Method," an article that authoritatively presents the policies advocated by the Cubans. It is translated from the September issue of Cuba Socialista -- Editor. ]
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Guerrilla warfare has been utilized innumerable times in history under different conditions and in pursuit of distinct aims. Recently it. has been used in various popular liberation wars in which the vanguard. of the people chose the road of armed irregular war against enemies of superior military power. Asia, Africa and the Americas have witnessed such action in attempts to take power in the struggle against feudal, neocolonial or colonial exploitation. In Europe it has been employed as. an auxiliary of regular armies themselves or in alliance with them,” .
In the Americas recourse to guerrilla warfare has taken place at various times. As a not distant antecedent the experience can be cited of César Augusto Sandino, who fought Yankee expeditionaries in the Nicaraguan Segovia. And, recently, Cuba's revolutionary war. Since then in the Americas the problem of guerrilla warfare has been posed in the theoretical discussions of the progressive parties of tne continent and the possibility and advisability of utilizing it is a topic in sharp dispute.
In. these. notes we will attempt to express our ideas on guerrilla warfare and how it should be correctly utilized.
First of all it must be specified that this form of struggle is a method =~ a method for gaining an end. This end, necessary and inescapable for every revolutionist, is the conquest of political power. Consequently, in analyzing the specific situations in the various countries of the Americas, the concept of guerrilla warfare must be limited to the simple: category. of a method of struggle to gain this end.
Almost immediately the question arises: Is the method of guerrilla warfare the only form for taking power throughout the Americas? Or is | it, in any case, the predominant form? Or is it simply one more formula, among all those to be used in the struggle? And, finally, it is asked, is the example of Cuba applicable to the different realities of the continent? In the polemics it has become customary to criticize those who conduct guerrilla warfare. It is argued that they forget the mass struggle, almost as if these methods were counterposed. We reject the concept implied in this position. Guerrilla warfare is warfare of the people; it is a mass struggle. To try to carry on this type of warfare without the support of the population is the prelude to inevitable disaster. Guerrilla fighters constitute the militant vanguard of the people, located in a definite place of some given territory, armed, ready to develop a series of military actions aimed at the only possible strategic end -- to take power. They are supported by the masses of peasants and workers of the zone and of all the territory involved. Without these premises guerrilla warfare is inadmissible.
"In our American situation, we believe that the Cuban Revolution brought three fundamental contributions to the mechanics of revolutionary movements in the Americas. These are: First, popular forces can win a war. against the army. Second, it is not always necessary to wait until all the conditions are given for the revolution, the insurrectional center can create them. Third, in the underdeveloped countries of the Americas, the terrain of armed struggle must be fundamentally the countryside. " (Guerrilla Warfare. ) . .-
Such are the contributions to the development of the revolutionary
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struggle in the Americas, and they can be applied to any of the countries of our continent in which guerrilla warfare develops.
The Second Declaration of Havana states: ‘In our countries are met the circumstances of an underdeveloped industry with an agrarian regime of feudal character. That is why, that with all the hardships of the condi- ' tions of life of the urban workers, the rural population lives in even more horrible conditions of oppression and exploitation; but it. is also, with exceptions, the absolute majority sector, at times exceeding seventy per cent of the Latin-American populations.
“Discounting the landlords, who often reside in the ‘cities, the rest of the great mass gains its livelihood working as peons on the haciendas for the most miserable wages, or work the land under conditions of exploitation which in no manner pub the Middle Ages to shame. These circumstances are those which determine that in Latin America the poor rural population constitutes a tremendous potential revolutionary force.
"The armies, built and equipped for conventional war, which are the - force on which the power of the exploiting classes rest, become absolutely impotent when they have to confront the irregular struggle of the peasants ‘on their own terrain. They lose ten men for each revolutionary fighter who falls and demoralization spreads rapidly among them from having to face an invisible and invincible enemy who does not offer them the opportunity of showing off their academy. tactics and their braggadocio which they use so much in military displays to curb the olty | workers and the students.
"The initial struggle by small combat units, is incessantly fed by new forces, the mass movement begins to loosen its bonds, the old order, Little by- little begins to break into.a thousand pieces, "and that is the moment when the working class anda the urban masses decide the battle.
tyhat is it that from the beginning of the struggle of those first “nuclei, makes them invincible, regardless of the numbers, power and resources of their enemies? The aid of the people, and they will be able to count on that help of the people on an ever growing scale.
"But the peasantry is a class which, because of the uncultured state in which it is kept and the isolation in which it lives, needs the revolutionary and political leadership of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals, for without them it would not by itself be able to plunge into the struggle and achieve victory.
"In the actual historic conditions of Latin America, the national bourgeoisie cannot lead the antifeudal and anti-imperialist struggle. Experience shows that in our nations that class, even when its interests are in contradiction to those of Yankee imperialism, has been incapable . of confronting it, for it is paralyzed by fear of social revolution and frightened by the’ ery of the exploited masses." (Second Declaration of Havana. )
Completing these statements which constitute the heart of the revolutionary declaration of the Americas, the Second Declaration of Havana says elsewhere: "The subjective conditions of each country, that is to say, the conscious factor, organization, leadership, can accelerate or
retard the revolution, according to its greater or lesser degree of development, but sooner or later, in each historic epoch, when the — objective conditions mature, consciousness is acquired, the organization is formed, the leadership emerges and the revolution takes place.
"Whether this takes place peacefully or in painful birth does not depend on the revolutionists, 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. The tools of force are not used needlessly, but they are used 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.
Tn many countries of Latin America the revolution is today inevitable. That fact is not determined by anyone's will. It is determined by the horrifying conditions of exploitation in which American man lives, the development of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, the world ‘crisis of imperialism and the universal movement of struggle of the subjugated peoples." (Second Declaration of Havana.) —
We start from this foundation in analyzing the whole guerrilla question in the Americas.
We have esta. lished that it is a method of struggle to achieve an end, What interests us first is to analyze the end to see if the con- — quest of power can be gained in a different way than through armed _. struggle, here in the Americas.
Peaceful struggle can be carried through by means of mass movements, compelling the governments -- in special situations of crisis -- to concede, the popular forces eventually occupying power and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Correct theoretically. On analyzing — this in the panorama of the Americas, we are forced to reach the following conclusions: In this continent objective conditions exist in general that impel the masses to violent action against the bourgeois, landlord governments; a crisis of power exists in many other countries and some subjective conditions too, Clearly, in countries in which all the conditions are given, it would.be virtually criminal not to move toward taking power. In others in which this is not the case it is natural for various alternatives to appear which can be settled for each country through theoretical discussion. The only thing that history does not admit is that the analysts and executors of the policy of the proletariat. have a misconception. No one can insist on being taken as the party of the vanguard because he has been given an official diploma by a univer-~ sity. To be the party of the vanguard means to stand at the head of the working class in the struggle for power, to have the ability to guide it in the seizure, including taking the short cuts. This is the mission of our revolutionary parties and the analysis must be profound and exhaus~ tive so that there will be no misconceptions.
Right now in the Americas we see an unstable state of equilibrium . ‘between the oligarchical dictatorship and the popular pressure. We denominate it with the word "oligarchical" in an attempt to define the reactionary alliance between the bourgeoisie of each country and the classes of landlords, with more or less preponderance of feudal structures,
m23~ These dictatorships conformed with certain legal frameworks which they themselves set up, the better to operate throughout the whole period of unrestricted class domination, but we are now passing through a stage in _which the popular pressures are very great; they are knocking at the doors of bourgeois legality and this can be violated by its own authors in order to keep back the impulsion of the masses. However, the shameless violations, contrary to all pre-established legislation -- or in accordance with legislation established a posteriori tosanctify the deed -- increase the tension of the forces of the people. Because of this the oligarchical dictatorship tries to utilize the old legal frame in order to change con= stitutionality and to further stifle the proletariat without engaging in -@ head-on clash. However here is where the contradiction arises. © The people no longer support the old and, still less, the new coercive measures passed by the dictatorship, and. seek to break them. We must never forget the authoritarian, restrictive, class character of the bourgeois state. Lenin refers to it this way: * nthe state is the product and manifestation of the irreconcilable character of class contradictions. The state arises in the place, at the moment and to the degree that class contradictions cannot be objectively reconciled. And vice versa: The . existence of the state shows that class contradictions are irreconcilable," (State and Revolution, )
‘This means that we must not let the word 1 "democracy," used in an apologetic way to represent the dictatorship of the exploiting classes, ‘lose its profound meaning so that it comes to signify merely certain more or less optimum liberties granted the citizen. To struggle only to win the restoration of a- certain bourgeois legalism without posing, instead, the problem of revolutionary power, is to struggle for the restoration of a certain dictatorial order pre-established by the ruling social classes -et he struggle, at all events, for prisoner's chains carrying a lighter ba
In these conditions of conflict, the oligarchy breaks its own contracts, its: own: appearance of democracy" and attacks the people, although it always tries to use the methods of the superstructure which it has formed for oppression. At this moment the dilemma is again posed: What to do? We answer: Violence is not the patrimony of the exploiters; the exploited can use it and, still more, must use it at a given moment. Martf said: "Whoever promotes a war that can be avoided is a criminal; likewise anyone who fails to promote an inevitable war."
Lenin, for his part, said: "The social-democracy has never viewed war from a sentimental point of view, It absolutely condemns war as a Savage recourse to settle differences among men, but it understands that wars are inevitable so long as society is divided into classes, so long as the exploitation of man by man exists. And to finish with this exploitation we cannot foreswear war, which is always and everywhere begun by the exploiting, ruling, oppressor classes." He said this in the year 1905,. Later, in "The’ Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution, a analyzing profoundly the character of the class struggle, he affirmed: "Whoever admits the class struggle can-no less admit civil wars, which in every class society represents the continuation, the development and the recrudescence =-- natural and in determined circumstances inevitable -- of the class struggle. All the great revolutions confirm it. To deny civil wars or to forget them would be to fall into extreme opportunism and turn renegade to the socialist revolution."
This means that we must not fear violence, the birth of the new societies; only, this violence must be unleashed exactly at the precise moment when the leaders of the people have found the most favorable cir~ cumstances,
What are these circumstances? They depend, on the subjective side, on two factors that are complementary and which in turn become deepened in the course of struggle: consciousness of the necessity of a change and certainty of the possibility of this revolutionary change. These, combined with the objective conditions -- which are immensely favorable for the development of the struggle throughout almost all the Americas == to the firmness of will to succeed and to the new correlation of forces in the world, determine a mode of acting. a
No matter how far away the socialist countries are, they will always make their beneficent influence felt among the peoples in struggle, and. their educational example will give them great force. Fidel Castro said — last July 26; "And the duty of the revolutionaries, above all at this moment, is to know how to perceive and catch the changes in the correla-~ tion of forces which have taken place in the world, and to understand that this change facilitates the struggle of the peoples, The duty of revolutionaries, of the Latin-American revolutionaries, is not to wait for a change in the correlation of forces to produce the miracle of social revolutions in Latin America, but to make full use of everything that favors the revolutionary movement in this changed correlation of forces and’ to make revolutions!"
There are those who say, “We admit revolutionary war as ‘an.adequate ..means, in certain specific eases, of arriving at the seizure. of power. Where do we get the great leaders, the Fidel Castros who will assure the triumph?" Fidel Castro, like every human being, is a product of history. The military and political chiefs who lead the insurrectional struggles ‘in the Americas, all put together, if it were possible, in a single person, would still learn the art of war by engaging in war itself. There is no skill or profession that can be learned solely from textbooks. The struggle, in this instance, is the great teacher. .
It is clear that the task will not be simple nor exempt from grave dangers throughout its course.
[To be continued. ]
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