The French edition of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for April. Sixty-four years ago, Cuban workers and peasants in the Revolutionary Armed Forces and militias fought to defend their socialist revolution arms in hand, defeating the U.S.-backed mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs in less than 72 hours. This first military defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Americas electrified working people and youth there and around the world. The excerpt is from the chapter, “There will be a victorious revolution in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba.” Copyright © 2001 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
In September 1960, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro announced to the world: “In the coming year, our country intends to wage its great battle against illiteracy, with the ambitious goal of teaching every single illiterate person in the country” — one million Cubans, roughly one-third of the adult population — “to read and write.” And that’s exactly what they did, as some 100,000 young people, most of them teenagers, went to the countryside and lived and worked alongside peasant families. …
On April 15, 1961, when the Yankee-organized mercenaries announced their imminent invasion by simultaneously bombing three Cuban airfields, the revolutionary government mobilized the people’s militias and other military units. In the declaration announcing that state of alert, Fidel Castro called on all Cubans to “occupy their assigned posts, whether in a military unit or a workplace” — and he added, in the same sentence, “with no interruption in production, the literacy campaign, or a single revolutionary task.”
Four days later, when the counterrevolutionary forces had been defeated, the communiqué signed by Fidel reporting that victory to the Cuban people was demonstratively dated: “April 19, 1961, Year of Education.” …
Nineteen sixty-one in Cuba was the Year of Education in all the meanings of that word — the capacity to learn, to produce, to become a more disciplined revolutionary soldier, to create, to develop. The Year of Education meant making culture more accessible. It meant bravery in serving the highest human goals. It meant extending a hand of solidarity to anyone fighting against injustice and oppression anywhere in the world. It meant offering your life to achieve these goals.
Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and other leaders of the Cuban Revolution were very much aware that the greatest obstacle to the line of march of the toilers is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth. That’s why revolutionists in Cuba were so proud that the literacy effort had continued with minimal disruption as the battle against the invaders — a battle for the very life of the revolution — was fought and won. “The literacy campaign has not stopped even during these days,” announced Fidel Castro in his April 23 report on the victory to the Cuban people.
Whatever any particular individual was doing over those three days, April 17–19 — whether deployed at the front, working in the fields or factories, or helping someone learn to read and write — the Cuban people felt the bond of a common battle waged by equals. A common bond that provided a basis for discipline, a basis for the shared joy of construction, the joy of creation, and the joy of victory in battle over those who sought to destroy everything their revolution was making possible.
What a moment for the people of Cuba to announce to the world the socialist character of the revolution! …
The literacy campaign was central to strengthening the worker-peasant alliance on which revolutionary Cuba was founded; it was central to narrowing the gulf between toilers in city and countryside. Peasants and their families in prerevolutionary Cuba had virtually no educational opportunities. This was especially true for women in rural areas. So the literacy campaign struck a mighty blow for the emancipation of women, too.
A central part of the education of every revolutionary-minded person is coming to recognize the terror, violence, and degradation on which the landlords and capitalists base their rule. That’s one of the lessons underlined by José Ramón Fernández, commander of the main column that repelled the invaders at Playa Girón, in his July 1999 testimony before a Havana court during the trial of a lawsuit brought by the people of Cuba against the U.S. government for the thousands of deaths and massive physical destruction Washington’s decades-long effort to destroy the Cuban Revolution has wrought.
In 1961 the literacy campaign volunteers were among those in Cuba against whom the U.S. government unleashed its counterrevolutionary assassins and torturers. As we explained in the foreword to Playa Girón, for young people in the United States during those opening years of the revolution, the press dispatches and photographs depicting “Cuban teenagers lynched for the crime of teaching peasant families to read and write” offered a graphic representation of the motives, the real character of the contending class forces confronting each other not just in Cuba but the world over.
Such images confirmed what young people in the United States in the early 1960s were learning here at home about the lynchings, night-riding terror, and police violence, both local and federal, against Blacks and civil rights fighters. This helped us understand the class reality that cop beatings, frame-ups, humiliations, and, yes, executions on the streets are part of the everyday life of millions of workers — daily horrors that bear down disproportionately on Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, other oppressed nationalities, and immigrants. It opened our eyes slowly but surely to recognizing that the capitalist rulers will unleash fascist terror in face of a challenge to their rule by workers and farmers.