Harry Targ
I attended a national convention of the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) in late July, 2013. About
100 participants, including representatives from other socialist organizations,
came together for a three-day discussion of impediments to economic and
political justice and how to create a better world, what activists from the
Global South call “21st century socialism.” They were young and old,
Black and white, women and men, gay and straight with a variety of analyses of
how to build a more humane future. Despite differences, participants saw
capitalism as an obstacle to the survival of the human race and the creation of
some form of democratic socialism as a necessary alternative to the drift
toward destruction.
The opening plenary identified the devastating
effects of reactionary policies of austerity, starving the many for the benefit
of the few, as a central feature of contemporary politics. Workers, people of
color, and women are its prime victims. Austerity was seen as parallel to the
globalization of exploitation, war, and interventionism and inextricably
connected to the destruction of nature. Capitalism was identified by panelists
as a fundamental cause of inequality; controlling distant people and
territories; and destroying land, sea, and air. Other workshops and plenaries explored
the possibilities of building majorities to oppose austerity, war, and
environmental devastation. Also the issue of how organizations from various
left traditions in the United States could more effectively work together to
turn the country around was explored.
Attendees left the convention sobered by the
analyses of the dire nature of the prospects of survivability but buoyed by the
spirit of the meeting and the commitments to work together more effectively.
Particularly, the diversity of the gathering gave participants hope about the
future of progressive politics.
Sixty years earlier, on July 26, 1953, Cuban
revolutionaries launched an assault on the Moncada military barracks in
Santiago, Cuba. The revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro, hoped that a
successful attack on the military of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, would
spark a revolution all across the island. The attack was crushed in less than
30 minutes by Batista’s armies. About two-thirds of the rebels were killed or
captured and tortured. The rebel leader, Fidel Castro, was sentenced to 15 years
in jail for his part. He was pardoned and released by Batista in 1955.
At his trial, Fidel Castro gave a speech that would
speak across years to the Cuban people and the basic human needs that all
progressives and revolutionaries pursue in their different political, economic,
and cultural contexts. The speech, Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech,
referred to those he felt would gain from a revolution, “the vast unredeemed
masses, to whom all make promises and whom all deceive.”
He described “the masses” in the Cuban context. They
included 700,000 unemployed Cubans and 500,000 farm laborers who worked only
four months a year and lived in hovels with no land for personal cultivation.
Also he referred to 400,000 industrial laborers and stevedores who had their
retirement funds embezzled by bosses and politicians, 100,000 small farmers
working on tiny parcels of rented land, teachers and other professionals who
could not find attractive work, and small business persons weighed down with
debt. Most important he identified the critical issues faced by all the strata
of Cuban society, except foreign and local capitalists: “The problems
concerning land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the
problem of unemployment, the problem of education, and the problem of health of
the people, these are the six problems we would take immediate steps to
resolve, along with the restoration of public liberties and political
democracy.”
Castro elaborated on the depths of each of the
problems and offered a platform for their solution. A new government would give
landless peasants land encouraging the formation of agricultural cooperatives.
Technical assistance, equipment, and other needs would be provided to small
farmers. Rents for all would be cut in half and hovels would be torn down and
replaced with multiple-dwelling units. Electricity would be made accessible to
all. With the redistribution of land and the dramatic increase in housing
construction, the problem of unemployment would be eliminated. Finally, Castro
envisioned a new government that provided for the educational needs of the
entire population.
Castro claimed that a new society that met the needs
of the people was possible; that “there is no excuse for the abject poverty of
a single one of its present inhabitants… This is not an inconceivable thought.
What is inconceivable is that anyone should go to bed hungry, that children
should die for lack of medical attention; what is inconceivable is that 30
percent of our farm people cannot write their names and 99 percent of them know
nothing of Cuba’s history.” He declared
that when tyrannies violated the principles of constitutional government the
people had the right to rebel to reestablish legitimate political institutions
that were based upon a social contract between rulers and the ruled. To this
analysis Fidel Castro declared “History Will Absolve Me.”
As I was driving home from the CCDS convention I
thought about the speech Fidel Castro gave 60 years ago and all the analyses
and exhortations at the meeting I had recently attended. Sure the times,
history, politics, geography, and economic conditions of Cuba in 1953 and the
United States in 2013 were radically different. But what struck me about the
comparisons were the remarkable similarities. First, the basic forms of human
suffering were the same: lack of economic justice, inequality, and the stifling
of democracy. Second, the vision of an alternative to pain and suffering
articulated by Fidel Castro in 1953 and the convention participants in 2013
were remarkably similar: more equitable distribution of societal resources,
access to adequate nutrition, health care, education, housing, and jobs. The
passion for economic and social justice transcends time and place and the
struggle continues.
