The history of Cuba is but the history of Latin America. The history of Latin America is but the history of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. And the history of all these peoples is but the history of the most pitiless and cruel exploitation by imperialism throughout the world. The history of Latin America is the history of imperialist exploitation

At the end of the last and the beginning of the present century a handful of economically developed nations had finished partitioning the world among themselves, subjecting to their economic and political domination two-thirds of humanity, which was thus forced to work for the ruling classes of the economically advanced capitalist countries.

The historical circumstances that permitted a high level of industrial development to certain European countries and the United States of America placed them in a position to subject the rest of the world to their domination and exploitation.

What were the compelling motives behind the expansion of the industrial powers? Were they for reasons of morality and civilizing, as they claim? No, the reasons were economic.

From the discovery of America, which hurled the European conquerors across the seas to occupy and exploit the lands and inhabitants of other continents, the fundamental motive for their conduct was the desire for riches. The discovery of America itself was carried out in search of shorter routes to the Orient, whose goods were highly paid for in Europe.

A new social class, the merchants and the producers of manufactured articles for commerce, arose from the womb of the feudal society of lords and serfs in the decline of the Middle Ages.

The thirst for gold was the cause that spurred the efforts of that new class. The desire for gain has been the incentive of its conduct throughout history. With the growth of manufacturing and commerce, its social influence also grew. The new productive forces that were developing in the womb of feudal society clashed more and more with feudalism’s relations of servitude, its laws, its institutions, its philosophy, its morality, its art, and its political ideology.

New philosophical and political ideas, new concepts of right and of the state were proclaimed by the intellectual representatives of the bourgeois class, which--because they responded to the new necessities of social life--gradually entered into the consciousness of the exploited masses. These were then revolutionary ideas opposed to the outworn ideas of feudal society. The peasants, the artisans, the workers in manufacture, led by the bourgeoisie, overthrew the feudal order, its philosophy, its ideas, its institutions, its laws, and the privileges of the ruling class, that is, the hereditary nobility. At that time the bourgeoisie considered revolution necessary and just. It did not think that the feudal order could and should be eternal--as it now thinks of its capitalist social order.

It encouraged the peasants to free themselves from feudal servitude; it encouraged the artisans against the medieval guilds and demanded the right to political power. The absolute monarchs, the nobility, and the high clergy stubbornly defended their class privileges, proclaiming the divine right of kings and the immutability of the social order. To be liberal, to proclaim the ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, spokesmen for bourgeois philosophy, at that time constituted, in the eyes of the ruling classes, as serious a crime as it is today in the eyes of the bourgeoisie to be a socialist and to proclaim the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

The bourgeoisie took political power and established upon the ruins of feudal society its capitalist mode of production; and on the basis of this mode of production it erected its state, its laws, its ideas, and its institutions. Those institutions sanctified above all the essence of its class rule: private property.

The new society based on the private ownership of the means of production and free competition was thus divided into two basic classes: one the owner of the means of production, ever more modern and efficient; the other, deprived of all wealth, possessing only its labor power, of necessity sold on the market as just another commodity simply in order to live.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home