Skip Nav Destination Article Navigation. Book Review May 01 Corbitt Duvon C. This Site. Hispanic American Historical Review 42 2 : Volume 42, Issue 2. Previous Article Next Article. Cuba may be the most recognizable example of nationalist ideas bubbling over into a successful revolution that would ultimately nationalize industries and develop a socialist society from this era in Latin America.
Brown University Libraries. Accessed March 11, Economy , Education , Politics. The 95 theses that the monk Martin Luther nailed to the doors of the Wittenberg Cathedral in would not have gone from being a conventual dispute, an inconsequential tantrum by the Augustinian monk if it weren't for the fact that they had the ability to capture the sensitivity of their time.
It was only when the ideas of the clergyman - that "ray of thought", appealing to the expression used by the young Marx on this matter - made contact with popular soil that they became powerful instruments of social transformation.
Something similar can be said of The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which, of course, did not "produce" the French Revolution or cause the wars of independence for the Spanish colonies in the Americas. But as in the previous case, the Geneva-born's writing somehow synthesized the aspirations of an era and allowed us to imagine the contours of the new society that was developing in the womb of the old one.
The same is true in relation to another extraordinary text, the Communist Manifesto written by those two brilliant young Germans at the beginning of and which, over the years, was to become the herald of a new historical stage.
Finally, the same can be said of The State and the Revolution, written by Lenin in the midst of the rages of the first socialist revolution in history. It was not the books, or the pamphlets, but the articulation between these and the struggles of the peoples that moved history. The conjuncture of ' It is an extraordinary allegation, an impressive text, undoubtedly one of the most important in Latin American history, both for its content and for the conditions under which it was produced.
This radical decision was precipitated by the accelerated decomposition of the Batista political regime and the capitulation of the legal opposition to it. Fidel remained in the party and the following year he was appointed as a candidate for deputy for the elections scheduled for June But on March 10, Colonel Fulgencio Batista's coup d'etat took place, and the electoral process was aborted. Fidel had repeatedly expressed his disagreement with the faltering line of the PPC and the paralyzing ineffectiveness of the legal opposition to a regime that, in the midst of the Cold War and encouraged by his US mentors, was limited to denunciation and protests in the scope of Congress.
However, his demand that the party adopt an extra-parliamentary opposition strategy - thereby appealing to the best Cuban revolutionary tradition - had been ignored. The cowardly response that the PPC offered to the Batista coup and its blatant violation of the Constitution, influenced, according to Fidel, "by the socialist currents of the world today", and whose progressive contents reflected a moment of heyday of the struggle of classes in Cuba, precipitated Fidel's break with the leadership of the PPC and his going into hiding p.
It was from those moments that, under the leadership of Fidel, the group of young revolutionaries adopted an insurrectionary strategy. This had as its initial moment the capture of an emblematic site of the dictatorship to, from there, precipitate the popular uprising in a city or a region. The attack was carried out on July 26 and due to circumstances that Fidel himself explains in his allegation, it ended in a defeat for the insurgent forces.
Sixty of the members of the revolutionary command fell, most of them after the fighting ceased, victims of savage torture and mass shooting. Fidel and a handful of his men managed to retreat to the mountain, but on August 1 they were arrested by a Cuban army patrol. Public hospitals, which are always full, accept only patients recommended by some powerful politician who, in turn, demands the electoral votes of the unfortunate one and his family so that Cuba may continue forever the same or worse.
With this background, is it not understandable that from May to December over a million persons lost their jobs. The revolutionary movement, as the mommentous incarnation of this sovereignty, the only source of legitimate power, would have assumed all the faculties inherent in it, except that of modifying the Constitution itself: in other words it would have assumed the legislative, executive and judicial powers.
The Third Revolutionary Law would have granted workers and employees the right to share thirty per cent of the profits of all the large industrial, mercantile and miling enterprises, including the sugar mills.
The Fifth Revolutionary Law would have ordered the confiscation of all holdings and ill-gotten gains of those who had committed frauds during previous regimes, as well as the holdings and ill-gotten gains of all their legatees and heirs. Cuba should be the bulwark of liberty and not a shameful link in the chain of despotism. These laws would have been proclaimed immediately. They would have been followed by another series of laws, and the fundamental measures, such as the Agrarian Reform, the integral Reform of Education, electric power nationalization of the trust and the telephone trust, refund to the people of the illegal excessive rates this company has charged, and payment to the Treausury of all taxes brazenly evaded in the past.
The greatness and prosperty of our country depends on the healthy and vigorous rural population that loves the land and knows how to till it, within the framework of a State that protects and guides them. Do you ask him how many children he has, which days of the week he ate and which he didn't, do you concern yourselves with his environment at all? You send him to jail without further thought. But those who burn warehouses and stores to collect insurance do not go to jail, even though a few human beings should have happened to [be cremated with the property insured].
The insured have money to hire lawyers and bribe judges. You fail the poor wretch who steals because he is hungry; but none of the hundreds who steal from the Government has ever spent a night in jail; you dine with them at the end of the year in some elegant place and they enjoy your respect. Cuba could easily provide for a population three times as great as it now has, so there is no excuse for the abject poverty of a single one of its present inhabitants.
The markets should be overflowing with produce, pantries should be full, all hands should be working. This is not an inconceivable thought. What is inconceivable is that the majority of our rural people are now living in worse circumstances than were the Indians Columbus discovered living in the fairest land that human eyes had ever seen.
But I do not fear prison, just as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who snuffed life out of 70 brothers of mine.
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