Toward the Party Conference (III)

A party for the Revolution

By Jorge Gómez Barata

On July 26, 1953, with his assault on the Moncada army barracks, Fidel Castro initiated the final stage of the revolutionary struggle in Cuba.

At the height of the Cold War, when practically nothing in world politics was unaffected by the East-West conflict, the Cuban Revolution marked the difference. Its leaders were smiling youths, bearded and beardless, none of whom was known (except for Fidel Castro), none had doctrinaire commitments and none had been a member of any party.

They began the prodigious decade, tore down conventions, made fatigues and dishevelment acceptable and made youth and irreverence fashionable. Along with Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Martin Luther King and JFK, they began to change the world.

Because of their Caribbean packaging, youthful profile, clean-cut origins and high-minded goals, their success captivated the world, especially the dilettante and skeptical Europe, the left (immobilized by the criticism of Stalinism and the Sino-Soviet conflict) and the pragmatic America that thought communism sowed winds.

In the light of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism and seen from liberalism, Fidel Castro was a heretic.

According to those who know him, Fidel, who improvises little (according to his brother Raúl he improvises none at all), proclaimed in 1952: “The moment is not political; it is revolutionary.” From that position, he advanced to revolutionary war, bet on unity and pluralism and opened spaces for anyone who wanted to fight against the dictatorship.

After landing in Havana with a Revolution still unfinished and a country still to govern, Fidel must have realized the need for political structures. Although he did not agree to turn the 26 July Movement into a party and rejected elections, he maneuvered to share the political space and call on two other revolutionary forces to join and form the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI), the embryo of what later became the United Party of Socialist Revolution (PURS), which, through mutations in its trajectory, became in 1965 the Communist Party of Cuba.

Unlike what happened with the Bolsheviks, where the party made the revolution, in Cuba the Revolution made the party, through a process that began when, after the triumph, Fidel, Raúl Castro and Che Guevara approached the leadership of the then-Socialist People’s Party. They did the same with the 13 March Revolutionary Directorate.

The first Cuban Communist Party was founded in 1925 and, except for a brief period in the 1940s when it mistakenly established some connection with Batista, it achieved a brilliant performance in the service of the people’s struggles.

Although small, that party had solid roots in the working-class sectors. Although initially it did not join the armed struggle, it contributed to it by confronting the dictatorship. It finally approximated Fidel’s positions, acknowledged his leadership and adhered firmly and loyally to the Revolution, to the point that it adopted the unprecedented and dramatic decision to dissolve itself. When considering that decision, to become part of the political organization, the Revolution did not take into account any stage or episode of its performance but the whole of its history.

The 13 March Revolutionary Directory planted its roots in the student battles. It has a rich history of clandestine struggle and countless political actions, demonstrations and confrontations against the dictatorship, the execution of notorious goons, and the assault on the presidential palace in 1957, the most important urban armed action after the attack on the Moncada barracks.

The Directorate’s alliance with the 26 July Movement was based on a rejection of the dictatorship and in a conjunction of criteria regarding the method of struggle. It was boosted by the empathy between Fidel Castro and José Antonio Echevarría, expressed in the Mexico Pact they signed in 1956. In 1958, on its own, the Directorate opened a guerrilla front in Cuba’s central mountains and, upon Che’s arrival, signed the Pedrero Pact, by virtue of which, without losing its identity, it coordinated all actions until triumph came.

When seen as a whole, it was a process of exceptional political finesse, as if hand-embroidered by Fidel. This was not overlooked by the vernacular right, or even by the liberal elements that had participated in the struggle against Batista and that — infested by anti-communism and sectarianism — rejected the alliance.

Imperialist aggressiveness and the criminal actions of the domestic counter-revolution, while contributing to the radicalization of the process, worked as a catalyst for the unity of the revolutionary forces. The Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 and the proclamation of the Revolution’s socialist nature, issued earlier, decanted the strength and gave a vigorous push to the creation of the party of the Revolution.

In June 1961, the People’s Socialist Party came out in support of a united party; other organizations did the same. The road was cleared for the creation of the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI).

The process was not exempt from shadows. Suddenly, on March 26, 1962, Fidel Castro went on television to state that during that unification effort, in the bosom of the ORI, a sectarian current had been incubated and that it was headed by Aníbal Escalante, a renowned leader of the old People’s Socialist Party.

Not without deep trauma, that chapter was left behind and the processes continued. In May 1963, the ORI became the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution, which adopted the name of Communist Party of Cuba in 1965.

On Oct. 3 of that year, Fidel introduced the members of the Central Committee and the Political Bureau. On account of Ernesto Che Guevara’s absence, the only alternative was to read his letter of farewell.

The Revolution had given birth to the party that, years later, adopted as the date of its foundation the day of victory at Girón Beach.

Jorge Gómez Barata is a Cuban journalist. He lives in Havana.