The declaration was widely discussed by working people in Cuba and approved by acclamation after being delivered by Fidel Castro to a rally of one million in Havana Feb. 4, 1962. The perspectives in the anticapitalist document struck throughout the Americas like a bolt of lightning because they cut through decades of lies and distortions and illuminated the centuries of struggle against colonial and imperialist domination of Latin America and the Caribbean. The declaration points to the example of the Cuban Revolution as the way forward for the oppressed and exploited in the Americas and worldwide.

Three years earlier, on Jan. 1, 1959, rebel forces led by Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, and others had overthrown the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and paved the way for a government representing the class interests of workers and farmers.

In May of that year the Cuban Revolution initiated a deep-going agrarian reform, confiscating the large landed estates of foreign and Cuban owners and distributing land titles to hundreds of thousands of peasants. By late 1960, through mass mobilizations of workers and peasants, Cuba had nationalized the country's mines, mills, factories, and banks and opened the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

On April 19, 1961, U.S. imperialism suffered its first military defeat in the Americas, as the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and popular militias, defending their revolution, crushed within 72 hours the U.S.-organized mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

The invasion was part of an acceleration of hostile acts by the billionaire ruling families of the United States and their government in Washington. The Second Declaration of Havana a year later came days after Cuba had been expelled at Washington's behest from the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS called on governments in the hemisphere to cut all economic and diplomatic ties with Cuba. On February 3, just one day earlier, Washington had imposed a trade embargo against Cuba, a policy that remains in place today, forty years later.

This pamphlet is copyright © 1994 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

What Cuba can give to the peoples, and has already given, is its example.

And what does the Cuban revolution teach? That revolution is possible, that the people can make it, that in the contemporary world there are no forces capable of halting the liberation movement of the peoples.

Our triumph would never have been feasible if the revolution itself had not been inexorably destined to arise out of existing conditions in our socioeconomic reality, a reality that exists to an even greater degree in a good number of Latin American countries.

It inevitably occurs that in the nations where the control of the Yankee monopolies is strongest, the exploitation of the oligarchy cruelest, and the situation of the laboring and peasant masses most unbearable, the political power appears most solid. The state of siege becomes habitual, every manifestation of discontent by the masses is repressed by force. The democratic path is closed completely. The brutal character of dictatorship, the form of rule adopted by the ruling classes, reveals itself more clearly than ever. It is then that the revolutionary explosion of the peoples becomes inevitable.

Although it is true that in those underdeveloped countries of America the working class generally is relatively small, there is a social class which, because of the subhuman conditions in which it lives, constitutes a potential force that, led by the workers and the revolutionary intellectuals, has a decisive importance in the struggle for national liberation: the peasants.

Our countries combine the circumstances of an underdeveloped industry with those of an agrarian regime of a feudal character. That is why, with all the hardships of the conditions of life of the urban workers, the rural population lives in even more horrible conditions of oppression and exploitation. But it is also, with exceptions, the absolute majority sector, at times exceeding 70 percent of the Latin American population.

Discounting the landlords, who often reside in the cities, the rest of that great mass gains its livelihood working as peons on the haciendas for the most miserable wages, or work the land under conditions of exploitation that in no manner put the Middle Ages to shame. These circumstances are those which determine that in Latin America the rural poor constitute a tremendous potential revolutionary force.

The armies, the force on which the power of the exploiting classes rest, are built and equipped for conventional war. However, they become absolutely impotent when they have to confront the irregular struggle of the peasants on their own terrain. They lose ten men for each revolutionary fighter who falls, and demoralization spreads rapidly among them from having to face an invisible and invincible enemy who does not offer them the opportunity of showing off their academy tactics and their swaggering, which they use so much in military displays to curb the workers and students in the cities.

The initial struggle by small combat units is incessantly fed by new forces, the mass movement begins, and the old order little by little starts to break into a thousand pieces. That is the moment when the working class and the urban masses decide the battle.

What is it that from the beginning of the struggle of those first nuclei, makes them invincible, regardless of the numbers, power, and resources of their enemies? The aid of the people, and they will be able to count on that help of the people on an ever growing scale.

But the peasantry is a class which, because of the uncultured state in which it is kept and the isolation in which it lives, needs the revolutionary and political leadership of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals, for without them it would not by itself be able to plunge into the struggle and achieve victory.  
 
National bourgeoisie cannot lead
In the actual historical conditions of Latin America, the national bourgeoisie cannot lead the antifeudal and anti-imperialist struggle. Experience shows that in our nations that class, even when its interests are in contradiction to those of Yankee imperialism, has been incapable of confronting it, for the national bourgeoisie is paralyzed by fear of social revolution and frightened by the cry of the exploited masses.

Facing the dilemma of imperialism or revolution, only its most progressive layers will be with the people.

The current world correlation of forces and the universal movement for the liberation of the colonial and dependent peoples points out to the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals of Latin America their true role, which is to place themselves resolutely in the vanguard of the struggle against imperialism and feudalism.

Imperialism, utilizing the great movie monopolies, its news services, its periodicals, books, and reactionary newspapers, resorts to the most subtle lies to sow divisionism and inculcate among the most ignorant people fear and superstition against revolutionary ideas that can and should frighten only the powerful exploiters with their worldly interests and privileges.

Divisionism, a product of all kinds of prejudices, false ideas, and lies; sectarianism, dogmatism, a lack of broadness in analyzing the role of each social layer, its parties, organizations, and leaders--these obstruct the necessary unity of action of the democratic and progressive forces of our peoples. They are defects of growth, infantile sicknesses of the revolutionary movement that must be left behind. In the antifeudal and anti-imperialist struggle it is possible to bring the majority of the people resolutely behind goals of liberation that unite the spirit of the working class, the peasants, the intellectual workers, the petty bourgeoisie, and the most progressive layers of the national bourgeoisie. These sectors comprise the immense majority of the population and join together great social forces capable of sweeping out the imperialist and reactionary feudal rule. In that broad movement they can and must struggle together for the good of our nations, for the good of our peoples, and for the good of the Americas, from the old Marxist militant, right up to the sincere Catholic who has nothing to do with the Yankee monopolists and the feudal lords of the land.

That movement would pull alongside it the most progressive elements of the armed forces, also humiliated by the Yankee military missions, the betrayal of national interests by the feudal oligarchies, and the sacrifice of national sovereignty to Washington's dictates.

Where the roads for the peoples are closed, where the repression of workers and peasants is fierce, where the rule of the Yankee monopolists is strongest, the first and most important task is to understand that it is neither honorable nor correct to beguile people with the fallacious and convenient illusion of uprooting--by legal means that do not and will not exist--ruling classes that are entrenched in all the state positions, monopolizing education, owning all the means of information, possessing infinite financial resources--a power that the monopolies and oligarchies will defend with blood and fire and with the might of their police and armies.  
 
The duty of every revolutionist
The duty of every revolutionist is to make the revolution. It is known that the revolution will triumph in the Americas and throughout the world, but it is not for revolutionists to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by. The role of Job does not suit a revolutionist. Each year that the liberation of Latin America is speeded up will mean the lives of millions of children saved, millions of intellects saved for culture, an infinite quantity of pain spared the people. Even if the Yankee imperialists prepare a bloody drama for Latin America, they will not succeed in crushing the peoples' struggles; they will only arouse universal hatred against themselves. And such a drama will also mark the death of their greedy and stone-age system.

No nation in Latin America is weak--because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers, who suffer the same miseries, who harbor the same sentiments, who have the same enemy, who dream about the same better future and who count upon the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world.

Great as was the epic of Latin American independence, heroic as was that struggle, today's generation of Latin Americans is called upon to engage in an epic that is even greater and more decisive for humanity. For that struggle was for liberation from Spanish colonial power, from a decadent Spain invaded by the armies of Napoleon. Today the call for struggle is for liberation from the most powerful world imperialist center, from the strongest force of world imperialism and to render humanity a greater service than that rendered by our predecessors.

But this struggle, to a greater extent than the earlier one, will be waged by the masses, will be carried out by the people: the people are going to play a much more important role now than they did then, the leaders are less important and will be less important in this struggle than in the one before....

Already they can be seen armed with stones, sticks, machetes, in one direction and another, each day, occupying lands, sinking hooks into the land which belongs to them and defending it with their lives. They can be seen carrying signs, slogans, flags; letting them flap in the mountain or prairie winds. And the wave of anger, of demands for justice, of claims for rights trampled underfoot, which is beginning to sweep the lands of Latin America, will not stop. That wave will swell with every passing day. For that wave is composed of the greatest number, the majorities in every respect, those whose labor amasses the wealth and turns the wheels of history. Now they are awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected.

For this great mass of humanity has said, "Enough!" and has begun to march. And their march of giants will not be halted until they conquer true independence--for which they have died in vain more than once. Today, however, those who die will die like the Cubans at Playa Girón: they will die for their own, true, never-to-be-surrendered independence.

Patria o muerte! [Homeland or death]

Venceremos! [We will win]

The People of Cuba

Havana, Cuba

Free Territory of the Americas

February 4, 1962

The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba resolves that this Declaration be known as the Second Declaration of Havana, translated into the major languages, and distributed throughout the world. It also resolves to urge all friends of the Cuban revolution in Latin America to distribute it widely among the masses of workers, peasants, students, and intellectuals of this continent.  
 
 
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