It is often said that there are texts, books or speeches that are history makers. The metaphor is expressive but, at the same time, misleading. The first, because it does justice to the extraordinary importance that a writing can exceptionally acquire in the unleashing of great historical processes. But also misleading because in its initial formulation it hides a decisive fact: it is men and women who really make history.
The 95 theses that the monk Martin Luther nailed to the doors of the Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517 would not have gone from being a conventual dispute, an inconsequential tantrum by the Augustinian monk if it weren't for the fact that they had the ability to capture the sensitivity of their time. It was only when the ideas of the clergyman - that "ray of thought", appealing to the expression used by the young Marx on this matter - made contact with popular soil that they became powerful instruments of social transformation. Something similar can be said of The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which, of course, did not "produce" the French Revolution or cause the wars of independence for the Spanish colonies in the Americas. But as in the previous case, the Geneva-born's writing somehow synthesized the aspirations of an era and allowed us to imagine the contours of the new society that was developing in the womb of the old one. The same is true in relation to another extraordinary text, the Communist Manifesto written by those two brilliant young Germans at the beginning of 1848 and which, over the years, was to become the herald of a new historical stage. Finally, the same can be said of The State and the Revolution, written by Lenin in the midst of the rages of the first socialist revolution in history. It was not the books, or the pamphlets, but the articulation between these and the struggles of the peoples that moved history.
The conjuncture of '53
“History will absolve me” belongs to this same illustrious genre. It is an extraordinary allegation, an impressive text, undoubtedly one of the most important in Latin American history, both for its content and for the conditions under which it was produced. As is well known, on July 26, 1953, a group of young people who constituted the revolutionary opposition to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista - supported militarily and financially by the United States government - proposed to take the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barrack from Bayamo, and Moncada, from Santiago de Cuba. This radical decision was precipitated by the accelerated decomposition of the Batista political regime and the capitulation of the legal opposition to it. At that time Fidel was a member of the Cuban People's Party (PPC), an organization of vague social democratic inspiration, founded by an honest Cuban politician, Senator Eduardo Chibás, in 1947, as a detachment from the then ruling Authentic Party. Widespread corruption and the total capitulation of the political, economic and social leadership led to the spectacular suicide of Chibás in 1951, literally broadcast "live" at the end of one of his regular and very popular radio addresses. Fidel remained in the party and the following year he was appointed as a candidate for deputy for the elections scheduled for June 1952. But on March 10, Colonel Fulgencio Batista's coup d'etat took place, and the electoral process was aborted.
Fidel had repeatedly expressed his disagreement with the faltering line of the PPC and the paralyzing ineffectiveness of the legal opposition to a regime that, in the midst of the Cold War and encouraged by his US mentors, was limited to denunciation and protests in the scope of Congress. However, his demand that the party adopt an extra-parliamentary opposition strategy - thereby appealing to the best Cuban revolutionary tradition - had been ignored. The cowardly response that the PPC offered to the Batista coup and its blatant violation of the 1940 Constitution, influenced, according to Fidel, "by the socialist currents of the world today", and whose progressive contents reflected a moment of heyday of the struggle of classes in Cuba, precipitated Fidel's break with the leadership of the PPC and his going into hiding (p. 101).
It was from those moments that, under the leadership of Fidel, the group of young revolutionaries adopted an insurrectionary strategy. This had as its initial moment the capture of an emblematic site of the dictatorship to, from there, precipitate the popular uprising in a city or a region. Given the dense and long tradition of struggle and popular rebellion that from colonial times characterized the province of Oriente, the cradle of the wars of independence and the place where, together with Máximo Gómez, Martí landed in 1895 to fight what It would be their last battle for the liberation of Cuba, the revolutionaries decided to attack the aforementioned barracks in the year that marked the centenary of the birth of José Martí. The attack was carried out on July 26 and due to circumstances that Fidel himself explains in his allegation, it ended in a defeat for the insurgent forces. Sixty of the 135 members of the revolutionary command fell, most of them after the fighting ceased, victims of savage torture and mass shooting. Fidel and a handful of his men managed to retreat to the mountain, but on August 1 they were arrested by a Cuban army patrol. After spending more than two months in solitary confinement and under harsh prison conditions, on October 16 a legal process begins against him and in which, given the absolute lack of guarantees, the young 27-year-old lawyer decides to assume his own defense.
Martí, Gramsci and the "battle of ideas". The foregoing is the political and historical framework in which Fidel delivers his famous speech.
Let us now look at the concrete details of the conditions under which he delivered it. To begin with, the trial was not carried out in any building of the judicial power of Santiago, but in a small room of the School of Nurses of the Civil Hospital of that city. For this, nothing better than to reproduce verbatim what a journalist who could be present at the trial, Marta Rojas, wrote on that day:
“The accused doctor Fidel Castro has not stopped at all in his report, sometimes he raises his voice, and he holds himself back; in moments he leans over the table in front of him and almost speaks in secret. As he speaks, always improvising, there is more silence in the room, no other sound is heard other than his slow voice, as if he were talking to everyone, he stares at the court that attends him with pleasure [...] the soldiers are there huddled in the doorway and made no secret of their attention. Sometimes he looks at the portrait of Florence Nigthingale that presides over the nurses' lounge and seems to be conversing with her. He has neither a paper nor a book with him [...] All the people who have heard him comment on his talent. He improvised the complete piece and colored it with other people's thoughts (of jurists), with pieces of allegations and especially with the verbatim words of José Martí. His stance [...] has aroused true admiration for the revolutionary. " *
Fidel's exceptional plea - not improvised but deeply pondered and weighed, but which flowed from his thought with the freshness of ideas that are said for the first time - soon transcended the walls of the School of Nurses. Despite the strict censorship of the press, the Cuban people had begun to learn the details of the attack on the Moncada. In principle, thanks to the irrepressible indiscretion unleashed, especially among the assistants of popular origin to the singular judicial process, by the eloquence and the argumentative forcefulness of Fidel that made his allegation run like wildfire through Santiago; and shortly thereafter, due to the clandestine distribution of the speech, a task to which Haydee Santamaría and Melba Hernández committed themselves with heroism and efficiency, once their sentences had been completed. I refer the reader to the “Introduction” by Pedro Álvarez Tabío and Guillermo Alonso Fiel, with which this edition of Fidel's plea opens, for a detailed knowledge of the ingenious strategies developed by him to re-write what had been written and lost, achieving the true feat of doing it in his cell and sending him outside the walls, circumventing the vigilance of his jailers. On July 26, it not only had a leader of exceptional political and intellectual stature; He also had an organization that was at the same level and that made it possible to “rearm”. History will absolve me from hundreds of small fragments skilfully sent from prison.
For Fidel it was evident that no effort could be spared when waging what, using today's language, we could call the "battle of ideas." This was necessary to counteract the negative effects that, for the course of the revolution, resulted from the military defeat of July 26. In a message that he sends to his colleagues from his jail on the Isle of Pines, he tells them that "propaganda cannot be abandoned for a moment, because it is the soul of the entire struggle." In a masterful synthesis he says that "what was sedimented with blood must be built with ideas", also noting that in his plea "the program of our ideology is contained, without which it is not possible to think of anything great." Hence its decisive importance. Quoting Martí, he would say in his argument that “a just beginning from the bottom of a cave can do more than an army” (pp. 41-42). The military defeat therefore forced to undertake a new battle, this time going out to dispute with "the weapons of criticism" in the field of ideas and common sense, an indispensable requirement for the construction of a new hegemony. In this sense, it can be said that Fidel applies in the practical life of the revolutionary struggle the recommendations formulated, just over twenty years before and also from prison, by the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci: the conquest of hegemony is a condition necessary for the triumph of the revolution. "The criticism of weapons" is infertile if it is not accompanied by "the weapons of criticism." Martí and Gramsci constitute the moral and political foundation of Fidel's strategy.
The results will be visible when, forced by the increasingly adverse climate of opinion generated by the extraordinary dissemination of the allegation, the tyrant had no choice but to give amnesty for Fidel, his brother Raúl and 18 other participants in the assault on the Moncada. His liberation would take place on May 15, 1955, and Fidel's arrival at the Havana railway station turned into a massive demonstration, whose proportions exceeded everything the young revolutionaries expected. The awareness and mobilization of the Cuban people installed the revolutionary process on a new plateau, but they demanded a radical change in strategy. Fidel's exile in Mexico, starting in July of that same year, and the founding of the July 26 Revolutionary Movement and his meeting with Che would be the milestones in a history destined to culminate victoriously on January 1, 1959.
Political theses
Before inviting the reader to dive into the text, let us say a few words about its content. Its author dismantles all the illegality and unconstitutionality of the trial to which he is subjected by the Cuban state. Trial that, as Fidel recalls, the court itself had characterized as "the most momentous in republican history" and despite which it is flawed by the most flagrant violations of due process (p. 38). He was unable to converse alone with a lawyer and was only allowed access to a tiny code; but no criminal treaty or book could reach his dungeon, not even those of Martí. Even before his final argument, in a hearing held in mid-September, Fidel had declared that the Apostle “was the mastermind of July 26” and that despite being denied books and tracts “I carry in my heart the doctrines of the Teacher ”(p. 45).
Fidel was not deceiving himself as to the political significance of the trial to which he was subjected. He was very aware that in him something would be decided that went much further than his freedom: “it is discussed - he tells us - on fundamental questions of principle, it is judged on the right of men to be free, it is debated on the very bases of our existence as a civilized and democratic nation. When I finish, I don't want to have to reproach myself for having left a principle to defend, truth without saying, or crime without reporting ”(p. 46). And this is what Fidel does with extraordinary thoroughness, perhaps following that old aphorism attributed to the Jesuits and which assures that "God is in the details." His description of the crimes of the regime is precise and detailed, as is his balanced presentation of the events developed in the combat.
After the first third of the speech, Fidel delves into an analysis not so much legal but more political and economic-social. There he dismantles the belief that the formidable military might constitutes an impregnable barrier before which any people who wanted to fight a tyranny would crash. "No weapon, no force is capable of defeating a people that decides to fight for their rights." He cites in favor of his affirmation the Bolivian revolution of 1952 and the independence feat of Cuba against Spanish colonialism, which with half a million soldiers and despite having an overwhelmingly superior armament were defeated by the patriots. We could add, with the benefit of later historical experience, the defeats suffered by the French and the Americans in Vietnam; the very survival of the Cuban Revolution; and, more recently, the resistance of the Iraqi people against the occupation decreed by George W. Bush, like so many other proofs of the truth of that assertion.
But who are the people? Against all schematics and with a language with clear reminiscences of the young Marx, Fidel says that “we understand by people, when we speak of struggle, the great irredeemable mass [...] that everyone deceives and betrays, the one that yearns for a better and more dignified and just country; the one that is moved by ancestral yearnings for justice because it has suffered injustice and mockery generation after generation” (p. 59). And there are the 600 thousand Cubans without work, the 500 thousand farm workers, the 400 thousand industrial workers and braceros, the 100 thousand small farmers, the 30 thousand teachers, the 20 thousand small merchants, the 10 thousand young professionals. "To this people [...] we were not going to say 'We are going to give you', but 'Here you go, fight now with all your might so that freedom and happiness are yours!'" (Pp. 60- 61). It follows from the above a conception of the popular field alien to the "workers’" exclusivism that did so much damage to the Latin American left, by preventing it from even "seeing" - let us not say incorporating into its political construction! - that huge mass of peasants, indigenous people and the rural and urban poor condemned to invisibility and denial due to the peripheral condition of Latin American capitalism and the intellectual colonialism of the traditional left, with some honorable exceptions such as José Carlos Mariátegui. What Fidel proposes in his argument implies precisely, a break with traditional conceptions about the subject of emancipatory struggles. Instead, it proposes a broad, encompassing vision, reconciled with the urgent needs of the situation that demands the unification of all the social forces oppressed and exploited by capitalism and not their dispersion in an archipelago of political and social organizations whose disunity is a guarantee of its own irrelevance. The policy of alliances of the July 26 Movement would make this true theoretical renewal the very foundation of its political action.
With military blackmail neutralized and the subject of social transformation defined, Fidel enunciated the concrete program of the revolution. In the first place, return to the people of the sovereignty usurped by the tyrant, reestablishing the Constitution of 1940; the second revolutionary law would grant land ownership to settlers, tenants, and squatters who occupy small plots, with reasonable compensation to the former owners. The third law would grant workers and employees a 30% share in the profits of large companies. The fourth revolutionary law would grant settlers 55% of the sugarcane yield. The fifth would confiscate all the assets embezzled by the rulers, half of which would go to increase the retirement funds of workers and employees, and the other half to finance hospitals, nursing homes and charities. Cuban foreign policy would be one of close solidarity with the struggles of the democratic peoples of the continent. Other measures included the agrarian reform of large land property, the comprehensive reform of education, the nationalization of monopolies in the electrical and telephone industries; all these measures that should be proclaimed and carried out immediately (pp. 61-62).
These measures were based on a diagnosis of what Fidel called in his speech the "dreadful tragedy" that Cuba is going through, "added to the most humiliating political oppression." 85% of the small Cuban farmers live under the permanent threat of eviction; There are 200,000 huts in the countryside, while 400,000 families live crammed into barracks; 2.2 million people in the city pay heavy rents and 2.8 million lack electricity. Schools are lacking, and the ones that do exist have poorly paid teachers. In the countryside, 90% of children are infested with parasites, and between May and December there are 1 million people without work, a figure higher than in countries like France and Italy, with a population several times higher than that of Cuba. “You send the unfortunate man who steals out of hunger to jail, but none of the hundreds of thieves who have stolen millions from the state ever slept a night behind bars” (p. 66).
The last part of the allegation, after a new series of denunciations about the savagery of the repression of the Moncada attackers, culminates in an elaborate justification - anchored in the best tradition of Western political philosophy - on the right to rebellion. "I admit and believe that the revolution is a source of law - he says in his speech - but the night armed assault on March 10 can never be called a revolution" that the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista established (p. 91). And in a reference whose timeliness is reaffirmed just by taking a look at the leadership of our so-called “democracies” –in reality, oligarchies barely disguised behind a very slight veneer of skillfully manipulated universal suffrage– Fidel said that Batista “lives delivered on his feet and hands to the great interests, and it could not be otherwise due to their mentality, due to the total lack of ideology and principles, due to the absolute absence of faith, trust and the support of the masses ”(p. 92). Alluding to what in the language of our days would be the much praised “alternation”, an attribute supposedly typical of mature democracies, he completes his reasoning by saying that the coup led by Batista “was a simple change of hands and a distribution of loot between the friends, relatives, accomplices and the hindrance of voracious parasites that make up the dictator's political scaffolding” (p. 92).
The last movement of this true political symphony that is History will absolve me is a fiery invocation of the legitimacy of the right to rebellion in the face of all forms of despotism.
In the final sections of his speech, Fidel first reviews the provisions of the 1940 Constitution itself, trampled on by the ruling satrapy, to then go down the long path of political philosophy, pointing out, at each step, the way in which that its main exponents defended throughout a history more than twice a thousand years old the right of peoples to rebel against tyrants. Thus, they parade from references to the political-religious thought of China and India in their most remote times to their connection with the Western tradition born in Greece and, from there, to Rome and then spread throughout Western Europe. Special mention is made of the arguments in favor of the rebellion developed by John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Juan Mariana, Jean Calvin, John Knox, John Ponet, Johannes Althussius, John Milton, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine and also present in the Declaration of Independence of the USA and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that emerged from the French Revolution.
After such an argument, “How to justify the presence of Batista in power, to which he arrived against the will of the people and violating by treason and by force the laws of the republic? How to qualify as legitimate a regime of blood, oppression and tyranny? The entire Western philosophical-political tradition condemns such nonsense, but the mandate that arises from Martí's teachings is even more definitive: “when there are many men without decorum there are always others who have in themselves the decorum of many men” and those will be the ones may they rebel against tyrants and satrapies. The young attackers of the Moncada are precisely the kind of men and women necessary for the great epics of liberation. Men and women willing to give their lives, knowing that "dying for the country is living." In the centenary year of his birth, concludes Fidel, Martí is more alive than ever in the rebellion and dignity of his people.
His unshakable faith in the cause of human and social emancipation, his absolute conviction in the final triumph of the revolutionary process, leads him to warn his judges that “now you are trying a defendant, but you, in turn, will not be judged. once, if not many, how many times the present is subjected to the devastating criticism of the future. So what I say here will be repeated many times, not because it has been heard from my mouth, but because the problem of justice is eternal "(p. 87). In the careful, measured, political and ethical balance of his discourse, the desire for justice clearly predominates over the desire for revenge. All this, of course, against the Gramscian backdrop of "optimism of the heart." Balance and serenity that had been revealed by saying that "for my dead companions I do not claim revenge", despite the fact that some of their closest friends were among them. "Since their lives were priceless, all criminals together could not pay for them with theirs" (p. 86). He does not appeal, as is usual in these cases, to the clemency of his judges to obtain his own freedom. "I cannot ask for it - he tells us, showing her exemplary dignity - when my companions are already suffering in the Isla de Pinos ignominious prison." And he ends with a premonitory phrase: "Condemn me, it doesn't matter, history will absolve me."
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