Vol. 72/No. 18      May 5, 2008

Hart was invited to speak on “Marx and Martí in the Roots of Cuba’s Socialist Revolution” and related themes. José Martí was the most outstanding anti-imperialist leader in Latin America in the late 19th century and the central organizer of Cuba’s final independence struggle against Spanish colonial rule.

Four books by and about Hart were presented at the April 6-12 meetings: José Martí: Apóstol de nuestra América (José Martí: Apostle of Our America); Sin permiso de la OEA (Without Permission from the OAS); Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58; and Armando Hart Dávalos: un revolucionario cubano (Armando Hart Dávalos: a Cuban Revolutionary). Also presented was a booklet describing the Armando Hart Archive, an ongoing effort to collect and publish his writings and historic documents of the revolution. Aldabonazo was published by Pathfinder Press, the other four by Mexican publisher Plaza y Valdés.

In Monterrey, capital of the state of Nuevo León, meetings were held at the José Martí Institute for Higher Education, the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, and the Museum of Mexican History.

In Zacatecas, seven hours south of Monterrey, Hart spoke at the Institute of Culture in nearby Guadalupe, the Zacatecas Institute of Culture, and the Technological Institute. He was the guest of honor at the unveiling of a bust of José Martí in Guadalupe, and at a reception at a photo gallery, welcomed at both events by the governor of the state of Zacatecas, Amalia García. In Guadalupe, mayor Samuel Herrera proclaimed him a “distinguished guest” at a ceremony held at city hall. Several of the events drew 150-200 people.

At each of the meetings, Hart spoke about the influence of Martí’s anti-imperialist legacy on the generation of Cubans, including himself, who led the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the first socialist revolution in the Americas. Today, he argued, these revolutionary ideas and experiences are needed for those throughout the Americas—including in the United States—seeking to confront the worldwide social crisis.

Also speaking at the meetings were Cuban researcher Eloisa Carreras; Raúl Rojas, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City; and Martín Koppel, a Pathfinder Press editor and writer for the Militant. At several of the events they were joined by Eulogio Rodríguez, Cuba’s consul for northern and central Mexico.  
 
Lessons remain relevant
Carreras, who has compiled and edited several titles by Hart, said these books describe “how Armando Hart became a revolutionary and a Fidelista,” and why the lessons of the Cuban Revolution remain relevant “to confront the challenges of the 21st century.”

Rojas explained that in 1955 Hart became a founding leader of the July 26 Movement, which, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, led the struggle against the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Hart was a central organizer of the July 26 Movement’s urban underground, which gave vital support to the Rebel Army in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Rojas recounted how Hart carried out a bold escape from jail in 1957.

After the January 1959 overthrow of the Batista regime, Hart, at age 28, became minister of education in the new revolutionary government, directing the mass campaign that wiped out illiteracy in 1961. In 1976 he became the first minister of culture, and today is the director of the Martí Program.

Rojas, editor of the four titles published by Plaza y Valdés, described the meticulous work involved in producing them, a two-year-long project. José Martí: Apóstol de nuestra América is about the life and work of Martí. Armando Hart Dávalos: un revolucionario cubano, by Carreras, is a biographical sketch of Hart.

Sin permiso de la OEA is a tribute to Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos. The title is a quote from a 1976 speech by Fidel Castro noting that Panama under Torrijos had reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1974 “without permission from the OAS,” the Organization of American States.

Rojas recounted that originally the book was to have been published in Panama, with a subsidy from the government there. But its release coincided with an OAS summit in that country last summer, and the Panamanian government demanded the title be changed. Hart refused, so it was published in Mexico this year.

Carreras introduced Koppel, who presented Aldabonazo. She thanked Pathfinder Press for publishing the book, and introduced the others from the United States who brought copies of that title and helped organize the display of books on sale at all the meetings: Ellie García, a socialist and garment worker from Atlanta; Tom Baumann, a Young Socialist in New York; and Linda Joyce and Pat Leamon, volunteers in the Pathfinder Printing Project from West Virginia and North Carolina, respectively.

Koppel explained that Pathfinder published Aldabonazo, in English and Spanish, “because it is needed by working people and youth, in the United States and around the world.” Describing the stepped-up assaults by the U.S. employers and government on workers’ living standards and rights, he pointed to recent examples of working-class resistance—from protests by independent truck drivers against skyrocketing fuel costs to the upcoming May Day actions to demand legal status for undocumented immigrants.

“Cuba’s socialist revolution offers a living example of how to fight and how to win,” Koppel said. “For fighting workers, and youth attracted to their struggles, books such as Aldabonazo are political weapons today and in the class battles to come.”  
 
Cuba’s literacy campaign
On the evening of April 7, a book presentation attended by 100 people was held at the José Martí Institute for Higher Education, a small private college with academic ties to the University of Havana. That morning Hart swore in the officers of the José Martí Cultural Foundation, a newly established organization in Torreón, in the neighboring state of Coahuila, and spoke to half a dozen newspaper and TV reporters.

Carlos Caballero, president of the Martí Cultural Foundation, spoke with enthusiasm about the four ophthalmology clinics that have been set up in Coahuila, staffed by Cuban volunteer doctors, as part of the worldwide Cuban initiative called Operation Miracle. Tens of thousands of working people and children in Coahuila have undergone cataract operations, free of charge, to restore their eyesight.

One of the reporters asked Hart, “As a leader of what has been called the most successful literacy campaign in the history of Latin America, what would you recommend for us here, where there is a high level of illiteracy?”

“I can’t tell you what to do here,” Hart answered. “In Cuba, we made a revolution.”

Hart was asked questions about the fight against illiteracy at virtually all the meetings he addressed. At a meeting of nearly 200 at the Museum of Mexican History, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the José Martí Cultural Society in Monterrey, he gave a more detailed account of the Cuban literacy campaign of 1961. More than 100,000 volunteer teachers, mostly teenagers, went into the countryside, and within a year illiteracy was reduced from 30 percent to barely 4 percent, he said.

“The success of this campaign required mass support and participation,” the Cuban leader said. It involved the unions, neighborhood defense committees, and organizations of women, peasants, and students. When literacy volunteers were murdered by U.S.-backed counterrevolutionaries, people responded with large protest demonstrations.  
 
Revolutionary heritage
The Cuban Revolution, Hart pointed out in each of his talks, draws on more than a century of revolutionary continuity. In the 1920s, early communist leaders such as Julio Antonio Mella were influenced by the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of October 1917 under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, while at the same time rediscovering the anti-imperialist traditions of Martí.

“We need to recover our historical memory. The Mexican people too have revolutionary traditions,” he said, pointing to 19th century revolutionary democratic leader Benito Juárez, the Mexican revolution of 1910, and the anti-imperialist mobilizations that led to the 1938 nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry under President Lázaro Cárdenas.

At a meeting of 200, mostly students, at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in Monterrey, Hart explained that when he joined the revolutionary movement in the 1950s, he didn’t consider himself a socialist, but in fact was already influenced by Marxist ideas.

He read from a 1956 open letter he had addressed to the president of Mexico—asking for the release of Fidel Castro, who had been jailed there at the time—declaring that Cuba’s revolution “will lay the foundations of a socialist and revolutionary democracy.”

Such prosocialist ideas, Hart said, “characterized my generation, those who attacked the Moncada barracks [in 1953] and others” who, like him, were not part of the old pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party in Cuba.

Asked during the discussion period what writings on Marxism he recommended, Hart urged his audience to study the broadest range of revolutionary leaders, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, José Carlos Mariátegui, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro—“in the original texts,” he insisted. “We need an antidogmatic understanding of Marx and Engels.”

In several of his talks Hart referred to his experience as Cuba’s first minister of culture, from 1976 to 1997. In the early 1970s, he said, “sectarianism and bureaucratism”—what in the Soviet Union was called “socialist realism”—had made inroads in the implementation of cultural policies. “I had the honor of being named minister of culture in order to end those policies” and restore the original policy of the Cuban revolutionary leadership of guaranteeing full freedom of artistic expression.

At the Zacatecas Institute of Culture, Hart was introduced by Pablo González Casanova, a prominent Mexican academic figure. He praised Hart’s role in promoting “respect for different currents, tastes, and interpretations” of cultural expression in Cuba.  
 
Not changing course
In the discussion periods at every meeting, questions were also asked about the Cuban Revolution today. One frequent question was whether Cuba will change course now that Raúl Castro has replaced Fidel Castro as president.

A reporter at the first event in Monterrey asked Hart, referring to recent economic measures, “Is a Cuban perestroika now under way with Raúl Castro?” Perestroika was the term used for the procapitalist economic “reforms” carried out by the Soviet government in the late 1980s before its implosion.

“Perestroika died a long time ago,” Hart replied, adding that Cuba is taking a different road from the former Soviet Union. “We are not renouncing socialism,” he said.

He was asked a similar question at the university meeting in Monterrey. Do the new measures announced by the Cuban government represent a retreat from socialism? Is Raúl Castro following the Chinese model?

“No,” Hart said. “And we don’t believe in models. We are not following a model—we are following an aspiration, socialism, which we don’t yet have today, but are striving toward.”

At the Zacatecas Institute of Culture Hart ended his talk with an appeal to the youth in the audience of 150, many of whom were university students. “I am addressing the new generations,” he said. “We need to promote a dialogue between the generations who made the revolution in Cuba and you, the generations that will lead the 21st century.”

The Cuban leader noted that such a dialogue must include “reaching out to North American society.” He pointed to the presence of revolutionaries from the United States at the meeting to underscore his point that the political questions he was discussing were relevant not only in Latin America but in the United States.

At the end of each meeting, members of the audience went to the literature table to buy books. Many asked the socialists from the United States about the social and political conditions facing working people there. Most said they had relatives living in Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, or other U.S. cities. Some had heard of the truckers’ protests and immigrant rights demonstrations there. More than 200 books were sold at the meetings, including more than 80 copies of Aldabonazo and dozens of copies of the other books presented.  
 
 
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