Image by Juan Luis Ozaez.
“We are still on trial, and we know it, but resignation is not written in our genes. As they once did in the very difficult days of our demand for Elián returning, they are betting again on fatigue, our being suffocated, on pressures more and more inhuman all the time. How little they know who we are!”
Leidys María Labrador Herrera, writing for Cuba’s Granma newspaper on February 19, was recalling President Fidel Castro’s address to thousands of Cubans on that day in 2000. They gathered in Mangos de Baraguá, a small settlement in eastern Cuba. They were supporting the campaign to return Elián González to Cuba from Miami.
Fidel Castro’s speech and the choice of its setting illustrate the outsized role of historical memory in strengthening and defending Cuba’s Revolution. Castro reminded listeners of the far-reaching aspirations of their Revolution.
Five-year-old Elián, found in late 1999 floating on an inner tube off the Florida Coast, had survived the sinking of a small boat heading to Florida and carrying a group of Cubans, including his mother, who died. Members of Elián’s extended family living in Miami refused to give him up to the care of his father, in Cuba. Demands from Cuba, backed by a worldwide solidarity campaign including U.S. solidarity activists, led to his return to Cuba on June 28, 2000.
Labrador Herrera’s article mentions the “symbolism of the place” where Castro spoke and “where Maceo’s revolutionary intransigence saved the honor of the Liberation Army.” On March 15, 1878 at Mangos de Baraguá, General Antonio Maceo, joined by 500 or so rebel soldiers involved with Cuba’s First War of Independence (1868-1878), met with General Arsenio Martinez Campos Spanish, head of the Spanish colonialists’ army.
The meeting took place a month after rebel forces, not including Maceo’s contingent, had joined the Pact of Zanjón that ended the War. Maceo explained that he was rejecting the peace agreement because the Zanjón Pact granted neither national independence for Cubans nor freedom for Cuba’s enslaved Africans.
Cubans know Maceo’s remarks as the “Protest of Baraguá.” Addressing “the Inhabitants of the Eastern Department, on March 23, Maceo announced that “our work of regeneration” would continue. He died fighting in Cuba’s Second War of Independence that began in 1895.
On February 19, journalist Randy Alonso Falcón, director of Cuba TV’s Round Table programs, also commented on Fidel Castro’s historic speech. He recalled that:
“We gathered in that wonderful grove in Baraguá … Elián González was still being held in the United States. Beginning on that day a new stage of struggle was being organized. It had to be symbolic, with powerful arguments outlining the true scope of the Cuban people’s struggle, which was about the happiness of one child and the destiny of all Cuban children … It was push-back against all those aggressive and genocidal policies the U.S. government had deployed against Cuba. These were the real causes of the tragedy of Elián and his family. There was nothing more symbolic than Baraguá, under the mango trees, where Antonio Maceo rejected the surrender of Zanjón, to express the Cuban people’s determination to resist.”
Fidel Castro’s speech (excerpted) begins: The “mafia, the extreme right wing in Congress and even the U.S. government itself … are betting on Cubans getting tired … It is not simply the struggle for the return of a child, it is the struggle for the right of every child in the world not to be kidnapped … not to be uprooted from the culture and the homeland where he was born and lived the first and most tender years of his life.
“That is why [this episode] has to hurt all the parents and close relatives of all the children in Cuba, in the world and even in the country where he is being held hostage: the United States. There are many things for humans not to agree on, but they all believe in one thing: the innocence, tenderness and defenselessness of a child.”
Cuba’s campaign for Elián “will never stop as long as there is injustice to be repaired, as long as the imperialist system exists, and even when it ceases to exist, because it will always be necessary to fight for a more united and humane world.”
The campaign is far-reaching: “[R]evolutionary consciousness has deepened as never before in our homeland. In fact, throughout this historic struggle, the people’s energy and our forms and means of struggle have multiplied. … [T]he seed sown by the Revolution and a social and human work stands out everywhere … Cuba discovers itself, its geography, its history, its cultivated intelligences, its children, its youth, its teachers, its doctors, its professionals, its enormous human work product of 40 years of heroic struggle against the strongest power that has ever existed.”
Cuba “understands its modest but fruitful and promising role in today’s world. Its invincible weapons are its revolutionary, humanist and universal ideas. Nuclear weapons, military or scientific technology, the monopoly of the mass media, the political and economic power of the empire can do nothing against them. An increasingly exploited, insubordinate and rebellious world confronts the empire, while more than ever losing its fear and arming itself with ideas.” Castro was launching Cuba’s own “Battle of Ideas.”
Castro speaks of two instances of U.S. assaults on Cuba families. He describes Operation Peter Pan, a joint enterprise of the CIA, Catholic Church, and U.S. State Department taking place in 1960-1962, “as perhaps one of the great evils committed against Cuba.” “[U]nder the terror of an infamous calumny … 14,000 Cuban children were kidnapped and surreptitiously transferred to the United States with the support of their own parents.” The perpetrators claimed that the revolutionary government, while “suppressing [parents’] legal custody” (patria potestad), was planning to send children to communist indoctrination centers.
Castro recalls the “many equally cruel tragedies [that] must have taken place during the 33 years of the Cuban Adjustment Act that rewards those who flout the rules of legal and safe emigration… [O]rganizers usually include women and children in their adventures.” He condemns “efforts … to massively remove qualified personnel from the country, including teachers, professors, doctors and other professionals and thereby hinder our economic and social development.”
The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 remains in effect. It assures that Cubans entering the United States without papers can gain permanent residence after a stay of one year.
Cubans have lived with, and remember, shortages of vital supplies, impediments to production and development, and the resulting grief and suffering. Castro, in his speech, offers memories accounting for Cuba’s difficulties, of U.S. “aggressions and threats to the security of the country and the acts of terrorism; the blockade and economic war, plans for subversion, … sabotage, internal destabilization; laws such as Helms-Burton, Torricelli and numerous amendments to tighten the blockade in order to crush our people through hunger and disease.”
Castro finishes: “Our children and young people will not lack spaces for healthy and joyful recreation. Their intelligence and lives will be fulfilled. All our people will have equal rights and spaces for happiness. Their moral and spiritual values will constantly grow. We will see who gets tired first! We will see who resists more! Before the immortal glory of Maceo, today, February 19, 2000, we dedicate ourselves!”
Historical memory has played a prominent role in Cuba’s political life, especially for Cubans remaining on the island. Those who left for the United States and elsewhere, in varying degrees disenchanted with the Revolution, undoubtedly harbor an alternative set of memories. Many of the early migrants had economic resources. Later ones were seeking economic rescue.
Cuba serves, in effect, as a laboratory experiment testing the role of historical memory in a revolutionary setting versus its place in a society given over to capitalism, as in the United States. There, politically significant memories, logically enough, differ according to the varying nature of politically significant movements and politically-charged collective experiences.
U.S. society stands out for its great mixing of peoples from afar, inherent social class differences, and non-acceptance of seriously oppressed population groups. Clearly, historical memories fortify particular struggles for social justice ─ for relief from racism, ending oppression of workers and women, and defending against assaults on gender diversity.
In such a tumultuous situation, however, no brand of historical memory has emerged coherent enough to fuel the overarching political effort usually associated with people-centered revolutionary change. Nor has anything of that order showed in other places where capitalism is in charge.
U.S. capitalists can call upon ample historical memory of their own that sufficiently rationalizes their dominant role in U.S. society. But our purpose here is confined to that which furthers socialist change.
In Cuba, influences of a common language and of the Catholic Church may have eased divisive tendencies. Cuban capitalists were a timid lot compared their aggressive counterparts in the United States. Cuba, for the most part, exhibits unity in struggle. Cuban’s historical memory has been promotor and product of that unity. The prominent role of historical memory in furthering revolutionary struggle there is an indicator of where revolutionary struggles are likely to take place and where that is not so.
A people’s common experience of colonial subjugation or imperialist depredations ought to feed into a common history that is well remembered. The historical record shows that such memories, accumulating, help turn a population to resistance and the making of revolution. To add aspirations of national independence to a pot where stirrings of social and political revolution are already heating up surely represents a potent mix.
This process of combined struggles looks to be unique to what are now labeled the peripheral regions of the world. Examples are Cuba plus Vietnam, China, Laos, and North Korea. Historical memory became a weapon of war in those places
Paul Sweezy, economist and editor of Monthly Review, described the phenomenon this way:
“[T]he sharp point of proletarian resistance decisively shifted in the twentieth century from the Global North to the Global South. Nearly all revolutions since 1917 have taken place in the periphery of the world capitalist system and have been revolutions against imperialism. The vast majority of these revolutions have occurred under the auspices of Marxism. All have been subjected to counterrevolutionary actions by the great imperial powers.”
Source: Counter Punch
