What Do I Join?

By the time Che had arrived in Mexico his open commitment to socialism had matured. Whilst in Mexico he developed his studies of Marx, Engels and Lenin and supplemented them with further reading of Jack London and other writers. However, despite this political evolution of Che’s political knowledge, his grasp of Marxist theory was still one sided and incomplete.

This weakness was particularly evident in his interpretation of how to apply a Marxist method to the colonial and semi-colonial countries of Latin America. This would become clear in a very real way as he engaged in the concrete struggle to overthrow the Batista dictatorship in Cuba.

Che was drawn to the July 26th Movement, which was initiated by Fidel Castro rather than the Cuban Communist Party. This decision has puzzled many on the left, especially in Latin America. The answer lies in the role and policies advocated by the communist parties throughout Latin America at that time and the character of the July 26th Movement.

The July 26th Movement was so-named to commemorate the date of an assault on the Moncada military barracks in the Cuban city of Santiago during 1953. This attack was carried out by a group of youth who were mainly linked with the Cuban Peoples’ Party (Partido del Pueblo Cubano), known as the Orthodox Party. This was a radical Cuban nationalist formation which had split from the Auténticos (Authentic Revolutionary Movement) in 1947 and was led by Eduardo Chibas whose main program was “honesty in government”. The Autenticos, re-organized during the 1930s, initially attempted to lay claim to the 19th Century national democratic revolutionary tradition of Cuba’s national hero, José Martí – the poet and fighter for independence who was killed in 1895 whilst leading a charge on horse-back against the Spanish army.

Martí and the independence movement were comprised of many strands and included a certain anarchist influence from the growing Spanish workers’ movement. Martí himself supported a radical social program. He was influenced by certain anarchist organizations that had links with the Spanish workers’ movement. However, as Hugh Thomas points out in his extensive tome, Cuba – The Pursuit of Freedom, Martí “…from his writings, seems a contemporary of Rousseau rather than of Marx…” Martí was in essence a fighter for national independence and defender of “social justice”. He did not however advocate a break with capitalism or defend socialist ideas.

The Auténticos increasingly modified their stand just as the Orthodox Party were destined to do less than a decade later. Within the youth wing of the Orthodox party a radical current was to be found which increasingly became frustrated because of the lack of serious struggle by the party against the Batista regime.

Those who carried out the attack on the Moncada barracks hoped that it would begin a national uprising against the Batista regime. Instead it was brutally crushed and its participants either killed or imprisoned. Amongst those involved in the assault were Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl. Most of the 170 participants were either from a lower middle class or working class background. Despite this they were not advocates of socialist ideas. Raúl Castro was a member of the Young Communists but had participated in the attack as an individual and without the knowledge of the Communist Party.

The majority were not members of any political organization. The program they advocated was mainly limited to the radical aspects of the policy of the democratic but capitalist Orthodox Party. Fidel Castro was no exception. At that stage he did not regard himself as a socialist and he was certainly not committed to Marxist ideology despite having read some Marx and Lenin.

The basic idea which the insurgents at Moncada advocated can be gauged from the proclamation they read after the capture of the radio station: “The Revolution declares its firm intention to establish Cuba on a plan of welfare and economic prosperity that ensures the survival of its rich subsoil, its geographical position, diversified agriculture and industrialization…The Revolution declares its respect for the workers…and…the establishment of total and definitive social justice, based on economic and industrial progress under a well organized and timed national plan…” The proclamation affirmed that it “…recognizes and bases itself upon the ideas of Martí” and then pledged itself to restore the constitution of 1940.

In other words it proposed a program to established in Cuba a modern, industrialized capitalist democracy that would grant elementary rights to the working class and the poor. This was amplified still further by Castro after his arrest in the speech he delivered during his trial. Castro outlined five laws they intended to implement once in power. These were radical and promised nationalization of the telephone system and other public utilities, a program of land reform and proposals to restructure the sugar industry. It proposed a profit sharing scheme in the sugar mills and other non-agricultural sectors of the economy.

However, the program did not even propose the nationalization of the sugar industry and would not have ended foreign ownership of the economy. In essence it was a program of liberal capitalist reform which if implemented would attempt to tackle the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution.

Historically, these tasks include a program of land reform to end feudal class relations, the development of industry, the unification of the country into a nation state, the establishment of capitalist parliamentary democracy and the winning of national independence from imperialist domination and laying the basis for the modern nation state.

The exact form the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution take differs from country to country and in some countries some of the questions posed can be resolved or partly resolved, others remain to be achieved. For example in Argentina capitalist property relations as opposed to feudal ownership exists in the rural areas. However, Argentina is still shackled by the domination of the major imperialist countries’ economic power.

However, for decades in the semi-colonial and colonial countries such as Cuba, the implementing of the program of the democratic bourgeois revolution has meant a conflict with capitalism and imperialism. This is because the national capitalist class is too enfeebled, linked to the landowners and shackled to imperialism to accomplish the bourgeois democratic revolution. A further factor is the fear the national bourgeoisie have of the working class entering any arena of struggle against imperialism.

The vice in which Cuba was locked by imperialism, together with the decadent Cuban ruling class, was too strong to permit even a limited program of liberal reform. As in other non-industrialized countries, the national capitalist class in Cuba was too weak, corrupt and shackled to imperialism to complete the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. And yet these tasks need to be resolved if society is to develop.

As the Russian Revolution had illustrated in 1917, this dilemma could be solved by the working class, even in a country where it was in a minority. It could do this by taking control of the running of society and establishing a workers’ democracy. With a program to win the support of the poorer sections of the peasantry and other exploited layers such as the urban middle class and intelligentsia, landlordism and capitalism could be overthrown.

Through the victory of the international revolution in the more industrialized capitalist countries the building of socialism could begin. Triumphant revolution in these countries would end the isolation of other workers’ states and because of their higher productivity level lay the basis for the construction of socialism – that is, a society of plenty where need is met. In this way the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution would be achieved by the working class as part of the international socialist revolution.

These were the classical ideas of the Permanent Revolution that were developed from the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. In particular they were developed by Trotsky and encompassed by Lenin.

In a distorted caricature of this Marxist prognosis the Cuban Revolution would eventually result in the overthrow of landlordism and capitalism and replace it with a centrally planned economy. The revolution was to acquire mass support and bring tremendous benefits to the Cuban population. But the new regime that triumphed in 1959 would not be based upon a regime of workers’ democracy.

Castro and the July 26th Movement

At the time of the Moncada attack Castro still pronounced his allegiance to the Ortodoxos. The party leadership regarded the attempted assault on the Moncada as an adventure. Large sections of the Ortodoxos and the urban middle class were still hoping to reach an agreement with the dictatorship. Batista denounced it as an attempted “communist putsch (coup)”. The Communist Party denounced it as an attempt at a “bourgeois putsch”.

US imperialism at the time was increasingly expressing its concern about what it viewed as “communist encroachment” throughout Latin America. Under pressure from Washington, after a visit to Havana by CIA director Allen Dulles, Batista agreed to the establishment of the Buró de Represión a las Actividades Comunistas- BRAC.

Neither the CIA nor Batista had Castro and his supporters in mind when this special police unit was established. Reflecting how little his movement was perceived as a serious threat at the time, Castro and the other imprisoned insurgents were released in 1955 as a “good-will gesture” after a campaign to free them, which in part was initiated by the Roman Catholic Church.

In Cuba Castro was heralded as a cause celebre because of his struggle against Batista and especially as a consequence of his imprisonment on the infamous Isle of Pines. The one condition of his release was that he should leave Cuba. He headed for Mexico where Cuban exiles and some of his followers had been congregating during the early 1950s.

Castro had established a reputation as an audacious and charismatic leader. As a ‘Young Turk’ in the movement, he was able to exploit this to his maximum advantage. In the summer of 1955 his new group, the Movement of the 26th of July, was formally established and he broke from the Ortodoxos in 1956. At its launch the Movement declared that in its view the “Jefferson philosophy was still valid”. Jefferson was one of the eighteenth century leaders of the US War of Independence against colonial British rule. His “philosophy” was therefore liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy. Castro viewed the USA as his model for Cuba.

Within the Ortodoxos movement a layer of its supporters were seeking negotiations and a compromise with the dictatorship. Others, especially the youth, were seeking more direct means of confronting the regime.

The prospects for Castro had been enhanced by the suicide of the former leader of the party, Eduardo Chibas, in 1951. By projecting himself in the image of a new Martí, Castro made an appeal to the ranks of the Ortodoxos to support him.

The Communist Party in Retirement

At the same time the expanding political vacuum was inflated by the situation in which the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular – PSP) found itself. Hugh Thomas in his book on Cuba accurately states, ” The Cuban Communists in general were in semi-retirement during most of these years, recovering their health and energies…”

The party had lost much of its credibility as a consequence of its earlier policy of supporting a Popular or People’s Front. The policy had been adopted by the Latin American communist parties after 1935 when a meeting of all the regional communist parties was called in Moscow where the new line was imposed in each country, with some exceptions such as Brazil.

It was adopted in Cuba during an exceptional period of social turmoil. 1933 had seen a radical revolt by junior officers in the army. Amongst other measures they demanded the ending of the Platt Amendment, signed with the USA in 1901, which gave the US the right to militarily intervene in Cuba. At the head of this movement was a young officer from a working class background, Fulgencio Batista.

This was an entire period of social upheaval and radicalization in Cuba. There was a crisis of authority in the government. The one force which seemed able to hold things together was the army headed by the radicalized junior officers. Batista reflected the varying conflicts between the various classes that existed at the time. He reflected the pressure from a wing of the national ruling class to assert its own interests against US imperialism. At the same time he reflected the pressures from the working class and sections of the radicalized middle class for greater social change. For a period Batista balanced between the different class pressures that were bursting forth.

Batista ruled Cuba through a series of puppet presidents, granting concessions to workers and also implementing some land reform. A minimum wage was introduced and it was made illegal to dismiss employees “without reason”. These measures were slow in being implemented but they boosted the confidence of the working class. As a populist leader from a working class background Batista enjoyed widespread support from the Cuban population for a short time. But like all such bonapartist leaders and regimes – those which balance between various class interests combining reforms to the masses with repression – in the final analysis they act to defend one class or another, in this case the interests of capitalism. Batista proved to be no different.

Political opponents were viciously dealt with and under Batista’s leadership, with the encouragement of the US ambassador, the army was deployed in 1935 against a general strike demanding a new democratic constitution. Despite his earlier populist nationalism, Batista succumbed to the pressures of imperialism and ultimately fully collaborated with it.

After winning the Presidential elections in 1940 and withdrawing his candidature in 1944, Batista returned to power in a coup that was staged in 1952 after he lost another Presidential election. The new hated regime that seized power in 1952 was to unleash repression and terror. The communists throughout this period adopted a policy of supporting Batista, slavishly following the decisions of the Moscow conference in 1935.

At its congress in 1939 the PSP agreed it should “adopt a more positive attitude towards Colonel Batista”. From that moment on in party journals Batista was no longer “…the focal point of reaction; but the focal point of democracy”. (New York Daily Worker 1 October 1939).

The international organization of the communist parties which existed at the time, the Comintern, stated in its journal: “Batista…no longer represents the center of reaction…the people who are working for the overthrow of Batista are no longer acting in the interests of the Cuban people.” (World News and Views, No 60 1938).

In 1952 the PSP declared the new regime to be “no different” to the preceding one! The “Communists” had been loyal supporters of the Bonapartist dictator for more than a decade when he seized power. As Hugh Thomas comments in his book, the Catholic laity had endured more conflicts with the regime than the Communist Party leaders.

Despite this the PSP maintained an important influence amongst important sections of workers. Yet, in the course of events, the party paid a price for its collaboration with a loss of support amongst the working class and the youth.

However, the highest price was paid by the Cuban masses, suffering under a regime that rapidly showed itself to be puppet of US imperialism. Historically Cuba had been a playground for the “gringos” north of the Rio Grande. Havana developed as the local brothel and gambling casino of US bankers and industrialists. Batista was merely the local pimp.

It was against this historical background that Che Guevara eventually found his way into the ranks of the July 26th Movement. Castro and his followers would undoubtedly have seemed a more attractive and combative force than the communist parties at the time. Che was in contact with some of Castro’s supporters prior to his arrival in Mexico. Plans were already being laid to begin an armed struggle against Batista.

During 1954 Che was also mixing with Communist Party members from all over Latin America, especially exiles from Guatemala. Initially he saw his future within the Communist Party and wrote to his mother anticipating that he would eventually take such a path. But he held back at this time largely because the bohemian dragon within him had still not been fully slain. As Che himself admitted, he had “well-defined convictions” but also what he described as his “vagabonding” and “repeated informality”. As he explained in the letter to his mother he still yearned to travel, especially through Europe and “I couldn’t do that submitted to an iron discipline”.

It was not until 1955 that he met Castro. The immediate prospect of a struggle, which was offered to him by Castro and his movement together with his “well-defined convictions,” finally led Che to accept that “iron discipline” which he had previously rejected, although it was not within the ranks of the Communist Party.

Che’s entry into the July 26th Movement was not without its problems. Some of its members were of a pronounced middle class background and his political persona irritated them. Che, despite his lack of formal commitment to the movement, was showing aspects of his character that would emerge in a very forceful way during the rest of his revolutionary life.

He was austere and once he had decided to commit himself to revolutionary struggle, utterly self-sacrificing. Some of those who met him were somewhat “put out” by what they regarded as Che’s “self-righteousness”. As Jon Anderson recounts in his biography, a Moncada veteran, Melba Hernández, had arrived in Mexico to join her husband. She was still dressed in refined clothes and jewelry when she was introduced to Che. He looked at her and proclaimed she could not be a serious revolutionary dressed so. “Real revolutionaries adorn themselves on the inside, not on the surface”, he stated.

Having joined the July 26th Movement, Che threw himself into it body and soul as preparations were undertaken to land in Cuba and begin the “revolution” during 1956. He intensified his political studies and undertook an increasingly harsh physical training course and put himself on a diet to get fit. Still plagued by asthma he needed to be twice as healthy as other fighters. Through will power and determination Che overcame the limitations his health imposed upon him. Within the group, which numbered no more than twenty to thirty according to Castro, Che rapidly rose to pre-eminence.

The group was arrested in Mexico and then released. From prison Che wrote to his parents: “My future is linked with that of the Cuban revolution. I either triumph with it or die there…From now on I wouldn’t consider my death a frustration, only, like Hikmet (the Turkish poet): “I will take to the grave only the sorrow of an unfinished song.”

His commitment to the cause of revolution was now his entire life. This spirit is indispensable to defeat capitalism and win a revolution. It is the quality in Che which those fighting to emancipate the working class and exploited classes today need to emulate.

As he engaged directly in revolutionary struggle his boldness and self-sacrifice was to become very evident. At the same time his ideas developed in a one-sided manner. He based himself on the peasantry and guerrilla struggle. This is one important aspect of the Marxist policy that applies in the rural areas where a peasant class exists.

The question of the role of the working class and the urban centers is also of decisive importance to apply a correct Marxist policy. As will be further explained in this pamphlet this is true even in countries where the working class forms a relatively small section of the population.

Unfortunately because of the uneven development of Che’s ideas it was not possible for him to develop a policy and program that could bring about a victorious revolution in countries such as Argentina, Brazil or Chile where powerful working classes existed.