Cuba And The Revolutionary Myth

The Political Education Of The Cuban Rebel Army, 1953-1963

C. Fred Judson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367017217
• eBook ISBN: 9780429716508
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume provides is a look at the social function of myth during two distinct phases of the Cuban revolutionary process. The first period spanned the years of armed struggle, from 1953 through 1958, a time during which the rebel leadership prevailed. Moving onto the years between 1959 and 1963, the achievements during the revolutionary war, and particularly the deeds of the Rebel Army, in which sacrifice and measure of heroism whose function was to sustain morale and consciousness.

1 The Revolutionary Myth in the Political Education of the Cuban Military

DOI: 10.4324/9780429047077-1

REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS

There is nothing automatic or inevitable in the making of socialist revolutions. Objective conditions may help set the stage, but they have not of themselves moved any society into revolution. To expect that they will is to fall into the mechanism so roundly condemned by Lenin.¹ In Batista's Cuba, as in czarist Russia, human actions made history. There is a relationship between objective conditions and the human actors in social history discernible on a common-sense level. Conditions act upon people and social classes, and actions are influenced by conditions. As Marx put it in his essay on the 1851 coup in France, "men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past".²

Marx's dictum about human beings and history contains his usual dialectical interpretation of phenomena. Human beings act upon their environment and upon "objective conditions" to change them, i.e., to make history. And yet the actors are not free subjects. There is no tabula rase upon which human action may engrave history. Action occurs within a given and defined set of circumstances, the objective conditions to which Marx refers. These conditions are no more nor less than the state of property and production relations, class hierarchies and inter-class relations as embodied in the state and ideology, and the stage of development which productive forces have reached. It follows, for Marxists, that it is impossible to interpret human actions in history as pure voluntarism. If there is to be debate, it may be over the relative weight and dialectical relationship of subjective and objective factors in a given event or process. In human history there is not the one without the other but, rather, their interplay.

Revolutionary theorists of socialism in the twentieth century have dedicated much of their attention and practice to the subjective factors, those intellectual and emotional forces which have a leading role in the making of revolutions. Much of the political genius of Lenin as a revolutionary lies in his conception of the vanguard, the subjective force incarnate.³ It is in his theory and practice in this area that he is most directly addressing the revolutionary role of the subjective forces. Lenin's theory of the vanguard, the dedicated and disciplined body of professional revolutionaries, reflected his concern to activate subjective forces capable of moving beyond the restraints of objective conditions. The idea was to inject revolutionary consciousness into the mass of the population, a consciousness which would be deeper than the periodic spontaneity manifested in revolts and jacqueries.

Much of Lenin's original conception of the revolutionary vanguard grew out of the objective conditions specific to czarist Russia. Bourgeois democratic forms were truncated and obscured; police repression and censorship haunted Russian social democracy, and a history of clandestinity contributed to the atmosphere of the time. Nevertheless, the larger historical lesson has generally been confirmed by the experience of socialist insurrections in this century. It has taken a dedicated and tight-knit group to lead successful insurrections in virtually every instance. Such groups have been responsible for engendering and extending revolutionary consciousness into the larger population.

The dedication and discipline of groups which lead insurrections and the subsequent revolutions are based on revolutionary consciousness. This can be defined, on the cognitive level, as the awareness of contradictions in a society which have reached a stage, that of crisis, where a revolutionary outcome is possible. The term "revolution" here is taken to mean the radical readjustment of class relations, the overthrow of the rule of one class by another, social revolution in the classical Marxist sense. This level of revolutionary consciousness can be achieved by political practice, observation and reasoning. However, such consciousness also includes an element of faith. It includes the conviction not only that such a resolution of contradictions is possible, but also desirable, necessary and imminent. Revolutionary consciousness implies faith and belief in victory, emotional identification with the cause of social revolution, and a belief that social regeneration will be made possible by insurrection and revolution.

Socialist revolutionary consciousness, that awareness of class conflict and militant faith that action and not merely the laws of motion of capitalist development will decide the struggle in favor of the proletariat and its allies, is the prerequisite for the formation and influence of leadership cadres. From Lenin to Mao, and from Fanon to Cabral, theorists of socialist revolution insist upon this. Further, their writings commonly pose as an essential goal the extension of revolutionary consciousness to the mass of the population. They advocate nothing less than the transformation of the extant political culture into a revolutionary political culture.

Revolutionary consciousness encompasses two aspects. One may be termed the rational, in that an individual's conviction that revolution is desirable and necessary for the given society derives from an analysis of that society and of human experiences within it. Here the distinction between personal experiences and observation may be vague, just as the distinction between the perception of isolated social phenomena such as individual poverty and generalizations about class conflict or exploitation may be vague. But it is the process of coming to revolutionary consciousness' that is of concern here. The rational aspect of this process involves logic in the sense that phenomena are observed and/or experienced, and conclusions drawn therefrom. But the non-rational aspect, that involving emotion and faith, is just as important in coming to revolutionary convictions, and perhaps more important in impelling revolutionary action. The present study is an inquiry into the non-rational bases of revolutionary consciousness and action in the Cuban Revolution. It is argued that non-rational elements of revolutionary consciousness are crucial to revolutions. Indeed, it will be maintained that an understanding of revolutionary movements demands attention to the non-rational bases of action.

Specifically, the object of study is the role of social myth in the Cuban Revolution. "Social myth" is conceived to be non-rational, in that adherence to myth or its acceptance as a description of reality is an act of faith. The inheritance and use of social myths from Cuban history by revolutionaries in the 1950s, the making of a new social myth, that of the Rebel Army led by Fidel Castro, and the use of social myth in the political education of the revolutionary Cuban military are the main topics of discussion.

THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF THE CUBAN MILITARY AS AN OBJECT OF STUDY

In revolutionary Cuba, the military is the center of power. Armed struggle established the revolution and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (PAR) 'Revolutionary Armed Forces', defend it and enforce it. The Cuban military is the locus of revolutionary leadership. These truths are determined largely by the historical genesis of the anti-dictatorial, anti-neocolonialist struggle during and immediately after the Batista regime of 1952— 1959. The antagonistic relationship of the Cuban revolution with imperialism also determines the continuing central political role of the military.

It is a combination of factors which makes for the historical and continuing centrality of the Cuban military in the revolutionary era. The combination can be pictured as a three-tiered system of relationships developing during the twentieth century history of Cuba and culminating in the crises which produced both the objective and subjective conditions for social revolution. The basis of the system of relationships is imperialism, the international economic and political domination of monopoly capital. In the case of Cuba, United States imperialism, i.e. monopoly capitalist interests and the state apparatus which those interests dominate in the United States, embodies the first tier of the relationship system. Imperialism, then, can be seen as the fundamental independent variable for the purposes of this study. All other variables in the system derive largely, though of course not exclusively, from the basic reality of imperialist economic and political domination of Cuba until its social revolution commenced.

The second tier of variables is comprised of emanations of imperialism. In the economic sphere of Cuban society, imperialist domination resulted in dependency and underdevelopment. Following the now almost classical definition,⁴ Cuban economic dependency on imperialism meant that patterns and rates of economic growth were largely dependent on decisions made outside of Cuba. Foreign corporate decision-making, guided by the needs and aims of metropolitan capitalist accumulation, exercised the determining influence over the Cuban economy. In Cuba, decisions of the United States sugar monopoly interests determined the fate of investments and production of that dominant commodity and impinged upon all other sectors of the economy. Underdevelopment or, more accurately, uneven development, has been the general result of imperialist economic domination. Uneven development, in the case of Cuba, meant distorted capitalist development. The dictates of profit produced sectoral inequality, monoculture, urban-rural discrepancies in the extreme, boom and bust cycles and chronically high underemployment and unemployment, especially among the large rural population in Cuba.

In the second tier or variables, alongside economic dependency and its consequence, uneven development, is found political dependency. Again, it is the overriding reality of imperialism which is to be considered the theoretical source of dependency, in the political as well as in the economic sphere. The basic objective of imperialism is to maintain and improve conditions for capital accumulation which benefit, primarily, the monopoly capitalist interests based in the imperialistic power. In the case of Cuba, United. States imperialism maintained a "favorable investment climate" first by means of direct military intervention in the years prior to 1934, under the Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution. But imperialist political domination of Cuba came increasingly to mean the political and financial support of Cuban political and economic elites which would serve the interests of United States monopoly capital, This is not to say that contradictions never emerged between United States monopoly capital and sectors of the capitalist class in Cuba. Certainly the populist and nationalist elements in the policies of Cuban regimes after 1933 emerged from these contradictions. Nevertheless, in terms of constituencies, the political elites of Cuba owed first loyalty to imperialism and those economic interests in Cuba allied to foreign monopoly capital. Economic dependency produced a situation in which an independent national bourgeoisie was impossible. The Cuban capitalist class and the Cuban state remained clients in the imperialist system. A contemporary characterization of this system applies to the general nature and purpose of the imperialist-dominated Cuban state apparatus: "The basic fact is that the United States has organized under its sponsorship and protection a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite".⁵

In simple terms, imperialist economic domination of Cuba produced an oligarchy and restricted the development of an indigenous capitalist class. This truncated and dependent national bourgeoisie thus failed to develop a full system of bourgeois democratic political participation. The political duty of the oligarchy, within the imperialist system, became that of repressing the majority adversely affected by uneven and dependent capitalist development. Thus, a tendency towards militarism and dictatorship appeared early in Cuba's republican era. No group could achieve political hegemony through the institutions of liberal bourgeois democracy and still serve the vital interests of imperialism and its economic clients. The final result was the Batista dictatorship and the bankruptcy of the traditional political parties in the 1950s.

The third tier of variables is also independent in the sense that it too, as imperialism, economic and political dependency, acts upon the dependent variables the nature of the insurrectionary forces in the 1950s, the development of revolutionary consciousness among those forces, and the process ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• 1 THE REVOLUTIONARY MYTH IN THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OP THE CUBAN MILITARY
• 2 THE FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICAL EDUCATION IN THE CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY GENERATION
• 3 THE NEW MAMBISES: COMBAT, REPRESSION AND IMPRISONMENT AS POLITICAL EDUCATION FOR REVOLUTIONARY CADRES
• 4 THE NEW MAMBISES: EXILE AND THE SO-CALLED SUBJECTIVIST PHASE
• 5 POLITICAL EDUCATION IN THE REBEL ARMY: ARMED STRUGGLE AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE GUERRILLAS
• 6 THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF EXPERIENCE: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF POPULAR SUPPORT IN THE GUERRILLA FOCO AND THE TERRITORIO LIBRE
• 7 THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF COMBAT: THE MYTH OF THE GUERRILLA STRUGGLE IN THE SIERRA
• 8 FALL 1958: THE EXPANSION OF GUERRILLA STRUGGLE AND THE FURTHER GENERATION OF THE REBEL ARMY MYTH
• 9 THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF MYTHS IN THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF THE REBEL ARMY/FAR, 1959 to 1963
• Selected Chronology of Events
• Bibliography
• Index