January 1, 2009, marks the 50th anniversary of the victory of the rebel forces in Cuba, led by the Castro brothers, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and others. The fictional movie “Godfather 2” depicts well how dictator Fulgencio Batista went to a New Year’s Eve ball filled with rich local and U.S. bosses and Mafiosi and announced he was surrendering power.
The rebel forces had almost been annihilated when they landed in a boat from Mexico in 1956, with only a few making it to the mountains of Sierra Maestra. How could one of the most powerful armies in Latin America be routed by this group of rebels? Actually the small guerrilla army had much active support in all the major cities among workers and peasants who hated the corrupt and repressive Batista regime.
Fidel Castro came from the Orthodox Party, a bourgeois electoral party. The political program of the movement he later founded to fight the Batista regime, the MR26J (July 26 Revolutionary Movement), was basically one of “revolutionary nationalism” to reform capitalism, not replace it with a revolutionary Marxist system. The movement itself had many tendencies — some just wanted to eliminate Batista without changing anything; others, like Fidel, wanted more reforms.
After the small guerrilla band landed from Mexico on November 26, 1956, it was limited to some small clashes with Batista’s military. But in cities like Santiago, strikes, marches and even attacks against government installations were common. Frank País, a 22-year-old student leader, led the movement in the city of Santiago. He was also in charge of supplying the guerrillas in the mountains.
Early in May 1957, the Revolutionary Directorate (DR), that worked with the MR26J movement, attacked the presidential palace in Havana trying to assassinate Batista. The attempt failed. It was opposed by MR26J and Castro who wanted to publicly try Batista for his crimes. The DR commander died in the attempt. The other DR leaders joined the guerrillas in the mountains. Several weeks later, the guerrillas became more active and were able to open a second front led by Che Guevara.
On July 30, 1957, the cops killed Frank País, sparking a five-day general strike shutting down Santiago. The strike spread throughout Oriente province, to the city of Camaguey. País’s funeral was the biggest protest in Santiago’s history.
The MR26J attempted an insurrection, supported by the sailors at the Cayo Loco naval base, who had rebelled against their officers and the regime. On September 5, the sailors, with civilian help, arrested the base commander and handed out weapons to the local population. The mutineers seized the neighboring city of Camaguey. The Batista air force bombed the city for 12 hours, and used tanks and artillery to crush the uprising. The rebellion’s leader surrendered and was shot. Dozens of other sailors and civilians were also executed. But the rebellion demonstrated that the military rank and file did not support the dictatorship.
As the Batista dictatorship began to lose the war in the mountains and the cities, it became more repressive. Meanwhile, the U.S. ruling class was looking for a way to dump Batista while relying on the right-wing capitalist opposition to assure U.S. interests in Cuba. But the masses of workers and students were in no mood just to replace Batista with another U.S. lackey. They wanted radical changes. So the struggle within the anti-Batista opposition sharpened, between those who later ended up in Miami and those wanting radical reforms (the Castro brothers, Che and their allies).
(Next: The end of the Batista regime; how the sellout pro-Soviet “C”P — which earlier had supported Batista — later was able to influence the new Castro government, so that the Cuban revolution was born containing all the errors of the old communist movement and therefore never led to the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.)
а все таки: мне понравилось..