We learned the value of organisation, while again we taught the value of rebellion. And out of this, organised rebellion arose throughout the entire territory of Cuba.
By then much time had passed. Many deaths marked the road of our victory – many in combat, others innocent victims. The imperialist forces began to see there was something more than a group of bandits in the heights of the Sierra Maestra, something more than a group of ambitious assailants arrayed against the ruling power. The imperialists generously offered their bombs, their bullets, their planes, and their tanks to the dictatorship. And with those tanks in the lead, the government’s forces again attempted, for the last time, to ascend the Sierra Maestra.
By then, columns of our forces had already left the Sierra to invade other regions of Cuba and had formed the “Frank Pais” Second Eastern Front under Commander Raúl Castro.2 [Applause] By then, our strength was growing within public opinion – we were now headline material in the international sections of newspapers in every corner of the world. Yet despite all this, the Cuban Revolution at that time possessed only 200 rifles – not 200 men, but 200 rifles – to stop the regime’s last offensive, in which the dictatorship amassed 10,000 soldiers and every type of instrument of death.3 The history of each one of those 200 rifles is a history of sacrifice and blood; they were rifles of imperialism that the blood and determination of our martyrs had dignified and transformed into rifles of the people. This was how the last stage of the army’s great offensive unfolded, under the name of “encirclement and annihilation”.
What I am saying to you, young people from throughout the Americas who are diligent and eager to learn, is that if today we are putting into practice what is called Marxism, it is because we discovered it here. In those days, after defeating the dictatorship’s troops and inflicting 1,000 casualties on their ranks – that is, five times as many casualties as the sum total of our combat forces – and after seizing more than 600 weapons, a small pamphlet written by Mao Zedong fell into our hands. [Applause] That pamphlet, which dealt with the strategic problems of the revolutionary war in China, described the campaigns that Chiang Kai-shek carried out against the popular forces, which the dictator, just like here, called “campaigns of encirclement and annihilation”.
Not only had the same words been used on opposite sides of the globe to designate their campaigns, but both dictators resorted to the same type of campaign to try to destroy the popular forces. And the popular forces here, without knowing the manuals that had already been written about the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare, used the same methods as those used on the opposite side of the world to combat the dictatorship’s forces. Because naturally, whenever somebody goes through an experience, it can be utilised by somebody else. But it is also possible to go through the same experience without knowing of the earlier one.
We were unaware of the experiences the Chinese troops accumulated during twenty years of struggle in their territory. But we knew our own territory, we knew our enemy, and we used something every man has on his shoulders – which, if he knows how to use it, is worth a lot – we used our heads to guide our fight against the enemy. As a result, we defeated him.
Later came the westward invasions,4 the breaking of Batista’s communication lines, and the crushing fall of the dictatorship when no one expected it. Then came 1 January and the revolution – again without thinking about what it had read, but hearing what it needed to from the lips of the people – decided first and foremost to punish the guilty ones, and it did so.5
The colonial powers immediately splashed the story all over the front pages, calling it murder, and they immediately tried to do what the imperialists always try to do: sow division. “Communist murderers are killing people,” they said, “but there is a naive patriot named Fidel Castro who had nothing to do with it and can be saved.” [Applause] Using pretexts and trivial arguments, they tried to sow divisions among men who had fought for the same cause. They maintained this hope for some time.
But one day they came upon the fact that the Agrarian Reform Law approved here was much more violent and deep-going than the one their very brainy, self-appointed advisers had counselled.6 All of them, by the way, are today in Miami or some other US city. Pepin Rivero of Diario de la Marina, or Medrano of Prensa Libre. [Shouts and hisses] And there were others, including a prime minister in our government, who counselled great moderation, because “one must handle such things with moderation”.7
“Moderation” is another one of the words colonial agents like to use. All those who are afraid, or who think of betraying in one way or another are moderates. [Applause] As for the people, in no sense are they moderates.
The advice given was to divide up marabú land – marabú is a wild shrub that plagues our fields – and have the peasants cut marabú with machetes, or settle in some swamp, or grab a piece of public land that somehow might have escaped the voraciousness of the large landowners. But to touch the holdings of the large landowners – that was a sin greater than anything they ever imagined to be possible. But it was possible.
I recall a conversation I had in those days with a gentleman who told me he had no problems at all with the revolutionary government, because he owned no more than nine hundred caballerias. Nine hundred caballerias comes to more than ten thousand hectares [25,000 acres].8
Of course, this gentleman did have problems with the revolutionary government; his lands were seized, divided up, and turned over to individual peasants. In addition, cooperatives were created on lands that agricultural workers were already becoming accustomed to working in common for a wage.
Here lies one of the peculiar features of the Cuban Revolution that must be studied. For the first time in Latin America, this revolution carried out an agrarian reform that attacked property relations other than feudal ones. There were feudal remnants in tobacco and coffee, and in these areas land was turned over to individuals who had been working small plots and wanted their land. But given how sugarcane, rice, and cattle were worked in Cuba, the land involved was seized as a unit and worked as a unit by workers who were given joint ownership. They are not owners of a single parcel of land, but of the whole great joint enterprise called a cooperative. This has enabled our deep-going agrarian reform to move rapidly. Each of you should let it sink in, as an incontrovertible truth, that no government here in Latin America can call itself revolutionary unless its first measure is an agrarian reform. [Applause]
Furthermore, a government that says it’s going to implement a timid agrarian reform cannot call itself revolutionary. A revolutionary government is one that carries out an agrarian reform that transforms the system of property relations on the land – not just giving the peasants land that was not in use, but primarily giving the peasants land that was in use, land that belonged to the large landowners, the best land, with the greatest yield, land that moreover had been stolen from the peasants in past epochs. [Applause]
That is agrarian reform, and that is how all revolutionary governments must begin. On the basis of an agrarian reform the great battle for the industrialisation of a country can be waged, a battle that is not so simple, that is very complicated, and where one must fight against very big things. We could very easily fail, as in the past, if it weren’t for the existence today of very great forces in the world that are friends of small nations like ours. [Applause]
One must note here for the benefit of everyone – both those who like it and those who hate it – that at the present time countries such as Cuba, revolutionary countries, nonmoderate countries, cannot give a half-hearted answer to whether the Soviet Union or People’s China is our friend. With all their might they must respond that the Soviet Union, China, and all the socialist countries, and many colonial or semicolonial countries that have freed themselves, are our friends. [Applause]
This friendship, the friendship with these governments throughout the world, is what makes it possible to carry out a revolution in Latin America. Because when they carried out aggression against us using sugar and petroleum, the Soviet Union was there to give us petroleum and buy sugar from us. Had it not been for that, we would have needed all our strength, all our faith, and all the devotion of this people – which is enormous – to withstand the blow this would have signified.9 The forces of disunity would then have done their work, playing on the effects these measures taken by the “US democracy” against