In March of that year, the steamship Le Coubre, which was bringing arms and munitions from Belgium, exploded at the Havana docks in an accident that the experts said was intentional and that killed 100 people.
In May 1960, the conflict with imperialism became direct and sharp. The oil companies operating in Cuba, invoking the right of force and scorning the laws of the republic, which clearly specified their obligations, refused to refine the crude oil that we had bought from the Soviet Union, in the exercise of our free right to trade with the whole world and not with just a part of it, as Martí said.
Everyone knows how the Soviet Union responded, by sending us, in a real effort, hundreds of ships to annually transport 3.6 million tons—the total of our crude oil imports—to keep our whole industrial apparatus operating, which today runs on the basis of oil.
In July 1960, there was the economic aggression against Cuban sugar, although some governments have not yet recognized it as such. The conflicts became sharper and the meeting of the OAS took place in August 1960, in Costa Rica. There—in August 1960, I repeat—it was stated: “The intervention or threat of intervention by an extra-continental power in the affairs of the American republics, even when it is invited, is strongly condemned. It is declared that the acceptance by an American state of a threat of extra-continental intervention endangers American solidarity and security, which obligates the Organization of American States to condemn and reject it with equal energy.”
In other words, the sister nations of the Americas, gathered in Costa Rica, denied us the right to be defended. It is one of the strangest denials in the history of international law. Of course, our people are rather disobedient to the dictates of gatherings of experts and they gathered in a great assembly in Havana, approving unanimously—with more than a million hands raised to the sky, one-sixth of the total population of the whole country—what was called the Declaration of Havana, one of whose points states:
The National General Assembly of the Cuban People—confident that it is expressing the general opinion of the people of Latin America— affirms that democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy; with discrimination against blacks; with outrages by the Ku Klux Klan; nor with the persecution that drove scientists like Oppenheimer from their posts, deprived the world for years of the marvelous voice of Paul Robeson, held prisoner in his own country; and sent the Rosenbergs to their death against the protests of a shocked world, including the appeals of many governments and even Pope Pius XII.
The National General Assembly of the Cuban People expresses the Cuban conviction that democracy does not consist solely of elections that are nearly always managed by rich landowners and professional politicians in order to produce fictitious results, but rather in the right of citizens to determine their own destiny, as this assembly of the people is now doing. Furthermore, democracy will come to exist in Latin America only when people are really free to make choices, when the poor are not reduced— by hunger, social discrimination, illiteracy and the judicial system—to the most wretched impotence. […]
Finally, the National General Assembly of the Cuban People condemns: the exploitation of human beings and the exploitation of underdeveloped countries by imperialist finance capital.
This was a declaration of our people made before the whole world, to show our resolve to defend with arms, with our blood, and with our lives, our freedom and our right to determine the destiny of our country in the way our people think best.
There followed many skirmishes and battles, verbal at times, with deeds at others, until December 1960 when the Cuban sugar quota in the US market was cut once and for all. The Soviet Union responded in the manner that you know. Other socialist countries did likewise and contracts were signed to sell to the whole socialist area four million tons of sugar, at a preferential price of four cents. That naturally saved the situation for Cuba, which unfortunately is still today as much of a one-crop country as are the majority of the countries of Latin America, and as dependent upon a single market, on a single product—at that time—as the rest of her sister countries are today.
It seemed that President Kennedy was initiating the new era that has been so talked about. And in spite of the fact that the verbal battle had been so intense between President Kennedy and the prime minister of our government, we hoped things would improve. President Kennedy in his speech issued some clear warnings on a range of Latin America issues, but he appeared to publicly accept that the case of Cuba must now be considered as a fait accompli.
We were mobilized at that time, but the day after Kennedy’s speech, demobilization was ordered. Unfortunately, on March 13, 1961—the day President Kennedy announced the Alliance for Progress—the pirate attack on our refinery at Santiago de Cuba took place, endangering the installations and taking the life of one of those defending it. We were thus again faced with an accomplished fact.
In that speech, which I have no doubt will be remembered, Kennedy also said that he hoped the peoples of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, for whom he felt great sympathy, could join the community of free nations. Within a month there was Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs invasion], and a few days later President Trujillo was mysteriously assassinated. We were always enemies of President Trujillo; we merely take note of the bare fact, which has not been clarified in any way up to the present time.
Afterward, a true masterpiece of belligerence and political naiveté was prepared, called the White Paper. According to the magazines that chatter so much in the United States—even provoking the ire of President Kennedy— its author is one of the distinguished advisers of the US delegation that is with us today. It is an indictment filled with distortions about Cuban reality, and was conceived to prepare for what was coming.
“The revolutionary regime betrayed their own revolution,” said the White Paper, as if it were the judge of revolutions and of how to make revolutions, the great appraiser of revolutions in the Americas. “The Castro regime offers a clear and present danger to the authentic revolutions of the Americas.” The word revolution also needs the barnacles scraped off it now and then, as one of the members presiding here said.
“The Castro regime refuses to negotiate amicably.” This, in spite of our having said many times that we will sit down on an equal basis to discuss our problems with the United States. I take advantage of the opportunity now, on behalf of my government, Mr. President, to state once more that Cuba is ready to sit down to discuss as equals everything that the US delegation wishes to discuss, but on the strict basis that there be no prior conditions. In other words, our position is very clear on this matter.
The White Paper calls the Cuban people to subversion and to revolution “against the Castro regime.” Yet, in spite of this, on April 13 [1961], President Kennedy once more spoke and affirmed categorically that he would not invade Cuba and that the armed forces of the United States would never intervene in Cuba’s internal affairs. Two days later, unmarked planes bombed our airports and reduced to ashes the greater part of our ancient air force, the remnants of what Batista’s men had left behind when they fled.
In the UN Security Council, Mr. Adlai Stevenson gave emphatic assurances that they were Cuban pilots, from our air force, “unhappy with the Castro regime,” who had carried out such a deed. And he stated he had spoken with them.
On April 17, the unsuccessful invasion took place. Our entire people, united and on a war footing, once more demonstrated that there are forces stronger than widespread propaganda, that there are forces stronger than the brutal force of arms, that there are higher values than the value of money. They threw themselves in a mad rush on to the narrow paths that led to the battlefield, many of them massacred on the way by the enemy’s superiority in the air. Nine Cuban pilots were the heroes of that struggle, with the old planes. Two of them gave their lives; seven of them are exceptional witnesses to the triumph of freedom’s weapons.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was over, and—to be brief, for there is no need to offer pro
of when the guilty party confesses, distinguished delegates— President Kennedy assumed full responsibility for the aggression. Perhaps at that time he had forgotten the words he had spoken a few days before.
You might think that the history of aggression was over. Nevertheless, I’ll give you a scoop, as the newspaper people say. On July 26 of this year, armed counterrevolutionary groups at the Guantánamo Naval Base were waiting for Commander Raúl Castro at two strategic places in order to assassinate him. The plan was intelligent and macabre. They would fire upon Commander Raúl Castro while he was on the road from his house to the mass meeting at which we celebrate the date of our revolution. If they failed, they would dynamite the foundation, or rather, they would detonate the already dynamited foundations of the stand from which our compañero Raúl Castro would preside over that patriotic meeting. And a few hours later, distinguished delegates, US mortars would begin firing from Cuban territory against the Guantánamo Naval Base. So the whole world would clearly understand the matter: the Cubans, exasperated because in the midst of their personal quarrels one of those “communists over there” was assassinated, were attacking the Guantánamo Naval Base, and the poor United States would have no recourse but to defend itself.
That was the plan our security forces, which are much more efficient than you might imagine, discovered a few days ago.
All that I have just told you is why I believe the Cuban revolution cannot come to this conference of illustrious experts to speak about technical matters. I know that you think, “It is because they do not know about these things.” And perhaps you are right. But the fundamental thing is that politics and facts, so obstinate, which are constantly present in our situation, prevent us from coming here to speak about numbers or to analyze the perfections of the CIES specialists.
There are a number of political issues circulating. One of them is a political-economic question: the tractors. Five hundred tractors is not an exchange value. Five hundred tractors is what our government estimates would allow it to repair the material damage caused by the 1,200 mercenaries. They do not pay for a single life because we are not accustomed to placing a dollar value on the lives of our citizens, or a value on equipment of any kind. And much less on the lives of the children who died there, of the women who died there at the Bay of Pigs.
But we want to make it clear that if the exchange of human beings— those [captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion] we call gusanos [worms]—for tractors seems to be an odious transaction, something from the days of piracy, we could make an exchange of human beings for human beings. We direct our remarks to the gentlemen from the United States. We reminded them of the great [Puerto Rican] patriot Pedro Albizu Campos, on the verge of death after being in a dungeon of the empire for years and years, and we offered them whatever they wanted for the freedom of Albizu Campos. We reminded the nations of the Americas who might have political prisoners in their jails that we could make an exchange. No one responded.
Naturally, we cannot force that exchange. It is simply up to those who think that the freedom of those “valiant” Cuban counterrevolutionaries—the only army in the world that surrendered in its entirety, with almost no losses—whoever thinks that these individuals should be set free, let them set free their own political prisoners. Then all the jails of the Americas will be resplendent, or at least their political prisons will be empty.
There is another problem, also of a political-economic nature. This is, Mr. President, that our air transport fleet is being brought, plane by plane, to the United States. The procedure is simple: a few ladies enter a plane with guns hidden in their clothing, they hand them over to their accomplices, the accomplices murder the guard, they put a gun to the pilot’s head, the pilot heads for Miami, and a company, legally of course—because in the United States everything is done legally—files a suit for debts against the Cuban government, and then the plane is confiscated.
But it so happens that among those many Cuban patriots—and in addition there was a US patriot, but he is not ours—there was a Cuban patriot [in the United States]. And he, all by himself, without anyone telling him anything, decided to better the record of the hijackers of the two-engine planes, and he brought to Cuban shores a beautiful four-engine plane. Naturally, we are not going to use this four-engine plane, which is not ours. We respect private property, but we demand the right to be respected in kind, gentlemen. We demand an end to shams; the right for there to be organizations in the Americas that can say to the United States: “Gentlemen, you are committing a vulgar outrage. You cannot take the planes of another country even though it may be opposed to you. Those planes are not yours. Return those planes, or sanctions will be imposed against you.”
Naturally we understand that, unfortunately, there is no inter-American body strong enough to do this. Nevertheless, in this august conclave, we appeal to the sense of fairness and justice of the US delegation, in order to normalize the situation with regard to the hijacking of our respective planes.
It is necessary to explain what the Cuban revolution is, what this special event is that has made the blood of the world’s empires boil, and that has also made the blood of the dispossessed of the world, or of this part of the world at least, boil with hope. It is an agrarian, antifeudal and anti-imperialist revolution that under the imperatives of its internal evolution and of external aggressions became transformed into a socialist revolution, and that declares itself as such before all the Americas: a socialist revolution.
A socialist revolution that took the land from those who had plenty and gave it to those who used to be hired to work that land, or distributed it in cooperatives among other groups of people who had no land on which to work, even as hired hands.
It is a revolution that came to power with its own army and on the ruins of the oppressor’s army; a revolution that looked around when it came to power and dedicated itself to the systematic destruction of all the old forms of the structure that upheld the dictatorship of an exploiter class over the exploited class. It destroyed the army completely, as a caste, as an institution—not as men, except for the war criminals who were shot before a firing squad; this, too, was done openly before the public opinion of the continent and with a clear conscience.
It is a revolution that has reaffirmed national sovereignty and that, for the first time, has called in its own name, and in the name of all the peoples of the Americas and of the world, for the return of all territories unjustly occupied by foreign powers.
It is a revolution that has an independent foreign policy, that comes here to this meeting of American states as one more Latin American country, that goes to the meeting of the Movement of Nonaligned Countries as one of its important members, and that participates in the deliberations of the socialist countries and is considered by them to be a fraternal nation.
It is, then, a revolution with humanist characteristics. It is in solidarity with all the oppressed peoples of the world. It is in solidarity, Mr. President, because as Martí also said: “Every true human must feel on their own cheek every blow dealt against the cheek of another.” And every time that an imperialist power subjugates a territory, it is a blow against every inhabitant of that territory.
That is why we struggle for the independence of other countries, for the independence of the occupied territories, indiscriminately, without asking about the political regime or about the aspirations of those who fight for their independence. We support Panama, which has a piece of its territory occupied by the United States. We call the islands near the south of Argentina the Malvinas and not the Falkland Islands. And we call the island that the United States snatched from Honduras and from which it is insulting us over radio and telegraph, Swan Island.
Here in the Americas we are constantly fighting for the independence of the Guyanas and the British Antilles. We accept the fact of an independent Belize because Guatemala has already renounced its sovereignty over that piece of its territory. And we also fight in Africa, in Asia, in any par
t of the world where the strong oppress the weak, so that the weak may achieve independence, self-determination, and the right to self-rule as a sovereign state.
Permit us to say that, when the earthquake struck Chile, our people came to her aid to the extent of our resources, with our only product, sugar. It was a small amount of aid, but nevertheless it was a type of aid for which nothing was demanded in return. It was simply handing over to a sister nation some food to tide her over those anxious hours. Nor does that country have to thank us, and much less does she owe us anything; it was our duty to give what we gave.
Our revolution nationalized the domestic economy; it nationalized basic industry, including mining. It nationalized all foreign trade, which is now in the hands of the state, and which we proceeded to diversify by trading with the whole world. It nationalized the banking system in order to have in its hands the efficient instrument with which to exercise the function of credit in accordance with the country’s needs.
It provides for the participation of the workers in the management of the planned national economy. It carried out the urban reform just a few months ago, through which every inhabitant of the country was made the owner of the home they occupied on the sole condition that they continue to pay the same rent that they were already paying, in accordance with a table, for a set number of years.
It instituted many measures to affirm the dignity of the human being. Among the first of these was the abolition of racial discrimination, which existed in our country, distinguished delegates, in a somewhat subtle form, but it existed. The beaches of our island were not for blacks or the poor to swim at because they belonged to some private club visited by tourists who did not like to swim with black people.
The Awakening of Latin America Page 31