Vol. 71/No. 6      February 12, 2007

So asserts the Second Declaration of Havana, a manifesto of revolutionary struggle in the Americas adopted by the million-strong National General Assembly of the Cuban People in February 1962.

The document, addressed to the people of Latin America and the world, is contained in The First and Second Declarations of Havana, a new book issued by Pathfinder Press on the 45th anniversary of its adoption. The manifesto was published in full by the Militant at the time.

Pathfinder (then called Pioneer) released the Second Declaration as a pamphlet in March 1962 and has kept it in print ever since. The new edition contains the first and second declarations of Havana, along with a chronology, glossary, 16 pages of photographs, and a preface by Mary-Alice Waters, the book’s editor.

Looking back on the situation described by these declarations, Cuban president Fidel Castro told the International Meeting of Solidarity among Women in 1998 that he “believed then—and I believe now—that it was possible then to make a revolution such as Cuba’s in all of Latin America, which would have accelerated the course of history.”

The wave of struggle “sweeping the lands of Latin America” referred to by the Second Declaration was vividly recorded by Militant editor Joseph Hansen during a four-month reporting trip across Latin America from September 1961 to January 1962. As Hansen concluded:

“Latin America is moving onto the road of social revolution. It is true that this movement is irregular and subject to many ups and downs, but the basic direction is unmistakable.”

It was among the working people and youth engaged in such struggles, the Militant editor said, “that a leadership will be formed” politically capable of organizing the toilers to make a revolution.  
 
General strikes, street battles
“In yesterday’s nationwide 24-hour general strike the labor movement of Ecuador scored an outstanding victory,” begins Hansen’s Oct. 5, 1961, dispatch from Quito, the capital.

“Business was at a virtual standstill, plants closed,” he wrote. Armed troops were everywhere. “In some areas soldiers, divided into groups of three, marched through the streets, bayonets glinting in the equatorial sun.”

Hansen reported what happened next: “At the Plaza del Teatro, workers and students attempted to hold a street meeting. Soldiers in gas masks were ordered to move on the crowd … .

“[T]hree tanks roared into the square and wheeled into formation, guns trained on the crowd, which was already running. The tear gas, I might add, smelled exactly like that sometimes used in the United States in labor conflicts.”

Hansen gave graphic portrayals of similar battles in other countries he visited: a one-day general strike in Uruguay; a six-week strike of railway workers in Argentina; an attempted general strike in São Paulo, Brazil; strikes by thousands of bank workers in Colombia and taxi drivers in La Paz, Bolivia.

Most of these actions were met by assaults from the cops and armed forces. One street battle Hansen witnessed was in Bolivia.

“Late Monday afternoon [Oct. 23, 1961] a crowd of some thousands gathered on El Prado, a beautiful wide street” in La Paz, Hansen reported. “The crowd sought to reach the plaza, where speakers might be heard, but police barred the way. The crowd pushed forward. The police threw tear-gas grenades, using a type of gas not seen before in this city. It forms a yellowish haze that bites persistently. The crowd retreated, reformed and came back again. When the tear gas was exhausted the crowd succeeded in overcoming the police and chased some of them into a deep gulley where the La Paz river runs through the city.

“Heavy police reinforcements came through surrounding streets with fresh supplies of tear gas… . The gas did not prove sufficient to disperse the demonstrators and rifles came into play… .

“A student advised us not to venture closer to the rifle fire as it was dangerous. Some people had ‘already been killed’ and ‘many were wounded.’

“A few demonstrators were running down the street, away from the persistent shooting. Our own inclination was to match their pace; however, we followed the example of those who kept close to walls… .

“It turned out that it didn’t really matter much in which direction we went, for street battles were in process in various areas over strategic squares. The demonstrators used rocks, bottles—some empty and some filled with gasoline and flaming wicks—and pieces of iron” yanked from benches along the street.  
 
‘Alliance for Progress’
Millions of workers and peasants across the Americas at the time were being attracted to the measures carried out by working people in Cuba since the 1959 revolutionary victory registered in the toppling of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. These measures included: a sweeping land reform, a radical reduction of rent and utilities rates, steps barring racist discrimination against Blacks, and the expropriation of U.S. imperialist interests and Cuban capitalists who had brutally exploited the toilers and despoiled the nation’s resources for decades.

To counter the appeal of the Cuban Revolution and forestall revolution elsewhere in the Americas, in 1961 the U.S. administration of President John F. Kennedy announced the “Alliance for Progress.” As its most highly touted feature, the program allocated $20 billion for loans to Latin American governments over a 10-year period in exchange for their compliance in lining up against Cuba.

As Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and other Cuban leaders repeatedly pointed out, this program was incapable of dealing with the problems created by imperialism itself. This “alliance,” in fact, intensified Latin America’s exploitation by the ruling families of the United States, sucking out billions of dollars through interest payments on debts from these loans.

Pro-imperialist capitalist and landlord regimes in Latin America trumpeted the program as an alternative to Cuba.

“As for the workers and other oppressed layers of the population,” however, Hansen said, “they are showing what they think about Kennedy’s promises in the way that comes most natural to them—action.”

In a humorous example of the low esteem in which U.S. imperialism was held among working people south of the Rio Grande, Hansen in one article recalled a trip by the president to Latin America earlier in 1961:

“Kennedy’s brief visit to Venezuela and Colombia was hailed in the press here as an enormous success. He was not stoned.”  
 
Discussions among militants
In discussions with militants in Latin America about fights in their own countries, Hansen found that they were also interested in struggles in the United States, particularly the fight led by Blacks to overturn Jim Crow segregation in the South during the 1950s and ’60s.

Hansen also reported on efforts by working-class militants to grapple with life-or-death questions of program, strategy, and tactics. In Brazil, for example, he explained how workers were drawing a balance sheet of what union leaders had termed an “indefinite general strike.”

“The strike was organized with insufficient foresight,” Hansen wrote. “While customary preparations were made for an ordinary strike, the leaders overlooked the possibility of violence being used against an ‘indefinite’ general strike.

“The government, on the other hand, decided to utilize the strike for a demonstration of force and made all-out preparations. It declared the strike ‘illegal’ and the press took up the hue and cry about ‘outside agitators’ and ‘communist influence.’” Some 1,300 were arrested, including virtually the entire strike leadership.

“Unprepared to meet such measures,” Hansen reported, “the leaders felt forced to call off the strike.”  
 
Example of Cuban Revolution
It was not only in the cities that struggles were unfolding in Latin America in the early 1960s. In Peru, for example, a mass movement based among Quechua Indians was fighting to take back land stolen from them over centuries by foreign colonizers and local capitalists and landlords. The movement also fought to unionize agricultural workers. That story is recounted in the Pathfinder book Land or Death by Hugo Blanco.

In Brazil at that time the Peasant Leagues were mobilizing thousands of rural toilers to struggle for land. Hansen interviewed Francisco Julião, organizer of the Peasant Leagues. Julião said the organization had experienced big growth among peasants inspired by the example of agrarian reform in Cuba.

While in Mexico, his last stop of the Latin American tour, in February 1962, Hansen also interviewed Ramón Romero, a leader of the battle in Nicaragua against the tyranny of the Somoza family. Romero’s history went back to the days of liberation fighter Augusto César Sandino in the 1930s. Hansen asked Romero about the impact in Nicaragua of the victory of the Cuban Revolution.

“Surprise and joy,” Romero replied. In the sharpening conflict between U.S. imperialism and the workers and farmers of Cuba, he said, “The Nicaraguan people … are on Cuba’s side.”

Reporting in a Nov. 11, 1961, article on how the general strike in Ecuador had led to the overthrow of the hated government of José María Velasco Ibarra, Hansen reviewed the challenges the new regime faced. A capitalist politician, Carlos Julio Arosemena, had become president, and his spokesmen “declared that the new head of state could be counted on ‘to attempt to put into practice the ideas of the Kennedy plan for an “Alliance for Progress.”’

“The alternative,” Hansen wrote, “is a thoroughgoing agrarian reform, the expropriation of foreign and native capitalist holdings and the introduction of economic planning, as in Cuba. Will Arosemena follow the Cuban example? It would be completely illusory to expect this bourgeois figure to follow such a revolutionary course… .

“Among the popular forces, however, the desire to follow through à la Cubana is very deep.”

Such responses, which Hansen traced throughout his dispatches, confirm the accuracy of the Second Declaration of Havana’s conclusion:

“What Cuba can give to the peoples, and has already given, is its example. And what does the Cuban Revolution teach? That revolution is possible.”
 
 
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