Memories of An Earlier Speech from Fidel: Cuba 1960

In the summer of 1960 I had the great good fortune to be invited with a group of young Britons, mainly students, to spend a few months in Cuba as participants in an international work brigade – the first ever to visit the country. This was before the Bay of Pigs and before the missile Crisis. We spent most of the time working on the construction of a “school city” (ciudad escolar)  which was being constructed in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra where Fidel’s guerrilla movement had first been formed. It was intended to provide residential education for many thousands of children in a remote part of the country where there had been no schools. It was named after one of the revolutionary leaders, Camilo Cienfuegos, who had mysteriously died in a plane crash, believed to have been sabotaged by US backed counter-revolutionaries earlier that year. While there, the 200 or so members of the international work brigades, were on one notable occasion, visited by Che Guevara, with whom we spent an hour or so discussing aspects of Cuba’s revolutionary experience and the increasingly tense relations with the USA. But my most vivid memories are of the few weeks we spent in Havana before leaving for the sierra.

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[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n August 6th all the work brigades were invited to attend what was publicized as a very important rally in the Havana sports stadium. It was to be addressed by Fidel. More than 70.000  people packed the stadium. There were workers’ militia, peasants’ militia, students’ militia, young, middle-aged and old, male and female. The atmosphere was jubilant, but also infused with a sense of urgent expectancy. Threats from the US were growing daily. The most outrageous lies against the revolution and its leaders emanated from Washington and there was a palpable sense that invasion was a very real possibility. Counter-revolutionaries were setting fire to sugar plantations. The revolutionary government had already taken over the western- owned oil refineries which had refused to refine Soviet crude oil. The Organization of American States (OAS), under US pressure, had condemned this intervention and the new agrarian reform law as “communist.” The defiance of the thousands attending the rally simply expressed the mood of the overwhelming majority of the Cuban people who stood solidly with their government.

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Fidel, who had been suffering from a sore throat brought on by his numerous speaking engagements at this time, arrived late and started to address the crowd. The international work brigades had been honoured by a special place in the hall, immediately in front of the speakers platform. After he was about 20 minutes into his introduction his voice started to give out until he could hardly be heard. I was seated next to a member of the Association of Rebel Youth (AJR) who interpreted for me. The crowd started to shout in unison for Fidel to stop and rest. He was reluctant to do so. Eventually, Raul, who had earlier spoken briefly to point out how important his brother’s speech was to be, came onto the stage and almost literally had to drag Fidel off. In the interval between his leaving and his return (about 30 minutes) the thousands in attendance began to sing and chant revolutionary jingles and humorous ditties with which we were to become very familiar over the next few months: They chanted in unison “Cuba Si! Yankee No” and many others, of which I recall only a few, such as: “Fidel, seguro! A los Yankees dale duro! (Come on Fidel! Give the Yankees Hell!) “Fidel, Fidel, que tiene Fidel, “Que los Americanos no pueden con el.” (What is it about Fidel that the Yankees want nothing to do with him?)

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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen Fidel returned he spoke without faltering for over three hours. Despite having to rely on an interpreter, listening to him and gradually absorbing the full significance of what he was saying, made me aware that this was the most important event I had ever experienced; that I was present at a major juncture in twentieth century history. There came a point in his oration where it was obvious something quite exceptional was about to be announced. I became aware of this because after a marked pause in his delivery, followed by an expectant silence that gripped the huge crowd, he began to read off a list of US corporations, starting with the oil companies. “Texaco!” he said. The crowd burst into a crescendo of unrestrained joy and jubilation. Hats were thrown into the air. Militianos raised rifles into the air. I thought then, and wrote later in my diary, that this is what it must have been like in Petrograd in October 1917. I thought that I had never been in the presence of so many armed people, and I had never felt safer!

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[dropcap]F[/dropcap]idel was telling the Cuban people that they, and through them their revolutionary government, was defying the greatest power on earth; that they were taking into public ownership the commanding corporations that had for so long exploited them and their resources; that they were expropriating the expropriators, the US corporations and the remnants of the Cuban compradore clique that served them. He went on to expose and condemn the litany of lies unleashed by the US against the revolution, no doubt, he said, in order to deceive US and world opinion into accepting a future armed intervention to overthrow it. He struck a note of defiance and expressed the firm confidence that in this David versus Goliath struggle, Cuba would win – “Patria o Muerte! Venceremos! But it was far more than a long defiant speech; it was quite different from demagogy. It was that rare phenomenon, an expression of total solidarity between a leader and his people, expressing a  unity of purpose in pursuit of human dignity and  liberation. I can honestly say without hyperbole, that being present at that event changed my life irrevocably. I learned what imperialism was; I learned the meaning of  solidarity and I learned what it meant to be a communist.

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In the weeks that followed, as we worked with spades and shovels on the construction of the school city in the Sierra Maestra, a member of the US delegation working with us showed me a cutting from the Herald Tribune ( I think) in which our work brigade was described by Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Cristian Herter, as a group of expertly trained communist agents from Eastern Europe, who, under the guise of a work brigade, had been smuggled into Cuba by the Soviet Union to reinforce the supposedly demoralized Castro militia. This blatant lie was dispatched by the State Department to the foreign secretaries of various Latin American countries whose foreign policy was dictated by the US, for use against Cuba at the 1960 OAS conference convened in Costa Rica for the purpose of expelling Cuba from the organization for handing the country over to “Sino-Soviet Imperialism.” On September 2nd 1960 the revolutionary government answered the US at a rally in Havana attended by more than a million people. We listened to Fidel’s speech, which went on well into the night, broadcast to a rebel army base where we were staying in the Sierra. That rally, which incorporated the first “Declaration of Havana”, was essentially a declaration of Cuba’s complete independence from the US and its commitment to shape its own foreign and domestic economic policy free from interference. It set the scene for the next fifty five years of unremitting hostility and vengefulness against Cuba by US imperialism; and for Cuba’s heroic and unbending defiance and revolutionary solidarity with those referred to by Jose Marti as “los pobres de la tierra” – the wretched and poor of this earth.