This account of the struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship led by the July 26 Movement and the Rebel Army, headed by Fidel Castro, recounts the events from the perspective of revolutionary cadres organized in the cities.

The Militant is publishing a series of excerpts from the book. This week’s selection is, “To Cuban youth, To all Latin American youth, To the youth of the world.”Drafted by Raúl Castro, then commander of the Rebel Army’s Second Front in northern Oriente province, the document describes how young people in Cuba took the lead in resisting the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who grabbed power in a 1952 coup.

Issued in June 1958, the call was circulated clandestinely. Among those it reached were members of the July 26 Movement imprisoned in the Príncipe Castle prison. Copyright © 2004 by Pathfinder Press and reprinted by permission.
 

From the rebel mountains of this eastern province—Free Territory of Cuba—on behalf of youth who, sacrificing everything, have promised to win or die rather than live under such ignominious oppression at a decisive moment of our history, we issue this urgent call to all young people in the world to unite their efforts with ours, so as to help save the youth of a brother people from destruction and extermination. We call on them to help a defenseless people that is being cruelly subjugated by the worst gang of criminals and murderers that any nation has ever suffered. We will never abandon the fight, no matter how unequal it might be.

On March 10, 1952, eighty days before general elections in which the people were to freely choose their rulers, Mr. Fulgencio Batista assumed military control of the country through a coup d’état. With a stroke of the pen he swept away all democratic institutions, assumed control in an autocratic way, and imposed the darkest despotism on the people. The leaders of the traditional political parties betrayed the people and abandoned them to their fate, taking refuge in their comfortable positions to await better times, in order to reappear with the stupid ambitions that have always helped characterize them as vultures over a battlefield. In this situation, Batista prepared phony one-man elections, electing himself president together with a housebroken congress.

Meanwhile, a people who suffer want to fight. It was then that Cuban youth decided to take the reins of the resistance. Students, workers, peasants, and professionals prepared to fight. On July 26,1953, a youth ready to conquer its own destiny waged a frontal attack on the second most important fortress in the country. When the attack failed, a hundred young people paid with their lives for their brave act of rebellion after suffering horrendous tortures. The students, on a struggle footing from the very first moment, saw their ranks diminished with the fall of new martyrs, including José Antonio Echeverría, the leader of the Cuban students. The sugar workers shook the country with tremendous strikes for the conquest of their just demands and the defense of violated liberties, facing the regime’s repressive apparatus and the gangster machinery of the officialdom imposed on the trade unions. New losses are being added to the already long list of combatants of the Cuban proletariat.

At the end of 1956, after several years of preparation, the insurrection broke out in the countryside and the cities under the leadership of Fidel Castro and Frank País, an insurrection that continues and grows today. In mid-1957 the murder of Frank País in the streets of Santiago de Cuba produced the most formidable explosion of popular indignation ever witnessed in our country, and the general strike caused by his premature death at twenty-three years of age was drowned in blood. . . .

José Martí, our mentor and guide, whose work and ideas we are firmly determined today to carry forward, was not only concerned with the future of Cuba but of Our America—as he called the Latin American republics. Martí proved to be one of the greatest statesmen of all time. He saw accurately, before anyone else, the threat that the newly born empire represented to our young republics. On the eve of his death, from the fields of Free Cuba, in a letter to his friend Manuel Mercado, he wrote, among other things: “I have lived inside the monster and know its entrails; my sling is the sling of David…. I am daily in danger of giving my life for my country and my duty—since I understand that duty and am prepared to carry it out—the duty of preventing the United States from spreading across the Antilles, as Cuba obtains its independence, and overpowering with that additional strength our lands of America.”

Foreseeing his approaching death he opens his heart to his distant friend and adds: “All I have done up til now, and all I will do, has been with that aim. I have had to work quietly and somewhat indirectly, because there are things that must be kept under cover in order to be achieved. Because to proclaim them openly would raise such difficulties that the objectives could not be reached.”

The events smashed to pieces Martí’s dreams. The events that he tried, with the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico, to prevent, unfortunately came to pass.

So much fighting, bleeding, suffering and dying just to have our island pass from one set of hands to another….

With Batista in power accompanied by the worst den of thieves and murderers ever suffered by a people anywhere, open U.S. interference continues. Mr. Gardner, their ambassador to Cuba, publicly declares his government’s unwavering support to the island’s tyranny, going so far as to accuse Cuban revolutionaries of being gangsters.

Batista has handed over great wealth to U.S. interests, but the Yankees want more, and to obtain it they are employing the tactic of a diplomatic shift. Now they are naming as ambassador Mr. [Earl] Smith, who pretends to pester Batista and support the revolutionary opposition. The goal was clear, and within a few days bore fruit: Batista, fearful of losing Yankee support, delivered scandalous concessions: the Moa cobalt mines, located in the territory of this Second Front; new concessions to the Telephone Company, to the Electric Company, to the oil companies, to the King Ranch cattle farm, and so on. We are so sure of what we say that our denunciation is being confirmed as we write these lines. This very morning, June 26, we heard on the radio that Batista has signed a decree with new and more humiliating concessions of Cuban subsoil to U.S. companies, in perpetuity no less. We have never seen such great monstrosities done to the economy of a nation. Undoubtedly these latest concessions come in exchange for the military aid the U.S. government is giving Batista at this precise and terrible moment.

As irrefutable proof of these charges, we point out the following facts: Colonel Tabernilla Palmero, chief of the dictatorship’s air force and responsible for the merciless bombings of the cities of Cienfuegos and Sagua la Grande, was decorated by Major General Truman H. Landon, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Command of the Caribbean, on the express orders and on behalf of President Eisenhower himself. This event was recorded in photographs by several newspapers of our country. At the end of May, officers of our Department of Rebel Intelligence informed us that throughout the month, the enemy air force had been supplied by bombs of all types at the Caimanera U.S. naval base [at Guantánamo Bay]. One of these reports reads: “On May 8 the dictatorship’s army received 300 rocket bombs and 300 rocket-launch tubes with a weight of 9.6 tons. The Batista planes, after bombing the Sierra Maestra and this Second Front, often fill up their gasoline tanks at the base itself.” These documents will be published in official organs of our Movement, and photographs and documents obtained inside the base itself will make their way around the world, presenting irrefutable proof of the charges we are making….

An infinite number of shells for 60 and 80 mm. mortars have been captured in the different battle fronts of this Second Front, as well as bazooka shells, rifle grenades, and weapons of recent manufacture coming from U.S. arsenals. Unexploded bombs of the most varied types with the invariable inscription, “Made in USA,” have been seized in the towns attacked by the dictator’s planes. They are being kept as evidence of what we declare here. Our troops in combat have seized from the enemy light machine guns with the following inscription: “Fábrica San Cristóbal, República Dominicana.”

In the battle zones, our combatants, armed only with land mines and Molotov cocktails, have had to face tanks obtained from the Nicaraguan dictatorship. In view of the popular reaction aroused in Latin America by a few demagogic statements that no more weapons would be delivered to Batista, as well as the existing pressure everywhere, it’s easy to see why the U.S. government eliminated the direct and public supplying of military aid. Instead, they now do so indirectly through Dominican dictator Leónidas Trujillo and the Somoza dynasty, oppressors of the sister Nicaraguan republic. At the same time and behind the back of world public opinion, they continue their direct aid through the Caimanera U.S. naval base, as we detailed earlier.

As a consequence of these events, the Cuban people suffer the following evils:

In addition to the economic consequences already explained, the Cuban people suffer the most cruel and criminal oppression such as few nations in the world have had the misfortune of enduring. With the military aid that the U.S. government delivers to the murderers of Cubans, our people have and are continuing to suffer, on an ever greater scale, the most barbaric air raids ever seen in any republic of the American continent. With those same weapons, delivered by the U.S. government, thousands and thousands of Cuban youth, the flower of our generation, have been murdered. The beasts that are kept in power with the help of the U.S. government—many of whom were released from penal institutions by Batista—have turned our once happy cities into hell. They have tortured children of thirteen and fourteen and raped women of all ages. The most refined tortures, which make the worst Nazis look like children, have been put into practice with the diabolic cruelty of Batista’s henchmen and the criminal knowledge and consent of the U.S. government….

We may fall in the struggle, but we will have done our duty by holding aloft til the end the principles of José Martí. We are the historic link between past generations and future generations—of those children now five, eight, and ten years old who look at us with admiration and who tomorrow will pick up the banner of the struggle, a banner not just for today or tomorrow, but for the future.

Cuban youth have taken a step forward. They have mounted an untamed beast in a high-speed race, and it is no longer possible to stop it or turn it around. There is thus only one outcome possible: either the beast is tamed, or it throws us off and tramples us. That depends on you, Cuban youth, Latin American youth, youth from anywhere in the world. If you maintain an indifferent silence, you will become accomplices of those who today murder us and tomorrow will murder you. It does not matter if you are North American, Soviet, Chinese, or Venezuelan; we are all brothers. Across borders, languages, political or religious beliefs, we all belong to the great family of the world’s youth. We confront the same problems, suffer the same consequences, and live under the same threats. In face of that, arm in arm, with a firm footing and our heads held high, let us all sing the same hymn of hope. Let us aspire to and fight for peace and future happiness. And let us conquer the common good for the well-being of all.

Finally, Martí, whose road we follow, told us something that is part of the body of ideas we put forward on behalf of Cuban youth who await your determined support: “Every American of Our America is a Cuban. In Cuba we do not fight only for human freedom, nor for a well-being that is impossible under a government of conquest and bribes, nor for the exclusive well-being of a revered island that inspires and strengthens us with its simple name. In Cuba we fight to assure, with our independence, the independence of Latin America.”

Freedom or Death
Raúl Castro Ruz
Commander
“Frank País” Second Front (northern zone)  
 
 
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