the cuban revolution: sierra and llano
DESCRIPTION
The peasants of the Sierra Madre and The FocoTRANSCRIPT
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GLOBAL STUDIES 611
JOHN ALAN SUTHERLAND 2980775
DR. DEBAL SINGHAROY
SEPTEMBER 12th 2011
REVISED RESEARCH ESSAY
“MOBILIZING THE MARGINALIZED RURAL POOR AND PEASANTS FOR
REVOLUTION: FIDEL CASTRO’S JULY 26TH ‘SIERRA’ MOVEMENT IN ORIENTE
PROVINCE”
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Peasant Humanism
Without the support of the rural peasants of the Oriente mountains Fidel Castro’s Cuban
Revolution would never have succeeded in toppling the dictatorship of Batista nor have even
survived its initial setbacks. But why did these rural peasants-many of whom were illiterate-
support Castro and his July 26th movement, in spite of great personal risk to themselves from the
oppressive police and army of the dictator? The answer I suggest lies in the fact that collectively
as a group and individually peasants constitute the “party of humanity” (Wolf, 1969) because
they believe in the basic qualities of humanism. “Humanism” as a universal quality is closely
linked with peasants (Heyman, 2005). Whenever peasants engage in rebellion or revolution it is
as “an agent” (Wolf, 1969) of forces larger than themselves and the revolutions are usually won
by non-peasant men of “statist vision” (Wolf, 1969) who in turn implement policies that disrupt
and even harm the peasants. “The peasant’s role is essentially tragic: his efforts to undo a
grievous (existing) present only usher in a vaster, more uncertain future” (Wolf, 1969). A
peasant believes that that the solutions to the age old problems of hunger and disease and the
ancient monopolies of power and received wisdom “will yield to human effort to widen
participation and knowledge” (Wolf, 1969). To the extent peasants join revolutions based on
these hopes their effort is not just tragic but “to that extent theirs is the party of humanity” (Wolf,
1969). When Castro’s small band of rebels were able to convince peasants that their
revolutionary goals were “humanistic” they gained their support. There was no social movement
among the Oriente peasants in the theoretical sense of an ideology strong enough to collectively
mobilize a large force of peasants to rise up and rebel. Peasants came to support Castro as
individuals and not as a group. Castro was the charismatic leader who needed the help of the
peasants to survive in a hostile environment and by showing the humanist side of his rebellion to
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peasants as a group he was able to gain their support. He showed the humanist side of his July
26th movement by accepting and later putting into policy universal goals common to all peasants
and marginalized people- the demand to redress injustices and alleviate poverty through a fairer
distribution of the country’s wealth including land reform.
The Initial Goals of Castro’s Rebels
What were the aims of Castro’s rebels when they arrived in Oriente province? How was
Castro able to bring his goals in line with those of the peasants? On December 2nd , 1956 Fidel
Castro and his July 26th group of dedicated revolutionaries, after crossing from Mexico, left their
shipwrecked ship “Granma”on the south coast of Oriente Province, Cuba. The group’s social
identity consisted almost entirely of intellectuals, professionals, students, liberals and other urban
activists and idealists whose main goal was to liberate Cuba from the repressive dictatorship of
Fulgencio Batista; the former army sergeant who had seized power in Cuba in 1952. Castro and
his followers identified themselves with other dissident segments of the Cuban population whose
main aims were to restore democracy to the country and return civil rights to Cubans. These
other groups known as the opposition of the lowlands or llano were urban based either in Cuba
or within Cuban exile groups in the United States. None of these groups addressed the poverty of
the rural labour and peasant proletariat. Even Castro and his group did not realize at the time that
the only way they would be able to eventually drive out the dictator would be by mobilizing the
support of the large rural proletariat (Wolf, 1969) marginalized not only by the dictatorship of
Batista but by the preceding liberal democratic bourgeoisie governments. The Communist Party
had refused to support Castro’s movement labelling it a Blanquist strategy involving a
“relatively small number of resolute ,well organized men seeking to seize the helm of state and
hold it by energetic and unrelenting action until they had succeeded in drawing the mass of the
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people into the revolution by marshalling them around a small band of leaders” (Wolf, 1969, p.
269).
The events which unfolded in Oriente after the landing forced Castro and his followers to
seek the support of the rural peasants simply in order to survive and to establish a base from
which to operate. This interaction between the urban rebels and the rural peasants would
transform the identity of the Castro led revolution to one focusing on addressing the
marginalization of the Cuban rural poor. The eventual result would be an evolvement of
Castro’s July 26th ‘sierra’ movement from a proletarian leadership of a bourgeois-democratic
revolution to a proletarian leadership of an alliance with the peasantry and other exploited groups
(Forgacs, 1988, p. 422). It was this alliance which ultimately led to the paramountcy of Castro
and his force over the other revolutionary movements within and outside Cuba.
The Significance of Che Guevara
The ideology of Che Guevara aided the Castro sierra movement to shift from an elite band
centered on defeating a dictator to a movement with economic, social and political policies
designed to attract peasant support. Guevara had been previously involved in a social movement
to help the poor through his participation in the short lived popular government of Jacobo
Arbenz in Guatemala. That government had been freely elected with the goals to deal with the
problems of rural and urban poverty (Guevara, 2009). It was eliminated by an American CIA
backed military coup when it sided with the poor. Guevara, an Argentinean doctor, would later
record the changes of the July 26th movement in Oriente from an elite group of conspirators to a
full fledged social movement exhibiting its own collective mobilization of the rural peasants
under the charismatic leadership of Fidel Castro with an ideology close to that of
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Marxism/Leninism. Guevara was familiar with Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Letters from Prison’ which
were published in 1950 in Argentina by Editorial Lautaro which was associated with the
Communist Party of Argentina (PCA) (Burgos, 2002). Gramsci had predicted that the
“proletariat can only become hegemonic, a ruling class, if it can overcome its economic self-
interest and win the support of the poor peasantry” (Forgacs, p. 422). It was only when they had
accepted the principles that the guerrilla fighter is fighting for the masses; that he or she is a
social reformer, “who takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their
oppressors; and fights to change the social system that keeps all his brothers in ignominy and
poverty” (Deutschmann, 1997) did the poor peasant and marginalized classes support Castro’s
revolutionary movement.
Geographic and Economic Isolation of the Oriente Peasants
Why had Castro and his rebels sought Oriente as the place to start their revolution?
Oriente, with its major city of Santiago, is located at the most easterly end of the island of Cuba.
It is separated from Havana and the rest of the country by the Sierra Maestra, a massif rising
along the south coast, running eighty miles on a west-east line and some thirty miles at its
broadest north-south stretch. The spine of that mountain range averages 4,500 feet in altitude and
its highest point is over 6,000 feet. Its terrain is forbidding –mountain peaks and valleys, forest
and boulders, rivers and creeks-even today the region is sparsely populated. In 1956 it had no
paved highways and the dirt roads were often impassable because of “drenching rains that turned
them into ribbons of deep, red mud” (Szulc, 1986, p. 378). In short a perfect place from which to
launch a rebellion. Many of the rebellions against the Spanish in the 1800’s had been started in
Oriente because of its isolation from the rest of the country.
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The Need for Land Reform
The peasantry of the Oriente mountain area was economically and culturally distinct from
the rural proletariat of the sugar plantations in the Cuban plains (Blackburn, 1963). The Sierra
Maestra served as a refuge to all those poor rural workers who struggled daily against the
landlords. They came to the Oriente as squatters on land belonging to the state or some
landowner, searching for a piece of land which will bring them some wealth. They had to fight
continuously against the exactions of the soldiers, always allied with the land owners. The
landowners didn’t let anyone else work the land: it was all theirs and the peasants had no way out
without a revolution (Szulc, p. 389).
The Need to Survive
But first the Castro rebels had to reach the mountains from the coast and then find a way to
survive in this mountainous area. The plans made by the rebels while they organized in Mexico
seemed to be unravelling fast following their landing. There was no mass uprising of dissidents
in Oriente, as expected on news of the rebel landing. To the contrary police and army forces of
the dictator Batista had been alerted to Castro’s landing and quickly began a search for him and
his group. “Cubans had known Castro for years as a loud and ineffectual plotter, a loser” (Szulc,
p. 19) especially after his abortive attack on the Moncada army barracks on July 26, 1953 (Wolf,
1969, p. 268) . There was a feeling that this adventure might also end in failure. The goal of
these mainly ‘urban’ rebels had been to start a revolution from a base as far away as possible
from Havana where the dictator Batista had his base of power including the headquarters of his
army and police . The rebel group’s belief (and that of its fledgling national directorate in Cuba)
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was that the population of this distant province would rise up in armed rebellion once the landing
was made known because of widespread dislike, among the young and educated classes, of
Batista’s policies of crushing human rights and suspending democratic freedoms. The rebellion
almost ended before it even began when Batista’s troops ambushed the rebels on December 6th
as they left the coast, killing or capturing all except Castro, his brother Raul, Che Guevara and a
handful of others who were fortunate to escape with peasant help into the mountainous terrain of
the Sierra Maestra.
Castro and the Elite Class
Faced with the reality that to survive they would have to rely upon support from the
area’s peasant class Castro and the other members of his movement sought to mobilize the
peasants of the Sierra Maestra to support his movement. While many believe that peasants
“alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain” (Fanon, 1963, p.
48) there was nothing in the background of Fidel Castro to suggest that he had previously
considered the Cuban peasantry as the backbone of his revolutionary plans. In fact little in
Castro’s life to that point showed an interest in leading a peasant backed revolution to bring
about changes to the Cuban political, economic and social systems. His father was a Spanish
immigrant who had established himself initially as a small farmer and then as a labour boss
supplying labour to neighbouring ranches and sugar cane fields. Fidel learned from his father
how to be “an enforcer, able to mobilize impoverished men to work in brutal conditions for long
hours and criminally low pay” (Symmes, 2007, p. 87). Angel Castro, on one occasion, when
imported Haitian workers went on strike refusing to cut sugar cane at the price offered, rode in
among them on horseback beating them with the flat of his machete (Symmes, p. 88). By the
1940’s the elder Castro had acquired control of 26,000 acres of ranch lands, the second biggest
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landholding in Oriente. He had become rich enough to send his three sons to the very
conservative Jesuit school in Santiago, Oriente-the “Colegio de Dolores” (Symmes, p. 88).
Castro and his rich ranching family were products of a economic system which saw control of
the agricultural economy in Cuba held by large landowners including many American
enterprises. Since a large proportion of American-dominated agricultural economy lay in the
cultivation and refinement of sugar which was a seasonal crop, Cuban farm labourers were
subject to the seasonal and market fluctuations of a spasmodic employment (Tanter, 1967).
These factors created a large rural labour class who were dependent on low wages, seasonal
employment and subsistence farming of marginal lands for survival.
The Rebellion seen as a Conspiracy
Most scholars have described Castro’s Cuban Revolution as “an example of the
‘conspiracy’ model and an illustration of processes by which conspiracy can develop into an
internal war’ (Gurr, 1970, p. 344). Some have described it as a “conspiratorial coup d’etat, the
planned work of a tiny elite fired by an oligarchic, sectarian ideology” (Stone, 1966, p. 163).
Certainly in the middle 1950’s those who were most intensely discontented with the Batista
dictatorship were the students and the bourgeoisie who had been deprived of political liberties
and conventional means of political participation by the military coup. Castro himself, a lawyer
in Havana at the time, had planned to run as a candidate for one of the old line liberal
bourgeoisie parties ( the Ortodoxo party) (Wolf, p. 268) but the Batista’s coup prevented that
election. Almost all of the rebel force that accompanied Castro on the Granma were members of
this politically discontented bourgeoisie. It was small in number but highly organized and tightly
disciplined. It is clear that neither the expressed goals of the Castro rebels to topple the Batista
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dictatorship and restore democratic rights nor their middle class background would be enough to
attract the support of the peasant population of Oriente province.
Castro as a Reformer
The only inclination that Castro might be a reformer for the benefit of the poor and
marginalized classes was his speech in his defence at his trial in 1953 after the movement’s
failed attempt to seize an army barracks by force. He spoke then of the “500,000 farm labourers
who live in miserable shacks, who work four months of the year and starve the rest, sharing their
misery with their children, who don’t have an inch of land to till and whose existence would
move any heart not made of stone” (Castro, 1975, p. 69). He spoke of “ the one hundred
thousand small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs, looking at it with the
sadness of Moses gazing at the promised land, to die without ever owning it, who like feudal
serfs have to pay for the use of their parcel of land by giving up a portion of its produce , who
cannot love it, improve it, beautify it nor plant a cedar or an orange tree on it because they never
know when a sheriff will come with the rural guard to evict them from it” (Castro, p. 69). Yet
despite these utterings his movement was opposed by the Communist Party of Cuba, the main
voice at that time of the poor and marginalized, until after the abortive general strike of 1958.
Steps to Gain Peasant Support
How then did Castro gain the marginalized rural poor and peasant support? The answer to
that question has often been framed to suggest that as the guerrilla activity became more
successful it prompted stronger and more repressive political policies and terroristic tactics by
the police and military of the Batista regime (Gurr, p. 345). This increased the political and
economic discontent among those who principally bore the brunt of this repression; the rural
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poor and the peasants in the Sierra Maestra. With the support if not passive neutrality of these
marginalized segments of the Oriente rural society in the mountains the rebel guerrilla movement
gradually increased the scope of its control in rural areas. The 1500 man rebel force with tactical
brilliance –relative to the tactics of the Batista regime which its declining morale and loyalty-
effectively was able to advance towards Havana in December of 1958 aided by the flight of the
dictator on New Year’s Eve. Within the short space of two years Castro and his rebel force had
helped spread discontent against Batista among most of the Cuban population; concentrated an
effective armed dissent force outside the regime’s sphere of control; shifted the balance of power
between the regime from one favouring Batista to one of at most equality and rapidly swinging
in favour of the rebels.
Organization and Mobilization of Peasants
It took the organizational ability and determination of Castro and his July 26th movement to
direct and control the mobilization of the rural poor and peasantry. In general “the peasantry has
proved no match for smaller, closely knit, better organized and technically superior groups and
has, time and time again, been ‘double-crossed or suppressed politically and by force of arms”
(Shanin, 1971, p. 256). Frequently peasant political action is guided by an external uniting
power-elite which in this case was Castro’s rebel movement. Such a group provided the
peasantry with the missing factor of unity on a wide scale (Shanin, p. 257). The existence of a
closely knit group of activists , having its own impetus, specific organizational structure, aims
and leadership- a group for which the peasantry is an object of leadership or manipulation
(Shanin, p. 257). The peasantry may be used or led to achieve its own aims: yet the very
definition of ‘aims is in the hands of qualitatively distinct leaders. The peasantry’s weak
influence on such leaders seems to make the elite group’s dynamics appear in purer form. On the
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other hand peasant action may take the form of passivity. The influence of conservative peasant
‘apathy’ has also many times proved decisive for the victory of the establishment over the
revolutionaries (Shanin, p. 258). Army and guerrilla actions play a crucial role in the political life
of the peasants. These actions represent the peasantry as ‘class-for-itself’. The professional
rebels, nationwide ideological and organizational cohesion, their stability and zeal and their
ability to work out a long term strategy may enable them to unite the peasantry, sometimes
transforming its revolt into a successful revolution (SinghaRoy D. K., 2004, p. 32). Guevara
referred to the small group of elite rebels who pushed the peasant mass into revolution as the
‘foco’. To him the guerrilla fighter must be a social reformer who “ fully dedicates himself to
destroy an unjust social order to replace it with something new” (Moreno, 1970).
Guerrilla War as a Tool of Social Reform
Guerrilla warfare is the most suitable form for the expression of armed peasant action
because of its ability to dissolve itself into the sympathetic peasant mass (Shanin, p. 260). Its
weaknesses : segmentation; lack of crystallized ideology and aims; and lack of stable
membership; all may be overcome by an injection of a hard core of professional rebels, making
the revolt into a guided action. The professional rebels’ nationwide ideological and
organizational cohesion, their stability and zeal and their ability to work out a long term strategy
may enable them to unite the peasantry, sometimes transforming its revolt into a successful
revolution.
Under what circumstances do peasants become revolutionary or what roles different
sections of peasantry play in revolutionary situations? A peasant who owns a tiny patch of land ,
but depends for his livelihood mainly on sharecropping or on working as a labourer is classed as
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a ‘poor’ peasant (Alvai, 1973) while a middle peasant is one who employs casual labour
occasionally to cope with peak operations but does not exploit the labour of others as a rich
peasant does.
Agrarian Reform in Oriente
The Castro rebels came to recognize that to be successful they had to take up the cause of
the rural peasant whose demands are “ aimed primarily and almost exclusively at changing the
social form of land ownership; in other words the guerrilla fighter is above all an agrarian
revolutionary. He interprets the desires of the great peasant masses to be owners of the land, of
their means of production, of their livestock , of all they have yearned for over the years, of what
makes up their lives and will also be their grave” (Deutschmann, p. 69). But the peasants will
only support the revolution if “ the guerrilla struggle appears to them to be the expression of their
class struggle. For this to happen , it is therefore necessary that the armed action of the guerrilla
fighter be an echo of the social protest of the people against their oppressors, and of the
aspirations of the great mass of peasants who want to change the agrarian regime. In other words,
the people must understand the political significance of the guerrilla struggle and make it their
own” (Lowy, 1973).
Castro’s Just Society
How did the Castro rebels show that they were one with the goals and aspirations of the
rural peasant poor? Firstly they had the foresight to recruit early to their cause in the sierra a
peasant, Guillermo Garcia (Szulc, p. 385), a cattle buyer, who was respected by the rural poor
and communities throughout the region. He was put in charge of all the peasants who joined up
with the rebels. This gave a known face to the rebel cause. Secondly they established a system of
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laws in the areas they controlled meting out justice to oppressors of the poor , those who tried to
use the revolution for their own ends and those who committed crimes against their own people.
As well within their area they encouraged the growing of crops, the dissemination of religion by
their own priest who was part of the movement. “ I was very moved by the warm reception that
greeted me when I re-joined the column. They had just completed a people’s trial in which three
informers had been tried and judged” (Guevara, p. 67). The peasant’s fears of the rebels
disappeared once Castro and his men were able to demonstrate the guerrilla’s kinship with them
(Szulc, p. 403). Castro enforced rigid discipline among the rebels and was quick to apply
revolutionary justice even to members of his own rebel group. Thirdly they brought medical aid
to the areas in which they operated. “I was still working as a doctor and in each little village and
place I set up a consultation area. I had little medicine to offer and the clinical cases in the Sierra
Maestra were all more or less the same: prematurely aged and toothless women, children with
distended bellies, parasites, rickets, general vitamin deficiencies-these were the stains of the
Sierra Maestra” (Guevara, p. 67) poverty. Fourthly the rebels set about maintaining public order.
“Experience in the territory we occupy has taught us that maintaining public order is an
important problem for the country” (Guevara, p. 221). Overall Castro and his men tried
everything to earn the confidence of the rural poor and peasants, helping them and not
mistreating them. These actions were the direct opposite of the treatment the peasants received at
the hands of Batista’s rural guard (Szulc, p. 390).
As they mobilized the rural poor and peasants to support them the July 26th movement in
the sierra changed its political focus and goals. “Our revolutionary war was already beginning to
acquire new characteristics. The consciousness of the leaders and the combatants was growing.
We were beginning to feel in our flesh and blood the need for an agrarian reform and for
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profound, essential changes in the social structure that were vital to cleanse the country”
(Guevara, p. 167). Overall Castro relied upon his own personal magnetism and imagination to
keep the morale of his own men high and to expand the guerrilla war. “This brand of
‘subjectivism’ was very much alive and it worked in the mountains” (Szulc, p. 403). In the free
zone of the sierra which gradually expanded as the rebels became more successful the rebels
gave peasants land to work. This mini land reform along with protecting peasant families from
the landowner’s overseers and the Rural guard, applying ‘revolutionary justice to criminals
within the area of control and opening a schools and clinics they loomed as friends of the rural
poor. As Guevara remarked “ we came to overthrow a tyrant but we discovered that this
immense peasant zone, where our struggle is being prolonged is the area of Cuba thaqt needs
liberation the most” (Szulc, p. 433). In effect the marginalized rural poor had gained
empowerment as through their alliance with the Castro rebels they were able to be involved in “
the formulation, implementation and evaluations of decisions determining the functioning and
well being” (SinghaRoy D. , 2001) of their society.
Conclusion
As a result of its actions to win peasant support to ensure the survival and growth of the July
26th revolutionary movement the rebels were forced to confront the basic issues of humanism of
the rural poor in Cuba and to restructure their priorities to make paramount the issue of agrarian
land and other social measures to empower the poor. By doing this it won the support of
individual peasants which spread to a mobilization behind the Castro sierra movement of the
rural and urban poor.
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