The talk is copyright ©2000 by Pathfinder Press and is printed here by permission.
 
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
Speaking in New York City's Riverside Church two weeks ago to a meeting of more than 2,500 opponents of Washington's policy towards Cuba, Cuban President Fidel Castro remarked that he did not share the "pretended optimism" about the future presented by many "experts" who simply close their eyes to the reality of what is happening in the world today.

"Humanity is beginning the 21st century in extremely harsh and disquieting conditions," he noted.

He went on to detail the economic and social devastation facing the vast majority of the world's population and the widening divide between them and the tiny handful of families at the top of the capitalist heap.

As if the point needed to be emphasized, this week Forbes magazine published its list of the 400 wealthiest men and women in the United States. The top two alone, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Oracle's Larry Ellison, were reported to hold combined assets valued at $121 billion. That's more than the combined gross domestic product of 31 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with a total population of 380 million people.

The reality of this truly devastating divide--a gap that can only continue to increase so long as capitalism dominates the planet--is the only place to begin if we want to place the U.S. government's cold war against Cuba in historical perspective. We have to begin with the sweep of the epoch in which we are living, the epoch of imperialist war and socialist revolution that began at the opening of the 20th century.

We have to be able to live not moment-to-moment, but to see and live the present as history. And we must find the courage and imagination to affect that history.

Cuba's socialist revolution, and the more than 40 years of ceaseless bipartisan efforts by the U.S. government to destroy it, is not a story of the past, however rich it may be in historical lessons.

It is about the present and the future, about the unfolding, sharpening social struggles that Fidel Castro pointed to, and about the example of Cuba's revolution, its communist leadership, and the ability of Cuban working people to stand down Washington year after year for more than four decades.

How has this been possible? That is the single biggest question before us this morning as we place the Cuban revolution in historical perspective. How and why are the people of Cuba able to do this--to counter assault after assault, provocation after provocation--and not only survive but emerge victorious, despite seemingly insurmountable odds.  
 
A popular revolutionary government
On January 1, 1959, as the new year dawned, one of the bloodiest tyrannies yet seen in Latin America crumbled under the combined blows of the advancing Rebel Army commanded by Fidel Castro from the heights of the eastern Sierra Maestra mountains, and a spreading popular insurrection in the cities and countryside. Batista, the hated dictator, fled.

The men and women of Cuba in their millions had ceased being simply the objects of history; they became its makers as well. They were ordinary working people--factory hands and agricultural workers, small farmers and landless peasants, students and shopkeepers. Most were young, still in their teens and twenties.

To Washington and the wealthy of Cuba these were men and women from nowhere. Nobodies. Bearded rabble. A mob. Easily to be disposed of, bypassed, or if necessary bought off, as the propertied rulers had successfully done so many times in the past when the interests and prerogatives of capital were threatened in Cuba and throughout the Americas.

As the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara wrote a few years later, however, "It never entered their heads that what Fidel Castro and our Movement were saying so candidly and sharply was what we actually intended to do. For them we constitute the great fraud of the century; we stated the truth in an attempt to deceive."

The small handful of incorruptible revolutionaries hadn't set out to change the world. They wanted "merely" to bring down the hated dictatorship backed by the military might of Washington and introduce a larger element of social justice in Cuba. But in that process they transformed themselves. As they fought together with the rural poor to transform the intolerable conditions of life that surrounded them, these fighters themselves became different human beings.

They changed the course of history in our hemisphere, opening the door to the first socialist revolution in the Americas. The first free territory of the Americas, as they so accurately and proudly proclaimed.

Their initial measures were modest: to implement a thoroughgoing land reform, as mandated by the 1940 constitution of Cuba but never carried out; to reduce the rates charged for electricity and telephone service; to establish rent controls; to outlaw racial discrimination in hiring; to desegregate the beaches and other public facilities; to establish and expand a system of public education.

But carrying out even such limited democratic and immediate economic measures brought down the fury of Washington and the propertied interests it represents.

Well over a quarter of the best agricultural land in Cuba was owned by Americans or American-owned corporations, who controlled 40 percent of all sugar production. Seven hundred thousand peasants and other rural toilers were landless--700,000! Ninety percent of the island's mineral wealth was U.S.-controlled, as were 80 percent of the public utilities. One hundred percent of all oil reserves were U.S.- and British-owned. What happened? Fidel Castro, then Cuban prime minister described it eloquently to the United Nations General Assembly in September 1960. The conflicts with Washington began in the first months of the revolution, he explained: "Notes from the U.S. State Department began to rain down on Cuba." Castro continued:

They never asked us about our problems.... They never asked us how many died of starvation in our country, how many were suffering from tuberculosis, how many were unemployed. No.... Every conversation we had with the representatives of the U.S. government centered around the telephone company, the electricity company, the problem of the land owned by U.S. companies. The question they asked was how we were going to pay....They demanded three things: "prompt, adequate, and effective compensation." Do you understand that language?... That means "Pay this instant, in dollars, and whatever we ask." [Applause] We were not 150 percent communists at that time, [Laughter] we just appeared slightly pink. We were not confiscating land. We simply proposed to pay for it in 20 years, and in the only way we could--by bonds that would mature in 20 years, at 4.5 percent interest amortized annually.

Castro noted that the U.S. government had warned the Cuban people that the agrarian reform was ruining the country. "It is possible [Washington] imagined that without the all-powerful monopolies we Cubans were incapable of producing sugar," he said. But clearly "if the revolution had ruined the country, the United States would have had no need to attack us," he pointed out. "They would have left us alone and the U.S. government would have appeared as a very noble and honorable government while we ruined the nation, proving that you cannot make a revolution because revolutions ruin countries."

History, and the policies pursued by the U.S. government, proved the opposite, however.

"Cuba had not been ruined and it therefore had to be ruined," Castro explained.

That was the origin of the course that Washington has pursued for more than 40 years.  
 
From hot war to 'cold war'
Washington's bipartisan war against the people of Cuba, to punish them for their audacity at refusing to back down before Yankee ultimatums and interests, did not begin as a cold war. It began as a hot war. Very hot.

Starting within months of the revolutionary victory in 1959, sugar mills were bombed by planes based in Florida. Cane fields were set on fire. The Belgian ship La Coubre in Havana's harbor, carrying small arms purchased by the Cuban people, "mysteriously" blew up, killing more than 80 people. Terrorist bands were infiltrated into the cities and countryside. Factories were sabotaged. Volunteer student teachers in the mountains were murdered. Leaders were targeted with multiple assassination attempts.

In April 1961, at the Bay of Pigs, an invading force of some 1,500 U.S.-organized and -financed Cuban counterrevolutionary mercenaries were crushed in 72 hours by the combined operations of the popular militias and fledgling Revolutionary Armed Forces. The army was so new that it's revolutionary motto was, "What you learn in the morning, you teach in the afternoon."

The humiliating defeat of the U.S.-backed forces at what Cubans call the battle of Playa Girón led the Kennedy administration to set in motion military and intelligence operations preparing for a direct invasion by U.S. forces. That plan was well advanced by October 1962 when the Soviet missiles that Cuba had agreed to station on the island to defend against the coming invasion were detected, and Washington took the world to the brink of nuclear war.

What stayed Kennedy's hand and forced him to abandon invasion plans at that moment, a military action that would almost certainly have ended in the use of nuclear weapons, was not cool heads in Washington and Moscow, as many pretend. It was the preparedness of the Cuban people and their determination to defend their revolution at all costs. Kennedy, with his politician's instincts, knew that the U.S. people were unwilling to accept the stunning level of casualties the Pentagon gauged would result from any attempted invasion of Cuba.

There would be 18,000 casualties in the first 10 days alone, the Pentagon assured Kennedy--to his great surprise. The first 10 days alone! That was more than U.S. forces were to face during the first several years of the Vietnam war, still to come.

It was the selfless courage of the Cuban people and their armed forces that saved the world from nuclear annihilation.

The origins of the U.S. cold war against Cuba are rooted in that history. They are rooted in Washington's fiasco at the hands of Cuba's armed people at the Bay of Pigs and in Kennedy's cold-blooded political calculations--the result of Cuba's preparedness--that led to the settlement of the October crisis, negotiated between Moscow and Washington behind the backs of the Cuban leadership.

The cost to the American rulers of an invasion was rejected by them as too great. From that point on, Washington set out to try to overturn the Cuban revolution through economic, diplomatic, and political warfare. The violent acts of cowards--terrorist operations, assassination schemes, and biological agents--were used as opportunity presented itself. They were baked in the bread.

The origins are important. Very important. Because Washington's cold war against Cuba is not and never was an extension of the cold war against the USSR.

The cold war we're discussing here today has always been about the strength of the revolution in Cuba, not Moscow or anyplace else. It is about the strength and steadfastness of Cuban working people, the caliber of the Cuban revolutionary leadership, its revolutionary and incorruptible character, its openly-proclaimed internationalist and proletarian course. Nothing else.

Even U.S. Senator Jesse Helms--sponsor of the most recent brutal bill signed into law in 1996 by President Clinton to punish the audacity of the people of Cuba--paid a backhanded tribute to the revolution three months ago, in an opinion piece published by the New York Times. Responding to those who argued that if "trade will promote democratic change in China, then why not adopt the same policy for Cuba?" Helm's answer was simply, "Cuba is not China."

Using the only economic yardstick that matters to the imperialist masters, Helms complained that "foreign investors in Cuba cannot do business with private citizens.... Foreign investors cannot hire or pay workers directly."

In short, unlike China, Cuba will not open its people, land, and resources to exploitation by capital. Even more importantly, it will not make foreign policy decisions calculated to win favorable diplomatic or economic consideration from Washington, the European Union, or any other power, if doing so entails harm to the sovereignty or defense of the people of Cuba or any other peoples or oppressed nations.

Yet such are the minimum "concessions" demanded by Washington for changing its policies of 40-plus years standing--policies needed by the U.S. rulers to try to blacken the image of Cuba's revolutionary example and warn the peoples of Latin America, especially, of what will happen if they emulate that example.

In short, Cuba's socialist revolution has not and will not be negotiated away.  
 
U.S. imperialism has lost the cold war
It is worth reminding ourselves that Washington's cold war against the Soviet Union was not the U.S. rulers' policy of choice there either. It was adopted only because World War II ended with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union still undefeated, despite the 20 million dead and physical destruction inflicted by German imperialism.

What prevented the U.S. government from using its military might then was the immediate postwar labor upsurge in Europe and the United States, together with the mass demonstrations and "going-home" movement among U.S. GIs in the Pacific and Europe, and the accelerating demands for civil rights for Black Americans. Washington was unable to move against the socialist foundations and working people of a weakened Soviet Union, or to block the victory of the Chinese revolution, or to slow the sweeping advances of the colonial revolution from Indonesia, to Vietnam, to India, and eventually to Africa.

That is how the U.S. rulers "lost China." And it marked the beginning of the cold war.

U.S. imperialism had to try to accomplish by other means--"cold" means--what Washington and its allies were too weak to accomplish militarily at the end of World War II and immediately following it.

The brutal bureaucratic regime that had dominated all Soviet life and politics since the late 1920s, and that crumbled of its own internal contradictions some 60 years later, was--despite the labels it appropriated--not socialist but the negation of socialism.

The U.S. rulers set out to intensify economic, military, diplomatic, and political pressure on this regime to act as a transmission belt for imperialist interests against the workers and farmers of the USSR and the world, to prevent them from acting in defense of their own class interests. The U.S. rulers' hope was that this counterrevolutionary course would so demoralize the Soviet toilers as to deliver the country back into the world capitalist system without having to try to defeat the working class there in battle.

The policy failed. The U.S. lost the cold war. What broke was the transmission belt, not the toilers. Their resistance to capitalist forms of exploitation and its social relations remains a powerful impediment to integration into the capitalist world. The imperialist powers will now have to take on the workers and farmers throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union directly--and sooner or later militarily--in order to impose a capitalist order on them.

That is what the spreading war in the Balkans, NATO's assault on Yugoslavia, is all about, no matter how masked it may seem today. That is what Washington's determination to establish the Star Wars missile shield is about. The wars of the 21st century have begun.  
 
Not a tropical variant of Stalinism
The cold war against Cuba is a different matter.

When the Soviet bureaucracy and its siblings imploded at the opening of the 1990s, and Cuba's primary world trade connections were suddenly shattered, the U.S. government hoped the revolution would be easy pickings. A few in Washington genuinely believed that the sudden, brutal decline in living standards in Cuba would lead to popular discontent and a collapse of support among Cuban working people for their revolutionary government. Many thought the Cuban government and its leadership were at bottom another transmission belt with a Spanish accent. But they missed the beat.

The U.S. rulers failed to understand, as they have from the beginning, that the leadership of the Cuban revolution is not some tropical variant of a Stalinist type, but its antithesis--a truly popular, internationalist, and communist worker and peasant leadership. Far from collapsing, the revolution has emerged stronger today, more self-confident, despite the enormous problems Cubans face and concessions they have been obliged to make to survive, as well as the dangers these concessions entail.

The question most frequently posed in meetings and discussions about Cuba that I have been involved in is simply: How has the Cuban revolution survived more than 40 years of relentless determination by the world's most powerful empire to destroy it? And especially, how has it managed to come through the last 10 years?

Suddenly, at the beginning of the 1990s, Cuba was deprived of 75 percent of its foreign trade. The economic dislocation was then compounded by an intensification of the U.S. economic war. Over night, an underdeveloped country was brutally thrust into the world market with all the devastating consequences that entailed.

As the Cuban leadership has pointed out on more than one occasion, no other government anywhere in world could have survived such a test of popular support.

Is this an exaggeration by the leaders of the revolution? I don't think so. It is not bragging. It is a statement of fact.

It registers the depth of popular support among the Cuban people for their socialist revolution. For the transformation of social relations they've achieved, as social solidarity replaces the dog-eat-dog reality of life under capitalism. For their commitment to international solidarity from Latin America to Africa to the people of the United States.  
 
Irreconcilable class systems
Several months ago a group of working farmers from the United States visited Cuba. They were curious to see with their own eyes a country where men and women like themselves sit in the highest councils of government, a country where no working farmer can lose his or her land to a bank or debt collector. They wanted to find out how such a society had been established and why the U.S. government is so hostile to it.

When they returned, one of the participants in that trip, a dairy farmer from Wisconsin, described an experience that made an enormous impact on him.

Among the many farms the American visitors went to was an urban cooperative that raises fresh vegetables to supply the needs of Havana's residents. These cooperatives, some of them quite large, have sprung up on plots of unused land all over the city in the last years, making a qualitative difference in the availability of fresh vegetables there. The members of the cooperative who work the land share in the produce and the proceeds from sales. At this one, income was greater than expenses and everyone was quite proud of and happy with their work.

The farmer from the United States knew from his own experience what happens to profitable cooperatives under capitalism, as wealthier farmers buy out their struggling brothers and sisters and the whole operation is progressively taken over by bigger and bigger monopolies, remaining a cooperative in name only. He asked the woman who was the head of the cooperative in Havana, "How do you stop someone from just moving in and taking this over?"

The director, he said, just looked at him in utter bewilderment and responded, "But why would anyone want to do that?"

Nothing could better capture the difference in social attitudes between two antithetical class systems. In that exchange you see crystallized the change in social relations that takes root when private property in the means of production is eliminated, along with the cash nexus of all human interaction under capitalism.  
 
Deep historical roots
To understand the staying power of the Cuba revolution today, you also have to appreciate the reach of its roots. The struggle that culminated in the victory of January 1, 1959, and the trajectory it accelerated, is the product of a long historical struggle, whose continuity has occasionally been frayed but never broken.

Last year, when hundreds of thousands of Cubans poured into the streets, week after week, demanding the U.S. government return Elián González to his homeland, those mobilizations were the expression of a deep popular sentiment and determination. They were organized and led. That's what Cubans expect of their leadership. But the outpourings were not staged. Anyone who was in Cuba during those months can attest to that fact.

Next Monday, there will be another mobilization in Havana, demanding the U.S. government surrender the pilot who hijacked a crop-dusting plane a few days ago. They will denounce the infamous 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act that has enticed hundreds, and probably thousands, of Cubans to their deaths these last 35 years, including the one who died when that small aircraft ditched in the Gulf of Mexico.

At every opportunity, the revolution strives for the moral high ground, refusing to acquiesce, banishing resignation.

Wave after wave of massive resistance for more than 40 years is incomprehensible if you don't trace the roots of struggle back to the last century. You have to see the 400 years of Spanish colonial domination. The intertwining of the struggle to abolish slavery and the plantation system with the struggle to win independence from the Spanish crown. A war for independence that took decades to triumph and cost the lives of one third of the Cuban population. A struggle that culminated in victory in 1898--only to have that achievement snatched away as the adolescent imperialist power to the north moved in to claim the spoils of the Spanish-American-Cuban War, establishing a Yankee protectorate in Havana.

Imposing a U.S. military occupation of the island.

Forcing the new "Cuban" government in 1901 to incorporate into its constitution the infamous Platt Amendment ceding Washington the right to militarily intervene in Cuban affairs when it deemed it necessary to do so "for the preservation of Cuban independence," that is, the preservation of U.S. interests--a clause eliminated from the constitution only some 30 years later, in the wake of the 1933-34 revolutionary upsurge.

Exacting tribute in the form of a perpetual lease granted Washington for the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station.

Providing support for decades of rampant corruption, crime, degradation of women and children, and brutal dictatorships.

All the while, buying up the land, minerals, railroads, and factories of Cuba as a Yankee fiefdom, and turning the country into a degrading, gangster-ridden playpen for the rich and arrogant of North America.

This century of struggle, under the leadership of political and moral giants the likes of José Martí, Antonio Maceo, Máximo Gómez, and Manuel de Céspedes, is what formed and nourished the leaders of the struggle to overthrow the Batista dictatorship. The determination of the combatants in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra to fight for genuine independence from Washington, their knowledge of the stakes and difficulties involved, and their understanding of the consequences of surrender was steeped in the bloody lessons of this entire history.

As Ernesto Che Guevara told the first Latin American Youth Congress in July 1960 in Havana, "If this revolution is Marxist, it is because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx."  
 
Why the cold war has failed
Washington's cold war against Cuba continues because, as Fidel put it in a recent interview with Federíco Mayor Zaragoza, the former director general of UNESCO, "Cuba will neither negotiate nor sell out its revolution, which has cost the blood and the sacrifice of many of its sons and daughters."

The cold war against Cuba is a policy that has failed in its ultimate goals. Utterly. And that is what leads many today to question why Washington does not abandon it. But it remains the bedrock of U.S. policy because Washington has nothing more effective, no more "intelligent" policy from the standpoint of finance capital, to put in its place.

The problem for the bipartisan rulers remains that the Cuban people refuse to cry uncle, refuse to surrender. The leadership remains as one with the Cuban toilers, the transformers of nature into the wealth and culture that underpin a truly human future. The revolutionary government has refused to trade Cuban sovereignty and human dignity for a mess of pottage. The problem is not the "intelligence" or lack thereof exhibited by the U.S. rulers. Their problem is the Cuban revolution's irreconcilable antagonism to the needs and prerogatives of capital. Cuba's problem--and ours--is U.S. capitalism.

As Fidel Castro explained at the United Nations two weeks ago, the Cuban people in their majority really don't think capitalism has anything to offer the future of humanity. "There is nothing in the existing economic and political order that can serve the interests of Humankind," he told the assembled heads of state. Nothing.

That is why the Cuban revolution remains an example to the oppressed and exploited the world over, including right here, showing that yes, it is possible to stand against the mightiest power on earth and win.

Sí se puede.  
 
The world of the 21st century
To end, we have to return to the world Fidel Castro described at the United Nations and at Riverside Church during his recent trip, which many of you here today saw, heard, or read about. That is the world of growing capitalist disorder, of intensified interimperialist competition and conflict, of third world devastation.

The conditions Castro described, however, are giving birth not only to millions of suffering victims--truly the slaughter of the innocents--but to millions who become fighters and who more and more loudly say "Enough!" and have begun to march.

In their ranks are those here in the United States who are part of the growing resistance in the mines, the packinghouses, garment shops, mills and factories and fields. Alongside the descendants of slaves, native Americans, and previous generations of immigrants, today the largest wave of Hispanic immigration ever in history is swelling the ranks of the U.S. working class, bringing new confidence and traditions of struggle into battles taking shape across the country. The employers' arrogance, colonial-master mentality, and brutality is becoming the spark that sets off the resistance.

As this world of the 21st century comes into being, the Cuban revolution will be there with its internationalist strengths, fighting alongside us as it has alongside others these last 40 years.

The theme of this forum today--a goal we all share--is "ending the U.S. cold war against Cuba." Throughout the day we will be discussing not only the origins, history, and character of that war, but how to join forces with those who want to work to force changes in that policy, to make its practitioners here at home who insist on maintaining it pay a growing price.

Our goal is not to find some more effective way to try to destroy the Cuban revolution but to uphold the right of the Cuban people to themselves decide their historical course and social values, and to live in a world where their dignity and sovereignty, like that of all other peoples, is respected.

The vast majority of the people of the United States have no reason to impose anything on the people of Cuba but the offer of an extended hand of human solidarity, as we fight together to change the policies of the government of this country that pretends to speak in our name.  
 
 
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