Cuban Revolution
| date | July 26, 1953 to January 1, 1959 |
|---|---|
| place | Cuba |
| exit | Overthrow the government |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
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| Commander | |
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Fidel Castro |
Fulgencio Batista
|
The term Cuban Revolution describes three things: First, it means the historical event of the overthrow of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista by the resistance movement led by Fidel Castro's organization " Movement of July 26th ". The declared aim of the resistance was to restore the 1940 constitution , which Batista had partially repealed since 1952 , including all basic democratic rights and the land reform it contained . The armed struggle has been practiced since 1956 by both urban underground activistsas well as by the guerrilla army operating from the mountains . In the course of 1958 it was intensified and expanded continuously. It ended with Batista's flight on January 1, 1959.
Secondly, it is understood as the sum of the radical measures that Castro, as a political leader, gradually took between 1959 and 1961 to promote the totalitarian restructuring of the state, economy and society of the country in line with the Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Thirdly, the term is still used - especially by the Cuban leadership themselves - in the sense of "maintaining the revolutionary course in Cuba". He stands for a fixation of the Marxist-Leninist policy and the leadership claim of the Communist Party of Cuba . In this sense, the term is mostly used by the Cuban population themselves.
prehistory
In March 1952, the former President-Elect (1940-1944), Colonel, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and then Senator Fulgencio Batista overthrew President Carlos Prío, who had become unpopular because of allegations of corruption, in a bloodless military coup. He suspended important legal guarantees of the 1940 constitution - including the right to strike - canceled the elections originally planned for June 1952, dissolved the Senate-House Congress and proclaimed himself president. There should be no new elections before the end of 1953 and the political parties should remain suspended. Batista promised to implement the unrealized social goals of the revolution of 1933 (the overthrow of the dictator Gerardo Machado , in which he had participated) through extensive measures .
Disappointment about Batista's administration soon spread, even among his initial supporters. Due to internal disputes, the major parties ( Ortodoxos and Auténticos ) could not agree on a common line that would have gone beyond the rejection of Batista's conditions for the planned elections in November 1953. At the same time, the regime's repressive character grew and discontent grew.
Formation of revolutionary organizations
Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR)
One of the most prominent members of the student movement of the 1933 revolution against Machado was the philosopher Rafael García Bárcena , a founding member of the Ortodoxos who has since resigned . He led the "Revolutionary National Movement" (MNR) founded by him, taught at the military college and had tried unsuccessfully under Prío to organize a conspiracy of liberal officers. He found supporters, especially among young intellectuals in Havana, who from 1952 wanted to work with him to bring about the forcible overthrow of Batista through a union of students and officers. MNR activists who later became protagonists of the Cuban Revolution included: Frank País , Armando Hart , Vilma Espín and Enrique Oltuski . The armed march to Campamento Columbia , the Cuban military headquarters in Havana, prepared by the MNR for Easter Sunday 1953 , was thwarted by the government, which had previously learned of the plans. Bárcena was arrested and tortured and received a two-year prison term. After a year he was given amnesty and went into exile. 69 of his fellow campaigners were also brought to justice, but only twelve of them were sentenced to one year suspended sentences. The group did not recover from the blow. Many members later joined the July 26th Movement or other revolutionary groups.
July 26th Movement
The organization that made the greatest contribution to the overthrow of Batista was founded by Fidel Castro, who in 1952 was still a comparatively unknown lawyer and a 25-year-old parliamentary candidate for the Orthodox Party . After his charge against Batista for usurpation of power was rejected by the Supreme Court, Castro declared in a small student magazine that the constitutional right of resistance had come into force, and then worked with some party friends and other Batista opponents to develop a plan for the violent overthrow of the decisive from Military backed regime. The group gave itself the name Generación del Centenario (Eng. "Generation of the 100th Anniversary"), as a reference to the ideas of the Cuban freedom hero José Martí , whose birth the nation commemorated in 1953 100 years ago.
The plan included an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks in Bayamo in order to give the Cuban people a signal to revolt. (see Assault on the Moncada barracks ) The badly prepared attack failed and ended in a bloodbath, but made the surviving Castro known nationwide as a death-defying idealist. In prison he worked out the closing argument he had held in his own defense on his political manifesto , which was later circulated under the name “ History will acquit me ”. In it he called for the restoration of the constitution of 1940 and the civil liberties contained in it, as well as numerous measures to combat poverty and underdevelopment, especially among the rural population of Cuba. After his amnesty after serving only 18 months of his 15-year prison sentence, he founded the "Movement of July 26th" in May 1955 with the aim of a revolutionary overthrow of the Batista government through armed struggle. A few weeks later, Fidel Castro left Cuba in order to prepare his group for military purposes in exile in Mexico.
In Mexico, Fidel Castro gathered Cuban exiles who were ready to fight for an overthrow in their homeland. During this time Castro met, among others, the Argentine doctor Che Guevara , who joined his movement. The Cuban-born and former Spanish officer Alberto Bayo trained the rebels in guerrilla warfare . In parallel to the military preparation, the movement raised money for the purchase of weapons and other equipment both in Cuba and in exile. One of the largest individual donors was ex-President Prío, who has lived in Miami since his fall and with whom Castro met in Texas in September 1956. On the night of November 25, 1956, 82 fighters from the Cuban Movement of July 26, led by Fidel Castro, left the port of Tuxpan (Mexico) on board the yacht Granma for Cuba in order to overthrow the Batista regime. On December 2, 1956, they reached Cuba at Playa Las Coloradas (south of the city of Niquero in what is now the province of Granma , named after the yacht ).
Guerrilla warfare
In the first skirmishes after the landing, around half of the rebels were killed or arrested. Fidel and Raúl Castro as well as Che Guevara were among the survivors. Around a quarter of the troops managed to retreat to the then impassable area of the Sierra Maestra . Celia Sánchez and Frank País , the commander of the arm of the underground movement active in the cities of the country, provided weapons and medicines and also sent new fighters to the rebels in the mountains.
This was followed by a two-year guerrilla fight in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, during which the rebel army of the Movement of July 26, led by Fidel Castro, was able to recruit more and more fighters and achieve ever greater successes against the Batista army. The general command of the rebel army was at the foot of the highest Cuban mountain, the Pico Turquino ( 1974 m ). Despite the incessant search and constant bombardment, the Batista army failed to locate and destroy the command during the entire guerrilla war.
Successful revolution
Support from the cities was crucial to the nationwide victory of the Cuban revolution. Numerous small groups of insurgents fought against Batista and his secret police in all Cuban cities. Also important was the great social and political breadth of the movement, which encompassed all classes of the population, while the Communist Party of Cuba ( Partido Socialista Popular ) was skeptical of the movement that had emerged from the anti-communist Orthodox Party , and also many equally minded citizens among its black - united red flag. It was only when it became clear that the July 26th Movement was planning not just a change of political power but also far-reaching social and economic reforms that cooperation with the Partido Socialista Popular and the trade unions took place. There was constant communication between the July 26 groups in the cities and the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra.
While Batista repeatedly assured the foreign press, in particular, that there was no guerrilla army at all, the insurgents managed to prove their existence through sometimes imaginative propaganda campaigns. This included the kidnapping of the world-famous Argentine racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio on February 26, 1958, who, instead of participating in a race organized by Batista in Havana, had to spend time with the revolutionaries and, after his release, the next day in front of the world press by his good ones Treatment reported.
In 1958 the rebels went on the offensive. In the meantime, her army had grown so much that in addition to Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro (Chief of the First Front in the East) other Comandantes had been appointed. The most famous today are:
- Ernesto "Che" Guevara (from July 21, 1957, head of the south front and center of Las Villas ),
- Raúl Castro (from February 1958, Chief of the Second Front in the East),
- Juan Almeida (from February 1958, Chief of the Third Front in the East),
- Camilo Cienfuegos (from April 16, 1958, Head of the North Front of Las Villas ).
They advanced in two columns . The first was commanded by the Castro brothers and moved to the eastern part of the island with the second largest city, Santiago de Cuba. The second column was led by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos and moved west, towards the capital Havana.
The decisive battle for Santa Clara was won by the second column at the turn of the year 1958/59: On December 29, 1958, led by Che Guevara, they attacked the Tren Blindado - a train fully loaded with weapons and ammunition. After several hours of fighting, the weapons fell into the hands of the guerrillas. The conquest of the city of Santa Clara followed shortly thereafter. In the morning hours of January 1, 1959, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic . In the evening Fidel Castro announced the victory of the revolution in Santiago de Cuba. The next day, the first rebel groups reached Havana, where Castro entered as the triumphant winner after a week-long triumphal procession through Cuba on January 8th.
After the win
In the period immediately after the coup, there were killings under the law . The best known example is the execution of seventy soldiers from the Batista regime in Santiago, which was ordered by Raúl Castro after the city was occupied.
Hundreds of Batista regime soldiers and police officers were tried for crimes committed under the old regime. Che Guevara was appointed chief investigator, with official seat in the port fortress La Cabaña . The charges included murder and torture. The majority of those convicted of murder (a few hundred) were executed, while the remainder were sentenced to long prison terms.
Cuba's political path has long been unclear and also controversial among the revolutionary leaders. Shortly after taking power, Fidel Castro began to gradually distance himself from the political ideals of the revolution that had been propagated since 1953. A prominent example of the departure from the rule of law was his massive intervention in the war crimes trial against members of the Cuban Air Force in March 1959. Dissidents have been persecuted and punished since the early days and continue to this day. Batista's opponents and fellow campaigners against him were no exception. One of the most important comandantes after the Castro brothers and Che Guevara , Huber Matos , then military chief of Camagüey , declared his resignation in October 1959 in protest against the government's gradual turn towards communism, which Fidel Castro had previously publicly rejected. He was then sentenced as a "traitor" to 20 years in prison in December 1959 after Fidel Castro had demanded the death penalty in the trial. Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos was killed in a mysterious plane crash in October 1959. Here too there were rumors that this accident was staged due to political differences with the Castro brothers.
As early as 1959, in the wake of the land reform in Cuba and the nationalization of assets, the United States raised its concerns and demanded prompt, appropriate and effective compensation. Cuba gradually nationalized agriculture and industry and expropriated US assets ($ 1 billion). Disappointed by the revolution and favored by a generous immigration regime, around 10% of the population emigrated after 1959, including almost the entire Cuban upper class. The Cubans in exile now form an influential community of around two million people in the United States, particularly in Florida. For example, the Bacardi rum dynasty, expropriated in Cuba, has been fighting Castro's politics since then . In February 1960, Cuba began trading with the Soviet Union when a Soviet trade delegation was received in Havana . This made the Soviet Union an important buyer, lender and supplier of oil for Cuba, the price of which was below that of American importers. When the American oil refineries in Cuba refused to refine Soviet oil, in late June 1960 all foreign oil refineries in Cuba were nationalized.
American response
As early as April 1960, the American President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the CIA Cubans in exile in the USA to arm and train them militarily. The United States ended its annual economic aid ($ 200 million) on May 17, 1960, and a trade embargo on October 13, 1960. In the years that followed, the USA also depressed the price of sugar on international markets and supported sabotage, particularly against the Cuban sugar industry. At the end of 1960, Cuba concluded trade agreements under the aegis of Che Guevara, among others. with the PR China, the GDR, the CSSR and Vietnam.
In January 1961, Cuba massively reduced its embassy staff in Washington and called on the US to withdraw most of its diplomatic staff from Cuba within 48 hours. President Eisenhower then broke off diplomatic relations completely as his last official act. The next day, at the request of Cuba , the UN Security Council negotiated the US's aggressive foreign policy against the island. On April 15, 1961, the US bombed three Cuban air bases with three B-26 bombers launched in Nicaragua . On April 16, Castro declared "the fact that our revolution is a socialist revolution" . The USA replied the following day: On April 17th, shortly after midnight, Brigade 2506 , the military unit financed by the USA and Cubans in exile, made up of around 1,500 soldiers, landed in the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) in the south-central part of the island. But Fidel Castro was prepared for this invasion and the revolutionary forces were mobilized within a few hours. On April 20, the invaders gave up due to a lack of food. 104 invaders had fallen, the remainder were taken prisoner and were only released in late 1962 after long negotiations between Castro and James B. Donovan .
The successful defense against the Bay of Pigs invasion cemented the Cuban revolution, which had previously stood on shaky legs.
Cuba after the Bay of Pigs 1961
As a reaction to the invasion, the expropriations that had already begun were intensified from August 6, 1961, and all US and other foreign property in Cuba that had existed up to that point was nationalized without compensation. In addition to the influence of the large Cuban exile communities in the US state of Florida that are opposed to Castro, international US corporations are also emerging as driving forces, which to this day demand the return of their nationalized production facilities in Cuba.
After 1961 the USA put increasing pressure on third countries to break off trade relations with Cuba (especially Japan and Canada). Between 1962 and 1963, deliveries to the Cuban ports decreased from an average of 352 to 59 ships.
In July 1961 the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations ( Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas , ORI) were formed. They arose from the amalgamation of Castro's July 26th Movement with the People's Socialist Party and the March 13th Revolutionary Directory . On March 26, 1962, the ORI became the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution , which in turn became the Communist Party of Cuba on October 3, 1965 .
See also
literature
- Fritz René Allemann : Fidel Castro. The beard revolution. Rütten & Löning, Hamburg 1961.
- Ramón L. Bonachea, Marta San Martín: The Cuban Insurrection 1952–1959. Transaction Publishers, 1974, ISBN 0-87855-576-5 . (English)
- Fidel Castro: The Strategic Victory. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-355-01800-5 .
- Boris Goldenberg : Latin America and the Cuban Revolution. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1963
- Ernesto Guevara: Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria. Ocean Press, New York et al. 2006, ISBN 1-920888-36-5 . (First edition Havana (Ed.Union) 1963)
- Sam Dolgoff: Beacon in the Caribbean. A libertarian view of the Cuban revolution. Libertad-Verlag, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-922226-07-8 .
- Nicholas John Williams: The Memory of Cuba. Interview with the revolution. Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8288-2663-2 .
- Michael Zeuske: island of extremes. Cuba in the 20th century. 2., updated and strong exp. Edition. Rotpunkt, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-85869-208-5 .
- Michael Zeuske: A Brief History of Cuba. 3rd, revised. and updated edition. Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-49422-2 .
- Mario Llerena: The Unsuspected Revolution: The Birth and Rise of Castroism. Ardent Media, 1978, ISBN 0-8014-1094-0 . (English)
- Hugh Thomas : Castros Cuba. Siedler, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88680-035-0 .
- Julia Sweig: Inside the Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro and the urban underground. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. i.a. 2002, ISBN 0-674-00848-0 .
- Fidel Castro, Ignacio Ramonet: Fidel Castro - My Life. German Barbara Köhler. Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86789-128-8 .
Web links
- Extensive "learning path" with good references ( www.latein America-studien.at )
- Boris Goldenberg : Comments on the Character of the Cuban Revolution . (PDF, 68 kB). In: Union monthly journal . Vol. 11, H. 8, 1960, pp. 458-464.
- Deena Stryker Photographs , over 1,800 photographs of Cuba from 1963–64 and undated, Duke University Library
Individual evidence
- ^ Julia E. Sweig: Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the urban underground. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2002.
- ^ Samuel Farber: The origins of the Cuban Revolution reconsidered. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2006.
- ↑ This usage is illustrated, for example, by Castro's statement in January 2012 that “the revolution” is proud to have respected its original principles “for more than 50 years”. Quoted from: The fruit that did not fall into their lap. In: Granma. January 26, 2012, accessed July 9, 2014.
- ↑ Nicholas John Williams: The Memory of Cuba . Tectum, Marburg 2011, p. 75.
- ^ Hugh Thomas: Castro's Cuba. 1984, pp. 17-18.
- ^ Hugh Thomas: Castro's Cuba. 1984, pp. 19-28.
- ^ Hugh Thomas: Castro's Cuba. 1984, pp. 26-28.
- ^ Heberto Norman Acosta: El día que Fidel cruzó a nado el río Bravo. ( Memento from February 17, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Granma. September 13, 2011, accessed December 31, 2012 (Spanish)
- ↑ Gerd Koenen : Dream Paths of the World Revolution. The Guevara Project. KiWi, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-462-04008-1 , pp. 210-212.
- ↑ Thomas Schmid: The merciless comandante. In: Berliner Zeitung . January 2, 1999, accessed June 14, 2015 .
- ↑ Luis Guardia: ¿Asesinaron a Camilo? 2007 documentary, accessed from Vimeo on January 13, 2012 (Spanish with English subtitles)
- ^ Louis A. Pérez: Cuba and the United States. Ties of Singular Intimacy . Athens / London 1998, p. 240.
- ^ Louis A. Pérez: Cuba and the United States. Ties of Singular Intimacy . Athens / London 1998, p. 242.
- ↑ Nicholas John Williams: The Memory of Cuba . Tectum, Marburg 2011, pp. 105-118.
- ^ Louis A. Pérez: Cuba and the United States. Ties of Singular Intimacy . Athens / London 1998, p. 250.