Vol. 80/No. 38 October 10, 2016
1958 Cuban peasant congress: ‘It’s your revolution’
“The Rebel Army is your army, it’s the army of the people, of the peasants,” Raúl Castro, commander of the Second Front, told them.
The meeting was one of many actions by rebel leaders aimed at organizing working people to take control and put in place what Fidel Castro called “the embryo of the new state that would emerge after the revolutionary triumph.”
The congress had been set for Calabaza de Sagua, but after nearby bombing raids by Batista’s air force, it was moved 30 miles away. Many delegates found out about the change at the last minute and ended up walking for three days, at times through swamps, crossing rivers and dodging strafing by the regime.
The delegates were sharecroppers, tenant farmers, working farmers and “squatters” from rebel-controlled territory. Some came from areas still ruled by Batista. There were also some farmworkers, mostly cane cutters. They were joined by Raúl Castro, Vilma Espín and other leaders of the Second Front.
This wasn’t the first meeting of the rural poor. In May, Fidel Castro met with 500 coffee pickers in the Sierra Maestra to discuss how to deal with sabotage of the harvest by capitalist landowners seeking to undermine the advancing revolution.
There were more than 159,000 farms in Cuba in 1958, but 1.4 percent of the owners controlled 46 percent of the land. Nine U.S. capitalists alone owned more than 3 million acres. Peasants were forced to accept lower prices for their crops because of the stranglehold on transportation and financing by capitalist landlords and middlemen. Most farmworkers, with no land of their own, barely squeaked by with a few months of work during harvest time.
According to Sierra Maestra newspaper, 96 percent of peasants rarely ate meat and only 2 percent had eggs in their diet. More than 40 percent of the rural population was illiterate.
After Raúl Castro promoted the first Revolutionary Peasant Committees in April, 84 were formed, attracting some 5,000 members. They organized peasants to support the Rebel Army by storing food, gathering supplies and providing information on the movement of the dictatorship’s forces. They became the champions of the demands of the rural poor.
In July, 32 peasant leaders from every municipality controlled by the Second Front elected a Regional Agrarian Committee with José “Pepe” Ramírez Cruz as president and Teodoro Pereira La Rosa as vice president. They told coffee farmers they should not sell a quintal of coffee — about 100 lbs. — for less than 42.5 pesos. And they encouraged farmers to contribute to finance the Rebel Army.
The capitalist landowners launched a campaign to red-bait the committee, charging it was a communist plot. Longtime peasant leader Ramírez, and other members of the Popular Socialist Party, were particular targets. In response, the committee worked to organize the congress, promising leadership elections.
The congress became a tribune for exploited peasants. They denounced the evictions of farmers from the land they worked and the actions of the thugs of the latifundistas and demanded fixed prices for their crops, access to health care, roads and credit.
The congress formed the Regional Peasant Committee, laying the basis for what is today the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP). Choosing between two competing slates, delegates elected a leadership that backed the revolution and rejected those that had spearheaded the red-baiting attack. Pereira was elected president and Ramírez organization secretary.
‘Without land reform, no revolution’
“Without land reform, there can be no Cuban Revolution,” Raúl Castro said in his closing remarks to the congress. “We may be unaware of the magnitude of what we are doing here, because right now, today, the Agrarian Revolution is beginning, is emerging, and must form the basis of the true Cuban Revolution.”“Workers and peasants have the same destiny and have to unite in struggle,” he added.
Two weeks later, Fidel Castro, the central leader of the Rebel Army and the July 26 Movement, issued Law 3, which stated that peasants would “immediately” begin to receive titles to the land they worked.
In 2014 Onésimo Marín Rodríguez, one of the delegates, described to Venceremos the impact the congress had on the peasant struggle.
“We felt a support that we never saw in previous governments. We learned firsthand what the political, social and economic objectives were of the revolution that was being born,” he said. “We left enthusiastic with the idea of creating more peasant associations to accelerate the fall of the dictatorship.”
And accelerate it they did. On Jan. 1, 1959, Batista fled as the Rebel Army advanced across the country. Workers and farmers responded to the July 26 movement’s call for a general strike and insurrection to ensure that a revolutionary government would take his place.
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