With the feudal bonds broken, the productive forces developed extraordinarily. Great factories arose in which greater and greater numbers of workers assembled.

The most modern and technically efficient factories continually displaced from the market the less efficient competitors. The cost of industrial equipment continually rose. It became necessary to accumulate more and more capital. A greater portion of production passed into a smaller number of hands. Thus arose the great capitalist enterprises and later, according to the degree and character of the association, the great industrial combines through cartels, syndicates, trusts, and corporations, controlled by the owners of the major portion of the stock, that is to say, by the most powerful heads of industry. Free play, characteristic of capitalism in its first phase, gave way to monopolies, which entered into agreements among themselves and controlled the markets.

Where did the colossal quantity of resources come from that permitted a handful of monopolists to accumulate billions of dollars? Simply from the exploitation of human labor. Millions of men, forced to work for a wage of bare subsistence, produced with their strength the gigantic capital of the monopolies. The workers amassed the fortunes of the privileged classes, ever richer, ever more powerful. Through the banking institutions these classes were able to make use not only of their own money but that of all society. Thus came about the fusion of the banks with great industry, and finance capital was born. What should they do with the great surplus of capital that was accumulating in ever greater quantities? Invade the world with it…. Thus began the territorial and economic division of the world. By 1914, eight or ten imperialist countries had subjugated territories beyond their own borders covering more than 83.7 million square kilometers, with a population of 970 million inhabitants. They had simply divided up the world.

But as the world, limited in size, was divided to the last corner of the earth, a clash ensued among the different monopolist nations. Struggles arose for new divisions, originating in the disproportionate distribution of industrial and economic power that the various monopolistic nations had attained in their uneven development. Imperialist wars broke out that would cost humanity 50 million dead, tens of millions wounded, and the destruction of incalculable material and cultural wealth. Even before this had happened, Karl Marx wrote that “capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot from every pore with blood and mire.”

The capitalist system of production, once it had given all it was capable of, became an abysmal obstacle to the progress of humanity. But the bourgeoisie from its origins carried within itself its antithesis. In its womb gigantic productive instruments were developed, but with time a new and vigorous social force developed: the proletariat, destined to change the old and worn-out social system of capitalism to a higher socioeconomic form in accordance with the historic possibilities of human society, converting into social property those gigantic means of production which the people—and no one else but the people—by their work had created and amassed. At such a stage of development of the productive forces, it became completely anachronistic and outmoded to have a regime that stood for private ownership and with it the economic subordination of millions and millions of human beings to the dictates of a small social minority.

The interests of humanity cried out for a halt to the anarchy of production, the waste, economic crises, and the rapacious wars that are part of the capitalist system. The growing necessities of the human race and the possibility of satisfying them, demanded the planned development of the economy and the rational utilization of its means of production and natural resources.

It was inevitable that imperialism and colonialism would fall into a profound and insoluble crisis. The general crisis began with the outbreak of World War I, with the revolution of the workers and peasants that overthrew the tsarist empire of Russia and founded, amidst the most difficult conditions of capitalist encirclement and aggression, the world’s first socialist state, opening a new era in the history of humanity. From that time until today, the crisis and decomposition of the imperialist system has steadily worsened.

World War II, unleashed by the imperialist powers—into which were dragged the Soviet Union and other criminally invaded peoples of Asia and Europe, who engaged in a bloody struggle of liberation—culminated in the defeat of fascism, formation of the world camp of socialism, and the struggle of the colonial and dependent peoples for their sovereignty. Between 1945 and 1957 more than 1.2 billion human beings conquered their independence in Asia and Africa. The blood shed by the people was not in vain.

The movement of the dependent and colonial peoples is a phenomenon of universal character that agitates the world and marks the final crisis of imperialism.

Cuba and Latin America are part of the world. Our problems form part of the problems engendered by the general crisis of imperialism and the struggle of the subjugated peoples, the clash between the world that is being born and the world that is dying. The odious and brutal campaign unleashed against our nation expresses the desperate as well as futile effort that the imperialists are making to prevent the liberation of the peoples.  
 
 
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