Events are being held around the world to celebrate the 72nd anniversary of the July 26th attack on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks in Cuba. They mark the opening battle of a revolutionary uprising that would lead working people in Cuba to make the first socialist revolution in the Americas. This revolution is an example for working people everywhere.
These celebrations in Cuba, the U.S. and elsewhere are an opportunity to condemn Washington’s unremitting economic and political war aimed at extinguishing that revolution, to offer solidarity and to demand an immediate end to the U.S. rulers’ embargo.
On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro led rebel forces in an attack that announced the onset of a movement to overthrow the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista that seized power a year earlier. Although the assault was defeated and many of its leaders murdered or jailed, it began a historic struggle.
Castro’s courtroom speech History Will Absolve Me presented a forthright program of revolutionary struggle. It was smuggled out of prison and used to recruit new combatants.
The July 26 Movement led workers and peasants to bring down the Batista tyranny in 1959, end Cuba’s subordination to the dictates of U.S. imperialism and establish a government that working people could call their own.
Its accomplishments showed the kind of communist, working-class leadership that must be built to organize the toilers to take and to hold power, including here in the U.S. They are worthy of serious study.
Castro and the movement he led organized working people to use their conquest of state power to take control of the factories, land and banks from the capitalists and to organize production and mass popular organizations to meet human needs. Working people transformed themselves as they began transforming class relations around them. As Malcolm X would say, they learned their own worth.
Peasants were granted title to the land. Thousands of youth mobilized to eradicate illiteracy. Racist acts were outlawed. The Federation of Cuban Women was formed to deepen the revolution.
Internationalism was the hallmark of the revolution. Castro and Che Guevara explained that only the extension of the revolution could keep Cuba’s transformation moving forward.
The U.S. rulers will never forgive working people in Cuba for showing that it is possible to make a socialist revolution.
Advancing the fight to replace capitalist rule with workers power is the most important thing working people in the U.S. can do to end the U.S. rulers’ efforts to destroy the Cuban Revolution.
That’s what the Socialist Workers Party exists to do and why you should join it.