BY SARA LOBMAN
The speech by Fidel Castro, major excerpts of which are
featured in this issue, was given to a mass rally of 80,000
peasants and workers in Santa Clara, Cuba's third-largest
city, on June 21, 1959.
Just five weeks earlier, on May 17, Castro had signed into law a far-reaching agrarian reform. The rally in Santa Clara, the capital of central Cuba's Las Villas province, was one of numerous events held across the country to explain the Agrarian Reform Law, mobilize support for it, and build toward a national demonstration in Havana on July 26. That date marked the sixth anniversary of the 1953 attack on the Moncada garrison in Santiago de Cuba by 160 combatants under Castro's command - the action that opened the revolutionary struggle against the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
Hundreds of thousands of peasants from across Cuba traveled to Havana, many for the first time in their lives, to take part in the gigantic July 26 mobilization. Workers in the capital opened their homes to these campesinos, strengthening the alliance of exploited producers in city and countryside on which the revolution was based.
The 1959 Agrarian Reform Law was "one of the most important events in the life of Cuba," as Castro put it in proclaiming the law on May 17. The government's rapid action to organize rural toilers to implement the land reform consolidated the worker-peasant alliance and brought the revolution into head- on confrontation with U.S. imperialism and its allies among the exploiting classes in Cuba.
Prior to the revolution, 85 percent of Cuba's small farmers rented rather than owned land. They lived under the constant threat of eviction. Some 200,000 peasant families did not have a single acre to till for their own use. Meanwhile, more than 50 percent of the most productive land was in the hands of wealthy plantation owners abroad, primarily from the United States.
Eradicating these oppressive and inequitable conditions was central to the struggle against Batista from its origins, codified in the programmatic manifesto of the revolutionary July 26 Movement - "History Will Absolve Me," Fidel Castro's 1953 speech to the court that convicted and sentenced him following the Moncada attack. And in October 1958, toward the close of the revolutionary war that brought down the Batista regime three months later, the Rebel Army put its political authority and military power behind the peasants' demands, decreeing "Law no. 3" redistributing land in areas liberated from the tyranny.
The goal of the May 1959 law was to expropriate the large plantations, eliminate the system of rents and mortgages crushing the peasantry, and guarantee use of the land to those who worked it. It granted each peasant family a "vital minimum" of two caballerias, or 67 acres. Every tenant, sharecropper, or squatter cultivating up to 165 acres was given clear title to that land.
Land could be mortgaged only to the state, not to banks or private individuals. This freed peasants from the threat of foreclosure and lessened their enslavement to debt by making credit available at favorable rates. The law limited the amount of land an individual family could own to 1,000 acres in most cases, and prohibited foreign ownership.
As the accompanying article by Mike Taber explains, the 1959 Agrarian Reform Law was a watershed in the revolution, accelerating its anticapitalist course. It was a far- reaching, revolutionary, and anti-imperialist measure, one that could only be carried out by the workers and peasants. But it did not end capitalist relations on the land. Many privately owned estates between 165 and 1,000 acres continued to be cultivated by agricultural workers who faced brutal exploitation at the hands of landowners.
In 1963 the revolutionary government in Cuba organized the toilers to implement a second agrarian reform, which will be the topic of the September installment in this series. The new law expropriated capitalist farmers with holdings in excess of 165 acres - still 20 percent of the agricultural land at the time. Working farmers and their families were guaranteed the right to remain on their land and produce for as long as they wished. They would receive as much aid as the resources of the revolution permitted. These guarantees have been honored to this day.
The June 1959 speech by Fidel Castro excerpted above will appear in full in the first volume of a collection of his talks from the early years of the revolution. The translation is copyright (c) Pathfinder Press and reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.