Mary-Alice Waters, who edited this book, is the president of Pathfinder Press and the editor of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory. She has edited more than a dozen books of interviews, writings, and speeches of leaders of the Cuban Revolution. Copyright ©2003 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
The simultaneous publication in English and Spanish of Pathfinder’s edition of Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58, brings this account of the victorious struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista to significantly new and broader audiences.
Written by Armando Hart, one of the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution, Aldabonazo is now accessible for the first time ever to English-speaking readers. In Spanish, the book, which has been out of print for half a decade, is again available not only in Latin America and Spain, but for the first time to the large and ever-growing audience of Spanish-speaking readers in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere around the globe—wherever the whiplash of capital has accelerated the emigration of those who possess nothing to live by but the sale of their own labor power.
More than five decades ago, Armando Hart emerged as a leader of the young generation of students and working people who burst into history as they took to the streets in opposition to the 1952 military coup d’état in Cuba that installed one of the most brutal dictatorships Latin America had yet experienced. The Centennial Generation, as they became known, refused to accept or compromise with the tyranny and corruption that marked political life in Cuba. They asserted not only the right but the obligation of the Cuban people to rise in armed insurrection if need be to bring down a bloody, illegitimate regime that had usurped power by force. And they set out to forge a revolutionary movement capable of achieving their aims.
Aldabonazo—which in Spanish means a sharp, warning knock on the door—became a rallying cry of that generation of youth who risked their lives in defiance of the military regime. What distinguished them from the various bourgeois political parties and associations that opposed the Batista dictatorship was not primarily words, but deeds. Without fear of consequences for themselves, or political hesitation over where the struggle might lead, they fought for what they believed was right and refused to settle for less.
Fewer than seven years later, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, the July 26 Revolutionary Movement and its Rebel Army led the workers, peasants, and revolutionary-minded youth of Cuba to victory. Some 20,000 had paid with their lives by the time Batista and his henchmen fled the country on January 1, 1959. A new revolutionary government was installed with the jubilant support of the overwhelming majority of the Cuban people. Armando Hart was the first minister of education in that government.
Aldabonazo takes us into this history from the perspective of the cadres who with courage and audacity led the struggle waged by the urban underground, known in the political vocabulary of Cuba as the Llano (plains). The book joins other titles published by Pathfinder over the last decade, among which are:
Hart’s narrative of his own political trajectory and experiences in the revolutionary underground draws extensively on and ties together a rich, even dizzying, collection of letters, circulars, articles, and manifestos interspersed throughout the pages of this book. Hart himself participated in drafting many of these documents, each written in the heat of the struggle. A good number of them are published for the first time in Aldabonazo.
Through Hart’s account we begin to understand more fully and accurately the day-by-day political struggle waged by the forces that came together in 1955 under the leadership of Fidel Castro to form the July 26 Revolutionary Movement, named for the date of the 1953 assault on the Moncada military garrison in Santiago de Cuba that marked the opening of the popular insurrection against the dictatorship. We follow the men and women of the July 26 Movement as they work to develop their political program; as they struggle, through action and debate, to win the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard; as they take advantage of every opening to intervene in the broad political ferment, exposing the empty posturing and pretensions of the traditional bourgeois opposition parties; and as they clarify questions of strategy and tactics debated not only among the revolutionary cadres of the Llano and of the Sierra, but throughout the anti-Batista opposition.
Above all we come to appreciate the leadership capacities of Fidel Castro as he pulls together and politically orients the revolutionary cadres coming from diverse origins and experiences— exemplified by men and women like Armando Hart and his brother Enrique, Celia Sánchez, Frank País, Haydée Santamaría, Ñico López, Vilma Espín, and Faustino Pérez—to name but a few of those whom we meet and begin to know in these pages. We watch the core of the national leadership of the July 26 Movement in the Llano emerge, grow, and recover from the blows of repression, and transform themselves in the course of the struggle.
As Hart puts it in his epilogue, “Revolutions are not a stroll through beautiful meadows and gardens, where men march without difficulty or anguish. A process of change is filled with both, and multiplies them. History does not move in a straight line. Contradictory situations generate passions that are full of human conflict and mark revolutionary conduct.” Those were the leadership challenges they met and surmounted.
We see how the men and women of the July 26 Movement fought to forge a disciplined organization of cadres whose goal—as explained in the leadership’s 1957 “Circular No. 1 to the membership,” printed here—was “a) To overthrow Batista through popular action, [which] is not the same as just overthrowing him,” and “b) To consolidate the revolutionary instrument to ensure the fulfillment of the revolution’s program, also through popular action, [which] is not the same as simply creating a new party.”
Along this course the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army not only led the working people of Cuba to bring down the dictatorship and establish the first “free territory of the Americas.” They opened the road to the first socialist revolution in our hemisphere as well. For the first time since the Bolsheviks under Lenin led the workers, peasants, and soldiers of the tsarist empire to power in October 1917, a leadership of the toilers unpoisoned by the degeneration of the Russian Revolution emerged on the world stage, bypassing obstacles and creating new possibilities for struggle. A quarter century of revolution in the Americas ensued—from the Southern Cone through the Andes, to Central America and the Caribbean. The liberation of southern Africa became a reality.
Therein lies the root of the implacable hatred of the U.S. rulers for the Cuban Revolution and for those who led—and lead—it. Therein lie the reasons why for more than forty years Washington has never for an instant ceased attempting to punish the Cuban people for their audacity, to force them into submission. And why imperialism has failed.
Aldabonazo is not an “inside story” or a polemic. “My aim was not to investigate what was done badly, or what could have been done, or what should have been done better,” Hart writes in his epilogue. “The main interest of this book lies in showing some fundamental elements of a historical thread that should not be forgotten, and that can serve as an important point of reference to better understand how the fabric of the Cuban Revolution was woven and, more broadly, to comprehend the second half of the twentieth century.”
It is in that spirit, too, that Pathfinder publishes this new edition of Aldabonazo. The book is of interest not only, or even primarily, for historical reasons, as important as they may be. The Cuban Revolution in all its rich complexity is a vital, living part of the present and future struggles of Our America, and the world. The better we understand how that revolution was led to victory, the better prepared we will be to emulate its example and meet the challenges posed by the social and political explosions that will shape the twenty-first century.
Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban Revolution, told an international youth congress in Havana in July of 1960, “If this revolution is Marxist . . . it is because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx.”
For more than forty years, one of the most persistent themes of the left-liberal spokespersons for the U.S. ruling class has been the examination and reexamination of what could have been done, what should have been done to prevent (or can yet be done to reverse) the mighty social revolution in Cuba. A revolution that swept away not only North American propertied interests but their Cuban counterparts as well, and established a new class—the working class—in power.
A mythology has been cultivated and widely disseminated, especially by a layer of individuals who supported the struggle against Batista but recoiled from the deep social revolution that accelerated as that struggle advanced, assuring its victory. Among these individuals were men and women of whom Hart says, “they aspired to be more than what they could be in the revolution. They were moved by resentment.”
That mythology, in the version popular among liberals in the United States, holds that deep political differences existed between the leading cadres of the Sierra and Llano, with the latter being more “democratically” inclined. If only the U.S. government had acted differently, they argue, then somehow the leaders of the Llano, not Fidel Castro and the commanders of the Rebel Army in the mountains, would have emerged as the political leadership of the Cuban people after Batista was overthrown. The subsequent history of Cuba, and indeed the twentieth century, would have been different.
Hart addresses this mythology directly and indirectly throughout the pages of Aldabonazo, exposing the fallacies in which such arguments are rooted. “Outside the country,” he writes, “a tale has been woven about how our whole struggle could have moved toward a bourgeois revolution. I invite anyone who believes this to consider the consequences of the implementation of our entire program. Enactment and strict enforcement of laws implementing the constitution of 1940 alone meant totally opposing the interests of the domestic oligarchy and imperialism. Suffice it to say that this constitution provided for the abolition of the large landed estates.”
While he himself came from the family of a prominent Havana magistrate, “the social composition of the most representative leadership cadres and rank-and-file combatants was not bourgeois,” Hart notes. “They came from the working masses, the middle layers (mostly of modest means), the poor peasants, and the unemployed.” The reader need only review the content of the circulars, letters, and declarations printed here, issued from the beginning of the revolutionary war in 1956 onward, to realize the accuracy of Hart’s statement that they “illustrate the social and profoundly radical character of the revolution from its formative years.” They offer “proof that we were marching toward a confrontation with imperialism, and that the idea of social revolution had taken root among the combatants of the July 26 Movement.”
The majority of cadres of the July 26 Movement fighting in the Llano as well as the Sierra underwent a profound transformation as they put their lives on the line day after day, determined to transform their world. They emerged as different people, molded by these experiences and by the social realities they shared with the men and women in the mountains and fields, from whom they learned, and with whom their future was fused. Whatever ideas each individual held to begin with, those ideas evolved, matured, became clearer, more proletarian, as the revolutionary struggle deepened. Moving from city to mountains, and sometimes in reverse, as a significant number of cadres of the Llano did, brought greater homogeneity in political character and revolutionary priorities to the leadership core. As Faustino Pérez, Hart’s close comrade-in-arms, puts it in a letter to Hart included in these pages, the “Sierra is a savior. It has saved the revolution from being annihilated, and it saves sick spirits from death. . . . [It] detoxifies, encourages, heals, restores, revitalizes.”
The cord that has bound the leadership of the Cuban Revolution together for more than five decades is none other than their commitment to that “profoundly radical” social program, first presented in History Will Absolve Me, Fidel Castro’s courtroom defense speech at his trial for leading the July 26, 1953, assault on the Moncada garrison. That program became flesh and blood in the trenches of battle to bring down the dictatorship and to prevent the fruits of victory from being stolen once again by the masters of the empire to the north.
Aldabonazo was first published in Cuba by Editorial Letras Cubanas in 1997. In 1998 the Spanish publishing house Libertarias Prodhufi brought out an edition under the title Cuba: Roots of the Present.
Pathfinder’s edition, prepared in collaboration with the author, reorganizes materials contained in the earlier publications, incorporating them into the narrative in a more integral way. Readers, especially those for whom much of the rich revolutionary history of Cuba is relatively unknown, will be aided by the extensive chronology and glossary, edited with generous help from a number of knowledgeable collaborators in Cuba, but for which Pathfinder alone bears editorial responsibility.
The historic photos and graphic illustrations of the underground publications of the 1950s that appear in these pages are also reproduced in large part courtesy of Armando Hart, who provided them from his own collection or helped make them available from other archives.
The preface to the U.S. edition by Eliades Acosta, director of the José Martí National Library of Cuba, is an especially welcome contribution. It joins the valuable preface to the original Cuban edition by Roberto Fernández Retamar, director of Casa de las Américas, and himself a combatant of the Centennial Generation.
The initial translation into English was provided by Olimpia Sigarroa. Editing of the translation and preparation of the glossary, chronology, and annotation were the work of Michael Taber. The Spanish-language text was prepared by Luis Madrid.
Scores of volunteers from countries around the world, all part of the Pathfinder Printing Project, eagerly contributed their time and abilities to translate, format, proofread, index, prepare the photo pages and maps, assemble the digital production files, and assure delivery of the final printed product.
Above all, special appreciation is due to Eloísa Carreras, whose alert editorial contributions, diligence, and good-natured collaboration from Havana were indispensable to the quality and accuracy of this edition.
Most important, of course, without the close attention, keen interest, and generous allotment of time of the author himself, this new edition of Aldabonazo would not have been possible.
November 2003
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