Moncada Barracks
Seven things to read and watch on the 71st anniversary of the military assault that sparked six years of domestic terrorism in Cuba and 65 years and counting of dictatorship.
A group of Cubans led by Fidel Castro assaulted the barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Approximately, 18 government officials were killed and 28 wounded in the attack. 27 rebels were killed and 11 wounded. 51 of the surviving 99 rebels were placed on trial.
Fidel Castro turned himself in after seeking guarantees for his safety and was also put on trial. At his trial Castro praised the old republic, and the democracy that had existed prior to March 10, 1952. The future Cuban despot expressed outrage at the Batista regime’s repression against his fellow assailants. “The unprecedented moral degradation our nation is suffering is expressed beyond the power of words in that mother’s sobs of grief before the cowardly insolence of the very man who murdered her son.”
The official version put out by the Cuban government about the July 26, 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks is not what happened. No mention is made about how Fidel Castro lied about his true intentions. On December 2, 1961 he explained his reasoning,“If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains.” Not to mention that Washington would not have backed him.
On March 26, 1964, before the trial of the alleged informant of the Humbolt Seven Martyrs, Fidel Castro explained that truth had to be useful: ”I conceive the truth based on a just and noble end, and that is when the truth is really true. If it does not serve a fair, noble and positive end, the truth, as an abstract entity, a philosophical category, in my opinion, does not exist.”
Fidel Castro following his capture for the attack on the Moncada Barracks.
This concept of “truth” is not original to Fidel Castro, but taken from Lenin. On October 2, 1920, the first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, stated in a speech to Russian communist youth: “The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society.” This is at the heart of communist morality, the ends justify the means, a profound immorality and a pillar of international communism. It also leads to the doctrine of the “big lie.” According to Lenin, “To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie’s aim.” This entry will seek to remain true to the facts.
1. The Moncada Attack
The Moncada Attack by Antonio Rafael De la Cova on C-SPAN
Antonio Rafael De la Cova talked about his book The Moncada Attack: Birth of the Cuban Revolution, published by the University of South Carolina Press. He described Fidel Castro’s failed attack on the Cuban Army on July 26, 1953, saying that Raul and Fidel Castro led a party of 160 people in assaults on two Cuban army posts. They were turned back by the army and defeated, and the author contended that Fidel Castro used the skirmish for his own propaganda purposes and that the events of July 26 put in motion Castro’s ascension to power. After his presentation the author responded to a few audience members’ questions. Above is the C-Span video, and below is local coverage on the book presentation.
2. What Fidel Castro said about Cuba’s democratic republic (1902 – 1952) that the regime now down plays.
Fidel Castro mugshot after July 26, 1953 Moncada Barracks attack.
Castro said at his trial on October 16, 1953 that later became known as the ““History Will Absolve Me” speech.
“Let me tell you a story: Once upon a time there was a Republic. It had its Constitution, its laws, its freedoms, a President, a Congress and Courts of Law. Everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with complete freedom.” …”Public opinion was respected and heeded and all problems of common interest were freely discussed. There were political parties, radio and television debates and forums of public meetings. The whole nation pulsated with enthusiasm.”
The promise made by the July 26 Movement was to restore the pre-existing democratic order along with reforms. The Castro revolution ended a seven year authoritarian dictatorship, and replaced it with a communist dictatorship that has ruled over Cuba for 65 years and counting. The Castro dictatorship was not a break from Batista but a continuity into more profound tyranny that continues to kill Cubans and has already, at a conservative estimate, killed tens of thousands .
3. Castro’s movement in the 1950s engaged in terrorism against Cubans
Throughout the 1950s., Castro’s July 26th Movement carried out multiple bombings that terrorized and killed Cuban civilians. Several of them were planned by Raul Castro, who is considered by some as ‘the father’ of contemporary skyjacking. On November 1, 1958, he orchestrated a skyjacking that killed 17 civilians. Terrorism is an essential component of Castroism. The Castro regime took power believing that they had achieved their victory through guerrilla warfare and terrorism, not their successfully lobbying of the U.S. government to place an arms embargo on Batista in March 1958. Terrorism is a core part of Castroism that views it as a valid tactic by the Castro dictatorship to further its goals. The Tricontinental Conference was held in Havana in 1966, and the Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAL) was created to sponsor and support guerilla and terrorist groups around the world.
4. Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins (2006)
German documentary filmmakers Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler in 2006 explored the ruins left by Castroism. and the Cubans living in them. Prior to 1959 there were pockets of poverty in Cuba, especially in the country side, but there was a country with a large and growing middle class. This ended with the arrival of communism, and is reflected in this documentary.
5. The novels of Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Guillermo Cabrera Infante is a member of the Latin American Boom writers’ generation, which includes his contemporary Mario Vargas Llosa. Tres tristes tigres, Vista del amanecer en el trópico, and La Habana para un infante difunto are among his most appreciated works. He influenced Puerto Rican and Cuban writers like Luis Rafael Sánchez (La guaracha del Macho Camacho) and Fernando Velázquez Medina (La ultima rumba en La Habana).
Under the pen name Guillermo Can, he co-wrote the script for Richard C. Sarafian’s 1971 cult film Vanishing Point. In 1997, King Juan Carlos of Spain bestowed upon him the Premio Cervantes.
His works are a much needed read to understand the past 72 years of Cuban history.
6. The poetry of Jorge Valls Arango and Angel Cuadra
Jorge Valls, a poet, writer, and former Cuban prisoner of conscience who had unjustly spent 20 years and 40 days in a Cuban prison. He’d fought against two dictatorships and in favor of human rights and dignity and paid a heavy price for being a free man with a conscience. He explained what happened below.Like Mr. Castro, I wanted a radical change in Cuban society, but I also knew that authority would never become legitimate unless the pure power of violence was submitted to reason, and strict respect for individual rights was guaranteed.
Without civil rights, the best intentions turn into a trap, and societies become prisons and asylums. There is a danger that we become as alienated and as fierce as the evil we think we are fighting.
That is what happened in Cuba under the Castro regime. In 1964, I was convicted of “conspiracy against the state,” because I testified against the Castro government in a political trial, and I spent 20 years and 40 days in jail. I don’t regret my time there, because I was defending this essential respectability of the human person.
If you read one book of poetry then make it Jorge Valls’s Donde Estoy No Hay Luz Y Esta Enrejado/Where I Am, There’s No Light.
Donde Estoy No Hay Luz Y Esta Enrejado [Where I Am, There’s No Light ]
Ángel Cuadra was a Cuban lawyer, writer, poet, and actor who in 1967 was sentenced to 15 years in prison and in February 1977 Amnesty International highlighted his case and recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. He was paroled for four months in 1976, but returned to prison to serve out his sentence after a book of his poems were published in the United States, reported Amnesty International in 1981. Ángel Cuadra completed his 15 year prison sentence in 1982 and was exiled from Cuba. Would highly recommend Esa Tristeza Que Nos Inunda (1985) and La voz inevitable/ The inevitable voice.
7. Watch Nobody Listened – Nadie Escuchaba (1987)
From the archives
Miami Herald, July 27, 2023
In the 1950s, Cubans soon learned the Moncada attack was nothing to celebrate | Opinion
By John Suarez
On July 26, at 5:00 a.m., Raúl Castro, age 92, Ramiro Valdés, 91, and Guillermo García Frías, 95, presided over the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. It was a violent act that led to the formation of the July 26th Movement and helped establish a dictatorship with Fidel Castro as its leader.
By contrast, 75 years ago, a delegation representing the Cuban Republic helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations. That republic provided an eight-hour work day; the right to strike; and university autonomy. The island enjoyed a large number of newspapers and radio stations with diverse political and ideological viewpoints. This year, Cuba is observing the Declaration’s 75th anniversary with a new draconian penal code and more beatings and arrests of dissidents.
After Fulgencio Batista’s coup ended Cuban democracy on March 10, 1952, Cubans fell for Fidel Castro, a charismatic young lawyer who promised to return constitutional order. Following the July 26 Moncada attack in 1953, the July 26th Movement’s urban terrorism killed Cubans throughout the rest of the decade. Raúl Castro plotted numerous aircraft hijackings. On Nov. 1, 1958, one such skyjacking killed 17 civilians when the plane crashed.
The United States slapped an arms embargo on the Batista dictatorship in March 1958, thanks to Castro’s July 26th Movement’s lobbying, and in December 1958, the U.S. ambassador in Havana pressed Batista to leave.
On Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro rose to power and was quickly recognized by the United States. Raúl Castro remains there today.
What happened to the Cubans who, in good faith, used violence to effect democratic change?
Mario Chanes de Armas, for example, who survived the Moncada attack, served prison time with Fidel and, like Castro, received amnesty, went to Mexico to train and returned to Cuba on the Granma yacht to unseat Batista. Chanes could have taken any position in the new regime, but he chose to return to his brewery work. After watching Castro betray their movement, Chanes spoke out against communist influence. In 1961, Chanes was prosecuted as a counterrevolutionary and imprisoned for 30 years. He died of Alzheimer’s in 2007 in Miami, after being released in 1991 and going into exile in 1993.
He was not the only one to follow this trajectory; others took up arms again.
The men and women who battled Batista’s dictatorship, many of them in Castro’s July 26th Movement, hoped for the restoration of Cuba’s 1940 Constitution and its republic. This is what Fidel promised in his “History will Absolve Me” speech at his trial for the Moncada assault. They got a totalitarian dictatorship, instead. They then fought Castro for six years in a civil war with substantially higher casualties on both sides than during the struggle against Batista. About 400 Soviet advisers assisted Castro in crushing the resistance. The opposition ended up in exile, imprisoned or executed.
It was within the prison cells that Cuba’s human-rights movement was forged.
This movement understood the potential of nonviolent resistance, demonstrated by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The resistance practiced it in Castro’s prisons and saw it as a means of mobilizing Cubans. It became a national civic movement to challenge Castro’s monopoly, educate citizens, rebuild democratic culture, reclaim human rights, refuse to accept injustice and oppose repression. Members reveal the dictatorship’s own contradictions by insisting that it adhere to the democratic provisions in its own constitution.
The communist dictatorship refused to follow Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, believing that glasnost and perestroika would bring an end to its rule. They understood that nonviolent leaders would provide an alternative to their regime and had them murdered.
One high-profile case was the July 22, 2012 assassination of pro-democracy leaders Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero. Payá and his Christian Liberation Movement amassed over 30,000 signatures for the Varela Project petition calling for human rights reforms, organizing tens of thousands of Cubans and attracting international attention. Payá was a Sakharov Laureate, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Fidel Castro became sick in 2006 and handed down power to his younger brother. The elder Castro died on Nov. 25, 2016. Raúl Castro and his son Alejandro continue to rule Cuba today through their hand-picked president Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Cuba’s prisons remain full of political prisoners — and the freedom struggle continues.
John Suarez is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba
https://www.yahoo.com/news/1950s-cubans-soon-learned-moncada-221614597.html