After his capture in the attack on Moncada, FIDEL CASTRO was held, mostly in solitary confinement, and finally placed on trial in October. Castro defended himself. His defence speech is known to history by its concluding line, "History will absolve me". Although taking five hours to deliver, the speech was made without notes. In it, Castro ranged over the crimes of the Batista government and its illegitimacy, economic and social conditions in Cuba and his hopes for a Cuba cleansed of poverty, corruption and degradation. Here, we reproduce portions of the speech in which Castro indicated the social forces that would carry out, and benefit from, the coming revolution.
When we speak of the people, we do not mean the comfortable ones, the conservative elements of the nation, who welcome any regime of oppression, any dictatorship, any despotism, prostrating themselves before the master of the moment until they grind their foreheads into the ground.
When we speak of the struggle, the peoplemeans the vast unredeemed masses, to whom all make promises and whom all deceive; we mean the people who yearn for a better, more dignified and more just nation; who are moved by ancestral aspirations for justice, for they have suffered injustice and mockery, generation after generation; who long for great and wise changes in all aspects of their life; people, who, to attain these changes, are ready to give even the very last breath of their lives — when they believe in something or in someone, especially when they believe in themselves.
In stating a purpose, the first condition of sincerity and good faith, is to do precisely what nobody else ever does, that is, to speak with absolute clarity, without fear. The demagogues and professional politicians who manage to perform the miracle of being right in everything, and in pleasing everyone, are, of necessity, deceiving everyone about everything. The revolutionaries
must proclaim their ideas courageously, define their principles and express their intentions so that no one is deceived, neither friend nor foe.
The people we counted on in our struggle were these:
Seven hundred thousand Cubans without work, who desire to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate in search of livelihood.
Five hundred thousand farm labourers inhabiting miserable shacks, who work four months of the year and starve for the rest of the year, sharing their misery with their children, who have not an inch of land to cultivate, and whose existence inspires compassion in any heart not made of stone.
Four hundred thousand industrial labourers and stevedores whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose benefits are being taken away, whose homes are wretched quarters, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the usurer, whose future is a pay reduction and dismissal, whose life is eternal work and whose only rest is in the tomb.
One hundred thousand small farmers who live and die working on land that is not theirs, looking at it with sadness as Moses did the promised land, to die without possessing it; who, like feudal serfs, have to pay for the use of their parcel of land by giving up a portion of their products; who cannot love it, improve it, beautify it or plant a lemon or orange tree on it, because they never know when a sheriff will come with the rural guard to evict them from it.
Thirty thousand teachers and professors who are so devoted, dedicated and necessary to the better destiny of future generations and who are so badly treated and paid.
Twenty thousand small business men weighed down by debts, ruined by the crisis and harangued by a plague of filibusters and venal officials.
Ten thousand young professionals: doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school
teachers, dentists, pharmacists, newspapermen, painters, sculptors, etc who come forth from school with their degrees, anxious to work and full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end with all doors closed, and where no ear hears their clamour or supplication.
These are the people, the ones who know misfortune and, therefore, are capable of fighting with limitless courage!
To the people whose desperate roads through life have been paved with the brick of betrayals and false promises, we were not going to say: "We will eventually give you what you need", but rather, "Here you have it, fight for it with all your might so that liberty and happiness may be yours!" ...
Cuba could easily provide for a population three times as great as it now has, so there is no excuse for the abject poverty of a single one of its present inhabitants. The markets should be working. This is not an inconceivable thought.
What is inconceivable is that anyone should go to bed hungry, that children should die for lack of medical attention; what is inconceivable is that 30% of our farm people cannot write their names and that 99% of them know nothing of Cuba's history. What is inconceivable is that the majority of our rural people are now living in worse circumstances than were the Indians Columbus discovered living in the fairest land that human eyes had ever seen.
To those who would call me a dreamer, I quote the words of MartÃ: "A true man does not seek the path where advantage lies, but rather, the path where duty lies, and this is the only practical man, whose dream of today with be the law of tomorrow, because he who has looked back on the upheavals of history and has seen civilisations going up in flames, crying out in bloody struggle, throughout the centuries, knows that the future well-being of man, without exception, lies on the side of duty."