On Dec. 2, 1956, 82 young revolutionaries from the July 26th Movement led by Fidel Castro landed on Cuba’s southeastern shores in the Granma yacht, which had departed from Mexico. From there they launched a revolutionary war, mobilizing workers and peasants against the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The war culminated in a popular insurrection that ousted Batista on Jan. 1, 1959. Workers and peasants took political power and opened the door to the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

“The Rebel Army was the soul of the revolution,” armed forces minister and Cuba’s acting president Raúl Castro told the morning military ceremony. He was quoting a 1975 speech by Fidel Castro. Referring to the involvement of workers and farmers in the 1956-58 war against the Batista regime, he said the rebels “gave the people the weapons snatched from the oppressors in the epic struggle, and they merged with the people to become, since then and forever, the people in arms.”

Some 300,000 people from the Havana area participated in the popular march in contingents with their coworkers and neighbors. The lead contingent carried a banner that read, “Imperialism will never be able to crush Cuba.” Many were dressed in red T-shirts, waving small Cuban flags. Marchers carried thousands of homemade signs with slogans such as, “We are the revolution,” “Yankee: nobody surrenders here,” and “Socialism or death.”

The events, part of several weeks of activities celebrating the FAR, were also a tribute to President Fidel Castro. Festivities for his 80th birthday in August, including an international conference, had been postponed due to his illness.

The military parade began with 120 horseback riders symbolizing the mambí fighters of Cuba’s 19th century independence wars. They were followed by companies of troops from Cuba’s Eastern, Western, and Central armies as well as the navy. Young military school cadets then marched, along with members of the all-volunteer Territorial Troop Militias, including an all-female unit. After them came tanks, armored cars, rocket launchers, cannon, and anti-artillery units. Squadrons of MiG fighter planes and attack helicopters flew overhead.

One contingent featured a replica of the Granma yacht surrounded by 3,000 schoolchildren waving blue handkerchiefs representing the sea. Lines of young men and women filed behind, dressed to simulate the ragtag uniforms of the Rebel Army fighters-long hair, beards, and all.

Raúl Castro said the military review symbolized the history of “138 years of struggle by the Cuban people for their definitive independence,” going back to anticolonial wars against Spanish rule.

The Rebel Army was the founding nucleus of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the popular militias, through which millions in Cuba today take part in the defense of the revolution—the strategy of “the war of the entire people,” as it is known here.

In face of nearly five decades of assaults and threats by Washington, “we will continue to consolidate the military invulnerability of our nation based on the strategic concept of the war of the entire people, whose planning and introduction we initiated 25 years ago,” Castro said. “We will preserve at whatever cost necessary the freedom of the Cuban people and the independence and sovereignty of our homeland.”
 
 
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