Vol. 77/No. 45      December 16, 2013

Below is an excerpt from Cuba and the Coming American Revolution. The Spanish edition is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for December. The selection is from “There Will Be a Victorious Revolution in the United States Before a Victorious Counterrevolution in Cuba,” based on two talks by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes in March 2001 on 40th anniversary of Cuba’s victory over Washington’s mercenary force at the Bay of Pigs. Copyright © 2001 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES  
The victory at Playa Girón reminds us of the price toilers must be ready to pay to win our freedom from exploitation and oppression and then to defend it. We can’t help but be affected by the fearlessness displayed by tens of thousands of Cuban workers and peasants, many of them very young — by their courage and determination in face of death. That’s one of the qualities of a people engaged in a profound revolutionary transformation of their circumstances and themselves.

What’s so striking about Cuban revolutionists, however, is not their courage and determination in face of death. It’s their attitude toward life. That, above all, is what the élan, the discipline, the bravery that ensured the triumph at Playa Girón were all about.

That’s why, as [Playa Girón Cuban Commander] José Ramón Fernández testifies, there was such surprise in Washington in April 1961 “at the scope of the Cuban people’s victory.” The outcome, he points out, “can be explained only by the courage of a people who saw the January 1 [1959] triumph as the genuine opportunity to determine their own future. This is why they proudly wore the militia uniforms and were on alert, and willing to fight, with the firm conviction they would win.”

That’s what the U.S. rulers did not understand — and even more importantly, can never understand. They do not and cannot understand the scope of the capacities of workers and farmers engaged in struggle, revolutionary struggle above all. They cannot understand human beings like the militia members in that wonderful photograph the Militant newspaper ran this week of the First Company of the 134th Battalion celebrating their victory at Playa Girón.

If this weren’t true — if the ruling class could understand what propels workers and farmers into revolutionary action; if they understood what we are ready to fight and die for, or could learn to understand it—then socialist revolution would be an illusion. But they do not and cannot.

In order to rationalize the legitimacy of their exploitative system before the eyes of society as a whole, the rulers rely on ideology. Contrary to the bourgeoisie’s pretensions to civilization and culture, there are no “great ideas” or scientific social theories whose inexorable conclusion is that a handful of property-holding families must forever grow wealthy off the labor of the majority of humanity, maintaining their class dictatorship by whatever force and violence is necessary. That’s not a law of nature, or of political economy. …

[B]ourgeois ideology is not a conspiracy. It’s not some clever plot they hatch. The closer the rulers’ rationalizations come to something with a family resemblance to social thought, the more impossible it becomes for them and their children to disentangle what they, as a class, want and claim to be true from the truth itself. The same ideological illusions hold sway among the middle-class and professional layers who look to the bourgeois rulers and act on their behalf. …

Because the bourgeoisie and their servants believe their own ideology, they end up making political misjudgments about the capacities of working people — about the toilers whose courageous actions allow them to begin escaping the domination of these ghosts. Thus, at decisive moments the rulers make big miscalculations. And, in the end, that’s one of the main reasons why they will lose.

Over the years, I’ve frequently heard the question: “Didn’t most top CIA and White House officials really know there would be no uprising by the Cuban people in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion?” The answer is, no. It’s not that simple. And it’s worth taking a few minutes to discuss why.

A good place to start is Fernández’s judgment that “from a strategic and tactical point of view, the enemy’s idea was well conceived.” We should take that assessment as dead serious. But it contradicts all the most common evaluations promoted for forty years by the U.S. rulers and their propagandists to rationalize Cuba’s stunning victory. They point to the CIA’s supposed blunders, or to Kennedy’s claimed vacillations, or to a combination of both.

Fernández rejects this. “The mercenaries came well organized, well armed, and well supported,” he says. “What they lacked was a just cause to defend. That is why they did not fight with the same passion, courage, conviction, valor, firmness, bravery, and spirit of victory as did the revolutionary forces.”

Che Guevara made the same point just a few weeks after the victory at Playa Girón. …

The U.S. rulers, Che said, figured they needed only 1,000 men to carry out a successful invasion and hold a beachhead in Cuba. “But they needed 1,000 men there who would fight to the death,” he emphasized, and that they did not have. “Someone whose daddy had 30,000 acres of land, and who comes here solely to show his presence so the 30,000 acres of land will be returned to him — you can’t ask him to die at the hand of a peasant who had nothing and who has a ferocious desire to kill him because they’re coming to take the peasant’s land away.”

“They have always been wrong about us,” Che concluded. “They have always arrived late. And they have never done anything that did not serve instead to strengthen the trust of the people in their government, to make the revolution more militant: in short, to strengthen us more.”
 
 
Related articles:
‘Proud to know Ramón Labañino, a person of values and principles’
Embargo forces closing of Cuba’s US consular service
Who are the Cuban Five?
 
 
 
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