In the communist movement “reformist” refers to forces within the workers movement that follow a course of class collaboration with the capitalist class. They advocate a strategy of political and economic reforms to modify capitalism—counterposed to a course of deepening the political education, mobilization, and independent organization of working people and their allies to take political power into their own hands and overturn capitalist rule. The forces in Cuba that issued the Miami Pact were not part of the workers movement—they were bourgeois.

Aldabonazo, by Armando Hart, one of the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution, is an 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. It recounts the events from the perspective of revolutionary cadres organizing in the cities. Hart was a central organizer of the urban underground.

The excerpt of the book reprinted in the March 15 Militant was taken from a document entitled, “Manifesto to the nation: Response to the Miami Pact,” which appears in chapter seven. It is a repudiation, drafted by Fidel Castro, of the 1957 Miami Pact and of the political course of the forces that issued it, the so-called Cuban Liberation Council. Presented as a call for unity among the antidictatorship forces, it was drafted without the knowledge or participation of the July 26 Movement in Cuba.

The Cuban Liberation Council was dominated by bourgeois opponents of Batista living in the United States. One of the main capitalist parties that signed the pact was the Authentic Party, which had held the presidency in Cuba from 1944 until the government of President Carlos Prío was overthrown by Batista in a military coup in March 1952.

Showing that the class it represented feared a popular armed mobilization more than a military dictatorship, Prío’s government had vacated office without a fight, refusing to distribute weapons to students and others who were demanding them in order to resist the coup.

Under the guise of unity, the Miami Pact sought to reestablish the old political order in Cuba based on the Authentic Party and other bourgeois forces. In his reply Castro exposed, point by point, the political cowardice and subservience of the document’s authors toward the dictatorship’s backers in Washington. Among other things, they failed to explicitly reject all foreign intervention in Cuba’s internal affairs. “Are we such cowards that we won’t even demand no intervention on the side of Batista?” Castro asked. The bourgeois leaders also did not explicitly reject replacement of the dictatorship with a military junta as a “provisional government”—an action Batista would gladly concede, as Castro explained, “as the best way to guarantee a transition that does the least damage to his interests and those of his cronies.”

“What is important for the revolution,” Castro emphasized, “is not unity in itself, but the principles on which it is based, how it is achieved, and the patriotic intentions motivating it.”  
 
 
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