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July 26, 2003
50 Years after Moncada
A Statement of the Committees of Correspondence for
Democracy and Socialism
On July 26, 1953, approximately 200 young men and women
launched an attack on the Moncada Military Garrison in
Cuba's eastern region in its most Caribbean City -
Santiago de Cuba. Like all previous Cuban revolutionary
campaigners, Fidel Castro, Melba Hernandez, Haydee
Santamaria and their comrades knew that the eastern part
of the Island was the poorest economically, the
strongest in anti-imperialist sentiment-and an area
populated mostly by people of African descent. The
Moncada barracks had become a symbol of some of the
worst repression in the country. It was used as a
staging ground by police and soldiers known for their
brutality and torture. The goal of the young
revolutionaries was to gain control of the barracks,
seize large caches of weapons, arm the popular movement,
and unleash a definitive uprising against the Batista
dictatorship. Now known as the July 26 Movement, the
movement is credited with launching the Cuban
revolution.
Ironically, though, the July 26 attack was a military
failure. Most of the 200 were captured, and tortured or
killed. However, their effort proved a tremendous
political success on two fronts. They won the hearts and
minds of the Cuban people who were ready to stand their
ground and fight, and Cuba finally got a hearing from
the international community. Word of torture and
brutality in Cuba finally became front-page news
throughout the world and U.S. domination was being
challenged. Fidel Castro was among those captured, tried
and jailed. During his trial he gave a speech that laid
out the reasons for the attack on Moncada. This speech,
History Will Absolve Me, became a major political
treatise of the revolution. The military court sentenced
the surviving Moncada attackers to fifteen years in
prison. But due to a powerful national amnesty movement,
they were released unconditionally two years later.
After their release, Fidel and much of the leadership of
what would become the July 26 Movement went into exile
in Mexico. From there they planned and launched their
new military campaign centered in the Sierra Maestra
mountains. This military campaign was supported by an
underground movement led by Frank Pais. It had deep
roots and gained far-reaching support throughout Cuban
cities and rural communities. Students, workers,
professionals, and others staged daily protests in the
streets of cities and towns across the island. This
broad movement would bring an end to the U.S. backed
Batista government, five years, five months, and five
days after the attack on the Moncada garrison. The fall
of the Batista regime was a definitive event in the
struggle for Cuban sovereignty. The movement stretched
far back, first against Spanish colonial rule and then,
after 1898, against U.S. neo-colonialism embodied in the
Platt Amendment, with military interventions and
economic domination by a handful of U.S. sugar, mining,
telecommunications, banking and "entertainment"
corporations -- the latter melded with organized crime.
Many ask: How did this, the "youngest revolution" of its
time survive and triumph in the back yard of U.S.
imperialism? How has it continued to survive for 44
years? Historians, political scientists and activists
alike point to Cuba's ability to maintain its social
base with its people, its strong relationships with
other countries and forces in the world and its
solidarity with other struggling peoples. However,
probably the most important factor has been Cuba's
overall social project of leveling the playing field
among its own people. Through laws and programs, they
have worked to guarantee equal access to education,
health, employment, culture, housing and food to all
Cubans especially the least able such as children and
the elderly. They have also narrowed the historic
economic divisions between black and non-black in Cuba
and have worked to support African countries in a
special way because of Africa's historic connection to
Cuba.
The successes of the revolution and its durability,
therefore, have been grounded in its challenge to
economic domination by U.S.-based interests, and its
establishment of national authority over Cuban economic
life. It also owed much, during its first three decades,
to economic and technical assistance from the Soviet
Union, which frustrated U.S. attempts at economic
strangulation.
The U.S. campaign against Cuba, which has continued
through ten U.S. presidencies, is among the ugliest
chapters in the history of international relations. It
has included invasion, assassination plots, poisoning of
its food, spying and encouragement of anti-Cuba
terrorism, economic embargo and incessant psychological
warfare. The anti-Cuba campaign has also deeply wounded
democracy in the United States, creating an ultra-
reactionary force within our own country operating in
concert with, and often at the direction of, the CIA.
The anti-Cuba campaign once brought the world to the
brink of nuclear catastrophe, and more than once has
threatened international crises.
Many friends of Cuba -- including CCDS -- have differed
with Cuban policy on various issues, including the
continued application of the death penalty, the
abolition of which, we believe, ought to be universal.
But in reflecting on the Cuba experience, one should be
mindful that the Cubans have made and defended their
revolution, not under conditions of their own choosing,
but under the most adverse conditions, imposed on them
by very powerful hostile forces. The Cuban Revolution is
not a blueprint for social change - as no revolution is
- but it is a genuinely creative and popular response
to a unique and irreproducible set of circumstances. And
it ought to be the right of the Cuban people, without
any outside interference, to continue that process.
We in CCDS, as with so many others on the Left, continue
to support the Cuban Revolution, not because we believe
it is perfect or has not engaged in projects and
initiatives that some of us may disagree with, but
because at its core this revolution has organized in
practice a radical and deeply egalitarian socialist
experiment which has raised the bar to new heights on
questions of race, gender and class equality and
international solidarity. We continue to support the
Cuban Revolution because it has established Cuba's true
sovereignty and economic independence, which ought to be
guiding principles for a system of peaceful and
cooperative international relations. History, geography
and nature would make Cuba and the United States the
most natural of partners. It is only the drive for
imperial domination and exploitation which has erected
barriers between our two nations. Cuba has suffered
bitterly for it, and we are the poorer, in every sense,
for it as well.
We in the CCDS therefore continue to demand that the
U.S. government:
1. End the more than 40 year old illegal economic
blockade of Cuba,
2. Respect Cuba's independence and sovereignty,
3. End its interference in Cuba's internal affairs,
4. Return the Guantanamo naval base to the government of
Cuba,
5. Respect all treaties and agreements between the U.S.
government and the government of Cuba, including those
on immigration and terrorism.
Statement of the CCDS National Executive Committee,
July 26, 2003
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