We reproduce here two key documents of the Cuban Revolution, the First and Second Havana Declarations. This is the first in a series to commemorate 100 Years with Fidel (100 años con Fidel). 2026 marks a century since the birth of Fidel Castro – a revolutionary leader who proved that ideas, when rooted in popular struggle, can make history. Through this series, we will reflect on Fidel’s contributions to Marxism and seek to galvanise for the Cuban Revolution the internationalist solidarity and support it has consistently shown for the rest of the world.
Introduction: The Declaration of Havana
In January 1959, the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba. Shortly after, guerrillas under the command of Fidel Castro in the July 26 Movement entered the capital of Havana. Located just 90 miles from the US coast, Revolutionary Cuba was immediately subject to a campaign of total hostility and aggression. This has remained the policy of the US for the last 67 years and has involved assassinations, terrorist attacks, military occupation of Guantanamo Bay, and invasion, most famously in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón).
Cuba has also endured an extreme and crippling economic blockade and attempts to politically isolate and strangle the Revolution on the international stage. A central player in this is the Organisation of American States (OAS), a regional body established in 1948, which is the subject of both the First and Second Declarations of Havana included here.
The First Declaration of Havana was drafted by Fidel Castro in response to the Declaration of San José – a denunciation of the Cuban government signed by OAS members at the Seventh Conference of Consultation of Foreign Ministers on August 28, 1960, in San José, Costa Rica.
On 2 September 1960, the First Declaration was read out by Fidel Castro at the José Martí Revolution Square in Havana. The more than one million Cubans gathered and raised their hands in agreement, ratifying each of the nine points as they were read out.
The Second Declaration, an abridged version of which we publish here, was delivered on 4 February 1962, in the wake of the failed CIA-led Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Eighth Consultative Meeting of Foreign Ministers of the OAS held in December 1961 in Punta del Este, Uruguay. At the behest of the Kennedy regime, Cuba was expelled from the OAS by a vote of 14 in favour, 1 against, and 6 abstentions.
Intense US hostility poses a question: why has the most powerful country in world history spent almost seventy years attempting to overthrow the government of a small, relatively underdeveloped island nation in the Caribbean?
On the one hand, the Cuban Revolution directly challenges the interests of US capital. Historically built through a slave-based plantation regime, when the US displaced Spain in Latin America, Cuba’s economy came under the control of US monopolies like the Cuban-American Sugar Corporation and United Fruit Company. In overthrowing this system, the Cuban people resolved to never again allow their labour and land to be devoted to profit for overseas capitalists and their lackeys at home. In defying this central driving force of imperialism, Cuba resolved to build a new system based on dignity and human flourishing.
But the more fundamental threat is that the Cuban Revolution shows us that another world is possible. As the Second Declaration states: “What Cuba can give to the people, and has already given, is its example. And what does the Cuban Revolution teach? That revolution is possible, that the people can make it, that in the contemporary world there are no forces capable of halting the liberation movement of the peoples”.
Despite a life-or-death struggle for survival, Cuba has made remarkable achievements since 1959. According to UNESCO, the literacy rate in Cuba is 98 percent, and it has one of the highest ratios of doctors to patients at 7.5 doctors per 1,000 people in 2018. Since 1969, hundreds of thousands of Cuban health workers have participated in missions in over 150 countries. According to Helen Yaffe, this saw almost 6 million lives saved from 1999 to 2015—3 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2.8 million in Africa, and over 60,000 in other regions.
In 1975, Cuba also sent a large volunteer army to Angola to support the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the fight against the invading South African Apartheid army. The forced withdrawal from Angola and Namibia was a decisive blow against Apartheid, which Nelson Mandela said, “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor”.
A note on spelling
The First and Second Declarations are based on versions published online by Walter Lippmann. The latter has been abridged for inclusion here. Both have been lightly edited according to Australian-English grammar and spelling conventions. Some minor changes have also been made to the original text for clarity.
Nick Dobrijevich, February 2026
The First Declaration of Havana
Close to the monument and to the memory of José Martí in Cuba, free territory of America, the people, in the full exercise of the inalienable powers that proceed from the true exercise of the sovereignty expressed in the direct, universal, and public suffrage, have constituted itself into a National General Assembly.
Acting on its own behalf and echoing the true sentiments of the people of our America, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba:
1. Condemns in all its terms the so-called “Declaration of San José,” a document dictated by North American imperialism that is detrimental to the national self-determination, the sovereignty, and the dignity of the sister nations of the Continent.
2. The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba energetically condemns the overt and criminal intervention exerted by North American imperialism for more than a century over all the nations of Latin America, which have seen their lands invaded more than once in Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Santo Domingo and Cuba; have lost, through the voracity of Yankee imperialism, huge and rich areas, whole countries, such as Puerto Rico, which has been converted into an occupied territory; and have suffered, moreover, the outrageous treatment dealt by the Marines to our wives and daughters, as well as to the most exalted symbols of our history, such as the statue of José Martí.1
This intervention, based upon military superiority, inequitable treaties and the miserable submission of treacherous rulers throughout one hundred years has converted our America –the America that Bolívar, Hidalgo, Juárez, San Martín, O’Higgins, Sucre and Martí wanted free – into an area of exploitation, the backyard of the political and financial Yankee empire, a reserve of votes for the international organisation in which the Latin America countries have figured only as the herds driven by the “restless and brutal North that despises us.”
The National General Assembly of the People declares that the acceptance by the governments that officially represent the countries of Latin America of that continued and historically irrefutable intervention betrays the ideals of independence of its peoples, negates its sovereignty and prevents true solidarity among our nations, all of which obliges this assembly to repudiate it in the name of the people of echoes the hope and the will of the Latin American peoples.
3. The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba rejects likewise the intention of preserving the Monroe Doctrine, used until now, as foreseen by José Martí, “to extend the dominance in America” of the voracious imperialists, to better inject the poison also denounced in his time by José Martí, “the poison of the loans, the canals, the railroads …”
Therefore, in the presence of a hypocritical Pan-Americanism which is only the dominance of Yankee monopolies over the interests of our people and Yankee manipulation of governments prostrated before Washington, the Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims the liberating Latin-Americanism that throbs in Martí and Benito Juárez. And, upon extending its friendship to the North American people – a country where Negroes are lynched, intellectuals are persecuted, and workers are forced to accept the leadership of gangsters – reaffirms its will to march “with all the world and not with just a part of it.”
4. The National General Assembly of the People declares that the help spontaneously offered by the Soviet Union to Cuba in the event our country is attacked by the military forces of the imperialists could never be considered as an act of intrusion, but that it constitutes an evident act of solidarity, and that such help, offered to Cuba in the face of an imminent attack by the Pentagon, honours the Government of the Soviet Union that offered it, as much as the cowardly and criminal aggressions against Cuba dishonour the Government of the United States.
Therefore, the General Assembly of the People declares, before America and before the world, that it accepts and is grateful for the support of the Soviet Union’s rockets, should its territory be invaded by military forces of the United States.
5. The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba categorically denies the existence of any intent whatsoever on the part of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic to “use Cuba’s political and social situation . . . to break the continental unity and endanger the unity of the hemisphere.” From the first to the last shot, from the first to the last of the twenty thousand martyrs who died in the struggles to overthrow the tyranny and win revolutionary control, from the first to the last revolutionary law, from the first to the last act of the Revolution, the people of Cuba has acted with free and absolute self-determination, and therefore, the Soviet Union or the Chinese People’s Republic can never be blamed for the existence of a Revolution which is Cuba’s firm reply to the crimes and wrongs perpetrated by imperialism in America.
On the contrary, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba maintains that the policy of isolation and hostility toward the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic, promoted and imposed by the United States Government upon the governments of Latin America, and the belligerent and aggressive conduct of the North American Government, as well as its systematic opposition to the acceptance of the Chinese People’s Republic as a member of the United Nations, despite the fact that it represents almost the total population of a country of over six hundred million inhabitants, endanger the peace and security of the hemisphere and the world.
Therefore, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba ratifies its policy of friendship with all the peoples of the world, reaffirms its purpose of establishing diplomatic relations with all the Socialist countries and, from this moment, in the full exercise of its sovereignty and free will, expresses to the Government of the Chinese People’s Republic that it agrees to establish diplomatic relations between both countries, and that, therefore, the relations that Cuba has maintained until now with the puppet regime, which is supported in Formosa by the vessels of the Seventh Fleet, are hereby rescinded.
6. The National General Assembly of the People reaffirms – and is certain of doing so as an expression of a view common to all the people of Latin America – that democracy is incompatible with the financial oligarchy, racial discrimination, and the outrages of the Klu Klux Klan, the persecutions that prevented the world from hearing for many years the wonderful voice of Paul Robeson, imprisoned in his own country, and that killed the Rosenbergs, in the face of the protests and the horror of the world and despite the appeal of the rulers of many countries, and of Pope Pius XII, himself.
The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba expresses its conviction that democracy cannot consist only in a vote, which is almost always fictitious and manipulated by big landholders and professional politicians, but in the right of the citizens to decide, as this Assembly of the People is now deciding, its own destiny. Moreover, democracy will only exist in Latin America when its people are really free to choose, when the humble people are not reduced—by hunger, social inequality, illiteracy, and the juridical systems—to the most degrading impotence.
For all the foregoing reasons, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba:
Condemns the latifundium, a source of poverty for the peasants and a backward and inhuman agricultural system; condemns starvation wages and the iniquitous exploitation of human labour by immoral and privileged interests; condemns illiteracy, the lack of teachers, of schools, of doctors and hospitals, the lack of protection of old age that prevails in Latin America; condemns the inequality and exploitation of women; condemns the discrimination against the Negro and the Indian; condemns the military and political oligarchies that keep our peoples in utter poverty and block their democratic development and the full exercise of their sovereignty; condemns the handing over of our countries’ natural resources to the foreign monopolies as a submissive policy that betrays the interests of the peoples; condemns the governments that ignore the feelings of their people and yield to the directives of Washington; condemns the systematic deception of the people by the information media that serve the interests of the oligarchies and the policies of oppressive imperialism; condemns the news monopoly of the Yankee agencies, instruments of the North. American trusts and agents of Washington; condemns the repressive laws that prevent workers, peasants, students and intellectuals, which form the great majority of each country, from organising themselves and fighting for the realisation of their social and patriotic aspirations; condemns the monopolies and imperialistic organisations that continuously loot our wealth, exploit our workers and peasants, bleed and keep in backwardness our economies, and submit the political life of Latin America to the sway of their own designs and interests.
In short, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba condemns both the exploitation of man by man and the exploitation of underdeveloped countries by imperialistic finance capital.
Therefore, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims before America:
The right of the peasants to the land; the right of the workers to the fruit of their work; the right of children to education; the right of the ill to medical and hospital attention; the right of youth to work; the right of students to free, experimental, and scientific education; the right of Negroes and Indians to “the full dignity of Man;” the right of women to civil, social and political equality; the right of the aged to a secure old age; the right of intellectuals, artists, and scientists to fight, with their works, for a better world; the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of nations to turn fortresses into schools, and to arm their workers, their peasants, their students, their intellectuals, the Negro, the Indian, the women, the young and the old, the oppressed and exploited people, so that they may themselves defend their rights and their destinies.
7. The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims: The duty of peasants, workers, intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, young and old, and women, to fight for their economic, political and social rights; the duty of oppressed and exploited nations to fight for their liberation; the duty of each nation to make common cause with all the oppressed, colonised, exploited peoples, regardless of their location in the world or the geographical distance that may separate them. All the peoples of the world are brothers!
8. The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba reaffirms its faith that Latin America soon will be marching, united and triumphant, free from the control that turns its economy over to North American imperialism and prevents its true voice from being heard at the meetings where domesticated Chancellors form an infamous chorus led by its despotic masters.
Therefore, it ratifies its decision of working for that common Latin American destiny that will enable our countries to build a true solidarity, based upon the free will of each of them and the joint aspirations of all. In the struggle for such a Latin America, in opposition to the obedient voices of those who usurp its official representation, there arises now, with invincible power, the genuine voice of the people, a voice that rises from the depths of its tin and coal mines, from its factories and sugar mills, from its feudal lands, where rotos, cholos, gauchos, jíbaros, heirs of Zapata and Sandino, grip the weapons of their freedom, a voice that resounds in its poets and novelists, in its students, in its women and children, in its vigilant old people.2
To that voice of our brothers, the Assembly of the People of Cuba answers:
“Present!” Cuba shall not fall. Cuba is here today to ratify before Latin America and before the world, as a historical commitment, its irrevocable dilemma: Homeland or Death!
9. The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba resolves that this declaration shall be known as “The Declaration of Havana.”
Havana, Cuba
Free Territory of America
2 September 1960.
The Second Declaration of Havana
On May 18, 1895, on the eve of his death from a Spanish bullet through the heart, José Martí, apostle of our independence, said in an unfinished letter to his friend Manuel Mercado:
“Now I am able to write, I am in danger each day of giving my life for my country and for my obligation of preventing in time the United States from extending its control over the Antilles and consequently falling with that much more force upon our countries of America. Whatever I have done till now, and whatever I shall do, has been with that aim.
“The people most vitally concerned with preventing the imperialist annexation of Cuba, which would make Cuba the starting point of that course which must be blocked and which we are blocking with our blood of annexation of our American nations to the violent and brutal North which despises them, are being hindered by lesser and public commitments from the open and avowed espousal of this sacrifice, which is being made for our and their benefit.
“I have lived inside the monster and know its guts; and my sling is the sling of David.”
In 1895, Marti already pointed out the danger hovering over America and called imperialism by its name: imperialism. He pointed out to the people of Latin America that more than anyone, they had a stake in seeing that Cuba did not succumb to the greed of the Yankee, scornful of the peoples of Latin America. And with his own blood, shed for Cuba and America, he wrote the words which, posthumously, in homage to his memory, the people of Cuba place at the head of this declaration.
Sixty-seven years have passed. Puerto Rico was converted into a colony and is still a colony saturated with military bases. Cuba also fell into the Clutches of imperialism. Their troops occupied our territory. The Platt Amendment was imposed on our first constitution, as a humiliating clause which sanctioned the odious right of foreign intervention. Our riches passed into their hands, our history was falsified, our government and our politics were entirely moulded in the interests of the overseers; the nation was subjected to sixty years of political, economic, and cultural suffocation.
But Cuba rose, Cuba was able to redeem itself from the bastard guardianship. Cuba broke the chains which tied its fortunes to those of the imperialist oppressor, redeemed its riches, reclaimed its culture, and unfurled its banner as the Free Territory of America.
Now the United States will never again be able to use Cuba’s strength against America, but conversely, dominating the majority of the other Latin American states, the United States is attempting to use the strength of America against Cuba.
What is the history of Cuba but the history of Latin America? And what is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa, and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the most pitiless and cruel exploitation by imperialism throughout the world?
The movement of the dependent and colonial peoples is a phenomenon of universal character which agitates the world and marks the final crisis of imperialism.
Cuba and Latin America are part of the world. Our problems form part of the problems engendered by the general crisis of imperialism and the struggle of the subjugated peoples, the clash between the world that is being born and the world that is dying. The odious and brutal campaign unleashed against our nation expresses the desperate, as well as futile, effort which the imperialists are making to prevent the liberation of the people. Cuba hurts the imperialists in a special way. What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees’ hatred of the Cuban Revolution? What is it that rationally explains the conspiracy which unites, for the same aggressive purpose, the most powerful and richest imperialist power in the modern world and the oligarchies of an entire continent, which together are supposed to represent a population of 350 million human beings, against a small country of only seven million inhabitants, economically underdeveloped, without financial or military means to threaten the security or economy of any other country? What unites them and stirs them up in fear? What explains it is fear. Not fear of the Cuban Revolution but fear of the Latin American revolution. Not fear of the workers, peasants, intellectuals, students, and progressive sectors of the middle strata which, by revolutionary means, have taken power in Cuba; but fear that the workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, and progressive sectors of the middle strata will, by revolutionary means, take power in the oppressed and hungry countries exploited by the Yankee monopolies and reactionary oligarchies of America; fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the arms from the oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free people of America.
By crushing the Cuban Revolution, they hope to dispel the fear that torments them, the spectre of the revolution that threatens them. By liquidating the Cuban Revolution, they hope to liquidate the revolutionary spirit of the people. They imagine in their delirium that Cuba is an exporter of revolutions. In their sleepless merchants’ and usurers’ minds, there is the idea that revolutions can be bought, sold, rented, loaned, exported, and imported like some piece of merchandise.
But the evolution of history, the upward march of humanity, is not held back, nor can it be held back. The forces which impel the people, who are the real makers of history, forces determined by the material conditions of existence and aspirations to higher goals of wellbeing and liberty, forces which surge forth when man’s progress in the fields of science, technology, and culture makes it possible, are superior to the will and the terror unleashed by the ruling oligarchies.
The subjective conditions of each country, that is, the consciousness, organisation, and leadership, can accelerate or retard the revolution, according to their greater or lesser degree of development, but sooner or later, in each historical period, when the objective conditions mature, consciousness is acquired, the organisation is formed, the leadership emerges, and the revolution takes place.
Whether this takes place peacefully or in painful birth does not depend on the revolutionaries; it depends on the reactionary forces of the old society, who resist the birth of the new society engendered by the contradictions carried in the womb of the old society. The revolution is in history, like the doctor who assists at the birth of a new life. It does not use the tools of force needlessly, but will use them without hesitation whenever necessary to help the birth, a birth which brings to the enslaved and exploited masses the hope of a new and better life.
Today, in many countries of Latin America, revolution is inevitable. That fact is not determined by anyone’s will. It is determined by the horrifying conditions of exploitation in which American man lives, by the development of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, by the world crisis of imperialism, and the universal movement of struggle among subjugated peoples.
What is the attitude of Yankee imperialism to the objective reality of the historically inexorable Latin American revolution? To prepare to wage a colonial war against the peoples of Latin America, to create an apparatus of force, the political pretexts and the pseudo-legal instruments subscribed to by the reactionary oligarchies, to repress with blood and fire the struggle of the Latin American peoples.
This policy of gradual strangulation of the sovereignty of the Latin American nations, and of a free hand to intervene in their internal affairs, culminated in the recent meeting of foreign ministers at Punta del Este. Yankee imperialism gathered the ministers together to wrest from them through political pressure and unprecedented economic blackmail in collusion with a group of the most discredited rulers of this continent the renunciation of the national sovereignty of our peoples and the consecration of the odious Yankee right to intervention in the internal affairs of Latin America; the submission of the peoples completely to the will of the United States of North America, against which all our great men, from Bolivar to Sandino, fought.
At Punta del Este, a great ideological battle unfolded between the Cuban Revolution and Yankee imperialism. Who did they represent there, for whom did each speak? Cuba represented the people; the United States represented the monopolies. Cuba spoke for America’s exploited masses; the United States for the exploiting, oligarchical, and imperialist interests; Cuba for sovereignty; the United States for intervention; Cuba for the nationalisation of foreign enterprises; the United States for new investments of foreign capital. Cuba for culture; the United States for ignorance. Cuba for agrarian reform; the United States for great landed estates. Cuba for the industrialisation of America; the United States for underdevelopment. Cuba for creative work; the United States for sabotage and counterrevolutionary terror practiced by its agents – the destruction of sugarcane fields and factories, the bombing by their pirate planes of the labour of a peaceful people. Cuba for the murdered teachers; the United States for the assassins. Cuba for bread; the United States for hunger. Cuba for equality; the United States for privilege and discrimination. Cuba for the truth; the United States for lies. Cuba for liberation; the United States for oppression. Cuba for the bright future of humanity; the United States for the past without hope. Cuba for the heroes who fell at Giron to save the country from foreign domination; the United States for mercenaries and traitors who serve the foreigner against their country. Cuba for peace among peoples; the United States for aggression and war. Cuba for socialism; the United States for capitalism.
What Alliance for Progress can serve as encouragement to those 107 million men and women of our America, the backbone of labour in the cities and fields, whose dark skin – black, mestizo, mulatto, Indian – inspires scorn in the new colonialists? How are they – who with bitter impotence have seen how in Panama there is one wage scale for Yankees and another for Panamanians, who are regarded as an inferior race – going to put any trust in the supposed Alliance?
What Cuba can give to the people, and has already given, is its example. And what does the Cuban Revolution teach? That revolution is possible, that the people can make it, that in the contemporary world there are no forces capable of halting the liberation movement of the peoples.
No nation in Latin America is weak because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers, who suffer the same miseries, who harbour the same sentiments, who have the same enemy, who dream about the same better future, and who count upon the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world.
Great as was the epic of Latin American Independence, heroic as was that struggle, today’s generation of Latin Americans is called upon to engage in an epic which is even greater and more decisive for humanity. For that struggle was for liberation from Spanish colonial power, from a decadent Spain invaded by the armies of Napoleon. Today, the call for struggle is for liberation from the most powerful world imperialist centre, from the strongest force of world imperialism, and to render humanity a greater service than that rendered by our predecessors.
But this struggle, to a greater extent than the earlier one, will be waged by the masses, will be carried out by the people; the people are going to play a much more important role now than then, the leaders are less important and will be less important in this struggle than in the one before.
This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly abound in our suffering Latin American countries. Struggles of masses and ideas. An epic which will be carried forward by our people, despised and maltreated by imperialism, our people, unreckoned with till today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock, and now it begins to be terrified of that flock, a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers.
This toiling humanity, inhumanely exploited, these paupers, controlled by the whip and overseer, have not been reckoned with or have been little reckoned with. From the dawn of independence their fate has been the same: Indians, gauchos, mestizos, zambos, quadroons, whites without property or income, all this human mass which formed the ranks of the “nation,” which never reaped any benefits, which fell by the millions, which was cut into bits, which won independence from the mother country for the bourgeoisie, which was shut out from its share of the rewards, which continued to occupy the lowest step on the ladder of social benefits, which continued to die of hunger, curable diseases and neglect, because for them there were never enough essentials of life ordinary bread, a hospital bed, the medicine which cures, the hand which aids their fate has been all the same.
But now, from one end of the continent to the other, they are signalling with clarity that the hour has come, the hour of their redemption. Now this anonymous mass, this America of colour, sombre, taciturn America, which all over the continent sings with the same sadness and disillusionment, now this mass is beginning to enter conclusively into its own history, is beginning to write it with its own blood, is beginning to suffer and die for it.
Because now in the fields and mountains of America, on its slopes and prairies and in its jungles, in the wilderness or in the traffic of cities, this world is beginning with full cause to erupt. Anxious hands are stretched forth, ready to die for what is theirs, to win those rights which were laughed at by one and all for 500 years. Yes, now history will have to take the poor of America into account, the exploited and spurned of Latin America, who have decided to begin writing history for themselves for all time. Already they can be seen on the roads, on foot, day after day, in endless marches of hundreds of kilometres to the governmental “eminences,” to obtain their rights.
Already they can be seen armed with stones, sticks, machetes, in one direction and another, each day, occupying lands, sinking hooks into the land which belongs to them, and defending it with their lives. They can be seen carrying signs, slogans, flags, letting them flap in the mountain or prairie winds. And the wave of anger, of demands for justice, of claims for rights, which is beginning to sweep the lands of Latin America, will not stop. That wave will swell with every passing day. For that wave is composed of the greatest number, the majorities in every respect, those whose labour amasses the wealth and turns the wheels of history. Now, they are awakening from the long, brutalising sleep to which they had been subjected.
For this, great humanity has said, “enough!” and has begun to march. And their giant march will not be halted until they conquer true independence for which they have vainly died more than once. Today, however, those who die will die like the Cubans at Playa Giron. They will die for their own true and never-to-be-surrendered independence.
¡Patria o Muerte!
Venceremos!
THE PEOPLE OF CUBA
Havana, Cuba
Free Territory of America
4 February 1962
- On March 12, 1949, three crew members from the U. S. Navy ships visiting Havana urinated on the monument of José Martí, Cuba’s most venerated patriot.
↩︎ - Roto: A member of the exploited labour force of Peru, generally of Indian and European blood. Cholo: A member of the exploited labour force of Chile, generally of Indian and European blood. Gaucho: the cowboy of Argentina, an exploited class which forms the backbone of the cattle industry of that country. Jíbaro: A member of the much-exploited agricultural labour force of Puerto Rico.
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