The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 68/No. 9           March 8, 2004  
 
 
‘Cuban Revolution must be understood
by those in U.S. who seek to emulate it’
Pathfinder Press president speaks at
Havana book fair launching of ‘Aldabonazo’
(feature article)
 
The following are the remarks by Mary-Alice Waters to 150 participants attending the presentation of Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58 by Armando Hart, organized as part of the recently concluded 13th International Book Fair in Havana, Cuba. Waters, who is president of Pathfinder Press, is the editor and author of the publisher’s preface.

The launching of the new Pathfinder edition was held Sunday, February 15, the last day of the book fair, at the Nicolás Guillén room. The book fair event was followed in subsequent days by two other public presentations, one at the Polytechnic University in Havana, the other at the national center of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. Coverage of these events appears elsewhere in this issue.

Waters’s presentation is copyright © 2004 by Pathfinder Press. It is reprinted by permission.
 

*****

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
First, a thank you to everyone here this afternoon for the opportunity to join you in celebrating the publication, both in English and in Spanish, of this new edition of Aldabonazo.

On behalf of Pathfinder Press, I want to express to compañero Armando Hart and to compañera Eloísa Carreras our unqualified appreciation for the time and effort each of them dedicated to working with us to produce this invaluable book. It makes available another slice of the history and rich political lessons of the Cuban Revolution to a new, broader—and in English a very different—readership.

I’ll begin with a confession. Four years ago, when we first discussed this project with compañero Hart, we told him Pathfinder could not publish a book of more than 150 pages and asked him to propose some way to cut down the manuscript to come within that limit. Being the experienced political tactician he is, he demurred, saying, “You’re better judges than I am of what is useful in this book.” He offered to entertain any suggestions we might make.

The outcome of those suggestions is the book we have here today—a little over 400 pages. And that doesn’t count another 28 pages of magnificent photos that bring to life the events recounted here—bring them to life even for young workers and students in North America who have never visited Cuba and know little of its history.

The size of the book is not for want of trying to make it shorter. As Armando can attest, we worked at it. But as we studied and absorbed not just the narrative but also the rich trove of documents around which Aldabonazo is constructed, many never before in print, we decided in most cases to keep rather than cut. We realized that to do otherwise would slice into the muscle, and the political lessons would be unfolded in a less understandable, less rich, less useful manner for those of us who—unlike a good many of you here present—didn’t live this history hour-by-hour with our lives on the line every day.

Pathfinder is not a publisher of history books, however necessary such works are. We publish the tools, the weapons needed by working people in the United States, as well as elsewhere around the world, in order to politically arm ourselves for class battles we all see coming towards us in the twenty-first century—battles that will determine the future—even the survival—of humanity. Like yourselves, we know we do not fight alone. But we also know that the hardest and most decisive battles are those that must be fought, and will be fought, within the belly of the monster.

That’s why we need the truth, with all its rich contradictions and complexities. We need access to our revolutionary history—warts and all—as told by the leaders who, from the inside, know how each action was weighed, how each decision was made.

The Cuban Revolution will never be copied. But it must be understood by those who seek to emulate its course.

That is what Aldabonazo strives to convey: the “fabric” of history, as the author writes. That’s why we’ve published it. And it explains who we’ve published it for.  
 
Class struggle in United States
For us, the importance of this book lies in what is already happening in the United States and, even more so, the lessons indicating what is coming.

The driving force behind U.S. foreign policy is neither irrationality nor stupidity. From increasingly aggressive protectionist offensives dressed up as “free trade,” to wars of imperial conquest under the banner of combating terrorism, the U.S. rulers are driven by something far more deadly: the insatiable demands of capitalism itself.

Economic and social conditions today bear increasing resemblance to the overheated financial bubbles, underlying capitalist stagnation, sharpening trade conflicts, and interimperialist offensives that gave rise to the Great Depression and struggles of the 1930s, and culminated in the second imperialist slaughter of the twentieth century.

We can all see with some clarity what the U.S. rulers are doing in Afghanistan and at their Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, in Iraq and Korea, at their forward bases in Central Europe and along Central Asia’s Silk Road, and even their military buildup in Colombia—on the doorstep of our brothers and sisters in Venezuela.

But it is harder for those outside the United States to see concretely the consequences of the exact same policies inside the U.S. Yet Lenin’s insistence that foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy, not the other way around, is as true today as when he pointed it out.

The brutal offensive of the bosses and their government against the rights, working conditions, and living standards of working people in the United States began long before the election of George W. Bush. It began long before September 11, 2001. That offensive is driven by the capitalists’ increasingly desperate need to boost their profit rate enough to stabilize the bloated dollar, in the vain hope of holding off the ever-deepening consequences of their financial overextension, of flooding the world with a national paper currency to a degree never before seen in history, of the sharpest interimperialist conflicts since the opening decades of the last century.

Those same roots are giving rise to a dangerous coarsening of polemics among bourgeois forces in the United States. What begins as the violent politics of demagogy is more ominous in its direction and consequences than those of us who did not live through the 1920s and 1930s yet realize.

The pressures on the working class and its defensive organizations, the trade unions, the drive to cut costs and intensify the exploitation of labor are unremitting and accelerating. But all this is precisely what is also producing a new kind of resistance, new attitudes of solidarity across all generations of proletarian militants, and an intensifying desire by young militants to acquire competence in trade union strategy and tactics. In short, new examples of increasing stature, determination, and mutual respect among the toilers and our allies.

Many of you have heard about the strike by some 70,000 workers at giant supermarket chains in Southern California. Those workers are fighting, among other things, to maintain even the limited health-care coverage they’ve won through previous battles.

Less known, but perhaps even more significant are numerous other sharp struggles, such as the strike at Point Blank in Miami, a garment shop that contracts to make bullet-proof vests for police and military agencies. War or no war, and appeals to imperial patriotism aside, that work force—largely immigrants from across the Caribbean and Latin America, including Cubans, some of them recently arrived—has been in the streets time and again over the past year and a half. They are refusing to accept conditions such as the bosses’ attempt to impose a limit of one glass of water per workday for each employee—in Miami!—in order to reduce time “lost” to bathroom breaks.

Another example is the union organizing drive being waged by 75 coal miners in the western state of Utah. Almost all of them are immigrants from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, many of their leaders in their twenties, who finally said “enough.” They decided to fight back, rejecting the extreme dangers of working with defective equipment, in mine shafts with only one exit, flooded with water, for which they were being paid a third to a quarter of what other miners in the region earned.

These miners are today engaged in a strike that has the support not only of the United Mine Workers of America, a union in the United States with a long tradition of struggle, but among growing sectors of the organized labor movement. In addition, the solidarity of students, churches, immigrants rights organizations, and others has begun turning this battle also into a social struggle throughout the region, with an impact that extends nationwide.

It is forces such as these, frequently involved in hard-fought battles, for whom we publish books like Aldabonazo. They are the ones whose struggles lead them to search for the experiences of others who have fought and won. And that, in turn, makes them more open to seeing through the lies about the Cuban Revolution. It makes working people more open to seeing through attempts to prejudice them against seeking out the truth about the kind of example Cuba continues to set.

And it is for people such as these that Pathfinder—with the help of Armando, Eloísa, and others they enlisted in the cause—worked to make this account as accessible as possible to those who may know little of Cuba’s revolutionary history. That’s the reason for the care we took in preparing a chronology that sketches the story from the Cry of Yara at the opening of Cuba’s independence wars of the nineteenth century, to the naming of Fidel Castro as prime minister in the first government of workers and farmers in this hemisphere in 1959, as well as a glossary of more than 200 entries that provides information necessary for new readers to understand what they are reading.  
 
Rebutting a liberal myth
The release of the Pathfinder edition of Aldabonazo is timely for a second reason. It gives lie to one of the most persistent myths of the liberal left in the United States, one that has been given a new facelift with the recent publication of yet another crop of doctoral theses.

According to this mythology, there were deep political differences between the men and women who were formed as cadres of the Rebel Army in the Sierra, and those who led the July 26 Movement’s forces in the clandestine struggle in the cities and towns, what came to be know as the llano. If the llano had prevailed over the sierra in the decisive final year of the revolutionary war, they argue, Cuba’s revolution would have been a bourgeois democratic one—one that naturally looked to the democracy of imperialist North America as a model to emulate—instead of consciously and unflichingly advancing toward the opening of the socialist revolution in the Americas.

The extensive documents on which Aldabonazo is based provide ample evidence to the contrary. They “illustrate the social and profoundly radical character of the revolution from its formative years,” as compañero Hart writes. 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 hazy but unmistakable outlines of a socialist revolution can already be seen even in the earliest declarations and dreams.

The narrative and documents in Aldabonazo offer striking proof of the leadership capacities of Fidel as he forged the unified striking power of a cadre that was increasingly homogeneous, transformed by their own experiences as they fought to lay the foundations for this profound social transformation. A cadre transformed by the very workers and peasants they recruited to the revolutionary war.  
 
What Washington can’t forgive
In the final chapter of Aldabonazo, compañero Hart tells a story about Col. Ramón Barquín, one of the officers of Batista’s army incarcerated on the Isle of Pines for leading a military conspiracy against the dictatorship.

When those incarcerated at the prison learned of the successful invasion of Las Villas province in central Cuba by two Rebel Army columns under the command of Camilo [Cienfuegos] and Che [Guevara], Barquín insisted: “That’s not possible. It’s not militarily feasible.”

To which a compañero replied, “Colonel, they did it because they didn’t know it was impossible.”

That is the example for which Washington has never forgiven the people of Cuba. And why it can never do so.

It remains the U.S. rulers’ certain knowledge that they will face the resistance of millions of Cubans—who continue “not knowing it’s impossible”—that has always made them fear invading Cuba.

Those words capture the unflinching dignity and revolutionary fiber of Gerardo, Ramón, René, Fernando, and Antonio,1 of the example they set for young militants in North America to emulate. And those acts convey the political confidence and courage the Cuban Revolution continues to give those on the front lines of revolutionary struggles everywhere.

These are our reasons for the new editions of Aldabonazo, and for our gratitude that this has been possible.
 


1 René González, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González are five Cuban revolutionists resident in the United States who in 1998 were framed up by the federal government on charges of conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign power, to commit espionage for Havana, and, in the case of Hernández, to commit murder. In December 1999 they were given sentences ranging from fifteen years to a double-life term and are currently in prison.
 
 
Related articles:
Book by Cuban leader Armando Hart is launched at three Havana meetings  
 
 
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