Seventy-three years ago Fidel Castro led an armed attack aimed at seizing the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks of the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Although the July 26, 1953, assault failed, it set in motion a historic struggle that led a few years later to a successful popular revolution. Under Castro’s leadership, workers and farmers organized to make the first socialist revolution in the Americas, setting an example for working people everywhere, one that the U.S. rulers have been trying to overturn ever since.
With a trusted battle-tested leadership, the working people of Cuba proved that it’s possible to fight and to win. Cuba’s defeat of both Batista and Washington opened a renewal of communist leadership across the Americas, in the U.S. and around the world.
Washington has never forgiven working people for putting an end to U.S. imperialism’s domination of Cuba and uprooting capitalist exploitation. Cuba’s toilers were mobilized by the revolutionary government to take over and run the U.S.-owned banks and businesses, as well as those of Cuba’s capitalist class, transforming themselves in the process. Agrarian reform put land into the hands of hundreds of thousands of landless peasants.
After the revolution, Cuban internationalist volunteers joined struggles against imperialism worldwide. They were part of the fight that brought down Portuguese colonial rule in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. They fought to repel multiple invasions of Angola by the South African army, accelerating the mass struggle that brought down the apartheid regime itself a few years later.
For more than 60 years, Cuba’s working people have faced a political and economic war as well as outright military aggression from Washington, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
After Washington’s Jan. 3 military attack on Venezuela, President Donald Trump’s administration systematically tightened U.S. sanctions, escalated military threats against the island, pressured governments abroad to break relations with Cuba and imposed a crippling oil blockade.
Working people in Cuba will mark the anniversary of the Moncada attack. Joining them at protests and meetings in the U.S. and around the world is an opportunity to answer Washington’s lies and to get out the truth about Cuba’s socialist revolution. And to win more workers and our unions here to demand, “U.S. hands off Cuba!”
Workers join revolt against dictator
Batista’s 1952 coup impelled into action thousands of men and women determined to oppose the dictatorship at all costs. Castro, who had gained support for continuous actions against the Batista regime, organized an underground movement to carry out the July 26 attacks on the barracks in Santiago and Bayamo. The audacious assaults by 160 revolutionaries were put down and 56 of the captured combatants were murdered by Batista’s henchmen in the following days.
The Batista regime put Castro and other surviving revolutionaries on trial. His courtroom defense speech, “History Will Absolve Me,” presented a bold program of revolutionary struggle to win land for peasants, end chronic unemployment and exploitation, and win political rights. It was smuggled out of prison, printed in tens of thousands of copies and used to win new recruits to the revolutionary movement.
Marta Rojas Rodríguez, a student who became a veteran Cuban revolutionary, was present at the trial. Years later she described the social composition of the movement Castro led. She pointed to the bricklayers, carpenters, mechanics and laborers, as well as farmworkers and “peasants, workers, unpretentious professionals, unemployed youth and those with temporary and seasonal jobs.”
Aim was for different class to rule
The insurgents “wanted to achieve more than a simple change of government,” Rojas wrote. Castro’s courtroom statement announced, “We were not going to say: ‘We will give you,’” but rather, now fight for what you need “with everything you have!”
In 1955 a broad movement for amnesty won the release of Castro and the other Moncada defendants. In exile in Mexico they prepared to return to the island to resume the battle against the dictatorship.
Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara described how he and other members of the Rebel Army were transformed in the course of this struggle: “We were beginning to feel in our flesh and blood the need for an agrarian reform and for profound and integral changes in the social structure.”
In areas they liberated, the Rebel Army organized working people to take charge of education, land reform, health care and the administration of justice.
In two years, the Rebel Army defeated Batista’s forces. When Batista fled the country Jan. 1, 1959, some of his generals tried to hold onto power. But millions responded to Castro’s call for a general strike, which turned into a popular insurrection.
Castro then planned to get to Havana rapidly from Santiago. But as he traveled across the island, in each town the Rebel Army column was met by thousands of people wanting to see and hear from “the men of Moncada” — the people who had led the fight to rid Cuba of Batista’s rule.
“Hundreds and thousands of men and women with the red and black uniforms of the July 26 Movement” joined the crowds that met the Freedom Caravan, Castro said a few years later. But there were also many thousands more who “wore the work shirts of workers and farmers and other men and women of the people. … They are the strength, the backbone of the revolution! Fist, arm, muscle of the revolutionary people, of the working class, of the peasants, of the workers!”
“We are making a revolution much bigger, and of course, more important than ourselves,” he said, “something that will withstand the test of time.”
As in the other great socialist revolution of the 20th century in Russia, led by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Castro acted on the necessity of organizing millions of the exploited and oppressed to take their destinies into their own hands. He declared from the outset that the new revolutionary government would draw them into the struggle. And it did.
The rich lessons of the Cuban Revolution are a vital part of forging a working-class party in the U.S., capable of leading working people to take power, as they did in Cuba. Advancing resolutely along that course today is the best help we can offer to Cuba’s unbowed working people as they continue to resist Washington’s escalating assaults.