum area of land any one person or entity might own for each type of agricultural enterprise would be stipulated by law. Measures would be adopted to return land to the people of Cuba.

The second article would categorically order the state to use all means at its disposal to provide employment for all who lack it and to ensure a decent livelihood to each manual or intellectual worker.

None of these laws could be called unconstitutional. The first popularly elected government that came to power after these decrees would have to respect them, not only because of moral obligations to the nation but because when people achieve something they have yearned for over generations, no force in the world is capable of taking it away.

Land, industrialization, housing, unemployment, education, and public health: these are the six problems we would have taken resolute steps to solve, along with restoring civil liberties and political democracy. …

Eighty-five percent of small farmers in Cuba pay rent and live under the constant threat of being evicted from their plots of land.

More than half of our best farmland is in the hands of foreign owners.

In Oriente, our biggest province, the holdings of the United Fruit Company and the West Indian Company extend coast to coast from north to south.

Some 200,000 peasant families don’t have a square meter of land to till to provide food for their starving children.

On the other hand, nearly 300,000 caballerías [10 million acres] of productive land owned by powerful interests remain uncultivated. …

Except for a few food processing plants, lumber mills, and textile factories, Cuba continues to be primarily a producer of raw materials. We export sugar to import candy. We export hides to import shoes. We export iron ore to import plows. …

Just as serious or even worse is the tragedy in housing. There are 200,000 huts and hovels in Cuba. Some 400,000 families in the countryside and in cities are crowded into barracks-style housing and shacks that lack even the most elementary sanitary facilities.

Some 2.2 million of our urban population pay rents that absorb between one-fifth and one-third of their incomes.

Some 2.8 million of our rural population and those who live on the outskirts of our cities lack electricity. …

Death is the only liberation from such poverty and here, yes, the state is most helpful. Ninety percent of children in the countryside are devoured by parasites that enter under the nails of their bare feet. …

Crime of unemployment

When the father of a family works only four months a year, how can he buy clothing and medicine for his children? They will grow up with rickets. At age thirty they won’t have a single healthy tooth in their mouths. They will have heard ten million speeches and will finally die of poverty and deception. Public hospitals, which are always full, accept only patients recommended by some powerful politician who demands in return the vote of the unfortunate person and his entire family so that Cuba may continue forever in the same or worse condition.

In face of these facts, is it not understandable that from May to December over a million people are jobless? …

When you try a defendant for robbery, honorable judges, you don’t ask him how long he has been unemployed. How many children he has. Which days of the week he ate, which he didn’t. You aren’t concerned at all with the social conditions he faces. You send him to jail without further thought. But the rich man who burns warehouses and stores to collect insurance doesn’t go to jail — even though a few human beings may have gone up in flames as well — because he has more than enough money to hire lawyers and bribe judges.

You imprison the poor wretch who steals because he is hungry. Yet not one of the hundreds of thieves who steal millions from the government has ever spent a night behind bars. You dine with them at the end of the year in an aristocratic club and they enjoy your respect.

In Cuba, when a government official becomes a millionaire overnight and enters the fraternity of the rich, he could very well be greeted with the words of that wealthy character in Balzac — Taillefer — who in his toast to the young heir to an enormous fortune, says:

Gentlemen, let us drink to the power of gold. M. de Valentin, who has become a millionaire six times over, has become a power. He is a king, he can do anything; he is above everyone, as are all who are rich. For him from now on, the statement that “All Frenchmen are equal before the law” is a lie inscribed at the opening of the legal code. He is not going to obey the law; the law is going to obey him. There are neither scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires.*

* From 1831 novel by Honoré de Balzac La peau de chagrin (The wild ass’s skin).

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