On The Shoulders Of Giants . . . 'The Declaration Of Havana' - Fidel Castro
To mark the seventh anniversary of the great Fidel Castro, and as part of our On the Shoulders of Giants series, we republish ‘The Declaration of Havana’.
An estimated one million Cubans packed into Havana’s Revolution Square on the 2nd of September, 1960 to hear Castro deliver a passionate rebuke to a statement issued the previous week from San José in Costa Rica by the Organisation of the American States which sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Cuban revolution.
It is essential to first set out the context in which these events took place, this being crucial to understanding the historical significance of Castro’s speech. In the space of less than two years, the victorious Cuban revolutionaries set about a series of radical reforms to Cuban society. Beginning with a drive to eradicate poverty and illiteracy, the revolutionaries brought in land reforms along with other measures to help the most impoverished sector of Cuban society first – the rural peasantry, or ‘campesinos’.
The revolutionaries also set about the destruction of the mafia-controlled gambling industry and the dominance of the wealthy elites as a point of urgency. In order to build a new and truly egalitarian society, it was necessary to initiate a wide ranging redistribution of wealth, and to this end privately owned industries, including oil refineries, electricity infrastructure, and sugar plantations were nationalised.
These measures provoked a reaction from the United States government who backed two early attempts to violently overthrow the new revolutionary government, culminating in the introduction of economic measures aimed at depriving the Cuban economy of much needed income.
By August 1960, Dwight Eisenhower, the then US President, approved a huge budget for a CIA run training camp in Guatemala to train a force of Cuban exiles who would attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Cuban government. This failed amphibious landing, which took place a year later, infamously became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Guatemala was the site of a US-backed coup six years earlier which overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz - a comprador regime was installed in its place. Through the compliance of this regime, along with mixed but sufficient levels of cooperation from other Latin American states, the US government were successful in pushing through a statement from the OAS which sought to reinforce US hegemony in the region.
Fidel speaking to the huge crowd in Havana’s Revolution Square on the 2nd of September, 1960
The Declaration of Havana
1) Condemns in all its terms the so called "Saint Joseph Declaration," a document dictated by the North American imperialism that is detrimental to the national self-determination, the sovereignty and the dignity of the sister nations of the Continent.
2) The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba, energetically condemns the overt and criminal intervention exerted by North American imperialism for more than a century over all the nations of Latin America, which have seen their lands invaded more than once in Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Santo Domingo or Cuba; have lost, through the voracity of Yankee imperialism, huge and rich areas, such as Texas, vital strategic centers, such as the Panama Canal, whole countries, such as Puerto Rico, which has been converted into an occupied territory; and have suffered, moreover, the outrageous treatment dealt by the Marines to our women and daughters as well as to the highest symbols of our history, such as the effigy of Jose Marti.
This intervention, based upon military superiority, unfair treaties and the miserable submission of treacherous rulers, throughout 100 years has been turning our America -- the America that Boilvar, Hidalgo, Juarez, San Martin, O'Higgins, Sucre and Marti wanted free -- into areas of exploitation, the backyard of the political and financial Yankee empire, a reserve of votes for the international organizations in which the Latin American countries have been appearing only as droves of beasts behind the "restless and brutal North that despises us."
The National General Assembly of the People declares that the acceptance by the Governments that officially represent the countries of Latin America of that continued and historically irrefutable intervention betrays the ideals of independent of its peoples, destroys its sovereignty and prevents true solidarity among our nations, all of which obliges this assembly to repudiate it in the name of the people of Cuba, with a voice that echoes the hope and decision of the Latin American people and the liberating accent of the immortal patriots of Our America.
3) The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba rejects likewise, the intention of preserving the Monroe Doctrine, used until now, as foreseen by Jose Marti, "to extend the domination in America" of the voracious imperialists, to better inject the poison also denounced in his time by Jose Marti, "the poison of the loans, the canals, the railroads..."
Therefore, in the presence of a hypocritical Panamericanism which is only the predominance of Yankee monopolies over the interests of our people and Yankee handling of governments prostrated before Washington, the Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims the liberating Latinamericanism that throbs in Marti and Benito Juarez. And, upon extending its friendship to the North American people--a country where Negroes are lynched, intellectual are persecuted and workers are forced to accept the leadership of gangsters--reaffirms its will to march "with all the world and not with just a part of it."
4) The National General Assembly of the People declares that the spontaneous help offered by the Soviet Union to Cuba in the event our country is attacked by the imperialist military forces could never be considered as an act of intrusion, but that it constitutes an evident act of solidarity, and that such help, offered to Cuba in the cace of an imminent attack by the Yankee Pentagon, honors the Government of the Soviet Union that offered it, as much as the cowardly and criminal aggressions against Cuba dishonored the Government of the United States. Therefore, the General Assembly of the People declares, before America and before the world, that it accepts and is grateful for the support of the Soviet Union's rockets, should its territory be invaded by military forces of the United States.
5) The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba categorically denies the existence of any purpose whatsoever on the part of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic to "use Cuba's political, economic and social situation... to jeopardize the continental unity and endanger the unity of the hemisphere." From the first to the last shot, from the first to the last of the twenty thousand martyrs who died in the struggle to overthrow the tyranny and win revolutionary power, from the first to the last revolutionary law, from the first to the last act of the revolution, the people of Cuba have acted with free and absolute self-determination, and, therefore, the Soviet Union or the Chinese People's Republic cannot be blamed for the existence of a Revolution which is Cuba's firm reply to the crimes and wrongs perpetrated by imperialism in America.
On the other hand, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba maintains that the policy of isolation and hostility toward the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic, promoted and imposed by the United States Government upon the Governments of Latin America, and the belligerent and aggressive conduct of the North American Government, as well as its systematic opposition to the acceptance of the Chinese People's Republic as a member of the United Nations, despite its representing almost the total population of a country of over 600 million inhabitants, do endanger the peace and security of the hemisphere and the world.
Therefore, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba ratifies its policy of friendship with all the peoples of the world, reaffirms its purpose of establishing diplomatic relations with all the socialist countries also, and, from this moment, in full exercise of its sovereignty and free will, expresses to the Government of the Chinese People's republic that it agrees to establish diplomatic relations between both countries and that, therefore, the relations that Cuba has maintained until now with the puppet regime, which is supported in Formosa by the vessels of the Seventh Fleet, are hereby rescinded.
6) The National General Assembly of the People reaffirms -- and is certain of doing so as an expression of a view to all the people of Latin America--the democracy is incompatible with the financial oligarchy, racial discrimination and the outrages of the Klu Klux Klan, the persecution that deprived scientists like Oppenheimer of their positions, that prevented the world from hearing for many years the wonderful voice of Paul Robeson, imprisoned in his own country, and that killed the Rosenbergs, in spite of the protest and horror of the world and the appeal of rulers from many countries, including Pope Plus XII.
The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba expresses its conviction that democracy cannot consists only in an electoral vote, which is almost always fictitious and handled by big landholders and professional politicians, but in the rights of citizens to decide, as this Assembly of the People is now doing, their own destiny. Moreover, democracy will only exist in Latin America when its people are really free to choose, when the humble people are not reduced--by hunger, social inequality, illiteracy and the judicial systems--to the most degrading impotence.
For all the foregoing reasons, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba:
condemns the latifundium, a source of poverty for the peasants and a backward and inhuman agricultural system;
condemns starvation wages and the iniquitous exploitation of human labor by immoral and privileged interests;
condemns illiteracy, the lack of teachers, of schools, of doctors and hospitals, the lack of protection to old age that prevails in Latin America;
condemns the inequality and exploitation of women;
condemns the discrimination of the Negro and the Indian;
condemns the military and political oligarchies that keep our peoples in utter poverty, block their democratic development and the full exercise of their sovereignty;
condemns the granting of our countries' natural resources to the foreign monopolies as a submissive policy that betrays the interests of the people and yield to the directives from Washington;
condemns the systematic deceiving of the people by the publicity media that serve the interests of the oligarchies and the policies of oppressive imperialism;
condemns the news monopoly by Yankee agencies, which are both instruments of the North American trusts and agents of Washington;
condemns the repressive laws that prevent workers, peasants, students and intellectuals, in short, the great majority of each country, from organizing themselves and fighting for the realization of their social and patriotic aspirations;
condemns the monopolies and imperialistic organizations that continuously loot our wealth, exploit our workers and peasants, bleed and keep in backwardness our economies, and submit the political life of Latin America to the sway of their own designs and interests.
In short, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba condemns, both the exploitation of man by man and the exploitation of under-developed countries by imperialistic financial capital.
Therefore, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims before America:
The right of peasants to the land;
the right of workers to the fruit of their work;
the right of children to education;
the right of sick people to medical and hospital attention;
the right of youth to work;
the right of students to free, experimental and scientific education;
the right of Negroes and Indians to "the full dignity of man;"
the right of women to civil, social and political equality;
the right of the aged to a secure old age;
the right of intellectuals, artists and scientists to fight, with their works, for a better world;
the right of States to nationalize imperialist monopolies, thus rescuing their wealth and national resources;
the right of nations to trade freely with all peoples of the world;
the right of nations to their full sovereignty;
the right of nations to turn fortresses into schools, and to arm their workers, their peasants, their students, their intellectuals, the Negro, the Indian, the women, the young and the old, the oppressed and exploited people, so that they may defend, by themselves, their rights and their destinies.
7) The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims:
The duty of peasants, workers, intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, young and old, and women, to fight for their economic, political and social claims;
the duty of oppressed and exploited nations to fight for their liberation;
the duty of each nation to make common cause with all the oppressed, colonized, exploited or attacked peoples, regardless of their location in the world or the geographical distance that may separate them.
All the peoples of the world are brothers!
8) The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba reaffirms its faith in that Latin America will be marching soon, united and triumphant, free from the bindings that turn their economies into wealth relinquished to North American Imperialism and prevent its true voice from being hard at the meetings where domesticated Chancellors form an infamous chorus led by their despotic masters. Therefore, it ratifies its decision of working for that common Latin American destiny that will enable our countries to build a true solidarity, based upon the free will of each of them and the joints aspirations of all. In the struggle for such Latin America, in opposition to the obedient voices of those who usurp its official representation, there arises now, with invincible power, the genuine voice of the people, a voice that forges ahead from the heart of its tin and coal mines, from its factories and sugar mills, from its feudalised lands, where "rotos," "Cholos," "Gauchos," "Jibaros," heirs of Zapata and Sandino, grip the weapons for their freedom, a voice that resounds in its poets and novelists, in its students, in its wives and children, in its vigilant old people.
To that friendly voice, the Assembly of the People of Cuba answers:
Present! Cuba shall not fail. Cuba is here today to ratify, before Latin America and before the world, as a historical commitment, its irrevocable dilemma: Fatherland or Death.
9) The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba resolves that this declaration be known as "The Havana Declaration."