Tens of thousands of Cubans, joined by many youth attending the congress, celebrated by marching through the streets of Havana bearing coffins containing the symbolic remains of US enterprises, such as the United Fruit Company, International Telephone and Telegraph, and Standard Oil, and tossing them into the sea.
Over the next three months, Cuban workers and peasants mobilised in the millions, supported and organised by their new government, to defend their revolution. They occupied factories and fields and strengthened their volunteer militias. By late October virtually all imperialist-owned banks and industry, as well as the largest holdings of Cuba’s capitalist class, had been expropriated by the workers and farmers government. They had become the property of Cuba. This transformation of property relations in city and countryside opened the first socialist revolution in the Americas.
Delegates to the Latin American Youth Congress worked in three commissions through 8 August. They discussed and adopted resolutions, among others, extending their support to revolutionary Cuba, calling for international solidarity against Yankee imperialism, backing admission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations, and demanding an end to racist discrimination and the creation of jobs and economic opportunities for youth throughout the Americas.
Compañeros of the Americas and the entire world:
It would take a long time to extend individual greetings on behalf of our country to each of you, and to each of the countries represented here. We nevertheless want to draw attention to some of those who are representing countries afflicted by natural catastrophes or catastrophes caused by imperialism.
We would like to extend special greetings tonight to the representative of the people of Chile, Clotario Blest, [Applause] whose youthful voice you heard a moment ago. Nevertheless, his maturity can serve as an example and a guide to our fellow working people from that unfortunate land, which has been devastated by one of the most terrible earthquakes in history.1
We would also like to extend special greetings to Jacobo Arbenz, [Applause] president of the first Latin American nation [Guatemala] to fearlessly raise its voice against colonialism, and to express the cherished desires of its peasant masses through a deep-going and courageous agrarian reform. We would like to express our gratitude to him and to the democracy that fell in that country for the example it gave us, and for enabling us to make a correct appreciation of all the weaknesses that government was unable to overcome. Doing so has made it possible for us to get to the root of the matter, and to decapitate in one blow those who held power, and the henchmen serving them.
We would also like to greet two of the delegations representing the countries that have perhaps suffered the most in the Americas. First of all, Puerto Rico, [Applause] which even today, 150 years after freedom was proclaimed for the first time in the Americas, continues fighting to take the first – and perhaps most difficult – step of achieving, at least formally, a free government. And I would like the delegates of Puerto Rico to convey my greetings, and those of all Cuba, to Pedro Albizu Campos. [Applause] We would like you to convey to Pedro Albizu Campos our deep-felt respect, our recognition of the example he has shown with his valour, and our fraternal feelings as free men towards a man who is free, despite being in the dungeons of the so-called US democracy. [Shouts of “Get rid of it!”]
Although it may seem paradoxical, I would also like to greet today the delegation representing the purest of the North American people. [Ovation] I would like to salute them not only because the North American people are not to blame for the barbarity and injustice of their rulers, but also because they are innocent victims of the rage of all the peoples of the world, who sometimes confuse a social system with a people.
I therefore extend my personal greetings to the distinguished individuals I’ve named, and to the delegations of the fraternal peoples I’ve named. All of Cuba, myself included, open our arms to receive you and to show you what is good here and what is bad, what has been achieved and what has yet to be achieved, the road travelled and the road ahead. Because even though all of you come to deliberate at this Latin American Youth Congress on behalf of your respective countries, I’m sure each one of you came here full of curiosity to find out exactly what is this phenomenon born on a Caribbean island that is called the Cuban Revolution.
Many of you, from diverse political tendencies, will ask yourselves, as you did yesterday and as perhaps you will also do tomorrow: What is the Cuban Revolution? What is its ideology? And immediately a question will arise, as it always does in these cases, among both adherents and adversaries: Is the Cuban Revolution communist? Some say yes, hoping the answer is yes, or that it is heading in that direction. Others, disappointed perhaps, will also think the answer is yes. There will be those disappointed people who think the answer is no, as well as those who hope the answer is no.
I might be asked whether this revolution before your eyes is a communist revolution. After the usual explanations as to what communism is (I leave aside the hackneyed accusations by imperialism and the colonial powers, who confuse everything), I would answer that if this revolution is Marxist – and listen well that I say “Marxist” – it is because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx. [Applause]
Recently, in toasting the Cuban Revolution, one of the leading figures of the Soviet Union, Vice Premier [Anastas] Mikoyan, [Applause] a lifelong Marxist, said that it was a phenomenon Marx had not foreseen. [Applause] He then noted that life teaches more than the wisest books and the most profound thinkers. [Applause]
The Cuban Revolution was moving forward, not worrying about labels, not checking what others said about it, but constantly scrutinising what the Cuban people wanted of it. And it quickly found that not only had it achieved, or was on the way to achieving, the happiness of its people; it had also become the object of inquisitive looks from friend and foe alike – hopeful looks from an entire continent, and furious looks from the king of monopolies.
But all this did not come about overnight. Permit me to relate some of my own experience – an experience that can help many people in similar circumstances get an understanding of how our current revolutionary thinking arose. Because even though there is certainly continuity, the Cuban Revolution you see today is not the Cuban Revolution of yesterday, even after the victory. Much less is it the Cuban insurrection prior to the victory, at the time when those eighty-two youths made the difficult crossing of the Gulf of Mexico in a leaky boat, to reach the shores of the Sierra Maestra. Between those youths and the representatives of Cuba today there is a distance that cannot be measured in years – or at least not accurately measured in years, with twenty-four-hour days and sixty-minute hours.
All the members of the Cuban government – young in age, young in character, and young in the illusions they held – have nevertheless matured in the extraordinary school of experience; in living contact with the people, with their needs and aspirations.
The hope all of us had was to arrive one day somewhere in Cuba, and after a few shouts, a few heroic actions, a few deaths, and a few radio broadcasts, to take power and drive out the dictator Batista. History showed us it was much more difficult to overthrow a whole government backed by an army of murderers – murderers who were partners of that government and were backed by the greatest colonial power on earth.
That was how, little by little, all our ideas changed. We, the children of the cities, learned to respect the peasant. We learned to respect his sense of independence, his loyalty; to recognise his age-old yearning for the land that had been snatched from him; and to recognise his experience in the thousand paths through the hills. And from us, the peasants learned how valuable a man is when he has a rifle in his hand, and when he is prepared to fire that rifle at another man, regardless of how many rifles the other man has. The peasants taught us their know-how and we taught the peasants our sense of rebellion. And from that moment until today, and forever, the peasants of Cuba and the rebel forces of Cuba – today the Cuban revolutionary government – have marched united as one.
The revolution continued progressing, and we drove the troops of the dictatorship from the steep slopes of the Sierra Maestra. We then came face-to-face with another reality of Cuba: the worker – both agricultural and in the industrial centres. We learned from him too, while we taught him that at the right moment, a well-aimed shot fired at the right person is much more powerful