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Che Guevara Archive
Cuba: Exceptional Case or Vanguard in the Struggle against Colonialism?
The following selection is from Guevara's article "Cuba:
Exceptional Case or Vanguard in the Struggle Against Colonialism?
" in the April 9, 1961, issue of Verde Olivo, the magazine
of Cuba's armed forces.
. . . Some sectors, in good faith or with axes to grind, claim to
see in the Cuban Revolution a series of exceptional origins and features
whose importance for this great historical event they even inflate
to that of the decisive factor . They speak of the exceptionalism
of the Cuban Revolution as compared with the course of other progressive
parties in America and conclude therefrom that the form and road of
the Cuban Revolution are unique and that in the other countries of
America the historic transition of the peoples will be different.
 We
accept that there are exceptions which give the Cuban Revolution its
peculiar characteristics. It is a clearly established fact that every
revolution has this type of specific factor, but it is no less an
established fact that all of them follow laws which society cannot
violate. Let us analyze, then, the factors of this purported exceptionalism.
The first, perhaps the most important, the most original, is that
cosmic force called Fidel Castro Ruz, a name that in a few years has
attained historic proportions. The future will accord our Prime Minister's
merits their exact place, but to us they appear comparable to those
of the greatest historic figures of all Latin America. And what are
the exceptional circumstances about the personality of Fidel Castro?
There are various features of his life and character which make him
stand out far above all his compañeros and followers. Fidel
is a man of such tremendous personality that he would gain the leadership
in whatever movement he participated in; and so it has been throughout
his career from his student days to the premiership of our country
and of the oppressed peoples of America. He has the qualities of a
great leader, and added to these are his personal gifts of audacity,
strength, courage, an extraordinary eagerness always to discern the
will of the people; and these have brought him to the position of
honor and sacrifice that he occupies today. But he has other important
qualities, such as his ability to assimilate knowledge and experience
in order to understand a situation as a whole without losing sight
of the details, his immense faith in the future, and the breadth of
his vision to foresee events and anticipate them in action, always
seeing farther and better than his compañeros. With these great
cardinal qualities, with his capacity to bring people together and
unite them, opposing the division which weakens; with his ability
to lead the whole people in action; with his infinite love for the
people; with his faith in the future and his capacity to foresee it,
Fidel Castro did more than anyone else in Cuba to construct from nothing
the present formidable apparatus of the Cuban Revolution.
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However, no one could assert that there were political and social
conditions in Cuba totally different from those in the other countries
of America, and that precisely because of that difference the revolution
took place. Nor could anyone assert, on the other hand, that Fidel
Castro made the revolution despite that difference. Fidel, a great
and able leader, led the revolution in Cuba, at the time and in the
way he did, by interpreting the profound political disturbances that
were preparing the people for the great leap onto the revolutionary
road. Also certain conditions existed which were not confined to Cuba,
but which it will be hard for other peoples to take advantage of again
because imperialism, in contrast to some progressive groups, does
learn from its errors.
The condition that we would describe as exceptional was that North
American imperialism was disoriented and was never able to measure
accurately the true scope of the Cuban Revolution. Here is something
that explains many of the apparent contradictions in North American
policy. The monopolies, as is habitual in such cases, began to think
about a successor for Batista precisely because they knew that the
people were not compliant and were also looking for a successor to
Batista, but along revolutionary paths. What more intelligent and
expert stroke then than to get rid of the now unserviceable little
dictator and to replace him with the new "boys" who could
in their turn serve the interests of imperialism very well? The empire
gambled on this card from its continental deck for a while, and lost
miserably. Prior to our military victory they were suspicious, but
not afraid of us; rather, with all their experience at this game,
which they were accustomed to winning, they played with two decks.
On various occasions, emissaries of the State Department, disguised
as newspapermen, came to investigate our rustic revolution, but they
never found any trace of imminent danger in it. When imperialism wanted
to react, when the imperialists discovered that the group of inexperienced
young men, who were marching in triumph through the streets of Havana,
had a clear awareness of their political duty and an iron determination
to carry out that duty, it was already too late. And thus in January,
1959, dawned the first social revolution of the Caribbean zone and
the most profound of the revolutions in America.
 We
don't believe that it could be considered exceptional that the bourgeoisie,
or at least a good part of it, showed itself favorable to the revolutionary
war against the tyranny at the same time that it was supporting and
promoting movements seeking for negotiated solutions which would permit
them to substitute for the Batista regime elements disposed to curb
the revolution. Considering the conditions in which the revolutionary
war took place and the complexity of the political tendencies which
opposed the tyranny, it was not at all exceptional that some latifundist
elements adopted a neutral, or at least non-belligerent, attitude
toward the insurrectionary forces. It is understandable that the national
bourgeoisie, struck down by imperialism and the tyranny, whose troops
sacked small properties and made extortion a daily way of life, felt
a certain sympathy when they saw those young rebels from the mountains
punish the military arm of imperialism, which is what the mercenary
army was.
So non-revolutionary forces indeed helped smooth the road for the
advent of revolutionary power . Going further, we can add as a new
factor of exceptionalism the fact that in most places in Cuba the
peasants had been proletarianized by the needs of big semimechanized
capitalist agriculture, and had reached a stage of organization which
gave them greater class-consciousness. We can admit this. But we should
point out, in the interest of truth, that the first area where the
Rebel Army, made up of the survivors of the defeated band that had
made the voyage on the Granma, operated, was an area inhabited by
peasants whose social and cultural roots were different from those
of the peasants found in the areas of large-scale semi-mechanized
agriculture. In fact, the Sierra Maestra, locale of the first revolutionary
beehive, is a place where peasants struggling barehanded against latifundism
took refuge. They went there seeking a new piece of land, somehow
overlooked by the state or the voracious latifundists, on which to
create a modest fortune. They constantly had to struggle against the
exactions of the soldiers, who were always allied to the latifundists;
and their ambition extended no farther than a property deed. Concretely,
the soldiers who belonged to our first peasant-type guerrilla armies
came from the section of this social class which shows most strongly
love for the land and the possession of it; that is to say, which
shows most perfectly what we can define as the petty-bourgeois spirit.
The peasant fought because he wanted land for himself, for his children,
to manage it, sell it, and get rich by his work.
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Despite his petty bourgois spirit, the peasant soon learned that he
could not satisfy his land hunger without breaking up the system of
latifundist property. Radical agrarian reform, the only kind that
could give land to the peasants, clashed directly with the interests
of the imperialists, latifundists and sugar and cattle magnates. The
bourgeoisie was afraid to clash with those interests. But the proletariat
wasn't. In this way the revolution's course itself brought together
the workers and peasants. The workers supported the demands against
the latifundists. The poor peasant, rewarded with ownership of the
land, loyally supported the revolutionary power and defended it against
its imperialist and counter-revolutionary enemies.
In our opinion no further factors of exceptionalism can be claimed.
We have been generous in stating those listed in their strongest form.
Now we shall examine the permanent roots of all social phenomena in
America, the contradictions which, ripening in the womb of present
societies, produce changes that can attain the scope of a revolution
like Cuba's.
First in chronological order, though not in the order of importance
at present, is latifundism. Latifundism was the economic power base
of the ruling class throughout the entire period which followed the
great liberating anticolonialist revolution of the last century. But
that latifundist social class, which is found in all of the countries,
generally lags behind the social developments that move the world.
In some places, however, the most alert and clear-sighted members
of the latifundist class are aware of the dangers and begin to change
the investment form of their capital, at times going in for mechanized
agriculture, transferring some of their wealth to industrial investment,
or becoming commercial agents of the monopolies. In any case, the
first liberating revolution never destroyed the latifundist bases
which always constituted a reactionary force and upheld the principle
of servitude on the land. This is the phenomenon that shows up in
all the American countries without exception and has been the substratum
of all the injustices committed since the era when the King of Spain
gave huge grants of land to his most noble conquistadores, leaving,
in the case of Cuba, for the natives, creoles and mestizos, only the
realengos, that is, the scraps left between where three circular grants
touched each other.
In most countries the latifundist realized he couldn't survive alone
and promptly entered into alliances with the monopolies, that is,
with the strongest and cruelest oppressor of the American peoples.
North American capital arrived on the scene to make the virgin lands
fruitful, so that later it could carry off unnoticed all the funds
so "generously" given, plus several times the amounts originally
invested in the "beneficiary" country.
America was a field of inter-imperialist struggle and the "wars"
between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, the separation of Panama from Colombia,
the infamy committed against Ecuador in its dispute with Peru, the
fight between Paraguay and Bolivia, are nothing but manifestations
of the gigantic battle between the world's great monopolistic combines,
a battle decided almost completely in favor of the North American
monopolies following World War II. From that point on, the empire
dedicated itself to strengthening its grip on its colonial possessions
and perfecting the whole structure to prevent the intrusion of old
or new competitors from other imperialist countries. All this resuIted
in a monstrously distorted economy which has been described by the
shamefaced economists of the imperialist regime in an innocuous term
which reveals the deep compassion they feel for us inferior beings
(they call our miserably exploited Indians, persecuted and reduced
to utter wretchedness, 'little Indians"; all Negroes and mulattos,
disinherited and discriminated against, are called "colored";
individually they are used as instruments, collectively, as a means
of dividing the working masses in their struggle for a better economic
future). For us, the peoples of America, they have another polite
and refined term: "underdeveloped."
What is "underdeveloped"?
 A
dwarf with an enormus head and a swollen chest is "underdeveloped,"
inasmuch as his weak legs or short arms do not match the rest of his
anatomy. He is the product of an abnormal formation that distorted
his development. That is really what we are, we, who are politely
referred to as "underdeveloped," but in truth are colonial,
semi-colonial or dependent countries. We are countries whose economies
have been twisted by imperialism, which has abnormally developed in
us those branches of industry or agriculture needed to complement
its complex economy. "Underdevelopment," or distorted development,
brings dangerous specialization in raw materials, inherent in which
is the threat of hunger for all our peopIes. We, the underdeveloped,
are also those with monoculture, with the single product, with the
single market. A single product whose uncertain sale depends on a
single market that imposes and fixes conditions, that is the great
formula for imperialist economic domination. It should be added to
the old, but eternally young, Roman slogan Divide and Conquer!
Latifundism, then, through its connections with imperialism, completely
shapes the so-called underdevelopment, whose results are low wages
and unemployment. This phenomenon of low wages and unemployment is
a vicious circle which produces ever lower wages and ever more unemployment,
as the great contradictions of the system sharpen and, constantly
at the mercy of the cyclical fluctuations of its own economy, provides
the common denominator of all the peoples of America, from the Rio
Bravo, (The Latin American name for the river called the Rio Grande
in the United States) to the South Pole. This common denominator,
which we shall print in capital letters and which serves as the starting
point for analysis by all who think about these social phenomena,
is called THE PEOPLE'S HUNGER; weary of being oppressed, persecuted,
exploited to the limit; weary of the wretched selling of their laborpower
day after day (faced with the fear of swelling the enormous mass of
unemployed) so that the greatest profit can be wrung from each human
body, profits that are later squandered in the orgies of the masters
of capital.
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We see, then, that there are great and inescapable common denominators
in Latin America, and that we cannot say we were exempt from any of
those leading to the most terrible and permanent of all: the people's
hunger. Latifundism, whether as a primitive form of exploitation or
as a form of capitalist monopoly of the land, adjusts to the new conditions
and becomes an ally of imperialism, the exploitative form finance
and monopoly capitalism takes outside its national borders, in order
to create economic colonialism, euphemistically called "underdevelopment,"
which results in low wages, underemployment, unemployment: the people's
hunger. It all existed in Cuba. Here, too, there was hunger. Here
the percentage of unemployed was one of the highest in Latin America.
Here imperialism was crueler than in many countries of America. And
here latifundism was as strong as in any brother country.
What did we do to free ourselves from the vast imperialist system
with its train of puppet rulers in each country and mercenary armies
to protect the puppets and the whole complex social system of the
exploitation of man by man? We applied certain formulas, which on
some previous occasions we have given out as discoveries of our empirical
medicine for the great evils of our beloved Latin America, empirical
medicine which was soon adopted into the expositions of scientific
truth.
The objective conditions for struggle are provided by the people's
hunger, their reaction to that hunger, the terror unleashed to crush
the people's reaction, and the wave of hatred that the repression
creates. America lacked the subjective conditions, the most important
of which is awareness of the possibility of victory through violent
struggle against the imperialist powers and their internal allies.
These conditions were created through the armed struggle which made
clearer the need for change (and permitted it to be foreseen) and
the defeat and subsequent annihilation of the army by the people's
forces (an absolutely necessary condition for every true revolution).
Having already shown that these conditions are created through the
armed struggle, we have to explain once more that the scene of the
struggle should be the countryside. A peasant army, pursuing the great
objectives for which the peasantry should fight (the first of which
is the just distribution of the land ), will capture the cities from
the countryside. The peasant class of America, basing itself on the
ideology of the working class, whose great thinkers discovered the
social laws governing us, will provide the great liberating army of
the future, as it has already done in Cuba. This army, created in
the countryside, where the subjective conditions keep ripening for
the taking of power, proceeds to take the cities, uniting with the
workers and enriching itself ideologically from contributions of the
working class. It can and must defeat the oppressor army, at first
in skirmishes, engagements, surprises; and in big battles at the end,
when the army will have grown from its small-scale guerrilla footing
to the proportions of a great popular army of liberation. One stage
in the consolidation of the revolutionary power, as we indicated above,
will be the liquidation of the old army. . . .
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