As part of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Fidel Castro, the central leader of Cuba’s socialist revolution, the Militant is printing excerpts of his political writings over the coming year. This one is from The Second Declaration of Havana, presented by Castro and adopted by a million-strong General Assembly of the Cuban People on Feb. 4, 1962. The full text is available in The First and Second Declarations of Havana. Copyright © 2007 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Cuba affronts the imperialists in a special way. What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees’ hatred of the Cuban Revolution? What explains it is fear. Not fear of the Cuban Revolution, but fear of the Latin American revolution.
By crushing the Cuban Revolution they hope to dispel the fear that torments them, the specter of revolution that threatens them. By eliminating the Cuban Revolution, they hope to eliminate the revolutionary spirit of the people. They imagine in their delirium that Cuba is an exporter of revolutions. In their sleepless merchants’ and money lenders’ minds lives the idea that revolutions can be bought, sold, rented, loaned, exported and imported like a piece of merchandise. Ignorant of the objective laws that govern the development of human societies, they believe that their monopolistic, capitalistic, and semifeudal regimes are eternal.
Always, in each historic epoch, the ruling classes have committed murder. They do so invoking the “defense of society, order, country” — their “society” of the privileged minority against the exploited majority; their class “order,” maintained by blood and fire against the dispossessed; the “country,” whose fruits only they enjoy, depriving the rest of the people — all this to repress the revolutionaries who aspire to a new society, a just order, a country truly for all.
But the development of history, the ascending march of humanity, cannot and will not be halted. The forces that impel the people, who are the real makers of history, are determined by the material conditions of their existence and by the aspirations for higher goals of well-being and liberty that emerge when man’s progress in the fields of science, technology, and culture make this possible. These forces are superior to the will and the terror unleashed by the ruling oligarchies.
Imperialism considered us a powerless and submissive flock. Now it begins to be terrified of that flock — a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism today sees its gravediggers.