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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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